HARLAN COBEN

SHE WAS A PICKPOCKET.

She haunted the subway station on Thirty-fourth and Holloway, where every morning Gerald waited for his train on the same cold concrete bench. He watched her through thick glasses. She was young, frail and thin, waiflike, with short shaggy black hair, and she moved like a ghost, drifting in and out of sight as the crowd milled about.

She made him look forward to the mornings. She made him feel sparks. Watching her was the only time that Gerald had felt alive since he found Dolores, his wife of fifty-three years, face-down in her Cheerios on a Sunday morning, dead from a stroke.

Gerald's pickpocket wore black leggings covered by a short blue-jean skirt. She wore two jackets, Windbreaker over denim-lots of pockets, Gerald figured. Sometimes she wore sunglasses, even though she was underground.

She was good, crafty and swift and clever, and not greedy-you get caught when you get greedy. Gerald learned her patterns as he watched her on the way to work.

Not work really. After Dolores died, and after the funeral and the family and the random visitors bringing potluck stuff over to mold in the fridge, he found himself alone in the house. He had been retired for nine years before she died, and they had never done much of anything. They never traveled or went to parties or joined any clubs. But they were in the house together, living close but separate lives, side by side. She was there, a constant, a daily affirmation, like the soreness of his right rear molar or the ingrown toenail on his middle toe-a part of life.

Once she was gone, there was nothing there but an empty house and a lot of hours between waking up and falling asleep. Gerald cleaned and straightened until there was nothing left to clean and straighten; then he tried to get his job as a building inspector back, but the contracting business had moved on, far on, from the last time he worked. The site was now run by a kid who had been an intern when Gerald retired. He had laughed and put his hand on Gerald's shoulder when he brought up returning to work. Gerald watched the light drain from the kid's eyes, watched the uncomfortable tension slide in, when he realized Gerald was serious. The kid forced the smile back onto his face. "We'd love to have you back, Gerald," he said, "but it's just not safe to have a seventy-four-year-old on a construction site."

Gerald had smiled and nodded, shook the kid's hand. His hand seemed old and callused in the young man's grip. It felt bulky in his pocket as he walked away from the site. Gerald's hair was white by now, even though he parted it the same way he had when he was thirty. His skin was weathered and wrinkled. Everything around him was new. He didn't fit.

He took an office downtown, a small dusty room with a big window that was full of sun and blue sky in the mornings. He told people he was going to be a freelance writer. He didn't write much-a humor piece for the local tabloid, a few halfhearted attempts at a memoir; mostly he looked out the window and breathed in the musty air. He just liked the rhythm it gave to his life, this waking up and getting ready and going to work and coming home, although every morning it got harder to get off that bench and onto the train. And then he found his pickpocket.

She followed patterns that no one but Gerald knew. She entered from the south entrance, the one with the stairs, rather than the escalator. She skipped down the stairs and moved close to the tracks, leaned her back against a cement pillar. She faced straight down into the black hole of the tunnel, but her eyes darted around-light, searching. She stood at the pillar a few minutes. When the first train came rumbling up the tunnel and the crowds pressed right up to the edge of the track, she drifted in, melted right into the throng, and when the doors hissed open, she made her move. Gerald had seen her unzip purses and unhook wallets from chains while the crowd jostled and shoved. She snatched a silver fountain pen from a stockbroker's breast pocket, plucked a small jewel out of an Indian woman's scarf. Then, as the crowd disappeared behind the sliding doors and was shuttled away from her, she slipped her prizes deep in her jacket, slid out the north entrance, and was gone until tomorrow.

She was interesting, a diversion for a while, until the day she pickpocketed the cop. The cop was young and nervous-looking, and he stalked around the station every other day and ran out the bums who begged for change. He stood over a bum on a Wednesday morning.

"Got to move along, buddy," he said.

The bum looked up at him. "Come on, man," he said.

"No panhandling in here."

"Cut me a break."

"Don't make this hard," the cop said. He wore a heavy utility belt loaded down with radio and gun and baton and other cop stuff. Everything was held down by leather straps with snaps on them. He unsnapped the pepper spray. '"Just move along."

The train rumbled in and the doors opened and the crowd sardined its way into the waiting cars, and as Gerald watched, his pickpocket wove her way in between the people and up behind the cop, nicked the pepper spray right out of his belt, and scuttled on out the north entrance. The cop reached for his belt, fumbled thin air, looked down with confusion.

"Watch out for those damn ghosts," the bum said, laughing, grinning a dirty-toothed grin.

Gerald fell in love with her that morning.

WE DIDN'T START breaking into houses to steal things. The four of us started breaking into houses simply to see what would happen.

By the time we were eighteen, we were still doing it because none of us had found any reason to stop.

"Now," Will Wilson whispers, waving me forward, then silently pushing me over the high windowsill of another house we've broken into in Tacoma.

When we were little kids, like eight or nine years old, my friend Teddy and I would walk home from Sherman Elementary together collecting bottle caps and Popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. We searched the grass and the sidewalks, under bus stop benches and around paper boxes, keeping what we found in secret pockets we made in the lining of our jackets. Teddy and I would walk home in the rain, racing the cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks along the narrow streams of water in the gutters; then days or weeks later, when it was dry, we searched for the butts and sticks in the stiff, matted mess around the sewer drains.

Teddy and I were best friends.

On rainy days back at Sherman, Teddy and I built dams during recess in the dirt near the long-jump pit. The rainwater ran through the pit in a shallow, foot-wide stream as it flowed along the far side of the schoolyard toward a big iron drain. Other kids came out to make dams too, but Teddy and me were always the first there, building the main dam, a tapering arc six inches high and five feet across, leaving the other kids to make small dams and beg us to release some water.

I remember being out there in my corduroys and nylon coat, wet like everyone else. None of us wearing raincoats. It's as if it rained so much no one bothered to fight it. Except Teddy. Teddy always wore one of those bright yellow slickers, curls of black hair bursting from beneath the yellow hood. Scraping more dirt toward the dam with his yellow rubber boots.

And as recess went on and our dam got to be seven and eight inches high at the front, now ten feet around, the kids below would always start their really loud yelling, wanting us to break our dam, to let the water rush down and wreck theirs. But Teddy and me always held out, even when one of the kids tried to kick a hole in our dam-one of the hyperactive kids, usually, the ones that every day had to go to the nurse's office to take their medication. The ones like Michael Coe, who we weren't friends with then and didn't ever want to have to talk to.

I had to push Coe away once, after he tried to kick at our dam. He was a low, heavy kid with a buzz cut and tight T-shirt. I knocked him into a small mud puddle, and he went into this frenzy, whipping himself in circles and screaming and his face turning red. Coe told on me, and the teacher made us put our desks together for a week, and that, we always said, is how we became friends. Although, really, that is how Coe started following Teddy and me to my house after school, showing up uninvited when me and my babysitter and Teddy were playing Wiffle bat baseball or eating bologna sandwiches. How, after a while, Coe started bringing his new friend Will Wilson over to my house.

But on those rainy days in the dirt, when the bell to end recess would finally ring, on those days Teddy would only then begin to smile, carefully moving to the very front of our big dam, the other kids now yelling happily and jumping up and down and Coe and the hyperactive ones turning in fast circles, flailing their bodies onto the hard, wet ground, the teachers a hundred yards away, screaming at us from the dry doorways, and Teddy with the tip of his round, brightly booted yellow foot, he'd make just a nick in the dirt of our dam and the water would begin to trickle out.

And Coe and the other hyper ones would be breaking their thin little dams even before the water had reached them, the water flowing faster through the now bigger break in ours, Teddy pacing back and forth, staring and watching and smiling.

And sometimes I thought I wanted to smash the wall of our dam, jump on it with my wet sneakers and let the water rush down. But I never did that to Teddy.

And I remember now a day when I looked past the kids around us, seeing some new kid leaning against the high chainlink fence, watching us all and smiling too. Smiling like Teddy was. Smiling like he understood something more. Although now, when I think of him, I think of Will Wilson in that first moment, and he had a lean face, older, eighteen, not eight.

Will Wilson did look young then, I know. He'd been just a child. But I can't remember that so well.

But I remember standing next to Teddy, so satisfied with him. Teddy, my best friend, dry beneath his coat, me wet and warm in the rain, both of us watching our dam in the schoolyard, smiling as it went through its slow self-destruction.

Old Town was the wealthiest area of Tacoma, an area that we sometimes drove through just to look at, to see it. And as I cross that sill into the darkness of this house in Old Town, I see the black shapes of unseen furniture, gray light from a window. Touch my feet to a wood floor, then carpet, feel around me the full and spreading silence, and even then I can't explain it, can only sense it and want it, but from that moment, like the first moment we ever entered a house, the break-in is about the violation itself, the entering of a space that isn't ours, that is protected not by guns or bars or even locks but by an assumption of safety. An assumption that we-with one easy motion-have taken hold of and destroyed.

And like most every time before, I now turn to Will Wilson, standing with him in the shadows of a wall, the two of us smiling as we think of the owners and their children upstairs asleep. Oblivious to it all.

When we were seventeen and eighteen, we'd wake up at Will Wilson's house. It was a house on an empty road between two neighborhoods, some unplanned midpoint between subdivisions. It was like a lot of places I remember in Tacoma, one of those forgotten roads lined by high fences and tall, overgrown bushes and lit just barely by intermittent streetlights. Sometimes there'd be a store, a corner store with faded advertisements for cigarette deals and inexpensive beer, and in a few places there'd be duplexes or old storefronts, doors that faced these forgotten roads, dark doorways that looked abandoned until you looked close and you saw something, mail in the mailbox or the flickering blue light of a TV behind a curtain or a tricycle pressed against the side of the building, and you realized that someone was home.

It was always damp in Will Wilson's house and it smelled bad, and you'd wake up on the thin hard carpet feeling sick and like you'd never slept at all. His stepdad was always teaching himself to play the guitar, this bright pink guitar he'd bought at a pawn shop and that he'd rigged up to run through the old console stereo that filled one wall of the living room, which was one of only a few rooms in that whole house, so a lot of the time I'd end up sleeping against that hard wooden stereo with the tan cloth over the speakers. I'd wake up hearing the feedback still ringing quietly from the speakers, my face against the floor and having to pee, feeling cold and wet in my jacket, wet maybe from the night before out in the rain or just wet from the air in the house, with the curtains pulled shut and the floor and couch almost damp when you touched them. I'd wake up in the silence, turning over and staring up at that gray ceiling sprayed rough with texture and mixed with the thousand glimmering bits of pink and green and gold, lying there feeling so gray through my body, hurting, and wanting to throw up, and staring up at that ceiling and now hearing the buzz from the speakers next to me and hearing the others sleeping in the room and remembering all that beer we'd drunk and the half gallon of gin and the dope his cousin's friend had had, because you couldn't not remember it, every drink and all that smoke now so deep in every part of your body, turned sick now and dying, and for me staring at that ceiling glimmering pink and green, I could remember every drink and every breath of smoke and would feel it still, wondering now if I was really sick or just stoned or drunk, all of it turning bad through the end of the night, that fight in your mind that you'd forgotten in the drinking and smoking and that had finally just sunk you, so you'd only known to drink more, drinking through the smoking hoping another drink would make you feel like you had when you'd started, that soft, warm moment of the first hit of the pot and the first sip of the first drink. But now it was lost, everything awful, and worn, and gone. And I'd sit up finally, among my sleeping friends, finding Will Wilson sitting up, on the couch, sipping a beer, staring at me, gray eyes in a leathered face, nodding at me like he'd never gone to sleep.

Bad things had happened. I'd feel my hand then and know we'd gone out and fought. Know we'd driven to each corner of Tacoma. I'd close my eyes and see dark figures tearing at each other, hidden faces in the black backyards of the houses we'd passed, faces turning gray as they ran in groups through the pale white light of empty parking lots.

And I'd blink my eyes and know there'd been a dream I'd just woken up from, that I couldn't quite remember, a dream of the hidden faces in groups, in backyards, roaming.

Bad things had happened. We'd started here and ended up here, on this floor, in the quiet of this small, forgotten, almost unidentifiable home.

"What happened?" I'd ask Will Wilson then, my mouth hurting just to speak.

And he'd sip beer. "Fuck you," he'd say, swallowing. "You know. You know what happened."

"Hung over," I'd say, and close my eyes, touch them lightly with one hand, then another, pain shooting through my eyes to the top of my head, my neck, the front of my chest.

"Fuck you," he'd say. "You were right there."

And I'd still have my eyes in my hand, pressing just that bit harder, the pain going white, with the other hand finding a Valium in the pocket of my jeans, slipping it across my lips, biting it once before swallowing it down.

And I'd be nodding now. Saying, "Right," realizing my face was damp too, like the carpet and my jacket and the insides of my jeans, and I'd know that I was damp from this house we were in and from the rain we'd run through and from the sweat of all that we'd done. "Yes," I'd say. "Yes, you're right."

Coe's low, heavy body is moving so gracefully in the dark, silently bouncing on couches, stretching out easily on carpets, walking quietly across dining room tables. He is trying to circle the room without stepping on the floor, hiking up his badly fitting jeans as he noiselessly leaps from a piano bench to a radiator to a TV on a rolling stand that he uses to pull himself three feet before the cord goes tight. And only when he seems on the verge of thrashing about and finally making noise does Will Wilson step in front of him and grab his face at the jaw, shake it: No.

Often the four of us don't speak at all. We just move our lips or point.

The guy was still smiling as I broke his first finger. My hand already holding his thick, wet hair, pulling his head back and another finger back, and I was pulling him to the ground, the side of his head smacking loud against the sidewalk, the second finger breaking easily in my hand.

When I was a child, one night I watched my dad lean over the kitchen sink, washing blood from his swollen face as I stood near my babysitter. There's nothing you can't do in a fight, Brian, he said to me quietly, his voice slowed and heavy. Long hair in his blue eyes. Pushing his fingers along the thin lines leading to his lips. Twenty-two years old. Maybe twenty-three. You just want to win, Brian. You just want to hurt him.

I was hitting this guy in the face now, striking his nose, his eye, his cheek. We were in front of a mini-market near school, and it was raining, hard, after school and this guy, eighteen, he'd pushed Teddy hard into a door, being cool in front of his friends, this guy from school who'd tried to push Teddy around a few times that week, and today I'd told him to fuck off, and he'd turned to me, smiling, leaning close and pointing his finger in my face, smiling down at me, a foot or more taller.

"Fucker," I said quietly, feeling the light rain against my lips as I spoke. Breathing steadily, finding a rhythm between my words and motions. Feeling all that anger, feeling it run through my chest and arms and hands.

And I turned slightly as I swung, seeing Teddy standing near the window of the store. Watching.

And the guy's friends, they hadn't moved.

Will Wilson had shown up. Standing near Teddy. Not smiling, just watching. He carefully sat down. Cross-legged on the wet sidewalk. Watching.

The guy rolled away from me, standing and turning and trying to find me, his right eye covered with blood and the left side of his face bleeding too, his twisted hand wiping at his good eye, and when he saw me he came at me. Not wildly. Moving forward, saying, "No," and breathing hard. Swinging straight and almost hitting me again. "No."

I hit him in the throat and he leaned over. I moved to my left. Watching him gag. I kicked him in the chest.

"Don't ever," I said. Spitting blood from my lips. Tasting blood in my throat. "Don't ever fuck with my friend."

Teddy had stepped forward. Standing on the curb, a few feet away. Watching.

The guy's nose poured red and yellow. He sat up. I knocked him onto his back.

My hands were wet with spit and blood and rain.

I was tired. I was mad.

The guy looked toward his friends, three of them standing on the sidewalk. He stared at them for a moment but didn't ask for help. Didn't expect them to do anything.

I hit him in the ear. His face hit the street. He was laid out on his side. In a moment, he asked dully, "Why won't you stop?"

I was tired. I was mad. I didn't know why exactly.

Will Wilson stood up now. I turned to look at him, and behind him, in the window of the store, I could see my reflection. Hair so wet in the rain. Hair that hung straight past my eyes.

Will Wilson was standing. It was time to go.

The guy was screaming, blood and spit spraying across the street.

I walked to the curb and kneeled at a puddle, rinsing my hands in the cool rainwater. Two fingers on my right hand were numb and bent. I turned my face to the sky, let the rain run down my eyes and neck. Wiped the water away before again rinsing my hands in the puddle. Again wiping at my face before the three of us met up with Coe and we all walked home, fourteen, and none of us had a car.

Teddy is standing at a window. With his curly hair turned gray in the darkness, his soft and round face turned pale by a streetlight outside, Teddy looks like an aging man. Some old guy at his window. With nothing to do but stare. For a while I'd thought Teddy stood at the windows because he was watching for the police. But one time he tells me he is just seeing what this family looks at during the day.

Will Wilson is going through cabinets, drawers, seeming to count the forgotten records and books.

Coe is rolling, on his side, across the couch.

And years later, when I find myself thinking about the break-ins, I know that what I liked most was watching the three of them in a house that was ours. I bounced soundlessly on chairs playing tag with Coe, stood next to Teddy staring out at the night, searched through closets and drawers with a smiling Will Wilson. But I now mostly remember watching through the shadows, seeing my three best friends doing a careful and silent nighttime dance.

Maybe because they're too small to park in or too far from the house, but the garages behind a lot of the houses in Tacoma's blocky, sprawling neighborhoods often stand unused, the swinging door left open, the small panes of the windows broken by neighborhood kids. And beginning in the middle of our senior year, Will Wilson, Coe, Teddy, and I had started burning these garages down. At two or three in the morning, we'd sneak along a dark alley with a can of gasoline, pouring it against the inside base of the wooden walls, making a big pool in the center of the smooth, concrete slab. Lighting the gas, the four of us throwing matches while watching the alley and the surrounding houses, the garage igniting in front of us like a huge gas oven, the walls burning with low flames, the pool in the center burning with flames three feet high.

We'd burned nine by the end of May. Six days from graduation, we burned another one. The next day, we made the newspaper, a small article about what fire officials believed was a pattern of arson. The police had been consulted. Officers on patrol in Tacoma's North End would be checking alleys.

We went out that night at two A.M. in our black sweatshirts and gloves and ski masks and found a garage on Cheyenne Street only ten blocks from the last garage we'd burned.

Will Wilson went to check if the house was dark.

"Shit," Teddy whispered to me in the dark. "Shit. This is serious. They've got to be watching, Brian. Fuck, Brian, fuck. This is serious, Brian."

"Well," I whispered. "Fuck. Well."

Will Wilson came back, matches in his hand. There were paint cans and a can of paint thinner in the garage. There was also a lawn chair, an old croquet set and a cardboard box full of books. We spread out the junk and books and some boards from the stairs, then poured thinner and gas over it all.

Coe was bouncing on his heels, circling in place.

Will Wilson held a book of matches out to Teddy and me but didn't look at us. We were all near the entrance, and Will Wilson lit a match and tossed it, then another, the gas catching. Teddy kept looking over his shoulder, glancing down the alley.

"Come on," Will Wilson said, still not looking at Teddy and me, just flicking matches across the floor, small blue fires now burning in four or five places.

And finally I took a match from Will Wilson. Lit it and threw it because Will Wilson wanted me to. But most of all I lit it because I wanted to be a part of this. I wanted to see what would happen.

Blue flames had spread across much of the floor. A small pool near the books ignited.

I lit and threw another match.

And Teddy was starting to go down the alley and Will Wilson turned quickly, grabbed him hard by the neck, pulling Teddy close to his face. "Come on," he said quietly and held up a lit match for Teddy.

The books were burning orange and red, the wood catching now. The plastic seat of the lawn chair burning bright, shining on Will Wilson's face and Teddy's face and sending a foul smell through the garage.

"Come on," Will Wilson said, and then smiled and took a high voice. Whining, "This is serious."

And Teddy did light a match and did throw it then, lighting another and another, tossing each into the already hot fire, the tiny match flames disappearing in the gold and growing light, but Teddy just stared at Will Wilson, not scared, not weak, just staring, Will Wilson holding him by the neck and not once looking at the fire behind him, whining over and over, "This is serious. This is serious"

And then a white police cruiser turned down the alley and hit its lights.

And Teddy's pool of gas was burning yellow, blue, and white.

We ran. Through alleys, across yards, over fences, and through hedges. Ducking behind houses, running along streets, trying to make our way toward a huge, wooded park where we could hide.

Fifteen minutes later, with two cops on foot behind us, the sirens of three cruisers screaming near us, Will Wilson and I were sprinting toward the park, Teddy and Coe probably already in there, the two of us crossing a brightly lit street, aiming for the low white wall that bordered the park, the park here sweeping in an arc a half-mile around, sloping a few hundred yards deep like a quilt of thick green trees and bushes, stretching three quarters of a mile uninterrupted to the waterfront. And as I ran across that pavement with a cop car skidding to a stop near me, both doors opening, two more men jumping out, I saw the glow of lights from the unseen mills and oil plants five miles away where right then my dad was working.

And I do remember wondering if the police would shoot an arsonist.

Will Wilson and I hit the low fence, stepping off, jumping, floating for that moment, silently flying into the park. We hit trees, then bushes, finally sliding across the wet, steep ground. We were a hundred feet down before I looked back. Another hundred and we stopped sliding, seeing the pinpoint of searchlights waving back and forth above us.

It only took twenty minutes to find the base of the Proctor Bridge, where Teddy and Coe were waiting.

We climbed up the dirt hillside, the bridge's heavy concrete supports stretching out over our heads, hearing all around us the low, numbing sound of the rain against the leaves. We reached the wide dirt ledge just below the surface of the bridge, the four of us sharing from a bottle of vodka that we had hidden there.

"God," Will Wilson said, "God." He somehow seemed so thin in the dark. A bare, hard person drinking next to me. "They were chasing us. Everywhere we went they were chasing us. And it was beautiful."

The four of us never called anything beautiful.

He told Teddy and Coe how the two of us split off from them, crossing through yards and over fences, and he was drinking and saying beautiful, and finally he sat down in the dirt and I realized Will Wilson was drunk.

And I watched him and I remembered how, when we were running, he'd split off from Coe and Teddy, touched my arm, pulled me with him. Taking the two of us down an alley he knew, toward a street we'd been on a hundred times.

A brightly lit street that led away from the park. Where the three police cars had been waiting.

Will Wilson hadn't made a mistake. He'd just tried to draw out the chase. To make it more dangerous for me and him.

Will Wilson was getting bored.

I watched him now. Even in the shadows under that bridge, I could see his eyes staring out behind half-closed lids. His usually hard face gone somehow soft. I don't think I'd ever seen him drunk. I'd seen him drink twice as much, but I'd never seen him drunk.

"It's coming to an end," he said slowly. "We'll get jobs. And sooner than you think, it'll all come to an end."

We hear the steps upstairs and my legs go blurry, then numb. I'm pulling in air as slowly as I can, turning left, seeing the door I can run through if the voice comes any closer.

"Colleen?" the voice says. "Colleen?"

Coe is crouched low on the floor. Teddy stands at the door. Will Wilson stands at the foot of the stairs.

But then it is quiet, a door upstairs closing. And I look at Will Wilson and he is smiling.

"Almost," he whispers. And he smiles even more.

Teddy and Coe are already starting to climb out the window, Will Wilson next. And as I turn to lower myself over the sill, I think about Will Wilson standing at the foot of those steps, Will Wilson like always starting to think of another way, another step, another thing we can do to find something more. And as I drop to the ground I glance back in the house and I see a woman sitting in the dark kitchen off the wide living room, her eyes barely white in the darkness of the house, staring at me as I still hold on to the frame, having watched the four of us wander through her first floor. Not saying a word, Colleen just a silhouette in a far corner chair.

Teddy had come by to pick me up. He wanted to go for a drive. The two of us used to go for drives a few times a week. We were thirteen and neither of us had a license, Teddy using his cousin's Volkswagen Bug as just me and him went driving around Tacoma.

As we'd turned fourteen, though, I was less interested in driving with Teddy, wanting instead to go by Will Wilson's house, wanting to see what he had going on. And Teddy always agreed.

We were eighteen now, and it was a few days before we all were going to graduate, then leave for summer jobs in Alaska.

We drove in Teddy's white Dodge Dart, the June night air swirling cool around us in the car.

And Teddy then quietly told me he was thinking about going to college when we got back from Alaska. Trying to get into Washington State University, in eastern Washington, three hundred miles away.

And as he told me this I nodded and was quiet.

We were crossing along the waterfront at low tide, the wet and salty, heavy bay smell pouring through the windows. And the silence, not speaking, it was a kind of answer. Teddy, who'd never thought school was important, needed my encouragement to go to college. Teddy, who seemed bound to Tacoma and Will Wilson as deeply as me, needed my support to leave. Even to Seattle. Especially to eastern Washington. Teddy was trying to make a break. But that night I gave him nothing.

Teddy and I drove up McCarver Hill toward our small houses above Old Town, silently driving past the steplike rows of nice homes, the reflection of the yellow streetlights glowing on the hood, the reflection of a house window sometimes even shining on our windshield. McCarver Hill, which we'd ridden up on our bikes when we were ten years old, back then talking about being little kids, saying, do you remember that bush on that corner where we found that whole box of Popsicle sticks? Do you remember the day we skipped school and walked through that alley and then that alley to cross just an edge of the gulch, going to the waterfront with the sand and the rock crabs? Saying, do you remember the lady who lived in that house, who gave everyone the cocoa on snowy days? Do you remember that kid in the window of that house, how he'd smoke pot and stare, just stare out his window for hours, how he was there at the start of that walk and when we got back? Do you remember racing sticks down this hill in the rain, this very spot on this very block, me and you chasing boats, right here, right there, eight years old and passing through this place, me and you in a race at one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour?

But that night on McCarver Hill, I just stared at the road. And, still, said nothing to Teddy.

The car stopped in front of my house. The engine still running. I was about to open the door when Teddy said quietly, "Will Wilson was blowing up some old toaster this morning."

Teddy didn't talk for another moment. I held on to the door handle, thinking Teddy must have something more to say. Will Wilson was always blowing things up.

"And an old gas can," Teddy said quietly, "and this little black-and-white TV. Two M-8os each. He called me at six this morning. Said he was blowing stuff up. Told me to come over."

Teddy was leaning against his door, turned as if looking toward me but staring out the windshield toward my house. The light from the radio glowed above my knee.

"It's like I can't say no," Teddy said. "Going over there at six. I'd rather be in bed. But I can't say no."

I didn't say anything, just looked out the window. I could feel Teddy staring. Wanting me to agree.

"He was talking about break-ins and all," Teddy said, his voice loud now and awkward. "I don't know. It's like he's maybe pushing for something more. When we get back from Alaska."

I stared ahead, the intersection glowing pale yellow from a streetlight, the roads leading into it all lost in shadows. "Like what?" I asked.

"I don't know. He was just talking. All quiet like he gets. Taping M-8os to this toaster. He unscrewed the back of this TV. You should have seen that TV go."

"What was he saying, though?"

"Like, I don't know," Teddy said, turning the radio up slightly. "I love this song."

"Come on, Teddy," I said.

"Just more, you know? When we're in the house. Things he's thinking about for when we get back from Alaska. I don't know. He blew up an old wooden mailbox. It caught fire."

I sat in the car, staring at the shadows beyond the intersection. I knew Will Wilson was making decisions. Will Wilson was thinking, wishing.

Will Wilson was getting bored.

Teddy's face looked a little pained, talking now like he was answering a question. "More," he said, shrugging. "Just doing more. I'm not sure about it. Like, I don't know. He was saying stuff. While, like, he was blowing these things up. Six A.M."

I lowered my head. Saw my feet. "Come on, Teddy."

"Just saying," Teddy went on, but getting quiet now and his voice evening out, not struggling. "When we're in the house. Doing more. I'm not sure about it, Brian. Like, I don't know, Brian. Like waking people up."

