
# Thriller Almanac

Presented by

**Dystel and Goderich Literary Management**

to introduce you to exciting e-books self-published by our clients.

Excerpts include:

**David Morrell**

**_The Protector_**

**_ _**

**Glen Apseloff**

**_Lethal Cure_**

**_ _**

**Diane Fanning**

**_The Trophy Exchange_**

**_ _**

**J.E. Fishman**

**_The Dark Pool_**

**_ _**

**G.D. Gearino**

**_Counting Coup_**

**_ _**

**James Hankins**

**_Jack of Spades_**

**_ _**

**Kathleen Taylor**

**_Funeral Food_**

**_ _**

**Steve Winshel**

**_A Twisted Path_**

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

Excerpts included here at the permission of the authors.

_The Protector_ © 2003 David Morrell

_Lethal Cure_ © 2013 Glen Apseloff

_The Trophy Exchange_ © 2008 Diane Fanning

_The Dark Pool_ © 2013 Verbitrage LLC, Series 4

_Counting Coup_ © 1997 G.D. Gearino

_Jack of Spades_ © 2012 James Hankins

_Funeral Food_ © 1998 Kathleen Taylor

_A Twisted Path_ © 2011 Steve Winshel

# THE PROTECTOR

** **

**By**

**David Morrell**
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**

** **

From First Blood to The Fifth Profession, New York Times bestselling author David Morrell has delivered more high-octane thrills than any writer of his time. Now he shows his readers the never-before-revealed secrets of real-life covert operators and takes action to a whole new level.

Know Him. See Him. Stop Him -- Or Die.

No one knows his real name. No one knows where he lives. Trained by Delta Force, calm in moments of absolute terror, Cavanaugh stops threats before they strike-silently, swiftly, and lethally. His latest assignment: protect a brilliant scientist with a secret so extraordinary he needs to disappear and adopt a new identity.

For Cavanaugh, helping Daniel Prescott is just another job. Until it explodes, Prescott vanishes, and the protector finds himself in a fast, furious battle for his life.

"Spectacular action backed by the author's hands-on research . . . a horrifying climax . . . twists and turns . . . one of the best of the genre."— _Associated Press_

"Everything [Morrell} writes has a you-are-there quality, and that, coupled with his ability to propel characters through a scene, makes reading him like attending a private screening."— _Washington Post Book World_

"Impressive action . . . plenty of twists . . . most notable, though, is the advertised 'tradecraft'—from clever ways to modify one's ammo and armor to the very best method of taking out a car you're chasing."— _Publishers Weekly_

"The story accelerates to warp speed, hurtles to a stunning climax. A wonderfully entertaining action adventure."— _Booklist_

** **
**  
**

** **

**PART ONE**

**_Threat Assessment_**

## 1

SHOES AND WATCHES. Cavanaugh had learned a long time ago that one of the secrets of being a capable protective agent was to pay attention to shoes and watches. Loafers, for example. Somebody wearing them was unlikely to be a trained kidnapper or assassin because an experienced runner-and-gunner knew how easy it was to lose loafers in a chase or a fight. Only boots or lace-up shoes were acceptable. Thin soles were a further indication that someone was unlikely to be a serious threat, thick soles being mandatory in a fight. Of course, somebody wearing loafers or thin-soled shoes could still be a threat, but at least Cavanaugh would know he was dealing with an amateur.

Similarly, watches told Cavanaugh a lot. Many operators trained in the 1970s and '80s wore either Rolex divers' watches or Rolex pilots' watches. The rationale was twofold. First, those watches had a reputation for functioning under rugged conditions, an essential requirement for a runner-and-gunner. Second, in an emergency, a Rolex became portable wealth, easily sold for cash.

Not that everyone wearing a Rolex aroused Cavanaugh's suspicions. They had to be in their forties or older, fitting the age profile of someone who'd been trained during the '70s and '80s. Also, operators from that era tended to prefer sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, and windbreakers (often leather) for their casual street clothes. The windbreaker would be loose, capable of concealing a handgun. To the untutored eye, someone who fit that description wouldn't seem unusual, but to Cavanaugh, that person caused concern.

Operators trained in the 1990s and afterward had a different profile. They were younger, of course, and the watch they preferred was cheap and anonymous but capable of taking a beating, the sort of rubber-coated diver's watch that had a timer function and could be bought in any decent sporting-goods store. They preferred hiking boots (tough, thick soles), loose-fitting camping pants with baggy pockets (to conceal a weapon), a loose pullover (to conceal a weapon), and a fanny pack (to conceal a weapon). Given the poor fashion sense of most people on the street, anyone who matched this profile didn't stand out, except to a protective agent like Cavanaugh, who instantly placed them under suspicion.

Watches. So much could be revealed by them. Cavanaugh had once been on a protective detail in Istanbul. His assignment had been to help provide security for an American billionaire who had gone to Istanbul to negotiate a corporate merger, despite threats against the man's life because of his much-publicized financial support of Israel. Before the billionaire's jet arrived at Istanbul's airport, Cavanaugh had checked the busy concourse and the area outside. The variety of clothes that the crowd wore—traditional Arab robes as well as numerous types of Western dress—made it hard to find a telltale common denominator. But watches, Cavanaugh knew, seldom lied. When he noticed half a dozen men in their thirties who wore dissimilar but baggy clothes, who appeared not to have anything to do with one another but who all had similar thick-soled shoes and the same type of sturdy black rubber-coated athlete's watch, alarms went off inside him, warning him that he had to find another way to get his client out of the airport.

It wasn't something Cavanaugh did consciously. It was his reflexive way of seeing the world, much as the legendary security expert Col. Jeff Cooper advised everyone to maintain a state of vigilance that Cooper called "Condition Yellow" (White being the average person's lack of awareness, Orange being intense alertness in response to danger, and Red being a fight for one's life).

In Condition Yellow, then, observing shoes, watches, and other indicators, Cavanaugh got out of a taxi at Columbus Circle and walked into Central Park. The time was around two in the afternoon. The route he took through the trees avoided paths and was intended to let him know if he was being followed. He exited at West 70th Street and crisscrossed blocks at random, heading south, eventually climbing the steps from Columbus Avenue and starting across the huge open area in front of Lincoln Center.

One benefit of this cautious frame of mind was that it kept him solidly in the moment, appreciative of each second, not only aware of the crowd that was typically in front of Lincoln Center but also aware of the unusually clear sky, of the pleasant feel of the sun on this splendid May afternoon. He crossed to the famous fountain, sat with his back to it, and considered what was going on around him. Two young men threw a Frisbee back and forth. Students, presumably from nearby Juilliard, sat on benches, reading textbooks. Busy-looking people crossed back and forth from the various buildings. Couples chatted. Turning, Cavanaugh saw a businessman sitting behind him on the edge of the fountain. The man had a briefcase in his lap and glanced at his watch.

Out of habit, Cavanaugh shifted so he could pay closer attention. The man was in his thirties, of medium height and weight, with short dark hair. Any number of businessmen fit that profile. His black suit looked expensive and fit him perfectly. No place to hide a weapon. The man's black briefcase also looked expensive and was shiny enough to be brand-new. When the man crossed his legs, Cavanaugh was able to study one of his shoes. A sturdy black Oxford, so new that the sole was barely scraped. And as for the watch...

Cavanaugh didn't mind that it was one of those shiny types with all sorts of dials and buttons. True, a certain level of businessman preferred to be unostentatious, but others liked to indulge themselves with gadgets, and a watch capable of being a timer while it also indicated the hour, minute, and second in two different time zones could be amusing for a certain type of mind. No, what bothered Cavanaugh was that the watch was so thick, the shirtsleeve around it had to be unbuttoned, looking sloppy in contrast to the man's otherwise-impeccable appearance.

The man checked his watch again, then directed his attention to the left, toward the entrance to Avery Fisher Hall, one of the buildings in the complex.

At that moment, Cavanaugh sensed someone coming toward him and peered up at a tall, slender man who had a slight mustache and a wide-brimmed hat that Cavanaugh knew hid thinning gray hair. Although the man was in his fifties, he exuded the wiry strength of someone much younger. His shoes were so polished that they reflected the movement of people walking past. His gray pinstriped suit gave the impression of a uniform. His white shirt was heavily starched. The only colors were the red and blue of his tie, which didn't relieve his pallor.

"Duncan." Cavanaugh smiled and shook hands with him. "You look pasty. You need to get outside more."

"Bad for my health." The brim of Duncan's hat cast his face in shadow. His last name was Wentworth, and because he'd spent much of his life outdoors as a member of Special Forces and later as the head instructor for Delta Force, he'd had three operations for serious skin cancer. "You're far too tan. Put on more sunblock."

"Yeah, the ozone layer's getting thinner. One more thing to worry about." Cavanaugh glanced again toward the man in the black suit sitting behind him on the edge of the fountain. "Anyway, it's too nice a day to be indoors. I figured since you were supervising the new security arrangements at Lincoln Center, we could meet here instead of at your office." He referred to the Madison Avenue headquarters for Global Protective Services, a security agency Duncan had established when he'd left Delta Force. After only five years, the agency had branches in London, Paris, Rome, and Hong Kong, with another soon to open in Tokyo. Its reputation had spread because of the quality of the protective agents Duncan hired, all of them having been special-operations personnel, many of them Duncan's former students.

"How are your injuries?" Duncan asked.

"Healed."

"The ambassador sends his regards."

"He's very lucky."

"Yes. To have had somebody as good as you running interference for him."

Cavanaugh couldn't resist grinning. "Anytime you start buttering me up, it means you want something."

Duncan gave him a "guilty as charged" look. "Do you think you're ready to go back to work?"

Taking another glance over his shoulder, Cavanaugh noticed that the man in the black suit looked more intense as he checked his watch yet again and continued staring toward Avery Fisher Hall. The open cuff around the thick watch became more bothersome.

At once, the man saw something that made him sit rigidly. With the briefcase on his lap, he placed his hands on the buttons that would open it.

"Excuse me a minute," Cavanaugh said to Duncan. He stood and rounded the fountain, following the man's gaze toward Avery Fisher Hall and a red-haired woman who had just stepped out. In her thirties, well dressed and pleasant-looking, she was with a man, whom she gave a "see you later" kiss on the cheek. Then she started across the open area. In ten seconds, she would pass through the crowd and be close to where the man in the black suit sat staring at her.

Cavanaugh came up on his blind side as the man opened the briefcase just enough to reach inside it.

The woman came closer and glanced in the man's direction, amazing Cavanaugh, inasmuch as most people never noticed anything around them. She froze as the man dropped the briefcase, revealing a pistol in his hand.

Several things happened almost at once. The woman screamed, the man moved toward her, and Cavanaugh darted behind him, shoving his arm into the air. He wrenched the pistol from the man's hand, dragged him backward, tipped him into the fountain, and pressed his head underwater.

Duncan came over to him. "Yes, you're certainly feeling better."

"Are you just going to stand there enjoying yourself, or would you mind calling a cop?"

Duncan pulled out a cell phone. "Don't you think you should let him breathe?"

"Not really, but I guess we'll never hear his story otherwise."

"She told him she wanted a divorce—something like that—and he couldn't take the rejection, of course," Duncan said.

"Of course. But I want to know why he dressed up. He doesn't normally wear a suit. You can tell, because his watch is too big for the cuff on a dress shirt."

"If you don't let him breathe pretty soon, you'll never know."

"Spoilsport." Cavanaugh pulled the man's face from the water, watched him splutter, and demanded to know about the suit.

With a little more submersion, the man was persuaded to explain. After shooting his wife, who had indeed asked for a divorce and who'd been going to meet him at her lawyer's office, he had planned to shoot himself. The black suit, like the shoes, was new. He had left instructions that they were to be his burial clothes.

"Just when you think you've heard everything," Cavanaugh said.

But there was more. The man had kept checking his watch because he'd known when to expect his wife to leave work and go to her appointment with her attorney. One of the three dials on his watch indicated the current time. Another dial showed the amount of time that had elapsed since she'd told him she wanted a divorce; a third counted down the remaining seconds that she'd had to live.

Cavanaugh shoved the man's head underwater again.

"So what do you think?" Duncan asked.

"About?"

"Are you ready for another assignment?"

## 2

THE WARWICK HOTEL had recently been renovated, but its marble and dark wood lobby still evoked the tradition and character of a Manhattan landmark. Cavanaugh turned left and entered the hotel's quiet bar, where an attractive woman with green eyes and an intriguing expression sat at a corner table. He approved of her choice of location—her back to an inside wall, away from the bar's numerous windows—although if he'd believed she was in any danger, he wouldn't have let her appear in public in the first place.

Her name was Jamie Travers, and until recently, she had lived in seclusion with him at his ranch in the mountains near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from where he had periodically set out on security assignments, taking care that her weapons training was up-to-date and that colleagues in need of R and R were there to watch over her when he had to go away. Two years earlier, she had testified about a gangland killing she'd witnessed. The mob boss who'd gone to prison had put out a contract against her. Twice, despite police protection, she'd nearly been killed, prompting Cavanaugh, who admired her determination, to step in and arrange for her to disappear. The contract had finally ended when the man who'd ordered it choked to death while eating spaghetti and meatballs in a federal prison. Despite the seeming innocence of the mob boss's death, Jamie had been convinced that Cavanaugh had had something to do with it, but he continued to deny any involvement, even though he had once told her that the only way to stop the mob boss from being a threat was to kill him. "Kismet" was all Cavanaugh would say about the supposed accident. Shortly afterward, they had married. Now they continued to base their lives in Wyoming, but for its beauty, not its seclusion.

Shoulder-long glossy brunette hair made the beige pantsuit and the emerald blouse she wore perfect choices. Admiring his wife, he moved a chair so that he could sit in the corner with her. The location allowed him to survey both entrances to the room as well as the pedestrians passing the windows along 54th Street and the Avenue of the Americas.

"What are you drinking?" he asked.

"Perrier and lime."

He tasted it, savoring the lime. "How was your afternoon? Enjoying being a tourist?"

"Love it. I haven't been to the Museum of Modern Art in so long. It was like seeing an old friend. And how was _your_ afternoon?"

He told her.

"You accepted another assignment?" Jamie looked surprised.

"We planned to fly home the day after tomorrow, so this won't interfere with much, especially since you're seeing your mother again tomorrow. I didn't think you'd mind going home ahead of me. I'll join you in a week."

"But you're barely healed from the last job you did."

"This one's easy."

"That's what you said the last time."

"And the money's good."

"I've got more than enough money for both of us," Jamie said.

Cavanaugh nodded. His protective agent's income allowed them to stay at the Warwick, which was comfortable without being palatial. But if they'd used Jamie's money, which came from the sale of a promising dot-com company she'd founded during the Internet frenzy of the 1990s, they'd have stayed in a master suite at the Plaza or, at the very least, the St. Regis.

"Why don't you let me take care of you?" she asked.

"Foolish male pride."

"You said it. _I_ didn't."

He shrugged. "People need protecting."

"And that's what you do. I shouldn't have bothered asking." She hooked an arm around one of his. "So what makes _this_ job easy?"

"The client doesn't want anybody to shield him."

"Oh?" Jamie looked surprised again. "What does he want?"

"The same as _you_ did. To disappear."

## 3

CAVANAUGH GOT OUT of the car, a two-year-old Ford Taurus that Global Protective Services had supplied. Apart from its special modifications, including a race-car engine and a suspension to match, it had been chosen because its dusty gray color and ubiquitous design made it so nondescript, it was almost invisible among other sedans. Sunday afternoon, however, it was the only vehicle in this abandoned industrial area of Newark, New Jersey. He scanned the graffiti-covered warehouse: a sprawling three-story structure that had most of its windows smashed. Rust-streaked doors hung open, revealing what at first appeared to be garbage but turned out to be a city of homeless people. As far as was visible into the building, battered cardboard boxes provided shelter. Black plastic bags held whatever possessions the inhabitants treasured.

Dark clouds cast a cold shadow. On the river behind the warehouse, boat engines droned. A tug blew its horn. Thunder rumbled. Cavanaugh pressed his right elbow reassuringly against the nine-millimeter handgun holstered on the belt beneath his jacket. The Sig Sauer 225 held eight rounds in the magazine and one in the firing chamber. Not a massive amount of firepower, not the sixteen rounds that a Beretta was capable of holding, but he'd found that a pistol containing that much ammunition was slightly large for his hand, affecting the accuracy of his aim, nine well-placed shots being better than sixteen that went astray because of a poor grip. Plus, as the federal air marshals had decided in the late 1980s, the Sig Sauer 225's lighter weight and thin, compact design made it an ideal concealed carry weapon. But just in case, he had two other eight-round magazines in a pouch on the left side of his belt, beneath his jacket.

A chill wind strengthened, redolent of approaching rain. At the gaping entrances to the warehouse, a few grizzled faces squinted out.

Cavanaugh took his cell phone from his jacket and pressed the "good for today only" numbers Duncan had given to him.

As the phone rang on the other end, more grizzled faces appeared, some apprehensive, others assessing.

On the other end, the phone rang a second time.

"Yes?" a man's trembly voice asked, sounding like he was in an echo chamber.

Cavanaugh supplied his half of the recognition sequence. "I didn't realize the warehouse was closed."

"Ten years ago," came the other half of the sequence, the voice continuing to sound unsteady. "Your name is..."

"Cavanaugh. And yours is..."

"Daniel Prescott. Daniel. Not Dan."

This exchange, too, was part of the sequence.

More haggard faces studied him, an army of rags trying to decide if the newcomer was an enemy, a benefactor, or a target.

Isolated drops of rain struck the greasy pavement.

"Global Protective Services has a reputation for being the best," the voice said. "I expected a fancier car."

"One of the reasons we're the best is we don't attract attention to ourselves and, more important, to our clients."

Heavier drops struck the pavement.

"I assume you can see me," Cavanaugh said. "As you wanted, I came alone."

"Open the car doors."

Cavanaugh did.

"Open the trunk."

He did that, too. The man evidently had a vantage point that allowed him to look into the vehicle.

The dark clouds thickened. A few more drops of rain struck around him.

Cavanaugh heard faint echoing metallic noises on the phone. "Hello?"

No response.

"Hello?" he asked again.

More faint echoing metallic noises.

Thunder rumbled closer.

A few derelicts stepped from the warehouse. Like the others, they were scruffy and beard-stubbled, but the desperation in their eyes contrasted with the blankness and resignation Cavanaugh sensed in the others. Crack addicts, he assumed, so overdue for a fix that they'd try taking on a stranger who was unwise enough to visit hell. "Hey, I came here to help you," he said into the phone, "not to get soaked."

More metallic noises.

"I think we both made a mistake." He shut the trunk and the passenger doors. About to get into the car, he heard the trembly voice say:

"Ahead of you. On the left. You see the door?"

"Yes."

It was the only door still intact. Closed.

"Come in," the unsteady voice said.

Cavanaugh got behind the steering wheel.

"I said, 'Come in,'" the voice insisted.

"After I move the vehicle."

He drove along the cracked concrete parking area. Near the door, he turned the car in a half circle, facing it in the direction from which he'd come, ready to leave in a hurry if he needed to.

"Entering," he said into his phone.

He got out of the car, locked it with his remote control, and sprinted through the drizzle. Sensing movement with his peripheral vision, he glanced to his left along the warehouse, toward where more crack addicts stepped into the increasing rain and watched him. Wary of what might be behind the door (more crack addicts?), he put his phone into his jacket and did something that he hadn't planned: drew his pistol. As he turned the knob, he noted that although the lock was coated with grit, there was a hint of shininess underneath—the lock was new. But it wasn't engaged. Pulling the heavy, creaking door open, he ducked inside.

## 4

AS SWIFTLY AS the door's protesting hinges allowed, Cavanaugh closed it. No longer a silhouette, he shifted toward the deepest shadows and took account of where he was. At the bottom of a dusty concrete stairwell, metal steps led up. Cobwebs dangled from the railing. On the left, a motor rumbled behind an elevator door. The place smelled of must and gave off a chill.

Aiming his pistol toward the stairs and then toward the elevator, he reached behind him to turn the latch on the sturdy lock and secure the door. But before he could touch it, the lock's bolt rammed home, triggered electronically from a distance.

He concentrated to control his uneasiness. There wasn't any reason to suspect he was in danger. After all, Duncan had warned him that the potential client, although legitimate, had eccentricities.

Prescott's merely being cautious, Cavanaugh tried to assure himself. Hell, if he's so nervous about his safety that he feels he needs protection, it's natural he'd make sure the door's locked. He's the one in danger, not me.

Then why am I holding this gun?

He pulled the phone from his jacket and spoke into it. "Now what?" His voice echoed.

As if in response, the elevator opened, revealing a brightly lit compartment.

Cavanaugh hated elevators—small sealed boxes that could easily become traps. There wasn't any way to know what might be on the other side when the door reopened.

"Thanks," he said into the phone, "but I need some exercise. I'll take the stairs."

As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he noticed a surveillance camera mounted discreetly under the stairs, facing the door. "I was told you wanted to disappear. It seems to me you've already done that."

"Not enough," the unsteady voice said. This time, it came not from the phone but from a speaker hidden in the wall.

Cavanaugh put away his phone. A vague pungent smell pinched his nostrils, as if something had died nearby. His pulse quickened.

No matter how softly he placed his shoes, the metal stairs echoed loudly as he climbed.

He came to a landing and shifted higher. The pungent smell became a little more noticeable. His stomach fidgeted as he faced a solid metal door. Hesitating, he reached for it.

"Not that one," the voice said from the wall.

Nerves inexplicably more on edge, Cavanaugh climbed higher and came to a door halfway up the stairs.

"Not that one, either," the voice said. "Incidentally, am I supposed to feel reassured that you're coming with a gun?"

"I don't know about you, but under the circumstances, it does a world of good for _me._ "

The voice made a sound that might have been a bitter chuckle.

Heavy rain hit the building, sending vibrations through it.

At the top, a final door awaited. It was open, inviting Cavanaugh into a brightly lit corridor, which had a closed door at the other end.

This is the same as stepping into an elevator, he decided. The pungent smell seemed a little stronger. His muscles tightening, he didn't understand what was happening to him. A visceral part of him warned him to leave the building. Abruptly, he wondered if he _could_ leave the building. Even though he always carried lock picks in his jacket's collar, he had the suspicion that they wouldn't be enough to open the downstairs door. Breathing slightly faster, he had to keep telling himself that he wasn't the one in danger—Prescott was, which explained what Cavanaugh hoped were merely security precautions and not a trap that had been set for him.

He glanced up at a security camera in the corridor he was expected to enter. To hell with it, he thought, annoyed by the nervous moisture on his palms. If Prescott wanted me dead, he could have killed me before now. Regardless of the insistent pounding of his heart, a strong intuition told Cavanaugh to surrender to the situation. Something else told him to run, which made no sense, inasmuch as he didn't have a reason to believe he was in danger. Impatient with himself, he came to a firm decision and holstered his weapon. It's not going to do me any good in that corridor anyhow.

Entering, he wasn't surprised that the door swung shut behind him, locking loudly.

After the gloom of the stairwell, the lights hurt his eyes, but at least the pungent smell was gone. Managing to feel less on edge, he walked to the door at the end of the corridor, turned the knob, pushed the door open, and found himself in a bright room filled with closed-circuit television monitors and electronic consoles. Across from him, bricks covered a window.

What captured his attention, however, was an overweight man in his forties who stood among the glowing equipment. The man wore wrinkled slacks and an equally wrinkled white shirt that had sweat marks and clung to his ample stomach. His thick sandy hair was uncombed. He needed a shave. The skin under his eyes was puffy from lack of sleep. The dark pupils of his eyes were large from tension.

The man aimed a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol at him. Its barrel wavered.

Cavanaugh had no doubt that if he had still been holding his pistol when he'd entered, the man would have fired. Doing his best to keep his breathing steady, he raised his hands in reassuring submission. Despite the big gun that was nervously aimed at him, the uneasiness Cavanaugh had felt coming up the stairs seemed of no importance compared to what _this_ man must be feeling, for, outside of combat, Prescott was the most frightened man Cavanaugh had ever seen.

## 5

"PLEASE REMEMBER YOU sent for me," Cavanaugh said. "I'm here to help you."

As Prescott continued to aim the Colt, his pupils got larger. The room became more sour with fear.

"I knew your one-time-only phone number and the recognition code," Cavanaugh said. "Only someone from Protective Services could have had that information."

"You could have forced those details from the person they were sending," Prescott said. As on the phone, his voice was unsteady, but now Cavanaugh understood that it wasn't an electronic effect—Prescott's voice shook because he was afraid.

The door behind Cavanaugh swung shut, its lock ramming electronically home. He managed not to flinch. "I don't know who or what you feel threatened by, but I hardly think one man coming here would be the smartest way to get at you, not the way you've got this place set up. Logic should tell you I'm not a threat."

"The unexpected is the most brilliant tactic." Prescott's grip on the .45 was as unsteady as his voice. "Besides, your logic works against you. If one man isn't much of a threat, how can one man provide adequate protection?"

"You didn't say you wanted protection. You said you wanted to _disappear_."

Sweat marks spreading under his arms, Prescott studied Cavanaugh warily.

"My initial interviews are _always_ one-on-one," Cavanaugh said. "I have to ask questions to assess the threat level. Then I decide how much help the job requires."

"I was told you used to be in Delta Force." Prescott licked his dry, fleshy lips.

"That's right."

The classic special-operations physique involved muscular shoulders that trimmed down to solid, compact hips, upper-body strength being one of the goals of the arduous training.

"Lots of exercise," Prescott said. "Is that what you think qualifies you to protect somebody?"

Trying to put Prescott at ease, Cavanaugh chuckled. "You want my job stats?"

"If you want to convince me you're here to help. If you want to work for me."

"You've got this turned around. When I interview potential clients, it's not because I want to work for them. Sometimes, I _don't_ want to work for them."

"You mean you have to _like_ them?" Prescott asked with distaste.

"Sometimes, I don't like them, either," Cavanaugh said. "But that doesn't mean they don't have a right to live. I'm a protector, not a judge. With exceptions. No drug traffickers. No child abusers. Nobody who's an obvious monster. Are you a monster?"

Prescott had a look of incredulity. "Of course not."

"Then there's only one other standard that'll help me decide if I want to protect you."

"Which is?"

"Are you willing to be compliant?"

Prescott blinked sweat from his eyes. "What?"

"I can't protect someone who won't take orders," Cavanaugh said. "That's the paradox of being a protector. Someone hires me. In theory, that person's the boss. But when it comes to protection, _I'm_ the one who gives the orders. The employer has to react to me as if I'm the boss. Are you willing to be compliant?"

"Anything to keep me alive."

"You'll do what I say?"

Prescott thought and then fearfully nodded.

"So, okay here's your first order: Put that damned gun away before I ram it down your throat."

Prescott blinked several times, stepping back as if Cavanaugh had slapped him. He held the gun steadier, frowned, and slowly lowered it.

"An excellent start," Cavanaugh said.

"If you're not who you say you are, do it right now," Prescott said. "Kill me. I can't stand living this way."

"Relax. Whoever your enemies are, I'm not one of them."

Cavanaugh surveyed the room. To the right, in a corner, past the electronics and the monitors, he saw a cot, a minifridge, a sink, and a small stove. Beyond was a toilet, a showerhead, and a drain. The type of food on the shelves made clear that Prescott didn't worry about being overweight: boxes of macaroni and cheese, cans of ravioli and lasagna, bags of chocolates, candy bars, and potato chips, cases of classic Coke. "How long have you been here?"

"Three weeks."

Cavanaugh noticed books on a shelf below the food. Most were nonfiction, on subjects as various as geology and photography. One had a photo of a naked woman on the cover and seemed to be a sex book. In contrast, another volume was _The Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers_ , with a few books about Jeffers next to it. "You like poetry?" Cavanaugh asked.

"Soothes the soul." Prescott's tone was slightly defensive, as if he suspected that Cavanaugh might be mocking him.

Cavanaugh picked up the book and opened it, reading the first lines he came to. "'I built her a tower when I was young—Sometime she will die.'"

Prescott looked more defensive.

"Knows how to grab my attention." Cavanaugh set down the book and continued scanning the place. Videotapes sat next to a small television. Prescott's taste had no consistency: a Clint Eastwood thriller, an old Troy Donahue-Sandra Dee teenage-romance tearjerker...

"I've seen worse places to go to ground." Cavanaugh thought about it. "Homeless people and crack addicts as your cover. Smart. How'd you know about this warehouse? How'd you set up this room?"

"I did it a year ago," Prescott said.

"Whatever your trouble is, you saw it coming?"

"Not this particular trouble."

"Then why did you..."

"I always take precautions," Prescott said.

"You're not making sense."

"In case," Prescott told him.

"In case of what?" Movement on a TV monitor abruptly caught Cavanaugh's attention. "Wait a second."

## 6

"WHAT'S WRONG?" PRESCOTT spun toward the monitor.

On the screen, a gray image showed a dozen ragged men plodding through the rain, converging on the Taurus.

"Jesus," Prescott said.

"Crack addicts are amazing," Cavanaugh said. "No matter what it is, if it's left alone, they'll try to steal it. I once knew a guy who stole forty pounds of dog food from his father so he could buy crack. What's _more_ amazing, his drug dealer took the dog food, rather than demanding money. For all I know, the drug dealer ate it."

On the screen, the ragged men, drenched with rain, tugged at the side-view mirrors or used chunks of metal to pry at the hubcaps.

"Have you got a way to hear what's going on outside?" Cavanaugh asked.

Prescott flipped a switch on a console. Immediately, the sound of rain came through an audio speaker.

Cavanaugh heard the distant scrape of metal as the ragged men worked in the downpour to try to disassemble his car. "Get a job, guys."

He took the car's remote control from his jacket pocket. It was more elaborate than usual, equipped with half a dozen buttons.

Prescott looked puzzled as Cavanaugh pressed one of the buttons.

Suddenly, the audio speaker filled the room with an ear-torturing siren that came from the Taurus and made the men drop their makeshift burglary tools, fleeing like drenched versions of the scarecrow in _The Wizard of Oz._

Cavanaugh pressed the button again, and the siren stopped.

"Are you ready to get out of here?" he asked Prescott.

"To?" Prescott looked apprehensive.

"Somewhere safer than this, although, Lord knows, this place is safe enough. After my team arrives, after we get organized, we'll give you a new identity and relocate you. But first I need to know what kind of risk level we're talking about. Why are you so frightened?"

Prescott opened his mouth to answer, then frowned at the monitor.

Four of the men were back, heading for the Taurus.

"At least they get points for persistence," Cavanaugh said.

He pressed another button on the remote control.

Gray vapor spewed from under the wheel wells. Despite the rain, it blossomed, enveloping the crack addicts. Coughing and cursing, they stumbled back. Bent over as if they were going to be sick, they pawed at their eyes and staggered away.

Cavanaugh pressed the button again, and the vapor stopped spewing from the wheel wells.

"What on earth was that?" Prescott asked.

"Tear gas."

"What?"

"The car's modified the way the best Secret Service vehicles are. It's armor-plated and—" A new image on the monitor made him stop. "Amazing. With their ambition, if these guys were in politics, they could run the world."

On the screen, two more crack addicts approached the Taurus.

"Turn down the volume on that speaker," Cavanaugh told Prescott.

Confused, Prescott did what he was told.

As the men came closer to the Taurus, Cavanaugh pressed another button on the remote control.

Small black canisters catapulted from under the wheel wells. Shaped like miniature soup cans, they exploded with numerous roars that shook the speaker, even though its volume had been reduced. The multiple flashes of the explosions were so bright that the camera had trouble maintaining its contrast level.

When the smoke cleared, the two crack addicts lay on the concrete.

"My God, you killed them," Prescott said.

"No."

"But they were so close to the grenades."

"Those weren't grenades."

On the screen, the two men began to squirm.

"I used flash-bangs," Cavanaugh said.

"Flash-bangs?"

"Sort of like grenades, except they don't throw shrapnel. But they blind and deafen for a while. Those guys are going to have a whale of a headache."

On the screen, the two crack addicts struggled upright, holding their ears.

"But this car _can_ be equipped to launch grenades if the mission calls for it," Cavanaugh said. "And it can be modified for machine guns under the headlights. All the best dictators and drug lords have those extras. In a more luxurious car than a Taurus, of course. Believe me, Mr. Prescott, we can take care of you."

Cavanaugh looked back at the row of monitors, where one of the images showed the Taurus at ground level. Able to see partway under the car, he frowned, noticing what appeared to be a shadow under the vehicle. He pointed. "Does that camera have a zoom lens?"

"All of them do." Prescott twisted a dial, enlarging the image on the monitor. The shadow under the Taurus took the shape of a small box. Jesus, Cavanaugh thought, one of the crack addicts must have put it under there.

He blinked as the Taurus exploded.

## 7

THE ROAR FROM the speaker was so loud that the entire room shook. On the screen, chunks of the Taurus crashed onto the concrete, smoke and fire swelling.

Prescott gaped.

A second explosion rocked the room. On a different monitor, the door through which Cavanaugh had entered the building blasted inward, smoke and flames filling the area at the bottom of the stairs. Three men rushed in, but although their hair was matted and their faces were beard-stubbled and filthy, their eyes had neither the blankness of the homeless nor the desperation of drug addicts. These men had eyes as alert as any gunfighter Cavanaugh had ever encountered.

"Is there another way out of here?"

Prescott kept staring at the screen, which showed one of the men aiming a pistol at the elevator door while the other two aimed pistols upward and stormed the stairs.

"Prescott?" Cavanaugh repeated, drawing his weapon.

Prescott kept staring at the screen.

Cavanaugh grabbed him, turned him, and shook him, "For Christ's sake, listen to me. Is there another way out of here?"

Instead of responding, Prescott lunged toward one of the electronic consoles and twisted a dial.

_"What are you doing?"_ Cavanaugh asked.

Prescott stared toward a different screen.

The two men came into view on an upper portion of the stairs. They stopped and aimed upward, looking as if they thought getting in had been too easy, that there had to be traps in the building.

On the monitor that showed the entrance to the building, two other ragged men charged in through the fading smoke from the explosion. They, too, aimed pistols.

They started up the stairs, then paused, as had the pair above them. Wary, they glanced behind and below them, seeming to sense danger.

_"Have you got the stairwell booby-trapped, is that it?"_ Cavanaugh asked Prescott.

But on the screen, nothing exploded in the stairwell. No hidden guns went off. No flames erupted from the walls. Even so, the gunmen were obviously disturbed about something. Various monitors showed the man watching the elevator, the two that had just paused on the stairs, and the pair halfway up, who stared apprehensively toward the top as if they knew they were walking into a death trap.

Moisture dripped from their faces. At first, Cavanaugh thought it was from the rain they'd charged through.

Then he realized it was sweat.

One of the gunmen on the stairs suddenly started firing toward the upper level.

Abruptly, the other gunmen on the stairs did the same. At the bottom, the ragged figure watching the elevator kept looking behind him, as if he'd heard a threatening sound. He spun toward the blown-apart door and fired toward the rain.

"What the hell's gong on?" Cavanaugh asked.

Prescott kept twisting the dial, mumbling to himself, as if something had malfunctioned. "Yes." He spun toward Cavanaugh. "There's another way out of here."

Puzzled, Cavanaugh watched Prescott hurry toward the shelves of food. Then he frowned again at the monitors, seeing the gunmen continue firing up the stairs. Two furiously reloaded. The other pair spun to aim behind them. The man on the ground floor kept switching his aim between the elevator and the blown-open door.

A noise in the room distracted Cavanaugh, a scrape as Prescott slid the shelves to the left, revealing a door.

"Where does it lead?"

"The warehouse."

Recalling the army of crack addicts he'd seen when he'd arrived, Cavanaugh wondered how much he could count on Prescott to help. "Do you know how to handle that gun you pointed at me?"

"No."

Cavanaugh wasn't surprised. He picked up the .45 and found that Prescott had aimed it with the safety on. Worse, after Cavanaugh freed the safety and pulled back the slide half an inch, he saw that the firing chamber was empty. Releasing the magazine from the grip, he discovered that it did contain the usual seven rounds, however. After he shoved the magazine back into the grip, he racked a round into the firing chamber, ready for business.

"Do you have extra ammunition?"

"No."

Cavanaugh wasn't surprised about that, either. Because the .45 needed to be cocked before it could be fired, he left the hammer back and the safety on, a method preferred by most professionals. After shoving it under his belt, he drew his Sig.

He took one final look at the monitors, where he saw other ragged men rush into the stairwell, aiming pistols. Like the others, they suddenly hesitated, as if threatened by something the cameras didn't show in the stairway.

The image that most caught Cavanaugh's attention, however, was one in the middle, where a beard-stubbled man in grimy clothes stood outside, beyond the wreckage of the Taurus, which was still in flames despite the downpour. Drenched, the man held a metal tube that was about four feet long and looked suspiciously like an antitank rocket launcher.

_"Prescott, is there a way to tell what's behind this door?"_

"The top row of monitors. On the right."

The screen showed nothing but a shadowy metal catwalk.

"Open the door! Get out of the way!"

Wild-eyed, Prescott freed the lock and yanked the door open, veering toward the cover of the wall.

Cavanaugh aimed through the opening but saw nothing except the catwalk he'd observed on the monitor. The suspended metal walkway stretched into the shadows. The warehouse rumbled from the rain.

"Remember what I said about following orders?"

Prescott could barely speak. "Yes."

"Do you have a heart condition? Any serious illnesses that would keep you from moving fast?"

Prescott squeezed out a "No."

"Okay, when I run through this doorway, run after me! Stay close!"

On the middle screen, the drenched, grimy man outside finished arming the antitank rocket launcher. It was short enough that he could easily manage it as he raised it to his shoulder and sighted upward through the rain toward the room's bricked-in window.

"Now!" Cavanaugh said.

Charging through the door, then aiming down toward the shadows below the catwalk, he heard his urgent footsteps on the catwalk's metal. An instant later, he was relieved to hear Prescott's footsteps clattering close behind him.

Then all he heard was a ringing in his ears as the rocket exploded against the side of the building behind him. He felt the concussion, like hands slamming against his back, shoving him forward, and although he couldn't risk distracting himself by looking behind him, he imagined bricks flying into the room, smashing the monitors and electronic consoles.

The shock wave knocked him off balance, sending him sprawling onto the catwalk, his forehead banging against it as Prescott's heavy frame landed on him. The .45 under Cavanaugh's belt gouged into his side. For a moment, his vision turned gray.

The catwalk swayed.

## 8

PRESCOTT MOANED.

The catwalk swung farther out.

Cavanaugh's mind cleared. Inhaling painfully, he tried to squirm from under Prescott's weight. Smoke and dust from the explosion swirled over them.

"Prescott."

The big man coughed.

Cavanaugh felt the force of it. "Are you hurt?"

"Not sure.... Don't think so."

The ringing in Cavanaugh's ears made Prescott sound far away, instead of on top of him. "We have to stand."

"The catwalk," Prescott warned.

Its back-and-forth motion made Cavanaugh feel he was in a plane being tossed in a storm. His Delta Force training had conditioned him not to feel off balance or nauseated. But Prescott was another matter. With no experience, he had to be nearly out of his mind with fright.

Pigeons scattered in panic. Rain cascaded from holes in the roof.

"Prescott, I'll take care of you. All you have to do is something simple."

"Simple?" Prescott clung to him as a drowning man does to his rescuer.

"Very simple." Cavanaugh imagined the gunmen running up the stairs, about to burst into the room, but he didn't dare communicate his urgency to Prescott.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Lift yourself."

As the catwalk vibrated, Prescott tensed.

"There's nothing to it." Cavanaugh strained to keep his voice calm. "Pretend you're doing a push-up."

Prescott couldn't move.

"Do it," Cavanaugh said. _"Now."_

Prescott cautiously made an effort at straightening his elbows. An inch. Another inch.

Cavanaugh crawled from under Prescott's bulk. He shoved his handgun into its holster and rose to a crouch, gripping the metal railings as the catwalk shuddered. Now that the dust had lessened, gray light through the broken windows was enough to help his eyes adjust to the shadows. He stared toward the wreckage-filled room they'd escaped from and saw where the catwalk was attached to the wall.

Its corroded bolts were half out.

He wondered how long it would take the gunmen to break into the room.

"Prescott, you're doing fine. Now all you have to do is stand."

"Can't."

The catwalk trembled. Cavanaugh could barely keep his balance. Rain coming through holes in the roof fell around him.

"Then crawl," he said.

"What?"

"Crawl. _Now."_

He tugged Prescott, inching him forward.

"More. A little faster."

Cavanaugh gave another tug, and Prescott crawled farther along. Water splashed his hand.

"Feel sick," Prescott said.

"Save it for when we get off this thing." Cavanaugh hoped to transport Prescott's mind into a future scenario.

"Off this thing," Prescott murmured.

"That's right. Keep crawling. Faster. We'll soon be at the other door."

Cavanaugh peered through the shadows ahead and saw that the catwalk's bolts were halfway out of the opposite wall, too.

Metal creaked.

From below, a man shouted, "Look! On the catwalk!"

In the room where Prescott had been hiding, an explosion blew away the door through which Cavanaugh had entered. As gunmen charged in, Cavanaugh drew his pistol and fired three times, sending the assault team for cover. He fired three more times, hoping to keep the gunmen down long enough for him and Prescott to reach the opposite door. But as Prescott flinched from the roar of the shots, his sudden movement jerked the catwalk. The bolts popped from the wall they approached.

The catwalk plunged.

_THE PROTECTOR: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

Visit David Morrell online

# LETHAL CURE

** **

**By**

**Glen Apseloff**
**  
**

From the award-winning author of OVERDOSE and DYING TO REMEMBER

"This medical thriller is chock-full of fascinating ideas—memory erasure, memory transfer, the military applications of memory—that will hook readers almost immediately." --Publishers Weekly

"The book moves forward with impressive momentum . . . Like running up a spiral staircase--you might see where it's going, but the twists will leave you dizzy." --Kirkus Reviews

A teenage girl hobbles into the emergency room on the stump of an amputated leg, only to die in the arms of medical resident Jake Warner. She leaves behind a handgun, a strange diary, and many unanswered questions. Haunted by his inability to save the girl, Jake photocopies the diary before turning it over to the police.

Days later another patient in Jake's care unexpectedly dies, and he discovers that he has somehow forgotten everything from the entire day when he was treating the young man. Seemingly by coincidence he also wins a free vacation in Europe. Although the trip comes with unusual restrictions, he accepts and brings the girl's diary with him.

On the streets of Milan, Jake witnesses a mugging and helps the victim, a tourist named Tykeria. They fall in love, and together they try to figure out the connections among the deaths, the diary, and Jake's forgotten day. But Jake's problems, including his memory loss, keep getting worse. Somehow he must cross the void of lost memories to reveal the true cause of his patient's deaths—and to save himself.

## Prologue

PETE JANSEN HAD never seen so much blood. A buck from the grove had darted onto the highway and into the path of his Ford Taurus. The car plowed into it before his foot could hit the brake. Before he could do anything but gasp.

His wife of three months, Jeanine, had seen it too. She'd stopped talking midsentence. Out of the corner of his eye, Jansen glimpsed her fear—eyes wide, jaw clenched. That had been a fraction of a second before impact, a snapshot in time. To Jansen, it had seemed both instantaneous and interminable.

His fingers had been interlocked in hers, in her lap, the back of his hand resting on her sundress. He could still remember the warmth of her thigh. Looking back on that moment, he wished they'd held on to each other, wished their instinct had been to stay together. But their hands flew apart. Shielding their faces.

An instant later, the deer burst through the windshield. Spears of antlers in a spray of glass. Diamonds in the sunlight.

Shards of antlers rushed toward him, toward Jeanine. All in a flash.

The car veered off the road, careened into a ditch. The impact threw the deer back out the windshield.

An airbag had exploded in Jansen's face. All he knew was that something had dazed him. The smell of burning oil sifted through the ringing in his head, cleared his senses.

Then came the pain. An intense crushing below his left knee. Was the leg even still attached? He didn't look. Instead he turned to Jeanine. She would know what to do, how to tie a tourniquet.

But what he saw swept away all thoughts of his leg.

Blood. Everywhere. Pouring from Jeanine's neck. A neck he'd kissed a thousand times, now sent through him a wave of revulsion. An antler, or the broken shard of one, had ripped open her throat, torn God knows what arteries and veins.

She was trying to scream, but no sound escaped her lips, only the gurgle and hiss of blood around a severed windpipe.

In contrast, Jansen's voice was just fine. He screamed at the top of his lungs. Shrieks that surely half the nation's capital must have heard.

But no one came to help.

He reached over to his wife. Within the tattered flesh of her neck, a large artery spilled her life. Somehow he had to stop the flow. He clasped both hands over the ragged flesh.

Blood poured through his fingers. Warm and slippery. It turned cold as it ran down his arms.

Flailing, Jeanine fought to escape, or to grasp the life escaping her. Jansen didn't know which, only that the throes of death had taken hold. He felt his own blood surge, pulsating through every part of his being. Pounding in his head, his chest, even the hands clasping his dying wife.

Jeanine, beautiful Jeanine—high-school sweetheart, fading dream. Dying. Before his eyes.

If he lived to a hundred, he would never forget that look on her face. A tapestry of horror, agony, and death. Eyes big and glazed. Mouth agape. Hair dripping blood.

A moment earlier they'd been watching the autumn leaves, the emerging red, yellow, and fiery orange. Nature's fireworks. Both of them relished this time of year. That afternoon they'd walked along a bank of the Potomac. Hand in hand. A near perfect day.

Sunday. Day of sun. Day of rest.

Day of death.

JEANINE DIED IN the passenger's seat, her seatbelt still fastened. Blood stopped seeping through Jansen's fingers, and he knew that meant her heart had stopped as well.

His life would never be the same.

THAT EVENING HE lay in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery on his lower leg. He'd suffered a compound fracture of the tibia, the jagged bone sticking out through his skin at such an odd angle he'd thought at first it was part of a deer antler. The surgeons had inserted a plate, a bolt, and six screws to fix it, and nurses gave him narcotics to dull the pain. But nothing could touch the loss of Jeanine.

