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If I told him just the right way—leaving out the crazy stuff, in other words—he might believe it. Because of what he believed already. What he knew in his heart.

“He’s going to do it again.”

He started to ask what I meant, then didn’t have to. His eyes widened. “You mean… her?” He looked toward the hedge. Until then, I hadn’t even been sure he knew what was beyond it.

“Not just her.”

“One of the kids, too?”

“Not one, all. He’s out drinking right now, Turcotte. Working himself into another of his blind rages. You know all about those, don’t you? Only this time there won’t be any covering up afterward. He doesn’t care, either. This has been building ever since his last binge, when Doris finally got tired of being knocked around. She showed him the door, did you know that?”

“Everybody knows. He’s livin in a roomin house over on Charity.”

“He’s been trying to get back into her good graces, but the charming act doesn’t work on her anymore. She wants a divorce, and since he finally understands he can’t talk her out of it, he’s going to give her one with a hammer. Then he’s going to divorce his kids the same way.”

He frowned at me. Bayonet in one hand, gun in the other. A hard wind would blow you away, his sister had told him all those years ago, but I didn’t think it would take much more than a breeze tonight. “How could you know that?”

“I don’t have time to explain, but I know, all right. I’m here to stop it. So give me back my gun and let me do it. For your sister. For your nephew. And because I think down deep, you’re a pretty nice guy.” This was bullshit, but if you’re going to lay it on, my father used to say, you might as well lay it on thick. “Why else would you have stopped Dunning and his friends from beating Chaz Frati half to death?”

He was thinking. I could almost hear the wheels turning and the cogs clicking. Then a light went on in his eyes. Perhaps it was only the last remains of the sunset, but to me it looked like the candles that would now be flickering inside of jack-o’-lanterns all over town. He began to smile. What he said next could only have come from a man who was mentally ill… or who had lived too long in Derry… or both.

“Gonna go after em, is he? Okay, let im.”

“What?”

He pointed the .38 at me. “Sit back down, Amberson. Take a load off.”

I reluctantly settled back. It was now past 7:00 P.M. and he was turning into a shadow-man. “Mr. Turcotte—Bill—I know you don’t feel good, so maybe you don’t fully understand the situation. There’s a woman and four little kids in there. The little girl is only seven, for God’s sake.”

“My nephew was a lot younger’n that.” Turcotte spoke weightily, a man articulating a great truth that explains everything. And justifies it, as well. “I’m too sick to take im on, and you ain’t got the guts. I can see that just lookin at you.”

I thought he was wrong about that. He might have been right about Jake Epping of Lisbon Falls, but that fellow had changed. “Why not let me try? What harm to you?”

“Because even if you killed his ass, it wouldn’t be enough. I just figured that out. It come to me like—” He snapped his fingers. “Like out of thin air.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“That’s because you ain’t had twenty years of seeing men like Tony and Phil Tracker treat him like King Shit. Twenty years of seeing women bat their eyes at him like he was Frank Sinatra. He’s been drivin a Pontiac while I worked my ass off in about six different mills for minimum wage, suckin fabric fibers down my throat until I can’t hardly get up in the morning.” Hand at his chest. Rubbing and rubbing. His face a pale smear in the backyard gloom of 202 Wyemore. “Killin’s too good for that cuntwipe. What he needs is forty years or so in the Shank, where if he drops the soap in the shower, he won’t fuckin dare to bend over and pick it up. Where the only booze he gets’ll be prune squeeze.” His voice dropped. “And you know what else?”

“What?” I felt cold all over.

“When he sobers up, he’ll miss em. He’ll be sorry he did it. He’ll wish he could take it back.” Now almost whispering—a hoarse and phlegmy sound. It’s how the irretrievably mad must talk to themselves late at night in places like Juniper Hill, when their meds wear off. “Maybe he wun’t regret the wife s’much, but the kiddies, sure.” He laughed, then grimaced as if it hurt him. “You’re probably fulla shit, but you know what? I hope you’re not. We’ll wait and see.”

“Turcotte, those kids are innocent.”

“So was Clara. So was little Mikey.” His shadow-shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “Fuck em.”

“You don’t mean th—”

“Shut up. We’ll wait.”

