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fag, no doubt about that. This was only the third time he'd cut Larkin's hair-well, he'd only been working here at Unicorn since the beginning of April- but Larkin knew definitely that Hollister was a fag. Still, he was the kind of fag Larkin could get along with. Not the flouncy type, you know? Not mincing. No limp wrist Talked like anybody would, no lisp. Dressed like a normal human being. No jeans tight across the buns. A very interesting person, too. The things he talked about were very interesting. Like which hotel to stay at in Positano, Italy. Or where to buy good amber in London, England. Also, if he'd been a woman, Vincent had what a man would consider a very pretty mouth. Larkin wondered if he ever dressed up like a woman. He wondered what fairies did when they got together, other than blow each other and fuck each other in the ass. He was almost tempted to ask. He felt he knew Vincent well enough to ask. But then Vincent might take it the wrong way. You never knew with fags.
        "So," Vincent said, "what have you been up to?"
        "Oh, I been busy," Larkin said.
        "Always busy, busy, busy," Vincent said and smiled, and began combing out Larkin's hair, his eyes on each separate strand as it passed through the comb, searching each strand the way Larkin's mother used to search her fine tooth comb when he was a kid growing up in New York City. Larkin was fifty-three years old. When he was growing up, you'd go to school in the morning, come back that afternoon with a head full of lice. His mother used to fine comb his hair, looking for nits. Every time she found a nit, she'd squash it against the comb with her thumbnail. Vincent was maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, he didn't know about nits. Christ knew why he studied the hair that way.
        Maybe it was an act.
        Make the customer think you were paying great attention to the way the hair fell or whatever. Fags were great actors. In fact, some of the best actors in the world were fags. It always came as a shock when somebody told Larkin this or that actor was a fag. Last month sometime it must've been, he told this girl he had in bed with him-she was nineteen years old, this juicy little girl down from Atlanta, ass like a brewer's horse and an appetite for coke that was astonishing-he told her Burt Reynolds was a fag. She almost started crying. She should have realized he was lying, Burt Reynolds used to have that big thing going with Dinah Shore, didn't he? And then Sally Field. So unless every woman in Hollywood was a beard, then how could Burt Reynolds be a fag? Her eyes going big and round, misting over, he really thought she was going to start crying. Hey, I was only kidding, he said. It's Clint Eastwood who's the fog. Had to smile even now, just thinking of it.
        "What's comical?" Vincent asked.
        "Oh, just remembering something," Larkin said. "Just remembering something."
        
***
        
        In Miami Beach, Domingo thought Alice Carmody wasn't getting the address fast enough to suit him.
        He cut her again, on the arm this time.
        She said, "Hey, come on, I'm dancin' as fast as I can."
        A minute later, while she was opening the top drawer of the dresser across the room, he cut her again, over the eye this time. She said, "Shit, what's the matter with you?" and angrily threw her address book on the dresser top and stamped off into the bathroom to get a towel. There were only two rooms, the bathroom and the other room with the daybed and the dresser in it. As she turned on the water in the sink, Ernesto and Domingo began talking in Spanish about whether or not they had to kill her. It was Ernesto's contention that Domingo had now cut her a few more times than were necessary to scare her, and she might go to the police once they were gone. Alice didn't know what they were talking about out there, jabbering away in Spanish. She was trying to stop the flow of blood from the cut over