Later that night he awoke in a sweat, disoriented by the strange surroundings and the lingering effect of morphine. He'd dreamed of the accident and, for a moment, felt still trapped in the car, still sitting next to Jeanine. This was the woman he'd proposed to only six months earlier, during a moonlit stroll along the streets of Georgetown. He'd popped the question on a street corner while they waited for the pedestrian light to change. She'd kissed him before giving her reply, and when she'd said "yes," her lips still inches from his, her eyes sparkling in the moonlight, he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

But now his beautiful bride had been reduced to a haunting terror. And the nightmare was every bit as frightening as the real thing. She'd turned to him just before dying, and her eyes had reflected such horror that he'd have done anything to escape it. Awake, he felt that way too.

How many more times would he watch her die?

From the first time they'd met, he'd tried to remember everything about her, every smile, every glance, every gesture. Every shared moment. Now, the image that would overshadow all others was the moment that had marred an otherwise idyllic day.

He closed his eyes, and the scene returned: Jeanine in the throes of death, air rasping through her severed windpipe, blood spilling from her neck. He could still feel it, warm and sticky over his hands. He would give anything to forget that.

Anything.

##  1

SHE LIMPED INTO the emergency room on the bloody stump of her left ankle. A quiet teenager. So quiet nobody noticed. Like a child who ventures down the hallway from the darkness of her bedroom to the light at the edge of the living room, intruding upon the adult world but hesitant to break her silence, hoping instead simply to be seen, then to ask a favor. A simple but important favor.

For a moment, she stood there as still as the windless day. The late afternoon sun streamed through the glass doors, backlighting her, creating a halo around her slender figure and filtering through tresses of blonde hair, roots soaked with sweat. A bead of perspiration dripped down the side of her forehead. Blood pooled around her stump.

The sound of the pneumatic doors made Dr. Jake Warner interrupt his conversation to glance in that direction. He'd been talking to Trina Tucker, a triage nurse with such allure that some residents signed up for the ER rotation just to try to get into her scrubs. He'd been so caught up in his conversation that he'd heard only the closing of the doors.

Then he saw the girl.

In his fifteen months as a medical resident, Warner had never witnessed anything like this. A young teenager hobbling on the crushed ends of her tibia and fibula. She took a few unsteady steps forward, leaving behind red blotches on the linoleum. With her came the scent of autumn flowers. And blood.

Her face appeared pearly white under the fluorescent lights. Warner recognized that color, the grayish hue of shock. In contrast, her tanned legs, only partially covered by capri pants, looked healthy all the way down to her amputation. On the right foot she wore a running shoe. No sock. Dried and congealing blood covered much of the shoe and ankle—spatterings from her other limb. Her shoulders and pelvis looked normal, but a deformity in her left wrist suggested a Colles fracture, a break through the radius and ulna.

In her right hand she clasped a canvas bag, holding it close like a stuffed animal.

_Why is she carrying that?_ he wondered. _Why hold on to a handbag when you've just lost your foot?_

He met the girl's gaze. Eyes like cut glass. Piercing. That made no sense. Any normal person would be terrified, or maybe numb from shock. But this girl was angry.

"Somebody fucking help me!"

The words reverberated through the ER.

Warner jumped to his feet, calling for Trina and Belinda. The two nurses and Clay Stokes, a minor-league baseball player turned orderly, constituted the entire ER staff that afternoon.

"Call anesthesia, a vascular surgeon, and an orthopod," he said to Belinda, a twenty-year ER veteran who suddenly looked whiter than her shoes. "And order six units of O negative." To Stokes, he said, "Get a gurney." To Trina, "Start an i.v. of normal saline."

He rushed to the teenager, and the girl's eyes again met his. In that instant, she reminded him of Vivian Storm, a phantom from his past. Vivian had appeared on the first day of classes in the sixth grade, only to vanish two weeks later. A true mystery girl. She'd had looks and brains, but something else that said, _Stay away._ Warner had never spoken to her. On a couple of occasions they'd come face to face, and the defiance in her eyes had always taken him aback. Years later he wondered whether her parents were fugitives—that would explain her coming and going so quickly—but he never knew.

Now this teenager had appeared in the ER, enshrouded in even more mystery. But _this_ girl he wouldn't avoid.

"We'll take care of you," he promised her. He turned his head. "Stokes!"

Stokes was already coming up alongside him, gurney in tow. Warner had never seen the man move so fast.

"Help me with her." Warner took her injured side, and the two of them lifted her. As if on cue, she collapsed in their arms.

They put her on the gurney. "We're going to need portable x-rays and a—"

Warner wasn't even aware he'd stopped talking. Something more important had seized his attention.

The girl wasn't breathing.

He felt her neck—warm, damp with sweat. He pressed two fingers alongside her windpipe, over the carotid artery.

No pulse.

"Get a defibrillator and crash cart," he ordered Stokes, starting chest compressions with one hand. With the other, he pulled off his white coat, then, without skipping a beat, switched arms to get out of the other sleeve. He wadded up the coat with one hand and shoved it under the girl's leg, raising her amputation stump to lessen the bleeding. He'd work more on that later. Right now he needed to focus on her heart.

Stokes returned with an emergency cart and defibrillator. He placed a mask over the girl's face and squeezed in oxygen through an Ambu bag while Trina tried to start an i.v.

Warner turned on the defibrillator. "Page any other doctor in the hospital," he shouted to Belinda, who had just hung up the phone. But on a late Sunday afternoon, out here in the sticks, finding help was a longshot.

He shoved the girl's T-shirt up under her chin and slapped defibrillator pads onto her flesh—one below her right collarbone, the other to the left side of her chest. Electrodes in the pads transmitted her rhythm to a monitor. A flat line.

Shocking her heart now would be useless. He resumed chest compressions, thirty for every two breaths from Stokes. "A milligram of epinephrine, i.v.," he ordered Trina.

She'd found a vein on her first try and was just finishing taping the catheter into place. She grabbed a prefilled syringe of epinephrine from the crash cart and injected the drug into the girl's arm.

Warner felt the carotid artery, confirming the monitor's reading. No pulse.

_We_ can't _lose her,_ he thought. "Vasopressin! Forty units."

Trina grabbed a vial from the emergency cart and injected it.

No response.

"Help us here," Warner coaxed the girl, pausing between compressions to allow Stokes to squeeze air into her lungs. The orderly glanced over at him, dark eyes filled with uncertainty.

_Don't panic,_ Warner admonished himself. Only a clear head could save this girl. No other doctors were going to assist. He ordered Trina to inject epinephrine again, then atropine, then more epinephrine. Every few minutes another injection.

Still a flat line.

His shoulders were burning from the repetition of chest compressions. "I need povidone-iodine solution," he ordered Belinda, who had returned from her phone calls, "and a milligram of epinephrine in a syringe with a three-and-a-half-inch needle."

She hurried off.

"Are you going to do what I'm thinking?" asked Trina.

He glanced across the gurney at her grim face and tried not to show the fear that had taken hold of him. "Whatever it takes."

Even on the brink of death, this girl exuded life. He could feel it in the warmth of her skin, the suppleness of her ribs, the smell of her sweat. She was just a kid.

Belinda returned, and Warner stopped chest compressions long enough to smear iodine solution on the girl's chest. Then he thrust the long needle between two ribs, near her sternum.

_This is her last chance,_ he told himself, advancing the needle to her heart. _Don't screw it up._

He pushed the needle in farther and pulled back on the plunger. The syringe filled with blood. The needle was where it was supposed to be—in the right ventricle of her heart.

He injected the epinephrine, shoving the plunger and delivering the drug directly where it was needed. Then he yanked the needle from her chest and looked back at the monitor.

Still a flat line.

"I don't believe this!" He resumed chest compressions.

What now? Internal cardiac massage? Crack open her chest and squeeze her heart with a gloved hand? In a trauma center, maybe. But not here. Not without a surgical team.

Just then a technician hustled into the emergency room, carrying plastic bags filled with blood. "Type O negative," the man announced.

"Thank God," Belinda said. Her practiced hands hung a unit on an i.v. pole and connected it to the i.v. line.

But even before the blood began to drip in, Warner knew it would change nothing.

##  2

THIRTY MINUTES AND several drugs later, Warner stopped chest compressions. Not because his arms and shoulders ached to the point of exhaustion, but because the girl no longer had any chance of surviving.

He motioned Stokes to stop squeezing the Ambu bag. Everyone just stood there. They couldn't have been more silent if they'd all collapsed with her.

Then Warner said, "Time of death—5:45." Even as he uttered those words, he couldn't believe what had happened, couldn't fathom that a teenage girl had walked all the way to the hospital, God knows how far, on broken and exposed shafts of bone. Unassisted. All the way to the emergency room, only to die there after finally asking for—no, _demanding_ —help. And _he'd_ been the one to lose her.

"Sheesh," said Stokes, one hand on his hip. "What a train wreck."

_Worse,_ thought Warner. With a train wreck, you usually have survivors. Here he had only a body.

But then the orderly's words registered another thought. _Train._ The girl's foot could have been crushed under the wheel of a train. Railroad tracks ran within half a mile of the hospital, and train whistles could be heard in the ER every few hours. He'd tuned them out, but, now that he thought about it, one might have sounded fifteen or twenty minutes before the girl came in.

"Call the police," he said to Stokes. "We need to find out who this was and what happened to her. And somebody's going to need to notify her parents."

Warner now remembered the handbag. It had fallen to the floor and lay on its side.

He wondered what was in there that was so important to the girl. When people suffer a catastrophic injury, they usually don't carry an accessory with them to the ER.

He picked up the bag by the handles. It weighed more than it should, or at least more than he'd expected just looking at it. Something heavy was inside. From the size of it, that could be anything from a potted plant to someone's head. Or someone's foot.

His throat knotted. A foot in the handbag. Maybe that's why she hadn't dumped the contents and twisted the handles around her ankle in a tourniquet. Doing that could have saved her life. Instead, she might have been trying to save her foot.

He carried the handbag to the reception counter. If the foot was inside, it would tell him what had happened, whether the girl had suffered a crush injury or a clean amputation. But he didn't want to look at it. A body part is such a personal thing. Once he'd seen severed fingers from a man who wasn't careful with a circular saw, and the image had stayed with him for weeks. The foot of a young girl might haunt him forever.

"Are you gonna open it or what?" Stokes eyed the handbag like a blackjack player waiting for his next card. Belinda and Trina had come to look too. Morbid curiosity. Everyone had it except Warner. _He_ was holding the bag.

He took a deep breath and let it out. "All right." And before he could change his mind, he upended the handbag.

The contents tumbled out—a gray M.I.T. polo shirt and blue shorts, a hardbound diary or notebook, and then the heaviest object of all. It clattered and clunked on the counter.

A 9mm handgun.

##  3

WARNER COULDN'T BELIEVE it. He just stood there, unable to do anything but hold his breath, as the weapon tumbled out of the handbag and onto the counter. The barrel came to rest pointing at him.

He stepped aside.

"That don't look like no lady's gun," Stokes said, moving in for a closer view. When nobody dignified that with a response, he added, "Betcha it's loaded."

Warner turned to him. "We'll leave that to the police."

"We don't need no cop to pull out a clip and take a look at it."

Warner planted his hand on the counter, inches from the gun. "This could be a murder weapon. You don't want your fingerprints on it."

Stokes grinned. "That's okay. I got you as an alibi."

The orderly was acting this way to distance himself from what had happened to the girl. Be brave and brash, and you don't have to think about the kid who just had the life sucked out of her. Warner understood, but he couldn't allow that behavior. "Nobody's going to touch the gun. The police will want to dust it for fingerprints."

Stokes wasn't ready to give up. "Seeing's how she had it in her bag, ain't it obvious what they're gonna find?"

"I don't know what's obvious, and neither do you."

"I know it's obvious you're scared to touch it."

Warner didn't dignify that with a reply. To all of them he said, "Step back."

They did, even Stokes, although not as far as the other two.

Warner put on latex gloves. He picked up the gun by the stock and put it on a high shelf behind the counter. Next he gathered up the girl's belongings. The shirt and shorts appeared to be her size. Petite. He placed them and the handbag on the shelf with the gun. Then he flipped through the notebook, looking for anything useful, like a contact number.

Something parted the pages near the back. A color photograph. It was a headshot of a man in his early to mid thirties. Light brown hair starting to recede, cropped close like a military cut. No smile, but no frown either—the expression of someone distracted by his thoughts.

The man had a prominent jaw, and a slight deviation to the nose, maybe from a fight or an accident. No visible scars or tattoos. He was looking past the camera, at something in the distance, or at nothing at all.

Warner turned over the photograph. No writing on the back. Not even a date. He put the picture back where he'd found it.

The notebook appeared to be a diary—each entry started with a date. Flipping through it, he saw no addresses or phone numbers, nothing that might help identify the girl.

Maybe she had an ID in one of her pockets. That was the place to look. But the thought of returning to her body made him shudder. He'd witnessed the deaths of many patients, but this one was different. This one had not merely touched him; she'd grabbed hold and wouldn't let go. Even now. He could tell that Stokes, Belinda, and Trina felt it too; they were all busying themselves with their backs to the gurney.

_You have to go over there,_ he told himself, looking across the room at the lifeless body. This was the last thing he could do for her—find out who she was and notify her parents. _You have to go over there._

He did, before he could talk himself out of it. He tried not to look at the girl's face, but that was impossible. Even in death she demanded his attention. Devoid of anger, she looked almost serene, yet on some primitive level he feared her. Why, he wasn't sure. It was as if death had finished with her and was ready to jump to another victim. Tentatively he reached into one of her front pants pockets. Through the thin fabric, the flesh of her thigh still felt warm, her musculature supple. But if he pressed at her inner thigh, he would feel no femoral pulse.

The first pocket was empty. He checked the other one. Wedged in the bottom was something thick, like folded papers, only softer. He pulled it out. A wad of money. Mostly tens and twenties, about three hundred dollars altogether. Getaway money? With the gun and change of clothing, that made sense, but what was she trying to get away from?

He put the money back into her pocket.

"I wonder what happened to her," Trina said.

Warner was surprised she'd ventured over there; it couldn't have been easier for her than for him. But he wasn't in the mood for conversation. He just shrugged.

He left the gurney and returned to the diary, searching for a name or anything useful. The handwriting looked like that of an adult, small letters strung together in a rapid, tight scrawl. Ballpoint pen, barely legible. Probably not the handwriting of a teenager. More likely that of the man in the photograph. Regardless, it must have been important to her. But he didn't have the energy to decipher it. Not now. Not with the dead teenager so close. He put it off to the side on the counter.

"Let's move the gurney," he said to Stokes. "This isn't the place for it."

"Ain't that the truth."

The two of them wheeled the gurney back to a far corner of the ER and drew a curtain around it. Warner didn't know what else to do, other than wait for the police. This was the first time anyone had died under suspicious circumstances during one of his shifts. All the other deaths had been heart attacks, strokes, or motor vehicle accidents. The car accidents were sometimes gruesome, especially the head injuries, but nothing mysterious. Not much happened out here, south of the beltway in a town with fewer than ten thousand residents.

Today had been unusually quiet, even for this ER. At the time the girl hobbled in, the emergency room had been empty, not a single patient. That's why he'd been out front talking with Trina instead of in the back. Normally in good weather like this, the ER had a steady flow of accident victims—kids falling out of trees or off bicycles, older teenagers wrecking motorcycles. But not today. It was as if all the usual accidents had been exchanged for one spectacular injury.

Warner worked only one twelve-hour shift a week in this ER, like all the other medical residents who signed up for the general ER rotation. The day of the week varied, but not the time—7 a.m. to 7 p.m. It had been set up that way to provide coverage for the financially strapped facility.

The rest of Warner's shifts took place at Alexandria Parkside Hospital, less rural but still smaller and more remote than the other teaching hospitals in the D.C. area. He preferred the rural settings because they offered more hands-on experience for residents in training.

Rotations always ended on the last day of the month, and today, September 30, was Warner's last ER shift of the year. Tomorrow morning he'd begin a month of psychiatry—a vacation compared to this. It might even be therapeutic. Parkside Hospital boasted one of the best psychiatry programs in the country, thanks to Dr. Abrams. The chairman of the department, Dr. Abrams was rumored to have been nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work in posttraumatic stress disorder. After what had happened today in the ER, Warner might benefit from that type of expertise.

_This is your last day,_ he reminded himself, taking a deep breath. _It's almost over._

WHEN THE POLICE arrived at the emergency room, Warner took them to view the body. Two small-town cops who looked like bouncers. They both turned ashen at the sight of the dead girl, but soon they recovered enough to unleash a barrage of questions. Who was she? What had happened to her? Where had it happened?

Warner answered as best he could.

"She walked in here like that," he explained. "I've never seen anything like it. I've never even _heard_ of anything like it."

"First time for everything," said one of the cops.

The other was now communicating with a fellow policeman following up on a report of a severed and crushed foot found at the railroad tracks. Warner overheard the conversation on the walkie talkie, confirming his suspicion about the train. The police speculated that the girl had been trying to hop onto one of the freight cars but had slipped and landed with her foot on the track.

The two cops bagged the gun and took it as evidence, along with the handbag and clothes. Only after they left did Warner realize he'd forgotten to give them the diary. It lay on the end of the counter, hidden in plain sight. Later he would call them back to pick it up. In the meantime, he opened it to the first page and began reading.

##  4

_December 6._

_ _

I'M STANDING IN _a room of dust and sweat, breathing air so hot it burns my throat. The walls are the color of dirt baked and bleached by the desert sun, and a window cut high into one of them looks out onto an empty sky. Standing in front of me, so close I can smell her, is a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern girl, her bare feet almost touching my sandals. She can't be more than fifteen—the face of a girl on the body of a young woman. Beads of sweat dot her forehead. I see this as I look down on her, and I see my beard—thick and coarse as a rug. I don't know where it came from._

_The girl is tall, but her head barely reaches my chest. Her brown eyes are turned up, looking at me like I'm about to hurt her. I try to catch my reflection in them, but before she looks away, all I see is fear._

_Her fingers tremble. They're undoing the buttons on my sweat-soaked shirt, starting at the bottom. She's done this before. Many times._

_She unfastens the last button and opens my shirt, like she's peeling off a bandage. She hasn't touched me yet. Hasn't said a word, or made a sound._

_I put a hand around her throat. A dark hand. It doesn't look like mine._

_Blood forms where I press my nails into her skin. It trickles down her neck, runs under her blouse, turns the cloth red._

_I feel the urge to dig deeper into her flesh, to bathe my hands in her blood._

_ _

The entry ended there. Warner shuddered. _What kind of man dreams of something so violent?_ Everyone has nightmares, but like that? He wanted to read more but didn't have the time to decipher another entry. The handwriting was worse than a physician's— _a_ 's and _n_ 's that looked like _u_ 's, _o_ 's that looked like _a_ 's, _i_ 's that looked like _e_ 's, and other letters that sometimes looked like lines or squiggles. Letter by letter, word by word, he'd managed to reconstruct the sentences, but now they formed an entirely different puzzle. Symbolism. Figuring out that sort of thing had never been his forte. In English classes in college, he'd struggled to understand the abstract language of poets and literary figures. Now he had no idea how to interpret the dream in this man's diary. But one thing was for sure—when you feel the urge to bathe your hands in someone's blood, that can't be good.

Warner wondered what relationship this man had with the teenager who'd died in the emergency room. The girl in the dream had been about the same age.

The diary would most likely have been carried as a reminder or memento, assuming it had been written by someone close to the girl. If so, she had either loved or hated this man. Given her pent-up rage, hate seemed likely. But her anger might have been _for_ him, directed toward someone who had wronged him.

Warner speculated that the man was her father. That would explain their age difference. It would also explain why the girl attached so much importance to the diary. But that still didn't answer the fundamental question.

Did she love him or hate him?

##  5

WARNER MADE PHOTOCOPIES of the diary and photograph and put them in a pocket of his scrubs before calling the police to turn in the originals. Ten minutes later, the same two cops walked through the double doors. They looked left and right, as if canvassing the area for more bodies, then honed in on Warner. He spoke to them in the triage area, not far from where the teenager had died. A janitor had mopped her blood from the floor, but Warner could still picture it there—rust-colored blotches on the linoleum.

He handed the diary to the police and apologized for not remembering it earlier.

"This is an important piece of evidence," the bigger of the two cops said, looking him in the eye, close enough that Warner could see the stubble of a five-o'clock shadow and smell the odor of garlic on his breath. "Is there anything _else_ you might've forgot to tell us?"

"No. That's everything."

"Good, because we don't want anyone calling us back in half an hour for more evidence."

"Have you identified the girl yet?" Warner asked.

The other cop answered. "We're working on it."

They probably wouldn't need much longer. Within a day, any normal parent would report a missing child.

Warner didn't know how the girl's parents would react when they learned what had happened, but he could imagine how they'd feel. Many times he'd been assigned the task of informing family members about the death of a loved one, and although they responded in every possible way—with wails, curses, denials, stunned silence, and even kindness—he knew the loss they suffered was always immeasurable. And he couldn't help being drawn into it.

Yet now he felt something that made the loss even more unsettling—uncertainty. What exactly had happened to the teenager? Not just losing her foot, but dying in the emergency room. And more importantly, what could have saved her? That question might never be answered. Like the question of what had motivated her to put a gun in a handbag and to try to hop a train. Or the question of why the diary was so important to her.

The girl's parents might be able to shed light on the situation, but Warner would most likely never know. That was the nature of working in the ER. When your shift ends, so does your contact with the patients. And Warner was about to finish not only his shift but his entire rotation.

Of course, he'd made a copy of the diary, and that in itself might hold some answers, but he had no business reading it. He shouldn't have photocopied it in the first place. Yet he couldn't bring himself to throw it away. Maybe later. For now it would stay in his pocket.

After the police left for a second time, all he could think about were the final events leading to the girl's death, from the instant he first saw her standing in the ER. Had he administered every drug in the proper sequence at the optimal dose and time? Had he focused too much attention on the medications and not enough on her blood loss? Most medical emergencies offer at least a brief window during which a physician can avert disaster, and Warner couldn't help but rehash the situation and speculate about what actions during those moments might have changed this outcome. There must have been _something_ he could have done.

Sitting at the triage desk, he reviewed in his mind the sequence of events. As he did that, Trina came up behind him.

"You did everything you could," she murmured into his ear, close enough that he felt the words. Under different circumstances, her breath in his ear would have done even more than console him, but now . . . it might just as well have come from Stokes.

He said nothing.

She put a hand on his shoulder. "Nobody could have saved her."

She clearly believed that. He could hear it in her voice, feel it in her touch. As far as she was concerned, he'd done everything possible, even though the girl had died. If only he could believe that too . . .

"I know," he said finally, both to her and to himself. But in his mind he kept replaying the sequence of events.

##  6

ALICIA, WHERE THE _hell are you?_ Lindsay tried not to worry as she poured her third vodka on the rocks. The rocks were now mere slivers, but that was okay. For her, vodka went down the same at any temperature.

She carried her glass to the living-room window and looked out among the long shadows for any sign of her daughter. That girl was so unreliable, and so moody lately. Bordering on rebellious.

At her age, Lindsey had been nothing like that. When she was a teenager, the word "rebellious" wasn't even a part of her vocabulary. No, she'd followed all the rules. But look where that had gotten her—alone at thirty-six with a teenager to care for. No wonder a bottle of vodka lasted her about as long as a pizza on a football Sunday. It was her only entertainment, and her only escape from the doldrums of everyday life.

After Lyle had been discharged from the military, they'd moved away from the base to cheap housing near the VA hospital. Her friends from back then might as well now be in another country, and dealing with Lyle had been worse than having a second child. Even before his accident, Lindsay had been close to the end of her rope. She didn't know when she'd stopped loving him, but it had been a long time ago, probably when Alicia was still in diapers.

It wasn't all Lyle's fault, she realized. She'd made her own choices. But Lyle had led her in the wrong direction, away from a career. She'd graduated from college with honors and a degree in political science, but her plans for law school had evaporated before she even filled out an application form. Now her fourteen-year-old college degree would qualify her to do nothing. Still, if she'd felt a sense of satisfaction with her family life, if Lyle had simply allowed her to feel like an equal, that would have made all the difference. Instead she'd been reduced to servicing an ungrateful husband and, ultimately, an ungrateful teenager.

After Lyle's accident, with him home every day "recovering," things weren't any better. That's when Lindsey had started getting hammered on a regular basis. But she never drank before 5 p.m., and never at work. She'd taken a part-time job as a receptionist at Atlas Gym, and that helped get her through the day. Vodka helped get her through the night.

She looked at her watch—6:15. The sun would be setting soon. Maybe in another hour she would start to worry. Good thing she had blonde hair; if she'd been a brunette, it'd be half gray by now.

_Lindsey Ashton, you need to reclaim your life._ She had already taken the first small step, deciding to change her name back to the way it was, dropping the Wykowski. She never should have taken it in the first place. What sane woman would change her name from Ashton to Wykowski? At least with Wykowski she'd still had good initials—L.A.W. She'd read that people with bad initials do worse in life, people with initials like D.U.M. and A.S.S. But then, where had good initials gotten her?

Alicia had said she was going to a matinee and would be home by six. Lindsey had planned to cook a quick dinner of macaroni and cheese for her, then head over to Uncle Joe'z Tavern while Alicia studied. Uncle Joe'z was always a good place to unwind. It drew a thirty-something crowd with few regulars. A good place to meet new people and not have to see them a second time. And its subdued lighting masked the fine lines around her eyes—took off at least five years.

At Uncle Joe'z, one guy or another was always eager to put Lindsey's drinks on his tab, and sometimes she made it worth his while. Alicia usually gave her hell for that, though, so Lindsay didn't bring men home with any regularity. With Lyle gone less than a year, Alicia had a point, but that girl didn't have a clue how hard it is to be responsible for someone, and how lonely it can be when you're doing it all by yourself. Lindsey didn't take men home simply to get laid; she did it to feel alive, and, at least for one night, to feel less alone, less empty.

Teenagers think they know everything. Alicia knew more than most, but that didn't make her any easier to raise, especially since Lyle had killed himself. Driving the old Chevy off a bridge had been ruled an accident, but his diary said otherwise. Of course, the life insurance policy wouldn't pay for suicide, so Lindsay had kept that to herself. She'd tried, anyway. Alicia had gotten hold of the diary, and the girl had gone ballistic.

"It's all your fault!" she'd accused Lindsey.

The fact was, the only one to blame for Lyle's death was Lyle, but Alicia couldn't accept that her daddy had done such a horrible thing all on his own. Maybe someday she'd grow up, but for now . . . thank God for vodka.

Lindsey picked up the remote control to the TV and turned on the local news for the weather. Not that she really cared, but if a storm was coming, she'd start to worry about Alicia sooner. She looked at her watch again—6:17. More often than not, she used the TV for background noise, to keep her company. Maybe she should get a dog. But then that would be yet another responsibility, and right now Alicia was all she could handle.

You can't help but worry about your only child, especially a daughter. It doesn't matter that she's the reason you never went to law school—despite those L.A.W. initials—or that she appreciates none of the sacrifices you've made; you can't help worrying about her.

Fortunately the weather forecast didn't make things worse—continued warm temperatures, ten percent chance of showers. Not that ten percent in weather lingo means anything.

Lindsey sat through the sports, too. Football interested her as much as peeling an apple and watching it turn brown, but channel surfing had never been her thing.

The program closed with a recap of the evening's top story.

 "Let's go back to Cindy Mays for an update on our late-breaking news," said the anchor. "Cindy?"

"Yes, Mark. I'm standing beside the railroad tracks where late this afternoon a still-unidentified teenage girl had her foot crushed and amputated by a passing train. She died at Pike Hospital after walking, yes walking, more than a quarter of a mile on her own."

"Quite a tragic story, Cindy. And that's all the time we have left. We'll give you another update on our eleven o'clock report. Until then, from all of us here, thank you for watching channel seven news."

Lindsey turned away from the TV. 6:29. Too early to start worrying. She finished her drink and poured another. She'd be the first to admit she drank too much, but it was better than the alternative—having a nervous breakdown. And at least drinking doesn't give your kid asthma the way cigarette smoking does. Still, one of these days she'd need to cut down and give her liver a break.

National news was about to begin, but Lindsey didn't care. She was still thinking about the teenage girl and the train. How would that girl's mother feel when the police knocked on her door? Talk about a mother's worst nightmare!

She took a long drink from her glass, then went back to the living-room window. Where the hell was Alicia?

##  7

WARNER FINISHED HIS shift in the ER with no other major incidents, then changed into street clothes in preparation for a blind date at The Kava Kafé in D.C. Earlier, he'd been looking forward to this, but now, engaging in small talk and other dating rituals had all the appeal of getting his teeth drilled. Thanks to the teenager who'd died in the ER.

The scene kept replaying itself in his mind, and each time, the images seemed more vivid, his senses more acute. He could hear the pneumatic doors whooshing shut, smell the sweat and blood wafting through the ER, and, with terrifying clarity, see the girl shuffling forward like a child wearing one of her mother's high heels, right hip jutting out as she shifted her weight onto the shorter leg. He could even hear the jagged ends of bone tapping against the linoleum.

To make matters worse, the girl's blood had dripped off the gurney onto one of his socks, and he hadn't brought an extra pair to the hospital. That meant he would have to wear her blood until he got home. The stain was hardly noticeable on dark blue, but _he_ knew it was there.

Thoughts of the dead teenager stayed with him as he stepped outside the hospital into the evening chill, but they grew more distant with every step. By the time he drove from the parking lot, he'd mustered enough sheer will to push the images from his mind. At least for now.

He would go to The Kava Kafé, go on his date. Canceling wasn't an option. He wasn't sure how to get hold of the woman on such short notice, and standing her up would be rude. But changing gears from losing a patient to winning a goodnight kiss seemed impossible. On the other hand, the social interaction, however strained, would be therapeutic. And he'd paid for it.

A month earlier he'd splurged and joined a dating service—Coffee or Cocktails. For a fee, men and women were set up on casual dates. Nothing stressful like dinner or the theater, just coffee or cocktails. Hence the name. Working eighty hours a week didn't leave much time for Warner to focus on his social life, and this seemed like the best way to improve that. Most of the medical residents he knew dated nurses and other hospital workers, but he preferred to get away from the hospital scene, away from conversations about diseases, injuries, and death. Coffee or Cocktails offered that alternative, and it was easy. Just fill out a questionnaire, talk to a staff member, and then wait to be contacted with names and phone numbers.

Tonight's date was his third from the service. The other two hadn't gone well. Dolores wouldn't let him get in a word edgewise, even though she seemed to have little of substance to say, and when she spoke, she flailed her hands with such animation that he was afraid at times she might poke out one of his eyes.

Kelly hadn't been much better; she kept saying "like" or "you know" after every four or five words, and he'd felt compelled to do most of the talking just so he wouldn't have to listen to that.

But maybe this one—Stacie—would be different. He was reminded of the saying, "Third time's a charm." Of course, there's also "Three strikes and you're out," but an attitude like that would doom this from the start. No, tonight would be different. Tonight he was going to meet a charming, intelligent, sophisticated professional. Maybe even one with chemistry. _That_ he hadn't experienced in a long time. He didn't even know what it was anymore, only that he'd recognize it when he saw it.

Stacie had agreed to meet him at the coffee shop at 7:30. "I have blonde hair that hangs halfway down my back," she'd told him over the phone, "and I'll be wearing, let's see . . . a red blouse and beige skirt."

He would try not to keep her waiting.

By the time he left the hospital grounds, the sun had painted a crimson strip along the horizon and had turned orange leaves on the maples a blood red. The encroaching darkness reminded him that soon all his daylight hours would be lost to work. For months, darkness would linger into morning rounds, or later, and it would return again well before the end of evening rounds. That pattern was enough to cause seasonal depression in even the heartiest medical residents. But at least during the winter Warner wouldn't have to sit in a sweltering car and worry about it overheating. His car did have air conditioning, a basic requirement for D.C. summers, but whenever he turned it on for more than a few minutes, the temperature gauge crept up into the red zone. The odometer had passed the 180-thousand mile mark, and he wondered whether it would ever reach 185. Already the vehicle was consuming a quart of oil every two weeks. Outwardly the car looked presentable—no major dents or large patches of rust—but inwardly it had been stressed to the breaking point.

Warner felt that way at times. He kept chugging along on caffeine and sheer determination, but on at least a few occasions his gauge had entered the red zone. Usually that happened when he least expected it. Like tonight in the ER.

But maybe, with a little luck, Stacie would take his mind off work for an hour or two. That wasn't so much to ask.

He arrived at the coffee shop a couple minutes early and looked for a blonde woman in a red blouse and beige skirt. Nobody was wearing red anything. He took a seat at an empty table and thumbed through an apartment guide, keeping one eye on the door. With every passing minute, he questioned why he bothered going on these dates. They never worked out. The fact was, he wouldn't have minded if she didn't show up at all. Right now a burger and fries from a drive-thru sounded more appealing than forced conversation with a stranger.

But he'd already committed to meeting this woman. He'd give her ten minutes to show up. He looked at his watch. Okay, maybe fifteen.

Twelve minutes later a blonde in a red blouse breezed through the door, hair streaming behind her. The look of confidence on her face and in her step reminded Warner of a teacher entering a classroom.

Heads turned.

_Why does this woman need a dating service?_ he asked himself.

"Jake?" She was standing there, hand extended.

"Yes, hi." He took her hand, and as she introduced herself, he suddenly welcomed the prospect of forced conversation.

They both ordered coffee and sat at the table Warner had already claimed. Stacie, he learned, was a sales representative for a photocopying company, aspiring to obtain a managerial position. She had relocated for her job and signed up with Coffee or Cocktails to meet people. Sure, the company where she worked employed plenty of eligible men, but she didn't want to mix her professional and personal life. Too bad for those coworkers—the woman was stunning. Her only flaw was that she looked a little too young. Although twenty-one years old, she could have passed for a cover girl on _Seventeen_.

"When I'm thirty, I'll like that," she said, "but now it's not so great. Boys on the street ask me where I go to high school."

Warner nodded. "What do you tell them?"

"I don't have any witty retorts. Maybe you can help me with that."

"I guess you could ask them where they go to junior high."

She smiled over her cup. "I like that. Thank you."

"Anytime."

The conversation turned to hobbies—Stacie liked hockey; she'd grown up playing with her brothers and their friends—then art and literature. Warner had never demanded much of the women he dated—he usually tried to focus on their positive attributes—but he couldn't take someone seriously if she didn't have a rudimentary knowledge of simple facts from elementary school. Stacie didn't have that problem. She remembered not only elementary school but a few things from NYU, where she'd graduated with a business degree a little more than a year ago.

And yet, there was something Warner couldn't get past, a bizarre coincidence: she reminded him of the teenager in the ER. Same blonde tresses, same tan, same air of independence. And her red blouse looked too much like the color of blood. A couple of days ago he'd have felt thrilled to be sitting across from this woman, looking into her steely eyes, but now all he could think of was the teenager. The dead girl's presence hung so thick in the air, he half expected her to hobble into the coffee shop, clutching her handbag and leaving behind a trail of blood.

He put his napkin on the table. "I'm sorry to do this to you . . . but I really need to take off."

"Oh." Stacie's face flushed. "Was it something I said?"

"No. I'm not feeling well." That was true. "I've had a horrendous day," he added, "and as much as I'd like to spend more time with you, I really need for it to be over."

"Okay." But the expression on her face said otherwise. She believed this had something to do with her, and further reassurances wouldn't make any difference.

He apologized again and left without looking back.

On his way out of town, he stopped at a drive-thru and got that burger and fries he'd been thinking about, then ate as he drove home to his one-bedroom apartment in the Ballston district of Arlington. The aging building, his residence for the past sixteen months, looked, and at times felt, more like an abandoned factory than an apartment complex. Dirty brick and peeling trim spoke of years of neglect. The building had been constructed without central air conditioning, and an unappealing array of window units mooned the passing traffic.

Next to the structure, dark asphalt extended to the corners of the property, pockmarked by potholes and marred by cracks and fissures. Warner parked near the entrance. Time and tire treads had faded the white markings that once delineated spaces, but he and most of the other residents still parked within the lines.

The interior of his building looked like a cheap hotel—dimly lit corridors lined with numbered doors and smelling faintly of mildew and cigarette smoke. He lived behind door number 113, on the first floor. Mismatched chairs and an old cloth sofa occupied most of the living room, the largest room. A coffee table, bought secondhand, served as a desk and storage area for medical journals, textbooks, mail, and anything else he felt more inclined to save than discard. This included phone books, coupon books, and, on occasion, kitchen utensils he didn't have the energy to return to their proper places. Tonight he felt that way about himself, that he'd been taken somewhere he didn't belong. This apartment, this ER rotation, this entire residency program. Maybe he should have gone into dermatology or radiology. Or pathology—when people are already dead, you don't have to worry about how to save them.

He took a long shower and went to bed early, hoping in sleep to escape the nightmare of this day. Tomorrow would be a fresh start. A new rotation—new specialty, new patients—and those new experiences would soon replace events from today.

But as Warner slept, his mind transported him back to The Kava Kafé with Stacie. Over coffee, she was talking about life in Michigan, where she grew up. Then, in a heartbeat, her facial features rearranged themselves into those of the girl who had died in the ER. She seemed not to notice, but Warner, unable to ignore the change, scooted his chair back and looked under the table. The sight made him almost fall backwards. Her ankle ended in a bloody amputation, with dirt and gravel clinging to jagged ends of white bone.

"I feel faint," she said, her face suddenly pale.

Warner knew she was going to die. Knew it as sure as Monday follows Sunday. And he could do nothing about it.

Except wake up. That he did—heart pounding, muscles taut, skin damp with sweat.

He threw back the covers and sat up. _What a nightmare!_ He swung his legs over the side, took a few deep breaths.

After getting his bearings, he forced himself out of bed and traipsed to the bathroom. There he flipped on the wall switch. Engulfed by light, he felt distanced from the dream. He leaned over the sink and splashed cold water onto his face. Yet remnants of the nightmare still lingered, as if waiting for him to go back to bed.

"It was just a dream," he told himself, looking into the mirror.

But "just" seemed an understatement. He wondered how many more times this nightmare would punctuate his sleep. And for how long.

_LETHAL CURE: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

Contact Glen Apseloff

# THE TROPHY EXCHANGE

A Lucinda Pierce Mystery

**by**

**Diane Fanning**

Life's been tough for Lieutenant Lucinda Pierce. She lost an eye and disfigured her face responding to a domestic violence call. She accidentally killed a small child in the middle of a shoot-out with his father.

Now, she's up against a serial killer and her main suspect is a highly respected doctor known for his international relief work.

It's a good thing she doesn't mind bending the rules.

"Fanning (Bite the Moon) provides plenty of forensic details, plot twists, and suspense. Though this near-perfect police procedural is not for the faint of heart, readers who like Kate Flora and Alex Kava will put it on their reserve lists. Highly recommended." – _Library Journal_

"Fanning has produced an exciting, emotionally intense story with a complex heroine whose future adventures will be widely anticipated." – _Kirkus Reviews_

"Fanning's true-crime writing experience gives the story added verisimilitude, and she has made great strides at tightening her storytelling. She is one to watch." _–Booklist_

"We all know by now that I'm a mystery lover and have read more than my fair share of books in this genre. So when I shout out "5 Stars" at the top of my lungs for Diane Fanning's The Trophy Exchange it is with extreme enthusiasm. Every now and then you encounter a book that just speaks to you. You can't put it down, you run the gamut of emotions from anger to fear to elation so intensely that you feel as if you are riding in the front pocket of the narrator." _–Book Club Queen_

## 1

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Charley Spencer bounded up the broad white steps of the porch of her curlicue-embellished Victorian home. She pushed open the heavy front door then turned back to the street and waved goodbye to her best friend Becca and her mother as they drove away from the curb.

She pushed the door closed and hollered, "Mo-oo-om, Ru-uu-bee." The smell of fresh baked cookies made her smile. She dropped her knapsack by the foot of the elegant, curved wooden stairway that led to the second floor.

The tantalizing smell drew her into the kitchen with the single-minded intensity of a dog to sizzling bacon. On the counter beside the oven, a baking sheet sat half-full of sagging but still rounded globs of cookie dough. On the island, a dozen chocolate chip cookies covered the cooling rack. She snatched one and sank her teeth in – just the way she liked them, crunchy on the edges, gooey in the middle and sweet enough to break a heart.

She gobbled the cookie up in record speed then grabbed another one. The second one she would savor, taking tiny bites letting the chocolate soften and ooze across her tongue and allowing each little crunch of walnut to release a separate burst of flavor.

She munched on the cookie as she went back into the hallway. She spewed cookie crumbs into the air as she shouted out again, "Mo-oo-om, Ru-uu-bee." She wiped her lips with the back of her hand as she climbed the stairway to the second floor. She called out for her mother and sister again as she entered Ruby's bedroom. No one there. She looked in her own bedroom. Nope, not there. Then she headed to the master bedroom suite. It used to be two bedrooms but that was one of the things her parents had changed in the large, old house, taking out a wall and adding a walk-in closet and a huge master bath.

She saw no one in the bedroom. Poked her head into the bathroom and no one was there either. She walked into the closet and went to the back corner where a cubbyhole jutted off with more storage. Unease creased her brow and turned the cookie crumbs in her mouth into irritating pebbles. Then, she heard footsteps downstairs and grinned as she rushed down to the first floor. On the bottom landing, she jerked to a sudden stop. The front door was hanging wide open.

She sucked in a deep breath. I closed that door when I came in. I know I did, she thought. She expelled air in her lungs and headed over to the door to see if Mom and Ruby were on the front porch looking for her to come home. She saw nothing but the steps, the intricate white railings and a very still green porch swing.

She stepped back into the house, pushed the door shut with both hands, then turned around and pushed against it with her back for good measure. That's when she noticed the door under the stairs was wide open, too. The door to the basement. Charley hated the basement. She didn't like going into the finished area where concrete covered the floor of the laundry room and a washer, dryer and laundry tub stood ready for duty. Even worse was the unfinished part of the cellar with its dirt floor and spiderwebs. Just thinking about that part of the basement suffused her senses with primordial dread.

That was why she was uncomfortable in the brightly lit laundry room. Whenever she was there she was consumed by a painful awareness that the dark, musty underworld of the house lay just beyond the door. She imagined a realm ruled by legions of rats. She'd never actually seen one but her fantasy contained creatures with shiny demon eyes, fang-like teeth, thick, long, whip-like tails and claws capable of shredding flesh from bones in seconds flat.

She stood at the top of the open wood plank stairs and trembled. "Mom? Ruby?" Her voice quavered. She heard a small whimper and forced a foot down one step. "Mom? Ruby?" The words formed a lump in her throat as they escaped from her mouth. She took another step. "Mom? Ruby? Mom?"

She smelled the musty odor that reminded her of dark dreams and forbidden places. In the bottom corner of the stairway, she saw a brown six-legged predator dangling from the ceiling on a silken thread. It swung in small arcs in the draft caused by the open door. She shivered in revulsion. Goosebumps raced up and down her arms and legs.

She heard a sloppy wet sound that made her want to turn, run up the stairs, slam the door, hide under her bed. She breathed in deeply and exhaled hard. The calming breath jogged a familiar memory. The sloppy noise seemed the same as the sound Ruby made when she sucked her thumb. But Ruby hadn't sucked her thumb since before last summer. "Mom? Ruby?"

She took another step and bent over. She peered through the banister to the basement below. She saw Ruby sitting on the floor, a thumb in her mouth. The fingers of her other hand were tangled in her hair twisting with quiet desperation. "Ruby!" Charley shouted.

Ruby scooted back on her rump snuggling closer to the lump on the floor. The lump was their mother. Charley screamed. Ruby cringed and sucked on her thumb at a more furious pace.

Their mother was stretched out flat on the cold, hard slab. A concrete block rested flat on her face. Her arms were sprawled at angles from her sides as if she was caught in the act of making angels in the snow. Ruby pushed back farther into the triangle formed between her mother's arm and her torso.

The rats fled from Charley's mind. The real horror exceeded the capacity of her imagination and was right before her eyes. She raced down the remaining stairs. "Mom? Mom? Mom? Ruby? Ruby? What happened, Ruby?"

Ruby's eyes widened, her black pupils swallowing her dark brown irises. She whimpered while she sucked her thumb. Charley knelt by her mother's side. She touched her arm. It was still warm. But her chest did not move – no rise, no fall. She laid her ear below her mother's breast listening for the sound of her heart beat. How many times had she said, "I hear your heartbeat, Mama?" How many times did her mother say, "It beats for you, Charley". But now, it did not beat at all.

With both hands, Charley pushed on the concrete block, shoving it off her mother's face and on to the floor. Where her mother's face should have been, Charley saw a gory mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone. Charley's hand flew to her mouth and she scrambled to her feet. At the laundry sink, she rose up on her toes, leaned over and heaved up the birthday cake and ice cream she had eaten just a short time before. She grabbed the old frayed washcloth that hung over the faucet. She turned on the water, wet the cloth and wiped her face with shaking hands.

She looked back at Ruby who had not yet turned and glimpsed the ravaged visage that used to host the warmth of their mother's smile. She stepped in front of the three-year-old and stuck her hand out to her sister. "Ruby, come on."

Ruby snuggled up closer to her mother and shook her head. Charley sucked in a straggly breath and kneeled in front of Ruby with outstretched arms. "C'mon, Ruby." Still Ruby would not come to her.

Charley slid her hands under Ruby's arms and pulled her up. Her legs staggered under the weight of her three-year-old sister. She pressed Ruby's face to her chest to keep her from seeing their mother's face when she turned around and headed for the stairs.

Ruby wriggled to get free. When she failed, her thumb flew out of her mouth and she wailed. Her high-pitched squeal pierced Charley's ears but she still held Ruby tight.

"Ssssh. Sshhh, Ruby," Charley whispered as she patted Ruby's back. She wanted to set her sister down and let her walk up the steps under her own power, but she feared if she did, Ruby would race back to her mother and see the carnage that was etched forever in Charley's own mind. She held tight to her squirming burden and climbed, one shaky step at a time up to the top of the stairs.

She set Ruby down in the hallway. She shut the door. She turned the skeleton key in the lock. She slid the key into her pocket. Ruby hung on the doorknob with both hands. She rocked back and forth trying to force the door open. Whimpering. Sobbing. Shrieking.

Charley picked up the phone and pressed 9-1-1.

"9-1-1. Where is your emergency?"

"I'm at home," Charley whispered.

"You have to speak up. Where is your emergency?"

"I'm at home."

"Where's your home?"

"457 Cross Street."

"What is your emergency?"

"My mom."

"What's wrong with your mother?"

"Someone hurt her."

"Can she come to the phone?"

