That smug face and shit-eating grin of his popped up alongside his Wikipedia entry, and Jimmy clicked the News icon. After several articles about Marty's agent and Gimme Jimmy's "daring late-night escape," which made the killer smile thinking of how he and Tisha May pulled it off, the latest result was a New Yorker article titled "Crime Writer Hunted by His Past," written by an attractive Chicano woman named Izzie Medina.

The title made Jimmy grin. Not haunted by his past but hunted, as if the past was a living thing, a man-eating monster that would tear him apart when it finally caught up. The rest painted Jimmy in a poor light, far too much editorializing. But his witch-hunting days weren't the focus of the article. The "Past" of the title referred to Marty's hometown. Not Stratford, Connecticut but a small island called Barrows Bay in the Rhode Island Sound. And to think all this time Ol' Gimme Jimmy had Marty pegged as a Nutmegger, born and bred.

Jimmy slipped out of the library as unnoticed as he'd entered. He considered paying the Medina woman a visit. Make her the next breadcrumb on his trail of blood, get Marty and the headshrink bitch's fear juices really and truly percolating. But when destiny came calling Ol' Gimme Jimmy wouldn't just stand there gawping with the door wide open. Surprise was the key.

In that spirit, he washed up as best he could in a gas station toilet and bussed straight out to Hartford. From the Nutmeg State he hitched to Narragansett and down to the cape, where he now stood waiting on a water taxi with fifteen dollars in his pocket.

Sailboat riggings clanged against their masts like the cowbells he remembered from when he was a boy, living next to the Rockford farm, and with the gentle wash of waves against the rocky shore it put him in a mood of peaceful contemplation, knowing his work would soon be done.

This business with Marty was a pleasure but it distracted him from his true purpose. He'd be glad to get back to cleansing the world of Satan's whores and their infernal spawn. Vanquishing women who partook of the osculum obscenum, the profane act of puckering up and kissing Ol' Scratch's scarlet-hued turdcutter.

The end of the world was nigh on coming. A fella only had to surf the world wide web for a few minutes or switch on the news to see it plain as day.

The high-pitched buzz of a motor perked his ears.

"Here I come, Marty," he told the darkness. "Can ya feel it? Can ya feel death creepin up on ya like a rattler? The past is a man-eatin monster, an' he gon' gobble you up tonight. Count on it."

A flashlight came on in the dark out on the water, scouring the shore. The beam swished past him and returned, catching him in spotlight, not quite as bright and blinding as the light he'd seen when the Lord anointed him one of His holy soldiers for the End Times.