He swung around, startled, stumbling slightly as his feet tangled. She hadn't stayed by the fridges. Somehow, she'd circled around, coming at him from behind his own counter, slipping through the narrow gap beyond the hotdog machine at the far end. She was ghostly pale, her red, sunken eyes resting on dark pouches of swollen skin. She looked barely able to stand, much less resist an attack by him.

But in her hand she held a knife, large and glinting in the light, and the gun against his abdomen suddenly felt like an ice cube, sending a deep wave of cold from his stomach out to his extremities.

"Take it easy," he said.

"Give me the money," she ordered, her voice barely a whisper.

"You need a doctor."

She stepped closer and gestured with the knife. What strength she had was clearly being routed to that hand. He had no doubt whatsoever she could harm him if necessary.

And yet, inexplicably to him, staring at another weapon in still another loser's fist suddenly reversed the coldness he'd just experienced, flushing his face with rage and making him at least think of some heroic counteraction.

But that's where it stayed-in the thought process. The impotence remained, compounding his anger. He turned toward the cash register, humiliated, presenting her with his back. "You f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

The sound of the till springing open matched the electronic ding of someone crossing the threshold of the store's far entrance-the one near the hot-dog machine behind the girl.

Despite it being summertime, the man entering had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled partly over his face.

They were a team.

Seeing his nightmare brought back to life threw Arnie into a second reversal. Yielding to fear and fury combined, he pulled his gun from under his shirt, swiveled to face the girl, who was looking over her shoulder at the man in the hood, and fired.

The explosion was huge, deafening Arnie, reverberating off the walls, dropping the girl like a pile of clothes to the floor, and sending the hooded man staggering back in alarm against the door behind him.

His hood slipped from his head as his head smacked against the gla.s.s and Arnie, his gun now trained on him, his finger tight on the trigger, saw a wide-eyed, pimply teenager he knew well from past transactions.

They stared at each other for a long, very quiet moment before the teenager finally managed to stammer, "Oh, s.h.i.t. Please don't."

Arnie saw him raise his empty hands in surrender and finally lowered the gun, the realization of what he'd just done slowly settling on him like a fog.

Crumpled and silent on the floor, the girl began leaking a dark puddle of blood.

Joe Gunther didn't bother showing his badge to the Brattleboro patrolman guarding the convenience store entrance. They knew one another. Gunther had once been his superior.

"Hey, Larry. Who's running this?"

"The detective's inside. How'd you hear about it? We barely got here."

Gunther smiled. "Scanner. Hard to break old habits."

The patrolman opened the door for him and Gunther stepped from a cool summer darkness filled with flashing red and blue strobes into the store's harsh fluorescent lighting, suggestive of an operating room.

Or a morgue.

A tall young man with an oddly hesitant manner rose from behind the counter. His face broke into a broad smile as he recognized the new arrival.

"Lieutenant. Good to see you. G.o.d, it's been a while. I didn't think the VBI went in for things like this."

He stuck out a hand, realized it was sheathed in a latex glove, and began struggling to remove it.

Joe Gunther quickly grasped him by the forearm in greeting. "It's okay, Ron. It's not worth the ha.s.sle to put it back on."

He didn't bother correcting the other man on his outdated rank. Gunther hadn't been a lieutenant in several years. It was "Special Agent" now, a burdensome t.i.tle he still found absurd, but which the political birth mothers of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation had chosen in a typical effort to impose profundity where it could only be earned over time. "And I'm not here officially-just offering help if it's needed. You okay with my dropping by?"

Ron Klesczewski shook his head in amazement. "You kidding? Just like old times. Not that we need help. This is more like the inevitable finally happening."

"I just heard it was a shooting."

Klesczewski invited Gunther to look over the far edge of the counter at the wide pool of drying blood now spread from one edge of the narrow s.p.a.ce to the other. It was smeared and covered with lug-soled boot prints, he presumed from the ambulance crew he'd also heard summoned on the scanner. If not for the slaughterhouse color, it might have looked like the aftermath of a playful struggle in a mud bath.

"Storekeeper shot a nineteen-year-old woman. She's still alive-barely. He used a .357. Real cannon. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing."

Gunther tilted his chin toward a carving knife lying at the edge of the crimson mess. "That hers?"

Klesczewski nodded and quickly glanced at the small notepad in his hand. "Arnold Weller's the owner. He's been robbed twice recently, once at gunpoint, once by a guy with a hammer. He bought the gun out of frustration. Said he wouldn't have shot her if he hadn't thought the other guy was involved, but I'm not so sure."

Gunther looked at him briefly without comment. Klesczewski quickly answered the implied question. "Some teenage kid walked in just as these two were facing off. He had his sweatshirt hood down low over his face-it's a fad right now, plus it's a little on the cool side. Arnie swore he thought he was a bad guy."

"The kid was clueless?" Gunther asked.

"Oh, yeah. Went to the hospital, too. He could barely talk, he was so shaken up. Like I said, the whole thing was just waiting to happen-more and more dopers doing more and more rip-offs. Storekeepers getting cranked by the week. Matter of time before somebody killed somebody. Maybe this one was itching for an opportunity, maybe he was just frazzled to the limit."

