He kissed her cool lips and pushed back her hair.

"I need this, this," he said.

"Make no mistake," said Stephanie. "So do I."

Bernie Walters cracked open a can of Bud and took it downstairs to the rec room of his three-bedroom house in Wheaton, off Randolph Road. He had a seat in a leather recliner and hit the remote, which he had Velcroed to the chair.

When Vance was a teenager he was always misplacing the television's remote. After carrying mailbags all day through Bethesda's business district, Walters would come home with no more ambition than to put his feet up and watch a little tube. The remote always seemed to be missing when he got downstairs, and that drove him nuts.

"What's the big deal with the remote, Dad?"

"I been on my dogs all day. The big deal is, once I get settled in my chair at night, I don't want to get back up."

Both Vance and Bernie got tired of that exchange. Bernie rigged up a kind of sheath for the remote and Velcroed it to the right arm of the chair.

Vance's friends got a big charge out of it.Vance's dad, the Vietnam vet and mail carrier - with that combo, he had to be some kind of wack job, right? - had gone and rigged a permanent remote control to his chair. Remote on the right arm, ashtray on the left. He even heard one of those friends call the recliner "the captain's chair," then hum a few bars of the Star Trek Star Trek theme when he thought Walters wasn't listening. theme when he thought Walters wasn't listening.

Yeah, Vance's friends got a big laugh out of Bernie Walters. The captain's chair, the ten-point buck's head mounted on the wall of the rec room, the gla.s.s-doored gun case with the beautiful oiled shotguns aligned in a row, the b.u.mper sticker on his truck that read, "Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace," the prayers and psalms framed and hung throughout the house. It was okay by Walters for those kids to think whatever they wanted. And for the members of the group as well. He knew it made them uncomfortable to hear him talk about the Lord at the meetings. Well, they had their own way of getting through this and he had his. Because they had become his closest friends, he felt he owed it to them to talk about G.o.d's plan. He knew that everything happened for a reason, even the bad.

As for Vance, he had never seemed to be embarra.s.sed by his old man. Bernie had heard Vance describe him one time as a "blue-collar eccentric."Whatever it meant, it didn't sound bad, not the way Vance said it; by the tone of his voice, you'd almost get the impression that Vance was proud.

Vance's friends stopped coming around when his mother, Walters's wife, Lynne, got the cancer in both of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She'd found the lumps fairly early, but fear had made her wait too long to get herself checked. After the diagnosis she opted for the radical mastectomy, but it couldn't save her and she went six months later, heavily doped on morphine, at home in their marriage bed.

Bernie Walters's father died that same year, in a nursing home on East West Highway.

So it ended up just Bernie and Vance. By then Vance had entered Montgomery College, hoping to do a couple of years on the Takoma Park campus before heading for New York to attend one of the design schools in the city. At home he spent most of his time in his room, listening to CDs, studying, and talking on the phone with his friends. He worked three or four shifts a week waitering at the pizza parlor on Wisconsin, saving for his move to New York.

When Bernie wasn't working, he liked to hang out in the rec room or the laundry room, where he had a workbench set up. During warm-weather months he would drive his pickup down to Southern Maryland and spend each weekend on his property, hunting, casting for perch and catfish, walking the woods, and drinking beer.

Walters. .h.i.t the up-channel b.u.t.ton on the remote and landed on a late-night talk show. The host with the gap-toothed grin said something, then stared unsmiling into the camera as the audience laughed. Walters shook a cigarette out of his pack and gave it a light.

Those last couple of years Vance and Bernie had pretty much led separate lives. Now he wished they'd talked more - he wished he'd said those things to Vance that he'd never said.

Vance talked to him him now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance's voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn't stop it. He knew it was Vance's spirit that was talking to him in his dreams. He knew. now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance's voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn't stop it. He knew it was Vance's spirit that was talking to him in his dreams. He knew.

