Our uniforms are not designed for comfort–special Kevlar, too many Velcro pouches of heavy gear–but the worst is the steel collars we wear to avoid getting fanged. It’s like a clerical collar of metal designed to strangle you and cook your neck at the same time. Mine is pitted from all the bites it has deflected. Our ordnance hasn’t changed for about ten years: Ashwood stakes, garlic in aerosol cans, auto-assault rifles packing silvertip slugs with little crosses embossed on each bullet head. The little crosses still work; virtually none of that other religious claptrap even phases your boneyard-variety vamps, these days. Nights.

We haven’t been able to call them “vampires,” legally, ever since Alucard Vs. the State of California, 1995. Turns out they have the rights of normal human beings, so long as they are “provably alive,” and the courts determined that there was really no applicable difference under law between “living” and “living dead.” That damned attorney, whatsisname, Winter, not only got all the appeals by various churches flushed, but showed that sociologically there was no legal distinction between vampires and homeless people. Think about it. In fact, vampires often preyed upon homeless people, putting them sort of on the rung between gangbangers and East LA bartenders. Well, that lawsuit loosed a real shitstorm in the courts. All of a sudden vampires wanted their rights. Their own language had to be legitimized–Nosferatonics. “Sanguinary Parasitism” took its rightful place alongside Creation Science and Scientology. Social Security was damned near busted out flat.

And we went from being heroic, modern-day Van Helsings to just another bludgeoning bully-arm of the LAPD. As you might imagine, the budget for vamp-smashing pales next to the appropriations for what politicians call the “war” on drugs. Cutbacks savaged us. We had to go to silver plating, for the bullets.

Then tabloid TV shows began stalking our stakeouts to document how we abused vamps. Thankfully that amounted to nothing because our supposed “victims” never registered on videotape, and were invisible in the surveillance photos. We were all acquitted.

Finally we had to eat a bushwhack–an officer was ambushed by a crowd of juvenile vamps, drained like a juice-pak and left hanging upside-down with his eyes removed and limbs broken in front of the Hollywood Station. In broad daylight, not to put to o fine an emphasis on how little they respected us. The news treated us fair because the officer had children. The vamps themselves didn’t look old enough to prosecute as adults even though a couple of them were into triple digits. Public sympathy elevated the profile of our unit, and all of a sudden it was payback time.

We nailed an old-schooler–slicked-back hair, opera cape, the works–living, or unliving, inside a junked hearse in the middle of an auto salvage yard. It was amazing how fast he talked once we set fire to him. He gave us the location of the crypt. We gave him the business end of an assault auto and a full magazine of silvertips right in the face. Our first bag of the work day.

Now, inside the crypt, just shy of dinnertime, my partner Naylor levered back the stone lid of a sarcophagus and shined in his worklight. Man, vamp or no, the occupant was drop-dead gorgeous (she had obviously dropped dead that way) and it seemed a pity to mess her up by driving in the stake. But that was our job.

Naylor shifted the lid further back. “Take a look,” he said, and we all moved in.

She had centerfold boobs too big to be real–gravid, too round, enough flat sternum between them to land a small airplane–just like those lesbian vampiresses in Hammer Films’ more lurid Technicolor melodramas. The kind of tits that looked great in repose, or in a still photo; the kind that would hang crookedly like bags of broken glass if she was moved.

Our unit deployed, each selecting a sleeping target. Weirdly, every vamp in this crypt seemed to be a female with inflated breastworks; a kind of adults-only Vampi-rama. Stake-points were positioned and, at my say-so, the mallets would come down in symphonic synchronization, three whacks each.

“Hit it,” I said.

I never saw what became of my teammates.

Upon penetration came the usual chorus of cheating, hellish howling, the smoke of corruption freed, and the steamy fizzing of the bogus human form you expect when the earthly corpus begins to deliquesce. At least, that was how it was supposed to go, and did not. I saw that my stake, which had sunk firmly, was not jutting up and liberating gouts of blood, but had flopped over and was crumbling like a rotten tooth stump. A million miles from my ears, my guys began screaming.

My hands were dissolving. The smoke from burning flesh was my own. When I inhaled, the corrosive steam began to gobble up my lung tissue.

In human beings, the most metabolically user-friendly kind of breast implant is composed of a plastic bag of saline–salt water. Vamps never had to worry about bodily integrity because they just regenerated when damaged. What they had to worry about was sharp wooden objects being driven into their chests. Therefore, to preserve your own existence, those plastic bags hanging off your front could be filled with a bit more bite than saltwater. Something that could eat a wooden stake in half in four seconds, for example.

