It was the telephone which woke him an hour and a quarter later. He struggled out of a terrible dream - someone had been chasing him, that was all he could clearly remember - to a sitting position on the couch. He was horribly hot; every inch of his skin seemed to be running with sweat. The sun had crept around to this side of the house while he was sleeping and had shone in on him through the window-wall for God knew how long.

Mort walked slowly toward the telephone table in the front hall, plodding like a man in a diver's suit walking in the bed of a river against the current, his head thumping slowly, his mouth tasting like old dead gopher-shit. For every step he took forward, the entrance to the hall seemed to retreat a step, and it occurred to Mort, not for the first time, that hell was probably like the way you felt after sleeping too long and too hard on a hot afternoon. The worst of it wasn't physical. The worst was that dismaying, disorienting sense of being outside yourself, somehow - just an observer looking through dual TV cameras with blurry lenses.

He picked up the phone thinking it would be Shooter.

Yeah, it'll be him, all right - the one person in the whole wide world I shouldn't be talking to with my guard down and one half of my mind feeling unbuttoned from the other half. Sure tell be him - who else?

'Hello?'

It wasn't Shooter, but as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line reply to his greeting, he discovered there was at least one other person to whom he had no business talking while in a physically vulnerable state.

'Hello, Mort,' Amy said. 'Are you all right?'