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pissed and decided to act.”
    “They go back and carve her up?” I said. “That’s one helluva grudge.”
    “True but dealing with a high level of stress could kick up the frustration level, right? What if the poor little thing passed away shortly after the confrontation? That would jam one helluva memory into Mommy and Daddy’s heads. Daddy stewed on it, started eating himself up. Eating his guts out. So to speak. He spots Vita, maybe she even snots off again. He decides to—whatever you guys call it—displace his anger.”
    “That’s what we call it.” And I’d seen plenty of it. Families railing against hospital food, a misspoken phrase, anything but the core issue because you can only deal with so much. More than once I’d been called to ease a weapon away from a grieving father. But nothing at the level of the savagery visited upon Vita Berlin and I said so.
    Milo said, “So if I wanna go there, I’m on my own.”
    “Where I’m going is phoning Dr. Shacker. If he has an opening, I’ll prioritize a meeting.”
    “Thanks.”
    “No problem.”
    “Oh, there are plenty of problems,” he said. “But they’re all mine.”

CHAPTER
6
    I drove home thinking about the horror, tried to switch off The Unthinkable Channel.
    The body floated back into my head.
    Switching on the radio, I amped the volume to ear-bruise. Knowing that each thunder-chunk of noise was ripping loose tiny hairs in my auditory canal but figuring a little hearing loss was worth it. But station-surfing fed me a bland stew of passionless jingly crap and nerve-scraping chatter that failed to do the trick, so I pulled over, popped the trunk, took out a battered black vinyl case I hadn’t touched in a long time.
    Audiocassettes.
    To anyone under thirty, as relevant as wax cylinders. The Seville has a different opinion. She’s a ’79 who rumbled out of Detroit a few months before Detroit turned her successors into Bloatmobiles. Fifteen thousand miles on the third engine with an enhanced suspension. Regular oil and filter changes keep her appeased. I retrofitted a CD player years ago, a hands-off phone system recently. But I’ve resistedan MP3 and kept the original tape deck in place because back when I was a grad student tapes were a major luxury and I’ve got lots of them, purchased secondhand back when that mattered.
    As I got back in the car, the growling in my head grew thunderous. I’ve seen a lot of bad things and I don’t get that way often but I’m pretty sure where the noise comes from: hiding from my father when he drank too much and decided someone needed to be punished. Blocking the bump-bump of my racing heart with imaginary white noise.
    But now I couldn’t turn it off and just as amphetamines quiet a hyperactive mind, my consciousness craved something loud and dark and aggressively competitive.
    Thrash metal might’ve been nice but I’d never bought any. I flipped through tapes, found something promising: ZZ Top. Eliminator .
    I slipped the tape into the deck, started up the car, resumed the drive home. Covered a block and cranked the music louder.
    Minimalistic guitar, truck-engine drum, and ominous synthesizer backup worked pretty well. Then I turned off Sunset and got close to home and the peace and beauty of Beverly Glen, the sinuous silence of the old bridal path leading up to my pretty white house, the prospect of kissing my beautiful girlfriend, patting my adorable dog, feeding the pretty fish in my pond, sparked a sly little voice:
    Nice life, huh?
    Then: malevolent laughter.
    The house was empty and sun-suffused. Wood floors tom-tommed as I trudged to my office and left a collegial message for Dr. Bernhard Shacker. His soft, reassuring, recorded voice promised he’d get back to me as soon as possible. The kind of voice you believed. I made coffee, drank two cups without tasting, went out back and tossed pellets to the koi and tried to appreciate their slurpy gratitude and continued on to the tree-shrouded