He pockets the key to room 8 along with the last of his cash. Can’t help but run his fingers over the slight seam the bills make beneath the denim, ensuring their safety. He wants to vomit after saying, out of habit, “Thanks.”

As he smacks past the office door, the bell above gives a Christmas jingle, as out of place as mistletoe at a wake. Outside, dusk has been sheeted under a cloudy, starless sky, leaving below it a darkness that amplifies sounds, tunes them crisper. The gravel croaking beneath his footfalls. A lone cricket chirping beyond the tree line. A click. A second click hardens into a tap, tapping, and then a knock, knock, knock. A stranger’s voice says, “Hey, kid.”

A slender man stands hunched at the driver’s window of Henry’s truck, peering inside.

It happens fast. Too fast to distinguish wrath from panic. The next thing he knows, he’s got the slender man’s shirtfront balled in both fists and rams him into the side panel. He screams at the shadow of a face he can’t see but can certainly smell: menthols, ammonia, scalp.

“Whoa, whoa. Easy now, buddy.”

“The fuck you think you’re doing?” Henry yells.

The man opens his hands to show Henry he’s unarmed, as if that were the fucking problem. Henry yanks and slams the man against the truck again, peeks into the driver’s-side window. Junior is inside, safe, hugging his knees to his chest, forehead buried in his forearms.

Even though he’s half-blind with rage, Henry’s thoughts flicker back to that horrible November evening—his old friend Lucius and the fire-axe; the crayons and subtraction homework; Michelle’s monosyllabic gibe and red clown smirk.

Henry can’t let the boy see him get like that, not again.

But this needs settling.

Henry jerks the slender man away from his son and into the dim glow cast by a pair of curbside vending machines. The stranger’s comb-over sprouts too close to his brow, giving him a shrunken, overcooked look. His shirt is silk and two sizes too big. Between Henry’s fists, hanging from a gold chain, is a gem-encrusted pendant in the shape of an AK-47.

When the man tries to grin, it looks as if it hurts, his lower lip jig-gering like a hooked fish.

“My dog just come up sniffing and then I seen the kid. Just checking if the little guy were okay, feel me? You watch the news? Junkie bitches be leaving they kids to roast on the daily.”

Slowly, firmly, Henry releases the man. He pivots, setting himself between the stranger and the truck. No leash in the man’s hands. No doggie bags poking out his pockets, though something heavy in his waistband.

“What dog?” Henry says.

“She here somewhere,” the man says. “Pooping or some shit. Come, doggie!”