he noticed that there was a new flyer in the mailbox, something orange. He imagined it was for a lawn service. Maybe a roofing company. Pavers looking for work, perhaps. It was the kind of advertisement that would have showed up at his parents’ house back when he was young, back when he didn’t have to worry about adult things. Not that he had done much of that sort of worrying when he’d reached adulthood. He’d always thought he was better than all that average Joe stuff. He’d been convinced he was going to be a rocker à la Kurt Cobain. A real badass poet with a pocketful of guitar riffs.
Reality had proven to be so much less inspirational—although he’d lived up to the drug standard, for sure.
And now he was here.
Going through the garage, he stomped the rain off himself, leaving a dark splatter on the cement floor. Inside the house, he took a moment to focus. Then he started rifling through cabinets, closets, and drawers. He opened them in the kitchen. In the downstairs half bath. In the built-in shelving of the family room and in the front hall. He went upstairs and opened them in the master suite, and the two bedrooms, and the full bath that was supposed to be shared at the head of the stairs.
Anything he found, he put in an empty box he’d taken from the hall closet.
Back on the first floor, he set the box down on the dusty kitchen counter, and before he did an inventory, he went into the basement. Nothing there except for a washer and dryer, three paint cans that were open and dried up, and a box of Bounce dryer sheets that had mouse turds in it.
In the kitchen once again, he sifted through his bounty. Two sets of Ford-branded car keys, only one of which was accompanied by a remote—which suggested the other vehicle was an older model. A house key that, when he tried it in the front door and the back door, did not fit the house. An autoloader with no bullets. A magazine that did not match the gun. A pair of handcuffs with no key. Four cell phones that were out of juice and did not have chargers.
The laptop and the book he was already familiar with thanks to his first visit here.
Plugging the laptop in, he got nowhere. No power in the socket. No battery life left. It was probably password protected anyway, and there was nothing he could do about that. He had the IT skills of . . . well, a junkie.
Mr. F put both palms on the countertop and leaned into braced arms. Hanging his head, he felt the remnant aches of the internal injuries the Omega had given him and thought of the do-nothing H he had shot up under the bridge. The two realities formed a north and south pole, his existence trapped and rotating on the axis between the pair.
Taking the book with him, he found a spot in the living room on the unvacuumed rug. As he settled his back against the wall, he opened the cover of the book.
The words were dense, made out of small letters that were squeezed in tightly, like commuters on a morning train. His eyes refused to focus at first.
The sense that he had to find his way in this new prison he’d ended up in was what made him start to absorb what was on the page.
In the Omega’s world, the only asset Mr. F had was himself.
Jo parallel parked her Golf across the street from the police barricades and the news crews that surrounded the Hudson Hunt & Fish Club. Getting out, she frowned up at the drooling sky and put the hood of her windbreaker over her head. On a jog, she crossed to the other side of the road, and skirted the crowd that had gathered. As she shuffled behind a newscaster with a camera rolling on him and a microphone up to his mouth, Jo was glad she could cover her face. No reason she needed to be seen here.
The front entrance of the concrete block building was a no go and so was the side door where, according to the news conference that had been held at nine a.m., the assassinations had occurred. Three were dead. Gigante, his bodyguard, and his chauffeur. Gigante had been shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the throat, his body found slumped in