“Bet on Red” by Jeff Abbott. First published in High Stakes. Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Abbott. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Stonewalls” by Jeffrey Robert Bowman. First published in The Chattahoochee Review, Winter-Spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Jeffrey Robert Bowman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Height Advantage” by William J. Carroll, Jr. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 2003. Copyright © 2003 by William J. Carroll, Jr. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Evolution” by Benjamin Cavell. Copyright © 2003 by Benjamin Cavell. First published in Humble, Young Man, Rumble. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

“All Through the House” by Christopher Coake. First published in The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Christopher Coake. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Where Beautiful Indies Dance for You” by Patrick Michael Finn. First published in Ploughshares, Winter 2003–2004. Copyright © 2003 by Patrick Michael Finn. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“How Wendy Tudhope Was Saved from Sure and Certain Death” by Rob Kantner. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Rob Kantner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Snake Eyes” by Jonathon King. First published in High Stakes. Copyright © 2003 by Jonathon King. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Harvey’s Dream” by Stephen King. First published in The New Yorker, June 30, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Stephen King. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Smash and Grab” by Michael Knight. First published in StoryQuarterly, issue 39. Copyright © 2003 by Michael Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bank of America” by Richard Lange. First published in StoryQuarterly, issue 38. Copyright © 2003 by Richard Lange. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Lids” by Tom Larsen. First published in New Millennium Writings. Copyright © 2003 by Thomas R. Larsen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Low Tide” by Dick Lochte. First published in Flesh and Blood. Copyright © 2003 by Dick Lochte. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier” by Richard A. Lupoff. First published in My Sherlock Holmes. Copyright © 2003 by Richard A. Lupoff. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents. Scovil Chichak Galen.

“Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Ontario Review, Inc.

“The Swag from Doc Hawthorne’s” by Jack O’Connell. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 2003 by Jack O’Connell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Best Man Wins” by Frederick Waterman. First published in Hemispheres: The Magazine of United Airlines, August 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Frederick Waterman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Something About Teddy” by Timothy Williams. First published in Plots with Guns. January/February 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Timothy Williams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“El Rey“ by Scott Wolven. First published in Lost in Front. December 23, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Scott Wolven. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.

“Green Heat” by Angela Zeman. First published in A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime. Copyright © 2003 by Angela Zeman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

O.P.

Like many of my generation, I grew up on mystery short stories, devouring anthologies and collections as well as mystery magazines. My favorite mystery stories, and probably everyone’s favorites, were Edgar Allan Poe, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

The short story is a deceptively simple format, and the mystery shorts seem even simpler, until you try to write one.

Two of the first things I ever had published were mystery stories: one titled “Life or Breath,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the other called “The Mystery at Thorn Mansion,” in the now-defunct Mystery Monthly.

I also have a file of rejection letters and enough unpublished short stories to kindle wet logs.

It became obvious to me that short stories are not easy to write just because they are short. Which takes me back to my high school days, when I was a sprinter on the track team. Anyone can run a hundred-yard dash, but the difference between doing it in 11 seconds or 10.2 seconds is the difference between last place and first place.

Obviously, when it came to writing, I wasn’t a sprinter, so I tried out for the long-distance team and became a novelist, which I found to be a lot easier.

The moral, if there is a moral, is that the short story, like the short race, needs to be close to perfect; there is no recovery from a bad start, no time to get a second wind, and no forgiveness for even one misstep.

“I’ll make a bet with you,” Bobby said. He was bourbon-drunk and he leaned close to Sean’s ear to talk over the arpeggios of the piano music, the never-ending chimes of the slot machines, the high roar of gamblers who, just for a moment, were beating the odds.

“I’m listening.” Sean thought it was about time to head up to his room, tired of talking to Bobby, just tired, period. Bobby was scaring off all the women with his overeager laughing, raising his glass to passing beauties like an idiot dink. It was a shame, really; this was Bobby’s last night to be with a woman and the odds weren’t pretty. Sean was supposed to get rid of Bobby tomorrow, take him into the desert outside of Vegas, shoot him, bury him deep in the dry earth, and then fly back to Houston with Vic’s hundred grand and pretend he hadn’t set foot on the Strip recently.

“I bet,” Bobby gestured with his near empty glass, “I can nail that pretty little redhead at the end of the bar.”

Sean looked. Pretty was an understatement. She was gorgeous, hair that soft color of auburn that made Sean’s throat catch, skin flawless as a statue’s, dressed tastefully in a little black number that suggested a firm, ripe figure but didn’t give away too much of the show. She was sitting alone, not looking at anyone, not trying to make eye contact. Maybe a high-class hooker, maybe not. Maybe just waiting on her boyfriend to finish at the craps table. She was drinking white wine and she cradled the stem of the glass between her palms, like she was keeping a delicate bird from taking wing.

“You aim high,” Sean said.

“I got the gun for it,” Bobby said.

“And you could impress her with all the cash you got,” Sean said. At least temporarily. Sean thought about Vic’s money, neat bricks of green he would have to hide in his checked bag tomorrow morning, wishing now he was driving from Vegas to Houston, but what a dreary, endless drive it would have been. He didn’t dislike Bobby, didn’t like the idea of killing him, but orders were orders and when Vic gave them, you listened.

“Listen, man, that’s Vegas for you. The air is thick with constant possibility. You never know which way the ball’s gon’ drop and then you’re broke or rich, all in an instant,” Bobby said. “I’m feeling like the ball’s dropping my way. She’s been looking at me.”

“Looking ain’t buying,” Sean said. “And the keno screen’s above your head, buddy.”

“But see, that’s all Vegas is about. The potential of every single moment.” Bobby pulled a wad from his pants pocket, twenties rolled into a thick burrito, and Sean thought, this is why Vic wants you dead, you dummy.

“A thousand bucks says I get her,” Bobby said.

Sean said nothing. A thousand bucks. Money in his pocket he could take and not feel guilty for taking and keeping after Bobby was dead. If he shot Bobby and then pocketed the money, that would be stealing from Vic, his boss — an unwise move. But if he won the cash from Bobby, then that was fair. Fair as could be. Plus it would be funny to watch Bobby try with the perfect redhead, and hell, if Bobby won, he’d die happier. Harmless. Sean felt an odd tug of friendship for Bobby, soon to die, with his heavy, earnest face flush with life.

“And if you do bed her, what do I have to pay?” Sean said.

“Man,” Bobby said, “that happens. I’ll have already won.”

“That’s not a fair bet,” Sean said.

“Tell you what: I win,” Bobby said, “and you help me straighten out this misunderstanding with Vic. You tell him I’ve got the deals working just the way he wants.”

Vic had sent Bobby to Vegas to shut down his drug operation, sell out the remaining supplies, close the office Bobby ran the deals from three days a week, clean the last hundred grand through the Caymans, pull up stakes, and kiss Vegas good-bye. The Feds and the locals were cracking down hard and Vic didn’t have enough friends in town to make dealing worthwhile. Bobby didn’t want to give up Vegas. And instead of taking three days to wrap up the project. Bobby had taken a week, living off Vic’s account at the King Midas, apparently doing nothing but drinking and betting and generally not closing shop in any great hurry, keeping the money tied up. And Vic was killing mad.

“That’s really between you and Vic,” Sean said. “It’s your business. Bobby.”

“Yeah, but you got his ear more than I do. You could help me a lot. I got the feeling he was a little irritated with me the last time we talked. He doesn’t get that it took me longer than I thought it would to collect all the money.”

Bobby was fun but dumber than a stump. It didn’t matter how long it truly took to gather funds and close shop, it mattered how long Vic gave you to get the work done. Sean finished his beer. Bobby didn’t have a chance in hell with the redhead. This was betting with a dead man, and Sean was the house. “Okay,” he said. “You’re on.”

Bobby finished his drink, motioned to the bartender for another. “Observe, grasshopper,” he said, moving down toward the redhead.

“Good luck,” Sean said, meaning it, being nice, ordering himself another beer for the floor show.

I dreamt, but dreams such as these are the slippery slopes to madness and I found myself unhinged from the moorings of my mind in a cornfield where the bodies of the dead lay all about in various states of decay. I alone was of one flesh and soon I began to recognize the faces of the corpses and found in each one people I had known — family, friends, acquaintances, even the women I’d had back in the districts of Richmond, all were there with death and I raised myself up from the bloody stalks and ran through the field but it only stretched wider in all directions and the bodies grew thicker like some awful harvest of offal. But on the horizon, I could make out the pale shape of a rider and I strained for my life to collapse at the horse’s feet and with trembling hands grasped the hem of the rider’s cloak. I turned my face to his and saw with surprise no decay there, nothing but the refined features of Jackson but Caesar there too and what I took to be Alexander the Great and a whole host of other men shimmering there underneath with a great vitality. The horseman spoke and his voice was an organ that sang out over the dead fields, “Poet, you know nothing about the workings of the heart.” Before the words were complete, I thought them strange but then he drew aside his heavy gray cloak and I saw nothing inside the emptiness but a heart most hideous, a thing of sutured iron and quaking with a great turn of pistons. I longed to rip the revolting organ out of him with my hands but when I reached to do so he was already gone and I saw with a horror fathomless the arm I raised to wrest was nothing but a rotted thing of maggoted flesh and I collapsed on legs rotted through and my face was in blood and mud and I screamed the shriek which waked me to a world changed anew.

I raised my face off the ground and found the battle had moved away, at least from where I was directly, and I could hear off in the distance the harsh roar of rifle fire coming back through the woods in long discordant waves. There hung heavy over the camp a pall of gun smoke and through its fog I could make out the ground slithering around me and I thought I might still be in dreams but then saw the undulations were nothing but the wounded in their aimless wanderings for aid and succor. I remembered myself and found the pain gone in my wound and my neck and uniform front stained wet from a bottle drained to its very dregs. It sat between my legs, placed by whom or how I know not. I took a sniff from the neck and the overwhelming smell of laudanum threatened to return me back to the land from which I had just returned. I must have swooned with horror at the prospect for the pain brought my head back some clarity. With tenderness I removed a gauntlet and probed the wound for some sign of mortal death. I found nothing but a shallow groove high on the side of my head, near the part, and though the blood was all on me I could not help but think, “Life,” and I rose like the dead one day will do and stood on feet none too steady and swayed.

The faintness dissipated and I noticed most of the moving forms about me had stilled their motions and now I appeared to be the only one standing among the wrecked tents and scattered provisions of a camp abruptly abandoned. The smoke continued to drift backwards from the battle lines and I began to smell burning resin and leaves from the dry bracken caught fire. Common enough occurrence on these battlefields but today it lent the gun smoke a denser opacity and as I walked towards the woods often I tripped blindly over the dead forms of enemies and allies. Finally, I gained the trees and felt a sense of relief come to my light head. But even here in the confines of the forest I grew muddled and lost in my bearings. I found myself walking in ever widening circles. At one point, there was a man ahead of me looking equally lost and I took him by the arm to ask where General Jackson’s corps was but when he turned to look at me I saw he was without a nose and blood flowed freely from the rude orifice lead-gouged. I let him pass and set out again into the forest where the sounds of war echoed and rebounded among the trees.

I know not how many hours passed in my labyrinth hut when I came to again out of the haze of opiates I found myself in a thinned area of the forest and the moon was a pale pearl streaming its light down cleanly from above the tree line. Somewhere deeper in the woods the flames of the fire gleamed like a jewel hut the smoke here had cleared by some trick of the wind. I was halfway through the scattered grass tussocks when I heard the voice of a man cursing, harsh and strained, hut in a steady monotone. I looked about hut there was no one, save the dead and the wounded not expired. The cursing continued and I realized this was not the ranting of the wounded against the heavy hand of existence hut a vital man struggling under some heavy load. I walked further and in the fading light. I made out the origin of the words. Beneath a tall oak, near blended in from the darkness about, a man held a dead horse by the foreleg and lugged with jerks and pulls backwards on the balls of his feet against the weight. As I came closer. I saw there was a man underneath near crushed by the beast. The person pulling had an odd medley of colors to his uniform and for the life of me I could not tell whether he was my ally or my enemy hut despite the vulgarities thought he had to be at least a brother officer bereaved by the death of the man on horseback. Instinctively I came up behind him and lent a hand and together we heaved and the horse finally shifted in a great slough of dead skin, the horseman beneath freed.

“Whew!” said the other man. “Thankee kindly. I was about worn out from tugging on that thing.” I looked at him and could make out little of his features, save he was of my height and weight and seemed in good health. He wore a great heard stretched down near to the middle of his chest though it was neatly barbered and smelled even pomaded, which was slathered in full evidence upon his hair. His blouse was grimy from powder stains hut his coat looked newly bought. A gold watch chain gleamed dully from the pocket. He looked at me with an aspect not unfriendly and from his accent I could only conclude he was Southern and of good standing. He suddenly smiled and said, “Looks like you been wounded, friend,” and he gestured with a hand towards the side of my head.

“It’s nothing,” I said, “I’m fine.” I touched the wound and my hands came back black and clotted. My fingers felt thick and strange from the opiates but I still spoke my plan lucidly, “Well, shall we go about bringing him to the surgeons?”

The man looked confused. “Who?” he asked.

“The man, the officer,” I pointed at the nearly crushed horseman, who now was beginning to mutter and move with odd, spasmodic jerks. The other man followed my finger and an expression of surprise flittered across his features. “Well, I’ll be... I thought ye was a dead ’un...” he said underneath his breath and he looked about for a moment and stooped down and brought up in his hands the shattered butt-end of a Springfield rifle. He walked over to the stirring horseman and before I had a chance to shout a protest dispatched him out of this world with two swift violent chops of the club. The head made the same sound a melon did splitting open under the blade of one of the kitchen hands back home. He threw away the rifle butt and commenced to root through the pockets of the dead man. He palmed up gold coins and threw away all else into a pile behind him. My mouth was open. I closed it. I pulled my revolver from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and leveled it at the kneeling form. The hands froze in mid-rummage at the clean click of the pistol coming back to cock.

“What in the name of God do ye think you’re doing?” he asked, not daring to raise his head so it looked as though he were addressing the dead. I laid the front sight right middle below his beard.

“Halting you in the name of justice,” I replied. “You’ll hang for murder,” I assured him. “Now stand up and turn around.”

Still on his knees, the man barked a hoarse laugh, “You’ll have to shoot me.” He laughed. “Murder. What all do you think is going on around you, ye dumb son of a bitch.” He stood and turned and walked away. “Go on and shoot me, I ain’t got the time to waste on you fine-minded gentlemen.”

“Very well,” I murmured and squeezed on the curve of the trigger. The snap of a misfire came and quickly I cocked hack and pulled again. Misfire. His high yokel laugh taunted out of the darkness. I pulled my saber and rushed after his receding form. He whirled and I saw in his arms a bayoneted rifle and I drew up like a horse tethered.

“Easy now, my pretty,” he said as we began to circle each other delicately. “Don’t be messing where ye going to get hurt. I’ll kill ye dead I will,” he said. It was a scene backlit by the forest fire and our shadows danced dark in the dirt in a ghoulish duel. My opponent continued to circle but with one hand fumbled in his pockets. I prepared myself to come in a rush and thrust hut out of his grimy fingers came a percussion cap, which he stuck in beneath the pulled hack hammer as he pointed the rifle at me.

“Loaded and cocked, now,” he grinned, lupine. “Stick it in the dirt, son.” The muzzle drooped to show me the direction.

“How come you know it’s loaded?” I asked him. “Perhaps it isn’t.”

“Try it, son.” He still grinned. “Shoot you or run you through, don’t make no difference atall. Now.” He jerked the muzzle downwards.

I turned the sword blade down and stuck it in the ground.

“Good,” he said. “Now walk on in front of me. Get on hack to where ye come from.” I stepped forward and stumbled past him, each second an eternity waiting for the roar of the rifle which would announce a bullet ripping through my hack and out my stomach to kill me slow and steady. It did not come but I didn’t want to turn and see what he was doing. The woods loomed ahead dark and mysterious and still full of the rippling waves of gunfire and a trace of fear went through me when I thought that death awaited no matter which way I now turned. Certainly the wounded here knew these salient facts. One grasped the cuff of my trouser leg as I passed and said in a plaintive voice, “It don’t look had do it?” I never paused in my stride. I heard the man with the rifle begin to walk behind me and a few minutes later the wounded man asked him the same query. I turned and looked. The man knelt and cradled the wounded man’s head. With a canteen, he gave him a drink and wiped some of the grime away from his face. “It don’t look had do it?” the wounded man repeated.

“Hey. How you?” said my opponent, and he raised up one leg. From out of his hoot, he pulled a bowie knife and he stuck the knife into the man and he died. He was searching through the man’s moneybag when he heard my approach and stood, knife at the ready. I held up my hands when he slashed the air in front of him as duelists do.

“Easy, boy, don’t get no ideas,” he told me.

“Why?” I asked him. “All I want to know is why?”

The eyes went blank for a second but then he let loose the high yokel laugh. There were gaps in between his teeth, some all but rotted away. “Goddamn,” he snorted, “I tell you, you officers ain’t got the brains God gave a turkey.” He knell back to his counting and finding no gold coins he threw away the purse in disgust. He turned on the balls of his feet and pulled another man, dead this one, to him with a grunt. He began the search anew.

“But why?” I asked again.

“Lord God,” the man said, sighing. “To get rich, you fool! You know how much gold is out here just going to perdition and gone cause no one bothers to collect it? Least ten dollars worth, mayhap as much as fifteen.”

“No, but why are you killing them?” I asked. He had moved on to yet another one, Yankee this time, groaning with the crimson slaverous froth about the mouth that comes from being lung shot. He stabbed him and held it until the quaking ceased. He looked at me with eyes baleful and red rimmed from the smoke spread everywhere on the clearing floor.

“How long you figger this feller had?” he asked. “Ten? Twelve hours? Or how about them sonsofbitches over there with they arms done shot off? Four? Lessen the sawbones gets to them and leaves them crippled for they whole lives ahead. I’m just helping them get out of this here vale of tears and into the vale of glory. It’s Christian duty, pure and simple.”

I looked about me and saw the men with faces contorted from hurt and their low moans seemed to be felt more than heard and the world looked a sad and blasted place indeed, metal churned and blood soaked and there seemed no flaw to his reasoning even in my addled state. But yet, I persisted.

“Some would call it murder,” I said. “Courts, for instance.”

The man shrugged and went back to his labors like a prophet unbowed despite the years of perpetual misunderstanding. “Let them,” he said and then an explosion shook the ground from a battery firing blind into the dark and drowned out the rest of his words. When I could hear over my ringing ears, he was saying in an indifferent tone, “... them sonsofbitches will sit up there on high and run they mouths and tell you that what they doing is so high and mighty and if ye listened to they words you’d think God was on everybody’s side in this here war. All we’re doing is fighting for niggers and that means money and that means nigger money.” He shook his head. “The world’s come to a sorry pass when white men are killing white men over niggers.” He looked at me standing in front of him as he tried to roll a big Dutchman over. “Goddamn, you could give me a hand at least,” he said. I apologized and bent and helped him drag the man by the heels to where we could see his pockets in the light of the fire. I almost fainted from the exertion and sat down beside the dead.

The man continued to talk as he hefted a gold watch in his hand feeling the weight. “All a man can do,” he said, “is find pleasure in what he knows is good for him. They stole me from home, give me a rifle and said, go fight. I said. All right. Said, I’ll fight all you sons of bitches tooth and nail and get rich in the meantime.”

He continued to gather corpses, me his earnest helper all the while. Before long, there was a stack of dead almost knee high and the purses of them had been slit open and their contents gathered in a pile which grew as we threw in a watch or gold coins and the precious metal gleamed with a weird luminescence from the silver moon light and the burnished orange glow of the fire. Before long, we both gave pause and I collapsed from weakness and he sat down beside me grinning his odd grin out of the sweat-beaded fur of his beard. He took out a pipe and put in a small white ball, lit a match and breathed in a lungful. He offered me the pipe. “Get ye some,” he said kindly. I took the pipe to calm myself and breathed in and the colors of the laudanum came back to me and I felt near drunk.

“Yes indeed,” said the man, “I took to ship a good bit in my younger days and the monkeys over there in Cathay got me good and drunk with that there tobaccer. I got me a New Orleans Jew doctor over in Heth’s division who sells it to me for a half take on the gold. Times been where he run out and I had to go on over and be with the boys in blue and get the supply on up again. Them boys will swap ye anything long as ye got tobaccer. Especially them Irishmen, you never seen the likes of it. I stay around there and turn myself a nice profit and then conic on back over. Yes sir, I drifted from one side in this war clear on over to the other one and it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference in the world far as I was concerned.”

I smoked the pipe again and watched the whorls and swirls of smoke come up out of my mouth and drift upwards into the black ether of the night now pinpricked by a few cold stars. I felt like taking the man’s knife and cutting through my clothes to open my skin and chest until my heart was laid bare and could beat freely out into the void. “It makes a great deal of difference to me,” I revealed.

The man took the pipe from me and held the match to the pipe bowl again and inhaled. “Well, more’s the fool,” he said in a puff of smoke. “Given time and provided death don’t find ye, ye’ll learn there’s no difference betwixt the sides and the highest pleasure them ones, gray or blue,” he pointed, “have are one and the same.” I followed the finger to a group of horsemen emerging out of the forest fire as they drifted towards us in long elongations of movement, like demons from a flame.

“Cavalry?” I asked vaguely. There was a boundless lassitude to my limbs. It seemed like I were talking to the heavens above.

“No, dammit,” said the pipe smoker. “Generals. They’re kith and kin no matter which side they fight. I swain all they want is death. That’s the only reason for them. It’s the only way they get filled up, on blood, on death.”

“Fulfillment?” I muttered. “No... No...”

But then suddenly the pounding of hooves on the ground was a loud and steady drumming and I heard the man beside me curse and scuttle away on all fours like a rat out into the darkness and then Jackson’s face and those of his staff peered down on me from atop their horses and I realized from my cloud who I was facing and I fell off and found myself on top of a pile of dead bodies with their purses lain carelessly strewn about.

The General spoke. “How odd,” he said.

“Looks like we done caught ourselves a grave robber. General,” said a colonel with a handlebar mustache. His fine hand tweaked the end of one whisker.

“Now, this is a first,” said the General. He looked genuinely perplexed. “I must say we can’t have any of that going on in this army. Does horrid things for discipline. I saw the effects myself down in Mexico. Have him shot tomorrow,” he ordered, and then in an afterthought, “In front of the men. Where there’s lice, there’s filth. Be so kind to tie his hands and bring him along. Major.”

I grunted some sort of protest. My head needed to clear.

“Wail,” Jackson said. He raised a gloved hand. “Speak, my good man.”

I wanted to beg for mercy, redress, a board of inquiry. I wanted to scream: For you! It is for you I fight! Two full long years! Stonewall! South! South!

Instead, I came out with. “I am an officer in the Confederate States Army.”

“Ah,” Jackson said. “A noose then. Someone make a note of it. Come along, gentlemen.”

The thing on its side at the bottom of the wooden-walled hot tub was not human. Whoever it had been, it wasn’t human any longer. Just a brown, shriveled husk, lying in a foot of slimy-black water. Protein for the small animals and insects that had drawn me to look inside.

Nothing now to get upset about.

At least that’s what I was force-feeding my mind to consider as I lowered the folding lid and started breathing again.

Jesus, I thought. Poor Carole...

I felt dizzy with shock and moved away, back toward the bench, where I started to sit, but the odor now was suddenly overwhelming. So much so, I stumbled off the porch, into the cold rain, and walked away from the cabin.

Down to the dry creek where I sat on a large rock and for a moment just breathed.

Good God, I thought. Poor Carole!

Now

Here is an empty meadow, circled by bare autumn woods.

The trees of the wood — oak, maple, locust — grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly, but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow’s edge, is a gravel track, twin ruts now grown over, switching back and forth through the woods and away.

The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling — save for at the meadow’s center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath the thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.

Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox, rusty and quick, lives in the nearby trees. His den, twisting among tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.

Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the gravel track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out and walk into the grass. They take photographs or draw pictures or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.

Whenever these people come, a policeman arrives soon after, fat and gray-haired. Sometimes the people speak with him — and sometimes they shout — but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they depart he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When he comes at night, the spinning of his red and blue lights causes the trees to jump and dance.

