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  Everybody always asking him if he understood. What would happen if he ever said no?

  "My daughter's death was not your fault. It was that bastard who did it. He tried for years to kill me and Stacy, a bit more every day, and this time he tried to finish the job. He fed her hamburgers and ice cream as if that's what makes a good father. Joe would've taken her away and he would have ruined his own little girl. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you?"

  He wet his lips, the pressure easing from his heart. "Yes," he said.

  "Gray, you have to focus on me. I'm going to tell you some important things. You have to listen."

  "All right," he said.

  "Are you listening?"

  Everybody always thinking he was deaf.

  "Yes."

  Her voice was so casual, almost detached, that Chase had a difficult time following the depth of her words. It was like she was reading poetry to him, swinging into the sounds of the stanzas but not allowing herself to reach inside and spew up everything that was there.

  They were talking about a dead girl, and there were people out in the parking lot holding up signs calling him a murderer, a hero. A few of the more creative folks actually carried tiny cardboard coffins and set fire to his books. They flung burning pages in the air and let the soot sweep into the breeze. His sales were at an all-time high.

  Annie Singleton was right. He had to concentrate. He stared at her, gathered himself.

  "I came here to warn you," she told him. Stacy nodded, the barrettes flapping in her bloody hair. "You have to watch out for Joe."

  "He killed his friends over the truck heist."

  "Yes, and he's done a lot worse. He's sharp and he's cruel but he's not motivated or smart enough to be anything besides a low-class hustler. He's got animal instincts that keep him mostly out of harm's way."

  "Is the mob after him?"

  "No. Killing his partners cleared him with the local underworld for his stupid blunders. They keep him around to do petty crap. All his real troubles, he finds on his own."

  "He's good with a knife."

  "It's all he knows," she said. "But he only knows a little of it. His grandfather was a marine who taught him four or five moves when he was a kid. He's practiced them his whole life."

  "But never learned anything else."

  She nodded. "Like I said, he's not motivated. But he can hold a grudge."

  Almost everybody could, no matter the reason. "And he's got one against me."

  "It's what he has to keep him going, all this goddamn poison. Stacy was the only thing he ever cared about, in his own twisted way."

  She'd been doing well, up until now, but now heat and heartbreak worked their way into Annie Singleton's face. She clomped her cane for emphasis as she spoke, as if crushing her ex-husband's windpipe.

  She dropped her head back, took a breath, and fought to keep control. Her shoulders heaved, as if she might break into a sob, but she didn't.

  "He hated me for keeping Stacy from him. He'll hate you too. In a fashion, he's happy now. He can give himself over completely to his malice. Can you understand that?"

  "Yes," Chase said, nervous that he could comprehend a sick fucker like that.

  "This has given him a new purpose, something else to feed his fury. It's why he does the things he does. He loves chaos and mess. He loves tension and pain. He's got this long scar on his belly—"

  "I saw it."

  "Well, he did it to himself. Because he was bored."

  "Jesus."

  She tilted her head, gave him a pitying look. "Prison might be the safest place for you. Fortwell anyway. He hardly has any friends, and none of them are there. Don't do anything wrong to make them transfer you up to Hardwick or worse, Arlingville. Joe's done time in both for his misdemeanors. But now, because of this, he'll probably be going back to Arlingville for a longer stint. At least five years they tell me. He likes it there, I think. Much better than on the outside. It keeps him high-strung. He doesn't know how to act in the world. He never has."

  This would probably be the only chance that Chase had to learn something meaningful about Singleton. "He's going to make a run for me. It'll give him something to do, thinking about it, for the next five years."

  "Maybe you do understand a little about him," she said.

  You could hear the traffic from the parkway buzzing by. He wondered what it sounded like, the night of the accident. Had Arlo Barrack listened to the shrieking metal smash-up? Did he unlock the grille over the window and try to catch a glance of the dead girl as they bagged and dragged her off? Is that why the man had taken such a dislike to Chase?

