Warlock drove slowly past Captain Ted Rabun’s house, the address gotten, in a smart move, out of the phone book. A pretty young woman sat on the porch dandling an infant. Ruse or wife? Great sums of money were the obvious impulse behind most of the deceit on earth. What better way to cover up your depravity than by becoming a fishing guide? You had to check out all of the sides of the coin, which were two in number. Or facets of the diamond face of reality. When reality whirled it became a basketball with no sides, he decided, when the narrow streets became confusing and he ended up driving by Captain Ted’s house the second time. Now the wife or ruse wasn’t on the front porch. Neither was the baby. They must have gone inside, he thought; hopefully she didn’t sense that the man in the expensive car wasn’t exactly a friend of the family. Diana and the cowboy flitted through his mind like dream tatters. How did dreams make up people that didn’t exist? There weren’t any cowboys in Michigan and Diana had never really left his company on their Wyoming trip. Guys who wrote letters to Penthouse frequently described themselves as hiding in closets and watching their wives gleefully receive members of awesome proportions, if the writers could be believed. The owners of the disproportionate organs were usually old army buddies named Bill or Bob. There were a number of variations on this inscrutable theme. Thank god I’m normal, he thought.

He drove down to the Pier House for a drink on the deck, but the afternoon light was waning and there was only a single topless sunbather left on the narrow beach. One of her teats, interestingly enough, was larger than the other. A number of polyester dodos were drinking on the deck and pretending not to look at the hapless woman. Warlock felt poignant despair about the whole sexual question until he discovered the waitress of his first night in town passing by with a tray of drinks.

“It can’t be you!” She was amazed at his undercover guise.

“You might say it’s me. There’s a reason behind everything. It’s my birthday, how about a gourmet French dinner?”

“If you’re after your cocaine I lost it.” She was a wary lass.

“Cocaine, schmocaine. There’s more where that came from, baby.” He was learning that this drug was the prime pussy bait of the age.