I grabbed rearward for my gun but my target swept my feet and was on top of me, shrieking, one full breast dangling, its voided partner still sizzling and smoking, its load discharged. She drove down hard from the shoulders, swinging one of my own wooden stakes dead-bang toward my open mouth, and the last thing I learned was a new meaning for the word implant.

Gradually, each street had mutated into a warren of such apartment buildings, chockablock, of equal height, in differing colors, as the few remaining houses were systematically leveraged and eliminated. Generally, anyone could score an equal-opportunity apartment with a splendid bathroom window’s view of someone else’s bathroom window, about ten feet away, on the next lot. Very few houses held out–mostly older residents, subsisting on Social Security, paying low property taxes and seasonally fending off ever-more-lavish offers from the developers who never stop needing to swallow up that last square foot of unexploited ground. Usually the old residents cave in for the money, or die, at which point their heirs cave in for the money. Nail any of their offspring on the street after the realty sign goes up and you’ll usually hear a tale of woe about how they don’t wish to sell but “have to” because of debts, or other responsibilities they’ve averred. It’s not the sale I mind, it’s the attitude. There goes the neighborhood. Then guys like me move in because they can’t afford anything better.

Munster Drive was not a proper drive, more an avenue, named after some forgotten city father or local booster who had no idea his name and memory would be completely overridden by a hysterically bad television show. The residence featuring the garage sale was one of only two bonafide houses left on the block, in an honest-to-cinderblock garage, packed to the rafters with old furniture and dusty cardboard boxes. A vague, antique-shop smell hinted that there was at least one abandoned rodent nest, somewhere way in the back. A terminally bored thirteen-year-old girl was doing her best to beat a Gameboy. She was sitting on a metal folding chair and wearing gigantic shoes with five-inch-thick rubber soles. Her hair was lank and streaky blonde, there was a minor skirmish of microdot pimples on her forehead, and her attitude broadcast that she was dying for some stranger to notice her nipples so she could tear into a him with choice, properly outraged invective. She popped her gum as a way of acknowledging my presence; she was good enough at that skill to produce a sound like a small-caliber gunshot in the confined acoustics of the garage.

“Hi there.”

“Hi.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

She rolled her eyes, stark eyes, the kind of frank brown that look really smart with blonde hair. Was I an idiot? Was she sitting here, obviously under duress and protest, for her health? Couldn’t I read the goddamned sign? She crashed into some sort of scoring crisis on the Gameboy, which began emitting distressing little noises, and gave up on attacking me for ruining her afternoon. She inclined her head to indicate I could enter the musty darkness. “Whatever.” Then she vanished into the game.

Old kitchenware. A blender that would look attractively retro if it were polished and the cord replaced. A crippled rocker, much scarred, probably broken by the growth of one or several kids. Maybe the gum-popper had climbed on this chair as a tot. Maybe she could smile. A vanity with no mirror and a missing drawer was haphazardly piled with books. The books weren’t arranged or turned spine-out so the titles were perceivable; most bargain-hunters who had ventured this deeply into the garage had been more interested in the vanity.

It was a sight you used to see in used book emporiums: Haphazard interbreeds of cheap book club editions and savaged paperbacks; bargain reprints of public domain masterworks in their billionth printing; jacketless hardcovers, runaway library copies, outdated dictionaries, useless travel guides. In every stack, everywhere in the world, at least one copy of last year’s best-selling blockbuster. I picked up one. It was a paperback with a spine four inches thick. It still smelled the way paper mills do, which isn’t pleasant. Some of the older books scattered in front of me smelled differently.

Because certain vintages exude specific bouquets, it is possible to become a connoisseur of books. Foxed paper can possess pedigree. And those hiding, deep within the convolutions of their brains, the secret love, the almost-forbidden passion for books, can sometimes rely on dead reckoning, on the magnetism books provide for those who pause to be attracted. It’s like a spiritual divining rod at the moment it selects a direction. Bingo–a little red paperback spine declared itself to my eye.

It was a copy of a Ray Bradbury book that had come out more than thirty years ago, part of a uniform reissue of Bradbury’s work. Golden Apples of the Sun. It looked like it had survived a bombing. It looked like an orphan. It looked like it wanted to go with me.

Most of my personal library had bitten the street years earlier, in a charming bureaucratic tragedy I like to call the Great Shitcanning. It involved credit card numbers and the storage locker into which I had filed too much of my life for far too long. By the time I learned that the locker was no longer under my name, and its contents had gone for landfill or used-store credit at the hands of employees unknown and untraceable, management of the storage establishment had rotated its usual five or six times and the misdeed was buried in ancient history, which was to say, more than one year ago. Along with my clothes, which had become moth-riddled, and my kitchenware, which had become obsolete, and my desk, which had grown senile from rot, had gone all of my books. I had put them where they could remain safe until I could decide about new living arrangements in another state, and they had been mugged en masse while I was out of reach. To rebuild was impractical, out of the question, absurd. I had already invested effort and love into the books which had died, or been executed, and my heart just wasn’t into the idea of recapture until I opened one of those books at the garage sale and the smell hit me.

