matter that stung his face like insects. Overhead, yellow pools of dry lightning flared and pulsed in the clouds but made no sound. Even though he had soaked the lawn that morning, the ground under his feet felt as hard as brick. Five or six deer had clustered down in the trees as though preparing for an impending storm. Then he realized the deer were there for other reasons. On a rise just above his property, he saw the silhouettes of four coyotes slink across the crest. When lightning lit the sky behind them, he saw the yellow-gray of their coats, the peculiar way they hung their heads, the neck bones and jaws loose and not completely connected, a suggestion of slather on the teeth and lips.

Was this what it was all about? he wondered. One creature killing and eating another? Or even worse, the fanged predator with eyes in the front hunting down and tearing apart the gentle grass-eating animal born with eyes on the sides of its head, forever condemned to be food for coyotes and wolves and cougars and, finally, man with his sharpened stick?

What was it that had bothered him about Ethan Riser? The fact that he could drink normally and walk away from it? That he represented an organization with power that had almost global reach? Or Hackberry?s refusal to accept the notion that the Ethan Risers of the world were functional and made the system work and, in spite of all their inadequacies and failures, did an enormous amount of good?

No, that wasn?t it, either. Some people dwelled apart and didn?t fit. It was that simple. Preacher Jack Collins was one of them. In all probability, he was a psychopath who, upon his death, would continue to look upon himself as normal, stepping through a hole in the dimension still convinced it was the world that was wrong and not he. But there were both male and female counterparts to men like Jack Collins. They wore badges or Roman collars or climbed fire ladders into flaming buildings or did triage in battalion aid stations and, like Collins, never discussed their difference or the events in their lives that had sawed them loose from the seminal glue holding the rest of humankind together.

Saint Paul had written that perhaps there were angels living among us. If so, perhaps this was the bunch he was talking about. But before any one of them congratulated himself, he needed to be aware of the dues that went with membership. If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.

The greatest irony was that celibacy often went with the residency, less out of spiritual choice than circumstance. And those who called celibacy a gift were usually, in Hackberry?s opinion, those who lived twenty-four hours a day inside the iron maiden, their flesh tormented by the spikes of their unacknowledged desire.

He leaned forward in his folding chair and stretched his lower back, his sciatica like a fire creeping along his spinal cord.

He saw the cruiser turn off the road and come up his driveway. He heard the doorbell ring but did not bother to get up to answer it. When Pam Tibbs came around the side of the house, he saw that she had changed out of her evening clothes into jeans and a departmental khaki shirt. She was wearing her gun belt and cuffs and slapjack and Mace.

?What are you doing here?? he said.

?This month I go on at oh-one-hundred Saturdays,? she replied.

?That doesn?t address the question.?

?You always sit in the yard by yourself at one in the morning??

?Sometimes my back lights up and I have to wait for it to pass.?

She was standing in front of him, looking down at him, the curly ends of her hair hanging against her cheeks, her eyes bright in the shadows. He could hear her breathing and see her breasts rising and falling under her shirt. ?You want me to resign?? she said.

?No, I just want you to accept certain realities.?

?Like what??

?You?re still a young woman. The world is yours. Don?t mistake sympathy or admiration or friendship for love.?

?Who the hell are you to tell me what to think??

?Your goddamn boss is what I am.?

?You never