“Introduction” copyright © 1992 by Joe Gores.

“File #1: The Mayfield Case” copyright © 1967 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Davis Publications, Inc.

“The Second Coming” copyright © 1966 by Holloway House Publishing Co. First published in Adam’s Best Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Plot It Yourself” copyright © 1987 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the title “Detectivitis, Anyone?” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Raptor” copyright © 1983 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Watch for It” copyright © 1973 by Mystery Writers of America. First published in the anthology Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson. Reprinted by permission of the Mystery Writers of America.

“The Andrech Samples” copyright © 1970 by Magnum-Royal Publications, Inc. First published in Swank Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Killer Man” copyright © 1958 by Flying Eagle Publications, Inc. First published in Manhunt Magazine under the title “Pro.” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Goodbye, Pops” copyright © 1969 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Writing is a profession you start to get the hang of about the time your non-writing contemporaries are talking early retirement. So selecting a group of your own stories is a humbling experience. True, each brings an earlier “you” back to life. True, you read with the eyes you wore when you wrote them, you smell the smells of then, feel the textures, hear the sounds, taste the excitements, remember the enthusiasms.

But reading them now, you also see what you should have done better, what you should smooth out, update, modernize. But you can’t. Mysteries, like Hamlet’s players, are the abstracts and brief chronicles of their time; to edit and alter them after the fact destroys much of their value. Any differences the scholars among you might find between the stories here and their first publication is just a restoration of the original text.

Larry Ballard was halfway to the Daniel Kearny Associates office before he remembered to switch on his radio. After a whine and a blast of static, O’Bannon’s voice came on loudly in mid-transmission.

“...Bay Bridge yet, Oakland 3?”

“Coming up to the toll plaza now. The subject is three cars ahead of me. I’ll need a front tail once he’s off the bridge, over.”

“Stand by. KDM 366 Control calling any San Francisco unit.”

Ballard unclipped his mike and pressed the red TRANSMIT button. “This is SF 6. My location is Oak and Buchanan, moving east, over.”

“Oakland 3 is trailing a red Comet convertible across Bay Bridge, license Charlie, X-Ray, Kenneth, 8-8-1. The legal owner, California Citizens Bank on Polk Street, wants car only — contract outlawed.”

Oakland 3 cut in: “Wait by the Ninth and Bryant off-ramp, SF 6.”

“Control standing by,” said O’Bannon. “KDM 366 clear.”

I’ve thought about it a lot, man; like why Victor and I made that terrible scene out there at San Quentin, putting ourselves on that it was just for kicks. Victor was hung up on kicks; they were a thing with him. He was a sharp dark-haired cat with bright eyes, built lean and hard like a French skin-diver. His old man dug only money, so he’d always had plenty of bread. We got this idea out at his pad on Potrero Hill — a penthouse, of course — one afternoon when we were lying around on the sun-porch in swim trunks and drinking gin.

“You know, man,” he said, “I have made about every scene in the world. I have balled all the chicks, red and yellow and black and white, and I have gotten high on muggles, bluejays, redbirds, and mescaline. I have even tried the white stuff a time or two. But—”

“You’re a goddamned tiger, dad.”

“—but there is one kick I’ve never had, man.”

When he didn’t go on I rolled my head off the quart gin bottle I was using for a pillow and looked at him. He was giving me a shot with those hot, wild eyes of his.

“So like what is it?”

“I’ve never watched an execution.”

I thought about it a minute, drowsily. The sun was so hot it was like nailing me right to the air mattress. Watching an execution. Seeing a man go through the wall. A groovy idea for an artist.

“Too much,” I murmured. “I’m with you, dad.”

The next day, of course, I was back at work on some abstracts for my first one-man show and had forgotten all about it; but that night Victor called me up.

“Did you write to the warden up at San Quentin today, man? He has to contact the San Francisco police chief and make sure you don’t have a record and aren’t a psycho and are useful to the community.”

So I went ahead and wrote the letter because even sober it still seemed a cool idea for some kicks; I knew they always need twelve witnesses to make sure that the accused isn’t sneaked out the back door or something at the last minute like an old Jimmy Cagney movie. Even so, I lay dead for two months before the letter came. The star of our show would be a stud who’d broken into a house trailer near Fort Ord to rape this Army lieutenant’s wife, only right in the middle of it she’d started screaming so he’d put a pillow over her face to keep her quiet until he could finish. But she’d quit breathing. There were eight chicks on the jury and I think like three of them got broken ankles in the rush to send him to the gas chamber. Not that I cared. Kicks, man.

Victor picked me up at seven-thirty in the morning, an hour before we were supposed to report to San Quentin. He was wearing this really hip Italian import, and fifty-dollar shoes, and a narrow-brim hat with a little feather in it, so all he needed was a briefcase to be Chairman of the Board. The top was down on the Mercedes, cold as it was, and when he saw my black suit and hand-knit tie he flashed this crazy white-toothed grin you’d never see in any Director’s meeting.

“Too much, killer! If you’d like comb your hair you could pass for an undertaker coming after the body.”

Since I am a very long, thin cat with black hair always hanging in my eyes, who fully dressed weighs as much as a medium-sized collie, I guess he wasn’t too far off. I put a pint of José Cuervo in the side pocket of the car and we split. We were both really turned on: I mean this senseless, breathless hilarity as if we’d just heard the world’s funniest joke. Or were just going to.

It was one of those chilly California brights with blue sky and cold sunshine and here and there a cloud like Mr. Big was popping Himself a cap down beyond the horizon. I dug it all: the sail of a lone early yacht out in the Bay like a tossed-away paper cup; the whitecaps flipping around out by Angel Island like they were stoned out of their minds; the top down on the 300-SL so we could smell salt and feel the icy bite of the wind. But beyond the tunnel on U.S. 101, coming down towards Marin City, I felt a sudden sharp chill as if a cloud had passed between me and the sun, but none had; and then I dug for the first time what I was actually doing.

Victor felt it, too, for he turned to me and said, “Must maintain cool, dad.”

