“I’m Hook. David Hook. You wanted to see me?”

Still the young man said nothing, just stood there looking heavy and stupid and as frightened as Hook himself felt.

“Well?” Hook snapped. But even as he said it, he got all the answer he needed, heard a pebble turning over somewhere behind him, shoe leather lightly touching asphalt. And he whirled.

It was Parnelli.

“Well—shitkicker.”

The big Italian grinned drunkenly. And Hook saw that this night the man was not wearing electric blue or grasshopper green but black, a black sweatshirt and Levi’s, black shoes. Hook knew that he should already have been running as fast and far as he could. Instead he found himself standing there as if he had taken root.

Grinning still, Parnelli reached out and took hold of Hook’s shoulder, lightly for a moment, and then the hand began to bite like ice tongs into his flesh.

“Hey, relax, man,” Parnelli said. “Don’t sweat it. This ain’t the way it looks.”

“How is it then?”

“I’m drunk, that’s how it is.”

“I can see that.”

Laughing, Parnelli turned to the younger man. “See, Joey? See what I tell you. He’s all balls, our Mister Hook. All balls and no brains.”

“Why’s the boy here?” Hook asked. “What do you need him for?”

“Joey? Joey’s my nephew. My sister Angela’s kid. Kind of my gopher too. Ain’t you, kid?”

The youth’s face remained expressionless, all mustache and sunglasses.

“What’s he doing here?” Hook persisted.

“Nothing. Just used him to get you up here, that’s all. So we could be alone.”

“So you could tell me you were drunk.”

Parnelli laughed again. Letting go of Hook’s shoulder, he turned away. “Come on. Let’s walk down the road a little. We can talk.”

Hook went with him, moving downhill away from the truck, into the darkness.

“We could talk at the sheriff’s,” Hook suggested.

“Yeah. Sure. There’s always that.” As they walked, Parnelli held his hands out in front of Hook. They were shaking. “Look at them. They been like this all day. And all last night. And I been drunk the whole time. How about that, huh? Can you figure that?”

Hook was only half listening to him, for he knew the man had not gone to the trouble of luring him up onto this lonely mountain road just to talk. So as they walked he watched the big athlete’s every movement. And he studied the trees and night boulders along the road, wondering who might be crouched and waiting behind them. Douglas? He doubted it. But it was possible. He had learned that anything was possible.

“I never been so uptight in all my goddamn life,” Parnelli was saying. “I mean it. I’m really coming unglued. Like getting in touch with that cat Icarus and setting this whole weird thing up—I mean what the fuck was I thinking about anyway, huh? Can you tell me that? I guess at first I figured I’d lean on you a little and you’d just fold up and go home.” He laughed ruefully at this, shaking his head. “Then when I got to thinking about it I knew that was just a lot of horseshit. Any bastard crazy enough to come up here alone at night on a phone call from some kid he don’t even know—well you ain’t gonna scare him off with a little muscle, right? No, you gonna have to kill him. You gonna have to beat him to death.”