#stories

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Three men in a tub, that was no blaze of glory, or none like Deuce foresaw. Yet there he stood, he and two longtime friends, in a clawfoot huddle downwind of a trigger pull. Finicky mise-en-scène, so he dreamt up a bright side and fast. No bath drawn so no soggy loafers, nor any splashes to wreck a nice crisp pleat. There—big plus. Juvie’s rayon blacktie was beyond the pale and wrinkle alike—if bloodied up—and Lester was in the shop coveralls he always wore except on church Sundays. But Deuce’s getup—worsted check with charmeuse silk in the warp—keeping that string in tune took an ear.

“Don’t worry, Deuce,” said the comedienne. “You won’t get that wet for now.” Atop all else, an extrasensory broad—terrific. Or she had caught his glances down to the two-button wonderland from her kraut thirty-two. Not a lot of iron but plug enough for three mere mortals. He took it for kraut but had never seen a piece quite like it. The slim build and cylinder screwed in for a less cocksure gunshot were downright aero.

“What’s the dizzy dame mean for now?” Juvie asked. The nosebleed from the head kick had got him adenoidal, and the black of his blacktie hid a pointillistic bib of red.

Lester spoke first and loud. “She mean blood you big dumb polack.”

“Who you calling polack, Jim? I’m bleeding here already.”

“A quarter pint down, maybe, with nine to spare.”

This from the comedienne. So much for bright sides. Yet Deuce knew his part to play, same here in a murder tub as anyplace. “Amigos, come on now! Think of this as our finest hour. And in a four-way diablo a little cool never hurt.” The charms swung back out. “Never mind them, Milady of Winter. It’s a lark—better friends there never were. So can I ask what’s the story here?”

—

The checkers had first gone on, straight out of the tailor’s box and tissue wrap, after a more standard-issue wash at his suite in the ay of em. Deuce always did prefer an early rise. Also, he got up at sunup. How late a night had run was no matter to him, though his two lady guests might disagree. Shirley Jean was dead to the world but Principessa, she’d already put the coal on a Kool, one leg stuck beneath the sweet snoring mess. Poor kid—all tuckered out. He would leave some pep on the table with the cab fare. Two pills would do her. From behind in the floor-length he saw Principessa take a gander. Her updo was a washout but a siren like that could only sing him serenades. “Nice blazer”—in mouth alone, no word spoke aloud—and then she blew the menthol. Blazer—as if it buttoned left. But damn if he didn’t know how that smoke ring felt.

Brylcreemed to a suave luster, racked up sharp and straight, Deuce lit out for the territories. He lived at the Strand, he worked at the Strand, and the horny devil and his two-prong sticker only knew how he played at the Strand, the finest hotel casino on the Strip. But there were other places he had to go. The Sprezzaturas had outside interests, and those within bounds of this latterday oasis were his to tend. The Strand—the expanse of tables, happy crowds day and night, the jinks at the Summit Lounge, where you might catch Frank, Dino, and that mutt with the glass eye and the melter voice—the Strand was Deuce’s Bali Hai, the big beautiful axis mundi on which he swung.

Through the courtyard and past the slots to grandmother’s house we go, with the handshake, smile, and chin-chuck paid thither and yon. That early in the shift it was mostly staff out. Twice a young lovely came up to stop him for a hug and to lay on the sweet crinkly-eyes. Remembrances of things not-so-past, like Proust had said of madeleines. Cookies were a strange choice for a fruit. On that last note a bellhop might have done the meet-and-greet, too, but, for one, there was a difference between flexible and fast, and for two, the q.t. there was maximal—the omerta beyond omerta. Never let an underboss catch any drifts thereto, no siree. Best keep the Jolly Roger down on that whole pirate vessel. Still, Ricky there in regulation pillbox by the grand stair—finook or not, top squire. To win the dimples and the pearly whites Deuce threw a wink.

Out to the curb, where the valet had his ragtop Eldorado ready for the easy two-lane slalom, cherry red with vanilla seats and two fuzzy dice loaded on the rear view. The color scheme was like malted in a glass, and the sunshine on it threw a gleam no less bright and tasty. Deuce Fix—he knew the handle for the jive it was, but therein lay the jingle. Neither part got close to line A on his birth certificate, the name on which could not have been more dello stivale if it came with extra moozadell. But a brand was easy to remember and fun like a thirty-second spot. Keep up the smiles—that was how the mob had broken the demon nag of the Wild West and trotted out the cash receipts, a nonstop pony show. Deuce heard no broadcast better than human joy and would swoop on a frown to adjust the knob as necessary. Yes indeed, dear Watson—come in for the fix.

Dig that sun, the fresh desert air. Top down was the only way to fly. Few were out on the strip so early, and he had the ranks of palms and the big blue beyond all to himself. He could see the drifts and bluffs in the distance past the architecture. Scrub on arid sand, the framework of a prehuman seafloor. The Strip could be a nutty place, but a desert, where Poseidon had lay to die of thirst, that was downright spooks. Nothing had ever lived there in the ghost of forty fathoms, not aside from a thirsty injun and the Gila monster he kept for a commonlaw wife. Pioneer times had left blood on the westing walk—Spanish, Mormon, red man and sundry—and even in the here and now people vanished every day. Some caught sight of nameless things, both up in the sky and scrawled out in the dust. Just an hour’s ride away eggheads were teaming up with dogfaces to test the instant sunrise. Clouds on that spectacle had drawn tourists into Vegas only a few years back, booking out all the higher floors to watch them loom, and sometimes Deuce had felt a rattle in the earth when the distant switch was thrown. But then some weisenheimer saw that gamma rays and alpha particles were not the best of souvenirs. It was goddam crazy, evidence to schemes of a lunatic higher power. Well the hell with the spooks and dead ocean boneyards, and a Gila monster was a bum. Look what the Sprezzaturas hath wrought here in the infernal waste, you injun lizard mooks.

Speaking of made-up names, Colonel Digby received him at the gentlemen’s club. Digby’s chic was whites and a string tie, a fry-free Harland Sanders. He aimed for class—no callout like Dom Merringue in his cream-pink Pontiac, who sat in the Strand at all hours to drop nickels into slots and vie for notice. What’s more, the Colonel’s mob-backed club was a discreet place. There they used every part of the vixen, as ought any thoughtful sous. And where honey traps went it was downright upright, with paneling and leather on the seats, not some habañero donkey show with fly strips playing chandelier. At six-thirty it stood empty and silent—no salivating clientele, no tasty haze, no five-piece jazz skelter with the be bop a dobbily dop bop a loo yeah. The two had a booth, a breakfast Bloody each, and European cigarettes from the Colonel’s golden breast pocket case—nice! But not so for the whorehouse brass, it seemed. “It’s embarrassing,” Digby said. “I know you’re good for a listen—that you are the party in matters of the utmost—but it’s just such a pother.” Southern accent—what a gas. Even if it was inconsistent and the guy behind it hied from Muncie.

“Colonel, don’t be like that! I’m in your corner and Don Casci has the six o’clock. It couldn’t be more peculiar than what we’ve heard six ways to Sunday. You know me. Need a whole steer for a pit in an hour? Come in for the fix. A chimpanzee that tells riddles themed to a banana? Come in for the fix. Army surplus? Live ordnance? Pick-me-ups? Writs of assistance? Letters of marque? Come in for the fix.”

“I am wholly cognizant of your, ah, resourcefulness, dear young sir. And my gratitude is—well. Okay. Okay. I broke it.” Bye-bye fancy voice.

“How now, Brown Cow?”

“I broke it.” Oh, damn—tears. “That’s a thing you can do. You know. When you have an, um, an erection, and you jam—. The doctor says I’ll never—.”

“Colonel, Colonel, baby! Stand up, stand up. Bring it on in.” Hug dealt, he gave a hankie assist and took answers in the form of nod and head shake.“Holy Moses! I didn’t know it would be tragedy. That’s Euripides and Aeschylus rolled into one. My heart’s busted wide. Tell me—who was this quacksalver who spoke the word of doom? Just your regular G.P.? Okay, nice guy I’m sure. Colonel, it seems to me that what you want for is a specialist. And you know what’s going on at the Arrowhead this weekend? A medical convention. Practitioners of physic clear up to your meaty tidbits. You know what they do at conventions—what those august gents get to when nobody is bedazzled by the Ivy League bill of sale and the stethoscope in extra long?” Deuce motioned to the club around them. “Would you look at that! A garden of earthly delights. You didn’t even need my help. You’re the one with infrastructure, am I right? Still, still—Uncle Serge and me, we’re going to rally troops. Get a shutterbug in situ behind a nasty little peephole once we comb the roster. One of those longbeards is going to be an eminent man of dong. And you know what we’re going to make John Thomas M.D.’s priority A-number one? The Lieutenant Colonel and his premature Waterloo. Clear your schedule, O mighty shaman, and hark ye to the village drum—from now on the Colonel will have care like care never was. You are the calendar, front page to cigarette ad in back. Damn straight, sweetheart. Damn straight.”

The waterworks had turned joyful like the knockoff Trevi at the Strand. Selling hopes mattered, even those between the slender and the none. It was the Hebrews who ran the Arrowhead Hotel and Casino, rivals of yore from the Lower East Side, but they could be reasonable as long as you never went and called them names. Also, a brothel baron usually ran hot, but damn, this old yeller was a ramrod!

So the Colonel situation was on the mend, but here came a wet blanket in the form of his girl Friday, Chelsea. Weird sister, and she and the Colonel might even have been related. There was a certain resemblance, the poor man-handed spinster, and moreover a certain deficit where it came to giving even one square damn.

“Phone call,” she said.

The Colonel was mopping up with the hankie. “Take a message.”

“Not you, Geoff.” Worrying enough but she added, “It’s the manager at the Strand.” Some of the misgiving may have shown, because now the Colonel started up again.

—

No matter for an open line, per signal word—that meant not only circumspect but dire. So the morning joyride turned heel and the Eldorado was soon back at reception.

“Early checkout,” Giancarlo said in his office.

Even for that euphemism he had shut the door and said it quietly. As Sidney Falco had put it, the cat was in the bag and the bag was in the river. Except for all the work ahead. No, that was a yowling floater with claws and teeth. Deuce made the sign of the cross. “Okay. On it.” Like Deuce, Giancarlo was a direct report. Neither held the higher ground, and each knew how to show the due and proper. Still, whenever candles were lit up Giancarlo made his wishes. He wanted to be the only big boy at the table. “What’s the urgency? The hotel’s never sewn up this time of year. There will be lots of rooms.”

“It’s the presidential suite”—reading Deuce’s face—“no, not a name, thank God Almighty. Thing is, though, a name is coming. A high roller and a plus one.”

“Who?”

“Dino. You want the plus one?”

No mere five-alarm fire—a goddam holocaust. “Wet?”

“Dry as a hambone at a dog’s dinner. So yeah, uh, dry. But once you clear it we’re replacing the shag and the mattress. There won’t be so much as an eyelash on the floor. It’s Dino and a plus one. Got to get it square.”

“Understood, Gianni. This is all for tactical—best practice. Hit? Lover’s quarrel?”

“No drama I can see. Just some lonely guy in his underwear.”

“Suicide?”

“Maybe, if he did it with a medicine vial. Or a heart attack. Sudden either way—and neat. But an hour ago the desk did get a strange call. It’s how we found out so early, and praises be, because otherwise we’d be good and punked. No answer at the knock.”

Before he took the dash upstairs Deuce went over to the Summit Lounge. The doors were not yet open—hours to go—but Juvie would be in back to place calls and take inventory. And there he was, unshaven, suspenders in a flipflop, eating borsht cold at kitchen prep and going over the cook’s ledger. Juvie was a big rascal. He bent chairs. They had met at nineteen and only now, mid-thirties, was he taking on a convexity where shirttails went into pants. What Juvie had did not wiggle or give. Too bad about the hairline, but that was a crapshoot for anybody in possession of a Y chromosome.

“Hey Deuce.”

“Need you, pal.”

Neither please nor pronto need apply. Up with the bracers and off they went. Ricky held the elevator door with an Our Father and a shoe study. Juvie scared him—and scared any save the very bosomest of friends. Once back in civvies he had gone in on one of those newfangled biker clubs. Hairy guys, and they liked to flaunt trophies from the war—iron crosses, Reichsalers, and whatnot. You could almost mistake them for Wermacht, though they never did cotton to a swastika. After he fell for a cigarette girl in town Deuce had got him the gig. Juvie ran the Summit Lounge and did things on the side. Not much of a stretch—Juvie had gotten in dutch with MPs so often that, mighty centurion or none, he was put on PX duty for the close of Europe. He had not bothered with coat and collar, and soldier’s ink read in peacock triplicate up and down his arms.

“Trix good?” Meaning the wife, a third his size and prized above rubies.

“The tricksiest.” A churchgoing lady for all the pipeweed she slung, and Juvie was a project in the works. She would get him baptized even if he had to drown along the way.

Access took a special key in the panel. The car opened right on the private lounge. There was a conversation pit, a sectional in the round, and a Streamline Moderne–style hearth you could toast a space age heifer in. Behind that was a glassy sweep on all the Strip. Breathtaking, and best at night, but that was not where the sorry business lay.

In so sprawling a pad the master bedroom could only sprawl itself, and Deuce had to do a long walkup with what he now had in sights. The occupant was unremarkable except for the face he wore. A touch of sunburn, all over, no trucker’s tan. Nor brains, nor blood, nor shat britches, just as told. Sight of such unpleasantries was always a turnoff. It would ruin Deuce’s whole afternoon. But the eyes were open wide, and the mouth, and the telephone was still in hand with the ack-ack-ack of please hang up. A guy a little older but more or less like Deuce—maybe less thick of shoulder, more pencil to the neck—and he had died scared like a kid in his underwear. The free hand was at the chest, and the undone gaze could only plead. Sight of a demise was nothing new to a war vet and gangland concierge. But the dead did tend to relax once the dying part was over. Not this poor dope. His map was in a rigor, and not the mortuary kind. Deuce ran through the Ave, Hail Mary to amen.

“No company?” Juvie asked from back near the door.

“Find the ticket, okay?” Meaning the valet stub. Something had Deuce’s hackles up—a dead body was about to move of its own accord, sure, but these hackles came extra. He could not break his stare. The phone—that was the outlier. “After that go through the closets and pack the bags.” Movement of the unliving: such mysteries came with many a rule of thumb. Rooms that slept a lonesome stiff could not be booked out, not until the county swung by for a once-over. So wherever possible these “early checkouts” were relocated first. With respect, though—not fed to a body of water like a rat or a tough guy. Quick, but not careless. If it was a murder scene, the Strand had to let it play out. If other rooms were available, same. If there was a mess left to scrub up, well, win some, lose some, and pay out hazard rates to the cleaning staff. However, if doing so would cause no further grief, guest and flivver would take a spectral jaunt up onto the nearest mesa. Dig that view—of course the sort of vagabond who checked into a Strip hotel solo would want to see the desert city lights. Friends and relatives could take heart in that—a last razzle-dazzle on a peaceful au revoir. The coroner was as venal as any on the public paycheck, not to mention a poky old buzzard who had cattle rustling times in his living memory. Whenever corpus delecti and his one-horse open sleigh were found on the lookout the coro knew which down was up. Monthly gifts smoothed that cowlick for the class portrait—those and the usual promises of tip-for-tap. Same for the patrolmen, same for housekeeping, same for all the teeming whirl we dub the planet Earth.

“Holy cow—the guy’s face!”

“Juvie, please! This is a solemn undertaking.” Juvie gave over the ticket—and the billfold, too. Deuce had a look. “You pull the cash?”

“Aw gee whiz.”

“Kick back a little.” Snap snap, open hand. “Finder’s fee. Twenty per.”

“But I’m the one who found it,” Juvie said, thumbing up the tender.

Deuce read the name on the ID. Ernest Gumtree. Unremarkable once again, though fake-fake with an underscore. It was a Nevada driver’s license. That also meant little—nobody but nobody came from the sagebrush state. But tucked behind there was another card, this one utilitarian in a way that spoke of mortal peril.

“I’ll go fetch up the ride. Tell Les what’s coming. I have to swing the desk.” Coming back down the chute Deuce puzzled at it. Federal government ID, with a Special Access Clearance number typed on. And it began with a Q. That alphanumeric meant a guy inside and deep. “Hiya, Florimel. You were on this morning, right? Mind my gentle probe?” Deuce took the front desk clerk aside. He could tell from the look beneath the look that she knew what was up. “You okay? Need a breather?”

“I’ll be fine, Deucie. This is about the phone call?” No prompt needed. “He sounded all mixed up—Mr. Gumtree. He might have had a fever. His voice, it shook like that. He was slurring, but not like he was liquored up or nothing.”

“What did he say to you?”

“I couldn’t make out the most—something about what they’re doing out there. His words, not mine—‘They don’t know what they’re doing out there.’ What what, there, and who I couldn’t tell you.” Looking past him she put her voice low. “That redhead across the lobby is staring at us—no, at you.”

Deuce took a study. Sure enough, in repose there on the tuffet, no curds or whey in sight, a rouge femme petite. She wore a green dress and black lenses in a wireframe, tight and round and not at all the current style, and sat in a reception area chair, morning newsprint in a careless splay. She did not look away from him—not shy at all, no hint of caution—but gave a smirk, one eyebrow high, before the paper went back up. Deuce turned back. “Just the checkerboard here, I guess—draws an eye. When you dress up like the finish you let the crowd call the race.”

“What? It is a nice blazer, Deucie.”

Heaven forfend, sister-wife. “Anything else you remember?”

“Nothing that made much sense. I think I heard, ‘The cloud shaper.’ Something like that. But then it was just—he started to cry. I told Giancarlo right away. Poor man.”

“Thanks a million, Florimel.” A front pocket coughed up some blackjack clay. “Get thee to a day spa, all right? You’re a doll.” Steak and flowers later. Maybe a spin on the merry-go-round. Seesaw would be more apt, he supposed. The register gave up the license plate. Gumtree’s cursive shook on the rule but was legible. Before he went out for more alphanumerics—these far more ordinary—he stopped in with Giancarlo. Findings first—the federale ID in particular—and then he took the counterargument.

“Dino.”

The valet asked no questions of the Gumtree stub. Left side, nod alone, that was all. Good man. The lot fronted the Strip and had breadth, and Deuce walked opposite each row to make the plate check a bit less conspicuous. Make and model had been listed, too—standard deal for a hotel register—but that did not much narrow it down. Half the cars were a Chevy Bel Air in the selfsame shade of cornpone. Hackles all the while—like he was being watched. Once he had the car—same blah inside as out, seats empty—he fired up the engine. And he felt a rock of impact. The mirror showed him the offender at right rear taillight—this car of a factory design he had never seen before. No tailfins to it—no features at all, really, not even a coat of paint on what looked like nude aluminum. Unbroken curves made it resemble a slipper. European maybe. Deuce got out angry—or made an angry face for a bit of leverage—until he saw the redhead again, stepping out of the driver’s seat with a green handbag to match the dress.

“Drat it, Missus—are you okay?”

“Wasn’t I the one to run into you? And hard?” She had put a smirk up again. The fun had never quit for her, nor the oddball sunglasses, worn both indoors and out.

“That’s on me, from the mea to the culpa. My attention fell short of the goal.”

No blush for innuendoes. “Would you like to take my information?”

“Your—? Well, I could always use a number. You know.”

Here came the valet. “Sorry, Deuce. Sorry. Ma’am, you don’t park the cars yourself!”

“How else was I going to break a light? Say what you will about my driving, but a fender bender does help a car stand out.” She motioned to the vicinity, the superabundance—Chevies Bel, like twins upon twins in a Beige Period orphanage.

“Rodrigo, it’s okay. Nobody’s the worse.”

“May I take your card?” she asked Deuce. That grin—this was somebody who knew how to enjoy a road for the bump. Either black lens had yet to give up an eye, much less an iris, but he had the hue for emerald green. She was like something off a paddock done up cosmopolitan. He gave the tile over. “Guest relations?” she said reading. “I’ll bet.”

“I’ll re-park your car for you, ma’am” the valet said, with a double take. He had never seen the like either, and Rodrigo saw a lot. “Just, uh, just let me borrow the key.”

“There is no key,” red said. “It came from a future without locks.”

Beneath Deuce’s chuckles there was no engine sound—nor even a dent to the bodywork, unlike on Gumtree’s iron swan, where shards of plastic dressed a bumper thrown askew. Dig that quietude—like the work of a watchmaker. Those European motors sure were something else. Off went the funny coupe, likewise the mystery-mobile she drove. He waved the valet back toward the podium. Cherchez la comedienne—this would be a meetup for the ages.

—

Lester waved him into the motor pool garage and brought down the door. He was chewing a cigar, unlit. Were he not cued up so it would have been strange indeed. A colored guy—even a standout, a prince among Nubians such as Les—might not take the same perks as front-door folk but on the Strip a top-rate smoke was fair game for every man. Like any mechanic he kept his sleeves rolled, and there showed awful burn scars. The cookery had come from a machine gun in a snowy nest, picked up and repositioned while hot to keep the onslaught of krauts good and mown down. So many boys rescued by that sacrifice alone—just like Basilone had done against the Sendai Division on the other end of the planetary scuffle. But Les would never get the chance to weigh a ribbon, not even on a casket lid. Dealt a hand of spades at birth, not of hearts—no fault of his.

“Got to kill some white folk,” young Les had said in triage with a wink.

“Hallelujah,” Deuce had said back, through a bandage. He had lit up two loosies and he held the second to the unsung hero’s mouth. Years later Deuce had got him the fattest job he was able—run of the pool with some chop shop action a la carte. Lester had the back of the casino to himself, his own separate but, mind you, equal kingdom. A table, some folding chairs—when the other colored staff weren’t sitting in for the daily shuck and jive, a few hands of cards, Les would kick up heels, switch on a transistor radio, and read through his second love, the newest issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

“Not much boat here for the trouble.”

Juvie must have filled in blanks. Any was too many. Trust might have been implicit but that Chatty Cathiness called for an audit. “Ain’t it the truth,” Deuce said. “How’s Judy Lee?”

Wife and high school sweetheart. Big smile. “Fine, Deuce, fine.”

“Standard shenanigans here, okay? Lockup till night, then tail Juvie in the wrecker. Where’s he got to?” A laundry cart threw wide the swinging doors—crash—with guess who shoving at the load. Not the best pall bearer and no fit honor guard for a government man. “Easy!”

“He’ll live,” Juvie said. Nerves, Deuce could tell, so he let the flippancy slide. “Let’s drop him in the trunk.” He wrinkled his nose at the car. “A Chevy Bel Air? Will he fit?”

“Is he stiff?”

“Yeah, Juvie”—this in from Lester, sure as a tax bill—“how hard you grab him?”

“Don’t start with the get-cute. It’s early yet.”

“Sorry bout that. After Sammy got with Kim Novak I guess I lost my place.”

Even four years on this was a sore point on the Strip—proof that cracks could show in paradise. “Chrissakes—would you give it a rest?”

“That what Harry Cohn said.”

“Can it and shelve it,” Deuce said. “And listen, both of you, keep an eye out. No,” he said to cut off a joke, since the topic of the mutt hung fresh in the air. “There’s something—I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right—like there’s some scrutiny.”

Both friends knew about those hackles. A sixth sense was a good sidekick on patrol. “Seen anything strange?” Lester asked. “Anyone act suspicious?”

“Nobody comes to mind. Tonight I’ll sub for Juvie at the lounge. Your errand should only take, what, an hour’s time, maybe two.” He had come up to the cart and Lester took the driver’s seat to man the lever. Gumtree had been wrapped up in bedsheet, a slipshod pharaoh. Juvie was really spooked. Deuce patted down Tutankhamen, then had a closer look. “Why the hell ain’t he dressed?”

“Check the suitcase underneath,” Juvie said. “He tore up all his clothes. Every last stitch of them.” Spinny index finger and a ding-dong whistle. “Putting him in a bunch of rags—wouldn’t that wreck the angle on this? The loner gone out for a city view?”

“Hm. Guess I get to run an errand. Forty-two regular?” Between the two of them they got Gumtree toward the back of the car. The neck was rigid in the shroud but limbs and trunk were pliable. “Let’s lie him down like he was seated,” Deuce said with strain. “By six he’ll drag harder than a plank.” Fool me once. “Pop it, Lester. That reminds me. Go through everything. Glovebox, under seats. Look for anything that might show where the car has been today and get it good and lost.”

“I know the score, Deuce.”

Heave-ho, and fetal in the Chevy’s berth. Come the designated hour and a spot up on the lookout, Juvie would manage. Nobody could say he lacked for strength. But suiting up a mannequin whose arms never bent, and that might get a tad poopy if squeezed too hard in the wrong spot—that would take some patience.

“Can I go wash my hands now?” Juvie said. “I work near food.”

—

Play along, he was screaming to his bathtub pals through the back of his scalp. What came out of that sweet mouth would be off-kilter, he wanted to tell them, and it was crucial—like a ring thrown to rough seas—to make her feel understood.

“De Winter,” she said.

“What?”

“You said Milady of Winter. It’s de Winter—The Three Musketeers?”

“Never read it,” Deuce said. “I’m more a movie guy, if you’re up for a matinee.”

The smile tightened to her skull. “Tonight, in earshot, you’ve called me Milady de Winter, Cruella de Vil, and Natasha Fatale, and you don’t even read books?”

“Hey, no offense. I talk to people—about books they’ve read, about other things. Better yet, I listen. That’s the gold standard right there—a sympathetic ear. Anyways the last two are cartoons. What, you never caught Rocky and Bullwinkle?”

“Touché!”

“This is not how we die,” Juvie said.

Lester said, “Speak for yourself.”

Deuce had more to add but the comedienne had leaned out to one side. “Hey, big fella back there—Juvie, right? What’s that short for?”

“It’s not short for anything. I faked my age when I signed up. The guys in my unit found out.”

“We found out,” Deuce said to draw the bead back, “I mean the guys in our unit—”

“Shh.” To Juvie, “You said, ‘This is not how we die’—isn’t that right?”

“Being funny—or trying. Got some jitters. Sorry.”

“Don’t be! Funny’s good. Strindberg sure could have used a couple of laughs. Did you want to know how you die?”

“Huh?”

“Did you want to know how you die.”

No forethought, Juvie said, “That’s a loaded question.”

For all the absurdity—and danger—Deuce cracked a smile, and Lester gave a spare chuckle. Gallows humor. None of them had relented in the sweats department, though.

“Huh?” Juvie asked again. “What’d I say?”

“You didn’t mean what you said about knowing, of course. I know it was rhetorical. But ontologically speaking it does raise an interesting point. Outcomes are in flux, but the more likely they are the easier they are to see. It’s the same deal as physical distance. In truth it is distance—what physical distance actually is without the ruse of space and time. Diminishing probability of interaction, ergo a slowdown in cause and effect.”

Deuce was lost—so much crazy here to weather—but thanks to his preferred reading Lester had less trouble. “Alls you just say, that call for time to function.”

“Holy hell,” Juvie said.

“No, he’s right—well spotted. Language, frame of reference—those are no small constraints. I can assure you that the strongest likelihood, for now, is that inside of two minutes I hit each of you, pop pop and pop. You bleed out and drain cleaner wrecks the forensic evidence while I make my hair nice again. But that might not be true even half a minute on, once you decide it’s smartest not make another lunge for the service weapon—a weapon I don’t need to do the job, except that it leaves my hair in place. Where it heads from here depends on choices, see—your choices, mine. Outcomes are visible—that’s material reality, no less so than train tracks in a switchyard. But the mind is what directs the switches. That’s a mystery—and that’s you. All that you really are. What you choose, or better said what you don’t. Free will. Free won’t.”

“We dead men,” Les muttered.

“Still, it’s not as if the deviations are invisible from here. Put fog in the switchyard if we stick with the picture. The steeper the curve of branching tracks, the less shows farther down, because more fog is in the way. The second most likely outcome—if a gun doesn’t go off—that’s plain enough even now, though not quite dead ahead. So to speak.”

“Sure,” Deuce said, not.

“I could tell you how you almost die, if you want—and if I don’t kill you.”

Stymied three times over, but out of politeness Juvie said, “Okay?”

One by one she pointed to Deuce, Juvie, and Lester. “Bullet, old age, cancer.”

Silence. A chuckle broke it. “You got cancer,” Juvie said to Les.

“Oh ha ha. She see my cigar, Hercule Poirot.”

A minor snag for Deuce: “Wait—why do I still get shot?”

“Different bullet,” she said. “Maybe rethink your day-to-daily?”

Les leaned close. “This aydee-lae might be from a nother-ae imension-dae.”

How she laughed at that. “Like the one between up and down? No, what I’m from is a different superposition on the wave-function manifold that underpins material reality. And I’m the one who’s armed. Does that clear it up?”

“Psst, fellas,” Deuce said, taking the chance. “Go easy. She’s nuts.”

“And if my bike had no wheels it would be a grandma.” Wink. “Nut joke. Okay. The story, Deuce, going forward, will be told in a Q and A. The Q stands for questions, the A stands for answers.” Her watch took a glance. “I guess the carpets are safe enough. Step on out, you three. And slow. Juvie, twist up some toilet paper for that nose.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

—

Seeing Deuce cross the threshold—back in so soon—threw Mr. Szabó-Zsigmond into a reel. “Somethingk wrong with coat?” On came the gnome from the Pest bank of the Danube. Behind him the dummy spun from the wind he had raised. He had busted out chalk and tape to go over the checkers with the jolly blue lamps. Thick glass warped his eyes into a scope that was downright supernatural.

“Not at all, Mr. Szabó Zsigmond, not at all! It’s a triumph! A win through-and-through. They always love the cut of your jib up in the Strand—especially the ladies.”

A finger waved. “Careful, careful, youngk man, or someday pecker fallingk off.”

“Ha ha ha! What a gas you are, Mr. Szabó Zsigmond. Here, get a nice hot lunch.” Deuce fed clay to the spotted hand. Strand Chips—in Vegas they outshone the treasury.

“So what can?”

“I need a full suit, and quick.”

“I am measuringk?” Up came the tape for the inches. “I have on file.”

“This’ll have to be off the rack.”

One struck gnome: the stare dug tunnels. “Rack? I hearingk right?”

“That you are, and more’s the pity. Forty-two regular—that’s all that counts.”

Light came into the Coke-bottle blues. “Not your size! I see. You want for makingk gift? No high roller, eh? Prêt-à-porter—pvoo!”

“On the contrary—the beau of the ball. Ad hoc, but ad astra.”

“I don’t know what means.”

“Anything’ll do it, good sir. Anything at all. Poly linen, dish towel, blue jean to go.”

As Mr. Szabó-Zsigmond got it square—whisking some tan nondescript off its boomerang and folding up shameful origami on the countertop—he said, “How come hangksome boy like you not married, eh? Make girl happy! Make yourself happy.” Deuce could only shrug. But the tailor had a further thought. “Mr. Fix, I have somethingk just come in. I was goingk to show to Vrankie, but I show you.”

“That’s swell, but—whoa. Frankie?”

“Yes, yes. Vrankie Blue-Eyes. Not about this”—motion toward the blah—“but for you for later. I can for you make coat with byssus.” Deuce had never heard the word but excitement ran ahead. He had unshod his feet and stood this hallowed ground many times before, and he knew when miracles were nigh. “Here—I show bolt.” Coming back with the exhibit at parade right shoulder, the gnome laid two yards flat. A golden fleece.

Covets hotted up Deuce’s face. “What, what, what is this?”

“Byssus. Sea silk some are callingk it. You touch?”

Deuce lent the stroke. A glide between atmospheres. And where he pressed it, chatoyancy like in a jewel, rainbow depths. Merest touch had summoned forth the aurora borealis. “Mr. Szabó-Zsigmond, this, this is a treasure. But Frankie. Those are toes you don’t step on, and I wouldn’t even have the heart. I’m his confidante in town.”

“Frankie, he does not know of! Not yet. Bolt enough, three suits. One more bolt is comingk. Six total. Your wear first cut, all high rollers seeingk you at Strand.”

“Oooooh—Mr. Szabó-Zsigmond! Cornering the market, you sly dog you!”

The gnome shook his head at the cloth, reverent to a mistiness. “Light. Strong. Weaingk summer, wearingk cold. Almost none are makingk now. The sea snail, she die. Last few womengk on little island, Sant’Antioco, by hand they are cardingk it. Loom this much—years, years, years. High quality, high price. Blazer for you?”

“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!” Out came the money roll.

“No, no—you are good for, and your measurements in book. For byssus, I throwingk in off-the-rack for nothingk.”

So out came Deuce with a garment bag and a ray of sunshine. No fit drape for a glueworks mule, but it would do. Win it again, checkered flag, and ahead lay troves. Speaking of which, here was the comedienne, just up the street and looking on without the least hesitation. Lucky him! Perhaps she had come down for a manicure. On his eye-stroke back in the lot at the Strand her nails had looked a mite short, even bitten. They were the cuticles of a woman whose form of trade was strictly hands-on. The century had grown late for Rosie the Riveter to flourish, so milking cows, say—an udder tugger. No—he owed this one gallantries. On closer leer it seemed she chose no heel, either, nor ankle strap to keep shod on a stilted walk. Now that—save every last thing between insoles and fingertips—was downright androgynous. No pinup hopes for this lady-friend. And no need.

On sight of him she was smiling in her sunglasses, and laughs were close. Time to milk the bull. No, no. “Hiya,” he said. “Coffee?” This let the sputter break through, but she went along. The nearest joint served cappuccino—wee friar, nella lingua, for the brown of its frothy cowl. Just the foreign-friendly thing for a dame who had blown into Vegas with a Freedonian Batmobile. For himself he ordered an Americano, black, sugar. Before he slid into the booth he hung the garment bag.

“Unreal,” she said. The ticklishness had not let up.

“You’re in good spirits—nice to see, what with the whiplash. How’s your neck, sweetheart?” Again with the sputter. “You can let me in on the joke,” he said.

“But you already are in, and deep.”

Awkward, but here came hots to the rescue. “It’s on the house, Mr. Fix,” per the girl.

“See—she knows who I am, so she gives me the chance. That’s the Vegas way. One big friendly place. The scratching of backs is an open market, no strings. Maybe you should, too. Find out who I am, I mean, not scratch backs. Though I do have a hell of a knot between my scapulae.”

“I got your card, Andrea. Pretty good for backwater.” Of the sip.

“Tea service out here has come a ways. What did you say?”

“‘Backwater.’ But I’m betting you meant the name part.”

“How’d you know I’m … that?”

“Card?”

“But that’s not what the card had on it. Say—you’ve been asking around! Ho ho! Murder! Will! Out! This sure brightens up my day, I’ll tell you that.”

Down blew the gale. She took her sunglasses off to smear back jolly tears. Here he got to see whether he had been right—green for the win, blue to place. But at what he saw the grin went wooden. True, there was a band of color to either eye, but only wire thin. Green or blue was too narrow to call. Mostly you could say her eyes were black—pitch black and deep. All pupil, blown out to hollows. Gaze into the abyss, and the abyss gazes also he forgot the rest.

“Uh—missus? I never did catch a name.” Double pits, unblinking. “Okay. Skip the names and the friendlies. I think you might have conked your head. In, uh, the tap back at the Strand. Maybe see a doctor? Hey, tell you what—I know just the guy.”

“What’s funny,” she said, “is truth. Every word I’ve said to you is true. Nothing hidden, not one word a joke or a lie or even a stretch. I can lay out plots, plans, existential horrors, dot all the ais, cross all the tees, and you’ll think I’m being cute. I straight up admit that I followed you and watched you go shopping—and you crow victory. Narratives versus qualia.”

“Qualia? What’s the what there?”

“Couldn’t have said it better. Okay, let’s use a metaphor. How about data entry? Input? Ten-key? You’re still drawing a blank? A walking numbers racket like you?”

“So like an accountant? With the green visor and the books and such?”

