Danny

12:04 A.M.

The woman asked to use the bathroom. Danny Lukens was 99 percent sure of what she wanted it for — and it had nothing to do with the usual uses to which bathrooms are put. He said yes, though, because it wasn't worth arguing about. He had a long night still ahead of him. He had just started his shift. He didn't want any trouble.

"Okay, thanks," she said.

Her speech wasn't slurred, which surprised him. Then he realized that he shouldn't have been surprised. The slurring would come later. Right now, she was honed to a clean, brittle edge, polished to a gloss of pure longing. No wonder the "Okay, thanks" had come out intelligibly. She was too sharp, too attuned to her life and its attendant miseries. Slurring — not only her words, but also her world — was the goal, not the current reality. In a few minutes, she would be able to relax into the newly made mess of herself. The beautiful ooze.

"Back there," he said, pointing. "It ain't locked."

Whatever she did in the bathroom was her business. Not his.

She nodded and moved away from the counter. He took a quick mental snapshot with his sideways glance, just in case she trashed it and his manager asked him for a description of her to give to the sheriff. As if, Danny thought, they'd be able to find her again if she didn't want to be found. Addicts were ghosts. They drifted in and out of people's lives, just as they drifted in and out of their own lives.

He sort of knew her and he sort of didn't. He had seen her before, most likely, but he didn't have a precise recollection of it, and they all ran together in his mind, anyway, the faces and the skinny bodies. She had been in here before; again, he didn't remember it, but the odds favored it. This was a small town. Not that many places to go. She wore cutoff denim shorts and a too-tight black T-shirt with the word PINK splayed across her chest in — Duh, Danny thought — pink letters. She was very, very thin; her arms and legs were like tiny white PVC pipes. She had a long narrow face, scraggly blondish hair with black roots, and dead eyes. Her eyebrows were charcoal smudges. She was barefoot. She was — how old? Danny couldn't guess. Maybe eighteen. Maybe forty.

Did it matter? It did not.

Until she came in, he had been alone since his shift started at 11 P.M. Chuckie Purvis, the guy with the shift before his, had reported that it had been slow all night. Which was strange, really, for August. Usually August nights brought an unbroken line of customers: smart-ass kids, say, out for midnight rides in dusty pickups, buying gas and beer, shedding waves of look-at-me bravado, slapping a fake ID down on the counter like the winning card in a blackjack game. Or truckers craving a can of Red Bull and a flap of conversation. Or sometimes it was deputies from the Raythune County Sheriff's Department. They had a habit of stopping in, too, at intervals throughout the night, propping a black-holstered hip against the front counter and slowly unwinding the brown wrapper from a Snickers, alternating bites with observations about how anybody in their right mind would've gotten the hell out of this state a long time ago. No question about it. Once the last chunk of candy was chewed and swallowed, they would use the tip of their tongue to pry out the nut pieces from their back teeth.

The Marathon was a natural gathering place. It was the only station in these parts open after 11 P.M., except for the Highway Haven up on the interstate. The Marathon was closer to Acker's Gap, the county seat. At one time there had been a Lester Oil station even closer, but it shut down last year, the front glass window replaced by sheets of yellow plywood. The pumps and the underground tank had been hauled out, leaving open holes and a trough gorged with trash and rainwater. Husky weeds had colonized the long cracks in the asphalt.

The Marathon, though, was still going strong.

Danny's favorite deputy was Jake Oakes. He liked Charlie Mathers, who had retired a while back, well enough, and he didn't mind Steve Brinksneader, Charlie's replacement. Jake, though, was the best; he was the one Danny most admired, most looked forward to seeing during his shift — or any other time, for that matter, which was weird, because Danny wasn't the kind of guy who liked authority figures. That had been his whole problem back in high school, and the reason he had to drop out: He couldn't stand it when somebody tried to tell him what he could and couldn't do. In study hall one afternoon in his junior year, he spat at Mrs. Pyles, the civics teacher. She had told him to quit talking and do his work. Witnessing him being called out that way, some of the other guys laughed at him. That was not okay. And so when Mrs. Pyles marched down the aisle in his direction, surely intending to repeat her reprimand, he stood up and sent a ginormous wad of spit right in her eye. It was worth everything that came after — being expelled for the rest of the year — just to see the look on the old bitch's face, the shock and the fear. By the time the school year rolled around again, he was out on his own. To hell with her. To hell with all of them.

Jake, though, he respected. He never made Jake pay for his Snickers. Yet so far tonight there had been no sign of Jake. No sign of anybody. Just this woman. Danny didn't see a car outside, which meant that wherever she had come from, she had walked.

It had been a strange summer. The heat never really settled in. Throughout June and July and the first two weeks of August the weather seemed to be in a sort of trance, a holding pattern, as if it was waiting for a secret signal to let loose and intensify, prompting a moist and insistent misery. That is what usually happened. Not even the cooler air in the mountain valleys was any match for the sudden descent of the wipe-out heat of August. This year, though, things were different; temperatures remained moderate. And yet people could not quite trust the moderation. They waited nervously for that final blast, for a day when a red, pitiless sun stuck to the sky like a wet lollipop on a sidewalk. It was like expecting a call with bad news and listening always for the phone to ring.

Danny looked toward the short hallway leading to the bathroom. He wondered how long he should give her — the station only had the one bathroom, and both women and men had to use it — before he fist-knocked on the door and muttered, "Hey," followed by, "you okay in there?"

Chuckie Purvis had gotten in trouble last month for not checking on a trucker whose name turned out to be Gil Trautwein. Trautwein had stumbled in through the double doors at about 2 A.M. on a very busy night,...