Over Exposure

And six other stories

By

James W. Hall

(Includes the Edgar Award Winning "The Catch")

"Crack," Murder and Obsession, Otto Penzler, editor (Dell)

"Ride Along," Miami Noir, Les Standiford, editor (Akashic Books)

"Bells," On a Raven's Wing, New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Kaminsky, editor (Harper Paperbacks)

"The Catch," Greatest Hits: Original Stories of Hitmen, Hired Guns, and Private Eyes, Robert J. Randisi, editor (Carroll and Graf, 2006)

"Tight Lines," Hook, Line and Sinister, (Countryman Press, 2010)

"Six Love," Murder Is My Racquet: Fourteen Original Tales of Love, Death, and Tennis by Today's Great Writers (Mysterious Press)

"Over Exposure," Florida Heat Wave, Michael Lister, editor (Tyrus Books, 2010)

CRACK

When I first saw the slit of light coming through the wall, I halted abruptly on the stairway, and instantly my heart began to thrash with a giddy blend of dread and craving.

At the time, I was living in Spain, a section named Puerto Viejo, or the Old Port, in the small village of Algorta just outside the industrial city of Bilbao. It was a filthy town, a dirty region, with a taste in the air of old pennies and a patina of grime dulling every bright surface. The sunlight strained through perpetual clouds that had the density and monotonous luster of lead. It was to have been my year of flamenco y sol, but instead I was picked to be the Fulbright fellow of a dour Jesuit university in Bilbao on the northern coast where the umbrellas were pocked by ceaseless acid rain and the customary dress was black—shawls, dresses, berets, raincoats, shirts and trousers. It was as if the entire Basque nation was in perpetual mourning.

The night I first saw the light I was drunk. All afternoon I had been swilling Rioja on the balcony overlooking the harbor, celebrating the first sunny day in a month. It was October and despite the brightness and clarity of the light, my wife had been darkly unhappy all day, even unhappier than usual. At nine o'clock she was already in bed paging aimlessly through month old magazines and sipping her sherry. I finished with the dishes and double-checked all the locks and began to stumble up the stairs of our two hundred and fifty year old stone house that only a few weeks before our arrival in Spain had been subdivided into three apartments.

I was midway up the stairs to the second floor, when I saw the slim line of light shining through a chink in the new mortar. There was no debate, not even a millisecond of equivocation about the propriety of my actions. In most matters I considered myself a scrupulously moral man. I had always been one who could be trusted with other people's money or their most damning secrets. But like so many of my fellow Puritans I long ago had discovered that when it came to certain libidinous temptations I was all too easily swept off my safe moorings into the raging currents of erotic gluttony.

I immediately pressed my eye to the crack.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to find the focus. And when I did, my knees softened and my breath deserted me. The view was beyond anything I might have hoped for. The small slit provided a full panorama of my neighbors' second story. At knee-high level I could see their master bathroom and a few feet to the left their king sized brass bed.

That first night the young daughter was in the bathroom with the door swung open. If the lights had been off in their apartment or the bathroom door had been closed I might never have given the peephole another look. But that girl was standing before the full length mirror and she was lifting her fifteen year old breasts that had already developed quite satisfactorily, lifting them both at once and reshaping them with her hands to meet some standard that only she could see. After a while she released them from her grip, then lifted them on her flat palms as though offering them to her image in the mirror. They were beautiful breasts with small nipples that protruded nearly an inch from the aureole, and she handled them beautifully, in a fashion that was far more mature and knowing than one would expect from any ordinary fifteen year old.

I did not know her name. I still don't, though certainly she is the most important female who ever crossed my path. Far more crucial in my life's trajectory than my mother or either of my wives. Yet, it seems appropriate that I should remain unaware of her name. That I should not personalize her in any way. That she should remain simply an abstraction—simply the girl who destroyed me.

In the vernacular of that year in Spain, she was known as a nina pera, or pear girl. One of hundreds of shapely and succulent creatures who cruised about the narrow, serpentine roads of Algorta and Bilbao on loud mopeds, their hair streaming in their wake. She was as juicy as any of them. More succulent than most as I had already noticed from several brief encounters as we exited from adjacent doors onto the narrow alley-streets of the Old Port. On these two or three occasions, I remember fumbling through my Spanish greetings and taking a stab at small talk while she, with a patient but faintly disdainful smile, suffered my clumsy attempts at courtesy. Although she wore the white blouse and green plaid skirts of all the other Catholic schoolgirls, such prosaic dress failed to disguise her pearness. She was achingly succulent, blindingly juicy. At the time I was twice her age. Double the fool and half the man I believed I was.

That first night, after a long, hungering look, I pulled away from the crack of light and with equal measures of reluctance and urgency, I marched back down the stairs, and went immediately to the kitchen and found the longest and flattest knife in the drawer and brought it back to the stairway and with surgical precision I inserted the blade into the soft mortar and as my pulse throbbed, I painstakingly doubled the size of my peephole.

When I withdrew the blade and applied my eye again to the slit, I now could see my nina pera from her thick black waist-length hair to her bright pink toenails. While at the same time I calculated that if my neighbors ever detected the lighted slit from their side and dared to press an eye to the breach, they would be rewarded with nothing more than a static view of the two hundred and fifty year old stones of my rented stairwell.

I knew little about my neighbors except that the father of my pear girl was a Vice Consul for that South American country whose major role in international affairs seemed to be to supply America with her daily dose of granulated ecstasy.

He didn't look like a gangster. He was tall and elegant with wavy black hair that touched his shoulders and an exquisitely precise beard. He might have been a maestro of a European symphony or a painter of romantic landscapes. And his young wife could easily have been a slightly older sister to my succulent one. She was in her middle thirties and had the wide and graceful hips, the bold, uplifting breasts, the gypsy features and black unfathomable eyes that seemed to spring directly from the archetypal pool of my carnality. In the Jungian parlance of my age, the wife was my Anima, while the daughter was the Anima of my adolescent self. They were perfect echoes of the dark secret female who glowed like uranium in the bowels of my psyche.

That first night when the bedsprings squeaked behind me, and my wife padded across the bedroom floor for her final visit to the bathroom, I allowed myself one last draught of the amazing sight before me. The nina was now stooped forward, and was holding a small hand mirror to her thicket of pubic hair, poking and searching with her free hand through the dense snarl as if she were seeking that tender part of herself she had discovered by touch but not yet by sight.

Trembling and breathless, I pressed my two hands flat against the stone wall and shoved myself away and with my heart in utter disarray, I carried my lechery up the stairs to bed.

The next day I set about learning my neighbors' schedule and altering mine accordingly. My wife had taken a job as an English teacher in a nearby instituto and was occupied every afternoon and through the early evening. My duties at the university occupied me Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I was expected to offer office hours before and after my classes on those days. However, I immediately began to curtail these sessions because I discovered that my nina pera returned from school around three o'clock, and on many days she showered and changed into casual clothes, leaving her school garb in a heap on the bathroom floor as she fled the apartment for an afternoon of boy watching in the Algorta pubs.

To my department chairman's dismay, I began to absent myself from the university hallways immediately after my last class of the day, hurrying with my umbrella along the five blocks to the train station so I could be home by 2:55. In the silence of my apartment, hunched breathless at my hole, I watched her undress. I watched the steam rise from her shower, and I watched her towel herself dry. I watched her on the toilet and I watched her using the sanitary products she preferred. I watched her touch the flawless skin of her face with her fingertips, applying makeup or wiping it away. On many afternoons I watched her examine herself in the full length mirror. Running her hands over that seamless flesh, trying out various seductive poses while an expression played on her face that was equal parts exultation and shame—that peculiar adolescent emotion I so vividly recalled.

These were the times when I would have touched myself were I going to do so. But these moments at the peephole, while they were intensely sexual, were not the least masturbatory. Instead, they had an almost spiritual component. As though I were worshipping at the shrine of hidden mysteries, allowed by divine privilege to see beyond the walls of my own paltry life. In exchange for this gift I was cursed to suffer a brand of reverential horniness I had not imagined possible. I lusted for a vision that was forever intangible, a girl I could not touch, nor smell, nor taste. A girl who was no more than a scattering of light across my retina.

Although I never managed to establish a definite pattern to her mother's schedule, I did my best to watch her as well. At odd unpredictable hours, she appeared in my viewfinder and I watched the elder nina pera bathe in a tub of bubbles, and even when her house was empty, I watched her chastely close the bathroom door whenever she performed her toilette. I watched her nap on the large brass bed. And three times that fall in the late afternoons, I watched her slide her hand inside her green silk robe and touch herself between the legs, hardly moving the hand at all, giving herself the subtlest of touches until she rocked her head back into the pillow and wept.

I kept my eye to the wall during the hours when I should have been preparing for my classes and grading my students' papers and writing up their weekly exams. Instead, I stationed myself at the peephole, propping myself up with pillows, finding the best alignment for nose and cheek against the rough cool rock. I breathed in the sweet grit of mortar, trained my good right eye on the bathroom door and the bed, scanning the floor for shadows, primed for any flick of movement, always dreadfully alert for the sound of my wife's key in the front door.

After careful study, I had memorized her homecoming ritual. Whenever she entered our apartment, it took her two steps to reach the foyer and put down her bag. She could then choose to turn right into the kitchen or take another step toward the stairway. If she chose the later, almost instantly, she would be able to witness me perched at the peephole and my clandestine life would be exposed. In my leisure, I clocked a normal entry and found that on average I had almost a full twenty seconds from the moment her key turned the tumblers till she reached the bottom of the stairs, twenty seconds to toss the pillows back into the bedroom and absent myself from the hole.

I briefly toyed with the idea of revealing the peephole to her. But I knew her sense of the perverse was far short of my own. She was constitutionally gloomy, probably a clinical depressive. Certainly a passive aggressive, who reveled in bitter non-response, bland affect, withdrawing into maddening hours of silence whenever I blundered across another invisible foul line she had drawn.

I watched the father too, the Vice Consul. On many occasions I saw him strip off his underwear and climb into the shower and I saw him dry himself and urinate and brush his teeth. Once I saw him reach down and retrieve a pair of discarded briefs and bring the crotch to his nose before deciding they were indeed fresh enough to wear again. He had the slender and muscular build of a long distance runner. Even in its slackened state his penis was formidable.

On one particular Sunday morning, I watched with grim fascination as he worked his organ to an erection, all the while gazing at the reflection of his face. And a few moments later as the spasms of his pleasure shook him and he was bending forward to ejaculate into the sink, the nina pera appeared at the doorway of the bathroom. She paused briefly to watch the Vice Consul's last strokes, then passed behind him and stepped into the shower with a nonchalance that I found more shocking than anything I had witnessed to that point.

Late in November, the chairman of my department called me into his office and asked me if I was happy in Spain, and I assured him that I most certainly was. He smiled uncomfortably and offered me a glass of Scotch and as we sipped, he told me that the students had been complaining that I was not making myself sufficiently available to them. I feigned shock, but he simply shook his head and waved off my pretense. Not only had I taken to missing office hours, I had failed to return a single set of papers or tests. The students were directionless and confused and in a unified uproar. And because of their protests, much to his regret, the chairman was going to have to insist that I begin holding my regular office hours immediately. If I failed to comply, he would have no choice but to act in his students' best interest by calling the Fulbright offices in Madrid and having my visiting professorship withdrawn for the second semester. I would be shipped home in disgrace.

I assured him that I would not disappoint him again.

Two days later after my last class of the day as I walked back to my office, all I could think of was my nina pera stripping away her Catholic uniform and stepping into the shower, then stepping out again wet and naked and perfectly succulent. I turned from my office door and the five scowling students waiting there, and hurried out of the building. I caught the train just in time and was home only seconds before she arrived.

And this was the day it happened.

Breathless from my jog from the train station, I clambered up the stairs and quickly assumed my position at the slit, but was startled to see that it was not my nina pera beyond the wall, but her father, the diplomat in his dark suit, home at that unaccustomed hour. He was pacing back and forth in front of the bathroom where a much shorter and much less elegant man was holding the head of a teenage boy over the open toilet bowl. The young man had long stringy hair and was dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. The thug who was gripping him by the ears above the bowl was also dressed in black, a bulky black sweatshirt with the sleeves torn away, and dark jeans and a black Basque beret. His arms were as gnarled as oak limbs and the boy he held was unable to manage even a squirm.

The Vice Consul stopped his pacing and spat out a quick indecent bit of Spanish . Even though the wall muffled most conversation, I heard and recognized the phrase. While my conversational skills were limited, I had mastered a dozen or so of the more useful and colorful Spanish curses. The Vice Consul had chosen to brand the boy as a pig's bastard child. Furthermore, a pig covered in its own excrement.

Though my disappointment at missing my daily appointment with the nina pera deflated my spirits, witnessing such violence and drama was almost fair compensation. My assumption was that my neighbor was disciplining the young man for some botched assignment—the most natural guess being that he was a courier who transported certain highly valued pharmaceutical products that happened also to be the leading export of the Vice Consul's country. The other possibility, of course, and one that gave me a particularly nasty thrill was that the boy was guilty of some impropriety with the diplomat's daughter, my own nina pera, and now was suffering the dire consequences of his effrontery.

I watched as the Vice Consul came close to the boy and bent to whisper something to him, then tipped his head up by the chin, and gave some command to the thug. The squat man let go of the boy's right ear and with a gesture so quick I only caught the end of it, he produced a knife and slashed the boy's right ear away from his head.

I reeled back from the slit in the wall and pressed my back against the banister and tried to force the air into my lungs.

At that moment I should have rushed downstairs, gotten on the phone and called the militia to report the outrage beyond my wall. And I honestly considered doing so. For surely it would have been the moral, virtuous path. But I could not move. And as I considered my paralysis, the utter selfishness of my inaction filled me with acid self-contempt. I reviled myself even as I kept my place. I could not call for help because I did not dare to upset the delicate equipoise of my neighbors' lives. The thought of losing my nina pera to the judicial process, or even worse to extradition, left me lifeless on the stairway. Almost as terrifying was the possibility that if I called for the militia, a further investigation would expose the slit in the wall and I would be hauled out into the streets for a public thrashing.

For a very long while I did not move.

Finally when I found the courage to bring my eye back to the crack in the wall, I saw that the thug had lifted the boy to a standing position before the toilet and the Vice Council had unzipped him and was gripping the tip of his penis, holding it out above the bloody porcelain bowl, a long steak knife poised a few inches above the pale finger of flesh.

The Vice Council's arm quivered and began its downward slash.

"No!" I cried out, then louder, "No!"

My neighbor aborted his savage swipe and spun around. I watched him take a hesitant step my way, then another. His patent leather shoes glowed in the eerie light beyond the wall. Then in an unerring path he marched directly to the wall where I was perched.

I pulled away, scooted backwards up the stairs, and held my breath.

I waited.

I heard nothing but the distant siren wail of another supertanker coming into port.

I was just turning to tiptoe up to the bedroom when the blade appeared. It slid through the wall and glittered in the late afternoon light, protruding a full five inches into my apartment. He slipped it back and forth as if he too were trying to widen the viewing hole, then drew it slowly out of sight. For a second I was in real danger of toppling forward down the flight of stairs, but I found a grip on the hand rail and restrained myself on the precarious landing.

Though it was no longer visible, the knife blade continued to vibrate in my inner sight. I realized it was not a steak knife at all, but a very long filet knife with a venomous tapered blade that shone with the brilliance of a surgical tool. I had seen similar knives many times along the Algorta docks, for this was the sort of cutlery that saw service gutting the abundant local cod.

And while I held my place on the stairs, the point of the knife shot through the wall again and remained there, very still, as eloquent and vile a threat as I had ever experienced. And a moment later in the Vice Consul's apartment I heard a wet piercing noise followed by a heavy thunk as if a sack of cement had been broken open with the point of a shovel.

A second later my wife's key turned in the front door lock and she entered the apartment, shook her umbrella and stripped off her rain gear and took her standard fifteen seconds to reach the bottom of the stairs. She gazed up and saw me frozen on the landing and the knife blade still shimmering through the wall of this house she had come to despise. For it was there in those four walls that I had fatally withdrawn from her as well as my students, where I had begun to match her obdurate silences with my own. In these last few months I had become so devoted to my nina pera that I had established a bond with this unknown juvenile beyond the wall that was more committed and passionate than any feelings I had ever shown my wife.

And when she saw the knife blade protruding from the wall, she knew all this and more. More than I could have told her if I had fallen to my knees and wallowed in confession. Everything was explained to her, my vast guilt, my repellant preoccupation, the death of our life together. Our eyes interlocked and whatever final molecules of adhesion still existed between us dissolved in those silent seconds.

She turned and strode to the foyer. As I came quickly down the stairs, she picked up her raincoat and umbrella and opened the heavy door of our apartment and stepped out into the narrow alley street of the Old Port. I hurried after her, calling out her name, pleading with her, but she shut the door behind her with brutal finality.

As I rushed to catch her, pushing open the door, I nearly collided with my succulent young neighbor coming home late from school. She graced me with a two second smile and entered her door and I stood on the stoop for a moment looking down the winding, rain-slicked street after my wife. Wretched and elated, I swung around and shut myself in once more with my utter depravity.

I mounted the stairs.

There was nothing in my heart, nothing in my head. Simply the raging current of blood that powered my flesh. I kneeled at the wall and felt the magnetic throb of an act committed a thousand times and rewarded almost as often, the Pavlovian allure, a need beyond need, a death-hungering wish to see, to know, to live among that nefarious family who resided only a knife blade away.

I pressed my eye to the hole and she was there, framed in the bathroom doorway wearing her white blouse, her green plaid skirt. Behind her I could see that the toilet bowl had been wiped clean of blood. My nina pera's hands hung uneasily at her side and she was staring across the room at the wall we shared, her head canted to the side, her eyes focused on the exact spot where I pressed my face into the stone and drank her in. My pear girl, my succulent child, daughter of the devil.

And though I was certain that the glimmer of my eye was plainly visible to her and anyone else who stood on that side of the wall, I could not pull myself from the crack, for my nina pera had begun to lift her skirt, inch by excruciating inch, exposing those immaculate white thighs. And though there was no doubt she was performing under duress and on instructions from her father, I pressed my face still harder against the wall and drank deep of the vision before me.

Even when my succulent one cringed and averted her face, giving me a second or two of ample warning of what her father was about to do, I could not draw my eye away from the lush expanse of her thighs.

A half second later her body disappeared and a wondrous flash of darkness swelled inside me and exploded. I was launched into utter blankness, riding swiftly out beyond the edges of the visible world, flying headlong into a bright galaxy of pain.

And yet, if I had not passed out on the stairway, bleeding profusely from my ruined eye, if somehow I had managed to stay conscious for only a few seconds more, I am absolutely certain that after I suffered the loss of sight in my right eye, I would have used the last strength I had to reposition myself on the stairway and resume my vigil with my left.

In the following months of recuperation and repair, I came to discover that a man can subsist with one eye as readily as with one hand or leg. For apparently nature anticipated that some of us would commit acts of such extreme folly and self-destructiveness that we would require such anatomical redundancy if we were to survive. And in her wisdom, she created us to be two halves co-joined. So that even with one eye, a man can still see, just as with only a single hand he may still reach out and beckon for his needs. And yes, even half-heartedly, he may once again know love.

RIDE ALONG

Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, "Nothing weird this time. Promise me."

Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

"Define weird."

He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, four A.M., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams and coconut palms. The haves nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Ford with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn't Guy's idea of good business practice.

"The soul train must have a station around here," Jumpy said.

"You're jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it's over, I walk."

"I don't like dreadlocks," Jumpy said.

"It's a hairstyle is all," Guy told him. "A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you."

"I never did like dreadlocks. It's a gut reaction."

"Okay, so you don't like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn't going to keep us from doing our business, right?"

"It looks dirty," Jumpy said. "Unkempt."

"Yeah, well, then let's forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here."

"You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?"

"Nothing weird, okay? That's all I'm asking."

Jumpy was six-four, skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam's apples. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he'd shipped out as marine for two hitches, then a lone wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he'd been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn't ask, Jumpy didn't say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.

Jumpy didn't pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound body builders who only wore loose clothes. Tight shirts were for showboat assholes.

Jumpy didn't have to flaunt. There was a halo around him nobody could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a bar room edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out in a spew of sawdust.

Trouble was, in Jumpy's line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy's throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He'd written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh and blood action, no, that wasn't his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.

"So we cool on this?" Guy said. "Do your deal and walk. No crazy ass banter, no stare downs. Right?"

Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.

"I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough."

Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was all Guy was getting.

They got out and Guy tried to match Jumpy's casual saunter over to the Olds.

The two gangstas insisted on patting Guy down, then after a moment's indecision, they did a hurry-up job frisking Jumpy and stepped away like they'd burned their hands. The tall one went around to the trunk of the Olds and popped the lid.

Guy stayed a couple of steps behind Jumpy while the tall dude, wearing a black T-top and baggy shorts, showed off the Squad. His dreadlock buddy stood by the driver door watching. His right hand fiddling around his shirt-tail, ready to quick-draw if things went bad.

Dreadlock One was extolling the merits of the Squad Automatic Weapon, otherwise known as SAW. Eight hundred meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred round magazine. Talking straight English with a little Bahamian sing-song, none of the hip-hop, we-badass bullshit.

When Dreadlock paused, Guy said, "You want to hold it, Jumpy? Inspect it?"

Jumpy was silent.

"One of you should check that shit, man, we don't want no pissing and moaning later on."

"Let me know when the sales pitch is over," Jumpy said. "I'll get the cash."

The dreadlock shifted his angle, moving for a better view of Guy.

"What're you looking at?"

"That's what I'm asking myself," the dreadlock said.

"Do that again?" Guy said.

"Who'm I doing business with," the dreadlock said, "man or woman? From across the way, you look like a dude, up close like this, you could be a bull dyke bitch."