There were glow-in-the-dark hands on the watch Al had given me, and I watched with horror and resignation as the long hand moved down toward the bottom of the dial, then started up once more. Twenty-five minutes until the start of The New Adventures of Ellery Queen. Then twenty. Then fifteen. I tried to talk to him and he told me to shut up. He kept rubbing his chest, only stopping long enough to take his cigarettes from his breast pocket.

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” I said. “That’ll help your heart a lot.”

“Put a sock in it.”

He stuck the bayonet in the gravel behind the garage and lit his cigarette with a battered Zippo. In the momentary flicker of flame, I saw sweat running down his cheeks, even though the night was chilly. His eyes seemed to have receded into their sockets, making his face look like a skull. He sucked in smoke, coughed it out. His thin body shook, but the gun remained steady. Pointed at my chest. Overhead, the stars were out. It was now ten of eight. How far along had Ellery Queen been when Dunning arrived? Harry’s theme hadn’t said, but I was guessing not long. There was no school tomorrow, but Doris Dunning still wouldn’t want seven-year-old Ellen out much later than ten, even if she was with Tugga and Harry.

Five minutes of eight.

And suddenly an idea occurred to me. It had the clarity of undisputed truth, and I spoke while it was still bright.

“You chickenshit.”

“What?” He straightened as if he’d been goosed.

“You heard me.” I mimicked him. “‘Nobody messes with Frankie Dunning but me. He’s mine.’ You’ve been telling yourself that for twenty years, haven’t you? And you haven’t messed with him yet.”

“I told you to shut up.”

“Hell, twenty-two! You didn’t mess with him when he went after Chaz Frati, either, did you? You ran away like a little girl and got the football players.”

“There was six of em!”

“Sure, but Dunning’s been on his own plenty of times since, and you haven’t even put a banana peel down on the sidewalk and hoped he’d slip on it. You’re a chickenshit coward, Turcotte. Hiding over here like a rabbit in a hole.”

“Shut up!”

“Telling yourself some bullshit about how seeing him in prison would be the best revenge, so you don’t have to face the fact—”

“Shut up!”

“—that you’re a nutless wonder who’s let his sister’s murderer walk around free for over twenty years—”

“I’m warning you!” He cocked the revolver’s hammer.

I thumped the middle of my chest. “Go on. Do it. Everybody’ll hear the shot, the police will come, Dunning’ll see the ruckus and turn right around, and you’ll be the one in Shawshank. I bet they got a mill there, too. You can work in it for a nickel an hour instead of a buck-twenty. Only you’ll like that, because you won’t have to try and explain to yourself why you just stood by all those years. If your sister was alive, she’d spit on y—”

He thrust the gun forward, meaning to press the muzzle against my chest, and stumbled on his own damn bayonet. I batted the pistol aside with the back of my hand and it went off. The bullet must have gone into the ground less than an inch from my leg, because a little spray of stones struck my pants. I grabbed the gun and pointed it at him, ready to shoot if he made the slightest move to grab the fallen bayonet.

What he did was slump against the garage wall. Now both hands were plastered over the left side of his chest, and he was making a low gagging sound.

Somewhere not too far away—on Kossuth, not Wyemore—a man bellowed: “Fun’s fun, you kids, but one more cherry bomb and I’m calling the cops! A word to the wise!”

I let out my breath. Turcotte was letting his out as well, but in hitching gasps. The gagging sounds continued as he slid down the side of the garage and sprawled on the gravel. I took the bayonet, considered putting it in my belt, and decided I’d only gash my leg with it when I pushed through the hedge: the past hard at work, trying to stop me. I hucked it into the dark yard instead, and heard a low clunk as it hit something. Maybe the side of the YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE doghouse.

“Ambulance,” Turcotte croaked. His eyes gleamed with what might have been tears. “Please, Amberson. Hurts bad.”

Ambulance. Good idea. And here’s something hilarious. I’d been in Derry—in 1958—for almost two months, but I still plunged my hand into my right front pants pocket, where I always kept my cell phone when I wasn’t wearing a sport coat. My fingers found nothing there but some change and the keys to the Sunliner.

“Sorry, Turcotte. You were born in the wrong era for instant rescue.”

“What?”

According to the Bulova, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen was now being telecast to a waiting America. “Tough it out,” I said, and shoved through the hedge, the hand not holding the gun raised to protect my eyes from the stiff, raking branches.