The trim edge of the ravaged Bradbury was so soft that it invited my thumb to ruffle the pages. It felt worn-in and comfortable. It appealed directly to the tactile centers of my brain.

“How much for this?” I held up the book.

The young miss squinted sourly at it. “A penny.”

It had to be a trick. “You mean a penny, as in one cent?” I could go on about coppers and Lincoln heads, but that would make me a geek trying lamely to play suave, or worse, a grownup trying to dazzle her.

“You got it.”

“One single penny?”

“Including tax. The whole box cost us like a dollar, so it’s no big.” Her eye lent the book in my hand what I could only call less than half of a once-over.

I guessed she meant a whole box of books, which had found their way to a pile on the vanity back there in the darkness. “God, I don’t even know if I have a penny. People who have to give you four cents in change usually just throw you a nickel.”

“Yep, or you leave ‘em in those little bins by the cash register, you know–if you have one, leave one, and if you need one, take one.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can still buy for a penny.”

“You can buy that book.”

“Sold.” There was exactly one penny among all the change clogging up my pocket. Perhaps it had found its way there for a reason. All my life I have preferred to believe minor superstitions like that, trusting in their reliability and basic harmlessness. I’d picked a penny from the sidewalk just yesterday. Perhaps this one.

She dropped the penny into a bustle of bills and change rattling around inside of a cigar box. I thanked her but she said nothing else.

Back inside my apartment, third floor, with a “balcony” about the size of placemat providing a splendid view of the building across the street, I got myself a drink, sat down with the paperback, and finished reading it cover to cover in less time than it would take to watch a movie. Sometimes, when you’re starving, you eat like a goat.

I work as a traveling senior process engineer for a company you’ve never heard of called CortCom. I work with a lot of people who possess a pile of important physics degrees, and basically we make sure the metal plating process for microchips works the way it’s supposed to. If you’ve ever been near a computer, home or otherwise, CortCom is a big invisible part of your life. Most of the books I see these days are tech manuals, or bindered report folios. Not until I sat down with the paperback from the garage sale did I stop to realize I’d pretty much given up reading for pleasure–with the usual excuses involving too little time and too many things on screens, begging my notice.

This is difficult to explain rationally. I fell into that little book. I was engulfed by it. It was like an old film I’d seen of a writer, actually writing. The film had been digitally enhanced and colorized, but it was clear that it had originally been in black and white, and shot on actual film stock. Someone long ago had decided to make a movie of a writer at work. Big mistake. In nearly ten minutes of footage, the writer types out maybe a single line on his old manual typewriter. The rest of the time, he sits with his back mostly to the camera, staring at a blank sheet of paper rolled into the machine. The fancified version I saw was a download from some now-forgotten website, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was the most boring waste of time I’d ever endured. But it got saved to one of my desktops and eventually I watched it again. And it got more interesting, the more I watched it.

The writer is a guy about 30 (I guess), wearing a white dress shirt several sizes too big, but tucked in and belted as if that was the fashion and not merely a haberdashery mistake. The way the shirt moves and drapes, you can tell it’s hot in the room. The light is a single incandescent bulb in a hooded gooseneck lamp, very noirish, harsh enough to form an occasional hot spot in one corner of the frame. The man is smoking as he works. Rather, he’s not smoking. His cigarette burns in the ashtray the whole time he’s staring at the paper. The man–the writer–gets perhaps one puff off it before it’s dead.

He stares at that empty page, seeing something I cannot. It has absorbed him, and elapsed time means nothing except the slow, sinuous meandering of smoke toward the ceiling. No cursor prompts him. What he does, with little motion, with exacting concentration, is burn up enough energy to pop a sweat on his brow. It’s not just the heat. I can sense the closeness of that room, and wonder where it is, or was. What you might see if you looked out his window.

It’s not a commercial film; no brand names or product placement are visible. If this were done today it would be simple enough to optically insert the right merchandise in the right places, so the idea of this film is not to sell anything. The frame for the image itself referenced an internet link that no longer existed.

