“Death is the only way out for me,” she said, like it was a well thought out conclusion after much study. “Really, I’m ruined. I’ll have nothing. Unless he dies. Soon. Now, I guess. Then…and I deserve it…it’s what’s right. I want to have him killed.”

“No, you don’t mean that.”

“Yes, yes, I totally do.”

“You’re asking for trouble.”

“I would pay,” she said.

“Look…”

“Really,” she said. “You must know people like that. Right? You must.”

“Come on, you should maybe have some coffee.”

“A hundred thousand,” she said.

“Do you have money like that?”

“After,” she said. “After he’s dead. Easily.”

“You want someone to do it on spec?” I knew enough literary and movie types to know the difference between working on commission and speculation.

“I could…I have some…I could come up with like ten…ten K up front. The rest after.”

“That’s not enough, not nearly enough,” I said, trying to shut her down.

“I could do twenty,” she said. “Twenty thousand. Cash. Untraceable. I could do that.”

“Really?”

“Yes, yes, I can,” she said, with what appeared to be utter sincerity and conviction.

I was very broke. That’s not an excuse. Maybe it’s an explanation. Maybe it’s not. My home was thirty-six hours from going into foreclosure. Maybe it was one of those moments where you’re saying to yourself, I have to do something new and different with my life, though that’s not something you expect when you’ve recently turned seventy, and then something just comes along and presents itself. I’d never done anything like that. Not remotely like that.

I said, “Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I think I can help you.”

CHAPTER TWO

DARK AND DAWN

“I have outlasted all desire,

My dreams and I have grown apart.”

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

THERE IS A TIME THAT is neither dark nor dawn as there is a time between sleep and waking.

Sleep is the time of dreams, the real kind, that are run by a part of our mind that might as well be a different person, with its own drives, desires, and needs, that uses us the way that writers use the stories of strangers, snatching and stealing parts and pieces, kibbles and bits, putting them out of order, into other arrangements, for different made-up tales, loose in logic, ungrounded by space-time, using our synapses like fiber-optic cables to play them IMAX-style against the curved inside walls of our skulls as if they’d been already cleaned and polished white by death. That particular dream time, on the way to morning after the mourning of the funeral, was filled with corpses and cadavers.

It started with reality, Winston C. Walker, centerpiece in an open casket.