“Better yet. Yes, books. How do I get away with it? Even when the books sum it up?” Both thumbs inward. “Tit one, tit two.” Index fingers. “In a dress.” Again. “One tit, two tit, sitting in a dress. Even now, for all you’ve seen and all you’ve heard. Nothing could be funnier than that. These really are simpler times—simple for me.”

Back on went the sunglasses. The last-ditch was a boyish pout.

“Coming on too strong, eh?”

Laughs afresh even as she rose. To the door, never a turn as she spoke loud enough for him to hear. “Las Vegas is fine. It’s what surrounds it that’s the backwater.”

A bell left wiggling on the jamb. Lose some, win some. At least the golden fleece was on its way. Though now Deuce saw he had forgot to ask Mr. Szabó-Zsigmond to cut a sport coat and not a blazer. Oh well—for a swaddling of byssus he would button left.

—

Hours later the Summit Lounge was open and free to swing. Before coming down to sub Deuce had neglected to swap out for blacktie. Decked in his own, Juvie had to point this out. Rules were rules. “Deuce, it’s a supper club.”

“Huh?” They were in the vestibule. Marjorie helmed the pen and ledger for any incoming reservation, though none was ever needed for a VIP. People of distinction had a better view on the stage and a separate velvet rope. On post all Deuce and Juvie had to do was gladhand with guests, smile, and hoist the velvet now and then, as fit. Deuce looked down at himself, the natty but wrongful checkers. “Oh, rats. I’ve been a bit distracted.” Musing on cats and fiddles all afternoon, the moon not yet out. Mother Goose was growing sparse. Try Hubbard. She had a cupboard.

“What’s eating you?”

“I don’t know, pal. It’s like something’s on the tip of my tongue. Some obvious conclusion that even a mouth-breather would have drawn by now.”

“Are you going to be able to work a rope? You know—while …?”

“Nuff said. My portion here’s easy. Hey, you been outside?”

“Why?”

“You look like you got a bit of sun.”

“Huh. You too, Deuce. That rag top Eldorado you love so much, it does no favors. And a desert, that’s no homestead for us two palefaces. I’d better head out.”

Left to reveries, doling out smiles for tourists as Marjorie did the lifting. Even at the roughest girls played nice. What haunted him, and had since cappuccino, was nonsense.

Still. Gumtree. Trouble on the prowl.

“Hey, Deuce—got a minute?”

“Dino! Sorry, must have zoned out!” Here at last, the high-roller, plus one just behind, waiting to wine, dine, and dig the band. “So lovely to see you again, my fine sir.”

“Whoa nelly! Is that the Hunky national flag?

“That hand stitching—you know it so well! Right this way. We’ve got French bubbles on ice and shrimp cocktails in the LZ.” He unhooked the rope and the plus one came into view. A biped would have listed. With courtly bow: “Mrs. Dickinson.”

“Angie. Please. And tonight it’s Miss.”

Good for one more bob of the head. Behind the velvet the VIP maitre d’ stood with menus, ready to lead. “Feathers” in the flesh, so to speak (per Rio Bravo). That would make for shockwaves in town, just like those old tests. On the slip of a Ben Dino threw a wink—savvy? Thus a night to remember became a night to forget, even for all to see. There were two kinds of invisible. This was not the other kind.

Funny.

The Chevrolet was in idle as he ran into the garage, tow truck likewise, churning up a diesel stink. Deuce threw himself in front like an umpire calling off a pitch. As Lester and Juvie came on with the inevitable curiosity he caught his breath and yanked his tie loose from the strangle. Bare bones only as he hauled on the chain fast as he could—down with the garage door, good and tight—and then he laid on the beef.

—

Powwow done with, the convoy set out. They could never leave an early checkout in the garage overnight, but the motto of every good Boy Scout had become a creed. How much caution was called for, that was a matter to debate. “Heater?” Juvie had said, going Runyon. “I can handle a frail without ammunition, thank you very much.” As for Les, he had spread light-palmed hands to mark himself exhibit A.

Worse to ask Giancarlo for backup—they could never live that down, such terrors for a damsel. So Deuce had tucked a gun into the checkered coat right aside the poker chips. He chose to drive, Juvie on shotgun, per figure alone. Three cars back was Les in the wrecker. Two winks on the beams should anything strange and European-built come in sights. And what sights they were. Lester was renowned for an eye and had been since boot. Too bad about the politics—he had always been a much better shot than Deuce, kept off the roster only because shadows doth offend. But no bribe would have cooled the boil with the Vegas cops. Even a trunkful of wrapped cadaver was more forgivable than a colored man gunning down Miss Lillian.

Cool and easy, radio on, as they took a roll down the Strip, top up on the Eldorado. Deuce and Juvie had cigarettes going, windows down a crack to pull smoke clear, and they kept a vigil on side mirrors and on the streets ahead. Nighttime palms were a different animal. Lester called them triffids, and whatever triffids were they lent no optimism, not with all the sharp points and scales drawn in silhouette. Even at a stand the Strip was in motion. So much neon, so much flash. One cashbox after another thirsting for square money. House wins.

“Never much did care to gamble,” Deuce said aloud.

“Me neither, pal.”

“Shit, the headlamps.” And twice, brightening Deuce’s eyes in a quadrangle thrown from the rearview. Two postures became impeccable, each man straight as a post.

There were cars between the wrecker and the Chevy, one coming on but not in any visible rush. No funny petit French slipper, anyway.

“Must have seen something. But what?”

In truth deeper in the field Lester was stepping on the gas. But a wrecker like that, strapped and yoked for anything up to a rig tractor, was never any Formula One.

Juvie had turned around to stare, squinting through beams in the back window. “Pontiac Bonneville sport coupe. Hard top. White all over with a custom pink trim.”

“Only a pimp would—wait. That’s Dom Merringue’s goddam car.”

“Language.”

The Pontiac hit a blinker and took a gentle veer into the faster lane. Never a hurry, even as it sidled up. Deuce had a look—and here was the discount middleman himself, at passenger side, wet tongue and bullet hole put up on the glass. From behind him the comedienne had leaned forward, hunching into the steering wheel, to meet Deuce’s eye.

Hard right. The rear wheels skidded out and the junk-trunk on the Chevy overswung them, but the Bel Air made the side street. Coupe de pimp did not stop or even slow from the limit. Juvie had clamped hard on the dash.

“What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?”

“Sound the retreat,” Deuce said. He thought of adding something about king’s horses and king’s men but that struck him as puerile. Nor did he want to be the egg.

“What the fuck was that?”

The wrecker’s lamps were right behind them, eye-high in the rear window. Deuce turned to Juvie but had no comeback. Toying with them. Only then did he remember the sixgun in his pocket—and he knew he was not that guy, never was, never would be.

“We need the soldiers,” he said. Pride cometh before the fall, but there were falls and then there were falls. Take a powder, Humpty Dumpty—a corner stool and a dunce cap were not too steep a shill.

The wrecker idled in both lanes on the side street, blocking the Strip. Up ran Lester. 

“What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?”

—

The audience took their seats—three of the four around the Eames dinette. Bottle and card were still dead center, three shot glasses damp, the well-chewed cigar gone cold. One by one she had had them pluck electric cords from table lamps. This dimming of the light scheme not only lent ambience—intimate, like a fancy dinner—but kept hands to backs and asses fast to seats. Whatever she did to tighten the grip—a single jerk, no wiggle left—spoke of a hitch well past basic seamanship.

Deuce had chosen optimism. “You trust us not to shout?” 

Juvie and Lester gave faces. “I do, Andrea,” said the comedienne. “Plus you’d have to be pretty loud. You know.”

Great—two more stiffs someplace close, and prime goombahs no less. That was a lot of meat for a freezer haul. Deuce sought to keep the count flat.

“What’d she call you?” Juvie said.

Lester won the laugh. “That a lady name!” The comedienne joined them.

“Okay, you got me,” Deuce said. “Never was an Andy, dead to rights over here. Mind if I have something to call you back, Ishmael aside? Or Red?”

“You can call me Mary-Kate Ultra.” Whatever that meant was plenty funny to her.

“Aha!” Juvie said. “I knew it! That’s a spy name! She’s a Soviet!”

“Russian? I was born in Dubuque. Anglo-Irish stock. And what kind of spy would use a, what, a ‘spy name,’ you said? Unlike Fatale I’m a pretty good spy.”

“Aha!” Juvie.

“I thought you say you were from a different superposition on the wave-function manifold that underpin material reality.”

“Sure, Lester—and Dubuque. With a radically different experience of here and now.”

Deuce was not about to call anybody Mary-Kate Ultra, not even with a Cracker Jack decoder ring. So, “Red, if it’s not too impertinent, may I pose a question? Why aren’t you asking us some questions? If this is a brace—a sweat under lights, like the cops go for—you know, isn’t interrogation a part of that?”

She checked her watch. “Ten more minutes,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Why?”

But Juvie leapt in. “Okay, so if you’re a spy, but not a Russian one, that must mean you’re one of ours.” She said nothing. He went on. “And that would mean what’s-his-face, Gumption, he’d have to be the Russian, since you kept tabs.”

“That does make some sense,” Deuce said. “He had government ID in the wallet. Q clearance. And the name was Gumtree, pal. Ernest Gumtree.”

“By Doctor Seuss,” Lester said.

“Correct.”

“One fewer question for me to ask,” said the comedienne. “Thanks, Deuce. And thank you, Dr. Seuss.”

“What’s Q clearance?”

Deuce eased back as best he could, the height of complacency. “Well, Juvie, you see, some government secrets are more secret than others. To know everything all at once—code names, projects, the color of the presidential briefs—you have to have the highest government clearance.” The comedienne took a seat and let him tumble. “Q is the most special I know of, and I only got that much because some of those eggheads were a mite loose on gin and tonics. They come in from the testing range for weekend R and R.”

“Go on,” said the comedienne, chin to palm.

“No, no, wait,” Juvie cut in. “Let me finish. If Elmer Gantry was a Russian spy and the redhead here is one of ours, then we’re all on the same side, right? We three, we’re servicemen, mustered out or not. We swore an oath. To defend the homeland? I might not have a Q but I know my alphabet and my word is my bond.”

The comedienne raised a finger to flag for silence. The smile had left her face. Something in her bearing made the room go tense. At rest her face wore creases from the grin deep as age. She put down the handgun and reached for a shot glass. Into this she poured whiskey from the bottle clear to the brim. A forefinger hook scooted it back in front. She took off her lenses. Juvie and Les saw her blown-out eyes. The sight shut them up as she began to speak—each phrase and word a nonsense, but somehow dire. She tapped each out with a fingertip on the table.

“Paperclip. Tuskeegee. Pain maudit. Sea spray. Guatemala. Ohio State Penitentiary. Chatter. Naomi. Delta. Midnight climax. Artichoke. Rendition. Black sites. Prison camps. Vivisectors. Heard of that book The Manchurian Candidate? That’s the Sunday funnies. That’s Mutt and Jeff. Offshore stuff, that’s a lot worse, but what’s at home is plenty awful.” She took the whiskey all at once—no winces—and kept them in a rivet.  “Substances,” she said, pouring out a second belt. “Substances and materials. That’s your role here in the grand curiosity. That’s how each of you is a lab rat. I’ll cite the page that isn’t here, verbatim.” Her voice grew sharp. “One. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public. Two. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception. Three. Materials which will cause the victim to age faster or slower in maturity. Four. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol. Five. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, et cetera. Six. Materials which will cause temporary or permanent brain damage and loss of memory. Seven. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called brain-washing. Eight. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use. Nine. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.” Her recital sped. “Ten. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, et cetera. Eleven. Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters. Twelve. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced. Thirteen. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.” She took the dram in a belt and spoke yet faster, pouring out a third. “Fourteen. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts. Fifteen. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects. Sixteen. A knockout pill which can be surreptitiously administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, et cetera, which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.” Now she was shouting. “Seventeen. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity. Eighteen. Eighteen.” Drink taken, she threw the glass—a fierce overhand. “Eighteen, eighteen, eighteen eighteen eighteen eighteen eighteen eighteen eighteen!”

The audience had not one clever word to share. They sat in a terror, too afraid to move. Shards and whiskey drew straight tracks down the wall. Their shuddering breath was the only sound.

“I forget.” A faint smile. “Maybe there never was an eighteenth. Reply hazy. Try again.” Without threat she stepped up close to touch Juvie’s cheek. A rueful tone—like a grownup might use to tell a kid that she broke a promise—as she said a lone quiet word.

“Side?”

Juvie hung his head. Deuce came in, and his voice shook no less.

“What’s in the bottle, Red?”

Nothing but the tension.

“What’s in the goddam whisky bottle?”

Lester came in. “No, no, there can’t—there can’t be nothing, Deuce—she just, she just drank from that herself.”

The comedienne said, “LSD-25. I’ve been on it for seven years.” She took up the handgun to check the clip. “Seven years straight.” Clapped tight, palm to weapon. “If the bastards only knew.”

—

Giancarlo had four goombahs on standby. Fat heads, ungenerous faces—each of them looked like a hospital corner put on a bear trap. Large guys, so big laughs, one of them with a wheeze atop the thunder like a rubber duck on the tweak. The biggest and the ugliest, Deuce assumed without a look, who had probably not only slain his fellow man but eaten him medium rare with a nice pan sauce. Fantastic suits on each of them, though—herringbone, sharkskin. Fiends did like a good set of clothes.

The jolly triggermen were behind Deuce’s flinching threesome, who in turn stood before the desk in the office. “A girl.” Giancarlo said. “One girl.” No laughs except from the gallery which did not mean unamused. Giancarlo ran cold like that—an introvert, maybe, but one who knew how to play to a room. “One.” Finger up.

“Yes, Giancarlo. Girl. One. Short, too, and a redhead. Slim. Couldn’t weigh past a buck twenty soaking wet. And boy did she ever get the drop on us. Hell, maybe there are other players and we just haven’t caught a glimpse.”

“Russians,” Juvie said. “She might be a Russian spy.” The drop of ambient heat iced his mouth shut.

Giancarlo asked, “You brought a thirty-eight along, you say?”

“Thirty-two,” Deuce said. “S and W long. Bigger would have spoiled my lines.”

“May I see this thirty-two?” The sixgun lay the desk. “Were you going to start a soapbox derby?” The goombahs were really going now. Giancarlo looked on with an analytical bent. “Okay,” he said at last. “Here’s what happened. The Jews.”

“Come again?”

“The tribe down at the Arrowhead. How they love a badger game—back on the Lower East Side they ran one every day. This redhead, she’s been skulking out in the lobby, waiting to overhear. You were loud at the front desk. You are always too damn loud, just like that godawful sport coat. Marjorie was it?”

“Florimel. Leave her out, Gianni.”

“Oh, I shall, I shall. It’s you who tests me. The redhead—nobody noticed her there until the early checkout was discovered in the presidential suite. Just one more floozy on a smoke break—who’d ever gripe about a piece like that on the loiter? And who was it you saw in that Pontiac? A pimp named Merringue? She might have played fools there, too—pretended to be part and parcel to keep in good position. And a crack shot of theirs, that cinched it once his usefulness was over—someone like Rothschild or Vach brought in to play Dot the Swami, then prop him up for your divertissement. The theatrics got you spooked so you came back with the early checkout—here, the one place where he does not belong. They have untimely stiffs of their own down at the Arrowhead. More so—those Christ killers are a glum and clannish bunch, am I right? But their in-house operations—surreptitious removals—those would work just like ours. See? They’d know just how to trip us up. It’s the scenario that speaks to me.”

“Except why? What do you do with a, a spare left in the trunk?”

“And the trunk left in a garage on hotel grounds. What’s coming next—what’s coming tonight, soon—will be a federal agent. A tip or a favor, either way. Local cops have a good thing going—they let it ride—but a G-man, some Washingtonian carpetbagger feeling light on his resume, he’d strap on the lobster bib and get the butter melted.” Giancarlo shook his head with a scoff. “Jews.”

“Jews,” the goombahs said with nods.

Deuce was blushing but kept the furies on the bench. Giancarlo was not done yet. “You, my friend—you fancy yourself mercurial, a trickster god, so you ought to know a game or two. They played you like a klezmer clarinet.” Next would come the shofar because that had more Yid on it. “They blew your shofar.” Big laughs brought up the rear. “So here’s what we’ll do. Gabby and Lou, you’re going to take the Chevy and one of your own for a desert Rose Parade up onto the mesa. Rocham for who drives what to the lookout and what back. Take trench brooms in case this rundown is just a fever dream of mine. Raffle, Eddie, you’re here on guard—the floor five stairwells. Like I said, just in case. We’ll shut down the elevator stop. That’s all staff housing. No complaints.”

Deuce knew floor five. Did he ever. “Home quarantine?”

“You and your bookends here—you’re overnighting. Once the early checkout is done with and the coroner is on the case it won’t make no difference. Who takes couch, who takes bathtub, that’s none of my business. Reception will send up extra pillows.”

“Gianni, they’ve got wives to go home to!”

“So do I, Don Juan Cockamamie. So do I. Anyway, I’m sure Mrs. Shemp and Mrs. Moe know about midnight oil. Want I should give you each a dime for the booth?”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” Juvie said.

Lester had been quiet. A colored guy knew how to bide. Now he fished out his keys from the coveralls and laid them on the desk. “For the loading dock.”

“Good man. You’ll go places. One last thing before we break huddle. Deuce, this will all need thorough spelling out—to Sergio. You and me together, tomorrow noon—I’ll arrange a little conference call. Unless you want Eddie Spaghetti there to run a handwritten note like that Greek jamoke to Athens.” Right—Eddie—that was the ducky wheezer cannibal. The noodle choice was wordplay. “Remember it well—none of our four friends here are errand boys. Sprezzatura regulars—they’re here for Don Casci, one hundred percent. And so am I.”

—

“‘And so am I.’ Goddam brown-noser. Welcome to my humble commode.” He dropped the plaque on the outer knob. Mere formality since the corridor would be empty.

“No need to cuss,” Juvie said.

“What, commode?” The dish took the keys. Deuce let the houseguests pass and shut the door. “When you get so hung up on bad words, anyways?”

“Trix, she likes a clean mouth.” To Lester, “Run with that and I make a doormat. Anyways it’s not all the words, just the one.”

Juvie meant the Almighty. “I think I swore worse in the Chevy, pal.”

“I was too busy swearing over you to hear.”

“Hey, hey.” Lester stepped aside to enhance the view. On the dinette was a bottle in a box—good whiskey, and an import, actual Scotch scotch. There was a gift bow on it and a card propped on the ribbon. “Don’t tell me boss man up and grew his self a heart.”

Deuce read. And brightened. “Ho, ho, ho—Dino, baby! What a guy!”

“That bottle from Dean Martin?” Lester scouted out glasses. “Never had me a movie star drink before.” And an ashtray. “Can I light up?” Sharing was a given. They took their seats, Lester in a spicy cloud. “He got something to be happy about?”

“An assignation. Bottoms up!”

On the ahh, Juvie asked. “No talk out of school, but celebrities are everybody’s business. What’s said at this table stays at this table. So, uh, who?”

“Angie Dickinson.”

“Whoa!” From Les and Juvie alike. Another round, two more whoas. “Hang on,” Juvie said. “Are you telling me there’s a chance that even now, somewhere overhead, Dean Martin is playing flute for Angie Dickinson?” He caught himself. “Sorry.” To Trix.

“You got that instrumentation in reverse,” Lester said.

“No, no, like playing the part. Being the flute. Okay. Whatever. Down the hatch.”

“That more like it.”

“Palomine,” Deuce said, “it’s no first rodeo. What a life that guy must lead. He’s having a better night than us anyway, with Cruela de Vil clamoring for our spots.”

“Not enough fly in all of Spain,” Juvie said, of Dino, not de Vil.

“Damn sunburn,” Lester said. He was rubbing at a hand.

“What did you say, Les?”

Leave it to Juvie. “Didn’t think you could burn. All that brown considered.”

“Oh—I see some on you guys, too. Like a cock smack on a albino.”

“Hey,” Juvie said. “That’s uncivil.”

Deuce was stuck on the burn. “Lester, when did you ever get the chance? You were in the garage all day long. And on the loading dock. Indoors and in the shade. And you were only outside after dark, when Natasha Fatale did the sidecar act. How could you get sun?” And he would have made it further if not for a faintest step. She had kicked off her flats and opened the green handbag.

—

“Something’s happening. Something’s happening. Something’s happening.”

“Try to relax,” the comedienne told Juvie. “I could have always just shot you.”

“No help there.”

“Point is, it won’t hurt. LSD has never killed anybody. Well, that chemist died of jumping from a window, but that’s incidental.”

“What chemist? What window?”

Deuce saw, too—the onset. Every hue in his visual field was brightening and dimming like an ember in a hearth. But not with any cosy warmth, not at first. Light had grown cold, metallic, and every pigment false. Madness in a bottle.

“How bad does it get?” he asked. “How long’s this stuff take to go full blast?”

“Two hours. Three.” She had set the gun aside and brought out something else—a rectangle scarcely bigger than Colonel Digby’s cigarette case. She laid it flat on the tabletop, and Deuce would have asked for a smoke until he saw the glow. A glassy surface—she tapped at it with a fingertip. Colored lights shifted and music came on. What played was negro bubblegum—kid’s stuff, a girl group—but the tiny speakers caught it better than any hi-fi Deuce had heard.

“That the Shirelles?” Lester asked. “It sure sound like the Shirelles.”

The comedienne smiled and did a dance. Surprise—a sort of twist or sock hop or whatever the youngsters called it. She pumped fists on hooked arms held close to her body, and her face was stern. She sang along:

“Got a baby who can kiss

In thirty-one flavors

And we like tutti-frutti best

I call him ice cream Joe

He is the most delicious boy I know”

On it went. “My mistake,” Lester said.

She quit the teenybopper Salome. “No, you were right. Maybe off by a couple of years. Let me show you something.” She tapped at the case and the music quit. “A decade,” she said, hooking through more colored lights with a fillip. Music came back on, if you could call it that, and loud: drums in a smack hard and stuttering, guitar atop like an air raid siren. Deuce was flinching—that was no radio, no music station, whatever the device had inside other than a transistor. No home console had ever played so rich, loud, full. She sang along:

“If it keeps on raining

Levee’s going to break

If it keeps on raining

The levee’s going to break

When the levee breaks

We’ll have no place to stay”

Music had more weight than usual, and this stuff was leaden. Nevertheless it flew, crept up all over him, and he tried to shake it off. “Goddam! Quit that noise!”

“That Memphis Minnie,” Lester said through uneasy breath, “or the words, but—”

“Hold on,” she said. Again with the glowing pane, the hooking fingertip. “Twenty-five years.” The audio came on slow, a sound of rainfall and concussive triple drum strikes. From a distance the caterwaul of some inhuman thing, mournful or wounded. Then a theme amid war drum triples, broken and alien, redoubling in sick harmony. Rhythm burst like a head caught in a motor block—each rip and gush crystal clear. The comedienne threw a breeze with her pretty red hair, thrashing at the neck and waist like a maniac. The tempo sped double and the theme became an atonal flurry. The three men writhed. Juvie wept. The comedienne began to sing—better said rant, snarl:

“Trapped in purgatory

A lifeless object, alive

Awaiting reprisal

Death will be their acquittance

The sky is turning red”

Juvie was shouting—no, no—again and again. Shell shock. He had been there before after the Siege. “Red!” Deuce was teary-eyed. “No more. Let him be—please!”

She jabbed the slate to a glowless silence. Through the witchy muss she looked at them with honest surprise. “It’s only music. I hadn’t even got to the 1990s. That stuff’s my favorite. Try this.” She tapped and for all the dread what came on was the Hot Club—a frisky five-piece jam at moderate volume. “Better?” She smoothed her hair back.

“What is that thing?” Lester asked.

“A transistor radio, pretty much. Towers have to go up.”

“She a time traveler—she a goddam time traveler!”

The comedienne found patience. “Set aside that there’s no such thing as time and nobody to do the traveling, every last person you’ve ever met is a time traveler. You guys got acquainted in what, 1944? Yet here you all are, seventeen years up the road. I’m not magical and I’m not from the planet Venus. I was born in August 1928 and I die in April 2021. The only difference between you and me is that I have a higher vantage point.”

“Superposition,” Lester said.

“Superposition.”

“Who wins the World Series this year?” Deuce asked. Colors had begun to thaw and jokes felt possible again.

“How would I know? I hate baseball. Never watch it.”

Deuce laughed, and a laugh felt good, driving out the chill. For him, that was—Juvie was having a harder time. “Twenty-five,” he was saying, slick with sweat, tears spilling down. “Just twenty-five years and we’re all devil worshippers. Do they drop the bomb? What hell is left for that to be the music? Dear Lord in heaven, save us all.”

“Poor man. I’ll get some tapwater.”

While she was off Deuce leaned in as best he could. “Listen, you two. Remember what she said about secrets? Okay—first I thought she was a lunatic. Well, before that I thought she was a kidder, but let’s skip the big prelude. She’s not crazy, or not mainly crazy. This is more like a practical joke—a boondoggle—to shake us up, get us off our pins. Chin up—it’s cool. We’re just working on our tans here at poolside.”

Thought of a gag seemed to relieve Juvie. His breathing slowed.

“He’s not wrong,” the comedienne said, back with a glass. “Psyops are a part. Though he could sure learn to whisper.” A tilt lent Juvie the welcome sip. “Plus, Deuce, got to say—if I’m the clown here, why am I doing most of the laughing?”

Deuce was distracted from the lesson. Tans—something about working on tans. He thought hard. Lester noted the inattention and said, “We don’t know nothing.”

“You don’t know what you know. Litter in the wind. That’s why I needed to compare  testimony. Gumtree was a runner. I was just keeping tabs, waiting for the call.”

“So you didn’t,” Deuce said. “Or not with him like you did with the pimp.”

“Hm? Oh. Right. Chickenhawk—I’ll take a mulligan. Gumtree would have vanished. All very neat. None of this would be going on right now. I think what ailed him aside from a big bout of conscience was his heart. Arrhythmia, not valentines. Don’t ask me the what got him scared. They sent me with minimum information, same as always.”

So this was about the desert again—the strangeness of an empty quarter blowing into town. Dunes crept, dunes swallowed. Cities lay at the bottom of the sand. The room had begun to spark. Sound had taken on an echo deeper than the walls—vast spaces beyond matter. And the inanimate was in a seethe. Subtly for now, but a swirl of geometries in tabletop and wall alike, draining in reverse from nothingness.

“Damn it,” Lester said. “You only forthcoming because we the ones going to vanish now. Thank you for leaving my baby out of it. Judy Lee.”

“Sweet. But no. That’s not how it will wind up. As of two minutes ago.”

Juvie was all in. “It’s true? You were going to? And you’re not?”

“And I don’t know why.” No callout of foul intent ever brought more relief. But she went on. “It’s rare. Something changed and I haven’t found out what yet. That means I’m not driving things. We’re in the dark.” She turned to Deuce and read his face. “You could say that,” she said. “Crazy. But only because no one has the full take. Crazy—it means cracked. I am like that—broken out. Here, let me give you some pointers for the ride. None of this comes from beyond you. Go in bad and you wind up in hell. Calm, and it’s a wonderment—a glimpse. First trips won’t take you far. Seeing past takes a long time. Same with developing a reach. I am far gone.”

“I’ll stick with crazy,” Deuce said.

“How are you feeling? You look a little red in the face—you and Juvie both.”

There. Seen so clearly now, even in four walls fluid like the bottle imp itself. “In the dark, eh? Well, surprise, surprise, Red—I just saw the light. And I’m here to testify.”

“Do tell.”

“Let me make a phone call.”

“Will the cord reach? Come on, Deuce.”

“I’m dead serious. Pun most definitely not intended, and better shown than told. The front desk—I can have something sent. I know people. This is a place of resource.”

“That wasn’t a pun. I’ll admit this is fun, though.” Lester and Juvie were no less absorbed in whatever it was that would save their lives.

“Half an hour, tops. No funny business, I swear. Later I won’t be able to do—I can tell. I won’t squeal and I’m too dumb to speak in codes. Trust me.”

“You are too dumb to speak in codes,” the comedienne said, weighing it.

Principessa was on desk that hour, which made for a tougher bargain, thanks to all the counteroffers. “Want I should come up later?”

“Daddy like, but raincheck, baby.” Cradle on the table, receiver to his ear, sound suppressor on his temple. “The room is spinning ring-around-the-rosie. Man, that new bartender can sling that sting from Singapore, I’ll tell you that.”

“Company, eh?” Principessa said. “Like I’d mind.” He told her whom to call and for what, and to drop his name good and hard. Because it was Las Vegas and Principessa was a consummate professional, no questions were asked, even for so oddball a ticket. When he nodded for the hangup, the comedienne burst into laughter.

“Sorry, Deuce. The way you talk to us—to womenfolk—it cracks me up.” Still, something ate, Deuce could see, and had been noshing since he had put the name to the errand. Not twenty minutes, but fifteen. There was a tap on the door. Nice—the Fix brand held sway, even in the last. The comedienne went to the door to open it a fissure, as prearranged, and she kept the weapon out of sight. Deuce heard giggles. The floor had taken up the rippling by then, and he could feel each duck and heave in his bones. Something else—the low light in the room, it had a flavor to it. Peach and mint. The name of the cocktail eluded him. But he kept it together. He even smiled.

The comedienne came back. “Was lady fair flirting with me?”

“Such are the delights of a desert oasis.”

“Ouch,” Lester said. “That hot.”

“Open up the box and switch the doo-dad on. Maybe read the manual.”

“I know how it works.”

“Go ahead then.”

Harsh—a squall dropping off to sparer clicks. Once more, once more.

“What’s that mean?” Juvie said.

The comedienne had no smiles, nothing to say. So Lester threw in. “Hot. We been irradiated—all of us. The car, Gumtree, they took a bad zap somewhere in the desert.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.” Not a cuss.

Deuce said to the comedienne, “Maybe point it at yourself.” She shook her head—no need. “I know you know. We’re not gloating. Nobody’s happy about it.”

Gumtree had not said shaper to Florimel on the phoen, but chamber. That was how the wisenheimers of science realms saw things move that were too small and too fast for a human eye. Fields of vapor shredded through, trails that veered and curled and even cut a zigzag. To flaunt the virtues of the atomic age magazines ran photos of such, and these Deuce had seen, whether in lobbies or sat down for a shoeshine. A cloud chamber was no esoteric thing, but even a chump who liked to skip words for pictures knew that tracery—the hieroglyphs drawn—could spell out something damnable.

With a frown the comedienne did the self-check. A harsh burst. And she threw the geiger counter into the kitchenette, overhand and hard. Such language, like a fury lashed to the roost. The three ex-GIs were impressed—even Lester, who heard much the same every day when friends showed up in his garage for rounds of cribbage. In time she composed herself, showed her face. Mascara had run. All the surfaces were really twisting now, a moire pattern draining up. But not her. The comedienne was resolute. 

“I’ll have to have to hash this out with the clientele,” she said. “My words will be stern ones.”

“You weren’t told?” Juvie asked.

“Oh, these perverts. These goddam reptiles. How they love to hold back. Smug about it, too—self-congratulating, greater good, schoolmarm little bitches. Keep it from me? Well you’re about to perfect the art, you beta male motherfuckers.” 

The word again. She went into the kitchenette and came back with a chef’s knife. No strong flinches as she cut bonds. Though she did keep the gun in hand—only good form.

Lester rubbed his wrists. He seemed far away, smaller with a distance. “We dying?”

“We are, but not of this,” she said. “Not us four. Some might.” A private smile had come back. “No, I see the way out.” A titter escaped. “Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy. Everyone into the bathroom. Chop chop. Double quick.”

“Red, not with the tub again!”

“No, no—not the tub. The shower stall.”

The three men stood mute. Lester was quickest. “Oh—we can wash some of this off. It like fallout. A residue, not gamma rays.”

“Dibs,” Juvie called, and they stood up to run for the door. The sudden movement unsettled the balance or the very surface. All three men fell and the floor caught them like a cartoon glove, billowing inward, puffing out. They rose to try again.

“All of you,” the comedienne shouted, halt brought. She was no longer pointing the weapon though it remained in hand. “In the shower stall. All at once.”

Deuce was whipping off the checkerboard already. He folded it in half and slung it over a forearm. Good thing—looking at the pattern had begun to make him feel dizzy. They were not squares but the faces of cubes—or of cubes that were more than cubes, submerged in higher-dimensional space. “Red, have you seen it in there? Close quarters. We can go one at a time. We’re all on board.”

“All at once,” she said again. “And you’re going to soap each other up.”

Juvie was appalled. “What?”

“Swallow that pride,” she said. “You three have been to boot. I know you know what it’s like to share a shower. Hell, those low toilet bowls didn’t even come with stalls.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “all true—but why soap each other up?”

“Look! I’m not the threat! What’s on you will kill you dead, Juvie. You’re going to have to be thorough. Head to foot. Hands in places you never knew hands could go.”

Lester was laughing, stripping nude. His limbs stretched like taffy where he pulled clothes. Deuce turned to him. “Hey, a little consideration for the lady present?”

“She going to watch,” Lester said.

Deuce turned to meet the smile. But she had advice.

“Don’t throw the clothes all around. Leave them in a pile. They’ll have to be buried in concrete—among other things.”

“Not my checkerboard!”

“Your wardrobe or your life,” said the comedienne.

Like the Benny bit. I’m thinking it over, Jack had told the stickup artist. But a wallet, a coat—these were not the firm ground they had been earlier in the day, and the flood was on them. What was that lyric? Deuce let the checkerboard fall away, and the carpet drank it up. “Thought I’d die in that,” he said. More clothes were piling on.

“No,” she said. “You’ll button left.”

“Don’t look at me,” Juvie said to the comedienne, covering up with a hand.

“No need to be scared. Plus I like how a man looks, even before the rooster crows. It’s cute—like a funny nose and glasses. Though I suppose that’s a chicken and egg argument. Inside, inside—and if you slam the door on me I’m shooting off a knob.” Word play meant. She followed. “You guys are in good shape,” she said. “Get the water the right temperature,” she told Deuce. “Warm but not too hot. It’s going to run for a while. A hotel like this has a big boiler—good thing. Leave the shower curtain wide.”

Something had changed about the water—about water itself. Each droplet struck with a musical chime. Soft, subtle, but in concert it was the sound of a music box in the wind. That choral music gave peace. Deuce put a hand to the rain and felt himself relax.

The feeling was not mutual, not at first. “Darn it,” Juvie said into the steam. The stall was narrow and he found a corner. The three could scarcely fit without touching. The comedienne was throwing bars of soap from the cabinet.

“Lather up,” she said.

Deuce felt hands, and more—not a first time for him, but neither was it his favorite circus. But these hands—the hands themselves, like the water drops—these were new. He was going to say something smart to the comedienne, mock her voyeur stare a little, just for a joke, but as he looked out past the vapor he saw her throw the pistol in the wastebasket. And she began to take off her own clothes, too, turning to him, staring back. She bit a lip. His two friends had also turned to gawk, and Deuce felt a pressure. He looked down—never so hard, like a sculpt, recurving to himself. Off came her blouse, her skirt, never to be worn again. She unhooked her brassiere and pulled free the straps and cups. The skin was cream with cinnamon shook on. Off came the hose and the panties underneath. He saw the red triangle, all the curves wrought around that simple shape, a body sleek and muscular. No seethe, no geometries unclocking—she was more here than here. She stepped in—slipped between all three men and stood as one flesh, her eyes and Deuce’s very close, in a lock. Her red hair melted down. She smoothed it back from her face. “Help me,” she said, and he felt her hand take his cock. Just the touch was enough to throw every last thought of self. “Help me.” Mouths met his and her lips parted, tongues in play. The kiss spread through head to foot, and her gentle grip began to work him. Juvie had hands on her, too, and Lester on the other side, and they were no less hard and ready. Deuce felt her breast, the nipple at thumb and finger beneath the film of soap, and she drew in a sharp breath. You’re so beautiful—never spoken, never heard, rain chiming down. All limit fell away in a swirl on the drainpipe.