There’s a calendar on the wall in front of the writer, to the left, but the data is indistinct. The picture on it was a cityscape at night, too vague for me to tell exactly which city. I blew up the image and tinkered with the playback for clarity, and still couldn’t read the calendar. I sort of began to wish I had that calendar, which you could tell had become like a tiny window for the writer. When he wasn’t gazing into the blank whiteness of the paper, he was looking at the calendar, abstracting into the picture there, maybe imagining himself somewhere else. That was when he took the only useful drag on his smoke. He holds it in a long time, perhaps pretending that the night skyline he sees is right outside his tiny room, maybe trying to pick out stars against the urban upglow. The smoke trails out of him contemplatively. Could be a city he once lived in, or aspired to.

Sometimes I wished, more than anything, that I could read the line this mysterious, unidentified character finally decided to write. That longing, that unexpected and unexplainable emotion, was similar to what I felt not as I was reading the paperback I’d just bought, but after I had finished it. I put it on the mantel for my fake fireplace. It looked absurd, like an armoire holding up a single inadequate book. I returned to the garage sale the next day.

I did not take the book whose blurb proclaimed it to be by the best-selling writer of suspense in all history; I tried later to find that author’s name on a database and all my searches returned zero hits. I wanted the orphans, the obscure and lost books, and eventually selected a weak-spined Book Club edition of a novel titled Mad Horizon, by L. Clark Stevens.

It cost exactly one penny.

The chair was now occupied by a young boy, eleven-ish, who made it abundantly clear that removing his headphones to speak to me was a nuisance.

“Are all the books a penny?”

“I guess.”

“Where’s the girl who was here yesterday?”

“Keisha?”

“Is that her name?”

“What do you want to know for?” He narrowed his eyes; they were the same color as his big sister’s. “She’s probably off getting pregnant or something.”

“Why are the books only a penny?”

“Because that’s what they cost.” He rolled his eyes.

“That’s what they cost you, or that’s what you’re charging for them?”

“Can I help you?” A new voice joined us, in a stern tone that indicated annoyance, possible danger flags, and that help was a dishonest word to use. The woman who interceded had to be the mom; she fulfilled no other stereotype.

“I was just asking your son why the books only cost a penny.”

Now her eyes narrowed. They were algae green, and stormy with suspicion. “What makes you think he’s my son?”

I tried to force a conciliatory smile and it felt like fish-hooks, reeling my lips back, all bloody. “I was just curious about the price.”

Mom held her distance. She had a very militarized concept of personal space. I swore that she was preparing to say, why were you curious, but instead she looked around, as though assuring herself this was no ambush, or a big gag featuring hidden cameras, then spoke more personally, less like a tape cartridge was madly spooling off fight-or-flight responses inside her skull. With a dramatic sigh, she said, “Them books are a penny because Keisha asked me what to charge for them, and I didn’t have no idea so I says, just charge a penny because nobody’ll want them anyway. Hell, I just put them back there to make that vanity look more, you know, attractive.”

“You didn’t think that was a real bargain price?”

She watched me, sidelong, like a creature of cold blood fancying a strike. “No, I didn’t think that,” she said. “Who reads?”

I read Mad Horizon all at once. When I noticed my TV screen was dusty, around midnight, I laughed out loud.

The following day being Monday, the sale signs vanished and the garage was padlocked when I walked past it. On sheer impulse I decided to knock on the door and make a pre-emptive offer to take all the remaining books off Mom’s hands. Through burglary bars, an aluminum-framed door window, a dirty screen, and even dirtier scalloped drapes, I saw the kid from the previous day recognize me. Instead of answering the door he ran to fetch Mom. She stayed fortressed inside even though she recognized me, too.

“Now, what could you possibly want?”

“I thought I’d stop by and ask about the rest of those books in the garage. If it’s not any trouble–”

She overrode me. “Mister, don’t come around here. I ain’t got the time and I don’t want to talk to you.” Her eyes were distressed, as though the world had horsewhipped her one time beyond the day’s limit, or perhaps she had merely lost the remote control to her TV. She wheeled and stomped off as though I was a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s the kind of rude you expect in the city.

The boy was watching me from a side window. When I turned to look back at him, he vanished behind Venetian blinds. When I had walked to the entryway of my building, I glanced back and caught him standing on the sidewalk, still staring. He lit into his house.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I could catch him or the girl, Keisha, outdoors and out from under Mom’s fascist umbrella of influence. Most likely, the entire remaining pile of books could be obtained for free, or a pittance.

I did some work at the desk but my heart wasn’t really in it. The little icon for the strange playback of the writer, writing, beckoned. I decided to re-read a little of the Bradbury when I was buzzed from downstairs by someone identifying himself as Detective Weinstein, who showed up at my door moments later in the company of a uniformed officer. He asked if I’d mind a brief interview.

