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from the knife, we need prints. Anybody touches it, goes to jail.”
    He still had a hand on Lucas’ coat collar. Lucas said, “I’m okay, man.”
    “You okay?” Del looked at him and silently mouthed, Witnesses. Lucas nodded and Del said loudly, “You didn’t get stabbed?”
    “I think I’m okay . . . .”
    “Close call,” Del said, still too loud. “The kid was nuts. You see him go nuts with that knife? Never saw anything like that . . .”
    Steering the witnesses, Lucas thought. He looked around for Randy. The boy was on the floor, faceup, unmoving, his face a mask of blood.
    “Where’s his girlfriend?” Lucas asked.
    “Fuck her,” Del said. He stepped over to Randy, keeping one eye on Lucas, then squatted next to the boy and cuffed his hands in front. “I thought you were gonna get stuck, you crazy fuck.”
    One of the hookers, up and wrapping a red plastic raincoat around her shoulders, ready to leave, looked down at Randy and into the general silence said, in a long, calm Kansas City drawl, “You better call an ambliance. That motherfucker is hurt.”

CHAPTER
3
    Bekker was of two minds.
    There was an Everyday Bekker, the man of science, the man in the white lab coat, doing his separations in the high-speed centrifuge, the man with the scalpel.
    And then there was Beauty.
     
    Beauty was up. Beauty was light. Beauty was dance . . . .
    Beauty was the dextroamphetamines, the orange heart-shaped tablets and the half-black, half-clear capsules. Beauty was the white tabs of methamphetamine hydrochloride, the shiny jet-black caps of amphetamine, and the green-and-black bumblebees of phendimetrazine tartrate. All legal.
    Beauty was especially the illegals, the anonymous white tabs of MDMA, called ecstasy, and the perforated squares of blotter, printed with the signs of the Zodiac, each with its drop of sweet acid, and the cocaine.
    Beauty was anabolic steroids for the body and synthetic human growth hormone to fight the years . . . .
     
    Everyday Bekker was down and dark.
    Bekker was blood-red capsules of codeine, the Dilaudid.The minor benzodiazepines smoothed his anxieties, the Xanax and Librium and Clonopin, Tranxene and Valium, Dalmane and Paxipam, Ativan and Serax. The molindone, for a troubled mind. All legal.
    And the illegals.
    The white tabs of methaqualone, coming in from Europe.
    Most of all, the phencyclidine, the PCP.
    The power.
     
    Bekker had once carried an elegant gold pillbox for his medicines, but eventually it no longer sufficed. At a Minneapolis antique store he bought a brass Art Deco cigarette case, which he lined with velvet. It would hold upward of a hundred tablets. Food for them both, Beauty and Bekker . . .
    Beauty stared into the cigarette case and relived the morning. As Bekker, he’d gone to the funeral home and demanded to see his wife.
     
    “Mr. Bekker, I really think, the condition . . .” The undertaker was nervous, his face flickering from phony warmth to genuine concern, a light patina of sweat on his forehead. Mrs. Bekker was not one of their better products. He didn’t want her husband sick on the carpet.
    “God damn it, I want to see her,” Bekker snapped.
    “Sir, I have to warn you . . .” The undertaker’s hands were fluttering.
    Bekker fixed him with a cold stare, a ferret’s stare: “I am a pathologist. I know what I will see.”
    “Well. I suppose . . .” The undertaker’s lips made an O of distaste.
     
    She was lying on a frilly orange satin pad, inside the bronze coffin. She was smiling, just slightly, with a rosy blush on her cheeks. The top half of her face, from the bridge of the noseup, looked like an airbrushed photograph. All wax, all moldings and makeup and paint, and none of it quite right. The eyes were definitely gone. They’d put her together the best they could, but considering the way she’d died, there wasn’t much they could do . . . .
    “My God,” Bekker said, reaching out to the coffin. A wave