About the same time that Dale and Lena were having their go-round down at the Thrifty-Mart, Mavis, perched on her stool behind the bar, looked up from a crossword puzzle to see the most beautiful man she'd ever lain eyes on coming through Slug's double doors. What had once been a desert bloomed down under; where for years lay a dusty streambed, a mighty river did now flow. Her heart skipped a beat and the defibrillator implanted in her chest gave her a little jolt that sent her sluicing electric off her bar stool to his service. If he ordered a wallbanger she'd come so hard her tennis shoes would rip out from the toe curl, she knew it, she felt it, she wanted it. Mavis was a romantic.

"Can I help you?" she asked, batting her eyelashes, which gave the appearance of spastic wolf spiders convulsing behind her glasses.

A half-dozen daytime regulars who had been sitting at the bar turned on their stools to behold the source of that oily courtesy — there was no way that voice had come out of Mavis, who normally spoke to them in tones of disdain and nicotine.

"I'm looking for a child," said the stranger. He had long blond hair that fanned out over the rain flap of a black trench coat. His eyes were violet, his facial features both rugged and delicate, finely cut and yet with no lines of age or experience.

Mavis tweaked the little knob on her right hearing aid and tilted her head like a dog who has just bitten into a plastic pork chop. Oh, how the pillars of lust can crumble under the weight of stupidity. "You're looking for a child?" asked Mavis.

"Yes," said the stranger.

"In a bar? On a Monday afternoon? You're looking for a child?"

"Yes."

"A particular child, or will just any child do?"

"I'll know it when I see it," said the stranger.

"You sick fuck," said one of the daytime regulars, and Mavis, for once, nodded in agreement, her neck vertebrae clicking like a socket wrench.