O.P.

Carl Hiaasen

Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood. We found them in the road outside our houses, and from far away they looked like the victims of careless drivers, but close up you saw that they were plump and round, not flat, and that their bodies were marred by clean-edged rectangular stab wounds. Sometimes they lay in drying pools of blood, and you knew the murder had occurred right there. Other times it was obvious they had been moved from the scene of the crime and arranged in postures, like the two squirrels posed in a hug on Mrs. Chenoweth’s doorstep.

Squirrels, then rabbits, then the cats, and dogs in late summer. By that time I had known for months who was doing all the stabbing. I got that information on the first day of June 1979, two years and one month and fourteen days after my brother’s death from cancer. I woke up early that morning, a sunny one that broke a chain of rainy days, because my father was taking me to see Spider-Man, who was scheduled to make an appearance at the fourth annual Leukemia Society of America Summer Fair in Washington, D.C. I was eight years old and I thought Spider-Man was very important.

In the kitchen I ate a bowl of cereal while my father spread the paper out before me. “Look at that,” he said. On the front page was an article detailing the separation of Siamese twin girls, Lisa and Elisa Johansen from Salt Lake City. They were joined at the thorax, like my brother and I had been, but they shared vital organs, whereas Colm and I never did. There was a word for the way we and they had been joined: thoracopagus. It was still the biggest word I knew.

“Isn’t that amazing?” my father said. He was a surgeon, so these sorts of things interested him above all others. “See that? They’re just six months old!” Colm and I were separated at eighteen months. I had no clear memories of either the attachment or the operation, though Colm claimed he remembered our heads knocking together all the time, and that he dreamed of monkeys just before we went under from the anesthesia. The Johansen twins were joined side by side; my brother and I were joined back to back. Our parents would hold up mirrors so we could look at each other — that was something I did remember: looking in my mother’s silver-handled mirror, over my shoulder at my own face.

Early as it was, on our way out to the car we saw our new neighbor, Molly Matthews, sitting on the front steps of her grandparents’ house, reading a book in the morning sun.

“Hello, Molly,” said my father.

“Good morning, Dr. Cole,” she said. She was unfailingly polite with adults. At school she was already very popular, though she had been there for only two months, and she had a tendency to oppress the other children in our class with her formidable vocabulary.

“Poor girl,” said my father, when we were in the car and on our way. He pitied her because both her parents had died in a car accident. She was in the car with them when they crashed, but she was thrown from the wreck through an open window — this was in Florida, where I supposed everyone always drove around with their windows down and never wore seatbelts.

I turned in my seat so I was upside down. This had long been my habit; I did it so I could look out the window at the trees and telephone wires as we passed them. My mother would never stand for it, but she was flying that day to San Francisco. She was a stewardess. Once my father and I flew with her while she was working and she brought me a cup of Coke with three cherries in it. She put down the drink and leaned over me to open up the window shade, which I had kept closed from the beginning of the flight out of fear. “Look,” she said to me. “Look at all that!” I looked and saw sandy mountains that resembled crumpled brown paper bags. I imagined falling from that great height into my brother’s arms.

“Spider-Man!” said my father, after we had pulled onto Route 50 and passed a sign that read WASHINGTON, D.C. 29 MILES. “Aren’t you excited?” He reached over and rubbed my head with his fist. Had my mother been with me, she would not have spoken at all, but my father talked the whole way, about Spider-Man, about the mall, about the Farrah Fawcett look-alike who was also scheduled to appear; he asked me repeatedly if the prospect of seeing such things didn’t make me excited, though he knew I would not answer him. I hadn’t spoken a word or uttered a sound since my brother’s funeral.

Solomon’s alley parallels M Street, Georgetown’s main drag. Running behind Johnny Rockets, Ben & Jerry’s, Old Glory Barbecue, and the Riggs Bank, the alley connects Wisconsin Avenue on the west to Thirty-first Street one block east.

Battered blue dumpsters line the alley. Solomon had puzzled over the dumpsters for several years. Finally, he’d decided that their BFI logo stood for big fucking incinerators. That job done, he’d taken on thinking out the likely origins of the five ancient magnolia trees that shaded the stretch of alley where he parked his two Safeway carts.

On this Tuesday morning in September, he sat in his folding canvas deck chair, part of him pondering the magnolias while another part got ready for his day job, watching the Nigerian. At 10:00, like clockwork, the white Dodge van pulled up across Wisconsin at the corner of Prospect, by Restoration Hardware.

“Hello, Nigerian,” Solomon whispered. He settled back to watch the sidewalk come alive. Each morning’s setup was a ballet, a precisely choreographed routine, and Solomon was a discriminating critic.

Most mornings the performance went well: every move efficient, rhythmic, smooth. Some mornings it didn’t: some mornings everything fell apart in a cranky series of busted plays.

The driver eased the van forward so its front bumper toed the white marks on the pavement. He switched off the ignition and got out to go round to the back.

Waverly Ngame was a big man. Two-fifty, six feet and a couple of inches, Solomon figured. His skin blue-black… shin… like the barrel of a.38.

First out, a long rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements. Ngame locked the legs open. With his toe and wood shims, he worked around the table until it rested solid on the uneven brick sidewalk.

He disappeared into the van and came out with racks of white plastic-coated wire-grid shelving under both arms and a grease-stained canvas bag in his left hand.

In swift, practiced motions, he picked the largest of the shelves and braced it upright on the side of the table facing the street. With one hand he held the shelf, with the other he reached into the canvas bag and came out with a large C-clamp. Twirling it with sharp snaps of his wrist, he opened the jaws just enough to slip over the shelf and the table edge. He tightened the clamp, and moved to repeat the process on the other side of the table.

More shelving and more C-clamps produced a display stand.

Now the van disgorged Ngame’s merchandise in large nylon bags and sturdy blue plastic storage boxes. Soon, Gucci and Kate Spade handbags hung alluringly from the vertical shelving while Rolex watches and Serengeti sunglasses marched in neat ranks across the top of the church-basement folding table.

He slow today, said Voice.

“He did good,” Solomon contradicted. He didn’t want to give Voice shit. He did that, give Voice any slack, Voice start up. Voice need his pills? Solomon tried to remember the last time he trucked to the clinic, then gave it up. Long as it was only one Voice, he could handle it. It only got bad when he had to put up with the whole goddamn family yelling and screaming, scrambling things inside his head.

Ngame climbed into his van. That was Solomon’s cue. He got out of his chair and walked to where the alley ran into Wisconsin. There, he could keep a closer eye on Ngame’s stand.

Ngame eased the van across Wisconsin and into the alley, waving to Solomon as he passed by. He pulled the van into a slot by the florist shop on Thirty-first Street where he had a deal with the manager. Locking the van, he walked back up the alley toward Solomon.

“Nobody bother the stand, Waverly.”

Ngame palmed Solomon a folded five.

“A good day, Solomon.”

As a boy in Lagos, Ngame had learned his English listening to BBC. He sounded like a Brit announcer except that he had a Nigerian’s way of softly rounding his vowels and stressing the final syllables of his sentences.

Solomon shook his head. “Watch yourself today.”

Ngame gripped Solomon’s shoulder.

“Voice tell you that?” he asked. He searched Solomon’s face with clinical curiosity.

Ngame’s concern irritated Solomon. “Hunh! Voice don’t know shit,” he said crossly. “Solomon telling you.”

Something passed behind Ngame’s eyes. He looked serious. “You hear anything?”

“Just feel,” Solomon whispered to keep Voice from hearing, “just feel.”

Ngame smiled. “You are a belt-and-suspenders man, Solomon.”

Solomon pouted and tucked the five away. “You don’t have belt and suspenders, Waverly, you lose your ass.”

Ngame took that in with a laugh. He squeezed Solomon’s shoulder, then turned and made his way across Wisconsin.

In the street by Ngame’s stand, a crow worried at the flattened remains of a road-killed rat.

And down the block from the stand, Solomon saw two men get out of a maroon Crown Vic. One black, one white. Both big. Both cops.

It happens so fast, Sussman only turns his head for, what, maybe two seconds, to check out that hoochie mama in the low-slung ram-riders and the spaghetti-strand top and when he looks back, his six-year-old Ben is already on the Coney Island — bound F train and the shiny metal doors are closing between them.

Sussman pushes through the crowd of departing passengers, trying to pry the doors apart, hut it’s too late. The train is already starting to move. He runs alongside it, yelling “STOP” and gesturing wildly, as Ben stares through the scratchiettied glass in open-mouthed confusion.

But then the window slips past him, like a frame going through a film projector, and he almost collides with a pillar near the end of the platform. A seismic rumble fills the station and he sees the white F on the hack of the train receding into darkness, going, going, gone, leaving him stranded.

He pictures his heart untethered from his body, falling through space but somehow still pulsing on its own.

Keller, his hands in his pockets, watched a dark-skinned black man with his shirt off drive for the basket. His shaved head gleamed, and the muscles of his upper back, the traps and lats, bulged as if steroidally enhanced. Another man, wearing a T-shirt but otherwise of the same shade and physique, leapt to block the shot, and the two bodies met in midair. It was a little like ballet, Keller thought, and a little like combat, and the ball kissed off the backboard and dropped through the hoop.

There was no net, just a bare hoop. The playground was at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Third Street, in Greenwich Village, and Keller was one of a handful of spectators standing outside the high chain-link fence, watching idly as ten men, half wearing T-shirts, half bare-chested, played a fiercely competitive game of half-court basketball.

If this were a game at the Garden, the last play would have sent someone to the free-throw line. But there was no ref here to call fouls, and order was maintained in a simpler fashion: Anyone who fouled too frequently was thrown out of the game. It was, Keller felt, an interesting libertarian solution, and he thought it might be worth a try outside the basketball court, but had a feeling it would be tough to make it work.

Keller watched a few more plays, feeling his spirits sink as he did, yet finding it oddly difficult to tear himself away. He’d had a tooth drilled and filled a few blocks away, by a dentist who had himself played varsity basketball years ago at the University of Kentucky, and had been walking around waiting for the Novocain to wear off so he could grab some lunch, and the basketball game had caught his eye, and here he was. Watching, and being brought down in the process, because basketball always depressed him.

His mouth wasn’t numb anymore. He crossed the street, walked two blocks east, turned right on Sullivan Street, left on Bleecker. He considered and rejected restaurants as he walked, knowing he wanted something spicy. If basketball depressed him, highly seasoned food put him right again. He thought it odd, didn’t understand it, but knew it worked.

Before poker I was an insurance claims investigator, a corporate private eye with a short-sleeved white shirt and skinny tie, sometimes catching scumbags but mostly helping big gin’s screw little guys out of benefits they were entitled to. I put ten years’ experience to work on my own disability claim — a psych claim, though you can’t buy a decent psych policy anymore. Now I just open the mail for my check once a month and play poker. I’m never wearing a tie or watch again. The trick is to keep your head straight, not be sucked in, not to want too much.

I play at McKool’s, a sweet two-table poker room in a Miami River warehouse, minutes from the Dolphin Expressway. Across the bridge from the downtown ramps to I-95, it has easy access, drawing players from Boca to Homestead. McKool runs six nights a week, says if you don’t give players Saturdays with their wives, then the wives won’t let ’em play. I wouldn’t know from wives, and with any luck never will.

