chooses to start one. She approaches, unafraid, but still keeping her finger on the pepper spray’s trigger.
“Hi,” the man says.
“Hi.”
“Just starting your run?” he asks. Another knee-bend.
“Just finished,” she says, glancing past him, cringing at her reflection in the glass door. She looks like a wet collie. Of course. “Enough for me tonight.”
“What a pity. What’s your name?”
Her mind whirls. It is a little forward of him, a little too fast for her taste, but that’s not what throws her. What throws her is that she had not anticipated being anyone tonight. “Rachel,” she answers, as if the name were simply the next name up on a never-ending roster of deception. “Rachel Anne O’Malley.”
“You’re Irish.”
“Yes,” she says, telling the lie by rote. “Well, half. I’m Irish on my father’s side. My mother’s Italian.”
“Pretty volatile combination,” the man says, flashing a smile. “Italian and Irish.”
“Constant battle,” she jokes, surprised at her acumen at this after so long, shocked at her growing ease with the events of the last twenty-four hours. “Eat, drink, eat, drink, eat, drink…”
The booze, it appears, had finally kicked in, in spite of her halfhearted run around the block. Rachel Anne O’Malley is a little loaded after all.
He puts his foot on the decorative concrete bench and begins to stretch his leg muscles.
She has an insane thought: Maybe she’d take stud-boy upstairs. Maybe sleeping with a complete stranger will make the specter of Willis Walker go away.
Then, just as suddenly, she comes to her senses. She decides to run a little more, but alone. The last thing she needs is some cock she can’t get rid of, some pretty-boy lover to hang around just long enough to fuck up everything she’s worked for in the past two years.
But it seems that stud-boy, and his cock, are not quite finished with her.
“So, could I interest you in a late supper, maybe?” he asks. “A run and a shower won’t take me more than forty-five minutes.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anywhere you’d like,” he continues. “Just paid off Visa. I’m golden again.”
“No thanks,” she says, the phrase late supper crazily making her mind return to the late-night breast-feedings in the darkness of her living room, the pleasure and pain of Isabella at her nipple. The sorrow ignites within her. “Some other time. For sure.”
“Okay,” he says, agreeably, adding to his charm. Not the pushy type. “I’ll leave it up to you. I jog around here all the time. Look for me one of these nights. Maybe we can run together.”
“Sure,” she replies. She pulls open the door to her apartment building. She’ll walk through the lobby, down the service hallway and exit on the parking lot side of the building. Maybe have a real run through Cain Park, hope she doesn’t embarrass herself by running into him. “Nice meeting you.”
“The pleasure was all mine, Rachel,” he says, and with that he takes off down the street in long, powerful strides.
She watches him disappear into the night and feels a strange nervousness building inside her. Not necessarily about what just happened. She had handled the advances of a thousand men in her time. But, rather, about what almost just happened.
She’d nearly let someone in.
And she hadn’t even asked his name.
12
I am carved of moonlight.
I follow the jogging figure at a distance of no more than one hundred feet, sliding from shadow to shadow, heading south on Lee Road, waiting for the long stretch of gloom we will both soon enter, the colonnade of darkness leading into Cain Park.
The jogger makes a left, past the squat stone columns, past the huge dedication rock, into the all-but- deserted park. I follow on the access path that winds down the hill.
To the casual observer we might look entirely unconnected, two hardy citizens of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, out for a late-night winter workout, one maintaining a slow jogger’s pace; the other-the one carrying the odd- looking device-an even slower, but still quite graceful, power walk.
And yet we are connected in a way that most casual observers-indeed, most people on the planet-could never imagine nor understand.
The noise flourishes the moment I move within range of the jogger. This time: fat claps of thunder on the inside of my skull, a desperate pummeling of bloodied hands in a sealed coffin.
The jogger stops at the shuttered kiosk near the Alma, the smaller of the park’s two theaters. I approach from the west. In my right hand is a small-caliber pistol, loaded with hollow-point rounds. In my left I carry a four- quart pail, bottomed with a three-inch layer of hard rubber and wire mesh, a handle on its side.
I step to within five feet of the jogger.
The jogger, a handsome young man clad in an expensive-looking olive and black Nike jogging suit and black wool gloves, doesn’t see me. The reflective stripes on the elbows of his jacket made it embarrassingly easy to follow him.
“Hey,” I say.
The man freezes in place. A veteran of the streets, it seems. He doesn’t turn around. “My wallet is in my waist pack,” he says. He spins the nylon belt around his waist, slowly, until the pack faces me.
I step closer, take the wallet, say: “I have a message for you.”
The man swallows hard but remains very still. “What are you talking about?”
I place the barrel of the gun near his left temple. “She’s mine.” I lift the pail by the handle-as if wielding a giant coffee mug-and position it on the other side of the man’s head. “Mio!”
I pull the trigger.
The puff of smoke is insignificant in the darkness, as is the popping noise, no louder than the sound of a child flicking his thumb out of an empty soda bottle. What is significant is that the pail catches not only the bullet-a feat accomplished without putting a hole in the bottom-but also a good portion of the man’s brain. The police will not find a slug nor a shell casing, nor more than a drop or two of vaporized membrane on the shrubbery.
I look at the figure on the ground, then into the pail, at the pink tissue, the off-white bone, warm and gaseous in the December night air.
For my cauldron, I think. My nganga.
For the spell.
13
His mother sleeps on the couch by the space heater, a Jetson-age-looking Norelco model. The heater, as always, is on full blast and leaning perilously close to the orange and brown Afghan-Cleveland Browns colors.
The small second-floor apartment on Baltic Road has a clock radio in every room, including an old Magnavox on the back of the toilet, just beneath the macrame ballerina toilet-paper cozy. Today, from the kitchen, comes an Italian-language news program.
He kneels next to his mother, brushes a soft strand of white hair from her forehead. She had been Gabriella Russo when his father swept her off her feet nearly fifty years ago, a raven-haired siren of a lounge singer who strung Frank Paris along for two years before giving in to his repeated proposals of marriage.
An only child, Paris had been sixteen when his father died. His mother had worked two jobs to help put him through college, sometimes three. She is an undereducated woman, having finished only high school, but she is, and
