Pig

Andrew Lowman continues to puzzle over the clues...until he recieves a strange visitor.

 

Pig

 

            The Dead Man stands outside the den of his enemy. Like a trained hunter, he has run his prey to ground, though the startled creature does not yet know that he is trapped. A few bare inches of concrete are all that stand between them; a few spare inches of glass and steel. Heartbeats separate them, nothing more. The Dead Man’s lips twist into a snarl. So close now.

With cautious steps, he walks to the edge of the roof, staring down the seven stories to the street below. He’s made his way across rooftops for several blocks, pulled along by the unrelenting force that was becoming all too familiar now. As he’s vaulted from the apartment building to the government offices, he’d wondered why he had been drawn to the roofs. As he hurls himself with preternatural strength toward his destination, he begins to understand. One doesn’t just walk in the front door of a police station.

            Not when you are there to kill a cop.

***

           

            Paperwork. In the end it all came down to paperwork. The badge, the gun, the chevrons on his sleeve, the slick cruiser with the winking siren lights that could cut traffic and slice into the heart of even the most law-abiding citizen…it all came back to the freakin’ paperwork. No matter how high on the totem-pole he climbed, it stared back at him with that vacant black and white face, unavoidable and inscrutable.

            He hated it, of course. If there was one thing Detective Andrew Lowman could not stand, it was the mind-numbing tedium of forms and requisitions. He hadn’t joined the force to fill in blanks with a number two pencil (what happened to the number one pencil?). He’d joined to keep the streets safe, to put punks behind bars, and to make a living doing something that might actually make a difference. If he’d wanted to push pencils, he would’ve become an accountant like his a*****e brother.

            Lowman brought a ham-hock sized hand to his jaw, scratching at the patchy stubble that was already mounting a counter-assault after its defeat by a Bic disposable that morning in front of the steamy bathroom mirror. With his other hand he shuffled a green folder from the “In” pile to the “Out”. No matter how many he got through, there was no getting around the fact that he’d be shackled to his desk for at least another two hours. Eyes the color of a muddy river bottom flicked toward the digital clock on his computer desk-top. Half past eleven. He hadn’t even gotten to the Frost case yet.

            “S**t,” he breathed.

            Lowman leaned back in his chair, a decrepit ruin held together with equal parts duct tape and prayer. It squealed in protest as he stretched his arms above his head, letting the tension drain from his shoulders. Two more hours and he could go home and crawl into bed, quiet as a church mouse, and pray that he didn’t wake Gladys.

            She was always a grizzly-bear when his cold feet or the agonized squeak of their aging mattress managed to jar her from her sleep. And that was when she hadn’t been angry to begin with. Nearly a full year since he’d made full detective and been given his first solo homicide, and she still couldn’t seem to make peace with the hours.

            He’d catch hell.

            The detective ground the heels of his hands into his burning eyes and groaned as the little white aurora’s sparked up in the dark places along his optic nerves. There would be time to think about all of that later. The job called.

            He takes up the next folder in the pile. It’s green surface is tabbed with a single white label which reads “Nathan Kale, 21 October.” Lowman shakes his head. Messy case. Gunshot wound, close quarters. Homicide. No physical, no DNA, no witness, no leads. Nothing.

            He spreads the folder out and goes over the details. Nathan Kale, age 28; shot in his home on Rondell Street, Number 6 at the Heron’s Nest, on the 21^st of October. One shot, delivered at point blank range to the forehead. Forensics had gotten back to him about the make and model of the weapon. Best guess was a .357 magnum, probably Smith and Wesson. Death had come pretty quick for him. The bullet had carved through the front of his skull, through the frontal lobe, and exited through the parietal lobe, leaving a ragged hole in the back of Kale’s head about the size of an orange.

            Very messy.

            Lowman, drew a heavy breath through his nose. The job was always harder when you knew the corpse. It was easy to put some distance between yourself and the ugliness of it all when you were looking at the death of a stranger. It didn’t feel as real. The look of a broken body, the smell of blood and s**t which soaked into the carpets, they didn’t get to you as badly if you could just think of the thing in front of you as something other than human.

            But Detective Lowman had seen Kale give his testimony from the witness box. He could still see the mannerisms of the weaselly b*****d; the way he’d rake a hand over his close-shorn red hair, or the way he’d squint when he spoke. Lowman had only been a sergeant then…a year ago.

