Date: 2009-02-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Crime; Mystery; Novella
Description: Cryer once had another name, but he can't remember it.The man he used to be was stabbed in the head by an assailant. After months of catatonia Cryer awakens in a mental facility to find that his former life is almost completely forgotten. He knows his wife and daughter have been murdered - he saw them die moments before his own assault - but his shattered mind is incapable of retaining their names. Or even his own.Now Cryer is free again and trying to track down an elusive killer through his own unknown past. But how do you investigate the murders of your loved ones when you can't remember the

The Nobody

Tom Piccirilli

Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

Copyright 2010 by Tom Piccirilli & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

LICENSE NOTES:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

MORE FROM TOM PICCIRILLI & CROSSROAD PRESS

SHORT RIDE TO NOWHERE

Jenks and Hale aren't friends, partners, or even next door neighbors anymore. Not since they each lost their jobs and had their homes foreclosed. Not since they lost their wives and kids and whatever stability they'd fought for in the world. Adrift on the streets of New York, Jenks' dark path seems to parallel Hale's step by step.

After Hale is found nearly dead beside the corpse of a nine-year-old girl, and soon after commits suicide in a mental hospital, Jenks decides to find out just what the hell happened. What happened to Hale and the girl, what happened to the wayward American Dream, and what happened to his youth and forfeited hopes.

Because whatever happens to Hale happens to Jenks just a few months later.

THE FEVER KILL

Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree.

It's where his father the sheriff met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It's where crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line ten years earlier.

Now Crease is back. He's been undercover for so long that most days he feels more like a mobster than a cop. He doesn't mind much: the corrupt life is easier to stomach than a wife who can't understand him, a son who hates him, and a half-dozen adopted kids he can't even name anymore. He's also just gotten his drug-dealing, knife-wielding psycho boss Tucco's mistress pregnant.

A fine time to decide to settle old scores and resolve a decade-old mystery.

With Tucco hot on his tail, Crease has to find his answers fast. Who kidnapped little Mary? Who really killed her? Was his own father guilty? And what happened to the paltry fifteen grand ransom that seems to spell salvation to half the population of Hangtree? The town still has a taste for his blood and secrets it wants to keep. Crease has a single hope; a raw and raging fever driving him toward the truth that might just burn him up along the way.

NIGHTJACK

On the day of his release from a mental institution Pace is taken "hostage" by Faust, Pia, and Hayden, three escapees from the hospital who disappeared after the presumed rape and beating of Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of the Greek munitions tycoon Alexandra Kaltzas. Each suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, experiencing complex delusions and sometimes fantastical identities. Pace tries to piece together what happened when apparently one of their alternate personalities tried to kill Cassandra.

Pace himself is an alternate of William Pacella, a man whose wife died in a restaurant fire set by a local mobster for insurance money. William Pacella "dies" so that Nightjack can be born–a new personality who may or may not be Jack the Ripper.

For unknown reasons, Pace is able to see others’ delusions–when alternates take over members of the group, Pace alone is able to interact with each persona. Included among them is Princess Eirrin, a ten thousand year old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne; Smoker, a half-breed gunman from 1880s Arizona; Thaddeus, friend and companion to St. Paul; and the ancient Greek architect Daedalus, who soared among the clouds with his home-made wax wings and watched his son perish in the sea.

Now the four find themselves under attack from assassins sent by Kaltzas to punish the person who attacked his daughter. Conflicting stories abound about Cassandra–whether she was raped, if she was perhaps murdered, or if she and Pace somehow crossed paths even before the hospital. In fact, she may not even exist.

As the attacks persist, the group is forced to face their own personal traumas and terrors, and go in search of Kaltzas in Greece. There, on an island where fantasy, myth, and truth are all entangled, Pace and his many alternates must sift through madness and deceit to unlock the mystery. And everyone may wind up dead unless Pace willingly unleashes the most brutal killer of all: Nightjack.

1

As he searched backwards down the avenues of his black pain, he understood his name hadn’t always been Cryer.

Perhaps then it had been Chuck Smith, or Joe Evans, or maybe Abe Fishbaum, you just couldn’t tell. Turn it over for a while and you started to wonder how much you were the name and how much the name was you.

If he’d been Johnny Guitar, would he have ended up in the same place, with the same damage? Nick Steel might’ve been able to protect his family. Freddy "the Switchblade" Davis wouldn’t have stopped off for a couple of double cheeseburgers and three extra-large fries, sitting in the empty parking lot scarfing down the food while Bach’s "Air on a G String" thrummed on the CD player. Besides the classical music, the incessant satisfied slurps and greasy grunts were the only sounds in the night.

Then sneaking in two slow cigarettes, despite having nearly quit. Cheating on his diet, breaking his promise to his wife to take better care of himself as he slid across forty and entered, far too comfortably, into middle age. At least he wasn’t drinking again. He was content that his vices were minor ones when all things were considered.

Cryer was a madhouse name.

~ * ~

When Cryer got home that evening he found his twelve-year-old daughter gutted and whimpering, crawling around the living room in agonized circles. The carpet was thick with her blood and viscera. Cryer ran to her and let out a noise that sounded like a baby seal being pummeled.

As his girl reached for him, her lips parting and brow furrowed as she fought to speak, Cryer wailed and drowned out whatever she might’ve said. A moment later, she blinked twice at him and gave a deep, quivering sigh. She was dead and Cryer pounded his fists on the stained carpet once, twice, three times, nearly giving in to a convulsive tantrum. He vomited the fast food he’d choked down fifteen minutes ago. Then he was moving through the house, screaming for his wife.

He heard a thump on the second floor and rushed upstairs. All the rooms were dark. He flipped switches, shouting–sometimes calling her name, sometimes just letting go with little shrieks–and found her in the bathtub, fully clothed with her throat cut.

Her wrists were bound by duct tape. Another square had been placed over her mouth. She was still alive and turned her head to Cryer. Arterial spray arced through the air and struck him across the face. Blood sailed against the walls and pulsed over her lips and chin. She tried to speak but it looked like she’d bitten through her tongue trying to work the tape loose.

The killer was going out the window.

Cryer slid in his wife’s blood, and awful as it was it actually helped him cover the distance quicker. He was ninety pounds overweight with a huge spare tire but he made an awkward leap, feeling his gut wobble as he did so. He managed to catch the intruder by the belt before the guy cleared the sill. Cryer thought he recognized the face but couldn’t tell from where.

He tried to speak, wanted to say, Why? Why did you do this? Who are you? What? What is this? What? Heya–

A flash of light off metal crossed Cryer’s eyes. A knife high and twisting. A gloved hand. The guy spun and stabbed Cryer in the forehead.

The blade went in about three inches, almost directly between Cryer’s eyes. There was no pain. Cryer watched the killer slip out the window with a great agility, unafraid and in complete control, jumping two floors down to the back yard without a worry.

Cryer tumbled backward over the edge of the tub, but managed to stay on his feet.

Weirdest thing ever, he had a hardon.

His wife made a supreme effort of will and attempted to climb from the tub. Wrists still bound, watching her own life streaming out against the peach wallpaper in weakening, shorter and shorter spurts, her face hardened into of iron. Her eyes showed a great but controlled fear as well as a beautiful and haunting concern for him.

As she staggered forward she tried to raise her foot over the edge of the tub but couldn’t quite seem to take the step.

She tried again but a cold and awful realization flooded her expression–she wasn’t going to make it to him. She reached for him with bound hands, coughing out thick ribbons of blood through the gash in her throat, the endless rain thrumming against the porcelain like a brief summer shower. She fell back in a seated position, her hands still out to him, and Cryer tried to say something but again nothing would come out.

He dropped backward, his knees bending but his legs not giving way. He didn’t collapse, just lowered inch by inch until he was lying on the tiles wet with his wife’s blood, staring up at the ceiling. He tried to blink and couldn’t do it, but after a while his eyes closed on their own and he waited behind them in the darkness, lost and yet awake.

2

He opened his eyes again to see a lady cop bending over him. Nice black suit on, her feet covered in little plastic booties, the badge on a chain around her neck. Startled, she jumped back against the sink and broke the mirror of the medicine cabinet with her elbow. "Jesus fucking Christ, he’s still alive–"

Someone out of Cryer’s eyeshot said, "That’s not possible. There’s three inches of steel in his head."

Like you needed to hear that kind of shit considering the situation you were in. Cryer’s throat was dry. He swallowed twice and said, "Fuck off."

"His lips are moving." The lady cop leaned over, afraid to get too close and get blood on her suit. "What did you say?"

"Fuck off!"

They still didn’t get it. Thought he was trying to give them a clue or something. Someone kneeled and bent an ear to his mouth. Thick as hell with wax, what the hell kinds of cops were these anyway? He could tell already, they weren’t going to be able to solve a damn thing. It was up to him, except he couldn’t remember who he was.

3

He woke up once on the operating table, the tape holding his right eyelid down having loosened enough for him to open his eye. He glanced around the room at six or seven doctors and nurses all impossibly similar looking in baby blue scrubs and masks. He wanted to speak but there was a tube down his throat, another up his nose, all this machinery hooked up to him.

He still had a hardon.

There were bright lights and lots of metal reflective surfaces. On a small metal table beside him was a device with a circular saw covered with blood. They’d cut through his skull with it. His forehead had been peeled wide to expose his brain, and number of retractors held back his flesh and muscle.

Someone noticed him blinking and said, "Jesus Christ."

It caused a mini-riot. They started yelling at each other, shifting blame. One nurse took the brunt of it. He felt sorry for her, wanted to say, 'It’s not your fault,' but the words refused to come.

Someone else played around with some needles and tubes and he eventually fell asleep again.

4

He came to with bandages around his head, one of his eyes wrapped, no pain at all, but with the weird and distinct impression that a very small man was in the process of climbing out of his skull. Cryer reached up to grab the little guy, in order to either help pull him out or to try to shove him back inside, but the tiny fucker struggled to stay exactly where he was, laid out across the ridge of his brow, stuck halfway. Cryer wanted to ask a lot of questions, find out what was going on, how long he’d been here, what his name was, and the little guy seemed to want to answer, looking back at Cryer and staring into his one good eye, but neither of them could say a word.

5

As he recuperated in the hospital he was given intense physical therapy, mental faculty and motor skills testing. All the shit you’d expect. The Rorschach cards, word association–failed that one, he couldn’t talk, although they said he should be able to–even baby tests like putting square blocks in holes.

There was a great weight in his head. Maybe the little man living in there or maybe the metal plate that they’d stuck inside. They talked to him in goo-goo voices, like he was an infant or a dog. The docs put their index fingers in his hands and told him to squeeze as hard as he could. He had no strength. So they had him bounce hard rubber balls and catch them. Sometimes he played and sometimes he just looked at all these doctors and thought, You crazy sons of bitches.

They put him in a child’s pool and pretty young girls in bikinis tried to help him to walk and swim. His hardon was finally gone, fucking shame that.

Sometimes the little guy was there and sometimes he wasn’t. On occasion he was a touch further outside and at other times he was almost all the way back in. Cryer awoke from intense and vivid dreams, often crying, often finding that days had passed.

They said he had walking catatonia. They said his rational facility was so damaged by either the knife or the traumatic events themselves that he might never recover. They said he had the cognitive capacity of a five-year-old.

They stopped talking directly to him and instead spoke to one another across his bed. The nurses stopped the goo-goo talk and started complaining about their husbands, their ungrateful children. They couldn’t stop disgorging their daily frustrations, using him as a sounding board, knowing he couldn’t pass on their secrets but could still listen.

They got rougher when they changed his bedding around him. They bounced the balls like they wanted him to fetch.

The cops said he was faking.

They said he’d snuffed his own family. They said the bloody hand prints he’d left on the carpet next to his daughter proved he’d murdered her. They said the pile of vomit he’d left on the floor was evidence. They said he’d been covered with his wife’s blood from where he’d cut her throat, further proof he’d done it all himself. They wanted a confession. They said that his wife had gotten a lucky defense strike even as she was dying.

At first they questioned him good cop-bad cop style. Later on, they both went bad cop and even worked him over a little when nobody was looking. He felt a strange and distant pain that had nothing to do with their fists. It was beyond him, an anguish that hovered behind his body and a little to the left, even when they slugged him in the guts.

They broke his pinkies and he made no sound.

6

One middle-aged nurse had a seriously fucked up fetish and could only get turned on by comatose and insensate patients. It was thoroughly screwy, even the little guy in Cryer’s skull said so.

She called Cryer her daddy. She pulled his pants down, yanked her panties aside, got on top, and tried to ride him. Saying the whole time, Daddy oh Daddy.

You had to wonder about the depth of some folks' poor parental guidance.

She kept bucking along. His hard-on was gone, and that was that. She still managed to get herself off.

The bandages got thinner. So did he. The spare tire had dwindled to half of what it had once been, and then it was gone.

They transferred him to a different wing of the hospital, and then soon sent him off to a private facility, and then to a state run clinic.

Many other doctors talked to him once or twice. They wrote on their charts and left him alone.

Cryer squeezed the hard rubber balls. With the single-minded fixation that only a real maniac could have, he squeezed the hard rubber balls. Hour after hour, day in and out, for months. He didn’t even know he was doing it most of the time, his mind adrift in a void of color and subtle fluctuation, and terrible transition.

The muscles of his arms grew thick and huge. Eventually his fists were strong enough that he managed to finally grab hold of the little bastard stuck inside his head, tear him free, and throw him on the floor.

The little bastard looked up at Cryer and, somehow, perhaps because he was free at last, had achieved the power to speak.

Torn apart and dying on the floor, the little guy said, "Dis moot."

