"Fuck you."

On Sunday mornings, James B. Hansen attended early morning worship service with his wife Donna and stepson Jason, went out with them for a late breakfast at a favorite pancake house on Sheridan Drive, and stayed home in the afternoon while his wife took their son to her parents' place in Cheektowaga. It was his weekly time for private reflection and he rarely missed it.

No one was allowed in the basement except Hansen. He was the only one who had the key to his private gun room. Donna had never seen the inside of the room, not even when it was being renovated when they had first moved in almost a year earlier, and Jason knew that any attempt to trespass in his stepfather's private gun room would incur serious physical punishment. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was a Biblical injunction that was taken seriously in the home of Homicide Captain Robert G. Millworth.

The gun room was guarded by a keypad working on a separate code from the rest of the house security system, a steel door, and a physical combination lock. The room itself was spartan, with a metal desk, a wall of bookshelves holding a law-enforcement officer's assortment of reference books, and a case behind locked, shatterproof Plexiglas doors in which Hansen's expensive gun collection hung under halogen lights. A large safe was built into the north wall.

Hansen disarmed the third security system, entered the proper combination, and took his titanium case out from where it was nestled with stocks, bonds, and his collection of silver Krugerrands. Returning to his desk, he opened the case and reviewed the contents in the soft glow of the gun-case lights.

The thirteen-year-old girl in Miami two weeks earlier—a Cuban whose name he'd never learned, picking her up at random in the neighborhood where little Elian Gonzalez had stayed a few years earlier—had been Number Twenty-eight. Hansen looked at the Polaroid photos he had taken of her while she was still alive—and later. He paused only briefly at the single photograph he had taken with himself in the frame with her—he always took only one such photo—and then went on to study the rest of his collection. In recent years, he noticed, the twelve- to fourteen-year-olds had developed earlier than the girls of his own childhood. Nutrition, the experts said, although James B. Hansen knew it to be the Devil's work, turning these children into sexual objects sooner than in previous decades and centuries in order to entice men.

But there were no children in his collection of the twenty-eight Culled, Hansen knew, only demonettes who were not the Children of God, but the Spawn of the Enemy. This realization when Hansen was in his twenties—that God had given him this special ability, this second sight to differentiate the human girls from the young demons in human form—was what allowed him to carry out his ordained task.

This last girl's eyes stared up toward the camera after strangulation with that same look of total surprise and terror—surprise at being found out and terror at knowing she had been chosen to be Culled, Hansen knew—as had the other twenty-seven.

He always allowed himself precisely one hour to review the photographs. Showing the self-discipline that separated him from the mindless psychopaths that stalked the world, Hansen never took any souvenirs other than the Polaroid photos. Nor did he masturbate or otherwise attempt to relive the excitement of the actual Culling. This hour of reflection and review every Sunday was to remind him of the seriousness of his mission on earth, nothing more.

At the end of the hour, Hansen locked away the titanium case, looked lovingly at his collection of firearms reflecting the halogen spotlights, and left his gun room, scrambling the combination and activating the special alarm system as he did so. It would be another two or three hours before Donna and Jason returned from her parents' place; Hansen planned to use the time reading his Bible.

Donald Rafferty returned to his Lockport home on Sunday evening, obviously tired from his weekend trip with DeeDee, his Number Two girlfriend. Kurtz was parked down the street and monitoring the bugs in the Rafferty house.

"Did that kid—whatshername, Melissa? — come over this weekend while I was gone?" Rafferty's voice sounded slurred and tired.

"No, Dad."

"You lying to me?"

"No." Kurtz could hear the alarm in Rachel's voice.

"What about boys?"

"Boys?"

"Which boys were here while I was gone, goddammit?"

Kurtz knew from his phone taps that Rachel really didn't talk to any boys, other than Clarence Kleigman, who was in orchestra with her. She would never invite a boy to the house.

"Which boys did you have over here? Tell me the goddamn truth or I'll get the yardstick out."

"No boys, Dad." Rachel's voice was quavering slightly. "Did you have a good business trip?"

"Don't change the fucking subject." Rafferty was still quite drunk.

A minute of ambient noise and hiss. From the crashing around in the kitchen, it sounded like Rafferty was hunting for one of his bottles.

"I have homework to finish," Rachel said. Kurtz knew that she had finished all of her homework by Saturday night. "I'll be upstairs." From the bug in the hall, Kurtz could hear the sound of Rachel slipping the lock shut on her door as Rafferty stamped upstairs and began throwing his clothes around the bathroom.

It was snowing hard. Kurtz let the snow blanket the windshield as he sat listening to random noises through his earphones.

It had not been a promising week. Kurtz followed few rules in life, but not leaving enemies behind him came close to a rule for him, and this week he had left two people around who wished to do him harm—Big Bore Redhawk and the dying man, Johnny Norse. In each case it had simply been more trouble to deal with them than to let them live; Big Bore had more reasons to stay silent in the hospital than to rat Kurtz out, and Johnny Norse had no idea who Kurtz and Angelina were or what Kurtz's relationship to Emilio Gonzaga might be. Kurtz remembered Norse's almost obscene eagerness to hang onto the last dregs of life and felt secure that the dying man would not be contacting Gonzaga about the visit. But Kurtz's motto had always been "Why play the odds when you can fix the race?" In these cases, though, it would be riskier to deal with bodies than with odds.

Still, it was a bad habit to leave loose ends behind him and Kurtz could not afford bad habits at the moment.

Joe Kurtz knew that his one strength over the past dozen years—besides patience—was his ability to survive. Beyond the minimal survival skills necessary for spending more than a decade in a maximum security prison without getting raped or shanked or both, Kurtz had avoided the fatwa of the D-Block Mosque gangs when they had come to believe that he had killed a black enforcer named Ali a year before Kurtz's parole. Once back in Buffalo last autumn, Kurtz had gained the enmity of another black gang—the Seneca Street Social Club—who actually believed that he had thrown their leader, a drug-dealing psychopath named Malcolm Kibunte, over Niagara Falls.

The cops who were tailing him—Brubaker and Myers—believed that Joe Kurtz had shot a crooked homicide detective named Hathaway, even though there was absolutely no evidence for that Kurtz knew that Brubaker's suspicion had been fueled from Attica by Little Skag Farino, whose gratitude for Kurtz having literally saved his ass from Ali was now being shown by the third-rate hit men that Skag was hiring to kill him.

Kurtz doubted that Brubaker and Myers would try to kill him, but sooner or later they would roust him while he was carrying, which meant jail again, which meant all the current death sentences on Kurtz converging.

Then there were the Farino and Gonzaga families. You don't strike—much less kill—a made guy without paying for it; it was one of the last enforceable tenets of the weakening Mafia structure. And while Kurtz had not been involved—directly—in the shootings of Don Farino, his daughter, his lawyer, or his bodyguards the previous autumn, that fact would do him little good. Little Skag knew that Kurtz had not killed his family members, since Little Skag had ordered the hits on them himself, but he was also aware that Kurtz had been there during the denouement at the Farino compound. Joe Kurtz knew too much to stay alive.