—

Just past sunrise three changed men stumbled out to open sky. Under hotel robes they wore no more than undershirts and boxers, these lent out from one man’s private chest of drawers. Little choice—the other clothes, the squalling pile, had disappeared, and buttoning a shirt and trousers felt like a lot of work. Shuffling feet, six eyes haunted, pupils shrunken down. The phony Trevi was frothing up in waterworks. They stared on, and whether it was for the mickey lingering in their blood or the newfound nature of reality itself, the sight of water standing like a living thing, blossoming, pouring back down, was stranger than a dream.

Speaking of. Waking in a sticky pile with two man-friends—not picture perfect, once the one woman who had been there to buffer them was gone. While madness was still at work Deuce had had a vivid experience of some sort, if not quite wakeful. Very early, still dark out—she had gone into that selfsame chest of drawers to put on his things. But as they slid in place the clothes were other clothes, women’s clothes, and of a style he had never seen. Here the overlap of dream went to nightmare. She was not alone. Two others, maybe, had come into the room, not even firm silhouettes on backlit drapes. An ultraviolet beam shone from where faces should have been and a telegraph key served for a clicking voice. She spoke back in a whispering that had no language. Wherever the beams fell constellations lit up, ghostly on bare wall and furniture. Gone, then, those chaperones, and one last fond regard as she stared on from the foot of the bed. He could not see enough of her face to read it. Fond—maybe that was hope. Her stance was like that of a vulture in the dunes, waiting for a thirsty crawl to stop.

Juvie burst into tears. “We touched meats,” he said.

Lester covered up his mouth—a laugh held back while he hid the grin—but Deuce was more sympathetic. “Juvie, sweetheart—don’t let that fret you! Happenstance! You know how it is when three hot bloods rush the gate. Here, bring it in—”

Hug denied. “What am I going to tell Trix?”

“Not a goddam thing,” Deuce said. “Since you love her so. And friend, for righteous silence you know you’re in the right place.” On a sweep of the arms once again the town became his exhibit A. Juvie staggered away from the water dance. Deuce gave a nod to the valet, who waved a cab over. No need to pay fare, which was good since the morning getup had not come with pockets. Once Juvie was in and off, Deuce turned to Lester, who was still hand-to-mouth, a twinkle in his eye.

“You’re going to tell your wife, aren’t you?”

“Every damn word.” He was almost beaming. “Marriage a sacrament. Plus Judy Lee always up to hear how we got one up on a fay.” The merriment came down. “And even aside from that, uh, you know, there that whole other thing.”

“What other thing, pal?”

“She say cancer. She didn’t say when. But she say cancer.”

Deuce was thinking on it long after Lester’s cab was gone, the down note played flat. And then he saw it—what would keep the seal on the affair intact, and just what the comedienne had done. The omerta beyond omerta—the jolly roger on the masthead. Psyops, she had said, and though the word was new the use was not. All made up, orchestrated, and this was the result—airtight government work.

He began to laugh, and each hoot walloped hard, left him doubled over. Isn’t she funny, he said to himself. Isn’t she just the funniest. He found himself backward in the Trevi lite, sopping wet, and though that water was cold, chlorinated, less forgiving than a shower fuck, it did not cut short the happy gasp that shook him through and through.

“Working that backstroke, Deuce?”

Dino, bright and early, standing above him, and Miss Angie Dickinson at his side. Both were done up in Bermuda shorts, bucket hats, and smiles. Out for an early round of miniature golf, perhaps. Fame—what a strange kind of racket.

“It’s been a long night,” Deuce said. “Long and rare.”

“Amen,” said Miss Angie Dickinson. She and Dino each held out a hand, and so angels brought Deuce back to earth. Only later did he learn of the vanishing act and feel the chill come back. Four Sprezzatura infantry, the car, the stiff, and even Giancarlo—gone without a trace. Just like the checkerboard, taken to a secret spot. That made for upheaval, a temporary loss of face, but another day’s chaos had yet to visit.

—

Thus the wartime trio broke up, each friend gone his own way. Only Deuce kept on at the Strand, now done up in the golden fleece so lovingly tailored by the gnome. Once the stink had passed he had replaced Giancarlo as manager, but he remained visible. A talent was a talent and nothing to waste. The Rat Pack soon wore the same mystic threads, as foretold, even that mutt with the glass eye.

Juvie had opened a pentecostal revival tent back in rural southern California, and he left the desert behind. What a minister he made, slinging gospels to a big congregation, faithful cigarette girl at his side with an earmarked Bible in her lap. He wore a funny getup—deep sleeves like a wizard in samite. This hid all the tattoos, and he meant every word he said about the workings of the devil and tribulations to come.

Lester, that was different. Judy Lee had not been so keen. They split up, and soon after he began to wear a bow tie with a dark suit. He had changed his diet to vegetarian, his outlook to militant, and his last name to al-Shabazz. New York City was his new home, and he no longer much cared for tales of science fiction. Though his new crew did have flying saucers in the backstory, which was nice.

Hoodwinked, Deuce wanted to tell them. Merest theatrics. But they never spoke anymore and he still loved the role of gangster emcee. Two years later he went to a Vegas premiere—It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the cast of which included every funny person who had ever roamed the earth except for Don Rickles. There Deuce wore the golden fleece as he did anywhere in public. That byssus was a well-vaunted thread—resplendent, indestructible. It would outlast him. His date that night was a married woman, and he had a married man right behind him there in the auditorium, not husband to this particular she but to a whole different can of worms. In the man’s own coat was a small caliber handgun, and he stared with great intent at the back of Deuce’s well-combed and shiny head of hair. The lights went down. Before the half—long outing, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World—Ethel Merman’s character tried to phone up Dick Shawn, who portrayed her wayward idiot son, Sylvester. The telephone was left ringing on a tiki head because Barrie Chase was doing a dance that had Sylvester baying like a hound. A sort of twist or sock hop or whatever the youngsters called it. She pumped fists on hooked arms held close to her body, and her face was stern. “Go, baby, go!” Sylvester was saying. The Shirelles were on the hi-fi in a nutty boho beach shack palace, a song that had not theretofore been put out on 45 or radio. Got a baby who can kiss/ In thirty-one flavors/ And we like tutti-frutti best.

“Wait a minute,” Deuce said, and that was all. No more nursery rhymes.

#stories

---

Where a football trophy might rest on the bedside shelf of another boy of nine—or a geode, or a Wookiee, or a Snaptite fighter jet—Callum now kept the clean upper of a human skull. Awe was due, gobsmack awe, and friends came in to pay. Shug was a floor up in the scheme, Davy two below, and both had sped along on receipt of a selfie, foreground leer, pride at left shoulder. Thanks to friction with the brother Rab ran late, and he hid the limp on entry.

What built in him at the sight was not sportsmanlike. Jealous to a seethe, he said at last, “It’s no real.” Not a glance his way, whether hard or mild.

“That’s Beltran,” Davy said. “Tommothy Beltran. He’s still got the two gold teeth.”

“Lots of cunts have two gold teeth,” Rab said. “Orangeman Geoff has full grills and rocks ’t spell his name besides.”

“But no this pair—fang and fang.” Davy indicated with the two up ye.

“So it’s a grass,” Callum said. Everybody knew of the vanishing act. Solemn nods all around. “He must have crept out of the canal, perished there and bleached. They sank him yet alive.” Were it truth an oversight, Rab knew. Shawpark Young Team was the local task force. Proper in removals, no more passion than for a half litre at the bin. “It was in the rushes where A found him,” Callum went on, “amongst shopping bags.”

Shug asked, “Nae bones,” to get a line.

“No that A saw. Bloody hell—knuckles would have made a good chain, aye.”

“Didnae crawl out then,” Davy said, yet the boffin. “And the water in the canal, it wullnae wash you up like a clamshell. Wave action is at a minimum and tidal forces dunnae apply. Naw, the way A see it a creepypasta was up on the bank, a bottom dweller ’t ate what was left of him, come up for a shite.”

“Creepypasta!” Rab shouted, to surprise. “Out your arse, that’s where you flap it, and up the nearest too. CSI: Wee Schemie Cunt! Encyclopaedo Brown!”

The brawl upset the shelf and in turn the trove. Callum caught long, and in a whited fury, the skull cherished close, he said, “Fuck off, you—all you schemie cunts.”

Boarding the elevator Rab tongued a raw lip. As he nursed at his spite and blood plans took shape. The car found his floor. He was smiling in a tinge when the doors made way again. Had Junkie Stewart not boarded the drop would have been  straight.

“Hey big man, big man. Had a bit of barney, aye? Spare us a fiver?”

Rab knew where he could fetch a head. His would be better. His, it would have a jaw, with teeth and a bite to spare.

—

The brother was Team, a year out from his majority and low of rank. But Brace was in on things, if not so taut at mouth as being in should demand. Three hits of swally and he had been at arias in the maw’s kitchen with two Team prospects. They had told him to bite it off, gone loud for fear of their lives, as though powers heard through wall, floor, and tower block alike. Rab had grown crack at his ninjitsu, listening in from the other room. Soon after, an angry head had poked in to check. Earbuds were up, earbuds playing fools, and from behind a comic book Rab threw on a metronomic bob.

“Gie”—and snatch—to an open view of Brace off for the bog, Immortal Hulk in hand.

So he had the vicinity. This was not a dump. The remains were meant to be found— staged, as the shows said. The brother had been amazed that no one had yet caught scent. Skies had been blue, taps aff and aff again. Rab went armed: colours and a chef’s knife. Surely a muggy week or two was enough to reduce a cunt to bone, but there would be gristle. Domestic cutlery was no less outlaw than a chib, and less sly. Whence the scarf. It could have been anything wrapped up—a flute, a carrot—rooting for the F.C.

The trespass sign by the gap bore the Team tag: ShYT3. Second-string villainy, as Rab saw it, to leave a boast on the fence for the law. Through chainlink and rank shrub he went, shady trash underfoot, into a vault of leaves. Another rankness in mind he began to scent the air. Sight of the bothy, a green tarp on a frame of skids, brought a thrill. A hum rose, flies in the many hundred, and he breached the smell at last, like passing through a blister skin. Just beyond the vegetation lay the channel, the south side walking path. West enders would be out for a jog, and chipper junkies on chipper junkie rounds. Somehow they were unaware of the fumes. Maybe they had lost the nose. The whole bottom of that watercourse was bones, Maryhill and Possil knew, bones in a stack with mud and rubbish, but the flow kept it clean, slow yet steady, in time got out to sea. Wading into the smell—a thickening air—Rab was weighing up the swim. He came to a stop, took two back, thought it through. “Need us a skull.”

A makeshift home will paint a picture of an occupant—rough sleeper, anorak, flasks of Eldorado voided and shed. But no, this cunt had been to a tailor. Not that the cut was so bespoke now. A bloat pulled buttons tight as laces. Rats had worried at his hands, rats or creepypastas, for these had been the only naked meat, now an unfleshed pair of rakes. They lay crossed on a double breast, herringbone tweed, the body in a topcoat. No summerweight getup, no less so for the gunny sack atop the head. It had been cinched up tight—tighter even than the rayon windsor knot.

A muggy week does not reduce a cunt to bone, Rab saw. “Fuck.” Off came the scarf from the knife, to block up mouth and nose. For a better angle he pulled the tarp and let a skid fall out. In he leaned, looked away once the edge was placed, and began a dainty fiddle. The wet whisper was no less regrettable than the reek. Flies crept about his neck and sipped upon his blinking eyes.

Five minutes made for a nick and a sore wrist. Put a back into it, he told himself. On his knees, he bore down, both hands on the stroke. No looking off now, not even as the jostle gave up tenants—both sleeves, both trouser legs. Jumping back Rab gave a shriek. He had a look about to make sure none had heard the girl. Like shadows—gone with a rustle. He looked to his hands. Juices—nasty, like those that had run out from the shell of a pet turtle dead of thirst. He was an older boy now and knew how to commit.

Back to work. A cervical joint gave way easier than he might have thought, not in so many words. Perhaps the neck had been broken in the grip. The wetness was trying, so he doffed the scarf to give himself a wipe. It had not done much in blocking a stink, or so he thought until the nose was left undefended. Flies went spelunking in each nostril. The things he did for honour. Face pinching shut, he tidied up his hands, and the swaddling went on clean side out. He pulled, and a last connection gave way, to a reel of string. Worm, he thought at first as it sagged to dirt. But then he saw that it was spinal tissue. “Turtle!” he said on the revolt, more or less. A shrug and tuck of chin got the retch off.

One more pass, two more deepening heaves, these dry. Done! Neat to the crook of an arm, like a rugger ball up from the scrum. Folded plies kept off the soak. Rab looked down at what would be left. Per local rite he offered up a prayer. “Poor bastard.” One less grass, but in a state of decay all are innocent.

Pure rancid, though. Breath held, looking to his feet, he ran. He would see the deed forever, smell it, a codger in a pub of tomorrow ruing wisdom at a hologram of ale. But first he saw the lawman rear up, a yellow-vested polis of the goddam here and now.

Polis, Rab; Rab, polis. Just beyond, and radiant with open sun, was the gap in the fence. Panic—but no less plainly Rab saw the mind at work. Only a scold being formulated—polis wit, God help us—with no glance to the parcel. This was not a ghoul but a truant, to the officer’s mind, a mere naughty wean.

So Rab said, “There.”

The fright was honest, no less so than the nod back to sin. Sold. The stare broke, the polis looking past. Rab was glad to see range in those eyes: suspicion, focus, puzzlement, focus, surprise, career ambition.

“Stay there,” the polis said. Again ninjitsu came to play. Not a twig underfoot played the clype. You’ll never make DCI, Deppity Hamish, Rab thought between sun and pavement, at a dead run. Next up: find ye an anthill.

—

Four hours’ search down the Kelvin walk, all to see the light: the city parks were home to no such thing. Rab could visualise a hill, aye, a handsome cone littered with a scrap of ladybirds, but this must have been on the shows. Urban ants were a different sort: crack-dwellers, sugar bowl rapists. No death-mounds, no marches skeletonising a jungle road. Glasgow ants were plain shite. But worms could do the polish.

Off the walk he dug, the mill in sight from the fallen tree if he peeked up. Passersby only saw a wee man playing foxhole. Furrow made, he saw that he should take off the wraps. A head made bare would surrender more quickly. The step was clear—he had done the worse—but reluctance grew. Coming up on eight p.m., two hours to nightfall, and he was full of the smell upon him. Off came the scarf, never to be worn again save by weather. Once he laid bare the strangle cord, tight yet on gray meat, he thought back. The maw would miss the knife, as he did now; the cops at the scene, perhaps not.

Live and learn. Rab pulled in opposite directions at the top of the gunny cloth, to a rip. He caught a flash of face before the waft shut his eyes for him. “Fuckin ammonia?” he said in a choke. Biology was foul indeed. Someday we’d turn ours in for robots. No more deil realm of piss and stink. Eyes off, nose out, he picked up the bottom of the sack. A hard shake would lay it in the dirt. Not seeing the who of it, the former human being, was politeness, he told himself. But as the head slipped out it pulled against the throttle, not loose at all, and Rab felt the weight dangle. He shook and shook but let go. The tease flipped it face up. His palms were on the backfill when he glanced to what was shown. And another hour crept by in cold thought.

—

His face was a tattle on entry to the homestead. Brace was at the table with a vape pen, hash oil from the scent, slouched in two. Before him was a residue of Bucky in a snifter. Where he had found the snifter is lost to history, but he had poured to the rim.

“Whit’s ra mettur wi ye?”

“A—”

“Get tae fuck!”

 Rab did. He felt haunted to the rearmost teeth. But there were other ghosts making home, he saw. Brace’s eyes were cannabinol pink, or he had wept up a lather, or both. 

Faces were much on Rab’s mind. To the bath, for soap and lathers of his own, a scrub from quiff to queef. Afterward, on a frown, he shot Glade straight onto his hands. No trace could be left, not on the surface. The smell would have to wear off from deeper.

The afterimage, that would not. Puffed out, a gray slough, but features known to any. The bastard had disappeared back in wintertime. He had been enough of a figure to cut another by his absence. No grass, this—never. In that sunset hour Rab had been forced to play boy detective. Encyclopaedo Brown, the sequel. Poetic justice. What a cunt.

This was not sanitation, but politics. Surely nothing for Shawpark Young Team, least of all for numpty Brace. Even a nine-year-old schemie cunt could see that. As rinks of diarrhoea went, this was a colder one to skate. Not least for the state of the body after six months’ absence. Rancid, but not rancid enough. The gospel of the shows taught Rab the full. To thwart work in the lab, forensic timetables, they had put him in a freezer. Once the stars were right came the thaw. The ShYT3 tag nearby, Brace playing town crier—Rab saw it all. False flag—setup—a deliberate leak. Brace was a patsy, here confirmed by anguish, Bucky, vape. Rab was about to lose the brother.

“And gain a skull!”

The clothes were fire bound, save the tee. His Suspiria shirt was not going back to Gitche Manitou. He’d just have to drop some Woolite on that cunt. He was under the sink for a shopping bag when he heard Brace sob loud and clear.

“Ooh Netty, Netty. Ooh Netty.”

Netty Maclinnick—a jilt. The slag had shown some taste. A sigh, enthroned on the bog lid to ride it out. Rab would pay in lumps if Brace saw him see. Not soon enough, the maw got home from her shift, and Brace was shooed off to the sofa bed.

—

Grief was in no short supply, but a day of school was the grief he knew best. Off he went at eight a.m., the psychic smell of curdled victim unrelenting. He pouted through maths, looking forward to the exam that would rid him of the farce once and forever. Until then he would have to slum it in genpop. Callum was in the class, and even in the fug and drudgery Rab could not help but notice his rival looked plenty glum.

 “It’s gone,” Callum said at lunch. “Tommothy Beltran’s skull. Alas, A knew him well.” Rab made a face. “Ma parents, they found him, and they would nae hear reason. When A told how A got it, where A got it, ma maw even called the polis.”

“No!”

“Aye!” Callum laid boustrophedons in neeps and tatties with a spork. Rab had no thought on his own tray and had skipped even the dry morning toast.  “It’s no a grass when it’s your maw. The filth came in and grilled me for hours. They wanted to take me in like a proper villain, but da, he drew the line. They were snappin like mongrels in the living room. There were threats of calls—social workers, Legal Aid, prosecutor, queen’s counsel, Uncle Jay. What a shite show.”

‘They could take the skull without a warrant?”

“Aye—a bastard in a hazmat suit—no just gloves but a suit, head to foot, like some kind of moonbase cunt. He dropped it in an evidence bag, didnae he, Fuck Rogers.”

‘Even though you found it fair and square?”

“Even though A found it fair and square. They waved blacklights in ma room. A’m too young to skeet, the twats. They were there for hours. Impressing upon me how A should nae ‘tamper with evidence.’” His index fingers curled marks onto polis words.

“Did they aye.”

“That ‘interfering with human remains’ is a ‘matter for the courts.’”

“Huh.”

“That ‘hiding material evidence’ made me ‘accessory to the crime.’”

“Hm.”

“In this case a ‘likely homicide.’ Then they left off and went … but ma da, no he.”

‘Aw that’s rough, pal. A’m so sorry.” Inwardly: A’ll rush the schedule.

Recent loss, a sweet spot—sweeter than the thrill of competition. How Callum would boil. And Davy, the sucker-punch bampot, he might as well prepare himself for seppuku.

—

Overnight had made no dent, not a single worm a-nibble. Now that he had a better grasp on decomp Rab had not foreseen miracles. And he had come better prepared for a transfer: the maw’s dishwashing gloves; rubbish bags, a whole roll; and Brace’s never-once-used football tote. It had been a gift from the maw’s barnacle, a top chap who had hoped to temper the young through sport. Of course he might as well have brought tea to a troop of morlocks in an irradiated sewer complex but the thought had been nice. No scrape at the dirt—Rab was glad for any mask. The truffle quintuple-bagged, he went his merry way. He had also brought a jar of Tiger Balm, pinched from the Extra, to rub camphor at his nose. The shows again, peace be upon them.

There would be no stink at all, but it was best to avoid a busy route. Setting out for the block, the path near the aqueduct in mind, he saw a polis off the walk with a dog on lead—a Belgian Malinois sniffing through the underbrush.

Fifty feet off, yet it gave Rab a stern look. No need to run a fancy—polis dogs took squat time, same as any—until he saw the same again, yellow movements on the far bank. Each nearest dog turned his way, even from across the glassy slide of water. There would be more sniffing out ahead, were the fear correct—the whole Stasi kennel.

Rab doubled back toward the Extra. No more K-9s, but he saw the same picque amongst civilian dogs out for walkies. Black lab, Staffy, cockapoo, puggle, Pom—each gone grass on him. The last, come closest, drew the lead tight enough to hang wash, and it began to yap. “Jockie!” the human anchor said. “Jockie, you’ll stretch your wee neck! Sorry, son, A don’t know what’s got into him. Are you carrying a ham toastie by chance?”

More came out about ham and Pomeranian. Rab heard none of it. He ran the tenements above the Kelvin, imagining the j’accuse from any pet at a window. His nonhuman pals could scent it, but not Rab. Nor even the curse of the canal from the prior day, and that had been from within. Fright was a good reset.

Mention of a toastie even got him in a mind to eat. He had not in more than a day. To the Greggs, then. These sausage rolls will give me the quick energy A need to fetch us home, Rab thought, demolishing the pack on site. He was at a table for two, the football tote snug at his feet, and he went back up for caramel shortbread.

—

To task. Brace was not at home, and the maw would not be for hours yet. Into a stock pot with the trophy, features down, and water. Rab had seen a stew in his time. Given long enough a simmer would denude the skull and improve the smell along the way.

It did not. Rancid was rancid cooked or raw, he found. All windows open was no help. He thought to add dishwashing liquid, the very essence of cleanliness, and the slurry foamed over. Once that was tended to—heat low, pot sides wiped up and blotted—a residue began to burn. The atmosphere grew hazy as well as foul. Grim, but necessary: Rab bound a hoodie to his face, sleeves back. He added potpourri to the boil—mother’s stash atop the bog—marking whether it made the difference, no, and then, in turn, a cup of salt, no, a liter of bleach, worse, a half of milk, no better, glass cleaner from the unscrewed spray top, fuckin awful, and honey at a drizzle. He was about to reach for straight lye when beefs came in from the windows, neighbours above and below.

“What is that stink?”

“Paulie Boy! Is that bathtub meth again?”

“Who’s frying tripe?”

“Fuck aff!”

Rab’s eyes had gone a fierce red, bloodshot to the stems, and he coughed on every take of air. The windows would stay wide. But neither did he need a city council visit. Best to douse. He turned off the burner and threw a saucepan full of tap water. Steam clouds roiled up, and he waved both hands to thin the air.

“Fuck!”

This was from inside the flat. Here was Brace, uncharacteristically sober, which is to say only mostly drunk or high. Rab did not recognize the brother’s face straight off, for it did not wear its usual malevolence, only a shock.

“Whit ra fuck ur you at in here?” The diction was as usual, but not the tone. Brace had no go for a go in him. A kitchen chair received his blubbery drop.

“Science fair,” Rab said, wincing for the cuff.

None came. Neither did the stare relent. “A’ve been railroaded,” Brace said at last.

“Huh?”

“Set up, ye fuckin muppet. A’d be in jail noo if ra haunds an heid wur still oan.”

“Haunds and heid oan whit?” Rab said, through the glare of seeing all at once.

“Ra haunds went tae ra rats, ma pals telt me, fingerprints wi them, but ra rest, ra whole fuckin heid an dental records, naebidy knows who—”

Here Rab found he had a tell.

Brace saw. He followed the glance to the pot. The suspicion deepened. “Rab?”

“Brace?”

Up at once, the chair upset, to fetch a pair of tongs. Rab could not move, not even as Brace sounded the broth, nor on the gasp of coming face to face.

A full half minute crept by. Brace broke the freeze, made the turn. And then he was on Rab quick as shot, with a hug and a grin and eyes full of tears.

“A’m proud ay ye, wee man. Ye’ll huv me greetin.”

Rab said nothing.

“But here noo,” Brace went on. “It’s only hauf ra joab.”

Rab said nothing.

“Teeth.”

Rab said nothing but saw the joke.

“It’s awright,” Brace said. “Ye’ve been a gallus, done yer part. A’ll brek up ra jaw maself.” And soon nothing was left to be explained, except to the maw, once she came home to the newest stench, one of many made by two sons on their own.

#stories

---

Swim in it, piss in it, leave it to the ducks, no pool had ever been a feature of the Hub. But thanks to drainage choked with gems of Eldorado glass the miracle came due. That morning was a summer one, the blue shorn clean. Two boys had been on the swings nearby, kicking up corners on the turf. One had sly aims in bringing his friend  there and was only half on task—as much as half, that was, until he saw the puddle laid broad and deep. Skimming stones, a.k.a. thrawin shite—this was the new regime, though all they had to shy was any slag they could worry up off the tarmac. Tar could not bounce and the dabbles from these flop dives barely echoed off the tower blocks. Loud enough, though, for here were the wee schemies—all of them, a gushing litter birth—come down to aid in the murder of the day. Rafts made of fast food bags were set on fire, and those that Mcbeef had left see-through far outshone the rest. Trolleys from the Extra ran to plumes of water. Souse glass had shown up in the weeds, always welcome for a lob and a shatter. Where resources ran short fists were inevitable, even three bouts. The children were too soft yet, flyweight, to crack bone, and since all were under twelve none but Psycho Hamish carried a chib. “Keep it doon,” from a mother, one at the tables near. Back to talk, fags, a circle facing inward.

“Chaos,” Rab said, and not without a smile. “Chaos.”

But then he came back to why he had come with his new friend. Such a ruckus was never any good for a stakeout. The future timeline was at risk. Thinking fast—up quick for a change—he came back in wellies. A whistle left on the pitch had gone around his neck. This Rab blew, to a shriek and to nothing. Another scrap was underway. Two trolleys overturned in the joust, and on a wrenching crash a third caught air. But his friend stood aside him, and he tried again—double toot, extra shrill, for a penalty. The public eye was on him, or close enough.

“Nae runnin,” Rab said. “An nae fire.” Weegie Scots—off school grounds such was the default.

Just unhorsed, Davy stood up, sleeves draining. “Whit’s at noo?”

“A sayt nae fire an nae runnin by ra pool.”

“Did ye aye! An wha are ye tae say it?”

“A’m ra lifeguard.”

Of course Davy Duncan would be the one to jam the works. But laughs came hard all around, eyes to his friend but not with caution, as before. Rab bent a neck, to no sign.

“Did ye make a face?”

“Chan eil agam ach an tè.”

“Pal, pal, ye must commit. A’m ra smairt talk here, no ye.”

“Tell me about the rabbits, George.”

The friend had two means to poke, both just shown. Catchphrase, accent, dopey register—for Rab these were the worse. At least with Gaelic he could not fault himself. Nobody should expect to get through cluck from the North Atlantic, not in Maryhill.

“Whit fuckin rabbits,” to himself. To the crowd, “Listen aw ay ye. A was ra furst wan here, furst tae see water, and at gies a say. Craic is craic but how long afore ra auld yins notice? They’d shut us doon tight as a boulder’s erse, so they wid.” A sweep to the senga mums facing inward, yet in their envelope of nicotine.

“Cho teann ri de?”

Rab began to lay out pool rules. But the mob’s two up ye was still hooking baws. Eyes began to roam. Time was wasting. Bags to burn, carts to butt.

“Rab!”

Shug, late. On coming close he did a take, and Rab felt better. Shug had been away for a week to see a grandparent in Dundee. Feast yer specky eyes.

“Wha’s ra newbie? A had him fur a grup.”

“Grup?”

“‘Bonk bonk oan ra heid, grup, bonk bonk oan ra heid!’”

“Ra hell ye oan aboot?”

“Aw, at’s from—”

“Star Trek!”

A throaty burr, /r/s in a tumble. Cnut Mag Amlaíb had only just moved from a far and spumy rock. There life was different. Vikings in cable knits doffed hats to ewes. Friday nights saw a wicker man go up. Druids were new money and street signs were in runes. Call it the Isle of Nob. The name, and more, was a guess. Cnut had told little yet, though he had the human speech for broad strokes. He, too, was ten, even two months younger than Rab. Yet he stood a thumb above a meter eighty and weighed more than thirteen stone. None dare have a go, even for the outfit—breeks, hose, and a bluidy woolen gilet, all thirdhand. Like a sheepshagger husbandman from a telly countryside.

“This is Teuchter Cnut,” Rab said.

Bait untaken, as always, but you could see how the hook weighed in the eyes. Shug said, “Good tae meet ye.”

“Star Trek is braw! Ever play Doongeons an Dragons?”

“Ye are Dungeons an Dragons.” Shug caught himself. “A love a twel-sided die.”

“Ootrolls a caber,” said Rab.

“The toss?” Cnut said. “Och, that’s wummin’s work.” Joke and truth were too close a call. Plus nerd shite was not in the script, so Rab struck it. He would have to mind Shug and his reverse Midas touch.

“Hey! Hey Baywatch!” Davey was in the pond. “A’m drownin!” Angel motions for a churn and a go. Stuck to one ankle was a condom, fished out on a kick, flabby and yellow. “Baywatch! A’m fuckin drownin!”

Laughter again—and the weans took up the chant, stomping in the puddle.

“That’ll stick,” Rab said.

But here at last the agenda came into view. The ned dwarf. Led by Rab’s eye, Cnut and Shug watched him, too. The dwarf was local. Cut and colors aside he looked a lot like the best Lannister. Five years back, while in school, he had gone by Noser, and the tale there was cautionary. But that prendre pisse was not au courant. The dugs on lead had brought the change—each a wedge head, fawn and white, big as the man himself. A lone blung hand kept chains taut at two blung collars. Neither dug sped the pace. The dwarf was a big deal. He had graduated from the ranks of the Shawpark Young Team to the network that had no name. Rab had as much from Brace. That a “dinklage” could move up, and not his brother, made for whinges. Brace was away on a DTO. This freed up couch space and the PS4 and made home a wonderland.

The dwarf felt eyes. Rab and Shug found sky and earth. Children of Maryhill were no different from the grups, bonk bonk. They knew not to know.

But not Cnut Mag Amlaíb of the Norsedick clan. No, he lent a stare, and Rab a swat.

“Whit? Wha’s that noo?”

“Sledge. On’t-dae ucking-fae ook-lae.” Cnut had none of the vulgate. Rab put it in the best of teuchter terms. “Ra world behind ra world—ra Unseelie Court.”

Sledge had come to a halt. The wedge heads did the same. His face was wan, eyes pink, and both were on Cnut. A night’s fun—that would explain the late pickup.

“So e’s a drug dealer?”

“No so loud. An naw, e’s no a dealer, unless it’s iron ye want.”

“Snog,” Cnut said.

“‘Snog’?”

“Snog.”

“Fuckin ‘snog’?”

What could be more Nob. Saying snog did not break the stare. That could be trouble. Wee did not enjoy a gawk, muckle should have known.

But Sledge lost interest and the dugs led again. Hedge, rock, paper sack, all per custom, by the community center doors. Sparse leaf could not hide it. The rafters were not as numpty as Rab had feared. In went the free hand, and off went Sledge.

“That bag,” Cnut said. “A wonder whit’s in it.”

“Wan warm can ay Irn-Bru. Sugar Free. Tae make weight.”

Rab heard the irony as he said it. Funny. But his was the only smile.

“That wis specific,” said Shug.

Up came the hoodie, waistband made bare, and Rab basked in the reveal.

“Ye nickt it?” Shug said, eyes on. “Ye nickt a fuckin drop?”

“Too loud,” Rab said. “An anyhow A only found ra cunt.” Wink. “Whoever’s rightful owner cannae be happy but.” Shug whitened to an eerie translucence. “Drop a pair,” Rab said. “It’s ra call tae adventure.”

Cnut was less fretful. “Whit is it?”

Both hands free, hoodie safely down again, Rab made air quotes to nock the syllables. “Ta-ser. Like a phaser, fae ra anorak show ay Shug’s, but wi a tee instead ay ra pee aitch an ye cannae set er tae kill.” The syllables again.

“Tell me about the Rabbits, George.”

“How’m A fuckin George here,” Rab did not ask. Instead, “Mind ye A don’t know why, right enough. A taser’s polis, an rare—no ra style, no at aw. Nor is ra transfer ay black market arms ra most commonplace use ay ra middleman scenario. But taser, aye.”

Shug turned to walk away but stopped cold. Rab and Cnut were distracted by the abrupt appearance of Psycho Hamish. For him such contraband had a scent.

“Ooh, whit goodies huv ye goat therr?”

“Aye, boeys—whit?” Even more abrupt. A sip from the can of Irn-Bru. The dwarf made a face and read the label. “Sugar free?” Left and right the dugs were off chain.

Rab watched himself bolt, and Cnut. Psycho Hamish kicked a leg from under Shug and ran his own way. Rab could marvel at the ingenuity even as he saw the dugs’ scrum onto his nerdiest friend. “Bastard,” he heard Shug say, scarcely a whisper.

No growl, no scream—as boy killers went the wedge heads were first-rate.

Sledge shouted, “Might we no skip ra middle?” The pool party had gone silent and a senga mom aired her grief. For the sprinty gust in his ears Rab heard no more.

Even after he had come to a stop, hunkered at bins on Towie Place, his heart was a bell. “Never felt so alive,” he said to himself, clamping back a panic shite. Cnut was no less out of breath but had enough for a hairy eye. Gaelic came in bursts. Rab understood the pitches if not the words. “Don’t gies that,” he said. “Ye were starin oan like a cow. A waanted ye tae see him, no tae thraw a fuckin searchlight.”

“Whit do ye mean ye waanted me tae see him?”

Very tall and very short should gain a rivalry. Such a scheme to things was only right. Capers would go on for years, neither side with the upper hand until the epic showdown. But Rab only shook his head. Tending to the field was his own calling. No one else could understand. And here came a wedge head—trotting up to haunch before them.

A panting threesome. None moved. Gone cold in the dug breath, Rab drew the taser.

“Naw! E’s a good boy.”

“Ra cunt just ate Shug.”

But Cnut put out a hand. The wedge head took the invite and got close. No red on the muzzle, Rab had to admit, nor guts for garters. Cnut fell to petting, and the dug flagged lickings with a tail.

“It’s oan oor side!” Rab said.

“Fuckin hell,” said the dwarf. “Nae mair dash, all right?”

The taser had gone up in a two-hand grip, the trigger clicking tinnily.

Sledge gave a scoff. “Pal, at wad’s shot already—cartridge is emptit oot—an ye’ll never want yer traces oan it noo, trust us.” Yet catching breath, he held out a hand. And so the prize was surrendered. “A’ll admit, though—ye’ve goat neck oan ye, daein at.”

The first wedge head had gone belly up, and the second had come around the bins for more of the same. Rab had never seen a dug happier than those very two. “Whit’s it fur?” Cnut asked, petting with both hands.

“Funny ye should ask,” Sledge said and on that matter no more. “Yer pal back therr, e had a spill but e’s fine. Maybe a bit kissy yet from ra pups. Rom and Rem here, how they love a wean. Ye shouldnae play wi bastards like at Hamish boey.”

Cnut said, “Ye ever play Doongeons an Dragons?”

Rab felt a blush but Sledge said, “Dungeons an Dragons is pure gallus! A used tae run a tabletop campaign wi me pals. Planescape! But A only play online noo.”

Cnut perked up. “Em em oh are pee gees?”

Sledge shared a platform and a username. No good would come of that. “Ye’re no mad at us?” Rab asked.

“Mate, ye’re only a wean. Young’s a stupit ye graw oot ay.”

Years ahead, deep in the new timeline—and S6—Rab went home from school. On his passing a close a voice said, “Tell me about the rabbits, George”—a voice grown to a boom, all Gaelic shed along with thirdhand woolens. He who spoke was Team and fated to rise in the world behind the world. Rab kept on. By then he knew who George was and all about the rabbits, and he prayed that stupid was not a young he never would.

