“So, could I interest you in a late supper, maybe?” he asks. “A run and a shower won’t take me more than forty-five minutes.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anywhere you’d like,” he continues. “Just paid off Visa. I’m golden again.”

“No thanks,” she says, the phrase late supper crazily making her mind return to the late-night breast-feedings in the darkness of her living room, the pleasure and pain of Isabella at her nipple. The sorrow ignites within her. “Some other time. For sure.”

“Okay,” he says, agreeably, adding to his charm. Not the pushy type. “I’ll leave it up to you. I jog around here all the time. Look for me one of these nights. Maybe we can run together.”

“Sure,” she replies. She pulls open the door to her apartment building. She’ll walk through the lobby, down the service hallway and exit on the parking lot side of the building. Maybe have a real run through Cain Park, hope she doesn’t embarrass herself by running into him. “Nice meeting you.”

“The pleasure was all mine, Rachel,” he says, and with that he takes off down the street in long, powerful strides.

She watches him disappear into the night and feels a strange nervousness building inside her. Not necessarily about what just happened. She had handled the advances of a thousand men in her time. But, rather, about what almost just happened.

She’d nearly let someone in.

And she hadn’t even asked his name.

12

I am carved of moonlight.

I follow the jogging figure at a distance of no more than one hundred feet, sliding from shadow to shadow, heading south on Lee Road, waiting for the long stretch of gloom we will both soon enter, the colonnade of darkness leading into Cain Park.

The jogger makes a left, past the squat stone columns, past the huge dedication rock, into the all-but-deserted park. I follow on the access path that winds down the hill.

To the casual observer we might look entirely unconnected, two hardy citizens of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, out for a late-night winter workout, one maintaining a slow jogger’s pace; the other—the one carrying the odd-looking device—an even slower, but still quite graceful, power walk.

And yet we are connected in a way that most casual observers—indeed, most people on the planet—could never imagine nor understand.

The noise flourishes the moment I move within range of the jogger. This time: fat claps of thunder on the inside of my skull, a desperate pummeling of bloodied hands in a sealed coffin.

The jogger stops at the shuttered kiosk near the Alma, the smaller of the park’s two theaters. I approach from the west. In my right hand is a small-caliber pistol, loaded with hollow-point rounds. In my left I carry a four-quart pail, bottomed with a three-inch layer of hard rubber and wire mesh, a handle on its side.

I step to within five feet of the jogger.

The jogger, a handsome young man clad in an expensive-looking olive and black Nike jogging suit and black wool gloves, doesn’t see me. The reflective stripes on the elbows of his jacket made it embarrassingly easy to follow him.

“Hey,” I say.

The man freezes in place. A veteran of the streets, it seems. He doesn’t turn around. “My wallet is in my waist pack,” he says. He spins the nylon belt around his waist, slowly, until the pack faces me.

I step closer, take the wallet, say: “I have a message for you.”

The man swallows hard but remains very still. “What are you talking about?”

I place the barrel of the gun near his left temple. “She’s mine.” I lift the pail by the handle—as if wielding a giant coffee mug—and position it on the other side of the man’s head. “Mío!”

I pull the trigger.

The puff of smoke is insignificant in the darkness, as is the popping noise, no louder than the sound of a child flicking his thumb out of an empty soda bottle. What is significant is that the pail catches not only the bullet—a feat accomplished without putting a hole in the bottom—but also a good portion of the man’s brain. The police will not find a slug nor a shell casing, nor more than a drop or two of vaporized membrane on the shrubbery.

I look at the figure on the ground, then into the pail, at the pink tissue, the off-white bone, warm and gaseous in the December night air.

For my cauldron, I think. My nganga.

For the spell.

13

His mother sleeps on the couch by the space heater, a Jetson-age-looking Norelco model. The heater, as always, is on full blast and leaning perilously close to the orange and brown Afghan—Cleveland Browns colors.

The small second-floor apartment on Baltic Road has a clock radio in every room, including an old Magnavox on the back of the toilet, just beneath the macramé ballerina toilet-paper cozy. Today, from the kitchen, comes an Italian-language news program.

He kneels next to his mother, brushes a soft strand of white hair from her forehead. She had been Gabriella Russo when his father swept her off her feet nearly fifty years ago, a raven-haired siren of a lounge singer who strung Frank Paris along for two years before giving in to his repeated proposals of marriage.

An only child, Paris had been sixteen when his father died. His mother had worked two jobs to help put him through college, sometimes three. She is an undereducated woman, having finished only high school, but she is, and will always be, the smartest woman he has ever known.

She is content now, he thinks, nearly seventy-four years of age, still on her own, still a force at gin rummy. Still a force at gin gimlets, too. Two of them at lunch every day with her bingo cronies Millie and Claire. Followed by her nap.

He moves the space heater a safe distance from the couch and sits at the rolltop desk. The bills, as always, are neatly pigeonholed on the right side. He pays them. It is a monthly ritual for the two of them, one that has proceeded like clockwork for the past few years or so. At first, his mother would drift off to the bedroom when he paid her bills, ashamed that she could no longer work even part time. Sometimes, she would busy herself in the kitchen, and somehow, in the space of twenty minutes, produce a dish of baked ziti or linguine with calamari.

Now she just sleeps through it.

When he finishes, he closes the desk, then crosses the living room to the small Pullman kitchen. He takes the sandwich that is always on the top shelf of the fridge, wrapped in Saran Wrap, a pickle on the side.

Should he wake her? No, he decides. Let her sleep. She will know that he has been here.

She always does.

He puts on his coat, stands at the door, surveys the apartment: the old waterfall furniture; the shabby armchair that he had once, as a six-year-old, accidentally wet during an old horror movie on TV; the oval braided area rug she’d had for so many years that it was no longer possible to replace; his academy graduation photos on the mantel.

Jack Paris opens the door, steps through, closes it behind him, checks the lock.

Merry Christmas, Mom, he thinks as he wraps his scarf around his neck, a Casa di Gabriella hand-knitted special.

Merry Christmas.

The houses on this small section of Denison Avenue, near Brookside Park, are a collage of Eisenhower bungalows, paint-blistered pastels of powder blue, sea foam green, buttercup yellow, all washed gray by the impending dusk, the winter drizzle. Paris is parked at the curb, heater chugging, oldies station on low.

After leaving his mother’s apartment, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon canvassing a three-block circle around the Dream-A-Dream Motel. No one at any of the half-dozen bars had seen anyone running from the motel with a dripping butcher knife in the middle of the night, it seems. In the end Paris had interviewed three dozen bleary-eyed men and collected the expected: shrugs, urban apathy, temporary amnesia. Hear no evil, see even less.