"They outraged so much, they get tired bein outraged."

"You mean they're tired of being outraged at white people."

"I mean they tired bein outraged at the way they got to live, with the dopers breakin in they houses, the killins goin on outside they houses, and they ain nothin they can do 'bout none of it. They ain safe, they kids ain safe . . . yeah, and at white people too."

She put her hand on top of the dog's head, scratching it distractedly. When she stopped, Roux whimpered and tried getting her attention by nuzzling her leg. Finally the dog lay down on the gazebo floor with a sigh. Thea started to speak but stopped. Burgess could see she was having trouble saying something to him and he was pretty sure he knew what, but he wasn't going to help her. When she spoke, it came out in a rush. "Aren't you responsible, at least for some of that, maybe a lot of that?"

He smiled. "I'm the good guy," he said. "I sell the dope so I can fix up the houses and run the other pushers out the project."

"But that's what I mean." She was angry. "You sell drugs to the same people you say you're trying to help. That makes no sense."

He remained calm. "I don' sell dope to them people. I been keepin the dope out the Convent-tryin to, leastways. You want to hear the way it is: they ain no one could do that but the richest dope dealer 'round."

She opened her eyes wide. "That makes even less sense," she said and added, "I think."

"Ain no way none of it could make sense to someone like you. Ain no way to explain it 'cept that just the way it be."

"Someone like me? Let me see if I get it: you sell dope to get rid of dope. Is that it?" She was baiting him. He refused to take it, but he could feel his own anger building.

When she spoke again, she didn't sound quite so hostile. "What did you mean when you told your mother you wanted to see if you could get away with it?" His brows came together. Thea prodded him: "She asked you why you were worried about doing good."

He was thinking he owed her no explanation, but he also knew he wanted her to understand. He leaned closer toward her, spreading his hands, then clasping them again. He said, "I mean I got away all these years doin bad and I never thought I'd get away with it. I thought if I didn't get caught it was 'cause I was dead. I was all ready to die too. I always said I'd as soon die as let them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds get me." His heart was pounding hard, ferociously hard. "Now it's like I lived too long. Now I'm afraid to die. So I been thinkin it's time I better leave." He stopped, but he could see that her anger had dissipated as he talked, so he went on. "Trouble is, I don' really want to leave. Don' want to get caught, don' want to die, don' want to leave."

"Quit selling drugs," she said, her voice husky. "Then they can't catch you."

"Don' mean they can't kill you; don' mean they ain other people out there besides cops won' kill you. Don' mean jus 'cause you say you don' want to die no more you safe."

She frowned. "You always make me feel so nave, Burgess, like I don't understand anything that goes on beyond this house."

"That 'cause we talkin 'bout another kind of reality altogether. Ain no way you can understand black reality, ain possible. You white; you safe."

Her mouth, her whole face tightened. Her eyes, no longer tired and sunken, blazed at him. "When I'm in this house alone, I'm not safe; I'm terrified." Her voice was thick with barely controlled anger. "When Bobby leaves my house in the middle of the night, he's not safe; he's attacked. My parents weren't safe in their grocery store; they're dead." The dog, lying at her feet, had lifted its head. She spoke again, her voice rising more. "Who's to say that the two black men who killed them didn't take their money to buy drugs?" She stood up. The dog stood too. When Burgess stood, it barked.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It weren't right for me to say that." Her mouth trembled. She sat down again as if her legs had suddenly gone too weak for her to stand anymore. The dog backed off and Burgess sat down too. Thea closed her eyes, rubbing at her eyelids with her fingers so she wouldn't cry. He put his hand out and touched her knee, lightly, so maybe she didn't feel it through the jeans she was wearing. "I guess," he said and touched her so he knew she could feel, so she would look at him. She opened her eyes, wiping under each of them, then putting her hands, balled into fists, down close to where his fingers were. "I guess I don' have no idea 'bout your reality neither." She nodded, accepting his apology.

