He pulled up a couple of doors down and noticed that a new trailer had moved in next to the Crazy Lady. A new customer? Why not give it a try? The Crazy Lady didn’t receive the paper, so his pretense for knocking on her door was to get her to subscribe. He could practice on these new people. As he skated up to the front door of the new trailer, lights came on in the two front windows. Yes! Someone was home. Strange curtains—they looked like cat’s eyes.

Through a part in the curtains, Molly watched the kid come down the road into the trailer park. She liked kids, but she didn’t like this kid. At least once a week he knocked on her door and tried to get her to subscribe to the paper, and once a week she told him to go away and never come back. Sometimes he would bring one of his little buddies along. She could hear them skulking around her trailer, trying to peek in the windows. “Swear to God, she’s got a dead guy in there that she does it with. I’ve seen him. And she ate a kid once.”

The kid was heading for the monster trailer.

In the background, a videotape was playing on her TV—Mechanized Death: Warrior Babe VII—and THE SCENE was coming up. Molly looked away from the window and watched THE SCENE for the thousandth time.

Kendra is standing in the back of a jeep, manning a rack of net guns as the jeep pursues the Evil Warlord across the desert. The driver turns, as he is supposed to, throwing up a fishtail of dust, but the front wheel of the jeep hits a rock and the jeep rolls. Kendra is thrown fifty feet in the air and lands in a heap. The steel bra she is wearing cuts deep into her chest and blood sprays out across the dust.

The bastards! Every time she watches THE SCENE she can’t believe the bastards left it in. The accident was real, the blood was Molly’s, and when she returned to the set ten days later, a security guard escorted her to the producer’s trailer.

“I can pay you extra’s wages as a mutant,” the producer said, “but let’s face it, babe, you didn’t get your billing because of your acting ability. You think I’m gonna hold up filming for ten days when the whole schedule is only three weeks long? We got a new Kendra. Wrote the accident and the facial reconstruction into the script. She’s a cyborg now. Now you can get in line with the mutants to pick up your bag of rags, or you can get the fuck off the set. My audience wants perfect bodies, and you were getting up there anyway. With that scar you don’t sell anymore.”

Molly had just turned twenty-seven years old.

She pulled herself from THE SCENE and looked out the window again. The kid was there, right there in front of the monster trailer. She should warn him or something.

She pounded on the window and the kid looked up, not startled, but with a dreamy expression on his face. Molly gestured for him to move away. The window she was looking out of didn’t open. (Trailers built in those days were designed so people would burn up in case of a fire. The manufacturers thought it would keep the lawsuits down.)

The kid just stood there, his fist poised before the door as if he were frozen in the middle of knocking.

As Molly watched, the door began to open. Not on the hinges, but vertically, like a garage door. Molly pounded furiously on the window with the hilt of her sword. The kid smiled. A huge red tongue snaked out of the door, wrapped around the kid, and slurped him in, Rollerblades, paper satchel, and all. Molly screamed. The door slammed shut.

Molly watched, stunned, not knowing what to do. A few seconds later the mouth opened and expectorated a soccer-ball-sized wad of newspaper.

The hours of Theo’s day had moved like slugs crawling on razor wire. By four in the afternoon, he felt as if he’d been awake for a week and the cups of French roast he’d been drinking had turned to foaming acid in his stomach. Mercifully, there hadn’t been a single call for a bar fight or do-mestic dispute, so he had spent the entire day at the scene of the fuel truck explosion, talking to firemen, representatives from Texaco Oil, and an arson investigator sent up from the San Junipero Fire Department. Much to his surprise, going all day without a hit from his Sneaky Pete pot pipe had not sent him into fits of anxiety as it usually did. He was a little paranoid, but he wasn’t sure that that wasn’t just an informed response to the world anyway.

At a quarter past four, the arson investigator crossed the charred parking lot to where Theo was leaning on the hood of his Volvo. The investigator was in his late twenties, clean-cut, and carried himself like an athlete, even in the orange toxic waste suit. He carried a plastic space helmet under his arm like a tumorous football.

“Constable Crowe, I think that’s about all I can do today. It’ll be dark soon, and as long as we keep the area closed off, I’m sure everything will still be here in the morning.”

“What’s your call so far?

“Well, we generally look for evidence of accelerants, gas, kerosene, paint thinner—and I’d say there were definitely some flammable liquids involved here.” He smiled a weary smile.

“So you don’t know what happened?”

“Offhand, I’d say a fuel truck blew up, but without further investigation I’d hate to make a commitment at this time.” Again the smile.

Theo smiled back. “So no cause?”

“The driver probably didn’t seal the hose correctly and a cloud of fumes got set off. There wasn’t much wind last night, so the fumes would have just clung to the ground and built up. Anything could have set it off: the driver could have been smoking, the pilot lights at the hamburger place, a spark in the truck exhaust. Right now I’d say it was totally accidental. It was a company-owned store, and it was turning a profit, so there really isn’t a financial motive for arson. Texaco will definitely be building your town a new burger stand and probably paying off some nuisance settlements from people claiming trauma, duress, and irritation.”

“I have the information on the driver,” Theo said. “I’ll check to see if he was a smoker.”

“I asked him. He’s keeping quiet” came a voice from a few yards away.

Theo and the arson investigator looked up to see Vance McNally coming toward them holding up a Ziploc bag full of white and gray powder. “I’ve got him right here,” the EMT said. “You want to interrogate him?”

“Very funny, Vance,” Theo said.

“They’re going to have to do the autopsy with a flour sifter,” Vance said.

The investigator took the Ziploc from Vance and examined it. “You find any remains of a cigarette lighter? Anything like that?”

“Not my job,” Vance said. “The fire was so hot it turned the seat springs to liquid. Even incinerated the bones, except for those little bits of calcium in there. Honestly, this might not all be our boy. We might be giving his wife a bag full of burnt-up truck parts to put in an urn on the mantel.”

The investigator shrugged and handed the bag back to Vance. Then to Theo he said, “I’m going home. I’ll come back tomorrow and look around some more. As soon as I give the okay, the oil company will send in a crew to drain the ground tanks.”

“Thanks,” Theo said. The investigator left in a county car.

Vance McNally turned the Ziploc bag of truck driver in the air. “Theo, this ever happens to me, I want you to get all my friends together, have a big party, and snort me, okay?”

“You have friends, Vance?”

“Okay, it was just an idea,” Vance said. He turned and carried his bag to the waiting ambulance.

Theo sipped his coffee and noticed something moving in the charred brush beyond the Texaco. It looked as if someone was holding up a TV antenna and getting altogether too close to the yellow tape he had run around the perimeter. Jeez, was he going to have to stay here all night guarding the scene? He pried himself off the Volvo and headed for the offender.