Disciple of the dog

MR. DINKFINGERS

Saturday… Once, when I was eleven years old, my parents brought me to a pig- roast-slash-family-reunion hosted by my uncle Tony. Even though Mom and Dad were vegetarians, they allowed me to dig in with the rest of my cousins. They were already troubled-terrified would be the better term-by their little boy’s peculiarities, so they were loath to do anything that might further segregate him from his peers. I remember that pork sandwich like it was yesterday. As the forbidden fruit, Meat simply had to be the best thing a boy of eleven could eat. Knowledge of grease and evil.

The hitch-and there’s always a hitch where I’m concerned-was that Uncle Tony’s nearest neighbour happened to be a pig farmer, which is why he got the pig dirt cheap, and why his property reeked whenever the breeze blew in from the south-as happened to be the case the day of the Manning family reunion.

As a result, every time I smell roasting pork, I quite literally smell pig shit-and salivate.

So when Molly and I found our way to the backyard of the humble white frame Church of the Third Resurrection, my nostrils flared even as my mouth watered.

“Do you smell anything?” I asked her.

“All stuffed up,” she said, fluttering a hand around her small freckled nose. “Hay fever.”

The church was situated just outside of town on a small lot fenced with trees and bracken. The lawn was redneck lumpy, but lush and green all the same. Around forty people or so threaded the expanse, forming a web of laughter and conversation. Groups of screaming children bobbed in and out of the fringes, some chasing balls, others chasing one another. The barbecue stood near the back, set perpendicular to a number of tables, most of which were covered in potluck delicacies. A keg of beer gleamed invitingly from one, accompanied by stacks of red plastic cups. The barbecue was one of those homemade jobs: metal drums cut in half then welded together end to end. The pig had been spitted whole. It gleamed and sizzled and smoked-and smelled like mouth-watering pig shit.

“The head?” Molly murmured beside me. “Who eats the head?”

“First pig roast, Molls?”

“They don’t really eat it, do they?”

“Sure do. Actually, it’s something of an honour to eat the cheeks. So if someone offers you the cheeks, whatever you do, make sure you act gracious and eat them… “

“What?” She smiled, but with that furrow in her sunburnt brow that told me she worried I was serious. “Fuck that, Disciple. I’m not eating a pig’s face.”

“They’ll take offence. Remember, we’re here for Jennifer. Jennifer..”

“Fuck that,” she repeated, her tone more uncertain, more chastised.

I grinned and sorted through the crowd, the homely congregation of Reverend Nill’s Church of the Third Resurrection. A good mix of men and women, old and young. A lot of fat-asses. Several butt-crack cowboys. A couple of so-so attractive women-I’ve always had a thing for chicks who dress sexy for church. I suppose Molly and I were conspicuous for our good looks, because I counted more than a few curious glances. I even recognized a couple of faces from our canvassing. Waved and smiled. Most everyone sported a red plastic beer cup, always a reassuring sight in a community of believers. I was also relieved to see a fair number of smokers blowing contrails into the motionless late afternoon air. So much so that I took the opportunity to spark a Winston of my own.

Number 99,933.

They were working people, by and large. My kind of people, truth be told. Construction workers. Retail employees. High school dropouts like me, with humble skills, warm laughs, and defensive hearts. Suddenly Jonathan Bonjour’s choice of Manning Investigations didn’t seem so out of sorts after all.

Did he know something I didn’t?

I glimpsed a guy swearing and laughing, flicking liquid from his fingertips-beer, I realized. The spill had shrink-wrapped his red T around his gut, and I was just about to glance away when he pulled the shirt off in a single fat-armed motion.

A flash of winter-pale skin. I found myself blinking at the black arms of a tattoo swastika flexing across the flab of his gut…

Uh-oh.

The guy mimed a striptease, swinging his shirt, wagging his hips, and slapping his ass to uproarious laughter. Apparently the Holocaust was no big deal around here.

“You gotta-” Molly began.

“Hey!” a voice shouted from our right. It was Tim. “Hey, Disciple!”

“Remember the cheeks,” I muttered to Molly.

“I told you. Fuck that. No way. Besides, what the hell-”

I tuned her out. Tim jogged up to us wearing baggy blue jeans and a vintage Led Zeppelin T-shirt. His face was flushed with something akin to relief. He had been talking about me, I could tell.

