Number thirteen.

Done . . . yes?

She reaches into her shoulder bag, removes her small Pentax portable printer, prints off a copy of one of the photos. Handling it by the edges, she places the picture on Elton Merryweather’s lap, then makes another quick scan of the room.

Number thirteen. Yes.

Done.

3

It is just after midnight and I am standing in the shadows of a vacant lot on the west side of East Fortieth Street, my heart jackhammering in my chest. There are no streetlights for three blocks in each direction. There is no traffic, no commerce. Across from me sits the Reginald Building, a slanty, clapboard hovel that once housed Weeza’s Corner Café, a rib-and-shoulder-sandwich joint. Before that, the Shante House of Style.

Now it is long-forsaken, save for the woman standing in the deep violet darkness of the doorway, a little girl punished, her feet spread slightly apart, her shoulders hunched against the chill. In the moonlight that slices through the tortured trees along East Fortieth Street I can see the ivory glow of her calves, her thighs.

I am dressed in a black suede duster, black jeans, no shirt, boots.

I cross the street, silently, and step up behind her.

She is wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, studded and zippered, a short white cheerleader skirt with accordion pleats, high white heels. She is thirty, blond, petite, fit. Within moments I am fully erect again.

I pull down my zipper and free myself as I lift the back of her skirt and tuck it into her waistband. She is violently trembling with anticipation, softly crying with the deep degradation of this moment. But despite her penitence, despite the chill in the air, I can see the glistening rivulet of fluid trickling down her leg. Without a word I trace my finger up her inner thigh, taste her brine. I then take a fistful of her hair in my right hand and slip my left hand around her waist, under the front of her skirt, to the warm oasis of her abdomen. I step closer, and enter her slowly.

She bites her hand as I fill her, the tears flowing freely now. My face is inches away from hers. I can see her in profile: a child’s nose, a small cleft in her chin, long lashes.

She pushes against me, hard, increasing the rhythm, allowing me ever deeper, her descent now complete. I pull her jacket off roughly and put my full weight against her, pressing her smooth white breasts against the filth of decades of grime.

In my hand now: a single-edged razor blade. Without warning, I scratch a very shallow inch-long cut between her shoulders—quickly, sparing her any undue suffering. Her body becomes rigid for a moment as the tip of the razor slides across her flesh. But I can smell the alcohol on her vaporous breath and know that she has medicated herself against all manner of fear. She will accept this level of pain, it seems.

And so I continue, my much-practiced hand engaged, for the first time, in marking a human being.

I drop the blade, pull her close, blotting her blood with my chest. I bury myself deep inside her and, within moments, I feel the electricity building, and know that she is coming.

A soft snow begins to whisper down as she embraces the throes of her orgasm, submitting to the dirtiest realities of her darkest fantasy fulfilled. She plants her hands firmly on the door and pushes back into me with all her strength.

I reach over my left shoulder and remove the much bigger blade from the scabbard strapped to my back as the woman comes in a long steady flow, spiraling her warmth around her legs onto the frozen ground, shedding her final tears.

The machete flutters above us: a saber-sharp wing in the moonlight.

Then, like a sleek silver peregrine, it descends.

4

It is four days until Christmas, and Public Square is sparkling with displays, robust with early-morning commuters. This year, the city-center quadrant is decked with strands of silver garland, dotted with white and gold lights. The streetlamps have been refitted to look like gas lamps. This season’s theme: A Dickens Christmas in Cleveland.

Yet homicide detective John Salvatore Paris knows that there is no amount of candlepower that can begin to illuminate the dark corners of his heart, the lightless chambers of his memory. It is the third Christmas since his divorce, the third time he has shopped alone, celebrated alone, wrapped his daughter’s gifts alone—absolutely certain he had purchased the queerest, goofiest, hokiest presents an eleven-year-old girl could imagine. Sure, the therapist said that the average healing time for these things is two years or so, but it was common knowledge that therapists don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. It was three full years and still his heart sank with every carol, every clang of the Salvation Army bell, every rum-pum-pum-pum.

How had it all slipped away? Hadn’t he been certain that all his Christmases and birthdays and Thanksgiving dinners, for the rest of his life, were guaranteed to be joyous?

As the light turns green at Euclid Avenue and East Fourth Street, Jack Paris edges forward, realizing the answer to that question is a heart-clamping no. Then, as always, the other realizations begin to scrimmage in his mind: he is on the Centrum Silver side of forty, he lives with a Jack Russell terrier named Manfred in a crumbling walk-up on Carnegie, and he cannot remember the last time he walked down the street without his 9 mm, without looking over his shoulder every ten seconds.

But still Paris knows exactly what it is that keeps him on the fifty-yard line of the zone, what has so far prevented him from quitting the force, taking a job in security somewhere, and moving to Lakewood or Lyndhurst or Linndale.

He likes the inner city.

No, God save him, he loves it.

For the past eighteen years he has climbed the city’s darkest stairways, descended into its dankest cellars, ventured down its most threatening alleyways, walked among its neediest denizens of the night. From Fairfax to Collinwood to Hough to Old Brooklyn. It had cost him his marriage and a few billion alcohol-sodden brain cells, but the rush was still there, his heart still leapt in his chest when the case-making piece of evidence presented itself to him. The body might not respond the way it did when he was a rookie, it might take a few extra steps to run down a suspect, but he still brought a young man’s fervor to this game of crime and punishment.

And thus—if for no other reason than to keep that body from collapsing with a myocardial infarction from climbing three flights of stairs every day—it is time for a change. At least in his living arrangements. He had appointments all over the east side during the week after New Year’s. He would find new digs. Maybe it would vanquish the malaise that had settled over him of late.

The last real advance in his career was the task force he had headed during the Pharaoh murders, a series of killings in Cleveland, courtesy of a pair of psychopaths named Saila and Pharaoh and their bloody game of voyeurism, seduction, and murder.

Since that time there had been scores of homicides in Cleveland. The figures were mercifully down from even a year earlier, but still the bloodshed continued. Bar shootings, armed carjackings, convenience-store holdups, the ever-escalating carnage of domestic disputes.

He is busy enough. Yet there is nothing on his plate that compares to that night when he had been run all over town in a maniacal race against time, back when his heart nearly broke forever in an alleyway off St. Clair Avenue.

Back when his daughter had been in the hands of a madwoman.

“She’ll be twelve in February,” Paris says. “Valentine’s Day.”

The woman at the perfume counter at Macy’s is wearing a long white coat and a name tag that identifies her as “Oksana.” Paris looks at the lab coat and wonders if Oksana is indeed the chemist responsible for the perfume she is selling and might be summoned back to the lab for some crucial research at any minute. He thinks about making a joke, but Oksana sounds Russian, and a lousy joke in English is probably a lot worse when translated into broken English.