The killer arrived fifteen minutes early, in the shape of a human being. The killer was a human being most of the time, except when engaged as a killer. Being fifteen minutes early allowed enough time to sit in the car and transform into a killer.

The sun was flattening itself on rooftops, dragging along alleyways. When it was time to do it, the killer got out of the car, locked the door, and walked toward the house. There was only one car parked in the driveway, the one the killer knew belonged to Ayrton. So there shouldn’t be anyone else in the house.

The killer rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a woman in her thirties. Ayrton’s wife.
Shit.
Experience had taught the killer that when things went wrong it was best just to proceed as if they were going right, and blow away any extraneous obstacles. So when the woman looked askance, the killer calmly said, “Is Mr. Ayrton home?”

“Yes. He’s upstairs. I’ll get him.”

The killer followed the woman inside and shot her from behind as they walked through the hall. The bullet went into the woman’s head, but instead of going down she staggered, screamed and ran into the living room. The killer followed, trying to stay focused. This had never happened before. The woman cowered in an armchair, hands pressed to the side of her head, blood squirting from between her fingers.
“Please don’t, please don’t—”
The killer shot her twice more, once in the body and once in the face.

There was the panicky crash of footsteps coming down the stairs. The killer turned, faced the door, held the pistol in both hands, aimed it. A boy, about fourteen or fifteen. “Mom, what’s—” The killer’s bullet took him in the throat. He sat down on the floor and silently cried himself to death.

Where was Ayrton? Probably arming himself. Would he keep his guns upstairs? Probably. The killer debated whether to go upstairs or wait it out. Best to wait it out, not walk into something. But what if he had a phone up there? The killer moved fast and quietly into the hall, knelt at the bottom of the stairs. “Ayrton? Do you hear me? Your wife’s dead. Your brat’s still breathing. But he won’t be for much longer unless you get down here.”

“Okay. I’m coming.”
It sounded like he was crying.

“Come, then. Now.”

Ayrton appeared at the top of the stairs. The killer leveled the gun and emptied it. Ayrton flew backward out of sight. The killer reloaded the gun, then moved up the stairs, crouched so low as to be almost squatting. Ayrton was lying against a wall. He wasn’t moving and the lower half of his face was hanging off. The killer shot him twice more to be sure.

Back in the living room, the killer checked that the woman and boy were dead. The living room door suddenly swung open. The killer hadn’t heard any footsteps. The killer flew to the floor, rolled, pointed the gun. Didn’t shoot.

The girl who came in couldn’t have been three years old. She looked at the killer, then stumbled over to the dead woman. She said, “Mommy.” She shook the corpse. “Mommy.” She didn’t cry at first. She didn’t seem to get it, seemed baffled by all the blood. She didn’t look at the killer again. The human being inside the killer decided not to shoot her, reasoning that she was too young to be able to give the police a description.

The killer left the house, slammed the door and walked down the driveway. Drove to the rendezvous and dropped off the gun. Changed cars. By the time the car arrived at LAX its driver was a human being. The human being who was sometimes a killer bought copies of
Spin
and
Vanity Fair
to read on the flight home to Phoenix, Arizona.

ONE

I’ve heard it said that no violent death is shocking to a cop, a soldier or a journalist. I’ve been a soldier and a journalist. The cop quoted in the news report was shocked, and so was I when I read it. It wasn’t because the family in LA had been murdered. If they’d all died it probably wouldn’t have seemed so bad. What got to me was how they found the little girl; when the cops arrived, she was sitting by her mother’s corpse, holding it by the hand.

Janine had gotten up an hour before me, and she’d read the paper. “Did you see this?” I asked her, pointing to the news story.

“Yeah. The poor kid.”

“When you read something like that, how can you still criticize my classes? Somebody who’d do a thing like that—do you think making a peace sign or handing them a flower is going to stop them?”

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen to most people. It said in the paper that the guy was a drug baron. That’s why he was killed. You want people to get guns—that guy had two guns in the house. They didn’t help him.”

“If his whole family had known how to use them, they might have been able to protect themselves.”

She shook her head again. “Andy, I don’t want to get into it.”

Neither did I. “Okay.” I scarfed the last of my fruit salad, gulped some water and stood up. “I’d better get going.”

“What’ve you got?”

“A toilet to fix. And some repairs in an apartment complex.”

“When’ll you be back?”

“Don’t know. I’ve got band practice in the afternoon. And I’ve got a class tonight. I might make it home before it, but I might not.”

She gave me a look at the mention of the class, but she didn’t say anything about it. “Okay. Call me if you’re going to be home before the class, and I’ll try to cook something if you’re too tired.”

“Thanks.” I kissed the top of her head, then went outside.

It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, but the temperature was already above ninety. It would be over a hundred and ten by the afternoon. I started to sweat as soon as I stepped out of the air-conditioning of our apartment. I got in my car. There was a towel covering the steering wheel, in an attempt to protect it from the sun. It didn’t work. The wheel burned my hands when they touched it.

