I drank the gla.s.s of water and filled it again while I read the letter again. "So what are we going to do?"

"I'm going to work in the backyard. You wanna come?"

Baby and dog came with us, one going into a playpen and the other ending up tied to a stake by a long length of strong rope. Claire made me rearrange them and then looked around and pulled on canvas gardening gloves before tossing me a bright pink pair of rubber ones.

"Lots of work to do yet."

I slapped the gloves against my thigh and nodded in agreement. The yard was a mess. Earlier tenants had reshingled the roof and left the trash in big piles all over the yard, where it killed off the gra.s.s and the flowers. Someone had tried to grow wildflowers in a big bed along one fence and now that corner was full of weeds and thistles. The lawn that did remain was mostly crabgra.s.s mixed with dandelions and scarred with the treads of cars and trucks, many of them quite deep.

"Where do you want to start?"

"Nowhere. We've been evicted, remember?"

Claire nodded politely and went to work in the flowerbed, ripping the weeds out and stuffing them in a garbage bag at her feet.

"Suit yourself."

In places she'd stop and kneel down close to the earth. Sometimes she'd leave the plant alone; at other times she'd rip it up as well and add it to her sack. When I wandered over, I couldn't see much difference between what she considered weeds and what she considered valuable plants. The smells of the fresh earth and the greenery mixed and I picked up my own bag.

Our neighbors on both sides had headed indoors the moment we had come out, so we had the s.p.a.ce to ourselves, which was fine. The yard was about fifteen yards long and ten wide and was covered with gra.s.s up to the last five yards before the back alley, where gravel and scabs of concrete started. Someone had driven over a small stand of bushes so I started with them.

"Can I toss these bushes?"

"Let me see."

Claire came over and looked at the ruins carefully. Finally she bent down and broke off one branch and sniffed the end. "Yeah. They're dead."

Removing the hedge was harder than it looked but eventually I managed to dig up the roots of the bushes and manhandle them into garbage bags. While I was working, a police car cruised up the alley and paused next to me. In it were two young white men with handlebar mustaches. They turned in unison to look at me through eyes concealed behind expensive mirrored shades.

"Good afternoon."

They were silent.

"Or is it evening?"

The cop who was driving carefully peeled the Saran Wrap off a toothpick and put it between his front teeth. He said something unintelligible to his partner and then they drove away.

"Nice guys, you know."

Claire had ignored them and worked. She had cleared half the flowerbed and was working on the verge along the outside. She looked at me and then at the departing car. "Morons."

She planted the root back in the garden itself and I went to work on the shingles near the house. They had been there long enough to begin to molder, and white slugs as big as baby carrots were busy among the dead leaves and pale plants next to the ground. When I was finished, I brushed the dirt off my hands and dumped the bag with the others near the alley.

"You still haven't told me why we're doing this."

She shrugged and went to wrap Fred up in a blanket. He had fallen asleep and was happily drooling.

"It has to be done."

Renfield had found something in the gra.s.s and was rolling around in it with much glee. She patted him as she went past and then started working again. When she spoke again, she was very precise. "Do you want to leave?"

I thought about it and snarled, "No."

She went back to tearing up the foilage and I filled two more bags and was raking up the remaining litter before she spoke again. "What would you have done before?"

The rake wasn't working so I was reduced to picking up armloads of mold and filth and dropping them into the bags. "Before, before? You mean, in the before time? When I was single and life was great?"

"Yes, smart-a.s.s."

She lowered her head and looked at me from under her bangs. The street lights had come on and we were both bathed in their harsh light. The difference between her and me was that she was beautiful.

"I would have left. It would've been a fight to stay, that wouldn't have mattered to me. I mean, what's a home for someone like me? No roots, no nothing."

She nodded and tied another bag shut. I was pretty much finished so I went into the back porch and came out with a six-foot length of copper pipe a quarter-inch in diameter. I'd found it in a corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt when I'd been cleaning, and I'd soaked it in soapy water in the bathtub to remove some of the grit and verdigris. I rolled it back and forth between my hands and thought some more as Claire went on. "And if the fight was worth fighting for?"

I'd put a piece of string aside and now I tied a nut to the end and dropped it down until it emerged from the other end of the pipe. When I had both ends of string I tied a bit of fine cotton cloth to one end and slowly pulled it through. The cloth came out filthy and I put on a new one and tried again. After a couple more pulls, the cloth started to come out unstained and I dropped them into the garbage bag at my feet.

