The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

From Rumble, Young Man, Rumble

Part One: Sex

On our first date, Heather Gordon orders the Maryland crab cakes with red-pepper polenta and when I walk her home she asks me to take her to bed. On our second date, she has portabello and endive salad followed by veal tenderloin with poblano chiles and we make love on the swing set of an empty playground. On our third date, she tells me she is going to marry me.

For our one-month anniversary, Heather lights candles all around my bedroom and strips me naked and walks me to the bathtub, which is filled with warm water and rose petals. After three months, she takes me to Paris for the weekend. When we have been dating for six months, she asks me to kill her father.

“The first thing we have to do,” Kelly says when I tell him, “is cross over.”

“Cross over,” I say.

“Cross over the line between the good people and the bad people.”

“There’s a line?”

“Sure,” he says. “Actually, there are several. We’ll cross them in stages. We’ll work slowly. We’ll keep upping the ante.”

“Did you get this from a book?”

He shakes his head. “No books. This is about personal experience. We must walk the path.”

“The path.”

“The path to emotional detachment.”

“Are you making this up?”

He shakes his head again. “It’s in all the latest literature.”

I stare at him. “I thought you said no books.”

He frowns. “From now on,” he says.

We are sitting on the sofa in our apartment watching Kelly’s high-definition television, which is shaped like a fish tank. The picture is so sharp that it reveals the individual pores in human faces.

Kelly says, “Everything’s going cerebral these days. If we want to resist that trend, we have to master the physical world. If we want to be masters of the physical world, we have to know about life and death.”

“Kel,” I say, “are you sure you want to do this?”

He looks at me in silence for a while. Then he says, “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

The room is cavernous and blue-carpeted and honey-combed with tiny cubicles. The analysts sit in the cubicles between eighty and a hundred hours each week. The traders come in at eight-thirty and leave at five.

A green digital stock ticker rushes along the edges of the ceiling.

Kelly and I are sitting in brown leather armchairs outside a glass-walled conference room. Inside the conference room is a long cherry table with a podium at one end.

A kid about our age wearing Ferragamo lace-ups strolls past the analysts and pours himself a cup of coffee from the cart next to us.

Kelly says, “You have to come all the way over here every time you want coffee?”

The kid shrugs. “Can’t put it on the trading floor. Someone would crash into it.”

“You a trader?” Kelly says.

“Apprentice. You the boys from Merrill?”

Kelly shakes his head.

“We work for a start-up,” I say.

The kid frowns. “But you’re wearing suits.”

“We’re in new investment.”

“You’re here to pitch us?”

“Something like that,” Kelly says.

The kid nods. “You guys have one of those cute tech names where you change the first couple letters of an existing word? Like Verizon. Or Cinergy.”

“We’re called eVolution,” I tell him.

“Small ее, big vee?”

“That’s right.”

He smiles. “So what does it do?”

“The small ее, big vee?”

“The company.”

I look around the room at analysts hunched over keyboards and at traders in shirtsleeves shouting into telephones. “I really don’t know.” I tell him.

You can open a car door without a slimjim by bending a hanger into a squared hook and inserting it between the window and the weather stripping and using it to catch the lock rod. Sometimes you can open the door by using a key from the same manufacturer.

It is possible to hot-wire the car from the inside, but to do this you need to remove the ignition mechanism and complete the circuit manually. This risks severe electric shock. It also damages the car.

It is better to pop the hood and run a wire from the positive side of the battery to the positive side of the coil wire. The coil wire is red. Use a pair of pliers to hold the starter solenoid to the positive battery cable. This fires the engine. To unlock the wheel, insert a screwdriver into the steering column and use it to push the locking pin away from the wheel.

Kelly says, before you can kill you have to know what it is like to die.

Before you can know what it is like to die, he says, you have to know what it is to live.

“Do you know the life span of the common housefly?” he asks me.

“One day.”

“One day,” he says. “Twenty-four hours in which to pack all his loving and hating and living and dying.”

I say, “I don’t think a housefly does much loving and hating.”

I change the channel on the high-definition television. The news is running a feature on school shootings.

Kelly sighs. “You’re missing the point.”

I shrug. “His life isn’t short if he doesn’t know it’s short.”

Kelly frowns and wrinkles his forehead and then says, “He only gets one sunrise and one sunset.”

“And you only get a few thousand.”

“Hopefully more than a few.”

“Even so,” I say.

Kelly nods. “Even so.”

We are in a taxi. The driver wears a green knit hat and loafers with no socks. He has a stick of incense burning on the dashboard, which makes the air smell and taste like hot soap. I am sitting in the middle, between Kelly and my boss. My boss wears a linen suit. His tan is perfectly even.

Looking out the window at skyscrapers like enormous gray wafers, I say, “I don’t understand my job.”

My boss says, “What’s to understand?”

“Shouldn’t we bring a programmer with us?”

“Didn’t I explain this to you last week?”

My scalp itches. I say, “It’s just that I’ve been thinking some more about it and I figure it couldn’t hurt to have an expert along.”

My boss sighs. I look at Kelly. He is shaking his head. My boss says, “Our investors didn’t grow up covered with zits.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

“These people made their money the old-fashioned way — they inherited it. And they’ll never give it away to some fruitcake in clear-framed glasses who wears his jeans two sizes too small. The key is charm, not knowledge. You were born for this.”

Kelly is smiling at me. I ignore him. “But what if they ask me” — I lean close to my boss and whisper — “technical questions?”

“Do they ever?”

“They could.”

He rolls his eyes. “Make something up. We’re salesmen, for Chrissake.”

“What are we selling? We don’t make anything.”

He looks at me. “We make money, kid. I sell experience. Kelly sells cool. You sell cheekbones and green eyes and leading-rusher-in-Ivy-League-history.”

“Second-leading.”

“My mistake,” he says.

“It’s just,” I say, “that I don’t know anything about computers.”

He shakes his head. “This isn’t about computers. Do you think Rockefeller knew anything about oil? Do you think Carnegie knew anything about steel? All you have to know is what people want and how to tell them they want it from you.”

“But what if you don’t know what people want?”

He shrugs. “Then you have to know how to tell them what they want.”

When you die violently, your bowels let go. It’s called involuntary-sphincter-release response and it means that you spew all the foul waste from inside you, more than you ever imagined possible.

Kelly says the next step after crossing over is the planning phase.

Really, he says, the two steps are simultaneous.

I am sitting in our living room, listening to the steam heat, and Kelly is telling me that evolution means the extinction of the weak.

“Every human and animal characteristic is the result of random genetic mutation.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Think of the creatures who lived before certain features developed. Think of the ones whose mutations failed to increase their fitness.”

I close my eyes and picture ancient sea creatures with squat bodies and tails like embryonic alligators’, bobbing on the tide, near powerless with their shrunken fins, watching one of their fellows crawl out of the surf and onto the beach. He will go on to populate the world. The rest will be prey for prehistoric sharks or else will have descendants who will be less and less suited to the sea and will eventually drown as infants or occasionally flop their way onto the sand. I wonder whether these creatures know that they are the footnotes of history while their friend on the beach is the ancestor of an entire planet. I think of all the animals not selected for a place on the ark. I think of the thieves crucified next to Jesus.

“Eyelids,” Kelly says.

I open my eyes. “What?”

“Eyelids are the result of random genetic mutation.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You have to be able to imagine how it felt before eyelids. If you looked at the sky during the day, your retinas would burn. You’d have to walk with your face pressed into the ground, dirt in your mouth all the time. You’d have to sleep with your eyes open.”

“Yes,” I say.

Kelly nods. “You need to be able to imagine the time before tear ducts.”

Heather’s father leaves his office between 6:18 and 6:51. Monday through Friday. On Saturday and Sunday he works noon to five. It takes him between four and seven minutes to make his way down to the garage, depending on the elevators. He drives a black Lexus sedan.

There ought to be two men in bland suits who drive Heather’s father to and from work and sit all day behind Plexiglas in the hallway outside his office and shadow him wherever he goes.

This would make for more of an operation.

In that case, we might use a pipe bomb. We might use an incendiary device underneath the back seat. We might use a sniper. If the bodyguards blocked sight lines to the subject whenever they were out in the open (as they should), we might use the sniper to take out the bodyguards and use a chase man to go after the subject if he broke and ran. Of course, it is better to snipe in two-man teams. And neither of us knows how to use a rifle.