"No. No," Charley sobbed. "She can't come anywhere."

"Is the person who hurt your mother still in the house?"

"I don't know."

"Are you alone with your mother?"

"Yes. No. I mean, my little sister Ruby is here. Somebody needs to help my mom. Please help."

"The police and an ambulance are on their way. What's your name?"

"Charley."

"How old are you, Charley?"

"Eight."

"Do you know any of your neighbors?"

"Yeah."

"Is there one that is safe? That your mom says is safe?"

"Yeah."

"Can you take your little sister and go there, now?"

"Uh huh."

"You need to get out of the house right now and go straight to your neighbor's house. Okay?"

Charley dropped the phone on the floor and grabbed one of Ruby's hands off the doorknob to the basement and pulled. Ruby clung tight with the other hand. Charley jerked it loose and dragged her kicking, screaming sister to the front door. She could still hear the sound of the dispatcher's tinny voice coming out of the discarded telephone but could not understand a word she said.

Out on the porch, Ruby went limp. She hung like a dead weight from Charley's hand. Charley hoisted Ruby up on her small hip and hurried down the front steps with her sister in tow. She wanted to do as she was told and escape to a neighbor's house, but she was afraid to leave the yard – afraid to open the gate and step out on to the sidewalk. She coaxed her sister to the side of the porch. Around its base, three-foot-high lattice work covered a storage area for the lawn mower and garden tools.

Ruby's thumb was back in her mouth but even with that obstruction, she was able to rub her dripping nose on her older sister's shoulder. Charley hid her repulsion, stifled her scold and moved to the door in the lattice. She sat Ruby down on the ground. On her knees, she reached inside the under-porch and pushed on the lawn mower frame driving the machine deeper into the speckled darkness. She picked up Ruby again. She stooped over and pushed down on the back of Ruby's head to clear the opening. She pulled the door shut behind them.

Charley sat down in the dirt with Ruby in her arms. She rocked back and forth as much to comfort herself as to quiet her sister. She put her lips up to Ruby's ear and whispered a song, "Hush, little Ruby, don't you cry. Charley's gonna buy you an apple pie."

While they huddled under the porch, Charley listened for the sounds of sirens. She imagined them several times before their clarion call was clear. Across the neighborhood, faces inside houses peered from windows, those outside turned their ears to the sky. All counted their blessings – except for two little girls in the dark.

## 2

AS THE CRIME scene truck rumbled its bulk around the corner and on to Cross Street, officers scrambled to move the vehicles in front of the house to make room for the over-large van at the curb. An unmarked pulled up to the other side of the street and Homicide Investigator Lieutenant Lucinda Pierce sat in her car pressing down on her growing anxiety. The muted susurrations of blood rushing through her jugular vein roared in her head like a stadium cheer. When she swallowed, the gulp sounded like a sonic boom. She didn't like looking at herself since the shotgun blast had ripped across her face, but she flipped down the visor anyway. She knew if she could face that sight, she could face anything.

She sighed, slapped the visor back into place and opened the car door. She checked to make sure her cream-colored silk T-shirt was tucked firmly in the waistband of her black pantsuit. Her look was tailored to the point of severity, adorned only by a simple gold wristwatch and two small gold studs on her ear lobes. She stretched long legs out onto the road and headed straight for the house flashing her gold badge at the officers in her path. It had been two years since her injury. Her determined approach to rehabilitation was a department legend and the people she worked with had grown accustomed to her face. Their shocked reactions were no longer a source of Lucinda's dread.

Under investigation and off the streets for three months for a shooting incident, this excursion was her first visit to a crime scene since Internal Affairs lifted her probation and allowed her to return to full-time status. She was too self-conscious about her recent professional turmoil to look any of the other cops in the eye.

A couple of the men shouted words of encouragement: "Way to go, Loot" and "Glad to see ya back on the streets".

She just looked straight ahead and did not respond. At 5'11" before she slid into her black pumps, looking at the air above the heads of most of the officers was a natural place for her to focus her eye.

She knew she could not screw this one up. She was cleared of wrongdoing in her Excessive Violence hearing but it would all mean nothing if she blew it her first time out of the chute. The apprehension she'd felt at her first homicide case years ago was nothing compared to the anxiety she felt now.

Ted met her at the gate and hurried up the sidewalk after her. Even with the long legs of his 6'4" frame, he labored to keep pace with her rapid strides, briefing her as she moved toward the basement door. Their footsteps echoed down the rough-cut wooden stairs as they made their way into the cellar. She acknowledged nothing he said but Ted's presence at the scene allowed Lucinda to relax a bit. She trusted him more than anyone else on the force. She'd known him for years. The two had dated in high school but when they went off to their separate universities, they drifted apart. They both married after graduation. Lucinda's childless marriage lasted a short two years. The wedding of Ted and his college sweetheart demonstrated more staying power and produced two kids. She felt a brief twinge of regret for what might have been.

Although Lucinda's non-responsiveness would have rattled many other officers, it didn't faze Ted. In addition to their ancient history together, he'd worked with Lieutenant Pierce at crime scenes before and he knew she heard, understood and absorbed every word he said. She stopped two feet from the body. Ted jerked to a stop to keep from running into her back.

"Killed by that concrete block?" she asked.

"Seems so," Ted replied.

"Is this what the scene looked like when you arrived?"

"Except for the leads attached by the paramedics, yes."

Lucinda looked at the shirt hanging open around the dangling leads. "Completely clothed?"

"Yes."

"You didn't move the block?"

"No."

"Where's the girl, who called 9-1-1 ," Lucinda asked.

 "We don't know."

"You don't know?"

"She's not in the house – neither of the girls are. The 9-1-1 officer told them to go to a neighbor's house. Uniforms are going door-to-door looking for them now."

"Oh, jeez," Lucinda said, shaking her head. "Where's the blood?"

"There's not much – just a small puddle around her head."

"That's not enough. That's just oozing blood – draining blood. Where's the blood from the blunt trauma? Look. See how close she is to the washer and dryer. That white porcelain should be covered with spatter. Nothing's there. Where's the coroner?"

"He's on his way. He was called just moments after the call went into your office."

"She either wasn't killed here or she wasn't killed with that block."

"We didn't find signs of a struggle anywhere else in the house."

"Interesting. How long does it take the damn coroner to get here? Call them again."

Ted reached for the key on his radio and stopped at the sound of a familiar voice booming down from the top of the stairs. "Don't get your knickers in a wad, Lieutenant. I'm here."

"Dr. Sam. About time."

"I'm two years from retirement, Lieutenant. Don't move as fast as I used to. Besides, none of my patients are ever in a hurry."

Watching his descent, Lucinda laughed. White hair plastered to his head as if he'd just stepped out of the shower. White whiskers poked out of his chin – he hadn't taken the time to shave before responding to the scene. "Okay, Doc. One look at you and I can't complain – you sure didn't stop for a beauty treatment on your way here."

He rubbed a hand across his chin. "Damn. Forgot to shave again." He kneeled down by the woman on the floor. "Where's all the blood?"

"My question exactly, Doc. Any ideas?"

"I'd guess that block smashed into her face after she was already dead." He put a finger under the remains of her chin and raised it up. "Look," he said pointing to her throat. A red line stretched across swollen, irritated skin. "Ligature mark."

"Interesting. Did she die of strangulation?" Lucinda asked.

"Maybe. Maybe not. I'll know after I've done the autopsy." He pushed himself off the floor, grunting with effort. Lucinda offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet. He winced as he rose.

"Did I pull too hard?" she asked.

"No. It wasn't you. My knees just don't like concrete floors any more. Yours won't either in a few short years. It's all yours, Lieutenant. Move the body when you're ready."

"When will you do the autopsy?"

"First thing in the morning."

"Not tonight?"

He glared at her. "8 a.m. tomorrow morning, Lieutenant."

Lucinda's lips parted forming a protest.

"No, Lieutenant," Dr. Sam said before she could speak, "tomorrow morning. I'm too old to stay up all night. She ain't going anywhere." He shambled up the stairs mumbling about the demands of the young and of the dead.

## 3

LUCINDA WENT BACK to the first floor and unleashed the team of forensic technicians. In blue Tyvec suits and booties and latex gloves, they entered the home. The first one carried a video camera filming every step of his passage. Behind him, another tech took an endless series of still shots with a digital camera.

Lucinda roamed through the house with Ted by her side. In the sitting room, she plucked a frame off the mantle. Four faces peered out – the image of a happy family. The two little girls exuded innocence. The mother's face was warm and lovely before today's trauma. Even in this two-dimensional state, she appeared to be in motion: energetic, optimistic and self-assured. The man in the portrait looked more stiff and wooden – either he was uncomfortable posing or uneasy in his own skin. He was a handsome man, though, with dark hair and deep blue eyes – but he seemed edgy as if the idea of relaxation was an alien concept.

Lucinda pointed at his face as she turned to Ted. "Where's the husband?"

"Don't know yet. A couple of the neighbors said he traveled a lot."

"What do we know about him?"

"He's an orthopedic surgeon. One of the neighbors said that he does surgery all over the world."

"Hmm. Where in the world is he now?"

"Sergeant Creger is on his way over to the doctor's office to find out."

Lucinda set the frame back on the mantelpiece. "It's easy to read more than you should into a photograph when you've got a dead body on your hands and a spouse who's AWOL. For the girls' sake, I hope he has a solid alibi. They've got enough to deal with already. What about the victim?"

"Stay-at-home mom. But she has a PhD in mathematics. She taught over at the University of Virginia before Charley was born."

"Interesting. Any neighbors notice problems in the marriage?"

"Not yet. No loud voices heard. No arguments witnessed. Even called them a perfect family more than once."

"Perfect? That word always makes me suspicious."

Lucinda and Ted continued to wander through the Spencer home seeking the telltale signs of disharmony, dysfunction or denial. No red flags popped into view.

Ted answered the bleat of his phone. His face formed a scowl as he listened. "Hold on a sec," he said into the cell. "Lieutenant, the team looking for the girls has covered a two-block radius. None of the neighbors have seen them. Should we organize a full-blown search? Call in a canine team?"

"Somebody should have seen them," Lucinda said. "Even if they just ran down the street, someone should have seen something. Tell them to make the calls but don't put anything into motion until we make one last search of the house."

Lucinda and Ted ran through the house, checking under beds and peering into all the closets. In the kitchen, where forgotten cookies cooled and hardened and unbaked blobs of dough crusted where they sat beside the stove, the two officers opened every cabinet door. In the basement, they looked in the washer and dryer and moved into the dirt-floor cellar. They probed every corner and cranny with bright flashlight beams. No children anywhere. They stepped out on to the front porch. In every yard, neighbors stood on the grass staring in their direction.

"What was the name of the kid that called?" Lucinda asked Ted.

"Charley."

"Charley. Charley, where are you? You're safe now."

Charley heard her but could not urge her limbs into movement. Her mouth was too dry to speak. She sat in the dirt clutching her baby sister. Rocking back and forth. All she wanted to do was go to sleep. But every time she closed her eyes, the vision of her mother's crushed face sent her lids flying back open.

Lucinda and Ted came down the steps. Lucinda went left; Ted went right. Both called out Charley's name as they started a circle of the house. Lucinda spotted the small door under the porch. She pulled it open and shone the flashlight inside. The harsh light landed on two pairs of big brown eyes. She jerked the light downward, focusing the beam on the ground. "Charley, is that you?"

Charley nodded her head.

"You're safe now, Charley. It's that your little sister?"

She nodded again.

"What's her name, Charley?"

Charley forced her tongue from the roof of her mouth and rasped, "Ruby."

"Okay, Charley, Ruby, we need to get you out of here."

She shouted out for Ted and walked on her knees into the cubbyhole. "Hand Ruby to me, Charley."

Slowly she stretched her arms forward. As Lucinda's arms wrapped around Ruby, the little one erupted in noisy protest. She kicked Lucinda's chest, she bit her hand. Lucinda held her tight and handed her out to Ted. He grabbed the screaming burden and walked away. Ruby's arms windmilled back in the direction of her sister as she squealed. Ted dropped to the grass under a shady tree. He stroked Ruby's hair and whispered reassurances in her ear. Ruby stuck her thumb back in her mouth and curled up in the officer's arms.

Lucinda backed out of the confined space and coaxed Charley to join her.

The thought of leaving the security of her hiding place made Charley cry. Her tiny body wracked with sobs as she remained rooted to the spot. Then she remembered Ruby. Ruby needed her now more than ever before. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her shirt and moved toward Lucinda.

Once she was out, Lucinda swung her up in her arms and carried her down to the patrol car at the curb. Ted rose and, cradling the now quieted Ruby, joined her there.

Lucinda slid into the front seat behind the steering wheel, her undamaged profile facing into the back seat. Ted sat in the back between the two girls, an arm around each of their shoulders. Their sweet little girl smell was overpowered by the earthy aroma of the dirt where they'd sat and by the salty tang of their fresh-spilled tears.

Lucinda closed her eye and breathed in with force. The thought of these small children seeing that scene in the basement struck a deep nerve of adolescent pain. No time to think about her own mother now. She pushed those thoughts away and opened her eye.

With a gentle voice and indirect questions, Ted coaxed information out of the traumatized sisters. Charley gave jerky responses, one syllable at a time. Ruby remained wide-eyed and mute.

"Yes," Charley told him, she had locked the door to the basement. "No," she said when asked if she saw anyone else in the house.

A pair of social workers arrived on the scene to take charge of the girls. Before stepping out of the car, Charley turned to Lucinda and stared. The intensity of her gaze and the wounded look in her eyes hit Lucinda like a scream for help. The mantle of responsibility to this child grew heavy, almost oppressive. "I'll do everything I can," Lucinda whispered.

Charley bobbed her head as she walked off holding a state employee's hand. For a moment, Lucinda felt pinned in her seat by the burden of Charley's unspoken expectations. She followed Ted back into the home. As soon as they were inside, Lucinda's cellphone chirped. "This is Lieutenant Pierce."

"Hey Loot! Think you oughta come over and talk to this woman – she has some interesting insight on Dr. Spencer. We're across the street, down one house to the right – the burgundy bungalow."

"Which Dr. Spencer?"

"The lady's a doctor, too?"

"PhD."

"Ms. Craddick didn't mention that. She's concerned about the husband."

"You with her right now or can you talk?"

"Ms. Craddick is right here, Lieutenant, and just dying to talk to the person in charge."

Lucinda strode out of the house. Reporters dogged her before she could open the gate.

"Lieutenant?"

 "Lieutenant?"

 "Do you have a suspect?"

"Who's the victim?"

"Lieutenant, over here."

She turned her back on them and addressed the officer responsible for logging law enforcement members in and out of the house. "Kirby, get someone to barricade this damn block. ASAP. I want these shit-eating jackals out of here."

"Yes ma'am," he said as he keyed in on his radio and shouted instructions. A mass of blue materialized in a flash pushing back reporters and cameramen. White sawhorses appeared like magic.

Lucinda headed across the street. She didn't notice the lone reporter who evaded the round-up until a microphone was pushed to her mouth. "Lieutenant Pierce, I see you've got a gun in your holster. Did they let you have bullets to go with it?"

She looked down at the reporter. Her nostrils flared. Her jaw throbbed. She wanted to pistol-whip his smirking face but she just stared.

He flinched under her gaze but did not back away. "Well, Lieutenant, did they let you load your gun or did they make you keep your bullet in your pocket?"

She spread out the fingers of one hand enveloping the fuzzy head of the microphone and pushed it down toward the ground. "I could tell you, yes, my gun is loaded, but you wouldn't really know unless I showed you, would you?"

His Adam's apple took a deep bob. "No, Lieutenant. I suppose I wouldn't."

"I never pull my gun out unless I intend to use it. Do you want me to pull it out right here, right now? Do you want to look down the barrel of my gun?"

"No, Lieutenant. I suppose I don't."

"Fine. Take your smart mouth and your dumb ass to the other side of the barricade. Now." She lifted her hand off the microphone, turned her back on the rattled reporter and headed to the burgundy bungalow. The tape of the shooting incident that resulted in her recent suspension was downloaded and ready to roll in her head. She had no time to relive the should-haves and would-haves of the worst moment of her life as a cop. She blinked her eye and tried to force the vision away.

But a freeze-frame of that tiny dead body on the lawn remained displayed in vivid color in her mind as she finished crossing the street from the Spencer home. She opened the gate, went up the sidewalk and on to the porch of the burgundy bungalow. She shook her head to dislodge the image. It receded but would not go away. The sight of the little lifeless body was burned permanently on the back of her retina.

## 4

BEFORE LUCINDA COULD knock, the door flew open. A short intense woman with dyed blonde hair and gray roots looked straight at Lucinda's chest and slowly raised her head. "My! You're a tall one, aren't you?"

"Are you Ms. Craddick?"

"Just call me Rose. Come in, come in," she said, turning her back and waving her arm over her head.

Lucinda followed the woman down a hallway, sidling through the stacked boxes that lined both walls. They went past a spacious kitchen where foot after foot of counter surface was piled high with books, bills, newspapers, magazines, cooking utensils and other miscellaneous debris. If she ever tried to cook in here, Lucinda thought, the whole place would go up like a bonfire.

"Have a seat, have a seat." Rose gestured to the chairs at a table in the adjacent dining room. The room was small and packed with furniture: an oversized china cabinet, an enormous buffet, eight ponderous carved chairs and a long table covered with piles of paper and periodicals. Rose shoved a couple of stacks out of the way as she sat across from Lucinda. "Did you catch that no-goodnik yet?"

"Catch who, Ms. Craddick?"

"Rose. Call me Rose." She peered at Lucinda showing no inclination to continue the conversation until her visitor complied.

"Yes, Rose. Rose it is."

"Speaking of roses, officer, did you notice those big bushes on the side of the Spencer house?"

"Yes, Rose, I did. But who do you think we need to catch?"

"That nasty Dr. Spencer, that's who. He planted those roses."

"Dr. Spencer?"

"Yes. He planted those roses and he killed his wife. I know he did it."

"You do?"

"Yes, ma'am, officer. I saw him plant those roses."

"The roses?"

"Yes. I can see that side of the house real good from my bedroom window and I saw him do it."

"Do what, Rose?"

"Plant those roses," she said staring at Lucinda as if she were dense. "It's what they call one of those 'previous bad acts' on TV."

"Oh, on TV."

"Yep. I watch all those shows. You can learn a lot from them, you know. I bet you watch them all, too. Anyway, that Dr. Spencer, he dug those holes after dark one night. When he finished, I went to watch one of my shows. The next morning – at the butt crack of dawn – he was out there again. He was planting those rose bushes. They were really small then. But you see them now. They've grown like crazy. You saw them, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did, Rose. They are quite large."

Rose leaned forward, her chin nearly on the table. "Unnaturally large, officer. I think while I was watching my show, that's when he snuck back and put the dead bodies in the holes."

"Dead bodies?" Lucinda said and looked over the woman's head to the patrolman leaning against the wall. He rolled his eyes.

"Yes, dead bodies. Bodies are natural fertilizer. Made those bushes grow so fast. I'm sure of it."

"Whose bodies, Rose?"

"Don't know. But he's a doctor. I'm sure he killed a patient or two. They all do. Only he didn't want no law suit."

"So because of the bodies under the rose bushes, you think Dr. Spencer killed his wife?" Lucinda asked as she rose to her feet.

"Well, yeah. But that's not all. I haven't told you the rest. You want a cup of coffee? I can make a fresh pot in just a minute."

"No thanks, Rose. We really need to get going. What haven't you told us yet?"

"I haven't gotten to the time he pulled a gun on me."

"Dr. Spencer pulled a gun on you, Rose?" Lucinda asked as she sank back down on her chair.

"Yep. He sure did. And he called me a nosy old biddy and told me I needed to get a life."

"He did?"

"Yes. Can you imagine? I'm just a concerned neighbor who tries to watch out for her neighbors – keep the neighborhood safe – and he threatens me with a gun. I could be one of the bodies buried under the rose bushes right now."

"Rose, when did this happen?"

"Just before last Christmas."

"Did you report it to the police?"

"No ma'am. I'm a good neighbor. A good neighbor doesn't rat on her fellow neighbors."

Lucinda raised her eyebrows. The patrolman covered his mouth to hide his grin. "Did it happen here at your house?" Lucinda asked.

"Oh, heavens, no. It was over at their house."

"In the house?"

"No. On the front porch."

"You were on their front porch?"

"Yes. I wanted to get a better look at their Christmas tree. Charley told me they strung real cranberries and popcorn for the tree. So that night, I went over to look."

"And what happened?"

"I was looking in the window, minding my own business, when that Dr. Spencer came roaring out of the front door waving a gun."

"You were on their front porch, peeping in their window, in the dark?"

"Well, the lights just don't look the same in the daytime. Everybody knows that. And that crazy man came out waving a gun in the air."

"Okay, Rose. Thank you so much for your time." Lucinda stood and exchanged a knowing glance with the patrolman.

"Wait. Wait, officer. I haven't told you the best part yet. I saw him running from the house just a little bit before I heard the sirens." Rose folded her arms across her chest and beamed at Lucinda.

The lieutenant sat back down again. "You saw Dr. Spencer leaving the house this afternoon?"

"Yes I did. And, let me tell you, he was in a hurry."

"Are you sure it was Dr. Spencer?"

"Yes, ma'am. You don't live across the street from someone all these years without knowing what they look like."

"So you got a good look at him?"

"Good enough to know it was him."

"Did you see his face?"

"Not real good. He had this hooded sweatshirt on. That's pretty suspicious, isn't it? I thought about that when I saw him. I wondered what he was doing wearing a sweatshirt. Still a little warm to have the hood pulled up over your head."

"The hood was up but you still saw his face?"

"Well, not exactly."

"Not exactly? What did you see?"

"He had that drawstring cinched up so tight, his eyes barely poked through. But I knew it was him."

"You knew it, Rose?"

"Looked just like him. And besides, he's a mean man."

"Right. Anything else, Rose?"

"I'm sure there is but I just can't think of it right now."

Lucinda rose again. "If you think of it, Rose, you just give us a call."

"Of course. It's my duty as a citizen. Do you have a card?"

Lucinda reached for her pocket. She stopped as her fingertips grazed her cards and patted down her jacket. "Sorry Rose," Lucinda lied. "I'm all out. You just call the station and leave a message. They'll get all the information to me. Thanks for your time."

Lucinda crossed back over the street and caught up with Ted in the master bedroom of the Spencer home. "The neighbor thinks she saw the husband leaving the house in a hurry," she said.

"You don't sound like you believe her."

"Not sure. She's a bit loopy. The guys out there canvassing – have they found anyone else who saw someone leaving the house this afternoon?"

"Not yet," Ted sighed.

Lucinda's cellphone chirped again. She pressed the green button. "Pierce here." She turned to Ted and mouthed, "Creger." She nodded her head several times and said, "You checked it out?" She nodded again, disconnected and turned to Ted. "Creger found the husband."

"Where?"

"Afghanistan."

"What?"

"Afghanistan. It seems like the good doctor volunteers for Doctors Without Borders. He's been in Afghanistan for the last three days tending to the victims of land mine explosions. Missing feet. Mangled arms. That kind of stuff. The organization is flying him back on a priority basis. Don't know yet when he'll get here."

"Guess we can scratch him off the list," Ted said.

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"He's a doctor. He's got money. He could have hired someone to kill her while he was conveniently out of the country. It does make for an excellent alibi. Could be he's a victim. Could be he's a good planner."

## 5

TED PULLED INTO the concrete driveway and drove up to the garage doors of his brick ranch. He headed up the sidewalk to the porch. Long before he reached the front door, it flew open. Six-year-old Kimmy squealed, "Daddy!" as she raced toward him.

Nine-year-old Pete swaggered out in an attempt to appear cool although his delight at his father's return home from work twinkled in his eyes. "Hey, Dad," he said.

Ted swung Kimmy up in one arm and threw the other one around Pete's shoulders. "How was football practice today, Pete?"

"Okay. I'm running back, now," he said with a smile.

"Congratulations. Good job. You've been working hard for that position―"

"Daddy, daddy, daddy," Kimmy interrupted.

"Yes, Kimmy."

"I took a toad to school for show and tell."

"You did?"

"It peed on my hand."

"It did?"

"I dropped it on the floor and washed off my hands. When I came back, Toadie was gone."

"Oh no."

"Ms. Rogers said we have to find him. She wouldn't let us go out to recess. We all had to stay inside and look. But we couldn't find Toadie anywhere. I told Ms. Rogers you were a policeman and you could find him. Can you come to school and find Toadie, Daddy?"

"I'll drive you to school tomorrow morning and we'll go toad hunting."

"But don't use your gun, Daddy. I miss Toadie. I want him back."

"What if he pees on your hand again?"

"Oh, I forgot," she said squeezing her face tight in distaste.

"You are such a sissy," Pete said.

"Am not," Kimmy responded poking out her bottom lip.

"Are, too."

"Am not."

"Enough," Ted said as he set Kimmy down on the floor of the living room.

"Are, too," Pete hissed as he raced off to his room with Kimmy in hot pursuit.

Ted shook his head and walked into the kitchen to give his wife Ellen a kiss. She turned her face away from him and his lips brushed the side of her head. Ice crackled in her voice as she said, "I saw a glimpse of you on the news, Ted."

Ted tensed, shut his eyes and inhaled deeply. Not again, he thought.

"Saw your girlfriend, too."

Ted knew any protest would fuel Ellen's anger. "Can I help you with dinner?"

Ellen's mouth drew up as tight as a miser's purse. "You can set the table if you want."

He grabbed four yellow Fiestaware plates from the cabinet. He noticed for the first time the scratches on their surface as he kept his focus away from Ellen and on the job at hand.

"If you really want to help, Ted, you can stop seeing that woman," Ellen said.

"It's work, Ellen. I don't control the assignments. No one asks me which homicide detective I want at the scene," he said knowing if they did, he'd pick Lucinda every time.

"Right," Ellen snapped.

Ted wondered once again about how different his life would be if he'd clung tight to Lucinda during those four years at school. How would it be if she stood in the kitchen now? If his kids were Lucinda's kids, too? He opened a drawer to retrieve the eating utensils and placed a fork, knife and spoon by each plate.

"If work keeps throwing you and your girlfriend together, maybe you need to get another job," Ellen persisted.

"Ellen, we've been over this a thousand times. You don't want to move. I am a cop. I love my work and wouldn't be happy doing anything else."

"And you love being near your girlfriend, don't you?"

"Ellen, please, Lieutenant Pierce and I dated in high school. That was long ago and before I ever met you. I married you not her. Case closed."

She slammed a plate of pork chops on the table. "Maybe our marriage should be closed, Ted."

"Ellen, that's not fair."

"Maybe I should set you free to run after bad guys and chase after your bloodthirsty, baby-killing girlfriend," she spat as she plopped a bowl of green beans next to the chops.

"Ellen, that's enough."

"Yes, it is enough. I've had enough. Now you're on another case together again, she'll be calling here at all hours. You'll drop everything to rush to her side. I have had more than enough," she said slapping down the mashed potato bowl so hard white glops flew out of it and on to the table. "Kimmy, Pete," she hollered, "dinner's ready."

The kids flew in and scooted into the chairs. As Ted pulled out his seat, Ellen started down the hall. "Aren't you going to have some dinner, Ellen?"

"I've lost my appetite," she said over her shoulder. The door to their bedroom slammed. The hostile noise reverberated down the hall and made the children squirm. Ted looked at the kids and saw two little furrowed brows, two pairs of downturned lips, two innocents caught in a storm of their parents' making.

Ted served out a pile of potatoes on each plate, making sound effects with his mouth. Then he picked up green beans with his fingers and stuck them like a green picket fence in the white mounds. He etched smiley faces on the chops before slipping them on to their plates. Kimmy and Pete giggled, their parents' troubles forgotten.

Ted put a smile on his face for the sake of his son and daughter but his mind twisted in turmoil. He didn't want to lose his family despite the pangs of regret he harbored about Lucinda. Right now, though, it seemed inevitable. Ellen's hostility escalated with every passing day and still he loved her. But how long could that love last under the constant barrage of negativity from her?

 He'd begged her to go to counseling but she refused. He could not decide if she really felt threatened by Lucinda or if Ellen was just building a justification for the day when she'd say goodbye.

## 6

ELLEN SANK DOWN in the softness of the quilt on the edge of the bed. She held her body as stiff as if she was sitting in a hard wooden pew. She'd regretted her outburst the moment she slammed the door. But pride, embarrassment and hurt kept her cloistered in the lonely room.

The children's muted giggling drifted into the room. She felt relief and a keen sadness – tears coursed down her checks. She didn't want to be so angry. She didn't want to lash out at Ted. But she was no longer in control – not since the baby died.

When she first started dating Ted she knew he still carried a picture of Lucinda in his wallet. That was okay. She didn't hold on to any pictures of her first love but she still thought of Mark often. In the beginning, she'd even fantasized about him when she and Ted made love.

Time passed, her relationship with Ted grew serious and Mark faded from her mind. The only time his memory resurrected was when she ran into an old high school friend and she'd wondered if she'd ever bump into Mark at Wal-Mart before they were both too old to remember.

She didn't expect Ted would ever run into Lucinda. When Ellen and Ted married, they'd settled down in _her_ home town, not his. She assumed Lucinda had drifted out of Ted's thoughts, too. She had no idea that they were both working in the same police department until the day a shotgun blast tore through Lucinda's face.

Ellen shot to her feet and paced around the perimeter of the bed. _I should go out to the table. I should smile like nothing happened. Joke with the kids. Flirt with Ted._ Her hand wrapped around the bedroom doorknob then jerked back as if a jolt of electricity shot through the brass and into her flesh. _I can't do it. I can't pretend I'm happy. I can't walk around pretending I don't believe something is going on between Ted and Lucinda._

She paced again thinking about the day she learned of Lucinda's continued presence in Ted's life. He'd told her about the injury, the loss of her eye. Ellen had recoiled at the sound of the other woman's name but was too stunned by the revelation to ask any questions. Then, it became too awkward as she said nothing week after week with Ted coming home recounting tales of Lucinda's recovery, rehabilitation and her return to active duty. She'd kept trying to brush her concerns away. After all, Lucinda was a hot topic on everyone's tongue at the department's Christmas party that year. Ellen had employed logic in an attempt to banish her fears but still they would not stop haunting her sleep.

On Christmas Eve, after they'd put the presents under the tree and were preparing for bed, the question had finally crossed her lips: "Why didn't you tell me you were working with Lucinda before?"

"Before?" Ted asked, turning his face away from her to rummage in a dresser drawer. "I've been talking to you about her for months."

"Not until she was shot. How come you didn't mention it before then?"

"I didn't think it mattered."

"It didn't matter? You're working with your old girlfriend and it didn't matter? For the last few months, you've been obsessed with her."

"Oh, Ellen," Ted said as he turned around and crossed the room without looking her in the eye. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. "Don't be jealous. Sure, I'm obsessed with her . . ."

Ellen squirmed trying to push off and get free.

Ted just tightened his grip and planted a kiss on top of her head. "But so is everyone else. It's what she went through – a cop's worst nightmare. She was shot in the line of duty and we've all been pulling for her. You're my wife, Ellen. I come home to you every night – to you and the kids and the warm home you've created for all of us. This is where my heart is."

She wanted to believe him but with her head against his chest, she couldn't see his face. She couldn't scan his eyes for hidden lies. Still, she relaxed and they stood together in quiet reflection. She lost herself in the comfort of familiar arms and inhaled the scent she knew so well.

Ted pulled back and looked down at her with his hands resting on her upper arms. "You okay, now?"

She nodded.

"Good. I need a shower. Bad. I'm surprised you didn't gag when you got close." He raised his arm and sniffed in the direction of his armpit. "Phew!" He pulled off his pants, dropped them on the bed and left the room.

Ellen stared at the bulge of his wallet in the back pocket of his pants. She heard the water pounding the glass shower enclosure. _Trust,_ she told herself. _Trust. It's all about trust._ But her eyes couldn't pull away from the pocket and the proof that it might hold.

When she heard the shower door shut and Ted's humming begin, her resolve dissipated. She wrestled out his wallet and flipped it open. Her hands shook as she made her first quick scan; she didn't see Lucinda. She inhaled deeply and went through the pictures again. This time she turned each plastic sleeve with care and looked for any pictures hidden between the photos that faced out on either side. Nothing.

The pipes clinked as the water shut off. She crammed the wallet back in his pants, grabbed her book, jumped on the bed and started to read. She believed him now. A smile of relief locked on her face.

Ted walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. "What are you grinning about?"

"Just waiting for you," she said with outstretched arms. Ted dropped the towel and joined her in bed. Ellen gave her passion full rein – her fears of the last few months laid to rest.

_I was stupid that night_ , she thought now. _Stupid. Stupid. Stupid_. She grabbed her robe and stomped into the shower.

## 7

FOUR DAYS LATER, Lucinda led Dr. Evan Spencer into an interrogation room. "Please have a seat, doctor," she said as she eased into a chair. They sat on opposite sides of an ugly gray metal table. He was even better looking in person than he was in the studio portrait she'd seen in his home, she noticed. She thought in an odd way the pain in his eyes animated his features and brightened his face.

She laid a manila envelope on the surface. "I know it is difficult for you to talk to me right now. I want you to know I appreciate your willingness to do so. And I want to thank you for rushing back from your trip overseas."

He studied her face. The repulsion or pity she often saw in others' eyes was absent from his stare. His lips parted as if ready to ask a question or make a comment about what he saw. Then he shook his head and clamped his mouth shut. After a moment he said, "Did you think I wouldn't?"

Lucinda studied his face without making a response.

"It wasn't a pleasure trip, Lieutenant. It was work – important work."

"I understand that, Doctor. I'm fully aware of the reason you were in Afghanistan. The fact that you had to leave ahead of schedule only adds to the tragedy."

"I love the work I do for Doctors Without Borders. But I love my wife – and my daughters – more."

"Of course," Lucinda said and slid the envelope across the table to the new widower. "Here is your wife's jewelry. Her autopsy is complete but we've kept her clothing for further analysis. We can release her to the funeral home of your choice at any time."

"How did Kate die – was she killed with that concrete block?"

I hate that question, she thought as she struggled to find the right words. He is a suspect now but he might only be a victim in the end. "It appears as if Kathleen died from strangulation. The coroner believes she was already gone before the concrete block was used."

Evan threw his hands to his face and leaned into them with his elbows resting on the table. Lucinda sat quietly waiting for Evan to resume the conversation. He slid his hands up over his face and ran his fingers through his hair to the back of his neck. "I guess that's supposed to make me feel better."

"I don't think anything could make you feel better right now, Doctor."

"That bastard has to pay."

"We are following up every lead we can, sir. We want – I am determined – to get justice for your wife."

"Well, that's just not going to happen, is it?"

"We are doing everything we can, Dr. Spencer. We have devoted massive resources—"

"Damn your resources. It doesn't matter what you bring into play here, Lieutenant," he interrupted. "Justice for Kate means that she would walk into her home and hug her daughters and the man who killed her would be the one lying dead on the floor. That would be justice. You can't manage that, can you?"

"No sir. We can't do that. I wish—"

"Keep your wishes. They're not going to do me or my daughters any damn good." He picked up the envelope, squeezed the metal fastener and upended the package. The contents slid out onto the table. "Where's her ring?"

Lucinda pointed to a small gold band. "There it is, sir."

"Not that. Not her wedding band. Her engagement ring. Where is it?"

"She wasn't wearing one."

"She had to be. She always wore it. She never took if off. He stole it."

"You think she might have been killed because someone wanted to steal her ring?"

"It was a valuable ring but what he did to take it makes no sense. He didn't have to be so violent. He didn't have to kill her."

"He? Do you know – or suspect – who took her ring?"

"The bastard who killed her – who else?"

"Just how valuable was the ring, Dr. Spencer?"

"Don't know. I haven't had it appraised in years. I paid at least ten thousand for it when I bought it."

Lucinda flipped out her notepad. "Can you describe it to me?"

"It's unusual – custom-made. If you find it, you'll know it. It was a two-carat emerald-cut diamond with a small heart-shaped ruby on each side. The points holding the diamond were shaped like small leaves."

"Sounds lovely," Lucinda said.

"My wife is lovely, Lieutenant. The ring was just a thing."

"Yes, but a ring that valuable could make robbery a motive."

Evan did not respond. He hung his head and stared at the surface of the table.

"Dr. Spencer, do you know of anyone who would want to hurt your wife?"

He raised his head, looked in Lucinda's eye then shifted his gaze back down.

"Do you know anyone who was angry with her? Anyone she may have slighted or insulted?"

Evan raised his head again; this time he maintained eye contact. "Lieutenant, when I tell you Kate is lovely, I mean it in every way. Sure, she is a beautiful woman to look at – but she's more. She's warm. She's caring. She's a wonderful mother and a supportive wife.

"People think of a mathematician and they think cold and remote. Kate isn't like that. She lights up any room she enters. She embraces the world. She is kind to everyone – even those who don't deserve it."

Lucinda remained silent, her eye focused on his face. She hoped her quiet would compel him to continue. Instead, Evan averted his eyes. Was he avoiding the sight of her face? Or was he avoiding her?

He pushed around the jewelry he'd dumped from the envelope. Then he picked up the watch and looked at the black smudge on its face. "A fingerprint?" he asked.

"Your wife's. I'm sorry. I should have cleaned that up for you."

"I'm glad you didn't. I never will. It's a unique piece of her," he said and sighed. He fingered her gold wedding band and the small gold hoop earrings. Then he picked up the tarnished silver chain with a turquoise cross and dangled it in front of Lucinda. "This does not belong to Kate."

"Are you sure Dr. Spencer?"

"Absolutely."

"She was wearing it when we arrived on the scene."

"It is not hers," he said pushing his chair back from the table and rising to his feet. He shook the cross in Lucinda's direction. "She would not wear this."

"I realize it's not an expensive piece, sir. But she may have just taken a liking to it. It was a minor purchase and maybe she just never showed it to you."

"No!" he shouted. "She would not buy this. She would not wear this." He clenched his teeth and nodded his head. "He put it there. He put it there to taunt her." He dropped the chain as if it were molten metal. It clattered on to the table.

"Who put it there?"

"The bastard who murdered my wife. He must have known – he must have hated her to put that thing around her neck."

"I just don't understand why you would jump to those conclusions, Dr. Spencer. Do you know who took her life? How can you be so sure your wife wouldn't wear this necklace?"

Spencer slammed his hands on to the table and leaned toward Lucinda. "Lieutenant. My wife. Is Jewish."

"Has her Judaism caused problems with other people? Did someone threaten her? Intimidate her?"

"No. Nothing like that."

"No racial epithets?"

"Of course not."

"Is there anyone in the neighborhood who would be bothered about a Jewish woman living there?"

"I don't think any of the neighbors knew. She didn't practice her religion."

"Was it a problem in your marriage, Dr. Spencer?"

"Of course not," he snapped. Then he slumped back into the chair. "Sorry. Maybe it was a problem, in a way. I was raised a Methodist but I didn't go to church any longer. I guess I really never had that solid core of faith. When we married, Kate said she didn't either. But the last couple of years, she's done some soul-searching and found that she did after all.

"We talked about it a lot. I think Kate is like a lot of people. They leave home. They react against becoming anything like their parents. Then they get a little older. The children come and some – like Kate – find they're ready to embrace the faith of their fathers once again."

"Did that bother you?"

"No. It bothers Kate though. She worries that if she revitalizes her faith and introduces it to the girls, it might alienate them from me."

"Was that a concern for you?"

"I didn't see it that way and I told her so. She said she might go see a rabbi while I was in Afghanistan. I told her I thought that was a good idea."

"You didn't worry about your daughters practicing Judaism?"

"I was raised in a home where you went to church because of social expectations. Kate, on the other hand, was raised in a religiously observant household. That home environment molded her and played a major role in creating the woman I married. Kate is wonderful, warm – almost perfect. I couldn't want anything less for my two little girls." Evan's head fell back into his hands. His shoulders shook but he made no sound.

When he raised his head, his eyes were wet. "Lieutenant, I really want to get back to my girls. Do you need anything else?"

"No, Dr. Spencer. That's enough for now. Thank you so much for your time. I'm so sorry . . ."

He waved her words of sympathy away and pushed on the table as he rose. He dropped his wife's watch, wedding band and earrings in the pocket of his jacket. He pointed to the cross on the table. "That I don't ever want to see again."

Lucinda nodded. Evan left the room and Lucinda stood in the doorway watching him walk down the hall with hunched shoulders and a rapid stride. The door to the next room opened and Ted stepped into the hall.

"You saw it all?" Lucinda asked.

"Yeah."

"What do you think?"

"He seemed sincere – grief-stricken."

"He did. But he also seemed very angry."

"Hey, Lucinda, you would be angry, too, if your spouse had just been murdered and your three-year-old witnessed it all."

"Yes, you're right. But still—"

"He often referred to his wife in the present tense," Ted said. "That usually indicates a lack of guilt."

"But did you notice he never asked who did it? Never asked if we had any leads?"

"That was a little odd. Is that all that's bothering you?"

"Yes. No. Maybe. I just have the feeling he knows something."

"Like what?"

"Who the killer is. Why she died. I don't know. Something. He knows something he doesn't want me to know."

"You really think so?"

"Yeah. But maybe he isn't aware of what he knows. But there's knowledge there, Ted. I can taste it. I can roll it around in my mouth. The flavor is familiar but I can't identify it. And I won't stop until I do."

_THE TROPHY EXCHANGE: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

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# THE DARK POOL

** **

**By**

**J.E. Fishman**
**  
**

This market's a KILLER.

Three men's lives on a knife's edge...

Shoog Clay: The nation's winningest inner-city high school football coach resists pressure to move up to the college level because his kids in the Bronx mean everything to him. But more powerful people won't take no for an answer.

Antwon Meeps: One day Harriet Tubman High School's star running back is a shoe-in for a college scholarship. The next day he's accused of a rape he didn't commit, his life begins unraveling, and he doesn't know how to stop it.

The Mean: This incognito Greenwich hedge fund manager is so rich he keeps a giant sea creature as his pet. But a risky investment threatens to ruin him, and a stubborn high school football coach holds the key to his redemption.

Soon a tragic hanging in the school gymnasium will lay bare a secret force that none of these men understands. In a "dark pool" marketplace, insatiable Wall Street players have wagered everything on certain real-world outcomes. When fortunes hang in the balance, financiers cloaked in anonymity won't hesitate to pay off their claims with the blood of others.

"With The Dark Pool, J.E. Fishman has created a gripping story with great characters and a stirring dilemma at its core. A top-notch read for suspense fans." --Lou Aronica,  bestselling author

## Prologue

IN THE TOWN of Greenwich, Connecticut, office buildings rarely betray the power of the players inside. Consistent with that principle, a man who privately called himself The Mean had chosen to occupy the second floor of a modest four-story brick building within easy walking distance of both Putnam and Greenwich Avenues. The former was a major thoroughfare, two lanes in either direction. The latter, which locals simply called The Avenue, was a one-way street on a steep hill between Putnam and the railroad tracks. Lined with tony shops and expensive restaurants, it furnished a promenade for people who drove Maybachs and Ferraris, Bentleys and Land Rovers. At two key intersections, traffic cops policed both moving cars and pedestrians, who often received tickets for jaywalking.

If Manhattan's streets, crowded and chaotic, resembled a grotesque Hieronymus Bosch painting, the neat roads of Greenwich—just thirty miles away—were a delicate Vermeer, calm and ordered.

The Mean didn't do metaphors. He lived a life of numbers and exactitude, oblivious to all that he considered superfluous. He paid no attention to food or cars and little attention to the bespoke suits that he wore more out of habit than from any sense of style. Today he had his jacket off with his vest fully buttoned, no tie, and wore black suede shoes, contrary to advice from his Paul Stuart tailor and the girl behind the accessories counter of Richards department store. On his right wrist, a Patek Philippe Chronograph Manual watch with a brown lizard band poked out from the french cuff. Collectors would know that the watch had cost more than two hundred thousand dollars. For his part, The Mean rarely thought of it, and when he did so he considered the expense no more than a curiosity.

Every trader on the floor that day also knew the price of the watch and the suit and the cufflinks and the shoes. They knew the price of every car that crammed The Avenue and of half the real estate in the town's back country, where hedge fund moguls built great residences as monuments to their own genius.

The Mean never worried about any of that. He cared only that traders in this room knew the price of everything within their purview. If they faltered, The Mean surely would not. He walked among them in the open-plan trading floor and peered over their shoulders: two dozen men and women whose jobs involved shaving a microgram of copper from every penny that crossed their screens.

And what crossed their screens each second were a great deal of pennies. Trillions, in fact.

At this moment the gross number of pennies didn't concern The Mean. It was only background noise, like the white paint on the walls and the stained paper coffee cups strewn about nearby workspaces. Between groups of desks and on the perimeter, giant tanks of colorful fish and live coral divided the office. There were eighty-one varieties of fish inside and thirteen varieties of coral—six hundred and fifteen organisms in all. That wasn't a number The Mean needed to know, but he had chosen to track it because the fish inside those tanks fascinated him. They seemed to be flitting about aimlessly, but if you studied them carefully you learned that their behavior comported to a set of rules most of the time. To know those rules was to know the school's next move.

_Insight must be married to discipline_ _._

The exact time of day was another important data point for The Mean. It was now thirteen minutes to four. He might have consulted his chronograph, but he could read the time by the corner of every Bloomberg terminal in the room and by a row of plain dial clocks on the wall: New York—London—Hong Kong—Tokyo. In addition to knowing the price of everything traders always knew how much time remained before markets opened or closed. And in addition to these two bits of information, one other set of figures preoccupied them: the number of shares of specific holdings within their portfolios.

Now, thirteen minutes before the closing bell in New York, The Mean began to indicate the exact moment each trader would close out his or her position. He looked over the shoulder of a beautiful young brunette in a pinstriped business suit. The frill of a satin bra highlighted her cleavage, but The Mean didn't process that any more than he processed her hair or her striking beauty or the perfume she always wore. He ran an index finger along the edge at the top of her computer terminal, back and forth, back and forth, while he watched shares measured in hundredths change values within fractions of a second. When he saw what he wanted, he flicked his middle finger upon her terminal, making a faint ticking sound. She immediately picked up her phone and began working her keyboard. When you were trading hundreds of millions of dollars a day, you didn't trust computers alone.

