The trap house was a ninety-minute drive away, set on the farther, eastern edge of the city. From the elevated freeway that bypassed downtown, the distant skyline was jagged, inflamed. The spires at Mom’s old campus were hangnails, the stadium’s low dome a wart. Girdling them were buildings that didn’t quite scrape the sky, just chafed it. All together they formed a carbuncle, a sawtooth horizon ready to ooze.

Henry locked the truck’s doors before taking the exit into the industrial rim, where all-glass condos gave way to smokestacks and long-abandoned factories. As they rolled past block after crumbling block of row houses, Henry imagined their previous punch-clock inhabitants. Lifelong careers on assembly lines. Secondhand staring monotony. The daily shuffle toward obsolescence. This must have been why Papa had wanted Henry to study, then later see his son in an office wearing a suit instead of a tool belt, sipping from a logo’d mug instead of a thermos, working on a laptop instead of on his hands and knees.

But Henry would never have traded the serene desolation back west for a life in this concrete hive. Here, packed so dense, contagion by the parasitic more—more assets, more status, more brand-name validation—would have been inescapable. Even if off-the-clock life-styles varied, labor was universally in service to the insatiable pit of industry and commerce. Same difference in the end. Whether by shovel or spreadsheet, everybody had to dig.

Duplexes ran in columns as uniform as a military parade. The trap house was identical to the others except for a white Escalade bulging out of its tight driveway. Al winked at Henry before poking the doorbell. An immense, pasty man wearing a beater and a blank expression let them in. He was so big that the double-barrel shotgun looked almost toy-like in his grasp. A second glance confirmed that it’d been sawn short, and Henry’s ass went swampy.

Al, on the other hand, was a mellow bulb, entirely unfazed when his hand went un–high-fived. On the drive into the city, he’d insisted on sampling their product yet again. Quality control, dude. The dose had left him so calm that when a pat-down revealed a .38 in his waistband, he practically purred when telling the pasty man to keep it safe for him.

The duplex was unfurnished except for some folding chairs circling a stack of wooden pallets. That was where the pasty man set Al’s piece, after he’d opened the chamber and tipped five rounds into his baseball mitt of a palm. All the while Henry was busy flexing and straightening himself to come across as hard and crime savvy as humanly possible, though he was fairly certain the rest of him was as visibly mushy as his boxers.