Texas Hold’em’s hot, and I play it, but I prefer Omaha 8-or-better high-low split, which McKool spreads on Fridays. There’s more to think about in high-low, and a lot of seductive starting hands, trap hands that suck people in. I scoop both sides in split-pot games more than anybody. That’s why McKool calls me Bobby Two-ways. Everybody has a nickname: Rebel, Bumper, Luckbucket, Goombah. Everybody except McKool.

McKool’s has a kitchen girl who knows how you take your coffee, what you want on your sandwich, what snacks you like. I catch two meals every play, and sometimes hit the fridge for a takeout bag at the end of the night. There’s a shower, for guys who play all night and then head straight to the office. McKool’s got a smoking room in back with its own vent system, and another room with two computers so people can play online poker while waiting for a seat. Both rooms have queen-size beds — some guys take a little nap then get up to play more, or snooze for an hour before heading to work.

I met McKool when he first came back to Miami after twenty years in the army, before he opened up his room. We were playing in the big game at Blackjack’s, down in Ocean Reef — $100-$200-limit Hold’em. We’d played all night and were down to the hard cores. Only four of us remained. Tommy Trash — he had the garbage contract for the Keys — had lost $20k-plus, and wanted to play a four-handed $25k freeze out, winner take all. McKool had gotten beat up pretty badly too, and didn’t have the buy-in. I’d been the big winner. So I bought McKool’s cherry red 1962 Ford Thunderbird Sports Roadster convertible with a 390 V-8 300-hp engine for twenty-five grand — a steal. The four of us played for the hundred thousand. It only took a couple of hours for McKool and me to bust out Tommy and Jack and get heads up. We played and played and played. And played some more. Fourteen hours later McKool busted me. His mental toughness and physical conditioning for the long sit made the difference. He won the hundred grand, and offered me $30k to buy back the T-bird. But I liked it and said no.

McKool used that win to bankroll opening his place. He’s offered me forty, then fifty, and recently sixty grand for the car. I’m not much into things, but I love that ragtop. Besides, it’s good when The Man wants something he can’t have from you.

I don’t really have friends, but McKool and I know we can rely on each other. I think I’m the only player in the game who has his private cell. I do a lot for McKool: recruit from the parimutuels; deal when somebody calls in sick; give up my seat when he needs to fit a live one in. Mostly I show up for the afternoon gin game before start time and stay through the last hand. Starters and finishers are key to running a profitable house game, getting games off early and keeping them going late.

My trouble started at McKool’s Thursday game. No Limit Hold’em night, five hundred minimum/a thousand maximum buy-in, five and ten blinds. Rebel — Rebecca Ellen O’Shaunessy — strolled in after her shift as bartender at a trendy South Beach club, as she did a couple of nights a week.

Rebel’s easy on the eyes, all natural. To see her is to want her. She’d sweetly turned me down more than once. Mid-twenties, about five-foot-six, maybe 115 pounds, green eyes, and auburn-almost-red hair, perfect spinner bod. The kind of girl men would leave their wives for in a heartbeat. McKool uses Rebel like he uses me, like he uses everybody — hustling here, cajoling there, pushing buttons, building up a stash of favors so butts are in seats and the cards are always in the air by seven o’clock, and the game goes on toward dawn and beyond. Knowing the hottie was coming kept early players hanging on late, and gave the late players reason to arrive early. We rarely broke before sunrise when Rebel played.

Poker’s not a game where you have to be the best player in the world — just the best at the table. Winning players aren’t welcome at most private games. We take cash from the game, use it to pay rent and buy groceries. A houseman wants action. Gambling fools. The suckers who look for any excuse to play a hand, who don’t understand that more often than not the right play is to pass, not get involved. Live ones attract players, working pros drive them away. I’ve been barred from the weekly games at the Coconut Grove Yacht Club and Lauderdale Country Club. I help McKool not because I’m a nice guy, but so he’ll let me play in his juicy lineup of fish.

Rebel did her grand-entrance thing, giving this one a wink, tousling that one’s hair, stroking the other’s arm. Escort Randy — he owns a low-rent Internet escort agency, buck-fifty-an-hour girls, mostly but not all skanks — asked her for the zillionth time if she’d work for him, and for the zillionth time she smacked him on the arm, then gave him a hug. I like Randy — he gives me a twenty-dollar discount on calls.

McKool had his usual crew on hand: three dealers, Lilith the kitchen girl, and Cartouche, the half-Senegalese half-Moroccan from Montreal McKool had hooked up with in some little jungle war. Cartouche didn’t exactly have a job, though he sometimes dealt and even sometimes cooked. He just stood by McKool’s side, a silent giant.

Rebel sat down and set off on a chip fry like she hated her money. No Limit’s a dangerous game for people who play fast. In limit games, when you make a mistake, you lose a bet or maybe a pot. In No Limit, when you make a mistake, you lose everything. Rebel got herself stuck fifteen hundred in less than twenty minutes, and soon had McKool pinned in a corner, stroking his arm, giving him that damsel-in-distress look.

McKool sometimes gives regulars a nickel or dime’s credit juice-free, but only until the next play, up to a week max. Having players on the hook is a necessary evil of the business. Problem is, when they owe you money, the next time they have a few bucks they take that money someplace else to play, instead of paying you. McKool, after his twenty years in Special Forces, doesn’t have a lot of collection problems. Plus he has Cartouche. McKool’s rule is only lend to people who have money to pay you back right away. I knew Rebel wasn’t getting a penny more out of McKool.

She looked around the room, caught me eyeing her. She stuck out her lower lip in a pouty way, and mouthed “please.” I shook my head. She smiled and shrugged, then grabbed Skip Converse, one of Miami’s slimiest shysters, and pulled him away from the table. A minute later he plopped his big butt back in his seat — Skip’s a fish with no clue when to pass and hates to miss a hand. Reb sashayed over to the other table, draped her arms around Big Country’s shoulders, and whispered something in his car. He got up and they stepped into one of the back rooms.

“Chick already owes me five hundred,” Skip said. “I told her the next nickel would require sex. Can’t imagine why she passed.”

Five minutes later they came out of the back, Big Country laughing like a schoolboy. He bought two racks of reds from McKool and handed them to Rebel. She gave him a full-contact hug, something more than affectionate, and a kiss on the cheek.

“Thanks, Country, you’re a real gentleman,” she said. “I’ll crush these fuckers, but if for some reason they escape, I promise you’ll have it back Sunday.” Then she terrorized the game. One hand she came over the top on Big Country and moved him off a big pot. I knew from the way she stared him down she’d bluffed him off. Lending people money to play against you is a bad bet. If they lose, you won’t see it anytime soon. If they win, you lose. But I understand not being able to say no to a pretty girl. What man doesn’t? In a couple of hours Reb won back the fifteen hundred she’d lost, the dime she’d borrowed from Big Country, and seven hundred sugar. Then she did something she almost never does. She locked up her win.

While McKool counted her down, Rebel came over, rested her hand oh-so-lightly on my inside thigh, and blew gently on my neck, sending a shiver down my neck and making my dick hard. She whispered in my ear, “Two-ways, I need your help. Meet me upstairs at the Road in an hour?”

I hate being manipulated by anybody, especially women. “Make it an hour and a half,” I said.

As she headed to the door, Skip called out to her: “Hey. Rebel, what about my five bills?”

She smiled sweetly. “Next week, Skip.”

Cartouche gave Rebel a look; she understood that really meant next week.

Every eye in the room followed her as she walked out. If God had ever made a more perfect ass than Rebel’s, he kept it for himself.

Albert Hollister likes the heft of it, the coldness of the steel, the way his hand fits inside the lever action. Even though the Winchester is brand-new, just out of the box from Wal-Mart, he ticks a chain of tiny drops from a can of 3-in-One on all the moving parts, cocks and recocks the hammer, and rubs a clean rag over the metal and stock. The directions tell him to run a lubricated bore brush down the barrel, although the weapon has never been fired. After he does so, he slips a piece of white paper behind the chamber and squints down the muzzle with one eye. The oily spiral of light that spins at him through the rifling has an otherworldly quality about it.

He presses a half-dozen.30–30 shells into the tubular magazine with his thumb, then ejects them one by one on his bedspread. His wife has gone to town with the nurse’s aide for her doctor’s appointment and the house is quiet. The fir trees and Ponderosa pine on the hillside are full of wind and a cloud of yellow dust rises off the canopy and sucks away over his barn and pasture. He picks up the shells and fits them back in the cartridge box, then puts the rifle and the shells in his closet, closes the door on them, and drinks a glass of iced tea on the front porch.

Down the canyon he can see the long roll of the Bitterroot Mountains, the moon still visible against the pale blueness of the sky, like a sliver of dry ice. He drains his glass and feels a terrible sense of fatigue and hopelessness wash through his body. If age brings wisdom, he has yet to see it in his own life. Across the driveway, in his north pasture, a large sorrel-colored hump lies in the bunch grass. A pair of magpies descend on top of it, their beaks dipping into their bloody work. Albert looks at the scene with great sorrow on his face, gathers up a pick and a shovel from the garage, and walks down the hillside into the pasture. A yellow Labrador retriever bounds along behind him.

“Go back to the house, Buddy,” Albert says.

The wind makes a sound like water when it sharks through the grass.

At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger’s consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words. He had been trying to explain to the doctor why he no longer felt comfortable being in the same room with his shadow. He’d said, If light can pass through the universe, why can’t it pass through me? But now he could only manage to hum and to shake his head. I highlighted a speech in my script. Dad’s contention, as near as I could figure it, was that light had a mind of its own and had taken to behaving arbitrarily and recklessly in the last six months or so. After Dr. Hamburger clicked off his desk lamp, Dad took off his eyeshade, blinked, rubbed his rheumy eyes, and asked me who I was. Dr. Hamburger tapped the side of his prescription pad on his desk blotter, leaned back in his squeaky Posture-Tech office chair, cast me a glance, raised his articulate brow, and lifted his upper eyelids. Lid-lifters tend to be a tad melodramatic.

Dr. Hamburger had diagnosed Dad with Alzheimer’s. Dad said he was merely closing up shop. He hadn’t lost his ability to make metaphor, not yet. And he did have his lucid moments. He was in and out, however, and he was hard to read. His expressions were often without nuance or blend. He was extremely angry, extremely happy, or extremely vacant. He could remember what he had for breakfast on June 15, 1944, in Guam (gumdrop candy, two cookies), but not that he just turned on the gas without lighting the pilot; which is why I had to move him into an all-electric, assisted-living facility.

John Stregg opened his front door wide and there was Gleason, his girlfriend Jade’s little brother. The boy stood, frail and skinny, in the snow with a sad look on his face and a gun in his hand. As the president of the New Otto Bank, of New Otto, North Dakota, Stregg had trained his employees to stay relaxed in situations like this. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and Stregg had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a methamphetamine addict. He did not flinch now.

“What can I do for you?” he said to Gleason. His voice was loud and calm. His wife, Carmen, was reading in the living room.

“You can come with me, Mr. Stregg,” Gleason said, leading slightly to the left with the barrel of the gun. Behind him, at the curb, a low-slung Oldsmobile idled. Stregg could see no one else in it. Gleason was just nineteen years old, and Stregg now wished that he’d joined the Army as Jade had said he was threatening to do. Except that, if he had, he might be carrying something better than an old, jammed-looking.22-caliber pistol. From the living room Carmen called, “Who is it?” and Gleason whispered, “Say ‘Kids selling candy.’ ”

“Kids selling candy,” Stregg called back.

“Tell them we don’t want any,” Carmen yelled.

