of homework being tackled.
‘How’s it going?’
He shrugged. Shrugging was the lingua franca. She remembered that too. ‘Okay,’ he added.
‘Good. Who’s that you’re listening to, anyway?’
Josh blushed faintly, as if his mom had asked who this Connie Lingus was, that everyone was talking about.
‘Stu Rezni,’ he said, diffidently. ‘He …’
‘Used to hit sticks for Fallow. I know. I saw him at the Astoria. Before they knocked it down. He was so wasted he fell off his stool.’
She was gratified to see her son’s eyebrows shoot up. She tried not to smile.
‘Can you keep the volume sane for a while, honey? There’s a show I want to watch. Plus people are staggering up the street with bleeding ears, and you know how that lowers the tone.’
‘Sure,’ he said, with a genuine smile. ‘Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ she said, thinking I hope he’s going to be okay. He was a nice boy, polite, a slacker who still got (most of) his chores done eventually. She hoped without a trace of egotism that he’d taken on enough of her, too, along with the big old helping of Bill he’d absorbed. This young man already spent a lot of time alone, and seldom seemed more content than when taking something apart or putting it back together. That was cool, of course, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she saw evidence of his first hangover. Man cannot live by coding skills alone, not even in these strange days.
‘Later,’ she said, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.
The doorbell rang.
As she hurried downstairs she heard the volume drop a little farther, and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.
It was dark outside, the street lamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.
A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long dark coat.
‘Yes?’ Gina said.
She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.
‘I’m looking for William Anderson,’ he said.
‘He’s not here right now. Who are you?’
‘Agent Shepherd,’ the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. ‘Mind if I come inside?’
Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.
‘Hold on a second there, buster,’ she said, leaving the door open and following him. ‘Can I see some ID?’
The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.
‘What’s this about?’ Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live Fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.
‘I need to talk to your husband,’ the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.
Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. ‘Well, he’s out, like I said.’
The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.
‘You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.’
‘The hell you do,’ Gina said. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but …’
His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.
She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.
‘Where is it?’ he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.
Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to pull away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.
‘I’m going to find it anyway,’ he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. ‘But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?’
‘I … don’t …’
‘Mom?’
Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.
‘Let go of my mom.’
Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.
Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. ‘Let go of my …’
Gina just had time to realize she’d got it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all but just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.
She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.
Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw and she didn’t know where she was.
A second or several minutes passed.
Then she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half-propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arms’ reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.
The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing through the pool of blood seeping from his head.
The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can over her son, then dropped it on him
