Deadweight
Author: Robert Devereaux
Date: 1994-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: THE PAST NEVER STAYS BURIEDKarin has had enough of her abusive husband, Danny, so one day she kills him. With the aid of her attorney/lover she stays out of jail. The perfect crime and now she is free to live her life. But when she accidentally brings Danny back to life, her past is going to catch up to her.Now Danny is a walking corpse and being undead has caused his worst desires to come out. Karin thought he was evil before, but she has no idea how much worse it's going to get.From Robert Devereaux (Slaughterhouse High, Santa Steps Out) comes a splatterpunk novel of outrageous gore and vici

DEADITE PRESS

205 NE BRYANT

PORTLAND, OR 97211
www.DEADITEPRESS.com

AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY

www.ERASERHEADPRESS.com

ISBN: 1-62105-046-7

Deadweight copyright 2012 by Robert Devereaux

Cover art copyright © 2012 Alan M. Clark

www.ALANMCLARK.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Printed in the USA.

PROLOGUE

GOOD FRIDAY 1970

“Sweetpea, that crumpled bag of potting soil, the one that’s just about empty, would you bring it to me please?” The light in the greenhouse glowed rich and spacious high above Karin’s head and out beyond her grandmother. There was magic in the air, filling the greenhouse like helium fills a balloon. Long Island always seemed more vast to Karin than all of upstate New York did, mostly because of the way her head bloomed here in Granny’s greenhouse.

“Okay,” said Karin, loving the way Granny Eva looked at her. Her large crinkly eyes made Karin feel as airy as angels. Lifting the bag by its torn top, holding it away from her new coveralls, she felt it uncurl with unexpected weight.

“Thank you, lovely lady.” Granny set the bag beside her tray of seedlings, reached inside, withdrew fists full of dark soil, dark as coffee grounds, which she fingered around the fragile plants and tamped down with her thumbs. “You know,” she said, her hands moving from one plant to the next, her voice grown not angry but firm nonetheless and full of wisdom, “it’s not my place to say anything, and you mustn’t tell your father I did,”—Granny’s eyes filled with concern and Karin shook her head to assure her—“but it’s a shame how he treats you, how he treats both of you. I’ve seen the bruises and said nothing in all these years. But you’re getting bigger now. Your mother made her choice, and it was a bad one. She could still undo it, though she has a hard time realizing that. What I’m trying to say is—oh, come hug your grandma!”

Karin saw Granny’s eyes moisten. Then her own eyes teared up. She thought of Grandpa Borchert, crook-nosed and stern in his chair by the fire, his hair a wild white swirl atop his head, his spine stiff as a tomato stake in Granny’s garden. Grandpa’s eyes gleamed with winter fire like her daddy’s eyes. Her daddy blundered around their house like a bear, big and dark and loud. He struck her mother when he felt like it, which was nearly every night. Lately, he had taken to striking Karin too, shifting from mother to child as though they occupied one body. Karin fell now into her grandmother’s embrace, heard her speak through tears: “You have a choice too, that’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t lose yourself. Resist when you can. Draw lines. Always keep a place that’s all your own, a private place where no hurt can come to you.”

Karin verged on tears but Granny’s body felt too good for that. She smelled of bread ovens and loam and her big arms gave worlds of comfort. “Thank you, Granny,” was all Karin could say, her heart overflowing with love.

Granny released her, yet the press of Granny’s egg-blue smock still tingled on her cheek. “I have a present for you,” Granny said, daubing at her eyes with one half-rolled sleeve and reaching into a secret cache below. A smile broke over her wide wrinkled face. “Early Easter,” she said. “Easter’s early this year anyway, I never like it coming in March like this, so I have a special gift for you, two days in advance.”

Karin knew it would be a rose, a miniature rose, but it was one thing to know it and another to see it emerge from beneath Granny’s workbench, to watch Granny treat it like caught sunlight, to hear her caress it with her words and see her fingertips play among its petals. The single bloom sat proudly atop its stem like a perfect strawberry, though pale, which, having decided to transform one day into a rose, smoothed out its pocks and unfurled itself like wood shavings dyed in light pink, still tight with pride, still moist with beads of strawberry juice. “It’s beautiful, Granny.”

“It’s a Fresh Pink,” Granny told her, “for your fresh young face, my Karin, and your pig-pink cheeks.” She gave it like a new kitten from her palms into Karin’s, speaking her catechism as to its care and feeding. Karin nodded as though she were hearing the words for the first time, but she focused on the rose, letting the perfect curve of its petals teach her fingers how to worship it, how to give it back life in abundance.

Karin had been blessed with the magic touch, Granny always said, just like Granny herself but not like Karin’s mother. Karin was green not only in her thumbs but in all her fingers and toes and throughout her body, in sympathy with the plant world like those Findhorn folks who claimed to talk with Pan and the vegetative spirits.

***

Later that day, in the disquiet of Grandpa Borchert’s den, her daddy suddenly took it into his head to drag her and her mother out of the unbearable clamp of silence into the waning sunlight for an enforced stroll about the farm. He was full of words about taking the place over some day, getting rid of the nursery (it brought too many strangers out to the place, never knew when one of them would steal you blind), tearing down the greenhouse, growing something useful in its place. They had paused near the farmhouse, beside the ancient oak with its tire swing.

Karin’s mom, thinking her husband was joking, started poking fun at him. She’d never seen him grow anything but fatter, she told him. Besides, she didn’t think her folks had plans to die any time soon. She had more to say, but Daddy smacked the back of her head so that her long hair went flying. Then he whirled her about and swatted her across the face. “Don’t you ever call me fat,” he said, “never, never, never,” and each never was another slap.

Karin didn’t know what got into her then. Maybe it was Granny’s words of encouragement that afternoon. Maybe it was the fact that Easter weekend on the farm had always been a safety zone: Daddy had never struck either of them here, not even his wife in the privacy of the guest room, sound carried so in Granny’s house. Whatever the reason, she lashed out at her father now—with her fists and her words—flailing away with all the zeal at her command.

Daddy seized her by the upper arms, pulled her tight to his chest, and hurtled her away from him, her progress stopped by the brutal whack of the tree trunk at her back. An instant later the oak slammed into her skull, made her jaws clack together on the sides of her tongue. Crushed bitterness opened in her mouth. Then Granny burst past Karin on her left, going for Karin’s daddy. “Stop that, stop it!” she bellowed, wrenching at his shoulders. His blows were striking her mommy, who sobbed and keened but took them about her face and upper body as if they were what she deserved.

Daddy wheeled on Granny Eva. “You want a taste of it too, old girl?” She backed off, wiping her mouth with the edge of her hand. “Come on, come and get it, you’ll love it, just like these two.”

“You’re sick, William, sick in the head,” Granny told him, backing off, trying to keep him away with the magic of her outstretched hands. There was anger in her voice, yes, and fear, and Karin had never heard either one come from her grandmother before, not like this. “May the Good Lord strike you dead for hurting my—”

Karin yelled “No!” a fraction of a second too late. Daddy’s sharp jab took the old woman square in the belly, sank deep, then out. As she doubled over, he backhanded her across the face. She whirled about, grabbed for the tire swing but missed it, set it spinning. She collapsed to the hard-packed earth, struggling for breath.

Karin ran to her, knelt beside her under the hail of her father’s invective. The strength she’d always relied upon in her grandmother’s face was gone. Instead she saw there a puffier, more wrinkled copy of her mother’s face: same panic, same pain, a little-girl look in her eyes.

Daddy clamped Karin’s arm tight, lifted her as though to rip it from its socket. Mommy cowered and wept behind him. “Pack your suitcase,” he said, eyes on fire, “we’re leaving.”

“But what about Easter?” Karin protested, aware even as she asked it how absurd her question was.

“Fuck Easter,” he said, grabbing his wife by the belt and booting her backside toward the house. “Fuck this farm and fuck the ugly old bitch that grows her fucking petunias on it. We’re going home, and when we get there I’m going to teach you not to sass your old man. Now shut your fucking hole and get moving.” He stumbled her along up the back stoop and into the house, shoving her halfway across the kitchen.

Karin turned and sprinted up the high narrow steps to her attic room, still feeling the throb of the tree trunk bruising her back and the vise grip of Daddy’s hand on her arm. She hoped—and immediately hated herself for hoping it—that when they got home he would hit Mommy first and for a long time, so that when he came to Karin, his hands would be tired and she wouldn’t hurt so much the next day.

Then she burst into tears at the memory of Granny Eva curled up helpless beside the tall oak. Suddenly the fury of her father’s voice rang like thunder in her ears: “You up there, little girl, can it or I’ll wale the fucking tar out of you. You be ready in five minutes or you are dead, you hear me?”

***

It was a warm night but the windows were closed, the blinds drawn. Daddy always kept all the blinds drawn.

Karin wished she were up in Granny’s attic room now, looking at her new rose under the moonlight that fanned in from the peaked window. Instead she lay quietly trembling under the covers at home, her drab room enlivened only by the flowers she’d bought or grown out back, and she could barely make out, by the weak light that stole through the slats, the tiny rose sitting in its pot on her nightstand. She reached out through the noise of her father’s violence and her mother’s pleadings and ran a finger along the soft cool silk of its furls.

She heard Mommy’s sobs fall away. The last staccato bursts of Daddy’s anger fired randomly through the night. Her stomach tensed. When their door slammed, it took her as always by surprise. Then came his impatient footsteps in the hall, as if he couldn’t wait to pound her, and her door suddenly wrenched open.

Turning away from the glare of the hall light, Karin saw her rose, shocked on the nightstand. It seemed to be coated in a glaze of pink ice. Daddy filled the doorway. Then he was inside, moving toward her bed, wearing his big green woolen bathrobe, holding in one hand an old towel of the kind Mommy used for dusting. Karin felt relieved: It was strange that Daddy was already in his pajamas, but at least there would be no wide leather belt tonight. Unless he had it coiled in the pocket of his robe, she would be spared the welts it raised on her rump.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, trying to come in under his anger, diffuse it, soften it before he got started.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he said, pacing at the foot of her bed, holding the white towel like a limp bludgeon. “You’ve been sorry before, just like your fucking mother, but somehow it never seems to matter, you two never seem to learn who’s boss—”

“—it won’t happen again, I promise—”

“—you never understand unless it’s beaten into you. But I’m only human, the beatings can only go on so long, I’ve got to rest sometime. So the reminders stop, the bruises go away, and you’re back to your old ways again. It’s like lecturing the deaf with you two cunts, isn’t it?”

“No, Daddy, I—”

“Fuck it, girl, that’s enough,” he said, advancing on her, swinging the towel over his head like a bolas, taking vicious swipes out of the warm night air. “That’s all you two are, isn’t it? Just a couple of smelly cunts.”

“Please don’t say that, Daddy.”

“Empty in your belly, empty in your head.” The towel swooped closer. “Always up to the daddy to put obedience into that empty head, beat it into you, slap it into you until my hand hurts. And then it dribbles out and I have to do it all over again.” Swoop. The towel grabbed at her silken nightgown, took quick fists of fabric across her chest just above the nubs of her budding breasts and up toward her right shoulder. Swoop. A whap to her chin, mad white fists moving to her face. They looked like fan blades up close, no protective grid and no further to back away. She tried to ward them off but there was too much fury in them.

“Keep your hands down!” he said.

He climbed onto the bed, climbed onto her, hunkering down around her thighs. Her nightgown had ridden up and she felt the tickle and drift of his bathrobe on her skin, then the hot crush of his body. His knees pinned her legs together. Although he towered above her, she could barely see him through the squint of her eyes. Swoop. Eagle wings beat maniacally against her cheek, again and again and again, not soft with feathers but hard with bone like Granny Eva’s fold-up Oriental fan, that opened and closed with a shuk sound when you got just the right snap in your wrist. She heard herself crying, felt her daddy’s weight bouncing on her in time to the swooping of the towel, felt the towel take big stinging bites out of her left cheek.

Then suddenly he was off her and the towel struck her in ghostly throbbings only, but she was afraid at first to do more than squint. Her sobs kept on beyond her control. Sound was all distorted. He might have yelled at her to shut the fuck up, but she couldn’t tell whether that was merely the memory of other times or whether he was really yelling it now. His hands vised her arms, lifting her off the bed, as though he were squeezing toothpaste tubes to make them burst. He let her go and she fell to the floor, hitting the worn throw rug with one bony hip. She heard the sharp snap of the towel, saw it drift down flat upon the bed. The hair on her daddy’s chest swirled out like a black mat where his exertions had wrenched open his robe.

“Spanking time,” he growled, grabbing her again. She felt out of control in his hands, as if he might hurl her at any moment against the blinds and out past the jagged glass of her bedroom window or drive her straight into the floor. Instead he threw her, face down, on the bed, her body bouncing once with the force he used, and ordered her to hike up her nightgown. She obeyed, her hands compliant from long practice, although it had only been in the past year that he’d had her bare her bottom and only weeks ago that he’d given her the shimmering peach nightgown she had grown to hate so, tossing it in her face and demanding she wear it during her punishments instead of the long toasty flannel one she’d been given at her eighth birthday party and grown out of and fond of.

At first Daddy’s open hand fell loud and hard on her upraised buttocks, driving her wet face into the pillow and making her bottom sting. “This will teach you,” he said over and over. She glanced back once but it was hard to make things out in the dim light. Her daddy was red-faced and the palm of his hand was red from swatting her. His robe hung all the way open now, and there was a tiny red arm with a red fist on the end of it coming out from under a mound of black body hair, and that arm was shaking stiffly, tremors of anger timed to his hand’s wide arc and shudder. She looked away, fixing on her new rose. It was stiff too but its color was not the red of anger but the pink of love, a soft bright comforting pink like the pink of Granny Eva’s cheeks under the greenhouse lights.

Then his hand fell with less force, its arcs abruptly shorter, falling at last to nothing until it rested there. “This will teach you,” he kept saying, only now his words were quieter and had a tone to them that scared her worse than ever. His hands started to move, to probe, to pry her legs apart.

“Don’t, Daddy,” she said, scarcely able to get the words out. He ignored her, didn’t tell her to shut up, kept probing, kept moving his fingers deeper inside her. “Daddy, please stop it, you’re hurting me.”

There was a gasp from him that made her look back up at him. There were tears in his eyes. He saw her glance toward him. “Don’t look at me!” he shouted, and she fixed again on her rose, trying to shut out the pain. There was gravel in his voice. His hands came out of her, then she felt the mattress give as he climbed up behind her, felt his strong hands grip her thighs and pull them apart, felt him press something large and warm and terrible into her, something that kept moving deeper inside, tight and hard and hurtful. She squirmed against it but he clamped her thighs tight in his hands and pressed inward, crying now audibly.

Karin’s jaw strained open. She put a thumb knuckle in her mouth, bit down. This was worse than anything that had come before, worse than the beatings and black eyes, worse than the spankings, worse even than hearing him tear her down with his words. She fixed on the rose, the tight pink beauty of it. In it, she saw her Granny’s face, the love that shown there always. The thorns, tiny but sharp, vied for her attention when the general throb of hurt he was visiting on her bristled with pain. But she kept to the bloom, saw her Granny there, heard her words. Keep a private place, that’s what she’d said. But if her daddy could do this to her, there were no private places left. She felt that shared space she had with Granny die inside her, saw Granny’s face become her mother’s face. The glow of the rose dimmed, but she could still see Mommy there. They had consoled one another before, sobbed in each other’s arms, gently stroking one another’s bruises; she saw her mother’s tired face in the flower and tried to throw her mind forward to the comfort her mother would provide when her torments were over.

Then came one last awful thrust and her daddy stifled a huge sob, but she could hear that sob in the confines of her room and it seemed to go on and on. The pressure left off, but it was like the whirling towel had been before, still there, still throbbing, though gone. She lowered herself to the bed. The towel’s coarse cotton was cold and grainy on her belly and thighs.

Daddy came around to her nightstand. Reaching for a Kleenex, he knocked the rose over, swore at it, left it there, its furled pink bloom pressed to the laminate like her face had been pressed to the pillow. Turned away, he daubed at his belly, tugged on something, then balled the Kleenex up and thrust it in his robe pocket. Cinching up his robe, he leaned over her. He pressed his face close to hers, put a hand on the back of her neck, pulling her hair so tight she had to bend her head back. His other hand lay on her pillow, a thumb pressed to her forehead like a spot of dark sunlight. “If you tell anyone about this,” he said, “I will kill you.”

There was a calm in his voice that terrified her.

“Nod if you understand.”

She gave the barest of nods, unable to tear her eyes away from the hurt she saw in him. It was a wounded look, a haunted look, as if the part of her he had stolen was now trapped in his eyes.

“You bled some. It’s all right. It’s normal. When the bleeding stops, take the towel, ball it up, and put it in the garbage under the sink. Make sure it gets covered over with other things. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“That’s my girl.” He leaned toward her as if to kiss her cheek, then checked himself. He threw a blanket over her. Karin wished him away, he went away. The hall light snapped off, deepened the darkness in her room.

***

After a while, she did as her father had said.

Lying there on her belly, feeling her body ache and throb where her daddy had hurt her, she thought she’d bled more than she had. Still, the shock of seeing the bright red blotch of blood on the white towel set her softly to crying again. She put on her flannel nightgown, disposed of the towel, and climbed back into bed.

The little rose lay overturned upon her nightstand, a spill of potting soil at its base. She closed two fingers about the stem, shook most of the soil off into the paper bag in her wastebasket—stray rain beating at windows—and brought the bloom to her nose. The soft pink aroma of the dying flower was a breath of heaven.

Her whole body ached from her daddy’s abuse, but the pain throbbed worse between her thighs than anywhere else. She turned on her night lamp, bending its neck so the light was inches from the wall, casting an intense yellow circle there but bathing the rest of the room in the glow of one small candle. Then she propped her pillows up and slowly tugged at her nightgown until it was bunched at her waist. She ran a fingertip over the hurt area but it felt too raw and tender even for that amount of touch. Taking the stem of the rose carefully in one hand, she lowered its bloom to her hurt, feeling the soothe of its velvet-soft petals. She moved it gently along her sore wrinkled lips like the twin kiss of flower to skin. Looking about her room, she saw the other roses—in bottles, in jars, in Maxwell House cans—all seeming to comfort her, to add their soothing to the rose in her right hand.

She lifted the rose to her face, frowning at a trick of the light. The top third now appeared bright red, like a strawberry indeed, like Alice’s white roses painted red in the Disney cartoon. And just like those cartoon roses, it dripped now, one red drop on her creamy nightgown. She felt the wetness even as she looked down, saw the scarlet flow seeping out of her, trickling down onto her bed like the first water spilling from a cracked dam.

“Mommy,” she screamed, “Mommy, I’m bleeding.” Over and over she screamed it, staring down helplessly at the spreading red on her sheets, the liquid coming out of her where she still throbbed from her punishment.

Then the door came open and the light flooded in and Mommy came with it, holding her, and Daddy stood there at the door, blocking the light. “I didn’t know there’d be more,” she said. “I didn’t know it would start up again.” Then realizing what she’d said: “Don’t let me die, Mommy. Please don’t let me die.”

“There, there, my baby,” her mother said, squeezing her tightly. New yellow bruises stood out on her mother’s high cheekbones. “Don’t talk nonsense. You’re not going to die. You’re just becoming a woman is all. William, go back to bed. This is for me and Karin to deal with.”

Daddy didn’t move.

Mommy looked back at him. “Go on,” she said, “go to bed,” but Karin heard the last word die and saw her daddy stare something into her mommy without meaning to and felt her mommy’s hands stiffen on her back. Then the doorway was empty, the glare harsher from the hallway. When her mommy turned back, shock had pulled her face tight.

She knew. She knew it all. For a moment, Karin saw rage flare distantly in her mother’s eyes, rage not at her but at her father; then it extinguished like a spent match and a sheen fell over her face. Karin saw it fall, saw it stay fallen and become fixed, and she cried and cried, but her mother did not hug her her mother did not hug her but helped clean her up and tucked her in and did not kiss her good night.

When she left the room, she took her love with her.

***

The next day Karin threw out all her roses, replacing them gradually with other flowers. Asters, orange tiger lilies, marigolds. None of them lasted long, not in her room, not in her garden. She’d lost her touch with them, stopped caring whether they lived or died.

She cried when Granny Eva died the following October, late when the leaves fell. She and her mother went to the funeral, sat beside the impassive Grandpa Borchert. But neither of them could summon any tears then, and barely a word passed between them that day.

On Christmas Eve, Daddy brought his punishment—which had kept on unabated and would continue so for eight more years—to her face, filling her mouth with wet white ashes and her heart with wormwood.

ONE

BROKEN BLOSSOMS

Sal had one heck of a sharp ear, that much could be said for him. Only missed one in ten. Other nine times, he identified her pickup with ease, the soft purr of its motor mingling with the sounds of air being scooped and scoured off the road in the waning light.

He sat, not rocking, on the porch of the modest house the cemetery provided. Tabby had settled herself as usual into the fleshy nest—an arched V like bird wings—his fat thighs made. She was heavy and warm with sleep. Years as a graveyard cat, she knew enough to stay close to Sal, not to bother the mourners, though it being Easter Sunday, the traffic in mourners had been light. Easter was a time of joy, of chicks and colored eggs; for the faithful, it was the celebration of the Lord’s triumph over death. People tended, even the most zealously bereaved, to steer clear of the cemetery on Easter.

But not, it seems, Mrs. Karin Tanner.

Sal looked out beyond the easy plateaus and slopes of grave after grave, black ribbons of road winding here and there to separate one era of cemetery from the next, ash trees providing shade for white stone benches from which the living could contemplate the dead. He looked out, no strain in his eyes, toward the west, off where Taylor Road funneled over the rise to Loomis and Rocklin and Roseville beyond.

Was her, all right. Any doubt, however faint, erased itself when her truck hove into view. The pick-up curved obediently along the road, slowed as it neared the gates with their CLOSED AT NIGHTFALL sign, blinked its intended left, stopped to let two cars—a leadfooted bubblepopping teenybopper and some gray-haired grouch of a tailgater in a business suit—sail by, then eased across the road into the cemetery and lazed its way, predictable as any rut can be, through the grounds. This time of day, she could have parked in one of the spaces painted in faded white on the blacktop in front of Sal’s house. Instead she invariably chose, as now, to pull over on the shoulder of one of the access roads and walk—the slight uphill struggle seeming to earn her some right she otherwise lacked—between the earliest Penryn plots and the stretch of graves belonging to the Barker clan (from Benjamin Barker 1931, through the logjam of deaths in the ’50s and ’60s, on past the trickle that ended, one final drop, with Eunice Barker 1974, when Calvin her son, the last of a long line, pulled up stakes and fled north to Oregon). From there, she’d pick her way through in a predictable meander—leaving always one sprig of baby’s breath on stillborn Betsy Trillin’s plot—until she reached her bastard of a husband’s grave.

She reminded Sal, as she came on, of someone from his past. Pretty, more than pretty, but beat down inside her bird bones; beat down yes, but not out; no, she had a good measure of feist in her. He couldn’t place the memory but that was okay—was it the braid-haired girl from his third grade class, Terry something, whose wet-lashed eyes seemed always to be crying? Nope, not quite, but that was close. No matter. It tied this Karin Tanner to Sal’s past in an intriguing way, and that pleased him, made him appreciate the hint of mystery she brought into his quiet life. Not enough to disturb, just enough to tantalize.

Now she had slowed on the approach to her tormentor’s grave, stopped where she always stopped, raised her eyes to Sal’s, lifted her carefully wrapped bouquet in greeting to him, silent, reverential as if he were the god of death watching over her wife-beating husband and she needed his permission to kneel by the tombstone. Dear God, what was the draw, he wondered. Why did she come back, day after day, to Danny Daniels’ grave? And what must the good man she had hooked up with since be thinking? But Sal held all of that in. He just eased into a smile, waved his short slow wave, gathered fat startled Tabby to his chest, and, stroking the scruff of her neck, went inside, careful to catch the screen door before it banged shut.

It wasn’t a large place. Just the front room for the idle sit in bad weather and the rare TV show; the little kitchen alcove with its munchkin appliances, save for a fridge that stuck out some; a john complete with crapper, sink, and shower stall; and one cramped bedroom whose sag of a window looked out on the tall back-building where the digging equipment awaited its next corpse.

Sal dropped Tabby on the couch, where she curled up and went to sleep again. He tugged on the silver handle of the fridge, let the light and the stale cheesy smells assault him as he foraged for drink. No, not Pabst Blue Ribbon, not on Easter. Passing over V-8, Apricot Nectar, and Jolt, he settled on the bitter juice of the cranberry over ice. Tinged with red, tasting of evil, making the tongue say yes and no at the same time, Sal didn’t always love it. But now, with Karin Tanner kneeling beside the rotting slime who had roughed her up and whom she had finally had the sense to do in with a carving knife, kneeling by that grave on an Easter Sunday no less, talking to him as she always did—this was an evening for bitter cranberry.

He sat beside Tabby, lights off, and watched Karin Tanner through the front window. Today’s bouquet lay to one side. Her fingers were lovingly stroking offerings from days past, lifting away dead blossoms, leaving behind those that still held a semblance of life. As her hands worked over the grassy plot, she leaned in to talk to the dead man.

Sal shook his head, swirled cranberry juice over his tongue, felt it go down cold and wrong, like burped barf. What a waste of a beautiful woman’s time, mooning over a dead wife-beater. But then life was funny, indeed it was, and every one of God’s souls found its own way through the thicket. She’d gotten worse. Put him under nearly a year past, maybe one or two visits during the summer, then once a week in the fall, double that through the winter, and so on increasing, until, for the last month at least, it had been every goddamn day, the Lord pardon him his blasphemy. But it wasn’t his blasphemy, but hers for showing such guilt or devotion or whatever it was, to mourn a man who’d abused her the way the reporters covering her trial hinted at. Daniels was one sorry lowlife Sal had been pleased to bury—though for months after, he had felt obliged to extend silent apologies to those good souls buried nearby.

He gazed at her. She was leaning now over the grave like the White Rock girl, her breasts straining the fabric of her dress just like the White Rock girl’s did her tunic or whatever the heck she wore. Staring down into the lake at her reflection, was that what was going on? First time he’d seen her, he hadn’t seen her. That’d been two years ago when Walter Pyne, who owned not only this cemetery but a funeral home in Penryn as well, had talked Daniels into buying a plot, or rather a pair of plots—no, not for his spouse, who hung back like a faint wraith from the men as they walked among the graves and whom Sal could not recall with any clarity. Not for her but for the dog, the steel-gray German shepherd who’d made Tabby’s eyes go wide, whom the husband had hugged and pointed at the twin plots, whom Sal had interred an hour past midnight, full-sized coffin, grave liner, the works, but no headstone of course, for it was only right, Mr. Pyne had told him, to honor the wishes (not to mention the signed contracts) of the dead but what would folks think if word got around that animals as well as people were buried in the Pyne Memorial Cemetery? The wife hadn’t known, Sal thought. Probably didn’t know now that just beyond the grave grass she caressed, the family dog, willed to Pyne at Daniels’ death, now lay buried.

He sat on that couch for another hour, watching the day die around her. She rose, indistinct now in the dark, and stood looking down at her husband’s grave. Next thing Sal knew, she was moving away, a creamy blur in the night. Her engine scattered the quiet. Her headlights lanced the darkness, scooped over headstones, drew the car around the curves of the access road, onto the highway, and off into the west. Sal thought of Mildred for a while, buried in a special place up on the hill, how much he missed her after twenty years and more, how fine it would have been to have had children with her, how bitter even now it was to think of her barren womb, and they both from large families.

He sat maybe ten minutes longer. Then he got up, hit the switch to turn on the floodlights Pyne had put in four years back to discourage vandals, and retired early.

***

In the beginning, there was pain, and pain was with him, and pain was him. A knifepoint pried at his center, cold place come suddenly back into being. It twisted and poked like a merciless dental probe, found the agony that lay deep in him and made it grow and billow and swell.

One with the pain was the stench, sharp and dark, a blade-twist of putrefaction. It savaged the organs that sensed it, demeaned them by ravage and rape, ten thousand scalpels tinier than wasp stings pressing their way into them, forcing wave on wave of redefinition upon them.

He groped—not knowing who “he” might be—for some place, any place, to stand. He was a coal brought forth from cold ash, red glow pulsing in his dead belly, in an airless lightless terrain. It pulsed, this frosted flame of pain and stench, and its pulse, ugly, irregular, washed waves of terror over him.

From nothing, there was suddenly everything. Floods of mentation, but not whole, not healing. Vile tatters of thought, more color than word, garroted, syllable-warped, whip stings darting in, at once denying and affirming all origin: to him, to them, to anything.

But out of the unbearable chaos—not to be borne yet impossible to flinch from—the very struggle to coalesce gathered the scatterings of coherence around the faintest of images: A woman. Her face a thin suggestion, carved by pain out of pain, tiny steel leaves of agony flurrying by, blood and flesh, sculpting an image in vitriol. But even as it formed, it began to disperse. The pain blurred and spanged back into focus, multiplied. No air, none, to sustain the impossible glow of undead embers.

He tried to seize the image, reached for it with his mind, even though it was loathsome, even though the effort to reach howled new cries of pain through him. Two truths banshee’d around the image as it crumbled: This wasn’t the first awakening, although it was the first time reflection had come back; and the woman’s name—the sound shivved his heart—was Karin.

Then the agony collapsed in upon itself. His lungs pulled for oxygen, found none, foundered, and he was no more.

***

Monday afternoon, Karin knelt beside the windflowers. Flanked by beds of dwarf blue stars and the pinks and reds of sweet-scented monkeyroot, the white of the windflowers with their bright yellow centers bloomed forth like God’s pure thought. Leaning in, she caressed the cool petals, nosed the overlapping white folds, breathed the delicate scent of buttercup there beside the redwood fence that enclosed her backyard.

Idling a finger up and down the thin but sturdy stem of the tallest of them, she decided that it and its three closest neighbors would make a fine bright centerpiece for Danny’s bouquet this evening. She took up her clippers—Smith & Hawken specials that fit just so in her hand—and snipped them off near the base, placing them beside others gathered so far in the long flat wicker basket.

She sat back on her haunches and took in the perfume of colors all about her. The deep bordering gentian of forget-me-nots, as blue and troubled as her thoughts of Danny sometimes. Clusters of yard-high scarlet lightning darting up here and there. A wide range of yellows from the sunrays and moonbeams of coreopsis, near the central meeting place where the curved cobbled paths she’d laid down years ago came together. Large clematis in velvety blues and reds climbing the trellis she’d put up near the back porch. Her garden was the best place in the world, an escape from both the ruins of her past and the bland homogeneity of her new marriage, a place where her hands and indeed her whole being could work the magic Granny Eva had told her about so often.

The sun felt grand on her skin. Moments like these, she wished she felt comfortable not stopping at halter and shorts but stripping all the way to the buff, standing out here in the full glory of the sun, feeling the cool brush of gladiolus at her thighs. Once or twice when Danny had gone drinking and left her alone, humid summer evenings in the house, she had slipped out the sliding door, laid her robe over a lawn chair on the back patio, felt fingertips of air move against her unrestricted front as she walked easy and open along the cobbled paths, kneeling to love the flowers without reserve and to feel the return of that affection. Those times had been precious in the extreme, daring and lovely.

Frank never went drinking. Never went out at night. Just holed up in his study, poring over torts and wills and briefs, or whatever it was trial lawyers pored over. She didn’t know. He never shared his work with her and she never asked. All she knew was that, as much as she liked him and whatever residue of gratitude remained from what Frank had done to win her acquittal, she no longer felt she loved him, not the way a woman ought to love her husband. It had been the turmoil of the trial and the media play that surrounded it, his undeniable good looks and his many kindnesses toward her during that time and in the months following, the whole built-in melodrama—these things, she supposed, had turned her head, had made her cling to the belief that he was her beloved white knight and that agreeing to marry him would lead inevitably to the happy ending she deserved.

Frank was such a contrast to Danny, kind where Danny had been cruel, bookish and reserved where Danny had been brash and outgoing. But arguing before a judge and jury on behalf of a client whose cause he believed in, another side of him came out, and that was the Frank Tanner she’d fallen for, the Frank Tanner she missed, who, she was now convinced, was little more than an illusion.

Karin rose from the windflowers, her basket over her arm, and caught a brilliant cluster of wakerobins off to her right. Their deep-green leaves and tri-petaled white flowers seemed to reach up to her as she approached. She bent from the waist, feeling her shorts ride up the backs of her thighs, and let her fingers caress love among the wide leaves and stiff popcorn-burst petals. She flexed at the knees, balancing on the balls of her feet, and snipped off half a dozen of the most eager suppliants at the base of their stems.

Behind her a sound. Something brushed through grass. And as she turned, she knew, without needing to turn, that it was Jimmy. Cloth gliding past a knothole, a shirt or skin, too close to the hole to mean anything but that he’d been spying on her again; and the day dimmed, not much but enough for her stomach to tense. She finished up with the wakerobins, then moved nearer the house for one more batch of flowers to complete the bouquet, a carnation cluster of soft yellow dianthus. But her mind was on her neighbor of seven years.

Pot-bellied, wispy-haired little creature acted like the patriarch of the neighborhood. Him and his peroxide wife Nona. Danny’d taken at once to Jimmy Gallagher when he and Karin moved in, the more traditional welcome of a cake or pie being replaced by a six-pack of Rolling Rock, Jimmy at the door in his bermudas and faded green tee-shirt, one arm crooked around Nona’s neck like an ox yoke so that her great breasts swayed their welcome, she staggering on the stoop and braying laughter through that fashion-model face of hers.

What was ferret-eyed old Jimmy doing glued to the fence so often when he had Nona to keep him busy? Karin knew she herself was no great shakes as a looker—decent, but not one to cause heads to turn. But Nona, good lord she had what all the men lusted after and she knew it and loved to flaunt it. Of course, Nona did more than flirt. Karin knew that for a fact. Jimmy hadn’t been the only one in that household Danny had been taken with; Nona had snagged Danny by the belt, dragged him in, and tried him on quite soon after they met and regularly right up until the day he died. His jogging cover, as painfully obvious as it was bogus, never fooled her for an instant, but she didn’t dare call him on it. Not then. Probably not from the first moment she’d met him.

But that was behind her now, all that letting herself be a victim. She was growing stronger, out from under the domination of others. Her plants were hardier and getting more so. Green thumbs in the neighborhood had turned even greener at the ease with which she grew a vast variety of flowers in the clay that passed for soil in Rocklin, but since Danny’s death, she’d added blooms—added them with no problem at all—which were not supposed to germinate, let alone sprout, burgeon, blossom, and thrive, in this planting zone. Her garden grew healthier and so did she, mistress of her own destiny and getting more so each day.

She crossed to the patio, slid the screen door aside, and carried her basket of flowers into the kitchen. There she wrapped them in light-green tissue paper and secured dark-green twist-ties around the base and center of the cluster of stems.

The house was quiet. Frank was still at the office, or more likely—she checked the kitchen clock, 5:15—he was snarled in a stop-and-go slalom down a parking-garage ramp to join the Sacramento commute home. He’d tried to raise the issue of her visits to Danny’s grave a few times but had backed off in the face of her vehemence. Now he simply made sure to arrive home after she’d left for the cemetery, ensconced in his study until she called him to a late supper. Never said a word about it.

Walking down the hall, she undid her halter, caught the strap as it fell, had one hand at the button of her shorts as she passed through the bedroom door. Stripped them off, panties too, tossed her clothing into the brown laundry basket in her closet, stepped under the shower for five minutes. Danny had sometimes surprised her by rumbling back the opaque shower door and sauntering his taut hairy body in to join her, soaping her everywhere, circle upon circle, spiraling in on her pleasure until she shuddered in his arms and impaled herself on him like a monkey toy climbing a dowel. Not Frank. Never Frank.

Out of the shower, she dried herself and dressed, her mind busy with memories of Danny. For a time, right after the trial when Frank first moved in, he’d convinced her to redo the house, have it repainted inside and out, sell or donate their old rundown furniture and put in new, get rid of all reminders of him. But she refused to move, giving the garden as her initial excuse, but knowing even then that there was more to it than that. And as his things started to go—the clothing, the dog-eared paperback of Shogun, the coffee-table book on samurai warriors, the video collection, the back issues of Hustler he kept under the sink in the hall bathroom—she’d grown more reluctant to continue, hating him sometimes for his zeal. At last she’d refused to part with the final two items: Danny’s Chevy-10 pickup (bought second-hand on Florin Road five years before) and the collection of decorative swords hanging on the wall in Danny’s den, Frank’s study. They seemed to have faded out of Frank’s consciousness, but Karin sat there sometimes during the day when sunlight streamed in by the study window and set the burnished metal to glowing like Danny’s spirit touching them into fire—sat there and missed him so much.

She retrieved the flowers, went through the laundry room into the garage, locking the door behind her as the garage door clattered open on its track. She climbed up into the pickup and backed it out the driveway. Millie Ryder was sitting out in her front yard, sipping iced tea and watching a toddler tethered to a tree. She pretended as usual not to notice Karin and Karin returned the favor. She turned left on Midas, then drove a few miles, past the country club where she voted, over three sets of railroad tracks, and left on Taylor Road. She liked reaching this point, because twenty minutes of automatic pilot took her through the nothing town of Loomis and on her way to the graveyard, during which time she could let the feel of the truck, its rhythms, its smells, lull her back to the good times with Danny, him where she now sat, her by his side, both of them looking forward to a weekend in Danny’s cabin at Chiquita Lake, him for pre-dawn bow-and-arrow hunting, her for solitary walks through the still forest and long nights of loving in the cabin’s cozy bed.

She parked the truck in her usual spot, a blacktopped shoulder dappled with shade, and walked the slight incline of the access road. Day after Easter. Fresh flowers were arrayed on numerous plots, no doubt from morning visitors. Made sense, celebrate Christ’s triumph over death one day, use the same flowers to ease the sting of death’s triumph over a loved one the next, perhaps on the off-chance that sympathetic magic might work. She saw the tiny headstone rise to greet her. BETSY LOUISE TRILLIN, it said in small letters, BUDDING ON EARTH TO BLOOM IN HEAVEN, BORN 7/4/76, DIED 7/4/76. A tiny grave. Neglected, Mister Romano had told her, though he didn’t know why. She placed a sprig of baby’s breath upon it and tucked Easter’s faded sprig into her dress pocket, pleased to imagine that its life had gone to comfort little Betsy like a kiss from, if not a mother, then a compassionate stranger.

Danny’s grave lay ahead.

She approached it slowly, feeling the guilt rise in her like sexual tension. Guilt, yes, and fear, though she had nothing to be afraid of from Danny. Not any more. An ornamental knife to the heart had taken care of that.

Uncanny. As she moved closer, it always seemed as if she were fixed in the earth and the headstones, Danny’s in the lead, marched grandly around her.

She stopped, looked up at Mister Romano, a kindly old man though he always seemed to be judging her in some way. She’d given him a dahlia the other week, brought a can of cat food for Tabby once. Have to offer him another flower some time soon, she thought; not today but tomorrow. She raised her bouquet in greeting, took in his nod and smile. He rose, as usual, to leave her alone with her husband.

Under Karin’s fingers, the stone was smooth and cool and white. Flecks of something—was it mica?—gleamed in the waning sun. “Hello, Danny,” she said, “it’s me.” She knelt beside him, arranging her dress about her knees. It was morbid, she knew, but she imagined him naked under the grassy plot, just inches beneath the surface, preserved to perfection in a protective bubble like Snow White—not six feet under in his Sunday best, his flesh slowly . . . no, he wasn’t doing that, not if she didn’t will it. He was there, fully intact, heart whole, yes that above all, no wound at all nor no trace of one, his skin smooth beneath the black curls of his chest hair.

“Yes, you’re right here, aren’t you, Danny, so close to me,” she said, running loving fingers over yesterday’s strewn blooms. “It’s like you’re in a coma, able to hear every word I say, but unable to move.” Withered mountain laurel clustered red and white like garnished radishes at his head. She toyed with their petals, felt the life flow back into them, their limp surrender turning to a renewal of bloom. They would last another day, no more, but that was, she proudly thought, one day more than anyone else could have coaxed out of them. She brushed beneath the laurels and fingered the thick grass blades, closing her eyes and pretending it was Danny’s hair she touched.

“I miss you, honey. You got awful mean to me in the end, but we had some lovely times, didn’t we?” Her left hand came in to join her right, which wandered through the blooms, feeling the grave mound solid and sinewy like tight muscle. “And even when we fought, when you hit me, it was crazy, I still needed you even while I hated what you were doing. It was like you’d always say when you were sobbing in my arms, kissing my bruises and telling me you loved me more than life itself and begging me to forgive you, that you would never do that again—it was like you said, just a sad little toddler in a big man’s body, throwing a huge tantrum at the world and me getting in his way.” A tear fell on her hand. “I’m not proud of doing what I did to you, Danny. Not proud at all. But if I hadn’t done it, that sad little boy would have killed me for sure. You’d be the one out here grieving for me and I’d be lying under the grass, listening to you be torn up inside, hurting so bad. But you know something, Danny? I’m not so sure now I did the right thing. There’s this big gaping hole where my life used to be. I fill it up with flowers—you should see the house now, stuffed with ferns and potted plants so there’s hardly room to walk—but as dearly as I love them, they can’t fill the ache inside me, not like you could, my dear sweet darling.”

She wiped her eyes clear with the sides of her hand. The sunlight was fading to the west, back from where she’d come. The world was dying again, closing the books on yet one more miserable day. She loved it here as night seeped in around the graves. She couldn’t begin to guess why so peaceful a place as this had ever come to stand in folks’ imaginations for something to be feared and avoided.

A light breeze cooled the tears on her cheeks, then the tops of the trees began an easy rustle and sway. She moved her hands among the strewn flowers, picking out dead peonies, iris, and phlox, reviving for one more day asters and hollyhocks and hibiscus whose whites, reds, and blues strove toward the life in her touch. “You always told me we could work it out, in your gentler moments, after we cried together, and I forgave you, and you lifted me in your arms and took me to bed. If only we had one more chance together. I’d beg you to forgive me, Danny. I’d forgive you. We’d start all over, wipe the slate clean, and never hurt one another again.”

Her hand moved up and down over the muscled earth of the plot, as if she were massaging her man’s grassy torso. She unwrapped her flowers, laid them upon his grave, gave them fondlement unto new life as she did so. A good hour Karin sat beside the grave, talking, remembering; and all that while, her hands idly, ceaselessly moved.

***

Membrance of expiring, wisps of hatred hovering still in the dark air about him, ghostly fingers treadling upon his flesh. Beneath his flesh. That, yes, and the teeming of tiny insects, trillions of hairy mite-legs tickling the underside of his skin as they moved, picking out a hidden tattoo—heart, dagger, the woman’s name floridly scripted there in the center—that sheeted his flesh with pain yet kept somehow its heart shape.

Karin.

