The door opened, and now the whispers could be heard inside the car, more urgent and rapid. The engine started. One of the boys let out a whoop as the car was put in gear and pulled out of the lot onto the pavement again. Merrill was thinking that he had failed Amy completely. He almost cried out her name. The sawing sound had been made by a tool called a Slim Jim. Its only purpose was to undo the lock of a car door from the outside.

The car was being stolen. By a couple of kids out for a joyride. In high school, Merrill had done it himself — hell, Amy had put him up to it.

Nobody had said she couldn’t take a shower. Amy hadn’t needed to be told to put a towel over the bathroom mirror, either. What looked like a medicine chest, wasn’t. All the tugging and prying around the edge of the glass wasn’t going to yield anything but a bunch of broken fingernails. It only fed her rage over what seemed to have become inevitable, now that they had Sam. She was supposed to accept Chino as a monster without conviction in his own wickedness. Right. Whoever built a guest bathroom of marble and gold only to cheap out on the medicine chest? For all she knew, Chino was only a few feet away, on the other side of the “mirror,” drooling like a dirty-minded old man, thinking she had outsmarted him again. Sooner or later he was going to get fed up with her. But Amy was beginning not to care.

She believed Gregory. Chino hadn’t given her a straight answer yet — yet he expected her to believe everything he said. He wanted Amy to give him what he claimed not to have, conviction, as if that were the only piece missing from him. No, he was a monster, just as he said, and nothing she could possibly give him would ever be the answer to his problem — except a dose of his own medicine. He was wicked for its own sake, in love with the bottomless of it. If he could get a piece of her ass before he killed them both, so much better. All she had to do was think like him to figure out his just desserts, and all that took was practice. More practice.

And she was not outsmarting him. Not yet. It still was the other way around. She has to keep that clearly in mind. She had braced herself for a guestroom closet filled with the kind of cheap, mail order, red and black, push-up, squeeze-in, see-through mesh, elastic cups and straps that were the fantasy paraphernalia of frightened, powerless, control freakazoids the world over.

No.