When they are finished, heavily lathered after such a workout in such heat, the boy reaches into the Dumpster and retrieves the gallon plastic bottle he had placed there earlier in the day. He completes his task by pouring the contents—the full measure of two thirty-ounce cans of beef broth—over the length of his father’s corpse.

The boy and girl agree that they have done the world a favor. Of course, the law enforcement agencies will not see it that way. And thus they must split up. She will return to her foster home, where she is, at that very minute, on the third floor, asleep. He will take the Greyhound to San Diego. From there, a cousin will bring him into Mexico, a place where he will be safe.

They hold each other in a long, silent embrace, just as they had held each other in that doorway nearly a decade earlier. Then, for her own safety, the girl gets in her car, a car belonging to her foster mother, a late-model Toyota for which the girl had made a duplicate key months earlier. She meets her brother’s eyes one last time as he readies the key at the back of the van. He had stolen the van earlier in the day and will leave it a dozen or so blocks from the Greyhound bus station at East Thirteenth Street and Chester Avenue.

They had collected the dogs for the past two weeks, alternately starving them, then throwing them the slightest morsels of rancid beef. The dogs are ravenous, insane with hunger, and long bereft of any notion of their place as domesticated animals in a civilized world. There are four of them in the back of the van. Two Rottweilers, two Dobermans.

The boy opens the door and carefully, one by one, removes their muzzles. Within seconds, the four big dogs are out, their huge paws chewing up the gravel to get to this fallen cousin so freshly and mortally wounded in the primordial mist of their need.

As the boy and girl look on, the dogs descend upon the body with a viciousness that has lived in their beings, untapped, for centuries. The boy and girl understand completely, for they too have carried a dark violence within them for years, a visceral craving for this moment.

And so they watch, still and silent and rapt, two children of the same mother.

But, at this moment, their thoughts are one.

Rest now, Lydia.

Rest.

The girl pulls out of the lot first, leaving the boy in the driver’s seat of the van, idling, lights off, watching the last of the carnage unfold.

Mexico, he thinks. He does not know it yet, but Mexico is a place where he will learn the way of the road, the way of the night, the way by which all things must pass at least once as the devil smiles upon them. The way beside which all other ways pale.

In Mexico, he will learn the way of the saints.

24

She is horrified. Disgusted. More than a little afraid. And completely bewildered.

Here’s what she knows. Or thinks she knows.

Jean Luc and his sister beat their father to death because their father was an animal and abused their mother. Then they let dogs eat him.

But how does she know the story is true? How does she know that Jean Luc is really the boy in the story? And what can it possibly have to do with her? Did he tell her that story just to frighten her? On top of the blackmail?

She looks up to see him cross the room, pick up Isabella’s photo.

Fighting her growing nausea, she sprints across the room, takes the photograph from him, as forcefully as she dares, and places it in the end table drawer. “What do you want from me? Just tell me what the fuck you want from me.”

“Tonight? Nothing.” He takes her chin in his right hand, angles her face toward his. “But tomorrow. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“It is a magical night and I want you to have the best time possible.”

She remains absolutely still, silent.

“Tomorrow night you are going to a party,” he continues. “A party filled with laughter and goodwill and all the other joys of the season.”

She looks at his handsome face, thinks about him as a thirteen-year-old boy, a bloodied baseball bat in his hands. She considers the will that must have propelled that fury. She feels it seething from him as he moves ever closer. She retreats, little by little, until her back is to the wall. Is any of this true? She has no idea. But she is a realist, if nothing else, and knows the box score. As long as Jean Luc has those pictures of her at the Dream-A-Dream Motel, it doesn’t really matter if the story is true or not.

Jean Luc says: “All I want you to think about, between now and tomorrow night, are three little words.”

He touches her cheek.

For a moment she feels, what, charmed?

In the middle of all this?

“What three words?” she asks.

He tells her, counting each word off with his fingers.

“Merry Christmas, Jack.”

25

Jack Paris stands in the checkout line at the Rite Aid drugstore at East 113th Street and Euclid Avenue, a ridiculous parody of a Christmas tree in his hands. Actually, he is holding a box no bigger than a boot box, a box that allegedly contains a “full 36-inch-tall Christmas tree, great for small spaces!”

He has decided that he will not let this Christmas pass without some sort of cheer in his otherwise cheerless apartment.

The line is moving slowly, but that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incessant, mind-scrambling ring of the Salvation Army bell, courtesy of the Santa-clad volunteer standing just outside the door. Paris, like everyone else in the store, would like to take Santa out with a spinning back kick and stomp that bell flatter than a tuna can on the freeway.

Instead, after paying for his tree in a box, he nods at Santa as he passes him and, as per routine, walks another ten feet or so, spins on his heels, saunters back, and dumps a buck in the bucket.

“Thank you,” Santa says. “And Happy Holidays.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Paris answers, his grumpiness a receipt for his small generosity.

Paris reaches his car and opens the trunk. At least one-third of his life stares back at him. After some clever maneuvering, he is able to slip the Christmas tree box into the left side, next to the gym bag containing workout sweats that have already survived two full years in the trunk without ever having seen the inside of a gym.

Then, from behind him, a sunny voice says: “What a softie.”

Paris turns around to see Mercedes Cruz. They had planned to meet here and she is right on time. “Hi,” he says.

“Saw you give in to the Christmas spirit there, detective.”

“Don’t let it get out, okay?” Paris says, slamming the trunk, hoping, for some reason, that Mercedes hadn’t seen his pathetic tree-thing. “Cops have four million charities and I’d never have a minute’s peace. In fact, tonight is the annual Cleveland League Christmas party. Bunch of conscience-plagued cops and inner-city kids. I go every year. It’s my penance.”

“You are a softie. I admire that in a . . . married man?”

“Divorced,” Paris says.

“I admire it even more,” she says, then instantly covers her mouth with a magenta-mittened hand. “Oh my goodness, was that sexual harassment?”

“Let’s see. Who has the power here?”

“I’d say it’s equal. I’ve got a pen. You’ve got a gun.”

“Then it was a compliment.”

“Whew,” Mercedes says.

“But let’s keep it to a minimum,” Paris says. “First it’s compliments, then the next thing you know people will think the press and the police are getting along.”

“I won’t let it happen again.”

“By the way, I met your brother. He took a few photos of this crooked face and busted nose.”

“You’ve got to be shittin’ me,” Mercedes says.

“What?”

“My brother actually did something I asked him to? Unbelievable.”