"Do you mind if I leave the crawl s.p.a.ce under the porch 'til tomorrow?"

"Go ahead. Don't change the subject, though."

I put the pipe back into the house and came back out.

"All right. If the fight was worthwhile, then I'd do whatever was necessary in order to win. Lie, cheat, steal."

"So. Do you want to keep living here?"

"Yes."

"Then you have to fight. But. You can't slide back to your past behavior, that would be self-defeating."

"Right. Returning to the past behavior would nullify the present course."

Claire stood up and dusted her hands. I knelt down and checked angles, and when I was satisfied, I picked up a shard of broken mirror I'd found and put it near the fence. From under the back porch I'd be able to see the mirror clearly and the door reflected within it.

"You are snotty and overly precise, but an essentially correct prissy b.i.t.c.h. So that means no violence."

She was grinning when she said that and so was I and she added, "Well, how about this for a rule? Don't kill anyone."

We hugged and traded dirt.

I slept until 3:45 in the a.m. and slid out of bed. Over the years I'd trained myself to wake up when necessary and the skill remained. When I was up, I took a few minutes to stretch before heading downstairs into the bas.e.m.e.nt. I'd chained the dog up in the front this time and left the back undefended. I hoped the note pa.s.sers would notice that.

The piece of pipe was where I'd left it, along with a shorter piece of heavy hardwood the size of a police flashlight, good-sized for cracking heads and breaking bones. I found both items in the dark and moved slowly and carefully. I'd tied a string around the pipe, and attached to that was a cork into which were stuffed nine darning needles, four inches long, with a tuft of cotton glued to the end and a second tuft glued midway down for stability.

Moving through the dark bas.e.m.e.nt was difficult but I'd strung a length of clothesline from the end of the stairs to the rear window, and by holding the rope in one hand, I could move almost soundlessly. At the window I listened but couldn't hear anything, so I opened the dirty pane of gla.s.s on freshly oiled hinges and listened again to nothing.

Wiggling through the window was easy and then I found myself in a little nest of dirt and broken wood, leaves, and shards of plastic wrap. The floor of the rear porch was six inches above me when I was folded in half, so I carefully cleared away some of the rubbish in front of my face and hunkered down to wait. There were spiderwebs everywhere but I focused my eyes on a narrow line of light coming in between the tops of the piles of trash and the bottom of the back porch.

Nothing moved so I carefully pushed the pipe into place and inserted the dart into the end with the tip of my thumb. When it was properly seated, I kissed the end and tasted the metal, which reminded me of fresh blood and electricity. I made a seal with my lips and inhaled through my nose until my lungs were full and then I held it. The pressure was uncomfortable so I only held it for a few moments and when I released it, I found myself panting.

Outside, nothing was happening. The dogs of the neighbors on both sides snuffled loudly and lay down with sighs audible over the sounds of distant traffic. The dogs were a familiar thing to me, every poor neighborhood has dogs, they're burglar alarms and companions all rolled into one. It's when you find a neighborhood with no dogs that you find real poverty, that's where you get the true ghetto. Since the neighbors on both sides had dogs and Renfield was in front, the note pa.s.sers could only come from the alley and across the yard in front of me.

About five yards away I could see the mirror I'd placed. It dimly reflected the rear of the house but I could not see myself in it at all. While I waited, I emptied my mind and relaxed all the muscles in my back and legs. Every few minutes I tightened everything, starting at my toes and moving up to my face and then I consciously loosened them again but I did not move.

A bird made a sleepy noise across the alley and I waited but it was not repeated. It was tempting to daydream or to think about food or s.e.x or any positive thing but in that way lay inattention, so I just waited in the dark and the dirt and listened. A long time later, just when the sky was starting to turn light with false dawn, a car pulled up. It was a low-slung, four-door sedan with bright whitewalls and it was driving without lights, including interior ones. I watched it wait with the engine running and I gathered my breath, but a few minutes later it drove off.

To distract myself I laid the possibilities out. If there were two of them, I'd deal with whoever had a weapon first and if neither had a weapon I'd deal with whoever was biggest. I'd put three darts into each of them to get their attention. A four-inch needle wouldn't kill, unless I aimed for the face and had unusual luck. Having said that, there were dozens of good targets on a human that would disable. Belly, groin, throat, those would all incapacitate a human quickly, and a dart to the back of the knee would drop anyone, if I could find the right angle.