“Say you’re going for a little walk,” Gleason said.

“I’m going for a little walk.”

“In this snow?” his wife cried. “You’re crazy!”

“Put your coat on,” Gleason said. “So she doesn’t see it still hanging on the rack. Then come with me. Shut the door.”

As he headed down the walkway with Gleason behind him, Stregg began to hope that he would find Jade hidden in the car. That this was some odd kind of prank. Some desperate way for her to get to see him. It was evening, and the windows of his house cast a soft, golden light all the way down the landscaped twist of paving stones. There was a band of utter darkness where a stone wall and close-grown arborvitae cast a shadow onto the boulevard. The car sat beyond that, in the wintry shimmer of a street lamp.

“Get in,” Gleason said.

Stregg stumbled a bit in the icy snow, then let himself into the passenger’s side. The back seat was empty, he saw. Gleason held the pistol just inside the sleeve of his large topcoat, and kept it pointed at the windshield as he rounded the front of the car and ducked quickly into the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to ease out of this light,” he said.

Gleason kept his gun out and his mild eyes trained on Stregg as he put the car in drive and rolled forward into the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow.

“Time to talk.” He put the car in park.

Gleason was a nervous-looking boy with large brown eyes, a thin face, and a mop of toast-brown hair flopping over one eye and bending into his collar. There were little wisps of down on his chin. He was artistic. This sort of behavior, Stregg knew, did not come naturally to Gleason. He’d probably had to get slightly drunk in order to drive to the Stregg residence with a gun and ring the bell. And what would he have done if Carmen had answered? Would he have pretended to be selling candy bars for some high-school trip? Did he have a Plan B? Stregg stared at Gleason’s gaunt little face. The boy didn’t seem likely to put a bullet in him. Plus, his hands looked too weak to pull back the slide. Stregg knew, too, that his presence in Gleason’s car had depended on some implicit collaboration on his own part.

“So,” Stregg repeated, in the patient voice he used with jumpy investors, “what can I do for you?”

“I think a hundred thousand dollars should be just about right,” Gleason said.

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

Gleason was silently expectant. Stregg shivered a little, then he pulled his coat tightly around himself and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Jade. She had brought all his tears up to the surface. Sometimes they rushed out, and sometimes they trickled in long tracks down his cheeks.

She’d said that there was no shame in it, and she’d cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s body, toward a dark peace. Stregg heard himself make a sound, an Ah of doubt. There was something about the monetary figure that struck him as wretched.

“It’s just not enough,” he said.

Gleason looked perplexed.

“Look, if she keeps the baby — and you know I want her to keep the baby — she’s going to need a house. Maybe in Fargo, you know? A hundred thousand isn’t enough for a decent house. And then there are clothes, and, what, car seats, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but I know they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good, safe car. A hundred thousand isn’t enough for everything. It’s not a future.”

“O.K.,” Gleason said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”

“Besides,” Stregg went on, thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. A hundred thousand would be missed just as much as a larger amount would be. My wife sees our accounts. It might as well be… Let me think. If it’s under half a million, the papers will say nearly half a million anyway. So it might as well be over half a million. But not seven hundred thousand, because they’ll call that three-quarters of a million. So let’s say six hundred thousand.”

Gleason was quiet. “That’s just over half a million,” he said finally.

Stregg nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there has to be a reason. A very good reason.”

“Well,” Gleason said, “maybe you were going to start some kind of business?”

Stregg looked at Gleason in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’d need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail, and that’d lead to more deception, and the taxes… It’d all lead back to me. It’s too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”

“A tornado,” Gleason said. “I mean, in winter, maybe not. A blizzard.”

“And where does the money come in?”

“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”

Stregg looked disappointed, and Gleason shrugged weakly.

They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Gleason said, “Question.”

“Yes?”

“How come you don’t just get divorced from your wife and marry Jade? The way you’re talking, it sounds to me like you love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “But I’m not getting why you don’t just leave your wife and run off with Jade, or something, if you love her.”

“I do love her.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Look at me, Gleason.” Stregg put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now, be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”

Gleason shrugged again. “You’re not so bad, man.”

“Yes, I am,” Stregg said. “I’m sixteen years older than Jade and I’m half bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that that’s the only reason Jade cares for me, not at all — Jade is a pure soul — but the money helps. If I divorced Carmen now, I wouldn’t have a job. I took the bank over from her father, who is, yes, in his nineties and in a nursing home, but perfectly lucid. Carmen is a fifty-one-per-cent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Carmen has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me, within her own powers. Until I met Jade last year, you understand, I was reasonably happy. Carmen and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida in the winter; we gave dinner parties and stayed at the lake for two weeks every summer. In the summer, we had sex twice a week and I cooked all our meals.”

Gleason looked uncomfortable.

“The thing is, we’re the last small, independent bank in this part of the state and pretty soon we’ll get bought out, swallowed up. That will change my situation. I’d like to be with Jade. I plan to be with Jade. When I can. If she’ll have me.”

Now Stregg leaned searchingly toward Gleason. “What does your presence here mean, exactly? Did she send you?”

“No.”

“What happened? She won’t talk to me right now, you know.”

“Well, she told me about her being pregnant. She was kind of upset, and I thought you were ditching her. That’s what I thought. You know, it’s always been just the two of us. She raised me after our mother OD’ed. I was only eleven when it happened, and she was twenty-one. I’d die for her.”

“Of course,” Stregg said. “Of course you would. Let that be our bond, Gleason. Both of us would die for her. But here’s the thing. Only one of us — right now, anyway — only one of us can provide for her.”

“So what should we do?”

“Something has come to me,” Stregg said. “Now, I’m going to propose something that may surprise you. It may seem bizarre, but give it a chance, hear me out, Gleason, because I think it will work. Are you ready?”

Gleason nodded.

“Say you kidnap my wife.”

Gleason gave a strangled yelp.

“No, just listen. Tomorrow night you do the very same thing as tonight. You come to the door. Carmen answers. You show her the gun and you come into the house. You have some strapping tape. A pair of scissors. At gunpoint, you order me to tie Carmen up. Once she’s taken care of, you tie me up and say to me, in her hearing, that if I don’t deliver six hundred thousand dollars in cash to you by the next day you’ll kill her. You have to say that, I’m afraid. Then you bring her out to the car — not this car, a rental. Don’t let her see the license plates.”

“I don’t think so,” Gleason said. “I think you’re describing a federal crime.”

“Well, yes,” Stregg said. “But is it really a crime if nothing happens? I mean, you’ll be really, really nice to Carmen. That’s a given. You’ll take her to a secure out-of-town location, like your house. Keep her blindfolded. Put her in the back bedroom where you keep the freezer. Lay down a mattress so she’s comfortable. It’ll just be for a day. I’ll drop off the money. Then you’ll let her out somewhere on the other side of town. She may have a long walk — be sure she brings shoes and a coat. I don’t think we should tell Jade.”

“Jade’s gone, anyway.”

Stregg’s heart lurched. He’d somehow known it. “Where?” he managed to ask.

“Her friend Bonnie took her to Bismarck, just to clear her head. They’ll be back on Friday.”

“Oh, then this is perfect,” Stregg said.

Gleason looked at him with great, silent eyes. His and Jade’s eyes were very similar, Stregg thought, and he suddenly felt extremely sorry for Gleason. He was so wimpy, so young, and what would he do with Carmen? She worked out on a stationary bicycle and lifted free weights. Gleason kept shifting the gun from hand to hand, probably because his wrist was getting tired.

“By the way, where did that gun come from?” Stregg asked.

“It used to belong to my mother’s boyfriend.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course it is.”

“You don’t have ammunition for it, do you?” Stregg said. “But that’s good. We don’t want any accidents.”

Chellini was MUCH younger than he seemed. A Sicilian wife, bubbly six-year-old twin daughters, and perpetually aching feet conspired to deprive him of the swagger customary to men from the Puglia region of Italy. So too did a rotund frame, legs that were slightly bowed, and a floppy gray mustache he grew shortly after his discharge from the U.S. Army Air Force in ’46. At the time, just seven years ago, the mustache was a deep brown.

Chellini did his best to meet life with a shrug, as would befit a man from a sunny southern province, though life in postwar America was maybe a bit hectic for his tastes, what with his sharp-tongued Lydia, their mischievous daughters, and his job as a waiter in an Italian restaurant near the National Broadcasting Company in Rockefeller Center. Despite the hubbub, he himself kept quiet and sought what he would call uneventfulness. He had no ambitions, save a desire for abundant happiness for his daughters and for Lydia to love him as she once did.

Chellini had a pet bulldog, Ambrose, with whom he shared a slow, labored gait. Each night, after a clattering dinner during which Ava and Rita amused each other and Lydia reminded him of the dreary life he provided, Chellini would wander the cobblestone streets of his mile-square New Jersey town in search of serenity and equilibrium. With Ambrose at his side, he would drift into his own agreeable fantasies, which consisted of little more than sitting under an olive tree in Bovino, straw between his teeth, a manageable herd of goats feeding nearby, white almond blossoms blooming at the lip of the field, and his little family enjoying the stone house in which he was raised.

Chellini would often lose track of time during his nightly sojourns and return home as Lydia slept, her back to his side of their bed. While Ambrose slurped his water, Chellini would tiptoe toward his daughters’ bed in the living room and kiss them on the palm of the hand, which he would then close to a fist so they would have a token of his devotion as soon as they awoke. Then he would retire to his room and hope for streams of moonlight and tranquil dreams of Lydia as the bright-eyed girl from Ragusa who had shyly accepted his invitation to dance.

One night not long ago, Chellini found he had returned to the Italian quarter much sooner than he had intended, and he passed Tartuffo’s, the cigar store where a group of neighborhood men congregated. On such a pleasant, summerlike evening, the crowd of hardscrabble brown-skinned thugs of one sort or another sat outside the store and played penny-a-point gin and smoked cheroots. Unlike Chellini, most of these dubious men had immigrated to the United States after the war; some had served in Mussolini’s army and others remained at home and willingly suffered the indignity of the German occupation.

Chellini preferred to avoid them, as they were not merely argumentative but bitter. He considered them lazy malcontents who pronounced big schemes but took no action when action was needed, thus allowing the Nazis to steal their homes, their women, and their pride.

A voice reached Chellini on the other side of the narrow street.

“Chellini, dove andate?”

Of course, it was the man he respected least who had addressed him.

“Chellini, I’m speaking to you,” said Emilio Marzano, whose accent revealed him to be from the Liguria region, though he sought to portray a Sicilian tough. “What do you think? I want to talk to your dog?”

The other men laughed with a dark, superior tone.

Under the street lamp’s dull violet light, Chellini stopped, tipped his fedora, and continued walking, Ambrose chugging along at his side.

The men whispered to each other as if sharing a secret. Tartuffo, the impossibly fat store owner and chief of the local numbers racket, flicked his thumb dismissively at Chellini, shaking his mammoth head.

“Hey, war hero,” Marzano said with an air of derision. “Wait.”

Marzano climbed out of his chair and, though he was built as if cut from the same stubby, thickset mold as Chellini, he tried to affect a strut. On Marzano’s skull was a brown cap festooned with colorful buttons of various trade unions and social organizations with which he was associated. He ran a carting business, and what needed removal ended up in his rattling truck for a trip to the city dump. This was said to include Mrs. Feduza’s rabid dog, Benny, and the thieving iceman, Stucchi.

