Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

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      The man got out and walked off down a street that looked as though it had recently withstood a minor hurricane and hadn’t been remotely picturesque before that. Domingo thought about going after him, but this was, bottom line, not a neighbourhood where he wanted to linger any longer than necessary.

      So he drove away.

      The old man spent an hour strolling the streets as the light faded. He saw low storage buildings of indeterminate purpose, fortified with barbed wire. He passed squat one-storey dwellings interspersed with clumps of stunted palm trees, houses set apart from each other not for the luxury of space but as though the inhabitants didn’t trust their neighbours enough to live in closer proximity. There were no sidewalks, so he walked down the middle of the streets, which were pitted and patched and ragged at the edges and sprouting grass in many places: the kind of broken roads you’d expect to see down the dusty end of country towns that had been dying for decades. It was stiflingly humid.

      He encountered few people. Every now and then a child would run past, but never stop. A woman stared at him from the stoop of her small, battered house, as if wondering what kind of fool he might be. A couple of times he observed men loitering outside corner grocery stores, their eyes following him. He passed slowly, in case it would be one of these who’d show him where he needed to go. None moved, however. They seemed winded, listless, as though they couldn’t summon up the energy to rob a frail-looking old man who was evidently a long way from base.

      But eventually he hesitated.

      He felt something.

      He turned in a slow circle, sniffed the air, and then set off up the next cross street. The houses were even farther apart here, and few showed a light. It felt … right.

      When he saw the abandoned warehouse down the end, looming in dark isolation, he knew for sure that it was.

      They looked up as he entered.

      It was a large, empty space, the heart of the disused building. A fire built of fallen palm leaves and broken furniture burned in the centre.

      Five men stood around it. Three white, one black, one half-Latino, none of them kids, all in their late twenties or thirties, but dressed in hoodies and ragged jeans all the same. Each looked as though it would be their pleasure to hurt you quite badly. There were a lot of candles, a hundred or more, spread over the floor and flickering in cavities in the walls.

      One of the men, the tallest of the white guys, laughed. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Holy crap, are you lost.’

      The old man kept walking until he was within ten feet of the fire. He put his hands together as if in prayer, and looked at each of the men in turn.

      ‘No,’ he said in a calm and thoughtful voice. ‘I believe this is precisely where I need to be.’ He pulled out his wallet and threw it on the floor closest to the man who’d spoken. ‘Let’s get that part over with. I’d hate us to get distracted by mere theft.’

      The tall guy frowned.

      One of the others picked up the wallet. He leafed through it with a professional eye, and whistled. ‘Six hundred,’ he said to the tall guy, evidently the leader. ‘And change. We going to kill him now?’

      The tall guy said nothing. His real name was Robert. That’s what his mother had called him, anyhow. She was dead and had been for a long time, along with his father and two sisters, and these days most people called him Nash instead. He’d been alive for nearly forty years – a long story by local criminal standards – and during that period had done many things. It’d be hard to come up with something he hadn’t done, in fact. Suffice it to say there were women, and men, and children, who woke in the night with his face in their minds as they lay sweating with the terrible memories they had acquired at his hands. Nash had stolen and beaten, and he had killed, via the media of gun and knife and bare hands and the sale of drugs cut with everything from toilet cleaner and chalk to concrete dust idly swept up off the street.

      Bottom line: Nash was a very bad man, and in the last six months he’d started to explore whole new realms and means and levels of being not-good.

      He was, however, also not-dumb. The way the old guy was presenting said you didn’t simply kill him. Not yet. ‘What do you want?’

      ‘Tell me about the candles.’

      The other three guys glanced at each other. ‘We’re Satanists,’ one said proudly, the guy who’d rifled through the wallet, and still clutched it in his hand.

      ‘Shut up,’ Nash said.

      The old man seemed intrigued. ‘Is that so?’

      The guy holding the wallet didn’t want to stop talking. ‘You don’t believe us?’

      ‘You say you are, you are.’

      ‘You’d better bel—’

      Nash turned to the wallet guy, his eyes hard. The other man went silent. He froze, his mouth open in mid-word. It looked as though he was trying to close it but could not. Eventually, after a great deal of effort, he managed to. Sweat had broken out on his forehead and his hands were trembling.

      The old man watched all this with interest.

      The trembling man retreated into the shadows. The others followed suit, leaving only Nash standing opposite the old man.

      ‘Going to ask you one last time,’ Nash told him. ‘What do you want?’

      The old man shrugged in a friendly way. ‘I’m curious. I have a fondness for ruins, the abandoned, the lost. I was walking, and saw this place. I decided I’d take a look. I was assuming it would be empty or that I’d find a few homeless or addicts sprawled over the floor. Instead …’ He gestured around. ‘Candles. They look well enough. But you don’t seem the Martha Stewart Living type. So I’m curious.’

      ‘Who are you?’

      ‘Merely what I appear to be. But who are you, Robert? What are you these days?’

      Nash stared at him. ‘How you know that name?’

      ‘It’s just a game of mine. Whenever I don’t know someone’s name, I call them Robert, that’s all. So tell me. Was what he said true? Are you gentlemen really Satanists?’

      Nash elected to tell the truth, not because he considered the practice to be important or valuable, but because it was time to let the weird old dude know exactly what – and who – he was dealing with.

      He lifted his right hand, raising it to chest height. His eyes on the other man’s, he coughed, once.

      A small glow puffed into life in his palm, at first very dim, but quickly growing into a little ball of bright orange fire, about the size of a golf ball.

      The old man watched the flame. ‘Huh,’ he said, as if impressed.

      ‘Right,’ Nash said, closing his hand and lowering it back to his side. ‘That answer your question?’

      ‘I suppose it does.’

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