TWO BULLETS IN THE BRAIN.
Wearing his Kevlar chest protector and conscious of what an easy target his lionesque head would make, Hazard closed the car door and crossed the street.
The house of the mother-killer seemed to attract the incoming fog, which moved not in a monolithic bank but in curious eddies and lithe plumes: one quick-footed vaporous slinkiness after another, tail following tail of Angora mist, as though here were a thousand cats drawn home by the scent of tuna fresh from the can.
The aura of the house so entranced Hazard that he had crossed the street and followed the private walkway while remaining oblivious of the rain. Only when he reached the foot of the front-porch steps did he realize that he had approached with such deliberation that he had gotten wet to the skin.
Ascending the porch steps, he felt something in his hand—and discovered the cell phone on which he had spoken to Dunny Whistler.
I’m dead and alive, Dunny had said, and Hazard at the moment was of much that same sentiment.
At the top of the steps, instead of proceeding straight to the door and ringing the bell, he paused, realizing that he had neglected to do a [486] standard bit of follow-up to Dunny’s call that he would have done had he received a menacing message from anyone else who should not have had his mobile number. He pressed *69.
The call was answered on the second ring, but the person at the far end of the line said nothing.
“Somebody there?” Hazard asked.
A hard voice came back at him: “Oh, somebody here. Somebody here, sure enough, you hook nigger.”
Gang talk: hook meaning phony, imitation.
“I be here, got lit up by you, punched twice, and still taste pencil.”
Pencil meaning lead, meaning bullets.
Hazard had never heard thi............