The name returned, sharp as a slap, blazing screams of color at him. And then, riding on its back, the smell came howling down upon him, funneling like a twister full of stench and suet, coating him, penetrating like liniment to where the insects crawled. It choked the air, made the air seem solid like hard blackness shaped precisely to his nasal passages and on down his throat into the branches of his bronchial tubes. Any change in their shape—and there were myriad attempts at that—met the obsidian resistance of that blackness, cold, dead, and impassive.

His skull pounded. Every beat of his heart he could hear—yet still (but no, not still but again) he had no idea who “he” was—and every beat felt like a seizure, as sharp and incisive as a dagger come in for the kill.

Karin! That name again. And an image of her face, eyes glowing, mouth twisted inside the cracks and bruises that surrounded it. The dagger—his lion-head kriss!—sank into him, deeper, like a dentist’s needle probing for nerves to deaden. Her hand, gripping the staghorn handle, twisted grimly on her thin wrist.

He moved his arm to stop her—first real move—and a howl of pain seized it as though the movement had set off explosives inside and nothing was left but the memory of its detonation, a phantom limb in the eternal recurrence of its last agony. His gut tightened, pulling shearings of blackness down into his lungs, the thrust of a mailed fist deep and wayward inside him.

That hateful face glowed in triumph as the kriss bit and cut into the muscle of his heart. Every throb of pain echoed her name. Karin, Karin, the hateful litany kept on, and yet there were tinges of an emotion beyond hatred, a bleak kindness, a warped adoration.

His last memory, as his lungs failed and he fell into death again was a faulty one, and he knew that, even as it crimped and curled like a burning photograph: Somehow his heart, flush with the heat of hatred, systoled tight about the blade of the kriss like stone about a sword, turned it red- then white-hot, shot heat past the acorn-headed guard into the hilt, made the staghorn split and sizzle and the lion’s head roar, married the weapon to her smoking fist, shot flame up her arm until her flesh burned and melted, her face sheeted over with flame, her hair frizzed up and bloomed like a torch, and she, the murdering bitch who’d have enchained his balls if she could, collapsed with him into death.

TWO

HOUSEWORK

Karin was coming in from the garden with a perfect basket for Danny—daffodils, bluebells, irises, and boldly colored cotton-candy moptops of hyacinth spilling up and over its sides—when the phone rang.

“Tanners,” she said.

“Karin, thank God you’re still there!”

“You sound frantic. What’s wrong?”

“I’m at some Honda place, um,” his voice faded, then returned, “Hondas Forever, off Business-80, corner of Howe and Alta-Arden.”

“You weren’t in an accident?”

“Nope, nothing like that. Five minutes from work the engine starts juddering when I shift, then smooths out as I accelerate. Remember? Same damned thing happened last fall; some kind of carbon buildup on one of the plugs. I told them what it was but they say they’re backlogged and can’t get to it till tomorrow. Listen, Karin, I know—”

Shit.

“—you’re probably on your way out the door, but I really need you to swing by and pick me up. I’m—”

“Can’t you take a cab?” Alarms were going off in her head, tiny soundless ones, more like the memories of dead clocks than the clamor of live ones. She knew it sounded absurd, but Danny was expecting her.

“It’s a good thirty minutes from here to Rocklin in normal traffic. Add twenty for rush hour, double the fare to get the taxi driver back to the city, and we’re looking at close to a hundred dollars.” How prosaic Frank sounded over the phone, not a bit like the confident young lawyer she had fallen for during her trial the previous summer. “I’ll drive you straight to the cemetery, maybe even break a few speed limits on the way, how’s that?”

Sure, Frank, she thought; even if we somehow pull off the miracle of getting there before nightfall—and there’s no way in hell of that—I’m really going to feel just fine about your waiting in the pickup or, worse, coming with me to Danny’s grave. “No problem,” she said, staring down at the basket, thinking she would salvage the hyacinths at least, put them in water, but then knowing that Frank would look at them that certain way, not saying a thing, but there’d be this thick fog of silence between them, and she knew it was best to dispose of them. “Shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to change clothes. I guess I’ll have to skip the visit for today, maybe go early tomorrow.” She almost said Danny would understand, but she held it in, hearing, a moment before it came out, how bizarre it would sound. Besides, she knew that Danny would not understand at all, certainly not the Danny he’d become in the end.

“Great, Karin, you’re a life saver. Now you know how to get here, right, or do you need—”

She assured him she knew the way, hung up, dumped the flowers in the weed pile at the side of the house, changed clothes, and fired up the pickup. It felt wrong to turn right on Midas instead of left, but she gritted her teeth and did it anyway. Traffic was light on I-80 going toward Sacramento, but Business-80 was another story. A stalled big rig in the center lane slowed things to a crawl just past the Watt exit, so that by the time she turned in to Hondas Forever—Frank waving as he emerged, briefcase in hand, from the showroom—she and a good half of the other drivers had turned their lights on.

Through the plate glass, she could make out a young couple talking to a salesman over paper. He was punching numbers into a calculator and jotting the results down on a yellow legal pad. A second salesman who’d been talking to Frank—overweight, bullet-headed, and looking like he’d kill for a cigar—stood by the door, his hands behind his back, watching Frank walk through the pickup’s headlights and giving Karin an appraising eye.

Frank opened her door. “Scoot over, honey, I’ll drive.”

“That’s okay, I’ll do it,” she said.

He looked arch, then smiled and shook his head. “I brought you out of your way. I admit it and I apologize. The least I can do is to take the brunt of rush hour on my shoulders.”

What the hell, she thought. It was a little thing to give in on. Sure, she’d looked forward to sulking at him from the driver’s seat, but she could do that just as well staring out the passenger side at the backs of malls and into the bubbles of other people’s lives as they whizzed by. “Suit yourself,” she said, unbelting, sliding over. The fat salesman was still mauling her with his eyes.

Frank got in and passed her his briefcase. It was the same one she’d watched him open and close the summer before at the defense table, slightly worn now but sturdy as always, FGT in raised gold beside the tumblers. She remembered his fingers dialing up the combination, the shy smile he gave her every day before the judge came in, the winning way he had of coaxing the truth, her truth, out of even the most hostile witnesses: John Conti, for example, one of Danny’s drinking buddies, who lived down the street still and who, Karin had no doubt, beat up on Viv, though nowhere near as bad as Danny. She set the briefcase down at her feet, leaning it against the door at an angle that ensured it wouldn’t fall back on her legs.

Frank slammed the door and leaned to kiss her before putting on his seat belt. She returned it, as perfunctory as all their kisses had become, and so too their weekend-only sex and their married life in general. “Thanks again for picking me up,” he said, then released her.

“What choice did I have?” she replied and gave him a look which made him laugh, but not before the barb caught him beneath the skin. She could see that happen, and she regretted it and felt pleased.

The ride home was uneventful. She was subliminally aware of the same old shitty super-highway macadam-scape skimming by as the night closed in and Frank babbled on and on about his latest series of cases and she gave out with the expected grunts and mutters and even one or two brief phrases that had all the conviction behind them of cold wet noodles. She even drifted back for a moment to assess the drama of Frank and the tailgater, size it up, and dismiss it from her thoughts. Her mind dwelt on the night, how that same light-leeching thief was closing bit by bit around her dead lover’s grave and the strewn dying flowers scattered over it and the Karin-shaped space next to it and the soft-spoken Mister Romano, whom she pictured absurdly as still on his porch, lacking the trigger of her visit to raise him out of his rocking chair and impel him into the house. She shouldn’t have missed her visit. She needed to be there, needed to talk with Danny, to beg his forgiveness, to feel the thick green grass and caress the blossoms she laid upon him.

By the time Frank pulled into the garage, doused the lights, and killed the motor, he’d caught on clear enough and lapsed into silence. They sat in the dark, listening to the engine tick down into silence. Karin felt hollowed out and filled with sadness.

Frank softly said, “We should have sold this fucking house.” His voice had no power in it, no hint that this idea expressed anything more than regret. He had made his bed. Weak, will-less, a little boy lost, that’s who she’d ended up marrying the second time around.

Karin unclasped her seatbelt and threw open the door. Frank, looking forlorn in the cold glow of the roof light, followed her lead. The fragrance of the house opened to embrace her as she unlocked the door separating the garage from the laundry room and went in. Frank was slower than usual in getting out so she didn’t bother holding the door for him, just went through the house turning on lights and adjusting the heat, giving kind words and caresses to her houseplants as she passed them.

In the kitchen, Karin closed the blinds at the south window and over the sliding glass doors to the east. In doing so, she skirted around the table she and Danny had once eaten all their meals at. Since Danny’s death, and especially since Frank had moved in, houseplants had taken over all but a small patch of the table. From there, they had come to spread throughout the house, something which Danny would not have tolerated—if he’d ever felt the urge to use the backyard, and thank God he hadn’t, she doubted she could have had even the comfort of her garden during those years—but which Frank seemed quite pleased about. During their initial months together here, he had delighted in learning the names of all of her plants, trading Latin phrases, one for one, with her, a legal term in trade for something out of Linnaeus. That game, however, as so much of what they shared initially, had fallen off in the past six months; she left the tags sticking up out of the soil for each new plant she bought, but she doubted that Frank paid any attention to them any more.

She was inspecting the underleaves of a Joseph’s Coat for red spider mite, pleased to find no sign of their tiny webs, when Frank, still in his three-piece suit, came over to the sill that separated kitchen from TV room. Lifting the key off the wallhook, he said, “I’ll go get the mail.” Then he was out the front door, which closed behind him with a solid ka-thunk.

***

Nona couldn’t remember being so fucking horny in her entire life. Until a year ago when he’d gone permanently soft on her, she’d had her big-dicked if butt-ugly spouse to fill in the gaps between lovers. Paunchy old Jimmy, a fast tongue to drive her wild and then the ramming of his huge tool to top her off. Add a comical always-on side to him, a willingness to look the other way when it came to her affairs, and he’d seemed the perfect mate.

But now her fields lay totally fallow. Art Crumley, who’d lived a block over on Pyrite Lane and whom she’d met two years before at Hank and Sarah Buntz’s Fourth of July block party, had been forced to relocate to Arizona when his company collapsed their Sacramento and Phoenix sales offices into one. Dave Meisner, quick delivery in and out and then a dash to his truck—even kept his genuine U.S. Post Office pith helmet on if she asked him to—had been switched last month to a new route on the other side of town, and he’d been too chickenshit (or maybe the skinny bastard just didn’t care a whizz about her—sometimes she thought he liked the idea of shtupping her more than actually doing it) to arrange anything special, some shit about a wife with the eyes of a ferret and an overbite to match. And then there was Danny Daniels, fucking studbuns with a torso that made her weak just to think about, laid low by a shiv in the heart. Sure he beat the bitch that stuck it to him (she’d heard that shit transpiring once or twice when he forgot to shut the windows), but he loved to get real submissive with her, take orders, lick where she told him to, let her take him over her naked lap and tug off his sweatpants so she could feel his firm hot rod at her pussy and pressed into her thighs, its tip drooling, as the whack of her hairbrush brought a rosy blush to his butt.

Danny’s loss had been a real tragedy.

Then, not long after, Jimmy’d gone limp. Just like that. Nothing she could do, he neither, to get a rise out of him. Dead dangle of salami. Took the zing out of his tongue too, those rare times she forgot what a frustration it was not to be able to follow through, and let him feast on her, closing her eyes because she could only get off by remembering how good he used to be. On top of that, his back operation had laid him low for two solid weeks last month, forcing her to play nursemaid to an invalid, giving her a taste of what it would be like if she grew old with the impotent son-of-a-bitch.

She took a drag on her mentholated Camel—Fuck the pristine lungs of all anti-smokers!—leaning against the wall and looking out into the night. Lovely Rocklin, two-bit burg, no coherence at all, former quarry town, bedroom community for those who hadn’t a clue about what bedrooms were for. She’d been born in Roseville thirty-six years ago, split to L.A. in ’75 after squeaking out of Oakmont High with a C minus, two abortions, and the shattered ruins of her biology teacher’s career sizzling in the local paper for a while, then came back and played prodigal daughter after Tinsel Town—all take and no give to the young and fuckable—started stroking her flesh with one beguiling hand while scooping the life out of her with the other. Saw a friend go down and die; pulled out of that shit in time to come crying home to mama. But now, it sure felt like time to cut loose again, get out of this dead end of a nothing town, and see the world. Atlanta was supposed to be nice, Seattle maybe, or Nashville—any place but Rocklin or Roseville. Get her head together, figure out what was worth doing in this lousy world.

Then she heard the neighbors’ door open and shut. In the moonlight, she saw Frank Tanner strut down the walkway to the sidewalk. He looked refreshing and rich, compared to Jimmy anyway, in that killer suit of his. Then she saw the mailbox key in his hand and before she had a chance to formulate it, the plan sprang full-blown into her head and made her turn abruptly from the window. The suddenness of her movement made Queenie’s ears perk up where she sat on the rug near the front door. She barked once, then again, lifting her melt-brown collie eyes to Nona. Jimmy looked up from his evening paper: “What’s up, sugar pie?”

“Nothin’,” she said. With one hand she grabbed the mailbox key out of the tin on the kitchen counter. With the other she tossed her cigarette into a sinkful of suds, heard it hiss. Stepping into her clogs by the door and snapping her fingers to command Queenie to sit—which she immediately, if forlornly, did—Nona smoothed her shorts over the perfect curves of her butt. The clogs’ bright red straps matched her toenail polish. A quick primp of her nipples through the tube top to make sure they showed against the cloth and she was out the door, clocking on the pavement, putting an extra sway into her hips against the moment Frank Tanner was sure to turn around.

He was past the Ryders’ driveway when he glanced back at her. Didn’t break stride. Just gave a little wave and kept on to the blocky stand of mailboxes stacked four high and two wide, two bins for larger packages on a stand next to them. By the time she reached him, Frank had a hefty stack of mail in his left hand and the key to one of the package bins in his right.

“Evening, Nona. How’s it going?” He had that sharp lawyer look she liked. The cut of his clothes went right up his chiseled face into his eyes, made them glint in the moonlight like gold coins. She liked that.

“Fine, Frank,” she said, making a show of running her fingers along the silver edge of the mailbox and inserting her key. “Looks like you hit the jackpot.”

“Usual bills and junk mail,” he said, smiling.

She laughed, then leaned forward to reach into her box, her full breasts straining outward as she arched her back, bending one long smooth leg slightly at the knee so that her clog dangled. “Nothing for poor Nona tonight, I guess, and I was so looking forward to finding something long and white and stiff in my box.”

“Um, expecting an important piece of mail?”

“Yes, Frank,” she said, “the most important piece I can think of.” Her clog clattered to the sidewalk. She slowly straightened. “Oh, how stupid of me.”

“Here, Nona, I’ll get that.” In a flash he had set his mail on the sidewalk and retrieved the clog. She steadied herself on the mailbox stand and lifted her foot, feeling the heat of Frank’s hand on her ankle and heel. His gaze flickered up the smooth expanse of her leg, right straight up one inner thigh to the creased prize she kept between both of them, then back down to the clog he slipped onto her foot.

“Nice tight fit,” she joked. “Don’t bother wrapping them. I’ll wear them out of the store.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, that sexy smile still on his lips. “Come back often. And bring your friends.”

“I’d love that.” Her voice turned soft and serious now. “But I’ll leave my friends out of it. All but one silky smooth one. She likes to be licked. And fed.”

Frank retrieved his mail and rose. She moved closer to him. The smile was gone from his lips. “I’ve got to get back home, Nona.”

“Would you like to feed my friend?”

“I’m sorry, Nona.”

“I think you would.”

“I can’t give you what you want.”

“I think you have something nice and hard for her to suck on.” She was getting to him, she could sense it, but this one was going to take some work, that much was clear. Faithful husbands. She’d run up against a few of those in her time, very few, but she’d never met one that succeeded in resisting her, once she set her sights on him.

He pulled away, fumbled the key into the package bin lock. “I’ll say this much for you, Nona,” he said. “You are a lovely lady. But I’ve seen first hand what happens when husbands and wives cheat on each other, and I’d just as soon not start down that road.”

She smiled. “That’s okay, Frank.” He pulled out a small brown parcel, some book club thing, and tucked it in his left hand with the sheaf of mail. His right hand fell free and she took it, feeling only a tremor of resistance. “Just remember this.” She brought the back of his hand to her shorts, pressed it in and up so that she felt herself open slightly against him, then released him, turned away, and sauntered off, smiling with the certainty that Mister Frank Tanner would soon be hers.

***

Jimmy set his paper down and watched Nona’s long legs in perfect strut turn the sidewalk into a runway. What a lovely supercharged animal he’d by some miracle managed to marry. So now she was after his foxy neighbor’s second husband. He wondered what had taken her so long.

Scrabbling on the tile before the front door, Queenie barked happily when the door opened and Nona came in. She bent to Queenie and chucked her under the chin. “You bad dog,” she mock-scolded. “Are you a bad dog? Yes you are, you Lassie dog, you!” Then she snapped her fingers, said “Come on, girl!” and Queenie dashed after her, Nona’s body blessing the air she moved through. She let Queenie out the sliding door in the kitchen, then lit up a cigarette and returned to the living room.

It had always pleased Jimmy to run his eyes along the sleek contours of her body. But that pleasure had dimmed since the onset of impotence (“erectile dysfunction” was what Doctor Briggs liked to call it)—more precisely it’d been too mixed with bitterness for him to dwell very long on the delights of Nona’s body. But in recent weeks, as he ticked off the days in his head, the old excitement had returned and grown near to bursting; if anything, he found himself more excited than he could remember, excited about having back what he thought he’d lost forever, and excited about surprising Nona with his new gift.

“You are one hell of a sexy lady, Nona.”

She glared at him, kicked off her clogs, flumped down in her armchair, and tucked her legs under her, releasing a smoke ring from the O of her carmine lips. “Fat lot of good it does me in this house,” she said, staring out into the night. Her eyes followed Frank Tanner, and Jimmy too watched him pass by the picture window.

“Six weeks.”

“Mmmm?”

“The operation was six weeks ago tomorrow.”

“Yeah? So?” she challenged. Then, a hint of caring in her voice: “Fancy back specialist think everything’s okay? Or does he want to soak us for more money?”

“Everything’s fine.” The agony from his visit three weeks before, when Briggs had first pumped him up, spiked back into memory; it had felt like being hit in the balls with a hockey puck. But today’s visit had turned anxiety to elation as first the doctor, then Jimmy himself, put a hand to his scrotum and squeezed the pump implanted there ten or twelve times to get him hard, then hit the release valve to deflate him. No pain. Just this giddy sensation in his head at how odd it was to be erect without stroking himself or thinking lusty thoughts, and the beginnings of the Nona-anticipation he was feeling now. “In fact,” said Jimmy, “I have a confession to make.”

“So go see a priest.”

“It wasn’t exactly my back that was fixed.”

Nona perked up. She’d caught the leer in his voice, the old lure he hadn’t thrown out in quite a while. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I think you know.”

“You’re not a limp noodle any more?”

“All I’m saying is don’t go making plans for tomorrow night, all right?”

Nona set her cigarette down in the crimped groove of her golden ashtray and rose from her chair. She slinked toward him in a way that would have instantly hardened his penis in the old days. There was a rush of blood to his head but nowhere else. Fine. He’d show her tomorrow the permanency of his love for her, his new staying power in bed. Perhaps she’d stray no more.

She knelt by his chair, put her hand on his thigh and her mouth to his ear. He could smell the tempting tobacco on her breath. “And just what,” her fingers moved on his thigh, “did you have in mind for tomorrow, lover boy?”

“Well, I—” He tried to squirm away before she could grab him, but her hand was too eager. “Don’t, baby. Wait until tomorrow.” Her nails squished into softness beneath his fly. She squeezed him once, then let go, like she was tossing down a dishrag, and stood up.

“What kind of shit you pulling?” Anger rode Nona’s voice, yes, that and something more, something that wished their marriage healed. She slinked toward her cigarette, retrieved it, took a drag so deep it pitted her chin, let it out like fire.

“Just be here tomorrow night, honey,” he said. “Wait one more night. You’ll see. You’re going to like what I have to offer.” He knew Nona was off the rag. No pads in the wicker wastebasket in their bathroom all week.

She stared at him, took another drag and blew it out those soft red lips of hers. “Jimmy, you’re one grade-A weirdo motherfucker, you know that? I swear to God.”

He smiled at her. She’d change her tune tomorrow, no doubt in his mind. “Just be here and make sure your sexy body’s primed for the best loving it’s ever had, ‘cause I aim to give it to you.”

“Right. You and whose brother?”

“You’ll see, honey.”

“Right. Hey, I’m going to watch the tube. You want anything out of the fridge?”

He shook his head. “Nah, go ahead.”

“Suit yourself.” She walked out of the room, Queenie brushing against her kissable legs. He imagined his hands on those legs, snaking up inside the legholes of her tight shorts, coming around and meeting in the middle where her hair-pie was. Shit, she turned him on.

He’d have Nona tomorrow night for sure. And for all the tomorrows on the calendar. Would-be Nona-humpers like big-boy attorney Franklin Tanner would have to be content with lying on top of their own wives and dreaming it was Nona they were plugging, not the Karins they’d married instead. Come to think of it, wouldn’t be bad at all to snake your way into Karin Tanner. Meek, obedient earth goddess bent to water her garden, sweet legs, stacked deck on top, broad-brimmed hat on her curly blond head. Yeah, maybe her good friend Jimmy and his everlasting gobstopper would toss the covers over his exhausted Nona, smiles of contentment on her lush lips, and leap the fence into that lovely lady’s backyard; yes, turn the tables on all those gamecocks who’d strutted their way into his backyard.

Jimmy patted his limp penis, then lifted the paper to his eyes. Karin Tanner. Choice morsel.

***

Frank sat at his desk—the door to the study slightly ajar so he could feel not entirely cut off from Karin—and tried to get Nona Gallagher out of his mind. Wasn’t easy. He could still smell her scent, still see the taut stretch of skin from below her tubed-in breasts to just above the top of her shorts. He sniffed the back of his hand, then castigated himself for it and tried to focus on his notes for the Malloy trial.

Wouldn’t work.

Karin passed his door, moving from the hallway into their bedroom to tend the houseplants there. He could hear her speak softly to them. He imagined her fingers lightly massaging their leaves and petals, her nose and lips moving into their beauty. This house—her house, not his—had once been a place of violence. The array of swords at his back were a mute reminder of that, nearly invisible to him now but an annoyance he’d have to get rid of soon. He’d remodeled a little, done some repainting, replaced furniture, trying to change the character of the house, to turn Karin’s tormentor out. Her attempt to do likewise had brought her garden inside, a healing tongue of greenery so pervasive it was difficult to walk around without toppling one plant or another.

And she’d gotten better, more self-reliant, less of a clinging vine than she’d been when he first met her. But the houseplants had become an obsession, a way of avoiding contact with him. And her visits to Danny Daniels’ grave were, he felt, the height of perversity. He had tried to cajole her out of them, but she took it as a challenge to her newfound independence and simply dug in deeper.

He loved Karin. He had adopted a stance of patience, hoping his love would draw her back to him, but wanting to give her room to work things out for herself. But in the last many months, things had solidified, grown worse, not better, and he’d begun to wonder for the first time if his marriage had been a mistake.

He was thirty, a rising star in the firm of Scithers, Thancher, & Wilde, tight, trim, attractive to all sorts of lovely women. Not just Nona. There was Jeannine, the new admin assistant: short, pert, long auburn hair, a tad too much makeup, and depths of intelligence behind those large burnt-almond eyes—just the type Frank the eligible single would have loved to know better. But a guy got married—“did the awful deed,” as Archer Wilde had once joked in that bittersweet way of his—and suddenly what had been natural urges were supposed to be denied, shut off, no longer acted upon.

Some cheated. Just today, Ethan Bell, another junior partner, had wangled out of Frank the keys to the cabin at Chiquita Lake for the weekend. Ethan had a scorching hot rendezvous with a Sac State coed named Marcie something or other, while poor Susan Bell stayed home with the twins, thinking her husband was attending a legal conference in San Francisco. Only seminar Ethan would be attending was a marathon meeting between the sheets.

But cheating wasn’t Frank’s style. He’d promised to forsake all others, to love, honor, and obey only Karin, and he was a man who kept his promises. His father had harped constantly on that theme, how too many lawyers—but not him, and not, by God, any son of his—made promises that were only as good as the water they were written on. Too many men of all stripes, he’d say. But it was by God especially heinous—how Frank’s father loved to say that word and how Frank loved to hear him say it—for men sworn to uphold the law, by God it was heinous beyond heinosity for them to speak one way and act another.

Karin knocked and the door eased further open on its hinges. “Plant run,” she said, avoiding his eyes. Still miffed at her missed visit.

“No problem,” he replied, as he always replied. She breezed past him and headed for the shelf of devil’s ivy, mother-in-law’s tongue, ficus, and cyperus by the window. He pretended to be buried in his notes, but he could feel the tension between them and he wanted to say something to bring back the early days, their passion, the promise of a beautiful life together. But the courtroom—where he was at home, where his honed eloquence in a good cause brought him and his listeners to satisfying conclusions, where he had played a major part in winning Karin’s acquittal—the courtroom was one place and this accursed house was quite another.

He didn’t know why he’d lost his assertiveness with Karin, but he had. At the beginning, he supposed he had been especially gentle with her because of what she’d been through with men, as if any interaction were like touching a wound. He held back so that she might venture forth and find her long-buried self. He had played the white knight it seemed too well. Gone along with her wishes regarding selling neither the house nor the cabin, the friendly if steady invasion of plants, the visits—at first a drip, then a drizzle, now a steady downpour—to the graveyard. And now, though his voice rang out before one jury after another, though his control on the tennis court was near complete, he felt paralyzed and helpless around his wife, incapable of doing or saying anything that would revivify their lives together.

He looked over to where Karin knelt on the rug before a fiddle leaf fig, her cheek brushing lightly against its woman-hipped leaves, her fingertips moving along the thin stiff stem from which the leaves rose. He looked at her and loved her, wanting to tell her so, but feeling the time, the circumstances, were not right. They were never right these days.

“Karin, I’m really sorry about spoiling your plans for the afternoon.”

She moved her head slightly as if she were going to look at him but changed her mind. “It’s okay,” she said.

But it wasn’t.

THREE

UNWILTING

Wednesday dawned with its sky overcast and troubled, and Karin felt restless all day, as antsy as a smoker with nicotine withdrawal. Rain threatened but never fell, not one drop. Still, the air was just this side of cool, and Karin wore drawstring pants and an old flannel workshirt into the garden for her watering and weeding that morning, replacing the flannel shirt with a cotton blouse when she returned early that afternoon to replenish her basket.

She kept glancing at her watch as she worked, unable to believe how slowly the day moved, how much of her heart was already at Danny’s grave. I’ve got to break out of this, she thought. This isn’t normal, Danny is dead, I really don’t need to feel apologetic. But those were idle thoughts. She knew there was something inside her which demanded she do penance, that at some point she would have offered enough flowers to suffice. On that day, she would be able to walk away from the man who had adored her and abused her with such unholy vehemence, walk away and let her life take what direction it would, whether with Frank Tanner or without him. But until that day, all she could do was grow flowers, gather them, offer them to his buried corpse, cry over them and caress them, talking to her dead husband to assuage the pain in her own heart.

Since ten days past, when Daylight Savings Time had kicked in, sunset didn’t arrive until after seven-thirty, so Karin usually left the house around five-thirty, which gave her a good hour and a half to be with Danny and watch the daylight die. But on this day, when she’d planned on spending an extra thirty minutes at the gravesite, she was so fidgety that by the time her watch said 4:15, she’d had enough of waiting. Fifteen minutes later, she was on the road, a basket of jonquils, veronicas, blue flax, pansies, orange pinwheels, and assorted singles beside her.

When she arrived, Mister Romano was not on his porch. She saw him off in the distance through a stand of cypress trees, walking with an elderly man and woman and gesturing toward where a newer part of the cemetery climbed a slight rise. They had their backs to her and were distant enough that she doubted they had heard her drive in.

The tops of the trees swayed and rustled in the wind. It was only when Karin saw Betsy Trillin’s grave that she realized she’d forgotten to clip a sprig of baby’s breath for her. She felt terrible. She knew the missed day had distracted her but she hadn’t realized how much until this moment. She drew forth a bright yellow Missouri primrose, set it on the tiny grave, and retrieved the withered sprig she’d laid two days before. “Sorry, little darling,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring two sprigs, I promise.”

Danny’s grave lay just ahead and her heart fell when she saw the shriveled flowers. Funny. It had only been the end of March that her visits had become daily instead of every other day. Even so, a sight she’d been used to then now horrified her. Windflowers and wakerobins set out on Monday lay limp and puckered on his grave. Blooms she had revived a bit on Sunday were far beyond the pale: shriveled, withered, on their way to desiccation.

Karin knelt and lifted a wilted coreopsis.

“Forgive me, Danny,” she said. Nervously she stroked the brittle yellow puff, now brown at the edges. The name cut into his simple stone, DANIEL ARTHUR DANIELS, seemed chiseled with reproach. Danny’d hated his last name, the sound of it reminding him of spaniel tails and of Henry Daniell from The Bodysnatcher, whose face was mean and doglike. Still caressing the dead flower, she glanced away from his name and down at the plot. “His car konked out. I had to pick him up and drive him home. The call came after five, I couldn’t have reached you before the gates closed.” She heard the rising tone in her voice, knew how absurd her whining sounded, yet felt the tight knot—so familiar from her final months with him—in her stomach. Her ears stung then from Danny’s yelling at her close up. Glimpses of his wolfish face, twisted in hate, the mouth moving strangely around hard angled words, came rushing at her. “I’m sorry, Danny, I’m sorry.”

Her thumb moved over the coreopsis like wind rippling through fields of wheat, a troubled wind keening over the cool crimped softness of its bloom.

Softness.

She stopped stroking, stopped the unconscious rocking her body had been about. She stared down at the brilliant yellow flower cupped in her left hand. No hint of brown, no wilt. Her thumb resumed its motion and she brought her other fingers into play. The flower seemed to reach for them, to respond like a yearning lover, as they caressed and left each tightly bunched petal. Karin blinked, not believing what she was seeing. The bloom, limp and dry when she lifted it—or could she have been mistaken?—now felt like cool misted tissue paper, drawn tight in rings of thin yellow mouths around the central hub.

Lifting it to her nose, she inhaled a strange mix of fragrance and mortality that both revolted and attracted her. She set it down on Danny’s grave. It looked oddly out of place among the dead and dying blooms, alive again and yet with a glaze of razor-thin ice, a sheen, a patina that announced its apartness even from the freshly picked flowers in her basket.

Leaves rustled above, the wind wafted by her cheeks. The old couple still conferred with Mister Romano in the distance. Karin felt a twinge of guilt, as if she were doing something that ran counter to the rules. She idled an index finger around the outside of the coreopsis bloom, then eased down the stem, slowly, pushing the love of this flower, the love of life, into it. It was like stroking the green spine of an invisible lizard, a straight line almost like a crack in the earth. Her finger made love to the planet through this thin wire quivering with revival. She could feel it caressing her brain, she almost imagined she saw it swell with moisture, drawing it out of the air to feed the brilliant yellow bloom she’d brought back from the dead.

Now her hands began to stray left and right over the grave, tentative in their touch, feeling how far gone each flower was, feeling the distinct nature of each vegetative death—and feeling the urge again to push. She fixed on a Southern Belle hibiscus, its ten-inch bloom of deep red looking like a collapsed hat, a fallen soufflé of blood and pastry dough. With all ten fingers, she touched its red wrinkle, treadling and moving about, massaging lightly the troubled ruffles. She could feel the power-of-the-coreopsis, as she thought of it, building in her like a static charge; but she let it out slowly now, a slow push, nothing fast or violent, learning what it was she had hold of here, learning by exercising, by stretching, by feeling the hibiscus bloom come back under her fingers. It cooed, it curled, it purred, and death relaxed its grip to allow life abundant to seep back into the flower.

“If Granny Eva could only see me now,” she said. The old woman’s face came back, then faded, but its look spoke clearly to Karin for the first time. Though she could not now remember specific things her grandmother had told her, she felt for the first time a deeper connection to Granny Eva, beyond kinship, beyond gratitude for the refuge she’d provided back then, beyond even the common bond of their womanhood—something whose roots sank deep into the core of the earth. This was a power her granny had known, had enjoyed, though perhaps not as intensely as Karin.

Shame seized her. In the joy of her discovery, she had forgotten where she was, why she was here. “Oh Danny, forgive me. I’ve been bringing these flowers back without a thought to you. They were cut for you, brought for you, laid here above your murdered body. Let me give each one of them the life they’ve lost and leave them here for you, once more a plea for forgiveness.” Where her hands roved, she saw colors unfade and deepen, felt limp stems stiffen, shriveled petals take on the starch and moisture of light. “If only I could bring you back to me as easily as these flowers—”

—(drunken Danny, beer fumes reeking off his clothes, tugging on her arms, calling her a fucking slutbitch of a wife, yanking jolts of hurt out of her sockets, squeezing her shoulders tight enough to stress bone, hurtling her backward onto the bed)—

“—the loving half only, all hurt left in the grave.” She beat back the memory. Her heart pounded in her chest. Its pulse quickened through her, the blood pumping even to the fingertips that gave a windflower a sudden push toward life. She could almost hear it yelp with the violence of her still nascent talents. “You loved me in the beginning I know you did and there was none of that . . . nothing to get in its way. My life was nowhere. You anchored me for two solid years, said you loved me every day, many times a day, showed it to me in so many ways.” He’d swept her out from behind that dimestore counter, brought her completely into his life, shared his hopes, his dreams, juggernauted her into bed that first evening, overwhelmed every inch of her nakedness with love, his taut muscular body pistoning into her after he’d drenched her in the sweat and lushness of her own orgasms, nothing of the cautious fastidiousness of Frank, no, this was Danny, who’d married her and bought her the house and the cabin and tried for two years to get a son on her and then, when the doctor told him he was not capable of fathering a child, had begun to stay out later, to drink more, to let cracks open in the sleek simple love he had for her, cracks where demons of doubt and betrayal and resentment seeped in and began to grow.

Karin brought three hollyhock clusters—copper, pink, and white—back from oblivion where they lay together over her husband’s heart. The stems plumped out, and the grass beneath them, matted like Danny’s chest hair, seemed to do the same, even appearing to grow taller under the touch of her fingertips. She closed her eyes as her fingers roved, moving between flowers and grass, pretending that this was indeed his hairy torso, this green shield of a grave mound, and that she was coming up behind him, her breasts at his back, her hands moving upon his chest, at his nipples, one hand moving lower into a riot of thicker hair, seeking the hot stiffness of his love—

—(Danny insane with jealousy, his betrayal of her with Nona causing him to invent lovers for her, tearing her clothing off, trying to find love bites or crusted stains on her skin, a telltale glint in her eye, beating at her face and breasts, raising bruises where his fists fell, collapsing upon her body, sobbing in drunkenness, begging her forgiveness, and then, when he had it from her, fiercely loving her with all his heart and mind and body)—

—she jolted her eyes open. “No!” she said, feeling it as a shout inside, but only whispering it. Her hands clutched at the grass. From between her fingers a small cautious insect crept, an insect of the same sort as the one whose dead carapace she’d seen among the spare blades of grass just where her hand now lay. But the grass was not spare any more. It was thick and twisted, not a riot of growth, but enough to convince her she had somehow been the cause of it. The whole bed of grass she’d been laying her hands on appeared likewise, and the flowers shone like new upon it, glazed blooms on green coconut over a barely visible frosting of dark chocolate.

Karin had a sudden urge to give Mister Romano one of these flowers. Time had passed and she noticed him now in his darkened house, watching over her but pretending not to, Tabby on his lap. She placed the newly cut flowers in and around the old, gave each of them one last gentle push from her fingertips, and chose the original coreopsis she had begun with.

She lifted it off the grave.

And heard two sounds that raised the hair on the back of her neck and set her skull to throbbing. The first was a distant muffled dog whimper, short, choked off, and from a direction impossible to determine. The second sound was a short huff, so quiet Karin was almost convinced she had imagined it, a feint toward the clearing of a throat—and its echo in her head tied it to something terrifying, but what that was she had no idea.

She’d never ever been scared of graveyards. But for one moment she understood those who were. Nonsense, came the thought; a branch in a dark wood mistaken for an arm, raising a hackle or two, but settling back almost at once into explicable patterns. Rising, she looked in at Mister Romano and shrugged off all but the faintest vestiges of the frisson that had raced through her.

“See you tomorrow, Danny,” said Karin, and blew him a kiss. Then she lifted her basket in one hand, the revived coreopsis in the other, and moved beyond his grave toward the warmly lit porch of Mister Romano’s house.

***

Life blasted through him like cleansing fire.

Fever burned him up, but no rivulets of sweat coursed down his face. Nothing to sweat out. Eternity in a black airless sauna had leathered him like a bog mummy.

Felt like he was frying under light, a mirrored sun sizzling both sides of him—or like he was caught, coming out of sleep, in a raging inferno, its strong orange hand closing conflagration about him. But there was nothing to see but pitch blackness, no sound but the pounding of pain in his head, no smell but that pervasive stench like week-old road kill confined and concentrated.

He wanted to scream, the needles of fire wove so deep and deft into him. But his lungs were dead. And even as he pictured his lungs, a fisted ball of flame seared down his throat, scattering its offshoots into every branching tube and byway, an effervescence of pain. The bellows of his chest rose, his flesh screaming at the outrageousness of movement, yet still no sound assaulted his ears.

The thought that the pain had peaked came to him many times, but new agony continually surprised him. An image reared up: The dentist who put him under and dug out his wisdom teeth, four at once, speaking to him through a haze of Valium and Darvon, “Be sure to fill this prescription, Danny. Believe me, you’re going to need these pills when the anesthetic wears off.” But he’d ignored the advice, misplaced or tossed the slip of paper with Doctor Wrench-and-Tug’s scrawl across it, suffered as the throbbing haze grew harsher and lost its fuzzy edges in favor of razors, razors that twisted and sank deeper, sprouting barbs and scraping into exposed nerve and bone like the snacking of rats. It was like that now, but all over his body, harsh and dark and flaring, an unseen sun roasting him through and through.

The dentist had called him Danny. His name. It fit somehow, though there was something about it he detested. His chest rose and fell, adjusting to the agony, deriving no oxygen from the dead air but keeping up the rhythm of in-and-out because that was what living flesh did. Moving air deepened the stench. His tongue flexed in revulsion, and it was as if it had pressed up against a taut criss-cross of razor-wire, cut buds punished with the taste of rot. He swallowed. Instant regret. Felt like the Jolly Green Giant was dry-humping his throat, thrusting thorned, flesh-tattering prickmeat as deep and wide as it would go, ravaging with vegetative rape the long snaky length of his alimentary canal.

A fresh blast of heat, and Danny knew who was behind it. The assault had the feel of Karin about it, and as he thought the name, he saw her again. The kriss coming into him, her face a mass of bruises and blood, her puffed eyes crying and yet glinting as hard and sharp as the blade she plunged into his chest. The pain in his heart, the energy draining from his hands, his arms, a dizzying in his head, then swift nothing. She’d been so meek, so compliant, so docile, but inside there’d lurked a scrapper; he knew that and he loved to goad it, to see it cower just beneath the surface, to beat it down again and crow over it, then to let the hard side melt and the softness of regretful love overwhelm them both.

The gravy had driven her past her limit. The gravy and Wolf’s rough tongue licking it up. Jesus, he thought, she must have done one hefty shitload of damage for me to feel this way. Took my fucking eyes out for one thing, no light anywhere, totaled my fucking optic nerves.

Must be in a hospital bed.

But it didn’t feel like a hospital bed. There were no tucked-in sheets to resist, just a heavy wash of pain, a renewed surge of which now assaulted him like a wave of radiation. But this pain left behind a new strength, took away the dread sense and panic that there was no limit to what he had to endure. He tried moving a hand, found it was like thrusting it into a bucket of fishhooks, but had the will to keep drumming his fingers on the hard surface he lay on, drumming until he could bear the anguish of it and try something more daring.

He slid his fingers around, feeling the smooth cool bed sheets. Satin sheets? In a hospital? And they didn’t seem to cover any mattress. A board maybe. Christ, had she broken his back too? Another assault from above, and the stench went from offensive to intolerable, not because its intensity deepened but because his nose seemed infused with new life. This place didn’t smell like any hospital he’d ever been in before; more like high noon in a fucking slaughterhouse, if he had to judge.

Yet another assault, but the last few were beginning to feel pretty good. It wasn’t exactly that the pain grew less or was taken away, but more like it settled into his body for the long haul, turning into pockets of muscle or hard domes of thought. What was the deal here? Had they strapped him into some machine or other, an isolation tank with x-rays? Christ, he hoped that was it, that his eyes were just fine, simply not in use at the moment.

He bent his arms, gritting his teeth at the agony of it. The sides of this thing were awfully close in. Flat, upright, covered with the same cloth as the surface he lay on. Sleeves moved on his arms. No hospital gown, nor was he naked. Odd. Then his fingers touched the top of this chamber he was confined in, the abrupt satiny hardness of it, and—

Jesus motherfucking Christ!

—he knew. Fucking bitch had fucking killed him, or she’d done enough damage to make it seem so. What sort of dipshit doctor had pronounced him . . . he shoved the word away . . . he’d been fucking buried alive!

Suddenly the pain—which had begun to subside but was still fierce as tigers—could not stand in the way of his rush of panic. He scrabbled upward, clawing at the cloth, shredding it to wispy ribbons that fell like cobwebs about his face, knowing it was absolutely futile but needing to do it anyway. There were no thuds of dirt, no feeling of movement, no hollow knock to tell him he was not yet lost, not yet trapped under packed earth with no hope of escape. Still his hands ripped the satin above and on both sides, punching at the wood in what seemed like a futile gesture but which began to yield results. He dinged and dented it so that he could gain purchase, splintered it, ripped bits of it off and lay them beside him in the coffin.

He paused once, curious at how strong he felt and at how, without a proper supply of air, he could assault the wood so vehemently and yet not become winded. He brought his focus to his lungs. They moved in and out, exercising the dead air around him, but he could tell there was not a hint of oxygen in it.

Made no fucking sense.

Then he heard it: the throttled howl of Wolf, quick, high, and full of pain. It sounded close yet muffled, off to his left, and Danny by God knew why. He remembered his talks with that chubby old mole Walter Pyne, coughing into his hand at the idea of burying a dog in his graveyard but coming around when the cash hit the table. They’d buried Wolf too. But that made no fucking sense; Pyne would have had Wolf put down first, and there was no fucking way on God’s green earth that any vet could make the same fucking mistake the fucking coroner—Danny swore to tear the blind son-of-a-bitch’s eyes out if he ever got free—had made on his master.

Panic rose again and he let out a cry of anguish, a sound that scandalized his throat and hurt his ears. No time to think of such things now. He had to keep up the fight to dig out while his energy still held. No telling when his body would wise up and peter out on him.

