She was trembling violently and I didn’t think she had much left in her. I’d done my damage, and she’d do the rest to herself in the days and years ahead. So, I let my anger go, let it flush out of my heart and body until all I saw before me was a trembling heap of humanity on a sofa. I reached out and touched her shoulder.

She screamed. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”

I pulled the hand back.

“Get the hell off my floor and the hell out of my house, white man, and take your whore with you.”

Angie took a step toward her on the word “whore,” then stopped and closed her eyes for a second, then opened them. She looked at me and nodded.

There wasn’t anything else to say, so we left.

FOURTEEN

We were halfway back to Boston, avoiding any conversation about Simone Angeline or the scene in her apartment, when Angie sat up suddenly in her seat and said, “Aargghh,” or a reasonable facsimile. She stabbed her index finger into the eject button of my cassette player hard enough to send Exile on Main St. past me like a missile. It bounced off the back of the seat and fell to the floor. Right in the middle of “Shine a Light,” too. Sacrilege. I said, “Pick it up.”

She did and flipped it onto the seat beside my hip. She said, “Don’t you have any New Music?” New Music, I guess, is all those bands Angie listens to. They have names like Depeche Mode and The Smiths and they all sound the same to me like a bunch of skinny white British nerds on Thorazine. The Stones, when they started, were a bunch of skinny white British nerds too, but they never sounded like they were on Thorazine. Even if they were.

Angie was looking through my cassette case. I said, “Try the Lou Reed. More your style.”

After putting in New York, listening for five minutes, she said, “This is all right. What, you buy it by mistake?”

Just outside the city limits, I pulled into a Store 24 and Angie went in for cigarettes. She came out with two late editions of the News and handed me a copy.

That’s how I confirmed that I’d become the second generation of Kenzie to achieve a sort of immortality in newsprint. I’d always be there, frozen in time and black-and-white on June 30, for anyone who wished to access the file on a microfiche. And that moment, that most personal of moments squatting by Blue Cap with Jenna’s corpse behind me, my ears ringing and my brain trying to re-anchor in my skull none of it was completely mine anymore. It had been spat out for the breakfast consumption of hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t know me from Adam. Possibly the most intensely personal moment of my life and it would be rehashed and second-guessed by everyone from a barfly in Southie to two stockbrokers riding the elevator in some skyscraper downtown. The Global Village Principle at work, and I didn’t like it one bit.