            Lowman returned his focus to the details of the case. Without leads, without witnesses, the case would be hell to crack. His pencil drifts over the lines of typed script, tracing the words as his lips silently form them in tempo to the churning of his sluggish brain. He has no addendums to scrawl in the margins. Nothing glares in the face of his intuition.

            Chalk up another one for the scum who slink through the shadowy corners of the city, rising out of the mounds of urban decay to rape and kill and devour. Lowman tosses the folder back against the scarred and pitted surface of his desk, an antique like his chair. It rasps against the aged wood like an enraged rattlesnake as his hand quests for another folder from the pile.

            The Frost case. F**k all.

            “Lowman!” a friendly voice snapped the detective’s attention away from the little pool of light cast by the steadily failing desk-lamp and toward the brighter glare of his doorway.

            “Sanders.” Lowman’s grunt lacked the enthusiasm of the young detective, new to homicide, fresh from patrol duty, only three years out of the academy. Lean, athletic, and missing the growing paunch, gray hair, and day-old stubble of a successful detective like Lowman. The kid was a little green, but Lowman had to give him a little credit. He was either the best damn asskisser in the precinct, or he knew his job.

            “Working hard?”

            Lowman grunted and looked meaningfully down toward the sheaf of papers bound in the green folder between his fingers.

            “Worst part of the job, hands down.” Sanders leaned against the doorjamb, smoothing his full crop of sandy-blonde hair. Lowman’s own was beginning to thin at the edges. “Working late?”

            Lowman blew a derisive breath through his nose, eyeing first the computer’s clock and then the young buck. “Looks that way.”

            “Damn. Hoping we could get a beer. Y’know, get to know each other a little better.”

            “Not tonight, Sanders. Rain check.”

            “Uh-huh. Look, I know I’m the new guy, and you old salty veterans are a little bunged up about letting a kid like me into the club, but give me a break, alright?” Sanders’ easy smile was somewhere between the amicable and s**t-eating categories.

            “Sanders, I’ve got work to do. Rain check.” Lowman waved a placating hand.

            “Yeah, alright. Rain check.” He took a meandering step into the office.

            “Any leads on Kale?”

            Sanders shook his head and folded his arms as he moved to inspect the plaques on Lowman’s wall. “Not yet…we’re looking for blood and hair. Most of what we got looked to be Kales. Never know…we may get lucky.”

            “Yeah—“

            “Is it true that you were the one who picked him up for murder one last year?”

            Lowman’s teeth ground. The kid was either trying to get under his skin, or he was several shades beyond oblivious. How the hell he ever got detective…

            “Yeah, that was me.”

            “And he walked? F*****g technicalities, huh?” Sanders turned on his heel and folded his arms in front of him, canting his head to one side. He was still smiling that f*****g buddy-buddy smile.

            “Mishandling of evidence.”

            “Sorry to hear it, Lowman.”

            “Yeah.” Lowman was only hairs away from vaulting the table and hammering the kid’s teeth down his throat.

            “Guess he got his dues anyway.”

            “Looks like.”

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

            “Yeah, well…Hey, I heard about the Frost case…weird stuff. Any leads?” He wandered a bit closer to the beleaguered detective’s desk.

            Lowman made a negative sound low in the back of his throat as he peered intently at the text on the poorly-Xeroxed pages.

            “Had to be freaky—“

            “This ain’t my first rodeo, kid.” Lowman snapped off the line quickly enough that Sanders’ comment stuck in his throat.

            “I’m just saying, is all,” Sanders began again, almost apologetically. “Who f*****g writes on the walls in blood?”

            Lowman closed the folder and laid it on the desk. “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Sanders.” The older detective folded his hands and laid them on top of the Frost case, leaning over his desk. “That’s what we do. We find the sickos. We find their work, we clean it up, we find them, and then we nail their asses to the wall.”

            “Yeah.” Sanders nodded. “Good luck, Lowman.”

            “Mmmhmmm.” Lowman picked up the folder again, dropping his eyes to the details once more, dismissing the younger officer by virtue of willful unawareness of him.

            “And, we’ll talk about that beer.” Sanders brightened, undimmed by the patiently dismissive tone of the senior detective.

            “Sure, kid.”