The four of us leave the houses almost completely undisturbed. Even Coe is always careful to return furniture to its place. I think the owners woke up in the morning and never knew anything had happened, maybe wondered weeks or months later, How long has that lampshade been crooked? Is this where I left my shoes?

Teddy had been wrong. Will Wilson didn't want to wake people up when we got back from Alaska. Will Wilson didn't want to wait even that long.

One night later, we were in a house in Old Town, the four of us standing against a wall in the living room, after hours of near silence under that bridge near the park, under there quietly drinking, and I was blurry now, and slowed and focused from all the drinking, watching the lights on the ceiling now, light from the bay that flickered up through the windows, white, white flashes in a room that was dim violet from a streetlight outside, and I think I knew it was different when I saw Will Wilson pull a bottle of bourbon from a liquor cabinet, take a drink, and we'd never drunk in a house, never stolen anything. Coe was smiling, drinking, and I was watching Will Wilson, in his gloves like we always wore, with a ski mask in his pocket this time, and passing the bourbon to me before he put the mask over his head.

"Let's just see what happens," Will Wilson said.

And I knew what would happen. Knew we would do anything. Knew we would not stop. I knew we had so lost ourselves to whatever was possible. And so I was watching Coe and Will Wilson move and I was drinking from the bourbon, and I looked around for Teddy. He was staring out a window. And for a moment I thought I'd stay with him. For a moment I thought I'd grab his arm, pull him with me, and we would run from here.

Because I knew I would do what Will Wilson wanted.

And because I knew I wanted it too.

I found Will Wilson and Coe on the second floor, already turning down a hall, at a door in their masks, Will Wilson turning the knob, and there would be chaos soon, and violence, and power and fear and anger, and I drank from the bourbon, still in my hand, drank again from the bourbon and heard the screaming.

Screaming downstairs. People screaming downstairs.

Will Wilson and Coe had gone in the room. But downstairs there were people screaming and alarms going off, and I looked back down the stairs, saw Teddy standing there now, looking up at me, and I was glad he was there, glad and I smiled, at Teddy, my friend, and I saw that a flame had sprung out from his hand, Teddy looking up at me, Teddy flicking matches toward the stairs, the steps going blue, then red, then gold.

He'd poured something on the stairs. He was lighting them on fire.

I could smell the smoke already, the flames climbing toward me, heat all across my body, Teddy disappearing from the foot of the steps, the downstairs turning gold, the smoke alarms screaming up at us, and I ran into the room with Will Wilson and Coe, could see out the window, see people outside, one last person running out of the first floor, and then I remembered someone should have been in this room. But there wasn't anyone except Will Wilson and Coe, which seemed strange, I thought, and I was drunk and confused and scared, but I couldn't help but think it, couldn't believe that Will Wilson had been wrong. There was supposed to be someone in here.

Smoke alarms were going off upstairs too now, all screaming together.

I turned to Will Wilson and Coe, standing in the dark, watching out the hall, Coe bouncing, and Will Wilson looking around now, out the window, toward the hall, saying something I couldn't hear in the noise of the alarms and the fire now spreading up the stairs.

"How do we get out?" Coe was saying, loudly, and he was bouncing up and down even harder.

Will Wilson turned to me, his eyes staring out of the mask. "Where the fuck is Ted?"

"I don't know," I was saying. "We have to get out," I was saying.

Will Wilson hit me, in the face, so hard and so fast, and I was on the floor and couldn't hear and couldn't see and couldn't breathe.

I could see him before I could hear anything, blurry and above me and his mouth moving and I'd never been hit so hard.

"Where the fuck is Ted?" Will Wilson was screaming.

I was talking, I thought, saying, "I don't know," but I couldn't hear my voice. Couldn't feel my mouth or lips.

"How do we get out?" Coe was yelling.

Will Wilson hit me again and it was white and black and gone and there was a smell then, I remember now, a smell of air and water and rain against my face. But in a moment I could see again and the smoke was in the room. The fire in the hall.

Will Wilson was gone.

"He left," Coe was saying, quietly or maybe I still couldn't hear. "Oh my god, he left."

The smoke was getting heavier. The flames had reached the hall. Coe was bouncing against the walls. "How do we get out?" he was saying. "How do we get out?"

I stood and felt the blood across my nose and mouth and my head spun and I threw up, fell down again. I crawled to the window and looked out. There were about five people in the street.

Coe was hitting the wall. Coe was spinning in place. "How?" he was screaming, "how?"

"We have to climb down," I tried to say, but I still couldn't hear my voice. "Okay, Coe? We climb and then we run."

Coe kept hitting the wall. I tried to stand but threw up again, my head spinning and my neck all sickly numb.

And then Coe started running. Through the smoke. Into the hall. Into the flames.

Trying to make it downstairs.

Maybe he was thinking he could make it to the door. Maybe he was afraid to climb. But probably he just wanted to find Will Wilson. To see how Will Wilson would finally make this work.

Once, in a house, I leave Will Wilson in a kitchen as he slowly makes his way through every drawer and cabinet, pass Coe in the dining room climbing across a fireplace mantel. I'm looking for Teddy and find him in the living room, a wide, tall room with windows open onto the bay and the bright ships and the lights of the neighborhoods all around us, and he is climbing up the windows, in bare feet with his toes just balanced on the thin frames of the windows, fifteen feet in the air now, and he is looking out of a skylight, his hands touching the panes of the glass, his face close to the frame.

"What are you doing?" I whisper, as loud I can.

I can see he is talking, but I can't hear him.

"What are you looking for?" I ask again.

He is talking, his fingers running along the edges of the skylight, his head turned upward, and I think I hear more the echo of his voice, coming back to me off that window, and I've never known if he knew I was there.

"Something pretty," Teddy whispers, "something beautiful."

I knew Coe would die. Like all of them. All of them would die.

I climbed out a window, dropping to a covered porch, then jumping to the ground. I turned to the now ten people in the street and they stared at me and I fell on the ground, dizzy still, vomiting again, and they hadn't moved.

But when they did, I stood and I ran. Down an alley, through yards, across parking lots, finally into the park, across it, finding my car on the other side.

I was already packed for Alaska. My clothes and tent and sleeping bag.

I was in Bellingham by dawn. I crossed the border into Canada on foot. Stole a car. Stole a truck. I rode three freight trains, riding blind first north, then east, then west again. I did not hitch a ride. Did not eat in restaurants. Did not sleep in any motels. I broke into grocery stores at night. And I'm sure no one ever knew I'd been there.

I rode the ferries as much as I could. Sometimes north, sometimes south. But I was on the Aleutians within two weeks.

Alaska is a very big place.

Within two years I was living in Arizona. Within three years I was out in New Hampshire. And that's a long way from Tacoma.

These things are not so hard to do.

Once, in a house, Coe almost breaks a dining room table, falling off of it onto Teddy, and when we get outside, six blocks away, walking quietly like we usually did, Teddy then turns on Coe, in one motion hitting him in the face, falling on him, hitting him still, and Will Wilson steps back and smiles, and I step back and watch, and Teddy is saying something to Coe as he hits him again, something about trying to be more careful, about not fucking up all the time, about thinking about what he was doing.

THERE WAS A STARBUCKS just across the street from the building where he had his office, and she settled in at a window table a little before five. She thought she might be in for a long wait. In New York, young associates at law firms typically worked until midnight and took lunch and dinner at their desks. Was it the same in Toledo?

Well, the cappuccino was the same. She sipped hers, making it last, and was about to go to the counter for another when she saw him.

But was it him? He was tall and slender, wearing a dark suit and a tie, clutching a briefcase, walking with purpose. His hair when she'd known him was long and shaggy, a match for the jeans and T-shirt that were his usual costume, and now it was cut to match the suit and the briefcase. And he wore glasses now, and they gave him a serious, studious look. He hadn't worn them then, and he'd certainly never looked studious.

But it was Douglas. No question, it was him.

She rose from her chair, hit the door, quickened her pace to catch up with him at the corner. She said, "Doug? Douglas Pratter?"

He turned, and she caught the puzzlement in his eyes. She helped him out. "It's Kit," she said. "Katherine Tolliver." She smiled softly. "A voice from the past. Well, a whole person from the past, actually."

"My God," he said. "It's really you."

"I was having a cup of coffee," she said, "and looking out the window and wishing I knew somebody in this town, and when I saw you I thought you were a mirage. Or that you were just somebody who looked the way Doug Pratter might look eight years later."

"Is that how long it's been?"

"Just about. I was fifteen and I'm twenty-three now. You were two years older."

"Still am. That much hasn't changed."

"And your family picked up and moved right in the middle of your junior year of high school."

"My dad got a job he couldn't say no to. He was going to send for us at the end of the term, but my mother wouldn't hear of it. We'd all be too lonely is what she said. It took me years before I realized she just didn't trust him on his own."

"Was he not to be trusted?"

"I don't know about that, but the marriage failed two years later anyway. He went a little nuts and wound up in California. He got it in his head that he wanted to be a surfer."

"Seriously? Well, good for him, I guess."

"Not all that good for him. He drowned."

"I'm sorry."

"Who knows? Maybe that's what he wanted, whether he knew it or not. Mom's still alive and well."

"In Toledo?"

"Bowling Green."

"That's it. I knew you'd moved to Ohio, and I couldn't remember the city, and I didn't think it was Toledo. Bowling Green."

"I've always thought of it as a color. Lime green, forest green, and bowling green."

"Same old Doug."

"You think? I wear a suit and go to an office. Christ, I wear glasses."

"And a wedding ring." And before he could tell her about his wife and kiddies and adorable suburban house, she said, "But you've got to get home, and I've got plans of my own. I want to catch up, though. Have you got any time tomorrow?"

Port Arthur

THE NIGHT I WENT to work, I gathered up my reporter's notebook and heavy purse and then went to check on my husband, Peter. My sweetie-pie was sitting up in bed, his left leg in a cast. The bruises about his eyes were beginning to fade, though they still had a sickish green-yellow aura. The television was on and a cell phone was clasped in his right hand.

"You doing okay?" I asked.

He grinned, his teeth showing nicely through his puffy lips. "Like I've been saying, as well as could be expected."

I kissed his forehead. "You okay moving around by yourself?"

"Of course."

"Good," I said. "But you be careful. You go and break your other leg, that means you're stuck in bed. And I don't think this whole 'in sickness and in health' covers bedpan duty."

He moved up against the pillows, winced. "You could have warned me earlier."

"But you wouldn't have listened."

"And why's that?"

"Because you're madly, hopelessly, and dopily in love with me, that's why."

As I headed out Peter said, "Erica? Be careful."

I hoisted my heavy purse on my shoulder. "Don't worry, I will."

And then his face darkened. "One more thing. Sorry I got dinged up."

I shook my head. "No time to talk about that."

I blew him a kiss, which he pretended to catch and slap against his heart with his free hand.

My sweetie.

WHY I TOLD THE JOKE AT ALL I can't say. It wasn't that good, but then neither was the bar I told it in nor the bartender I told it to. I was drenched through with the sweat of a long day, with nothing else to show for it but the thought of an unpleasant telephone conversation with the client the next morning. Sometimes you stick with the subject like his own bad taste in aftershave, sometimes he drops you like a weak signal; but the guy paying your freight is never a philosopher.

I'd driven past the place a hundred times without noticing. I hadn't been thirsty the first hundred times. A long way back it had been someone's idea of home, a square frame eight-hundred-square-foot house with a shingle roof and tile siding that reminded you you'd missed three appointments to have your teeth cleaned. It didn't identify itself: the owner had just bought an orange LED sign that said OPEN and stuck it in the front window. But in that neighborhood a bar was all it could be. I still think of it, when I think of it at all, as the Open.

Inside was permanent dusk, two piles of protoplasm dumped on stools at the end of the bar, and a tabletop shuffleboard game whose pine boards had been slapped with a varnish that went tacky in high humidity so that one of the shuttles had stopped halfway down its length one day and decided that was where it would stay. A paint-can opener would be needed to pry it loose.

I don't remember what the bartender looked like. He would be a middle-aged guy running to flab who had seen Cocktail once, pictured himself in some swanky joint juggling shakers and stem glasses, and like the shuttle had come to everlasting rest in that spot. Normally I wouldn't have spoken to him beyond ordering a double scotch, but while he was siphoning it out my gaze lit upon a sepia picture in a frame on the wall above the beer taps. Someone had cut a photo of zebras grazing in the veldt from National Geographic and put it behind glass to make the place seem exotic.

"Guy walks into a bar," I said.

"Guys do, pleased to say." He slapped a paper napkin in front of me and set my drink on it. "This a joke?"

"That's the punch line from another 'Guy walks into a bar' joke; but you tell me. There's a kangaroo mixing the drinks. Kangaroo looks at the guy and says, 'I see you're surprised to find a kangaroo behind the bar.' Guy says, 'I'll say. Did the zebra sell the place?'"

He grunted, which told me all I needed to know about how he'd wound up in a dump like the Open. A really first-class barman laughs when the joke isn't funny and shakes his head when the story isn't that sad. Now that I think of it, his face belonged on the other side of the bar, tie-dyed with red gin blossoms and yellowed lost opportunities. But then that might just have been my face in the peel-and-stick mirrors in back of the bottles with recycled premium labels. An unexpected glimpse of one's reflection on that sort of day is no treat.

I'd thought of leaving him change from my ten, but I put it away. His kid could scrub pots and pans for his tuition, just like all the other self-made millionaires. I was in what the poets call a dark humor. I looked around for someone to kick sand in my face.

"Fucking cops," the bartender said.

He'd flicked on the TV on the corner shelf under the ceiling, in case my opening routine might lead to a set.

I wasn't the least bit curious. That state of mind is the first off-duty casualty in the life of a detective. I couldn't care less about what the cops were up to that put him out of his sunny mood. So of course I looked up at the screen.

A female reporter stood on a street crosshatched with yellow caution tape, pretending to read from a notepad while red and blue strobes pulsed in the background. An Early Response Team-downtown Detroit jargon for SWAT-had charged a house on the northwest side where an armed man was said to be barricaded with his wife. The husband was in custody, but the wife was dead with a slug in her heart. An unidentified source swore that no firearms were found in the house. An investigation was under way to determine whether a stray police round had killed the woman.

The bartender backhanded his remote at the TV and the screen went black. "They'll sweep that one under the rug toot-sweet. State should make them buy a hunting license."

"I guess you've never been in on a bust."

"I been on the receiving end. Cops think they own the town."

"Anything can happen when the adrenaline kicks in and the guns come out. A little girl got killed the same way last spring. That time they were looking for an armed robber."

"I remember it. Seems to me a cop got an unpaid vacation. He's back on the job and the girl's still dead. You a cop?"

"If I said I was, would you spit in my drink?"

He grinned sourly. "For starters."

July, 1927

THEY LEFT THE DEAD LOOTERS in the house and were striding toward their horses, Ham Johnson reloading his.30-.30, when they heard what sounded like a cat.

"Ain't no cat," said Ingersoll.

"Naw." Ham clicked a cartridge into the port of his rifle. He clicked in another.

They followed the squawling past the house's slanted silhouette-the owners smart enough to leave the doors and windows open, which had let the floodwaters swirl through. Behind the house, a shade tree, now like something dipped in batter halfway up. Snagged in the top branches, a coop filled with dead chickens.

Anyway, Ingersoll was right about it not being a cat. It was a baby.

The men stared. A bushel basket on a low branch held the red-faced thing. In the mud, beneath the basket, a shred of blanket it'd kicked away.

"Mother of God," Ingersoll said.

"Wasn't nothing of God about this one's mother," Ham said. He raised his right arm, aiming his shotgun at the door of the house, and closed one eye. "She was the one. Got damn it. When she heard us coming she must've up and left this one here and hid herself in the house."

Ingersoll considered the baby. It wore a gnarl of diaper and was impossible to name boy or girl. It was bald. Red from crying and he realized they'd been yelling above its noise.

"You better off," Ham told it. "Take a chance with the current elements. Maybe a gang of coyote'll take you in. Isn't that what happened to you, Ingersoll? Band of coyotes found you in the tundra and raised you as their own?"

Ham shoved the silver tray they'd taken from the looters into his saddlebag. A white man just over six feet tall with a red face and bright red hair he kept cut short, Ham wore muttonchops (also red) he called burnsides, and a belly nutria derby that he was slightly vain about and endeavored to keep clean. Ingersoll's hat was bigger and more practical, a black Stetson Dakota.

"Ain't no coyotes this far south," he said.

"Is too," Ham said. He kicked his leg to flap his boot sole down-the leather wet so long it'd rotted-and fitted his boot into his stirrup and swung onto his saddle.

"It's wild dogs a-plenty, Ham. But it ain't no coyotes."

Ingersoll was looking beyond the house, studying the inland sea of dried and drying mud where cotton plants had once been, the horizon unrelenting brown, flat and cracking like so much poorly thrown pottery. Twice he had seen arms of the dead reaching out of it.

The levees had ruptured back in April, and even here, twenty-five miles southeast of the Mounds Landing crevasse, the waves had surged six feet. Thunderous breakers of coffee-colored froth had flattened near every tree and building, then just wiped them all away, like something out of Revelation. Ingersoll recalled the buried road to Yazoo City, a bloated mare and in front of its muzzle a bloated Bible as if the horse were verifying the events of the end time when they befell him.

"Tell Junior goodbye," Ham said.

"What you mean?"

"I mean it's somebody'll come along sooner or later and get this damn baby's what I mean. We got to skedaddle." He looked over his shoulder at the basket, now swaying in the breeze. "What's that lullaby? 'When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.'"

"Ham-"

"C'mon," Ham said. "Let's get to New Orleans, spend some of this looter loot. I got me a mind for a foreign girl. Russian if we can find one. Get a steak and lay some pipe. Then buy me a new pair of boots."

"I can't leave no baby, Ham."

"Well we ain't bringing it, Ing."

The foul wind from the east moaned through the leaning mule barn.

"Adios, Junior," Ham said, and gigged his sorrel with his heels. "Vaya con dios."

Ingersoll stared down at the kicking baby like maybe he'd had a baby himself long ago. And a wife.

But he hadn't. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no living family anywhere. He'd never even touched a baby.

"Ah, hell," he said and looked at the pewter sky, which gave a chuckle of thunder.

NO MATTER HOW FAST or how far she ran, she was never going to outrun herself. That was the sorry truth, Delilah thought. She was still here. She slowed on the last stretch through Golden Gate Park and found Mrs. Stowe-no, she had to remember, Renée-waiting where she said she'd be, by the windmill. They crossed the highway to the sidewalk along the seawall that paralleled the dunes. It was already dark at six, a November dark, a West Coast dark, nothing like New York in November, where you always seemed to be in the shadow of the buildings. And not as cold here, as if the wispy fog were insulation against the wind.

Where were they now? Even after five months in San Francisco she still got lost, running, day or night. She wasn't sure what direction they were going now-north, south?-though she could hear the waves slap against the sandy beach. She didn't want to seem anxious; Renée would say, "Okay, Delilah, what is it?" with that hint of impatience in her voice. Once she'd told Renée, "Prepare for the worst and it will never happen," and Renée had come back with, "Preparation inhibits spontaneity. Forget those maxims, Delilah. You're no longer in the Girl Scouts."

She hadn't taken her cell phone or her pager. Renée never commented, though, if she got a call from her office; Renée knew her job involved instant decisions at all hours. The plan tonight was that they would walk for a while and end up in a small neighborhood restaurant Renée knew about. She could phone in to the office from there, Delilah thought, to get the new euro high against the dollar.

Renée was in her storytelling mode, this time about her paleontologist husband's first discovery in Patagonia. "We lived in one of those white canvas pyramid tents: I remember how the dozen or so guy lines would sing in the night wind. The place where Sonny had chosen to dig was a treasure trove of Pliocene-era fossils. The armadillo, by the way, has hardly changed at all in forty-five million years: it has stayed the same since the Eocene period, a living fossil. We had twenty of the local Indians to work the site. Wonderfully conscientious men and women."

Striding along in her British outfit, long tartan skirt, turtleneck sweater, and camel-hair blazer, heavy brogans, her gray hair topped by a beret, Renée was becoming more English with each sentence. Her husband had been born in London. Clothes seemed made for her: she was tall, narrow, long-waisted like the models you saw in magazines. Extremely trim, though she ate like a horse. She was swinging her cane-her English shooting stick, she called it-which turned into a kind of stool when you stuck the metal spike at the end into the ground and opened the handle.

"Let's stop for a minute so I can stretch." She interrupted Renée's story to steer them to a cement bench under a streetlight. She was warm in her sweats and twisted her fanny pack around so it didn't stick into her side before she started her stretches. Renée paced in the square of light; she couldn't sit still either. What was amazing was that Renée looked no more than forty, say, maybe fifty. But she had to be nearly eighty. One of her stories took place in 1939. Her face was almost unlined, though there was no sign of surgery. She had young breasts; she'd seen them when Renée was trying on a dress at Nordstrom's. There were no liver spots on the back of her hands.

There had been occasional passersby, a woman walking a dog, but now two men stopped. "Lovely evening," one said. Renée stopped pacing but didn't pause in her tale about discovering that she'd been sitting upon four vertebrae of a species never before found in South America. "Why don't you two ladies hand over your purses and start taking off your clothes." The one who spoke was wearing a leather jacket like an undercover cop in a TV series. Then he yelled, "You heard me-strip."

That got Renée's attention. "I beg your pardon. Are you speaking to us?"

In response, the other one, like a conjuring trick, slowly drew a machete from the sleeve of his raincoat. Renée laughed out loud like she had seen something funny.

It all happened so fast there was no time to be scared. "Run," Delilah yelled, grabbing for Renée's hand. But Renée had stepped aside and had raised her shooting stick one-handed, as if she was going to twirl it like a baton: a blade of grass was dangling from the point of the stick. Cell phone, Delilah thought; pretend you've got it, and she reached into her pocket and yelled "I'm calling 911" the same instant she saw the blade of the machete catch the light as it came down toward Renée's head. It was too fast for her to see exactly what happened, but one man screamed, the other fled, and the machete fell with a clang to the sidewalk. She caught Renée's hand this time, and they ran too.

After a block and a half they couldn't hear the screams anymore. Renée slowed a little, still walking so fast Delilah had to jog to keep up. "Renée, shouldn't we get the police?"

"No, no; I don't think so. I just administered a life lesson to that young man. The police would only confuse the issue. Remember now, it's not the groin or the kneecap you kick. The whole business with karate and jujitsu and the rest is overrated. Too physical. You have to go for the eyes in a situation like that. Car keys are very good. Your thumb will do too."

By the end of the block Renée had resumed her Patagonia story in Argentina. But the image of the point of the walking stick spearing the man's eyeball made Delilah feel dizzy, made her own eyes water. It was the second time she'd heard Renée say life lesson. The first had been on the day they'd met.

"YOU SMOKING AGAIN?"

"Yeah." Ralph's sly smile. "You afraid these'll give me cancer?"

"You mind rolling down the window then?"

"I bought a pack today. It felt good. I've been wanting a cigarette for twenty-six years. That's how long ago I gave them up. I was still walking a beat back then. I figure what the hell, you know. I mean, the way things are. I been debating this a long time. I don't know why I picked today to start again. I just did." He rolled the window down. The soft summer night came in like a sweet angel of mercy. "I've smoked four of them but this is the only one I've really enjoyed."

"Why this one?"

"Because I got to see your face."

"The Catholic thing?"

"That's right, kid. The Catholic thing. They've got you so tight inside you need an enema. No cheating on the wife, no cheating on the taxes, no cheating on the church. And somebody bends the rules a little, your panties get all bunched up."

"You're pretty eloquent for an ex-cop. That enema remark. And also, by the way, whenever you call me 'kid' people look at you funny. I mean, I'm sixty-six and you're sixty-eight."

Ralph always portrayed himself as a swashbuckler; the day he left the force he did so with seventeen citizen complaints on his record. He took a long, deep drag on his Winston. "We're upping the ante tonight, Tom. That's why I'm a little prickish. I know you hate being called 'kid.' It's just nerves."

I was surprised he admitted something like that. He enjoyed playing fearless.

"That waitress didn't have it coming, Ralph."

"How many times you gonna bring that up? And for the record, I did ask for a cheeseburger if you'll remember, and I did leave her a frigging ten-dollar tip after I apologized to her twice. See how uptight you are?"

"She probably makes six bucks an hour and has a kid at home."

"You're just a little bit nervous the way I am. That's why you're runnin' your mouth so hard."

He was probably right. "So we're really going to do it, huh?"

"Yeah, Tom, we're really going to do it."

FOUR MEN WALKED through the December night along tracks for Washington, D.C.'s subway and Amtrak trains that rumble through America. Their shoes crunched gravel. Música ranchera drifted from a nearby industrial park where Sami, who drove a taxi, remembered signs for a Latino ballroom.

"When?" Maher was a California blond born with the name Michael.

"Soon," said Ivan, their Ameer.

Zlatko said, "Ameer, I have money for my last buys tomorrow."

"Brother, I can ride you with my taxi," said Sami.

"No," said Ivan. "Work alone. Let no one see us as fingers of a fist."

"A fist is five," said Maher. "I thought there were only us four."

"Jihad is the thumb that shapes us," proclaimed their Ameer.

Sami said, "Someone's coming."

A trio of hombres swaggered toward them through the darkness.

"Hola, amigos, "said that trio's jefe. "What you doing here, eh?"

"Leaving," said Sami.

"Don' thin' so." Jefe soured the night with his beer-and-tequila breath. "You gringos got lots of nowhere to run."

His tallest compañero frowned. "Not gringos. Only the blond guero."

"Who cares?" Jefe drew a black pistol. "Tool up, Juan."

The third Hispanic fumbled inside his coat's back collar.

Maher jumped Juan as he unsheathed a machete.

Jefe blinked-and Sami ripped the pistol from him with a move taught in Al-Qaeda's Afghan camps, while Zlatko and Maher wrestled the machete from Juan.

Ivan relieved Sami of the gun. "See what they have."

"Amigos!" said Jefe as Sami searched the three thugs, made them kneel on the gravel. "We all just joking, si?"

Maher said, "Shut up, motherfucker!"

Sami gave confiscated cell phones, cash, and IDs to Ivan. Zlatko threw away the machete.

"Let's go," whispered Sami. "They can't tell anybody anything."

"Whach you sayin'?" called out the kneeling jefe.

Ivan whispered, "They are kuffars. Unbelievers."

"That is not enough." Zlatko shrugged. "But they saw we don't belong-especially with Maher."

"They can't tell police or FBI or CIA," said Sami. "They don't dare."

"You talkin' FBI? La migra? Don' fuck with us! We MS-13!"

Ivan said, "Loose ends. They'll tell someone. And America is full of ears."

He put the pistol in Maher's hands. The blond kid stared at it. Stared at three men kneeling before him. The night floated their clouds of breath.

Ivan told him, "You asked when. Allah granted you the answer."

Maher fired three flash-cracking shots. The thugs crumpled into the gravel.

Ameer Ivan led his followers away from the trackside executions. He gave Zlatko the gun. Distributed the dead men's cash to all of his soldiers. Sami saw Zlatko tuck his bills inside an envelope he returned to his jacket's outside right pocket.

The Ameer tossed the thugs' cell phones. Plastic clattered on unseen rocks.

Maher staggered away from his comrades. Vomited.

"Be proud, Maher." The Ameer wrapped an arm around the youngest man's shoulders. "Diverting the enemy with the gun let us attack."

Maher mumbled, "I went wild in my mind."

"And learned a key lesson," said the Ameer. "Timing. When is now, and if all goes well with Zlatko's work… three days."

"Three days?"said Sami. "Are you sure, Ameer?"

"Yes." They neared the gap in the chain-link fence. "And only we four know."

"And Allah," said Zlatko.

"Sami," said the Ameer. "Keep that vaquera in your control."

"She is no problem," said Sami.

They left the tracks for a street that was once a route from the capital to a rural town. Now city sprawled from Congress's white dome to far beyond D.C.'s Beltway.