  "What do I have to do?" Chase asked.

  She gave him the same look that Ellis had, trying to decide just how sly Chase might really be. "Kill him, of course. If you can. He has plenty of weaknesses. He's stupid, like I said."

  "He'll have five years to come up with a plan."

  "He's only ever had one plan. He'll come at you with a knife and he'll enjoy using it. Don't give him the chance. Get a gun and if you see him coming, shoot him in the head. Don't hesitate."

  He wanted to ask her another question but couldn't figure out how he might do it. He glanced over at Stacy and saw that the girl was gone.

  Annie Singleton said, "Go ahead and say it. You want to know why I stayed with him."

  "Actually," Chase told her. "I want to know why you never killed him yourself."

  "I tried once. I thought I was being so slick. He was selling coke and meth at the time and had a couple of ounces of each stashed under the closet floor. I cut open the bags and mixed enough in a stew I made for supper that he would've OD'ed after a couple of bites. That's all it would've taken." The nervous energy started to grow inside her. "I was doing too many 8-balls myself, wired pretty good. I must've left out a sign. Something, I don't know."

  "He caught on," Chase said.

  "Like I said, the bastard's got the instincts of an animal. He must've smelled it. Sensed it. Stacy was sleeping in her bedroom and he got her up and stuck the bowl in front of her, just to see what would happen, what I'd do."

  The agitation played across her, plucking her nerves. He watched a shudder pass through her like an angry wave, starting with her left shoulder and going right across and out the other side.

  She grabbed his hand again, held on tight and dug her fingernails into the sensitive under his thumb. He appreciated the harsh feeling, so different from the cool detachment from the ice bath drownings.

  "I begged him to leave her alone. I threw myself down and crawled on the floor." Her voice drifted, depleted, becoming more vacuous. "God, the look in Stacy's eyes. She thought I'd gone insane. He humiliated me in front of my little girl. Finally he put the bowl out in the yard and poisoned the next door neighbor's chocolate lab. You could hear it howling in agony for blocks."

  Chase could see the haunted, guilty expression taking over her eyes and said, "You were terrified and you still made the effort. You've got nothing to be ashamed about."

  "I should've just picked up a gun and blown him away, but I was afraid. I was so afraid! I didn't want to go to jail. I didn't want to lose Stacy. And now—"

  She paused and they stayed like that for a while. Then she slowly, painfully, got to her feet. He wondered what the ex-wife of a violent man who liked knives looked like beneath her clothes. He imagined horrible lumps and knobs of scars protruding twisting across her body.

  "But I'm not smart either, Mr. Chase, and that's why I stayed in the same apartment even after he left. I felt relief and then got lazy and forgot he was still alive. Don't make the same mistake. Never forget about him."

  "I won't," Chase said. "Thank you for visiting me."

  "I wanted to do something to help. You won't ever see me again. I'm moving somewhere he'll never find me. He won't look. He won't care. He's done all he can do to me. He took my baby. He'll let me go, now that he has you."

  Annie Singleton left then, limping away with a heavy air. As she r
eached the door someone passed her coming in.

  They brushed shoulders but didn't look at one another.

  It was Jez, who met Chase's gaze with a jealous lover's scowl. It promised joy and professed anguish, and after this he still had prison to look forward to.

  Turning.

  Turning, staring around, looking at the door to Isaac's room and listening to Shake starting in on the babaganoush, Chase fell back into himself.

  The need to get the hell out of the hospital ripped through him as he rushed through the corridors, barely keeping himself from breaking into a dead run.

  When he hit the street he looked up the block and saw Joe Singleton standing on the corner, dressed in a T-shirt and black leather vest. He still had a pony tail and had never gone in for any plastic surgery, his face ruined from the accident. His busted piggy nose flailed across the center of his face.

  He gave Chase that same nod again and moved away, joining the crowd crossing to the other side of the street. Chase thought he was coming over but instead Singleton hailed a cab and took off downtown.

