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blinked open again.
    The eye surveyed her surroundings, and she tried to sit up. Her left breast popped out of the dress. She looked down at herself, and some drool spilled from her mouth to her chest and slid into the gulf, the fleshy abyss, and was gone.
    “ ‘Oops!’” he said for her, now laughing along with her as she made that sound again. “‘Hey, what’s with my arms, anyway?’” he narrated. “‘I mean, I can’t feel anything .’
    “Isn’t that right?” he asked her. “Numb as Novocain. The good news is, you won’t want to remember any of this. Good for both of us. Won’t feel hardly anything either, but that’s your loss.” He rubbed his crotch, and then took hold of it and squeezed it like a rapper. “Old Max is dying to meet you.”
    His looks must have frightened her on some level, for he was a big son of a bitch, with too much hair and too little grooming.
    He waited for her but got only that one wandering eye.
    He raised his voice an octave to imitate her. “‘I like to par . . . ty.’
    “We’re going to have fun, all right,” he said.
    Ostensibly, he was on contract, but he had ulterior motives, information of his own to collect from her. Had she been horsey, he might have gleaned the information and been done with her. But she was a rare thing of youthful beauty—and the ketamine cocktail would erase any memory of these precious hours. As a survivalist, he knew never to waste anything. Put everything to good use.
    “‘Well, what are we waiting for?’” his ventriloquist puppet asked. Her good eye was locked onto the stove, apparently having lost track of him, but he didn’t let that bother him. You didn’t lose track of a man with a near-three-foot span to his shoulders and twenty-eight-inch thighs for very long. You just chose to ignore him. But that wouldn’t last either. Old Max was coming to attention.
    A geometric pattern of light rounded the ceiling and fled down a wall like a ghost, and a car engine was heard shutting off. The cabin door opened a moment later, and, with it, came a gust of cold that turned them both that direction.
    “Nice,” the visitor said, noticing the gooseflesh on her exposed breast, the tight pucker to her nipple and areola, as he shut the door.
    “‘Who are you?’” he imagined her asking.
    He’s who you have to thank for this, he answered himself silently.
    The visitor was dressed like a shoe salesman. He removed his Eddie Bauer jacket—black suede peppered with melted snow—and stepped away from the door and into the light. He had uncommon good looks, though his face was difficult to read. He might have once been a high school quarterback or varsity pitcher, the kind of guy that didn’t need to drug a girl to get some action. “Stop humming,” he said.
    The big man went silent and backed away. He could break this guy with one hand tied behind his back, if he had to, but he wasn’t about to. Both men knew that.
    The visitor stepped toward the woodstove, holding his hands out for warmth. “Kira, you can hear me and understand me?”
    “Do I know you?” Her words slurred. It was the first time she’d spoken since leaving the bar. “Help me . . .”
    “I will help you. But I need your help first. Okay?” He waited. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. The visitor looked over his shoulder and the big man handed him a syringe from the kitchen table.
    “You work at the Sun Valley Animal Center,” the visitor said.
    “Do ... I ... know ... you?” she repeated.
    “You’re Mark Aker’s secretary.”
    “His assistant. Ass -isn’t?” she said, amusing herself. “How do you . . . know . . . that?”
    The quavering of her voice changed her in the big man’s eyes. She looked so incredibly young and childish, all of a sudden. Just a baby in a bridesmaid’s dress.
    “Tell me about the sheep.”
    “What sheep? Which sheep?”
    “The sheep . The sick sheep. Why are the sheep so sick?”
    “Are we going to party or talk