Guy felt Jumpy shift closer to him.

"Happens all the time," Guy said. "It's the haircut."

Guy had blonde shoulder-length Jesus hair, slender hips and sleek Scandinavian features. A man of long smooth planes. Not feminine so much as asexual. A floater. Hovering between the sexes. Some women found him sexy, and just about as many men.

"More than the freaking haircut. It's your whole entire weird ass self."

Jumpy stepped between Guy and the dread and said, "Why don't you reach down my partner's pants and find out?"

The other dreadlock cackled.

"Yeah, Willie, do it, man, reach your hand in there and squeeze." The second dreadlock grinned a big gold smile.

"I was just curious," Willie said. "It don't matter. Forget it."

"Don't be shy," said Jumpy. "Reach in, take a handful, make yourself happy. Guy's cool with that, aren't you, Guy?"

Willie stared at Guy's face for a few ticks then shook his dreads.

Jumpy took two quick steps and grabbed Willie's hand, took a grip on Guy's belt buckle, pulled it out, and jammed the dude's spidery fingers down the front of Guy's pants.

The other dread had his pistol out and was aiming at Jumpy, ordering him to step the fuck away from his partner, let him go, stop that shit.

Jumpy released the dreadlock's hand and the man yanked it out of Guy's pants.

"So what am I?" Guy said.

The dreadlock didn't say anything. He turned and saw his partner with the pistol out.

"Put that shit away, man. Put it away."

"So what I am?" Guy said. "Did your field trip enlighten you?"

"Two thousand for the SAW. Five hundred for the loaded magazine. Take it or leave it, no negotiating."

"Two for the whole caboodle or I'm outta here. Starting now. Ten, nine, eight, seven…"

"Two'll do," Willie said.

"Hard bargainer," Jumpy said. "Tough nut."

Jumpy and Guy walked back over to the stolen Chevy, Jumpy getting into the passenger seat. Staying there for a minute, another minute with Guy standing back by the trunk waiting, watching, recording.

Jumpy's door was swung wide open, the overhead light on.

The two dreadlocks were talking near their Olds Ciera, but after a while they started shooting looks over. The big dread held the SAW in one hand.

Jumpy sat there and sat there and sat some more until finally the head dread came strolling. Dumbass carrying the SAW one-handed.

"You got the bread or you fucking with me?"

"It's stuck," Jumpy said. "Fucking glove box is stuck."

"Stuck?"

Jumpy leaned back in the seat, gestured toward the glove compartment.

Dread leaned in the door, peered through the darkness.

"You got a screwdriver," Jumpy said, "something we can pry it open?"

Dreadlock craned another inch forward and Guy took a grip on the padded handle and slammed the door closed on Dreadlock's neck. Opened it and slammed it again and then a third time. Then one more for good luck and pushed the dread out of the way and reached down to the gravel and took hold of the SAW and aimed it out the crook of the open door at Dreadlock Two who was trotting over with a big ass chrome .45 in his right hand.

Guy was frozen. It was a freaking movie streaming around him. Every outrageous, amazing second of it. Hand down the pants and all.

The SAW kicked against Jumpy's shoulder. Jumpy fired again over Dread Two's head, yelling at him to drop his weapon. Which he did. Not giving it a second thought, just tossing it into the gravel.

The downed dread struggled to his feet. Jumpy aimed the SAW at his chest.

"So what're we going to have here? Two dead assholes?"

"No, man. Don't be doing that. Ain't no need. We just get the fuck up and be gone."

"Sounds like a plan," Jumpy said. He fired the SAW into the air and the two men sprinted off toward the neighborhood where lights were coming on in bedrooms.

Jumpy got out of the Chevy and walked over to the Oldsmobile.

"We got about ten seconds. You coming? Or you want to stay here and get the police point of view on things?"

Guy trotted over to the Oldsmobile and got in.

Jumpy pitched the SAW into the back seat. Guy could smell its oily warmth. Jumpy must've used nearly forty rounds. Which left one-sixty still in the magazine.

Guy started the car. Put the shifter into drive and made a U-turn.

"Can you use any of that?" Jumpy said when they were five blocks away cruising down Douglas Road into the ritzy jungle shadows of Coconut Grove.

"Think I can," Guy said. "Yes, sir. I think I most certainly can."

Guy dug the little Sony from his front pocket and found the record button and he started to speak into the miniature device. Jumpy smiled and took them south toward the condo parking lot where he'd left his old Civic.

Sirens filled the night like the wails of predatory beasts circling their night's meal.

"What's this mean?" Jumpy held up a sheaf of papers.

He was standing in the doorway of Dr. Guy Carmichael's tiny windowless cubicle. Guy's office hours were from four till six. At six fifteen his evening graduate fiction workshop started and ran till nine-forty. At the moment it was five-thirty, so at worst he'd have to deal with Jumpy for fifteen minutes before he could claim he had to rush off to class.

"Could you be more precise? What does what mean?"

"Okay," Jumpy said. "What the fuck is this? A fucking C minus on my story."

"Did you read my comments? Is there something you're confused about?"

Jumpy looked down the hall, then checked the other direction. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and blue jeans and loafers without socks. Trying to fit in with some preppie image of a college student still surviving from his first fling at higher education back in the early seventies.

"I wrote what happened. You were there. You saw it. This is what happened. And that's all it's worth? Not even a fucking C? What've I got to do, kill somebody to get an A?"

"It's the writing," Guy said. "Not the events you describe."

"On my paper you said, shit, where is it?" Jumpy started fumbling through the typed pages, looking for Guy's tiny scrawl.

Jumpy used a battered Royal typewriter and he whited out his mistakes with big glops smeared across paragraph-sized portions of his paper. Guy admired his stamina, hunched over the tiny machine, those enormous fingers drilling letter after letter onto the white page. Stamina was one thing. Talent was another. Guy had tried hard with Jumpy, made him a special project, devoted hours and hours to one-on-one's in his office and in a bar on Biscayne. But after a minute or two of anything short of unadulterated praise, Jumpy glazed over and slid back into the murky grotto inside his bulletproof skull.

Jumpy found the comment he'd been searching for and put a finger on Guy's words as he read.

"'It's not credible that two such dissimilar men would pair up for such an effort.' That's what I mean. 'Not credible.' But we did. We paired up. So why in fuck's name is that a C minus?"

"You have to convince the reader it's credible."

"You're the reader, Guy. You were fucking there. You were fucking standing right there pissing your fucking Dockers. And you don't believe what happened right in front of your fucking eyes? I'm missing something here."

One of Guy's grad students, Mindy Johnston, stuck her head in the doorway and said, "Ooops. Didn't mean to interrupt."

Mindy was a poet, aggressively ethereal. Wispy red hair, enormous breasts that defeated her every attempt to conceal them.

"I just came by to drop off my assignment. I can't be in class tonight. Migraine's acting up."

Guy accepted the paper and told Mindy he hoped she felt better soon.

"Try a pop of heroin," Jumpy said. "Blow that migraine right away."

Jumpy's gaze was fixed on Mindy's bosom. A smile slathered on his lips.

"Heroin?" Mindy said.

"Say the word, and I'll drop a couple of hits off at your apartment. Special delivery. First two are free."

She squinched up her face into something between a smile and a scream.

"That's a joke, right?" Mindy backed out of the office and floated quickly down the hallway.

"Inappropriate," Guy said.

Jumpy said, "You got anything going Saturday night?"

Guy drummed the nub of his red ink pen against his desktop.

"Not more gun dealing," Guy said. "I've had my fill of that."

"I got so much shit going on I gotta get a bigger appointment book," Jumpy said. "Name your poison. Something that'll get me an A this time."

"I remember one time you mentioned organized crime. That caught my attention. There's a place in the book I'm working on, I could use some details."

"The mob," Jumpy said. Then he looked around Guy's office at the framed diplomas, the photographs of his kids and wife and two little dogs.

"Might could arrange something," Jumpy said. "I'll give you a call."

"And about that C minus," Guy said.

"Yeah?"

"I'll read it again," Guy said. "Maybe I missed something the first time."

"That's cool," said Jumpy. "Maybe you did."

Jumpy picked Guy up in the Pink Pussycat parking lot at one A.M. on Saturday. He was driving a green Jaguar convertible, top down. Chrome wraparound sunglasses and a black aloha shirt with red martini glasses printed on it.

Guy got in, and without a word or look in his direction, Jumpy peeled out, slashed into traffic on Biscayne. Once they'd settled down into the flow of traffic, Guy smoothed his hand across the leather seat. His long blonde hair tangling in the wind.

"Car yours?"

"It is tonight."

"A loaner," Guy said, smiling, trying to get with the lingo.

Jumpy looked over. His expression was dead tonight, maybe he was working himself up, or he was nervous, Guy couldn't tell. That had been his biggest challenge, trying to capture the interior life of a man like Jumpy. Was he constantly on drugs and so blitzed there was no coherent thought rolling through his head? Or was he dumb, just incapable of nuanced feelings or thought? Based on the writing Guy had seen, he was tilting toward the dumb option. Jumpy couldn't string two sentences together without making half a dozen errors of grammar, syntax, or logic. By the end of a paragraph, Jumpy's ideas were so insufferably scrambled, making sense of his story was impossible.

Guy was getting good detail from these ride alongs, some nice asshole puckering moments of violence, but overall, Jumpy wasn't giving away a lot about his psychodynamics. What pushed the man's buttons? Who the hell could tell?

After tonight, Guy figured he'd bail on this whole enterprise. He'd had enough of the street for a while. A night or two like the gun buy last week could keep Guy satiated for a good long time. His wife, Shelly, had no idea what he was up to. But she could smell the fear on him when he returned, the stink of sweat and cigarette smoke and the prickly tang of danger. And she was beginning to make irritable noises.

So after tonight Guy was done. Cash out, walk away with his winnings. Spend the rest of the semester using this brief immersion in the back-alley world of Jumpy Swanson to fuel his imagination for one more crime novel.

He didn't know how Jumpy would take it, him making his exit. Or what quid pro quo Jumpy was expecting. C minus was already a mercy grade. And Guy wasn't about to fudge on his own academic values as payback for a half dozen adventures on the South Florida streets. There would come a day, Guy was pretty sure, when Jumpy would stomp out of his office disgusted with Guy's failure to give him the secret key to the kingdom Jumpy so passionately and unaccountably wanted. Jumpy Swanson, an author? Oh, get serious.

Jumpy headed north off Biscayne into neighborhoods Guy didn't recognize. Residential, middle-class, or maybe edging down to lower-middle. The cars in the driveways were mostly mid-size, newer models. The houses were dark, maybe retirees or working class folks who'd had their fill of TV movies for the evening and had headed off to the sack.

It wasn't the sort of neighborhood Guy had been expecting. Though Jumpy had revealed only that his mob friends were eager to meet Guy, a professional writer. Guy assumed the gangsters had the customary over-inflated sense of their own glamour and the resulting ambition to have their lives portrayed on the screen, or on the pages of some runaway bestseller.

Guy was always ambivalent about being introduced as a writer. On the one hand it embarrassed him to be the object of admiration to people who had no inkling what the artistic endeavor was all about. It felt silly to get the little bows of courtesy from illiterates. On the other hand, in an instance like tonight, meeting men for whom crime was a way of life, having some professional connection with the larger world was, to Guy's way of thinking, like wearing Kevlar. Sure, he was a snitch. But it was all in the open, and for commercial, not legal gains. He'd make sure these guys got a copy of the next book, maybe even put their nicknames on the acknowledgement page. Johnny, The Nose. Frank, Hatchet Breath, Condilini.

Jumpy wheeled into a yard that was crowded with cars. They were parked in every direction, beaten up compacts, a brand new white Cadillac, a couple of BMW's, a pickup truck from the sixties Hard to decipher the demographics. But the haphazard parking jobs suggested the occupants had arrived in haste and under the influence of dangerous substances.

There was a peephole in the front door. A cliché that Guy saw instantly he would be unable to use. The man whose face appeared was fat and his greasy skin danced with colored lights. Guy could feel the throb of bass music rising up from the sidewalk, a beat that was as hypnotically slow and primitive as the heartbeat of a dying man.

"Who's the pussy?"

"I told Philly I was bringing him. He's the guy, the writer."

"What's he write?" the thug said. "Parking tickets?"

"Open the fucking door, Moon."

The door opened and the wall of music rushed like dark wind from the house. Guy waded past Moon. The man was at least four hundred pounds and he moved with a sluggish wobble like a deep-sea diver running low on air.

"What is this place?" Guy spoke an inch from Jumpy's ear but wasn't sure he heard. Jumpy made no response, just led the way across the room.

The living room stretched half the length of the house and through sliding doors looked out on an empty swimming pool and a dark canal. The strobes were covered with colored lenses and Guy was almost instantly seasick. No furniture, no rugs on the terrazzo. Half a dozen mattresses sprawled around the room, where knots of naked people squirmed in the flickering light.

"You brought me to a freaking sex party, Jump?"

The music cut off halfway through his question and Guy's voice echoed through the room. Someone tittered and there was a muffled groan. A second later as Guy was still processing his embarrassment, the music restarted, something faster and even louder, and the strobes picked up their pace as well. The air was tainted with chemical smells, booze and weed and other compounds he could only guess at.

Guy followed Jumpy over to a makeshift bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of long necks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.

"Relax you, put you in the mood."

He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.

"To improving my grade," Jumpy said.

"To creating credible characters." Guy wasn't backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hash den.

Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit, mano a mano.

Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the sixties. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such spaces forbidding, but given the present circumstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.

At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.

Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back.

"You want to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. That the idea?"

Guy felt his fear tightening into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he'd bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.

"Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly."

The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped under shorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding glass door had a view across the canal, into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow dancing under paper lanterns.

Philly shook Guy's limp hand and stepped back to size him up.

"This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit."

Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he'd come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.

Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.

Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.

The gin and tonic, or whatever it was, spun inside his skull.

"You son of a bitch." Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy's face. "What the fuck have you done?"

"Hey, Professor, come on in, the water's fine." It was a woman's voice he vaguely recognized.

He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who'd been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who'd written for New York travel magazines and already had a Masters degree. She, like Mindy, wanted for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

"Hey, I want to thank you, doc," Philly said. "You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man."

Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn't recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred round magazine.

Moon presented the hors d'oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

"A little hit of research, Guy?" Jumpy said.

The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy's chest.

"You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids."

"I used you, Guy? I fucking used you?"

Mindy Johnston's hand snaked inside the leg of Guy's trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

"Come on, Professor. Come on, it's fun. It's so wild."

Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn't pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he'd known.

"Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon'll show you the ropes, won't you big fellow?"

The pig-faced man had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy's right biceps and was injecting a solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy's arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

"This is what you wanted, right?" Jumpy said from the hall. "Up close and personal."

There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy colored lights, a world he'd written about before. But he'd gotten all wrong. Completely wrong.

BELLS

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and tinkling of the bells.

"They're back," she whispered. "The bells. They're jingling. Listen. Listen, goddamn it."

Isaac squinted up at the ceiling as though straining to hear. A white ceiling. The four-bladed Hunter fan was turned off, the better to hear the bells. They lay silently side by side with the tumble of sheets at their feet. Both of them still sweating from the sex. The scent of their juices ripe in the air.

Isaac said, "I wish I could hear them. I truly do."

Janet pressed her head back in the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut.

She'd cut her hair this week. There was a trendy name for the style, but Isaac thought her stylist must've used a hatchet and a pair of pinking shears, leaving less than an inch of shiny jet black ruffling against her white skin. She'd not told him she was having it done. Just went off and returned with it hacked away, an act of defiance, or self-destruction. Her shrink had labeled her impulsive act with some jargon Isaac couldn't recall

Janet's hair had been growing uncut for a decade. When he first saw her, Isaac thought she resembled a folk singer, a throwback to their grandparents' era, the ends of that feathered hair teasing at her butt.

Still, the new buzzed look turned him on, this strange woman lying beside him with the fine dusting of hair. While they made love for the first time in months, he'd rubbed his hands through it, feeling the shape of her skull so close to the surface. Not at all like the tangles and layers of her old mane. He was touching her hair during his climax, doggy style as he preferred. That short, boy's cut making him rock hard, firing him up and out, over a high, cascading ledge that he'd forgotten was there. Sending him freefalling on that thousand foot plunge into a groaning, wailing release.

He used to go sailing into that void every time they fucked. But after two years together that phase had melted away. Until this new cut. Until her fit of reinvention. All because of the bells. This certainty Janet had developed that there were bells tinkling within the walls of their old house.

For weeks the fixation had been rattling her normal insouciance. Janet's yoga-induced, vegetarian and chamomile serenity was gone. In recent days, at random moments she would come to an abrupt halt, swing around, stare at the thick plaster of the living room wall, or the kitchen, or the TV room, and she'd point and whisper to him to listen. Listen, damn it, couldn't he hear?

Beside him now she opened her eyes, lifted her shorn head from the pillow and fixed him with a wretched look.

"They've stopped," she said. "Can you at least hear that they've stopped?"

"That," Isaac said, "I can hear."

Isaac took a joint from the side table, lit it, drew a slow drag and let the smoke crawl back out his mouth in a yawn.

"You're mocking me."

"I'm lying here smoking."

"You don't take any of this seriously. I'm going crazy and you're just acting like nothing's happening."

He was silent. They'd covered and recovered this ground. He didn't want to argue. He wanted to savor the erotic afterglow, the arousing pretense that she was someone else, a stranger he'd met on the fly. That this encounter had been a wild, zipless fuck. That's what they'd called it back in the day. Hooking up, a one night stand. If she'd only quit talking and let him luxuriate in the last few glowing seconds of his fantasy.

"It feels different this time. More quiet than usual. I can't describe it."

"Maybe they've left." He offered her the joint but she waved it off. "Maybe they've taken their bells and gotten the fuck out of our walls."

"Mocking me," she said. "Again and again and again."

With her toes she tweezered the edge of the sheet and pulled it up to cover her. She had the most prehensile toes. He'd found it sexy once, the things she could do with her feet.

"No, Isaac," she said. "I'm afraid these bells are here to stay."

* * *

He wondered how long it would take her to try to validate what she thought she was hearing. Bring a friend over to listen, for instance. Though she had only one friend. Carla, a masseuse at the same spa were Janet worked. But Carla had a new boyfriend and was spending a lot of her off hours with him, so she hadn't made it over yet. Screwing the lucky guy, then massaging the knots in his trigger points, easing his tensions inside and out.

Three days ago Janet bought a small Sony tape-recorder and she'd been carrying it around with her in the evenings after work, waiting for the next episode of tinkling. Going to tape the bells and play them back for whoever would listen. So far she'd fumbled with the switch when the bells came, or they'd stopped tinkling just as she got it on. The devilish bells were proving too quick and slippery for validation.

Isaac approved of the recorder. He told her so.

"You're doing something positive, that's good. Is this something Ray suggested?" Ray being her shrink. Wednesdays and Fridays at five-thirty, an hour session at one-sixty five a pop. Her medical insurance wasn't covering it, so Janet was using all her tips from the Emerald Spa where she did facials, six customers a day, extracting blackheads from the cheeks and greasy noses of rich old ladies and goombas from Miami Beach, every cent of that money was going to Ray so Ray could steer her through this obsession and return her to normalcy. Make the bells stop ringing.

He could hear them going at it, Ray and Janet, their tango of psycho-blather.

Did bells have any special meaning to her?

Not particularly.

Were there any bells of significance buried in her past?

Well, there were church bells when she was growing up. Presbyterian bells. But she was an atheist now.

Did the bells make her miss her childhood, miss church, miss that time in her life when she still had faith in a higher power?

No, she didn't miss any of that. And anyway, these bells were more like sleigh bells, or chimes, a higher pitched jingle They didn't have the seriousness and weight of church bells.

Did you ever go on a sleigh ride as a child? Perhaps something happened on that ride, some trauma? An unwanted sexual advance perhaps.

I grew up in Orlando. No sleigh rides, no hay rides. Nothing but endless traffic, lots of horns, but no bells.

Are there any other bells in your past?

None I can think of.

Stories with bells, movies with bells? Dreams with bells?

Maybe there's a Christmas movie, I don't know, some clichéd scene with kids in a sleigh in the snow. But it means nothing to me. Just some snippet I can picture, but I can't even remember the movie's name.

One-sixty five an hour. All those blackheads, all that pinching and massaging and cleansing the cheeks of the rich, the pampered, and Janet was converting all that into worthless back and forth blather. Nothing to show for it week after week as the bells continued to chime within their walls.

Janet reported on her sessions to Isaac. She claimed she was giving him the verbatim replay. Even if it was true, he doubted she caught every nuance of Ray's questioning, or her own responses. How could she? And it was often the nuances, the unspoken revelations hidden in the shadows of the sentences, crouched in the timbre of the voice or lurking in the incomplete phrases, the swallowed word, the unfinished thought which gave away the truth. He wondered if Ray had requested that Isaac attend a session. Couples therapy. He wondered if he'd been implicated in Janet's deteriorating mental health, this hallucinatory excursion she was taking. He wondered if Janet had refused to ask Isaac, for fear he'd decline. Or maybe she was working herself up to ask him. She was right. He would decline. That was certain. He wanted no part of shrinks and their manipulative manner, their insidious tactics for sneaking past the surface into the private regions. Fuck them all. Fuck their seemingly neutral questions, their long silences, their slimy trade craft.

He could distinctly hear other conversations between Ray and Janet. Conversations that went unreported, but which Isaac was nonetheless certain had occurred.

Were there any other stresses in her life? Problems. Sexual, marital, work related.

Oh, I forgot.

What's that, Janet?

Well, really it's no big deal. I mean nothing that would explain the bells.

Tell me about it.

A couple of months ago I had a miscarriage.

I'm sorry.

You think that could be connected? You think that miscarriage could have set this whole thing off?

Do you?

