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Where do they begin, the roads that lead a man to hell?

… With a ritual …

Lien Takananda sits at the kitchen table wearing her bathrobe, her short helmet of gray-touched black hair still rumpled from sleep. She holds three Chinese coins in her hand and concentrates, only subconsciously aware of her husband, Harry, in the bathroom, singing a lascivious parody of a saccharine popular song as he shaves. Almond eyes on the copy of I Ching before her, she asks the same question of the sage that she has asked every morning for over fifteen years, since Harry joined the San Francisco police: “Will my husband be safe today?” And she throws the coins.

The hexagram produced by the six throws is number 10, Treading. Treading upon the tail of the tiger the text reads. It does not bite the man. Success.

She sighs in relief, then smiles, listening to Harry sing. After a minute, she gathers the coins again, and as she has done for most of the past year, asks on behalf of Harry’s partner, “Will Garreth Mikaelian be safe today?”

This time the coins produce hexagram number 36, Darkening of the Light, with two moving lines. She bites her lip. The text of both the hexagram and the individual lines is cautionary. However, the moving lines produce a second hexagram, 46, Pushing Upward, which reads: Pushing upward has supreme success. One must see the great man. Fear not.

She reads the interpretation of the text just to be certain of its meaning. Reassured, Lien Takananda rewraps the coins and book in black silk and returns them to their shelf, then begins preparing Harry’s breakfast.

… with nagging grief…

Garreth Mikaelian still feels the void in his life and in the apartment around him. Through the open bathroom door he can see the most visible evidence: the bed, empty, slightly depressed on one side but otherwise neat. Marti’s sprawling, twisting sleep used to turn their nights into a wrestle for blankets that left the bed in a tangled knot every morning.

He looks away quickly and concentrates on his reflection in the mirror. A square face with sandy hair and smoky gray eyes looks back at him. Burly, he fills the mirror … a bit more so than he would like, admittedly, but the width does give the illusion of a big man, larger than his actual five foot eight.

And makes you look like a cop even stark naked, my man, he silently tells the reflection.

He leans closer to the mirror, frowning as he works the humming razor across his upper lip. He looks older than he would like, too. Barely twenty-eight and already he can see lines etching down his forehead between his eyes and around the corners of his mouth … lines not visible six months ago.

Don’t I ever stop missing her? He had not cared this way when Judith walked out. There had been more relief than anything, in fact, though he had missed his son. But, then, Marti was different from Judith. He could talk to her. After what she saw as a nurse in the trauma unit at San Francisco General every day, he had not been afraid of shocking or frightening her by talking about what happened to him at work, or of the examples he witnessed of man’s unrelenting and fiendishly imaginative inhumanity to man. He could even cry in front of her and still feel like a man. They were two halves of the same soul.

His fingers tighten around the razor, dragging it under his chin. His vision blurs. Fate is a bitch! Why else give him such a woman and then put her in an intersection when an impatient driver tried to beat the light …

When does the pain stop? When does the emptiness fill?

At least he has the department. He can bridge the void with his work .

… With a corpse …

The body floats facedown in the bay, held on the surface by air trapped under its shirt and red suit coat. Carried on the tide, supported by its chance water wings, it drifts into the watery span between Fisherman’s Wharf and the forbidding silhouette of Alcatraz Island. Bobbing, it awaits discovery.

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