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cocksuckers are mean. Move your ass, ace.”
    Murray jumped up and leaned around her, yapping at R.J. “Sue us, you dumb loser. You have to file in California, and that’s my private pissing grounds. I guarantee it’ll take you twenty years to see court, and you won’t have a penny left. And when you do get in court, it’ll be my court and my judge and you, you pathetic loser, you —”
    “That’s enough, Murray,” Janine Wright said.
    “Loser,” Murray yapped, and then he flinched away as if expecting a kick.
    R.J. found his way to the door. “You’re a tough lady,” he said.
    She gave him that look again, that used-furniture look. “You’re only half right, half-wit,” she said. She gave him a push and slammed the door.
    R.J. stood in the hall and looked at the beautiful oak door.
    She was right. She was no lady.
    R.J. made it back to his office in plenty of time for the session with Reverend Lake and it was as bad as he had figured. The reverend wept when he saw the pictures and fell to his knees on the office floor, yelling out pleas for forgiveness and blubbering like a baby. Then he looked at the pictures some more, a little too long, R J. thought, and a little too interested, before he caught himself and went back to praying and snuffling on the floor.
    R.J. sat through the whole performance without blinking. The check had already cleared. Even when the reverend got a little more specific than he should have about some of the things he wanted forgiveness for—something about one of the teenage boys in the youth group)—R.J. just sat and watched. He’d seen it before. Besides, he was still churning over the whole thing with Janine Wright. He was so burned up about it that he couldn’t really enjoy the reverend’s performance as much as he should have.
    And when that was over, he didn’t even enjoy banking the fat bonus check Reverend Lake left with him in exchange for the envelope with the pictures. The good man left, clutching the envelope like he would have paid even more for something that good. R.J. should have enjoyed the way the man’s sweaty knuckles turned white as he gripped that envelope, but he didn’t.
    In fact, although he didn’t know it then, it would be a good long time before R.J. really enjoyed anything again.

CHAPTER 7
    R.J. was in a long hallway lined with doors. There had to be a couple thousand doors, and his father was behind one of them. But inside the one he opened there was just a pile of bones, and then the door slammed shut behind him and he knew the bones were his father’s and as he tried to back off, the bones got up and danced and the door started to slam open and shut to set the beat for the dancing bones—
    —and he woke up covered with sweat and somebody was pounding on the door of his apartment.
    R.J. shook his head to clear it. It didn’t work. The pounding on the door didn’t stop, either. He got up and splashed some water on his face. Anybody who pounded on the goddamn door like that at—what was it, 3:45? Hell, let ’em wait.
    He let them wait until he got a bathrobe on. Then he opened the door. There stood Detective Don Boggs.
    Boggs was a square guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a widow’s peak that almost touched his eyebrows and was wearing one of the ugliest suits R.J. had ever seen.
    Even more amazing, it was different from the one he’d been wearing last time they’d met, which until then had been the ugliest R.J. had ever seen.
    R.J. had met Boggs on several occasions and they would never be doubles partners at the country-club tennis tournament. In fact, R.J. would cheerfully spit on Boggs’s grave and he knew the detective felt the same about him.
    So it wasn’t a pleasant surprise to see him, especially with that righteous scowl on his face.
    “What the hell took you so long?”
    “Gee, I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” said R.J. “I was reading Tennyson and just lost myself.”
    Boggs frowned. “Is that