With renewed vigor, he assaulted the top and sides of the coffin, tearing enough out of the sides to weaken them and bring the top down on him. He wondered why it wasn’t weighty with three to four feet of packed earth, but then remembered seeing the grave liner, an outer box made from concrete slabs, that encased his stepfather’s coffin when he was buried. Pinch-faced, pinch-penny Archer Daniels. Death had come too slow, by a lifespan, to that smugfuck of a skinflint. Danny ripped at the coffin top, tore it to flinders and set them to either side of him, not that there was a lot of room to maneuver in.

The grave liner felt cold and rough on his fingers. He caught a faint whiff that reminded him of root cellar, but it was overwhelmed by what he now realized was his own stench. Christ, how long had he been under? Had to have been more than a few days for him to smell this foul. On his left, Wolf’s whimpering kept up. His spirits took a nosedive. What hope did he have against concrete? Still he tried pounding at it with his fists and found, to his amazement, that it crumbled bit by bit under his blows. He struck leftward toward Wolf, wanting to free the only friend he’d ever had in the world, then cursed himself for an idiot for not trying to save himself first and switched to assaulting the right side. The slab above him seemed made of hardier stuff, so he left it alone, concentrating on a half-baked plan to crawl out the side and dig his way to the surface.

He punched through to soil on the right first, chunks of concrete hitting his legs, his fingers probing into the impacted earth behind it. He wanted to weep, but there were no tears inside him. Instead he renewed his assault on the grave liner, pounding at it, pulling divot-sized chunks away, feeling for soil, bringing his fists back and ramming them again and again into the cold thick invisible slabs of concrete.

It was about the time it occurred to Danny that all the bones in both hands ought to be broken, the flesh of his fists worn down at the very least to the knuckles—it was about this time that he heard a creaking sound above him and before he could think what it was, the top of the liner fell full upon him, not flattening him but pinning him down, immobile and immovable, no matter how hard he squirmed and struggled beneath it. Bone crushed under the strain, under his face, inside his chest, but the agony of the affront—as bold and gritty as it was—brought no pain or but the dream of pain.

For twenty-four hours, Danny lay there, terrorized by his immobility yet amazed that his body persisted from one no-breath to the next. Wolf’s whimper went on, minute by minute, hour after hour, a Chinese water torture of sound.

The only thing that kept him whole in all that time was his hatred for Karin, for the meek mocking demon who had caused this to happen. Part of him—the part that was shocked at how vile his thoughts were—wanted to drag him down the corridors of insanity in a futile search for the comforts of death. But Danny squelched that weak weepy fucker just like he planned to squelch his blond bitch of a wife. She’d pay for what she’d done if he ever got out of here; by God in heaven he’d wring coins of retribution out of her bones if he had to, damned if he wouldn’t.

***

“Night,” she said, handing him the remote. Nona had just solved the world’s problems, thanks to C-SPAN and her own running political commentary. Now she was off to the showers and an hour or two of bedtime reading in Krantz’s latest trashy novel. Used to be hours of fucking instead, followed by a mutual shower before he went off to work as night security at Hewlett-Packard, and Nona kept whatever rendezvous she’d arranged with one lover or another.

“Later,” he replied, still using his have-we-got-a-problem tone, the one he’d used every since his penis had decided to adopt a permanent hangdog look.

Nona ambled down the hall and disappeared left into their bedroom. Jimmy watched an actress take a spoonful of cornflakes into her sensuous mouth, simulate an orgasm, let milk spill from her lips in slo-mo, all to a pounding upbeat backbeat and frenzied cutaways to the same actress, now naked, squinching her eyes and opening her lips to the needle spray of a shower, her red-nailed fingers coming up to deflect the diamond spray onto her upturned face. Yep, sure made him want to eat some cornflakes. He zapped the sheepdog rising to clamp its jaws on the flung cereal box, flakes arcing up like golden outflings of lava lit by the sun. No sit-coms for Jimmy tonight. He had a bigger and better agenda than that.

When he pushed open the bedroom door, Nona’s red silk teddy was laid out on her side of the bed like a collapsed rose on snow. Nona stood before her closet door, her pale pink blouse tugged out of her jeans and unbuttoned halfway down. “What’s with you?” she said.

“Thought I’d watch you undress,” said Jimmy, propping his pillow against the wall and taking a ringside seat on the bed. “You mind?”

She shrugged and continued to unbutton. “You want to torment yourself, go right ahead.” Letting the blouse fall off her shoulders, she caught it deftly and tossed it into her laundry basket. Her black lace bra followed the swell and jut of her breasts. “Just keep your hands to yourself, Mister Limp Dick.”

Running joke.

“You’re gonna have to find a new name for me, honey.”

“Right. I ain’t seen any evidence of it yet.” She turned to him, watched him with those soulful eyes as her fingers popped her jeans button and eased down the zipper. Slowly she slid them off her hips, bumping and grinding to a slow dance whose tune Jimmy could almost hear. She was teasing him cruelly, bringing back the old days when she’d strip to get him hot.

“You’re doing it to me, baby.”

“Right,” she said. She was grim about it, but there was still the hint of a smile. Nona loved showing off and being appreciated for it. “Above the neck. Boner in your head.”

“Sure like to have my boner in your head.”

“Fat chance.” She unhooked her bra, peeled it like hands reluctant to let go, made Jimmy’s heart leap at the creamy loveliness of her, twin fountains of flesh surging up from her slim waist, caught just so and brought up to two tight pinched-pink nubs.

“Shit, Nona, when God made you, he sure knew what the fuck he was doing.”

“Don’t blaspheme, Jimmy,” she said. “It doesn’t sit right with me.” Slowly she peeled off the tight V of her black lace panties, then tossed them into his lap. “Want a treat? Take a whiff. Remember old times.”

Jimmy crushed them in his hand. “Come here and fuck me,” he said. Her hips made him wild, the golden tuft of private hair springing up like honey spun for his lips.

Nona laughed. “Right.” She strutted her perfection into the bathroom, closed the sliding door behind her. He heard the water splash like rain into the stall. She’d be standing outside it, testing the temperature with one in-thrust hand. His head pounded with desire. Funny to feel this turned on and still be limp as linguine below; in his brain, he felt like he ought to be as stiff and hard as a baseball bat.

Jimmy waited for the shower door to slide open, thud shut, the splash of water dispersed as Nona stepped under it. Then he got up and tore off his clothes, tossing his shirt and socks and underwear into his closet, inverting and hanging up his pants. His fingers fumbled. He was as nervous as a high school kid fixing to lose his virginity with some good-time sally.

He slid his closet door closed and examined himself in its full-length mirror. Fucking pot belly crept up on you, day by day, one taut micro-inch defeated each day so you never noticed it, never cared. Scrawny chest, Jesus it was a wonder Nona had taken to him at all. But women, so they said, cared less about how their men looked than how they treated their ladies. Were they kind, considerate, caring? Fuck, he was all of those to Nona. Didn’t make the greatest of livings, but they got by.

Reaching down, he lifted the long dangle of his dick in his left hand, cupped his balls in his right, feeling for the pump. It had cost a shitload of money, but he was glad he’d done it. Glad, too, he’d mentioned his potency problem to Anson Coombs, his back doctor, who’d suspected nerve damage and referred him to Randolph “Randy” Briggs, a urologist with an office in the same complex.

Spanking young smart-ass was Doctor Briggs, but the snooty fuck knew what he was doing. Shoved a damned tube up Jimmy’s rod to check out his bladder and the nerves in charge of hard-ons. Then took out some sort of vibrating thing to test how sensitive his dick was (“Hey doc,” he’d joked, “it’s so sensitive it cries at weddings.”). Nerve damage from his accumulated history of back problems, the doc had said, was keeping his dingle down.

Over and done with now. Time to end his and Nona’s months of deprivation. Jimmy squeezed the pump again and again like Briggs had taught him, watched his penis grow and harden as the fluid in the reservoir just in front of his bladder flooded the cylinders implanted in his corpora cavernosa like flames whooshing hot air into the uprising, burgeoning folds of a hot-air balloon. Hell, he’d seen a specialty balloon a few years back rise last of all into the Rocklin skies, a champagne bottle in a silver bucket, the crowds applauding and laughing as its flat black top unlimped at last, achieving erection and finally liftoff. He felt like that crowd now. After a year and a half of sexual humiliation, his outsized manflesh at last hefted thick and tall in his hand, a fitting match once more to the excitement brewing in his head. God bless technology, he thought, and God bless the child that’s got his own.

He slid back the bathroom door, stepped into the tiny room with its toilet and its few feet of carpeting and its throw rug and its shower stall, and rumbled the door shut behind him. The water was suddenly louder; mist danced in the air. He could see Nona’s flesh-pink opacity shifting behind the glass. “Jimmy, what the fuck are you doing in here?” she shouted, not angry, just making herself heard over the water. “Use the potty in the hall, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want your stink in here.”

Here goes nothing, he thought, then rolled the shower door open on its runners and stepped inside.

***

“Hey can’t a girl get any—?” privacy around here she was going to say, but faltered when she saw that his ski slope of a pot belly, so long unencumbered by obstacle, now sprouted, from below, the huge tree trunk she’d loved so well in the past.

“A girl can get plenty,” said Jimmy, rumbling the shower door closed and resting his fists on his hips like George Reeves in Superman, “if she knows how to ask for it good and proper.”

Nona was faced away from the detachable shower head, feeling the hot water needle against the back of her wet helmet of hair and stream down the curvature of her spine as she soaped breasts and belly. She reached up to the tiled window ledge and laid the soap in its dish. “You weren’t kidding about that operation, were you?”

“Good as new,” he said proudly, a little boy showing off his trophy. “Better than new.”

With both hands, Nona scooped a thick lather of suds off her breasts and brought it to Jimmy’s genitals. She kissed him as she soaped him, a long lingering kiss, then knelt to inspect her handiwork. The water drummed across the top of her scalp and hit Jimmy in the chest, rivulets zigzagging down his belly to wash the soap from his penis and depend soapy dribbles from his testicles. When Jimmy was erect, damned if he didn’t put John Holmes himself to shame. Popular wisdom had it that most women didn’t care what size a man was as long as he knew what to do with it. Yeah, well fuck that, thought Nona, I’m not most women and I like some heft, some length to my lovers, I like to wrap myself around someone who’s got the stuff to fill me right to the brim and then some.

“This is more like it, Jimmy,” she said, brushing her cheek up against it, feeling its primitive heat. “This is why I married you, honey, and I’m damned glad you’re back to normal.”

“Better than normal, sweets,” he said, hips slowly moving to her rhythm. “Doc says I can last just as long as you want me to.”

“Mmmm, you’ve always done fine in that department.” She lazed her lips up his tentpole, drew back an inch to scrutinize it when she encountered softness at its head, softness that surprised her. It was true, she thought, running a thumb around it and cupping his balls in her other hand. Not as firm as before, kind of flat, almost floppy—odd, as if the head of his penis had decided to sit this one out. Oh well, the rest of him was good as new and the stubborn head—more beret than bowler—would, like a worn eraser on the end of a pencil, just go along for the ride. And Nona planned to make it a ride worth the effort, both for her and for Jimmy.

She eased her lips up over it, gave him head. The shower deflected off Jimmy’s belly and spattered Nona’s forehead with warm water. As she moved, it danced from the bridge of her nose up her brow to the front of her scalp, then back down again. Her right hand clasped the base of him, thumb not touching her other fingers for the thickness of him there; her left gentled below his scrotum the way he liked, stroking and squeezing lightly. Jimmy’s hand closed on her left wrist, almost as if to stop her. And then she felt something weird under his skin, and he softened in her mouth, lost all his glorious thickness in seconds, went floppy and flat like a boned finger as the strain on her ringed lips eased and vanished altogether. Damned thing died right there in her mouth.

She let it fall out, watched it flop in shame above his balls. “Nice try, champ,” she said, rising to her feet, “but you’re going to have to do a whole hell of a lot better than that. Now get out of here, Mister Limp Dick, and let me finish my—”

“No, wait, Nona, it’s all right. You hit the wrong button, that’s all. Here, I’ll just pump it back up and things’ll be as good as new.” Jimmy looked frantic. He had his hand cupped around himself and his fingers were feeling for something, almost as if he thought the fleshy pouch contained a lost coin if he could only feel it out. Then he relaxed a little—found it!—and his hand pulsed to some rhythm he seemed to know. His penis perked up, a hound dog sniffing something in the wind, and Jimmy began to spout nonsense. “See, Nona, I could have gone for the permanent boner, the Flexirod or the Small-Carrion, which I remember because it has such a bizarre name, but really it’s named after the two doctors who invented it—”

“Wait, what—?” His penis was stirring, waving back and forth over his balls like an old blind snake. She’d had the pleasure of bringing on this sort of resurrection before, but there was something odd, almost zombie-like, about this priapic revival.

“—but hell I couldn’t stand the idea of twisted wire covered with rubber and shoved into my dick, Jesus what if you and me bent it one time too many and the damned thing broke. Made me shiver.” His thing continued to fill out, angling up as if to hear him better, ultimate egotist, in love with talk about itself. “So we chose an inflatable. Reservoir here, pump down here—”

“You mean you—?” Nona’s head felt hot. This whole monstrous thing was swirling in on her, snatches of babble falling together like woozy jigsaw puzzle pieces yammering over her objections into her mind.

“Yes, twin inflatable balloon things on the right and left where the blood usually flows in and out.” His penis stood now fully at attention. “Here let me show you where the release valve is so you—”

Jimmy took her hand but she yanked it back. “Get out of here, you fucking freak!” she screamed. “And take your fucking Frankendick with you!” He was suddenly loathsome to her, a pathetic old man looking beyond his forty years, his life one joke after another. And now, without telling her in advance, without giving her a say in the decision, he’d managed to turn his prick into a joke too, an insult to her and to their marriage.

“But Nona, I—”

She snatched a bottle of Vidal Sassoon UltraCare from the ledge and hurled it at him. It slapped at his chest, urped pink goop on his left shoulder, and clattered to the stippled floor. His bottle of cheap, vile-smelling, blue-green dandruff shampoo followed; Jimmy deflected it, tried to catch it as it fell, but sent it smashing instead into the shower doors, making them rattle violently in their runners. “Get out of here,” she said, “get out!” But still he stood there trying to calm her, trying to reason chaos away, his huge erection absurdly rigid, flapping this way and that as he dodged her missiles and blows.

Anger throbbed in her head, made her strong in rage. The fucker was still here, still jabbering. She reached for the shower head, yanked it out of its holder, gripped its white plastic handle. Up the gushing thing rose, its shiny silver flexcord slapping at her arm. Down it came, hard, against Jimmy’s skull, a sudden slap of shower water froomp like a lawn sprinkler across his face. Again it rose and fell, connected once more, this time smack on his left ear. “Stop, that hurts,” he said, his arms up like a boxer on the defensive, him trying to backpedal but being stopped by the tiles. Her third blow hit him high on the shoulder blade as he turned to the door, the water sickling up his neck like splayed rake tines to slap at the back of his skull. Then in a flash, the door rumbled open and he was gone, his naked body flinging drops of water out into the bathroom, the door shuddering closed, then rebounding open an inch, in her face.

Nona’s head was throbbing. Her throat was sore from the shouting she’d done. She leaned back against the cool tile of the outer wall and cried, one hand rubbing at her forehead, the other collapsed on her thigh, still holding the gushing shower head, which braided hot snaky rivulets down the smooth shaved skin of her right leg. She’d show him, she thought. She’d go on a sexual rampage the likes of which he’d never seen, she’d flaunt it openly, force it on the world, humiliate the motherfucker but good.

For a moment she was outside by the mailboxes, warm male hand clasped in hers, pressing it up into the crotch of her shorts, watching Mister Hot-Shot Attorney falter an instant before he walked away. Then she was back in the shower, slowly regaining control over her breathing—but Frank Tanner’s face, a conflict of doubts raging not all that far beneath the surface, stayed with her, teased her, tantalized her, turned her way the fuck on.

FOUR

IN THE GARDEN

Ethan Bell’s sprightly rap startled Frank. His head poked in, gave a scattershot of sound: “Lookertoseeyou, Frank.”

“Come again?”

The younger man, making a show of exasperation and over-enunciating his words, leaned in, most of him still behind the door. “There’s a woman out here, dressed to the nines, asking for you.”

Frank glanced at his desk clock: 6:50. “Why’d you let her in? You know I use seven to nine for catch-up. No meetings, no clients, no exceptions.”

A shrug. “She blew me a kiss.”

“Fine, then kiss her and get rid of her. Tell her to call for an appointment.”

“Says she knows you. Nona something.”

Frank looked up from his papers. “Nona Gallagher?”

“Bingo, Mister Sabich.” Ethan fired a finger gun at him. “Now if we can just locate that missing glass, we’ll have enough evidence to send you away for life.”

Frank laughed. “You should talk.”

“I’ll show her in.”

“No, that’s all right.” Frank pushed his chair back and got up. “We’ll use the El Dorado room.”

Ethan stepped back to let Frank through. “Big table, plush chairs, picture window on beautiful downtown Sacra-tomato, and enough glass into the main office to make your meeting semi-private at best? Where’s the fun in that?”

“Right where it belongs,” said Frank, “nowhere.” He caught Nona seated beside Jeannine’s vacant desk. “I do believe I’d prefer safe to fun in this case.”

“Frank, my man, you are crazy.”

“But magnanimous with my cabin keys.”

“Magnanimous to a fault. For which I thank you once again, and for which I’m sure my Marcie—once she recovers from the workout I have in store for her—will also thank you most profusely.”

“Hello, Frank,” she said, her cherry lips liquid with words. Rising, she offered her hand. Frank took it.

“Nona.” Ethan was right. Her dress, a black number of frills and satin, hugged her in all the right places, played up her breasts and hips, and broke just above the knee. Patterned stockings took over, going straight down her amazing legs to a pair of three-inch heels. She had a black clutch purse in one hand and a thin choker of black velvet around her neck. Her platinum hair was swept to one side and caught up in a black-sequined barrette. On any other woman, the outfit would have been overdone; on Nona, it was staggering. That surprised Frank, who was usually turned off more than on by women who adopted the frou-frou of femininity.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call first, Frank, but I—” She stopped to look over at Ethan, who was hiding a smile.

“Well I’ll see you two later,” said Ethan, “I’ve got some work to do.” Frank introduced them, then Ethan took off, though not before glancing a split-second of manly significance Frank’s way.

“I remembered you mentioning you weren’t busy before nine and—”

“I’m very” he began, then regretted it. “Go on.” And then he regretted that. If only he could assert himself as boldly in real life as he did in the courtroom.

“Pardon?”

“Please continue.”

“—and I needed to see you about something.”

Frank nodded and showed her into the El Dorado room, her perfume not overdone, just enough to make him think of pheromones. He pulled out a chair for her and watched her pear-shaped bottom ease into it.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asked.

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

She looked at him.

“Office policy.”

She opened her clutch purse, tamped out a Camel on the ball of her thumb, put it between her lips—soft, red, in a generously wide mouth—and lit it. Inhaling, she blew a thick stream of smoke past his face, her O’d lips a Monroe pucker. Then she grinned like an impish girl who loves to break rules and Frank let free with laughter, in which she joined. She gave him a dark look, almost a leer, and rose to her feet.

Frank watched her strut about the room, fingering the backs of plush swivel chairs, the goose-curved silver neck of the overhead projector, the perfect sheen of the top of the conference table. She peered out the window, one arm a shelf beneath her bosom, the other involved in cigarette maneuvers. Her back swayed up from her waist like a woman in a lingerie ad. One leg lazed behind the other.

“So what can I do for you, Nona?”

She smiled, not turning her head, still fixed perhaps on the capitol dome and the flowered park around it. She took another puff, then said, “Do you do divorce?”

The question caught him up short.

“Not as a general rule,” he said, suddenly eaten up with curiosity but stifling it. “Even if I did, I would, as a general rule, avoid divorce cases involving people I know outside of my professional life.”

Almost as if she’d expected his answer, Nona veered off on another tangent. “Your wife’s first husband and I had an affair. Lasted a good year and a half. First time we laid eyes on each other, we knew.” She held Frank with a cool smoky gaze, then released him. “Queenie and I took our evening walk to Forty-Niner Park soon after they moved in. Danny was there, at a picnic table, watching Wolf run free. I unleashed Queenie and sat next to him. There was easy talk at first, new neighbor stuff, no one else in the park, we were a foot apart. And then the talk stopped and he took his hand and put it on my knee and ran it smoothly up to here, where my shorts began.”

“I don’t see how this—”

Nona reshelved her arm, but this time her hand curved beneath her right breast, the thumb idling back and forth at her nipple. “I looked out toward the swing set and the slides and saw them in the sand, right under a floodlight, Wolf and Queenie going at it. Wolf had his paws together on her back like he was praying. I laughed and Danny did too and then I guided his pinkie and ring finger, the ones he’d slid under the cuff of my shorts, farther along so he could feel how . . . how moist I was, and then he—”

“That’s enough,” said Frank. He rose, feeling used by this woman, sickened by new evidence of Danny Daniels’ callousness toward Karin, and—he had to admit it—turned on by Nona’s seductive ways, despite the transparency of her wiles. “I have lots to do and I’m not interested in hearing anything more about Danny Daniels.”

Nona stood by the window. Running a hand along her hip, she looked at Frank and said, “Queenie is lonely for Wolf and I’m lonely for the man next door.”

“Nona, you’re a beautiful woman, but I’ve got to tell you you’re not acting beautiful at the moment.” He didn’t know whether to usher her out bodily or simply to open the conference room door in hopes she’d take the hint.

“Jimmy’s been impotent for nearly a year and now some doctor’s gone and put a hard-on engine in his dick, turned him into a monster. I need you, Frank, I need to make the most beautiful love in the world with you.”

“That’s enough, Nona.” He took a step toward her but halted when she held out her arms. He strode to the door. “This conference has gone on far too long. I’m sorry but I love my wife and I’m not in the market for an affair.” He gripped the handle and pulled the door open.

Nona sighed, stubbed her cigarette out on the marble sill, then retrieved her clutch purse and sauntered toward the door. “You’re forceful. I like it. It’s not a side you show much, is it? Danny was that way all the time, no surprise I guess; but I turned him to putty in my house, I got him to play along, made him beg for it.”

“That’s enough, Nona.”

“There’s lots of ways to a man’s heart, Frank.” She touched his cheek and he drew back. “I just haven’t found the way to yours yet. But I will.” The voice was playful but there was hurt as well. “See you soon, Frank.”

Frank didn’t escort Nona past Jeannine’s desk to the door, but walked instead back to his office, catching the easy sway of her body out of the corner of one eye—that and the mimed wolf-whistle of Ethan, who peered out of his office door and gave the A-OK sign to Frank.

Frank returned to his desk and tried to collect his thoughts. Ten to seven. Karin rose at six-thirty. If he was lucky, he’d catch her between shower and garden. He lifted the receiver, punched up the number.

“Tanners,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“Frank?”

“Who else?”

“Anything wrong? Car conk out again?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to call and tell you, you know, what I told you.”

“That you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Well, good. Well, I . . . I love you too.”

“Great!” Form’s sake. She didn’t really mean it.

She said nothing.

“Um, see you later, okay?”

“Okay, Frank. Have a good day.”

They hung up and Frank wished he hadn’t called. He’d stop someplace on the way home, maybe pick up a fruit and cheese basket. Quit early. Get home before she left for the graveyard. No, that would be too much, too pushy, an affront. Time enough for him to give it to her after dark when she got home.

There it was again. That wishy washy, Charlie Brown way of his, never a problem in the courtroom, but life was so much more complex and rudderless than the law. Law, an elaborate structure of words that closed in the blood and guts of chaotic reality. There seemed to Frank no clear-cut ground for belief in anything, no convenient right or wrong. People who met him first in the office or at home and who then had occasion to observe him in the courtroom were invariably astonished at the force of his words, the conviction behind them. Mere role-playing; not a lie, no, he believed in his client’s cause while he was arguing it, but belief was so much more uncertain when he put off his lawyerly role and the whirligig world rushed in.

That was his problem with Karin. She had met him in the turmoil of her trial for murder; then there’d been the fervor he’d had to employ afterward to ensure she received the treatment, both physical and psychological, she needed for full recovery. Events came with a built-in structure, a mold to pour his passion into. But then things had died down, and it was just the two of them alone in this house, unshared insecurities making for unease. She’d started to draw away, visiting the graveyard with increased frequency and canceling, against his advice, her remaining sessions with Doctor Williamson.

Maybe he could bring her a gift, candy or a basket of goodies, talk to her about all of this, talk it out.

But then, he thought, maybe it was too late for that, months too late.

***

Karin felt touched by Frank’s phone call all day, a little thing, his “I love you,” but nice to hear and nice to feel again in her ear when she recalled it. After the early morning watering, after the weeding and replanting that followed, she had an idea: She’d pick a bouquet for Frank, say mid-afternoon, clean up that vase Granny Eva’d given her, the tall pink and green one accumulating dust in the garage, and put it out on Frank’s nightstand with a little love note attached. Maybe come home from her visit early, invade his study, seduce the hell out of him.

The day had started with a nip in the air, so Karin had worn socks and jeans and two layers on top as she went from one plot to the next, water wand in hand, keeping up her running conversation with the flowers and giving their root systems just the amount of water they needed. Later in the morning, she had traded in her jeans for drawstring pants and stripped off one layer above, to her ten-year-old peach blouse with the rip in one elbow; but she always rolled up the sleeves, so that didn’t matter. In between bouts of weeding, she wandered among the flowers as usual, talking to them, touching them, bringing her face close to their blooms, breathing their fragrance. But today, after her discovery at the cemetery, she did these things with a new consciousness.

Perhaps she’d absorbed her granny’s gardening skills at her elbow those many years ago, so much so that they’d become instinctual or, at the very least, below conscious awareness. But today, she had a new appreciation, a new reverence, for her power. Where before she had imagined that she was a mere catalyst, bringing forth what existed in the flowers themselves but remaining herself unchanged, now she felt the gentle flow of power through her fingers, her lips, her cheeks, every part of her skin that touched stem or leaf or bloom, now she felt the life-giving force that flowed through her and coaxed out what was strongest and healthiest in each plant.

It seemed not as intense as it had been the previous evening, but she thought perhaps it ebbed and flowed, and besides, there wasn’t now the high adrenalin of discovery she’d had to draw on at Danny’s grave. In any event, one thing was clear, thinking back on the year since she had taken his life: Her gardening skills, as good as they’d been before, were continually improving. This power she had been blessed with was growing stronger. And, more important to her well-being, her own personal strength, long suppressed by a lifetime of abuse—first from her father and then from Danny—was cautiously flowing back into her life, rising with increasing confidence to the surface.

She ate lunch and drove out to the nursery for some new seedlings and a two-cubic-foot bag of organic compost. When she returned, the sun had pushed the mercury up past ninety-five. The white mailtruck was stopped by the Ryder house. Karin waved at the pith-helmeted mail carrier, who waved back, a sheaf of mail in his hand. Frank loved to receive mail, loved collecting it himself when he arrived home, no matter if it was all throw-away stuff. That was fine with Karin, who expected nothing but gardening mail, catalogs and magazines, and she could wait a few hours to see them appear on the dining room table.

Quarter to three. Time to gather Frank’s bouquet and make it presentable, then pick some flowers for Danny—not as many as usual, since she would surely be able to revive at least the ones she’d left yesterday—and drive to the cemetery. In her bedroom, she peeled off what she’d been wearing and put on a halter top, three big buttons at the back and a pattern which entwined the bell-shaped white of lily of the valley with the purple of creeping myrtle; a wide-brimmed hat; and a pair of pink shorts, cuffed nearly to the crotch. She slathered sunblock on her legs, on her belly and back, on her neck, shoulders, and arms, so that her skin glistened.

At first Karin didn’t want to use the same basket to gather Frank’s flowers as she used for Danny’s. She went so far as to empty out the long wicker basket they kept rolls of wrapping paper in. But she decided it looked too big and bulky and just plain wrong and that she was being silly, so she refilled it and put it back up on top of the bookshelves in the front room where it belonged. She laid out two red-and-white checked dishcloths on the bottom of the basket and decided that made it sufficiently different to serve her purpose.

Then she went out the kitchen door and surveying the ruly riot of shape and color that was her garden. “Okay, folks,” she said under her breath, “which of you is ready to make the grand sacrifice for love.” Love felt strange to say, as regarded Frank, not quite true, yet not a word she felt like retracting.

A cluster of nymph gladiolus, white with an open red spade marking on each petal, beckoned to her first, and she smiled and made for them, there at the fence between her property and Alice Brown’s. She wandered like a bee from one part of the garden to another, picking out just the blooms that spoke to her feelings for Frank, or maybe for what she wished those feelings were. Halfway through her task, she heard Jimmy Gallagher trying to keep silent behind his fence, saw movement at that same knothole he loved to peep at her through. Fucking asshole, thought Karin, then scolded herself. Poor idiot’s harmless, if obnoxious as all hell. Still she felt angry at him, at the invasion of her privacy. She’d at least have to see about plugging up that knothole.

Then she heard a skittering behind her, like a dog scrabbling at a door. When she turned around, Jimmy was completing his leap over the fence, coming down on a bed of bearded iris. He righted himself at their expense and came out onto the cobblestones. “Hi,” he said, and broke into a nervous grin. There was sweat on his forehead.

Karin was too shocked to say anything.

He started toward her and Karin realized it was less shock that held her still as it was fear, an old fear now welling up out of its hiding place.

“Nice afternoon,” he said.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, but it came out soft and trembly. She felt outrage inside, huge and burly, but it was shackled down and didn’t show. The fear surged through her, filling its old haunts, settling in for a spell.

“Just paying a neighborly visit is all.” He ran his eyes over her. She’d seen him joke around before, even be mock-demonic to frighten the kids in the neighborhood, but there was something new in his eyes. She looked down, saw the huge bulge in his trousers, felt energy drain from her limbs. “You look very pretty this afternoon, Karin, quite quite lovely.”

“Go away.” Same damned little-girl voice. It seemed to come from a great distance.

“Lovely hair, lovely face, lovely—” he blinked and licked his lips, seemingly disquieted at the things coming out of his mouth, but also encouraged by them, encouraged to go on, “—lovely breasts, lovely nipples, little twin darlings look like they’re hardening right up as I speak, lovely tummy, lovely inny belly-button, makes me want to lick right around it and inside it, lovely hips—”

“Please go away.” There was a break in her voice, a well of tears blurring her vision but not spilling out.

He stepped closer.

Inside, her anger thrashed about. She could catch a glimpse of it now and again, but far more overwhelming was the old awful feeling she thought she’d conquered. It had been with her forever, this fear that acquiesced, and now it held her just as firmly in its grip as ever.

“May I touch your beautiful body?”

“No,” she whispered, and felt his fingers on her arm, just above the elbow. She shuddered. Jimmy’s hand closed on her biceps and his other hand did the same on her left side, so that she was parenthesized by his desires.

“Smooth arms,” he said, looking only at the front of her halter. His hands squeezed her, like the hands of a butcher appraising meat, from elbows to shoulders. Then they traveled to her midriff, curving about her ribcage, and his nostrils, big and hairy, sniffed at her cleavage. He looked nothing like the Jimmy Gallagher she knew, and for one moment she thought he might be an impostor. Then she remembered Danny, how unlike himself he’d looked when he beat her and tormented her, and she knew that what she was seeing was something Jimmy kept inside, only bringing it out on special occasions.

“Don’t,” she whimpered.

“Calm down, Karin,” he said, and planted a small wet kiss on the top of her left breast. His thumbs made twin swirls about her nipples. “I won’t do anything you don’t really want me to. All you have to do is say no like you genuinely mean it, and I’ll stop.” His hands went around back of her, met in the middle.

“What are you doing?”

His hands fumbled at the buttons. “Taking off your halter.”

“Why?”

“Because I like you, Karin.”

The halter came loose. He tugged it off and tossed it aside. She made to cover her breasts, but he took her hands down and held them firmly at her sides.

“Christ in heaven, you are one beautiful woman.”

Her vision blurred with tears. He forced her hands together in front of her so that they came together palms out and her V’d arms pushed her naked breasts up and out. The sun shone hot upon them. His eyes burned into them, laser beams searing her flesh as he lowered his head to taste her.

***

Nona had come in just before nine that morning, right after Jimmy had gotten home from work. She’d been dressed to kill in a steamy black outfit, but she didn’t look like she’d been out all night. Pissed about something, though. “Stay the fuck away from me!” she’d bellowed, slamming the bedroom door in his face.

Fine. Fucking bitch. He had spare pj’s, toiletries, bedding, the works, in the guest room for occasions like this, or for times when she snagged a particularly decent lover and just didn’t give a fuck if Jimmy found out. He would usually see Mister Prick-of-the-Moment’s car by the curb, quietly invade his house, and slink into the spare bed for some shuteye, five or six hours’ worth, doing his best to ignore the humping and groaning two closed doors and a hallway’s distance away. Sometimes the rhythm of it lulled him to sleep.

Today, when he woke, Nona was gone. He’d had a bowl of Total, a shave, and a shower, remembering the slam of the laundry room door half-waking him at ten, the up-and-down rumble of the garage door completing the job, but he had soon subsiding again into sleep. As he was dressing, he’d heard Karin Tanner working in her garden, flashed on what she looked like through the knothole, and decided to check her out.

Something about her today had really turned him on. He thought at first it was the sunlight on her flanks or the way her halter strap cut across the valley down her back; some women had that nice V of flesh, the kind that made running your hands down the two halves of their back almost as exciting as stroking their breasts. But then he realized what it was: This was the same skimpy outfit she had been wearing that night two summers ago when he’d been privileged to watch Danny Daniels strip his wife and have her right smack in the middle of her fucking garden, over first her whimpered protests and then her suppressed cries of delight. He’d exposed his wife’s white nakedness, then his own, to the warm moonlight and stood beside her on the cobbles, stroking her, arousing her, then forcing her down to feed on him, like a wood nymph gnawing on a fat gnarled stub of branch from a dark tree trunk.

The crazy notion had popped into his head to take her now that same way in the blinding sunlight. It fed on his anger at Nona, the way she’d rejected him last night, the finality he’d felt in her door slam this morning. And it fed on his desire for Karin, a lust he’d nursed for years, and my my wasn’t it a big bruiser now? So before he could intrude any hesitation to stop himself, he pumped up his manhood and took a running leap at the fence.

Now here he was, those tender breasts within licking distance, her weak pliable hands just inches away from his erection, in for a penny, in for a pound. He felt soiled inside, and excited. Here he was—a night watchman and a damned good one—trespassing on his neighbor’s property, about to enjoy his neighbor’s wife, to steal her virtue from her. But hell, she’d resisted that night too before coming around. She knew he peeped at her, had to know he did that, and never said one word to discourage him from doing so, just kept wearing these tiny outfits, just kept showing him that little girl face that begged to be taken. Something in her attitude, he could feel it now, said I am a victim, please victimize me. Christ, he wasn’t any kind of rapist, she wasn’t resisting that was for damn sure, no was on her lips and he knew everyone said these days that no meant no, but her whole body, the way it trembled and melted at his touch, was saying yes, take me, get me hot, shove it into me.

He took a small step closer, brought her palms right up against him, felt her feint at pulling away but pressed her hands to him so she could appreciate how large he was, so her backbrain could start thinking how nice it would be to take all of that manflesh in.

“Don’t,” she said, but their was a rising inflection in that word, a doubt that retracted it, reversed it, even as she spoke it. The rising tremble in her voice perhaps masked her rising excitation.

He stared at the soft perfection of her breasts, the hurt-pink nipples, pert and tiny, smaller than Nona’s and a deeper red. His nose brushed her left nipple, the one over her heart, then he lowered his lips to it, enclosing it, tonguing the hard flat point, feeling her upper body tremble at his touch.

Nearby, a garage door opened. Mine, he thought, but the direction was wrong. He lifted off the nipple, cocked his head. Sudden panic rushed into him. It was Tanner’s garage, the fucker was home early. His ears tried to make it Alice Brown’s garage, but that wouldn’t wash. Shit on a fucking stick!

He stepped backed from Karin Tanner, who stood there trembling in the warm sun, all dewy-eyed and rigid, like a girl at the doctor’s office steeling herself for a booster shot. “Here,” he said, retrieving her halter top, shoving it into her hands, “put this on.”

She didn’t move.

Jimmy slapped her, saw a teardrop fly from one eye. “Listen to me.” He shook her until she focused on him: “Put this on. Your goddamn husband is home.”

It flopped in her hand.

He snatched it from her, shaking with guilt, got her hands through the loops, pulled it up onto her chest, the damned boobs hung down a little, whirled her around like a rag doll, did up one button, then whirled her back, jammed it onto her tits till they looked right. “You don’t say a word about this, understand? You say anything and you’ll regret it.” He held a fist to her face.

Then he really had to go, fearing Tanner was already in the house, that he would walk by a window at any second and see his next-door neighbor with his wife. Christ, the fucking bitch was going to spill her guts he just knew it, so what the hell did it matter whether he made it over the fence or not. Nah, she wouldn’t say shit, the raised fist had decided her, although he was just bluffing, he’d never really use it on her.

Jimmy tromped over the patch of iris again, stood on the horizontal timber a foot above the base of the redwood fence and hauled himself up and over the sucker, taking a handful of splinters for his haste and a slammed shoulder coming down hard on a smack of lawn.

***

Frank had cut out early after all, stopping at See’s on the way home and picking up a two-pound sampler. No card, just gift-wrapping. One more attempt to cut through to Karin, to break out of the awful rut their marriage had foundered into.

Glancing out the kitchen window, he saw her standing there in the garden, looking almost as if she had fallen asleep on her feet. He rapped on the window, waved when she turned her head. She slowly raised a hand and waved back, then reached down to retrieve the basket of flowers she’d been gathering.

Frank turned away and got a drink of organic apple juice from the fridge. He sat at the kitchen table with his glass. Two-thirds of the table top was covered with plants, which splayed off like greensward and leaped over a narrow chasm to the long shelf of cactus by the window. To the right where the mini-blind pull hung down, a tall Silver Torch cactus rose up like a big green spike.

Karin appeared on the patio, sliding the door open and leading the way into the kitchen with her basket.

“Hi,” he said. “I brought you something.”

“Home early,” she said, not looking at him.

Uh oh, he was in hot water. What, he wondered, had his phone call set off? “For you,” he said, offering his present. “Sweets for the sweet.”

She set the basket down in front of him, a feast of beauty she was about to waste on the corpse of a man who had beaten her nearly to death. He could not for the life of him understand it, and, yes he was jealous, jealous and something more, that this Danny, for all his faults, still offered Karin something he couldn’t. Not looking at him, she took the box and unwrapped it. “You bought this for me?”

“Yes, I did.” Why did she say it that way, making him feel guilty for his gift, as if she suspected some ulterior motive.

“Thank you,” she said, setting it on the fridge next to the box of Kleenex. No kiss, no smile. A heavy sigh. What in Christ’s name was going on? “I need to change out of these clothes and be on my way.”

“Karin, it’s only three-fifteen.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were moist but otherwise unreadable. “Sorry, I have to be alone.”

“I came home early so we could talk.”

“What about?”

“About us.”

“Not now, Frank. Later, maybe tonight.” She walked off, through the TV room and down the hall.

He was afraid he knew what was going on. He’d become too dull for her. She’d grown stronger in the last year, too strong to be held under by any man. She was going to walk out, quiet and strong and no longer needing him.

He wanted to rush into the bedroom right now, rush in there and grab her, pull her close and tell her how much he loved her. But he couldn’t do that. The mood was all wrong. It was too late. He was going to lose her and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

He tried to drink some apple juice but his attempt at swallowing hurt something fierce. Pouring it in the sink, he watched the rich brown juice coat the white porcelain and heard Karin’s shower start up in the distance.

FIVE

SOILED HANDS

“Mrs. Tanner, you’re early again. I was planning to meet you at your truck and explain what happened.”

Karin had heard Mister Romano’s screen door slam, and part of her mind registered his approach, but for the most part her attention fixed on the fresh earth—no grass, no blooms—that mounded over Danny’s grave. Deep tire tracks gouged the earth where she was used to kneeling, and here and there tamped-down spills of dirt clumped the crushed grass.

“It’s really a baffler. In the old days, before we had grave liners, a coffin would collapse after a year or two from the weight of the earth and you’d have to fill in the depression just like this. But grave liners changed all that—big blocky concrete boxes form-fitted together and banded on the sides with metal strips—I’ve never seen them fail before, except for one time with Joel Beddoe, a fellow we hired who claimed more knowledge than he had. I trusted him to do a decent job, thing collapsed soon’s he started filling the grave, major embarrassment. But I did all the work on this burial and I know this liner got put together right, got set in the ground right, lid lowered into place just as nice as you please, and I just wanted to say I’m real sorry and as baffled as a man can be.”

Karin had never heard so much out of Mister Romano before, not even during the funeral preparations nor the burial ceremony when Frank, bless him, had taken over the bulk of the planning, what with her hospitalization, her arrest and arraignment, the swirl of media that left her helpless with trauma and distress. Mister Romano stood before her, his hands folded over his belly, fingers in uneasy twitch, a subtle rocking where his gray cuffs met his workboots. Karin suddenly realized that the poor man was waiting for some sign of forgiveness, anything that would let him return, shriven, to his house.

“I . . . I understand,” she offered, and he accepted it with relief. “We ceded it,” he said absurdly before he turned and left, and she spent a confused moment wondering to whom Mister Romano had surrendered her husband’s grave before she saw the tan-white splinters of seed generously scattered on the plot and realized what he’d said.

Kneeling, she set her basket down in one of the tire tracks. She’d been so upset at Jimmy Gallagher’s assault on her that she could hardly remember showering, changing, driving here. Yes, there was her Chevy-10 in its usual spot, there yesterday’s primrose on Betsy Trillin’s grave, and now she remembered—but as in a dream—lifting the flower to her face only minutes ago, renewing it to a brilliant yellow, and replacing it with new apologies for again forgetting Betsy’s sprig of baby’s breath.

Now she was here, her moment with Mister Romano had come and gone, and she was here in the protective folds of the cemetery’s rolling greenery, sitting beside Danny once more. “Danny,” she said, “my life’s a mess. Feels weird talking to this newly turned earth, I’m so used to the cut and swirl of the grass, the dents and bumps in the ground the way they were.” Karin touched the mound tentatively, its smoothed-over spade marks still apparent from morning before they’d sprinkled the grass seed. It was warm from hours of sunlight, warmer than the grass plot she’d grown used to. She closed her eyes, caressed it, tried to find Danny’s spirit newly infused in it.

“Danny, I don’t want to be a victim, not yours or anybody’s. I thought I was stronger than I am, no, I know I’m stronger, but Danny, I don’t seem to be strong enough. Jimmy came on to me. The guy next door? He nearly raped me, and dammit I just stood there and let him do it. I’m frightened, Danny, I’m really scared I’ve been a victim so long that that’s what I am at the core, this weak mewling woman who’s only comfortable when she’s being misused. I know I’m not like that inside, there’s this rage in me I let out when I . . . when I hurt you, and it’s stayed with me and it’s a good rage, I know it is, but it stayed deep and buried inside me just when I needed it most.” Karin’s hands roved over Danny’s plot, touching thin stubble. “If only I had your strength, Danny, your passion, not the bad parts but the good, alive, all-out exuberant parts of you, if I could only depend on that passion for self-defense at least, I could maybe sort everything out, decide what me and Frank need to do, decide what I should do with my life besides stay at home and talk to my plants.” Her fingers glided over the ground, feeling yielding lashes of grass everywhere.

