Ronald “Butch” Dafoe. Killed six family members. 1974. Now this guy is one mean son of a bitch. You look at old Butch, and the rest of us seem like the boys next door. Six! I thought three was bad. Looks like I’m Snow White. Okay, I can sort of see doing it. Here’s old Butch kid. Dad is always whaling on him. Mom’s a doormat. His dad tells him not to take any shit off the kids at school but heaps shit on him at home. Heaps shit on the mom and the other kids. Yelling all the time. Huge fights. Four brothers and sisters. So Butch turns out to be a chip off the old block. He starts hitting back, and it works great. Gets him all this stuff, this boat, and his own room, and stuff. Dad kind of secretly respects him. I mean, he’s been preaching this Butchie’s whole life, right? Now, not only is Butch not getting the tar smacked out of him, but his dad is paying him to be cool. Big money, too. I can see where Butch might think he earned that money, what with getting whaled on and listening to screaming matches and whatever. But after he gets used to that for a while, he thinks, Hey, I could get more. These fucks owe me more. Way more. First thing is, he’s got to kill the old man. No biggie; he’s been hating the bastard forever. Then, probably Mom should bite the dust, too. She watched his dad beat up on him when he was little, so fuck her. The little kids. That’s harder. But why not? I mean, who is going to look after them? Not our Butch. Hell, he’s doing them a favor. Shoots them in their sleep. I think he’s sorry about the little kids. You know, like when Dad had to kill a kitten we had because it got sick and went blind, and he felt sad about that.

But he got over it.

Dr. Kowalski had grown old treating Dylan. A few years with Butcher Boy, and the psychiatrist’s sandy gray hair was thinning, the incongruous red beard flecked with dull white hairs.

Dylan had grown, if not wiser, then more cunning. He figured he’d learned more than Kowalski had. For one thing, he’d learned that Kowalski was not so much treating him-as if there were any treatment for boys who ran with axes-as exploiting him. He also realized that the thinning hair and graying beard had little to do with the fact that Dylan was a murderer, or even a poor tragic boy in juvie, and all to do with the fact that Dylan still wouldn’t remember.

As the doctor’s decline became more pronounced, he’d taken to looking at Dylan with piercing need. Every boy in Drummond knew that look. They saw it on the faces of the “girls” who wanted to love them and the users who wanted to fuck them. It was so sharp in the faces of the boys whose folks came to visit that it hurt to look at them. Gangs of kids stared hungry like that when he and Draco peddled the drugs they’d scored. When that kind of naked hunger manifested, Dylan’s hackles rose. Either the beast was fed or there was trouble.

In the ward, in the yard, trouble could be met with fists or knives. Fists and knives wouldn’t work with Kowalski.

They’d work, Dylan thought with a half smile. They’d just cost too much.

Kowalski was still lusting after his New York Times best seller. That first day Dylan hadn’t known if that was good or bad. Now he knew. It was life and death for Kowalski. Life was when people thought he was a big deal; death was shrinking delinquents in the middle of Piddlesquat, Minnesota.

The “hook,” Kowalski had told him in an unguarded moment, was when Dylan, like Kafka’s cockroach boy, had metamorphosed into a hideous beast. The climax would be when Dylan remembered his transformation and spewed it forth for the delectation of his brilliant and kindly doctor. Right there in Dylan Raines’s brain was fame and fortune. And the little psycho fuck wouldn’t fork it over.

Dylan smiled, slumped down until his butt was nearly off the couch and his head at a sharp angle to the backrest, widened his eyes, and stared vacuously at the psychiatrist.

Kowalski knew the Ward C boys called the warren where his office was located the Rat’s Maze. What he didn’t know was that he was their pet rat. They conducted experiments on him. The result of one such experiment, conducted over a period of six weeks with four Ward C boys, was eye movement. The conclusion was that narrowed eyes excited the doc-not sexual excitement, Dr. K. wasn’t AC/DC-but the way a cat gets excited when it sees a bird. The doctor saw a challenge and it goosed up his energy. Avoiding eye contact bored the shrink, and a bored head examiner was a bad thing. He’d start in with the do-you-smell-your-own-shit routine. The way to piss him off most effectively was the idiot stare. All the boys had perfected it.

Maybe Kowalski’s book should be about mental retardation brought on by psychoanalysis, Dylan thought.

He could have given Kowalski what he wanted, or a facsimile thereof. Under the guise of getting him to remember, he had been forced to study his crimes as assiduously as other boys his age were made to study English, science, and math. He knew exactly what he had done, how he had done it, how long it had taken, where the blood spatters were, and how many steps there were from one body to the next. There probably wasn’t a felon in America who knew as much about himself as Dylan did.

But he wouldn’t remember it.

He would remember his mom and dad, weekends at the lake cabin. He would remember school and his friends. His last best memory was of his mother’s lips pressed like butterfly wings against his forehead the night she died, the tiny gold cross falling from her robe onto his cheek, the fresh-out-of-the-dryer smell of her nightgown, how cool her hand felt when she held his chin and spooned the cherry-flavored flu medicine into his mouth, the tired smile as she said, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Pseudomedical brain battering had reduced those memories to dull, sepia-toned images. Since he wasn’t likely to be gathering a whole lot more warm fuzzy memories in the near future, it pissed Dylan off that the mental health professionals had pawed over what he had until they were threadbare.

Dylan could have told a hell of a good story, complete with adolescent angst and revelations to get Kowalski off his back, but there was no way he’d let the pompous self-serving fuck make a dime off of him. And he’d gotten to where he kind of enjoyed the game.

So Dylan idiot-stared and Kowalski sat, one knee crossed over the other, hands steepled, fingertips to his lips, pretending he could see through Dylan’s bones.

Dylan opened his eyes a fraction wider and cocked his head to one side. Kowalski recrossed his legs. There was a moth hole in his right trouser cuff. The left lens of his glasses was badly scratched.

Kowalski was in debt, broke, Dylan realized. Wednesdays and Saturdays the loser parents of loser JDs came to visit. Poverty oozed from their pores, leaked onto their clothes; they stank of it. Kowalski was stinking of it now.

Psychiatrists were rich; they didn’t go broke unless they were owned by something-gambling, coke, heroin.

Heroin had been the hot item in Ward C a few years back, but Dylan laid off the stuff. The first time it was offered him, he’d turned it down.

Draco asked, “Saving your virginity for the big house?”

Dylan missed Draco. He’d gotten out when Dylan was thirteen or fourteen, but they still heard from him occasionally. He was doing time in a California state prison for getting caught in a men’s room trying to peddle a dime bag to a cop.

Big-time drug dealer, going to “go ‘to the coast’ and sell coke to the stars.” Dylan smiled.

“I’m glad to see you’re in such a gay mood,” Kowalski snapped from his preshrink silence. He recrossed his legs and checked his watch-the signal that the session was to begin. “I won’t be able to come back to Drummond as often as I’d like,” he said in his reserved, we-both-know-I’m-God sort of way. “I have other commitments-a new job, better.”