"Did they say anything?"

She shivered. Her arms were folded tight across her chest and her shoulders hunched. He wanted to put his arms around her and have her bury her face in his shoulder and cry, and he wanted to say There there it's all right. I'm here. Go ahead and cry it out. But he knew if he reached for her she'd shrink away.

"No. It was awful. Neither one ever said a word. Not to me. Not to each other."

"I'm sorry I wasn't here."

She shrugged. "They had guns. You'd have ended up beside me."

"Maybe," he said. "The sons of bitches. I'll kill them if lean." She smiled very faintly.

The phone rang. They both looked automatically at the clock. Four fifteen. It rang again. With the shotgun pointing toward the floor, the hammers still cocked, he stepped to the bedside table on her side where the phone sat. He picked it up with his left hand.

"Hello?"

"You find her yet?" The voice was uneducated, flattened by a Boston accent.

"Find who?"

"Your old lady. The bimbo we left done up like a wet wash in the bedroom."

The fear wasn't a sudden stab anymore. It was a steady hurt that waxed and waned but never vanished. Now it was powerful and he felt weak from it.

"Yeah, I found her," he said.

"See the initials above her snatch?"

Newman nodded.

"Did you?" The voice was harsher.

"Yes. I saw them." He squeezed his hand around the smooth stock of the shotgun where it narrowed at the breech. What if they came and it wouldn't fire. Or there were three of them and they came from different directions. It was hard to swallow.

"You know whose initials they are?"

"AK?"

"Yeah, douche bag, AK. You was talking about him to some people just a couple hours ago."