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some time to come.
    Inside, the Sweet Creek Inn still had something of the look of a poor holy-roller church, that kind of crude, jerry-built, naked-lightbulb ambience endemic to the Ozarks, where almost everyone was his own architect, his own carpenter and electrician and plumber. While Blanchard admired this trait, the nonchalant versatility of the people, at the same time he had to admit that the phenomenon had created an esthetic blight of sorts, an architecture in which wallboard and Masonite and corrugated tin prevailed, superseding the picturesque log cabins and Arkansas native stone dwellings of an earlier era. Susan in fact maintained that the mobile home was the penultimate Ozark art form, all those sixty-foot double-wides precariously hugging the rock hillsides against that inevitable day when a spring storm would scatter their stapled walls and dollhouse bordello furniture across a dozen sections. Just you wait, Susan would tell him. If he thought suburban Saint Louis was a monstrosity, he should wait until these country folkgot enough money to make their dreams real. Then the hills would be alive with the sound of Muzak, and all would be Day-Glo plastic, chartreuse and pink and orange.
    But none of this bothered him in the least as he made his way to the bar and sidled onto a wooden stool there. The owner, Reagan, gave him a glass and a quart of tonic to go with the vodka he had brought in from the truck.
    â€œHow’s it goin’?” Reagan asked him.
    â€œCan’t complain.”
    â€œYou’re the only one then.” Reagan took his money, twice what the tonic would have cost at retail. Then he told Blanchard what he wanted to know. “She’s in the back. Be out in a minute.”
    Blanchard said nothing and Reagan, a short and stocky bald man, moved on down the bar, to the five other men sitting there, ranchers and truckers and cattle dealers like almost everyone else in the place—except for Shea, who with another large man was the center of attention across the room. Facing each other over a small table strewn with five- and ten-dollar bills, they were preparing to arm-wrestle, going through a nervous little dance of hand and elbow movements, jockeying for an advantage. One of the men standing over them, a garage mechanic in Rockton, was gingerly massaging his bare right arm, which looked red and sore, snared in a net of swollen veins. And his face was not much different, so full of blood and anger that Blanchard judged he had lost more than money to Shea, as the new opponent probably would too, a man Blanchard recognized now as one of the Fowler brothers, who owned and worked a large spread just over the state line, in Arkansas. He was almost as tall as Shea, and he was younger and undoubtedly in far better shape, but he lacked the great ursine shoulders that Shea had, the arms like logs. Nevertheless most of the rednecks appeared to be betting on him, betting their hearts instead of their eyes. The one exception—the oneman with the look of a winner—was standing closest to Shea, and though Blanchard had never seen him before he did not have to wonder who he was, not with the familiar curly auburn hair, the squarish face and pug nose and large green eyes. And though he was indeed little, he was a good deal larger than the four feet, one hundred pounds Shea had accorded him that morning, was in fact closer to Ronda’s size, five feet three or better and probably thirty pounds heavier than her one hundred ten. So he could have been her twin, only male—and only different. Those same green eyes looked out from an alien, frightening place, a place Ronda had never been.
    Suddenly one of the men standing with Little called go and the battle at the table was joined, Fowler quickly driving Shea’s arm halfway to the tabletop. But there it stopped, and would go no further, Blanchard saw, in the playful wink Shea cast his way. His friend made a great show of it,