The faceless hood, darting behind trees and bushes thirty yards ahead of Raymond, took him from Atchison to Topeka, Northfield to New York. The irony of these streets, named for the cities of Raymond’s past and located within blocks of his present. He never drove on them, fearing taint. But now he was running at full steam along New York, following a junior gangbanger who was rustling against high hedges, causing dogs to whimper as he passed. He thought of Donald Sutherland chasing a hooded kid around Venice, thinking it was his dead daughter—what was the name of that damn movie now?—only to have a dwarf swivel around and stick a knife into his neck.

Suddenly, silence. No more swishing in the bushes, no more canine protestations. The rascal had vanished.

It was just as well. Three blocks into the pursuit, Raymond was panting. He reminded himself of the pathetic zombies in his books—lumbering, lurching lummoxes that could be outrun by any granny in a wheelchair; they frightened people because they moved with unnatural slowness.

He decided to go home. The Santa Ana winds had picked up again, rustling all the trees and bushes around him. His beard flew up against his face like a deranged octopus.

Something made him turn back for one last look.

The hoodie was twenty or thirty feet behind him, cheekily baiting him.

“You motherfucker!” Raymond cried, tugging the beard away from his face.

The kid went sprinting. Raymond sighed, and followed, the sweat soaking through his wifebeater and pooling down the cheap polyester fibers of the Santa suit. In his books, Raymond usually described nights like this as “voluptuous,” “doom-coated,” or “unrepentantly black.” But the night was merely inert, uncooperative. It obscured his vision. He paused to wheeze at the base of Mount Curve, grabbing onto a white picket fence for support. His heart was ready to explode.

The kid stopped, too. For a second he almost believed the kid would come over and offer him a sip of water. But the boy started running again.

“Stop, I said!” Raymond picked up his pace, but the fiend continued to elude him. His rapidly diminishing form was at the top of Mount Curve, and Raymond knew he’d soon be out of sight.

He fished the gun out of his pocket—it’d been pounding against his thigh as he ran, a persistent reminder of its availability. “Look at me!” He cocked the gun, his hands shaking from the excitement of holding it. Nobody had told him it’d feel quite so sweetly sexy. He put his finger on the trigger. “Look at me, I said!”

Miraculously, his tormentor stopped, in the front yard of a pretty blue cottage. Nobody appeared to be home. He had his back to Raymond. Slowly he turned.