Jack stands stooped, one hand clutching the ball of his shoulder to no avail. Blood sprays through his fingers. His blue flannel shirt saturated. His eyes accusing.

Darkness prevails. There is the spotlight of Jack and nothing else. Evan watches from somewhere in the gloom, spellbound.

They are in Parking Level 3. Or somewhere much, much worse.

Jack’s mouth pulses, his lips locked shut, but Evan can hear his thoughts.

What have you done?

Little boy who I loved as my own, what have you done to me?

Jack’s mouth opens, but instead of words there is only blood, black as oil, loosed as if from a faucet. It sheets over his lower teeth, pours across his chin, streams down his legs. It pools on the floor and spreads and spreads, filling the spotlit circle and oozing outward.

Evan is helpless, trapped in the darkness. He tries to open his own mouth, but he cannot. When he reaches to see why, bristling sutures poke his tender palm.

His lips have been stitched shut.

Jack’s blood seeps through Evan’s shoes, warm and tacky. It waterlogs his socks, claims his ankles, his calves. He tries to cry out, to no avail. He is a mute witness to what he has wrought.

The warmth is at his waist now. His pants sodden. His shirt grows heavy, clings to his flesh. The blood rises past his clavicles, fills the hollow of his neck. And then he is under, his eyes wide and comprehending, the world below vast and empty.

The universe strained through a crimson filter.

20. No End Point

20

No End Point

Young voices lit up the parlor. David was being David—making trick shots on the billiard table, mixing drinks behind the bar, licking salt off a young woman’s gazelle-like neck before throwing back another amber shot and sinking his immaculate teeth into the embrace of a lime. The other girl slumped on the couch, propping up her forehead with one hand and sloppily texting with a thumb. Her iPhone in its sparkly case slipped from her manicured grip. The young men were doing young men things—pounding pints, warring over the foosball table, enacting elaborate handshakes and high-fives.

There was free-flowing top-shelf booze, and there were Viennese chocolates and Cohiba Robustos. Platters of short-rib sliders and sashimi. Kale salad with bacon–blue cheese vinaigrette and fresh oysters on spoons. Invisible as stagehands, the least sinister of René’s rented men circulated and cleared, dressed in servantwear with mandarin collars, the better to hide the menacing tattoos. The more colorful of the men—and certainly Dex—were best kept from view.