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already begun. They’re saying it was no accident, because users of Rayce’s experience don’t accidentally swallow blow. Not in lethal amounts, anyway. I think we should be prepared to see his death ruled a suicide.”
    “No way. He was so happy . . . at the party and, omigod, at the concert on Friday, he was incredible , he was off the charts and he couldn’t have delivered like that if he was getting ready to off himself and he couldn’t have been so up for the European tour if he wasn’t gonna see it through and . . . and . . . I have trouble even believing he started using again, let alone . . . Something’s wrong here, they have to be wrong about this.”
    “I couldn’t agree more, and now I have to hope all my bridges are not burnt.”

FIVE
    Afternoon, April 13, 1987
    Because it’s midafternoon on a Monday when everyone ought to be at work, Hoople Jakeway feels more at ease about parking in plain sight on Old Quarry Court. Of the many things observed on Saturday, one of the most useful has to do with showing up here on a weekend when more people are free to take notice. He won’t do that again even though a face-off out here in the open isn’t the worst thing imaginable. It’s the chance encounter and being outnumbered in a closed-in space that worries him most, as he hefts his tool case and makes the trek to the side door of Laurel Chandler’s garage. Just thinking about Saturday’s brush with more than bargained for produces sweat; he’d rather cut off Audrey’s head again than repeat any of that.
    He forces the grade door as he’s done before, and sucks his breath in hard when it opens. The lawyerwoman’s car is in the garage. It’s not supposed to be there now; she’s not supposed to be home now.
    For the second time in as many days, he’d chant oaths and swears if he knew any good ones. Instead, he crouches in the shadow of her car—the showoff version of a Jeep Wrangler—and readies for a face-off. When it doesn’t come, he braves up to enter the house with the expectation the Chandler woman’s in there and this is the chance he was denied on Saturday. But that expectation weakens in the kitchen, where the icebox door is propped open and the insides are stripped of everything but a box of baking soda.
    The expectation fades altogether when he sees that the outside of the icebox has been stripped as well. And that’s all the proof he needs. There’s no need for a trip upstairs to look for missing valises and count empty clothes hangers; the absence of the age-yellowed children’s drawings that were stuck to the icebox with little alphabet magnets says plain as talk that the lawyerwoman’s gone away again and won’t be coming back for a long while.
    Hoop leaves the way he came in, with shoulders back and head high, like he had every right to be there. On the inside he’s a churn of disappointment and fuddled purpose. Saturday’s limited success counts for nothing as he drives away with no set direction in mind.
    Thirty minutes later, he’s on Route 22 like some homing device steered him to the neighborhood of the storage unit yard and the Family-Mart where he provisioned himself a week ago. But he’s not ready to talk to Audrey, and he’s not looking to buy anything else.
    The only thing of interest right now is the car that moved up to pass in the outside lane and stayed abreast instead of speeding by. The occupants, three teenage tough guys banded together in the front seat of an old sedan with mismatched doors, are looking at him. They’re making fun of him, pointing, laughing, jeering, and mocking in a way that reminds of high school days in Bimmerman when he was taunted for riding a girl’s bicycle.
    The temptation to do what he couldn’t do in the old days—fight back with any chance of winning—is so strong he can almost taste it. What he tastes for real when he cumbers himself from crowding the tormentors off the road, is blood from the place where he just bit