Hairless turns on the addict, blade raised high.

His face is a grinning, crimson rictus. A skull with bloodstain lipstick.

Hairless lunges at the addict.

The blade cleaves the addict's head right down the middle.

The gun does off.

Hairless's brains fly like someone tossing out muddy washwater.

Blood zig-zags down his face. He looks around. He sits down on the steps as the addict comes tumbling down next to him. The red stuff drips past his nose to his lips, and he licks them and makes a look like he's pondering the taste, seriously thinking about becoming a cannibal. And then he slumps to the side, dead.

– and he presses her cheeks so hard that her teeth bite into the inside of her mouth.

He holds her there like that, staring into her eyes.

"You saw," he whispers. "You saw how I die."

Miriam nods, as much as his grasp will allow.

Beaming, he lets go. He's eager. Excited. "Tell me. Tell me, now."

Miriam grins a rueful grin.

"I kill you," she lies. "Me. I shoot you right in the fucking head."

Hairless searches her face. His gaze is panicked. You can make me have my vision, she thinks, but you can't make me tell you the truth.

"She's lying," Harriet says. "I can see it."

Hairless steps away.

"You'll tell me," he says, still unsure. "You'll tell me so I can beat it. I will beat fate. I will sidestep death with your help, one way or another."

"Doesn't work like that," Miriam says, tasting the coppery penny-taste from where she bit into her cheeks. "You can't beat the system. The house always wins."

"I am different."

Hairless's phone rings. He holds it up, looks at the number, then snaps his fingers at Frankie. "You. Let our new employee have her rest."

Hairless answers the phone as Frankie ducks through the doorway and comes back with another syringe.

Miriam struggles, hoping to bring the shower down, maybe the whole house.

Frankie sticks the needle in her neck.

"Yes?" Hairless says on the phone.

The world hems in from the edges. Rimmed with blur and shadow.

"You have the location?" she hears Hairless say, but it's like hearing him through the glass of a bubbling fish-tank. His words slow. Honey, molasses, black tar. "You know where the trucker is, then?"

Louis, she thinks.

Once more, she tongue-kisses darkness. Lights out.

INTERLUDE

The Dream

Miriam's mother sits at a table but doesn't notice her. Can't notice her, probably. That's the frustrating part. Miriam hasn't seen the woman in eight years, and this doesn't even count because it's a dream, and she knows it's a dream.

Her mother is a pinched woman, shrunken and dry like a shriveled apricot. She's not that old, not really, but she looks it. Time – fake time, dream time, the time in Miriam's own crazy head – has taken its toll.

"It's almost over now," says Louis behind her.

The tape over his eyes shifts and bubbles, the way soft drywall rises and falls with a tide of hidden roaches.