“Chellini, what’s with you? You can’t be a friend?”

As Ambrose sniffed disapprovingly at Marzano’s soiled shoes, Chellini shrugged.

“Listen to me. It’s about Lydia. Your wife.”

Chellini scratched the underside of his chin. Lydia, he knew, bought her many movie magazines at the candy store, and her Chesterfields. With a nature as outgoing as Chellini’s was not, she was bound to be known by Tartuffo. Marzano, and the others.

Marzano shifted to give his associates a better view. “I have to say it’s not pleasant.”

Chellini began to walk away, Ambrose in his wake.

Said Marzano, a snicker in his voice, “Don’t you want to know his name?”

The Jeepster couldn’t keep still. For forty-eight hours he’s been steady on the move and no place worked for long. He’d think of somewhere to be and go there and almost immediately suck the life from it, he could feel it charring around him. He felt he was on fire and running with upraised arms into a stiff cold wind but instead of cooling him the wind just fanned the flames. His last so-called friend had faded on him and demanded to be left by the roadside with his thumb in the air.

The Jeepster drove westward into a sun that had gone down the sky so fast it left a fiery wake like a comet. Light pooled above the horizon like blood and red light hammered off the hood of the SUV he was driving. He put on his sunglasses. In the failing day the light was falling almost horizontally and the highway glittered like some virtual highway in a fairy tale or nightmare.

His so-called friend had faded because The Jeepster was armed and dangerous. He was armed and dangerous and running on adrenaline and fury and grief and honed to such a fine edge that alcohol and drugs no longer affected him. Nothing worked on him. He had a pocket full of money and nine-millimeter automatic shoved into the waistband of his jeans and his T-shirt pulled down over it. He had his ticket punched for the graveyard or the penitentiary and one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train. He had everything he needed to get himself killed, to push the borders back and alter the very geography of reality itself.

On the outskirts of Ackerman’s Field the neon of a Texaco station bled into the dusk like a virulent stain. Night was falling like some disease he was in the act of catching. At the pumps he filled the SUV up and watched the traffic accomplish itself in a kind of wonder. Everyone should have been frozen in whatever attitude they’d held when the hammer fell on Aimee and they should hold that attitude forever. He felt like a plague set upon the world to cauterize and cleanse it.

He went through the pneumatic door. He had his Ray-Bans shoved on the top of his shaven head and he was grinning his gap-toothed grin. Such patrons as were about regarded him warily. He looked like bad news. He looked like the letter edged in black, the telegram shoved under your door at three o’clock in the morning.

You seen that Coors man? The Jeepster asked the man at the register.

Seen what? The man asked. Somewhere behind them a cue stick tipped a ball and it went down the felt in a near-silent hush and a ball rattled into a pocket and spiraled down and then there was just silence.

The Jeepster laid money on the counter. I know all about that Coors man, he said. I know Escue was broke and he borrowed ten bucks off the Coors man for the gas to get to where Aimee was working. Where’s he at?

The counterman made careful change. He don’t run today, he said. Wednesday was the last day he’s been here. And what if he did run, what if he was here? How could he know? He was just a guy doing Escue a favor. He didn’t know.

He didn’t know, he didn’t know. The Jeepster said. You reckon that’ll keep the dirt out of his face? I don’t.

They regarded each other in silence. The Jeepster picked up his change and slid it into his pocket. He leaned toward the counterman until their faces were very close together. Could be you chipped in a few bucks yourself, he finally said.

Just so you know, the counterman said, I’ve got me a sawed-off here under the counter. And I got my hand right on the stock. You don’t look just right to me. You look crazy. You look like you escaped from prison or the crazy house.

I didn’t escape, The Jeepster said. They let me out and was glad to see me go. They said I was too far gone, they couldn’t do anything for me. They said I was a bad influence.

Sergeant Thomas Cippolo, desk sergeant at Midtown South, peers over his half-moon reading glasses at Detective Morrie Goldstein and his handcuffed prisoner as they enter the precinct.

“What’s up wit’ Charlie Chang?” he asks.

“Chang?”

“Yeah.” Cippolo starts his various chins in motion with a vigorous shake of his head. “Charlie Chang. The dude made all those movies with Number One Son.”

“That’s Chan, ya moron,” Goldstein replies without relaxing his grip on the arm of his prisoner. “Charlie Chan.” Goldstein is a massive man, well over six feet tall with broad sloping shoulders that challenge the seams of an off-the-rack suit from the Big & Tall shop at Macy’s. “Anyway, he’s not Chinese. He’s a Nip. Hoshi Taiku.”

“A Nip?”

“Yeah, like Nipponese. From Japan.” Goldstein notes Cippolo’s blank stare, and sighs in disgust. “The Japanese people don’t call their country Japan. They call it Nippon. Ain’t that right, Hoshi?”

Taiku does not speak. Though he’s been in the United States for three days and has only the vaguest notion of the American criminal justice system, he’s heard about Abner Louima and wouldn’t be surprised if the giant policeman strung him up by his toes.

Goldstein steers Taiku around Cippolo’s desk and up a flight of stairs to a large room jammed with desks set back-to-back. A few of the desks are occupied by detectives who look up from their paperwork to watch Goldstein direct his prisoner to a small interview room. They do not speak. The windowless interview room contains a table and two metal chairs, one of which is bolted to the floor. The table and chairs are gray, the floor tiles brown, the walls a dull institutional yellow. All are glazed with decades of accumulated grime, even the small one-way mirror in the wall opposite the hump seat.

“That feel better?” Goldstein removes Taiku’s handcuffs, then flips them onto the table where they settle with an echoing clang. “Okay, that’s your chair.” He points to the bolted-down chair. “Take a seat.”

Hoshi Taiku is a short middle-aged man with a round face that complements his soft belly. From his seated position, looking up, Goldstein appears gigantic and menacing. Curiously, this effect remains undiminished when Goldstein draws his own chair close, then settles down with an appreciative sigh.

“My back,” he explains. “When I gotta stand around, it goes into spasm. I don’t know, maybe I should get myself one of those supports. I mean, standing around is all I ever fuckin’ do.” He removes a cheap ballpoint pen, a notebook, and a small tape recorder from his jacket pocket and sets them on the table.

“First thing I gotta do is explain your rights. Understand?”

Taiku does not reply. Instead, his gaze shifts to the wall on the other side of the room, a small act of defiance which elicits a triumphant smile from Goldstein. Goldstein has bet Sergeant Alex Mowrey twenty-five dollars that Taiku will crack before one o’clock in the afternoon. It is now 10:30 in the morning.

Goldstein lays his hand on Hoshi’s shoulder, and notes a barely detectable shudder run along the man’s spine. “Hoshi, listen to me. You chatted up the desk clerk, the bartender in the Tiger Lounge, and a barmaid named Clara. I know you know how to speak English, so please don’t start me off with bullshit. It’s inconsiderate.”

After a moment, Hoshi bows, a short nod that Goldstein returns.

“Okay, like I already said, you got certain rights which I will now carefully enumerate. You don’t have to speak to me at all if you don’t want to, plus you can call a lawyer whenever you like. In fact, if you’re broke, which I doubt very much, the court will appoint a lawyer to represent you. But the main thing, which you should take into your heart, is that whatever you say here is on the record. Even though you haven’t been arrested and you might never be. You got it so far?”

Goldstein acknowledges a second bow with a squeeze of Taiku’s bony shoulder, then releases his grip, leans back in the chair, and scratches his head. In contrast to his body, Goldstein’s oval skull is very small and rises to a definite point in the back, a sad truth made all the more apparent by a hairline the stops an inch or so above his ears.

“So it’s up to you, Hoshi,” he finally declares. “What you’re gonna do and all. You say the word, tell me you don’t wanna clear this up, I’ll put you under arrest, and that’ll be that.”

“No lawyer.” Despite a prodigious effort, the words come out, “‘No roy-uh.’”

“Okay, then you gotta sign this.” Goldstein takes a standard Miranda waiver from the inside pocket of his jacket, then spreads it on the table as if unrolling a precious scroll. “Right here, Yoshi. Right on the dotted line.”

A moment later, after Yoshi signs, a knock on the door precedes the entrance of Detective Vera Katakura.

“The lieutenant wants you in his office.”

“Now?” Goldstein is incredulous.

“Not now, Morris. Ten minutes ago.”

His face didn’t register at first. Probably hers didn’t either. It wasn’t a face-oriented business, strange to say. In the early days, on the streets, she had made a point of studying the men’s faces as a means of protection. Not because she thought she’d ever be downtown, picking someone out of a lineup. Quite the opposite. If she wasn’t careful, if she didn’t size them up beforehand, she’d be on a gurney in the morgue and no one would give a shit. Certainly not Val, although he’d be pissed in principle at being deprived of anything he considered his property. And while Brad thought he loved her, dead was dead. Who needed postmortem devotion?

So she had learned to look closely at her potential customers. Sometimes just the act of that intense scrutiny was enough to fluster a man and he moved on, which was the paradoxical proof that he was okay. Others stared back, welcoming her gaze, inviting it. That kind really creeped her out. You wanted nervous, but not too nervous; any trace of self-loathing was a big tip. In the end, she had probably walked away from more harmless ones than not, guys whose problems were nothing more than a losing card in the great genetics lottery — dry lips, a dead eye, or that bad skin that always seemed to signal villainy, perhaps because of all the acne-pitted bad guys in bad movies. Goes to show what filmmakers knew; Val’s face couldn’t be smoother. Still, she never regretted her vigilance, although she had paid for it in the short run, taking the beatings that were her due when she didn’t meet Val’s quotas. But she was alive and no one raised a hand to her anymore, not unless they paid handsomely for that privilege. She had come a long way.

Twenty-seven miles, to be precise, for that was the distance from where her son had been conceived in a motel that charged by the hour and the suburban soccer field where he was now playing forward for the Sherwood Forest Robin Hoods. He was good, and not just motherly pride good, but truly skilled, fleet and lithe. Over the years, she had persuaded herself that he bore no resemblance to his father, an illusion that allowed her to enjoy unqualified delight in his long limbs, his bright red hair and freckles. Scott was Scott, hers alone. Not in a smothering way, far from it. But when he was present, no one else mattered to her. At these weekend games, she stayed tightly focused on him. It was appalling, in her private opinion, that some other mothers and fathers barely followed the game, chatting on their cell phones or to one another. And during the breaks, when she did try to make conversation, it was unbearably shallow. She wanted to talk about the things she read in the Economist or heard on NPR, things she had to know to keep up with her clientele. They wanted to talk about aphids and restaurants. It was a relief when the game resumed and she no longer had to make the effort.

She never would have noticed the father on the other side of the field if his son hadn’t collided with Scott, one of those heart-stopping, freeze-frame moments in which one part of your brain insists it’s okay, even as another part helpfully supplies all the worst-case scenarios. Stitches, concussion, paralysis. Play was suspended and she went flying across the still-dewy grass. Adrenaline seemed to heighten all her senses, taking her out of herself, so she was aware of how she looked. She was equally aware of the frumpy, overweight blond mother who commented to a washed-out redhead: “Can you believe she’s wearing Tod’s loafers and Prada slacks to a kids’ soccer game?” But she wasn’t the kind to go around in yoga pants and tracksuits, although she actually practiced yoga and ran every morning.

Scott was all right, thank God. So was the other boy. Their egos were more bruised than their bodies, so they staggered around a bit, exaggerating their injuries for the benefit of their teammates. It was only polite to introduce herself to the father, to stick out her hand and say: “Heloise Lewis.”