I tripped over the sandbox in the middle of the Dunning backyard, fell full length, and found myself face-to-face with a blank-eyed doll wearing a tiara and nothing else. The revolver flew out of my hand. I went searching for it on my hands and knees, thinking I would never find it; this was the obdurate past’s final trick. A small one, compared to raging stomach flu and Bill Turcotte, but a good one. Then, just as I spotted it lying at the edge of a trapezoidal length of light thrown by the kitchen window, I heard a car coming down Kossuth Street. It was moving far faster than any reasonable driver would have dared to travel on a street that was no doubt full of children wearing masks and carrying trick-or-treat bags. I knew who it was even before it screeched to a stop.

Inside 379, Doris Dunning was sitting on the couch with Troy while Ellen pranced around in her Indian princess costume, wild to get going. Troy had just told her that he would help eat the candy when she, Tugga, and Harry came back. Ellen was replying, “No, you won’t, dress up and get your own.” Everybody would laugh at that, even Harry, who was in the bathroom taking a last-minute whiz. Because Ellen was a real Lucille Ball who could make anybody laugh.

I snatched at the gun. It slipped through my sweat-slick fingers and landed in the grass again. My shin was howling where I’d barked it on the side of the sandbox. On the other side of the house, a car door slammed and rapid footsteps rattled on concrete. I remember thinking, Bar the door, Mom, that’s not just your bad-tempered husband; that’s Derry itself coming up the walk.

I grabbed the gun, staggered upright, stumbled over my own stupid feet, almost went down again, found my balance, and ran for the back door. The cellar bulkhead was in my path. I detoured around it, convinced that if I put my weight on it, it would give way. The air itself seemed to have turned syrupy, as if it were also trying to slow me down.

Even if it kills me, I thought. Even if it kills me and Oswald goes through with it and millions die. Even then. Because this is now. This is them.

The back door would be locked. I was so sure of this that I almost tumbled off the stoop when the knob turned and it swung outward. I stepped into a kitchen that still smelled of the pot roast Mrs. Dunning had cooked in her Hotpoint. The sink was stacked with dishes. There was a gravy boat on the counter; beside it, a platter of cold noodles. From the TV came a trembling violin soundtrack—what Christy used to call “murder music.” Very fitting. Lying on the counter was the rubber Frankenstein mask Tugga meant to wear when he went out trick-or-treating. Next to it was a paper swag-bag with TUGGA’S CANDY DO NOT TOUCH printed on the side in black crayon.

In his theme, Harry had quoted his mother as saying, “Get out of here with that thing, you’re not suppose to be here.” What I heard her actually say as I ran across the linoleum toward the arch between the kitchen and the living room was, “Frank? What are you doing here?” Her voice began to rise. “What’s that? Why have you… get out of here!”

Then she screamed.

As I came through the arch, a child said: “Who are you? Why is my mom yelling? Is my daddy here?”

I turned my head and saw ten-year-old Harry Dunning standing in the door of a small water closet in the far corner of the kitchen. He was dressed in buckskin and carrying his air rifle in one hand. With the other he was pulling at his fly. Then Doris Dunning screamed again. The other two boys were yelling. There was a thud—a heavy, sickening sound—and the scream was cut off.

“No, Daddy, don’t, you’re HURRRTING her!” Ellen shrieked.

I ran through the arch and stopped there with my mouth open. Based on Harry’s theme, I had always assumed that I’d have to stop a man swinging the sort of hammer guys kept in their toolboxes. That wasn’t what he had. What he had was a sledgehammer with a twenty-pound head, and he was handling it as if it were a toy. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see the bulge of muscles that had been built up by twenty years of cutting meat and toting carcasses. Doris was on the living room rug. He had already broken her arm—the bone was sticking out through a rip in the sleeve of her dress—and dislocated her shoulder as well, from the look. Her face was pale and dazed. She was crawling across the rug in front of the TV with her hair hanging in her face. Dunning was slinging back the hammer. This time he’d connect with her head, crushing her skull and sending her brains flying onto the couch cushions.

Ellen was a little dervish, trying to push him back out the door. “Stop, Daddy, stop!”

He grabbed her by her hair and heaved her. She went reeling, feathers flying out of her headdress. She struck the rocking chair and knocked it over.

“Dunning!” I shouted. “Stop it!”

