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“Your old partner’s back in town,” he said, leaning to fill ‘er up. “Lookinland. You hear about that?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“Well, he is.”

Another swallow—it went down burning, hot and hard, straight to where I always used to think my heart was located. Before I knew better.

Lee Earle: “Did a Quantico internship, now he’s mister big-shit honorary profiler, with a hard-on for cults and crazies. Pitched them some new division—same old freak-show cases you guys used to break back when. Like that rape/snuff job they found Monday on Jenner, in the vacant lot.”

“Didn’t hear about that, either.”

He reached under the bar, threw me a copy of the Highlight. “Try reading the paper every once in a while, Proulx. In between drinks.”

Fresh ink, smeared fingerprints. The headline, all screaming caps: BRUTAL MURDER! “TORTURED,” SAYS CORONER! LOCAL BOY TO HEAD! Beh

ind me, Georgia’s sour-sweet pipes wailed on over piano-wire strings—Argentinian whore-house tango turned over-orchestrated Hollyweird torch song, the words a bad-translation joke. If I’m a slave, then it’s a slave I want to be!

Beck’s familiar face stared up at me where he knelt by the body, lifting a tarpaulin corner with his pen—a black-on-grey collage, all dots and shadows. New suit, new grey paling his short brown hair, new glasses: Plastic frames—easier to break, harder to embed. A thin white shadow of raised keloiding along the length of his occipital bone.

Don’t pity me!

More bourbon, acid on a sandpaper tongue.

Don’t pity me!

His dark, level eyes under dark, level brows, gaze narrow and discreet as ever. A hidden bruise.

Hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the day he walked into the locker room, put his crushed and purple nose next to mine, and told me if I ever got this close to him again, he’d shoot me cold and call it self-defense. And all I could think of then, like all I could think of now: How bad I wanted to feel the sharp, new-moon ridge of his scar on my tongue; to taste and trace the damage I’d made, in the heat of the moment.

Smelling his hair, his skin. Feeling my heart swell, rib-locked, so quick and huge it made me want to cry.

Me.

I put the paper down. To Lee Earle: “This dump got a phone?”

“Not for free, it don’t.”

Twenty on the counter—receiver in my hand, low-grade magic. I punched the station switchboard, gambling on booze-soaked memory. Itchy flame stinging at my eyes and groin, lighting my way.

Beck’s nameplate, hovering phantom in the dark behind my forehead: A blind neon pain.

* * *

“I wish you love, Detective,” she whispered to me, as she went by—Mrs. Silas. First name Maria, N.M.I. I looked it up in her file. Her head was bowed, hair hanging in her eyes; just a breath of a phrase on my cheek, consonants etched in bile and honey. Beck didn’t even hear her.

I did. And laughed, because it didn’t seem like much of a curse. At the time.

* * *

Afterwards, I went home, called it in from my own line. I.A. found me ten hours later, so long gone they could have used my blood to spike the V-Day party punch.

They brought me a letter of resignation to sign; I signed it. No charges pressed, no publicity, no pension—some deal. Better than I deserved.

They told me Beck told them I did it. I allowed as how I had.

Asked me why.

I swore to Christ I did not know.