  9

  Chase walked in the same direction, wondering if Singleton were on his way to Chase's apartment right now to try out his couple of moves with the blade.

  He scanned every store front, alleyway, and face coming at him along the sidewalks. After five years, Singleton would want to make the game last, have some fun. Toy with Chase for a while. It wasn't going to go down quick.

  Once, he thought he saw Arlo Barrack's reflection in the window of a wicker furniture shop on Ninth Street. Chase had to focus, had to try to fight the time-sense aphasia. He could step off a curb and relive six hours of his seventh birthday party in his jumbled mind, seeing the kids and tasting the vanilla frosting of the cake, pissy about a couple of the presents because they weren't what he was hoping for.

  Hearing his mother with a direct and almost numbing clarity, while she took photos and kept telling him to smile. Mom moving to him, about to say something else, perhaps give some advice that would bring meaning to his life from that point on. The flash going off, her lips parting, as she said his name and returned to the world, coming down off the damn curb.

  He struggled to stay in the now. He'd promised Annie Singleton that he wouldn't forget and yet, even with the girl Stacy finding him over and over, he had. He still wasn't ready. He'd gotten lazy and crazy and it was going to cost him if Singleton spun out of a darkened door and tried to clip Chase's hamstrings.

  By the time he got back to his apartment he'd spotted Barrack again, slipping between delivery trucks. Chase was more antsy about Jez coming up behind him than Singleton.

  Sometimes your ghosts mattered more than four inches of steel under the ribs. You didn't set your priorities to get you through another year or even another week. You just hoped to make it alive from one minute to the next.

  He wandered into his building and thought about grabbing his mail but let it go. He wanted to keep his hands free. The colorless day followed him inside and he took the stairs two at a time.

  The lock on his apartment door looked fine and hadn't been jimmied. He stepped inside already hearing the voices ambling into his head. At first he thought it was his parents, but soon he gathered his flailing concentration and looked at the ceiling.

  The newlyweds upstairs were losing their shit again.

  Late 20s, they'd more or less left the goth scene behind but had never gotten over the hurdle to becoming full-fledged yuppies, still playing in the middleground. Hip, liberal, and raging against machinery, but starting to worry about their social security. At least they both worked.

  The husband drank too much and did a touch of coke on the weekends, grooving to techno pop that warbled beneath their door in the off hours. The wife spent her free time waiting for the revolution she'd been promised when she was sixteen. Sexually liberated and independent but left hurting and wanting for the picket fence and chubby babies.

  She was Mary and he was Howard.

  Chase couldn't get by her in the hall without hearing about some march or protest going on, the latest articles in Elle and The Paris Review. He liked her energy and her abrupt manner of cornering him as he went for the mail—it was a gauntlet he ran pretty well and didn't mind. She must've laid in wait hoping to find someone who would listen. He knew the feeling. She read poetry but not his.

  Maybe it hit home harder than he wanted to admit, but he let it ripple off his shoulders as best he could. He could appreciate the force of her urgency as she swept down the back-lit stairwell followed by her own massive shadow. He'd stand there, smiling, trying to put her frenetic words into verse. Sometimes he'd tap his foot, finding a rhythm and going along with it.

  His mother's name, he thought, it might've been Mary.

  Her eyes would zone past him as she spoke, thoughts skittering from track to track, throwing sparks. He'd angle in, going nose to nose and trying to bring her back to center on him. She didn't notice because he wasn't really there, in a way. Neither was she.

  On occasion she'd stop in mid-sentence and float off back up the stairs, hands held out in front of her as if she were moving through a thick, sticky liquid.

  It broke the day up. Chase used to see lots of people like that on the ward. She was as happy as any of them.

  Tonight, though, Mary screamed. Maybe God wasn't listening either. The husband was doing some kind of flake-out up there, sounded like he was pounding his head on the floor, muttering. Chase had a sudden idea for a poem and grabbed a pad and pen off his coffee table, but even as he attempted to hold onto the outlines of a skittering image, his mind blanked to a comforting snow.

