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As he moved past the woman, he stopped and asked, “When did you get those trains for her?”

“A week ago,” the woman said. “That new shop in town.”

“He seems to be doing a bang-up business,” Harry said.

Thirty-Nine

Something was up. Edwin Nabler could always tell.

While he couldn’t accurately predict what his products would trigger when he sent them out into the world, he liked to stay on top of what they’d set in motion. It was much more than idle curiosity, or taking pleasure in one’s work. He wanted to know the trains were doing what they were designed to do, which amounted to so much more than bringing a smile to a little boy or girl’s face.

Nabler had never been a student of chemistry, but he understood the principle of an activating agent. Something that when introduced into a situation exacted a change onto whatever it came into contact with. But chemistry was rooted in science, and Nabler considered his talents as more metaphysical, something beyond the realm of human understanding, given that he operated within the sliver. He wasn’t so much an activating agent, or a change agent, to use the more popular current terminology, but an agent of chaos.

He’d hardly be the first. Such agents were the stuff of myth and folklore, like the coyote-like trickster common to the cultures of many North American indigenous tribes, or the conniving Anansi spider from the African fable of the Ashanti people of Ghana, or even the mischievous gremlin believed to be behind aircraft malfunctions. They even appeared in the pages of comic books. What was Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, if not an agent of chaos? Nabler fancied himself much like them, except he presented himself to themasses in a ridiculous engineer’s cap and a stupid vest peppered with railway logos. He liked to be as original as the circumstances allowed.

There were plenty of others like him in the sliver, some with similar methods, others more fantastical. The work ethic they all stuck to was simple: insinuate yourself into a host, which could be an individual or a group setting, and ensure that bad things happened to good people. (It was acceptable if a bad thing happened to a bad person, too, of course, and Nabler was not unhappy with how things turned out for Delbert Dorfman.)

Nabler employed an iconic, much-loved toy to work his magic. Others made use of everyday appliances from toasters to televisions, the latter being especially useful for transmitting subliminal messages. Nabler knew of one in the sliver who used automobiles. That fellow who wrote about a homicidal Plymouth Fury with a girl’s name would be astounded to learn how close he’d come to the truth. Nabler heard tell of another colleague who did amazing things with Royal Doulton figurines. How many little old ladies had choked on their Jell-O while one of those porcelain doodads looked on from a nearby shelf?

Some even used common house pets, although adapting a living organism did present challenges. Nabler’s trains couldaffectpets, but that wasn’t the same as a cat or a dog or an adorable little bunny that was chock-full of mayhem from the get-go.

As for the more fantastical, well, Nabler was willing to admit he envied those who engineered the crashing of jumbo jets, the careening of overloaded buses off cliffs, the capsizing of ferry boats, the plunging of elevators.

He had a grudging admiration for the ones who’d executed the events of September 11. Those were actualpeopleintent on chaos and disruption. Pulled it off all on their own without any help fromthe Edwin Nablers of the sliver world. You had to tip your hat to them. Enough types like that would put Nabler and his ilk out of business.

Thankfully, there were not.

That didn’t mean he didn’t have his work cut out for him these days. So many safeguards! Smoke detectors, seat belts, childproof outlet plugs, playgrounds with padded ground cover, parents who drove their moppets to school instead of letting them walk, the goddamn Food and Drug Administration, for Christ’s sake. No one worried about any of this forty or fifty or sixty years ago. It all made the work that much more important.

How did Nabler know something was up?

When a man blew himself up at a barbecue, a woman killed herself in the tub, a dog went mad, it was as though Nabler werethere. His trains were his receivers, his eyes, transmitting information back to him, and not through some sophisticated surveillance software.

On top of that, Nabler himself had special gifts. When it suited his purposes, he could make those within his sphere of influence see and hear things that were not there. Whistles in the night. Creepy-crawlies. Lost loved ones. He could present himself as he wished to be seen, and often sensed what they were feeling.

Which was how he was so confident that someone was sniffing around. It was his own fault, getting lazy with Tanner, leaving his boneless carcass to be found. He’d run into a temporary glitch with the mini-cremation machine he had tucked into a secondary room back of the shop. Worked fine for Hillman, but then Nabler briefly lost his surreptitious hookup to the local power grid.

But it was more than that. His successes in Lucknow had been, if he could say this to himself modestly, a bit splashier than he might have hoped for.

Chief Harry Cook’s interest had been piqued.

Nabler would have to exercise greater caution. What worked in his favor was that if and when the chief started putting it together, he’d doubt himself. When the evidence led him to a theory so outside the realm of the possible, he would discount it. He would think he must be wrong, that there had to be some other explanation.

Nabler certainly hoped so. He’d grown weary of moving. There was still much he could accomplish here in Lucknow and environs. He could attract customers from as far away as Bennington and Montpelier and Burlington and Middlebury, even from some towns across the border into New York State. Spread the mayhem far and wide.

But if he had to pull up stakes, so be it.

Nabler was ready.

It would be interesting to see whether Chief Cook could think beyond whatever investigative techniques he’d learned back in his police academy days.

And if he could, if he ended up at Nabler’s door, well, the man did have a decent bone structure.

Forty

Harry was thinking about a cartoon he watched as a kid.

Bugs Bunny has conned gangster Rocky into thinking his moron henchman, Mugsy, has been tormenting him. Mugsy’s tied up in a closet while Bugs cuts a hole in the floor under Rocky’s chair. Rocky plunges into the basement, and when he finds Mugsy, there’s a saw planted into his bound hands, courtesy of Bugs.