“Anyway,” Kevin said, “the guy’s screaming, his girlfriend’s screaming, and they keep looking at the door to this shitty fucking apartment, not because they think they got a chance of getting to it, but because they know that door means they’re locked in. With me. I have the power. I decide what images they take to hell with them.”

He lit another cigarette and I felt the breeze bore through the center of my chest.

“So,” he said, “I turn this guy over. I make him sit up on his broken spine, and I rape his girlfriend for, I dunno, a few hours. Had to keep throwing whiskey in the guy’s face to keep him from passing out. Then I shot his girlfriend like eight, maybe nine, times. I pour myself a drink and I look in the guy’s eyes for a while.

“It’s all gone. All his hope. All his pride. All his love. I own it. Me. I own it all. And he knows it. And I walk behind him. I put my gun against the back of his head, right at the brain stem. And then, you know what I do?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I wait. I wait like five minutes. And guess what? Guess what the guy did, Kenzie. Guess.”

I folded my hands across my lap.

“He begs, Kenzie. Fucking guy’s paralyzed. He’s just let another guy rape and kill his girl and he couldn’t do shit. He’s got nothing to live for. Nothing. But he begs to stay alive anyway. This fucking crazy world, I swear.”

He flicked his cigarette into the steps below me and the coals shattered and were picked up and swirled by the wind.

“I shot him in the brain just as he started to pray.”

Usually when I’d looked at Kevin in the past, I’d seen nothing, a great hole of it. But now I realized it wasn’t nothing, it was everything. Everything rancid in this world. It was swastikas and killing fields and labor camps and vermin and fire that rained from the sky. Kevin’s nothing was simply an infinite capacity for all of that and more.

“Stay away from the Jason Warren thing,” he said. “That guy who ripped off Jackie? His girlfriend? They were friends of mine. You,” he said, “I don’t ever remember liking.”

He stood there a full minute, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt filth and depravity violate my blood and stain, stain, stain every inch of my body.

He walked around to the driver’s side of the car, rested his hands on the hood.

“I hear you went out and got yourself a ready-made family, Kenzie. Some doctor cunt and her little girl cunt. This little girl, she’s what, like four years old?”

I thought of Mae sleeping only three stories up.

“How strong you think a four-year-old’s spine is, Kenzie?”

“Kevin,” I said and my voice felt thick and filled with phlegm, “if you—”

He held up a hand and pantomimed a chatterbox, then looked down as he opened his door.