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looked at him without speaking. She ran the ball of her index finger around the rim of her glass.
    “Didn’t they?”
    She shook her head.
    “Like hell,” Newman said. “They touched you. Didn’t they?” He felt desperation. He had to know.
    Hood said, “Aaron, for crissake.”
    Newman said, “Didn’t they?”
    Very softly Janet said, “No. They made me touch them.”
    Newman slammed his open palm on the bar top. Hood said, as softly as Janet had spoken, “Jesus.”
    Newman said, “How …” and stopped. Hood looked at him once and shook his head.
    Janet said, very softly and with no apparent emotion, “Yes. I want to kill them. This morning when I woke up I was afraid and didn’t remember why. You know that feeling. You wake up and you think
Oh something is awful but I forgot what
and then you remember, and I remember how they made me touch them. And I remember how helpless I was first when they made me touch them and then when they tied me up and I couldn’t move and they gagged me and I couldn’t talk or even spit. I remember that feeling of nakedness and helplessness and every morning when I wake up I will be afraid. And all the time I walk around with that feeling in my stomach of sinkingness and afraid. All the time I think
What if they come back
and I feel helpless. It’s not a good feeling for me. I need to control things. I need to feel that I am in control. You know that, Aaron. I’ve always needed to manage things, otherwise they frighten me. They get out of control. I can’t function like this. I say ‘I’ll not let it happen.’ I say ‘I’ll put it aside and go on and do my business and my work and not think about it,’ but it’s always there and every morning I’ll wake up frightened.”
    Hood put his hand lightly on her forearm. Newman was silent. Both men were leaning forward toward her to listen as she spoke very softly.
    “I’ve got to get back in control,” she said. “It willdestroy me and destroy us. I can’t be anything you’d want to live with unless I have control.”
    “We’ll get it back,” Newman said. He spoke very carefully so as not to slur his words.
    “I want to shoot him,” Janet said. “I want to shoot him and the two men who came and tied me up. I want them to die. I want to be free of this.”
    “Could it be done, Chris?” Newman said.
    “Sure. Sure it could.”
    “Would you do it with me?”
    “Sure,” Hood said. “Sure I would.”

6
    They had moved to a booth and a waitress had brought them a platter of sandwiches.
    “If we shot him,” Hood said, “it would solve a lot of problems. You’d bring him, in a sense, to justice.”
    Newman had been drinking beer for two hours and it had begun to show in his speech. “And we’d see to it that he hurt no one else.” He had trouble separating the
to
and the
it
. “That would make me feel better. It bothers me, he walks around loose.”
    “And we’d be out from under,” Janet said. “The son of a bitch.”
    “Is it just revenge?” Newman said. He ate a triangular sandwich and gestured with his empty beer bottle toward the waitress. She brought him another.
    Janet said, “I want revenge and I want to be sure that what happened to me never happens again. I don’t mind killing somebody. I don’t give a damn about that.”
    “Course you never have,” Hood said softly.
    “Killed somebody? No. But the thought doesn’t bother me.”
    Newman said, “For crissake, Janet, keep it down.”
    She cocked her head at him and the flint edge came into her voice. It always scared him when the edge came. “Oh, you find me loud? Am I embarrassing you?”
    “No, it’s just that if we do it, we wouldn’t want people to say they heard us talking about it.” He felt as if he’d been bad. His stomach ached slightly with apprehension.
Her disapproval is devastating. She just looks hard at me and I get scared. Talk about pussy-whipped
. “We are talking about murder.”
    Hood said, “He’s right,