She folded her arms and danced on the balls of her feet. ‘I’m Tina. Look, can I just go? With all these abandoned houses, I figured no one would care if I crashed here.’

‘Why are you here? Where do you live?’

‘I lived with my boyfriend until two days ago. Bastard threw me out because I ran up a 200-dollar cell phone bill. I mean, hello, who doesn’t have unlimited texting these days?’

‘How old are you?’

She shrugged. ‘Nineteen.’

‘How did you find this place?’

‘I drove around looking for somewhere I could crash. The house looked empty. I said I was sorry, okay? You beat me to it. Fine. Take it, I’ll go someplace else.’

‘Did you tell anyone where you were?’

‘Nobody, I swear, nobody else is going to crash your crib, man. I’m not looking to party. Besides, no phone, remember?’

He looked at her. She was young, foolish, and sweet. Half-teenager, half-woman. A tattoo of a sunflower peeked from her shoulder. Her skin had bikini tan lines. She misread his eyes, and her head cocked, and her mouth bent into a flirty grin. She took a strand of hair and twisted it around her finger.

‘Hey, maybe we could figure something out,’ she said. ‘Like, maybe we could share the place.’

She bunched the lacy trim of her camisole with both hands and pulled it over her head, baring her chest. Her breasts were small, with chocolate brown, erect nipples and a tear-drop birthmark under her left cup. She tugged back and forth on the elastic of her panties, as if she were working the handlebars on a bicycle. When she peeled them halfway down her hips, he saw the curly fuzz of her pubic hair.

Tina bit her lip and came closer. ‘Like what you see?’

He let the jagged knife slide down his hand, until the handle was in his grasp. The blade was an ugly, deadly thing. She didn’t notice it.

‘This could be like me paying rent, huh?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

She really was cute, trying so hard to get what she wanted, which was a place to stay the night. He ran the gloved fingers of his other hand along her cheek, then into the hollow of her neck, then down to her right breast, which he cradled in his palm. His thumb flicked her nipple, and she purred.

‘That would be great,’ he said, ‘except for one thing.’

She nestled against him, reaching for his zipper. ‘What’s that, lover?’

‘DNA,’ he said.

7

‘It makes you wonder how they do it, right?’ Chuck Warren asked. He gestured across the busy street, where a billboard featured an attractive thirty-something couple playing with three children in a Florida backyard. The tagline advertised a local doctor who performed vasectomies using no knife and no needle. ‘I mean, what’s the deal? Do they use garden clippers or what?’