Grass.

She opened her eyes. A moment of discontinuity, as if a week or two had elapsed as she spoke. Young shoots of grass sprang up through the brown bald head of Danny’s grave. The power, like a tingle of electricity, coursed in her arms, down into her fingers, which brushed through the new spare growth like a harpist barely touching her strings. She let them rove wider, to the all-brown edges of the mound, caressing the air not a quarter of an inch above the ground and watching, as if it were a time-lapse film, crumbles of dirt part to let through the unfurling silent sproing of new growth. Where her hands brushed back through the sparse patches directly above her buried husband, what was already there shot forth and widened by barely perceptible millimeters, joined by microscopic new needles that gradually unbrowned the bare soil with sheer profusion. It made her forget her trauma for a time, made her want to laugh, and she did that, briefly, not loud, an escaped giggle, enough to sense the depths from which her power came. For it wasn’t simply her arms and hands that tingled; that same core of goodness, of excitation, glowed throughout her body. Its roots sank deep into her, almost as though it began inside the relaxed fist of her womb and emanated outward from there, up through her belly and her lungs and heart, up into her brain and coursing through every limb. She let it splash invisibly onto the plot of earth, amazed at what her eyes witnessed and yet feeling as if she’d never participated in anything so natural; it was what giving birth must be like, she thought, if you could strip away the pain and feel only the ecstasy of helping new life, life you’d created, push out into the air and take its first breath.

“Danny, if you could only see this,” she said, then wished she hadn’t. Jimmy Gallagher’s attack had, for all its horror, brought body memory jarringly back, had forced Karin to recall the worst times with Danny. Until now, as Danny’s final outrages and her assault on him had receded into a haze of memory, she had conveniently let their good moments come to the fore, represent—with more force than their frequency should have allowed—the totality of their life together. Danny’d been loving, ardent, boyish in his initial devotion. But then his love had curdled, grown in directions that disturbed and then hurt, emotionally and at last physically. It had seemed inevitable, like a foot slipping into a forgotten shoe. She’d gone with it, felt perversely closer to him, knew it was Daddy come again but didn’t know how to strike back at what her body recognized as home. She veered off that thought.

“Mister Romano’s eyes are going to bug right out when he sees this.” Karin’s hands filled in the spare patches as she spoke, made the grass over the plot blend in with the surrounding blades. She peered closer. “They don’t quite blend, do they, Danny? A little like the glaze of yesterday’s flowers, but not so much.” These were new seeds sped up, but those had been dead blooms brought back to life. “Hmmm. Maybe I need to experiment further, I—”

The sound came to her, under her voice and over it. It was distant and muffled and high-pitched, and it took her by the spine and shook her something fierce. There it came again, rasped and terrifying, a razor on the wind and then gone. Realizing she was holding her breath, she let it out. The shadows fell long over the graveyard; the sun hung low, close to the horizon, not yet down. No matter. It was time to go. Yet again the sound, and her neck came up sharply, her head whipping about to catch direction, a scent on the air. Nothing. It had been like a door hinge protesting, a screen door on a deserted house waiting for enough wind to bang shut; but this hinge had been no mere whine of rust on rust, but something alive, something out of a hellish throat.

“I’m sorry, Danny. Suddenly I’m spooked like I’ve never been before.” She laid the flowers she’d intended for Frank on the fresh new grass, gladiolus and crocus, wisteria and lavender, her hands shaking. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, blowing her kiss, but she wasn’t too sure about that any more.

On the way back to her truck, empty basket dangling on her arm, Karin felt as if dark clouds were closing on her: storm premonitions, though the sun on this clear day threw her shadow long and black and thin before her on the ground like a sacrificial knife cut from stone. She found them impossible to shake. She fumbled the ignition. The keys fell with a jangle to the mat, and after she clutched them in her hand, she had to grip the steering wheel and force herself to calm down.

Maybe, she thought, it was the full trauma of the afternoon finally catching up with her. God damn that Jimmy Gallagher, the nerve of that son-of-a-bitch. She’d show him. She slammed the wheel with her palm, gripped it tight in both hands. “Fucker!” she said, and then Oh fine, now you let it out, now when he’s miles away instead of then, right then, when you could have kneed him in the balls and taken the edge clean off him. She would keep a weapon by her at all times, a knife, no not a knife, by God she’d tell Frank, he’d know what to do. Yes, she’d let him know what had happened, bring the law down on that bastard.

Karin fired up the truck. In her rear-view mirror, the sun sat squat on the horizon. Already the hills up ahead—where white tombstones decorated with ribbons and floral bouquets climbed the slopes like proud teeth—were darkening. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, swore at the world, and eased along the weave of access road to the cemetery gates, turning right, heading home.

***

The darkness roiled with hope and fear.

His hope came from the sound of machinery above—that old fart Romano would dig him out, him and Wolf, offer his apologies but Danny would beat the crap out of him anyway, assuming he had the strength and no bones had been crushed by the grave liner. His fear started as a fringe feeling, tangled with rage at Karin. But when no weight was lifted at all, no spade shoofed into the earth, but instead it felt if anything like more had been added, and the machine rumbled away, then Danny’s fear rose up and panicked him: What if they left him here, absurdly alive, mouth jammed shut, forced to hear Wolf’s soft squeal for all eternity, forced to endure the slither of worm and insect over him, inside him, world without end.

When such thoughts came, he deflected their torment onto his wife. Sure he’d bruised her, slapped her about some out of anger over the barrenness of their lives that beer couldn’t wash away. And sure he’d even gotten a bit carried away at the sight of his naked lady trembling into the fear of pain, full animal trembling that he knew, even at the flailing height of his rage, he’d be able—come the time to cry for her forgiveness—to turn into all-out, no-holds-barred loving.

But he’d never intentionally drawn blood.

She had.

She’d plunged that knife into his heart and twisted the sucker—he remembered that in this airless lightless void under a God-crush of concrete—twisted it like she was prying a pearl from the bleeding oyster of his heart. Meek and mild Karin, his bruised and battered wimp of a wife, had in one stroke raised the stakes and forced him to fold. Well now, by some miracle, he was unfolding, and by God when he got free, he was going to deal her a hand she wasn’t going to live long enough to regret.

Dreams came. Hard to separate from waking delirium, which he knew slipped over him whenever a face formed in the black blindness or a voice tickled at his ear, words maddeningly off any language he knew. But they came, as much as he feared sleep and the lapse into nothingness it threatened. In them he ran, his skin choked in layers of cloth, his feet pounding against mirrored feet, his voice raised in one continuous deafening shout that went on and on and up and up through the brilliant air, at once grown deeper and higher, a full spectrum of sound, until with a deafening crack the swirling silver surface shattered under his feet, shot shards of razor-jag into him, closed a fist of knives about him, sucked him down into a vortex of slashing impaling angles of pain. He woke to nothing, this nothing, cold and dead and filled with a downward press that rendered him immobile but for one index finger brushing against satin. He would have waked screaming if there’d been any space to draw breath, any air to suck in and expel, if his mouth were not broken under stone.

Wolf, poor suffering bastard, had kept up his high-pitched squeal forever, as dependable and unpredictable as a tormented pendulum. At last the whining began to fray, one thin strand snapping at a time, until it was so faint, a mere ghostly exhalation, that Danny could no longer tell if he was imagining it or not. And that was in some ways the greater torment.

The simpering rhythms of Karin’s voice lured him out of his dreams—aural memories, he thought at first, which made more real the knifed icon of her he’d carved from his hatred. But then he grew more certain that she was indeed there, three or four or however-many-the-fuck feet above him, talking to him, maybe taunting him. Anger boiled in him. Against the press of concrete he struggled. Yeah, right, you’ve got some imagination, Danny, old boy. He was pinned tight, ribs staved in, face smashed so flat he could probably smell memories if he gave his nose half a chance; he suspected his pain was so universal, the damage so massive, that the overload had shut down his ability to feel anything at all.

But now the energy began to well up in him, that same radiance as yesterday streaming down from above. Strength formed a core inside his heart and rippled outward. Danny felt flesh shift in him, try to push up and out. It felt like an alien writhing there, until he accepted it as part of himself and joined the agony of its struggle. Crushed organs were doing their best to uncrush, compacted lumps of raging force confined between the curved shaking hands of a bodybuilder. Danny was tearing up inside. He wanted to holler, but his lungs had no room for air, even if air had been in ready supply, and were in any case struggling to repel rib ends and fill in the punctures with new pink lung tissue. The energy rippled through him, head to toe to head to toe, slamming back and forth like a caged wind-demon. His body verged on explosion.

Yet still the non-stop changes twisted his insides. Organs clamoring for room pressed one another and fought back to defend and enlarge their space. His crushed rib cage tried to unclench like a fist caught in a vise, went bone against stone, the immense poundage of the concrete slab bearing down, refusing room. And his face—dear God his flattened shatter of a face—throbbed with skinshift, fractures straining to unfracture, bone planes shredding flesh as they tried to reclaim curve, to turn concave to convex. The radiance turned malevolent, no longer a warm wash of life but pinpoints of agony, uncountable hosts of them jagging in and twisting with pert viciousness, from below now as well as above. His body was a pin cushion. Thin shafts of steel invaded him, sank deep, turned the hurtful stuff inside harder. Whenever the agony seemed at its height, a new attack drove it higher; invading steel, invaded by sharper, harsher steel, thrashed in throes that threw forth pain new-invented by a goddess who reveled in its delivery.

Her doing, all of it. She was the dentist probing without Novocain his every nerve end, making him want to die even as she drilled life into him—life crowded into too compact a body, life in too much abundance for a man impacted inside the earth. His brain raged, caught up in conflict between the desire simply to live and the need to tear his tormentor apart; and although the second easily brought the first to its knees, all was not right in his head, and she’d pay for that too.

In his mouth he could taste coffin wood and the dust of concrete. His tongue moved. His tongue moved. Until now, it had been caught between palate and floor. But in his agony, any new motion, even the slightest movement of his tongue, registered.

His jaw had shifted.

Impossible.

And then, as if that one movement were the crack in the dam, a flood of twitches overran his pinned body like an army of fire ants, mandibles open and biting, savaging every inch of skin. It was as if the boiling pain of his organs bubbled over with generation, lancing back out and playing his body with a billion fingers of fire. Thought was drowned out for a time in a symphony of suffering, no relief in blackout, not for him. Then a smooth coherence made itself manifest in his gut, a cool absence of agony. His mind sought refuge there, huddled there away from the firestorm of his body’s transformation and protest against earth and concrete. It spread. He felt it move out, full of confidence, pushing the pain up against the envelope of his outer skin. It streaked out, beautiful blue shoots of soothing and strength. With amazing suddenness, the hurt dispersed, flaming barbs of torment bursting and flaring and whickering every which way out of bone and pore.

And the earth moved.

Not greatly. Enough for the newly bowed perfection of his rib cage to cast off pain even as it resumed its proper shape. Enough for his face to uncrush, strength spilling upward like sunrays as it took back every curve and jut—like a translucent Halloween mask, crushed in a closet from long forgetfulness, but then poked back into shape by its grubby owner in hopes of yelping new scares out of his friends. If Danny had had air to breathe, he would have shouted for joy.

Wolf whined. Danny hadn’t heard that sound in a long time. He could tell Wolf’s throat hurt like hell, was all raspy and sore from the endless hours of fruitless keening that had kept them both in misery for an ungodly eternity. Now there was new strength in Wolf’s voice, strength and a weary caution that said, “I don’t suppose this is going to do me any good, but my options are limited, so here goes.” Wolf tried three muffled bursts of sound before he gave it up and started skritch-skritch-skritching at the sides of his coffin, more vigorous than ever.

Danny’s first impulse was to dig toward Wolf. But it made a hell of a lot more sense to try to break through on the other side, get out from under all this concrete if he could, and burrow up through dirt, rather than run smack into Wolf’s grave liner not inches away, punch through it, and potentially have the same problem all over again. Not only that, but whatever miracle kept him alive without the need to breathe might suddenly abandon him just a few more handfuls of dirt from the surface, sucking in greedy gulps of grade-Z topsoil. Better to tunnel out as quickly as he could, then dig Wolf free with his remaining strength.

His chest’s filling out had given Danny a few inches to maneuver in. He could rotate his arms, bend them so that his hands scraped against the underside of the slab and touched his shoulders. He could even position his flattened palms against the rough stone and gesture toward shoving upward. But he simply didn’t have room enough to put any force behind it, and the top of the grave liner, though now less oppressive, still felt like a mattress of granite sat on by half a dozen impassive sumo wrestlers. They weren’t about to jounce up and down on him, but they also weren’t about to cut him any slack just for trying. Making half an angel in the grave, Danny worked his left hand down to his side and applied pressure downward with his left arm and thigh. The weight shifted, then rocked back on him. He tried again and this time he managed to slide his right buttock back just an inch so that when the weight settled, he was in a slightly better position, one he built on the next time. His right leg slid gradually under his left, his left shoulder bore increasingly more of the shifting weight, his torso and hips turned and held rightward like a finely calibrated ratchet moving a notch at a time—until at last he was facing right and the slab tried to flatten him left side to right rather than front to back, its weight more intense for having less surface area to spread out over.

He suddenly pictured himself, a Berol No. 2 balancing a fucking stack of encyclopedias on some Watch Mr. Wizard long ago, and he thought, Hey, fuck this fulcrum shit, I’m gonna make the World Books topple! Wasn’t as dramatic as that demonstration had been, but by inching ever closer to the side, ignoring the crushing punishment above him that tore with rough stone at clothing and flesh, he gradually felt the center of gravity move behind him. The angle of the slab crept up from zero to five to ten, like a rooster beak creaking opening to crow him out into the world. It gave him only slightly less weight to fight against but he had more space to work with, a blind wall of earth instead of unyielding cement, and some place—not as vast as he’d have liked, but better than nothing—to put the dirt once he dug it out.

His left hand wasn’t much help, flopping uselessly at the end of an arm that had all it could do to keep off the crushing weight from above. But he made up for that with his right hand, gouging and clawing at the earth in front of him: ferociously at first, then being more methodical about it, carefully scooping it out not straight ahead but at an upward angle and packing it down in front of him to make a platform for further upward movement. A clod fell in his face, asquirm with worms. He brushed them off and wiped his eyes clean, absurdly blinking them against the impenetrable blackness. Can’t see a damn thing now, but that’s sure as hell gonna change before too long. With renewed zeal, he dug upward, at one point shifting free of the concrete slab, which canted and held behind his body—he was a fucking walnut easing out of the steel jaws of a nutcracker caught in a yawn. That’s right, officer, the grave gaped and let me the fuck out. But he wasn’t free yet, and he wasn’t about to sit back and chortle about it, not until he broke through to fresh air. And maybe not even then if, as he expected, his torn body had suppressed hurts of all sorts and they were just waiting to catch up. God help him if they slithered up from behind and seized him just inches from freedom.

Both hands now free and more of his body available to give each movement the old english, he threw himself into the digging with his whole being. The earth was solidly packed, as though not recently disturbed, which made him wonder just how long ago he and Wolf had been buried. But that was an idle thought at the moment, and spun free of his mind like the earth flying past his face. Earth and rock and the eyeless creatures that crawled and wriggled through it, they all came down, battered against his body, and were swept away. His lungs, he realized, were working again, moving the dead air in and out as they’d done when his coffin had angled whole about him. But he could tell somehow that they were merely exercising, not getting any sustenance at all from this pseudo-air; and though Danny didn’t need oxygen, and was amazed he didn’t, he craved it with his old cravings, craved it like a scuba diver whose air tanks fail him and who races to break the skin of the sea before the urge to inhale overwhelms him and his death comes rushing in.

His hands scooped upward, arms sweeping rocky earth down about him. One hand caught at a mat: soft tendrils bunched together. He tugged on it, felt it yield. Grass! The warm underside of grass. Both hands rose up, grappled with the stuff, pulled it apart like batting stuffed into a wall for insulation. Diffuse light poured in, battered his eyes. It tugged at him, made him impatient as all the demons in hell wanting to break loose and swarm out onto the earth. He thrust his head through, caught the stars in the night sky, heard the divine tops of swaying trees, saw them swaying, black shadows of broccoli against the night-blue sky. He expelled the rotten air in his chest, took in fresh: Christ, it fucking lit up his lungs. It seared them with effervescent flame. He felt the bursts of energy radiate through his body, spinules of pain and pleasure feeding every inch of him. They swirled in his torso, them zoomed down into his gut and off into all of his limbs. It was as if his entire body—not just a leg left crossed too long or an arm snoozed upon—had gone to sleep and was now tingling awake, fizzing like champagne under candlelight, bringing new stores of strength into a body already strong.

With his head free, he couldn’t dig out any more, but he wasn’t about to go under again. He shouldered his way out, tearing through the thick carpet of grass like it was an inconsequential layer of dust on a furnace filter. He pulled himself out, elbowing free. What remained of his graveclothes spilled dirt as he came. He stank like the worst pile of steaming dogshit he’d ever smelled; he could tell that now that fresh clean air washed through him with each breath. He’d need a shower, maybe a soaking-hot bath and a good scrubbing, a fucking toothbrush and some Crest and some Listerine, some new clothes, and a nice hot meal. Curious, he thought, he didn’t feel hungry yet. He tried to lick his lips, felt his dry tongue scrape over them, by instinct swallowed. Jesus! He gave a yelp at the sudden sword-thrust down his throat. The voice sounded deeper, more full of gravel, than his own. But the pain, like hammers ringing against steel, diverted him from that; his whole alimentary canal felt raw and red and flayed by the mere act of swallowing. He was hungry, all right, could probably eat a squalling baby if one were offered.

He’d get Wolf out first, then knock on Romano’s door, rip his fucking head off, and raid his fridge. He flexed his hands and attacked Wolf’s grave, falling upon it and digging his fingers into the covering of grass. He ripped it away like it was bad silk, marveling at the strength in his hands. Like kids in pure white sand at the beach, he scooped whole armfuls of packed earth out of the ground, clearing off a small patch of grave liner, then standing on it and flinging the dirt away from the rest, up out of the three-foot hole. He could hear Wolf under there when he stopped, a squealing and clawing more frantic now than before; he also heard sounds from Romano’s place, the slam of a screen door, the old man’s mutterings. But Danny had one goal before him, and fuck-Romano-for-a-fat-old-spic if he was about to stop freeing his dog to deal with the head ghoul just yet.

He clambered out of the hole, stiff-armed one hand on the opposite edge, and stuck the fingers of his other hand beneath the grave liner’s cover. The dirt yielding to his poking fingers as if it were brown tofu, Danny gripped the rim and tugged that sucker up and off. The solid slab of concrete felt like plywood in his hands. He lifted it out of there and let it crash to the ground, shattering of its own weight. A small splintered hole in the coffin lid let Danny glimpse Wolf’s gleaming eye, his mix of light and dark fur about the snout, moving and shifting behind the hole. Wolf could smell air and it was making him frantic; if his experience was anything like Danny’s, it was also increasing his strength tenfold.

Something hard poked into Danny’s lower back. “Hold it right there, mister,” Romano said. A flashlight flared on, splashing the shadow of Danny’s head across the lower half of his tombstone. “I’m not about to miss with this shotgun, and the police are on their way, so why don’t you take it nice and slow, ease down on the grass, face to the ground, and put your hands above your head like the smart son-of-a-gun I know you are?”

“Sure I will.” Danny’s voice struck him odd, tongue too thick or too dry or out of practice to form the words right. “But this dog isn’t dead. You buried him alive.”

Wolf’s howls filled the air, punctuated by the sound of wrenching wood. “How the hell did you know about—?” Romano stopped, finally focusing away from Danny and onto the source of the animal sounds.

The flashlight shifted down into the grave. “Holy shit, what the hell is—?” Wolf’s paws, all four of them, were raking at the wood, scoring it open. His snout was out, his teeth pulping the coffin lid where they came in contact with it. His body thrashed under flashlight, fat eel skin in fur shimmying free, and his squeals had turned to snarls. The barrel of the shotgun was suddenly gone from Danny’s back.

Danny shifted free, knocked against Romano to throw him off-balance. The shotgun went off, the blast cutting out a good half of Danny’s hearing, the smell of cordite stinging his nostrils like a sniff of pepper. But there was nothing compromised about Danny’s eyesight: He saw Romano struggle not to fall; he saw the beautiful silver-gray of Wolf’s fur leap upward, led by the smooth red and jagged white of his open jaws; he saw those jaws muting a snarl as they closed like a kiss around Romano’s face and ripped whatever he was about to say clean off his fucking skull. The flurry of blood hit Danny’s face like the slap of a dark wing, cooling on an instant.

Romano toppled across Wolf’s grave, screaming, but Wolf dove into him, ravaging his chest and belly, making a meal of him, snarling and tearing into the old caretaker until he was nothing but corpse meat.

Danny watched, fascinated, and dreamed of Karin.

SIX

RESTORED TO LIFE

Wolf was still snacking noisily, ripping bloody cloth aside to get at the Italian sausage, when Danny walked the few hundred feet into Romano’s house. Fucking cat already had Danny in its nose, glared at him, went real low to the carpet, ears folded down and claws working nervously, then streaked off into the back of the house. Wolf’s dessert.

Fucker said the cops were on the way. Bad news. A bluff maybe, but he didn’t think so. Christ did he stink! He went into the cramped kitchen, shedding grave dirt as he walked, and lifted a coffee mug from the drainer. Water shot from the tap, gave weight to the mug, splashed on his hand and started rivulets of mud spattering on the sink’s cracked enamel. The first mouthful he squitchelled around and spat out, his expectorate pink and brown and grainy; the second he swallowed. Motherfucking shit on a stick! An icicle of fire plunged down his throat, would not stop for nobody no how. Waves of nausea washed through him from below. He suddenly went all hot and cold in the head and had to set the mug down and grip the sink with both hands, leaning over and breathing deep, to keep the water down.

He chased it with another shot, this one better, yes quite nice in fact. Took a third. His eyes roamed over a calendar, pad of paper by the wall phone—one sheet ripped off and taped beside the phone, Police scrawled in large loops with a number beside it. Danny lifted the receiver and punched in the number, heard it ring. Earpiece felt gritty. Need a fucking bath, a fucking change of clothes, rummage through Romano’s closet once the cops are called off. He went over to the ancient fridge, tugged on its upright silver handle, pulled it open. “Penryn police.” A female voice, all business.

“Yeah, this is Romano, from the cemetery.” What the fuck was his first name. A stack of mail spilled over on the kitchen counter by the phone. Danny fixed on the top letter. “Sal Romano.” Once more his voice sounded weird, but it was adjusting fast. He tried to deepen it, slow it down like he remembered Romano talking when him and Danny had walked the grounds. “That call I made maybe five ten minutes ago. Forget it, it’s a false alarm.”

“Just a minute.” Sounded exasperated. He pictured the pert bitch, tits boldly pooching out her dress blues, her long yankable hair shoved up inside her cap, wearing pants and swaggering about like she sported a dick under there when all the time she needed one bad, a good thick one shoved up inside her. Her and some fuck jabbered in the background. Danny went back to the fridge and roved his eyes over the pickings: the browned withered rippings of half a head of lettuce collapsed on a piece of clear plastic beside a one-quart carton of Lucerne homogenized and an unopened package of sliced turkey.

A loud voice assaulted his ear; he pictured that cop guy on TV, what was the fucker’s name, Dolph Sweet. “Hey Sal, where do you get off with this false alarm crap?”

“What can I tell you, I went out to investigate, and there was nothing—”

“Look, it’s like every month with you, the kids this, the kids that . . . hey is this Sal?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Danny held the phone in the crook of his shoulder, ripped open the turkey.

“You don’t sound like yourself.”

“So maybe I’m getting a cold, I don’t know, I—”

“We got two of our best guys on the way.”

“So call ’em off.” Danny pulled a wadded clump of slices out of the package, started chewing. Jesus fuck, what a trip! His taste buds did cartwheels of delight.

“Okay, okay, we will, but you tell that cheap bastard Pyne to put a better lock on your front gate. Sure he’s a taxpayer, all that, but he used up nineteen ninety-three a month ago as far as I’m concerned, you hear me, Sal?”

Just then, three things happened: The cop’s words drew Danny’s eyes to the calendar, which—under a picture of Doubting Thomas gesturing to touch the palm wounds of Christ—absurdly declaimed APRIL 1993; Danny swallowed his first mouthful of masticated turkey breast and instantly regretted it; and Wolf, muzzle slicked back red with gore, burst growling through the screen door, hit the carpet on a run, and leaped at his master.

Danny dropped the receiver, which banged against the side of the kitchen counter and jump-twisted on its cord. One hand went to his throat, both to keep it from being ripped out and to stop the food’s obscene ripple downward. He fisted his other—swift instinct—and shot it against Wolf’s skull as the dog’s jaws closed on his hand. The fist connected solidly, a Louisville slugger smacking the hide of a baseball; the power of his punch surprised him. Out of the corner of his awareness, Danny saw Wolf’s body slap with a breath-stealing thud against the linoleum and skid into the stove. But for the most part his attention was otherwise engaged: He fell to his knees, feeling his insides shimmy and shake with invasion, and fountained his first swallows of food and water violently out across the floor. His guts clutched and heaved, another smaller wash of vomit, then a couple of dry mimes and it was over—all but the claws flaying his insides, a solid core of misery that made him cry out and beg for death. But through the scandal and acid of it, he wanted to laugh, couldn’t help in fact laughing as he throbbed in pain: he was dead, had to be dead, nobody could survive three days of burial let alone a whole fucking year. The phone was busy imitating the pinched metallic sound of a Victrola: “Hello, hello, hey Romano, what’s going on?”

But if he was dead, he was by God the alive-est dead man he’d ever come across. Wolf clacked aimlessly on the floor, shaking the blow out of his head and spattering the stove’s white enamel with the Ragu of Romano’s blood. He sniffed over Danny’s vomit, then nuzzled his master wetly. “That’s all right, boy,” he said, his voice ragged. “Way you look and smell, it’d be easy enough to mistake you for someone else too.”

Sirens wailed in the distance. The phone kept up its blustering, a cartoon fat man shrunk down to size, trapped hopping mad in a cage. Danny grabbed it. “Hey fuck you, you fucking pig, all right? Romano’s fucking dead, yeah, and I killed him, so why’n’t you get your fat fucking ass out here and spindle yourself on Romano’s dead Eye-talian dick, you fucking son-of-a-bitching bastard piece of hog shit!” He slammed the receiver against the floor and it put a gouge in the linoleum and shattered, white plastic flying everywhere. “Come on, Wolf,” he said, running a hand along the stiff fur that covered the musculature of his dog’s powerful shoulders, “let’s you and me get the fuck out of here.” Eyes gleaming with hellish fire, Wolf yawped his approval, his voice more powerful than Danny had ever heard it before.

Danny made a feint for the fridge, then said fuck it, there’d be other food out there. He ran out of the house and he and Wolf slalomed through the moonlit headstones to the gate. Locked. Ribbons of siren furled loudly in the curved highway air off left, coming closer. Fucking cops gonna bust my ass, kill me all over again. Danny grabbed the bars of the gate and shoved outward in fury. To his surprise they flew apart, twists of lock rocketing upward and jangling solidly on the highway. Wolf took it all in stride and bounded out; he tensed on the white line, teeth bared toward the loudening sirens.

“Fuck ’em, Wolf,” shouted Danny, “this way, boy. Let ’em chew on your last meal for a while, that and the empty grave.” Abandoning his post, Wolf dashed after Danny, who veered right, toward Loomis, leaving the highway in favor of underbrush. Behind him, he heard the police car slow, shut off its siren, turn cautiously and drive through the shattered gates. The flashing lights rotated their crazy way along the access road. Danny felt an urge to go back and tear those blue porkers to shreds, but his unfinished business came to mind, Karin came to mind, and he damped down his bloodlust. Ahead, the twinkling lights of a new development beckoned: food, clothing, a car or truck he could commandeer, yes, but what he craved right now was a fucking shower to wash off the puke and the blood and the foul miasma of death that rode in on every breath.

***

“Clarence Benson, you fat old tub of lard, the dishes are done and it’s almost eight, time for Death Squad.”

“I’m watching C-SPAN.” He tried to shut her out, put his voice on automatic so he’d be able to catch every word of Brian Lamb’s question. The man was amazing.

“Clarence!” She stood between him and the set, arms not quite at her sides because of the flabby ham hocks her biceps had turned into over the years.

He flared at her. “Dammit, Nancy, you’re a real pain in the you-know-what. Country’s been on the skids for two decades,” he gestured at the set with the remote, “Reagan and Bush’ve packed the damned court with a raft of closet fascists, and you want to dull your mind—what there is of one in that thick skull of yours—with some vigilante cop show, vacant-eyed Hollywood stud-bunnies wreaking weekend violence on fantasy sleazeballs the law won’t touch.”

Nancy punched the TV’s Off button, but Clarence was ready for her and hit the remote. A bespectacled Post reporter smeared off and then on, the faintest hint of a smile on his face as he listened to the ravings of some hinterland caller. “You ask me,” she said, “the country’s in a hell of a lot better shape than it was when the left wingers were running the show.”

“Well I didn’t ask you.”

“The Republicans brought decency back into style.”

“Don’t know why I married you.”

“No respect for the flag, dragging it down in the mud with their talk of freedom when all they meant—”

“To hell with the flag!”

“—was license, do what you damn-well please—yes!” into high gear now as she heard him and responded, “you see, just like that! ‘To hell with the flag,’ as if it had no meaning, as if the boys who gave up their lives to keep it waving proud and free died in vain.”

“Oh for the love of Christ, Nancy, you ever seen the old films of the Nuremberg rallies, flags flapping a mile high, dwarfing seas of sieg-heiling fools?” The doorbell rang. “There are people dying of cold and hunger in this country every minute of every day. Wrap them up in the goddamned flag, not your lying politicians.”

“There’s someone at the door.” She wore a look of exasperation, her standard argument look. He knew why he’d married her: There was the sex of course, and the food, both still served up in reasonable portions even after thirty years. But mostly he loved to triumph over her father’s politics, hear the old man spout out of her lips and trounce him like he’d been too cowed to do to the man himself when he was alive. Cheapskate had left it all to his widow, still hanging on, scatterwitted at seventy; nothing to his daughter, cut off at the knees because old Mister Moneybags couldn’t abide the pinko commie prevert his daughter had married.

Clarence muted the TV and worked his way to his feet. “I’ll get it,” he said, “but don’t go changing channels on me.” Remote clutched in one hand, he headed for the door.

“Check who it is first, Clarence. You never check.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Same damned thing.

“Ah, the hell with that. Been alive fifty years and never opened the door to an unfriendly soul.” He flicked off the deadbolt and put his hand on the knob, turning it. “Nance old girl, if you can’t trust people, what kind of a world have you got?”

It was as if the door had been tensed on a powerful steel spring. It leaped at him, whipped his hand behind him so vehemently that his shoulder socket snapped loudly and his fingers stung from the hardwood assault. The knob gouged the wall and the door swung back as if to ward off the fury now storming in. He was stunned for a moment by the sheer volume of information his brain had to process: the bristled growling barreling dynamo that leapt in, all jaws and rabid eyes, fouling the air with stench, and the bulkier figure behind him, a man of muscle in a tattered soiled suit, the whole charging hulk of him caked in dirt and smelling like shit stew.

But before Clarence could even think to respond, the dog claimed his leg, sinking its teeth tight and deep into his right calf, a jag of daggers lancing through a wet hot compress of slaver and growl. The door slammed and a fist gripped his shirt, twisted cloth and chest hair, wrenching his rotund body forward as if he were no weightier than a helium balloon clone of himself, right up to that grinning grime-caked face, to those eyes that torched fifty years of trusting his fellow man as if those years were so much flash paper. His glasses whipped off and skittered across the tile, the remote not far behind in its wild clattering tumble. Blood pounded in his leg as though to surge away the reseating razors of canine grip and worry below.

Clarence knew he was about to die, but what startled him was that his terror washed away under a rush of anger. This intrusion was an outrage, a rape, and by God he would fight it. “Get out of my house!” he shouted, his face all red and his hands tearing ineffectually at the muscled arm of the invader. Pain was searing up his leg but he tried to kick free of the attack dog, the ferocious mass of fur whose hot breath he could feel where the blood poured out of him. “Get out! And take your stink with you!” But the man just grinned, just pulled him deeper into the dark unwavering flame of his eyes. By God, Clarence thought, all my life I’ve been a pacifist and now I want to kill this sick bastard so bad I can taste it, and Jesus I love my dear Nancy and now it’s too late to tell her and I’ve put her into terrible danger, and in all my years I have not done one thing, not one single thing, to change the world in any way, just sat on the sidelines and grumbled as the parade passed by.

Then the bad man slammed him hard in the gut. Again. Again. So hard he couldn’t breathe. The last sight that came to him was the bad man’s fist slamming into his belly over and over and over, special delivery from God or his darker angels. The last sound he heard was the sole of his left shoe randomly tapping on tile as the bad man’s mongrel ripped bleeding chunks of flesh from his leg.

***

Nancy watched her husband die and felt relief.

That shocked her. But she had other shocks in store. Other beautiful and new things Nancy Benson was poised to learn about herself—not day by day, as the show tune had it (she didn’t have days), but moment by moment.

The violent rush of the animal and its master into her house had overwhelmed her at first, shocked her. She gasped when they wrenched Clarence around like a rag doll and made his glasses fly. But the intruder glanced once into her eyes and the smell of him forked up her nostrils at that same moment. The power was overwhelming, wicked and pure as a straight shot of heroin. All her life she had sheltered herself from vile things, kept herself from big cities and places that served hard liquor and men who stared at you too long or fixed their eyes on your covered parts. Now the vileness had come charging right into her home, as concentrated and heady as vanilla extract. It almost felt like watching a movie, seeing the blood stream off Clarence’s torn pant leg, watching him take fist after fist in his fat gut—it almost felt as if she herself were in no danger at all, no more danger than anyone else with a tub of popcorn in her lap and a girlfriend or two beside her to share the screams with.

She was less sure of that, felt the hackles rise at the back of her neck, when the man unbunched her husband’s shirt and let him fall, his skull loudly cracking against the tile. The only thing of Clarence’s that moved was the leg being sampled by the dog, which tore away blood-soaked cloth and chomped anew on the wet red meat. The man came toward her, his look demonic under bent brow. He was one compact man, not an ounce of his flesh withered or gone to fat. The sight and smell of her husband’s killer thrilled and repulsed her. Her honey-colored rug turned brown and soiled under his feet. He stopped not six feet from her, his dog chomping wetly by the door.

“You gonna give me any trouble?” he asked.

When he spoke, the memory slammed into focus: George Gault, her first boyfriend, her first and only hard-bodied lover, the high school football hero who’d punted his way into her heart ages ago. If dear George had gone through a dozen years of hell, then been steeped in filth, this is what he would look like. Careful, girl, she thought, this isn’t George and that isn’t affection beaming in his eyes. “No,” she said, “I’ll . . . I’ll do what you say.”

“Good.” She saw a hint of smile in his eyes, then he walked back to the animal. “Wolf, that’s enough. Lay off the poor bastard.” To her: “You got a name?”

She told him.

“Nancy, which way’s your bedroom?”

“It’s upstairs,” she said. Her head was pulsing. It was like some brightly lit dream, a woozy intravenous wow of distraction just before surgery.

He reached down, George to a T, and put a choke-hold on Clarence. “Follow me,” he said, dragging the bleeding corpse across her carpet as if it were a scarecrow stuffed with straw. She followed him up the stairs, trying not to hear the thump-thump-thump of her husband’s shoes on the steps nor the low growl of the dog behind her, but fixing her eyes on the taut legs and buttocks of the intruder who led the way, the muscular V of his torso.

In the bedroom, while he hoisted her dead husband on to the bed, Nancy eased open her night table drawer, took out the Smith & Wesson Model 60 she kept there, stainless steel with a three-inch barrel, and waited for him to turn around. She had a hard time holding it steady.

He saw the gun and grinned. The dog’s growl rose but it held its ground and she tried not to look at it. “Why Nancy, you little pistol-packing mama, is this your idea of no trouble?”

“I’ve had lessons. I know how to use this gun, so don’t try anything.” Oh lordy, the impish grin on his face—George in his bedroom, home alone with her for the first time, parents gone, his powerful hands tentatively lifting to enclose and caress her breasts.

He laughed, then slowly peeled off his dirt-encrusted jacket and dropped it behind him. “I bet if I rushed you, you’d shoot old Wolf here, then me, as clean and calm as if you were swatting a couple of flies.” His hands rose to the top button of his shirt, worked at it.

“Clarence thought the class was a waste of money. He said it was dangerous to have a gun around the house. Why are you doing that? Stop. Put . . . put your hands up.”

His fingers never faltered moving down the shirt. A glance at the bed. “That his name? Clarence? You don’t seem too upset at his passing.”

“That’s none of your business. If you don’t put your hands up, I’ll shoot you.” He tugged the shirt out. The tight plane of his abdomen showed itself, the dark whorl of the navel like a crater of love.

“Nancy, Nancy,” her name was smooth as whiskey on his tongue, “what a cold-hearted woman you’d have to be—and I can tell you’re not—to shoot a man for taking his clothes off.” He unbuckled his belt, lowered his fly. “You like my body? Lots of muscles, lots of life in me.” He raised an arm, flexed his biceps for her.

It wasn’t fair, she thought. You made uneasy peace with your life, put away the emotional turmoil of younger days—and suddenly it all came rushing back in. This was George all right, but a demonic George, looking like he’d climbed off the cover of a Harlequin Temptation, gleaming with life, stinking of death, and the crazy thing was, she couldn’t tell which held more allure. “Enough,” she said, but her voice was weak.

“Seventh grade, that greasy fuck of a history teacher Mister Orland told us how the guy who killed the king used to get his queen.” He stripped off his jockey shorts. He was huge, blue-veined and ruddy and thick. “You like what you see? Keep the gun on me, it’s turning me on something fierce. I’m going to take a shower now, Nancy. Wash the smell of death off me. No tricks while I’m gone.”

“Stay where you are.” There was no conviction in her voice. The gun refused to stop trembling.

“I’ll take the phone with me.” He yanked it off her husband’s night stand. The cord snapped out of the wall, its plastic end pinging off Clarence’s lamp. “Wolf, don’t you let Nancy out of this room.” The dog glared at him as if it wished he’d said Attack!, but she could tell it was smart enough to obey its master.

Then he was gone into the bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind him, and Nancy found she could think of nothing but George, how soft his huge hands had been on her naked body that first time, how he’d eased inside her, how she’d wrapped her girlish legs around those powerhouse hips, that animal juggernaut that treated her like a found cache of gems—sweet tender George, shy little boy peering out of the eyes of a hulking beast.

***

Danny soaped himself up good. All over. First time, the suds washed off coffee brown, the shampoo blacker and grittier than that; second time, it was closer to whipped cream consistency, closer to what he’d been used to while he was alive. Fuck that, you’re still alive, he thought, but he knew it wasn’t as simple as that. He’d been dead, buried for a whole fucking year, Wolf too; but somehow he and his dog had come back to life, just decided to wake up and dig themselves out of the ground. Right. Shit like that didn’t happen outside of the Cinedome. But here he was, brimming with dark energy, gargling Doctor Bronner’s (whoever the fuck he was) Peppermint Soap in an effort to lose the taste of gravedirt in his mouth.

Karin had something to do with it, that much he knew. Her face rose up, twisted and streaked with tears, and his whole body shuddered in rage. He wanted to pound her face under his fist, tenderize the hurt meat of it, tear it off her skull, and toss it on the barbee—a few scraps to Wolf but most of it savored and swallowed as his strapped-down wife suffered and bled and begged for the knife, the kriss she’d used on him, to open her heart. Then he was in the shower again, under the steady spray of water, feeling his heart pound like a dynamo and wondering at the savagery that had just washed through him. Sure he’d been bad to her when he was alive, but he’d known, even while he was beating her, even while he was forcing her to look at the hidden side of him—the photos, the magazines, the videos of topless chicks firing machine guns in the desert, the filmed gang-bang where you knew the redhead’s terror was not faked, the dog and donkey shows, the snuff flick that got him weirdly horny—he’d known it was wrong, known too that when it had run its course, his good side would wash back in and he’d castigate himself and beg her forgiveness and be so grateful when she forgave him and came rushing, all warm and lovely, into his arms. But now he felt as if that part of him had stayed dead, and it unsettled him.

One last plunge under the shower head, mouth open and sounding like a dentist’s suck-tube as the water furied in and out of it, and he twisted the faucets off. He sniffed himself, seemed clean. Still some unreachable grime under the fingernails though. A whiff of something foul in his nose, too, like lingering traces of vomit, only worse. He hoped it would go away on its own.

Stepping out onto the throw rug, he toweled off, then wrapped the towel around him and tucked it in. Habit, old modes; fuck it, he thought. He undid the towel, tossed it on the floor. Time to deal with granny, to sweet-talk the gun out of her hand, then off the stupid bitch, maybe nail their bodies together on the bed. Better odds naked, that was certain. Little Miss Nancy was one hot mama, he could tell, under that prim exterior of hers. Too bad her face and manner reminded him of his fucking stepmother, prissy Helen Daniels whose idea it had been to adopt Danny in the first place but whose regret for her decision hadn’t taken long to make itself known.

When he opened the door, the first thing that hit him was Wolf’s foul stench. Then the sight of Clarence’s legs sticking out from behind the bed, one shoe caked in blood. And finally Nancy, who had rolled her husband off the bed and now lay there in a sheer black peignoir, not trying to hide her varicose legs, not hiding much of anything at all in fact. She still had the pistol in her hand, the tip of its barrel making small circles over the sheer fabric that clung to her stiff right nipple. “Hello there,” she said, sounding like Lauren Bacall on a bad day.

“Beautiful,” he said. Pathetic, he thought. Of all the houses he’d had to choose from, he’d picked one with a crazy hausfrau in it. “Nancy, you’re one surprising lady, you know that?”

She twisted on the bed in what perhaps in her heyday had been a sexy way. But his penis, God love it, appeared to agree with her. What had some dead fart once written? Faces may age, but pussies don’t. Obviously some truth in that. “Come over here, you handsome hunk, and I’ll show you how beautiful I can be.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Stopping him: “I’d be more at ease without the dog.”

“He’s not exactly Mister Personality, is he?” Danny said. “Wolf, old buddy, you stink something awful. Don’t you give me that snarl or I’ll tear your fucking head off. Come on, out you go. Me and Nancy are going to have some fun for ourselves, right Nancy?, and when we’re done, you smelly old animal, I’ll give you a bath, how’s that? No, no, take your snout out of the door and get lost.” Wolf slinked off down the hall, tail drooping, trailing clouds of death stench after him. Danny closed the door, resting his forehead against the painted wood.

