OWEN WAS DOZING on the couch when the car pulled into his driveway, its headlights strafing the room with slatted yellow bands that slid across the walls and disappeared. He sat up with a grunt. The TV was on, showing infomercials for machines that promised to tone and shape your abdominal muscles in thirty days. At the other end of the sofa, Henry lay curled up like a cat, half covered by his coat, dreaming his secret little boy dreams. Owen shivered and looked around. The living room felt deep and cold, piled to the ceiling with unfamiliar shadows.

From outside, a car door opened and shut. The night was so quiet that he could hear footsteps coming up the driveway, a steady and unhesitant crunch-crunch. Owen stood up, stepped over his last empty beer bottle, and looked across the kitchen at the shape rising up onto the porch, gaining both height and bulk as it approached. He could see it through the glass, moving toward the door. The pulse in his throat was beating hard enough that he knew he’d be able to see it in a mirror. Before he could decide what to do, there was a sharp knock.

He opened a drawer, rummaged through it, and pulled out a steak knife. “Who’s there?”

The shape just knocked again, more forcefully this time. Owen’s mind flashed to a recurrent childhood nightmare—a faceless man in a black slicker standing outside the house shouting his name in the middle of the night, while he cowered under his covers and waited for the thing to go away. Go away. Go away. But the thing in the slicker never did. It just bellowed for him furiously, endlessly. Owen Mast! I know you’re in there! Come out! It never said what it wanted, but that didn’t matter. Owen knew that if he ever did go down there and the creature in the black slicker got its hands on him—hands he somehow knew would be wearing black leather driving gloves that ended at the wrist—he would die of fright.

He swallowed, the walls of his throat lined with sandpaper. Now his head had cleared, and the throb of his pulse in the side of his neck had become almost painful. He wished he hadn’t thought about that old nightmare. He hadn’t remembered it in years.

Still holding on to the knife, he took another step across the kitchen and squared his shoulders, feigning confidence in almost perfect counterbalance to what he felt.

“Who’s there? Scott? Is that you?”

When there was still no answer, he touched the knob, realizing too late that he’d never locked it. It swiveled in his grasp, the door swinging open to reveal a woman in a leather jacket standing on the other side, clutching two brown paper grocery sacks in her hands. It took Owen a moment to recognize her and a longer moment to process the reality of her appearance here at this hour.

“Well, can I come in?” Colette McGuire said. “Or are you just going to stand there getting a hard-on?” She looked at the knife in his hand and started laughing. “Oh God. You already got one.”

Owen lowered the knife, opened his mouth, and closed it again. The winter night had drawn all the color from her skin, and the effect was striking. She looked as though she had just stepped out of a Kabuki theater where her entire face had been painted white except for the two almost perfectly round rosy patches on her cheeks. When he still didn’t respond, she pushed past him and into the kitchen, hoisting the brown bags up and then dropping them on the table with a thump.

“It’s cold as hell out there,” she said, turning back to him and rubbing her hands together. The vapor of booze hung around her like perfume, a cloud so ripe and familiar that he felt as if he could reach up and pluck memories out of it. “Windchill is thirty below. And you want to hear the kicker? I’ve got a place in Key Biscayne, right down on the water. When I close my eyes, I can practically smell the tanning butter.”

Owen shrugged and shook his head, hoping for a clue or at least something to say. Inside the brown paper bags, he could see two six-packs of Schlitz beer, cold cuts, bread, milk, a box of Cap’n Crunch, and some peanut butter and jelly piled up.

“What is this?” he asked thickly.

“What?”

“This.” He gestured at the food and beer. “What, did you get an early dose of the Christmas spirit over at the McKennedy Compound?”

Colette shrugged and did a precise little pivot in the middle of the floor, pointing her chin at him. “You’ve got a little boy to take care of, don’t you? And he’s got to eat?” Her eyes sharpened the slightest bit. “And last I heard, you like the occasional beer.”

“I’m not looking for charity.”

“The only Charity I know is a whore down in Memphis. This is just me trying to help you out.”

“At one in the morning?” A thought occurred to him, not a pleasant one. “Did my brother put you up to this?”

“Whatever.” Colette waved a hand in his face as if the topic no longer interested her. “The food’s here. You can either take it from me or throw it in the trash. At this point, I’m totally indifferent.”

“You drove all the way out here to tell me that?”

She had already turned away from him, rounding the corner into the living room, where Henry lay on the far end of the couch. Owen went to follow her. The idea of Colette alone in the room with the boy made him uneasy in some ill-defined way, the way he might feel if an unfamiliar animal had entered the room with his sleeping son. When he came in, he found her standing over him, watching him.

“Don’t worry,” she said, not looking up. “I don’t bite.”

Owen didn’t say anything.

“They came by my house today.”

“Who did?”

