Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

Lawrence Light is no stranger to the world of financial skullduggery that his character Karen Glick tackles in Too Rich To Live and Fear and Greed. As an award-winning reporter covering Wall Street, Larry writes about the world Glick investigates. His real-life experience has given him insider information on the corrupting force of greed. And has given him his own share of enemies along the way.

“The Lamented” takes a slightly different turn as it examines the toll greed can take on the human conscience, even in characters who seem to lack one of their own. When their past pays them a visit, some unsavory individuals discover how easily the line between reality and imagination is blurred. But when all is said and done, payback is as unavoidable as it is deadly.

THE LAMENTED

When the man he’d killed a year ago walked into the bar, Joe Dogan was surprised. So surprised that he fell off his stool.

Dogan lay on his back on the sticky floor, his eyes as rounded as the moon, and mouthed words silently. His glass rolled away from him, trailing bourbon.

Brad Acton, dead a year now, smiled, showing his fine teeth. Brad’s well-cut suit fit just right on his trim, tall body, and his well-cut blond hair flopped just right down his noble forehead. Brad seemed delighted to be here, even though this had to be the seediest bar in Camden, New Jersey, arguably the nation’s seediest city. When he was alive, he had been perpetually delighted, and everyone was delighted by him.

With a smile as bright as the day outside, Brad took a step toward where Dogan lay sprawled.

Dogan managed to make a sound: “Noooooooooooo.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. It must be the booze. A few times before, after tipping too many wet ones, he’d had hallucinations.

Slowly, warily, Dogan opened his eyes. The bar was empty again. The light from the revolving beer sign was the brightest thing in this dark place. It twinkled off the treasury of neatly shelved booze bottles. The afternoon shined beneath the door. The bartender-

Wobbling, Dogan climbed to his feet. He steadied himself with a good, strong grip on the edge of the bar. “I need a drink,” he bellowed.

Where the hell was the bartender? The little weenie had diligently poured his drinks without complaint, even when Dogan drove the two other customers out, threatening to kill them if they didn’t stop yapping about politics.

His.45 lay on the bar. Dogan hefted the gun and admired it in the light from the revolving beer sign. Nice, powerful weapon.

Oh, yeah. The bartender left after Dogan had waved the.45 in his face. Dogan remembered now. Couldn’t the jackass tell that Dogan was only kidding around?

“That’s the gun you killed me with.”

Dogan gulped painfully, as if he were swallowing an entire lemon down his suddenly parched throat. He turned around with elaborate, jaw-clenched care.

“It’s in better shape than you are,” Brad said, pleasantly enough. He stood a mere two feet from Joe. The breezy, confident way Brad acted-this could have been another election campaign stop for him.

Dogan tried to say, “You can’t be here.” Instead, it came out as: “Yaaaacunbur.”

“Why not?” Brad said. “It was a year ago tonight.”

Dogan was breathing at a marathoner’s tempo. He could hear his heart slamming wildly inside his rib cage, as though it wanted to escape.

“Joe, Joe, Joe. What am I going to do with you? That no-show county job that Robert Stagg arranged for you isn’t doing wonders for your character. Drinking in the middle of the day? Your job is supposed to be on the roads. Hard work, but honest work.”

“I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I…”

Brad’s smile grew still more incandescent. “Robert and you and I really must get together. Tonight makes sense. How’s tonight for you?”

He reached out to shake Joe’s hand. Like any masterful politician, Brad was a skillful and eager shaker of hands.

Dogan screamed and backpedaled in panic. He knocked over several barstools and fell hard on his butt. He lost his hold on the gun. It went spinning off on the floor. Making wounded animal noises, Dogan crawled away from the bar. With hands and knees scurrying, he did not dare look back at Brad.

“Robert Stagg only paid you ten thousand to kill me,” Brad said. “I’m worth a lot more than that. Ten thousand? Chicken feed. Too bad the Justice Department is going to bag him. And on a corruption charge, not for my murder. How is that justice?”

Dogan stopped crawling when his head hit the jukebox. Fortunately for him, drink dulled the pain. The collision jolted the juke to life. It played an old Michael Jackson tune, the one with Vincent Price. He slumped against the machine, staring at the fading tattoo that decorated his thick forearm: a heart pierced with an arrow.