He looked at me with red, streaming eyes. He was drunk. He was crying. Snot hung from his nostrils and spit slicked his chin. His face was a cramp of rage, woe, and bewilderment.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, then charged at me without waiting for an answer.

I pulled the trigger of the revolver, thinking, This time it won’t fire, it’s a Derry gun and it won’t fire.

But it did. The bullet took him in the shoulder. A red rose bloomed on his white shirt. He twisted sideways with the impact, then came on again. He raised the sledge. The bloom on his shirt spread, but he didn’t seem to feel it.

I pulled the trigger again, but someone jostled me just as I did, and the bullet went high and wild. It was Harry. “Stop it, Daddy!” His voice was shrill. “Stop or I’ll shoot you!”

Arthur “Tugga” Dunning was crawling toward me, toward the kitchen. Just as Harry fired his air rifle—ka-chow!—Dunning brought the sledge down on Tugga’s head. The boy’s face was obliterated in a sheet of blood. Bone fragments and clumps of hair leaped high in the air; droplets of blood spattered the overhead light fixture. Ellen and Mrs. Dunning were shrieking, shrieking.

I caught my balance and fired a third time. This one tore off Dunning’s right cheek all the way up to the ear, but it still didn’t stop him. He’s not human is what I thought then, and what I still think now. All I saw in his gushing eyes and gnashing mouth—he seemed to be chewing the air rather than breathing it—was a kind of blabbering emptiness.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he repeated, then: “You’re trespassing.”

He slung the sledge back and brought it around in a whistling horizontal arc. I bent at the knees, ducking as I did it, and although the twenty-pound head seemed to miss me entirely—I felt no pain, not then—a wave of heat flashed across the top of my head. The gun flew out of my hand, struck the wall, and bounced into the corner. Something warm was running down the side of my face. Did I understand he’d clipped me just enough to tear a six-inch-long gash in my scalp? That he’d missed either knocking me unconscious or outright killing me by maybe as little as an eighth of an inch? I can’t say. All of this happened in less than a minute; maybe it was only thirty seconds. Life turns on a dime, and when it does, it turns fast.

“Get out!” I shouted at Troy. “Take your sister and get out! Yell for help! Yell your head o—”

Dunning swung the sledge. I jumped back, and the head buried itself in the wall, smashing laths and sending a puff of plaster into the air to join the gunsmoke. The TV was still playing. Still violins, still murder music.

As Dunning struggled to pull his sledge out of the wall, something flew past me. It was the Daisy air rifle. Harry had thrown it. The barrel struck Frank Dunning in his torn-open cheek and he screamed with pain.

“You little bastard! I’ll kill you for that!”

Troy was carrying Ellen to the door. So that’s all right, I thought, I changed things at least that much—

But before he could get her out, someone first filled the door and then came stumbling in, knocking Troy Dunning and the little girl to the floor. I barely had time to see this, because Frank had pulled the sledge free and was coming for me. I backed up, shoving Harry into the kitchen with one hand.

“Out the back door, son. Fast. I’ll hold him off until you—”

Frank Dunning shrieked and stiffened. All at once something was poking out through his chest. It was like a magic trick. The thing was so coated with blood it took a second for me to realize what it was: the point of a bayonet.

“That’s for my sister, you fuck,” Bill Turcotte rasped. “That’s for Clara.”

Dunning went down, feet in the living room, head in the archway between the living room and the kitchen. But not all the way down. The tip of the blade dug into the floor and held him up. One of his feet kicked a single time, then he was still. He looked like he’d died trying to do a push-up.

Everyone was screaming. The air stank of gunsmoke, plaster, and blood. Doris was lurching crookedly toward her dead son with her hair hanging in her face. I didn’t want her to see that—Tugga’s head had been split open all the way down to the jaw—but there was no way I could stop her.

“I’ll do better next time, Mrs. Dunning,” I croaked. “That’s a promise.”

There was blood all over my face; I had to wipe it out of my left eye in order to see on that side. Since I was still conscious, I thought I wasn’t hurt too badly, and I knew that scalp wounds bleed like a bitch. But I was a mess, and if there was ever going to be a next time, I had to get out of here this time, unseen and in a hurry.