7

Cryer was given his name by the suicidal cop who’d mistakenly shot a pregnant woman while responding to a 211, and who’d then botched his own hanging.

After the internal department investigation, the cop, who called himself Officer Bliss, was exonerated despite having had a few beers at lunch that day.

His partner and commanding officer covered up the fact. Bliss, never known for his emotional depth before, couldn’t forgive himself.

After taking anti-depressants for five months after the incident and deciding he should just eat the barrel of his gun the way a lot of the old-timers went out of the game, Bliss discovered that couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t even hold onto his service weapon with any strength of conviction anymore. He couldn’t make his hand close around it, which made him worthless as a cop, and so, he thought, as a man too.

On little more than a whim he decided to hang himself in the bedroom closet next to his wife’s nightie that had the nipples cut out. She hadn’t worn it since they were newlyweds but she kept it anyway, dangling there in the closet, a constant reminder of what they no longer shared.

His ten-year-old daughter found him a half hour later and performed CPR on her father as she’d been taught during health class during a training session out on the football field. All these kids moaning and groaning covered in bandages stained with red dye, pretending to be victims of a terrorist act, his daughter pumping their sternums with the palms of her hands and performing mouth to mouth with the cute boys.

She was a very mature kid, and had even once Googled "auto-erotic asphyxiation" after hearing about it in a Cinemax film she’d caught after she thought her parents were asleep. Officer Bliss found her frowning at the 27-inch screen, images reflecting off the kid’s glasses in the dark. He decided not to confront her at the time, but looking back on it now, he figured his daughter had decided her kinky father had probably botched the procedure in the closet. He wasn’t sure if that embarrassed him more than the idea that he’d fucked up trying to ice himself.

All of this Cryer found out while seated in a rocking chair, doing nothing every day except squeezing the hard rubber balls and staring at the illegal Mexican day laborers who cut the lawns, fed the screeching wood chippers, and kept the grounds immaculate.

Right at that moment they were raking leaves and trimming hedges, shouting to each other in Spanish, making maybe five bucks an hour. The director of the hospital was pocketing the state allotted funds and spending the money on his mistress, who was one of the nurses, Bliss told Cryer. The one with the really fat ass.

"You’re a cryer," Bliss said, his voice slightly damaged by the botched suicide attempt. Bliss hardly looked any worse for wear after his own hanging. Just some faint mottled scars ringed his throat. He hadn’t used a very thick rope to hang himself, looked more like it had been a bungee cord. "I hear you crying in your sleep sometimes. Sobbing. What else are you?"

Cryer wanted to say, I don’t know what I am.

"If you don’t know what you are," Bliss said, "it means you’ve still got choices. Options. Chances. Possibilities. You can reform your purpose, understand? Your intentions and function. You have one, even if you don’t know what it is."

Cryer didn’t know what the hell Bliss meant and wanted to say, What the hell do you mean?

"Let me explain what I mean."

For a guy who’d tried to off himself, Bliss seemed to have a pretty sunny disposition.

"I’ve read up on you," Bliss told him. "The security they’ve got attached to their computer filing system can be hacked by any kid who owns an X-Box. They’ve got hundreds of pages of documentation on you. Your medical records, your mental faculty test results, transcriptions, notes. And not any of it is worth a shit except for a couple of pages right in the middle. That’s where your whole story is. In there was all the shared files on the police investigation into the murders of your wife and daughter. Do you remember them?"

Since Cryer did nothing, Bliss had to repeat the question.

This time Cryer shook his head, because he wasn’t sure if he did remember them. He pressed at the contours of his memory, trying to move among the ramps of his identity, where he saw faces and heard voices and was buzzed by images, but couldn’t put any of it into an understandable framework.

"Do you want me to tell you what happened?"

Cryer nodded.

Bliss must’ve been a big smoker back in the real world. He was always reaching for a pack of cigarettes, forever tapping his pockets, going for the rolled cuff of his shirt.

"Okay, you came home one night and found them dying in your home. Your daughter gutted, your wife with her throat cut. You were stabbed in the forebrain with a small three-inch blade. The perp left it in you. The cops recovered it but never learned anything important about the weapon. It’s the kind of knife they sell by the thousands all over the city."

Cryer had to wonder, What’s everybody else doing with their three-inch knives?

"He had cased your house long in advance. He’d been watching you, knew your pattern. He wanted time alone with your family. Forensics say your wife was kept tied up in the bathroom for an hour or more while the perp was with your daughter. They can tell that from the bruising and chaffing on her wrists from the duct tape. Your girl wasn’t molested, and blood spatter evidence shows that the gutting wounds that killed her must’ve been made ten or fifteen minutes before you walked in. You know what that means?"

Why the fuck, Cryer wanted to say, do you keep stopping and asking me? Of course I don’t know what it means.

So he shook his head.

Bliss went on. "Means he was talking to her. In my precinct we used to call these guys Chatty Kathys. You found them everywhere. Some bank heister who winds up in hostage situation and starts talking to his captives. Spills his whole fucking life out to them. Forgets about the money, his demands, the helicopter he wants to escape in, the S.W.A.T. teams about to bust in, the gun he’s holding, everything, because all he really wanted was to open up to an audience."

My wife and daughter were murdered by a Chatty Kathy, Cryer thought. The man I used to be was stabbed in the head by someone who just wanted to talk about his life.

"Perp escaped via the second story bathroom window. You probably got a good look at his face. You might have recognized him. Do you remember that?"

Strange that this should be the easiest question so far, because Cryer, while he didn’t remember the guy’s face, did clearly recall the feeling that the killer had been familiar to him. Cryer stared into Bliss’s eyes and tried to beseech him, but to what end even he didn’t understand.

Continuing, Bliss said, "There were a number of burglaries in your area before the night of your incident. Maybe your wife tumbled onto the thief, but the nature of the attack suggests it was much more personal in nature. This was a man of rage, of quiet cruelty and explosive violence. Still, it’s possible your home had been scoped out by a cat burglar. The police rousted several known thieves, but that turned out to be a waste. And anyway, nothing was stolen."

So it might have or might not have been a homicidal cat burglar. Cryer waited for Bliss to clarify.

"Okay, as I mentioned, the vicious nature of the wounds and the fact that he watched your family for so long almost definitely proves that the crime was fueled by a personal grievance or a presumed personal grievance. This was almost certainly someone you knew or at least had some slight interaction with. They interviewed hundreds and came up with nothing concrete. No definitive suspects."

Hundreds? And no suspects? Cryer wondered if the cops broke a lot of other pinkies, or if they only tried that hard with Cryer.

Bliss was enjoying himself, his insanity set aside in the face of his own newfound purpose. "This perp, he’s a psychopath. That’s an easy word to throw around, especially in here, but this guy, he’s the real thing. Shrinks have been trying to understand the ways of these kinds of people for years and they’ll never get anywhere. It’s beyond them. It’s beyond everyone except the psycho himself. The reason for what he does, the bad trigger that gets pulled inside of him, even he might not know what it is or what it’s all about. You can go back to when he was a kid, and maybe you find abuse and maybe you don’t, and maybe there’s serious disturbances and maybe there isn’t. None of it matters. You don’t need to understand him. You don’t want his life story. You know what you want, don’t you?"

In the center of his skull, one ringing word–a word without any emotion attached to it. For reasons that had nothing to do with love or hate, because he couldn’t even remember his family, couldn’t even recall the names of his wife or daughter. Or himself. But still, thankfully, there remained a desperate wanting. A need full of meaning and context.

Cryer nodded.

"You want revenge. You want to smoke this prick. Ice him. Ace him. Snuff him. Crush him. That’s all that matters. Right?"

With no understanding of himself–the man he once was or the man he now is, this Cryer–incapable of remembering anything, but acknowledging his desire, Cryer sat there and thought, Right.

"Okay then. You have to get out of here. Either get better, or fake the doctors into thinking you’ve recovered. Or just bust out. Whatever it takes. That’s what you do. That’s all that you do. Concentrate. Focus."

Concentrate. Focus.

"Then, once you’re on the outside, you dig. You dig like a fucking dog. You go through the life you had, the one you don’t recall anymore. You find out about yourself. You go talk to your old friends, your neighbors, the women in your wife’s sewing circle or whatever the fuck she did. You find out if your daughter was dating any boys, if she made contact with some perv on the Internet. You search through it all piece by piece, incident by incident. You find out how he found you, and then you can find him."

Find him.

"That’s all that there is to you. It’s what defines you. You’re crying again."

Bliss reached over and touched Cryer’s face and thumbed away tears.

"Well, your pain still inside you, or you wouldn’t be sobbing, now would you? Maybe you’ll find your love again. Reach for it, maybe you’ll touch it, even if it’s just in your dreams. Love leads to vengeance. The mission is all that matters. You hold onto it. When you cry, you cry for that. When you bleed, you bleed for that."

8

You’d expect that after a speech like that, the suicidal cop would trundle off and finally manage to kill himself.

Pass the torch on to Cryer and then go drink a bottle of drain cleaner, throw himself off the roof, OD on a year’s worth of secretly hidden tranquilizers.

Instead, the next day Bliss was released. His daughter, who was nineteen or twenty now, and a real looker, who knew all about CPR and auto-erotic asphyxiation, showed up and took her father’s blue valise and led him outside to new SUV and drove him away past the illegal immigrant laborers and the screaming wood chippers.

9

It took over seven more months before Cryer spoke aloud again.

His first words weren’t meaningful or significant. He was standing in the rec room while Johnny G., the depressed fifteen-year-old, was ranting about his father who expected Johnny to get better grades and hit more home runs and stop acting like such a little fruit. Johnny G. had first tried to off himself after striking out while his team was losing three-to-two. He clubbed himself in the face with the bat at home plate, shattered his nose and given himself a concussion and hairline fracture of the occipital lobe.

Cryer sometimes couldn’t see the world in front of him because of the blood-soaked scenes inside his mind, and he’d begin to shake his head trying to rattle the images away. It wasn’t happening this time.

Johnny liked to hurt himself. Other kids, they might cut themselves on the arm, give themselves a nice neat row of slash marks. But Johnny, he liked blunt instruments. The whole ward had to be careful not to leave anything around that Johnny might bash himself in the head with.

Ten minutes ago Johnny had found a clay ashtray somebody’d made during a crafts workshop and the kid had pummeled himself with it. Now he appeared to have been partially scalped. A wedge of skin on his forehead was drawn forward in a raw-looking wound. A hank of his hair had been pulled back exposing bloody flesh beneath.

Cryer said to him, "Wash your face, it’s dripping red."

Over his long months of silence Cryer’s voice had withered to a dust-choked croak. He thought, right at that moment, that someone else was speaking, and he turned to look over his shoulder at whoever it might be.

It sounded a little like the suicidal cop. His next word was, "Bliss?"

Johnny was still so wrapped up in his story that he didn’t even realize Cryer had said anything.

The floor nurse, though, stepped over with a puzzled expression and looked intently into Cryer’s eyes. She asked, "What did you say?"

Cryer stared around himself and noticed, as if for the first time, that he was in a glaring white day room full of noise, sitting next to a kid who was bleeding like hell. Why wasn’t the nurse helping the boy? He walked to the window which was covered with a barred shutter that locked on the inside. He looked down at himself and barely recognized the body. He was still holding a hard red rubber ball. He let it slip from his hand and watched it bounce away.

He drank a cup of water and massaged his throat, turned back to the nurse and said, "Okay, so what do I have to do to get out of here?"

10

Turned out that Cryer had fallen through the cracks in the system and nobody had really known what to do with him beforehand or knew what to do with him now. His insurance had run out and the private hospital he’d been in for the first six weeks of his recovery had purged him into a state run facility.

The psychiatrists, nurses, guards, and administrators conferred and discussed Cryer and his situation.

They said he suffered from situation-specific amnesia rather than global or fugue or dissociative. The trauma had most probably been physiological and not psychological, but could now be helped by further therapy. They talked about retrograde amnesia and how most patients lost their personal identities leading up to the traumatic incident, but were able to learn new information and in some cases even form new personalities.

They put him in group therapy, primal scream therapy, regression therapy, and making clay ashtrays which he had to hide whenever Johnny was around. They actually did have classes on wicker basket weaving but Cryer thought even that was too crazy for him. He made a hell of an ashtray though.

He found that after he’d come back from wherever he’d gone he had to prove to the doctors that he deserved to get out. At first the rage took over and argued and shouted, but that only lost him points. With a frosty terror working through his chest, he realized they wanted to keep him in here forever because they thought he was somehow faking his return to sanity.

Proving you weren’t crazy was a whole lot tougher than it sounded. He had to mask his true feelings but make them sound reasonable at any given time, unless the docs expected him to have unreasonable feelings, as they sometimes did. He couldn’t beat them at the game, but he could learn to play it pretty well.

The scar on his forehead wasn’t as noticeable as one might think. The blade had gone in between his eyebrows, where a frown wrinkle folded his flesh and made him look constantly angry or puzzled. The surgery where they’d cut a window into his skull and burrowed inside somehow hadn’t left much of a mark. The metal plate under his skin didn’t bulge, didn’t go clang when he knocked against it with his knuckles. The only oddity was that a sharp path of white now cut through his dark hair, pointed and sort of shaped like a blade.

But all in all, you could barely tell that anybody had stabbed him in the head.

One guy in charge started coming around more than the rest. Young, wore a well-trimmed beard, always with a tie knotted loosely around his collar, his sleeves rolled up to the forearms. The doctor in charge of his case? His personal psychiatrist? Nobody told him, or if they did, he couldn’t remember. Cryer supposed it didn’t matter at all so long as he continued doing everything he was told to do.

Eventually they started to talk about his release. The main doc smiled more and more in Cryer’s presence and asked if there was anything else he could do.