Fearfully, Dogan raised his gaze. He brought his fingers, sticky from the filthy floor, to his stubbly cheeks.

Skanky’s Tavern was empty once more.

Dogan clasped the jukebox to get up. He moved unsteadily, whether from the shock or from the bourbon, to the bar. En route, he successfully stooped to collect his.45 from the floor. He knew he had to leave before Brad appeared again. But first-

Dogan trudged behind the bar and hoisted the bourbon bottle. He glugged down torrents of the blessed stuff, burning his gullet and soothing his nerves. The bottle emptied, Dogan threw it against the wall. It shattered satisfyingly.

Checking around for Brad, Dogan stalked-actually weaved-out of Skanky’s. He shoved the.45 into the pocket of his ratty jacket. The early spring sun assaulted his retinas. He stumbled as the pink, purple and green circles swirled. Then they disappeared, and he could see again. With his head tilted back, the first thing he saw was the soaring mass of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge over the wrecked rooftops.

His chin fell to his chest. Two small kids, maybe around nine or ten, were messing with his motorcycle. One had the stones to sit on it, his pipe-stem arms extending to the handlebars. “Vroom, vroom,” he cried with joy as he twisted the throttle in imaginary acceleration.

Dogan pulled out the keys to his Harley, but dropped them on the stained sidewalk. “Get off my damn bike, you little bastards,” he roared at them. Then he slowly reached down for the keys, taking care not to fall over.

“You drunk as a monkey,” shouted the one sitting on the bike. Both kids tittered.

The keys retrieved, Dogan drew himself upright. He didn’t like kids. He didn’t like blacks. The truth was he didn’t like anybody. And he double-disliked anybody messing with his bike. Even Christ himself had no business messing with Joe’s bike. And Christ hadn’t been to Camden in a long while.

Dogan struggled the gun out of his jacket pocket. The sight was caught in some fabric. He ripped it free.

“White man’s packing,” the kid on the bike cried out and he jumped off agilely. Laughing, the two of them ran away.

Stewed as he was, Dogan realized he shouldn’t be brandishing his weapon on the street. Not for fear of cops, who were as scarce as a brontosaurus in the fossilized ruins of Camden. This neighborhood, Dogan knew, was Mister Man’s turf, called H Town, for heroin. To the north was Dope City and to the south was Crackville. But in this swath of Camden, Mister Man was the absolute ruler, his power akin to Kim Jong-Il’s. In H Town, no one pulled out a piece unless Mister Man okayed it. Mister Man had the monopoly on firepower here. Dogan stuffed his.45 back into his pocket and jerkily mounted his bike.

He kick-started the Harley Night Rod into life. In a flash of chrome, he sped his 7,000 r.p.m. screamer through the rutted roads of H Town, past the unending series of boarded-up, graffiti-marred row houses and stores, past the dry fire hydrants, past the dead streetlamps. He headed for Wilson Boulevard, where he could open her up. If a cop stopped him, he had the juice to skip away free. Robert Stagg would ensure that.

What Joe Dogan needed was wind through his hair. What he needed was to wipe out the daytime nightmare of Brad Acton, dead a year now.

The memorial ceremony for Brad Acton droned on ad nauseam. The marbled, colonnaded lobby of the county courthouse overflowed with worshippers, recalling how their beloved Brad had been snatched from them a year ago today. The courthouse sat on Market Street, a drab strip of bail-bond offices and pawnbroker shops. It was the largest employer in Camden; make that the largest legitimate employer. A concrete, Depression-era monument to the futility of government to bring about a civil society in Camden, the courthouse was festooned with too many blown-up photos of the late, great Brad.

Robert Stagg, a high-level county official, sat in the front row and suffered through the sentimental twaddle about the “historic Acton legacy.” Both New Jersey U.S. senators and the governor were on hand. Up at the podium was that moron Denny Shaughnessy, blathering about how Brad was “the best freeholder this county has ever seen.” A few seats down from Stagg was Denny’s wife, crying bitterly. Brad had been screwing her for years.