But I had to talk to Turcotte before I left. Or at least try. He had collapsed against the wall by Dunning’s splayed feet. He was holding his chest and gasping. His face was corpse-white except for his lips, now as purple as those of a kid who has been gobbling huckleberries. I reached for his hand. He grasped it with panicky tightness, but there was a tiny glint of humor in his eyes.

“Who’s the chickenshit now, Amberson?”

“Not you,” I said. “You’re a hero.”

“Yeah,” he wheezed. “Just toss the fuckin medal in my coffin.”

Doris was cradling her dead son. Behind her, Troy was walking in circles with Ellen’s head pressed tight against his chest. He didn’t look toward us, didn’t seem to realize we were there. The little girl was wailing.

“You’ll be okay,” I said. As if I knew. “Now listen, because this is important: forget my name.”

“What name? You never gave it.”

“Right. And… you know my car?”

“Ford.” He was losing his voice, but his eyes were still fixed on mine. “Nice one. Convert. Y-block engine. Fifty-four or—five.”

“You never saw it. That’s the most important thing of all, Turcotte. I need it to get downstate tonight and I’ll have to take the turnpike most of the way because I don’t know any of the other roads. If I can get down to central Maine, I’ll be free and clear. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Never saw your car,” he said, then winced. “Ah, fuck, don’t that hurt.”

I put my fingers on his stubble-prickly throat and felt his pulse. It was rapid and wildly uneven. In the distance I could hear wailing sirens. “You did the right thing.”

His eyes rolled. “Almost didn’t. I don’t know what I was thinkin of. I must have been crazy. Listen, buddy. If they do run you down, don’t tell em what I… you know, what I—”

“I never would. You took care of him, Turcotte. He was a mad dog and you put him down. Your sister would be proud.”

He smiled and closed his eyes.

I went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, soaked it in the basin, and scrubbed my bloody face. I tossed the towel in the tub, grabbed two more, and stepped out into the kitchen.

The boy who had brought me here was standing on the faded linoleum by the stove and watching me. Although it had probably been six years since he’d sucked his thumb, he was sucking it now. His eyes were wide and solemn, swimming with tears. Freckles of blood spattered his cheeks and brow. Here was a boy who had just experienced something that would no doubt traumatize him, but he was also a boy who would never grow up to become Hoptoad Harry. Or to write a theme that would make me cry.

“Who are you, mister?” he asked.

“Nobody.” I walked past him to the door. He deserved more than that, though. The sirens were closer now, but I turned back. “Your good angel,” I said. Then I slipped out the back door and into Halloween night of 1958.

I walked up Wyemore to Witcham, saw flashing blue lights heading for Kossuth Street, and kept on walking. Two blocks further into the residential district, I turned right on Gerard Avenue. People were standing out on the sidewalks, turned toward the sound of the sirens.

“Mister, do you know what happened?” a man asked me. He was holding the hand of a sneaker-wearing Snow White.

“I heard kids setting off cherry bombs,” I said. “Maybe they started a fire.” I kept walking and made sure to keep the left side of my face away from him, because there was a streetlight nearby and my scalp was still oozing blood.

Four blocks down, I turned back toward Witcham. This far south of Kossuth, Witcham Street was dark and quiet. All the available police cars were probably now at the scene. Good. I had almost reached the corner of Grove and Witcham when my knees turned to rubber. I looked around, saw no trick-or-treaters, and sat down on the curb. I couldn’t afford to stop, but I had to. I’d thrown up everything in my stomach, I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for one lousy candybar (and couldn’t remember if I’d even managed to get all of that down before Turcotte jumped me), and I’d just been through a violent interlude in which I had been wounded—how badly I still didn’t know. It was either stop now and let my body regroup or pass out on the sidewalk.

I put my head between my knees and drew a series of deep slow breaths, as I’d learned in the Red Cross course I’d taken to get a lifeguard certification back in college. At first I kept seeing Tugga Dunning’s head as it exploded under the smashing downward force of the hammer, and that made the faintness worse. Then I thought of Harry, who had been splashed with his brother’s blood but was otherwise unhurt. And Ellen, who wasn’t deep in a coma from which she would never emerge. And Troy. And Doris. Her badly broken arm might hurt her for the rest of her life, but at least she was going to have a life.

“I did it, Al,” I whispered.