            Sanders left the room, rapping his knuckles against the jamb as he left, pounding the last nail into Lowman’s growing three-alarm migraine.

            Kids, man.

            The headache had taken up residence just behind and above the left side of Lowman’s jaw. It began to pulse, a slow and steady throbbing which forced him to drop the folder and massage his temples.

            He closed his eyes against the pain, schooling his thoughts into something beyond the basic animal understanding of the riot of stress and exhaustion-induced agony behind his eyes. Without the need for his eyes, he located one of the small post-it pads which he always kept on his desk, a pen filling the other hand without conscious effort.

            So what do we know?

            Nathan and Zach’s murders were short on physical evidence. Both were killed in their homes. Both were shot at close range with a heavy-caliber pistol. He notes this on the post-it.

           

            Cold hard facts. They were just that, cold and hard. Not a whole lot to go on; hardly even enough for a tenuous conclusion. So why did his gut tell him that the two were related? Why did he know that the same guy had pulled both triggers?

            Under his little list of coincidentals he writes: “Related.” He underlines it twice.

            Now there’s the why.

            Nathan Kale was a scumbag. He had a record of previous arrests, nickel and dime sort of crimes except for the big one. Murder One. Walked on a technicality. Plenty of people would want a guy like Nate dead. Anyone who could spot a particularly dangerous breed of cockroach wouldn’t hesitate to remove it from the equation. So the boot came down on Kale…no big deal. These things happen.

            Frost? Frost was clean. Especially for a lead-singer in a rock band. No prior arrests, no warrants, no history of sex drugs and rock and roll to mar his memory or provide even the barest handhold of a lead. No public enemies. Not even the fame required to attract the attention of overzealous John Lennon-syndrome fans. Nothing to explain the bullet that had turned his brain into macerated syrup.

            As Lowman pondered the angles in his death-silent office, he found that the pulsing in his head refused to give even an inch, but rather cranked up the intensity until it was all he could do to concentrate.

            And it was then that his desk lamp’s bulb burst.

            Little fragments of glass shrapnel flew from the exploding incandescent and sprayed harmlessly over Lowman’s right hand and the post-it, now covered in his cramped handwriting. Reflexively, he jerked his hand away, his eyes flicking open as he sat in the threadbare half-light of his computer’s monitor.

            He blew out a breath that was busy shaping itself into a gasp, willing the tightness in his chest to go with it. It didn’t.

            Lowman’s eyes traveled to windowless walls until they came to the small rectangle of light which cheerily proclaimed the small glass window which composed the upper portion of his door. He stood, impulsively taking the post-it and pen with him, and walked toward the door and the promise of light.

            As his feet drifted toward the door, the glare of the precincts working lights cut through the gloom of his office, shedding enough illumination for Lowman to glance down at his meager list of facts.

            Odd, at home, .357, Related, Dirty Nate, Clean Frost…

            Raker.

            Detective Andrew Lowman’s gait hitched, and he stared at the little yellow post-it note for a span of ten heartbeats, waiting for the word, scrawled in someone else’s handwriting, heavy and dark, to disappear. It did.

            And the light went with it.

            Someone drifted past the door. Someone tall and thin. Someone who wore a long jacket.

            “The f**k?” Lowman rasped.

            The post-it fluttered to the floor as Lowman reached out for the door and drew it open. The lights over the central hub of the precinct cast the desks of the three or four officers who comprised the skeleton crew between the hours of one and five a.m. in stark relief. Lowman’s eyes darted around the room, and finally stare down the hallway to his left toward the stairs.

            One lantern-jawed sergeant looked up from a stack of paperwork and furrowed his brow. “Something the matter, Detective?”

            S**t, did he look addled?

            He toyed with the idea of asking if the sergeant had seen a tall guy in a black trenchcoat walk by. He discarded it after a stilted instant’s hesitation. “Yeah, my f****n’ lamp just blew…gotta grab a bulb from supply.” Lowman managed a grim parody of a smile.

            The sergeant nodded his understanding, un-beetled his eyebrows, and turned his broad, shovel-shaped face back to the pile of paperwork which sat atop his desk.

            Lowman would just walk down the stairs toward supply, have a look around on the way, stretch, maybe get a cup of coffee…calm down.

