The Lanky Man awoke with a start. He felt as though he had been vomited up by a goldfish. He had been dreaming of the goldfish, or perhaps he had been having a vision. He had seen himself inside the goldfish's belly, clawing at the sides, drinking in the phosphorescence, eating and being eaten at the same time, until the two had merged into one. Then he had become ill and thrown himself up. Now he was here.

He felt a sense of loss, a sense of deviance. He felt as though he must find out what was wrong and right it. He did not know what to look for or where to start. He knew only that he was the Lanky Man, and that he was in desperate need of a smoke.

He was lying in an alleyway, covered with garbage and newspapers, but that was not the wrong. He knew that for certain. He wished he had a gun. He felt he needed a gun in order to be interesting and important.

The Lanky Man got up and went to find smokes. He searched his jeans and found four rumpled dollar bills and fifty cents in change. He went into a convenience store and walked up to the counter. He opened his mouth to ask for smokes and no sound came. He could not speak. At his hesitation, the register boy looked at him quizzically with a small derisive smile. The Lanky Man punched the register boy dead in the face and split his lip up to the bottom of the nose. Then he pointed at the Lucky Strikes. The register boy fumbled for a pack.

"Four-fifty," he sobbed.

The Lanky Man put all the money he had in the world on the counter and took the smokes. He already had a brass lighter in his pocket. Walking down the street, he smoked. He smoked three smokes in the span of a block.

He walked two-and-a-half miles an hour, and there was a light breeze blowing at exactly the same speed at his back. When he exhaled, the smoke drifted around his face, staying with him because of the breeze. After a time, there was a pall about him. He was an enigma.

Now, he thought, a gun.

He walked to a firearms store. As he opened the door and went inside, the breeze shifted and the pall drifted in with him.

"Help ya?" said the owner.

The Lanky Man silently pointed to a shelf filled with automatic pistols. He made no noise but only looked through the pall at the owner. The owner looked at him quizzically. Forty seconds later, the Lanky Man came out of the firearms store. He had three fully loaded automatic pistols with him. The breeze picked up as he exited the store and the pall floated along with him. The owner could be heard wailing from inside the store as he tried to pick burning cigarette ashes from his left eye. The Lanky Man lit a fresh smoke and continued on, adding to the pall as he went.

Ten minutes later the pack of smokes was empty. The Lanky Man needed more smokes. He searched his jeans and found two rumpled dollar bills and fifty cents in change. He walked into a convenience store. The smokes were stacked in compartments over the register boy's head. The Lanky Man walked up to the counter and pointed at the Lucky Strikes. The register boy looked at him quizzically. The Lanky Man grabbed the register boy by the shirt and brought his head up into the cigarette compartments. Blood and smokes flew. The Lanky Man put the register boy down. The casing of the cigarette compartments unlatched and came crashing down on the register boy's head, making him a full three inches shorter than he had just been. He toppled over and lay still.

The Lanky Man put all the money he had in the world on the counter and took a pack of Lucky Strikes from among the pile. He walked to the back of the store to use the men's room. He looked in the mirror and saw that he was Lanky.

He also looked tired, as though he had been through a great deal and had a great deal yet to go. He yawned. Through the pall he saw a glint in the mirror. He leaned close and opened his mouth wide.

Deep in his mouth, there was a single goldfish scale set into his tongue.

He lit a smoke.

VI

"Faster."

"Fuck you."

"Faster."

"Fuck you."

"Faster."

Hot Dog and Crazy were piloting a speedboat along the river at a speed of roughly eighty miles an hour. Four dead pleasure cruisers lay in the area to stern. The bodies jumped and shuffled as the boat bucked in the choppy windblown waters. Seventeen police boats, the city's entire force, were pursuing them.

"Just like that fucking O'Malley to peg us coming out of the House," said Hot Dog.

"Don't talk about it."

"Why the fuck are you steering? You've only got one good eye."

"You've only got one good hand."

