Hey, old friend.
What do you say, old friend?
Make it okay, old friend,
Give an old friendship a break.
Why so grim?
We're going on forever.
You, me, him-
Too many lives are at stake...

-Stephen Sondheim, "Old Friends"

It was Saturday morning. Shadow answered the door.

Marguerite Olsen was there. She did hot come in, just stood in the sunlight, looking serious. "Mister Ainsel...?"

"Mike, please," said Shadow.

"Mike, yes. Would you like to come over for dinner tonight? About six, eh? It won't be anything exciting, just spaghetti and meatballs."

"I like spaghetti and meatballs."

"Obviously, if you have any other plans..."

"I have no other plans."

"Six o'clock."

"Should I bring flowers?"

"If you must. But this is a social gesture. Not a romantic one."

He showered. He went for a short walk, down to the bridge and back. The sun was up, a tarnished quarter in the sky, and he was sweating in his coat by the time he got home. He drove the 4-Runner down to Dave's Finest Food and bought a bottle of wine. It was a twenty-dollar bottle, which seemed to Shadow like some kind of guarantee of quality. He didn't know wines, so he bought a Californian cabernet, because Shadow had once seen a bumper-sticker, back when he was younger and people still had bumper stickers on their cars, which said LIFE is A CABERNET and it had made him laugh.

He bought a plant in a pot as a gift. Green leaves, no flowers. Nothing remotely romantic about that.

He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and a selection of fruit, which he would never eat.

Then he drove over to Mabel's and bought a single lunchtime pasty. Mabel's face lit up when she saw him. "Did Hinzelmann catch up with you?"

"I didn't know he was looking for me."

"Yup. Wants to take you ice fishing. And Chad Mulligan wanted to know if I'd seen you around. His cousin's here from out of state. His second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. You'll love her," and she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top over to keep the pasty warm.

Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the pastry crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4-Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black-and-white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks.

He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.

There was a lot of time to kill until six. Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucy's tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.

He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people-normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams-since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.

He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.

Shadow's telephone rang.

"Yeah?" he said.

"That's no way to answer the phone," growled Wednesday.

"When I get my telephone connected I'll answer it politely," said Shadow. "Can I help you?"

"I don't know," said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, "Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it." There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday's voice that Shadow had never heard before.

"What's wrong?"

"It's hard. It's too fucking hard. I don't know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats."

"You mustn't talk like that."

"Yeah. Right."

"Well, if you do cut your throat," said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, "maybe it wouldn't even hurt."

"It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If we're still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we're forgotten, we're done."

Shadow did not know what to say. He said, "So where are you calling from?"

"None of your goddamn business."

"Are you drunk?"

"Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but he'd give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?"

"I'm sorry."

"You don't give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb." Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.

"What's wrong?" said Shadow, for the second time.

"They got in touch."

"Who did?"

"The opposition."

"And?"

"They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live."

"So what happens now?"

"Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic Hall."

"Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?"

"You stay there and you keep your head down. Don't get into any trouble. You hear me?"

"But-"

There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never had been.

Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.

Shadow picked up the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally stopping to scan something that caught his eye.

In July 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of the Mill-Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.

It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was manmade. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hildemuhlen in Bavaria, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann's pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project.

They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of 1876, as a precursor to the town's centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council.

Shadow checked his watch. It was five-thirty. He went into the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, arid he walked next door.

The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on, The Wizard of Oz on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvel's wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later triumphantly waving a quarter.

"Watch, Mike Ainsel!" he shouted. Then closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. "I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!"

"You did," agreed Shadow. "After we've eaten, if it's okay with your mom, I'll show you how to do it even smoother than that."

"Do it now if you want," said Marguerite. "We're still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don't know what's taking her so long."

And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, "I didn't know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories," and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.

"That's fine," said Marguerite. "Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister."

I don't know you, thought Shadow desperately. You've never met me before. We're total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, "Pleased to meetcha."

She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. "Hello," she said.

"I'll see how the food is doing," said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment.

Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. "So you're the melancholy but mysterious neighbor," she said. "Who'da thunk it?" She kept her voice down.

