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  And so he sat sipping coffee from a mug decorated with the image of a man in a raincoat reading a newspaper at a table, which was very apt, for Shepherd too was wearing a raincoat and sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Circles within circles. Two tables away from him, a young woman wearing green hospital scrubs sat taking notes from a textbook. She seemed to feel his eyes on her, for she looked up. He smiled casually at her, then went back to the newspaper.

  Shepherd didn’t like New Orleans. It was a third-world city in a first-world country, so in thrall to graft that it had come to regard corruption as the norm rather than as an aberration. When he walked its streets, all he saw was ugliness, the baseness of the human condition unashamedly revealed. Earlier, he had watched a hardfaced man stand at the doorway of a glorified titty bar, a huge woman with an even harder face standing behind him, rolls of fat dripping over dirty white lingerie. Why would anyone go into such a place? Shepherd wondered: to be ripped off, maybe to be threatened, to smell the cheap scent on a woman one step above whoredom? Such corruption of the spirit and of the soul repelled him, but at least it was obvious, unhidden. There were other forms of corruption that were far more insidious.

  The woman in the green scrubs stood, placed her textbook and notebook in a satchel, and left the coffeehouse. After a minute or two had passed, Shepherd also left. He stayed some way behind her, shadowing her from across the street as she headed up Decatur. He did not panic when he lost sight of her among the crowds, for he knew where she was going. To his left, starlings moved in great shrieking circles, hovering above an old chimney stack on Chartes. Above them, the January sky was gray and cheerless. Tourists watched the birds in momentary curiosity, then moved on, somehow unnerved by the sight. Slowly, the birds’ numbers were depleted as they found their roosts inside the chimney, black shapes descending into a deeper darkness.

  By the time he reached the top of Decatur, the woman was nowhere to be seen. He waited ten minutes, then walked to the security gates of a renovated condo and pressed the number nine, followed by the pound key. There was a click, and then a female voice said, “Who is it?”

  “My name is Jeff. I called earlier to make an appointment.”

  He’d found her ad offering a “sensual massage” the day before, and had called to arrange a visit.

  “Come on up,” she said. The gate buzzed and he entered the yard, following the interior lights to a stairway. He climbed three flights and stopped before the door to number nine. He was about to knock when the door opened.

  She had changed out of her scrubs and now wore a satin robe. The ends of her hair were still wet from the shower. She looked a little puzzled as she struggled to remember his face.

  “You were in—” she began, then found Shepherd’s gloved hand pressed firmly over her mouth as she was forced into the apartment. Shepherd closed the door silently behind him. He pushed her against the wall and removed his right hand from the pocket of his raincoat so that she could see the knife.

  “If you scream, I will hurt you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. If you answer my questions, I promise you that you will not be hurt. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded and he released his grip.

  “Sit down.”

  He followed her into her living room. The drapes were drawn and a single lamp, overhung with a red scarf, was the sole illumination in the room. A door to his right stood open. Inside he could see a massage table covered with a clean white towel.

  “I’m sorry to have misled you,” said Shepherd. He stood slightly to one side of her, his left leg slightly forward to protect his groin. He had encountered trouble with women before.

  She seemed on the verge of tears. He could hear them in her voice as she asked: “What do you want?”

  Shepherd nodded in satisfaction. “Good. I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. I’d like to know where your boyfriend is.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Your boyfriend,” he repeated. “Verso. Or have you forgotten him already?”

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  Shepherd sighed. His hand moved in a blur of flesh and metal, drawing a red line from her left shoulder to the top of her right breast. She started to yelp and he again covered her mouth with his hand.

  “I told you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you make me. I will ask you again: where is he?”

  “The police have him.”

  “The police where?”

  “In Virginia.”

  “Where in Virginia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shepherd raised the blade again and she said, louder this time: “I don’t know. They keep moving him. He’s not my boyfriend anymore. I haven’t seen him since he turned himself in. All I know is that he’s going to be in Norfolk soon. There’s a grand-jury hearing. He’s going to testify.”

  “When was the last time he called?”

  She was silent for a time.

  “There’s a limit to my patience,” he warned her.

  “This morning,” she said at last.

  “Before or after I called?”

  “After. I was just on my way out the door when the phone rang.”

  The phone lay on a table to Shepherd’s left. There was an answering machine hooked up to it, but it was turned off.

  “Why is your machine off?”

  “I was going to go out tonight, catch a movie. You were my only appointment.”

  “Stand up,” said Shepherd.

  She did as she was told. He walked her to the phone table, then told her to kneel, facing away from him.

  “Please!” she said.

  “Just kneel. I want to star sixty-nine your phone, and I don’t want you doing anything stupid while I dial.”

  Reluctantly, she knelt. Shepherd pressed the buttons, then listened.

  “Chesapeake Inn and Suites,” said a male voice. Shepherd hung up.

  Asshole, he thought.