All of this struck me as weirdly, unnecessarily formal. Every cop in the city possessed a code card that would grant them instant access to buildings like mine, and since all the gun control hysteria the police had rarely had to ask permission to do anything. The first place I had ever seen cops wearing the exterior body armor–that is, outside the blouses–had been in Mexico City, but it was a fashion the LAPD was born to love. The armor came with all sorts of rigid little nylon pockets and tabs and slots for pens and cuffs and a special badge-mount and snaps to support the standard-issue sidearm belt, which pulled a lot of weight off the policeman’s waist.

Detective Weinstein’s gaze went directly to the paperback in my hand. “Doing a bit of reading?”

I shrugged. “That’s not a crime, yet, right?” I forgot, as most thoughtless people do, that levity with the police is always a rotten idea.

“Lady up the street says her daughter is missing.”

“Would that be a girl named Keisha?”

“Now, how would you know that? The mother gave her name as Victoria Jasmine Marina Wilson.”

“The girl told me her name was Keisha.”

Weinstein strolled over to my so-called balcony, leaned out, and pointed. “See that house?”

It was the garage sale house. “Is that where Mrs. Wilson lives? I didn’t know her name.”

“She sure seems to know you.”

“I don’t see how. Other than being amazingly rude to me.”

“Mrs. Wilson thinks that you may know something about the disappearance of her daughter. She directed us to this address.”

With the help of her piggy-eyed son, I thought.

The officer, whose nameplate read Sternberg, held up the copy of Mad Horizon from my fake fireplace mantel. “Here’s another one.”

“Video it,” said Weinstein. He pointed to the book in my hand. “This, too.” Sternberg recorded images with a little hand-held camera. Weinstein squinted at the cover illustration. “Guy looks like the Devil. And what’s Mad Horizon? Sure doesn’t sound like a bestseller.”

“You actually read this shit?” said Sternberg, replacing the other book as though it might have slimed his glove.

The need to be alone, and free of these two, rocked me like the wave of disorientation that slaps a drunk who tries to stand after one too many. No sane person wants the scrutiny of the police on them for any reason. I tried to steer this abrupt little nightmare back toward rational thought. “Okay, let me just get this in focus: Mrs. Wilson finds her daughter has taken off and she aims you guys at me.”

“You were seen talking to the daughter day before yesterday. You returned the following day, and again this afternoon. Why?”

“I got these books at a garage sale at that very house. I went back to see if I could get the rest of the books since the sale was only over the weekend.”

“You went there three days in a row to get books, and you didn’t even know which books?” The acid in his tone could have dissolved a tooth in a glass, overnight. “Pardon me if I say that sounds incredibly lame.” To Sternberg, he said, “Did you see any books at Mrs. Wilson’s?”

“No sir.”

“They’re in the garage,” I said.

“We looked in the garage,” Weinstein came back. “Zero books.”

“Well, then, she got rid of whatever didn’t sell.”

“Got rid of them how? Books like these, nobody would buy, so how come we didn’t find them in the garage, as you say?”

This was getting frustrating on a level that transcended mere aggravation. “Are you looking for books, or for Keisha?”

“Why do you keep calling her that?”

“Because that’s what she told me her name was.”

“You two seem to have had quite an intimate little conversation. Did you touch her or initiate any form of improper physical contact?”

“No, I–”

“Did you proposition her or make any sort of lewd commentary?”

Sternberg muttered into the mike Velcroed to his shoulder and came back with, “Couple of jaywalking pops, one arrest when he couldn’t produce proper ID.” I realized he was talking about my record.

“Look, I don’t know what this crazy woman told you, but I saw the girl once. I bought this book. The next day her brother mentioned that ‘maybe she went off to get pregnant or something.’”

“That’s a peculiar thing to remember.”

“That’s why I remembered it.”

“Sure it’s not like a fantasy you had, about getting her pregnant, maybe?”

“You’re the one having the fantasy,” I said, forgetting that where humor is a bad idea, sarcasm is a catastrophe.

Weinstein’s eyes went flat and metallic. “You better watch your fucking mouth.”

“Sir,” Sternberg said. “Better have a look at this.” He was standing next to my computer. He had already clicked on the little image of the writer, writing. I kept my lip zipped with the expected line about private papers; Weinstein would no doubt ask, what papers?

Instead he just stared as though witnessing a live donkey act. “Now what the hell is this supposed to mean?” He swiveled his scorn toward me. “What, do you jerk off to this?”

Sternberg held up one of my business cards. “He’s some kind of tech guy.”

“Oh, outstanding.” Weinstein rolled his eyes. “Some internet pervert. Here we got a local weirdo with a clear view of the subject residence, ritually repeated contact at the same time every day, a house full of books and some sick shit on the computer. Log it as a speed bench warrant and search this dump and I bet you find a pair of binoculars and some porno.” He dropped both the books from the garage sale into a plastic evidence bag whipped from of some inner pocket, like a magic handkerchief.