“I’m with it.”

San Quentin Prison, out on the end of its peninsula, looked like a sprawled ugly dragon sunning itself on a rock; we pulled up near the East Gate and there were not even any birds singing. Just a bunch of quiet cats in black, Quakers or Mennonites or something, protesting capital punishment by their silent presence as they’d done ever since Chessman had gotten his out there. I felt dark frightened things move around inside me when I saw them.

“Let’s fall out right here, dad,” I said in a momentary sort of panic, “and catch the matinee next week.”

But Victor was in kicksville, like desperate to put on all those squares in the black suits. When they looked over at us he jumped up on the back of the bucket seat and spread his arms wide like the Sermon on the Mount. With his tortoise-shell shades and his flashing teeth and that suit which had cost three yards, he looked like Christ on his way to Hollywood.

“Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do unto me,” he cried in this ringing apocalyptic voice.

I grabbed his arm and dragged him back down off the seat. “For Christ sake, man, cool it!”

But he went into high laughter and punched my arm with feverish exuberance, and then jerked a tiny American flag from his inside jacket pocket and began waving it around above the windshield. I could see the sweat on his forehead.

“It’s worth it to live in this country!” he yelled at them.

He put the car in gear and we went on. I looked back and saw one of those cats crossing himself. It put things back in perspective: they were from nowhere. The Middle Ages. Not that I judged them: that was their scene, man. Unto every cat what he digs the most.

The guard on the gate directed us to a small wooden building set against the outside wall, where we found five other witnesses. Three of them were reporters, one was a fat cat smoking a .45 caliber stogy like a politician from Sacramento, and the last was an Army type in lieutenant’s bars, his belt buckle and insignia looking as if he’d been up all night with a can of Brasso.

A guard came in and told us to surrender everything in our pockets and get a receipt for it. We had to remove our shoes, too; they were too heavy for the fluoroscope. Then they put us through this groovy little room one-by-one to x-ray us for cameras and so on; they don’t want anyone making the Kodak scene while they’re busy dropping the pellets. We ended up inside the prison with our shoes back on and with our noses full of that old prison detergent-disinfectant stink.

The politician type, who had those cold slitted eyes like a Sherman tank, started coming on with rank jokes: but everyone put him down, hard, even the reporters. I guess nobody but fuzz ever gets used to executions. The Army stud was at parade rest with a face so pale his freckles looked like a charge of shot. He had reddish hair.

After a while five guards came in to make up the twelve required witnesses. They looked rank, as fuzz always do, and got off in a corner in a little huddle, laughing and gassing together like a bunch of kids kicking a dog. Victor and I sidled over to hear what they were saying.

“Who’s sniffing the eggs this morning?” asked one.

“I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the papers.” He yawned when he answered.

“Don’t you remember?” urged another, “it’s the guy who smothered the woman in the house trailer. Down in the Valley by Salinas.”

“Yeah. Soldier’s wife; and he was raping her and...”

Like dogs hearing the plate rattle, they turned in unison toward the Army lieutenant; but just then more fuzz came in to march us to the observation room. We went in a column of twos with a guard beside each one, everyone unconsciously in step as if following a cadence call. I caught myself listening for measured mournful drum rolls.

The observation room was built right around the gas chamber, with rising tiers of benches for extras in case business was brisk. The chamber itself was hexagonal; the three walls in our room were of plate glass with a waist-high brass rail around the outside like the rail in an old-time saloon. The three other walls were steel plate, with a heavy door, rivet-studded, in the center one, and a small observation window in each of the others.

Inside the chamber were just these two massive chairs, probably oak, facing the rear walls side-by-side; their backs were high enough to come to the nape of the neck of anyone sitting in them. Under each was like a bucket that I knew contained hydrochloric acid. At a signal the executioner would drop sodium cyanide pellets into a chute; the pellets would roll down into the bucket; hydrocyanic acid gas would form; and the cat in the chair would be wasted.

The politician type, who had this rich fruity baritone like Burl Ives, asked why they had two chairs.

“That’s in case there’s a double-header, dad,” I said.

“You’re kidding.” But by his voice the idea pleased him. Then he wheezed plaintively: “I don’t see why they turn the chairs away — we can’t even watch his face while it’s happening to him.”

He was a true rank genuine creep, right out from under a rock with the slime barely dry on his scales; but I wouldn’t have wanted his dreams. I think he was one of those guys who tastes the big draught many times before he swallows it.

We milled around like cattle around the chute when they smell the blood from inside and know they’re somehow involved; then we heard sounds and saw the door in the back of the chamber swing open. A uniformed guard appeared to stand at attention, followed by a priest dressed all in black like Zorro, with his face hanging down to his belly button. He must have been a new man, because he had trouble maintaining his cool: just standing there beside the guard he dropped his little black book on the floor like three times in a row.

The Army cat said to me, as if he’d wig out unless he broke the silence: “They... have it arranged like a stage play, don’t they?”

“But no encores,” said Victor hollowly.

Another guard showed up in the doorway and they walked in the condemned man. He was like sort of a shock. You expect a stud to act like a murderer: I mean, cringe at the sight of the chair because he knows this is it, there’s finally no place to go, no appeal to make, or else bound in there full of cheap bravado and go-to-hell. But he just seemed mildly interested, nothing more.

He wore a white suit with the sleeves rolled up, suntan that looked Army issue, and no tie. Under thirty, brown crewcut hair — the terrible thing is that I cannot even remember the features on his face, man. The closest I could come to a description would be that he resembled the Army cat right there beside me with his nose to the glass.

The one thing I’ll never forget is that stud’s hands. He’d been on Death Row all these months, and here his hands were still red and chapped and knobby, as if he’d still been out picking turnips in the San Joaquin Valley. Then I realized: I was thinking of him in the past tense.

Two fuzz began strapping him down in the chair. A broad leather strap across the chest, narrower belts on the arms and legs. God they were careful about strapping him in. I mean they wanted to make sure he was comfortable. And all the time he was talking with them. Not that we could hear it, but I suppose it went that's fine, fellows, no, that strap isn’t too tight, gee, I hope I'm not making you late for lunch.