“Bill Carroll,” he said. “Eloise?”

“Heloise. As in hints from.”

He shook her hand. She had recognized him the moment he said his name, for he was a credit card customer, William F. Carroll. He had needed a second more, but then he knew her as Jane Smith. Not terribly original, but it did the job. Someone had to be named Jane Smith, and it was so bogusly fake that it seemed more real as a result.

“Heloise,” he repeated. “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Heloise. Your boy go to Dunwood?”

His vowels were round with fake sincerity, a bad sign. Most of her regulars were adequate liars; they had to be to juggle the compartmentalized lives they had created for themselves. And she was a superb liar. Bill Carroll wasn’t even adequate.

“We live in Turner’s Grove, but he goes to private school. Do you live—”

“Divorced,” he said briefly. “Weekend warrior, driving up from D.C. every other Saturday, expressly for this tedium.”

That explained everything. She hadn’t screwed up. Her system simply wasn’t as foolproof as she thought. Before Heloise’s company took on a new client, she always did a thorough background check, looking up vehicle registrations, tracking down the home addresses. (And if no home address could be found, she refused the job.) A man who lived in her zip code, or even a contiguous one, was rejected out of hand, although she might assign him to one of her associates.

She hadn’t factored in divorce. Perhaps that was an oversight that only the never-married could make.

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.” He smirked.

This was trouble. What kind of trouble, she wasn’t sure yet, but definitely trouble.

Jack Dunhill, a.k.a. Bone, a.k.a. the Bear, a.k.a. Stan Newhope, a.k.a. Winston Leonard, a.k.a. Michigan Pete, a.k.a. Bill Dempsey, a.k.a. Shank, said, Not those waves but that little pucker on the surface out there is where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in, right there, and if you were to dump enough poison on that spot you’d kill the entire city in one sweep. Believe me, I’ve thought it out. You’d just have to hit right there, he said, pointing again, and then he turned to examine her gaze, and in doing so presented his face, weathered from years of picking blueberries and cherries in Michigan, and, after that, a merchant marine gig during Vietnam. You see, the water is unsuspecting until it hits that spot. It has no idea it’s gonna be collected, drawn under the streets, cleaned up, and piped into homes. Not a clue. But when it touches that suck, its future vanishes. No chance of becoming a wave after that, no kissing the shore and yearning back out into the lake. Instead, it ends up pooled on somebody’s lawn, or slipping down a throat, or spooned into a bowl of baby cereal. That’s the mystery of chance. One minute you’re one thing, the next you’re another, and choice had nothing at all to do with it. He paused, pointed one last time at the spot, shook himself free of his reverie, and pulled her close while she searched the water, tried to find the spot, and, failing to do so, said, I see it. I do. It’s right where you said it would be.

… All this while killing time in Cleveland, waiting for the Mansfield john to show up to collect the girl, because against all odds he had sent payment in advance for an evening of pleasurable escort after succumbing to Shank’s well-polished pitch:

The girl’s name is Meg. Hell, name her whatever you want, but I’d like you to call her Meg when you greet her for the first time, my friend. Said girl being in the prime of her youth, fresh as a daisy and raring to go. She’d practically escort you for free if I weren’t around to mediate her desires, my friend, he said from a phone booth outside Ypsilanti, watching the girl as she sat in the car, fixing her face in the mirror. The Mansfield john’s number had come from a list of potential clients he’d been keeping, names and numbers whispered to him as he and Meg rambled aimlessly around the Great Lakes. OHIO MEN IN NEED, it said at the top in block lettering. Below were six names. He’d tried four of them already, with no luck, but this time he felt the guy taking the bait — a sense of urgency formed at the other end of the line as the Mansfield john succumbed to the image he had painted: a bright young girl entwined in a skein of sexual confusion, open to just about anything. A girl born out of the loins of Akron, smothered by a father’s touch, and then cast out to fend for herself. (He’d left out the boring details: the way he had come upon her small body curled up, asleep, beneath an overpass outside Port Huron; the long journey they’d taken around the rim of the state of Michigan, following the mitten, staying as close as possible to the waterline. He’d left out her delicate neckline and the shallow hopelessness of her gaze and the way he’d educated her in how to make use of her flesh to earn funds. He’d left out his former religious training at the Grand Rapids Bible Institute and the way God had failed to give him a precise indication of His Will.)

After that, he’d begun to zero in on a price, speaking to the image he had conjured of a somewhat dainty man in neat trousers, with the kind of studied, dreamy comportment you’d expect from a farmer who had gone into the seed business and left fieldwork behind for good; there was a hint of yokel in the Mansfield john’s voice, a bit of hick around his tongue tempered by churchgoing and Sunday-school teaching. Yes, there was most certainly some Bible study in the formality of his elocutions, and there was fear in the amplitude of his voice — just loud enough to sound natural. In the phone booth, Shank imagined Mansfield as a man with neat hair, parted clean on the left-hand side, held with a shellac of brilliantine, cut tight above the ears. His wife would be in the family room watching television, aware of her husband in the kitchen, maybe even listening in on his side of the conversation, which to her would seem naturally cryptic because he often made deals on the phone, talking about seed prices, the best hybrids to plant, the way to intercrop carrots with corn. With this in mind, Shank took care when the dickering began and told Mansfield, Just say soy if you’re going to bid lower on Meg, and alfalfa if we hit the magic number. Eventually the john said, softly, Yes, alfalfa is the way to go because it’s a versatile crop, alfalfa will do just fine in your soil if you’re lucky with the weather, and Shank said, Good, we’ve got a deal and you’ll be saving this little girl’s life, Mansfield, you understand, because she’s putting money away for college after being kicked out of her home for no good reason. Then he instructed the man where and when to meet, adding, Just give us a nod. You’ll see us standing around outside the Holiday Inn, and then go on and check in and I’ll send her up to you. You’ll know us when you see us. I’ll be the one with the big shoulders, and she’ll be the one with the sweet derrière.

We always knew the crazy sonofabitch was out there. Don’t know how many times people told me of waking at night to the sound of his rifle. Hell of a way to be jerked out of dreaming. Shane Valen was a weird son of a bitch from a long line of weird sonsabitches. Not that anyone ever went out and caught him in their headlights bending over an antelope or mulie he’d just poached. Just guts stinking and shining in a cloud of flies some hot, bright afternoon. We all knew who’d done it. Goddamn it, Greggy, they’d say to me, can’t you do something about that goofy bastard?

Tried once. Turned on my rack and pulled the sonofabitch over — this was in the middle of the afternoon — just for a friendly chat. Shane, I said, I been hearing reports you’re driving at night without headlights. Reports you’re trespassing on land all over the county. Lot of people complaining, Shane.

He stared out his windshield so long I wondered was he deaf. So long I wondered if I’d really spoke. Finally he says, Anyone cut me?

Cut you? I asked.

Trespassin’? Anyone cut me trespassin’?

Hell, wasn’t nobody in the goddamn county hadn’t come across Shane’s pickup parked along some back road at night with Shane behind the wheel and his rifle across his chest. Crazy bastard’d stare right into your headlights, never look away, so your lights’d bounce up and down on washboards, say, and his eyes’d be going on and off red, like a snapshot from a cheap camera. Spooky as hell. And you knew damn well he’d been creeping along, poaching, and saw your headlights from miles away, so he pulled off the road like that. A piece of the darkness. You knew damn well, too, if you’d go over the next hill and cut your own lights and come back, you’d find that sonofabitch moving along slow, feeling the edges of the road in the dark like one of his goddamned snakes, and seeing things out there in the night no one else can see.

Well, Shane, I said, they ain’t so much caught you, but—

You cut me?

No, I ain’t caught you either. Point is, though, you got neighbors, and—

You ketch me, we kin speak agin. I’m goin’ now.

And he did. Put his pickup in gear and left me standing there — the only person ever did that. And hell, I let’m go. I hadn’t cut Shane doing anything. Couldn’t even catch the sonofabitch actually driving at night without headlights. He always saw me first.

Wish I could’ve caught him, though. Maybe this last mess wouldn’t have happened. Thai’s the trouble with being a peace officer — you’re always after-the-fact.

Bring your driver’s license, sweetheart. You’re driving.”

Fritzi’s new car? He was letting her drive?

Smiling his easy smile. Reaching over to squeeze her arm in that way of his, which sent a sensation like a mild electric shock through Katie’s body. Even as Katie warned herself, Don’t fall for it. You’ll be hurt.

Fritzi Czechi was known for his upscale but tasteful cars. This new-model steely-silver BMW with the mulberry leather interior and teakwood dash, he’d purchased only two weeks before, he was asking Katie Flanders to drive to the Meadow-lands racetrack, handing over the keys to her as if they were husband and wife, not a man and a woman in an undefined if romantic relationship. Katie stared at the keys quivering on the palm of her hand. Don’t! Don’t fall for it.

“Look, Fritzi: Why exactly am I driving, and not you? I missed the reason.”

“Because I need to concentrate, sweetheart.”

This was so. On the way to Meadowlands, while Katie, always a careful driver, drove the elegant new car at exactly the Turnpike speed limit, Fritzi studied what appeared to be racing forms, frowning, making notations with a stubby pencil. After a while he shifted in his seat to stare out the passenger’s window, frowning as if painful-size thoughts were working their way through his brain, and Katie glanced over at him wondering, what was Fritzi thinking? (Probably not of what had happened between them the night before, as Katie was. A warm dreamy erotic memory intensified by the smell of the new-car interior.) Fritzi was part-owner of one of the horses scheduled to race this Friday evening at Meadowlands, a three-year-old stallion named Morning Star who was returning to serious racing after being sidelined for months with a hairline fracture of his right front knee. Katie understood that Fritzi was worried about his horse, but also Fritzi was a gambler, which meant he dealt in odds, in numerals, and probably he had a mathematical mind and could “see” figures in his head in a way Katie could only imagine, it was so alien to her way of perceiving the world. Once, when she’d asked Fritzi how much one of his horses had cost, Fritzi had told her, “A racehorse is beyond computation, sweetheart,” which had been a mysterious answer yet made sense.

It was a way of telling Katie Flanders, too, that Fritzi’s private professional life was beyond her comprehension.

So Katie drove, and liked it that Fritzi so trusted her with his car, which wasn’t like Fritzi Czechi in fact, or any man she’d ever known, asking or allowing a woman to drive his car while he sat in the passenger’s seat staring out the window. Katie wondered if maybe Fritzi was in one of his moods: captured by the look of the mottled, marbled early-evening sky like the usual sky over northern New Jersey, clouds like chunks of dirty concrete shot with veins of acid-yellow and sulfur-red. This Jersey sky they’d been seeing all their lives, Katie thought. Familiar as a ceiling of some room you could die in.

The last time Fritzi had taken Katie to Meadowlands to see one of his horses race had been a year ago, or more. That year had passed slowly! Fritzi’s horse then was Pink Lady, a four-year-old who hadn’t won her race but hadn’t lost badly, in Katie’s opinion. Pink Lady had galloped so hard, Katie’s heart had gone out to the shuddering mare, whipped by her scowling little jockey but unable to overtake the lead horses who’d seemed to pull away from the rest immediately out of the gate as if by magic. Pink Lady had come in third, out of nine. That wasn’t bad, was it? Katie had seemed to plead with Fritzi, who’d said little about the race, or about Pink Lady, and he hadn’t encouraged Katie’s encouragement, still less her emotions. Always Katie would remember A racehorse is beyond computation and understand it as a rebuke.

