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Maybeshe wasn’t Sue Grafton or Janet Evanovich, but neither was she, strictly speaking, a private person. She would even be on CNN for a day or two. The world would know a crazy, grinning giant had shot his load inside of the Willow Grove Scribe. Even the fact that he had taken her underwear as a souvenir might come out. CNN wouldn’t report that part, but The National Enquirer or Inside View would have no such compunctions.
    Sources inside the investigation say they found a pair of the Scribe’s panties in the accused rapist’s drawer: blue Victoria’s Secret hip-huggers, trimmed with lace.
    â€œI can’t tell,” she said. “I won’t tell.”
    But there were others before you, there could be others after y—
    She pushed this thought away. She was too tired to consider what might or might not be her moral responsibility. She’d work on that part later, if God meant to grant her a later . . . and it seemed He might. But not on this deserted road where any set of approaching lights might have her rapist behind it.
    Hers. He was hers now.

- 13 -
    A mile or so after passing the Colewich sign, Tess began to hear a low, rhythmic thudding that seemed to come up from the road through her feet. Her first thought was of H. G. Wells’s mutant Morlocks, tending their machinery deep in the bowels of the earth, but another five minutesclarified the sound. It was coming through the air, not from the ground, and it was one she knew: the heartbeat of a bass guitar. The rest of the band coalesced around it as she walked. She began to see light on the horizon, not headlights but the white of arc sodiums and the red gleam of neon. The band was playing “Mustang Sally,” and she could hear laughter. It was drunken and beautiful, punctuated by happy party-down whoops. The sound made her feel like crying some more.
    The roadhouse, a big old honkytonk barn with a huge dirt parking lot that looked full to capacity, was called The Stagger Inn. She stood at the edge of the glare cast by the parking lot lights, frowning. Why so many cars? Then she remembered it was Friday night. Apparently The Stagger Inn was the place to go on Friday nights if you were from Colewich or any of the surrounding towns. They would have a phone, but there were too many people. They would see her bruised face and leaning nose. They would want to know what had happened to her, and she was in no shape to make up a story. At least not yet. Even a pay phone outside was no good, because she could see people out there, too. Lots of them. Of course. These days you had to go outside if you wanted to smoke a cigarette. Also . . .
    He could be there. Hadn’t he been capering around her at one point, singing a Rolling Stones song in his awful tuneless voice? Tess supposed she might have dreamed that part—or hallucinated it—but she didn’t think so. Wasn’t it possible that after hiding her car, he’d come right here to TheStagger Inn, pipes all cleaned and ready to party the night away?
    The band launched into a perfectly adequate cover of an old Cramps song: “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog.” No, Tess thought, but today a dog certainly did my pussy. The Old Tess would not have approved of such a joke, but the New Tess thought it was pretty goddam funny. She barked a hoarse laugh and got walking again, moving to the other side of the road, where the lights from the road-house parking lot did not quite reach.
    As she passed the far side of the building, she saw an old white van backed up to the loading dock. There were no arc sodiums on this side of The Stagger Inn, but the moonlight was enough to show her the skeleton pounding its cupcake drums. No wonder the van hadn’t stopped to pick up the nail-studded road litter. The Zombie Bakers had been late for the load-in, and that wasn’t good, because on Friday nights, The Stagger Inn was hopping with the bopping, rolling with the strolling,