“Are you all right, lover?” she asked.

He winced, his face hidden. Then he put on a smile. “Right as rain.” He looked over at her, twisting his body about so that the door rested a cool flat hand across his shoulder blades. “You want him gone?”

“No.” Too quick. Freighted with meaning. No, not yet. Not until after we’ve done it. Not until dead old Clarence gets the final slap in the face, the final tweak to his dick, that he’s got coming. From the look on her face, it was clear she’d hated her fat fuck of a husband for a long time.

Danny shrugged. “Fine.” He approached on her right, idly fondling himself. He gentled one hand down upon her gun hand, noted that her finger was off the trigger. “We don’t really need this any more. Why don’t we bring the big gun into play?” His voice was calm and soothing, his face placid, and he knew it; but behind all that, violent thoughts were scrapping like a roomful of brats pummeling one another over who got to go first. He’d had vicious thoughts before, even acted on some of them, but never the worst of them. Those had always been nipped by conscience when they were no more than wicked hints, long before they had a chance to bud into notions, bloom into urgent ideas, propagate and flourish into lush gardens of obsession. No conscience now, or if one just a tiny niggle, while around it, the titanic struggle of sick lusts went on, concealed from its intended victim by guile alone.

Her hand tensed under his. Then relaxed, let the gun glide smoothly out from beneath it. The fingernails, not long, were painted a brilliant red. Her fingers closed as tight as greed around his wrist. Transferring the gun, he reached to set it down on the nightstand, as Nancy clasped his other hand, an ardent sinner feverish with prayer, and brought it to her old-lady lips.

Danny knelt beside her on the bed, towering over her. Her left hand toyed idly at her breast, unfocused, while all her energy was in her eyes and in the contrived writhe of her body and in the right hand that sculpted along his torso and hip and quickly wrapped itself about his penis. She was ugly and old, this one, and trying to make up for lost time. The peignoir was the pullover kind, a bow or two at the top. He took it in his hands, swirling at the frilly stuff like a diver trying to clear away clouds of squid ink. It ripped, she gasped, and he tore it easily off her with his new strength, yanking it out from under her and letting the damned thing drift like a black ghost over the far side of the bed.

Then he gentled her hand off him and straddled her naked body, feeling the warmth of her hips on the inside of his legs just above the knees, his hands pressing the edges of her pillow into the mattress but not touching her head, not yet. Her eyes were greedy on his body and her imperfectly round mouth oohed and aahed. His sex snaked through the tired kink of her pubic hair and up along her flabby belly, balls skidding after. He inched his knees along the sides of her body like a boy crawling through a long stretch of tight unlaid industrial pipe. She had her hands on his chest as it moved upward, continually molding him to her fantasy.

Then he slid snugly into the valley of her breasts, rocking back and forth as his hands reached down from the sill they’d attained and caressed her face. Her fingers tickled up and down his back and she had her neck arched and was looking up longingly at him. Sure, he was just a little hot, but the greater his excitation grew, the more his roomful of brats scrabbled for primacy. And then one of them emerged triumphant from the writhing pack, caught Danny’s ear, told him in tones that did not allow for any back talk exactly what he needed to do.

But that voice both propelled him and waked the tiny natter of conscience. Blooming full blown, it made his head throb with pain, a white stone statue standing aghast
and helpless amidst the snickering brats as his body, and indeed his will, obeyed without hesitation.

His thumbs gently stroked Nancy’s lined brow, soothed the pouches under her eyes, rounded in twinned motion the subtle convex of her closed eyelids, lifted off a fraction of a hair—and jackknifed deep into the sockets, the spray of her eye fluids hot against his palms, the cry quick in her mouth like flushed ravens. Still pistoning below, he pulled out of the popped grapes—mulled wine a mix of red and white—and wrapped his hands around her throat. Her nails clawed savagely at his back, digging and tearing at him wildly, without plan. He tightened about her throat, feeling something pop there, feeling the rage rise in him with the jism, and then his organ was shooting the stuff out and it burned like lava dragging fishhooks after it. Jets spattered at her eye sockets and into her mouth, weak and red and gasping for breath. She bucked beneath him, but tight and out of control, not nice like a woman all loose and cozy, more like the Mexican chick in that snuff film. But Nancy took longer to die and she gave him lots more pleasure doing it than any hoodwinked whore on any stinking video ever could.

But mixed with that undeniable pleasure was the head-hurt of his frozen appalled conscience, sickened at what he’d done and longing for death.

***

Danny washed Wolf in the downstairs bathtub, draining it three times and using half a bottle of Prell on Wolf’s body fur and several handfuls of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo on his head and ears and snout. The sight of him was almost comical. Wolf had always daunted strangers, what with the size of him, even as a pup, and the distrustful snarl-face Danny had trained him to show to anyone but him and Karin. But now, there was a new warp behind those eyes, and a new sense of bulk about him, that made Danny feel like he was washing a werewolf rather than a German shepherd. Yet the dog sat obediently in the suds, loving his bath as always, and any outflingings were Danny’s fault, not his.

Still, running his fingers through that vile fur made Danny feel unclean again, and he took another quick shower after it was over. Then he cinched on one of Clarence’s old robes, a tent of terrycloth, and raided the fridge. He was careful at first to go easy on the food, savoring every bite and making sure with each swallow that it was going nowhere but down. When he was sure his system had adjusted to taking in nutrition, he arrayed the leftovers and munchies from the pantry on Nancy’s kitchen table and took one amazing bite of each food: the snick and crunch of a Macintosh, the yummy mush of a banana, the white stringy fullness of chicken breast wadded up in his mouth, and the riot of flavors in Nancy’s covered casseroles and salads. Old gal’d been a good cook. That fucking shitwad Clarence hadn’t appreciated Nancy like he oughta.

The doorbell rang.

Danny froze, then relaxed. He had looked through the Bensons’ papers in case something like this happened, and he had his story down pat. And if little Miss or Mister Neighbor looked the least bit askance as he spoke, Danny’d just haul them the fuck inside the house and take care of them quick and easy. That’s why God had given him hands and, this time around, the strength to use them.

“Stay, Wolf.” When Wolf sat, Danny could almost feel the kitchen shudder with the weight of him. He retied the terrycloth cinch and made his way through the TV room to the vestibule, where he’d had the foresight to sponge off as much of Clarence’s blood as he could. The rest wasn’t noticeable unless you were looking for it. Danny saw cop blue through the beveled glass window, so he was able to prepare his face.

“Evening.”

“Evening, officer.” An Adam’s-apple wimp with an ego as solid as brick. Danny felt like he was examining a bug under a microscope, one he could crush with a thumb.

“You’re not . . . ,” he looked at his clipboard, “are you Mister Clarence Benson?”

“His son. Home for Easter. James is the name. My folks have gone to bed.”

The cop gave him a look. Easter’s over, what’s a guy your age doing at his parents’ house the week after, when most regular joes are back at work, didn’t mention a wife, maybe you’re one of those homos, maybe you’re one of those damned eternal students taking your doctorate in advanced basket weaving. Danny wanted to rip the asshole’s jaw off and rake his eyes out with his own teeth. Held back. He saw the other cop waiting in the squad car, didn’t want to invite bullets and backup, didn’t want to queer his chance to get at Karin.

“Seen or heard anything out of the ordinary tonight, Mister Benson?”

“Not a thing.”

“No loud noises? No suspicious characters? We’re looking for a man with a large dog.”

“No, other than a backfire off in the direction of the cemetery, nothing.”

The geek asked him when that was, he said maybe two hours ago, then the guy nodded and left.

Back in the kitchen, Danny picked up the wall phone and punched in a number. One ring. Two. Part way into three, she picked it up.

He thought she said “Daniels,” but it sounded funny, like Taniels or Tannels. What the fuck, the word didn’t matter, it was the voice that counted, her voice. He cupped the mouthpiece. Cupped it quick and hard because he felt the sound coming unstoppable out of him. Damped it down before a tight trill eeked out, but his body was suddenly full of warring emotions, not like with old lady Nancy where there’d been modes of viciousness; no, these were deeply rooted in him and of all varieties—undying love, resentment so dark it blinded him, a need to crush her to him, a need to kiss and hold her and give her his prick-love, to cry little-boy tears against her bosom, to smell that goddess aroma of hers just at the nose; a need to peel her flesh off, strip by strip, to tie her up and wallop her with his open hand, to bruise her, to bleed the fuck out of her, to stick every last one of his swords and knives into her at her edges, so she wouldn’t die until he twisted into her heart the kriss she’d killed him with.

The head-throb began again as the violent images grew his conscience anew, aghast at his ideas. His skull hurt. And it was her fault. Damned women birthed a man into the world but their bellies weren’t strong enough to grow him deathless. Now this woman had brought him back, perhaps proof against death, but she’d neglected to harmonize his head with the rest of him.

“Hello?” she said, concerned, then “hello,” flat and suspicious. Another second and—no don’t hang up!—she hung up.

“I’ll get you, you simpering bitch.” His voice felt raw and thick, clogged with hamburger meat. “I’ll get you good.” The saying of it wasn’t enough to calm him. He almost slammed the phone into the fridge, but then he thought of Nona, dark-eyed succubus with a lush wide mouth and a body that gave and gave like there was no tomorrow.

Lust-fever and the need to savage Nona, to flurry in her blood, waved up green and glittery and dashed down on conscience, drove it away and stopped cold the pounding in his head. Now there was only pure urge.

He riffled through the phone book, found her number. What if Jimmy answered, nope, wall clock said twelve past ten, he’d be at work by now. He missed a digit, started over, got it right. It took six rings but she was there.

“This is Nona.” That smoky voice, liquid with sex.

Danny kissed the phone.

“Hello?”

More slow kissy noises.

“Who is this?”

He pitched his voice low, put on a bad Lugosi accent. “I want to suck your blood.”

“Okay, whoever you are, I don’t like practical jokes so you either identify yourself or I’m hanging up.”

“You’re lying in bed, naked, fingering your lovely pussy, moonlight catching that tiny rose tattoo on your left thigh, making it glow red and green.”

“You know about that?”

“I’m at your window, flapping my black wings. Then I become night fog and seep through the screen, cover you in dark mist, all of me inside your moist pocket of fuck, and then out into human form.”

“Izzat right? And just what do you look like?”

“Your heart’s desire. What are you wearing?”

“Pair of shorts, tank top, a smile.”

“Undo the shorts, reach inside them, touch yourself.”

“You want me to unzip my—”

“Yes, hold the phone down there as you do it.”

“Sure, what the hell.” He heard her go away, heard the unzipping in three quick tugs, then she was back. “I got ’em open, big boy, and my fingers are on the button. Your move.”

“Good. Very good. Now close your eyes and think of your fingers as mine. You see me above you in the light of the moon. My fingers are working you, my eyes are on you and loving you. I smile and you see two sharp points in my mouth. You feel how warm I am on you?”

“Yes. Yes I do.” It sounded like she was having a problem breathing. “Ooh baby, keep doing that.”

“Now I cover you, warm as a comforter and cool as the edge of an ice cube lazing over your skin. My mouth is at your throat, my hot flesh slides inside you.”

“Yes, I can feel you.”

“I puncture you, two tiny bites like twin mosquitoes only it feels like trickles of bliss, right straight from heaven, and they do amazing things to your body.” Danny could see her at the bedroom phone. He wanted to be with her, wanted to catch her at her most vulnerable and open her up. They’d shared things, secret things, her playing at domination, him begging like a slave until she gave up her prize to him and he humped her like she was a divine slot machine guaranteed to pay off in salvation as soon as he shot his cache of coins into her. But things weren’t like that any more. He had other things he wanted out of Nona now, and he was going to get them, yes, him and Wolf would nail the bitch together, partners in fuck. “Can you feel my fangs at your neck? Do they make you hot?”

“Mmmm, yes. I . . . I . . . oh!” And then she was off and away, moaning into his ear, saying Oh fuck and Oh Christ and Yes, and he pretended he was coming too, even dropping out of Dracula but not out of the deep tone just in case; he’d save the real thing for later. He rode with her, down into normal breathing.

She laughed openly. “Come on now, who the fuck are you, lover baby?”

“A voice from the past.” Back to Lugosi.

“Come on, can’t you do better than that?”

“Sorry.”

“Well listen, why don’t you come over right now, let me fuck you for real. Guy makes me come like that, I want to eat him nice and deep like a fucking sword swallower.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Hard to get, huh? All right, have it your way.”

I intend to, Nona dear, don’t fret. “Goodbye, lovely lady.”

“So long. Keep in touch.”

Danny hung up, almost able to smell the dark steamy after-sex rising off Nona’s flesh.

He felt not the slightest bit of fatigue. ‘Course not, dummy, you’ve been asleep for nearly a year. Time to be on the move, just in case that cop ran a check on him or talked to a neighbor about the Bensons, and discovered they had no son.

Time to pay that visit to Nona she wanted so bad, do her like she needed doing; then on to Karin. The kitchen drawers yielded twine and tape. Then he went upstairs to rummage through Clarence’s closet for some thinwear from his younger days. Found suitable togs tucked in the back, and an extra pair of socks he shoved in his pants pocket—thin and nylonish in a damned unappealing pattern of brown and red diamonds, but they’d do the trick. The rest of what he needed would be in Jimmy’s garage.

He found Clarence’s car keys, hustled Wolf into the back seat of the Impala, and hit the road not ten minutes after sending Nona over the edge. Electricity coursed in his veins. He’d never felt more alive, more juiced, not since the first time he’d been born.

SEVEN

NEIGHBORLINESS

Karin cradled the phone. Odd. She’d gotten up the courage to talk to Frank, been halfway to his study, then the phone had rung. A weird silence. You wouldn’t think silence could take on a character all its own, but it had. Or maybe it was just her own mood reflecting off the mute stranger on the other end, a mood that combined her upset over Jimmy Gallagher’s outrageous attack on her, with the anxiety she felt about talking to Frank.

No matter. She shook it off, found that core inside that said “I won’t let Jimmy do that again, next time I’ll stand up to that bastard,” used it to strengthen the other voice, the one goading “It’s time to talk to Frank, time to face up to what our marriage has become.”

Her knock was tentative, then more firm. Hearing him acknowledge it, she opened the door and poked her head in. He was seated at the PC in his shorts and a polo shirt, no socks or shoes, legs wrapped under him on the brown swivel chair. His look was enigmatic. A mild annoyance at being interrupted. The confused look of a thinker uncurling out of concentration. Mostly an anxiety that mirrored hers.

“We need to talk,” she said, sounding more decisive that she felt inside.

“All right,” he said. “Let me save this file.” He hit a function key. The disc drive made its squirrelly sound. A few keystrokes and he turned the PC off.

He followed her in silence, down the hall to the TV room, where the L’d couch waited. It was their place for serious talk. They’d used it before, mostly in the early days when the trial’s aftershock had put a strain on them, one they’d been strong enough to overcome. Karin took her place and watched Frank settle into his. The spill of the hall light sufficed. Lovely plant smell hung everywhere, the spikes and blooms of shadowed vegetation. She smiled awkwardly and he glanced down.

“Frank, it’s just not working.”

He didn’t look at her. A hand went to his face, then back down to his lap. “Yes, I know.”

“Maybe we ought to think about a separation, I don’t know.” Her voice trailed off.

“I . . . I love you, Karin.” There was a little boy softness to his voice. “I’ve tried to be a good husband to you, I—”

“And you have been, you have, Frank. But it used to be not just good but great. We’ve lost that. I think I need that again, and I’m not sure I can find it with you.”

He nodded. “I see.” Dead silence. She’d expected a scene, some display of emotion, some tears or entreaties. Then she wondered why. The absence of such displays was precisely the problem. There was nothing solid about her husband, not until you got him into a courtroom. He gave her nothing to play against, left her with nothing but her plants, bold and refreshing in their nakedness, not wimpy and uncertain like Frank.

Frank looked at her, eyes moist. “What about Joe and Laura?” Tomorrow’s dinner guests. She had just suggested they separate and Frank was worried about his police buddy coming to dinner.

“We can go ahead with it, if you want. Put the best face on it. We can talk again Saturday night when we’ve both had a few days to think.” A pause. Still he didn’t look at her. “How does that sound?”

He nodded. Nodded again. “Fine.”

More silence. “All right, then. I guess I’ll go to bed.” No use in bringing up Jimmy at this point. It was her problem now, and by God she hoped she’d have the guts to resolve it if Jimmy tried anything further. She rose, walked by Frank, and made her way down the hall.

When she closed the bedroom door ten minutes later, prepared for bed, Frank, as far as she could tell, hadn’t left the couch, but sat alone in the dark.

***

It’d been a dull night until the phone rang. Nothing decent on the tube; Queenie flumphed down, head resting on her paws, as bored as her mistress; two loads of wash, his and hers, going through endless cycles; a paperback with a super cover but writing that made the night longer than it seemed. She’d been transferring damp clumps of laundry to the dryer when the call came.

Put the zest back into her life. Some fresh mystery, an unknown admirer. She hadn’t wanted to run down a list names while he was on the line, would’ve been gauche. Men liked to think they’re the only one, particularly in this chickenshit age of AIDS—homo disease, nothing for a good hetero woman to worry about, she’d read about that, how it was a scare the prude bastards had been able to brainwash the public into swallowing. Fuck ’em all. Fuck Wildmon, fuck Falwell, and fuck Jesse fucking Helms, for spoiling her fun.

Nona lay in bed, trying to concentrate on her novel but finding herself flipping instead through the Rolodex of old lovers in her head. None of them fit. Could it be someone new? But he’d mentioned her tattoo. A peeper in at windows, maybe. Frank Tanner. Ooh what an intriguing possibility that was, Mister Faithful Husband getting his rocks off by watching her through the blinds and talking dirty over the phone. Too scared to have it on with her in the open, afraid that Danny’s bitch might shiv him like she did Danny. Possible. Not likely. And even if it was Frank who had just put her through such amazing paces on the phone, Nona didn’t suppose the novelty would last very long. Fish or cut bait, Frank old buddy. It was time to shake on out of this place, time for a real abrupt change in her life. Go on a cruise, bed down with some rich guy, marry the fuck out of him. She still had plenty of tender young flesh on her body, firm and tight and smooth enough to snag any man she wanted.

It was so easy to drift along in these doldrums, get by, have her flings, go out, Jimmy didn’t give a shit if she fucked around, and now that he’d had some mad doctor turn his weenie into a sideshow attraction, Jimmy was less than nothing to her, it was like living alone as far as she was concerned. Comfy house, Jimmy paid the bills, no work for her but walking the dog, filling up and emptying machines to clean dishes and clothes, and fucking the odd neighbor or two. Routine, dead dull boring routine, with little likelihood of resurrection any time soon.

There was a rap at the windowpane, just above Nona’s head. The suddenness of it startled her. But she quickly forgot that, because its pattern—three quick knuckle taps followed twice by a soft drumming of fingertips—made her head go all nonlinear. Danny’s pattern. The signal that he was there in his jogging suit and that it was time for her to unlock the sliding glass doors to the kitchen and let him in for fun and games.

Knees on her pillows, Nona grabbed the pull cord and wrenched the blinds up. Nothing. Her reflection staring back at her. Outlines of their redwood fence and the dark backyard. Lights on in some second-floor windows the next street over. She was suddenly conscious of her bare bosom in full view above the window sill. Good. Flash the dead Rocklinites, shock a few of them out of their torpor, the zombie hoards. She had a sudden fear that a monster, skin all lizardy and mouth sharp-fanged and dripping some clear disgusting fluid, would leap up like a jack-in-the-box and shatter the glass to seize her. Yeah, right, she scoffed, but not before her brain did whirligigs around the idea.

Letting the blinds fall, Nona planted the book on her nightstand, unhangered and put on a long frilly nightgown, and opened the bedroom door. Walked the dark hallway in a dream state. This was total bullshit, some sick prankster having fun with her head. Rooms dark ahead, except for a spill of light from the porch. It was Jimmy, it had to be him, around once somehow to hear Danny signal her, now for god knows what reason playing hooky from work and pulling this weird shit on her, maybe whacked out from her having rejected his bionic dick. It was suddenly clear: Jimmy’d been the vampire on the phone too. Pitiful asshole turned away from her bed, he’d used Ma Bell to pimp for him.

Behind the curtains drawn over the glass doors to the kitchen, she saw shadows moving. Fingered a fold back at one sly edge, not wanting to give Jimmy the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten her out of bed.

It was Danny Daniels.

Nona’s stomach clenched. Wild thoughts raced in her brain, refusing to cohere. Danny hadn’t died at all, they had somehow conspired to play a cruel joke on her, deprive her of the best lover she’d ever had. (Flip!) Danny had a twin brother. (Flip!) This was all a dream just like in a lousy movie. (Flip!) He was a walking corpse, one of George Romero’s zombies, poised to smash a fist through that glass, stiff-leg her down the hallway to her bedroom, and eat her as a midnight snack. Yeah, get real.

Her hand drew back the curtain, its rings clicking at the rod above, slowly, almost without her willing it. She stared at him through the glass as if he were a wax figure of Cro-Magnon man and she a dazed schoolgirl. He smiled, gestured at the door, mimed unlocking it. Wolf sat beside him in shadow, tongue lolling out. There was no fear in Nona, just bedazzlement. In the past, she would keep him locked out, do a slow striptease for him, fondle herself, make herself wet so he could see the moonlight glisten on her flesh, then unlock the door and feel his fevered need rush in to overwhelm her; and then the game of delay would begin anew, she the dominatrix, he the slave. But now the shock of seeing him put even the idea of falling into the old patterns out of her head. Her left hand met the lock, flipped it down, started to slide the door open.

Then his hands came up and she felt the force of the smudged glass barrier vanishing from between them, the air subtly cool with night on her legs, her face. He came in, Wolf right behind him, and swept her up into his arms, his lips meeting hers, his tongue pushing them open, thrusting deep into her mouth. Its cold meaty taste was not as she remembered, not the sweet savage tang she loved so, but a bitter putrescence coating the roof and walls of her mouth like a slathering of plasma. She tried to pull away, but Danny’s right arm encircled her and his left hand braced the back of her head like a dentist’s chair, pressing her face against his with such force that her lips stretched white and her jaws began to throb from being forced open so wide.

Then suddenly her head was free. Danny ripped at her nightgown, tore it downward so that her shoulders hurt and her breasts stung from his fingernails catching gouges of flesh in the throes of wrenching away her clothes. But he wasn’t after sex, not in the least, she could feel the bad energy radiating off him like heat off tarmac, the violent intent. Rearing back, Danny pulled his tongue out of her mouth, which felt stretched and tingly and hung open as if a spring had broken somewhere. Then his hand spidered up to her face, shoving something into her mouth, a piece of nightgown she thought at first, but saw the socks, tasted the thin smooth old-man white-shanked flavor of them. His arm unvised her, but before she could respond, he spun her about and bent her over the table, yanking her arms behind her and tying them together at the wrists. She’d started to work the gag out of her mouth so she could scream for help, but he thrust it back in with three fingers—nearly cramming it down her throat—and sealed her lips with a rrrip-kiss of tape, as tall and wide and tight as Jack Nicholson’s wickedest grin.

***

Frank stared at his clock-radio. Eleven-fifteen. He was used to hitting the sheets at ten, conking right out. It wasn’t like him to toss and turn, although he was only doing that in his head. Behind his back, Karin lay at the edge of the mattress, lightly snoring.

Karin seemed an architecture of contradictions: one moment brick-solid, the next a house of cards. He loved her. He’d told her so. But he hadn’t sounded convinced, hadn’t moved her one iota. All part of the barrier he’d somehow constructed between his passion in the courtroom and his confusion in the real world, endless dithering on about how to behave on the world-stage. He had no sturdy religion to hold to and often envied those that did, even while he feel relieved to be above their simplicity, their occasional intolerance. He sometimes wished he were more like some of the senior attorneys. Henry Scithers came to mind, or Peyton Thancher, a man who exuded contentment in every context, who had found pleasing form in the law, welcomed it into his head, and let it flow freely from his heart and mind into every action, public or private, he performed. Thancher did not seem a slave to order, nor so obsessed by it as to oppress family or co-workers with his moral rectitude. No, he was easy with it, partnered with this inner spirit in a more harmonious bond than kept him partnered with Scithers and Wilde. Frank bunched pillow under his head and wished he were that forthright.

Had to face facts, though. Wishing wasn’t going to cut it. Maybe he’d corral the older man before lunch the next day, open his heart, ask for advice, probe into what he cared to reveal about his past, discover the secret of the man’s happiness, then do his damnedest to incorporate what he’d learned into his own life. No. He’d lived long enough to know that sort of thing never worked, that when you tried such measures, you tended to poison the well of relaxed camaraderie the two of you had dug in your days of first acquaintance. Besides he expected there was more to Thancher than he supposed; clay feet were best kept in the finest shoe leather money could buy.

A few backyards away, a lonely dog bayed a few times, then gave it up. Frank ached inside, dreading the loss he felt powerless to stop. Counseling came to mind, then he heard Karin say the word separation with the merest hint of hesitation, heard too divorce, its unspoken echo, burst into a million bewildered souls, like a fist of bats split and scattered by a glare of angry light.

He wanted to heal his marriage, to reinvigorate it. He’d never wanted anything so much, nor been so stymied, in his life.

***

Danny saw it all—from the moment when Nona unlocked the door until he collapsed into sleep above her headless body—through a haze of red. The red of his rage, the red of Nona’s blood, the ameliorative red of one whose rosy lenses filter out the harsh world.

He was on a resurrection high, a revenge high. All those times she’d excited him with her pretense at power, a pretense he fell into the habit of playing to—he knew now that, thought he’d been physically stronger, the games they played hadn’t been games at all, but had revealed her genuine power over him. No time to figure why. Just time enough to set things right, reclaim his manhood, take Nona all the way through and out the back end.

An arm about her waist from the back, a lift, and she was airborne. Nona felt as light as a toddler, though her head whipped to and fro like buffeting wind and her legs bicycled furiously all the way to the bedroom, striking walls but knocking nothing over. Queenie had pulled back into the bedroom from the first, a bad odor in her snout, and now she snarled and barked at Wolf, who looked both confused and menacing. He had her trapped where Jimmy’s closet cornered the wall. The crimson carrot of his penis jutted from its furry sheath. Good. Bitch was either in heat or Wolf’s revival had hornified him, but either way, Danny wasn’t about to let him waste it on a dog.

He slammed the door to Nona’s death chamber, feeling the already dark forces in him grow darker. “Attack her, Wolf,” he said. “Kill Queenie.” There was a growl or two of protest, a moment when Danny thought Wolf would defend his bitch and attack his master. But in the end, training triumphed over instinct. He leaped at the cowering collie and tore her throat out, her head forced into an endearing angle against his jaws as he charged in to open her veins. In the mirrored closet doors, blood leaped to meet blood, sheeting down like waves of Ocean Spray. When Nona, still in one arm, turned away from the sight, Danny carried her closer, ordered Wolf away, forced her left foot down into the gore, let her feel her pet’s death throes even as she refused to watch them. Nona’s struggles dimmed into the beating of so many butterfly wings. His mind fixed on the refusal of Queenie’s quivering body to accept death until it crept into her heart and chilled her out. Fascinating. A real object lesson.

He lifted Nona out, wiped her foot on the carpet, and carried her to the bed. Put her on her stomach, her foot bloodying the pillow, her face turned toward the carnage. “Stay put or I’ll hurt you,” he said. When she didn’t, he broke one of her fingers. Chose it at random and bent it back until it snapped. She protested under the tape, her eyes moist with pain, but she didn’t move after that. He tested her once when he went back to the kitchen and again when he visited Jimmy’s rack of tools in the garage, but remembrance of pain and Wolf’s close vigil kept her wide-eyed and quiescent.

“Watch this,” he said. An order. He dragged Queenie away from the wall, head lolled half off, blood now only a trickle. Belly up. The first incision went the length of her body, from the vent to the ragged gash of her throat. The other two, from paw to paw, fore and aft, right-angled his first cut. Methodically, he peeled off the white and butterscotch pelt, using Jimmy’s curved linoleum knife to separate skin from muscle, old wet rug reluctant to come up in one piece, but coaxable.

Nona whimpered.

Danny ignored her, but his head began again to throb, humming like a distant furnace and eating at him like the black bite of a gnat. Damned vestige of humanity. He’d make his wife plead through blood bubbles—when it was her turn to wear the shackles—for having saddled him with it. First she would get rid of it for good, then he’d do the same to her.

Washing his hands to get the grease off, he went to work. He turned Nona about, face now to the pillow, hands still tied behind her. No bedposts so he malleted a spike into the floor on her left, roped her left foot to it, her right foot to the base of her dresser, which he lifted, no problem, one hand sliding the rope end under. He hammered heavy brads, two to a side, half way into the window sill, then released her hands and secured them between the brads with tight-wristed rope, slamming the brads in so far that his blows gouged white smiles in the wood. Her arms were thrust before her, not straight out but angled slightly to welcome into her embrace some fat lover. Two feet of wall lay between sill and mattress, and Nona’s shoulders, Danny was pleased to note, paralleled the sheetfold a few inches down from where her pillow left off. But for her head, he could picture his hips fitting quite nicely into the magic trapezoid of her embrace. He had allowed some play in the leg restraints so he could put her in a kneeling position, which he now did, folding her thighs under her so that her knees were level with her navel, but letting the tension in the ropes keep her legs wide apart, plenty of room for him to slip beneath her.

Time to strip. He shucked off Clarence’s oversized clothes, looking forward to selecting something of Jimmy’s when he was done here, hoping Karin would prove—after he savaged her—to have thrown away none of his own clothes. But Nona was waiting, butt out, big curvy breasts hanging down, a lost look in her eyes, and an unfortunate gag at her mouth. Couldn’t afford to remove it. The sound, the teeth: weapons at this point. He didn’t want anything to queer his chances with Karin. Old Nona’d humped him many times in this bedroom; now they—him and Wolf, the grainy footage flickering in his mind, wince-faced junkie hugging a stained caseless pillow as a Saint Bernard wuffled his dick into her hole—they were going to hump her, hump her brains out, hump her to death. He took her pastel-pink fuck-me shoes, the ones with the stiletto heels, out of the closet and put them on Nona’s night table next to the carving knife. Their curves and angles brought back past arousals, past humiliations, past climaxes she’d visited on him in this room.

Wolf was chomping at Queenie’s stripped guts. Danny retrieved the nearby pelt, the fur tickly warm against his left leg. The staple gun, on the dresser, felt good and cold and hard in his hand. Then his mind caught the tall candles there beside her jewelry box, white and winding in their squat wood bases, a black stiff whisker of a wick at the top—Nona’s fuck-me candles. Only moon and fire could light Nona’s ways, not the harsh man-made light that now lit her body. Danny flared a wood match from the tiny box beside them, lit them, doused the overhead light, filled his hands back up with pelt and staple gun, positioned the one against her back and buttocks, used the other to fix it there, Nona’s muffled screams and thrashings thrilling him with the depths of his own depravity. Dead or alive, he was damned; no question about it. He shuddered inside at the goad, gone now from gnat to mosquito to wasp. No way would he yield, not with the rest of him craving the total freedom to ride every impulse all the way, no stop of any kind, the joy of sane madness squeezing him like a toothpaste tube in its triumphant fist. Fuck the wasp-man inside, fuck him to hell and back!

Wolf leaped up at the snap of his fingers, sniffing at the pelt, laying his jaw on it, feeling Nona’s warmth. Danny took Wolf’s front paws, walked him up the bed until he covered the woman, furry underbelly against Queenie’s fur, snout buried in Nona’s confusing platinum hair. Not confusing enough, however, to cancel the signal that came to him from the pelt and his position. Danny helped him find Nona’s anus, got him started with a handful of spit and some manual guidance.

Then he slid under Nona’s body, his legs bracketing his dog’s, Nona’s bracketing his. She was dry and tight as a healed wound going in; would have abraded him before he died (yes, fuck it, he’d been dead), but now, with his new strength, she parted like knifed butter. Her breasts hung tantalizingly less than an inch above his chest, her nipples tight with terror. Her eyes, changed nearly past recognizing, widened down at him. A tear splashed at his lips, salty and fine.

“Having fun, Nona?” he said. He ran his fingers over her face, lightly at first, then more roughly, but more in control now, careful not to get carried away, not to reach endgame too soon. “Too bad about your mouth. I’d love to do all sorts of things with your sweet mouth.” Retrieving her shoes, he fixed on the tapered pink heels, the sliver-thin tips, reinforced, had to be. “So maybe we’ll just go a different way in. I wanted to watch you suck on these heels like you made me do once, remember?” She made no acknowledgment, her head bobbing like a dashboard doll’s, out of synch with the reaming Wolf now shuddered into her from below.

Danny touched the tips of the heels to her cheeks, dimpled them there, deepened the dimples, broke through the skin, slid them into the punctures past new rivulets of blood until they met wadded wet nylon socks between her tongue and palate. He pulled them out, pink gone red and dripping. “You made ’em all wet, Nona.” Danny drew red trails up past her temples, played her outer ears like a mirrored needle running through record grooves, a maverick needle not honoring label boundaries, headed for the small dark hole in the center. He deafened her then, watching her eyes widen further, holding himself back from shoving them in all the way. He let go of the shoes for a moment, saw Nona as a gagged, lop-eared rabbit, felt the enormity of what he was doing. He was amazed at the distance he’d traveled, while underground, from where he’d been. Sure, he’d beaten up on Karin, tied her up, made Wolf lick gravy off her breasts, even gotten hard once watching an out-of-her-skull-with-terror Mexican whore buy the bloody farm in a snuff flick. But he would never have done then—never even conceived of—what he was doing now. The mutilation, the murder, these came to him naturally, one outrage upon another.

He uneared the heels, outlined her eyes in gore, Nona trying to arch out of his way but not having much room for it. The heels eased in, just at the lashes. She bucked and thrashed, cheek holes wheezing blood from her stifled screams. A high yip sounded behind her. Wolf was on his way to doggy heaven. Danny was hard inside her and gently moving every now and then, but nowhere near to coming. He tossed Nona’s shoes aside and grabbed the carving knife, a deep cut, so deep he felt backbone resist blade, bathing his face in neck blood, nearly choking on the hot outgush as it washed down on him. Wolf, who bounded off, watched from the floor.

Danny uncunted himself and hustled out from beneath her shuddering body, gripping her chin and wrenching her head over—crack of spine like wet kindling—so that it lay back against fur, staring up eyeless at the ceiling. He knelt between her arms, a tight fit, his feet against the wall, his knees pooled in blood. Two holes hungered for him, two neckholes like snapped graphite in the halves of a pencil, one leading to the brain, the other to the belly. The first was too short, too inactive, and he had no great craving to fuck fat old Clarence’s socks. The second wheezed like wet lips spewing liquid vomit and gasping for air. That one he filled up, his head on fire with the inhumanity of his act, wallowing in it, suffering for it, yet with one new spark of horror in him, Karin his salvation, but the thought of being beholden to Karin trebled his rage and he thrust into Nona’s throathole with renewed violence, her hot blood gushing like vampire puke against his groin. He made to bend over her body but the head got in his way. He wrenched it off—a flap of flesh peeling between her shoulder blades like a torn cuticle—and hurled it with a fisted rap against the bedroom door, blood and platinum curls sawblading end over end. Wolf chased after it, a tossed Frisbee, almost brought it back, then sat down by Queenie’s corpse and dug into it like a stew bone. He huffed once like he’d done near nap time in the old days.

Nona’s throat clutched hot about him. He leaned over the stapled pelt, hands on her breasts, feet pressed back against the wall below the sill, stretching her arms with every thrust, dislocating her shoulders with the force of his passion. Then it was on him, riding him, riding her: the monster drive inside him, the need to love by hurting, the dark expression of pain, pumping his pain into any hot victim, getting rid of it, shooting the rapids of his seed into her, and it came, it came, out of him it came, fierce as jungle beasts lunging, and Nona became dead flesh under him as he died inside her.

The air escaped him. Deep lungsful he needed. Then it rushed back in, calming him. And with it came fatigue like he’d never known. He saw Wolf lying beside the head of Queenie’s mistress, Danny’s mistress. Eyes in and out of focus. Sudden panic took him, but not far. There was a blanket of wool slowly enfolding his mind. His body was shutting down. Wolf had already collapsed. Was he dead? Deep terror welled up, but everything was cotton candy in his head. Spirits of sleep dragged him down, no power in his limbs suddenly, and he knew for certain that it was over, that he’d never wake up, never have the pleasure of doing to Karin what he’d done to Nona. Nona: all furry under him, her buttocks still warm beneath his hands, her deep throat flexing around him in the afterglow of their love. Karin’s face hovered over candlelight as he fell, hovered and gloated and taunted.

Winked out.

***

Six-twelve by the clock in his car. Jimmy was nearly home, Quint having agreed to cover for him the last hour or two at work.

“Want to sneak off and, you know, grab a piece on the side,” he’d said. “Look, I’ll owe you one.”

To which Quint had joked, “I don’t know, Jimmy. Wife like yours? If it was me, it’d have to be an awful snazzy little piece to get me up off Nona.”

“Angel food, Quint. A slice of heaven on earth. And she lets me do whatever I want, strip her, whatever.”

“Gee, maybe Nona’d like some company while you’re at this other piece. Maybe—”

“Maybe you’d better shut your fucking mouth,” he’d snapped at Quint, then they’d had harsh words there in the lobby, pausing while some deadline-driven nerd signed out, patching it up after he left.

Jimmy turned off Sunrise onto Whitney. “Yeah, Quint, long’s I’m working the guard desk beside you, you sure as hell better stay away from Nona.” Was one thing to let your wife fuck the odd cock or two, a whole nother ball of wax working beside him for eight hours straight, a sidearm at your waist just itching to rise out of its holster like a cobra and zap the fucker between the eyes.

He took a drag on his Camel, let the fumes spiral out his nose. Karin’d looked real sweet in her garden, tender skin of her breast on his lips. His brain was firing off rockets just recalling her passivity, transposing it into her bedroom, him yanking those white shorts off her pretty butt, exposing the cleft, working those thighs open, her a tad trembly, saying no but doing jackshit to stop him. It wasn’t rape if the voice said one thing and the body said another, just your traditional token resistance, good girl not wanting to seem a slut. What a wacko notion that was. Kept American women low on the world senso-meter far as he was concerned. Not like the Dutch, the Swedes, hell, the fucking Brits, come to that.

He considered parking on Midas, cutting through the undeveloped lot behind Karin’s house, vaulting the fence there. Fuck that noise, he thought, Nona’ll be asleep or humping her latest catch. None of her business what I do anyway. I’ll just hit the garage door opener, give her a jolt of hubby-home-early in case she’s got it spread wide for some normal-dicked geek, then break the fuck into the neighbor’s house and try his wife on for sighs.

Checked the clock, six-nineteen. Another ten minutes and Frank would be out the door, a half-hour commute into Sacramento. With luck, Jimmy’d be inside Frank’s sweetie, jazzing her before Frank reached Business-80. Be still my beating hard-on.

He cruised past the Georges’ house, old man Kinski’s perfect lawn, ugly Alice Brown’s ugly brown place (bratty son, husband who’d wised up and left), then Tanner’s house (pale light spilling into the front room off the kitchen, shadows moving, her shadow maybe, a whole shitload of vines and flowers everywhere, talk about obsessed!). He juiced the opener, heard it nit-nit-nit-nit, heard the rumble of his garage door as he shone headlights on its rising panels and drove forward when it had risen high enough to clear his roof.

House was quiet. Smelled weird, like Queenie’d lost it, taken a dump somewhere. Speaking of dumps. He went into the hall bathroom, dragged on the Camel, dropped it into the can, took a huge quick shit on it, the excited kind like just before the big exam. Finished up. Guest room, traded his uniform for a pair of workpants and an old shirt. Jesus Christ, he needed a shot of something. Minimal lights on, he felt like a fucking burglar in his own house. Didn’t want the neighbors remembering a lot of activity in case she cried rape. Yeah, right, dummy, so you rumble into the garage at six in the morning, no one’s going to notice, old Flora Larchmont across the way, biddy never sleeps, time enough for that when she was dead, and none too soon for that neither. Fridge open, friendly old Johnny Walker tipping his hat, poured a big one, sloshed on the counter, felt tight and frantic going down, like a chocoholic shoveling in a layer of Whitman’s to stave off loneliness. Put it away. Slid the collapsible stepping stool—dirt clods still on it from his earlier vault—out from between the fridge and the counter with the toaster oven, crumbs scattered about. Neglectful Nona. Speaking of neglect: Sheer nightwear on the floor, torn up, the kitchen table askew. Odd. No come stains on the table. Jesus, sliding door unlocked. Have to talk to her about that in the morning after the stud she’d snagged tonight got the fuck out of their house.

But right now, he had other things on his mind. Sun on bare breasts, wide-brimmed straw hat on Karin Tanner’s little-girl head, those perfect legs, the tight hug of her shorts. These were a few of his favorite things. Stool in hand, he slid the door shut behind him, stepped off the patio, his throat dry, liquor fumes in his nose. He crept along the back of his house, past the chimney, wasp nests and black widows in the eaves in past summers, wondering where they’d show this year. Bottles of shampoo dark on the shower ledge. Then their bedroom window, blinds down and dark, no candle flicker. Must have exhausted the poor bastard, no staying power, not like him, he could stay up forever. Nona would come around, once she got used to the idea. Go off with her on a cruise, spend it all in their cabin, worshiping his eternal hardness. Hell, maybe take Karin along too, if she asked real nice. Start off with two acolytes, then build his harem from there.

Jimmy uncollapsed the stool by the fence, carefully, so as to minimize the noise. Peered through a knothole. The spill of light from blind slats in their kitchen made Karin’s garden a diorama of vegetation. But it lacked its goddess. The night was pulling away. The sky had given up black for deep purple. Jimmy heard a garage door open. Frank Tanner’s, no question. When it shuddered to a stop, he heard Frank’s Honda reversing onto the street, pausing, driving off. Garage door started again, on its downward track.

He felt like he had to take another shit, he was so excited about what lay ahead. He’d steal into their yard, sneak around to the side door to the garage, get the key under the funnel (trusted neighbor indeed), haul himself out and pump up, surprise Karin in her bathrobe, ease it off her shoulders and away. By God he was going to have her, minutes from now, and she would love it. He climbed the steps and gripped the top of the fence, hoisting his body up and over, landing this time between bushes, no noise, none.

The pre-dawn garden lay open before him.

***

She’d gotten up as usual, dressed, made Frank an egg breakfast. Habit left over from her life with Danny, one she enjoyed.

It had been a mistake.

They usually didn’t say much in the morning. Usually it was a nice easy time to be together. Calm, relaxed, a chance to feel the fresh energy of awakening to a new day. Today her stomach had tightened up when he walked into the kitchen, fully clothed except for his coat and tie. He’d taken longer to dress, eaten less than usual, made a point of avoiding her eyes. She was glad to have it over, glad to take his token kiss on the cheek (lingered there a hair longer than he had to) and hear the rote series of sounds that went with his departure: the vigorous toothbrushing, the snap of his briefcase, the opening and closing of the garage door.

