The wheel vibrated under Jack's hands. "What did the sign say?"

"What d'you mean?" Armitage was bewildered. "You could read it as well as I could."

"Just tell me what it said!" Jack shouted.

"It said Kirby Road was under construction for the next half mile."

There was no help for it now. "Hang on," Jack said grimly.

They jounced over the rutted roadbed, Jack swinging the car back and forth in order to avoid the deepest holes. The bone-jarring half mile seemed to take forever; then the car reared up onto smooth tarmac. Jack could see the gray BMW negotiating the road behind them.

Swiveling back around, Armitage said, "Why is someone following us?"

"Damn good question."

Jack flicked open his phone, dialed his ATF office, which was not five minutes away. "It's McClure; get me Bennett," he said as soon as someone answered. Chief Rodney Bennett came on the line right away.

"How's it hanging, Jack?"

"I'll know in a couple of minutes, Chief. I've got a high-powered tail on me. Late-model gray BMW Five Series. Three minutes from now I'll be on Claiborne Drive. I need a stop 'n' shop."

"I'm all over it," Bennett growled.

"Right. Later." He folded away his phone.

"Open the glove box," he said to Armitage. "Take out a pad and pen."

Armitage did as he was told.

Precisely three minutes later, Jack took a left onto Claiborne Drive. This was a high-rent district with large, gracious homes, spacious front lawns, expensive landscaping.

Jack, one eye on the rearview mirror, saw the gray BMW corner after them, its distinctive front end just entering Claiborne.

"Why are you slowing down?" Armitage was truly alarmed now. "They'll be on top of us before-!"

"Shut up and take down the BMW's tag number," Jack snapped.

"Got it," Armitage said, scribbling hurriedly.

Jack heard sirens on Kirby, heading straight for them.

With the BMW close enough to rear-end him, he suddenly veered to the left. The BMW jumped the curb, plowed over a lawn, through a low hedge of boxwood, veered out of sight around the side of the house just as a pair of ATF cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, tore up Osborne Drive, bracketing Jack's car.

NINETEEN

THE MAN we got t'see, he don't like people he don't know," Gus says. "Plus, he don't like whitey, so that makes two strikes against you."

"You want me to stay in the car?" Jack says.

Gus turns the wheel over, rolls slowly down T Street SE. "Huh. You stay in the car, the Marmoset he liable to come over, shoot you through the head. He don't ask me, should I do sumthin'. It don't smell kosher to him, he acts."

"What's a marmoset?" Jack asks.

"Some kinda monkey, I think, likes the treetops in forests, sumthin' like that, anyway."

"You ever see one? I mean a real marmoset."

"Me, no."

Gus's eyes are scanning the street. Jack can feel something in Gus condensing with concentration.

"When you think I got time t'go to the zoo?"

Between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, Gus pulls into the curb, turns off the engine.

"This here's Anacostia, no place fo' you, okay? So jes' keep close t' me, don't say a word, and do yo' thing, got me?"

"Gotcha," Jack says.

The Continental's enormous engine ticks over like a clock winding down. The heat of the early evening seeps in, begins to weigh on the air-conditioned air. Gus grunts, opens the driver's door.

They're on a street of narrow row houses sided with peeling wooden slats. Tiny overgrown front yards are divided by cyclone fencing. A huge German shepherd starts to bark, throwing itself against the fence as its jaws snap.

"Hey, Godzilla." Gus strolls over to the fence, Jack right behind him. "Marmoset's neighbor keeps Zilla half-starved so he'll go for anybody gets too close." Gus digs in his pocket, pulls out a handful of dog biscuits, launches them over the fence. "Can't stand to see a animal mistreated."

As Godzilla cracks down on the first biscuit, Gus and Jack approach the next house. "My father, he was a dogcatcher," Gus says. "Man, he hated his job-dealing with 'em alla time-the rabies, the mistreatment, he come up against it all."

Gus leads them up the steps of a house painted the color of the evening sky. It has neat white shutters and a roof without the tar paper patches of its neighbors.

"This it here." He raps on the door.

There's a short pause, then, "Come on in," a male voice calls.

The instant Gus opens the door, three gunshots ring out, and Gus throws Jack unceremoniously back out onto the stoop. Jack's ears ring, he can't hear a thing, but from his prone position he sees Gus pull a Magnum.357 from his jacket, bang open the door. He shouts something to Jack as he vanishes into the interior, but Jack can't hear what it is.

Jack pushes himself up and runs inside. As he passes the door, he sees three bullet holes ripped clear through the wood. It's strange to feel himself moving, but to hear nothing except the ringing in his ears, beneath which is a dead, all-encompassing silence. It's as if the world has been stuffed solid with cotton balls.

Sprinting after Gus, he finds himself in a dimly lit room, so cluttered with books, records, magazines, strewn clothes, hats, shoes, sneakers that it seems like a maze. The ceiling fixtures have been removed, leaving bare patches like the hide of a mangy dog. Instead, a multitude of lamps on tables, chairs, the floor provide weird colored light. It's a moment before Jack realizes that all the lampshades are draped with colored bits of fabric, dimming the illumination as well as dyeing it.

Across the room he sees Gus lumber back toward him from a butter-yellow kitchen. The Magnum is pointed at the floor. Gus says something to him, gesturing emphatically with his free hand, but Jack is still deaf from the aftermath of the gunshots, possibly in shock, and keeps on coming.

He sidesteps a precariously stacked pile of books, stumbles clumsily over another, larger mound. It has one red mark on its back, like a chalk mark or a brand. Then it hits him. First, his balance deserts him, then his legs turn watery, and he falls.

On his hands and knees, he finds himself not six inches from a thin, scarred face. The eyes, open wide, stare back at him. Then he becomes aware of the trickle of blood leaking from the corner of the half-open mouth, the horrific stench of offal, and he screams, leaping backwards, tripping over a pair of boots, tumbling onto his backside, his legs in the air. It would be funny if Jack weren't so terrified. He pushes himself to his feet, smacks blindly into the wall in a desperate attempt to run out of the house. His only thought is to get as far away from the dead man as he can.

He's crying, and he's sick, vomiting onto the floor. He can't get the sight of those staring eyes out of his mind. He wants only to have time run backwards, to be back in Gus's air-conditioned Continental, safe and secure, before this all began.

Then Gus grabs him by the collar, hauls him off his feet. Jack is hysterical, kicking and screaming, and the fact that he's still half-deaf makes everything worse, as if he's living out a nightmare from which he can't pinch himself awake. Nothing is real, and yet everything is all too real: those eyes, the blood drooling out of the half-open mouth, the stench of excrement and death, of a human body letting go of life. It's all too much. His fists beat a silent tattoo against Gus's shoulders; his shoes swing back and forth into Gus's shins.

Then he's outside and Gus has let him go and he doubles over, gagging and retching, feeling as if every atom in his body is exploding in pain and terror. He is empty inside. His guts feel as if they have been turned inside out. Every nerve in his body is firing at once, making his limbs jump, his torso twitch.