The Mean calmly walked up behind a middle-aged man on the other side of the coral reef divider. This trader had been with The Mean for a long time—eleven years—which had made him prematurely gray but very rich. The Mean ran his index finger back and forth on the edge of the man's terminal and flicked.

Phone picked up. Keyboard tapped. Another set of positions began to close.

And so it went. _Approach. Rub-rub. Flick_ _._ With thirty seconds to spare, the last trader closed the last position. By four o'clock, The Mean's operation appeared to have settled for the day and those who traded for him in the New York markets believed that the firm rested on solid financial footing.

But The Mean and his partner knew better. Only they knew that their trading operation flirted every moment with oblivion.

**PART I**

**_LONG_**

## 1

TWO HOURS INTO his visit to Somset Lake, Georgia, Antwon Meeps felt on top of the world.

They sat on a scrap of field grass around a pair of old tables with formica pieces cracked off of them. What remained on the tabletop looked to Antwon like the silhouettes of states on an unidentifiable map. The exposed wood had turned black with mildew, and the chairs were no better. They'd been chrome once but their shine had gone to rust. The remains of the cushioned seats managed to be slippery and lumpy at the same time, so that once you settled your ass into a comfortable spot, you kept it there. And when you had to adjust, you never gave up your point of contact, just tilted the chair onto one or two legs like you were riding a bronc in slow motion.

The guy across from Antwon was a high school dropout with bad teeth, said to be the fastest man in south Georgia. _Who said? Fast Man did_. And that afternoon no one argued.

Yet there were other points to be made. Antwon gripped the back of his chair and lifted his feet off the ground, hanging on two chair legs. He ended the impromptu demonstration and reported, "Coach says balance is the key to everything."

Fast Man—real name Dewine or Demint, something like that—considered Coach Shoog Clay's advice, courtesy of Antwon Meeps, then squinted and nodded.

The way he did that made Antwon sit up on the broken chair and raise his shoulders to emphasize every one of his two hundred and fifteen pounds. If he had to catch Fast Man between here and the road, Antwon figured he could do it, but it would take a lot to make him bother.

There was something delicious about the overall situation: no one around older than twenty and no pressure to move along. Even the temperature felt mellow, Antwon thought. It could have been cool this time of year, but everyone wore t-shirts. Bright sun warmed the backs of their necks, and the pink flowers of nearby oleander bushes hung in the still air like wilted crepe paper. He knew oleander because Grandma was always showing him pictures back home. It wouldn't grow in the north and she missed it.

Antwon's cousin Randall sat forward and shuffled a sticky deck of cards. They'd been playing Texas Hold 'Em for hours using bottle caps as tender. Nobody cared about the bottle caps, but Antwon couldn't stand a game where people don't keep score. They called him Flash because he was star running back for Harriet Tubman High School back in the Bronx, where he'd concluded the Beacons' championship season with a forty-six yard run from scrimmage. Although that had been weeks ago and miles away, Antwon still wore the glow.

He believed he'd earned this week, lolling about with Randall and seven of his friends behind the social club, telling tales, eating chips and sandwiches, and taking turns snapping cards. Their position overlooked a weedy parking lot that served Lucky's, the convenience store in front. Now and then, someone on the way from picking up a container of milk or a box of spuds sauntered over to bump knuckles and to chat. Just now a woman and her daughter emerged from the store carrying a paper sack.

"Hey, Wanda!"

Fast Man waved her over. She had dark shiny skin and wore shorts and a tube top. The whitish residue of deodorant scalloped the edges of her underarms. Her daughter, maybe fourteen or fifteen, hung back with her arms braided across her stomach, chewing gum in a camisole with spaghetti straps. Wanda directed her attention to the young man who'd shouted.

"Don't you have school, Dewine?"

So Dewine was the name. Fast Man. Guess his feet moved quicker than his lips, because he didn't say anything back at Wanda. For that fleeting moment Antwon felt responsible for protecting them all from accusations of vagrancy. "It's Christmas in two days," he explained.

"That right?" Wanda pouted. "Don't feel like it."

Dewine ignored Antwon's defense and raked his eyes over the daughter. He finally had a line. "Is it the weather or is that steam coming from the heat you two's throwing off?"

"And what are you gonna do about that, school boy?"

"Hush up. You know I'm done."

"Dropped out?"

"I'm working now. We should hang some time."

"You can't afford me."

"No? How much you charging now?"

Four of the boys cracked up and the other five pretended to.

Wanda shook her head with a gleaming white smile. "That's funny, Dewine. If I _was_ charging, you couldn't afford that neither."

The words were harsh but they came out sultry and she took her time retreating. The daughter, for her part, gave the boys a long look as she climbed into the passenger seat of a tattered Buick. It took Wanda three tries to get the engine to turn over.

Randall shook his head. "Practically old enough to be your mother, Dewine. You into cougars now?"

"Take that action for myself any day it's offered, even if it ain't maybe. That daughter of hers, too."

"The girl? She underage."

"She's ready. You see how she's looking? She wanted some of Flash here."

The suggestion made Antwon flush. He called for a card to change the subject, but the game was melting away.

Dewine stood up and stretched. "Three o'clock and this sun has me thirsty. Who wants a nip of something?"

They all nodded and reached into their pockets.

"I'll take a water," Antwon said, producing two dollars.

"You won't!" Randall laughed.

"Coach says water is every athlete's best friend."

"Could be," Dewine said. "For my money there's a bunch of things I'd put ahead of that. I mean,  _water?"_

Two guys, Victor and Terrell, headed for the store. Since the card game had nearly expired of inertia, they were back before the next hand had finished, plopping forty-ounce bottles of Country Club onto the center of each table.

Buck, the other person at Antwon's table, seized the bottle of malt liquor around the neck with one plump hand and took a long series of gulps. He wiped his mouth with his wrist and slid the bottle over in front of Antwon, who passed it straight to Randall.

"What?" his cousin said. "You really not drinking?"

"Coach—"

"Coach?! Season's over, ain't it?" Randall lifted the bottle to his lips, tilted his head back and emptied all but four inches without pausing for breath. He looked damned refreshed, Antwon thought.

Someone put another bottle on the table and Dewine twisted off the top, brought the opening to his lips and practically made love to it. He ran his fingers over the glass. "Pretty good candidate for a real best friend, you ask me."

Antwon couldn't take the implied insult to Coach Clay, who had proved through action that he was right about everything this past year, even if this fool would never see that. "What do you know? You quit track and field."

Randall finished his bottle and tossed it into the oleander. It clattered; there must be others in there. He ran his tongue over one canine. "Chill out, boys. This is a time for celebration, not arguing."

Paulie, who was mottled from that disease Michael Jackson had and tried to hide it under a scraggly beard, rose from a neighboring table and called, "Ante up!" They knew he didn't mean the poker game. He straightened their crumpled dollars as he took long strides back toward the general store.

Buck had barely uttered a word all day. He let out a belch and looked at Antwon as if he'd just landed from the sky. "You want some, dontcha? You didn't come down all this way to bore shit out of us with what some coach told you to do or not."

Antwon had been drinking alcohol since he was twelve, but he'd given it up every school year since making varsity and rarely got drunk even in summer. Now, since he'd practically turned it into a matter of principle, he forced himself to tamp down the growing temptation. He shook his head at Buck and lifted his eyebrows.

"Whatever," Randall said, frowning. "That's my cousin's business. So long as he's ponying up we're all even."

Dewine leaned toward Antwon. "Why _are_ you paying, anyhow?"

"I was hoping for a water. I guess I'll have to get it myself."

Buck waved the bottle of Country Club. "That ain't it. You think you're paying for your entertainment, huh." He reflected. "College next year?"

"Hell, yes. Sports scholarship."

"You think they don't drink in college, them boys?"

"Coach says—"

"Coach! Bet he didn't tell you this here malt is ninety percent water."

## 2

BY SIX O'CLOCK, the town of Somset Lake had grown so quiet that the buzz of three lonely streetlights competed with the crickets. Randall's mother, Antwon's Aunt Marsha, had sent word that she and the girls would be off shopping at the mall an hour's ride north, back by midnight. With no school tomorrow, Randall and Antwon could fend for themselves for supper.

They ate stale disks of pizza that had been kept warm all day under a lamp at Lucky's convenience store, followed by fistfuls of pork rinds and Tastykake Kreamies. They washed it all down with gallons of malt liquor. Then Antwon and Randall and four remaining friends moved their festivities inside the social club, which was no more than a back storage room for castaway fixtures from Lucky's.

In ten hours they'd scarcely moved twenty-five yards, but they'd graduated from cards to foosball and bumper pool. An old boom box, propped on the windowsill, pounded out a Snoop Dogg CD, set on repeat.

Buck's older brother manned Lucky's solo that night, and Buck kept coming and going through the one-person bathroom that connected the two areas. Antwon sensed that Buck's brother didn't appreciate the help that Buck offered, probably because he was visibly drunk, which was why he never lasted on the working side for more than a few minutes.

Dewine watched Buck disappear through the bathroom for a fourth time and rested his hand on a warped and dusty retail gondola. He peered behind it, where an old cot stood jammed into one corner. "There's a case of Jack around here somewhere."

He grabbed hold of a shelf, which buckled when he tugged on it.

"Hey, careful there," Buck said, returning sideways through the tight bathroom and closing the door behind him. He turned down the music a little.

Dewine used his knee to slide the gondola along the floor, producing a screeching noise. He ducked under the cot and dragged forth a case of Jack Daniels liters, a third of which stood empty. Dewine pulled out two full bottles, hesitated, tucked one bottle under his left arm, and withdrew a third. Then he slid the case back home with his toe, sat on the cot, twisted off one cap, filled it and took a shot.

The musty odor of the old mattress, giving up its stale dust, hit Antwon's nostrils before the smell of the bourbon did. He coughed as Dewine passed out the square bottles. Coughed again when he took his first shot.

There were no chairs, so they sat on the floor and the bumper pool table. Antwon had decided hours ago to yield fully to temptation. It amazed him that the Jack burned his throat less with each gulp, like the way exercise got easier the more you did it.

When they'd consumed a bottle and two-thirds, Buck got up and went through the bathroom door again to check on his brother.

The others rose, too, turning up the music and seizing the pool cues. Antwon was beginning to feel that he needed the stick just to stand straight. He took another swig of Jack anyway.

They played for a while, swapping turns and keeping count of the number of balls sunk, then re-racking and continuing the running score. Then Dewine and Paulie got into a dispute about who was ahead, and Dewine hit a shot in anger that sent the cue ball airborne. Buck caught it knee high just as he came through the bathroom door again.

"Hey, fellas. Look who I found."

Emerging from behind him were Wanda and her daughter. They were dressed the same as this afternoon, but Antwon now allowed himself to study them in a different way. Wanda's tube-top didn't leave much to the imagination and her shorts revealed a cleft between her legs. In the dim light, the daughter looked older than she had earlier. Her camisole clung to her tiny breasts and the thighs under her short skirt revealed perfectly smooth skin. She held a chilled bottle of Yahoo in her left hand. It was sweating, and Antwon, with the focus of a drunk, watched a single drop of water roll down the neck, fall through the air, and bead on the dusty floor.

Buck said, "They always wanted to know what was back here, they said. Here it is, ladies: the official Lucky's Main Street Social Club and Lounge." He grinned and Wanda's daughter giggled.

Paulie held out a bottle of Jack, and Wanda needed no convincing. She took a long pull, suppressed a grimace, then followed it with a longer one.

While this was happening, Dewine let out a low yelp. He eased himself behind the two females, closed the bathroom door and slid the foosball table flush against it.

Antwon hungered for any interaction with the girl. He said, "Let me open that for you," took the Yahoo and twisted off the cap. When he passed it back to her, he accepted the bottle of Jack from Paulie and made a big show of downing his next shot.

"Started with water." Dewine humphed. "Now an expert." He approached Wanda with his hands out. "What about you?"

"What about me what?"

"You like Jack?"

"Who doesn't?"

"What else turns you on?"

"Gimme some more and I'll tell you."

She set down her grocery sack and took two more swigs of the bourbon. They passed it around once again, but Antwon pretended to be looking off. The truth was, his head had begun to spin. He felt like he was losing control, tried to rein it in, and failed. He raked his eyes over the girl and touched her on the arm, just to feel her young heat. She wasn't that much younger than he'd been two or three years ago, he reasoned. Two years meant nothing.

Wanda said, "Got any more of that?" The bottles were all empty.

"Sure do, for you, sugar," Randall said. "This way."

"I'll get it," Paulie said. "Come on, Wanda, I'll show you."

Randall and Paulie went together toward the gondola, Wanda following out of curiosity, like she might find Aladdin's cave back there. Dewine stepped up behind her and put his hands on her hips, as if he needed the leverage to peer over her shoulder. She rolled her eyes, but he didn't see that or chose to ignore it. He'd gone into his own zone. He pressed in closer.

"Mom," the girl said.

"Right here, baby. Just a minute."

They had another two bottles of Jack out and Wanda took another pull. She said something Antwon didn't hear, something to be funny, and attempted to take a step back toward the center of the room, but the three boys had her trapped. She pushed harder and Dewine lowered a shoulder into her, blocked her with a forearm across her ribs.

"If I'm buying," he said, "let's see the goods in exchange."

"I told you," Wanda said, slapping his arm away. "Out of your price range."

She tried again to brush him aside, but he had her by the shirt. Dewine tugged and the tank top came down and Antwon saw one of Wanda's breasts flop out, exposing a large dark nipple. Shelving hid the other half of her.

"Hey, asshole!" she said.

Dewine backed her toward the cot and she fell backward, hitting her head against the wall. Randall and Paulie, pretending to help, began groping at her.

Antwon took a step toward them, drawling, "Hey. Easy now." But Randall and his friends ignored him. It had become a full-on wrestling match back there, Wanda issuing expletives and slapping at the boys, whose hands now descended upon her like a school of piranhas relentlessly nipping their prey.

The sound came of a seam ripping, Antwon figured her shorts.  _Jesus._  Dewine had his pants open and the other two were holding her down.

Wanda's daughter made for the cot and, on impulse, Antwon caught her arm and yanked her out the door, her bottle of Yahoo hitting the floor. "Let's go for a walk."

"My momma!"

"You don't want to see that."

"Momma!" She turned to him in the dark. "Why don't you do something? Are you gonna rape me, too?"

"They're not raping her. They're just having fun. Let's take a walk."

They heard Wanda screaming now. Her voice came to them through the walls and cracked windows.

Antwon still had a grip of the girl's wrist. "Tell me your name."

"Becka," she conceded.

"Becka, can I buy you another drink? You dropped yours."

"You're not gonna help her?"

"Look. They're my friends in there. She's a grown-up. She shoulda known what she was getting into..."

They stood in the shadow of the building. The whites of Becka's eyes reflected the streetlights.

"Look it!" Antwon said.

He grabbed Becka by the other wrist and dragged her to the edge of the woods. She might have yelled, but she didn't. Antwon wasn't worrying about how it looked, in any case. He thought of her mother in there, flat on her back, Randall and his friends running a train on her. It made him dizzy. He let go Becka's wrist as they reached the oleander, leaned through the bushes, and puked into a sea of discarded bottles.

## 3

WHEN SCHOOL WAS in session, Coach Shoog Clay worked himself out in the weight room alongside his players. But during holiday breaks like the one today, his two-room garden apartment sufficed.

Shoog pulled open the bedroom blinds and let the morning sun pour fully in. His apartment faced due east and the misshapen slats of the blinds couldn't compete with that low-slung ball of fire. If you overslept your alarm and the noise of the street didn't get you up, the sun's harsh rays eventually would.

His eyes shot open at precisely 7:17 a.m., although he could barely read the alarm clock for the glare. Still in his boxers and ribbed wife-beater, he did several squat-pushup-leg-thrust series, followed by three two-minute wall sits, enough leg lifts to make his lower abdominals cramp, and triceps push-ups that ended in muscle failure. He finished it off with a plank that he sustained until his hip flexors trembled so badly that he collapsed on his face laughing.

After brushing his teeth, Shoog pulled on a pair of jeans and a winter coat. His once blond hair, now graying, stood uncombed and he was unshaven and still sweating when he walked into his favorite coffee shop, Sal's, and took a seat toward the back, where he could read yesterday's _New York Post_ unmolested and listen to the morning news on a television that faced the kitchen pass-through.

Miguel, the owner of Sal's, cracked a roll of nickels against an edge of the cash drawer and clattered them into the coin cup. "What'll it be, Shoog?"

"Triple soy non-fat crunchy granola screw-top lat- _tay_  with an extra shoelace, hold the aglets."

"This ain't Starbucks. Therefore...the usual?"

"Vacation special."

"So you want your egg sandwich on a plate today?"

"That's what I said, Miguel. Eating in, no hurry. The coffee fresh?"

"I just put on another pot. Give it a minute."

"You're a prince."

"It's you, Coach. You know how to get the best out of everyone."

"Aw, shut up. Just before winter break half the student body was blowing smoke up my ass. Which reminds me."

He reached into a coat pocket and extracted a pile of envelopes, most addressed to Shoog. He found the one on which he'd written Miguel's name, leaned forward and flipped it across the empty restaurant like a frisbee. Miguel missed the catch and the envelope skimmed the counter and landed atop a pastry box. He snatched it up and wiped his free hand on his apron.

"Para mí?"

"No. The other Miguel."

Shoog looked down and sorted his remaining envelopes by size. Some had been sent through the mail and others delivered by the hands of his students. He slid a thumb under the back flap of one just as he heard Miguel slit his open with a knife.

_Picture of a dove holding an olive branch in its beak in the middle of a wreath. One word below: Noël. Inside only an illegible signature and, in parentheses, "Romero's mother."_ That was strange, because Romero's mother was known to be AWOL. Harriet Tubman High School's wiry star receiver lived with his great aunt, the nearest relative that social workers could identify with any means of financial support. Maybe she'd adopted him now or maybe she only meant to establish the pecking order.

"What the hell's the matter with you, Shoog?" Miguel came out from behind the counter, waving the envelope.

"What?" Shoog tucked all the mail back into his coat pocket.

"A gift card? You can't do this. You're  _my_  customer, not the other way around."

Miguel tried pushing the card back at Shoog, who stood up and raised his open palms in mock self defense. "It's just Kohl's. I had an extra, must've miscounted."

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Twenty bucks. I dunno. Buy yourself a new apron or something."

"You bastard." Miguel broke into a smile and they embraced. "Breakfast's on me. Vacation special. No tipping." He hesitated. "Ain't you gonna open them other cards?"

Shoog shook his head. "I like to string it out. Gives me something to look forward to with the season behind me."

"You're too much. Any money in there?"

"I doubt it. If I worked up in Scarsdale, maybe."

Miguel retreated back to his counter, poked his head inside the kitchen and spoke to the griddle man, Luis.

"Extra bacon," Shoog heard.

"Not for me!" he called back to them, patting his paunch. He was solid rock somewhere down there, but the crust was five inches of blubber.

A few minutes later, Shoog watched Miguel pour his steaming coffee into a large porcelain mug just as a couple of young men in do-rags walked in, bouncing off their toes. Miguel was in the process of placing the mug on the counter as they crowded in front of him. One slapped a handgun down on its side, rattling the plexiglas screen that guarded the muffins and empanadas.

"The money!"

Miguel retreated a step and threw up his hands.

"The money! The money!"

With a long reach, Miguel rang open the drawer at the same moment that Luis stepped into the kitchen doorway from his workspace. He found the gun pointed at him.

"Freeze, chef!" The guy with the gun looked jumpy as his partner reached around and grabbed a fistful of cash.

Shoog had eased the newspaper to his right hip when the gun hit the counter. They were paying him no mind, just a harmless guy waiting for his breakfast. He was a big man, though—a linebacker once—with quick feet. Without giving it a thought he popped from his seat and rushed them. Shoving the open  _Post_  into the face of the gunman, he snatched up the coffee mug and flung the hot liquid right into the other's eyes. He grabbed the wrist of the gunman as Miguel and Luis ducked, but no shot went off.

The gunman let go and both men behind the counter straightened up. Shoog, to his surprise, found the gun in his hand. He threw it through the kitchen door, where it skittered across the floor, and a wrestling match began, three on two.

One guy slipped out of his coat and got away, but they had the gunman pressed to the floor. Luis saw a beat cop pass and ran out the door and flagged him down.

In a minute they had the bad guy in cuffs and Luis dropped to his hands and knees, retrieving the gun from his kitchen.

"Sonavabitch!" Miguel said, as another cop showed up, report pad in hand. "My friend here did the whole thing with a newspaper and a cup a coffee!"

The cop turned to Shoog.

"Just a guess," the coach said, bending and picking up some fallen dollar bills, "...those guys don't do this every day."

A moment later, Luis emerged from the kitchen, holding the pistol by the barrel with a dish towel. He handed it gingerly to the nearest cop.

"Burned them damn eggs, Shoog. Gotta start again."

## 4

MIRANDA SARK HAD her cell phone out when Shoog arrived at school for his last meeting of the year. She pressed it to her ear while staring into space with quiet fury.

Shoog felt his own phone vibrate in his back pocket.  _Miranda_ _._  He held it up and waved it at her.

"You're late."

"I got held up."

"Shoog!" She rolled her eyes, speechless. The soft ends of her hair, the color of barley, rested on the collar of a brown silk shirt. Her black wool skirt ended below the knee, and her shoes had heels. Furthermore, she was wearing more makeup than usual.

"You look beautiful. You clean up well."

"You— Tuck your shirt in, at least."

He had put on a tie and such, per her instructions, along with his finest dress sneakers, in an attempt to look—if not sharp exactly—like he was trying, at least. But his outdated slacks, the waistband of which settled below his paunch, resisted the notion.

Miranda turned and sprung into a crisp walk down the hall. "Eleven o'clock sharp, Emily said. You know how she is."

Emily Tang was the school principal. They privately called her Emily Enema because she gave it to everyone up the ass. The fact that Miranda now used the woman's proper name was a measure of how anxious she felt.

Shoog glanced at the time on his phone. "Ten minutes never killed anyone."

"Says you. We both know how she is with her damned navy training. This isn't a high school to her, it's a battleship. A submarine, more like—and she's got a death grip on the periscope."

"She's always been wound a little tight. I wouldn't take it personally."

"Shut up. I once heard that in Catholic seminaries they ring the bell every twenty minutes during meditation: sit, stand, kneel. You drop whatever you're doing and change your position. She must get pictures like that in her head every time the school bell rings. You know this, Shoog. Emily should've been a mother superior, not a public school principal."

"Well, she's here now."

"And on the warpath." Miranda's lips were like down pillows. She plumped the lower one. "And we're late, which makes me look bad as your boss. She'll suspect whose fault it is, too, which makes me seem incompetent, suggests I can't keep you in line."

"I'm sorry, Mandy. I really did get held up. Or Sal's did. Armed robbery."

They rounded the corner and stopped at the entrance to the administrative suite. She whispered, "You were there?"

"Having a leisurely breakfast. Forced me to intervene and then I had to stick around to give my side to the cops. Could be in the papers tomorrow if somebody talks."

"Holy crap. Everyone's okay? You're okay?"

He smiled. "Never better."

They came to the desk of Principal Tang's assistant, Penny, who waved them right through with a sympathetic wince.

Miranda started right in. "Ms. Tang, my apologies. I was caught up on a phone call with a concerned parent. One of my softball players. Marginal grades."

Shoog liked that Miranda was lying to cover for him. He loved her a lot and this made him love her all the more.

Unfortunately, she wasn't any good at it. Emily Enema looked down her nose with practiced skepticism. She was a dark-skinned Asian-American, chubby with a round face and permed hair that fell over her temples in tight curlicues. Behind her big oak desk hung pictures of  _Saturday Evening Post_  images, probably dating from the last time any New York public school principal had a budget for decorating.

Shoog sat upright in his chair, sneakers on the floor. His hands closed over the ends of the armrests as if to brace himself for flight. He interrupted Miranda. "It was my fault, too. Car trouble. I'm sorry. I know your time is valuable."

Miranda broke off her own excuses and gave Shoog a resigned look. Together they fell into silence.

Tang had a manila folder lying before her on the desk. The tab said, "Clay, Jonathan ('98)"—1998 being the year that Shoog had been hired, in this very room, by Tang's predecessor. The folder also had some color-coded stripes on it that Shoog didn't understand. He suspected that one of them indicated he was a male and that another told Tang at a glance that he held tenure. The other codes—who knew?—maybe said he threw right-handed, liked the female gender, and lived alone. The woman was nothing if not well organized.

"Ms. Stone, please come in here."

Penny entered, closed the door and sat off to the side, legs crossed, stenographer's pad poised on her bony knee.

Tang nodded and spoke the time and date, as if she were conducting a deposition. Then she said, "Let's get started with your mid-year review, Mr. Clay."

Shoog forced a smile, on one level hating Tang's formality but on another level accustomed to it by now. She was famous for ruling by intimidation and innuendo, but Shoog considered himself a solid citizen who had brought great acclaim to the school with his six football championships. Deep down, not much bothered him. When he worried at all he figured that he had fans in high places and tenure and the protections afforded to all civil servants.

"First of all, congratulations on another championship."

"Unprecedented," Miranda added.

Tang backed her off with an insincere smile. "Your performance in physical education classes has been consistent, if not stellar. I want to acknowledge"—she turned to Penny—"that I know it's hard to keep it together with the equipment shortage. Ms. Sark, in her own review, promised to work extra hard to do better next year, perhaps re-budgeting some professional development funds, which we can do unless Tweed"—the old Tweed Courthouse, Board of Education headquarters—"decides to put a special emphasis on fitness re-training next year or that sort of thing."

"I'm sure we can scrape by. With enough motivation, a person can get ripped just using his body, the floor and a nearby wall."

"And motivation is your specialty, isn't it?" Tang opened Shoog's folder and fingered a small folded card with a picture of Santa on it dunking a basketball.

Miranda sat forward and pressed her knees together. "Shoog takes kids who ordinarily wouldn't leave bed for class and gets them here with near perfect attendance."

Tang gave a curt nod. She lifted the card from the folder and spread it open with the fingers of one hand, revealing a plastic Kohl's gift card. "Is bribery one of your proven techniques, Mr. Clay?"

"How'd you get that, Emily?"

"Abeeku Rawlings threw it down in the hall. Maybe it wasn't enough incentive for him."

"It's twenty bucks...all I can afford. Not incentive, either, just a Christmas gift. He threw it down, you say?"

"Threw it, dropped it—what's the difference?—treated it with enough consideration not to hold onto it."

"With all due respect," Miranda piped up, "I doubt that. Anyone can lose something now and then. It's not necessarily a sign of contempt."

"No. But it's not a sign of respect, either. More to the point, I have expressly forbidden faculty giving gifts to the students. Or don't you think that rule applies to football coaches."

"Is that a question?" Shoog asked.

"Not really, no. It's a statement. I won't have my rules flaunted, not by anyone. I've put a warning into your file."

"Ms. Tang," Miranda began, "I'm sorry this happened. I thought Shoog—uh, Mr. Clay—and I had been through this and things were clear." She gave him a withering look.

Shoog fondled the tip of his tie. "In the scheme of things, Emily, I didn't think a few gift cards mattered much to your policy. They matter to the kids a lot, though. Mostly they use them to buy some small clothing items for themselves or for their families. Last year, Ralph Diaz bought underwear with his, so he could stop wearing his older brother's hand-me-downs. The brother suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and wets the bed. That doesn't leave this room, I hope." Shoog looked over at Penny, who felt his eyes upon her and stopped writing.

Tang directed her attention at Miranda. "He's right, on one level, that this is a small thing, but it's a symptom of something larger, a program at risk of slipping out of control. In my experience, these things are best nipped in the bud."

"It will be," Miranda said weakly.

There was a pause as Tang waved Penny from the room and had her close the door.

"Something much bigger," she said, "is the matter of the football program's funding. This so-called anonymous donor—I want the name."

"I can't." Shoog frowned.

"You will."

"I don't know who it is. The funds, as you know, wash through the Board of Ed."

"It's all on the up and up," Miranda added. "The donor is vetted for conflicts of interest and all that."

Tang closed her eyes. "This year we had to cut the budget in half for library books, eliminate some electives, curtail discretionary spending. Yet the football program skates along and this donor doesn't contribute a nickel toward the general well-being of the school, not even to the rest of the phys ed program. I'd like to make a personal appeal to this person at the least, on behalf of the other programs."

"I don't know," Shoog said. "He's guarded his privacy pretty jealously until now."

"You're sure you don't know his name?"

Miranda shook her head. "We swear, Ms. Tang. Why don't you try Tweed?"

"I have. No luck."

Shoog dropped his tie and readjusted himself in the chair. "It's a tough thing. We should be grateful to have this individual, and clearly he doesn't wish to be known. Does it really make sense to rock the boat?"

"That's for me to judge, Mr. Clay. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I have a whole school to run, not just a football program. I'm asking you firmly to get me the name. The football program is secondary to my students' education."

"You kidding, Emily? Have you checked the grades of my football players? They're above average by every measure."

"Acknowledged, Mr. Clay, but they're one percent of the student body. What about the rest? Maybe your donor can be made to care, and I don't seem to have the power to get his name myself right now. But, notwithstanding the adulation that seems to follow you everywhere, I can remind you that a football program in New York City is a privilege, not a right."

"You're not saying—"

"Get me the name, Mr. Clay."

_THE DARK POOL: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

Visit J.E. Fishman online

# COUNTING COUP

**by**

**G. D. Gearino**
**  
**

"God help you if you ever get a second chance."

So writes Tad Beckman, a bored and cynical newspaper columnist who learns the hard way the truth behind that thought. After dismissing a reader who'd called for his help in dealing with an abusive husband, and later learning she'd been murdered by him, Tad goes into temporary exile before returning to the newspaper world.

Landing in Miami, Tad falls in love with a beautiful woman fleeing a violent ex-husband who has launched a million-dollar fraud scheme. Given a second chance, and reinvigorated both professionally and personally, Tad succeeds in derailing the fraud. But what he thinks is the end of the story is actually the beginning of an odyssey that takes him to a remote coastal village in Georgia, where he finally understands the truth: of his lover, of her ex-husband's scheme, of Tad's own family secret, and of the idea that justice is sometimes wrought in curious ways.

##  1

_ _

_THE TOOTHLESS, FAT kid died Sunday._

_You probably remember him. Perhaps you were on a city bus one morning when he climbed aboard and stood in the front, preaching the gospel in earnest tones and stepping aside politely at each stop to let new riders aboard. Or maybe you saw him on the sidewalk one day as he sat on the curb to enjoy a typical meal of take-out fried chicken and three or four bananas, watching in awe as he gobbled away happily. The fat kid was a two-fisted eater, but generous. Chances are, he offered you a drumstick. I'll bet you declined._

_Maybe you saw him stop somebody one day to shake hands. He did that a lot. He made a little ritual of it, introducing himself to two people every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The lucky ones got the morning shift, because after lunch his hand was sure to be slick with chicken grease. He wasn't subtle about_ _it—y_ _ou_ _could see him a half-block away peering into faces trying to decide who to stop and meet_ — _and most people were alert enough to duck into a store or cross to the other side. I did, countless times._

_But he made his quota every day. Two people a day, week in and week out, for the several years of his short career. By my estimate, he probably introduced himself to 4,000 people._ _So why did so few people know his name?_

_Let me answer a question with a question: Who wants to be pals with a retarded, ungainly, toothless, beefy kid who rides buses around all day and pesters you about Jesus?_

_It doesn't matter now, anyway. He died of a brain tumor, so he won't be shaking hands and preaching on buses anymore. But I learned a few things about the toothless, fat kid in recent days that I'd like to tell you._

_His name was Benjamin Lee Woodward, Jr., and he was 23 years old. He lived with his widowed mother in Barrington Heights, which isn't really high at all. In fact, it's a place where all the runoff seems to end up after a hard rain, flooding yards and filling ditches. Benny's mother says the rain indirectly caused him to be the way he was. When he was little, he fell into an open storm sewer drain after a hard rain and nearly drowned, she says. He was never right after that, she says._

_Yeah, maybe, says Barrington police Sgt. Monroe Finch. But he also remembers being called to Barrington Memorial Hospital one evening after one of her boyfriend's titanic, drunken rages. Little Benny was there, a five-year-old with an old brawler's bruises: a black eye, an ear that looked like someone had tried to twist it off, and eyes with pupils in two different sizes, a sure sign of brain trauma._

_No charges were filed, Finch remembers. Benny's mom said he fell down the steps, and besides, this was back when children were hurt and not seen. Finch made it a point after that to stop by the Woodward household occasionally to check on Benny. He never found the youngster in that sort of shape again, but what was done was done._

_Benny was in a special class for a while, long enough to learn to read a bit. And at some point_ — _it's not clear when_ — _he heard about Jesus. They became great pals._

_Benny made it his life's work to tell as many people as possible about Jesus. Because I was particularly deft at avoiding both of them, I never heard Benny's pitch. But the drivers of Barrington's buses, where Benny did most of his preaching, heard it often._

_"He would stand in the front, next to me, with the Bible in one hand, and wave and gesture like the preachers do on television," says driver Roland Fellows. "I think he must have watched them a lot. Also, he would pretend to refer to the Bible for a certain passage. But I could see he didn't have it open to the right page. And he mixed up the words sometimes. You know the part in John that says, 'God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son'? Well, Benny would always say 'His only forgotten son.' I tried to help him out with it once, but he couldn't seem to get his tongue wrapped around it."_

_Another driver simply says this: "He was the sweetest human being you'd ever meet."_

_Benny may have had a friend in Jesus, but the drivers became his family. They saw something special in him that eluded people like me. They chipped in and bought him a coat for Christmas. They made sure he always had a little money to give the Colonel for chicken. And finally, they carried his coffin._

_The toothless, fat kid was dropped in the ground Tuesday, buried with the Bible he misquoted from so often. I attended the service. Afterwards, I went to the drivers' lounge at the municipal bus depot, where Benny's only friends held a wake for him. They toasted his life with soft drinks, told their best stories about him and had lunch._

_Chicken and bananas never tasted so good._

_ _

That's what I do. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, I give you a reason to pick up the morning newspaper. I'll take 750 words or so and arrange them this way or that, and make sure that when you come to the end, I have you in my hand. Some mornings I'll leave you snickering, some mornings I'll leave you outraged, and some mornings I'll leave you dropping tears into your Cheerios.

I don't worry about objectivity, fairness, balance or all the other things that journalists promise to honor. If you want a recitation of the facts, go to the front page. If you want the issues weighed, measured and debated, turn to that wasteland called the editorial pages. Don't ask me to make the picture clear for you. That's somebody else's role. I'm the storyteller, wielder of the gut punch and the fond caress. If in the course of the morning I've angered a politician, offended a few churchgoers, enraged a Rotarian and made an editor squirm and regret the moment he ever gave me this job, then it's a successful day.

I am a creature of twentieth-century American journalism. I am what it invented to battle that strange, twilight coupling of television and ignorance. There was a time when the printed word was how people informed themselves. It was how we were led to our outrage or joy or compassion, whatever the moment called for. Untold millions of us every morning turned to the page that carried H. L. Mencken or Damon Runyon or, later, Jimmy Breslin. There, we found more nuance and subtlety and wisdom about the world, sometimes in a single sentence, than television can deliver in an hour.

But television is the perfect lover for an impatient world: It gives us release without asking us to work for it. Newspapers are now like the stereotype of the first wife—smart and clever as ever, but increasingly shrill as her looks fade and resentment over the livelier, younger competitor builds. These days, too many people drop their quarter into the newspaper box only because their car just died and they need to see who's got another one to be had for a few hundred dollars; or because it's Monday morning, and the standings in the fantasy football league have to be adjusted; or because layoffs are coming at the plant and it's time to see what other jobs are out there.

So newspaper editors need me to stack the words, this way or that. We spend two minutes together three days a week, and we arrive at the end each time either friends or enemies. It's nice if you like me, but I'd prefer that you didn't. I don't want the responsibility of your affection. I've never been all that happy with myself, so it makes me uneasy when others profess to be.

Oh, I'll accept your compliment with a grateful smile, and I'll dash off a note in acknowledgment of your letter. I even gave an autograph once, to a drunk in a bar who insisted I sign a cocktail napkin. But loathing is better: It's much less intrusive, yet just as loyal.

*

Justice tripped me up.

I should have known better. Justice is capricious and treacherous, as anyone who sees its application knows. It cannot be wrought. A wrong is like an iceberg, with most of its mass concealed from sight, and it is the foolish man who seeks to apply justice to what he can see. I knew that.

I also knew from the beginning that truth is likewise elusive. I knew the truth is shaded a thousand different ways, shaped and fitted ever so slightly by whoever held it at the moment before it was handed back to me with the earnest plea: "Just print the truth."

God, how many times did someone call me, write me, stop me on the street to demand that I just tell the truth? How many times did I hear this profoundly impossible request? Tell the truth? I'd love to. I'd love to be able to sort through a dozen different accounts of the same event and extract the truth. I want desperately to plow through court records, accounting statements, police reports or council minutes and be confident that everything was transcribed perfectly and precisely, with no misplaced numbers or transposed words. I've tried to forget that a countless number of the "facts" drummed into me by a parade of teachers, ministers and relatives have been contradicted by more contemporary ideas offered up in a we-really-know-for-sure-this-time tone. Anyone who thinks the truth can be found is a fool, a naive, trusting, dangerous fool. I knew that. But when the time came for me to dispense justice, I forgot it. My foolishness cost me my job and cost my publisher millions of dollars.

Yes, I'm actually on the sidelines now. No longer do I arrange the words this way and that. When I finally learned my lesson, I learned it a little too well, and I now can find certainty only in the smallest places and routines. But even if I wanted back in the game, and I don't, no one would have me. My two failures were high-profile affairs, much discussed and debated. The first was, perversely, a triumph in the beginning, making me a valued commodity to be wooed by editors everywhere. But the second was unforgivable to those very same people, making me an outcast.

*

But this is not a story about journalism. It takes place in and around newspapers, but it's really the tale of one person who knew something and another who had to learn it. That thing is this: God help you if you ever get a second chance.

##  2

** **

DESPITE MUCH EVIDENCE to the contrary, I have always considered myself rootless. True, I grew up in my ancestral home and worked in a nearby town until I was in my mid-thirties. It's also true that I lived among people who'd known me since my birth; some of them had known my mother since her birth, and a few of the oldest ones had known even my grandfather since his birth. Had I been allowed to venture that far as a child, I could have walked through the woods behind my house for a mile or so, crossed the highway and continued for another mile until I came to a church graveyard filled with my forebears, including a great-great grandfather who'd left an arm somewhere on the ground during the second battle of Manassas and an uncle two generations back who'd served a term in the state legislature.

So "rootless" isn't the first word that comes to mind when you learn of my circumstance. If anything, you'd think I would be head of the local of the Sons of the Confederacy, spending my time earnestly explaining that the war wasn't about slavery and that no Son has anything but love for his black brothers, at least those who behave themselves and don't whine every time they see the rebel flag.

But I was almost literally no one's son. For as long as I can remember, I've had an outsider's sensibility. Life has always seemed like an improvisational theater, where everyone except me meets offstage somewhere to go over their routines and nail down their timing and delivery. Then, when everything is worked out, I arrive onstage and suddenly find myself in the middle of other people's lives. Sometimes the other actors are forgiving and understanding as I blunder through my role, but other times they're impatient and resentful, making sure I understand that I don't really belong among them. At the end of each day, everyone else retires to those secret places in the rear of the stage while I trudge back to my seat to await the next raising of the curtain.

I grew up in a place called Doralee. It's the last town that can claim to be in Georgia before U.S. 29 hits the South Carolina line. Down the road in the other direction is Royston, which—as you're reminded the moment you hit the city limits—was home to baseball great Ty Cobb. My grandfather claimed to have played baseball against Cobb one time, which means that on one memorable afternoon in the early 1900s, on some remote, dusty Southern ball field, the world achieved a critical mass of prick.

I won't pretend I have no idea what caused my sense of rootlessness, though. My father was a Yankee and the grandson of Jewish immigrants. His own father, for reasons long since lost to history, had shunned his faith and family, anglicized his name and married an Irish woman from Hell's Kitchen. That union produced one child, my father, who himself continued this legacy of cultural confusion by marrying a rural-born, timid Southern girl he encountered in a train station. He was a soldier at the time, traveling from a boot camp in Alabama to his first posting, and my mother was working as a volunteer in the train depot in Atlanta, one of the army of young women who served soft drinks and cookies to servicemen at countless public places. It was 1944, and the fevered wartime atmosphere had already prompted the first of my mother's two sole acts of rebellion in her life: Against my grandfather's wishes, she had accepted a cousin's offer of room and board in Atlanta for a summer of girlish adventure.

Then one afternoon, she served a refreshment to a tall, dark-eyed infantryman who lingered by her table for an hour before reluctantly running at the last moment to catch his train. A few moments later, he was back.

"People are going to be shooting at me in a few weeks," he said. "If I'm going to die, I'd like to at least know your name."

I heard this story from my mother dozens of times, and listening to her languid, honeyed accent, I could understand what made my father return to her table. Her voice has always been her best feature, a slow drawl that within minutes doubtless had my father dreaming of verandas and sloe gin and the feel of her breath in his ear on warm, humid nights.

Ironically, her voice was completely at odds with her character. The person my father must have believed was confident, sensual and adventurous—and what else could he think of a fetching girl, barely out of high school, who answered a strange soldier's come-on with a sly look and this retort: "If my daddy saw the way you're looking at me, he wouldn't wait a few weeks"—was in fact insecure and helpless. What he must have assumed was a barely banked fire of passion was instead a single flicker, a show of verve that lasted only the two weeks they spent together.

Perhaps my father's boldness also was uncharacteristic; I don't know. He was somehow able to arrange for the army to do without him long enough to court my mother and prompt her second, and last, act of rebellion. They were married ten days after meeting in the train station, despite my grandfather's threats and ultimate boycott of the service. Sometime in the following few days, the seed that would become me was planted.

After my father left to report for duty, my mother reverted to form. My grandfather told her it wasn't proper for a married woman to flaunt her charms around soldiers, so she stopped volunteering. He then told her it wasn't right to just hang around Atlanta living off her cousin's largesse, so she moved back to Doralee. When my fetal presence became known, he told her folks would assume she was a grass widow and it wasn't much better to say she was a Yankee's wife, so she should keep out of sight, which meant my mother spent her pregnancy fanning herself on the porch and waiting for letters from my father, sinking deeper into that peculiar darkness of helplessness from which she never really emerged. And when the telegram came saying he was dead, my grandfather told her that was that, she could pack up those letters now and put them away and get on with life.

But I was the one bit of evidence of my mother's summer of rebellion that couldn't be packed away. I was born in the summer of 1945 after a twenty-nine-hour labor that left my mother barely conscious the following day. So it fell to my grandfather to see that the birth certificate was filled out. From one of the letters, he got the proper spelling of my father's name: Allen Beckman of New York City. In the place for my mother's name, he listed them all: Vivian Collie Roseen Beckman of Doralee, Georgia. Her last name was written in cramped, tight letters, as if he hadn't planned to include it, but added it later at someone's prompting.

In the space for my name, my grandfather wrote "Thaddeus Stevens Beckman." A few days afterward, my mother protested that it wasn't the name she'd wanted for me, but she took no step to correct it. I doubt my grandfather would have let her, anyway. He was enchanted with his own cleverness. "A good Yankee name for a Yankee's son," he said, using a phrase I heard countless times throughout my life and grew to detest.

*

We made an odd little family.

There were just the three of us. My grandmother had died when my mother was young, and no one talked much about her: my grandfather because he was still clearly annoyed years later to have been given no son and left with a girl to raise; my mother because she had so few memories of her; and me because every question about her was answered only with a shrug or a grunt.

My grandfather worked as a foreman in a cotton mill. The company provided homes for many of its workers in a village on the edge of Doralee, but my grandfather preferred to live a couple of miles outside of town. He fancied himself a farmer, and kept a garden on one side of the house and a yearling in the pasture on the other. In the fall, my mother put the garden into jars, and in the winter the yearling was confined to the barn, where I fed him grain and meal to fatten him. When I was younger; they were my pets. I named each of them, and would chatter at them all winter, feeding them corncobs by hand and assigning to them all sorts of personality traits and moods.

"Domino's feeling a little peevish," I said one day. I was six, and "peevish" was a word I'd just learned and was using a lot. I didn't have its meaning down exactly, and tended to use it mostly when referring to inanimate objects: I couldn't tie my shoes because the laces were peevish, for instance.

"How do you know?" my mother asked.

"He's not eating much," I said. "Maybe his food is peevish."

"You keep that cow fed," my grandfather said. "I need that freezer locker filled."

"What?" I said, confused. I hadn't yet made the connection between the disappearance of my pets and the meat that filled the locker my grandfather rented in town.

"You said you wouldn't tell him," my mother said.

"You mean he doesn't know?" my grandfather asked in mock surprise. He turned his attention back to me. "Son, you've got the tastiest pets in town. But it's a good thing you ain't partial to dogs. I've never had much of a taste for them."

I started to cry and my mother came over to hug me. After a moment, my grandfather waved her off.

"Leave him be. God knows you don't need to make him any softer."

As always, my mother did what she was told.

*

I was Collie's boy. On the occasional trip into Doralee with my grandfather, or on the rare occasion someone came to visit, that's how I was always introduced. Around the house, he called me "son" or "boy." Only my mother called me by name.

Our neighbors took their cue from him. I was treated with a well-mannered detachment in town and in school, the sort of polite acknowledgment one makes of distant relatives or long-term guests. Aside from my teachers, only one adult talked to me very much. He owned a store on the crossroads corner a half-mile from my grandfather's house.

It was the rural South's version of the convenience store, a place where you could get gas, cigarettes, bread, twine, credit and gossip. The owner's name was Almo Hardy, and he was a cheery fellow with one droopy eyelid that made it seem like he was always winking. Part of the forefinger on his right hand was missing, too, severed at the first knuckle and puckered at the tip, where the skin had grown together. I was fascinated with his finger, and frequently asked him how he'd lost it. The answer changed every time.

"A lawn mower cut it off," he said one day. There was no one else in the store, and I felt free to lean against the front counter and nurse my bottled chocolate drink like the men did.

"You stuck your hand under the lawn mower?" I asked.

"Nah. I was napping in the yard when it started up by itself. Ran over my hand before I woke up."

