He found the boogie house bungalow but it was all dark, locked up. The Main House had lights on inside. Lett rushed through the trees and up the driveway and hugged the front door to stay in shadow on the porch. All clear. He gently knocked on the door with his knuckles, so as not to alert any possible sentry. He stopped, placed his ear to the door and listened, the sweat making his ear a suction cup.

The door pulled away from his ear with the slightest wet smack.

Kanani stood before him. She wore a robe too big for her. Her hair was up. She hadn’t turned a light on. “He’s not here,” she said from the dimness.

“I’m not looking for Selfer.” Lett stepped inside, pulling the door shut. “Is it safe?”

“I’m the only one here. They laid off old Yoshiko, she went home—”

“There is no cure,” Lett blurted.

“What?”

“My dose. It’s bogus. It’s all a sham. Lansdale . . .”

Kanani’s eyes widened. She pulled him into the sunken living room area without turning on a light. She sat him down and sat facing him.

He told her about confronting Lansdale.

“You what?” She pulled back. “Oh, no . . .”

She moved to punch him in the arm but he snatched her wrist.

“My treatment, it makes me even worse than I was,” he told her. “Corrupts me all the way. Early on, ‘Doctor’ Lansdale told me treatment has three stages: talk, medication, training. He said treatment involves the full confrontation of what’s troubling a guy. First, I talk it out, then I get a ‘revolutionary’ new medication, then I ‘replace’ my toughest issues with new assignments that rebuild my ability to cope, all by reinforcing my latest actions. Lansdale claimed I would own my trouble this way and thereby destroy it. ‘Rebuild,’ he called it. The mission makes the man—”

“You’re hurting me.”

Lett was squeezing her wrist. He kept squeezing. “Treatment turns me into a man who doesn’t feel the combat fatigue, the terrors. That makes me a psychopath. A guy who likes it. And who doesn’t need his dose after that. But I was fighting it. I kept needing my dose. Even though it was a placebo. See? I was fighting it inside and didn’t even know it at first.”

“Let go.”

Lett released her. “The end stage of the cure—it’s killing. The cure is the cause.”

Kanani, rubbing her wrist, stared above his head, into darkness. Thinking.

“Finally using a gun? That’s the clincher,” he added.

“Your next mission,” she said.

“Who’s at this important meeting?” Kanani said.

“I don’t know. Has Selfer told you anything? Confided in you?”

“No, not like that,” Kanani muttered. She wiped at her face, pushing the last of her sleep off it. “He just said things are changing and changing fast.”

“Frankie. You seen him here again? Anywhere?”