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He sniffed it again A frown touched his ue, and his smile broadened It wasn’t spit at all It was brandy Napoleon brandy A short laugh bubbled from his throat as he licked up the brandy

After a moment, Polk slowly lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, a contented shed, when he had seen the stain on his hand, not as brandy, but as sooo, the doubts and fears about what Vic was going to ask of hiht about was the last few tasty drags of his cigarette and the sleeping girl next to hiht’s sleep Not with two hundred dollars to earn

4

Iron Mike Sweeney was throwing up With each spasony, and fresh tears of pain sizzled in his eyes He knelt by the side of the road, knees on thepints of a thick, black, viscous liquid into the gutter It tasted hot and salty, like tears, or blood

Mike had been halfway home from the hospital after his aborted atteree by that shri Mayfair Street when suddenly his stomach convulsed in such a powerful cramp that his knees had buckled and he’d slumped down over the handlebars of the War Machine and slowed to a stop hard against a curb He stepped off the bike and let it fall into the street and then sagged against a parkinghis other hand to his stoed down to the pave down onto the curb with a thump The first spasreasy mist that had formed as soon as the sick wave of pain had hit, but then a second wave, bigger, darker, far more powerful slammed into him and he fell forward onto hands and knees and vorill of a culvert It was so sudden, and so unexpected, that it scared hi up, the fear had blosso, throwing up blood froht that Vic had finally done it, finally beat hih his brain The voed and choked, eyes squeezed shut against the pain that twisted his guts and closed his throat For almost two minutes he knelt there on the e for the spasradually, the awful tension in his stomach faded and went away He could still feel the stricture in his throat and the searing pain of his rib, but his stoe

Slowly, afraid to look at the blood he’d puked out, he opened his eyes

There was nothing in the gutter Just a drop or two of spit glistening on the bars of the culvert grill Nothing else

Mike stared down, trying to understand He had seen the blood, da as rahiskey He had felt it as it flooded out of him It had happened Except--apparently, it hadn’t happened

Mike Sweeney stared down at the gutter and felt a powerful wave of terror of some vast and unidentifiable kind sweep over him

5

Officer Coralita Too the winding stretch of A-32 under a haphazard scattering of stars overhead The edges of the sky were black as a ring of cloud cover was ain The road shook itself out in front of them as they swept southeast toward the Pine Deep–Black Marsh border By noas a familiar circuit for Too for nearly seven hours They had a loop that started at the intersection of A-32 and Old Mill Road, dropped south as directly as the winding A-32 would allow, past the Guthrie fare that spanned the Delaware to Black Marsh in New Jersey, and there they would jag west on Peddler’s Trail, which looped past the rusty stretch of S Hill Bridge and turned northeast again until it once more hit the Extension by Old Mill The whole loop ate up an even thirty ht fly it the trip could have been done in just over ten, but there wasn’t a straight road to be had anywhere in or around Pine Deep

Toombes and MacVey drove in silence, partly from tiredness, partly from boredom, and partly because they couldn’t stand each other Fro-​city bitch cop who thought that she had seen it all, done it all, and had it all under control MacVey saw Toombes as one of those cynical and dismissive types who had no time for small-​town cops because they weren’t "real cops" and hadn’t tangled with "real criminals" and therefore didn’t rate much, if at all MacVey was also clearly intimidated by Toombes for these very same reasons

As Toombes saw it, MacVey was just another one of those NRA types who collected big guns because they were disappointed by the size of their own dicks, and had wet dreaosh shoot-​outs with real honest-​to-​gosh crih Toombes had to admit that there were plenty of theh stack of Soldier of Fortune and Aazines next to his bed, watched every episode of COPS, and could recite the specs and stats of every high-​caliber gun ht MacVey was an adolescent ass wearing a cop’s disguise, and having him as a partner made her miss Jerry Head, her own partner from back in the city, and it alsoa cop needs for peace of e that her backup is a professional and not likely to shoot her instead of the bad guy Tooured that if push ever really came to shove, MacVey would probably shoot his own balls off while trying to reet that monster Blackhawk 44 out its fancy breakaway holster