Sometimes the policeman arrives alone:

He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.

When he makes noise the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man’s barks and howls.

He does not stay long.

After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground and into the burrows of mice. Things eat and are eaten.

Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman and the house and all the people who have come and gone here are not forgotten.

They are, simply, never remembered.

By the time he’d turned twenty, Ray Dwyer looked like a movie gangster’s bodyguard, and was either feared or adored by everyone who knew him. He drove trucks on a local route for Tamco, one of the many quarries in South Joliet, and when he wasn’t working, Ray Dwyer liked to dress up in nice shirts and slacks from Baskin’s on Roosevelt Avenue and take pretty girls to elegant dinners and shows. There was never a shortage of pretty girls who wanted to accompany Ray Dwyer, for not only was he naturally muscular with green eyes and handsome black hair he combed slick with Royal Crown hairdress, but he was always a perfect gentleman who didn’t force or even expect anything beyond a kiss at the end of the date, no matter how much he’d spent on the evening.

And even though this angered the other men who knew Ray Dwyer, an impossible act to follow when it came to pretty girls (most guys tried to hike a girl’s skirt after bowling, burgers, and maybe a beer or two at Stone City or Andy and Sophie’s), who among them had the balls to say anything to him? Everyone knew about the quarry strikes a few years back, when Ray Dwyer, five months out of high school and unarmed, beat the living Christ out of three cops who’d tried to pull him away from the quarry gate he was blocking with the rest of the truckers and heavy machinists. Three cops. With his bare hands. Ten more patrolmen had to eventually bring him down, and Ray Dwyer had a smooth, deep scar from one of their billy clubs hidden under his handsome black hair to prove it, which he never did, since Ray Dwyer was never one to boast about his own strength, no matter how hammered he was.

And everyone also knew Ray Dwyer’s secret when it came to his ease and virtue with the pretty girls: Ray Dwyer was raised in a home where pretty girls outnumbered him four to one. His father, James Dwyer, a quarry machinist who’d loved Camel cigarettes and corned beef hash, died of a heart attack when Ray was still a boy, which left Ray Dwyer the little man of the house surrounded by his mother and three younger sisters: Mary, Katie, and Maureen. Like most men Ray’s age, he still lived at home, and would continue to do so until he fell in love with the right pretty girl whom he would marry and have a family with.

The Dwyer girls were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, and whenever a fellow wanted to take one of them out, he’d usually be intimidated enough to ask her big brother, Ray, for permission beforehand, something Ray Dwyer found incredibly dumb and unmanly.

“Aw, come off it,” Ray would tell the fellow between swigs of Old Style at the Stone City tavern. “You don’t need my okay, but thanks,” Ray would say, then offer a friendly squeeze of the fellow’s trembling, relieved shoulder.

Hell, it was only natural that the guys wanted to take Ray’s sisters out, and he had no problem with it, as long as the guys behaved themselves. And the guys sure as shit did behave when it came to the Dwyer girls; any guy who even thought of getting fast with one of them would have been out of his goddamn gourd.

So Ray Dwyer didn’t think twice when John Lucas, a hillbilly from Georgia or some damn place who’d just started driving for the GAF quarry, took Katie Dwyer to the movies on a Saturday night without asking for Ray’s approval. As a matter of fact, Ray Dwyer was so happy with his own plans for the night that his sister’s date with John Lucas never once crossed his mind. Ray was so happy because he was on his own date with Samantha Baskin, an absolutely beautiful girl with black hair and perfect skin she somehow kept tan even in the middle of winter, whose father owned the very clothing store where Ray had purchased the crisp white shirt and charcoal slacks he wore that night. First they had dinner at a small French restaurant downtown (Ray wasn’t much for that frog food, but Samantha was crazy about it, and if Samantha had wanted Ray to eat dog chow, he would have gladly asked for seconds — thirds, even), and then Ray took Samantha to a Jerry Lewis movie she wanted to see. Ray’s first choice would have been a Western, but he laughed at all the scenes Samantha laughed at even though he found the movie pretty silly, because Ray was deeply in love with Samantha Baskin, and as far as he was concerned, Samantha Baskin was the only girl on Earth he wanted to marry. But there was a problem: Samantha Baskin was Jewish, and Ray Dwyer wasn’t, and though Ray never once even hinted to Samantha that he wanted to marry her (how the hell could he say that?), she’d told him how bent her parents were on making sure she married someone who was Jewish, too. Ray didn’t care what church Samantha went to, and he knew the problem was Samantha’s parents, and not Samantha. Hell, Samantha only went to her church two or three times a year, anyway. But Ray wasn’t thinking about the problem too much that night, since Samantha was sitting right next to him and holding his hand and having a good time — a hell of a good time.

When Ray took Samantha home (this had been their tenth date, and Samantha had agreed to go out with Ray again the following weekend), she invited him into her house, since her parents had driven up to Milwaukee for the weekend to visit relatives. Then Samantha took him into her bedroom, where Ray lost his virginity. They stayed in Samantha’s bed for a couple of hours, kissed and watched each other without saying a word, even though Ray was dying to ask her if she’d consider running away with him someday real soon.

But Ray Dwyer never did ask Samantha that question, since he was afraid of ruining what he considered the greatest moment of his life, a moment that lifted and dizzied him for the rest of the weekend. Until he got to work Monday morning.

Ray Dwyer had actually been whistling to himself as he walked from the clock room to his truck when his friend Bob Placher took him aside. He’d been whistling because he’d never before felt so lucky and swell on a Monday morning. “Listen, Ray,” Bob Placher told him: he was whispering and gently gesturing with both hands. Ray noticed that the other drivers and machinists who walked past didn’t nod hello to him like they usually did, but tossed quick glances his way that were either sympathetic or fearful: they were obviously in on what Bob was about to tell him, and Ray Dwyer was afraid the news had something to do with his job. “Now take it easy, Ray,” Bob Placher said, then went on to tell him about John Lucas — how, on Saturday night, after John Lucas dropped Ray’s sister Katie off, he’d driven over to the Stone City tavern and, as he slammed boilermakers, went on to brag at the top of his hillbilly lungs about how he’d just fucked the sweet singing hell out of Katie Dwyer, and how Katie Dwyer was the tightest piece of ass he’d ever had, and that if he’d known the pussy was this good around here, he would have moved up north ten years ago. “Now take it easy, buddy,” Bob Placher said again, and that’s exactly what Ray Dwyer did; he simply nodded, thanked Bob for keeping him informed, then climbed into his truck, which was loaded for delivery to Collins Headstone up in Lockport.

Only as Ray Dwyer sat in his cab waiting behind the other trucks to pass through the gate did he realize the significance of how quiet and strange his sister Katie had been acting the day before, how she hadn’t gone to Mass because she felt sick, how she’d stayed in her room all day. Ray Dwyer hadn’t thought twice about it, since everyone gets sick sometimes.

Ray Dwyer was about to turn left onto Patterson Road, since that was the route he’d follow to Lockport, but he turned right instead. Then Ray Dwyer drove half a mile to the GAF quarry, left his truck on the side of Patterson Road, marched through the gate, and found John Lucas leaning against his own truck, sipping coffee and smoking.

“What,” John Lucas said, a tired, empty drawl that didn’t sound like a question.

And then Ray Dwyer murdered John Lucas — grabbed his head and slammed it into the side of his truck over and again, until it came apart in his huge, bare hands.

He saw them coming. Over the high grass a swirl of dust spun up on the horizon, rising on the midday heat. He squinted into hard sunlight and timed the movement. Car, he thought. Maybe two. Behind him, to the west, towering clouds with anvil-flat bottoms moved across the sky from the Everglades toward the ocean, soaking up moisture and turning bruised and dark as they came. In his hand was the twisted neck of a burlap sack and he could feel the writhing of thick animal muscle inside of it.

He pulled the wide-brimmed hat from his head and wiped the sweat from his eyes and then looked down, refocusing on the shadows of a saw palmetto clumped up beside him. The snakes were not forgiving of a man’s inattention. And contrary to legend, diamond-backs did not always sound their dry rattle before they struck. He stood watching both the trailing dust of approaching men and the half-hidden maw of a gopher hole, where the rattlers in this open ridge country liked to nest. He’d been in this part of south Florida long enough to know either one could bring trouble. And as in all gambles, anticipation and assessment are always key.

Four days earlier, on a dirt street in Miami, he had arrived on a corner at the edge of town with a handbill: “Wanted: Men Not Afraid of Snakes and Reptiles. Cash Money!” He’d joined two dozen others at the printed address. Most of the men who showed up were in their twenties and thirties, anxious and fidgety, their feet shuffling and hands busy around cigarettes and small packages of chew. Some wore their tweed suits, the color faded from the sun, the collars and cuffs rubbed soft at the edges. Others were in suspenders and caps but still scuffed about in stitched, hard-leather shoes. Street shoes. City shoes.

O’Hanlon had been in Miami less than a week, fresh off the train from his Brooklyn neighborhood, and he could already spot the “binder boys.” They were the young, slick-talking hustlers from the city who’d come to the land boom of Florida. They’d heard on cold northern sidewalks that there were fortunes to be made in the sun. Packing their cardboard suitcases and carrying a roll of savings or a stake gathered from family and friends, they’d come south. In a place gone real-estate mad they’d buy a chunk of unseen land and then sell it for profit days later, long before they ever had to make a payment. The “binder” on the property would change hands ten times until the last fool left holding it was stuck with the inflated bill, unable to find another buyer.

It was high-stakes gambling, not high finance. O’Hanlon had learned the scam from the shoeshine boy outside his flophouse hotel. He also learned that by this late fall of 1925, the boom was going bust. It had been a cleanout for the ones who had arrived early and who had money to begin with. No doubt some nameless butter-and-egg man from Yonkers fell into luck and came out sharp. But by this time the binder boys had fallen to O’Hanlon’s level, scrounging after any odd job they could just to buy a meal.

At the morning gathering he watched the group, scrutinizing each man’s hands, reading their eyes when they turned to speak to one another and especially when the conversation went quiet.

“You can always measure a man by his hands and eyes,” O’Hanlon’s father had taught him. “Don’t even need to see ’em get into the ring. If they’re scared, it’s in their eyes, son. If they’re weak, it’s in their hands.”

He had heard it hundreds of times in his father’s boxing gym on Delacourt. He had grown up in that gym, watching men bring their dreams in off the street, watching the ones whose ambition or determination or desperation drove them. He’d also seen the ones who let that same motivation leak away and watched others have it beaten out of them. The many who were without talent or were just plain lazy left without scars, their pride put in its proper place before the real fighting started. The few with skill labored and learned and could raise a dozen expectations with their potential. But he had only witnessed one champion, then seen him fall under the thumb of promoters and handlers and gamblers. The rich got richer, the rest of us worked and watched.

His father’s lessons were still with him that morning when a battered Model T truck pulled to the corner. A gray-bearded man with red suspenders climbed out of the cab and then swung himself up into the truck bed. With a voice scratched with age and handrolled tobacco, he introduced himself as Rattlesnake Pete. O’Hanlon took in the old man’s hands, the fingers knurled and twisted, two of them missing half their length. He could see that despite their damage, they were not weak hands.

“Any you all boys ever catched you a snake?” he said, his drawl coming straight out of Alabama. The group of men had started to gather, but no one offered an answer. The man called Pete did not bother to look up for any nods of assent or bragging. His attention was on the truck-bed floor where he’d bent to hoist a burlap bag.

“Ya’ll work with me an’ we got ten acres of brush land to clear outta rattlers,” he went on while untwisting the neck of the bag. A half dozen of the men narrowed their eyes on the movement of Mr. Pete’s hands and another half dozen, most of the binder boys, took a subtle step back.

“I pay you fifty cent a snake and that’ll beat pickin’ beans any day, boys,” he said, still looking into the hole of the bag opening and then suddenly stabbing his hand in.

“Course, this ain’t no bean neither,” he said as his fist came out with a slick, writhing ribbon of flesh.

Six more men stepped two full steps back. A few stayed rooted. They were not necessarily brave men. The promise of fifty cents a snake was the glue. Mr. Pete now focused his attention back on the group, looking each of them in the eyes, going face to face. Then, without a word of embellishment or warning, he flung the snake down into the dirt, and two more of the men jumped back while the beast coiled itself in the shadow of the truck bumper and began to vibrate.

“All right, boys,” the snakeman said, climbing down from the bed and moving more smoothly and surely than a man his age should have. “Ain’t no danger if ya’ll do what I learn ya.”

O’Hanlon and three others who’d stayed close cut their eyes to old Pete’s movements, O’Hanlon studying the footwork, watching the body parts closest to the snake. The old man eased in, bending at the knee and never letting his eyes leave the rattler’s head.

“Oncet ya’ll know where he’s at, just keep his attention. They’s just stupid animals, boys. Ain’t got nothin’ in they heads but meanness and belly hunger and they already know ya’ll too big to eat.”

Now on his knee only a yard from the snake, the old man raised one hand and the reptile’s unblinking eyes locked onto the movement and rotated its head to match its slow path. O’Hanlon could hear the heavy breathing of the man next to him and the scuffle of feet farther back of the onlookers now trying to gain a view. With the animal’s head now focused on his left hand, the old snake man drifted his right hand more slowly to circle back behind the floating head.

“Ain’t a magician nor card player don’t know how to git you lookin’ at the one thing whilst they trickin’ you with the other,” old Pete said, staring intently at the snake’s head and sliding his left hand to further distract it. If the beast did not follow his left, the snake man kept his right hand still and waited for the snake’s attention to return to the movement before closing the gap. The breath sound next to O’Hanlon had stopped. Or maybe it was his own.

“Ya’ll old enough to know THAT!” old Pete suddenly yelped, simultaneously flicking his right hand across ten inches of space and snatching up the snake just behind its spade-shaped head. “Ain’t ya’ll?”

The man called Pete stood up and extended his arm. From his fist the rattler hung, curling its body frantically into a series of desperate S-shapes, its unhinged mouth glistening wide and white and angry.

The man beside O’Hanlon was shaking his head in appreciation and the group behind began to mumble.

“Fifty cent for five minutes of work, boys,” Pete said, now with a teasing light in his eye. “Anybody that’s game, climb on up into the truck.”

Three of them made it into the field. Rattlesnake Pete was not nearly as dramatic when showing the newcomers how to flush a gopher hole with kerosene to bring the snakes writhing and blind out into the sunlight. He’d armed them with long-handled, close-tined pitchforks if they wanted. The old man had been hired, he said, to clear the scrub just north and west of Miami of all its rattlers. The buyer of the land was to begin construction on what he promised would be the finest horseracing track and paddock south of Lexington, and just the thought of snakes and thoroughbred horses together would not do.

With an early morning sun already burning deep into his shoulders and the exposed angles of his nose and cheeks and forehead, O’Hanlon had spent his first day in the field watching. The more experienced snake hunters moved quickly away from the recruits, knowing the terrain and the gopher holes — which actually belonged to a large kind of land tortoise — where easy catches could be made. O’Hanlon quickly discarded their lies about the snake’s habit of staying in the shade to avoid the heat of the sun. The logic seemed right; the semitropical sun was raw and unmerciful. But O’Hanlon soon recognized that the cold-blooded species needed the sun to stay warm and he’d found his first catch half curled on a gray-white slab of limestone, the sun full on its distinctive, diamond-patterned skin. By watching the others, he’d stolen the idea of a hook at the end of the pitchfork handle fashioned from a length of stiff wire. Moving slowly, he eased the wire under the snake as it rattled its tail at him and then lifted it off the rock. By suspending the beast in air he robbed it of a solid foundation from which to launch a strike. Then, while carefully watching the movement of the head, he stuffed it into the open gunnysack and earned his first legitimate fifty cents since arriving in Florida.

By the third day he had snared ten of the animals, as many as even the more experienced men of the dozen who stayed on. At noontime old Pete fed them all lunch under any nearby shade oak. From the bed of his truck he handed out day-old loaves of hard bread, chunks of cheese cut from huge disks, and all the oranges a man could eat. It was during the breaks that O’Hanlon heard that Pete collected one dollar from the land developer for each of the snakes they all caught. The old man tallied the number on his own count, though he did offer the sacks to the rich owner to count for himself. Several of the men smiled knowingly when one suggested that Pete was not beyond overstating the catch or releasing a few of the undamaged snakes to be caught and paid for again.

“That ole rich man, he’ll stick his hand down your pocket to take ya’ll money but he ain’t gone take a chance puttin’ his finger on that snake for countin’,” said one, raising smiles and nods from the others.

“He don’t have to when he has fools like us to do it for him,” said another.

That statement put a damp silence over the group. But when the foreman called them up they all still stretched out their legs and took to the field. O’Hanlon rose with them, the five dollars he’d earned tucked deep under the leather of his boot.

Janet turns from the sink and, boom, all at once her husband of nearly thirty years is sitting at the kitchen table in a white T-shirt and a pair of Big Dog boxers, watching her.

More and more often she has found this weekday commodore of Wall Street in just this place and dressed in just this fashion come Saturday morning: slumped at the shoulder and blank in the eye, a white scruff showing on his cheeks, man-tits sagging out the front of his T, hair standing up in back like Alfalfa of the Little Rascals grown old and stupid. Janet and her friend Hannah have frightened each other lately (like little girls telling ghost stories during a sleepover) by swapping Alzheimer’s tales: who can no longer recognize his wife, who can no longer remember the names of her children.

But she doesn’t really believe these silent Saturday-morning appearances have anything to do with early-onset Alzheimer’s; on any given weekday morning Harvey Stevens is ready and raring to go by six-forty-five, a man of sixty who looks fifty (well, fifty-four) in either of his best suits, and who can still cut a trade, buy on margin, or sell short with the best of them.

No, she thinks, this is merely practicing to be old, and she hates it. She’s afraid that when he retires it will be this way every morning, at least until she gives him a glass of orange juice and asks him (with an increasing impatience she won’t be able to help) if he wants cereal or just toast. She’s afraid she’ll turn from whatever she’s doing and see him sitting there in a bar of far too brilliant morning sun, Harvey in the morning, Harvey in his T-shirt and his boxer shorts, legs spread apart so she can view the meagre bulge of his basket (should she care to) and see the yellow calluses on his great toes, which always make her think of Wallace Stevens having on about the Emperor of Ice Cream. Sitting there silent and dopily contemplative instead of ready and raring, psyching himself up for the day. God, she hopes she’s wrong. It makes life seem so thin, so stupid somehow. She can’t help wondering if this is what they fought through for, raised and married off their three girls for, got past his inevitable middle-aged affair for, worked for and sometimes (let’s face it) grabbed for. If this is where you come out of the deep dark woods, Janet thinks, this... this parking lot... then why does anyone do it?

But the answer is easy. Because you didn’t know. You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered. You kept a scrapbook devoted to the girls, and in it they were still young and still interesting in their possibilities: Trisha, the eldest, wearing a top hat and waving a tinfoil wand over Tim, the cocker spaniel; Jenna, frozen in mid-jump halfway through the lawn sprinkler, her taste for dope, credit cards, and older men still far over the horizon; Stephanie, the youngest, at the county spelling bee, where “cantaloupe” turned out to be her Waterloo. Somewhere in most of these pictures (usually in the background) were Janet and the man she had married, always smiling, as if it were against the law to do anything else.

Then one day you made the mistake of looking over your shoulder and discovered that the girls were grown and that the man you had struggled to stay married to was sitting with his legs apart, his fish-white legs, staring into a bar of sun, and by God maybe he looked fifty-four in either of his best suits, but sitting there at the kitchen table like that he looked seventy. Hell, seventy-five. He looked like what the goons on The Sopranos called a mope.

She turns back to the sink and sneezes delicately, once, twice, a third time.

“How are they this morning?” he asks, meaning her sinuses, meaning her allergies. The answer is not very good, but, like a surprising number of bad things, her summer allergies have their sunny side. She no longer has to sleep with him and fight for her share of the covers in the middle of the night; no longer has to listen to the occasional muffled fart as Harvey soldiers ever deeper into sleep. Most nights during the summer she gets six, even seven hours, and that’s more than enough. When fall comes and he moves back in from the guest room, it will drop to four, and much of that will be troubled.

One year, she knows, he won’t move back in. And although she doesn’t tell him so — it would hurt his feelings, and she still doesn’t like to hurt his feelings; this is what now passes for love between them, at least going from her direction to his — she will be glad.

She sighs and reaches into the pot of water in the sink. Gropes around in it. “Not so bad,” she says.

And then, just when she is thinking (and not for the first time) about how this life holds no more surprises, no unplumbed marital depths, he says in a strangely casual voice, “It’s a good thing you weren’t sleeping with me last night, Jax. I had a bad dream. I actually screamed myself awake.”

She’s startled. How long has it been since he called her Jax instead of Janet or Jan? The last is a nickname she secretly hates. It makes her think of that syrupy-sweet actress on Lassie when she was a kid, the little boy (Timmy, his name was Timmy) always fell down a well or got bitten by a snake or trapped under a rock, and what kind of parents put a kid’s life in the hands of a fucking collie?

She turns to him again, forgetting the pot with the last egg still in it, the water now long enough off the boil to be lukewarm. He had a bad dream? Harvey? She tries to remember when Harvey has mentioned having had any kind of dream and has no luck. All that comes is a vague memory of their courtship days, Harvey saying something like “I dream of you,” she herself young enough to think it sweet instead of lame.

“You what?”

“Screamed myself awake,” he says. “Did you not hear me?”

“No.” Still looking at him. Wondering if he’s kidding her. If it’s some kind of bizarre morning joke. But Harvey is not a joking man. His idea of humor is telling anecdotes at dinner about his Army days. She has heard all of them at least a hundred times.

“I was screaming words, but I wasn’t really able to say them. It was like... I don’t know... I couldn’t close my mouth around them. I sounded like I’d had a stroke. And my voice was lower. Not like my own voice at all.” He pauses. “I heard myself, and made myself stop. But I was shaking all over, and I had to turn on the light for a little while. I tried to pee, and I couldn’t. These days it seems like I can always pee — a little, anyway — but not this morning at two-forty-seven.” He pauses, sitting there in his bar of sun. She can see dust motes dancing in it. They seem to give him a halo.

“What was your dream?” she asks, and here is an odd thing: for the first time in maybe five years, since they stayed up until midnight discussing whether to hold the Motorola stock or sell it (they wound up selling), she’s interested in something he has to say.

“I don’t know if I want to tell you,” he says, sounding uncharacteristically shy. He turns, picks up the pepper mill, and begins to toss it from hand to hand.

“They say if you tell your dreams they won’t come true,” she says to him, and here is Odd Thing No. 2: all at once Harvey looks there, in a way he hasn’t looked to her in years. Even his shadow on the wall above the toaster oven looks somehow more there. She thinks, He looks as though he matters, and why should that be? Why, when I was just thinking that life is thin, should it seem thick? This is a summer morning in late June. We are in Connecticut. When June comes we are always in Connecticut. Soon one of us will get the newspaper, which will be divided into three parts, like Gaul.

“Do they say so?” He considers the idea, eyebrows raised (she needs to pluck them again, they are getting that wild look, and he never knows), tossing the pepper mill from hand to hand. She would like to tell him to stop doing that, it’s making her nervous (like the exclamatory blackness of his shadow on the wall, like her very beating heart, which has suddenly begun to accelerate its rhythm for no reason at all), but she doesn’t want to distract him from whatever is going on in his Saturday-morning head. And then he puts the pepper mill down anyway, which should be all right but somehow isn’t, because it has its own shadow — it runs out long on the table like the shadow of an oversized chess piece, even the toast crumbs lying there have shadows, and she has no idea why that should frighten her but it does. She thinks of the Cheshire Cat telling Alice, “We’re all mad here,” and suddenly she doesn’t want to hear Harvey’s stupid dream, the one from which he awakened himself screaming and sounding like a man who has had a stroke. Suddenly she doesn’t want life to be anything but thin. Thin is O.K., thin is good, just look at the actresses in the movies if you doubt it.

Nothing must announce itself, she thinks feverishly. Yes, feverishly; it’s as if she’s having a hot flash, although she could have sworn all that nonsense ended two or three years ago. Nothing must announce itself, it’s Saturday morning and nothing must announce itself.

She opens her mouth to tell him she got it backward, what they really say is that if you tell your dreams they will come true, but it’s too late, he’s already talking, and it occurs to her that this is her punishment for dismissing life as thin. Life is actually like a Jethro Tull song, thick as a brick, how could she have ever thought otherwise?

