was on a long-distance trip and Lester had no intention of ever seeing him again. He was free. Revenge was close.
But, walking the streets of a deadbeat town, feeling conspicuous as only a freed man can, Lester’s resolve began to waver. He caught his reflection in a shop window. He had gained weight. His hair was different; he seemed taller. There was a steeliness in his eyes that he admired. He felt stronger than he ever had.
Lester Fallon had defied death–there was nothing he could not do now.
That night he sheltered under a flattened cardboard box, kicking the rats that gnawed at his ankles. He slept fitfully in short, lucid bursts. Then, around dawn, a voice came to him. The voice was other-worldly, primal, and it spoke to his core. It seemed to come from within him and outside him at the same time, and told him simply this–that revenge would come some years from now, and the moment of that revenge would end the world as they knew it.
The end of the world as they knew it …
A new plan began to take shape. What was there to go back for? Belleville and the people in it were as dead to him as he was to them. He would wait for Laura, biding his time. The scene of his vengeance would be all the sweeter for it.
Over the next year, with no possessions or money, Lester decided to reinvent himself. He became Nelson Price, a name he’d seen on a reel of daytime movie credits, and hitched a ride to Bosfield, a town not far outside Indianapolis. There, drinking one night, he had hooked up with a local fraudster named Irvin Chance, owner of a ginger balding head and russet handlebar moustache, as well as a notorious strip joint on East Meridian. In return for waiting tables, Irvin gave him a bed in the house he shared with his wife, an overweight, unhappy-looking broad called Anna-May. The work was hard and unrewarding, but it was a roof over his head.
Things became complicated when Anna-May started spilling her guts, confiding that Irvin hadn’t paid her that kind of attention in months.
‘He used to say I had the sweetest ass in the whole of the state,’ she’d slur, shoving her fat hands into a bag of chips. ‘Now he won’t even look at me.’
At first Lester wished she’d shut the hell up, but as Anna-May’s drunken, rambling confessions took on a new light, things began to get interesting. It turned out that Anna-May was the only daughter, once young and beautiful, of a wealthy oil baron, but had been cast out of her family when they’d discovered her relationship with neighbourhood bad boy Irvin. In fact, Lester discovered, it was she who had financed Irvin’s bar, and she, despite her apparent indolence, who held complete control over their finances.
Lester saw his way in. Sex. Anna-May didn’t get it any more–he could give it to her. It was the perfect transaction. Soon it transpired that Anna-May had never had a man go down on her, and, though it made bile rise in Lester’s throat every time, he grit his teeth and got to it. In only a matter of weeks Irvin was phased out of the marriage–and, with special indulgences from Lester, out of the bar. Lester stepped up as owner, choked back disgust in bed every night with a sweating, insatiable Anna-May, and had soon saved enough to make it on his own.
Eighteen months later, Nelson Price–who, of course, despite Anna-May’s concentrated search efforts, did not exist–disappeared quietly into the night. Just in time, for Anna-May had started gabbing on about marriage, which was about as far away from his intentions as it was possible to get. Over the months his hunger for revenge had not waned–it was fiercer now than ever. He took as much cash and jewellery as he could and headed for New York. That was nearly eight years ago now.
Some time after, downing shots in a bar on West 14th Street, he had seen a face he recognised. She was in a low-budget TV drama about a woman who falls in love with her psychiatrist.
Laura.
A year later, his sister was starring in a sitcom you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing in a store window–one of the best-loved American shows of the last twenty years or some crap. Lester’s heart had turned to stone, hardened by the fist of his loathing. Was she still fucking her