That’s what bugged me, he was so damned apologetic! While they were fastening him down over that little bucket of oblivion, that poor dead lonely son of a bitch twisted around to look over his shoulder at us, and he smiled. I mean if he’d had an arm free he might have waved! One of the fuzz, who had white hair and these sad gentle eyes like he was wearing a hair shirt, patted him on the head on the way out. No personal animosity, son, just doing my job.

After that the tempo increased, like your heartbeat when you’re on a black street at three a.m. and the echo of your own footsteps begins to sound like someone following you. The warden was at one observation window, the priest and the doctor at the other. The blackrobe made the sign of the cross, having a last go at the condemned, but he was digging only Ben Casey. Here was this M.D. cat who’d taken the Hippocratic Oath to preserve life, waving his arms around like a TV director to show that stud the easiest way to die.

Hold your breath, then breathe deeply: you won't feel a thing. Of course hydrocyanic acid gas melts your guts into a red-hot soup and bums out every fiber in the lining of your lungs, but you won’t be really feeling it as you Jerk around, that’ll just be raw nerve endings.

Like they should have called his the Hypocritical Oath.

So there we were, three yards and half an inch of plate glass apart, with us staring at him and him by just turning his head able to stare right back: but there were a million light years between the two sides of the glass. He didn’t turn. He was shrived and strapped in and briefed on how to die, and he was ready for the fumes. I found out afterwards that he had even willed his body to medical research.

I did a quick take around.

Victor was sweating profusely, his eyes glued to the window.

The politician was pop-eyed, nose pressed flat and belly indented by the brass rail, pudgy fingers like plump garlic sausages smearing the glass on either side of his head. A look on his face, already, like that of a stud making it with a chick.

The reporters seemed ashamed, as if someone had caught them peeking over the transom into the ladies’ john.

The Army cat just looked sick.

Only the fuzz were unchanged, expending no more emotion on this than on their targets after rapid-fire exercises at the range.

On no face was there hatred.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was part of it. I wanted to yell out STOP! We were about to gas this stud and none of us wanted him to die! We’ve created this society and we’re all responsible for what it does, but none of us as individuals is willing to take that responsibility. We’re like that Nazi cat at Nuremberg who said that everything would have been all right if they’d only given him more ovens.

The warden signaled. I heard gas whoosh up around the chair.

The condemned man didn’t move. He was following doctor’s orders. Then he took the huge gulping breath the M.D. had pantomimed. All of a sudden he threw this tremendous convulsion, his body straining up against the straps, his head slewed around so I could see his eyes were shut tight and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. Then he started panting like a baby in an oxygen tent, swiftly and shallowly. Only it wasn’t oxygen his lungs were trying to work on.

The lieutenant stepped back smartly from the window, blinked, and puked on the glass. His vomit hung there for an instant like a phosphorus bomb burst in a bunker; then two fuzz were supporting him from the room and we were all jerking back from the mess. All except the politician. He hadn’t even noticed: he was in Henry Millersville, getting his sex kicks the easy way.

I guess the stud in there had never dug that he was supposed to be gone in two seconds without pain, because his body was still arched up in that terrible bow, and his hands were still claws. I could see the muscles standing out along the sides of his jaws like marbles. Finally he flopped back and just hung there in his straps like a machine-gunned paratrooper.

But that wasn’t the end. He took another huge gasp, so I could see his ribs pressing out against his white shirt. After that one, twenty seconds. We decided that he had cut out.

Then another gasp. Then nothing. Half a minute nothing.

Another of those final terrible shuddering racking gasps. At last: all through. All used up. Making it with the angels.

But then he did it again. Every fiber of that dead wasted comic thrown-away body strained for air on this one. No air: only hydrocyanic acid gas. Just nerves, like the fish twitching after you whack it on the skull with the back edge of the skinning knife. Except that it wasn’t a fish we were seeing die.

His head flopped sideways and his tongue came out slyly like the tongue of a dead deer. Then this gunk ran out of his mouth. It was just saliva — they said it couldn’t be anything else — but it reminded me of the residue after light-line resistors have been melted in an electrical fire. That kind of black. That kind of scorched.

Very softly, almost to himself, Victor murmured: “Later, dad.”

That was it. Dig you in the hereafter, dad. Ten little minutes and you’re through the wall. Mistah Kurtz, be dead. Mistah Kurtz, he very very goddamn dead.

I believed it. Looking at what was left of that cat was like looking at a chick who’s gotten herself bombed on the heavy, so when you hold a match in front of her eyes the pupils don’t react and there’s no one home, man. No one. Nowhere. End of the lineville.

We split.

But on the way out I kept thinking of that Army stud, and wondering what had made him sick. Was it because the cat in the chair had been the last to enter, no matter how violently, the body of his beloved, and now even that feeble connection had been severed? Whatever the reason, his body had known what perhaps his mind had refused to accept: this ending was no new beginning, this death would not restore his dead chick to him. This death, no matter how just in his eyes, had generated only nausea.

Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.

Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”

I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”

“I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”

Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.

On U.S. 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 m.p.h. through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally stopped us, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holster flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.

I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit — he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.

They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.

He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a gray raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans — and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.

“Ah... how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”

He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”

“Why no strollers, dad?”

“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”

Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teenagers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.

Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.

Wasn’t it Shakespeare who suggested that we kill all the lawyers? Too drastic? Well, then, what about one lawyer?

I am his murderer.

Can you catch me?

I won’t lie to you. Oh, I might tease you a little. Do a bit of business over here with my left hand to hold your eye, say, while over here my right hand is doing, oh, maybe, murder.

At eleven p.m., Spiro Gounaris, a hawk-nosed man carrying fifty years and forty extra pounds, locked the door of the second-hand store which fronted his treasury book. He crossed the sidewalk to the phonebooth, as he had done for six nights in a row. As he dropped his dime and tapped out the Federal Prosecutor Task Force number, Raptor came bopping along in shades and a floppy beret — on my way home from an early gig, man.

