He'd fixed up three rooms and one bathroom on the second floor, although there were hidey holes and escape routes out of all nine rooms up here. He'd replaced the windows and cleaned up the big triangular room in front—not as his bedroom, that was a smaller room next to it, but as an exercise room, fitted out with a speed bag, heavy bag, a treadmill he'd scavenged from the junk heap behind the Buffalo Athletic Club and repaired, a padded bench, and various weights. Kurtz had never fallen into the bodybuilding fetish so endemic in Attica during his eleven and a half years there—he'd found that strength was fine, but speed and the ability to react fast were more important—but during the last six months he'd been doing a lot of physical therapy. Two of the windows in here looked out on Chicago and Ohio Streets and the abandoned grain silos and factory complex to the west; the center window looked right into the pockmarked lighthouse sign.

His bedroom was nothing special—a mattress, an old wardrobe that now held his suits and clothes—and wooden blinds over the window. The third room had brick and board bookcases against two walls, shelves filled with paperbacks, a faded red carpet, a single floor lamp that Arlene had planned to throw away, and—amazingly—an Eames chair and ottoman that some idiot out in Williamsville had put out for junk pickup. It looked like some eighty-pound cat had gone at the black leather upholstery with its claws, but Kurtz had fixed that with electrical tape.

Kurtz went to the end of the dark hall, stripped out of the old man's clothes, and took a fast but very hot shower, making sure to keep the spray off his bandages.

After drying off, Kurtz took out his razor, squeezed lather into his palm, and looked at the mirror for the first time.

"Jesus Christ," he said disgustedly.