"Belongings," Cryer said.

"Excuse me?"

"My personal belongings, where are they? Whatever I owned before I came here."

"Gone. Your wife’s family came and took a great many personal effects, and the remainder was sold to help defer hospital costs."

"Photos."

"I wouldn’t know about that."

"The house? My house?"

"I believe it’s been sold. Or perhaps taken over by the bank." He nervously flipped pages of a file. He scanned line after line but who knew what he was reading.

"Anything left?" Cryer asked. "In storage? My wallet? What I came in with?" He looked at his hands. "I was married. Shouldn’t I be wearing a wedding ring?"

The doc checked a couple more folders, got on his computer and typed for ten minutes, scanning, searching, perhaps a little afraid now because he realized how easy it was for things to go missing–not just objects, but identities, whole lives–murmuring to himself in agitation but unable to find anything at all.

"I’m sorry," Doc said.

"Don’t be." Cryer couldn’t cry or bleed over that.

He had to save his tears and blood.

11

The cops who busted his pinkies showed up again. This time they were good cop-good cop. Who knew why? Some new evidence that proved he didn’t fall down on the knife? That he hadn’t disemboweled his own daughter? Maybe they’d found shoe prints in the back yard, maybe they’d tracked him to his workplace and the fast food joint and realized he couldn’t have tied his wife up and left her in the bathtub for an hour.

They asked him questions about that night and he told them everything that he could still remember, which wasn’t much. They said they were sorry for his loss. They expressed great respect and sorrow for him. They said they would devote their lives to catching this crazed killer. They said they had no definite leads.

"What happened to it?" Cryer asked.

"To what?"

"The three-inch blade they took out of my brain."

"It’s in evidence."

"What kind was it?"

"You want to know what kind of knife it was?"

"Yes."

They searched their little notebooks but neither of them could tell him.

"I suppose it doesn’t matter."

He held out both his hands to shake goodbye.

The cops looked puzzled but each shook with him. Cryer gripped their hands and tightened his hold, exerting more and more pressure second by second until both cops were gasping and struggling. He continued to grip their fists harder and harder even after the cops started to kick him in the shins and slug him in the face with their free hands. He didn’t stop until he felt their fingers breaking.

12

The facility cut him loose three days shy of a full year after he’d been stabbed in the head.

Like they’d told him, his home had been taken back by the bank. The insurance payout was long gone too. They set him up in a halfway place.

It made him wonder: Halfway to what?

Toward sanity? The grave? The reclaiming of a life?

A caseworker was supposed to get in contact with him soon and help him get set up, find a job, get back on his feet as he reentered the world.

He spent the morning sitting around the place, watching other mental deficients arguing over the television, flipping channels from one kid’s show to another. Nothing else was allowed. Nothing adult, nothing real, because it might upset the loonies.

Others were reading children’s magazines and religious pamphlets. The entire place was like a doctor’s waiting room. The same boredom, fear, and hopelessness. The tension constantly growing until it consumed everyone.

Cryer got up and started for the door. Somebody in charge–what were they called?...guards, nurses, counselors?–big guy in a white shirt, dark pants, shiny shoes, put a hand to Cryer’s chest, pushed a little, told him to relax. He wasn’t allowed to leave until he’d met with his caseworker.

"I just want some fresh air."

"Open a window."

All that time in the hospital, the tests, and the fact that, no matter how you looked at it, none of this was his fault, he’d been a victim, and even now he continued to be victimized, all of that and still they had to fuck with him.

"What’s your name?" Cryer asked.

"For you, for right now, in this house, it’s Boss. That’s all you need to know." Boss shoved a bit harder, rocked Cryer back onto his heels. "You do what I say, got that? You take your medication on time, keep your room clean, don’t get in anybody’s face, mine or the other folks in the house, and we’ll get along just fine. That’s all you need to do."

Cryer reached up and took the guy’s wrist in his hand and squeezed. Boss went down to his knees screaming as if he’d been shot. Cryer didn’t know he’d broken Boss’s wrist until he released him and saw the guy’s hand dangling at an ugly angle.

The other deficients began to laugh and a couple came over and kicked Boss in his stomach, his ribs, his ass. Boss started calling for Mikey and Evelyn. Cryer hadn’t seen any other guards, nurses, counselors around, so he walked through the halfway home and found Mikey and Evelyn getting a fairly elaborate groove on upstairs in the claw-foot tub. They didn’t look like anything was likely to break their concentration for a long while, so Cryer just backed out and went downstairs again.

Boss was getting the shit beat out of him. Cryer found himself a touch worried that the deviants might kill the guy, so he grabbed Boss and locked him in a pantry closet filled with about eighty cans of powdered milk. If the apocalypse came tomorrow, the maniacs would still have plenty of calcium.

13

He had the address for his house, the house of the man he’d once been, where he’d lived with his dead wife and daughter. He shut his eyes and tried to visualize them, the life they’d shared. He searched down through the blackness behind his eyes, going deeper backward into his own skull, trying to get beyond the thrust of the knife that was still somehow there. But he saw nothing.

Although he couldn’t remember the address, or the area, his body knew the way.

He had just enough money to get around. He took a bus and transferred to another. It was difficult and not really familiar. He must’ve been a man who drove everywhere who’d still managed to occasionally overhear schedules, see buses go by in half-recollected flits of motion.

Then he walked.

He entered a suburban development and saw a number of groups of children playing together in the streets and yards. These might very well have been his daughter’s friends.

Cryer came to his house. They’d told him it had been sold but it actually seemed abandoned, perhaps taken over by the bank. He didn’t know what kind of job he’d once had, but it must’ve been fairly lucrative. The home was large, impressive, and had been so well-cared for that even now it still retained the look of wealth and attention. He’d been rich, and had still been stuffing his fat face with fast food burgers gobbled down in a parking lot. What did that tell him about his home life? Was it average despite his money? Did he see shame in the face of his wife?

He tried the front door and it was locked. He put his face to the window and saw empty rooms that meant nothing to him. He walked around the side, through a large wooden gate, and into the back yard.

A large deck with weather-chipped paint hung off the back of the house and jutted across the yard. There was a pond crusted with dead leaves and algae. A broken trampoline. Dead branches that had fallen during the winter and never been cleared.

He stared up at what he knew was the second story bathroom window.

He had no names, not even his own. How did you dig like a dog through your own life when you knew nothing about it?

Cryer walked back around front, down the driveway to the sidewalk, made a left, and decided to pay a visit to his one-time next door neighbor.

14

The fence on the house next door was faux split-rail, made of some kind of hardy plastic that would never need repair. He could see a trampoline in the back yard here too. All these kids in the neighborhood bouncing around like crazy. Limber as hell. He thought his daughter must’ve been disgusted by him, the way he trundled with his fat belly. Weak, bloated, full of insipid vices.

Cryer rang the doorbell and then gave a tippity-tap knock, his hand moving on its own. Something else from the other life.

It took a minute before the door swung back to reveal a woman about his age, mid-30s, petite, very pretty, with flowing blonde hair. A name moved across his tongue. His lips tried to taste it. Annie. Annie...Kostler.

A broad vapid smile was tacked into place on her face. She said, "Yes?" the way that someone who doesn’t want to buy your shit says it while you stand their holding your product.

He looked into her eyes and saw no sign of recognition. More had changed than the weight loss and the silver blade cutting through his hair. He wet his lips and said, "Annie Kostler?"

"Yes?"

That stopped him. He couldn’t even go, Hiya, I’m Abe Fishbaum. I’m Chuck Smith, Joe Evans. It’s me, Annie; it’s your old friend Johnny Guitar. Nick Steel at your service. He couldn’t say anything of significance at all.

Cryer simply stared, and after a minute tried once more. "Annie?"

Her face fell and she started to retreat into the house. Nobody needed to deal with trouble on their stoop, some guy preaching his religion, wanting to sell magazines, asking to clean your gutters.

Then the door stopped closing and was flung open again. Annie Kostler stepped to him and, with her hands held as if she might touch his face, said, "Oh God. Oh my Christ. You’ve come back." Then she spoke the name that he could not hear, could not retain.

She moved into his arms and hugged him. It felt natural to be held by her, and he vaguely wondered if they’d been having an affair, or were just such good friends that they’d done this many times before, acted this way, during holidays or parties or during rough patches.

Or perhaps it was true that even now, as Cryer, he had grown so lonely and in need of human contact that he could finally reach out to another person.

Except he wasn’t. His arms hung around her limply, his powerful hands opening and closing while he waited as Annie Kostler patted his back, pressed her face to his throat, and then drew away. She continued to hold him though, looking deeply into his face, and seeing that he was not the same.

Tears brimmed and fell in jagged patterns down her cheeks.

"What did they fucking do to you?" she asked.

Meaning the killer or the surgeons or the psychiatrists or the guards or all of them?

She said his name again, the name that was not his name, would never be his name again, but Cryer nodded as if it was his own, as she led him into her home.

15

His presence wrecked her. Annie broke down sobbing twice more within ten minutes, before they’d even had a chance to speak much. She sat on the couch and he sat in a chair facing her, near enough for Annie to cautiously reach out and press her finger to knife scar, then thread her fingers through his white patch. She apparently felt very comfortable touching him.

She suffered through a brief trembling fit, and then put cookies, coffee, and a bottle of scotch out. The bottle she kept close to herself, the coffee in front of him. There was clearly a message in that.

"We visited you in the hospital," she said. "Phil and I. Do you remember that?"

"No."

"I didn’t think so. You stared but didn’t recognize us at all, or didn’t seem to. The doctors said your memory would be permanently damaged."

"Yes."

"We came to the private clinic as well. You were...catatonic, I suppose it’s called. We couldn’t bear seeing you like that. That’s why we didn’t come again. I mean...I’m sorry."

"Don’t be, it’s all right."

Eyes steeped with genuine grief, she stared at him, afraid to learn exactly how much of the man she’d once known was gone. "Do you recognize me now?"

"My body does," he said. "My lips knew your name."

"Your lips?"

"Yes, but I don’t really recall."

The truth seemed to both frighten and relax her. Perhaps she’d been worried that he wanted to discuss the affair, if there had been one, or planned on impressing himself into her life in some fashion, since he no longer had a family of his own. Ask to stay in the guest room, throw Phil into a dither. Have her run away with him to the halfway house, live on powdered milk.

"You actually look good," she said. "Healthy. Fit."

"Thank you."

"But you’re so different."

"Yes."

"You’re not the person I knew."

"No."

"I want to help," she said. "What can I do?"

Where to start? Where to begin digging like a dog? When he cried, he cried for this. When he bled, he was bleeding for this. This was his mission.

"They never found who did this to us," he said.

"No. The police canvassed the area for days. They interviewed everyone in the neighborhood. But they never found out anything."

"Someone told me there were burglaries in the neighborhood just before the night my family was attacked," Cryer told her. "Do you know anything about that?"

Annie pointed over her left shoulder, toward the back of the house. "The Russells, two blocks south of us, were burglarized while they were vacationing in Barbados. The police suspected it might be the carpet cleaning crew they used or maybe the pool guy who came twice a month. Turned out to be someone who once fixed their central air unit. He’d hit a number of homes all over the city."

"Did you ever hear of a possible connection between those robberies and what happened at my house?"

"No," Annie said. "I never heard anything like that."

"Think about it for a minute. Does it seem likely?"

She didn’t have to think about it, just immediately frowned and shook her head. "No. Nothing was taken from your place. And this central air guy, he only went in when he knew families were vacationing. And he never hurt anyone, so far as I know."

The vicious nature of the wounds and the fact that he watched your family for so long almost definitely proves the crime was fueled by a personal grievance or a presumed personal grievance. This was almost certainly someone you knew.

"Did I have any enemies?" Cryer asked.

"Enemies?"

"At work? In my personal life?"

She poured a medium-sized glass of scotch for herself, didn’t offer him any. "It’s so strange hearing you talk like this. So distant. Asking me questions about your own personal life. It’s...unsettling."

He picked up the coffee cup, put it down again. "I’m sorry."

"Jesus Christ, don’t be. It’s not your fault. It’s just...I wish I was stronger. I feel like...I don’t know what I feel like doing. Crying some more. Screaming. I don’t know what. But none of that would help you."

Cryer waited but she seemed to have forgotten that he’d asked a question. "Enemies, Annie. Did I have any that you knew of?"

"No."

He thought, If we were fooling around, would that have sent Phil over the edge?
Could the psychopath have been living next door, all of his bad triggers pulled at once because he walked in and saw my fat naked ass in his bed?

Spread throughout the room were framed photos of Annie and Phil. Cryer studied the man.

"Did my wife?"

"Enemies? No, she managed a flower shop on the other side of town."

"How about my daughter?"

"She was twelve."

"She was gutted."

Annie remained composed for another minute while she threw back the drink and followed it with another. Then she slowly reached for a napkin, covered much of her face with it, and began sobbing. It wasn’t a sign of weakness but of humanity, of free emotion. She wouldn’t have been feeling as desperate if only he could console her in some way.

He also realized she wasn’t crying merely for him and his family, but also her own. Knowing that this awful thing happened right next door. That it could have just as easily been her and Phil.

She snapped out of it quickly, maybe the liquor helped. She dried her eyes, cleared her throat, and said, "No. No enemies that I’m aware of."

On the mantle was a picture of a young girl, maybe thirteen. The same lovely features as her mother, same flowing blonde hair.

"Your daughter."

"Milly. She’s at a swim meet this afternoon."

"She’s beautiful. Like you."

"Terrible as it sounds, that’s the real reason why I’m crying. Because every time I think about what happened to you, I imagine how easily it might have been us. How it could have been Milly."

