Dallie quickened his pace, doing his best to lose the Bear in the crowd. But the Bear was tenacious.

He'd stuck around for a long time, and he wasn't going anyplace now.

Holly Grace lived in the Museum Tower, the luxury condominiums built above the Museum of Modern Art, which made her fond of announcing that she slept on top of some of the greatest painters in the world. The doorman recognized Dallie and let him into Holly Grace's apartment to wait for her. Dallie hadn't seen Holly Grace for several months, but they talked on the telephone frequently and not much happened in either life that didn't get discussed between them.

The apartment wasn't Dallie's style at all-too much white furniture, with free-form chairs that didn't fit his lanky body, and some abstract art that reminded him of pond scum. He shucked off his coat and tie, then stuck a tape of Born in the U.S.A. into a cassette player he found in a cabinet that looked as if it

was designed to hold dental equipment. He fast-forwarded the tape to "Darlington County," which, in

his opinion, was one of the ten greatest American songs ever written. While the Boss sang about his adventures with Wayne, Dallie wandered about the spacious living room, finally coming to a stop in front of Holly Grace's piano. Since he'd last been in the apartment, she'd added a group of photographs in silver frames to the collection of glass paperweights that had always occupied the top of the piano. He noted several pictures of Holly Grace and her mother, a couple of photos of himself, some snapshots of the

two of them together, and a photograph of Danny they'd had taken at Sears in 1969.

Dallie's fingers tightened around the edge of the frame as he picked it up. Danny's round face looked back at him, wide-eyed and laughing, a tiny bubble of drool frozen forever on the inside of his bottom lip. If Danny had lived, he would have been eighteen years old now. Dallie couldn't imagine it. He couldn't picture Danny at eighteen, as tall as himself, blond and lithe, as good-looking as his mother. In his mind, Danny would always be a toddler running toward his twenty-year-old father with a loaded diaper sagging down around his knees and his chubby arms extended in perfect trust.

Dallie replaced the photograph and looked away. After all these years, the ache was still there-not as acute, maybe, but still there. He distracted himself by studying a photograph of Francesca wearing bright red shorts and laughing mischievously into the camera. She was perched on a big rock, pushing her hair away from her face with one hand and propping a chubby baby between her legs with the other. He smiled. She looked happy in the picture. That time with Francesca had been a good time in his life, sort

of like living inside a private joke. Still, maybe the laugh was on him now.

Who would have ever thought Miss Fancy Pants would turn out to be such a success? She'd done it on her own, too-he knew that from Holly Grace. She'd raised a baby without anyone to help her and made a career for herself. Of course, there'd been something special about her even ten years before-a feistiness, a way she had of charging at life straight on and going after what she wanted without any thought of the consequences. For a fraction of a moment it flashed through his mind that Francesca had taken life on at a full run while he was still hanging out at the fringes.

The idea didn't please him, and he rewound the Springsteen tape to distract himself. He then went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, bypassing Holly Grace's Miller Lite for a Dr Pepper. He'd always appreciated the fact that Francesca had been honest with Holly Grace about that baby of hers. It had been natural for him to wonder if the baby might not be his, and Francesca could certainly have pinned old Nicky's kid on him without too much trouble. But she hadn't done it, and he admired her for it.

Popping the lid on the Dr Pepper, he walked back to the piano and looked around for another picture of Francesca's son, but found only the one. He got a kick out of the fact that whenever the child was mentioned in an article about Francesca, he was always identified as the product of an unhappy early marriage-so unhappy that Francesca had refused to give the child his father's last name. As far as Dallie knew, he, Holly Grace, and Skeet were the only people who knew the marriage had never existed, but all of them had enough respect for what Francesca had done with herself to keep their mouths shut.

The unexpected friendship that had developed between Holly Grace and Francesca seemed to Dallie one of life's more interesting relationships, and he'd mentioned to Holly Grace more than once that he would like to drop in some time when the two of them were together to see how they got along. "I just can't picture it," he'd once said. "All I can see is you going on and on about the last Cowboys game while Francie talks about her Gucci shoes and admires herself in the mirror."

"She's not like that, Dallie." Holly Grace replied. "I mean, she does talk about her shoes, but that's not all."

"It just seems ironic," he answered, "that somebody like her should be raising a male child. I'll bet you anything he grows up strange."

Holly Grace hadn't liked that remark, so he'd stopped teasing her, but he could tell she was worried

about the same thing. That's how he knew the kid was pretty much a sissy.

Dallie had rewound Bom in the U.S.A. for the third time when he heard a key turn in the front door. Holly Grace called out, "Hey, Dallie. The doorman said he let you in. You weren't supposed to show

up until tomorrow."

"I had a change of plans. Damn, Holly Grace, this place reminds me of a doctor's office."

Holly Grace had a peculiar look on her face as she walked in from the foyer, her blond hair sweeping over the collar of her coat. "That's exactly what Francesca always says. Honestly, Dallie, it's the

spookiest thing. Sometimes the two of you give me the willies."

"Now, why's that?"

She tossed her purse down on a white leather couch. "You're not going to believe this, but you have

these strange similarities. I mean, you and me, we're like two peas in a pod, right? We look alike, we

talk alike. We have just about all the same interests-sports, sex, cars."

"Is there a point in here somewhere, because I'm starting to get hungry."

