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carry it out.
    “How long have"—he chose his words with care—"you and I been here.” She smiled at him. “How many days?” He thought he might kill her then if she refused to answer him.
    “Pippy will count up,” she said, and turned away from him. He felt nausea and dizzy waves that shook his body. He picked up the cold can of tuna fish and began eating out of the can, devouring great hunks of the food and then washing it down with the rest of the cloudy water that was in the bottle. “Sixteen days,” she said proudly. “Oh, look! Big Boy ate all his dinner like a good boy. Pretty Pipper will give him a nice dessert now."
    She reached for something and held it in her hands where she alone could see it, and made a show of peering into her hands. Then she laughed and offered it to Chaingang, holding out her hand as she said, “Big Boy's nice dessert treat.” She was holding a tiny dead mouse in her hand. He stared at her in disbelief as she dropped it and cackled away into the darkness. Insane and lucky.
    He tried to get to his feet but the effort was too much and he sat back down with a splash, realizing then that he was still immersed in his own dried filth.
    It was then that intense hatred probably saved his life. A surge of scarlet hate poured through him and the raging tide propelled him to his feet, forcing him up at the thought of the cop who had done this to him, and the momentum carried him forward as he plunged ahead into the wet black stench looking for a way up.
    Soon he had forced himself to return through the malodorous sewer tunnel to the place where the old woman was waiting, and he tapped the last of his strength to glean what information she might be capable of dispensing. He learned how she had happened upon him, his body half out of the water, washed into a nearby submain where she sometimes went to seek shelter. He learned how she had found his huge “bag of pretty treasures.” And from what he could gather, nobody besides the crazy sewer lady knew that he was alive.
    He sent her scurrying off on his supply errand, the dog limping along beside her, and as soon as they were gone, he gave in to the soporific pull of his total exhaustion and fell into a deep sleep.

BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

    I t was a good, solid marriage, this crazy, hot thing of theirs. It broke some rules but, hell, a lot of great things break rules—that was what rules are for. She broke some of Eichord's rules about women, and with every misconception shattering, with each new stereotypical cop thought breaking like so much cheap glass, his smile would get a little wider. She was good for him, and the reverse was also true.
    She'd saved his butt one time and she was a good-enough lady that she never looked back and said, Way they go, or patted herself on her gorgeous back for it. She was a caring person. She genuinely liked people. There'd been a time when all that had hung precariously in the balance and Eichord had been a part of that case. He'd asked her out and she wasn't having any of him, or men in general, having been at her lowest all-time ebb, and the two of them had pulled each other up.
    There were only two things she didn't like about the marriage: she had to leave Dallas, which was so much a part of her she couldn't shake loose from the Big D sunshine, but there was sunshine here too. The people were a little different: closer in, tighter, kept more to themselves, not open like she was used to knowing. But she was a monogamous family-oriented lady and she'd build their own world around her lover.
    Their new friends were a problem. She'd left a couple of girlfriends of years’ duration and in trade had inherited a couple of stuck-up, nosy neighbors, and a bunch of “hard-on cops.” The closest thing Eichord could deliver by way of what ordinary folks call friends or close acquaintances.
    It had taken the passage of some time and then the constancy of the hot sex had tapered off to something approximating