“Your slave number’s five, little shit,” Smoke was saying. “Pretty good, huh. That makes you in the top ten—hell, it makes you in the top five, right? That makes you a first-string Pike. And a fucking lot is expected of a first-string Pike, right, everybody?”

“Sure as fuck is.”

“Fucking got it fucking straight.”

“Honey, don’t you fret. You’re gonna be just great,” Divinity reassured Weed.

“We’re going to initiate you, retard,” Smoke said as again he stuck the needle in Weed’s right index finger, above the first knuckle. “You’re gonna do a little paint job for us.”

Weed almost fell over and Divinity had to hold him up. She was laughing and rubbing his back.

“We’re gonna show this city who we are once and for all,” Smoke went on, full of liquor and himself. “You got paints, don’t you, little art fag?”

Smoke’s words whirled inside Weed’s head like the Milky Way.

“He’s gone, man,” Beeper said. “Whatta we do with him?”

“Nothing right now,” Smoke said. “I got an errand to run.”

It was almost eight P.M., and Virginia West was glad. Working long hours meant she didn’t have the energy to get emotional about the dishes in the sink, the dirty clothes on the floor, the clean ones draped over chairs and falling off hangers.

She didn’t have to wait for Brazil to ring her up and suggest a pizza or just a walk like he used to back in Charlotte. She knew from her InLog of calls that he never tried, but why should he? She made sure he knew she was never home. If it even crossed his mind to call, he wouldn’t because it was pointless. She was busy, out, not thinking of him, not interested.

In fact, eight P.M. was earlier than usual. West preferred to roll in around ten or eleven, when it was too late to even call her family on the farm, where she rarely visited anymore because she now lived so far away. Time had become West’s enemy. A pause in it echoed with an unbearable emptiness and loneliness that sent her fleeing from the nineteenth-century town house she rented on Park Avenue, once known as Scuffletown Road, in Richmond’s Fan District.

Although the name “Fan” meant nothing to outsiders or even the majority of Richmond residents who were not interested in the history of their city, a quick look at a map brought much clarity to the matter. The neighborhood fanned out several miles west of downtown, spreading fingers of quaint streets with names like Strawberry, Plum and Grove. Homes and town houses of distinctive designs were brick and stone with slate and shingle roofs, stained glass transoms, elaborate porches and parapets, finials and even medallions and domes. Styles ranged from Queen Anne to Neo-Georgian and Italian Villa.

West’s town house was three stories with a gray and brown granite front on the first floor and red brick on the two above. There were stained glass bands around the sashes on the second-floor windows and a white frame sitting porch in front. Although Park Avenue had once been one of the most prominent addresses in the city, much of the area had become more affordable as Virginia Commonwealth University continued to expand. Quite frankly, West was growing to hate the Fan, finding its unrelenting noises were causing her mood swings, which in turn seemed to be causing the same in Niles, her Abyssinian cat.