Unlike the previous nights, Raptor saw no other pedestrians on the street. Gounaris was saying, “Seven-thousand two-hundred and eighty” into the phone when Raptor pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .357 Magnum against the back of his head and pulled the trigger...

At three minutes to midnight, Raptor walked into a gas station three miles away and laid five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump the night man was locking up.

“The pay phone,” said Raptor.

The phone was saying, “Hello, this is Dunstan Trevis speaking,” as the night man, a kid in his twenties, came up tentatively. Raptor handed him the receiver to hear the rest of the message. At the tone, the kid cleared his throat and read from the note, “Uh... this is Raptor. Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”

Eric’s first one. The very first.

And it went up early.

If I’d been in my apartment on Durant, with the window open, I probably would have heard it. And probably, at 4:30 in the morning, would have thought like any straight that it had been a truck back-fire. But I’d spent the night balling Elizabeth over in San Francisco while Eric was placing the bomb in Berkeley. With her every minute, I’d made sure, because whatever else you can say about the federal pigs, they’re thorough. I’d known that if anything went wrong, they’d be around looking.

Liz and I heard it together on the noon news, when we were having breakfast before her afternoon classes. She teaches freshman English at SF State.

“God, that’s terrible,” Liz said with a shudder. She’d been in a number of upper-level courses with both Eric and me. “What could have happened to him, Ross, to make him do... something like that?”

“I guess... Well, I haven’t seen much of him since graduation last June...” I gestured above the remains of our eggs and bacon.

“‘Student revolutionary’ — it’s hard to think of Eric that way.” Then I came up with a nice touch. “Maybe he shouldn’t have gone beyond his M.A. Maybe he should have stopped when we did — before he lost touch.”

When I’d recruited Eric without appearing to, it had seemed a very heavy idea. I mean, nobody actually expects this vocal, kinky, Rubin-type radical to go out and set bombs; because they don’t. We usually avoid Eric’s sort ourselves: they have no sense of history, no discipline. They’re as bad as the Communists on the other side of the street, with their excessive regimentation, their endless orders from somewhere else.

I stood up. “Well, baby, I’d better get back across the Bay...”

“Ross, aren’t you... I mean, can’t you...”

She stopped there, coloring; still a lot of that corrupting Middle America in her. She was ready to try anything at all in bed, but to say right out in daylight that she wanted me to ball her again after class — that still sort of blew her mind.

“I can’t, Liz,” I said all aw-shucksy, laughing down inside at how straight she was. “I was his roommate until four months ago, and the police or somebody might want to ask me questions about him.”

I actually thought that they might, and nothing brings out pig paranoia quicker than somebody not available for harassment when they want him. But nobody showed up. I guess they knew that as long as they had Eric they could get whatever they wanted out of him just by shooting electricity into his balls or something, like the French pigs in Algeria. I know how the fascists operate.

Beyond possible questions by the pigs, however, I knew there’d be a strategy session that night in Berkeley. After dark at Zeta Books, on Telegraph south of the campus, is the usual time and place for a meet. Armand Marsh let me in and locked the door behind me; he runs the store for the Student Socialist Alliance as a cover. He’s a long skinny redheaded cat with ascetic features and quick nervous mannerisms, and is cell-leader for our three-man focal.

I saw that Danzer was in the mailing room when I got there, as was Benny. I didn’t like Danzer being there. Sure, he acted as liaison with other Bay Area focals, but he never went out on operations and so he was an outsider. No outsider can be trusted.

“Benny,” said Armand, “how badly is Whitlach really hurt?”

Benny Leland is night administrator for Alta Monte Hospital. With his close-trimmed hair and conservative clothes he looks like the ultimate straight.

“He took a big splinter off the table right through his shoulder. Damned lucky that he had already set it and was on his way out when it blew. Otherwise they’d have just found a few teeth and toes.”

“So he’d be able to move around?”

“Oh, sure. The injury caused severe shock, but he’s out of that now; and the wound itself is not critical.” He paused to look pointedly at me. “What I don’t understand is how the damned thing went off prematurely.”

Meaning I was somehow to blame, since I had supplied Eric with the matériel for the bomb. Armand looked over at me too.

“Ross? What sort of device was it?”

“Standard,” I said. “Two sticks of dynamite liberated from that P.G. and E. site four months ago. An electric blasting cap with a small battery to detonate it. Alarm clock timer. He was going to carry the whole thing in a gift-wrapped shoe box to make it less conspicuous. There are several ways that detonation could—”

“None of that is pertinent now,” interrupted Danzer. His voice was cold and heavy, like his face. He even looked like a younger Raymond Burr. “Our first concern is this: Will the focal be compromised if they break him down and he starts talking?”

“Eric was my best friend before I joined the focal,” I said, “and he was my roommate for four years. But once we had determined it was better to use someone still a student than to set this one ourselves, I observed the standard security procedures in recruiting him. He believes the bombing was totally his own idea.”

“He isn’t even aware of the existence of the focal, let alone who’s in it,” Armand explained. “There’s no way that he could hurt us.”

Danzer’s face was still cold when he looked over at me, but I had realized he always looked cold. “Then it seems that Ross is the one to go in after him.”

“If there’s any need to go at all,” said Benny quickly. I knew what he was thinking. Any operation would entail the hospital, which meant he would be involved. He didn’t like that. “After all, if he can’t hurt us, why not just...” He shrugged.

“Just leave him there? Mmmph.” Danzer publishes a couple of underground radical newspapers even though he’s only twenty-seven, and also uses his presses to run off porn novels for some outfit in L.A. I think he nets some heavy bread. “I believe I can convince you of the desirability of going in after him. If Ross is willing...”

“Absolutely.” I kept the excitement from my voice. Cold. Controlled. That’s the image I like to project. A desperate man, reckless, careless of self. “If anyone else came through that door, Eric would be convinced he was an undercover pig. As soon as he sees me, he’ll know that I’ve come to get him away.”