"Yes. You were home that night?"

"Yes."

"You heard nothing?"

"No.

The pure brazenness of the killer, the arrogance of that rotten bastard.

"May I see Milly’s room?"

"Why?"

"I don’t know. Maybe it will help me to remember my own daughter. To feel closer to her."

But there was no real chance of that, because he couldn’t really feel anything at all.

16

Milly’s room was at the top of a huge staircase that receded into the bright and silent expanse of the house.

Moving through a doorway beautifully decorated with prints of celebrities and stills from film–black & white photos of Monroe, Dean, Bogart, and Nixon–Cryer had a strange sense of déjà vu, and his scar seemed to tingle. Maybe because he’d been here before or maybe because his own daughter had shared similar tastes. He had to wonder: Nixon?

Three cameras were laid out on her desk–two digital and one with ancient flashbulbs. Milly was an amateur photographer with a high caliber of talent. He looked around and let himself waft to and fro into the hundreds of photos adorning her walls. A mosaic of the life and fantasy and interests of a hip thirteen-year-old. Some of the pictures were blown up to poster size, scissored into sections and clipped together to form new and intriguing patterns of subtly conflicted images.

Medals, ribbons, and awards were arrayed across Milly’s bureau. Trophies she’d won in swimming, gymnastics, and track cluttered her packed bookshelves. Already an old pro and star athlete at thirteen.

He stared at the pictures. It was impossible to take them all in at once, yet easy and natural to be taken in by them, to feel the inviting vista opening before him and drawing him forward. The smiling faces, the action of these figures and illustrations, the motion of effigy, each portrayal a small aspect of a much larger whole. Annie’s presence pressed against him from behind, advancing within his space but somehow not reaching him, unable to truly touch him.

"Is my daughter here?" he asked.

For an instant it seemed he was alone, and was talking to no one, as if she had left the room and perhaps even the house. His voice darted back at him, not quite the same as before. Charged with a kind of new energy. Was it love? Was it memory?

Annie moved past him, tapped her index finger to a photograph of two grinning girls in pink leotards, hair tied back in ponytails, mugging for the camera. "Yes, right here."

"Which?"

The finger touching the dead girl. She pointed out Cryer’s daughter in a number of other photos.

Standing at the edge of a pool preparing to dive in, gyrating on gymnastics mats, bouncing on a trampoline. "This is her. Here. Here. Here."

Cryer was soon able to see and memorize the lines of his dead daughter’s face, although he still couldn’t hold onto her name.

Names didn’t matter. Names had no true meaning. They could be given or taken away with ease. Johnny Guitar knew it. Abe Fishbaum knew it. Nick Steel knew it.

"She was beautiful," he said.

"Yes, she was."

"Do you think it would be all right if I took one of these? Would Milly mind much?"

"Of course not." She removed a photo and handed it to him.

The weight of his lost life and death suddenly seemed to land on him all at once. The burden of it hung heavy atop him, crushing down, first shoving at his skull and then the rest of his body. He bowed before it and had to struggle to stay upright.

Annie sensed his exertion and put both hands on his elbow, drawing him up from the depths of himself. Cryer looked at her, moved as if he might kiss her, and she turned her face up to meet his.

He asked, "Was I a bad father? Did she hate me?"

"What?"

"My daughter. Did she hate me?" He held the photo between his hands and stared at the girls, all of them adorable, sleek, and muscular, on the verge of womanhood. "She was strong. I wasn’t. I stuffed my face with fries. I had to sneak cigarettes. I was weak. She must’ve hated the sight of me. My wife as well. They must’ve both–"

"No, no listen to me–"

"They had power. At the end, my wife, she stood up in the bathtub bleeding to death, she refused to give in. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything at all. I was weak. I couldn’t do anything."

Annie too showed some real strength. Her face firmed. "Is that what you’ve been thinking? You doted on them. You and your wife were in love in a way I wish Phil and I were ever in love, even at the beginning. As for your daughter, you know, most of the time, mothers and daughters are the ones that share a special rapport. But with you two, you were as close as any two people I’ve ever met. You went to every PTA meeting, every parent-teacher conference, to all the special events. Homecoming, the parades, the games, the tourneys, sometimes even the practices. You loaded up your SUV with the girls, all their friends, and shuttled them all over town. Took them out for dinner, celebrated when they won their regionals. You did everything for her and she knew it. She loved you dearly. Everyone did. You had no enemies. None of you had any enemies."

Someone had.

Someone had connected to the killer and drawn him back to the house. Cryer, who couldn’t feel much of anything at all, still felt that.

"What else can I do for you?" she asked.

"Names and addresses. Where I worked. Friends. Anything you can recall."

"The police checked. They interviewed everybody."

"Not closely enough. He knew us. The man who did this knew us."

"But how can you be so sure?"

"I’m sure."

She touched his face, hands to his cheeks, again as if to kiss him. His lips knew her name but didn’t know her kiss, and never would. She realized it and said, "What do you plan on doing?"

Cryer said, "When I bleed, I bleed for this."

"What?"

"When I cry, I cry for this."

"I don’t under–"

"This is my mission."

"Your–"

"Yes, my mission. I’m going to kill him. I’ve got to kill him."

Annie walked across the room to get a pad and pen, not quite staggering but almost so. Cryer had broken her. He thought that, weak and disgusting as he might have once been, at least he’d also been loved. It was something he couldn’t afford this time around.

He sat on the end of the bed and waited until she finished writing out her list. When she was done, she folded up the sheet of paper and handed it to him.

"Thank you for your help," Cryer said.

"Dee moont," she told him.

17

His feet got him back to the halfway house. Boss was nowhere to be seen. Mikey and Evelyn looked highly sated and a little sleepy as they sat on the worn couch in the day room smoking joints rolled to look like regular cigarettes, drinking from paper cups, and watching television with the droolers. They turned to him and mumbled small talk and made introductions. Cryer smelled Four Roses on their breath.

He went to the pantry, unlocked the door, and found Boss still out cold on the floor. He went through Boss’s pockets, found a baggie of cocaine, a handful of joints, and wallet stuffed with four hundred and ninety bucks.

He kept the cash and put everything else on the kitchen table. He went through the cabinets until he found the bottle of cheap whiskey. He wet a dish towel in the sink, carried Boss to the nearest chair, dumped him in it, and washed the blood from his face. Boss roused and began to cry out from the agony of his broken wrist.

Cryer put his hand over Boss’s mouth and said, "Don’t make a sound. Here’s some whiskey, coke, and weed. Use whatever you want to kill the pain. But don’t you make a sound."

You had to give it to him, Boss was a man of serious appetites. He swallowed three gulps from the whiskey bottle, snorted directly from the bag, wiped his nose, and then lit himself a joint. Soon his eyes drained of anguish and filled with a calm contentedness. Boss started to smile.

"Okay," Cryer said, "now we’re going to have a chat. Then you can have Mikey or Evelyn drive you to the hospital, or call an ambulance if you want."

"It still hurts, man."

"You’ll live."

"You can’t take over the house, man, I’m in charge. I’m the boss, not you."

A needle of distant rage pressed through Cryer’s chest, ramped his heart rate up, nearly made him reach out and snatch Boss’s other wrist and squeeze that one too until the fine bones cracked and crumbled together.

But almost as soon as the strange, detached emotion made itself know, it dissipated. "I don’t want to take over the house. I’m not going to be staying here long anyway."

"What do you want, man?"

"You three run a nice little store out of here. Reminds me of what used to happen on the ward. Smuggling in all kinds of contraband, with nobody but deficients and catatonics and droolers around to see your action."

"My arms hurts, don’t keep me here all day long." Boss puffed harder on the joint, took another swallow of the Four Roses. "I already asked you, what do you want?"

"I’m going to kill somebody and I need a gun."

The admission didn’t mean much to Boss. "I don’t deal in guns. I’m strictly into the shit that people enjoy."

"You know people who know people though, right?"

"Right, right."

"I want a gun."

Boss, grinning now, getting higher. "Crazy motherfucker, who are you going to off?"

"Listen to how crazy this is. I’m going to kill the man who killed me."

18

Cryer returned to his room across the hall from the bathroom with the claw-foot tub. He would have to think twice before he showered in there.

There was a note on the night stand saying he had a meeting with his caseworker at nine in the morning. A Miss Avery. She was supposed to try to help him get a job, find his own apartment, all the things that no one would ever let him do because they didn’t allow lunatics to work in their shops or live in their neighborhoods.

But he had to go through the motions, the same as she did, until he fell through the deeper cracks in the system and wound up on the street or back in the bin.

His muscles were tired, but his mind was on fire. Being on the outside for the first time in a year, reestablishing contact with the life he’d led and forging ahead with his mission had set him all the more firmly in his purpose.

Cryer stared at his daughter’s picture for hours. He went through names the way he and his wife probably had before the girl was born. Emily. Sarah. Noel. Margaret. No, not Margaret, he didn’t like Margaret. Maria. Dawn. Jane. Sara without the H on the end.

Eventually he tried to sleep, but Mikey and Evelyn were getting freaky again. Some of the other nutjobs were arguing how directly the 1790 Critique of Judgment applied to the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. Insane, but not so stupid. Harvard professors went just as out of their heads as drug addicts, postpartum depressives, nervous wrecks, and guys who’d suffered significant trauma to their pre-frontal lobes.

In the night, his dreams, or perhaps memories, took shape.

He sat several rows back on the indoor bleachers and watched the girls diving and swimming.

The sound of their splashing, as if they were trying to get away from something, made him perk up in an odd but manageable terror. That churning action of the water was the kind of wild noise you expect to hear if your kid is being chased around the shallows by a Great White shark.

His daughter’s lithe form lifted from the edge of the pool in one graceful surge of composed motion, and she stood framed in a shaft of light thrown down through the large plate glass windows overhead.

He felt a swelling of pride–not for her swimming technique or the fact that she was a top athlete, but simply because she was already so beautiful, and every day becoming more so. She flipped her hair out of her face, and, as she turned and prepared to dive from the edge again, spun for an instant in his direction, grinned and gave him a slight wave.

Milly had finished her laps but had swallowed a little water on her last heat. The coach, a petite woman barely any taller than the girls on the team, approached her with a towel, patted her back, and helped dry her off. Milly retreated to a table set up with fruit juice. She took a cup and moved to the first row of bleachers where she drank quickly and began encouraging her teammates to swim faster.

His daughter, breaking from the water, rose from the lip of the pool, walked around the edge, drew a towel from folded stack, and moved first to Milly where they exchanged a few excited words, and then came climbing row after row towards him.

He strained with worry, afraid she’d slip on the heavily shellacked bleachers, wishing she’d put on her slippers first, as he held out a hand to reach for her, to pull her close.

Saying her name, his daughter’s name, his girl’s name.

He awoke–what he thought was an awakening–to find the little fucker that had been inside his head was back again, lying stretched out on his pillow, as if he’d been whispering in Cryer’s ear all night.

The tiny version of himself that should be dead but wasn’t stared into Cryer’s eyes, placed his tiny hands to the sides of Cryer’s chin, and said to him, "Thees ount."

19

Miss Avery the caseworker never showed up in the morning. In a few days a harried woman with a briefcase jammed with files would sit in front of him with a lot of excuses about red tape and overwork, and she’d have him sign papers that meant nothing to him or anybody else, ask a lot of questions with no answers, and leave him watching cartoons.

Boss had found his way to an emergency room and now his wrist was in a streamlined cast. He must’ve told a pretty convincing story because he walked around as if his street cred had been given a big boost. Defender of the crown, hero of the hour. Maybe he said the house had been broken into and he’d saved the loonies’ lives. Maybe one of the nuts had attacked him. It didn’t matter.

Boss was finishing his rounds, handing out medication, making sure everyone had showered and remembered to wipe their asses. He caught Cryer’s eye and motioned to the kitchen.

At the table, Boss said, "I made a couple of calls. Give me a day or two."

"Sure."

"You’ve got to know, up front, that if I do this for you, you’re out of here. I can’t take a chance you’ll freak out and start shooting people up and this will somehow get back to me. You get what you want, you’re gone."

"That’s fine."

"You got somewhere to go?"

"No."

"No, of course not, if you did you’d be there instead of in this shithole, right?"

"Right."

Shaking his head, Boss had that look like he wanted to say, You’re out of your mind.

As if that should surprise him. As if they hadn’t already established that. As if Cryer wasn’t here for that very reason.

20

According to Annie’s list of names and addresses, the company Cryer had once worked for was called Intel Six Securities Inc. He got mixed up on the buses and spent twenty minutes going in the wrong direction. Then he stood around waiting a half hour to take the crosstown line, but eventually he managed to get to the right part of the city.

He walked six blocks to a huge industrial development centered on an enormous and breathtaking glass building. INTEL loomed in two story high letters. It certainly made an impression.

Cryer walked inside the lobby and a girl at a desk asked him if she could help him. He didn’t know how to respond.

He waited for his mouth to say the words that would get him back into his office, where his colleagues had once clustered together, taking three martini lunches and putting his heavy bill on the Gold Card business account. He smiled and his lips didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

"Sir?"

He searched the lobby, trying to find something that would make his body respond. He tried to focus on the elevators; maybe a certain floor would get him rolling. Sixth? Ninth? Did they have penthouses in industrial park buildings?

"Sir?"

"Ah–"

"May I help you?"

He said, "I’d like to see the director of Intel Six Securities, please."

"Do you have an appointment with Mr. Ferman?"

"Yes. Yes, I do."

"Your name?"

"Johnny Guitar."

"Johnny...Guitar."

"Yes."

