“The Indian I’m talking about,” the voice says. “He’s showing up more and more often on the radar screen, getting sloppy, and it’s getting embarrassing.”

  The old man remembers suddenly. “That fat half breed? He’s a freelancer. Did a few things for me in the nineties. Works for the Nigger now.”

  On the other end: “The who?”

  “The Nigger, the Nigger.” The word rolls off the old man’s tongue. “Candy-something. West loop moolie. Runs hookers out of a laundromat.”

  Another pause on the other end of the line. “The Candy Man you’re talking about?”

  “No offense, Lieutenant, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The old man shakes his head disdainfully. “Do your homework.”

  Gerbil Goldstein plops down on the shopworn futon with a pained exhalation of air, a lit Camel in her spindly fingers, her black nail polish starting to chip. “That’s just about the stupidest question I ever heard.” She speaks in a sleepy, exhausted voice as she lies back against the headboard.

  It’s late afternoon, and the sun is starting to sink behind the west windows of Gerbil’s apartment, the rays shimmering in the dust motes.

  “C’mon, it’s a simple question.” Oswald paces back and forth across the living room. Despite the low, hot ache in his ribs, and the constant slow burn behind his left ear, he has done nothing all afternoon but pace Gerbil’s apartment in his girdle and boxer shorts, compulsively popping aspirin and polishing off an entire package of potato chips and half a baggie of skunky weed. Shirtless, his huge belly straining the frayed elastic bands of the orthopedic girdle like a great kettledrum, he scratches his testicles thoughtfully as he grapples with the cosmic. “I mean, if you think about it, what do doctors do?”

  “Are you serious?” Gerbil rubs her eyes, slowly shaking her head. “Blow the gunk outta your brain, Chief. Doctors are car dealers, they’re scam artists.” Gerbil chuckles groggily. She has the thick, sleepy slur of a druggie sliding over the peak and down the other side. “Doctors saving lives? That’s a good one.”

  “Whattya mean?”

  “The grief is making you stupid, Ozzy. You have to see somebody about this. I’m not saying you can’t grieve. Grief is natural, healthy. But you have to be smart about it. You can’t let it make you stupid.

  “Okay, sorry, bad example.” Oswald paces some more. “Paramedics, firemen. It doesn’t matter. Just answer the question. It’s a rhetorical question. A hypothetical.”

  Gerbil yawns like a cat, stretching her wiry, tattooed arms. “I don’t know—in a month? I don’t know. It’s not like popping people.”

  “How’s that?”

  She shrugs, rubbing her eyes. “You want to whack somebody, all you gotta do is find ’em, get ’em in your front sight, and bango—problem solved.”

  “So...?”

  “Think about it for a second. You can’t just, like, save somebody’s life on demand.”

  Oswald stops pacing, stares at her. “Why not?”

  Another yawn: “Gee, lemme see... well, first of all, it might help if they’re, like, in mortal danger and shit.”

  “I already thought of that,” Oswald says. “This day and age, you find shit-loads of people in mortal danger. All over the place. I mean, Jesus Christ, you can’t go to the mall without getting your ass shot off in a terrorist attack. You can’t eat a fucking burrito without getting the trots.”

  Gerbil’s eyelids are drooping. “Don’t you think you oughtta sit down or something?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Didn’t they tell you to like stay off your feet for a while?”

  Oswald paces some more. “Nope. I got no restrictions, got a clean bill of health.”

  She closes her eyes, her head lolling back. “Yeah, right, aside from that bullet lodged in your brain.” She yawns again. “And another thing: Could you please take that girdle off? You’re creeping me out with that thing, you look like my third grade teacher.”

  Oswald reaches behind the girdle with a sigh, and works the eyehooks open. The thing suddenly pops off like a catapult, flinging across the room, bouncing off the wall and knocking over one of Gerbil’s lava lamps. Oswald hitches up his boxers and keeps pacing. “Anyway... I’m thinking you could maybe save about—what—a dozen? Maybe a dozen in a month, depending on the breaks?”

  Gerbil curls into a fetal position on the futon, yawns for the third time. “You gonna tag the Candy Man for setting you up?”