Well, I really did want to get pregnant and have a child. I still want to.

Go on.

But I mean, what? Like the bells might be related to a lost child? How would that work?

I don't know. But the mind is very good at finding images for its pain.

Oh. So like I'm hearing these bells, they're metaphors for the baby somehow. Bells I would've hung on the baby's crib. Is that it? The bells that were meant to be but aren't going to be? That's a stretch. I don't buy it.

Why not, Janet?

Bells on a crib? No. I don't really associate bells and cribs.

Go on. See where that leads you.

Go where? I had a miscarriage. That was real. And now these bells are real. They're in the wall. Like rats or mice. Only bells.

Are they?

Yes, there're real.

But your husband can't hear them.

No, he can't. That's what he says.

You don't believe him?

The bells are real.

Why would Isaac lie?

Sometimes he's not supportive. Like he's unhappy with me. I love him and I know he loves me, but it feels like he's the enemy sometimes. Like he's run out of patience with me.

Is that what you think? Your husband hears the bells and he's lying so you'll doubt your own sanity?

He's very smart. He's clever and ingenious. I think he's disappointed in me. He seems to have lost interest in me physically. Especially since the miscarriage.

So make the connection. Your marriage is suffering a downturn and then there are these bells you hear in the wall.

Okay, okay. So somehow I created the goddamn bells to make myself interesting to Isaac? To get attention?

Did you?

No, absolutely not.

All right.

But while we're on my marriage, I've been thinking about something. This thing I haven't thought about it for years. It's probably nothing.

I'm here. I'm listening.

At the beginning, before we got married, we signed papers. Legal stuff. Prenups, you know. I get half no matter what.

Is that important? Are you considering a divorce?

I'm not. But sometimes I think Isaac may be.

And that connects to the bells how?

Well, you know, there's like a kick out clause or something in the prenups. I don't know what it's called. Something about sound mind, good mental health. Some boilerplate thing that the lawyers put in.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, Janet.

If I'm crazy, I get nothing. If I get committed to an institution or if you diagnose me as unstable. Oh, never mind. That's too weird. It's impossible.

Why is it impossible?

I think I'm hearing bells. But you're not about to commit me to a mental ward, right? I'm not that far gone. Am I? Tell me I'm not that far gone.

Ray would laugh at that.

Janet, calm down. We're just talking. You're not that far gone. Not even close.

Fucking shrinks. Isaac imagined this conversation. Imagined it, but it felt like it happened. And did she report it to him? Hell, no.

Isaac and Janet hadn't discussed the miscarriage or the emotional fallout. That morning when it happened she'd come into his office looking pale. Her face grim. He rocked himself to his feet, followed her to the bathroom.

"I don't think we should flush it. That would surely clog the pipes."

Janet said nothing. She stared at the soupy mess.

So Isaac disposed of it. Scooped it out of the toilet with a garden trowel and dumped it into a garbage bag, then put that in another, and that in another. Three bags for the little red mass. They discussed burying it in the backyard, but Janet said no. She couldn't bear the thought that it would always be so close by. So Isaac dropped the garbage bags into the can outside. The red unfortunate mass in the toilet bowl had to wait inside the garbage can for two days until the Friday pick-up.

Isaac wasn't ready for a child. Not even close. So he had to pretend to grieve, go through the motions. She seemed to buy it, and said reassuring things to him, hugged him. Then sure enough, not long after that she began hearing the bells. So maybe there was a connection. One would think.

* * *

A week went by. The bells kept ringing for Janet. Janet, for whom the bells tolled. They didn't toll for Isaac. He smoked his dope, watched sports on TV, bought and sold his stocks. A day trader for the last five years, he was at his computer twelve hours a day making split-second money, in and out of one position, then another, you couldn't get sentimental about anything, or have any doubts, you had to forge on, click and click again, buy and sell and be quick about it, at his computer all day while Janet extracted plugs of wax from the enlarged pores of her pampered customers, the insipid spa music playing overhead.

Isaac rarely left the house. Everything he wanted he could order online. He bought his toothbrushes online, his deodorant, all his needs. Even his dope arrived at the front door. The teenage kid down the street came by every couple of weeks. Stood on the porch, and gave Isaac a baggie inside a paper sack, and Isaac gave him a white business envelope full of bills. Hydroponic sensimilla, one toke and Isaac was gone. Gone for hours. One freaking toke.

Lately he'd been making a new departure from the house twice a week. A round trip jaunt to his lover's condo on South Beach. Took a couple of hours off from work. Trading one perfectly timed transaction for another.

Was he a shit? Was he a shit for cheating on Janet after her unfortunate biological accident? Was that any way to be supportive? Okay, sure. He was a shit. A jackass, a son-of-a-bitch. Guilty as charged. Hey, he was a guy. What could he do? It was part of the job description. Psychoanalyze that, Ray.

Wednesday night Isaac was watching ESPN, Indiana's tall white guys clobbering the beejesus out of a scrappy all-black Kentucky team. Online he'd placed a five hundred dollar bet on the Hoosiers, taking the eight point spread. And his bet looked safe late in the fourth quarter.

That's when Janet and Carla walked into the TV room. Carla wore a white T-shirt, the material as thin as a film of sweat. Isaac was thinking, why bother with a shirt at all?

Her boobs were bigger than Janet's, perkier too, and her nipples were the shadows of pennies behind the vaporous fabric. She had shoulder length blonde hair and dark bushy eyebrows. The blonde was real, and the dark eyebrows were real. Janet had commented on it. Actually she said she found Carla hot. If she was lesbian, she'd hit on her. Slim-hipped, a boyish butt, great legs that she liked to show off. Calves that you might expect on a ballerina. A physical specimen. Isaac had suggested a threesome, but Janet thought he was joking and blew him off. He wasn't joking. He'd never had a threesome. One of his many unfulfilled fantasies.

"Have the bells been ringing?" Janet asked him.

"Not so I've noticed," Isaac said. "Anyone want a toke?"

He picked the baggie off the side table. Held it up.

Carla smiled, but said nothing.

"We're just going to walk around and see if we can hear the bells," Janet said. "Carla's going to tell me if I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy," Carla said. "Nobody thinks you're crazy. You've just been under stress."

Carla knew about the miscarriage. That made four people in the know, counting Ray. Their little extended family.

They started a tour of the house, searching for bells. Isaac waited till they were in the kitchen, the most distant room, then got up from the lounge chair, went into his office and jiggled the mouse to wake his computer. He clicked to the program he'd written.

His router was set to activate the wireless modules scattered through the house, each tucked a few inches inside air-conditioning grills, and all of them faced inward so the sound would travel back into the walls. Five chiming units, each with a microprocessor, set to play a few seconds of wind chime music or the tinkle of a xylophone. Small deviations between the bell sounds. He'd ordered the units online as he had with his toothbrush and deodorant. The shit you could find online, it was amazing.

Just that morning when he'd been resequencing them to keep things fresh, he found a bug in the system. He wasn't sure where or what it was. Since then, all afternoon, the chimes had been going off and turning on without warning. He rebooted his computer but that didn't stop it. Off and on, on and off. He'd fucked up the program somehow, inserted a line of bad code, or deleted some crucial passage, or the fucker had just gone unstable on its own. He spent hours trying to track it down but couldn't. So the whole bell-ringing system was pretty much fucked. He'd have to wait till Janet went to work tomorrow and take down each chiming units. Figure out what to do next.

For a minute he fiddled with the program, but it didn't respond. He'd lost control of the damn thing, and now that Carla was here, there'd be no bells. Or maybe there would be. It was no longer his call. Some gremlin was calling the shots.

He went back to the TV. While he'd been gone, Kentucky had employed a full court press and those dogged ball hawkers had stolen three inbound passes from Indiana and scored each time. Less than a minute he'd been gone, and the Wildcats had erased the comfortable lead and now were endangering the spread. Five hundred bucks about to disappear. More gremlins.

From the dining room Janet gasped. Then she made a bright metallic scream. The chimes had decided to ring. Just then, just at that moment, right in front of Carla and Janet together. Like black magic. Like chupacabra blood-sucking voodoo.

Then he heard their voices, Carla's was calm, trying to be reasonable with Janet, comforting her, telling her everything was going to be okay. Just relax, find her center, be tranquil, breathe breathe breathe. Then her voice grew quiet, and a second later Janet made a howl so low and forlorn you might've thought she was a starving dog.

After a long moment Carla marched into the TV room and sat down on the couch. He could hear Janet sobbing in the bedroom at the far end of the house.

"I assume you told her you didn't hear the bells."

Carla looked at the TV. She smoothed a hand across her forehead as if trying to ease away a headache.

"I told her I didn't hear them."

She looked at Isaac then stared off toward the other end of the house where Janet was sobbing. Frost glazed her blue eyes.

"Okay. Well done."

"I don't like this, Isaac. This is mean. This is shitty."

"You're not mean, Carla. Or shitty. You're a wonderful person. I'm the shitty one. Blame it on me. The twisted husband."

"Are you mocking me?"

"Maybe a little."

"Stop it, Isaac. Just stop it."

"Look, we're almost there," he said.

"I don't like it."

"Okay, sure, it's not pretty. But it's necessary. We need to suck it up, keep our focus."

"This is mean. Just flat out mean."

"Don't go soft on me, sweetness. You knew what it would take."

"Hearing about it is one thing. But this… Janet is my friend."

"Lose a friend, gain a lover. You're having second thoughts, it's normal. Don't worry about it. You'd have to be a heartless bitch not to have second thoughts. I wouldn't like you if you were heartless. Completely heartless. A little heartless, that's fine."

They listened to Janet's sobs die to whimpers.

Carla pinched the bridge of her nose. A pretty nose, maybe a little bigger than textbook, but it gave her a certain exotic flavor. The places that nose had been. That prodding beak.

"It's too much, Isaac, screwing with my friend this way, what, just to weasel her out of her rightful split."

"I made that money. Every nickel."

"It's a marriage, Isaac. Things are supposed to be fifty-fifty."

"Well, it's not completely the money. Not really. It's the principle, you know. All those hours of work. Poof, gone."

"I don't like it."

"Be cool. We can talk about it tomorrow. I'll come over at noon. We'll sort it out. Now you just breathe, find your center."

"You're mocking me again."

"Okay, I'll cut that out. I'll never do that again."

"Yes, you will."

She was watching Kentucky celebrate. Come-from-behind assholes.

Janet wasn't sobbing anymore. And the bells were going again. Fucking gremlins. Fucking weird-ass voodoo spirits.

* * *

Isaac was wearing his pajamas at three in the afternoon. He was in the TV room watching ESPN. He'd jacked up the volume as high as it would go, but the walls were still alive with the sound of bells.

He'd removed all five units. He'd crushed each one of them with a ball peen hammer. Pulverized them to smithereens. But there were still bells. They'd started ringing the night Janet told him she was leaving, that she was moving in with Carla. That it was over between them and he could have the entire nest egg, she didn't give a shit. She was so happy and relieved to get away from him, to be free of his asshole mockery, his shit eating grin that she would have raided her own small savings account to bribe her way out. Or something to that effect. It sounded rehearsed. In fact it sounded a lot like Carla's kiss-off lecture the night before. Like maybe they'd compared notes, put their air-heads together and come up with this pathetic termination speech.

That was two weeks ago.

The night she left he took the bells down, but they continued to ring. He pried opened all the other air-conditioning grills but could find no sign of any more. Maybe Carla or Janet had snuck in when he was sleeping and planted their own chiming units in other places around the house. That would be just like them. The sluts. The devious bitches.

He searched the closets, the pantry, the drawers, the cabinets. He searched the dirty clothes hamper, the dish washer, the cushions of the couch, the bottoms of chairs and tables and desks. He looked in every lampshade. He was thorough. He was methodical. He wasn't a raving lunatic. He went from one room to the next meticulously tearing open every place that chimes or bells or any other ringing device could be concealed. And he found nothing. Nothing at all.

So he drowned out the bells with TV noise, with music, with the radio. None of it worked. Faintly, behind the blare of CNN or ESPN or CNBC, he could hear the sweet tinkle of a bell. A hand chime, a wind chime, a dinner bell, a sleigh bell. Some fucking bell or another.

Even now as a beer commercial filled the house with its blather, he could hear the bells clinking like silver coins in the pocket. And he could hear a conversation too. Janet and Carla talking. He could hear it inside his head as though he was there in the room, standing beside Carla's queen-sized bed.

Both of them breathing hard. Both of them gasping and giggling and sighing deep.

I didn't know it would be like this.

I always had a feeling about you. I would look at your incredible body, and I had a feeling. You did something to me. I knew this was going to happen. Not like this exactly, but something like this. I knew it.

Are we lesbians now?

I think what we are, Janet, we're broadening our horizons.

I can't get enough of you. I really can't

There's plenty of me left.

Now?

Whenever you're ready.

Really, you're still horny?

Not horny, no. Hungry, yearning. But for you. Horny's too general. I want what you've got. I want to give you what I have.

Jesus, you're insatiable.

You know what they say, Janet. The best laid women often go astray.

I never thought he was a particularly good lay. Did you?

The shithead was worthless. Nothing like this.

I should be mad at you. Fucking my husband.

Except you're not.

You did me a favor, Carla. You did me a huge favor. Got me out of that hell hole.

Of course this was happening in Isaac's head. The two of them mocking him, having fun at his expense. It sounded real to him. It felt real. After all, wasn't all conversation just something in your head?

The bells were ringing louder. And there was something different. A different bell. An old familiar bell he couldn't place.

Isaac turned off the TV and got up from his lounge chair and padded into the living room in search of this new blood-sucking voodoo bell.

Halfway into the room he saw through the front window a UPS truck parked at the curb.

The doorbell rang again.

Ah, yes. He'd forgotten its sweet ding-dong, a comforting sound, so unique, so different than all the other bells.

The UPS guy was wearing his brown short-sleeve sweat stained shirt and his shorts. The day was hot outside. The man was bald and he was in a hurry like he always was.

"I didn't think you were home."

"I'm home, yes."

They were old friends, he and the UPS man. All the online shit he got delivered over the years. You name it, this man in brown brought it to the door. He never said anything to Isaac about all the parcels. He never even suggested anything obliquely. Very professional delivery man.

He handed Isaac the two packages and Isaac put them down on the floor just inside the front door. They were heavy. He wanted to tear open the boxes right away and get to work, but he'd had an idea and turned back to the UPS man.

"Could you do me a favor?" Isaac signed his name to the electronic pad.

"Okay."

"Could you step inside. It'll just take a second?"

"Inside?"

"I'm not going to hit on you or anything."

"I didn't think that."

"I just want to get your opinion on something."

"My opinion."

Isaac held the door wide open.

"One second, that's all."

The UPS man stepped into the house. For years he'd been stopping at Isaac's house several times a week, but this was the first time he'd ever been across the threshold. When he was inside, Isaac waved at the ceiling, at the walls, at the air filling the room.

"Do you hear anything?"

The UPS man stared at Isaac and tilted his head like a dog decoding a new command.

"Like what?"

The bells were ringing throughout the house. Twenty bells, thirty. A symphony of bells. A tabernacle choir of bells. A horde and great multitude of bells. Church bells, the bells on a tricycle's handlebars, the ice cream man's bell, glass wind chimes, the Salvation Army's Christmas bells, the gong and jangle, plink, chinkle, dong and peal of bells. The house was ringing, the walls were throbbing with bells.

"I hear your refrigerator going on," the UPS man said. "Is that what you mean?"

* * *

Isaac forced himself to go slow. He forced himself to stay disciplined. Using the hand sledge and chisel he'd ordered from an online hardware store, following the blue-lined quadrants he'd laid out against the white plaster, he was working his way around the living room, cracking open the walls, breaking through the drywall, tearing out the insulation, section by section, scooping out the dust and debris with the garden trowel.

Moving down the front wall until he'd peeled it open, then working down the west wall in the same methodical fashion.

No bells yet. No hidden chiming units. But he knew they were there. Ones he had planted himself and forgotten, or ones that Carla and Janet had secreted into some cavity within the wall to sabotage his peace of mind, to destroy his bulwark against the chaos beyond his castle walls. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew what was happening at Carla's South Beach condo.

All of it rang in his ears, their voices, their heaving sighs, their quick tightly spiraling cries, their orgasmic bellows and yawps and sobs. The creak of her bedsprings, the thud of the headboard against that lavender wall, the shimmy and teeter of Carla's dwarf collection, those little ceramic men and women who stood guard on a shelf of her bookcase, watching it all, watching Isaac's two women have at it. His lover and his wife joined in unholy union.

And Ray was there. Fucking psycho-babbler, Ray was getting undressed. Skinning out of his professional clothes, his stylish slacks and shirt falling to the floor, his Calvin Klein fancy ass underwear. Until there he was, Ray, the unshrinking shrink standing naked and at attention beside the bed watching the two of them satisfy each other the way only women can satisfy another woman. And Ray waited until he was asked. Which Janet finally did.

What are you waiting for, Ray? An engraved invitation?

Everyone chuckled. Carla snuggled into the embrace of her damp lover, Isaac's soon to be ex-wife, and the two of them opened their free arms to Ray.

Permission to come aboard? Ray said.

Granted, Janet said.

Double granted, said Carla. Come anywhere you like.

Where do I start? I've never done anything like this before.

Neither have we, Carla said. Ain't it great?

It's like being reborn, starting fresh, the slate is clean, and this is a whole new me, Janet said.

Follow that thought, Ray said. Follow that thought.

I'd like to get pregnant again, Janet said. There, I've said it.

Whoa, said Carla. Where'd that come from? Pregnant?

I'd like to, Ray. Is that bad? Is that wrong?

No, it's not wrong, Ray said. Nothing you do is wrong. You're perfect just as you are, Don't doubt yourself. And I think you're very brave, very open.

Oh, man, said Carla. Oh, man. Do I get to be the daddy?

Oh, yes, goddamn Ray was there, taking Isaac's seat at the table, satiating himself with those two she-demons. Spreading his psycho-babbling seed. The man was going to father Isaac's son. All this going on while Isaac worked his way around the house, inch by scrupulous inch, painstaking, utterly focused on the plaster before him, digging beneath the hard crust to root out those bells, exorcise those jingly, gonging, twinkling, hellish voodoo chimes.

THE CATCH

"Two hundred bucks? You're kidding, right?"

"A hundred now, the rest when it's done."

"You can't be serious."

"You're asking me to charge more?"

"I always heard it was like five thousand or something."

"Yeah? Where'd you hear that?"

"The movies, I guess. Somewhere."

Mason took a second to appraise the guy—shoulders pulled back, trim waist, the look of command. Wearing a dark blue corporate suit, oxblood cordovans polished to a deep gleam. Gray hair clipped in a military style. Ice blue eyes clicking here and there, but a little pouchy underneath them like he wasn't getting his full eight hours. Fifty-nine, sixty years old. Stock broker, he said. Probably pulled down half a million a year. Manicured and massaged with a leased Porsche and slinky girlfriends, a third his age. An apartment with a ten mile ocean view, decorated with furniture too chrome and weird-angled to sit in. To this guy two hundred bucks was tip money for a valet parker.

"Some get five thousand, some get more," Mason said. "The rip-off artists. The hotshots. How hard it is to pull a trigger? Two hundred dollars. I been getting that for forty years. It's my rate."

"But the chances you take. Prison, the death penalty. I don't know, it just sounds cut-rate."

"Think of me as the generic alternative. Same drug, lower price."

"Weird," the guy said. "Very weird."

"You want to pay more, I got some phone numbers, guys'll be glad to take your cash."

On his prehistoric Motorola Jeopardy was playing. Some red-haired twerp was getting everything right, been winning for a solid month, like they were feeding him the answers. Trying to draw in a larger audience. Mason wouldn't put it past the TV assholes. That's how it worked. Couldn't trust anything that came out of that box. Which didn't keep him from having it on twenty-four hours a day. Playing in the background like Muzak with pictures. Kept him company, kept him from drifting off into memories, bad dreams, regrets or worse.

Mason sat in his green corduroy chair. One lamp on. Lighting up the over-sized oil painting of Jesus with his hands upraised like he was calling a heavenly touchdown.

The painting belonged to his wife, long dead. He kept it as a reminder of her and her ridiculous faith.

"Do they know what you do, your relations?" The guy motioned toward the front house where his son lived with his anorexic wife and three brats.

Mason shrugged, and the guy took a deep breath and blew it out.

"So how'm I doing so far?" Mason said.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"You're interviewing me, how'm I doing?"

"Hey, I'm just trying to get a feel for this thing. Who you are, what I'm getting into. How much danger I'm putting myself in. You're so nonchalant, cause yeah, you do this all the time. But this is a big deal for me."

"I just told you," said Mason. "I never been in jail. Never arrested, or seen the inside of a courtroom. Nothing like that. If that isn't good enough, take a hike."

"But I found you. A normal guy like me. What's to keep the cops from doing the same thing? Sniffing you out."

Mason just smiled. The people Mason got rid of, shit almighty, the cops should give him the keys to the city.

"All I'm saying, the kind of reputation you've got, if I were you, I'd charge more." The executive dug his hands in the pockets of his nicely tailored trousers. "I'd raise it to two, three thousand at least."

"So buy a gun," Mason said. "Hang out a shingle."

The guy turned away from Mason, glanced at Jesus, at the TV, at the empty bird cage. The cage was another leftover from his wife. Mason hated birds. How could anybody love a bird? Like loving a radish with feathers. But his wife had adored the thing. Broke her heart when the chirping, shitting, pecking creature died. Wept for weeks, stayed in bed. Mason kept the cage for the same reason he held onto the Jesus picture. Something from that other time, that life when she fussed over that bird, fussed over Mason, fussed over their boy. The boy who now lived in the ten thousand square foot mansion and let Mason stay rent free in the pool house.

"Just so you know," the executive said. "I got your name from a shoe shine guy in the lobby of my building downtown."