She scanned her computer screen. "I’m afraid I don’t have you listed, Mr. Guitar." Her smile didn’t falter, even though her eyes started to spin a little as she realized she might be dealing with the beginnings of a situation here.

"Someone dropped the ball then. Please tell Mr. Ferman that his old pal Johnny’s here to see him."

21

She told Cryer to take a seat in the waiting area, and then whispered at length into the phone.

With a name like Intel Securities, Cryer figured some tough rent-a-cops would be by soon to escort him out. They’d be extremely polite but firm, block his path and body check him towards the front door.

Then he’d have to throw a scene, create a real stir, until he got people rushing out here to take a look at what was happening. Maybe someone would recognize him.

Instead, only one man appeared, dressed in a thousand dollar suit, with a hundred dollar haircut, but smelling of cheap cologne. It was the scent that got Cryer’s brain squeaking along again. His mouth watered. He tasted cocktail sauce.

"Mr. Doyle," the secretary said, "this gentleman would like to see Mr. Ferman, but he doesn’t have an appointment."

"Thanks, I’ll take care of it, Cecily."

Doyle approached, already recognizing Cryer. The look on his face proved it. Fearful, shocked, disbelieving, and a little glad. Cryer glanced up at the high corners of the lobby and saw the security cameras. Doyle had seen him on some monitor someplace and figured out who he was.

"It’s you," Doyle said, gripping both of Cryer’s shoulders. Not quite a hug, but close. "I can’t believe it."

"Hiya."

Doyle examined Cryer’s face closely and said the name that was there and wasn’t there. "You don’t even have any scars. When I heard what had happened, I thought, hell, when I heard, I thought. Well you know, of course–I thought you’d never get on your feet again, never get out of that institution. But you look fine,. Hell, better than fine, except you need to dye your hair. But you’re trim, look at the muscles, you–"

"Right," Cryer said.

"So what’s with this Johnny Guitar shit?"

Cryer just smiled. It was the only thing he could think to do. He hoped he didn’t look too slack-jawed and stupid. He stared at Doyle trying to see a buddy, someone he might’ve gone bowling with, sat around a barbecue pit with having a few beers. But he just couldn’t see it, and sharp-eyed Doyle immediately caught on.

"You don’t know me at all, do you?"

Cryer waited, and after a moment his mouth finally moved. "Joe. Joe Doyle."

"That’s right."

The guy took Cryer by the arm, gently, like leading a frail old man, and ushered him down a series of halls, past an enormous room filled with rows of cubicles. Then up an aisle beyond another series of secretaries to a group of large offices. No wonder the elevator didn’t spur anything, he’d been on the ground floor. At least he thought maybe that was the reason. None of this looked familiar to Cryer.

"We sent a fruit basket."

"Thank you."

"We also helped out when your insurance wouldn’t cover certain expenses."

"That was very kind of you."

Doyle wasn’t the director, he was the troubleshooter. The go-to guy. Always worried about something. Always checking the cameras to see who was about.

This time he tried to sniff out whether Cryer was going to put the squeeze on him, maybe sue the company or ask for some kind of settlement. It didn’t matter if it made any sense, you could tell Doyle was someone who always expected the worst. His wariness made him almost aggressive.

Might as well come right out with it; see if it made any difference to the guy. "I’m not here for any money or to disrupt your company in any way."

"Why are you here?"

"I need to find out if I had any enemies."

"Enemies?"

"Yes."

"Because you were attacked."

"Yes."

"You think it might have been someone from Intel?"

"I don’t know."

Doyle shook his head. With that slight action, he stirred the air. It carried the stink of the bad cologne into Cryer’s face. "You couldn’t have made any enemies at Intel."

"Why not?"

"You didn’t work here."

"Excuse me?"

"You were employed by Intel, but only as a private consultant. You worked from your home office, on the computer. You only came in once every three or four months, to meet with me and discuss various projects."

"What projects?"

Doyle went off on an explanation that Cryer immediately decided had nothing to do with anything and promptly forgot it all. He’d been a boring son of a bitch in his other life. No wonder he’d found so much solace in greasy burgers and a couple of drags of tobacco.

"But I was at work," Cryer said. "Coming home that night...the night my family and I were attacked. I was out. I thought I was arriving home from work."

"Like I said, you didn’t need to come in often. And I was the only one you ever met with, and always during the early afternoon. We usually sat in the board room, had a small lunch or appetizers–"

Cocktail sauce. "Shrimp. Jumbo shrimp."

"Yes, as we went over numbers and sales."

"I never dealt with anyone else?"

"On occasion one or two other consultants, but they were all friendly and cursory relationships."

"Business rivalries? Jealousy?"

"Not towards you. You did very well here, but so far as your consultation work, you were low man on the totem pole. Committed but not competitive."

No wonder Cryer had gotten so fat. Sitting at home, on the computer all day long, never getting any exercise. Showing no serious ambition. Annie had told him he was always at his daughter’s school events, taking her to practice, going to the parent-teacher meetings. He’d been a house-husband.

"How was I as an employee?"

"First-rate, otherwise we wouldn’t have kept you on."

"How long did I work for Intel?"

"Twelve years."

All of his daughter’s life. Had he taken the consulting job so he could stay home with her?

"How was business?" he asked Doyle.

"Never better. Losing you was a great blow to us. Are you ready to come back to work?"

It almost made Cryer smile, imagining what it would be like to sit in front of a computer, barely looking at the screen, and letting his hands work away without him, as he toyed with figures, unaware of what his job was, what he was selling, what he was consulting about, who his associates and colleagues and buyers might be.

"No," Cryer said. "I think I need a little more time."

"You’re always welcome here. You’re part of the Intel Six Securities Inc. family."

"I appreciate that."

"Let me know if there’s anything I can ever do to help."

"I will."

Doyle shook Cryer’s hand, led him to the door, patted him on the shoulder and then dug his fingers in gently, massaging a little, the way a friend who can’t articulate deep emotion might try to express himself through touch.

Wandering past the cubicles, Cryer looked over the tiny walls and seeing dozens of well-dressed men and women on phones and busily working on the computers. He tried to imagine what kind of job he did at home that was significantly different than what all these people were doing here.

He made it out into the parking lot and turned back to the shining glass building, watching the sun gleam and riot across every window.

But if he hadn’t been at work, where had he been coming back from?

Someplace he went to often enough to form a pattern. A pattern that had been used by the killer.

Cryer checked Annie’s list. He’d been so eager to begin his mission that he hadn’t bothered to read through it all. Beneath the address for Intel Six, his wife’s flower shop, his daughter’s middle-school, and below that was the name of a church.

ST. IGNATIUS OF GOD.

224 Jones St. Basement.

And then, in a hesitant scrawl, as if she wasn’t sure she should share his own secret with him:

A.A.

22

Alcoholics Anonymous. He’d had to sneak cigarettes. Had to cram fast food down as quickly as possible. Burdened with guilt and regret, certain addictions rose within him to counter others.

And Annie knew about it how? She’d only offered him the coffee, had kept the bottle of scotch close to herself. Maybe a fellow member? She hit the sauce pretty hard.

Or had Cryer or his wife confided in her? Not all that anonymous in the long run.

His body knew the way to the church. It wasn’t far from Intel. Cryer had to wonder if he’d been a religious man–if he and his family had attended mass every Sunday or if it was just a place for him to wrestle with his failures alongside others with the same troubles. He tried to see it. Going up before the crowd, admitting certain sins and shortcomings, telling them he’d been dry for a week, a month, a year and a half. Then raiding the jelly-filled donuts, jamming two at a time in his mouth.

Cryer thought that A.A. members went to different meetings at different times on different days. Was he such a creature of habit that he had a set schedule for when he went to the meetings? Is that how the killer had been able to note his comings and goings? It was another weakness.

How could he have run across and incurred the wrath of a psychopath there?

Because he’d scarfed all the donuts? Drank all the tepid coffee? Someone just didn’t like his face when he went up there and said, "Hi, I’m Freddy the Switchblade, and I’m an alcoholic."

Hi Freddy!

Was there an Overeaters Anonymous? Smokers Anonymous? What other petty vices did he possess, and which possessed him? Nothing meaningful, probably just ridiculous fatass shit. Internet gambling? Skin mags? Soft-core cable movies? Computer golf?

St. Ignatius was enormous and atmospheric, with an ancient stone appearance, the church having been one of the earliest erected edifices in the city. There was a plaque out front that said so.

A javelin fence surrounded the front grounds, which opened into a small and very well-tended garden. Cryer tried the huge wooden front doors and was surprised to find them locked. Weren’t churches always supposed to be open so the faithful could come in and pray and mourn and light candles and confess and swallow crackers?

As his thoughts twisted along that direction he remembered that the votive candles were now automated. You put in some change and pressed a button and an electric candle flashed on instead. No more waxy build-up. The man he’d once been seemed to be incensed by the change. Cryer didn’t give a shit.

He was about to step back into the street when he saw the rectory situated about forty yards away. He turned and proceeded towards it, a niggling worry trying to exert itself upon him from somewhere deep. He stopped and shut his eyes and tried to focus on it, and thought it might have something to do with the question of, now that he was a different man, did he also have a new soul?

Had the incident resulted in some kind of act of expiation?

He came around the corner of the small building and nearly walked into a pile of brush.

The priest was raking the little lawn around the rectory, scratching out some crabgrass patches. He wore dark slacks, a loose-fitting cotton shirt, and an unzipped blue windbreaker, nothing showing him to be a priest except that he still had the collar on. Cryer wondered about that. Why the guy, clearly off the clock and doing his own thing, dressed way down, would still wear the collar even while doing yard work.

"Hiya," Cryer said.

The priest looked thankful for the break. "Can I help you?"

"Maybe. I’m sorry to bother you."

"It’s no bother at all. I’m Father Bruno."

Something else that snagged Cryer’s attention. Why did some priests give you their last names and others give you their first? Father Callahan, Father O’Murphy, Father Jim, Father Tom.

Why all these distractions? Nothing mattered but what he cried for, what he bled for. "I just wanted to know about...the A.A. meetings," Cryer said.

"We meet in the basement here three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 7:30pm."

Making sure that if somebody felt like they were going to off the rails they could immediately get in on a meeting before the weekend. Or else right after fucking up all of Saturday and Sunday nights. "Are you in charge of the meetings?"

"Yes, I am."

Father Bruno stared into Cryer’s eyes, grinning amiably, with a tenderness reserved for those one is trying to comfort. He either hadn’t known Cryer before or just didn’t recognize him. Cryer figured he could use that. Maybe come at things from a different direction, but still digging like a dog.

"A friend of mine used to attend the meetings about a year ago. Were you here then?"

A ripple of pain passed over the priest’s face, and then he smiled again, this time a bit more contritely. "I was here. I was assisting Father Antonio at the time, and losing my own war with the bottle. I started attending meetings, sitting far in the back corners, trying to hide my face in the basement of my own church, afraid someone from the congregation would recognize me. I hadn’t quite figured out how things were supposed to work. I was too worried about my vanity rather than the state of my life and my faith. It took a few months before I was comfortable enough to actually get up in front of the group, before I was self-aware enough to realize I truly needed help." Father Bruno laid his rake up against the side of a statue of St. Francis. "And your name?"

"Abe Fishbaum."

They shook hands. "You say your friend came around about a year ago, Abe? I hope the experience helped him."

"I can’t attest to that. He was murdered shortly thereafter."

"How dreadful."

"The police reached a dead end in their investigations, and I’ve decided to do what I can to find the person responsible. I was hoping I could ask someone a few questions."

"Certainly. Ask away. I’ll try to answer if I can."

"It was very big in the news at the time. My friend, his wife and daughter were all slain by an intruder. Do you remember the man I’m talking about?"

"What was his name?"

How to dodge a question like that. "He was obese, used to eat all the donuts, and was angry about the votive candles going automatic."

"It might be easier for me to remember if you tell me his name."

"Well, it’s alcoholics anonymous, isn’t it?"

"His first name at least. And if the case was in the papers and on the news, then–"

"He worked over at Intel, maybe came in with some of those folks, if you know any of them. They eat a lot of jumbo shrimp over there."

Father Bruno cocked his head and let out a small huh. A short breathy sound, but full of implication. "He couldn’t have been much of a friend if you can only describe him but don’t know his name."

"I know it," Cryer said, "or I once did. I just can’t remember it. I just can’t say it."

"You can’t say it?"

"No."

It was the truth. And any man trained to deal with the weak, the irresolute, the crestfallen, the unstable, the broken, the impaired, the sinners and the sinned upon and sinned against, who himself was an alcoholic, shouldn’t take Cryer to too much task.

"Huh. I don’t understand that," Father Bruno said, clearly interested now, one of those guys who is bored to shit seeing the same faces day in and out, listening to their common transgressions, their average anguish. "But let’s put it aside for now. Are you in need of solace? Do you need to confess anything?"

An expected. You start acting weird and mentioning murders and a priest is going to want to get you into the hot box and lay it out on the ear of Christ and try to get you to turn yourself in to the cops.

"No, I’m not here to confess, I’m here to find out if you noticed anyone or anything strange about the A.A. meetings from a year or so ago. Someone who didn’t belong. A fight, threats, anyone who might have come to you with significant troubles. Serious mental ills. I’m talking about someone who might have frightened you."

"As I admitted, I had my own problems at the time. I’m afraid I was more caught up in those than I was in helping my congregation or the people at the meetings. But from what I recall, no, there wasn’t anything that stands out in my mind a year ago concerning fights or threats. You say your friend was murdered?"

"He and his entire family."

"I’m sorry for your loss."

"It wasn’t my loss, it was someone else’s."

"Who do you mean?"

