followed him for ten blocks before things got weird.

He was old, fat, and obviously well-off. His suit hadn't come from any Wal-Mart rack, and the Italian shoes clack-clack-clacking on the cracked sidewalks must have set him back at least a G. He jangled his change and checked his pocket watch every few seconds as he walked. Somehow he managed to give the impression that he was searching for something while at the same time completely oblivious to what was going on.

Brandston's not the most dangerous city in the world, but it's no place for a rich white man to stroll downtown at two in the morning.

I won't lie to you. I wanted his wallet, his watch, whatever I could get. I was willing to kill him to get it. I wasn't one of these guys that thinks he's the hardest mug around, butI knew I was hard enough to get the job done. I'd killed people before. It wasn't that big a deal.

Ten blocks north took us past Brigadier Field, into neighborhoods even poorer and darker. Even I didn't come this far into the caverns of the north side without a good reason, so I was hoping like you wouldn't believe that the rich guy would pay off.

Ten blocks is a pretty long time for me to trail somebody. Most of the time, in my own range, I can spot 'em, shepherd 'em into one of my alleys, and take what I wanted in four or five minutes. This time I was getting out of my range and into Green-Hawg's, and he and I had an understanding. Following a sucker into the Hawg's house was risky, but the rich guy was acting too strange to just jump.

Ten blocks into the hunt, he started talking to me.

"You think I don't know you're there?" His voice was quiet, but I heard every word clear as day. He was a block and a half ahead of me and hadn't turned around.

"You think you're going to rob me? You want my money?" He dropped something and kept walking. When I caught up to where he'd been, I saw that it was his wallet. There was a wad of hundreds straining the seams of the thing. "Take it," he said. I was beginning to wonder if I was hallucinating. I hadn't done anything that night that would cause me to, but there's always the flashbacks.

"Take it and go."

I looked up to see him standing right in front of me. He looked pretty much the same up close as he had from a block away, a fat man with a balding head and a strange, sharp way of looking around. My eyes fell to the shimmering gold watch chain across his huge belly. It must have hypnotized me, because the next thing I knew I lying on the ground looking up at him with a tremendous pain in my gut.

"Take the wallet and go, T-Town," he said. God only knows how he knew my street name. "You're not like the rest of the trash on the streets. A college boy like you ought to be working for a living, not killing and stealing for drugs. Let someone else lose this game."

He leaned down slightly and looked me directly in the eyes, first one, then another. "I see it in your eyes, T-Town. You've got thieving in your left eye, and murder in your right one. Which one have you been watching me with?" The watch chain dangled, casting reflections into my dazzled mind, blinding.

Standing upright, he added, "If you follow me, you're going to die. I promise you, son. Take the wallet and go home. Get a job and quit this nonsense."

After his little speech, I did my best to get up. I felt like I'd been hit in the stomach with the heavy end of a milk truck. He was walking away with that same sense of seeing everything and nothing at all. It made me furious, the way he turned and walked away like I was nothing.

The watch chain had been glorious. I wanted the watch.

I'd followed him for twenty blocks before I got lost.

The north side of Brandston was my home; I'd been born there, I'd grown up too fast there, and after the drugs ended my two years of college, I'd come back there. My own range was only about five blocks square, but I knew the rest of the north side better than I knew my own face. Twenty blocks is about a mile and a half, and I could go farther than that with my eyes closed.

We should have been in Spooksville, between Godden Park and University Hospital. The University sprawls across the north edge of the city like a wall between us and the county beyond. We should have ben smack in the middle of it, in Spooksville. It was called that because the astronomy department and its dorms were there, and there were always pasty little astronomy geeks running around at all hours of the night, looking like a bunch of nerd spooks.

Wherever we were, it wasn't Spooksville. I could see a park of some kind a little ways to the left, where Godden should have been, but the University was gone, and the town around me was looking weird.

It's hard to get more squalid than the ghetto we'd just come through, but this place did it. Maybe one streetlight in ten was working, and even those were flickering shizophrenically. In the deep, deep darkness, I could see people moving, in contrast to the unnaturally empty streets we'd been walking for the last twenty minutes.

I assumed they were people moving in the shadows. Some of them didn't seem to move like people.

Clack, clack, went the shoes of the rich man, and I followed a little closer. I was getting creeped out, big-time, and I was subconsciously clinging to the only thing familiar. I was clinging, of course, to a man who'd promised to kill me, and this didn't escape me as I abandoned all pretense of stealth.

Something huge grunted at me from a pitch-black alley. It sounded like something I'd heard in the middle of a very bad trip, but about all I could see of it was a vague, hulking shape, pushing a pile of trash and garbage out as it reached toward me. There was a suggestion of two feral eyes, and as I stood petrified, the left one seemed to slowly shut.

"Hill," the fat man's voice said, its tone impatient, "he's following me."

The thing's eye opened, and the hand drew back, and its abyssal voice crawled from the darkness. "It's in my range."

"Your range is the alley, Hill. He's on the street. Leave him to me."

An angry grunt rolled from the alley as Hill departed. We walked on.

After the thirtieth block, the man turned around, holding the glowing watch in his hand.

"Where are we?" I asked him.