He moved back, taking his hand off her. He wished she would say something, but he thought maybe she didn't trust herself yet to speak and not cry. "Funny, ain it," he said, "you bein scared in this house and it bein the only place I'm not."

She smiled a shaky smile, and then it crumbled and she cried, silently, no sobbing. He wanted to move next to her, to comfort her somehow, but the dog blocked his way. He sat forward and put his hand out again. This time he took one of hers and held it. She just let him hold it at first, then she tightened her fingers around his.

Inside the house Delzora turned off the vacuum cleaner. She unplugged it and wound the cord and moved a chair back into place. She straightened a corner of the rug that had been flipped back by the suction. She turned to plump up the cushions on the sofa and through the window she saw the two of them sitting outside in the gazebo. She watched as Thea turned Burgess' arm over and pushed back his sleeve, looking at the scar on his arm where he'd caught himself on the top of a chain link fence, running to get away from somebody, she had no doubt, though he'd never told her.

It was funny how those two had always liked each other, even as little kids. Delzora had seen how sad Thea was when she realized Burgess wouldn't be back to play anymore on Sat.u.r.days. She never brought any playmates with her; she'd seemed alone and isolated even then, before her parents got killed. Delzora had a.s.sumed the parents shipped her off to the aunt to get her out of the way, and that she came alone because Althea wouldn't have wanted kids playing in her house full of fine breakables. But that was no reason to send Burgess away. He and the girl never played in the house, always out on the porch, or out in the part of the yard that was all overgrown like a small forest. Maybe that was the problem: Althea didn't want them underfoot but she didn't want them out of sight either. Just think how that straitlaced old lady's imagination could have run wild.

Delzora heard Bobby come in calling out for Thea. He sounded impatient, agitated. He came to the door. "Where's Thea?" The strain he'd been under was all over his face.

"They outside," Delzora told him. He glanced through the window then hurried out.

Delzora looked out at the gazebo again, a crowded scene with the three of them and the dog there. She watched them commiserate, huddled together over the dog, who kept trying to lick their faces as they kept pushing her down. She watched a few moments longer before she plumped the sofa cushions and went into the kitchen to finish up lunch.

Bobby went out to the gazebo with a feeling that he was at the cracking point. He needed to talk to Thea, to tell her about this latest affront, one more bad thing that had happened, to say he didn't know if he could take anymore, and knowing too that he shouldn't say that-because once you did, you usually got tested.

Maybe it was a Catholic thing, this wanting to unload, to confess-that's what it really was, he wanted to confess because he felt guilty. He didn't know why he should feel guilty; these things were happening to him, yet he could feel the burden of guilt sitting heavily within his chest, crushing, unmovable. The apartment house had burned down with a man inside, and he felt responsible. He'd gone home to get the insurance papers and discovered that sometime during the past week, while his mother had been in the hospital and he'd stayed at Thea's, the house had been broken into, everything dumped out in the middle of the floors for the thieves to sift through, leaving him with an unG.o.dly mess from which to discover what was missing. His mother's jewelry was gone and so was the gun Lyle had given him. He had caught himself thinking that neither Lyle nor Millie ever needed to know, his friend now joining his mother as one who must be deceived. But he had lost heart completely when he realized his father's hunting gun, the Model 12, the old reliable Winchester, was also gone. That's when the guilt had come down with its weight like eternity: somehow he'd let his father down again.

He had come to Thea's to be soothed, perhaps rea.s.sured, at least to be heard, and instead here he was listening to Burgess Monroe talking about living on borrowed time, how it was because of him that a woman was gunned down in the project last night, how he wanted to live long enough to see his baby born. All the gravest matters of life and death, and riding over him a guilt that made Bobby's look small and sorry. And both Burgess and Thea looking at him as if there were something he could do about any of it.

He sat back in the gazebo, drawing his hand down over his face, feeling tired to his bones. All he could think of was his father saying, "When in doubt, go fishing," and he closed his eyes and got a whiff of salt air, felt the sun beating down on him, the lethargic swing of his swivel chair as he reached for a beer, and he opened his eyes because a thought had come to him with that whiff of salt, a way that he might finally be able to move this guilt, get out from under it.