"Let’s table that too." Cryer couldn’t find an adequate tactic. St. Francis stared at him sorrowfully, the statue’s face weather-pitted, the stone eyes pretty damning for a saint. "Maybe Father Antonio would know?"

"I’m sorry to say he passed away almost six months ago. Cancer."

"Did he front the meetings initially?"

"No, but the man who did will probably be there tonight. He still takes a lead role in the group. I can tell you that his first name is Larry. Maybe he’ll remember something that might help you."

"Thanks, I think I’ll stick around."

Thinking the whole time, Maybe it’s him. Maybe Father Bruno here is a part-time knife-wielding maniac. Sexually repressed, doesn’t diddle little boys like the normal priests, has to get his rocks off in another way.

Maybe he snuffed my wife and daughter and tried to ice me. Maybe he’s the one I’m going to have to kill.

23

Two hours to go before the A.A. meeting started, so Cryer decided to see if his body knew anywhere else nearby that he should go.

He walked and rounded corners, visited a computer store where he must’ve spent a lot of time before. It was incredibly busy, with bustling patrons elbowing their way through aisles. Mostly kids trying to get in on some new game recently released. A teenage boy was playing it, gyrating and slamming down on buttons, his tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth as the screen burst with activity.

Some kind of shoot-‘em-up. You played the good bad guy fighting the bad bad guys. You blasted at each other and had lengthy martial arts battles. You jumped into cars and drove up on sidewalks, followed some hitmen who plowed into schoolchildren and old ladies in wheelchairs. If you managed to kill your enemy you could appropriate his weapons. You gained energy by knocking over a liquor store and stealing six-packs and liquor bottles. You could also use the booze to make Molotov cocktails and lob fiery bombs at the cops.

Cryer took the second player controls and joined in. He did well but kept getting sandbagged by some skateboarding drug dealer who’d ride the curb and trip his man in front of a pack of wild dogs that would tear him to pieces. He kept losing energy and he couldn’t seem to draw his gun in time. It annoyed the hell out of him, especially since the kid playing beside him would let out a high-pitched giggle whenever Cryer’s man hit the ground.

After a few more near misses, he soon discovered how to use the controls to lash out at the skateboarder, knock him clear, and send him flying into the dogs, allowing Cryer to escape and continue on.

It didn’t take much time before Cryer had progressed far enough along to be side by side with the kid. They worked together breaking into a bank, taking hostages, blowing up the vault, and stealing the cash before the other bad guys arrived.

That must be how the makers of this thing market it to the parents’ groups. Look, it teaches your children teamwork.

Without glancing away from the screen, the kid said, "You’re freakin’ good, dude!"

"Yeah, looks that way, eh?"

They managed to keep the game going for forty-five minutes. By then they had a small group of folks surrounding them. Cryer could barely manage to pull himself away from the screen, but it was time to get moving.

He had to go face the priest and the guy named Larry and find out if one of them had murdered his family or knew the person who had.

He dropped the controls and a young boy jumped on them and tried to keep his man going.

Cryer looked down at his powerful hands and thought, So there was something else I used to do when I was sitting around the house, waiting for my daughter to finish school and my wife to come home. Not Internet porn, not online casinos, no cybersex. I sat in a big soft chair and played games all day long.

Hell, he thought. I didn’t have much of a life then either.

24

In the church basement, Cryer sat in the back row of folding chairs watching men drift inside. Some were confident and comfortable there. Others were nervous and even angry. A few were drunk and wandered around in a fog. Fellow A.A. members seemed to expect this and took the arms of the inebriated and led them off to the side of the room where a table sat with coffee, juice, and baked goods.

Father Bruno walked in and spotted Cryer immediately. He stepped over, put his hand out, and sat beside him. Cryer got the feeling that the priest was there with the specific intent of tackling Cryer in case he went shitstorm crazy right there in the basement.

"I’m glad to see you showed up," Father Bruno said.

"I told you I would."

"A great many people say they will but then bow out."

"I was bowed out for an entire year."

"From the program?"

"From life."

"Ah," Father Bruno said, nodding, still smiling, because what the hell else are you supposed to do except smile. Cryer figured the priest thought Cryer was in the throes of alcoholic dementia and gripped by paranoia. A couple of meetings and some donuts might straighten him right the fuck up.

"I was hoping to talk to Larry," Cryer said. "Can you point him out to me?"

"We’re about to start. Why don’t you wait until after the group breaks up and then we’ll get a chance to talk at length?"

"Sure."

Eventually Larry got up there and did the whole "Hi, my name is..." bit. Cryer studied the man wondering if that was the psycho who’d set him on this course.

Larry stood about five six, with a slight frame, shaved head, well-trimmed beard, with a very controlled and calming energy about him. His voice was deep and vibrant and he knew how to speak distinctly, congenially, like he was talking only to you.

He thanked the folks who’d brought the coffee and cookies. He thanked Father Bruno for allowing them to use the basement of St. Ignatius. He asked for volunteers to stay afterward and help fold all the chairs. He had them all bow their heads as he said a short prayer that didn’t mention God or addiction. A lot of what he’d said so far sounded as if it was rote.

The meeting began.

Cryer sat through fifty minutes of testimonials, listening to men and women talk about how they’d drink at work, drink on duty, drink at home while watching the kids, pass out in pools of vomit and awaken to their three-year-olds wanting to be fed and changed. There were tears; there was some wit and insight.

One of the drunk guys stood up and began to heckle the others> He ranted for ten minutes and got off some good one-liners. Eventually he stumbled off.

One woman discussed her days as a prostitute and how she’d drink with the clients, some of whom were very powerful and famous men. She made veiled references that even Cryer picked up on.

It was all a little more theatrical than he was expecting. Some of the folks had clearly refined their personal tales and learned how to tell them well, with proper dramatic flair, timely pauses, and solid punch lines.

Larry got back up there and said they’d be taking a short break before continuing on. The folks instantly drifted for the cookies and the former prostitute. She’d excited a hell of a lot of the men talking about sex and liquor and celebrities. Cryer suspected that turning the whole group on had been her real reason for going before the others to begin with.

Father Bruno stood only when Cryer did. The priest was still watching him, making sure he wasn’t going to tackle somebody, start screaming he was possessed and puke split pea soup on the walls.

They headed for Larry, who was trying to clear some of the pushier guys away from the ex-hooker. He wasn’t doing a good job of it.

Father Bruno stepped up and said, "Larry, can we talk privately for a moment? I’d like you to meet this gentlemen. He’s in need of some...assistance."

"Sure, sure, that’s fine," Larry said, holding his hand out. Cryer took it. He held on an extra second, thinking, Maybe this is the hand that held the knife. Maybe here is the Chatty Kathy who knew my routine well enough that he could zip over to my house with his roll of duct tape.

They moved to the far side of the recessed basement, where the three of them stood off from the rest of the group. Everywhere Cryer looked he saw representations of pain. Christ at the stations of the cross. Portrayals of saints and martyrs getting wiped out in nasty ways. Nobody having any fun. Well, wait, over there was a paint-by-numbers of Jesus and some kids petting a lamb.

If you saw that today, a bearded guy in a white dress kneeling with several blue-eyed children and some barnyard animals, you’d have the guy strung up as a pervert.

"What can I do for you?" Larry asked.

He’d addressed Cryer but Father Bruno responded. "It’s a rather unique situation. You see–this man here, he’d like to ask you some questions about–"

Cryer said, "A little over a year ago a man was attacked in his home and stabbed in the head. His wife and daughter were slain. Slaughtered by an intruder. The killer was never caught."

"I think I read about that," Larry said. "It was big news for a while. Worst crime to hit town in years."

"The man attended meetings here. His routine was set and the murderer knew it. I’d like to know if you recall anything out of the ordinary at the time."

"What was the man’s name?" Larry asked. There was a light mist of sweat on his bald shining head. Was he nervous? Had he recognized Cryer? Was he getting worried now?

"I can’t remember my name."

"So we are talking about you," Father Bruno said.

"Yes."

"Why did you say a man was dead?"

"He is dead. I said he was murdered. And I was. I said I couldn’t remember his name. And I can’t. I was very different then. I was obese. I was probably starved for companionship. I worked at home on a computer, and I think I probably enjoyed these meetings just so I could get out of the house for a while. I don’t know much more about the person I was."

"Jesus Christ," Larry said, peering intently into Cryer’s face. "I do remember you. Between your eyes, that scar, Christ, you really did get stabbed, didn’t you. Jesus, you’ve changed." Then, sort of nodding to the priest, showing him he was sorry for the whole taking the lord’s name in vain bit. "Let me think for a second. Yeah, you were a big guy then. You were shy, didn’t like talking in front of the group, but when you did you were pretty funny. Talked about–about–" Took Larry a minute to get it. "Your kid. A champion, was always winning awards, best in state, all kinds of stuff like that. I didn’t realize it was you, when I read the paper. Your family. I’m sorry to hear all that."

Nodding, Cryer shifted to look back and forth between Larry and Father Bruno, turning slightly from left to the right and then back again, studying their expressions.

Which one of them, if I had to choose right now?

Which one of them had sat out there in his folding chair learning to refine and hone his hatred?

Larry said, "I don’t recall anything out of the ordinary back then. You never looked, you know, worried or anything. Nobody troubled you. I’ve been heading the meetings for almost two years but I don’t attend every one, of course."

The priest looked ashamed. "I’m so sorry I don’t recall. I should, of course, but–"

"Anybody else here who might remember me?" Cryer asked.

Larry scanned the group. "There’s maybe three or four guys who’ve been coming around here for at least a year, wouldn’t you say, Father?"

The priest nodded. "Yes, I think so."

Turning back to Cryer, Larry said, "Okay, so why don’t you sit through the rest of the meeting and after it breaks up tonight, I’ll introduce you to them and we’ll see if we can help you out with your troubles. Maybe they can remember something I can’t. Maybe they’ll know your name. Who knows, could be one of them was a close friend of yours, right? Close enough to give you some answers. So how does that sound? Father, you think that would be all right?"

"Yes, I believe it would be," Father Bruno said.

Cryer said, "Terrific."

He turned his back and sat again, and waited for everyone else to finish their small talk chatter and to yank themselves away from the prostitute and finish their cookies.

People were feeling a little looser now, the heavy mood of the tragic alcoholic figures having shifted now to a more party-like atmosphere. No wonder it was so easy to fall back into the bottle. Even A.A. meetings became social affairs. He could just see folks leaving, and then meeting up again at a nearby bar just to keep flirting and bullshitting.

Larry got out there again in front of the crowd and said, "Who’d like to speak next?"

Cryer said, "I would," and marched up.

25

He stepped to the podium and said, "Do any of you people know me?"

No one responded.

"Take a good long look. I’m not the same as I once was. When you knew me, if you knew me, I was much fatter. I didn’t have any silver in my hair. I was probably smiling. Larry just told me I was funny. Even with my faults I believe I was happy. I had a loving wife and daughter. I was probably here for at least a few meetings more than a year ago. So, think about it for a minute. Do any of you know me?"

There were murmurs and some men twisting in their seats. Cryer tried to focus on each face but there were too many of them. He hoped to see something in any one of them that might generate his memories, his hate, his pain. Anything.

He’d been someone of small vices. Maybe he’d hit on the ex-hooker too. Cryer gazed at her, trying to see if there was any recognition. She showed nothing.

The men settled and watched him.

"Well, it doesn’t really matter," Cryer went on. "I’m not talking to you as a group. I’m really just talking to one man. Maybe he’s here tonight, maybe not. In case he is, I just want to say to him: I’m back. I’m here. I’m alive. You cut open my daughter and left her dying in agony in her own steaming shit. You cut my wife’s throat and bled her in a bathtub. She was strong, much stronger than me. Both of them were. But for some reason I lived. For some reason, you couldn’t finish me. I hope you’ll try again. I hope I see you again, because when I do, I’m going to kill you."

So then here came Larry, trying to throw himself at Cryer and get him to shut up. Cryer pressed a hand to Larry’s chest and shoved. Not a particularly hard push, but Larry flew from the podium and tumbled away, rolling over and over. Father Bruno ran to him and just stared at Cryer, no longer showing teeth.

"There’s only one reason why I’m still alive, and that’s to find you. And I will. If you’re here. If the killer’s not, well then...sorry to bother you all. Have a good night."

He walked away and no one got in his way or tried to stop him.

Out in front, the drunk heckler was asleep in the garden, covered in vomit. The guy roused, settled his gaze on Cryer, and said, "Tis ont."

Cryer stopped and asked, "What?"

"Tis ont."

"Say that again."

"Tis ont."

"What the hell’s it mean?" Cryer asked.

"What’s what mean?" the drunk said.

"Tis ont."

"What?"

"Tis ont," Cryer said.

"Tis ont?" the guy asked. "What?"

"It’s what you said."

"What I said? I didn’t say anything."

"You said it. You said it twice."

"Get the fuck away from me, you idiot," the drunk said, and laid his face back down in the dirt and retch and went back to sleep.

26

Miss Avery turned out to be a remarkably attractive woman. Not harried at all, although she looked a little tired and overworked. Her smile was authentic and endearing. They sat at the kitchen table and Cryer had the very odd notion to offer her a glass of milk.

Her briefcase was so packed that she grunted and the fake leather creaked when she hefted it onto the table. He wondered if all the reams of paper inside were devoted to him or if she carried the entire histories of all her cases.

"You continue to suffer from psychogenic amnesia, is that right?" she asked.

"I’d answer you but I forgot the question."

She let loose with an amiable laugh from the center of her well-endowed chest. "Ah, so you’re one of those. Got a wise line for everything. That sense of humor must’ve gotten you through some tough times."

"You have no idea," Cryer said.