#stories

---

Nights at hospice were a race without a step, save for a nurse and her sensible shoes. Here went the latest victor, Lourdes Santandrea, widow of seventy, mother of two. She had a mouth full of thrush and the trach came out with a faint sigh and leaven smell. The voice hinted in that breath, the tones of a woman who would never speak again. A bath of ice got the ring loose enough to draw, and into the bag it went, along with a crux on a chain, now keepsakes for daughter and son. Soon the morgue would show and Mrs. Santandrea would enter the next heat—one she might not mind so much.

A change of cotton blues for Mildred Dephane, RN, Palliative Care, and a turn at the desk with the medical record. The foam clogs were toed free as she typed into a field. “Dark Entries” by Bauhaus came up so she goosed the shuffle with a thumb. “Dead Souls” by Joy Division. One last skip. “Requiem” by Killing Joke. She pulled the buds. Goth rock was a favorite but not a punchline.

She heard the wheels. The gurney came into view, and the angel from the basement in his darker scrubs. A push to the doors Mildred could see at the end of the hall, and on to whatever doors she could not. So it went. Daylight hours were for admitting, hers for the ushering out. But here came that one exception, just as the auto close had put a finish on the widow. A swoop as it broke again.

Gide in paperback went down, spread on a crease, as the admit drew near. The sweet-faced Tahitian orderly was in control, and she glanced down shyly from the oddball makeup. Dress codes had give in a terminal ward, and Mildred made the most of her slack with spray-on eyeliner and red tips on an inky bob. And that atop skin like unblushed bisque. Like a doll misused by a child.

So Pua either liked her or took her for undead. Maybe a bit of both, and either way Mildred thought it was cute, the big dumb lesbian. She might have played the flirt, but the orderly was not alone. Even aside the rattle in the blanket, a sound of breath just coming into reach, Pua had two people at her flank. A cardigan with clipboard—some admin, fully interchangeable—and a dreamy black man with silver in the wings of his high-and-tight.

Zoom on the dreamy black man, Mildred thought, and did. He had a tweedy coat draped on a forearm, and there was a bead of rain on it. He had entered from the lot, away from the awning—a car of his own. That and the official look—not to mention the shewing of the way—told that the admit had come in on a bus. A transfer of some kind, even that late, and not under lights. Straight up to eight—no triage, no ICU. A panel stuttered, and a gleam led her to the final clue. One handcuff end was fastened to a bedrail, the other locked on a thin forearm.

That was something new—a prisoner.

The doctor had come out to mend the view with girth. The rose of his neck fat was pinking up. An interest—no less a surprise. He knew something.

The admin was in on the scheme and handed him a sheaf in a folder. Pua carried on, as did the patient and the plainclothes. Around a corner and to the same berth just made vacant. There was no effort to fill Mildred in, so she went to help Pua with the bed transfer. She came in as the cop undid a shackle. He stood back to make room, saw Mildred, said with a nod, “Miss.”

And so Mildred got the first full look. She had not expected a man so old, so done. There were two high-fives on the ward—both near the slap, so to speak—and they were the only patients who might compare. This waste was age, no more, if that were the word for such a feat of lasting. No hair left, and the spotted skin was laid to the bone. Lips and cheeks were in a draw, no teeth to fill out the gap. And those eyes, set deep—they blinked to the minute, a slowest froth. Awake, if not aware, behind each scratch of breath.

Transfer made, the blanket was laid on again, and there was more weight in the fabric than there was in the man. Pua walked out with a simper. Officer and cuffs were back for more. “Should I pretend you’re not here?” Mildred asked above the ratchet.

“No, I’m all here, Miss. Officer Harvey, SSU, Corrections.”

“I’m Nurse Mildred,” Mildred said. “Mildred Dephane.”

They stepped out into the hall, where their voices could rise above a mutter. “Andrew Harvey,” he said. “Call me Ange, like the rest. Though that’ll date me some.”

A nod to something past Mildred’s years, all twenty-five of them. But so be it: Ange, a hottish man in the low fifties. “I don’t know what SSU stands for.”

“Special Service Unit. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It means—”

The clipboard was on them. “Mildred, may I borrow you for a moment?”

She came back half an hour later with rules, promptly broke. Ange was still there and would be for the term, Mildred knew now. He had put a chair by the door and himself down in it. Another officer would spell him at sunup, one no less nolo to a medical professional, at least one without a seven-year diploma and a residency.

Ange was scrying the glow of a smartphone. The overcoat had been rolled tight for the small of his back. When he stood up for her the bolster tumbled to the floor.

“I really can’t ask who he is?” Mildred said.

Phone went to pocket and he stooped for the coat, unfurled where it lay. “Who could tell you not to ask? But I can’t say—judge’s orders. It’s so the old man gets a fair shake.”

Sly. The patient had severe urticaria, which some might take for diaper rash. And there had been neglect. “It’s not like you’re a secret agent, Ange. You can tell me who you are.”

“Rude not to.”

“Why would someone who chases cons watch after a patient? Even one from the prison system? There must be six or seven different badges raring to go.”

“So you Internetted SSU on the way back. That’s really not all we do—chase cons.”

“But it does make him an offender of some kind. And since I’m a quick study, a special one. Best guess, special means violent.”

“Violent? There’s not a bite left in that head. And he can’t even throw up an arm.”

“Bad news for a cannibal, if that’s the gimmick. I don’t care who he is, Ange, or what he’s done. The whole thing is stupid. If he had just been brought in without fuss—no blindfolds, no gags, no lion tamer—nobody here would have thought twice. It’s belittling.”

“She make you sign something? That rep lady?” A form on letterhead. Healthcare had evil in the works: actuaries who drove up costs, and admins on the counter-hex with majestic overbilling. And each side kept attorneys like familiars on a chain. The firm with the hospital had put names of counsel at the top, a message in itself. “Sorry about that,” Ange said. “It’s not how I’d ever handle it. Nothing can happen here. And even if it could, I’d make sure it wouldn’t. You have my promise.”

“How gallant of you.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. I’m being a dick. It’s not your fault.” Mildred’s eye went to where the lapel hung open: a strut holster and a gun butt. “I could just ask him for his name. Most folks don’t forget it.”

“You could ask.”

“Is he lucid?”

“Wouldn’t know—he hasn’t had a thing to say to me. But I am a screw.” Her smile took no notice. “Of sorts. I’ll undo those cuffs whenever you need me to.”

She might have asked why anyone should bother to clap a man so weak in irons, but instead she answered for him. “Judge’s orders.”

“To the dot.”

—

“Palest woman I ever saw.”

First words, no louder than a kick of leaves. She had been having a look beneath the gown. His skin could bruise on a puff of breath. He had split and bled wherever he had been pulled during the transfers. The backs of his hands were like gloves ready for the trash. Everywhere else that wisp of a hide was raised up in wheals. Some sorts of urticaria could be written on. This was just a strikeout.

Normally a duty nurse on nights would let an admit sleep. But on the buzz-by Dr. Joss thought he had caught a whiff of clostridium. No black, or none that showed through. She had started at the rustle of his voice. There was no eye for her to meet—a flat potted ink.

She pitched each word. “Hello, mister!” A man so old would have a touch of deafness, if he still heard at all. “My name’s Mildred. I’m here to help make you comfortable. What’s your name?” She made sure it carried through the door.

He took his time. “Are you a ghost?”

“A friendly ghost.” She closed the gown.

“Robbert,” he said at last. And nothing else, not yet.

On her way out she walked past Ange. What he was reading in landscape turned out to be The Friends of Eddie Coyle. So a header said. Pretty fine print to be snatched up past a shoulder.

“He’s Bob,” Mildred said, continuing on her way. “His name is Bob.”

Ange gave a hum but never a look. I hear, it meant.

She came back with sponges and with her colleague Sus, for the turns. “We’ll need the jewelry off,” Mildred said.

Ange obliged.

Once he had returned to his post in the hall, she and Sus undressed the patient. He said not a word, only gasping through the dabs, the wring of suds into a pan. He was as frail a thing as either woman had ever washed. Sus sang a lullaby, “A la Nanita Nana,” but not so loud that a word stood out. Her full name was Jesusa Ruiz and she had a softness for the old, the very young, and the infirm. And for nobody else. She had a radiant cross in the web of a thumb. Mildred’s other coworker on nights, Harriet—born Hank and going by Hatsy—was a much sweeter person and not half the nurse. Hatsy and Mildred did enjoy a rapport. Mildred, once, looking to a list on a tube: “Why do they call it lanolin?” Hatsy, in a snap: “‘Sheep smegma’ wouldn’t move a lot of hand cream.” Still a smile.

When Sus left the room the old man spoke.

“The first, he was a boy. Six, seven, walking alone with a rod. I took him from behind the Sunday school. Chloral from the vet. Put on a chain in an old barn. Woke him up with a cup of piss. He asked for his mother once he got a breath. I showed him what I’d use, told him what I’d do. He shouted for her like I wasn’t there. Straightened out a finger on that hand. He tried to hold a fist shut but I forced it open. Soft. The bone so small. My teeth went right through. Like a bite out of a fig.”

It went on.

“All set,” Mildred heard herself say once she had finished bandaging the hands. The sheet and blanket were up snug, the bead of his eyes elsewhere. She walked past Ange and straight into the lav across the hall, where she retched into the sink once the door swung shut. Just a strand, but the burn of it ruined her eye makeup. She took a moment to blot, black curds on hand paper, because she knew the SSU officer would be waiting just outside to get a look at all the mess.

And there he was, with a look of such bare concern that she rolled her eyes. “Shucks,” she said, taking a hankie. A pocket square, silk, monogrammed—shame to snot into something so dressy. But she did so with a meek snort and and a digging pinch. “That was a eureka moment.”

“Are you okay?”

“He was telling me about some kid.”

Ange was quiet, but the anger spoke.

“So he likes children.”

No nod, nothing proven. And this time there was shame.

“What’s the count? How many were there?”

“Miss Dephane,” through a head shake.

“Here’s an easier number. He gave me a year. Just how old is he, Ange? It’s a blank on what I have. Like the spaces for name and social. But he’s got better than a century in him, doesn’t he? How else could he have a victim in 1926?”

What showed through had changed again.

“What? You didn’t know about one so far back?”

“I’ll have to make a call,” he said.

—

No further episodes, not that night. Nor did the old man die in it. Mildred went home at six in the morning, N Judah and a brisk walk uphill, still raw. It surprised her. A person in her calling got tough quick. Most nurses developed a hard sort of wit they could share on break, but a joke from hospice staff, that was downright acid. It ate through bone and bureaucrat alike.

Minds near the end could fetch back some purple stuff. The likelihood of truth was what made the difference. Mildred had more than pictured that dim barn. The weathered wood, cracked with sunlight. Alfalfa strewn out. The musky undertone of stalls. Smut on the chain. A grisly taste of rust.

The sun was up when she made the door. It would not clear buildings for hours. But she knew it was there. The rays put a chime in the air, unheard but crisp. Two flights, and then an attic ladder.

Mildred had lived in the Duboce Triangle for a while, all thanks to the generosity of a high-tech gay couple who owned a Vic. She had a “garret,” as they called it, all to herself for two point five a month and some dog-sitting with Miso, their toy. Mini fridge and hotplate, with headspace down a center line and in two dormers. It worked well enough for a kook’s life, which otherwise she would have had to run through the Transbay Tube, that lone howl underwater. But two point five did leave her tight. A review was coming up, which would mean a raise. Tu Lan and Mission Chinese whenever, and maybe a wine bar, a cocktail hat, and some dank if she was good. Best not to test the harpies in admin, tight as those snatching horrors were with human resources.

She showered. She brushed. She washed down two tabs of melatonin and pulled the Birthday Party T-shirt with the six-armed skull past a stuffy head. She knotted on the blackout mask with a granny at her nape. She scooted into tired satin sheets. And found that she would not sleep.

So went the first day without it in quite a while, as sunlight thumbed the tines out past the shades. The slowing of a music that had never quit.

—

Three doppios of espresso con grappa lent a will to go to work. And there she promptly made friends with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Rather one of them, and not bosom. The name was Penny Amerike and the title was Special Agent. Pleasant enough but all business—middle-aged and straw-blonde without visible eyebrows, in a skirtsuit whose taut fit shored up an already rangy height.

They had gone to a conference room along with Ange and the admin marm. Acoustic panels, windowless save for slotted vents, with high-backed chairs about a refectory table made of Swedish chipboard. “Mildred, please limit your responses to what’s appropriate,” said the marm.

“Donna,” Mildred said, “try to remember you’re not a lawyer.”

A scrawl upon the clipboard pad. The smile was remedial enough—slight but meant to be read.

“I wish I could tell you more,” said Agent Amerike. “But there’s a bench order.”

“Better said a public defender,” Ange said. “The judge, she’s a giver.”

Ange’s colleague for days—a blotchy red man—had agreed to spell him while the meet was underway. Just as Mildred’s equivalent—Cissy Isidro, alternate duty nurse—had done for her. 

Cissy was spooked—almost as flat in affect as the main lead for days, who would be back on shift in twelve. Mildred wondered what she knew—what had been said. Last night a rave had still been likely—fictions, nothing more. An FBI visit confirmed that it had grounds, true or not.

“I won’t ask,” Mildred said, meaning about the patient and his crimes. “But how about the law? Can I go there?” She drew no comment. The full attention of Special Agent Amerike was enough of a yes. “A boy back in 1926,” Mildred said. “Could that even be prosecuted?”

“It could,” said the agent, and Ange lent a nod. “There’s no statute on criminal homicides. Time can’t run out. No one here can be sure what good could come of this. There might not be files going back that far. Children vanish and in time so do records. Well, you get my point. If it was a countywide jurisdiction, a sheriff’s office, it’s probably impossible. All the case history in boxes that went to a furnace or a landfill most of a lifetime ago.”

Ange said, “There’d be nothing left to bury anyway. Or rebury, with a name and dates on a stone.” He shook his head, even on the look from Amerike.

“And with a show of respect,” was all the reply. And to Mildred, “Are you ready?”

With that okay the recorder was put out, centered on the table space. Nice manicure, Mildred thought, as the fed touched the button with the red dot. Hatsy had squovals, and as she typed they chirruped like an angry mantis. Even from down the hall the sound raised hackles. Just look at the bumps, Mildred thought, with a glance to her forearm.

Each word, every detail—this time from Mildred, as well as she could recall.

She noted the discomfort, Donna’s, with a mean satisfaction, even in her own cold aftermath. Mildred wondered where the lawyers were. The pacts for silence had been struck in that selfsame room.

Statement made, Mildred took a sweaty glass of water. It had been set out for her at the start and untouched until the end. The dryness on her tongue broke on the swallow. She asked, “Think he’ll keep talking?”

No one had a thing to say to that.

So she added, “It’s not the gore that bothers me. More than once I’ve had my hand in a bedsore up to here”—touching the band on a watch she never wore. “I’ve pulled back a sheet on toes broken off. And one time”—to Donna—“a pleural empyema burst while I was assisting in a tube thoracostomy. I was pelted—soaked—my hair, my scrubs, my—”

“I think they have all they need,” Donna said, through the ashen drain. Mildred kept the simper down. She did have a pay hike to worry about.

—

“No one would remember,” Ange was saying after the rest had left. He and Mildred had gone to the break room for a quick cup, right next door. The exact same room, save for a rank of vending machines and a change of IKEA. “There’d be no one left to grieve. Seems to me, enough time goes by, it’s best to let ground lie still.” He took a sip and said the first part again.

“Somebody does.”

They looked at each other. The sum of it. Neither had a thing to add.

“Things were less creepy when I worked in a funeral home,” he said at last.

“You were an undertaker?”

“It’s the Harvey family business.”

“You trying to appeal to my inner Wednesday Addams?”

“You have an inner Wednesday Addams?”

The fun was in the stress. Mildred held the smile. “I’m a full picture, Ange.” If he hadn’t known he sure did now. She hoped the eyeliner hid the wreck of going so long without sleep.

—

She had rounds, and they kept her from the room. One of the AIDS patients was lost in a gaze. He would pass before dawn, same as most aimed to. The stare was nothing new to a hospice nurse, and neither was the question of what it saw. Gloves went to the biohazard bin, scrubs to the laundry in the red hamper. Deborah Hankle was a new admit—terminal from something Mildred had never heard of. She leaned in to introduce herself. The gluey eyes tracked the lips. A nod at understanding, though edema had gotten the woman so puffy that she could barely shift a chin.

But in time Mildred had to force a step past Ange in his chair. There the old man lay, blinking slow, no weight of presence, nothing to say. And she noted with relief that he had shit the bed.

Code brown: that was cake. The task had a checklist, and a list kept a mind honest. She called in Hatsy as Ange undid the handcuff, hand to mouth and nose, regretting whatever round of departmental roshambo had sent him there.

Blackest stuff, as was fitting, and plenty of it. Most old-timers’ stool ran to sparse and dry, but this was a tar, and no less hot. No word from the patient as he went on a side. Nor from Hatsy, though some quip would be forthcoming in a sidebar out of earshot. Once Hatsy peeled off the filthy nitriles and ran out to fetch some powder, Mildred heard herself make the dare.

“No more stories for me? No more Timothy in the well?”

“Wipe that ass,” came the whisper.

When Ange came in the curt look told her right off that he had heard. Once the prisoner was under lock he gave a tilt of the head out toward the hall.

She headed him off. “Could we talk about it later, Ange? After?”

Not because she minded a scold in her place of work, though mind she did. No, she had to tucker herself out—that was the story. Beat the redeye as best she knew how. A folk remedy. Like grandma used to make, though that much might ruin the mood.

—

Only once the drinks were before them at an intimate table—a cafe steps from her door, just shy of seven a.m.—did he state the unnecessary.

“Don’t bait him.”

An unmarked Crown Victoria had got them there. No paint or stencil was needed, so loud did that make scream cop. He had parked in front of a hydrant, the only place anyone could on the Triangle that early. A Lovely Rita, fat and roundly hated, rode past on her three-wheel punt, never slowing. The fix was in.

“So you did hear that.” Espresso con grappa once again, or caffè corretto per the chalkboard.

“Why would you want to make him tell you?”

“The suspense was killing me? I don’t know, Ange.”

“Trying to help, I suppose.” He liked the sip he took and showed it with a hum. “All these law people there, waiting on a dime. First and foremost Special Agent Penny Amerike.”

No love there. Mildred gave a smirk despite the opening loft. Trying to help? “I’ll be a trooper.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. We’re here to protect you. And that’s all I’m trying to do now. Me, my fondest wish is that he just clams up and dies. Never breathes out another word, even if it’s good morning. Mildred, you know, what you do there, on that floor, it’s …”

“Saintly?”

“I was going to say hard, but saintly, sure.”

She would never speak the truth of it—just what, so very far from any saint, had brought her to that work. Hell could pass, once she let it.

“Saintly,” she said. “Maybe a little tougher than working with the ones who already died, like in a funeral home. But that’s just because they’re so good at keeping it to themselves.”

A joke. But it wiped that bright smile clean off.

“What?” He gave nothing back, but the intuition led her. “The family business. You’re not in it.”

“I did have a reason to bug out. If reason can be the word. Maybe I should say I got a push. And maybe you don’t want to hear about it.”

“Anyone has pushes in her stories, it’s a nurse in terminal care. What could you possibly tell me that’s worse?”

“A dead body looked at me.”

That shut Mildred up. She leaned back aghast as more came.

“I was just a kid, really—not even twenty. My family had put me through the two years of coursework, and I had just begun my apprenticeship. It’s for the licensing—a requirement. The board didn’t mind that the mentor was my father and the apprenticeship in our home.

“Home—a place I knew already. The ceramic tile, sinks, tank, cart, the chains on the hoist, the stainless steel table, all of that. Home. And I’d seen the dead before. A kid gets used to things. And my father would bolt the door if it got to be too much—a body in a worse state.

“Late one night I was doing prep for him. He had gone out for a break. A smoke. He had a taste for cigars from back when preservatives were less trusty. One stink to shame the other.

“The body I was working with, it had been a young lady. A standard embalming—my father had an unorthodox way of going through it, though, English style, and I was following his steps. I’d washed her and worked the rigor out, but I hadn’t shut her eyes or mouth—set the features. That gets done with a glue and inserts, and for the arterial my father thought it helped to leave the mouth unsealed. Air pressure or some such. I was going to do the arterial first, the cavity work second, so I had a cannula and an aspirator and a trocar ready. I’m sure you know what those are in a medical context. I had to drain fluids to make room for the formaldehyde and the humectants. You open up the right carotid and jugular for the in and the out. Then if that all goes right you make a cut on the belly to get the trocar in. And the thing about this body was, well, the young lady had been pretty.

“No no, it’s not headed there. If anything I just felt protective—a regular Galahad. Also, a little embarrassed to be handling the lady fair with any sort of closeness. Creeps—now they do pop up, but they’re rare. Most of us just enjoy a show of respect. No one is garbage. That’s what we prove. 

“Still, she’d been pretty, and I felt awkward. I had a cloth on her for modesty’s sake, mine I suppose. I kept glancing up to the face, the eyes. They were set staring upward. Droopy lids, glassy and cold and unevenly open. But pretty. A green. The head was on a block. Out of nerves I kept glancing to the face. And when I made the cut and got the cannula in the neck where it belonged, with a shove—before I switched on the pump—I glanced up again, and the eyes had turned to take me in.

“I froze. Not the head, just the eyes. Still claylike, lifeless, but in a perfect line of sight.” Two fingertips drew rays. “They’d slid in their sockets to meet mine.

“I know what you’re thinking. A coma, a premature declaration, all of that. But no. This body was stiff and cold and livid down the back. As dead as dead gets. And I know you’ve probably seen a postmortem spasm—that flutter. Morticians have seen it, too, and run with it. You hear tales—corpses kicking or swatting out an arm. But that’s all those are, tales. It’s a real thing, sure, but just a muscle twitch and only near the time of passing. An oddity, not a freak.

“This body … this body had been in the fridge overnight and dead for two days. The eyes didn’t track. They had just taken a glimpse and gone still again. I’d been seen while I wasn’t looking.”

“By what? By her?”

“By.” He shrugged. “By I don’t know. Whatever is. I’m not a churchgoing man. I don’t put names to blanks. But whatever is, it made an appearance that night, and it threw me off. Like a volt. I walked out to where my dad was burning down a Swisher and told him I had to leave. I never set foot in an embalming room again, and not in the rest of the house either once I could leave for good. The day after, I sat my father and mother down in the parlor—my brother was there, too—and told them there had been a change of plan. I couldn’t go back there—not even after my father died and my brother took over. Home one minute, a house the next. A strange house.”

“What does any of this have to do with becoming a cop?”

“Nothing,” Ange said, “and that’s the point. It turned out when I looked elsewhere that I had aptitudes. They led me where they would. As it should be. What, a single event created you?”

Mildred would say nothing on that, but she did say “Let’s fuck.”

He was a composed man, hard to fluster, but what a stare.

“Are you okay, Ange? I’m just propositioning you. You can say no. Life will go on.”

“I’m twice your age.”

“Who are you trying to talk out of it? Turn me down. It’s simple.”

“There’s a whole host of reasons—”

“‘No thank you, Mildred, for a whole host of reasons.’ What, you think bats will fly out?”

“I’m here on duty.”

She glanced to the back of a wrist—again, never worn. “No you’re not. Married?”

“Divorced. Gleefully divorced. Divorced with a hallelujah chorus.”

“Well.”

“Well.”

—

So it went. A few bumps of his graying head on her ceiling and then where it counted. He was not above an opener, nor the rest. No valentines or cues on the strings. Just a fiddle, so to speak—“Turkey in the Straw” and a bumpy hayride. She laughed at the thought, even as she felt him move her. And even as coming left her wrung. Not limp, but boned.

She laughed again, facedown and through the wrack of her hair, washed ashore. He laid on a kiss and she scarcely noticed the brush. The sheets were setting like a cast. She tied on the mask and let her guest rasp away in peace, in a better dark. And found again that she would not sleep.

The daylight hours rolled on at a slow crank. The rack, the tune, had grown familiar. A memory—and she had not paid any mind to it for the longest time.

—

At least she got a lift in a government hearse. No ruck of a commute for the walking dead, with fifty wakeful hours in a tow. Ange had asked, “You okay?” so she knew the drag showed. Same cafe, four doppios and a croque gagnet that merged with the plate. He had paid. She had let him.

And zip-a-dee-doo-dah, Felix was waiting. This was the name of the day lead, Mildred’s counterpart—Felix Roos. He was a small, dark man whose face never stirred, mouth aside, and that only in a happenstance as he spoke. The doe-eyes rarely blinked, even as he gave her the post-shift brief. She watched him in a leaden trance.

“Mrs. Loos is stable. Mr. Piedmont is having trouble with solids so we’ve switched him over to liquid supplements. Mr. Wan asked not to take visitors aside from his wife but that shouldn’t matter for the night shift. The unnamed gentleman is stable, though the attending was concerned about an odor. Mrs. Johnson coded and was called just before noon. Ms. Vandekamp is showing rubor on the left natis so the attending ordered a change in the bed posture rotation. The decubitus on the right is showing some response to the vac sponge so her primary ordered that therapy continue until the secondary pneumothorax is untreatable. Just for her comfort.”

His habit—a love for the rundown, terms and all, and none for the nurse’s cant. With Felix it was enuresis and never gold. Mildred supposed, while she had the flicker of energy, that such devotion was what the patients needed. Felix often stayed on late. Especially for those nearest the end.

But something had stuck out in the hum—more like a gap than a point of focus. “You said unnamed,” Mildred said. “The unnamed patient.”

“Unnamed gentleman. Yes.”

“You didn’t ask about that.”

“Pardon?”

“It never gave you a second thought when you saw a top sheet with no name on it.”

“No name was provided. Administration had me sign a document. You must have done the same. So there’s nothing to ask about. I don’t understand.”

True that, yet wrong. A part of her wondered what had bothered her. She herself had claimed that she did not care who the patient was. But that was a matter of fame and not of the blank laid out right before her, on the wane in a bed. She tried again. “Did you get a look at him?”

“I inspected for sign of necrosis. No debridement was necessary. The odor is worrisome.”

“Never mind a course of treatment. I meant his face. The look in his eye. What do you make of him? Of the man himself?”

Felix was silent, and Mildred knew this meant he had never glanced to the face, not once. He had no curiosity about who lived behind the eyes. Nor any question in himself.

So Mildred tried to prompt one. “None of us knows who he is, Felix. And he has a police on hand. He’s under, like, actual guard. A dying man handcuffed to a bed. None of that struck you as talk? As someone worth looking at?”

“We look at a condition. What would be the point of mentioning what we both know?”

Mildred was working out the knot when the marm came up.

“May I borrow you?”

“I’m just starting a shift, Donna. My, my colleague here was—”

“Felix can fill in for the next hour or so. There’s a deposition in the conference room.”

“Again?”

“I said deposition. There’s somebody brand new for you to meet.”

“Great. I’ll be a minute,” Mildred said, because she saw that Ange was coming up even as Felix broke away. He had been chatting down the hall with his own day-shift sub all the while. The looks between them had not been pleased.

Donna made no move at first, so Mildred repeated the last two words with undertones of lady-friend, I am going to kick you in the vagina until gum balls fall out.

Alone at last, though not for long. Ange led her aside. “Hey, just don’t mention anything.”

“What?” And on the lead—a silence, a meaningful stare—she added, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ve never met a crybaby who could flick a bean so well.” A look of distaste made her think twice. “Sorry. I’m pretty ragged. I just need some sleep.”

“Well, mea culpa.”

She let him think so. A sheepish smile was too sweet to ruin. He was pretty—she could say that much for him.

—

An attorney, as guessed. But not one with a name Mildred had pledged her troth to. A lawyer—young for that ilk, soft in feature and a three-piece. And not alone. There was a videographer, who would remain nameless, like the weather; Penny Amerike, the fed; and the fed’s fed, a stout gray man with a bluish shave who went by Joe in a quick aside. Mildred stared at the card given to her. Aside a bureau wreath and shield, his title was Unit Chief. She wondered where an ancestral name took a mark above a letter cee.

Those four, Donna, and the wraithlike presence of a judge. The lawyer made this loom known almost as soon as he gave himself an identity. “Peter Coniglio,” he said. “Feel free.”

“Free to what?” Mildred asked.

“Okay. Miss Dephane, I’m here with a judicial order on behalf of my client, whom you’ve met.”

“Bob.”

No pause. “Judge Gabriella Wong has asked for a transcript of your statement. This will go into the sealed record, pending a decision of the court to make it available for an investigation.”

“Over our objection,” Joe said. And he would add nothing more.

“Noted, Mr. Banicevac.”

Mildred would not have guessed the sound of it, said aloud. “Wait,” she said. “You just want me to repeat what I told them already? For the cam?”

“For the court. That’s our sole aim here, Miss Dephane.”

That story, alive in her own mouth once again. She felt a crawl. “Why? Their word isn’t good enough?” Mildred noted a smile from Amerike—pained.

“As sworn agents, their testimony is admissible. You needn’t concern yourself with just why.”

“Glad for an option. But I’ve already gone through this, and I’d rather not—I’d—I’d rather not.”

“Mildred, under your agreement, you’re bound to—”

“Yes yes, Donna. Shouldn’t there be another lawyer in here? One for me?”

“Why, Miss Dephane?” Coniglio asked. “Do you feel you need one?”

Mildred stared at him. He stared back. And in that space she made the leap.

“Oh.”

“Miss Dephane—”

“You think—”

“Miss Dephane, please.”

“You think I made it up,” she said.

Mildred watched the young attorney’s eye. And she saw that he did not believe it himself. He had a public face—one that vested a thought and perhaps even his truth—but that much was plain. It didn’t matter, not for a defense. A story would beat a story—that was the plan of attack.

She went on anyway. “You think that I heard what he was—the name, the crimes—in spite of precautions the hospital took, and the court. And that once I had that much traction, I dug in and built on. Either because I’m a liar or because I’m an idiot—a idiot who can’t tell waking life from nightmares. And all because my waking life, the work I do here, is ugly.”

Even Donna would not touch that anger. The attorney began to raise a hand.

“No, no, Peter Rabbit, you just roll that thing. How’s my hair?”

Half an hour as she told it again. Half an hour, down to least and worst—led and cued and corrected all through, to make as whole a picture as mere word allowed. By the end she was sobbing. Relived, and slavishly felt—this miserable end all she knew of a long-dead boy who had gone out and never come home to a mother.

And there were follow-up questions, of course. About what she had known, what she did not, and who had told her or had not. Worse, whether anyone else had been in the room when what Mildred alleged had been said had been said. To corroborate, as Coniglio put it.

Just as sussed out. She considered adding that she had fucked the turnkey. Corrupted a sworn officer on duty. She might as well have been cast as a jezebel while she was at it.

Only after—once the videographer was packing up and the attorney made patent heels down the hall—did Special Agent Penny Amerike step up and give a hug, short and unprofessional. Mildred’s fists stayed on the tabletop. The smell of glue in that chipboard would never fade.

“I’m sorry,” the agent said, straightening back up. “I’m so sorry.”

—

They would not meet again. The wrongful death to come would go to another agent, thanks perhaps to that show of regret, as the Unit Chief had looked on through the pepper of his beard.

The air felt brittle as Mildred waded back to the desk. The fluorescent lights cycled overhead, a comb of bees in her hair. A swat. She checked the move and looked about her. None had seen. 

Sounds had grown close in that sleeplessness. The working idle of her brain had begun a shift, she knew. Grim experience, forgot for years, told her that in a day or two she would begin to see things. At present they only showed in the corners—darks that scatted whenever she turned to look.

Ange was sitting by the door, and Felix was coming back through with a speed, eyes to Mildred. Some sort of news. She had never seen him so alert, so involved.

“Gas gangrene,” he announced. “Jesusa is in there. Dr. Joss is on the way.”

Mildred was trotting for her locker and a change, but Felix said, “Wait,” and caught up. She did. He stepped up too close again, this time with a confidence.

“You were right. I hadn’t looked him in the face. That’s Robbert Frisk.”

She might have asked just who Robbert Frisk was, if she cared, but Felix had already turned to leave. The end of his shift was long past.

Like many nurses on nights, Mildred had a popper stash. There was a stockpile of dex in the locker, too, but that fatter bootstrap would have to wait. She made it to the room in two minutes’ time, wiping at a nostril. By then Sus was sponging down the chest with antiseptic. There at last an evil had shown, and fast, come up through the ribcage like a pouched smoke.

“Poor demonio,” Sus was saying. “Poor old monster.”

—

Now it mattered. Robbert Anselm Frisk was born on December 17, 1908, in a worker’s camp outside Sebastopol, California. His mother died of puerperal fever not long after. His father, native to Sweden, had become a beekeeper, and this career kept the survivors on a move. They found a beat among the vineyards and orchards of Sonoma, Solano, and Napa, always dusty, never at home.

As she read on—a wiki article on the staff desktop computer—Mildred expected bee themes to the crimes. Flip, but also what middlebrow stuff had told her about procedure, from wrongful death to hunt. Any fact she met would have to figure in a truth—a strand linking man to crime. But there was no sense to any of what she read, no underlying shape. Frisk’s only motive was the need itself, and the need had come from nowhere. Pat and so much worse for it—something visited on a man by chance. A moth lit to a sleeve, drawn in from empty night.

Frisk had moved to San Francisco after clerk service in the Pacific theater. Police later tied him to three disappearances there, all of them young children, the first in 1947. He went to Los Angeles in late 1955; that turn saw another three vanish. A relocation to San Jose, 1961, where two more children had lived too near. He was caught with that last of these in 1967—a bundle in his arms, and a walk into the redwoods off Route 17, well past dark. It so happened that a sheriff’s car had been parked in a thicket with its beams off. Lit on once again. What she read gave her no detail but she pictured the scene. A flurry of wings in a round of headlights and flashers, cast off by a sky gone blue.

By trial Frisk had reached late middle age—a lifetime, all but, that had shortened eight. The true count was higher, all agreed—it had to be. Inquiries opened in Manila, where the Army had stationed him in 1944 to oversee a warehouse, and in Anchorage, on map work for minesweeper ops in the Aleutians, 1943. Anywhere Frisk had lived, folders were unstrung, foxed pages laid out.

But nothing more was proved, and in any case the man had been found guilty. The sentence was tempered by a diminished capacity, which spared the neck. Life without parole, to be served in a psychiatric lockdown on the other side of the Contra Costa Hills. There he had lived under watch, but not with much pity, for almost half a century. And so he spited the bars by refusing to die.

—

Until now. Gas gangrene was hard to treat even for the strongest of patients. And this was in the trunk, not on a limb. Septic shock was sure. Frisk showed no sign of delirium—and no pain. 

“Good” was what Ange said once he got the chance.

Painlessness was not what he meant. If Sus had caught the remark, she might have thrown for the face. Mildred knew then and there what she had suspected already—that they would never hook up again.

She had been walking up on the door with a fresh gown. Dr. Joss had ordered HBOT therapy, fragile state or not. At worst, rich air would just kill Frisk faster. There were hyperbaric chambers on six, and Frisk would spend the night in one, under glass, and the day after.

And Ange said it again on her lengthy stare. “Good.”

“Why?” she said. The whisper had a slice. “Have you seen it? Do you know what myonecrosis is? There are blisters on him—black blisters. There’s nowhere to amputate. Nothing we can cut without killing him. Part of his body is already dead and it’s going to take the rest with it.”

“This is a hospice floor, isn’t it? Isn’t dying the point?”

“Dying better is the goddam point. Dying without a screaming agony.”

“I know you know,” he said. “I read it in your eyes. And now that you know, you know why. He came here because they took him for on the outs. Now he actually is. And not for any better. Good.”

And she not even on a slab to throw him a volt. She stared. Ange shrank.

“Keep it to yourself, Officer Harvey,” she said at last. And nothing more.

While she was alone with the patient to change the soiled johnny gown—mouth set hard, muttering through a list of names she wished she’d called him—Frisk spoke.

“Same barn.”