At other times, he told me a pig had bitten it off, that he'd accidentally shot it off while squirrel hunting, and that his daddy cut it off as punishment for lying. Each tale was delivered with a straight face and elaborate detail, and each featured some malevolent force that struck with inexplicable violence. He always answered my follow-up questions earnestly, and never failed to register surprise when, at the end, I said, "Aw, I don't believe that."

"Wait a minute. You think I'm making this up?" he would ask. "I may have to reconsider your credit situation."

Indeed, I had a tab at Almo's store. He'd created it for me not long after my range—the amount of territory I was allowed to cover on foot or on my bike—had been extended to the store. I'd visited often enough with my grandfather, of course, but it wasn't until it became apparent late one afternoon that we didn't have enough milk to last until morning that I was allowed to walk down the road to the store by myself. I was nine years old, and this was an exciting new addition to my map of the world.

I took a half-gallon of milk to the counter, but then found myself pulled into the irresistible orbit of the ice cream freezer. It was a large chest squatting on the floor next to the cash register, a boxy temptress with sliding glass doors through which her delights beckoned: Eskimo pies, Popsicles, ice cream sandwiches and cups of sherbet with little wooden spoons taped to their sides. In one corner was a box full of various candy bars, frozen to a brick-hard consistency to suit some customers' tastes. I knew the location of everything by heart, but was rarely allowed to claim one; my grandfather was not the sort who bought treats, and had in fact once lectured Almo about the mercenary placement of the freezer so close to the counter.

I looked for a long moment at the orderly stacks, then on impulse grabbed a Popsicle and laid it on the counter next to the milk. Almo reached for the box that sat next to the register and walked his fingers along the spines of the dozens of palm-sized notebooks it contained until he found one that carried my grandfather's name. He withdrew it, licked his pencil and entered the price of the milk and Popsicle.

"Your grandpa say it's okay to have that?" he asked casually as he wrote.

"It's okay," I said. I had already begun to unwrap the Popsicle, taking care to pull the paper away gingerly lest it rip and leave a bit of frozen wrapper bonded to the bar.

Almo pressed the point. "It's pretty close to dinnertime. You sure?"

I nodded. Almo closed the notebook and returned it to the box. "If you say so," he said, sounding skeptical.

I went straight home with the milk, eating as I walked and discarding the evidence in the ditch. My diligence was rewarded with an approving nod from my grandfather, and when another trip to the store became necessary a few days later—for cigarettes this time—I again was drafted. I treated myself to an ice cream sandwich that day.

The process repeated itself two more times before my grandfather went to settle his tab with Almo. My grandfather had been paid that day, and as was his routine, he visited the various merchants who extended him credit to bring his debts up to date. He usually took me with him, partly for company but mostly because I think he suspected that my Jewish blood, even diluted as it was, lent itself to financial trickery; he believed it was good for me to see that a man settled his obligations quickly and completely.

First we stopped at the store in the mill village, where my grandfather paid the monthly fee for the box he rented at the post office annex there. Then we went to the feed store and paid for the hundred-pound sack of grain that my yearling had already worked halfway through. Next was the finance company, to make the payment on his car, then the electric cooperative and the fuel-oil company. Our last stop, just before we made the turn for home, was Almo's.

Somehow, in the way the young can be blind to consequences, I had ignored the inevitable reckoning. I knew my grandfather scrutinized his bills carefully. How could I have been so reckless?

I sat in the car as he went in. "Ain't you getting out?" he asked. I shook my head.

It didn't take long. A few moments later, he stepped out of the store and gave a come-here wave. When I went inside, I saw that the account book was open on the counter between them.

"It seems you've taken some liberties with my finances," my grandfather said with a menacing formality.

"Yes, sir, I guess so," I said.

"Do you have any money to pay Mr. Hardy?" he asked.

"Yes, sir, at home," I said. Indeed, I'd hoarded some coins, which were stashed in a cigar box along with my other treasures: a .22-caliber bullet I'd found on the ground, the rattle from a rattlesnake my grandfather had killed in the barn, a handful of baseball cards, some marbles, a whistle and a picture of some second-tier movie star that had come in a Christmas gift wallet and that I imagined looked like my father.

"Then you'll need to come back this afternoon and settle up," he said. "And you'll have to be punished."

Almo spoke for the first time. "Henry, this is probably my fault."

My grandfather turned back to him. "Oh?"

"I told him to help himself to a treat. You never minded when Collie did it when she was little, so I thought it was okay."

"That was different. I could trust Collie," my grandfather said.

The words were harsh even for him. "C'mon, he's a good kid," Almo said.

"He'll become one someday," my grandfather said, "as long as people like you don't get in the way."

Almo said nothing more, silently giving my grandfather the change from his ten-dollar bill—after subtracting my charges from the amount due—and noting the transaction in the account book. Twenty minutes later, I was back with the coins from my cigar box.

"Keep your money," Almo said when I laid them on the counter.

I thought he was mad at me, even though he'd chosen to jump in with the lie about encouraging me to help myself. "I'm sorry about this," I said.

"It ain't your fault. But I'll tell you what we do. How 'bout if I set up your own account book?"

He reached under the counter; withdrew a clean spiral notebook and wrote my name on the cover. He entered my balance due, fifty-five cents, and the date, then closed it and stored it in the box containing the other account books.

"There we go," he said.

"But I still have to pay you," I said.

"You can work it off. Why don't you start by picking up outside?"

In a way, I suppose my story began that day. There is, indeed, a certain symmetry: Until then, I had lived on life's fringe, my world defined exclusively by my grandfather. But the more time I spent at Almo's store—the more I came to know other men, hear them talk, listen to the rhythm and cadence of their stories—the more I came to understand my place in life. I may have been a fatherless half-breed, but I learned that working hard, keeping your mouth shut and remembering everything you see and hear made up for a lot. Now, over forty years later, I have returned to the fringe. Instead of a rural store, I sit on a fishing pier that juts away from a coastal Georgia island. But I still listen to older men talk, the retirees in baseball caps who tend crab nets and surreptitiously sip beer as they form their lawn chairs into loose clumps and relive their better days. Age has stiffened their fingers, made them vulnerable to the waving claws, so I pluck the crabs from their nets when a catch is made. Once again, I'm a good lad: quiet, helpful and attentive.

*

Even as I began to edge away from my grandfather's world, my mother retreated into it.

My memory is cruel toward her. She is aged and helpless now, tended to by strangers and allowed to dress up only on holidays or the rare days I visit. She's barely seventy, but when the spirit leaves, the body ages quickly. And it's clear to me now, as I seek to entice my own spirit to return, that hers left early and permanently.

I don't remember her as a young woman, I was born a month after her nineteenth birthday, and at the time of my earliest memories she wasn't even twenty-five years old. Yet the face that comes to me as I think back is that of a middle-aged woman, with sad eyes, loose skin, and teeth and fingertips stained by an endless parade of cigarettes. Her clothes were added as the seasons cooled, so that by midwinter sweaters and socks were layered over one another, peeled off only for the occasional bath and reassembled randomly. She sometimes went days without speaking, preparing our meals and tending to the house in dead silence; other times she was chatty and funny, serving dinner with a flourish and talking back to the radio.

But bizarre behavior wasn't her exclusive domain. I used to hear my grandfather creeping around the house at night, would listen to his footsteps in the hall outside my bedroom, or hear them creaking up the steps as he climbed the staircase. Sometimes the footsteps would trail off toward his bedroom, and I would hear them no more after his door closed. Other times the footsteps just stopped somewhere in the hall, as if he were listening for something that only he could hear.

Once I watched through slitted eyes as he opened the door to my room and looked at me for a moment before withdrawing and closing the door. I remember being disoriented the next morning, unsure that it had actually happened: Had I been awake when he opened the door but only pretended to be asleep? Or had I actually been asleep but dreaming that I was awake? Another time the footsteps seemed to lead to my mother's bedroom, and I thought I could hear them talking. I fretted that they were talking about me. I had an irrational fear that I would be carted to the orphanage someday, that my grandfather would simply declare that it would be best to house me with the other strays, so it worried me to hear them talking privately.

One day we suddenly left. I was six or seven at the time, and I remember a trip to Atlanta on a bus and a blur of nights spent sleeping on cots on someone's back porch. There were several phone conversations that carried a tone of negotiation, held only when that strange house was empty but for the two of us, and a couple of times my mother held me as she cried. Then there was a bus trip back to Doralee, where my grandfather met us at the depot, somehow managing to look angry and wary and relieved all at the same time.

"I don't mean any harm, you know," he said.

"You just remember what we talked about," my mother replied with a rare show of verve. They both seemed to be taking care to not give me a clue as to what had happened.

We walked in silence to his car and returned home. Things were easy between them for a while, but they eventually settled back into their roles, the ruler and the ruled. Aside from the occasional trip around town, I don't recall that my mother ever left the house again during my childhood.

*

My grandfather was cold, brutal and abusive, while my mother was merely meek and helpless. Naturally, I hated her more. I left as soon as I could. I enrolled at the university, then spent my first year there scrounging for financial aid. I also discovered that the corporation which owned the mill where my grandfather worked had a scholarship program, so I obtained an application and forged his signature. It netted me $1,000 and a threat when he found out.

"That's the Jew in you," my grandfather said. "Do it again and I'll have you arrested."

Later, while he was away, my mother offered a bit of comfort. "I'd have done the same thing. He's not going to give you anything."

I shrugged. I knew where this was going, as it had countless times before.

"At least you have a chance. I'm stuck here."

Early on, I'd encouraged her to have strength. Later, I would make soothing noises, remarkable only for their insincerity. But at that moment, I said nothing, refusing to feed what I had come to see as an addiction to pity. We sat in silence for a few long moments before she tried again.

"I wish I were younger. I'd do something with my life."

I kissed her forehead and left. The next day I wrote to the president of the company that employed my grandfather, thanking him not only for the scholarship but also for being tolerant of my grandfather's rabidly pro-union sentiment. It takes a large-hearted company to embrace such a diversity of viewpoints, I noted.

A few weeks later, my grandfather was busted down from his foreman's job and returned to the machine he'd left years before. No reason was given, my mother reported, other than the company had suddenly decided he wasn't "management material."

*

Given a mystery to chew over, almost no one will conclude something is an accident. They'll add supposition and speculation until the most mundane inconsistency evolves into something profound and unique. As I'd grown, my curiosity about my father's family had developed in lockstep with my grandfather's disdain. I had my mother's tale of their meeting, of course, and a stealthy, committed rummaging of the house had turned up the handful of letters he'd written before his death. But they contained nothing about his background, suggesting little else beyond his clear desire to occupy her bed again as soon as possible. So it was left to my imagination to create a history for him, and me, and over time that history became an epic. When a child—especially a lonely one with an imagination fueled by countless adventure books and detective stories—turns his attention to a mystery, he'll always conclude it's a textbook case of destiny thwarted.

But epics seem to suffer in the cold light of reality. During the spring break of my second year in college, I impulsively caught a bus to New York. When I arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, I searched the bank of pay telephones until I found one that still had a phone book attached. Among the pages of Smiths and Browns, there was only one Beckman. I wrote down the address, then spent a half-hour figuring out where it was and how to get there.

I got off the subway in the Village and pushed my way toward the address. It was a warm day, perhaps the first of the season there, and the sidewalks were full. I heard a number of different languages, and even the English seemed to be accented in countless ways; my own tongue thickened the two times I asked directions, making me sound like I'd just stepped off the turnip truck. The address, when I finally found it, turned out to be a decaying apartment building near Washington Square. It was on a narrow street, a half-block from the main thoroughfare, and in the quiet I could hear my footsteps echo. There was an intercom with ten buttons to the side of the building's heavy glass door, but none of the buttons was marked. Inside, however, I could see a row of mailboxes with names on them, and when I pulled on the door, it opened. I stepped into the foyer.

The smell was horrible. Just outside one of the two ground-floor apartments, someone had set out a bag of garbage, and its soggy bottom had split and spilled crap all over the hallway floor. There was also the rank odor of something noxious cooking. Somewhere the volume on a television was turned up way too high.

I examined the mailboxes. Three of them carried no name, and the other seven were a mishmash of ethnicities. The last one, marked as apartment 5-B, was labeled "Beckman."

There was no elevator; so I climbed to the building's top floor. One of the two doors at the top of the stairs was unmarked, while the other was labeled 5-A. I knocked on the blank door. Even then, my powers of deduction were awesome. I heard someone inside shuffle toward the door, but it didn't open. "Who is it?" a woman's voice said.

"Mrs. Beckman?" I asked.

"Whaddya want?"

"Is this where Ira Beckman lives?" The phone book I'd consulted an hour earlier had listed only a man's name. If this was my grandmother, I didn't even know how to address her.

"There ain't no Ira Beckman," the woman said. "He's dead."

"Are you Mrs. Beckman?"

"Whaddya want?" she repeated.

I hadn't given this part much thought. What was I supposed to say—"Hello, Granny, it's me, your beloved grandson, here for a little apple pie in your warm, homey kitchen. Take off that apron and give me a hug"?

I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: "U.S. census. I just need to ask a couple of questions."

The door opened a few inches, as far as the chain would stretch. A haggard, elderly woman peered out, blinking several times as if she'd just come out into sunlight, even though the hall was dim. Despite the warm weather, she wore a sweater over a faded print dress, and the buttons on her sweater were mismatched with the holes, leaving one long tail hanging down in front. Behind her, in the small slice of the apartment I could see beyond the door, was a table with a hot plate, a pan crusted with what looked like old food, and a half-empty liquor bottle.

Her breath was boozy.

"Yeah?" she said.

"So Mr. Ira Beckman is deceased?" I said, trying to sound official.

"That's right."

"And your name is ... ? "

"Mrs. Ira Beckman."

I hoped her stupidity wasn't genetic. "No, I mean your given name."

"Oh. Eileen Beckman."

"Thank you. Do you have any children, Mrs. Beckman?"

She hesitated, then said, "No."

"I'm sorry. They teach us to ask these questions better," I said, slipping into the role. She hadn't noticed, or didn't care, that I had no identification or forms to fill out. "Have you ever had children?" She hesitated again before answering. "Yes, a son. He died in the war."

Behind her, a cat leaped up to the table and began nibbling on the food in the pan. "I see. Was he married? Have children?"

"I don't know. We sort of lost touch."

"What was his name?"

"Allen." She blinked several times again and her eyes seemed to focus. "What's this all about? I ain't read about no census."

"We have to update the information periodically," I said.

"Well, I'm through talking," she said, shutting the door. From inside, I heard her say "Shoo!" then there was the sound of the bottle breaking on the floor. "Goddamn you," she said.

She yanked the door open again. "Don't they pay for helping with the census?" she said. She didn't seem surprised that I was still standing there.

"Uh, not normally."

"Well, they should," she said, and waited expectantly.

I had enough money for the bus trip home, and not much more. Still, I reached into my wallet and gave her $10. She took it without a word and shut the door again.

*

I went to a nearby bar and spent the rest of the afternoon getting drunk, marveling that the bartender hadn't asked me to prove I was old enough for this ritualistic sacrifice of brain cells. Perhaps my unhappiness gave me gravity. I had the sense that something irretrievable was gone, that I had banked too much on a notion that was now revealed as groundless and foolish. My unhappiness, of course, was as fanciful as my original longing had been for something epically satisfying. I had wanted too much, so naturally I felt my disappointment was tragically poignant. But both ends of the process were inflated by youthful desire. I had known for a long time that I was alone in the world, yet I'd fashioned an edifice of belonging from a few stray facts and a wealth of need for it. Then, when reality confirmed what circumstance already had suggested, my disappointment was as wildly out of proportion as my hopes had been. I was a chump, and I vowed never to be one again.

Shortly after dark, I walked the whole way back to the Port Authority terminal and slept sitting up on a bench, waking at 3 A.M. with a headache and a stiff neck. I figured I would have to hitchhike most of the way home, so I fortified myself with a big breakfast and several cups of coffee, then spent what little money I had left on a bus ticket to Philadelphia, the longest distance I could afford. At a stop somewhere in rural New Jersey, though, I got off the bus, realizing that I was more likely to find a ride alongside the highway than from some inner-city depot.

It worked. The first ride came almost immediately, from an elderly gentleman who spent several hours helping me get right with Jesus before dropping me off just past Baltimore. The next ride, on a moving van hauling someone's household, took me to Richmond, Virginia. The last ride came from a group of Jewish students from Hofstra University heading to Florida for spring break. There were four of them, two men and two women, arranged in the car like old married couples: the men in the front, the women in the back. I squeezed into the middle of the backseat.

The women were sweet and brazen and funny, sharing their sandwiches and making a good-natured mockery of my accent. The relationships between the four of them weren't clear, but the men seemed to be annoyed by the attention being paid to me by the women.

"So what's it like being a Southern boy?" the driver asked at one point.

"It's the greatest thing in the world," I said.

"What's so great about it?"

"Well, what's better than being white, male and Southern?"

"How about being a decent human being?"

"Yeah, maybe," I said. "But I wouldn't know. I've never met one."

The other man turned in the seat to address me directly. "So what do you boys do for entertainment? I mean, when you're not beating colored people?"

"You want an honest answer?"

"Yeah," he said.

"We think up new ways to get rid of the bodies of civil rights workers," I said.

We rode in silence for a few minutes until someone turned on the car radio. They then spent the next hour cruising the dial, seeking out country music stations and howling with laughter at the songs and the voices. By the time they let me out of the car at a highway crossroads they were a unit again, and the rapport I'd had with the women early on was gone.

"Thanks for the ride," I said as I got out.

One of the men leaned out of the passenger-side window and offered a bit of advice: "Treat your coloreds better, Billy Bob. Or they might slip into the plantation house one night and cut your throat." The others smirked as the car pulled away.

I wasn't one of them; they'd made that clear. But the moment they drove off, leaving me at that remote crossroads near Doralee, I became one of them again: The Yankee. The Jew. Collie's boy.

I turned my back toward home and stuck my thumb out one more time.

##  3

** **

_A TORNADO AT night is nature's greatest treachery._

_First comes the darkness, as it does at the end of every day, to lull us with the comfort of the routine. Then comes a hard rain drumming on roofs and windows, to lull us to sleep as we lie snug and dry in the embrace of our homes. It is easy, in those moments before sleep, to see nature as a volatile but essentially benign force: Its moisture nurtures our crops and its winds strip away from the trees that which is dead or soon to be. The noise and drama just beyond the bedroom wall never intrude._

_But one time, it does._

_"I had just rolled over to look at the clock when the roof went flying off," said Rowena Hallman. "Everything on Roy's side of the room went sailing up and was gone. There was a big dresser with a mirror, took three of us to horse it into the room when we moved. Well, that thing went up like someone put rocket motors under it. But nothing happened to the stuff near me. There's a picture of me with my granny, from when I was just a baby, sitting on a table next to the bed and it didn't even get tipped over. And another weird thing. The bedspread got blown away, and the wind pulled the sheets right out from under us. I remember laying there on the bare mattress wishing I'd put pajamas on or something."_

_Rowena and Roy used to live in a three-bedroom wood-frame home just off Altahatchee Road. Around them were neighbors and friends who lived in similar homes scattered about on one-acre lots. Most of them are just one generation away from the farm, and all of them have a need for enough land for at least a garden and maybe a few chickens._

_None of them live there anymore. They were evicted Sunday night in the rudest fashion._

_"It takes longer to tell about it than it took for it to happen," Rowena said. "One second I'm asleep, then the next second my house is being wrecked while I lay in bed. And a second after that, everything's quiet again."_

_Sometimes you hear of tornadoes that hopscotch through an area, destroying some homes but hurtling over others. That didn't happen here. Sixteen homes sitting on 16 adjoining plots of land were destroyed. The last of them belonged to Leon Lettner, whose home sits near the edge of the Ravine, Soque County's answer to the Grand Canyon. There are no homes beyond his, and it almost seems as if the tornado was a malevolent, thinking force: It didn't lift its deadly trunk until the last home had been destroyed._

_"On one side of the house, you can see clear through to Barrington now," Leon said. "Used to be nothing but trees. But on the other side, there ain't a single tree down. He got done with my house, he just pulled up and went on his way."_

_Houses weren't the only casualties. There are 23 chickens unaccounted for, five barns down, a lawn tractor squashed almost flat under a downed tree, and countless tomatoes disappeared from one garden, deposited God-knows-where by a wind that stripped the fruit but curiously left the vines intact, still tied to their stakes._

_And for a while, it seemed that Lady was a casualty._

_Lady is a four-year-old English setter, a happy and faithful friend with an uncanny nose for birds. She was the runt of a litter and was given to Major Johnson by a friend who couldn't_ _sell her and wouldn't keep her. So Major, who's as soft on dogs as he is merciless on birds, adopted Lady and took her in the field with Duke, his first-string pointer, in hopes that the pup would pick up a few lessons from an old pro._

_Poor Duke. He lost his starting job before the middle of bird season. Lady ran circles around him, finding birds in thickets that Duke had dismissed only moments before and leaving him panting as she reconnoitered fields in perfect rings. She was barely grown before Major had bestowed upon her his highest compliment: damn good dog._

_But by the time dawn broke Monday morning, it seemed Lady was a damn dead dog. She was gone, her pen was destroyed and her house had been sucked up into the tornado's maw. Major's house was gone, too, with only a few bits of timber and siding left behind to suggest that a structure had once occupied this spot. But a house and its contents can be replaced; a dog like Lady only comes along once._

_Grief can play strange tricks on the mind. All morning long, as he worked in the yard to salvage what he could from the mess, Major heard Lady calling to him from the other side of the great divide. In his mind, he heard her whimper her unhappiness from the heavens. After several hours of steady toil, he stopped to rest, and it was then that a neighbor came over to compare notes on damage. The neighbor was there only for a few moments before he raised his eyes and squinted up into the sun._

_"Major," he finally said, "ain't you gonna get your dog down from that tree?"_

_ _

Truth be told and prizes notwithstanding, it's not that I'm all that good. It's just that most journalism isn't worth the paper it's badly printed on.

Taken individually, reporters and editors tend to be bright, charming people. When they gather in a crowd to produce a newspaper, however, the result is usually horrid: a publication that manages to be both resolutely inoffensive and preachily purposeful. You'll die of boredom if you aren't driven off by the hectoring first. But then, most things done in groups end badly. If you need proof of that, attend a political convention. Or a war.

Of course, I knew none of this when I walked into the Barrington _Chronicle_ in 1965 to ask for a job. I was twenty years old and full of pepper, ready for adventure of some kind. I'd given the military some thought and had even visited a few recruiters, but the results were inauspicious. The Navy man gave me his best see-the-world pitch, but you had to sign on for four years and he couldn't talk around the fact that most of that time would be spent at sea exclusively in the company of men, although he went to great lengths to assure me all of them were thoroughly heterosexual.

"There's pussy in every port," he said. "I've had 'em all—Oriental, colored, Spanish. I prefer a Chinaman myself." He didn't seem to notice the slip.

The Air Force recruiter, after learning I had two years of college, appealed to my intellectual vanity: The Air Force required the highest test scores of any branch of the service, he said, painting it as the military equivalent of Mensa. Great, I thought. Four years with people who discuss thrust and lift, and not even be talking about getting laid.

I didn't bother with the Marine Corps recruiter. I was bored, not crazy.

It was the Army recruiter, though, who put me off the military for good. "You ought to think about the Korean option," he said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"You do thirteen months in Korea after basic training, and we guarantee you spend the rest of your hitch anywhere you want in the free world."

"Including Australia?" This was promising. I'd had a long-distance enchantment with Australia for years, which was rooted in a television documentary I'd seen once that painted the country as a land of opportunity, filled with hail-fellow-well-met men and golden-skinned women who looked like California starlets but sounded (and hopefully fornicated) like Lady Caroline Lamb.

"Nah, anywhere except Australia."

"How 'bout South America?" Argentina was my emergency backup fantasy.

"We don't have bases in South America."

"Well, where do you have bases?"

"We're starting to send lots of people to Vietnam," he said hopefully.

I also briefly considered the Peace Corps, but two encounters with its officials caused me to realize that here was a mutant nightmare in the making: a federal bureaucracy infused with missionary zeal. Finally, I decided to become a foreign correspondent. I wrote to the international editor of _The New York Times_ and suggested that my complete lack of experience in journalism—coupled with my inability to speak any language but English and a travel background that consisted of a single bus trip to New York City and a summer of aimless hitchhiking—could give the _Times_ a fresh perspective on foreign affairs that it likely wasn't getting from older, jaded hands. I said I would supply my own trench coat, but that the _Times_ would need to give me the names and addresses of a few women of easy virtue in whatever city it sent me—Vienna or Paris would be acceptable—who might act as my pilot through the social strata. Oh, and salary is negotiable, I said, but I can't promise to be scrupulous about receipts for my expense account.

I got a bemused reply within a week. The editor said I had a remarkable and rare grasp of the life of a correspondent, and that copies of my letter of application had been forwarded to every international bureau with a note attached remarking that the next generation of reporters was showing promise, and that grizzled old fools who think they're secure in their posts should beware. He also suggested that I put in a few years at a newspaper somewhere else, because the _Times_ was run by hidebound editors who demand experience; and that I get some practice at meeting women on my own, since the _Times's_ foreign desk leaves pimping and pandering to the Washington correspondents.

As it turned out, he remembered me years later when, after my self-loathing drew acclaim from all quarters, I had fled Barrington. He was the fool who hired me.

*

Taking the _Times_ editor's advice, I presented myself at the Barrington _Chronicle's_ newsroom on a Monday morning to ask for the worst job available.

"Got lots of bad ones," the editor said. "Hard to say which is the worst. Probably headline writer."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because no matter what the story is, I always hate the headline. You'd think after twenty-eight years I'd have seen a headline I liked." He shook his head. "Hasn't happened yet."

Two desks away, a woman with a pencil was working her way through a stack of paper, scribbling marks and notes with an aggressive impatience. "He wouldn't know a good headline if it bit him on the butt," she said without looking up.

"Ignore her," the editor said. "She's still pissed off that God didn't give her the right equipment."

"You got the dick and I got the brain," she said. "So we're both well equipped to do our jobs." She transferred the last paper in front of her to one of the many untidy stacks on her desk, then stalked off.

The editor watched her go, then turned back to me and shrugged. "I'd be unhappy, too, if I spent my life talking to Junior Leaguers. Why should I hire you?"

I knew he'd ask, but I still didn't have much of an answer. What was I supposed to say? I was a college dropout whose most notable achievement was a recent cross-continent hitchhiking odyssey, four months of near-constant movement interrupted only by a twenty-day sentence to a county work camp on a vagrancy charge in Montana. After the four students had dropped me off that spring day and continued on to Florida—continued on with lives that presumably were happy and orderly, spent among people like themselves—I realized I might find a perverse comfort in being completely and literally adrift in the world. I had returned to school, collected the few things I wanted to preserve—my driver's license, Social Security card, a pair of letters from Almo Hardy and a few photographs—and jammed them all into an empty coffee jar. After screwing the lid tight and melting candle wax around the lip to seal it, I buried it late at night in the yard outside my dormitory, one hand span away from the gnarled root that we had used as first base during intramural softball games. I left an hour later with $62 in my pocket, a change of clothes in a backpack and two letters in hand, one to the dean explaining that a family emergency would keep me out of class for a while and one to my mother telling her I'd be in touch. I dropped them into a mailbox at the edge of town.

I lived at the most basic level of barter. I learned there were a thousand minor chores to be done at any truck stop, and that if you checked in with the manager after arriving it would be only minutes before he pointed you out to a trucker who needed a hand shifting his load around or cleaning up his cab. They're a generous bunch, and even the simplest job was worth five bucks and a ride. Sometimes, they wanted nothing more than company as they drove, and I gave full value: I listened to them talk, asked questions about their lives and nodded in approval at all the right moments. I became an extractor of information, unknowingly training for my later life.

I wandered through twenty-seven states, and only at one point did anyone ask my name or even anything about me. The policeman who found me asleep in a riverside park in downtown Great Falls, Montana, snoozing peacefully no more than twenty steps from a sign prohibiting overnight camping, asked who I was. So did the booking officer at the jail, and so did the judge the next morning. I gave them all the same answer.

"Alexis de Tocqueville," I said, which became "Alex Tokebill" on the arrest report and subsequent court documents.

"Do you have some identification, Mr. Tokebill?" the judge asked. He was a stately old gentleman, hawk-nosed and lean, with a nice crop of white hair swept straight back. I'd noticed when he entered the courtroom that he wore cowboy boots and whipcord pants under his robe, making me wonder if there wasn't a ranch nearby that he'd prefer to be tending rather than sparring with uncooperative drifters.

"No, sir, I don't."

"Where are you from, Mr. Tokebill?"

"Pretty much all over," I said. He was silent for a moment, so I added: "Sir."

"Mr. Tokebill, the sign in the park couldn't be more clear. Why did you choose to sleep there?"

"Well, sir, when I stopped at the Cattleman's Hotel, they told me all the suites were taken," I said. The court clerk, sitting at a small table in front of the judge, stopped writing and looked up for the first time, while the bailiff beside me was suddenly alert.

The judge regarded me for a moment, then sighed. "Mr. Tokebill, what I usually do in a situation like this is ask the sheriff to simply give you a lift to the county line and send you on your way. But I believe, in this instance, you might be well served by cutting brush with a county work crew for ten days. It might give you a little respect for the law and time to practice holding your tongue. Although I doubt it'll do much good."

"You're right, sir," I said.

"It'll do some good?" he asked, surprised.

"No, sir. You were right to doubt it."

"Let's make it twenty days," he said.

 My companions on the work crew were wife beaters, drunks, petty thieves, brawlers, and a seventeen year old who had broken into his high school one night and dropped a turd on the principal's desk, inadvertently leaving his wallet as well. We worked all day, and they smoked cigarettes and talked in the dormitory at night about drinking and women. I realized pretty quickly that this was what the future held for the nameless and the rootless. I also realized that a disappearance, even a belated one, might possibly make my grandfather happy.

So when my twenty days were up, I headed home.

*

''Because I can talk to truck drivers," I said.

"Gee. And I just filled the long-distance-hauling beat," the editor said. "Do you speak French? I have an opening on the Paris fashion beat."

"I can talk to anybody."

"Yeah, but right now you're only talking to me, and we're not getting anywhere."

"Goddamn. It ain't for lack of trying," I said. "I'm playing my part. I'm the young pup who'll take the sorriest job you've got." The cause seemed to be lost, so I figured I may as well go down firing. "Did you forget your lines?"

But the editor just grinned. "Maybe I did. What are my lines?"

"'Sonny, I'll give you a week. You'd better show me something.'"

He nodded. "Sonny, I'll give you a week. You'd better show me something."

"Starting today?" I asked.

"Be back here at three. You'll do night cops. If you're lucky, somebody'll die."

I got lucky on my third night.

_COUNTING COUP: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

Email G.D. Gearino

# JACK OF SPADES

**by**

**James Hankins**
**  
**

Just two years ago, the media turned Detective John Spader into a hero. He'd caught a twisted serial killer terrorizing Massachusetts, and the "Jack of Spades," as the media dubbed Spader, was born. But when the murderer walked free on a technicality--free to kill again--the public turned on Spader.

Now a new serial killer is on the loose. He wears the silly, gap-toothed, grinning mask of Galaxo, Starboy Avenger!--a cartoon alien of unparalleled popularity with children. With the aid of voice-changing technology in the mask, he speaks in the alien's cheerful, high-pitched, robotic vibrato, the same voice that delights millions of cartoon-watching kids every day. And he does all this while he maims, tortures, and murders his victims. With the body count rising, and the public's fear growing, it's up to the Jack of Spades to find the man beneath the mask and stop the killing.

## 1

PETER LISBON WOKE to the sound of a voice. It was a strange voice. Unnatural. The strange voice spoke again. "Wakey, wakey, Peter."

_There's something really wrong with that voice_ , Lisbon thought. It was the only thought that came to him. He was having trouble forming others. His mind was...foggy.

"Open your eyes now, Peter," the voice said. "You have to wake up now. You've got some thinking to do. A difficult decision to make."

_What's wrong with that voice?_ It was high pitched and nasal, slightly tremulous and...mechanical or robotic or...something. It was just very, very wrong and it did _not_ belong in his bedroom.

Lisbon opened his eyes and realized he wasn't in his bed, where he should have been. He wasn't even lying down. He was sitting in a chair. He lifted his head, which weighed far more than it should have, and blinked a sleep haze from his eyes. Though the lights were off, he could see that he was still in his bedroom, sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He couldn't see whoever had spoken.

"I'm sure you have a lot of questions, Peter," the voice said in its weird vibrato. It sounded like a cross between a robot and one of the Munchkins from _The Wizard of Oz_. "But I don't have the time to answer them for you. In the interest of moving things forward, though, I'll bring you up to speed. I'll start by telling you that you are bound to that chair by duct tape. Strong stuff, wound several times. You can't free yourself."

_Jesus_ , Lisbon realized as he tried to move, it was true. Thick bands of silver duct tape ran around his chest. His arms were securely taped to the arms of the chair, his legs to its legs.

_Holy shit_ , he was taped to a chair.

He was completely helpless.

And that voice. It was so close to Lisbon, right behind him in the darkness.

"I'm sure you're wondering how you ended up in that chair," it said, its high-pitched tremolo sounding both terribly strange and strangely familiar. How was that possible? How could a voice like this be familiar to him? "Well, I'll tell you how you got there," the voice said. "You were sleeping like an angel in your bed when I held a rag soaked with chloroform to your nose. When you lost consciousness, I sat you in that chair and taped you there. And now here we are."

Lisbon had a flash of memory, memory of something soft held hard against his nose, a sickly sweet smell, then nothing...until that bizarre voice.

"I've left the lights off for your sake, Peter. I thought it would be easier for you if we worked our way into this gradually."

Wan moonlight floated lazily through the windows, barely shedding light on the bedroom's landscape, doing nothing to illuminate the shadowy figure now stepping right in front of Lisbon. The man was thickly built and his head, which Lisbon saw only in silhouette, was...dear God, it was shaped so strangely. Too big. Too wide at the cheeks. And there, where the eyes should be, did he see a pale-green shine?

Lisbon tried to speak, to ask what the man wanted—if the figure was a man at all—but discovered that his mouth was taped shut.

Peter Lisbon was not a fearful man. In the past six months alone he had made his first solo parachute jump and, perhaps unwisely, fended off an armed carjacker. He didn't frighten easily. So the cold, clammy sweat now dampening his skin, the chilly fingers teasing their way up his spine, were new sensations to him. But who wouldn't be frightened by this? A figure who appeared in the dark of his room, a stranger with a strange head and a strange voice, a voice so unnatural, so terrible, so—

So damn _familiar_? How could that be? Surely he'd remember a voice as alien as—

That was it. He remembered.

"So I'll turn on the light now if you're ready, Peter."

He knew where he'd heard the voice before. But this was crazy. That voice didn't belong here in his room. It didn't belong in the real world.

The man stepped toward the far side of the room, his movements accompanied by a small metallic sound, very faint, like two knives rubbing gently together. He reached out and flicked the switch on the wall. Light filled the room and Lisbon saw the face of his captor, and the strange voice began to make sense, though nothing about this really made any sense at all.

Standing in front of him was a figure dressed all in black, from his black running suit to his black sneakers. Lisbon's eyes barely registered this, though. What grabbed his attention was the man's head. It was completely bald. It was also impossibly yellow, almost neon, in fact. The cheeks of the face were stretched wide, far too wide, in a huge, cheerful, gap-toothed grin. Above the mouth was a cute little button nose. The eyes were a brilliant, sparkling green, the irises filled with reflective emerald specks. From the otherwise smooth forehead protruded two stubby growths with little knobs at the end. Antennae. There were no ears. The face, as strange as it was, was instantly recognizable. It belonged to Galaxo, Starboy Avenger! The exclamation point wasn't in Lisbon's head; it was in all the advertising for the popular cartoon alien.

Lisbon recognized Galaxo because, well, everyone with a child under the age of ten knew him. In fact, Lisbon doubted there was a single person in the country who didn't know Galaxo. The alien had a hold on America's youth unseen in recent years, surpassing every other childhood media creation—talking dinosaurs, talking sponges, talking trains, whatever. First, there was Galaxo's Saturday morning cartoon. In no time there were books, T-shirts, pajamas, video games, action figures, backpacks, bedsheets, a theatrical movie, and anything else the merchandisers believed could suck weekly allowance money from kids' pockets, as well as money from the wallets of loving parents eager to please their children. Lisbon couldn't begin to imagine how much he himself had spent on Galaxo stuff for his own son Toby, most of which the boy kept at his mother's house.

The weird voice made perfect sense now. It belonged with the mask. On TV, Galaxo spoke in that strange, high-pitched voice with the weird vibrato. Lisbon recognized the mask as the same type he'd bought Toby for Christmas last year. It fit over the entire head and came in one size that, with the adjustable strap inside, could fit anyone from age five to adult. The mask contained voice-changing technology—a microphone inside and a speaker cleverly concealed in the gap between Galaxo's two front teeth. Having purchased other characters' voice-changing masks for Toby over the years, Lisbon knew the technology had improved vastly of late and the voice that came out of Galaxo's mouth was virtually unrecognizable as that of the person wearing the mask; rather, to the delight of children and the dismay of parents everywhere, it sounded remarkably like the cartoon alien.

And now someone was standing in Lisbon's bedroom wearing that mask. For the first time since his divorce, Lisbon was glad he'd lost the custody battle for Toby. Otherwise his son might be bound in a chair next to him, and God only knew what this sick bastard had in mind. Lisbon tried to speak again, but remembered his mouth was taped shut.

"You'll get a chance to talk," Galaxo said in that creepy, squeaky, alien voice. "You have to. You've got a choice to make. But first, the ground rules. The first rule is, no screaming for help. When I take that tape off your mouth, you're going to want to scream for help. Frankly, I wouldn't blame you. But I have to tell you, if you do that, I'll stick this in your throat." He held up an ice pick. "So you're not going to scream, right?"

Lisbon hesitated, then nodded. What the hell else could he do?

"Good. Now, the second rule...this one applies to me. And you, I guess. Here it is. I'll try not to kill you, but I'll kill you in a heartbeat if you make me. So don't make me, okay?"

Lisbon had no intention of making Galaxo kill him, so he nodded again.

"Okay, rule number three. This is the biggie. I'm going to give you a choice to make. I warn you, it will be a bitch of a choice. But you have to choose. From the moment I pull off that tape, you'll have one minute to decide. If you don't choose in that time, I'll treat it as if you've chosen both options. But I promise you, Peter, you won't want to do that, not after you hear your choices. So for your sake, I really hope you're able to choose. You with me so far?"

Lisbon nodded yet again and the movement shook loose a drop of sweat from his hairline. The cold drop traced its way over his forehead, lingered for a moment at his right eyebrow, then fell onto his lap. Galaxo watched the sweat drop's progress to its completion before continuing.

"Just so you know I'm playing fair, this will be the official timer."

There was a very soft _snick_ of metal as Galaxo knelt down slowly before Lisbon and grabbed a small gym bag from the floor. He lifted it and placed it on the bed beside him, unzipped it, and began rummaging around inside. As he did, Lisbon heard metal clinking and caught glimpses of nasty-looking things with sharp metal ends and serrated edges and pinching claws. Gooseflesh rose on Lisbon's skin. Galaxo rooted around in the bag some more before finally producing a shiny red apple. A black line ran horizontally around its middle, with numbers and corresponding little vertical lines along it. A kitchen timer.

"I'll set this for one minute, give you your options, start the timer, then take the tape off your mouth. You understand?"

This couldn't be happening. There couldn't be a cartoon alien in his bedroom threatening to stab him in the throat with an ice pick, babbling in his creepy alien voice about a choice he had to make. This was too surreal.

"I asked if you understood, Peter. Respond somehow or I'll hurt you very badly."

He would, too. Lisbon believed him. But he just couldn't make himself respond in any way.

"Peter..." the perpetually smiling alien said, though it was more of a warning. Lisbon nodded. "Good. Now, let's see, what to offer, what to offer..." Galaxo stroked his yellow chin in a mocking simulation of deep thought. He tapped his yellow temple. "How about this? I'll either smash your knees with a hammer, or I'll...hmm...I'll cut off all your fingers, one by one. It's your choice. What do you think?" Then the strangest sound of all came from that friendly cartoon face, a burst of vibrato that, after a moment, Lisbon recognized as a chuckle.

A pounding at the door gave Lisbon a brief instant of hope before he realized the sound was in his head, the pounding of blood in his ears. He tried to swallow but his throat was a dry sponge. This guy was nuts.

Suddenly, panic seized him. He remembered the second of the lunatic's ground rules. Or was it the third? Whichever, he had only a minute to answer or else...what was it?...oh, yeah, shit, Galaxo said it would be as if he had chosen both options. Galaxo would smash his knees _and_ cut off his fingers. _Jesus Christ_.

But wait. Galaxo hadn't started the timer. He hadn't pulled the tape off Lisbon's mouth. Lisbon looked up at Galaxo, who was still smiling, of course, always smiling, and who was once again tapping his temple.

"No," he said, "that's not very good. Forget that one."

Lisbon sucked a lungful of air through his nostrils and let it out again. But his relief didn't last long.

"Wait, I've got it," Galaxo said. "Oh, this is good. Here we go. Here's your choice, Peter, so listen carefully. I'll either pour hydrochloric acid all over your face, or—" Galaxo paused dramatically "—or I'll cut off both your feet. That's it. The choice is yours."

For a moment, Lisbon's mind went completely blank, like a television screen after someone has yanked the plug from the wall. He barely processed the images he saw, the sounds he heard—Galaxo turning the top half of the apple timer, the ticking that followed, Galaxo placing the apple on the bed, Galaxo reaching for the tape covering his mouth, Galaxo saying words he couldn't, in that frame of mind, understand. It was the sharp sting of the tape ripping skin from his lips that jolted him back into the moment.

"Peter, I hope you're trying to decide. You don't want the timer to go off before you've made your choice. It would be a tragedy to lose both your face _and_ your feet when you have the chance to keep one or the other, don't you think?"

Lisbon couldn't think. He couldn't speak. He was paralyzed, unable to move but for the uncontrollable shaking as adrenaline coursed through him.

Galaxo glanced down at the timer on the bed. "Ten seconds gone, Peter. Only fifty left."

Lisbon sucked in a great gasping breath and tried to speak, but that ability hadn't yet returned to him. The ticking seemed impossibly loud. He strained against the tape holding him to the chair, trying with every ounce of his strength to pull himself free. He couldn't move his arms an inch. His gasps became louder, his exhalations more forceful.

Galaxo looked down at him, shaking his freakish head. "Bad time to panic, Peter. I really don't want to have to take your feet and your face."

Words finally exploded out of Lisbon. "Then don't, for Chrissake."

"Ah, good, you're talking now." Galaxo seemed genuinely pleased. "That's a start. Forty seconds left now though. I really hope you're giving this difficult choice due consideration. Obviously, your decision will have a profound impact on the rest of your life."

Lisbon started to speak, emitted a panicked grunt, cleared his throat, and said desperately, "Why are you doing this to me?"

Galaxo shook his head. "This is really disappointing. You simply do not have time for questions, not with a decision like yours hanging over your head. I strongly urge you to think about your options. You have less than half a minute left." He sounded so calm, so reasonable, yet he was threatening to maim Lisbon in unspeakable ways, the threat made all the more horrible coming from that permanently grinning cartoon alien face, in that squeaky tremolo that delighted millions of children every day.

Oh, God, oh, God. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...

"Please," Lisbon said, " _please_ don't do this. I have a son. Please."

"Almost down to twenty-five seconds. I assure you, I have a container of acid with me. To be honest, I left it in my car, but I could be back with it in a jiff. Or..." He turned to the gym bag on the bed and pulled out a short handsaw, its sharp, ugly little shark teeth making the gorge rise in Lisbon's throat. Those teeth looked sharp enough to cut through bone.

Lisbon's eyes bounced wildly around the room, as if hoping to see someone standing in one of the corners, someone who could save him, someone who, until then, had been waiting for the right time to make his move. But there was no one.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

"Fifteen seconds left now, Peter," Galaxo said. "What's it going to be? Are you going to make me go back out to my car for the acid, or are we good to go with this saw here?"

Lisbon's breath was gone again. And he couldn't suck in another. He was trying like hell but his lungs wouldn't cooperate. He tried to speak but managed only a pathetic croak.

"Oh no, Peter, bad luck here. You're hyperventilating. It will be hard for you to make your choice clear in that condition. Please try to relax. You may not believe me, but I truly don't want to make you a faceless, footless freak. That's a lot for any person to bear. One or the other you might be able to handle, but both...I just don't know."

Tick, tick...

"Come on, Peter," Galaxo said, "I'm pulling for you. You can do it. Choose."

Lisbon tried to beg for mercy again, tried to ask why, why, Jesus, why Galaxo was doing this to him, but he had no breath, no voice. Suddenly, he hoped he'd choke to death or suffocate or have a massive, fatal heart attack, just so he wouldn't have to _choose_ , so he wouldn't have to watch this fucking nutcase screw the lid off a bottle of acid, wouldn't have to feel liquid fire drip over his forehead, down his face, maybe into his eyes, the corrosive eating away his nose, chewing holes in his cheeks, exposing bone, melting his lips...and then, while he was screaming in agony, he'd have to sit there while this piece of shit cut off his feet, first one, then the other. _Oh God, please, God, please_ —

"Damn it, Peter," Galaxo said, his voice urgent now, "You have ten seconds left and you better fucking believe I'll do what I say. I'll burn your face away, then I'll cut off both your feet. Fucking believe it." Galaxo was yelling now. "Think, Peter. _Decide_."

Lisbon did believe him. He had no doubt that Galaxo would carry out his threat, commit both atrocities. But he couldn't speak. He couldn't get enough air into his lungs to make an intelligible sound. He grunted and groaned and felt tears pouring down his cheeks and he couldn't say a word. He didn't even know what he'd say if he could.

"Almost time, Peter, and then it's too late. I won't let you choose after the timer goes off, I swear to God. I'm being fair here. I wouldn't do it for anyone else and I won't do it for you. So make a fucking choice."

Oh God, living life as a faceless monster, unable to show his ruined, acid-eaten face in public without drawing horrified stares, without seeing pointing fingers, without hearing frightened gasps or cruel insults. He'd always been a handsome man. Strong features, they told him, a nice smile, they said, and he had to agree. Oh God, to lose it all. And the pain. The pain would be unbearable. But his feet, he needed his feet, needed them to walk, to run, to play with his son, to drive, Christ, he needed them for everything. But his face—

"Choose right now, Peter. If you can't speak, just make a sign. Wiggle your toes for your feet, or shake your head for your face."