“I dreamed it was morning and I came down to the kitchen,” he says. “Saturday morning, just like this, only you weren’t up yet.”

“I’m always up before you on Saturday morning,” she says.

“I know, but this was a dream,” he says patiently, and she can see the white hairs on the insides of his thighs, where the muscles are wasted and starved. Once he played tennis, but those days are done. She thinks, with a viciousness that is entirely unlike her, You will have a heart attack, white man, that’s what will finish you, and maybe they’ll discuss giving you an obit in the Times, but if a B-movie actress from the fifties died that day, or a semi-famous ballerina from the forties, you won’t even get that.

“But it was like this,” he says. “I mean, the sun was shining in.” He raises a hand and stirs the dust motes into lively life around his head and she wants to scream at him not to do that, not to disturb the universe like that.

“I could see my shadow on the floor and it never looked so bright or so thick.” He pauses, then smiles, and she sees how cracked his lips are. “Bright’s a funny word to use for a shadow, isn’t it? Thick, too.”

“Harvey—”

“I crossed to the window,” he says, “and I looked out, and I saw there was a dent in the side of the Friedmans’ Volvo, and I knew — somehow — that Frank had been out drinking and that the dent happened coming home.”

She suddenly feels that she will faint. She saw the dent in the side of Frank Friedman’s Volvo herself, when she went to the door to see if the newspaper had come (it hadn’t), and she thought the same thing, that Frank had been out at the Gourd and scraped something in the parking lot. How does the other guy look? had been her exact thought.

The idea that Harvey has also seen this comes to her, that he is goofing with her for some strange reason of his own. Certainly it’s possible; the guest room where he sleeps on summer nights has an angle on the street. Only Harvey isn’t that sort of man. “Goofing” is not Harvey Stevens’s “thing.”

There is sweat on her cheeks and brow and neck, she can feel it, and her heart is beating faster than ever. There really is a sense of something looming, and why should this be happening now? Now, when the world is quiet, when prospects are tranquil? If I asked for this, I’m sorry, she thinks... or maybe she’s actually praying. Take it back, please take it back.

“I went to the refrigerator,” Harvey is saying, “and I looked inside, and I saw a plate of devilled eggs with a piece of Saran wrap over them. I was delighted — I wanted lunch at seven in the morning!”

He laughs. Janet — Jax that was — looks down into the pot sitting in the sink. At the one hard-boiled egg left in it. The others have been shelled and neatly sliced in two, the yolks scooped out. They are in a bowl beside the drying rack. Beside the bowl is the jar of mayonnaise. She has been planning to serve the devilled eggs for lunch, along with a green salad.

“I don’t want to hear the rest,” she says, but in a voice so low she can barely hear it herself. Once she was in the Dramatics Club and now she can’t even project across the kitchen. The muscles in her chest feel all loose, the way Harvey’s legs would if he tried to play tennis.

“I thought I would have just one,” Harvey says, “and then I thought, No, if I do that she’ll yell at me. And then the phone rang. I dashed for it because I didn’t want it to wake you up, and here comes the scary part. Do you want to hear the scary part?”

No, she thinks from her place by the sink. I don’t want to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we’re all mad here, and her mother really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn’t come true, which meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow. They have three girls. One of them lives just down the road, Jenna the gay divorcée, same name as one of the Bush twins, and doesn’t Jenna hate that; these days she insists that people call her Jen. Three girls, which meant a lot of teeth under a lot of pillows, a lot of worries about strangers in cars offering rides and candy, which had meant a lot of precautions, and oh how she hopes her mother was right, that telling a bad dream is like putting a stake in a vampire’s heart.

“I picked up the phone,” Harvey says, “and it was Trisha.” Trisha is their oldest daughter, who idolized Houdini and Blackstone before discovering boys. “She only said one word at first, just ‘Dad,’ but I knew it was Trisha. You know how you always know?”

Yes. She knows how you always know. How you always know your own, from the very first word, at least until they grow up and become someone else’s.

“I said, ‘Hi, Trish, why you calling so early, hon? Your mom’s still in the sack.’ And at first there was no answer. I thought we’d been cut off, and then I heard these whispering whimpering sounds. Not words but half-words. Like she was trying to talk but hardly anything could come out because she wasn’t able to muster any strength or get her breath. And that was when I started being afraid.”

Well, then, he’s pretty slow, isn’t he? Because Janet — who was Jax at Sarah Lawrence, Jax in the Dramatics Club, Jax the truly excellent French-kisser, Jax who smoked Gitanes and affected enjoyment of tequila shooters — Janet has been scared for quite some time now, was scared even before Harvey mentioned the dent in the side of Frank Friedman’s Volvo. And thinking of that makes her think of the phone conversation she had with her friend Hannah not even a week ago, the one that eventually progressed to Alzheimer’s ghost stories. Hannah in the city, Janet curled up on the window seat in the living room and looking out at their one-acre share of Westport, at all the beautiful growing things that make her sneeze and water at the eyes, and before the conversation turned to Alzheimer’s they had discussed first Lucy Friedman and then Frank, and which one of them had said it? Which one of them had said, “If he doesn’t do something about his drinking and driving, he’s eventually going to kill somebody?”

“And then Trish said what sounded like ‘lees’ or ‘least,’ but in the dream I knew she was... eliding?... is that the word? Eliding the first syllable, and that what she was really saying was ‘police.’ I asked her what about the police, what was she trying to say about the police, and I sat down. Right there.” He points to the chair in what they call the telephone nook. “There was some more silence, then a few more of those half-words, those whispered half-words. She was making me so mad doing that, I thought, Drama queen, same as it ever was, but then she said, ‘number,’ just as clear as a bell. And I knew — the way I knew she was trying to say ‘police’ — that she was trying to tell me the police had called her because they didn’t have our number.”

Janet nods numbly. They decided to unlist their number two years ago because reporters kept calling Harvey about the Enron mess. Usually at dinnertime. Not because he’d had anything to do with Enron per se but because those big energy companies were sort of a specialty of his. He’d even served on a Presidential commission a few years earlier, when Clinton had been the big kahuna and the world had been (in her humble opinion, at least) a slightly better, slightly safer place. And while there were a lot of things about Harvey she no longer liked, one thing she knew perfectly well was that he had more integrity in his little finger than all those Enron sleazebags put together. She might sometimes be bored by integrity, but she knows what it is.

But don’t the police have a way of getting unlisted numbers? Well, maybe not if they’re in a hurry to find something out or tell somebody something. Plus, dreams don’t have to be logical, do they? Dreams are poems from the subconscious.

And now, because she can no longer bear to stand still, she goes to the kitchen door and looks out into the bright June day, looks out at Sewing Lane, which is their little version of what she supposes is the American dream. How quiet this morning lies, with a trillion drops of dew still sparkling on the grass! And still her heart hammers in her chest and the sweat rolls down her face and she wants to tell him he must stop, he must not tell this dream, this terrible dream. She must remind him that Jenna lives right down the road — Jen, that is, Jen who works at the Video Stop in the village and spends all too many weekend nights drinking at the Gourd with the likes of Frank Friedman, who is old enough to be her father. Which is undoubtedly part of the attraction.

“All these whispered little half-words,” Harvey is saying, “and she would not speak up. Then I heard ‘killed,’ and I knew that one of the girls was dead. I just knew it. Not Trisha, because it was Trisha on the phone, but either Jenna or Stephanie. And I was so scared. I actually sat there wondering which one I wanted it to be, like Sophie’s fucking Choice. I started to shout at her. “Tell me which one! Tell me which one! For God’s sake, Trish, tell me which one!” Only then the real world started to bleed through... always assuming there is such a thing...”

Harvey utters a little laugh, and in the bright morning light Janet sees there is a red stain in the middle of the dent on the side of Frank Friedman’s Volvo, and in the middle of the stain is a dark smutch that might be dirt or even hair. She can see Frank pulling up crooked to the curb at two in the morning, too drunk even to try the driveway, let alone the garage — strait is the gate, and all that. She can see him stumbling to the house with his head down, breathing hard through his nose. Viva ze bool.

“By then I knew I was in bed, but I could hear this low voice that didn’t sound like mine at all, it sounded like some stranger’s voice, and it couldn’t put corners on any of the words it was saying. ‘Ell-ee itch-un, ell-ee itch-un,’ that’s what it sounded like. ‘Ell-ee itch-un, Ish!’ ”

Tell me which one. Tell me which one, Trish.

Harvey falls silent, thinking. Considering. The dust motes dance around his face. The sun makes his T-shirt almost too dazzling to look at; it is a T-shirt from a laundry-detergent ad.

“I lay there waiting for you to run in and see what was wrong,” he finally says. “I lay there all over goosebumps, and trembling, telling myself it was just a dream, the way you do, of course, but also thinking how real it was. How marvellous, in a horrible way.”

He stops again, thinking how to say what comes next, unaware that his wife is no longer listening to him. Jax-that-was is now employing all her mind, all her considerable powers of thought, to make herself believe that what she is seeing is not blood but just the Volvo’s undercoating where the paint has been scraped away. “Undercoating” is a word her subconscious has been more than eager to cast up.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it, how deep imagination goes?” he says finally. “A dream like that is how a poet — one of the really great ones — must see his poem. Every detail so clear and so bright.”

He falls silent and the kitchen belongs to the sun and the dancing motes; outside, the world is on hold. Janet looks at the Volvo across the street; it seems to pulse in her eyes, thick as a brick. When the phone rings, she would scream if she could draw breath, cover her ears if she could lift her hands. She hears Harvey get up and cross to the nook as it rings again, and then a third time.

It is a wrong number, she thinks. It has to be, because if you tell your dreams they don’t come true.

Harvey says, “Hello?”

At the last house on the left, the one with no security system sign staked on the lawn, no dog in the backyard, Cashdollar elbowed out a pane of glass in the kitchen door and reached through to unlock it from the inside. Though he was 99 percent certain that the house was empty — he’d watched the owners leave himself — he paused a moment just across the threshold, listened carefully, heard nothing. Satisfied, he padded through an archway into the dining room, where he found a chest of silverware and emptied its contents into the pillowcase he’d brought. He was headed down the hall, looking for the master bedroom, hoping that, in the rush to make some New Year’s Eve soiree, the lady of the house had left her jewelry in plain sight, when he saw a flash of white and his head was snapped back on his neck, the bones in his face suddenly aflame. He wobbled, dropped to his knees. Then a girlish grunt and another burst of pain and all he knew was darkness.

He came to with his wrists and ankles bound with duct tape to the arms and legs of a ladder-back chair. His cheeks throbbed. His nose felt huge with ache. Opposite him, in an identical chair, a teenage girl was blowing lightly on the fingers of her left hand. There was a porcelain toilet tank lid, flecked with blood, across her lap. On it was arrayed a pair of cuticle scissors, a bottle of clear polish, cotton balls, and a nail file. The girl glanced up at him now, and he would have sworn she was pleased to find him awake.

“How’s your face?” she said.

She was long-limbed, lean but not skinny, wearing a T-shirt with the words Saint Bridget’s Volleyball across the front in pastel plaids. Her hair was pulled into pigtails. She wore flannel boxers and pink wool socks.

“It hurts like hell.” His nostrils were plugged with blood, his voice buzzing like bad wiring in his head.

The girl did a sympathetic wince.

“I didn’t think anyone was home,” he said.

“I guess you cased the house?” she said. “Is that the word — cased?”

Cashdollar nodded and she gave him a look, like she was sorry for spoiling his plans.

“I’m at boarding school. I just flew in this afternoon.”

“I didn’t see a light,” he said.

“I keep foil over the windows,” she said. “I need total darkness when I sleep. There’s weather stripping under the door and everything.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Right after I knocked you out. You scared me so bad I practically just shouted my address into the phone and hung up.” She giggled a little at herself. “I was afraid you’d wake up and kill me. That’s why the tape. I’ll call again if they aren’t here soon.” This last she delivered as if she regretted having to make him wait. She waggled her fingers at him. “I was on my left pinky when I heard the window break.”

Cashdollar estimated at least ten minutes for the girl to drag him down the hall and truss him up, which meant that the police would be arriving momentarily. He had robbed houses in seven states, had surprised his share of home owners, but he’d never once had a run-in with the law. He was too fast on his feet for that, strictly smash and grab, never got greedy, never resorted to violence. Neither, however, had a teenage girl ever bashed him unconscious with a toilet lid and duct taped him to a chair.

“This boarding school,” he said. “They don’t send you home for Christmas.”

“I do Christmas with my mom,” she said.

Cashdollar waited a moment for her to elaborate but she was quiet and he wondered if he hadn’t hit on the beginnings of an angle here, wondered if he had time enough to work it. When it was clear that she wasn’t going to continue, he prompted her. “Divorce is hard,” he said.

The girl shrugged. “Everybody’s divorced.”

“So the woman I saw before—” He let the words trail off into a question.

“My father’s girlfriend,” she said. “One of.” She rolled her eyes. “My father is the last of the big-time swingers.”

“Do you like her?” he said. “Is she nice?”

“I hardly know her. She’s a nurse. She works for him.” She waved a hand before her face as if swiping at an insect. “I think it’s tacky if you want to know the truth.”

They were in the dining room, though Cashdollar hadn’t bothered to take it in when he was loading up the silverware. He saw crown molding. He saw paintings on the walls, dogs and dead birds done in oils, expensive but without resale value. This was a doctor’s house, he thought. It made him angry that he’d misread the presence of the woman, angrier even than the fact that he’d let himself get caught. He was thirty-six years old. That seemed to him just then like a long time to be alive.

“I’m surprised you don’t have a date,” he said. “Pretty girl like you home alone on New Year’s Eve.”

He had his doubts about flattery — the girl seemed too sharp for that — but she took his remark in stride.

“Like I said, I just got in today and I’m away at school most of the year. Plus, I spend more time with my mother in California than my father so I don’t really know anybody here.”

“What’s your name?” he said.

The girl hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you that.”

“I just figured if you told me your name and I told you mine then you’d know somebody here.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Cashdollar closed his eyes. He was glad that he wasn’t wearing some kind of burglar costume — the black sweat suit, the ski mask. He felt less obvious in street clothes. Tonight, he’d chosen a hunter green coat, a navy turtleneck, khaki pants, and boat shoes. He didn’t bother wearing gloves. He wasn’t so scary-looking this way, he thought, and when he asked the question that was on his mind, it might seem like one regular person asking a favor of another.

“Listen, I’m just going to come right out and say this, okay. I’m wondering what are the chances you’d consider letting me go?” The girl opened her mouth but Cashdollar pressed ahead before she could refuse and she settled back into her chair to let him finish. “Because the police will be here soon and I don’t want to go to prison and I promise, if you let me, I’ll leave the way I came in and vanish from your life forever.”

The girl was quiet for a moment, her face patient and composed, as if waiting to be sure he’d said his piece. He could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A moth plinked against the chandelier over their heads. He wondered if it hadn’t slipped in through the broken pane. The girl capped the bottle of nail polish, lifted the toilet lid from her lap without disturbing the contents, and set it on the floor beside her chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am but you did break into the house and you put my father’s silverware in your pillowcase and I’m sure you would have taken other things if I hadn’t hit you on the head. If you want, I’ll tell the police that you’ve been very nice, but I don’t think it’s right for me to let you go.”

In spite — or because — of her genial demeanor, Cashdollar was beginning to feel like his heart was on the blink; it felt as thick and rubbery as a hot water bottle in his chest. He held his breath and strained against his bonds, hard enough to hop his chair, once, twice, but the tape held fast. He sat there, panting.

The girl said, “Let me ask you something. Let’s say I was asleep or watching TV or whatever and I didn’t hear the window break. Let’s say you saw me first — what would you have done?”

He didn’t have to think about his reply.

“I would have turned around and left the house. I’ve never hurt anyone in my whole life.”

The girl stared at him for a long moment, then dropped her eyes, fanned her fingers, studied her handiwork. She didn’t look altogether pleased. To the backs of her hands, she said, “I believe you.”

As if to punctuate her sentence, the doorbell rang, followed by four sharp knocks, announcing the arrival of the police.

After we take control of a bank and subdue the security guard, it’s my job to watch the customers while Moriarty slides over the counter and empties the tills. I’m not sure why this task fell to me. Even after all this time, I’m not the most convincing bad guy. I’ve worked on my posture and stuff in the mirror, practiced evil glares and unnerving twitches, but I still worry that someone is going to see through me.

The gun I carry helps. A big, ugly, silver thing, it’s fairly undeniable. I’m careful not to abuse the upper hand it gives me, though. You see psychos playing those games in movies, and you’re always glad when they get theirs. And I’ve been on the other end of it, too, shortly after I moved to L.A. I know what it feels like. As I left a liquor store one night, a couple of peewees rushed me and flashed a piece. My wallet practically flew out of my pocket and into their hands. It took me weeks to stop shaking. I vomited right there on the sidewalk. I keep that in mind when we’re doing our thing. No need to push it.

Timothy “Lids” Picone has always been partial to the smell, but this guy is too much. Eight, ten times a day he hears him hacking his lungs out. Minutes later he can smell it, right through the fucking wall. Stanley calls him the pothead or sometimes just “the pot.” Picone doesn’t see how the guy can function. But he does function.

The walls are so thin he can pick up everything with his stethoscope. He’s heard some things he’d like to forget. The pothead really plays the role. Flashy clothes, flashy car. His sound system could do serious structural damage. Sometimes Picone has to plug his ears to sleep at night.

It’s been three weeks since he moved in. Stanley put up the deposit but the rent came out of Picone’s pocket. It should be well worth it. Every Friday night the pothead checks out with an empty duffel bag and when he comes home the bag is full. The rest of the week is traffic, all hours of the day and night. Mostly yuppies and college kids. Funny how dopers look like everyone else these days. Except for Maurice. The dreadlocks and gangster shades are a dead giveaway. Droopy eyelids just like Picone’s. The droopy lids make Maurice look dangerous. Picone’s just make him look sleepy. All things considered, it’s better that way.

Maurice usually arrives with an entourage and a lizard skin attaché case. Might as well have “Drug Dealer” stenciled on the side. Picone can hear the snap of latches through the wall. The pothead’s door and windows are wired and he has a wall safe in his bedroom. He’s heard the tumblers clicking.

According to Stanley, the pothead and Maurice are planning a major transaction — cocaine by the kilo. Picone wishes they’d get on with it.

Shay studied the customer’s driver’s license. It had been issued by the State of California approximately two years before. It stated that the name of the woman standing across the counter was Noreen Waldman and that she’d been born eighteen years ago. Her photo indicated that in the period of time since she’d posed for the DMV Noreen had gone through a few changes. The brunet bangs and rosy cheeks had been traded in for a platinum rooster cut and a chalk-powdered face accentuated by jet eyebrows and purple-black lipstick. Instead of a pressed schoolgirl blouse, Noreen was wearing a boutique-tattered T-shirt over latticed black spandex tights.

The bank was located on LA’s Sunset Strip, an area not known for its conservative style of dress, but the girl was pushing it, Shay thought. And her orchid musk was almost as toxic as sewer gas.

But she did have a body on her.

“That’s a screamin’ corsage,” Noreen Waldman said, pointing a black fingernail at the violet flower pinned to Shay’s blouse. “I’m going org just looking at it.”

Shay responded with a brief, patronizing smile. She placed the ID on the marble counter and picked up the check Noreen Waldman wanted to cash. It was for the sum of fifteen hundred dollars and no cents from Aristo Escorts, Inc., made out to “Nasty Wald.” Shay looked at the girl and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Nom de business,” the girl said.

Trying to ignore another blast of the orchid musk, Shay turned the check over. It was properly endorsed. “How would you like it?” she asked.

“In my hand.”

“I mean, in what denominations, large or small?”

“Like my men, big and hard.”

Shay fell the blood rising to her face. She glanced at her cash drawer and saw nothing larger than hundreds. The bank had a prescribed limit to the amount a teller was allowed to keep there. The big bills were in a drawer below, near the carpet. Shay bent down and retrieved three five-hundred-dollar notes.

Nasty stared at the bills on the marble counter. “Can’t you find me a Grover down there?”

Trying to hide her annoyance, Shay drew back two of the bills and hunkered down again, exchanging them for a one-thousand-dollar note from the bottom drawer.

Nasty smiled at her, folded the crisp bills once, then twice. Watching Shay watching her, she slid them inside the front of her tights. “My bank box,” she said. “Big bills keep it nice and smooth.” She touched herself. “Wanna feel?”

Shay stared at her without expression or reply.

“Well, c’est la vie,” Nasty said, and blew her an orchid-scented kiss.

Shay watched the girl strut to the door.

“You okay?”

Taylor, the security guard, was standing at the counter in his gray uniform, bolstered pistol on his hip. His ordinary, almost handsome face registered concern.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Problem with Morticia?”

“Nope.”

“Smells like a two-bit whore,” Taylor said.

“She’s a little more expensive than that,” Shay said.

“Strictly low tide,” Taylor said. When Shay didn’t respond, he added, “You know, what’s left on the beach after—”

“I got it,” Shay said.

He made her nervous. She hadn’t seen anything about it in the rule book, but she assumed the bitchy bank manager wouldn’t be too crazy about tellers yakking it up with the bank guard during business hours.

“Flower looks better on you than it did on the vine,” he said, pointing to the violet bud.

“It was sweet of you.”

“It’s called a Princess,” he said. “You up for a taco at lunch?”

She’d been working at the Sunset branch for only eight days. Her second day, she’d made the mistake of letting Taylor share her table at the Mucho Taco down the block. She’d thought he might be able to bring her up to speed on gossip about her coworkers and the manager, Sylvia Berg. But Taylor, a stolid man in his mid-forties whose half-day security turn was supplementing a retirement check from the army, seemed totally indifferent to office politics.

He was one of those God-and-country guys, full of talk about honor and integrity and all that happy horseshit. But he apparently-had a thing for her. That morning he’d brought her the flower. A proud part-time security guard. Jesus!

“No taco today, Taylor,” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

She was watching him reluctantly amble back to his position near the door when a considerably more appealing figure caught her eye. Young, wearing an expensive Italian-cut cocoa-brown suit, narrow in the waist, broad in the shoulders. Deep-tanned, with blond hair that, combed straight back, was long enough to whisk against the collar of his black silk shirt. His eyes were hidden behind very dark sunglasses so thin and smoothly curved they resembled a burglar’s mask.

She was amused by the overall effect. Buccaneer businessman.

He was headed toward her when, suddenly, a rumpled, bearded figure plunged in front of him clutching a deposit slip and a wad of cash. The buccaneer businessman shrugged and moved to the teller on her right. Greg something. She could remember the teller’s full name if she concentrated.

But her new customer wouldn’t let her. He shoved his money and deposit slip at her. “I furry it up, honey,” he said. “Got things to see, people to do.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Shay.”

The teller, Greg whatever, was calling her. His face was pale. Silently he showed her a slip of notepaper. His customer, the buccaneer, was smiling at her.

“What part of ‘hurry it up’ don’t you understand?” her customer asked nastily.

“Y-yes, sir. Just a second.”

The neatly typed note read: “My partner is watching with gun. Take two stacks of $500 bills from bottom drawer. Place on counter. No alarm, no harm.”

Greg was at his bottom drawer, complying with the request.

Shay searched the room. Business as usual. Taylor stood beside the front door, pointing a customer toward the area known as the platform, where the bank’s service reps sat. Sylvia, the manager, was absent. Probably in the alley catching a smoke. Great timing.

Shay bent down and found two stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills. Twenty-live to a stack, tightly wrapped. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Hey, honey,” her customer said. “What the hell are you doin’? I said I’m in a hurry. Chop-chop.”

Then there was a softer voice, almost a whisper. “One more peep out of that hairy mouth and my partner will shoot you in your fucking head. Dig? Good boy. Now, I’ll take that off your hands.”

Shay arose. The buccaneer businessman was standing next to her customer, his back hiding his actions from Taylor. No one else in the bank seemed to notice that a robbery was taking place. The bearded customer stood wide-eyed and frozen as the blond man added his bills to Shay’s packs and slipped the combination into his inside coat pocket. Then he took a sideways step and retrieved Greg’s packets.

“Thanks for your cooperation,” he said quietly. “Stay chilled for five minutes. My partner will leave and nobody bleeds.”

