We had a curious and rocky relationship, Tinnie and me. Sort of can't live with and can't live without. We fought a lot. Though it hadn't been going anywhere, the relationship was important to me. I guess what kept it going was the making up. It was making up that was two hundred proof and hotter than boiling steel.

Before I got to the house, I knew it wouldn't matter what Tinnie had done, wouldn't matter what she'd been into, whoever hurt her would pay with interest that would make a loan shark blush.

Old Dean had the house forted up. He wouldn't have answered the door if the Dead Man hadn't been awake. He was, for sure. I felt his touch while I was pounding on the door and hollering like a Charismatic priest on a holy roll.

Dean opened the door. He looked ten years older and all worn out. I was down the hall pushing into the Dead Man's room before he finished bolting the door behind Saucerhead.

Garrett!

The Dead Man's mind touch was a blow. It was an icewater shower, It stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to scream. That could only mean.

She was there on the floor. I didn't look. I couldn't. I looked at the Dead Man, all four hundred fifty pounds of him, sitting in the chair where he'd been since somebody stuck a knife in him four hundred years ago. Except for a ten-inch, elephantlike schnoz he could have passed for the world's fattest human, but he was Loghyr, one of a race so rare nobody has seen a live one in my lifetime. And that's fine by me. The dead, immobile ones are aggravation enough.

See, if you kill a Loghyr, he doesn't just go away. You don't get him out of your hair that easy. He just stops breathing and gives up dancing. His spirit stays at home and gets crankier and crankier. He doesn't decay. At least mine hasn't in the few years I've known him, though he's a little ragged around the edges where the moths and mice and whatnot nibble on him while he naps and there's no one around to shoo them away.