“Brad would’ve been our next congressman from the First District,” Denny was saying. “Then a year ago, at midnight, some son of a bitch gunned him down. On his own doorstep. In Haddonfield, for God’s sake.” Denny, a fellow freeholder from the suburbs, was offended that a crime would occur in wealthy Haddonfield. Violence was too gauche to be permitted there. It was as if Haddonfield had become Camden.

To Stagg’s right was Brad’s widow, who still looked great if you didn’t look closely. She wore a Donna Karan suit that needed dry cleaning. Her knees were spread like a schoolgirl’s. She chewed her brunette hair.

Everyone had been dismayed that Stagg had married Diana Acton, so soon after Brad’s death. But since Brad’s murder had devastated her, they got used to the idea.

“Take me home, Robert,” Diana said in that little-girl’s voice she had adopted lately. “This is all stupid.”

“If they ever find the coward who murdered Brad,” Denny ranted, “I want him to swing from the highest tree.”

“This will be over in a moment,” Stagg whispered to his wife, containing his exasperation at her, at Denny, at the whole idiotic ceremony. He wanted it to be over, too.

“There’s no need for it,” Diana went on. Stagg shushed her gently. He had always treated her gently, even when he shouldn’t.

“I played football at Haddonfield High with Brad, and thanks to him, we won the state championship two years in a row,” Denny said, calming down some.

With rancor, Stagg recalled his service as team manager, when he waited on Brad like a servant, when he was the target of the team’s jokes and pranks, when even Brad called him “Stagg the Bag” for his shapeless body.

“Once Brad became a freeholder, he started to turn around our county seat,” Denny said. “If he’d lived, Camden would be cleaned up. Brad always kept a promise.”

The county’s white, bucolic suburbs surrounding Camden pretended to be impressed by that pledge, Stagg remembered ruefully. The truth was the wealthy suburbanites didn’t care about blighted inner-city Camden, the county’s shameful dark heart, a drug-ridden, gang-run hell. When Brad agreed to back Stagg for the Board of Freeholders, the county’s governing body, Stagg bravely said he’d campaign on resurrecting the city of Camden, too. Brad told him not to bother; he had that covered.

So Denny Shaughnessy nattered away, Sheila Shaughnessy sobbed and Diana Acton-she insisted on keeping the name from her first marriage-twiddled her thumbs in her lap. Robert Stagg wished she had taken a bigger dose of Halcion.

His attention wandered around the lobby, transformed nauseatingly into the Saint Brad Cathedral. He knew almost everyone in the crowd. And he liked that they gazed at him with respect, much as they had with Brad. He had been asked to speak, of course, yet had demurred out of concern for Diana. He needed to be at her side constantly.

Stagg’s eyes bugged out.

There. In the crowd, by the elevators. Standing tall. The blond hair over his forehead. Smiling as if every day was his birthday. Staring at Stagg.

Stagg whimpered involuntarily.

“What’s wrong, Freeholder Stagg?” asked Jimmy Sparacino, the Democratic Party’s county chairman, who sat to Stagg’s left.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing.” The vision of Brad had vanished in the throng.

“I wish you’d spoken today,” Sparacino whispered. “You were Brad’s best friend. I understand about poor Diana, but…”

Sparacino liked to refer to Brad’s widow as “poor Diana.” Luckily for her new husband, Diana was far from poor. She had inherited a load from her rich family, and Brad’s fortune had passed to her, also. Now it was Stagg’s.

Stagg thanked the chairman for his concern. “This is a rough day for her,” he said in a low voice she couldn’t hear. “All the memories rushing back-it’s hard to handle.”

When Brad chose Stagg to run, Sparacino had objected, saying, “Stagg’s fat, he’s bald, he’s ugly. The only reason to vote for him is he’s your gofer.” Since Brad’s death, Sparacino had changed his mind and come to value Stagg’s brains. As he should, having none himself.

At long, painful last, the ceremony ended. The dignitaries stood up to greet, gab and guffaw. Smiling is to politics what dribbling is to basketball. But Stagg wasn’t in the mood to play the game today. He took Diana’s arm and led her out.

