He didn't get much into that first one, because he was still in the doorway and there wasn't much room to swing; he could only draw his arm back to half-cock. He might not have hit her at all (at least not to start with) had she not been flashing a grin — God, those teeth, they'd given him the creeps even in grammar school — and if she hadn't called him Junior.

Of course everyone in town called him Junior, he thought of himself us Junior, but he hadn't realized how much he hated it, how much he hoped-to-die-in-a-maggot-pie hated it until he heard it come bolting out from between the spooky tombstone teeth of the bitch who had caused him so much trouble. The sound of it went through his head like the sunglare when he'd looked up to see the plane.

But as slaps from half-cock go, this one wasn't bad. She went stumbling backward against the newel post of the stairway and the towel flew off her hair. Wet brown snaggles hung around her cheeks, making her look like Medusa. The smile had been replaced by a look of stunned surprise, and Junior saw a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth. That was good. That was fine. The bitch deserved to bleed for what she had done. So much trouble, not just for him but for Frankie and Mel and Carter, too.

His mother's voice in his head: Don't let yourself get out of control, honey. She was dead and still wouldn't stop giving advice. Teach her a lesson, but make it a little one.

And he really might have managed to do that, but then her robe came open and she was naked underneath it. He could see the dark patch of hair over her breeding-farm, her goddam itchy breeding-farm that was all the fucking trouble, when you got right down to it those farms were all the fucking trouble in the world, and his head was throbbing, thudding, whamming, smashing, splitting.