“What was that?”

“Same barn for the second. Same length of chain. This time a girl, nine. She went out to the pail closet in the dark, a summer night. I was waiting in it. She knew me from the school. I took her by the hand. We were leaving Pew Creek Valley just the next day. Her nightgown was from that wish book—white cotton that smelled like laundry soap. And then it didn’t, and it wasn’t.”

It went on.

“I put her in an oak. Up there a quarter mile deep in the draw. The nightgown never caught an eye. Not enough brightness left in it. Never did find that one. Not a word in the papers except about the loss. She must still be there. Fallen from the branch, leafed over. Spread out on the floor.”

Like the change of hospital gown. The vinyl had a dull shine, mopped not an hour past with antiseptic, and was cold underfoot even through the clogs. Mildred had never said a word or moved away. She had only willed herself not to heed a thing and had leaned in on every word.

At last she turned about and made past Ange without a glance. His huff let her know a message was received. But her thought was no longer on him, not at all, and she never heard the sigh.

At the station, front and center. A colleague—the alternate duty nurse for nights. “Can you cover?” she said. “I don’t feel so good.”

“You do look a fright,” big Hatsy said, camp but kind.

—

And found for the third time, worst and last, that she would not sleep.

The dainty figure played in her mind once again—a music box left unclosed. Someone must have shut it after, but by then Mildred—exhausted, sixteen, and set to zero—had gone from her mother’s room, and then her mother’s house, to let it wind down unheard. Nine years, and the trundle was still going, the teeth plucking at the comb.

The mask came off—a yank, a stare into the seams of the roof. Eyes sore and dry, not just on a blink but in their very gel. The scrape of light was worst at the shades, and she met the nearest glare with her own. A warm fabric with crisp shapes showing through—every husk of a fly, every fiber in the weave. Like an amber catch, sunny but timeless, looking out on a reel of days and stars.

Mildred rose. She pulled the tee clear. A shower and ten drops of Visine let eyes roll without grit, but she skipped the makeup and the double shots. Go-pills were what she had in mind, and not an hour later she found them raring in the locker back at work.

She had come in a sunhat, sunglasses, and a rental car, her very first. But before she took the wad of keys and contract terms back to it—and the aspirin bottle full of dex—she paid a visit to six. Ange’s colleague on days, reposted there, gave her a nod from his chair in the hall. He went back to an issue of Fly Tyer with a bead-head nymph on the front, as he could have told her.

A nod, but not of recognition, and a look askance at the doorway. On a stray breath Mildred caught the whiff—something cheap from a flask. That post was a penalty, it seemed. And Ange’s assignment on graveyard was the worse—not just rock met up with paper. Now she wondered what Andrew Harvey had done, righteous or not, to have met her at all.

Felix came out as she tried to enter. She heard her name but paid him no mind. He was off the ward where he worked, but Felix often did make special rounds for patients near the end. He stared after her as she went in, and the duty cop never looked up from nymph and hook.

The treatment was a vitrine with a bed in it, airtight, the whole rounded like a drum. There Frisk lay. No need for handcuffs, not in those thick glass confines. His hands lay crossed at his belly. Bandages gone, she could see into them—a violet in the rays of bones. The bruise of life. Some of the color showed in all the dressing on his chest, where debridement had gone as deep as it could. But more the seep was a hopeless gray, and watery.

Mildred set her hand near his face. She waited as a haze formed around it on the glass.

And for the first time, with trouble, that head turned to meet her eyes. His own had no depth. Like a daub from a thumb even as they searched, and even as she asked, and even as the answers came.

—

So much sun, so awake—a gnash under a smirk as she sped up the highway, so to speak. Pills were the least of it. The daylight was hammer and scald, both at once. When she raised the sunglasses the scene would bleach out. She drove under the limit, even in the pebbly wakes of trailers, eyes forward. She had a license but not the use—she had not driven for years. But it all turned out to be so close, not even two hours behind the wheel—a rural country shot with roads that made do without names. Those with numbers closed the distance—101, 116, 12 East, 12 North, through yellow hills and marsh flats and on to wooded ridges and the staked glens that lay between them. Pew Creek Valley was one such, a peg to drop above old Sonoma and Boyes Hot Springs. It was on the geothermal chain that ran to Calistoga, so Mildred was half sure the Pew name would turn out to have come from a famous stink.

Nearer, the lead became hard to follow. But the whisper from the jar had got her far enough. Once someone from local times might know a name, she asked where the old Skene Orchards had been—a gas station clerk and a vendor at a stand. The latter had more, and plenty, as deep as the lettuce bins. Mildred took the advice and even a hand-sketched chart. Neither man paid her sickly whiteness any bother, nor her blindwoman’s shades and the squint behind them. And neither told her not to go, nor why she should not. City hair and all, they took her for a student. Those were like to show out there at the old Skene Orchards, though none had ever sought it by that name.

At last her rental was raising dirt through a scrub and the trip began to feel done. Here was a backcountry, a lapsed place. Woodland had crept into the unturned fields, and the tillage never showed. But the first tractors had beat ruts as hard as grout, even where furrow and ditch had vanished, and her tires skipped among them—throughways that would never close.

Shortly before Frisk’s time, Virgil Skene and kin had called it quits. There had been a beetle in the rows and a strange dying—a chicken coop smothered all at once, and nothing but the empty sky to blame. Skene’s horse barn had stood near Farrow Ridge, named so because the spurs looked like piglets at a sow. Also, Pew was Welsh, the name of a homesteader who predated the Skenes by half again. These were not Mildred’s facts but part of the map given out free of charge. She hoped the ten-dollar sack of apples, nestled in the trunk and headed nowhere near her mouth, was gratitude enough. That and two bunches, an impulse buy—flowers to put on unmarked ground.

Trees had reclaimed it all to a glut, live oak and bay laurel that smelled like garnish. The understory scraped at her doors, invasive broom that was all but forest itself.

In short time she came upon a chain-link fence. The signs put up by the county were rusted out to a mellow brown. The barricade ran across the lane she had followed, and weeds had set up in the wire hems as best they could. But they could not break the pan, and the track was whole. It vanished up ahead, down a slope—the end so very close, just visible through a mesh. To either side, where shade had let it grow unruly, poison oak boiled on the wire. Bugs were creaking in the shrubs like mainsprings that never wound down. In chorus the sound of them was otherworldly, the heat itself.

She considered the fence, nine feet high and capped with bobwire. No use. The door swung wide. Here the leaves and branches were thick enough to lay a mottle, half dark, so she raised the frames. Rays struck like matches. With a cuss she rubbed out the pain and the afterimage. Back the sunglasses went. She chased two pills with the last of an orange soda and knew from a remove how done she was. The rasp in her breath told her as much, under the dreamy whine of insects.

No water bottle, no long pants, and a pair of eight-eye Docs meant for a dance floor. Nevertheless off she went, straight through a bale of red and oily leaves that had slumped off the fence. The bouquets stayed behind with the fruit, in the brace of the trunk, and it was no longer cool enough to keep off the wilt.

The county had let a university install a gate, well chained, for study of the Farrow Ridge Mazuku. But Mildred had driven in the wrong way and gone in the wrong direction to stumble on that entrance or its grave warnings. Most of an hour and a half mile, the progress slow, and yet she could not turn back. The fence had long since veered toward the ridge, and sweat hung unfelt in her dark clothes. A modest summer—low eighties, no more—but to her a disembodied singe.

At last she found a weak spot. In wetter months a runnel had cut space under the mesh. On a nervous gulp her throat was no less dusty. Mildred had a dread of ticks, but more she wanted shut of it all, whatever had urged her on. She shimmied under boots first, the first stipples of a rash on her bare calves. The ends of the wires added their own scratches, and one drew blood.

Water for ticks, she thought, chin in a crane.

Through—she was somewhere in the memory. The country looked no different. She rose to her feet and shook twigs and bits of plant matter from her hair. But she noted that the song fell behind. No bugs, only a silence and the scrape of feet as she drove herself along. Back the hat went.

A strong breeze came in on a glide, channeled by the ridge, and this alone saved her life. She had found a much older fence, this one split-railed and low. In places it was dry-rotted to a crumbling dice. Where rails stood whole, the wood was crusted with lichen so thick it made a nap.

The spans and posts led her over a short rise. Once she crossed a verge of stunted trees and thinning shrubs, just at the drop, she found the world changed.

The spurs of the ridge looked as they had—on her right and closer than ever, not a half mile. There were thickets up in the draws. But the land the fence split was the surface of a moon.

Mildred could see the edges, concave and neatly circular. No weeds, no dirt underfoot, a rootless soil washed down to a rubble of stone. Trees lay near where they had stood, or what remained, wry and smooth and whitened like a coral growth. A bowl of nine acres, and in it nothing known.

Save a roof, a ruin—those were human traces. A pond, broad and scummed, was at the low center, and at the heart of the pond were the slumping pitches. A drowned barn. Mildred’s eye went to it and held. The fence ran to the pond itself and led her up. At the waterline it shed the rails. Three uprights showed in the catchment, out of true and ducking underwater at a steady rake.

A sinkhole, Mildred guessed. The Skene barn and the land around it had settled three fathoms into the earth, at deepest, and the water lent two more. On the far side lay the heaping timbers of an old house, spread like a hand for a trick. The earth had been pulled out from under it. One old window casement had survived—panes of glass, sashes, and all, latched shut and at rest on a side. Nothing grew on the wreck. But it was unblackened—nothing like that barn roof. She stared.

There was a bleachy stink to that whole stadium of rubble. Mildred did not know but this was tell of a smother clear down to germ cells. On windless mornings when the cold was still in the rock, a veil showed, sparse and clinging flat at the drop. The same line where the land itself had once stood. Nothing would stir in that ghostly pool. But on a summer afternoon—no cloud above, and air on the move—there was no flaunting the threat save by what it had killed.

And it had killed without limit. Some prey was more obvious than a nose, but Mildred had blinkers on hers, those thick sunglasses. Here and there were duster heads where birds had made an unlucky choice of roost. Clutches of feathers, yellowed and shivering until the wind sowed them.

No eye for those trophies. Mildred looked down from the roof to the face of the pond. No play, no ripple. The breeze shied off it and came to her, and the scent was different: a ferment, like an open gut. The film had every shade in it but green—a twist of blues, oranges, ruddy browns. And in the few places where the crust fell through, the water that showed was a depthless black. But thin streams of bubbles were coursing up without stop.

The waterline on the ridge side, past the fence, got closest to the barn. Mildred squinted through the tint as she approached. No detail came but the hips of the roof. The wreck was as unreflective as the water it sat in. No texture, no seam. It might have been cut from rock and polished. She coughed. Near the edge there was a coolness at her knees, a discrete surface, like wading. She swung a boot over the unhitched rails, then the next. No lichen there: only the selfsame damp char and a white ring of salts. The wood had no brown rot either. Nothing ate at that depth, whatever the size. And nothing aged but slowly, under weather.

A mound stuck out into the pond. This jut was a shallow mix of lag gravel and skulls—of frogs and lizards and field mice, long built up. Not even as hearty a snap as an eggshell underfoot. A mortar of insect parts, an armor dropped, was packed deep into the stones.

No glance down. She made out the give of bones no better than she had those blanks on the fence. All her thought was on the top of the barn, like a raft just cast off. Bygone time, past reach but in sight. She coughed again, at what she thought was the bony tickle of the place.

Under there, she thought, looking at the rooftop. That was where. Empty and remote, even before it had come to look as it did now. The near ruin and its single pristine window. Even while it had all stood—Frisk near, and those he had carried—no one would have seen them come.

More—if she could get no closer she needed to see more. She hunkered down to squint at the blackened joins, the boards and the shingles, if she could make them out, and the ghost was at her chest, just under the thrust of the wind. The sunglasses were too dark for a scruple.

The sun had ducked into the farther ridge. No beam right on her—nothing to hurt an eye.

Impatience, anger—Mildred reached up to whisk off the frames. And all the clear light of day came pealing in at once. She cried out. She set a hand into the scrap and forced her eyes wide.

Shapes were returning through the dazzle and the stream of tears. Aside the frames where she had dropped them and between her outspread fingers she began to see the hollow orbits, the skulls, the teeth. But the afternoon wind fell off, and in the lull the chokedamp sat and rose.

Mildred’s face went cyan. She was unaware of strangling until she heard her own breath, a hard pull into her chest like an inward shout. Strangling, strangling—too fast she stood. No balance, no legs. She reeled back. A hollow log caught her up. She clapped her hands to the wood. With a muted crack it gave beneath her weight. She heard only the hauls of her breath, breaking like a voice.

A gust. The living air came back. Blue flushed red and strands dangled from her gasping mouth. The nap felt unlike bark or wood, even at the splinter. She looked down through the beat of her pulse and saw that the log was the carcass of a mountain lion, stretched out on a side. One stray hand was in the teeth, the other on the pelt.

She saw, she knew. A run for higher ground, half blind. Sunglasses and hat stayed behind, lost for good or until a student in an oxygen mask and hazmat whites bent down, picked them up, and wondered.

Near trees, Mildred thought without the words—green plants. Up into the draw she went.

Shade, a puke, a cry. Only then did Mildred realize just how close she had come. The sour smell was gone, and the carpet of little bones save in her mind. She never looked back, only ahead, as her eyesight and her mind tuned to clear day for the first time in years. It amazed her, how far she could see, and how small—every stalk, every leaf.

But there was room for marvel. In the trees she came upon a lone black oak. Slopes rose to either side, full of bay, and the ground lay bare from runoff. Acorns were cached at the foot—piled deep, one with the soil—and the boughs were laden with mistletoe.

Not so thick that the hank of a rope was lost. A tarred hemp rope, in a fray. Her eye had gone right to it. The other end had merged into the platy wood itself. The throttle showed in a line.

Regrets said, the dig began—bare hands in nuts and cupules and a thready black dirt—though Mildred had never heard herself speak a word. At last her fingers combed through a braid of rope, undone like a lock of human hair. And in it a hook, rusted to a flake that turned the soil red.

—

The sight of Ange was no surprise. His voice had led her while she followed the chain-link fence—her own name, and loud. Her breath had been too short to throw a yell. But once she had got past the foot of the last spur—all downhill—she called back to him, one hand in a hard fist.

The tale showed in his eyes from behind the links. His fingers came through the wires and she laced them with her own, the hand she could spare, dirty raw nails and all.

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked. “Do you know what this place is?”

But she was sagging down to the bottom of the links. Someone else was rushing up on the far side—a uniform, a deputy sheriff. Before he ran off again, Ange said more to him than what Mildred caught, which was cutters. He kept a hand to her shoulder through the fencing at her back. No one could enjoy a sit better than she did then. Her arms hung dead.

“You’ll want to get a bus,” she said at last.

“What?”

“An ambulance. That’s what those of us in healthcare call it.”

The grip tightened. “You’re hurt?”

She opened the fist to a milk tooth—hardly more than a shuck in that clot of black dirt. “A bus and, I don’t know, a coroner?” Too recent for historians, too ordinary for a dig.

—

He had tailed, he explained in the back of the ambulance, the one sent just for her. His partner on days had listened in at the door, apparently less of an avid fly-tier than he had let on. Police work had not stopped, even while they babysat a fiend.

“We’re not stupid,” was how Ange put it, as she lay strapped in a gurney. “Though I did lose you in the open. I had to hang back in the woods and I missed your turn. I went to that fruit stand you stopped at and et cetera.” The daylight was fading from the windows of the rear door, even as the siren wailed through the rooftop and the lights made a clap. Several miles back, other lights had made a flashing circle, and moths would gather in the beams.

“I never saw you,” she said through the mask, clouded with her breath. The twinkle he held back touched on more than she knew. “What about my rental car?”

“You’re going to worry about that? You almost died back there.”

“I’m alive and I’m flat broke.”

“The sheriff will get a wrecker on it. Tow truck—calm down. I’m guessing that you won’t have to pay the impound. You did aid in a criminal investigation. That’s how I’ll put it, anyway.”

“The car is going back,” she said. “They have my credit card.”

“Mildred, the ambulance ride alone will bankrupt you.” He was joking, not without truth, but she made no fusses for him. In truth she was already near to sleep, but not before she got out the whole point in a last mutter.

“No one is garbage, Ange.”

Asleep, and she stayed that way through the night and well into the morning. Even in a ward in Santa Rosa, under observation by a team of nurses. Ange had left. But not before his cash put her rental car in the hospital lot, waiting for her, without a further liability on the drab tourist finish.

—

She woke in a strange room, and it was a wonder. Not for the strangeness, same as any dowdy hospital space, but for the waking, and for when. A stride had been broken—a night watch that had gone on for nine years. She saw that she had not truly been awake in all that time. That she had forgot what waking meant.

Bandaged and salved and dreading a bill, Mildred stepped through sliders and into morning sun without so much as a squint. Ange had left a note—short—and this led her to the car. She was rid of that yoke before noon, formerly midnight. The attendant at the rental car depot found the apple sack and the fallen petals, and one or the other got eaten. Mildred had cha gio with sweet iced coffee.

Good lunch, but Mildred knew what she would eat with the admins and human resources for missing a shift. She doubted the ax. In truth she had a mind to do some swinging of her own. A penance was done—there was no remedy in the sick and dying, not any more.

So she went to work off shift. And there took the news.

—

The angel let her in, in his darker scrubs. Mildred had never set foot down in the basement before, but she and the morgue attendant had met so often that they spoke as friends.

“Hey, Milly. You okay? Dang—that poison oak?”

“I’m fine, Vico. Though my legs are tapioca. I’m looking for Robbert Frisk.”

“Sorry, who?”

She remembered the ruse. “He wouldn’t have had a name on the form. He was a hundred and six, so that’ll help. You would have brought him down about three hours ago.”

“Got me at no name. Some admin was just down here with a page for me to put an ex on. There’s gonna be a transfer to the popo. I’m not supposed to let anyone near.”

“Obnoxious, right?”

“Oh yeah. Fuck those guys. This way. He was a favorite? Saying some farewells?”

A shrug.

Drawer pulled, Mildred found herself alone as Vico returned to his desk. She looked down at a figment—something that could never be taken for a man. And she watched that stillness for a long time before she heard herself speak. She might have pocketed the tooth—brought it there for a show. But there was nothing to defeat and even a scrap of a nameless girl deserved better.

Instead, Mildred felt the tears, hot but weightless.

“I wish I had killed her,” she said easily. “I had them draw the tube. She had suffered enough—the disease took her apart for years. Her lungs were whited out on the X-ray. She got the infection when they were treating a bedsore. She was scared and confused when she was there at all. She asked for my help. That’s the last word I heard her say—help. And I held her hand and lied to her. I watched her gasp. It went on. Most of a week—no water but a drip, no food, white inside her mouth. It went on. Gasping, gasping for breath in that wet rattle, and I told her it would be okay. It went on. Fighting for a breath day and night. I spoke to her about about meeting again somehow, but not so loud to open her eyes. I didn’t want her to be awake for it. I wanted her to die without knowing—without being scared. But it went on. And on. And on. I wish I had what you had in me.”

She had been looking at the chest where Vico had drawn back the sheet, to that soiled tape and gauze. But now she looked to the face, those shallows. And only then did she realize how dearly she wished an eye had turned—how she had counted on a glimpse.

“Mildred.”

A near whisper, gentle, but she leapt. The angel in the basement never called her that. Still, she was surprised to see Ange once more. He held out a handkerchief like the first. Perhaps it was the same, back from the cleaners for another round of mop work.

“Get away from there,” he said, no less mild.

The silk smeared at her face. No makeup to leave a mess this time. “He can’t hurt me.” The holes were trained into the panel lights. Cold, unseeing—those remnants could not rightly be called eyes.

“You’re tampering with evidence,” Ange said. “The room upstairs, it’s a crime scene. A unit is on the way. Detectives, forensics, and one peeyoed public defender.”

—

Now it mattered. Felix Christian Roos was born August 10, 1980, in a back-to-earth commune outside Big Sur, California. His father died of a heroin overdose not long after. His mother, a zipper bag heiress, child model, and drifter with schizophrenia, led her son from one compound to another along that coast, and later in backwoods Oregon—always rainy, never at home.

As her health grew worse, she subjected him to abuse, some of it sexual, some emotional, and most with doses of LSD. He was taken from her custody at the age of nine and placed in foster care, where his treatment got better but his stare did not. His mother’s family tracked him down by 1991—difficult, since she had long used an assumed name, and they knew nothing of the father.

Roos found himself the ward of a great uncle, living all but alone in a split-terraced home on a fragile slope in Malibu. There he found out his mother had died not long after his removal. A suicide by gunshot. He kept a diary even that early, and it revealed the beginning of his fixations. How he might have helped her, for one, and homicide. Not least of that, killers and their fame.

The count of victims was undetermined and could never fully be known. But authorities knew it was high, possibly over a hundred. His sole choice of target was any patient suffering on the verge of death. Whether that was out of mercy, or for expedience, was a matter of question.

In truth when Mildred read up on her former colleague, many weeks later, she saw that he had only been charged in one case: that of an anonymous patient brought in under court order after years of neglect. Only lately had the news revealed, with much hype, that this was Robbert Anselm Frisk, murderer of children, somehow yet alive half a century after those other gruesome facts. He had outlived the infamy, at first.

But this was months ahead. And Mildred would never care about any of that, least her own brushes. Instead she would look for the signs—any tell of what she had missed, and how she might not miss it again. More than once she had met flat eyes and wondered who could live in them.

What she did know that night was how Felix Roos had been caught. It was Ange’s partner on days who had noticed the tampering with the oxygen supply, and still she forgot the name. Her mind was elsewhere. The doubt grew, and then the surety, and then it was anger.

The police interviews were done, and she only knew she had new amends to make. In time life might lead past a sickbed, but not yet. Not while she had let harm roam free after looking it in the eye.

In the hall she walked past Ange, who was taking an earful from Coniglio, without so much as a smirk. She admired that in her new friend—that restraint—but not much else. Even as he shot her a wink, and even as that wink raised the volume behind her. For once she felt a sympathy for Peter Rabbit. So much so that even in her remorse and her purpose—an errand downstairs—she waited just down the corridor, leaning on a wall, staring into a panel light. She remembered the flicker, how it had played on that handcuff.

At last Ange was with her. The attorney had made a last round of threats—much ado about Judge Gabriella Wong—and had turned around to find another way to vent.

“Don’t call me, Ange.”

She read the hurt, but no surprise. He said nothing.

“You and your partner figured it out before anyone else. You watched the rounds and got a feeling. You knew about Felix.”

Narrow eyes, a quick glance around, to see who had heard. Mildred had not lowered her voice.

“Before he was even in that hyperbaric chamber. Stuck into a bottle, and dying, and helpless. You both knew, and you both let it happen.”

Ange smirked, looked to his feet. Wounded pride, nothing more. “Well, now, Nurse Dephane,” he said at last, “do I have to make another phone call? My union rep? Pull a rabbit of my own?”

“No one is garbage,” she said, and no more. A turn, and one more fix.

Down to three she went, in search of human resources for an unscheduled meet. It was not Donna whom she found but some other Donna in that hive of busywork, clear down to the fat sweater buttons, the printout stacks, the untouchable air.

“Yes, Ms. Dephane, how can we help you?”

“I understand there’s an opening on days.”

#stories

---

The fiction writer woke without fear of a clock. It was sometime, any time really, after eight a.m. Drowsy masturbation nudged him toward awareness. For the trip downstairs he stood into a wad of sweatpants and kept the T-shirt that he had slept in. Curtains to be drawn, and then the coffee. The bare glass took in a residential neighborhood—a tree-lined street with good money and leafy shade. Nothing amiss in any part of that except for a car at the curb. In parking at a dutch angle it had intruded on the driveway ramp. Unfamiliar—not a neighbor’s. An older model hatchback. The hedge blocked a look inside, as seen from where he stood, behind his glass and cozy in his slippered feet, but not the top of a minivan straight ahead. Plenty of room to spare. Thoughtless, but just by a matter of inches and best let go for now. The neighbors, whom the writer never spoke to, had guests at times, and having guests, that was what people liked to do. He went back to the business of working at home. Microwave oven, espresso machine, an Americano the sure result. Hot water went in the mug before the brew so as to leave a crema whole. Half and half put down a sueded curl on the trickle through the foam. Thoughts turned, as thoughts do, to the next short piece. The title long in mind was “A Child’s Drawing of the Sun,” which would look sharp in that New Yorker typeface. No story to prop it up on that estimable page, but craft and patience would see it done. Right there in the title a child was mentioned, so it followed that there should be a parent, and since there was a parent and a child, family trouble. A daughter just reaching middle age could pretend to make up with her mother once she saw the lapse into senile dementia. There, that was pretty good. The lede could be a search of a closet at the family home. That was strong shorthand for a history. Coats worn and weathered but long unused, each a like blaze where the trail no longer showed. The writer drew his phone from the sweatpocket and thumbed each a like blaze where the trail no longer showed into notes as he listened to a bagel chew and a coffee soften it up.

By nine-thirty the car had yet to pull away. Tow trucks were a sure means to start a feud. Better to put in an hour on the laptop and let the problem mind itself. The headline typeface in the New Yorker was named Irvin, the fiction writer read, for the selfsame art director who had drawn up that sissy with the quizzing glass. Body text was set in Caslon. This was a commonplace  font and available on the laptop, though Irvin, it seemed, was not. The wiki article further said that the pair of dots put above the second of two vowels was not an umlaut, but a diëresis. New Yorker house style was an odd taskmaster. A lap through the house to burn off the nervous energy. The car—still there. An out-of-state license, bent on a corner and hung out of true. By the lock screen on the phone it was ten o’clock. Ten o’clock as the lock screen crows, the fiction writer thought. Someone had no day job to get to, looked like to the writer.

Have at you, “A Child’s Drawing of the Sun.” Dorcas found a school coat in the gloaming of the closet. Loyola Marymount, the embroidery told. A lion rampant in the dust. That right there was the straight dope. Time for a midmorning chai. The car, as he sipped. The car. No trace of glass in the rear window, the writer now saw. He took a shower to clear the head. Here the dick play had more forward lunge, and a tenth ounce of the writer went through the trap with some guidance from a toe. He wondered if a tenth was a dram, which would have sounded cool. Sweatpants and a tee again, these from a drawer and not so unlaundered. Straight to the laptop, since there was no further progress to be seen on the matter of the car. Stale got at a frame of mind, so into the narrative stale would go. The writer tried the word out in places. Stale closet, stale coat, stale lion rampant, stale gloaming. At last it took an enviable spot. Dorcas found a school coat in the gloaming of the closet. Loyola Marymount, the stale embroidery told. A lion rampant in the dust. Like a well-tuned music.

Eleven-thirty. Another walk through the front and back, and to the front once again, with a stare that lingered through the window. The car, still there, and near to lunch. What if the writer had wanted to drive down to Whole Foods? One would be the deadline he would set. Noon was just too genre. Back to it, and going smooth. Going never took a diëresis in New Yorker house style, the writer realized, and he put some nonapparent energy into why. Goïng, goïng, gone. By changing the name of the character to Marisol, he could earn magical realism. A coup—and then he remembered the first line that morning. No need to read the notes from the phone, since the author used Apple products and anything keyed into the one came back to haunt the other. He cut and pasted each a like blaze where the trail no longer showed into the word app. He gave it a look. Blank at first, but then near to worry. It would put gloaming, rampant lions, and trail blazes into the same block of text. Perhaps it would mix metaphors. A spot consultation with the Internet followed, and a mixed metaphor turned out to be how a bird in hand saved nine, et cetera. Rampant gloaming stale lion trail blazes were more just, like, bad prose. Not every fuckup had a term of art.

Fuck that car and fuckever the who had left it. Twelve-thirty: split the difference. House slippers were good enough for a walkup to the curb. No rain, no mud, and not too many leaves. The police bureau would have taken the call either way—a cruiser sent, ticket written out, tow truck conjured forth from one hell realm or another. But that missing glass might have meant the car was stolen, and the bureau would want to know in advance—surely it would bring them a little quicker.

The writer came around the hedge with a stoop as he walked. He took a peek through the rear window gap. There were two people inside, both seated in front and both in a slump. From the driver’s side window the writer saw that all eyes were shut. Behind the wheel, a young man, his forehead in a suction on the dirty glass, and beside him a young woman. A taut shoulder belt kept her up, but she was in a hard lean, to the left. Each wore a T-shirt and jeans, faded and worn to a thread like the tires on the car. Both were unwashed. Grime sat in the quicks of the driver’s fingernails. He had a bruise on his eye and a buzz cut and three-day stubble to round him out. She wore a sink-blackened razor bob matted up from sweat. Mascara had sprinkled from her eyes, and lipstick was smeared back to an earlobe and on the base of a palm like a slash. Rough ink at the top of her arm read no daddy no. Asleep—they had been that way the whole time, the writer would never see, and for two hours in the early dark outside his house. A random stop, and nowhere left to go. The fuel gauge put them somewhere between the E and the pump. Beneath his seat was a mouse gun, twenty-five caliber ACP with three in the clip, beneath hers a fast food bag full of small wet bills. Under a blanket in the back lay a German shepherd guard dog that had died of fright.

The writer tapped at the glass, gently with a fingertip, so as not to give a start. No stirrings from the driver. A knuckle rap, and the writer was looking through the smears and his own dim reflection to sprung eyes. Haunted, hunted, guttered out, a look that he took for sleepiness. The young woman never made a move, not even a twitch, but a whimper came up from the sleep. 

“Hi! You’re hanging in my driveway a little.”

“Oh okay, sorry, we’ll move it,” hand to ignition.

The engine turned over at once, and the hatchback swung around the minivan and headed up the street. There was a last fretful glance in the rear view mirror, too small for the writer to make out and shrinking fast. Gone, and they took the story with them. The fiction writer, secure at last, went back into his house to have another poke at “A Child’s Drawing of the Sun.”

#stories

---

Three a.m. was a best guess as to when the Butt brothers came to snatch him out of bed. The clock readout made a puddle on the nightstand, but that thaw never caught a glance, not once a kick to the door woke Migue in an awful fright. Half yet in dream he leapt to the headboard, backward like a crawdad, shoulders first. A smutty magazine had read him a bedtime story, and it shied into a curl on the floor. No lights went on as two shapes loomed close on either side of him.

“Get him up. You getting him up?”

“Quit barking orders. Fucking mongoloid—what’s it look like?”

“The dark. And it smells like jerking it. Goddam, if I touch cum—”

“Sew up your pussy and grab a hold.”

Cusses were as good as name tags here, or narrowed each man down to the same two. It was Rod or Jack at an armpit and Jack or Rod at the other. A hoist got him into a pair of slacks, and then the brothers drove him down the hall as he hopped a second shoe on. He pictured eyes at peep holes but never saw a face. Jack and Rod were no twins but the brute ugliness was the same. Beneath streaks of white on their temples—the sole show of age—one was sandy blond, the other dark. Just which was which had never meant that much. The family name was Zaitsev. “Butt” had come thanks to a taunt from when they were all of nine, courtesy of an old number by the Jimmy Castor Bunch and the name of their mom. The joke was lost a sous chef from Guatemala City, who only hoped to keep all pairs intact, but it had shown the Butts a happier way. Through skirmishes with everyone and everything else, they bled each other somewhat less.

“Put him in there.”

“What am I, your sidekick?”

“I’d scope a nut if you’re asking. Migue, watch your head. Watcho your heado. Comprende?”

The trunk of their Buick Wildcat gave him a scrub through the turns. He thought the hatch would come open on the alleyway behind Chez Daphne—a steel door without handle or knob that swung inward with a deadbolt key. It led straight into the kitchen, which was where and how they knew him. But the how and where of the visit—how they had known where to find him—these were no less a mystery than the why. Bracing him against a turn, his hand found a stiff spot in the nap. Met up with sweat it gave back a scent of blood. He heard the bickering through the rearmost seats. No small feat over the thud of the stereo and the thickness of all that custom leather.

“Take a right.”

“I don’t know where it is? You don’t like the driving, tuck and roll, motherfucker.”

“Leave Bertha out of this. I said right! Well great! There goes the shortcut!”

“Christ! It’s a grid! North, south, west, east! You need a guide for that? Fucking Sacagawea?”

“What did you just call me?”

“Look. Donuts—first batch. Pull up, pull up.”

Well past the kitchen, to judge from the commute—even without stops for donuts figured in. Food was their love, and eating was the only time Migue had seen peace on those bitten faces. A slow chew at the table in the back, breath through noses under half-shut eyes. The kitchen would quiet down, meaning that the only yells would be coming from the chef, and those through the ruck of prep work. Daphne Waterbeeste was bi in the polar sense as well as the usual and tattooed out to midway geek, but you could only call her rash for bringing in Jack and Rod. Regulars before, big tippers and fans of the menu, now a piece of things—silent partners, she had likely hoped. Foolish, but she had to know the long game there. Migue had seldom worked for a better cook than Daphne, a restaurateur through and through, and he had been places. Never before in the trunk of a car, although he had to admit that it was spacious. They removed him from it almost gently once the Buttmobile quit with the veering and the lurching and the bouncing up and down. The latch popped, and the street light flooded in. Good thing they had a liking for him, or for the talent. Either could have stuck thumbs in to pry Migue open like a done hen, yet all they did was shove him into motion as they knuckled sugar from their mouths. Migue saw that he had come uptown—a residential street. Newer buildings, frameworks of glass and steel, so nearer to the river than the park and a scifi jewelscape in the eyes of a working man. A sharp palate let him smell the cinnamon and fruit on his two chaperones, so he knew they had gone with apple fritters.

The three came to a lift. There was no doorman, nor any concierge, but the lobby had a long desk where one should have sat, perhaps with smut of his own. Jack or Rod had a keycard, and he stuck it in a slot. Migue never would have took them for high society, and in truth he did not now. The misgiving grew, and it had already been at frantic.

The door reopened on a private foyer, and Migue had never seen the like. Past a short privacy wall and bureau table there was an open floor plan. Silly low-slung furniture, like corn chips made of aircraft fuselage, under row on row of potted downlight. A cityscape view swept about a conversation pit. It was like the reveal on a knock-knock joke told by the ghost of Eero Saarinen. Migue had few notions of architecture or of any joke in progress and saw only the keys in the dish on the bureau. He knew the fob on sight: a lightning bolt and the letters tcb. So this was Daphne’s home. She kept such long hours at the restaurant that she might have slept in a casserole. Beside the key dish was an address book, open to a scrawl. His own contact info, Migue knew without too close a look. The how.

Next, why, as in why a chef he trusted had a pair of goons fetch him out. But it was not Daphne who rose from the pit to greet them. Even with Migue’s present escort, the danger he knew so well, he felt gooseflesh break up and down his arms. There was nothing unusual about the look on the man—pale golf jacket, average height, slim, balding at the crown—but he bore an immaterial reek of death and was the only person Migue had ever seen, Daphne aside, to give the brothers an open stare. 

“I don’t wait,” was how he led.

“Six?” Jack or Rod said. “How’d you get up without us?”

“You brought somebody in.” Not a question. “And left the scene to do it.” The eyes never went to Migue, and he was glad. Six, they had called him, like a name and not a number. Since the Butts were criminals—enforcers of note—it hinted at mayhem best left unknown. Six was worse.

“Never you mind our boy here. Migue, he don’t do American so good.”

English, that meant, and speak, and Migue outspoke theirs. The no se ploy came with regret—a petty vice among staff who wanted to skip the Anglo headaches, not to mention the whole apocalyptic katzenjammer of the Butts. He had only ever used it on those two and for that reason. It would protect him, true, but he was about to wind up eavesdropping. Worse than whatever would be said, he would have to keep the simper up while he did so—act the dumb Guat el norte took him for.

Like so: “Mister Rod, Mister Yack, is hokay? I go now jou want?”

“Stayo closeo,” said Jack or Rod. “We’ll just be un momentum. For pavor?”

“Si. Cuánta razón tienes.” Migue looked down and away as the Butts stepped in for the huddle.

