“Miss Coogan told me the next bus went to New York, so I bought a ticket on that one. If she’d told me it went to Jacksonville or Nome or Hot Burgoo, South Dakota, I would have gone to one of those places. All I wanted to do was get out of that town. I didn’t care that people were dying and worse than dying, some of them my friends, some of them my parishioners. I just wanted to get out . Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” Roland said with no hesitation. “Very well.”

Callahan looked into his face, and what he saw there seemed to reassure him a little. When he continued, he seemed calmer.

“Loretta Coogan was one of the town spinsters. I must have frightened her, because she said I’d have to wait for the bus outside. I went out. Eventually the bus came. I got on and gave the driver my ticket. He took his half and gave me my half. I sat down. The bus started to roll. We went under the flashing yellow blinker at the middle of town, and that was the first mile. The first mile on the road that took me here. Later on—maybe four-thirty in the morning, still dark outside—the bus stopped in”

Seven

“Hartford,” the bus driver says. “This is Hartford, Mac. We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Do you want to go in and get a sandwich or something?”

Callahan fumbles his wallet out of his pocket with his bandaged hand and almost drops it. The taste of death is in his mouth, a moronic, mealy taste like a spoiled apple. He needs something to take away that taste, and if nothing will take it away something to change it, and if nothing will change it at least something to cover it up, the way you might cover up an ugly gouge in a wood floor with a piece of cheap carpet.

He holds out a twenty to the bus driver and says, “Can you get me a bottle?”

“Mister, the rules—”

“And keep the change, of course. A pint would be fine.”

“I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus. We’ll be in New York in two hours. You can get anything you want once we’re there.” The bus driver tries to smile. “It’s Fun City, you know.”

Callahan— he’s no longer Father Callahan, the flash of fire from the doorhandle answeredthat question, at least — adds a ten to the twenty. Now he’s holding out thirty dollars. Again he tells the driver a pint would be fine, and he doesn’t expect any change. This time the driver, not an idiot, takes the money. “But don’t you go cutting up on me,” he repeats. “I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus.”