According to one witness, the killer came out of the bay, dragging itself over the lip of the seawall. Another witness saw the monster, dripping ooze, squeezing up from the storm sewer. These same people said the forensic evidence was consistent with a hard backhanded slap from a giant lizard walking on its hind legs. The ribcage collapsed was sure proof the victim was stepped on by some dinosaur throwback.

Something dashed past, other people said, something low to the ground, too fast to be an animal. Or it was a maniac run amok with a fifty-pound sledgehammer. One witness, she said we were being “smote” by God from the Old Testament. Swatted by something with a huge paw. Black as the black night. Silent and invisible. Everyone saw something different.

“What matters,” Sister Vigilante says, “is, people need a monster they can believe in.”

A true and horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us.

Working the tip of the knife blade under another nail, she says, What's important is, the crime rate went down.

In times like that, every man is a suspect. Every woman, a potential victim.

Public attention went this same way during the White Chapel Murders. During Jack the Ripper. For that hundred days, the murder rate dropped 94 percent, to just five prostitutes. Their throats slashed. A kidney half eaten. Guts hung around the room on picture hooks. The sex organs and a fetus taken for a souvenir. Burglaries dropped by 85 percent. Assault by 70 percent.

Sister Vigilante, she says how nobody wanted to be the next victim of the Ripper. People locked their windows. More important, nobody wanted to be accused of being the killer. People didn't walk out at night.

During the Atlanta Child Murders, while thirty kids were strangled, tied to trees, and stabbed, beaten, and shot, most of the city lived in security and safety they'd never known.

During the Cleveland Torso Murders. The Boston Strangler. The Chicago Ripper. The Tulsa Bludgeoner. The Los Angeles Slasher . . .

During these waves of murder, all crime dropped in each city. Except for the showoffy handful of victims, their arms hacked away and their heads found elsewhere, except for these spectacular sacrifices, each city enjoyed the safest period in its history.

During the New Orleans Ax Man Murders, the killer wrote the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. On the night of March 19, the killer promised to kill no one in a house where he could hear jazz music. That night, New Orleans was roaring with music, and no one was killed.

“In a city with a limited police budget,” Sister Vigilante says, “a high-profile serial killer is an effective means of behavior modification.”

With the shadow of this horrible bogeyman, with it stalking the streets downtown, nobody beefed about the unemployment rate. The water shortage. The traffic.

With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved.

At this point in Sister Vigilante's story, Director Denial walks by, calling and sobbing for Cora Reynolds.

It's one thing, the Sister says, a person getting killed, somebody with a crushed ribcage trying to catch another breath before they die, they heave and moan, their lips stretched wide, mouthing the air. Somebody with a crushed-in ribcage, she says, you can kneel next to them in the dark street with nobody around to watch. You can see their eyes glaze over. But killing an animal, well, that's different. Animals, she says, a dog, it makes us human. Proof of our humanity. Other people, they just make us redundant. A dog or cat, a bird or a lizard, it makes us God.

All day long, she says, our biggest enemy is other people. It's people packed around us in traffic. People ahead of us in line at the supermarket. It's the supermarket checkers who hate us for keeping them so busy. No, people didn't want this killer to be another human being. But they wanted people to die.

In ancient Rome, Sister Vigilante says, at the Colosseum, the “editor” was the man who organized the bloody games at the heart of keeping people peaceful and united. That's where the word “editor” really comes from. Today, our editor plans the menu of murder, rape, arson, and assault on the front page of the day's newspaper.

Of course, there was a hero. By accident, August 2, sunset at 8:34, a twenty-seven-year-old named Maria Alvarez was leaving a hotel where she worked as the night auditor. She stood on the curb, stopped to light a cigarette when a man pulled her back. That same instant, the monster rushed past. This man had saved her life. The city applauded on television, but in their hearts, they hated him.

A hero, this messiah, they didn't want. The idiot bastard who saved a life that wasn't their own. What people wanted was a sacrifice every few days, something to throw in the volcano. Our regular offering to random fate.

How it ended is, one night the monster got a dog. A hairy rag of a little dog on the end of a leash, tied to a parking meter on Porter Street, it stood and barked as the pounding came closer. The closer the sound came, the more the dog barked.

A store window webbed into a puzzle of broken glass. A fire hydrant clanked to one side, cracked cast iron, hissing a white curtain of water. The edge of a windowsill explodes in a spray of gravel and concrete dust. A smacked parking meter, jiggling in place, rattling the coins inside. A steel “No Parking” sign flaps down, torn from its metal post. The metal post still humming from some invisible impact.

One more stomp and the barking stopped.

The monster seemed to disappear after that night. A week went by, and the streets were still empty after dark. A month went by, and the editors found some new horror to put on the front page of the newspaper. A war somewhere else. Some new kind of cancer.

On September 10, sunset was at 8:02. Curtis Hammond was leaving a group-therapy session he attended every week at 257 West Mill Street. He was pulling down the knot of his tie when it happened. He'd just opened his collar button. It was when he'd just turned to look up the street. He smiled at the warm air on his face, shut his eyes, and breathed in through his nose. A month before, everyone in town knew him from the front page of the paper. From the television news. He'd pulled a night auditor away from getting killed by the monster. From getting smote by God.

He was the hero we didn't want.

On September 10, civil twilight was at 8:34, and a moment later, Curtis Hammond turned toward a noise. His tie loose, he squinted into the dark. Smiling, his teeth shining, he said, “Hello?”

14

We find Comrade Snarky collapsed on the carpet in front of a tapestry sofa in the second-balcony foyer. Her face, blue-white, framed by the pillow of her crusty, gray wigs. The wigs piled and pinned together. None of her moving. Her hands are bones beaded together with tendon inside the flesh of her black velvet gloves. The cords of her thin neck look webbed with skin. Her cheeks and each closed eye look caved in, sunken and hollow.

She's dead.

Her eyes, the pupils stay the same pinhole size when the Earl of Slander thumbs her eyelids up. We check her arms for rigor mortis, her skin for stippling and settled blood, but she's still fresh meat.

Our royalties only have to split fourteen ways now.

The Earl of Slander thumbs the eyes shut.

Thirteen ways, if Miss Sneezy keeps coughing. Twelve ways, if the Matchmaker gets the courage to chop off his dick.

Now Comrade Snarky's a permanent member of the supporting cast. A tragedy the rest of us get to tell. How she was so brave and kind, now that she's dead. Just a prop in our story.

“If she's dead—she's food,” Miss America says. She stands at the top of the lobby stairs, one hand holding the golden railing. Her other hand holds her belly. “You know she'd eat you,” she says. Clutching the railing, supported by fat cupids painted gold, Miss America says, “She'd want us to.”