“I told you about her. There’s no more to tell.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re as transparent as window glass.”

“I’m bleeding like a pig here.”

“As if I care. Talk to me.”

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled and wind drove shatters of rain through the open door.

“I’m gonna have major water damage here. This isn’t you, man. This isn’t how you are. What’s happened to you? What’s wrong with you?”

“You’ve got three minutes to spill everything. If you don’t,” David lied, “I’ll kill you. I’m in a bad place you can’t begin to understand. I’ve got nothing to lose, Richie. So talk or die. Was she pretty?”

“Was who pretty?”

David fired a round into the ottoman between Mathers’s feet.

“Holy shit!” The stoner pulled his legs onto the armchair as thin smoke curled out of the hole in the vinyl. “Yeah, she was a looker. Hotter than hot. So what? Are you horny? You need a date?”

“Black hair, blue eyes?”

“If you already knew, why come here and ask?”

From a hip pocket, David withdrew a photograph of Emily and unfolded it and showed it to Mathers. “Is this her?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s the bitch.” Greater fear darkened his expression. “Is she something to you?”

Returning the photo to his pocket, the pistol still trained on Mathers, David said, “What did you do to her?”

“What shit are you talking? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means. Your first minute is almost up.”

Richard Mathers continued to avoid meeting David’s eyes. “That amazing face. I’m only human, aren’t I?”

“I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

“Hey, I only did what any guy would do.”

“Any pervert. Tell me.”

“She was all alone in the house, just sitting there staring, totally out of it, like hypnotized or maybe some autistic person, maybe having a seizure, maybe some kind of deep stupid. I don’t know. I’m no freakin’ doctor.”

“Go on.”

“It was creepy, you know, like crazy weird, but she had this super nice rack, and I could see she wasn’t wearing no bra.”

“You unbuttoned her blouse.”

“It was a sweater. I pulled it off, right over her head, and she just sat there like some blow-up doll, like she was saying you could do anything to her and she’d be cool with it.”

“And?”

“Give me a break. You don’t need to ask.”

“And?”

“I hate your guts, man. Okay, all right, I took her head in my hands, you know, just to put it where I needed it to be.”

“Dirtbag.”

“Like you wouldn’t have done the same. But before I could do what I wanted, I felt this thing through her hair, in the back of her head.”

David frowned. “What thing?”

“Like a recess, very shallow, like a sixteenth-inch deep. You could hardly detect it, except it was perfectly round, which felt really weird. Creepy. I bent her head farther forward, pulled her hair out of the way, and there was this shiny metal cap, like the size of a quarter, in her skull.”