            He took the steps two at a time, quickening his pace in an effort to catch a glimpse of the man who had walked past his door. All the while, his brain churned like an unquiet pond, the mud and sludge and gravel and skinless bodies rising in a toxic cloud.

            Raker?

            “Christ…” he whispers it like a ward against evil.

            Nathan Kale had been brought in a year ago for the murder of a local artist by the name of Dorian Raker. Kale’s .357 Smith and Wesson which had proved to be the murder weapon, the lynch-pin in the case, was deemed inadmissible evidence and the b*****d had walked.

            And Lowman got a big fat promotion.

            The basement, holding cells toward the north, interrogation toward the east, and supply and other sundries to the west, was not generally dark at this hour of the night. A guard or two were always on duty in this section of the precinct, even when the cages were empty. Someone should have had the lights on. Voices should have broken the silence which reigned on the basement level as Lowman gained the landing. Should have.

            Nothing moved.

            Lowman reached out to flick on a light. Fluorescent illumination spewed out of plastic-paneled fixtures, washing the processing room in overwrought light just in time to catch a flap of black cloth vanishing behind the corner of a hallway to Lowman’s left.

            “Hey!” Lowman called.

            Nothing answered.

            Lowman picked up the pace, settling into a slow jog across the empty room and toward after the phantom flapping of the long black jacket. The hallway was well-lit; fluorescent light glinted on bare white walls. Anything black, much less a man-sized trenchcoat, would stick out like a sore thumb. No sore thumbs stuck out.

            “Anyone here?” Lowman shouted down the hallway again, hoping against hope that whatever phantasm his over-worked, under-paid mind had conjured would have the decency to give a response.

            No such luck.

            “Damn it all.”

            Reflexively, Lowman’s hand strayed to the comfortable weight of his shoulder-rig and the .38 which lay nestled against his side, cold steel long since warmed by diffused body-heat. He thumbed the catch, letting the safety strap pop off with an old bone snap.

            Whatever was down here, he’d be ready for it.

            His eyes swept the hallway, left to right and back again. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Tentative steps forward. Rinse. Repeat.

            A door, at the end of the hallway, shifted, creaking inward until the catch clicked. Lowman, alone and finally left to chase shadows without the prying eyes of his fellow officers, sprinted toward it. His booted feet slapped heavily against the tiled floor, staccato gunshots in the stillness.

            His left hand, thudding with every morbidly heavy heartbeat, closed on the brushed aluminum knob as his right mysteriously filled itself with fourteen ounces of standard service revolver. The door swung inward. Lowman leveled his revolver at an empty interrogation room.

            The stainless steel chair was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, behind a matching desk. A used Styrofoam coffee-cup (still half-full of ditchwater and cigarette butts, no doubt) perched precariously on the edge of the stained and dented table. A blackened two-way mirror made up fully half of the left wall, casting the whole scene in high-contrast double.

The whole place stank of sour sweat, fear, and bad coffee. But Lowman was alone.

Until Lowman felt the barrel of a large-caliber pistol press against his right temple.

“Gun down, Detective.”

A multitude of emotions ripped through the detective’s mind in the span of a single heartbeat. Fear, certainly. His gut contracted fiercely as he registered the steely kiss of a gun against his head. He’d been shot at before. Hell, he’d been shot before, but there would be no escaping a shot from so close…no vest to soak up all of the potential energy bound up in the sulfur, saltpeter, and cordite resting behind the lethal projectile at the other end of the barrel.

Then there was the confusion. He’d been so wrapped up in his search that he’d missed all of the telltale signs. How the hell had he missed someone pressed against the wall and waiting? How had he let himself get bushwhacked like that? F*****g rookie mistake. And now he was going to pay for it.

But mostly there was anger. Hot, roiling rage; Steam rising from the ice-water which now composed his gut, flashing against the flame of his fury and clouding his better judgment. He wasn’t going out like this. Oh, like hell.

 Lowman swung up and toward the voice, throwing his entire body weight, spearheading his attack with two hands clenched firmly on the .38. Gunmetal connected with body mass with a tooth-rattling thump, and Lowman pulled away a step, squaring himself into a shooter’s stance, leveling his weapon on the now supine form of his attacker.

“Hands, a*****e!” He roared.

