At a quarter to 4:45 p.m., Central Standard Time, Kevin Trout checks in at the front desk—which is situated in a little clapboard shack near the entrance gate. Then he drives his mistress around the winding blacktop to the last windowless Quonset hut on the east edge of the complex.

  He grabs his little bag of tricks from his trunk, and then escorts a giggling Cathy O’Dell up the landscaped walk to the door.

  “Home sweet home,” Cathy purrs, after Kevin ushers her inside Building 12-A and locks the door.

  Scanning the room, she takes in the purple shag on the floor, the mirrors on the ceiling above the circular bed, the glass-encased Swedish sauna, the boxcar-shaped lap pool, and the Jacuzzi happily bubbling away in the corner. Above the pool, a thin tendril of water trickles down from a fountain embedded in the ceiling. The soft murmur of Chi-Lites music plays through recessed speakers in the bed’s pedestal.

  Trout drops the duffel bag, which clunks noisily with metal and fabric. “C’mere, you.”

  Cathy goes to him, and they tangle up in a heated embrace, already breathing hard. Their tongues come out and probe each other’s mouths. He pulls her blouse up and cups her tiny breasts. He whispers in her ear: “You really gonna do the thing tonight?”

  “What the hell, right?” she whispers. “You only live once.”

  “Oh my God, I’m getting harder than Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

  She grins. “Let’s see it.”

  She watches him carefully unzip the canvas bag. He starts pulling out the adult-sized diapers, the Little Bo Peep baby bonnet, the giant rubber pacifier. Way at the bottom of the bag is the apparatus. It looks like a block and tackle, like something a mechanic might use to lift an engine out of a truck.

  Cathy O’Dell stares at the apparatus. “All right then... in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  * * *

  Gerbil finds a spot just south of the Harum’s property line, along the edge of a vacant lot. She pulls behind a garbage dumpster and slams the stick into NEUTRAL.

  Through the passenger window and the spindly, diseased trees, Oswald can see Building 12-A, the late afternoon sun glimmering off the hut’s shingles. He is reaching for the door handle, his head pounding unmercifully, when his cell phone starts chirping.

  “Who’s calling, please,” he says, after positioning the Bluetooth earpiece. The number on the caller ID window looks familiar but he can’t place it.

  The Candy Man’s voice crackles on the other end. “Hey, Big Chief, whassup?”

  “Candy?”

  “That’s right, dawg, it’s your homey from the home team, your inside man, your blood brother. Now listen. Something important’s come up, Chief, and I gots to give you the 4-1-1—A-S-A-P—and you gotta trust me on this, dawg, it’s O-M-G.”

  26.

  “Tell that asshole you’ll call him back,” Gerbil says, killing the engine. She gathers up her denim jacket and her Camels. She wears a torn purple unitard embellished with strategically spray-painted profanities—a remnant of her days with her garage band, the Flotsam and the Jetsons—and she has a fervid, pinched expression on her face, like a child being forced to do homework.

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something right now,” Oswald informs the caller, pushing open his door and climbing out of the truck.

  Oswald steps around the front of the S-10 as he whispers into the Bluetooth, adjusting the gun, which is wedged behind his belt. Icy-hot chills surge through him. “I’m going to need to call you back.”

  Gerbil comes around the front of the truck. “Tell him to fuck off already. Jesus Christ. And gimme one of your pistols.”

  Dizziness swirls through Oswald’s head, and he has to grab the door handle to steady himself. The back of his scalp tingles—a shard of broken glass shooting through his left eye. “Hold on a second, Candy—”

  “C’mon, c’mon.” Gerbil has her hand out. “Gimme a gun, c’mon—”

  “I am not giving you a gun.” Oswald blinks away the light-spots dotting his vision. “Just watch the front door so they don’t get away.”

  Through the Bluetooth: “Hey, Chief? Did I lose ya? Y’all still there?”

  “Goddamnit, Candy, hold on.” Oswald looks at Gerbil. “Why are you doing this?”

  Petulant, Gerbil puts her hands on her hips. “I am not budging until you give me a fucking gun.”