_I can't choose, I really can't, I can't even think with all that fucking ticking, no, no, no, please don't make me choose—_

"Goddamn it, Peter, you're out of time," Galaxo said, sounding truly disappointed. "Three...two...one—"

" _My feet_." The words tore from Lisbon's throat at the same moment the timer emitted a pleasant little _ding_. Lisbon rasped in a huge breath of air and let it out in staccato bursts—shameless, unmanly sobs. His head fell to his chest. Tears poured into his lap. Another deep breath, another series of racking sobs.

"Hmm, I don't know, Peter," Galaxo said. "That was awfully close."

Lisbon looked up in horror. He forced himself to stop crying. "B-b-but I chose," he said. "I _chose_."

"I think I heard the bell ring before you said 'feet.' "

Lisbon looked up into those huge green eyes, into the black sheer fabric covering the nickel-sized pupil in the center of the brilliant green iris, to where he thought he could detect the wet shine of real eyes in the blackness there, and pleaded into those eyes.

"Please, please, _please_ just take my feet."

Galaxo stroked his yellow chin again.

"For God's sake, show a little mercy," Lisbon added. "Just take my feet."

He closed his eyes. He couldn't believe he had just begged a man to cut off his feet. Nonetheless, he prayed his request would be granted. Galaxo was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, "Okay, maybe that was close enough. I guess it's your lucky night," he added cheerfully.

Lisbon opened his eyes as Galaxo slapped a new length of duct tape over his mouth. He began to cry again. Then he dropped his gaze to the shark-toothed saw hanging in Galaxo's hand and he screamed at the top of his lungs, from the bottom of his soul, the scream feeling like it was shredding his vocal cords, yet still sounding soft, even to Lisbon, muffled as it was by the tape across his mouth.

Soon he was beyond screaming.

## 2

THE WOMAN BENEATH John Spader moved with him in perfect rhythm, her breathing in sync with his, their bodies parting slightly, then coming together again at exactly the right moment, exactly the right angle. It was like this every time with Hannah. They each knew instinctively what the other wanted, needed, and met that need without disrupting the flow of movement. It was like an extemporaneous, free-form dance that somehow managed to seem precisely choreographed. And it was like that every time. And as he did every time, Spader looked down into Hannah's pretty, whiskey-brown eyes and thought, "Those should be blue. Those should be my wife's eyes." The guilt he felt every time nearly broke his rhythm tonight, but it didn't. Instead, his cell phone did.

Without disengaging, he leaned up on one elbow and reached for the phone on the nightstand. Hannah, breathing hard, her pelvis still rocking against his now motionless one, stared up at him in disbelief.

"Spader," he said into the phone, realizing his voice was a little huskier than usual. "No, not at all. What's—Jesus, so soon? What's it been, just twelve days since Lisbon's feet? What was it this time?" A pause. "Both ears?"

Beneath him, Hannah ground her pelvis against his a little harder now and dug her fingernails just a bit into his lower back.

"Where'd this happen?" He glanced at the red numerals of the clock beside the bed. Almost two a.m. Hannah began to increase the urgency of her rocking. She also added a nice little rotation of her hips. She slid her hands lower and grabbed Spader's naked butt, pulling him far into her as she thrust against him. She began to breathe more deeply again, back in rhythm, moaning with pleasure.

Spader turned his head a little so he could hear better—his caller, not Hannah.

"I can be at Ten Fed in twenty minutes," he said, referring to Ten Federal Street in Salem, Massachusetts, where the Essex County State Police Detective Unit was located. "We can go together from there. What? Yeah, I'm leaving right now." He snapped the phone shut and looked down at Hannah. "Sorry, but I have to go."

"Hmm?" Her voice was even huskier than his had been. Her face, always nice to look at, was even prettier than usual at the moment, flushed as it was with passion, several strands of her dark hair lying across her forehead and over one eye. Then just a touch of the suddenly enhanced beauty faded as her expression changed the moment she realized he was serious. "You're leaving? Right now?" She still hadn't stopped moving her hips.

"Sorry."

She stopped moving her hips then. She looked up at him with those eyes that weren't his wife's and said, "Please tell me you're kidding. You're kidding, right?"

"PLEASE TELL ME you're kidding," Gavin Dunbar said.

Spader looked over at the man with whom he'd worked in the detective unit for nine years and been friends with for just about as long. "Sorry, I can't. You're drifting over the line."

Dunbar steered the Ford Crown Victoria back into their lane and said, "Jesus, John, you stopped right in the middle? Is that even physically possible?"

"Yeah, Gavin, it is."

"I don't think I could do that. Nope, no way I could do that. It's probably dangerous too, like they say about holding back a sneeze. You know, supposedly your eyeballs explode or something. Only with stopping sex in the middle, it wouldn't be your _eye_ balls that explode."

"I seemed to survive it okay."

"Probably just got lucky this time. So what the hell did you say to her?"

"I told her that judging by past experience, she was probably still six or seven minutes away from her big finish, that I felt like for some reason I'd probably be a few minutes behind her tonight, and that there was a guy who'd just had his ear cut off who probably didn't want to wait an extra ten minutes before things really got rolling on his case just so the lead detective could get his rocks off."

"You didn't tell her that. About the ear."

"I did." And he had, figuring that hearing about a guy having his ear cut off might help her understand his decision. And if it didn't, too bad, because she'd have plenty of other orgasms in the future, but the guy had only one ear from now on.

"You know, John, I've known you just long enough to actually believe you. I think maybe you really did leave in the middle of a big bounce just because duty called." Dunbar kept his eyes on the road and added, "But I don't think that's the only reason."

"Some guy losing his ear to a whackjob who's been going around hacking off pieces of people in the middle of the night isn't enough of a reason?"

"Might be, I guess, but it wasn't your only one tonight." Dunbar was focused on the road in front of them, but Spader felt like the man's eyes were somehow on him instead.

"Yeah, I was thinking of my wife, so what?"

"Your ex-wife, John." Dunbar meant well. He was a good guy, a dependable friend, and Spader would stop a bullet for him if it came down to it, because that's what cops who work together do, or should anyway, but Spader wasn't sure he wanted to open up to him about matters of the heart. "What are you?" Dunbar asked. "Four, five years younger than me?"

"Beats me, what are you? Fifty-five? Sixty?" Spader asked, knowing full well Dunbar was forty-six.

"Screw you, funny guy. So what are you, forty?"

"Forty-one. What's your point?"

"My point is, you're still a young guy. And not bad looking, I guess. So maybe—"

"Gee, Gavin, are you hitting on me?" Spader asked. "I'm touched."

Dunbar sighed, grimaced, shook his head, and finally said, "I'm just saying, you got that thick hair women go for." He ran a hand through his own thinning crop. "And they seem to like your eyes, all blue and everything. Anyway, some of the ladies at the office have talked to me about you." Everyone who worked at Ten Federal sometimes referred to it as "the office."

"Yeah? What do they say?" Spader wasn't overly curious about what they said. He'd heard a few things himself. And he'd been told that he wasn't bad looking often enough to believe it. But he wanted to hear more from Dunbar, simply because he was amused by the man's obvious discomfort.

Dunbar grimaced again. "Shit, I don't know. Whatever. Stuff about your hair, your eyes, your...your butt."

"What about my butt? Exactly, I mean. What exactly did they say about my butt?"

"Screw it. Just forget it. Man, you try to do something nice for someone." Dunbar shook his head. "No, wait a second, don't forget it. You gotta stop pining away for your ex-wife. I guess I'm just saying, if Hannah's the one for you, that's great. But even if she isn't, you can find someone else, someone other than your ex, you follow? That's my point here. Olivia's gone, man. You should let her go. That's my opinion, anyway. And now I'm done here. I've made my point." He shook his head. "I mean, it's been what, nine months now?"

It had been eleven months since Olivia asked Spader to move out and he told Dunbar so. "Divorce has been final for six," he added. This conversation had quickly turned unamusing.

"Eleven months is a long time, buddy. Too long to still be feeling guilty when you're with another woman. Actually, with Olivia being the one who called things off, you should never have felt guilty in the first place."

Spader began to suspect he'd shared more than he'd meant to with Dunbar over the past few months. "I'm thinking of breaking it off with Hannah. It's not fair to her."

"Hold on a sec. Didn't you say sex with her was always a mind-blowing Olympic event?" Spader recalled saying something like that once and now regretted it. And he was positive now that he'd been a bit too sharing. "And she earned a gold medal every time?"

"I'm not sure I took the metaphor that far. Anyway, good sex isn't always enough, you know?"

"It is for a lot of guys."

And for the first month and a half of the three he'd been dating Hannah, it was enough for Spader. Then he found himself looking into her brown eyes and wishing they were blue. He looked out the windshield and said, "Anyway, it's just not fair to her. Not right now. Take the next right."

Dunbar seemed as though he was about to reply, but he didn't. As Spader guided them through the streets of Beverly, he said, "This is our guy's third victim in just over six weeks. Only twelve days since he killed Peter Lisbon."

The perp they'd come to know simply as Galaxo had cut off both of Lisbon's feet and then actually called 9-1-1 himself before leaving Lisbon's house. But Lisbon had lost so much blood that he died shortly after the cops arrived, before the ambulance could even get there.

Dunbar nodded. "Twelve days, yeah."

"He didn't wait long."

"Dyin' to get that cute yellow mask on again."

"If the psycho ever even takes if off. That's the street up there."

Dunbar turned. Spader didn't have to point out which house they were looking for. The flashing lights of two Beverly police cruisers in the driveway of the third house on the right—along with the state police crime scene services van parked on the street in front of it—was enough of a clue. Dunbar pulled the Crown Vic to the curb behind the CSS van and killed the engine. As they got out of the car, Dunbar said, "CSS got here fast."

"I called them as soon as I left Hannah's. Told them to get started and we'd be right behind them." Spader trusted the evidence team not to move anything he wouldn't want moved before he saw it.

The two detectives walked up the short driveway toward the house. Spader noticed a wooden ramp leading from one end of the front porch to the driveway, where a bulky van sat. Spader recognized it as a van equipped with a hydraulic lift for passengers in wheelchairs. He and Dunbar flashed their state police badges at the uniform at the front door.

"Troopers Spader and Dunbar," Spader said to the cop. "State Police Detective Unit."

The young officer nodded and dutifully recorded their names on a pad on his clipboard. They walked up the three stairs and into the house. Inside the foyer stood another local cop in uniform, not much older than the kid outside. Spader identified Dunbar and himself again.

"Kitchen's back there and to the right, sir," the cop said. "Victims are in there. Most of the action took place in the bedroom at the end of the hall on your left there."

"Hold on," Spader said. "I thought this guy's ear was cut off."

"That's right."

"Why isn't he at the hospital?"

"EMTs stopped the bleeding and patched him up. Told him the ear's gone for good, so the victim didn't think he had anything to lose by waiting for you. Said he wants to do anything he can to catch the guy who did...did what he did to him. Said he'll go to the hospital after you tell him you don't need anything else from him."

"And the mother?"

"She seems all right. Minor injuries, they tell me. Tough lady, that one."

Spader nodded to the kid, then suggested to Dunbar that they see the crime scene first. As they walked down the hall, passing a couple of CSS personnel coming the other way, Spader noticed dings and gouges on the walls and the doorjambs, some a few inches off the floor, the height of a wheelchair's footrest, some higher, where a wheel or handle might hit. Hanging on the walls on both sides of the hallway were framed photographs. Spader slowed his pace so he could look at each of the pictures briefly as he passed. They were various photographs of the same two people, sometimes together, sometimes alone. One of the subjects was a thin woman with a sad face. Her face looked a little sad even when she was smiling, as if she couldn't forget the sorrows of her life even for the brief moment it took for someone to snap a picture of her. The other person in the photos was male. In one, he was very young, seven or eight years old, and he stood smiling beneath a gnarled, shady tree, baseball hat tipped back on his head, a glove on his hand. In the rest of the pictures, he was older. In those showing his body, he was in a wheelchair. And his face had changed. In every one of those photos, he had three long scars running vertically the length of his left cheek, starting at his temple and reaching nearly to his jaw.

"My face had those scars," Dunbar said quietly, "I'd probably have my picture taken from the other side."

Spader looked at the pictures again and noticed that in every one the face was angled so the scars showed.

"Course, maybe the other side's worse," Dunbar added.

As they passed a bathroom, Spader saw a raised, padded seat on the toilet and a sturdy metal bar affixed to the wall beside it. Then they reached the back bedroom.

The room was fairly small, maybe fifteen by fifteen. There was a twin bed, unmade, against one wall. A low, long dresser against another. A desk in the corner with a pretty nice-looking computer setup. No desk chair Spader could see. The closet door stood open, a clothing rod about four feet off the floor stretching from one side to the other. Beside the rumpled bed sat an empty wheelchair.

Two members of the CSS team were working the scene. One pulled a digital camera from an equipment case and began snapping photographs. The other had already started taking distance measurements and recording them in a notebook. Spader knew that next someone would use reflective ultraviolet imaging equipment to scan for fingerprints. Spader turned his attention to a straight-backed chair—a kitchen chair, by the look of it—sitting in the center of the room. It clearly didn't belong there. Nor did the tangle of duct tape lying on the floor beside it, or the numerous splotches of blood around the tape. The evidence officer with the camera took a few pictures of the tape and the blood from different angles, then focused his lens on the chair.

Spader took his notebook from his pocket as a black man in a navy suit strode across the room and stuck out his hand.

"Ken Matthews, Beverly PD."

They all shook as Spader and Dunbar introduced themselves. Spader could tell that Matthews recognized him, as too many people did, and looked for a hint of judgment in the man's face or demeanor. He saw none, which certainly wasn't always the case. Spader had made headlines not that long ago, first lauding him, later vilifying him. But Matthews showed no sign of disapproval. He merely looked solid, in every sense of the word—solidly built, yet he also exuded an aura of confidence and capability.

"Got the call ninety minutes ago," Matthews said. "Soon as I realized this was your boy, I called the state police."

"How'd you know this was our guy's work?" Spader asked.

"How many yellow aliens are running around cutting people up? You seen the victims yet?"

"Not yet," Spader said. "Why don't we back up, start from the top?"

Matthews pulled out his own notebook, flipped it open, and started reciting facts, though Spader got the feeling that he had every fact committed to memory and the notebook was little more than a prop, something to keep his hands busy while he talked.

"Nine-one-one call came in almost two and a half hours ago," he said. "First officers on the scene arrived and the victim's mother—" he glanced quickly at his notes, simply from habit, by the look of it "—Louise Pendleton, answered the door. She's sixty-one, has worked as a nurse at Mass General in Boston for over thirty years."

They'd interview the woman themselves, of course, but Spader would take down what she had told Matthews anyway. Apparently, sometime a little after midnight, an intruder entered the house, probably through the door leading from the backyard into the kitchen, a door the occupants rarely locked. No security system. The intruder went first to the mother's room. She heard a noise and opened her eyes in time to see a dark figure looming over her bed. She was about to scream when he pressed something against her neck—turned out to be a stun gun—and she was incapacitated for a while. She sustained minor burns on her neck. Then he left. When he came back a few minutes later, muscle control was beginning to return to her, so he chloroformed her and stuck her in a closet, jamming a chair under the doorknob.

"Jesus," Dunbar said. "He used a stun gun on a sixty-one-year-old lady?"

"He could have killed her," Spader said.

"That's what I'm saying. Jesus."

"No, I meant that if he'd wanted to, he could have easily killed her. She's lucky. Detective Matthews, if the perp locked the mother in a closet, how did she answer the door for your guys?"

"The doorknob on the closet's apparently been loose for years," Matthews said. "It's one of those knobs that doesn't actually turn. You just pull on it to open the door. Anyway, one of the two screws has been missing for a long time—looks like the knob was held on the door by paint as much as anything—so when Mrs. Pendleton banged enough times, the knob came off and she was able to push the door open."

Spader nodded. "Who made the nine-one-one call?" he asked, though he knew the answer.

"Apparently the perp did," Matthews answered, "because the mother says she didn't do it. She would have, but the phone in here was off the hook when she came in, and when she picked it up there was a nine-one-one dispatcher on the line trying to get someone to talk to her."

_Just like the others_ , Spader thought. "There a father?"

"Warren Pendleton. He was fifty-one when he died of lung cancer thirteen years ago."

"Okay, so what about the son?"

Matthews glanced at his notes again. "Stanley Pendleton, twenty-nine. Been in a wheelchair for twenty-one years. The mother found him duct-taped to a chair in his room. The perp apparently brought it in from the kitchen. There was blood running down his face and neck and his right ear was missing."

"Why not just put him in his wheelchair?" Spader asked. "It was right there by the bed, right?"

"When you catch the guy, ask him."

"Is Pendleton on painkillers right now?"

Matthews nodded. "Yeah, but nothing that should affect his recall."

"If his wheelchair's in here, what's he sitting in?"

"When he heard we wanted to keep that chair right where it is until the evidence team got here, he asked our officers to carry him to the kitchen. He's in a regular chair in there until your evidence folks finish with his wheels."

Spader nodded and Matthews continued his narrative. It seemed that after hitting the mother with the stun gun, the perp came down to the son's bedroom and chloroformed him while he was sleeping. The guy woke up taped to the chair.

Again, Spader didn't need the detective to tell him what Pendleton saw when he woke—he'd be interviewing the victim himself—but he let Matthews tell it his own way. Matthews said, "So the guy wakes up and sees that yellow cartoon alien all the kids are so nuts about."

"Galaxo," Dunbar said.

"Right, Galaxo. The perp's wearing a Galaxo mask and when he talks the voice is just like the cartoon, you know?"

"Voice-changing technology," Spader added.

"Right. I knew right away this was your guy. Or maybe a copycat, I guess. Either way, it's your case. Anyway, the guy wakes up from his chloroform nap taped to a chair, and there's Galaxo standing in front of him."

They listened to Matthews tell Pendleton's story. Spader was glad to hear it, because Galaxo's two prior victims had been able to provide only the sketchiest details before they each died, one from heart failure resulting from the trauma he experienced, the other directly from the wounds Galaxo inflicted. But Pendleton was different. He'd survived and, apparently, could tell his whole story. That was a break for the good guys.

Matthews finished his recitation of the facts. An evidence-team officer entered the room, said something to a fellow CSS officer, and headed for the door again. Spader stopped him. "You know if we found any footprints outside?"

"We found a partial by a front window," the officer said, "but it doesn't look promising. Not much of it there."

Dunbar asked, "You find any evidence outside that he was watching the house for a while from somewhere nearby? Cigarette butt on the street or under a lamppost, something like that?"

"I don't think so yet, but we're still looking." The officer paused, waiting for another question, and when none came he left the room.

Matthews looked at Spader and Dunbar. "I realize this is your case, but I assume I'll be staying on board, liaising with your office, things like that."

"That's the way I usually like to work it," Spader said. "You'll know the area a lot better than we do, and if anyone local becomes a suspect, you may have a file on him or even know him."

Matthews nodded. "I've worked with the state police on a few cases. You guys have done okay by me. I'll do whatever I can to help. Somebody does this kind of thing in my town, I want him caught. I don't care who gets the collar."

Spader nodded.

"That said," Matthews continued, "this is your scene now, but you mind if I stay awhile, look around a bit more, maybe see if the evidence team finds anything?"

"Happy to have you. Let me know if anything strikes you. Just so you know, I'll be putting together a task force on this right away, which, as liaison on this case, I hope you'll join." Matthews nodded, so Spader added, "I'll be leaving messages for people on my way home tonight, in fact. I'd like to meet early in the morning, maybe nine thirty."

"Your place?"

"Ten Federal Street in Salem."

"I'll be there."

"One more thing. The uniforms out front going to be here for a while?"

"If you want 'em to."

Spader nodded and Matthews left the room. Spader and Dunbar walked around the room for a few minutes, making notes, discussing what they saw, then went back up the hall, past the bathroom, and into what was obviously the mother's bedroom. Matthews was kneeling in front of the closet, looking closely at the door. Spader nodded to a CSS officer running a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner over the bed, the sheets of which were in disarray. A straight-backed chair with a needlepoint seat lay on its side on the floor near the closet. A few feet from the chair, with a little numbered flag on a stand sitting next to it, was the doorknob, which had come off the door, as Matthews said. Not much else to see in there, so Spader and Dunbar checked out the rest of the house, leaving the kitchen for last. Now and then they spoke with one of the various CSS officers working the scene, making sure every angle was covered. Once they'd seen what they wanted to see of the rest of the house, they went into the kitchen, where a third uniformed cop, a woman with a round face and big eyes, was sitting at the table with what were obviously the two victims. The cop, clearly knowing who Spader and Dunbar must be, stood up from her chair and took up a position by the door leading back into the hallway.

The mother was thin, with a wig of poor quality looking uncomfortable on her head, the brown hair far too dark for a woman her age. A young man sat beside her at the table, looking as uncomfortable in a kitchen chair as his mother's wig did sitting on her head. Stanley Pendleton looked pretty much as he did in the more recent photographs in the hall. Spader introduced Dunbar, then himself. When Pendleton saw Spader, his face showed recognition.

According to Matthews, Pendleton was twenty-nine years old. He looked ten years older. The photographs Spader had seen in the hall had prepared him for the scars on the man's face, but in person they looked worse. One actually passed close enough to the left eye to pull the corner down toward it, making the left side of that eye droop a little. There was a thick gauze pad on the side of his head, where his right ear used to be, secured by white gauze bandages. Spader also now saw what he couldn't see in the photos, that the right side of the man's face was unmarked, left untouched by whatever had caused the scarring on the left side. Remembering that Pendleton had posed in nearly every photo he saw with the damaged side of his face toward the camera, Spader couldn't help but admire the man's spirit. He didn't try to hide what bad luck had done to him.

Spader tried not to look at the man's scars or his slightly deformed left eye, and he tried not to be obvious about avoiding them. "I see you recognize me, Mr. Pendleton," he said. "You've seen my face in the papers?"

Pendleton dropped his gaze, seemingly embarrassed. He nodded. "And on the news. Sorry if I looked surprised. You're the Jack of Spades, right?"

"Well, I go by Detective Spader, actually."

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it."

Easy for Spader to say...not so easy for him to do himself. His appearance in the papers and on the local news was a part of his life he'd rather forget. But moments like this made that difficult. He knew what Pendleton had thought the moment he looked up and saw him: _Is this cop gonna blow it again?_ Shit. And the "Jack of Spades" thing didn't help. He had no idea how Jack ever developed into a nickname for people named John, but some joker he attended the police academy with put that together with his last name, which he altered slightly, and started calling him the Jack of Spades for all the world to hear. Unfortunately, other cadets followed suit, using the damn nickname, and it just stuck. Once Spader joined the state police, he thought he'd put the stupid nickname behind him. Then when everyone thought he was a big hero for a while two years ago, the idiot from the academy saw his face on the news, got himself interviewed, and called Spader the Jack of Spades. Predictably, the press ate that up, made the Jack of Spades famous, called him a hero...until things fell apart and the news people turned on him, leading the public to turn on him as well. A lot of people had forgotten him by now, but for Spader, too many remembered.

Spader looked at the woman. He noticed again how thin she was—perhaps that's where her son got his slender frame—but somehow she didn't look frail. A small white bandage was taped to the left side of her neck, where the stun gun had hit her.

"Are you all right to talk for a little while, Mrs. Pendleton?" he asked. "You've been through a lot tonight, and it's late, but if you feel up to it, we're really better off talking while tonight's events are still fresh in your mind." He figured he had to give her the option of talking the following day, given the circumstances, but he really hoped she wouldn't feel the need to wait.

"I told everything I could to the black fellow." Her voice was smoky, but had none of the sexiness of Lauren Bacall's smoky voice.

"I know you gave your statement to Detective Matthews, and probably answered a lot of questions for him, but we'll need you to go through it again, and the sooner the better. If not tonight, then tomorrow at the latest."

"Mom," Pendleton said, "would you rather wait—"

"No, no, I'm all right," she said. "Really. If it might help catch the man who did this to you, I'll talk all night if I have to."

"Thank you, Mrs. Pendleton," Spader said.

"I only wish that when you catch him, I could get five minutes alone in a room with him."

"Mom," Pendleton said almost apologetically. "The man's dangerous. He could—"

"Hush, Stanley. I meant that he should be handcuffed or something, so I could get at him but he couldn't get at me. I'm not crazy, you know."

The cop in the front hall was right. Tough lady. "Okay, then, Mrs. Pendleton, my partner, Detective Dunbar here, would like you to show him your room, where you were assaulted. And he'll ask you his questions in there, if that's all right."

Dunbar and Spader weren't partners in the truest sense of the word. State police detectives typically were not assigned regular partners, not like the police detectives in TV shows or FBI agents in the movies usually seemed to be. Rather, they tended to work alone or partner with a local police officer in a discrete investigation in that cop's jurisdiction. But Spader and Dunbar had occasion to work a few cases together over the years, and Spader respected his friend's skills and work ethic. So when the detective captain assigned this case to Spader, he'd known it could turn into a high-profile one and told Spader to choose a partner to work it with. Spader chose Dunbar.

"Like I told you," Mrs. Pendleton said, "whatever we can do to help put this crazy person behind bars."

Dunbar followed the woman out of the room. Spader and Dunbar had separated the witnesses primarily so they couldn't create a joint account of what they'd experienced. In this case, the mother had experienced certain things and the son other things, and some of what they'd gone through might overlap, but it was better to have them tell their stories in isolation so one wouldn't influence the other, even subconsciously. He assumed Detective Matthews had done the same thing earlier.

When they were gone, Spader turned to Pendleton and said, "Before we begin, you mind my asking...?"

"My legs? Accident as a kid. I used to play in the woods a lot, climbing trees, hiking, that kind of stuff." He spoke quietly, like a man who didn't like to call attention to himself. "When I was eight years old, I was just walking through the woods with a friend and I fell down a steep hill. I broke some bones in my back, busted a bunch of ribs, tore my face up on some rocks."

Spader's own wife—well, his ex-wife—sported her own woods-related injury, a five-inch scar on her shin she got as a memento of a trip and fall of her own during a trek through the woods when she was a teenager, so Spader was able to say with complete sincerity, "The woods can be dangerous."

"Yeah, that's why I don't do much hiking these days," Pendleton said in his quiet voice. Spader couldn't help but smile. "It's all right, though. That was a long time ago." He looked openly at Spader, as if waiting for more questions about his disability. He was probably used to them.

Spader flipped open his notebook. He asked basic questions at first, writing down the information he learned—about Pendleton's background, his age, the fact that he had a very small and not terribly profitable business designing websites from his home computer, that he volunteered three days a week at the local public library.

"Okay," Spader finally said, "let's talk about tonight. Tell me what happened as best you can remember. Be as thorough as you can, because you never know what small detail will make a big difference in a case. Okay?"

Pendleton nodded and took a deep breath. "Well, I was sound asleep. The next thing I know there's a cloth pressed to my face and a strange smell coming from it. I see a shadow above me, then everything goes black. That was the chloroform, they tell me." Spader nodded. "I wake up a while later, I don't know how long, and I'm tied to a chair and this...this nut in a kid's mask is standing there. It was that cartoon alien all the kids watch, Galaxo Something or Other."

_Starboy Avenger!_ , Spader said in his head. "Other than the mask," he said aloud, "what did he look like?"

"Oh, well, he was dressed all in black."

"Black jeans and a black sweater? Or a black sweat suit? What do you remember?"

Pendleton thought for a moment. "I'm just not sure." He sounded apologetic. "I was focused on his face, you know? I mean, his mask. Plus I was scared, I guess." He looked embarrassed by this admission.

"Who wouldn't be?" Spader said. "You notice anything about him at all other than the mask? How about his hands?"

Pendleton thought for a second. Spader noticed that blood had started to seep through his bandages. "He wore black gloves, I think. Maybe leather, but I couldn't tell you for sure."

"How about his build?"

"Stocky guy. Regular height, I guess. It's hard for me to estimate very well, seeing as I look up to everyone." He smiled slightly. "But I'd guess he was around your height."

"I'm six feet even."

"Sounds about right, give or take an inch. And like I said, he was stocky, thick." He stared off into a corner of the room for half a minute. "That's it, I think. I can't remember anything else about the way he looked."

"That's fine. You did great. You were saying that you woke up in the chair and you saw him standing there. Right in front of you?" Pendleton nodded. "What happened next?"

"Right. Okay. So the creep starts talking. Oh, my mouth's taped up, by the way. Anyway, he starts talking, and his voice is weird. I mean _really_ weird. It's like...like..."

"Like the alien on TV?" Spader asked.

"Yeah, almost exactly like that. Really creepy."

"Could you tell whether it was a man or a woman behind the mask?"

The question seemed to surprise Pendleton. "I don't know. I guess I just assumed it was a man. Plus he was built kind of solid, you know?"

"But the voice, you couldn't tell from the voice? I mean, inside the mask, could you get a sense of whether the person had a deep voice, or a high one. Or spoke with a lisp, maybe. Anything like that?"

"No lisp, I don't think. And as for the rest, well, I couldn't hear anything. Like I told you, he sounded just like that alien on TV. But I'm pretty sure it was a man."

"And how did he speak? I mean, did he sound educated to you? Like someone with a college or graduate degree? Or maybe he sounded like someone who never got out of the fifth grade? You notice anything along those lines?"

"Uh, not really. I had to guess, I'd say he was educated. Spoke well enough, I think."

"Okay," Spader said, "that's good. So what did he say to you?"

"Well, right away he tells me there are ground rules."

"Such as?"

"First, he won't kill me unless he has to. Second, I'm not allowed to scream for help when he takes the tape off my mouth. That made me happy right then, you know? Knowing he was going to take the tape off. At the time I'm thinking, well shit, it can't be too bad what he's going to do to me, right, if he's going to take the tape off. Man, was I wrong." He fell silent for a moment and Spader waited patiently. Pendleton took a breath and continued, saying that his attacker gave him two choices and that if he didn't choose one within one minute the guy would treat it as though he'd chosen _both_ options.

Spader nodded. "Okay. Were you worried about your mother?"

"Huh? Well, yeah, sure I was. Since the cancer she seems to be a little more frail." That explained the wig, Spader thought. "But I forgot to tell you. One of the first things the guy says to me is that my mother's okay. She's locked in a closet, and he swears he didn't hurt her, and he won't if I behave myself."

Spader nodded again and asked a few clarifying questions, probing for a little more detail on the story up to that point. Dunbar came into the room and took an empty chair at the table. He told Pendleton his mother was resting in her room. _Good job, Dunbar_ , Spader thought, keeping her out of the kitchen even after her interview ended. Spader asked Pendleton to continue.

"Okay, so he stands there," Pendleton said, "scratching his weird plastic head, looking like he's thinking it over, then he gives me two choices. It's either have my nose sliced off or my ear. Can you believe it? I couldn't. It was crazy. It just didn't compute. And he reaches for the tape on my mouth and my mind's spinning, right, wondering how the heck I'm supposed to choose between my nose and my ear. Then the guy stops before he pulls off the tape. He seems to think it over a little more, and he changes my choices. I don't why. One of my choices is still my ear—obviously," and he turned his head slightly to show Spader the bandage on the side of his head, "but instead of having my nose sliced off, my other option is all my teeth pulled out of my head, one by one, with a pair of pliers. And if they won't come out with pliers, he'll use a hammer, he says. Then, real quick, he rips off the tape. Suddenly I notice the timer's going and I can barely think. And there's this freaky alien standing there with his crazy smile and his huge happy eyes and I'm trying to think and the whole time he's talking to me, talking in that high-pitched cartoon voice, telling me I'd better choose or else he'll yank out all my teeth _and_ cut off my ear. And he never stops talking and I'm trying like crazy to think what I should do, because I believed every word he said, you know? I just _knew_ he'd do exactly like he said. And seeing how I wasn't gonna get out of that situation before the timer went off, I knew I'd better choose one of the options, no matter how bad it was. So I chose to have my ear cut off. I mean, you probably didn't notice, but I don't exactly break the ladies' hearts, you know, not with this face, so I figured losing the ear wouldn't be that big a deal, 'cause they probably have fake ones they can put on—and I was right, by the way, the ambulance guy told me they have...I forget what he called them—"

"Prosthetic ears?" Spader offered.

"Right," Pendleton said, "that's right. Anyway, I figured I'd either have a fake ear or fake teeth, and it didn't matter which as far as my looks went, but it'd probably hurt a lot more to have each tooth taken out one by one—maybe with a hammer—than to have my ear cut off. You know, one quick slice might do it, and then it would be over. That's what I thought, anyway. Instead, the bastard took his time sawing it off." He shivered involuntarily. "I don't know, I still figure I made the right decision. What would you have done?"

The question surprised Spader. "I honestly don't know. I'd have to think about it."

"I would have liked some time to think about it too, but he only gave me a minute. Anyway, I picked the ear. I guess I made it by a few seconds, because a little after I made my choice the timer went off. Galaxo tells me I did good and slaps another piece of tape over my mouth. Then he opens this little gym bag and takes out a little saw, grabs my ear with his free hand, pulls it out from my head, and begins sawing away. It hurt like you wouldn't believe."

"I bet it did. And then?"

"And then I think I passed out. Next thing I know my mother's waking me up—and wow, you should have seen her looking at me, at all the blood—and Galaxo is gone. Then the cops show up and the ambulance guys come."

"And your mother called nine-one-one?" Spader asked, though he knew the answer.

"No, that's another weird thing. Galaxo did, they think, 'cause the phone was off the hook when my mother came into my room and apparently nine-one-one was already on the line."

Spader asked several more questions, queries formulated to fill in any holes Pendleton had left, to coax out additional details. Then he covered new ground, asking whether Pendleton could think of anyone who would want to hurt him, had he had any serious arguments with anyone lately, had he met anyone new recently who might be worth looking into. Finally, he said, "We're almost finished here, Mr. Pendleton. Now, can you tell me, does the name Andrew Yasovich mean anything to you?"

Pendleton thought about it and shook his head. "No, should it?"

"How about Peter Lisbon?"

He frowned this time. "I might have seen that name in the paper. I don't know."

"Does either name mean anything to you, other than what you may have seen on the news or in the paper? Some connection in your own life? Take your time. This could be very important."

Pendleton blew out a breath and appeared to be concentrating hard. He shook his head again. "I'm sorry, no."

"Okay, Mr. Pendleton, we're just about finished now. Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything at all you can remember about tonight that might help?"

Pendleton seemed to give it some thought. "No, sorry."

"That's okay. You did really well." He handed the man one of his cards. "Don't hesitate to call me if you think of anything else. You never know when something might come to you. Just before you fall asleep, when you're watching TV, you never know. Call me anytime."

"I will."

Spader closed his notebook and stood. "I really think you should get to a hospital soon. The paramedics who were here are undoubtedly good, but you'll want proper treatment as soon as possible."

"Yeah, I just wanted to wait for you, that's all. I wanted to make sure I talked to you before I forgot anything. And the paramedics told me there wasn't all that much left to do for me, at least right away."

"Still, you should go. Your mother should be seen too. I'll see that your wheelchair is brought to you soon and I'll ask one of the officers to drive you both to the hospital, okay?"

"Okay."

Spader looked at the cop standing by the doorway to the hall, then glanced down at her nametag. "Officer Davis? How about it? Want to take the Pendletons to the hospital?"

"Of course," she said.

Spader was about to leave when Pendleton said, "You gonna catch the guy who did this to us, Detective Spader?" It sounded like there was some hope in his voice, but Spader thought he heard a little doubt too. It was the same way a lot of people had reacted to him over the past year or so.

"We'll sure as hell try, Mr. Pendleton," he said. "I promise you that."

Pendleton nodded and Spader followed Dunbar out of the room and straight out of the house.

AS DUNBAR DROVE them back toward their detective unit in Salem, the town immediately to the south of Beverly, they went over what they'd each learned. Dunbar reported that the mother had told him essentially the same thing she'd told Matthews.

"She tell you how the son ended up in a wheelchair?" Spader asked.

"You didn't ask the son?"

"Of course I did."

"She said he fell off a cliff walking in the woods. Broke his back."

"He told me it was a steep hill."

"Yeah, well, when I was a kid I was bitten by a beagle," Dunbar said. "You hear my mother tell that story now, it was a rabid Saint Bernard."

Spader recalled for Dunbar what Pendleton had said before Dunbar came into the room, after which they drove in silence for several minutes.

"Sick son of a bitch," Dunbar finally said.

"Pendleton?"

"Very funny. Like that poor bastard doesn't have enough problems. He has to lose his ear too? Shit, John, I'm starting to think this Galaxo asshole has no conscience."

"You didn't get that impression after he sliced out Andrew Yasovich's tongue and the old man's heart just popped? Or how about when he cut off Peter Lisbon's feet and the poor guy bled to death?"

"Well, yeah, but...shit, I mean, a cripple. With those scars on his face, no less. I'm just saying, you know?"

Spader nodded. "Yeah, I know."

Another couple of miles slid by in the dark before Dunbar said quietly, "John?"

"Yeah?"

"I really wanna catch this guy."

"Me too."

They were almost back at Ten Fed before either of them spoke again. "John?"

"Yeah?"

"If you're really gonna break up with Hannah, you wanna give me her number?"

## 3

SPADER CLOSED THE door to his apartment and engaged both deadbolts. It had been a long day and he was glad it was over. At that moment, most people would think, "It's good to be home," but Spader still couldn't bring himself to think of his apartment as home. Home was where he'd lived with Olivia, in the three-bedroom Victorian in the seaside town of Swampscott, the house where they'd made love, eaten dinners, watched movies on the couch, debated when to start trying to have children, disagreed about the color of the wallpaper in the foyer, and where they'd made plans for the rest of their lives, plans that hadn't worked out very well at all. Home definitely wasn't this sterile two-bedroom apartment in a relatively seedy corner of Salem, a largely blue-collar town next to Swampscott, fifteen or so miles north of Boston.

Salem, once one of the most important seaports in the country, is most famous for an ugly episode in its distant past, an episode of ignorance and hysteria. In 1692, three young women claimed they'd been afflicted by witches. Soon the jail cells in the little Puritan village were crammed with men and women accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. In less than four months, nineteen men and women were hanged as witches, and one man over eighty was "pressed" to death; large stones were placed on him, one after another, until he died. Spader still felt oddly uncomfortable driving through this town, seeing how it capitalized on its infamous past. Everywhere you looked was a novelty store with a witch on its sign, a wicked play of words in its name, skulls and gargoyles and other creepy things in their windows. Restaurants might sell a beverage concoction called a "Witch's Brew." Weekend tourists took graveyard tours or visited wax museums or life-sized dioramas depicting the trials and eventual hangings of the suspected witches. And Halloween was a nightmare. If you found a public parking space in town in late October, you'd be smart to find the nearest lottery-ticket seller and bet your paycheck, because you'd be having a damned lucky day. Spader sighed, realizing that Halloween was only three months away.

Spader shrugged out of his shoulder holster and draped it, Glock and all, over the back of a chair in the living room. He lifted his pant leg and unsnapped the ankle holster for his snub-nosed .38 Colt Detective Special and laid that on the chair as well. The message light on his answering machine was blinking. The first call was from a telemarketer. Because Spader didn't want a free weekend in Atlantic City in exchange for his attendance at a short informational meeting about time-shares, he didn't bother to write down the toll-free number the robotic voice left for him. The second call was from his son David, not even trying to hide the sullenness in his voice as he said that he wanted to talk about school again. Spader was glad it was far too late to call him back. The kid was screwing up in college, so they were pulling him out. End of story. He loved his son dearly, as did Olivia, but they weren't going to budge on the school issue, and David wasn't going to see their side of it any time soon. Spader didn't feel like fighting with the boy about it yet again tonight. He made a mental note to call David tomorrow and deleted the message. The third message was from Hannah. Because he didn't want to hear what she had to say about his disappearing act, at least not tonight, he skipped to the fourth and final message.

"John, it's me." Olivia. Spader hated himself for the way his wife's voice—his _ex_ -wife's voice—still made his breath catch just a little, as it had ever since they separated. "We need to meet sometime." He hated himself even more for the ridiculous feeling of hope those few words gave him the second he heard them. "I hope you're doing all right. Anyway, I, uh, I think you have a couple of my photo albums. I'd like to get them back sometime, okay?" He knew the albums she was referring to. There were two. The first contained pictures from her life before him, the second held photos from their life together. Spader wondered if she didn't care quite as much about getting the second album back but simply was too kind to say, "I'd like the pictures from my life before you, but you can keep all the others."

Spader realized he'd missed part of the phone message, so he rewound it.

"I don't know, I wondered if maybe you packed the albums by accident, with your stuff. You must have seen them. I hope we can meet sometime. I'd really like to get those photos back. And see how you're doing," she added, just a second too late, it seemed to him.

He erased the message and picked up the phone and called her cell number. He knew she didn't keep it turned on at night, when she was home. When her voicemail picked up, he said, "Olivia, it's John. I got your message. I haven't seen those photo albums you want, but they could be in one of the boxes I still haven't gotten around to unpacking yet. I'll try to look tomorrow." He closed out with "See you" and was able, just in time, to avoid adding "sweetheart" at the end.

He went to the fridge, grabbed a Budweiser, and went to into his second bedroom, which he used as an office of sorts. He slid into the chair behind his desk, opened the bottom drawer and pulled out two photo albums with burgundy faux-leather binding. He took a sip of beer, opened the first album, and started flipping through the pictures. Black-and-whites and faded color shots from Olivia's youth. There she was as a smiling infant, less than a year old, her eyes sparkling with the unbridled joy that can only be found on the face of a child. And in the next one she was maybe two years old, up to her chubby calves in a kiddie pool, a floppy hat on her head, a lopsided grin on her face. Spader saw her blowing out birthday candles, in Halloween costumes, in school plays, hugging one or the other of her parents, posing with Cookie the cocker spaniel, opening Christmas presents, grinning with a group of other kids at some camp by a lake, playing junior-varsity basketball, standing with her arm looped through that of her nervous-looking prom date, graduating from high school, going off to college. He sipped his beer and turned the pages and the years and watched his ex-wife grow from a beautiful child into a beautiful young woman.

He got himself a second beer and returned to his desk. He replaced the first photo album in the drawer, took a sip of Bud, then another, and opened the second album. A shot of Olivia with her arms around him, from when they were first dating. Pictures of them dancing, smiling, standing in front of various landmarks, laughing. Photos from their wedding and their intentionally cheesy honeymoon in the Poconos, complete with heart-shaped bathtub. Pictures of their first house, then their second, of their first brand-new car. Shots of them with their son David, as the boy grew over the years. Spader smiled now in spite of himself. There he and Olivia were, a happy, carefree, never-suspecting-that-all-this-was-fleeting couple. She seemed to be smiling in every picture. He wondered when she'd stopped smiling. He downed a little more Bud and realized that he didn't really wonder at all. He knew.

He wanted to be angry at Olivia. For a while he had been. Angry that she hadn't stuck by him through his darkest time like she was supposed to do, at least according to the spiel the priest gave before pronouncing them husband and wife. But after she'd been gone a few months he thought about things, about the way he'd acted throughout his ordeal, and he saw things a little more clearly. Maybe she hadn't really walked away from their marriage. Maybe he'd shoved her out the door. He certainly couldn't have been a bushel of laughs in the months after Eddie Rivers came into his life.

EDDIE RIVERS LIKED to cut off people's legs. It turned him on. He chose his victims largely by the kind of homes they lived in. It didn't matter so much what town it was in—his killing ground appeared to be the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts—but it was always a single-family residence with a backyard, preferably one with bushes along the back of the house, but that didn't seem to be a deal-breaker. He'd surveil the house, learn the occupants' routines, and return on a night when he knew there would be only one person at home. He didn't care who it was—man, woman, young, old—it didn't matter to him. He'd wait until the person was alone, then he'd break into the house, subdue his victim with a stun gun, tie him up, gag him, and cut off his legs at the knees with a hacksaw. He'd do the same thing every time. Once the legs were off, he'd walk out through a back door—he always did the messy work in a room facing the back of the house—peer in a window at the victim he'd just maimed, and, while the vic bled, Rivers would masturbate into a tissue. Some of this was gleaned during the investigation prior to Rivers's arrest, some Rivers let slip after his incarceration. It was believed that he was aroused by the infliction of pain, watching its effects on his victims, and by voyeurism. In all, seven of his victims bled to death before help could arrive—four men, two women, and one ten-year-old boy. Two of his victims miraculously survived. They were of little help to investigators, however, because Rivers wore a black ski mask. The only thing he said during the entire time he was with his victims—and he said it to both who survived, so it was assumed he also said it to the ones who weren't so lucky—was, "I have no choice."

Spader drew the case and for fifteen months he did nothing but run into brick walls in the investigation. Meanwhile, the time between attacks grew shorter, which is common for serial killers. After his first victim, Rivers waited nearly four months to strike again. His next victim came three months later. Then two and a half months. The seven weeks. And so on. The killer was spinning out of control.

When the final two victims fell only a couple of weeks apart, and a week had already passed since the last one, Spader grew anxious. The killer would strike again soon. Time was running out for somebody, somebody who would die a horrible death just so some crazy fuck could jerk off. Massachusetts suburban residents—especially those living in single-family dwellings with backyards—were getting scared. And Spader was getting desperate. Then an anonymous tip came in to the hotline. It said to check out Eddie Rivers of East Boston, and do so before he killed again. Under normal circumstances, Spader would have taken some time to look into Rivers. Investigate quietly and, if there was something there, move in. But the hourglass was emptying fast, so Spader took Oscar Wagner, who'd been assigned to work the high-profile case with him, and went to East Boston.

RIVERS LIVED IN an apartment building on a street lined with nearly identical, dilapidated three-story buildings. Spader and Wagner walked up the stairs of the second building on the left, stopped at the common doorway that served all the apartments inside, and buzzed what appeared to be the super's apartment. Two minutes later they were on their way up a dimly lit stairway with peeling avocado paint, up to the second floor. An anonymous tip with nothing more isn't close to a sufficient basis for an arrest warrant, or even a search warrant, so all Spader and Wagner could do was knock on Rivers's door and try to talk to him, if they could. Assuming for a moment that the guy was their killer, maybe he'd be stupid enough to speak with them and say something incriminating. Or maybe he'd even let them in and some damning piece of evidence would be lying in plain sight, giving them probable cause to arrest him. Or maybe their visit would scare him into doing something stupid, something that would give him away before he could strike again. At the very least, maybe it would make Rivers—if he was their guy—maybe it would make him cautious enough to alter his timetable, wait a while before moving in on his next victim, and maybe that would give Spader time to put together a case on the dirtbag, a strong enough case to get him off the street before he could kill anyone else.

