“Who’s the guy you were showing your pussy to? I hope he’s paying you big money.”

Misty pulled on her blue jeans. “My old man,” she said. She didn’t look at Gypsy.

“You were sticking your fingers up yourself for your father?” Gypsy had lowered her voice. There was still shouting out in the club.

Misty drew a blue University of New Hampshire sweatshirt over her head. It hung halfway down her thighs. “Not my father, my stepfather. My father’s dead.” Her voice was neutral—the practiced tone she thought she had perfected. She tied her money belt around her waist and shoved it under her jeans. Then she stuck her feet into her Tevas and adjusted the Velcro. She grabbed her green backpack off the hook and collected a couple of loose dance tapes from the shelf along with a squirrel-sized brown teddy bear that was missing an eye. The bear’s name was Harold; she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t have him.

Misty wished she could wash the makeup off her face and body but she didn’t have the time. Maybe later, depending where Tremblay took her. She hoped the detective would stay with them. She was afraid of being alone with Tremblay. Misty dug a blue Red Sox cap out of her bag, then twisted up her hair and pulled the cap over it, turning the cap around so the bill pointed down her back. Taking a towel from a hook, she rubbed it across her mouth and face, trying to remove her lip gloss. The towel smelled of sweat and cheap perfume.

There was a hammering on the door and Bob entered without waiting for a response. He was tall and he shaved his head to look mean. “You’re done. You’re outta here!” He stood holding the door open. Misty could see her stepfather standing just beyond him. Tremblay was brushing his thumb against his gray mustache, and he wore a little smile to indicate he wasn’t surprised. He was never surprised.

“Where’re you going to go?” asked Gypsy, already taking the costumes from the other girl’s locker and putting them in her own.

“School,” said Misty. “I’m going to school. I’m going to start tenth grade.” She tossed the dirty towel at Bob, then walked past him without saying a word.

—

The bigger of the two men walking along the edge of the surf was laughing and scuffing his heels in the sand. It was a cool night on the first day of fall and the men wore dark jackets. The moon to the east was a little past full and seemed to lay a silver finger on the water off Revere Beach as the surf advanced and retreated with hisses and melancholy sighs. There was no wind.

“If you could of seen him, Sally,” he was saying, “I almost pissed myself. That would have made both of us. He was wearing these light pants and suddenly I seen this big wet spot. I couldn’t help it, I snorted right through my mask.”

The smaller man chuckled appreciatively, but all he wanted was to go home. It was past two-thirty and he had an appointment at eight the next morning to look at a greyhound puppy, “a guaranteed champion,” he’d been told.

“He didn’t even notice what he’d done. ‘Jesus, you piece of shit,’ I told him, ‘look what you done to yourself. Didn’t you have a mommy?’”

The smaller man chuckled again. His name was Sal Procopio and he was twenty-six. The guy with him, Frank, was a little older. Sal didn’t know Frank’s last name, or rather, he’d heard Frank give several—all of them French, so maybe he was a Canuck. For that matter, Sal didn’t even know if the guy’s first name was really Frank, so maybe that was phony as well. In fact, the longer he knew Frank, the less he knew him, as if each new fact took away a piece of knowledge instead of adding to the small amount already accumulated. Sal wasn’t sure how he felt about this.

Frank laid an arm across Sal’s shoulder, squeezing the muscle. With his other hand, he accompanied his story, spreading his fingers or closing them into a fist. “But, hey, I didn’t have a lot of time. The longer you’re inside, the bigger chance you take. You hear what I’m saying? What if a cop had wandered in? It could be anybody, some alkie wanting another drink. The chickenshits are worse than the tough guys. They don’t fuckin’ move! This guy just stood there and pissed himself. ‘What’s wrong,’ I tell him, ‘ain’t you seen a gun before?’ Asshole in a liquor store. You’d think he was a virgin. These guys get stuck up all the time.”

Sal tried to keep his feet out of the water but Frank kept bumping him. Although the tide was going out, every so often a large wave sent the foam right up to his basketball shoes. The two men were walking south. Few people were visible: some couples making out but no one nearby. Sal had brought girls to Revere a few times when he was a kid but he didn’t like getting sand in his Jockey shorts and he didn’t like being seen. People knew what you were doing. Even under a blanket, they could tell what was going on. If you couldn’t afford a motel, then you had no business with a girl in the first place, that was how he saw it.

Frank gave his shoulder another squeeze. “So I tell him to get a move on. I should never of been friendly in the first place. ‘We’re closing in ten minutes,’ he says. His back was to me and he hadn’t seen the mask. So I put the barrel against his ear, smacking him a little so I could hear the clunk against his skull and I asked him as sweet as I could, ‘You ever seen one of these?’ He cut his eyes toward it and I cocked it. That little double click—it’s almost like music. That’s when he pissed himself. Jesus, I laughed.”

Sal tried to laugh as well, but it ended up more like a grunt. He’d been out in the car ready to take off at the first sign of trouble, even though he’d sworn to wait. This was their fourth job together and Sal wanted out. In the morning, he’d get this greyhound pup, train him, and make a bundle. It was honest work, pretty much. His only worry was that Frank would get mad when he said he didn’t want to drive anymore. He’d seen Frank’s temper in a bar about two weeks earlier. Frank hadn’t been drinking but that only made it scarier, that he’d try to beat a guy to death cold sober. If he hadn’t been pulled off, Frank would have killed the guy, just beaten his head in with the pool cue. And what had the guy done, for Pete’s sake? Called him a loony when Frank got mad and threw down his cue. Five bucks on the game, and Frank was ready for the slammer. Shit, Sal had been called worse than that, a whole lot worse.

Frank stepped away as another wave came up the beach. The foam glittered and slid toward them. “But the kid wouldn’t do shit. He wouldn’t get the money and wouldn’t budge. A red light on the video camera kept blinking. So I grabbed his hair and shoved the pistol right into his mouth so it jams against his tonsils. ‘You got two seconds,’ I told him. No way was he going to fuck with me, piss or no piss. He straightened up, though he was bawling. Nodding and gagging all at once. At least he emptied the cash register.”

“How much?”

“A couple of grand or more. We’ll count it out.”

The two men had met at a bar across from Wonderland in May. Frank was from New Hampshire, at least that’s what Sal thought. He was about five ten, with a narrow face and thick dark hair that he slicked back with gel. Frank wouldn’t say much about himself. Sometimes he talked about cooking, so maybe he’d been a cook. He told a lot of jokes and had no trouble talking to women. He was always upbeat, or pretty much. He didn’t seem to have a job and Sal figured he made his money at the track, until Frank asked him to drive for him. Before that Sal had already told him about his troubles with the law. Frank had been sympathetic, like he’d had cop problems of his own. And Frank didn’t drink much or do drugs. He seemed like a guy who was always in charge so Sal figured he could do the driving. After all, he’d be sitting in the car; if anything bad happened, he could drive away. That was in June. Now Sal didn’t trust Frank anymore. He’d seen him in fights, he’d listened to stories that he’d thought were total bullshit, then he got to be unsure. Frank didn’t have a lid, was how Sal put it to himself. If he thought of doing a thing, he’d do it. He was like a drunk but he never got drunk and Sal almost laughed at that, though he didn’t feel like laughing and only wanted to get his cut and go home, have a glass of milk, eat a couple of Devil Dogs, and hit the sack.