He said to Burgess, "My man, let's go fishing." It wasn't what they were expecting-two pairs of eyebrows arched in concert. "It's not meant as a solution, just some s.p.a.ce where you can gather your thoughts, figure out what to do. Nothing like a little lethargy to put things in their proper perspective."

Burgess thought on it only a few seconds before he agreed, and Bobby spent the afternoon getting gear together, going to the bait shop and the grocery store, getting plenty of beer and food, all the things he and his father used to like to take on fishing trips. He made a ritual of it, gathering all the necessities, stacking the rods, oiling the reels, checking the line, reorganizing the tackle box, packing the ice chests. He performed the ritual slowly and thoroughly, not the way he was used to doing it, throwing things together at the last minute, usually forgetting something, but in the deliberate way he'd seen his father do it countless times, so carefully, with such attention to neatness and compactness that it would get Bobby aggravated, especially since his father never did anything else with an eye to such detail. Like his will.

Bobby had gone fishing only once after his father died, and that's when he'd been so overcome with guilt he'd never gone again. He'd even thought about selling the boat since he wasn't using it and he needed the money. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. It wouldn't have lessened his guilt; it would have seemed like another offense against his father, another way of disappointing him.

So the ritual was a way of getting rid of the guilt, a way to restore his sense of well-being, a way to be at peace finally with his father.

Only one thing remained to do and he would be ready. Late that afternoon Bobby made another trip to the ill-fated apartment house to get the most important element for the ritual, the element needed for the final cleansing act. He filled a plain brown paper bag with ashes from the burned house, symbolic ashes from the place his father had once seen as a sort of salvation, to scatter over the blue water of the Gulf at daybreak. It was a ritual Bobby thought even his father, lapsed Catholic though he'd been, would appreciate.

Bobby and Burgess left at four o'clock the following morning. Bobby, full of purpose, was wide awake and energetic. As he drove, he tried to get Burgess to indulge in some repartee, but Burgess was still groggy from a long and difficult night with Janine. He had told her again why he thought it was best that he leave, and she told him again why it was best that she didn't. They had the same conversation over and over, using different words, coming at it from different angles, until Burgess, frustrated and angry, stormed out, telling her he'd be back for his belongings in a day or two.

The car sped down the deserted highway in the dark, the clumpy low marshland brush like apparitions of danger, lurking strangers behind every bush in Burgess' peripheral vision, and all at once the drive took on that feeling of stealing away in the night, moving under cover of darkness, off and running before sunup. It made him tired, more tired than he already was, too tired to think. He hunkered down on the car seat, taking his eyes off the road, focusing instead on the softly lit dashboard, Bobby's monologue droning just beyond comprehension. After a while he closed his eyes, and then he couldn't hear Bobby anymore, only Janine saying, "I'm not gon spend my life runnin." And he knew that Janine saw more clearly than he did that if he wasn't running from place to place, then he was running in place, no good way to spend a life. Always trying to stave off the inevitable.

He sat up straight. Bobby was telling a long fish story from his childhood about his father baiting Bobby's hook with the boiled eggs they'd brought for lunch. "He promised me I'd catch a chicken-fish. But when he tried to put a whole egg on the hook . . ."

Burgess cut into Bobby's punchline. "I can't go fishin," he said.

"What?"

"I can't go fishin. I gotta go back."

"Why?" Bobby asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothin's wrong. I just figured somethin out." Burgess looked directly at Bobby and said it again. "I gotta go back."

"But we're halfway there. More than halfway."

Burgess said, "What I'm tryin to tell you, man, I don't need to go fishin anymore, I need to go back."