He turned and calmly walked toward the door. He stumbled on the way and Taylor grabbed him and helped him regain his balance. The blond man smiled gratefully and Shay could see his lips form the words “Thanks, Officer.”

Then he was gone.

Shay, Greg, and the bearded customer stood like statues for about a minute, with the tension growing nearly unbearable. Then the bearded customer threw himself to the floor, shouting, “It’s a robbery, goddammit!”

Faces turned their way. Taylor was the first to react, charging toward them, hand on holster. He scowled at the customer in the fetal position on the floor.

“It was the guy in the brown suit,” Greg said in a rush. “With the shades.”

“His partner’s here with a gun,” Shay said.

Taylor scanned the frightened and startled faces on the scattered customers. “Not likely. Hit the alarm.”

“Done,” Greg shouted at Taylor, who was racing to the front door. “And he’s got a dye pack.”

A dye pack. Shay couldn’t believe it. She’d pegged Greg as a total wuss. But he’d had balls enough to slip the buccaneer a dye pack along with a stack of real bills. Two to three minutes after exposure to the microwave signal at the bank doors, the dye pack would explode, covering the buccaneer with red paint, dyeing that long blond hair, sending blinding tear gas past those expensive sunglasses, maybe even scorching that expensive suit.

Convinced that there was no longer any danger, the bearded customer rose to his feet just as the branch manager, Sylvia Berg, approached from the rear of the bank. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“We’ve been robbed, Sylvia,” Shay said.

“Dammit.” The bank manager wheeled around, looking at the startled customers. “Where’s my security?”

“He ran off after the guy,” Greg said.

Sylvia pursed her lips, then turned to Shay. “Your station?”

“And Greg’s.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five thousand,” Shay said.

“Twelve thousand five hundred,” Greg said, adding smugly, “and a dye pack.”

“You were carrying that much? You know the bank’s policy—”

“The robber made us get it from the bottom drawer,” Greg said.

“He knew about the bottom drawer? I have to call Mysner.” Joseph Mysner was the bank’s head of security.

The bearded customer said, “You in charge?”

“Yes, sir. I’m the branch manager, Sylvia Berg.”

“Well, Sylvia, you’re out another nine hundred bucks, too. That’s what he took off me.”

“The robber took your money, Mr....?”

“Calusia. Chick Calusia. Yeah. He took my cash. And it’s this broad’s fault.”

Sylvia’s unblinking, birdlike green eyes shifted to Shay.

“My fault?”

“If you’d got off your ass and deposited my cash, I’d of been out of here.”

“Shay?” Sylvia asked.

“I’m sorry. This ‘gentleman’ started to hand me his deposit — which was for only six hundred dollars, by the way — and that’s when the robber—”

“Excuse me, sister. You move like you’re being paid by the hour. I was standin’ here for ten fucking minutes waiting for you to get it in gear. And the amount was nine hundred fucking dollars.”

“Sylvia, that’s not—”

“We’ll discuss this in a—”

Sylvia was interrupted by the sound of gunfire from out on Sunset. All conversation stopped in the bank. People turned toward the front door, curious, afraid.

A young man with spiked hair and tattoo-covered arms banged against the door, backed up, and tried again. This time he got it open. “Call the cops,” he shouted, ducking down, hands protecting the back of his partially shaved head. “There’s a dude out in the street, wailin’ with a gun. Crazy. Covered in red paint.”

Shay’s heart skipped a beat.

Ignoring Sylvia and the bearded man, she rushed to the teller gate, fumbled it open, and headed for the front door. She heard Sylvia calling her name. Screw her.

Shay stepped from the bank to a glare-bright, shockingly subdued Sunset Boulevard. Traffic had stopped. People were pressed against the sides of buildings. Everyone seemed to be staring at the red-dye-stained figure sitting in the middle of the street, keening in pain, hands pressed against his tearing eyes. His discarded gun was at his side.

It was the bank guard, Taylor.

It was not by choice but by necessity that I continued to read by oil lamp rather than arranging for the installation of the new gas lighting. In my wanderings throughout the metropolis, I had been present at demonstrations of M. Lebon’s wondrous invention and especially of the improved thorium and cerium mantle devised by Herr von Welsbach, and thought at length of the pleasure of this brilliant mode of illumination, but the undernourished condition of my purse forbade me to pursue such an alteration in the condition of my lodgings.

Even so, I took comfort of an evening in crouching beside the hearth in my lodgings, a small flame of dried driftwood flickering on the stones, a lamp at my elbow, and a volume in my lap. The pleasures of old age are few and small, nor did I anticipate to experience them for many more months before departing this planet and its life of travail. What fate my Maker might plan for me, once my eyes should close for the last time, I could only wonder and await. The priests might assert that a Day of Judgment awaited. The Theosophists might maintain that the doctrine of Karma would apply to all beings. As for me, the Parisian metropolis and its varied denizens were world enough indeed.

My attention had drifted from the printed page before me and my mind had wandered in the byways of philosophical musings to such an extent that the loud rapping upon my door induced a violent start within my nervous system. My fingers relaxed their grasp upon the book which they held, my eyes opened widely and a loud moan escaped my lips.

With an effort I rose to my feet and made my way through my chill and darkened apartment to answer the summons at the door. I placed myself beside the portal, pulling at the draperies that I kept drawn by day against the inquiring gaze of strangers and by night against the moist chill of the Parisian winter. Outside my door I perceived an urchin, cap set at an uncouth angle upon his unshorn head, an object or scrap of material clutched in the hand which he was not using to set up his racket on my door.

Lifting an iron bar which I kept beside the door in case of need to defend myself from the invasion of ruffians and setting the latch chain to prevent the door from opening more than a hand’s width, I turned the latch and drew the door open far enough to peer out.

The boy who stood upon my stoop could not have been more than ten years of age, ragged of clothing and filthy of visage. The meager light of the passage outside my apartment reflected from his eye, giving an impression of wary suspicion. We studied each other through the narrow opening for long seconds before either spoke. At length I demanded to know his reason for disturbing my musings. He ignored my question, responding to it by speaking my name.

“Yes,” I responded, “it is indeed I. Again, I require to know the purpose of your visit.”

“I’ve brought you a message, monsieur,” the urchin stated.

“From whom?”

“I don’t know the gentleman’s name,” he replied.

“Then what is the message?”

The boy held the object in his hand closer to the opening. I could see now that it was a letter, folded and sealed with wax, and crumpled and covered with grime. It struck me that the boy might have found the paper lying in a gutter and brought it to me as part of a devious scheme, but then I remembered that he had known my name, a feat not likely on the part of a wild street urchin.

“I can’t read, monsieur,” the child said. “The gentleman gave it me and directed me to your lodging. I know numbers, some, and was able to find your place, monsieur.”

“Very well,” I assented, “give me the paper.”

“I’ve got to be paid first, monsieur.”

The boy’s demand was annoying, and yet he had performed a service and was, I suppose, entitled to his pay. Perhaps the mysterious gentleman who had dispatched him had already furnished him with payment, but this was a contingency beyond my ability to influence. Telling the child to await my return I closed the door, made my way to the place where I keep my small treasury, and extracted from it a sou coin.

At the doorway once more I exchanged the coin for the paper and sent the child on his way. Returning to the dual illumination of hearth and oil lamp, I broke the seal that held the letter closed and unfolded the sheet of foolscap. The flickering firelight revealed to me the work of a familiar hand, albeit one I had not glimpsed for many years, and a message that was characteristically terse and demanding.

Come at once. A matter of urgency.

The message was signed with a single letter, the initial D.

I rocked back upon my heels, sinking into the old chair which I had used as my comfort and my retreat from the world through the passing decades. I was clad in slippers and robe, nightcap perched upon my head. It has been my plan, following a small meal, to spend an hour reading, then retire to my narrow bed. Instead, I now garbed myself for the chill of the out-of-doors. Again I raided my own poor treasury and furnished myself with a small reserve of coins. In a short time I had left my apartment and stood upon my stoop, drawing the door closed behind me and turning my key in the lock.

No address had been given in the demanding message, nor was the messenger anywhere to be seen. I could only infer from the lack of information to the contrary that my old friend was still to be located at the lodgings we once had shared, long ago.

It was too far to travel on foot, so I hailed a passing cab, not without difficulty, and instructed the driver as to my destination. He looked at me with suspicion until I repeated the address, 33 Rue Dunôt in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He held out his hand and refused to whip up until I had delivered the fare into his possession.

The streets of the metropolis were deserted at this hour, and mostly silent save for an occasional shout of anger or moan of despair — the sounds of the night after even revellers have retired to their homes or elsewhere.

As the cab drew up I exited from it and stood gazing at the old stone structure where the two of us had shared quarters for so long. Behind me I heard the driver grumble, then whip up, then pull away from number 33 with the creak of the wooden axle and the clatter of horse’s hooves on cobblestones.

A light appeared in a window and I tried, without success, to espy the form of the person who held it. In a moment the light moved and I knew that my erstwhile friend was making his way to the door. I presented myself in time to hear the bar withdrawn and to see the door swing open.

Before me stood my old friend, the world’s first and greatest consulting detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Yet though it was unquestionably he, I was shocked at the ravages that the years had worked upon his once sharp-featured visage and whip-thin frame. He had grown old. The flesh did not so much cover his bones as hang from them. I saw that he still wore the smoked-glass spectacles of an earlier age; when he raised them to peer at me his once ferret-like eyes were dim and his hands, once as hard and steady as iron rods, appeared fragile and tremulous.

“Do not stand there like a goose,” Dupin commanded, “surely by this time you know the way.”

He retreated a pace and I entered the apartment which had meant so much to me in those days of our companionship. Characteristically, Dupin uttered not another syllable, but instead led the way through my onetime home. I shut the door behind me, then threw the heavy iron bolt, mindful of the enemies known to seek Dupin’s destruction in a former epoch. That any of them still survived was doubtful, that they remained capable of working mischief upon the great mind was close to what Dupin would have deemed “a nil possibility,” but still I threw the bolt.

Dupin led the way to his book closet, and within moments it was almost as if the decades had slipped away. He seemed to regain his youthful vigour, and I my former enthusiasm. Not waiting for me to assume the sofa upon which I had so often reclined to peruse musty volumes in past decades, Dupin flung himself into his favourite seat. He seized a volume which he had laid face downward, its pages open, upon the arm of his chair.

“Have you seen this?” he demanded angrily, brandishing the volume.

I leaned forward, straining in the gloom to recognize the publication. “It bears no familiarity,” I confessed. “It looks but newly arrived, and my reading in recent years has been entirely of an antiquarian nature.”

“Of course, of course,” Dupin muttered. “I will tell you what it is. I have been reading a volume translated from the English. Its title in our own tongue is Une étude en écarlate. The author has divided the work into chapters. I will read to you from a chapter which he entitles ingenuously La Science de Déduction.

Knowing that there was no stopping Dupin once he was determined upon a course, I settled upon the sofa. The room was not uncomfortable, I was in the company of my ancient friend, I was content.

“I will omit the author’s interpolations,” Dupin prefaced his reading, “and present to you only the significant portions of his work. Very well, then! ‘Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.’ ”

With a furious gesture he flung the slim volume across the room against a shelf of volumes, where it struck, its pages fluttering, and fell to the carpet. I knew that the Poe to whom the writer averred was the American journalist who had visited Dupin and myself from time to time, authoring reports of the several mysteries which Dupin had unraveled — with, I took pride in recalling, my own modest, but not insubstantial assistance.

“What think you of that?” Dupin demanded.

“A cruel assessment,” I ventured, “and an inaccurate one. Why, on many occasions I can recall—”

“Indeed, my good friend, you can recall the occasions upon which I interrupted your words to tell you your very thoughts.”

“As you have just done,” I averred. I awaited further words from Dupin, but they were not at that moment forthcoming so I resumed my speech. “Who is the author of this scurrilous assessment?”

“The author’s name matters not. It is the villain whom he quotes, who is of significance.”

“And who, may I inquire, might that person be?”

Dupin raised his eyes to the ceiling where smoke from the fireplace, draughty as ever, swirled menacingly. “He is one whom I met some years ago, long after you had departed these quarters, mon ami. I had by then largely retired from my labours as a consulting detective, and of course my reputation had long since reached the islands of fools.”

By this time I could see that Dupin was off on a tale, and I settled myself more thoroughly than ever upon the sofa, prepared to listen to the end.

What happened between Ira Early and his (step)daughter Doll is a secret between them of long standing. What has happened to x number of men as a result of this secret is more public.

Yuk Tang likes to think of himself as Darcey’s partner. Darcey would choke if he knew this. He works with Yuk Tang because everyone else he knows has moved west or south. And because Yuk Tang is connected with more than one guy in Little Asia who can move anything — TVs and jewelry right down to paintings and rare stamps and precious metals — in less than a week. And because Yuk Tang agrees to a sixty-forty split, with Darcey hugging the sixty end.

Though Darcey dislikes Yuk Tang on instinct, he admitted to himself last week, while sober and bored, that they work well together. They work the way he dreams about, like they had one smart brain and six fast hands. Yuk Tang has this innate talent for smelling dogs. He can take one whiff, any room of any house, halfway in the window, and give the thumbs down. Darcey has never known Yuk Tang to be careless or unpredictable. He’d walk away from an open jewelry box without flinching if the fifteen-minute buzzer on his watch went off.

For his part, Darcey thinks of himself as smart and in control. And it’s his friends who know whether someone’s enjoying a week in the Bahamas or just doing three hours at a funeral. Darcey’s generous with these friends. He gives them money and as much time as he can spare. There’s the guy whose sister is a groomer at a ridiculously expensive kennel. There’s the kid who works for the award-winning landscaper. And there’s Scalley, a new electrician for a hot local burglar and fire alarm company.

Darcey pays close attention to these people. He studies them the way he’d study a hotel poker game. He knows, without exception, what it is they respond to, what it takes to cement their trust in his friendship. He bought himself a pager so he can return their calls immediately. He knows their favorite restaurants and reserves good tables monthly. He takes them to terrible movies and manages to discuss the films afterward over coffee. He spent a serious chunk of money recently on Scalley’s dental restoration.

All of this has paid off like you read about. Without getting sloppy or greedy, Yuk Tang and Darcey have put away a barrel of money. Yuk Tang has shipped a wad to less fortunate family members back in the homeland. Darcey has filled more than one closet suitcase with respectable dollars. It’s a happy time. They’re not logging a lot of hours and they’re rarely losing any sleep. And most importantly, the worry is minimal. Their timing, their attention to detail and planning, has meant few close calls and no sudden trips out of town.

Darcey would hate to have to leave Quinsigamond again. He’s done it in the past and it breaks his heart. Even when the trip has been to Miami or Bermuda. He’s spent hours on clean beaches, ninety degrees and a breeze, dreaming about the coffee and the smell of the meatloaf at the Miss Q Diner. What he’d really like to do, and what he keeps hidden from everyone, is let some time pass and then launch into a legitimate business. A bar or, more exactly, a club. Something with style and subtlety, where people dress up and it never gets too loud. Sometimes, while on the phone with Scalley, Darcey doodles pictures of the club. Ceiling fans. A long bar. An office for himself, in an upstairs loft, with a one-way mirror for a wall.

Yuk Tang has some of his own plans that he keeps to himself. They’re vague, but they also involve the entrepreneurial arts. He’s thought about opening a restaurant. Or maybe a video-rental franchise that specializes in martial arts films. What he’d like most is an import clothing store. Women’s satin dresses and silk scarves. The mark-up could be tremendous. Because of relations in need, he hasn’t managed to pile up as much ready cash as Darcey. And though he doesn’t resent this, he is unhappy with the sixty-forty split. But his options are limited and he knows he’d have a hell of a time finding a reliable and intelligent partner who’d work with an Asian immigrant who can’t drive.

They both hold irritating part-time jobs, though at this point there’s no need to do so. They had these jobs before things got lucrative and, because of a fear they don’t understand, they haven’t quit. They know that seeing someone go off to work on a regular schedule keeps any neighbors from being too interested and the routine keeps their minds calm and occupied for the few days before any gig.

Yuk Tang works as an aide in an old-age home out on Main South. Darcey drives a shuttle van for the Foundation for Experimental Biochemistry. Yuk Fang pushes around a cart twenty hours a week, placing tiny cups of ginger ale and apple juice into palsied hands. He pulls lit cigarettes out of sleeping mouths and helps pick up people who have slid out of chairs to the floor. Darcey drives a two-year-old silver Ford van back and forth, every twenty minutes, down the same boring stretch of tree-lined road, dropping off and picking up people who, for all he knows, could be world famous. They all carry large manila envelopes and ask about the weather. They’re condescending without meaning to be. About ninety percent of them are Asian, which amuses and annoys Darcey at the same time. It makes him look funny at Yuk Tang sometimes, even in the middle of a job.

Lately though, Yuk and Darcey’s luck won’t let up. It’s good and it’s steady. It’s like they can do no wrong. Storm windows are missing from the shrubbery side of the house. Rolex watches are left out on the bathroom vanity. Ten hundred-dollar bills, all brand new and banded together, are found by accident underneath a thirteen-inch Trinitron when they move it off its stand. Street lights are out. Dogs have died or been shipped down to Florida. It’s getting scary, it’s so damned easy.

Then there’s a moment in this lawyer’s place up in Windsor Hills. Because things have been so sweet, Darcey and Yuk Tang have been pushing it up in the Hills. They’ve talked about setting a monthly limit on jobs in the Hills. They kicked numbers back and forth on the way to this lawyer’s house. Yuk Tang wanted to play it simple, a given number of houses in the area in any thirty-day period. Darcey, thinking of his club, figured it would be better to work up until they hit an agreed gross. They decided nothing and drove the last block to the job in silence.

They’d been given the word on the house two days before. Attorney and Mrs. Bennett stopped at the Avondale Animal Hotel on their way to the airport. Darcey drove past the Bennett home after work and filled out his checklist. He drove by again with Yuk Tang and they spent a few minutes discussing it over a small dinner plate at the Grille. Though neither one will acknowledge it, they know they didn’t give this gig the attention it requires. But it’s hard when things have been coming so easy. It’s like they’re working with the guardian angel of thieves and he doesn’t want a cut.

Then, in the midst of lifting a Toshiba receiver out of its slot in an enormous media wall, Darcey’s beeper goes off. He nearly has a coronary and drops the receiver and it breaks on the hardwood floor. Yuk Tang runs down from the bedrooms, glares at him in the doorway, and motions a thumb outside. They leave with half the potential take. In the car — a semi-restored MG — Yuk Tang, ever the minimalist, says only, “You’re not thinking,” and Darcey comes back with a loud “Screw you, Bruce Lee. Find me a phone booth.”

There’s a tension that grows in the quiet. Yuk Tang only recently confided in Darcey that Bruce Lee was a real spiritual hero to him, that at night he said what Darcey might consider prayers to Bruce Lee. Darcey, in the driver’s seat, knows he’s screwed up for the first time since their streak began. It’s no big problem. No one is hurt or pinched. But the stupidity of bringing the pager on a job has brought him next door to panic. He knows what to do on a job like he knows his own name. Like he knows how to breathe.

Darcey swings into a drugstore lot and uses the phone outside. The page turns out to be from Scalley, who’s excited and confused: He’s got some information. He’s not sure Darcey’s interested. He’s talking second-hand tip here. He needs a few dollars. He hasn’t eaten in two days. He thinks he has a fever. He’s leaving tonight on a plane for Ensenada or Buenos Aires.

Darcey has to scream into the phone to get him to quiet down. He tells Scalley to be at the Menard Diner in twenty minutes, jumps back in the car, and starts to head for the Menard without consulting Yuk Tang. Yuk Tang, not normally a hateful or violent man, daydreams as they drive, too fast, to the meeting. He imagines Bruce Lee holding Darcey above his head. Darcey’s terrified body parallel with the ground. Bruce Lee’s arms expanding with muscle and tension, waiting to snap this careless thief in two.

The Menard is one of the best of the many diners in Quinsigamond, always clean and almost never crowded. They sit in the wooden booth near the exit for close to an hour, getting wired on too many coffees. Darcey would like to talk, but thinks Yuk Tang might take this as an apology and a sign of weakness. A kind of peace gets made when Darcey orders a veal cutlet sandwich and Yuk Tang puts half the money on the table and says, “I don’t think your friend is coming.”

Darcey nods and pushes the money back at Yuk Tang.

“I don’t think we would have wanted what he had to offer,” says Yuk Tang.

“Little hard to say at this point,” Darcey says, cracking his knuckles and immediately regretting it. “I didn’t think you ate meat.”

“I’m a flexible man,” Yuk Tang says.

Darcey nods again, readies himself, and says, “About the crap with the pager...”

“I don’t think we need to talk about that,” says Yuk Tang. “Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Darcey says, and he slides out of their booth and up to the counter to hurry along the sandwich.

At the end of the counter, on the last seat on the left, sits an elderly man that he hadn’t noticed before. As he looks at the man, he thinks the guy might be blind. The man’s eyes have that rigid, unmoving stare. The man holds a full soup spoon an inch from his lips but doesn’t blow on it or sip at it.

The fry-boy hauls up the cutlet from the grease and Darcey’s tongue goes a little wet. He’s about to ask for two large milks when the blind man, the old man he thinks is blind, says, “Would you be Mr. Darcey?” in a quiet voice you’d use to talk to someone next to you. The voice contains an accent that gives the man away as a foreigner, but won’t get more specific.

Darcey looks over his shoulder to Yuk Tang, who holds out his right hand, palm down, like this were some signal between the two of them. Darcey turns back to the old man and, like he’s been called before the Pope, he walks down the aisle and slides onto the stool next to him.

“That’s right. I’m Darcey,” he says.

“I’m George Lewis,” the old man says and sinks his spoonful of soup back in his bowl, uneaten. The name doesn’t sound foreign and as he turns his head, Darcey wonders why he had the impression this guy was blind.

“Do I know you, Mr. Lewis?” Darcey asks.

“You do look familiar,” Lewis says, “but I really doubt we know each other. I haven’t been in Quinsigamond in years. Actually, I’m just passing through tonight.”

He looks at Darcey’s face and decides to continue. “I’m really just an accidental messenger,” he says and pulls a long white envelope from the pocket of his raincoat.

“From a friend of yours, I assume,” he says, “a Mr. Scalley. He asked me to say that he had to leave and to give you this.”

The envelope has been folded over and Darce is written across it in what looks like a child’s handwriting.

“I’ve been here awhile,” Darcey says, even but firm.

Lewis stirs his thick orange soup and after a minute says, “Yes, well, you don’t look a bit like your friend described you.”

The night’s not going well. Darcey wishes he’d just remembered to leave the damn pager on his bureau. He feels as if forgetting about the pager is the first domino in a long row, just falling over. Scalley would be number two. George Lewis, with his eyes and his voice, he might be three.

Darcey nods to George Lewis and mouths the word thanks. He walks backward, pulling money out of his pocket and placing it on the counter to his right. Yuk Tang slips out of their booth, mixes his money with Darcey’s, and thanks the fry-boy. He lifts the sandwich off the plate, one half in each hand and tomato sauce oozing down the sides, and follows Darcey out of the Menard.

In the car, they sit for a moment, both a little shaken. To calm himself, Yuk Tang begins arranging the sandwiches on the glove box door like this was a formal banquet. He finds napkins from various drive-through restaurants, packets of salt and pepper, tubes of ketchup and mustard. When he comes across a container of duck sauce, he eases it out the window.

Darcey opens the envelope, reads it once, looks at Yuk Tang without expression, and hands the letter over. Yuk Tang sucks tomato sauce off his thumb and reads:

Yuk Tang hands the letter back to Darcey as if it were evidence in a trial. It ends up with a red tomato stain despite his attempt to be careful. Darcey folds the letter several times, lifts his behind off his seat, and crams the paper into a back pocket.

They sit in silence, watching cars run down Orbis Ave, until Darcey says, “What the hell you figure got into the little bastard?”

Yuk Tang stares forward, takes a breath, and says, “I think we know what got into your friend. I think we should discuss retirement.”

Darcey reaches over and pulls his half of the veal cutlet off the glove box door. He decides to ignore Yuk Tang and says aloud to himself, “And how the hell did he get to the Menard before me? The little shmuck is late for everything. He gets there, writes a half-assed note, gives it to some weird old fart at the counter, and gets on the road before I pull in?”