But what had I done in 2011? What had I done to 2011? Those were questions that still had to be answered. If something terrible had happened because of the butterfly effect, I could always go back and erase it… unless, in changing the course of the Dunning family’s lives, I had somehow changed the course of Al Templeton’s as well. Suppose the diner was no longer where I’d left it? Suppose it turned out he’d never moved it from Auburn? Or never opened a diner at all? It didn’t seem likely… but here I was, sitting on a 1958 curb with blood oozing out of my 1958 haircut, and how likely was that?

I rose to my feet, staggered, then got moving. To my right, down Witcham Street, I could see the flash and strobe of blue lights. A crowd had gathered on the corner of Kossuth, but their backs were to me. The church where I’d left my car was just across the street. The Sunliner was alone in the parking lot now, but it looked okay; no Halloween pranksters had let the air out of my tires. Then I saw a yellow square under one of the windshield wipers. My thoughts flashed to the Yellow Card Man, and my gut tightened. I snatched it, then exhaled a sigh of relief when I read what was written there: JOIN YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS FOR WORSHIP THIS SUNDAY AT 9 AM NEWCOMERS ALWAYS WELCOME! REMEMBER, “LIFE IS THE QUESTION, JESUS IS THE ANSWER.”

“I thought hard drugs were the answer, and I could sure use some right now,” I muttered, and unlocked the driver’s door. I thought of the paper bag I’d left behind the garage of the house on Wyemore Lane. The cops investigating the area were apt to discover it. Inside they’d find a few candybars, a mostly empty bottle of Kaopectate… and a stack of what amounted to adult diapers.

I wondered what they’d make of that.

But not too much.

By the time I reached the turnpike, my head was aching fiercely, but even if this hadn’t been before the era of twenty-four-hour convenience stores, I’m not sure I would have dared to stop; my shirt was stiff with drying blood on the lefthand side. At least I’d remembered to fill the gas tank.

Once I tried exploring the gash on my head with the tips of my fingers and was rewarded with a blaze of pain that persuaded me not to make a second attempt.

I did stop at the rest area outside of Augusta. By then it was past ten o’clock and the place was deserted. I turned on the dome light and checked my pupils in the rearview mirror. They looked the same size, which was a relief. There was a snacks vending machine outside the men’s privy, where ten cents bought me a cream-stuffed chocolate whoopie pie. I gobbled it as I drove, and my headache abated somewhat.

It was after midnight when I got to Lisbon Falls. Main Street was dark, but both the Worumbo and U.S. Gypsum mills were running full tilt, huffing and chuffing, throwing their stinks into the air and spilling their acid wastes into the river. The clusters of shining lights made them look like spaceships. I parked the Sunliner outside the Kennebec Fruit, where it would stay until someone peeked inside and saw the spots of blood on the seat, driver’s door, and steering wheel. Then the police would be called. I supposed they’d dust the Ford for fingerprints. It was possible they’d match prints found on a certain .38 Police Special at a murder scene in Derry. The name George Amberson might emerge in Derry and then down here in the Falls. But if the rabbit-hole was still where I’d left it, George was going to leave no trail to follow, and the fingerprints belonged to a man who wasn’t going to be born for another eighteen years.

I opened the trunk, took out the briefcase, and decided to leave everything else. For all I knew, it might end up being sold at the Jolly White Elephant, the secondhand store not far from Titus Chevron. I crossed the street toward the mill’s dragon-breath, a shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH that would continue around the clock until Reagan-era free trade rendered pricey American textiles obsolete.

The drying shed was lit by a white fluorescent glow from the dirty dyehouse windows. I spotted the chain blocking off the drying shed from the rest of the courtyard. It was too dark to read the sign hanging from it, and it had been almost two months since I’d seen it, but I remembered what it said: NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED. There was no sign of the Yellow Card Man—or the Orange Card Man, if that’s what he was now.

Headlights flooded the courtyard, illuminating me like an ant on a plate. My shadow jumped out long and scrawny in front of me. I froze as a big transport truck trundled toward me. I expected the driver to stop, lean out, and ask me what the hell I was doing here. He slowed but didn’t stop. Raised a hand to me. I raised mine in return, and he drove on toward the loading docks with dozens of empty barrels clunking around in back. I headed for the chain, took one quick look around, and ducked under it.

I walked down the flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard in my chest. The gash on my head pounded in harmony. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot. Slow, I told myself. Slow. The step is right… here.