Strange Highways

and he headed for the office door.
     "I suspect P.J. will want whatever your dad wanted. He'll say you should keep it all."
     "I won't, I won't," Joey said, raising his voice.
     Kadinska caught up with him in the reception lounge, took him by the arm, and halted him. "Joey, it's not that easy."
     "Sure it is."
     "If you really don't want it, then you have to renounce the inheritance.'
     "I renounce it. I already did. Don't want it."
     "A document has to be drawn, signed, notarized."
     Although the day was cold and the office was on the chilly side, Joey had broken into a sweat. "How long will it take to put these papers together?"
     "If you'll come back tomorrow afternoon-"
     "No." Joey's heart was jackhammering almost hard enough to shatter the ribs and breastbone that caged it. "No, sir, I'm not staying here another night. I'm going to Scranton. A flight to Pittsburgh in the morning. Vegas from there. All the way out to Vegas. Mail me the papers.'
     "That's probably better anyway," Kadinska said. "It'll give you more time to think, to reconsider."
     At first the lawyer had seemed to be a gentle, bookish man. Not now.
     Joey no longer saw kindness in the man's eyes. Instead he perceived the slyness of a bargainer for souls, something with scales under the disguise of skin, with eyes that in a different light would be like the sulfur-yellow eyes of the dog that had confronted him on the front porch a while ago.
     He wrenched loose of the attorney's hand, shoved him aside, and made for the outer door in a state close to panic.
     Kadinska called after him: "Joey, what's wrong?"
     The hallway. Past the real-estate office. The dentist. Toward the stairs. He wanted desperately to be out in the fresh air, to be washed clean by the rain.
     "Joey, what's the matter with you?"
     "Stay away from me!" he shouted.
When he reached the head of the stairs, he halted so abruptly that he almost pitched to the bottom. He grabbed the newel post to keep
his balance.
     At the foot of the steep stairs lay the dead blonde, bundled in a transparent tarp partly opaque with blood. The plastic was drawn tightly across her bare breasts, compressing them. Her nipples were visible but not her face.
     One pale arm had slipped out of her shroud. Although she was dead, she reached out beseechingly.
     He could not bear the sight of her mangled hand, the blood, the nail hole in her delicate palm. Most of all he was terrified that she would speak to him from behind her plastic veil and that he would be told things that he shouldn't know, mustn't know.
     With a whimper like that of a cornered animal, he turned from her and started back the way he had come.
     "Joey?"
     Henry Kadinska stood in the dimly lighted hall ahead of him. Shadows seemed to be drawn to the attorney - except for his thick eyeglasses, which blazed with reflections of the yellow light overhead. He was blocking the way. Approaching. Eager to have another chance to offer his bargain.
     Now frantic for fresh air and cleansing rain, Joey spun away from Kadinska and returned to the stairs.
     The blonde still sprawled below, her arm extended, her hand open, silently pleading for something, perhaps for mercy.
     "Joey?"
     Kadinska's voice. Close behind him.
     Joey descended the precipitous flight of stairs hesitantly at first, then faster, figuring that he would step over her if she was really there, kick at her if she tried to seize him, down two stairs at a time, not even holding on to the handrail, barely keeping his balance, a third of the way, halfway, and still she was there, now eight steps below, six, four, and she was reaching out to him, the red stigmata glistening in the center of her palm. He screamed as he reached the last step, and the dead woman vanished when he cried out. He plunged through the space that she had occupied, crashed through the door, and staggered onto the sidewalk in front of the Old Town Tavern.
     He turned his face up into the Pabst-blue and Rolling Rock-green rain, which was so cold that it might soon turn to sleet. In seconds he was soaked - but he didn't feel entirely clean.
     In the rental car again, he fumbled the flask out from under the driver's seat where he'd tucked it earlier.
     The rain had not