Mohawk

signs of fatigue despite his age, it took nearly half an hour to load the van. Some of the skins had been cut into gloves and stacked in boxes. There were jackets and coats too, complete except for linings and buttons. Still other skins bore only pattern markings.
    Once they were finished, Rory Gaffney gave him the keys to the van. “Careful,” he said. “The vehicle ain’t exactly mine. I’ll drop off the bug,” he said, holding out his hand for the keys.
    Randall held them out to him. “Your brother pulled me over tonight.”
    That brought the old man up short. “What?”
    “On the way over here. Which is why I was late.”
    “What the hell for?”
    “Just to tell me he’s hearing voices coming out of the walls. You want to know whose?”
    “I’ll handle him. You just drive. Carefully. You get pulled over now and you won’t have to worry about the draft.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Ahhh,” he said. “You just naturally like to hide out.”

49
    When the lightning strikes the top of what had once been the Montgomery Ward building two blocks from the diner, the thunderclap cracks several windows along Main Street, and Harry Saunders, at his wife’s insistence, gets up to check things out. Harry’s awake anyway. The Grotto was expensive to start up and isn’t close to paying for itself.
    “Is he back yet,” Harry’s wife asks when he returns.
    “No.”
    “Did you look in his room?”
    “I didn’t have to. He isn’t back yet.”
    “You shouldn’t let him go.”
    “How would I stop him? Lock him in his room?”
    “He wouldn’t do anything you forbid.”
    “I don’t have the heart. I won’t make this a jail. He’s been in jails.”
    “He could be getting in trouble.”
    “No.”
    “How can you be sure?”
    “Because I know where he goes.”
    His wife’s hair is aflame, bright red. “Where, then? Where does he go?”

50
    Near the outskirts of town on Kings Road, the thunderclap was less severe, though it shook the windows of the Wood home. Only old Milly was able to sleep out the storm. Dan and Diana didn’t even bother to turn on the bedroom light.
    “I can’t get her face out of my mind,” Diana said. “If a painter had been able to capture it.… I’ve never seen anything like it. For once I was happy to be childless.”
    Dan said nothing.
    “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
    “I know what you meant.”
    “It’s just that the poor girl made me feel so strange … about us.”
    Dan looked over at her, so small inside the bedclothes, so physically like her mother. “How?”
    “I’m not sure I can explain. We regret the little things that don’t work out, but not the big things. Seeing that woman made me realize I never told you how sorry I was—I am … about everything.”
    “You make it sound like you were driving the car.”
    “I wasn’t thinking of that so much. I guess I’m sorry about Mother and the way things are now. Maybe aboutnot turning out to be the kind of woman you needed me to be.”
    “You’ve been a perfect wife.”
    Their bedroom lit up and Diana waited for the thunder before continuing. “You needed someone to make you run like the wind.”
    “For that,” he said, “I have your Mother.”

51
    The trip from Mohawk to White Plains would’ve taken nearly four hours if Randall Younger had had any intention of completing it. He knew he didn’t even before he recrossed the one-lane bridge and brought the van out of the trees at the dark end of the one-way street. Off to the side of the cul-de-sac, the police cruiser was almost completely hidden in the trees. No one who wasn’t looking for it would’ve noticed. But Randall Younger
was
, and he wasn’t surprised when his headlights reflected something blue. There was no telling if Rory Gaffney had seen it when he emerged from the trees in the VW. Randall guessed he didn’t, since the bug’s headlights hadn’t come on until it was fifty yards up the street. Of course there was always the possibility that Rory Gaffney didn’t need to see, that the brothers were setting him up, though he doubted it. To have Randall arrested when he would immediately implicate the man who hired him made no kind of sense. Still, he didn’t understand something that was going on. He kept his eye on the sideview mirror, waiting for the cruiser to come to life. Only after three blocks did a single set of headlights switch on somewhere down the dark