  He went to the window and stared down at the street, wondering how many of the dead might be walking by. Jez, his parents, Stacy. They would crowd the sidewalks and force the living in front of speeding taxis. He hadn't uncapped the pen but realized he was scratching tiny holes in the pad with his fingernails. His first therapist in the Falls would've said he had a vagina fixation, wanting to hump the paper.

  Maybe that was it.

  He could usually find a nice balance, if he looked.

  Now there was deep moaning, amazingly bitter, and Chase spun and started for the door. He had the abrupt fear that Singleton was upstairs right now, cutting off eyelids and peeling back tendons. He touched his doorknob and heard the husband shushing Mary, his words creeping down through the ceiling. "…she doesn't matter…"

  It inspired her to howl like a dying dog.

  His parents had never fought like that in their thirty year marriage.

  His mother was gone but he couldn't remember what had happened to her unless somebody told him. Even then, he couldn't retain it for very long as she smoothly skated from his memory.

  His father's name, he thought, it was probably Howard.

  Okay, so, Mary bucked her way out of the corner and rushed across the floor, giving it all she had, really swinging the noise up out of her chest and letting it explode. "I swear to God! I swear to Christ!"

  Her voice kept cracking, which added an extra spike of emotion to her shouts. Howard thumped away hard enough for the dishes in Chase's sink to rattle. He wondered if maybe Mary was bashing out her husband's brains.

  Doors slammed—sounded like the bathroom first, then their front door. Mary was moving a lot faster than usual, filled with purpose. Whatever the hell Howard had done it really got her going. Stomping angry footsteps clacked and thudded one after the other, down the steps and up the hallway, right to Chase's apartment.

  "Ah shit," he said.

  Directly overhead, Howard repeated after him. "Ah shit's right, man! Say it again! Say it again! Ah, holy shit! Christ!"

  Whatever was in her head, Mary had already gone all the way there. She giggled in semi-hysteria and tried Chase's doorknob as if expecting it to be open for her. Like she was going to waft on in and drag him into even more commonplace madness. What, he didn't have enough?

  Chase backed up a step and looked around f
or a place to hide. In the corner crouched behind the dying fern? Why hadn't he watered it enough?… maybe he could've gotten some cover from the leaves.

  She waited silently, hopeful, expectant. Why was it that everybody in the world had so much more patience than he did? Sometimes he jumped the rails just because there was nothing on TV.

  Five minutes went by while he stared at the door. He kept his eyes on his watch, making sure he wasn't blacking out, slipping off someplace. Six minutes. Eight. She was going to outlast him. You had to have an immense reserve of willpower to stand for eight minutes with your face up to a locked door. He knew, he'd done it himself.

  Chase took a step and the noise stopped him. Her knocking was timid and tentative but somehow eerily sensual as well. She dropped something tiny in the hallway, it sounded light as a packet of sugar. The whisper of her clothing followed as she stooped to retrieve it.

  He thought he knew what was going on, what she had with her. So, she had a pack of condoms with her. Sure, it was all right. He didn't have anything to be guilty about, there was no need for the familiar self-hatred and paranoia to hit.

  But already he could feel it coming on strong, plying his kidneys. You could never be ready for all the crap the world threw at you.

  "You gonna do it, man?" Howard called down to him, pressing his lips to the floor. Chase looked up, could almost see the man's face shoving through the ceiling at him. "How you gonna do that, huh? Don't let her in! Don't open the door!"

  Chase didn't know. He spoke quietly, as if the guy were right there in the room. "Listen, this isn't my action."

  "Don't open the door, man!"

  The rapping continued until it became soft scratching, a lost pet trying to get back inside.

  Chase put his hand on the knob, the rasping intensified and she started tittering. It gave him some pause. Chase could smell her breath from here and it almost sent him into a sneezing fit. She'd been knocking back one of those sweet wines that stank like rotting fruit.