Bill's smile was pure Mona Lisa. 'Same ol, same ol, huh?' He crinkled his nose. 'I think that's my cue…' Sidling between the Bibles, he walked to his old model Toyota SUV—one of the ones eco-protestors liked to sling tar across. He looked like a blond Sears catalogue model in his three-piece. Thomas glimpsed Mia mouth Fuck off and die as he pulled out the driveway.

For as long as he'd known them, Bill and Mia had done all the things statistically doomed couples typically do. They made faces while the other was talking—a frightfully good indicator of impending relationship meltdown. They described each other in unrelentingly negative terms. They even smacked each other around now and again. And yet somehow they managed to thrive, let alone survive. They had certainly outlasted the Bibles.

'Nothing too serious?' Thomas said, checking as much as asking. Over the years he'd helped the two of them sort out several near-fatal communication breakdowns, usually by talking one of them from the brink without the other knowing. Guerilla therapy, he called it.

'I'll be fine, professor. Gay men love assholes, remember? Pardon my French.'

'Daddy speaks French too,' Ripley said.

'I'm sure he does, honey.' Mia nodded at the black minivan parked next to Thomas's Acura. He raised his eyebrows. 'Company, professor? L'amore, perhaps?'

Smirking, Thomas closed his eyes and shook his head. Mia was hopelessly nosy.

'No. Nothing like that.'

Thomas was a creature of habit.

Over the years since he and Nora had moved to the burbs, the hour-long commute into Manhattan on the MTA North had become a reprieve of sorts. Thomas liked the packed anonymity of it all. The literary types could boo-hoo all they wanted about the 'lonely post-industrial crowd', but there was something to be said for the privacy of vacant and indifferent faces. Countless millions of people all herded into queues, all possessing lives of extraordinary richness, and most with sense enough not to share them with strangers.

It seemed a miracle.

Thomas imagined some grad student somewhere had published a paper on the topic. Some grad student somewhere had published a paper on everything. Now that the big game had been hunted to extinction, all the little mysteries found themselves in the academic crosshairs, all the things that made humans human.

Usually Thomas read the New York Times—the ink and paper version—on the trip into Manhattan, but sometimes, like today, he simply stared at the passing Hudson and dozed. No river, he was certain, had been the object of more absent contemplation than the Hudson.

He had much to think about. Frankie's incestuous exhibitionism was the least of his concerns.

He glanced at the front page of his neighbor's Times and saw the headlines he'd expected.

EU SAYS US AID PACKAGE 'NOT ENOUGH'

DEATH TOLL COULD TOP 50,000 RUSSIAN OFFICIALS SAY

And of course,

THE 'CHIROPRACTOR' STRIKES AGAIN:

SPINELESS CORPSE FOUND IN BROOKLYN