In an attempt to be taken seriously, Yuk Tang’s voice drops to a whisper. He says, “You can ignore me. This is fine, ignore me. But we both know there’s a problem here. Something scared your friend Scalley enough to make him run. Do you really want to wait around and find out what it is?”

Darcey licks across the front of his lips, swallows hard, and says to Yuk Tang. “First of all, stop calling the little bastard my friend. I hate it when you do that. My friend. Jesus. And second, you little wuss, you don’t cut and run because some half-retarded scumbag gets a tough question and decides to tour South America. Goddammit.”

“We could vacation,” says Yuk Tang. “Just for a little while.”

Darcey turns, mouth bulging with veal and bread, and says, “It’s this pager crap, isn’t it? You’re spooked because of this pager crap. Christ Almighty.”

They chew in the dark, watch lights go on and off in the apartments over the storefronts. When he finishes his sandwich, as if he’s decided to give in to things he can’t change or understand, Yuk Tang says, meekly, “So you want to do this Usher job?”

Darcey, unsure if this is a challenge or not, says, “You’re damn right.”

The quiet comes again. At one point they turn at the same moment, and look in the windows of the Menard Diner. Neither one says a word. George Lewis has left his soup and his stool and walked out of the diner.

I walked onboard flight 587 from Paris to New York, showed my ticket to the flight attendant, then walked through first class, where I usually sat, and continued back to coach. At Row 22, I stopped and looked down at the man sitting in Seat A, the man who I knew would be there, the man who had been having an affair with my wife for the past four months.

I sat down in Seat B.

Jean-Louis Vachon did not look up from the pages of Le Monde, for he was not a man to be bothered with nods of hello to other travelers. I have known him for nine years, but I wasn’t sure how I’d react this time. Five days ago, a computer at home malfunctioned, restoring a hundred deleted files. My wife’s words to Vachon left no room for doubt.

What did I feel? Rage, bitterness, bewilderment, and sick despair each took their turns with me. I have not told her that I know, but each day I struggle to hide my anger, while every night my best and sweetest memories of love are turned into nightmares — with the Frenchman in my place.

I’m trying to think clearly now, trying to get back to who I am. I want to know whom to blame. Her? Him? Probably both. Revenge is tempting, but I’m going to solve this problem for good.

The wedding ring on my left hand still looks new. Our impulsive, romantic marriage took place three years ago, in a small stone chapel outside of Paris. At the post-wedding dinner, I remember my best man, Jean-Louis Vachon, saving how envious he was, for I was marrying “the most beautiful woman in the world.” I didn’t know how deep his envy ran.

I glanced at Vachon. If I waited too long to greet him, my presence would seem ominous, and he would guess that our seat assignments were not by chance.

I took a deep breath. “Jean-Louis! Is that you behind the newspaper?”

He turned to me. “Edward, my friend! They have given you this seat? How lucky for me!” His charming smile was now in place, but I had seen a flicker — not of guilt, for Vachon would have none of that — but animal alertness.

“It’s wonderful to see you, Jean-Louis. It’s been too long.”

What, I’d asked myself last night, should a cuckold sound like when he’s sitting next to his wife’s lover? I would try for one part happy, two parts ignorant, with a thin coating of fool.

“How are the Vachon vines?” I asked cheerfully. “Provence is getting good weather this summer, and I’ve heard two vintners say they are dreaming of another year like 2000.”

“We are all dreaming of another 2000, though it may not come in our lifetime.” Vachon’s English was perfect, but his words still rode a French cadence. “Men who grow grapes are always at nature’s mercy.”

I smiled at the man I hated. “Jean-Louis, at Les Mirettes my customers don’t even look at the wine list anymore. They only want to know if I have ‘Vachon.’ I might as well take the rest of the wine cellar and throw it into the East River.”

“Let me know the day, and I’ll help you. I’m always glad to get rid of my competition. But, Edward, as a wonderful chef, you will never have that problem. You have no competition.”

Vachon, I thought, you are playing a little game with your words — you are my competition, and you know it. But I let no recognition come into my face while the Frenchman enjoyed his private double-entendre.

The last, breathless passengers arrived on Flight 587. The usual announcements were made as we taxied across the tarmac, and the plane barely paused at the head of the runway before accelerating, lifting off, and angling upward.

Vachon traveled frequently to the United States and often came to my restaurant, though not in the past four months. Now I knew why.

“Jean-Louis, it’s been too long since you’ve been to Les Mirettes,” I said, with a cuckold’s amiability. ”I can’t tell you how much Carolyn enjoys seeing you.”

Vachon studied my innocent face and relaxed completely. He was safe.

“You are a lucky man, Edward, being married to Carolyn. If you ever get tired of her, give me a call.”

And there was the problem: I wasn’t tired of her.

Four years ago, blond, blue-eyed Carolyn, whose face had looked out from a hundred magazine covers, came to my restaurant with a group that I knew. They invited me to join them for a drink, and I sat next to her. As we talked, I remembered her pictures because her eyes had an intelligence that, through the makeup and poses, seemed to say, “Isn’t this silly?”

She treated her beauty like an inheritance — unearned, but appreciated. Of all the models who came into Les Mirettes, Carolyn was the only one whom I never saw glance at herself in the long mirrors.

She was from South Dakota; I grew up in Brooklyn. We were country and city, but from that first evening, the chemistry was good. The following night, at my invitation, she returned to the restaurant alone. And the next night, she ended up eating in the kitchen, talking and laughing with my crew, who threatened to quit en masse if I let her get away.

I was thirty-four when we made that impetuous marriage trip to France, and Carolyn was twenty-four — young enough to make the age difference interesting.

There is one invaluable skill that I think comes easier when you are from a city: the ability to talk to anyone, and a successful restaurant owner must know how to work both the stove and the crowd. But how do you handle seven hours with your wife’s lover? What do you say — “What’s new? How’s your business? How’s my wi...”

Stop it! I told myself. But the anger, so alive it had a voice, whispered to me, “He’s right next to you! One punch! Do it now!” At this range, I could knock Vachon out with a single blow. Afterward, I would quietly tell the flight attendants, “Shhhh, he’s sleeping.” And if he started to come around? I could hit him again. What husband would not be tempted?

It is impossible not to compare myself to Vachon, to ask: Who is truly the best man? I will concede right now that he is far better-looking. Vachon is handsome in a sleek, self-aware way and possesses an almost courtly demeanor. “Half-prince, half-tennis pro” is how someone once described him. Vachon looks like men wish they did: I look like they do. I look like the man who comes to fix the washing machine.

But there are similarities between us. We are both driven men who have become rich because people will pay well to satisfy the whims of their taste.

Fifteen years ago, Vachon inherited the vineyard from his father. He understood how good the wine was and how underpriced it had been, so he canceled the vineyard’s long-standing European contracts, came to the United States, and began selling only to restaurants — at ten times his father’s old price. And he made a killing.

“Vachon vines” now have cachet and are one of the standards by which the top restaurants distinguish themselves from the second tier. Vachon has made his name famous — and I know how much that pleases him.

High above the Atlantic, the brilliant August sun turned the white clouds below into an ethereal wonderland. I was not in the mood for beauty.

“Jean-Louis,” I said, idly turning the wedding band on my finger. “I’m surprised to find you here, firing in coach.” In fact, I’d been astonished when my travel agent located the Frenchman’s reservation.

He responded with a “What can you do?” shrug. “I had a meeting this morning in Montrouge that could not be changed, and I must be in New York tonight. This is the only flight that fit into my schedule, and first class is sold out. And what is your excuse, Edward?”

“A last-minute reservation,” I answered, and it was true — somewhat.

Yesterday, the owner of Les Tifs mentioned Vachon’s arrival from Paris. I called my sous-chef, told him he was running the kitchen that night, and gave him a list of instructions. Four hours later, I left for Paris — for the sole purpose of taking this flight back, in this seat.

Why, I’ve asked myself a thousand times, did the affair happen? Carolyn and I had fought no fights, had suffered no silences. I had not cheated on her, nor, I thought, she on me.

For the first two years of our marriage, Carolyn only went on one-day photo shoots. But, I was rarely home, my life was at the restaurant. During the past year, she went back to a full schedule, including location shoots in Bali, Tangiers, and Rio, and runway work at the fashion shows in Milan and Paris. There was too much distance, too many nights apart. Either you’re together or you’re not; it’s one of the basics, and both of us had missed it.

A salesman doesn’t sell a product, he sells himself, and Vachon never stops selling. How can a woman tell which whispered words of love are real, for winning a woman’s heart is the greatest sales pitch of all.

“Jean-Louis, my friend,” I said, “you are remarkable. Who else could make his wine the most popular one in the United States without ever hiring a salesman there?”

“I worked hard those first two years,” he said, “taking the wine myself from restaurant to restaurant. That was before the dinners, of course.”

Among restaurateurs, an invitation to a Vachon dinner is as prized as an invitation to the White House. Every April, Vachon gives eight dinners: four on the East Coast, two in California, one in Chicago, and one in Texas. His guests are the men and women who own the finest restaurants in the United States. We are each asked to invite someone else, and we always do, for every meal is an epicure’s feast, and every course is designed to complement the Frenchman’s wine.

At the dinners, Vachon, always wearing a dark, European-cut business suit, listens intently to every owner’s words, flirts just the right amount with every woman, and never mentions the business of wine — not once. But, a week later, one of his staff will call from Provence and ask if the restaurant is interested in placing an order. Once, an owner said “no,” and he never received another call from Provence, nor an invitation to dinner. No one is sure if the story is true, but no one will take the chance that it isn’t.

It was at one of these dinners that Carolyn first met Vachon, and there was no connection, no chemistry between them. After Carolyn and I sat down, with a mischievous smile she began whispering interesting possibilities into my car. New love is a fine and imaginative thing.

At the following year’s dinner, after we’d been married, I saw Carolyn looking at Vachon, appraising him. Later, when the three of us were talking, I noticed that her arms were crossed in front of her — a barrier in body-language terms.

This spring, after dinner, while I spoke with three other restaurant owners, Carolyn talked with Vachon, and this time there were no crossed arms. Twice, my wife touched his shoulder as she laughed; I knew that gesture, and its touch. Afterward, in the taxi, Carolyn never mentioned Vachon, but she talked a little faster and her words came out a little brighter. That’s what she does when she’s trying to hide her thoughts. I’ve never brought this flaw to her attention.

In the past four months, I heard that extra animation in her voice a dozen times, but I always ascribed it to the wrong things: to a gift, to a birthday, to the moment. I never reached for the larger answer. I never thought the unthinkable.

In summer, the time difference between Paris and New York is six hours. Flight 587 left at 12:55 P.M. and would arrive just before three o’clock. The timing would be perfect.

I worked the conversation with Vachon until we were talking like brothers, discussing his business, my business, the latest strikes in Paris, and a dozen other things. I marveled at how cool he was, joking and laughing with the man whose wife he was bedding.

The in-flight movie was a thriller and, to my relief, a long one. Afterward, I again talked with Vachon about every subject that would interest him — but one — until the plane touched down at Kennedy International at 2:59 P.M.

“Jean-Louis,” I said as we walked off the flight, “it’s nine o’clock in Paris, we’re both hungry, and New York has a thousand restaurants. Let’s find a good one and have a great meal.”

“Ahh, my friend, I like the way you think. You make time for life’s pleasures. How fortunate that we share the same tastes.” His words were filled with self-amusement.

A car and driver were waiting for Vachon and, during the ride into the city, we discussed our restaurant options. We each suggested a dozen names and considered Bartolo’s, Sierra Leone, and Jacquie M. before Vachon finally offered the compliment I was waiting for: “Edward, your restaurant is better than any of those.”

“Then it’s decided,” I said. “I will make the food, and we will drink Vachon wine.”

“The perfect meal,” he agreed.

I leaned forward and told the driver, “Fifty-fourth and Lexington, please.”

When we walked into Les Mirettes, I was reminded again how much a restaurant, in its off-hours, feels like an empty theatrical set, waiting for the actors to arrive. Here, it would have been performers in a French play, for the restaurant’s high ceilings, tall paintings, and cream-colored walls with gilt touches have elicited more than one mention of Versailles.

It was not yet four o’clock; even the earliest dinner customers wouldn’t arrive for another two hours. One of my instructions was for the kitchen staff to complete today’s prep work by three-thirty, then take a break away from the restaurant — mandatory.

Vachon followed me from the luxury of eighteenth-century France into the stainless-steel, operating-room cleanliness of the kitchen, where pots hung overhead, the floor was easy-on-the-feet rubber, and the refrigerators and freezers hummed together.

I exchanged my clothes for chefs whites, then from the temperature-controlled wine cellar at the back of the kitchen took out a bottle of Vachon wine. While the original owner opened it, I set up two wineglasses on the metal counter between us.

From the walk-in refrigerator, I took a flat, plastic Lexan box that had two loops of clear tape around it. My name was written in block letters on a piece of paper that I crumpled and put into my pocket. I sliced the tape, appreciative of how well my sous-chef followed orders.

“Jean-Louis,” I said, “have you ever tried amontillado?”

Vachon did not look up from the glass he was pouring. “That little sherry from Spain? I choked a glass down once because the silly woman who gave it to me was pretty. Why do you ask?”

“I remember reading about it once,” I said, “but I’ve never tried it.”

I took the glass of Syrah that Vachon handed me, swirled the wine in the small bowl, then brought the glass up to my nose. The aromas of fruit and earth triggered my salivary glands; I was tasting the wine before it reached my mouth.

“Outstanding,” I acknowledged, enjoying the wine’s long finish. I took a second sip, savored its three distinct stages of taste, then put the glass aside. From the Lexan bin, I removed several smaller, plastic containers and a package wrapped in wax paper.

“Jean-Louis,” I said, “you’ve always succeeded in enjoying life to the fullest.”

“Life is for the living,” he replied, holding the glass of wine up to the overhead light and studying its reddish-plum color. “I want to die with a smile on my face.”

I’d be surprised if you did, I thought.

“But, Edward,” Vachon continued, “you, too, are living well. After all, you are the best chef in America. What did that food critic write? That you cook like someone who ‘knows twelve languages and can mix the words together into a new language that only he can speak, but everyone can understand’? With you, every meal is like a trip around the world.”

Vachon, the master complimenter, I thought. And so I stole his tactic.

“Jean-Louis,” I said, “sometimes I think that before people sit down to dinner, they should be required to sing at least a chorus of ‘La Marseillaise.’”

Vachon’s eyebrows rose in question.

“After all, it is France that gave us all the great sauces, pastries, bouillons, and stocks. And, after doing that, France gave us the best wines to go with every dish. Without your country, there would be no great food.” Someone once told me you’d probably get physically sick before the recipient of a compliment thought you were being too effusive.

“Ah, Edward, what can I say?” Vachon replied, as if my praise had been given directly to him, instead of three centuries of chefs and vintners. “The French just know how to live. We appreciate the best things in life.”

While Vachon talked about his country’s magnificence, I began cooking. I opened one container, poured the pork and noodle broth, with shrimp, into a saucepan and turned the stove’s burner to a low heat.

The second container held leeks and mushrooms. I stripped the leaves off a sprig of thyme, mixed it with ground mustard seed and Szechuan peppercorns, then added these seasonings. I put the completed dish into a saucepan and set the heat at simmer.

From overhead, I took down a low, wide pan, put in olive oil and turned on the flame. I prepared and added, in order, garlic, onions, bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, herbs, saffron, and finally pignoli. Vachon nodded in approval. “Ratatouille,” he said. “Provence’s other great export.”

I pulled out a knife, checked the sharpness of its point and edge, unwrapped the wax-paper package, and took out the wide, flat fish. I sliced off the head and tail and dropped them into the shiny trash bin below the cutting board. I gutted, skinned, filleted, and panseared the fish, brushed on a hot-ginger glaze, and put it into the oven for a few minutes to caramelize.

From the shelves near the dining-room doors, I took two large plates, two soup bowls, two linen napkins, and a handful of silverware. I served the broth, then the food. The aromas were as good as I knew they’d be.

Vachon took his first taste of the soup, closed his eyes, and said. “Amazing!” After another few spoonfuls, he could not wait any longer for the food. With almost gluttonous speed, Vachon picked up a fork and tried the fish, then moved on to the leeks and mushrooms, and finally the ratatouille. He was torn between savoring each bite and hurrying to the next one. I enjoy watching people eat what I’ve prepared; this time more than ever.

In just a few minutes, Vachon was halfway through each dish. That would be enough.

“You know, Jean-Louis,” I said, as if a thought had just come to mind, “a beautiful woman is a remarkable creation, and there is nothing like the effect she has on a man.”

Vachon, between bites, grinned at me.

“After all,” I continued, “that’s why you’re still a bachelor, because of all the beautiful women. Every man who marries wants to marry a beautiful woman — but he forgets that after he walks his wife out of the church, she’s still beautiful to other men, and jealousy is a terrible thing.”

An uneasiness entered Vachon’s eyes.

“In fact, I’ve wondered what’s at the core of that emotion for men, and I think that jealousy goes back to something very basic.”

I paused, considering for a moment whether Vachon would ever love any woman enough to be jealous.

“And what is the reason for men’s jealousy?” Vachon was trying for a casual, amused tone, but his voice had moved up half an octave.

“Over the centuries, before the scientists and their laboratories, how many men looked into their children’s faces, searching for any resemblance, wanting to ask. ‘Are you mine?’ ”

I now had Vachon’s full attention. He had forgotten about the fork that his right hand was still holding.

“Now, if a husband found out that his wife was having an affair, I wonder how he’d react,” I said. “First, he might ask himself whose fault it was. Who was the pursuer, the wife or the lover? Or was the lover the kind of man for whom women were just a game? Could he make any woman feel beautiful and desired — make her feel as if she had found the perfect, romantic lover?

“Then, what would the husband do? Get angry? Get quiet? Want to talk it out? We’d all react a little differently, but some would decide to solve the problem — permanently. And, how they’d go about it would probably depend on what they knew.

“A carpenter, for example, would own a nail gun, and the next time he was pouring cement into a building’s foundation, he’d have his problem solved. And a fisherman? Well, he’d probably take his wife’s lover on a boat trip, along with a rope, a rock, and a net.” I paused. “But a chef? I wonder what a chef would do?”

I looked at Vachon, who was now incapable of speech.

“I think a chef would look into all his cookbooks and find all the foods that had warnings; he would then invite his wife’s lover to share a meal.” I looked at the bowl and plate in front of Vachon. “For example, maybe he makes the soup with an extra ingredient — the botulism bacillus; then he might serve Death Cap mushrooms with the white ridge around their stems, and complete the menu with a Japanese delicacy — the poisonous fish fugu, which is delicious, but will kill you if it’s not gutted just right. And maybe a very angry husband would serve all three to his wife’s lover, just to make sure the job was done right.”

I smiled amiably at Vachon. “But, I don’t have to worry about you, Jean-Louis, my good friend, my best man. You would never do a thing like that — not with Carolyn. Now, as the chef who made this meal, I want you to know how much pleasure it gives me to watch you cat.”

Vachon stared at me, frozen with fear.

“Eat up,” I said, holding my smile. “Otherwise, Jean-Louis, I will start to wonder if there might be something between you and my wife. Go on.”

Vachon dropped his eyes to my plate and saw that my fish, leeks and mushrooms, and soup were all untouched. The ratatouille was the only thing I’d eaten. He suddenly noticed the fork in his right hand, a piece of fish speared on its four tines. Vachon started to lift the fork to his mouth, but his hand only moved a few inches. The fork dropped to his plate.

“I’m not hungry,” he said, his French accent suddenly thick.

“I understand,” I said. “A man can suddenly lose his appetite; it happens. So, let us just sit here for a while and enjoy your good wine. It will help you digest your meal that much faster.”

Vachon was a broken man. He stood up and smiled a ghastly smile. “I must go,” he said. “I just remembered an appointment.” And the Frenchman shot out of the kitchen. I heard the heavy front door close.

The nearest hospital was Bellevue. I guessed that Vachon would be there in about ten minutes. I’ve never had my stomach pumped, but I’ve heard it’s a miserable experience.

I looked down at the plate of food in front of me and realized that my appetite was back. I picked up a fork, cut a large piece of fish, and tasted it. Excellent. I’ve always enjoyed the puffer fish, a safe, distant cousin to the famous fugu.

The dining-room door swung open. I glanced up at the clock — 5 P.M. exactly. My wife is a wonderfully prompt woman.

“Edward! I just saw Jean-Louis jump into a taxi. He was screaming to be taken to a hospital. What happened?”

“He thinks that someone poisoned him,” I said, and took a sip of wine.

“But who would do that?”

“I would,” I said, “if I thought he was having an affair with my wife.”

Awareness came into her eyes, and, I think, a bit of relief. Sometimes, the hardest part of a mistake is ending it. Carolyn looked at me for a long moment, then sat on the stool where my old friend had been. She looked down at the half-eaten meal.

“Do you have a plate for me?” she asked quietly.

I shook my head.

“I deserve it,” she said.

“You probably do,” I replied.

I raised my left hand, took off my gold wedding band, and put it on the metal counter between us, next to the bottle of Vachon wine. Carolyn stared down at the ring that, in three years, she’d never seen off my finger.

“Your choice,” I said. “What will it be?”

Carolyn looked up at me, then down at the ring and the bottle of wine. Without hesitation, she picked up the Vachon, and my heart sank. So it hadn’t been just an affair.

“There’s no choice,” she said, and turned away from me. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the dark bottle ten feet into the trash bin below the cutting board.

Carolyn turned back to me. “Do you have another bottle of wine that you could open? Something American — something that goes well with confession?”

I studied my wife’s face, the face that I wanted to see every day for the rest of my life.

“I’m sure I do,” I said. “Red or white?”

Halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati, snow spitting and slush gathering on I-75, Tom Lennox regretted telling Teddy his secret. Teddy, nineteen or twenty with greasy blond hair smashed to his forehead by a sock cap and the tattoos and piercings that even nice kids his age had these days, wanted to make it a game.

“What about her?” he asked when they passed a woman in a Honda Civic. “How would you kill her?” Teddy propped his feet on the dash, licked his bottom lip. “You’d play with her first though, wouldn’t you? Do her before you did her.”

Lennox checked his rearview mirror and measured a car-length distance before he glided the Buick back into the right lane. Twenty-seven years on the road as a sales rep for Lindite Bowling Balls had made him a lot of things — twenty pounds overweight, enough money to support his wife’s addiction to Home Shopping, a few friends, and a cautious driver. Once the Buick had settled into its lane, he glanced at Teddy’s filthy Reeboks on the dash and fought the urge to slap him.

The boy was Crude. That was his wife’s term for boys like Teddy. Muriel taught geometry in their hometown of Port Huron, Michigan, and she said most of her students were crude these days. She was thankful that they had never had children. Lennox wasn’t sure. Maybe children would have changed things, would have given him a reason to come home from the road. Muriel’s womb had been the source of their problems. It still was. This afternoon she had an appointment with an oncologist who would confirm what both Muriel and Tom knew. She was beyond treatment. The fact that Muriel had insisted that he continue his sales route instead of coming home to accompany her to the doctor both angered and frightened him.

“Get your shoes off my dash,” Lennox said.

Teddy dropped his feet to the floor, sucked air between his teeth, and grinned. “Hey, you’d pop her before you popped her. Right?”

“I wouldn’t rape her.”

“Sure you wouldn’t,” Teddy said. “In a pig’s eye.”

“I’ve never raped anyone.”

Teddy leaned forward and took a last look through the rearview mirror. “I’d do her,” he said. “A lot of women like that. I read it in a book once.”

Lennox quickened his wipers against the snow and shifted his weight behind the wheel to give his hemorrhoids relief. He reached for a pack of Camel Lights, told himself he could wait ten more miles before he smoked another, and then lit it anyway. He’d been trying to quit for months but nothing worked. Not the patches or the gum or even the fear he felt when he climbed a flight of stairs and felt fluttering in his chest. He was forty-nine, a big, balding man carrying too much weight in his upper stomach, with high blood pressure and an even higher cholesterol count thanks to a lifetime of eating in diners and truck stops from Saginaw, Michigan, to Valdosta, Georgia — the endless ribbon of I-75 that he’d traversed for decades. Sooner or later, a half-clogged artery would clog completely or a platelet would burst free and hit his heart and Tom Lennox, excellent salesman, competent Canasta player, mediocre husband, would be a lump of dead weight for a maid to discover. There were nights when he lay in bed at a Motel 6 in Ohio or a Comfort Inn in Kentucky or a Ramada in Tennessee and prayed for sooner rather than later. He couldn’t imagine life at home without Muriel. The three-bedroom ranch house would be quiet and empty and there would be nothing but the sound of the television for company while he ate and drank alone. It would be exactly like being on the road.

