Irately, the town's councilor slammed the gears through their cycle, forcing his mind to concentrate on other immediate issues at hand. As much as he had his own personal weaknesses, there were other local matters to be looked to, especially the area's drug trouble. The high-school was seemingly saturated with it, and Clete Anderson had done nothing concerning the three teenage pushers Mark had picked up and turned over to the police chief. Though Mark tried never to draw obvious conclusions, Clete's laxity in bringing the three before the county judge for indictment, plus his refusal to discuss the matter, underscored what he'd feared all along. He hated to believe it, but more and more it began to look as if Clete was in cahoots with the young pushers, though to prove the matter might be next to impossible in Pickford's Meadows, for it was up to Clete himself to present all evidence.

The police chief had the Devereauxs on his side, had somehow curried favor with good old venomous Priscilla and her father, and who would buck James Devereaux, even with him somewhere overseas. On top of that, Mark had already made an unbearable enemy in the beautiful, auburn-haired whiplash of a daughter who had laid claim to him years back. But what else could he have done but spurn those big, lusty green-eyes? He'd married DesirЋe, was head-over-heels in love with her. His affair with Priscilla, which had never been anything more than a lurid diet of sexual variety, was over! Hell, there'd never been any future in it from the beginning. There was no place at the time for him in the wealthy Devereaux circle. It had always been his stud value, and he'd never tried to fool himself on that score. But Priscilla didn't like her playthings taken from her, not before she had broken them and was finished, and she had made that well known to him back at the Radisson Hotel. How had she so glibly and gently put it? "You-you sonofabitch, Goddamn you, Mark Denning! I'll have your nuts for this! I swear I will! I'll have your nuts!"