Just don’t panic, he tells himself. Do not panic. This thought flashes like enemy tracer fire through his brain as he taps his forehead against the padded steering wheel of his next-year’s-model car. The make isn’t important. What is important, however, is that said car won’t start—let’s be a bit more specific about that: It’s sitting in the parking lot of a strip club called The Blue Empress, and it won’t start. That’s right, not even turn over. Oh fuck.

He can just make out the Montblanc key ring that his wife gave him for Christmas as it catches some light filtering in from a sodium lamp overhead. The little white star twinkles up at him. How could this happen? He hadn’t been inside for more than two or three hours—four at most—and now his new battery inside his new car is completely dead. Yes, maybe he’d left the lights on, OK, anybody can do that. But here, in a place like this? Unforgivable. He glances at his watch now, checking to see how much time he has left. It’s ten minutes past eleven—that’s P.M., folks—and he begins to understand the magnitude of his dilemma. If God doesn’t get up off his benevolent ass this instant and send him some help here, he’s going to end up in a hell of a spot. A bit of a pickle, as they used to say back when it was impolite to swear. If he’s not home by twelve, then the entire network of lies that he has so carefully constructed around this visit will crumble like the house of cards that it is. In other words, she’s not going to buy it. His wife. Third wife, by the way, so even more suspicious and prone to disbelief than his first two were.

The sound of hinges creaking open brings him back from the precipice—he swings his door open and hops out onto the pavement, trotting over two aisles to where a pair of young men are moving slowly toward a Jeep Liberty. Staggering a bit.

“’Scuse me,” the man says, in a halting sort of voice. “Hello?”

One of the guys turns to him, hopping to one side as he does and putting his fists up in a defensive gesture. “Damn, dude, you spooked the shit outta me!” Both of the guys laugh at this and the man jumps in as well, trying to play along and break the ice.

“Sorry! Craziest thing … my car won’t start. Battery, I guess.”

“Yeah?” says the other one, who is shorter than the first man and maybe a year or two younger. Sporting the faintest of mustaches on his lip. In fact, it may even be the stain from a chocolate milk he had at dinner; it’s that questionable. “Which one’s yours?”