Ivan stood alone by a roadside white pole, an ordinary, fortyish man waiting for the bus that took him to his gold SUV stashed among a multiplex's moviegoer machines.

When the bus rolled out of sight, his three warriors walked from the shadows to a Metro subway station. Sami made Maher stand alone on the platform. Zlatko's nod approved such tradecraft for the cameras mounted on the platform's ceiling.

A silver subway train snaked to a stop. Maher carelessly drifted onto the same car as Zlatko and Sami. Words bounced in his eyes. Sami's glare welded the young man's jaws shut.

The subway slid out of the station. Zlatko sat between Sami and the window. They memorized their fellow passengers: A black guy bopping to earphone music. Two Spanish-babbling women dressed like office cleaners. A white-haired security guard.

Zlatko whispered, "Brother Maher did well, though not like our karate school teaches. But he would not last fifteen minutes in interrogation. He needs to tell. Get fame so he can be real. I worry that he'll always be a born American."

"Our Ameer must know what he's doing, choosing Maher."

"The smallest cog turns the whole assembly." His engineer past haunted Zlatko's words. "But, brother, that is not what troubles me most."

Brake squeals killed Sami's question. The train stopped. Zlatko and Maher stood to leave the train for wherever they would spend that night, facts the jihad brothers did not share among themselves.

Sami stood to let Zlatko pass. Pickpocketed the money envelope.

Zlatko stepped onto the platform.

The train slid away.

Sami rode to a neighborhood known for vegetarians, PEACE lawn signs, and citizens who thought the 1960s meant something holy. A bus took him to twin high-rises on a smog-soaked hill.

A high-rise elevator clunked him to its ninth floor. He entered his one-room apartment and closed the door with a thunk for any eavesdropper. Fought for breath. You 're clear! Clear! He eased back into the hall. Glided down the stairwell like a shadow.

In the basement, Sami dialed open the combination lock on an electric breaker box. Left the Glock pistol on the box shelf. Turned on the shelf's cell phone, texted a four-word message. Grabbed keys for a stashed car, drove toward the white dome center of town, and parked by a brick building with a peeling sign for Belfield Casket Company. The coffin factory's door flew open.

Harry Mizell-who looked like a bear-waved Sami inside.

Harry and boyish FBI agent Ted escorted Sami through the beehive of cubicles where men and women monitored computers and whispered into phones.

They sat Sami at a conference table in a windowless room. Video cameras clung to the walls. Sami imagined the scene transmitting to the aging H-shaped CIA headquarters, to Homeland Security's new complex in a powerful congressman's district, to the FBI. Maybe even to the White House.

Sami wondered if the private contractor Argus, whose ID dangled from Harry's neck, got a direct feed.

As COOK-Case Officer/Operation Control-Harry debriefed. Ted, who wore the FBI ID Harry had forsaken, sat mute at the table.

Sami told Harry, Ted, and the cameras about the murders. About when. Put the pickpocketed envelope on the table. Told Harry, Ted, and the cameras what they had to do now, right now.

Harry said, "When you texted 'Crash Exfilt Base Soonest,' we cocked to rock. Now…Now you sit tight. Relax."

Harry left the room. Left the FBI agent in charge of their spy. The glass eye of a video camera captured Sami's slump.

Ted cleared his throat. "Do you want a soft drink?"

"A soft drink?"

The FBI agent nodded yes.

"No, Ted. I don't want a soft drink."

Hmmm. The room's CTSU-Covert Transmission Suppression Unit.

"Sami," said Ted, "I pray for you every day."

"You don't know how much that means to me."

The FBI agent nodded. "God's work."

"So they tell me."

Ted let Sami go to the bathroom alone. The fluorescent retreat smelled of ammonia and angst. Sami washed his hands, face. Stared into the sink's mirror. Was there a camera behind that glass?

An hour later, Harry returned. "Bottom line, our op is still running."

"What?" Sami whirled to the video cameras. "We've got them right now on triple murder charges! Scoop them up!"

"Bosses say we need to find who's behind the cell, Al-Qaeda or-"

"There is no mastermind link! No organizational chart like we've got. That's mirror reasoning. These guys are homegrown! Self-contained."

"So you say, and I'm inclined to agree, but…" Harry got up from the table, disconnected the visible cameras. " Ted, leave us alone."

"I'm the FBI liaison and thus the official presence for-"

"Ted, Homeland Security outsourced Argus Inc. to run this op. I'm Argus's archangel. Go write a cover-your-ass e-mail about how I kicked you out."

The door closed on Ted's exit.

"Realize what we've got here," said Harry.

"You were CIA special ops in JAWBREAKER hunting Al-Qaeda in A-stan. CIA used your real Beirut life, snuck you in with captured Taliban guys our Paki allies freed. For years you've worked your terrorist bona fides all over the globe.

"Just like your buddy Zlatko. After Bosnia, he pops up looking for phony papers in Rose's outlaw gig. She's righteous enough to call her ex-FBI buddy, moi. My clout jerks you from CIA to Homeland Security. We put you next to Zlatko at Rose's. He brings you to Ivan, a Chechen physician who found Zlatko at the night school English class where Ivan teaches and fishes. Ivan had already hooked that goofy suburban kid who showed up at a mosque before they shoved Ivan out as a false Muslim.

"And presto," said Harry, "we've penetrated a terrorist cell. A cell that's going to attack in three days. And with ninety-three Islamic terrorist groups on our radar, our bosses are convinced this cell has got to be somebody's baby. Those sponsors are who we want."

"Three people got murdered tonight. That's enough!"

"Those thugs don't count right now."

"So we won't tell the local cops? What about those men's families? Hell, if they are MS-13, those murders could spark a street war!"

"Terrorists are America's number-one priority. Ivan compartmentalizes. He might have other soldiers. Something even the hard boys can't sweat out of him."

"They're going to hit on Christmas Eve!"

"Is it coordinated? What's their target? Their method?"

"Take them down, Harry. Get me out."

"We all want out. But we are where we are. This op-"

"No, not this op. Everything. I want all the way out. Now."

"Oh." Harry leaned back. "I can't make you spy. But bottom line, our gov bosses are going to let the cell run to get what they want whether it's there or not. Without you on the bricks, without me as COOK, will guys like Ted do it right?"

"Not my problem."

"My company and I get paid big bucks however this breaks. But I want to nail this job. I'm no walk-away guy. What kinda guy are you?"

That image sat at the conference table like a giant question mark.

Sami blinked. "Three days-and before they pull a trigger."

"Damn straight. So what are you going to do?"

Sami stood to leave, took the pickpocketed cash. Told Harry, "I'm going to fuck with them."

The next morning Sami worked his cab between Capitol Hill and glistening downtown. Such fares made him remember his high school senior class trip to "our nation's capi tal," how "the Hill" had been open driveways looping past the vanilla ice cream Capitol. White-shirted congressional cops looked like marshmallow men.

That post-9/11 routine December morning, concrete barricades blocked all vehicle approaches to the white marble heart of Congress. Steel barriers funneled pedestrians past barbell-muscled, black-jumpsuited, mirror-sunglassed sentinels with M-4 assault rifles or shotguns strapped across their armored chests.

But it's not Beirut, he thought. Not yet. I can stop that clock.

At 10:07 he flipped down the ON call visor sign. Drove to an Asian fusion restaurant where lunch for one cost enough to feed a shantytown Malaysian family. Parked in the alley so he faced the restaurant's service door.

10:11: Two cooks walked past his cab and into the restaurant. 10:13: A sixtyish Vietnamese man in busboy's black shirt and pants took a Saigon second to scan the vehicle crouched near his destination. 10:14: Zlatko strolled into the alley carrying a dishwasher's white apron and a flat expression. Used the restaurant's back door. 10:21: Zlatko appeared in the cab's mirrors, arms by his side, coming toward the blue taxi on a circular route justified, Sami guessed, by the bummed cigarette tucked above nonsmoker Zlatko's right ear.

Zlatko got in the back of the cab.

Right behind me! Can't see his hands!

Sami said, "As-salaam alaykum."

"Why are you here?" Zlatko's eyes burned in the rearview mirror.

"On the subway, you said you are troubled. We are brothers. I came to help."

"And that is all? No confession?"

"What do either of us have to confess?"

Zlatko shrank in the backseat.

"On the train, I was worried our Ameer has confusion about what is righteous and halal. What is haram and not permitted. How the Koran forbids killing innocents, women, and children, so the planes that hit the towers, the one crashed in that green field, they must be haram. The Pentagon plane, against soldiers, yes, halal, and civilians there who served the soldiers, unavoidable. Loose ends or contingency casualties. But instead of worrying about our Ameer, I should have paid attention to my own duties."

Zlatko shook his head. "Last night I lost our money envelope."

"Wait-you thought I stole it?"

"Ours is a wicked world. I saw the bodies of my wife, two daughters, son. Saw what my neighbors had done to us Muslims in our Bosnian town while I was out riding my bicycle thinking about the Olympics… Forgive me: I feared this kuffar world around us had swallowed your soul. But it is I who lost the money. Have endangered our mission."

"You are not to blame for accidents." Sami let his mercy sink in, then threw out a hook. "Have you told our Ameer?"

"Not yet."

"How much money do you need?"

"All of my end should cost around nine hundred and fifty dollars. I've spent about six hundred. All the rest plus the extra from last night was in the lost envelope."

"I have a hundred and forty-seven dollars. If I hustle now, my taxi can make the rest."

"You are a true brother! I will be waiting down the block in that grocery store parking lot at two-oh-five."

As Zlatko left the cab, out of his sleeve popped a restaurant butcher knife.

That's why he sat behind me.

He let Zlatko sweat until 2:19, raced the taxi into the grocery store lot. Zlatko told him: "Radio Shack on Georgia Avenue."

There Zlatko made Sami wait in the parked taxi. Sami kept a window open to hear the street. An instrumental "Jingle Bells" from a store competed with a man ringing a handheld bell by a red bucket.

Cari Jones defied her dark hair with blond highlights, wore a black leather trench coat, marched past the taxi telling her cell phone, "Soon as I get there, Mom'll say it's great I have a career, but my baby clock…"

Zlatko put packages in the taxi's back seat. Climbed in front with one Radio Shack sack, told Sami to drop him off on a corner different from any the Homeland Security/FBI/outsourced street dogs had trailed him to before they broke off surveillance to avoid spooking the streetwise warrior.

Zlatko pulled two prepaid cell phones from the sack, fished out the manual, saying, "Yes, call waiting, call conferencing, call blocking…"

He looked at Sami. "In Baghdad, we learned you don't want to be holding the right cell phone when someone dials a wrong number."

After he left Zlatko, Sami drove eleven blocks to find a pay phone. Twenty minutes later, as he cruised up North Capital Street, Sami drove past a waving ebony-skinned lawyer in an Italian suit to pick up a white man who looked like a rumpled bear.

"I wish your Ameer let you guys carry cell phones," said Harry as he settled in the back of Sami's taxi.

"No cell phones. Coded messages on Facebook from computers at libraries, Staples, and Internet cafés."

"But Zlatko just bought two phones. 'Course, it's in the rule book that every black ops honcho, spy runner, and Ameer lies to his button boys."

"Every case officer lies? Even you?"

"I play by my rules." Harry winked. "We've got our geniuses reverse-engineering Zlatko's latest buys from that Radio Shack."

The rearview mirror showed Sami a tan sedan.

"It's Ted," said Harry. "Don't shake him, okay? He's learning. He's got to. FBI, CIA, Uncle Sam's top street shooters are turning in their papers, going private, getting outsource-contracted back to do the same job at twice their government paychecks."

"Private armies fight for private profit. Government is about citizens carrying their public weight."

"When did Sami start caring about how Uncle Sam works?"

"I'm almost straight, remember? After your geniuses report, you'll have the who, when, and how. You can take down the cell. I can fly free."

Sami fed the taxi into traffic up Constitution Avenue past Smithsonian museums.

A dead pigeon lay in their traffic lane. Sami saw a sunbaked soldier named John Herne standing on the corner, staring at the fallen bird as if it hid a bomb.

"Look at this town," said Harry. "I remember when this was an AM radio burg where white folks were scared to come out after dark and Nixon had his finger on the Doomsday trigger. 'Top dollar' meant a civil service paycheck. Nobody was from D.C. People came here as cause-humpers. Now, crash or no crash, all the big money has a D.C. cash register.

"Some say we're inevitable. Like Rome, only adjusted for the Internet and Mister Glock.40. I say if we create a Sophia Loren like Rome did, let the D.C. of Washington stand for 'Destiny City.'"

"My jihad brothers say the same thing. So do Ted and his evangelical crusaders."

"What do you say?"

"That real people are trapped in those big ideas."

"Yeah, but what about Sophia Loren?"

The two men laughed.

"D.C. is your story, Sami. Destiny City. Born and bred for it. Spy life and street action are all you know. What makes you think you can quit?"

Harry's cell phone rang. He took the call. Listened. Clicked off.

Told Sami, "Our geniuses got no idea what Zlatko is building. We're flooding every Radio Shack kinda place with agents and Zlakto's photos to see what he bought before, but it's elbow-to-elbow Christmas rush in those stores."

They rode past a block strung with colored bulbs.

"In this life," said Harry, "you're either doing something or something's getting done to you. What's your deal, Sami?"

Sami let Harry out of the cab, drove to a commercial strip where French and African patois jammed with Spanish. Cruising cars blasted gangsta rap idolized by white Kansas teenagers. Sami parked his cab in the lot of a four-story commercial building.

He checked his watch: 4:29. Ivan usually closed his doctor's office at 5:00 and drove his gold SUV home. Sami scanned ethnic stores, discount furniture barns, a veterinary hospital with a green Dumpster. Told himself he couldn't see flies circling the emerald steel. Wondered where Harry'd set up the surveillance posts. Wondered if they'd called in his presence, if a satellite snapped his picture.

"Understand our new spy biz," Harry had told Sami. "Sure, satellite surveillance of Doc Ivan's office and house is overkill, but it's about buy-in.

"We got something real, but if it's only a Homeland/CIA/FBI-outsourced Argus show, with sixteen major spy shops dancing for the old U.S. of A., we might be weak on bureaucratic muscle. So I partnered my company with a contractor for the National Applications Office to satellite-monitor your Ameer. Now NAO'll line up to make sure we get what we want so they can share our credit."

I'm a taxi driver, thought Sami. I take you where you want to go.

I'm a spy. I take you where you want to go.

At 4:47 a brown medical transport services van parked at the building. The driver in a white uniform got out to lower the electric motored stairs.

They shuffled out of the building. Some were black, some brown. A wispy blond girl on crutches swung toward the van. They were all poor. The bottom line mattered as much as any for two women in black burkas that exposed only their eyes.

Last out of the door came Ivan, a doctor who didn't care about health insurance, charged what patients could afford for what he could do. Sometimes, like now, that meant walking a white-haired old lady to the van.

Sami parked behind the van, pulled on a black Detroit Tigers baseball cap to hide his face as he joined his Ameer and the old lady.

"Taxi," said Sami.

Ivan kept the poise of an emergency room boss. "Here you go, Mrs. Callaghan."

The white-haired old lady wrinkled her brow. "But… I didn't order a cab."

"You've got a voucher for today," said her doctor. "Remember?"

"I do?"

"Yes."

The white-uniformed van driver took his cue from Doc Ivan. The stairs' electric motor whined, the doors shut, and away drove the brown van.

Her doctor said, "Emma, did you drop your gloves in the elevator?"

The old lady looked at her trembling bird hands. "I must have."

"I'll wait with the cabbie. Take your time."

She toddled back inside the building.

"Ameer, I must confess," blurted Sami. He told him about breaking the rules to confront a worried Zlatko and replace the lost money.

"But why are you here now?"

"I fear that Zlatko's vision of what is acceptable for our target and the vision you and I share… I fear a conflict of faith. I have seen this before."

"In Beirut," said the Ameer, "where holy martyrs blew up the Marines' barracks and Ronald Reagan slunk away. There we learned Americans will back down. Then sex-crazy Clinton ran from one Blackhawk helicopter crash, missed Osama with missiles."

The Ameer put a fatherly hand on Sami's shoulder. "Sometimes it's easiest for a soldier not to know all, so if his heart is challenged, his conscience is clear. Don't worry about Zlatko. He will do what must be done. His part will not pain his soul. All else is sacrifice to contain this disease called America. Americans fear death. Their overreaction to us will force our misguided Muslim brothers to rally to our true path."

"What of my part, Ameer? I have done so little."

"You are whispered about online." The doctor smiled, so Sami knew the legend birthed by the CIA still lived. "Praise Allah that I work in a building where if you make friends, keys are shared. With my colleagues at the medical imaging office. With two kuffars who repair computers that are probably stolen."

Dozens of computers! Untraceable! That's how he makes contacts!

"I dared not put you too close to the operation. If your fame attracted attention… But in two days, we will both be heroes on the run."

The building's glass doors showed Emma tottering toward them.

The Ameer told Sami what to do that night at the vaquera's. Told Sami where to go tomorrow morning.

Emma wiggled her gloved hands. "They were in my pockets!" Sami drove her home, refused a tip of her few silver coins.

He drove to a pay phone. Called Harry, told him about the computers, the Ameer's new orders. Argued for the cell to be rolled up. Got told, "We're gonna let it ride." Drove to 13th Street's hilltop panorama of Destiny City, parked on a block of row houses where a Latino grocery store flanked a green door.

He pushed the doorbell for the green door. Made a loud ring!

Invisible feet clunked down unseen stairs. The door's glass peephole darkened as someone looked out. The green door opened. Star-streaked midnight hair curled to her blue sweater. She wore faded jeans. Had a clean jaw, high cheekbones with a puckered scar on her heart side from the punch she'd taken in junior high soccer. The scar gave her lips a perpetual sardonic smile. Those fleshy lips along with her desert tribe Jewish Sephardic tan skin and the Sinaloensa Mexican she'd perfected while surfing away the summer before law school fooled people into thinking Rose was gringo for Rosalita.

"I wasn't expecting anyone," said Rose.

Climbing those stairs behind her rounded blue jean hips, Sami smelled Christmas pine, spices like cumin and chili from the downstairs store, perhaps incense, her musk.

Her apartment's main room held a computer, fax, photocopy machine. An eviction-salvaged sofa. Two chairs separated by a table where Sami had set his tea the morning he'd been officially waiting for a fax from the Taxi Commission but truly waiting for Zlatko to return for credit card applications the vaquera had promised him.

Sami's eyes swept through the kitchen to the closed door for a room lined with law books, government manuals. The door to her bedroom-closed. He refused to fear the closed doors. Refused to wonder whether Harry had bugged all of Rose's rooms.

She stood behind Sami. "Are you here for work?"

"Yes."

Shadows filled the apartment. Her walls and fading-gray-light glass windows kept out sounds of the street. Muffled screams.

He lunged with his hands like a Muay Thai strike, caught her face in his prayer grasp, pressed her against the wall as she met his kiss.

Night took the city.

They sat naked in her bed, propped on pillows, covers drawn up. A lamp glowed.

Rose lit a joint. "Do you think Harry figured this would happen?"

"He's practical."

"For your crew, I'm just an inferior woman you seduced to use, but Harry… Maybe he figures, What the hell, let them get some happy."

"Maybe," said Sami as he watched her take a hit.

Across town in her Virginia apartment, redheaded Lorna Dumas exhaled burned tobacco, stared at the blue uniform on her bed, thought, I gotta quit smoking.

Upstairs from her green door, Rose asked Sami, "Do you still think of yourself as Muslim?"

"Feels like some God is chasing me."

"Nice dodge." Rose passed him the joint.

Sami took a hit.

She said: "Getting stoned puts you in solid with both your jihad and the FBI."

"I always wanted to be popular. What about you?"

"My mother taught my girlfriends how to give a blowjob," said Rose. "Made me promise not to have sex until I knew what the hell I was doing.

"Who the hell ever knows what they're doing? I fell for the wrong guy over and over again, became a kick-ass federal prosecutor who one day found a certain political slant to her job, spent two years as a public defender, realized that helping unconnected people work the system was the only way they were ever going to get a fair shake.

"So now I'm the vaquera. Don't speak enough English to fill out an immigration form without fucking yourself? Go to the vaquera. Work permits, car registration, insurance, your political asylum application with the photo of you minus your arm that got hacked off in Sierra Leone-hey, America is the fill-in-the-blank society.

"Then came Zlatko. Everybody lies, but he lied like an antiabortion murderer I interviewed when I was a prosecutor. Hard-core eyes. Plus no way was he Albanian. I can't trust badges, but the tingles made me call my old pal Harry."

She hit the joint, held it to him. "Zlatko found me through the people who snuck here with him from Mexico, right?"

Sami waved away another hit-

– fluttering wing vision vanished like smoke.

"Right," said Rose. "I'm not supposed to know anything."

"Be glad you've got no idea what it's like out there."

"I stipulate to a certain degree of unreality. But I'm no virgin."

Sami said, "I knew this kid. His virgin mission, he gets handed killing three guys. Said he went 'wild in his mind.' That's what it's like out there. You live behind the world others see. All alone out there on a street full of invisible gunmen is you."

"You adopt survival mechanisms," she said.

"Fuck survival. You beat the other guy.

"Beirut. I'm thirteen. Men drove into the neighborhoods, gave us kids AK-47s. I never thought to ask who the ammo really really came from. Barricades cut up my home blocks. Sandbags, barbed wire, fuel barrels. Fuck what our parents said, we were cool and saving our world. I learned to run fast because I was small, and the fucking snipers' priority was wounding kids because that suckers out rescuers.

"One day, down the block at some other crew's barricade, those guys made an old man step out front, hands in the air. We see he's one of us, a Muslim. They tell him to walk to us. So he does, him and us thinking it's a swap. They let him get 'bout nine feet from our sandbags. Shot him dead.

"We couldn't leave cover to pull his body in, so it lay there. After three days we had to abandon our barricade. The stench. The flies.

"Two weeks, different barricade, same thing-only now it's a teenage Muslim guy just like me, hands up, had taken three steps toward our spot.

"I nailed him. Head shot." Sami paused. "He was dead as soon as he walked my way. I just got to choose his time and place, his meaning."

Night held the city.

"Is that why you left Beirut?" asked Rose.

"PLO guys I idolized took custody of a sniper we captured, set him free. Started me thinking: Whose side is anybody really on? Then my father got a job at the Marine barracks. One of our factions blew it and him up. The Marines took care of my family. Put me in a Detroit high school. Soon as I could, I joined the Corps. Semper fi."

"Me too," she said.

He leaned into a kiss she captured. She kicked off the covers, cupped his hand over her breast. Seven minutes later, he guided her on top of him, straddling him, arcing over him like a quarter moon as he whispered, "I see you. I see you."

Afterward, Rose lay across him. "Don't say anything. Neither of us. Not unless we can say it again and again and again."

"Until,"he said. "Until, not unless."

Their flesh goose-bumped. He reached for the sheet and blanket.

"Are you hungry?" she said.

"Not now. Now you have to fall asleep."

"Why?"

"I have to use your computer when you don't know it."

"Oh," she said.

"But I can spend the night."

And he did, his last waking moment echoing a fluttering wing.

A mile away in her go-to-sleep teddy bears bedroom, seven-year-old Amy Lewis whispered to her best friend through a cell phone bought for the adventure: "Gramma says I'll really be going to bed a whole three hours later because the world is round!"

Wake up! Sami bolts upright in Rose's bed. Glides through the dark to her main room, grabs her phone, taps in the panic number, gets routed to a woken bear who hears Sami whisper, "The Ameer! Keys! Medical imaging office! He's got access to-"

"Fuck!" Harry killed their call.

Sami calmed his jackhammering heart. Made himself go back to sleep. Have faith in himself and a bear.

Gray clouds covered the morning sky. Sami drove to where the Ameer had sent Maher. Maher waved. Too friendly for just a cab, but this feral kid's street skills had beaten Harry's tails. Maher climbed in front. Another mistake. Sami thought, Where do you live? How do you get money? Did you come up with using Facebook?

"What's that smell?" said Sami as they drove around the Beltway.

"Sorry, chemicals from the dry cleaners. The Koreans are nice. Took me a month to get the job through that Christian youth hostel."

Maher carried a backpack. "The newspaper calls it the Trackside Slaughter. Ballistics say the gun was also used to shoot a gangbanger from the Clifton Terrace crew. The cops can't figure Latino and black bodies."

The future filled Maher's eyes. "We'll be something to write about. Brother," he said, "I know Ameer is worried. But I'm chill. He's so smart! Combining what you've got to do with checking me out while I get the last of my shit, like, how tight is that?"

"Very tight." Sami grinned. "Is that how American kids say it?"

"Yeah." Suburbia flowed past the taxi. "Look out there. Re-dondo Beach. Akron where my cousins live. Here. It's all the same TV shows. Stupid news about dumb rich girls who do nothing but get their pictures taken. The holy Jesus in the Koran, blessed be his name, what if he were driving with us today, seeing all this meaningless crap? We gotta stop all the ruining. If not us, who?"

"We're in the same car, my brother."

The gun shop sat in a Beltway exit mall. A pine wreath decorated the barred door. The clerk behind the glass counter wore a holstered Glock and a red Santa Claus hat.

"Hey, guy!" The clerk smiled at Maher. "Good to see you again."

"Yeah." Maher handed the clerk his California driver's license for routine processing by the law with a five-year backlog.

The clerk filled his eyes with nonblond Sami.

"This is my uncle," explained Maher. "He's Jewish."

"Oh, well Sha-lum Ha-nooka."

"Shalom," said Sami.

Maher rented a 1911 Colt.45 automatic and ear protectors, bought four boxes of ammo and a black silhouette from a target display that featured a pistol-pointing, grizzled Arab in a burnoose and bumper stickers proclaiming that an aging, antiwar movie actress should still be bombed back to Hanoi.

The store's shooting range had ten lanes, three occupied. Gunfire boomed. As Sami shot holes in their target, Maher dumped three boxes of ammo into his backpack.

"The.45s are the biggest bullets," said Maher, taking his turn on the firing line. He showed no post-traumatic stress syndrome from the last time he'd fired a gun.

As they left the gun shop, the clerk said, "Happy New Year!"

At the next mall, the sporting goods store roared with crazed shoppers. Sami gave a clerk the order printed from Rose's computer. The clerk said, "You know these bikes are unassembled in boxes, right?"

"Cheaper that way."

"It's for orphans," said Maher.

"God bless you." The clerk took their cash so they could skip the line.

"Um," said Maher. "Do you guys sell steel cup protectors? You know. For… for down there. For hockey."

"I think they're all plastic."

As they carried three bike boxes to the taxi, Sami said, "Hockey?"

Maher shrugged. "Won't happen tomorrow, but when I become a holy martyr, the virgins waiting for me in paradise will get one too. I wanna be able to have kids."

"You want to have children in paradise?"

"Got to be a better place to raise them than here."

They crammed the bike boxes in the taxi. Drove to a subway stop. Only then did Maher relay the Ameer's orders for that night, where to be tomorrow, what to do precisely when. Before he vanished into the crowd, Maher said, "I love you, brother."

Thirty-four minutes later, Harry rode in the taxi beside Sami and said, "Before dawn, NEST black-bagged Ivan's building-not the Nuclear Emergency Search Teams, their shadows whose S stands for Strike. They pulled all hazmat out of the medical imaging office, substituted fake material, and broke the machines so nobody will wonder when they don't work. We're still balancing records hacked from the office computers, but it looks like all radioactive material is accounted for. Put that together with your horny teenager looking for a metal cup to shield his balls, and they're probably building a put-together-at-the-last-minute dirty bomb."

"So now it won't be dirty, but it'll still be a bomb."

"Yeah, but even if they augment hydrogen peroxide or chemicals from a dry cleaner with gunpowder from bullets, how big could it be?"

"How many deaths add up to 'big'?"

