Beauty Queen

society as it had never been focused before.
    Jewel had been right. Dear Jewel, who was now so safely removed from the whole thing, working quietly at her publishing job. Jewel, who had called Jeannie Colter the "Hammer," using the name of a medieval kingpin who had caused terror and death wherever he went.
    Someone was needed to break that Hammer on the anvil of divine justice.
    Jeannie woke from the dream, gasping and drenched with sweat. She lay there trying to shake off its dread spell. She had had the Miss America dream again.
    She looked at the bedside clock. It was nearly one o'clock.
    She felt the usual compulsion to visit the church grounds.
    She got up and banged on Mary Ellen's door to wake
    her.
    "Okay," said Mary Ellen sleepily, "be right with you."
    You had to hand it to the girl—she was very good-natured about getting up in the middle of the night. Maybe she realized—as Jeannie now dimly recognized—that these trips to the church at night were screams for help, and she was not yet sure what she wanted to be saved from.
    Fifteen minutes later, they were driving down Quaker Hill.
    Mary Ellen clutched the dashboard as Jeannie took the big car screeching around the hairpin turns. We'll both get killed tonight, she thought. She had the Beretta and the silencer in her big suede over-the-arm bag. She had already slipped the ammo clip into the gun in the bedroom.
    Her stomach was clenching uneasily. All the rationalizations of what she was about to do, and all the objections to it, had returned to haunt her mind in these last minutes. Ten minutes or so from now, she would be guilty of a homicide.
    She wondered if everybody who did things like this had second thoughts at the last moment. Some killers probably didn't—the psychopaths. They probably spent the last minutes as cool and detached as if they were about to spray cockroaches with insecticide.
    They passed the Bel Aire Motel. The room was dark in front of the dark-green Pinto. Armando had better be awake. Maybe he had left the room dark so that he could see the road better. She definitely would not fire until she saw that Pinto coming up the drive to the church.
    She thought of Liv, deep in her warm and innocent child's sleep at the cabin, sleeping grandly on her back with arms
    spread out to the world, the way she always did. If she and Armando goofed this thing up, she wondered if Liv would stay true to her, visit her in jail.
    Jeannie gunned the car up the little church drive, parked it in the gravel parking lot, and shut everything off. They got out of the car.
    It was a very dark moonless night, sultry and close. The church, which looked so small in the daylight, seemed to loom larger in the dark. So did the two immense elms in front of it.
    First Jeannie had to go through the whole charade, as if she didn't know why she had really come here.
    She said, "Now you wait here. I am going up to visit Reverend Irving."
    While Jeannie walked off in the dark, Mary Ellen looked nervously down the drive. No headlights coming yet. She fitted the silencer to the gun. The spent bullet casing would fly out on the ground in the cemetery. That was okay—the police were supposed to find it.
    She hoped that, this time, Jeannie wouldn't actually wake Irving up. The old man probably wouldn't appreciate this much. Jeannie had told her that, when she was first saved, she used to come down here late at night and talk about Jesus with him, so maybe all this was less crazy than it looked. Maybe the old man went to bed earlier now.
    In a minute Jeannie was back, wearing a long face. "He's asleep," she moaned. "What'll I do? I need to talk to him."
    She went over to the church. It was locked tight—Irving always did that, for fear of vandals. Jeannie shook the door with futile rage, and the rattle echoed hollowly inside the church.
    Mary Ellen stood silently. Still no sign of Armando, damn it. The fucker was asleep.
    Jeannie came back from the church. "Well..she said, sounding like a lost child.
    She started off toward the cemetery, her raincoat wrapped tightly around her, walking with unsure steps over the grass.
    Mary Ellen followed. If the voters could see this, she thought, they'd be amazed. She wondered how many politicians had a crazy side like this, a closet craziness that no one but a few aides and intimates ever saw. After all, Nixon seemed to have lost some of his grip on reality in those last days in the White House. And she could think of others.
    She