“What?”

“You know that old baseball glove I got, the one with the stuffing out? Well, you can have it.” He shook his head. “I don’t like baseball, anyway.”

Tenth Avenue and Farrow Street was the busiest intersection in town. Jimmie Larkin died under a truck there. All it took was an outstretched foot as they raced across to beat traffic.

Jimmie looked even better than the man in the car who’d died.

All smashed and gray and with his eyes starting out of his head.

In the next six months there were three others. Not all from the Twelfth Avenue school, of course. The need for Rodney’s particular talent was spread around. And all payment in advance.

There was the blonde girl at the old pond behind the lumber company—the one who insisted on stomping the pigtailed girl’s mud pies as quickly as she made them. The pigtailed girl had a stamp that Rodney coveted. He waited while the mud pie girl ran home for the stamp. Then he drowned the blonde girl after stunning her with a piece of wood. That one hadn’t been particularly enjoyable as they’d made him leave and he never had seen the blonde one’s body. But it was summer work.

The best one was the boy at school he’d pushed out the window. They’d washed for days and never got the pink tinge out of the sidewalk. Rodney made the place a shrine. He could get a thrill just standing near it.

That one’d been the best because he was a tattle-tale, and three kids had all chipped in to get rid of him; they had each contributed ten baseball cards, Rodney Parish’s most important hobby of all. Thirty pictures, almost every player on the Dodgers and Yankees, with the exception of the real-hard-to-get Mickey Mantle card.

It was the Mickey Mantle card that eventually caused the death of Leroy Tarvish.

Owl Eyes stood in the shadow of the building, near the concrete apron with its six manholes down which they dumped coal for the school; the concrete apron on which the kids played “pussy-inna-corner.” He stood there with his odd pudgy face squished up, with his crew cut bothering him—the haircut had been the day before and little pieces of it were down his back itching worse than anything—and his soft, blue eyes behind their great lenses staring at the scene on the playground.