A gentle rebuke, though. Not like somebody telling you to shut up and mind your own business, you don’t know shit.

Fritzi Czechi was one of those men in Katie’s life — Katie didn’t want to think how many there were, and that some of them knew one another from Jersey City High where they’d all gone — who’d been in and out of her life since the early 1970s. Now it was 1988 and they were fully grown, no longer high school kids, yet when you looked closely at them, as at yourself in a mirror, frankly, unsparingly, you saw that they were still kids trying to figure what the hell it was all about, and what they were missing out on, they were beginning to realize they’d never get.

Except Fritzi Czechi. But for his broken-up marriages, Fritzi hadn’t done badly. He exuded a certain glamour. He dressed in style. He was a fair-skinned, lean, ropy-muscled man of about five feet nine, not tall, carrying himself with a certain confidence, at least when people were likely to be watching. Fritzi had strangely luminous stone-colored eyes, fair hair thinning at the crown he wore slightly long so that it curled behind his ears; he had a habit of stroking his hair, the back of his head, a medallion ring gleaming on the third finger of his right hand. (Katie recalled Fritzi had once worn a wedding band. But no longer.) Fritzi was a good-looking man, if no longer as good-looking as he’d been six or seven years before when his smiling picture had been printed in Jersey papers as the part-owner of a Thoroughbred that had won $500,000 in the Belmont Stakes. (Katie had saved these clippings. She hadn’t been going out with Fritzi at that time, Fritzi had been married then. If he’d been seeing other women, which probably he had been, Katie Flanders wasn’t one of these women.)

As well as horses, Fritzi was known to have invested in a number of restaurants, clubs, and bowling alleys in Jersey, though he rarely spoke of his business life; it was part of Fritzi’s glamour that he was so reticent, so elusive you might say, keeping his private life to himself, so if you were Katie Flanders you’d have to hear from other sources that things were going well for Fritzi, or not so well. “Investments,” horses, marriages. (Three marriages. Children, both boys, from the first, long-ago marriage when Fritzi had thought he’d wanted to be a New Jersey state trooper like his oldest brother. So far as Katie knew, Fritzi was separated from his third wife, not yet legally divorced. But it was only an assumption. She couldn’t ask.) Definitely it was part of Fritzi Czechi’s glamour that he did unpredictable things like giving money to bankrupt Jersey City High for new uniforms for both the boys’ and the girls’ varsity basketball teams, or he’d send boxes of expensive chocolate candies to the mothers of certain of his old friends for their birthdays, or hospitalizations, or a dozen red roses to a woman friend like Katie Flanders he was sorry about not having seen in a while, as a token of his “esteem.” Fritzi was known to pick up tabs in restaurants and clubs, and he was known to lend money to friends, if they were old friends, without asking for interest, and often without much hope of getting the money back.

He’d “lent” money to Katie, too. When there’d been a medical crisis in her family. When she’d tried to return it he’d told her, “Someday, sweetheart, you can bail me out. We’ll wait.”

Katie was a secretary at Drummond Tools, Ltd., in Hackensack. One of those temporary jobs, she’d thought, until she got married, started having babies. But just to be a secretary these days you had to know computers, and computers are always being upgraded, which is scary as hell when you’re on the downside of thirty and not getting any younger or smarter while the new girls being hired look like junior high kids. The thought chilled Katie. She reached out to touch Fritzi’s arm, needing to touch him, and liking the fact that it was Katie Flanders’s privilege to touch Fritzi Czechi in this casual intimate way since they were more than lovers, they were old friends. “This BMW, Fritzi, is very nice.”

Fritzi said, “Well, good.”

He wasn’t listening. He’d put away his racing forms and was staring now at his watch, which he wore turned inward, the flat oval disc of digital numbers against his pulse. As if, with Fritzi Czechi, even the exact time was a secret.

“’Specially compared to my own.” Katie drove a 1985 Ford compact, not a new model when she’d bought it. After this roomy number it would feel about the size of a sardine can.

Katie was suddenly quiet, realizing how she sounded. Like she was hinting that Fritzi give her this car, or another like it. She didn’t mean that at all. She only just wanted to talk. She was lonely, and she wanted to talk. After last night, she wanted to be assured that Fritzi cared for her, that he wasn’t already forgetting her, his mind flying ahead to the Meadowlands racetrack, to that blur of frantic movement out of the gate and around the dirt track and back to the finish line that would involve less than two minutes, yet could decide so much. She was frightened: If things turned out badly for Morning Star, as, she’d gathered, they hadn’t turned out all that wonderfully for Pink Lady, Fritzi would be plunged into one of his moods. If he didn’t call her, she could not call him. He’d never exactly said, but that was her understanding. Wanting to tell him, It’s lonely being the only one in love.

She wondered: Maybe Fritzi wasn’t driving because his license had been suspended? Or maybe: nerves?

If they were living together, or married, Katie had to concede, Fritzi would be like this much of the time: distant, distracted. If — why not be extravagant, in fantasy — they had children, he’d never be home. Yet she felt tenderness for him. She wanted to forgive him, for hurting her. Katie’s father, now deceased, a machine shop worker in Jersey City through his adult life, had been the same way. Probably most men were. So much to think about, a world of numbers, odds that always eluded them. So much, they couldn’t hope to squeeze into their heads.

Lonely? That’s life.

The night before, in her apartment, in her bedroom where he’d rarely been, Fritzi had showed Katie snapshots of Morning Star, taken at the Thoroughbred farm where the horse was boarded and trained in rural Hunterdon County. The way Fritzi passed the snapshots to her, Katie could sense that he felt strongly about the horse; the way he pronounced “hairline fracture,” with a just-perceptible faintness in his voice, allowed Katie to know that Fritzi felt this injury as painfully as if it had been his own. “Beautiful, eh?” was all Fritzi could say. Katie marveled over the silky russet-red horse with a white starlike mark high on his nose, the high-pricked ears and big shiny black protuberant eyes, for Morning Star was in fact a beauty, and maybe the knowledge that such beauty was fragile, so powerful an animal as a horse can be so easily injured, was a part of that beauty, as pain was part of it: the pain of anticipated loss.

“Oh yes. Oh Fritzi! Beautiful.”

Two of the snapshots had been bluntly cropped. A third party, posed with Fritzi and Morning Star, had been scissored out of the picture. Katie wouldn’t ask: It had to be the third wife. (Her name was Rosalind. Very beautiful, people said. A former model. And younger than Katie Flanders by several years.) In the snapshots, Fritzi Czechi was smiling a rare wide smile, one of his hard-muscled arms slung around the horse’s neck, through the horse’s thick chestnut-red mane. Fritzi was wearing a sports shirt open at the throat, his stone-colored eyes gleamed like liquid fire; clearly he’d been happy at that moment, as Katie had to concede she’d never seen him.

Carefully Katie asked, “Was this last summer?”

“Was what last summer?”

“… These pictures taken.”

Fritzi grunted what sounded like yes. Already he’d taken the snapshots back and put them away in his inside coat pocket, with his narrow flat Italian leather wallet that was so sleek and fine.

Later, making love in Katie’s darkened bedroom, Fritzi had gotten so carried away he’d almost sobbed, burying his heated face in Katie’s neck. She’d been surprised by his emotion, and deeply moved. Katie wasn’t the kind of girl who could make love with a man without falling in love with him, or, it was fair to say, she wasn’t the kind of girl to make love with a man without preparing beforehand to fall in love with him, and deeply in love with him, like sinking through a thin crust of ice and you discover that, beneath the ice, there’s quicksand. She’d been wondering if she would ever hear from Fritzi Czechi since the last time she’d seen him, months before, and now he was with her and in her arms, and he was saying, “You’re my good, sweet girl, Katie Flemings, aren’t you?” and Katie pretended she hadn’t heard the wrong name, or maybe she could pretend she’d heard, but knew that Fritzi was teasing. She said, “I am if you want me, Fritzi.” She hadn’t meant to say this! It sounded all wrong. Holding Fritzi’s warm body, stroking his smooth tight-muscled back, kissing the crown of his head where his hair was thinnest, as, half-consciously, you might kiss an infant at such a spot, to protect it from harm, she teased, “Are you my ‘good, sweet guy,’ Fritzi Czechi?”

Fritzi was most at ease in banter. The way an eel squirms, so you can’t get hold of it.

Therm is in the woodshed rubbing gasoline on his bloodstained sneakers when he sees a handcuffed man break from the woods and amble toward the house. Hefting an ax, Therm calls out, and the man, surprised, arms defeated behind his back, freezes.

The men consider each other over the short distance of semi-mowed backyard lawn in the cool prerain breeze. The mower hunkers to the bloodied ground between the woodshed and the house. For a moment the men feel the weight of their guilt, and then the moment breaks.

What the hell are you doing? Therm asks, stepping forward with the ax.

Hoping I could get a little water, the handcuffed man says, nodding to a green hose heaped next to the house.

Therm is a big man with broad shoulders and a measurable gut. He isn’t a fighter, but he can defend himself if he has to. Especially with an ax. And if his potential opponent is handcuffed. There is nothing threatening about the restrained man; he is a foot shorter than Therm and has wiry hair, sun-browned skin, and a long chin. What makes Therm uncomfortable are the man’s eyes. There is something off about them — not crossed exactly, just crooked.

Looks like you’ve gotten yourself into some trouble, Therm says, squaring himself against the other man.

The man raises his eyebrows, cocks his head back, and gazes down his chin at the bloodied patch of lawn. You too, he responds.

What, that? That was an accident. I hit a snake, Therm says.

A lot of blood for a snake.

A nest of them, I guess.

I last saw her at breakfast.

I work alone, in a room above the garage where a carpenter once told me the wood in the floor dated back pre-American Revolution. He could tell by the lightness of the grain, and the history of the building. People know that stuff. A friend of mine makes guitars. He once saw an instrument at a trade show and knew it had been made out of the same piece of African mahogany that he’d built a guitar out of. He exchanged stories with the luthier responsible, and sure enough he was right: same wood. People know weird stuff.

She’d mentioned it in passing, when I was furiously cooking pancakes for one of our daughters and scrambling eggs for the other; cooking oatmeal for my wife and me. It’s the one real spoil I give our daughters: any breakfast you want, anything you name. But I’m a stickler with them in every other way. We get along well because the boundaries are set. There’s respect and love now, not testing and challenges. There’s harmony, real harmony, and that’s a cherished commodity in a family.

“Some guy turned around running at Queeny Park and caught up to me, and ran with me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

I think she told me to impress me, to remind me nine years into our marriage that other men still look. It wasn’t news to me — I knew they looked — but I sensed that this was one of those moments in a marriage when you don’t want to say the stupid thing. But she wasn’t asking me if I liked her haircut.

“He say anything?” I ask.

“Yeah, we talked. He asked questions like how often I run. Stuff like that.”

“You talked to him.” I try not to make it sound accusatory, but my concern gets the better of me, and I blow it.

“I can’t talk to a guy?” She goes back to the dishes. I have a pancake I’m burning. I flip it. The color of shoe leather.

She soaps up, runs the water a little louder than necessary.

“It isn’t like that,” I say, when I get a chance.

“No, it isn’t,” she replies.

“I mean… I’m not trying to tell you what you can and can’t do. But it’s a park, sweetie. You’re a single woman, or at least a woman running alone, as far as he’s concerned.”