The door opened as far as the security chain inside would allow and a broad face with dull little eyes stared out at them through the opening. Spader stated that they were the police and wanted to talk with him. Rivers's eyes shifted from Spader to Wagner and back to Spader again. Something flickered in those dull eyes for a fraction of a second, some cocktail of emotions. Hostility and concern? Or had Spader imagined it? And there was something else, something he hadn't seen when he first saw the eyes. An intelligence greater than those eyes would have you believe.

"What's this about?" Rivers asked.

"We just have a few questions for you," Spader answered.

"About what?"

"Do you think we could come inside?"

"No."

"It'll only take a few minutes."

"No reason to come in then, I guess. Ask your questions."

Rivers was either smarter than he looked or obstinate enough to have denied them access under any circumstances, guilty or innocent.

Spader tried another tack. "Mr. Rivers, maybe what we're going to be asking you about isn't the kind of thing you want your neighbors to hear, you know what I mean?"

"I got no secrets." Rivers smiled and Spader was struck by a lightning-quick flash, just a _feeling_ —he couldn't even call it instinct—that this was the smile behind the black ski mask, the smile the killer wore when he dragged a hacksaw across his victims' legs. So he asked Rivers where he was on the night of each of the killer's attacks. "I'm usually home at night, by myself, without an alibi."

"What makes you think you need an alibi?"

"I don't. I was just trying to save you time. You were gonna ask if anyone could tell you what I just told you, that I was home those nights, and I was telling you that no, they can't."

"And you just happen to know that? Standing here, right now, you know that you were home alone on nine specific nights over the past fifteen months?"

Rivers smirked. "Well, I'd have to check my calendar to be certain I didn't have an engagement of some kind, but I'm betting I was home watching TV by myself those nights. I usually am. So you think I'm the guy cutting people's legs off, huh?"

Spader and Wagner exchanged looks. "Why would you say that, Mr. Rivers?"

"Those are the nights he killed those people, aren't they? Well, I guess some of 'em lived, right?"

"Those are the dates, yes, but how did you know that?"

Rivers smiled. "You think I'm stupid? That guy's been hacking legs off for fifteen months, same as you just asked me. Besides, I think I saw your pretty face on the TV, at a news conference after one of the murders."

Spader nodded. "I see. You been following that case closely, Mr. Rivers?"

"Nah. But they showed you on the news, outside some victim's house. I don't really watch the news myself, but it came on right after one of my TV shows, one of those about forensic teams and evidence and shit. There are so many, I get 'em confused. But I watch 'em all. Those shows are really educational."

Was he trying to say that because he watched those kinds of shows, he could avoid being caught?

Spader stared into Rivers's dull eyes, eyes that consciously hid intelligence and probably far darker things, and had that _feeling_ again, that feeling that Rivers was their guy. As Rivers held his gaze, that feeling grew into a certainty.

"I'll catch you, Mr. Rivers," he said, perhaps unwisely. "I'll put you in jail."

The eyes no longer looked dull. Now they held amusement. And arrogance. "No, you won't." Another smile. "Because I'm not the guy." He winked at Wagner and said, "Good night, officers."

"Detectives," Spader said. "Or troopers."

"Oh, yeah, shit, sorry, detectives." Spader heard a contemptuous chuckle behind the closed door.

SPADER LEFT HIS office and Olivia's photo albums behind and moved to a recliner in the living room. He also opened his third beer. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about Rivers's final victims, and how much of their blood was on Spader's own hands.

"SURE, I KNOW the guy, but I don't know nothin' about anybody gettin' their legs cut off, 'cept what I seen on TV. Caught you on the tube, by the way. You were lookin' sharp, my man. A little stressed, but still sharp."

J.R. Sands was one of Spader's confidential informants, one who had, in the past, provided reliable information that served as the basis for a good number of warrants served in the towns around Boston, including East Boston, where both J.R. and Rivers lived. J.R. was a small-time fence of stolen goods. In that capacity he was in touch with a number of criminal lowlifes in the Boston area. Spader knew all about his operation and let him stay in business. He figured that if J.R. didn't fence the goods someone else would, and Spader might as well get something out of it—and that something was information from time to time.

After meeting Rivers, Spader knew he had to act fast, so he'd called Sands. Rivers—he was sure now it was Rivers—was compressing his time frame. Spader couldn't arrest the bastard, not with nothing more than an anonymous tip and his own hunch. He hadn't even been able to justify to his superiors' satisfaction the use of manpower to watch Rivers over the next few days. There simply wasn't enough basis there. But he couldn't just sit around and wait for Rivers to strike.

Spader puffed a breath into his hands, trying to blow the chill off them. "Maybe you heard how this killer's speeding up, killing more and more frequently?"

They were standing under an overpass at the southern end of East Boston. The place stank of garbage and urine. A few scraps of paper swirled and scraped along the ground, dragged by a brisk early-December wind.

J.R. sniffed, spat out a glob of phlegm, thoughtfully turning his head first and sending the thick mass a few feet off to his right rather than on the ground right between them. "Yeah, I heard that. But so what? I'm tellin' you, I don't know a thing 'bout Eddie Rivers killin' nobody."

Spader shook his head. "I need Rivers, J.R., and I need him now. You know everything that happens in East Boston."

"Yeah, but he ain't killin' anyone in East Boston, is he?"

"That's not my point."

"Look, Spader, if I knew, I'd tell you, you know? I got no loyalty to that guy. I barely know him. And like I been sayin', I don't know nothin' 'bout him killin' nobody. God's truth, man." He shrugged.

Spader stared into J.R.'s dark-brown eyes. An angry horn blared on the overpass above.

J.R. said, "Shit, I just don't know nothin', so I don't see how I can help you out on this one, bro. Sorry." And he actually looked it. "Now it's cold out here, man, so we 'bout done?"

Spader said, very quietly, "Yeah, I guess we're done." J.R. spit again and looked like he was about to turn to leave, when Spader said, "You got a family, J.R.? A wife, maybe, or kids? How about a mother, she still alive?"

J.R.'s eyes grew cold, as if the late-fall wind had chilled them. He shook his head. "That's sad, man, really sad."

"What is?"

"You and I known each other for, what? Twelve, thirteen years now? And we don't know shit about each other, do we? You don't even know if I got a wife or kids. Well, I had a wife, but she livin' somewhere else now. And I got kids. They live with her."

Spader had struck a nerve. He couldn't tell if J.R. still cared for the wife, but he cared about the kids. "Rivers doesn't care who he kills, J.R. He'd kill your kids if he felt like it. Just for kicks."

"Your man only kills in the 'burbs, Spader, and in case you hadn't noticed, there ain't no green lawns around here, no tennis clubs or moms droppin' kids off at soccer practice."

"That's not my point."

"Then what's your point?" The laid-back J.R. was gone.

"You're right, it's not going to be your kid, but it _could_ be. It could be your kid, or your mother, or your friend, or you. It won't be, because he'll probably strike in the suburbs, like you say, but he could pick just about anyone, and somebody's going to suffer, suffer in a way you wouldn't want to suffer, in a way you wouldn't want anyone you care about to suffer. And others will be left behind, alive—family, friends—and they'll feel the way you'd feel if you lost your kids." Spader took a breath while they stared at each other, then he turned away and headed toward his car. "Just something to think about," he added.

"Hold up."

Spader turned.

"Rivers is pond scum, man, but like I said, I don't know shit about him killin' nobody, okay? Let's get that clear."

"Okay. So why'd you stop me?"

"I was just wonderin'. Did you know he deals?"

"Rivers? He's dealing drugs? I watched his place a couple of times. Didn't seem to be a lot of foot traffic in and out of there."

"Trust me, man. He only sells outta there a couple of nights a month. And they aren't regular nights, you know? They change and you gotta know someone who knows someone who knows when he's open for business, you know?"

"And you know this how?"

A pause. "I buy from him sometimes, okay?"

Spader thought for a moment. This could be enough. "And you know when he was selling out of his apartment last? The exact date?"

"Last Thursday."

"You're sure about that? No doubt?"

"Last fucking Thursday. Friend of mine picked up some weed for us."

"And the one before that?"

J.R. thought for a moment. "The first of the month."

"You're certain?"

"Dead certain, yeah, but I don't know what that does for you, man, 'cause it got nothin' to do with them people dyin'."

"I'll worry about that, J.R.," Spader said. "Thanks."

He had his hand on his car-door handle when, from behind, he heard J.R. clear his throat. Spader turned. J.R. was looking down at his feet. He moved a pebble with the toe of his brilliant-white sneaker.

"You think this shit I gave you helps at all, Spader?"

"I don't know. I hope so."

Spader called Oscar Wagner on his cell phone. Wagner had left Ten Fed hours before, but he said he was eating a late dinner not far away. He took down all the information Spader wanted included in the search warrant application. He'd return to the office, type it up, and put a call in to the judge on call for warrants. Spader hoped it would be Judge Banks, who was known to be a pretty soft touch for warrants. In the meantime, Spader would make some calls and put together a team to execute the search warrant. When Spader ended the call, he had no idea how profoundly several lives would be affected by what Oscar Wagner did in the next hour.

While waiting to hear back from Wagner, Spader drove to their scheduled rendezvous point, an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from Rivers's residence. Spader's plan was simple. Although he didn't have a sufficient basis for a warrant related to the murders and attempted murders, nor would an arrest warrant on drug charges pass constitutional muster, Spader had enough for a _search_ warrant covering Rivers's residence. Spader figured they'd search the house for items associated with the possession or sale of illegal drugs, and while they were looking, they might come across evidence linking Rivers to the murders. If the initial search was legal, and the places they searched in Rivers's apartment were places in which evidence related to the suspected illegal drug activity could realistically be concealed, anything they found relating to other crimes was fair game. And if they were lucky enough to find Rivers at home when they served the warrant, and they found evidence of a crime, they wouldn't need an arrest warrant. They'd have probable cause to arrest and Spader could snap the cuffs on the son of a bitch then and there. He prayed it all worked out like he hoped. He prayed they'd find enough to at least get Rivers off the street and into jail on drug charges. And he prayed the piece of shit was home and not already in the process of committing another in his series of truly heinous crimes.

Thirty-five minutes after Judge Banks—it had indeed been Judge Banks—approved the warrant, Spader and Wagner were back at Rivers's apartment building. They walked up the stairs and buzzed the super. Then they climbed up through the avocado-green stairwell to the first floor and approached apartment number three. Because Judge Banks had agreed with their assessment that the suspect would likely destroy crucial evidence immediately after the police announced their presence, their request for a "no-knock" warrant, one allowing unannounced forced entry, was granted. Spader followed Massachusetts procedure and made a token "threshold reappraisal of the actual threat" to the evidence they were there to search for, then gave a hand signal. Two East Boston police officers stepped forward and swung a heavy iron battering ram into the door, splintering it and knocking it off its hinges. Then Spader, Wagner, and the two cops were through the door, Spader identifying them as police officers and ordering anyone inside to remain still, hands in sight.

They were in a living room. The television was on. A single lamp in one corner illuminated Eddie Rivers standing up from the couch, a bottle of beer dropping from his left hand, his right slipping behind his back. Spader told him to freeze, asshole, but Rivers didn't, and his hand brought a gun from behind his back. Spader ordered him to drop the gun and Rivers didn't do that either. Instead, he began to raise it. Someone yelled " _gun_."

With adrenaline coursing through him, jacking him up, everything seemed to slow down for Spader. Rivers was actually smiling as he raised his gun, its barrel swinging toward Spader, who had his own gun trained on Rivers. Spader was a terrific shot with his weapon. He outshone his classmates at the academy and had kept his skills sharp over the years. In that surreal slow-down of time, Spader had time to decide—do I take the high-percentage shot, put a couple into his chest, or do I shoot to incapacitate? He could take Rivers down without killing him—in that split second of real time, he just _knew_ that he could—or he could kill the sick fuck who got off on others' agony, the murderer of seven people, the bastard who had left two survivors to spend the rest of their lives legless, crippled. Spader fired his weapon, the only time he'd done so outside the range in his entire career. The bullet struck Rivers in the right shoulder, just where Spader meant to put it, and the gun fell from Rivers's hand as he dropped back onto the couch. His smiled disappeared.

Rivers was cuffed, frisked, and Mirandized, and someone suggested—probably facetiously, Spader figured—that they significantly delay calling for an ambulance for the motherfucker, delay it long enough for the piece of garbage to bleed to death. While the ambulance was on its way, they began to execute the search warrant and almost immediately found evidence of the illegal drug activities that had been the basis for the search warrant. Continued searching turned up more of the same. They carefully recorded each item, noting precisely where it had been found. They were meticulous. They wanted no screwups, nothing to give Rivers's defense lawyer grounds for claiming any of the evidence was illegally obtained.

While the other officers searched, Spader sat on the cheap, scratched coffee table, directly in front of Rivers.

"I know you killed them, Eddie," he said. "You cut off their legs and killed them. It's only a matter of time before we find evidence of that. You're better off just telling us. I'll tell the judge you cooperated."

"Fuck you." Rivers was in pain but perfectly lucid. And grouchy because of the bullet in his shoulder.

"That wasn't very cooperative, Eddie. And it was rude. It makes me want to put my fist into that bullet hole, which I think you wouldn't like at all."

Rivers was well built, his muscles evident beneath his bloody T-shirt. He looked like a real hard case, one who wouldn't be intimidated by physical threats. Still, certain physical threats were worse than others.

A siren wailed nearby, closer and closer.

"One of your victims was a ten-year-old kid, Eddie. I don't have to tell you how the other prisoners treat child killers, do I? I sure as shit wouldn't want to be you after we lock your ass up. Well, unfortunately for you, we can't actually lock your _ass_ up. But you know what I'm saying. So why don't you talk to me now, get it all off your chest, and the judge might go easier on you."

"I don't have to say a word to you," Rivers said. "My friend Miranda just told me that."

Rivers's Miranda rights, which Spader had read to him, did indeed give him the right to remain silent. Spader didn't care. "Come on, Eddie. Just tell me why you did it. What do you get out of cutting off their legs? Is it a sexual thrill of some kind? Can't see how you could jerk off with one hand while sawing with the other, but maybe you're a good multitasker, I don't know. Then again, you probably do this because you _can't_ get it up. Need to feel powerful." Spader didn't yet know that Rivers jerked off in the bushes outside the victims' houses. He saw Rivers's jaw clench, maybe from the pain, he thought, but maybe from something else. "Is that it? A little soft below the belt?"

He was trying to goad Rivers into saying something stupid, something incriminating. Rivers opened his mouth and Spader thought it might have worked. Then the asshole smiled and said, "I'm not your guy, man."

"Yes, you are, Eddie."

Paramedics rushed into the apartment and Spader had to back away to give them room to work on Rivers. As they did, Spader looked at the punk, who stared back with black eyes. Soon they had him strapped to a stretcher and were taking him from the room. As they passed, Spader saw something scurry across Rivers's face, like a shadow, something darkly unpleasant. If he'd had any doubts about Rivers's guilt, they would have evaporated right then.

After the ambulance left, Spader joined the search of the apartment. At one point, Oscar Wagner said to him, "Couldn't you have aimed a few inches higher and to the right, put that bullet between the cocksucker's eyes?"

It wasn't until twenty minutes later that Spader heard an officer's voice from one of the bedrooms toward the back of the apartment.

"Oh, shit. Look at these."

What the cop found—and what they found later—should have put Rivers in jail for the rest of his life. The trial should have been a mere formality. And it would have been, everything would have gone as it should have, if the cops—if Spader—hadn't screwed up. Instead, Eddie Rivers got the chance to walk around free again, free to listen to his demons, to do the terrible things he so enjoyed doing. And at least two more innocents died.

SPADER WAS LYING on his bed now, on top of the covers. He put an empty beer bottle—his fourth, he thought—on the nightstand and closed his eyes. He was tired. Tired of the day and tired of thinking about Eddie Rivers. He wanted to close his eyes, keep them shut tight, and try not to listen to ghosts. But on some nights they spoke longer and louder than on others, and on those nights he got very little sleep. This felt like one of those nights.

_JACK OF SPADES: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

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# FUNERAL FOOD

The First Tory Bauer Mystery

**by**

**Kathleen Taylor**
**  
**

Delphi, South Dakota is a dusty little prairie town, the kind people drive through on their way to bigger cities. But as Tory Bauer, middle-aged, widowed, overweight, cranky waitress might say, "Everything that happens in big towns, happens here too. We just don't look as good naked."

In _Funeral Food_ , the first of six mysteries featuring the crew at the Delphi Café, Tory would like nothing more than to get through the hot June days waiting tables, and her nights reading mysteries and thinking about the married Stu McKee. The last thing she wants is to be involved with a real-life mystery, but when a handsome young Mormon Missionary is found, dead, in the café's mop closet, Tory is drawn into the investigation, and what she discovers shakes the foundations of her small town world.

## Prologue

I'M NOT THE first to observe that funerals are for the living, not the dead. Whether Uncle John is stuck forever in a pine box, on his way to a better world, or somewhere in between, is beyond our knowledge, and our control. And since the deceased is pretty well beyond caring about the ceremonies and rituals that commemorate the end of life as we know it, it's safe to assume that survivors are the ones who demand a proper send-off.

Personal belief systems notwithstanding, the ceremonies we choose to honor the dead are remarkably similar to each other. Relatives and friends gather. They speak and they cry. They accompany the dear departed to a final resting place. They speak and cry some more. And then they come back and eat.

The words are the same. The tears are the same. And the food is the same.

At least that's how it works in Delphi, South Dakota. No self-respecting funeral would be caught without a hearty meal dutifully prepared by the church ladies, spread out buffet-style in the reception hall, CCD center, or auditorium.

Mourners know the drill. They talk and cry, and sometimes even laugh, as they pile their Styrofoam plates with a casserole hot dish and red Jell-O salad, carrot sticks, buttered buns, and bar cookies. They sit together, drink coffee and punch, tell old stories and invent new ones, surrounding each other with comfort continuity.

Our preference for routine and conformity goes a long way toward explaining why we are the way we are. Mired in routine, we don't need a funeral, or funeral food, to carry on, doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way.

That sort of near-ceremonial gathering, minus the crying and dead bodies, occurs every day in Aphrodite Ferguson's Delphi Cafe.

We gather, we talk, and we eat bad food.

And on the cusp of a hectic, hot and sticky noon hour, on a day that started out like all others, unfortunately unaware that my own routine was about to become permanently altered, I tried to maintain continuity for the rest of the locals by ignoring an earnest, freshly scrubbed, young man dressed in a long sleeved white shirt and dark tie.

An out-of-towner, not much more than a boy really, who had no way of knowing that the noon special he'd ordered would be nearly identical to the food that would be served at his own memorial service.

Or that I would be the one to find his body.

## 1

**Old Men at Breakfast**

JUNE 23

WITHOUT A DOUBT, a humorless Christian Conservatism is the ideological default setting here. While friends and neighbors will not scurry across the road to avoid you if you come out of the Liberal Closet, resisting adoption by one of the mainstream churches is simply beyond the experience of most natives.

In a region where Wednesday evenings are left free of school activities for confirmation classes and football games begin with a prayer, refusal to teach Sunday School and chair bake sales is treated with a disbelief bordering on horror.

Though I never set out to be a rebel, the fact that I prefer to address Heaven alone and in private, produces a fair amount of over-reaction from the local mainstream.

A while back, my name appeared in "The Un-Churched," an irregularly mailed, home-published bulletin that listed, by address and telephone number, the Plains States Unsaved.

It was another salvo in my Aunt Juanita Doreen Engebretson's never ending cycle of hope that I'd be tempted back into The Fold. Any fold. Even one usually viewed askance by the religious mainstream.

Every couple of years, the Latter-day Saints assign another pair of young missionaries to our area. Arriving happy and hopeful, charged with True Religion and fired by youth and inexperience, they do their level best to show us The Way.

Unfortunately, since they looked as though they had just completed an Up With People Tour, it was difficult for Delphi's female population to remember that celibacy is required for the duration of a young Mormon's mission. And not just the younger females either.

"Jesus," Del whispered with no apparent irony, stealthily watching Charles Winston from the far end of the counter, "he really is serious about that Mormon stuff."

A sporadic and cynical Catholic, she was honestly amazed. Delphine Bauer's religious observations consist of biannual confessions and a bone-deep skepticism of anyone else's piety.

"Charles," I said, blowing a clump of damp hair out of my eyes and carrying an armload of #2s to a table full of out-of towners just behind him, "I appreciate your concern, but I just don't have time for this right now."

"I think you're afraid to hear me, Tory," he said in a soft drawl, swiveling around on his stool at the counter, to continue talking while I worked. "You don't want to admit how empty your life has been the past couple of years. Honestly, we can help, if you'd just let us."

This conversation was a variation of the same one I'd been having with Charles Winston, and his partner Donald Garrett, for the past few weeks. They were sweet, gentle, persistent boys who usually stopped in for meals, and a late afternoon break, before returning to their mission homes in Aberdeen, some twenty-five miles north, which held a small but thriving Mormon community. Blond Donald Garrett was a heartstopper with a heretofore undiscovered sensitivity to the dust and spores with which South Dakota abounds. On low pollen days, high school girls would appear in the cafe, interrupting summer tanning schedules to accommodate a purely intellectual interest in Other People's Religions.

They would sit across from him in the booth, sipping decaffeinated Coke, making great cow eyes, and nodding seriously. He would testify earnestly with a clogged voice and runny eyes. Unconscious, apparently, of the effect blue eyes and broad shoulders had on teenage girls, Donald sniffled, and thought the gigglers were intrigued by his message.

Donald had occasionally been incapacitated to the point of barricading himself in the dust-free room thoughtfully provided by his Mission Mom, while Charles ran down ecumenical hot prospects alone.

"And what is Donald doing today?" I asked a while later, trying to change the subject as I measured coffee grounds into fluted paper filters during a brief lull.

"Sneezin'," Charles said with a grin. He had curling brown hair, dark sparkling eyes, and a sense of humor rare in the seriously religious. It's no wonder that Del, who found most men attractive, flirted outrageously with him, especially on days when Donald stayed behind.

"You can come and talk to me anytime," she said, leaning over just enough to breathe softly on his cheek as she passed by carrying a plate of fresh strawberry pie for the Old Farts. "My life is bleak and empty too," she said, lying through her teeth.

Charles pulled back a little, not a recoil, just a tightening of the defenses. I could see that he was not immune to Del's ample charms. Few males are. But he was serious about his calling and willing to undergo a trial or two in the South Dakota wilderness if need be, even if the trial included resisting the none-to-subtle invitations of a plush, if slightly shopworn, temptress.

Del is not thin and she is not beautiful, and she is more or less my age, which is not exactly young. But no one seems to notice. With a toss of her tousled red hair and a flash of her astonishing cleavage, she reduces men of all ages to jelly, and loves every minute of it.

"How're they hanging today, gents?" she asked the Old Farts, a group of elderly and cantankerous regulars. She winked theatrically, knowing that Charles was watching her out of the corner of his eye. The men in the booth hemmed and hawed and leered in response to a question that would have produced apoplexy if any other woman had asked it.

Bound by mutual antagonism and the steady stimulant of continuing arguments, the Old Farts, mostly retired farmers, met every day at the same gray booth at the Delphi Cafe. They rehashed old conflicts, dreamed up new ones, and caught up on the latest gossip.

If the awful truth were known, the only real difference between them and the rest of us is a certain fashion sense. That and the fact we make sure to use a bathroom elsewhere because the Old Farts always monopolize the one at the cafe.

As a group they were slow to warm to outsiders, but both young missionaries were pretty well accepted by everyone else, once they learned the important cafe rules of behavior, such as: Don't sit in the Old Farts' booth (the one closest to the bathroom, considered their own private property); and Do laugh at Ron Adler's Ole and Lena jokes even though they're rarely funny, and usually obscene.

Though their steadfastly Mormon designs on local souls didn't exactly endear the boys to the cafe crowd, their cheerful willingness to play one of Delphi's favorite games, was encouraging.

The game is simple: You name all your relatives and friends, and all their relatives and friends, tell us what they do and where they live, and we'll cross-check the information with all our friends and relatives to see if we come up with a match.

Points are awarded for similar occupations, affiliations, and vacations, and for living in the same state.

Sometimes we hit the jackpot- it's amazing how often a second cousin's ex-husband lives a block away from a Michigan family of four on their way through to Denver, who only stopped at the cafe to change the baby.

So far the only discovered link with our missionaries has been Del's pilgrimages to Memphis, the final resting place of her hero Elvis, and hometown of dark-haired Charles Winston. We have all heard more than enough about Memphis (and Elvis) from Del, but Charles enjoyed map tracing, and Del certainly enjoyed Charles.

"God, Tory, will you look at that," she said, lasciviously peering through the streaked window as the retreating Charles bent over to retrieve a piece of paper. "Makes my mouth water just to think of it."

I didn't ask her exactly which "it" she had in mind, though she would have been more than happy to specify. I was mostly willing to let her enjoy her own fantasies, since Del had rescued me shortly after Nicky's death, by insisting that I move into the trailer she shared with her son, Presley.

"What's the problem?" she had asked when I hesitated. "Pres loves you, I love you. We'll take your mind off Nicky and find a nice married boyfriend to occupy you during my shift so you'll always be home evenings."

To Del, who was Nicky's first cousin and who shared his habit of unexplained nights out, the idea of a Backup Mom for Presley must have carried considerable appeal (and married boyfriends never bothered her conscience).

My reasons for accepting her offer weren't entirely altruistic either. Nicky's insurance settlement had been pitifully small, and I was faced with the dreadful prospect of moving back to the farm with my mother and dotty grandmother.

All in all, it had been an interesting experiment, relatively uncomplicated since our shifts at the cafe rotate, and my most pressing need is for Diet Coke and buttered popcorn while reading the latest Ed McBain or Tony Hillerman novels.

We settled easily into a routine that suits all of us. I work or read, and take care of Presley. Del spends all her time being Del.

"Ain't she something?" sighed Ron Adler, a married mechanic with no chin, an unrequited crush, and a facial tic that causes him to blink furiously every third word.

"She's a fine", blink, blink, blink, "figure of a woman."

Nobody defines me as a "fine figure" of anything. Always struggling for control over my own hair and weight, I opt for sensible, easy-to-manage styles. I'm more interested in big pockets than high fashion, and like most large ladies, I'm unwilling to buy clothes that actually fit, the size frightens me.

Del goes for flash, wearing short skirts and heels one day, and jeans and cowboy boots the next.

I have watched her with Charles, leaning toward him when she takes his order, touching his arm lightly, smiling directly into his eyes. It's a well tested routine with a proven track record, and she has bagged a covey of men with it, including her current boyfriend, the well-armed county deputy Big Dick Albrecht.

She claims to be happy with Big Dick and he is obviously skilled in bed, trailer house walls being notoriously thin. But I also saw that Del, who could have any man, wanted this boy too. Badly. Young Charles Winston also saw this and was unwise enough to let just a little smug amusement show. Charles had probably spent his entire life fending off unwanted females, young and old. His certainty that he was equal to this particular challenge was apparent.

That sort of obstacle, unfortunately for Charles, only served to fuel her fires. That Del nursed a small grudge against men of the cloth complicated and enhanced her determination to have him at all costs. One of her rare misfires was with the Reverend Clay Deibert (son-in-law of my aunt the postmistress, and husband of my cousin Junior the Dreadful).

The cafe was gearing into the dinner rush. Del had thoughtfully watched Charles's asthmatic tan Chevy drive off in a cloud of dust. I'd just finished ringing up a crew of combiners when the reason for Del's attempt at clergy seduction breezed in with her four surgically neat children in tow. Del stabbed out her cigarette, then headed back to sit with an adoring Ron Adler. "You take this one, I'm on break."

Junior (born Juanita Doreen Engebretson II) is a younger, trimmer version of her mother, a dark-haired whirlwind of ambitions and pretensions. Like her mother, she is also possessed of an indomitable will and enormous reserves of energy that are barely tapped managing her picture book home, husband, and children.

I refilled cups, a pot of decaf in one hand and regular in the other, waiting for Junior and her brood to get settled.

"Hot enough for you?" I asked, swiping the table with a damp rag and setting water glasses in front of Junior and her oldest daughter, Tres. Ninety-three degrees and 84 percent humidity outside, and 80 and 80 percent inside, should be hot enough for anyone, though I have yet to see Junior break a sweat, even in August.

"Actually..." She paused to dunk a napkin in her water glass and scrub a spot that I had apparently missed. "Heat and humidity are wonderful for the body. Gives the skin a young, fresh look, and it encourages weight loss. You should get out more." She smiled up at me with innocent good humor. "It would do you a world of good."

As an exercise in goodwill, I put special effort into not hating Junior. It is an ongoing struggle.

"We're on our way to Aberdeen," Junior continued, answering a question I hadn't asked, "and we thought we'd see if Tory had anything good to eat before we left town."

She directed that last comment across the table to her unnaturally well-behaved toddlers. Like three apple-cheeked, red-haired puppets, they nodded in unison back. Triplets Joshua, Jessica, and Jeremy, with their hands folded neatly on the table, smiled up at me too. It was spooky. Eight-year-old Tres (Juanita Doreen III, _Tres_ is the Spanish word for _three_ , get it?) sat beside her mother, looking out the window. Pretty and dark, Tres used to flash an occasional grin or smother a genuine little-girl giggle. But lately she has been solemn and dignified, as though weighed down with the burden of being Juanita Doreen III.

"What's up today, kiddo?" I asked her, ignoring Junior. "Got exciting plans for the big city?" Aberdeen has approximately twenty-three thousand people and a mall. By our standards, it's big.

"Tell Tory your news," said Junior, just as if I had been talking to her.

"Guess what!" Tres said excitedly. "Mom, Grandma, and I figured out what to call my oldest daughter!"

"Did I miss something?" I asked, depressed that this eight-year-old had been pressured, already, into planning her children's names. "I didn't even know you were engaged. Or did you and Presley elope?"

I was hoping for a giggle from Tres.

"Hardly," Junior said in a tone that made me glad that Del was sitting back with Ron, and not eavesdropping.

"You _know_ when I have a baby, she has to be named Juanita Doreen, just like Mom and Grandma," Tres said, parroting her mother's and grandmother's insane notion that the world actually needs more Juanita Doreens.

"And you," I added. What with an overbearing mother and grandmother, and three younger siblings, the poor kid could be forgiven for forgetting about herself.

"Yeah, but we can't _call_ her Juanita Doreen because that's Grandma's name. So we need a nickname, like Junior and Tres, only with the number four somehow. Last night we finally figured it out!"

"What did you come up with?" I considered and rejected adding that daughters can't be ordered like drapery. The kid already had enough to worry about.

"Ivy," she crowed triumphantly. I must have looked confused because she adopted the tone that bright children use when explaining the obvious to stupid adults.

"Not ivy like the plant, I-V, like the Roman numeral!"

"She thought of it all by herself." Junior beamed. "Isn't that wonderful?"

"Marvelous" I said dryly. "I can't wait for number six. What would you like?"

While I got carrot sticks and orange juice for the triplets, which they ate and drank without making a mess or spilling a drop, and yogurt and mineral water for Tres and her Mom (tap water was good only for washing tables), Junior continued to tick off her day's itinerary, just in case anyone was interested.

"First we go to the dentist, then we shop for shoes, then we talk to my district manager for a minute."

In her spare time Junior coordinated parties for the sale of a line of household decorations consisting mainly of overpriced bisque woodland figurines and wrought-iron festooned with plastic greenery. A representative displays and sells the goods, in a Tupperware-party-like setting, to women with disposable income and dubious taste.

Junior makes pretty fair money selling this stuff, which she in turn donates to charities whose main function is telling the rest of us what to do. The antipornographers, the music censors, and the GOP love her. On the local level, there are some who wish she would get hit by a truck. "Finally we go to the Aberdeen library," she said.

"What's the matter with Neil's?" I asked. My friend Neil Pascoe runs a private library out of his own home here in Delphi. In '86 he won twelve million in the Iowa lottery, and he has since devoted his money and time to his passions: old car restoration, music, and books. He is perfectly willing to find and lend any book to anyone. In fact his personal library is more extensive than most city libraries, filling the first floor of the three story Victorian house he shares with his two cats. Books arrive by mail and UPS daily, and I usually look over the new ones with him on the way home after work.

"I want the children to go to a real library, dear," Junior said on the way out. "I simply can't imagine why an unmarried man would want to lend books to unsupervised children," imputing shady motives to one of the nicest men I know.

Not for the first time I was sorry that Del hadn't succeeded with Clay. It was never a case of attraction to the man, though Clay is a mature honey-blond version of our Mormon missionaries, almost unbearably cheerful, studiously pious, and seriously dedicated to his Lutheran pulpit and family. In fact, I like and respect Clay, though I wish he had chosen a different lifetime companion.

No, it was sheer exasperation with Junior, who manages to insult and aggravate everyone around her, that decided Del to take her down a peg or two, via Clay.

"I am going to fuck her husband," Del had said slowly and deliberately, with a chilling smile, after Junior had again said something condescending about the Bauers in general and Nicky in particular. "And I am going to videotape it, and I am going to send it to her afterward."

Del was serious about the threat. She had an impressive collection of audio and video recordings of just such encounters. It was a hobby of hers. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your attitude toward marital fidelity in clergymen married to impossible women), Clay wouldn't cooperate. Del went to him, pleading for private counseling, which he gladly granted. She wasted no time with preliminaries, and he wasted no time in getting the hell out of there. A rejection Del could have tolerated; it was his look of abject horror that offended her.

In the aftermath Del and I rightly assumed that Clay was too honorable and sensible to tell anyone (especially Junior) about the unfortunate incident. We had truly hoped to keep it quiet, for everyone's sake. But secrets have a way of leaking out by osmosis, of infiltrating the prairie air we breathe. And it was soon obvious that everyone knew. Conversation in the cafe would slow in tense, if hopeful, expectation whenever either Junior or Clay walked in during Del's shift, as if everyone were waiting for a confrontation.

Junior is my first cousin and I know her. Whatever her inner turmoil, she is publicly unflappable. She would never subject herself to the kind of spectacle everyone seemed to want. Nevertheless, she ceased to be any more than formally civil to Del, though this civility didn't preclude the occasional nasty remark.

Opinion, freely aired when none of the above was in the cafe, was fairly evenly divided along the lines of sex. The women blamed Del for trying, and the men were disgusted with Clay for resisting. No one gave Junior a second thought. Except maybe Del, who mixed a dash of malice for both into her unsavory intentions for Charles.

Long ago I made my peace with Del's gleeful insistence on having her own way with men, her total lack of restraint, the absence of taboos. I don't pretend to understand how she avoids dealing with the sometimes irreparably mangled lives that result.

But I didn't understand how Nicky did it either. And I loved him too.

At least Charles is not married.

Neither is Big Dick Albrecht, though he perhaps is a different species from Del's other men, who seem content to vie for whatever attention she deigns to give. Big Dick wants her exclusively and is grimly determined to achieve that improbable goal.

Nicknames in Delphi are awarded for any number of reasons. Like Native American warrior names, some are chosen to commemorate watershed moments. For example, Chainlink Harris could well have gone through life known as Clyde, if he had not believed the ninth graders who assured him that his tongue wouldn't stick to the flagpole on a bitterly cold winter day, as long as he said the magic word first.

Obviously, the magic word was Teflon. All in all, a hunk of tongue was a fair trade for a dreadful name like Clyde, and Chainlink seems satisfied.

Big Dick (whose ID tag reads ALBRECHT, GERALD R.) has a legacy name. His father, Richard, a massive six-two and 230 pounds, was known by inescapable South Dakota logic, as Little Dick. As soon as it was apparent that young Gerald would bypass his father in height and girth, he became, permanently, Big Dick.

"Huge," Del said, when I finally worked up the nerve to ask. Deputy Albrecht was due soon for dinner, and then he and Del were leaving for the Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul in South Dakota parlance). They had planned a cozy, romantic visit with all the trimmings: tickets to see the Twins lose, a pocketful of crisp twenties, and a motel suite with a Jacuzzi.

Del had arranged for Rhonda Saunders, our nineteen-year-old relief, to take her supper shift. At home her overnight bags were ready and waiting by the door.

"What do you think of this?" she had asked me yesterday while packing, holding up a wisp of white silk and lace that was probably supposed to be underwear, though it had loops and spaces where most of the cloth should have been. "It's the latest thing in user-friendly lingerie." Del had hummed and sorted flavored body oils, genuinely excited about this trip with Big Dick.

Big Dick always took time to joke with the Old Farts or the other guys, and went out of his way to charm my mother and the ladies, before sitting at the counter with Del. He told suitably raunchy stories and laughed loudly.

He would smile broadly. But the smile never reached his eyes, which had a dark reptilian glitter.

And though he would turn sideways if I had to pass him in the aisle, he would always brush his body against mine. He would plant his heavy hands on my shoulders, chest pressing against my back, while he gabbed over my head with whomever I was serving. I could feel that pressure hours afterward. When he wanted a refill, he would seize a wrist and squeeze just slightly harder and longer than necessary to get my attention.

There are large, gentle men. Men who are almost apologetic about their size, who move and speak softly, and who always take the seat next to the window, so as not to be in the way.

And there are men like Big Dick, who use their size as a weapon, a tool for intimidation. Men who never forget their own power, and who never let you forget it either.

Del enjoyed the hint of danger his strength implied, and their relationship went smoothly for about the first six months, until Del, being Del, segued off into a short fling with a Combined Insurance salesman. Big Dick seemed indifferent, which reassured Del enough to accompany the salesman into Jackson's Hole, Delphi's only bar. The pair stayed late, drinking heavily, dancing to the jukebox music, and smooching sloppily. The official report read that Deputy Albrecht had come upon an inebriated man stumbling along the highway that same night. The official report stated that the man had been attacked and beaten by unknown assailants and that he had been transported to an Aberdeen hospital at the request of Deputy Albrecht. The salesman corroborated the story, and the unknown assailants were never identified.

The next night, as I lay in my bed, I could hear faint sounds echoing through the house like soft thuds, from Del's bedroom, and a soft moaning that could have been either pain or pleasure.

When it was finally quiet, I padded softly from my room through the moonlit kitchen and living room, down past Presley's room, into the trailer's only bathroom, which could also be entered from Del's room at the end of the hall.

Not wanting to disturb anyone, I left the light off; and bumped into Big Dick, who stood silent and naked in the middle of the bathroom, bathed in moonlight.

Involuntarily I flicked my eyes down his body. The glance took less time than a blink but he saw it and smiled. He stepped toward me.

I fumbled with the door and tried to back out of the bathroom, to twist out of his way, but he pinned me to the door with his body. His chest pressed against mine, making it hard to breathe.

He leaned down, whispering confidentially as though we had a secret to share, a desire to keep this just between us.

"Want some, sweetie?" Through the thin nightshirt I wore, I could feel him twitching against my leg.

"Anytime," he breathed, shifting slightly, increasing the pressure of his body against mine. His breath was hot and damp on my neck. I tried to slide down the door, to make myself smaller, but that only raised my nightshirt. He shifted again, this time bare skin against skin.

"Just say the word." He chuckled softly in my ear. Then, abruptly, he turned and went back into Del's bedroom.

I have no idea how long I stood against the door, trembling, But I know that it was hours before I slept, because the noises, not soft echoing this time, began again. And I know I was supposed to hear his triumphant, shattering cry at the end.

Though I avoid Big Dick whenever possible now, he smiles and winks, implying a jolly conspiracy of which I do not want to be a part.

And Del continues to enjoy a theoretically all-encompassing affair with Big Dick, and circumspectly entertains occasional lovers in private.

It is a precarious, and perhaps dangerous, balance.

## 2

**After Dinner Rush**

The English/South Dakotan Dictionary defines _coffee_ , strong and black, as the daytime drink of choice among natives, who would have ordered a cup of cream and sugar if that's what they had wanted. _Coffee_ is also the term used for a workday break, a chance to sit with a cigarette and a cup, to shoot the shit with whoever else happens to be in the cafe. Coffee is what you meet your friends for in the afternoon, even if you order pie and Diet Coke.

Though traditionally observed in midmorning and midafternoon, when the gossip is juicy or the weather is bad, coffee often overlaps and absorbs South Dakota's official midday meal, which is "dinner."

In our recent pioneer past, farmers toiled an exhausting number of hours under relentless suns and in howling blizzards. Survival was a full-time occupation that could only be accomplished by ingesting several thousand calories each day. We have preserved that tradition, even though today most farmers accomplish their backbreaking toil in an air conditioned, luxuriously appointed tractor cab.

An average farm dinner might consist of fried chicken and mashed potatoes with thick white gravy, homemade buns, chokecherry jelly, green beans from the garden, fruit sauce (another South Dakotan phrase, meaning sliced fruit in heavy syrup), and dessert. The dessert would depend on the season: strawberry, rhubarb, apple and squash pies; cobblers and crisps; egg-heavy cakes; bread or rice puddings, or home-cranked ice cream.

We are a round folk, we South Dakotans.

Dinner specials at the cafe, while not the repast enjoyed on the old homestead, are traditional high-calorie, fat-laden, and salt-drenched meals, served in generous portions at a reasonable price.

Like Ron Adler says, "We gotta harden them arteries somehow." Blink, blink.

As owner and chief cook at the Delphi Cafe, Aphrodite Ferguson begins her morning at five-thirty. A short powerhouse of a woman, she wears a spattered apron that reads, "Kiss the Cook," smokes continuously at the grill, and speaks in monosyllables, if at all.

Her meatloaf had been hot and ready since eleven-thirty; the mashed potatoes, gravy, and creamed corn were steaming. Squares of cherry Jell-O, served on a single lettuce leaf, embedded with marshmallows and topped with Cool Whip, sat on individual plates in the salad cooler. And the cafe was hopping already.

The bulk of our customers are regulars, locals whose names and faces and life histories are as familiar as our own. But our location, just a half-mile off, and visible from, Highway 281, on the edge of Delphi, ensures steady drop-in traffic.

Just now, all five booths along the south wall, including the Old Farts' domain, were filled by a small noisy Air Stream caravan from upstate New York who had hardily decided to brave quaint Midwest scowls from ancient retired farmers, and eat quaint Midwest food in an authentic quaint Midwest diner.

They gabbled, pointing out the sights to each other, laughing and exclaiming in loud, nasal voices, like visitors to a third world country who assume the natives don't speak the mother tongue.

Maybe they'd never seen a rifle on a gun rack in the back window of a pickup before.

I raided the walk-in cooler for more club soda, doubting that the brave New Yorkers would be hardy enough to survive our quaint Midwest tap water, which can cause a certain delayed digestive unpleasantness.

"Is that actually Bach?" one old duck asked another, incredulous, apparently, that civilization had reached this far inland.

I happen to like the Brandenburg Concertos, which were tootling from the crusty portable tape player on the counter under the air conditioner.

The shift captain, a whimsical title that means me in the morning and Del in the late afternoon, selects the music that is played all day in the cafe except when the radio is switched on for the weather, livestock reports, and Paul Harvey.

Del's obsession with Elvis, and her fondness for all music in the country-western mode is more to the local taste, and would probably not raise the eyebrows of outsiders, who seemed to expect cowboys on horseback to mosey in for meals after the roundup.

"We'd like to order now, miss, if you don't mind," a heavyset man with three chins, a florid complexion, and an enormous Rolex, said brusquely. "We're in a hurry here. Bring each of us the specialty of the house. If it's edible, that is."

He did not smile when he said that.

"Well," I said, resisting the urge to add a drawl and drop some filial consonants, "The meatloaf is nice and hot, and we made it only last Tuesday."

Customers like this bring out the worst in me.

They bring out the worst in Del too, who told a woman dressed in a mustard color designer jumpsuit that "red" was the salad flavor "doo-joor."

"I heartily recommend Delphi's own spring water, drawn from an artesian well sunk fourteen hundred feet below the Earth's surface," Del said, with a wink at the jumpsuit's companion, setting glasses in front of them.

I was juggling three specials and one tuna on whole wheat (water packed, no mayonnaise) when Big Dick finally pulled up to the cafe. He was still armed and in uniform, and obviously unready to leave for Minnesota. There was a figure slumped in the shadowy backseat of his patrol car.

Del's welcoming smile died when she saw his expression.

Though I tried to move out of his way, Big Dick's hands grazed my waist on his way toward Del. He waited impatiently while she delivered an armload of specials, and then cornered her at the small table along the cafe's west wall.

Though the caravaners kept me too busy to spy outright, I could see that their conversation was heated. With his back to the rest of the cafe, Big Dick pounded the table softly in emphasis. Del's eyes narrowed and shifted to the wall as she lit a cigarette and dragged on it furiously, ignoring customers and Aphrodite's inquiring glance.

Big Dick's voice rose in muted anger. Del glared back and muttered something short and sharp. With no warning, he stood and grabbed Del's shoulders and shook her violently. The cigarette fell from her hand and down the aisle, leaving a trail of ash.

Then he stormed out of the cafe and drove off leaving a rooster tail of dust and spattered gravel.

The New Yorkers, who now had another quaint story to add to their repertoire, buzzed among themselves.

Del sat at the table with unfocused eyes, smoking unsteadily.

"Can I help you, miss?" the jumpsuit's companion turned and asked quietly.

"You can fuck yourself," Del said precisely, and served her remaining orders with a mechanical smile.

Abashed, the New Yorkers paid their bills.

While Aphrodite does not approve of recommending anatomically impossible sexual stunts to patrons, she views outsiders existentially, real only while they are seated in the cafe. Once they leave, they're like figments of our imagination, though these figments add considerably to the financial security of the establishment. She shrugged philosophically as the Air Streams drove off.

Shaking her hair back, Del walked the length of the cafe to the pay phone, fished in her pocket for a quarter, and dialed, drumming her fingers on the wall while she waited.

"Rhonda," she said, "listen, don't worry about coming in for me this afternoon. I'll be here."

Del closed her eyes and said into the phone, "No, he has to escort a prisoner to Fargo." Pause. "The shits, ain't it?"

