What he really wanted was something to make him look older. If he could dye his hair gray, well, that would be ideal. The photo, taken during his visit to Albuquerque, showed a man with dark hair and a younger face than the one he wore now. With a little gray in his hair, and the hair trimmed into more of an older man’s cut, he’d look less like his picture, and less threatening as well.

He found a kit containing an electric clipper and a couple of different interchangeable blades, all of which according to the hype on the package could be used to “create easily at home all of the latest hairstyles available from the world’s most exclusive barbers.” That sounded a little optimistic to Keller, who was prepared to settle for less from the contraption.

There was a bewildering selection of products to color the hair, some specifically for men, others marketed to women. Keller wondered how the dye was supposed to know the sex of the person using it, or why it would care.

Every possible hue was represented, including blue and green, but the one thing he couldn’t find was gray. If you already had gray hair, every manufacturer had ways for you to deal with it. If your gray hair had a yellowish cast to it, you could try this product; if you wanted to bring out its hidden blue highlights, whatever they were, you could try that one. Or you could get rid of the gray and restore your hair’s natural color, two mealy-mouthed ways of describing the process of dyeing your gray hair some color it could no longer manage to be on its own.

He couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let you dye your hair gray, although he was beginning to believe that he was the only person alive that wanted to. He wound up picking up a packet of a product for men promising to get rid of the gray and restore the natural color to a head of light brown hair. But would it do anything if you applied it to hair as dark as his own? He was dubious, but figured he’d buy it, anyway.

And he bought the clippers, too. If all else failed, he could use them to take his hair right down to the scalp. Then all he’d have to do was keep his cap on, and at the end of ten days or two weeks he’d have a nice short buzz cut.

Walking along, aiming himself in the general direction of where he’d parked the car, he wondered if he’d actually taken the cap of the fellow who’d walked off with Homer. Suppose his cap had been swiped by someone who’d walked in bareheaded, and Keller had turned around and stolen some other fellow’s cap in return, essentially robbing Peter to get even with Paul.

That was something he could live with, something that didn’t figure to weigh too heavily on any celestial balance sheet, but what if the cap’s rightful owner spotted him walking down the street?

Well, he was on his way out of New Orleans, so that became less of a likelihood with every passing moment. Besides, the article in question was a Saints cap, and half of the city seemed to be similarly attired. The team had had a good year, had done far better than anybody expected them to do, and the whole country had elected to see in their performance the resurgence and regeneration of the city itself. If the Saints could make the playoffs, the reasoning seemed to hold, then certainly New Orleans could get over a dinky little thing like a hurricane.

Homer Simpson had set him apart, even while it made his face less recognizable. The Saints cap did every bit as much to conceal his face, but did so by bonding him with the people among whom he walked.

He grinned, gave the brim a tug.

The street he was on was called Euterpe. The first time he saw the street sign he’d been unsure how to pronounce it, though he could have narrowed it down to a couple of likely choices. Then he encountered other parallel streets with names like Terpsichore and Melpomene and Polymnia, and they didn’t quite do it, but then Erato and Calliope turned up and he worked it out. He knew from crossword puzzles that Erato was one of the nine muses, and it seemed to him that Calliope, in addition to being a steam instrument you might encounter on a carnival midway, was another. And that was why Euterpe had been faintly familiar, because she’d turned up in a crossword puzzle once or twice herself, and that meant you pronounced it You-Tour-Pee, with that long e on the end of the word, as in all those Greek names, Nike and Aphrodite and Persephone and, well, Calliope.

Imagine naming streets after the nine muses. Where else would it ever occur to them to do that? Well, Athens, maybe, but where else?

He walked along Euterpe and came to Prytania, who as far as he knew wasn’t a muse at all. Rule, Prytania, Prytania rules the waves… He crossed Prytania and walked another block to a street called Coliseum, which was Roman, not Greek, and which bordered a small park that might have been two football fields laid end to end. Except Coliseum, which had been laid out either by a drunk or by someone imaginative enough to name streets after the muses, or both, meandered like the mighty Mississippi itself, making the resultant park wider than a football field in some parts and narrower in others.

Which was just as well, Keller thought, because in order to play football there you’d have to cut down a couple dozen live oak trees, and anyone who’d do that ought to be hanged from one of them instead. They were magnificent trees, and while it might not be the best route back to his car, it was worth a few minutes just to walk on the greensward among these majestic oaks, with the light fading and the day drawing to a close and—

A woman screamed.

22

“Stop! Oh, God! Somebody help me!”

His first thought was that someone had screamed at the sight of him, recognized him as the Des Moines Assassin and cried out in terror. But the thought was gone before the scream had ceased to echo in the still air. It had come from fifty yards away, off to the left and halfway across the little park. Keller saw movement, screened partly by a tree trunk, and heard another cry, less distinct this time, and cut short.

A woman was being attacked.

Not your problem, he told himself, immediately and unequivocally. He was the object of a nationwide manhunt, and the last thing he was going to do was get involved in somebody else’s problem. And it was probably just a domestic quarrel, anyway, one of Nature’s noblemen kicking the crap out of his slattern of a wife, and if the cops came she’d decide not to press charges, and might even take her husband’s side and go after the cops then and there, which was why cops hated responding to calls of that sort.

And he wasn’t a cop, and didn’t have a dog in this fight, as they would put it in the states he’d been spending time in lately. So what he would do now was turn around and leave the park and walk back up Euterpe — pronounced You-Tour-Pee — and figure out a route that would get him back to his car, and then find his way out of this town as quickly as he possibly could.

That was the only course of action that made the slightest bit of sense.

But what he was doing, even as he was working all of this out in his mind, was racing full speed toward the source of the screams.

No question what was going on. There was nothing remotely ambiguous about the scene that confronted Keller. Even in the dim light, it was unmistakable.

The woman, dark-haired, slender, was sprawled out on the grass, one hand braced against the ground, the other held up to ward off her attacker. And the guy was your stereotypical mad rapist from central casting, his hair a ragged dirty-blond mop, his broad flat mug sporting a week’s growth of patchy beard, and a teardrop jailhouse tattoo on one cheekbone to let you know he wasn’t just another pretty face. He was crouched over her, tearing at her clothes.

“Hey!”

The man whirled at the sound, bared his teeth at Keller as if they were weapons. He came up out of his crouch, light glinting off the blade of his knife.