"We don't think that's the point," said Harry. "We know what Zlatko is building. I posted what we had on A-Space and Intellipedia, the classified sites, set it up like a game. A dozen nerds came up with an Explosive Magnetic Generator of Frequency. The Soviets perfected them. Both Ivan and Zlatko grew up behind the Iron Curtain. A U.S. general challenged some grad students a few years ago, and they designed an EMGF to fit in a pickup truck with a cost of eight hundred dollars-most of it bought from Radio Shack.

"EMGFs are why you turn off your cell phone when you fly. They don't really explode, they beam a sphere of electronic waves that fries unshielded computers, phones, circuit boards for car engines-"

"That's why I'm supposed to turn off my taxi tomorrow at precisely two P.M.!"

"And why you're parking where they told you. That pull-off by the Potomac is across the freeways from the Pentagon. EMGFs are designed to slam the enemy's command and control centers. They're invisible inside any pickup-sized vehicle…"

"Like the Ameer's SUV," said Sami.

"Assemble an EMGF with an electric motor into your shielded vehicle, drive it-hell, park it -outside the Pentagon's secure perimeter, turn it on, fry systems all over a mile-thick spherical zone. We'd be burned all the way to Baghdad and A-stan."

"What about the bomb they think is dirty?"

Harry said, "We figure it's a Baghdad double tap. They park the EMGF vehicle. The longer the EMGF runs, the more it destroys. When SWAT teams figure out what's going on, blitz the source… boom! Booby-trapped. Radiation is bonus blood."

"And the cell phones?"

"Maybe one of your crew is gonna be a martyr, stay behind, detonate the booby trap when he sees SWAT closing in. That'd be optimum."

"Frying the Pentagon meets Zlatko's conscience. After they ditch the EMGF vehicle, I'll be the walk-to getaway. If my cab engine gets fried, bikes will still work. Three bikes, four brothers, one staybehind.

"When do we hit them?" said Sami.

The blue taxi crawled through holiday traffic.

"No!" said Sami.

"After dark, the Pentagon gets ringed by camouflaged snake eaters. Tomorrow when your brothers attack, we got 'em. Odds are, we get two alive for interrogation."

"Take them now!"

"Then we get Ivan, but even you don't know where the other two are. We can't let them run free. And if we take them too soon, we won't find out who they report to."

"They answer to no one but themselves! You said you get that!"

"I do-our bosses don't."

"Get the fuck out of my cab."

On that night before Christmas Eve, Sami assembled three bikes in his apartment. He looked around the mattress-on-the-floor hideaway that his Ameer believed had been made safe from discovery by the vaquera's tricks, told himself, No more lying rooms.

At 9:30 he broke all the rules, used the breaker box phone outside in the night.

Cold kisses wet his skin. He told Rose, "It's starting to snow."

"Too early for holiday clichés. Can't count on the weather."

"Tomorrow starts a whole new season."

"I'm ready," said Rose.

The city went to sleep.

Cari Jones brushed her streaked blond hair, saw her black leather coat hung ready to go, decided to try computer dating when she got back.

John Herne packed three different pill bottles for post-traumatic stress syndrome in his soldier's duffel at Walter Reed Hospital.

Lorna Dumas decided to let her red hair swing free on her blue uniform tomorrow, threw her cigarettes down her building's trash chute.

Amy Lewis chose her bestest brown teddy bear for Gramma's.

Morning woke Sami to a snow-dusted town.

At ten A.M. he grabbed the cell phone and Glock. Loaded three bikes into his taxi. They gotta see what they 're expecting. Called Harry: "Launching." Drove his taxi into Christmas Eve snowstorm traffic.

"It's a mess out there," said the man on news/traffic radio. "Washingtonians have never figured out how to drive in the snow, and we weren't expecting this storm."

Sami flashed on the Beirut radio announcer who daily reported which commuter streets were ruled by snipers.

He eased the blue taxi over slick streets: Fender-benders fuck up ops.

Windshield wipers washed Sami's view as he drove through a whooshing tunnel, popped up on an interstate threaded along the city. Green metal highway signs arrowed routes for I-395 south to Virginia, for exits to the Jefferson Memorial, federal office complexes, the airport, George Washington Parkway, the Pentagon.

Traffic on the bridge over the Potomac parted for the blue taxi obviously headed to the airport, taking that exit-but then unexpectedly pulling off the main road into a tree-lined turnout where the sign read roach's roost waterfowl sanctuary.

Bad day to be a bird. Sami parked the taxi away from the only other vehicle in the bird watchers' roost, a battered car with bumper stickers reading "One Planet, One People" and "Audubon Society." A passenger jet roared overhead. Snowflakes died on the warm blue taxi. A husky man wearing a parka stood at tripodmounted binoculars aimed at the icy gray river, at the highways that blocked a view of the Pentagon.

Parka Man turned to face the taxi and Sami saw he was a bear.

Harry lumbered to the taxi, got in beside the driver. "Anything- anything -from your Ameer, the others?"

"What's wrong?"

"It's nearing noon. Attack time is two P.M. Doc Ivan came to work like always. But his SUV is still in its parking spot. Given the traffic, the weather, the time they'll need to fit in the EMGF and some electric motor-"

"Hit him! Hit him now!"

Harry started to protest-barked orders up his sleeve: "COOK to all units: HRT Alpha: Take down Target One. I say again: Hit Target One now! Go! Go!"

The idling taxi grew close. Sami shut off the engine. A passenger jet roared overhead. The bear unzipped his parka. The taxi smelled of bike oil and rubber, fading car heater fumes, salty hope.

Harry's eyes lost focus. He listened to his radio earpiece. Blinked.

"Shit!" Harry radioed, "Core plan! Reset to core plan!"

Told Sami, "All they found in Doc Ivan's office was a scared old lady in an examination robe. She's Muslim, did what the doctor ordered. Ivan walked out of the building right under our eyes inside her full burka, rode that charity van to poof.

"S'okay," Harry said. "He's just being cagey. Doesn't know we're on him. He'll keep with the plan. We're set if he comes back for his SUV. They'll attack the Pentagon and we'll nail them. Everything's cool, got FBI execs visiting Muslim leaders here to assure them that the busts are legit. It's okay."

Sami said, "I don't know about them having other vehicles!"

"That's the way a cell works. Nobody knows everything."

"Except the guy you let slip away."

"Life is risk. You don't play it that way, you get played." Harry shrugged. "You gotta go with what you know. That's why we have spies."

They sat waiting in the cold until 12:51- trigger (time) minus 69 minutes.

A tan sedan pulled into the parking lot. Ted raced to the taxi through sleet. Through the lowered driver's window and the hail of ice pellets he said, "An hour till they're due here. We do this now or I have to pull Sami!"

"What?" said both Sami and Harry.

"You're six months overdue for your mandatory drug test. Has to be cleared immediately, or we pull you off. I got a portable kit in the car, on-site processing will clear you so you can stay on-"

"This is bullshit!" yelled Sami. "We've got a terrorist attack!"

"I've got orders," said Ted. "The Hoover Building says I'm fired if I don't get this done right darn now."

Harry said, "Okay, Ted. He'll be right over."

The FBI liaison ran for the shelter of his tan sedan.

Sami stared at the bear.

"Go do it. Time like this, we all gotta pee."

"If I go… I'm gone."

"Ahh." A jetliner roared overhead. Harry smiled. "Fuck them."

The bear used his cell phone.

"Hey, Jenny." He asked Sami for his real name, Social Security number, CIA identifiers. Relayed them to Jenny. Said, "Crash RIP. "

Hung up. Grinned at Sami. "Congratulations. Ted's off your case, but give him what he wants or he could still fuck this up. You've been Rebooted In Place, RIP. Now work for Argus. Twice the salary, half the BS."

Harry sent the dazed spy to the tan sedan.

"Sorry," said Ted as Sami filled a plastic bottle with his urine.

Don't give this holier-than-thou bureaucrat the time of-

"This is so stupid," said Ted. "So what if Argus wants to certify-"

"This came from Argus? Harry's company?"

"Well… sure. This is their show."

Sami left Ted watching liquid change colors in a bottle. Slammed the door when he climbed in the blue taxi. His expression killed the bear's grin.

"Why?" said Sami.

"You're too good to lose."

"I'm quitting! I'm not working for Argus!"

"Sure you are. It'll take a year commitment to get your ass out of the drug-use sling. And yeah, don't worry: I'll protect Rose. Why wouldn't I? One more op. You spy as the holy warrior hero who escaped from the Christmas Eve D.C. bust."

"Fuck you!"

"Fucking costs. I know what you're thinking," continued Harry. "Going Beirut on me gets you nothing but Uncle Sam's sniper scopes zeroing your back."

The bear said, "I didn't pick any of this war. But I'm not going to lose."

Snowflakes hit the taxi windshield. A jetliner roared overhead. The bear sighed. T minus 47 minutes. The choppy gray river lapped against the riprap of the bird sanctuary. Harry relocated Ted's tan sedan next to the bumper-stickered car. T minus 17. Pentagon units reported all clear. A jetliner roared. Ted got out of the tan sedan to look through the tripod binoculars.

Sami yelled, "They're not after the Pentagon!"

"What?"

"The Ameer doesn't give a shit about our 'command and control.' He hates our whole thing. He wants fear. To humiliate us. Make us overreact. Maher's expecting to live today. Ivan wants to be a hero on the run. He implied that Zlatko's mission is solo and won't bother his beliefs. Zlatko'd love to hit a target like the Pentagon, but he's not coming here. So that's not it. Three bikes: Ivan, Maher, me. Here!"

Harry touched his radio earpiece. Said, "That Al-Qaeda media group al-Sahab, 'The Clouds.' NSA just intercepted an e-mail to them via a D.C. server saying that today will be a great day, to watch the skies."

A jetliner roared overhead.

"They know the taxi!" Sami ran toward the tan sedan.

A bear charged his heels.

A Marine sniper popped out of his hide, his rifle hungry for a target.

Harry crammed himself behind the wheel of the tan sedan, Sami dove in the front seat, and Ted jumped in the back, even though he didn't know why. The tan sedan fishtailed out of the bird sanctuary as Harry yelled, "Told you they were linked!"

"Ivan posted bragging rights, not-just drive! Go, go!"

Christmas Eve afternoon on the way to the airport. Falling snow. Cars surging bumper to bumper on a two-lane, one-way road.

"Get around them!" yelled Sami.

Harry whipped the tan sedan onto the shoulder. Horns honked. They ran over a highway reflector pole. Slid past a parked airport police cruiser. Spinning red lights filled their mirrors.

"Call them off!" yelled Sami.

"No unencrypted radios!" Harry yelled into his sleeve at T minus 13."They could have a police band monitor! Cell phone the airport cops!"

Ted yelled, "What are we looking for?"

"We gotta know it when we see it!" said Sami.

The electronic marquee sign mounted over one-way airport traffic read THREAT LEVEL CODE ORANGE. The digital clock revealed T minus 11.

Ronald Reagan National Airport sits across the river from the white dome of the Capitol. The "old" terminal is a gray concrete box few airlines use. The air-travel gem is the "new" white stone terminal: one million square feet, three levels, a rectangle shopping mall with three-story windows between thirty-five gates to jetliners. The airport control tower rises from the terminal's far end like a towering rook from chess.

The tan sedan forced its way back into airport traffic.

Harry barked orders up his sleeve.

Wide-eyed Ted braced himself in the backseat.

Ahead, at the old terminal, sweeping into the car-clogged road, airport cop, phone pressed to his ear, hand on his holstered pistol, he-

Halts the chasing cop cruiser.

Autos hunt drop-off parking spots. Travelers drag wheeled suitcases. Snow falls.

"Nothing!" yelled Sami. "I see nothing! Go! Go!"

Driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic to the upper level of the new terminal ate two minutes off the clock. Three lanes of vehicles lined the sidewalk.

"Couldn't evacuate this place now!" Harry's eyes scanned the chaos.

"Gotta be here, gotta." Sami stared through the falling snow. Saw-

"Way down at the end! Close to the control tower!"

Parked near the sidewalk. Flashers blinking. A brown van. MEDICAL TRANSPORT SERVICES.

"The stairs' electric motor! They'll use that!"

Out! Sami ran crouched alongside moving cars. Fog blurred the van's windows. Exhaust smogged out the tailpipe: engine running. Driver will be watching side mirrors.

Sami dove under the van. The shock of ice slush soaked his pants and shirt as he crawled on his elbows. Hot muffler! Gas stench, he crawled to the front tire, rolled out-

He rose like a cobra beside the driver's closed window.

Startled stolen-white-uniform-wearing Ivan on the other side of that glass.

A woman rolled a hard-shell pink suitcase past Sami. He grabbed it- "Hey!"-swung the suitcase through the air. Bam! The driver's window cobwebbed into a thousand shards. Bam! The pink suitcase knocked the cobwebbed window into the van.

Driver's seat Ivan whirled toward a control box. Sami grabbed the Ameer's lips, pulled him through the shattered window, slammed him to the slushy pavement. "Stop! Police!" Sami kicked the Ameer in the head, drew his Glock, imagined the pull of the trigger, the recoil, the splat of brains on wet pavement. "Alive, Sami!"yelled Harry. Strangers screamed. "Police! Drop your weapon!"

Ted bellowed above the chaos, "FBI! Everyone freeze!"

"No one's in the van!" Sami glared at the traffic cop who'd helped the medical crew park the brown van at the curb. "Was there another guy?"

"They had a patient pickup! With a wheelchair." The cop pointed to the terminal.

"What did he look like?"

"Like a guy! White guy. Blond hair. White uniform. EMT vest."

Ghosts whispered to Sami, "Diverting the enemy… let us attack. Timing."

"Harry!" Sami yelled to the man cuffing the unconscious Ameer. "It's Maher!"

"Go!" Harry guarded a brown van with a neutralized EMGF near an airport control tower and people-packed jetliners flying through a snowstorm.

"Ted-you know Maher's face-work down from the other end!"

The FBI agent leaped into the tan sedan. Siren wailing, red light spinning, Ted raced back the way they'd come-straight into oncoming one-way traffic.

Sami ran toward the terminal, told the uniformed cop, "Stay away from me!"

Don't blow my cover. I'm a spy. I'm a spy.

Plunging into a sea of shuffling humanity. Shoulder to shoulder. Move! Suitcases rolled like roadblocks. Crowd hubbub. Scents of Christmas pine, lemony floor cleaner, sweat, petroleum luggage fabric. Through the bedlam cut ringing phones.

Sami shoved his way toward the other end of the terminal.

Where is he? White uniform. Blond guy. Vest. Pushing an empty wheelchair.

Sami didn't exactly know how his brothers packed the wheelchair's tubular frame with gunpowder and particles they thought were radioactive. Wired an IV bag of liquid to the same detonation device Zlatko engineered for the gunpowder. But Sami knew.

A digital clock on the wall told him T minus 1.

The diversion bomb timed to cover the EMGF transmission. First responders might mistake the brown medical van for one of their own. Let it run as jetliners tumbled through the snowflakes.

Where are you? Move, out of my way! Sami jumped for a glimpse over the teeming crowd. "Watch it!" Somebody bumped him. There's the terminal wall, the end, the last/first street exit, there's-

An IV-bagged wheelchair sat by the wall of windows.

Sami leaped onto a planter- There! Fifty feet from the wheelchair. Nearing the exit: blond, EMT vest over a stolen white uniform. Get to him! Con him! Neutralize!

"Maher!" bellowed Sami.

Quiet filled the moment as if in slow motion. Maher turned. Saw his brother waving at him above the airport crowd. A quizzical look filled the California blond's face. He reached his right hand inside the vest.

Forty-four feet away, known murderer and terrorist Maher's textbook gesture equaled gun! FBI Special Agent Ted Harris drew his service weapon, pushed an old man out of the way, acquired his target-fired three booming shots.

Panic exploded. Screaming. People tried to run. Dive. Hide.

"FBI!" yelled Ted. "FBI!"

Shots one and two blasted Maher off his feet.

His third bullet crashed into a metal heating grate above an exit.

Sami fought through the scared, silent mob toward where Maher sprawled on his back as combat-shuffling toward him came Ted, his eyes on what the suspect had pulled from his vest, still held in his right hand: only a cell phone.

Maher rose on his elbows, vaguely heard "Don't move!" Saw his white shirt reddening. Felt phone in his right hand. Saw brother Sami scrambling through the huddled crowd to save him. Maher smiled blood. Saw Sami stumble, crawl closer. Maher's right thumb hit speed-dial as he raised a weakening left thumbs-up.

Sami screamed, "No!"

In the city, Zlatko stood outside a green door, left hand pushing a buzzer while his right hand held a pistol tied to four other murders as he terminated a loose end who ran downstairs to the peephole he'd blurred with street slush.

In Ronald Reagan National Airport, soldier John Herne huddled with blondish, black-leather-coated Cari Jones. Beside them was redheaded, blue-uniformed, airline service rep Lorna Dumas pulling Amy Lewis and teddy bear closer to the shelter of an empty wheelchair rigged with a cell phone programmed to block every call. Except one.

They all heard ring!

THE PLAZA SHIMMERED in the midday heat, flush with handsome brown-skinned people bedecked in the garish red so favored by their nation's ruling party. They awaited the appearance of their newly reelected leader, a paunchy smile-and-haircut of fifty who fancied himself a revolutionary, and whose trademark fatigues always looked as clean and pressed as any banker's suit.

I awaited his appearance too, from my perch four stories above the square-my nerves jangling as they always do before a job, my rifle stock held flush to my shoulder in anticipation of the coming shot.

He was late.

Despite the wait and the oppressive heat, the crowd seemed jovial enough. Not exactly a surprise-everyone for blocks around had been screened six ways from Sunday to ensure a pretense of unity and good cheer. To ensure the cameras caught none of the starving, the torture-scarred, or the dissidents spurred to violence by the widespread reports of election fraud that, though suppressed here, were plastered across every newspaper in the Western world.

Lucky for me, their screening wasn't perfect.

If you want to kill somebody badly enough, no screening ever is.

Some below waved flags of yellow and green. Some held small children atop their shoulders as they jockeyed for position. Most laughed and whooped along to what I could only assume were charming ditties about the triumph of the proletariat, written in a language I didn't speak and blasted through the PA so loud it shook droplets of sweat loose from the tip of my nose. As they fell, they tapped a lazy rhythm on my hotel room's window frame. Reminded me of a radiator cooling, or the ticking of a watch in need of winding.

As if I needed reminding it was past time.

As if my itchy trigger finger wasn't reminder enough.

I trained my gun sight on the PA for a moment, entertained the thought of quieting the fucking thing for good. But then, why prematurely pierce the plaza's good cheer?

No. Best to wait.

And I was very good at waiting.

I'd been staying here a week. In this tiny island nation, in this tiny sweat-lodge room. I watched the election on the rheumy black-and-white bolted to the wall in the corner. Watched UN officials cluck their tongues as, one by one, all challengers conceded. Watched last night's drunken dancing in the square as party loyalists celebrated the only result that ever would have been allowed, all the while wondering if any of them suspected they were standing in the very spot their leader was to die.

I watched it all atop a mattress made lumpy by dint of the M40A3 sniper rifle I'd stashed inside it on my first day here. Sliced it open at one end with a blade taken from one of my own safety razors, stitched it back up with a sewing kit sent up by the front desk. One never knows who might wind up poking around one's room, after all-and in a nation where the courtrooms sit suspiciously empty given the number of executions carried out, one can never be too careful.

For a moment, the PA fell silent. Then the bombastic strains of a victory march blared from its speakers. The crowd hushed in anticipation, and then erupted in cheers as their fearless leader bounded up the stairs to the bunted riser and headed toward the podium, all waves and gleaming teeth.

The music built to a thundering crescendo. The crowd seethed with ecstatic frenzy.

I exhaled a measured breath, willed my drumroll heart to slow.

He reached the podium and stood hands raised, palms out-a mock plea for quiet. The crowd raged on, as he no doubt hoped they would. The victory march continued.

My body still, I sighted my target and squeezed the trigger: three pounds' pressure-no more, no less.

A crack like thunder echoed through the plaza. When Haircut heard the shot, he hit the deck. The man had a survivor's instinct, I'll give him that-he reacted a full second before anyone else in the square. But ultimately, his gesture of self-preservation was futile; by the time you hear the gunshot, the bullet's come and gone.

Lucky for him, he's not who I was aiming for.

When my target's head exploded in a mist of blood and brain, spattering the face of a young girl who sat on her father's shoulders beside him, the crowd contracted. For just a heartbeat, they were one-hunched together, a cornered animal, trying in vain to assess this sudden threat. Then the little girl began to scream, and the crowd's reaction tipped the slope to panic.

They pushed against each other-clawing, scrabbling, anything to get away from the mess of ruined flesh that, seconds ago, had been a man. As if he were contagious. As if they might be next.

Armed security materialized as though from nowhere at the perimeter of the square, their weapons brandished as they locked down the plaza's exits. A couple warning shots to dissuade the charging masses, and the crowd diverted as one like a flock of birds in flight.

More gunfire, a strangled cry-these from the sole guard manning a secondary entrance to the plaza-and the perimeter was breached. The guard disappeared beneath the surging crowd, and his brothers-in-arms responded by turning their rifles on the crowd. A chopper thudded overhead, no doubt to spirit Haircut and his detail away from the melee. Never mind he knew damn well the threat to him had passed; being caught on camera watching helplessly as your citizens rioted before you was bad business for a despot.

And riot they would, until the lot of them were locked up or dead or far away from here. Which is why the soldiers should have said to hell with orders and let them flee the square. But most of them were kids-green, untrained. They didn't know any better. They didn't know some orders were best ignored.

I turned from the window, stretching and rubbing grit from my eyes. I didn't need to see the rest-I'd seen enough of these scenes over the years to know that's how they always play. Pop a leader up onstage and the crowd will scatter, sure, but deep down, they know they're not a target.

You want to see real panic, pop a member of the crowd.

Not that panic was my goal. My goal was to get paid. Panic was merely an inevitable side effect. And that which one can reliably predict can be used to one's advantage-say, for example, in making one's getaway.

I left the gun. I left the room. I left the hotel. I left the country. The details of my egress, I won't bore you with; they're more prosaic than you might expect. After all, no head of state had died that day-just some lowly schlub nobody'd ever miss. Hell, by the time my plane was wheels-up, Haircut had gone before the cameras to calm his panicked nation and commend his security detail for detecting and eradicating so imminent a threat as said schlub posed.

You'd think it'd sting, watching someone else get credit for your kill, but the eight hundred grand in my bank account was salve enough to soothe my wounded ego.

In the days that followed, Haircut and his ministers painted the deceased as a supporter of the far-right fringe, out of touch with the mainstream and spurred to violence by Haircut's landslide victory. When all was said and done, two dozen so-called coconspirators saw the business end of the firing squad for the part they'd played in the botched assassination.

It was a tidy justification for a bit of housecleaning, but it was bullshit nonetheless. You don't call me if you want to pop an amateur. In fact, you don't call me at all-I call you. And when I do, you'd be well advised to take the call.

See, I hit hitmen.

Which means if you hear from me, someone wants you dead.

That smear of brain matter I left back in the square? Former triggerman for the Varela cartel by the name of Juan Miguel Garcia. Went freelance a few years back. Hired to hit Haircut by a consortium of sugar manufacturers, if you can believe it. Seems under Haircut's tutelage, the state reclaimed a hefty chunk of land that had belonged to them, and they thought perhaps new leadership might be more inclined to negotiate its release.

Not that their reasons matter much to me. Everybody's got a reason to kill. It's the ones who've got the means to that I keep tabs on.

It's the ones who've got the means to that I end up putting in the ground.

Garcia's benefactors set the price on Haircut's head at eighty K. I asked Haircut for ten times that. My biggest payday yet-but then, ten times the hit's my going rate, and it's nonnegotiable. The smart ones pay. The ones who don't aren't around long to regret it. Haircut did some homework, ponied up. Now he lives to subjugate another day, and Garcia gets a dirt retirement. And me and my eight hundred grand live happily ever after.

Or at least, that was the plan. Seems that in my line of work, happily ever after is hard to come by.

Just ask Garcia.

DANNY THE DUMB-ASS fires once into the ceiling of the bar.

Plaster and slivers from a ruined fan shower the room, a slurry of dust and wood fragments.

I cringe, grip my pistol tighter, face hidden by a Ronald Reagan Halloween mask.

Rule One: The guns are for show only; don't shoot unless absolutely necessary.

"N-n-n-nobody move." Danny's voice, muffled by his own rubber mask, sounds shrill, scared. "Ha-ha-hands where I can see them."

Rule Two: Let me do the talking. Especially if you're a stutterer.

In the middle of the room, a half-dozen men in overalls and work clothes sit around a felt-covered gaming surface. The table is between a bar on one wall and a shuffleboard game on the other. Nobody else in the place except for a scared-looking bartender by the beer taps.

In the middle of the table: a pile of chips and cash, and a spray of playing cards, trapped by a circular fence of longneck bottles and ashtrays.

Danny the Dumb-ass moves to one side of the front door and unplugs the jukebox.

Toby Keith and Willie Nelson stop singing in midverse. "Whiskey for my men-"

Silence. The bartender is shaking. A mug in one hand, beer slops over onto his fingers. Danny looks at me and nods, apparently now remembering to be quiet.

I resist the urge to slap him. Instead, I flip the deadbolt on the door, stride to the table.

Outside, it's early afternoon and the sign on the bank around the corner reads ninety-three degrees. Inside it's balmy, the narrow room thick with air conditioning and smoke, lit only by a handful of neon beer signs.

"Put the cash in here." I drop a canvas bag in the middle of the card pile. "All of it."

The guy at the head of the table is about seventy. He has work-gnarled hands and a leathery face, evidence of a lifetime in the sun, most likely working the rocky soil of Central Texas.

"Boy, you are making a big mistake." He exhales a plume of smoke from his nostrils.

"Less talk, more money." I fire a round into a framed picture of John Wayne. The photo hangs next to a deer's head with a dusty bra dangling from the antlers.

What the heck; the don't-shoot rule has already been broken and my other wingman is a no-show. Time to crank this cash-and-dash up to eleven and get out.

Five of the six people at the table flinch and duck. The old man with the gnarled hands doesn't move, not even a blink. He smiles instead.

Danny hobbles to the table, dragging his foot in the special shoe, the one he told me would allow him to walk normally but clearly doesn't. He grabs a wad of currency and a manila envelope that sits in front of the old man. He stuffs both into the sack.

The old guy tenses, the tiniest movement in an otherwise still room. Losing that much cash hurts. Danny doesn't notice. I do, and the old man knows it.

"The rest of it," I say. "Get a move on."

The other players shove money toward Danny.

"You know whose game this is?" the old man says.

"W-w-w-wouldja just shut the hell up." Danny's voice is louder than necessary. He jams the muzzle against the man's temple. "It's our ga-ga-game now."

"You nervous or something?" The old guy raises one eyebrow. "People stutter when they get nervous."

Danny's gloved hands shake. He doesn't handle stress well, not the best attribute for the sidecar on an armed robbery, even one as easy as this. Sometimes, however, you've got to run with whoever's on the playground, even if he comes to school on the short bus and has one leg longer than the other.

The old man shrugs. He stares at me. His eyes seem to pierce my mask.

Danny scoops up the rest of the money with his free hand, shoves it in the bag.

Lots of high-denomination bills, a big game. The stopwatch in my head says we've been inside for about fifteen seconds. Another fifteen to wrap things up, and we'll be in the stolen pickup just outside the front entrance.

Danny limps toward the door, sack in hand.

"Don't anybody be stupid." I back away, weapon pointing at the men. "It's just money."

Danny is at the entrance when the back door we'd locked earlier opens.

A woman in her mid-thirties wearing a denim miniskirt and a halter top bounces in, cigarette dangling between her lips.

Everybody turns her way.

She stares at me and screams, a keening sound like the gates of hell just opened up for an instant or maybe American Idol has been canceled. The cigarette falls to the floor.

