Janet took the car (keys still in the ignition) and drove to Elma Park, her central headquarters, and there she avoided cops and found new friends and did her best to completely forget Jimmy (because it had dawned on her after five minutes of staring at her friend, sprawled on the ground next to the hatchery tank, that maybe she had made a grievous error in giving him such a hard pop with such a hard pipe). The loot from their exploits that evening disappeared into the hands of a dealer, who in turn gave her a small baggie loaded with white-comet life-force powder.

Just the faintest sound of footfalls on the thick carpet padding, a lingering give of floorboard along with the central air sealed silence of the house to keep the sound of crickets out. He was an old man but not particularly weak. He worked out on his home gym, kept his muscles toned, and during his life he had put in his time doing manual stuff, putting a shovel tip into the ground alongside the other men, even when he was doing the contracting. He was proud of this fact. When he looked in the mirror and made a careful study of what was left of his physique, he saw the general sagging along his bones, the veins and arteries rising up through the rice-paper skin; the only major defect aside from age was the small scar just above his Adam’s apple (he had one of those turkeylike jiggling gullets). He took pride in the faculties he had left, honed them, buffed and rebuffed. One of these was his acute auditory sense. I can hear like hell, he liked to say. I’ve got the ears of a dog. So when he heard the soft give of the loose stair board (the only squeaky step), he rolled sideways out of bed (because his only other affliction of account was his tight back, which would spasm in knots if it took the full lift of his body from the prone position), twisted in a half gainer, and landed softly on the carpeting, where he leaned over and groped from beneath the bed a nine-iron golf club he superstitiously kept there—not so much for protection from an intruder but because he had golfed his whole life and felt that in keeping a club there he might, when his spirit left his body and hovered momentarily, be able to reach down beneath the bed and clutch the arm of his favorite club and haul it up to heaven. There wasn’t much light in the room, just the pale wash of starlight. But with his eyes adjusted he could see enough to make out the shadowy torso of the intruder in the doorway, just standing, unmoving, and then he heard the sharp intake and outtake of his breathing labored from the stairs (it was Jimmy in the doorway, not sure exactly if he was in the bedroom or a bathroom but getting the feel that it was a bedroom before discerning a movement of something in front of him. His eyes were adjusted but not 20/20, more 20/40, and a bit of cataract had formed on one eye along with whatever effects years of drug use had produced; so the form in front of him was twisted partly sidelong the way an image distorted by heat might be, and he hardly had a chance to get his bearings when there was the swish of the club and he was struck in the side, near his kidney, and knocked over). Janet came and flicked on the light.