I am pressing my face into Heather’s neck and smelling her perfume and her shampoo and the soap she uses, which is goat’s milk and honey and costs twenty dollars a bar. Even through all of that, I can still catch the scent of her skin.

Heather is wearing a pair of my boxer shorts and a T-shirt from the gym I go to, which is called Advance.

We are watching 2001 on my DVD player.

I stop nuzzling Heather’s neck and sit back into the sofa with my legs extended in front of me. Heather rests her head on my chest. The light from the television twinkles all around us.

“It’s less than two thousand years since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Is that right?” Heather says.

“That’s right,” I say. “Less than two thousand years after chariot races, we have airplanes and space shuttles and movie-theater popcorn.”

“Amazing.”

She shifts the position of her body and nestles into my chest.

I say, “We weren’t even the same species until about twenty thousand years ago. Before that we were Cro-Magnons.”

“Fascinating,” Heather murmurs. Her breathing is becoming deep and slow.

“Until recently, we were carrying clubs and living in caves.”

She is silent.

I watch the television. Keir Dullea has just shut down the supercomputer. This is immediately before the part I don’t understand, in which he imagines himself sitting in a room that looks like the smoking room from the world’s fanciest mental hospital and then sees himself as an old man and a fetus.

I say, “Kelly and I are making preparations.”

Heather stirs for a moment and then relaxes back onto me. “Mmm,” she says sleepily. “Preparations for what?”

“Never mind,” I say. “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Kelly says, “You’re the bastard who gave measles to the Yanomami.” He is talking to the waiter, whom he has just accused of sneezing over his Parmesan-and-onion tartlet. “These people lived in isolation for hundreds of years and then you goddamn sociobiologists and you save-the-rain-forest fairies came in and gave them a measles vaccine, except that there were measles in the rain forest until you brought them. And when the vaccine made some of the people sick, you refused them treatment on the grounds that you wanted to study a society completely free from outside influence.” The waiter is trying to figure out whether Kelly is making fun of him. The men sitting next to Kelly are laughing. One of them says, “This guy is a card. A goddamn card.”

The other one nods and says, “The genuine article.”

Kelly says, “Do you have any idea how many germs live in the mucus inside your nose?”

We are in a restaurant called Neoterra in which each of the tables has a different shape from the others and none of them is round. Our table is shaped like a lima bean or like a slug writhing to death under a blanket of salt.

The men we are eating with all wear suspenders and Kenneth Cole glasses and have their sideburns trimmed every other day. There are five of these men. They are venture capitalists. I cannot remember any of their names, so I have assigned names to them, at random. When I cannot remember the name that I have assigned, I say the first name I can think of. They do not seem to notice.

One of the men next to Kelly is saying, “The plain ones are always the most suggestible. The pretty ones tend to be too uppity and the ugly ones are too wary. The plain ones are up for whatever.”

Kelly says, “How do you know who’s pretty and who’s ugly?”

The man says, “You look.”

“But how do you assign categories? Certain features make you feel physical attraction, but these features are different from culture to culture and even, sometimes, from person to person. It is a selection-based instinct to want to combine your genes with the genes of someone physically attractive, in order that you will have attractive offspring whose appearance will make them more likely to have reproductive success. Of course, you have a chicken-and-egg problem there. Also, that does not account for differences of opinion.”

The man stares at him.

Kelly says, “Do you ever try to imagine the time before dilating pupils?”

When I open my eyes, the man to my right is speaking earnestly to my boss. He is asking to see the business plan.

My boss shifts in his chair.

“You do have a business plan,” the man says.

My boss clears his throat. “Of course we have a plan,” he says. “But we’re not planning to be captains of industry. This isn’t industry. We’re not planning to be the world’s leading distributor of butt plugs. We’re sure as hell not planning to build the world’s best shuffleboard Web site so that some Daddy Warbucks can stroll up and pat us on the head and pay us twenty-five million to split twenty-four ways, so we can buy a town house and a Benz and some pussy and live god-damn upper-middle-class. Upper-middle-class means dick. Fuck the suburbs. Fuck commuting. Fuck neighbors. Our plan here is to be rich enough not to have neighbors. To be able to stand in front of your house and turn around in a circle and own everything you see. Not season tickets, not even courtside. I’m talking about owning your own team. No Internet millionaires here. Fuck that, too. I’m talking about Internet billionaires. What we’re offering you is the opportunity to be part of that.”

The man to my left, whom I have decided (I think) to refer to as Gill, looks at me and says, “So, you played halfback at Princeton?”

“Not Princeton,” I tell him.

“Of course not,” he says. “How tall are you? Six feet?”

“Why not?”

“You weigh around two hundred?”

“One-ninety.”

He smiles. “What’s your forty time?”

“My forty time.”

He nods.

“I don’t know these days.”

He frowns.

“I’m not really an athlete anymore,” I explain.

“Hmm,” Gill says.

We drink in silence for a while. Suddenly Gill looks at me. I lean back toward him.

Gill says, “What’s your body-fat percentage?”

We are standing at the urinals in the bathroom at Neoterra and Kelly is saying. “The difference between assault and aggravated assault is mostly about the severity of the injuries.”

I say, “How bad does it have to be to be aggravated?”

“It’s subjective.”

We zip up. The urinals flush automatically when we walk away.

We hold our hands under the faucets, waiting for the sink to recognize that we are not just dust particles blowing in front of the electric eye.

Kelly says, “Last night I was reading about the human botfly.”

“I thought you said no books.”

He nods. “I think we’re going to have to forget that rule.”

“I already did, I tell him.”

The water begins to spray from our faucets.

He glances at me. “When?”

“From the beginning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug. “I don’t care much about it. As long as we don’t say no movies.”

“Of course not,” he says. “That would ruin everything.”

“The human botfly,” I remind him.

“Right, right. Anyway, when it bites you, it raises a bump like a mosquito bite. Except that the fly has burrowed its way into your arm and the bump is covering it. It incubates for a while until it gets hungry and then it begins to consume you. You can feel it eating its way up your arm.”

We take our hands from under the faucet and the water stops. We stand with our hands under the nozzles of the hand dryers.

Kelly says, “There are tiny parasitic worms that can live in drinking water. Once they’re inside you, they gather in sores on your legs. The only way to get rid of them is to immerse them in water and allow them to flow out of the hole they’ll open in your skin.”

They are laughing when they leave the club and weaving as they walk. Both of them wear white baseball caps emblazoned with the letters of their fraternity.

Kelly says, “Are you ready for this?”

I nod.

“Deep breaths,” he says. “Try to swallow.”

I nod again.

The frat boys do not notice us until they are only a few feet away. Then they stop.

Kelly is wearing a long black overcoat and leather gloves with lead studs sewn into the knuckles on the inside. He says, “You boys sure you’re all right to drive? You look a little under the weather.”

The frat boys are silent.

Kelly says, “Is this your car?”

“Yeah,” one of them says.

“This a Corvette?”

The frat boy snorts. “Try Lamborghini.”

“Ah.”

He narrows his eyes. “You fuck with the alarm or something?” Kelly smiles. “Now why would you think that?”

“Should be going off with you sitting on the hood.”

“Well,” Kelly says, “we’re not as heavy as we look. The camera adds ten pounds.” He laughs.

The frat boy says, “If you get off the car by yourselves, we’ll give you a running start.” He spreads his hands, palms, up. He is thick through the chest and shoulders. His friend is taller than he is and wide.

Kelly slides off the car onto his feet. The frat boy smiles and turns his head to glance at his friend and when he turns back Kelly throws a straight right hand into the middle of his face. The gloved fist makes a dull-hollow slapping sound when it lands, followed immediately by the crunch of the nose breaking, and the frat boy’s head disappears in red mist and then he has fallen to his knees. His friend is staring, openmouthed, and does not notice me standing up off the hood. He is reaching for Kelly when I kick him in the groin as hard as I can. He crumples next to the other one. And then we are on top of them.