  Oswald pauses again, looks at the floor, the dull ache in his ribcage a constant reminder of the pimp’s double-cross. “I’m thinking I might take him to small claims court, breach of contract, I’m thinking.”

  Gerbil mumbles into her armpit, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Absolutely, I’m hanging in there, I’m working through the pain and grief and stuff.”

  Her mumbling voice is barely audible: “What the fuck happened to you, Ozzy? This seems like a lot more than just the normal grieving process. Did something else happen?”

  Oswald takes a deep, girding breath. Should he tell her? Should he spill the whole thing? She already thinks he’s crazy, so what difference does it make? He needs to tell somebody. He needs a friend, and Gerbil is it. Gerbil’s all he’s got. “Interesting story,” he says finally, resuming his nervous, compulsive pacing.

  Then he tells her. He tells her everything. He tells her all about Matilda’s strange, rambling last wish, and he doesn’t leave anything out. “She said it was the only way I would ever be able to see her again,” he says finally, after running through the whole crazy assignment. His eyes begin to burn and well up with the thought of never seeing Matilda again. He thinks some more, stares some more, his voice softening. “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done.” Pause, reaching for the right words. “Guy like me.” One last pause. “I guess this is my only shot to get into hit man heaven.”

  The faint sound of snoring comes from the deepening shadows behind him.

  He turns and sees that his only friend in the world has nodded off.

  That night, Oswald dreams that he’s wandering around the periphery of a house, circumnavigating its scabrous yard in his galoshes and rain slicker, alone, soaked to the bone by a needling sleet coming down from the gunmetal sky. In the dream he’s desperate to get inside the place, get out of the incessant cold drizzle, but all the windows are shut tight, locked, the doors bolted, the small, wood-framed, canary-yellow two-story sealed up like a vault. Time is of the essence, for some reason, and the urgency hangs over Oswald like a sword of Damocles.

  Part of his dreaming self recognizes the quaint little Cape Cod with its twin dormers and bay window as the first rental that he and Matilda had stretched their budget to lease decades ago. The neighborhood around it was a blue-collar enclave on the north side of Chicago called Wrigleyville, the home of the Chicago Cubs and more taverns per capita than skid row. But the dream environment in which the little cottage sits is also warping reality like a funhouse mirror.

  The iron lintel of the First Unitarian Cemetery rises over the porch, the letters embossed in rusty, timeworn metal. At the threshold of the flower-lined sidewalk leading up to the front door, a massive wrought iron sign is silhouetted against the dark, churning sky: LOMBARD MEMORIAL VETERANS CEMETARY AND COLUMBARIUM.

  Oswald checks his watch. Time is running out. He lurches over to a side door, tries it, finds it locked, and curses silently. He has no voice in this dream; he can’t make a sound. He hears the soft, muffled cries of a woman inside the structure, moving in silhouette behind the shaded windows, her sobs coming in terrible waves, her breath hitching with each gasp as she searches the dark, empty rooms. She’s alone and scared. She calls out for Oswald. She needs him. She is lost without him.

  In the dream, the word lost whispers in Oswald’s ears. It galvanizes him. He goes over to a shuttered window and bangs on it desperately. The ghostly woman inside the house stirs as a goldfish might twitch at a thump on the side of its bowl. She calls out, her words garbled as she gasps for breath. She falls to her knees, crying out for her dearly beloved missing husband.

  Oswald claws at the seams along the side of the window until his fingernails bleed. He senses dusk rolling in, a darkness unlike any other he has ever seen or felt. In the midst of that darkness, a jaundiced, iridescent light begins to rise behind him. Like a cold, cadaverous finger touching the bare skin of his neck, the light whispers to him, Tick-tock—tick-tock—tick-tock.

  Whirling around, Oswald sees the source of the light, and feels his soul contract into a tiny, hard seed of dread. The great, fiery, yellow sliver of a moon arcs in time-lapse motion across the infinite blackness of the night sky, ever changing, moving toward fullness, a ticking time bomb, a demonic stage light slanting down and illuminating a necropolis of dead strewn across the yard like cordwood.

