This fellow graduated from high school the same year Gary did, but only because the teachers let him pass through his courses out of kindness. He’d been a terrific shortstop and was hoping for a try at the minors, but now he was too nervous for that. He would no longer play baseball out on the field. Too much open space. Too much of a chance he’d be the tallest thing around if lightning should decide to strike twice. That was the end for him; he wound up working in a movie theater, selling tickets and sweeping up popcorn and refusing to give any patrons their money back if they didn’t like the film they’d paid to see.

The other guy who was hit was even more affected; lightning changed his life and every single thing about it. It lifted him up, right off his feet, and spun him around, and by the time it set him back on the ground, he was ready for just about anything. This man was Gary’s grandfather, Sonny, and he spoke about being struck by what he called “the white snake” every single day until the day he died, two years ago, at the age of ninety-three. Long before Gary had ever come to live with him, Sonny had been out in the yard where the cottonwoods grew, and he’d been so drunk he didn’t notice the oncoming storm. Being drunk was his natural state at that point. He couldn’t recall what it felt like to be sober, and that alone was enough of a reason for him to figure he’d better go on avoiding it, at least until they put him in his grave. Maybe then he’d consider abstinence; but only if a good foot of dirt had been shoveled on top of him, to keep him in the ground and out of the package store over on Speedway.

“There I was,” he told Gary, “minding my own business, when the sky came down and slapped me.”

It slapped him and tossed him into the clouds, and for a second he felt he might never come back to earth. He got hit with enough voltage for his clothes to be burned to ashes as he wore them, and if he hadn’t had the presence of mind to jump into the scummy green pond where he kept two pet ducks, he’d have burned up alive. His eyebrows never grew back, and he never again had to shave, but after that day he never had a drink again. Not a single shot of whiskey. Not one short, cold beer. Sonny Hallet stuck to coffee, never less than two pots of thick, black stuff a day, and because of this he was ready, willing, and able to take Gary in when his parents couldn’t care for him any longer.

Gary’s parents were well intentioned, but young and addicted to trouble and alcohol; they both ended up dead long before they should have. Gary’s mother had been gone for a year when the news came through about his father, and that very day Sonny walked into the courthouse downtown and announced to the county clerk that his son and daughter-in-law had killed themselves—which was more or less the truth, if you consider a drinking-related death a suicide—and that he wished to become Gary’s legal guardian.

As Gary drives through this suburban neighborhood, he’s thinking that his grandfather wouldn’t have liked this area of New York much. Lightning could come up and surprise you here. There are too many buildings, they’re endless, they block out what you ought to see, which, in Sonny’s opinion, and in Gary’s as well, should always be the sky.

Gary is working on a preliminary inquiry begun by the attorney general’s office, where he’s been an investigator for seven years. Before that he had a background of wrong choices. He was tall and lanky and could have considered basketball as a possibility, but although he was dogged enough, he didn’t have the raw aggression needed for professional sports. In the end, he went back to college, thought about law school, then decided against spending all those years studying in closed rooms. The result is that he’s doing what he’s best at anyway, which is figuring things out. What sets him apart from most of his colleagues is that he likes murder. He likes it so well that his friends rib him and call him the Mexican Turkey Vulture, a carrion creature that hunts by scent. Gary doesn’t mind the kidding and he doesn’t mind that most people have an easy answer that allows them to believe they’ve gotten a fix on the reason why he’s so interested in homicide. They point straight to his family history—his mother died of liver failure, and his father probably would have done so as well, if he hadn’t been murdered first, over in New Mexico. The fellow who did it never was found, and, frankly, nobody seemed to look very hard for him. But the circumstances of Gary’s past aren’t what drives him, no matter what his friends think. It’s figuring out the why of things; the final factor that makes a person act can be so damn elusive, but you can always find some motivation, if you look hard enough. The wrong word said at the wrong time, a gun in the wrong hand, the wrong woman who kisses you just right. Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything. You can usually uncover the truth, or a version of it at any rate, if you ask enough questions; if you close your eyes and imagine the way it might have been, how you might have reacted if you’d had enough, if you just couldn’t find it in you to care anymore.