He would would tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he'd tell him when they were reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in the hands of the Lord. tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he'd tell him when they were reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in the hands of the Lord.

Stephanie Maroulis draped an arm over the shoulder of Dimitri Karras and laid the flat of her palm on his chest. She'd go to sleep now, drawing on the warmth of his body, spooned against him in the bed.

Over the gray-haired head of Karras she could see the framed photograph of Steve set on the nightstand beside the bed. Steve was at the Preakness with his oldest friends grouped around, all of them on an afternoon beer drunk, happy, high in the sun and secure in the knowledge that it could not end. In the photo, Stephanie, smiling and smashed as the rest of them, stood behind Steve, her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing the base of his thick neck.

The photograph had been on the nightstand for seven years. It was Steve's favorite snapshot of the two of them and his friends, and as long as she lived in this place, the one-bedroom condo they'd bought soon after they were married, she'd leave the picture where it had always been. Leaving it there after Steve's death was an act of neither superst.i.tion nor sentiment. The photograph belonged belonged there. She saw no reason to move it now. there. She saw no reason to move it now.

"Doesn't it make you sad?" asked Karras the week before. "I mean, to have to look at it every night before you go to sleep."

"It makes me happy to know that Steve and I had one day as good as that one. Most people never even get that."

"I couldn't," said Karras, his voice trailing off, and she'd hugged him then, the way she was hugging him now.

She stroked his chest. Karras had a decent build for a man in his late forties. Not like Steve, who'd always been on the heavy side. She used to call Steve "the Bear," because he felt as big as one, sleeping next to her. She liked to be with a man who had some weight on him. Karras had a handsome face, a straight back, and a flat stomach. Even at his age, he was the kind women noticed, and wondered about, on the street. But Karras was always sad. He didn't have Steve's smile, the kind that said he appreciated the moment and the people he was sharing it with. No, Karras wasn't Steve. But she was getting used to having him around.

Stephanie closed her eyes.

She enjoyed going to bed with Karras after the meetings and sleeping with him once a week. She needed the companionship, and she needed the s.e.x. Their being together, it helped Dimitri, if only for the night, and she knew it helped her.

If she could have talked to Steve right then, she'd explain their relationship to him like that. And she believed he'd be happy for her, pleased that she was slowly finding her way out of the dark places she'd visited after his death.

She fell to sleep, knowing Steve would understand.

Thomas Wilson had a slow drink at the Hummingbird on Georgia Avenue and got into his Dodge Intrepid, parked out front. He turned the ignition, hit the preset b.u.t.ton, brought up WHUR. Quiet Storm: Every city in the country with a sizable black population had the format now, but the original had been created on HUR. And here was Gladys Knight, singing "Where Peaceful Waters Flow." You couldn't get much more beautiful than that.

Wilson headed over to Underwood, where he lived alone in the small brick he'd grown up in. Momma had died suddenly when he was away, back in the '80s. His uncle Lindo, who owned the hauling business, claimed it was from a broken heart.

None of the women in the bar had looked at him tonight. Seemed they never did. He wasn't yet forty, but he looked ten years older, and he felt far away from what was hip and new. He favored the music that he had come up with. He dressed like 1989. He still wore his hair in that same tired fade.

The truth was, he didn't have the spirit to mack the women anymore. With Bernie, it was easy to claim all that bulls.h.i.t about how he, Wilson, "operated" up around the way, loved to "play in the nappy dugout" and every other tired thing you could think of. Boasting aside, after Charles had been killed there wasn't much fun in it anymore for real. He shared with many men the secret opinion that half the fun in hitting p.u.s.s.y was in talking about it afterward with your boys. Charles was his main boy going back forever. So it wasn't no surprise that Wilson's urge to slay the freaks had died with Charles.

The glow from the dash threw greenish light on the gray leather seats of the immaculate car. He cleaned the Dodge and had it detailed regularly at the brushless place near the Maryland line.

It was a beautiful car. He was always unhappy.

