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interior desert. Oases of relief appeared. Whole hour-long gaps in his self-flagellating misery. Occasional minutes in his wife’s arms when Margo didn’t curse and witchify his imagination.
    Then, just as he thought he might have crossed the Shame Sahara, might have spied the Land of the Living at the far horizon (well, of course; because this was her original calculation, the timing of her mind-novel)—just as he was beginning to think he might recover from his mistake, her text came this afternoon:
    We need to talk.
    Grace was breathing rhythmically against his body now. He slipped out from under her, slid from her embrace. He wasn’t going back to sleep, that was for sure—not for hours, anyway. The doze he’d had after their love-making had only made things worse. It had given him just enough rest to keep him awake. Might as well get something done tonight, take his mind off things, maybe catch a nap tomorrow.
    He went downstairs. He set his laptop up on the living-room coffee table. He perched on the edge of the sofa cushion in his Jockeys, bending over the keyboard. He called up the video of April Gomez interviewing the boy, Mickey Paz.
    What were the men looking for, Mickey? What were they trying to find? Did they say?
    Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.
    Bastard? Stupid bastard?
    Bastard. Yes. Stupid bastard.
    Only not , thought Zach. Because he did know that word—“bastard.” Zach could tell by the way the boy seized on it when April made the mistake of suggesting it to him. He would know that word, young as he was, hanging out in that den of thieves. He’d know that word and plenty worse.
    Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . stum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.
    He called up his search engine. It would spell-check and make substitutions, which might make some sense out of what the boy had said. Zach searched stupe bassard .
    Did you mean stupid bastard? the search engine asked.
    He searched stump bassard .
    Did you mean stump busters?
    He scrolled through a few stump removal services, then tried again: Abend bassard . . . Brüderlichkeit bassard . . . German bassard. . . .
    That seemed to get him somewhere: Did you mean German bastard sword?
    He shifted a little closer to the edge of the sofa. “I might,” he murmured to the living-room shadows. He was thinking of the longswords the BLK preferred to kill with. “I might mean that.”
    The French épée bâtarde as well as the English bastard sword originates in the 15th or 16th century . . . irregular sword of uncertain origin. . . . The German langes schwert (“long sword”) . . . as opposed to kurzes schwert (“short sword”) or half-sword . . . hand-and-a-half sword later called bastard. . . .
    He skimmed through it, but could see nothing meaningful, no connection to his charnel-house crime scene. Could there be some valuable old sword Abend was looking for? Something with some important history or symbolism maybe . . . ? He who pulls this sword from this stone shall be crowned mob boss of the Western world. . . .
    He put a fist against his kidney and stretched his back, trying to figure it out.
    We need to talk.
    He shook the thought of Margo off, literally shook his head to make it go away. No sense worrying about it in the dead of night. Nothing he could do now. But, of course, he was worried—very.
    He leaned forward again, resting his fingers on the keyboard, staring over the top of the monitor into the darkness, uncertain where to go from here.
    Experimentally, he typed: stupe sword.
    Did you mean stone sword? State sword? Stun sword? Stupid word?
    He typed: stump sword .
    A couple of video-game sites came up: The Stump and the Sword .
    He who pulls this sword from this stump. . . .
    He was about to try some other combination when he noticed, at the bottom of