Now, having adjusted the blinds in the kitchen and the TV room so they still kept out the world while letting in some light, she settled into Frank’s corner—her corner come six-thirty—of the L-shaped couch, one arm resting on its arm, and savored her solitude. She liked to watch the quality of the light change, plum to nectarine to peach to yellow-skinned apple, imagining each individual flower in her garden waking to it, watching the subdued spectrum of green in the stems and leaves of her houseplants shift and intensify with the light.

Thoughts of Frank distracted her this morning. This simply couldn’t be happening to them. It felt all wrong. She loved him. He loved her. But they just didn’t seem to fit together. He—

His key in the lock.

He’d come back to sweep her into his arms, batter her face with kisses, tell her to put away all her silly ideas about breaking up because he intended to stay with her and love her forever. But wait. He’d driven off, she’d heard him. Car problems. Damned Honda had conked out again two or three houses down the block—Hondas Forever indeed—and he was coming back in to tell her he had to take the truck to work. But why would he use the alcove door instead of the front door? He’d have to go through the redwood gate, reaching up and over for the latch, then use the side door into the garage—a whole lot of needless bother. Made no sense, none at all.

Rising to her feet, she heard the door close behind him. She began to call his name, then heard the footsteps not his footsteps on the tile floor past the washer and dryer. She held her breath, saw the alien shape hove into view, take space that did not belong to it. It moved down the hallway, a tight smile on its Jimmy’s! face. No, it couldn’t be, this wasn’t happening. Get out of here, she thought. Get out of here, you bastard. But nothing came out of her mouth, and the will was draining from her like always, and Jimmy was moving toward her, holding something below his waist, holding oh God his penis, red and jutting and erect, and Karin’s head throbbed, struggling against a lifetime of helplessness.

EIGHT

A DUBIOUS RESCUE

Jimmy’d never been so jazzed in all his life. So this was the rush the bad man felt, this the high you got breaking and entering. No wonder cops were needed in such numbers. No wonder security guards like him never had to worry about being canned. He’d been in the house before, sure, during Danny’s time and once or twice since. But to steal in just before dawn, to cross through the garden and run your hand along the siding where it turned corners out of the backyard, to slip into a garage still oily with the fumes of the owner’s vanished car, to open the alcove door with your dick unzipped and out, knowing the prize at the center of this transformed wonderland was just around the corner—now that was a trip and a half! Three cheers for owning stuff, and three more for screwing the owner out of what he owned while his back was turned.

Layout was like his house. More plants though, even more than the last time he’d dropped in. Walking down the hall toward Karin was like hacking out a jungle path, all the hanging planters above and whole shitloads of potted plants making the hallway narrower. The lady had plants on the brain. But it was obvious from the way she stared at him coming toward her that she weren’t thinking about no damned plants now, nosirree.

“Well,” he said, sounding different here, quavery and dark, hopped-up marauder’s voice. “Hello there. Hope you don’t mind my popping in like this, but I’ve got something here I wanted to share with you.” Hand on his penis; he’d be scared into limpness probably without his pump, but now he was stiff as stiff could be, balls and hair like backup men spilling out of the zipper-toothed vulva at the front of his pants, his prick ramrod thick and tall in his hand.

She stood there, not in her bathrobe, dressed in some simple white blouse tucked into a reddish skirt that broke above the knees. She was blonde and beautiful, not flashy like Nona but simple and churchy almost, a dainty goldfish waiting to be netted, waiting for him to expose her animal parts, to strip and fuck her, to celebrate the lascivious side of her that called to him from beneath that innocent exterior whenever he watched her through the fence.

It seemed at any second she’d bolt. But no. He came nearer and she just stood there, body tense. All part of the game. Pretend to be troubled, maybe even buy into it herself, all the time craving what both of them wanted so much: the bed, the flesh, the spillway.

“You are so pretty,” he said, and it was true. Only natural light here, no hum of kitchen fluorescents. His hand, the one not clutching below, rose to touch her face.

She gave a whimper, eyes wincing but not looking away from him, not breaking the gaze. Her chin arched up as if she were cornered prey baring its neck.

He touched her cheek.

“Don’t,” she said, flinching away. Louder than her protests in the garden, stronger even. Then, weaker, as if she’d startled herself: “Get out of my house.”

“It’s all right,” he soothed. “You’re shocked at me barging in here like this. I’m shocked too, you want to know the truth. But maybe you should feel flattered. It shows what an impression you made on me this afternoon in the garden.”

“If you go now, I won’t call the police.”

“I really need to see those lovely breasts again, to feel their nipples harden under my tongue. Let me do that and I’ll leave.” Fat chance. But give her the option of sliding into it without seeming to.

He laid one hand on her shoulder, felt the soft thin-boned structure beneath. She stepped back, out from under it. “Don’t touch me again.” Genuine warning there. “You have about one more second before I go for the phone.”

His hand tingled where he’d touched her. Her feint at resistance surprised him. But he could still hear the victim inside her, waiting for that false shell of denial to crumble. Just a case of this being her house. Alone with him, her doors and windows closed against sound. No wonder her defenses, such as they were, were up. “No need for threats, sweet lady. I won’t beat you like Danny did. I’ll just—”

“You’ll get out of here is what you’ll do.” She went for the front door, brushing past him. He grabbed her arm and spun her about, held her tight around the waist.

“Maybe you like the rough stuff,” he said. “Maybe it turns you on, maybe that’s why you stayed with Daniels. I can give you that in spades if that’s what you want.” He felt absurd, offering to beat her, but it felt right too: Something about her was sucking his anger right up to the surface, anger he didn’t even know he had. And by God it was a sexual anger, a turn-on. She was looking better and better to him, struggling helpless in his arms, her skirts brushing cool against his erection as he tried to press it into her.

Her hands whipped up to Jimmy’s face, searing flame along his cheeks. He gave her his backhand. She lost her footing, stumbled to the linoleum, grabbed for the door. Locked, deadbolted like his and Nona’s front door.

He hauled her up from behind, breasts squished flat beneath his arm. With his other hand he reached under her skirt along the hip, felt the sheer bikini fabric at his fingertips, struggled to get purchase on it despite her sudden resistance.

“No!” she shouted, breaking away from him and running for the front room, intending he guessed to circle through the dining room into the kitchen and out the sliding door.

Absurd, he thought, heading back through the TV room to cut her off, upsetting a big-leafed plant on a flimsy table as he ran. Bitch wasn’t playing fair. Or maybe he just didn’t know her game yet. But by God she was going to learn his pretty quick. His penis flapped against his pants like an impatient turkeyhead, but he made good time. Sound of door-blinds being shoved aside, a combination celery crunch and card shuffle. Not her day for escape, he thought, this door locked too and her attacker—Got her!—spry in his rage and desire. He shoved a hand straight down the back of her skirt, yanked her backward as hard as he could. A button pinged off the blinds.

***

The garage door woke Danny from a dreamless sleep. One moment gone, the next revived. Disoriented though. Shit stench close by, his body draped over a log of fur. Then it all came back and he knew he was lying on top of Nona’s cold corpse. Her bowels and bladder had let go in the night; the sheets were cold and damp under his hands. Wolf lay sleeping by the door, Nona’s chewed head nestled like best buddies next to his. The door into the garage opened and closed out there. Jimmy, tuft-haired joke of a security guard, couldn’t even guard his own wife. Man was in for a surprise when he waltzed through that door. But he heard Jimmy use the hall bathroom, then move around the house everywhere but here.

Danny rolled off Nona; tried to anyway. His cock was clotted inside her neck, groin hairs stuck to the stump of her torso like thin spaghetti congealed in meat sauce. He lost a few hairs in the process, but peeled carefully free of her and stood at last by her bed in the pre-dawn light. The candles he had lit hours before hunkered like turrets, melted in upon themselves.

Sounds outside the window. Jimmy going by. Amazing. Was he doing yardwork? Danny raised the end of a slat and put his eye to the thin angle. Jimmy, in work clothes and white Adidas, unfolded a stepping stool and peered through the fence, something in Danny’s yard fascinating him. He watched Jimmy climb the steps, saw him vault over into his wife’s garden. “Cocksucker,” Danny muttered, not too loud but loud enough to rouse Wolf. Bastard was clearly up to no good. A surge of anger seized Danny. Murderous bitch or not, Karin was still his wife; now here she was, alone in the house, about to be set upon by her neighbor. His house, his wife, under attack. If not sexual, then maybe violent. That upset him even more: It was his job to take Karin apart, nobody else’s. Pussy on demand and the doling out of discipline as needed, these were a husband’s prerogative.

Wolf growled behind him.

“Save it, Wolf,” he said, snagging Clarence’s clothes off the floor. No time to clean the gore off his body, no time to go through Jimmy’s closet.

Wolf’s growl deepened.

“What the fuck’s with you?” He turned in time to see Wolf take off. Instinctually his hand shot out, snatching the German shepherd by the throat in mid-leap. The grave had given Wolf a mean streak. Not to mention a lapse in obedience. Danny arced him around and slammed him against the wall by the windows, knocking a crook-necked lamp off Jimmy’s night table. Wolf fell awkwardly, but came out of it chastened, his big brown eyes limpid in a savage face. “Let’s go,” said Danny, kicking aside his lover’s head and storming out of the bedroom.

Down the hall and out the kitchen door, Wolf now in lockstep beside him, Danny pictured Jimmy breaking into his house. Little twerp. He’d pretzel him for that. He touched even one hair on his woman’s head, Danny’d wrench his fucking teeth out and do some exploratory root canal work with the help of an auger bit and his buddies Black and Decker. Cool night air, grass wet and soft under his unshod feet, he vaulted the fence as easily as if it were three feet instead of six, Wolf right behind him. A bush bristled and snapped under Wolf’s weight, but he righted himself quick enough, and Danny said, “Not a sound.” In the kitchen, Danny could see a hand—her hand—fumble at the door, then disappear. The blinds were only partially open, but it was enough for Danny to see shapes struggling in the house, one trying to flee, the other preventing it.

He had an urge to smash through the door, rip aside the blinds, and take the fucker down in a rain of glass. Right, play Rambo, watch the lights go on all up and down the block, rouse the neighbors, bring on the police, lose his chance to kill Karin in leisure. “Come on, Wolf,” he said and sprinted through the garden, noting as he passed how much more profuse and varied the flowers had become in a year’s time. He rounded the house, found the side door to the garage open, good old pickup sitting there on the wrong side of the garage, things fucking rearranged on the walls. He wrenched open the door, key still in the lock from Jimmy. Wolf burst past him—his mouth roiling with growl—through the laundry room, and Danny steamrollered behind him down the hall, knocking over potted plants and setting overhead ones spinning as they came on.

***

Amazing how unsexual this is, he thought, this attack on Karin. True his dick was up, but that was the doctor’s doing, not his. What he felt was rage that she’d resisted after being so compliant in the garden and an exhilarating sense of impending triumph now that he’d pinned her to the floor in front of the TV and her blouse was yanked halfway out of her skirt. Jimmy held her down with one hand and a knee, his other hand struggling with fabric. Her kicking, vicious but ineffectual, exposed her legs and thighs, the pink bikinis hugging the cleft that was almost his.

Then the house exploded in fear, a fireball of sheer terror invading from the direction of the garage. Jimmy, needing no time to think about it, rose to his feet and turned as if to run. Sound buffeted his ears, too much sound to process, and a glimpse of movement slipped into the corner of his eye. Reddened creatures. A dog, a man, fresh from a pool of crimson clay. Jimmy did this absurd fandango with the dog, backing up and raising his hands as the creature advanced, slower now, teeth bared, fur tufted with mats of blood, his master standing behind but not at all Jimmy’s focus, a man of shadows.

Jimmy tried to break from the dance, tried to run for the kitchen, but even as he tried it, he knew it was part of the dance too: his hand, his good right hand, hovering too long between them, impossible jaws snapping out like a sprung jack-in-the-box, closing dead center on it, skin pierced, blood shooting up about white canines that closed and met despite Jimmy’s shock, despite the remembered pain of falling at the beach when he was no more than ten—that same hand!—jagged piece of bottle hidden in the sand, him crying, his daddy carrying him into the ocean to wash it off, then to the first-aid station by the parking lot, a scared confusion of sound, watching a needle slide into his arm, tetanus shot, coming to with smelling salts—all this in the split-second the dog punched its teeth through his hand and began to shake him so hard his arm was nearly wrenched from its socket. He had the absurd thought that he ought to be able to shrug off his body like a grabbed coat, to escape out the door without it.

“Wolf!” came the voice. Jimmy looked up as the dog released him, the flash of recognition first in the sound of that name, then in the confirming inconceivable face of the man, a face caked in blood like bad Indian makeup but no less familiar for all that.

“Danny?” The name hardly came out at all.

The insane apparition moved forward, passing through every invisible protective barrier Jimmy’s mind threw up against it. Jimmy drifted back against the fridge but the drifting was weak in his legs, no energy, no speed. The closer the Danny-thing came, the more his hold on sanity slipped. Right up to him it came, close enough to breathe into his face, to burn him with its eyes. When it spoke, something snapped in Jimmy’s brain, a seal broke and the air rushed into his vacuum-packed head. “Whatsa matter, neighbor? Dog hurt your hand?”

“Please,” he said, soft through tears, over and over, not knowing what he meant. Please, Danny, please go back into the earth? Please vanish into the nightmare you came from and take your hellish pet with you? No matter. The Danny-thing understood.

“Okay, Jimmy,” it said, holding his bleeding hand up between them so the flow of blood tickled his wrist even as his palm throbbed. It gathered a pair of fingers in each hand, forced Vulcan salute, and split them apart at the webbing, an opening rend of flesh burbling new blood and impossible agony down his arm. “Ooh, I’ll bet that hurts, huh Jimmy? Let me see if I can’t make it better.” The fisted hands closed the V they had made, folded one over the other, Schwarzenegger fervently praying, then crushed Jimmy’s hand between them, pulverized it into the sawdust mitt of a stuffed doll. Jimmy nearly passed out, but it slapped him, shouted, “Not yet, damn you, you don’t slip out of it that easy.” Then quieter, glancing down, back up: “Besides, you seem to be getting off on the pain a whole bunch. I’ve heard of masochism, but Jesus, Jimmy, keeping your hard-on while having your hand crushed, why, that’s just plain perverse. What were you planning to do with this dick, Jimmy? Were you going to screw my woman, Jimmy, is that what you had in mind?”

He shook his head, or tried to. The Danny-thing had let go of his hand, but Jimmy rested it against his chest, afraid to uncrook his elbow. It gripped his erection now, halfway up from the balls, not like a ball player testing a bat but more like a skinflint boss gripping the arm of a worker caught with his fingers in the till. “Looks pretty lethal, Jimmy. You think this is a weapon? This ain’t no weapon. You don’t believe me, I’ll prove it to you.” His last words were tight but his grip was tighter. A string of no’s streamed through Jimmy’s mind because he knew what was about to happen and he couldn’t stop it. The thing’s other hand dug into his shoulder, leverage, then it rose slightly and wrenched his penis out and down and off, it was off, by God it was off just like that, no more roots to it than a snowman’s arm, and his pain mixed the muscle wrench and nerve yowls of an entire system savaged, with the raw mind-scandal of losing what he’d built half his life around, his linchpin, his axis, The Great Persuader as an old girlfriend had put it. Now it rose in the air, ball-less but still erect, squeezed off at the base, two thin plastic tubes whipping about like bloody handlebar streamers, tubes tugged out of the pump in his scrotum. And down it came on his head and face, again and again, whap! like a fat boneless finger, Daddy’s admonishing finger, only swelled up tenfold and connecting viciously, not just hovering a warning in the air but coming down, a bludgeon of flesh spurting thin red arcs with each smack to his face. There was trauma below and trauma throbbing on his chest but he somehow had room in his inventory of hurt to feel the battering he was taking above and try to resist it. He raised his left arm, blocked a blow or two with his hand. Then stopping its assault, the Danny-thing grabbed that hand, opened it, closed it about the severed organ. “You want it, buddy? You got it. Want to whack that sucker off? Go on, beat yourself over the head with it.” His eyes scanned the room. “I got a better plan.”

He was gone, off past the kitchen table. Jimmy held his manhood in his hand, felt blood and pump-fluid ribbon down his arm, watched the thing go limp as a balloon and bow forlornly before him, a dying white snake. He was in shock. His back lay flat against the fridge and only the tension in his knees kept them from unlocking and sliding him to the floor. His eyes shifted toward the window, to Danny, his murderer, standing next to a tall thin cactus. One hand was on the pot. The other closed around the base of the cactus, not flinching back as the needles sank into it. The cactus pulled right out, hardly any roots at all for such a tall sucker, nature’s chainsaw blade in Danny’s hand.

The face loomed again. The breath, the anger. “Okay Jimmy, time for you to get royally fucked.” Jimmy mewled, wanting the misery to end. “You got the hole, hey I don’t mind you’re on the rag if you don’t. Now all we need is something to shove into it. Why Jimmy, look what I have here. Big bruiser, isn’t it? But where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s what my fuckin’ momma always told me. Let’s see if she was right.” The Danny-thing pressed the cactus head to Jimmy’s pants, twisting it past the blood-soaked fly and flaring off rockets of agony when it touched the new wound. He saw it disappear, slowly at first, then quicker, as Danny pushed the thing inside him, demons playing on his face. He thought absurdly of Civil War soldiers having legs removed without anesthetic, of being brave in the dentist’s chair; but it hurt, it hurt so godawful much, his insides skewered and punctured and flowing together where boundaries had once separated them. His bladder let go, his bowels, not much choice, they were being shredded anyway. Let me die, he thought, let me die now. Oh shit, please please God now. But he hung on, his body fiercely craving life in the midst of torment.

Then his killer pulled the cactus out like a thrust sword, needles hooking his life and dragging it through a flaring tunnel of pain. He felt it leaving him, felt the Valium of death begin to fog his suffering. Then a hand covered his face, two fingers opened his mouth like steel calipers, and the taste of blood and shit washed over his tongue as the unstoppable ram of a cactal fist flattened it, shredded it, taking its thick way down his throat.

***

“Well, well,” he said, strangely devoid of anger at seeing her, “if it isn’t Karin herself.” She was still on the TV room carpet, having come to a kneeling position but kept at bay by Wolf. “I guess Jimmy didn’t realize what a dangerous position he was in, attacking you. Man could’ve been killed. Lucky for him I came along.” He picked two cactus needles out of his palm. Long ones. A few drops of blood, then the skin closed.

“I . . . ,” she said, then shut up.

He looked around the room. “Where the fuck’s my TV? Where’s our sofa? And what’s with the fucking wallpaper? Made a few changes around here. Trying to wipe me out of your memory, is that what’s going on? Brought your crummy plants in here and fucked up a perfectly good house like I said you would.”

In the kitchen, the soles of his feet sticky with blood, Danny kicked aside the dead man’s legs. Killing was some kind of fun, but the mess of the afterglow he could do without. He washed his hands, talking to her through the half-wall that ended six inches above the sink. “Got new carpet I see, yuppie white. Couldn’t get my blood out of the other one over yonder? Over there, where you murdered me?” He shut the water off and shook his hands into the sink, rain gusts against tin roof.

“You’re . . . different,” she ventured.

Infuriating little-girl voice. He’d always despised that voice, but now it started a new seed of pure rage in his gut. He couldn’t have that, not yet, so he closed the sucker off. “You bet I am. And if I’m not mistaken, I’ve got you to thank for it, for which you can bet I’m going to pay you back in the worst way. You can count on that, I—” The TV room came suddenly into focus: The gleam on the far wall was wrong. Not short sharp ornamental steel, but glass, the pale glass of framed pictures. His Viking dagger, no frills, just six inches of double-edged death; his good old Arkansas Toothpick, Jim Bowie’s proud eight inches of flared flamboyance; the Green River Knife, its crude walnut handle plain beside the fancy-dan finery of the Black Forest dagger—all of them missing. He hurried over to the wall in disbelief, past Karin, past Wolf, the pictures looming larger, resolving into images, a wedding, bride and groom knifing into a cake, two grinning idiots in tender embrace. Karin. Happy with some fool Danny’d never seen, some guy reminded him of the fucking jerkoff who’d been class president or some shit in high school, walking the hallways with his books neatly tucked under his arm like he owned the fucking universe. Framed baby pictures, his and hers. Danny recognized some of Karin’s, scared kid, that trapped look he liked to terrorize out of her. The other joker, upscale photos, upscale trike and toys, little-man suits on a three-year-old and he looked, the little fuck, like he belonged in them.

“I don’t believe this.”

“I’m married, Danny.”

“Who is this asshole?”

“His name’s Frank. Frank Tanner.”

“You love him?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I guess I do.”

“The fuck you do. You have to hesitate like that, it ain’t love. Now me, baby,” he took her hair in his hand, bunched it up tight at the back of her neck where she sat on the floor, first contact, her warm sweaty nape making the edge of his hand tingle, making weird thoughts start up inside, “I love you like nobody’s business and you can bet I’m going to prove it to you.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“What happened to my daggers? I didn’t expect you’d keep the kriss, the one you jammed into my heart, or maybe you’ve got it enshrined somewhere. But where are the rest of them?”

“Frank sold them, gave them away, I don’t know.”

“This Frank fuck has got a lot of nerve, taking over my house, stealing my wife, throwing my shit out, putting his shit in, repainting, recarpeting, new drapes, maybe a new front lawn, mine not good enough for him, letting you overrun the house with your fucking ferns. I want you to tell me all about this Frank.” He put a spin on the word. “Me, I’ll sit right here, you stay the fuck where you are, then you fill me in on you and him, understand?”

***

Karin nodded as best she could. Her hair felt like a clutch of gray-green tufts being pulled from an artichoke heart. When he let her go, her scalp tingled like a knee scrape, unclean from his touch.

And she told him about Frank, about the trial, how he helped her over the hurdles, legal and otherwise, how they married, their decision to keep the house and the property at Chiquita Lake, how things had disintegrated since then, but not about her graveyard visits becoming more frequent nor about her ability to bring plants—and now, it seemed, something worse—back to life. She skirted around Danny’s death, his burial, couldn’t bring herself to mention them or even allude to them. This was all a bad dream. Danny was not alive, naked and streaked with gore, sitting back like some slovenly house guest and staring at her through eyes that flickered like the fires of hell. Wolf—or some demonic clone with no hint of kindness in his nature—was not bunching his brow toward her, could not be baring his teeth through a ragged black hole and rolling a low growl at the back of his throat. And her next-door neighbor was not lying, mutilated, ripe-smelling as an infant, on her kitchen floor.

So her voice rattled on, and Danny nodded and stared, and still she did not wake up. When she was done, he made her show him the house, his hands reaching out to what was left of his life here, touching a jade necklace he’d given her, running his fingers over the smooth green stones. In the study he went straight to the wall of swords, took one down from its mount, said, “Don’t move,” set its unblunted point at her left nipple so that the cotton of her blouse took on sharpness and dug in.

Karin trembled and felt her year’s strength roll away before the husband she deserved. He pulled back suddenly, saying, “Later for that and only after lots more foreplay, right, baby? But now you’re going to get a blanket out of the hall closet, wrap these swords in it, and put them in the pickup. You and me, we’re going up to the cabin.”

She did as he said, knowing she was awkwardly toting the instruments of her own death, but feeling none of the power she’d gathered in the past year, nothing of even the resistance she’d managed finally to put up against Jimmy. When the swords were bundled into the back of the pickup, he sat her down at the kitchen table. “Stay here while I take a shower and change into some fresh clothes. I don’t suppose you’ve saved any of mine.”

Karin shook her head.

“Fine, I’ll wear some of Frankie boy’s weekend duds, his relax-around-the-house, wipe-the-lawyer-shit-off-me clothes. Wolf, she moves out of this chair or says one damned thing, you tear her throat out.” Karin could tell the dog understood, not just the gist of it, but the exact command. Then Danny walked off and his leaving was like a great weight being lifted.

She had to think. Gears were spinning wildly in her head but nothing was engaging. Had to leave Frank a note somehow, hope she’d still be alive by the time the police showed up. There was a pad of paper and a pencil by the phone but she’d have to get up to retrieve them. She spun her legs around that way. Too fast. Wolf’s growls revved up and Karin forced herself to look at him. Tensed muscle under blood-slicked fur. A face that begged for an excuse to attack. She’d never liked Wolf, but they’d learned to tolerate each other, avoiding one another while he’d been alive; but now, her dislike was echoing back out of those eyes in spades. Easy, Wolf, I’m just stretching, she said with a look, but he didn’t soften one bit.

She faced forward again, caressing the silver-patched leaves of a pilea before her. Houseplants covered three fourths of the table, reaching out and intermingling with one another, shades of green splayed out in waves. The remaining few feet, a tongue into the rest of the kitchen, was sufficient for one person to eat at comfortably. She looked out over the plants, reaching for an idea. Maybe remove a few leaves, tear them into strips, spell a word on the tabletop—but Danny would see it and that was the problem with anything she thought of.

Then it came to her. She quickly took an inventory, hoping there’d be enough—yes, four out of five, but she prayed it would suffice. She began with the pilea, slow and steady so as not to excite Wolf, edging it around the other plants and positioning it on the tongue, far enough from them to be noticed by what she hoped would be a crack police team, but close enough not to seem planned. Moving the other three was a harder task. Two she had to lift to clear the surrounding plants, not easy while remaining in her seat, and she nearly dropped her nephrolepis exaltata, what with the stretch involved getting her fingers around the pot. But at last she maneuvered them into place.

She had just enough time to fill in the holes she’d left, shifting plants about but being careful not to make the quartet stand out too obviously, when Danny returned. He’d put on Frank’s old pair of jeans, a khaki work shirt, some socks, and his running shoes. “Pretty close fit, me and Frank. When I’m done with you, I’ll have to come back and meet the son-of-a-bitch.” Renewed terror washed over her. Frank wouldn’t stand a chance against Danny, not as he’d been before, and certainly not now.

She looked at Danny, hair still damp from his shower but otherwise normal. “Please, Danny, leave Frank out of this.” No, not normal. There’d been a kind side to Danny before, not often seen and never admitted to, but there nonetheless, a counterbalance to the ugliness. Now his eyes glinted as if they didn’t curve at all but came to two sharp aqueous points that would prick her fingers if she touched them.

“Unless you want to die early,” he said, “that’s the last backtalk I’m going to hear out of you.” He came up to her, put his left hand behind her head and wrapped his right around her jaw so that his thumb was on one cheek and his fingers on the other. “Coming back to you—fuck the house, I don’t give a shit about the house—but me and you, we’re like hand and glove, we fit right together just like before. No, don’t move.” His fingers tensed around her jaw. She could feel the nails digging in. “Hand and glove, but my hand is filling up with hate for you right at this moment, it’s just pouring into my fingers, and I got me some claws in the grave, yes I did, so you, Little Miss Leather Glove, had better count on being stretched and tattered and torn before this day is out.” His nails dragged down her face, opening thin furrows. Karin could feel the skin part as his nails trailed down her cheekbone into the flesh beneath. “But before I kill you, and I’m holding back for just this reason—also because I want to torture screams out of you without any spoilsports trying to stop me—I need you to bring me back all the way.”

She didn’t understand.

“That’s right. You left something out. I could feel you there, above ground, I know you’re the one who brought me out of the grave; but there’s something missing inside. So you’re going to lay hands on me up there and finish what you started. You’re going to give me back my soul so I can feel the whole fucking enchilada again, all of it, not just the shit of it, understand?”

She did her best to nod.

“Good.” He released her, reached for the paper and pencil, and dropped it on the tongue of the table. “Sit here. Write what I tell you.” Karin changed chairs, not looking at Jimmy, the butt-end of her Silver Torch cactus sticking out of his mouth in a way that made her want to gag. “My dearest darling Frank,” he said, and Karin wrote it. The rest was some nonsense about how she killed Jimmy because he attacked her, and then she killed Nona—she did not dare stop to ask him what that meant—because she’d found out Frank was sleeping with her, that she was going off to San Francisco for a few days, no make that Carmel, good old Clint Eastwood’s stomping grounds, to think about what she’d done and then come back and turn herself in to the cops, that she was afraid she had a screw loose, which explained why she’d killed her first husband and why she’d killed the neighbors, and, oh Frank, she was thinking real serious about killing him too.

He read it over. “That’ll do her,” he said, sticking an edge of it under the cineraria, the leftmost member of her quartet of saviors. They made the barest arc around the paper, and as Danny hustled her out to the pickup and into the front seat, she prayed for someone with sharp eyes to notice what Danny hadn’t.

“Buckle up, sugar pie,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to see you hurt before your time.”

She did and they were on their way, nine-thirty by the clock on the dash, not one neighbor obliging enough to be out, noticing who was driving the truck and what canine long dead was glowering from the side window.

NINE

CABIN FEVER

It was a running joke with them, the whole creaky notion of secretaries and coffee. Peyton Thancher didn’t drink the stuff, bad for his health. Henry Scithers was of the old school and, when he was in the office, he had his coffee promptly at nine and one or there’d be hell to pay. Wilde got his own, a dime at the table by the door, like everybody else, Frank included. But Frank had bumped into Jeannine at Java City one day after work, discovered they shared a love of cappuccino. Ever since, she picked up a steaming cup for him as well as herself, ten sharp.

Jeannine had just dropped it off, her smile lingering in the air, when the phone rang, his direct line.

“Frank, it’s Joe Caldone.” His blustery voice always brought Broderick Crawford to mind, though Joe was as trim and baby-faced as Crawford had been overweight and jowly.

“Joe, what’s up?”

“Bad news, Frank. I just drew the short straw for a stakeout tonight. Looks like dinner’s a no-go. Sorry for the short notice.”

“They giving you time off this afternoon?”

“Some.”

“Well, look, suppose I knock off early today, I’m in research mode these days, shouldn’t be a problem, you and Laura come over say four or so, we’re done at seven, you and me shoot the shit for however long and you’re on your way? It’s not ideal, but . . .”

“Okay with Karin, you think?”

“Hold a sec. I’ll ring her up.” He put Joe on hold, hoping Karin would agree to it, not use it as an excuse to cancel out. The Joe-and-Laura show always brightened up the house for a few days, her with her non-stop brilliance in the face of everything that engaged her attention, him laconic and loving, astounded that this amazing woman, who painted and painted beautifully, who was indeed on her way to major fame, had latched onto him.

Phone rang. He gave it six rings, then two more for good measure. Strange. Probably out back, but it usually took her four rings tops to reach the kitchen phone.

“No answer, Joe. She must be in the garden.”

“You ought to buy her a cellular phone,” he joked.

“Right, and hook it to the bluebells. Hey, I’m sure it’s okay with her, I’ll call you if it’s not. Why don’t you guys swing by around four?”

Joe said that would do him fine and hung up. Good man. Happily married, far as anyone could tell. Frank took a coffee break from the State of California v. Joe Malloy, sipped cappuccino, stared out the window at the Capitol Dome, thought of Jeannine’s warm smile, eyes that tempted. The choices were never easy. Let his love for Karin die, break it off clean, and start over. Or sneak behind her back like Ethan Bell, who right at this moment was at the cabin with Marcie and was probably committing first-degree adultery with her, having a hell of a time, and setting the stage for a divorce or, what was perhaps worse, a lifetime of deception. Or take firm hold of his life with Karin, seize every opportunity to demonstrate in no uncertain terms his love for her, to tell her what joy she gave him, not hold back and let her guess. She’d had a lifetime of abuse. She needed him to be a trellis, not wavery, not vague and ill-defined, but rooted and there for her when her own gathering strength needed to retreat and regroup. It was so easy to make such a promise here, the larger trellis of the law around and within him. But it was much harder to deliver on it when he reached home, what with the inertia of their lives, alone and together, working against his efforts.

He took another sip. Sweet and bitter, milky, a tie to childhood, simpler days. The liquid warmed him and it chilled him too.

***

Ethan Bell had never been happier in his life. Not soft-lipped, slightly neurotic Kim Vega, whose closet he’d had to hide in and whose window at two in the morning he’d had to sneak out of when her parents came home early; not Michele Crevecoeur, the Montreal lovely who’d latched onto him at a party and raped him with her eyes while they rode the interminable Metro to her apartment, her lips steaming French sibilants into his ear, her hands doing things that came close to having them arrested; and certainly not good old reliable Susan, who’d once been interested in sex but, since the twins’ arrival, had lapsed into little more than tolerance of it and him—none of them gave Ethan anywhere near the rush he felt in Marcie’s company.

“More wine?” he asked. A bottle of chablis, Gallo’s best, glistened like liquid topaz on the hearth.

Her glass upended. Long neck beautiful in firelight, the smooth curve of skin swooping down to her lovely body, her breasts the most amazing miracle of softness and sweet perfection, on down the planes and dimplings of flesh and hair, the promised places, the claimed, the tasted. Time had ceased here. Eternity filled him. The stress of his work, much as he loved its high energy, was as the dream of some earlier life. Glass came down, one last swallow and a sigh, the shift of her body—a slip of stream over smooth rock—on the blankets they’d laid down in front of the couch not six feet from the fire. Marcie’s right arm elbowed into the cushion. She rested her head, her mussed lovely billows of auburn, in her hand. “Yes, Ethan,” she said. “More. But not wine.”

He took the empty glass she offered and set it on the hearth, then relaxed back into his mirrored pose, his left arm propping up his head, his naked body turned to reflect the welcoming hip-lyre of hers. Gentling a hand down upon her toasty thigh, he smiled into her eyes: flames twisted there, orange and sharp in the glistening black. Her back was a symphony of touch, with all the delicacy and detail of a sculpted figurine but with the heat of life and youth and a love that held nothing back. He stroked the nape of her neck and, as if in response, she slid closer and into him, all Marcie, a god-gift, kissing him, the sweet almond aroma making him ache inside with the trembling joy of it, wanting to weep for the splendor of her body touching his, cushioning and comforting him, loving him and inviting him to love her in return. He kissed her, deep and long, then loved her face with his lips, gentle butterfly kisses that alternated with words of love, words he’d never used with Susan, not even in the beginning. But Marcie loved them, loved to hear him tell her how beautiful she was and how much he loved her; his voice, she’d said, was like a new organ whose sole purpose was to turn her on—and that it did, so swiftly and completely that it drove her out of her mind with desire for him.

He couldn’t believe how many times they’d made love since they’d pulled in just before dawn. Didn’t think he had that much starch in him. But he did, sure as hell he did, when the setting was as peaceful as these woods, the cabin so cozy and inviting and well-equipped, the woman so much enamored of him, and he of her. Later, when it got a little warmer out, they’d have to carry a blanket into the woods, make love with all of nature concurring, sun-dapple on skin, soaring treetops replete with birdsong, moss and branch and bramble. But that was to come. This was now, and now it was a pleasure to occupy his mind with Marcie. Any moment now—he was getting more in tune with her—she would have done with the preliminaries. She would guide him onto his back and ease herself down on him, ride him, make him once again happy to be alive.

But no. She stiffened almost imperceptibly. Pulled back. “I hear a car,” she said.

“But that’s—”

She shushed him, then he heard it too. Not on them yet, but clearly making its way down the access road that ended at Frank Tanner’s cabin.

Lost hunter, he thought. Fucking bumbling numskull, had no business not knowing where he was going, spoiling a lovely mood by just showing up. Marcie rose. He took her hand, stopped her. “Don’t go.”

She kissed his fingers, held his palm to her cheek. “We’ve got company.”

“Some guy who’s lost his way. He’ll see the cabin, realize he’s in the wrong place, and turn around without bothering us.”

“Just in case,” she said. She brought his hand to her groin, the silken hair weaving around his fingers, a hint of moist lip beneath his pinkie. “You can give him directions. And then, if you’re very good, I’ll let you take off my robe with your mouth.” Then she turned and walked into the bedroom, a perfect pendulum.

Car, truck, whatever, was getting louder. He pushed off the floor, using the couch for balance. Marcie came back, carrying her silk robe over one arm, and tossed him his worn teal terrycloth robe, the one Susan had made for him a year before they married. He caught it but held it bunched against his chest and watched Marcie arch back to put hers on, wrap it over her breasts, cinch it around her waist. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Watching you.”

She nodded below. “You’re not getting into the right mood for guests. The robe won’t be much good if you can’t lose that for a while.”

“I guess I’d better stop looking at you then. Think of something sobering, some real turnoff. Kids starving in Ethiopia. A multi-car collision.”

“Your wife.”

“Ah-ah.”

“Sorry, that was uncalled for.” She said it in a way that brought them closer into collusion, playing out the role of naughty lovers. But Ethan knew, and she knew, that Susan was a topic they’d have to discuss before the weekend was over.

Time enough.

An eternity already, and two more blissful days still ahead. But he knew one thing for sure: If it kept being this good, he’d have no choice but to go for it, no matter what the cost to him, to Susan, to four-year-old Sean and Ivan, whom he vowed he would treat with extra special care if it came to breaking up the family.

He pulled on his robe, hearing the crackle of stones under the wheels of what was obviously a truck. It came in close to the cabin, sounded like maybe parallel to his car, and shut off. Ethan headed for the window. A truck door slammed, then another. A dog barked but like no dog Ethan had ever heard. This bark split the air, exploding in Ethan’s ears like the loud sudden popping of paper bags behind him. Made him start, swear under his breath.

A woman walking past his car. Tanner’s wife! What was her name? Karin. Major battered-wife-syndrome case just before Thancher hired him. Then he recognized the truck too. Chance meeting at the Folsom Lake beachfront one weekend about a month ago. What the devil were Frank and his wife doing here? Maybe they were swingers, taking a chance coming out here, making their proposal to him and Marcie, Karin Tanner wasn’t a shabby-looking lady that was for damn sure, worst thing could happen was they got their no and left, Ethan wasn’t about to spread the news, not in his current situation, but Frank risked—

Then he caught a glimpse of the guy. Not Frank. The guy smiled and waved. Ethan drifted back from the window. Big muscular jock-type. Rolled-up sleeves. Pecs out to here. What the hell was going on?

“Who is it, Ethan?” Marcie from the couch.

“Frank’s wife and some guy I’ve never seen before.”

“You don’t think she—”

“I’ll bet that’s it. Poor Frank. These two probably make a regular thing of it and he has no idea.”

A knock on the door, three quick friendly raps.

“Must be something else. She would have seen the car and had him turn his truck around.”

“Not this guy. Probably thinks he can talk us out of the cabin. Don’t worry. We’ve got squatter’s rights, and you’ve got the best lawyer in town.” He unlocked the door and went for the handle, nervous about Karin’s discovering his affair. Wives hung together sometimes. But then, he figured, he knew her secret too; bit of mutual blackmail might suit them nicely. As for the palooka, he’d only got a glimpse of him, but the man would see reason soon enough under the onslaught of Ethan’s trained analytical mind, a gift that had sparked envy and admiration at Yale, lots of good-natured skull rubbings for luck. If it came down to it, he’d offer to pay half of their motel room, hell he’d give them the keys to his timeshare condo up at Tahoe with the built-in hot tub if they liked.

He turned the handle and opened the door.

The guy was taller than he’d thought. Ethan adjusted his gaze upward, noting the man’s odd stance: not square with the door, but right foot trailing the left, his body plane just the least bit askew. Strange pose: left hand thrust into his jeans pocket, right obscured at his side, the whole picture reminding Ethan of a long-coated Civil War vet leaning grandly on a cane. Then he fixed on the face, the flat grin, lips lying closed, not preparing to say a thing, the eyes too small and too close together to be handsome, they drew him, the thought flashed “a prison look,” but yes and no, not prison but something far worse, something Ethan wished he hadn’t opened the door to, felt the impulse to close it flash in his arm, muscles starting to tense, then saw the guy flex his knees a tad, drop his right shoulder, twist back and then forward, the right arm coming out of hiding, its hand impossibly long and narrow and Johnny Depp it was no hand. He made to back away, to raise his hands, but the steel parted the air in front of him, uprising past his chest, punching up through the soft meat just above and in front of his neck with such force that his teeth slammed on his tongue, his mouth went wet and foul with invasion, and his sinuses clogged up like a sudden cold, and he wanted to say Wait, no wait, but his head was full of random impulse, part dream, part memory, the time he filled his pants halfway to school, but he was there, the three-year-old’s agony warping his head, and he was a dozen other places, buzzing frantically from one of them to the next, seeking home, some stability, trying to breathe for starters, and it was then he began to fly.

***

Hot damn! Fucking Roman Gladius short sword, ten hot inches of blade and enough pommel to feel absolutely in control—no wonder them fuckers had ruled the world! Danny didn’t know who this jerkoff in the bathrobe was, but his head skewered nice and easy, like a tender chunk of beef on a shish kabob. Thick skull though, eggshell of a roc. Danny could feel the beveled swordpoint stuck there like a dagger in an oak table. Fucker was twitching. Weird eye blinks. Musta never had his skull shanked by a lightning rod before. Little rooster boy, bantam weight, poor sap had lost his boxing gloves. Danny didn’t mind the blood dripping off the crouching lions on the guard, ribboning down his arm. Made him feel righteous, to tell the truth, warm and fuzzy inside like a crusader laying some defiant heathen low. But the red stuff wasn’t going to do wonders for his porch, and dammit he’d paid good money and put in a lot of sweaty weekends getting this cabin built. No way was he going to let this idiot bleed all over it.

“Stand clear,” he said, but Karin and Wolf waited to his right on the porch, out of the line of fire. Flexing his knees, Danny tugged the fucker down and forward, then twisted about and shot his arm up and over his head, off toward the left, the twitching body coming after like an inflatable knock-me-down toy. He released the sword just past the peak of its arc, saw the Mohawk of blood glisten like rubies in the sun, watched the fool curve up into the air and break his bones against the roof of his shit-brown Celica. “Wolf,” he shouted, “snack time.”

Wolf nearly knocked Danny off the porch, he streaked by so fast. A blur of steel-gray fur, black with Nona’s and Jimmy’s blood. Fucking beast was going to be needing another bath real soon. Maybe shave his ass next time, save himself a lot of trouble. Wasn’t much life left in Mister Celica there, but Wolf’s jaws digging for his liver set him twitching a few more times until at last he gave up living and got cozy with being dead meat.

“Follow me,” he said, not looking at Karin, knowing she wouldn’t dare disobey him.

He walked in. A girl. Hugging herself, trembling. Brown hair, big tits, shiny blue silk kimono. Guy’d been a rooster all right, stuffing his cock into this piece of chicken here. Sounded like a dandy idea. But she looked like she could use a little foreplay first.

Danny strode over to her, not aggressive, casual like he could be trusted. But she backed away, blinking tears. She’d seen him trash her boyfriend, her husband, whatever. “Hey, where you off to?” He reached out, grabbed a lapel, felt hot breast against his knuckles. She stopped, unsure what to do. Danny could feel her thinking: Do I leave my robe in his hand, maybe rouse him more? Do I try to claw out his eyes or slam the heel of my hand against his nose, break it, drive the bone up into his brain? Or do I stay and hope he changes his mind, wimps out, doesn’t rape the bloody fucking hell out of me?

