CHAPTER 41

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

CHAPTER 41

Stover Fitz, also known as The Map Man, really hadn’t expected to see Satan that night.

Stover groaned and pulled the newspapers up higher. He’d been dreaming about turkey dinners, but the dreams left him and he woke up with a sharp pain in his ankle. He reached down underneath the newspaper blanket and touched the spot, and his fingers came back bloody.

Damn rats.

His wife used to cook turkey dinners for him. Turkey dinners and pecan pies, and divinity candy, and barbecued pork chops and steak and biscuits and gravy. The food was the hardest part. Now and then he’d think about her, think about how he always called her Kiddo instead of Lori, and he’d remember her skin and her lips and how she smelled and that’d hurt for a while. But mostly it hurt the worst when he thought about the food. He could usually work on his map some, and that’d make the hurt go away, but now it was dark and he was hungry and he wished the damn rats’d let him be.

He hadn’t planned it to go like this, with everything in the crapper, and don’t anybody think he didn’t know it was in the crapper, but then he hadn’t planned on Lori checking him into the hospital and he sure as hell hadn’t planned on her walking out on him.

The hospital wouldn’t keep him, of course. They had their own problems.

Had people to deal with who didn’t even know where they were. So now he lived under a damn newspaper blanket and had rats for alarm clocks, and that was in the crapper, yeah, but he knew where he was. That’s right.

Because he had his map.

Stover had found a spiral-bound notebook and a few broken pencils some little while ago—he knew it was on a Thursday—and he rubbed the pencils against a brick wall until they were sharp, and he’d begun his map of all the best dumpsters in the area.

It hadn’t started out as much, just a sort of connect-the-dots thing, really, but then he made a few notes along in the margins about other places nearby.

But then the notes never really seemed complete, so he kept working on them and adding to them, and he drew in the locations of the other places he’d noted, and to make it a little more pleasing to the eye he drew a border around the sheet and that really never seemed like it got finished. Couple of days ago he sat and worked on it outside the library, on a bench, and looked at a big clock every now and then, and four hours just went right past him in no time at all. That surprised him so he didn’t even mind it when the cop came and told him to move along.

Too dark right now to work on the map, but Stover rolled over—that was a rhyme, Stover rolled over, Stover from Dover, Stover the clover, Stover Red Rover—and touched the paper where it rested inside his shirt. Maybe he’d take it out and see if he could make out the lines, just a little.

The first thing he thought when Satan ran into the alley was He won’t get my map. And to keep Satan from trying for it, Stover lay perfectly still and tried not to breathe too hard.

Satan looked a lot like Stover had imagined he would. He never had bought into the horns-and-tail bit, and it turned out he was right. Satan had black spiky hair and a mouth like a cross between a shark’s and a snake’s, and instead of hands he had cats-o’-nine-tails all twisty and wiggly. Stover didn’t know why Satan would wear Nike Air sneakers, but he figured the Prince of Darkness could dress however he wanted.

It looked like Satan had run quite a distance. He panted and gasped and held himself up against the wall, then turned around and put his hands on his knees and panted some more. Then Stover stopped breathing entirely, ‘cause he thought Satan had seen him, ‘cause Satan got real still all of a sudden—and then held up one hand in front of his face like he’d never seen it before. And he changed, Satan did, so as to look like a normal human person, and Stover thought Well he can be right handsome when he wants to be.

When Satan looked completely like a regular person he took hold of that hand with the other one and felt of it, and opened it and closed it and shook it around like he thought it might come off. Then Stover nearly peed in his pants, because Satan jumped up, still holding up the one hand, and he whooped and hollered and danced around and screamed out, “Yes! Yes yes yes! Ha ha, look at this! Whooooo-ha!”

He danced and danced for most of a minute, Stover reckoned, and then Satan reached in his pocket and pulled out a cellular phone, which cemented Stover Fitz’s opinion of cellular phones once and for all.

Satan dialed a number and talked for a bit but Stover couldn’t hear any of the words. Then he stuck the phone back in his pocket and strolled out of the alley.

Stover lay there for a full half hour to be sure Satan wasn’t coming back.

He went out to a streetlight and pulled out his map. Before he scurried away down the street, he drew in his present location on the map, and wrote: DONT GO HERE. SATAN.



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