  Oswald sees the gangly body of the accountant that he whacked eleven years ago, now lying a few feet away from him, the Coke-bottle eyeglasses still askew on the dead face. A few feet to the left lie the crumpled remains of the Kiddie-Porn Guy, his head ruptured like a rotten gourd. More of them lie in contortions and twisted heaps in each direction—the Drug Dealer whose neck Oswald snapped like dry kindling with an axe handle, the Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse, the Gangbanger Dude whom Oswald decommissioned with a screwdriver, and the Crooked Politician that Oswald took out three years ago with a length of coaxial cable and a little elbow grease. They all litter the yard like the ghosts of some Civil War battlefield, and Oswald is just beginning to register the import of the bodies when he sees the dark object hanging off a lone picket at the corner of the little white fence.

  He gapes at it. His blood freezes in his veins. His flesh crawls. No bigger than a stocking cap or a baseball glove, the object radiates pain. Sorrow. Shame. Horror. He forces himself to walk over to it, weaving through the rows of dead bodies. Gripped in its thrall, his gaze remains fixed on the thing as he approaches, slowly, as though it might vanish at any moment.

  He reaches the fence and pauses mere inches from the thing, his heart racing so hard it’s about to punch through his sternum.

  He reaches out for it.

  Oswald jerks awake in a tangle of bed linen and sweaty skivvies. He sits up in bed. The horrors of the nightmare reverberate in his brain like cobwebs sticking to his face.

  He takes deep breaths. His heart thumps painfully in his chest as he looks around the lonely room, eyes adjusting to the darkness, to the cold splash of reality, to the lack of a wife.

  Matilda’s absence is everywhere in the room. Even in the predawn dark, Oswald can see the bureau across the room now missing its makeup mirror and customary litter of moisturizers and skin creams. Next to the dresser, the empty side of the closet is as gaping and painful to Oswald as a pulled tooth. But it’s that last foreign object in his dream—the thing dangling off the fence post—that haunts him now.

  He gets out of bed and pads across the room to his side of the closet. He reaches up to the hatboxes and stacks of old copies of National Geographic and Playboy, and he finds the shoebox. He pulls it out, takes it over to the dresser, sets it down, and blows the dust off it. The words Genuine Hush Puppies across the top have faded with age. The corners are worn. He opens it.

  Inside, nestled in ancient tissue paper, lies the wig. Oswald has no idea why he has kept it all these years. The edges of the thing are charred, some of the natural hair split and fire damaged from the heat of a point-blank gunshot. In some far-flung time and place, in some other context—when the wig was new and very possibly sat in the window of Marshal Fields under a festive bonnet of white roses and calla lilies—the thing had probably been called Autumn Sunset Bouffant from the Joan Collins Collection.

  Now, cradled in Oswald Means’s enormous hands, the thing looks like a dead animal.

  She was whack number eight—the one that Oswald regretted the most. The details of the hit have long faded from his memory, but the lasting effects of this one will stay with Oswald for the rest of his sorry life. The woman was a prostitute—more accurately an upscale escort working the old money corridors of LaSalle Street and the Magnificent Mile—who had committed the unpardonable sin of getting cozy with Anthony “the Mink” Ferri.

  It was one of those open secrets among the backrooms, wise guy haunts, and smoke filled offices of organized crime task force members. Ferri fell for the woman hard, overlooking the stigma attached to her chosen vocation. She was seen on the mobster’s arm at all the gala charity events, governor’s balls, and high society soirees up and down the North Shore. She was a looker—that much Oswald remembers—her beauty a combination of a dark, sultry Jennifer Connelly, and an exotic native of some uncharted Peloponnesian island. And for a while, she and the Mink were inseparable.

  Then she went and did something inexcusable, something that no self-respecting Catholic mobster could abide: she got herself pregnant.

  The sigh that comes out of Oswald Means right then is laden with the anguish and remorse of the ages. He can’t bear to look at the wig anymore, and he can’t bear to throw it away. All he can do is carefully return it to its nest of tissue paper, where it will likely stay entombed for another decade, collecting dust and festering in his subconscious.

  He takes a deep breath, turns, and starts getting dressed for the first day of the rest of his life.