“Why couldn’t Ross just walk in off the street as a normal visitor?” asked Danzer.

“There’s a twenty-four hour police guard on Whitlach’s door.” Benny was still fighting the idea of a rescue operation. “Only the doctors and one authorized nurse per shift get in.”

“All right. And Ross must not be compromised. If he is, the whole attempt would be negated, worse than useless.” Which at the moment I didn’t understand. “Now let’s get down to it.”

As Danzer talked, I began to comprehend why he had been chosen to coordinate the activities of the focals. His mind was cold and logical and precise, as was his plan. What bothered me was my role in that plan. But I soon saw the error in my objections. I was Eric’s friend, the only one he knew he could trust — and I had brought him into it in the first place. There was danger, of course, but that only made me feel better the more I thought of it. You have to take risks if you are to destroy a corrupt society, because like a snake with a broken back it still has venom on its fangs.

It took three hours to work out the operational scheme.

Riding the personnel transport belt up to the level of Rogul’s office, I wiped my hands down my thighs. I never had killed anyone before. Never had wanted to. Hell, I didn’t want to now. But since yesterday it had been sure. I wiped my hands again. Clammy, even though I had seen no one since entering the building. They all had gone, all had crowded to the heliports, all had been fed by aerial arteries into the residence blocks for the usual evening tele.

All except Rogul.

I stopped outside his office, wiped my palms nervously again; then I stepped forward to break the light beam. The tele-screen above glowed with the color image of Rogul, made familiar by two months of patient stalking and watching.

“Mr. Andrech?”

“That’s right.” I was amazed at the steadiness of my voice. “I hope I’m not too late...”

“Oh, no, no. I had a lot of work to catch up on. Come in please.”

I broke the second light beam and went through the opening door to his inner office. First time I’d been there, of course; wouldn’t do to have his secretarial robot able to identify me later.

Rogul was behind his desk, standing: a tall, gray-haired, well-conditioned man in his late forties. A self made man who had come up a dozen years before with a new design for mass transport of planetary settlers which had made him wealthy. We shook hands.

“So, Andrech. You claim to have developed cheap artificial atmospheres for small, low-gravity planets. Is that true?”

“I have.”

I’d needed a cover story, in case his secretary still had been switched on, or a business associate still had been present But we were alone. I seemed to see each second stretch out long and thin around us, thinner and thinner, until finally it snapped and fell away.

“I hope so, Andrech. Even if there is overlapping between your design and the encased bubble atmosphere, a workable new process would be worth a great deal of money.”

I went past him toward some abstract figurines on the window sill; I wanted him on his feet — with his back to me. I wasn’t sure I could do it if he were sitting, and I didn’t want to watch his face as the blade went in.

“These statues are... damned interesting.”

“Unique, aren’t they? The indigenous humanoids of Akaniam used to make them before...” His voice trailed off absently as he moved over beside me. “Seems a damned shame, actually.”

I picked up a figurine, and then set it down again. “Before what?”

“Before they were exterminated. We had to, of course; Akaniam’s close in, easy access.” His eyes momentarily were sad: large, intelligent eyes, with whites so clear they had a bluish tinge. “We needed the land for settlers. We always do.”

He turned from the window. Turned away from me.

Reflexes took over. My right arm flicked, the sleeve-knife slid its thin, razor-edged length from the plastic sheath strapped to my forearm. The same flow of movement swept the blade forward and into his kidney.

Rogul gave a hoarse cry of agony, his body arching back as it tried to contain the searing pain. My cupped left hand went over his shoulder to jerk his chin up and to the left as the knife pulled wetly free, slashing, then darted up in a lethal arc at his throat.

Bright arterial blood splashed across my fingers and jacket sleeve, making me jerk back as if it were scalding. The flaccid corpse collapsed on the tiles. It didn’t even twitch. Rogul was finally dead.

I leaned against a corner of the desk, panting, sweat searing my eyes and dripping on the polished plastic so my fingers dragged wet smeary marks across the surface. I had done it, just as Delia and I had rehearsed a thousand times in the months since making our decision.

After slumping there for an eternity of those elastic seconds, head down, breath whistling raggedly through my clenched teeth, I straightened up with something like a sob. Averting my gaze from the pathetic huddle of cloth and flesh which had been Rogul, I went to his private sink and washed my hands. I didn’t want to waste it all by drawing attention on the nearly deserted, post-rush helitrans home.

Delia knew the moment she saw me, with that instant rapport of people deeply in love; but she could say nothing because of the twelve other tenants with whom by regulation we shared a dwelling area. When we finally were in a bed cubicle with the beam switched on for privacy, she sank down slowly beside me on the edge of the bed.

“Poor darling. What have we done to each other? Killing...” Under the light synthetics of her pajamas, I could see the almost childish wings of her shoulder blades. She turned great tear-stained eyes at me. “Maybe we should just... stop—”

I stilled her words with my lips. This was the moment to be strong, I knew. I could feel her body heat through the pajamas. Her stomach still was flat but in that body, right now, was our child, embryonic yet, little more than a tiny heart pulsing in its warm dark bath of amniotic fluid, but ours. Yesterday’s tests had confirmed it.

“We’ve been over all this, Delia. We’re going through with it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “So Mrs. Rogul too...”

“Not until tomorrow,” I whispered against her fragrant hair.

We spent the time afterwards, until lights-out, giggling over our attempts to find mutually acceptable names for the baby.

Neither Delia nor I were psychologically prepared for waiting: time to study, to plan, to foresee, also meant time to remember the hot sticky gush of life’s blood across my wrist, the broken cry of Rogul’s anguish. And waiting might give Mrs. Rogul time to begin wondering whether it had been more than a random killing. So I went after her the next night, almost blindly. As it turned out, my direct approach made it ridiculously simple.

Amelia Rogul was childless, of course, a few years younger than her husband had been. A modem woman who loved life, used it, spent it, and thus who needed no friends beside her for support in grief. This meant she was alone, since the Roguls, as wealthy people, had a separate dwelling unit, even the luxury of separate cooking facilities.