The meetings were good. The meetings helped. As the session day neared he looked forward to seeing these people who had become his friends. He liked hearing their stories, and going back and forth with Karras, and the idea that his personality - always up and funny in front of them - drove the group toward some kind of better place. That his being there with them made a positive difference in their ruined lives.

But after the sessions, he couldn't help feeling down. For various reasons, real or imagined, they all shared feelings of guilt. Wilson took solace in the belief that G.o.d and Father Time would take care of the rest of them. But he knew he'd never be healed himself. No, this sickness of his would never go away.

Dimitri Karras stared straight ahead at the items on the night-stand: the photograph of Steve and Stephanie, an old Panasonic clock radio, his Swiss Army watch, a small stack of pocket change, Stephanie's hoop earrings. The red LED numerals changed to 2:31 on the clock. He'd been lying there, not at all tired, for the last two hours. Stephanie had fallen asleep long ago, the sound of her deep breathing filling the room. There was that other sound, too, always there at night in Karras's head.

When Karras was a boy, he was playing by himself one summer day in the alley behind his mother's house on Davenport. It was a still, hot day, quiet but for the drone of Mr. Scordato's window unit next door and the occasional call of cicadas pa.s.sing through the trees.

Karras had been bouncing a basketball in the alley, distracted all afternoon by a vaguely putrid smell, the source of which he could not find. And then he saw the robin, lying beneath the apple tree that grew in the small square of backyard by the alley's edge. He found a small fallen branch, stripped it of its leaves, and went to the bird.

The smell got stronger as he approached. It was the awful smell of spoiled things, and he choked down a gag. As he reached the fallen bird and got down on his haunches, he could hear a sound, like the faraway crunch of soldiers marching on gravel, rhythmic, continuous, relentless. He leaned forward, slid the stick under the robin, and turned it on its side. Hundreds of writhing maggots were devouring the decaying bird. The sound he had heard was the sound of their feast.

Karras opened his eyes. For the past two and a half years, he had been paralyzed and haunted by grief. Staring at the photograph of a smiling Steve Maroulis, Karras wondered if Stephanie was haunted, too. If she ever pictured Steve in his coffin the way he pictured his son, lying in the dark beneath the ground in that small wooden box.

At night, when he could not sleep, Karras would see Jimmy in his coffin, rotted away and covered in maggots. And Karras would hear that steady marching sound coming from every corner of the room. He could shake the pictures from his head but not the sound. Never the sound.

"G.o.d, stop," whispered Karras, blinking tears from his eyes. It was strange, hearing his own voice speak those words in a pleading way. Invoking the name of G.o.d, this was a ridiculous thing for him to do, nothing more than a reaction, really, a habit unbroken from a churchgoing youth. Because he didn't believe in G.o.d, any kind of G.o.d, anymore.

Bernie Walters claimed that to live without G.o.d was to live without hope. And why, said Bernie, would anyone want to live in a world without hope?

Well, G.o.d was Bernie's crutch, not his. Karras had his own reason for staying alive. Since Jimmy's death, the feeling had never weakened. In fact, it grew stronger every day.

EIGHT.

NICK STEFANOS CAUGHT an uptown Red Line car and picked up his Dodge in Takoma Park. He slipped Lungfish's an uptown Red Line car and picked up his Dodge in Takoma Park. He slipped Lungfish's Pa.s.s and Stow Pa.s.s and Stow into the tape deck and headed back south via North Capitol. The band locked into a killer groove on "Terminal Crush" as Stefanos drove the Coronet 500 alongside the black iron fence of Rock Creek Cemetery. into the tape deck and headed back south via North Capitol. The band locked into a killer groove on "Terminal Crush" as Stefanos drove the Coronet 500 alongside the black iron fence of Rock Creek Cemetery.