  He searches for his guns, so preoccupied by his dark thoughts now that he doesn’t even notice his own testicles hanging out of his boxers, swinging like pendulous fuzzy dice from a rearview mirror. The cut-down Mossburg 12-gauge pistol-grip, loaded for rhinoceros—is wedged behind the golf clubs in his closet, a full set, which haven’t been used in eons. He grabs the shotgun, a box of shells, and the APC nine-millimeter postil hidden on the top shelf behind the bike helmet that he never wears.

  He gets dressed in a hurry, noticing by the bedside clock it’s still only 5:59 a.m. He’ll have to wake Gerbil up—unless she hasn’t turned in yet. He turns the lights out, leaving the sad little shoebox on the dresser. He’s too busy to notice.

  He has work to do.

  10.

  The average time span between full moons—29.53 days, which amounts to precisely three hundred and sixty hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven seconds—is known as the synodic month, but to Oswald, down through the years, it has become known as Caleb’s Rule. Matilda always believed that her father’s “lunar atonement” had somehow been ratified into cosmic law and was governed forevermore by the late patriarch, who gazed down from the heavens like some celestial Supreme Court justice. And now that the moon was governing Oswald’s fate, he was certain that Caleb Valkenburg was watching his every move and would be enforcing the deadline with extreme prejudice.

  The duration of the synodic month varies from calendar month to calendar month (and from viewing location to viewing location) due to the moon’s elliptical orbit. The different phases of the moon are determined by the relative positions of the sun, the earth, and the moon. The moon appears full when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth. When the sun is on the same side of the earth as the moon—a phase commonly known as a “new moon” (or “dark moon”)—the moon is invisible to the naked eye.

  On the evening of Oswald’s epiphany, the new moon is already three days into its next cycle—already rising each night like a luminous fingernail over the shimmering black horizon of Lake Michigan.

  According to both the Chicago Tribune and the Farmer’s Almanac, the lunar metamorphosis this month will last approximately 32.5 days.

  However, nobody on earth is less interested in all this than Andrew R. Kornblum.

  Twelve days into the lunar cycle, on a Thursday morning, just before dawn, Kornblum scrabbles out of bed after a night of dreamless, woozy sleep. He vaguely remembers going to bed the night before, but since starting the new cocktail of Effexor, Klonopin, Cymbalta, Ritalin, and Xanax, he remembers very little of his ghastly dreams.

  He drags himself around his bedroom, a scrawny middle-aged man in tartan plaid boxer shorts, trying to remember what it is he needs to do today. He pauses in front of the dresser mirror. He thinks and thinks, his mind swamped with medication, recrimination, and regret.

  All at once he remembers what it is he has to do. He remembers the task.

  His clothes—carefully selected the night before for the big day—hang off the back of a bureau chair. He dresses carefully in business casual, as his former employer might call it, pulling on his pleated khaki pants, his goldenrod Izod twill shirt, Topsiders, no socks. He takes his time, as if dressing for a performance.

  Most of the preliminary due diligence has already been done. Paperwork has been sent to the lawyer. The note—carefully composed over the last two days—lies on the kitchen table under a clay turtle paperweight that his daughter made for him at Montessori school about a dozen millennia ago.

  Kornblum skips breakfast and goes right over to the pedestal table by the front door.

  He finds his keychain, removes the key to the Dodge Caravan, and then puts the rest of his keys next to the mail basket in plain view. He turns off the air conditioning but leaves the porch light on, as well as the overhead in the kitchen. On his way to the garage, he dumps a week’s worth of dry cat food in Mr. Peepers’s dish.

  The forest-green Caravan, still as shiny as the day it rolled off the assembly line, is waiting for him in the garage. As specified in his master plan, the tank is a quarter full—just enough to make it to the limestone quarry outside.

  He gets in, fires it up, thumbs the garage door opener, yanks the lever into reverse, and backs out of the enclosure and into the last day of his life.

  * * *

  The weather is mild for April along the Mississippi. The huge northern Illinois sky reaches high and cloudless into the heavens, the pallid morning sun glaring down off the shimmering steel-gray shoals like endless streamers of cellophane. The gurgle of distant barges, pushing southward toward Cape Girardeau, Cairo, and Memphis, wax and wane under the chatter of geese.