Her eyes shifted over his shoulder, to Karin, took on softness, relief. Another woman, a sister who might save her, comfort her, keep this maniac—him!—off her. Anger flared. He was no maniac. Just an ordinary joe trying to get by, trying to figure out this lousy world and do what he could to leave it in a better state than he’d found it. Not a daunting task. Couldn’t be much worse. “Don’t back away.” He drew closer to her.

She gentled back, repelled by his nearness.

“What did I just say? I said don’t back away from me. Didn’t I? Didn’t I just say that?”

“Danny, for God’s sake, let her go.” Karin, inside the door.

He ignored her, but she was getting him steamed. A year apart had wreaked havoc on her obedience. She would need punishment, that was clear. Lots of it. He released the girl’s lapel and prodded her—his five fingers splayed stiff against her chest—backward toward the couch.

“Answer me, dammit, I asked you a question.” Fucking dummy looked like a dimestore floozy, brain or head-of-air not focusing very well, hoping maybe if she held still, he might mistake her for a mannequin. He slapped her, making it as hard as his slaps had been in life, holding back the reserves of strength boiling just below the surface.

“What?” she said. A plead, drawn out and plaintive, as well as a request that he repeat the question.

No matter. He had what he wanted: the sound of her. Incredible. Not Karin’s annoying whine, but a rich sultry voice that caressed him just below the gut. He shoved her over the back of the couch, the pivot point just above her ass. Her arms flailed, her white legs scissored past him. Danny caught her right ankle, stopped her wild tumble over the couch so that she slammed onto her back and struck her head on the cushioned armrest. Her left foot slapped loud against the floor. When she saw that he was staring right up her exposed leg into her hairy pink treasure, she tried to bring her thighs together, but Danny kept her right leg high and she had to content herself with holding a flap of blue silk over it with both hands.

“Spoiling my fun,” he said. “I don’t like that.” He walked over the back of the couch, keeping her ankle high. Then, when he was kneeling inside her thighs, he let go of the ankle and vised her bird-bone wrists in his left hand, gripping them, trapping them at her groin. He yanked at the robe, left and right, exposed her breasts, red-tipped jugs just made for staring and sucking.

A hand at his shoulder, tugging. “Danny, don’t!”

He couldn’t fucking believe it: his wife, standing right behind the couch, her fucking face full of terror and alarm, daring to oppose his will. Maybe even less of a tremble in her voice. Instinct hauled back his right hand and let it fly with a slap that would have taken the flesh off her skull and snapped her neck; but at the last moment, he pulled it, sapped its strength and sent Karin sprawling across the room. “Shut the fuck up, woman, or I’ll fucking shut it for you.” He should have felt his usual triumph, but her look stayed with him, augered into his brain, the wasp-man suddenly reborn with a vengeance. The pounding was immense, a pneumatic piston coming down on both lobes, its violence battering outward against his skull. He fought back, overwhelming it with hatred. But still it throbbed and goaded, and he knew eventually he’d have to force Karin to heal his warp, to kill the wasp-man and free him from torment.

Fuck the sex thing, he had better uses for this bitch than that. But first she needed subduing. He clamped his right hand over her mouth and pinched her nostrils closed between thumb and index finger. She thrashed beneath him, vacuuming his palm for air, a big wide death-hickey in the making. She clung to her puny little life almost as if it mattered, her hands spidering ineffectually over her pussy where he held them, her breasts faking passion’s rise and fall, her eyes wide and frenzied above his knuckles. He was sorely tempted, when she passed out, to keep his hand where it was and finish the job. But no, that would waste a golden opportunity to test Karin’s powers gradually, in stages. He lifted his hand from her face and felt the air immediately rush into her, the body’s involuntary seizure on survival.

“Get garbage bags,” he said, “and masking tape.”

Karin was standing there where she’d fallen, the old meekness once more on her face. She gingerly touched the bruise he’d raised. At his command, she began wordlessly to obey, meandering off toward the kitchen area.

Wolf trotted in, muzzle dripping blood. He found a place near the door and sat there, eagerly watching.

“You still got the cuffs?” asked Danny.

“Yes, I . . . I never told Frank about them.”

Good sign. Saved the swords. Kept the cuffs in that special box up in the closet. Fuck the house, fuck Frank. He could understand how that could happen, her old man six feet under, pussy unfucked for months, got herself a new boss and went along with his changes. But by God, she’d kept Danny’s memory green. She’d held onto the swords and hadn’t even told Frank about the cuffs. Never knew when they’d come in handy. Yeah, well that when was now.

“Get them. And some good strong rope. Ought to be a length or two coiled up out back in the tool shed.”

“But why do you—?”

“Just do it!”

She winced as if struck, and went off.

Danny stripped the girl and tossed her robe aside. A fucking beauty. He stroked her flesh. Owned her with his hands. When Karin returned with the things he’d demanded, he had her cuff the girl’s wrists over her head, then rope them to the back couch leg. Her ankles he himself secured on the other side, the spread between her thighs a gradual one, but sufficient for the odd fuck if the mood took him. The handcuff key rested against his sternum when he looped its long leather thong around his neck.

To Karin as he checked the ropes: “You remember the snuff film, right? I want you to tape three garbage bags together, then help me slide them under her. No sense in spoiling a good couch.”

Karin seemed about to protest again, but he tightened his glare and that shit was history. She spread the shiny green bags out before the hearth and tugged wide widths of masking tape off with her hands. While they were putting the makeshift dropcloth in place, the girl came to.

Woozy at first, then swimming into focus, she looked down at her naked body, felt the restraints. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Fuck, I don’t believe this.”

“Welcome to your worst nightmare.”

“Look, mister, you want money, I’ve got some savings, you can have it. Just let me go, okay?”

“That’s not how this plays out, sweetmeat, you know that. We both know you’re either going to get fucked or killed or some twisted combination of the two. So let’s pretend I’m your dentist and, oh dear me, I just ran out of Novocain, but you’re going to be brave and survive a series of root canals without it.”

“Lady, please do something.”

“I—”

Danny grabbed the girl’s face. “She’s out of it. I make the decisions here. Don’t you forget it.”

Tears of pain. Danny released her, saw fingerprints whiten and vanish on her cheeks. “You . . . you want it nice,” she said, her voice trembling, “I can . . . do you, but please let me—”

“Same old song. Fuck for freedom.” A gleam of glass on the hearth caught his eye. “Ah, a bottle of wine, how romantic. Still a few swallows left. You want some?”

“No, I—”

“Sure you do. Now open up.” She struggled to keep her mouth closed, but Danny easily prised open her teeth and splashed a few glugs down her throat. He downed the rest while she sputtered and coughed. Lowered the empty bottle, stared at the vineyards engraved on the label, a farmhouse in the distance. “You got a name?”

“Marcie.”

He looked at her. “Pleased to meet you, Marcie.”

She lowered her eyes.

“Now, Karin—Marcie, this here’s Karin—you told me on the way up here that you were able to unwilt flowers, revive flowers that were dead, and that you raised me up without even knowing it.” Straddling the girl’s waist, he reversed the bottle, held its neck like a club, a few last drops of white wine splashing on her breasts.

“That being the case, it occurs to me that you should be worth a lot of money. But before we try you out on the marketplace, I think we need some heavy, in-house testing. Marcie here has kindly consented, well okay maybe I had to twist her arm a little bit, to be your guinea pig.” Danny went belt to tummy with Marcie, his left hand shoved under a cushion corner at her shoulder, his right hand arm-and-hammering down to the floor beyond the blankets, where he smashed the wine bottle and came up with a good clean jag, no label waggling any broken pieces like dingleberries on ass hair after an imperfect shit.

“So let’s just see how good your healing powers are, Karin babes.” The bottle slid right in, blood welling and spilling immediately, and he twisted and scooped with it, the screams of both women mingling in his brain, making it shout and sting so fiercely that he struck out against the wasp-man with jags of smoky wet glass wrapped in rage.

TEN

SLEUTHWORK

Frank was arguing a fine point of tort law with one of his more disputatious colleagues—a hemorrhoidal boy wonder who managed to win most of his cases while making everyone involved feel tainted—when Jeannine knocked on the door. The colleague, animate with peroration, ignored the urgency on her face and went on.

“Hold it, Stan.” Frank cut him off. “What’s up?”

“Joe Caldone’s on line three, Frank. He says it’s important.”

“Thanks, Jeannine.” He followed her out of Stan’s office, ignoring the bluster aimed at his back, where you going Tanner, you can’t squirm out of a good argument that easy, ad nauseam. No gadfly, just a gnat, and one of the firm’s rare mistakes in hiring.

Karin hadn’t answered the phone all day. Frank had tried her twice more, at noon and one. No response. It was now past two. He prayed that Joe’s call had nothing to do with her.

“Frank, something’s come across the wire I thought you should know about,” Joe said. “You might want to let Karin in on it before the Penryn police call her.”

Heart leapt at first, then calmed when his friend made it clear that Karin hadn’t been injured or killed, that if she was involved in what Joe had to say, it was only peripherally. “Let her in on what?”

“Seems something happened over at Pyne Memorial last night. Someone stole a body right out of the ground, and old Sal Romano was savaged by a large animal of some sort. There’s bloody pawprints all over his place. They suspect an attack dog. They found prints along the roadside, him and his owner, leading off toward Loomis and Rocklin.”

Frank asked where Karin came into the picture.

“Body snatched was Danny Daniels.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Just what Karin needs.”

“Not a great time for upset, I gather.”

“Yeah, she’s been a little obsessive about the son- of-a-bitch. This won’t help.”

“Maybe me and Laura ought to—”

“No, no, that’s okay. Let’s play this down. You two come by at four just like we planned. I’ll try her again, cut out early if I can’t rouse her.”

Joe agreed and hung up. Frank punched in his number, swearing and starting over when his finger strayed off on a wrong digit. Five rings, ten, fifteen. He hung up, got Jeannine’s copy of the Rocklin area directory. No answer at the Gallagher home—Jimmy probably asleep, getting mad at the phone or maybe he’d disconnected it in the bedroom. Come on, Nona, where are you when I need you? Same with Alice Brown, the other next door neighbor, but her boy was at school and Alice was most likely at the Wells Fargo in Roseville Square where she worked. Maybe Karin was there and the phone had inadvertently been turned off, had only appeared to ring. Who would be home at this hour, someone he and Karin were on speaking terms with, who’d be willing to look around? He surveyed the block in his mind. Zack Ryder worked at HP, his wife Millie was a teacher’s aide, and their two teens would be at school. Then he thought of Flora Larchmont, the sharp-eyed eighty-year-old who lived across from Nona and Jimmy and knew everything there was to know about her neighbors. Cared for her bedridden sister Blanche, but the rest of the time she was working at her flowers in the front yard or sitting out there on a lawn chair, from dawn to dusk, observing the lazy movement of the block and clucking her tongue when some fool driver came roaring along at an untoward speed.

Flora answered on the sixth ring. “Hello?” she said, marbles in her mouth.

“Miss Larchmont, this is Frank Tanner calling.”

A pause. “The new neighbor. You and her got rid of that awful Danny Daniels. Glad to see him go. That man was a philanderer of the first water, you know. Carried on with an awful floozy who shall remain nameless.”

“I’m trying to reach Karin. Have you seen her?”

“Pretty girl. Amazing talent with flowers, she puts my carnations and bachelor buttons to shame. No, I think she drove off, oh nine-thirty or so. I was inside tending to Blanche’s needs, but when I heard the garage door go up I poked my head out the front door and saw the back end of your pickup truck just turning onto Midas. Turned left so I thought she might be going to Safeway or Payless, garden supplies. Magic fertilizer or something. She surely puts the lie to all those gardening books. Grows whatever she pleases, whether they say it’s the right region or season to do so. Nine-thirty seemed an odd time though. Most of the time, she goes on her shopping expeditions just about one-fifteen. She never came back. I’m a little concerned about her, and I expect you are too.”

Frank’s thumb nervously stroked the Pilot Razor Point on his blotter. “Would you do me a favor, Miss Larchmont? Would you knock on our door? Maybe see if Karin’s in the backyard if there’s no answer?”

“Oh dear, I hate to poke my nose that way.”

“Just this once?”

She finally agreed when Frank promised he’d ask Karin to give her a few “secrets of the green thumb.” She wrote down his number and he sat at his desk waiting, unable to concentrate on the Malloy case, gripping the Razor Point in both hands, urging Flora Larchmont across the street, a friendly hello at the door or, no, in the backyard, sorry to bother you, your husband has a case of the worries, why don’t you give him a call, I guess when you came back from shopping I must have been out of earshot, I must have been in . . . well indisposed, oh what a lovely garden—come on Flora, come on, the second hand on his walnut-framed wall clock dragging around the clockface—old Flora making her way across the street, his wife sliding the kitchen door open, tugging off her gardening gloves, dropping them on the table, phone now resting in her hand, punching in the numbers, a one for long distance, then seven more—come on, come on, playing back the scenario in his head, five minutes gone by? Felt like fifteen.

The phone rang.

“Karin?”

“She’s nowhere to be found. Drove off, like I said, around nine-thirty.”

“Did you check the backyard?”

“Oh yes. Most of the blinds were closed, you know in that frustrating way where they’re almost open but there’s just a tad too little space to slip your eyes in between? The blinds that were open just showed empty rooms, your bedroom, the room with your computer. One thing, though.”

“What?”

“The side door to the garage was swung wide open, an invitation to marauders, in my opinion. The doorknob was dirty too, some kind of grit on it, same as on the door into your house. I only mention that because your place is otherwise so well kept. Blemishes stand out on clean faces. The door was unlocked too. Key still in it.”

“From the garage?”

“Into the house, yes. I didn’t go in, mind. I only gave it a try and then closed it right away. I don’t feel it’s proper to go barging into other people’s homes.”

Frank didn’t like what he was hearing. He felt like pleading family emergency and getting the hell out of the office right now. But then he chided himself for letting his imagination get the best of him. He thanked Flora for her pains.

“Oh, there was one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“Looked like some big dog cut a path across a stretch of her flowers. I’m afraid she’s lost a few nasturtiums because some thoughtless pet owner let his dog roam about unleashed. Wasn’t Queenie, her paws are smaller than this dog, but I can’t think who else owns one. Anyway, the paw prints lead right around to the garage and I may have seen some inside the garage too, my poor eyes are going and the light’s none too good in there.”

***

Karin felt exhausted and exhilarated—sunk in Danny’s depravity while exulting in the miracle of her restorative powers—and both as doomed and as alive as she’d ever felt in her life. The first time he had used the broken bottle on Marcie, the blood had spilled from the rent meat of her face, thick as motor oil, spattering the green plastic of the garbage bags with precisely that viscosity. Karin’s skull had felt all scooped out and airy as Danny slashed, dark ecstasy lighting his eyes, that little-boy-lost look she’d known so well from when he’d beaten her, but now an exponential hatred sparked from his face; both the frenzy of her own screams and the savage mutilation she witnessed had brought the floor haltingly to her outstretched hands. Then he was shaking her, slapping her wetly, saying “You need to see this. If you’re going to undo it—and baby believe me you will—I want you to see it.” He’d yanked her off the floor and set her down in a cane chair, white except for where his fingers had touched it. And she had watched, numb with disbelief, as he carved and gouged his victim like a sculptor working clay with a knife. Only this clay clung to life, and bled, and suffered, and at last there were too many lacerations and too much misery and the woman on the couch checked out, all at once.

It had been a mercy to see her go.

And then Danny had lifted her chair, as easily as if it were empty, and set her down in front of his handiwork, saying “Heal the fucking cunt,” forcing her hands into the slick red muck of her, egging her on, until at last there came a point at which Karin had cried herself out, sunk to exhaustion, abstracting what she touched: not the cooling ribboned flesh of a dead woman, but dripping tenderloin, no worse than what she’d had to deal with in preparing a meal. And, if only to break free, to get Danny’s bloody hands off her and be able to walk around, she calmed her mind and brought back how she’d felt at his grave—power in her hands, power from the heart of her soul. Massaging the woman’s torn skin, she saw that the slashes were thin, not deep, though numerous and criss-crossed like uncooked hamburger patties. Her hands tingled like humming scalp massagers. She felt healing happen before she saw it, but she did see it, miraculous as nature itself, and it elated her and drove her deeper, her will to heal penetrating the flayed flesh until at last, in a sudden jolt that thrilled her, Marcie came back, lids fluttering like electroshock, deflated lungs suddenly filling and then emptying with the most gut-wrenching scream Karin had ever heard, worse even than in Marcie’s agonies of torment. She lifted her hands off—hot stove!—then quickly replaced them, frantic to soothe the poor woman’s suffering, to eradicate the pain her sick husband had inflicted. It had felt beautiful to heal, empowering, knowing now what she was doing and what a gift she’d been blessed with—not in the dark like she’d been at the grave, unclear why she’d felt so elated making grass seed grow. She’d closed her eyes and touched Marcie everywhere, hearing the screams die down and her groans be replaced by easy sighs of contentment. She looked a mess, spilt blood pooling like aspic stuck to her body while new blood coursed through her veins, her long hair clumped and reddened about her shoulders, her white skin mottled with what looked like uneven sunburn. But there were also the beginnings of a smile as Karin palmed Marcie’s forehead, a mother feeling her child’s fever gone.

Then Danny had said, “Nice work, old girl. Now let’s see if you can handle a real challenge.” He clattered the blanket of swords onto the floor and Karin pleaded with him to leave Marcie alone, but all she got for her pains were a punch to the solar plexus, a blackened eye, and a beating that made her bones ache. Her face to the floor, she heard the short sharp unzip of his pants, followed by the jingle of his belt, and fully expected the crude rape he’d favored in his last months of life. Instead Marcie’s ragged voice again pierced the cabin air.

Karin turned and saw Danny, his Cavalry Sabre in one hand and his pants at his ankles, sink the sword deep into Marcie’s right thigh and twist it this way and that, then pull it out and stopper her up—Dutch boy thumbing a dike of blood—with his penis. “No!” she found herself urging over and over, uncontrollably, hugging herself and rocking on the floor, almost to the rhythm of Danny’s hump, while he fired angry words at her, the same ones over and over, weaving through her whine just like their fights at home, his domineering bark denying her high-pitched wails until he’d whipped out of the woman, stiff prick flailing blood, and pummeled Karin, saying over and over, “Fuck you, kill you, eat you, love you.” He’d left her on the floor, gone back to Marcie, burrowing flesh and steel inside her, but Karin blocked most of it out. And when he yanked her back to the couch, what he thrust her hands into this time was utter devastation, the body cavity wrenched open, organs collapsed and battered and punctured, hacked ropes of gut sprung confusedly this way and that, a heart sliced neatly across and hinged apart in her chest like a halved grape. Karin had cried dry tears over it, her throat hurting with the effort. “Fix it!” Danny had said, and she’d wailed “I can’t, I won’t,” but he wore her out and at last her hands gathered the flowering guts together like a drunk weeping over spilled laundry, and then the power was back, quicker and more certain this time, and it felt good to caress all the pieces back together, to bring that same intensity of love to bear she felt for her daisies and her dianthus and her dwarf asters, only more urgent, bent more fiercely to revival.

Almost more monstrous than Danny’s renewed assault on the woman and the warped sexual bent it had taken had been the steel-jawed, manic enthusiasm of his outrages, still a lost-boy look in the eyes but blizzard-buried beneath an alien ferocity. Karin felt now as if she were tracking in reverse along that maniacal fury, undoing it, peeling it back. It seemed graspable, Danny’s manifest rage, a slick cable passing through her fingers. He was the mugger, she the surgeon, learning the other’s loathed craft by undoing it. She wondered, as she let the life force flow into the unmangling corpse, if she couldn’t reverse it too, draw it out, not of Marcie but of Danny. But then the hardly half healed woman had jolted alive again, rasp-screaming from a pair of lungs multiply punctured, collapsed, shredded, not yet revitalized, and all Karin’s energies were bent to the swift reconstitution of organs, breasts, muscle flesh, and the skin that held it all in. All else, she shut out. By the time she finished, she was dripping with sweat, blouse drenched and stinky, hair like soaked yarn. The woman who moved beneath her hands had no voice left, but Karin could hear her saying “No, no, no,” over and over, a melancholy heartbeat as the pain subsided, a wish never to have gone through revival again, and then a swiftly building terror implied in the no-voice’s tightening.

His hand on her shoulder. “Nicely done, sweet fuck. Old Marcie looks more appealing every time you bring her back. Ain’t that right, Marcie babes? You and me, we’re sort of kinfolk. The living dead.”

Exhausted, Karin looked up at him. He was naked, his chest oddly pale against the crimson dye on his hands, his arms, his aproned thighs, his stiffened penis. His other hand gripped the hilt of his gold-plated Excalibur, whose point dug into the floor straight below.

“Now once more, and this time, no half measures. I’m going to skewer the bitch, rapiers every which way I can. Then finish with this baby, thirty-five inches of tempered steel sheathed in snatch right up to its cruciform quillion. Be like old King Arthur fucking her brains out. If she’s got any kick in her after that, I’ll work on crushing her bones, really check out your limits.”

Karin rose. “I won’t,” she said. There was no spunk in her, but she knew she was done.

“Fuck if you won’t.”

She raised her fists and beat on his chest, a feather on granite, given her exhaustion, but she kept it up. “No more,” she said. “No more.”

He laughed. “I can’t believe it. You’re raising your hands to me. First you talk back, then you hit. Oh sure, you pulled a kriss off the wall once and stuck it into my heart. I haven’t forgotten—hey, you’re starting to piss me off with that shit, stop it—but that wasn’t you, not really, and we both know it.”

Her fists fell, drifts of snow, on his chest.

He raised the sword a few inches and slammed it into the floor. It stuck there, quivering from the thock. He faced Karin, took her earlobes, tore them up and out just a fraction, paper cuts widening, enough that she cried out, felt twin trickles of blood runnel past her jawbone and down her neck. Then his hands closed on her breasts, tighter, tighter, as if to burst them inside her blouse. He shoved her backward across the room, so that she lost her footing, fell, knocked her head against a wall. “Get the fuck into the bedroom. Fix your fucking ears. I’ll tell you when it’s time to put Miss Humpty Dumpty together again.”

“I won’t do it.”

Danny glowered.

“That’s final. I won’t put her through any more of this. I can’t, I can’t.”

The stench of him came forward, bloody naked ape. He fisted her hair, pulled her up so that her neck threatened to break. “You talk back any more and it’s no more Mister Nice Guy. I’ll hobble the fuck out of you, you hear me, I will. I’ll take a bite out of your boobs if I want, fuck your mouth if I feel the need. All’s I need is your hands whole and your head obedient. But as for the rest of you babe, all bets are off. I own every stinking inch of you and don’t you forget it.”

Then he was kicking her toward the bedroom door, his bare feet like workboots against her buttocks, and he took her and threw her on the bed and called Wolf in—and there she was, Wolf’s blood-slicked jaws spilling growls to keep her pinned to the bed, while through the closed door came the muffled sounds of Marcie dying all over again.

***

The traffic at quarter past three surprised him. He was used to late hours at the office, preparing arguments for the following day or researching the next case. Had to remind himself that it was Friday afternoon and folks tended to wangle themselves off work early so they could beat everybody else to Tahoe.

Karin would be there when he got home, he was sure of that. Or else a note saying where she was and when she’d be back. If need be, he’d whip something up himself for Joe and Laura, mock-scold her when she walked through the door, the three of them in the midst of their meal. Then, after the Caldones left, he would embrace her, tell her how much he loved her, how much he wanted their marriage to work. Let Malloy hang for a day, he’d get up at five and modem into LEXIS for what he needed, Karin sunk into dreamless sleep from the amazing lovemaking he’d indulge her with tonight.

Roseville exits up ahead. A billboard yokel shouted, “Hey, Vern” for some car dealership. Maybe he should stop and pick up flowers. Right, just what she needed. But it was the gesture that mattered. He recalled bringing home roses once, not a rose in her garden and she’d never told him why. When she saw the bouquet, she freaked, wouldn’t speak to him for a day, wouldn’t tell him why, took three days of decompressing from whatever-the-hell-it-was before she was back to normal.

She’d probably gone for a walk in the park, brought a picnic lunch and ended up staying for hours. Or maybe she had gone to the Cinedome with . . . but he couldn’t think who that might be. She had no friends except his friends. Danny’d kept her caged up, and once he was gone, she’d put most of her energy into her plants—tending as it were her own garden and shutting out all else, save what or whom he brought home.

He took the first Rocklin exit, Taylor Road to Sunset to Whitney, and turned right onto his street. Past John and Viv Conti’s place; past grim-faced old man Kinski, not looking up, mowing his over-mown grass, not giving a shit for anyone but himself; waved to Flora Larchmont sitting in her front yard, and zapped his garage door open. There was the side door swung wide, just as Flora said. Pickup gone. Oilslick on concrete. He drove the Honda in, shut it off, got out. Across the street, Flora leaned forward in her lawn chair, hoping for one gesture of invitation. Ignoring her, he gazed about the garage.

Dog tracks all right. And a handsmudge on the side door. The door into the house, though unlocked, didn’t seem to have been forced. Its fake-bronze doorknob and the key still in it were glazed with grit. He opened it. The stench caught him unawares, not an overwhelming slaughterhouse odor but enough there to raise a sob in his throat, to make him picture Karin raped and torn in the bedroom. But the dog tracks and his nose led him down the hall, past the spilled plants, through the TV room and right up to the lip of the kitchen: the stink of death, the pooled blood, Jimmy Gallagher lying at the base of the fridge, the butt end of a cactus blooming from his mouth, the severed genitals on the floor by his head.

Frank backed away from the sight, light-headed, doing his best not to faint. “Karin!” Frank called, but no, he only thought he’d said anything. He tried again, barely a whisper, then a reasonable shout but it echoed the knot of terror in his gut. Dead quiet. The silent skirl of death piped up his nose, painting and repainting the grotesque picture of Jimmy. He reached past the TV and raised the blinds. The window slid open when he lifted the latch, a rush of fresh air. “Karin!” again, still terrified, not a thought to what the neighbors might think, and no response either. He was about to gather up his nerve to enter the kitchen again, unblind the side door, and check the garden himself, when the doorbell rang.

His first thought was Flora Larchmont, but then he saw the side of Laura Caldone’s face through the front door’s tiny window, and Joe smiling and holding up a wine bottle, Joe’s favorite Chianti, no doubt, and a very good wine it was. Frank opened the door, tried to speak and couldn’t.

Joe registered concern. He opened his mouth to say something, obviously in response to Frank’s demeanor, but cocked his head when the smell hit him. He recognized it.

Frank said, “Maybe Laura should wait in the car.”

“Karin?” asked Joe.

Frank shook his head.

“I’ll be back in a second, buddy. Don’t go away, stay right there.” He walked his wife to the car by the curb, handed her the wine. Frank watched her nod, pull her legs in, and close the door. Then Joe returned, all business. A fly buzzed in just after Joe, and Joe closed the door, guided Frank to the couch, seated him. Phoned in for backup, not two feet from where Jimmy lay. Frank felt like he should get up and help somehow, but he was also numb enough and woozy enough to appreciate sitting here and letting Joe handle things.

“You know this guy?”

“Yes. Next door neighbor.” Frank gestured beyond the kitchen. “Jimmy Gallagher. Don’t let his wife see this.”

“Vegetarian, I see. Sorry, Frank. This guy a good friend or something, relieves the tension, don’t mean any disrespect by it, understand?”

“Yeah, I know,” said Frank. “Jimmy was a . . . an acquaintance. We rarely saw him or Nona. Joe, Karin is missing and I have no idea where she is.”

“Did you check the rest of the house?”

“I called her name, twice. She’s not here.”

“Did you check the rest of the house?” Slower, more deliberate. Frank took his meaning, saw her on their bed, eviscerated. He said no and Joe said he’d look around.

But then his eye went to the kitchen table. “Frank, take a look at this.”

Frank rose, crossed over into the kitchen, the sight near the fridge like a force field repelling him. Single sheet of paper on the table, one edge of it weighted down with a cineraria plant. He read it without touching it, a caution from Joe. It was absurd, forced, not his Karin in the least.

“Think there’s anything to it?”

“Come on, Joe, you think Karin did this?”

“She knifed Daniels, shoved a dagger straight into his heart.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this. Just look at him. Jesus, what a . . . I think I’m going to be sick. You think Karin could shove a cactus down a man’s throat? And then . . . do that to him?”

Joe veered off. “What about Carmel?”

“I think it’s meant to throw us off. She could be anywhere. Some maniac has got her, and I think it’s the same guy that stole Daniels’ body from the cemetery and killed Romano. There are dog tracks in the garage and down the hall.”

“This Nona from the note. She the cactus-eater’s wife?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s call in an APB on Karin, then go check next door.” Joe dialed again, had Frank describe Karin, then they crossed the lawn, knocked, went around back, found the kitchen door slid open. Death stench led them down the hall. The spectacle on the bed struck them both dumb for a moment, then Frank said, “You still think Karin did this?”

“I’d say it’s not likely. Take more strength than Karin’s got to rip a woman’s head off like that.”

Frank looked down where Joe gestured, turned away. “Jesus.” He’d thought Nona had her head bowed between her shoulders, hidden like a bird’s head tucked under a wing. Now he saw that her arms stretched down to her bunched furry back and an empty neck, the skin of her arms and buttocks as blue as a stillborn baby’s where it wasn’t splashed dark red.

“You really know how to throw a dinner party, Frank. Just kidding again. Fuck me, I’m a monster. Look, you want a place to stay tonight, me and Laura have a guest room.”

“Let’s get out of here.” On the way back across the lawn, Frank said he needed to stay home in case Karin or her kidnapper called. Joe pressed his invitation again, then backed off and nodded.

A couple of police cars idled in Frank’s driveway. One cop was talking to Laura through the car window, and she looked over at them and gestured. The cop followed her gesture, straightened up with recognition. Joe let the cop cross to them, out of earshot of his wife.

“Two-for-one special today, Tony. Mutilation in both houses, rape and a skinned dog in that one, a dickless guy with a cactus chaser in his throat in this one. Take your pick.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s okay. Defense lawyer so watch what you say and do. Looks like his wife’s been taken by the freak who did this, I called it in already.”

“You think we need more people?”

“Twice the fun, Tony. You decide. Use the phone in the kitchen. I already fucked it up for fingerprints, mea culpa, you know?”

Tony nodded then was off.

“You up to checking out the rest of the house, Frank? Maybe you’ll see something out of place, you can tell us what Karin took with her.”

“Sure. Let’s go in through the garage. I can show you the tracks.” And keep as far away from the kitchen as I can. Frank could see Flora Larchmont leaning back in her lawn chair, fanning herself, beaming obscenely as if God had just given her a front row seat at the apocalypse and was unfolding it all into her lap.

They went in, Joe’s eyes and ears open to it all. As far as Frank could tell, nothing had been disturbed in his bedroom. Wet towel hanging askew on the rack, not neatly like Karin did it. Water drops tinged red on the shower floor, a shampoo bottle left open, its plastic perfume in the air.

In the study, Frank noticed it at once. “The swords are gone.”

“What swords?”

“Daniels had a wall of ceremonial swords, maybe half a dozen in all, samurai, cavalry, big Scottish claymore, a few more. Those brass circles with the rings sticking out are swordholders. It was my one concession to Karin.”

“Who the fuck would hijack your wife and a wall full of swords? What the fuck sort of maniac have we got here, Frank?”

His mind was an empty suckhole, gaped open as wide as his mouth. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d swear it was Danny Daniels come back from the grave.”

ELEVEN

DEATH CLOSES IN

Flurries of blood. Fuck the garbage bags, they were useless anyway. One sword thrust too far through Marcie, one puncture, and the couch was blood city. Yanked them out from under her. Stuck gore and shit made it no simple task. Soft spongy cushions. Better. Kinder. He adored this Marcie lady. He dished it out, she took it, she was the fucking love of his life. His little appetizer. His bloody chunk of cheese with a cocktail sword stuck through its middle. Magic act without the box, without any of the trickery of stage magicians, and no teasing sequins come between him and the pretty assistant. Pretty assistant in shackles, taking swords into her where he chose to thrust them. She’d been dead twice before, now a third time—two up on him. Had to be cautious, all that steel inside her, evil angles, had to be careful what new holes he made and how violently he plugged them, didn’t want to lose the old pecker on hidden blades. Sure he was super-strong but hey no sense in testing that too far, lose a finger before he lost his dick. Yep, Marcie weren’t like the rest of these human geeks. Been transformed, that was the word, fucking transmogrified; but he’d held Karin back, made certain she didn’t give Marcie the strength to resist wounds or escape from her handcuffs. But tomorrow he’d bring her back, his bitch-wife would use those powers on Marcie again, gather her scattered limbs together, come hell or high water she would, and then he’d tell Marcie she was one fucking sexy piece of tail, she liked it rough and so did he, and, say, wouldn’t she like to be immortal like him, draw blood when they humped, go off together and start a new race to boot the current tenants off this planet? Bastards were dumb-fuck trashing it anyway. Yep, she’d go for that, and he’d make Karin cure his hurting head, brain-boost the wasp-man out of him, then force her to make Marcie immortal too and then—but he wouldn’t tell Karin this, no he’d pretend he was going to let her go—he’d kill Karin, him and his new bride would take the bitch apart, bit by bit, share their first communion, the blood and body of his old wife, yes, broken for them. His tongue, snaked in mid-kiss between Marcie’s purple lips, brunted against the flat blade of his Charles the Fifth rapier, need to reseat the fucker through her brain, not cheek to cheek, then French the bitch deep inside her dead bloody mouth. Last chance to savor it before Karin made her undead like him and they pounced on that wacky plant lady and stripped and fucked her and ate the flesh off her shattered bones, yes!

***

She’d propped her pillows up and healed her ears, a tingling buzz like the heating pad Granny Eva had rested Karin’s head on when she had an ear ache. Wolf watched her like a coiled spring, brown-black eyes tracking her every move. In the other room, the hoarse muffled sound of suffering, punctuated by Danny’s grunts, whether they were words or something worse—made Karin’s stomach hurt in sympathy for his victim.

Then she saw the spider. Not huge, maybe the size of her knuckle, its black legs angled up and down and splayed out, two feet across from her on the mattress. Slowly she raised a finger and pointed at it, her mind focused on the now familiar power, but holding it back, drawing it in, a wish to drain the insect—no, stronger than a wish, more an insistence, an order not to be countermanded. Twitch. A black flex. Then a stillness she knew was death.

She dropped her hand. From the next room—made more terrible by the indistinctness of the sound—came a long, drawn-out, hoarse clutch or slide of flesh around sword, a child controlling her terror as she watches a doctor slip a hypodermic into her arm. Karin was amazed that, in the face of the horror in the next room, she felt a twinge of vileness over having killed an innocent spider. But there was bigger game afoot, and she didn’t know how much time she had nor whether she could gain the control she needed to combat and defeat Danny.

Again her hand came up, fingers shifting toward the dog. His growl became more ominous; he didn’t like being gestured at. “Nice Wolf,” she said, “there there, boy.” He wasn’t buying it. Worse, he was too far away. She’d felt a connection being made with the spider; not so now. An idea: “Wolf, I have a biscuit for you.” Perked ears. Growl shut off, then came back. She said it again, saw the confusion it aroused. “Don’t you want your biscuit?” She leaned on the word, gave him soothing sentences, all centered on it, gentle hands holding up a gleaming gem to catch the sunlight. Biscuit, Wolf, biscuit.

He got off his haunches, uncertain yet stirred. The growling kept up, more intense but still low, nothing to arouse suspicion. He sidled toward her, his fur so caked in blood that he seemed in patches to be a painted Revell model of a dog rather than the real thing, simulated fur enameled red. Closer, closer, drawing back and then on when she repeated the word. When he hit the flat tired coils of the throw rug, she felt the thread between them clarify itself. Not too fast. She didn’t want to scare him off or spring him toward her in attack. She needed him a little closer, but it was difficult to keep up the soothing stream of words while beginning her assault on him. She alternated them, dreading that he would catch on and leap at her, or that Danny would come in at any moment and break her concentration. Concentrate, that’s it, you can do it. More praise of biscuits, empty promises, more fumbling for that elusive thread. Wolf’s full belly and rumbled distrust slowed his progress toward her, but the treat-word held its allure and he kept moving, paw inched past paw and that dumb canine look bewildered across his face. Closer, dammit, closer. Wolf eased onto the rug, growls louder now, maybe too loud. She wished for Marcie to cover her, then cursed herself for wishing it—but his face, tight around the growls, weltered with conflict; the monster he’d become now fought against the puppy Danny had raised, whom she’d twice indulged with doggie treats.

“That’s right, Wolf. Come get your biscuit.” His eyes drifted closer, a 3-D nightmare emerging from the screen, but he was right here with her and his jaws held death. Her hand tingled with life force, finding the core of him and slowly draining what she found there. If only she had time to experiment. She didn’t want to do it too fast, or sensing her hostility, he’d attack. But if she went too slow, Danny might burst in on them or Wolf might realize there was no biscuit and decide to nibble on her instead. But she wasn’t sure she even had any say about the speed of this thing. And there was another problem: She was beginning to feel hateful. Yes, Wolf had become a monster and yes, if she was to survive, then putting him down, and quickly, was essential; but she didn’t have to like it, and she didn’t like it. It made her feel as if animal fat were being smeared all over her soul.

She took hold now inside Wolf’s head. It was almost as if her arm had grown an invisible metal extender, but as supple as flesh, not metal at all. She held him there on the rug and kept up the slow reverse flow of life, the vileness of him disgusting her as it seeped from him. No more talk of biscuits now, no more subterfuge. She had a grip on him, tenuous though it was, and he tried to back up, tried to approach her, but as long as she maintained her concentration, she knew she had him. Wolf struggled against an envelope of air, whining softly, his face one mass of terror and rage. No growls, no barking now, no unearthly howls to bring his master running. She had a grip on his will and it paralyzed his throat.

Stalemate. No more coming out of him, but he fought against his enchainment and Karin was beginning to tire. She had to get closer to him, to touch him. Slowly, not breaking her focus, she slid her legs over the side of the bed, felt the floor under her feet. An alarmed look came over Wolf, topping the panic he was already feeling—this was proscribed behavior, this getting off the bed; it was his duty to tear her apart. New stores of life surged in him. She wasn’t as close to killing him as she’d thought. And she felt her resolve slipping, the ugliness coated her insides so. Then she noticed suddenly that all was quiet in the next room, no grunts or curses from Danny, no moans from his victim. That was it. Any moment, he’d open the door, see what she was doing, and—healing powers or no—maim and torture her to death. And then he’d go after her husband. The distraction was sudden and jolting, and she felt Wolf tear free of her grip in that instant, haunches gathering to launch his twisted mouth at her, the pent-up growl rising to give her away. She was lost, even without Danny’s coming into the room.

The throw rug shot backward—hockey puck on ice—as he leaped. No puppy now, but monster through and through, two hundred pounds of muscle and fur coming at her like a misjudged train, faster than seemed possible. Her hands came up by instinct, denying the rush of death. Propelled back against her pillows, she felt the crush of his spiked body, saw his teeth sink into her left arm, gripped him by the throat and shouted denial with her whole being. Not a passive denial. No, she squeezed his throat and redoubled her efforts, not physically but mentally, a rush of spirit surging toward renewed connection. All thoughts of Danny or Marcie or Frank were gone. There was only her and this devil dog whose teeth ripped at her arm, making it drool blood like a squeezed hunk of beef. And she was sucking the life out of him, drying him up inside, the surge in her now powerful, controlled, and all-encompassing. She locked on those eyes, gripped him inside, triumphed over him, and felt both soiled and cleansed doing it. The paws fell still first, then the gleam winked out of his eyes and the bunched muscles went lax, and he was like a spent lover crushing her, a bloody stench of a man who’d taken his pleasure and checked out for the night.

A rustle outside, the squeak of a door. Toolshed by the outdoor shower. Karin winced at the pain and praised God. Danny hadn’t heard the ruckus in here, hadn’t heard Wolf’s growl. A sudden sharp shock. Startled wood. He was chopping. Breaking up a cord. She worked the dog’s jaws off her arm, letting the tears well as freely in her eyes as the blood welled on her arm, but letting no sound leave her. Wolf rolled to the floor, dull thud. The axe stopped. Surely he hadn’t heard that, surely not. Again the rustle, then nothing. She massaged her arm with her good right hand, trying for the power again, reversing it this time. But she was weakened, nearly drained. Don’t pass out now, she thought, not when you’re so close. She put all her mind on her wounds. At first, they seemed as painful as ever, then a numbness crept over the arm. The thought of gangrene, tetanus, rabies occurred to her, but then life came back into it and Karin felt wholeness from the bone out and saw the wounds close over and heal.

A thud in the next room. Another. He’d been testing the axe. Now he was using it. It wasn’t fair: Wolf was dead, but she felt drained in the process, and she feared her time had run out. Dragging herself off the bed, she tugged at Wolf’s body, scudded it inch by inch along the floor, three feet, then four. Then she slid the throw rug back into place and rocked him to and fro onto it, paws X’d over like a sacrificial lamb, head shifting here and there like a bloody afterthought. She couldn’t remember being this drained ever. She struggled him into his nap position, careful to hide his newly bloodied mouth under one paw, but it took forever, and any moment that latch would lift and the door would open.

What did it matter? She’d lost. Might as well crawl to him right now, beg him to make it as swift and painless as possible. Instead she stumbled to the bed, wiping as much blood off her arm as she could with the inside hang of the bedspread, and collapsed onto it. As the springs jounced, the bedroom door clicked open. He stood there in shadow, the blade of the axe dripping blood, its handle’s stiff pride holding no apology, its head as blunt and no-nonsense as Fearless Fosdick.

“It’s time,” he said, his words revving up like a rewound Victrola, slurred and not quite in focus.

She said nothing, strangely calm in the face of her death. Not uncaring, she thought. Just emptied out.

“I said it’s time.” No rise in pitch, nor louder than his first summons. Something off about him. Coming out of the shadows, he was bare-chested in bloody jeans, his face a red blur.

“No,” she said. “I won’t do it. I won’t.”

***

Frank lay in bed, wondering if this was what being in shock felt like. The digits on his clock-radio bled into the graying room: 7:41. But the sun was just about ready to set and its last glow lit the closed blinds with bands of pressed light. The spectacle of Nona came rushing in again, but the head was Karin’s head, and he let the foul image wash through and vanish as he had uncountable times before.

The bedroom door was shut. Not their usual practice. In fact it had been one of the early ways, so said Karin, in which Frank had differentiated himself from Danny, the open door into the darkness of the house symbolizing for her a new openness in her life, a new sense of safety and security. But none of those things existed now. No one was safe in this lousy world.

