CLARISSA WHISPERED. I watched Alonzo totter toward us. I saw the pickled line of his lip gleaming through the thatch of beard. “Henry,” he said. The distance between us melted away, and before I understood what I was doing I had placed my hand in the center of his chest—I could feel his heartbeat pulsing between my fingers—and pushed him to the floor. He fell comprehensively, limbs splayed like rubble across the dirty linoleum floor, tongue pushed out like a clapper. I stared at him for a long moment. And then I walked out. * * * Not far, as it turned out. To Amory Swale’s backyard, a tiny mesa of compacted sand, pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts and an empty container of fuel additive and the remains of a basketball net. An old NO PARKING sign flapped on a haggard stretch of chain-link fence. It was evening now, just beginning to shade into night. And through the shivering frame of pampas grass came a fragment of ocean, scaly-silver. Even muffled in sand, his tread was unmistakable.