"And you," he said, "are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?"

"If you promise to tell me what's going on."

"Deal."

Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow's pants. "Will you show me now?" he asked, and held out his quarter.

"Okay," said Shadow. "But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it's done."

"I promise," said Leon, gravely. Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leon's right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow's left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own.

After several attempts the boy mastered the move. "Now you know half of it," said Shadow. "The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place it's meant to be. If you act like it's in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are."

Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing.

"Dinner!" called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. "Leon, go wash your hands."

There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.

"Old family recipe," she told him, "from the Corsican side of the family."

"I thought you were Native American."

"Dad's Cherokee," said Sam. "Mag's mom's father came from Corsica." Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the cabernet. "Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through. When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span."

"Well, he's been out in Oklahoma for ten years," said Marguerite.

"Now, my mom's family were European Jewish," continued Sam, "from one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. I think she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver." She took another sip of the red wine.

"Sam's mom's a wild woman," said Marguerite, semi-approvingly.

"You know where she is now?" asked Sam. Shadow shook his head. "She's in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart. When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she really liked Tasmania. So she's living down there, with a woman's group, teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. Isn't that cool? At her age?"

Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs. Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the thylacines-the Tasmanian tigers-had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass of wine, poured her third.

"So, Mike," said Sam, suddenly, her cheeks reddening, "tell us about your family. What are the Ainsels like?" She was smiling, and there was mischief in that smile.

"We're real dull," said Shadow. "None of us ever got as far as Tasmania. So you're at school in Madison. What's that like?"

"You know," she said. "I'm studying art history, women's studies, and casting my own bronzes."

"When I grow up," said Leon, "I'm going to do magic. Poof. Will you teach me, Mike Ainsel?"

"Sure," said Shadow. "If your mom doesn't mind."

Sam said, "After we've eaten, while you're putting Leon to bed, Mags, I think I'm going to get Mike to take me to the Buck Stops Here for an hour or so."

Marguerite did not shrug. Her head moved, her eyebrow raised slightly.

"I think he's interesting," said Sam. "And we have lots to talk about."

Marguerite looked at Shadow, who busied himself in dabbing an imaginary blob of red sauce from his chin with a paper napkin. "Well, you're grownups," she said, in a tone of voice that implied that they weren't, and that even if they were they shouldn't be.

After dinner Shadow helped Sam with the washing up-he dried-and then he did a trick for Leon, counting pennies into Leon's palm: each time Leon opened his hand and counted them there was one less coin than he had counted in. And as for the final penny-"Are you squeezing it? Tightly?"-when Leon opened his hand he found it had transformed into a dime. Leon's plaintive cries of "How'd you do that? Momma, how'd he do that?" followed him out into the hall.

Sam handed him his coat. "Come on," she said. Her cheeks were flushed from the wine.

Outside it was cold.

Shadow stopped in his apartment, tossed the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council into a plastic grocery bag, and brought it along. Hinzelmann might be down at the Buck, and he wanted to show him the mention of his grandfather.

They walked down the drive side by side.

He opened the garage door, and she started to laugh. "Omigod," she said, when she saw the 4-Runner. "Paul Gunther's car. You bought Paul Gunther's car. Omigod."

Shadow opened the door for her. Then he went around and got in. "You know the car?"

"When I came up here two or three years ago to stay with Mags. It was me that persuaded him to paint it purple."

"Oh," said Shadow. "It's good to have someone to blame."

He drove the car out onto the street. Got out and closed the garage door. Got back into the car. Sam was looking at him oddly as he got in, as if the confidence had begun to leak out of her. He put on his seat belt, and she said, "Okay. This is a stupid thing to do, isn't it? Getting into a car with a psycho killer."

"I got you home safe last time," said Shadow.

"You killed two men," she said. "You're wanted by the feds. And now I find out you're living under an assumed name next door to my sister. Unless Mike Ainsel is your real name?"

"No," said Shadow, and he sighed. "It's not." He hated saying it. It was as if he was letting go of something important, abandoning Mike Ainsel by denying him; as if he were taking his leave of a friend.