He passed the U.S. Attorney, Javers, who was flanked by his young Dobermans in their Brooks Brothers suits. They regarded Stagg hungrily. “We’ll see you tomorrow morning at nine, Freeholder Stagg,” Javers said from somewhere above his bow tie. “Sharp.”

Stagg couldn’t meet the man’s eyes and instead looked to the side, toward the crowd. “Talk to my lawyer, Mr. Javers, not me.”

As they reached the crowded door, Diana said, in her nursery school cadences, “What did that mean-looking man in the bow tie want?”

“Some nonsense Justice Department fishing expedition about the widening of Salem Turnpike in Lindenwold. I pushed it through the board.” Stagg didn’t mention to her that the road project benefited a monster shopping mall that went in a year later. Or let on who owned the mall.

Diana walked like her old regal self. Perfect posture, proud stride. Too bad she didn’t talk like her old self. “The ceremony was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Whatever you say, Diana.” In fact, this was Diana’s only sensible utterance in a long time. “I know this was difficult for you.”

“It’s stupid because Brad is alive.”

“Alive?”

Her laugh was one he’d never heard before, almost like a crow’s cawing. “He was here today. I talked to him. Why have a memorial ceremony when he’s alive?”

Stagg grimaced. “You’re mistaken, Diana. I myself saw someone in the crowd who looked a lot like Brad. But Brad is dead. We’re all on edge today.”

As they reached Stagg’s Volvo, parked in his designated spot, his cell phone rang. The display read Homey the Clown. He groaned and flipped it open. “Freeholder Stagg,” he said, full of entitlement and self-assurance.

“Brad’s come back for me,” Diana said, getting into the car.

A Barry White-deep voice came on the line. “Hello, neighbor.” The gangster got a kick out of his recent move to a Haddonfield mansion from his old Camden row house. “Are we good for tomorrow? Or are we bad?”

The confidence in Stagg’s voice faltered. “The U.S. Attorney has nothing to link you and me and Salem Turnpike. This is a crock. Javers can’t-”

“Enough, neighbor,” Mister Man said. “I be checking, is all.”

“While you’re at it, check where my money is. My banker in Luxembourg says not one red cent has arrived this month from you.”

Like Brad, Mister Man was ruffled by nothing and no one. “Always with you and the money. Brad Acton never mentioned the money. He had class up the ass. Neighbor, you not just a freeholder. You a freeloader.”

“Well said. Brad the classy guy. What an original viewpoint. Now if that will be all, I need to take my wife…”

“I got me another reason to call. We got us a problem.”

“Where’s Brad?” Diana called from the passenger seat.

Stagg sagged. “Oh, no. Now what?”

“That crazy-mother white-trash boy of yours, the one with the no-show job on the county road crew.” The drug lord sounded angry. “That drunken hunk of human garbage named Joe Dogan. He be in one of my bars in H Town today, Skanky’s, pointing his piece at my peeps like he the Frito Bandito. Customers and bartender went running. Then he aimed the gun at two little kids. Can you believe that?”

“Oh, Lord. Not Dogan.” Stagg shook his head. “Fine. I’ll give him hell. Again.”

“I know Dogan took care of our problem with Brad Acton, neighbor. But I am sick of his presence on this earth. I’m not gonna give him hell, I’m gonna send him to hell. I mean, little kids?”

“Do what you want with him. I’m tired of Dogan, too.”

When Stagg settled his copious behind into the driver’s seat, he saw that Diana was smiling and humming.

“I’m glad you’re back in a good mood, Diana.”

“He said he’d come to the house tonight.” Diana’s strange grin widened. “He looks wonderful. Brad is back. I am very, very happy.”

The moon was a tight, white fist overhead. By nightfall, Joe Dogan was getting very frustrated, not to mention very drunk. He sat on a bench in a deserted park by the Cooper River. A full six-pack of beer was beside him, sweating, still cold. The other six-pack was almost gone. Only one can remained in its plastic yoke.

Cursing, he fished his phone out of his pocket, and for the umpteenth time, stabbed redial. He got Stagg’s cell-phone voice mail, as usual. “Call me back, you fat sack of crap,” Dogan snarled. He’d left the identical message the time before, and the time before that.