“Scott and Henry.”

Owen frowned, feeling the ground slope downward under his feet, as if he were sinking into the deeper end of the pool. “So he did put you up to this.”

“Hardly.” Colette reached into her jacket pocket, swaying a little, and snapped the cap off a small airline bottle of Jack Daniel’s, opening it and pouring it down her throat without seeming to swallow, then followed it with an equally small bottle of vodka. “Single servings,” she said. “They’re never quite enough, are they?”

“You’re trashed.”

“Another country heard from.” Colette smiled, her lips wet and sticky-shiny with whiskey; he knew if he kissed her, he’d taste it. “You know what I am, really, O-wen? I submit to you that I am queen of the dead.” She spread her hands, gesturing outward to an invisible empire. “Here’s to me, the newly appointed matriarch of all that is cold and calculating.”

“Jesus.” In spite of everything, he found himself nodding in appreciation. “How shit-faced are you, right now?”

“How the hell would you even know?” She was still looking down at Henry. “At this point, everything in a twelve-mile radius of you reeks of whatever was on sale at the liquor store this week.” She reached down toward the boy’s hair, almost running her fingers though it, and Owen’s hand slapped it away.

“Don’t touch him.”

“Paranoid much? Maybe you’re right to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think about it.” She gazed up at him, a different kind of smile making its way over her face now, slow and leisurely, like a serpent stretching to sun itself across a rock. “Little Henry here likes Unkie Scott a lot, you know. In fact, I bet little Henry would give anything to just leave here for good and fly back out west with Unkie Scott forever. He wishes Unkie Scott were his daddy. It’s written all over his face. I was blind drunk today on three kinds of medication, and even I could see it.”

Owen felt a bright bolt of pain shooting across his chest, but he got a grip on himself, took in a deep breath, and an instant later it was gone. “You think you’re telling me anything I don’t already know?” he asked, surprised at how steady his voice sounded. “You think I even care what you think?”

“I think I’m looking at a guy who has reached the end of his rope and realized it’s tied around his neck,” she said. “I mean, come on. Look at this place. You can’t even take care of yourself.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t inherit a fortune, like some people.”

“No, and you didn’t work for it either. Your brother, Scott, on the other hand, he’s a goddamn American success story. I bet he could afford some good lawyers. If he decides to get serious about helping your little boy get free of this half-assed kennel you’ve got him in now—”

“You listen to me.” Owen grabbed her by the collar of her leather jacket. “Me and my little boy are no business of yours.” The surprised expression on her face, however short-lived, eased the tension clamping down on his chest, and for an instant, he felt back in control of the situation again. Then Colette blew the hair out of her face and shrugged, her swollen lips parting to release a soft, smoky chuckle so quiet that he felt it rather than hearing it.

“You want something from me, Owen? You just give it a name.”

“Does Red know you’re here?”

“Red?” Colette snorted. “Please. He’s got his own little extracurricular activities to think about.” Her voice became a mocking lilt. “Don’t you even want to know why Scott came over to see me today? Or are you too stupid to even ask the right questions?”

He realized that he was on the verge of hitting her, punching her in the stomach, and how satisfying it would be to watch the self-satisfied smirk fall away from her face once and for all. Once, he’d gone through court-mandated psychological counseling, and the therapist had stressed the importance of visualizing his reactions. But his problem was, the only reactions he could truly visualize were the wrong ones. So, instead, he put his hands under his arms and clamped them so tightly that his biceps ached.

“Scott wanted to know about Rosemary Carver,” Colette’s voice drifted in. “My aunt Pauline gave him an earful. Good old Aunt Pauline, always happy to receive a visitor.”

Owen shook his head. “I don’t know these people.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, “you don’t need anybody, right? The last man on earth out here with his son. Good thing you can always rely on the kindness of strangers, isn’t that—”

A pulley cracked somewhere inside him, and his arm flew out like a mast breaking loose from its moorings, knocking one of the bags of groceries off the table. A jar of peanut butter hit the floor and rolled away in a lazy semicircle until it bumped into the cupboard. “Get your ass out of my house.”

“Tsk.” She clucked her tongue. “Sounds like someone woke up on the grumpy side of the bottle.”

“Blow me.”

“I’ll take a rain check.” She sauntered out, slammed the door behind her, and Owen went back into the living room and sat down next to his son. His heart was choking on an undigested bolus of rage and humiliation. He put one hand on the boy’s shoulder, felt his chest rising and falling, and closed his eyes, hoping to find reassurance in this simple moment. Despite everything—his inexplicable anger at Colette, and whatever it had turned into in the final moments before he’d thrown her out—he could feel the rest of the beer in the kitchen calling out to him. There was something comforting in its siren song, and eventually he went to answer it.

As he cracked open the first can, he thought he heard her laugh.