“Here’s how it works,” Six said, pointing in a jab at the floor. “You call Mr. Bodiak, he calls me. I show up, you show me the problem, I take care of it, I leave. I don’t punk, not for a krysha.”

“Easy, Six,” said Rod or Jack. “We didn’t mean to be, like, fucking rude. There was some time to spare before you got here, and, you know, a pressing matter at hand.”

“It was serious,” Jack or Rod threw in.

Six shook his head. “Moving along. I saw how you left it. Too bad it can’t be staged. That’s the easy route most often—just scrawl a note and then whatever. But, you know, a bump on the head like that, nobody ever—so that leaves cleanup, and judging from what I saw, that was what you expected. Whatever movies told you, a tub’s no good. Any fluid that works, works—given a chance it would chew through the finish and even through the metal. As red flags go it’s a fifty-foot candid of a baboon’s ass. And the other way—the carryout—well, it takes time, it’s piecemeal, there’s more risk, and time and risk, those’ll run you extra.”

On tub Migue no longer wondered where the chef might be. Each hint brought a chill.

Six went on. “Keep that Mex out of the way. He’s your problem or you’ll be mine. I’m going to make a call.”

“Bossy,” Jack or Rod muttered once Six was in the back.

His brother said, “Yeah. I’m all, lighten up, Mother Superior.”

“Nice. Migue, hey Migue, comeo overo hereo.”

To a kitchen area, part of the open floor. It was just past an island and a row of backless stools. Had the lightning bolt gone unseen, he would have spotted Daphne’s handiwork there and then. Open prep surfaces, a chaos of tools magnetized to the backsplashes, save for the one good knife. This was a non-brand gyuto made of a chrome-moly steel. It had been honed so often that the tip had grown thin. It would cut you on a peek, and it lay between a bamboo cutting board and white towels in a trig little stack. Daphne Waterbeeste never let the one good knife roam far, and folded kitchen towels, those were like her wings. Funny to think of that unhinged and inky lady as an angel now, but he did. She would be the patron saint of duck fat. Migue fought the tears.

One area, near the sink, was a mess. Bowl on bowl had stacked up, smeared with a dark residue. All sorts of ingredients from refrigerator and pantry were strewn and smashed into paste and raggedly cut and torn, slopping off the counter onto the tile. Lettuce leaves, herbs fresh and dry, mushrooms and meats, all laid waste. The shards of plates were on the floor nearest the sink. 

No time for surmises. Jack or Rod had gone to a deep pot on the stove and taken up the lid. Rod or Jack kept behind. There was heat in the cookware yet, thanks to an enameled cast iron. A steam rose that smelt of shrimp and cuttlefish and the seawater they swam.

Jack or Rod nodded him over, and Migue went to take a look. The contents of the pot were a uniform black, with chunks both small and large. None of the tasty smell seemed right for that mealy pitch. “Migue,” Jack or Rod said, “this stuff, it’s delicious. Muy delicioso. Si?” Migue thought on a broken watch that could speak Spanish twice a day. “We can’t figure out what’s in it. We had, like, half the batch, more, and we sure as fucking donkey tits want to eat up all the rest. But we need to know how to make it. What’s in it. Before it’s gone. We need to know.”

Migue chose his Spanglish. He had never needed to resort to so much of it before. “Jou want mees make jous dinner?” The ghost of raza pride owed him a punch in the throat, but dire was dire.

“No, no,” said Rod or Jack. He took Migue by the shoulders and turned him about. “We. Want. To know. How to make. To know. What’s. In it. The ingredients.”

“Ah—los ingredientes! Si, si, I honderstand. Then I make jous dinner?”

Jack or Rod took the shoulders, and Migue was spun to face the other mouth. Same gestures, same donut breath. “Just los ingrediochos, mon ami. My brother and me, we been learning how to cook for ourselves. How. To. Cook. We love food. Been getting taught on the side.”

“Que? No lo entiendo.”

“Getting. Taught. Teacho mucho aqui, aqui. Cook, cook, cook.” Jack or Rod was shouting now—right into his face, though without anger—and doing a pantomime. Chop, stir, a pepper grind. The smile never let up as Migue felt the mist of spittle. So that was how the Butts had come. At work they were a constant distraction. Daphne had likely seen lessons as a way to get them off her grill.

“Hokay. I honderstand. Los ingredientes.” He pointed to the pot. “I take a casa, si? To mees chome. Cómo decirlo? Chow jou say? Chome. Home.” And thought, Se prepara un incendio, San Lorenzo. Lo que deberé.

Rod or Jack had stepped up to make a united front with Jack or Rod. Soft smiles under deadly earnest eyes. Either had a hundred pounds on Migue, more, and that was the least of his trouble.

“Here,” said one.

“Now,” said the other. “That’s how it’s gotta be, Migue.”

“Yeah, Migue. Here and now.”

They would never let him go. Full tilt on a pollito clown act for nothing, and nothing left to do but keep it up, pray for the best.

What came out instead of any godly fixes was Six. “I spoke to Mr. Bodiak,” he said to the Butts from halfway across the carpet. “You two have a good night.” And on toward the door, unhurried.

“Whoa! Whoa!” The Butts were in pursuit, both at once. Migue listened in, but his eyes went to the nearest backsplash and what was hung there. “Just where do you think you’re going?” he heard Jack or Rod ask. There was a meat cleaver on the magnetic stripe.

“Not your concern,” Six said. “What should bother you is that Mr. Bodiak has revoked the privilege.” Not the Chinese chef’s knife people called a cleaver, nor that half spade the Japanese used to behead all the fish they ate, but a nice, heavy bone-thwacker.

“What the shit, Six?” asked Rod or Jack. The one good knife had a better edge but was far less good for bone. Steel that keen was hard and brittle. “What the hell? This is our out-of-pocket.”

“Mr. Bodiak asked for a briefing, and I gave him one. The circumstances, well, they just aren’t to his liking.” If not the ax, there was always the cheese grater. “Not my problem, in other words. You might want to take a step back before I feel abused.” A baller, a mandoline, a rice paddle.

The Butts had raised their hands and taken the step. “Six, hey, we don’t mean no harm. Never mind my brother here. I know he ain’t got no class. He’s like a turd in summer put there by a hobo. But, you know, what are we supposed to do about the situation?” Air quotes.

“Look in the closet for plastic bags. And there seem to be plenty of knives.”

Migue felt the eyes. Despite himself he glanced up from the cleaver. A bad tell, obvious, but the Butts were only considering the whole toolshed and the task at hand. Six was looking right to Migue. When their stares met, Six gave a wink. No reassurance, of course—that would never be the aim—but it also felt like more. As if Six were signaling a gag. The look stopped blood but was over fast. Six turned for the elevator. And the stammering from the Butts kept up until the door slid shut at leisure. The Butts stood there in silence. All at once the nape cuffing began, and it was mutual.

“Hobo turd!”

“Can’t take the truth, huh? Goddam—shoulda ate you in the womb.”

“We ain’t twins. I bet your dad ain’t even mine.”

“Same drunk, different hole. You didn’t need a name, you needed a flush.”

There was some wrestling on the floor, and Migue would have snuck past, had the action rolled any farther back from the elevator button. By the time he thought of a fire exit—somewhere in the back, not yet seen—the fracas was done with. The Butts took out pocket combs and slicked back the muss. Next they picked up their handguns, dropped in the scuffle, and slung them in waistbands.

“So how do we do this? We got to get the recipe.”

“Sun’s up soon. Best get this done while there’s still some dark out. We need to split the work. One of us gets the cooking tips, the other the et cetera.”

“So rosham for it?”

Migue saw no more. In truth, while those eyes were taken up with fists clapping to palms on a three count, he had pulled the cleaver off the stripe. He gave it a weigh below a sight line on the countertops, and by the time the Butts had come to terms he had put the steel back. There was no place to hide it and no advantage in doing so. Daphne kept a speedy kitchen.

All too soon, Jack or Rod was at his side while Rod or Jack was rooting around under the sink. “Have a taste, Migue,” said Jack or Rod, handing over a wooden spoon. “Tell me what you think.” He lifted the lid off the pot. Rod or Jack had given up that search and gone for the pantry.

The flop sweat went unnoticed. Migue thought quick. “Jou try too? Por el sabor. Eh. For taste.”

“Hey!” Rod or Jack said in the background. “Cinch Saks!”

Migue swallowed hard and went on. “Jou have un paladar fino. Good palate.”

He already knew what the dish was, more or less—a variant of seafood paella from Valencian Spain—but flattery would help keep the oaf thrown off. More time for a grab when the chance came.

“Aw, hell. You really think so?”

“Si, si. Como un jefe de cocina. Por favor.” Migue gestured to the pot and offered the spoon. The other Butt brother set a package of garbage bags on the counter and began to eye the kitchen tools.

The spoon in Migue’s hand went ignored. Jack or Rod stuck a hand, bare and unwashed, straight into the pot. Up came a wad of dark rice and shellfish meat—maybe a full pint in that big palm.

“Ah, ah, ah!” Migue said. “Smell first.” A bead of sweat chased into his collar. The other Butt was looking to the meat cleaver. He picked it up—a heft, lips pursed—and Migue felt defeat.

Jack or Rod let the mass of arròs negre waft into his nose and open mouth. He more than sniffed at it—he breathed it in, and deeply—and Migue saw the transport, the sure delight.

“What it smell like?”

The eyes kept shut. “Good twat.”

The other Butt had noticed the one good knife, and a grin spread. The cleaver rattled on the counter, left behind, and off Rod or Jack went with the brittler steel and the bag box.

No relief for Migue. He turned back to Jack or Rod. “Okay, sure. Go ahead and taste.”

Smeared into the mouth, all at once, like caulk for a staved hull. Cheeks puffed out, breathing through the nose. The chew was slow—in no hurry at all to be done. “Goddam,” Jack or Rod said at last. “That’s good. I wish I could feel this way all the time.”

“But what do you taste?” Fingers creeping for the handle. “Salt? Fish? A browning?”

“I don’t know, but I—”

The other Butt came back. “Hey, Rod,” he said. “It’s weird.” So for now Migue knew which was which. His hand fell away from the countertop and his eyes met the floor. He felt the haul of the cleaver, the fear of what he had to do, but he willed his gaze downward and kept his face meek.

“Goddam it, bro,” Rod said, on a quick swallow. “Do you have to wreck every good thing?”

“Six—it looks like he, uh, shot up.” Both hands were free—knife and bags left behind—and Jack did a pantomime of a hypo. “This big-ass needle—it was right beside the situation.” Air quotes. “Just, like, thrown there.”

“Yeah? So what? Maybe it’ll keep things, like, flexible.”

“But she—he moved the situation.” Air quotes. “The situation”—air quotes—“was on the situation’s back, and now it’s on its side, with the shirt pulled up.” A thoughtful look. Air quotes.

“So he’s a pervert. You gotta figure he’s in it for something. Look, Migue and I are on the verge of culinary discovery here, so kindly shut your uppermost dick hole and get back to it. Chop chop.” A pause, a smirk. “Chop, chop.”

“Good one.” Off Jack went again.

“Okay, Migue, back to school. You want I should try some more? Never mind. I just have one question. What makes it so black? It don’t even look like it should be food. But it’s the best fucking shit I ever ate, and I’ve eaten some delicious fucking shit. So what makes it black like that?”

The eyes were right on him, so Migue kept his own from what he wanted. “Well, it could be any one of a few things. It’s probably not bean paste, because that would make it starchy—”

“Uh, Migue.”

“—and food coloring, that’s not too likely—”

“Migue.”

“—so that leaves—uh—”

“Just me here, or did your talk get better?”

They stared at each other for a good while, one up, the other down. Migue was surprised to see the look worn—hurt at a betrayal. Any mercy this might have brought quickly gave way to rage.  Migue realized with a gallows fascination that he had never seen a Butt angry until now. Things would have gone another route had Jack not just then come back around the corner.

“Rod,” he said with a quiet rasp, “she’s alive.”

“Huh? You sure?” Rod looked to his brother and away from Migue.

“Pretty sure,” Jack said, with blood running in a lollop from his throat and mouth. He pitched forward, and there stood Daphne Waterbeeste, the one good knife in hand. A crust of blood was matted through her hair, and it had pooled up to give her crazy panda eyes. Undershirt stained, sleeves of tattoos on bare arms, hair sprung, eyes afire, she was a harpy, a gorgon, a professional cook.

Rod took his time, which was short. “Cunt!” By the time the epitaph was said the gun was drawn and aimed, and no sooner drawn and aimed than hanging limp along with the beefy hand that held it. The stroke had landed right above the knob on the wrist, where the joint was weakest, and had sheared through to a hinge. Years of prep had given the sous a quick cut.

Wild eyes, pale shock—Rod looked to what had become of him, to the generous spurt, to the short Guatemalan who had become his end, to the cleaver brought high once more.

“Squid ink,” Migue said, but only after.

Daphne watched it all with a sleepier eye. She took a ragged step for one of the stools and held herself steady against the seat. The one good knife took a place on the countertop, set down with reverence, and she clutched her head once the hand was free. Migue had thrown the cleaver aside and rushed up to her.

“Chef! Are you okay? Where is the phone in here? I’ll call an ambulance.”

“Don’t call just yet,” she said. He had never heard that voice so weak. “Not before I try my dish. Degenerates. Always with a hand in the pot. Can’t take wait for an answer.” She righted herself with a push and began to inch toward the stove. “Now I have to look for new investors. Christ.”

Migue looked around him with a shrug. “You don’t have money?”

“My own? Into a restaurant? That’s nuts.” She took a step over Rod or Jack. Just which was which had never meant that much. At last she came to the hard-won pot. In went the wooden spoon. Daphne took a bite. A chew, a frown. She threw in a dash of salt.

#stories

---

Gulls fussing in the trash, hundreds at a time. So it had gone in Auction City, and so it went at the Weroansquaw County dump. A new last stop for all that civic waste, several thousand tons of it a day. The traffic led gulls up the pike and they lit down on the old hydraulic cuts, waiting for garbage to be sown. Five hundred acres, once a quarry, lashed down to rock and left to yawn for sixty years.

The county had a hole to spare and Auction had the cash, so a shorebird had come into the woods. As had Steph Metzger, who ran the site. A city kid now pepper gray and walking with a limp. Just as strange out there, without the asphalt underfoot, but he could never take any gull for a neighborhood friend. Least when the flock drew that circle on the trash, a sloppy whirl that did no vulture proud. Here as back home men on shift knew how to leave a sight unseen. But this time Steph had been called out. “Get down here, boss,” twice, and nothing more from the office radio.

And there he stood on the edge of a circuit road, staring down into the washout and frowning on a cane. That gyre, same as four or five times a year. Close by was a dozer that had lent the shove. On the blade sat the driver, walkie talkie yet in hand. Name of Luke, thinning at twenty-two and in a fidget. He toed clay from his soles, and his thumb drew a tsk on the push-to-talk. His lunch box sat up in the cab—always kept close at hand, with a thermos, like a mousy youngster would at school.

One chain of prints led down to the bottom, one back up. The floor was strewn maybe to a knee and nothing leapt out from the clutter, even where birds fought for scrap. The cane gave Steph an authoritative pivot, all thanks to a Nipponese Type 97 hand grenade. Held plumb it made a man look tall no matter that he stood tit high. “How’d you walk that? Fifty-point slope goddam near.” Steph had sent the traffic to another tipping face, barely a hum from where they were. No need to shout, though shout he did. “It could pile onto you! Glass in the mix and baby diapers and Christ knows what, and then no one even knows to dig!” Luke kept quiet. He had taken his feet but kept the share of dirt between them in his sights. Steph gave him a moment and came up close, though no other man was near. When he had the eye he spoke no louder than was needed, and to the point.

“Son, you’ll get yourself buried.”

“’S not like that.”

“You know better.”

“’S not like that,” Luke said again. “That down there, that’s a woman.”

Save for the yawp all had gone still. Steph shook his head without a no, and again. “Hustler,” he guessed more than asked. And on the blank look he said, “A lady of the evening.”

“Looks more like a daughter than a flossie. Boss, it’s just not like that. Not like them others.”

Steph took time yet—no need for hurry. On the mention he had known that he would go, known in spite of twenty years. He looked to the topmost rim of the site, ten fathoms up. A certain kind of hole got measured like a depth of water, even a hole so dry and large, that had started out, innocently enough, as an open-cast mine. But the work there had never been kind or gentle. Once the china clay ran out, trees had taken time to inch up to the drop. Now saplings crowded at the ledge, and the oak stood thick behind them. Fill done, a billion cubic feet, whatever took root would sew it all shut.

“I’ll use the jeep then. I’m not itching for a sled ride. Stand where I can see you.”

“To show where? Those mews’ll do that, won’t they?”

Gulls would, however a youngster out of deep Virginny liked to name them. But down at the old man’s side was no place for Luke, not while he had a prayer. “Stand there anyway,” was how Steph put it, already moving for the jeep and fishing at a pocket. Like him, the jeep was military surplus and not so frisky. Roundabout—bad shocks and all the old hydraulicking made for a bumpy trip. But soon enough he got through the unnatural ravines to where soil had been laid. Under that soft pan was the trash he knew too well. Dump and cover, a daily routine, and by law the new way of doing things. It beat what Steph had seen before. Alkaline foam slavering out of a battery pile. Seeps of copper green with shorelines made of rust. Patchworks of tire and rag and bottle, in mounds that rose and fell as an eye sought the end. One site in town had been a whole neighborhood. Brick and concrete stood where fire had swept through, in a shape of doorway and window and a flight of steps leading down. He had watched those basements clot up, and when he drove the crawler at the end to spread the earth, he had never felt more like an undertaker. Not even when he caught glimpses of those nameless dead a few times a year, and busily unsaw them no sooner.

Any union shop ran with an understanding. What was understood got left some nights, put down where bulldozers were about to make the tuck. Steph had seen a cool dozen himself, and he knew of twice again as many, from times when a friend would walk up for the bucket. No word needed in the dripping of the ladle. A look back, a sure eye, and Steph had known then where not to go. The birds had told it first, of course. Just over a rise, pestering at the dirt.

Learning to skip the peek had taken time, and each lesson was vivid to this day. Swarthy-looking men in good suits. Fingers and face sometimes gone, but those were the wounds that had never bled. Gunshot, knife, piano wire, nothing sly in how. Some looked less guinea, even white, but Steph took those for Irish. Never a shine, though. Negroes must have got some shady place all to their lonesome.

There was Luke upslope, and the mews as he called them, in a flurry. Steph let the jeep stall out. He took the last few yards on foot, minding where the cane tip sank. All around was that ferment he had known half a life, that taste of garbage from the nose on down. Wrapper and table scrap and newsprint in a wilt. Tin can and broken jar and empty box and shirt. With a cuss gulls hopped out of reach. Slow going, save the race in his blood, one he had long hoped to forget. Steph had watched men fall back in the Pacific, even on his own aim and pull. Awful, true. And not the same.

Nor this, just as told. Blanket and cord part undone in the tumble. A driver had brought her in unknowing, he saw. Forked up in an alley bin by a truck out on a route. From there she would have gone to a transfer station, snug and well hid as a tilt loader took the pour. The gulls had mussed the hair and got into a lip and eye. The throat was a bruise, and a choker of pearls stood out crisp and whole. She had on one of those mod summer dresses—“hot cooter” was the gag—here in pale green and nothing like a joke. A Terrace deb, maybe, who said Chewsdie for Tuesday and played mallet games on a lawn with sweet tea in reach. Strung up cold and thrown into a dumpster.

Nothing like the usual and not the usual way. The handiwork never showed up like a wrapper or melon rind chucked into the haul. There was more care and a separate car besides. Some mornings saw a tire track at the gate, taking a puddle at the dip, whoever had a copy of the key. Just one more piece to keep from falling into place. And Steph had no wish to solve any puzzles on the look up.

Dillard, in badge and browns, and right beside Luke. The head deliveryman. All knew, none said.

—

Steph thought hard and quick on the drive. There would have been no time for the kid to use a phone—no jog to the front and back—even if Luke were fool enough to dial out. The walkie-talkie, open channel, it could only be. Not much had been said but the tone might have been enough to draw notice. A judas on the payroll. Steph should have known.

“Sheriff.”

“Steph.”

One car, and no deputy along for the ride, which meant it was not so grim. Dillard was Steph’s age and had come to Weroansquaw at the same time. They had met when both were young and Dillard had not been the name. The muscle at the union vote had ended in a vowel. Fix or no fix, an Anglo had wound up on the ticket. White mustache now, and all jaw and shoulder, same as then.

“So,” said the duly sworn hat and gun. He looked to Steph’s windbreaker, shed already and in a grip. “Those birds went and dotted you up, eh?”

“It’s sick. That’s what a gull does—sick on you. Can you and me talk?”

“Your man here filled me in. Seems I paid a visit just in time to catch grief.” The smirk let Steph know just who there owned the truth.

“Front office. Please. Just us two. Come on—it’s a Friday, right?”

Dillard gave a shrug. “Stay near,” he said to Luke. “There might be more to ask you.”

And Luke did, with the same fidget and guilt, on the bench outside the trailer door as Steph pulled it to. He dearly hoped it would keep, whatever built in that face, at least until the sheriff drove away. Dillard had already helped himself to the urn. The window had a sweep on the weigh bridge and wheel wash. Dawn to four, trucks came in on the one and left through the other.

“Butt tea,” the sheriff said, with a look at the mug. “And no sugar. Not going to call your rep?”

“That pot’s been on since morning. Would have told you if you gave me a chance.”

“Am though. Giving you a chance.”

Steph took a breath and a seat. “I wasn’t calling anyone. Can we talk plain? Two guys who have been there? The kid—hey, he didn’t mean no harm when he had me down.” There would be no proof that Luke had done anything but go in for birdwatching, even with a snoop on the walkie. “Just made him uneasy, whatever was at the bottom.”

“Who said kid? You’re what I saw there, and you’re no kid. Talking plain, and on a Friday.”

“Sorry. I am. Apologies to … to whoever takes apologies. But this is different.”

“The string of pearls? Is that what you were going to tell me about? The necklace, what it means? Still in one piece and not taken after. Maybe even put on at time of strangle, like dressup. Which would make the whole why of it a lot more gothic. But Steph”—thumb to uniform—“do I look like a cop to you?”

Some youngsters never knew when to shut a goddam mouth. The dump had a county contract and here was the county in the flesh, once town had put in the rig.

“That’s an innocent down there,” Steph said. “A civilian, let’s call her.”

The hand came up, open, to no flinch. “There’s a number I can call. That showing up here, everything says just dumb luck to me. Whoever did it better hope there’s no way to flush him out. Put our thing at risk, you know how it is. But this isn’t just about business. I’ve got a daughter, Steph. Not that you’d need a girl of your own to understand. You don’t have any little ones, do you? You and the wife?”

“No.” Same grenade.

“So I’ll get on that phone, but we both know the answer. Not out of heartlessness, but for a precaution. And we’ll have to live with it. No outside sleuth is going to poke around.”

There had been a weight on the for and Steph felt it drop. “Luke didn’t mean—like I said. This wasn’t like the rest.”

“How’d he know that before the walkup?”

No answer would help. “We all looked when we were green,” Steph said. “All of us.”

“I could let it go myself. But I’m obligated here. I have to make a report. Kid like that—hell, I bet there are walks all the goddam time.”

Which went a ways to explaining the remorse outside, just past the door. Steph shook his head. “We’re going to leave her there. Bury her with the city waste and finish up some bastard’s work.”

“The her in that was never here, if it helps.”

—

The shackle took the chain, and Steph drove off in a full gradient dusk, orange to stars. He and Alice lived in a foursquare on land they could call their own. A rickety kit brought in by train three deeds back. They were going to pour a new foot in the next year or two, put up a three bedroom once the permit came through, and meantime they had a private drive and six acres to guard the solitude. Better than any of the thin-walled fleabites where they had paid out monthly rent back in town.

Outcast gulls took to the cover of trees at night, even so far from the dump. Steph spotted one as the lamps went dark on his pickup. Brooding in the underbrush like a hen with the air let out. Wrongheaded, and cruelly stupid, but no ghost. Any harm a gull did was just for idiot hunger. Steph had thought to launder the jacket, but now he threw it in the can on the way to the door.

A shower, hot on through to cold. Tuna casserole with cheddar, and one bourbon too many. Alice sang mezzo in a church choir and she told him about the cutthroat politics. He could tell she saw the bother, the hands kneading at each other, but she never said a word. There was good footing on the home front. And some marriage-type fun once the dishes were dry, praises be that the Nip weapon had not been more thorough. On summer nights the bed went out onto a sleeping porch, and through the screens Steph heard a windless tick of branches. He was never close to sleep or rest. Nor had the girl been, however still. He had drawn the blanket up around that valentine face, pretty in life, and weighted down the edges with whatever he could scrounge up from the trash. The touch of that cloth was deep in his fingertips. A callback had come near the end of shift. Just a ring and a syllable on pickup. One he had said back to himself in the hours since. But at last he let it slip, and Alice asked him no what, what was wrong, and he told from start to finish. Or to somewhere near the middle, he saw now.

“You know better.”

—

He did, Alice was only right, yet here he was at the padlock again, well past twelve. His shadow broke the beams on the chainlink as he fed the key into the slot, one hand steadying the other. He had never thought to drive up blind and safe. Caught was caught if it came to that.

“Anyone can see us,” Luke said from the cab, of a different mind. “Car light’s like blazes.”

Steph had known the kid would be awake. A work file at home had every address, and Luke’s was a trailer park in outermost Cedarville. A hobbled vet was never going to make the carry on his own.

The wire played in afterimage as the pickup found the jeep. “Han’t been at night,” Luke said, and again, as the engine quit. The squirm from earlier that day was on him yet. There was no resenting a boyish man for nerves, or for the stream of chatter. Especially where fright put off coming clean, even for a weekend. “Han’t been at night. Why take the jeep instead?”

“Those are the axles I can risk.”

“My hands, they won’t sit.”

“There’s a flask in the glove box.”

“And a pistol,” the kid said, on looking. “And a Bible.”

“You take the whiskey and the book, and I’ll get the rest from the back.”

“Sure we don’t want that gun along?”

The kid had no share in the laugh. “Let’s go,” Steph managed at last, palming at an eye. A thirty-two Rem. Good one. The wheeze carried to the jeep along with shovels and a blanket from home.

Luke said, “I’m scared. But right is right.”

“So’s three lefts.” A lame try in a place without a city block. The jeep got in gear with a coughing start. Luke took a pull as they swung onto the bottom road.

“Bible’s for a verse, yeah?” he asked. “A prayer for after? We don’t know a thing about the lady. Can’t speak gospels if she were Jewish.”

“So we’ll go to that stuff at the front.” And Steph felt they already had, watching the scarp rise up. Those parts of scripture had a better line or two to name what lay ahead. Night made a difference, and so did the task.

“I got to tell you something, Mr. Metzger.”

“No you don’t.”

“I take pictures when it happens. My lunch pail—it an’t just a nutter sandwich and a apple I bring. There’s a camera, too.”

“Let me drive, son.”

“One of them Polaroids.”

“Goddam it!”

That bought quiet as the trench grew deep. So much wreckage made, and not just where nozzle  and hose had thrown a cut. Sediment had flowed to the southwest, every ton of dirt voided out—fields paved, creeks dammed up, back in the Aughts. There had been skirmishes, Steph had heard, and never in court with a lawyer or a judge. No, it was farm owners against the flood, with booby trap and a shotgun or two near the end, when the National Guard came in to break it up.

The past was no distraction, or not enough, and his misgiving got worse alongside the fear. Once he saw the sprawl of gulls Steph knew he had to try. He killed the motor and considered how to say what needed being said. The lamps stayed on, and the yellowish cast and clipped shadow made the birds read flat, unreal, like a theater prop. But a few shivered yet at the noise of the engine, and a head or two poked up from the puddle they had made of themselves. Hundreds in the open, miles from a tidal marsh. Steph had left the cover off at the end of shift, which was illegal. The gulls might have flown out to mass up someplace else, if not for the glory they took in a stink.

“Pictures,” he said to prompt the kid. “Instant pictures.”

“I’m sorry. I put them in this book I keep, just for my own. Wasn’t ever aiming to sell—I’m not stupid you know. And when I saw it was a, a lady instead, I never—”

“In a whisper, son. Or just, you know, not so damn loud. Why, though? Why keep photographs?”

The answer came quick, and Steph took the meaning. “To know what I saw.”

He could never have put it better himself—not with a sheepskin and twice as many words. “Here’s what you do,” he said at last. “You get home to that trailer, start a fire. Pack a bag first. You know what to leave. Get someplace before you call. And far. Never say where beforehand. I’ll wire out a little money.”

“But the sheriff, he was nice about it.”

“Nice just wants. How did this get here? Municipal waste hauled across the line, county and state, like a bumper crop. Auction is a maritime city—Christ almighty, on the water. You’d think a fleet of hopper barges might run it out for cheaper. Or at least take some across the roadstead and break the corner hold. But a couple years back there was that goof with the medical waste. A tugboat hooked up on the shallows, all those beaches decorated. Front page news, and then a big fat no on barges in the roads, by order of a judge. Was it a mishap, though? Just when every last dump in city limits got full or shut down? And that disposal act went through with the feds?”

The effort showed. “What’s that got to do with my trailer and me?”

“Scale,” Steph said.

“Like a snake?”

“Yes. And the size of it, too—a big where small won’t go unnoticed. Pack a bag. Burn what you leave. Get somewhere else.”

“Well, where?”

“Go before you know it. Hell, join up with the army. It’s not so bad. Hots, cots, and all your skivvies washed.”

“Military service, with that Gulf of Tonka thing getting worse? Hey, wasn’t you a marine?”

“Yeah. Join the army, kid. Come on.”

Said without heart. Once the quiet was on him Steph felt the volt lick in it. More gull heads came up as he and the kid took a wide lane. The whole bed of them was shivering now. Not far into their camp, there she lay, or no one at all, if it helped. The birds had got a corner up, bared a shoulder, teased a lock of hair, but the face was still kept safe.

“Brought a blanket,” Steph heard himself say.

“What? Who you talking to, Mr. Metzger?”

“Call me Steph.” His eye took a sleeve. “I don’t know. Let’s get that wrap off.”

“What for?”

“Because of who put it on her.” Cuts with a jackknife, fraying ends of cord. He saw more of what had been done. “Oh,” he said as the anger woke. “Oh you fucking bastard.”

The kid never shed a tear, which might have gone to credit until he spun away for a retch and spit. “An’t smell too good,” he said on coming back around. No eyes to wipe there, but a mouth and nose.

“Let’s get her on the jeep.”

Same gap between the birds, into the headlamp glare. It had grown only a little dimmer in the ten minutes that saw it through. The battery would turn the motor yet. Rigor had passed, and like a slow hinge the blanket wrap began to dip between them. A heave got her on the back. Gently on the finish—that bundled head laid down with a palm cradle. The knee had begun to hurt—given out a couple of times—but it had kept him upright. Steph put the cane to the dirt and caught his breath.

“Where next? Steph.”

“Above the site, I guess.”

“One of those pits where we took out the topper fill?”

“No, no—there’s a high spot where the trees grew back already. I don’t know. A sunrise view.”

“Well, she ought to like that, I’m sure.”

“She’d never like any part of this.”

And the gulls broke, all at once. No voice would carry through the rush of wings. Luke cringed as they beat about his head in the scatter for the dark. But Steph kept to his feet and stick, looking fast to where beams showed on the road above, gone bright all at once. For the life of him he had never heard a shot.

—

Fired into the grounded flock, or the sky. Steph took the meaning and called out, just as loud as he might, “We’ll be up,” once the racket died and every gull had fled. The bottom road only led one place, and that was back the way they had come. The quarry’s open end had taken a berm of clay to keep the leachate back, and apparently any fugitive from the mob. Steph never would have tried anyway, but those facts, once spelled out, kept Luke to a churchly sit and alive a bit longer. Now he showed some weeping, into a back pocket hanky festooned with baby ducks. The kid might have had talent for a slope, but a shortcut and lam would have gone no different from a suicide jump.

Four cars, all arrayed with headlights on the fork. Steph squinted through as he came to a stop. Three with the county logo, spinners off and two trunks open, and behind them a quad-lamp Sedan de Ville that was somehow more a threat. First and foremost were three backlit hats and two barrels held at presentation. The deputies had come this time, both of them, Stucky and Boone. They stood behind the sheriff to form the V, each with a high-caliber semiaut and extended clip. Not the standard issue for Weroansqaw County, nor any other. They, like Dillard, had got rechristened for the job, and Steph suspected the names they chose were a spoof, funny to someone for some reason. He led with no smile as he rose up from the jeep. No sign of more, not in the open, but that final car had not coasted in by itself.

“You left the cover off,” Dillard explained. His sidearm had kept to the holster, right beneath a hand spread to a hip. “That gave it up, but I knew already. Cops like to talk about a blue sense, so I guess that makes mine brown. Tell your fella there to come over.”

“Give him a sec.” Steph had taken three steps back, and he stood aside what had been rescued from the fill. “His knees are shaking pretty hard.”

“Not yours.”

“Good thing I got mad.”

A chuckle from the deputies. Even Dillard cracked a grin. “You’re angry with us, Steph? Take my word for it—there’s no call for brave here. I bet this isn’t going to go where you think it is.”

“Got sixteen bucks on me,” with a clap to a back pocket. “Whichever one of you takes the pot, I hope I mess myself.”

 “Easy now. I had to report what you were up to before I acted. I know how this getup makes me look like a generalissimo, but I’m just a go-between. One more call—and lucky thing, because there was a lead.”

The grief up in the passenger seat quit all at once, but Steph hardly took notice. He put a hand to the blanket, at what felt like a shoulder. “She gets a funeral? Buried right?”

“Not that lucky. But yes, there’s maybe a name and even a tie. I didn’t get told what to what. And someone else will handle it from here—someone nameless, understand. They’ve come to take notes. Once that’s done we can put her wherever you like. As long as it’s good and secret.”

Secret would be good enough, but Steph kept guard. He believed the things he had said to Luke, most that nice only wanted. Luke showed more willingness to trust.

“Can I get out of here, Sheriff?”

“Quiet, son,” Steph said low. “And step clear. Let the people work.”

He was already looking to the sedan. On the sheriff’s glance the doors had swung out. The two who came up through the headlamp glare took him by surprise. Both were wrong, most that they should have come together. Some sort of Oriental, taller and sturdier than Dillard himself, and a woman. He was almost surely Chinese—none of that coarse Nip brow, seen from the far side of a bayonet—and despite the cut of a sharkskin suit not so interesting as she. A knockout, for one, and dressed to strange elegance for the job. Hot cooter once more, this time in a red. Called out in the middle of a function, Steph guessed, with no time for a change of wardrobe. Matching pumps took the dirt without a hitch. Each of the two had a kit slung to a shoulder, and what the woman brought out from hers turned out to be a camera with a flashcube. No word as the man snapped gloves on, nor as the flash pack began to whine. Steph’s knots were undone, the blanket spread. And then the scene was snatched away, and Steph blinked the whiteness out.

What came back first was a hard stare, from Dillard—straight at Luke. Steph turned just enough for a glimpse. Regret there at each pop of the bulb, a face hung low. Like a whupped dog.

“No,” he whispered, loud as he dared, and the kid never caught the hint.

Swabs, fingerprints, a piece cut from the dress. At last the blanket was folded shut, the gloves stripped off, the wad thrown to the tipping face. No outside sleuth, Dillard had said, and outside was key. Done, and not a word spoken. Nor did the sheriff ever look them in the face. Some kind of deference, maybe even worry. Certainly he was not the man in charge, not to them. Back into the sedan for an unhurried roll for the gate. The pop of gravel in the treads grew quiet.

Deep city, and much higher up, but Steph found himself uneasy to see them go. Dillard had turned for a soft word with Boone. Once the brakelight glow had gone to full black, he said to Luke, “You can get on home. I know the boss drove you, but the dep here will give you a lift.”

“Won’t Steph need a hand?”

“Nah. He’s got me and Stucky. Sleep tight.”

