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By Root 618 0

he has enough smarts to keep his mouth shut but because nobody ever listens to such a lame. So he gets out again, right? As soon as he gets on the street he hits a housing project to do another of his dumb penny-ante burglaries. He goes in a window and it turns out to be a bedroom. There’s a woman sleeping there and she wakes up. If she’d screamed or tried to fight him he would have run away. But this woman, she read too many books—she tells him, ‘Don’t hurt me, I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt me,’ and for the first time in his pitiful life he’s in control—he’s got power. He is a fucking god right there in that bedroom—and every evil thing he ever heard about in the joint floods his tiny brain. He puts the woman through every kind of change he can think of. He stays there for hours with her, just power-tripping. And when he leaves there’s a Coke bottle sticking out of one side of the woman and a wooden spoon sticking out the other. He doesn’t kill her, doesn’t take a thing from her apartment. And the next time he goes prowling, he’s not looking to steal—you understand me? He crossed that power-rush line and he can’t ever step back over it—he has to live on that other side until he stops living. He’s not a man anymore, not a person.”

“How could you know this?”

“I knew that kid,” I told her, “I talked to him”

“In prison?”

“No. He was in a juvenile prison, one of those dumps they call a training school for delinquents. No, I met him on the street—and I talked to him just before he died.”

“Couldn’t he have been locked up for the rest of his life?”

“There’s no such thing. He’d sit in his cell and draw pictures of women with blunt objects sticking out of them—or he’d do like another freak, a guy I did know in prison. This guy had a little tape recorder and he’d prowl around the blocks until he heard some kid being raped and then he’d just roll up and record the sounds and go back to his cell and play the tape and giggle to himself and jack off all over the walls. Sooner or later the parole board’s going to cut that freak loose too. And then he’ll do some cutting-loose of his own.”

“How did that other kid die?”

“He jumped off a sixteen-story building,” I said, letting her think it was suicide.

“Oh. And Goldor . . . ?”

“What he does is more addictive than any heroin. But there’s more to him than just being a sicko. He believes in what he does—you can tell. The way he smashed that woman—it was because he was so angry. So much hate because she wouldn’t see the Way—you know, like the Tao. The perfect way—pain for life. And we have to find a way to make him tell us something,” I said, thinking how hopeless it was.

“Maybe if we—”

“Forget it—I know what you’re thinking. He would beat us, Flood. You could kill him easy enough, but could you really torture him? He could outwait us—he’d know we don’t have his feeling for pain—he’d know he could survive. He just wouldn’t believe we would kill him.”

“You remember that guy in the alley? When I—”

“You going to castrate him, Flood? The problem’s not in his balls, it’s in his head—he wouldn’t be any different gelded. Even the threat wouldn’t make him talk to us.”

“We have to try.”

“We are going to try, but first we have to read all this stuff and then make it disappear. Then I have to sleep, and then see some people. And then I have to—”

“Burke, you want to sleep first?”

“I can’t—can’t sleep. This stuff . . .” I held out the Goldor file.

Flood stood up and shrugged off her robe. She held out her hand. “Just come and lie down with me. Sleep first—I’ll put the papers where they’re safe.”

I got up with her and went inside. She took my clothes off and pushed me back against the mats. She lay across me with her warm body, her chubby little hand rubbing the side of my face. She kept rubbing me, whispering that Goldor wouldn’t win . . . that it would be us, that she believed in me, that I would find a way for us. I got calm and quiet but still not sleepy. And Flood understood the last door for me to go through before I could fight this freak—she helped me inside her