Stagg had told Dogan never to contact him unless there was an emergency, like the cops asking about Brad Acton’s death, or if Dogan got into a jam that would interest the law. And Dogan was never to go to where Stagg lived. A year ago, that had been in a garden apartment in Cherry Hill. Now, Dogan knew from the scuttlebutt, Stagg lived in Acton ’s palatial house and was married to the widow. What a babe like Diana Acton saw in a piglet like Robert Stagg was beyond Dogan.

“Must have a wart on the end of it,” Dogan muttered as he popped open the last brewski in his first six-pack.

Wait. In his wallet. He had a scrap of paper with Brad Acton’s home phone number. It was unlisted. Stagg had given him the number a year ago, so he could call and be sure Acton was home.

Dinner was a horror show. The latest cook refused to set a place for Brad. When Diana screamed at her-for not whipping up Brad’s favorite dessert, peach cobbler-the woman stormed out.

Stagg tried to settle Diana down in front of the TV in the cinema-large entertainment center. A Discovery Channel show on hunting was playing; a deer fled through the woods with baying hounds in pursuit. But she wouldn’t stop chattering about Brad’s miraculous return to life.

Stagg tried to watch the show. But her comments grew more and more irritating. “Brad was the loveliest man” and “you have no money, really.”

“I make plenty of money.”

“How? All you ever did was puppy-dog behind Brad.” She gave a brittle laugh. “Oh, I know. You are taking bribes. From that gangster who moved to Haddonfield. That’s why the mean man in the bow tie wants to put you in prison.”

Slumping even deeper into the huge, overstuffed chair, Stagg said, “Diana, maybe you should go to bed. Have you taken your meds?”

This behavior was new. She’d been mostly lethargic in recent months. The doctor said to be careful if she became delusional. The risk of suicide was small, but couldn’t be shrugged off. Stagg kept the kitchen knives locked up. Ditto the German Luger, which Brad’s father had brought back from World War II.

“Since Brad is back, we should get our marriage annulled. I can’t be married to you. You aren’t Brad. I only married you because I needed someone to take care of me. But you are nothing.”

“How thoughtful of you to say. I’m going outside.”

“Brad will take care of me again.”

Stagg fetched a large sweater and poured himself a modest measure of Chivas. It was a bit chilly on the patio, but better than listening to her insanity.

He sloshed scotch around in his tumbler, standing next to the empty pool with its dead-leaf-coated bottom. The plastic rope with the floats, which divided the deep end from the shallow, lay coiled on the greening lawn like a dead snake.

Stagg’s memory fell back to high school days. Brad always had a pool party here for the football team. Stagg, as team manager, was also invited. Senior year, to everyone’s delight, Brad and Denny swung little Stagg by his ankles and wrists, and tossed him into the pool. Stagg couldn’t swim. That was even funnier.

The night after that party, Stagg stayed hidden among the trees and spied on Brad and Diana, the virgin queen of Haddonfield High. It was the apex of his life up to then, seeing Brad deflower lovely, naked Diana, poolside.

Another big, world-beating memory: how, tending to the stunned Diana in the wake of Brad’s death, he brought her groceries in on a night as starkly moonlit as this one. How Diana rose from the swimming pool, water glistening on her bare skin, her forty-year-old body as taut as a teenager’s.

How under that hunters’ moon, she had smiled at him. Diana, naked for him. That night was the true apex.

Diana’s shrill cry broke the reverie. She stood in the French doors to the study. “You have a phone call.”

Stagg trundled inside. The landline phone display read Joe Dogan. Wonderful. That dirtbag must have kept the unlisted number from a year ago. “What do you want?”

Diana was climbing the stairs. “I’m tired. Wake me up when Brad comes.”

Dogan had ingested his usual royal portion of spirits. “You gotta help me out.”

Had Dogan heard that he was on Mister Man’s priority boarding list for evacuation from the planet? “I’m getting sick of this, you idiot.”

“You think you’re smarter than everyone,” Dogan slurred. “Well, I’m not the idiot. You’re the idiot.”

