But the voices helped. They strengthened his resolve, refined his purpose.

Not that his purpose had ever faltered. Not that he had ever, even for a moment, doubted the necessity, the urgency, of his mission.

No, but by their presence the voices added strength to a strength that was already incalculable.

Where? Where is the wh.o.r.e?

It was near now, the creature destined for him: he knew this. Already he had seen others of its kind, only a few feet from the sidewalk, leaning out the windows of their squalid shacks, their slack faces feigning desire, their flaccid b.r.e.a.s.t.s draped like rotting fruit between the open folds of their gowns.

Perfect. The night was perfect. Only a few souls stumbled through the streets, and these were debased, furtive beings so blinded by their own sordid l.u.s.ts that he would be invisible.

Oh, it was delicious, was it not? Could anything, could even the ritual itself, the joining, the union, could even that be sweeter than this triumph of secrecy? To walk as softly as a shadow among them, unknown, unsuspected- The wh.o.r.e!

Yes, yes. Yes.

This one!

This one, yes, was perfect.

Its face grotesquely powdered and painted, it leaned toward him from its window, its fat red mouth twisted in a leer. A small oil lamp on the sill beside it cast a trembling yellow light that seemed to set the creature's bright red hair aflame.

"Only three dollars," it said, its voice tattered from a lifetime of debauch. "Ten dollars gets you all night."

He glanced up and down the street. No one watching.

Dare he do it?

Always, before, in the alleyways, in the dim sidewalk alcoves rank with the fumes of rotten garbage, he had found union quickly, performed the ritual as swiftly as possible. Detection loomed in every pa.s.sing moment, in every approaching footfall. He had never been allowed-he had never permitted himself-to prolong it. To bring it to a level of perfection, of artistry, about which, he now suddenly understood, he had always dreamed.

Time, then, would become irrelevant. There would be no limits, no boundaries at all. Except those which in the process he set, or discovered, for himself.

The slow unhurried opening of flesh into blossoms of scarlet; the slow unhurried sc.r.a.pe of knife against pink bone, The prospect made him breathless, dizzy.

But dare he do it?

Do it. Do it. Take this one.

Yes.

Yes.

He stepped to the entrance and knocked. The pinewood door, thin and shabby, rattled in its frame.

THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, as usual, Grigsby woke up and wished he was dead.

It was dawn. Even with the curtains drawn, the light a blurred uncertain gray, he knew it was dawn. Since Clara left, no matter how much he drank the night before, no matter how early or how late he went to bed, he always awoke at dawn. It was as though some pain-loving, pain-seeking part of him insisted on his being present at sunrise, so he could suffer through every single long aching moment of daylight.

His lips were parched and cracked; overnight his tongue and teeth had produced a fine thick crop of moss. His lungs were clotted with phlegm-it had been their rattle, as they lurched for breath, that snapped him awake, hurled him back from oblivion into a world, and a life, and a bed, in which he had virtually no interest.

Stale fumes of cheap perfume made the air seem like some dense substance too thick to sustain life, certainly too thick to breathe. The smell was sickly sweet, spiky with the sharp, sour-oatmeal tang of dried sweat. The sweat might be his, it sometimes was, but who belonged to the perfume?

He turned his head to the left-slowly, cautiously, so that it wouldn't split down the middle.

Above the brown woolen blanket poked a bundle of blond hair, showing an inch or so of gray roots on either side of a ragged part.

For an empty moment he had no idea whose head it was.

And then, his heart dipping in his chest, he realized.

Brenda.

Jesus.

Had he really been drunk enough to f.u.c.k Brenda again?

At the thought of drink, or maybe at the thought of f.u.c.king Brenda, his stomach reeled; hot bile foamed at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down, tossed aside the blanket, and slowly pulled his big weary frame upright. Carefully, he swung his legs off the mattress. Bones creaked loudly in his left knee-his body reminding him, once again, that it was turning into stone.