At a stoplight just below Florida Avenue, he saw a woman pull a butcher's knife from the trunk of her parked car and wave it wildly at a laughing man. A dozen ugly people in varying stages of decay stood outside a corner liquor store, huffing smokes and drinking from brown paper bags. Behind them, taped to the store windows, colorful posters depicted beautiful black models promoting malt liquor and menthol cigarettes. A guy with matted dreads walked toward Stefanos's driver's-side window, one hand slipped into a bulged jacket pocket. Stefanos locked his door.

The Capitol loomed dead ahead, crowning the street. On this particular winter day, the press and public were fixated on the alleged extramarital affairs of the sitting president and giving odds on his possible impeachment. It was the media event of the decade, the subject of sarcastic lunch conversations all across town. But few talked about the real crime of this city, not anymore: American children were undernourished, criminally undereducated, and living in a viper's nest of drugs, violence, and despair within a mile of the Capitol dome. It should have been a national disgrace. But hunger and poverty had never been tabloid s.e.xy. Beyond the occasional obligatory lip service, the truth was that no one in a position of power cared.

The man with the matted hair tapped on Stefanos's window just as the light turned green. Stefanos gave the Dodge gas.

Nick Stefanos drove into Southeast and found a s.p.a.ce on 8th Street. He walked toward the marine barracks, pa.s.sing a real estate office, a women's bar named Athena's, an alley, and an athletic-shoe store fronted by a riot gate. He came to the Spot, a windowless, low-slung cinder-block structure in the middle of the strip. He pushed on the scarred green door and walked inside.

Hanging conical lamps and the light from a blue neon Schlitz logo colored the room. Stefanos hung his leather on a coat tree by the door and stepped off the landing into the bar area.

Ramon, the long-time busboy, was coming up from the cellar with two cases of beer cradled in his arms. Wisps of reefer smoke swirled behind him, the smell of it deep in his clothing. He was a little leering guy who wore a red bandanna on his head and scarred suede cowboy boots on his size-seven feet. Ramon stayed high throughout his shifts.

"Hey, amigo," said Stefanos, flicking Ramon's ear as he motored by.

"Ow. Chit, man."

"Did that hurt?"

"Maricon," said Ramon, showing capped teeth with his smile. "You lucky I got my hands full."

"Yeah, sure. Better get those Buds in the cooler, though. Before Before you kick my a.s.s, I mean." you kick my a.s.s, I mean."

"I already got it all done. This beer is the last of it. The mixers, the liquor, the bev naps... everything's all set up."

"Thanks. I'll get you later."

Stefanos went toward the kitchen, pa.s.sing the reach-through at the side of the bar. He could hear the radio, set on WPGC and playing the new Puff Daddy single, and the raised voices of Phil, James, and Darnell. Maria would be in there, too, making the salad special, quietly working on the presentation of the plates. Stefanos walked in under the bright fluorescents, stepping onto the thick rubber mats that covered the tile floor.

It was a small kitchen to begin with, way too small for what it had become. A stainless-steel prep table stood at the entrance, topped by dual steel shelves. The top shelf was lipped; live tickets were fitted into the lip in the order in which they came in. Beyond the prep table were two workstations, each capped by a steel refrigerator. The dishwashing station was located along the back wall of the room. On the shelf over the grill sat an Amana commercial microwave with a door that never closed on the first attempt. Over the sandwich bar sat the most important and most fought over component of any restaurant kitchen: the house boom box. Beside it, a Rudy Ray Moore poster, now gray with grease, had been taped to the wall.

Maria Juarez worked the cold end of the menu and James Posten, the grill man, worked hots. Their stations were on opposite walls, so that Maria and James's backs were to each other while they worked lunch.

