Studying her.

“Whoa, sweetheart. Have you been crying?”

Marianne turned to the straw-haired woman. She stared too.

“I mean, your eyes are red,” he went on. “I don’t mean to pry or anything. But, I mean, are you okay?”

“Fine,” Marianne said. She thought that maybe there was a slur in her voice. “I just want to drink in peace.”

“Sure, I get that.” He raised his hands. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Marianne kept her eyes on the liquor. She waited for movement in her peripheral vision. It didn’t happen. The man with the mustache was still standing there.

She took another deep sip. The bartender cleaned a mug with the ease of a man who’d done it for a very long time. She half-expected him to spit in it, like something from an old Western. The lights were low. There was the standard dark mirror behind the bar with the anticosmetic glass, so you could scope out your fellow patrons in a smoky thus flattering light.

Marianne checked the mustache man in the mirror.

He glared at her. She locked on those lightless eyes in the mirror, unable to move.

The glare slowly turned into a smile, and she felt it chill her neck. Marianne watched him turn away and leave, and when he did, she breathed a sigh of relief.

She shook her head. Cain reproducing with an ape-sure, pal.

Her hand reached for her drink. The glass shook. Nice distraction, that idiotic theory, but her mind couldn’t stay away from the bad place for long.

She thought about what she had done. Had it really seemed like a good idea at the time? Had she really thought it through-the personal price, the consequences to others, the lives altered forever?

Guess not.

There had been injury. There had been injustice. There had been blind rage. There had been the burning, primitive desire for revenge. And none of this biblical (or heck, evolutionary) “eye for an eye” stuff-what had they used to call what she’d done?

Massive retaliation.

She closed her eyes, rubbed them. Her stomach started gurgling. Stress, she imagined. Her eyes opened. The bar seemed darker now. Her head began to spin.

Too early for that.

How much had she drunk?

She grabbed hold of the bar, the way you do on nights like this, when you lie down after you have too much to drink and the bed starts twirling and you hang on because the centrifugal force will hurl you through the nearest window.

The gurgling in her stomach tightened. Then her eyes opened wide. A thunderbolt of agony ripped through her abdomen. She opened her mouth, but the scream wouldn’t come-blind pain squeezed it shut. Marianne doubled over.

“Are you okay?”

Straw Hair’s voice. She sounded very far away. The pain was horrible. The worst she had felt, well, since childbirth. Giving birth- God’s little test. Oh, guess what-that little being you are supposed to love and care for more than yourself? When it first comes out, it is going to cause physical pain you can’t begin to fathom.

Nice way to start a relationship, don’t you think?

Wonder what Mustache would make of that.

Razor blades-that was what it felt like-clawed at her insides as if fighting to get out. All rational thought fled. The pain consumed her. She even forgot about what she’d done, the damage she had caused, not just now, today, but throughout her life. Her parents had withered and been aged by her teenage recklessness. Her first husband had been destroyed by her constant infidelity, her second husband by the way she treated him, and then there were her kid, the few people who’d befriended her for more than a few weeks, the men she’d used before they used her…

The men. Maybe that was about payback too. Hurt them before they hurt you.

She was sure that she was going to vomit.

“Bathroom,” she managed.

“I got you.”

Straw Hair again.

Marianne felt herself falling off the stool. Strong hands slithered underneath her armpits and kept her upright. Someone-Straw Hair-guided her toward the back. She stumbled toward the bathroom. Her throat felt impossibly dry. The pain in her stomach made it impossible to stand upright.

The strong hands held on to her. Marianne kept her eyes on the floor. Dark. She could only see her own feet shuffling, barely lifting. She tried to look up, saw the bathroom door not far ahead, wondered if she’d ever get there. She did.

And kept on going.

Straw Hair still held her under the armpits. She steered Marianne past the bathroom door. Marianne tried to put on the brakes. Her brain wouldn’t obey the command. She tried to call out, to tell her savior that they’d passed the door, but her mouth wouldn’t work either.

“Out this way,” the woman whispered. “It will be better.”

Better?

She felt her body push against the metal rod of an emergency door. The door gave way. Back exit. Made sense, Marianne figured. Why mess up a bathroom? Better to do it in a back alley. And get some fresh air. Fresh air might help. Fresh air might make her feel better.

The door opened all the way, hitting the outside wall with a bang. Marianne stumbled out. The air did indeed feel good. Not great. The pain was still there. But the coolness on her face felt good.

That was when she saw the van.

The van was white with tinted windows. The back doors were open like a mouth waiting to swallow her whole. And standing there, right by those doors, now taking hold of Marianne and pushing her up inside the van, was the man with the bushy mustache.

Marianne tried to pull up, but it was no use.

Mustache tossed her in as if she were a sack of peat moss. She landed on the van’s floor with a thud. He crawled in, closed the back doors, and stood over her. Marianne rolled to a fetal position. Her stomach still ached, but fear was taking over now.

The man peeled off his mustache and smiled at her. The van started moving. Straw Hair must be driving.

“Hi, Marianne,” he said.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He sat next to her, pulled his fist back, and punched her hard in the stomach.

If the pain had been bad before, it went to another dimension now.

“Where’s the tape?” he asked.

And then he began to hurt her for real.

“ARE you sure you want to do this?”

There are times you run off a cliff. It is like one of those Looney Tunes cartoons, where Wile E. Coyote sprints really hard and he’s still running even though he’s already gone off the cliff and then he stops and looks down and knows he will plummet and that there is nothing he can do to stop it.

But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn’t that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of the cliff but you’re moving slowly, not sure what direction you’re heading in. Your steps are tentative but they are still blind in the night. You don’t realize how close you are to the edge, how the soft earth could give way, how you could just slip a bit and suddenly plunge into the dark.

This is when Mike knew that he and Tia were on that edge-when this installer, this young yah-dude with the rat-nest hair and the muscleless, overtattooed arms and the dirty, long fingernails, looked back at them and asked that damn question in a voice too ominous for his years.

Are you sure you want to do this…?

None of them belonged in this room. Sure, Mike and Tia Baye (pronounced byeas in good- bye) were in their own home, a split-level-cum-McMansion in the suburb of Livingston, but this bedroom had become enemy territory to them, strictly forbidden. There were still, Mike noticed, a surprising amount of remnants from the past. The hockey trophies hadn’t been put away, but while they used to dominate the room, they now seemed to cower toward the back of the shelf. Posters of Jaromir Jagr and his most recent favorite Ranger hero, Chris Drury, were still up, but they’d been faded by the sun or maybe lack of attention.