I take the big one, who is curled into a ball with his hands cupped between his legs. He is dry-heaving. White lines of saliva hang from his chin. I kick him a few times in his kidneys and he rolls onto his back and I stomp his forearm with the heel of my boot and I am pretty sure I feel bones breaking. He screams. I kick him in the stomach and listen to him gasp as the air rushes out of him. Now he has no breath to scream and he is gagging. I drop onto his chest and, as I do this, I bring my elbow straight down into his mouth and feel the teeth give. He brings his arms up to cover his face and I punch the broken forearm. He screams again. When he moves the forearm, I drive my fists into him over and over. The skin splits along his eyebrows and forehead and cheekbones and blood seeps through the cracks like lava. Sweat is rolling down my face, plastering my hair to my forehead. I feel like crying.

Kelly says, “Enough.”

I stand up and look at the big frat boy at my feet. His wrist is bent at a terrible angle. His mouth looks like a tomato with ripped skin. There are teeth sticking through his upper lip.

I look at Kelly, who is also standing. “Wallets?” I say, my chest heaving.

Kelly shakes his head. “This is assault, not robbery.”

“Two birds, one stone?”

He chews his bottom lip and considers this. “Fuck it,” he says. He reaches inside his frat boy’s jacket and pulls out his wallet. The frat boy groans. Kelly kicks him in the ribs.

“We taking the car?” I say.

“No,” Kelly says. He looks at the frat boy below him. “Don’t take it too hard, fellas,” he says. “We’ve just grown past you. You’re the giraffes whose necks never stretched.” He pulls off his gloves. “You’re the elephants with short noses.”

“I think we’re ready for the next level,” Kelly says.

I glance at him. The streetlights we pass turn his face ghostly white and run the shadow of the windshield wipers along his profile. I massage the fingers of my left hand against the knuckles of my right, which are scraped bloody and have already begun to swell.

“What’s the next level?” I say.

Kelly turns his head slightly so that the wiper shadow now flows over his face asymmetrically, making a jagged line on his nose. He is smiling enough for me to see the tips of his teeth.

“It’s time to shoot somebody,” he says.

Heather is wearing a red dress with no back. The dress is longer on one side than the other. On the short side, it rises almost above her hip.

The skin on Heather’s thighs is the color of butterscotch.

We are standing under an enormous crystal chandelier that hangs over a crimson staircase. Everywhere I look, there are men in tuxedoes. Heather has the fingers of her left hand laced through the fingers of my right.

The poster next to the theater door shows two immense eyes and, above that, the word “Gatsby” in white letters.

Heather is talking to Cynthia Lowell-Wellington and Vanessa Mather Coppedge Bryson, who are jammed up against us by the crush of people. Cynthia’s boyfriend, who is taller than I am and has a dimpled chin, looms on my left, just behind Cynthia. I am fairly certain that he was on the crew team at Brown, but it is possible that he was on the lacrosse team at Penn. He shakes my hand at every opportunity.

For dinner, Heather had the New Orleans-style catfish with chipotle dipping sauce.

She is saying, “If you’re going to use a bronzing agent of any kind, you have to couple it with a good moisturizer.”

Cynthia says, “Should I be looking for one with sunblock in it?”

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt. But really, you should be keeping yourself out of the sun completely. That’s what the bronzer is for.”

Vanessa leans toward Heather and says, “So, do you put it everywhere?”

Heather nods. “No white should show.”

I say, “Can you picture the time before melanin?”

Heather raises herself on the balls of her feet and kisses the side of my mouth.

The mob surges all around us, moving with tiny shuffling steps.

We are sitting in a private box on the left side above the orchestra. The house lights are down and the women onstage are singing to each other and staring into the audience. According to the program, they are singing in English, but it is impossible to understand them and my attention is focused on the seat backs of the row in front of us where a thin digital screen shows a scrolling transcription of the lyrics.

Heather is sucking my thumb.

Next to me, Cynthia’s boyfriend, Clay Harrison Adams, whispers, “When’s your IPO?”

I say, “We’re not trying to be the world’s leading distributor of butt plugs.”

He says, “Oh.”

The stage is darker now and the women are gone. They have been replaced by a dancing mob and bright-colored balloons. In the background a tiny green light is flashing.

Suddenly I have the urge to climb on top of my seat and throw my head back and scream. I have this urge every time I go to the theater. I believe it is a similar instinct to the one I have to turn on the engine of my car when the mechanic has his hand inside it. Or the impulse I feel on subway platforms to push the man next to me in front of the oncoming train. Or when I imagine swerving my car into a group of pedestrians and feeling the dull cracks of their heads against my windshield and gazing at the wet smears of their blood. Or when I think of diving through the plate glass of the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and plunging, back arched, head up, gleaming shards of glass falling all around me, into the middle of the herd of ice-skaters circling sixty-seven stories below.

Clay says, “Johnson and Johnson?”

“What?” I say, turning to him.

“The butt plugs. Leading distributor.”

I sigh. “I don’t know, guy.”

“Oh,” he says.

I think about throwing him over our balcony and watching him drop, arms and legs windmilling, into the front row.

With all these impulses, there is the idea stage, then the imagination stage, then the spine-tingle, adrenaline-shot, testicle-clench moment when you know that you are actually going to do whatever it is.

But you never do.

During intermission Heather and I get on one of the mirror-walled elevators and ride it until we are alone. She pushes the Run-Stop button. A voice comes over the intercom asking if everything is all right. Heather begins unbuttoning my shirt. The voice from the intercom says that if the elevator does not begin moving in the next five minutes it will call the fire department. Heather licks my chest. I put my arms around her. The voice tells us not to panic.

Heather pulls away from me and takes two steps backward, smiling slightly, and presses herself against the brass handrail. As she leans onto the handrail, her dress drifts up and I can see the thin black string of her panties. I move close to her and she kisses me hard and runs her hand along the back of my neck and along my shoulder and down my arm and then she takes my hand and puts it gently between her legs. Her underwear is already moist. I grab hold of it and pull so that the narrow strip rubs against her. She gasps. I slide my hand under the wet fabric and touch the soft, slick skin and then I ease my middle finger inside her. She tips her head back and moans. I suck on the skin of her neck. Her perfume has a bitter taste.

She says, “Oh my God.”

I kneel down in front of her and grip the backs of her thighs and pull her close to me, resting my head just below her ribs.

She strokes my hair. “How much do you want me?” she whispers.

I groan against her stomach.

Back in my seat, I can smell Heather on my fingers and I can taste her when I lick my lips.

In front of us, dozens of miniature chandeliers hang on long cords from the ceiling. In the hallways behind us, the lights flash off and on and an usher closes the door to our box. The cords begin to retract and the chandeliers float toward the high ceiling.

Heather whispers, “What’s wrong with you lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been even more distant than usual.”

I say, “I’ve been walking the path to emotional detachment.”

She frowns. “This is Kelly’s idea?”

I nod. “We’re working in stages.”

She opens her mouth to say something else, but the two women are singing again. They are slumped in lawn chairs. They wear straw hats and white dresses. They draw out a single note so long that I have to take a deep breath in sympathy. The urge to scream washes over me again.

The words click by in white block letters on the digital screen in front of me. IT’S HOT, says the screen, IT’S HOT.

Part Two: Violence

The man by the door is wearing a beige turtleneck and a leather jacket. He leans us against the wall and frisks us quickly.

Kelly says, “Won’t you at least buy me dinner first?”

The man sighs. “Haven’t heard that one yet this week.”

Dexter is sitting in the far corner on a hydraulic chair that looks like a life raft. The man cutting his hair wears a long white shirt that says м коса across the chest. The room smells of cocoa butter. The floor is covered with hair.

The man beside Dexter is almost as thick as he is and has a big jagged scar along his jaw. He wears a cream-colored suit and a silk shirt.

The only other man in the barbershop lounges on a leather sofa in the corner opposite Dexter. His entire body seems frozen, including his eyes, which are locked on mine.

Dexter raises his head and looks at me in the mirror. “Looking good, baby,” he says.

I smile. “You remember Kelly?”

He shrugs. “Why not?”

“Good to see you again,” Kelly says.

Dexter grunts. He jerks his head toward the window. “That your new whip?”

“Yeah.”

“Whip?” Kelly whispers.

“Car,” I tell him.

Dexter whistles. “Fuckin’ ay. You niggers must be flush.”

“We can’t complain,” I say.

