He looked up at the sky, which seemed to have disappeared for a second. Then, like a narrow strip little more than a foot wide, he saw a band of black sprinkled with stars. He realized the eaves of the two buildings arched out over the alley, almost touching in places. It was almost as if he were in a tunnel with a skylight. He felt the walls pressing in on him, and his head started to spin. He closed his eyes to fight off the vertigo, shook his head to clear it and tried once more to concentrate on the business at hand.

Ten feet, he kept telling himself, eight feet, six feet. Step by step, like a scared kid inching past a graveyard, he marked his progress.

In the darkness, in the back of his mind, he kept hearing the squeak of the rats. He shivered, imagining the rodents trying to slither under his cuffs and up his legs. God, how he hated being there. He wondered whether that was why he did what he did, whether he hated such places so much he had a compulsion to obliterate them all, wipe them away as surely and completely as the teacher's pet washing the day's assignments from a blackboard. He asked himself that sort of question often. He never had the answer, but knew it didn't make any difference. He was what he was, and nothing could change him. And it suited him to think of himself that way immutable, irresistible. He was a force of nature, a fact of life.

He was at the hard part. He could look a man in the eye in broad daylight, and put a bullet right between his eyes. He knew he could because he'd done it.

He could design a bomb to look like anything from a Bible to a hair dryer. He'd done that, too. But in the damp dark he felt vulnerable.

He shut his ears to the droning of the flies and groped along the wall until he found the back corner. It was tricky work in the dark, but he couldn't risk using a light. He didn't want to call attention to himself and, more than that, dreaded what unwanted things would be picked out by the beam. At the back corner, he leaned against the wall, taking long, slow breaths through his nose.