My mouth was cottony. My bare skin was sticky and tight with dried sweat. I could smell coffee, and the dry sting of woodsmoke in the still air.
I pushed back the blankets some, tried my legs again. They still wouldn't stretch, so I pushed back the blankets some more and tried something else: sitting up.
It was easy, if you didn't count the stiffness and the dizziness. The stiffness stayed with me, but the dizziness passed.
I looked around from my new perspective. I saw my boots, on spread newspapers by the woodstove. I was sitting on an ivory-colored couch not as long as I was tall. I knew this couch; I knew this place. Eve Colgate's house, her living room.
On the easy chair was a pile of clothes, my jeans, my shirt, my underwear, all folded and stacked as if they'd just come back from the laundry. On the cedar chest, in a big wooden bowl, some other things: my wallet, keys, cigarettes, junk from my pockets. My gun, the holster coiled beside it.
The story behind this, I told myself, has got to be good. I couldn't wait to hear it.
I stood, creaking like a rusty hinge. I made my way to the pile of clothes on the chair, pulled on my shorts. Minimally decent, I kept going, to the small bathroom under the stairs.
I took a piss it felt like I'd been waiting a week to take. Then I turned on the water in the sink. The rush of it, loud in the silence, made me vaguely uneasy. I filled the bathroom tumbler, drained it three times. The water was sharp and sweet.
The face in the mirror looked worse than it had last time I'd seen it: pale, stubble-covered, and old.
I soaked a hand towel in hot water, used it to wash everywhere I could reach. I took a look at my shoulder. A messy-looking bruise was coming up inboard of the shoulder blade, more or less in line with the aching place behind my ear.
Something, or someone, had hit me pretty hard.
I wandered back out to the living room, pulled on my jeans. They were as stiff as I was. I maneuvered my undershirt on with as little use of my left shoulder as I could manage, which was not little enough.
Then I had done enough hard work for a while. I reached into the wooden bowl for the unopened pack of Kents that lay there, then went to the woodstove for a kitchen match.
I dropped back down onto the couch, rested my elbows on my knees. I drew smoke in, streamed it out, probed the blank space in my memory for a way in. The cigarette was almost gone when I heard the front door open.
I grabbed my gun from the bowl, held it out of sight. I didn't stand; I was steadier seated. The door closed; there were sounds in the vestibule. The inner door opened and Leo trotted through.
When he saw me he scrabbled over to the couch, wagging everything from his neck back. He put his front paws on my knee and stuck his face up near mine, licked my chin. I scratched his ears with my left hand, which was holding the cigarette. I figured that was better than my right one, where the gun was.
'Leo!' Eve said, coming through the inner door. 'Get down!'
He did, sitting in front of me, lifting a paw excitedly, scratching at my knee.
I put the gun down as Eve walked around the cedar chest, came to stand in front of me.
'How do you feel?' she asked.
'Tired.' A half dozen other words came to mind, but that one got there first.
She nodded. 'You had a bad night. You ran a fever. I don't think you really slept until almost dawn.'
'What happened?' I asked her.
She frowned. 'I was waiting for you to wake up so you could tell me that.'
I made no answer.
Eve moved around the couch to the kitchen. 'Do you think you could handle a cup of coffee?'
'God, yes.'
She brought me one, and one for herself. The coffee was rich and fragrant and hot. I gulped at it.
She moved what was left of the laundry pile onto the cedar chest, settled herself in the chair.
'I found you,' she said. 'About an hour after you left here last night, just down the hill.' She gestured toward the slope outside the windows, where the scrub trees began about ten yards from the house.
'Found me,' I repeated stupidly. I wasn't sure I was following her.
'Well, Leo did. Something strange happened. Something . . . frightening.'
'Tell me.'
She sipped at her coffee. 'I got a phone call, maybe forty-five minutes after you left. A man's voice, I think, but whispering, so I really don't know. 'Your friend Smith,' it said. 'He's down the hill from your place. It's a bad night to be out.''
I sipped my coffee, tried to understand this. She went on, 'He hung up. I didn't know what he meant, down the hill, but I took Leo and went out. Leo found you, lying just where the trees start, only half-conscious.' She stopped, studied me. 'You don't remember? You were soaking wet; you were freezing.'
I shook my head. 'No. How did I get here?'
'Back to the house? You walked.' She smiled her small smile. 'You didn't want to. You kept telling me to leave you alone. I began to get desperate. It's a way of conserving heat, that refusal to move, but it really would have killed you. Alcohol's not the best thing for someone whose body temperature's dropped as low as yours had, but it feels good, and you needed motivation. I came back for the brandy.' Her smile faded. 'You don't remember any of this?'
