“If I had the chance I’d kill them both.” She uttered this with a kind of chilling neutrality. “That clear enough for you?”

“No.”

“My mother stood by while my father abused me over and over.”

St. Vincent shook his head. “How could a father do that, Lucy?”

“You’re a man. You tell me.”

He sat for a moment, hands now clasped together, fingers intertwined, as if changing his aspect from inquisitional jailer to priestly confessor. “I have no answers for you. I’m not that kind of man.”

His personality was that mercurial, a quality Lucy recognized and noted for future exploitation.

“I believe you, Lucy.” His voice softened like butter on the dinner table. “I believe you would kill them.”

An example, Lucy thought, of people believing what they want to believe. And she should know. There was a time when she was at war with those she had left behind, with those skunks and weasels around her. More significantly, she had been at war with herself. In her experience people fell into drugs because they were weak or unhappy, or both. That was why they could rarely get out of that hole: it felt too good in the place where the pain of the real world faded away.

That had not been Lucy’s problem. She had had no problem. Her aim was to push herself as far as she could go, right to the edge of death, if need be. It was only in the fiercest crucible that absolute truth would emerge. She had gone there. Now she was someone else, some other Lucy who had none of the former’s hate and bitterness. She was no longer at war with herself, only with the people, like St. Vincent, bound and determined to use her for their own ends.

The state police finding her, forcing her to dry out, and here, the so-called shrinks, putting her on yet another drug cocktail to take the place of the one that had taken her apart, all that wasn’t a mistake on her part. It had been time for her to return from the back of beyond. To her dismay, she had discovered that she could not do it herself. She needed help. Hence the police.

Being taken apart had revealed to her all her flaws, weaknesses, strengths, and beauty. She finally could embrace that beauty and not be afraid of it—afraid of where it might lead her, afraid of the false flattery that might force her down dark and twisted alleys. She had already visited those terrible places, and she had survived, though, it was true, in pieces. But she was whole now—better than whole, because now she could see in others her own strengths, flaws, and weaknesses. She could play off the strengths, work the flaws and weaknesses like “A Lil Mexican,” as Mookey Baby rapped in such fine fashion.