Danny startles. Fires his pistol again for no apparent reason. The bullet hits the floor.

Several of the men at the table jump up. The bartender reaches under the bar.

The old guy moves faster than everybody. A gun appears in his hand. An orange spit of flame. BOOM. The bullet hits the wall about a foot from my head.

In the same movement, I fire twice and turn to the door. I'm not really aiming, only pointing in the general direction of the table, hoping not to hit anybody, especially the girl, just trying to make the old man quit shooting.

Another round hits the wall near my face. Shouts from behind me. A grunt of pain too, maybe.

I grab Danny, push him outside. Slam the door behind us.

The joint is on a side street in a little town in the Texas hill country, between an antique shop that's always closed for lunch and an abandoned feed store. No traffic or people visible. Yet.

I rip off the mask and blink at the sun. From the cardboard box we've left sitting by the front of the bar, I grab a battery-powered nail gun.

Thwack-thwack-thwack. Three nails in the door and frame, almost as good as a deadbolt.

Danny takes off his mask too. Sweat drips down his nose. "S-s-sorry about that."

"Get in the truck." I walk as fast as possible to the driver's side of the Chevy parked by the curb.

Inside, we buckle up, all legal. I head to Main Street, driving well under the speed limit.

"Don't forget Chris." Danny's tone has returned to default, a whine somewhere between petulant and pathetic. "We g-g-gotta go to the rendezvous to get Chris."

The urge to rip out a clump of Danny the Dumb-ass's red hair rises in my gorge like week-old anchovy pizza eaten too quickly. I reach over. Danny backs away. I mutter, lean back, keep driving.

We're in the clear so far. There looks to be enough money in the canvas bag to pay off a few debts with some left over to send to the kid and hopefully make the she-beast that is my ex-wife go away.

A sheriff's car idles by in the other direction. The driver's window is down and a uniformed guy who looks like Jabba the Hutt but bigger sits behind the wheel. He pays us no mind.

I don't look at him either. I keep my hands at ten and two on the wheel. At the next stop sign, I turn toward the rendezvous point, the parking lot of the Baptist church. A few moments later, we stop by a Dumpster behind the sanctuary, windows down. The air stinks of grease from the trash and a charcoal fire nearby.

Thirty nervous seconds stretch to a panic-filled minute before Chris appears, running around the corner of the church.

She's wearing a denim skirt and a halter top, the girl from the bar, our lookout who was supposed to be inside before we got there, sending a text or three on the situation.

"Sorry I was late." She hops in, scoots Danny between us. "But I dropped the key to the back door and then my parole officer called. Figured I'd scream to distract everybody."

"That's okay, Chrissie." Danny smiles, a goofy look on his face. "It's all good."

Danny would give another inch from his bad leg if she'd acknowledge him as something more than a lopsided stump with eyes. He'd give his entire leg if she'd sleep with him. Chrissie, who's made a career out of going to bed with authority figures and dope-addled musicians, would rather French-kiss an armadillo than let Danny touch her.

I pull away from the Dumpster, marveling at the stupidity of my cohorts.

"The old guy's hurt." Chrissie lights a cigarette. "One of your shots hit him in the gut."

"All good" just morphed into something less, more like "all screwed."

"W-w-w-what are we gonna do?" Danny looks at me. "That guy said the operation was connected."

"Somebody owned that game?" Chrissie leans forward, stares at me. "I thought this was an indie?"

I don't reply, trying to process it all. Only so many people who could control a poker table like that, none of them folks you want to mess with. One in particular is especially vigilant when it comes to keeping a watch on his investments: Sinclair, a psychopathic Pole whose problem-solving techniques start with a blowtorch and then get nasty.

"Jesus H." Chrissie flicks her cigarette out the window. "I thought that guy was familiar. I've seen him before. In Waco."

I keep driving, vision tunneling at the news. We pass the city-limit sign on a narrow two-lane farm-to-market road that heads west.

"Waco?" Danny starts to shake.

Waco is Sinclair's base. Which means the game we just robbed was his.

And so was the guy I had shot.

PUPPET SHOOTING THAT BABY comes into my head again, like a match flaring in the dark, this time while I'm wiping down the steam tables after the breakfast rush at the hospital.

Julio steps up behind me with a vat of scrambled eggs, and I flinch like he's some kind of monster.

"Que pasa?" he asks as he squeezes by me to drop the vat into its slot.

"Nothing, guapo. You startled me is all."

I was coming back from the park and saw it all. Someone yelled something stupid from a passing car, Puppet pulled a gun and fired. The bullet missed the car and hit little Antonio instead, two years old, playing on the steps of the apartment building where he lived with his parents. Puppet tossed the gun to one of his homies, Cheeks, and took off running. He shot that baby, and now he's going to get away with it, you watch.

Dr. Wu slides her tray over and asks for pancakes. She looks at me funny through her thick glasses. These days everybody can tell what I'm thinking. My heart is pounding, and my hand is cold when I raise it to my forehead.

"How's your family, Blanca?" Dr. Wu asks.

"Fine, doctor, fine," I say. I straighten up and wipe my face with a towel, give her a big smile. "Angela graduated from Northridge in June and is working at an insurance company, Manuel is still selling cars, and Lorena is staying with me for a while, her and her daughter, Brianna. We're all doing great."

"You're lucky to have your children close by," Dr. Wu says.

"I sure am," I reply.

I walk back into the kitchen. It's so hot in there, you start sweating as soon as the doors swing shut behind you. Josefina is flirting with the cooks again. That girl spends half her shift back here when she should be up front, working the line. She's fresh from Guatemala, barely speaks English, but still she reminds me of myself when I was young, more than my daughters ever did. It's the old-fashioned jokes she tells, the way she blushes when the doctors or security guards talk to her.

"Josefina," I say. "Maple was looking for you. Andale if you don't want to get in trouble."

"Gracias, señora"she replies. She grabs a tray of hash browns and pushes through the doors into the cafeteria.

"Que buena percha," says one of the cooks, watching her go.

"Hey, payaso," I say, "is that how you talk about ladies?"

"Lo siento, Mamá."

Lots of the boys who work here call me Mamá. Many of them are far from home, and I do my best to teach them a little about how it goes in this country, to show them some kindness.

BEFORE DEEL ARROWSMITH came back from the dead, he was crossing a field by late moonlight in search of his home. His surroundings were familiar, but at the same time different. It was as if he had left as a child and returned as an adult to examine old property only to find the tree swing gone, the apple tree cut down, the grass grown high, and an outhouse erected over the mound where his best dog was buried.

As he crossed, the dropping moon turned thin, like cheap candy licked too long, and the sun bled through the trees. There were spots of frost on the drooping green grass and on the taller weeds, yellow as ripe corn. In his mind's eye he saw not the East Texas field before him or the dark rows of oaks and pines beyond it, or even the clay path that twisted across the field toward the trees like a ribbon of blood.

He saw a field in France where there was a long, deep trench, and in the trench were bloodied bodies, some of them missing limbs and with bits of brains scattered about like spilled oatmeal. The air filled with the stinging stench of rotting meat and wafting gun smoke, the residue of poison gas, and the buzz of flies. The back of his throat tasted of burning copper. His stomach was a knot. The trees were like the shadowy shades of soldiers charging toward him, and for a moment, he thought to meet their charge, even though he no longer carried a gun.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, shook his head. When he opened them the stench had passed and his nostrils filled with the nip of early morning. The last of the moon faded like a melting snowflake. Puffy white clouds sailed along the heavens and light tripped across the tops of the trees, fell between them, made shadows run low along the trunks and across the ground. The sky turned light blue and the frost dried off the drooping grass and it sprang to attention. Birds began to sing. Grasshoppers began to jump.

He continued down the path that crossed the field and split the trees. As he went, he tried to remember exactly where his house was and how it looked and how it smelled, and most important, how he felt when he was inside it. He tried to remember his wife and how she looked and how he felt when he was inside her, and all he could find in the back of his mind was a cipher of a woman younger than he was in a long, colorless dress in a house with three rooms. He couldn't even remember her nakedness, the shape of her breasts and the length of her legs. It was as if they had met only once, and in passing.

When he came through the trees and out on the other side, the field was there as it should be, and it was full of bright blue and yellow flowers. Once it had been filled with tall corn and green bursts of beans and peas. It hadn't been plowed now in years, most likely since he left. He followed the trail and trudged toward his house. It stood where he had left it. It had not improved with age. The chimney was black at the top and the unpainted lumber was stripping like shedding snakeskin. He had cut the trees and split them and made the lumber for the house, and like everything else he had seen since he had returned, it was smaller than he remembered. Behind it was the smokehouse he had made of logs, and far out to the left was the outhouse he had built. He had read many a magazine there while having his morning constitutional.

Out front, near the well, which had been built up with stones and now had a roof over it supported on four stout poles, was a young boy. He knew immediately it was his son. The boy was probably eight. He had been four years old when Deel had left to fight in the Great War, sailed across the vast dark ocean. The boy had a bucket in his hand, held by the handle. He set it down and raced toward the house, yelling something Deel couldn't define.

A moment later she came out of the house and his memory filled up. He kept walking, and the closer he came to her, standing framed in the doorway, the tighter his heart felt. She was blond and tall and lean and dressed in a light-colored dress on which were printed flowers much duller than those in the field. But her face was brighter than the sun, and he knew now how she looked naked and in bed, and all that had been lost came back to him, and he knew he was home again.

When he was ten feet away the boy, frightened, grabbed his mother and held her, and she said, "Deel, is that you?"

He stopped and stood, and said nothing. He just looked at her, drinking her in like a cool beer. Finally he said, "Worn and tired, but me."

"I thought…"

"I didn't write 'cause I can't."

"I know… but…"

"I'm back, Mary Lou."

I FIRST NOTICED the man I will call Benjamin in the bar of the Independence Hotel in Ndala. He sat alone, drinking orange soda, no ice. He was tall and burly-knotty biceps, huge hands. His short-sleeved white shirt and khaki pants were as crisp as a uniform. Instead of the usual third-world Omega or Rolex, he wore a cheap plastic Japanese watch on his right wrist. No rings, no gold, no sunglasses. I did not recognize the tribal tattoos on his cheeks. He spoke to no one, looked at no one. He himself might as well have been invisible as far as the rest of the customers were concerned. No one spoke to him or offered to buy him a drink or asked him any questions. He seemed poised to leap off his barstool and kill something at a moment's notice.

He was the only person in the bar I did not already know by sight. In those days, more than half a century ago, when an American was a rare bird along the Guinea coast, you got to know everyone in your hotel bar pretty quickly. I was standing at the bar, my back to Benjamin, but I could see him in the mirror. He was watching me. I surmised that he was gathering information rather than sizing me up for robbery or some other dark purpose.

I called the barman, put a ten-shilling note on the bar, and asked him to mix a pink gin using actual Beefeater's. He laughed merrily as he pocketed the money and swirled the bitters in the glass. When I looked in the mirror again, Benjamin was gone. How a man his size could get up and leave without being reflected in the mirror I do not know, but somehow he managed it. I did not dismiss him from my thoughts, he was too memorable for that, but I didn't dwell on the episode either. I could not, however, shake the feeling that I had been subjected to a professional appraisal. For an operative under deep cover, that is always an uncomfortable experience, especially if you have the feeling, as I did, that the man who is giving you the once-over is a professional who is doing a job that he has done many times before.

I had come to Ndala to debrief an agent. He missed the first two meetings, but there is nothing unusual about that even if you're not in Africa. On the third try, he showed up close to the appointed hour at the appointed place-two A.M. on an unpaved street in which hundreds of people, all of them sound asleep, lay side by side. It was a moonless night. No electric light, no lantern or candle even, burned for at least a mile in any direction. I could not see the sleepers, but I could feel their presence and hear them exhale and inhale. The agent, a member of parliament, had nothing to tell me apart from his usual bagful of pointless gossip. I gave him his money anyway, and he signed for it with a thumbprint by the light of my pocket torch. As I walked away I heard him ripping open his envelope and counting banknotes in the dark.

I had not walked far when a car turned into the street with headlights blazing. The sleepers awoke and popped up one after another as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley. The member of parliament had vanished. No doubt he had simply laid down with the others, and two of the wide-open eyes and one of the broad smiles I saw dwindling into the darkness belonged to him.

The car stopped. I kept walking toward it, and when I was beside it the driver, who was a police constable, leaped out and shone a flashlight in my face. He said, "Please get in, master." The British had been gone from this country for only a short time, and the locals still addressed white men by the title preferred by their former colonial rulers. The old etiquette survived in English and French and Portuguese in most of the thirty-two African countries that had become independent in a period of two and a half years-less time than it took Stanley to find Livingstone.

I said, "Get in? What for?"

"This is not a good place for you, master."

My rescuer was impeccably turned out in British tropical kit-blue service cap, bush jacket with sergeant's chevrons on the shoulder boards, voluminous khaki shorts, blue woolen knee socks, gleaming oxfords, black Sam Browne belt. A truncheon dangling from the belt seemed to be his only weapon. I climbed into the backseat. The sergeant got behind the wheel and, using the rearview mirror rather than looking behind him, backed out of the street at breathtaking speed. I kept my eyes on the windshield, expecting him to plow into the sleepers at any moment. They themselves seemed unconcerned, and as the headlights swept over them they lay down one after the other with the same precise timing as before.

The sergeant drove at high speed through back streets, nearly every one of them another open-air dormitory. Our destination, as it turned out, was the Equator Club, Ndala's most popular nightclub. This structure was really just a fenced-in space, open to the sky. Inside, a band played highlife, a kind of hypercalypso, so loudly that you had the illusion that the music was visible as it rose into the pitch-black night.

Inside, the music was even louder. The air was the temperature of blood. The odors of sweat and spilled beer were sharp and strong. Guttering candles created a substitute for light. Silhouettes danced on the hard dirt floor, cigarettes glowed. The sensation was something like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex.

Benjamin, alone again, sat at another small table. He was drinking orange soda again. He too wore a uniform. Though made of finer cloth, it was a duplicate of the sergeant's, except that he was equipped with a swagger stick instead of a baton and the badge on his shoulder boards displayed the wreath, crossed batons, and crown of a chief constable. Benjamin, it appeared, was the head of the national police. He made a gesture of welcome. I sat down. A waiter placed a pink gin with ice before me with such efficiency, and was so neatly dressed, that I supposed he was a constable too, but undercover. I lifted my glass to Benjamin and sipped my drink.

Benjamin said, "Are you a naval person?"

I said, "No. Why do you ask?"

"Pink gin is the traditional drink of the Royal Navy."

"Not rum?"

"Rum is for the crew."

I had difficulty suppressing a grin. Our exchange of words sounded so much like a recognition code used by spies that I wondered if that's what it really was. Had Benjamin got the wrong American? He did not seem the type to make such an elementary mistake. He looked down on me-even while seated he was at least a head taller than I was-and said, "Welcome to my country, Mr. Brown. I have been waiting for you to come here again, because I believe that you and I can work together."

Brown was one of the names I had used on previous visits to Ndala, but it was not the name on the passport I was using this time. He paused, studying my face. His own face showed no flicker of expression.

Without further preamble, he said, "I am contemplating a project that requires the support of the United States of America."

The dramaturgy of the situation suggested that my next line should be, "Really?" or "How so?" However, I said nothing, hoping that Benjamin would fill the silence.

Frankly, I was puzzled. Was he volunteering for something? Most agents recruited by any intelligence service are volunteers, and the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-l ined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door. People simply walk in and for whatever motive-usually petty resentment over having been passed over for promotion or the like-offer to betray their country. It was also possible, unusual though that might be, that Benjamin hoped to recruit me.

His eyes bored into mine. His back was to the wall, mine to the dance floor. Behind me I could feel but not see the dancers, moving as a single organism. Through the soles of my shoes I felt vibration set up by scores of feet stamping in unison on the dirt floor. In the yellow candlelight I could see a little more expression on Benjamin's face.

Many seconds passed before he broke the silence. "What is your opinion of the president of this country?"

Once again I took my time answering. The problem with this conversation was that I never knew what to say next.

Finally I said, "President Ga and I have never met."

"Nevertheless you must have an opinion."

And of course I did. So did everyone who read the newspapers. Akokwu Ga, president for life of Ndala, was a man of strong appetites. He enjoyed his position and its many opportunities for pleasure with an enthusiasm that was remarkable even by the usual standards for dictators. He possessed a solid gold bathtub and bedstead. He had a private zoo, and it was said that he was sometimes seized by the impulse to feed his enemies to the lions. He had deposited tens of millions of dollars from his country's treasury into personal numbered accounts in Swiss banks.

Dinner for him and his guests was flown in every day from one of the restaurants in Paris that had a three-star rating in the Guide Michelin. A French chef heated the food and arranged it on plates, an English butler served it. Both were assumed to be secret agents employed by their respective governments. Ga maintained love nests in every quarter of the capital city. Women from all over the world occupied these cribs. The ones he liked best were given luxurious houses formerly occupied by Europeans and provided with German cars, French champagne, and "houseboys" (actually undercover policemen) who kept an eye on them.

"Speak," Benjamin said.

I said, "Frankly, chief constable, this conversation is making me nervous."

"Why? No one can bug us. Listen to the noise."

How right he was. We were shouting at each other in order to be heard above the din. The music made my ears ring, and no microphone then known could penetrate it. I said, "Nevertheless, I would prefer to discuss this in private. Just the two of us."

"And how then will you know that I am not bugging you? Or that someone else is not bugging both of us?"

"I wouldn't. But would it matter?"

Benjamin examined me for a long moment. Then he said, "No, it wouldn't. Because I am the one who will be saying dangerous things."

He got to his feet- uncoiled would be the better word. Instantly the sergeant who had brought me here and three other constables in plain clothes materialized from the shadows. Everyone else was dancing, eyes closed, seemingly in another world and time. Benjamin put on his cap and picked up his swagger stick.

He said, "Tomorrow I will come for you."

With that, he disappeared, leaving me without a ride. Eventually I found a taxi back to the hotel. The driver was so wide awake, his taxi so tidy, that I assumed that he too must be one of Benjamin's men.

The porter who brought me my mug of tea at six A.M. also brought me a note from Benjamin. The penmanship was beautiful. The note was short and to the point: "Nine o'clock, by the front entrance."

Through the glass in the hotel's front door, the street outside was a scene from Goya-lepers and amputees and victims of polio or smallpox or psoriasis, and among the child beggars a few examples of hamstringing by parents who needed the income that a crippled child could bring home. A tourist arrived in a taxi and scattered a handful of change in order to disperse the beggars while he made his dash for the entrance. Clearly he was a greenhorn. The seasoned traveler in Africa distributed money only after checkout. To do so on arrival guaranteed your being fondled by lepers every time you came in or went out. One particularly handsome, smiling young fellow who had lost his fingers and toes to leprosy caught coins in his mouth.

At the appointed time exactly-was I still in Africa?-Benjamin's sergeant pulled up in his gleaming black Austin. He barked a command in one of the local languages, and once again the crowd parted. He took me by the hand in the friendly African way and led me to the car.

We headed north, out of town, horn sounding tinnily at every turn of the wheels. Otherwise, the sergeant explained, pedestrians would assume that the driver was trying to kill them. In daylight when everyone was awake and walking around instead of sleeping by the wayside, Ndala sounded like the overture of An American in Paris. After a hair-raising drive past the brand-new government buildings and banks of downtown, through raucous streets lined with shops and filled with the smoke of street vendors' grills, through labyrinthine neighborhoods of low shacks made from scraps of lumber and tin and cardboard, we arrived at last in Africa itself, a sun-scorched plain of rusty soil dotted with stunted bush, stretching from horizon to horizon. After a mile or so of emptiness, we came upon a policeman seated on a parked motorcycle. The sergeant stopped the car, leaped out, and, leaving the motor running and the front door open, opened the back door to let me out. He gave me a map, drew himself up to attention, and, after stamping his right foot into the dust, gave me a quivering British hand salute. He then jumped onto the motorcycle behind its rider, who revved the engine, made a slithering U-turn, and headed back toward the city trailed by a corkscrew of red dust.

I got into the Austin and started driving. The road soon became a dirt trail whose billowing ocher dust stuck to the car like snow and made it necessary to run the windshield wipers. It was impossible to drive with the windows open. The temperature inside the closed vehicle (air conditioning was a thing of the future) could not have been less than one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Slippery with sweat, I followed the map and, after making a right turn into what seemed to be an impenetrable thicket of rubbery bushes, straddled a footpath which in time opened into a clearing containing a small village. Another car, a dusty black Rover, was parked in front of one of the conical mud huts. This place was deserted. Grass had grown on the footpaths. There was no sign of life.

I parked beside the other car and ducked into the mud hut. Benjamin, alone as usual, sat inside. He wore national dress-the white togalike gown invented by nineteenth-century missionaries to clothe the natives for the benefit of English knitting mills. His feet were bare. He seemed to be deep in thought and did not greet me with word or sign. A.455-caliber Webley revolver lay beside him on the floor of beaten earth. The light was dim, and because I had come into the shadowy interior out of intense sunlight, it was some time before I was able to see his face well enough to be absolutely certain that the mute tribesman before me actually was the chief constable with whom I had passed a pleasant hour the night before in the Equator Club. As for the revolver, I can't explain why I trusted this glowering giant not to shoot me just yet, but I did.

Benjamin said, "Is this meeting place sufficiently private?"

"It's fine," I replied. "But where have all the people gone?"

"To Ndala, a long time ago."

All over Africa were abandoned villages like this one whose inhabitants had packed up and left for the city in search of money and excitement and the new life of opportunity that independence promised. Nearly all of them now slept in the streets.

"As I said last night," Benjamin said, "I am thinking about doing something that is necessary to the future of this country, and I would like to have the encouragement of the United States government."

"It must be something impressive if you need the encouragement of Washington."

"It is. I plan to remove the present government of this country and replace it with a freely elected new government."

"That is impressive. What exactly do you mean by encouragement?"

"A willingness to stand aside, to make no silliness, and afterward to be helpful."

"Afterward? Not before?"

"Before is a local problem."

The odds were at least even that afterward might be a large problem for Benjamin. President Ga's instinct for survival was highly developed. Others, including his own brother, had tried to overthrow him. They were all dead now.

I said, "I recommend first of all that you forget this idea of yours. If you can't do that, then you should speak to somebody in the American embassy. I'm sure you already know the right person."

"I prefer to speak to you."

"Why? I'm not a member of the Ministry of Encouragement."

"But that is exactly what you are, Mr. Brown. You are famous for it. You can be trusted. This man in the American embassy you call 'the right person' is in fact a fool. He is an admirer of President for Life Ga. He plays ball with President Ga. He cannot be trusted."

I started to answer this nonsense. Benjamin showed me the palm of his hand. "Please, no protestations of innocence. I have all the evidence I would ever need about your good works in my country, should I ever need it."

That made me blink. No doubt he did have an interesting file on me. I had done a good deal of mischief in his country, even before the British departed, and for all I knew his courtship was a charade. He might very well be trying to entrap me.

I said, "I'm flattered. But I don't think I'd make a good assistant in this particular matter."

Something like a frown crossed Benjamin's brow. I had annoyed him. Since we were in the middle of nowhere and he was the one with the revolver, this was not a good sign.

"I have no need of an assistant," Benjamin said. "What I need is a witness. A trained observer whose word is trusted in high places in the U.S. Someone who can tell the right people in Washington what I have done, how I have done it, and most of all, that I have done it for the good of my country."

I could think of nothing to say that would not make this conversation even more unpleasant than it already was.

Benjamin said, "I can see that you do not trust me."

He picked up the revolver and cocked it. The Webley is something of an antique, having been designed around the time of the Boer War as the standard British officer's sidearm. It is large and ugly but also effective, being powerful enough to kill an elephant. For a long moment Benjamin looked deeply into my eyes and then, holding the gun by the barrel, handed it to me.

"If you believe I am being false to you in any way," he said, "you can shoot me."

It was a wonder that he had not shot himself, handling a cocked revolver in such a carefree way. I took the weapon from his hand, lowered the hammer, swung open the cylinder, and shook out the cartridges. They were not blanks. I reloaded and handed the weapon back to Benjamin. He wiped it clean of fingerprints-my fingerprints-with the skirt of his robe and put it back on the floor.

In the jargon of espionage, the recruitment of an agent is called a seduction. As in a real seduction, assuming that things are going well, a moment comes when resistance turns into encouragement. We had arrived at the moment for a word of encouragement.

I said, "What exactly is the plan?"

"When you strike at a prince," Benjamin said, "you must strike to kill."

Absolutely true. It did not surprise me that he had read Machiavelli. At this point it would not have surprised me if he burst into fluent Sanskrit. Despite the rigmarole with the Webley, I still did not trust him and probably never would, but I was doing the work that I was paid to do, so I decided to press on with the thing.

"That's an excellent principle," I said, "but it's a principle, not a plan."

"All the right things will be done," Benjamin said. "The radio station and newspapers will be seized, the army will cooperate, the airport will be closed, curfews will be imposed."

"Don't forget to surround the presidential palace."

"That will not be necessary."

"Why?"

"Because the president will not be in the palace," Benjamin said.

All of a sudden Benjamin was becoming cryptic. Frankly, I was just as glad, because what he was proposing in words of one syllable scared the bejesus out of me. So did the expression on his face. He was as calm as a Buddha.

He rose to his feet. In his British uniform he had looked impressive, if slightly uncomfortable. In his gown he looked positively majestic, a black Caesar in a white toga.

"You now know enough now to think this over," he said. "Do so, if you please. We will talk some more before you fly away."

He ducked through the door and drove away. I waited for a few minutes, then went outside myself. A large black mamba lay in the sun in front of my car. My blood froze. The mamba was twelve or thirteen feet long. This species is the fastest-moving snake known to zoology, capable of slithering at fifteen miles an hour, faster than most men can run. Its strike is much quicker than that. Its venom will usually kill an adult human being in about fifteen minutes. Hoping that this one was not fully awake, I got into the car and started the engine. The snake moved but did not go away. I could easily have run over it, but instead I backed up and steered around it. Locally this serpent was regarded as a sign of bad luck to come. I wasn't looking for any more misfortune than I already had on my plate.

After dinner that evening I spent an extra hour in the hotel bar. I felt the alcohol after I went upstairs and got into bed, but fell almost immediately into a deep sleep. Cognac makes for bad dreams, and I was in the middle of one when I was awakened by the click of the latch. For an instant I thought the porter must be bringing my morning tea and wondered where the night had gone. But when I opened my eyes it was still dark outside. The door opened and closed. No light came in, meaning that the intruder had switched off the dim bulbs in the corridor. He was now inside the room. I could not see him but I could smell him: soap, spicy food, shoe polish. Shoe polish? I slid out of bed, taking the pillows and the covers with me and rolling them into a ball, as if this would help me defend myself against the intruder who I believed was about to attack me in the dark with a machete.

In the dark, the intruder drew the shade over the window. An instant later the lights came on. Benjamin said, "Sorry to disturb you."

He wore his impeccable uniform, swagger stick tucked under his left arm, cap square on his head, badges and shoes and Sam Browne belt gleaming. The clock read 4:23. It was an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock with two bells on top. It ticked loudly while I waited until I was sure I could trust my voice to reply. I was stark naked. I felt a little foolish to be holding a bundle of bedclothes in my arms, but at least this preserved my modesty.

Finally I said, "I thought we'd already had our conversation for the day."

Benjamin ignored the Bogart impersonation. "There is something I want you to see," he said. "Get dressed as quick as you can, please." Benjamin never forgot a please or a thank-you. Like his penmanship, Victorian good manners seemed to have been rubbed into his soul in missionary school.

As soon as I had tied my shoes, he led the way down the back stairs. He moved at a swift trot. Outside the back door, a black Rover sedan waited with the engine running. The sergeant stood at attention beside it. He opened the back door as Benjamin and I approached, and after a brief moment as Alphonse and Gaston, we got into the backseat.

