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heart attack by thirty? I mean, look at my face, the lines. Jeez.”
    Tears were welling up in her eyes. Even in the dark he could see that. Out in the living room, the TV was laughing.
    “Come on, Carol. Knock it off. It’s going to work out okay.”
    “Ken?”
    “What?”
    “You wouldn’t hurt anybody, would you, honey?”
    “You know me better than that, don’t you? Jeez, Carol. How can you even say that.”
    She touched his hand, stroked it. “You want some coffee?”
    “Okay. Then I got to get back downstairs and finish up.”
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
    One
     
     
    1
     
     
    SOMEBODY WAS BANGING at the side door. Jon ignored it for a while, focusing his attention on the late movie he was watching—the original 1933 King Kong . But the banging was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Jon pulled away from the TV and headed downstairs to see what inconsiderate S.O.B. had the crazy idea something was important enough to go around bothering people in the middle of King Kong . Better be pretty damn earth-shaking, Jon thought, pisses me off, and yanked open the door and saw a heavy-set man leaning against the side of the building, his shirt and hands covered with blood. The guy had blood on his face, too, and looked at Jon and rasped, “Who . . . who the hell are you?”
    Which took the words right out of Jon’s mouth.
    Up until then, it had been a normal day. He’d risen around noon, showered, got dressed, thrown some juice down, and gone out front to the box to see if he’d gotten any comic books in the mail. Jon was a comics freak, a dedicated collector of comic art in all its forms, and did a lot of mail-order buying and trading with other buffs around the country.
    He was also an aspiring comics artist himself (as yet unpublished), and while he was disappointed to find no letters of acceptance for any of the artwork he’d sent off, so too was he relieved to find no rejections.
    Jon was twenty-one years old, a short but powerfully built kid (he was such a comics nut that he’d actually sent in for that Charles Atlas course advertised on the back of the books) with a full head of curly brown hair and intense blue eyes. He also had a turned-up nose that he despised and that girls, thankfully, found cute. His dress ran to worn jeans, and T-shirts picturing various comic strip heroes, everything from Wonder Warthog of the underground comics to Captain Marvel (Shazam!) of the forties “Golden Age” of comics. Today he had a Flash Gordon short-sleeve sweatshirt; the artwork (a full-figure shot of Flash with cape) was by Alex Raymond, the late creator of Flash. Jon would accept no substitutes.
    You see, comics were Jon’s life.
    Take his room, for example. When his uncle had first given it to him, this room was a dreary storeroom in the back of the antique shop, a cement-floored, gray-wood-walled cubicle about as cheerful as a Death Row cell. Now it was a bright reflection of Jon’s love for comic art. The walls were literally papered with colorful posters depicting such heroes as Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, and the aforementioned Flash Gordon, all drawn by Jon himself in pen and ink and watercolored, and were uncanny recreations of the characters, drawn in their original style. (That was both a skill and a problem of Jon’s: while his eye for copying technique was first-rate, he had no real style of his own. “Give me time,” Jon would say to the invisible critics, “give me time.”) Shag throw rugs covered the floors in splashes of cartoon color, and the walls were lined three deep with the boxes containing his voluminous collection of plastic-bagged and filed comic books, a file cabinet in one corner the keeper of the more precious of his pop artifacts. A drawing easel with swivel chair was against the wall, a brimming wastebasket next to it, and sheets of drawing paper and Zip-a-Tone backing lay at the easel’s feet like oversize dandruff. And the two pieces of antique walnut furniture his