The car didn’t have air-conditioning, but that was okay. I would never have used the air-conditioning in the apartment if it hadn’t been for Janine. People have lived in Arizona without air-conditioning for hundreds of years. You just drink plenty of water and get on with things.

I drove over to Scottsdale, where the faulty crapper was waiting for me. I took a look at it, and diagnosed that a part needed to be replaced, a part I didn’t have. I told the tenant that I’d call the manager of the complex, get her to okay the job, then go and buy a replacement part. I called the manager and she wasn’t home, so I told the guy I’d come back another day.

I drove to another complex and did some repairs in different apartments. I enjoyed it. I liked strolling from my car to an apartment in the heat, feeling the sweat stream down my neck and back, then working at my own pace on the plumbing or the electrical appliances, pausing to drink from my water bottle. I’d tied a bright red bandanna around my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes.

I’d started my handyman business as a temporary measure when I’d quit journalism, just as I’d gone into journalism after quitting the army. But I’d realized that there was nothing else I’d rather do, unless things with the band took off. I was hoping to build up the business to the stage where I could make a secure living from it. Right now, I wouldn’t be able to survive off of it if I didn’t live with Janine.

I finished work just before noon, and drove to a Denny’s for some lunch. I didn’t stay long. They had the air conditioning on so high it was freezing. I was actually shivering. A furnace outside, and a refrigerator inside. In the summer, just about every cafe and diner does it. They might as well move to Alaska. If you’re going to live in Arizona, live in Arizona. The city’s natives were always complaining about the number of incomers. All they had to do was ban air-conditioning and a few hundred thousand wusses would have scurried North.

I drove downtown. On the way, I listened to the car radio.
“This is 101.5 The Zone, Arizona’s rock alternative.”
Then they played Alanis Morrisette, and, to make it really scary, The Cranberries. If that was the alternative station, I wasn’t brave enough to find out what sort of stuff the mainstream ones played. I only listened to it because the car didn’t have a cassette player.

The rehearsal space was in an artists’ studio on McDowell. It was rented by a couple of painters who let us use it for practice. Today was hardly a rehearsal at all. When I said hello to Swineboy, he giggled. I asked what the joke was, then realized that he was stoned. I didn’t say anything about it. We’d been through it before, and I just couldn’t be bothered this time. George and Ricky Retardo seemed uptight too, either at Swineboy for being stoned or at me for being pissed at him. We played through a bunch of our songs without much conversation. Then I said I’d see them later, and I left.

I wasn’t in the mood to go home, so I went to the Willow House and had a sandwich before going to the class. I called Janine to let her know I wouldn’t be home till later, but she wasn’t there. I left a message on the machine.

A romantic might have said that, when the sun went down, Death prowled the dark and arid streets of Phoenix, searching for people to take. But the truth was something worse: the streets were abandoned, left to themselves. No one controlled them, not Death, not the politicians, not the cops. On the streets at night, you were alone. Anything could happen to you and no one would save you.

It wasn’t always that way. When I first came to Phoenix as a kid, it was a town of quiet safety, a place where people came to retire. I didn’t face the kind of childhood dangers that friends the same age as me had to face in LA and New York. The worst thing that ever happened to me in Phoenix was when I was fifteen. I was working part-time in a store, and in the evenings I’d ride my bicycle home. I always passed this house that had a pit bull chained in the front yard. Every time I rode past, it would go for me, showing its teeth, almost flying through the air until the chain pulled it up short. I never knew what it had against me; one time I stopped and watched and waited to see if it tried to attack everyone who passed by. It didn’t. People would walk or run by, and it would just sit there. But it clearly had special feelings for me, feelings I began to return. I developed a habit of stopping to taunt it, watching as it nearly throttled itself at the end of the chain, saliva cascading from its mouth, eyes rolling. Sometimes I’d hold a cookie an inch or two from its face, then eat the cookie. “Come on, boy. That’s it. Woof, woof. You dumb fucking mutt.”

One night it broke the chain. If it had happened while I was standing there taunting it, I don’t believe I’d be alive right now. But, after a few minutes of tormenting the beast, I spat in its face and got on my bicycle. As I rode away, I realized that its growling wasn’t fading into the distance. I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was so close behind me that if I’d stopped suddenly its head would have gone up my ass.

I wasn’t religious and I thought my parents were jerks. But somewhere inside me there must have resided a family-loving Christian, because I screamed,
“God!—Jesus!—Mommy!—Daddy!—HELP ME!”
My bicycle accelerated faster that night than some cars I’ve owned since then. I went up a hill faster than I’d ever gone down one. The dog got so close at one point that some of its drool got on my left leg. I’m sure it was only the weight of the chain that slowed it down enough for me to put a few feet of distance between us, then a few more, then more, until I left it behind, snapping its jaws on empty air and, I imagined, howling at the moon.

Later, when I was in the army, we’d trade childhood experiences. Horrific though I thought mine was, the other guys just thought it was funny. I seemed to be the only guy in my division who hadn’t seen the corpse of a murder victim, if not the murder itself, by the age of sixteen. I’d never seen anything more extreme than a fist-fight. That’s the kind of place Phoenix was.

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