Intensity

up the blood in the kitchen while Anne had forced Chyna to drink a shot of whiskey. Chyna didn't want the whiskey, sealed her lips against it, but Anne said, "You're a wreck, for Christ's sake, you can't stop blubbering, and one shot isn't going to hurt you. This is what you need, kiddo, trust Mama, this is what you need. A shot of good whiskey will break a fever, you know, and what you've got now is a kind of fever. Come on, you little wuss, it's not poison. Jesus, you can be a whiny little shit sometimes. Either you drink it quick, or I'll hold you down and pinch your nose shut, and Memphis will pour it in when you open your mouth to breathe. That how you want it?" So Chyna drank the whiskey, and then took a second shot with a few ounces of milk when her mother decided that she needed it. The booze made her dizzy and strange but did not calm her.
        She had appeared calmer to them because, good little fisher that she was, she'd caught her fear and reeled it inside, where they could not see it. Even by the age of seven, she had begun to understand that a show of fear was dangerous, because others interpreted it as weakness, and there was no place in this world for the weak.
        Later that night, Zack had returned with whiskey on his breath too. He was exuberant, in a raucous and celebratory mood. He came straight to Chyna and hugged her, kissed her on the cheek, took her by the hands and tried to make her dance with him. "That bastard Bobby, the last time he was here, I knew by the way he couldn't take his eyes off Chyna that he was hot for little girls, a genuine sicko, so tonight he walks in and his tongue just about uncurls to his knees when he sees her! You could've shot the geek half a dozen times, Memphis, before he might've noticed!" Bobby had been the man sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Chyna, his beautiful gray eyes fixed intently on her, speaking directly to her in a way that few adults; ever spoke to kids, asking whether she liked kittens or puppies best and did she want to grow up to be a famous movie star or a nurse or a doctor or what, when Memphis shot him in the head. "The way our Chyna girl was dressed," Zack said excitedly, "Bobby just about totally forgot anyone else was here." The night was hot and swamp-humid, and before the visitors arrived, Chyna's mother made her change out of her shorts and T-shirt into a brief yellow bikini swimsuit: "But only the bottoms because, child, you're going to get heatstroke in this weather." Although only seven, Chyna was old enough to feel peculiar about going bare-chested, even if she didn't quite know why she felt that way. She'd gone bare-chested when she was younger, even just the previous summer, when she was six; and it was an awfully hot, sticky night. When Zack said that the way she was dressed had something to do with Bobby's forgetting that anyone else was in the room, Chyna didn't understand what he meant. Years later, when she did understand, she had confronted her mother with it. Anne had laughed and said, "Oh, baby, don't get self-righteous on me. We get along by using what we've got, and one sure thing we girls have is our bodies. You were the perfect distraction. Anyway, poor dumb old Bobby never touched you, did he? He just got to gawk at you a little, that's all, while Memphis went for the gun. Don't forget, sweetie, we were cut in for a piece of that pie and lived well on it for a while." And Chyna had wanted to say, But you used me, you put me right there in front of him where I'd see his head come apart, and I was only seven!
        All these years later, in Edgler Vess's study, she could still hear the crash of the shot and see Bobby's face explode; the memory was as vivid as ever it had been. She didn't know what gun Memphis used, but the ammunition must have been high-caliber hollow-point lead wad-cutters that expanded on impact, because the damage they inflicted had been tremendous.
        She lowered her hands from her face and looked at the open file cabinet. Vess had used three formats of folders, with staggered tab placement, so it was easy for Chyna to see all the names along the length of the drawer. Much farther back from the Almes file was one labeled TEMPLETON.
        She pushed the drawer shut with her foot.
        She'd found too much in this study-yet nothing helpful.
        Before leaving the second floor, she turned off all the lights. If Vess came home early, before Chyna could get away with