She wonders how she's going to kill him. Hunched over in a Sumo position, puking on himself, he's trying to crabwalk backward.

Fuck it, she thinks. Strangle him to death.

Miriam gets behind him and takes her gun arm and brings the crook of the elbow up under his throat. She pulls back hard enough to choke a pony –

Frankie's an old man forty-two years from now, and he's sitting in a darkened theater with his grandson, and the boy is held rapt as his face is lit by whatever it is that's on the screen. The boy is beaming, and Frankie sees it, and then he lays his head back and rests his eyes and lets the heart attack that's been attacking him for the last six hours, working him over with dull pipe and crushing grip, finally take him. His mouth opens, gasping one last breath, and the boy doesn't notice; he just keeps watching.

– and she lets go. Frankie, gasping, stumbles forward into his own hoagie bile.

He tries to stand, but Miriam presses the gun to the back of his head.

"You're going to be a grandfather someday," she says.

"OK," he croaks, blinking back tears.

"You don't really like this life, do you?"

"No. Christ, no. I hate it."

"You have the keys to the Escalade?"

He nods.

"Take them. Go to it. Get away. You don't want to be here."

Another nod.

"I see you again," she says, "I'll make sure you never get to be a grandfather."

She moves past him and heads into the lighthouse as thunder tumbles over thunder, not far away now, but very close.

FORTY

Old Barney

The lantern room is encased in glass – or, rather, some windows are glass, some have already been replaced with polycarbonate panes.

They haven't yet replaced the lantern, though.

Louis is bound to a wooden chair next to it. The lantern is a bulbous thing, like a giant insect's eye. Louis is held there by brown extension cords over hands and feet. His head is affixed to the base of the lantern by what seems to be a whole roll of electrical tape.

Ingersoll plays with the rusty fillet knife. The scent of fish guts plays at his nose.

He stole it from a fisherman asleep on a nearby jetty. Broke his neck, and let the poor fool crash into the surf – though not before snatching the knife from beneath his chair.

Ingersoll rolls the bones that he empties from his satchel. They clatter across the lantern-room floor at his feet, and he sorts through them the way one might sort through dried beans looking for stones. His finger shifts the bones this way and that. Like he's reading them.

He's not, of course. He can't read them. He does not possess his grandmother's gift of vision, not like he wants to. He pretends, sometimes, and this act of pretending is sometimes so good that he convinces himself.

This time, he tries as hard as he can to see what will happen here.