Chapter 1
Donovan McBride stood at his favorite window, sipping sweet coffee and thinking he and Allie were in terrible trouble—if they
didn’t get their drinking under control, one of them was going to die, punch out like John Bonham or Bon Scott—when something
huge detonated around the corner, on Garfield Place. A blast of fire, twenty feet high, erupted through the gap between buildings.
The explosion, a gas main maybe, made a deep, resonating thud that he felt more than heard, and drove a rippling shockwave down the avenue. Van saw it coming, the air going all wavy and
distorted, like heat rising from blacktop, and had time to drop his mug and fall to the floor before the lovely, big, round
window erupted. Glass showered around him in a bright drizzle of light.
“Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck! Fuck!” He had long known that when he died, there would be no fine last words. It would just be fuckshit fuckfuckFUUUUUCK and then he’d be gone.
He rose to his knees and looked out the window and that’s when it hit him. Allie. Allie was down there. Allie had gone to the Garfield Street convenience store for V8, had wanted a Bloody Mary with her
eggs. He had encouraged her to go, didn’t want her to see him starting his day with a couple of lines and a lonely wank.
Filthy smoke boiled from the brick canyon of the side street.
A blackened confetti of debris fluttered in the air amid the sparks.
The idea that Allie had just been blown off the face of the earth filled him with such shock, such horror, he could not compose a single clear thought.
He was halfway down the concrete stairs when he realized he was still barefooted.
He couldn’t run shoeless all the way to Garfield Place.
If nothing else, there was going to be a shit-ton of broken glass to cross.
He ran back to the apartment, ran around the kitchen hunting for his shoes. It looked as if the shockwave had scattered shit
everywhere, though that was just the way their apartment looked: magazines and newspapers strewn on couch and floor, empty
Chinese cartons on the kitchen island drawing flies. He found one of his Sperrys under the coffee table. He found one of his
slippers in the master bedroom. They were both for his right foot. It was like a bad dream, scrambling about in his robe and
pajamas, desperate for something to put on his left foot so he could go out and collect the pieces of his dead wife.
He was on all fours when the phone went off. He rose so quickly he slammed his head on the underside of the kitchen island,
hard. A white flash went off behind his eyeballs. He shook his head to clear it and grabbed the cordless, sure it would be Donna.
He had never been this scared and confused without Donna knowing it, even if they were miles apart . . . the one little part
of their twin telepathy act that wasn’t bullshit, wasn’t a game to play on rubes.
Only it wasn’t Donna. It was Allie.
“Van,” she gasped. “Get out of the apartment.”
“You aren’t dead!” He was so relieved, he thought he was going to be sick.
“You have to go right now,” she said. “There’s men.”
“Fucking Garfield Place just—and I thought fuck, fuck, I thought—”
“They’re dressed like repairmen. They’re with the fat man from Greenland, I never learned his name. I spotted him in a van,
parked right in front of our apartment, but I didn’t remember where I had seen him before until I was on Garfield—”
“Allie, I don’t understand. You aren’t making sense. Can you come home?”
“No. And you can’t stay there. Get your wallet and go, Van. They’re after us. One of them tried to stick me in the butt with a needle and I had to bring King Sorrow through from the Long Dark.”
A snow of burning confetti fell outside the shattered window, a window he loved, his favorite thing about the apartment, the
now-smashed panes composed in a pattern of petals that reminded him of a sand dollar.
“Someone tried to—what? Jesus. Are you sure? You weren’t—you didn’t—Allie, have you been drinking?”
“Have I been—oh. Oh, Van. Yes, sure, but I mean—not enough to be wrong about this. We can talk about it later, just please go. We’ll meet at Washington Square. I can’t talk anymore. I need to call Donna.”
“Why do you need to call Donna?” Even through his disorientation and alarm he felt an itch of resentment. They couldn’t have
a life-or-death crisis in peace like other couples. Allie had to bring Donna into it.
“If they’re after me and after you, they might be after all of us. Now get going.”
“Okay,” he said. “I just can’t find my shoes.”
She had already hung up. He was standing there in front of the blown-open window, holding the cordless in one hand and a Sperry
in the other, when the needle slid into his neck. He cried out, a pitiful little squeak. He looked around, discovered two
men behind him. The one with the syringe was a lithe little guy, with the dimples, the rosy complexion, and the tousled blond
hair of a cherub in a Renaissance painting. The one grabbing Van’s right bicep had black hair, slicked back, in the style
of Bela Lugosi. It was a lucky thing he had Van’s arm too, because Van’s knees buckled suddenly, and the man behind him was
the only thing holding him up.
“Don’t worry about the other shoe,” said a third man, standing just inside the open front door. He was a big guy, a wide-body
with a Magnum PI mustache, and he was holding Van’s other Sperry. “Found it.”
Van opened his mouth to thank him, but couldn’t seem to lift his tongue, or produce any sound at all beyond a slurred, miserable moan.
The men standing behind him had him by the arms. They marched him forward, one step, and another, and then he walked right off an invisible ledge.
He fell four stories—or maybe it was forty, who could really say—and struck the darkness waiting at the bottom with a resounding clap.