  He stepped back from the kneeling woman. She didn’t turn around.

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

  “I won’t,” said Shepherd.

  He was a man of his word. She didn’t feel a thing.

  Harry Rylance had never thought of himself as the nervous type. Nobody ever made a good living out of the insurance business by being nervous. Nervousness was for the suckers who bought the policies. The whole business was predicated on fear. Without it, the insurance industry would sink like a stone and Harry would sink along with it, but Harry had to admit that he was feeling pretty damn nervous now. The creepy retard kid had disappeared and Harry’s instinct was to get the hell out of the house and hope that he and Veronica could find their own route back to the highway.

  Except the house smelled of dead meat, and there were flies buzzing.

  And curiosity was a terrible thing.

  Harry padded softly across the floor of the living room, wincing every time a board creaked. In the kitchen, he found a pile of take-out chicken buckets littered with the stripped bones of those midget chickens the fast-food companies raised on some irradiated Pacific atoll; no other way, thought Harry, that you got legs and wings that small. A frying pan stood on the range, pieces of burnt fat adhering to its base, and bugs floated on the surface of the foul-smelling stew that sat in a pot beside it. There was an ancient refrigerator beside the stove, humming and rattling like a crazy old man in a tin cage. Harry reached out to open it, then paused. He could see himself reflected in the metal, his features distorted. Something white was behind him.

  Harry spun around and lashed out at the drapes that in the still air, hung unmoving over the window. A plate fell from the drain board and shattered on the floor, sending ants scurrying in confusion. Somewhere, a cockroach clicked.

  “Shit,” said Harry, and opened the fridge door.

  Apart from a carton of week-old milk, it was empty.

  In the freezer compartment, Harry found meat pa
cked in bags. There was a lot of it.

  He closed the fridge doors, then went back into the living room. No sounds came from upstairs.

  “Hello?” called Harry. “Kid, you okay up there?”

  He began to climb and, for the first time, he heard it: two words of a song, repeated over and over, the needle caught in the groove of the record.

  —don’t care

  —don’t care

  —don’t care

  Elvis, thought Harry. The King don’t care.

  He reached the top of the steps. There was a bedroom before him, but it was empty, the sheets on the bed thrown back where its occupant had departed, leaving it unmade. Beside it was a bathroom, judging by the tiles on the floor, but it stank so bad that Harry’s eyes began to water. The door was almost closed. Harry nudged it with his foot, and it opened slowly.

  There was a man sitting on the toilet. His pants were around his ankles, and a newspaper dangled from his hand. Instinctively, Harry started to apologize.

  “Shit, sorr—”

  Harry stepped back and covered his mouth with his hand, but it was too late. He felt the fluid on his fingers, then bent down to finish puking.

  The guy on the john had been shot where he sat, a bloody cloud behind what remained of his head. There wasn’t much of his face left either, but Harry figured from his stringy legs, his gray hair, and sagging flesh, that the guy was well into his seventies. His white T-shirt was sweat-stained yellow in places, and blood had soaked into the shoulders, leaving marks like epaulettes. His skin was split by gas blisters.

  Harry wanted to run, but there was still the sound of Elvis coming from what was probably a bedroom at the end of the hall. He walked slowly to the door and looked inside.

  The couple in the bedroom were younger than the old man in the can, much younger. Harry figured them for their late twenties, at most. The man had been shot on the floor and lay naked by an open drawer, its contents littering the floor. A box of ammunition had fallen and scattered around him, but there was no gun. There was a bullet hole in his back, barely recognizable amid the damage that had been done to his body. Harry retched, but he had nothing left inside and so he just belched acidic gas.

  The woman had dark hair and sat slumped sideways against the pillows and the headboard. She too was naked. The sheets had been pulled away from her body and she’d been cut up pretty bad as well. Despite himself, Harry stepped closer, and something registered in his head. This wasn’t a frenzy, thought Harry. No, there was purpose to these wounds. There was—

  “Jesus,” whispered Harry.

  She had chunks of flesh missing from her thighs and buttocks, where someone had hacked them out. There was flesh missing from the man as well: less flesh, admittedly, but then he was scrawny and muscular, a little like the old man in the john.

  A mental image flashed in Harry’s mind: the refrigerator, empty but for a carton of sour milk.

  And meat. Fresh meat.

  Harry ran.

  He hit the stairs at speed, taking the steps two at a time. The front door was still open and he could see Veronica sitting behind the wheel, her fingers tapping an impatient cadence on the dashboard. Her eyes widened as she saw him emerge.

  “Open the door,” shouted Harry. “Quickly!”

  She reached for the driver’s door, still staring at him while her fingers fumbled for the handle. Then she was no longer looking at him but beyond and behind him. Harry heard her scream his name before the world spun around in a circle, and Harry found himself looking first at the car from a sideways angle, then at the ground, then the sky and the house and the grass, all tumbling in a crazy mixture of images that seemed to go on forever but in fact lasted barely seconds.

