She had not only eluded him but indirectly had gotten Liam Eriksson killed and involved a sheriff named Holland in the case, probably the kind of rural hardhead a pro didn’t mess with or, if necessary, you paid somebody else to pop.

Preacher turned in a circle and began thudding his way back toward his house. The hills and mesas were pink in the sunrise, the air sweet, the leaves of the mesquite brushing wetly against his trousers and wrists and hands. He wanted to breathe the morning into his chest and cast out the funk and depression that seemed to screw him into the earth, but it was no use; he had never felt so alone in his life. When he closed his eyes, he thought he saw a boxcar on a rail siding, his mother sitting on a stool inside the open door, cutting carrots and onions into a pot in which she would make a soup that she would heat on an open fire that evening. In the dream, his mother lifted her face into the sunlight and smiled at him.

Maybe it was time to put aside doubt and self-recrimination. A man could always become captain of his soul if he tried. A man didn’t have to accept the hand fate had dealt him. Moses didn’t. Neither did David. Wasn’t it time to continue his journey into a biblical past and to become a son of whom his mother could be proud, regardless of deeds he had performed on behalf of Artie Rooney, regardless of the nightmares in which a line of Oriental women tried to hold up their palms against the weapon that jerked sideways in his grasp, almost as though it possessed a will stronger than his own?

The answer lay in the Book of Esther. The story had been written twenty-three hundred years before he was born, and it had waited all these centuries for him to step inside it and take on the role that should have been his, that was now being offered to him by an invisible hand. He drew the freshness of the morning into his lungs and felt a pang in his chest as sharp as a piece of broken glass.

AT FIVE A.M. Nick Dolan woke to the sound of raindrops striking the banana fronds below his bedroom window. Briefly, he thought he was at his grandfather’s house off Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans. His grandfather had lived in a shotgun house with a peaked tin roof and ceiling-high windows flanged by ventilated shutters that could be latched during the hurricane season. There was a pecan tree in the backyard with a rope swing, and the ground under its branches was soft and moldy and green with flattened pecan husks. Even in the hottest part of the day, the yard was breezy and stayed in deep shade and the neighborhood children gathered there each summer afternoon at three o’clock to await the arrival of the Sno-Ball truck.

The grandfather’s house was a safe place, far different from Nick’s neighborhood in the Ninth Ward, where Artie Rooney and his brothers and their friends had made life a daily torment for Nick.

Nick sat on the side of the bed and cupped his hand lightly on Esther’s hip. She was turned toward the wall, her dark hair and paleness touched with the shadows the moonlight created through the window. He slipped her nightgown up her thigh and hooked his finger over the elastic of her panties and pulled them down far enough so he could kiss her lightly on the rump, something he always did before congress with her. He could feel the nocturnal intensity of her body heat through her gown and hear the steady, undisturbed sound of her breathing against the wall. The touch of his hand or his lips seemed to neither awaken nor arouse her, and he wondered if her deep slumber was feigned or if indeed she had dreamed herself back into a time when Nick had not exchanged off their happiness for success in the skin trade.

He put on his slippers and robe and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and drank a glass of cold milk in the kitchen and, at six A.M., disarmed the burglar alarm and retrieved the newspaper from the front yard. The morning was cool and damp and smelled of water sprinklers and Nick’s closely cropped St. Augustine grass that his Mexican gardeners had mowed late yesterday and the night-blooming flowers Esther constantly fertilized with coffee grounds and bat guano and fish blood and black dirt bagged from a swamp outside Lake Charles, all of which created a fecund odor Nick associated with a Louisiana graveyard that lay so deep in shadow it was never penetrated by sunlight.

Enough with thoughts about graveyards, he told himself, and went back in the house, the rolled newspaper fat in his hand. Nor did he wish to dwell on thoughts about schoolyard bullies and personal failure and the slippage of his fortune onto the shoals of financial ruin. He wanted to be with Esther, inside her warm embrace, inside the glow of her thighs with the smell of her hair in his face and the rhythm of her breath on his cheek. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. Why had the Fates ganged up against him? He pulled the plastic rain sheath off the newspaper and unrolled the paper on the breakfast table. The lead story dealt with the murder of a young mother and her two children. The primary suspect was an estranged boyfriend. The woman’s face looked familiar. Had she worked in his club? Yeah, it was possible. But what if she had? What was worse, the daily drudgery and humiliation and penury of a welfare recipient or knocking down some quasi-serious bucks by cavorting a few hours on a pole for the titty-baby brigade?

Nick knew the secret source of his discontent. His money had been his validation and his protection from the world, his payback for every time he had been shoved down on line at school or at the movie theater or chased crying into his yard by the army of street rats who claimed they were avenging the death of Jesus. Now a large part of Nick’s income was gone, and some bad ventures in commodities and mortgage companies were about to wipe out the rest of it.

Nick had nail wounds in his wrists and hands for other reasons. Although Esther pretended differently, she would probably never forgive him for his involvement in the deaths of the Asian women, regardless of the fact that he was almost as much a victim as they were. At least that was the way he saw it.

A shadow moved across the breakfast table. Nick turned in his chair, startled, knocking over his glass of milk.

“You want oatmeal?” Esther said.

“I already ate,” he replied.

“Why are you up so early?”

“Restless, I guess.”

“Go on back to bed.”

“Do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“Sleep some more?”

“I’m going to fix some tea.”

“Maybe neither one of us got enough sleep,” Nick said, stifling a yawn. “It’s only six-twenty. We could take a little nap. Later, we can go out for breakfast. Want to do that?”

“My aerobics class is at seven-thirty.”

“Better not miss the aerobics. That’s important. They let men in there? I could use that. Jumping up and down and sweatin’ to the golden oldies or whatever.” He stiffened his fingers and jabbed them against the softness of his stomach. Then he did it again, harder.

She gave him a curious look and filled a pan with water and placed it on the gas burner. “Sure you don’t want some oatmeal?”

“I’m starting a diet. I need to reform myself physically, maybe get plastic surgery while I’m at it.”

Nick went upstairs and shaved and brushed his teeth and got fully dressed, putting on a tie and a white shirt, more as a statement of independence from his sexual and emotional need than as preparation to go to work at his restaurant, which didn’t open until eleven. He went back downstairs, deliberately walking through the kitchen, pulling a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator, sucking his teeth, whistling a tune, ignoring Esther’s presence.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Downstairs and pay some bills. While there’s still money in the bank for me to pay the bills. Tell the kids I’ll drive them to the pool later.”