The weather saved my life. If it hadn’t poured rain two nights before, and if the dew hadn’t been heavy that morning, the parched trees and tall grass next to Walt Felkin’s house would have kindled from the flaming debris and burned like a grease fire, and me with them. As it was, they smoldered, and the smoke from the field, the house, and Walt’s old tires kept anyone from spotting me for a while. It would have been longer yet, except for Sunny Rico. According to stories I heard later, she refused to listen to the suggestion that I might never have been there at all.

“Drunks would pass up free beer first,” she said through clenched teeth, and began to comb the site for me or my remains.

The first I knew of this was Rico’s voice, saying, “No, don’t move. There’s a stretcher coming.”

Everything I’d found out flooded my mind and clamored to be reported. I couldn’t sort it. I opened my eyes and shut them again immediately; the sun was painful, and the smoke. I’d caught a glimpse of Rico’s face, daubed with soot and with a bleeding scratch across the bridge of her nose, her hair soaked with sweat and sticking to her forehead. Now that I paid attention, I could hear the rushing noise of flames, and the firecracker explosions of things caught in the fire. The heat was buffetting.

“It’s a he,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s a he,” I said, more carefully this time, and louder.

“I can’t hear you. Don’t worry about it now.”

“Felkin said ‘he.’ The bike was here. I can describe it.”

Inside my head, the words had been half shouted and clear. But Rico shook her head, frowning. I finally realized that I was only half conscious, and even that wasn’t guaranteed.

“I can’t tell if you’ve broken anything,” she said. “The blood’s just from the cut on your head. I’m worried about things like your spine. So when we move you onto the stretcher, if anything hurts, scream like hell right away, okay?”

That seemed funny. She might even have meant it to be. “Helper of men,” I murmured.

She raised one eyebrow.

I didn’t recognize the two people with the stretcher, when I squinted up at them. They were probably with the neighborhood fire watch. They were both as grubby as Rico. At that point I lost the signal again, if not consciousness altogether. I tuned back in as the sky was being replaced by the roof of an ambulance. “Sunny!” I said with all the force I could manage.

“Yeah?” She was somewhere close by.

“Tell Tick-Tick.” I hoped she’d understood; I hadn’t the strength to stick around and find out.

Chapter 6. The Consequences of Thataway