Bobby turned back, annoyed with Burgess for spoiling his chance to scatter the ashes right at daybreak, but he decided he would take Burgess to the Convent and go on out to the Gulf without him. Without Burgess, though, it somehow wouldn't be the same, although Bobby wasn't sure why. Was it because he needed a witness to his act, that without a witness the act wouldn't be as meaningful, that it wouldn't be legitimate, that it would have no memorable substance, something like the sound of one hand clapping?

When he dropped Burgess off at the Convent, he had a strong feeling that it was the last time he would see the man, that Burgess thought so too, but neither of them said good-bye as if it were. There was only a brief moment of awkwardness after they shook hands, a moment of lingering and nothing more to say.

Bobby drove along Convent Street in the direction of the Interstate, his full intention to carry through his plan. He took the bag of ashes from the back seat and put it on the floor up front. He kept glancing at the bag and, maybe because of the change in plan, the delay, all the driving, he wasn't so sure anymore that scattering a bag full of ashes and pieces of charred wood from a house that for his father had become a source of aggravation, even humiliation, rather than salvation, and, worse, a place that had become a crematory for another man, was going to do a thing for his guilt. And all that business about lethargy putting things in proper perspective. What a lot of c.r.a.p. Lethargy was a way of putting things off, and guilt couldn't be put off, couldn't be tossed to the wind, swallowed by blue water. What it could do, though, was confine his father forever to a place of unhappy thoughts, so that Bobby tried not to think about him, a place his father wouldn't have wanted to be any more than he had wanted to be in that tomb.

At the edge of the Convent, behind a convenience store, Bobby spotted a dumpster. He pulled the car to the curb and sat there with the engine idling. After a few moments he picked up the bag of ashes and got out of the car. He walked over to the dumpster and threw the bag into it. When he turned away to go back to the car, though he'd had no such expectations-maybe that was the trick to it-he felt much better.

He drove to Thea's, slipped quietly into the house, then into her bed. Here the ritual was not about a preoccupation with the past. It was about making a future.

28.

The shooting of Sherree divided the city in a way that only the very astute or the very cynical could have foreseen.

Blacks were outraged and they stayed outraged for a long time-Burgess had been wrong about that. They wanted indictments against all the policemen involved and they wanted them fired from the police department.

The chief of police defended his officers' actions. He said they went into Sherree Morganza's that night with search and arrest warrants based on information and observation. The residents of the Convent told the media how the cops got their information. They told how they were rousted from their apartments, how they were lined up and marched like POWs. They told of racial slurs, rubber saps, and plastic bags. They cried that their civil rights had been violated, and this time the media jumped on it.

The black mayor of the city saw his political standing begin to crumble: because half of New Orleans' population was black, his reelection was in jeopardy. Someone was going to be sacrificed and he didn't intend to be that person. Within days, the white chief of police had handed in his resignation. Once this convenient scapegoat was dispatched, official interest in the case rapidly waned. The investigation dragged on for months, and during that time the names of the officers involved were not made public nor were the men fired. The mayor said that he couldn't dismiss a police officer summarily; each had a right to his hearing. The status of the officers was not disclosed during the investigation. Meanwhile, a federal probe into civil rights violations began.

And so the city became divided. The outrage in the black community was such that the whites became more afraid. They feared race riots; they called for more police protection. The blacks feared more police brutality, more murders; they called for protection against the police.

The atmosphere in the Hindermann household was thick with unrelieved tension. It crowded the house, making it seem smaller, leaving nowhere to go to escape. It clung to the Hindermanns themselves, tenacious, moving with them from room to room, spoiling the mood in each carefully created sanctuary of muted colors and soft, unfocused lighting.

It showed on Sandy's face, in her tired, puffy eyes, the downward turn of her mouth, two vertical lines between her brows that she smoothed away with the tip of a finger now and again but that returned the moment she forgot them. It showed in a blemish on her cheek, a twist of unruly hair, in the way her clothes were wrinkled, uncomfortable on her body swathed in all that tension.

It was showing on the children too. They were crankier than usual, harder to handle. One of their babysitters had quit, although Sandy didn't think that had anything to do with the children. The woman had quit without notice, simply failed to show up the day after the incident in the project.

