Arthur checked the street signs, and it occurred to him that Sunbury Road might be in the neighborhood of the Hoover Reservoir. He pulled over to the curb, took out the highway map and plotted the coordinates. He was indeed near the dam he had been intending to visit for a long time.

He had heard that ever since the Army Corps of Engineers had built the dam, the sludge had accumulated against the structure. He had been wrestling with the question of whether this sludge area, with its varied forms of microscopic life, might turn out to be an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. If he discovered this was indeed an infested area, he would inform the authorities that action must be taken. The important thing was for him to take some scrapings of the sludge and examine them under the microscope at home. It was not a major project, he realized, but someone had to do it.

He was deep in thought, driving slowly and carefully, when a truck passing him swerved back into the lane, drove a car ahead of him off the road, and kept going. The car hit the guardrail and went into the ditch end over end. Arthur pulled quickly off onto the berm. He got out calmly and climbed down. A woman was moving, crawling out of the car.

“I say, don’t move any more,” he said. “Let me help you.”

She was bleeding, and he used direct pressure to stop it. She began to gag—he could see her teeth had been knocked out and she was choking. Discarding the idea of performing a tracheotomy, he decided to create an airway instead. Searching through his pockets, he found a plastic ball-point pen. He pulled out the ink sheath and, using his pipe lighter, softened the plastic shell and bent it. Then he slipped it into her throat to help her breathe, turning her head to the side to allow the blood to run out of her mouth.

A brief examination tpld him that her jaw was broken, as was her wrist. Her side was lacerated and he suspected her ribs were crushed. She must have hit the steering wheel when she went forward.

When the ambulance arrived, he quickly told the driver what had happened and what he had done. Then he walked off into the gathering crowd.

He discarded the idea of going to the Hoover Dam. It was getting rather late, and he really should be getting home before dark. He did not like the idea of driving on the wrong side of the road at night.

Chapter Fourteen

(1)

Arthur found himself growing increasingly irritated with the way things were going. Allen had been fired from his latest job—filling invoices and loading trucks at the J. C. Penney distribution center—when David came on the spot unexpectedly and crashed a forklift into a steel pillar. Tommy wandered around Lancaster and Columbus looking, unsuccessfully, for a new j,ob. Ragen was working for Foley on a regular basis— guarding shipments of guns and drugs—and was drinking too much vodka and smoking too much marijuana. After Ragen had spent four days in Indianapolis tracing a confiscated shipment of guns, he ended up in Dayton. Someone took too many downers and Tommy, finding himself on Interstate 70 feeling dizzy and sick to his stomach, gave up the spot to David, who was arrested on a complaint from a motel owner. At the hospital, they pumped Davids stomach and treated him for an overdose, but the police let him go when the motel owner decided not to sign the complaint. When Allen got back to Lancaster, Marlene stayed with him. Then one of the undesirables—the Brooklyn accent revealed it to be Philip—took an overdose of red capsules. Marlene called the emergency squad and went along to the hospital. After they pumped his stomach again, she stayed and comforted him.