"I'm supposed to be surprised? That's how it works."

"It's amazing," the guy said. "I sort of hinted around I wanted a person removed, made it sound like a joke. Just said it to this one guy, kind of a shady character. Made it sound like I was fooling around. Then yesterday he gives me your name and address. Whispers it while he's putting a shine on."

"Word of mouth," Mason said. "A killer's best friend."

"So I guess you want to know who I want dead."

"Either that, or I go shoot somebody at random."

The guy tried a smile but after a nervous second it curdled and slipped off his lips. He lowered his butt to the arm of a chair and watched Jeopardy for a minute. The executive had a name, Arnold Chalmers, an old-fashioned moniker like the name of some loser from a black and white Bogart movie.

In the backyard one of the brats, his grandson, was playing with a neighbor kid. They were passing a football back and forth, getting pissed off over something. Squawking at each other. Always with the squawking. His son and the anorexic, not the greatest parents.

Truth be told, Mason hadn't been either. A downright shitty father. Moody and irritable. Feeling low a good percentage of the time. Nothing much to celebrate, a professional hitter with a busy schedule. Leaving the child rearing to his wife, giving her something to do while Mason flew in and out of Miami all the time. Two hundred bucks plus expenses. Which had been a decent wage in the early sixties when he started out.

But Chalmers was right. Mason should ask a thousand at least, more likely five or ten. But he stuck with the two hundred out of stubborn habit. Funny thing was, these days since it was such a ridiculous amount, and since Mason was such a withered up old fart, an oddity in this age of bleached blond punks from Odessa and Gdansk, covered in tattoos and flashing their chrome nine millimeters, Mason had acquired a certain status. A retro celebrity. His name getting around in circles he'd never cracked before. Becoming a minor legend. Funny. A thing like he did, requiring no skills whatsoever, all of a sudden people treating him like he's Babe Ruth.

Not that he was ever a second-rater. Back in the old days when Miami Beach was the mob's winter playground, Mason had more business than he could handle. Things getting so routine at one point, he even had a regular commute. Up and back to New York. Some Goomba wanted his son-in-law whacked, guy had been cheating on the Goomba's daughter or maybe it was a bookie skimming receipts. Next week a Miami dog track boss calls up and gives Mason the address of somebody to clip in Long Island—retaliation and more retaliation. Back and forth, back and forth, Miami International to Newark or LaGuardia. Mason working both sides. Though he had to admit, he got more of a zing from doing the New York assholes. Their loud-mouth arrogance annoyed him. The way they treated Miami like a bumpkin patch. Their bus station urinal. Miami was Mason's town. Had been since birth. As bad as it was turning out with the Cubans and the Nicaraguans and the Haitians and the Russians crowding the roads and stinking up the evening news, he'd take Miami over New York any day of the week. A paradise. As good a place as there was to get old and wait to die.

Chalmers dug out his wallet. He fingered through the bills and extracted two fifties. Held them out to Mason.

"On top of the TV," Mason said.

He aimed the remote and flicked through the channels, looking for what he watched after Jeopardy. Lately he'd been on a Seinfeld binge. Reruns. Those four kooks hanging out in Jerry's apartment or the diner downstairs. The goofball with the big hair always sliding into Jerry's apartment like it was an ice rink. The goony faces he made. And the fat little schmuck who reminded Mason of his own son. Such a loser he was actually funny.

"So there it is," Chalmers said. "Aren't you going to count it?"

The guy smirked at him. Proud of his stupid joke.

When Mason didn't smile back, Chalmers walked over to the bird cage and peered inside the bars. Everything was still exactly like the day the bird died. Same newspaper on the floor. Hulls, bird shit, little plastic swing.

"Okay," the guy said. "There's the money. Now what's the catch?"

"The catch," Mason said.

"There is one, isn't there?"

Mason watched Jerry spooning cereal into his smug New Yorker mouth while Elaine yakked about some new boyfriend. George on the couch clipping his toenails. Gross and a annoying as usual. Annoying and oblivious. He could picture shooting them, one by one, make the remaining ones watch what was coming. They made him laugh though. Funny but irritating.

Mason said, "Well, I wouldn't call it a catch exactly."

"Christ, I knew it," Chalmers said. "Two hundred dollars, there had to be a catch."

"I'm not a sociopath," Mason said. "That's the catch."

"Yeah, okay? What's that supposed to mean?"

"I got a sense of shame. I'm not some robot, wind him up, he goes and shoots a guy, then comes home makes a plate of spaghetti and sleeps his eight hours. I used to be that guy, but I'm not anymore."

"I still don't get it."

Seinfeld's latest girlfriend comes strutting out of the back bedroom, making a grand entrance. She's tall and wearing a super tight low cut blouse which naturally shows off her mammoth boobs. Jerry introduces her to Elaine and Elaine looks at her and slips up and says something about knockers. She can't help herself. For the next minute everything out of her mouth is about tits. All tasteful enough for TV, but still a little on the raunchy side. Seinfeld was a TV show his wife would never sit still for. The morals of America were in steep decline, that was her view. From the time she was born in some redneck coal town in West Virginia, American morals had been sliding downhill. For seventy-two years, everywhere the woman looked, everything she saw confirmed it. America was going to hell. Their entire married life the woman thought Mason sold medical supplies.

"Okay, so you got a conscience. How's that change things?"

"It means you gotta convince me."

"Convince you to murder this person?"

"Something like that. I gotta hear what he did. I got to see this from your point of view, be converted."

"Jesus Christ."

"You don't like the rules, take your money and go."

"You want me to plead with you, grovel, is that it? Get on my knees."

"What I'm saying is, I got scruples. Only way I can do what I do, I gotta be convinced it's necessary."

The executive stared at Mason for half a minute then sighed and walked to the door. He opened it, gave Mason a parting look, and headed out into the dusky light and shut the door behind him.

Todd, the bratty grandson, screamed at his little brat friend and the two of them came whooping over to the pool house. A few seconds later, Todd threw open the door, stuck his fat sweaty head inside and screeched for a full five seconds then slammed the door and ran back into the yard. His little game. Scream at the boogeyman. That's what he called his grandfather. Not Granddad. Not some cute goo-goo name left over from when he couldn't pronounce. No, Mason was boogeyman.

A minute later Mason was back with Seinfeld. The show was almost over and he'd only caught the basic outline. The bosomy girlfriend, Elaine's breast jokes. George and Kramer in awe of the woman, falling all over themselves as she approached. Not the funniest one Mason had seen.

As the final commercial came on, the door opened again and Chalmers walked back in. He was shaking his head like he couldn't believe he'd returned to this nut house.

"It's my son," the guy said. "I want you to kill my son."

"Okay, that's a start."

The man's neat haircut look rumpled now. Like he'd been grinding his head in his hands. Giving him a wretched look.

"You're not shocked. A man wanting his own son dead."

"Wouldn't be my first," Mason said. "Wouldn't be my second or third."

The brats were practicing their banshee yells outside Mason's bathroom window. Cranking up the volume, trying to outdo each other. Hateful little turds.

"Here's a picture," Chalmers said.

He dug a snapshot out of his jacket pocket and held it out. Mason told him to put it on the arm of his chair. Not like he was obsessive compulsive about fingerprints or any of that DNA bullshit. He just didn't want to touch things if he didn't have to.

Chalmers set the photo on the chair arm, nudged it around so Mason had a good view, then he stepped back.

Chalmers was wearing bathing trunks and had his arm around the shoulder of the boy. There was a lake behind them, other swimmers. The boy was maybe thirty, thirty-three. Wearing shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt that fit tight enough to show the hump of his belly. Wide simple face, bad haircut, blunt features, too much forehead.

"Retarded?" Mason said.

"Learning disabled." Chalmers turned his back on Mason and watched the commercials jabbering on and on.

"So cause he's dumb, he's got to die?"

Chalmers came around slowly. A look forming on his face, going from the gloomy dread he'd been wearing to something with more edge. His business face. Take it or leave it, that's my best offer. A bully boy look.

"You trying to piss me off?"

Mason reached into the crack of the cushion and extracted Ruger .22 auto with the long silencer cylinder.

He lay the pistol on his lap and watched Chalmers' face drain of hardass. The same effect the Ruger usually had—making the lungs tighter, the eyes more focused.

"He's retarded," Mason said. "For thirty years you put up with it, now enough's enough. Is that it? He's cramping your style. Your bachelor ambitions. The girls find out about him, it turns them off?"

"Fuck this," Chalmers said and headed for the door again. Then remembered the photo and about-faced and came over and plucked it off the chair.

"So help me," Mason said. "What changed? What made it suddenly intolerable to live with this pitiful creature? Your son."

"He raped a girl."

Mason gave it a few seconds' thought then nodded.

"Okay. That would change things."

"Raped her and then threw her off a bridge."

"Here in Miami?"

"In Lauderdale."

"I didn't see it on the news," Mason said. "I watch the news and there wasn't anything about a rape and a girl off a bridge."

"I got there in time," Chalmers said.

"And you covered it up," said Mason. "You buried the girl."

Chalmers took a deep breath and looked at the photo, at himself and his son. Same blood bumping through their veins. But Mason knew that didn't count for shit. Look at his own flesh and blood son. Look at his grandson. They might as well be from Gdansk themselves, for all he knew them, understood them, cared about them. Or vice versa.

"His name is Julius," Chalmers said. "I call him Jules."

"And you buried the girl. The two of you."

"I did it," Chalmers said. "I dug a hole and put her in it and Jules stood there the whole time complaining about his pecker. How it itched. He raped this girl, killed her and he's grumbling about how she gave him some disease. Crabs or something. While I was digging out in the dark, he's going on about feeling prickly between his legs."

"You wanted to hit him with the shovel. Smack him in the face."

Chalmers raised his eyes and gave Mason a level look.

"Is this some kind of game you play?"

Mason said, "Yeah, it's a game. That's right. You enjoying it?"

He picked up the Ruger, unscrewed the suppressor a couple of turns then tightened it back down.

"Okay, so we're at the bridge. You're digging and Jules is whining about crabs."

"That's all," Chalmers said.

Mason shook his head.

"I said that's all. That's all there is. He killed a girl. And, I don't know, maybe he knew what he was doing, maybe he didn't. Maybe he has a guilty conscience. But I don't think so. I'm afraid he found out he liked it, raping girls and killing them, and he's going to do it again and then again after that, and one of those times I won't be able to cover it up."

"So?" Mason lay the Ruger across his lap. "So the kid gets caught, goes to jail, problem solved. You save two hundred bucks, don't have to live with the guilt you killed your own boy."

Out in the yard the brats were splashing in the pool. School night, but they might be going at it till ten, eleven o'clock before the anorexic or Mason's fat, sloppy son called them in to bed.

Already dark out there, but the floodlights from the rear patio were on. Sometimes his son and the anorexic forgot and left the floodlights on all night, blasting into Mason's bedroom. Penetrating the slats in his worthless mini-blinds. Mason would lie there and stare at the slits of light and he'd think of what his wife would say. She wouldn't complain about there being too much light to sleep. No, that old woman would be blathering about the wasted money. Ten dollars at least, all those lights running through the night. You know how hard people in her generation had to work for ten dollars, the things she had to do. Take in sewing, baby-sit, all the pennies she put away, and look at that waste, those big fancy lights burning for no good reason.

Mason didn't miss his wife. He didn't miss her bird and if something happened to his own son and the grandchildren, hell, he wouldn't miss them either. All three of them were brats. Screaming in the pool, going out of their way to raise the volume. And did his fat, lazy son put down his cocktail for a second to go out and see what they were screaming about? Never. Not once. They could be drowning, or being molested by a passing pervert.

"I don't want my son going to jail."

"You don't mind killing him," Mason said, "but what is it, you don't want some big black guy bulldozing your baby's butt. That it?"

"You're a crude man."

"I don't get paid for my refinement and urbanity."

Chalmers watched a few seconds of the TV show, another sitcom set in New York City. "Friends." A bunch of do-nothing twenty year olds who could spend half an hour whining about an ingrown toenail or a soufflé that collapsed. Mason usually switched over to CNN after Seinfeld, spent the evening catching up on all the ways the world was going to hell. Something the dead wife would appreciate. See there. See there. See there. Gloom, gloom and more gloom.

Chalmers sat down in the chair beneath the Jesus picture. He raised both hands and finger combed his hair, raking it back into place.

"I don't want my boy going to jail."

"Yeah, we established that. We just haven't figured out why that's worse than him being dead."

"Don't you have what you wanted? Isn't it enough he killed this girl?"

"That's a start, yeah. I'm getting into your head a little, seeing your misery. Yeah. Digging a hole, rolling a dead girl into it, son scratching his nuts the whole time. I'm warming up to it, I'm just not quite there yet."

"I'll give you five hundred dollars. Shit, I'll give you ten thousand. I don't care. Just no more questions, okay?"

"That's a good sign, resisting like that. Means we're getting closer, a layer or two more, we might have a deal."

"Look, maybe you should just shoot me. Just shoot me now. Right here, right now. Do it. Take all my money, get rid of my corpse. Nobody knows I'm here. You could get away with it."

"That what you want?"

"I don't know. Maybe it is."

"Do me a favor, Chalmers. Before we go any farther with this, get up, take down that picture."

Chalmers looked at Mason for a few seconds then turned his head and looked up at Jesus.

"That?"

"That."

Chalmers rose and lifted the painting off its hook. Grunted a little. The thing was heavier than it looked.

He set it down, propped it against the TV.

"So?"

"The wall," Mason said.

Chalmers looked back at the wall. Chunks missing in the drywall, fist-sized holes, dried blood, some fragments of bone and hair.

"Fuck."

Chalmers swung back, giving Mason a wild stare.

Expecting the Ruger to be aimed his way. But it lay on Mason's lap.

"What is this?"

Chalmer's mouth was open, a ribbon of drool showing at the corner.

"You execute people in here? This is a murder chamber?"

"That makes it sound creepy."

"You shoot people. Clients coming in to hire you. You kill them instead."

"Right where you're standing. Ten, twelve. I don't keep a total."

"Why?"

"They ask me to. Sometimes they beg."

"Jesus, this is fucking crazy. You're a crazy man."

"Some guys, they come in, tell their story, I bully till it's all out, last bit of puke from their guts, then bingo, they ask me to do it. They plead. Well, sometimes they plead, not always. Different people, it works different ways."

"And how's it working with me?"

"Don't know yet. We're not there. Not at the end. We're sort of stuck on why you'd rather your son be dead than go to jail."

"I'm out of here," Chalmers said.

"No one's stopping you."

Chalmers stared at the wall again as if counting the holes. That wasn't a reliable way to figure out how many had died because sometimes it took two shots, sometimes, Mason hated to admit, he missed with the first one, sometimes the second one too. So there had to be a few more holes than victims.

"What were you wearing?"

"Wearing?"

"We're back at the hole, the grave for this girl. What'd you have on?"

"Hell, I don't know. Why's that matter?"

"I'm trying to get a picture. I'm trying to put myself there, inside your skin. Get the feel."

"A suit," Chalmers said. "A black suit."

"Armani, that's what you wear?"

Chalmers swallowed.

"How'd you know that?"

"I got an eye for tailoring. I'm not a clothes horse myself, but some of the guys I associated with in my younger days, they dressed nice. I made it a hobby. So you're in your black Armani, five, six thousand dollar coat and pants. You're sweating like a pig. Your son is all cranky about his itchy dick. I bet there were mosquitoes out there too."

"A few, but I wasn't feeling much."

"Too focused on the inner turmoil. Cleaning up after your son's murder. A guy wouldn't feel a few mosquito bites."

"I got blisters on my hands from the shovel. I remember that."

"Bleed a little, did you?"

"Where's this going?"

"Hey, you were there, not me," Mason said. "I don't know where it's going."

On the TV the good looking blond girl who is also the resident airhead is trying to cook something for Thanksgiving dinner. But she'd read the recipe wrong. That was supposed to be funny? Maybe his wife had a point. The world was going to hell. Men wanted to hire other men to kill their retarded sons while there were all those people in an audience laughing at a girl who couldn't cook.

"I buried the girl then Jules and I drove back to my apartment and we took showers and changed clothes and I ordered a pizza."

"A pizza."

"Jules has a very limited range of foods he'll eat."

"Picky boy."

"It's part of his disability. He gets stuck in ruts."

"Happens to the best of us," Mason said.

Chalmers glanced back at the wall behind him.

"What do you do with the bodies?" Chalmers said it, then he swung around to face Mason and said, "Never mind, that's none of my business."

"I use a wheelbarrow," Mason said. "Roll 'em out to my car, put them in the trunk. I got a canal I like out in the Glades. Shovels, no way, I'm too old for shovels. This canal, though, it has gators."

"No one's ever been found?"

"Not that I heard."

Chalmers sat down in the chair again. His body seemed heavier than it had a few minutes earlier.

"So you and Jules are eating pizza. How's his itch doing?"

"Still there," Chalmers said.

One of the girl brats, fourteen, fifteen, Mason could never remember, she turns on the music in her bedroom. Window open, this ghetto rap, hip-hop bullshit starts booming. The boys in the pool yell for her to turn it down. It turns into a war out there. Girl screeches and little boy screeches, and the volume of the music gets higher. And where's Daddy and anorexic Mommy? No fucking where to be found.

"I told Jules he had to go see a psychiatrist. He had to get this new lustfulness under control."

"Lustfulness? That's what you think?"

"Whatever the right word is. I'm no shrink."

"So this just started? Came out of the blue, did it. He's thirty, all of a sudden he's horny?"

"As far as I know."

"Nothing set it off?"

"What're you saying?"

"I'm asking questions. I'm not saying anything."

"You're suggesting something I did might've set it off. That I'm responsible for what my son does. My adult son. My dating habits influenced him to go out and rape a girl."

Mason looked across at the holes in his wall. Seeing a little fragment of a blouse wedged into one of the ragged craters. Mason remembered that one. She was one of the pleaders. Yeah, down on her knees. Begging with her hands pressed together like Mason was the Pope. Pretty woman. Mason made her stand up. Made her look him in the eye. Made her stop crying. Made her stand up straight. Then that was that.

"If Jules went to jail, it would all go public. It would be a major story. The people I represent, they're the movers and shakers in this community. Names you'd know. Owners of the sports franchise, the cruise ship company. You know who I mean. I'd be ruined. My business is built on trust and confidence. How's anybody going to give me their life savings to manage if they know what's in my family's bloodstream?"

"So, your boy's got to die to protect your net worth."

"He could rape and kill again. Another innocent girl. That's my number one concern. But, yeah, to be completely honest, the money's an issue too. I've got obligations."

"Mortgage, things like that."

"Alimony payment, mortgage, I've got obligations like everybody else."

"So Jules gets two in the brain."

"Oh, fuck it. Forget this. I'm out of here. Go ahead, try to shoot me. I'm gone."

But Chalmers didn't get up from the chair. They usually didn't.

"Pizza is over, you had some ice cream, whatever, and what then?"

"I don't remember."

"Sure you do. That's a night you're not going to forget."

"I had an appointment. I went out."

"Left your boy in your condo, blood on his hands, while you went out on a date."

"Where'd you get 'date?' I went out."

"With a woman."

"Okay, okay. I had a date. It was important to me. I was in love with this woman."

"Not anymore though."

Chalmers shook his head. Watched a little of the end of "Friends." Everyone laughing their heads off about the fucked up recipe. Poor air headed blonde.

"Jules," Chalmers spoke softly, watching the TV show. "He followed me that night. He waited till I was gone from Sheila's condo, and he broke in and raped her."

"Yeah, okay. But there's a topper. Something worse."

"How do you know that?"

"There's a topper. What is it?"

"Sheila had a security video. She runs it to make sure her Nanny isn't abusing her kid while she's off at work."

"Okay," Mason said. "So she's got the whole rape thing on tape. Now she's blackmailing you. Or she goes to the police and there goes your career."

Chalmers stared at Mason.

"Jesus, where do you get this stuff?"

"I'm an old man. There's only so many ways people can treat each other badly."

"I been sending her ten thousand a month."

Mason nodded.

"Ten thousand's a bargain."

"It's pinching me. That and everything else. The alimony. All of it, the market dipping, it's making life difficult."

"So killing Jules, how does that fix anything?"

He rocked forward, settled his elbows on his knees, giving Mason an earnest look. Salesman's eyes, man to man.

"I thought if Jules turns up dead, clearly a murder, it would scare her off. Show her what I'm capable of."

Mason shrugged, picked up the remote and cut to CNN. People starving somewhere in Africa. Their bellies swollen, flies all around their eyes. Little kids who looked two hundred years old. Bones showing through.

"Yeah, I guess, a certain woman, that could work."

"It's to scare her away, but it's also because I'm worried what that boy'll do next. I don't see any other choice."

"So two hundred bucks, that's a bargain. Saves you a fortune."

"It's not the money."

"It's never the money."

The little brat, his grandson, came screeching one more time at Mason's door, swung it open, stuck his blocky head through, closed his beady eyes and wailed for five seconds, then slammed the door and ran off to the big house where the anorexic and Mason's sad, unhappy son were burying themselves alive.

Chalmers looked over his shoulder at the wall.

"I don't want to die."

Mason said, "I'm not trying to convince you of anything."

"I got things I want to do, places I want to see. I've got appetites. I'm not suicidal."

"That's good. Everyone needs something to live for."

The starving kids in Africa were living in camps behind barbed wire. Their mothers pressed them to their breasts. Dying faster themselves so their kids could live a few more days. No men anywhere. All of them had been macheted or machine-gunned by another tribe. One tribe versus another tribe. Women nursing kids. People starving. Babies dying. Flies everywhere.

"You can put Jesus back on the wall."

Chalmers' frown relaxed and his eyes lingered on Mason.

Chalmers rose and hung the Jesus picture on the wall. Covering up the gashes and bloody streaks.