He was wearing his union suit, so maybe he hadn't actually f.u.c.ked Brenda after all.

He was exhausted. Sleep no longer comforted; it left him more weary than a day in the saddle.

His stomach heaved again.

He stood, swayed slightly, and then staggered from the bedroom that he and Clara had shared for four years, tottered down the hallway where Clara had sometimes sung softly to herself as she pa.s.sed through on her errands, where the children had run and played and hooted. Bits of grit clung to the cold soles of his feet. He stumbled into the bathroom that Clara had kept spotlessly clean-this had been one of the first houses in the neighborhood with indoor plumbing-and he hobbled over to the toilet.

The curtains were open; gray light seeped into the room. In the toilet, circling the bowl at the waterline, was a ragged ring of brown fur. The moment he saw it, his stomach erupted.

He felt flimsy, fragile, made of sticks and string and rice paper. His skin itched, not on the surface, but below it, as though the hair on his body was growing backward. His shoulders were slumped, his head was bowed as he sat on the rim of the bathtub and stared down at the tile floor. Yellow splotches at the base of the toilet bowl. Small spidery coils of gray hair scattered about.

Clara had been so d.a.m.n proud of that floor-it was crazy, the way she'd carried on. Real tile, she'd grinned proudly, her big brown eyes wide and excited, her face slightly flushed.

As though it was silver or gold.

Maybe he should rip it out and send it off to her. They'd paid for it with money from her inheritance. It really belonged to her.

He could box it up, freight it by train to San Francisco. With a note. Here, Clara, take the f.u.c.king floor, you've got everything else, you might as well have this too.

He didn't want the f.u.c.king thing.

When you came right down to it, he didn't want the f.u.c.king house.

He should've moved out. At the beginning, as soon as she left. (She wasn't coming back, not ever-it was time to face it.) Should've sold the place, got himself a room at one of the hotels. Fresh linen. Maid service. (And some of the maids, he knew, had a pretty broad-minded notion of service.) A good restaurant downstairs, tablecloths, smiling waiters who served up fried eggs and crisp bacon in the morning.

His stomach twisted.

He stood, opened the medicine cabinet with a trembling hand, groped past the cough elixir (unused, untouched since the children left), and plucked out the pint of bonded bourbon.

He uncorked the bottle, raised it to his mouth, took a swallow, felt the whiskey scald its way down his throat. As the warmth went glowing out along the old familiar pathways, his stomach gurgled and cooed like a baby at the breast.

He looked at himself in the mirror.

His eyes were rimmed with red, as though someone had poked at them-someone with a sharp stick and a mean streak. His gray hair was matted. (Clara had always made fun of his hair in the morning, the way sleep had poked it into fuzzy tufts at the back.) His skin was gray and blotched and lined; along his cheeks and nose, narrow red veins traced whorls and curlicues. His stubble was pure white now, an old man's, not a speck of black in it anywhere, not a one.

One day you wake up and you look in the mirror and you discover that you're an old man.

And one day you wake up and you discover that you're dead.

He said aloud, "Grigsby, you are one pathetic son of a b.i.t.c.h."

He took another swallow of bourbon.

Better. The whiskey was driving its core of warmth down through the hollow center of his being.

He was beginning to feel half human again. Half human was about the best he ever managed.

Now if he could get himself cleaned up and dressed and away from the house before Brenda figured out that he was gone.

She came into the kitchen while he sat gulping his coffee at the table. Making the coffee had been a mistake.

She was wearing an old pink bathrobe of Clara's, one that Clara had left forgotten at the rear of the bedroom closet, and for an instant Grigsby wanted to leap up and rip it off her back.

His fury surprised him. And then somehow, in the midst of his surprise, the anger dissipated.

These days none of his emotions lasted for very long. Not fury, not surprise.

Self-contempt-but that wasn't an emotion.

f.u.c.k the robe. What difference did it make if Brenda wore the d.a.m.n thing?