  “Jesus!” Oswald marches around behind the truck, yanks the tailgate down, throws the tarp back, fishes inside the trunk, and digs out a little filed-down .38 Police Special. “You’re gonna shoot your damn foot off!”

  “Is it loaded?” Gerbil says, holding out her hand. “Are there bullets in it, Ozzy?”

  “Yes, there are bullets in it!” He hands it to her.

  “Chief? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Candy, I can hear you!” Oswald hisses into the Bluetooth, then turns to Gerbil. “C’mon, let’s do this thing—before we lose the lovebirds.”

  He grabs Gerbil by the arm, then starts dragging her across the gravel apron and into the undergrowth. The late-afternoon sun has sharpened its angles, filtering down through the dust motes in shafts of dirty light, the air thick with gnats. “Candy, what the fuck do you want?”

  “Awright... what it is, is there’s another motherfucker making it to Top of the Pops.”

  Oswald reaches the Harum’s back fence, and gives Gerbil a boost over the concertina wire.

  They land in a mushy patch of weeds, sodden and moldy with a recent rain. Bungalow 12-A is less than twenty yards away, the lovebirds’ little baby-shit-yellow Ford Focus tucked into the carport.

  “I’m still listening,” Oswald says into the wireless. His heart is starting to chug as he creeps across the weeds with Gerbil on his flank. With the moon full in less than four days, he needs every opportunity to save another asshole he can get. “Go on, Candy.”

  “You said you wanted to hear about every contract comes down the line.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, this one deal, it comes all the way down from the Don himself. You stop this one, you can really fuck with the old man.”

  Oswald does not notice the strange, wooden tone in the Candy Man’s voice—almost as though the pimp is reading a script—nor does Oswald wonder how the Candy Man knows about Oswald’s quest to save lives. Oswald doesn’t even notice that Gerbil has already split off, vanishing around the opposite side of the bungalow. The plan is for her to wait in front, guarding the entrance.

  But Oswald is not thinking about the bungalow right now. At the moment, he is too distracted by the icy needle of pain shooting down the bridge of his nose. He is drenched in sweat.

  He falls against the back of the building, his massive shoulder banging into an unmarked access door that is obscured by the shadows of poplar trees. This narrow, unmarked slab of framed timber—the egress commonly used by cleaning crews—has a cheap dead bolt. A little welcome mat hewn from weathered Astroturf, the color of rotten eggs, lies at the base of the door, fringed in weeds.

  Oswald fights the dark shade threatening to swallow him up as he pulls a jimmy-pick from his back pocket and starts digging at the bolt.

  “Chief—?”

  “Hold on a second, Candy, I’m interested, but right now I gotta—”

  Oswald stops and looks down. The Astroturf welcome mat is moving beneath him, the moldy little filaments of grass undulating like a carpet of bugs, roiling and liquifying and changing.

  “Chief, you there—?”

  “I’m—I’m in the—” His boots appear to be sinking into the welcome mat now, which has morphed into a spongy quicksand, bubbling and cracking like an undercooked pie. Through the cracks, narrow scintillas of brilliant orange light shoot up, radiating heat, as though Oswald is being sucked down into hot porridge.

  He tries to say something—tries to pull himself free of the miraculous gunk—but the dizziness is a tidal wave now, washing over him, drowning him.

  He sinks into oblivion, everything going black except for the flickering fire of the netherworld.

  * * *

  Oswald lands with a thud on hard-packed earth in a haze of wood smoke. Gasping for breath, coughing, lungs heaving for air, as though he’s underwater, he gazes around the shadowy, alien world, trying to get his bearings. He is drenched to the bone in his own sweat, and the chills are constant now. He is shivering so convulsively now his teeth and jaw are clenched. At first all he can see are blurry shapes and the flickering orange glow of a campfire.

  “Dude, you gotta get on the ball—I mean, time is running out.”

  The voice comes from Oswald’s left—a familiar husky voice from his misspent youth—and Oswald twists around just in time to see a portly little gentleman in a John Deere cap and beard give him a sad little salute. The man sits on the earthen floor, his face only partially visible in the firelight.

