Free Shame the Devil by George P. Pelecanos Page B

sickness of his would never go away.
    Dimitri Karras stared straight ahead at the items on the night-stand: the photograph of Steve and Stephanie, an old Panasonic
     clock radio, his Swiss Army watch, a small stack of pocket change, Stephanie’s hoop earrings. The red LED numerals changed
     to 2:31 on the clock. He’d been lying there, not at all tired, for the last two hours. Stephanie had fallen asleep long ago,
     the sound of her deep breathing filling the room. There was that other sound, too, always there at night in Karras’s head.
    When Karras was a boy, he was playing by himself one summer day in the alley behind his mother’s house on Davenport. It was
     a still, hot day, quiet but for the drone of Mr. Scordato’s window unit next door and the occasional call of cicadas passing
     through the trees.
    Karras had been bouncing a basketball in the alley, distracted all afternoon by a vaguely putrid smell, the source of which
     he could not find. And then he saw the robin, lying beneath the apple tree that grew in the small square of backyard by the
     alley’s edge. He found a small fallen branch, stripped it of its leaves, and went to the bird.
    The smell got stronger as he approached. It was the awful smell of spoiled things, and he choked down a gag. As he reached
     the fallen bird and got down on his haunches, he could hear a sound, like the faraway crunch of soldiers marching on gravel,
     rhythmic, continuous, relentless. He leaned forward, slid the stick under the robin, and turned it on its side. Hundreds of
     writhing maggots were devouring the decaying bird. The sound he had heard was the sound of their feast.
    Karras opened his eyes. For the past two and a half years, he had been paralyzed and haunted by grief. Staring at the photograph
     of a smiling Steve Maroulis, Karras wondered if Stephanie was haunted, too. If she ever pictured Steve in his coffin the way
     he pictured his son, lying in the dark beneath the ground in that small wooden box.
    At night, when he could not sleep, Karras would see Jimmy in his coffin, rotted away and covered in maggots. And Karras would
     hear that steady marching sound coming from every corner of the room. He could shake the pictures from his head but not the
     sound. Never the sound.
    “God, stop,” whispered Karras, blinking tears from his eyes. It was strange, hearing his own voice speak those words in a
     pleading way. Invoking the name of God, this was a ridiculous thing for him to do, nothing more than a reaction, really, a
     habit unbroken from a churchgoing youth. Because he didn’t believe in God, any kind of God, anymore.
    Bernie Walters claimed that to live without God was to live without hope. And why, said Bernie, would anyone want to live
     in a world without hope?
    Well, God was Bernie’s crutch, not his. Karras had his own reason for staying alive. Since Jimmy’s death, the feeling had
     never weakened. In fact, it grew stronger every day.

EIGHT
    NICK STEFANOS CAUGHT an uptown Red Line car and picked up his Dodge in Takoma Park. He slipped Lungfish’s
Pass and Stow
into the tape deck and headed back south via North Capitol. The band locked into a killer groove on “Terminal Crush” as Stefanos
     drove the Coronet 500 alongside the black iron fence of Rock Creek Cemetery.
    At a stoplight just below Florida Avenue, he saw a woman pull a butcher’s knife from the trunk of her parked car and wave
     it wildly at a laughing man. A dozen ugly people in varying stages of decay stood outside a corner liquor store, huffing smokes
     and drinking from brown paper bags. Behind them, taped to the store windows, colorful posters depicted beautiful black models
     promoting malt liquor and menthol cigarettes. A guy with matted dreads walked toward Stefanos’s driver’s-side window, one
     hand slipped into a bulged jacket pocket. Stefanos locked his door.
    The Capitol loomed dead ahead, crowning the street. On this particular winter day, the press and public were