The gunman laughed, a throaty little chuckle over the barrel of the .357 which still lined up with the detective’s throat. His grip didn’t relax on the gun. In fact, one thin digit thumbed back the hammer. Lowman thumbed his in return.

He was pale in a liquid-paper sort of way. Long, lank black hair framed his hawk-face and hung past his shoulders. His black trench-coat splayed out around him like an upturned vial of ink. Everything about him was unsettling in a faint, flesh-crawling sort of way. Nothing overt…just somehow wrong.

The detective and the gunman regarded each other for a tense moment.

“We seem to be at an impasse, Detective Lowman.”

“Don’t you f*****g move.” He’d seen this a*****e before, but he was having trouble placing him. It slipped through the fingers of his mind like a well-greased eel.

“What ‘s your plan, Detective? You going to continue this standoff until one of the other boys in blue show up?” The gunman flowed fluidly to his feet, never letting the barrel of his gun droop even the slightest degree.

“I told you to stay down, goddammit!”

The gunman twisted his face into a deprecating frown. One hand kept the gun level, while the other swept toward the chair. “Let’s sit.”

            It was Lowman’s turn to frown. Quickly, he measured the odds of getting out the door and hollering for back-up. They were slim. At least the chances of getting out without a heavy-caliber slug firmly lodged in his spine were slim. Getting out the door oozing a trail of blood and dying several steps away was rather more likely. “You’re kidding.”

            “Never.” The way the gunman spoke the word left no question as to whether or not he spoke the truth. “Come on. Just because I’m here to kill you doesn’t mean we can’t be civil about it.”

            Lowman shook his head and frowned so hard that he was sure the corners of his mouth were touching the ragged stubble which dotted his chin. “Here to kill me?”

            Lean-limbed and smooth, the man in the trench-coat sat on the edge of the table, folding one leg over the other. “Indeed.”

            What the hell? Lowman crossed the room with the careful steps of a spooked buck, suspecting trouble with every footfall. The gunman didn’t move. But he didn’t lower the gun, either. Lowman dropped into the two-shades-too-uncomfortable chair and considered his opposite.

            “We’re sitting. Talk.”

            “Certainly, Detective. Did you have a topic in mind?”

            “Who are you?”

            The gunman shrugged in an offhand sort of way. “That’s a difficult question.” His tone was almost apologetic.

            Lowman noticed for the first time that the gunman had no color to his eyes; no whites, no cornea. Only an all-encompassing pool of black.

            “I’ve got a few aliases, detective. Which would you prefer?”

            “I can keep calling you ‘a*****e’.”

            “Give me your hand.” The gunman’s head cocked to one side, his eyes narrowing querulously.

            “What?”

            “Your hand. Give it to me.”

            “Not a chance, a*****e.”

            The gunman pursed his lips. With a placating wave he set the gun on the table. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot, I understand.”

            Lowman’s jaw dropped. The b*****d had just set his gun on the table, peaceful as you please. He sprang to his feet and took a firmer grip on his service revolver, leveling the gun at his forehead.

            “Hands where I can see them!”

            With a bored nod, the perp spread his hands.

            “Now you’re going to give me some straight f*****g answers, starting with your name…” Lowman closed the space between them and began to run his hands over the surface of the still-seated figure’s coat, feeling for any bulges which might indicate a hidden weapon.

            When he struck, Lowman didn’t even have a chance to widen his eyes. One hand took hold of his wrist, jerking it painfully into line with the cement as his finger spasmed on the trigger. The other hand had fastened on his throat, and he found himself being lifted into the air by a man who was easily seventy pounds lighter than himself.

The gunshot’s echo in the enclosed space left Lowman’s ears ringing. His nostrils smoldered with the sulfur tang of spent gunpowder. His throat burned under the iron grip of his assailant. But the words the gunman spoke cut through the wall of over-stimulation.

“My name is Dorian Raker.” 

X

“…too good to be true.”

The man across the booth nodded and brushed a hand through his blonde hair, smoothing an errant lock back into place. Rings flashed on more than one digit, silver and expensive looking. As if the perfectly tailored slate-grey Armani didn’t scream money on its own.

“I understand your hesitance, Sergeant Lowman, really I do.” The man who had insisted that Lowman call him Aries raised a hand to cut off any reply. “But it’s misplaced. You’re doing nothing illegal, and I assure you that you will be well-compensated.”

