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it the way you should deal with everything,” she says, soothing him. “With a cool heart. You look for what’s best for everyone. You create a situation where you can earn merit.”
    “So we don’t just clean the kid up, dress him in new clothes, slip him a twenty, wish him luck, and put him back on the street.”
    Rose looks past Rafferty at the balcony, where Miaow has let her head fall all the way forward onto her chest. “You can’t,” Rose says. “I think you’ll lose Miaow if you do.”
    The words straighten Rafferty’s spine. “You don’t know what I’ve heard about this kid. Tik says he killed someone.”
    “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Rose says.
    Rafferty abandons the rest of his speech and stares at her.
    “I can see it. When I was dancing, there were men who came intothe bar, and I knew immediately I shouldn’t go with them. They hated women, and the hatred steamed off them like heat from a road. It rippled. I knew I shouldn’t let them buy me drinks, shouldn’t let them talk to me, shouldn’t give them any reason to think they were going to get me out of the bar. I tried to tell the other girls, but some of them went anyway. They came back with cigarette burns on their arms, a missing tooth, a broken nose, razor cuts on the webbing between the fingers. And those men only shimmered . This boy’s aura is a very dark red. It boils the air around him. He’s like a cat that’s gone wild again and can’t decide whether it wants to kill or be fed.” She holds out her arm to display a red crescent of bruising, not bad enough to break the skin but bad enough to triple Rafferty’s pulse. “He bit me,” she says.
    Rafferty slaps a palm against one thigh. “That’s that. He’s gone.”
    A hand on his arm. “Miaow will go with him.”
    “She won’t.” He is whispering, and he can see Miaow straining to hear him. “She’s not going to run away with a killer.”
    “Even if he is a killer,” Rose says, “we don’t know who he killed.”
    “And?” Rafferty says. “If we knew, that would make everything okay?”
    “There are people who should die.” Rose might be discussing the price of milk. “Americans have a hard time with that, because they think everyone who is bad got broken somehow and someone else is at fault. Whoever broke them. But in the real world, people know life would be better if some people were removed from it.”
    “Jesus,” Rafferty says. Her face is calm and clear. “I feel like I’m back in the States, listening to talk radio.”
    “I don’t know what that means. But I know you’ll lose Miaow if you don’t keep your heart cool. Learn what you can. The boy has been hurt terribly. Just listen and go gently, and look for a chance to do something good.” She leans forward, kisses his cheek, and taps the nearest plastic bag. “And give me the shampoo.”
    He hands it to her and watches her straight back as she leaves the room. The kitchen is immaculately ordered, everything part of a set,everything in the right place. If anything broke, he thinks, it would create disorder and incompletion as obvious as a missing tooth. But, of course, there’s nothing in the kitchen that couldn’t be replaced.
     
    “UNLESS MY EYES deceive me, we’re burning clothes.” Framed in the doorway, despite a yellow polo shirt and a pair of checkered slacks loud enough to draw stares even on a golf course, Rafferty’s friend Arthit still looks like a cop. “Are we trying to make someone disappear?”
    “Actually, we’re attempting a rebirth,” Rafferty says.
    “If you figure it out, let us know,” Arthit says. “There are a few hundred thousand people who’d give their all for it.” He looks hollowed out, almost to the point of transparency. Total exhaustion identifies honest cops in the days following the great waves, in stark contrast to the sleek cheeriness of their corrupt colleagues. The tsunami has made many of them extremely rich. “How are you, Miaow?”