Something was beating in Ig’s temples. It was like a hammer falling on hot metal, a steady ringing crash. He came off the interstate and followed the highway to the office park, where the congressman kept his offices in a building with a great wedge-shaped glass atrium thrusting outward from the front of the building, like the prow of some enormous glass tanker. Ig drove to the entrance around back.

The blacktop lot behind the building was two-thirds empty, baking in the afternoon heat. Ig parked and grabbed his blue nylon windbreaker from the backseat and climbed out. It was too warm for a coat, but he put it on anyway. He liked the feel of the sun on his face and head and the heat shimmering up off the asphalt beneath him. Gloried in it, really.

He opened the hatchback and raised the compartment in the floor. The tire iron was bolted to the underside of a metal panel, but the bolts were caked in rust, and trying to twist them loose hurt his hands. He quit and looked in his roadside-emergency kit. It held a magnesium flare, a tube wrapped in red paper, oily and smooth. He grinned. A flare beat the hell out of a tire iron. He could burn Lee’s pretty face with it. Blind him in the other eye, maybe-that might be as good as killing him. Besides, Ig was more suited to a flare than a tire iron. Wasn’t it well established that fire was the devil’s only friend?

Ig crossed the blacktop through the shimmering heat. It was this summer that the seventeen-year locusts came out to mate, and the trees behind the parking lot were filled with their noise, a deep, resonating thrum, like the working of a great mechanical lung. The sound of them filled Ig’s head, was the sound of his headache, of madness, of his clarifying rage. A snippet of the Revelation to John came back to him: Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth. The locusts came every seventeen years to fuck and to die. Lee Tourneau was a bug, no better than the locusts-quite a bit worse, really. He had done the fucking part, and now he could die. Ig would help him. As he crossed the lot, he jammed the flare up into the sleeve of his coat and held it there with his right hand.

He approached a pair of Plexiglas doors imprinted with the Honorable Congressman of New Hampshire’s name. They had a mirrored tint, and he saw himself reflected there: a scrawny, sweating man in a windbreaker zipped to his throat, who looked as if he’d come to commit a crime. Not to mention he had horns. The points had split through the skin of his temples, and the bone beneath was stained pink with blood. Worse even than the horns, though, was the way he was grinning. If he had been standing on the other side of those doors and saw himself coming, he would’ve turned the lock and called 911.

He pushed into air-conditioned, carpeted quiet. A fat man with a flattop haircut sat behind a desk, talking cheerfully into a headset. Just to the right of the desk was a security checkpoint where visitors were required to pass through a metal detector. A fifty-something state trooper sat behind the X-ray monitor, chewing gum. A sliding Plexiglas window behind the receptionist’s desk looked into a small bare room with a map of New Hampshire tacked to the wall and a security monitor on a table. A second state trooper, an enormous, broad-shouldered man, sat in there at a folding table, bent over paperwork. Ig could not see his face, but he had a thick neck and a great white bald head that was somehow vaguely obscene.

It unnerved Ig, those state troopers, that metal detector. The sight of them brought back bad memories of Logan Airport, and his body tingled with an ill sweat. He had not been here to see Lee in well over a year and didn’t remember ever having to clear any kind of security before.

The receptionist said “Good-bye, honey” into his headset, pressed a button on his desk, and looked at Ig. The receptionist had a big, round, moony face, and probably his name was Chet or Chip. Behind his square-framed glasses was a bright look of dismay or bafflement.

“Help you?” he asked Ig.

“Yes. Could you-”

But then something else caught Ig’s attention: the security monitor in that room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. It displayed a fish-eyed view of the reception area-the potted plants, the inoffensive plush couches, and Ig himself. Only something was wrong with the monitor. Ig kept splitting into two overlapping figures and then jumping back together; that part of the image was flickering and unstable. The primary image of Ig showed him as he was, a pale, gaunt man with tragically receding hair, a goatee, and curving horns. But then there was that secondary shadow image, dark and featureless, which kept twitching in and out of existence. This second version of himself was without horns-an image not of who he was but of who he had been. It was like watching his own soul trying to pry itself free from the demon to which it was anchored.

The state trooper who sat in that bare, brightly lit room with the monitor had noticed as well, had revolved in his office chair to study the screen. Ig could still not see the trooper’s face; he had rotated far enough around so Ig could see only his ear and his polished white dome, a cannonball of bone and skin, resting on the thick, brutal plug of his neck. After a moment the state trooper reached out and banged his fist on the monitor, trying to correct the image, and hit it so hard that for a moment the whole picture blacked out.

“Sir?” said the receptionist.

Ig pulled his stare away from the monitor. “Could…could you page Lee Tourneau? Tell him Ig Perrish is here to see him.”

“I have to see your driver’s license and print you an ID tag before I can send you through,” he said in a flat, automatic sort of way, staring at the horns with blank-eyed fascination.

Ig glanced at the security checkpoint and knew he couldn’t walk through it with a magnesium flare stuck up his sleeve.

“Tell him I’ll wait out here. Tell him he’s going to want to see me.”

“I don’t think he will,” said the receptionist. “I can’t imagine anyone would want to. You’re awful. You have horns, and you’re awful. I wish I didn’t even come into work today, just looking at you. I almost didn’t come into work. Once a month I give myself a mental-health day and stay at home and put on my mother’s underpants and get myself good and hot. For an old bird, she has some really dirty stuff. She’s got a black satin corset with a whalebone back, lotta straps, real nice.” His eyes were glazed, and there was a little white spit at the corner of his mouth.

“I especially like that you think of it as a mental-health day,” Ig said. “Get me Lee Tourneau, would you?”

The receptionist rotated ninety degrees to one side, turning his shoulder to Ig. He punched a button, then murmured into his headset. He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He revolved back toward Ig. His round face gleamed with perspiration.

“He’s in meetings all morning.”

“Tell him I know what he did. Use those exact words. Tell Lee if he wants to talk about it, I’ll wait five minutes in the parking lot.”

The receptionist gave him a blank stare, then nodded and turned slightly away again. Into his headset he said, “Mr. Tourneau? He says…he says he knows what you did?” Turning it into a question at the last moment.

Ig didn’t hear what else the receptionist had to say, though, because in the next moment there was a voice in his ear, a voice he knew well but had not heard in several years.

“Iggy fucking Perrish,” said Eric Hannity.

Ig turned around and saw the bald state trooper who’d been sitting with the security monitor in the room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. At eighteen Eric had been a teenager straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, big and sinewy, with a head of close-cropped curly brown hair. He had liked to walk around with no shoes and his shirt off and his jeans slipping down around his hips. But now that he was almost thirty, his face had lost its definition, becoming a fleshy block, and when his hair started to thin, he’d shaved it off rather than fight a battle he couldn’t win. He was magnificent now in his baldness; if he had an earring in one ear, he could’ve played Mr. Clean in a TV commerical. He had, perhaps inevitably, gone into his daddy’s line of work, a trade that offered him both authority and legal cover to occasionally hurt people. Back when Ig and Lee were still friends (if they had ever really been friends), Lee had mentioned that Eric was in charge of the congressman’s security. Lee said Eric had mellowed a lot. Lee had even been out sportfishing with him a time or two. “Course, for chum he uses the livers of disemboweled protesters,” Lee said. “Make of that what you will.”