I introduced him to Molly, who managed to be pleasant even though she was obviously distracted. Swastikas at church picnics tend to do that, I suppose. She tossed two What-the-hell-Disciple? glances in my direction as I made nice with Tim.

“There,” the skinny young man said with a smile in his voice. “That’s him. Reverend Nill.”

I have this bad habit, a kind of hmmpf habit, where I immediately become skeptical of anyone described in glowing terms. At some level I think I actually wanted Reverend Nill to be an obvious putz, someone who would let me sling an arm around Tim’s shoulders and say, “I hate to break it to you, kid…” But if the swastika had spiked the pork punch, then Reverend Nill was a true-blue mickey. He looked unremarkable enough-you know, in that generic, doughy all-American way. Fit. Short dark hair. But his eyes, fawk. Even from a dozen yards away they fairly sparked Prussian blue. The first thing I literally thought was, Rasputin.

Rasputin. Have you ever seen pictures of that crazy fucker? A look that gropes you. Dead a century and still makes you feel your fly’s undone. Now, we all know how it works in the movies: the guy with the freaky eyes is always guilty. But this wasn’t a movie, and as it so happened, I knew someone else with eyes like that, someone I would have died for had he not died for me first. Sean O’May.

One-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame. Thousand-pound gaze. Give you Alzheimer’s trying to stare him down.

So I didn’t jump to conclusions. I really didn’t.

No, it was actually the chick glaring in ostrich fury at his side that sealed the deal. She was kind of hot, actually, only in a more mature way than Molly. High heels pricked into turf. Spray paint for blue jeans. A rack that would make strange babies cry.

“Who’s the woman next to him?” I asked Tim.

“Uh, his wife, Sheila.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking, Now that’s one Angry Bitch…

“Well,she looks friendly,” Molly muttered.

Gawd, I loved her when she was sarcastic.

Oh ya, I know angry bitches. They’re pretty much my investigative bread and butter: nothing pries open the wallet quite as effectively as vindictiveness. A true, High Holy Angry Bitch would burn down the world just to see you scorched. She would sit beside you in the Burn Victims Unit filing her nails and then, when the nurses weren’t looking, she would start wiping her-what is it called? emery board?-across your blistered skin.

In this instance, the most important thing to know about Angry Bitches is the kind ofmen who find themselves in their evil clutches. You see, typically, Angry Bitches sink their claws into the soft white souls of Nice Guys-you know the type, the kind who are blessedly happy to be relieved of command. A few Hapless Dudes fall into their clutches here and there-you never know where you’re going to bounce on a bad rebound-but otherwise the main victim of the Angry Bitch is not a victim at all… Far from it, in fact.

Sociopaths.

Given my own fears of falling under this category, I’ve actually spent quite some time pondering what it is that brings Angry Bitches and Sociopaths together. And I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from the rigours of compulsive sexuality, Sociopaths are drawn to Angry Bitches because they, and they alone, can make them feel. I’ve often noticed in the Mexican soap opera I call my romantic life that it’s painfully easy to confuse emotional violence with passion. So it strikes me that if you’re generally passionless, if you belong to that not-as- small-as-you-think minority that has the same emotional response to words like “rape” as to words like “chair,” then an Angry Bitch is bound to stick out in the long string of women you break and humiliate-to seem exceptional, even.

So there it was. I took one look at Reverend Nill’s wife and pretty much instantly realized that Nill was more than just another evangelical, more than just another man whose vicious circles were exceedingly small.

He was a big fat Sociopath.

Which is to say, my new prime suspect.

In the absence of conscience, there’s pretty much always some kind of crime. Nine out of ten Presidents agree. So. Move on over, Baars. A new freak had come to Suspicion Town.

“Um,Disciple…” Molly said, with the blank look of a babe soaking in a bad vibe.

“Thank you, Tim,” I said with an air of gratitude I almost felt. “This is awesome… Can’t you smell it, Molly?” Of course all I could smell was pig shit. Don’t ask me how memories can reek; all I know is that they do. “My mouth’s watering already!”

The kid’s grin fairly bubbled toothpaste, it was so raw and uncut.

Fawk.

