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like that? Where did that hate come from?
    He hadn’t seen her since the end of spring, or was it early summer? She ran through the clubs he had frequented, the Hi-Hat, Devereaux’s, Savoy Café, and sometimes the Roseland, but in all that time, not a sign of her, not even at the Rose when her favorite, Dizzy, played a string of sets last October.
    Sheila had had everything Margo hadn’t. The fiery hair and blue eyes, a voluptuous body. That outgoing, sugar-coated exterior and that laugh that carried through the room, warming even the most hardened of men. And she’d had conviction, too, something Margo could never hold on to. Upon Fierro’s dissecting table she’d been dead—beyond dead, even, for the brutality of her murder prevented him from seeing her in any other way—but now he imagined her unmarked and every part of her flushed with life.
    He tried to let the song from the player ease into his mind, but it wouldn’t take hold. He shut off the player without taking the needle off the record, and it slowly ground to a stop. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and below it on the floor a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He lay on the bed. As his eyes fluttered, he glanced over at the bare wall to the right of the door. The three jagged holes from his fist stood out against the pale blue paint, a reminder of Margo’s dying the spring before. When he finally fell asleep, it was of Sheila that he dreamed, talking, whispering hotly in his ear something he could not quite make out, and then she was laughing, head thrown back and neck bared, so pale and vulnerable, and he had the sense that she was laughing at him.

8
    _________________________
    Savin Hill, Dorchester
    CAL LAY WITH his head back upon his pillow and stared at the ceiling. The wind whipped unevenly along the street and sent hard scatterings of snow against the house and the windowpanes. Lynne was next to him, turned toward the wall, her bare back above the sheets bowed in a pale curve, and he could feel her warmth. He watched as the darkness outside lightened and leaked down through the curtains, and the ceiling with its fine web of fractured plaster became more visible. He sighed and pushed the sheets off him and, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep again, was about to move to the living room and have a cigarette when Lynne stirred beside him.
    “What’s wrong?” she murmured. It was still an hour or so before dawn, but she was on the day shift at the Carney for the next two weeks and was half-awake, listening to him, he guessed, with her eyes closed.
    “Nothing’s wrong. Go back to sleep. It’s still early yet.”
    “How long have you been awake?”
    “Not long.”
    “Are you thinking about Dante?”
    He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand and worked at prying one from the packet.
    “Yeah. I’m gonna head over there this morning.”
    Lynne was silent and he waited for her to speak. She inhaled deeply and then sighed, pulled at the sheets and blankets, and covered her shoulders. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. “That sounds like trouble,” she said.
    He nodded in the dark, exhaled cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “If you’d seen Sheila, what this guy did to her…”
    “I see enough at the hospital.”
    He waited, jaw clenched in the dark. “The cops have written this one off. He’s got nowhere else to go.”
    “Is he paying you?”
    “Is he paying me? For Christ’s sake.”
    “Don’t get mad, I’m only asking.”
    “Dante hasn’t got a pot to piss in, you know that.”
    “He’s in trouble again.”
    “Not so much. Nothing we can’t handle.”
    He sensed her about to say something and then she paused and said, “I’m sorry, I’m just tired is all. This must be terrible for him.”
    “Shhhhh,” he said after a moment and stroked her hip through the blanket. “You go back to sleep.”
    He waited until her breathing deepened and then got up from the bed, trod the cold linoleum to