“Jimmy, that’ll knock you out.”

“No. No, it won’t. Do it.”

Ben took the needle and looked questioningly into Jimmy’s eyes. He nodded. Ben injected the needle.

Jimmy’s body tensed like spring steel. For a moment he was a sculpture in agony, every tendon pulled out into sharp relief. Little by little he began to relax. His body shuddered in reaction, and Ben saw that tears had mixed with the sweat on his face.

“Put the cross on me,” he said. “If I’m still dirty from her, it’ll…it’ll do something to me.”

“Will it?”

“I’m sure it will. When you were going after her, I looked up and I wanted to go after you. God help me, I did. And I looked at that cross and I…my belly wanted to heave up.”

Ben put the cross on his neck. Nothing happened. Its glow—if there had been a glow at all—was entirely gone. Ben took the cross away.

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “I think that’s all we can do.” He rummaged in his bag again, found an envelope containing two pills, and crushed them into his mouth. “Dope,” he said. “Great invention. Thank God I used the john before that…before it happened. I think I pissed myself, but it only came to about six drops. Can you bandage my neck?”

“I think so,” Ben said.

Jimmy handed him gauze, adhesive tape, and a pair of surgical scissors. Bending to put the bandage on, he saw that the skin around the wounds had gone an ugly, congealed red. Jimmy flinched when he pressed the bandage gently into place.

He said: “For a couple of minutes there, I thought I was going to go nuts. Really, clinically nuts. Her lips on me…biting me…” His throat rippled as he swallowed. “And when she was doing it, I likedit, Ben. That’s the hellish part. I actually had an erection. Can you believe it? If you hadn’t been here to pull her off, I would have…would have let her…”

“Never mind,” Ben said.

“There’s one more thing I have to do that I don’t like.”

“What’s that?”

“Here. Look at me a minute.”

Ben finished the bandage and drew back a little to look at Jimmy. “What—”

And suddenly Jimmy slugged him. Stars rocketed up in his brain and he took three wandering steps backward and sat down heavily. He shook his head and saw Jimmy getting carefully down from the table and coming toward him. He groped madly for the cross, thinking: This is what’s known as an O. Henry ending, you stupid shit, you stupid, stupid—

“You all right?” Jimmy was asking him. “I’m sorry, but it’s a little easier when you don’t know it’s coming.”

“What the Christ—?”

Jimmy sat down beside him on the floor. “I’m going to tell you our story,” he said. “It’s a damned poor one, but I’m pretty sure Maury Green will back it up. It will keep my practice, and keep us both out of jail or some asylum…and at this point, I’m not so concerned about those things as I am about staying free to fight these…things, whatever you want to call them, another day. Do you understand that?”

“The thrust of it,” Ben said. He touched his jaw and winced. There was a knot to the left of his chin.

“Somebody barged in on us while I was examining Mrs Glick,” Jimmy said. “The somebody coldcocked you and then used me for a punching bag. During the struggle, the somebody bit me to make me let him go. That’s all either of us remembers. All. Understand?”

Ben nodded.

“The guy was wearing a dark CPO coat, maybe blue, maybe black, and a green or gray knitted cap. That’s all you saw. Okay?”

“Have you ever thought about giving up doctoring in favor of a career in creative writing?”

Jimmy smiled. “I’m only creative in moments of extreme self-interest. Can you remember the story?”

“Sure. And I don’t think it’s as poor as you might believe. After all, hers isn’t the first body that’s disappeared lately.”

“I’m hoping they’ll add that up. But the county sheriff is a lot more on the ball than Parkins Gillespie ever thought of being. We have to watch our step. Don’t embellish the story.”

“Do you suppose anyone in officialdom will begin to see the pattern in all this?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Not a chance in the world. We’re going to have to bumble through this on our own. And remember that from this point on, we’re criminals.”

Shortly after, he went to the phone and called Maury Green, then County Sheriff Homer McCaslin.

TWELVE

Ben got back to Eva’s at about fifteen minutes past midnight and made himself a cup of coffee in the deserted downstairs kitchen. He drank it slowly, reviewing the night’s events with all the intense recall of a man who has just escaped falling from a high ledge.

The county sheriff was a tall, balding man. He chewed tobacco. He moved slowly, but his eyes were bright with observation. He had pulled an enormous battered notebook on a chain from his hip pocket, and an old thick-barreled fountain pen from under his green wool vest. He had questioned Ben and Jimmy while two deputies dusted for fingerprints and took pictures. Maury Green stood quietly in the background, throwing a puzzled look at Jimmy from time to time.

What had brought them to Green’s Mortuary?

Jimmy took that one, reciting the encephalitis story.

Did old Doc Reardon know about it?

Well, no. Jimmy thought it would be best to make a quiet check before mentioning it to anyone. Doc Reardon had been known to be, well, overly chatty on occasion.

What about this encephawhatzis? Did the woman have it?

No, almost certainly not. He had finished his examination before the man in the CPO coat burst in. He (Jimmy) would not be willing—or able—to state just how the woman haddied, but it certainly wasn’t of encephalitis.

Could they describe this fella?

They answered in terms of the story they had worked out. Ben added a pair of brown work boots just so they wouldn’t sound too much like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

McCaslin asked a few more questions, and Ben was just beginning to feel that they were going to get out of it unscathed when McCaslin turned to him and asked:

“What are you doing in this, Mears? You ain’t no doctor.”

His watchful eyes twinkled benignly. Jimmy opened his mouth to answer, but the sheriff quieted him with a single hand gesture.

If the purpose of McCaslin’s sudden shot had been to startle Ben into a guilty expression or gesture, it failed. He was too emotionally wrung out to react much. Being caught in a misstatement did not seem too shattering after what had gone before. “I’m a writer, not a doctor. I write novels. I’m writing one currently where one of the important secondary characters is a mortician’s son. I just wanted a look into the back room. I hitched a ride with Jimmy here. He told me he would rather not reveal his business, and I didn’t ask.” He rubbed his chin, where a small, knotted bump had risen. “I got more than I bargained for.”

McCaslin looked neither pleased nor disappointed in Ben’s answer. “I should say you did. You’re the fella that wrote Conway’s Daughter, ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“My wife read part of that in some woman’s magazine. Cosmopolitan, I think. Laughed like hell. I took a look and couldn’t see nothing funny in a little girl strung out on drugs.”

“No,” Ben said, looking McCaslin in the eye. “I didn’t see anything funny about it, either.”

“This new book the one they say you been workin’ on up to the Lot?”

“Yes.”

“P’raps, you’d like Moe Green here to read it over,” McCaslin remarked. “See if you got the undertakin’ parts right.”

“That section isn’t written yet,” Ben said. “I always research before I write. It’s easier.”

McCaslin shook his head wonderingly. “You know, your story sounds just like one of those Fu Manchu books. Some guy breaks in here an’ overpowers two strong men an’ makes off with the body of some poor woman who died of unknown causes.”