Darnell, the bar's career dishwasher, had previously handled the lunch business himself, preparing the one daily special and placing orders on the reach-through, from which the day tender or the waitress would retrieve and serve them. In those couple of hours, Ramon would bus the trays in and wash dishes when he was able. But when the owner of the place, a smallish bespectacled man named Phil Saylor, had decided to expand the menu, he had hired Maria and James and made Darnell the expediter - the person who called out the orders, garnished the plates, and moved the lunches onto the reach-through. Since Ramon would be occupied out in the dining room with the extra table turnover, Phil had suggested they hire a new dishwasher, but Darnell, who had been washing dishes at the Spot since serving out an armed-robbery sentence at Lorton years earlier, wouldn't hear of it. He took a small raise and told Phil he'd get to the dishes after the lunch rush was through. The popularity of the new menu had surprised everyone, though - it was previously a.s.sumed that the Spot's regulars would not care to consume any substance that required chewing - and the three-hat arrangement with Darnell wasn't exactly working out as planned. Since the new system had been put in place, there was often high confusion in the kitchen during the rush, and the dining room had run out of plates and silver more than once.

"A little late, aren't you?" said Phil Saylor with halfhearted force, noticing Stefanos by the door. It was about as tough as the mellow Saylor got with his employees.

"I had an appointment," said Stefanos, his eyes staying on Saylor's, letting him know with his overly serious look that the appointment had to do with his "other" life. Saylor was an ex-cop, which explained the high percentage of plainclothesmen and uniforms among the Spot's clientele. Phil was retired, but the profession had never entirely left his blood. Invoking his investigative gigs was a cheap way for Stefanos to reach Saylor, but it worked.

"Try to make it on time," mumbled Saylor.

"I will."

"Nick," said James Posten, who sported a fox-head fur stole draped over his uniform shirt. "How you doin', man?"

James wore eye shadow and carried a walking stick with an amber stone glued in its head. He went six-four, two eighty, and most of it was hard.

"James."

"Ni," said Maria Juarez. Her reddish lipstick clashed with the rinse in her shoulder-length hair. She was on the short and curvy side, with the worn, aging-before-her-time look of many working-cla.s.s immigrant women across the city. When she smiled her lovely smile, the hard life and age lines on her face seemed to fall away.

"Hey, baby."

"Check this out," she said, pulling a locket away from her chest and opening it up for Stefanos to see. He went to her, looked at the photograph of her gorgeous five-year-old daughter, Rosita, cut to fit the locket's oval shape.

"She's beautiful," said Stefanos, noticing the patch of discol-oration on Maria's temple.

"She doing good in school," said Maria. "The teacher say she smart."

"How could she not be," said Stefanos, "with a mother like you?"

"Ah, Ni!" she said, making a wave of her hand, then wiping her hands dry on her ap.r.o.n as she returned, blushing, to her salads.

Darnell removed his leather kufi and wiped sweat from his forehead. The knife scar running across his neck was pink against his deep brown skin. "You got business in here, Nick? 'Cause we're trying to prepare for lunch."

"Just, you know, stopped in to brighten everyone's day."

"Yeah, well we gotta get this place set up, man."

"What're the specials?"

"Chef's salad," said Maria.

"Got a nice grilled chicken breast today," said James, raising his spatula in the air, affecting the manner of a school-taught chef. "Marinated it overnight in teriyaki, some herbs and s.h.i.t. I'm not lyin', man, that bird is so tender you could f.u.c.k it - excuse excuse me, Maria." me, Maria."

"Is okay," said Maria.

"Wouldn't want to lie about that," said Stefanos.

"Tell the truth," said James, "and shame the devil."

"Thought you were gone," said Darnell, trying to get around Stefanos.

"I'm goin'," said Stefanos, shaking Darnell's hand as he pa.s.sed, then putting pressure on the fleshy, tender spot between Darnell's thumb and forefinger.

Darnell smiled, caught a grip on Stefanos's other hand, pushed down so that it bent unnaturally forward at the wrist. They stood toe-to-toe, grunting, until Stefanos yanked his hand free.

"All right, man," said Darnell, clapping Stefanos on the shoulder.

Stefanos said, "All right."

"You guys through playing?" said Saylor.

"Yeah," said Stefanos.

"So what are you still standing here for?"