She let him do that for a while, his other hand groping her breast. Then she elbowed him off her.
“That’s enough,” she said.
“No it isn’t.”
She reached into his jeans, ran her hand down his hard-on, then took his balls and began to apply pressure until he let out a little moan, not entirely of pleasure.
“It’s plenty,” she said. She pulled her hand from his pants. “You want more than that, you’ll have to wake up your wife. Give her a thrill.”
Mal let him out of the car in front of his home and peeled away, tires throwing gravel at him.
Back at her father’s house, she sat on the kitchen counter, looking at the wedding ring in the cup of her palm. A simple gold band, scuffed and scratched, all the shine dulled out of it. She wondered why she had taken it.
Mal knew Glen Kardon, Glen and his wife, Helen, both. The three of them were the same age, had all gone to school together. Glen had a magician at his tenth-birthday party, who had escaped from handcuffs and a straitjacket as his final trick. Years later Mal would become well acquainted with another escape artist who managed to slip out of a pair of handcuffs, a Ba’athist. Both of his thumbs had been broken, making it possible for him to squeeze out of the cuffs. It was easy if you could bend your thumb in any direction—all you had to do was ignore the pain.
And Helen had been Mal’s lab partner in sixth-grade biology. Helen took notes in her delicate cursive, using different-colored inks to brighten up their reports, while Mal sliced things open. Mal liked the scalpel, the way the skin popped apart at the slightest touch of the blade to show what was hidden behind it. She had an instinct for it, always somehow knew just where to put the cut.
Mal shook the wedding ring in one hand for a while and finally dropped it down the sink. She didn’t know what to do with it, wasn’t sure where to fence it. Had no use for it, really.
When she went down to the mailbox the next morning, she found an oil bill, a real-estate flyer, and a plain white envelope. Inside the envelope was a crisp sheet of typing paper, neatly folded, blank except for a single thumbprint in black ink. The print was a clean impression, and among the whorls and lines was a scar, like a fishhook. There was nothing on the envelope—no stamp, no addresses, no mark of any kind. The postman had not left it.
In her first glance, she knew it was a threat and that whoever had put the envelope in her mailbox might still be watching. Mal felt her vulnerability in the sick clench of her insides and had to struggle against the conditioned impulse to get low and find cover. She looked to either side but saw only the trees, their branches waving in the cold swirl of a light breeze. There was no traffic along the road and no sign of life anywhere.
The whole long walk back to the house, she was aware of a weakness in her legs. She didn’t look at the thumbprint again but carried it inside and left it with the other mail on the kitchen counter. She let her shaky legs carry her on into her father’s bedroom, her bedroom now. The M4 was in its case in the closet, but her father’s .45 automatic was even closer—she slept with it under the pillow—and it didn’t need to be assembled. Mal slid the action back to pump a bullet into the chamber. She got her field glasses from her ruck.
Mal climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor and opened the door into her old bedroom under the eaves. She hadn’t been in there since coming home, and the air had a musty, stale quality. A tatty poster of Alan Jackson was stuck up on the inverted slant of the roof. Her dolls—the blue corduroy bear, the pig with the queer silver-button eyes that gave him a look of blindness—were set neatly in the shelves of a bookcase without books.
Her bed was made, but when she went close, she was surprised to find the shape of a body pressed into it, the pillow dented in the outline of someone’s head. The idea occurred that whoever had left the thumbprint had been inside the house while she was out, and had taken a nap up