SIX GARBAGE BAGS full of red cedar shavings, purchased two at a time for a dollar a bag, at midnight, at the self-serve shed at Dunstead amp; Daughter Custom Furniture, serving your fine cabinetry needs since 1986. No cameras, no lights, no attendant, no theft, no problem.

Moonie stacked the bags in the basement, Cross Canadian Ragweed pounding through the iPod ear-buds, singing about those dead-red lips; then up the stairs, pulling the ear-buds, to where the old man lay facedown on the rug, shaking, kicking, crying, trying to get free. Tied with cheap hemp rope, but no matter. The old man was so old and so feeble that string would have worked as well as rope.

"Please," he groaned, "don't hurt me."

Moonie laughed, a long singing rock 'n' roll laugh, and at the end of it, said, "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to kill you."

"What do you want? I can tell you where the money is."

"The money's not what I want. I've got what I want." Moonie gripped the rope between the old man's ankles and dragged him to the basement stairs, and then down the stairs, the old man's face banging down each tread as they went.

"Oh my Jesus, help me," the old man wept through his bloody lips, his fractured face. "Help me, Jesus."

Thump! Thump! Thump! Nine times.

"Jesus isn't going to help," Moonie said.

The old man pulled it together for a second. "He can send you to hell," he snarled.

"Where do you think I am, old man?"

"You…"

"Shut up. I'm working."

GETTING THE OLD MAN onto the bags was the hardest part. Moonie first threw him facedown on the topmost bag, then heaved his feet up. The old man was tall, but frail; eighty-two years old and sedentary and semi-senile, though not so senile that he didn't know what was happening now. He sank down into the bags of wood shavings and thrashed there, got halfway off, then sank down between them, thrashed some more, then quit. Wood shavings made for the most intense fire, and left no obvious residue; or so the arson fans theorized on the Internet.