Sternberg collected my wrists and I heard cuffs jangle. Brusquely.

“You get to take a ride with us,” said Weinstein. “Seem more like a fantasy, now? You’re not going to make any more comments about how you know your rights, or how you pay my salary?”

When the cuffs were snapped, I knew what I thought, and what I might have said.

“Want to know what part of your story sucks?” Weinstein continued as I was hauled away, and people who I didn’t really know poked out their heads to watch, most with relief. “That crap about your going back to buy books, not bestsellers. Nobody actually reads those other things, anymore.”

They held me for three days and finally had to release me when Keisha turned up as a runaway. Needless to say, my “evidence” was never returned, and I was sprung on my own recognizance, which means probation, which means doing the egg-walk. You can still find books if you’re willing to look for them–”books” being different from “bestsellers,” as Weinstein pointed out–and are prepared to weather the social stigma of actually possessing them. It’s like smoking used to be. It was bad for you, but people did it anyway until it became illegal, and they still kept lighting up after that, but fewer and fewer. That’s evolution.

Preparing to open another crumbling book, from a disreputable source, will make me feel like I’m igniting something that will kill me. But I’ll probably open it anyway, wondering who is watching me as I do it. At the computer I try to diarize my feelings into words that peter out after a single, pathetic line:

How much longer before what I’m doing evolves from misdemeanor to felony?

And before I slink back to my reading, I stare at the blank wall of my apartment, visualizing the anonymous cityscape, trying to see the stars.

He reminded himself to ask for more money. After careful consideration, Abel Swift adjudged that he had done no more wrong in his life than the average, basically good man. His flaws were forgivable; his transgressions, minor. He constantly strove to take stock of himself, subjecting his life to microscopic scrutiny, and this bargain-basement therapy spilled over into his prayers, every night.

“Oh Lord, I know you’re a kind and tolerant God, so I am hoping that you will understand about Lizbeth. I am not a violent man, Lord, you have seen that, because you see and know everything, but sometimes the Devil tries to get at me through that bottle, and sometimes I have what you’d call that moment of weakness, like I had tonight, and I swear to you that I never meant to hit her, not hard at least, and it was ole Satan himself who raised my hand in anger, because if it had been me I only woulda hit her once. Once is all Lizbeth ever needs. She’s slow, Lord, and I get frustrated when she can’t track what I am saying. Like how she lets them dishes pile up until they dry and get all crusty and it never occurs to her to scrape ‘em or rinse ‘em or anything; then she put ‘em in the dishwasher and the hot water sort of vulcanized the food onto the plates, then later the chunks broke off and clogged up the dishwasher, and how now neither the dishwasher nor the disposal neither works, and after I came home she was whining about it, you know in that way she does, Lord, and then she can’t understand why I get mad, she just stares at me like some sort of befuddled animal, like she’s trying to smell what I want, and that makes her face get a ll squinty and puffy and, well, God, it just makes me want to never stop hitting it. Plus I told her to bring back an extra fifth of whiskey, you know, as a kind of backup, because I knew the cabinet was low, and she forgot, so in total I could not possibly have been drunk enough to actually abuse my wife, because thanks to her there was not enough liquor in the house to get drunk on, so I hope you can see your way clear to letting me slide on account of my hitting her just a little bit. Like she probably told you herself, Lord, I only hit her when she deserves it.

“Now, God, as to MaryRose, you have to understand that it was her that sinned and started up all that commotion by getting called to the principal’s office at school. Eighth grade girls ought not to wear that much makeup in school anyway; it makes them look cheap and tartish. Well, I figure all the boys were sniffing around and saying lewdness and it all sort of reached some kind of critical mass of sinning, or she would not have been called to the principal’s office in the first place. Since everybody’s screaming about capital punishment, you know the schools won’t do anything anymore, Lord. About all they can do is send her home, and when I found out Lizbeth had thrashed MaryRose without my say-so, well, first I had to wake up Lizbeth — you know, revive her, with water and stuff — and give her a stern talking to about striking our daughter, which is and should be a father’s responsibility. So I’m afraid I cracked Lizbeth a couple of more times, but when she fell and hit her head I found some Black Jack I’d forgotten about by the sofa, so I asked her to please forgive me for hitting her the first time.