I didn't need to hear any more. It was obvious that Big Dick had to cancel their trip, and obviously Del was disappointed. Still, I didn't think the vehemence of their argument was caused solely by not being able to have soggy sex in a Minneapolis whirlpool.

I was relieved that Del had not met with any success on the Charles front. That poor boy would never survive a confrontation with Big Dick.

Del's grim expression and flat eyes precluded any questioning, so I went back to work.

"My nose is starting to wheeze, Tory," announced my Uncle Albert Engebretson, a man of daily water-pack tuna sandwiches and various unsettling medical symptoms. "Do you think it means anything?"

I couldn't remember any life-threatening diseases heralded by wheezy noses. "Nah," I said. "It's probably just a little hay fever."

He didn't look relieved.

"You think it could be a polyp?" he asked holding his cup at a goofy angle, trying to use the coffee's smooth surface as a mirror to look up his own nose.

Uncle Albert is a soft, round, insurance salesman with a small independent office next to the grocery store. Mild and balding, he strives mightily to live up to his wife's and daughter's expectations, though his paperwork would be unreadably sloppy and his deadlines amiably missed were it not for Mrs. Beiber, a secretary/receptionist so terrifying that none dared to use her first name.

His grandchildren adored him. But his wife and daughter fussed constantly: tucking shirts, spit-cleaning, and correcting grammar. He bore it all with amazing composure.

I admired his restraint. If I were constantly surrounded by Juanita Doreens, I would probably have resorted to murder by now. Uncle Albert's retreat into hypochondria seemed a reasonable survival strategy. And the fact that the combined force of his women's indomitable wills has not yet molded him into their image proves Uncle Albert's inner (albeit hidden) steel core.

"Just the same", he nodded to himself, "I think I'll make an appointment."

I refilled his cup, looking fondly at the sparse hairs glued in precise formation over the top of his shiny head. I leaned over and smooched his forehead noisily.

"What's that for?" He looked up with genuine surprise, blushing a little.

"Just because," I said.

Dinner rush was mostly over, the crowd had thinned considerably, and Del had regained a brittle, though nonconversational poise.

I got myself the last brownie (stashed behind the salad dressing so no one else would find it) and sat sipping a Diet Coke on the stool closest to the till. With tired, aching shoulders, I closed my eyes and rolled my head, wincing at the grinding crunch.

Warm hands massaged my neck and between the shoulder blades. Thumbs kneaded expert, exquisite circles in sore muscles.

Thinking it was Del, or maybe even Aphrodite, who occasionally leaves her kitchen sanctuary, I leaned into the massage, eyes still closed, and murmured, "God, that's even better than sex."

"Someone hasn't been doing it right, then," a masculine voice said with more than a hint of amusement.

I whirled around, startled, embarrassed and blushing furiously, and looked straight into Stuart McKee's impossibly beautiful green eyes.

My heart stopped.

I had been a sophomore in high school when my lamentably late husband Nicky first noticed me, though I had been there, lumpy and ungainly, hiding out in the library and sneaking candy bars in the bathroom all along.

I'd once asked why he had absorbed me into his group, an assortment of goofballs and hoods that included his wild red-haired first cousin, Delphine Bauer.

"Hon," he said slipping his fingers under my nightgown, we were in bed, we were always in bed when I asked those questions, "you needed me."

That was the only explanation I ever got from him.

My mother, needless to say, had been horrified. Though not a snob of Junior and Aunt Juanita's caliber, she considered Bauers a species lower on the human evolutionary scale than our Osgood/Engebretson/Atwood branch (notwithstanding the fact that my own father had disappeared many years earlier, after it was discovered that he had a wife and three children in Sioux City, Iowa, to whom, I daresay, he also neglected to mention us).

"They're awfully fond of their own cousins, dear," Mother'd said, dredging up an old rumor about Oscar Bauer, late grandfather to the present clan, and a woman of reported ill-repute who also happened to be a daughter from Oscar's father's brother-in-law's first marriage.

In South Dakota, a cousin is anyone to whom you might possibly be related.

Luckily for me, I was not Nicky's cousin, and so a pregnancy scare, compounded by our own ignorance, hurried us into a civil ceremony. Would Nicky have married me if he had known then that pregnancy was never to be a threat? I honestly don't know.

For a long time I thought the problems in our marriage were caused by my inability to bear children, and that Nicky was looking for something in other women that I could not give him.

I was wrong, of course. Nicky was looking for the same thing that I gave him, enthusiastically, all the time.

I willfully ignored Junior's first hint that Nicky was cheating on me. The next, with Aunt Juanita as a backup announcer, I furiously denied.

Sometime after the three hundredth, I came home from work early and discovered Lila Pankratz tied naked to my bed. With my pantyhose.

I have actually spit in Lila Pankratz's coffee.

Nicky really outdid himself the last time.

The newspapers reported that Nick and an unknown female (later identified as a Northern State University cheerleader) died from the injuries incurred in a one-car rollover on a gravel road, sometime in the early morning hours. The papers, thank God, omitted that she was found without underwear of any sort, and that his pants had been pushed down around his ankles.

I suppose it was impossible to drive safely that way.

Delphi, being what it is, knew all the sordid details immediately, but at least I was spared the acid pity of total strangers, on whose kindness it is never wise to rely.

The resident armchair psychiatrists thought that my father's disappearance had made me desperate for male acceptance and fearful of further abandonment, willing to settle for an irresponsible charmer rather than go it alone. And in a limited way, they were right, though giving Nicky every freedom did not, in the end, keep him from that final departure.

And even if I had known all the drawbacks in this particular deal with the devil, I would still have signed on the dotted line, though I have a hard time suppressing the nasty wish that Lila Pankratz had lost the lottery instead of a nineteen-year-old coed.

Everyday survival with Nicky took most of my energy before his death. And simple survival took all my energy afterward. I was not looking for a replacement.

Then Stu McKee moved back to Delphi and into my dreams.

With slightly receding sandy-brown hair, the spare beginnings of a paunch, and deep laugh lines around his astonishing eyes, Stu is Midwest handsome, but no one's definition of gorgeous.

In the way that we all know everything about each other, I knew that Stu had moved from Delphi and South Dakota, in disgust. His father Eldon, owner of McKee's Feed right across the street from the cafe, had reneged on a promise to retire and turn the store over to Stu. After a decade of patient waiting, a hale and ornery Eldon (definitely an Old Fart) still refused to leave the helm, so Stu had left for Minnesota.

Last winter Eldon had suffered a minor stroke that slowed him enough to summon his son. Stu reluctantly returned to take charge, though the old man could not resist sticking his nose into the business and his fingers into the till. As much to keep Eldon occupied as for any other reason, he and Stu also worked as handymen. Though they were both officially available for small jobs involving easy carpentry and household repair, it was usually Eldon who made the house calls, and Stu who hunted up jobs for him. Eldon had, just lately, been taking his own sweet time tearing down an old chicken coop at my mother's place.

At first Stu was just a pleasant addition to the regulars. Always smiling, joshing the ladies gently, and reminiscing with the Old Farts, he never complained about the food or the weather. He was well liked, and he left generous tips.

But he had a disconcerting way of smiling directly into my eyes when he ordered, of asking how I was, and then actually listening to the reply. He would touch me lightly when he wanted more coffee, broad fingers gently grazing the inner surface of my arm.

At first I assumed that was his way with waitresses. It was more than a month before I noticed that he never touched Rhonda, and that he kept a cool distance from Del.

"Watch out for him," Del had said, nodding in Stu's direction, not seriously believing that there was a need for warning. "He's a tricky one."

I doubt I would have taken any special notice of Stu or his small attentions if not for the dreams.

Always identical, they start innocuously enough with the cafe crowd transplanted to Jackson's Hole. The Old Farts are grousing in the corner over a pitcher of beer. Del is tending bar with a frozen smile. The lighting is dim, the smoke is heavy, and couples are slow-dancing to something torchy by the Eagles.

I am thin and beautiful and dressed in satin. Even my hair looks good. Without a word, Stu takes my hand and we begin to dance. His arm tightens across my back, pulling me against him. He breathes softly on my neck. I am trembling, and when our thighs graze, I can feel a throbbing through his jeans.

With a diamond sparkle in his emerald eyes, he quietly, gently promises, "Any time."

Then Jackson's melts away and we are naked in my bedroom, and I am tied to my bed and he is smiling at me and I know we are going to make love. I want to make love. I am so ready that I will explode with just a touch.

If he doesn't hurry, I will untie myself and finish the job alone.

It is always then, with a pounding heart, that I wake up, gasping and savagely disappointed.

It's tough to serve a man breakfast with equanimity after a dream like that. After a dozen of them it was becoming impossible.

With just one (count 'em), boyfriend/lover/husband on my record, I am not adept at flirting. And I'm even less adept at figuring out whether Stu is really coming on to me, or if he is just being kind, with a little body contact thrown in for good measure.

My marriage to Nicky had, so far, kept me from finding out. Besides a pitifully small insurance settlement, Nicky left me with a permanent empathy for the families of philanderers.

Stu did not reluctantly move back to Delphi with only a longstanding resentment against his father. He also brought his wife and son.

Delphi didn't know Renee McKee, and she was happy to keep it that way. An intimidatingly elegant Minnesota native, Renee took one look at South Dakota and closed her mind.

She had a job as a legal secretary in Aberdeen, and with five-year-old Walton in a day care center close to her office, only rarely were either seen in town.

It was reported that she hated South Dakota in general, and Delphi specifically, and that she was beginning to hate Stu for bringing her here.

My own feelings for Stu were decidedly confused. He's married, I thought firmly, as he turned to greet someone in a booth.

I made myself remember Nicky's betrayals, the hurt, the pantyhose. Lila Pankratz. Unfortunately I could still feel the delicious pressure of Stu's warm hands on my shoulders.

Calling myself a fool, I stood and stretched, waiting for Stu to get settled with a couple of regulars. With his back to me, I noticed the firm set of his shoulders and his soft hair, just long enough to curl below his cap, a variation of which nearly every man in the state wears.

"Thanks for the back rob," I said, ignoring that he was in one of Del's booths, forgetting that my shift was nearly over. I filled his cup and placed one hand lightly, deliberately, on his shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. Definitely not a caress. I firmly resisted the urge to run a finger along his neck, at the hairline.

I wanted to bury my hand in his hair. I wanted to lean over and kiss his neck. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom and scream.

"Any time," he said with a smile.

I nearly dropped the pot.

Recognizing every single component of that infernal dream didn't stop it from recurring.

And it didn't stop my heart from fluttering each time Stu walked into the cafe. And reminding myself that I was short, fat, and funny-looking didn't keep me from being almost certain that he was interested.

I was in deep trouble.

Aphrodite, whose carrot-red beehive is sternly supported by direct order and copious amounts of hair spray, pushed my last two Delphi Burgers (double patty, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and fries) through the space over the stainless steel countertop that divides the kitchen from the rest of the cafe.

I filled Mountain Dews to go with the burgers, served them with a smile, then sat to wait out the rest of my shift, hoping no last-minute caravans would arrive.

Del, with a freshly minted smile, was bustling around efficiently.

"I'll take this one. You can take off if you want," she said to me as Charles slumped into one of my booths, leaning his forehead on the heel of his hand.

Though usually buoyant, with the joy of his mission sparkling in his brown eyes, and a good word (from at least one of the Good Books) in his soft drawl for everyone, Charles was subdued, quiet and pale.

His eyes were red-rimmed, and I thought perhaps he'd been crying.

Had Big Dick heard of Del's infatuation? Had he threatened this boy? Was that the source of their fight? I well knew how unsettling the deputy could be.

I groped under the counter for my purse and glanced back at Del and Charles on the way out the door.

She slid close to him on the same side of the booth, her arm looped loosely around his shoulders, one breast pressed to his side. False commiseration glittered in her eyes.

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back on her arm.

Charles looked very young and vulnerable and I was, suddenly and irrationally, frightened for him.

Across the cafe, Del shot me a look of pure triumph.

_FUNERAL FOOD: Buy now to keep reading!_

_ _

Visit Kathleen Taylor online

# A Twisted Path

**By**

**Steve Winshel**
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**Bill Furyk is an ex-cop with an anger management problem and an intimate relationship with Vicodin.**

When a woman from his past is found hunched over the body of her still-bleeding husband, a knife in her hand, Furyk is pulled into the mystery. As he tries to untangle what happened, he discovers a brutal, cruel, conspiracy that destroys lives and protects the powerful.

Furyk is not only seeking a killer, he is determined to put an end to the horrible secret he has uncovered. But the forces arrayed against him mean the solution might be too twisted for one man to survive.

## 1

WICK LAY ON the cold tiled floor of the kitchen. Copper pots swung gently from their hooks above the marble island where his wife had prepared meals for over a decade. Moonlight flickered off the bottom of the largest frying pan, catching the last fading glimmer of life in Wick's eyes. Eleven stab wounds covered his upper torso and shoulders, defensive cuts sliced his hands where he'd held them out to fend off the blows. Lying on his side, legs slightly curled, his hands slowly stopped clawing at the small, deep wound in his neck. His thoughts were incoherent, battered by the violence and the surprise that had preceded it. Calm came as his gaze turned to the swaying frying pan, slowing with each swing. The glint no longer caused him to blink when it shined in his eyes, too weak even for this involuntary movement. His last thought was of Merrill, how he loved her no matter what. Broken, fragile, Merrill. The pain of guilt and the sureness of the hell that awaited him didn't reach consciousness before he died.

Merrill knelt behind him. One hand reached aimlessly toward the hole in her husband's throat where the last few bubbles of blood quietly subsided as his chest stopped moving. The other hand held the thin, sharp knife she used for dicing carrots. Merrill slumped back on her heels, brown hair hanging in her face. The knees of her red plaid pajama bottoms began to feel sticky as the blood covered the few inches between her and Wick. She didn't turn even at the sound of bare-foot steps in the hallway leading to the kitchen and then the screams of their sixteen-year-old daughter.

## 2

BILL FURYK SAT in his car across from the club in downtown LA. Lots of short black dresses waited in line behind a velvet rope. Guys in ripped jeans and rocker shirts or five thousand dollar Armani trying to look cool enough to get in. Furyk watched from across the street, the fire hydrant providing a convenient parking spot. Cop habits died hard, even when you didn't have a badge anymore.

A couple came out of the club, the guy tall and lean and wearing a vest with no shirt. Tight black pants, shoulder-length black hair and sunglasses. Showing off broad shoulders and muscled chest. The girl was in uniform; short black skirt displaying long but very pale legs. Tattoos on each ankle, probably one on her buttocks but above what there was of the hemline. Spiked heels and hair. The boyfriend pulled her across the two-lane street, assuming the heavy traffic flow of lookers and cruisers would stop. They did, with a couple of horn blasts. They headed toward Furyk, the guy giving him a hard stare once he saw there was someone in the car. At the last second they veered to the left and keyed open the bright green Hummer parked directly in front of Furyk. The guy kept the hard stare on him, probably defending his turf because Furyk had taken in a full view of the girlfriend when they'd crossed. Furyk didn't care, but held the stare. The guy climbing into the absurd SUV broke the contact. Brake lights, then reverse lights, and the Hummer backed up slowly, and into the nondescript Honda Accord Furyk used when he was shooting for anonymity. It wasn't a car people noticed or remembered.

The Hummer's brake lights came back on and the guy jerked it into drive, pulled up a couple feet, and slammed to a stop. The driver's door flew open. No danger of getting hit, since all traffic had stopped behind a silver Lexus that couldn't believe its luck in finding someone pulling out right in front of the club. The guy jumped out and was at the space between his car and Furyk's in two strides. The shades came partway off as he looked at his bumper. Pristine as the day he got it. Then back at Furyk, whose hood now had a scrape caused by the Hummer bumper that was a foot higher than any other car on the road. Furyk hadn't reacted; had barely taken his eyes off the front door of the club. He was there for a reason. But his heart was beating a little harder as the guy came up to the window and made a sharp rapping noise with the rings on three fingers of his left hand. Furyk, keys in the ignition letting him use the electric windows without having to start the car, let it down a few inches. He was still able to see the front door of the club with the guy standing there.

"Asshole, you scratched my car!" with a finger pointing in Furyk's face, coming a couple inches into the window. Furyk's silence just pissed him off more.

"Get out of the car, bitch." Furyk turned his gaze to the front and flipped on his headlights. They gleamed off the perfect surface of the Hummer's fender.

"Your car's fine. Better than mine. Go home." The guy couldn't believe Furyk didn't care about the gouge in his own car. Must be a complete wuss, a coward. Now he was going to pull this jerkoff out of his crappy little beater and mark up his face. The passenger door of the Hummer opened and the girl came around her side. Not to tell the boyfriend to get back in the car and let's go home. To watch. In the light of the high beams Furyk had switched on, she looked pasty and the smile on her lips looked mean. She leaned against her car and put a leg up on the bumper – probably scratched it more than the bump into the Honda had. Her skirt rode up and the guy had new ammunition.

"You lookin' at my girl, asshole?" Spittle flew through the open crack of the window as he leaned close. Furyk rolled the window up, both to avoid the spray and to drown out the heavy breathing as the guy got more worked up. It would end with the guy giving him the finger and stalking off. Maybe. Furyk looked back at the club, wanting to make sure he didn't miss anything during this interruption. There was a pause, the guy deciding what to do next. Furyk could feel the transition, the tension getting ready to ebb. And then the Lexus hit his horn and flashed his lights. He wanted the parking space. It was fuel on an open flame. Furyk watched the guy's face contort as he stood and headed back to the Hummer. He didn't give Furyk the finger; a bad sign. He opened the driver's door and reached in instead of getting in. Another bad sign. Furyk's headlights made for the perfect spotlight as the guy came onto the stage he'd created in the middle of the street, carrying a baseball bat. Metal bat. No tradition, Furyk thought. Only little league teams used metal instead of the classic, better-feeling wood. He started to get a pain behind his left eye. Control, that's what he needed right now. He had work to do, and letting some moron break his rhythm was a waste of time. Let the guy get his revenge, show off for his girl. Another ding on the bumper from a bat wasn't a big deal; Furyk was going to have to get the front end buffed anyway because of the scratch.  But the guy went past the gap between the cars and headed for the driver side of the Honda. That meant shattered glass, a new window, and maybe even some scrapes and splinters in Furyk's face. The pain behind his eye ramped up a notch and he felt the anger start pushing in his gut. It only took a second to make itself felt, like an on-off switch. The guy was only a step away now and still coming. Too close. The bat swung up to his shoulder and as he shifted its momentum to swing it forward in time with the last step that brought him right up against the Honda's door, Furyk pulled the door handle in and pushed with his shoulder, hard. The bottom of the door cracked against the guy's shin, not enough to snap the bone but enough to stop his forward motion and the beginning of the swing of the bat. Furyk pulled the door in a foot as the guy bent over in pain, then pushed it open again. This time the window frame smacked the guy across the forehead, sending him back into the street, still empty as the Lexus waited for its spot. Pain and surprise played on the guy's face. Still on his feet but swaying, the bat hanging loosely from his right hand. Before the rocker could decide what to do, Furyk was standing in front of him. The guy was two inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. Furyk felt the anger evolve into rage, rage at this jerk who had made a scene for no reason, maybe blowing Furyk's whole night of work. Rage at having to deal with another asshole who had to show the world what a tough guy he was. Furyk raised a fist to give the guy a cross-cut blow across the face he wouldn't forget for weeks after the swelling went down, and stopped. He fought the rage. Cops, delays, a night of answering questions. It wasn't worth it. His hand shot forward and he grabbed a clump of hair on the guy's chest and pulled him forward hard. The guy followed without resistance, dragging the bat. Furyk turned to the girl, who was still standing in the gap between the cars.

"Get in." Her mouth hung open and he repeated the order. She disappeared around the passenger side. Furyk, still pulling the guy, spun him around as they got to the open Hummer driver's door. He pushed him up and in, grabbing the bat as the guy's body flopped into the plush leather seat. Keys were still in the ignition. He was recovering from the surprise; the pain in his leg and forehead made him mad. But the ease with which Furyk had manhandled him into the car made reason win out.

"Go home." The guy's sunglasses, still in place, nodded up and down once. Furyk slammed the door shut and headed back to his car. The Hummer backed up, bumping the Honda again but clearly without malice, and pulled into the street. A few seconds passed as Furyk got back in his car and the Lexus pulled up. It slowed but did not stop and then shot away. The spot didn't seem so prime anymore.

Furyk tossed the bat in the passenger seat and killed the headlights. Looking over at the club, he shook his head. Nobody was trying to bribe the bouncer, who wasn't checking the list or watching the door. All eyes were on Furyk. Silence for a few seconds, and then a cheer went up from the line. Applause and whistles. The throbbing in Furyk's eye persisted. He keyed the ignition and cut into traffic. The night was blown. Nothing but a new bat to show for it; metal. The kid who lived down the street from Furyk, who lingered outside his door on half a dozen occasions before working up the nerve to knock, would be disappointed. She just wanted to know if her father was really out of town on business trips, missing birthday parties and her quincea _ñ_ era celebration. Furyk had already found out the absent dad wasn't doing much traveling, but had a penchant for staying at downtown hotels with sweet young things he'd meet at the clubs. Tonight he was planning on have a chat with the guy. It would have to wait.

## 3

THE 911 CALL was made by the daughter who'd found her mother in a stupor sitting next to Wick, the apparent murder weapon in her hand. The police got there in under six minutes – standard response time for that neighborhood. The assistant coroner on the scene put the likely time of death within half an hour of the time of the daughter's call but nothing definitive until the autopsy. The teenage girl, the high cheekbones and deep blue eyes marking her as the dead man's daughter, was berating her mother in the living room. No tears, but lots of anger. Detective Sunny Prole thought she was going to have to separate them. The mother sat on the couch, a distant look in her eyes and not saying anything. Prole guessed it was a tranquilizer, though she'd have to find out whether the woman took it before or after gutting her husband. The girl was leaning in, long blonde ponytail shaking as she put her finger in her mother's face and chastising her in a surprisingly mature voice.

"I hate you, you pathetic..." the girl searched for words, face bright red. Nothing seemed harsh enough and she let it hang. "You hated him, I know you did, you..." Prole put a hand on her shoulder and the girl whirled around like she was going to hit her. Prole stood her ground, looking the girl who was as tall as she was straight in the eye.

"Sit. No, over there." She directed her to a large chair, probably costing more than Prole made in a month, on the other side of the room. The girl looked at the badge hanging around Prole's neck, then at the two patrolmen in the room, and went to the chair. Arms folded, she glared at her mother as she sat down hard.

"Bitch. Goddamn bitch..." Prole didn't interrupt – as long as the girl didn't hit her mother, it was interesting to watch the interaction. The mother hadn't even followed the girl's movements or appeared to know she was being abused. Maybe she was used to it.

The doorbell rang and one of the cops answered it. Crime scene workers, photographers, and evidence guys showed up within a few minutes of each other. After Prole checked out the kitchen, leaving one of the patrol guys to keep the girl off her mother, she walked back into the living room as the front door opened without the bell ringing. Expensive suit, nice haircut, very calm guy in his fifties walked in like he owned the place and she knew the family lawyer had arrived. She immediately identified him as a prick. Just what she needed – goddamn ambulance chaser cutting into her investigation.

He picked her out just as immediately as the lead investigator and didn't bother offering a soft, manicured hand in greeting. Just a smile full of unstained teeth.

"Detective, I'm Perry Margolin, Mrs. Wick's attorney. Please don't plan on asking her any more questions this evening."

## 4

FURYK WOKE WITH a start, body rigid. The sheets were wet again, the sweat from his body soaking through to the mattress. He didn't remember the dream, had no idea if it was the same one that jerked him awake at least once a month. But he knew what brought him out of it. A barking dog is an irritant; a yelping dog evokes murderous intent. One more shriek pierced the heavy silence of the humid night air and Furyk leapt out of bed, grabbing the baseball bat he'd confiscated earlier that night. Jaws clenched, he took a few steps toward the back door leading out to the high bushes obscuring the house next door. The yelping sound was like ragged fingernails against an emery board and his nerves jangled.

"Shut up, shut up..." barely audible through gritted teeth. He wanted to crash through the brush and beat the dog to a pulp. Heart beating hard, sweat dripping between chest muscles rigid with anger, he held back. Held back from the violence that fought its way to the surface; held back from screaming the obscenities the neighbors deserved. But reason and discipline kept him in check. His grip loosened on the bat and his neck muscles relaxed. He hit the switch on the thermostat next to his bed. The cold blast from the central air conditioning hit him like a spray of ice and a shiver worked its way up his spine. Three o'clock in the morning and it was still eighty degrees out. He could see the blinking red light on the answering machine on the other side of the bed. Ignoring it, he padded toward the master bathroom, the cold hardwood floors retaining the chill from earlier in the day when the A/C had been on continuously. The conflicting sensations of sweat, shivers, and the coolness on his feet made him feel alive. A long hot shower and then two minutes under an icy stream would get him ready for work in a few hours, would calm him down.

Furyk let the water heat to unbearable and stepped in. His skin almost instantly went red and he held still, waiting for the bite of pain to subside and the deep relief of heat and steam to edge out the sting. He left it on until he felt the subtle change, a little less hot water signaling he was draining the supply, then twisted the knob all the way to the left. The change from steam to ice was instantaneous and shocking. He leaned forward against the tiled wall of the shower and counted to a hundred and twenty, determined not to flinch while the bitterly cold water scalded his skin.  Rivulets ran down his shoulders, some catching in the furrow of the long scar on his left side that ended just below the tan line. When a girlfriend or temporary companion traced her finger along its route and asked its origin, he always came up with a new story. Like how he got drunk in a cantina in Uruguay and a beautiful young hooker lured him back to his hotel. He awoke the next morning in the bathtub filled with ice, a bandage where they had removed his kidney. Total crap, the kind of urban legend you hear about but never really happens, but the girls ate it up.

He got to 120 and shut the cold water off. Standing in the shower, goose bumps over his entire body, he let the sensation run its course. He watched himself walk to the sink below the mirror and pick up the Altoids tin sitting next to the empty beer bottle. Extra minty. He flipped open the metallic lid and dry-chewed two Vicodin. Six left. He'd have to refill the prescription. Letting the air dry his body, he stared into his face dispassionately. The brown hair looked almost black when wet. A few too many lines in his face for his age. Craggy. Nondescript unless you looked really close. Then there was an intensity, something that made tough guys not dismiss him. Maybe it was just the rage he kept at bay. He looked in his eyes, green with a faint yellow around the pupil. He looked like crap, but at least it matched how he felt.

Dry now, he pulled on gray sweat pants from the bedroom closet and arranged the comforter across the bed so it appeared made. That was the extent of his housekeeping. Hands on hips, he thought about a cigarette, more to kill time so he could avoid the answering machine, but he'd quit last month again and he'd go at least six months before even considering a back-slide. He closed his eyes and thought about driving up to Mulholland in the Boxster convertible in the garage next to the Honda, no one on the road and wind and bugs in his face. A minute passed, then another. He was calm. He headed to the bedroom and the blinking red light.

## 5

THE SOUND OF the helicopter outside told Prole all she needed to know about the speedy start of news coverage that would only increase in its frenzy. From the looks of the house and the expanse of lawn, the victim had plenty of cash and probably plenty of friends, so there'd be a lot of people interested in following the story. The lawyer must have seen the house on television or gotten a call from one of the neighbors – he may even have a group rate for representing anyone in the neighborhood who killed their spouse or embezzled a few million dollars. Prole stood her ground in the face of his warning not to talk to the wife but he went around her – ballsy, since Prole was pretty good at getting in the way despite being petite. But the guy had a right and she didn't want to screw anything up in the investigation by making a procedural error. There was plenty of evidence and even this guy wasn't going to be able to talk the woman out of a few nights in jail starting right now.

The attorney conferred with his client then joined Prole just out of Merrill's earshot. Prole crooked a finger and led him into the kitchen. The crime scene guys were just getting busy but she stepped around them and brought the lawyer with her.

"Sitting next to the body, holding the weapon, not objecting. She's going downtown tonight."

The attorney barely looked at the body on the floor. "She's in shock. You have no evidence to hold her, she's no threat..." Prole interrupted.

"She's in shock because she just stabbed her husband to death, looks like a dozen times or so. Let's cut the bullshit. She's going in and you can talk to the judge tomorrow – or tonight if you've got his home number." A little rancor edged into her voice. Prole hated the idea that having a lot of money got you a better deal, even if only a stay-out-of-jail card until the trial that got you convicted and strapped to a gurney and injected with a couple of drugs that would put you to sleep and stop your heart from beating. The attorney didn't argue, just headed back to his client and made comforting sounds about having her out as quickly as possible. Prole appreciated skipping the back and forth. She returned the favor by not putting cuffs on Merrill as she led her out of the house and into the lights from half a dozen news cameras. It pissed Prole off, but maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. A nice late night perp walk for the local stations and a good start to showing how this nice, quiet, rich housewife was a cold-blooded killer. Merrill didn't resist or seem to really take in everything that was going on. The attorney had told her to keep quiet, which turned out to be unnecessary. He would follow in his Jaguar to be there as they walked through the process of booking her. Prole looked back through the open front door and saw the daughter, still sitting in the chair. She was crying, but not for her mother's welfare. Prole hadn't gotten more than a few sentences out of her, all of them angry and directed at her mother. Nothing about her father, but that's who the tears were for now. The patrol guys would stay until the female neighbor who'd gotten past the growing mob out front and identified herself as a close family friend had gathered some things from the girl's room. She saw the woman talking with the attorney before heading upstairs, a patrolman in tow to keep an eye on her while she got some clothes for the daughter. The discussion looked intense and then the lawyer, Margolin, kissed the woman on the cheek and went out the door. Full service attorney, Prole thought.

Prole loaded Merrill into the back seat of the unmarked sedan and got in the front. No partner, just her. She didn't slow down as much as she should have as she backed through the pressing crowd and onto the now-busy street. Shit, it was going to be a long night.

** **

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## 6

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FURYK HIT THE Play button and listened to the first of three messages. The young voice was hard to distinguish as male or female.

"Mr. Furyk, it's Jimmy. I'm really sorry, man, I mean..." Furyk knew what was coming. "I gotta take my mom to the doctor and it's at 11, so I don't know if I can work my shift. I'll call Tiff and see if she can cover, but if not, I mean, I'm really sorry."

The second message was from Tiffany. She had class and couldn't cover Jimmy's shift. The third message was from his meat supplier. They were out of roasted turkey breast and he wouldn't have any until the next day, afternoon at the earliest. It was going to be a long day. He headed back to the bedroom to get dressed for the drive over to the sandwich shop he owned on Ventura Blvd even though it was still dark out and would be for hours. He'd had the shop for three years, his big adventure in normal living. Hadn't really worked out that way, but it helped create a balance. He thought about how hard it was to get good help and what lousy workers teenagers and college kids were and it helped him from thinking about guys like the Hummer driver. His moonlighting work introduced him to a lot of high-class guys like that. Dressed in his usual khakis and Polo shirt without the ridiculous emblem on the chest, he looked at the clock. 4:00 a.m. Goddamn dog. What the hell was he going to do for three hours at the shop? He made some instant coffee and sat on the couch. The leather crunched and he put his feet on the utilitarian coffee table and sipped from his mug. The remote was on the armrest and he flipped on the flat panel TV. It was set to the local news station and there must have been a car chase or some other world-shattering event because he was looking at an aerial shot of a neighborhood. The sound was muted; the brain-dead local anchors gave him a migraine. The picture was a tape and played on a loop. Then it cut to the front of a house, right under the helicopter, if the spotlight from above illuminating the scene were any indication. Another loop, ten seconds worth of a cop escorting a mousey woman out of the house. She must have really screwed things up to get this much attention. And she was out of it, not even bothering to cover her face or turn away like any self-respecting perp. The camera zoomed on her face but was too far away to keep the image still. Furyk was about to flip to ESPN when he stopped. His finger went to the Mute button and the cartoonish booming voice of the anchor in the studio started narrating mid-sentence. Furyk leaned in as the loop replayed and he took in the front of the house, the heavy iron plate hiding a modern peephole, and then the face of the woman. The name didn't come to him right away, but the image and the memory did. Then the newsman's voice brought it all back. "...was arrested this evening for the murder of her husband, prominent psychologist Carl Wick." That was it – Wick. Merrill Wick. Furyk remembered the one time he'd met her.

## 7

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BY 3 A.M. MERRILL had been through the degrading process of being booked at the LA County Jail. No first night transition at the comparatively cozy police station/jailhouse less than a mile from her home in Brentwood. Murder suspects went straight into the system. Margolin was able to keep her from being grilled by the cocky Prole, but couldn't keep her from getting an orange jumpsuit and small cell. People didn't realize how demoralizing and dehumanizing just the booking process was. It was like being a hunk of trash processed on an assembly line. Pounded, probed, labeled and passed along. Merrill floated through most of it, but shortly after midnight started to emerge from her torpor. Now Margolin was with her in the interrogation room, getting ready to leave and saying comforting things about getting bail the next morning. Her glaze-eyed look began to fade. Sitting in the cold windowless room with Prole going over what would be happening to her over the next few days, Merrill began to look afraid. She stood up from the steel table and matching chair, seeming to be shocked by the handcuffs she was now wearing.

"What...why am I..." was about all she could get out. Margolin realized the initial shock was wearing off and the next response would be strong – confusion, anger, denial. He wanted to be sure she said nothing, and told her so in a stronger voice than he'd used before. It woke her up further, but also calmed her down.

"Detective, I'd like a few minutes alone with my client." Prole rolled her eyes, figuring it was kind of late in the process to be having the first serious client-attorney conversation, but left the room, throwing over her shoulder an admonition: "Ten minutes. I'm off shift and wanna get some sleep before the show starts again tomorrow." She walked out the door without waiting for the comment she knew would come from the attorney, who didn't care whether she got her rest.

Alone in the room, Margolin took Merrill's arm from across the table. He held it tightly, partly to make sure she was listening and partly to keep her seated. He could see the agitation roiling in her face. "Merrill, I've known you and Carl since before you were married. You're the last person in the world I would expect to be sitting here with." Merrill looked at him and the anger subsided – just hurt and confusion now. "First, not a goddamn word to anyone but me. Do you hear me?" His grip tightened. Merrill's eyes widened and she nodded, looking small and meek. She had cut her hair recently; it used to be well down her back and was always clean and smooth, if not exactly luxurious. Now it was shoulder length, more girlish, the way she'd probably worn it as a teenager. Margolin didn't let go. "I need to hear you say it, Merrill. Say you won't talk to anyone except for me. Don't let them bully you."

Merrill whispered "yes," then cleared her throat and said it again. "Yes, I mean, no, I won't speak to anyone but you." That satisfied him and he finally let go of her arm. She absently rubbed it but held his eyes.

"Now, I have to ask you a question, Merrill. It's the only time I'm going to ask, ever. I only need to know so I can decide on your defense. And I am going to defend you, even though Carl was my friend. So are you." Merrill looked confused, not sure what was coming, and that concerned him. It should be obvious.

"Merrill, did you kill Carl?" Her eyes widened as if lightning had suddenly shot out of his mouth. She pulled back, and her lips started to form an involuntary answer. But then she stopped.

"I...I don't..." She couldn't, or didn't want to, finish the sentence. He waited. Almost a full minute passed. Finally she made her decision.

"I don't know."

It wasn't what he'd expected. "You don't know? Or you don't remember? Or you think you did but aren't sure? What are you saying Merrill?" She didn't do anything to lessen his exasperation.

"I just...I mean, I don't know if I did it. I don't remember doing it. But...I don't remember not doing it. I just remember seeing him there, dead." Confusion was replaced by fear and then tears. Margolin didn't show his thoughts. No more explanations tonight. They sat quietly for a few more minutes until Prole came noisily back into the room.

"Anything else, counselor?" It was a rhetorical question. A policewoman had come in behind her and was stepping around to gather up Merrill.

"Merrill, just remember what I said. Not one word." He waited until they'd left and he stayed a moment to watch her walk down the hall toward the heavy metal door with double remote locks that would take her into the bowels of the County Jail.

## 8

A GORGEOUS VIEW of the ocean dominated the bedroom. The house was propped on stilts, leaning heavily over the Malibu cliffs and ignoring gravity and the threat of earthquakes. The moon shone a streak over the calm ocean and burst through the glass covering the entire western bedroom wall. It was the only light except for the flicker of a large screen plasma television to one side. Both light sources glinted off the heavy school ring on the middle finger of the house's owner as it swung through the air and backhanded the girl across the cheek. The crack of something hard hitting bone was audible over the drone of the television and she fell sideways off the bed. She barely felt it. The agony of her dislocated shoulder shut out everything else. It made the red cotton t-shirt that came down past her hips hang at a crazy angle off the shoulder. There had been a loud popping noise when he'd yanked her off the floor a few minutes earlier, when she'd been cowering under the vanity table, and dragged her back onto the bed. She lay on the floor now, grimacing and ruining the perfect lines of an otherwise pretty face. Though only sixteen, she'd been beaten up worse than this. Except he wasn't done. Larry Brecker, only twenty pounds heavier and an inch taller than her but with a man's strength, jumped off the bed. He hadn't even bothered to put any shorts on and she could see he was excited by her pain. In his mind, he was Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Earth. Men feared him and women begged for his touch. They all deserved to be treated like the plebes that they were. Power surged in his veins and he was sure that if he looked down he'd see armor instead of his naked body. On the movie sets where he was the king behind the camera and everyone scraped and bowed, he had the power. But it was limited; he could only scream and yell and fire. Here, though, his power was unquestioned and complete. It thrilled him.

She rolled over to protect her face, curling up into a ball in the middle of the floor. Like a ball, he kicked her hard in the back. The sharp pain made her arch and he grabbed her long black hair and pulled up from behind. She was half-lifted off the floor, facing the television. With her hair out of her eyes and her mind trying to go someplace calm, someplace far away, she focused on the television for a second. Helicopter shot of a beautiful house, as nice as the one she was now in, with lots of lights breaking the night and reporters and gawkers filling the driveway. She lost sight of the scene as he half dragged her back to the bed. She knew how it would end. For almost three months she'd been coming here, unable to say no to the man with three cars in the garage each worth more than her mother made in two years. There was always wine and better food than she was used to having, though everything tasted a little bitter knowing what would come later in the evening. It wasn't always this violent, but just about. There was no one at her apartment in Panorama City to ask about the extra makeup she had been wearing lately, to cover bruises – her mother was always out, staying at some new boyfriend's place. No one at school in her neighborhood paid attention to anything like this, the few days she actually showed up anymore. They had their own problems. She tried to go with the momentum as Brecker pulled her onto the bed but her shoulder hitting the mattress reignited the agony. She was on her back and he stood over her. He was skinny in the arms and legs, but in a flabby, weak way. A small belly protruding forward, Brecker couldn't have been more that five foot six. He had started to sweat from the exertion and strands of hair fell into his face without the stiff gel he usually used to hold back the remaining wisps of long brown hair clinging to his crown. With one hand he started to choke her. She hated this. He wrapped his fingers around her throat, tightening until she began to choke. He was exultant. She knew it would last until she began to see spots, floaters in front of her eyes that meant the oxygen wasn't getting to her brain. She'd read about it in biology class that year. Then he'd let go and watch her cough and gasp to catch her breath. Only this time Brecker pulled her up by her throat, closer to him, and it hurt in a new way. She didn't know what to expect and it was a surprise when his other hand was suddenly hurtling toward her. She could hear something break in her face as the force from the punch took her out of his grip and slamming back into the bed. He stood back up, having straddled her just before the blow, and leaned back with his arms spread like he was taking applause. Blood was filling her nose and throat and she rolled toward the foot of the bed to be face down so she wouldn't choke on it. This was worse than usual and she didn't know what to do. Her mind was clouding and it was hard to concentrate. Brecker got back on the bed and rested against the pillows piled near the headboard. It was as if the scene had played itself out and now he was taking a break. His feet didn't quite reach where she was curled at the bottom of the mattress. His attention turned to the television. He was suddenly tired and bored. It was taking more and more to get the blood rushing like a tidal wave and tonight had been exhausting. He needed a break. The sound of air whistling past broken cartilage and the slight gurgle from the blood in her throat made it hard to hear the news commentator. Annoyed, he found the remote among the covers and pointed it at the television. The helicopter was still circling the house, its spotlight sweeping across the roof and driveway. The crawl along the bottom of the screen gave a brief summary; prominent psychologist murdered, wife being taken into custody. Typical fare, he thought. Except he recognized the name of the murdered man. His eyes went back to the girl at the foot of the bed. He poked her with a toe, which required him to scoot down towards her.

"Hey. Get up." She didn't respond and he poked harder. Nothing. She was out. Brecker could still hear her breathing, so it couldn't be too bad. He looked back at the television.

"Shit."

## 9

THE CLOTH RUBBED against her skin like burlap. The floor smelled of urine. Her roommate had tattoos. Merrill was miserable. She huddled in the corner of a shared cell in the Women's Ward at Los Angeles County Jail. She was already a celebrity, getting more news coverage than your average rapist or murderer. It wasn't worth much in her current situation. She felt white, whiter than she'd ever noticed being. It embarrassed her, noticing that the only other woman she'd seen in the jail who wasn't brown or black also had no teeth. She was more scared of the female detective, Prole, who'd looked at her like she was a piece of gum stuck to her shoe, than she was of the other prisoners – though it was a close call. The word "prisoner" echoed in her head as though she'd said it out loud. She felt the tears start again but she bit her lip hard to stop them. The veins below the tattoo on her roommate's neck, Sally, had stood out hard against the dark brown skin when Merrill cried before. She'd spit out a few words in Spanish mixed in with some English and Merrill caught "fuckin' white piece..." and "pussy cryin' shit" followed by more Spanish interjected with a word starting with "C" that Merrill hadn't heard spoken out loud since her best friend in junior high school intoned it late one night during a sleepover and told her it was the worst word ever. She'd stopped crying immediately.

Merrill looked down at her knees, drawn up tight against her chest as she huddled on the floor in the corner of the cell. Part of her noted that the hue of orange didn't go with anything, either here or in her closet at home. It made her sad, knowing she looked so hideous. No sleep, no makeup, tears streaking her face, and her hair certainly a mess. And it made her giggle for a second, knowing this was stupid and trivial and she was being accused of killing her husband. Killing the man she'd been with for almost twenty years, who'd rescued her in a way she didn't really understand. Who was the father of their perfect daughter. Sally whipped her head around at the burst of giggle. It didn't matter what Merrill did; it was all just as likely to lead to a profanity laced tirade and probably eventually a beating. Her husband, dead now. And they were telling her she did it. That she must have done it, who else could have? And they had a knife with her hands all over it and her cringing next to the body. Worse, her explanation was that she didn't know if she'd killed him. That wasn't what she said to the police, thank god for Perry Margolin, Carl's friend even before Merrill had met Carl, and the only one keeping a sane head right now. All that and she still knew her immediate worry should be if Sally would decide to launch her 275 pounds in Merrill's direction and crush her to death if Merrill sneezed. She didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, and she didn't even know what to feel. The loss of Carl was in her gut and it made her shake. It must be love, because she was afraid of life without him. She tried to picture herself standing over him, stabbing him repeatedly while he begged her to stop. She wanted to stop, to let the image evaporate, but she stayed with it. The knife going into his stomach, glancing off a shoulder, entering the soft part of his chest. Then punching a hole in his neck. She felt it in her hands, the speed of the knife moving through the air, the resistance as it hit his body, the pressure as it tried to break the skin and muscle. She listened for his voice, the pleading that replaced the deep, slightly threatening but never angry tone he used when conveying his disappointment in her. Pleading for her to stop, for God's sake, please Merrill, stop. She listened and she saw. But it didn't feel right. It was foreign, like a dream. Maybe she'd done it in a haze, a couple glasses of wine or the sleeping pill Carl gave her sometimes. She closed her eyes, squinted hard, pressed her fists against the sides of her head. It hurt to think about, to think about what she may have done. It hurt to think Carl was dead and she was alone. It scared her to think what might happen. Perry hadn't said anything but she had seen enough television shows. Jail or maybe the death penalty. What would Cheyenne do without her? And that hurt even more. Cheyenne, who was sure her mother had done this, taken away the one thing Cheyenne cared about. The tears started to well up again, silently, unstoppable. Cheyenne. The image of Carl dying on their kitchen floor meant a thousand things, none of which she understood. It was too much. In spite of herself, without realizing it, Merrill dozed off. Sally picked her teeth with a dirty fingernail and wondered whether she should kill the bitch now or later.

## 10

FURYK PARKED THE Honda around the back of the gas station a block from the sandwich shop. He walked past the filthy bathroom, the door propped open by a rusty shopping cart owned by the homeless guy ironically taking a leak against the long-dead bushes running next to the station. Furyk rounded the corner and caught the eye of the station owner. He'd done him a favor a year or so ago, a family thing. The parking spot was payment. Furyk nodded at the young man behind the fake bullet-proof glass cashier's cage, but Hamid's eyes went wide and he shoved some bills toward the customer standing on the other side of the glass. Hurrying past the register and racks of gum and beer nuts, he pushed out the door at a trot, grasping something in his hand. Furyk slowed down and waited for him to cross the space between them.

"Mr. Bill, please." Furyk waited, pulling the sunglasses off so Hamid could look him in the eye. It had taken three years to get out of the habit of keeping his eyes hidden, a cop move he still relied on sometimes. The slightly built gas station owner held out the crumpled paper. It was a postcard.

"Please, look. Here, it is from Farad." Furyk took the postcard and flipped it over. A generic picture of the Statue of Liberty, ablaze with lights against a dark sky. He turned to the other side. The postmark was Manhattan, dated three days ago. The note was written in beautiful, curlicued script. Furyk assumed it was script – he didn't read Farsi.

"He says, thank you, thank you a thousand million times. Everyone is happy. They sleep well now, even little Sarah. No more nightmares. She sends a kiss to Furyk." Hamid smiled at his niece's use of the last name. "Since they have moved...since your help, they are happy now." Hamid reached to take the postcard but clasped Furyk's hand instead. It was filled with gratitude. He wanted to give more than just a parking space, but even if he had more it would never be enough. Furyk had helped when no one else would. He held the man's look and put his own hand over Hamid's. A few seconds passed and then Furyk put his shades back on and headed to the busy intersection to cross and open up the shop. He absently rubbed the spot on his left thigh where the bullet had entered and passed clean through the night he had stopped Sarah's nightmares. It still ached sometimes.

_A TWISTED PATH: Buy now to keep reading!_

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