The chin had come up again, with a wink. “See you Monday, boss.”

Steph never would have thrown water on that wink. Nor was he rid of hope for his own sorry sake, not yet, even as he grew more sure. He had read it wrong, he tried to tell himself. Sore age and a few bad hours had made him see the worst. But then Luke began to name the intersection nearest to the trailer he called home, Deputy Boone said, “I know the way,” and Steph shut his eyes.

—

“If you think I’m going to dig my own grave,” he said soon after, “you’re out of your goddam mind.”

There was leadup of course. Several minutes more of roundabout driving, this time upward, off road, and to the spot he had in mind, the sheriff’s bumper right on the jeep and Stucky for a passenger. Then some coy talk about Dillard’s stiff back, and how the deputy had to keep a lookout, both hands free, and maybe Steph would be a pal and handle the excavation on his own. There was even a pat quip about shovels, when Steph pointed out that there were two. Good thing if one broke, the sheriff had replied. But now Steph was looking at the view he had chosen, where no one would ever come to look. A spade had been tossed to his feet but the cane was yet in hand. Maybe the Rem should have come out of the glove box after all. There had never been a frisk. Maybe—but no use now. That high up there was a long vantage eastward, and he could see the long curve of Marigold Hill with the city halo drawn about it. A radio mast stood atop, blinking red at tiptop to warn off air traffic, and even from so far away the lattice stood out against the glow. Not as pretty as a row of pearls, but no less clear a sign. 

So he said it, and he stood his ground. Dillard and his man were impressed—a pleased look with none of the gangster slime. Almost a camaraderie. “It’s just too damn obvious,” Steph said. “Can we skip the obvious part?”

What came next was not. A jerk of Dillard’s head, and Stucky went to put the rifle in the trunk and have a smoke. “I’ll level,” Dillard said in the moment alone. “Yeah, you’re supposed to dig, thinking what you think right now. An act of contrition, like they say in church. But we’re just supposed to scare you, to remind you how things are. You’re a valuable man here. It’s even good that you watch out for the guys—and that you carry all those doubts of yours with such taste.”

“Why am I a valuable man?”

“Because you go with it,” Dillard said. “Year in, year out, you plug away. You’ve outlasted everybody, even knowing what. Next time you show up for work, take a look around. Do you recognize anyone on your crew? Does anybody out here look familiar to you? Anyone at all?”

A pause, long and fraught. “Just you,” Steph said. He no longer feared a bullet. “Well, you and the wife.”

“That’s the spirit. But the order came, and it’s to make you dig, and it won’t look right if I don’t. You’ve got that knee, and Monday it’ll be at lot worse from this, and both those hands will be good and raw. But that’ll all heal up. I’m really glad for what we’re doing here, Steph—that it all went this way. Like I said, I have a daughter. Speaking as a career man, this is the best thing I’ve done in years.”

“If you go ahead and shoot me after all of that, you’re a devil and a half.”

“Shucks.”

One more look to the east, a sky lit up like a dirty hearth. “Glad I got to the countryside.”

“This is the suburbs. You just don’t know it yet. All that over there, under the tower? Remember when they put up G.I. housing on the far side, ticky-tacky like Seeger said? This side of it just got zoned for plots. And there are surveys underway all over the valley. That’s the point of all this,” with a nod down to where the trash rankled. The drop was much closer than Steph had thought, just past a thinning in the trees, almost too dark to spot. “Development,” Dillard said. “The land’s all bought. Ten years, twenty, this will be a backyard. A swimming pool. Maybe a lawn with croquet balls.”

Steph had already begun to dig, just to shut it out. The blade cut into a root and pried through clutches of rock. A throw would have sent each shovelful past the edge and down into the site. But he kept the pile near, even too close, sifting back into his progress.

Hours—hours of digging with a merciless pace. Until true dawn began to overtake the city light. Until his war wound had gone numb and an ounce of weight was too much for the leg to bear. Until his hands were skinned to muscle and his face and clothes were a paste of dirt and sweat and blood wherever he had wiped. Laid out on a side and out of breath, he scraped up the last loose backfill with a shovel edge. He peeled his raw grip from the wooden handle and gave the earth a pat.

“Want to say something, Steph?” Dillard asked. He and the deputy had burned through all their smokes and met the creeping hours with talk of baseball. “A prayer for the lady?” In a show of kindness they had done the lowering themselves, with a pair of underslung ropes. Slow and deliberate, length by length meted out, cueing each other in a softest voice. Dillard held up something taken from the floor of the jeep. The Bible from Steph’s own glovebox, held not long before in a trusting lap.

Steph blinked in his stinging mud, trying to gather a thought. “Wish I could do more.”

A frown from the sheriff and his lackey. Dillard laid the Bible on the hood. Each took out a string and fell to a knee for the sign of the cross. In sync they said, “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia piu es, requiem aeternum dona eis Domine,” and on through deliver us from evil, maybe. Steph was an Evangelical Lutheran and shy on tongues. One more reverence, knuckle to brow, and both took their feet. Steph stared all the while, gasping yet. The uniforms were costume, and they might just as well have shown up in black frock and bleachy collar.

Stucky said, “Now that’s how you say a prayer.”

—

Each lent a shoulder, helpful right up to the threshold of the door. There Alice took over at seven-thirty in the morning. She said little more than “Thank you, Sheriff” and “Thank you, Deputy,” because Steph Metzger had never put gold onto a fool. Nor did she get misty, even as her washcloth broke the two clean streaks on her husband’s face. A weekend on the recliner, with ice on the knee and in a glass kept otherwise full of whiskey. Hands in tape and gauze made for a tricky hold and he felt none of the dewy thaw as he drank it down. Alice came and went, to leave a sandwich and take a plate, with never a told you so. He had only asked for the file and, on confirming that the trailer had no line, a telephone book and the hefty black receiver. The manager at the park had gone up to knock on the door and come back to report no one home.

“Do you smell a fire?” Steph asked the second time he tried.

No, but there was neither hope nor dread in that alone. Monday morning came no less sure as Steph unlocked the gate with a bandaged hand. The pickup had been brought to him Sunday afternoon, yet another show of good faith, so he had made it without help, even with the step clutch. At first he skipped the office, where he had it in mind to fill up a meager box with what little he cared to take, and to leave an envelope on the desk. Instead he went straight out to the circuit road, yet in his own truck, foregoing any stretches on so bad a leg. And not long on that tour he took the answer. Gulls, hundreds, in a circle on the trash, a sloppy whirl that did no vulture proud.

#stories

---

A voice had come in from the dark. It was a last hot night in that studio apartment, close and small and all but empty now. I lay on an airbed on the floor and kept watch on a spray foam ceiling, awake the whole time, though used up from a bitter sweat and a day’s work. The window sash was laid open to the screen, in a thirst for air, and for privacy the blinds were angled off. The second story walkway was just on the other side of that dirty mesh, ten concrete paces left and right and an iron rail on a courtyard. Stucco and brake pad soot, same as any thereabouts at rates so low. Privacy, or near to it, but no peace. Every sound was mine, as was the distant voice. No word had stood out, just the tinge of a complaint. The onrush built again. Racks of traffic were hitting a red on Santa Monica Boulevard and it let them go in fits. A starless orange laid griddles on the wall where the slats threw the achy light. Bed aside, the floor held only a duffel, the clothes I had stepped out of, and those ready for me to wear. A ran a finger where the desk had weighted down the carpet tuft, tight as a seam. Hauls on a concrete flight of stairs—down and up several times—had got me to that camp, and nowhere. The true move awaited, first thing. Out of those three small rooms, then out of state. My hands were raw from boxes and I had to peel loose to shift for comfort. Sore, broke, and stiff in my own salt. Sleep was owed, and a full security deposit. I was no less desperate for rest than I was for cash in hand.

The onrush again. No traces of the voice in the last gap. The apartments were near to Westwood, all but kitty from the green temple lawn and LDS trophy. A complex of three buildings, with two courtyards, likely Streamline Moderne before a frump-over in the 1970s. Maybe thirty people living there, none of whom I knew and few I had ever caught glimpses of. We kept to ourselves, waiting it out. Shut doors, shut windows. Both had screens on them to let in air, but most often they went battened down. From the inside traffic would be no more than a hum. Shore break, if you could trick yourself. Gentle combers at the boardwalk. But when summer came—with no buffer of glass—it was just a racket once again, tread and motor that rose and fell in a drawn-out gasp for breath.

And now, once more, the gripe out in it all. The voice of a man—louder, nearer. The apartment buildings were open to the street. Neither courtyard had a gate, front or back, to shut him out. “Goddam,” was what I heard him say. “Goddam.” A shuffle nearby—the sidewalk on Little Santa Monica. “Goddam.” Some drunks had charm. My last, seen from the long glass of a coffee shop on Abbott-Kinney, met the dawn in a tee and no pants. I’m Donald Duck! I’m Donald Duck! Walt Disney had shown up in the form of a cop. “Goddam.” This drunk had no jokes to tell and rankled to be any part of one. The cuss held on a note that faded out, but it returned a moment later, louder than before. The man had come back down the alley, where tenants’ cars had spaces, as if sniffing out the place. My own car had been sold a year before to pay the deposit and first month, last chance, and I would need every dim nickel back that I could get. Hence the love put into the cleanup. Bleach, polish, a razor on the shower stall glass, soap scum shaved off like wet pages. The space seemed big again, as it had on moving in. “Goddam,” from the window in the kitchenette. The drag of his feet was out in the other courtyard, where the property manager had a ground-floor unit. That might get him gone. I had never met her, though at times I had heard the rasp of her voice. More often I had heard her will done, in the form of the busybody. Custodian, personal friend to her, or both. I call him that not for a grudge but because he had a chip about drivers who took the alley as a shortcut. He would get in front of their cars. This isn’t a throughway! Always heard, never seen—as I heard him now, come out to vie with the drunk, maybe in slippers and a kimono robe. “What are you doing? People are asleep here. Git on. You’re trespassing.”

Git had brought the shuffle to a halt. The turn was slow. Ideas fought for mouth time. Best skipped, but the cruxes were fuck you, you’re wrong, I was here earlier for a meeting, I left my keys, fuck you twice, don’t you feel stupid now, keys, suck my balls. Mention of a twelve-step—that got at the real story. To a man fallen off a wagon, any West L.A. courtyard looked the same. And to me, though I would ride the bus. The busybody spoke in an aside to a phone. “I’d like to report an intruder.” The story, the address, a thanks. That call might have put a shove on just about anyone, but not a sorrowful drunk bereft of his keys. Feet took the treads to the next level. A wounded scoot, tired of the load. The busybody had gone back inside to wait for backup and to keep any pities to himself. I heard a screen door open to the inner wooden one, and then a banging. Open hand on hollow core. It might have left a dent, but the riff he chose, it was that much worse. “Shave and a Haircut.” At two or three a.m. The drunk began to shout. “Think I’m mad at you? Goddam. If I were mad I’d just kill you.” A wait, a grumble. The screen door slapped to. More shuffling, past the middle door and straight on to the far corner. The creak of spring hinges once more. Same riff, same attack. A pause. “Come on. Come on.” Another pause. A sigh. The clap of the frame, and on again. Further goddams and such. He went through variations on the theme a half dozen times. He trudged to the back court corners—both levels, skipping the property manager—and then into mine.

Goddam. The riff would play at to my door. The anger was like a sudden gust, but hot and dry. As I tensed up the scoot came to my open window. The drunk was just on the other side of the slats, the dirty screen, and right behind him was the handrail I’d shove him past. No sleeping now, come whatever. But he walked on by to try another corner unit, my immediate neighbor. Riff, groan, cuss, the screen door slapping shut. He seemed to like the corners. The place he had been, where he had last seen the key ring and the exit, must have been the same. My apartment stood in the middle of a walk. I could wait him out, skip the trouble, leave it all behind. No story for a cop, if one ever came. No complications. Just sit pat like the tenants I would never know, and be gone, be done.

A good plan of action, but no relief. Heat kept me sharp, mine and all the rest, and every last sound drew a picture. He had gone down the flight with that hurtful plod, and I heard him take a lower corner. Yet another door that I had never once seen open, near to the postal boxes. It could just as easily have been that nobody lived there—nothing would be at home behind the door but the hollow sound of the knock. The riff made it past “shave” when I heard the latch clear the strike. The door had come open, and quick. A faint thud, no more, and a rustle as the drunk was pulled inside. There was a bump of shoes over a threshold, and I went cold. The inner door shut with a slam and the screen door rang behind it. The hush was like no quiet I had known until the traffic came on again. There was no further sound. As late became early the swell of cars thinned out. At one point a handset chirped in the dark and a flashlight swept the blinds, and nobody living there came out to meet the law. Three hours to sunrise when traffic would thicken up again. One hundred and eighty minutes of lulls and rushes. My heart beat just as loud, but fast and close, and I never felt a pause. I thought to shut the windows—never mind the awful roast—but I was too afraid to move.

—

“Well hello! Are you number nine?”

“I was. Morning.”

I knew the voice, and now I had the face: the property manager, a older lady waiting down below. She wore velvet and had a pom on a leash, training its frightwig pizzle on an alley hedge. Green leaves, but if you held one between a thumb and finger, the soot of traffic would be there too.

The pack strap bit lightly at my shoulder. The airbed came down the steps in a choke and a limp wad, dragging on the treads. That flight, the one in back, was farthest from the door yet in my thoughts. The dumpster was at the back, I told myself, and I could walk up the alley to a bus.

“We never did meet you!” she said. “Your neighbors said you were so quiet. No trouble at all!”

The trash bin took the airbed, and a set of clothes that I would never wear again.

#stories

---

He had never killed a man, this tall but mousy youngster, Clyde Rasmussen. Proof of times of the mend, that a boy might make it to seventeen without a notch on a gunstock. The whittling had gotten close for many in the town of Story, those old enough to remember a shift in the moonlight and a heave in the earth it glowed upon.

Molly Po—D.D.S. ret., potato farmer, and warrant squad lead—was that old twice over. Fitting that big blond Clyde and his maiden death should be hers to supervise. Her score beat her years, thanks to the post, and to more. Fair, if tart, to call her a sage.

They took seats in the warrant office, in leather chairs patched up with saltires of duct tape. The furniture was salvage, as was the charterhouse itself, once a bank. It had been built in days of overstatement—cool marble floors and a vault that now held an arsenal instead of dirty pocket linen. The squad came from the ranks of the Clatsop volunteers. They were not sworn vigilantes, yet they had entry under that dog Latin door motto, nihil non ultionis, and a space of their own. A nod to the rule of common folk, the very breath of justice—and a stipend of ammo besides.

Molly spread the paperwork on a steel desk—dip pen and gall ink on a barrel-limed parchment. In cursive, of course. Writs were pretty once again, drawn up in a fairest hand that might do an executioner proud. Her own two ached and she worked them with a dry lather. The fingers were slow to curl and soon enough they would put her out. A matter of fairness, despite a lengthy tenure—a lady who called down fire should have some of her own, headshot aside.

“I understand you don’t care to go hunting, Clyde,” was how she began.

“Couldn’t say I don’t. Never done it, ’s all.”

“But you have a qualm.” She looked to the day-blue eyes and thought she read a search. “A misgiving. A doubt.”

“What about? I’m a Rasmussen. We’re a marksman family, aren’t we. A marks-family?”

Every month the hits went up on display, per custom. Clyde’s targets were best—tight grouping, head and chest, no lag or misfire on an unsighted bolt-action Rem 700. The vigilante quartermaster once thought he had missed his aim, which would have been an actionable waste of powder and brass. But it had turned out that two of the holes were multiples, and both of them in that magic apricot. Instant death, and from a handsome distance, four times over.

“I’m not forgetting your brothers,” Molly said. “They stepped up. Not to mention Marcelle, up there on tower duty. She could part your hair.” One of the volunteer snipers, his sis. And soon enough she’d wear the garter on an arm, same as those brothers had, once the jury held the yearly sit. In time that vote came to tap almost every man and woman on the warrant squad. Talent could not go to waste, even when it came from a matter of ceremony like a public execution. “But you’ve never gone out yourself. Fair to say you’ve never killed anything.”

“I fish. So I’ve got some fish on my conscience.”

“You’ve haven’t killed anything that could look you in the eye.”

“You could turn a trout to face you.”

There: the heart in him. Molly smiled. A joke was welcome but uncanny aim was what had brought the boy to her. Everyone else of age who had it that good had already done the stint. A society of volunteers shared both chores and risks. Otherwise it was a racket, a government, a cheat.

“You nervous?”

“Sure I’m nervous. But I gave my word and it’s as good as anybody else’s.”

A rankle, just hinting: better. “I’m not out to give you a time just for hoots.”

“I know it.”

“But I can tell just from the way you’re hunkered in that seat that you’re feeling it. You ought. We do what we can with what we have. We all get to shoulder it.”

“I think I want to meet him, Molly.”

What? “It’s allowable. Why would you?”

“Look him in the eye,” Clyde said, into hers.

“You’ve read the charges,” she said, calling the bluff. Most young folks were slow in letters—no fault, letters grown as rare as teachers.

He only smiled at her, at the desk, himself.

Molly picked up the sheet without a glance. “Let’s recap. A team went out—a co-op between the board of volunteers and the jury.”

“I know this much already.”

“Just listen anyway. They had leave from St. Helens to cross the borders on horseback, under an armed escort of course. The vigilantes couldn’t go along thanks to that skirmish in Tanasbourne. The team rode all the way into old Multnomah over the Tualatins. And right into the ghost.”

City, that meant. Clyde looked away, to whatever he might picture there. Bones, most likely—bones laid flat in sun-bleached clothes. A photo would pale. Molly had seen the before to that after firsthand.

“They came out the old depository with three tons of books. Too much of a load for the hills. So they went west through a tunnel they found open, more or less, and then the lowland—Twality.” It had been known as Washington County while there were parish governments and war heroes. “That’s where they met the rustlers—near a place called Dorman Pond, just before getting back into the trees. The one in the cell, he’s the only survivor from what Juryman Blank sent out. And we both know a cell is where he belongs. In a cell and on the docket.”

“Sure, Molly. You skipped past what he did.”

She searched the sheet to find her place. Even a juryman could get to lengths, same as lawyers had, perhaps more so now that pen work could boast it. Best summed up. “It was the animals they wanted. To get them they shot every member of the team but one. Her they raped until they thought she was dead of it. At the mouth and at the ass—don’t you turn from me, Clyde—not to mention the cut they made with a bayonet. From here to here. She had to crawl out of all the dirt they thew on her to smother her alive. Not to hide a body, you understand, but just to be vicious. By the time she got free they had been gone a while and everyone else had bled out. And the books—those they burned, right there in the wagons. That’s actually the interesting part to me. That they would even bother.”

She read the anger. A good start. It beat an unstrung mope into the floor.

“I want to meet him,” Clyde said again, after a moment.

So. “While you’re at it, talk to the man who fetched him back. Mister Virtanen. Hung around just for the date, I hear. He’s the one who took the statement from Patricia Carter, too, while she could give it. Annabel Carter’s daughter. Do you understand what that means, her dying? It means there’s no one left who knows how to run a goddam library. Not in all of Clatsop and maybe not anywhere. It’s bad enough a selfless young woman—”

Molly let it settle. Clyde would know Annie had been a friend—had helped Molly get to the coast and saved her life. Patty had been a swaddled face in the crook of Annie’s left arm. The right did the mothering with an autorevolver, out and ready. A death put off by thirty years—a decent enough lifetime, now—but to Molly it felt like time revoked. She was still out there, on the run with that baby and her ma.

Clyde knew of Annie, and he would certainly have heard of Otto Virtanen, by that name or by the one people used on the hush. The population stood just below a thousand. No one could be a riddle, not even someone so rarely there among them, whatever he had done abroad, and before.

A thousand: a tenth of a town under a fuller name. The houses inland were returning to the earth—trees breaking through. Those buildings had become part of the defenses. About them stood berms of car and sandbag. Climbable, but not without putting a head up into the hairs of a scope. Redband or volunteer, these were only matters of degree—guns were how the people of Story distinguished themselves. That and the fishing. A man or woman on the squad had to be among the best, short range or no. A matter of due and proper shown.

“So why do we shoot them, Molly? Once they’re in our custody. I never did ask. Why not just bust out some rope?”

“To show we still have the bullets.”

—

He sat without company save the paint he rode. Horsemanship had made a comeback, much like pretty script and banditry, and a man who went out was never far from the saddle. So it was with Mister Virtanen. He went by Otto when not as a gunman and a mister, which was not very often, not even among his fellow redbands. Few could cite all of his honors, but that did not lessen the respect.

The paint, Sampo, was nose-down in a patch of dandelions on a broken lot but within the reach of his voice. Even a smooch to the air would have fetched her over. Otto had woken in his riding gear, a chocolate duster and wide brim atop a dimpled ballistic vest. A guardrail served for pew. The stare he made that morning had long been a sacrament, skies permitting.

His campfire and his bedroll were nearer to the horse, at the foot of the overpass, where the east–west span of the slumping onramp blocked the sight. A pot steamed in the mound of embers, a fire built on the slab where a highway department building had once stood. In hand he had a full cup, and now for the first time in memory he took a sip of coffee.

The taste had grown strange in the time without it. He wondered whether it was the grounds that had turned, or the mouth, now coming on fifty.

While in Story he could have slept indoors. But doing so would not have let him brew in peace. Even a hidey-spot near the riverbank brought a risk. A chance breeze might go upslope through the wire. To beaten houses full of retirees—volunteers too old to share a load. A river view helped them sit pat and wait it out. They would know coffee. Come rummaging. Smells could not be quit, Otto knew.

This was all a matter of caution on Otto’s part, not just selfishness. But he saw the greed too and tipped his hat. A vigilante got to live on a jury provender and it gave him a sense of due. He took a swallow. Quite a view. Beyond a slaw of brickwork, where a motel had stood, and the weedy slips of a marina, a fallen bridge lay. The current rilled through the iron hump. At Point Ellice, six-some miles out, a stub made a fleck where all the traffic would have gone. One snag of white among a patch of them. Those river shallows were dotted up with wrecks, drifted through the broken dams to nuzzle at the bank.

No firelight ever showed out there, it was said. A silenced place, just as most in town took parts south of Tillamook. But Otto had actually been well past it, reconnoitering as far as the Siskiyou. There he had made friends and caught rumors—tell of places even further out. Save the forms—mountain, river, shore—no chart was up to date. Lands just across a sweep of water had become as coy as the surface of the moon.

But not as strange, never that. What held Otto’s eye every morning was not the scenery but yes the moon. Presently gibbous and eleven o’clock high, making west. Or best said the tilted disk thereupon.

It resembled the halo of that outer planet but without a single streak, and it threw a solid curve on a face no less unfamiliar. The dust had been scribed by lines that ran in parallel, laid on like a hatching. Any other feature—crater, mare, and mountain range—had been raked out for thirty years.

The bed was ever changing. What combed it went yet unseen. Except on dark clear nights with a new moon or thinnest crescent. The unlit part would show the craze in a faintest yellow glow. Strands no thicker than a silk, deep in airless trenches. Whatever had come, that was it, the fire of its camp.

That glimpse was too much. Those sort of nights were when none who remembered other times could bear to look, not even a man without remorse. Radio had gone out—every band a caterwaul—and then motors, in a flashless clap that took out anything too near. Distances grew long, hunger followed, and then came the rest. And never anything otherworldly on the ground.

Otto did not mind much. It was the shutdown that had let him thrive. His true temper had room to show itself where before it had none. But heartless or not even he felt raw at the sight of the trespass, no matter that thirty years had passed. So come mornings when the moon was up he stared it down, dared it, made a dissection of his fright. The drink had grown tepid in his grip.

Footsteps. A young man was on the ramp. Ambling up to meet the vigilante, it seemed. That boy and youngsters like him, they could look up without trouble. And so this one did now, to see what held attention in that new-made sky—a simple glance, and back ahead. Not so much as a shrug and never a question. In those eyes the moon was the moon, strange ring and all.

And Otto could marvel at that, too. He poured out the muddy cupful.

“Hi,” the burly young man said as he drew near. He brushed back the pale hair to show a smile and a scattershot of acne. “My name’s Clyde Rasmussen. Can I talk to you, Mister Finish?”

“Son, you’re not supposed to go and say that to my face.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Guess I don’t know what it means.”

“That’s all right,” the vigilante said, seeing as much. The kid had a foot and an inch and a hundred strong pounds on Otto and was no threat to him whatsoever. Hi, he had said, without mind to the scar, the steady eye, the hand pulling a skirt of the coat back from the holster. Otto decided to like him. “The joke’s in the number of ens, you see.”

“Letter ens? No, I don’t get it.”

“Fair enough.” There was no profit in explaining a country to a young man, not a place any farther off than St. Aitch or Tillamook and dead on a map. Not even to a young man with a surname that was only a few degrees of longitude off from his own.

“I’m on the warrant squad,” the kid said. “I wanted to ask about the prisoner.”

“That’s a first,” Otto said. He looked Rasmussen over again and nodded to himself. “I was on the firing squad once, back when we called it that. Let’s get on down to my horse. I found a full bottle on the last tour and it’s in one of the bags.”

“A full bottle of what, mister?”

“Other times.”

“Burned some, didn’t they,” the Rasmussen kid said soon enough, once Otto had the dusty fifth and a second tin cup. The kid had the grace not to spew back on the treasure. He would not have heard of coffee, either, and no puzzlement showed at the traces where Otto had dashed the weeds.

That was the strangest thing—those deserters from beyond the Siskiyou, they had coffee on them, as well as the cups and the pot. They also had uniforms stripped of insignia and a kind of rifle no vigilante had ever seen. Something newly made from the look of it—gun-smithing with a die stamp code, maybe from a line. The bottoms of the cups had the same, nine alphanumeric digits struck on. None would dare run a motor, not under that moon, but industry might work given enough hands. Every detail made him uneasy, but none more so than those goddam beans. Familiar or not, and however sorely missed, they were two thousand miles out of any tropic where they could grow.

The Vanguard of Greater Alta California, Cass Mortimer had called them secondhand, through binoculars and up on the south face of Shasta. She had handed the lenses over. A flash of cannons out in Redding, past the hollows of silt the dam-store had laid.

“Burn some,” Otto said, coming back. “Funny you should say so, since I could have used this for a fuel. That’s part of what we do when we go out. Search the houses out there on the Twality. Bring back the weapons and anything else with a use. Burn the rest.”

That was the pretense of how he had come upon the victim by chance—Patty Carter, crawled up into the shade of a tree, trailing some behind her. The usual search and demolition, and whom should he meet. In truth he had set out to Dorman Pond when the rendezvous at Nehalem Valley was a day late.

“I know, mister,” Clyde said. “So outlaws don’t have a roof overhead. Not so close to the farms, and to Story.”

“Smart young man.”

Anything that had beams and uprights within two day’s ride had gone to torch. Soon it would be three days’ ride, save St. Aitch territory, and all the emptiness to their south. There were plans for the teeming wreck of Hillsboro, all those easily fortified office parks where squats kept watch.

“It’s what I’ve been told. So were they outlaws, Mister Virtanen? Rustlers? The ones who got Miss Carter and the rest?”

Otto took another snootful. It hid a smile. What he thought as the amber went down was, “Smart young man,” but this time he meant it past a remark. Strong plus clever, an uncommon mix. No doubt people took him for a simp. That, too, was an upper hand.

“Outlaws is a good enough word,” Otto said, “given what they did, whether there are laws or not. And they did have the horses. We checked the brands. But you suspect it otherwise.”

The kid took a moment. “Why go back another way, a less safe way, once you’ve got what you came for? Hills, we heard. But those hills are full of through-roads, being where they are and who-all used to live there. It’s not like pushing a heavy load up a bare-ass slope. I even heard they took a tunnel. That’s more like to cave than a graded roadway, ain’t it? And choked up besides, with what was left of all those cars? A lot more trouble, you ask me. And a lot more dangerous.”

Otto felt a relief. What had been noticed was manageable—part of a secret but not the secret. Let the kid suss it out—that would sate him. He found the right note of reluctance.

“Point being?”

“They didn’t want to go back through St. Helens territory. Because they didn’t want to risk the books.”

Share. St. Helens would have got a cut—part of the deal. But twenty percent of something dear was a tithe double deep. Even a papacy in a superstitious age never took that kind of bite.

“You think the Saints are gearing up,” Otto said. “You think St. Aitch sent a raid because they were keeping an eye on our people and their progress—to get those goods one way or another. That it was a double-cross they had in mind all along.”

“That’s about right. Except the books got torched. It might have been an accident. Or one of our people might have done it out of revenge. I might have myself, once I saw it was no good.”

“The Saints can barely hold a line,” Otto said. “You wouldn’t know that, because you haven’t been out and surely not among that whole godbothering bunch. They don’t have anything like our stockpile. I’ve been carting firearms back into Story for almost twenty years now. If it’s been a race with St. Helens, that’s how we’ll have won. Fair salvage. Think on the world after the shutdown as a laboratory. Us here in Story, we’re one kind of try for a livelihood, and St. Aitch, they’re another. Running a civilization with pslams and ration cards, turns out it don’t pay that easy.”

“What about Tillamook?”

“Tillamook is a clan of families behind a stakewall. Not more than three hundred of them all told. Good folks—good with a sword and spear, too, whatever help a backhand would give them in a range war. Ben Macleod is a friend of mine. He’s put me and old Sampo here up more than once.” And the boss Mook knew the score. It was a nervous sort of friendship.

“So outlaws. Okay. I was aiming to meet him first.”

Well. No harm there: all the prisoner would do was repeat name, rank, and number—concepts that would play dumb to a seventeen-year-old from northernmost Clatsop. So his comrades had done once trussed. Played dumb and made the old rote, more a custom than a matter for any treaty.

Just as much a mystery as the beans, and no less troubling. The men were turncoats. They had torn off patches and aiguillettes, judging from the loose threads. Possibly fugitives from a drumhead court, which amounted to the same. And yet even in the hands of a vengeful enemy and under no little stress, they held to name, rank, number. They feared what they had fled more.

Long trade routes. A regular army. Production and supply. An agenda of expansion. Even the name Cass had forwarded along spoke too much. And unless the strangers had hooked in from the east—one hell of a detour—the fact that they had crossed the Umpqua River meant that the Siskiyou had fallen, and those people had been armed to the teeth. No defenses in Josephine and hardly any souls at all. Hooves and boot soles on the ground in the Willamette Valley, soon or now.

“Why do you want to meet him?” Otto said at last.

“Why do people keep asking?”

“It’s not a commonplace a man wants to know a victim. I’ve chatted up a fellow or two to pass the time, but only once everything had been decided. Usually he asks for a drink of water. And I’m only too glad to hand over a canteen. But after. Only after. Anything else and people might think you had a hankering for it. But that don’t factor and I can see it’s just the other way around. Maybe you’re not cut out, son.”

“I can do my bit,” Rasmussen said, which made Otto doubt it.

“You don’t see the issue,” he said. “And I’m guessing it’s about six foot eleven.”

—

Turnkey duty fell most often to an elder redband or to one who had lost a piece. The man on point at present was of both sorts—Roger Demerit, bald and hard and about as old, at sixty-three, as a vigilante could ever get. The sundered portions were a left foot, forearm, nut, and eye, all claimed by a squat’s nail bomb at Tongue Point. It had been close enough to Story for a medical doctor to come tie off a gusher and stitch a body up, which made the shambles that had survived it quite an exhibition.

Some might have put a spryer man on to keep a prisoner in check, but that late into things, townside killings only came a few times a year, and there was rarely much of a layover. Once a juryman put out a warrant, the matter had been decided. Charge and sentence were clauses on the selfsame sheet. A prisoner in a cell would only be waiting for Molly Po to call the hour.

Just a matter of scooting some bread through the bars and shooting a miscreant dead if need be. Roger could see it through, he and the shotty. Meanwhile he got to do a lot of sitting and reading, when someone who went afield could scrounge up a paperback. The coach gun lay in easy reach.

A sniper came into the jailhouse. Roger knew a sniper same-how as any. Even aside the precision rifle strapped to the back, a drum suppressor screwed in place, there was a matter of the eyes, the burnt cork smeared beneath them. Something to do with glare, it was said, but more about being set apart, truth be.

This one was a rather trim young lady of dark ponytail and no special stature, which made her no less frightening. She was a night sniper on top of it all—pale from lack of sun and dressed up in camo black from boot to fingerless glove. A death mime in military scrap—sexy. No garter on the arm yet, but that made no difference. Snipers were a cult apart, whether vigilante or just plain folk.

Marcelle Rasmussen, all grown up. It had taken Roger a beat to make her out. He was so tense, and maybe a bit smitten, that he hardly noticed the blond oaf come in behind her, who had three times the mass or nearly that. Smaller or not, she eclipsed him.

“My brother wants to speak to the prisoner,” she said.

Which would make him Clyde, last seen cutting shines on a squeaky trike. “Oh? What for?”

She only looked at him. The business had been stated.

“I’m on the warrant squad,” the oaf said through his drape.

“Well why didn’t you say so? I can’t give you privacy if that’s what you’re after. But walk on over if you like. I’ll be listening, mind.”

The sniper turned to face her absurdly larger brother. She gave his paw a squeeze and smiled up at his face. “Go ahead,” she said gently, and even Roger’s tuckered heart felt the warmth. 

He did not rise from his desk or turn to face the conversation. He knew well enough what the prisoner looked like. Still in that stripped midnight blue and a wiry beard. He looked to Marcelle instead.

“I knew your father,” Roger whispered. “Remember me any? Whatever’s left?”

She paid him no mind, eyes to the cell. Roger glanced over. Past Clyde’s back and the iron bars the prisoner still lay in his cot, one eye shut, one arm and every finger left on it in a splint. As much mercy as he would ever get.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

There would be no further word, not even above a monotone, whatever threat the man was under. One of the vigilantes told Roger all that Mister Virtanen had done to test the sticktoitiveness. That mouth would part with nothing, save a ghost, come the mid-a.m. But Roger had to hear just what big dumb Clyde wanted.

“Um, hi.” Hi. Yeah.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

Roger supposed a “third noncom” would be a staff sergeant, if the outfit was like the marines. He himself had been one, and given how things had gone in the shut he could hardly fault a man for dereliction. What he could fault third noncom William Verge for was everything else. There would be a special order on the warrant squad, Roger knew. He had seen it before. That Molly Po could be a frigid one. A dentist once. That figured.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

“How tall are you?” Clyde asked.

“What?”

Roger perked. He himself had thought just the same—what—but it had come from that rustler’s mouth. He reached for a pen and pot as nonchalantly as he could.

“How tall are you?” Clyde asked again.

“Why? You here to fit me for a box?”

“There won’t be any casket,” Clyde said.

“What do you do with the bodies after? Eat them?”

“Not for a while now.” There was a silence, and Clyde said, “That was a joke.”

“It was a dry one.”

“You go in the river. The current will take your body out past the bar. Like the whole drainage basin is giving you a shove. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill them when you didn’t have to,” Clyde said. “Cut on Patricia Carter like that. Do all that to her, and what you did to the rest.”

“It’s a sheltered life you lead up here in the tits. You have no idea, none of you. For now. Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

Roger set the pen down as Clyde stepped away. A few notes but nothing worthy of a juryman’s ear. Mostly Roger was surprised that a kid could know what a drainage basin was, least of all that blond gorilla, who had never seen a day of school. Roger scarcely had a notion himself. “Drainage basin.” It sounded almost read.

Marcelle gave Roger an eye as she led her brother out, but not the sort a redband would have welcomed. What she didn’t know was that the one whole ear he had left to him was pretty keen and happened to point in the right direction. So he made out the confidence she spoke just past the open doorway, and it chilled him fast into his seat.

“I could dot him before they get him to the post.”

“No, Marcy,” Clyde was saying. “It’ll have to be somebody. Might as well be a man like that.”

