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nothing more. As he drifted into blackness, all he knew was that, somehow, he had gotten away.

    ***
    Don White was waiting in his office when Colton Banes got back. Kyle Hovey was with him. His jacket was torn and blood had spread all the way up his arm.
    "Did you get them?" Don asked.
    "We got one of them," Banes replied.
    "That's too bad." Don had a half bottle of bourbon. He poured himself a glass. 'You're still going to have to pay me for two." Neither of the two men said anything. Don White assumed that meant they agreed.
    He lifted the glass and drank. "What happened?" he asked.
    'You never told us about the dog," Banes murmured.

    "I didn't know about the dog."
    "It doesn't matter." Banes said slowly. "We have one of them. And the police will be looking for the other."
    "Oh, yeah? And why is that?"
    "He'll be wanted for murder."
    Don White looked surprised — or tried to. It was always difficult to read emotion in his face. There was too much flesh. "Whose murder?" he asked.
    Banes smiled. 'You shouldn't have asked."
    The sound of the bullet was very loud in the confined space of the office. Banes had shot Don White through the heart. For a few seconds, the man that Jamie and Scott had known as Uncle Don inspected his whiskey as if acknowledging the fact that, sadly, he would never now drink it. Then his hand fell.
    The liquid spilled. He sat back, unmoving in his chair.
    Colton Banes took one last look at the corpse. Then he slipped the gun back into his pocket and the two men left the room.
    FOUR
    Tenth Street
    Jamie opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer in Reno. He wasn't even in America. Somehow, impossibly, he had been transported to a deserted beach that stretched out along the edge of a black, lifeless sea. Was it day or night? He looked up but the sky seemed to be caught somewhere between the two. Jamie gulped for breath. He was still in the grip of his first panic, the knowledge that he was somewhere far away and utterly strange, that he was on his own. There was nobody in sight. Nothing.
    Just the beach and the sea and, in the distance, what might be an island, rising up to a needle point high above the waves.
    "Scott!"
    He called out the name but the single word seemed to die on his lips. That was more frightening than anything. He could shout as loud as he liked but there was no one to hear him. He wasn't just lost. He was completely abandoned. Where was he? Even the deserts of Nevada had offered more life and color than the place he now found himself.

    And yet…
    He had been here before. He knew where he was. Jamie drew his legs toward him, wrapping his hands around his shoulders, not so much to keep himself warm but to create a sort of protective cocoon. He forced himself to take a deep breath, to relax. Yes. It had been a long time ago, maybe years, but he knew this place. The island…The last time he had come here, there had been two boys making their way toward him in a boat made out of straw. He had wanted to meet them — he didn't know why — but he had woken up before they arrived. And he hadn't been alone. Scott had been here with him.
    And — standing next to them — there had been a girl.
    "This is a dream," Jamie muttered to himself. His voice still sounded very small but it was reassuring to hear anything at all. The waves were hitting the shore right in front of him but they were sluggish and hardly made any sound, as if someone had turned down the volume.
    A shaft of light flashed in the sky, far away. A storm. Jamie got to his feet. He was shivering. It wasn't cold — like everything else here, the temperature seemed to be fixed in some sort of neutral — but there was something about the lightning that set his teeth on edge. There it was again. He watched it flicker twice more, white forks of electricity so brilliant that they seemed to tear into the world as if determined to smash it. Somehow he knew that this was no ordinary storm. It was an announcement. Something was