He set the coffee cup down atop the red and white checkered oilcloth that covered the table. (Clara would've hated it, but it was easier to keep clean than wood.) He lifted his cigarette from the ashtray.

Brenda smiled at him-she was a bit blurry, like a photograph not quite in focus-and padded around behind him, put her heavy arms around his neck. "How's my big man this morning?"

Sucking on the cigarette, he concealed a cringe of distaste. This was what she always said in the morning, whenever he had been lonely enough, desperate enough, drunk enough, to bring her here for the night.

He grunted then, his standard morning greeting, deliberately cool, almost gruff. He always hoped that by refusing her any real conversation, she would one day stop trying to have one. So far, this had never worked.

She put her cheek next to his. Her hair was stiff and p.r.i.c.kly against his skin, like dried gra.s.s. "Let me fix you up some food," she said. "You're a growing boy, Bob. You need your vittles." Her cheek pillowed out against his as she smiled.

This was something else she always said.

And that was the problem with Brenda. (One of them, anyway.) Give her the same d.a.m.n situation and she would say exactly the same d.a.m.n thing. Every time. Regular as a banker's bowels. And whatever it was she said, you could tell from her smile, all sugary and pleased with herself, that she still thought it was cute as kittens. The first time, maybe it had been. (He couldn't remember, but he doubted it.) Now, after ten or twenty or fifty times, whenever she did it he wanted to scream.

He told her, "I'm not hungry." And then-reluctantly, because her pitiful grat.i.tude at his small kindnesses always shamed him-he added, "Thanks."

She squeezed his neck and again he felt her smile against his cheek. "Yeah," she said. "I reckon maybe you had your fill last night."

Jesus.

He had f.u.c.ked her.

He sighed. He lifted his cup and took a bitter, penitential swallow of coffee.

"'M I gonna see you tonight?" she asked him.

Not if he stayed sober. "Don't know," he said. "Lot of work to do."

"Well, you know where I live."

He grunted. He was able to make each grunt identically non-committal to the grunt before.

She smiled again. He thought, I'll keep the home fires burning.

She said, "I'll keep the home fires burning."

He grunted.

She chose to take this particular grunt as an endearment, and nuzzled her nose into his neck.

That was another problem with Brenda. She saw anything short of a punch in the gut as affection.

And even if he were the kind of a.s.shole who punched out women, how the h.e.l.l do you punch out a woman who was hurting so badly for some kindness? Any kindness at all? Be like kicking a little puppy dog.

The main problem with Brenda, when you got right down to it, was that she wasn't Clara. And he couldn't really blame her for that. Wasn't her fault.

The main problem with him was that he deserved Brenda, or someone like her, more than he had ever deserved Clara.

He finished off the rest of his coffee. "Gotta go," he said.

She stepped back as he stood up, and just then someone knocked at the front door.

Grigsby frowned. Doors that got knocked on at six in the morning never opened up onto anything good.

He turned to Brenda. "Stay here," he told her.

She curtsied, smiling. She was too big a woman to pull off a curtsy-too big and too old a woman to do half the cutesy little-girl things she did. His feelings moved through their old familiar dance, shuffling from embarra.s.sment to irritation to shame.

She said, "Your wish is my command, sire."

He nodded, looked grimly away. Jesus.

His clothes from yesterday, and hers, were flung about the parlor-pants on the floor, shirt draped over the armchair. Her corset wrapped around his other pair of boots. Her stiff petticoat standing upright, like a squat teepee, in the center of the carpet.

He and Brenda had done themselves proud, looked like. No wonder he was so d.a.m.n tired. He couldn't remember any of it, but probably that was a blessing.

He opened the front door.

Officer McKinley stood there in his blue Denver Police uniform, looking fat and ill at ease. He glanced quickly up and down the empty street, as though he suspected that spies watched him from within the small frame houses or from behind the hedges and shrubs. He tapped the brim of his cap. "Mornin', Marshal."