“Brilliant comeback,” Stagg said. “Repartee worthy of Dorothy Parker.”

“Never met the bitch,” Dogan said. “We got a problem,”

“We do, huh? Let me guess. You got another drunk-driving arrest on that stupid motorcycle, and I have to fix things with the cops. No, your supervisor on the county road crew called, and you told him you’d kill his children if he didn’t back off. No, you were drunk and groping women at T.G.I. Friday’s happy hour, and one called the cops. I’ve bailed you out so many times for so much asinine behavior that I’m losing track.”

With a moan, Dogan said, “Have you seen him?”

“Who?”

“Brad Acton came to me in a bar in H Town this afternoon. He said he wanted to see us. Both. Tonight.”

Stagg sighed. “My wife had the same hallucination. Her, high on meds. You, high on booze. Astute observers, the two of you.”

“He was real, man. I mean, not like a ghost. I couldn’t, like, see through him.”

“I can see through you. You are a serious alcoholic. Go get dried out.”

“He knew how much you paid me to do him. Plus, the no-show job on the county roads. How could he know that?”

“Because it is in your drink-addled head. Today is the anniversary. It brings back the trauma, makes you imagine things. You don’t have to be Freud to understand that.”

“He knew you are gonna get a barbed-wire enema from the feds. Mister Man pays you off, Stagg. Everybody knows it.”

“You know nothing,” Stagg snarled. “Brad was ten times as dirty as me. He came from family money, but wanted more. He introduced me to Mister Man. Then when Javers came sniffing around, Brad wanted me to be the fall guy. He wanted me to take Mister Man down, too.”

“I remember every minute from a year ago.”

“Meantime, King Brad stays simon-pure. Well, ha-ha, Brad. For the first time in your pampered life, you lost.”

Dogan didn’t seem to be listening anymore. “I tell you, he seemed like flesh and blood. Like you and me. I bet I could put another bullet in him, and that’d be that.”

“Check yourself into rehab, you cretin.”

“I don’t want to face him alone tonight, man.”

Stagg slammed the phone down.

A wind came up and blew about the budding branches of the ghostly trees. Winter and summer warred in the sudden draft off the river, and Dogan shivered. What was he doing sitting here like a frozen pond toad?

Dogan got on his bike and blasted away from the riverfront park. In a jiffy, his Harley’s loud engine was invading the smooth, quiet roads of Haddonfield, Brad Acton’s hometown. In Haddonfield, trees flower first, and their perfume seeped down from the elegant mosaic of branches that covered the old lanes.

The Harley brayed down King’s Highway, the town’s main street, where subtly lit colonial storefronts displayed chic clothing and leather goods. Tomorrow, the slender, blond women of the marvelous men of Haddonfield would float past those storefronts, browsing, blasé.

A year had gone by and beer had fuzzed his thinking, hence Dogan took a while to find Brad Acton’s house. He clattered through the lovely streets until he saw the right landmarks. Left at the three-century-old church, right at the giant white-board mansion, left onto Cypress Avenue.

Front yard carriage lamps shed soft glows on the brick and flagstone walkways flowing from the smooth road to the fine wood doors that guarded the aristocratic stone houses. Through the latticed windows of those handsome homes came the lamplight of the Haddonfield elite, who ran the world.

Acton ’s house, though, lay in darkness. Girded by vigilant firs, watched over by towering oaks, it seemed almost uninhabited. Then Dogan saw the two cars parked to the side: Stagg’s Volvo and Diana Acton’s Jaguar. He killed the bike’s motor and dismounted.

It had been a year ago, around midnight. About now, his watch said.

He couldn’t stand there forever, hypnotized by the house, the night, the clock. Dogan walked cautiously up the sloping, well-barbered lawn, bathed in intense moonglow. The wind, a devilish mix of warm and cold, made small gasps among the trees’ flowers.

A shadow shimmered among the tree trunks. Dogan gave a start and yelped. He yanked his.45 out of his coat pocket, tearing more fabric. “Killed you once, I’ll kill you twice, bastard,” he said through bared teeth.