"Did you kill those men?"

"No."

"They came to my house, and said we'd been seen together. And this guy showed me photographs of you. What was his name-Mister Hat? No. Mister Town. It was like The Fugitive. But I said I hadn't seen you."

"Thank you."

"So," she said. "Tell me what's going on. I'll keep your secrets if you keep mine."

"I don't know any of yours," said Shadow.

"Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely. We were kind of stoned," she admitted.

"I doubt that bit of it's much of a secret," said Shadow. "Everyone in Lakeside must have known. It's a stoner sort of purple."

And then she said, very quiet, very fast, "If you're going to kill me please don't hurt me. I shouldn't have come here with you. I am so fucking fucking dumb. I can identify you. Jesus."

Shadow sighed. "I've never killed anybody. Really. Now I'm going to take you to the Buck," he said. "We'll have a drink. Or if you give the word, I'll turn this car around and take you home. Either way, I'll just have to hope you aren't going to call the cops."

There was silence as they crossed the bridge.

"Who did kill those men?" she asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"I would." She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now.

"It's not easy to believe."

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."

"Maybe," she said. "Try me."

"Would you believe that all the gods that people have ever imagined are still with us today?"

"...Maybe."

"And that there are new gods out there, gods of computers and telephones and whatever, and that they all seem to think there isn't room for them both in the world. And that some kind of war is kind of likely."

"And these gods killed those two men?"

"No, my wife killed those two men."

"I thought you said your wife was dead."

"She is."

"She killed them before she died, then?"

"After. Don't ask."

She reached up a hand and flicked her hair from her forehead.

They pulled up on Main Street, outside the Buck Stops Here. The sign over the window showed a surprised-looking stag standing on its hind legs holding a glass of beer. Shadow grabbed the bag with the book in it and got out.

"Why would they have a war?" asked Sam. "It seems kind of redundant. What is there to win?"

"I don't know," admitted Shadow.

"It's easier to believe in aliens than in gods," said Sam. "Maybe Mister Town and Mister Whatever were Men in Black, only the alien kind."

They were standing on the sidewalk outside the Buck Stops Here and Sam stopped. She looked up at Shadow, and her breath hung on the night air like a faint cloud. She said, "Just tell me you're one of the good guys."

"I can't," said Shadow. "I wish I could. But I'm doing my best."

She looked up at him, and bit her lower lip. Then she nodded. "Good enough," she said. "I won't turn you in. You can buy me a beer."

Shadow pushed the door open for her, and they were hit by a blast of heat and music. They went inside.

Sam waved at some friends. Shadow nodded to a handful of people whose faces-although not their names-he remembered from the day he had spent searching for Alison McGovern, or who he had met in Mabel's in the morning. Chad Mulligan was standing at the bar, with his arm around the shoulders of a small red-haired woman-the kissing cousin, Shadow figured. He wondered what she looked like, but she had her back to him. Chad's hand raised in a mock salute when he saw Shadow. Shadow grinned, and waved back at him. Shadow looked around for Hinzelmann, but the old man did not seem to be there this evening. He spied a free table at the back and started walking toward it.

Then somebody began to scream.

It was a bad scream, a full-throated, seen-a-ghost hysterical scream, which silenced all conversation. Shadow looked around, certain somebody was being murdered, and then he realized that all the faces in the bar were turning toward him. Even the black cat, who slept in the window during the day, was standing up on top of the jukebox with its tail high and its back arched and was staring at Shadow.

Time slowed.

"Get him!" shouted a woman's voice, parked on the verge of hysteria. "Oh for God's sake, somebody stop him! Don't let him get away! Please!" It was a voice he knew.

Nobody moved. They stared at Shadow. He stared back at them.

Chad Mulligan stepped forward, walking through the people. The small woman walked behind him warily, her eyes wide, as if she was preparing to start screaming once more. Shadow knew her. Of course he knew her.

Chad was still holding his beer, which he put down on a nearby table. He said, "Mike."

Shadow said, "Chad."

