Mrs Garner was thirty, a dark-haired, almost-pretty young science teacher, with long, slender legs. He was drawn to her from the start; a week into class, he'd stopped at the front of the room, and the outer face had ventured an awkward pleasantry.

Mrs Garner had frozen him, had said, 'Go to your chair, please.' Two or three of the girls in the class had exchanged quick, knowing glances, smirking, at the snub.

As quickly as thatsnaphe hated the woman.

And noticed that she carried the coffee cup with her during chemistry class, and would, from time to time, duck into the teacher's work space at the back of the room to freshen the cup.

The inner face considered that for a time: that Mrs Garner never seemed to wash the cup after she started using it, but simply filled and refilled it. He got to class very early one day, while Mrs Garner was in the teachers' lounge for her hourly smoke, and tipped a small dose of chlordane into the cup.

Mrs Garner never noticed when she drank it: but a half hour later, she suddenly declared herself to be ill, and on the way to the door, collapsed in convulsions. Two-face was a hero: he took charge, ran to the principal's office, got an ambulance on the way. Ran back, knelt by Mrs Garner as her convulsions nearly pulled her apart.

She was sprawled on her back, her dress hiked up her legs; from two-face's perspective, kneeling next to her, he could see far up her legs to the squared-off juncture, and a few random dark hairs outside her white cotton underpants.

He was ferociously aroused; and for years afterward, he pictured himself kneeling next to Mrs Garner's body.

He didn't think, until later that day, that for two hours after the poisoning, the poison bottlean iodine bottle that he'd emptied to take the chlordanewas still in his pocket. If anyone had suspected poisoning, he would have convicted himself.

And it didn't occur to him until after he'd dumped the bottle in a trash barrel that he hadn't wiped it for fingerprints.

Nor did he consider for almost a month that the chlordane bottle where he'd gotten the poison was still in his parents' garage with the other pesticides.

Eventually, he thought of it all, and the two faces agreed: He'd been lucky to get away with it.

Mrs Garner lived, and returned to class, although her memory was never as good as it should have been. Her science was never as good. The other teachers were told that she might have accidentally poisoned herself with one of the compounds that sat around the science room, odd powders in small vials, not all identified; and they pitied her as her hands shook when she tried to grade papers or to write.

The two faces watched her for the rest of the year, and for all of his last year in high school. Proud of their handiwork. Tempted to finish it.

But too smart.

The inner face retracted, went back to the small cruelties. The other face matured, and learned even better how to mask the inside.

As two-face grew older, he had some women, but none that he really wanted. He got the leftovers, the losers. The ones he wanted sensed the wrongness about him, and turned away.

Then came Anna. The look of her, the sound of her.

She was his woman, always had been. He didn't know exactly why, didn't realize that his first view of her reminded him of his first glimpse of Mrs Garner, but there wasn't any doubt, never the slightest, from the first time he'd seen her amongst the others, heard them talk about her. She'd turned the key in him, and the inner face had gone outside. Had dealt with his rivals. One to go.

He still processed those images through his imagination: like Anna herself, the images excited him, turned him on, as did the memories of Mrs Garner. O'Brien and MacAllister, thrashing in their own blood. The inner face fed on the blood, swelled with it.

And Anna must feel it, somewhere in her soul. Or would feel it, when she was no longer surrounded by these others.

Two-face and Anna were fated to be together.

He fantasized: Anna bent over the bathroom counter, her buttocks thrust toward him, the sinewy structure of her spine and the soft sheets of her back muscles.

Then Anna turned and spoke to him.

He edited frantically: she couldn't see him, how could she speak to him? He edited, but she persisted, and she said:

'. talking to Les and he said the guys at Seventeen are going to ditch their overnight monitoring guy and the guys in the truck are gonna have to do their own, like with one scanner.'

Another voice: 'Oh, that's horseshit.'

The editing broke down, snarled, crashed: and the two-faced man suddenly came back. He was sitting in the dirt with a fender next to one cheek and a hedge next to the other. He had a.22 pistol in his hand.

The voice was real. And so was Anna.

He pushed himself up, and stepped out.

'Anna?'

Chapter 10

Harper pushed and Anna weakened: he was having an effect on her. Creek could stay, she decided.

'But you've got to give me space,' she told Creek, when Harper had gone. 'You can't follow me around the house. You can't fix anything.'

'Maybe I could do some painting,' Creek suggested, peering around the front room.

'No painting,' Anna said. 'No fix-up, no clean-up, no hedge-trimming. You sleep, you watch TV. We eat, we got to work.'

He grumbled about it, but agreed. 'I'm gonna have to repark the truck.'

'You've got the truck? I thought Louis dropped you off.'

He shook his head: 'I put him in a cabthe truck's down the block.' The dead-end streets between the canals were too narrow for the truck to maneuver. When they had to stop momentarily at Anna's, they'd leave it at the intersection of Linnie and Dell, usually with Louis to watch it.

'If it's there when Linkhof gets up, he'll call the cops and get it towed.' Linkhof was the antisocial neighbor.

'Yeah. I can ditch it at Jerry's. The cook'll be there, he can see it out the window.'

Anna nodded. 'All right. I'll ride down with you.'

She got a jacket, and when Creek said, 'Gun,' selfconsciously put the Smith in her jacket pocket, on the opposite side from her cell phone, which she carried by habit. 'If the cops see us walking back at this time of night, they'll stop us, and if they frisk us, I'll be downtown again,' Anna said.

'We'll stop at Jerry's, get a coffee. The sky'll be getting light in a half hour, we can walk back then,' Creek said. 'Besides,' he added, 'we're white.'

White.

The way things worked in L.A. Still, the pistol felt like a brick in her pocket as they walked in the dark toward the truck.

The truck represented a lot of heavy lifting. They'd started, five years earlier, with a rusty Dodge van, cast-off video gear and spanners, and a lot of metal shelving from Home Depot, which Louis and Creek had bolted to the floor. The floor on the Dodge leaked, both from rust-outs and the new bolt holes, and Louis sometimes emerged from the back suffering from advanced carbon monoxide poisoning.

After three years of street work, building their reputation and their contacts, walking tapes around to the TV stations, they'd ditched the van and bought the truck from a cable station that had decided to get out of the news business. The truck came with the dish and a compressed-air lift; Louis put in the electronics. The dish alone saved hours every night; if they could use the relay antennas on the mountainand they could from almost anywhere in the Los Angeles bowlthey could dump video and voice to everyone.

And the equipment was getting better: Creek's camera was almost new.

Anna felt a little thump every time she saw the truck: a lot of work. Something she was good at.

But she didn't see the man by the truck until they were almost on top of him, she and Creek talking away, and Creek said, 'Hey.'