His gun moved in small semicircles, pointed at where the movement had been, as he marched up the lawn. With his attention fixed on the trees, he missed seeing the ankle-high miniwall bisecting the lawn in front of him. Dogan went down hard, swearing.

Hell, last year, making this same approach, he’d tripped on the miniwall. He had been drunker then, but this couldn’t be a coincidence.

The wind came again, colder now, and enveloped him with a harsh sense of dread. Was he reliving the same night from a year ago?

The castlelike front door loomed in front of him. Dogan punched the doorbell button, and heard sweet chimes inside. As he had a year ago.

He hit the button again. As he had a year ago.

Somehow, he smelled burnt gunpowder. As he had a year ago.

Stagg had clumped wearily up the stairs, left his clothes on the floor of his dressing room and climbed into his pajamas. He heaved into the broad bed, where Diana lay, asleep. Good. No more nonsense from her. He had barely slipped into sleep’s welcome oblivion when the doorbell chimes rang. Repeatedly.

Diana was screaming. “Don’t go down there, Brad. Don’t go.”

He was fully awake. “I’m Robert, dammit.”

Finally, Dogan heard footsteps beyond the door. A muffled voice asked him who he was and what he wanted. Just like a year ago.

He replied the same. “It’s me. Joe Dogan. Robert’s guy. It’s about Mister Man.”

An inside light went on. The bolt slid open. The door swung inward. A man was in the threshold.

Brad Acton stood there, in his nice suit, with his nice hair, smiling. No one could smile like Brad.

Dogan raised the gun and pulled the trigger. The first shot splattered that handsome head. He pumped bullet after bullet into the body, as it lay on the Persian rug.

He stumbled down the lawn. He needed a drink. Was he out of beer?

A Mercedes slid to the curb, beside the parked Harley. A large black man, in a white suit and fedora, climbed out. He glanced at the motorcycle, then spotted Joe Dogan weaving toward him. Joe carried a gun. In the moonlight, Mister Man could see the slide was back and the weapon was empty.

“I’m on my way home and I see that this human garbage has blown into Haddonfield. They don’t allow your punk-ass kind here.”

“I killed Brad again,” Dogan said.

“Do tell. A lotta killing going around.”

Mister Man pulled his Glock out of its shoulder holster and blew a large hole in worthless Joe Dogan’s chest. The fool fell backward onto Brad Acton’s fine lawn and began to bleed on it.

Mister Man turned to his car, then stopped when he glimpsed the silhouette of a man up in the Acton house. A tall man standing in an upstairs window, taking in all that had happened on the moon-bright lawn. A witness.

Was it Stagg? Mister Man had better find out the state of play, before the neighbors called the cops. Of course, the lots here were far apart and the refined folk nearby may not have heard the gunfire. Or if they did hear, they wouldn’t know what it was. This was Haddonfield, not H Town. He had a little time, he figured.

Mister Man loped up the lawn, Glock at the ready. The tall fellow in the window waved. He was blond, well-dressed and familiar. Then he stepped out of sight.

The front door gaped open. Mister Man stepped gingerly inside.

“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

A pajama-clad Robert Stagg lay on the fine carpet, in a lake of blood. His bald head was a mass of goo. Bullet holes riddled his globular body. He was as dead as Camden ’s hopes.

“You can’t come in here. This is Brad Acton’s house.”

A woman’s voice. Mister Man looked up.

Diana Acton, lovely in a diaphanous nightgown, stood in the hall. She held a Luger in a two-handed grip. It was pointed at Mister Man.

He held out a conciliatory hand and advanced toward her, speaking low. “Let’s be cool. I was in business with your husband. Both of them.”

Diana opened fire. Mister Man keeled over and landed on Stagg’s body. The gangster twitched a few times. The blood stained his white suit. Whether it was Stagg’s blood or Mister Man’s own blood was hard to tell. She dropped the gun.

Robert Stagg, Joe Dogan and Mister Man were all dead. Diana was pleased. Brad always kept a promise.

Diana turned. She had heard a voice say her name. “I’m coming, Brad, darling,” she called with a radiant smile. “I’m coming to bed.”

She ran up the stairs.