Lennox took a hard drag from his cigarette and thought of the .22 stuffed beneath the front seat. He imagined pressing the barrel to Teddy’s left ear and squeezing the trigger and knew that doing it would push away the worry, the same way saying his prayers before bedtime had kept nightmares at bay when he was a boy.

“What about Fred and Wilma?” Teddy asked as they pulled even with a minivan and a fat, dark-haired man and his redheaded wife. “Gut shoot them, right? Make them suffer a little bit.”

“It’s not about making people suffer,” Lennox said. “I’m not disturbed.”

Teddy cocked his eyebrow and slouched back against the scat. Lennox snubbed his cigarette. He didn’t know how to make the kid understand or see the order and self-control of his murders. Lennox wasn’t a sadist, and he wasn’t excessive. One a year. Twenty-four murders so far, the first a vagrant who slept behind a liquor store in Lexington, Kentucky, the last a seventeen-year-old runaway who solicited travelers at a Waffle House in Dalton, Georgia. Lennox had been so discreet in choosing his victims and so cautious in his methods that the police had never guessed all of the murders were connected.

“You make them beg?” Teddy asked.

The boy would never understand. Lennox wasn’t sure he understood it. Occasionally, he tried to figure out why he’d started killing, but he’d never come up with a satisfactory answer. Sometimes, he thought it was just the road. Years of driving the same, unchanging highway and staring at the same billboards and same cityscapes and the patches of pine trees and grass that were always the same whether the signs told you that you were in northern Ohio or southern Georgia and eating in the same restaurants and diners and listening to the same songs on a dozen different radio stations and vomiting the same spiel a dozen times a day to bored Bowl-A-Rama managers made life as meaningless as the fragments of graffiti he read on overpasses and bathroom walls — Jesus Saves or Sandra’s a Slut, perhaps. One murder a year gave him a reason for his life on the road. The boy would never understand. With his endless chatter and his crudeness, Teddy was making even murder seem meaningless.

“Sure you do,” Teddy said. “You make them beg. I bet you get off on it.”

“Shut up,” Lennox said, surprising even himself with his anger.

Teddy blinked his bright blue eyes. “You don’t have to get pissy,” he said. “I was just talking.”

“That’s the problem.”

Teddy pretended to be fascinated by the billboards advertising Cincinnati FM stations and Budweiser. Lennox shouldn’t have told the boy about the murders and wasn’t sure why he did other than there was something about Teddy that drew Lennox to him. He’d felt it when he spotted the boy hanging around a payphone at a rest area just south of Toledo, and the feeling had been so strong that Lennox had broken his own rule and offered the boy a ride, telling himself it was because in his baggy jeans, windbreaker, and sock cap Teddy was likely to freeze on a snowy January day but knowing that he didn’t want to be alone today, not when the world was as gray and cold as Muriel would be under the hospital’s fluorescent lights.

He’d regretted it five minutes after Teddy got in the car when the boy leered at him, scooted across the seat, and offered to give him a blowjob. Lennox had recoiled, threatened to put him out on the side of the road. He told Teddy that one thing Tom Lennox was not was a faggot. Didn’t he see the wedding ring on his finger? Teddy had shrugged and said there was no reason to get angry. A lot of straight guys wouldn’t turn down a blowjob, and he’d just wanted to say thanks for the ride. Ten miles later, Teddy launched into a long discourse on why he always wore a sock cap. He said if you took your cap off your heat leaked out, which was bad, but sometimes your soul went with it and then where the hell were you, walking around without a soul? That was crazy talk, and it scared Lennox. But Teddy had just smiled as if the whole thing were a joke, and Lennox couldn’t decide if the boy was putting him on or if he was really crazy. Twenty minutes later, Teddy told Lennox that he’d served five years in a juvenile home for armed robbery and that while he was there he’d knifed two boys, but no one had been able to prove it so he walked away free as a bird. Something about Teddy was like a key turning inside Lennox’s mind, and when the boy finished his story, Lennox told his own. Now, Lennox looked at Teddy slumped against the door and felt guilty for the way he’d spoken to him. He wasn’t sure why, just that indefinable something.

“I’m sorry,” Lennox said. “Never mind what I said.”

Teddy’s head popped up, and he reached for a cigarette without asking. “You’re probably just tense,” he said. “You sure you don’t want me to blow you?”

Lennox squinted through the snow at the high rises and bridges that marked the beginnings of Cincinnati. “I told you I’m not a homosexual.”

Teddy blew a smoke ring. “Me neither. I mean not really. But I don’t mind doing a guy a favor.”

Then Teddy said he had a great idea. Why didn’t they kill someone. Make it a special occasion. If they killed somebody together, Lennox would know his secret was safe. The only other way to guarantee it was if Lennox killed him.

“And I don’t meant to be offensive or anything,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure I could take you.”

Lennox told him to stop talking. Traffic was picking up, the road was icy, and he needed to concentrate. They headed south through Cincinnati. With its snow tires and steady wipers, the Buick glided through traffic as anonymous as the first wayward cells of cancer.

They stopped at a Ramada just south of Richmond, Kentucky, and Lennox had Teddy lie across the front seat while he registered. Except for his diet and his smoking, Lennox was cautious in all things. If anything went wrong tonight, he wanted no one to be able to connect him with Teddy.

The sky was stained a molded gray, and snow swirled in a whipping wind that whistled from the foothills outside of town. Three-quarters of the parking lot was already full and yellow lights glowed from dozens of steamed windows.

“Nice room,” Teddy said when Lennox unlocked the door.

It was just a motel room — worn carpet, heavy green drapes, a paisley bedspread on a hard, queen-size bed, a couple of vinyl chairs, a burn-scarred writing table, and a television bolted to a stand on the dresser. Lennox unpacked while Teddy paced the room, turning the faucet on and off, bouncing on the bed, (lipping through channels on the television.

Lennox pulled off his sweater, uncomfortably aware of the way his gut sagged over his Dockers. It was five-thirty EST, which meant Muriel should be home from the doctor. Lennox pulled a pint of Jack Daniel’s from the side pocket of his suitcase, broke the seal, and poured a double shot into a plastic cup and then offered Teddy the bottle.

“I never drink the stuff,” he said. “A beer now and then, but that’s it. That junk will kill you. You don’t believe me ask my old man.”

Lennox downed his whiskey. He poured another two fingers into his cup.

“Don’t get soused,” Teddy said.

“I can handle my whiskey.”

Teddy fiddled with his sock cap. “I’m not preaching or anything.”

Lennox drank, refilled his cup, and told Teddy to keep quiet while he called home. Then he sat on the bed and dialed the number and was surprised that his hands weren’t shaking. The phone rang four times before the answering machine kicked on.

“Pick up,” Lennox said. “It’s me, babe. Pick up, okay?”

The phone beeped to let him know his time was over. He hung up, wondering if Muriel was there, alone in the living room with the lights off, terrified by the certainty of her dying. He dialed home again.

“It’s okay, babe,” he told the machine. “Things will be all right. Just pick up.”

Maybe she’d sent him on the road because she knew what the doctor would say and knew what she was going to do about it. He could see her lying across their king-size bed, her eyes closed, an empty pill bottle on the nightstand.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

Lennox slammed the receiver on the hook and then dialed again.

“Muriel, please answer,” he said. “Let me help you.”

Still no answer. Lennox had another idea that was as horrible as the first. Maybe she’d sent him on the road because there was someone else she wanted to comfort her.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be home tomorrow night. We’ll talk then.” He held the phone, and then just before his time ended, he remembered to say, “I love you.”

He was as tired as he’d ever been in his life. He unlaced his shoes and pulled his shirt from his trousers and lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

“Trouble at home?” Teddy asked, his voice soft and concerned.

Lennox sat up on the edge of the bed. He told Teddy his story. When he finished, it was as if his body was a balloon that lost its air. His shoulders sagged, his muscles quivered, and he flopped back on the bed, his eyes burning as if the effort of staying open was too much for them. He didn’t think he was crying, but maybe he was.

“Just take it easy,” Teddy said. “Rest awhile.”

Teddy helped him beneath the covers. Then Teddy stood and stretched, took off his windbreaker and tennis shoes. Lennox wasn’t surprised when Teddy slipped in beside him. But then Teddy moved closer and laid an arm over his shoulders, and Lennox stiffened.

“Don’t touch me,” he said.

Teddy put his mouth close to Lennox’s ear. “Don’t push me away,” he said. “Just let me stay here with you.”

Lennox shut his eyes. The whiskey still buzzed through his head, and he felt as if the world were disappearing down a long, narrow tunnel. A few minutes later, he rolled onto his back and told himself it was because his shoulder was aching. When Teddy’s hand moved under the cover, Lennox didn’t stop him.

“I’m not gay,” Lennox whispered.

“Relax,” Teddy said. “You don’t always got to put labels on everything.”

Then Teddy pulled the covers away. Lennox lay still and let the boy do what he wanted and told himself that the moaning in the room was coming from the wind rushing at the windows.

Afterward, Lennox dozed and woke later when he heard the door closing. He sat up, blinking stupidly, and then rushed to the window in time to see the Buick’s taillights easing from the parking lot. His mouth was dry with panic. The boy had stolen his car and probably his wallet and how in God’s name would he explain why he’d picked up a hitchhiker and what they were doing in a motel room with one bed.

“Little queer,” Lennox said. “Goddamn hustler.”

He went for a drink and found the note that Teddy had placed beneath the whiskey. Teddy had “borrowed” a hundred bucks from his wallet and was gone after supplies. Lennox took a shot of the whiskey and lit a cigarette and swore to himself that his relief came from not having to offer an explanation about what happened and not from his fear that he’d never see Teddy again.

Lennox finished his drink and went to the bathroom, stood staring in the mirror at his fat face with bloodshot eyes and broken capillaries on his cheeks. The self-loathing started slowly like water heating on an electric stove. It began with the sight of the bags under his eyes and moved to his hairy gut and then to the shriveled old prick that had stiffened at the touch of another man.

“Faggot,” he said to the mirror.

His disgust passed. He hadn’t touched Teddy. Not once. That proved that he wasn’t gay. A gay guy would have touched back, wouldn’t he? By the time Lennox sat back on the bed with another cup of whiskey, he was sure that almost anyone would have done the same thing under the circumstances. Tonight, they would find a victim, kill him or her together, and say goodbye in the morning. It would be as if none of this had ever happened, and the pain he felt in his chest at the thought of parting with Teddy was just heartburn brought on by too many cigarettes and too much whiskey.

Before the logging operation in Maine closed, Bill drove a big rig and generally got paid more than I did. I ran a saw. I drank quite a bit. It ate into my wallet. We kicked around in Maine. I was in good shape from working so much and in a bar outside Houlton I managed to sneak a right hand in and knocked a guy out for two hundred dollars. I thought I was a boxer.

We finally ended up at Bill’s mother’s house in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont. On the way there, we stopped at a reservation and picked up some tax-free cigarettes for her. She didn’t seem happy or sad to see us when we pulled up. She didn’t hug Bill, but she did take the cigarettes. “Are these for Mother’s Day?” she asked Bill when he gave her the cigarettes. “They are now,” he said. “You don’t have to pay me for them.” Hard times had made that love, for the two of them.

In the morning, I walked down to Thompson’s wood lot and fifteen minutes later, I was working. When I first started in late May, my back took a month to come into its own. I was lucky I was in decent shape to start with, or I couldn’t have done it at all. I hurt so bad some nights after work that I slept on the hardwood floor. My hands hummed from running the chain saw all day. My spine rusted tight. I didn’t think I’d be able to raise myself out of a bed to walk to work in the morning.

Bill started to cash a check, driving a log truck down from Quebec for a big outfit and then an accident got him, crushed him against the steering wheel. He sat totally paralyzed in a wheelchair at the house. He could look out the window and see me at the wood lot, and I would wave up to him, give him the high sign. Nurses from the county came in to feed him. His mother made sure the door was open so people could get in. A buddy of his, Tom Kennedy, came to see him once in a while. His voice still worked, and I imagine he gave those county people hell for the hour they were there. He hated being paralyzed. Beyond hate, really.

I ran the chain saw most days, filling firewood orders as they came in and trying to stay ahead, as people got ready for winter. We had as many as fifteen orders a day, mixed cords and half-cords. Gary worked with me, a wiry little local with a mustache and a tattoo on his arm that said amber inside a hand-drawn heart. Gary ran the hydraulic splitter and packed the cut cords into the rusted dump truck. He was a good worker. We managed eight cords a day, ten if nobody drank heavy the night before. The heat would drive it out of you anyway, sending you behind the shed to puke before eleven o’clock in the morning. We all did it, kicked sawdust over it, and kept right on working. The log trucks made the turn off the road down into the main yard and the French-Canadian drivers would hop up into their cherry pickers and unload themselves right onto the big stacks, and then walk over to the pay shed where Harold sat, answering the phone and paying cash for any decent load of logs that happened to come his way. He didn’t care where the logs came from or whose property they were. The log business can depend a lot on timing. You leave a load on the ground in the forest too long and bugs can get at the wood and ruin things quick. Or maybe somebody crossed a property line on a clear cut and had to get rid of some wood fast. Once the wood found its way into Harold’s yard, it was his, and the exchange rate being what it was, the French-Canadians made sure plenty of wood always managed to show up. Bill watched all day from his bedroom and we’d talk about my day at the woodlot when I got home.

“Better than television,” he said. I always knew if Tom had stopped by because Bill would be drunk. Tom left beer and sometimes whole bottles for Bill. “He keeps me in the juice,” Bill said. Then I’d join him for a drink in his room and look out the window at the woodlot where I worked all day.

Whether it was the heat or the work or the booze, I don’t know, but the job made everybody pretty mean. In the beginning of August, somebody made a comment at lunch about Gary’s pregnant girlfriend and the next day, Gary came in and took a swing at this new guy who was standing near the barn and came back to work the splitter with a bloody nose and the beginnings of a black eye. About two weeks later, a log truck pulled in and unloaded and while the driver walked across the yard, I looked at him through my goggles for a minute with the chain saw still running, He gave me the middle finger as he walked into the shed, and I started to move fast. I shut the saw down and took off my Kevlar chaps, headphones, plugs, and helmet, tossed my goggles into the sawdust, and met him as he came out the shed door. I hit him right in the face and then again and he fell to one knee and I picked up an ax handle that was leaning against the shed and started beating him on the shoulders and ribs and back. I hit him so hard that the ax handle stung my hand to the bone. As he lay in the sawdust, I reached into his right front pocket and took the money he’d just earned from the log delivery. Somebody helped him back to his truck and he sat there for a while and then drove out. Later that night, I counted five hundred dollars with my hurt right hand and then I went out and walked to the corner Gas Mart and treated myself to a twenty-four pack of cold beer. I drank three of them before I made it back to my sweltering attic room of Bill Doyle’s house. Bill was howling, laughing upstairs when I came in.

“You gave it to that frog,” he called down to me. The door to his mother’s room was closed with light coming out underneath. I walked upstairs. Bill’s face always looked tight and windburned, from all those years driving a truck. “That’s what I feel like doing, every day. Jumping out of this fucking chair and giving it to somebody.”

I poked my head in his room. “I hurt my hand doing it,” I said.

“You’ve got another one, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I wish Tom could have seen that.”

“Tell him about it,” I said. Bill talked about Tom Kennedy so much, I felt like a big deal to be mentioned in the same company.

“I will,” Bill said. “He loves a good fight.”

I came home from work one day and called up into the empty house from the bottom of the stairs like I always did and there was no answer. I went up to Bill’s room and opened the door and got sick. Bill really wasn’t there anymore: he’d sprayed most of his head onto the wall with a shotgun blast. A faint blue haze hung close to the ceiling. The wheelchair was there with the headless torso slumped in it and the shotgun on the floor. A bunch of beer bottles and a liquor bottle, cheap whiskey. Empty. For so much violence in such a small room, you’d have expected to hear noise, an echo, something. But it was silent. His mom left after the funeral, went to Florida to live with her sister, and I moved out too, got a new room in another house for an apartment.

In the last week of August, two shiny black four-by-fours with tinted windows and New York plates pulled off the highway and down into the main yard. I assumed they were new homeowners, maybe up from New York City, looking to fill a wood order for winter or with some land they wanted clear. I was wrong.

The man who got out of the first truck was a dapper-looking Hispanic, with the whole outfit on. The sunglasses, the gold chains. Shirt open a couple of buttons. The creased black dress pants, black pointy shoes. He spoke with a thick accent. Harold, his gut hanging out of his denim coveralls, walked out of the pay shack and shook hands with the Hispanic man. The rest of us stopped working, wandered over, and listened.

“Hello,” he said to us. “I am Melvin Martinez and we are looking for strong men to spar with.” His accent was so thick I could barely understand him. Several more Hispanic men got out of the trucks. Young, muscular, with black hair, all in blue warm-up suits.

Harold looked over at the men standing by the trucks. “Where’d you last fight, up in Quebec?”

“Yes,” said Melvin. “We started in a logging camp up there and are working our way back down to New York City.” He pointed at one young man wearing red boxing trunks. “That is El Rey,” he said. “We’re preparing him for the pros.”

“Did he win?” asked Harold. He took a kerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead and neck.

“El Rey has not lost,” Melvin said. The gold chains around his neck caught the sun. He wore a thick gold bracelet on his left wrist, along with a gold watch and some rings.

Harold considered this a minute. “What weight class are you looking for?” he said.

“El Rey will fight anyone, he doesn’t care, as long as there are gloves and a ring and limed rounds. No headgear. No kicking. Regular boxing.”

Harold nodded and his beard moved. “Well, usually before a fight, there’s another match, there’s more than one fight on the card. Got anybody else who wants to fight?”

“Yes,” Melvin said. He turned to the men who had come out of the trucks. “Hector will fight. He is El Rey’s sparring partner.” One of the men raised his hand and began to take off his warm-up jacket.

“Fine,” Harold said. “That’s fine. We’ll get something going here, just give me a minute.” He turned around and pointed at Gary. “Take a sledge and a tape and some of those long iron stakes by the shed and make me a ring here.” Harold turned to Melvin. “How big do you want?”

“Twenty feet is good,” Melvin said. “We’ve got gloves with us, sixteen ounces, for better protection. Do you need them?”

“Yeah,” Harold said. “I don’t have any boxing gloves sitting around.”

Gary held a stake as I pounded the top of it with a sledgehammer. The sawdust jumped around the base as it went into the ground. We used the tape to measure out twenty feet for the next stake, and snapped a plumb line to make sure the thing was square. The blue chalk dust hung in the hot air after the line drew taut. We drove in all four stakes this way and tied a white rope all the way around.

Harold and Melvin held a private conference on the hood of the closest four-by-four and then Harold came back over to us. Everybody was standing near the pay shack, looking at the ring. Harold ran a hand through his hair and spoke as he walked toward us.

“I put two hundred fifty dollars on it, so let’s see what happens,” he said. “If you want to bet, go give it to him.” He pointed at Melvin. “No odds, just straight win by time or knockout.” A couple of guys walked over and gave Melvin some money, but I wanted to wait.

Harold turned to George Hack. George was a big man, a drinker and a bar brawler. He generally ran the skidder if we were in the woods and he always worked on the big saws on any cutting job. He played football for Saint Jay High School and still talked frequently about it, although it was years ago and I’d seen him knock the daylights out of Jimmy Conrad, the bouncer over at Suedon’s Bar on Main Street. We prepped the ring area with a rake, and George went into shed and came out without a shirt on, just a pair of jeans, his work boots, and the sixteen-ounce boxing gloves on his hands. Some of his flab hung over his jeans. Hector was smaller than George, but there was no fat there. Hector had on boxing trunks and shoes laced up to his knees. His gloves. Melvin agreed to take the first round as referee. He wore a white towel around his neck.

The bell rang and both men came out of their corners toward the middle of the sawdust ring. George took a wild swing that hit nothing. He almost slipped. He was already sweating. Hector set him up fast. Two quick left-handed jabs, one to the face, one to the body, and all the time, the right fist was waiting, held back, the pressure building, as George’s hands chased Hector’s up then down, still back, the bombsight zeroed in on George’s left ear, then boom! Right on George’s ear, clean, solid, through, and George’s knees buckled and his head bounced when it hit the sawdust. George wasn’t even conscious and yet, tears were coming out of his eyes. Two guys jumped into the ring and pulled George into the back of a pickup truck. As they turned him over, sawdust stuck to his chest and his face and his crotch, which was soaked. He’d wet himself from the shot to the head.

Harold suddenly pulled me off to one side, behind the pay shack. “Go get me Tom Kennedy,” he said in a low voice. He handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Tell him there’s more to go with that.”

“Let me fight El Rey,” I said.

Harold shook his head. “I want to win,” he said. “You can’t take an ax handle out there in the ring with you.” He talked out of the side of his mouth and then turned toward me. “Besides,” he looked straight at me, “you don’t have the life in front of you that Tom does.”

I took the money and walked along the stream that made the back border of the wood lot. It brought me out at the end of Langmore Street and Kennedy lived one over, on Hartsel Avenue. I walked down the cracked sidewalk, full of frost heaves.

Tom Kennedy was Harold’s main tree climber, for any residential job that went up over a hundred feel. At least, that’s what everyone at the wood lot would say, but I’d only seen him at the woodlot once. I heard more about him through Bill than anything else. In reality, Tom Kennedy managed to collect weekly pay from Harold just for staying away from the wood lot. His temper and drinking were two of the things I first heard about when I came to Saint Jay. Tom Kennedy was also a local fighting legend. I’d heard stories about him from Bill, and the last I’d seen him at the wood lot, he’d yelled at Harold like I’d never heard anybody do, ever. You could tell he was a mean drunk just from the force of his words. Told Harold to suck it, then stood there and waited for Harold to say something. Harold didn’t say anything. I was nervous going to get Tom Kennedy.

He sat on the wood porch of his big house, drinking a beer. Bill told me Tom’s father had been the first Irish cop to leave Boston and tried to bring some big-city justice to the force here in Saint Johnsbury. Tom had tried to be a cop too, for a little while, but something went wrong and after a short time, he simply wasn’t a cop anymore. He didn’t wear the uniform and he didn’t drive the car anymore; he just faded out of that life into another.

There were kids running around, some his, some his girlfriend’s. Some belonged to other people and I thought that ten years from now, those same kids wouldn’t even hang out with anyone named Kennedy. Tom sat there on the front porch, drinking a beer. I walked up the sidewalk to the bottom step of the porch.

“Hi, Tom,” I said.

“Hi yourself,” he said. “What does Harold need done?” He tilted his head back and drained his beer, tossing the can on the porch. His reddish hair looked bronze in the sun.

I took the hundred-dollar bill out of my pocket and handed it to him. “There are some men from New York City over at the wood lot, looking to fight.” I indicated the money. “Harold says there’s more after that.”

“What type of men?” he asked. “Niggers?”

“No,” I said. “Hispanic men. From New York City.”

Tom made a noise I took as a laugh. “They aren’t from here,” he said. “They’re not local. There’s no Spanish Vermonters.” He looked at me. “How tough are they?” He touched his own check. “Some black guys got hard faces, their faces can break your hands. And they take people’s crap all the time, so they can get pretty mean. Hispanic guys aren’t like that.”

“The one guy just sent George Hack to the hospital,” I said. “Hurt bad.”

“George Hack?” he said. “George Hack couldn’t fight my sister.”

“Well he went down pretty hard,” I said. I thought of the tears coming out of Hack’s eyes, that he pissed himself.

“Did you think George Hack was tough?” he asked. He started lacing up his work boots.

“Maybe,” I allowed.

“George Hack was a fat slob,” Tom said. “I should go over to the hospital and beat him in his bed just for losing so bad.” He pushed on his right ear with the flat of his hand and I heard the cartilage crack. “He couldn’t box,” he said.

“He got hurt,” I said.