It was true. O'Malley and hordes of police had opened fire the minute Hot Dog and Crazy had stepped out of the House. The two had stood in front of the door and shot until their ears rang. They were sorry to be the cause of so much damage to the front of the House. They were better shots than the cops, however, and soon they had made it to a cruiser and begun a citywide chase. Passing through Chinatown, they stopped while Hot Dog ran in to get some stir fry.

"I'm hungry," he explained.

Their commandeered cruiser received a good number of ventilation holes while Hot Dog was inside the restaurant, but the cops still had a lot to learn about shooting out tires. They were not very good cops. Only O'Malley was any good, and he was great. Yet he knew it would take more than greatness to get the boys. Something extraordinary. He knew greater powers would thwart him until the time was right. He was also not a chaser by nature. But for now, he needed to keep up appearances. So he chased.

He found himself at the far end of seven blocks of narrow Chinatown streets choked solid with cruisers. The cops, who were not very good, were firing all the way down the street while Hot Dog was inside getting his stir fry. They were taking out dozens of tourists, pedestrians, and the like. They were also taking out the cops in front of them who caught stray bullets. As the ones in front got hit, those behind moved up and took their places, only to be mowed down themselves. The whole procession moved like a parade down the street.

Added to this was the fact that Crazy was blowing away large numbers of them as well. He was shooting in a constant rotation. He had taken off his shoes and socks and was loading clips with his toes. Then he would flick them deftly up and straight into the gun, while the newly emptied ones were on their way down. He never once lowered his arms, but simply kept firing. Soon there was a large pile of dead cops, which the remaining ones were stacking up and using as a barricade.

"Morons," mused O'Malley. He did not feel for any of his men. They were not his. He was not theirs. He would rather have been shooting them than commanding them, but it didn't exactly suit his present role. At least, shooting them was what he had been used to. For now he got along on complete indifference toward them. He actually cared more about the boys than anyone else. He needed Hot Dog to be as he was, and he needed Crazy for himself. He felt he just needed to make Crazy see the whole wrong, and maybe they could sort the whole thing out. Crazy knew at least a little bit. O'Malley was sure of that from their encounter in the House. But Crazy had to see it all, and right now he did not. Perhaps he just doesn't want to believe it, O'Malley thought. Well, there would be more chances. There was just no getting away from it.

But one thing troubled him. Where, he thought, was the third? As far as he could tell, he could account for only two of them. He knew all three would need to be present in order to understand what he understood. He hoped he would find the third before the boys did.

He ran down the street on the roofs of the cruisers, bypassing the procession below him. Bullets ricocheted off his back and took out more cops. Morons, he thought. He leapt from car to car, taking them in only three and two steps, but did not break a sweat. He was cool that way.

As he neared his target, Hot Dog came out with the stir fry. O'Malley was not surprised that they were about to get away again. But he had to try, at least, to be sure that if this was the right time, they would make a proper end of it. It was not so. But he did manage to put one into Crazy's right eye and out the side of the temple. He also took off most of Hot Dog's hand as he was closing the car door. Then they were gone. O'Malley heard Crazy's laughter and found it appealing.

Inside the car, they ate.

"Man, what the fuck took you so long?"

"Ah, they fucked up the order and I had to send it back. It was smoky as all fucking hell in there, too. I could barely see a thing. Everybody looked nervous. They must have just had a fire or something."

"You get rice?"

"Yeah, I got rice."

"You get peppers?"

"Yeah, I got peppers."

"You get egg rolls?"

"Shut the fuck up and eat," Hot Dog said, stabbing two chopsticks deep into Crazy's ear.

"You ass."

They ate. Hot Dog used two raw hot dogs as chopsticks, biting them as he went. He had several in his pockets and on the seat next to him. Crazy took handfuls of rice and stir fry and ate as he drove.

O'Malley had difficulty getting a cruiser through the barricade of dead cops. By the time he finally caught up with Hot Dog and Crazy, they were out of Chinatown and had ditched the car and were on the river.

