Beside him, Deidre watched Boyle fall into his haze and she started to cry. Her hair hung around her face; her fists shook with rage. She fumbled the syringe, stuck herself at the bend in her elbow, missed the vein. She cursed, withdrew; tried again and failed, unable to strike the sweet spot. Until Boyle reached over and inserted the needle himself, knowing her veins as well as his own. The next morning—Clay recalled from the news reports—investigators would observe the puncture wounds on Deidre’s arm and attribute them to her desperation for a fix.
As she fell into a stupor, her ribs moved slowly up and down. She rested her head on Boyle’s collarbone. “Happy now?” Boyle groaned.
“Not at all,” Karney told him. “This is only half of what I’m expected to do.” He dragged a wooden chair into the center of the room and stood upon it. Confused, Boyle and Deidre watched him play with the metal loop that held the chandelier to the ceiling fixture. The crystal adornments clanged musically as Karney unsnapped the loop. And for the first time, Clay realized that the onscreen Karney was wearing latex gloves. “What did this chandelier run you, Roc? Ten, twenty thousand? And you neglect it for a few cheap-ass candles?” Karney heaved the chandelier across the room, where it smashed to pieces in the dark. Then he hopped off the chair and stuck a coldblooded smile into the faces of his captives. “You both just injected heroin cut with fentanyl. Gray Death. Things will start going very badly for you now.”
Boyle fought himself out of his slouch. His typically muscular body looked flabby and useless. “Have you lost your goddamn mind? Why would you kill me if you want my business?”
“I don’t want your business. I quit selling dope the day you swore it off. It’s on to bigger, better things, Roc.”
Boyle was perched on the edge of the couch, his face a blank. “This is good product,” he said. “I forgot how focused it makes you. Like, right now, I can distill the entire universe down to your sneakers. Look at that shitty knot you tied in them. It tells me you were nervous, worried things would go south during whatever game you’re playin’. And your eyes? What they’re sayin’—”
Boyle bolted upward, knocking the smaller man back, and at the same time snatching Karney’s arm and wrenching the gun away. Deidre gave a triumphant cry and staggered to her feet. “Wait, wait,” Karney said, but Boyle was done playing. His finger found the trigger and he fired point-blank into Karney’s face.
When the tiny flame emerged, Boyle expelled his breath and Karney, despite having lost control, laughed heartily.
And that was when the fire at the end of the gun erupted in a six-foot tower of flame. The candles on the tables around them did the same. And suddenly the room was filled with pillars of fire, as if someone had shot several streams of lighter fluid vertically at the ceiling. A moment later the gun went out and the candles regressed to tiny pricks of light—but not before Clay spotted the hunkering, solitary figure in the far corner of the room.
Savy saw it too. “Someone else is there,” she gasped, bringing Clay back to the present.
Vaguely Clay was aware that he and Savy were holding each other, like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house. “And those candles. What just happened to them?”
Karney rocked anxiously in his recliner. “Here comes The Man.”
It seemed Boyle had caught sight of his other guest too, and in the reinstated shadows, the heroin numbness deserted him and he was cold-sober again. “I should have known.”
“Yes, you should have,” a voice boomed back. And it sounded like a sudden, unexpected crash of thunder. A bloodthirsty narrator, full of conviction. Even Boyle’s famous growl paled in comparison. “You should have honored our agreement.”
Frightened as he was, Boyle made no move to run. It was unclear whether the figure in the corner was armed—although it seemed the voice was plenty enough to paralyze anyone. “I gave you fame when you were no one. I bestowed everything, when you had nothing. I asked for so little—and you insist on treachery.”
“Baby?” Deidre asked, cringing from the thunder boom. “Who is that?”
“That’s The Hailmaker,” Karney told her. “The Man.”
“You’ve made millions off me,” Boyle told the darkness. “And you promised I could leave when I wanted. Well, I wanted.”
“Leaving me meant leaving the stage too. You knew that, but you couldn’t help yourself. Now you betray my kindness with your songs of”—the voice spit the word out like the vilest clump of phlegm—“hope!”
“I sold so many records ’cause I’ve always been honest in my songs. Those dark, early hits were how I felt then; this is how I feel now. I see the world clearly. I see the fight we’re all in. Find someone else to spew your hate.”
“No,” the voice boomed on. “There is no replacing you, Rocco Boyle. Your kind comes once in a mortal generation. Either you deliver what’s expected or you lose everything tonight.”
Boyle didn’t flinch; he stood tall, as if he’d known this night was coming for a long, long time. “You already knew my answer. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have sent Rooster to murder me.”
The figure’s laughter thundered from the darkness, so intensely loud it made the camera mic vibrate—and in turn, Karney’s surround sound. “No one’s here to murder you. That, you’ll do yourself.”
Something flew into the candle glow, striking Karney/Rooster in the chest. The dealer gasped and fell back a step. He lifted the thing that had fallen at his feet—a length of rope with a hangman’s noose looped on one end.
With a glance toward the unseen figure, Karney remounted the chair and fastened the rope to the chain dangling from the chandelier fixture.
“You owe me,” the voice decided. “And you’ll repay your debt—to save her. There’s time. Do as you’re told and she
