After a few interminable minutes more, he heard the sound of multiple footsteps on the stairs.

A crowd came up to the second-floor landing. Jesse counted seven people all together. Five of them were Candy’s henchmen, all cut from the same cloth: men with the upper-body strength of miners, all dressed in flashy clothing and all conspicuously armed. They varied in the details—younger, older, bearded, clean-shaven—but they were uniformly unhappy, snarling and gritting their teeth at whatever had just happened.

After them came Roscoe Candy himself. It had been years since Jesse had set eyes on him, and Candy had diminished in the interval. Part of that was surely an illusion: The memory was larger than the man. Some of it was a genuine physical diminishment. Candy had not died of the wound Jesse had inflicted on him, but the wings of death had brushed him. He wasn’t the bean-shaped, muscular force of nature he once had been. His belly had shrunk and looked lopsided. His face was scrawnier. But his wide, deceptively gentle eyes—like the glass eyes they put in porcelain dolls, Jesse thought—had not changed. Nor had his taste in clothing: He wore a red-and-white-striped jersey, like a sailor’s jersey, and a striped schoolboy cap. Nor had he lost his love of honed blades. He carried a long-bladed knife, like a flensing knife, in his hand. He was holding it at Elizabeth’s throat.

Elizabeth was the seventh person on the landing, and she was Roscoe Candy’s captive. Her dress was soiled and stained with blood. The blood came from her left flank, just under the ribs. The wound was messy but apparently not disabling—and a deep cut in that place would have taken her down quickly. She was pale and seemed frightened but not panicked. Her eyes repeatedly strayed to the knife in Candy’s hand, as if she were wondering how best to take it from him. Which, for all Jesse knew, she had been trained to do. But she didn’t know Roscoe Candy. How famously fast he was with a blade. How difficult to deceive or surprise.

Candy’s men were arguing fiercely. Jesse caught the name Wheeler, the name of the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler had been remiss in his duties was the gist of it; Wheeler had failed to warn them of something, presumably Elizabeth’s approach. Candy nodded at one of the five men and said, “Wake up that dog and send him down—tell him I want a word with him. And you stay up there and keep your damned eyes open. If this one’s come for us,”—meaning Elizabeth—“the other won’t be far behind.”

The designated man headed down the hallway, straight toward Jesse’s hiding place in the turret room. The others approached Phoebe’s room, inside of which they would find one of their men dead—testimony to the fact that Jesse was already in the house and prepared to fight. But he could do nothing about that right now.

He hurried up the iron staircase to the upper room and out onto the widow’s walk, stepping over the body of Mr. Wheeler, whose open eyes had gone cloudy. The moon shone down through a red, smoky haze. Jesse put his back to the wall and waited.

Candy’s henchman came up the staircase as subtly as a buffalo, every footfall a bell-like clank. He came through the door onto the widow’s walk and looked at the corpse of Wheeler at his feet and blinked as if he thought Wheeler might only be asleep, at which point Jesse shot him through the head. Unpleasant residue flew between the struts of the iron railing to the shadowy garden below.

By now Candy must have discovered the body in Phoebe’s room. Had he also heard Jesse’s gunshot? Maybe, maybe not. Jesse didn’t want to be cornered, so some misdirection was called for.

He took from his pocket one of the two flash-bang grenades he had brought with him. The flash-bang, also called a stun grenade, was a simple device: a black canister about the size of a can of beans, with a bright metal ring hanging out of it. Like the Taser he had sold to Little Tom, it was one of a class of weapons the City people called “nonlethal.” The concept of a nonlethal weapon had sounded idiotic to Jesse when he had first been introduced to it—what was a nonlethal weapon supposed to do, annoy your enemies?

No. In the case of the flash-bang, it was supposed to render your enemy temporarily blind, deaf, and disoriented—for thirty seconds or so, maybe longer if you factored in surprise and lingering confusion. But this particular flash-bang didn’t need to do any of that. It just needed to be loud.

Jesse depressed the safety lever, pulled the ring, and dropped the grenade over the railing of the widow’s walk.

He didn’t wait for the concussion but hustled into the turret and began to take the stairs two rungs at a time, no longer worried about the noise he was making. Plenty more noise to come, he thought. The grenade was on a two-second delay. It detonated as he was halfway between the upper and lower turret rooms. The stone walls of the house were impervious to anything short of artillery fire, but the concussion was audible even here. With any luck, it might have broken a window or two.

He reached the door to the hallway in time to watch from hiding as Candy’s men reacted. Three men boiled out of Phoebe’s bedroom with Roscoe Candy’s curses following them: “Find that son of a bitch before the whole of California Street comes crowding in to see what blew up,” which was a real possibility, Jesse hoped, though the city’s fire brigades and police were almost certainly busy in the Chinese quarter.

The three men headed downstairs, guns drawn. Which left Candy and one other man in the room with the hostages. Which sounded to Jesse like tolerable odds. Unfortunately, his only option was a frontal assault. Phoebe’s room had but a single door, and Candy was more than shrewd enough to have anticipated a hostile approach.

But the time for subtlety was past. Jesse took a Glock in each hand and ran down the hallway. At Phoebe’s door he slowed and swerved and hit the door, which wheeled inward, revealing one of Candy’s gunmen braced against the opposite wall with a revolver aimed and ready. The gunman fired first, and Jesse felt the bullet as a sharp blow to his right arm, but it only turned him a little and he was able to get off a shot that passed through his opponent’s throat. The gunman gawked blankly and slumped down the wall, leaving a smeary trail of blood. Jesse ducked to make himself a smaller target and swiveled to survey the room, and here was Roscoe Candy himself, a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face and his flensing knife still pressed to Elizabeth’s throat. “Put your pistols down,” he said.

*   *   *

Jesse hesitated. But he had no real choice but to obey. And he didn’t have to ask what Candy’s next move would be. Candy would cut Elizabeth’s throat and force Jesse to watch her die.

“Now,” Candy said.

Jesse held the pistols by their grips and bent at the knee, keeping his eyes locked on Candy’s. Peripheral vision told him a few interesting things. Including the fact that Phoebe, Abbie, and Soo Yee seemed not to be present.

“They’re in the closet,” Candy said. “Your sister, the old lady, the slant-eyed girl. But are they alive or are they dead? That’s the question!”

It was not a question Jesse wanted to consider. He placed the City pistols on the carpet and straightened up.

“Now empty your pockets.”

Jesse’s pockets were full to bursting. He had Wheeler’s pistol, spare clips for the Glocks, another flash-bang, and his iPod. He removed these items, taking as much time as he guessed Candy would tolerate, and spared a glance at Phoebe’s closet.

It was a big space, he knew. Unless her habits had changed over the last five years, Phoebe didn’t keep much in it. Three people could stand in there and feel only moderately crowded. Or it could hold three corpses, stacked like cordwood. Jesse sensed no motion from inside. Heard no sound of movement.