"Watch out for the pylon," Hot Dog cautioned. "The what?"

"The pylon."

"What the fuck is a pylon?"

Crazy had been shooting behind him at the police boats while he steered. There was an explosion as one of them, whose pilot Crazy had pegged, swerved into another. Hot Dog was pointing at a large round wooden support which sat, protruding out of the water, dead in front of their boat. Crazy had not seen this last remnant of an ancient pier, the rest of which had long since rotted away, in front of him. Also, Hot Dog had used the wrong word, adding to the confusion. Now Crazy turned just in time to see what Hot Dog was referring to.

"That's not a pylon, it's called a pile," he said.

They hit the pile at full speed. Both boat and pile disintegrated into splinters upon impact. Six figures sailed through the air at a speed of roughly eighty miles an hour, two of them flailing wildly.

Crazy looked at Hot Dog in midair, suddenly bright. "Oh, I remember now. Pylons are those stupid orange cones they put in the road-"

Crazy's lecture was cut short with a forceful grunt as he and Hot Dog, along with two of the dead pleasure cruisers, landed on the tracks of a low railroad bridge extending across the river. The other two bodies hit the side of the bridge with a meaty thud and fell into the waters. The bridge was shaking violently because a freight train was about to cross it. The train operator was drunk and the train was moving too fast for the standards of the bridge. Crazy placed a large rock on the track, and then he and Hot Dog jumped into the river. The train hit the two remaining dead pleasure cruisers with a meaty thud and sent them sailing several hundred yards through the air. Then it hit the rock, the jolt of which caused it to derail. At the same time the other fifteen police boats slammed into the side of the bridge, several of them exploding as they did so. The cops, who had mistaken the two dead pleasure cruisers in the water for Hot Dog and Crazy, had intended to run them over and had misjudged the distance between them and the bridge. The shock of the boats colliding and the train derailing caused the whole superstructure of the bridge to collapse and land on the cops. Bridge and train and cops sank quickly to the bottom of the river.

Hot Dog and Crazy clambered out of the river. Crazy looked worried.

"What if O'Malley's under there?"

Hot Dog whirled on him. He had never been truly angry with his companion before, but now he was.

"What the fuck did you just say? I can't believe you just said that. After all he's done to us you wonder if he's okay?"

"We've done a lot to him too."

"We haven't done fucking shit to him! The fucking guy is bulletproof! He's scaring me! You said yourself you thought he was going to get us, in the end. So why are you worried about him? Why did you say that, Crazy? Why are you worried about him? Come on, man! He shot your fucking eye out, man, and my hand too." Hot Dog began to wince in pain as he said this. "Now you're making me think about it, and now it hurts. We think about it, it hurts. We don't think about it, it doesn't hurt. You know that. And if we think about it too much we die. O'Malley wants us to think about the things we do to ourselves and to others, and that's why he's so dangerous. We can't think about it! We're doomed if we do! O'Malley's different. You can't be worried about him. He's different from us."

Crazy looked at Hot Dog with his one good eye. The sheer electricity was somewhat fouled, dimmed, confused, disillusioned. "Not so different," he said slowly, "from me."

"How the fuck do you know? What are you saying? Fuck! My hand hurts, man. It really hurts. Stop talking about it. Stop talking crazy."

"I have to talk Crazy."

"Stop it! STOP IT!" Hot Dog began to stumble off. Crazy followed, holding his throbbing head. "Gotta make it to the House," Hot Dog said to himself. "Gotta make it to the House, and then we'll be okay. No more of this fucking shit. Just get to the House, get all fixed up, and get back to the good times. Back to the old life."

Crazy overheard this last remark, and one last thought passed through his mind before he collapsed from the pain of his wound: what's the old life?

Hot Dog carried his friend along the bank of the river, back toward the House. His hand seemed to be on fire.

Things were getting serious.

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