From where I was, I would probably end up with a good shot, probably a series of good, silent, unexpected shots. I twisted my neck a little and stared some more into the darkness, stared until I started to see things that weren't there, so I throttled back and went on to more idle thoughts.

I like blow guns, they're instinctive, you don't aim them, you point, and, with very little practice, you can put ten absolutely silent darts into a target the size of a human face at ten yards, and I had been much better than that not all that long ago. There were other targets on a human as well as the face. Just below the elbow is a large concentration of useful muscles like the supinator longus and the extensor carpi radialis and especially the extensor caommunis digitorum, which moves the fingers. Any of those would do in a pinch. And if I had a shot at a leg, well, there was the foot. Halfway through it was a big muscle called the flexor accesorius. Injure that and walking becomes problematic.

Before I could hit anything, I needed a target.

Ten minutes later one presented itself. The sky was slowly turning pale and opalescent when I heard a door slowly creak open in the neighbor's house to the right of ours and a voice request that doggie sit and that doggie be good. Then there was silence inters.p.a.ced with grunting, and a large head suddenly appeared over the whitewashed fence. The head swiveled left and right and vanished, to be replaced by a large rump wearing dark blue polyester.

"s.h.i.t."

There was a pause and a short rip and then another longer one.

"s.h.i.t."

One of my neighbors, a big, wide-bodied woman with blue hair, crouched there in our yard and looked left and right. In her hand she clutched a piece of brown paper.

I put the pipe to my lips and started to inhale. She rushed forward at a c.u.mbersome trot towards the house and I could hear her panting and snorting. As she pa.s.sed by, I could see that she was barefoot and her toenails were painted with some kind of glitter paint and I had to exhale to avoid swallowing the dart with suppressed laughter.

The stairs creaked as she went up and she grunted some more while attaching the note to the door. A few seconds later, she trotted back across to the fence and hoisted herself up. For one beautiful and shining moment I had an incredible shot at the right hemisphere of her a.s.s but I was shaking too hard to take it.

When I'd recovered somewhat, I went back through the window and up to the kitchen to make coffee. I'd left the blowgun and the piece of wood downstairs and I had to turn on the radio to cover the sounds of my gasping laughter. That was how Claire found me.

"Sam? What are you doing?" Claire's voice was full of sleep. I was still laughing and I tried to give her a hug but she pulled away sharply.

"You're covered in dirt and cobwebs."

"I'll take a shower."

She followed me upstairs. "Um, what the h.e.l.l just happened?"

There was a big coc.o.o.n of some type in my hair and I combed it out with my fingers and looked at it curiously. "I found out our neighbor is one of the people leaving the notes."

She shook her head in disbelief and then she nodded and said calmly, "I'll kill them."

"No."

Dust and more cobwebs fell.

"We'll have them over for a barbecue."

"Huh? You're not making sense."

"Sure I am."

"Oh. When they come over, then I kill them, is that the plan?"

"No, that's not the plan."

"So I can't kill them?

"No, but we'll make them wish they were dead."

23.

I had to wait until 10:00 the next day for the hardware store on Main Street to open. While I was waiting, Claire made me do the exercises the doctor had recommended, and after that I had to take an extra shower just to get rid of the sweat. When I was done, I made myself a second breakfast under Claire's disapproving eye.

"You're going to get fat."

Fred was busy trying to build something with oversized wooden blocks in the living room, while Renfield was trying to knock them down. They both thought this was great fun so we let it go on, despite the increased decibel level of calls and howls.

"A second breakfast was common in the British Navy of the early eighteen hundreds."

"It's not the early eighteen hundreds."

"It could be. Maybe we're in some kind of time warp."

She ignored me. My eggs were done so I slid them onto the toast and ate standing up by the sink.

"What did you mean last night when you said we were going to invite our neighbors over for a barbecue?"

"Exactly what I said."

I finished the food and dumped the crumbs into the sink and washed them away.

"Can we afford a party?"

"Yes, if we keep the whole thing cheap."

She poured herself a cup of coffee. I was trying to obey the doctor and avoid caffeine so I just looked longingly at the black, hot happiness. She ignored me, made sure I knew she was ignoring me, and then agreed with herself. "Yes, we can afford it. Especially if the guests bring something."

I forgot the next question I was going to ask and asked a new one.

"Why would they bring something?"