It was a struggle, but she got the children to bed and went down to where Lyle was sitting in his big armchair in front of the TV set. He'd been sitting there all evening, unmoving, unresponsive, his head bent down, looking at the screen from under the jut of his eyebrows and the deeply imprinted scowl on his forehead.

Sandy blew at the lock of unruly hair as she let herself fall onto the sofa. She was worn out and it was only eight o'clock. "What's on?" she asked Lyle but he didn't answer. She raised her voice. "Lyle, I said, what's on?"

He turned toward her. "What?" But he didn't wait for her to repeat the question. "I don't know, wasn't really paying attention."

"You've been staring at the TV for over two hours," she said and she could hear the shrill edging into her voice. He'd been staring at the TV ever since the evening news, as if his fate would be revealed to him there. But there was no point in getting irritated with him; it would only make matters worse. Her nerves were already stretched to snapping and the ordeal was far from being over.

This was the worst, the waiting. And the wondering. What was going to happen to Lyle, to her, their family?

Very few of their friends knew of Lyle's involvement in the Convent killing, and Sandy wondered what the ones who did know were thinking. She got the impression that Bobby wished Lyle hadn't told him. Thea said all the right things; it was what she didn't say that Sandy wondered about. She dreaded the time that Lyle's name would be released, when everyone would know.

She had lost him again. He'd turned to the TV screen, drawn back into its low drone, a way to escape. He was so far removed from her now. She looked at his profile and remembered how he'd been ten years ago, even five years ago. He'd been ambitious, he'd been sociable, a social figure too, belonging to the best men's club, two of the oldest Carnival organizations, the yacht club, the country club. And then something happened that changed Lyle: their neighbor across the street and her young daughter were held at sawed-off-shotgun point. The daughter had been out front playing and went inside when it started getting dark, but she didn't close the front door behind her. A man followed her inside and grabbed her by the hair. Dragging her into the kitchen, he pushed her mother away from the stove with his gun. He made them lie face down on the floor, shoving the gun into the backs of their necks, then loading their possessions into their car, forcing the woman to drive him into the Convent, threatening to kill them both if they so much as turned around and looked at him.

It had done something to Lyle, that such a thing could happen right across the street from him, that next time it could be his wife and child, that next time they might be left dead on the floor and the killer drive himself into the Convent.

That had been the beginning of Lyle's imagination turning morbid. That had been when he'd started driving around with the neighborhood patrol until he decided that wasn't doing enough and became a reserve policeman. That was when he stopped being a social figure, no time left for clubs and Carnival organizations, and became a loner. That was when she had lost him.

"Lyle," she said, and she thought she might cry she felt so lonely, "come sit over here with me, sweetheart."

He turned, scowling at her, and she thought he was going to bite her head off, the way he'd been doing lately, if she said even the simplest thing. But he got up from the arm chair and moved next to her on the sofa. She looked hard into his eyes. She wanted to say to him, "Come back, come back," to say it without any words, to say it with her eyes, to make him come back with the force of her will. She held him like that until she became exhausted looking at his tired, worried eyes. She put her head on his shoulder and he slid down on the arm of the sofa, half sitting, half lying, her head on his chest now, the strong steady beat of his heart in her ear, drowning out the drone from the TV. He put his arm around her, and he pushed back the lock of unruly hair, smoothing it into the rest of her hair, smoothing it over and over around her ear, his fingers following the curve of her skull beneath the soft thick hair. Her nerve-wired body began to relax as she lay heavily on him. Her eyes closed. There was such comfort in the way they were lying together, in the way they fit, such familiarity about this particular position. But for several moments Sandy was at a loss; she couldn't remember why it was so familiar to her, and then it came rushing over her like the warm humid breeze coming off the lake and through the windows of Lyle's father's Cadillac when they used to go park out at the Point until it was time to go home. Sandy would lie up against Lyle just like this, he half sitting, half reclining, his back against the door, his fingers in her hair.