“You write too many of those books.”

She often blames my occupation on my tendency to see criminal behavior in everyone. She’s right, of course. She knows she’ll always win this one, and she does.

A day passes. Two. It’s breakfast again. It’s crepes this time, and soft-boiled eggs for the youngest, a dish we call Fishies in the Brook — why, I have no idea. Soft-boiled eggs on pieces of torn bread in a bowl. No brook. No fishes. But the girls love it and eat it down to a yellow smear on the walls of the bowl.

“He was there again. Yesterday. He was running in my direction this time. Caught up to me and… and we ran together.”

“I wish I could say something positive.” But I can’t. It’s not that I care about the contact, the attention. Lord knows we can all use it. I get it too, the flattering comments out on book tour, the looks that go beyond a normal look. I don’t act on them, and neither will she. That’s not my worry at all. And if she does act on it, then that’s dealt with then. But there’s not a grain of jealousy spilling out of my shaker. This is straight concern, and I try to disguise it just enough so that I don’t scare her. I’m good at scaring people. I’ve scared millions of readers for a very long time. I know the effect I can have, even when I don’t mean to. I work hard not to scare my family, the kids especially.

“It’s a dark park is all,” I continue. “Long stretches in the woods. A long way from anywhere. Some guy pulls up to you out on Adams and runs along with you, you can at least scream. You scream in Queeny Park and you’ll be lucky to scare off a few birds.”

There’s a hidden message here I’m not sure she gets. She stopped running for about five months — over a year ago now — because a car stalked her at five in the morning. It scared the pee out of her, literally. Slowed down and cruised alongside her before the sun was up, before the neighbors were up. When she hid behind a tree, the guy from the passenger window threw a can of soda at her and nearly hit her. We called the cops. I had the opening of Mystic River running through my head. She had laundry to do. The cop was pleasant and genuinely concerned. He took it around the block to the Bread Company, no doubt, and warmed up his cup and went on with his day. Bottom line: She stopped running. For five months.

Now she’s back at it, and this time the guy’s on foot and she doesn’t see the parallels.

“If he was in a car ‘running’ alongside of you, how would you feel?”

“It’s not the same thing,” she says.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s he live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he drive?”

She goes back to the dishes because she can hear me say: “It is the same thing.”

“How much does he know about you?” I ask.

She shakes her head. I sense she’s blown it out on the trail and knows it, and doesn’t have an answer.

We’ve been watching a movie on PBS where the husband is a jealous, controlling freak — it’s Trollope — and I use that as my reference. “I’m not trying to be the guy in the movie. You know that, right? You want to run? Run. You want to talk? Talk. But maybe run with a friend so it’s two against one. Maybe choose a park that isn’t so completely isolated and dark. Queeny Park is so wrong for a woman running alone. It’s totally wrong. You can see that, right?”

She shrugs.

I know that shrug. I’ve come to hate that shrug. It’s the blow-off shrug. We’re done here, and it’s on her terms, and that burns me.

Another day or two. Three, maybe. She comes home that afternoon for lunch and lists the friends she ran with this morning. She doesn’t do it in a way to sting me. She could, but she doesn’t, and I love her for it.

“Thanks,” I say between biles.

A couple days later it’s the same: Laurel and Tracy, four-mile loop at Queeny, Starbucks afterward and a good talk. No mention of Him.

So today when the call comes from school, my first reaction is to be pissed off. Our eldest, at all of seven, wasn’t picked up. Missed the bus and wasn’t picked up. Missed the bus because her mother told her not to take it. Makes sense because it’s Thursday and that’s ballet. I’m on the way there when the BlackBerry rings and it’s the private school. The youngest wasn’t picked up.

Now, for the first time, the tick goes off in my brain. It’s like a Tourette’s misfire of a synapse: a burst of cursing aloud followed by near blindness and the inability to keep any one part of my body still. My seven-year-old is freaking out in the back seat. She’s come out of the shoulder strap, and that really frosts me because she’s been doing this a lot lately, and it isn’t safe, and she knows it. So I brake to a stop rather dangerously, and get a bunch of car horns as my prize.

“Put your strap back on, young lady!” She’s the nearest target and she gets both barrels. My mind is racing now and I’m wondering how much of this is me the writer and how much the husband. I can see it all in my mind’s eye, and I erase it just as quickly. Do not go there! I tell myself. Steady keel.

This was the way you won the Open.

This was the way you won a million dollars.

This is what you did.

Lucy had a list, and she was sticking to it.

Every morning, in the back bedroom, braced on the tinny, oil-canning floor, looking into a full-length mirror she’d bought at the Wal-Mart, Lucy did a hundred grips and a hundred turns. She’d grip the club and check alignment, start the turn and check her intermediate position in the mirror. When she was satisfied, she’d continue, let her wrists cock, hold at the top and check the final position. Then she’d start over.

She was on the eighty-fourth turn when the screaming started. The screaming didn’t affect the drill. Strange sounds came off a golf course, and besides, she’d do a hundred reps if the trailer burned down around her. At ninety-nine she hadn’t even paused to look out the blinds.

On her hundredth turn, she checked her form in the mirror, nodded at herself and relaxed. She was a middle-sized girl, lean from walking and working out, deeply tanned, dishwater blonde with a pixie cut. She was sweating a little, and wiped the side of her nose on her shirtsleeve. She was dressed in a navy-blue golf shirt and khaki shorts, with a Ping golf hat. Her blond ponytail was threaded through the back of the hat.

She put the weighted club in the corner of the bedroom and walked down the central hall to the kitchen. Her mom was digging in a toaster with a fork, talking to it around a lit Marlboro, letting it know: “You piece of shit-ass junk, you let that outta there.”

By some mistake, the television was turned off, so the screaming outside sounded even louder than it had in the back. Mom, still talking sticky-lipped around the cigarette, glanced sideways at the screen door and said, “Goddamned golfers,” and turned the toaster upside down and banged it on the counter.

Lucy looked out through the screen, across the six-foot strip of grass that served as the front yard, past the corner of the Tobins’ double-wide and over the fence, across the end of the driving range and the east corner of the machine shed, and judged the screams as coming from the first fairway. “Don’t sound like drunks,” she said. She corrected herself. “Doesn’t.”

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em anyway,” Mom said. Lucy’s mother knew about golfers, having had a number of hasty relationships with them over the years, including one with Lucy’s father. Lucy knew little about him except that he was a 6-handicap and, under pressure, had a tendency to flip his hands at the beginning of his downswing.

“Duck-hooked me right into the county maternity ward,” her mother told her. “Not that I didn’t love you every minute, sweetheart.”

Lucy would have liked to know more, but never would. She had two photographs of him, taken with a small camera, reds and greens in the photos starting to bleed: her mom and dad in their golf clothes, standing near the ball machine on the driving range, squinting at the camera, sunlight harsh on their faces. Her father had been murdered by a man named Willis Franklin, who at that very moment was probably sitting on a barstool at the Rattlesnake Golf Club, not five hundred yards away, having gotten away with it.

“How did this happen?” her mother asked, peering into the toaster. “That sonofabitch is welded in there.”

“I told you, you cannot put frozen flapjacks in a toaster; it don’t work,” Lucy said. “When they thaw out they get sticky and they sink down and grab ahold of them little wires at the bottom… Ah, shit.” She was tired of hearing herself talk about it; and a little tired of correcting her own grammar. She did it anyway: “Doesn’t work,” she said. “Those little wires.”

Her mom looked up: “You been pretty goddamn prickly lately.”

“I’m headin’ out; see what’s going on,” Lucy said. She rattled through the golf bags stacked in the corner and pulled out her putter.

“Dinner at five thirty,” Mom said.

“Yeah.” Like it made any difference what time they fired up the microwave. “I’ll be back before then, probably for lunch. I got a couple of lessons; then I gotta run into town.”

Lucy took her putter, which she called the Lizard, and stuck five balls in the pocket of the golf vest she’d designed herself and produced on Mom’s pedal-driven Singer — a sports-activity vest that sooner or later would be stolen by those sons of bitches at Nike, she didn’t doubt, and somebody would make a million bucks, but it wouldn’t be her. She went out the door, the Lizard over her shoulder, the new Titleists clicking in her vest pocket. On the step, she automatically touched her pocket again, didn’t feel the book. “Shoot.”

She went back inside: “Forgot my list,” she said.

“Heaven forbid,” Mom said. She’d given up on the toaster and was looking through the litter in the kitchen for her Marlboros. “Got to clean this place up,” she muttered.

Lucy went back to the bedroom, got the little black book from the dresser and headed out again, out the door, past the Tobins’ place, through a hole in the fence and past the machine shed, where Donnie Dell was poking around the mower blades on an aging orange Kubota tractor. He called, “Hiya, Luce,” and she raised the putter and called back, “What’s all the hollerin’ about?”

He shook his head: “I don’t know. Too early to be drunks.” She kept going and he called after her, “You gonna be around?”

“Maybe tonight,” she called back. “Right now, I got a lesson with Rick Waite and his wife.”

“Okay. Maybe, uh, I’ll stop by. Later.”

She smiled and kept moving. Donnie Dell was taking some kind of ag course over at UW-River Falls; a college boy. She knew exactly what he wanted; he’d been coming around for a month, ever since he got hired. What he didn’t know, but that she did, was that he was going to get some, but not for a week. That’s when he came up on her list, and she’d hold to it.

But tonight, tomorrow, the next day — uh-uh. She was busy.

The closer we came to San Antonio, where we would join up with General Somervell’s army, the more our spirits grew. At last, Sam Houston had put his cards on the table. The glory of Texas would amass on the frontier and run the alien marauders to ground. With each town, more and more of our brave lads answered the call. They fell in behind our wagons, they clung to the sides of our wagons. They came on their own mounts, some of them plough horses. In one town a judge dismissed murder charges against a woman so he, the lawyers, and the jury could join our great march to glory. We were near about one hundred strong, though we still looked as ragtag as any band of gyps. But the president himself was reported to be moving among his foundling troops, predicting the stern rebuke with which we would confront Santa Anna.

And so it was that we came to the crest of a hill covered with mesquite and prickly pear, within sight of our goal, San Antonio. My first thought on seeing the white stone walls of the city was of the New Jerusalem. It was the largest and most glorious city I had ever laid eyes on. It was not so much a city as it was a brilliant whiteness in an otherwise empty place. But as we made our way down the hill toward town, our eyes revealed Nature’s cunning deception. The city was a ruin, its fair white walls peppered with grapeshot and musket balls, its streets strewn with Comanche arrows, its residents too fearful even to find hope in our advance. Like a ghost ship adrift on the desert, San Antonio’s five thousand residents had been reduced to a frightened few hundred, and not a white face among them. Even the Alamo itself seemed less like the site of that heroic battle and more a glorified sod house. What was here, I asked myself, that was worth defending?

We made camp with many other volunteers in a pecan grove just south of town, near an abandoned mission one of the townsmen called “Conception.” Our immediate task was to procure supplies — wood, food, whatever we could lay hands on. Joe himself turned up with the copper baptismal font from the mission, which was used to cook soup for the company. For we were a company now, ill fed, ill shod, and lacking in even the very rudiments of military training, but still a company of free men bound to free the Republic from barbarous hands.

