O Diana, O crazed bitch, faithless sodomite, wavering again into the cassoulet at the Lavandou in New York City. Was hunger yet another aftereffect of hate? He imagined opening the casserole and seeing her in foreign embrace, a visual decal on the delicious mixture of preserved goose, lamb, sausages and white beans. Diana’s face cast its lovely image against the dark cloud he was still staring at, his head gradually craning straight upward, when the cloud dumped buckets of water upon him. Oh jesus. He ran to the car with the pieces of the shotgun inside his Burberry bumping painfully against his side. The forepiece fell out and dropped to the mud. He bent to pick it up and blacked out for a second, falling to his knees with a hand stretched out to the car door. The brief seizure passed and he flicked off a bottle cap that had stuck to his muddy palm. Inside the car he whispered a prayer to the god of murder and wiped the mud from the forepiece. He assembled the 20-gauge Fox-Sterlingworth, locking in the barrels to the breech, and noting how the forepiece snapped on with a loud and satisfying clack. They wouldn’t leave the ketch in a hard rain because it was a long walk to the parking lot. O Diana, take me to Toad Hall where I can live with my own kind. Didn’t I finally pull down your Calvin Klein jeans last night, tears streaked with laughter instead of tear tears, and head home with gusto, unmindful in my lust if the tender thicket had owned a previous intruder? It takes a while for a fucking Subaru heater to crank up, he thought, reminding himself to write the manufacturer in old Nippon. How had he managed to go through a C-note in a New York sushi bar, and then that haunting trip to the Mudd Club with Garth? He turned on the wipers and viewed the ketch through two layers of glass, amused with the distortions.

Finally, through the metronomic whacks of the wipers, he saw Rabun’s head emerge from the hatch, then Diana’s. He was out of the car in a shot, and running in the crouched manner of the SWAT teams on TV, the shotgun barrels poking out the back of his trench coat like fatal exhaust pipes. Warlock caught them just at the edge of the gangplank holding two umbrellas.

“The jig is up,” he screamed, having failed to prepare a more appropriate line.

Their mouths made little circles of horror, sucking at the cold, wet air in disbelief; eyes flickering from Warlock’s face down to the shotgun and back.

“Johnny, we were just having lunch,” Diana said in a timbrous whisper that somehow made itself heard above the wind shrieking through the rigging.

“What did you have, a hot dog, you scheming bitch?” He found his voice breaking precipitously close to sobs.