He seemed to hear Detta Walker’s nasty, giggling voice: You want to go at me, graymeat? Sho you want to go at me! You ain’t afraid of no lil ole cripple black woman, are you?

“Only one way,” Jack’s mouth muttered. “Only one.”

The door of the office opened, and a bald man with lenses over his eyes looked in.

“How are you doing on that Dorfman account?” the bald man asked.

“I feel ill. I think it was my lunch. I think I might leave.”

The bald man looked worried. “It’s probably a bug. I heard there’s a nasty one going around.”

“Probably.”

“Well . . . as long as you get the Dorfman stuff finished by five tomorrow afternoon . . .”

“Yes.”

“Because you know what a dong he can be—”

“Yes.”

The bald man, now looking a little uneasy, nodded. “Yes, go home. You don’t seem like your usual self at all.”

“I’m not.”

The bald man went out the door in a hurry.

He sensed me, the gunslinger thought. That was part of it. Part, but not all. They’re afraid of him. They don’t know why, but they’re afraid of him. And they’re right to be afraid.

Jack Mort’s body got up, found the briefcase the man had been carrying when the gunslinger entered him, and swept all the papers on the surface of the desk into it.

He felt an urge to sneak a look back at the door and resisted it. He would not look again until he was ready to risk everything and come back.

In the meantime, time was short and there were things which had to be done.

CHAPTER 2

The Honeypot

1

Detta laid up in a deeply shadowed cleft formed by rocks which leaned together like old men who had been turned to stone while sharing some weird secret. She watched Eddie range up and down the rubble-strewn slopes of the hills, yelling himself hoarse. The duck-fuzz on his cheeks was finally becoming a beard, and you might have taken him for a growed man except for the three or four times he passed close to her (once he had come close enough for her to have snaked a hand out and grabbed his ankle). When he got close you saw he wasn’t nothing but a kid still, and one who was dog tired to boot.

Odetta would have felt pity; Detta felt only the still, coiled readiness of the natural predator.

When she first crawled in here she had felt things crackling under her hands like old autumn leaves in a woods holler. As her eyes adjusted she saw they weren’t leaves but the tiny bones of small animals. Some predator, long gone if these ancient yellow bones told the truth, had once denned here, something like a weasel or a ferret. It had perhaps gone out at night, following its nose further up into The Drawers to where the trees and undergrowth were thicker—following its nose to prey. It had killed, eaten, and brought the remains back here to snack on the following day as it laid up, waiting for night to bring the time of hunting on again.