“I thought you were supposed to call me before you went public.”

“We will.”

He frowns. “So how come you niggers are rolling Bill Gates-style all of a sudden?”

I look around at the bodyguards. “You think you have enough security?”

“Can’t be too careful.”

“I don’t remember anyone ever taking a shot at Butkus.”

Dexter grins. “He wasn’t a Nubian king.”

“All right, I don’t remember anyone taking a shot at Willie Lanier.”

“That was a different era. It’s all haters out there these days. Can’t stand to see a brother living the dream.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

Dexter’s barber opens a drawer in the counter in front of him and changes the guard on his clippers.

Dexter says, “You watch me in the Pro Bowl?”

I nod.

He says, “They’ve never seen anything like me.”

The barber removes the guard from his clippers and carefully shapes Dexter’s sideburns. He unsnaps Dexter’s maroon smock and passes the razor over the back of his neck. He pours alcohol onto a cotton ball and runs it around Dexter’s hairline. He douses him with talcum powder.

Dexter says, “That’s enough. Don’t give me any of that Afro-Sheen shit.”

The barber nods.

Dexter shrugs out of his smock and stands. He is an inch or two taller than I am. He is wearing a white knit tank top. His body is like a clenched fist.

“Shame the way you’re letting yourself go,” I say.

Dexter snorts. He takes a fat wad of bills from his pocket, peels one off the top, and hands it to the barber.

The man in the corner is moving now. He is on his feet and coming toward us. I can’t remember seeing him stand up.

Dexter says, “This is Wilton.”

“Wilton?” I say.

Dexter smiles. “Him a yardie, у’know.”

“What?” Kelly says.

“He’s Jamaican,” I say.

Wilton looks at Dexter. “That accent’s a little Harry Belafonte.”

Dexter says, “So are you.”

Wilton is wearing gray wool slacks and a black ribbed turtleneck sweater.

Dexter says, “These are the boys I told you about.”

Wilton nods. He does not move to shake out hands.

I say, “Dexter tells me you used to work for Mike Tyson.”

He shrugs.

“You know what we’re working on?”

He shrugs again.

“We’re trying to reach the next stage in our development.”

Wilton stares at me.

Kelly says, “For most mammals, grooming is a sign of affection. That’s why I cut my own hair.”

Wilton is saying, “You’d be amazed how long it takes some guys to die.”

I say, “Doesn’t it depend on where they get hit?”

“Not always.”

We are at an outdoor shooting range, lying on our stomachs beside green T-shaped shooting benches, facing white-and-black silhouette targets set up in front of a stone wall. I am leaning on my elbows on the concrete apron, sighting down the barrel of a rifle that looks like it is made out of Legos.

I say, “I wish these things still looked like they used to.”

“Why?”

“It would make me feel more real.”

Wilton says, “Draw down center body mass on everybody. No head shots.”

“What about bulletproof vests?”

“That’s just movie shit.”

“Someone must wear them.”

“Sure. But they’ll still be incapacitated if they take one in the chest, provided you have enough stopping power. Even with body armor, a heavy load can break ribs and collapse lungs.”

I squint through the aperture and place my crosshairs on the center of the target.

“Raise your aim four inches at two hundred yards, ten inches at three hundred.”

“Why?” I turn my head to look at him.

“Gravity,” he says.

“What do I do past three hundred?”

“You miss.”

I nod.

Wilton says, “How you know Dexter?”

“We went to high school together.”

“You play ball with him?”

“Sure.”

He frowns. “I thought he was from Cleveland.”

“So?”

“So, you don’t look too Cleveland to me.”

I shrug, gently so as not to lose my target picture. “Near Cleveland.”

“Shaker Heights?”

“Something like that.”

He smiles. “Always knew that motherfucker was wannabe hard.”

“Don’t need to be from the ghetto to be hard.”

“It helps.” He looks at Kelly, who is on his stomach fifty feet to my right, sighting down the barrel of his Lego rifle. “What about the ofay?”

“Why is he an ofay and I’m not?”

He shrugs. “Ain’t just about skin color.”

“Mmm,” I say. “We lived together in college.”

Wilton nods. “He’s a fuckin’ fruit loop.”

Sometimes, particularly when you can anticipate the precise location of your target, it is preferable to snipe at a near-flat trajectory. For countersniping, because you cannot predict your target’s whereabouts and because the target will likely be concealing himself from anyone on the ground, it is vital to occupy the highest position possible.

In close quarters, the pistol is ideal because of its concealability and case of use. However, its effectiveness drops sharply as range increases. It is very difficult to be accurate with a pistol at distances greater than fifty feet. Past a hundred, it is almost impossible.

My boss is riding in the cart in front of us with a man from Goldman who has skin like tapioca. We all wear green sweaters and brown-and-white spikes.

Kelly is driving our cart, bouncing over ruts in the dirt path. The air tastes like the dirt thrown up by the other cart. Kelly is saying, “Why doesn’t he have an accent?”

“He told me he lost it.”

“He talks like a goddamn Yalie.”

“He’s self-educated.”

Kelly snorts. “You must know what that means.”

“What?”

“Anytime a Nubian says he’s self-educated, ten to one he was reading with his ass to the wall.”

“Prison?”

He nods. “Probably has one of those correspondence diplomas.”

“That’s not fair.”

He glances at me. “You two have been getting awful close lately.”

“He’s been teaching me.”

“I hope you’re not losing perspective.”

“Perspective on what?” I say.

“Just make sure you keep in mind what it is we’re doing.”

The cart in front of us stops dustily. Kelly pulls in behind it.

We sit off to the side on a wooden bench while the man from Goldman sets himself over the tee.

Kelly says, “In gorilla societies, each adult male has his own position in the hierarchy. You don’t look directly at anyone higher than you. Eye contact indicates provocation for all primates. No one looks at the alpha male, unless they are ready to challenge for his position. If you look him in the eye before you’re ready for him, he will tear your limbs off.”

I am sitting in the back seat, between Heather and her father. We are on the way to the opening of an art gallery called Cave Paintings. Heather is gazing out the window.

Her father is my size with big hands. He has a thin white scar under his right eye. I am trying not to look at him.

He is saying, “Sometimes we would wait all night and not see anyone. Some nights we would all see movement on the road and we would blow the claymores and launch flares and pour fire into the tree line and when we walked down, we wouldn’t find anything except the craters we’d made.”

I say, “How’d they get away?”

“Who?”

“Whoever was on the road.”

He looks at me. “There wasn’t anybody on the road. We imagined it.”

“You all imagined the same thing?”

“The visions are contagious. One guy points at what he sees and you make yourself see it, too.”

“So, after a while, why didn’t you stop believing something was there?”

“Because sometimes something was there.”

“What were those nights like?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t want to hear about those nights.”

“Sure I do.”

He says, “Later on, I was with Recon and we did less search-and-destroy, but we still had visions.”

“Does it give you nightmares?”

“Nightmares?”

“Because you hated it so much.”

He frowns. “Did I say that?”

“I just assumed. I thought everybody hated it.”

He says, “It was the happiest time of my life.”

We are sitting in a rented van at the curb across the street from Heather’s father’s office building and Kelly says, “What about knives?”

Wilton looks at him. “This ain’t West Side Story.”

“It’s just that I thought we were supposed to learn these things in stages.”

“You niggers want to learn knives, you can do it on your own time.”

Wilton is shielding his eyes from the sun and staring up at the building, which looks like a giant milk carton. He says, “Next time we’re doing reconnaissance, you ought to bring a jacket.”

Kelly says, “Why not just keep the heat on?”

Wilton says, “Three guys silting by the curb all day in a car with the motor running might as well hang out a sign that says STAKE-OUT.”

“Why are we here at all? We already know his schedule.”

“You already know it. I want to see it for myself.”

“You don’t trust us?”

Wilton shakes his head. “You can’t learn this stuff from books.”

“And you’ve learned it through experience.”

“That’s right.”

“So when we have the experience we’ll be as good as you.”

Wilton shifts his eyes to look at Kelly. He says, “You can’t have a late start.”

Armor-piercing or KTW rounds can puncture steel doors and pass through bulletproof vests. Their drawback is that they make neat, surgical wounds.