He adjusted the angle of the painting, stepping back to make sure he'd gotten it lined up.

"You're a religious man?" Chalmers said.

"Water to wine. People coming back to life? Yeah, right."

Chalmers looked away from Christ and stared at the empty birdcage.

"Your bird died."

"I hated that bird. It was a fucking nuisance. The old woman liked it. I was glad to see it fall off its perch."

Mason watched Chalmers draw a hard breath. A quick glance at the painting to see if he had it straight.

"If you hate a bird," Chalmers said, "it's simple to break its neck, be done with it."

"I look like a guy who murders parakeets?"

Chalmers turned and eyed Mason. He drew a long breath.

Then he clenched his face into a tight scrunch like he'd stepped on a tack. When his features relaxed, he looked different. Not any smarter, not any richer or happier, but his suit fit better. His eyes were a quieter shade of blue.

One more slow look around Mason's pathetic pool house apartment, then Chalmers dug out his wallet and fingered through the bills and came out with two more fifties and set them on the television.

Mason was quiet. Some did it this way. You never knew how it would play out. It was what kept him interested, these conversations, these surprises at the end.

"Keep it," Chalmers said. "You earned it."

"I didn't kill anybody."

"That's what I mean."

"Two hundred for an hour of talk," Mason said. "They'll bust me for practicing without a license."

The commercial was on. That dark-haired woman with the pouty lips, lounging in a doorway making eyes at her husband who has finally taken the right drug and gotten his pecker working again. Modern science. Too bad they couldn't find a pill for those starving babies with the flies all over them.

"Hey, listen," Chalmers said. "How would it be if I brought Jules over sometime? Just for some talk, nothing more than that."

Chalmers heard his own words, then shook his head. A preposterous idea. Sorry he'd mentioned it.

He headed for the door.

Was halfway out when Mason said, "Sure, why not? Bring the kid over. Let's hear his side."

TIGHT LINES

"A handgun on a fishing trip?"

"For protection," I said.

"Oh, come on, Logan. Don't do this."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm taking a gun, that's all. And Dad's ashes."

She glanced at the door to my study as if she were considering barricading it. Anything to prevent me from going off with a pistol.

"Remember Deliverance," I said. "All they had was bows and arrows. Twenty miles down river, stalked by maniacs, they wished like hell they'd brought firearms."

"Don't joke about this, Logan. "

"I'm trying to be light-hearted. I'm trying to be upbeat."

"Look, you can't fake your way through this. You're depressed, walking around in a black funk, now you're heading off into the middle of nowhere, and you're taking a goddamn gun? That's crazy, Logan. Crazy."

"I'm fine. Really, I'm a lot better."

"No, you're not. You're not sleeping, you're skipping work. You're a zombie."

"So I'm still grieving. I'm allowed to grieve, right?"

"He's been gone for two months. It's time to move on."

"That's exactly what I'm doing, Nadine. I'm going fishing. I'm going to the Lost Lagoon. That's getting on with my life. Right? I'm trying."

"Going back to where you found his body. You ready to face that?"

"That's why I'm doing it," I said. "To answer that question."

My dad's suicide had shocked everyone. Most of all me. And I should have been the one to have seen it coming. I was, after all, closer to the old man than anybody in his family or his wide circle of friends. I was a partner in his cardiology practice, his only child, his duplicate in matters of temperament and personality. But Dad had hidden his state of mind from even me. He'd fooled me completely. A week after my mother, his wife of fifty-three years died of a heart attack, Dad was back at work, acting perfectly normal, making his rounds, seeing patients, playing golf with his same buddies, mowing his grass, preparing his own meals.

Then in January, only a month after Mother died, the old man vanished. No note of explanation, no warning. No one had an idea where he'd gone or why. The police merely went through the motions. After four days with no word, I decided to check our secret fishing hole.

Dad had discovered the Lost Lagoon as a boy. It was out in the far reaches of the southern Everglades. He and I had camped and fished there since I was a boy. It was our golden secret. Only Dad and I knew its location. If there was one place Dad might go to revive his spirits, it would be the Lost Lagoon.

Across the room Nadine paced back and forth, giving the Smith and Wesson in my hand dark looks while she combed a hand through her long red hair.

"Think of the gun, this way," I said. "It's for whatever invasive species have arrived lately. Pythons, monitor lizards. The Everglades, you never know what's out there. It just makes me feel safer. That's all it is, Nadine. I swear to you."

She walked over to me, got her face inches from mine, spoke in a whisper.

"You've chosen him over me," she said. "One more time, even when he's gone. He's more important to you."

"That's not true, Nadine."

But it was true, and we both knew it. My lie hung sour in the air.

She couldn't bear to look at me.

"Just promise me one thing," she said.

"All right."

"You won't do what your dad did."

Nadine was never one for small talk.

I tucked the .357 into the waterproof pouch. Nadine looked away, and squinted out the bedroom window at the palms tossing in a dawn breeze.

"I'm fine, Nadine, really. I'm going to sprinkle his ashes, sob for an hour or two, catch some fish, commune with the stars, and come home. That's all."

Nadine shook her head slowly. Resigned to losing this argument, perhaps even resigned to losing me.

For the two decades we'd been married, she'd heard hundreds of stories about my fishing trips with Dad. Most of them hammed up by the old man—the drinking games, the close calls with gators and sharks, the swamped canoes, violent thunderstorms, and stories about all the glorious fish we'd caught and cooked out there in the wilderness.

He and I were pals, best friends, far closer than any father and son I'd ever met. We had a bond that made some people nervous, as if it were somehow unnatural that two men, even father and son, could be such kindred spirits.

We had our fishing expeditions down to a ritual. A pair of canoes launched from Flamingo National Park, just me and Dad paddling for hours across bays, up and down twisting rivers into the remote northern fringes of the Everglades, then paddling another hour through the claw and snag of mangrove branches, cramming through narrow breaks in the foliage, places so tight even the canoes got hung up sometimes, and finally, five, six hours from the docks, an hour or two beyond all the known fishing grounds, we glided into a lagoon Dad had discovered more than a half century earlier. The lagoon bent like a beckoning finger, north then west, and was no more than thirty yards wide at any point.

Because the spot was isolated and virginal, it was primo fishing grounds—tarpon over fifty pounds, badass snook, reds, even some freshwater bass cruising the brackish water. The lagoon was all but invisible from the air, did not appear on any chart or GPS and was surrounded by flats too shallow for anything but canoes or kayaks. A place so hidden even the bugs and birds had a hard time zeroing in.

While Nadine watched in grim silence, I finished packing. I wedged a coil of heavy braided rope into my duffel. Repairs to the platform usually were necessary. A loose board, a broken branch.

Tucked into one corner of the lagoon was a flat shelf of cypress planks. When I was a kid, too young to be taken along on the fishing trip, I remember Dad sliding cypress planks into his car and driving away. One by one he had lugged the boards out across those miles of water, and gradually constructed a platform high above the waterline, lashing it to the sturdy mangrove trunks.

Even after brushes with hurricanes and the wear and tear of half a century, the platform was still sturdy. It was a ten by ten deck where Dad and I rolled out our sleeping bags, set up the cook stove, lay back and watched the stars. That's where I got to know my father, listening to him ramble through stories of his youth. After a six pack of beer, he even spoke of the war, his time in the jungles of Southeast Asia, stories of the women he'd loved before Mom. I knew things about him that not even she had known, things about his wild, adventuring mind, his restless imagination, and a sadness in him that came from putting his dreams on permanent hold as he settled into a lifelong marriage, parental duties and a job that brought him into daily contact with sick and dying.

I could feel Nadine watching me as I took the cardboard carton off my desk. My dad's ashes filled a white box that was as anonymous as a take-out carton from a Chinese restaurant. Pork fried Dad.

I thought of saying it out loud. Something to break the gloomy mood, get Nadine to smile. But I checked myself. It was a bad joke. Like so many things I'd been saying lately. Off-key, out of synch. As though some crude teenage kid had taken up residence in my body.

I looked Nadine in the eyes.

She wore only a lacy pink bra and a matching thong. She moved to the doorway of the study with her arms crossed beneath her lush breasts, giving them a subtle lift. The body language of a woman meaning to ambush me before I could get out the door, lure me into the four-poster so we might spend the afternoon twisting the sheets.

With my spinning rod in hand, I came over. She relaxed and cocked her head back an inviting inch and I bowed my face into her cleavage and inhaled her scent. Coconut and warm honey, like a tray of a macaroons fresh from the oven—an aroma that had triggered countless sexual episodes between us.

Until Dad died, our sex had been frequent and spirited, but in these last two months I'd lost my appetite for her, along with all the other reliable pleasures.

I let her odor fill my lungs, and held it in like dope smoke, trying to feel the familiar erotic high. But nothing stirred in the hollow reaches of my chest.

She pressed her hands against the back of my head and forced me deeper into that tempting flesh. In another moment, I saw my father's stern face, heard his commanding voice. Nadine's spell over me was broken, and I drew away.

"No," I said. "I have to go."

"Four days at home in bed. It could be nice. Like old times."

"You're evil."

"I'm a woman," Nadine said. "We're all evil."

I drew my face from the melt of her breasts, and saw in her smile that she wasn't kidding.

"When I get home," I said. "I'll make it up to you."

Nadine stepped back and folded her arms across her breasts.

"Don't take the gun, please."

"I won't use it, Nadine. Unless it's absolutely necessary."

"At least tell me where to find your body if you don't return. Draw me a map. Do me that kindness."

I shook my head.

"You know I can't do that."

* * *

I parked in the western edge of the huge parking lot of at Everglades National Park and hoisted the canoe off the roof top and carried it overhead to the dock. I eased it into the canal, lashed it to a cleat, then trip by trip, I transported my gear and rods and tackle. One spinning rod, one fly, a small plastic box of hand-tied lures and a few jigs. I wasn't fussy about casting only flies. Whatever the fish were biting was good enough, that was Dad's philosophy, and it became mine. Better to catch a few with plastic bait, than lay down flies all day with no results.

As I went through the drill, I felt a presence shadowing me. More than once I stopped and swung around as if I might find Dad standing close, a huge grin on his face as he sprung yet another of his elaborate practical jokes. But nothing was there. Nothing but the muggy morning air, the cries of gulls, the sulfurous vapors that rose from the stagnant waters near the dock.

By noon I'd paddled several miles across the length of Whitewater Bay. I saw my last motorized skiff by three o'clock. The wind was light from the west, the sky cluttered with wispy unthreatening clouds. The forecast called for a week of sun, only the remotest chance of rain. I didn't care one way or the other. Let it rain. Dad and I had been out there once for six solid days of rain. But it hadn't mattered. The rain just made the trip more memorable. The fishing out there was always good, no matter what.

I glided past the last chickee hut where campers were allowed to pitch tents and build cooking fires. A narrow dock of weathered pine jutted from a nameless mangrove island. Back in April it was to that very dock that I had transported my father's corpse and laid it out as if this had been his final resting place.

It was a ghastly journey, hauling his rotting body in the small canoe. My father lay at my feet as I paddled, his face destroyed from the pistol blast, and the days of rot. There were missing chunks of flesh and long lacerations where scavenging animals had feasted on him.

Ever since that afternoon those images haunted my dreams and waking hours and the vile gas of his decay still gagged me at unexpected moments. The horror of that hour alone with his body had driven me to a despair beyond simple grieving. I couldn't fathom what he'd done. I couldn't connect the images of the ravaged and shriveled corpse with the vital, dynamic man I'd revered from my earliest days.

When I found his body in the Lost Lagoon, I had not debated it for a moment. I knew the authorities would be required to thoroughly investigate his death, and their presence in the Lost Lagoon would forever desecrate the place. By relocating his body and washing down the original death scene, I'm sure I committed numerous crimes, but neither the Metro detectives or Park Rangers had seemed suspicious of the body's location. The investigation was hurried and minimal.

It was ruled a suicide. The gunshot to the head and the weapon still in my father's grip made it obvious. Even if the police had tried to dig deeper, it would have been difficult to prove anything. After days of decay and the ravages of vultures and raccoons, and several hard thunderstorms, forensics were all but impossible.

I paddled on beyond the nameless island, retracing the route I'd made two months ago. By the time I crossed the final bay and slid the tip of the canoe into the mouth of Homestretch Creek, my shoulders were aching and blisters were forming on both hands. Homestretch Creek was our private name for the narrow twist of water that led into the Lost Lagoon. Neither the lagoon nor that narrow creek had official names, for neither showed up on any navigational chart. The creek was a half mile long, but usually took an hour to negotiate, threading beneath the slick and knotty mangrove limbs, bumping past their exposed roots. It was barely wide enough for a canoe to pass, and on every trip Dad and I had to clip back a few encroaching branches just to wedge through. From anywhere out on the bay, a passing boater would see only an impenetrable wall of green.

As I paddled deep into the snarl of branches, ducking and twisting out of their way, small green herons eyed me from the shadows and spider webs shone in the golden afternoon light. Overhead, against the empty sky, a flock of snowy egrets drifted by like the spirits of departed souls, in no hurry to get where they were going.

Fifteen minutes into the thicket I came upon a fresh cut branch.

I held my paddle still. I peered around me in every direction into the tangle of green and brown leaves, but saw no movement. Off in the distance an osprey shrieked in alarm. I smelled the fetid stew of mud and exposed barnacles, and a fishy incense that breathed through the mesh of vegetation. I dragged the canoe close to the snipped branch and bent its pointed edge down. The meat of the wood was still green. It looked clean and new, but I was no expert on such matters.

I sat for a while till my heart calmed.

There was no way anyone could have discovered this sanctuary. The place was too remote, too hidden, too veiled by growth. Several million people lived only fifty miles away to the north and east in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, though this part of the Everglades was as primeval and desolate as the far side of the moon. It was legally off-limits to gasoline powered engines, and the few kayakers or canoeist who journeyed this far into the wilderness invariably camped at the National Park's primitive sites which were at least an hour's paddle west of Lost Lagoon. In all our years here, Dad and I had never seen another soul within two miles of the lagoon.

The cut branch, I decided, must have been from my last trip out. A snip I had made in my haste on that frantic afternoon when I'd come searching for my father, hoping beyond hope that I would discover him alive. Sorting out my mother's death, trying to revive his spirits.

I forged on, paddling a few strokes, then I had to drag the canoe by hand past overhanging branches and intruding roots. It was just after five o'clock when I squeezed through the final narrow passage and coasted out into the calm waters of the lagoon.

The smooth surface of the water was pocked here and there by fish rising to feed. I caught the silver flash of a single tarpon cruising deeper into the lagoon.

After tying off the canoe and lifting my gear onto the platform, I fortified myself with a long breath and climbed up onto the shelf of cypress.

There was no sign of his blood. No evidence of violence. The bullet that exploded his skull had left no trace in the surrounding shrubs. I had a momentary dizzy sense that none of what I remembered had truly happened. As though some terrible nightmare had taken root in my memory and borne its poisonous fruit.

I sat on the edge of the platform and looked out at the gathering darkness, at the metallic water, and watched the green mangrove leaves shiver as a sunset breeze passed through. With Dad gone, the isolation I felt in that place was total. No one knew where I was. No one knew such a place existed. If I chose to use the pistol and end my life, there would be no son to find my body. I was lost to the world.

It was when I was laying out my supplies, placing them into the customary corners of the platform that I noticed the photograph thumb tacked to a branch at eye-level in the northwestern corner of the deck.

I inched over to it, peered at the image. It was a faded black and white snapshot, a vintage photo so washed out that the two figures in it had almost disappeared. A man and a woman were leaning against the fender of a'57 Ford. The man was most certainly my father. He was maybe nineteen or twenty at the time, a few years before he married my mother. There was a jaunty expression on his face. Tight jeans and a snug T-shirt showed off his athletic build.

The woman snuggled in beside him was black-haired and smiling. She had large dark eyes and heavy eyebrows and wore a light-colored summer dress and the garland of flowers in her abundant black hair had come undone, a strand of it falling down along her smooth cheek. It was not my mother. It was no one I recognized.

On the previous trip, in my frenzied state, I must have missed the photo. For some reason my father had fixed it there as he struggled with his fateful decision. Was this the love of his life? A woman he returned to in his imagination after my mother's death? A haunting reminder of the romance he'd lost as his existence was gradually defined by routine family responsibilities and the grind of work?

He had told me about some of his early loves and I had imagined them vividly, but this young woman's face did not match any of the images in my mind. She was too stunning. Somehow both a classic beauty yet strangely exotic—as though her heritage was a wild mix of Slavic and Caribbean.

I studied the photograph until the light was nearly gone, then I rolled out my sleeping bag, ate the turkey sandwich Nadine had made for me, downed a beer in three swallows. I watched the stars appear, listened to the changing of the guard in the mangroves, night creatures stirring, the creaks and sighs of the branches. A splash, then another as the warfare between the predators and prey resumed.

I took out the pistol and held it in my hand. Its heft was oddly reassuring. The despair, the bleak hopelessness I'd been feeling was still there, but it had subsided by a degree or two like the momentary dulling of a migraine.

The photograph seemed to glow through the darkness. Two lovers leaning against that old car. A beautiful woman whose memory had some deep and special significance to my father, but not enough to save him from his suicide.

I raised the pistol and touched the barrel to my temple. Held it there for several seconds as I listened to the wilderness around me. I felt a communion with my father in his final moments, a gun at my head, death so close by. A slight tightening of my finger could end it all. Such power, such finality, such terror.

I exhaled and lowered the pistol and set it on the platform beside me. I could feel my bones trembling.

For decades I had marched side by side with my father, matching his stride, harmonizing my values to his. No other friends I had, not even Nadine, could compare. He was my model, my ideal. Calm, commanding, full of joy and fun, engaged in the rough and tumble world, smart and inquiring, endlessly curious. That he had gone off to this spot to end his life still seemed an unfathomable mystery. My mother's death had shaken him, of course, but my father was too strong-willed and independent to succumb to suicidal despair. Unless there was a side of him that he'd managed to hide from me.

I squinted at the pale unnatural moonlight shining from the photograph. Dad would have known that only I could have found it. Which meant he must have left the photo for that reason, like a confession, or the key to a puzzle he meant for me to solve.

I climbed into the bedroll and stared at the endless sky. The pistol lay at my side within easy reach. The scrape of branches and plinks and splashes and rattle of leaves keep me company for an hour or two as my eyes roamed the heavens.

When sleep came, it was agitated and cluttered with scraps of dream. My father was alive again, wearing the same ghoulish mask of death he'd worn on the last day I'd seen him. His jaw was missing, one eyeless socket wept blood, deep gouges grooved his cheeks and throat. He was speaking in an hysterical gibberish that sounded like two raccoons locked in a mortal battle. As I tried to speak his name, my father's hand reached up and took hold of the flesh of his cheek, and peeled away the macabre mask as if it were rubber. His normal face was revealed. He smiled in his sheepish, good-natured way yet I could see the smile was not for me, but for someone beyond the frame of the dream.

I groaned and broke away from sleep, my heart flailing, sweat soaking my clothes. For the rest of the night I lay with my eyes shut, asleep and not asleep, my body clenched and feverish until finally a gray light began to fill the Lost Lagoon.

Still groggy, I felt the platform trembling beneath me.

I lifted my head and squinted. Five feet away, sitting on the edge of a platform, a naked woman held my spinning rod. Her line was tight. A big fish was bending the rod almost double, but her arms and back seemed unstrained by the tension.

This had to be a continuation of the nightmares I'd been having all night. She had the same dense black hair of the woman in the snapshot. The knobs of her spine gleamed unnaturally as if her skin were translucent and the shadow of her skeleton was visible through the sheer flesh. I could see the muscles flex and relax as she worked the fish closer to the platform.

I tried to sit up, but discovered I couldn't lift my head more than a few inches from the planks. I fingered my throat, and felt the braided cord I'd brought along. I tried to tear the noose away, but it was knotted too well. I traced the single strand, finding that it was wrapped around one of the cedar planks, leaving just enough slack so I could lift my head a few inches.

"Tarpon," the woman said. "A hundred and five pounds, maybe one-ten."

She horsed the fish to the right and made it jump, a wild silver flailing before it crashed against the surface of the lagoon. Bigger than any catch my dad and I had ever made in these waters. It jumped a second time and a third, my rod bending so deeply I thought it might snap.

I fumbled with the cord around my neck but the fibers were so tough even if I'd had a knife at hand, it would've taken half an hour to saw through it. I clenched my eyes and opened them again. This was no dream. The pain was real, and the woman too. I lifted my head, straining against the ropes to see the tarpon jumping again high into the dawn light.

When she'd reeled the tarpon close to the deck, she stooped forward and with one hand she held the tarpon's mouth and with the other she pried the hook free. I could hear the swoosh of its departure.

"Who are you?"

She stood up and turned around, smiling with the glow of her catch. She set my rod on the deck in the same place my dad and I stored them.

Her body was long and lean and tanned all over. She was a few years younger than I, with large brown eyes and a plump lower lip. Her breasts were small and her hips boyish. A swimmer's body, or a long distance runner's.

She came over to me and squatted down and picked up the white carton that contained Dad's ashes.

"The woman in the photograph. You're her daughter."

"That's right."

I gripped the noose and tugged.

"Let me go. I won't hurt you."

"You couldn't hurt me if you tried."

"So let me go."

She eyed me for several moments.

"That tarpon," she said. "That's the smallest one I've caught in a month. You ever caught any that size?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. I guess I got the fishing genes."

"What do you want?"

"I wanted to meet you. Face to face. See what you're made of. It took you a damn long time to return here. I've been out here for a month. I've been eating so many fish, I'd kill for a hamburger."

"You're his daughter? He brought you here, to this place?"

"Oh, yes. You and I have been sharing him," she said. "We've been dividing the old man all our lives. But you didn't know that, did you? You thought he was all yours. All those conferences he went to, the golfing trips, that was my time with him."