  And Harry couldn’t understand why, even as he died and his severed head bounced to a halt by the porch steps.

  And out on Dutch Island, the man known to some as Melancholy Joe Dupree lay on his bed and watched the rain fall, harder and harder, until at last his view through the window was entirely obscured. His bones, his teeth, his joints, they all ached, as if the effort of supporting his great bulk were slowly becoming too much for them. Joe moaned and buried his face in his pillow, tears forcing themselves from the corners of his eyes.

  Make it stop, he begged. Please make it stop.

  A face appeared in the darkness beyond his window, a boy’s face, the skin blue-gray, the eyes dark. The boy reached out as if to touch the glass, but made no contact. Instead, he watched the man in uniform curl in upon himself on the huge bed, until at last the pain began to ease and Joe Dupree fell into a troubled sleep, tormented by the sound of whispering, of gray figures and tunnels beneath the earth, and a boy with tainted skin who gazed upon him as he slept.

  The Second Day

  Not a shred in the papers,

  Becoming all too clear

  Not a one cares that she got away.

  Now the fear of being found

  A little less profound

  On a face that’s never been

  Fit to laugh.

  —Pinetop Seven, “The Fear of Being Found”

  Chapter Three

  Know me, wife.

  The dream ended, and now Moloch’s features fell before him like rain. It was as though a great many photographs had been taken and shredded, the figures caught in the different frames intermingled, smiling familiarly while glancing against strangers from other pictures; yet in this downpour of images, this torrent of memories, he was ever the same. There he sat, beside parents unknown, amid siblings now lost and gone. He ran as a boy across sand and through sea; he held a fish on the end of a hook; he cried beside an open fire. This was his history, his past, yet it seemed to encompass not one life but many lives. Some images were sharper than others, some recollections more acute, but they were all linked to him, all part of the great chain of his existence. He was color, and he was sepia. He was black, and he was white. He was of this time, and he was of no time.

  He was Moloch, and he was No One.

  Moloch awoke, aware that he was being watched. His ear felt raw where it had been touching the cheap material, the pillow once again drenched with his sweat. He thought that he could smell the woman against his face, could touch her skin, could feel the blade tearing through her flesh. He stirred on his bunk but did not rise. Instead, he tried to identify the man watching him through his smell, his breathing, the soft jangle of the equipment on his belt. Images from the dream still ran through his mind, and he was suddenly aware of how aroused he had become, but he forced himself to concentrate on the figure at the other side of the bars. It was good practice. His incarceration had taken the edge off his abilities in so many ways that he welcomed any opportunity to hone them once more. That was the worst of his imprisonment: the monotony, the terrible similarity of each day to the next, so that every man became a seer, a fortune-teller, capable of predicting the wheres and whens of each hour to come, his precise location at any given time, the irrevocable nature of it all threatened only by the occasional outbreaks of sickness and violence.

  Every day the wake-up call came at six A.M., heralded by horns and coughing and the flushing of toilets. Two hours later, the doors opened and each man stepped outside onto the cold concrete to await the first count of the day. No words were permitted to be exchanged during any of the day’s six counts. The shower followed (for Moloch took every opportunity offered to clean himself, viewing any lapse in hygiene as the precursor to a greater collapse), and then breakfast, always taken seated at the same plastic chair, the food seemingly designed solely to provide energy without nutrition. Then Moloch would head to the laundry for his day’s work, socializing little with the other men. The noon count came next, then lunch, then more work, followed by an hour in the yard, then dinner, another count, and a retreat to his cell to read, to think. Eight count, then lights out at ten. In the first weeks, Moloch would wake for the late counts, at midnight and four, but no longer. He had received no visitors, apart from his lawyer, fo
r over three years. He made few phone calls and fewer friends. A waiting game was under way and he was prepared to play his part.

  Now the game was coming to an end.

  Moloch shifted on his mattress, his body once again under his control. Eyes closed, he concentrated on smell and hearing.

  Aftershave. Hints of sandalwood.

  A small rattle in the throat as the man breathed out. Congestion.

  Digestive noises. Coffee on an empty stomach.

  Reid.

  “Wake up, now,” Reid’s voice said. “It’s your big day.”

  Moloch lifted his head and saw the thin man standing at the bars, the brim of his hat perfectly level against his forehead, the creases on his uniform like blades set beneath the cloth. Reid looked away and called for 713 to be opened. Moloch remained where he was for a moment or two more, breathing deeply, then rose from his bunk and ran his hands through his hair.

  Moloch knew the date. Some inmates lost track of the days while in jail. Many did so deliberately, for there was nothing guaranteed to faster break the spirit of a man facing twenty years than an urge to count the days until his release. Days in prison passed slowly: they were beads on a long thread, an endless rosary of unanswered prayers.