“I always wear my gloves. The HIV, the AIDS, I’m always real careful.”

“Good,” said Jed. “That’s good.”

He nodded to himself.

“I’ll go down and check on him myself, once I’m done here, maybe convince him to let Doc Bradley take a look at him. Doesn’t sound to me like he’s on the mend, he leaves black blood in the bowl. Doesn’t sound like he’s getting better at all, if he’s doing that.”

He told Maria to head home early, spend some time with her grandchild. He would roust Phil if there was anything that needed to be done. Sure, Phil might whine some, but he was a good kid. Jed would miss him when he headed back to school at the end of the week. He wouldn’t be seeing him again until after Christmas, since Phil was spending the holidays with his mom in Seattle. Jed consoled himself with the thought that the boy would be back before New Year’s and, if the choice were his own, Phil would probably have preferred Easton to Seattle anyway. Most of his buddies would be back for the holiday season in the hopes of getting a little skiing in, and Phil was as good as any of them on the slopes.

In the meantime, he’d talk to the guy in 12 and try to figure out if there was anything that needed to be done. He might even send him on his way, since there would be nothing worse for business than a stranger dying in one of his rooms. Maria thanked him before she left. He could see that she was badly shaken, although he wasn’t certain why. Sure, finding bloodied towels and a bloodied bowl in a room occupied by a sick man wasn’t nice for anyone, but they’d had to mop up a lot worse in the past. Hell, there was a bachelor party that stopped off a couple of years back and left Jed thinking it might be easier just to burn down the motel and rebuild it instead of cleaning it.

Jed drew the register toward him and ran his finger down the page until he came to the name of the man in 12.

“ Carson,” he read aloud. “Buddy Carson. Well, Buddy, looks like you may be checking out sooner than you think.”

In more ways than one, he thought.

Although the man who gave his name as Buddy Carson had arrived at the motel only two nights before, he had been drifting around Easton and its environs for more than a week, ever since he left Colorado. Two thousand miles, and he’d covered it in less than two days. Buddy didn’t need to sleep more than an hour or two at most, and didn’t eat much other than candy bars and sweet things. Sometimes he wondered about his eating habits, but it didn’t occupy him for long. Buddy had more important things to worry about, like easing his pain and feeding the appetite of the thing that dwelt within him.

On Monday, shortly after crossing the Vermont/New Hampshire state line, he came across Link Frazier changing the wheel on his truck and knew it was time to begin again.

Link was seventy, moved like he was fifty, and came on to young women like he was seventeen, but changing a tire was still a damn chore. Link used to own Reed’s bar in Easton, but back then it was called The Missing Link, on account of the fact that his wife used to joke that whenever there was hard work to be done, Lincoln Frazier was always unaccountably absent. When Myra died ten years ago, some of the spark had gone out of Link and he sold the bar to Eddy Reed, on condition that Eddy change the name of the bar to something else. The joke seemed less funny, now that Myra was gone.

Link’s knees weren’t what they once were, so he was kind of pleased when the red Dodge Charger pulled up in front of him and the driver got out. He was younger than Link, decades younger, and wore faded blue jeans and an antique black leather vest over his equally faded denim shirt. From beneath the frayed ends of his jeans peeked the pointed toes of a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. His hair was black and long, slicked back against his head, with the parallel tracks of a wide-toothed comb visible among the strands. The hair was thin, though, and the white of his skull gleamed between the rows like rainwater shining on a rutted mud track.

The driver reached into his car and removed a battered straw cowboy hat from the passenger seat, then placed it carefully on his head. An oval of white material was stuck to the front of the hat. It looked as if it had been torn from a pair of coveralls, the kind worn by auto shop mechanics, and written on it was the word Buddy in red cursive script.

As the Dodge’s owner drew closer, Link got his first good look at the man’s face, slightly shadowed though it was by his hat. His cheeks were very gaunt, so that Link could see the tendons move as his jaws worked, chewing at something in the corner of his mouth. His lips were deep red, almost black, and his eyeballs bulged slightly in their sockets, as though he were slowly being choked by a pair of unseen hands. He was almost ugly, yet he carried himself with a kind of grace. There was a purposefulness about him, despite the laid-back air his clothing and manner seemed calculated to communicate.

“You having some trouble?” he asked.

His voice had a distinct Southern twang to it, although Link had the feeling he was exaggerating it a little, the way some men will do when they believe that a certain quality adds to their charm.

“Took a nail back a ways,” said Link.

“Flatter than a pancake, that’s for sure,” said the man.

He knelt down beside Link.

“Let me do that,” he said. “No offense. I know you can do it yourself. I know you could probably lift the whole damn truck without a jack, but just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should have to do it.”

Link decided to accept the compliment, excessive though it was, and the help that came with it. He rose, and watched as the man in the cowboy hat swiftly loosened the wheel nuts and hoisted the tire off. He was stronger than he looked, thought Link. The older man had been planning to beat on the tire iron with the heel of his boot to loosen the nuts, but this guy just flipped them free with barely a stretch of his back. Pretty soon the tire was changed with the minimum of fuss or conversation, which suited Link just fine. Link wasn’t much for polite conversation, least of all with strangers, didn’t matter how many tires they changed. When he owned The Missing Link, it was Myra who did the charming and Link who dealt with the beer and liquor people.

The cowboy stood, took a bright blue rag from his pocket, and wiped his hands clean.

“I appreciate your help,” said Link.

He stretched out his hand in thanks. “The name’s Link Frazier.”

The cowboy looked at Link’s outstretched palm the way a child molester might respond to an unexpected flash of young thigh in a playground. He finished cleaning his hands, put the rag back in his pocket, then shook Link’s hand in return. Link felt an unpleasant sensation, as if there were bugs crawling on his skin. He tried to hide it, but he felt sure that the cowboy had seen the change in his expression.

“Buddy Carson,” said the cowboy.

He had noticed Link’s response. Buddy was finely attuned to the rhythms of other people’s bodies. It made him good at what he did.

“It was my pleasure,” said Buddy, as the cells in Link’s body started to metastasize and his liver began to rot.

He tipped the fingers of his right hand to his hat, gave Link a little salute, and headed back to his car.

Later that day, Buddy picked up a waitress in a bar over by Danbury. She was fortyish and overweight. Nobody would have called her good-looking, but Buddy worked her pretty well and by the end of a night’s drinking he had convinced her that they were kindred spirits: two lonely but decent people who’d taken some knocks in life, but who had somehow managed to pull through. They went back to her place, a neat little two-bedroom duplex that smelled faintly of musty clothing, and Buddy rattled her bed and her bones. She told Buddy that it had been a long time, that it was just what she needed. She moaned beneath him, and he closed his eyes as he moved upon her.