"Let me go."

"That makes me your sister," she said. "Half-sister."

"No, you're not. I don't believe it."

"So don't believe it. Keep your fantasy. You and the old man were best buddies. You and the old man had a unique bond. You had this secret place. Well, you didn't. None of that was true. He was unfaithful to you, unfaithful to your mother. He was living a parallel life."

"You're lying."

"You can't wish me away. I'm here. I've always been here."

I lay still. I looked up at the sky where a single pelican was coasting past.

She kneeled beside me and worked at the knots with one hand while she held the white carton in the other. I could smell her aroma, like a bale of hay baking in the sun, or wildflowers withered on the stem. She was smiling at something, her eyes off in the distance as if she were listening to a voice.

When I was free, she rose and stepped away.

I struggled to sit up, feeling faint and weak.

"Sorry about the noose," she said. "I had to be sure I could handle you."

"Give me the ashes," I said. "Give them to me."

"Pork fried Dad," she said.

I couldn't speak. I felt the blood drain from my skull.

"It looks like Chinese takeout," she said. "Moo shoo Dad."

I saw my father's irreverent smile on her lips.

"You're an illusion," I said. "A figment of my imagination."

"Yeah, right. Dream on."

"What do you want with me?"

"My mother's gone now, in case you were wondering. She died a month before your mom went. That's what did Dad in. The double whammy of losing both his lovers. I'm not married. Never have been. So I don't have a family. No one knows about this place, but the two of us. Unless you told Nadine today."

"Dad told you about Nadine and me?"

"No," she said. "He pretended you didn't exist. But I figured it out. Tracked you down. It wasn't hard."

"You figured it out."

"I'm a woman. We're good at things like that. Seeing through our men."

I looked at the paper carton in her hand.

"So," she said. "Let's do his ashes. Then we'll decide who stays, who goes."

"What does that mean?"

"You know what it means, Logan. Only one of us is going to leave here."

I looked around for the pistol but it was no longer lying by my bedroll where I'd set it last night.

"Why?"

"Think about it. Are you willing to throw away your past? Revise your memories, spend the rest of your life adjusting to this new state of affairs. I know I'm not. I want Dad to myself. I want this place to myself. I want you gone."

I looked past her at the lagoon. At the morning light filtering through the dense green growth, the dazzle of sunlight on the water. For a moment I pictured Nadine back in Miami, waiting for me, wondering if I would return at all.

I thought of my own betrayal of her. The long years when she was second in line for my affection. How she must have longed for the larger part of me, the part I reserved for Dad. And I saw again the resigned look in her eyes as I left yesterday. Or was that a look of finality? A farewell to the man she had squandered her life on.

"You ready, Logan?" She was holding the carton above the water. "I was thinking I should sprinkle half of it and you sprinkle the rest."

I stepped closer to her and saw the pistol's rubber grip exposed at the edge of my sleeping bag.

"All right," I said. "You first then."

She gave me a look that was both wary and amused, one eyebrow cocked just as Dad used to do.

She held the box over the water and tipped it, then swept it from one side of the platform to the other. A breeze sent the gray cloud swirling across the waters.

"Now you," she said, turning to me.

The smile on her lips grew solemn as she saw the gun in my hand.

"Ah, yes. The inevitable pistol."

"I don't want to do this," I said. "But you give me no choice."

"Of course," she said. "I'd do the same. I don't blame you. Not in the least."

"Where's your canoe? Where's your gear?"

She motioned to the waters beyond the bend in the lagoon.

"I have to do this. I have to."

"Of course you do."

I aimed at her left breast. She would fall backwards into the lagoon and be carried by the tide deeper into the mangroves. I would sink her canoe, then pack mine and paddle back to the main dock and drive home. Her body would decay and would never be found. I would do what I could to repair my marriage. I would make love to Nadine with a fervor I hadn't shown in years. I would start my life anew. I had seen death a thousand times. I had looked into the dazed eyes of the dying as they breathed their last. I could do this.

But her hand swung up and my father's dust blinded me. In a second she was on me, as strong as any woman I'd ever known. She chopped at my hand and the pistol clattered onto the deck. I stumbled backwards over my sleeping bag, clawing at the air in a sightless frenzy. She had her hands around my throat, and I got my hands around hers.

In a moment I felt the fibers giving way beneath my fingers and I heard the crackle of my own ligaments beneath her powerful grip. The dim light grew dimmer as I staggered to the side, pulling her with me in this awkward dance. The deck swayed and rocked and I heard the creaks of the old ropes that held it in place.

I gasped and heard her gasp. My knees sagged. Tiny sparklers fizzled. I smelled the sweet burn of apples and saw my father in his prime hiking beside my mother and me across a mountain orchard on one of our family vacations. The reel of my childhood began to flash, scenes of my father and me on boats and with bats and balls in fields of play, swimming in a motel pool, riding a Ferris wheel, shooting beer cans off fence posts with a .22, falling asleep side by side beneath the Everglades stars. I felt the ache in my throat and watched blackness swell from the frame of my vision.

* * *

On Whitewater Bay, I paddled with even strokes, making it to the docks by noon. I loaded my car with the fishing gear, strapped the canoe on the roof rack, got behind the steering wheel and waited.

I watched the families come and go. Winnebagos and station wagons and SUV's. Men with their sons. Men with their daughters. Men with only their wives or girlfriends. Backing their fishing boats down the ramps, heading off for a day in the wilderness. I watched tourists park their rental cars and walk aimlessly around the parking lot. I watched birders with their binoculars combing the trees.

At two o'clock she arrived. She wore shorts and a red T-shirt and tennis shoes. She hauled her canoe from the water, carried it to a VW van and fixed it in place. She sat inside her van for a while, then started it and drove away.

I followed her out the entrance drive, then spent the next half hour shadowing her back to Florida City, staying a good half mile back. When she turned south on the Interstate, I turned north. I didn't need to know anything more. She wouldn't return to the Lost Lagoon and neither would I. We had spoiled it for each other, contaminated the place with our savagery.

It was an hour back to the house. I left the canoe on top of the car and sprinted to the front door. I swung it open, ran inside. I called out Nadine's name. Called it out again and again as I searched.

I found her sleeping in the guest room. The TV was on the Weather Channel and a man in a suit was promising more days of sun.

"You're back," Nadine said, as I staggered into the room. "What happened? You look terrible. What happened, Logan?"

I dropped to my knees beside the bed and held her. At first her embrace was stiff and uncertain, but in a moment it softened as though there were no sins she couldn't forgive, no limits to her mercy.

"Your eyes, Logan. What happened to your eyes?"

"It's nothing," I said. "I was crying. That's all. Just crying."

I rubbed at my swollen eyes until my vision finally cleared.

SIX LOVE

In the delicate crosshairs of Roger's telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway stood at her open window, only the thin mesh of window screen and a hundred yards of humid, bug-dense summer air separating them. With the golden lights of her room blazing behind her, her body seemed to glow.

Gigi still wore her white tennis dress with the blue bows on the sleeves and she was brushing her long auburn hair. For years Roger had observed her close-up each afternoon when he came to retrieve his daughter, Julie, from tennis practice. Since the age of six, Gigi had been Julie's nemesis, and Roger had made a careful study of this girl who caused his daughter such torment.

By now he was intimately familiar with the scent of sour peppermint that Gigi's clammy flesh gave off. And he could picture exactly the glint of long blond hairs coating her forearms and lately he'd noticed the razor line at mid-thigh, just above the hem of her pleated tennis skirt, the rigidly precise border where she stopped shaving her legs. He knew her half dozen habitual facial expressions, from the subtle smirk she made when one of her inferiors blew an easy shot, to the hawkish squint that furrowed her forehead when she fell behind and had to summon an extra quotient of concentration.

Gigi looked out at the dark and for a half-second seemed to stare directly at Roger Shelton where he stood, tense and uncertain, the coarse bark of the pine pressed hard against left his cheek, the smooth stock of his deer rifle flat against the other. He was five yards beyond the halo of the neighborhood security lights, in the shadows of the dense stand of pines that bordered Deepwood Estates, the exclusive community where Arthur Janeway, owner of the largest Cadillac dealership in Florida, resided. Arthur was a corpulent man who held a cold disdain for second-raters of every type, which most certainly included Roger Shelton, a common salesman on one of Janeway's used car lots.

Arthur's wife, Bettina, was from Dusseldorf. Gaunt and thin-lipped, with the cigarette roughened voice, the white-blonde hair, and the pale icy detachment of Greta Garbo in her prime. Ages ago, while still a bachelor, Roger had stumbled into Bettina during her first week in Sand Hills. New to America and deeply disoriented, she had briefly mistaken Roger for someone with a promising future and had dallied with him for two nights at a motel on the fringe of town. On the third night when she failed to appear, Roger Shelton went searching and located her at the Hotel Flamingo's wood paneled bar. On the stool next to her, Arthur Janeway was touching a flame to her cigarette. She turned and saw Roger in the doorway and the lungful of smoke that bloomed from her lips was directed at him with dismissive finality. When she turned back to Arthur, she gave a long, guttural laugh to some sly remark of his. In reply, Arthur reached up and touched a finger to one of her chiseled cheekbones. For several moments Roger stared from the doorway as Bettina pressed her baton, firmly and assuredly, into the hand of the swifter runner.

As he was turning to go, Molly Weatherstone appeared beside him in the doorway of the Hotel Flamingo bar. She wore a shimmering black cocktail dress and spiky heels. Roger managed a distracted hello but she didn't reply. Her furious gaze was fixed on the back of Arthur Janeway's head.

"You too, huh?" Roger said. "What'd he do, stand you up?"

After absorbing the scene for a moment more, Molly stalked across the room, bent to Arthur's ear and spoke a few short, sibilant words then swung around and marched out of the bar.

Less than a month later Bettina and Arthur Janeway eloped to Las Vegas. It was only days after that when Roger and Molly, consummated their own hasty romance with a civil ceremony at the Sand Hills courthouse. And though over the years, their marriage had proved sound enough, Roger always wondered if their bond had not been forged on the flimsy foundation of spite.

Gigi Janeway, the girl in Roger Shelton's wavering sights was Arthur and Bettina's cherished princess. Fourteen years old. A bony girl with pale gray eyes and a world class two-handed backhand, a good kick serve and a killer instinct around the net. As Roger watched through the telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway drew the brush through her coarse brown hair with the same mindlessly mechanical motion she employed on the court. Every stroke exactly like the last. Not a quiver of difference between the first backhand crosscourt of the afternoon and the five hundredth stroke that came two hours later. Her game was fearsomely robotic. She swung her racket like a scythe through the golden wheat of other men's daughters. Harvesting their vulnerabilities, their mind-wandering lapses, their muscular frailties. Gigi moved forward and forward again in an ever-widening swath, mowing down girl after girl with pitiless perfection.

Roger could see the shelf of trophies on the wall behind her. Not the small runner-up plaques Julie had managed to collect. But the big, gaudy, golden vessels of the triumphant. It was not simply to amass these trophies that drove Roger's daughter Julie to dash herself over and over and over against the impervious wall of Gigi Janeway's tennis game. Roger's daughter was guided by an artistic temperament. Capricious and creative and capable of flights of giddy inspiration, Julie played the game with volatile abandon. She was a poet on those strict and unforgiving courts. Lithe and inventive, mesmerizing in her finest moments, she had a dazzling array of shots and angles and paces and spins that sent the ball skidding away from her opponent's racket as if charmed.

On other days, however, when Julie's juices were not flowing, when the muse deserted her, she simply crumpled under the fractional weight of air. She could be sluggish and erratically self-destructive and painful to watch. Sometimes she fell into a daze of slow-motion awkwardness, eyes unlocked from the moment, stumbling about on the green clay as if she no longer cared about the game of tennis or about anything else on earth.

At her finest moments, Julie exposed Gigi for the mindless automaton that she was, yo-yoing her from side to side and up and back, twisting and turning the girl until she had to be dizzy, using her vast array of spins and speeds to search out the tiny chinks in Gigi's heavy armor. But those glorious moments came and went like fragile wisps of starlight. Julie had so far been unable to sustain her quicksilver magic for an entire match against Gigi's inexhaustible onslaught.

In the small town of Sand Hills, in the tennis crazy county of Palm Cove, Gigi was the unfailing winner and Julie was the eternal runner-up. A girl with more talent and flair than a hundred Gigi's, though lacking in Gigi's single-minded focus, her stubborn, animal appetite for conquest.

If simply winning her matches against Julie had been enough for Gigi Janeway, Roger would not be standing in the woods at that moment, aiming his deer rifle at the girl. But like her rapacious father, Gigi seemed to hunger for more than victory. Nothing less than total domination appeared to satisfy her. Every match against Julie was a blood-letting so vicious and so total that their accumulated affect was to drain the reservoirs of Julie's very spirit. Between matches, each word Gigi spoke to Julie had a belittling purpose. Every act, each haughty look or whispered remark to a fellow player tormented Julie, mocked her, undermined her faith in her abilities and reminded her of her inferior station in Sand Hills, Florida, where her father was merely an unremarkable salesman.

On too many nights, Julie lay in her sleepless bed and stared into her father's eyes pleading for Roger to tell her what she might do to alter her fate.

Roger had no answer. But he knew that Gigi Janeway and she alone blocked the way of his daughter. Her talent thwarted, skills obstructed, her very personality was being permanently stunted. No matter how hard she worked, no matter the peaks of athletic grace she reached, her efforts were forever mocked by Gigi Janeway. Just as his own career had been arrested by men like Gigi's father who were willing to be more aggressive, more relentlessly ruthless and hardnosed than Roger.

Out on the glaring pavement of the used car lot Roger had known his own moments of artistic grace. Closing deals in half an hour with penny-pinching old fools from the beachfront condos. There were days when he'd summoned his silver tongue and not even the devil himself could have withstood his sales pitch. He held the single day sales record of five used cars. However, he also held the record for the longest stretches without a sale. It was, Roger believed, all a function of the ebb and flow of the artistic temperament. But men like Arthur Janeway didn't appreciate transcendent qualities. Janeway, like his daughter, was unapologetically cold-blooded, relying on his superior focus, and his boundless stamina to wear down and eventually crush his competition. He got what he wanted by wanting it more than anyone else.

Roger was certain all Julie needed was the smallest of boosts. What father could turn away from such need? Truly, all he wished to do was wing the girl in the golden window, a non-fatal wound that would keep her sidelined for a month or two, long enough for Julie to replenish her confidence and gather the momentum she needed.

Framed by honeyed light, Gigi stood in her window and dared Roger to shoot. Dared him to still the shudder in his arms and summon the courage that had eluded him for months.

He watched as Gigi took hold of a clump of her hair and brought it close to her face and inspected it. He watched her pluck a split end and flick it toward the screen. A casual gesture that was a perfect echo for the way she mercilessly brushed aside her flawed opponents. Then he watched with fascination as she released her hair and lifted the hairbrush to her mouth—turning it into a microphone, tipping her head to the side as if searching for a more flattering angle in the lights of center court Wimbledon. Having completed the entire fortnight without the loss of a set, Gigi had dispatched her final opponent and now curtseyed before the Duke and Duchess and explained to the enraptured crowd how she had managed this stunning victory at such a young age. Lucky sperm, Roger imagined her to say. Lucky sperm swam up my mother's thingy and infected her with me and gave me the endless stamina and the narrow focus and the ability to be unbored by hours of unvarying, repetition. I am not worthy of this trophy, she would say. The deserving one is Julie Shelton back in Sand Hills, Florida, a girl who went farther than anyone would have expected given the fact she had such unlucky sperm. Julie Shelton, a beautiful loser. This is for you unlucky Julie. This is for you, you pathetic girl, who never found the guts and gristle and monotonous meanness to succeed.

Through his sight Roger Shelton watched as Gigi dropped the hairbrush and came to sudden attention . Her smile went rigid as if someone had plucked the harp string that joined her cerebellum with the million unbearable nerves of her body. And then Gigi's mouth went slack and with one final puff of energy those ruthless blue eyes fixed on Roger's and all around his hiding place the woods glowed with Gigi Janeway's outrage. In her last moment of consciousness, a pout took control of her lips as if she were suffering an unaccustomed disappointment, some treasure withheld, some bauble snatched from her grasp.

Roger lowered the rifle and listened to the echo of the blast swallowed by the thick, damp air, the surf roar of traffic, the high keening of crickets and mosquitoes, and the muffled television laughter leaking from behind insulated walls and all that machine driven air.

He was to learn later that no one had heard the shot. No witnesses came forward with descriptions of a man dressed in camouflage. Apparently Roger had moved back to his car with perfect anonymity. In the following days, police investigators searched the nearby woods but failed to locate his nest in the trees or any other sign of him. The Sand Hills police were utterly baffled. Their theory was that Gigi had been struck by a stray slug from someone target practicing in the woods. Arthur and Bettina pled for help from state authorities or the FBI but they were denied. A month after the incident the furor had subsided.

What Roger learned of Gigi's condition came from the newspaper stories and the scuttlebutt around the used car lot. For seven weeks Gigi Janeway lay in a coma. When she woke, she remembered little of her previous life. The most mundane physical movements were now monumental challenges. For a while, every breath was a test, every eye blink an accomplishment. Her muscle memory had been totally erased. It would be a year before she could walk without crutches. Two before she might even grip a tennis racket again.

Indeed, it was almost two years to the day of her shooting, when Roger witnessed Gigi's return to the courts at the Sand Hills Racket Club. Her spastic swing, her heavy trudge, her immediate weariness was a cruel parody of her former game. Roger took no pleasure in her misery. But the acid drip of guilt he felt was neutralized by the welling pleasure and satisfaction as he watched his own daughter thrive. With a single tightening of his finger, Roger had liberated Julie and had given a totally justifiable rebuke to the imperious Janeway family.

The week before Christmas, on the clay courts of Flamingo Park on Miami Beach, Julie was serving at 40-5 in the second set. This was the final match of the most prestigious junior tournament in the world. The best players from Europe and South America and Australia had assembled and Julie had roared through her draw to the finals, knocking off two seeded players in the process. After winning the first set, she was up a service break in the second. As the match progressed her serve seemed to be gaining strength. Now it was skittering into the corners, and occasionally blasting directly at her dark-haired opponent with such vicious pace that the poor Spanish girl's heavy thighs were pocked with bruises.

Roger wanted to signal Julie to ease off. She was losing the sympathy of the crowd. There were already a few whistles, some murmuring around him about the tall lean American's lack of sportsmanship. But the referee sitting in the chair at the net had already given Julie one warning for sneaking looks at her father's hand signals. Another warning and she'd be penalized a game. Though she was well ahead, such a small interruption in her concentration might just be enough to tip the momentum back to the Spaniard.

"She's killing her," Molly whispered. She beamed with motherly delight.

Roger Shelton's wife, Molly, was as thin and jumpy as a whippet. She kept her sandy hair chopped short and her skin had been forever ruined by countless hours in the sun and now was crisped to the hue and texture of the wrappings of a cheap cigar. She was an indefatigable doubles player, a woman who thought nothing of playing ten grueling sets in a day.

"I know, I know," Roger said. "Two more games. Just two more."

Roger sat still and suffered the crowd's restlessness and loss of support for his daughter. Julie had begun to employ an ugly strategy, drawing the Spaniard to the net with vicious dropshots and rather than lobbing over her to exploit her ponderous gait, again and again Julie drove the ball directly at the sluggish girl and more than once the ball found meat.

Finally Julie was a game from victory. The Orange Bowl trophy gleamed on a nearby table. Such a win would kick the door wide open for her tennis future. Endorsement requests would begin to tumble in the mail slot, media attention would escalate, all the best agents would be calling. Already in the last year she had been attracting ever increasing attention. Tall and blonde with shockingly blue eyes and an easy smile, gorgeously muscled legs and a voluptuous figure so different from her mother's hipless, flat-chested anatomy and from Roger's rail thin body. Known as "The Stick" for all his high school years, Roger found it amazing that he and Molly had produced such a plush beauty. In the last year a dozen websites had sprung up in cyberspace devoted to the worship of Julie Shelton. Fourteen year old boys posted photos of her lunging for net shots, her pleated skirt kicking up just enough to show a swatch of white panties. And it wasn't just an adolescent following either. Throughout her matches, Roger had to endure the soft groans of yearning all about him, a grumble of lust for his little girl. At first he'd wanted to search out each lecher and wrench him from his seat and toss him over the edge of the bleachers. A satisfaction he could not grant himself, however, for, like it or not, Julie's sexual aura would count as much in her future success as her victories on the courts.

She was serving for the match, for the Orange Bowl title, a win which would etch her name beside the great ones of the game, Billie Jean, Chrissie, Martina, Stephie. Roger shifted on the bleacher seat, about to rise to his feet and head down to give her a hug, when he saw from three rows away Arthur Janeway glaring at him. In a white warm-up suit, Gigi Janeway sat serenely next to him, her gaze fixed on the final moments of the match. On the far side of her ravaged daughter, Bettina was hunched forward, hollow-eyed and ashen. As if she felt the touch of his anxious stare, she turned her head slowly and locked her bitter gaze on Roger.

Shocked and befuddled, Roger raised a hand and gave the Janeways a ludicrous wave. Neither of them acknowledged the gesture, but continued to observe him coldly.

"Where are you going?" Molly asked as Roger rose. "She's still serving. You're going to distract her."

But Roger was already in motion. Thudding down the bleacher aisle, leaving a murmur of displeasure in his wake, he pushed past two wolfish teenagers in red sweatsuits, the Hungarian contingent, excused himself and hurried into the shadows beneath the bleachers.

His breath was still hot in his throat when he felt the presence behind him.

"You can't get away from me."

Roger swung around and bumped his shoulder into the deep chest of Arthur Janeway.