“Johnny’s the one,” he explained in a rush. “The one responsible. He’s an old buddy of the Rev’s from seminary. Wait till you try his sauce, man. Positively. Kick. Ass.”

“Who’s he? The biker guy?”

There was actually a group of three What’s-wrong-with-this-picture? types milling around a weather-worn picnic table behind and to the left of the good Reverend. Two looked like junkies, you know, with mean, hooded glares perched in beef-jerky bodies. But it was the guy who imperiously towered over them whom I had asked Tim about: auburn hair to his shoulders, a beard to his chest, and statuesque, a veritable museum exhibit of humanity…

“Everyone calls him Dinkfingers,” Tim laughed, “because of the size of his meathooks.”

Even Molly had to chuckle at that.

“Scary-looking dude,” I said.

“Yeah. Don’t mind that-his looks, I mean. He’s a fucking stand-up guy. Stand. Up.”

And he was also an AB, I realized. A member of the Aryan Brotherhood. I could tell by his tatts, which were somewhat more subtle than Swastika- Gut’s but just as clear. I found myself wondering about Reverend Nill’s “seminary.”

Another strike against the good Reverend. The future tends to resemble the past. Nobody knew this with quite the intimacy that I did. It was my fucking curse in a nutshell.

“Ah… Disciple?” Molly said, nudging me with her elbow this time. “We should-”

“Well? Dutchie, my boy, aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“-don’t you think?” Molly finished.

I strolled across the lumpy grass with Tim to my left and Molly in wary tow.

Introductions were exchanged. Sheila Nill’s smile made her look about as pleasant as a Klingon war cruiser. I almost shouted, Shields up! as I shook her clawed fingers. Reverend Nill folded my hand in two warm palms, positively beamed Christian welcome. Johnny Dinkfingers-that name still cracks me up, fawk-engulfed my little-boy hand in his banana-bunch grip. Smiling was beneath him, apparently.

“Disciple!”Nill exclaimed. “I love your name.”

“My parents were nudists,” I said. That got a laugh, even though I wasn’t joking.

Tim explained that we were the canvassers he had told them about, and the good Reverend described his congregation’s shock over Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance. “Would you please tell Amanda and Jonathan that our church is praying for them? Praying so hard.”

Afterward, he excused himself with an apology-apparently he had a small sermon to make before Johnny began carving the “wonderful pig,” as he put it.

Led by Tim, Molly and I retreated into the crowd of beer bellies and bra-strap-pinched shoulders that had gathered round the massive barbecue. Nill, looking dapper in his blue jeans and black button-up, began in the standard way. Community in Jesus. Salvation in Christ. All the usual bullshit, with meat sizzling and smoking behind him. But as he continued, the rhetoric became more and more heated, as did the response of the people surrounding us.

He told us all a little story. About how among the beasts that God created were the false men, created before the sixth day. About how Adam, whose name meant “shows blood in face” in ancient Hebrew, was the first true man, imbued with the sparks of divinity: conscience and shame. “Only the white man can blush,” Nill cried over a ragged chorus of amens, “because only the white man is human! Because only the white man carries the Law of God in his heart!” The mud people live like animals, he went on to explain, because animals are simply what they are, subject to the dominion of White America.

“Does a man let his dog run wild in the streets?”

He talked about the serpent, Satan, and his seduction of Eve, which led to the birth of Cain, the first Jew. About how this “serpent race” was the true threat, the deceiver, spinning the lies of liberalism, convincing the sons and daughters of Adam to lie with the two-legged beasts…

Fuck. Me. Gently.

You hear about these people, you hear about their whacked beliefs, and you think, No… Come on… Then your drunk cousin pulls you aside at Christmas, tells you he’s afraid you’re going to burn in hell. Black heart, black skin-what did it matter? Albert was right. People are capable of believing anything so long as it flatters them.

Soon Nill was railing about ZOG-the Zionist Occupied Government-and the coming Conflagration (pronounced Con-flag-ray- shunnn), the racial Ragnarok that would see the righteous raised up out of the iniquity of liberal equity, redeemed, purified-and, of course, firmly in charge.

Funny how it all comes down to power, isn’t it? You might almost think moral indignation was just another scam.

