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talent for stating the obvious."
    "Where is it?"
    For the first time Jack detected a trace of fear in Oz's eyes.
    "I don't know."
    "Swell." He glanced around. "Where's that guy Hank?"
    "Hank? What could you want with that imbecile?"
    "Just wondering if he was bothering it again."
    The boss slammed a bony fist into a palm. "I thought he'd learned his lesson. Well, he'll learn it now." He turned and called into the night. "Everyone—find Hank! Find him and bring him to me at once!"
    They waited but no one brought Hank. Hank was nowhere to be found.
    "It appears he’s run off," Prather said.
    "Or got carried off."
    "We found no blood near the truck, so perhaps the young idiot is still alive."
    "He is alive," said a woman’s voice.
    Jack turned and recognized the three-eyed fortune teller from the show.
    "What do you see, Carmella?" Oz said.
    "He is in the woods. He stole one of the guns and he carries a spear. He is full of wine and hate. He is going to kill it."
    "Oh, I doubt that," Oz said. "Going to get himself killed is more likely."
    Jack understood taking a gun, but not the spear, then he remembered the pointed iron rod Hank and Bondy had used to torture it. Neither would do the job. If Hank ever caught up with the rakosh, he wouldn't last long.
    He stared at the mass of trees rising on the far side of the Parkway. "We've got to find it."
    "Yes," Oz said. "Poor thing, alone out there in a strange environment, disoriented, lost, afraid."
    Jack couldn’t imagine Scar-lip afraid of anything, especially anything it might run across around here.
    "Where’d the rakosh break out?"
    "About a mile back. Right near mile marker fifty-one-point-three, to be exact. We stopped but could not stay parked on the shoulder—we’d have had the police asking what happened—so we pulled in here."
    "We’ve got to find it."
    "Nothing I'd like better, although I have a feeling you'd prefer to see it dead."
    "Very perceptive."
    "An interesting area here," Oz said. "Right on the edge of the Pine Barrens."
    Jack cursed under his breath. The Barrens. Shit. How was he going to locate Scar-lip in there—if that was where it was? This whole area was like a time warp. Near the coast you had a nuclear power plant and determinedly quaint but unquestionably twentieth century towns like Smithville and Leeds Point. West of the Parkway was wilderness. The Barrens—a million or so unsettled acres of pine, scrub brush, vanished towns, hills, bogs, creeks, all pretty much unchanged in population and level of civilization from the time the Indians had the Americas to themselves. From the Revolutionary days on, it had served as a haven for people who didn't want to be found. Hessians, Tories, smugglers, Lenape Indians, heretical Amish, escaped cons—at one time or another, they'd all sought shelter in the Pine Barrens.
    And now add a rakosh to its long list of fugitives.
    "We're not too far from Leeds Point, you know," Prather said, an amused expression flitting across his sallow face. "The birthplace of the Jersey Devil."
    "Save the history lesson for later. Are you sending out a search party?"
    "No. No one wants to go, and I can't say I blame them. But even if some were willing, we've got to be set up in Cape May tonight for our show tomorrow."
    "That leaves me."
    If Scar-lip got too much of a head start, he’d never find it . . . which Jack could live with unless the drive to kill Vicky was still fixed in its dim brain. Seemed unlikely, but Jack couldn’t take the chance.
    "You’re not seriously thinking of going after it."
    Jack shrugged. "Know somebody who’ll do it for me?"
    "May I ask why?" Oz said.
    "Take too long to tell. Let’s just leave it that Scar-lip and I go back a ways, and we’ve got some unfinished business."
    Oz stared at him a moment, then turned and began walking back toward his trailer.
    "Come with me. Perhaps I can help."
    Jack doubted that, but followed and waited outside as Oz rummaged within his trailer. Finally he emerged