Gone for Good

closely—you can’t have a front without a back, you can’t have an up without a down, and I’m not sure you can have light without dark, purity without sleaze, good without evil.

And if I can’t?” He held up the rope. There was a handle attached to the end. “Do you know what this is?” I did not reply. “It’s a Punjab lasso,” he said as if beginning a lecture. “The Thuggees used it. They were known as the silent assassins. From India. Some people think they were all wiped out in the nineteenth century. Others, well, others are not so sure.” He looked at Katy and held the primitive weapon up high. “Need I go on here, Will?” I shook my head. “He’ll know it’s a trap,” he said.

Yvonne started humming the QuickGo jingle, one of those torturous tunes that enters through the ear canal and proceeds to ricochet around the skull in search of an escape route it will never find.

We are always “shocked” when we hear about violence in the suburbs, as though a well-watered lawn, a split-level construction, Little League and soccer moms, piano lessons, Four Squares courts, and parent-teacher conferences, all worked as some sort of wolfsbane, warding off evil. If the Ghost and McGuane grew up just nine miles from Livingston—again, that was how far the heart of Newark was—no one would be “stunned” and “dismayed” by what they’d become. I

The early morning flight to Boise was uneventful. We took off from LaGuardia, which could be a lousier airport but not without a serious act of God. I got my customary seat in economy class, the one behind a tiny old lady who insists on reclining her seat against my knees for the duration of the flight. Studying her gray follicles and pallid scalp—her head was practically in my lap—helped distract me. Squares

The shirts were buttoned low enough that their gray chest hair jutted out like steel wool.

Even here, out in the supposed sticks, the strip malls dominated. There were all the customary mega-stores—the Chef Central, the Home Depot, the Old Navy—the country uniting in bloated monotony. The

Over the years, McGuane had learned that it was best to strike before you interrogate. Most people, when presented with the threat of pain, will try to talk their way out of it. That goes double for men who are accustomed to using their mouths. They’ll search for angles, for half-truths, for credible lies. They are rational, the assumption goes, and thus their opponents must be the same. Words can be used to defuse. You need to strip them of that delusion. The pain and fear that accompany a sudden physical assault are devastating to the psyche. Your cognitive reasoning—your intelligentsia, if you will, your evolved man—fades away, caves in. You are left with the Neanderthal, the primitive true-you who knows only to escape pain. The

I wanted to tell her that I loved her and appreciated her and wanted us, especially now that Mom was gone, to be closer, that I know Mom would have wanted that. But I couldn’t. I hugged her instead. Selma stiffened at first, startled by my aberrant display of affection, but then she relaxed. “It’ll be okay,” she told me. I

Sheila. Her betrayal pierced me deep, struck bone. To defend her now, to think I had been anything more to her than a dupe, would be to turn a blind eye in the worst way. You would have to be naïve beyond Pollyanna, to have rose-tinted glasses melded onto your face, to not be able to see the truth.

Do you know anything about Darwin?” he asked. I thought the question was rhetorical, but he waited for an answer. I said, “Survival of the strongest, all that.” “Not the strongest,” he said. “That’s the modern interpretation, and it’s wrong. The key for Darwin was not that the strongest survive—the most adaptable do. See the difference?” I nodded.

She dabbed her eye. A sarcastic rejoinder came to my lips, but I bit it back.

When we reached Pistillo’s office, I demanded to see him in my firmest voice. His secretary appeared unintimidated. She smiled with the genuineness of a politician’s wife and sweetly asked us to have a seat. Katy looked at me and shrugged. I would not sit. I paced like a caged lion, but I could feel my fury ebbing. Fifteen minutes later, the secretary told us that Assistant Director in Charge Joseph Pistillo—that was exactly how she said it, with the full title—would see us now. She opened the door. I blasted into the office. Pistillo

She turned and stared at the young D.A. as though he were a bleeding boar and she was a panther with an industrial-sized case of piles.