“Um, Disciple?” Molly began again-more discreetly than before, but still with the resentment of being stuck next to someone sick in the grocery checkout.

“Having fun?” I muttered back.

“Fun? Fun?”

“Yeah, you know, investigative journalizing…”

She punched me in the arm for that-you know, the kind of smack that tells you what she really wants is to kick you in the nuts. But at least she stopped with the “Ums.”

There was an organizational pause as the actual meal was laid out. Voices swelled, marbled with laughter and all the other sounds that soft people make no matter how vicious their beliefs. Molly kept nagging me-she had seen enough, it was time to go, she couldn’t stand fatty foods anyway-but I was intent on watching Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie pals talking around the picnic table.

With Tim in tow, Reverend Nill came up to Johnny, who loomed over him, nodding. One of the junkies spit. Then the other, the one with the ashtray eye sockets, abruptly turned to me and grinned…

Suddenly they were all walking toward Molly and me. The Church Elders, fawk. With the Angry Bitch not far behind.

“Just follow my lead,” I muttered to Molly. She wanted to scream in exasperation, I could tell, but it was too late for any last-second commentary on her part. Reverend Nill was nearly on top of us, all good grooming habits and phony smiles.

“So!” he called out in ministerial tones. “Young Tim here has told me that you were posing some interesting questions. About… context, was it?”

The fact that he brought Johnny Dinkfingers and the others told me he knew something was up.

“Loved the sermon,” I replied.

“He’s being sarcastic,” Sheila said in that commenting-on-people-as- if-they-weren’t-there tone. Another Angry Bitch thing. I’m always mildly amazed that racists have wives, as if part of me always assumes that women are too sensible for that racket.

“No-no,” I laughed, holding my palms out in an Easy-girl! wave. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of bigotry…”

I’m not sure anything took a breath on that church lawn for a good second or two. Even the ants froze in their tracks. I could see Tim in my periphery, as pale as the Holy Ghost.

“We’re not bigots,” Reverend Nill said with a patient, parental air. “Just children of God.”

“Now me,” I continued, my gaze flat and friendly, “I hate stupid people. It’s a little trickier than skin colour, so I guess I envy your setup that way. Kind of like sorting beans, isn’t it? White. Black. Yellow. With idiots you got to know what to look for. Things like simplistic, superficial thinking-you know, the tendency to look at things skin deep. And flattery-that’s another big one. Idiots are always saying things like, ‘Oh, me so special!’ and for the most fucking retarded reasons you could imagine. Like, because there’s this dead guy who loves them or because they got pink nipples…”

I swear I could hear Molly’s watch go tick, tick, tick.

To his credit, Nill’s endearing shepherd-among-his-flock smile never faltered in the slightest. But his crazy-ass eyes, oh my, did they shine. And Johnny Dinkfingers, he frowned like a cartoon Santa. Sheila I expected to de-cloak and launch a couple of photon torpedoes any instant.

“How do you guys think you would stack up?” I asked in an amiable, third-party tone. “If I were to give you IQ tests, I mean.”

“What?” the towering biker asked.

My smile was pure ham and cheese. “Apparently not so well.”

You see, in the movies it’s always Mom who’s sacred, the one thing people do not dare insult. But in the real world-and that includes Italians-people really don’t get all that worked up about their moms. The Holy Grail of insults, if anything, is their intelligence.

This is just my way of saying that I was being deliberately provocative- in case the ball’s bouncing a little too quickly for you to follow. I have a simple, three-stage rule when actively working someone for information. The three Rs, I call them. First, reason. If not reason, then ridicule. If not ridicule, then a hard right hook. Since I was dealing with obvious, abject idiots, I decided to forgo stage one.

This is just one of many things that let me know I’m not normal: hitting people. I feel some kind of adrenalin spike, I suppose, just enough to make my pits ripe. Sometimes I fart. But otherwise it just feels like business, just another tool of persuasion.

An old girlfriend of mine put it best. “Always anxious, but never afraid,” she said after a bad night at the bar. “You do realize that neurotics are supposed to be passive-aggressive.”