  Next to the man in the cap, the stoic old Ho-Chunk Chieftain sits cross-legged and mute. Ancient leathery face down-turned, shadows dancing across his deeply lined features, the Chief holds a two-foot long bundle of sage in his huge wrinkled hands. The end of the smudge stick is smoking. His face is the picture of exasperation.

  “Duffy?” The word puffs out of Oswald’s lungs on a wave of recognition, as he stares at his old friend, then at the Chieftain, then back at the chubby little man in the cap. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Just trying to help,” the man replies with a shrug, chewing a plug of Red Man.

  “Are you dead?”

  “Shit no, I ain’t dead. Got a wife and kids, live in Albuquerque.”

  “Then what are you—?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he says with another shrug. “It’s your hallucination.”

  Scott Edward Duff, one of Oswald’s only friends from his misspent youth, now wears overalls that strain against his rotund midsection. His round, suntanned face and droopy hound dog eyes radiate the honest ignorance of a man without ambition.

  “Where the hell am I? Is this like... hell or something?” Oswald rubs his eyes and gazes around the hot, smoky chamber surrounding him. There are others gathered in the blue fog, sitting around him on the floor like a tribunal, their baleful faces flickering in the light of a fire pit: the Head-Wound Guy, the Drug Dealer, the Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses, even Alberta Goldstein. There are others present as well, non-victims—Indians, tribal elders—with their war paint on, their beatific faces shimmering with perspiration, strobing in the dancing light.

  The air is sultry with magic.

  Oswald notices the beehive shape of the domed chamber, the way the walls are framed out of red willow sticks, tied together with rawhide and covered with Buffalo skins and old quilts. He notices the care with which the fire has been kindled and stoked in its ceremonial stone pit, not to mention the two forked antlers sticking out of the earth on either side of the pit, and the sacred lemon branches forming a spit. The dimensions and design of the sweat lodge are perfect—straight out of a history book.

  For thousands of years, members of the Winnebago tribe have used these enclosures for vision quests and other ceremonies.

  The Ho-Chunk Chief calmly leans over and whispers something to Scott Duff.

  Duffy looks at Oswald. “He says you should stop changing the subject.”

  Oswald stares at the man in the cap. “What are you—a translator now?”

  “I learned a little Ho-Chunk back on the Res’—you know, enough to get me by.”

  The Chief whispers something else.

  Duffy gives Oswald a shrug. “He says he’s tired of speaking the white man’s tongue, and he’s tired of waiting for you to save enough lives.”

  Oswald is confused. “What is he talking about? I already got five on the scoreboard, and I’d have two more if you guys would just stop interrupting me.”

  The Chief leans down to Duffy’s ear and whispers.

  Duffy nods and then looks at Oswald. “He says, ‘No offense, but are you retarded?’”

  Oswald starts to say, “Oh Great Leader of My People, I am not retarded—”

  More whispering.

  Duffy nods, looks at Oswald. “He says you should listen to the lady.”

  Oswald frowns. “The ‘lady’? What lady?”

  From the other side of the sweat lodge, a luminous glow begins to rise up through the smoke.

  Oswald glances at the far wall and his heart practically stops when he sees an apparition materializing from the nimbus of light like the yoke of egg separating from the white. She wears a flowing robe. Her face has returned to the peaches-and-cream complexion of her youth, her cornflower-blue eyes twinkling, her flaxen hair restored to its healthy luster. “Ozzie, you never were that good with math.”

  Oswald swallows hard. His eyes well with tears. He tries to keep his voice steady. “Sweetie, I’m trying... I swear to God... I’m gonna make it.”

  The ghost of Matilda pauses. “You just have to remember saving a life is a lot more involved than just deciding not to kill somebody.”

  “I got five on the scoreboard, though, right?”

  The angelic woman in the robe just shrugs. “You got... maybe three.”

  “Sweetie, look, the suicide you gotta count. Right? That’s one. And the gambler—that asshole makes two. Those are givens. Right? Those guys were dead men walking, and I saved their asses.”

