“I can pay you,” said the old woman.

She raised a pathetic handful of ragged bills.

“I don’t want yo money,” he said. “Get out of my face.”

“Please,” she said. “Just look at this picture.”

She held up the picture of the young black woman.

G-Mack glanced at the photograph, then tried to look away as casually as he could, the sick feeling in his stomach growing suddenly stronger.

“Don’t know her,” said G-Mack.

“Maybe-”

“I said I ain’t never seen her.”

“But you didn’t even look prop-”

And in his fear, G-Mack made his biggest mistake. He lashed out at her, catching her on the left cheek. She staggered back against the wall, a pale spot against her skin where his open hand had struck her.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Don’t you be comin round here no more.”

The woman swallowed, and he could see the tears starting, but she tried to hold them back. Old bitch had some balls, he’d give her that. She replaced the photograph in her bag, then walked away. Across the street, G-Mack could see Chantal staring at him.

“The fuck you lookin’ at?” he shouted to her. He made a move toward her, and she backed away, her body eventually obscured by a green Taurus that pulled up alongside her, the middle-aged business type inside easing down the window as he negotiated with her. When they’d agreed on a price, Chantal climbed in alongside him, and they pulled off, headed for one of the lots off the main drag. That was another thing he’d have to talk about with the bitch: curiosity.

Jackie Garner was at one side of the window, and I was at the other. Using a little dentist’s mirror I’d picked up, I’d seen two men watching TV in the living room. One of them was Torrans’s brother, Garry. The drapes on what I took to be a bedroom nearby were drawn, and I thought I could hear a man and a woman talking inside. I signaled to Jackie that he should stay where he was, then I moved to the bedroom window. Using the raised fingers of my right hand, I counted three, two, one, then hurled the smoke canister through the window of the room. Jackie tossed his through the glass of the living room, then followed it with a second. Instantly, noxious green fumes began to pour from the holes. We backed away, taking up positions in the shadows across from the front and back doors to the house. I could hear coughing and shouting inside, but I could see nothing. Already, the smoke had entirely filled the living room. The stench was incredible, and even at a distance my eyes were stinging.

It wasn’t just smoke. It was gas too.

The front door opened, and two men spilled out into the yard. One of them had a gun in his hand. He fell to his knees on the grass and began to retch. Jackie came at him from out of nowhere, put one big foot on the gun hand, and kicked him hard with the other. The other man, Garry Torrans, just lay on the ground, the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes.

Seconds later, the back door opened and Olivia Morales stumbled out. David Torrans was close behind her. He was shirtless, and a wet towel was pressed to his face. Once he was away from the house he discarded it and made a break for the next yard. His eyes were red and streaming, but he wasn’t suffering as badly as the others. He had almost made it to the wall when I emerged from the darkness and swept his feet from under him. He landed hard on his back, the wind abruptly knocked out of him by the impact. He lay there, staring up at me, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Who are you?” he said.

“My name’s Parker,” I said.

“You gassed us.”

He vomited the words out.

“You tried to steal my car.”

“Yeah, but…you gassed us. What kind of sonofabitch gasses someone?”

Jackie Garner shambled across the lawn. Behind him, I could see Garry and the other man lying on the ground, their hands and legs bound with plastic ties. Torrans’s head turned to take in the new arrival.

“This kind,” I told him.

Jackie shrugged.

“Sorry,” he said to Torrans. “At least I know it works.”

G-Mack lit a cigarette and noticed that his hands were shaking. He didn’t want to think about the girl in the picture. She was gone, and G-Mack didn’t never want to see the men who took her again. They found out someone was asking after her, and then another pimp would be taking care of the Mack’s team, because the Mack would be dead.

The Mack didn’t know it, but he had only days left to live. He should never have hit the woman.

And in the white-tiled room, Alice, now torn and ruined, prepared to breathe her last. The mouth of another touched her lips, waiting. He could sense it coming, could taste its sweetness. The woman shuddered, then grew limp. He felt her spirit enter him, and a new voice was added to the great chorus within.

CHAPTER TWO

The days are like leaves, waiting to fall.

The past lies in the shadows of our lives. It is endlessly patient, secure in the knowledge that all we have done, and all that we have failed to do, must surely return to haunt us in the end. When I was young, I cast each day aside unthinkingly, like dandelion seeds committed to the wind, floating harmlessly from the hands of a boy and vanishing over his shoulder as he moved onward along the path toward the sunset, and home. Nothing was to be regretted, for there were more days to come. Slights and injuries would be forgotten, hurts would be forgiven, and there was radiance enough in the world to light the days that followed.

Now, as I look back over my shoulder at the path that I have taken, I can see that it has become tangled and obscured by undergrowth, where the seeds of past actions and half-acknowledged sins have taken root. Another shadows me along the path. She has no name, but she looks like Susan, my dead wife; and Jennifer, my first daughter, who was killed beside her in our little house in New York, walks with her.

For a time I wished that I had died with them. Sometimes that regret returns.

I move more slowly through life now, and the growth is catching up with me. There are briars around my ankles, weeds brush my fingertips as I walk, and the ground beneath my feet crackles with the fallen leaves of half-dead days.

The past is waiting for me, a monster of my own creation.

The past is waiting for us all.

I awoke to darkness, with dawn impending. Beside me, Rachel slept, unknowing. In a small room next to ours, our infant daughter rested. We had made this place together. It was supposed to be a safe haven, but what I saw around me was no longer our home. It was some composite, a collision of remembered places. This was the bed that Rachel and I chose, yet it stood now not in a bedroom overlooking the Scarborough marshes but in an urban landscape. I could hear street voices raised, and sirens crying in the distance. There was a dresser from my parents’ house, and on it lay my dead wife’s cosmetics. I could see a brush on the cabinet to my left, over Rachel’s sleeping head. Her hair was red. The hairs caught in the brush were blond.

I rose. I entered a hallway in Maine, and descended stairs in New York. In the living room, she waited. Beyond the window, the marshes shone with silver, incandescent with moonlight. Shadows moved across the waters, although there was a cloudless night sky above. The shapes drifted endlessly east, until at last they were swallowed up by the waiting ocean beyond. There was no traffic now, and no sounds of the city broke the fragile quiet of the night. All was stillness, but for the shadows on the marsh.

Susan sat by the window, her back to me, her hair tied with an aquamarine bow. She stared through the glass at a little girl who skipped on the lawn. Her hair was like her mother’s. Her head was down as she counted her steps.