Normal neurotics, that is…

The fact that people respond the way they do says it all, really. We are born to violence. Our bodies react to it instinctively. I mean, some people piss themselves-literally. A fair fraction swing right back-I can appreciate that. Fair is fair. And who knows? Maybe I’m the one who needs a little persuading. Some scream like they’ve caught fire or something-I hate those fuckers. But most-a solid majority-go real quiet. Nothing like a smack to reacquaint you with your priorities.

I’ve seen the look enough to instantly recognize it by now. So I usually grin and pull a fin out of my wallet. Information becomes real cheap real quick after a smack or two.

Now I know you like to think you’re like me, but you’re not. Not if you’re reading this you’re not. If you met me, you would take the five, cough up your honour, and count your blessings. Nurse your wounded ego with a bag of Doritos or something.

Everyone but everyone knows that readers are pussies. I had assumed Johnny Dinkfingers was my natural opponent, so I had squared my stance with reference to him. But Reverend Nill, perhaps seized by some instinct for initiative, beat me to the punch, so to speak.

He kind of sidled into my space, catching me off guard in a way that baffles me to this very day. His features became little more than a mob of angry extras about the leading role of his mad white glare. Somehow I knew things weren’t going to deteriorate into violence-not physical violence. Not at this moment, anyway. Somehow I knew something stranger, something worse, was about to happen.

He leaned in close-smooch close. He was about four inches shorter than me, so he had to bend his face back to better wire his gaze into my own. And wire them together he did. An arc-welder look. A heartbeat had passed, less, and yet in that time the church backyard, the encircling fence of strangers, even the afternoon sky blew away like smoke.

Just Nill staring, leaning into me with chimpanzee rage.

Without warning, he raised his hands to his chest and began drumming-fucking drumming!-this primal beat. Then, his pupils soldered to the centre of my attention, the veins across his temple pulsing, he began to chant-a kind of rap, only infused with adrenalin and rage.

“God loves!”he began rasping. “Those who hate!”

His breath smelled like expensive cheese.

“Since Adam! Since Eve! Since the dawn of fate!”

And on it went. A litany of all the individuals and peoples cursed and destroyed in the Bible.

Cain. The heroes and monsters who brought about the Flood. Esau. Sodom and Gomorrah.

“As He rains fire on the Sodomite!

So He exterminates the Canaanite!”

The work of a vengeful God, a bloodthirsty God, one who punished virtue and rewarded deception. A God who chose some over others, and who delivered victims to the righteous in a pageant as long as history itself.

It was surreal. Vicious in a way that I really can’t describe. His look, Maori wide and unflinching, seemed the very eyes of Judgment. His face, red with feral intensity, seemed a topographical map of hell. And his voice, scarcely human, a fist knotted about ten thousand strands of hatred.

On and on he went, to the staccato beat of palms against his chest… Boom-shicka-boom.

Glaring at me like an evil hypnotist.

Describing all the poor bastards obliterated by the Christian God of Love.

It seemed I was next. “You. Have got. To be fucking kidding me…”

This was Molly. All this time she’d been as nervous as a lone hottie stranded in line with a bunch of hairy old truck drivers at the DMV. Now she stood there, her red hair aflame in the evening sunlight, staring at Nill with dumbfounded disgust. “What? Are you a fucking psycho or something, Reverend? Huh? I mean. Come. Fucking. On. What kind of goof does that?”

And somehow I just knew that pretty much every word she said was digestible…

Except goof.

It’s a prison thing.

“Goof?” Nill replied, twisting two fingers against his temple. “Psycho? What do you think happens when God-the God Almighty-lands in your brain? You think you stay sane? Read your Bible, bitch. All his vessels crack. All of ‘em!”

“Some,” Molly said, “apparently more than others.”

“Manners,” Nill grated. “Manners, Missy! The Good Lord has a way of teaching them!” He glanced at the hulking shadow of Johnny Dinkfingers, who almost instantly stepped forward, his hand drawn back for a bitch-slap…

And my reflexes took over. Johnny Dinkfingers was no pussy. He was big, surprisingly fit and fast, and, perhaps more importantly, he was hard.. Prison teaches you that a straight line runs through every violent encounter. If you fail to find and to follow it, you will be maimed or dead. Ex-cons tend not to fuck around.

Mr. Dinkfingers was all these things and mean besides. But the sad truth was that he simply did not stand a chance.

