A stereo was dimly visible as a collection of rectangularsilhouettes on the window ledge. A digital clockpunched red electronic minutes into the silence.

The maddog waited in the dark.

He could hear himself breathe. Feel the sweat tricklefrom the pores of his underarms. Taste the remains of hisdinner. Feel the shaven stubble at his groin. Smell theodor of the Chosen’s body.

He was never so alive as in the last moments of a longstalk. For some people, for people like his father, it mustbe like this every minute of every hour: life on a higherplane of existence.

The maddog watched the street. The Chosen was anartist. She had smooth olive skin and liquid brown eyes,tidy breasts and a slender waist. She lived illegally in thewarehouse, bathing late at night in the communal restroom down the hall, furtively cooking microwave mealsafter the building manager left for the day. She slept on anarrow bed in a tiny storage room, beneath an art-decocrucifix, immersed in vapors of turpentine and linseed.She was out now, shopping for microwave dinners. Themicrowave crap would kill her if he didn’t, the maddogthought. He was probably doing her a favor. He smiled.

The artist would be his third kill in the Cities, the fifthof his life.

The first was a ranch girl, riding out of her back pasturetoward the wooded limestone hills of East Texas.She wore jeans, a red-and-white-checked shirt, and cowboyboots. She sat high in a western saddle, riding morewith her knees and her head than with the reins in herhand. She came straight into him, her single blonde braidbouncing behind.

The maddog carried a rifle, a Remington Model 700ADL in .270 Winchester. He braced his forearm against arotting log and took her when she was forty yards out.The single shot penetrated her breastbone and blew heroff the horse.

That was a killing of a different kind. She had not beenChosen; she had asked for it. She had said, three years beforethe killing, in the maddog’s hearing, that he had lipslike red worms. Like the twisting red worms that youfound under river rocks. She said it in the hall of theirhigh school, a cluster of friends standing around her. Afew glanced over their shoulders at the maddog, whostood fifteen feet away, alone, as always, pushing hisbooks onto the top shelf of his locker. He gave no signthat he’d overheard. He had been very good at concealment,even in his youngest days, though the ranch girldidn’t seem to care one way or another. The maddog wasa social nonentity.

But she paid for her careless talk. He held her commentto his breast for three years, knowing his timewould come. And it did. She went off the back of thehorse, stricken stone-cold dead by a fast-expandingcopper-jacketed hunting bullet.

The maddog ran lightly through the woods and acrossa low stretch of swampy prairie. He dumped the gun beneatha rusting iron culvert where a road crossed themarsh. The culvert would confuse any metal detectorused to hunt for the weapon, although the maddogdidn’t expect a search—it was deer season and the woodswere full of maniacs from the cities, armed to the teethand ready to kill. The season, the weapon cache, had allbeen determined far in advance. Even as a sophomore incollege, the maddog was a planner.

He went to the girl’s...