—

Molly had known she was getting on—a body failing out from under her—but the morning of the execution showed her a rickety mind. She had forgot to check the almanac and the moon was out—up and full, delivered in its monstrous bow, in a slow drop to the west. That might have been less of a grief, if not for the placement of the jury post at Smith Point and the seats for viewers.

A bridge had led an interstate across Youngs Bay, so-called, a mile and change. That whole span had gone to the bottom, same as most, but the portion that lay upon a groyne left an opportune walkway. The lonesome post stood in an old traffic circle, centered on a perimeter of brick, and this had been where vehicles got on and off for the transit. Dumping the condemned into the river had become a button put on the act—a flourish.

Well and fine, except this once. The witnesses would convene at ten a.m.—gather to bleachers set up with that walkoff in mind—and the moon would draw their stares as it swung low. It could only—it always had, save for youngsters. They had not learned well enough to dread a plain fact. But any of those thirty on up might take it for an omen. A spoiler for the dignity at very least.

A doorless house at the corner of Florence and Taylor gave the squad a place to wait. Better than the awning-tent they took along when they made the Clatsop circuit, for each town juryman’s region. They whiled the time mutely, most of all that poor pale boy, checking and rechecking the glide of his bolt. Every click rang in a pall set around him.

Molly was sure he would follow through. In a volunteer society everybody knew he had to. She loaded the handgun for the coup de grace. Annie’s autorevolver, brought out special. Far more firepower with that rare magnum round than needed, even dangerous with the ricochet, but no one would question it. She fed the gun back to the holster, also Annie’s, stained yet.

A redband woman brought in a carton, hand-milled .223. This was the sign that the team had drawn up to the post. Soon three vigilantes would chain the wrists behind the pole. Then they would doff the hood so that the man could see the full of it.

Molly handed out cartridges, one each, set into a shirtfront pocket for loading in the open. Something like a pomp but more like a show of cards before the sleight of hand. Per custom no one got a blank. But all of them did get a directive from Molly. It was spoken in an ordinary voice once the redband had left the room.

“Aim low.”

Clyde looked up as if he had misheard, then about himself. None of the other volunteers met his eye. Some had given the nod straight to Molly Po, and some lent it to the floor.

He looked to Molly. She looked back to him. And nothing else was said between them.

They walked out in a file of seven but without cadence. There was no snare. They were not soldiers. Molly followed, keeping pace six back.

The bleachers were not only full but in an overflow. Witnessing an execution was a matter of choice, same as anything else in town, but few turned it down save for crib, sickbed, or sniper duty. Two hundred in the bleachers, five hundred more behind them. None stood in front save a line of vigilantes and Nathangel Blank, the juryman, first and foremost of nine.

Molly thought little of Blank as she drew close—a stooped man with a cane, her own age though carrying it sour. His decree had brought them there and would send one off, but her eye went past the august old fart. The redband nearest, on the end of the line, had deeply seamed features and washed-out eyes, one in the hinge of a bone-deep scar. Otto Virtanen, also known as Mister Finish, so rarely come back to pay a visit.

She knew Virtanen well—and too much about what he had done, both there and away. He, like Blank, Molly, and many else, had been part of town since it took the name. They and other fugitives had come when it was still Astoria, and they had come in need. Their desperate roaming had made the fugitives better armed. Near half of their own and all the rest—that had been the bargain.

Evidence had long since gone to sea, some of it from that very post in the mop-up. None of the youngsters would ever know—no father or mother had to speak a pact aloud. Virtanen had been instrumental, though back then he had been little older than Clyde Rasmussen. There was a word for that sort of man in those sorts of times, and god help us, Molly thought, even in these. Necessary.

Virtanen was deep in study on that unnatural moon. The bleachers held a devout silence. No natter, no asides. Molly looked the crowd over: nervous and fidgeting, to a one. The damn moon. Only a threesome of snipers in the front row was intent on the approaching squad.

One of those was Marcelle Rasmussen. Molly could not see Clyde’s face from her position at the back, but she knew they exchanged a glance when a slight smile fell off. Whatever she had noted there in Clyde, Marcelle did not like. When those cork-marked eyes swung to Molly, they did so in a squint. She all but felt a reticle. Spooky bunch, the snipers—but indispensable.

The squad filed onto the circle green and formed a rank. Molly walked before them to take a position on the far end. A last inspection. She glanced at Clyde as she passed and saw an anger, eyes dead ahead. Good. Vital.

And then she saw the prisoner for the first and only time. Beard and uncut hair and a cancelled blue uniform. There was nothing remarkable about him save a courage. Some prisoners wept. Some searched the air above them, some the ground. Not he. Perhaps courage was not the word. Molly could tell from a flutter in his eye that an arm was paining him, bent back like that. A great swollen bruise around the other took out none of the shine.

A silence, a rest. The juryman held up his copy of the parchment and there read aloud words he had written days before, lengths and all. At the end of the dazzle, Blank called out, “If the condemned has anything he would like to say, he may do so now.”

All eyes off the moon and to the victim. Another silence, another rest.

The man gathered up his words. “My name is Billy Verge, drummed out from the First Gyrene Expeditionary of the Second Altan Fleet, sent forth to haunt you until a day of reckoning. Go fuck yourselves.”

At last a mutter rose but fell off quick. Molly turned to Blank to take his signal. Just past him she saw Virtanen’s face, and there she read something that made her hesitate. A worry. Second thoughts. Never seen there before, even in the purge. He had heard something he did not like.

The juryman thumped his cane and bowed his head.

“Load weapons,” Molly called out, facing her squad. All seven opened their breeches with a lever flick and reached into their high pockets. One and all they would be thinking back to that private command, that measure of justice. The bolts shut as one, firing pins cocked, safeties off.

Molly turned back to the post. She drew breath to say, “Ready—”

A gunshot. Hundreds gasping and cringing in the rolling echo.

Molly’s gaze had snapped back to the line. Only Clyde’s barrel was up. Unthreading with a gunsmoke. The rest in the line were looking on aghast. They stood back, one step, two. Their rifles drooped. Clyde took the sight down from his eye.

The prisoner at the pole was just beginning to slump. Blood ran into the beard from the wreck of a nose. Dead center on the medulla, Molly saw—instant, painless. The apricot.

Clyde had broken out of rank. The rifle lay on the grass where he had stood. His sister ran from the bench, flanked by two redband snipers who were walking slower and with an eye to their fellow vigilantes. No one else was moving.

Molly had no thought but a consternation. She watched Marcelle take Clyde by an arm and lead him off. Tears had tracked through the blacking on her cheeks, and his face was down.

“What is this?” the juryman was saying. “What the hell is this?”

She looked to him at last, for reprimand—and past again. The doubts had left Mister Virtanen’s face. Instead he seemed all too sure—the same care showed that he had worn for the defacement on the moon. But it was not the sky he was looking to, but the horizon, out past the jury pole. His alone in all that upset crowd, eyes toward the sea beyond the river mouth.

Molly turned about. High sails had come around the Clatsop Spit—a hundred, more.

#stories

---

He had never killed a man, this tall but mousy youngster, Clyde Rasmussen. Proof of times of the mend, that a boy might make it to seventeen without a notch on a gunstock. The whittling had gotten close for many in the town of Story, those old enough to remember a shift in the moonlight and a heave in the earth it glowed upon.

Molly Po—D.D.S. ret., potato farmer, and warrant squad lead—was that old twice over. Fitting that big blond Clyde and his maiden death should be hers to supervise. Her score beat her years, thanks to the post, and to more. Fair, if tart, to call her a sage.

They took seats in the warrant office, in leather chairs patched up with saltires of duct tape. The furniture was salvage, as was the charterhouse itself, once a bank. It had been built in days of overstatement—cool marble floors and a vault that now held an arsenal instead of dirty pocket linen. The squad came from the ranks of the Clatsop volunteers. They were not sworn vigilantes, yet they had entry under that dog Latin door motto, nihil non ultionis, and a space of their own. A nod to the rule of common folk, the very breath of justice—and a stipend of ammo besides.

Molly spread the paperwork on a steel desk—dip pen and gall ink on a barrel-limed parchment. In cursive, of course. Writs were pretty once again, drawn up in a fairest hand that might do an executioner proud. Her own two ached and she worked them with a dry lather. The fingers were slow to curl and soon enough they would put her out. A matter of fairness, despite a lengthy tenure—a lady who called down fire should have some of her own, headshot aside.

“I understand you don’t care to go hunting, Clyde,” was how she began.

“Couldn’t say I don’t. Never done it, ’s all.”

“But you have a qualm.” She looked to the day-blue eyes and thought she read a search. “A misgiving. A doubt.”

“What about? I’m a Rasmussen. We’re a marksman family, aren’t we. A marks-family?”

Every month the hits went up on display, per custom. Clyde’s targets were best—tight grouping, head and chest, no lag or misfire on an unsighted bolt-action Rem 700. The vigilante quartermaster once thought he had missed his aim, which would have been an actionable waste of powder and brass. But it had turned out that two of the holes were multiples, and both of them in that magic apricot. Instant death, and from a handsome distance, four times over.

“I’m not forgetting your brothers,” Molly said. “They stepped up. Not to mention Marcelle, up there on tower duty. She could part your hair.” One of the volunteer snipers, his sis. And soon enough she’d wear the garter on an arm, same as those brothers had, once the jury held the yearly sit. In time that vote came to tap almost every man and woman on the warrant squad. Talent could not go to waste, even when it came from a matter of ceremony like a public execution. “But you’ve never gone out yourself. Fair to say you’ve never killed anything.”

“I fish. So I’ve got some fish on my conscience.”

“You’ve haven’t killed anything that could look you in the eye.”

“You could turn a trout to face you.”

There: the heart in him. Molly smiled. A joke was welcome but uncanny aim was what had brought the boy to her. Everyone else of age who had it that good had already done the stint. A society of volunteers shared both chores and risks. Otherwise it was a racket, a government, a cheat.

“You nervous?”

“Sure I’m nervous. But I gave my word and it’s as good as anybody else’s.”

A rankle, just hinting: better. “I’m not out to give you a time just for hoots.”

“I know it.”

“But I can tell just from the way you’re hunkered in that seat that you’re feeling it. You ought. We do what we can with what we have. We all get to shoulder it.”

“I think I want to meet him, Molly.”

What? “It’s allowable. Why would you?”

“Look him in the eye,” Clyde said, into hers.

“You’ve read the charges,” she said, calling the bluff. Most young folks were slow in letters—no fault, letters grown as rare as teachers.

He only smiled at her, at the desk, himself.

Molly picked up the sheet without a glance. “Let’s recap. A team went out—a co-op between the board of volunteers and the jury.”

“I know this much already.”

“Just listen anyway. They had leave from St. Helens to cross the borders on horseback, under an armed escort of course. The vigilantes couldn’t go along thanks to that skirmish in Tanasbourne. The team rode all the way into old Multnomah over the Tualatins. And right into the ghost.”

City, that meant. Clyde looked away, to whatever he might picture there. Bones, most likely—bones laid flat in sun-bleached clothes. A photo would pale. Molly had seen the before to that after firsthand.

“They came out the old depository with three tons of books. Too much of a load for the hills. So they went west through a tunnel they found open, more or less, and then the lowland—Twality.” It had been known as Washington County while there were parish governments and war heroes. “That’s where they met the rustlers—near a place called Dorman Pond, just before getting back into the trees. The one in the cell, he’s the only survivor from what Juryman Blank sent out. And we both know a cell is where he belongs. In a cell and on the docket.”

“Sure, Molly. You skipped past what he did.”

She searched the sheet to find her place. Even a juryman could get to lengths, same as lawyers had, perhaps more so now that pen work could boast it. Best summed up. “It was the animals they wanted. To get them they shot every member of the team but one. Her they raped until they thought she was dead of it. At the mouth and at the ass—don’t you turn from me, Clyde—not to mention the cut they made with a bayonet. From here to here. She had to crawl out of all the dirt they thew on her to smother her alive. Not to hide a body, you understand, but just to be vicious. By the time she got free they had been gone a while and everyone else had bled out. And the books—those they burned, right there in the wagons. That’s actually the interesting part to me. That they would even bother.”

She read the anger. A good start. It beat an unstrung mope into the floor.

“I want to meet him,” Clyde said again, after a moment.

So. “While you’re at it, talk to the man who fetched him back. Mister Virtanen. Hung around just for the date, I hear. He’s the one who took the statement from Patricia Carter, too, while she could give it. Annabel Carter’s daughter. Do you understand what that means, her dying? It means there’s no one left who knows how to run a goddam library. Not in all of Clatsop and maybe not anywhere. It’s bad enough a selfless young woman—”

Molly let it settle. Clyde would know Annie had been a friend—had helped Molly get to the coast and saved her life. Patty had been a swaddled face in the crook of Annie’s left arm. The right did the mothering with an autorevolver, out and ready. A death put off by thirty years—a decent enough lifetime, now—but to Molly it felt like time revoked. She was still out there, on the run with that baby and her ma.

Clyde knew of Annie, and he would certainly have heard of Otto Virtanen, by that name or by the one people used on the hush. The population stood just below a thousand. No one could be a riddle, not even someone so rarely there among them, whatever he had done abroad, and before.

A thousand: a tenth of a town under a fuller name. The houses inland were returning to the earth—trees breaking through. Those buildings had become part of the defenses. About them stood berms of car and sandbag. Climbable, but not without putting a head up into the hairs of a scope. Redband or volunteer, these were only matters of degree—guns were how the people of Story distinguished themselves. That and the fishing. A man or woman on the squad had to be among the best, short range or no. A matter of due and proper shown.

“So why do we shoot them, Molly? Once they’re in our custody. I never did ask. Why not just bust out some rope?”

“To show we still have the bullets.”

—

He sat without company save the paint he rode. Horsemanship had made a comeback, much like pretty script and banditry, and a man who went out was never far from the saddle. So it was with Mister Virtanen. He went by Otto when not as a gunman and a mister, which was not very often, not even among his fellow redbands. Few could cite all of his honors, but that did not lessen the respect.

The paint, Sampo, was nose-down in a patch of dandelions on a broken lot but within the reach of his voice. Even a smooch to the air would have fetched her over. Otto had woken in his riding gear, a chocolate duster and wide brim atop a dimpled ballistic vest. A guardrail served for pew. The stare he made that morning had long been a sacrament, skies permitting.

His campfire and his bedroll were nearer to the horse, at the foot of the overpass, where the east–west span of the slumping onramp blocked the sight. A pot steamed in the mound of embers, a fire built on the slab where a highway department building had once stood. In hand he had a full cup, and now for the first time in memory he took a sip of coffee.

The taste had grown strange in the time without it. He wondered whether it was the grounds that had turned, or the mouth, now coming on fifty.

While in Story he could have slept indoors. But doing so would not have let him brew in peace. Even a hidey-spot near the riverbank brought a risk. A chance breeze might go upslope through the wire. To beaten houses full of retirees—volunteers too old to share a load. A river view helped them sit pat and wait it out. They would know coffee. Come rummaging. Smells could not be quit, Otto knew.

This was all a matter of caution on Otto’s part, not just selfishness. But he saw the greed too and tipped his hat. A vigilante got to live on a jury provender and it gave him a sense of due. He took a swallow. Quite a view. Beyond a slaw of brickwork, where a motel had stood, and the weedy slips of a marina, a fallen bridge lay. The current rilled through the iron hump. At Point Ellice, six-some miles out, a stub made a fleck where all the traffic would have gone. One snag of white among a patch of them. Those river shallows were dotted up with wrecks, drifted through the broken dams to nuzzle at the bank.

No firelight ever showed out there, it was said. A silenced place, just as most in town took parts south of Tillamook. But Otto had actually been well past it, reconnoitering as far as the Siskiyou. There he had made friends and caught rumors—tell of places even further out. Save the forms—mountain, river, shore—no chart was up to date. Lands just across a sweep of water had become as coy as the surface of the moon.

But not as strange, never that. What held Otto’s eye every morning was not the scenery but yes the moon. Presently gibbous and eleven o’clock high, making west. Or best said the tilted disk thereupon.

It resembled the halo of that outer planet but without a single streak, and it threw a solid curve on a face no less unfamiliar. The dust had been scribed by lines that ran in parallel, laid on like a hatching. Any other feature—crater, mare, and mountain range—had been raked out for thirty years.

The bed was ever changing. What combed it went yet unseen. Except on dark clear nights with a new moon or thinnest crescent. The unlit part would show the craze in a faintest yellow glow. Strands no thicker than a silk, deep in airless trenches. Whatever had come, that was it, the fire of its camp.

That glimpse was too much. Those sort of nights were when none who remembered other times could bear to look, not even a man without remorse. Radio had gone out—every band a caterwaul—and then motors, in a flashless clap that took out anything too near. Distances grew long, hunger followed, and then came the rest. And never anything otherworldly on the ground.

Otto did not mind much. It was the shutdown that had let him thrive. His true temper had room to show itself where before it had none. But heartless or not even he felt raw at the sight of the trespass, no matter that thirty years had passed. So come mornings when the moon was up he stared it down, dared it, made a dissection of his fright. The drink had grown tepid in his grip.

Footsteps. A young man was on the ramp. Ambling up to meet the vigilante, it seemed. That boy and youngsters like him, they could look up without trouble. And so this one did now, to see what held attention in that new-made sky—a simple glance, and back ahead. Not so much as a shrug and never a question. In those eyes the moon was the moon, strange ring and all.

And Otto could marvel at that, too. He poured out the muddy cupful.

“Hi,” the burly young man said as he drew near. He brushed back the pale hair to show a smile and a scattershot of acne. “My name’s Clyde Rasmussen. Can I talk to you, Mister Finish?”

“Son, you’re not supposed to go and say that to my face.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Guess I don’t know what it means.”

“That’s all right,” the vigilante said, seeing as much. The kid had a foot and an inch and a hundred strong pounds on Otto and was no threat to him whatsoever. Hi, he had said, without mind to the scar, the steady eye, the hand pulling a skirt of the coat back from the holster. Otto decided to like him. “The joke’s in the number of ens, you see.”

“Letter ens? No, I don’t get it.”

“Fair enough.” There was no profit in explaining a country to a young man, not a place any farther off than St. Aitch or Tillamook and dead on a map. Not even to a young man with a surname that was only a few degrees of longitude off from his own.

“I’m on the warrant squad,” the kid said. “I wanted to ask about the prisoner.”

“That’s a first,” Otto said. He looked Rasmussen over again and nodded to himself. “I was on the firing squad once, back when we called it that. Let’s get on down to my horse. I found a full bottle on the last tour and it’s in one of the bags.”

“A full bottle of what, mister?”

“Other times.”

“Burned some, didn’t they,” the Rasmussen kid said soon enough, once Otto had the dusty fifth and a second tin cup. The kid had the grace not to spew back on the treasure. He would not have heard of coffee, either, and no puzzlement showed at the traces where Otto had dashed the weeds.

That was the strangest thing—those deserters from beyond the Siskiyou, they had coffee on them, as well as the cups and the pot. They also had uniforms stripped of insignia and a kind of rifle no vigilante had ever seen. Something newly made from the look of it—gun-smithing with a die stamp code, maybe from a line. The bottoms of the cups had the same, nine alphanumeric digits struck on. None would dare run a motor, not under that moon, but industry might work given enough hands. Every detail made him uneasy, but none more so than those goddam beans. Familiar or not, and however sorely missed, they were two thousand miles out of any tropic where they could grow.

The Vanguard of Greater Alta California, Cass Mortimer had called them secondhand, through binoculars and up on the south face of Shasta. She had handed the lenses over. A flash of cannons out in Redding, past the hollows of silt the dam-store had laid.

“Burn some,” Otto said, coming back. “Funny you should say so, since I could have used this for a fuel. That’s part of what we do when we go out. Search the houses out there on the Twality. Bring back the weapons and anything else with a use. Burn the rest.”

That was the pretense of how he had come upon the victim by chance—Patty Carter, crawled up into the shade of a tree, trailing some behind her. The usual search and demolition, and whom should he meet. In truth he had set out to Dorman Pond when the rendezvous at Nehalem Valley was a day late.

“I know, mister,” Clyde said. “So outlaws don’t have a roof overhead. Not so close to the farms, and to Story.”

“Smart young man.”

Anything that had beams and uprights within two day’s ride had gone to torch. Soon it would be three days’ ride, save St. Aitch territory, and all the emptiness to their south. There were plans for the teeming wreck of Hillsboro, all those easily fortified office parks where squats kept watch.

“It’s what I’ve been told. So were they outlaws, Mister Virtanen? Rustlers? The ones who got Miss Carter and the rest?”

Otto took another snootful. It hid a smile. What he thought as the amber went down was, “Smart young man,” but this time he meant it past a remark. Strong plus clever, an uncommon mix. No doubt people took him for a simp. That, too, was an upper hand.

“Outlaws is a good enough word,” Otto said, “given what they did, whether there are laws or not. And they did have the horses. We checked the brands. But you suspect it otherwise.”

The kid took a moment. “Why go back another way, a less safe way, once you’ve got what you came for? Hills, we heard. But those hills are full of through-roads, being where they are and who-all used to live there. It’s not like pushing a heavy load up a bare-ass slope. I even heard they took a tunnel. That’s more like to cave than a graded roadway, ain’t it? And choked up besides, with what was left of all those cars? A lot more trouble, you ask me. And a lot more dangerous.”

Otto felt a relief. What had been noticed was manageable—part of a secret but not the secret. Let the kid suss it out—that would sate him. He found the right note of reluctance.

“Point being?”

“They didn’t want to go back through St. Helens territory. Because they didn’t want to risk the books.”

Share. St. Helens would have got a cut—part of the deal. But twenty percent of something dear was a tithe double deep. Even a papacy in a superstitious age never took that kind of bite.

“You think the Saints are gearing up,” Otto said. “You think St. Aitch sent a raid because they were keeping an eye on our people and their progress—to get those goods one way or another. That it was a double-cross they had in mind all along.”

“That’s about right. Except the books got torched. It might have been an accident. Or one of our people might have done it out of revenge. I might have myself, once I saw it was no good.”

“The Saints can barely hold a line,” Otto said. “You wouldn’t know that, because you haven’t been out and surely not among that whole godbothering bunch. They don’t have anything like our stockpile. I’ve been carting firearms back into Story for almost twenty years now. If it’s been a race with St. Helens, that’s how we’ll have won. Fair salvage. Think on the world after the shutdown as a laboratory. Us here in Story, we’re one kind of try for a livelihood, and St. Aitch, they’re another. Running a civilization with pslams and ration cards, turns out it don’t pay that easy.”

“What about Tillamook?”

“Tillamook is a clan of families behind a stakewall. Not more than three hundred of them all told. Good folks—good with a sword and spear, too, whatever help a backhand would give them in a range war. Ben Macleod is a friend of mine. He’s put me and old Sampo here up more than once.” And the boss Mook knew the score. It was a nervous sort of friendship.

“So outlaws. Okay. I was aiming to meet him first.”

Well. No harm there: all the prisoner would do was repeat name, rank, and number—concepts that would play dumb to a seventeen-year-old from northernmost Clatsop. So his comrades had done once trussed. Played dumb and made the old rote, more a custom than a matter for any treaty.

Just as much a mystery as the beans, and no less troubling. The men were turncoats. They had torn off patches and aiguillettes, judging from the loose threads. Possibly fugitives from a drumhead court, which amounted to the same. And yet even in the hands of a vengeful enemy and under no little stress, they held to name, rank, number. They feared what they had fled more.

Long trade routes. A regular army. Production and supply. An agenda of expansion. Even the name Cass had forwarded along spoke too much. And unless the strangers had hooked in from the east—one hell of a detour—the fact that they had crossed the Umpqua River meant that the Siskiyou had fallen, and those people had been armed to the teeth. No defenses in Josephine and hardly any souls at all. Hooves and boot soles on the ground in the Willamette Valley, soon or now.

“Why do you want to meet him?” Otto said at last.

“Why do people keep asking?”

“It’s not a commonplace a man wants to know a victim. I’ve chatted up a fellow or two to pass the time, but only once everything had been decided. Usually he asks for a drink of water. And I’m only too glad to hand over a canteen. But after. Only after. Anything else and people might think you had a hankering for it. But that don’t factor and I can see it’s just the other way around. Maybe you’re not cut out, son.”

“I can do my bit,” Rasmussen said, which made Otto doubt it.

“You don’t see the issue,” he said. “And I’m guessing it’s about six foot eleven.”

—

Turnkey duty fell most often to an elder redband or to one who had lost a piece. The man on point at present was of both sorts—Roger Demerit, bald and hard and about as old, at sixty-three, as a vigilante could ever get. The sundered portions were a left foot, forearm, nut, and eye, all claimed by a squat’s nail bomb at Tongue Point. It had been close enough to Story for a medical doctor to come tie off a gusher and stitch a body up, which made the shambles that had survived it quite an exhibition.

Some might have put a spryer man on to keep a prisoner in check, but that late into things, townside killings only came a few times a year, and there was rarely much of a layover. Once a juryman put out a warrant, the matter had been decided. Charge and sentence were clauses on the selfsame sheet. A prisoner in a cell would only be waiting for Molly Po to call the hour.

Just a matter of scooting some bread through the bars and shooting a miscreant dead if need be. Roger could see it through, he and the shotty. Meanwhile he got to do a lot of sitting and reading, when someone who went afield could scrounge up a paperback. The coach gun lay in easy reach.

A sniper came into the jailhouse. Roger knew a sniper same-how as any. Even aside the precision rifle strapped to the back, a drum suppressor screwed in place, there was a matter of the eyes, the burnt cork smeared beneath them. Something to do with glare, it was said, but more about being set apart, truth be.

This one was a rather trim young lady of dark ponytail and no special stature, which made her no less frightening. She was a night sniper on top of it all—pale from lack of sun and dressed up in camo black from boot to fingerless glove. A death mime in military scrap—sexy. No garter on the arm yet, but that made no difference. Snipers were a cult apart, whether vigilante or just plain folk.

Marcelle Rasmussen, all grown up. It had taken Roger a beat to make her out. He was so tense, and maybe a bit smitten, that he hardly noticed the blond oaf come in behind her, who had three times the mass or nearly that. Smaller or not, she eclipsed him.

“My brother wants to speak to the prisoner,” she said.

Which would make him Clyde, last seen cutting shines on a squeaky trike. “Oh? What for?”

She only looked at him. The business had been stated.

“I’m on the warrant squad,” the oaf said through his drape.

“Well why didn’t you say so? I can’t give you privacy if that’s what you’re after. But walk on over if you like. I’ll be listening, mind.”

The sniper turned to face her absurdly larger brother. She gave his paw a squeeze and smiled up at his face. “Go ahead,” she said gently, and even Roger’s tuckered heart felt the warmth. 

He did not rise from his desk or turn to face the conversation. He knew well enough what the prisoner looked like. Still in that stripped midnight blue and a wiry beard. He looked to Marcelle instead.

“I knew your father,” Roger whispered. “Remember me any? Whatever’s left?”

She paid him no mind, eyes to the cell. Roger glanced over. Past Clyde’s back and the iron bars the prisoner still lay in his cot, one eye shut, one arm and every finger left on it in a splint. As much mercy as he would ever get.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

There would be no further word, not even above a monotone, whatever threat the man was under. One of the vigilantes told Roger all that Mister Virtanen had done to test the sticktoitiveness. That mouth would part with nothing, save a ghost, come the mid-a.m. But Roger had to hear just what big dumb Clyde wanted.

“Um, hi.” Hi. Yeah.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

Roger supposed a “third noncom” would be a staff sergeant, if the outfit was like the marines. He himself had been one, and given how things had gone in the shut he could hardly fault a man for dereliction. What he could fault third noncom William Verge for was everything else. There would be a special order on the warrant squad, Roger knew. He had seen it before. That Molly Po could be a frigid one. A dentist once. That figured.

“Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

“How tall are you?” Clyde asked.

“What?”

Roger perked. He himself had thought just the same—what—but it had come from that rustler’s mouth. He reached for a pen and pot as nonchalantly as he could.

“How tall are you?” Clyde asked again.

“Why? You here to fit me for a box?”

“There won’t be any casket,” Clyde said.

“What do you do with the bodies after? Eat them?”

“Not for a while now.” There was a silence, and Clyde said, “That was a joke.”

“It was a dry one.”

“You go in the river. The current will take your body out past the bar. Like the whole drainage basin is giving you a shove. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill them when you didn’t have to,” Clyde said. “Cut on Patricia Carter like that. Do all that to her, and what you did to the rest.”

“It’s a sheltered life you lead up here in the tits. You have no idea, none of you. For now. Third noncom William Verge, aleph nine six six five seven two.”

Roger set the pen down as Clyde stepped away. A few notes but nothing worthy of a juryman’s ear. Mostly Roger was surprised that a kid could know what a drainage basin was, least of all that blond gorilla, who had never seen a day of school. Roger scarcely had a notion himself. “Drainage basin.” It sounded almost read.

Marcelle gave Roger an eye as she led her brother out, but not the sort a redband would have welcomed. What she didn’t know was that the one whole ear he had left to him was pretty keen and happened to point in the right direction. So he made out the confidence she spoke just past the open doorway, and it chilled him fast into his seat.

“I could dot him before they get him to the post.”

“No, Marcy,” Clyde was saying. “It’ll have to be somebody. Might as well be a man like that.”

—

Molly had known she was getting on—a body failing out from under her—but the morning of the execution showed her a rickety mind. She had forgot to check the almanac and the moon was out—up and full, delivered in its monstrous bow, in a slow drop to the west. That might have been less of a grief, if not for the placement of the jury post at Smith Point and the seats for viewers.

A bridge had led an interstate across Youngs Bay, so-called, a mile and change. That whole span had gone to the bottom, same as most, but the portion that lay upon a groyne left an opportune walkway. The lonesome post stood in an old traffic circle, centered on a perimeter of brick, and this had been where vehicles got on and off for the transit. Dumping the condemned into the river had become a button put on the act—a flourish.

Well and fine, except this once. The witnesses would convene at ten a.m.—gather to bleachers set up with that walkoff in mind—and the moon would draw their stares as it swung low. It could only—it always had, save for youngsters. They had not learned well enough to dread a plain fact. But any of those thirty on up might take it for an omen. A spoiler for the dignity at very least.

A doorless house at the corner of Florence and Taylor gave the squad a place to wait. Better than the awning-tent they took along when they made the Clatsop circuit, for each town juryman’s region. They whiled the time mutely, most of all that poor pale boy, checking and rechecking the glide of his bolt. Every click rang in a pall set around him.

Molly was sure he would follow through. In a volunteer society everybody knew he had to. She loaded the handgun for the coup de grace. Annie’s autorevolver, brought out special. Far more firepower with that rare magnum round than needed, even dangerous with the ricochet, but no one would question it. She fed the gun back to the holster, also Annie’s, stained yet.

A redband woman brought in a carton, hand-milled .223. This was the sign that the team had drawn up to the post. Soon three vigilantes would chain the wrists behind the pole. Then they would doff the hood so that the man could see the full of it.

Molly handed out cartridges, one each, set into a shirtfront pocket for loading in the open. Something like a pomp but more like a show of cards before the sleight of hand. Per custom no one got a blank. But all of them did get a directive from Molly. It was spoken in an ordinary voice once the redband had left the room.

“Aim low.”

Clyde looked up as if he had misheard, then about himself. None of the other volunteers met his eye. Some had given the nod straight to Molly Po, and some lent it to the floor.

He looked to Molly. She looked back to him. And nothing else was said between them.

They walked out in a file of seven but without cadence. There was no snare. They were not soldiers. Molly followed, keeping pace six back.

The bleachers were not only full but in an overflow. Witnessing an execution was a matter of choice, same as anything else in town, but few turned it down save for crib, sickbed, or sniper duty. Two hundred in the bleachers, five hundred more behind them. None stood in front save a line of vigilantes and Nathangel Blank, the juryman, first and foremost of nine.

Molly thought little of Blank as she drew close—a stooped man with a cane, her own age though carrying it sour. His decree had brought them there and would send one off, but her eye went past the august old fart. The redband nearest, on the end of the line, had deeply seamed features and washed-out eyes, one in the hinge of a bone-deep scar. Otto Virtanen, also known as Mister Finish, so rarely come back to pay a visit.

She knew Virtanen well—and too much about what he had done, both there and away. He, like Blank, Molly, and many else, had been part of town since it took the name. They and other fugitives had come when it was still Astoria, and they had come in need. Their desperate roaming had made the fugitives better armed. Near half of their own and all the rest—that had been the bargain.

Evidence had long since gone to sea, some of it from that very post in the mop-up. None of the youngsters would ever know—no father or mother had to speak a pact aloud. Virtanen had been instrumental, though back then he had been little older than Clyde Rasmussen. There was a word for that sort of man in those sorts of times, and god help us, Molly thought, even in these. Necessary.

Virtanen was deep in study on that unnatural moon. The bleachers held a devout silence. No natter, no asides. Molly looked the crowd over: nervous and fidgeting, to a one. The damn moon. Only a threesome of snipers in the front row was intent on the approaching squad.

One of those was Marcelle Rasmussen. Molly could not see Clyde’s face from her position at the back, but she knew they exchanged a glance when a slight smile fell off. Whatever she had noted there in Clyde, Marcelle did not like. When those cork-marked eyes swung to Molly, they did so in a squint. She all but felt a reticle. Spooky bunch, the snipers—but indispensable.

The squad filed onto the circle green and formed a rank. Molly walked before them to take a position on the far end. A last inspection. She glanced at Clyde as she passed and saw an anger, eyes dead ahead. Good. Vital.

And then she saw the prisoner for the first and only time. Beard and uncut hair and a cancelled blue uniform. There was nothing remarkable about him save a courage. Some prisoners wept. Some searched the air above them, some the ground. Not he. Perhaps courage was not the word. Molly could tell from a flutter in his eye that an arm was paining him, bent back like that. A great swollen bruise around the other took out none of the shine.

A silence, a rest. The juryman held up his copy of the parchment and there read aloud words he had written days before, lengths and all. At the end of the dazzle, Blank called out, “If the condemned has anything he would like to say, he may do so now.”

All eyes off the moon and to the victim. Another silence, another rest.

The man gathered up his words. “My name is Billy Verge, drummed out from the First Gyrene Expeditionary of the Second Altan Fleet, sent forth to haunt you until a day of reckoning. Go fuck yourselves.”

At last a mutter rose but fell off quick. Molly turned to Blank to take his signal. Just past him she saw Virtanen’s face, and there she read something that made her hesitate. A worry. Second thoughts. Never seen there before, even in the purge. He had heard something he did not like.

The juryman thumped his cane and bowed his head.

“Load weapons,” Molly called out, facing her squad. All seven opened their breeches with a lever flick and reached into their high pockets. One and all they would be thinking back to that private command, that measure of justice. The bolts shut as one, firing pins cocked, safeties off.

Molly turned back to the post. She drew breath to say, “Ready—”

A gunshot. Hundreds gasping and cringing in the rolling echo.

Molly’s gaze had snapped back to the line. Only Clyde’s barrel was up. Unthreading with a gunsmoke. The rest in the line were looking on aghast. They stood back, one step, two. Their rifles drooped. Clyde took the sight down from his eye.

The prisoner at the pole was just beginning to slump. Blood ran into the beard from the wreck of a nose. Dead center on the medulla, Molly saw—instant, painless. The apricot.

Clyde had broken out of rank. The rifle lay on the grass where he had stood. His sister ran from the bench, flanked by two redband snipers who were walking slower and with an eye to their fellow vigilantes. No one else was moving.

Molly had no thought but a consternation. She watched Marcelle take Clyde by an arm and lead him off. Tears had tracked through the blacking on her cheeks, and his face was down.

“What is this?” the juryman was saying. “What the hell is this?”

She looked to him at last, for reprimand—and past again. The doubts had left Mister Virtanen’s face. Instead he seemed all too sure—the same care showed that he had worn for the defacement on the moon. But it was not the sky he was looking to, but the horizon, out past the jury pole. His alone in all that upset crowd, eyes toward the sea beyond the river mouth.

Molly turned about. High sails had come around the Clatsop Spit—a hundred, more.