Those of you with any long-standing involvement in sports know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you still fool yourself into thinking otherwise. I have heard no fewer than 3,687 fuckers claim, in this way or that, they were “ass-kickers.” Of those, only 16 or so were credible: real ass-kickers tend not to talk about kicking ass all that much (though with all this MMA crap I seem to hear it more and more).

See, if you play a sport, you have an inkling of just how vast the difference in skill and strength can be between players. Now take that inkling and apply it to combat, and you have a sense of just how unlike the movies real fights are. Trust me: you do not ever-ever-want to find yourself in the ring with someone like me.

There was simply no way I could ever gain the trust of these fuckers the way things stood, even if I had five years and wept at the mere mention of Herr Hitler. I was too clever, too arrogant, and just too damn good-looking to ever really be trusted by men like these. So I had to reach for the next best tool in my tool box: fear. Not that these guys were going to go all wobbly in the knees when they saw me in the street-not by a long shot. But they had done time, which meant that criminal paranoia was stamped as deep as a sex change into them. Cops, you see, have procedures, all kinds of rules that make them fluffy and cute so long as you don’t stumble into their sights-in which case they can bring the hammer down hard. But me? I was an unknown. And in a few moments I was about to become an unknown who could not be intimidated or otherwise bargained with-and who could kick some serious ass.

Atrained unknown.

I was about to become the big Who-the-fuck? in the marrow of their little world. The harbinger, baby.

And I had come bearing a gift-a simple feeling, one that said, I dunno but we gotta do something…

Something!

And something always leaves tracks. I caught the arm swinging toward Molly-before she had even registered it, I think. I stepped into its lumbering arc, twisted and turned, drawing the big man around and down. He didn’t really have much choice, given that he was simply following his own momentum-coaxed along arcs of my design, of course.

Afterward, I simply stood as relaxed as before, doing my best to appear as though I hadn’t even moved. A little Jet Li drama never hurts, I’ve found, when the violence is secondary to the message.

“Now where I come from,” I said in a toke-sharing voice, “you never- never-hit a white woman…”

Tim gaped in abject horror. The other sheeple just stood blinking-a critical incident processing lag of some kind. Stupid Nazi fuckers. Even stunned, Johnny Dinkfingers rolled forward on his rump, reaching for his boot-a knife of some kind, I imagine. The world becomes a Yard when you’re an ex-con. You always come armed.

Some woman screamed-a latecomer to the party.

Only Reverend Nill seemed unaffected. He held out a hand to stop Johnny mid-motion then turned to me with a mild expression of disappointment, placid while his Angry Bitch wife cackled in drunken laughter. It was pretty fucking hilarious, if you thought about it.

“I thank you for coming,” the Good Reverend Nill said.

“Sure thing,” I replied, drawing a shell-shocked Molly away from the crowd. “What time were Sunday services?”

He blinked those wild, freaky eyes.

“Ten,” he replied. “In the A.M.” Molly started crying on the drive back to the motel. I apologized-for real for a change. Told her some nonsense about provocation, the perfect balance of aggression and intelligence.

I sometimes forget what it’s like…

Being normal.

She should have been furious with me for putting her in a situation like that. Instead, she was embarrassed. She was young, eager to hammer pitons into the sheer cliffs of print fame and fortune. Her head was stuffed with almost as many ideals as romantic notions. Everyone knows that investigative journalists are fearless hard-asses, capable of staring down civil wars in illiterate nations, and here she was, getting all weepy about a little jiu-jitsu at a church picnic. She kept her face averted, pretended to stare at the setting sun through the passenger window. From time to time she wiped her eyes with fluttering fingers.

I could even hear her curse herself as she marched to her room.

“They were Nazis.!” I cried out in encouragement.

That was something, wasn’t it?

Once in my room, I called Albert, left a message on his machine or wherever the hell it is you leave messages nowadays-the nowhere of the Web probably. I needed to find out as much as I could about the Church of the Third Resurrection as soon as possible. There was piss all about them on the Web.

Say you were in a bind, a really, really tight bind, like the mob was out to hit you or something. Now, most men pretend they’ve stepped out of a movie, make believe they’re ready, willing, even eager to do what it takes, no matter what that involves. Most men pretend to be capable of calculated murder. But press them, and when the time comes I guarantee you they’ll find some bullshit way of backing out. Everyone postures in a vacuum, but when circumstances take hold, the sorting happens real quick.

