tell you the amount you were supposed to get?'
'Five thousand,' she said, with an extra wobble in her voice.
'I'll walk Mr. Underhill to the door.' He stepped out into the hall and waited for me to follow him.
I said good-bye to Judy Leatherwood and joined Baxter in the hallway. He set off at a quick march toward the big blue doors and the entrance, giving me sharp, inquisitive glances as we went. Betty Crocker waved good-bye to me. Once we got outside, Baxter stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shiny suit. 'Are you going to explain what you just did in there?'
'I gave her a check for five thousand dollars.'
'But you don't work for any insurance company.'
'It's a little more complicated than that.'
'Was her nephew really a Green Beret major?'
I nodded.
'Does this money come from him?'
'You might say that he owes a lot of people,' I said.
He thought it over. 'I think my responsibility ends at this point. I'm going to say good-bye to you, Mr. Underhill.' He didn't offer to shake hands. I walked to my car, and he stood in the sun on the concrete apron until I drove past the entrance.
I turned in the keys to the Chrysler and paid for the gas I had used at the counter. There was still half an hour to fill before boarding, so I went to the telephones to call Glenroy Breakstone. 'Tangent?' he asked me. 'Tangent, Ohio? Man, that's a dead place. Back in the fifties, we played a place called the French Quarter there, and the owner used to pay us in one-dollar bills.' I asked if I could come up to see him after I got back to Millhaven. 'How soon?' he asked. I told him that I'd be there in about two hours. 'As long as you're here before eight,' he said. 'I got a little business to do around then.'
After that I tried Tom Pasmore's number, on the off-chance that he might be up, and when his machine answered, I began describing what I had learned from Edward Hubbel and Judy Leatherwood. He picked up before I was able to say more than a couple of sentences. 'This case is turning my day around,' he said. 'I went to bed about an hour after you left, and I got up about noon to play with my machines a little more. So you found out, did you?'
'I found out, all right,' I said, and told him about it in detail.
'Well, that's that,' he said, 'but I still feel like exploring matters for a while, just to see if anything interesting turns up.'
Then I told him about giving Judy Leatherwood a check.
'Oh, you didn't! No, no, no.' He was laughing. 'Look, I'll pay you back as soon as I see you.'
'Tom, I'm not criticizing you, but I couldn't leave her stranded.'
'What do you think I am? I sent her a check for five thousand yesterday.' He started laughing again. 'She's going to love Mid-States Insurance.'
'Oh, hell,' I said.
He offered once again to pay me back.
'One white lie shouldn't cost you ten thousand dollars,' I said.
'But it was my white lie.' He was still laughing.
We talked for a few more minutes. There was still a lot of fog in Millhaven, and a small-scale riot had begun on Messmer Avenue. No one had been injured, so far.
I asked the cheerful blond person at the airline desk if the flight would be delayed. He said there were no problems.
Twenty minutes after we left the ground, the pilot announced that atmospheric problems in Millhaven meant that our flight was being diverted to Milwaukee, where we could either wait until conditions improved or arrange for connecting flights.
At about a quarter to seven, we touched down at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, where another cheerful blond person told us that if we remained in the departure lounge, we would be able to reboard and continue on to our original destination in no less than an hour. I had lost faith in cheerful blond persons and walked through the departure lounge, trudged along a series of corridors, took an escalator downstairs, and rented another car. This one was a gunmetal gray Ford Galaxy, and all it smelled of was new leather. They spray it into the cars, like air freshener.
South of Milwaukee, the city flattens out into miles of suburbs and then yields to the open farmland of the original Midwest. After I crossed the border into Illinois, the sunlight still fell on the broad green-and-yellow fields, and the billboards advertised high-yield fertilizer and super-effective crop spray. Herds of Holstein cows stood unmoving in vast pastures. Fifteen miles farther, the air darkened; and a little while after that, wisps and tendrils of fog floated between the cars ahead of me. Then the fields disappeared into misty gray. I turned on my fog lights when a Jeep Cherokee two hundred feet down the highway turned into a pair of tiny red eyes. After that, we crawled along at thirty miles an hour. The first Millhaven exit jumped up out of the emptiness barely in time for me to make the turn. After that, the ten-minute drive to the airport took half an hour, and it was seven-thirty before I found the rental parking spaces. I went into the terminal, turned over the keys, and walked back across the access road and down a long stretch of pavement to the long-term parking garage.
On the second floor, twenty or thirty cars stood parked at wide intervals on the gray cement. Overhead bulbs in metal cages shone down on cement pillars and bright yellow lines. The exit signs glowed red across empty space. I turned on the Pontiac's lights and rolled toward the curving wall before the ramp. Another pair of headlights shot out into the gloom. When I stopped to pay the attendant, long yellow beams elongated on the ramp behind me. The attendant handed back my change without looking at me, and the gate floated up. I sped out of the garage and across the pedestrian walkway, swerved onto the circular access road, and got up to forty on the empty drive to the highway. I wanted to vanish into the fog.
I paused at the stop sign long enough to be sure that nothing was coming, cramped the wheel, hit the accelerator and the horn at the same time, and cut into the middle lane. A huge sign flashing FOG WARNING 25MPH burned toward me from the side of the road. As soon as I got up to fifty, the taillights of a station wagon jumped toward me, and I swerved into the fast lane before I rammed into the puzzled face of the Irish retriever staring at me through the wagon's rear window. I whisked past the wagon. I thought that if I drove Paul Fontaine- style for another mile or two, I could put to rest the fear that Billy Ritz's replacement was gaining on me, back in the fog. And then I thought that probably no one was following me, cars drove out of the long-term garage night and day, and I slowed to twenty-five miles an hour. Tail-lights appeared before me in the fast lane, and I moved as slowly as a rowboat back into the center lane. Then I began to imagine a thug creeping toward me out of the sludge in my rearview mirror, and I moved the accelerator down until I was nipping along at forty. It seemed dangerously slow. I swerved around a little powder-blue hatchback that appeared in front of me with vivid, dreamlike suddenness, and ploughed through the drifting lengths and thicknesses of batting, of wool, of white gauze and gray gauze, and whipped past another flashing red FOG WARNING sign. A pain I had not felt in a good five years declared itself in a circle about eight inches in diameter on the upper right side of my back.
I remembered this pain, a combination of burn and puncture, though it is neither. Generally speaking, it is the