“How big is this guy I’m fighting?” he asked.

“Big,” I said. “Probably two-twenty, maybe more.”

“You know what they say?” he asked.

“No, what’s that?” I asked.

“It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. Tom stood and stretched his arms out. He sat again. “Thanks for looking in on Bill those days.” I appreciated Tom buying Bill’s booze.

“We went back a long way,” Tom said. “Used to be good friends, he knew my father when my father was still alive. I made sure his mother got around in the snow sometimes.” He waved it off. “Just friends, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He pointed toward the woodlot. “Think I can beat him?” he asked.

I took a minute to answer. “No,” I said. “I don’t think you can. If he’s better than that guy who fought George Hack, no way.”

“Is he mean?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, you’d know,” he said. “Heard you beat some frog with an ax handle a while back. Bill told me.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Sorry about Bill,” he said. “But he’s better off. He wasn’t living much. Not that any of us are but at least we can still walk.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You should learn to use your fists,” he said. “Learn to box.”

“I know how to box,” I said.

He snorted. “I’d have shoved that ax handle so far up your ass you’d have coughed splinters,” he said. “You want to see boxing? Come watch me right now. I’ll show you boxing.” He stood and stretched. He looked at one of the little kids running in the street. “A plastic helmet and toy gun don’t make a soldier.”

“You should’ve seen what this guy did to George Hack,” I repeated.

“Did he piss his pants?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“I been around,” he said. He showed me his right hand. There was a raised scar between his first and second knuckles. “I hit a man so hard his front tooth was lodged in there.” He pointed at the scar with his left hand. “All the way to my bone,” he said. “That’s what happens when you put that torque on your punches. I’m not just talking about a brawl. I’m talking about boxing, like my old man taught me.” We walked down the sidewalk in silence and as we turned, I stole a glance at his right hand again and at the massive scar between his knuckles.

We walked back the way I’d come over and by the time we got there, there were probably fifty people crowding around, looking at the little ring and staring at El Rey, who sat on a stool in the corner with his back to the four-by-fours. He and Hector were talking in Spanish, along with Melvin.

Harold came over to us as soon as we walked onto the lot. He went to shake hands with Tom, but Tom brushed him away.

“Two hundred dollars besides what you already gave me,” Tom said.

“Done,” Harold said. He reached into his coveralls and pulled out two damp hundred-dollar bills and gave them to Tom.

Tom stripped to a pair of shorts and sneakers, no shirt. On his back, along the right shoulder blade, he had a half-finished tattoo that looked like a shroud with a scythe and the words GRIM REAPER in shaky script. It was the color of mold. Tom got into the ring and sat in his corner. He looked over at El Rey.

Melvin and Harold both got into the ring and after looking at each other, Melvin clapped his hands. Everyone was quiet.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a twelve-round fight with two-minute rounds,” he said. Melvin pointed at El Rey. “And in this corner, wearing the red trunks, the Hispanic Panic, undefeated in his career, weighing two hundred and twenty-one pounds, the King of Knockout, from the Bronx, New York New York, El Rey!” The other Hispanic men whistled and clapped and El Rey stood up and shadowboxed for a minute, finished up with a flurry of short punches, then remained standing, dancing on his feet, loose. Melvin stepped out of the ring and Harold cleared his throat and pointed to Tom Kennedy.

“In this corner,” he said, “weighing one hundred eighty-five pounds, the Pride of Saint Jay, Tom Kennedy!”

And when his name was called, Kennedy got off his stool and danced for a minute, bobbed and weaved and threw a few light punches and we all cheered him, really cheered him, and he remained standing too, moving and ready.

Harold motioned for both guys to touch gloves and they did and Melvin hit the bell. El Rey came out fast, moved up to Tom and swung and missed, and Tom made two quick jabs at his ribs and backed off, his hands held at an almost awkward angle, his feet always moving. They moved together and El Rey jabbed with his left, pulling his right hand back, jabbed again, and swung full with the right, but Tom wasn’t there anymore, he moved back and to the side and then in again and bang! bang! two fast rights to El Rey’s head and the bell rang.

Tom came over to the corner and sat on the stool, and I gave him some water, which he spit into the sawdust. Melvin and Hector were in El Rey’s corner, talking loud in Spanish. Tom spit his white rubber mouth guard into his right glove and spoke.

“Watch me now, and learn about those fists,” he said. He popped his mouth guard back in and stared across at El Rey’s corner. The bell rang and he stood, and I grabbed the stool out of the ring.

He and El Rey met in the middle of the ring and El Rey juked left with his head, then right, swung, but Tom ducked under, and one two! Shots to the body and one two! again, one to the solar plexus. I saw the look on El Rey’s face, I knew it, and as he brought his hands down to cover himself, Tom slammed the right side of his head with the glove, hard, and again, and there was blood Hying, and I thought for sure Tom would step back, but he stepped forward, closer, almost hitting down on his target and bang! a strong left hand to El Rey’s nose and the bell rang.

Tom sat on the stool. He was breathing heavily, sweat all over his body, and we toweled him down and they were screaming in Spanish in the other corner. Tom popped his mouth guard out. He didn’t say anything. He looked mad. He stared across at El Rey’s corner and put his mouth guard back in. The bell rang and Tom came off the stool like a rocket. He threw a couple of light punches, and El Rey took a step back and Tom stepped up, closer again. Then he swung twice, fast, and it was like punching bullet holes in a paper target — El Rey didn’t feel the shock until the punches were through him.

I didn’t know exactly what happened next because Tom moved so fast and his back shielded me from seeing the punches directly. All I could watch were his shoulder blades, moving with each punch, over and over and all to the body of El Rey and El Rey’s face looking at me over Tom’s shoulder, trying to stay alert, and now Tom was on El Rey’s head, he found the range, it was a right, another right and a right and El Rey fell to his knees hard and Tom kept hitting him, blood coming out of El Rey’s ear onto the sawdust, and El Rey went down face first, the sawdust jumping up as his head hit the ground, his eyes closed, and it was silent. The Hispanic men jumped in the ring and popped amyl nitrate capsules under El Rey’s nose and he didn’t move, and Tom just sat there on the stool, with blood on his chest, as they picked El Rey up and carted him back to the trucks and presumably the hospital.

It stayed quiet as men collected their money from Melvin and came over to congratulate Tom. He was still sweating, still trying to catch his breath. A bruise was starting on his face from a punch I hadn’t even seen. The marks on his chest seemed to glow red. Slowly, he took his gloves off with his teeth.

“You want some help?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’m just taking my time.” He put a shirt on after a while and he and Harold talked and then I watched him walk back the same way we’d come over, along the stream toward the house.

I have a different job now, handling shipping and packages for a company near Montpelier. Every time I drive past Thompson s wood lot and see the men working there, I’m glad it’s not me. Last night, I was up late — my wife had already taken off to her mother’s house, she lives just down the block — had a couple of beers, and turned on ESPN. The late-night fight card had El Rey on it. He looked bulked up. I decided to walk to the corner store for some more beer and snacks. It was mid-November and snowing pretty hard.

Tom Kennedy was at the store. He smelled like beer. He was in the back, looking at the coolers full of beer.

“Hey, Tom Kennedy,” I said. “The Pride of Saint Jay.”

He turned and stared at me. Sometimes when people drink a lot, they have a certain look about them, a fog they have to get through before the world reaches them, and Tom’s gaze had retreated into that phase. He didn’t know who I was.

“Hey, mister,” he said. His jeans were ripped and he wore an old flannel shirt.

“I’ve got El Rey on ESPN over at the house,” I said. “Want to come over and watch?”

“What?” Kennedy said.

“You know, El Rey,” I said. “That guy you fought over at Thompson’s.” His hearing seemed a little weak too.

“I haven’t been in a fight,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Three years ago.”

He looked at me. “Three years ago? What the hell’s three years ago got to do with today?”

The question hung there in the air. I had the luxury of thinking about three years ago, of a TV, or having a fight with my wife. “Nothing,” I said. “Just thought you might be interested.”

“I’m interested in getting some fucking beer, but that asshole won’t sell it to me.” He pointed at the high school kid behind the counter. “Says I’m already drunk. Right?” Tom Kennedy gave him a deadly stare.

“I’ll call the cops if you don’t leave the store,” the kid said. “I’ve done it before on him,” the kid continued. “He makes me.” A phone hung on the wall behind him. Tom Kennedy headed back to the beer cooler. He grabbed a six-pack of bottles and ran out of the store, into the snow. I tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter and ran after him. He was already headed down the sidewalk.

“Hey, Tom,” I called. “Wait up.”

He turned fast. His face seemed to come clear out of the snow and I knew that he remembered me.

“I shot him,” he said. “He begged me to do it, and if you had been a good friend to him, you’d have done it.”

“What?” I said.

“I blew his head right off,” he said. “What was the point of him living if he didn’t want to live?”

“What?” I said. “You mean Bill?”

“That’s right,” Tom said. “But it should have been you. To pull the trigger.”

He hit me in the side of the head with a full bottle of beer. I lay there in the snow and went in and out of it. I heard a police siren going through the night, a sound you don’t hear very often in Saint Johnsbury, through the quiet streets and houses, echoing out into the huge forest of the Northeast Kingdom and beyond.

Tyree Garcia arrived late in the afternoon. For the last twenty miles he’d ridden State Highway 6 all alone and so felt free to indulge in a leisurely survey of Rushing River Hollow by riding the brakes of his black Cherokee van down the final hill. At a Mobil station, by all appearances the official western border of the town, he pulled over and rolled to a stop next to a gas pump. According to tattered and faded ads pasted across the office’s windows, the Mobil supplied repair services, gas, tires, beer, sodas, cigarettes, and tobacco in chewable form. Tyree guessed the strips of paper served to shade the Mobil’s glass-walled office from the merciless sun as much as to list the services offered.

The narrow asphalt highway flattened out and disappeared into the town’s main street, which was as neatly obscured beneath a layer of dirt as if deliberately coated. While he sat massaging sleep-deprived eyes, he noticed the occasional pedestrian scuff down the middle of the street, raising dust that obscured his or her feet in little dun-colored clouds.

He wondered if avoiding the sidewalks was a local habit. His was the only vehicle in sight. For all he knew, the tourist trade infused the Hollow with bustling life in spring and fall, and maybe even winter, but the intense summer heat drove them away — if this was a normal summer. Was this brain-sizzling heat unusual for the Hollow? Like a drought? He didn’t know that either. Country, especially genuine country like Rushing River Hollow, baffled him, was beyond his experience. Heat waves shimmered up from the concrete slab sidewalks bordering each side of the road. Maybe the thick layer of dirt was kinder to tender feet than roasted cement.

He just didn’t know.

To a Chicago kid born and raised in and devoted to its crowded neighborhoods. West Virginia looked like a foreign kingdom of crystalline creeks and river rapids and green, softly rounded mountains. An occasional ramshackle cabin propped up on a webbing of raw, unpainted four-by-fours dotted the sleep slopes. A paradise — unspoiled, vast, and rich — which accounted for the sprawling luxury resort hotel he knew from his AAA map occupied the other end of this dirt-crusted road. Pinebrook Resort offered — if one paid outrageous fees — hunting, golf, tennis, skeet and trap shooting, river rafting, nature hikes, even lessons in falconry. He’d picked up a travel agency brochure before driving all the way down here. He wondered if the privileged lives of the guests — outsiders — invited jealousy and comparison to the obviously scratch-scrabble lives of the residents.

Tyree finally swung his long, stiffened legs to the ground and began a series of stretches. He was a tall man, heavily muscled, and moved without haste.

As he reached for the fuel pump handle, he noticed a small sign propped against the second of the Mobil station’s two pumps (one for diesel fuel, but he’d happened to park beside the one dispensing gas: a sign he interpreted as a favorable omen; in his profession, he constantly looked for favorable omens). The sign, weatherbeaten almost to illegibility, said Rushin River Hollow, Population: the 421 was crossed out, 303 crossed out, 112 crossed out, then 427. A graph of the town’s fortunes. Had the millennium brought about a baby boom here?

Suddenly, a short, thick man with roughened skin so red his neck and face resembled a turkey’s wattle rushed up and grabbed the pump handle from Tyree’s grasp and inserted the nozzle into the Cherokee. “High test, I’d say, right?” He moved fast but talked slow.

Tyree nodded. The man punched a square plastic button on the pump, then turned on the juice. He apologized that he’d been “out back,” his slight flinch telling Tyree that “out back” meant the men’s rest room, then introduced himself as Emil Powers.

“Tyree Garcia,” Tyree said politely, nodding down at the top of the little man’s head. He saw no reason to lie about his name; nobody would’ve heard of him in this wilderness.

For no reason other than to open a conversation, Tyree asked what had happened to the gin Rushing on the population sign. The gap from its loss was obvious.

“Aw,” said Emil, sounding deeply distressed, “if’n you don’t mind a long story?”

Tyree shook his head, eyebrows lifted.

“Ya see, it ain’t in truth Rush-ing River. It’s Rooshion River. Like the Rooshions that come from Moscow. And somehow, ’cause we do a lot of business river rafting, y’know from the hotel, it got mangled over the years inta Rush-ing River. By the tourists, I guess.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders, jiggling the gas pump handle. “We need them tourists. So we jes’ didn’t know, should we change it legally or what, or did it even matter? So when the sun bleached the g off n the sign, we left it. I got maps in the office, legal ones from the gov’ment, they even call us Rushing River Hollow now. How they got aholt of the wrong name, nobody knows, or gives a hoot. Well, except for the Rooshions what established the town. They’s pissed. But,” he waved his free hand, dismissing them, “just Joey and Eban left, and they’s ninety something. Be gone by the time we decide anything. So we’re kind of relaxed about it. Now the sign itself, though—”

To Tyree’s amazement, he took a deep breath. Then, with a stiff dignity obviously meant to disguise personal embarrassment, confessed that he’d promised the Chamber of Commerce last spring he’d make a new sign, but jes’ hadn’t got to it. But he will. He will! He promised Tyree as fervently as if Tyree were an important Chamber member to be placated, a color-blind attitude that amazed Tyree. He’d anticipated some anxiety or even obstruction because of the color of his skin. After all, West Virginia was not known for high standards of education, an aspect that usually coincided with prejudice. Suddenly Tyree thought of the extreme heat and the deserted street. Possibly the color blindness meant only that in a roasting August barren of tourists, his color was green: income on the hoof.

A companionable silence set in between the two men as the gas slowly filled the Cherokee’s immense tank. Tyree nearly grinned as he watched Emil struggle not to peer too obviously into the darkened side and back windows, curious about what might be in there.

He would see nothing, Tyree knew, of his altered shotgun, his semiautomatic 9mm and .357 Magnum with extra clips, a red-dot laser scope on the .357, and the Archangel holster Tyree favored for its fast-draw design. His laptop, connected wireless phone, and portable printer were packed neatly in shockproof canvas carriers. His monocular night-vision headgear, an air taser (stun gun), and a Dazer he used for protection against guard dogs; mace in various sizes and canister shapes; and a digital camera with special lenses were all nested, like the laptop, in specially designed carriers. As was his Game Finder scope for detecting body heat behind walls. Tyree’s Cherokee was also designed with special features, one of which kept his equipment from prying eyes. And just as well. No need to panic the populace. Yet.

Emil sighed and gave up his covert peeking without resorting to the rudeness of trying to pry info from Tyree. Tyree liked him for that sigh; it revealed an easygoing nature. Tyree liked laid-back attitudes. They worked so much better for him when he was on a job.

Soot-blackened buildings dotted both sides of the street, reminders of the town’s coal-mining history. Edna’s Gift Shop leaned, bricks crumbling, against the timbered stones of Willem’s Pizza, which looked sturdy. The tall-pillared, red brick U.S. Post Office, which despite its height was about as wide as a cubicle, shared a wall with Mick’s rakish wood-paneled Railroader’s Pub. Across the road, Janna’s Coal Miner’s Daughter Clothing Boutique had been a similar wooden shack before being amateurishly slathered with a coating of infelicitous yellow stucco now flaking into a blotchy mess. A cracked cement sidewalk fronted these places of business, tilting along with the fortunes of those who’d hung on through both good and bad years.

“Where ya from?” asked Emil.

“Chicago,” murmured Tyree absently, studying the town. “Tourist trade the big industry here?” he asked his new friend Emil.

“Only industry, now the coal’s played out.” Emil tossed a hand to direct Tyree’s gaze down the length of the street. “They do what they can to brighten up the storefronts.” Emil shook his head sadly. “Order stuff from Sears catalogues or haul fancy goods in from Richmond or from Charleston, our capital, and then tell people it’s local handicraft. That’s big here, handicrafts. Not to criticize.”

Tyree nodded.

Elaborate Victorian wood lace and railings festooned porches that hadn’t worn such finery since their birth at the turn of the century. Log cabin-style benches had been sprinkled about, nestled near cedar tubs that Tyree guessed normally overflowed with pansies or geraniums or whatever grew here in cooler weather. He was no gardener, either. Flowers, in his experience, were just bright things hung in great lush balls from light poles lining Lake Shore Drive or the Miracle Mile. The tubs here were barren, filled only with tangles of sun-roasted brown moss. The stables near some derelict railroad tracks had been transformed into a hardware store, but the owner had scattered old horse tack and hay bales around to contribute to the desirable “charm.”

Suddenly Emil volunteered, “Talk’s going around about making a public park on the east end, just afore you get to the hotel grounds. Everybody hopes Miz Doree Zendall will donate her family’s Civil War iron cannons and cannonballs, now she’s widowed and no kids. Three generations of her husband’s family owned ’em. What good’re they to Doree? They’d make a center of interest for the park. Half rust, but still, it’s history. Lotta history here. And that’s genuine!”

Tyree nodded, tiring of his new friend. He checked the revolving numbers on the pump. He breathed deeply for patience and prepared to ask if there was a place to stay here other than the hotel, but Emil jumped in again.

“That woman! City council tried to bribe her with a white-painted gazebo, her name on it on a brass plaque. Only Doree’s cannons and the street lamps on Main Street here are for real; ever’thing else is like I said, from a Sears catalogue or hauled in. But Doree thinks her cannons ought to fetch her more ’n’ a plaque.”

Tyree jumped in as Emil took a breath. “You know a place I could stay? That hotel of yours is too rich for my wallet.”

Emil shrugged a bony shoulder. “We gots a couple В and Bs, if you don’t mind sharing bathrooms.”

Tyree frowned. He did mind. “No.”

“Oh, wait now. Doree’s place is huge. One of the rooms she rents gots its own bath. I’m sure it’s empty. Hell, whole damn town’s empty lately. Except she talks a lot, if you can stand it. Whal’d you say you here for?”

Tyree understood and didn’t hold it against the little man. Curiosity was a tough urge to control. “Vacation. No hunting yet, right?”

“Out of season right now.”

“Good. I don’t care for shooting.” It was true. He didn’t. “I’ll need directions.”

Tyree got the directions, climbed back into his Cherokee, and devoutly wished for a soft bed. If Rushing River aimed for historical accuracy, then the bed should sport a feather mattress. Of course, the blacks all slept out back in those historical days, too. He hoped Ms. Doree Zendall would be greedy enough to see his color as green, as Emil had.

He rolled slowly down the street, still taking in the sights, noticing a few side roads, unpaved paths, really, not visible from Emil’s station. He also noted a small, slightly built old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a store. Suddenly the man looked straight at Tyree, shouted, “Ho! What’s up?” Tyree looked again, taken aback. The man hastily ducked inside the Little Bear Market’s screen door, banging his broom on the stone steps as he dragged it in behind him.

Later. First get a place to park his car and his aching body.

Ms. Doree Zendall’s tiny raisin eyes narrowed, taking a long, silent moment to catalog the price of his black tee belted neatly within his black silk-and-linen-blend slacks, and the subtly expensive sleek black sneakers. Tyree congratulated himself for leaving behind his gold chain, bracelet, ear stud, and rings; he didn’t like to fit into a cliché of a typical big city black. The word hood usually attached itself to the end of that description. Now he was gold-free, and his watch stainless steel, although it included a few features he doubted Ms. Zendall would understand. Finally, she nodded. She tucked a stray strand of coarse hair into the ratty gray ball that rested on the roll of fat behind her neck and led the way to his new home for the next few days. As she hauled herself up the stairs, she began a rambling stream-of-consciousness monologue that Tyree listened to carefully in case he could use any of the info.

She was short and very heavy, a fireplug of a woman. Huffs appeared between her words as she struggled to talk and climb stairs simultaneously. Emil had it right, Tyree thought. Her house was massive and empty. The winding stair seemed endless. Her face reddened until sweat coursed down her round cheeks to plop like rain on her heaving bosom. When they finally gained the top landing of the wide, curving stairs, painted white but carpeted thickly in plush deep maroon, she abruptly finished with, “Breakfast is extra, how do you like your eggs?” The sudden cessation of sound as she waited for his answer woke Tyree from the mesmerizing flow of words. He’d almost fallen asleep on the stairway behind her.

He blinked, then registered the question. “Four eggs, easy over medium. You got whole wheat toast?”

“Muffins are better.”

“Toast,” he said firmly. “Whole wheat. No butter. And fresh juice?”

“Well sure, fresh!” she bristled. “Seven sharp.”

Tyree nodded, then handed her the agreed in-advance fee in cash. One shrewd glance at the interior of his wallet, and she wheeled smartly to leave him standing before the open door of a room more appropriate for a debutante than Tyree Garcia. The bed was a double, with an overlarge white lace coverlet that drifted to the varnished wood floor all around, the corners puddled like piles of snowflakes. It felt scratchy to his skin. He bundled it onto an overstuffed boudoir chair and dropped onto the crisp sheets, careful to let his feet hang off the side, too tired to remove his sneakers. The two corner windows were open, but no breeze stirred the sheer white curtains to cool the stagnant air.

The next hour passed in a luxurious haze of drifting between sleep and a blissful physical consciousness of the soft mattress cradling his weary body. When his conscience demanded he pull himself erect to get to work, it was a wrench. He wasn’t here to laze away the day after driving eighteen straight hours, racing newspaper or TV reports that might complicate his errand.

An early dinner, he decided. Coffee with sugar for the jolt, although he rarely drank coffee. Then get to it.

With little trouble he found a diner, the only source of food within sight, which helped narrow his choice, slid into the red plastic-covered bench seat, and just avoided propping his elbows in a pool of syrup left by a former customer. A battered window AC unit manfully refrigerated the air, although it hampered conversation with its metallic death rattles. Tyree basked in the chill.

After an agonizing attempt to swallow the larded slab of meatloaf floating in a lake of ketchup, he gave it up and asked for the freshest pic in the place. The waitress, a moon-faced teen, studied him like a science specimen, then brought him a large plate of banana cream pic. It was fresh, fragrant, and tasted like heaven. He got a second piece, making a mental note to ask for her recommendations if his job lasted long enough to force him to eat here again, swilled down the burnt coffee, and left her a 50 percent tip.

He strolled back toward the main part of town, suddenly aware that he, like the others he’d watched, was walking down the middle of the dirt-covered asphalt. After a small laugh at himself, he focused on looking for more conversationalists like Emil and Ms. Zendall. A small group had gathered in front of Edna’s Gift Shop, so he shifted his direction to end up there, but he moved slowly.

Give them all a chance to look him over, take in the details, like Ms. Zendall. He hoped his color would again be judged green. Helped a hell of a lot.

Again a good omen: Emil was there, holding court, telling the saga of Tyree’s arrival. Tyree stepped up on the sidewalk and smiled warmly at Emil, nodded hello. Bristling with pride. Emil greeted Tyree like a cousin, made introductions. Told his name and that he had come from Chicago, and didn’t have any interest in hunting. Just liked the peace of the area, “That right, Tyree?” he asked. Tyree nodded.

The nervous sidewalk sweeper was there, head bobbing. Again he declared in a booming voice, “Ho, what’s up!” then shyly backed away, tangling his broom between his own legs, nearly falling. His head hung as if ashamed of himself.

Emil said, “That’s Frankie. Says that to everybody. Sweeps sidewalks for the town. Gotta do something. ’Sides, it’s awful dusty this time o’ year. Good thing to do.”

Tyree nodded. Close up, he could see that Frankie was much younger than his wizened features indicated. An impaired young man who looked sixty. “Good job, Frankie,” he said. He held out his hand to him. Frankie went totally still. Despite his lowered head, his eyes went up to Tyree’s, holding there for a second. Then he grasped Tyree’s hand and squeezed, grinning. “Hey!” he said.