"Psychogenic amnesia is defined by the presence of retrograde amnesia or the inability to retrieve stored memories leading up to the insult."

It perked Cryer up in his seat. "The insult?"

"The event that triggered the amnesia in the first place. I understand that in your case it was severe head trauma."

An insult. Sure, he supposed you could call it that. Guy slams three inches of steel into your skull, it’s pretty fucking discourteous.

She continued. "And yet you’ve been capable of forming new long-term memories in the face of the insult. So you ought to be fine for just about any type of employment. Is there something in particular you might want to do?"

He tried to think around the all-consuming mission. After that, what was he supposed to do? Was he going to try to live a normal life? Find another wife, father more children? Would Annie leave Phil for him? Should he hit on Miss Avery?

"I haven’t thought about it," he said.

"No? Well then, I think you should!"

Again, the disarming and friendly smile. He saw now that it wasn’t only adorable but also extremely naive. She’d been sent here with absolutely no understanding of who she was dealing with, of what he might be capable of. It bothered him that they’d do that to her. She was already as lost in the system as everybody else was.

She scanned a sheet of paper. "Would you be interested in factory work?"

"I don’t think so. I bore easily."

"Employment in the fast food industry?"

"Grease traps give me hives."

"Okay. Ah. Landscaping?"

"Although I’m fond of gardening, I’m allergic to grass clippings."

It didn’t deter her. "Ah, let’s see, what else do we have here? Oh, how about...do you like pets? There’s an opening for a dog groomer. You’ll have to take classes to learn how to handle the animals. You know, clip their toenails, empty their anal sacs."

"Empty their anal sacs?"

"Yes, it’s an important part of keeping a dog healthy."

"I wasn’t aware of that."

"Oh yes," Miss Avery asserted, radiant now. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five and Cryer was already regretting the day when she would finally be crushed down by dealing with the lunatics and the asylum keepers. She was a genuine person. "I have three chocolate labs."

"I’m afraid I was attacked by a dog as a child. I have an overwhelming fear of them."

"That’s terrible. I don’t know where I’d be without my dogs. They’re my best friends."

"I bet they were shelter dogs too, weren’t they?"

She reached out and touched the back of his hand. "How did you guess?"

"I could see that about you, Miss Avery. That you try to take care of the helpless and vulnerable."

"I do. I’ve been very blessed in my life and I think it’s important to never take that for granted. I feel it’s my duty to help others."

"In just the brief time I’ve known you, I believe it is too. I can see that about you. You’ve a higher calling."

"I think we all do."

"It’s more prevalent in you."

She glanced down at his file again, made some notes, extended her hand and said, "Well, let me get back to you in a few days with some other possibilities. We’ll talk then about moving you to a shared apartment."

"Thank you for all your efforts, Miss Avery. I already feel like a new man."

27

Boss walked in and leaned against the counter, holding his cast up in front of his chest like a boxing glove. "Nice looking woman."

"She ever been here before?"

"No, man, she’s brand new, and you’re her one and only in this house. The other case workers, they’re mostly old men with irritable bowel syndrome. They show up drunk before noon and then spend the next forty-five minutes in the bathroom. Hardly even talk to the freaks out there. They’re some of my best customers, always looking for some weed to mellow their wrinkled asses out. Got one lady patient been here for over two years, and nobody’s ever come to see her. I’m not sure anybody even knows she’s still alive. Some wrong piece of paper probably got filed, said she was deceased. Who the fuck knows, maybe they already had a funeral, divvied up her property. One day she might walk out of here and go visit her kids and scare the shit out of them. They’ll think she’s a zombie and shoot her in the head."

"But you still take care of her," Cryer said.

"Yeah, man, it’s my job."

So even Boss had something unseen going on in his depths. A drug dealing hardass who made sure little old ladies took their medication.

"Listen," Boss said. "About what we were talking about the other day? I think I can get you something tomorrow. Like I said, I do this, and you’re gone. So make sure you go find an underpass or a sewer grate somewhere to bed down on from here on out."

"No need, I’ll be staying on for a while longer. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want a gun anymore."

Boss lurched forward and squared his shoulders. "What’s that you say now?"

"I don’t need a gun."

"Hey, hey, this guy I’ve been talking to, he expects to make a sale."

"He’ll get over it. Give him a cut rate on his next baggie of coke."

Cryer reached into his pocket and took out half the cash he’d stolen from Boss the other day. "Here, give him this if it helps to smooth things over between you."

"You’re paying me off with my own money?"

"No, I’m paying you off with the money I stole from you."

"That’s cold-blooded. So why don’t you want a gun anymore? Because I was going to kick you out?"

"No."

"Well, you seemed pretty set on going up against somebody."

"I still am. But now I want a blade."

That got Boss lifting his chin and giving Cryer a slow once-over, like he might see something new all of a sudden. You could stare at somebody for years and not know them. You could stare into the mirror for years and still not know what you really looked like. Boss rubbed the side of his chin with the cast. "Why do you want a knife?"

"Because it’s what he uses," Cryer said. "And it’s what he couldn’t kill me with."

28

Back to Annie’s list.

Boss was heading across town to sell some coke and offered to give Cryer a lift to the middle school.

"You scoping the baby chicks?"

"I continue to suffer from psychogenic amnesia, I’m not a pervert."

"If you say so."

"You’re not dealing to junior high kids, are you?" Cryer asked.

"No, man, although some of their security guards they got here toke a hell of a lot. But my real sales are down the block at the VFW. I’m telling you, the elderly are an almost untapped source of buyers. They got nothing to spend their pensions on except getting a little wasted. I’m providing a valuable service, just ask any of them."

"I’m sure they’d agree. Thanks for the ride."

"You get picked up by the cops for flashing your pecker, then I don’t know you."

"You don’t know me anyway."

"Truth."

Cryer climbed out and was a little surprised at the lack of any kind of security at the school. There was no guard in the little booth at the front gate. Was the guy off getting high on Boss’s weed? Cryer walked in through the front doors and saw that no one was monitoring the halls. He’d been in a mental facility for months, been dropped off at the curb by a drug dealer, and now he was wandering around freely, with no one to say a word to him.

Outside of the cafeteria was a glassed in case full of photos and trophies. He spotted his daughter and Milly and a couple of other faces he recognized from Milly’s pictures. He pressed his hand to the glass as if reaching for his girl and a spider-web crack appeared. Cryer kept moving.

He found himself outside of the gymnasium and took a peek inside. Boys and girls were rushing around playing basketball, a few of the best players bogarting the ball, passing it back and forth and leaving the others out of the game. Kids were screaming and the sound of it tightened the muscles in Cryer’s back. He moved on up the hall and came to the pool.

Time meant little. He sat in the stands surrounding the pool and found a strange solace to the place. His eyes fell shut. He felt the other Cryer he’d once been still waited within himself, eager to return to his weakness and ineffectuality. The fat happy oaf who wasn’t strong but who loved and was loved.

His daughter, breaking from the water, rose from the lip of the pool, walked around the edge, drew a towel from folded stack, and climbed row after row towards him.

He strained with worry, afraid she’d slip on the heavily shellacked bleachers, wishing she’d put on her slippers first, as he held out a hand to reach for her, to pull her close.

Saying her name. His daughter’s name. His girl’s name.

The loudspeaker signaled a class change. Cryer continued waiting. He wondered what Bliss would make of the mission so far, if Cryer could find him and present him with all that he’d done so far. Would Bliss find it pathetic or would he be able to finger the murderer already? Cryer’s body seemed content to be here, so he tried to force his thoughts to follow suit. There was a faint lapping of water. No one entered the pool area. The period changed again. And again. Jesus Christ, the maniac could’ve sat around here all day long exactly as he was, waiting for his daughter to slip into her suit and then ease into the water. For all he knew, the killer was still here, planning more murders.

Girls giggled. When Cryer opened his eyes he saw that the swim team was meeting for practice. The girls ignored him. Their parents hadn’t taught them well at all. He hadn’t taught his own daughter well at all.

The petite swim coach, but not the petite swim coach from his dream, approached him. She looked hardly any larger or older than the girls. Caramel-colored freckles covered her face, and she wore her honey-blonde hair very short. What else would you expect from a swimmer? "This is a closed practice session. Only parents are allowed to watch."

He climbed down to her and said, "I used to be a parent."

"Used to be?"

"Yes."

She frowned and withdrew a step. Good, she was sharp to be so cautious. She should’ve lectured the girls more. "Your name?"

"Chuck Smith."

"I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave."

"I’d like to talk to you for a moment if I could."

"I know all the fathers of my girls. You’re not one of them."

"No."

"Then you’ve got to leave here, please."

He liked the way she held herself. All bundled energy, ready to get in his face. She kept a fair distance between them.

"My daughter was killed a year ago. There was another coach here at the time." He let his tongue move without him. "Coach Tabitha. Tabitha Lee."

"I was Coach Lee’s replacement. She’s moved up to training the team at Reed College. I’m Coach Price. Vivian Price."

"Oh."

"Your daughter was killed?"

"Yes. I was hoping to talk to Coach Lee about her. About–"

She waited, curious, trying to appear interested and helpful, but also checking over her shoulder, watching the girls, making sure there were no problems. An eye everywhere. "About what, Mr. Smith?"

The girls were in the pool doing laps, doing heats. A few were diving, their bodies arcing and jetting through the air, entering the water with hardly a ripple. So fluid, like their lives. Constantly changing, surging forward. He wondered if this woman, Vivian Price, had been here a year ago, if she’d have noticed anyone skulking about. If she’d have

"It’s nothing too important," he said.

"You can reach Coach Lee at Reed, like I said. And in the future, if you want to visit the school again, please stop in at the front office first." She turned her head, talking half to him and half to herself. "Was that damn security guard off taking a break on shift again? I’m going to bust his stoner ass for him."

29

The flower shop where his wife had worked sat wedged between a liquor store and a bakery. Cryer could just see himself coming here to visit his wife, then hitting both the other shops and getting back in his car with a bottle of whiskey and a box of crullers.

A teenage girl was working the store, attending to an elderly woman and putting together and huge and colorful floral arrangement. Cryer looked around the place, imagining himself here before, leaning his bulk up against the counter, enjoying some time with his lady before heading off to his daughter’s swim meet.

The teenager finished up with the old woman and Cryer asked some questions. The teen had only been working at the shop for a few weeks and had no idea about anyone who’d managed the shop a year ago. She hadn’t heard about anyone being murdered. She assumed he was a cop and called him officer. She told him that Mrs. Phillips owned the place now. Mrs. Phillips would be in on Friday, Officer.

Cryer continued to press, hoping to get Mrs. Phillips’ phone number, and the girl started to get worried the way any normal kid would. You mention murder to a young girl and push her for information she knows she shouldn’t give out and you’re going to scare her, even if she does think you’re a cop. She asked him to come back on Friday. She said that Mrs. Phillips might be able to help him. Said, "Officer, would you like some two-day old roses for your wife, no charge?"

30

He had no idea what to do next, where to go. He wondered if there was some way to get in touch with Bliss. Bliss would know what the next step was supposed to be, provided he hadn’t wound up hanging in his closet again.

Cryer sat on the curb out in front of the flower shop and took out the picture of his daughter and her friends. He held it to his scar and wondered if the little guy inside his head might reach out and grab it and tug it into his skull. Once in his brain, maybe Cryer would be able to remember her, and once he remembered her, maybe he’d know what else to do.

But he did realize that he didn’t need Boss to get him a blade, and decided to go buy himself one. Two blocks down there was a pawn shop that had a nice array of knives with leather sheathes. They varied from enormous Bowies to thinner, one-, two-, and three-inch blades that hardly had any weight to them.

He chose a three-inch knife, knowing that all of that metal had been sunk into his head and still hadn’t been able to put him away.

It proved that this knife was his intimate, his brother, his benefactor. The universe had moved itself so that all forces, attractions, stresses, values and reactions worked in tandem to protect him from death.

He paid forty-five bucks for it, stuck it in his back pocket where the hilt barely jutted free, and let out his first real laugh in over a year.

31

He wandered, thinking maybe he’d return to Annie’s; hit the bottle with her for a while. Talk to Phil, perhaps meet with Milly and get a deeper picture of what his daughter was like. He headed for the bus stop but was fifteen seconds too late to catch the bus already heading up the road.

Motion called for impulse, for impetus. He moved because he didn’t know what else to do. His body carried him along. Perhaps his body already knew who the killer was. Perhaps the little man in his head was aware.

The blade was abruptly in his hand and then it wasn’t. His hands weren’t only strong, they were fast.

He kept flipping the blade up and catching it again, pressing the point to the scar between his eyes. It was a crazy thing to do, but there it was. People on the street backed way the fuck off. Somehow, this was bringing him closer to the killer. To Bliss, to the priest, Larry, the ex-prostitute, to the flower shop girl, Phil, Doyle, Miss Avery, Mikey and Evelyn, the claw foot tub, the kids who worked the fast food drive through, to the powdered milk. His mission encompassed them all. He placed the flat of the blade against his lips and waited for his mouth to say something that might help.

Speaking to the mouth, he said, "Come on, let’s go already. Help me out here."

The mouth, failing to respond.

The mouth silent. The mouth holding back secrets.

Threading the blade through his hair, digging it lightly along his scalp that bled the white hair. The white dead hair. Beneath it, a metal plate. If the psycho ever tried to stab him again, it would be like trying to stick a steel girder.

Someone called to him, asked him what business he had to be here.

Cryer looked.

He was back at his daughter’s middle school.

He stood at the little booth at the front gate.