She laughed, her body rising slightly then sinking into him again.

"Hm?" It was a low rumble against her ear.

She said, "I was just thinking about how we used to park at the Point. We used to lie together like this in the front seat of your daddy's car." He laughed too, a short one-syllable grunt, and she could remember bouncing just like that against him, especially when Bobby and Thea were with them, Bobby cracking jokes, hardly ever shutting up because Thea wouldn't let him do much except kiss her right before it was time for them to start heading home.

She went on, continuing her thoughts out loud. "And then you would rev up the Caddy and peel out and go as fast as you could down Breakwater Drive with Bobby hanging out of the window yelling, 'Hi ho silver, away!'"

His fingers slowed as they curved around her ear, and she wondered if he was remembering the way he used to slow the Cadillac at the curve in Breakwater because sometimes on the other side of the curve, next to the picnic pavilion, police cars would park and wait. Better not to think about police tonight.

She tipped her head up slightly. "You should have seen the Cadillac I saw at Thea's the other day," and she described it to him and described Dexter, the black-leather-clad chauffeur holding the door for Delzora. "Thea says Delzora's son sends it for her every day but he never uses it himself. He drives a beat-up old pickup truck. Isn't that crazy?"

His fingers stopped. She tipped her head up farther, to try to see his face. He pushed her shoulders and she sat up.

"What are you saying?" he demanded, his hands still on her, holding her shoulders as if to break her arms off, that policeman's look on his face, "Delzora's son owns that Cadillac?"

Sandy was confused by the sudden change in him, his alertness, by the way he'd put that question to her, as if she'd said something wrong, accusing her. She tensed defensively. "That's what Thea said," she told him, accusing Thea.

He got up. He said no more. He explained nothing. He punched the b.u.t.ton on the TV and turned it off. He left the room and before she realized what he was doing, he left the house.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Sandy said out loud, poised on the edge of the sofa. She started to get up but couldn't see the point. She sat back with a long sigh of exasperation and helplessness and sorrow. She was too angry to cry, too sad to be very angry. It was no good; he was gone, not just for now, for tonight, but gone from her for good. There was no going back, no matter what happened, no matter if everything turned out all right. Because no matter what happened, no matter how you looked at it, this time Lyle had gone too far.

Sandy could not sit still any longer. She got up and wandered about the house, going from room to room, looking at all the details, all the things she had spent so much time thinking about and picking out and putting all together. The house was the one thing in her life that remained unchanged, and she loved it, never tiring of looking at it and being in it. She walked around, trying to recapture her feeling of calm again, seeking comfort from the house. She went outside through the French doors in the dining room into the chill of the night. She walked to the edge of the swimming pool and listened to the water gurgling out of the stone frog's mouth into the three-tiered lily pad fountain set into the foliage at the other end of the pool. She loved hearing the sound of the water and looking at the variety of plant life, the drama of the hidden lights around the black pool. She loved it and never got tired of it because it contained her life, the life she had been so pleased with, but the life that was changed forever now. She stared into the black water, watching her reflection undulate on its calm but ceaselessly moving surface. The restlessness of her reflection began to unnerve her. She wanted it to be still, as if then life would be able to go on the same as always, but it continued to fold upon itself, break up, tear away at the edges until she turned from the pool, unable to look at it any more.

She looked up. Through the gla.s.s doors she looked into the house, its beauty and serenity belying the ugliness and anxiety that existed there, obscured by the false image of quality and richness. She felt betrayed by the deception and by the separation she was beginning to sense, as if those doors had closed and she was to be left outside forever, cursed to gaze longingly at what she wanted but could not have.

29.

When Dexter woke up it was dark. He was disoriented for a few moments because when he'd gone to sleep the sun had been streaming in through the bedroom window, making a bright warm patch of light over his legs. The warmth had helped lull him to sleep. He had no idea how long he'd been out or if it was still the same day on which he'd gone to sleep. He twisted around to look at the clock. He'd been asleep for more than seven hours, the only sleep he'd had in two days.

