TRENTON, NEW JERSEY

MAY 1973

Diane, Sarah, Carolyn, Mary, Sarah, Emily, Linda, Norwegian baby, Air Force baby, Marianne, Maryland baby, Prince George baby, Sarah Brown…

In a workhouse in Trenton for the assault of a police officer, Sam played his whole movie back as if projecting it on the wall of his cell.

Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey…

He’d hightailed it out of the Big Easy after Miss Sarah Brown gave him a run for his money, or tried at least. Maybe he was toying with them too much first, should get it done faster. She had said she needed to pee and had taken off running across that damn field. Burrs ripped the seam out of his hem before he got to her. The full moon shined on her ass as she ran, naked as the day she was born. A porch light glowed in the distance, beyond the edge of the high grass.

She’d almost made it. He tackled her and did her from behind. He folded her last breath into his palm and locked it in his heart before he flipped her over and laid her arms out in the shape of a cross. That was a nice touch.

New Jersey wasn’t much to look at, but he couldn’t see beyond the walls of the workhouse anyway, and he knew he wouldn’t be there long. Doing time was easy, a rest from the road. His new girlfriend, Ninah, was waiting for him on the outside. He’d picked her up off the street in Macon, Georgia. She was big, pretty, and yellow, how he liked them, and she’d flagged him down. He told her to meet him around the corner. He’d planned to do her quick, a junk-food meal. He’d learned his lesson and didn’t want to give another one a chance to run. He took her to a salvage yard. They passed a hulking pile of crushed steel. She clung to him and yelped.

“What, kitten?” He stroked the back of her neck while yearning for the front.

“I’m afraid of the dark,” she said.

They’d found a pile of junk so compacted it was practically a park bench and sat down.

Sam had leaned in for his first scent of the peppermint-laced breath he’d soon be stealing. She stopped him with a palm to his chest.

“If you want me to be yours, I already am.”

She’d uttered the magic words. You own me. He let her live. She never asked a question as they traversed the country, east to west on the southern route and back again west to east through the north. Along the way, he’d gotten a stiletto blade in his side in a pool hall in Detroit, a face full of brass knuckles at a bar in Vegas, an ice pick smack in the middle of his sternum outside Bakersfield. Would have liked to have picked up another baby along the way, but he’d been too busy narrowly escaping death at every turn.

“Yes, Daddy,” she said to his cockamamie ideas. “Yes, Mr. Sam. Yes.”

He survived all these brushes with death, stunned faces of doctors telling him how lucky he was they hadn’t hit any major organs. He emerged from each hospital with a prescription for antibiotics, a bandage he’d forget to change, and a bonus painkiller prescription they could hock at their next stop.

Sam kept his bargain with God. He hadn’t told anyone that he was His avenging angel. Working for His sanitation department, dumping society’s trash. As long as it was their little secret, Sam remained impervious to injury.

While Ninah had been sucking cock around the side of a gas station in lousy New Jersey, some police officers tackled him, and one of the officers dropped his gun in Sam’s reach. His partner trained his service revolver on a spitting mad Sam. Ninah practically flew around that corner, still stuffing a tit into her top, and threw herself on top of him until the cops grudgingly lowered their weapons and cuffed him.

Ninah was a good girl even if she wasn’t all there—staring off into the distance for hours, sometimes crying one minute and cackling the next. She would always be waiting for him on the other side of the wall.

New York looked like someone put Magic Grow on Miami, strung the whole thing with Christmas lights, and then ground about a billion pounds of soot into it. He and Ninah swung off the highway and slowed immediately to a crawl in a sea of cars moving like molasses in the snow. Catcalls echoed through the concrete canyon, intermingling with music from the doorways of juke joints. Looked more like a carnival than a city. He pulled over after just a few blocks, sent Ninah to make some cash money, and ducked into the first bar that took him out of the wind whipping down Fifth Avenue.

Grass mellowed other people out, but it made the Mad Daddy even madder. The lights behind his eyes came to life, and he got to looking at throats.

A jukebox played the Righteous Brothers’ “Soul and Inspiration.” Men and women danced like they were practically fucking, dresses so short you got a beaver show. Women danced with women, men with men, everyone slick with sweat. It was a wild scene.

Sam slid into an empty seat at the bar, and a Black man approached him with a slow smile, holding out a lit joint. His tie was loosened under a stiff wool military jacket emblazoned with medals and ribbons.

“You a doorman?” asked Sam.

“I’m a sergeant in the United States Army.” Sam reached for the joint, and the sergeant pulled it back again and put it to his lips. “You could say I’m the doorman who stops the enemies of democracy.”

The corners of Sam’s lips danced as he took a hit. The sergeant was pretty, neck slim like a woman. Sam was high as fuck when he followed the man to his hotel room for a steak dinner. He’d find Ninah again. Or he wouldn’t. The two men bellowed with back-slapping laughter as they stumbled into a closet-sized room in a Harlem flophouse. The neon of the streetlights flickered as the sergeant moved in to kiss him.

Sam, being Sam, wrapped his hands around the man’s throat.

Before the killer knew what was happening, he was flat on his back, a pair of strong hands encircling his own neck this time.

“You out of your goddamn mind, you piece of shit?” said the combat veteran above him.

Sam struggled for air as the world around him pixelated. Was he being beat at his own game?

Were these his last breaths?

Shadows pressed at the corners of his eyes. He remembered. Back, back, back…

This wasn’t the first time he was strangled.

Someone had smothered him, robbed him of oxygen. Someone had tried to take him out this way before. His uncle. Someone. Someone was about to do it again.

He remembered what Wilbert used to say: fight like a girl. Faster, smarter, and for your life.

Sam lashed out with his fists, throwing haymakers into the darkness, thrashing like some kind of fish, as they used to call the new prisoners.

He remembered that he used to take Big ’Un’s tie and loop it over a nail in the basement, then around his own neck, pushing against it while stroking his cock, halfway in between worlds. Was it someone else who gave him the idea, or was it him all along?

The soldier above Sam caught an index finger between his teeth and bit it clean off. He then hoisted a bleeding, howling Sam by the waistband and kicked him hard enough in the ass that he hit the opposite wall before slamming the door behind him.

Goddamn, lesson learned. Mess around in New York, you lose a finger. Sam preferred warmer climes anyway—secret worlds tucked behind curtains of trees and trash where you could glide silently through the dark waters like a shark. Always sniffing for blood in the water. Always moving, lest you die.

The gates of the Trenton workhouse opened to reveal Ninah shifting from foot to foot, arms at her sides like a child. She’d known when to be there. Clever in her own way, he supposed, when she wasn’t spinning batshit crazy talking nonstop or going silent for hours.

Ninah broke into a run and he swung her around. He was alive with freedom and propelled by the hunger he’d nurtured with fantasy after fantasy, night after night in his cell. Over Ninah’s shoulder, the white T-bird waited.