Free Light Before Day by Christopher Rice

silent laugh shook his shoulders. "Does the name Dale Dupre ring a bell?" he asked.
    It didn't, but I had a feeling Koffler was going to ring it for me.
    "Dale's from your hometown. I knew him when he lived out here. He wanted to be an actor, did some porn, ran back home—same old story. Anyway, he's a bartender at this club down in the French Quarter now. I understand it's one of your old haunts. Dale says you visited his bar after your mother's funeral. You remember?"
    I didn't. I couldn't remember anything about the night of my mother's funeral except calling my sister from a French Quarter pay phone because I couldn't find my rental car.
    "Dale says you told him that there were witnesses to the accident that killed your mother, and they claim that your mother was fighting with her boyfriend just before it happened. Apparently the boyfriend came to the funeral and sobbed to everyone about how he hadn't pushed her."
    My pulse sounded like a tribal drumbeat in my temples.
    "But the next thing you told Dale ..." Scott shook his head. "Dale says he'll never forget it.
    Do you remember, Adam?"
    "Get out, Scott."
    "You said if the guy had pushed her, you would understand."
    His eyes went wide and then his head snapped sideways on his neck. I felt the impact in my fist as I retracted it.
    He hit the floor like a sack of dirt and made a sound like a window unit in August. I grabbed the back of his belt and hoisted him up on all fours.
    He hit the door across the hall from mine hard enough to shake the wall. He rolled over onto his back, and I saw that his nostrils were bubbling and his lips were smeared red. His dead eyes met mine. "You're too easy," he breathed.
    He sat up, wiped blood from his face, then stared down at his red palm. "You're just too fucking easy," he croaked.
    I heard a door down the hall open just as I closed mine. One of my neighbors was calling after Scott as he walked down the hallway. I leaned against my door until the hallway was silent and the only sounds I could hear were Scott's car pulling off down the street and my own breaths whistling through my nostrils.

    When I reached the Strip, a sheriff's cruiser was parked in the median across from Keyclub, where a line of Goth kids waited to gain admittance to see some band whose name kept flashing on the Jumbotron above the entrance. I had never heard of them. I heard a squeal of brakes and saw the crime scene photograph that depicted my mother's death pose. Now her outstretched arm was not pointing in the direction of the cab that had run her down at forty miles an hour. She was telling me to walk past her fate. In life, my mother had never been so direct or so caring. In death, she had no choice but to become everything I chose to endow her with.
    I felt as if my mind were encased in steel and every thought inside my head had tried to escape a few seconds too late, clanging the walls of their prison until my ears screamed. The next thing I knew, I had turned my back on the Sunset Strip, a river of bass beats and heterosexual aggression, and was walking into the tree-shaded blocks that sloped downhill.
    At the door to Nate Bain's building, I studied the call box and determined the apartment number for the sober neighbor who had given me the card I had left for Nate. I don't remember what I said when he answered his buzzer. The neighbor opened his door for me without asking me what I was doing there. I sat at his small dining room table as he fixed a pot of tea.
    "There's blood on your shirt," he finally remarked. I didn't respond, which didn't seem to bother him. He handed me a cup of tea and sat down across from me. The overhead light bounced off his glasses, hiding his eyes, and gave a moist sheen to one side of his bald head.
    He sipped his tea and allowed a long silence to pass between us. "You're going to stay here until two A.M.," he said gently. "You can watch TV with me. You can sit right there and stare into your own head. You can even go in my