"Of course there's a point. You and Francesca don't like any of the same things. She loves clothes, cities, fancy people. Her stomach gets queasy if she sees somebody sweat, and her politics are definitely getting more liberal all the time-I guess maybe because she's an immigrant." Holly Grace perched one hip on the back of the couch and looked at him thoughtfully. "You, on the other hand, don't care much about fancy stuff, and you lean so far to the right on the political spectrum that you're just about ready to fall off. Looking at the surface, two people couldn't be any more different."

"I guess that's pretty much an understatement." The Springsteen tape had reached "Darlington County" again, and Dallie tapped out the rhythm with the toe of his shoe while he waited for Holly Grace to get

to the point.

"Except you're alike in the most peculiar ways. The first thing she said when she saw this apartment was that it reminded her of a doctor's office. And, Dallie, that girl just about has you beat when it comes to picking up strays. First it was cats. Then she branched off into dogs, which was interesting because she's scared to death of them. Finally, she began picking up people-teenage girls, fourteen, fifteen years old, who'd run away from home and were selling their wares on the street."

"No kidding," Dallie said, his interest finally caught. "What does she do with them once she-" But then he stopped as Holly Grace pulled off her coat and he caught sight of the bruise on her neck. "Hey, what's that? It looks like a sucker bite."

"I don't want to talk about it." She hunched up her shoulders to cover the mark and escaped into the kitchen.

He followed her. "Damn, I haven't seen one of those things in years. I remember when I put a few of those on you myself." He propped himself in the doorway. "You feel like telling me about it?"

"You'll only start yelling."

Dallie gave a snort of displeasure. "Gerry Jaffe. You saw your old commie lover again."

"He's not a commie." Holly Grace yanked a Miller Lite from the refrigerator. "Just because you don't happen to agree with somebody's politics doesn't mean you should go around calling him a commie. Besides, you're not half as conservative as you try to make people believe."

"My politics don't have anything to do with it. I just don't want to see you get hurt again, honey."

Holly Grace deflected the conversation by curving her mouth into a syrupy sweet smile. "Speaking of old lovers, how's Bambi? Has she learned to read those movie magazines yet without moving her lips?"

"Aw, come on, Holly Grace…"

She looked at him with disgust. "I swear to God I would never have divorced you if I'd known you were going to start dating women with names that end in i."

"Are you finished yet?" It aggravated him when she teased him about Bambi, even though he pretty much admitted the girl had been a low point in his amorous career. Still, Holly Grace didn't have to rub it in. "For your information, Bambi's getting married in a few weeks and moving to Oklahoma, so I'm currently looking for a replacement."

"Are you interviewing applicants yet?"

"Just keeping my eyes open."

They heard a key turn in the door and then a child's voice, shrill and breathless, rang out from the foyer. "Hey, Holly Grace, I did it! I climbed every step!"

"Good for you," she called out absentmindedly. And then she sucked in her breath. "Damn, Francie will kill me. That's Teddy, her little boy. Ever since she moved to New York, she's made me promise I wouldn't let the two of you get together."

Dallie was offended. "I'm not exactly a child molester. What does she think I'm going to do? Kidnap him?"

"She's embarrassed is all."

Holly Grace's response told Dallie exactly nothing, but before he could question her, the boy burst into the kitchen, his auburn hair standing up at the cowlick, a small hole in the shoulder seam of his Rambo T-shirt.

"Guess what I found on the stairs? A really cool bolt. Can we go to the Seaport Museum again sometime? It's really neat and-" He broke off as he spotted Dallie standing to the side, one hand resting on the countertop, the other lightly balanced on his hip. "Gee…" His mouth opened and closed like a goldfish's.

"Teddy, this is the one and only Dallas Beaudine," Holly Grace said. "Looks like vou finally got your chance to meet him."

Dallie smiled at the boy and held out his hand. "Hey, Teddy. I've heard a lot about you."

"Gee," Teddy repeated, his eyes widening with awe. "Oh, gee…" And then he rushed forward to return Dallie's handshake, but before he got there, he forgot which hand he was supposed to put out, and he stopped.

Dallie rescued him by reaching down and grabbing the right hand for a shake. "Holly Grace tells me you two are buddies."

"We watched you play on television about a million times," Teddy said enthusiastically. "Holly Grace

has been telling me all about golf and stuff."

"Well, that's real good." The boy certainly wasn't anything to look at, Dallie thought, amused by Teddy's awestruck expression-as if he'd just landed in the presence of God. Since his mama was drop-dead beautiful, old Nicky must have been three-quarters ugly.

Too excited to stand still, Teddy shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his eyes never leaving Dallie's face. His glasses slid down on his nose and he reached up to push them back, but he was too distracted by Dallie's presence to pay any attention to what he was doing, and he knocked the frames askew with his thumb. The glasses tilted toward one ear and then went flying.

"Hey, there…" Dallie said, reaching down to pick them up.

Teddy reached, too, so that they both crouched down. Their heads drew close together, the small auburn one and the larger blond one. Dallie got to the glasses first and held them out toward Teddy. Their faces were so close, less than a foot apart. Dallie felt Teddy's breath on his cheek.

On the stereo in the living room, the Boss was singing about being on fire and a knife that was cutting a six-inch valley through his soul. And for that small space of time while the Boss sang about knives and valleys, everything was still all right in Dallie Beaudine's world. And then, in the next space of time, with Teddy's breath falling like a whisper on his cheek, the fire reached out and grabbed him.