“ But you can see how fifty grand sounds like a lot of money for something that isn’t illegal.” Lowman pressed his sweaty palms down onto the cool table, right beside the bulging envelope that he knew, sight unseen, to be filled with crisp hundred-dollar bills. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

“It’s simple. Evidence gets mishandled, misplaced. It’s your first homicide bust. Completely understandable. You get caught up in the moment.” Aries took a slow drag from his slim cigar, making the lit end flare like a cherry-coal, and breathed a curling cloud of perfumed smoke. It filled the space between them with twisting claws. “It happens all the time.”

  “And you say that you can guarantee me detective?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I couldn’t.”

“And there’s no way—“

“None.”

Lowman swiped a hand over his jaw and stared hard at the envelope of money. Then his gaze shifted to take in the hard planes and angles of his business-like counterpart, the man who hid behind the name of a God of War. Aries’ lips split to show perfect white teeth. The best money can buy.

Lowman’s hand dropped to the envelope and scooped it up, tucking it into the pocket of his jacket. “If I get burnt for this…” he began to threaten.

“You won’t.”

“But if—“

“Then we both fry.”

“Yeah…”

“Pleasure doing business with you, Detective.” The words may as well have been, “Now go, and serve me well.”

Lowman stood and tried to keep his steps even and steady as he left the bar’s back room. Tried to stop the slow gnaw in his gut that told him that he’d regret this. Tried to stop the hammering of his heart.

X

When the cops arrived in interrogation room five, drawn by the sound of gunshots and spearheaded by the lantern-jawed homicide sergeant, Detective Andrew Lowman was already beyond pain or panic.

The room smelled of death already. Copper pennies and untreated sewage.

Lowman lay crumpled in the corner of the room, just beneath the edge of the two-way mirror. The pool of blood which spread to touch the stainless-steel legs of the hot-seat sprang from a crimson headwater, a ragged hole just beneath the point where his ribcage branched outward. The shot had left a cookie-cutter exit wound, shredded skin and bits of bone sprayed over the small of his back and onto the opposite wall, suggesting that the detective had been moved after the fatal shot.

Later, contusions and broken bones would suggest that he’d been thrown.

His gunman was nowhere to be found. Even after the building had been locked down. Even after the entire station was searched bottom to top and back again. He’d left behind nothing but a trail of blood-slick footsteps, neither overly large nor overly small. Footsteps which followed the route of Lowman’s would-be rescuers.

In reverse.

They vanished at the front door.

Not a single officer reported seeing anyone unusual coming or going.

X

Raze heard the Ouija board at 1:00 a.m. The skritch of the overturned planchette set his skin crawling. There was no more curiosity. Only revulsion.

There was no need to look. He’d seen enough. “Three down, two to go.”

Raze pulled the blankets over his head and begged for sleep.

X

            The Dead Man comes to, holding onto the gaping form of a dying detective. The gun, Nathan Kale’s revolver pillaged from yet another sight of slaughter, still smokes in his hand.  Blood flows over his hand.

            The Detective squints in incomprehension, his toes scraping back and forth on the concrete, as if he meant to swim away, following his soul. But in the wrong direction.

            “What am I doing?”

            No witty repartee from the Devil which crouches, enshrined, at the back of his skull. Instead, a cold wash of revulsion skitters through his gut like an unquiet colony of sharp clawed rodents. What has he become?

            With savage strength he hurls the broken, bleeding form of his quarry toward the far wall. With a bone-twisting crunch, the late detective smashes into cement, curls around his wound, and lies still. Blood spreads under him like a silk blanket. A tide which comes inexorably onward.

            “You monster!” Comes the voice of the Devil, all bitter mirth and mockery.

            The Dead Man’s  lips twist up into something which shares a common ancestry with both smile and snarl. “They called Frankenstein’s creation that too…”

            “But we know the truth, don’t we?”

            The Dead Man hears booted feet…a lot of them. Coming fast.

            He casts about, taking stock of the situation. He tucks the smoking instrument of his vengeance into the inner pocket of his coat.

            “Yeah, well, here’s to hoping you know the way out of here.”

            “Not to worry, pet. We’re not going to let fifteen of the city’s finest stop us are we?”

            He shakes his head. “We aren’t done yet.”

            “Not by a long shot.”

            No. Not by a long shot.