"The pushers – who are they?" Mark snapped.

"Johnny Canning, Billy, his brother, and Sam Quaid, but I haven't seen them around for a while," she quickly answered. "No one's seen them, as if they disappeared."

Mark licked at his thin lips. They were the three Clete had picked up and turned loose the next day. "Has the traffic died down?"

"I don't know, Mr. Denning. I've never been involved with drugs at all," she answered, slowly slipping her arm around the back-rim of his seat as she slithered tightly against him. "I've had no interest in them."

"Who's the source, do you know?" he managed, sensing the warm weight of her arm behind him and the delicate play of her fingers at the back of his neck. Jesus Christ, he'd been so right, so right! She was offering all that ripe, youthful loveliness to him to fuck right now if he wanted it!

Nancy swallowed, her young throat as tight as a drum. Someone out of town, that was all she knew. But lover Clete would kill her if he ever found out! He would, he'd kill her for even thinking of taking her panties off for his enemy, Mark Denning! It wasn't the same as before she'd begun to sleep with him; she hardly had any privacy or secrets anymore. He made her suck him all the time before he ate her pussy and fucked her, and she knew that he'd skin her alive if she made a mistake!

"I can't tell you that, Mark!" she hoarsely exclaimed.

"Please… please don't ask me! J-Just be nice to me, Mr. Denning, please? I-It isn't easy being me right now, little Nancy Pace – the sweet young girl that, that dog, Lobo, raped, with everyone in the county looking down at me."

Whether it was the pathetic tone of her child-like voice, or her self-pitying words that reached him, Mark would never know, anymore than he could understand the reasoning behind his own sudden, stupidly impulsive statement: "Damnit, I told you about these people!" he said, swinging into the mouth of a dirt lane that led to a deserted quarry and coming to a skidding halt. He rammed the gears into reverse, then turned to gape at inch-distance into the attractive young face crowding his.