N Leonard 8000 St, says the one green sign, and N St Lous 9100 Av the other, and she clings to the pole that holds them both, “Leonard, Moony!” she hoots. “Le-he-he-henny!”

“Minty,” he says, laughing himself as he hauls her off the pole, “come on, come on!” Staggering away from pool to pool of streetlight slipped over arms clutched about each other’s shoulders, pushing shadows out behind them, shadows that bobbing shrink to be swallowed by stumbling feet as they pass beneath the lamp above to seep out then before them, wavering, reaching, yearning for the return of darkness, “Lenny!” she yelps, and they laugh.

A house barely bigger than its garage, clad all about in clad in pale blue siding, an enormous tree in the front yard of it that dapples streetlight into moon-bright coins spread over grass and sidewalk, pinking the finish of the pickup in the driveway, the late-model sedan on the grass. “Home sweet home?” she says, dragged behind, “on Lenny Street?”

“Avenue,” he says, with a tug, but she won’t step off the sidewalk. Hoisting a bottle in his free hand he waggles it, “Fuck you,” she says, companionably, reaching for it. Taking the step. “Fuck you, Moody.”

Open the door on shouts and gunshots from a big screen television there before the picture window, bursting with digital explosions, a bulky cargo plane heels over crumpling wing, in the foreground ducking a couple of agents in tactical gear, guns up, “Whoa!” a guy on the couch, leaned away from the guy in the middle, controller in both hands swung wide, thumbs wildly twiddling knobs, “Shit!” and the guy on the other end of the couch clapping, “God damn! That was epic!”

“Danny Moody!” says the man in the leather recliner, “back so soon.” Jaw salted with stubble, slick white scar tensing his expression into something ambiguous. “Who’s this?” pointing with his chin, as gunfire chatters from surrounding speakers.

“Ada,” says Moody, an uncertain gesture with his unburdened hand, “this is,” waiting out another eruption of explosions, “God damn!” and “Hoo woo!” from the guys on the couch. “Runs pretty much every goddamn thing you’d ever give a shit about,” says Moody, his gesture having woozily ended up toward the man on the recliner. “Chad?” he says, that hand swooping back to her there by his side, “Ada here took me in, when I was,” both hands coming together, “out of sorts.” Holding out the bottle, clear and colorless but for a pale green label. Chad takes it as more blasts shake the screen, rattle the window behind it. “Pisco?” he says, his expression resolving as a scowl, but Moody’s tugged Ada out of that front room, through a short stub of a hall onto an awkward landing, a short flight of stairs dropping into a kitchen. The treads of the steps have been chewed up, pale splinters left about holes gouged here and there, a couple of bent nails left where they’d been yanked. Moody’s left his broad-brimmed hat on a linoleum table piled with pizza boxes and take-out cartons, he’s headed for the fridge, there by a big sheet of plywood leaned up against the cabinets. Ada stands in the middle of the checkerboard floor, grey-callused slabs of her feet pinched by lime green flip-flops, shoulders slumped in her purple rain shell, laughter draining away as she looks about, garbage overflowing the can, food wrappers and wads of paper towels, empty bottles, crumpled cans, dishes clinking in the sink as more explosions rumble the house about them.

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“Hey,” says Chad, on the landing. “Bottle’s half-empty.”

“Half a bottle,” says Moody, rifling the refrigerator, “better’n none.” Ada looks back and forth, from the one, to the other.

“You know the rules,” says Chad.

“She’ll stay in the basement, with me,” says Moody. “Least I could do. Where’s the beer?”

“Everybody pulls their own weight,” says Chad.

“Ada Minthorn,” says Moody, tossing a carton over his shoulder, splat on the floor, “used to be an event planner for, uh, whatshername. Governor’s ex-girlfriend.” A plastic bag filled with something liquidly dark tossed aside, a foil-wrapped oblong scattering sandy crumbs. “Yeah?” says Chad, looking down at Ada. She shrugs.

“The things she could tell you,” says Moody, straightening, slamming the fridge door shut. “She’ll whip this place into shape in no time. Where’s the damn beer, Chad?”

Chad looks up from Ada, then, over to Moody, that scar glossy in the light. “In the tub,” he says.

Moody blinks. “The beer,” he says, “is in the tub.”

“On ice,” says Chad.

Ada takes a breath. A treble fusillade occasions a basso profundo detonation, whoops and cheers, Holy shit! She opens her mouth.

“Ada,” says Moody, still looking at Chad. “Get us a couple of beers. Anything in particular, Chad?”

Chad shrugs, without looking away from Moody. “It’s all good shit.”

“Back up the hall, down the left, other end of the house,” says Moody. “Get yourself one, too. Should be nice and cold.”

Turning, shuffle-snap of flip-flops, Ada trudges up the steps, past Chad pressing against the heavy bannister to make room. The scar makes it hard to tell if his scowl’s become a smirk. Did for those camel-jockeys, somebody says in the front room, and fucko, that was Colombia, did you not see the fucking palm trees? The hall to the left is dark, couple of doors on the one wall, door at the end half-open on an unlit room. Stumbling over something, a pair of maybe pants left lolling on the carpet, “shit.” Leaning back to kick open the door at the end of the hall, coughing, she lifts up an arm, back of her hand over her nose, “fucking shithole fucks.”

The bathroom’s narrow, cramped, windowless dark. Might be a toilet there in the corner, a sink, the one shifting wall’s a shower curtain, drawn. Sweeping her free hand up and down by the jamb, feeling for something, click of a switch and the sudden roar of a ventilation fan, she yelps, flicks another. The bathroom leaps into light, bismuth-pink tiling, brown mat, white towel, shower curtain printed with some old map of the world, and the seat of the toilet’s up. “Fucking Moody.” A four-footed orthopædic cane bent almost in half in the corner there, under the switches. She leaves the fan running, grabs the shower curtain to drag it open, and screams.

Pale pink tub full of melting ice, bergs and chunks of it stained purple and brown with trailing swirls of red and even pink in the water about bobbing cans and bottles lodged about, and a body, a small man curled up on his side packed in white and grey striated ice soaked in a gelid sludge of red and purple and brown about his skinny blue thighs, his crotch, his swollen belly plastered with a T-shirt that might’ve once been white, slashed and punctured, ripped about the ripped-out throat where the packed ice is darkest, the melt most red, head tipped up at an angle on a pillow of more ice, thin lank hair wetly dark, pasted to skull and ear and crumpled, wrinkled cheek, wrinkles that radiate from a sunken nose to snarl shut one dead eye, the other purpled, vacantly shocked.

“The beer’s fine, Ada,” calls Moody from the hall behind her. “Just wipe the blood off.”

“You fucking fuck!” she shrieks. He’s laughing, Chad behind him’s laughing, she seizes a can from the tub and hurls it at them, thump and bouncing heavily down the carpet, “Shit!” yelps Moody, still laughing, Chad doubled over, trying to pull him back, “Your fucking beer!” she yells, throwing another bloody can.