When they came, they came in battalions. They were big, dirty gray, pink-eyed. Small fleas and ticks jumped on their hides. Their tails dragged after them like thick pink wires. Dud loved to shoot rats.

“You buy a powerful slug o’ shells, Dud,” George Middler down at the hardware store would say in his fruity voice, pushing the boxes of Remingtons across. “Town pay for ’em?” This was an old joke. Some years back, Dud had put in a purchase order for two thousand rounds of hollow-point .22 cartridges, and Bill Norton had grimly sent him packing.

“Now,” Dud would say, “you know this is purely a public service, George.”

There. That big fat one with the gimpy back leg was George Middler. Had something in his mouth that looked like a shredded piece of chicken liver.

“Here you go, George. Here y’are,” Dud said, and squeezed off. The .22’s report was flat and undramatic, but the rat tumbled over twice and lay twitching. Hollow points, that was the ticket. Someday he was going to get a large-bore .45 or a .357 Magnum and see what that did to the little cock-knockers.

That next one now, that was that slutty little Ruthie Crockett, the one who didn’t wear no bra to school and was always elbowing her chums and sniggering when Dud passed on the street. Bang. Good-by, Ruthie.

The rats scurried madly for the protection of the dump’s far side, but before they were gone Dud had gotten six of them—a good morning’s kill. If he went out there and looked at them, the ticks would be running off the cooling bodies like…like…why, like rats deserting a sinking ship.

This struck him as deliciously funny and he threw back his queerly cocked head and rocked back on his hump and laughed in great long gusts as the fire crept through the trash with its grasping orange fingers.

Life surely was grand.

ELEVEN

12:00 noon

The town whistle went off with a great twelve-second blast, ushering in lunch hour at all three schools and welcoming the afternoon. Lawrence Crockett, the Lot’s second selectman and proprietor of Crockett’s Southern Maine Insurance and Realty, put away the book he had been reading ( Satan’s Sex Slaves) and set his watch by the whistle. He went to the door and hung the “Back at One O’clock” sign from the shade pull. His routine was unvarying. He would walk up to the Excellent Café, have two cheeseburgers with the works and a cup of coffee, and watch Pauline’s legs while he smoked a William Penn.

He rattled the doorknob once to make sure the lock had caught and moved off down Jointner Avenue. He paused on the corner and glanced up at the Marsten House. There was a car in the driveway. He could just make it out, twinkling and shining. It caused a thread of disquiet somewhere in his chest. He had sold the Marsten House and the long-defunct Village Washtub in a package deal over a year ago. It had been the strangest deal of his life—and he had made some strange ones in his time. The owner of the car up there was, in all probability, a man named Straker. R.T. Straker. And just this morning he had received something in the mail from this Straker.

The fellow in question had driven up to Crockett’s office on a shimmering July afternoon just over a year ago. He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk for a moment before coming inside, a tall man dressed in a sober three-piece suit in spite of the day’s heat. He was as bald as a cueball and as sweatless as same. His eyebrows were a straight black slash, and the eye sockets shelved away below them to dark holes that might have been carved into the angular surface of his face with drill bits. He carried a slim black briefcase in one hand. Larry was alone in his office when Straker came in; his part-time secretary, a Falmouth girl with the most delectable set of jahoobies you ever clapped an eye to, worked for a Gates Falls lawyer on her afternoons.

The bald man sat down in the client’s chair, put his briefcase in his lap, and stared at Larry Crockett. It was impossible to read the expression in his eyes, and that bothered Larry. He liked to be able to read a man’s wants in his baby blues or browns before the man even opened his mouth. This man had not paused to look at the pictures of local properties that were tacked up on the bulletin board, had not offered to shake hands and introduce himself, had not even said hello.

“How can I help you?” Larry asked.

“I have been sent to buy a residence and a business establishment in your so-fair town,” the bald man said. He spoke with a flat, uninflected tonelessness that made Larry think of the recorded announcements you got when you dialed the weather.

“Well, hey, wonderful,” Larry said. “We have several very nice properties that might—”

“There is no need,” the bald man said, and held up his hand to stop Larry’s words. Larry noted with fascination that his fingers were amazingly long—the middle finger looked four or five inches from base to tip. “The business establishment is a block beyond the Town Office Building. It fronts on the park.”

“Yeah, I can deal with you on that. Used to be a Laundromat. Went broke a year ago. That’d be a real good location if you—”

“The residence,” the bald man overrode him, “is the one referred to in town as the Marsten House.”

Larry had been in the business too long to show his thunderstruck feelings on his face. “Is that so?”

“Yes. My name is Straker. Richard Throckett Straker. All papers will be in my name.”

“Very good,” Larry said. The man meant business, that much seemed clear enough. “The asking price on the Marsten House is fourteen thousand, although I think my clients could be persuaded to take a little less. On the old washateria—”

“That is no accord. I have been authorized to pay one dollar.”

“One—?” Larry tilted his head forward the way a man will when he has failed to hear something correctly.

“Yes. Attend, please.”

Straker’s long fingers undid the clasps on his briefcase, opened it, and took out a number of papers bound in a blue transparent folder.

Larry Crockett looked at him, frowning.

“Read, please. That will save time.”

Larry thumbed back the folder’s plastic cover and glanced down at the first sheet with the air of a man humoring a fool. His eyes moved from left to right randomly for a moment, then riveted on something.

Straker smiled thinly. He reached inside his suit coat, produced a flat gold cigarette case, and selected a cigarette. He tamped it and then lit it with a wooden match. The harsh aroma of a Turkish blend filled the office and was eddied around by the fan.

There had been silence in the office for the next ten minutes, broken only by the hum of the fan and the muted passage of traffic on the street outside. Straker smoked his cigarette down to a shred, crushed the glowing ash between his fingers, and lit another.

Larry looked up, his face pale and shaken. “This is a joke. Who put you up to it? John Kelly?”

“I know no John Kelly. I don’t joke.”

“These papers…quit-claim deed…land title search…my God, man, don’t you know that piece of land is worth one and a half million dollars?”

“You piker,” Straker said coldly. “It is worth four million. Soon to be worth more, when the shopping center is built.”

“What do you want?” Larry asked. His voice was hoarse.

“I have told you what I want. My partner and I plan to open a business in this town. We plan to live in the Marsten House.”

“What sort of business? Murder Incorporated?”

Straker smiled coldly. “A perfectly ordinary furniture business, I am afraid. With a line of rather special antiques for collectors. My partner is something of an expert in that field.”

“Shit,” Larry said crudely. “The Marsten House you could have for eight and a half grand, the shop for sixteen. Your partner must know that. And you both must know that this town can’t support a fancy furniture and antique place.”