Janeway was a few inches taller and outweighed Roger by fifty pounds. Since Gigi's injury, he'd virtually disappeared from the dealership. Indeed, this was the first time Roger had seen him in months. The man had lost his steak and martini paunch and his florid face, and the rigors of his grief had hardened his thickset body and turned his cheeks the color of frozen iron.

Roger tried to force some compassion into his smile.

"Hello, Arthur. It's good to see you. How is everything?"

Janeway eased his bulk close to Roger. He drew down a breath and blew it out so fiercely it was as if the very taste of air disgusted him.

"I know what you did, Shelton. I know everything."

Roger floundered for a half-second, then found a salesman's smile somewhere down in the hollow depths of his chest.

"You mean that Olds Ciera fiasco? Yeah, yeah. I low-balled it a little, but I had the wholesale numbers jumbled. Don't worry, Arthur, I'll get it back on the next deal."

"I'm not talking about a fucking Oldsmobile, Shelton. You know exactly what I'm talking about."

Roger watched as Bettina helped Gigi down the last steps of the bleachers then halted and surveyed the grounds until she caught sight of the two of them.

"Hey, Arthur, you know I'd love to talk shop a little more, but I really need to give Julie a big hug of celebration."

"You fucked my wife, Shelton," Janeway hissed.

"What?"

Roger drew a careful breath and eyed the big man whose lips had begun to quiver with rage.

"She told me the whole story. Everything."

Bettina had her arm around Gigi's waist. The girl was leaning against her mother as the two of them plodded closer.

"What in god's name are you talking about?"

Janeway's eyes were slitted now, tipping close to Roger's face. He could smell Arthur's breath, taste the green peppers he'd eaten the night before, and the sour fumes of incompletely digested meat.

"She's yours, Shelton. She's your little girl."

"You really shouldn't joke about something like that, Arthur."

"No one's kidding."

Roger nodded stupidly, a ridiculous smile twisting his lips as he watched mother and daughter draw near.

"Hello, Bettina," he said. "Hello, Gigi. How're you doing?"

Gigi's mouth flickered. She stretched her neck as if something might be stuck in her throat. When she spoke, her voice was a raspy croak.

"I'm surviving."

"Good, good," Roger said, then turned to his employer. "Well, it's certainly nice to see you all. Nice that you're out and around again."

Roger turned to go but Janeway clapped a meaty paw on his shoulder and spun him around.

"Don't bother showing up on the lot again, Shelton. Not that anyone would notice you were missing."

Roger shrugged free of Janeway's grip and headed for the court where Julie was speaking to a writer for Tennis Magazine. As he stood waiting for the interview to conclude, he could feel the sting of three pair of eyes on the back of his neck.

A week later, Roger Shelton sat in the den surveying the bleak landscape of the want ads while Julie was in the living room knee to knee with a sales rep for Nike apparel. She was evaluating their latest offer sheet, and even from two rooms away Roger could hear her bargaining tone turn severe. The girl adamantly insisted on making all her own deals. Even with the avalanche of offers she received after winning the Orange Bowl, Julie hadn't so much as requested a hint of advice from Roger or Molly. So far she'd signed a half dozen contracts on her own, a shoe deal, a racket contract, another agreement to wear a Rolex watch, another to only drink Gatorade on the court. Not even out of high school, and already well on her way to her first ten million.

Roger had been making the rounds of dealerships but had met nothing but cold smiles. He was certain Janeway had black-listed him. Roger had not given Molly any details about the disquieting conversation with Janeway, only telling her that he'd been downsized from his job of twenty years, without warning or just cause. Molly made a sad face, gave him a buck-up pat on the shoulder and poured him a double martini, and the next morning she was back to her punishing tennis schedule as if nothing had changed, as if Roger was not languishing in his pajamas till noon with the classifieds open in his lap.

On the mantel across the living room, the round-faced clock ticked loudly. Roger stared at it, watching the second hand stutter around its face. He found himself ticking off the seconds as if counting down to some kind of blast-off, waiting, waiting, waiting for the great rocket to lift from its silos and carry him away, giddy and free of gravity. At last the terrible weight lifted from his chest, the earth's pressures relieved.

"Hey, Dad." It was Julie in the doorway. She was wearing a new outfit, a dark blue warm-up with a silky sheen. Her name was embroidered in gold over the left breast. And beside her name was the company's logo. His daughter, a freshly minted trademark.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Martino wanted to meet you."

The young man with slicked back hair and tight muscles and a dark tan marched across the room before Roger could rise from the chair. The salesman stuck out his hand and crushed Roger's meager grip.

"Julie's a damn hard-bargainer, Mr. Shelton. Must've inherited that from you. I understand you're in the car business."

"Used cars," Julie said. "The junkers."

Martino nodded, fetching for a smile.

"And he couldn't even hack that," Julie said. "He got fired."

Roger looked at his daughter and then at Martino. Roger tried to smile but felt it wilt on his lips.

"A career transition," Roger said. He tapped the pile of newspapers in his lap, the pathetic red circles around job prospects.

"Well, I'm sure Julie owes a great deal to you, Mr. Shelton. You should be very proud."

"I am, I am."

"I owe something to Mom, maybe," Julie said. She was looking down at the breast of her new warm-up, studying the golden twist of letters that spelled out her name. "But I can't think of what Dad did. What I think is, the two of them found me on the doorstep. I mean, come on, look at me. And look at him."

Julie tugged the bottom of her warm-up to tighten the fabric against her swelling breasts.

"Sure, genes can be funny, but hey, you saw my mother. She's even skinnier than the old man. I think they found me under a cabbage somewhere."

Roger worked up the smile again and showed it to Martino.

"She's a spunky one," Roger said. "She's right though. What she's accomplished is her own doing."

"Oh, sure, Dad picked me up after practice now and then. But he only did that so he could check out the other girls. He's a major lech."

"A lech?" Roger said. "Me?"

Martino backed up a step, looking between the two of them, trying to keep his smile in place as if this was a comedy routine still building to the punch line.

"I've earned it all myself," Julie said. "Just look at Gigi Janeway and her dad. He's got more money than the Pope, so Gigi had all the best teaching pros. Lessons every day. A coach to work on her serve, one for her backhand, another one for her net game. I had like this one guy, he couldn't even speak English. All he did, he hit me balls from his basket. Bueno, bueno. An hour like that, him just hitting me forehands then backhands and yapping in Spanish, ninety-nine percent of which I couldn't understand. So yeah, I'd say I pretty much did it all on my own."

Martino left, chuckling and nodding like it was all an enormous joke. That uproariously witty Shelton family.

Julie went up to her room, shut the door, and turned on her rap music and Roger sat in the living room and watched the clock on the mantelpiece tick away the rest of the afternoon.

At dawn the next morning, he rolled from his sleepless bed and went downstairs and paced back and forth across the deck, staring out at the open field behind the house. As the sun broke into view above the pines, he went inside and took down a photo of Julie from the mantelpiece and stared at it. He sat in the living room easy chair and held it up, tilting it back and forth to catch the light. He put the photo back on the mantel and tiptoed upstairs and eased open the door to Julie's room. She was lying on her back, her head denting the pillow exactly in the center. She snored quietly. He stood there for several minutes watching the girl sleep.

At nine o'clock he roared into the used car lot, got out and stalked into the showroom. Gathered around the coffee machine, the other salesmen watched him but didn't so much as nod when he walked across the floor and went into his old office. Manny Mendoza was closing a deal with a black couple and their teenage daughter. He looked up at Roger and frowned.

"I'm looking for my stuff."

"Stuff?"

"My photos," Roger said. "The stuff I kept on my desk."

Manny nodded toward the far corner where a cardboard box was jammed behind the black couple and their daughter. He picked it up and took it out to the showroom and set it on the hood of a ten year old red pickup truck and dug through it till he found what he was looking for. He walked over to the large portrait of Arthur Janeway that hung on the back wall. He held his daughter's photo up to the portrait and cut his eyes back and forth between the two images.

The pouty lips, the heavy lids, the same crease in the earlobes, even an identical arch in the right eyebrow. When he was satisfied the likeness was unmistakable, he dropped the photo back in the box, left it on the hood of the pickup and went out to his nine year old Cadillac and drove straightaway to the Sand Hills Racket Club where he found Molly and her regular doubles partner engaged in a furious exchange of volleys with two much younger women.

Roger walked onto the court in the midst of the point, the ball whacking him between the shoulder blades.

"Roger! We were about to go up a service break. What in the hell are you doing?"

"We need to talk," he said quietly and pried the racket from her hand and marched over to a bench in the shade of a royal palm.

Molly stormed over and stood looking down at him with her fists balled against her narrow hips.

"This better be good, Roger."

"It's not good," he said. "No, not good at all."

Molly stared into his eyes and whatever she saw melted the knot in her jaw, neutralized the acid in her eyes. She sat down beside him and together they looked out at the busy courts. The balls passing back and forth across the nets, the cries of exultation and disgust, the peals of laughter. Those neatly lined rectangles of green clay that had always seemed so tranquil to Roger, so calming. The orderliness of it all, a stage so neatly structured, while all around those courts the cosmos whirled haphazardly.

"She's not mine, is she?" Roger said. "Yours, but not mine."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's a wonder I never saw it before. It's so obvious, really. So damn plain when you look at it. Even her personality. That same elbow-your-way-to-the-front approach. I guess on some level I've always known she couldn't be mine."

Roger watched the balls traveling back and forth and back and forth again across the precisely measured nets. He listened to the thwock of cleanly hit serves, the machine gun exchanges with all four players at the net. Such an orderly game. So pure, so simple, so perfectly symmetrical.

Two days later Roger stood in the field of tall grass and looked at the back of his two story house, aglow with lights on that moonless night. He could see Molly finishing her cleanup in the kitchen. The evening news was over now. She was watching the entertainment shows, learning about the latest tribulations of her Hollywood pals.

Earlier that afternoon Roger had an interview at a Buick dealership down in Miami, over a hundred miles south. Then a half hour ago he had called Molly to let her know he'd been caught in a snarl of rush hour traffic, so he'd pulled off I-95 and stopped at some bar in Ft. Lauderdale to pass an hour till the roadways cleared.

The truth was, after the interview, he'd driven back to Sand Hills and made the call from a bar on the edge of town and then he'd driven to the junior high school a half mile from their house and waited till it grew dark. He'd carried the deer rifle through the stand of pine trees that separated the ball fields of the junior high from the development where he lived. And now he stood in the meadow watching the windows of his own home and thinking about justice and lucky sperm and the difference between an artistic temperament and a plodding, methodical one, which was, he was starting to believe, the difference between arrogance and humility. What utter hubris to have ever believed that a few lucky days of salesmanship was the equivalent of artistic triumph. Roger Shelton was a hopeless plodder just as his daughter was. All she had inherited from him was an unfathomable mediocrity. She wasn't flashy, wasn't a slugger, had no killing shot. All she'd ever done was keep the ball in play one hit longer than her opponent. Hanging on, surviving.

When Julie appeared in her window, Roger raised the rifle and brought her closer to him. He lay the center of the X across her ample chest. Julie was on the phone. She was wearing one of her new monogrammed warm-ups and her hair was damp from the shower. The words came from her lips in a furious rush. Maybe it was her agent or one of her numerous boyfriends. He could see her lips moving, then he watched the clench of her jaw as she forced herself to be silent and listen. It was a gesture he had witnessed in Arthur Janeway a hundred times. Exasperated restraint. As if the two of them believed what they had to say was without question worth more than what any other man might want to say.

Roger did not possess such confidence. He had no idea how it felt to be absolutely certain of anything. Even now, as he stood aiming his rifle, a lonely marksman in a field, he had only the faintest hope that he could undo some small part of the harm he'd caused. Indeed, justice was the smallest part of what brought him to that dewy grass. Roger was acting out the logic of a dream. Like some tennis player driven deep into a corner of the court, left with only one unavoidable shot.

He watched Julie glare out her window into the dark field where he stood. He watched her talk. This girl who was neither his flesh nor his blood, this alien creature who for fifteen years had lived within his household and who was now prospering only because he had wounded the wrong daughter. His own girl, her will broken, her precise, predictable, tireless stroke forever ruined. While this cheap imposter flourished.

He watched Julie Shelton talk on the phone. He watched her shake her head in disdain and spit a few words into the receiver and jerk it away from her ear in a fit of disgust. Then he watched her pop to sudden attention, her face drained of all but a last flicker of contempt. He watched her drop stiffly out of sight. Then he shifted his gaze to his wife, as Molly lifted her head and stared up at the ceiling where she must have heard a crash against the bedroom floor. He watched her cup her hand to her mouth and call out her daughter's name. He watched her throw her dish towel down and hurry to the door, then halt abruptly and send one backward glance toward the window that looked out on the darkened field. Her eyes touching his for an icy instant.

Roger Shelton stepped backwards into the shadows and lowered his rifle. He listened to the fading echo of his shot. That single blast rippling through the humid air, loud and final, but already dissipating, in just those few seconds the waves of sound spreading outward, breaking up and scattering, until finally the blast was lost in the endless racket of the night.

OVER EXPOSURE

Johnny Fellows discovered the naked woman standing on a precipice when he was eight years old. She filled an entire page in the photography magazine, a perfectly focused black and white shot artful in its simplicity. Voluptuous nude woman poised on a stony perch.

Johnny found her in the basement among a stack of his father's photo magazines. Photography was his father's hobby, a laborious and chemically messy activity in those days of 1955, requiring a cramped dark room, trays of dizzy smelling liquids, a clothesline where the drying prints hung and long hours working alone in the red-lit darkness.

In the back room of the local barbershop, Johnny had seen bare-breasted women in Playboy Magazine but their crotches were air-brushed clean. On the walls of the gas station where his father, Arnold, took his car to be serviced, pin-up pictures of sexy babes were plastered everywhere, their crotches hidden behind feather dusters or conveniently placed objects. And he'd seen a few generic girlie magazines passed around at school. But none of the breasts Johnny had seen, or the sumptuous hips or graceful legs compared to the brazen nude in his father's photo magazine.

The woman on the rock was tall with loose, luxurious black hair that fell down her back. Her arms were poised slightly away from her wide hips as if she meant to take a swan dive into some unseen canyon. Her breasts were full and round, her nipples as dark and taut as fresh raisins. A tangled thatch of pubic hair formed a mysterious shadow a few inches below her navel.

He studied that bush for hours when his father was away on his business trips and his mother was upstairs relentlessly cleaning the house.

His parents didn't question Johnny's long absences in the basement for they believed he was engaged in a constructive hobby. In one corner of the basement he had cordoned off a workshop area where he fashioned model cars from kits. He specialized in Ford hotrods, the '32, the '40, which he modified with his X-acto knife and soldering iron. Johnny chopped and channeled their molded bodies and customized their interiors with corduroy and other fabrics that he glued to the bucket seats to replicate rolled and pleated upholstery. Then he delicately placed screws which allowed the seats to swivel outward. His creations had even won trophies at local contests.

It was the first pubic hair of Johnny's life. Lush and snarled like a nest that some strangely beautiful creature had woven and left behind in the branches of a tree. Hiding inside that mat of hair was some unimaginable bliss that weakened Johnny's knees, flushed his cheeks, and tensed his breath.

While he listened to his mother's tread on the floor above, he held the photo up to the light, cocked it at different angles, even used a magnifying glass. Still he could not penetrate the dark wooly triangle.

Months earlier while exploring his father's stash of magazines, Johnny had first discovered the photograph. The page was dog-eared, a small fold in the corner as if something in the photo had caught his father's attention. Arnold Fellows was a plain and colorless businessman who neither cursed nor boozed nor sinned in any way that Johnny had ever noted. He wore dreary suits and seemed more pale and quiet than the other fathers. So Johnny was certain he'd marked the page only because the photographer had employed some arcane technique that his father was trying to master.

Johnny, however, was struck dumb by the eroticism of the image and returned to it again and again, lured from his glue and spray paint and his modified antique Fords. Drawn to the cabinet where he knew she was standing on her rock, everything exposed. Her dark hair, her deep navel, her swollen hips, her faultless breasts.

She became for him, during those hours when he stared at her, the guiding image of his adult life, his anima, his secret touchstone for sexual thrill. The woman on the rock in black and white with the shadow of her perfect body flattened on the cliffside to her left. The incalculably deep cavern that opened before her was beyond the frame of the photograph. But he knew it was there. She had that look on her face. The expression of someone teetering on the edge of an abyss.

He called her Myra. He didn't know why he chose that name. To his youthful ear it sounded vaguely exotic. When he considered Myra later, and the role she would play in his adult life, he could never sort the chicken from the egg. Had his fascination with the photograph of Myra, the long hours he'd spent gazing at her, implanted that image of a dark goddess in his psyche? Or was that image pre-existent in his sexual genome, and Myra simply became the first and clearest manifestation of what was already lurking within him?

After graduating from college, Johnny married a thin blonde, whose body type and complexion was similar to his mother's. He loved Candace in a clear-cut, uncomplicated way. He found her familiar and easy. Like Johnny, she worked in the public schools. Candace taught math to the brightest high school kids, while Johnny was a guidance counselor in a nearby junior high, which meant he spent most of his day dealing with children who were failing in every imaginable way.

Candace and Johnny had half a dozen friends they met for dinner now and then. On school nights in the evenings while she graded quizzes, Johnny watched TV and nursed a single glass of wine. He read an occasional novel, whatever was popular at the moment. It was not a challenging life. Nor was it tumultuous. None of the prickly rancor he'd witnessed between Candace's parents, none of the strained indifference he'd observed between his own.

They had a child, a son named Jason who resembled his mother, thin and tall and blond. Though he was a bit of a loner, Jason never acted out, and seemed a happy child. He did well in his studies, won a scholarship to a state university and found a job teaching math in a junior college in Georgia. Once a month they talked on the phone, and visited on the holidays. He had a girlfriend and it looked serious. The Fellows genes were going to pass on.

Over three decades Johnny and Candace fell into a satisfying routine in the bedroom. Saturday was their sex day. Her orgasms were reliable and definite and afterwards they smiled at each other the rest of the afternoon. They rarely argued. They made decent money, had solid benefits. Politically they were in full agreement and the areas where they disagreed caused them to have a few spirited debates, though nothing acrimonious. Before he married Candace, Johnny had slept with five college girls. Since their vows, Johnny was absolutely faithful to her and he was certain she was to him. By all the customary measurements, their marriage was nearly perfect.

However, the woman on the rock who he'd last seen when he was eight, never left him for long. It was as if Myra was lodged in an essential vein restricting the normal flow to his libido. She was always there, poised to dive. Daring in her nakedness. Dark-skinned in his memory, perhaps tanned from the sun, perhaps from some ancestral strain. She might have been from gypsy stock or Mediterranean. Sometimes when he was walking through crowds at the mall, he saw fleeting fragments of Myra. Her dark hair kicking up across the shoulders of her blouse. Her strong nose. Her hourglass body with black sand tickling through it continuously.

At times when he and Candace were making love, Johnny had closed his eyes and Myra appeared before him unbidden, her wide, welcoming hips, her ravenous appetites. Lusty and primitive, a mystery he'd never solved.

At fifty-eight Johnny retired. Together he and Candace decided she should keep working to retain their health insurance and because she claimed she still enjoyed the students.

Johnny decided he would try to write a book, a collection of anecdotes he'd been filing away for years. Some funny, some sad, some tragic. An insider's guide to the silliness and outrages of public education. Candace rooted him on.

At home alone for the first time in his adult life, Johnny fell into a routine. For an hour or two in the morning, he piddled with his manuscript, wrote a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph or two, then he reread his efforts, saw nothing but flaws, and wound up deleting every word he had written, and drifted to the Internet.

Without ever consciously deciding to do so, he began to search out porn. He wasn't horny. Even after thirty years, Candace never failed to arouse him, and he seemed to have the same effect on her. Theirs was, by any textbook definition, a sound and healthy marriage.

Yet, there he was, utterly unfettered for the first time since childhood, and Johnny Fellows found himself surfing madly through the most obscene websites imaginable. He explored every fetish he'd heard of and many new to him. Lesbians with strap-ons, golden showers, women having sex with horses and other barnyard creatures, men with other men, women drenched with the sperm of a dozen men in leather masks. Men with silicone breasts, dressed as slutty women, showing off full functioning cocks. Old women screwing teenage boys. Teenage girls giving head to granddads, women dressed as nuns pleasuring themselves with gigantic, multi-headed dildos. It was all just a click away. He took the free tours, never subscribed, never used his credit card number. He just browsed and browsed and browsed.

After weeks of that, well into his first free semester in over fifty years, he began to circle in on what he'd come to consider his own domain. He found he liked to look at hirsute women, Earth-Mamas, Hippie Goddesses, Hairy Honeys. Johnny was drawn instinctively to women with mounds of pubic hair like Myra's.

Finding images of such women was more tricky than he might have expected. While Johnny hadn't been paying attention, apparently the fashion of sexual display had altered, and women began to coif their pubic patches, trimming them to narrow strips, or manicured valentines, or most frequently, to shave their mons pubis bare.

Johnny assumed the style grew out of one of the modern age's last taboos. The forbidden allure of pre-pubescence. Fully sexualized women simulating innocent girls.

As the raunchy pictures filled his computer screen, Johnny felt no urge to masturbate. Instead, what he experienced was a persistent and cavernous yearning. While his eyes roamed the bodies of anonymous women, he suffered a vast ache in his soul. An absence that yawned within him as large and unknowable as that bottomless canyon that opened below Myra's bare feet.

In early October he realized one morning that he'd been obsessing over surrogates for Myra, and that's when he decided to hunt for her.

It seemed to John Fellows that the Internet had absorbed most of the tangible world and nearly everything that once existed in three dimensions was floating in cyberspace if only one had the skill and resolve to search it out.