Full-metal-jacketed rounds also have a better penetration value than standard loads, but they are less streamlined than the armor piercers and cause more tissue damage.

Hollowpoints carry low penetration values but expand on impact. This is also true for dum-dums.

You can create a hollowpoint effect by cutting cross-shaped grooves into the tips of your cartridges. On impact, the round will flatten out along the grooves, disintegrating muscle and bone. (Note: Handmade loads may tend to jam an automatic.)

I am kneeling by an open window on the ninth floor of the Ritz, looking past the Public Garden at Beacon Street, and Wilton says, “Blue suit with the grocery bag.”

“Got it,” says Kelly.

“Why him?” I say.

“I don’t know,” Wilton says. “Easily identifiable.”

Kelly says, “It doesn’t pay to stand out.”

They are on their feet next to me, binoculars held to their faces. I open and close my hands against the rifle and blink my eyes and watch through the scope as the man scratches his neck, magnified ten times.

“I don’t know if I can,” I say.

Wilton sighs. “This is what you said you wanted.”

“I know. I just wasn’t expecting him to be so alive.”

Kelly says, “I’ll do it.”

“Wait your turn,” Wilton says.

The man stops walking and checks his watch.

I say, “Won’t they be able to tell where the shots came from?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I don’t know. Somebody.”

“Unlikely. The flash isn’t too apparent in daylight.”

“What about the sound?”

“It’ll echo off the buildings. It’ll seem to come from everywhere.”

“What if somebody sees us?”

“The chances of that increase with every second you don’t take the shot.”

The man is whistling now. I steady the crosshairs on the top button of his suit jacket. I close my eyes and imagine the way his face will look when the bullet hits him and the noises he’ll make and the way his body will come apart. I wonder whether he will drop the groceries. I open my eyes.

Wilton says, “Deep breaths. Squeeze, don’t pull.”

The man smiles suddenly and switches his grocery bag to the other arm. A young girl with blond hair runs into the sight picture. The man bends down and scoops her up with his free hand and spins her around in a circle. She kisses him on the cheek.

I draw back from the scope and lay the rifle on the windowsill and stand up. I shake my head. “Not in front of his daughter.”

Kelly looks at me. “The fuck you care?”

“She’ll never recover.”

“Nobody recovers from anything. Your experiences shape who you are. You have a chance to be the defining influence in this girl’s life.”

I don’t say anything.

“If you’re so worried about it,” he says, “maybe we should do her too.”

“No,” I say. “I won’t do that.”

He groans. “Have Wilton do it.”

“The girl can’t die.”

“She can and she will. The only question is when.”

“Not today.”

“What difference does it make? Today, tomorrow, eighty years from now. She won’t be in a position to care.”

“But in eighty years, when she feels it coming, she’ll be able to look at all the things she did. Now she could only think of what she didn’t do.”

“So what if this girl has an unpleasant last few minutes in which she imagines the life she didn’t live? It’ll probably be better when she imagines it than it would have been to live it. It’ll be better than remembering all the things she could never quite do. Besides, it’s only a few minutes at the end. And if you hit her right, she won’t even have that. Like flipping off a light switch.”

Wilton turns to look at him. “I don’t wash anybody for free.”

“We’ll pay you,” Kelly says.

On the street below us, the man has put the girl down and is holding her hand. Holding the girl’s other hand is a pretty blond woman in a blue cardigan.

Wilton turns back to the window. The family is moving away from us. They round the corner onto Charles Street.

I say, “They’ll go home tonight like they do every night and they’ll never know that they just lived through the most important moments of their lives. They don’t even know we exist.”

Kelly says, “Goldfish have thirty-second memories. Everything that happened more than thirty seconds ago is erased to make room for the new things. That means that at the very end, when they look back, they’ve been dying their whole lives.”

Wilton grunts. When Kelly shoots him, his body clenches and he half turns from the waist, head rigid, pupils crammed to the sides of his eyes, trying to look at Kelly behind him. Then he sags against the glass, blood spraying from the big exit wound in his chest. The sound of the handgun is much softer than I am expecting. It is the dry crack of a twig snapping over and over.

“Sorry about that,” Kelly tells me.

“You’re crazy,” I say quietly.

He smiles. “I doubt it. It’s just that I’ve developed a more complete understanding of our situation.”

“Do you understand that Dexter’s other boys will be looking loins now? Along with God-knows-who-else.”

He shrugs. “I hope you see why it was necessary.”

I stare at him.

He stands very close to Wilton, who is gurgling. “It’s all perfectly natural. Today we’re selecting for people who draw their guns on time.” He smiles. “We’re selecting against surly tarbabies who don’t know how to watch their mouths.”

We are sitting on long sofas in the dark-maple locker room at the Harvard Club and my boss is saying, “If poor people were as smart as rich people, they’d be rich by now.”

The man next to him is soft everywhere and colors his hair red-brown. He netted eleven million dollars last year. He chuckles.

My boss says, “Every generation of a family has a chance to hit it big. If they keep missing, after a while you have to assume that something’s wrong with the genes.”

The carpet is blood-colored. The walls of the locker room are covered with lacquered plaques that show vertical columns of men’s names. Kelly and I have our legs stuck out in front of us and crossed at the ankles. We are wearing white Izod shirts and gray shorts. We have long-handled rackets laid across our laps.

The television that hangs from the ceiling of the locker room shows a pretty blond woman with straight teeth and a gray-haired man, also with straight teeth, sitting at a curved desk in front of Corinthian columns and windows that show false sky. At the bottom of the screen, stock prices churn by in a blue strip.

Kelly whispers, “Ancient chieftains developed efficient methods of agriculture so that they could throw banquets to show their power.”

“What?” I say.

“It wasn’t to better provide for their people. For that, the old methods were sufficient.”

I stare at him.

“Technology develops not to advance the species but to consolidate the power of individuals.”

“Listen,” I say, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the death of emotion and the sublimation of desire.”

“I thought the death of emotion was what we wanted. I thought you said we were walking the path to emotional detachment.”

He nods. “Yes. I’ve come to reexamine our position. At the beginning I thought we were working to evolve into things capable of murder. I thought we were trying to divorce mind from body. I thought we were trying to resist going cerebral.” He sighs. “I realized recently that our problem is that we had already gone cerebral. We had already separated mind and body. We’ve been denying our instincts. For human beings to be able to kill, they don’t need to evolve, they need to regress. All these computer-geek faggots live in the world of the cerebral and they’ve probably never been in a fight. They can’t fight, they can’t luck, they have no physical presence. You and I have been trying to regain our instinctive behaviors. We’re trying to get back to basics.”

“But my instinct was to feel sorry for those frat boys and for the guy I was supposed to shoot.”

“You’re making the mistake of classifying compassion as a human emotion. Really, your natural instincts are to do what’s best for yourself and to eliminate anything that challenges your success. You do for you, I do for me, everyone does for themselves, shake it all up and the cream rises to the top. It’s mathematics.”

“How can you tell me what my instincts are?”

“Because human behavior has been completely dissected. The genome is mapped. There are no more secrets.”

My boss is smoothing a terry-cloth headband over his hairline. He looks at the man next to him, who is still chuckling. My boss says, “Take the Gettys, for example.”

The pretty blond anchorwoman looks into the camera and says something, but I can’t hear it because the sound on the television has been muted. Her words appear in a black closed-caption box below her. The black box says, “Now, the day’s headlines.”

I ignore the first two stories, both of which include videotape of rolling tanks. When the third story begins, a graphic appears over the anchorwoman’s shoulder featuring a painting of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel splattered with enormous puddles of blood. Written over this painting in white block letters are the words “Ritz Murder.”

Kelly says, “Normally they don’t make so much fuss over a shine killing.”

My boss says, “Location, location, location.”

The man sitting with him says, “Such a waste.”

Kelly says, “We don’t know if it’s a waste. It’s not like this was some kid on the honor roll. Maybe this was just a big, mean dog who ran into a bigger, meaner dog. These things happen.”

The man turns to look at him.

“Do you know any of the men on the walls?” I say quickly.

“Sure,” he says. “Most of them.”

“That must be hard.”

He turns away from Kelly to look at me. “What must be hard?”

“To lose so many friends.”

“Lose?”

“In the war.”

