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drive around town, in rough concentric circles, with Aztakea Woods as a kind of central point.   I weave around the streets keeping an eye out for Ricky.   There's going to be more blood on his hands soon, if there isn't already.   Someone else is going to have to say he loves Satan.   Someone else might love his mother.  
    Linda feels it too.   I glance at her and she's overjoyed.   The Acid King's will is in the wind.   She peels back her bandages and checks her wounds.   They're infected too, of course.   She has the start of a fever.   Gwen's bites and burns and razor slashes have ushered her down the road of transcendence.   She always knew there was another level to love and hate, one beyond normality, but now she's experienced it firsthand. It's left her gorged and wanting more.   
    We ride up and down Jericho Turnpike and stop and have brunch at the Majestic Diner on Old Country Road.   We eat in silence.   The buzzing, banal conversations of the other patrons are painful to hear.   Linda tilts her head like she's got an earache.   My chin is cocked at the same angle.
    We skip out on the check.   Back in the car she talks about murder like it's a new team cheer.   Something to practice after classes until you get it just right.   Something to do in front of a crowd to get them all applauding.   She acts like it's an important part of school spirit.   She wants to butcher old lovers, gut cheerleaders who don't pull their weight, cut the school custodian's throat.   She says he lurks around in the girls' locker room hoping to catch a flash of naked teenage ass.   She's got kill fantasies about the team mascot, the QB who got sacked three times at last year's homecoming, the assistant principal who put his sweaty hand on her knee.   She wants to throw acid in the face of the science teacher who gave her detention in the ninth grade.  
    Her rage calls to my rage.   I try hard not to writhe in my seat, clutching the wheel tighter.   I light a cigarette and lean my elbow out the window.   
    "I want to fuck you in the middle of Times Square," she purrs.   It's a pretty dramatic jump from all her kill fantasies.   She tells me to get on the LIE and rip towards the mid-town tunnel.  
    One of her old boyfriends used to bring over cheap porn films, the kind shot in somebody's basement.   They'd hang a sheet on the wall in her bedroom and use it as a screen. Then he'd run the projector and they'd watch nasty flicks until her father got home from work and her mother got back from PTA meetings and shopping at Klein's.   She wants to kill him too, and the thought of his death has got her horny to see whores in action.   She wants to invite a streetwalker into the backseat with us, then park down an alley on Forty-Second Street.   She wants us to get arrested.   She imagines the look on her father's face when he hears the news.   She imagines the look on his face when she slices off his dick with a box-cutter.
    "Gwen's going to die," she tells me, pinching her ruined nipples through her sweater.   "She's next.   I don't know when it's going to happen, but that's what Ricky's been saying.   He hates her too.   And don't say that he hates everyone.   He doesn't.   He's just–"
    She searches for the right word.   She can't come up with it.   She gestures meaninglessly, which has more meaning than anything else she's said today.   Ricky's not just anything.   He's not just in pain.   He's not just losing his mind.   He's not just being toyed with by powers and influences beyond his understanding.   He's seated at the eye of the hurricane, and he's drawn me into the storm.
    I don't head towards the city.   Linda doesn't care.   She spouts off more things we should do.   Some boring, some lethal.   It's all the same to her.  
    Instead, I run a search pattern all over town, waiting for the Knights of the Black Circle to turn up.   I send my will into the wind.   I picture Ricky's