“Yes, sir.”

“Now, go on.”

Eric took a step or two, then broke into a run.

A minute later, Kevin greeted his uncle from the far side of the screen door on the back porch. “Hey, Uncle Walt.” His lanky frame looked all the thinner with his shirt off. His pants hung below the elastic of his underwear-a fashion statement for some, but not for Kevin. No one in the family had fully processed the loss, nearly a year earlier, of Walt’s brother, Bobby. Least of all Kevin. Walt had tried to fill the void; had neglected his own family in the process; and had now paid for it with his own divorce. Walt had never been real good at getting close; perhaps Kevin read that awkwardness as something else. He’d never been receptive to Walt’s advances. The one thing that connected them was now dead, and they both reminded the other of him so much that it hurt.

“Hey, yourself,” Walt said. “Eric and Taylor Crabtree sure took off in a hurry. What was that about?”

He shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Maybe the cop car and the uniform didn’t help?”

“Maybe.”

“Taylor Crabtree is bad news.”

Kevin took a moment to study the places where paint had chipped from the doorjamb. “So you’ve said. Are you going to tell Mom?”

“You kidding me? You think I want to be on the receiving end of that windstorm?” He won a faint smile. “I’m going to tell her we had a talk about the keggers and that you promised me you wouldn’t drink and drive, and that you wouldn’t get high. Can you keep that promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“You know it’s my job to bust those parties, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re the last person on earth I’d ever want to arrest.”

“I got it.”

“How’s the job at Cristina’s going?”

“Good, I guess.”

“It’s shit work.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said, cracking another slight smile, “it sucks.”

“But if you hang in there, she’ll move you into the kitchen or out as a waiter. Both of those are better money, and they’re better work.”

Kevin’s face revealed his internal disconnect. Walt had seen that face before-the “oh, shit, here it comes again” look that any teenager learns to command. Walt wanted to take the kid and hug him, to hold him. He knew Myra; he didn’t imagine anyone had done that since the funeral. But something stopped him.

“Grandpa called.”

“You understand what I’m saying about Crabtree?” Walt owed it to the boy to get his point across.

“Said he was here for the long weekend, that maybe we’d have dinner or something. You, him, me, and Mom.”

“You’ve got to distance yourself from him, Kev.”

“Grandpa?” Kevin asked.

“Don’t twist things around on me. Tell me Crabtree being here had nothing to do with drugs.”

“Jesus, you’re not my father.” Kevin paused. “I suppose you want to come in and look around.” He swung open the screen door and held it.

“I’m not coming in. Shut the door.”

“What about it? Seeing Grandpa?”

“Your grandpa and I are having dinner later at the Pio. Why don’t you and your mom come up around eight for dessert?”

“Seriously?”

“I won’t be wearing my uniform.”

“That doesn’t bother me.”

“Sure it does,” Walt said.

“Yeah, kinda.”

“Eight o’clock, all right?”

“Got it.”

“Crabtree.”

“I know.”

“All right then.”

T revalian worked efficiently in the bathroom of the suite adjacent to Nagler’s. One misstep, and he’d be at the center of a fire so hot, so incendiary, that it would easily consume him and a wing of the hotel before help arrived.

The litter of packaging overflowed the wastebasket into a pile on the tile floor.

He finished assembling the Coleman camp stove. He’d removed the vent grate, allowing him to clamp and duct-tape a battery-operated fan into its rectangular hole, allowing the fan to evacuate the soon-to-be-toxin-ridden air more quickly. He lit both of the Coleman’s burners and began to hum quietly.

He inspected his various purchases. He’d bought no more than two items from a single store. Untraceable. Undetectable. Unbelievably easy. To the left of the sink he found the bottle of bleach. He broke its seal and filled a Pyrex bowl, then, with the fan running, brought it to a boil. He weighed out the table salt substitute and added it to the bleach and continued boiling until the battery tester registered FULL CHARGE. Full charge, indeed. He removed the bowl and set it to cool in the ice-filled sink. He then filtered out the crystals, recovering the bleach to boil it again. An hour later he was heating distilled water with the crystals and filtering this as well. At the end of this process of fractional crystallization, he had relatively pure potassium chlorate, which he ground to the consistency of face powder.

He melted equal parts Vaseline and wax, dissolved it over the camp stove, and then poured it over the potassium chlorate in a large Tupperware bowl. Wearing a pair of rubber gloves, he kneaded this until thoroughly mixed and set the bowl outside, in the corner of the balcony, pulling a potted plant over to conceal it.

He double-checked that the PRIVACY PLEASE tag was on the door and the dead bolt was still engaged. As a finishing touch, he angled the desk chair beneath the inside doorknob. Ensured no one could enter the Meisner room without a battering ram, he then cleaned up the bathroom, grouping the various ingredients in a brown paper bag beneath the sink.

He entered Nagler’s room, closed and locked the connecting door, pausing only briefly to once again reconsider each and every step. Lightheaded with excitement-or was it the fumes?-he proceeded to the mirror in Nagler’s bathroom and resolved himself to the patient application of the facial hair, the clothing, and finally the milky contact lenses that made him blind.

He had a party to attend.

W hat have I gotten myself into?” Liz Shaler asked Jenna, her plain-faced executive secretary who’d worked with her for nearly ten years. Liz was putting the finishing touches on her face, in front of a mirror in what had once been her parents’ bedroom.

“You’ll be fine,” Jenna assured her.

“I’m whoring, and we both know it. I might as well just spread my legs and get it over with.”

“Just don’t let the tabloids see you.”

“I’ll bet I’ve had a half dozen of these very people, or at least their companies, under some form of investigation or inquiry in the past six years. And now I’m asking them for money? How hypocritical is that?”

“You’re not asking anyone for money.”

“Give me a break.”

“You’re going to make your positions clear, and if some of these people choose to support those positions, then fine.”

“It is so much more complicated than that, and you know it. We’re tricking the system, Patrick Cutter and I, and I should know better. This kind of thing always backfires.”

“You’re doing nothing wrong, nothing illegal. We’ve vetted this six ways to Sunday. Your job is to have fun. It’s only a couple days.”

“You mean it’s my last couple of days. Feels like some kind of sentence. Everything changes Sunday morning. Don’t kid yourself about that, Jenna: everything.” She dabbed a cotton ball at the edge of her eyes. “We will not have a moment’s rest for the next fifteen months and twelve days. We are going way out on a limb here.”

“Since when have we not been out on a limb?”

“I’m comfortable as a whore? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Beats working for a living.”

The women exchanged smiles in the mirror, though Liz Shaler’s sank into a grimace. “I hope I’m not making a mistake.”

“Of course you are. But what’s the alternative?”

“I could be a ski bum,” Liz suggested.

“Or sit, bored, on a dozen boards.”

“You made your point,” Liz chided. She’d heard this often from her advisers: nowhere to go but up. “How’s this?” she asked, turning to show her face.