“So I said, thank you, Lord — you remember that, right? — for the whiskey and by that time I really needed a drink, and I think you could understand and forgive me for just that one drink. Actually it was my own cowardliness, Lord. I think that I was afraid to face my daughter sober, and I took that drink — those drinks — keeping a weather eye out for the Devil, who by now I knew was looking to get a grab on me. MaryRose had been crying a lot and her makeup was all smeared. She looked kind of like a cross between a raccoon and one of those harlots, Lord. So I spanked her naked ass good, first with the hand, then with the belt. If she hadn’t been wearing all that tawdry slut’s clothing nothing would have jumped off the tracks, I swear it, God. But her little tight ass was all red from me spanking it and she was bawling like a water fountain, and she just kind of, well, grabbed onto me is a good way to put it, Lord. It wasn’t the Devil of liquor but the Demon of lust that snuck in and took control. Preachers say you do this kind of thing as a test, Lord, and I admit that in this test I failed you in every way. I know you lay down the law, and I know what a sin is, and you probably think I’m a sodomite, but let me say in my own defense that I ain’t that much of one, and besides, the Bible doesn’t say anything about all that other stuff MaryRose committed on my weak flesh, but she sure didn’t learn those moves in no junior high school, and if there’s a sinner in this house, I think that she might be a bigger one than me.

“Now, Lord, about the farting … ”

#

Bill Gray considered the jolt of heroin within the sterile syringe, all waiting for his go-ahead, and in a supreme act of discipline, left it where it was. The cacophony inside his head was threatening to push out the walls of his skull, and the drug would calm the storm … but not tonight.

The pain was like throbbing, necrotic pulp in every tooth, plus a needle driven through each eye, combined with a spiking cluster migraine, in addition to his sinuses being filled with hydrochloric acid. Heated. It caused him to twitch and jolt involuntarily, making him appear in the throes of some minor spastic fit or major brain anomaly. Pedestrians dismissed him as just another weirdo and strolled on.

With bloodshot eyes, Bill consulted a matchbook, and his sleep-deprived mind processed the address scribbled there. He leaned on the buzzer until a voice answered.

“Is this Abel Swift?”

“Yeah, who the hell is this at this hour of the night?” It was late enough that people felt compelled to say things like do you know what time it is?—Bill detested rote.

“My name is Bill Gray and I need to see you.”

“I don’t need to see you; it’s the middle of the night.”

“Open the front door.”

“Fuck you, wino, go sleep it off.”

It was a heartbeat before that intercom click that terminates further discussion. Bill was able to slide right into the gap.

“I have money for you, Mr. Swift.” The pain in his head ebbed and offered him a small caesura in which to draw a single calm breath.

Among all the psychos and street flotsam that wander New York City in the dead of night, amidst all the incoherent ramblings and fever-dream monologues of the disenfranchised, within the unending stream of mad pronunciamentos issuing from the wild-eyed and lost, the average citizen may discern two select words that seem to be a part of every speech, by every grimy hostile one is likely to encounter. Those two words are bitch and money. Bill Gray had just used the second of those two potent words on the speaker grille that represented Abel Swift. Mr. Swift was now processing this information and would not cut him off.

“What? Did you say money?”

“Yes.” Bill hoped he would not have to explain the concept of money to this ape. “Quite a lot of money. You need a lot of money, am I correct?”

“I don’t know you.”

“I know you. You work for Luther Paxson down in the meat-packing district. You and your friends call Luther the Grinch because he doesn’t give bonuses at Christmas. You steal all the cuts you bring home and you sell cuts on the side to ten delis in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Hey, who is this really?”

“I’m just telling you this to assure you that none of your secrets are out. Remember the basketball pool, two weeks ago?”

“Nobody’s supposed to know about that!”

“What I know is that your pal Freddie took cash from the office safe, bet on the game based on inside information about the point spread, then sneaked the money back in after he’d won, and you knew about it.”

“Jesus Christ, man, you trying to get me burgered?!”

“Freddie parlayed the win into more cash and I’m here to give you a bonus. Freddie sent a stranger so nobody could trace it. And he said to keep this strictly between you and him, with me as the messenger. After tonight you won’t see or hear from me again, I promise.”

Pause. Abel was praying that this score was for real.

“How much money?”

“Five large.”

“I’ll be right down.”

Bill expected a sleepy guy in a grimy robe; Abel had actually donned pants and a muscle tee, and ventured down to the closet-sized foyer in person rather than permitting blind entry to a stranger. He kept his bandaged hand behind him for strategic reasons.

Abel microscoped Bill through shatterproof glass, first with one eye, then the other, tilting his head like a lizard. He did not like what he saw. If Bill had bothered to glance in a mirror, he would have seen a dazed and dishevelled man. He looked like car wreck victims look on the news — stunned, banged-up, flesh scuffed, grimacing into the too-revealing lights of news cameras the way shined deer stare down gun barrels. To Abel, the guy looked wobbly. To Abel, the guy was not right.

