Shepherd didn’t like New Orleans. It was a third-world city in a first-world country, so in thrall to graft that it had come to regard corruption as the norm rather than as an aberration. When he walked its streets, all he saw was ugliness, the baseness of the human condition unashamedly revealed. Earlier, he had watched a hardfaced man stand at the doorway of a glorified titty bar, a huge woman with an even harder face standing behind him, rolls of fat dripping over dirty white lingerie. Why would anyone go into such a place? Shepherd wondered: to be ripped off, maybe to be threatened, to smell the cheap scent on a woman one step above whoredom? Such corruption of the spirit and of the soul repelled him, but at least it was obvious, unhidden. There were other forms of corruption that were far more insidious.

The woman in the green scrubs stood, placed her textbook and notebook in a satchel, and left the coffeehouse. After a minute or two had passed, Shepherd also left. He stayed some way behind her, shadowing her from across the street as she headed up Decatur. He did not panic when he lost sight of her among the crowds, for he knew where she was going. To his left, starlings moved in great shrieking circles, hovering above an old chimney stack on Chartes. Above them, the January sky was gray and cheerless. Tourists watched the birds in momentary curiosity, then moved on, somehow unnerved by the sight. Slowly, the birds’ numbers were depleted as they found their roosts inside the chimney, black shapes descending into a deeper darkness.

By the time he reached the top of Decatur, the woman was nowhere to be seen. He waited ten minutes, then walked to the security gates of a renovated condo and pressed the number nine, followed by the pound key. There was a click, and then a female voice said, “Who is it?”

“My name is Jeff. I called earlier to make an appointment.”

He’d found her ad offering a “sensual massage” the day before, and had called to arrange a visit.

“Come on up,” she said. The gate buzzed and he entered the yard, following the interior lights to a stairway. He climbed three flights and stopped before the door to number nine. He was about to knock when the door opened.

She had changed out of her scrubs and now wore a satin robe. The ends of her hair were still wet from the shower. She looked a little puzzled as she struggled to remember his face.

“You were in-” she began, then found Shepherd’s gloved hand pressed firmly over her mouth as she was forced into the apartment. Shepherd closed the door silently behind him. He pushed her against the wall and removed his right hand from the pocket of his raincoat so that she could see the knife.

“If you scream, I will hurt you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. If you answer my questions, I promise you that you will not be hurt. Do you understand me?”

She nodded and he released his grip.

“Sit down.”

He followed her into her living room. The drapes were drawn and a single lamp, overhung with a red scarf, was the sole illumination in the room. A door to his right stood open. Inside he could see a massage table covered with a clean white towel.

“I’m sorry to have misled you,” said Shepherd. He stood slightly to one side of her, his left leg slightly forward to protect his groin. He had encountered trouble with women before.

She seemed on the verge of tears. He could hear them in her voice as she asked: “What do you want?”

Shepherd nodded in satisfaction. “Good. I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. I’d like to know where your boyfriend is.”

She didn’t reply.

“Your boyfriend,” he repeated. “Verso. Or have you forgotten him already?”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

Shepherd sighed. His hand moved in a blur of flesh and metal, drawing a red line from her left shoulder to the top of her right breast. She started to yelp and he again covered her mouth with his hand.

“I told you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you make me. I will ask you again: where is he?”

“The police have him.”

“The police where?”

“In Virginia.”

“Where in Virginia?”

“I don’t know.”

Shepherd raised the blade again and she said, louder this time: “I don’t know. They keep moving him. He’s not my boyfriend anymore. I haven’t seen him since he turned himself in. All I know is that he’s going to be in Norfolk soon. There’s a grand-jury hearing. He’s going to testify.”

“When was the last time he called?”

She was silent for a time.

“There’s a limit to my patience,” he warned her.

“This morning,” she said at last.

“Before or after I called?”

“After. I was just on my way out the door when the phone rang.”

The phone lay on a table to Shepherd’s left. There was an answering machine hooked up to it, but it was turned off.

“Why is your machine off?”

“I was going to go out tonight, catch a movie. You were my only appointment.”

“Stand up,” said Shepherd.

She did as she was told. He walked her to the phone table, then told her to kneel, facing away from him.

“Please!” she said.

“Just kneel. I want to star sixty-nine your phone, and I don’t want you doing anything stupid while I dial.”

Reluctantly, she knelt. Shepherd pressed the buttons, then listened.

“Chesapeake Inn and Suites,” said a male voice. Shepherd hung up.

Asshole, he thought.

He stepped back from the kneeling woman. She didn’t turn around.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

“I won’t,” said Shepherd.

He was a man of his word. She didn’t feel a thing.

Harry Rylance had never thought of himself as the nervous type. Nobody ever made a good living out of the insurance business by being nervous. Nervousness was for the suckers who bought the policies. The whole business was predicated on fear. Without it, the insurance industry would sink like a stone and Harry would sink along with it, but Harry had to admit that he was feeling pretty damn nervous now. The creepy retard kid had disappeared and Harry’s instinct was to get the hell out of the house and hope that he and Veronica could find their own route back to the highway.

Except the house smelled of dead meat, and there were flies buzzing.

And curiosity was a terrible thing.

Harry padded softly across the floor of the living room, wincing every time a board creaked. In the kitchen, he found a pile of take-out chicken buckets littered with the stripped bones of those midget chickens the fast-food companies raised on some irradiated Pacific atoll; no other way, thought Harry, that you got legs and wings that small. A frying pan stood on the range, pieces of burnt fat adhering to its base, and bugs floated on the surface of the foul-smelling stew that sat in a pot beside it. There was an ancient refrigerator beside the stove, humming and rattling like a crazy old man in a tin cage. Harry reached out to open it, then paused. He could see himself reflected in the metal, his features distorted. Something white was behind him.

Harry spun around and lashed out at the drapes that in the still air, hung unmoving over the window. A plate fell from the drain board and shattered on the floor, sending ants scurrying in confusion. Somewhere, a cockroach clicked.

“Shit,” said Harry, and opened the fridge door.

Apart from a carton of week-old milk, it was empty.

In the freezer compartment, Harry found meat packed in bags. There was a lot of it.

He closed the fridge doors, then went back into the living room. No sounds came from upstairs.

“Hello?” called Harry. “Kid, you okay up there?”

He began to climb and, for the first time, he heard it: two words of a song, repeated over and over, the needle caught in the groove of the record.