Now, you can call this cowardice if you want. But let’s face it, murder is stupid, particularly if you have any personal connection to the dude you intend to murder. So I’m more inclined to call this intelligence rather than cowardice-the brave ones are the ones who shatter lives and go to prison.

Reverend Nill understood this all too well. He knew what it took to get people to kill for him.

The key is to get them young, when peer group pressures are well- nigh irresistible. Then you start small: graffiti, other kinds of petty vandalism. Then you do something for them, something low-risk but illegal all the same. Like so many things human, trust is the foundation of co-operative crime, and few things inspire trust like someone breaking the law for you-actually risking his neck. Then you ask them to commit some crime in return-to reciprocate. Once their cherry is popped, once they get away with something bad, it becomes oh so easy, even addictive for some types.

You don’t need to be a chromosomal mutant to enjoy hurting people. You just need to believe that your victims deserve their pain. And we’re wired to think that already.

No. Reverend Nill was no fool.

This was the realization I kept in mind as I lay on my bed, boots and all: that I was dealing with a sociopath in the full manipulative sense of the term. If Reverend Nill was behind Jennifer Bonjour’s disappearance, then he was “behind the scenes” in every sense of the word. Not only would he have a herd of complimentary character witnesses, he would have an ironclad alibi.

Which meant the place to start would be his tools.

The moment came to me as it always does, the one most pertinent to my questions and concerns. Johnny Dinkfingers and his two junkie cohorts, sitting at the crooked picnic table. They were both as skinny as marathon runners, but the one was older, sporting a grey mullet, while the other, the younger, had short-cropped hair dyed an artificial black. They were having a long conversation without jokes, eyes fixed then wandering. Looking down and bored, then matching gazes.

A single nod from Johnny, eyes closing as the mouth said, “Okay. I see.”

The older junkie sucked in his lips. “Sheesh. Too much. “

Fists clenched to mime blows given and received.

A face raised to offer bruised evidence. The younger one had a shiner.

Laughter, but reserved, as if they talked on the corner of a major thoroughfare.

Johnny shot them a look over his shades. His eyes darted up and out, then down again. A knuckle glanced his nose. Weight shifted from foot to foot. A string of inaudible, unreadable words. From beneath his sunglasses his lips said, “Give me a fucking break.”

An impassive look from the younger one. “So? “

A sour stretch of Johnny’s lips.

And the sentence I swear that I saw. “She’s dead.. “

Johnny shrugged and spat. The old junkie turned to me and grinned.

A hard knock at the door startled me from my reverie. It was a wet-haired Molly, her freckled face scrubbed of makeup, staring up at me with wide and hungry eyes. Suddenly I understood what it was she wanted from me. She wanted my cynicism, my numbness… She wanted my disease.

Because she thought they would make her strong. Stupid twit.

“I know…” she began, breaking eye contact and hesitating. “I know you said you wanted to… work… or whatever the hell it is you do.”

“Recollect. Remember. I kick back, sort and sift and interpret.”

“If you say so.”

I say so.

I breathed deep. Gawd, how I love the smell of a woman fresh out of the shower.

“Well, I just wanted to thank you, you know, for what happened back there.”

“No thanks necessary. Getting hot young stringers into life-threatening situations is just what I do.”

She laughed, looked at the finger she had raised to pick at her hair. “Yeah? What were you thinking?” she asked, cross-eyed.

“Just doing what I do best, Molls.”

“Which is?”

A strange pang accompanied the question. Hard to explain, actually, like doing a somersault without moving, a kind of figure-field inversion of the soul. I could tell from her eyes that she could see it on my face, all that past crashing in. I reached for her hand, retreated with her into the orange of my room’s tacky light.

“Screwing with people.” Oh, I got laid that night.

Ladies, you can deny it all you want, talk about how violence makes you ill-whatever. Weird as it is, a good number of you like it, not as a spectator sport-more like an Olympic demonstration. For whatever reason, a man’s hands tingle all that much more when they’re scabbed with another man’s blood.

You see, we’re savages together, you and I.

Children of Reverend Nill. Track Ten