“You look like a junkie,” said Abel. “Where the hell did Freddie dig you up?”

“You want the cash or don’t you?” Bill palmed an envelope he had prepared. Exhibit A.

“Shove it through the slot.”

“If I do that, you won’t sign the note for it. Freddie said you have to sign the note.”

“Show me.”

Bill dutifully splayed the envelope. Inside was a wad of singles bracketed by two one-hundred dollar notes which had cost Bill $2.50 to Xerox. The whole package passed muster better than a prop in a movie. Abel’s eyes went weirdly flat, his vision excluding everything but the money. He began to unlock the building’s front door.

Bill felt an almost orgasmic rush, unadulterated by the pistol which had appeared in Abel’s free hand. His trigger finger stuck out from a bloodied wad of cloth. A cooler lobe of Bill’s brain registered the gun as a sleazy little revolver. No worries.

When Abel reached out for the envelope, Bill shot him in the hand with his own gun, a sleek polymer automatic, firing left-handed from inside his jacket pocket, smooth as thumbtacking a bug to a board. Abel jerked back and dropped his piece. The decoy money sprayed across the sidewalk, forgotten. Bill kicked the bottom of the door, sending the aluminum security frame straight back into Abel’s cheek and sprawl-assing him on the dirty tilework. Bill was in.

“Get a gun from this century, moron,” he said, lofting Abel’s gang-banger into the lobby trashcan. Abel was trying to crab backward while holding his perforated hand to his bosom like a diva. He obviously did not enjoy the sight of his own blood. He screamed a torrent of invective.

No matter; Bill was inside.

Bill kicked him, and kicked him, helping to propel Abel back into the recesses of the lobby. No matter how much noise they made, no one would bother them. Not in this neighborhood; not at this time of night.

No matter; now they were, for all practical purposes, alone.

“I never seen you before, I don’t know you, what the fuck you wanna do this to me for?!” This was more coherent than most of the floodtide spilling from Abel’s face just now.

“Shut up!” Bill kicked Abel hard enough to snap two ribs. It did not help Bill’s condition much, except to make him angrier. “I spend all day and all night waiting for you to shut up, and even when your mouth is shut you keep talking!”

“What’re you talking about?!”

“I tried to stay away, Abel. I really tried. But you’re too goddamn much for anybody to bear. Oh, God, please forgive me, oh, God, I’m sorry I hit my wife, oh, God, I didn’t mean to butt-fuck my little girl, oh, Lord, I drink too much, oh, God, cut me slack for gambling, please, Lord, I’m not really stealing meat, oh, fucking Jesus I humbly beseech Thee, my life isn’t my fault … holy shit, you asshole, you pray constantly, when you’re not mouthing prayers, you’re thinking them, and there’s no God to hear you, there’s just me, and you’re driving me crazy!”

Bill’s face was scarlet. Saliva had foamed up in the corners of his mouth. Was it really just a few months ago he had enjoyed a fairly normal life managing a mailbox and packaging storefront on West 54th? He had had a girlfriend named Sally and plans to open a branch store uptown … all dashed the first time the voice of Abel Swift, petitioning his Lord with prayer, popped into his head like a traffic cop in a rearview mirror. The stench of the slaughterhouse invaded Bill’s head, promptly filling it with every detail of every transgression Abel Swift had ever wreaked upon the world, and Abel never stopped fucking up. The only thing worse than his ceaseless menu of sins was his constant whining for forgiveness — pleas that nested in Bill Gray’s head, because they had no place else to go.

He knew Abel’s hand had been gashed by Lizbeth’s teeth, hence, the bloody bandage. Abel never left anything out of his prayers.

It had taken Bill a month to turn to drugs to obliterate the noise; another month to realize he was not insane, and a third month to gather enough details about Abel’s life and job to actually locate him in the city. By then, the mailbox business had been attached, Sally had fled and Bill had spent most of his savings on scoring.

There was no God who cared to spare Bill Gray, so Bill had assumed control.

He emptied his gun into Abel, who spasmed with each hit. Five large. The sudden silence nearly caused Bill to swoon. He wiped his face down slowly, savoring the quiet. He could actually recognize his own voice when he spoke.

“Taste my wrath, you son of a bitch.” … Where the hell had a slope-brow like Abel learned a big word like vulcanized?

He could kick; he wasn’t in that deep. He could call Sally and patch things up. He could roll up his sleeves and excavate his business. He could work hard and try to forget he had become a murderer. He could fight to win his life back.

He was almost home when he experienced a stab of pain in his left ear, and the voice of a woman named Arabella, earnestly praying that her next baby would be born healthy, eight months from now.