"I suspect P.J. will want whatever your dad wanted. He'll say you should keep it all."
    "I won't, I won't," Joey said, raising his voice.
    Kadinska caught up with him in the reception lounge, took him by the arm, and halted 
him. "Joey, it's not that easy."
    "Sure it is."
    "If you really don't want it, then you have to renounce the inheritance.'
    "I renounce it. I already did. Don't want it."
    "A document has to be drawn, signed, notarized."
    Although the day was cold and the office was on the chilly side, Joey had broken into 
a sweat. "How long will it take to put these papers together?"
    "If you'll come back tomorrow afternoon-"
    "No." Joey's heart was jackhammering almost hard enough to shatter the ribs and 
breastbone that caged it. "No, sir, I'm not staying here another night. I'm going to 
Scranton. A flight to Pittsburgh in the morning. Vegas from there. All the way out to 
Vegas. Mail me the papers.'
    "That's probably better anyway," Kadinska said. "It'll give you more time to think, 
to reconsider."
    At first the lawyer had seemed to be a gentle, bookish man. Not now.
    Joey no longer saw kindness in the man's eyes. Instead he perceived the slyness of a 
bargainer for souls, something with scales under the disguise of skin, with eyes that in 
a different light would be like the sulfur-yellow eyes of the dog that had confronted him 
on the front porch a while ago.
    He wrenched loose of the attorney's hand, shoved him aside, and made for the outer 
door in a state close to panic.
    Kadinska called after him: "Joey, what's wrong?"
    The hallway. Past the real-estate office. The dentist. Toward the stairs. He wanted 
desperately to be out in the fresh air, to be washed clean by the rain.
    "Joey, what's the matter with you?"
    "Stay away from me!" he shouted.
    When he reached the head of the stairs, he halted so abruptly that he almost pitched 
to the bottom. He grabbed the newel post to keep
    his balance.
    At the foot of the steep stairs lay the dead blonde, bundled in a transparent tarp 
partly opaque with blood. The plastic was drawn tightly across her bare breasts, 
compressing them. Her nipples were visible but not her face.
    One pale arm had slipped out of her shroud. Although she was dead, she reached out 
beseechingly.
    He could not bear the sight of her mangled hand, the blood, the nail hole in her 
delicate palm. Most of all he was terrified that she would speak to him from behind her 
plastic veil and that he would be told things that he shouldn't know, mustn't know.
    With a whimper like that of a cornered animal, he turned from her and started back 
the way he had come.
    "Joey?"
    Henry Kadinska stood in the dimly lighted hall ahead of him. Shadows seemed to be 
drawn to the attorney-except for his thick eyeglasses, which blazed with reflections of 
the yellow light overhead. He was blocking the way. Approaching. Eager to have another 
chance to offer his bargain.
    Now frantic for fresh air and cleansing rain, Joey spun away from Kadinska and 
returned to the stairs.
    The blonde still sprawled below, her arm extended, her hand open, silently pleading 
for something, perhaps for mercy.
    "Joey?"
    Kadinska's voice. Close behind him.
    Joey descended the precipitous flight of stairs hesitantly at first, then faster, 
figuring that he would step over her if she was really there, kick at her if she tried to 
seize him, down two stairs at a time, not even holding on to the handrail, barely keeping 
his balance, a third of the way, halfway, and still she was there, now eight steps below, 
six, four, and she was reaching out to him, the red stigmata glistening in the center of 
her palm. He screamed as he reached the last step, and the dead woman vanished when he 
cried out. He plunged through the space that she had occupied, crashed through the door, 
and staggered onto the sidewalk in front of the Old Town Tavern.
    He turned his face up into the Pabst-blue and Rolling Rock-green rain, which was so 
cold that it might soon turn to sleet. In seconds he was soaked-but he didn't feel 
entirely clean.
    In the rental car again, he fumbled the flask out from under the driver's seat where 
he'd tucked it earlier.
    The rain had not cleansed him inside. He had breathed in corruption, swallowed it. 
Blended whiskey offered considerable antiseptic power.
    He unscrewed the cap from the flask and took a long swallow. Then another.
    Choking on the spirits, gasping for breath, he replaced the cap, afraid that he would 
drop the flask and waste the precious ounces that it still contained.
    Kadinska hadn't followed him out into the storm, but Joey didn't want to delay 
another moment. He started the car, pulled away from the curb, splashed through a flooded 
intersection, and drove along Main Street toward the end of town.
    He didn't believe that he would be allowed to leave. Something would stop him. The 
car would sputter, stall, and refuse to start. Cross traffic would crash into him at an 
intersection, even though the streets seemed deserted. Lightning would strike a telephone 
pole and drop it across the road. Something would prevent him from getting out of town. 
He was in the grip of a superstition that he could not shake or explain.
    In spite of his dire expectations, he reached the town line and crossed it. Main 
Street became the county road. Forests and fields replaced the huddled and depressing 
buildings of Asherville.
    Still shuddering as much from fear as from having been soaked by the rain, he drove 
at least a mile before he began to realize how strangely he had reacted to the prospect 
of receiving a quarter of a million dollars. He had no idea why a sudden windfall should 
have terrified him, why a stroke of good fortune should instantly convince him that his 
soul was in peril.
    After all, considering how he had lived his life thus far, he was doomed to Hell 
anyway, if it existed.
    Three miles outside Asherville, Joey came to a three-way stop. Directly ahead of him, 
beyond the rural intersection, the county route continued: a glistening black ribbon 
dwindling down a long, gradual slope into the early twilight. To the left was Coal Valley 
Road, leading to the town of Coal Valley.
    On that Sunday night twenty years ago, when he had been on his way back to college, 
he had planned to take Coal Valley Road twelve miles through the mountains, until it 
connected with the old state three-lane that the locals called Black Hollow Highway, then 
go west nine miles to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He always went that way, because it was 
the shortest route.
    But on that night, for reasons he had never since been able to recall, he had driven 
past Coal Valley Road. He'd followed the county route another nineteen miles to the