He had closed the door to shut out the horror of the front rooms, the endless stream of strangers who had made his home a public place, ants clustered about a crumb of cake and then gone, measuring, photographing, asking him one question after another, then cleaning it all up, all except the images that refused to leave him alone. Wood like smoke, that’s how the door seemed; shut out nothing at all, the gore and violence seeped in through the walls and the joke of a door, flimsy stuff like the hull of an airplane whose windows let in at once the beautiful lull of cloud wisp and chessboard ground below, and the scream of shit-I’m-a-mile-high-and-I’m-going-to-fall. It amazed him now, how Karin could possibly have wanted, after what she had suffered and done here, to hang on to this house. He’d been a fool to give in to her, to believe that new paint, new paper, new furnishings, even a healthy rush of plant life, could transform this place into a haven for the two of them. He couldn’t imagine ever going to the fridge again. He would have to stand right where Jimmy’s mutilated body had lain, right there with his feet thrust through the ghost of him, imagining missed flecks of blood hiding under the handle or down around the edges where his pajama bottoms brushed. Christ, he’d never eat again.

His mind veered to the table. Comfort of avoidance, yes, but something more. Whenever he brought the table to mind, the note from Karin, there was a tug at his brain, a small boy yanking weakly at his coat, patiently repeating, “Hey, Mister,” over and over again. It was stronger now, so strong—and sleep so impossible—that Frank flung back the covers and switched on his bedside lamp. He put on a robe, empty motions, it was the table he needed to see and all else faded for him. But walking down the hallway was a struggle he could scarcely endure. He had come through here, him and his dog. He’d dragged Karin along here and she was with him now, and the images that violated his head made him break down into weeping right there in the hallway, just past the bathroom, sobbing with his forehead on his fists against the wall and choking out, “Keep it together, Frank, keep it together.” When the spell was finally past, he fixed again on the kitchen table.

He turned on light after light. Same damned place, the gathering gloom of night doing nothing to soften it. The miasma of death was still in the air, like lingering vomit smells in the nostrils hours after you’ve done the nasty deed. They’d taken the note but disturbed nothing else. The plants were still there in place. It was the arrangement that had pulled him out here. Something was different and possibly significant about them. What was it? These four, the ones you could almost imagine were arced around the note, seemed out of place: The fern to the right, the nephrolepis exaltata, belonged much closer to the window. As for the cineraria on the far left, he’d been used to seeing its brilliant pink flowers speak from the center of the table, not out on the edge. The pilea next to it—he and Karin had most often referred to it by one of its other names, the aluminum plant—had been much closer to the window. And the banana plant, broad green leaves sheathing out from its central stem, had up to now fiercely clung to its coveted spot on the far lip nearest the window.

Frank tried to meet the nag halfway, to coax it out, to fix fiercely on the little nativity scene before him—white crèche of Karin’s note gone—then to relax as best he could and let it float in. Maybe there was something about the context of these four plants that would unlock the secret Karin had left. He knew there was intent here, a meaning beyond the forced scrawl. Karin was never less than mindful about anything she did with plants. Watering them, feeding them, caressing them, arranging them about the house and in the backyard: every bit of it carried her life into them and theirs into her. He’d thought it a quirk at first but he swore he could predict her mood by a glance at this table. There was fear and despair in these four, yes, but anger and defiance too. She had outsmarted the bastard who had her now and she knew it. Something in the choice of these plants signified: the cineraria, the aluminum plant, the banana plant, the nephrolepis. They blared at him, but he was deaf. He spoke their names, ran his hands over them the way he’d seen Karin do it, brought his face to them and felt the cool green and silver of the leaves, the tender pink petals, the brittle tickle of fern against his cheek. Then he backed off again, relaxed into his advocate’s stance, hands gripping the table edge like the rail of a jury box, his four unreadable jurors needing to be convinced to give their verdict—and it came to him all at once, the names, the order. No impatiens, no iris. She’d either been constrained by time or by space, perhaps both, in making her selection. But she’d come as close as she could to spelling “cabin” and her choice of the banana plant—the “Chiquita Lake” connection reinforced, one last goad—cinched it, particularly as the browallia blue bells and two varieties of begonia were huddled right behind the cineraria, almost resentful at being passed over.

Frank picked up the phone. Slowed himself down just enough to punch in the numbers. Two rings.

“Rocklin police.”

“I have to speak to Joe Caldone right away.”

The guy on the other end, putting on his best public-servant voice, said the sergeant wasn’t available right now, but maybe someone else—

“This is Frank Tanner,” he broke in.

“Oh, the one whose—”

“Yes. I know where she’s been taken and I know Joe’s out on a . . . I know he’s in a squad car somewhere, and I need to find him quick.”

“Where did you say she was holed up?”

“I didn’t say. And she’s not holed up. She’s been kidnapped, taken to our cabin at Chiquita Lake.”

“And where might that be?”

“Out Auburn way, beyond Cool through Greenwood and Georgetown. Listen, Joe knows how to get there. He and Laura—”

“Got an address for that?”

“Address? It’s a cabin in the woods, for chrissakes! Look, you need to call Joe. Have him phone me. I’ll wait here half an hour, then I’m on my way.”

“No need to get riled, mister. I’ll do what I can.”

Frank apologized and hung up, praying the guy—left to tend shop while everyone with a shred of competence was on this stakeout—wouldn’t linger over the coffee station on his way to the radio.

Frank dressed quickly. He wondered how the son-of-a-bitch had known about the cabin. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing Karin would be likely to let slip nor even to be asked about during a kidnapping. And come to think of it, who the hell would want to kidnap her in the first place? Was someone trying to get back at him through her? Right. That sort of thing happened plenty in the movies but never in real life.

He reached up into his closet for the red-white-and-blue Reebok box. Taking out the Colt .38, he sat on the bed and loaded the damned thing, never imagining he’d ever need it and wishing he’d taken his instructor’s advice and signed up for regular target practice. Fuck the inventors of weapons everywhere, Frank thought, vile sons-of-bitches who’d made manifest the worst part of the human spirit and wrapped steel—and worse—around words and fists. He had no idea what sort of firepower he was about to confront—he knew the .38 Special he held in his hand was no match for some of the shit out there—but he prayed it would be enough, and mostly he prayed that Karin was safe and would stay that way until he reached her. Then the thoughts of brutality against his beautiful woman welled up again and he had to put the gun down on the bed sheets until no more tears came. He blew his nose and cursed himself for being less than a man and the phone for not ringing.

He looked at the clock. Eight on the button. Only ten minutes had gone by? Impossible. But his watch said the same. He filled his pockets: wallet, key ring, spare cartridges, coins. He paced, staying in the bedroom, once again spooked by the house. “Come on, Caldone, get on the horn.” Five after. What might have happened to Karin in those five minutes? What might happen to her in the next five?

Fuck it, he was on his way. Joe would find the cabin quick enough, him and the Georgetown police, assuming old Georgetown was big enough to have any. Christ, him and Laura’d come up five-six months before, following Frank’s Honda along the roads in daylight. Could he remember it enough to find it in the dark? The locals would help out if necessary. They’d have to.

He went into the garage, hit the button twice to turn on the center light and scroll the door up. Locking the door to the house, Frank felt that same damned grit there, and rage surged in him. He was going to get the son-of-a- bitch who’d hollowed out his life and made of it a bloody and deranged thing. He stopped, imagining the ringing of the phone. But there was nothing. He scrambled into the Honda, fired it up (good, gas tank at three-quarters), put the gun in the glove compartment, belted in, turned on the headlights, and backed out with less caution than usual.

A quiet neighborhood. Scared. Humbled. Even Flora Larchmont’s blinds were drawn against the violence that had touched down and savaged two people across the way.

It was a long way to Chiquita Lake. Too damn fucking long for comfort, and Frank prayed he wasn’t too late.

TWELVE

LIFE STRUGGLES

Fatigue was creeping over him again, swirling slowly around him like a column of fog and spiraling in through his pores. It had already overcome Wolf. He was conked out on the throw rug. Even Karin looked exhausted. Must be his tired eyes playing tricks. She’d done nothing to make her look like she’d run a marathon, just lying there in bed under Wolf’s guard for the last hour while he made a mess of Marcie.

Murdering bitch refused his orders? Fine, he could take the axe to her now. But that wouldn’t get him what he wanted. He needed to be slow with her, pry out a tooth or twist off a couple of her toes, bring her around to his way of thinking. Once she pieced Marcie back together and made her as strong as him, once she laid hands on his head and stilled the wasp-man stinging him, he’d off her and be on his way. Take that Frank fucker out too.

But if he fell asleep, she would escape. He didn’t have a whole shitload of time to secure her. Leaning the axe against the door jamb, he went back to the couch and its gutted torso, stuck swords angling out of it. Hacked legs—kneecaps on down—lay about like mannequin limbs on the floor, ropes still cutting into her ankles, someone neglecting to tell them they could relax, it was over. Where were the goddamn cuffs?

Her arms lay by the fireplace, one flat on the floor, the other elbowed up by the hearth, blue hands tentatively touching one another like adolescent starfish discovering love. Danny snagged them like kindling, held them to his chest, unlocked the cuffs from her abraded wrists, worked them free of the clothesline. The severed arms he tossed on the torso, thinking he’d soon be in their embrace, but not if he didn’t hurry. He staggered back to the bedroom, giddy in the head, losing motor control like a drunk, not feeling high or sick, just closing down at an unsettling pace. Past the axe, time enough for that later, past the mirrored vanity he’d surprised her with once, one glimpse of his face, bathed in blood, wasp-man peering out of his eyes. He looked away hurriedly, needed to use the fucking outdoor shower in back, saw her in the mirror, then made it to the bed, avoiding that look he’d seen in the glass, got hold of her right arm, cuffed her right wrist—

“Danny, please don’t.”

—functional bed, junkyard fixer-upper, curved steel above pillows, steel columns rising to punch into them at one foot intervals, he knelt on the pillows, blood-smeared them, steadied himself, shelfed logs swirling like marble batter behind the bed, tugged at her arm, clatter of cuff on steel, ringed it, heard-more-than-saw it snap shut but knew he’d gotten it right—

“I’m sorry, Danny, I’m sorry.”

—drifted down, slid down, strange her apologizing to him, tried to ask her what the frigging fuck she had to be sorry about, but then the pillow was too soft to resist, too soft the old flat mattress, and he couldn’t help but let the world deflate and dissipate around him.

***

“Listen, buddy, you’re as decent as you say, put the gun down and we’ll drive you to your cabin—”

“Maybe you’re telling the truth,” said Frank, “but I can’t afford maybe’s. You refused once without the gun, I think you’d refuse again. Look, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to get out of the car now, both of you.”

The woman opened her door.

The man stopped her. “Where you going?”

She yanked free and got out. “I believe him, Hank. Don’t be a mule about this.”

“It was your idea to stop and help this S.O.B. in the first place, pitch dark out here, miles from the nearest town. We were past him and you insisted I turn around and go back—”

“Mister,” said Frank, feeling his career as a lawyer go all to hell, but not caring one iota, “I’ve never shot anyone before, but if you’re not out of that car in three seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in you.”

“Now hold on, I—”

“Hank?” Anxious.

“One.”

“This isn’t how decent folks act, you can’t—”

“Two.” The guy was going to make him do it; he’d hit an artery by mistake, and while he was driving off to save Karin, leaning forward away from the bloody car seat, he’d rack up a manslaughter charge beside his conked-out Honda, damn those Hondas Forever jerkoffs.

“Hank, for godsakes get out of the car!”

“All right, all right, Jesus, don’t shoot me, I’m out of the seatbelt, I’m opening the door, all right?”

“That’s better,” said Frank. “Look, I’m sorry. You have my name, I’ll make it up to you I swear, I—”

The wife: “Just go and save her.”

“I don’t believe this,” said Hank.

“Yes, yes I will.” He asked them to face away from him, put their hands on the Honda rooftop, more to keep Hank the bulldog from trying any heroics of his own. He was clearly a bullshitter from way back, wasn’t about to be bullshat by any other bullshitter, and didn’t believe a word Frank had said. Fine. Let him read about it in the paper if he liked, day after tomorrow over breakfast, well how about that, the guy was telling the truth. Here’s to Hank’s wife. Here’s hoping (hard to read family dynamics but Frank thought he had a fifty-fifty chance) she had and used the power to avert a lawsuit against him, forgive and forget, glad to be part of a story Frank hoped to God had a happy ending.

He gunned the big-bodied car—hadn’t even had time to notice what kind it was, El Dorado writ in pseudo-elegant cursive across the dash—and drove off into the darkness, good old Hank in the rear-view mirror gesturing to heaven in exasperation, then shaking a fist after him.

***

Her husband lay on his back, painted in blood, softly snoring. Karin’s hand, a helpless spider, dangled above his red face. Metal rasped against metal when she moved. That made him start slightly, ease up on the snore, then resume. Danny had always fallen asleep quickly, though never as quickly as this. He’d been a light sleeper too, and she feared he might come fully awake at any moment if she shifted too abruptly or touched him.

Her free hand moved closer, her eyes on the key. A weight of exhaustion inside lured her down into sleep, but she fought it, resisted it with all her might, knowing she might not have such a chance again. She debated trying to kill him right then, shackled as she was. But she was not only awkwardly positioned, but drained as well from having taken Wolf’s life. She had to try to free herself first. Then if her attempt to kill him failed, she could at least make a run for it.

Her hand shone like red brass as it moved, slim water moccasin sliding through moonlight, trying not to slither against the undulating riverbed of Danny’s chest. Tip of a finger found cold key, lifted off it when he registered movement, lowered to it again when his resumption allowed the new pressure to become part of undifferentiated night. An owl hooted far off in the woods. Karin pressed gently on the round bow of the key so that its blade angled from the bed of gory chest hairs and she could grip it between thumb and forefinger. Started to lift it, felt the tug of a hair, stopped, got new purchase, letting the pulled hair fall back and curl, marveling at the dexterity in fingers, lifting the key, watching the thong sinew up from Danny’s skin, knowing if she kept it steady he might not wake. A moment of panic as he shifted on his pillow, seemed about to turn, then gave the notion up and renewed snoring. It wasn’t going to reach, no way would it reach. Her cuffed hand tugging downward as if it could taffy-pull metal by mere wish, the key now at the end of its thong and an inch shy of engaging the lock. She didn’t have an inch, maybe a quarter of that; she took the quarter, felt the thong resist, knew it was exerting pressure on the back of the sleeping man’s neck. Hoping leather had enough give, she strained the key upward, a quiver to it like a divining rod, no chafe, just a wire digging into his skin, a wire perturbing his sleep. Metal touched metal. Come on, come on. Key tip teased keyhole. Halfway in, more, the key’s shoulder closing on lockbed. A twist, a snap that seemed to split the night, twist back and ease out. She had to let up on the downward pressure lest her hand fly out and hit him, had to lower the key, gently, slowly, onto his chest, let the hand drift away like she was playing pick-up-sticks, then bring it back to free its mate, tingling rush of blood from being suspended above her head for so long, and she was free!

Now came the hard part.

She debated leaving the bed, crossing the room to the door, opening it, walking past the horror beyond, leaving the cabin, driving off in the pickup. Fantasy. Mattress was a mass of creaky springs, the hinges of this door and the other hadn’t been oiled for ages, and she was simply too exhausted to outrun Danny, startled out of sleep and with the energy of the demonic coursing through his veins. Even if she were successful, Danny would still be loose in the world. He would hunt her down, her and Frank, and he was sure to torture and maim others along the way. She’d brought him back to life. She had the power to undo that now, if only she could summon strength and will enough to see it through.

Slowly Karin shifted herself to a kneeling position beside him, careful to move lightly on the springs. His face and torso were out of the moonlight. It was easy to imagine, when his snores paused, that his eyes gleamed in shadow, watching her, that he’d seize her and finish her. Then the snores would resume and she knew she’d deceived herself. Her hands lifted, moving over him, seeking the connection and finding it. They felt like heavy weights on the ends of her arms but she struggled to keep them a foot above Danny’s body. When she began on the reversal, it cut into her, made her want to sob. He’d been a sick man while he lived, he was a depraved monster now, and it was up to her to stop him—and yet the removal of her gift of life, inadvertent as that gift had been, now felt ugly and wrong. Still she persisted, fighting against fatigue and choking back tears, her theft of his terrible energy a slow process. Battling Wolf, she’d felt a flood of power seize her. Now it was a mere trickle, a glove compartment light taking all night to drain a car battery. And yet, trickle though it was, each drop stung inside like acid. Please God, she thought, make it be swift, without pain for either of us. But though it was taking forever and felt like barbed wire being drawn through her, the first thin layer of Danny’s strength evaporated, then another, and another.

The snoring stopped. Her hands moved over him, still several inches above. Not sylphid movement but arthritic earned undoings, slow penance for resurrecting him in the first place. Her eyes drifted to his shadowed face, saw a gleam there again, a slitted shine of black on black. Not so. He slept, surely. The agony of picking away, bit by bit, at his power, birdwing brushing mountaintop, had that advantage: She was not likely to startle him awake with the suddenness of her assault. On the other hand, she had no idea how long his sleep would last, nor if she would be able to sustain her efforts much longer without collapsing from exhaustion and loss of will, it felt so monumentally perverse to peel back his life this way.

“What the fuck are you doing?” The voice stunned her so, she shook with the sudden fear of it. Her wrists he snatched from the air above him, tightening on them. She felt the connection shatter, tried to pull away. She knew she hadn’t weakened him nearly enough, and now she’d lost her one chance to escape.

“Wolf!” he called, then again “Wolf!” When he got no answer, he let her go and bounded off the bed. He stooped in the moonlight, inspected his pet, his hands moving here and there seeking life. “He’s dead,” not believing it, a ghost in his voice. “You killed him, and you were trying to kill me.”

“How could I possibly . . . ?” She heard her guilt, transparent as the night air.

He straightened. “It’s lesson time, my girl. Long past due.” She stood now by the bed, but he came at her through the moonlight and without warning his open hand flashed across her face. She fell against the mattress, springs jouncing like a trampoline. Her jaw felt funny. Dislocated? No, but just short of it. She expected more but Danny began working at the cuffs, unlocking them from the bed frame, working frantically as if they would explode if he didn’t open them at once. He clutched them in one hand, grabbed her nearest wrist with the other and tugged her off the bed and toward the door. “Let’s see if Marcie is willing to lend us her couch for a few hours of fun and games, shall we?”

“No, please, don’t.” She struggled futilely in his grip. But when he threw open the door and snapped on the light, the visual assault shocked her into silence.

***

The El Dorado had power-everything and Frank floored it, just this side of losing control. His Honda, usually reliable, was him. It had taken him past Pyne’s cemetery with its cop ribbons around the dead caretaker’s house, on to I-80 and through Auburn to highway 49, then the winding miles of road to Cool, growing increasingly frantic as at last he turned onto Georgetown Road and ate up the miles to Greenwood and beyond. Now he had discarded the Honda, turned to theft, put on this alien metal wrap he’d forced from Hank somebody. Felt wrong, felt late, way too late, the vision of Karin dead awaiting him at the end of this mad hurtle, likely his own death as well.

The cabins of Lively Pines Retirement Home zipped by on the left, the darkened Camp Virnir Grocery Store on the right. Fuck it all, Joe would never find him, not in this wilderness; he should have waited, should have called back and berated that cop, then come blazing in with the police by his side instead of charging off on his own. The crazy who’d abducted Karin would have had no chance against such a force.

He saw Nona, a dog pelt stapled to her headless body, in the dark road flashing under his wheels. He went over a bump and the gun jounced on the passenger seat. There’s still time, I’m not too late, he tried to assure himself, but he didn’t believe it. And yet, what if he were at the wire without knowing it, what if a fraction of a second’s hesitation meant the difference between rescuing Karin or losing her. Letting up on the gas pedal might be exactly equivalent to killing her himself. He pressed on, trying not to imagine what might await him at the cabin.

A bend in the road. The turnoff would be upon him in seconds, an unlit single-lane dirt road into the bullying darkness that loomed on the right. Here I come, you sick son-of-a-bitch, Frank thought. For what it’s worth, here comes Frank Tanner.

***

She’d dared to diminish him, had skimmed off some of his strength while he slept. But he still had plenty left and it was time to dismantle the bitch, slow and sweet; it was time to let his fists and his swords and his dick take revenge. If he had to endure the stings of the wasp-man for as long as he lived, so be it. She was too dangerous to trust, now that she could run her powers in reverse.

He dragged her toward Marcie, her resistance picking up as they neared the couch. The dead girl’s arms—cold flesh tapers with fingered wicks—he tossed over the back of the couch, hearing them hit like beef against the tile. He grabbed the hilt of the rapier stuck through her head and pulled her up so that she looked as if her legs went straight through the bloody cushions to the floor, then toppled her forward so that her midriff hit the armrest and she pinwheeled over, her back hitting the floor first, then her buttocks, the clatter of steel mingling with the slap of naked flesh.

“Lie down,” he said, and when Karin refused, all high pitched and frantic he said, “I told you to lie the fuck down!” He hurled her onto the couch so hard, her body twisted in the air, bloodspray lifting from the cushions as she landed on them.

Danny regripped her hands, lethal weapons, though she was clearly too distraught to use them. He pulled out the cuffs he’d tucked into his pants and tried to put them on her, but she fought like she’d never fought before. “Hold the fuck still!” He set the cuffs on the armrest and Y’d her neck with his free hand, cutting off her air. “Listen up.” He shook her, getting her attention. “If you ever want to breathe again, you’ll stop struggling.” One last futile gesture at escape, and she stopped, looking up at him out of that reddening face. He could break her neck with one twist, finish her, then enjoy her. But getting there was always half the fun, and he wanted to take his time, to savor ever last one of the hurts he intended to inflict. One beat more and he released her, picked up the cuffs, tugged away the hand that had gone instinctively to her throat as she gasped for air.

Then the door to the cabin burst open, Danny’s head whipped that way, and some fuck he’d never seen—ah, the photos on the wall, good old what’s-his-face, Frank, the new cock on the block—stood there pointing a gun at him.

***

“It’s over,” Frank said. “Move away from her and raise your hands.” The sight of Ethan Bell’s torn body had sent him rushing into the cabin. The bloodstench hit him as he spoke. Then there oozed in—around his fix on the kidnapper and Karin—a vision of gore and mutilation, impalement and torture, typhoons of blood that had touched down and passed on.

His wife’s skin, thank God, looked unbroken. But the kidnapper was bending to the hearth and Frank had to train his attention there. He moved in closer, almost past the woman’s hacked corpse. “Mister, you’ve got half a second to straighten up before I shoot you.”

The guy came up with a sword, the El Rey d’Oro that had claimed the center spot on the study wall. “Frank, old buddy,” he said, “don’t you recognize me?”

Shirtless, pants blood-soaked, chest and face crimson with gore, hair slicked back, he seemed hardly human. But the cast of his features, the grin, the eyes, screamed at Frank. And then all the photos he’d seen at the trial and afterward came rushing in, framed snaps on the wall, the scrapbook of his childhood, the proud hunter holding his crossbow and resting one foot on the head of a whitetail deer—the photo the Sacramento Bee had cropped and used—they flurried in on him, and meeting them, his denial of their composite effect. He faltered, and in that instant, Daniels himself rushed in, lunged, thrust a stiff tongue of steel straight through Frank’s belly, turned it so that the tang rotated like bug legs and the sharp pain darkened and bloomed in him, then tugged it straight out, pulling Frank’s thread of life with it.

Frank fell to his knees. He heard Karin’s voice call his name, full of anguish, not reproach, but he had failed her, was leaving her at the mercy of this thing from the grave. Then he recalled the gun in his hand and bent all his efforts there, raising it, firing it, feeling the rude recoil whicker back his weak hand, seeing the hole open in the man’s chest, the grin drop away, the sword fall out of his hand, the impossible corpse, hands imploring, stagger toward him and begin to topple. But then the floor angled up to meet him, and Frank fell against the skewered torso, Daniels landing on him like a six-hundred-pound wrestler, and then the darkness swallowed him up.

***

Karin watched it all, paralyzed. She was a helpless dreamer, witness to unstoppable events. The sword blade thrust into her beloved. The cloth-yield sound of a pin cushion being needled blent with his bluff grunt of pain. “Frank!” she said, but his eyes were already filming over. Then his arm came up, seeming not to be attached to the rest of him, and whipped backward in a buffet of sound. Danny’s skin, to the left of his spine, grew an eye that gushed red tears. Frank went down. Danny fell forward. And Karin felt the power take her: Frank could not die, she loved him too much, she would not let Danny take him away. But those thoughts spun out of a blur of instinct. She rose from the couch and, raising her red hands, let a stream of revivification shoot from her fingertips.

It fused forth green as sunlight through emeralds, a bath of healing that pushed back the room’s ugly sheen of red, damped down the stench. Too wide a swath. Her mind was fixed on Frank but her uncontrolled surge of power did not discriminate in what it healed: Frank jolted back to life, though perhaps she’d pulled him away from the brink before death could take him; Danny’s bullet wound smoothed over like a gash of sand in the backwash of an ocean wave, and he began to regain his feet; and Marcie, clotted and crusted, legless and armless, opened her eyes, lifted her head, and screamed at what she saw and felt, the steel of half a dozen swords still stuck through her. Frank looked for the gun, found it behind him, dove for it. Marcie’s eyes locked on Danny, dazed beside her. Her teeth sank into his palm, not letting go, but Danny put his foot on her chest and grabbed her neck with his other hand and shoved it with such force that her skull snapped away from the top of her spinal column and her neckskin ripped like rotted crimson drapery. New-created blood splashed from her neckhole onto her face. Her body quivered, then grew still. Danny yanked a sword out of her belly.

No! thought Karin, but this time she didn’t feel in the least paralyzed. She’d saved Frank. She had power in her, had always had it, buried at her center. It emerged now, and she felt strong and whole for the first time she could remember. She ran toward Danny, his back to her and his sword coming up, and leaped on him. Her arm clamped his neck in a choke hold. His free hand gripped it, began to wrench it away. Then Frank was on the other side of Danny, gun gone, both hands at Danny’s sword hand, trying to wrest it out of his grasp.

Danny dropped it, came in toward Frank’s face. He’d caught Frank offguard and his hands tightened on Frank’s windpipe, ready to squeeze it off like a wet paper straw. But Karin kept her arm about Danny’s neck, using it more for leverage than damage, put her right hand flat on his back just to the right of his backbone, and concentrated her killing power on his heart. Connection. Palm-suck. The wrench inside, the cry that came from him, from her, at the doing of it, the skipped beat. He fell and Karin rode him down, jolting him again.

Frank lifted her off him, danced her backward to her feet as Danny rolled over, hurt, and lay there gazing up at them. “Are you all right?” Frank asked her, his hands feeling for verification.

She didn’t want to take her eyes from Danny, not sure he wasn’t faking. But she chanced it. “I’m okay. Did he hurt you?” She touched his face, soothed his throat. She could not believe how glad she was to see him.

“I thought he ran me through with a sword, but I must have imagined it.” He tugged at his shirt, found the red rip there, looked bewildered. He looked at the floor. “I must have imagined a lot, and I guess I still am.”

She opened her mouth to explain.

“Karin.” Danny called out to her where he lay. His other voice spoke, the one he would use after beating her, the one she had once loved him for: contrite, filled with sorrow and suffering, the lost boy devoured by the crazed man he’d become.

“Please, Karin. Take away the pain in my head.”

She looked at him, tears pooling in his eyes. “I don’t—”

“Heal my mind. Forget about the rest of me, just fix me inside my head.”

“Don’t listen to him, Karin. It’s a trick. Keep away—”

She put a finger to Frank’s lips, felt them leave off talking, kiss her fingertip soft and warm. How lucky she was to know this man, to live with him.

Kneeling behind Danny, she touched his temples. The connection was there almost at once, focused and sure.

“Wait, you don’t know what you might be doing.”

“It’s all right, Frank,” she said. “I know.” And she flooded Danny’s brain with healing.

He cried out, short sharp cries again and again, not cries of physical pain but of recognition. Then they grew longer—drawn out, anguished groans that filled the cabin. “God, forgive me,” he said, not addressing her so much as the world entire. Again he begged forgiveness, and again. His fingertips touched the backs of her hands, not trying to stop her, not a threat, but welcoming in what she gave as he wept out his inner agony.

But at last he lifted her hands off him and released them. “On the table.” He gestured. “Wakizashi.” His samurai sword, or rather the shorter of the two he owned. The longer one, the katana, arced now through the base of the dead woman’s breasts like an ornamental bone through an aborigine’s nose. Karin looked away from the terrible sight and went to the table, a thick oaken affair Danny had made and stained soon after the cabin had been built. She lifted the scabbarded samurai sword, marveling anew at how heavy such a small weapon could be, unsheathed it, and gave it to Danny. Frank again cautioned her and again she calmed his fears.

“Sit me up?” Danny begged.

She started to obey but then realized she didn’t want to touch him. “No,” she said, “I can’t do that.” Frank came to her, held her.

Danny said he understood. Then he raised the sword up, cord-wrapped hilt toward the cabin’s crossbeams, and without hesitation sank it into his abdomen an inch from his belt. He grimaced and grunted as it cut across his belly, his strong hands never faltering. Blood welled behind the blade, drooling along the crusted runnels of Marcie’s blood. He let the sword clatter to the floor and called to Karin. “Kneel beside me.”

Frank tried to hold her, but she said, “He’s dying. It’s a last wish.” She went and knelt and saw the pain deep as starless night in his eyes. He raised his hands, imploring one last touch. She hesitated, then relented and rested her hands on his, felt them close around them and tighten and pull her hands downward, pull them toward his belly, toward the garish clown’s mouth, touching the wet lips, her fingers sinking into the steaming warmth of his wound. “It’s not working,” Danny said, his voice a razored whisper. “Kill me, kill me all the way.”

She stopped struggling and let him guide her hands inside him. His abdomen looked like a burst basketball. Her fingers felt serpents asleep in steaming mud, praying hands clenched around hot guts. She calmed herself, eased her eyes closed, slowed her breathing. She touched the wellspring of his life, the thing she’d sparked anew in him back in the graveyard. Like an abscess, she drained it, her weeping, her anguish, joining with his. But after a while, the sorrowful outgasp of Danny’s voice died away and only hers, higher pitched, remained, her arms buried deep inside a corpse whose fire had gone out.

***

Frank helped Karin up, her gloves of melted crimson cellophane spattering the dead man as she rose. As swift as a startled wildcat, and as fierce, she wheeled around, wrapped her arms about him, and hugged him. “It’s over,” he said, “and I love you. I haven’t told you that much, but that’s going to change.”

“You’re such a dear sweet man,” she said, not looking at him, her head nestled against his shoulder. She seemed about to say something more. But looking around the room, she thought better of it. She took his hand and led him past the table through the kitchen alcove to the bathroom. It felt exhilarating to leave behind the horrors of the front room, like stepping out of the sick, smoky smell of a cross-country bus into fresh Arizona air.

She stripped him, then herself, dropping the soiled clothing in a heap behind her. Frank felt his belly where the sword had gone in—smooth and unbroken, a crusted dash of dried blood the only remaining sign. She paused at the indoor shower, then shied away, again looking about as if the worst part of the house had followed her here. “Bring some towels,” she said, gathering soap and shampoo. The door let in the night air and then they passed through it and were outside, matted stairs rough against their feet. Frank set the towels on the steps as Karin turned on the solar-heated water and tested it with her fingers. She stepped under the shower, soaped her hands first, washed them off, then soaped them again.

A light breeze wafted across Frank’s belly, just two or three degrees away from cool. Karin looked strangely beautiful in all that blood, but more beautiful as little by little it spiraled down her thighs and was gone. She shampooed her hair, pink and white sudpuffs curling there, then held out the soap: “Help me, Frank. I don’t want to one spot left that hasn’t been soaped and rinsed clean.”

Frank joined her. The warm water steaming on the concrete beneath their feet sent up a swirl of cloud that both set them apart from and joined them to the panorama of thick dark forest fanning out from the logged back of the cabin. He lathered her up as the water battered his shoulders and raced down his back and buttocks. Then he led her under the water and watched the white suds melt along and define every contour of her flesh. She was a wood nymph freeing herself at last from the confines of bark and trunk, limb and leaf, and it was his privilege to witness her transformation.

Now she soaped him. He surrendered himself to those caring hands, recognizing gestures and sounds she had only used hitherto on plants, feeling how extraordinary Karin’s touch was, not simply in bestowing new life but primarily and more importantly in blessing and encouraging the life already in him. She soaped him everywhere, then washed him off, drew him under the downspray, and impaled herself on him, closing about him like a moist fist. “I love you, Frank,” she said, her voice at his left ear but also deep inside him, as rich and full as the smells and sounds of the forest. Her lovemaking was fierce but controlled, and yet the sounds of her mounting frenzy came free and loud, more uninhibited than she’d ever been. And that set him off too, gave him an openness of sound he’d never before given in to.

Above them, the stars, so bright on his approach to the cabin, dimmed and guttered for an instant. But then he was locked into Karin’s eyes, the ferocious love there driving him onward—scarcely believable the mutual upward spiral they had going, climbing, soaring, but not yet at its apex. He had no idea he had loved Karin this much. Nor she him. The continuing revelation in their locked eyes seemed both to create new love and to reveal the love that had previously been hidden.

He held back his orgasm, even as she coaxed it. She seemed to be doing the same, her shattering animal sounds building like wave on wave but never quite crashing on the shoreline of release.

Then bright light flared on and the first bark of a bullhorn and both of them went over the edge into ecstasy. Part of Frank’s mind registered what was happening, but most of him was deep into their shared coming. As their mingled breath began to calm, he heard more clearly the repeated message: “Put your hands up and step away from her. We have you surrounded.”

“I love you so much,” he said into her mouth.

“I love you more,” she said, her lips on his, a wet giggle forming there. “You going to step away from me?”

“Never. They’ll have to shoot me first.”

“Me too. Better put your hands up, though.”

“I will if you will.”

And, hands clasped like twin prayers, Frank and Karin brought them up, his arms running the length of hers like a hopeful tree reaching upward toward the sun.

EPILOGUE

SUNDAY, JULY 4, 1993

Frank backed out the door, letting it close and latch behind him. On a silver tray sat two champagne glasses of sparkling cider and a thin cut-glass vase which sprouted a carefully dethorned Pink Rose, as per Karin’s request. He set the tray on the ledge of the spa and removed the towel wrapped about his waist. The water bubbled about his wife like freshly opened ginger ale.

“Fireworks started yet?” he asked.

“Nope.” She gestured with her head. “Are you sure the park is off in that direction?”

“That’s what the natives tell me. Meg Kornfeld from the office, she and her husband live a few blocks over but their house is oriented same as this one, and according to Meg we should have the perfect view.” He slipped into the spa, put his hand on the almost imperceptible convexity of Karin’s belly, and kissed her gently on the lips.

“Beautiful lady,” he said, “you make me so happy.”

Smiling, she touched his face. “Is Mom in bed?”

“Yes.” He reached for the champagne glasses and gave one to Karin. Good old Martinelli. The first fruity sip was perfect, cool in his mouth, a dream going down. “She likes it out here. It’s amazing the change in her since I met her at the airport last month.”

Karin, her jaw tight for a moment, looked toward the darkening slope that rose abruptly out of their backyard, smooth stained steps set into it and rising to a trellised gazebo at the top. As beautiful as the rest of the house was, that one feature—more than the less hurried pace of life in general, more than the prospect of real seasons up here in the foothills—had sold them on the move to Grass Valley. “All it took was a transplant,” she said. “Gave her roots a chance to breathe. Poor woman, the separation was long overdue. She still has plenty to work through.” She turned again to Frank, kissed him, caressed his neck. “I have a feeling we won’t recognize her in another year.”

“I think you’re right. And I’ll bet the advent of little what’s-his-name here will help.”

Karin agreed, then sipped her cider. Frank couldn’t believe how lovely she looked. Her mother’s hadn’t been the only transformation he’d been witness to. As soon as the procedural hullabaloo had died down—in fact the day after the coroner took a professional gamble and issued a report stating that the corpse in the cabin was both long dead (in parts) and recently dead (in others) and that all signs corroborated the Tanners’ outrageous claim that this was Danny Daniels returned from the grave—Karin persuaded Frank to put their house and the Chiquita Lake property on the market and bought two round-trip tickets to the east coast. In a private meeting with her father, she’d shamed him to tears, convincing him—so Karin reported, though he apparently hadn’t yet implemented her suggestion—to see a therapist. And she had talked her mother out from under her father’s thumb, persuading her to “visit” them for an unspecified time, no hurry to return east, and they fully expected, indeed hoped, that she would spend her remaining years with them. Now that they had settled in Grass Valley, now that Frank’s Sacramento responsibilities had concluded and he’d linked up with Meg Kornfeld and Tommy Natale in a more relaxed, almost countrified law firm, Karin had begun to circulate, to find friends, to cultivate them almost as assiduously as she had her plants.

As for Frank himself, something—maybe helping Karin triumph over Danny, maybe his brush with death, maybe just vacating the Rocklin house—had healed the split he’d felt between his professional and personal lives. Where it was called for, there was still plenty of room for legitimate uncertainty in his life, but in matters crucial to his and his family’s well-being, he found himself iron-willed and decisive.

“Cider okay?” he asked her.

“Couldn’t be better.” She set it down on the ledge, her breasts wet and lovely as she twisted about. Her hand dipped below water, found his hardness.

There was a distant whistle in the sky, then a burst of gold stars, blue stars, red stars, followed by a white puff of smoke and a sonic boom that reached in and fisted his viscera tight and good.

“The fireworks are starting,” said Karin.

He laughed. “It sure feels that way.”

***

Karin took her husband’s glass and set it down next to the rose, then found and fondled him again beneath the incessant suds of the spa, nibbling on his ear. His warm wet hand found her left breast, thumb circling lovingly at her nipple. “I love you, Frank,” she said.

“I love you too, Karin,” he soothed, and it thrilled her ears like thick rich golden sunlight. To think she’d been on the verge of losing him, of never having lived the continual unfolding of new love, each glimpse of him, each shared experience adding new natural dimension to what had already grown precious between them.

Up in the sky, a corkscrew of orange sparks wowed and wippled, hotly pursued by a faster red upstart running the same evanescent track. They met high up, spraying diamond streamers in all directions, a pretense of breeze rippling their fanciful folds.

“That feels so incredibly good,” Frank said.

“I’m glad it does,” she said. The Fresh Pink sat on the silver tray next to her husband’s half-full champagne glass. It had been difficult to bring roses into her new backyard garden, but she’d been determined to knock down that barrier too. The Rocklin house had gone to another green thumb, though she’d warned Pat Sandoval that some of the more outrageously off-season or out-of-locale flowers were unlikely to survive. Here she had, by design, about half the garden and many fewer houseplants, but what she had she loved no less than before. The roses had been a welcome addition, a missing puzzle piece found and fitted into its proper place. They had even joined the rotation of blooms that perfumed their master bedroom.

After the media flurry had passed—all offers to spin off a book or to talk to Larry, Oprah, or Phil having been politely but persistently rejected—together she and Frank had decided she needed to cultivate her talent. They had suppressed, in relating the events of that week, all that they knew, or could piece together, about Karin’s role in Danny’s revival, feigning bewilderment as to how such an out-and-out impossibility could have come about. So when Karin had called the hospital, there had been no churning in the media waters, no laying-on-of-hands exposes in the offing to give the hospital administrators pause. They’d accepted her as a volunteer, with understandable caution, but as patients brightened, and minor—and not so minor—miracles occurred on her watch, Karin bloomed and grew in their esteem, came out of herself, felt as if she’d lived most of her life in a vacuum-packed jar but that now the lid had flown off and the glass had shattered outward and been swept away.

“You’re making me see stars,” Frank joked, one hand at her back, the other leaving her breast to move lower.

“Wait.” She glanced at the rose, then at him.

“I wondered why you wanted the thorns removed. You don’t, by any chance, have some kinky sex act in mind?”

“As if you’d object!” She was suddenly nervous. “I think you’re going to like this. And I really need it to happen, Frank. Call it unfinished business.”

“No problem,” he said, “if it feels good—if it makes you feel good—I’ll do it.”

He made her laugh, relieved the tension. The sky lit up like a flashbulb. Blinding white light sizzled outward in all directions like painted clown tears, then vanished. Letting Frank go with a gentle squeeze, Karin moved around to face him, then let her arms curve around the rim of the spa and lifted her dripping legs out of the water so that they rested on his shoulders. She floated there, feeling the bubbles moving like benign fairies along her back and buttocks. When Frank made as if to lower his lips to her, she said, “Use the rose. Stroke me with it.”

It came out low, maybe even sexy in Frank’s ears, but she was full of anxiety. It reminded her too much of that night long ago, the horror she’d remembered and lived over and over for more than twenty years. Surprising how easy it had been to confront her father, to make him confess to abusing her, and to coax a tentative and finally a tearful apology from him. But this last demon had his claws sunk deep inside her and only Frank’s love could help her send him packing.

“With pleasure,” he said, lifting the miniature rose from its vase. She saw it come near, its furls illumined by the light show in the sky. It reminded her absurdly of the heated coils of a car’s cigarette lighter. It was her father’s branding iron, closing in to sear her most secret part, the male hand, all male hands bringing it nearer, to steal pleasure from her, to give her only pain—but this hand was different, no threat, no sacrilege. Soft petals touched her and she gave a small cry. The childhood room vanished, the blood, her mother’s cowardice, her father at the bedroom door—and there was just her and Frank in the partially screened spa, just the two of them and the fire in the sky and the stroke of the rose, the tender rose, a Granny Eva rose in the hand of the man who loved her and was now, as always, intent on showing it.

An upspray of sapphire stars was overlapped by one of rubies and it in turn by one of emeralds. Then more and more overlaps, coming faster and faster, raising audible applause from the distant crowd and seeming to draw Karin closer and closer to climax. Then the upsprays stopped, the sky hung fire for an instant, and suddenly a flower etched itself on the blackness, stitched in brilliant red that expanded and grew a collar of green, becoming more clearly defined with each passing moment—a rose, no time to decide which one, it was the best rose that ever was, and Karin screamed out her bliss and ascended into it and then claimed the night that, having given it to her, now superseded it.

“Oh, Frank.” She gasped and then laughed. “I love you so much.” And then she lowered herself back into the water, splashing into his arms and kneeling herself open down around him, feeling his goodness ease inside of her, intent on making him see what she had just seen, wanting to show him, to show him all there was to see.

ROBERT DEVEREAUX made his professional debut in Pulphouse Magazine in the late 1980’s, attended the 1990 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and soon placed stories in such major venues as Crank!, Weird Tales, and Dennis Etchison’s anthology MetaHorror. Two of his stories made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards.

His novels include Slaughterhouse High, A Flight of Storks and Angels, Deadweight, Walking Wounded, Caliban, Santa Steps Out, and Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes. Also not to be missed is his new short story collection with Deadite Press, Baby’s First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit.

Robert has a well-deserved reputation as an author who pushes every envelope, though he would claim, with a stage actor’s assurance, that as long as one’s writing illuminates characters in all their kinks, quirks, kindnesses, and extremes, the imagination must be free to explore nasty places as well as nice, or what’s the point?

Robert lives in sunny northern Colorado with the delightful Victoria, making up stuff that tickles his fancy and, he hopes, that of his readers.

You can find him online at Facebook or at www.robertdevereaux.com.

Table of Contents

Deadweight