When the car was in motion, Benjamin turned to me and said, "You seem to want to give President Ga the benefit of the doubt. This morning you will see some things for yourself, and then you can decide whether that is the Christian thing to do."

It was still dark. As a usual thing there is no lingering painted sunrise in equatorial regions; the sun, huge and white, just materializes on the rim of the earth, and daylight begins. In the darkness, the miserable of Ndala were still asleep in rows on either side of every street, but little groups of people on the move were caught in our headlights.

"Beggars," Benjamin said. "They are on their way to work." The beggars limped and crawled according to their afflictions. Those who could not walk at all were carried by others.

"They help each other," Benjamin said. He said something to the sergeant in a tribal language. The sergeant put a spotlight on a big man carrying a leper who had lost his feet. The leper looked over his friend's shoulder and smiled. The big man walked onward as if unaware of the spotlight. Benjamin said, "See? A blind man will carry a crippled man, and the crippled man will tell him where to go. Take a good look, Mr. Brown. It is a sight you will never seen in Ndala again."

"Why not?"

"You will see."

At the end of the street an army truck was parked. A squad of soldiers armed with bayoneted rifles held at port arms formed a line across the street. Benjamin gave an order. The sergeant stopped the car and shone his spotlight on them. They did not stir or open their eyes as when the sergeant drove down this same street the night before. Whatever was happening, these people did not want to be witnesses. The soldiers paid no more attention to Benjamin's car than the people lying on the ground paid to the soldiers.

When the beggars arrived, the soldiers surrounded them and herded them into the truck. The blind man protested, a single syllable. Before he could say more, a soldier hit him in the small of the back with a rifle butt. The blind man dropped the crippled leper and fell down unconscious. The soldiers would not touch them, so the other beggars picked them up and loaded them into the truck, then climbed in themselves. The soldiers lowered the back curtain and got into a smaller truck of their own. All this happened in eerie silence, not an order given or a protest voiced, in a country in which the smallest human encounter sent tsunamis of shouting and laughter through crowds of hundreds.

We drove on. We witnessed the same scene over and over again. All over the city, beggars were being rounded up by troops. Our last stop was the Independence Hotel, my hotel, where I saw the beggars I knew best, including the handsome, smiling leper who caught coins in his mouth, being herded into the back of a truck. As the truck drove away, gears changing, the sun appeared on the eastern horizon, huge and entire, a miracle of timing.

Benjamin said, "You look a little sick, my friend. Let me tell you something. Those people are never coming back to Ndala. They give our country a bad image, and two weeks from now hundreds of foreigners will arrive for the Pan-African Conference. Thanks to President Ga, they will not have to look at these disgusting creatures, so maybe they will elect him president of the conference. Think about that. We will talk when you come back."

In Washington, two days later at six in the morning, I found my chief at his desk, drinking coffee from a chipped mug and reading the Wall Street Journal. I told him my tale. He knew at once exactly who Benjamin was. He asked how much money Benjamin wanted, what his timetable was, who his coconspirators were, whether he himself planned to replace the abominable Ga as dictator after he overthrew him, what his policy toward the United States would be-and, by the way, what were his hidden intentions? I was unable to answer most of these questions.

I said, "All he's asked for so far is encouragement."

"Encouragement?" said my chief. "That's a new one. He didn't suggest one night of love with the first lady in the Lincoln bedroom?"

A certain third-world general had once made just such a demand in return for his services as a spy in a country whose annual national product was smaller than that of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. I told him that Benjamin had not struck me as being the type to long for Mrs. Eisenhower.

My chief said, "You take him seriously?"

"He's an impressive person."

"Then go back and talk to him some more."

"When?"

"Tomorrow."

"What about the encouragement?"

"It's cheap. Ga is a bad 'un. Shovel it on."

I was cheap too-a singleton out at the end of the string. If I got into trouble, I'd get no help from the chief or anyone else in Washington. The old gentleman himself would cut the string. He owed me nothing. "Brown? Brown?" he would say in the unlikely event that he would be asked what had become of me. "The only Brown I know is Charlie."

The prospect of returning to Ndala on the next flight was not a very inviting one. I had just spent eight weeks traveling around Africa, in and out of countries, languages, time zones, identities. My intestines swarmed with parasites that were desperate to escape. There was something wrong with my liver: the whites of my eyes were yellow. I had had a malaria attack on the plane from London that frightened the woman seated next to me. The four aspirins I took, spilling only twenty or so while getting them out of the bottle with shaking hands, brought the fever and the sweating under control. Twelve hours later I still had a temperature of 102; I shuddered still, though only fitfully.

To the chief I said, "Right."

"This time get all the details," my chief said. "But no cables. Your skull only, and fly the information back to me personally. Tell the locals nothing."

"Which locals? Here or there?"

"Anywhere."

His tone was nonchalant, but I had known this man for a long time. He was interested; he saw an opportunity. He was a white-haired, tweedy, pipe-smoking old fellow with a toothbrush mustache and twinkling blue eyes. His specialty was doing the things that American presidents wanted done without actually requiring them to give the order. He smiled with big crooked teeth; he was rich but too old for orthodontia. "Until I give the word, nobody knows anything but us two chickens. Does that suit you?"

I nodded as if my assent really was necessary. After a breath or two, I said, "How much encouragement can I offer this fellow?"

"Use your judgment. Take some money too. You may have to tide him over till he gets hold of the national treasure. Just don't make any promises. Hear him out. Figure him out. Estimate his chances. We don't want a failure. Or an embarrassment."

I rose to leave.

"Hold on," said the chief.

He rummaged around in a desk drawer and, after examining several identical objects and discarding them, handed me a large bulging brown envelope. A receipt was attached to it with Scotch tape. It said that the envelope contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills. I signed it with the fictitious name my employer had assigned to me when I joined up. As I opened the door to leave, I saw that the old gentleman had gone back to his Wall Street Journal.

Benjamin and I had arranged no secure way of communicating with each other, so I had not notified him that I was coming back to Ndala. Nevertheless, the sergeant met me on the tarmac at the airport. I was not surprised that Benjamin knew I was coming. Like all good cops, he kept an eye on passenger manifests for flights in and out of his jurisdiction. After sending a baggage handler into the hold of the plane to find my bag, the sergeant drove me to a safe house in the European quarter of the city. It was five o'clock in the morning when we got there. Benjamin awaited me. The sergeant cooked and served a complete English breakfast-eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, grilled tomato, cold toast, Dundee orange marmalade, and sour gritty coffee. Benjamin ate with gusto but made no small talk. Air conditioners hummed in every window.

"Better that you stay in this house than the hotel," Benjamin said when he had cleaned his plate. "In that way there will never be a record that you have been in this country."

That was certainly true, and it was not the least of my worries. I was traveling on a Canadian passport as Robert Bruce Brown, who had died of meningitis in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, thirty-five years before at age two. Thanks to the sergeant, I had bypassed customs and passport control. That meant that there was no entry stamp in the passport. In theory I could not leave the country without one, but then again, I was carrying $100,000 American in cash in an airline bag, and this was a country in which money talked. If I did disappear, I would disappear without a trace. One way or another, so would the money.

"There is something I want you to see," Benjamin said. Apparently this was his standard phrase when he had something unpleasant to show me. After wiping his lips on a white linen napkin, folding it neatly, and dropping it onto the table, he led me into the living room. The drapes were drawn. The sun was up. A sliver of white-hot sunlight shone through. Benjamin called to the sergeant, who brought his briefcase and pulled the curtains tighter. Before leaving us he started an LP on the hi-fi and turned up the volume to defeat hidden microphones. Sinatra sang "In the Still of the Night."

Benjamin took a large envelope from the briefcase and handed it to me. It contained about twenty glossy black-and-white photographs-army trucks parked in a field, soldiers with bayonets fixed; a large empty ditch with two bulldozers standing by; beggars getting down from the truck; beggars being tumbled into the ditch; beggars, hedged in by bayonets, being buried alive by the bulldozers; bulldozers rolling over the dirt to tamp it down with their treads.

"The army is very unhappy about this," Benjamin said. "President Ga did not tell the generals that soldiers would be required to do this work. They thought they were just getting these beggars out of sight until after the Pan-African Conference. Instead the soldiers were ordered to solve the problem once and for all."

My throat was dry. I cleared it and said, "How many people were buried alive?"

"Nobody counted."

"Why was this done?"

"I told you. The beggars were an eyesore."

"That was reason enough to bury them alive?"

"The soldiers were supposed to shoot them first. But they refused. This is good for us, because now the army is angry. Also afraid. Now Ga can execute any general for murder simply by discovering the crime and punishing the culprits in the name of justice and the people. The generals have not told the president that the solders refused to follow his orders, so now they are in danger. If he ever finds out, he will bury the soldiers alive. Also a general or two. Or more."

I said, "Who would tell him?"

"Who indeed?" asked Benjamin, stone-faced. I handed the pictures back to him. He held up a palm. "Keep them."

I said, "No, thank you."

The photos were a death warrant for anyone who was arrested with them in his possession.

Benjamin ignored me. He rummaged in his briefcase and handed me a handheld radio transceiver. Technologically speaking, those were primitive days, and the device was not much smaller than a fifth of Beefeater's, minus the neck of the bottle. Nevertheless, it was a wonder for its time. It was made in the U.S.A., so I supposed it had been supplied by the local chief of station, the man who played ball with Ga, as a trinket for a native.

Benjamin said, "Your call sign is Mustard One. Mine is Mustard. This for emergencies. This too." He handed me a Webley and a box of hollow-point cartridges.

I was touched by his concern. But the transceiver was useless-if the situation was desperate enough to call him, I would be a dead man before he could get to me. The Webley, however, would be useful for shooting myself in case of need. Shooting anyone else in this country would be the equivalent of committing suicide.

Benjamin rose to his feet. "I will be back," he said. "We will spend the evening together."

When Benjamin returned around midnight, I was reading Sir Richard Burton's Wanderings in West Africa, the only book in the house. It was a first edition, published in 1863. The margins were sprinkled with pencil dots. I guessed that it had been used by some romantic Brit for a book code. Benjamin was sartorially correct as usual-crisp white shirt with paisley cravat, double-breasted naval blazer, gray slacks, gleaming oxblood oxfords. He cast a disapproving eye on my wrinkled shorts and sweaty shirt and bare feet.

"You must wash and shave and put on proper clothes," he said. "We have been invited to dinner."

Benjamin offered no further information. I asked no questions. The sergeant drove, rapidly, without headlights on narrow trails through the bush. We arrived at a guard shack. The guard, a very sharp soldier, saluted and waved us through without looking inside the car. The road widened into a sweeping driveway. Gravel crackled under the tires. We reached the top of a little rise and I saw before me the presidential palace, lit up like a football stadium by the light towers that surrounded it. The flags of all the newborn African nations flew from a ring of flagstaffs.

The soldiers guarding the front door-white belts, white gloves, white bootlaces, white rifle slings-came to present arms. We walked past them into a vast foyer from which a double staircase swept upward before separating at a landing decorated by a huge floodlit portrait of President Ga wearing his sash of office. A liveried servant led us up the stairs past a gallery of portraits of Ga variously uniformed as general of the army, admiral of the fleet, air chief marshal, head of the party, and other offices I could not identify.

We simply walked into the presidential office. No guards were visible. President Ga was seated behind a desk at the far end of the vast room. Two attack dogs, pit bulls, stood with ears pricked at either side of his oversize desk. The ceiling could not have been less than fifteen feet high. Ga, not a large person to begin with, was so diminished by these Brobdingnagian proportions that he looked like a puppet. He was reading what I supposed was a state paper, pen in hand in case he needed to add or cross something out. As we approached across the snow-white marble floor, our footsteps echoed. Benjamin's were especially loud because he wore leather heels, but nothing, apparently, could break the president's concentration.

About ten feet from the desk we stopped, our toes touching a bronze strip that was sunk into the marble. Ga ignored us. The pit bulls did not. Ga pressed a button. A hidden door opened behind the desk, and a young army officer in dress uniform stepped out. Behind him I could see half-a-dozen other soldiers, armed to the teeth and standing at attention in a closetlike space that was hardly large enough to hold them all.

Wordlessly, Ga handed the paper to the officer, who took it, made a smart about-face, and marched back into the closet. Ga stood up, still taking no notice of us, and strolled to the large window behind his desk. It looked out over the brightly lit, shadowless palace grounds. At a little distance I could see an enclosure in which several different species of gazelle were confined. In other paddocks-too many to be seen in a single glance-other wild animals paced. Ga drank in the scene for a long moment, then whirled and approached Benjamin and me at quick-march, as if he wore one of his many uniforms instead of the white bush jacket, black slacks, and sandals in which he actually was dressed. Benjamin did not introduce me. Apparently there was no need to do so, because Ga, looking me straight in the eye, shook my hand and said, "I hope you like French food, Mr. Brown."

I did. The menu was a terrine of gray sole served with a 1953 Corton-Charlemagne, veal stew accompanied by a 1949 Pommard, cheese, and grapes. The president ate the food hungrily, talking all the while, but only sipped the wines.

"Alcohol gives me bad dreams," he said to me. "Do you ever have bad dreams?"

"Doesn't everyone, sir?"

"My best friend, who died too young, never had bad dreams. He was too good in mind and heart to be troubled by such things. Now he is in my dreams. He visits me almost every night. Who is in your dreams?"

"Mostly people I don't know."

"Then you are very lucky."

During the dinner Ga talked about America. He knew it well. He had earned a degree from a Negro college in Missouri. Baptist missionaries had sent him to the college on a scholarship. He graduated second in his class, behind his best friend, who now called on him in dreams. When Ga spoke to his people, he spoke standard Africanized English, the common tongue of his country, where more than a hundred mutually incomprehensible tribal languages were in use. He spoke to me in American English, sounding like Harry S. Truman. He had had a wonderful time in college-the football games, the fraternity pranks, the music, the wonderful food, homecoming, the prom, those American coeds! His friend had been the school's star running back; Ga had been the team manager; they had won their conference championship two years in a row. "From the time we were boys together in our village, my friend was always the star, I was always the administrator," he said. "Until we got into politics and changed places. My friend stuttered. It was his only flaw. It is the reason I am president. Had he been able to speak to the people without making them laugh, he would be living in this house."

"You were fond of this man," I said.

"Fond of him? He was my brother."

Tears formed in the president's eyes. Despite everything I knew about his crimes, I found myself liking Akokwu Ga.

Servants arrived with coffee and a silver dessert bowl. "Ah, strawberries and crème fraîche!" said Ga, breaking into his first smile of the evening.

After the strawberries, another servant offered cigars and port, discreetly showing me the labels. Ga waved these temptations away like a good Baptist. I did the same, not without regret.

"Come, my friend," said Ga, rising to his feet and suddenly speaking West African rather than Missouri English, "it is time for a walk. Do you get enough exercise?"

I said, "I wish I got more."

"Ah, but you must make time to keep up to snuff," said Ga. "I ride horseback every morning and walk in the cool of the evening. Both things are excellent exercise, and also, to start the day, you have the companionship of the horse, which never says anything stupid. You must get a horse. If you are too busy for a horse, a masseur. Not a masseuse. They are too distracting. Massage is like hearty exercise if the masseur is strong and has the knowledge. Bob Hope told me that. Massage keeps him young."

By now we were at the front door. The spick-and-span young army captain who had earlier leaped out of the closet behind Ga's desk awaited us. Standing at rigid attention, he held out a paper for Ga. Benjamin immediately went into reverse, walking backward as he withdrew from eyeshot and earshot of the president while the latter read his document and spoke to his orderly. I followed suit.

Staring straight ahead and barely moving his lips, Benjamin muttered, "He is charming tonight. Be careful." These were the first words he had uttered all evening. Throughout dinner, Ga had ignored him entirely, as if he were a third pit bull lying at his feet.

Outside, under the stadium lights, Ga led the way across the shadowless grounds to his animal park. Three men walked in front, sweeping the ground in case of snakes. As I knew from rumor and intelligence reports, Ga had a morbid fear of snakes. Another bearer carried Ga's sporting rifle, a beautiful weapon that looked to me like a Churchill, retail in London £10,000.

The light from the towers was so strong that everything looked like an overexposed photograph. Ga pointed out the gazelles, naming them all one by one. "Some of these specimens are quite rare," he said, "or so I am told by the people who sell them. I am preserving them for the people of this nation. Most of these beasts no longer live in this part of Africa, but before the Europeans came with their guns and killed them for sport, we knew them as brothers."

Ga was a believer in raising a mythical African past to the status of reality. The public buildings he had built during his brief reign featured murals and mosaics depicting Africans of a lost civilization inventing agriculture, mathematics, architecture, medicine, electricity, the airplane, even the postage stamp. In his mind it was only logical that the ancients had also lived in peace with the lion, the elephant, the giraffe-everything but the serpent, which Ga had exiled from his utopia.

We tramped on a bit, to an empty paddock. "Now you will see something," he said. "You will see nature in the raw."

This paddock was unlighted. Ga lifted his hand, and the lights went on. Standing alone in the middle of the open space was an animal that even I was able to recognize as a Thomson's gazelle from its diminutive size, its lovely tan-and-white coat, the calligraphic black stripe on its flank. This one was a buck, something like three feet tall, a work of art like so many other African animals.

"This type of gazelle is common," Ga said. "There are hundreds of thousands of them in herds in Tanganyika. They can outrun a lion. Watch."

The word suddenly does not convey the speed of what happened next. Out of the blinding light in which it had somehow been concealing itself as it stalked the Tommy, a cheetah materialized, moving at sixty miles an hour. A cheetah can cover a hundred meters in less than three seconds. The Tommy saw or sensed this blur of death that hurtled toward him and leaped three or four feet straight up into the air, then hit the ground running. The Tommy was slightly slower than its predator, but far more nimble. When the cheetah got close enough to attack, the little gazelle would make a quick turn and escape. This happened over and over again. The size of the paddock-or playing field, as Ga must have thought of it-was an advantage to the Tommy, who would lead the cheetah straight at the fence, then make a last-second turn. One or twice the cheetah crashed into the wire.

"This is almost over," Ga said. "Usually it lasts only a minute or so. If the cat does not win very quickly, it runs out of strength and gives up."

A second later the cheetah won. The gazelle turned in the wrong direction, and the cat brought it down. A cheetah is not strong enough to break the neck of its prey, so it kills by suffocation, biting the throat and crushing the windpipe. The Tommy struggled, then went limp. The cheetah's eyes glittered. So did Ga's.

Beaming, he threw an arm around my shoulders. He said, "Wonderful, eh?"

I smelled the food and wine on his breath, felt his excited heart beating against my shoulder. Then, without a good night or even a facial expression, Ga turned on his heel and, surrounded by his snake sweepers and his gun bearer, marched away and disappeared into the palace. The evening was over. His guests had ceased to exist.

We lost no time in leaving. Minutes later, as we rolled toward the wakening city in Benjamin's Rover, I asked a question.

"Is he always so hospitable?"

"Tonight you saw one Ga," Benjamin said. "There are a thousand of him."

I could believe it. In this one evening I had seen him in half-a-dozen incarnations: Mussolini redux, gourmet, Joe College, tender friend, zoologist, mythologist, and a fun-loving god who stage-managed animal sacrifices to himself.

The Rover purred along a smoothly paved but deserted road, bush to the left and right, the sticky night dark as macadam. Headlights appeared behind us and approached at high speed. The sergeant switched off the Rover's lights and pulled off the road. The tires bit into soft dirt. Benjamin and I were slammed together hip and shoulder. We were being overtaken by a motorcade. A Cadillac, the lead car, swept by at high speed, then a Rolls-Royce, then another Cadillac as chase car.

"The president," Benjamin said calmly when the Rover stopped bouncing. "He always has a woman or two before the sun rises. He is quick with them, never more than fifteen minutes, then he goes back to the presidential palace. He never goes to the same woman twice in the same month."

"He keeps thirty-one women?"

"More, in case one of them is not clean on a certain night."

"How does he choose which one?"

"Each woman has a number. Each month Ga receives from somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, what is called a dream book. It is used in America to play the numbers game. He uses the number in the dream book for the day."

I said, "So if you want to find him on any given night, you match the woman's number to the number for that particular day in the dream book."

"Yes, if you know the address of every woman, that is the key," Benjamin said.

He smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder, pleased as a proud father with the quickness of my mind.

THE YEAR WE WERE SENIORS in high school, a girl in our class was murdered and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series. Which was the more momentous event? No contest, of course; how could a game, a boys' game at that, compete with the death of a classmate, a girl who was our friend? Yet somehow, despite our lip service to the contrary, these two happenings seemed to attain a shameful equality in our minds. And if anything, now that so many years have passed, Mazeroski rounding the bases in jubilation after his homer had vanquished the big, bad Yankees is more vivid in our memories than the image of Carol Siebenrock, young, beautiful, and naked, as seen from the darkness beyond her window.

The Pirates were with us everywhere that autumn. They filled the air. Every evening when we went out, we didn't need our transistors-we could hear Bob Prince calling the game all over town, his friendly baritone drifting from radios on porches, in kitchens and living rooms, pervasive as the scent of burning leaves. We would often pause, interrupting whatever nonsense we were up to, holding a hand in the air to signify an at-bat worthy of our attention: maybe Smoky Burgess coming up to pinch-hit with the tying run in scoring position, or Clemente connecting, sending a screamer through the gap, or big, dumb Dick Stuart approaching the plate with enough runners on to win the game with one mighty swing of his lumber. And every time they played the Pirates' jingle, we would sing along:

Oh, the Bucs are going all the way,

WE KNOW THE LARSONS. They come to Slocum Lake each summer. We would like them to stop, but they do not stop. For fifteen years they have come to Slocum Lake to stay at their place on the waterfront. They own the only cottage remaining on the lake: they possess the only waterfront property that has not been developed commercially. Here, in Slocum Lake, we could use that development. We desperately wish they would sell. Instead, they bring their children and teach them the ways of traditional summertime Slocum Lake living. It's very depressing, it's very outmoded, and our tolerance is pressed.

In June someone paid to have someone electrocute Slocum Lake, to stun and then kill some of the fish. It wasn't terribly expensive. A collection was taken. The more expensive part of the process involved gathering the dead fish and corralling them into the part of the lake that runs about twenty yards out from the Larsons' beachfront and approximately fifty yards across. The expensive part, actually, was installing the concealed netted cage that would keep the dead fish where we wanted them-mysteriously pent up against the Larsons' beach.

The Larsons always arrive on one of the first days of July. They roll in at nighttime. We presume they are sheepish people. It is possible their drive down from the north of Wisconsin is longer than we know it to be, because perhaps their children make them stop frequently. We don't exactly know. We know they arrive late at night, as a general annual rule. We know they carry their children into the cottage, put them in their respective bunk beds, knock off the bedroom lights, lock up, and walk down to the beachfront.

This year they arrived this way again. When they walked down to the beachfront, they held hands. Their hot truck engine was still ticking in their gravel drive. Locusts were scorching the ears of the trees on their property, the only native trees remaining on the waterfront, inglorious poplars. Summer had come very early to Slocum Lake. The locusts had hatched early also. The nights were very warm and still. The Larsons exchanged a few inaudible remarks. Their shoulders were rubbing.

Once they had reached the waterfront, they turned to face one another, held one another, and kissed. They kissed for quite some time. They have kissed before, in years previous, and they usually stop kissing and go into the water together. This year they did not go into the water. They dropped onto their knees and continued kissing. Then Robert Larson took his shirt off, and we thought this signaled a move they might make toward the water. We were wrong. Robert embraced his wife very hard. Then he slipped his wife's shirt over her head.

They were kissing with great force, it seemed, and it seemed they would not stop kissing. Then they stopped kissing. We thought this was it. Instead of rising from his knees, however, Robert lowered himself onto his back. His wife, Penny Larson, laughed and put herself on top of him. It was dark, and we believe they then made love in this position. We watched it, thinking they would go swimming after, but instead they only made docile, unremarkable love, gathered their clothes, and ran naked back toward their cottage. They were laughing, but when they stepped onto the porch, they stopped laughing and were very quiet as they slipped in through their screen door. They never turned on any house lights. They simply vanished into the dark of their little dwarfish cottage that everyone on Slocum Lake wanted to blow up.

We would not want to hurt the Larsons. We certainly would not want to hurt children. The Larsons are good people with good intentions. They leave their home in northernmost Wisconsin and head south just as everyone in Illinois not affiliated with Slocum Lake and its general and perpetual state of impoverishment goes north to summer on the largely virgin beachwater up there. No doubt the Larsons know exactly what it feels like to have strange people perching on your property, behaving as though it were their own just because they had purchased it from you. We actually feel for the Larsons as people.

We feel for them enough, in any case, that we try not to be awkward about our determination to ouster them. We believe confronting them would be awkward and, in the end, because it would likely change nothing, needless. Instead, we have for years determined to be chilly and unwelcoming. We believed this would be enough. Then they had the children, and we could see the future we imagined-fiscal and otherwise-being denied us.

Two years ago, facing this reality, someone who did not identify himself vandalized the Larson's boat launch. Last year, we decided as a community to vandalize their roof. We tore large holes in their shingles with hammers late at night, in February. We believed the water damage from spring runoff would give them pause. They came in early July, studied the damage, left to stay at a hotel, and simply had someone come and rebuild the roof and interior. It was Bernie Benson they hired to do it, and he could not be bribed to do shoddy work, as no one outside of Chicago can be bribed in this way, and their roof is now better than any roof of ours and their interior looks like a catalog image.

The Larsons could not be heard at their windows, so we retired: we returned just after dawn. The children were awake. They are darling children, twins, towheaded beauties. They ate breakfast in their pajamas, careful not to wake their parents. They poked each other without laughing, covering their mouths with their hands, and spoke about their dreams for their vacation. They are good children, and we decided on the dead fish because it would impact them directly. We knew the Larsons would not like their children impacted. We did not want to harm children, and yet the stakes were very high. We believed we could impact the children without devastating them.

The sun had risen over the buildings on the eastern shore, and it was already blasting the buildings on the western shore. The insects had moved from the water to the grasses, because the water was warmer than the air temperature. The insects were horrific biting savages. You never get used to that. Time waiting in such conditions is not terribly pleasant. You look at your watch a lot.

Even in their central air conditioning, installed the year of the children's arrival, the twins had become a little restless. They had already dressed for swimming-at the age of four years, these remarkable, delightful twins had dressed all by themselves. Then they slipped out of the cottage, careful not let the screen door slam. They ran to the boat, which was still hitched to the Larsons' car. They pulled back the protective covering and went down inside the boat, under the covering. We do not know what they do in there. We presume they play make-believe games. Every year they play inside the boat. We think it is peculiar that children from so far north play with boats the way that children from down here do. We often think that, for children and adults from the north, boats are just like old wallpaper.

They were laughing and giggling in the boat for the better part of an hour. Eventually they slid out from under the covering, hopped off the boat, and returned to the cottage. They were inflating their flotation toys just as their parents emerged from their bedroom and sat down beside them on the renovated floor. The Larsons kissed their children on their heads and their hands and petted their hair, and you could see the sort of bliss in the eyes of the Larsons we desired very determinedly to remove.

Shortly thereafter, the children at last received approval to go down to the beachfront, and Robert and Penny stood up to watch their children run from the porch of their cottage down to their sandy beach. The children ran as quickly as four-year-olds can run, shoeless and in minimal swimming wear: both were topless, and the girl's bottoms were nearly obscene, and the boy wore only a baggy pair of briefs. We recognize that the Larsons felt they were alone on their property, and we believe, had they realized the public dimension of their daily events, they likely would have dressed their children differently. Certainly they would have exercised greater restraint in letting their children run down to the beach and plunge half nude into the infested water. We know the Larsons well enough to grasp that they are not reckless, thoughtless types. Like many people from Wisconsin, actually, they are prudent and wry. They remind us of our grandparents.