I broke the entryway light beam and waited, an idiotic look of sorrow on my face, a blank tape deck prominent in my hand. I felt no compunction. Perhaps I had been brutalized by the first killing; perhaps, instead, it just was knowing that success was one body nearer.

“What is it, please?”

She hadn’t illuminated, so I couldn’t see her in the tele-screen as she studied me; but no nerves trilled in her voice. Good.

“I have a message of condolence from your husband’s employees, Mrs. Rogul.” Then, in a stroke of genius, I added, “If you want me to leave it here in the hall—”

That made her break the inner beam, of course, and step to the door to reach for the tape. “No need of that. I’ll take it and—”

My hands came up to close about her throat. She made a sound like that of the great sea birds on tele’d historicals. The door had shut behind me; with the tele-screen blanked one-way, nobody passing in the hall could see us at all.

Even then I almost lost her. She brought a knee up, hard, just missing my manhood; I squinted and clawed my hands deeper into her throat. We went about it in an odd, clumsy, ritual dance. Her breath hissed in my face. Her hands flapped ineffectually against my steeled forearms, desperate fingers peeled skin from my forehead and shredded my jacket pocket. My own fingers were slimy with our mingled sweats.

Finally the movements lost volition. She became too heavy to support My hands let the inert body slide to the floor, then felt for a pulse at the base of her throat. None. Spittle-flecked lips drawn back in a canine snarl, and I was surprised by a moment of acute nausea: her eyes protruded far enough to be knocked off with a sweep of a hand.

The sickness passed. I checked the hall through the tele-screen, then went home to give Delia the news.

The stewardess came by checking reservations.

“Your name please, sir.”

“Simmons,” said Falkoner. He was lean and dark, with long-fingered hands shaped like a piano player’s and cool gray eyes that observed almost everything. A thin white scar running across his chin made his otherwise pleasant face sullen. In his shoulder holster was a .357 Magnum on a cut-down frame and in his bleak heart was death. Falkoner was a professional murderer.

During the thirty-five minute flight from Los Angeles the lone woman huddled across the aisle aroused his melancholy contempt. She wore a cheap brown hat and had an old straw purse on the seat next to her. Updrafts over the rim of the desert made her tight fists whiten with strain and her eyes bum with fear. She was disgusting: he knew dying was swift and easy.

A slight sandy-haired man took his arm as he left the plane at Palm Springs and said: “Did Mr. David send you down?” His voice was soft and intimate and he wore a red and green sports shirt, khaki pants, and open sandals.

Looking him over, Falkoner nodded coolly. Little men who did not deal in the two great realities of life and death held scant interest for him.

“Fine. I’m Langly. My car’s over here in the lot.”

It was a blue and white 1957 Chrysler. On the blacktop road beyond the airport the sun was warm but the air dry and fresh; scraggly clumps of dusty green vegetation spotted the flat desert like regimented billiard balls on a giant yellow table. They passed a man and woman on horseback, wearing riding breeches, who waved gaily. A Cadillac Eldorado roared by like an escaped rocket, manned by two bleached blondes goggled with bright-rimmed sunglasses.

“Where’s the woman?” asked Falkoner.

“She’s got a shack in a date grove near Rancho Mirage — it’s a new section this side of Palm Desert.”

“Works?”

“Mex place in Palm Desert. She tells fortunes, goes to work at five — she’ll be home now.” Langly’s voice tingled and his bright eyes sparkled ripely. “I guess Mr. David wants her pretty bad, huh? I just notified Los Angeles last night, and you’re here from ’Frisco today to—”

“Let’s go out to her place.”

Langly drove swiftly as if stung by Falkoner’s abruptness. They passed the plush Thunderbird Club and turned left onto a dirt road before the Shadow Mountain Club. Dry clouds of tan dust swirled out behind them.

“When word came she’d left Scottsdale I thought she might try it here — the country’s a lot the same. Then I spotted her at the Mex place from her photo and—”

“Are we close?”

Langly drove across an old wash beyond which the date groves started.

“Next road to the right, first house on the left,” he said. His voice was sharp and piqued. “Only house.”

“Okay. Drive past.”

Down the narrow roadway Falkoner saw the tail of a black Mercury station wagon protruding from behind a palm tree. The shack was hidden by trees.

“That her Merc?”

“Yes. A ’55 Monterey with wood paneling. A beauty.”

After a moment of thought Falkoner said: “Turn around up here and let me off at the roadway. Then you go back to town.”

As he followed directions the other’s actions had a slightly feminine quality. Falkoner got out, walked around the car, and dropped a sealed envelope through the window into Langly’s lap. The envelope crinkled.

“What sort of work do you do?” Falkoner asked.

“I’ve been parking cars at one of the clubs.” Then the voice got malicious; excitement made it almost lisp. “But I did good work on this and I’m going to make sure Mr. David knows about it and about how you’ve treated me.”

“Stick to parking cars, nance,” Falkoner replied. Leaning very close he added confidentially: “You’ve got a leaky face.”

In his steady eyes Langly saw death’s cold scrutiny. He rammed the drive button hurriedly and the Chrysler swept him away down the dusty road.

Palm fronds tickled the roof drily and something gnawed with cautious haste under the sagging wooden porch. Falkoner’s shoes made cat sounds as he crossed to the screen door. After knocking on the frame he cupped his eyes to peer into the living room. The linoleum was so old it was worn almost white. Across the room sagged a beaten-down green couch, in one corner a red easy chair that looked almost new. There were three straight-backed chairs and one leg of the wooden table in the center of the floor had been cracked and stapled. A plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME decorated one wall.

Before he could call, Genevieve came through the inner doorway. She was as tall as he, nearly six feet, her face fine-featured: straight nose, high cheekbones, thin hungry lips. A red silk scarf was knotted loosely around her neck and her striking figure was displayed by a tight black dress. There were three hairpins in her mouth and her hands were smoothing her hair.

