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sure of: they’re all ruled by the same laws.
    A fter it was all over, a whole bunch of folks around here finally realized what they had to do.
    They came to understand that theirs was no different from any other village: unless they surrounded it with the image of a ring of human skulls planted on stakes, they were inviting predators to a party.
    I thought it was all done then.
    I was wrong. So now I was an invisible part of the under-brushon a little hill that sloped down to Lovers’ Lane. Waiting for a little red dot to pop into life. A little red dot that would tell me he was back to work.
    I didn’t know his name, or where he lived—although he thought I did. I didn’t know what demons drove him to film the action down below. Still, I knew
him
. I’d just have to turn the right key to unlock the rest of what I needed to know.
    T hat first time, I’d snapped him into a choke and held him tightly in the one embrace no man seeks.
    When I gently ran the serrated edge of my black-bladed Tanto across his Adam’s apple, he’d almost collapsed in terror.
    This time, he responded as though I was a guest he’d been expecting. An unwelcome guest, to be sure. But an inevitable one.
    “It’s time for us to work together again,” I whispered. “You know you can trust me, don’t you? You know if I wanted to use this blade, you’d be gone, yes?”
    “Yes,” he said. Or maybe I could just feel him say it.
    “You don’t always have to wear the same outfit,” I said. “Here, you wear it to blend with the night. But, sometimes, you have to blend in other places. To film what you need, yes?”
    That time, I was sure he didn’t speak. But I could feel the “yes” again.
    “That body, the one the ocean spit out on the beach …”
    I felt him quiver, but he stayed silent.
    “It was marked with all kinds of Nazi tattoos. The head was shaved, but the whole back of the skull was caved in. No shark could do that. Not even those razor rocks just a few yards past the shoreline. But there’s still a dozen different ways that body could have gotten into that ocean to begin with.”
    He stiffened.
    “You took that picture,” I said. Not an accusation, a statement of fact. Indisputable fact. “The one that was on the front page of the paper.”
    “How could you—?”
    “The quality,” I said, slipping a thread of admiration into my voice. “That was no cell-phone snap—it was the work of a top professional. The papers around here are too small to have their own staff photographers. The reporters take what whoever their story’s about gives them—like a picture of some politician. Anyone can take a picture, but that body on the beach,
that
was a work of art.”
    He longed for just that kind of praise, but he couldn’t risk the blame … which is why he’d sent the photo to the papers. So he took another feeble stab at throwing me off his scent. “There’s more than one photographer in—”
    “Studio men.” I dismissed them all under the same blanket of disdain. “They’re not photojournalists. And they aren’t night workers, either. You got a first-light photo. So you had to have been right there when it happened. When the body first washed up.”
    It was a safe guess. This wretched little man I was talking to would know all the spots where he might capture what he hunted. Images. Images of people doing what he … I stopped myself from speculating. It didn’t matter why he did what he did, only that he’d never stop. I didn’t judge him. All that mattered to me about his sickness was that it ensured I could always put my hands on him if I needed to.
    “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
    “Did I say you were? I found you once before, didn’t I? And I know where you live, too. But I never said a word, not to anybody. I said we were going to be friends then, didn’t I? Aren’t we still friends?”
    “I … guess.”
    “If we were enemies, I could hurt you a hundred differentways,” I said