He shakes his head. “The war dead are in the lobby, kid. These are the trustees.”

“Oh,” I say.

Kelly leans close to me and whispers, “Human beings have come to treat death differently than other animals do. When lions get too old, they lose their place in the pride and are forced to wander, scavenging for food, unable to hunt, until eventually they die of starvation or disease or they become immobilized by starvation or disease and are then eaten alive by hyenas. When sharks are injured, other sharks come from miles around and tear them to pieces. Human beings are the only species that tries to prolong life artificially after the subject has outlived his usefulness. We are the only creatures that mourn our dead.”

“Elephants,” I say.

“Elephants?”

“Elephants mourn their dead.”

“That’s impossible,” he tells me.

We are standing in Dexter’s living room, surrounded by Persian rugs and sliding glass doors and a glass-topped coffee table dusted with cocaine residue. The residue is smeared into white streaks. On the floor beside the table are three long-stemmed champagne glasses and a metal ice bucket.

On the other side of the glass doors are the floodlit patio and the swimming pool and the hot tub, both of which have underwater lights, and past all that are evergreen-covered hills that loom black in the darkness.

Dexter is in the hot tub with one of the girls. The other girl, naked and brown and smooth and gleaming, is standing on the edge of the pool and swaying in time to faint music. They are all laughing. I can’t tell where the music is coming from.

Kelly motions toward the glass doors. He is dressed entirely in black. His face is covered in greasepaint.

“What if they hear?” I whisper.

“They won’t,” he whispers back. “And, even so, if they look back at the house they’ll be looking from the light into the dark.”

“It’s not really dark in here.”

“Dark enough.”

I slide one of the doors open. It hisses on its runner. I freeze. Dexter and the girls keep laughing. I slip through the opening and onto the slate of the patio. Kelly follows me. We move slowly, crouched low, careful to keep our footfalls silent.

The dancing girl sees us first. She stops swaying and opens her mouth. Kelly shows her his gun. She does not speak.

I kneel down behind Dexter and press the barrel of my automatic into the back of his neck. His body shudders and tenses. The girl next to him gasps. She has long hair and skin the color of coffee ice cream.

I say, “Where are the roughnecks?”

“We’re the only ones here,” Dexter says. His voice is very steady.

“Bullshit,” Kelly says.

“I swear to God.”

Kelly says, “If you’re lying, I’m going to slice your eyeballs open with a razor.”

“I’m not lying.”

“After that, I’m going to pour gasoline into your eye sockets and pull off your fingernails one by one. Then I’m going to tie your hand to the side of this pool and mash it with a cinder block. Then I’m going to take a pair of garden shears and cut your tongue in half while it’s still in your mouth.”

The girl in the hot tub starts to cry.

Kelly turns to her. “Is he lying?”

She shakes her head.

Kelly says, “If he is, I’m going to do the same thing to you.”

She sobs more loudly. She keeps shaking her head.

Kelly looks at me. “I believe it.”

I stand and walk around in front of Dexter. “It’s me,” I say.

He squints at my face. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “You almost made me piss myself.”

Kelly says, “Don’t think I didn’t mean what I said.”

Dexter says, “What do you want?”

“We need to talk,” I tell him.

Dexter is sitting on the black leather sofa in his living room and wearing a white robe that pulls very tight across his shoulders. I am seated facing him on a ceramic barstool that I dragged in from the kitchen. Kelly is on the other side of the room, leaning on a mantelpiece. The girls are upstairs in the windowless walk-in closet in Dexter’s bedroom. We slid a heavy bureau in front of the closet door. We balanced a mirror between the bureau and the door. Kelly told the girls that if we heard the mirror break he was going to come upstairs and pull out their teeth with pliers and shove straightened coat hangers into their ear canals to rupture the drums.

“Where’d the hitters go?” I ask Dexter.

He says, “Wilton’s disappeared. They’re trying to find him.”

“They have any ideas?”

He shrugs. “Not that I know of.”

I glance at Kelly. He shakes his head.

“I don’t believe you,” I say to Dexter.

“I can’t help that.”

Kelly says, “The next time you lie, I’m going to shoot you in the hip. Won’t be too many more Pro Bowls after that.”

“Tell us,” I say.

Dexter says, “They think maybe you two clipped him.”

“You try to talk them out of that?”

“I tried. They weren’t sure anyway.”

“They have a theory?”

“They think Wilton’s that thing at the Ritz.”

“I thought that guy couldn’t be identified.”

He looks at me carefully. “Yeah, somebody put some caps in his face. Blew out his teeth and everything. Also, they look his wallet and cut off the tips of his fingers.”

“So what makes them think it’s Wilton?”

“It’s just a guess right now. That’s why you’re still walking.”

“How long before it’s not just a guess?”

“Who knows? Depends what they find.”

“Any chance you can get them off of us?”

He shakes his head. “They’re looking for payback, I can’t call them off.”

“What are they doing now?”

“They’re checking you out.”

“Any prediction about what their conclusion will be?”

“Again,” he says, “it depends.”

“On what?”

He stares at me. “On what you’ve done.”

“What’s your instinct?”

“These guys are pros. They’ll put this together in their sleep. They’ll take just enough time to be certain.” He takes a breath. “Then, Kelly goes for sure. I tried to tell them that you couldn’t have been involved. They’ll spend a little while thinking about that.”

“And then?”

“And then I figure you go too.”

“Unless?”

He shrugs. “Unless you’re gone to somewhere they can’t find you.”

“Or they aren’t good enough,” Kelly says.

“They’re good enough,” Dexter tells him.

“Wilton wasn’t.”

We are silent for a while.

Dexter says, “I’ll try to warn you.”

“Why would you do that?” Kelly says.

Dexter jerks his head at me. “He’s my friend. It isn’t fair for him to get burned just because of the company he keeps.”

“You’re so sure it was me?”

“Sure enough.”

Kelly smiles. “Then how do you know I won’t do you too?”

“Because I’m your early-warning system.”

“How can you warn us when you don’t know where they are?”

“They still check in.” He frowns. “That reminds me — how’d you get past the alarm?”

Kelly’s smile widens. “I think you may need a new one,” he says.

Heather comes out of the dressing room wearing blue jeans made from some kind of stretch material. She lifts the bottom of her sweater, showing a narrow strip of belly. The jeans ride low on her hips.

“What do you think?” she says.

“Great,” I say.

“That’s what you always say.”

“I always mean it.”

She examines herself in a long mirror on the wall.

“I like them,” she says. “You can wear them with a blouse. You can wear them with a halter.”

“You’re sexy,” I tell her.

She turns her head toward me and smiles. “You’re sweet.”

The walls of the store are lined with light brown shelves. Most of the shelves hold scented candles and kitchenware and lamps with rice-paper shades. The shelves in back hold thirty-dollar T-shirts.

Heather walks to the narrow doorframe of the dressing room and leans her head inside. She pulls her head out and says, “Still empty.”

She takes my hand and leads me into a pine-smelling corridor lined with stalls. The door of one of the stalls is hanging open and Heather pulls me inside. She closes the door behind us and throws the bolt. Her jacket is lying on the gray bench in the corner. Her shoes are on the floor under the bench. Each wall, including the back of the door, is completely covered by a mirror. The mirrors reflect each other’s reflections. We are surrounded by infinite versions of ourselves that extend as far as we can see in every direction. We can see ourselves from every angle.

Heather runs her tongue along the edge of my car. She puts her palm between my legs. I feel myself stirring against the zipper of my pants. I grip her shoulders and gently push her away. She frowns at me.

I say, “I’m sorry if my behavior has been strange lately.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

“Work?”

“Not really. I’ve been dealing with some personal issues.”

She presses me down onto the gray bench and sits across my knees with her arms around my neck. “Like what?” she says.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been working on my development.”

“As a person?”

“Sort of.”

She strokes my hair. “I want to get married.”

“I know. You told me after our third date.”

“I mean I want to get married soon. I want to take care of you. I want you to take care of me.”

“I don’t have anything,” I tell her. “At least let’s wait and see what happens with the company.”

“I don’t like waiting. Besides, my father is practically made of money.”

“I don’t want your father to take care of us.”

“No,” she says, “neither do I.”

