a heavy cleaver from a hook behind him, lifted it high overhead, and brought it down upon a wooden chopping block. The blade sank four inches into the block.

Strong, he thought. Like an ox.

He left the cleaver in the block. The freezer was in the back, and he walked through a sawdust-covered hallway to it. He opened the door and looked inside. Slabs of beef hung from the ceiling. Other cuts and sections of meat were piled on the floor. There were cleavers and hooks on pegs in the walls. The room was very cold.

He looked at the inside of the door. There was a safety latch there, installed so that the door could be opened from the inside if a person managed to lock himself in.

Two days ago he had smashed the safety latch. He broke it neatly and deliberately with a single blow of the cleaver, and then he told the Mexican kid what had happened.

“Watch yourself in the cold bin,” he had told the kid. “I busted the goddamn latch. That door shuts on you and you’re in trouble. The room’s soundproof. Nobody can hear you if you yell. So make damn sure the door’s open when you’re in there.”

He told Vicki about it that same night. “I did a real smart thing today,” he said. “Broke the damn safety latch on the cold bin door.”

“So what?” she said.

“So I got to watch it,” he said. “The door shuts when I’m in there and there’s no way out. A guy could freeze to death.”

“You should have it fixed.”

“Well,” he had said, shrugging, “one of these days.”

He stood looking into the cold bin for a few more moments now. Then he turned slowly and walked back to the front of the store. He closed the door, latched it. He turned off the lights. Then he went back to the cold bin.

He opened the door. This time he walked inside, stopping the door with a small wooden wedge. The wedge left the door open an inch or so. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with icy air.

He looked at his watch. Five-fifteen, it read. He took another breath and smiled slowly, gently, to himself.

By eight or nine he would be dead.

It started with a little pain in the chest. Just a twinge, really. It hurt him when he took a deep breath, and sometimes it made him cough. A little pain—you get to expect them now and then when you pass forty. The body starts to go to hell in one way or the other and you get a little pain from time to time.

He didn’t go to the doctor. What the hell, a big guy like Brad Malden, he should go to the doctor like a kid every time he gets a little pain? He didn’t go to the doctor. Then the pain got worse, and he started getting other pains in his stomach and legs, and he had a six-letter idea what it was all about.

He was right. By the time he went to a doctor, finally, it was inoperable. “You should have come in earlier,” the doctor told him. “Cancer’s curable, you know. We could have taken out a lung—”

Sure, he thought. And I could breath with my liver. Sure.

“I want to get you to the hospital right away,” the doctor had said.

And he asked, reasonably, “What the hell for?”

“Radium treatments. Radical surgery. We can help you, make the pain easier, delay the progress of the disease—”

Make me live longer, he had thought. Make it last longer, and hurt longer, and cost more.

“Forget it,” he said.

“Mr. Malden—”

“Forget it. Forget I came to you, understand? I never came here, I never saw you, period. Got it?”

The doctor did not like it that way. Brad didn’t care whether he liked it or not. He didn’t have to like it. It wasn’t his life.

He took a deep breath again and the pain was like a knife in his chest. Like a cleaver. Not for me, he thought. No lying in bed for a year dying by inches. No wasting away from two hundred pounds to eighty pounds. No pain. No dribbling away the money on doctors and hospitals until he was gone and there was nothing left for Vicki but a pile of bills that the insurance would barely cover. Thanks, doc. But no thanks. Not for me.

He looked again at his watch. Five-twenty. Go ahead, he told himself angrily. Get rid of the wedge, shut the