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Blinking, jaded, frightened (hurt…yes…hurt) but alive.
    Terror, yes, but God, he was alive . Alive at last.
    Keane actually laughed. Threw his head back, laughed into the sky, looking at the spire of the cathedral proud above the old gated wall before him, cross atop gleaming in the bright, hard sky.
    People looked at him and he didn’t care even a little bit.
    An old lady stopped before him, curly gray hair and a tartan shopping trolley on wheels that it seemed served only to hold her up.
    “Young man? Are you feeling all right?”
    “Yes,” he said. Oddly, it was kind of true. He probably stank, looked insane. He didn’t care. “Thank you,” he told her. She gave him a distrustful look and moved on. When she’d gone, he laughed again, more quietly this time. Then he pushed himself up and turned back the way he’d come. He didn’t have his van or his wallet, so he set out for home in his work clothes, smelling of shit and sweat, hair mussed, with no money in his pockets.
    He had nothing but his legs and his heart ticking and his mind…
    He had his mind back at last, and all it had taken was a dead man on his trail.
    The cold reality kicked in, then, the shock waned and his mind, returned to him like a lost set of keys or a puppy, began to work again.
    The man he’d killed seven years ago, the man who’d murdered his wife, was back.
    And still, Keane grinned. He didn’t know why he was grinning. He didn’t care. The grin felt just fine on his face, and he couldn’t have shifted it had he tried.
    You might be going a little crazy, baby, said his wife in his head.
    “Yep,” he said. But he didn’t stop grinning.

 
     
     
    II. Three Days to Die: ’06
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Some days it gets so hot your head pounds and your piss is bright yellow. You drink coffee and tea during the day and beer in a pub garden on the river in the evening, watching the sun fade away over the distant rooftops and hoping for respite from the heat. It doesn’t happen. The beer sits in your gut. You wake many times during the night, let loose a stream of luminescent urine in the half-summer’s dark. 2 a.m., 4 a.m., finally, give up. It’s 5 a.m., you’re up, not entirely awake, not entirely rested. Smelling and sweating already.
    You work your tongue against your teeth and lips and palate. Finally getting some spit ready, you cough-spit a brown glob into the toilet, residue of tar and beer and dehydration.
    Must take better care of myself , you think, maybe, looking down at the mess in the water, spreading like crude oil across the water. Your lungs are sore from the excess of the night before, your nostrils dry from the heat. Your mouth might as well be a cesspit. Floss your teeth and the floss stinks like the drains outside the house this long, hot summer. Brush with your electric toothbrush, for maybe five minutes. Shower. Wash your hair twice and your armpits and cock and balls three times.
    Human again, the sweat begins to pour at first from your hairline, then your armpits and everywhere else, all so resoundingly scrubbed just for that feeling of cleanliness that will last about another two minutes.
    You think maybe about tapping the wife up for a blowjob before you stink too bad, but you’re late for work. Click, click, you think. You’re on call, as of (you check your watch) now. 8 a.m. 48 hours on call.
    Maybe no one will die. But, you think, they probably will.

 
     
     
    7
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Sunday
    Life is a series of snapshots. No one remembers the connections between events and memories, but they remember those moments in time that impress. Might be an image, a smell. Schemers, they’re called in psychology. Links within the brain.
    Triggers, Keane thought. Shutters.
    Keane’s life was made of snapshots. First shot of the day, Teresa Reid beside him, sleeping in.
    He grinned and slid out of bed quietly, loath to wake her.
    He slept naked, but pulled on a pair of baggy pajama bottoms to