The Larson children tumbled face-first into the water. For approximately two minutes they rolled and played in innocence. They laughed and splashed and spread themselves lengthwise in the water. Then the boy screamed. Then the girl screamed. The two of them burst into a series of unpleasant sounds.

The Larsons sprinted from the cottage. They were pained. Their robes were encumbrances. The situation was tense, mortal. We had never seen Robert Larson move so swiftly. He shed his robe as he neared the water; Penny Larson's leg gave out, just at that moment, and she slipped, bent awkwardly, slid several feet, then lifted herself, clutching her knee, and continued running, hopping toward the children. Robert by then had hoisted them from the water. Penny took the girl. Penny and Robert exchanged only a few words in agitation, but we heard what we needed Robert to say: The beach is covered in dead fish.

Indeed. We waited. They walked quickly to the cottage, the twins in their arms. They went inside. There was very little to be heard. We believed we could see Robert pacing, if briefly, before emerging again and walking down to the water, where he kicked the fish with his sandaled foot. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand. The fish smelled even worse once you realized what you were smelling. Robert then shielded his eyes with his other hand and surveyed the water. From that vantage, dead fish carcasses spread out for what must have seemed miles. We'd paid good money for this.

There had been a fair bit of talk about the way to kill the fish. Plenty of the lake's sportsmen felt the need for careful electronic culling, separating the game fish-bass, bluegill, catfish-from those fish whose role in the lake seemed, by sportsmen standards, unclear. The mayor's office and Parks and Recreation, who in the end were footing the largest portion of the bill, contended that such careful culling would require an exorbitant amount of additional cash, and that it was cheaper to restock the game fish than to cull them and restore them once the electrocution was completed. Poets and local liberal activists like myself argued that the impact would be lessened if we merely blitzed the Larsons and their children with dead fish of all types; rather, we argued, if the fish were carefully selected-bottom-dwellers, suckers, waterway leeches all of the same genus-there would be no mistaking the message we were trying to send. It would be difficult, in other words, for the Larsons not to recognize a careful plan at work and to see themselves symbolized as sucking fish, disgusting bottom-dwellers left for dead on their beach.

Robert Larson moved slowly back up the sand, his hands in his pockets. He entered the cottage. He looked at his wife and shrugged. Then Penny shrugged. Then Robert Larson shrugged again. Then he said, Nature down here is funky, and he clicked his tongue and sat down.

The children, these fine and very sweet and well-mannered twins, were glancing back and forth between their parents, very forlorn and very anxious. Larson looked at his wife, and Penny looked at him. Larson nodded. The children darted through the screen door and ran to the beachfront again. They plunged into the water and seized the fish in large quantities, held them against their bodies, and threw them at one another. They lobbed them in various ways-like footballs, like hand grenades. They kissed them, and pretended to fall in love with them, and then they threw them back into the water, jilted. They rode on top of the big ones like dolphins. They pitched them onto the beach; some of the carp were more than five feet long, and by working together, the children were able to drag them onto the sand. The twins then began making forts and castles with them. We held our mouths.

We might have kept holding our mouths had Larson not sped out of the driveway. We turned to see him go. He drove quickly, but the stop signs slowed him. He had his arm out the window. He spat tobacco onto the road. He had his music on loudly-a local radio channel, country-western, not from the Chicago towers but from those in Kankakee. He turned into the Cat rental facility on the north end of Route 176, went inside, and according to Davis, the manager, rented a small skid steer loader for one half day at a holiday rate of $175. Davis also covered the cost of delivery, which would take place later that afternoon, as there was no demand for skid steers at that time. Repelling open or clandestine bribes is one thing; facilitating the enemy is really something entirely different. We sometimes look at Davis and wonder what Slocum Lake would feel like without him.

Larson stopped off at the Island Foods grocery. He called his wife two times on his cellular phone while he stood, looking uneasy, in the meats and seafood department. He bypassed the local bakery doughnuts and took three boxed Danish rings, the national brand. He brought his items to the counter and had the clerk fill several paper bags. He used coupons. He slid his credit card. He pushed his cart to the truck, dropped the bags in the back, and then returned the cart to the rack by the store entry. We never doubted Larson's goodness. He drove back to the cottage and joined his wife, who was sitting on the porch watching the twins bury each other in fish carcasses.

That night the Larsons barbecued the carp on an open grill and somehow managed to swallow it. Penny served the fillets with a mayonnaise and dill relish. We had not seen Robert purchase the dill. After dinner the kids climbed into their bunk beds, and the Larsons went down to the beach and rearranged the carp the kids had strewn across the sand. Given our distance, we did not know they had organized the fish into a sort of soft bed until, as they had the night before, they lay down to make sustained love.

Words cannot bring clarity to the feelings we had while watching the Larsons make love on top of the carp. We felt very depressed might be about as close as we can get. We left the Larsons' cottage to have meals with our own families. We figured we were back to the drawing board. We figured we had not impacted the children in the right way, and we therefore had failed to alter the Larsons' iron grip on their ownership of Lake Slocum waterfront property. Because of our depression, we had not foreseen Robert Larson's critical error.

Thankfully, we were not so depressed that we did not return the next morning, just after dawn. The twins were again playing in the boat, and Robert was already awake, running the skid steer, scooping large quantities of the carp and shunting them from the waterfront to the back of his property, where he had-apparently before sunrise-dug a massive grave for the fish. It did not strike all of us at the same time, but the image of Larson hoisting the fish and steering them away from our water gave one of us, and then every one of us, a rather brutal jolt.

We called Princess at the Parks and Recreation office to confirm the limit of carp a person could take from Slocum Lake on any single fishing day. Princess told us what we all well knew from the bylaws of the constitutional charter on fish reparation: one hundred carp is the maximum any one licensed person can catch and keep on a given day. We asked nicely if Princess would send someone over to have a look at the load of carp Mr. Robert Larson had taken from our Slocum Lake.

The fine for violating the charter ran $1,000 alone; the fine for each violating fish ran $100 per fish; the fine for not having a license issued by the state of Illinois for taking any fish from the water, $100. Princess herself came over with a clutch of Slocum Lake police officers to hand the Larsons their ticket for $250,000. She explained that the police estimated Larson had extracted no fewer than twenty-five hundred carp from Slocum Lake, and she pointed down into the massive pit. It would be difficult to doubt that estimate, certainly. She continued in explaining that Parks and Recreation was actually, probably, estimating low, and they were willing, also, to give the Larsons a break on the other violations and round off at a quarter of a million dollars, due October first of the current fiscal year. She touched Robert's shoulder and said, We only take money orders for fines that exceed one hundred thousand, Mister Larson, but we know we can trust your personal checks around here. Princess winked.

Robert Larson winced and recoiled from her hand. He attempted to explain that the fish were already dead, but Princess waved him down-irrelevant and subjective. Robert protested a second time. Princess simply extended the ticket. Robert refused to take it. Princess placed it on the ground near his feet. Robert raised his voice. The children came out from the boat to watch. The police officers adjusted their belts and crossed their arms. Princess withdrew. Robert picked up the ticket. He was sweating so completely, the sunlight glinted wildly off his face.

Robert took the ticket to the porch, where he had a brief conversation with Penny. They shook their heads. They retreated inside. Their children-so bright and sensitive-grasped the gravity of the situation and went inside, settled down into Indian-style sitting, and played cards with one another for the duration of the afternoon. The Larsons held protracted, at times heated dialogues inside the cottage. The skid steer simply sat out in the sun. Some of the carp baked in their pit, and still more lapped against the shoreline.

The sun shifted its weight against the east-facing side of the shore. Evening came and went. Night tumbled in. We were pretty drunk by then. Someone had brought tequila. We had a great deal to celebrate. We took a shot every time Robert Larson rubbed his eyes. We breathed very easily when the house went dark. We assumed we would retire early to our families. But then we heard the Larsons slip out of their screen door and head down to the beach again. The minxes! They took each other's clothes off and made love in the sand. They experimented a little bit. The locusts were screaming. The insects were loathsome. The Larsons rolled about for forty minutes, then ran naked back into their cottage. We wondered if we had all seen this, or if the most drunk of us had imagined it. How strange, these Larsons. What was Slocum Lake property to the kind of people who could make love in the face of its certain loss?

How brazen. We'd had someone at our bank evaluate the Larsons' portfolio: there was no way they could afford the fines. We shook our heads. These people from the northern fringe of Wisconsin were very much like our grandparents in so many ways. We knew them, and yet we knew them not at all.

We drank to this. Then we had a few more drinks. We became increasingly easy with one another as the night wore on. We did not return to our homes and families. We kissed a little bit ourselves, touching each other's limbs in the night. We became stupid in lust and mouthed one another. We did not hear Robert Larson leave the cottage. We did not at first hear the skid steer ignition. Sensuality creates a noise that cannot be rapidly punctured, but in time it became clear we were not hearing the thrumming of our bodies but rather Robert and the skid steer shifting gears in the middle of the night.

We cleared our throats and straightened. We had to adjust our eyes. We tapped our watches. Robert Larson was scooping out the grave of dead fish and, it became clear, trundling his scoops back down to the beach, where he was dumping them into his Shamrock 270 diesel. He had launched the Shamrock in the afternoon. It was a detail that meant very little to us while we were drinking. He was working very quickly with the skid steer. No sooner had he dumped a load into the Shamrock than he was racing back up toward the cottage, behind it, to the grave, to collect another scoop. Then back down to the beach and the boat. We tried to divine the meaning of this activity.

We discovered Penny Larson had also left the cottage and gone down to the water. She was in over her waist. She was wearing only a bra. She appeared to be moving the fish closer to the sand. She did not speak. She did not luxuriate. She seemed entirely devoted to the fish, a sort of shepherd, and we were perplexed until Robert emptied the grave and turned his scoop to the shoreline. Then the Larsons' intentions were made horribly clear and vivid to us. As Robert Larson loaded carp into the Shamrock-hoisting all our work and money very high in the air, water pouring from the hinges in the metal scoop, and dumping them with heavy thuds inside of the gunwales-we could see, very plainly, that Robert Larson planned to scuttle his fiscal and moral obligations to Slocum Lake. We were just sick. If the insects were draining us at that point, we were entirely unaware. We held each other.

And in what was surely less than thirty minutes, while we looked on, Robert Larson had filled his boat with every last fish from the grave and our mostly invisible netted cage. The sun was just beginning to illuminate Slocum Lake. The Larsons' boat sat low against the mooring. Robert killed the skid steer engine and hopped out. He walked the dock and stepped into the boat. With Penny's help, he proceeded to snap the canvas top over the entire boat, covering the fish with a sort of tightly fitted pall.

That's when one of us lost it. It was unspeakably hot. Heat like that, even under less demanding circumstances, it's cruel. Half of us were naked or drunk. All of us were slick with sweat. It is not surprising that one of us would break from our cover and rush the Larsons' cottage with a burning poplar branch in his arms.

Perhaps he thought the rest of us would join him. Perhaps the heat had harmed him. Perhaps he could just no longer operate in clandestine rage, as we all were, and let the Larsons prolong our suffering and embarrassment another year. But there he was-the Kubicka kid, we believed-thrusting a burning, limpid poplar branch at the Larsons' kitchen window, yelling the word crimes over and over again at the top of his childish pitch. Try as he might, he could not in the end break through the window with this flaming branch. The limb bent and splayed each time he thrust. But the boy kept at it, jabbing, stepping back a few steps, and charging, jousting, shouting crimes!

It was painful to watch, and we did what we could: we called him away. We tried to flag him down. We implored him to drop the branch and return to us. But Robert Larson ran quickly to apprehend the Kubicka boy. Had Larson been faster, he might have stopped the fire from torching the wooden shingles of the cottage. In that heat, the siding and the roof went up like gasoline. Penny had followed Robert and slipped inside the cottage. She emerged with their beautiful children, groggy, and pointed them down to the beachfront, away from the cottage.

The Larson kids, so precious, walked down toward the dock in silence and did not raise their eyes. Had the cottage not caught fire, the children would probably never have gone down to the water. But it did, and they did, and we owe a great debt to the Kubicka kid, whom we have never since seen. Robert Larson grappled with the lithe Kubicka boy in the grass beside the burning cottage until the boy broke from Robert's grip and fled into the dark glow of dawn.

Robert did not follow. He grabbed the hose, turned on the house spigot, and began dousing the fire before it could race to the other side of the cottage. Penny took down a pickax from the porch. She yanked the burned and burning siding away from the house and spread it across the lawn. She whacked at the flames when they flared up. To watch these two was like watching junior amateur firefighters in earnest judged competition, a sort of marvel of meticulous and urgent care, and all the while their children, those wonderful blond twins, stood in pajamas by the dock, looking upon the smoke rising from the last cottage on our Slocum Lake.

Those beautiful children, dear God, to think of them. So good. What we loved most were their good natures. They never knew mistrust. They never asked questions or doubted strangers. You could tell them to go inside the boat, lie down among the carp, that their mother had instructed you to help them bed down inside the boat, beneath the cover of the boat, and to close their eyes. And they would not doubt you. They would not fuss. They would not fear.

You could sing them a quiet song, hum a melody, and you could touch their fine hair, brush it from their cheeks, over their ears, and they would curl to the feel of your knuckles, and they would smile as their sleep took them back. You don't always know what you are doing in this sort of Slocum Lake midsummer heat, but the Larson kids could just slip beneath the canopy of a boat and never say a word, even as you snapped their covers securely over their heads. Those tender kids, the last thing you'd ever see of them, their hands folded beneath their chins, and that image could just shake you to the core, shatter your soul in a million ways.

And then we receded, and we watched Robert descend to the beach and the dock, and there we held our breath. Penny was scrambling about the inside of the house, working the interior wood paneling and insulation for any trace of smoldering. Robert Larson unmoored the boat, unlashed the tethers from its side, and hopped into the water. From there he pushed on the stern and, straining, moved the heavy, low-riding boat into deeper water. He pushed and built momentum until Slocum Lake was over his neck and nearly in his mouth. Then he let the boat go. In the placid water, it skated silently over our nearly invisible netted cage and into open water. No breeze touched its gentle, steady wake. Out it went.

Robert pulled himself on the dock and watched it go. Then he bent down, dripping, and lifted a rifle to his shoulder. He closed his eye. He aimed and, from his knee, fired two quick, resonant shots. We turned. We saw the boat pitch. It lurched, dropped, then plunged into the depths of Slocum Lake with enormous emissions of escaping air, like the blowing of cattle gas.

Then silence. Just like that. The hot Slocum Lake water was still. Our carp were gone, returned to the gunk of our lake bottom, and with them all our efforts to fleece and harry the Larsons. We felt some remorse. We do not like to devastate children, after all. But the sun was coming up. It shone on the Larsons' cottage. We waited. We watched Robert Larson walk inside, shower, and then sit down on the cottage's fine wood floor beside his wife. They talked as the sun rose. Penny had poured coffee. They wiped their eyes and their foreheads. They studied the fire damage to their interior wall. It was minor. They smiled and shook their heads. Then, as if pricked, Penny stuck up her head. We could see in her eyes the sudden flaming of awareness. She opened her mouth and ran to the empty bunk beds. She returned to Robert. She trembled. She took his shoulder. They began calling out the children's names. They searched the cottage. They moved outside to search the property. They yelled out. They shouted. They screamed in ways we could not have predicted. They ran to the water. They shielded their eyes from the sun in searching. Robert waded in several steps, and then he turned around to look at Penny. His face, we could see, was rent. He yelled to the skies above us all for states around. He entered and left our chests. We know the Larsons, yes. We have known them for years. Now we know they know loss. Now we know they know us.

DENNY FINAFRIGGINALLY NOTICED that the blonde serving us drinks and Cajun fries at Fiddlesticks was missing a finger, the finger that traditionally bears a wedding ring.

It was an Irish pub in the Village, always busy as hell for happy hour. But it was three in the afternoon, a time for nonworking drunks mostly, the dour hour. I flicked a pistachio down and around the horseshoe-shaped bar and it silently disappeared. If people still smoked in bars (like they should), it would've pinged off a metal ashtray.

"How should I know? Maybe she's real commitment-phobic."

"But don't you want to know?" He implored with both hands, shaking those nicely manicured fingernails in my face on the you. And he always said shit like that with a guilt-provoking inflection because you didn't agree with what he wanted right then and there.

"I don't. But I will ask anyway. By the way, your cuticles are lovely in this light."

I knew he wouldn't ask. That's the Denny way. If Denny wants an answer, he asks somebody to get it for him. If he wants some business done, he gets a subordinate to handle it. And everybody's a subordinate in Denny's world. He's very successful, owns his own (big) contracting firm, but he's gotten everywhere by having others provide for him. He was like that even in high school. And even before, I'd hazard. Hell, as an infant he probably outsourced for tit milk.

So when the defingered blonde came by, I said, "My friend here is wondering what happened to your finger."

Denny was shooting me a look, quick-tilted head and all, but she didn't mind. You can tell sometimes when someone's the type who's going to be bothered by any little thing or nothing in the world, and she was the latter. And quite from being commitment-phobic, her story was that she had been married all of a week and had been tending bar when her eye caught a cobweb on some ornamental woodwork above the shelves of booze. She jumped up to "swish" the cobweb away, the ring caught on the woodwork, and when she came down to the ground, the finger was literally ripped from her hand. Denny winced. I followed suit with a wince of my own-a courtesy wince. She provided more graphic details: doctors had cut her open at the hip-she peeled back enough of her jeans to show us the scar-and had sewn the severed digit up inside her, hoping to make it more amenable to a bid for future reattachment. Alas…

"Did you take it as a sign," Denny asked, "that you shouldn't have gotten married?"

"No, but it put me off cobwebs like forever."

She went to serve others, leaving us to each other, to it.

First he made a superficial inquiry about if things were working out for me on the West Coast, work- and women-wise; and then he made an equally superficial dig about my appearance-my hair had gotten long and hippy-straight and I was long in the beard, too-linking it rather adeptly with that initial inquiry, and how nice it must be that things were so laid back out there in California that I could just let myself go like this. I caught my reflection in the mirror behind; maybe he had a point: I kind of looked like I was living on a Brussels sprouts commune or something. And then it all got to being about him again.

"Things are good here," he said, "you'll be happy to hear."

"I'm overjoyed. What did you want to talk about?"

Denny jacked a smile onto his face and speared the Jim Beam-infused cherry at the bottom of his manhattan with a swizzle stick. When he got it to the glass rim, he grabbed it by the stem and dangled it in front of his mouth forever. It had to be big, and probably dirty. We hadn't sat together for a good three years. We'd been friends of sorts until I did a favor for him to keep him out of jail. Subsequently, he got leery of our association. Denny could deal with the blood on his hands as long as he didn't have a daily reminder of it. Shit, it wasn't all that much blood. And it wasn't even like someone had been killed. That being said, I certainly didn't mourn the loss of our friendship. I'd mainlined enough Dr. Phil while unemployed to recognize the toxic people in my life, and when this bastard broke wind, the room smelled of almonds and burned Legos. He finally popped the cherry, chewed, and swallowed. I'd only be guessing if I told you it tasted like anything to him.

He said, "I wonder where she keeps her ring now."

"Denny…"

"There's this guy…"

And if Denny wants some bit of dirty business done, he gets me, Brian Rehill.

"Christ, Den. Any time you begin a sentence, 'There's this guy.' Christ on a hand truck."

"I have no right to ask. I owe you. I remember."

He owed me. He remembered. California must be doing wonders for my disposition, because even that didn't get me worked up. And even though I suspected Denny had quietly put a few bad words in for me here and there, after I did him his little favor, putting the kibosh on jobs I should've gotten, including a couple of big sheetrocking contracts that would've put me into a whole other tax bracket, I didn't care now. This pariah's subsequent relocation westward turned out to be the best move I'd ever made. And L.A., much to the bemusement of my condescending New Yorker mentality, turned out to be paradise-professionally, romantically, and even, God help me, spiritually (I hadn't done anything I was ashamed of in nearly two years). I was even thinking about buying my first house, although I still needed to somehow come up with a big chunk for a down payment. Somehow…

I scanned the practically empty bar. No one at the other side was looking past their standard three-foot beer stare.

"I need to pat you down. Don't give me that look. I don't hear from you for two years, and six minutes into my Seven and Seven, 'There's this guy.' Again."

He clenched the bar rail, and I moved a hand around his body, quickly, efficiently. "Okay. Finish your fries and let's go for a stroll."

We walked out on Greenwich and headed east to Sixth, passing a bunch of specialty shops, an accessories store with Tibetan fur hats in its window, a mystery-book store, and a novelty shop selling the kinds of cheap, ironic gifts no one ever really needs, bobble-headed Jesus and Dick Cheney dolls. Denny did most of the talking.

There's this guy, it turns out, who happens to be the soon-to-be ex-husband of Denny's girlfriend-slash-administrative assistant. They separated over a year ago, but he won't stop calling, following her, showing up at her job (Denny's shop in Brooklyn), and threatening her if she doesn't take him back. He broke into her apartment a month ago, smacked her around, and she had gotten a restraining order. And things were getting even crazier now that he'd received his walking papers. Threats against her, Denny, and even himself-the ole hat trick of marital rage.

It was February in the city. I shivered as we walked.

"I know. Scary shit, right?"

"It's freaking freezing, Denny."

"Jesus, gone two years and you've already lost your cold-bloodedness. Is that a word?"

"Have somebody look it up for you."

We stopped on the next corner, in front of the Jefferson Market Garden, which had been the site of a women's prison in the 1930s. It was seasonal, and there was a big padlock and chain on the wrought iron gates. Everything's dead now, thank you, come again!

The wind was in our face, so we turned back the way we came, passing a graffiti-blighted playground I had not noticed on the first pass because of a fleeting redhead. I pointed out my car rental, and we stood next to it.

Denny said, "You know how these things go, Brian. If someone doesn't…"

"Intervene."

"You see it on the news all the time. The victim had a restraining order against her deranged husband. He kills her, himself… et cetera."

"I hate suicidal-homicidal guys the most. Make up your mind."

He didn't so much as crack a smile. Despite present circumstances, though, that was more his nature than situational. Denny never had much of a sense of humor. Cheap bastards rarely do. They don't give it up to charities, they cut corners on jobs at the customer's expense, if you sit with them during dinner and have only a drink, they expect you to pay for half of their shell steak and garlic mashed potatoes, and they don't yuck it up, cheap bastards, as if chuckles were something to be hoarded. Hell, ten seconds ago he wouldn't even let go of a second et cetera.

"This guy-he found Jesus last year too. But threatening your estranged wife, breaking into her place and smacking her around, this stuff Jesus doesn't object to."

"He's very understanding that way. That's why no one else has won the title."

"He left messages for her at work, disguising his voice. Saying Valentine's Day is coming up and he's got a big surprise for her. He's ruining our lives."

"Well, may I query, how does your wife feel about all this?"

He bristled. "I don't need you judging me. This girl-she fills me up. She makes my heart swell. It swells, just like a big red-"

"Okay, okay. In an ideal world, what kind of restraint would you put on the guy?"

"A talking-to won't work. I'm sure of that. He's proven that. He's way past…"

"So, we're talking about a permanent restraint."

His eyes went away from mine.

"Whatever you deem… most permanent."

He peered into my Avis midsize. He probably didn't want to look in my eyes-looking into mine might be like looking into his own soul, or lack thereof. And I must admit I'm kind of stunned that this is Denny's lump-sum estimate of me, that I am employable for such a grave task, capable of such a deed-past deeds notwithstanding. I'm slightly less stunned, however, by my agreeing to it-future deeds, specifically the one to the Santa Barbara ranch with the FOR SALE sign on its front lawn and fig tree in the backyard, coming to mind.

He was done looking into the front seat and moved on to some back-seat gazing.

"Are you gonna be guessing the contents of my trunk soon? Maybe win a kewpie doll or big comb?"

"Sorry. You got Wet Ones on the back seat? My hands are sticky from the ketchup."

"It's empty."

I was hoping he would beg off when I asked, "Look, I'm going in for another round. And to stare longingly at that nine-finger wonder. You want another?" I lit up a cigarette.

"I ought to head home."

"This isn't a favor, Denny. You and I are done with favors. Understand?"

"You're… like a subcontractor."

"Yeah, like I'm doing some facade restoration work for you. Or sheetrocking."

"What does a facade restoration cost these days?"

I gave him my estimate. He flinched but agreed. Rather too easily. I figured that would come back to haunt me, having seen firsthand the way Denny treats his subcontractors.

Details.

"He lives in Long Island City, in his mother's house, alone. She died last year and he moved in. There's a key. In Sucrete's purse. She won't even know it's gone."

"Just tell me his name and where he works and lives. And stay away from the girl-for now, and until things are done. I know she works for you, but don't be messing around with her in public. Close your office door and nail her on your desk blotter if you have to."

His eyes narrowed.

"Don't get crude. I love her. She fills my heart big like a…"

"Bite me. You want the thing done with savoir-faire, or do you want the thing done?"

He looked away again.

"I want the thing done."

We were quiet for a bit.

"Your girlfriend's name is Sucrete, huh?"

"What of it?"

"Nothing."

We shook on something. And he left. I unlocked the door to the car and removed the container of hand wipes. It didn't feel like he had transferred any stickiness to me on the shake, ketchupy and/or ethical, but just in case, I took one out, sniffed at the fresh lemony scent, and sighed. Whatever I deemed.

It's a type of fig, Sucrete is.

And his name was Joe.

MY DAUGHTER IS a private eye.

You see? It even sounds ridiculous. She follows people. She asks the computer about them as though it were a temple fortuneteller. She pulls out their secrets like dirt-covered roots to hand to the people who hire her. What is private about that? And always involved with criminals, with police! My only good luck, she is not a real police officer, like her best friend Kee Miao-Li. Whenever I see Miao-Li's mother, we give each other sympathy, though I give her the greater amount because her daughter's choice of profession is even more unacceptable than mine.

Although her daughter, at least, is engaged to be married, to a boy of good family, in Chinatown for three generations.

Mine is not.

Not that I believe marriage is the answer to all a woman's problems. I am not a fool, no matter what my daughter thinks. Marriage, if handled badly, can be a source of great distress. This has been the case for Tan Li-Li, a mahjong player of my own age-a fact she tries to hide behind black hair dye and crimson lipstick. I would not call Tan Li-Li "friend," although she is among the women I regularly meet with under the trees in the park or at the folding tables of the senior center. It is not easy to be the friend of a woman who eats so much bitterness. Difficulties make many people more kind than formerly; but some are like Tan Li-Li, thinking they can rid themselves of troubles by giving them to others. Tan Li-Li's gloom stems from marriage, though not her own. She is a widow, and as she will be the first to tell you, a widow's lot is sad, to be always alone. I am also a widow, and although I miss my husband, gone these many years, I do not find myself alone. Perhaps that is because I have five children and five grandchildren, all nearby. My daughter, in fact, though her profession is a disgrace, is filial in this: she still lives with me in the family apartment. But Tan Li-Li has only one son, and one grandson, and the marriage that is so bitter for her is her son's.

My daughter, who follows American ways, knows Tan Li-Li and how difficult she can be. She asks me, "Why do you play with her, Ma? When she's there, why don't you sit at another table or something?" If she had a true Chinese understanding, of course she would never say such things. Tan Li-Li was brought into our mahjong group by Feng Guo-Ha, with whom she shared a village childhood in China. Even a poor village has its social order. The poorest can be the worst: the smaller the treasure at the top of the staircase, the more fierce the battle on the steps. The Tans were a merchant family, while the Fengs labored in the fields. Feng Guo-Ha, a small, shy woman, tells us that Tan Li-Li was sour even as a child: and Tan Li-Li treats Feng Guo-Ha imperiously to this day. One thing that galls Tan Li-Li is the contrast between their sons. Feng Guo-Ha's son, like his mother, is friendly and eager to please. He treats his mother well, living nearby, taking her shopping and to the doctor. Often she looks after her granddaughter while her son and his wife are at work. Tan Li-Li's son, in contrast, has for four years ("Such an unlucky number!" Tan Li-Li sighs) been living on the other side of the world, in Beijing, and raising her grandson there.