Within a single day he located a site that trafficked in old issues of Modern Photography, the magazine she'd appeared in. Many of the pages within the magazine were reproduced and viewable online, but to his irritation, he could not locate Myra's picture among them. Unsure of the exact date of the magazine he had spent so many hours absorbed in, Johnny ordered every issue from 1954 and 1955. Furthermore, he paid an outrageous sum to have all twenty-four of them delivered the next day.

That night in a fever of expectancy he sat on the couch and pretended to be alive. Candace was watching their favorite sitcom and giggling along with the laugh track. Johnny held himself still, feeling the fracture lines branching through him as though he might crack apart right there and spill out a grim confession to his sweet blond wife, reveal that he had sinned against her, that he had betrayed her, that indeed, their whole romantic life together had been one long sham. For half a century he had been furtively in love with a woman named Myra. A ghostly being who haunted his reveries, whose perfumed breath whispered into his dreaming mind, and even now in his deep middle age, this seductive mistress had more than once materialized in his sleep to harden his cock, make him grind against the mattress until he released a flood of nocturnal emissions into the secret flesh behind Myra's nest of hair.

"Is something wrong?"

He made himself breathe. He made himself look at her.

"No," Johnny said. "Why do you ask?"

"You're so quiet."

"I am?"

"Yes," she said. "Very quiet."

"It must be the writing," he said.

"Not going well?"

"It's harder than I imagined. I'm just preoccupied."

"When are you going to show me something?"

The commercials ceased and the sitcom resumed. Johnny steered his eyes to the set and chuckled at the first comedic moment.

"Soon," he said. "When I'm comfortable with it."

"You can show me anything," she said. "No matter how raw it is. I'll go easy on you."

Johnny swallowed. He produced a smile for Candace, his devoted wife, his friend, his lover. He presented it to her and she seemed to buy it.

As the sitcom moved through its unvarying formula, Johnny's blood turned slowly to sludge, until he could bear it no longer.

"I'm a fraud," he announced.

By then Candace was into the show, and missed the pathos in his voice.

"Oh, stop. You're just learning to play a new instrument in the band. Writing can't be easy. Give yourself some time."

She laughed at something one of the actors said.

Johnny sat silently, feeling the fractures branch out from an immense cavity in his chest, sending shoots of anguish and dread squirming into every extremity.

At noon when the FedEx man arrived, Johnny didn't answer the bell. So disgusted with his disloyalty to Candace, he wanted this transaction to be devoid of human contact. He waited at the edge of the curtains to make sure the man would leave the parcel as Johnny had stipulated on the note he taped to the mailbox.

After the truck was gone, Johnny went to the door, ducked outside into the dazzling noonday sun, and scooped up the package. His hands were clumsy and damp. His heart was losing traction.

He shut the door and stood sightlessly in the living room. That flare of sunshine had stunned him. Johnny held the box with one hand and with the other he knuckled the blinding ache from his eyes just as he'd done so many times as a child after another of his father's flashbulb portraits.

When his vision finally cleared, he carried the package to his study and set it on his desk. He stared at it numbly. He opened a drawer, removed a knife, thumbed open a blade. He drew a straight line down the seam of the strapping tape with the clarity of purpose a cardiac surgeon might employ on his first stroke.

He spread the flaps and released into the air the tart mildewed scent of the antique pages. He lifted the magazines one by one from the box and lay them on the carpet at his feet, making a cartwheel around himself. Johnny had imagined it would take hours to sort through all those issues before he located the photograph. When he'd viewed the covers on the computer screen, none struck him as familiar. But apparently the image had lingered in some subliminal stratum of memory, for seeing them lying before him, Johnny knew instantly which was the magical issue.

On the cover was a black and white photo of a muted desert landscape at sunset, with a single tumbleweed kicking across the dunes.

He collected the others from the rug, and stacked them back in the box. He set the box on a top shelf in the study closet and shut the door. He carried the magazine to his desk and sat down before his computer. The cursor was blinking at the top left corner of a blank page. Its patient beat mocking his own churning heart.

As if by some charmed decree, the magazine fell open at his touch to her photograph. In a swoon of shame and delight, he felt it all flood back. He saw the long-ago basement. He saw his father's darkroom, the workbench, the pans of woozy fluids. Johnny watched himself draw the magazine from the pile, leaving the stack askew so he could reinsert it in the same place when he was done. He flashed through the hours he'd spent with Myra. Every delicious fantasy he'd entertained. He heard the echo of his mother's step as she did her housework, the scent of model car glue in the air, the helpless longing that consumed him as he pried behind her pubic hair to see what wonders the world had in store for him.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. With a subtle thrust of her chin and upward tilt to her face, she seemed both defiant and full of wanton pride. Yet there was an undertone of disquiet in her eyes, as if her nerve was being tested by the cliff's staggering height.

Her eyes were large and dark and her eyebrows heavy. There was a trail of hair leading up from her bush to her navel. A fine dusting of hair on her thighs. And the hair on her forearms coiled as dense and dark as Johnny's own. Myra was unshaven. Primitive. A natural woman.

The photographer was identified as Ernest L. James.

Johnny swiveled to his keyboard and did a search on Ernest James. For the first half hour he learned little, then he hit a website that featured the photographer's work, among other landscape artists. Johnny clicked through dozens of his photos. No nudes. But a great many rocks and granite walls and stark cliffs and boulders.

So that was it. The woman on that mountainside was not the object at all. She was there, Johnny saw, simply to highlight Ernest L. James's true fascination. Geology. The earth. Formations created from great forces clashing one against the other, thrusting upward, dramatic outcroppings, peaks and pikes and crests and summits. The scar tissue of creation.

Myra was simply counterpoint. An umbrella in the drink.

For most of the afternoon he stared at her photograph on the shiny page and feasted on a thousand guilty memories. The cursor blinked. The house was silent. What had once inflamed his eight year old mind still set his heart ablaze. The man he was today and the boy he'd been were absolutely equivalent. In every important way, he knew not a single thing more than he had in that basement. It was all still mystery. What was hidden behind Myra's profusion of pubes remained hidden and enthralling. Johnny was eight, Johnny was fifty-eight. The woman on the rock had not moved a muscle, nor had he.

It was nearly four o'clock when Johnny woke from his trance and thought to page to the end of the magazine and search the directory.

In fine print, he found the model's name.

Lila Calderon.

As his heart lurched and swayed, he heard Candace unlock the front door and step inside their home.

"You need to let me read some of it," Candace said to him at dinner. They were watching Wheel of Fortune while they ate the pork fried rice and spring rolls she'd picked up on her way home.

"I will. I will."

"You're getting gloomy, John."

"Gloomy?"

"Depressed. Sad, inward."

"I am?"

"Yes," Candace said. "I know you. You're disheartened."

"I'm okay. I'm good. I'm adjusting to being alone all day. That's all it is. Knocking around the empty house. I miss you."

"You're not writing at all, are you?"

One of the contestants had selected a vowel. The letter A. They always chose the letter A. A for alchemy. A for adultery. A for addiction. A for asshole.

"There was this girl when I was young."

"A girl?"

"Yeah, when I was a kid. Eight years old."

Candace tried without success to smile.

"You never told me about a girl when you were eight."

"She was older. Like mid-twenties."

"Johnny! What are you talking about?"

"I had a crush on this older woman."

"Like a neighbor?"

"Yeah, sort of. Anyway, I'm trying to write about her. Her name was Myra."

"Myra?"

Hearing Candace speak the name shocked him. He couldn't believe he'd blurted out his secret. He floated out of himself and looked down at this moment with incredulity. Would this neutralize his fixation? Opening the sore, letting the festering juices leak out, would this cure him? Was he even sick? He didn't feel sick. Desperate, perhaps. Intense, yes. But not sick.

"So you're trying to write about your first crush."

"I guess you could call it that."

"That's sweet. That's good, Johnny."

"You're not jealous?"

"Should I be?"

Johnny smiled his way past the question.

"I meant to write about my job. About school. But I sat down in front of that damn computer, and this was what came out."

"Let me read it, Johnny. It sounds great."

"Not yet. Oh, I do want you to read it, of course. I want your reaction. But it's still awkward and full of mistakes. Give me a while. A few more days."

Somebody had won a red Mustang convertible for solving the Wheel of Fortune puzzle. Johnny and Candace watched the woman run down to sit behind the steering wheel. She had long black hair like a Spanish priestess. Thick rich black hair. At the sight of it, Johnny's heart began to thrash so recklessly he had to stand and slip from the room lest Candace hear its throb.

The next morning as soon as she'd pulled from the driveway, Johnny began to insert Lila's name into online people finder sites. An entire industry was thriving on reconnecting those who'd become lost to one another.

Each website had a teaser page. Type in the name, the database went to work while showing an animated spinning wheel. A few seconds later a list materialized.

Every Lila Calderon in America. Their age, their city. Possible relatives.

There were four Lila's in the US.

Only one was in the right age bracket. Lila Calderon, age 75, Santa Monica, California. For a mere twenty dollars, Johnny would be provided her exact address, her phone number. For twice that he could access any public records that included her name. Property, DMV, deadbeat parent lists, divorce, marriage, assets search, criminal history and more.

Johnny typed in his credit card info and two minutes later he was looking at a map of Santa Monica with Lila Calderon's house marked with a red arrow. Her phone number. Two possible relatives. Lillian Sanchez, age fifty. Marianella Anderson, age twenty-five.

Johnny worked the math. He'd been eight. If the Lila standing naked on the mountainside was twenty-five when the photo was taken, she would be seventy-five today. Lila of Santa Monica.

Johnny stared at the possible relatives. Lillian Sanchez of Manhattan, age fifty. A name like Lillian might be simply a coincidence. Then again, could Lillian be Lila Calderon's daughter? Which would mean, of course, in the hasty arithmetic he was doing in his head, that Johnny's Lila would have given birth to Lillian sometime in the twelve months following the photo.

He looked again at her stance on the promontory. He tried to read that proud face, tried to interpret its deeper resonance. Had she been pregnant? Had she known? Had she suspected? Was she delighted by the life growing within her? Was she full of foreboding? Was the photograph a celebration of her secret or was it her swan song?

He looked at the telephone beside him on the desk. It was nine in Johnny's Miami, only six in Santa Monica. Was she up? Did she sleep late?

A woman answered on the first ring. A simple 'hello.'

His writing study became a whirl of color and shapes. He felt seasick and disconnected from the moment, as if his consciousness had not yet caught up with the impulsive acts his body was committing.

"Hello?" she said again.

Lila's tone was quiet and serene. The voice might have belonged to a woman twenty years younger. Not a smoker, not a woman who had screamed herself hoarse at men or other calamities. At peace. A drowsy contentment as if she had no fears and no enemies and no regrets.

"Is someone there?"

"Is this Lila? Lila Calderon?"

"That is my name, yes."

Johnny hung up.

He sat back in his chair and tried to breathe. He watched the cursor blink. Five minutes might have passed, or it might have been an hour. So lost in the smog of his imagining, so bewildered by his own mad pursuit.

The phone rang. The caller ID said Santa Monica, California.

His hand snaked out, trembling, and he watched himself lift the receiver and bring it to his ear. He could not manage to speak a word.

"You just called me," Lila said. "Do you need something?"

There was no ill will in her voice. A simple curiosity. But then again, to have made such a call to a stranger at six in the morning, there had to be strong currents steering her. Something more compelling than curiosity.

"My name is Johnny."

"Johnny Fellows, yes, I know."

She had him on her caller ID just as he had her on his.

"Yes, Johnny Fellows."

"And why is it that you called me?"

Something awkward in that phrasing. An accent? Was she Spanish? Her voice had an aristocratic flair. Not quite haughty, but bold. The same pride he'd seen in her jut of jaw.

"Were you a model?" Johnny said. "A photographer's model?"

"Long ago, yes, I was."

"I searched you out," Johnny said.

"I suspected this was true." Her voice was dreamy and knowing.

"It's crazy, I understand that. But I fell in love with your photograph. 1955, Modern Photography, Ernest L. James."

She was quiet but he could hear her puttering. The whisking of sheets? Were they silk? Or perhaps she was she slipping into her robe? No, it wouldn't be a robe, but a kimono. The kimono would be black as her hair was black with the same deep luster. Dragons were embroidered on its back. Their red eyes, their long curved claws.

"Arnold, your father, is he well?"

"Arnold?"

Johnny felt a skewer slide deep into his bowels.

"Your father, Johnny. How is he? Does he know you're calling me?"

"You know my father?"

The walls of his study were bleeding light. His dizzy eyes, his spiraling gut. The woman on the phone, Lila Calderon, she'd spoken his father's name with a familiarity that was unmistakable. And Johnny saw again the bent corner of the magazine page. That dog-ear.

"He died," Johnny said. "Two years ago. Cancer."

"I see," she said with a faraway tranquility as if she might have suspected this. "I'm sorry for your loss, Johnny. I'm deeply sorry."

Johnny lost it. He began to jabber into the phone, demanding to be told how she knew his dad, but getting no response, then pleading with her to reveal what the nature of the relationship had been, bullying, beseeching, his words rushed out messily for minutes, then he halted.

"Are you there?"

She was not.

She had gone away, left the line to hum with miles of emptiness.

He could picture her in Santa Monica. She had set the phone back in its cradle, walked to her bathroom, stood before the deep tub, let her kimono fall to the tile, ran the water warm, dusted it with herbal soap, let the faucet flow until the water reached the brim, then slipped beneath the foam to linger away the California morning, to sip green tea, to recall the ancient smoky nights, the long lather of love with a man who no longer existed.

Candace was flummoxed.

"You're going to California?"

"Just for a day or two."

"What's going on, Johnny? You're in some kind of trouble, aren't you?"

"No, no, it's not any kind of trouble."

"What then?"

"The woman," he said. "Myra."

Candace said nothing, but she wasn't pleased by this turn.

Johnny felt the air dying in his lungs. A vice closing against his sternum.

"I need to go," he said.

"Why, for godsakes?"

"To see her, to speak with her. For my book."

"For your book?"

The television was running. It was always running. The cable news, the blather of the world. Their dinner plates were on their laps. Chicken with rice and mushrooms. He'd taken a bite and felt it turn to lead in his gut. And then he'd set off on this exercise in insanity.

"The woman I had a crush on. I spoke with her. I tracked her down and called her on the phone. And somehow it came out that my dad and her, my dad and her had some kind of affair, or relationship, or something, I don't know. She hung up."

"Where have you gone, Johnny?"

"What?"

"Where have you gone off to? What's happened to you?"

"Nothing's happened. I was writing the story and this came up and I started thinking about Myra and trying to imagine her, where she was today, and I don't know, I just reached for the phone."

"You called a woman in California. A stranger from fifty years ago."

"I'm nuts."

"I'd say so. I'd call that a little nuts."

"I want to interview her."

"You're not a reporter, Johnny. You're a retired guidance counselor who's been spending long hours alone in your room. You've cut yourself off from the world and it's made you spooky and off-balance."

"Spooky?"

She peered at him with a touch of dread as if his body might be disintegrating before her.

"Yes," Candace said. "I'll stand by that. Spooky."

He left Candace a note. He told her that he loved her. But he had to do this. He felt compelled. She'd hate him. She'd never forgive him. She might not be here when he got back. But Johnny Fellows had jumped from the ledge where he'd stood for decades alongside Myra and he was falling weightless through the immeasurable air—nowhere to go but down.

Lila's house was hot pink. Vivid and glowing beside her neighbors' whites and beiges. Gaudy bougainvillea cascaded over her front porch, and the blooms of an ancient jacaranda sent a flurry of blue snow across her patio. The bungalow was old Spanish with a view down an alley to the Pacific, a block away.

Johnny parked his rental car at the curb, switched off the engine and sat for a while trying to remember who he was.

He was, he had come to understand, his father's son, the drab and spiritless man Johnny had never even tried to get to know. He was in involuntary lockstep with him, following the breadcrumbs to a holy grail programmed into his blood. He was on a quest to confront the woman who'd stoked his inner fires and stoked his father's as well. The woman who had undermined his marriage in ways both subtle and profound.

Is that why he was here, to save his life with Candace? To dispel Myra's spell? To break the hold her nakedness had on him? To set himself free?

Or had he come with some dim yearning to seduce her? To charm her to her bed and draw aside her clothes and view the body, that thick nest of hair that had obsessed him so, to curl his fingers through its snarls, to take a fistful of it, to bury his face in its coils, its musk, to draw into his lungs the atoms of her hidden realm? Was he still an undeveloped eight years old? Was he still trapped in the basement, in the darkroom, still dizzy and insane from inhaling the glue, and the pans of harsh chemicals?

A woman was tapping on his window.

She stood in the street. Her hair was short and graying, but he recognized her eyebrows, still thick and dark, her cheekbones, her bold chin, her wide-set eyes. The flaunting, aristocratic look.

He rolled the window down.

"Johnny?"

"Yes."

She wore jeans and a loose white shirt with green vines embroidered across her heavy breasts. On the vines were small red buds, hundreds of them, tight, unopened buds.

She held out a padded mail envelope. No label, the flap sealed.

"This is for you."

Johnny took it from her and lay it in his lap.

"It's everything we did," she said. "Arnold and I. It's all there. That's the sum total of everything that happened."

"I want to talk to you."

She shook her head and her smile was grave and final.

"Just for a few minutes," Johnny said. "Talk with me, please."

"Go home to Candace. Work harder."

"Candace? How do you know Candace?"

She looked off toward the beach.

Candace had called her. Found her on the Caller ID, spoken to Lila.

"What did you tell my wife? What did you say?"

"It's all in there. Everything I could possibly tell you is in the envelope. That's all there is, all that happened between your father and me. Now go."

Johnny sat at the gate, waiting for the red-eye flight back home. The envelope lay in his lap unopened. He watched the people in the lounge area. He listened to the announcements. He watched the passengers flow around him with the slow ungainly silkiness of underwater performers.

He made it home by nine A.M. Her car was gone. Candace might be at school. She might have gone home to stay with her parents.

Johnny walked inside. He checked her closet. He checked the kitchen and the luggage cabinet. She was at school. He closed his eyes and drew the first breath he'd managed since he'd left Santa Monica. He wiped his eyes dry.

He carried the padded mailer to his study and set it on the desk beside his computer, and jiggled the mouse to wake the machine from its slumber. He watched the cursor blink. Watched it blink on the empty page of his empty manuscript.

He tore open the mailer and reached into it and drew out another envelope. Printed on that envelope was the name of the photography store in Miami where fifty years before his father purchased fluids and film and an occasional camera or lens.

Inside the second envelope were dozens of photos of Lila Calderon.

In each she was naked. Some were taken in natural sunlight, outside in patios or screened-in backyards, some were taken indoors against a variety of prosaic backdrops.

She had displayed her body for Arnold Fellows, shown him everything she'd shown Ernest L. James. But as Johnny dealt the photos one by one from the pack in his hand, setting each on the desk beside him, it was clear the woman in these pictures was not the erotic goddess Johnny had worshipped for half a century.

The upward tilt of her jaw came across as crass and petty. Her eyes were guarded, ambiguous or vague. Whatever instructions Arnold had given her had not coaxed from her the defiant authority Johnny had witnessed in the magazine photo. Each of her poses seemed posed. Her arms awkward at her side. Her hands as gawky as broken chunks of brick. Even the lush hair between her legs that thrilled Johnny to his molten core, seemed blurry, indistinct, amateurishly out-of-focus or over-exposed.

There were three sets of photos. One group was taken while Lila was still in her twenties. In the other two she was at least a decade older. But in that interval Arnold Fellows had made little progress in mastering his craft. Whatever artistic techniques he had acquired over the years were insufficient. His passion could not offset his incompetence.

He'd taken dozens of girlie shots and paid whatever fee was arranged, and flown home to bring Lila's image alive in that basement dark room. Arnold had to have known his failure. He could not have been so cloddish as to deceive himself into believing he had done justice to his model. Because of his own artistic limitations or deficiencies within his character, he had turned Lila Calderon into a vulgar slut.

Johnny stacked the photos and slid them back in the envelope and replaced it inside the mailer. He went to his desk and pulled out the issue of Modern Photography and turned to Myra's photo on the cliffside. He stared at her body, at the sleekness of her skin against the jagged planes of rock. He studied her glossy black hair which lifted infinitesimally on a breeze that seemed to swell up from some place within the earth's unfathomable depths, and her dark eyes looked out and penetrated the lens, looked into the photographer's eye and beyond him, beyond his shrouded head, off into some distant era that had not yet arrived, into the far-off room where Johnny Fellows sat, his heart finding a new measure, slowing for the first time in a long while to something like a natural pace.

"Well, look who came home."

Johnny stood in the foyer, waiting, as Candace opened the front door. Through the doorway a slash of golden light was projected across the floor, its dagger tip touching Johnny's feet.

"Yes, I'm home," he said. "If you'll have me."

She set her purse on the table by the door. She took her time with her school books and her papers. She shut the door and bolted it. She was slim and blond and her hips hardly swelled at all. Beautiful in her own way.

She turned to him and in her eyes was something more solid and more certain than he'd detected there before. For five decades Johnny had failed to see her clearly, failed to capture her carnality in the thousand snapshots he took of her every day. He'd blurred her beauty, cheapened her essence with his own insufficient craft.

"You need to tell me everything."

"Yes."

"Absolutely everything."

"I will."

"If you skip anything, I'll know it. I will, I'll know, Johnny. No matter how hard it is to tell me, you have to do it. If you're going to save this, you have to say it all, down to the smallest detail."

"I'm ready."

"So do it right now. Look me in the eye and tell me everything."

He could feel the truth rising into his throat. Not scared of it. No longer alone in the basement with the secret woman, her unbearable perfection.

"I've been away, Candace.. I've been off somewhere for a long time."

She nodded. Yes, she knew. Maybe she'd always known.

"So that's the first thing," he said. "I'm here, I'm finally here. And now I want to get this right. You and me. I'm going to give it everything I have."

"Well, that's a start," she said. "That's at least a start."