The guard’s eyes were bloodshot. He’d been toking on a lot of Boss’s weed. Cryer felt a need to express his grave dissatisfaction with the guard for getting stoned on the job when he should’ve been watching out for the kids at school, keeping out mental patients like himself, watching for murderers. Cryer’s hand flashed out and chopped the guard across the bridge of his nose. Blood burst from both nostrils and the guy’s eyes rolled up in his head and he went down hard.

"Well now," Cryer said, and proceeded inside the school again.

32

Past the wall of trophies to the gymnasium doors. He walked in to see girls tumbling, whirling, and flipping on mats. His daughter hadn’t only been a first-rate swimmer but a gymnastics champion as well. He knew the after-school schedules. He knew that the top athletes took breaks between their training and then regrouped to continue punishing their bodies and perfecting their skills.

He climbed back into the stands and watched. This was his position. It had always been his position. Since long before he’d been born, this had been his place to sit and watch. The world needs men to watch and encourage and record the crafted perfection of their daughters’ movements.

And yet he hated what he saw here, what he had always seen here, and could feel the man he once was growing anxious and upset again. He was annoyed at himself and at the system which pressed these girls to win at any cost. His daughter had broken her fingers and toes, strained her back, pulled tendons and ripped muscles, had even been in traction. She’d once fallen off the high beam with such force that he’d thought she’d broken her neck.

Cryer closed his eyes and saw all her pain and all her pride. He let out a sharp grunt of emotion and the noise surprised the shit out of him.

The gymnastics coach’s name was Resnick. He heard the girls calling to Coach Resnick and watched the tall, wiry guy helping them during their practice. His hands carefully aiding their small, pliant but powerful bodies through the painful and trying actions.

Cryer glanced down at Resnick training a girl who looked to be no more than nine or ten years old. Cryer thought she was too young to be giving over so much of her life to such discipline. It’s what he always thought. It’s what he thought every day that he sat in every PTA meeting, every parent-teacher conference, to all the special events. The games, the heats, the tourneys, the practices. All that suffering, his daughter crying in the night because of her aching back, talking like a ninety year old woman. And yet always returning to the gym, to strain and beat her body further and further to the very edge of her endurance.

Now he watched a ten-year-old girl move so exquisitely along the balance beam, twisting and leaping to land on a piece of polished wood only a couple of inches wide. How many times had his daughter fallen off that beam only to climb back up onto it? Two thousand? Five thousand?

Dis moot.

With no apparent effort, the girl spun, leaped, and wove so gracefully that Cryer felt himself going with her. His hands were in his pockets but he could hear himself clapping, see himself waving, he could hear his own voice cheering, despite his fears and his reservations. The firm stomp of her feet landing on the wood occurred over and over again, the vibration storming into his chest.

Dee moont.

Cryer looked down and he was holding the knife and wondered why.

Thees ount.

The girls continued twining and hurling themselves across the mats, on the high bar, the balance beam, the vault. Running. Rolling. Bounding. Mounting and–

Tis ont.

"Dismount," Cryer said.

He’d seen the guy go out the window, swinging himself over the sill with that slight and effective motion, and it had struck a memory that had been ringing within Cryer ever since.

The gymnastics coach. Resnick.

Dismount.

Cryer climbed out of the stands and looked at the man–the Chatty Kathy–who had stabbed him in the head and murdered his wife and daughter.

33

Time meant little. He waited until the girls were finished with their practice and had retreated to the shower room. Then he watched as Resnick rolled up a couple of the mats, moved the vault box over to the side, and headed to his office in the corner of the gym. The guy either completely ignoring Cryer or just not noticing. In any case, not caring. Another sign that Resnick didn’t give a damn about the safety of the girls. What was one more psycho in the room anyway?

Cryer followed.

He knew, even as he took his first step after the killer, that the end of the mission would be a disappointment. There was no way it could be anything but dissatisfying. He could feel that his vengeance could not amount to anything truly worthwhile. Whatever blood fell in the next few minutes couldn’t wash away the grief and pain that had come before it. It would not return him to the world. It would not allow him to fully remember his family. This had always been the way but he had chosen not to see it. This had become his reason for being because he had nothing else to do. No hate accompanied him.

The scope of his clarity and understanding made him sigh deeply. The noise made Resnick turn just as he opened the door to his office.

"Can I help you with something?" Resnick asked.

How’s that for a loaded question?

Finally Cryer had come face to face again with the man who had taken everything from him, even himself.

Seeing Resnick now said as much about the man Cryer had been than it said about the psycho Chatty Kathy. Small, trim, plain, empty. Completely average in every way one could measure. Cryer couldn’t even describe the man except to say he was like ten million other men. And this is what had beaten him. What had watched him. What had been superior to him. What had talked to his daughter while his wife had bitten through her tongue and swallowed a pint of blood trying to get the duct tape off her mouth. This is what had entered his home and what had escaped from it. This is what he hadn’t been able to stop.

If the fat ineffectual game-playing addict he’d been wasn’t already dead, Cryer would’ve wanted to stab the fuck too.

"Excuse me?" Resnick said, entering the office, snapping on a light. There was an air vent high in the tiled wall. The echoes of the girls’ talking in the shower room could plainly be heard.

So maybe that’s what had done it. One of the slivers of pain that had pried under the guy’s skull and driven him mad. Sitting at his desk and listening to their laughter, thinking about their bodies, their slow and natural and unyielding transformation into women. Who knew? Men had been driven insane by less.

"Why did you do it?" Cryer asked. His voice was flat and weary.

"What?"

"Why did you do it?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"I do? What do you want?"

"You know what I want. You know who I am."

"I do?"

You could go around like this for hours, days, years. The coach, this athlete in charge of a generation, so common and typical and yet anything but normal. This man who only wanted to talk because he was too often alone with the unspeakable.

Cryer said, "They have hotlines, you know."

"Hotlines?" Resnick let go with a grin and a little spurt of laughter. "Look, what’s this about?"

"Hotlines where you can call and chat. Costs a couple of bucks a minute, which is a lot, I know, but still, it’s better than the alternative. I think so anyway."

"What the hell is going on here?"

It felt important to make an effort to show Resnick that it shouldn’t have had to go this way. That the man once had choices, even if there weren’t any now.

"You could’ve talked to me, but I suppose that wouldn’t have been good enough. I had time. I had lots of time on my hands. You could’ve come by and played some games. If you were looking for a friend. We could’ve ordered some pizzas."

"Pizzas? What are you–"

"I could’ve bummed a few cigarettes off you. We could’ve sat out back on the deck and watched the fish in the pond. You had options. You could’ve talked to me. You saw me for what I was. You watched me. But–that wasn’t enough. Christ, why didn’t you just take me out too? Why keep me out of the picture? I would’ve been the easiest one. I wasn’t strong, I couldn’t have resisted. Not like they did." The man’s eyes beginning to glint with understanding, perhaps even recognition. But no fear yet. Maybe there wouldn’t be any, but Cryer had to try. "But I suppose I wouldn’t have given you much satisfaction. You wouldn’t have gotten any joy out of murdering a weak man. You preferred strong women. You prefer powerful, driven little girls."

Now Resnick began reaching behind him going for a desk drawer. "I’m, I’m–"

"You can’t even deny it. You’re too full of shame to even try to dispute it. For a Chatty Kathy you sure as fuck aren’t saying much."

Cryer got in close, letting the charge grow in the air between them. He thought, Our heartbeats are in sync right now. It was something else that might be true, that he thought was true. Resnick seemed to understand and the confused expression vanished. He seemed to man up. His face hardened with acceptance.

"Killers don’t stop," Cryer said. "Are there more bodies out there waiting to be found?"

"Yes, there are," Resnick told him.

"You keep a journal? Trophies from your victims? A secret stash somewhere so when the cops break into your house they’ll have the whole story?"

"Yes."

"Good. When I cry, I cry for this."

"Whatever that means," Resnick said.

"When I bleed, I bleed for this."

"You should be dead. There’s no reason for you to be alive. I checked on you. You were comatose. You were asleep."

"I woke up."

Resnick was still fumbling around through his desk drawer, not exactly a super-cool move if he was trying to be slick about it. If he had a knife in there shouldn’t it be on top within easy reach? But no, he wasn’t that kind of killer, the guys who planned to be caught. Resnick was average enough to expect his days to plod on in and out without any change except the changes he effected himself.

"You were supposed to stay out of it," Resnick said. "You should’ve just kept away."

"I can’t help it. I have an addictive personality."

Time meant little, but it did mean something, and Cryer’s patience, after a year of purgatory, was finally coming to an end. He snatched the three-inch knife from his pocket, drew his arm back and prepared to stick the blade into Resnick’s heart, nice and deep. The knife began to descend, Resnick letting out a bark of horror, when Cryer decided that, no, no, this isn’t how it should be. This will get the job done but it’s just not sweet enough, there should be something more, even if he had to force it to happen.

He let his hand fall to his side.

"What did you say to her?" Cryer asked. "What were you discussing with my daughter right before you cut her belly open? You were talking with her for a while. A half hour? An hour? What did you say to her?"

"I’ll never tell you."

"Where’s your knife?"

"I–I–"

"You don’t have it here? You’ve got it at home someplace? Don’t worry, I have one for you. Here."

Holding the blade out to Resnick.

Handing it forward the way you offer a bit of cash to a homeless, hungry man.

The psycho almost afraid to take it.

Backing away from it, even though Cryer held it out hilt first.

"Yours is like this, isn’t it? Thin, small. Slices through flesh easily. Gets the job done but not too quickly. With a knife like this you got to work on my daughter for a while before she died."

Resnick, his mouth damn near watering, eyes spinning. "I–"

"Yeah, you."

"I–"

Disappointing all right. The Chatty Kathy unable to speak.

"Go on, take it."

Thrusting the hilt of the knife to the killer, an offering, almost a penance for his failures to save his own family.

His belly on display, waiting.

Sneaky psycho. Resnick grasped the blade and let loose with a small giggle. Not a crazed laugh, but something like real joy that had been held back for months, years, the ages of all mankind. A lizard’s laughter.

Resnick knew how to hold the blade. Low and on the edge of his fingertips, so he could slash out and slice. Cryer waited, growing bored.

"You can’t kill me with that. You tried already."

"I’ll finish this time."

"No. I’ll finish it."

Resnick feinted twice, once to the left and then to the right, so light on his feet that he was cavorting. Frolicking. Cryer stood stone still.

He waited. It was what he was good at.

The point of the knife wove forward and back, and then Resnick lunged. The blade caught Cryer across the belly and hardly scratched him. He looked down at himself. Resnick stood back, triumphant.

"I’m not fat anymore. You would’ve disemboweled me if I had been. You would’ve strewn my guts on the floor like you did with my girl. But I’m not fat anymore."

"You–you–"

"Yeah, me, you stammering fuck." He touched the wound and said, "I bleed for this."

His hands were strong.

He grabbed Resnick by the throat and tightened his hold, throttling the plain, common killer until Resnick almost passed out. Then he threw him hard against the wall, held him there, his free hand snaking out and finding Resnick’s forearm, latching on, and squeezing, squeezing and twisting. Only a mild resistance from the bones within until Resnick was screaming and his arm snapped.

Shards of bone jutted through the flesh just beneath the elbow.

Cryer still felt nothing–no sense of urgency or disgust or even horror, and yet still he thought that this was how it should be.

The screaming. Now this was something that was easy to become addicted to. He could feel the little man in his head, the man he was, suddenly dancing with joy inside.

"I’m about to insult you," Cryer said. "It’s going to be severe head trauma."

Then Cryer brought both his powerful fists down on top of Resnick’s forehead and felt the bone shattered and the brow cave in.

The corpse fell forward and when it hit, Resnick’s ears and eye sockets gushed.

"I cry for this," Cryer said although he wasn’t crying.

Vivian Price, dripping from her own workout in the pool, ran into the office, slipped on Resnick’s blood, and let out an awful gasp.

Cryer said, "Don’t look."

"What’s happened?" she breathed. "What have you done?"

"Don’t let the girls see this. Go get someone. Go get help."

Vivan draped herself against the wall trying to move again, and then turned and ran. He enjoyed the way the light glinted and played along her legs as her muscles rippled.

Then Cryer walked down the long hall and out the back of the gymnasium onto the football field, and he started across the well-trimmed grounds. The cops and the keepers and the guys with the big butterfly nets would eventually land him. But they’d find some kind of evidence in Resnick’s home. The journal, the pictures, the trophies, maybe a body in cement under his garage, something to tie him to the murders of Cryer’s family and the deaths of some other girls somewhere. Cryer knew he’d be vindicated but it didn’t matter. He was dead, been dead, and he suspected he’d always be dead no matter how long he lived.

34

His legs knew the way to the cemetery.

It took him six hours to walk there. By the time he arrived it was dark and only a sliver of moonlight bore down.

The man he was must’ve bought these plots. They were an investment. They were things you put at the back of your mind and didn’t think about often, but never forgot.

Clouds parted and flowed and covered the moon and then opened up and let it slip through again. When the silver streams washed down, Cryer could read the names on the gravestones, but he still couldn’t remember them from instant to instant. It didn’t matter.

He was here, he was home with those who mattered. The mouth, no longer failing to respond. The mouth speaking. The mouth giving way to the truth. He began murmuring to his wife and daughter, talking of things he didn’t recall, that he was learning for the first time, like a stranger listening in on a private conversation, and affected by the emotion and honesty and heartbreaking love he heard. The voice that was and wasn’t his own began to move him. He listened more intently there in the darkness, seated on a grave that would one day be his own, and as one hour went by, and then another and another, he thought he could hear the voices of his dead wife and daughter joining in, their laughter and affectionate whispers, someone calling to him with love, Daddy, Daddy, and as he turned over on the earth he noticed in the silver light that the grass was wet, covered with the dew of his own tears.