He’d had an unbelievable night at Big Ray Amato’s poker game. Walked in with two hundred, walked out with six. Drank Ray’s booze all night, ate his food. It’s a good thing Ray’s house was only two blocks away, within walking distance of the store, which is precisely where Tony B has decided to sleep it off. No way is he going to drive all the way up to Collinwood. He steps into the small pitted gravel parking lot behind his store. There are two cars, including his own, along with a beat-up van. The lot is dark, empty, still; the day’s wet heat seems to radiate from the ground like a colossal steam iron buried in the earth, just inches beneath his feet.

Tony B begins the ritual of searching for his keys.

And, for the second time that day, finds that someone is standing right in front of him. Someone who does not make noise. Tony B looks up, takes a wobbly step backward, and sees that it is a woman. A beautiful young woman with pale skin and shiny hair.

Where had he seen her before?

Man the short-term memory is shot, he thinks, laughing to himself. Guess thirty-some years of drug and alcohol abuse will do that to you. It’s the brunette bitch from the store, of course. The cocky one. The little girl with the tattooed tit. But now she is made up like a woman. Tight leather pants, spike heels, hair piled high on her head.

“Hey, baby,” Tony B says.

“Hey yourself,” she answers.

Tony B thinks: She dumped her little turd friend and she came back for Tony Fuckin’ B. Before he can take a step in her direction, he hears a sniffle from nearby and sees the boy sitting on a packing crate next to the Dumpster in a dark corner of the lot. The pungent smell in the air tells Tony B that the kid is smoking a joint. Right out in the open.

Right behind his store.

Ah, who gives a shit? Tony thinks. He is loaded, there’s a foxy little bitch nearby, and he hadn’t smoked a joint in five years. “You’re gonna get in trouble smoking that shit,” Tony B says, smiling, staggering over to the Dumpster. “Got a hit for your Uncle Tony?”

The boy looks at the girl. She nods. The boy hands the giant joint to Tony B.

“Man,” Tony B says, drunkenly examining the double-long spliff. “Where the fuck you from, Jamaica?”

The boy and the girl both break into stoned laughter. Tony B takes a huge, lung-rattling drag on the joint. He holds it for a few moments, his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie.

More laughter. It causes Tony B to lose the hit. “Hey . . . quit makin’ me laugh,” he says, already feeling some of the effects of the pot. “Damn,” he adds. “This is good shit.”

“Only the best,” the boy says. “Take another hit. Help yourself.”

What the fuck, Tony B thinks, and complies. This time, after holding it only a few seconds, the pot begins to excavate the top of his brain. Street sounds from Euclid Avenue, a half-mile away, are suddenly crystal clear. Somehow, he can smell the trash from behind China Garden, all the way up on East 105th! His mind is unclouded but, suddenly, his limbs weigh a ton. “I don’t . . .” Tony B says. “How come I—”

The kid laughs. “You’ve been dusted, man.”

“What?”

“You’ve been dusted. Angel dust.”

Before he can react, Tony B remembers the girl. He wants to get a good look at her with this new, scary buzz on. He turns on his heels and can suddenly smell her perfume—rich and flowery and sexy. He starts to get hard even before she steps out of the shadows and opens her blouse to reveal two of the most perfectly shaped breasts Tony B has ever seen. Ever. “God almighty,” he exclaims. “God. All. Mighty.”

The girl covers up, giggles.

“How much?” Tony B asks.

“How much?” the girl answers.

“Don’t play with me. How much? You say it, it’s yours.”

“How much do you have?”

Tony B rummages his pockets. He has cash everywhere. “Six hundred,” he says.

“Six hundred will get you everything you want,” she says, stepping very close. She begins to unbutton his shirt.

“What about him?” Tony B answers, nodding at the boy, who is now back next to the Dumpster, in the shadows, his eyes staring out like lucent black stones.

The girl removes Tony B’s shirt, letting it fall to the ground. “He doesn’t care,” she replies, unzipping his pants, backing him over to the pile of flattened cardboard boxes against the building. “He likes to watch.”

Tony B knows this is a huge mistake, just as he knows that he isn’t going to stop. Within a minute or so he is completely naked—save for his short black socks and soiled Reeboks—and half-sitting, half-leaning against the waist-high stack of boxes, the sultry night air pouring over his body, the angel dust and the alcohol in full control of his reflexes.

The girl backs up a few paces. She removes her white blouse and begins to dance, topless, in front of him, gently swaying her hips to one side, then the other.

Jesus jumped up Christ on an Easter palomino, Tony B thinks. I’ve died and gone to fuckin’ heaven. He glances over at the Dumpster.

The boy is gone.

Then, for Tony B, everything begins to happen at once; all of it shrouded in a pasty gray light, all of it lurching to a maddeningly unsyncopated beat.

Movement to his left. The crunch of gravel. A young man’s rhythm.

A shadow from Da Nang? Tony B wonders. Am I back in country?

The beautiful girl in front of him begins to exaggerate her slow, liquid movements. A pale arm lashes out in the moonlight; the curve of a young breast flashes before him.

Now—hot breath on his neck. Sounds from behind him. Sliding sounds.

Now—the girl’s leg rises toward him. Fast. A cobra strike from the darkness.

The kick to his exposed testicles is so swift, so precise, that at first Tony B thinks it is part of her dance routine. He knows he should feel it, but, for the moment he does not. For the moment, he cannot feel anything.

Then, a loop of wire is cast over his head. “Razor wire,” the boy whispers in his ear. “Concertina.” The boy is behind him now, kneeling on the boxes. “You move an inch you puncture your jugular vein. Don’t fucking move.” Wearing thick leather gloves, the boy continues to wrap Tony B’s head in the razor wire, slicing tiny cuts and nicks in the man’s head, neck, shoulders.

Tony B’s mind is a mire of confusion, indecision, anger.

You’ve been dusted.

“She’s dead,” the girl says.

Dead? Who’s dead? Tony B wonders. And why can’t I move my hands, my feet? Why does everything weigh . . . a fucking . . . ton?

“She’s finally dead,” the girl repeats. “You’ve finally killed her.”

And, in an instant, Tony B knows.

Jesus Christ.

Lydia.

He begins to cry as his daughter takes his now-flaccid penis in her right hand.

The sobs become a deep, soughing wail as his son produces a single-edge razor blade and examines it in the heat-shimmered moonlight.

Tony B tries to scream, but the pain now generated by his crushed right testicle, the fear generated by the razor wire at his throat, prevents him from making any coherent human sounds.

Instead, Anthony del Blanco opens his mouth, and all that pours forth is a series of small, wet whimpers, sounds of fear and defeat and failure and humiliation, sounds that return to his ears with full dynamic range and echo like a young woman’s footsteps across a long, dark gallery of remembrance.

For five minutes, they do not stop. The baseball bats they had fitted with the single-edge blades first demolish the man’s head, pounding the razor wire deep into his flesh, caving in his forehead, occipitals, cheekbones, jaw, clubbing his upper torso into a crimson mess, snapping his collarbone into dozens of pieces.

In spite of the girl’s wishes, in spite of her decade of prayers, her father is dead by the time the two begin work on his ribs, stomach, hips, legs.