Kelly’s sketch has wide eyes and too much nose. Mine is a cross between Errol Flynn without the mustache and Paul Bunyan without the beard. The sketches are superimposed side by side on the blue-sky background behind the pretty blond anchorwoman with the stock ticker flowing beneath her.

We are sitting on the sofa in our living room.

Kelly says, “I don’t like her as much on the HDTV. She wears too much makeup.”

“Everyone wears makeup on television.”

“She has bumps on her face. She looks like a pickle.”

The anchor is talking to a brunette with thin lips who is standing in front of the Ritz in the rain, looking concerned. The anchor also looks concerned.

I say, “Aren’t you a little bit worried?”

“About the sketches? You can’t tell it’s us unless you know what you’re looking for. Even then, they’re kind of a stretch. They made me look like Groucho, for Chrissake.”

“Maybe we ought to lay low. Get out of the apartment. Something.”

“Forget it. Those pictures could be almost anybody. The cops aren’t gonna find us with these descriptions unless they’re already onto us.”

“And what about Dexter’s boys?”

“The Jamaicans?”

“How do you know they’re Jamaicans?”

He shrugs. “Wilton was.”

“Fine, then,” I say. “What about the Jamaicans?”

He sighs. “The important thing is for us to stay on mission.”

“On mission?”

“Heather’s old man.”

“Are you serious?”

“We have to finish what we started.”

The back of my neck is hot. “I’m not sure about that.”

“You don’t have to be sure. I’m telling you it’s going to be done.”

“I think I may have made some kind of mistake.”

“Trust me,” Kelly says. “This is best for everybody. This is what you said you wanted.”

“I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Kelly nods.

The sketches are gone. The anchorwoman is smiling now.

Kelly stands up from the couch and walks to the door.

“Where are you going?” I say.

He opens the door and walks into the hallway. I listen to the door click shut behind him. I turn back to the television.

When the phone rings an hour later, I pick it up immediately. “Kel?” I say.

There is no answer.

“Where are you?” I say.

I hear the ticking of the open line.

I say, “Just come back and we can talk about it.”

I hold the receiver against my ear and listen to buzzing static and then Dexter’s voice says, “They’re coming.”

Part Three: Climax

“You don’t look good,” my boss says.

“I had to get a hotel room last night.”

He half-smiles. “You have a fight with your boyfriend?”

“We’re having some work done,” I say.

We are looking out the big window of the Credit Suisse luxury box at the Fleet Center, squinting at tiny players on a tiny floor hundreds of feet below us. It is almost impossible to tell what they are doing. When we want to see the game, we watch wide-screen televisions in the corners of the room.

My boss says, “I was trying to reach you. I called the cell phone.”

“It didn’t get reception in the hotel.”

“You need to be available to me twenty-four hours. Where’s Princess Grace?”

“He’s not here?”

My boss shakes his head. “If you two want a job where you don’t have to come in on Sundays, go work at the post office.”

“I am in,” I say.

A young trader is screaming at one of the televisions. His friends sit in front of the television in leather armchairs, Frisbeeing paper plates at the screen.

My boss says, “Any of these guys would kill for your job.”

The skin on my face feels very light. “So would I.”

I imagine throwing my boss through the tinted window and watching him plummet into the middle of the court. I can see the stain of him spreading on the bleached wood.

My boss says, “Let’s sec some of that.”

I pull my gun from inside my coat and touch the barrel to his eyebrow. “Open your mouth,” I say.

“What?”

I hit him in the forehead with the side of the gun. He steps back. Blood trickles down his face.

“Get on your knees,” I say.

He does.

“Open your mouth.”

The traders have stopped making noise. I know that people around the room are looking at us. No one moves. My boss opens his mouth.

“Wider,” I say.

I shove my gun deep into his mouth. It clatters against his teeth.

I say, “You’re going to have to learn how to treat people.”

He nods. He is shivering.

I say loudly. “You’re a ridiculous man. You don’t even understand your job. I don’t know who put you in charge. I’m younger than you. I’m better than you. I don’t even need this gun. I could kill you with my hands.”

A dark patch has appeared on my boss’s light gray trousers. There are tears running down his face.

I say, “You don’t have the balls for this kind of work.”

I take my gun out of his mouth.

Everyone stares at me uncertainly. A few of the traders applaud.

“Thank you,” I say.

My boss is slumped on the floor, moaning. I smile at the room. I put my gun away and give one last wave and then walk quickly to the door.

I say, “If I see this door open while I’m still in the hallway. I’m going to come back and choose two of you at random and shoot you in the balls.”

When the elevator opens, it is full of security guards. They have their guns drawn.

I say, “There’s some maniac in there with a gun. He has baggies of nitroglycerin taped all over his body. He said he would detonate if he heard anyone trying to come in. If you shoot him, the whole place might go up. Can you imagine what that would be like? You’d spend days sifting through body parts. You’d have to make piles of limbs. Can you imagine an enormous pile of severed arms?”

One of the security guards says, “Get behind us.”

They push past me and fan out around the entrance to the luxury box. One of them puts a finger to his lips and leans his ear against the door.

I step inside their elevator and press Lobby.

Standing on the sidewalk next to the Fleet Center, listening to the sirens approaching, I take out my cell phone and call Heather.

I say, “How soon can you be at South Station?”

“Is this a joke?” she says.

“It’s not a joke. I’m leaving. Will you go with me?”

“Yes.”

I cross Causeway Street. “How soon?”

“Do I have time to pack?”

“No.”

“Half hour,” she says.

I push the End button and put the phone back in my pocket and look over my shoulder at the Fleet Center and at the squad cars pulling up in front and that is when I see the Jamaicans.

They are on the other side of the street, half a block behind me, watching the cops pile out of their cars. One of the Jamaicans is tall and wide. The other is the one who frisked us at the barbershop. They are moving at the same speed I am. They turn away from the cops and toward me and I snap my head back around, but I am almost certain they saw me see them. I keep walking, sweat dripping down my back, feeling them behind me.

I cross Merrimac Street.

I glance over my shoulder. The Jamaicans are still matching their speed to mine. They are maintaining the same distance.

At Cambridge Street, I reach the corner just as the DOn’t WALK sign stops blinking and I slow down and almost stop and then suddenly I dash into the street and hear squealing brakes and slide over the hood of a moving taxi and hear horns screaming behind me and then I am on the other side, running.

Heather’s father stands up to meet me. His office is lined with black shelves that hold crystal eggs and lacquered cigar boxes.

“How did you know I’d be here?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Oh.” I run my tongue along the backs of my teeth. “Heather must have told me.”

He looks at me. “Must have,” he says.

I take a deep breath. “I need your help.” I glance out the window. “By the flower cart.”

Heather’s father walks to the window and gazes down at the street. “Who are they?” he says.

“I don’t know exactly.”

“They’re pros.”

“Yes.”

“How’d you make them?”

“I don’t know. They just sort of appeared across the street from me.”

“I mean, how’d they let you see them?”

“I was looking for them. I knew they were coming.”

He shakes his head. “Shouldn’t matter.”

“But why would they want me to spot them?”

He shrugs. “Maybe they wanted to see whether you’d run. Maybe they figure only a guilty man runs.”

We are silent for a while.

Seven stories below us, the big Jamaican crosses the street and walks along the sidewalk and around the far side of the building.

“Why don’t they follow me in?” I say.

“They don’t know which floor you’re on. Also, they’d be worried about the building’s security force. And they don’t want to trap themselves in case things go south. If they take you in the open, they have escape routes and it’s easier for them to avoid the cops. They’ll cover the exits and wait to reacquire.”

“You learned all this in Vietnam?”

“It’s textbook,” he says. He lifts his telephone receiver.

“What are you doing?”

“Cops.”

I shake my head.

He puts down the receiver. “Sounds like you have something to tell me.”

I don’t say anything.

He steps away from the window and takes his key ring from his pants pocket and unlocks the top drawer of his desk. He brings out a heavy automatic. He pulls back on the slide and checks the cylinder.

“You keep it loaded?” I say.

“Doesn’t do much good when it’s not.” He puts the gun in the waistband of his pants. “You carrying?”

I show him the pistol inside my jacket.

“You any good with that?”

I shrug.

“Who put these guys on you?”

I shrug again.

“This have anything to do with that fairy you hang around with?”