While we waited for orders, most of the men kept to camp, either sleeping or consulting the book of prophecies (of which there are fifty-two one-page chapters). Orders were given but few were obeyed. In truth it seemed as though we had been forgotten by Washington-on-the-Brazos. Rumor told of some men slipping away into the night, having no stomach for such waiting.

I and some others spent our days gathering pecans from the groves and selling them in town. I scoured the streets for ammunition, communicating my needs quickly to prospective sellers by holding up a musket ball between the thumb and finger of one hand and a coin between the thumb and finger of another. Even the meager pecan profits were more than I could spend. There seemed to be very little powder and lead to be had in the town, and some of the balls I bought were so misshapen that I feared they would fly no faster or truer than a toad, but I was determined to be as well equipped as possible.

In this way, I came to know the people somewhat. I learned a few words of their language and took the odd meal with them now and again, finding them a warm, outgoing people. Now and again I visited a rancho, where I was a quick study of Mexican farming practices. Black cattle were the stock of choice in all the places I visited. The need for water — something that had vexed my own efforts at farming — was satisfied with a system by which a hoodwinked mule was made to turn a shaft that connected ingeniously to a configuration of drum and buckets, bringing a constant supply of fresh water from underground to a reservoir on the surface. The mule, being blindfolded, loses all of its mulishness and turns the shaft until another is hitched in its place. In this way, one man may tend a small herd. I must say they were so skilled at disguising their savagery that the Mexicans seemed as civilized as the best of us. In short, I began to suspect they did not deserve the lot they had drawn.

Every night that June, from my cell window at Orofino, I watched the fireworks color-burn the midnight sky over the Indian reservation across the road. The colors lit up fields and sometimes the sparks would drift to earth and the old horses the Indians kept would scatter, faster than you would think they were capable of. Speed left from races they never ran, I told myself. I knew horses when I was a kid near Saratoga, in upstate New York. Whole worlds had happened since then. Those horses and fireworks were my only friends at the beginning of that summer.

I wasn’t in the race to win anymore. I’d fallen on some hard times in Eastern Washington and a gang that was a branch of the Posse made a deal with me. They’d pay me to finish off another man’s time in Idaho. I don’t know how they rigged it up, who they paid off. But one day they brought me into a hospital room in Spokane and the deputies that shackled me and took me to Orofino called me by a different name. I was inside under a new name and eight years stood between me and the door.

The Idaho State Correctional Facility at Orofino was an old brick campus, housing twice as many men as it was built for. It was a mixed classification facility, which is the worst, because the killers are in with the guys who forgot a child support payment. The guys doing a decade don’t look very kindly on the guy who gets to go home in three months. I was a maximum classification at that time, because the guy I was pretending to be had a record that began in the womb.

The guards came for me early one morning and cuffed me and shackled me for transport. I knew it couldn’t be good. Someone had filed a writ with the Federal Circuit Court and the federal judge had ordered that I be brought to his temporary chambers, in Boise. They were being forced to produce me, except I wasn’t anyone — I wasn’t the man they wanted incarcerated and I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone I was working for the Posse. In my own mind, they may as well have been driving a mute to Boise. We passed south through the beautiful Idaho mountains and trees and blue sky. The deputies driving me didn’t say a word, just stopped once for coffee and then drove on. We drove into the streets and city of Boise. I slept on a bench overnight in a holding cell and they brought me upstairs into chambers in the morning.

The judge was in robes and seated behind a large desk, with an older woman stenographer in front of the desk. My brother and an Asian man, both impeccably dressed in gray suits, stood in the back of the room. The judge addressed me.

“The court has been made aware of some unusual circumstances surrounding your case.” He pointed at my brother and the Asian man. I nodded and the judge continued. “We’re convinced… the court has been convinced…” He paused. “The court is convinced that a sealed record and immediate release is the only way you’ll be alive at the end of the week. The State of Idaho didn’t seem inclined to let you go — so the appeal was passed up to me.”

I didn’t say anything. The court bailiff came over and unlocked my cuffs and shackles. I rubbed my wrists.

The judge stood. “I’m instructing one of my marshals to escort you to the Nevada border so we don’t have a problem. I can’t help you if you re-enter this state. And you’re on your own with other problems — but we won’t hold you here as a stationary target.” He handed me some paperwork. “You’re free to go, as long as you’re leaving the state.”

I looked at my brother, who spoke to the judge. “He’ll ride with us to Nevada, Your Honor.”

“Keep your head down,” the judge said. He looked directly at me. “And watch behind you.”

My brother shook hands with me, but we didn’t say anything, not a word. He drove the new sedan behind the marshal’s car, with Mr. Osaka in the back and me in the passenger’s seat. It was a long ride, but finally we saw a sign for the Nevada state line. We crossed it and the marshal pulled a U-turn and headed north, back into Idaho.

Mr. Osaka mumbled something and my brother spoke to me.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t warn you, but we had a heck of a time finding you. You got yourself in pretty deep.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

My brother nodded as he drove. “We’d been looking for you, to come help with Mr. Osaka’s operation. In looking for you, we found out that the man you went as, the real man, just got arrested in Montana. It was only a matter of time before the Posse tried to get to you on the inside.”

Mr. Osaka mumbled to my brother.

“What’d he say?” I said.

“Mr. Osaka doesn’t speak,” my brother said. “He understands English perfectly well and he probably speaks it, although I’ve never heard him. I speak for him. Always, for the past five years. He talks in a kind of yakuza dialect — he and I speak it to each other and that’s it. Nobody else.”

“Handy,” I said. I hadn’t seen my brother much at the beginning of the last decade and not at all in the past five years, but years didn’t come between us. I just figured he had his own job going on, somewhere, and when my plans started to fail, I didn’t want to bring him down with me. He was a couple years younger than me and maybe I felt responsible. He’d gotten bigger since I’d seen him last.

“Do you want to work for Mr. Osaka?” my brother asked.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Watching whales,” my brother said. And as we drove, he detailed the operation to me. In the end, I agreed.

Whales are a select group of Japanese businessmen, probably only two hundred worldwide, who come to the United States to gamble. They’re called whales because they bet huge — they’re up seven million, they’re down thirty million. If one of these guys walks into a small casino on a good night, he can bankrupt the place, or lose enough to let the casino build another club and a hotel.

Whales like bets that other gamblers can’t get their hands on and sometimes it can be exotic — betting on street fights, illegal car racing. But the yakuza control the horse racing and that means that the yakuza can sometimes control the whales.

Mr. Osaka bought seven hundred acres of land outside Reno, flattened it all out, put in a private horse-racing track and was getting set to lay in a private airfield when some of his contractors thought they’d muscle him for more money. Those contractors are gone and now my brother and I are in charge of the operation.

A private racetrack, with all the barns and stables. The whales own stuff all over the world and pretty soon, the private jets are coming in, with the stallions and racehorses the whales have accumulated. A horseman’s field of dreams. We’ve got the compound gated off and the whales pull up, with their limos and their drivers and their party girls. Every morning — the races start at eleven and they walk around, drinking, looking at the horses.

Mr. Osaka has only two betting windows open, run by Asian men the same as him. Tattoos on their hands, one guy with a Japanese character right on his throat. These are the honest men, bound to count the money, to take the verbal bets and always pay. No slips, no tickets. These guys are taking bets in the hundreds of thousands and never sweating.

Mr. Osaka walks the compound with us and mumbles to my brother as we pass the honest men by the bet windows.

“As children, they are not taught about wanting. Then, when they learn about money, they are taught it is filthy. The combination makes them honest,” my brother translates.

The favorite bet for the whales is the pinwheel. The pin-wheel lets the whale run his horse on Mr. Osaka’s track, but bet against other horses running at other tracks that come in by satellite feed. Your horse can finish second here but if you’ve matched it up against the right combo, say from Saratoga, or Pimlico, or Yonkers, you can double or triple your take. Or you can throw your money in a bigger hole. Money is green paper, to these people. They give more money to the party girls to keep them quiet than I’ve ever earned in my life. But that ended, too, once I got on Mr. Osaka’s payroll.

The horses thundered around the track every day, a different group. Sired by names you’d recognize. The track stayed hard for the rest of the summer and there were winners — Jack Rabbit Fast, Sun Comet, The Last Laugh. Some of the names didn’t translate into English.

One morning, my brother and I had to take pistols out to the building where the stable hands slept and escort someone to the gate. We came back by the track and Mr. Osaka stood at the rail, watching the horses take their morning exercise. He mumbled and my brother spoke.

“Do you know the secret of a fast horse?” my brother translated.

“No,” I said.

Mr. Osaka mumbled at length and my brother fed me bits and pieces.

“When horses run fast, all four feet leave the ground. They fly. They like to fly. It’s their fantasy. But they have to push themselves back down to the ground, so their hooves can touch the track again. So when you look at a horse, or watch him in a race, see the look on his face and the jockey’s. If they like to fly, that is no good. They must like to push themselves back to ground, to run.”

“Do you bet?” I asked.

Mr. Osaka mumbled. My brother spoke.

“I swore a vow in the beginning never to bet on horses and I have kept that vow. Once, a horse had to be shot in front of me and my father told me, You can see someone’s life in the pattern of their death-blood. The horse’s blood stopped at my feet and it was a sign to me that I should not bet on horses.”

I nodded. Mr. Osaka moved his lips and my brother continued.

“If you were shot right now, and we saw your death blood, where would it go?”

I looked at the ground, which sloped slightly onto the track, and Mr. Osaka followed my gaze.

My brother finished. “Stay close to horses then, maybe that is your life.”

We watched Mr. Osaka walk back to the white clubhouse and he disappeared inside.

Robert Andrews is a former Green Beret and CIA officer whose first four novels dealt with the spy business. His last three novels, however (Marian Wood, G.P. Putnam’s Sons), feature homicide detective Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps. Andrews and his wife BJ live in Washington, D.C.

• I was noodling around, thinking about a plot for a fifth spy novel, when Chuck and I had lunch. Chuck was one of the Washington Posts best investigative reporters. An acolyte of Bob Woodward, Chuck specialized in prying the tops off well-guarded cans of worms Washington’s political elite hoped to hide from their constituents.

“Story on the wire,” Chuck tells me one day at Stoney’s. “Hit-run kills a Catholic priest in Boston. He’s got eighty thousand bucks… cash… in shoeboxes in his closet.”

Chuck smiled. “They trace it to a Brinks holdup.”

The Soviet Union had gone belly-up almost ten years before. And terrorists hadn’t yet driven into the Trade Center. BJ and I had just moved into D.C. from a quiet Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood. That year, the district earned the honor of becoming the nation’s murder capital.

And so my first crime novel, A Murder of Honor: A drive-by shooting, and Father Robert J. O’Brien sprawls dead on Pennsylvania Avenue. The more detectives Kearney and Phelps work the case, the more fingers point to the good priest’s involvement in a nasty drug operation. At the same time, more comes out that paints O’Brien as a man of honor.

Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon’s attorney general, described Washington as “too small to be a state, too big to be an insane asylum.” In writing A Murder of Honor and its sequels, I realized that Washington’s swamp-fever looniness offered more permutations for intrigue and mischief than did international espionage.

And so Kearney and Phelps show up in the draft of the fourth D.C. cop novel: On the same morning that an advertising executive kills himself in the upper-class Northwest, a student in ragged Anacostia murders a beloved high-school teacher. And there’s a connection… some three hundred pages from now.

Back to “Solomon’s Alley”: Kearney and Phelps have cameos. But the protagonist is Solomon, who tends to his Georgetown alley and argues with his Voices.