“Yes?” Her voice was husky.

The screen door was unlocked so Falkoner stepped in. When the light touched his features she went stark white and her mouth dropped the hairpins. She ran against him, slanted dark eyes smoky with terror, but he pushed her back.

“Rather a come-down, Genevieve,” he said.

He went through the inner doorway to see a small dirty kitchen with dishes piled in the sink, and a bedroom with a double bed that looked as if two large animals had been fighting on it. The room had a close, intimate smell. As he donned a pair of thin gray gloves he let Genevieve’s voice draw him back to the front room.

“What does he want with me? He — whoever killed Max... I didn’t see who killed Max.”

“If you hadn’t left Arizona he might have believed you.”

“I got tired of the stinking desert and the stinking men with only one thing on their stinking minds.”

Falkoner raised his eyebrows. “The men at the Mex place are different? The desert here is different?”

“I had to eat.” Her mouth made the next word a curse. “Men. You and Mr. David and all the rest. Money and power and women, that’s all you want.” Then the strength left her and her hands crawled up the black dress like broad white spiders to her bosom.

“Isn’t he ever going to let me live in peace?” she whispered.

Falkoner asked: “Did you really think he could let you live at all?” His quick hands closed around her throat like an act of love.

She scrabbled wildly at the iron-hard forearms, reached for his eyes, tried to kick him. She was strong, but the piano-player fingers possessed all the immeasurable strength of evil. A chair was overturned. They went around the table in a slow grotesque dance like cranes mating. He drove her down on the couch and kneed her viciously. The thrashing body, the smell of sweat and perfume aroused him: it was a pity there was no time to have her before she died. A great pity.

Her face darkened, her movements became erratic, lost volition, ceased. Finally her tongue, pink as a baby’s thumb, came out of one corner of her mouth and spittle ran down her cheek. There was a muted sound like cloth tearing. She sprawled under him in a lewd doll-pose of surrender, eyes staring beyond him into the infinite horror of death.

I got off the Greyhound and stopped to draw icy Minnesota air into my lungs. A bus had brought me from Springfield, Illinois to Chicago the day before; a second bus had brought me here. I caught my passing reflection in the window of the old-fashioned depot — a tall hard man with a white and savage face, wearing an ill-fitting overcoat. I caught another reflection, too, one that froze my guts: a cop in uniform. Could they already know it was someone else in that burned-out car?

Then the cop turned away, chafing his arms with gloved hands through his blue stormcoat, and I started breathing again. I went quickly over to the cab line. Only two hackies were waiting there; the front one rolled down his window as I came up.

“You know the Miller place north of town?” I asked. He looked me over.

“I know it. Five bucks — now.”

I paid him from the money I’d rolled a drunk for in Chicago, and eased back against the rear seat. As he nursed the cab out ice-rimed Second Street, my fingers gradually relaxed from their rigid chopping position. I deserved to go back inside if I let a clown like this get to me.

“Old man Miller’s pretty sick, I hear.” He half turned to catch me with a corner of an eye. “You got business with him?”

“Yeah. My own.”

That ended that conversation. It bothered me that Pops was sick enough for this clown to know about it; but maybe my brother Rod being vice-president at the bank would explain that. There was a lot of new construction and a freeway west of town with a tricky overpass to the old county road. A mile beyond a new subdivision were the 200 wooded hilly acres I knew so well.

After my break from the Federal pen at Terre Haute, Indiana two days before, I’d gotten outside their cordon through woods like these. I’d gone out in a prison truck, in a pail of swill meant for the prison farm pigs, had headed straight west, across the Illinois line. I’m good in open country, even when I’m in prison condition, so by dawn I was in a hayloft near Paris, Illinois some 20 miles from the pen. You can do what you have to do.

The cabby stopped at the foot of the private road, looking dubious. “Listen, buddy, I know that’s been plowed, but it looks damned icy. If I try it and go into the ditch—”

“I’ll walk from here.”

I waited beside the road until he’d driven away, then let the north wind chase me up the hill and into the leafless hardwoods. The cedars that Pops and I had put in as a windbreak were taller and fuller; rabbit paths were pounded hard into the snow under the barbed-wire tangles of wild raspberry bushes. Under the oaks at the top of the hill was the old-fashioned, two-story house, but I detoured to the kennels first. The snow was deep and undisturbed inside them. No more foxhounds. No cracked com in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window, either. I rang the front doorbell.

My sister-in-law Edwina, Rod’s wife, answered it. She was three years younger than my 35, and she’d started wearing a girdle.

“Good Lord! Chris!” Her mouth tightened. “We didn’t—”

“Ma wrote that the old man was sick.” She’d written, all right. Your father is very ill. Not that you have ever cared if any of us lives or dies... And then Edwina decided that my tone of voice had given her something to get righteous about

“I’m amazed you’d have the nerve to come here, even if they did let you out on parole or something.” So nobody had been around asking yet. “If you plan to drag the family name through the mud again—”

I pushed by her into the hallway. “What’s wrong with the old man?” I called him Pops only inside myself, where no one could hear.

“He’s dying, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

She said it with a sort of baleful pleasure. It hit me, but I just grunted and went by into the living room. Then the old girl called down from the head of the stairs.

“Eddy? What — who is it’”

“Just a salesman, Ma. He can wait until Doctor’s gone.”

Doctor. As if some damned croaker was generic physician himself. When he came downstairs Edwina tried to hustle him out before I could see him, but I caught his arm as he poked it into his overcoat sleeve.

“Like to see you a minute, Doc. About old man Miller.”

He was nearly six feet, a couple of inches shorter than me, but outweighing me forty pounds. He pulled his arm free.

“Now see here, fellow—”

I grabbed his lapels and shook him, just enough to pop a button off his coat and put his glasses awry on his nose. His face got red.

“Old family friend, Doc.” I jerked a thumb at the stairs. “What’s the story?”