Audrey Burton took hold of Chad's sleeve. Her face was white, and there were tears in her eyes. "Shadow," she said. "You bastard. You murderous evil bastard."

"Are you sure that you know this man, hon?" said Chad. He looked uncomfortable.

Audrey Burton looked at him incredulously. "Are you crazy? He worked for Robbie for years. His slutty wife was my best friend. He's wanted for murder. I had to answer questions. He's an escaped convict." She was way over the top, her voice trembling with suppressed hysteria, sobbing out her words like a soap actress going for a daytime Emmy. Kissing cousins, thought Shadow, unimpressed.

Nobody in the bar said a word. Chad Mulligan looked up at Shadow. "It's probably a mistake. I'm sure we can sort this all out," he said. Then he said, to the bar, "It's all fine. Nothing to worry about. We can sort this out. Everything's fine." Then, to Shadow, "Let's step outside, Mike." Quiet competence. Shadow was impressed.

"Sure," said Shadow. He felt a hand touch his hand, and he turned to see Sam staring at him. He smiled down at her as reassuringly as he could.

Sam looked at Shadow, then she looked around the bar at the faces staring at them. She said to Audrey Burton, "I don't know who you are. But. You. Are such. A cunt." Then she went up on tiptoes and pulled Shadow down to her, and kissed him hard on the lips, pushing her mouth against his for what felt to Shadow like several minutes, and might have been as long as five seconds in real, clock-ticking time.

It was a strange kiss, Shadow thought, as her lips pressed against his: it wasn't intended for him. It was for the other people in the bar, to let them know that she had picked sides. It was a flag-waving kiss. Even as she kissed him, he became certain that she didn't even like him-well, not like that.

Still, there was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question.

And the reply was, Eat the strawberries.

The story had never made any sense to him as a boy. It did now. So he closed his eyes, threw himself into the kiss and experienced nothing but Sam's lips and the softness of her skin against his, sweet as a wild strawberry.

"C'mon Mike," said Chad Mulligan, firmly. "Please. Let's take it outside."

Sam pulled back. She licked her lips, and smiled, a smile that nearly reached her eyes. "Not bad," she said. "You kiss good for a boy. Okay, go play outside." Then she turned to Audrey Burton. "But you," she said, "are still a cunt."

Shadow tossed Sam his car keys. She caught them, one-handed. He walked through the bar and stepped outside, followed by Chad Mulligan. A gentle snow had begun to fall, the flakes spinning down into the light of the neon bar sign. "You want to talk about this?" asked Chad.

Audrey had followed them out onto the sidewalk. She looked as if she were ready to start screaming again. She said, "He killed two men, Chad. The FBI came to my door. He's a psycho. I'll come down to the station with you, if you want."

"You've caused enough trouble, ma'am," said Shadow. He sounded tired, even to himself. "Please go away."

"Chad? Did you hear that? He threatened me!" said Audrey.

"Get back inside, Audrey," said Chad Mulligan. She looked as if she were about to argue, then she pressed her lips together so hard they went white, and went back into the bar.

"Would you like to comment on anything she said?" asked Chad Mulligan.

"I've never killed anyone," said Shadow.

Chad nodded. "I believe you," he said. "I'm sure we can deal with these allegations easily enough. You won't give me any trouble, will you, Mike?"

"No trouble," said Shadow. "This is all a mistake."

"Exactly," said Chad. "So I figure we ought to head down to my office and sort it all out there?"

"Am I under arrest?" asked Shadow.

"Nope," said Chad. "Not unless you want to be. I figure, you come with me out of a sense of civic duty, and we'll straighten all this out."

Chad patted Shadow down, found no weapons. They got into Mulligan's car. Again Shadow sat in the back, looking out through the metal cage. He thought, SOS. Mayday. Help. He tried to push Mulligan with his mind, as he'd once pushed a cop in Chicago-This is your old friend Mike Ainsel. You saved his life. Don't you know how silly this is? Why don't you just drop the whole thing?

"I figure it was good to get you out of there," said Chad. "All you needed was some loudmouth deciding that you were Alison McGovern's killer an............