“You mean Kelly?”

“How many fairies you know?”

“But Kelly’s just cool.”

He snorts. “For a catamite.”

“No,” I say. “It’s his job. Kelly sells cool. I sell cheekbones.”

He looks at me. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t much care. All I want to know is why there are two hard guys waiting for you outside my building.”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“Give me the broad strokes.”

“They think Kelly took out a friend of theirs.”

“Did he?”

I stare at him.

Heather’s father nods. “I guess that’s not too surprising.”

“Will you help me?”

He frowns. “You ever do any wet work?”

I take a breath. “Not really.”

“Stay close to me. When it happens, hold low and put your man down. Nothing fancy. Keep shooting until he drops.”

I am having trouble breathing. “Are we going now?”

He shakes his head. “We’ll wait until the game breaks. The more confusion, the better.”

When it’s time. Heather’s father says, “Get yourself frosty. They won’t go easy.”

“You can tell that by watching them stand on a street corner?”

“That’s right,” he says. He taps his middle finger against the handle of the gun in his waistband. “Let’s go have a little roughhouse.”

In the lobby we fall in step with a group of gray-suited corporate lawyers and pass with them through the enormous revolving door. Outside, the street is seething. The sidewalk in front of us is a sea of bobbing heads. We move with the crowd.

I am peering over the people around me, watching the Jamaican leaning against his flower cart on the opposite sidewalk. He is staring into the crowd, trying to keep sight of the door. Heather’s father is directly in front of me, crouched slightly, also watching the Jamaican.

Heather’s father glances at me over his shoulder. He says, “Cross at the corner. We’ll take him as soon as we hit the other side.”

I nod. Everything seems far away. I no longer feel shoulders jostling against mine. I no longer feel feet scraping the backs of my heels.

I imagine what would happen if a V-shaped flight of F-4S passed over us and dropped flaming orange sheets of napalm. I see the commuters around me turn black in the heat. I see their melting faces. I imagine an earthquake in which the skyscrapers above us disintegrate into a concrete avalanche. I imagine a world without skyscrapers where we would huddle close together and wait for lions or saber-toothed cats to charge us from the underbrush. We would scatter, lungs burning, tingling-hot all over from the adrenaline burst, and the lions would go after the youngest or the sickest or the weakest and they would bring him down with airborne strikes that break his legs and they would rip him apart.

I imagine meteor showers.

We are almost to the corner when I see Kelly. He is in a second-story window across the street. I do not see his rifle. He nods to me.

I lean toward Heather’s father. “We may have a problem,” I say.

“You mean your boy in the window?” he says. He does not turn around.

“You saw him.”

“When we got out here.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t know it was an issue.”

“He may not be a friendly,” I say.

“Is he a hostile?”

“Possibly.”

He turns his head now. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

We have reached the corner.

I say, “I believe there’s been a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”

“Leading to what?”

“Kelly is probably going to try to kill you.”

He stares at me. “Why would he do that?”

I don’t say anything.

Heather’s father says, “Because you told him to?”

The light changes and we begin moving across the street.

“I’ve recently come to reexamine some things,” I say.

When Kelly appears next to me, Heather’s father is still on his knees. The smaller Jamaican is lying next to the flower cart. There is a hole in the center of his face. His cheeks are caved in toward it. The big Jamaican is on the ground next to us. On the ground next to him are the white and gray and blue-veined coils of his guts. He has been cut nearly in half by the exit wound from Kelly’s hollow-point. His face is smooth and unmarked. His eyes are wide open.

Kelly says, “Let’s get what we came for.”

“I don’t think this is what Heather wants.”

“Sure it is. You said so.”

“I know that. I think I made it up.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yes,” I say.

He shrugs. “I suppose it doesn’t much matter. It was never really about her.”

“What was it about?”

“Getting back to nature.”

Heather’s father says, “You don’t have to do this.”

Kelly draws his pistol. “Don’t flatter yourself. It was never really about you either.”

I say, “You’ve already made your progress. You don’t need this.”

“We need to finish what we started.”

I shake my head. “You’re being too literal.”

“It’s what separates us from the animals.”

“I thought what separated us from the animals was that we know we’re going to die.”

“What separates us from the animals,” he says, “is our ability to ask what separates us from the animals.” He aims his pistol. Heather’s father closes his eyes. “The danger,” Kelly says, “is to become all talk and no action.”

I close my eyes before I lire — holding low, squeezing-not-pulling — so I do not see Kelly’s face when the bullet hits him. I imagine him looking at me with enormous, shocked eyes and reaching out his hand and taking a shaky step toward me and I fire again and again with my eyes closed until I hear his body fall.

He is still alive. He sounds like he is trying to clear his throat. I imagine the way he looks on the ground, flopping like a landed fish, drowning in the air.

I turn away before I open my eyes.

Heather’s father is leaning against me. We are shuffling along Purchase Street, trying to seem casual. I have draped my jacket over him to hide his shoulder. Taking the jacket off revealed my gun harness, so I unstrapped it and threw it in a garbage can on Federal Street. I have the pistol in my pants pocket.

There are sirens everywhere now. The cruisers are stuck in the traffic from the Central Artery construction site. The sidewalk is full of people who do not know what has happened. We are lost in the crowd again.

Heather’s father drags himself along, stepping as lightly as he can so as not to jostle his shoulder. We do not speak.

Heather is sitting in her Mercedes with the line of taxis in front of South Station.

She says, “Get in.”

I open the back door and help her father inside and slide in next to him. Heather pulls away from the curb.

Her father says, “Where are we going?”

“What is he doing here?” Heather says. “What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s sort of a long story,” I tell her. “We can’t go home.”

“No,” her father agrees.

“We need to get out of the city for a while.”

“What if they shut it down?”

“The whole city?”

“They could.”

“But they don’t even know what to look for. They don’t know what we’re driving.”

“Chancy,” he says.

Heather’s father closes his eyes and leans against the back of the seat. We creep onto the bridge beside the Children’s Museum and sit in the steaming line of stopped cars.

Heather’s father is taking deep breaths.

Heather turns her head toward me. “Do it,” she says.

“Do what?” I say.

“Kill him.”

I feel the inside of the car begin to spin. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

“What’s wrong?” Heather says.

“I thought I imagined it.”

“Imagined what?”

“That you asked for this.”

“Why would you think that? This is what you wanted.”

“Me?”

“You said you wanted to take care of me.”

“I do.”

“Then he’s served his purpose.”

“So he has to die?”

“You want me, you want money. He has both. I want a man who doesn’t ask for everything. I want a man who takes.”

“Are you sure you want this?”

“Really, I want it for you. I want you to feel like you can be the man in my life.”

I rub my neck.

“I’m establishing my independence,” she says.

Heather’s father says, “You must know she’s crazy.” His eyes are still closed.

“Shut up,” Heather says. She turns back to me. “Kill him.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Heather’s father says, “This can’t be the first time you’ve seen it. She used to sprinkle detergent in the birdfeeder.”

“Do it,” Heather tells me, “so we can start our new life.”

Her father says, “She was thirteen the first time she tried to kill me.”

“Why don’t you stake out some territory for yourself?” Heather asks me. “Be a man. Get in the game, for Chrissake. You can’t let people walk all over you. Let’s break free. Let’s set out on our own.”

“Let’s,” I say.

“Do it, then.”

“Why can’t we just leave?”

She says, “We have to cut all our ties.”

Her father says, “In an hour she’ll love me again. She’ll blame you for killing me. Every day you’ll be wondering who she’s going to ask to do you. Indecision, kid. It’s what separates man from the animals.”

“Regret,” I say.

“That too.”

I take a deep breath and unlock my door.

“Where will you go?” Heather says. “I thought you were on the run.”

“I’ll have to think of something.”

“You’re nothing,” she sneers. “You always need someone else to do your work. Maybe I’ll get Kelly to do it. I’m sure he has the balls. Maybe I’ll even throw a little pussy his way.”

“Good luck with that,” I say. “Today we’ve been selecting against silk-suit thrill killers.”

As I am opening the door, I hear Heather say, “I don’t need you anymore.”

“I love you,” her father says. “I want to help you.” His voice cracks.

I close the door and leave them there.

Walking back along the bridge, I imagine the beginning of the universe.