It was dumb, dumb as hell, of course, asking him; at any second the cops would figure out that the farmer in the burned-out car wasn’t me after all. I’d dumped enough gasoline before I struck the match so they couldn’t lift prints off anything except the shoe I’d planted: but they’d make him through dental charts as soon as they found out he was missing. When they did they’d come here asking questions, and then the croaker would realize who I was. But I wanted to know whether Pops was as bad off as Edwina said he was, and I’ve never been a patient man.

The croaker straightened his suit coat, striving to regain lost dignity. “He — Judge Miller is very weak, too weak to move. He probably won’t last out the week.” His eyes searched my face for pain, but there’s nothing like a Federal pen to give you control. Disappointed, he said, “His lungs. I got to it much too late, of course. He’s resting easily.”

I jerked the thumb again. “You know your way out.”

Edwina was at the head of the stairs, her face righteous again. It seems to run in the family, even with those who married in. Only Pops and I were short of it.

“Your father is very ill. I forbid you—”

“Save it for Rod; it might work on him.”

In the room I could see the old man’s arm hanging limply over the edge of the bed, with smoke from the cigarette between his fingers running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. The upper arm, which once had measured an honest 18 and had swung his small tight fist against the side of my head a score of times, could not even hold a cigarette up in the air. It gave me the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that’s gotten mixed up with a bobcat.

The old girl came out of her chair by the foot of the bed, her face blanched. I put my arms around her. “Hi, Ma,” I said. She was rigid inside my embrace, but I knew she wouldn’t pull away. Not there in Pop’s room.

He had turned his head at my voice. The light glinted from his silky white hair. His eyes, translucent with imminent death, were the pure, pale blue of birch shadows on fresh snow.

“Chris,” he said in a weak voice. “Son of a biscuit, boy... I’m glad to see you.”

“You ought to be, you lazy devil,” I said heartily. I pulled off my suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, and tugged off my tie. “Getting so lazy that you let the foxhounds go!”

“That’s enough, Chris.” She tried to put steel into it.

“I’ll just sit here a little, Ma,” I said easily. Pops wouldn’t have long, I knew, and any time I got with him would have to do me. She stood in the doorway, a dark indecisive shape; then she turned and went silently out, probably to phone Rod at the bank.

For the next couple of hours I did most of the talking; Pops just lay there with his eyes shut, like he was asleep. But then he started in, going way back, to the trapline he and I had run when I’d been a kid; to the big white-tail buck that followed him through the woods one rutting season until Pops whacked it on the nose with a tree branch. It was only after his law practice had ripened into a judgeship that we began to draw apart; I guess that in my twenties I was too wild, too much what he’d been himself 30 years before. Only I kept going in that direction.

About seven o’clock my brother Rod called from the doorway. I went out, shutting the door behind me. Rod was taller than me, broad and big-boned, with an athlete’s frame — but with mush where his guts should have been. He had close-set pale eyes and not quite enough chin, and hadn’t gone out for football in high school.

“My wife reported the vicious things you said to her.” It was his best give-the-teller-hell voice. “We’ve talked this over with Mother and we want you out of here tonight. We want—”

“You want? Until he kicks off it’s still the old man’s house, isn’t it’”

He swung at me then — being Rod, it was a right-hand lead — and I blocked it with an open palm. Then I back-handed him, hard, twice across the face each way, jerking his head from side to side with the slaps, and crowding him up against the wall. I could have fouled his groin to bend him over, then driven locked hands down on the back of his neck as I jerked a knee into his face; and I wanted to. The need to get away before they came after me was gnawing at my gut like a weasel in a trap gnawing off his own paw to get loose. But I merely stepped away from him.

“You... you murderous animal!” He had both hands up to his cheeks like a woman might have done. Then his eyes widened theatrically, as the realization struck him. I wondered why it had taken so long. “You’ve broken out!” he gasped. “Escaped! A fugitive from... from justice!”

“Yeah. And I’m staying that way. I know you, kid, all of you. The last thing any of you want is for the cops to take me here.” I tried to put his tones into my voice. “Oh! The scandal!”

“But they’ll be after you—”

“They think I’m dead,” I said flatly. “I went off an icy road in a stolen car in downstate Illinois, and it rolled and burned with me inside.”

His voice was hushed, almost horror-stricken. “You mean — that there is a body in the car?”

“Right.”

I knew what he was thinking, but I didn’t bother to tell him the truth — that the old farmer who was driving me to Springfield, because he thought my doubled-up fist in the overcoat pocket was a gun, hit a patch of ice and took the car right off the lonely country road. He was impaled on the steering post, so I took his shoes and put one of mine on his foot. The other I left, with my fingerprints on it, lying near enough so they’d find it but not so near that it’d bum along with the car. Rod wouldn’t have believed the truth anyway. If they caught me, who would?

I said, “Bring up a bottle of bourbon and a carton of cigarettes. And make sure Eddy and Ma keep their mouths shut if anyone asks about me.” I opened the door so Pops could hear. “Well, thanks, Rod. It is nice to be home again.”

Solitary in the pen makes you able to stay awake easily or snatch sleep easily, whichever is necessary. I stayed awake for the last 37 hours that Pops had, leaving the chair by his bed only to go to the bathroom and to listen at the head of the stairs whenever I heard the phone or the doorbell ring. Each time I thought: this is it. But my luck held. If they’d just take long enough so I could stay until Pops went; the second that happened, I told myself, I’d be on my way.

Rod and Edwina and Ma were there at the end, with Doctor hovering in the background to make sure he got paid. Pops finally moved a pallid arm and Ma sat down quickly on the edge of the bed — a small, erect, rather indomitable woman with a face made for wearing a lorgnette. She wasn’t crying yet; instead, she looked purely luminous in a way.

“Hold my hand, Eileen.” Pops paused for the terrible strength to speak again. “Hold my hand. Then I won’t be frightened.”

She took his hand and he almost smiled, and shut his eyes. We waited, listening to his breathing get slower and slower and then just stop, like a grandfather clock running down. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. I looked around at them, so soft, so unused to death, and I felt like a marten in a brooding house. Then Ma began to sob.