The Face

wind.
        While some in positions equivalent to his still used tall wooden stakes to prop these slender new trees, Mr. Yorn preferred one-inch and two-inch steel poles, in eight- and ten-foot lengths, for they would not rot, provided sturdier support, and could be reused.
        After wrenching an eight-foot pole from the ground and tearing the stretchy plastic ties securing it to the tree, Ethan staggered after the crazy son of a bitch in the storm suit, swung the steel at his head as hard as he knew how, and clubbed him to the ground.
        Toppling, the kidnapper reflexively fired the pistol. The bullet ricocheted off the granite garden bench and shrieked into the rain and darkness.
        The thug collapsed, rolled onto his back. He should have been [589] dead or unconscious, but he looked only dazed, confused. He still held the gun.
        Ethan dropped on his assailant with both knees, driving the breath out of him, with luck breaking a few of his ribs and crushing his spleen to paste. He clawed at the gloved hand that held the gun, seized possession of the weapon, fumbled it, and with dismay saw it clatter out of easy reach.
        Although his skull must be ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, the creep flailed at Ethan and snared a fistful of his hair, twisted it painfully, tried to pull his face down toward bared and snapping teeth.
        Fearing the teeth, Ethan nevertheless clamped his right hand on the man’s throat to pin him, and then punched, left knuckles to right eye, and punched again, but still his hair was twined in those iron fingers and being drawn out by the roots. He felt a thick jewelry chain around the maniac’s throat and thought to twist it, twisted and punched, twisted and punched, until his left hand ached and the taut chain, having scored the fingers of his right hand, finally broke like cheap string.
        The teeth stopped snapping. The eyes fixed on something beyond Ethan, beyond the night itself. Limp fingers released twisted locks of hair.
        Gasping, rising from the dead man, Ethan looked at the chain in his hand. A locket. A glass sphere in which floated a watchful eye.

        Moloch seemed to be dead, but he had seemed to be dead before. Fric watched the fight from an art-film angle and through a crimson haze, wondering why the director of photography had chosen to shoot an action scene with a distorting lens and a red filter.
        All this he wondered and worried about not with full attention but dreamily, as if he were asleep and having two nightmares at the same time, one involving two men in mortal combat and the other about [590] suffocation. He was back in the old suffacatorium, wheezing like a geezer of a coal miner with black-lung disease, like in that movie Ghost Dad had been wise to turn down, and the mother of the original owner of Palazzo Rospo was trying to smother him with a fur coat.
        Mr. Truman lifted him and carried him to the garden bench. Mr. Truman understood that during an attack Fric needed to be sitting up to better use his neck, chest, and abdominal muscles to force air out of his lungs. Mr. Truman knew the drill.
        Mr. Truman propped him on the bench. Held him upright. Checked Fric’s belt for the medicinal inhaler.
        Mr. Truman spewed out a string of vulgar and obscene words, all of which Fric had heard before in his years among the entertainment world’s elite, but he’d never heard them from Mr. Truman until now.
        More red everywhere and more of it darkening to black, and so little air getting through the mink, the sable, the fox, whatever fur it might be.

        Breathing through his mouth because his nose had clogged with wacked cartilage and clotting blood, Ethan didn’t know if he had enough wind left to carry the boy back to the house at a run, all the way to Mrs. McBee’s office where spare inhalers were stored.
        A bullet had nicked his left ear, too, and though the wound was superficial, blood followed the folds of the ear, into the resonant depths, half deafening him but also oozing down his eustachian tube and into his throat, causing him to cough in fits.
        After a hesitation, realizing that Fric was experiencing worse than an asthma attack, that this was something life-threatening, he scooped the boy off the bench, into his arms, turned toward the house-and confronted Dunny.
        “Sit down with him,” Dunny said.
         “Get out of my way, for