Feng Guo-Ha cannot enjoy being criticized and given orders by Tan Li-Li: nevertheless, loyalty to childhood friends is never wrong, no matter their behavior, and she remains loyal. Loyalty to friends from adulthood is also virtuous. Feng Guo-Ha and I sewed together in the garment factory for many years, when our children were young. She's my friend, and I won't abandon her to Tan Li-Li's sneering voice.

You can understand, however, what a surprise it was for me when that voice, which I rarely hear beyond the mahjong table, issued from the red telephone in my own kitchen.

"Chin Yong-Yun," Tan Li-Li said decisively, as though my name were something I didn't know and would be grateful to be told. "I hope you are well. I am looking for your daughter."

I recovered myself and answered calmly, "Quite well, thank you, Tan Li-Li." Politeness suggested I inquire after her health also before reaching the substance of our conversation, but she had not allowed me that courtesy. "I'm sorry, but my daughter is not at home."

"She is not in her office either. How can I speak to her?"

"If you've left a message, as I'm sure you have, she will no doubt call you as soon as she is able." Unless I spoke to her first myself. Perhaps I could discourage her from plunging into the cloud of bitterness that surrounds Tan Li-Li.

"That is not soon enough. Our matter is urgent."

"Our matter?"

"It concerns my son. As you know, he is visiting me here."

I could not help but know. As if it were not enough to see Tan Li-Li daily parading her three-year-old grandson in the park-grasping the child's hand so firmly I feared it would grow misshapen-she also had spoken of nothing but this impending visit for weeks before Tan Xiao-Du and his son arrived from Beijing. I had expected the visit to lighten her humor, especially since her daughter-in-law had remained in China, but her sourness did not abate. Probably I had been foolish. I had expected pleasure and pride to mark her reactions to many events involving her son: his posting to an important position in China with his American firm, his marriage to a kind and beautiful Beijinger, the birth of their son. Each time, however, Tan Li-Li's reaction had been only darkness. Of his return to the homeland: "How can he leave me here to grow old alone?" Of his marriage: "Now he will never come home!" Of his child: "My only grandson, growing up so far from me!" Xiao-Du had offered to bring his mother to Beijing as often as she wanted, even to settle her there for as long as he stayed. But still, around the mahjong table we heard only complaint and recrimination.

"I'm sorry, Tan Li-Li," I said. "I cannot-"

"There, you see?" Tan Li-Li interrupted with a voice of vinegared triumph. I started to ask, "See what?" but she wasn't speaking to me. "I told you, Xiao-Du, that calling Chin Yong-Yun was useless."

I did not want my daughter involved with Tan Li-Li's endless problems, but this insult was unacceptable. Before I could properly respond, however, a man's voice came into my ear.

"Chin Yong-Yun, I hope you and your family are well. This is Tan Xiao-Du."

"Tan Xiao-Du, I and my family are quite well, thank you. I hope your family is also." The son, teaching the mother courtesy. His Cantonese was good, also. I'm sure his skill didn't make his mother grateful for her luck, although it should have. Many American-born children are poor in Cantonese. My children all speak well, of course. They are talented in languages. I'm sure my choice not to learn English, which made it necessary for them to speak Cantonese at home, played only a very small part.

"I'm sorry my daughter is not available," I told Tan Xiao-Du, "but her services are much in demand, you understand."

"Yes, of course. But this is a very important matter. Isn't there any way we can contact her?" I was reluctant to share my daughter's cell phone number with the Tans, but I couldn't help hearing Xiao-Du's strained tones of distress. Especially when he announced, "It's my son. My son has been kidnapped."

I was briefly speechless, hearing this news. The despair in Xiao-Du's voice, and the situation's dire nature, changed my thinking. It did not, however, change the humor of his mother. "Never mind," I heard her sneer behind him. "I told you, there is only one solution. You will give them whatever they want and all will be well. Do as I say!"

"No!" Xiao-Du responded desperately. "Mother, I can't!"

"Foolish boy! You will not-"

"There must-"

"You are-"

"Come speak to me," I said loudly, into his ear.

"What? I'm sorry, Chin Yong-Yun, what did you say?" I could hear the son shushing the mother as he waited for my response.

"I often work with my daughter on her cases." I am not the sort of person to be unscrupulous with the truth, but circumstances were pressing. "I will collect your evidence, and brief it to her when she is available." My daughter thinks I never listen when she talks about her work. If that were so, would I know the words of her profession?

"Chin Yong-Yun-I don't think-"

"Come, you must hurry if your child is in danger." I hung up the phone. I find this often helps people make decisions.

KRATCH WAS DEAD.

They ran forty thousand volts through him in the stone mansion called Rahway State Prison with eight witnesses in attendance to watch him strain against the straps and smoke until his heart had stopped and his mind quit functioning.

An autopsy had opened his body to visual inspection and all his parts had been laid out on a table, probed and pored over, then slopped back in the assorted cavities and sewn shut with large economical stitches.

One old aunt, his mother's sister, came forth to claim the remains, and, with what little she had, treated him to a funeral. Kratch had left a fortune but it was tied up, and Auntie was on his mother's side of the family, and poor-Dad had married a succession of showgirls, and Kratch's mom had been the only one to produce an heir.

Whether hoping for a bequest or out of a sense of decency her nephew hadn't inherited, the old girl sat beside the coffin for two days and two nights, moving only to replace the candles when they burned down. Her next-door neighbor brought her the occasional plate of food, crying softly because nobody else had come to this wake.

Just before the hearse arrived, a small man carrying a camera entered the room, smiled at the old lady, offered his condolences, and asked if he could take a picture of the infamous departed.

There was no objection.

Quietly he moved around the inexpensive wooden coffin, snapped four shots with a 35 mm Nikon, thanked Auntie, and left. The next day the news service carried a sharp, clear photo of the notorious Grant Kratch, even to the stitches where they had slid his scalp back after taking off the top of his head on the autopsy table.

No doubt about it.

Kratch was dead.

The serial killer who had sent at least thirty-seven sexually defiled young women to early graves was nothing more than a compost pile himself now.

It had been a pleasure to nail that bastard. I had wanted to kill him when I found him, but the chance that he might give up information during interrogation that would bring some peace of mind to dozens of loved ones out there made me restrain myself.

I knew it was a risk-he was a rich kid who had inherited enough loot to bribe his way out of about anything-but I figured the papers would play up the horror show of the bodies buried on his Long Island estate and keep corruption at bay.

So I'd dragged him into the Fourth Precinct station, let the cops have him, then sat through a trial where he got the death penalty, sweated out the appeal lest some softhearted judge drop it to a life sentence, then was a witness to his smoldering contortions in the big oaken hot seat.

Oh, Kratch was dead all right.

Then what was he doing on a sunny spring afternoon, getting into a taxicab outside the Eastern terminal at LaGuardia Airport?

Damn. I felt like I was in an acid dropper's kaleidoscope-it came fast so fast, no warning-just a slow turn of the head and there he was, thirty feet away, a big man in a Brooks Brothers suit with a craggily handsome face whose perversity exposed itself only in his eyes, and the hate wrenched at my stomach and I could taste the bitterness of vomit. I had my hand on the butt of the.45 and almost yanked it out of the jacket when my reflexes caught hold and froze me to the spot.

Those same reflexes kept me out of his line of sight while my mind detailed every inch of him. He wasn't trying to hide. He wasn't doing a damn thing except standing there waiting for a taxi to pick him up. When one came, he told the cabbie to take him to the Commodore and the voice he spoke in was Kratch's voice.

And Kratch was a long time dead.

I flagged down the next cab and told the driver to take me to the Commodore, and gave him the route I wanted. All he had to do was look at my face and he knew something was hot and leaned into the job. I was forty-five seconds behind Kratch at the terminal, but I was waiting in the Commodore lobby a full five minutes before he came in.

At the desk he said his name was Grossman and they put him on the sixth floor. I got to the elevator bank before he did, went up to the sixth, and waited out of sight until he got out and walked away. When he'd gone in his room, I eased past it and noted the number-620.

Downstairs I asked for something on the sixth, got 601, then went up to my room and sat down to try to put a wild fifty minutes into focus.

Eric Barnes is the author of the novel Shimmer (2009), an IndieNext pick that is a dark and sometimes comic novel about a person who's built a company based entirely on a lie. He also has published short stories in Raritan, Washington Square Review, North Atlantic Review, Tampa Review, and a number of other journals. He has been a reporter, editor, and publisher in Connecticut, New York, and now Memphis. Years ago he drove a forklift in Tacoma, Washington, and then in Kenai, Alaska, worked construction on Puget Sound, and froze fish in a warehouse outside Anchorage. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the publisher of three newspapers covering business and politics in Memphis and Nashville.

▪ I wrote the first version of "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" a number of years ago, as part of a series of stories about Tacoma, where I grew up, and four friends who lived there. They are all very dark stories, and every time I reread one, I like them even more, yet am also slightly more disturbed that I was ever able to write them in the first place.

Lawrence Block has been doing this long enough to have collected lifetime achievement awards from Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the (U.K.) Crime Writers Association. He'll be publishing two books in 2011, A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.

▪ I'd written a couple of short stories about a young woman who picked up men for sex, went home with them, had a fine time in bed with them, and capped it off by killing them. I couldn't get her out of my head, and found myself wondering why she was doing this, and how she got this way, and where she was going with it. "Clean Slate" was the result.

Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film.

Both Collins and Mickey Spillane (who died in 2006) received the Private Eye Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Eye.

▪ Mickey Spillane said to his wife, Jane, just days before his passing, "After I'm gone, there'll be a treasure hunt around here-give everything you find to Max. He'll know what to do." Mickey was the hero of my adolescence, and the direct inspiration for my career. So it's hard for me to think of a greater honor.

Jane, my wife, Barb, and I went through the voluminous files in Mickey's three offices in his South Carolina home. Among the treasures discovered were half-a-dozen incomplete Hammer novels-all running 100 manuscript pages or more-and three of these (thus far) have appeared: The Goliath Bone, The Big Ban g, and Kiss Her Goodbye. We also discovered a number of shorter fragments that I felt would be better served as short stories.

"A Long Time Dead" was one of the most interesting of those fragments, and one that clearly appeared to be intended as a short story, not a novel. For the Spillane fan/scholar, this is particularly exciting, because Mickey published only a handful of Mike Hammer short stories in his lifetime. David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil's Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I'm Running?, published in March 2010 ("a rich, hard-hitting epic"- Publishers Weekly, starred review). Corbett's short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and his story "Pretty Little Parasite" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. For more, go to www.davidcorbett.com.

▪ When Luis was in San Francisco being feted because The Hummingbird's Daughter had been chosen for the One City One Book distinction, we met through a mutual friend, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, discovered we also had a mutual friend in John Connolly, and just basically hit it off. Then Luis, whose tastes are nothing if not eclectic, talked about collaborating on something in the genre realm, using his exhaustive knowledge of the border and Mexican arcana and my instincts for straight-ahead train-wreck plotting. It sounded like fun, but our other obligations kept us from doing anything but talking about it until Bobby Byrd, the editor of Lone Star Noir, approached Luis for a story and he (Luis) decided to throw me a bone. He had the main character, Chester Richard, already in mind, as well as the Cajun/zydeco musical background, the Port Arthur locale, and a few other impressionistic details. I added a few things of my own, we tossed a few other ideas back and forth, and then we agreed on a general story idea. I took first whack, Luis batted second, I did some minor cleanup, and we sent it on. It turned out to be strangely hassle-free, since Luis is both wildly imaginative and incredibly easy to work with.

Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of twelve novels and more than one hundred short stories. His latest novel, Deadly Cove, was published in July 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 and edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

▪ As a former newspaper reporter, I had scores of opportunities to go with police officers on ride-alongs, where I sat next to them in the front seat of police cruisers and got a firsthand look at "serving and protecting" the general public. Among the things I learned: ride-alongs at night are more productive; always take an anti-motion-sickness pill before leaving the station (cops are aggressive when it comes to braking and accelerating); and when responding at high speed with lights on and sirens racing, just relax-everything is out of your hands.

There are some slow evening shifts when the most important decision is what kind of muffin to buy, and there are other nights when you're responding to an "officer needs assistance" call, barreling down a two-lane road, going one hundred miles an hour.

And you learn other things as well: that during night ride-alongs, when the majority of people are home and asleep, there's a whole different breed of people who are out and about in one's community-the lonely, the drinkers, and the troublemakers. A mixture that often leads to arrests and crime stories. In "Ride-Along," I decided to make the troublemakers the ones inside the police cruiser, and not outside. It was a fun story to write, and I'm honored to have it appear in this anthology.

Loren D. Estleman's first novel was published in 1976. Since that time he has published sixty-five books, including mainstream and historical novels and the Amos Walker series, which debuted in 1980. In 2002 his alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, honored him with a doctorate in humane letters. He lives in Michigan with his wife, the author Deborah Morgan. Infernal Angels, the twenty-first Amos Walker novel, was released this past summer.

▪ When Tyrus Books asked me to compose a new story for Amos Waker: The Complete Story Collection, I started with the title "Sometimes a Hyena." This was nothing new; most of my ideas start with a title, although years may pass before I come up with a story to stick on the end of it. In this case, a joke I'd heard in several versions led to speculation over how one news story can lead to another, and I began writing with no clear idea where I was going. Of course, the real mystery is, who knows what makes a joke work?

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three books of poems (Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables) and a book of nonfiction (Great with Child). She's won a Pushcart Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. Tom Franklin is the author of one collection of short stories (Poachers) and three novels (Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter). He has won an Edgar and a Guggenheim. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford, Mississippi, and teach in the MFA program at Ole Miss. Together they have collaborated on short stories and short people (Anna Claire, nine, Thomas, five, and Nolan, three weeks).

▪ The seeds of "What His Hands Had Been Waiting For" began years ago, when Tommy wrote a bad story about zombies chomping through an apocalyptic wasteland and, thankfully, put it in a drawer. Later, he and Beth Ann were asked to contribute a story to an anthology of Mississippi blues tales. Feeling uninspired, he went to his drawer of failed attempts but couldn't make much happen, though on rereading the zombie story he realized it had some potential. Tommy gave the story to Beth Ann to see if she could help resurrect it. She got rid of the zombies and set about researching the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, figuring that sometimes what really happened with real live humans is much wilder than anything they could make up for zombies to do. They had so much fun writing this story together that now they are using it as the basis of an as-yet-untitled novel.

Ernest J. Finney is a native Californian and a sympathetic, though often amused and sometimes outraged, observer of daily life within that state. California figures large in all his fiction. His four novels take place in the San Francisco Bay area, the Sierra, and the San Joaquin Valley. His short fiction appears often in literary journals and anthologies, including the O. Henry Prize Stories, in which his story "Peacocks" was a first-prize winner. Each of his two story collections received a California Book Award. His third collection, Sequoia Gardens: California Stories was published in February 2011. Finney lives and writes on Pliocene Ridge in Sierra County, California.

▪ "A Crime of Opportunity" began with a platter of General Tso's chicken in a restaurant on Clement Street in San Francisco and a conversation about a novice public defender known as the Funeral Director by a host of unfortunate felons hoping for a life sentence but anticipating death row. Delilah emerged full-grown by the end of the meal. Renée was inspired by one of my mothers-in-law, who had a lot to say about life lessons.

Ed Gorman has published more than twenty mystery and suspense novels and seven collections of short stories. Over the years he's won a Shamus, twice been nominated for the Edgar, won an Anthony, and been short-listed for a Silver Dagger. Two of his books have been filmed, one as a low-budget feature and one as a TV movie. Kirkus Reviews called him "one of the most original crime writers around," while the San Francisco Examiner noted that "Gorman has a wonderful writing style that allows him to say things of substance in an entertaining way." Presently he writes the Dev Conrad series, dark political thrillers, and the Sam McCain books, which have followed the life of a young attorney from the late fifties up into the seventies.

▪ "Flying Solo" is the result of sitting in chemo rooms for the past nine years dealing with my multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. You buy as much time as you can. I've been very, very lucky so far. I'd been noticing a sad-eyed nurse for several visits. I'd never dealt with her, but one day she gave me my IVs and I noticed a bruise on her cheek. This day she looked forlorn. She told me she was tired, that she'd moved into an apartment with her two kids late the night before. I assumed she was a battered wife. You hear and see a lot in chemo rooms-usually nothing soap operatic (the rooms I've been in are generally friendly places with a lot of smiling faces)-but every once in a while a mask will slip and you get a glimpse of cancer turmoil. Of fear. And not only of cancer but of personal lives that the disease has only made more difficult. Couples divorcing following a cancer diagnosis is not unheard-of. All this caused me to drag out my nickel notebook one day and start taking notes about a mismatched pair of old cancer patients who decided they'd spend whatever time they had left taking care of the nurses and patients in the chemo room. And I still prefer James Garner.

James Grady is the author of Six Days of the Condor, a dozen more novels, and as many short stories, which often appear in "Best of" collections. He's covered politics, crime, spies, and terrorists as a journalist since Watergate, written for TV and the movies, been awarded France's Grand Prix de Roman Noir, Italy's Raymond Chandler Award, Japan's Baku-Misu literature award, and been nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar. London's Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of "fifty crime writers to read before you die."

▪ "Destiny City" let me shed light on the complex mysteries of terrorism and the often messy means we use to fight it. To make sure I got the story as right as writing can, I worked with our good guys and with terrorists-an interesting literary journalism dance. I also wanted to show readers snapshots of America they might not glimpse out the windows of their moving cars, but more than anything, I wanted to bring to life characters-heroes, villains, victims-who, like all of us, navigate through a fog of power politics and personal dreams.

Chris F. Holm was born in Syracuse, New York, the grandson of a cop who passed along his passion for crime fiction. He wrote his first story at the age of six. It got him sent to the principal's office. Since then his work has fared better, appearing in such publications as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Needle magazine, Beat to a Pulp, and Thuglit. He's been a Derringer Award finalist and a Spinetingler Award winner, and he's also written a novel or two, which he'd likely show you if you asked him nice.

▪ I'm not sure where the idea for "The Hitter" came from, but I remember precisely when it arrived. It was late one Sunday night in April of 2010, and I was lying in bed, drifting off to sleep. As my mind wandered, a scene ran through my head. A city square in some nameless banana republic. A teeming crowd, cheering on a petty despot. And above them all, watching through a gun sight, an assassin. Truth be told, I didn't think much of it until that assassin pulled the trigger-three pounds' pressure, no more, no less-and I realized that the petty despot wasn't the target. Once that happened, any pretense of a good night's sleep evaporated, and I leapt from bed, running to my computer to get down everything I could remember before it faded in the way that dreams do. See, a political assassination is straightforward, uncomplicated-a matter of money or of zealotry, nothing more. But my hitter's motives were of a subtler sort, and I knew that, much as I'd like never to meet him, I wanted to know what made him tick.

Three weeks later, the story was written. I thought it too long for most markets, but Steve Weddle, editor of the then not-yet-published Needle magazine, assured me that Needle was not your average market. Turns out Steve was right-which seems fitting, since Jake is hardly your average hitman.

Harry Hunsicker is the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of three novels, crime thrillers about a Dallas private investigator with the unfortunate name of Lee Henry Oswald. In 2006 his debut novel, Still River, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America, and in 2010 his short story "Iced" was nominated for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. Hunsicker lives in Dallas, where, when not working on a book, he is a commercial real estate appraiser and an occasional speaker on creative writing.

▪ "West of Nowhere" came to me in the form of an opening line about a man so inept his friends called him Danny the Dumb-ass. From there I imagined a small crew of robbers, each damaged and ill-functioning in his or her own special way. I placed them in Central Texas, a region where I spent a great deal of time as a child and young adult. For some reason, the relationship between these three lifelong friends solidified itself in my mind early on, and the story grew of its own volition.

Richard Lange is the author of the short story collection Dead Boys and the novel This Wicked World. His stories have appeared in the Sun, the Iowa Review, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly's Fiction for Kindle series. He was the 2008 recipient of the Rosen-thal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. He is currently working on a novel and another collection of stories.

▪ Children get shot in Los Angeles. It's a fact. Well, children get shot everywhere, but I live in L.A. and write about the city, so it's our dead children I was thinking of when I wrote "Baby Killer." One child in particular, actually, a four-year-old boy who happened to be walking down the street with his sister one afternoon when the local gangsters opened fire on a passing car. A stray bullet hit the boy in the chest, killing him.

People process tragedies like this in different ways. I'm a writer, so I write. And I resurrected a dead woman to tell this story. Blanca was a character from a failed novel, long laid to rest. I brought her back to life and started her talking, and little by little the tale came out. As with all of my stories, I wasn't sure where it was going until it got there. When it did, I wished it had ended a little better for Blanca. But it didn't. I also wish that little boy had never died, but he did. I hate this goddamn world sometimes, I really do.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and twenty short story collections, numerous essays and articles, and scripts. He has edited or coedited more than thirty anthologies. His work has been filmed, turned into comics, and performed on the stage. His story "Bubba Hotep" was turned into a cult film. He has received numerous awards for his work, among them the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Herodotus Award for Historical Fiction, the Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement in the field of comics, fantasy, and science fiction. He has had two New York Times Notable Books. A martial artist for forty-nine years, he is the founder of Lansdale's Shen Chuan, Martial Science, has been inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame four times, and owns a martial arts school in Nacogdoches, Texas. He teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he is writer in residence. Currently he is helping produce the low-budget film Christmas with the Dead, based on his story of the same name.

▪ I was born in Gladewater, Texas, and my first memory is of a house on a hill overlooking a honky-tonk, a highway, and a drive-in theater. My mother and I watched the drive-in from the windows of our house, and she told me what characters were saying. From then on I was hooked on storytelling and have often written about drive-ins and honky-tonks and the people who kept them in business. I began to learn boxing and wrestling from my father at an early age; he was forty-two years old when I was born. He could neither read nor write, but like my mother, who could, he was a great storyteller. He rode the rails during the Great Depression from one carnival to the next, where he wrestled or boxed for money. My mother encouraged my love for writing, my father my love for all manner of martial arts. I still practice them both. On my way to becoming a writer I've been an aluminum chair worker, farmer, field hand, bodyguard of sorts, and a janitor. I like writing and martial arts best. Follow me on Twitter. My handle is joelansdale.

Charles McCarry, born in 1930 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestsellers, The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1975). He is the author of nine other novels, translated into more than thirty languages, and the author, coauthor, or editor of nine nonfiction books, in addition to short stories, poems, and about a million words of journalism in leading American and foreign magazines. As a young man he drafted speeches for a president, a presidential candidate, and other politicians. During the early Cold War, he spent an uninterrupted decade abroad as a CIA agent under deep cover. Later on he was the editor in charge of freelance operations at National Geographic and wrote the magazine's official history for its one hundredth anniversary in 1988. He and his wife, Nancy, married since 1953, live in south Florida in winter and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in summer.

▪ "The End of the String" is autobiographical in the sense that it closely reflects the atmosphere and, to a degree, the reality of some of the things I experienced as a secret agent fifty-odd years ago in Africa. As is true of most works of fiction, parts of this story are invented and parts of it are drawn from vivid memory. I knew places like Ndala and made friends with men like Benjamin, the leading character in this tale, and lived through episodes that were not so very different from the ones in this story. But there is no parallel Ndala or real Benjamin. They are, by design, different enough from the originals to give away no secrets. Even for writers who never took an oath of secrecy, fiction is, after all, what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.

Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners in upstate New York. His collection of linked stories, Hart's Grove, was published in June 2010, and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Missouri Review, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, CutBank, and South Carolina Review.

▪ For a writer, the blessing of rejection is the opportunity it affords the rejected story to grow and develop. "Diamond Alley" was afforded ample opportunity. One of my earliest stories, it began as a simple vignette about a teenaged peeping Tom and the Voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, but it underwent some serious evolution after that humble beginning. Over the years the characters and lore of the small, fictional town of Hart's Grove began to take shape and take over, insinuating themselves into the story from the roots up. "Diamond Alley" probably grew most and developed best, however, the day I decided to shift the narration to the first-person-plural point of view; then, instead of a man remembering a murder that had occurred when he was a boy, I had a Greek chorus singing a Greek tragedy.

As for the mystery in this story, it's not much different from the mystery in every story I write-mystery in the sense that we can never really know everything that is happening in our lives, or anything that will happen after them. It's just that this one is magnified by murder. But mysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience; given that, and given the nature of the linked collection, it's not surprising that the answer to the primary mystery of "Diamond Alley"- who do you suppose really killed her? -lies naked there in Hart's Grove for all who care to see.

Christopher Merkner's stories have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and Cincinnati Review. He teaches creative writing for the University of Colorado, Denver.

▪ "Last Cottage" started as a touching and lighthearted meditation on my youth and my hometown in Illinois. I don't know what went wrong. At some point it became clear that the story had no interest in being touching or lighthearted. Writing and rewriting, I could not drop the image of the carp that sucked the surface of the lakes and rivers near my hometown. I have so many good memories of my youth in northern Illinois, but those carp-those mouths gasping and sucking, those oily eyes rolling-kept returning instead. So I decided to kill them. "Last Cottage" followed. A huge thanks to Brock Clarke and the amazing people at the Cincinnati Review for their help and support and encouragement.

Andrew Riconda lives on City Island in the Bronx. His fiction has appeared in the Amherst Review, Criminal Class Review, Oyez Review, Phantasmagoria, Rio Grande Review, Watchword, and William and Mary Review. He is currently at work on a novel, The Three People I Had to Kill Last Year, featuring the protagonist of the story in this collection.

▪ "Heart Like a Balloon" was my first attempt at the mystery genre. Most of my stories are quirky tales about sad, alienated men-just without crimes, guns, paring knives, and the flayed skin. Like many of my characters, the narrator, Brian Rehill, is trying to remain God-oblivious in a world that just won't permit that. Speaking of deities, I like to think that one of the gods of quirky crime tales, Charles Willeford, might have enjoyed this story. Hail Hoke Moseley.

S. J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She's the author of eleven books in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, the most recent of which is Ghost Hero. She also has two standalones, Absent Friends and In This Rain, and three dozen short stories published in various periodicals and anthologies, including a number of "Best of the Year" collections. She has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards for best novel, as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and the Edgar for best short story. She lectures and teaches widely and runs an English-language writing workshop in the summers in Assisi, Italy. Visit www.sjrozan.com.

▪ I get a lot of comments from readers about Lydia Chin's mother. Everyone, it seems, either knows someone with a mother like Chin Yong-Yun or has one. (My favorite comment ever at a book signing: a young Chinese man who said, "I only have one question. When did you meet my mother?") "Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case" was my first shot at giving Ma Chin her own voice, at seeing things from her side of the kitchen table. It probably won't be the last; I have a feeling she's just getting started.

Mickey Spillane was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial PI has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous films, notably director Robert Aldrich's seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of several books, among them In Search of Snow, The Hummingbird's Daughter (winner of the Kiriyama Prize), and The Devil's Highway (a finalist for the Pulitzer and winner of the Lannan Literary Award). He was born in Mexico and currently lives in the Chicago area, where he teaches at the University of Illinois. His story "Amapola," from Phoenix Noir, won the Edgar Award in 2010.

▪ This story began its life as a set of notes dating back to my time as writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I was taken-as who wouldn't be-by zydeco music and Cajun/Creole culture. I was a huge Beau Jocque fan, and when I finally met him and talked one night, I knew a zydeco story had to happen. I jotted notes for a "literary" fiction. What is that? I knew ol' Chester Richard was my hero, but beyond that… I had no idea. My advice to all lazy writers is to team up with David Corbett. He writes like some well-oiled machine and apparently doesn't mind doing a year's worth of research in one night.

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