Despite the nature of the conversation, Gunther suppressed a smile at his young colleague's seasoned att.i.tude. Ron Klesczewski had been a fresh-faced detective when Gunther had run the Brattleboro squad a few years back. He'd been given command of it upon Joe's departure only because Gunther had taken the most obvious successor along with him to his new job. A natural with paperwork and computers, Klesczewski had been slow gaining selfconfidence otherwise. Although things had obviously improved now that he was top dog. Gunther's amus.e.m.e.nt was in adjusting the new to his memories of the old.

"She was on drugs?" he asked.

Klesczewski shrugged. "Blood tests'll probably tell us before she will-a.s.suming she survives. But she has the look, all the way down to the fresh track marks in her arm."

Gunther gazed once more at the gore covering the linoleum behind the counter-a body's life blood diluted with the root cause of its own destruction. Ron Klesczewski was perfectly correct about the inevitability of Brattleboro's increasing dilemma, but he could just as easily have extended it to include the entire state. While bent on pushing the same old romantic, fuzzy image of cows and maple syrup and grizzled farmers muttering "Ah-yup," Vermont was in fact facing a heroin epidemic. Almost one hundred fatal overdoses had been racked up in the past ten years, and countless more reversed in hospitals and ambulances. Small potatoes compared to Boston or New York, but not so negligible on a per capita basis, in a state of a half million residents. And it was climbing fast. The state police drug task force, which used to count heroin busts in the single digits five years back, was now spending fifty percent of its time on these cases alone.

"What's her name?" he asked, almost as an afterthought.

Klesczewsi again consulted his notes. "Laurie Davis."

Gunther became very still, catching his younger colleague's attention. "You okay? You know her?"

"She a blonde?" Gunther asked.

Klesczewski began rummaging around in a box he'd placed on the counter. "Hang on. I think I can do better than that."

He extracted a plastic evidence envelope with a driver's license captured within it. Gunther held it at an angle under the bleak lighting to better see the small photo.

"And this was definitely her?" he asked.

Klesczewski nodded. "She's got more meat on her there. I have crime-scene photos in the digital camera if you don't mind the small screen."

Gunther shook his head and returned the envelope to him, feeling tired and mournful. "Doesn't matter. I know her."

Two hours later, Joe was staring at the coffee machine in a hallway off the waiting room at Brattleboro's Memorial Hospital, wondering if more coffee at this time of night would qualify as suicide by insomnia.

"Don't do it," came a woman's voice from behind him, as if his thoughts had been blinking on and off above his head.

He turned to see an equally tired-looking Gail Zigman approaching from the doors of the intensive care unit. She gave him a half-hearted smile and slipped her arm through his. "We both need some sleep," she finished.

"How's she doing?" he asked her.

"She's alive. They did what they could, but the blood loss was huge. Basically, she's in a coma and they have no idea if she'll come out of it." She rested her head against his shoulder and sighed. "At least they're getting some brain activity-whatever that means."

In books written a hundred years earlier, Gail was what might have been called Joe's "particular friend." She was all of that, certainly-his sounding board, the echo of his conscience, his love of many years-but she was not his wife. Perhaps because they'd met later in life, or were in many ways too independent, or simply were loners drawn together by instinct, they'd formed an eccentric partnership as solid as that found in a good marriage, but in which they sometimes didn't see each other for weeks at a time. In fact, for half of each year, Gail lived and worked as a lobbyist in the state capital of Montpelier, which under normal conditions was a two-hour drive away.

Not that these conditions applied. Gail had driven down at warp speed following Joe's phone call to her, and had been monitoring Laurie Davis's progress from just outside the operating room ever since.

Laurie Davis was ner niece-her sister Rachel's daughter.

Gunther kissed the top of her head. "She might get lucky. Sometimes, the brain just needs a little nap before waking up, good as new."

They began walking down the empty, bland hallway toward the elevators at the far end.

"You're talking about a previously healthy body," Gail responded. "Not someone already half dead from drugs."

He thought about saying something comforting, as he would have with anyone else, but that wasn't their way. Plus, they'd both seen the girl, or what was left of her. There was little point pretending she wasn't a train wreck before Arnie Weller's bullet had torn into her skinny chest.

Gail shook her head, her voice hardening as she stared at the floor. "What the h.e.l.l was she thinking?"

Joe felt uncomfortable. Laurie wasn't his relation. He'd only met her a couple of times. But she'd lived in Brattleboro, having moved up from suburban Connecticut at Gail's urging, and he was wondering now if he shouldn't have known that she'd fallen on hard times. He wasn't on the PD any longer, but he stayed connected. It would have been easy to keep tabs on her. Cops did that for one another's families, even extended ones.

"Thinking probably isn't a huge prerequisite," he suggested vaguely instead. "Seems like it's usually more about dulling the pain."

She looked up at him sharply, and he realized he'd unintentionally turned the tables on her, causing her to question her own responsibilities here.

"Sorry," he added quickly. "I didn't mean it to come out that way."

But Gail wasn't looking for a way out. "You're right," she admitted. "If she had been feeling any pain, I wouldn't have known about it. I didn't keep in touch- barely paid attention to her."

She paused to sigh. "My sister's going to flip out."

"You haven't reached her yet?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Got the answering machine. They're probably on the town. They do that a lot. It was one of the issues between them and Laurie." She paused and then added, "Everyone thought coming to Vermont would give them all a break."

RIVETING, ACTION-PACKED.

DETECTIVE ADVENTURES.

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OPEN SEASON.

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SCENT OF EVIL.

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THE DARK ROOT.

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