Maybe that makes it sound worse than it was. We were at least superficially comfortable. We had money; I went to a decent school. Furtive though my father’s business might be, he was successful at it. I overheard argumentative phone calls in which he inevitably prevailed. Sometimes men in neatly pressed suits came to see him, and they spoke to him softly and deferentially. I had occasionally wondered whether my father might be a criminal, but the idea seemed ludicrous on the face of it. I guessed he might be operating on the far side of some trivial law, maybe dodging taxes or import duties, but I had learned from television and the Internet that such behavior could be lovable and even, looked at in the right light, heroic. The Spin years had taught us that when the rules break down it’s root hog or die; and in those days you did what you had to do to keep a family together and food on the table.

I loved my father. I told myself so, and I believed it. It was only later that I collided with his disdain for conventional ethics, his pathological need to be obeyed.

The sluicing rain was useful cover. My father’s business was housed in a building older than the Spin, a twentieth-century building with brick walls and small high windows of green leaded glass. It fronted on this dreary street, but the real work was conducted from the rear, where the loading bays were. My father had taken me here twice before, against my mother’s objections, to give me a sanitized tour of the warehouse—he may have hoped to bring me into the business at some point in the future. And I had scouted the area myself just two days ago, working out a plan. I cut down a narrow passage between two adjoining buildings to the laneway at the back. Long ago, a railway spur had serviced these warehouses. The spur line had been paved over but the asphalt had scabbed away in places to reveal the old steel rails, glittering in the smoky orange light of the street lamps. The rain was coming down pretty hard but I could hear the slosh of flammable liquid in the jug I was carrying.

Last year I had fallen in love with a girl named Latisha Philips—fallen in love the way a seventeen-year-old falls in love, stupidly, wholeheartedly. Latisha was an inch taller than I was and so sweetly good-looking that I woke up most mornings afraid she’d figure out she could do better than Turk Findley. She was smart, too. If scholarship programs hadn’t been cut to the bone during the post-Spin austerity drives, she might have qualified for an Ivy League college. She wanted to be a marine biologist. She wanted to save the oceans from acidification. She attended local protests against the sulfur-aerosol launches.