The Face

Aelfric prisoner, he proceeded to destroy the boy emotionally.
        In the afterglow of insect-frenzy sex, Brittina never once had been suspicious that Corky’s interest in all things Manheim might be related to anything other than simple curiosity. She was an unwitting conspirator, a naive girl in love.
        “Do me,” Brittina insisted now, “do me,” and Corky obliged.
        Wind battered the narrow house and hard rain lashed its skinny flanks, and on the narrow bed, Brittina thrashed like an agitated mantis.
        This time, in their dreamy postcoital cuddle, Corky had no need to ask questions related to Manheim. He had more information on that subject than he needed to know.
        As occasionally was her wont, Brittina drifted into a monologue about the uselessness of literature: the antiquated nature of the written word; the coming triumph of image over language; those ideas that she called memes, which supposedly spread like viruses from mind to mind, creating new ways of thinking in society.
        Corky figured that his brain would explode if she didn’t shut up, after which he would need a new way to think.
        Eventually, Brittina clattered up from their love nest with the intention of rattling off to the bathroom.
        [389] Reaching under the bed, Corky retrieved the pistol where earlier he had hidden it.
        When he shot her twice in the back, he half expected Brittina to shatter into bone splinters and dust, as if she were an ancient mummy made brittle by two centuries of dehydration, but she only dropped dead in a pale, angular heap.

CHAPTER 57
        
        DURING THE YEARS THEY’D BEEN OFFICIAL partners, Ethan and Hazard had gone by the book as much as it is ever possible to go by a book that is written largely by people who have never done the job.
        On this December day, however, unofficially partners once more, they were bad boys. Being bad boys made Ethan uneasy, but it gave him the comforting feeling that at least they were taking control of the situation.
        A notice on Rolf Reynerd’s door warned that Apartment 2B was the site of an ongoing police investigation. The premises remained off-limits to all but authorized personnel of the police department and the district attorney’s office.
        They ignored the warning.
        The deadbolt lock on Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door was covered with a police seal. Ethan cracked it, peeled it.
        Hazard had with him a Lockaid lock-release gun, an item sold exclusively to law-enforcement agencies. In ordinary circumstances, he would have requisitioned this device with the proper paperwork, specifying the exact intended use, virtually always with reference to an existing search warrant.
        [391] These were not ordinary circumstances.
        Hazard had gotten his hands on one of the department’s Lockaids by unconventional means. He would be walking a razor’s edge between righteousness and ruin until he returned the device to the equipment locker where it belonged.
        “When you’re up against some mojo man who fades into mirrors,” he said, “your ass is hanging over a cliff anyway.”
        Hazard slid the thin pick of the Lockaid into the key channel of the deadbolt, under the pin tumblers. He squeezed the trigger four times before the steel spring in the gun managed to lodge all the pins at the shear line and thereby fully disengage the lock.
        Ethan followed Hazard into the apartment, closing the door behind them. He tried to step around and over the stains-Reynerd’s blood-that marred the white carpet just inside the threshold.
        He had spilled rivers of his own blood on this carpet. Died on it. The experience rose in memory, too vivid to have been a dream.
        The black-and-white furnishings, art, and decorations proved to be as he remembered them.
        On the walls, a flock of pigeons was frozen in midwhirl. Like white chalk checks on gray slate, geese flew across a somber sky, and a parliament of owls perched on a barn roof, deliberating over the fate of mice.
        Hazard had been present the previous night during the first search of the apartment. He knew what had been collected as possible evidence and what had been left behind.
        He went directly to that corner of the living room in which stood a black-lacquered desk with faux-ivory drawer pulls. “What we need is probably here,” he said, and searched the drawers from top to