He stretched out his arm to Sherree's side of the bed. Even though she was gone, he could not yet bring himself to lie there, to take up the whole bed. He lay where he always lay, close to the edge of the bed, because Sherree had not liked to be touched while she was sleeping. To sleep in his arms, she had said, made her feel trapped.

Dexter moved his hand up and down on the sheet, rubbing the place where she had slept. Things she'd said kept playing in his mind, things that had mostly annoyed him when she was alive, and now, unaccountably, made him feel the stunning size of his loss. She was gone; she would never lie next to him again. Before this he had been in a state of disbelief: now he believed it with a nausea at the pit of his stomach that burned upward, a rising bile full of helplessness and anger.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, his head in his hands, the heels of his palms kneading the skin on his forehead. The bile retreated and he got up, finding his clothes where he'd laid them out on the floor next to the bed, and he began to dress in the dark. The leather creaked and groaned and seemed to protest its use. The sound of the big silver zipper on the jacket was more like a rip than a closing.

When Dexter finished dressing he left the room and walked through the dark hallway, past the bathroom and into the kitchen, where he finally turned on a light. He washed his face and rinsed his mouth at the kitchen sink. He still couldn't bear to go into the bathroom though some of the neighborhood women had come and cleaned it up for him. He had even peed into an old coffee can. He hadn't gone back there during the day and he never turned on any lights in that part of the apartment because he couldn't stand to see the bullet holes in the walls or the splintered door-jambs. He had only ventured into the bedroom-after two days-when he realized he would never be able to get any sleep on the old uncomfortable sofa in the living room.

Dexter removed the chair he'd stuck under the doork.n.o.b to keep the broken front door shut, and left the apartment. He didn't care if anyone came into the place while he was gone, though he knew no one would unless it was the police. As for coming back, he didn't plan to until past daybreak, when he could see if anyone was in there with a gun turned on him.

He got into the Cadillac and drove over to the Solar Club. He thought he'd have a couple of drinks there then get some of the guys to go downtown with him to the strip joint where Sherree used to work. Dexter could not contain his grief any longer: he needed to share it, to spread it around at places where Sherree had been known.

He parked the Cadillac right outside the front door of the Solar Club. It was an illegal s.p.a.ce, too close to a fire hydrant, but he didn't care, he wouldn't be there long.

There weren't many people on the street. The temperature was dropping again, the air so cold and still it was as if everything was frozen in place. The bare skin under his jacket tightened with goose b.u.mps. He hurried into the close, fetid warmth of the Solar Club. The air in here was blue with smoke, dense with the sound of a blues band playing in a corner of the big room.

The usual large Friday night crowd was there. He began to move through the crush of bodies, his own body warming from the friction of getting past elbows and shoulders, bellies and backsides. Someone called out his name and everyone realized he was there. He became the center of the crush. Over the music he heard several voices saying, "Drinks on me, Dexter." There were back claps and embraces and sounds of sympathy: waves of brotherly love carried him toward the bar. He'd done right to get himself out; his burden already seemed lighter.

He was floating on the warmth and the voices and the music, his body buoyed, his head in the smoke, his feet hardly touching the floor. All around the room colored Christmas-tree lights winked off and on and their colors thickened the atmosphere. He felt a rush of heat up his neck and he was looking forward to some ice-cold beer sliding down his throat. The heat reached his jawbone and exploded in his head with a loud whoosh that seemed to turn the club into a vacuum. The band stopped playing and there was a brief moment of almost dead silence before the crowd surged, a panic of elbows in ribs and feet on feet, pushing and shoving and trying to get out of the room. Dexter found his progress toward the bar reversed. He was now being carried back to the front door. Above the yells and groans and hoa.r.s.e cries he could hear the crackling and spitting and wind of fire. He tried to run and would have landed on the floor had there been any room to fall. He fell up against the person in front of him, whose head jerked back and caught Dexter in the mouth. The sweetly bitter taste of blood covered his tongue.