Just then the Chevy pulled away from the curb and headed east along Forest Avenue toward the entrance to I-295. Rain had been falling steadily since morning, and the streets were nearly empty of people. Tony waited, and a minute or two later the Chevy reappeared in his rearview mirror, passed him, and pulled up at the intersection with Ashmont Street. The driver kept the engine running as the passenger got out. He was shorter and less well built than Tony – there were parking garages less structurally impressive than Tony Fulci – and was, in theory, not the kind of individual Tony should have been inclined to hit. But Tony, who was essentially a good person, had an unerring sense of badness in others. God did not always mark the worst of men, but He did brand some of them, and He had certainly taken the time to differentiate this one from the rest of the herd, if only – because say what you wanted about the Divine, He had a sense of humor – by giving him virtually no distinguishing features at all. From the top of his smooth head to the soles of his no-brand shoes, here was an unfinished man, a moral absence given human form.

Tony knew this because he had encountered similarly incomplete versions of such an entity before, often in prison and even, on occasion, in positions of authority. The best of them were willfully cruel, either to distract themselves from the prospect of their own inevitable damnation or to indulge their basest impulses, seeing no merit in depriving themselves of entertainment if their perdition was already assured. But in others nature and nurture had conspired in a grave error, giving the resulting creations no other option but to behave as they did, just as a bullet fired from a gun can only go in one direction until stopped by an impact or rendered harmless by the laws of energy and decay. They did not recognize concepts such as viciousness and sadism, just as any attempt to explain their opposites would be met with stares of absolute incomprehension. They were as content to inflict hurt as not to inflict it, and if they dreamed, they did not recall their visions. In repose, they gazed out on a featureless vista and heard only white noise. They were humanity’s detritus and the devil’s foot soldiers.