“Special.” Paulson snickered over the word. “You’re special, all right.”

They drove on in silence. Carter looked at the floor of the van, feeling dizzy and sick to his stomach. He wished now he’d never eaten the McMuffin. He’d begun to cry. Didn’t know when he’d done that last. Nobody had ever said anything about raping the woman, not that he recalled. They’d asked about the girl but he’d always said no, which was the God’s truth, he swore it. The little thing weren’t no more than five year old. He’d just been trying to show her a toad he found in the grass. He thought she’d like to see something like that, something tiny, like she was. That’s all he’d meant to do, nice. Ain’t nobody ever done things like that for him when he was a boy. C’mere honey, I got something to show you. Just a little bit of a thing, like you.

At least he’d known what Terrell was, what was going to happen to him there. Nobody’d said nothing about raping the lady, Mrs. Wood. That day in the yard, she’d gone just flat-out crazy on him, screaming and hitting, telling the little girl to run, and it wasn’t his fault she’d fallen in, he’d just been trying to make her calm down, tell her nothing had happened, he’d go away and never come back if that’s what she wanted. He’d been okay with that, and okay with the rest too, when it came down to it. But then Wolgast had showed up and told him he didn’t have to go to the needle after all, turning Carter’s mind in another direction, and now look where he was. There weren’t no sense in any of it. It made him sick and shaky to his bones.

He lifted his head to find Paulson grinning at him. The whites of his eyes widened.

“Boo!” Paulson slapped the wheel and burst into laughter, like he’d just told the best joke of his life. Then he slammed the window shut.

Wolgast and Doyle were somewhere in South Memphis now, working their way out of the city’s suburban ring through a warren of residential streets. The whole thing had gone bad from the start. Wolgast had no idea what in the hell had been going on at the zoo, the whole place was going berserk, and then the woman, the old nun, Arnette, had just about tackled the other one, Lacey, to get the girl out of her hands.

The girl. Amy NLN. She couldn’t have been more than six years old.