"But we should give him that little push, Rick."

"These are nice jobs, yours and mine. This place does a lot for a lot of people. A very nice cash flow for a lot of good works."

"And a lot of perks too."

"Which wouldn't add up to much of a big percentage of overhead, Elly. How many weeks does it take to bring in enough to buy those two Gulf streams? You worked the mail and money room. Take a guess."

"Eight to ten weeks."

"John Tinker has built up a lot of friendship in Congress, with Charley Winchester's help. It's like having a nice tent to keep out the rain. Something like this would blow the tent down. There would be a lot of things they'd start paying attention to. Like how many blacks they've got in the University. One on the faculty. Three students. Discrimination.

Student loans go out the window. Like with Bob Jones University."

"You're trying to tell me something, Rick."

"Jobs are still tight. This thing develops a lot of employment.

ECB Enterprises, the Mall, Lakemore Construction, Meadows Settlements, Meadows Development. With more big things coming, they say. Geriatric medical center and hospital."

"What good is it?" Erskine asked loudly.

"Even without any push from anybody, he's going to come apart. He can't handle it. Where are you trying to go with this?"

"You're a member of the Church too."

"I know. I tithe, you tithe. All God's chill en gotta tithe."

"I wouldn't want you should get smartass, Erskine. The Church has come to mean a lot to me. I told you that before.

And it means even more to Martha than it does to me. It is not going to come tumbling all the way down. Nothing with eighty something affiliate preachers and their little churches involved is going to lie down and die. But it would really cripple it for a long time, I think. I didn't know God was offering me eternal life until I found it here. Maybe I owe the Church some kind of sacrifice."

"Sacrifice?"

"The sudden death of Walter Macy."

"I didn't hear you say that."

"The sudden natural death of Walter Macy."

Erskine turned quickly and walked away, past the well house, out to where an old woodpile rotted away in the weeds.

He kicked one of the rotten logs, and then he walked slowly back.

"I don't know how to say this. Yes, that would be neat. That would quiet the whole thing. And not hard to do. Lots of easy ways. Sap him with a sock full of dry sand, and run a sharpened piano wire between his ribs into the heart, poke it around a few times. But what I am is a cop. An officer of the law. Maybe that's my religion. I can't take life. I don't even hunt."

"We're employees of an enterprise more private than public, agreed?"

"Of course."

"We took our oaths a long time ago to different entities.

Official oaths about official duties."

"Right."

"As paid security officers, we are, on the average, civilians, Elly. We can think as civilians, and we have the right to take any risks we think should be taken. As civilians."

"In spite of all that, I can't have any part of it, no matter how it neat ens things up, and no matter what kind of monster Macy is. Maybe he's dumped dozens of women down wells. It's against what I am, or maybe what I think I am. It is so impossible for me I can't even let you do it."

Liddy stood up and brushed the seat of his pants. He smiled and shook his head.

"I knew that's how you'd jump. I had to try. Maybe, if I guessed wrong about you, I would have tried to go through with it. I don't know. I don't think I want to know.

So there's only one thing I am going to ask you. Let's you and me not be the ones to give him the little push, okay?"

"Concealing the knowledge of a crime?"

"Tell me this, Mr. Clean. Are you absolutely positively certain that he killed that woman?"

"I guess not. Pretty sure, but not certain."

"Then you can go along with my suggestion that you leave it the hell alone?"

"On one condition, Rick. If they start to manufacture any evidence to tie Moses into it, I'm going to steer Coombs toward Macy."

"If that happens, we'll both do the steering."

"I appreciate that. I really do."

"Be my guest."

As they strolled back toward the car, Erskine said, almost laughing, "I can't believe we've been talking about what we've been talking about. I come off as some kind of priss cop, obeying every rule. I used to hate working with one of those as a partner. Everything by the book. I always took shortcuts here and there."

"You come off as a man, Elly."

For a very brief time after the rains the humidity had been low but now it was back up again, very high, in the usual August range of ninety-five to a hundred, in a heat that silenced the birds and brought out ten thousand cicadas and tree toads, sounding like faraway picnics and road races.

Molly Wintergarten left the club at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon and did not make as good time as usual driving south to the next exit, due to the places where shallow water still flowed onto the Interstate to be whacked into fine spray by the speeding sixteen-wheelers. So she fully expected John Tinker Meadows to be there waiting for her at the double-wide trailer. After she had relatched the big cattle gate behind her, she drove down the winding muddy trace toward the trailer and the pond, looking ahead for the sheen of his blue Ford van in the shade of the trees. She was uncomfortably sweaty because something had gone wrong with the air-conditioning unit in the little convertible Rabbit. She had the top closed and the windows closed, but the huff of air from the vents seemed but faintly chilled, certainly not enough for a day like this.

She was so busy looking for his car she did not notice the trailer until she was fifty feet away from it, and then wondered why she hadn't seen it sooner. Burden Pond extended all the way to the steps and underneath, and she could see, by the mud line along the length of the trailer, the water had come much higher and had, in fact, floated or pushed it off the foundation blocks. The back right corner was canted down, the front left corner lifted high. She undid the padlock and climbed up into it. It was a sodden ruin inside, stinking of mud and mildew. She backed out and shut the door and hurried back to her car. The bugs had begun to find her. She ran the motor for the sake of the faint chill from the vents until the warning light went on, indicating it was overheating. She turned the motor off and rolled the windows down a few inches and sat fanning herself with an old Time magazine she found under the front seat. But the bugs were coming in, whining in her ears, and the sweat was running down her face and down between her breasts and down from her armpits, soaking her pink top and the waistband of her white tennis skirt.

Slowly she began to realize that John Tinker had really meant it this time. She had used their phone signal three times during the morning, and he hadn't called back from a pay phone until after eleven.

"How about like three o'clock, lover?" she asked him.

"Sorry."

"Sewed up with something again?"