  She shrugs and gives him a nod. “Okay, sure, but—”

  Oswald pours it on: “Any other shooter, the Russian would have been a dead man. C’mon. You gotta give me the Russian. We gave him a brochure, for Chrissakes. C’mon, Tilda, whattya say...?”

  The ghost of his wife says nothing, thinking it over, chewing on it.

  Oswald wipes the sweat from his brow. He feels feverish. Dizzy. “Okay, okay, look... look. The ones you’re questioning are the kid in the tree with the sniper rifle and the Candy Man, right?”

  The woman nods. “That’s right. Those two are definitely grey areas.”

  Oswald takes a breath. “Look... gimme a break here. They put a cap in my ass. Whattya expect?”

  Matilda seems to be pondering the issue.

  Oswald wipes his mouth. “What I’m saying is, your average shooter would have been all over those assholes.”

  “If I may interject,” a voice chimes in from behind Oswald. “The man does have a point.”

  Oswald glances over his shoulder.

  The dead accountant is wringing his hands nervously, his eye twitching behind his broken eyeglasses, as he respectfully addresses the ghost of Matilda. “If you’ll pardon the impertinence, ma’am, the Indian did show a modicum of self-control.”

  “Shut up, Murray!” barks the Head-Wound Guy. “This is none of our business.”

  “The accountant’s right,” the dead drug dealer speaks up. “Maybe the big guy deserves, like, a little credit here. I mean, people change. Right?”

  “This is ridiculous,” grumbles the Head-Wound Guy, looking away.

  Matilda finally speaks up. “Okay, everybody just relax. Take some deep breaths. I’m going to have to get a ruling. Just sit tight for a second.”

  Oswald’s mind is swimming. “Huh?”

  Something is wrong. Crouching in the shadows of a spindly poplar tree out in front of Bungalow 12-A, Gerbil feels it in her marrow. Oswald should be in there by now.

  Gerbil can hear muffled giggling behind the door, and the intermittent clunk of metal, but no sign of any intervention from Oswald. Where the hell is he? It’s already after 5 o’clock. The sun is starting to set, and the shadows are deepening across the rear siding of the bungalow.

  How long has she been waiting? Ten minutes? Fifteen? The longer she huddles out there in the open, the more likely it is that somebody—a maintenance guy, a maid, a cheating husband—will see her and maybe call the cops. Or worse than that, the lovebirds are going to finish up, pack up their whips and chains, and go home.

  She feels like she should do something. The .38 is burning a hole in her left sock, wedged down into the top of her jackboot. Does she have the walnuts to fire the thing? Or is she kidding herself?

  At last, she rises up and creeps around the side of the building.

  Pushing her way through the foliage, she nearly slips on a wet carpet of leaves. She holds onto a tree for purchase, bats away a cloud of gnats in her face, and then continues on.

  When she clears the rear corner of the bungalow, she sees Oswald’s body.

  Lying near the service door, he appears dead, his flesh as pale as wallpaper paste.

  27.

  “Ozzy!”

  Gerbil rushes over to the big man, dropping the revolver in the weeds and kneeling down. She cradles his head. “Ozzy? Ozzy? Can you hear me?”

  Oswald lies on his back on the threshold, his stocking cap askew, his hair in his eyes. His huge head rests on the sun-faded welcome mat.

  “OZZY!”

  Gerbil feels the man’s big, bullish neck for a pulse, but she can’t feel anything. Her hands are shaking. He feels cold, and he looks dead. Is he dead? Oh God, is he dead? How can a person tell for sure? Gerbil racks her brain. How do they do it in the movies?

  “Fuck the movies!” she mutters and pinches his nose, and after an endless, agonizing second, she feels a weak puff of air bursting out. “Oh thank God, thank God,” she murmurs, hugging his gigantic wounded head to her narrow chest. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.”

  Inside the bungalow, the sound of a woman’s laughter rings out.

  “You fucking asshole, Ozzy!” Gerbil shakes him, and slaps his cold whiskered cheek, and pokes his ribs. “Ozzy, wake up! Ozzy! OZZY!”