“Hey,” Tyree answered. Frankie’s hand was bony and fragile, with skin like leather. Then Emil introduced him to an older woman, nearly as fat as Ms. Zendall but taller. “This is Mrs. Barstow. Lisle. And her beautiful Wendy-girl. Wendy married Rudy Stern a whiles back. Rudy’s on late duty today. At the hotel,” he confided. “Desk clerk. Good future!”

Tyree nodded, smiling. “Congratulations,” he said. The girl could not possibly be older than seventeen or eighteen and looked many months pregnant, although Tyree was careful not to mention this in case he was wrong. The women he’d met so far in this town had a tendency to corpulence, and he couldn’t afford to offend quite yet.

He turned to the girl’s mother and tipped his head. “You couldn’t possibly be old enough to be this young lady’s mother!” An oldie but goodie, he sighed to himself. Women. But to his surprise, Mrs. Barstow didn’t do the normal simper and denial that usually followed the compliment. She just gazed at him with a puzzled look on her face.

She blurted. “You rent that car? Don’t look like no rental. Rentals don’t normally black out their windows like that. But it’s got a West Virginia plate on it.”

Tyree nodded. “Yeah, I thought that odd myself, the dark windows. But I’m fond of vans. Roomy. I’m a big guy, long legs.” He shrugged at the mysteries of rental car companies, put an earnest but puzzled expression on his face. But Mrs. Barstow’s eyes chilled as she took in his explanation, studied his face. Calculating. Shit, he thought. He habitually changed the plates every time he crossed slate lines to stay inconspicuous, but weariness had led him to reveal to the town crier, Emil, that he’d come from Chicago. Might as well’ve put a blue chicken on the roof for Mrs. Barstow to point out.

“You drive here from the airport?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Which one?”

“Well, hell, Lisle. Give the man a vacation, will ya?” Emil rescued Tyree, who silently blessed the man. “Obviously he drove in from the capital. Look at the dust on the thing.”

“He could’ve flown in to the Greenville airport,” she said defensively. “It’s closer. And lotsa straight flights come there from big cities, ’cause of the hotel.”

“C’mon, Lisle. Then he woulda driv in from the opposite direction. I saw him myself hit town back thataway,” Emil exclaimed in exasperation, pointing toward the Mobil station. “Obviously he came by way of Charleston!”

“Well his car’s so filthy looks like he drove here all the way from Chicago!” she demanded. “And where’s the rental car sticker?”

Tyree rapidly reassessed the intelligence of Rushing River’s population. No detail too small to notice. “They don’t mark rental cars anymore, since the tourist shootings in Florida,” he said, crossing mental fingers that West Virginia had subscribed to that policy, too. He groaned, wondering what else he’d screwed up. Better get in, do it, get out. This is what allowing himself too little sleep got him.

“There now, happy, Lisle?” started Emil, gathering wind to begin a good long rebuke.

“You know what made me think of coming here?” Tyree said to divert attention from his car. “I had a buddy. Moved to this area, around, oh, twenty years ago.”

“Colored like you?” asked Mrs. Barstow innocently.

He distrusted her innocence. “No. White like you,” he said, trying to restrain his annoyance.

“What’s his name? You been in touch, know where he lives exactly?”

“Not exactly.”

She tilted her head, looking up at him with opaque pale eyes, same color as a blued gun barrel, he thought. She continued, full of attitude: “But twenty years pass, you think, hell, he probably hasn’t moved in all those years. I’ll just look up my old buddy an see how the fish’er jumpin’, is that it? What’s his name? You didn’t say.”

“Jeeze, Lisle. What’s your britches in a hitch for?” asked Emil plaintively.

Yeah, Lisle, Tyree asked himself, his interest in her sharpening with each passing second. “My friend’s mother died. And he didn’t come to the funeral, her only child. Didn’t seem natural. Wonderful woman, awfully good to me over the years, and she mentioned he was still here shortly before she died. That’s what brought me. I’d been working hard, had some time off coming to me. Thought, well, I’d see what was up with him and get some R and R same time.” Don’t explain so much, he reminded himself. Too much detail could trap a man like a web of steel. He shrugged. “No big deal if he’s not here anymore.” He gazed around the green mountains surrounding the dusty town and said, “Beautiful,” his voice quiet with appreciation. Sunset had begun, streaks of brilliant coral and mauve tinting the rows of small shops and even his new friends’ faces a reddish gold. He figured the time to be about eight or eight-thirty. Darkness might not come until nine-thirty or after, this late in the summer. He sighed inwardly. He was tired, but no rest waited for him tonight.

“Whatcha do for a livin’, Mr. Tyree?” asked a new voice softly. “In Chicago?”

He looked down at the area near his right elbow. A pixie stood there in baggy overalls, yellow work boots, and a white sleeveless man’s ribbed undershirt.

“Hey, Tyree, this’s one o’ our Master Wilderness Guides. Miss Amy Bearclaw.” Emil’s voice lifted with pride.

The dusky-skinned pixie smiled, but like Mrs. Lisle Barstow, her greenish eyes had a metallic glint. With the experience of a lifetime of observation, he saw she was the product of some sort of mixed marriage. Bearclaw? Sounded Indian. Her dark hair was cut like a boy’s, and she obviously ignored makeup, but nothing could make this little woman look like a boy.

“Master Wilderness Guide?” he repeated.

She nodded. “My pa and I have an exclusive contract with Pinebrook, because we’re the best. And the hotel believes in maintaining the highest standards.”

Obviously she had no objection to self-promotion, thought Tyree, amused. “Do you ever take on outsiders, people not guests at the resort? I wouldn’t mind a tour of a mountain or two. Maybe a river ride.”

Her eyelashes lowered to half-mast as she considered him. “Your city ways shine through you like a lamp, although you’d be good in a light, I’d bet.”

“It’s been said,” he agreed, wondering why she didn’t talk as much like a hick as the others in the group. “Fights happen in a city. In the country, too?”

She ignored this query, her expression labeling it stupid, as it was, he admitted to himself, and asked him if he’d had his dinner.

“At the diner,” said Mrs. Barstow. He looked at her. “I saw you in the window,” she said, shrugging.

“The pie was fantastic,” he said.

“That was the banana cream, right?” asked Emil with authority.

Tyree nodded, beginning to feel hemmed in.

The pixie said, “My mom made it. She bakes for the hotel, too. And grows vegetables so they can offer organic dishes. You couldn’ta liked anything else there, though. Somebody big as you needs to eat. Want to come home with me for dinner?”

Dazed, Tyree threw all plans to the wind and just nodded yes. The pixie wheeled to tromp down the middle of the street. Automatically, he hastened to follow. She would’ve made a natural military drill sergeant, was his first thought. It took a stunned second before he remembered his manners and turned to wave good-bye to Emil and the others. Frankie boomed out. “Ho, what’s up?” but also waved good-bye. Mrs. Barstow just turned and strode away, pulling her daughter along by her plump arm as if otherwise the girl might run off. To Tyree’s amusement, all moved to the middle of the deserted street before taking to their individual directions.

Dinner took on dimensions he hadn’t expected, but by now he’d learned not to let anything surprise him. This place was too far beyond his experience.

Mrs. Bearclaw was a beautiful woman, slender and graceful and tall, her hair silky and pale and twisted back out of her face. And she was blind. Probably not completely, he judged, Legally blind. Although he’d offered to help, at Amy’s command he instead sat quietly on a small painted wooden chair in the kitchen and watched as Mrs. Bearclaw kept track of several operations going on simultaneously on a modern commercial stove with three ovens that took up at least half the space in the kitchen. The smells seductively drove away all memory of the diner’s meatloaf. As if drawn home by the aromas, Mr. Bearclaw soon arrived, a small lanky man with ropy muscles, obviously Amy’s father and the source of her miniature dusky version of her mother’s beauty. They shook hands, and he was invited to call Amy’s father David, her mother Lydia. When the food finally reached the table, Amy nodded he could start eating.

He tried to restrain himself, knowing a belly too full of food would work against him that night, but Lydia Bearclaw’s talents overcame him. When he finally sat back with a sated sigh, Lydia spoke. In a cultured East Coast voice, she asked who he was after.

Tyree lowered his head and shook it. “Is every person in this Hollow psychic?”

Amy tilted back on the hind two legs of her wooden chair, thumbs hooked in her overalls pockets. She grinned. “You think we’re so danged dumb we ain’t never ran up against bounty hunters before?”

“Don’t say ain’t,” reproved her mother.

Amy ignored her. “Look around. Are we overflowing with cops, DEA? Feds? We got no sheriff, even. Half the world has tried to hide here: Colombian drug dealers, punks from Atlanta, kneecap men from New Orleans. I mean, we’re so nowheres, we’re ripe for disappearances — or so these types think before they get to know the locals. Besides, it’s pretty here. People like it.”

Tyree stared at her.

As if patiently explaining the obvious to a halfwit, Amy finished, “You saw our town’s population numbers if you was at the Mobil. You know how in each other’s pockets neighbors get in a place this size? Nothin’ else to do.” She held up her hands as if to say, Well duh!

She finished, “So who you after?”

He stared at her father, who just shrugged, then her mother. Lydia sat quietly, sipping her coffee.

Tyree squirmed, which is what he suspected Amy had intended him to do. “What’s with the jump in population, then? From 112 to 427 in the last year. Or did I read it wrong?”

David Bearclaw nodded, his mouth screwed tight as if suppressing anger. “You read right. The hotel. Sells plots now, fancy houses all squashed together like fleas, in sections tucked between the three golf courses they got. Word is they’re building another golf course just for the residents. Pools, all that.”

Tyree asked, “Vacation homes or permanent?”

David eyed him. “What’s the difference?”

“Permanent means schools,” said Tyree. “Post offices, restaurants, sewers, service roads. And eventually some type of industry to employ them. Lotta extras come with permanent residents. Money for the Hollow, though.” He lifted an eyebrow in question.

David shook his head. “Don’t need, don’t want that kind of prosperity.”

Tyree frowned. “You got no police at all?”

Amy grinned. “Didn’t say that. We got Kizzy.”

David said quietly, “My mother. One of the remaining full-blooded Cherokees from the Trail of Tears. Descended from those who hid so the soldiers missed them in the roundup.”

Tyree considered. “Didn’t I read that about a third of the Indians force-marched to the reservations out West died on the trail?”

David nodded, looked aside.

Amy grunted. “That’s why the name, Trail of Tears.”

Tyree folded his arms, said to David, “So your ma, Amy’s grandma, is the law here?”

Lydia smiled.

Amy grinned. “She’s a Wise Woman. She sees and knows it all. Nobody can get away with a dang thing. She nails somebody, they’re nailed for good. Who needs a pushy cop shooting up innocent bystanders? She’s teaching me to take her place someday. She can’t die until I take over from her.”

Tyree slid his eyes sideways to examine the half-pint-size girl so smug, so big for such a pixie. Tried to keep the flummoxed look off his face. He finally sighed. “I believe you. You asked about my mark: Don’t know his name. I know what used to be his name. Edgar Fallon.”

Silence.

“What’d he do?” rumbled David Bearclaw at last. “In Chicago, was it?”

“Oh, Dad. Drugs and heatin’ up women, you can guess that much.”

Tyree lilted his hands. “Holy shit. You sure Captain Sabinski didn’t just mail you the guy’s jacket?”

Lydia Bearclaw smiled. “It’s hard to get used to, I know. Like jungle drums. Kizzy is a... a natural force, like a tornado. Amy, too. She’s just not as disciplined or schooled. Yet.”

“And where’d you come from?” Tyree asked. “The Upper East Side of Manhattan?”

“Very good,” she said, still smiling.

He thought a minute. “So you were running, too, when you got here. From what?” He studied her, brow furrowed in thought. “Were you blind before you got here? From birth? Or from—”

“Not nice, Mr. Tyree,” said Lydia Bearclaw. “Mind your manners. I know you have some. And I know you’re used to minding them, because you’ve restrained yourself amazingly ever since you arrived in Rushing River.”

Tyree nodded. “You read me right. Sorry, ma’am. Sir,” he said to her husband, who just faintly smiled and shrugged. Not a talker, thought Tyree.

“So now what?” he said, more to himself than to his hosts.

“Tell us the whole thing,” insisted Amy. “I don’t get the twenty years ago part.”

Tyree looked at her ruefully. “Twenty-four years ago, to be exact. This kid lied about his age — he was seventeen then — so he could marry a twenty-year-old dumb Polack girl in Chicago. He’d knocked — he’d gotten her pregnant. Too innocent, no family. A pretty blonde. So she works hard in a local diner while he’s supposedly driving a cab, and she thinks they’re socking away every penny so they can escape the projects with their baby, but he’s depositing it all into his veins. But she trusts him. The sweet little girl has her beautiful baby boy, goes right back to work. He switches to nights to watch the kid during the day. Next thing she knows, stuff starts missing from the apartment. See, his addiction’s growing beyond their joint income. So she reports the thefts to the precinct, but they’re all petty. I mean, what do they have to steal? The local beat cop, after one look at the husband, guesses the truth, tries to tell her, but she won’t listen. Until one day she catches hubby snitching her paycheck from her purse. Big fight, lots of screaming, and then silence. Some hours pass, but the silence bothers one neighbor who really cares about the poor girl, who finally decides to check on her. He pushes open the door, finds the girl in the kitchen, bloody and out cold on the floor next to her baby. Baby’s head is smashed flat on one side. The woman’s physically OK. The blood is all the baby’s.”

“Jesus wept,” murmured David Bearclaw.

“The cops went for the husband at his place of work, found out he’d been fired a few weeks before. His former dispatcher confirmed Eddie was supporting a monster habit and unable to hold a job. He had to be getting desperate for cash. Dealers don’t extend credit.” His mouth twisted wryly. “Cops figured, with nerves raggedy from too long off the juice, his wife catching him in his theft — screaming wife, screaming baby — he popped. Then either he slam-dunked the child to shut it up, an accidental murder, or he just flat murdered it. Luckily a chop to his wife’s head knocked her cold, or the cops figured she’d be dead, too. No Eddie. And when she woke up, she’d lost herself. Catatonic.”

Mrs. Bearclaw asked gently, “That makes it twenty-three years ago, then. So why are you here? And why now?”

“Because after twenty-three years of institutionalization, therapy, and whatever they do to help poor souls like that sweet girl — woman now — she regained her mind and memory. The doctors say she not only recovered, although still frail, but can be believed. And she told what happened. The cops had the story nailed pretty much correctly.”

“But you’re no cop,” said Amy. “Doesn’t sound like there’s a bounty on the guy. Why are you here?”

Tyree sighed. “’Cause I had the misfortune of going through elementary, then junior high, then high school with a good buddy who’s now Captain Lee Sabinski of Homicide in Chicago. And over the years, he’s kept track of our running balance of favors. I owe him big right now, and bounty hunters don’t suffer from a need for search warrants, extradition paperwork, and that stuff.” He looked Amy in the eye, man to man, so to speak. His sharp cheekbones bunched up into his own grin. “Plus, I’m good at my job. The cops had nothing then, and Sabinski’s men found the same nothing now. They aren’t even sure he ever left Illinois. But I work with a rather special computer information expert — a genius in his own way. Probably should meet your Grandma Kizzy. He decided to start with Eddie’s car. Even if he ditched it fast, in that first flight away from his own house, we figure he used his own car. In the projects, he was one of the few who had a car.

“So my man patiently traced from car to car to car, all but a few of them stolen, natch, but the ones that he didn’t steal: he changed his name just a little with each transaction. And two patterns emerged: a trail that never went beyond West Virginia, and a name that by now we figure might somewhat resemble Roy Barso.”

Amy settled her chair back down on all four of its feet and gazed levelly at her father. Her father shook his head, then stood to take the used dishes from the table to the sink.

Tyree jumped to his feet, grabbed his dirty dishes. Lydia patted the air. “Never mind, Tyree. Amy, better lead Mr. Tyree back to his car.”

“If it’s still there,” Amy agreed. David nodded and started squirting dish soap in a large metal sink.

“Better run on,” David said, taking the dishes Tyree held.

“What?” said Tyree.

“C’mon,” said Amy. “Gotta chore to help you with, then you can bed down in comfort until tomorrow.”

“No, not tomorrow. Tonight. Sabinski and I both know the newspapers’re onto this. We have to nail him before he’s warned. He could run again and be smarter about it by now.”

Lydia shrugged, her back turned to him.

Tyree let out the breath he’d been holding, and a puzzled anger started to rise. Amy grabbed his large hand and tugged. “C’mon, we might be too late as it is.”

Tyree went.

When they reached the car, pulled into the deep shadow beneath a golden rain tree. Amy chided, “You parked under a rain tree? You’ve got crap all over your car from the tree droppings now. Worse than sitting under a caged polecat.”

She was right. Yellowish green bits covered his black car all over. “I bet your mom wouldn’t like you to say crap.”

“I know. I do my best around her.”

Tyree felt like saying worse than crap as he tried to brush the sticky yellow stuff off and it only rolled in the dust already coating his Cherokee.

“There.” She pointed at the back window of his car. Or actually, at the black hole where the window had been. He didn’t need his key to open the door. Swearing fluently but as quietly as possible under his breath to keep from corrupting his accomplice, he stuck his head inside the Cherokee to view — nothing.

He swung in fury to face Amy. “You knew!”

Amy shrugged, absolutely unintimidated. “Guessed. Might as well go on in and get a night’s sleep.”

He glared at the pixie, his eyes slits. Then he relaxed. “Good advice. See you in the morning.” He wheeled and strode his way up the broad white stairs to Ms. Doree’s back door. Finding it unlocked, he let himself in. As soon as he reached his room, he turned on the light, moved around here and there, sure Amy must still be down there watching, then extinguished the light. He rolled around on the bed for a few seconds, pulling back the covers, ruffling the sheets. For an instant, his body sank into fatigue like a warm bath, but he didn’t allow himself to stay there. He rolled sideways off the bed, crawled to the window, looked down. No sign of Amy. He couldn’t even see his car in the darkness, and he noticed the moon cast hardly any shadow. A good night for hunting. A frail sliver of moon slid from behind a cloud, confirming his assessment. He sat down and thought. Hunt with what? He held up his hands. Well-trained weapons. He preferred them to guns anyway. He hadn’t lost everything after all.

He let his back rest against the wall under the window. An hour’s rest. Sitting up. He didn’t trust the soft bed he longed for. One hour. Then go.

The hour passed, he lunged to his feet, did a few limbering stretches, then like a black cat crept down the stairs to let himself out the back door. It still wasn’t locked, at which he tsked, until he remembered he was in the land of Kizzy and Amy.

He took the side paths one by one, figuring that with many of the four hundred population tucked cozily up by the hotel, he could scan from house to house for a forty-year-old man without it taking all night. He had a detail he hadn’t shared with Amy. The man had a tattoo of a knife etched onto the back of his left hand. A jailhouse tattoo, which meant it was blue and homemade fuzzy, probably nearly invisible after so many years. The point of the knife aimed at the fugitive’s left middle finger, recording a knifing he’d done in Juvenile many years ago, his way of refusing a jailhouse romance. A matter of pride for a punk kid, to have killed an enemy and gotten away with it. For no proof had ever pointed to Edgar Fallon except that he’d never shown up in the clinic with a torn-up ass, and then the sudden appearance of the tattoo. Health and a tattoo were proof of nothing in court, although crystal-clear evidence inside. And Edgar was left-handed.

Keeping his head down and low, wishing fervently for his monocular night vision headgear and the Game Finder scope, he made do with his own eyes and crept through the Hollow. At both cabins and houses, going slow, he found that the Hollow residents had an uncommon love for dogs. One cabin even had pigs roaming free. He’d read that pigs were smarter and even more vicious than dogs, so he skirted this place nervously. Finally, the sky lightened and made his stealth ineffective. Not having gotten even close to one cabin, one bedroom window, or one man of the right age, he turned to creep home, then said, “Fuck it,” and straightening himself, scuffed like a native directly down the middle of the street.

In his room, he threw himself onto the soft bed and totally disgusted, fell into an intense, dreamless sleep. As the sun moved high enough to enter his window, he woke long enough to remember breakfast, then fell asleep again.

In the early evening he finally came to. His dusty sweat had dirtied the sheets, a detail he knew would anger the formidable Ms. Doree Zendall. He peeled himself off the hot bed and climbed naked into the curvy tub with legs and a shower nozzle like a sunflower. The shower curtain, a daisy-covered film of plastic, glued itself to his thighs as he stood in the hot downflow of water. Washing away his sins, he thought to himself with a snort. His stupidity in thinking all people were the same, all methods would work the same everywhere. He should’ve farmed out this chore to a fellow skip tracer from a nearby area, one used to country ways.

He put on clean clothes and descended the stairs. Ms. Zendall stood waiting, a stony expression on her flushed face as she watched him descend. He felt like he was approaching doom, not a landlady. He wondered if the glistening coat of sweat on her brow was from the heat or anger at him for missing breakfast.

“I’ll pay for—” he started, but she chopped off his words with a jab of a fat hand.

“Ms. Bearclaw is waiting to talk to you. Her and Amy.” She wheeled and marched away, her errand fulfilled.

Eyebrows high, Tyree whistled away the ghosts of last night’s failure as he strode easily down the middle of the road again, aimed for the path to the Bearclaw home.

Again seated in the kitchen, Tyree waited. Amy clearly had some things to say. Eyeing him with amusement, Amy asked, “Any luck last night?”

“You know the answer to that.”

She tapped her foot on the linoleum floor. “Ready to meet Kizzy now?”

He thought about it. “Whyn’t you offer this meeting last night?”

“’Cause you weren’t in any mind to listen to anybody. You knew what you wanted, and what you wanted was no interference. Now. Ready to meet Kizzy?”

He sighed. “Sure.”

In minutes he found himself climbing a hill along a path he doubled he’d have found without Amy’s guidance. A small, square cabin sat up high, tucked among the treetops and wedged into the hillside. With no knock, Amy opened the screen door and waved him through. The front door was in direct line with a back screen door, and as a result, a slight breeze cooled the small house, and the air felt pleasant to his baked skin. Amy pointed to a scoop-shaped bench of a sofa, padded with patterned Indian blankets, so he sat. The blankets smelled of sweet chamomile.

An old woman of an age he couldn’t guess, using a stick to lean on, was ushered into the room by Amy and helped to lower herself into a rocking chair padded so thickly it looked like a catcher’s mitt. Her balding head was outlined against the sun coming through the back door, and her hair looked like wiry fuzz in shadow. He stood to be polite, but she patted the air, motioning him to sit down.

“I’m Kizzy, hon. Amy’s told me about you and said she told you about me, so that starts us both off square.”

Tyree blinked. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Amy told you to rest yourself last night; you shoulda taken her advice. But you didn’t.”

“Ah, no ma’am.”

“Wasted yourself, din’tcha, son.”

Tyree settled back into the sofa with a sigh.

“I understand your feelings,” Kizzy said. “Now fill me in about this boy you’re after.”

Tyree told her all he knew. And this time included the tattoo and the left-handedness.

Amy frowned. “You held back on me.”

Tyree shrugged. “Sorry.”

Kizzy tapped her stick on the floor twice, turned to Amy, said. “Fetch ’im, hon. Hurry up afore he takes off.”

Amy said, “I kept watch on Elroy all night. He’s still here, but not much longer.”

Kizzy nodded and waved Amy away. “So run, then.” Amy darted for the door and was soon out of sight.

“You tellin’ me this little girl is going to fetch my perpetrator to me while I sit here?”

“Rather be bit by a pig?”

Tyree shut his mouth, shifted his broad shoulders within his T-shirt.

Kizzy smiled.

Jeffrey Robert Bowman was born in 1979 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. After attending Tufts University for three years, he graduated with a B.A. in literature and history. Currently, he divides his time between the United States and South America, where he works as a freelance writer and English teacher.

“Stonewalls” has remained a favorite of mine ever since I first conceived of the idea ages ago. While I do not consider the story a classic mystery story in the tradition of Chesterton or Doyle, there is a certain element to the lone I associate with my having read far too much Poe in too short a period of time. Poe was, to a great degree, the creator of the mystery genre, and it is his influence to which I am indebted for “Stonewalls.”