“What are you doing?” said the boy.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t even think it.”

“I wasn’t thinking a damn thing, boss. Jesus. You think I’d do something like that?”

The boy got a cigarette in his lips and lit it and held the smoke in his mouth, fighting the instinct to inhale.

“On the other hand,” said Lester. “A person might wonder what you were doing back there in the first place, boss. What’d you go looking for that got you into that fix?”

Before the boy could respond there was a sudden blooming of red and blue, and the sirens wailed up again and the cruisers multiplied all around them and the boy pulled carefully to the shoulder under the highway overpass.

The cab was shot through with the white light of the cruisers’ spots, and in that brilliance the cab’s dome light when it came on made no impression at all, and so the boy didn’t know that a door had opened until he turned to tell Reed Lester not to say or do a goddam thing, and found him gone. The door still swaying on its hinges, men shouting out there in the lights. Engines raced and tires spun and some of the colored lights went strobing away down the road.

All around him, officers crouched behind their doors with guns drawn and they were shouting at him. He looked again at his open passenger’s door and saw the ice scraper where Lester had left it on the floorboard and, beside it, something else, half stowed under the seat and pulsing blue and red with the cruiser lights. He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked straight ahead and raised his hands and spread his fingers, as if to designate the number 10. Up ahead, beyond the cruisers and their lights, less than a hundred yards from where he sat, there hung in the snowfall a lambent blue sign with the silvered words SISTERS OF MERCY.

34

Hold up, he says, and she stops and waits for him to come up beside her, no sound in the world but the soft whupping of his snowshoes.

He thumbs the pack from his shoulders and brings out two plastic bottles of water and they uncap them and drink, the water gurgling its way around clots of ice in the necks. She caps the bottle and unzips her jacket and fits the bottle into the pocket near her breast, and then rezips the jacket.

He watches her do this. And watches her after it’s done.

It’s too cold to drink, she explains.

He lifts his bottle again and then returns it to the pack, and she says: What else you got in there?

Granola bars. A couple of Snickers. Are you hungry?

I’ll take a Snickers, I guess. What else?

Nothing else. Nothing else to eat.

Tissue?

What?

Did you bring tissue?

Like Kleenex?

Like anything. She stares at him, into the yellow lenses, until he understands.

I have a small pack of Kleenex, that’s all.

Can I borrow it?

Of course. He digs into one jacket pocket and then another until he finds the small package.

She slips it into her jacket pocket with the Snickers, then she turns and begins to walk back the way they came, in her own tracks, downslope.

Where you going? he says after a moment.

She doesn’t look back. She points ahead to a squat, solitary spruce, wide and thick and hung with snow as if snow is its blossom and its only purpose. She missteps, totters on the snowshoes, rights herself.

Careful, he says, and she gives him the thumbs-up over her shoulder.

From the far side of the spruce she looks back through the snowy boughs, and the cold runs into her heart to see him standing dark against the snow just as she left him, far closer than she thought he would be. As if the distance she crossed to the spruce was an imaginary distance. Or as if he has moved as she moved but without sound and without tracks or effort.

She falters and then finds her voice: I can see you watching me.

I can’t see a thing, he says, and she knows it’s true.

She bends to tighten the bindings over her boots. I can see you watching, she says again. He doesn’t move. Standing there. I can’t go with you staring, she says, and at last, with an air of parental exasperation, he turns his back to her.

She takes a side step in the snow, downslope. She thinks she’s made no sound but can’t be sure because of the bloodbeat in her ears. She stands a moment in the stopped time and stopped breath and stopped heart of the starting blocks—Breathe, Courtland—and then she takes another step, and another, keeping the tree between herself and the Monkey, and when she is twenty paces from the spruce she turns and she begins to descend the mountain in great, soundless, weightless strides.

35

All that followed that long night and into the morning was a perverse waking dream that would not end but only taunted him with the taste of ending, with scraps of near sleep wrenched from him at the last second and replaced by more noise and more walking and another bare room or the same bare room with the same man or men across a steel table or different men but always the same questions and the same hard light and the only break in it all, the one brief escape, was a real dream that rose up during a lapse in procedure, some miscue among his keepers that left him alone long enough to sleep, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. Then the woods cracked with thunder and he jolted awake to the iron bars and the concrete and to the backlit man telling him to get up, and he was led in handcuffs once more down the corridor into the bare room.

The man at the table did not look up but sat studying the pages of a file that lay open before him while the man who brought the boy removed his cuffs and wordlessly left, pulling the steel door shut behind him.

The man at the table wore no jacket, only a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists and at the collar, his tie well-knotted and pristine. The leather straps of his gun holster had a defining effect on the shirt, suggesting the good health and fitness of the torso beneath it. He had a full head of short black hair razor-line-parted on one side, and his jaw was blued with stubble. He wore a gold wedding band.

This man at last looked at the boy. Searching his eyes as if he might see there what none of the men before him had thought even to look for. Whatever he saw he dropped his gaze and let it rest on the boy’s denim jacket, buttoned nearly to the throat. They had taken his white T-shirt with its catalog of bloodstains.

He looked again into the boy’s eyes and said: “Sean, my name is Detective Luske. I’m with the Omaha PD Sexual Assault Unit. Would you like some water?”

“All right.”

The detective filled a paper cup from a dispenser in the corner and set it in front of the boy and sat down again.

“Sean. As you know, since you say you saw it in progress, that girl you had with you in that truck last night was raped. By at least one assailant. Maybe as many as three. Now, she was inebriated and she was passed out for much of it, but I’ve talked to her and she believes she can identify those boys who were sitting with her inside the Paradise Lounge, if not necessarily those who raped her. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“What I want to do, Sean, is I want to bring another officer in here and take a sample from you. Would you agree to letting me do that?”

“What kind of sample?”