Free Carnival of Shadows by R.J. Ellory

fact appear to have been savaged by some wild and ravenous beast.
    Anthony Scarapetto took the contents of the wallet, all of eighty-six dollars, and stuffed it inside his shirt. He exited the vehicle, ran to the end of the alley, snatched a pair of pants from one washing line, a guinea tee from another, and when he was safely from view of the street, he stripped and changed. The pants were three or four sizes too big, but he buttoned and then rolled the waist, also turned up the legs, and thus looked no different from a hundred other kids who were dressed in their father’s worn-out pants for want of anything better. The knife itself was kicked into the first storm drain he encountered, the shirt into the second, the pants into the third. By the time he reached home, there was little evidence of his recent experience but for the blood beneath his fingernails and in the welts of his shoes.
    Anthony Scarapetto, thus having drawn first blood, began a swift downhill run into all things criminal and violent. Safe to say that by the time he was arrested for grievous assault and mayhem in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late winter of 1939, the Scarapetto boy that had stabbed Forrest Young had become a hardened, inveterate thief and liar.
    To Michael, the seventeen-year-old Scarapetto seemed more intense and threatening than any of the custodians, perhaps representing two sides of the same deal, nothing so simplistic as good guy and bad guy, but something close enough. Michael Travis understood that he had found himself an inmate of State Welfare due to fate, bad luck, even human error, whereas Scarapetto knew he was there became of the calumny and weakness and vindictive persecution of others. Michael knew he was in trouble because of himself, in essence, and thus knew it was up to him to get out of it. Scarapetto knew he was in trouble because of everyone else.
    On the day that Michael was released into general populace, Scarapetto watched him as he arrived for breakfast. He waited until Michael had taken a tray, joined the queue, been served his single piece of corn bread, his ladle of watery oatmeal, his spoonful of reconstituted egg. Michael—as all the greenhorns did—stood for a second away from the end of the queue and surveyed the mess hall before him. The noise was strange to his ears. There had to be a thousand people there, and each of them was talking in hushed voices. It gave the impression of far-off thunder, some distant sound beyond the horizon, a sound created by something that remained unseen.
    Eventually, Michael chose a table to the left near the corner. The table was occupied by one person and one person only—a teenager, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, who looked sufficiently unthreatening. Michael sat down. It was no more than thirty seconds before the teenager got up and walked away. He did so suddenly and swiftly, almost as if he had been directed by some unknown command.
    Michael frowned, looked over his shoulder, and was confronted by Anthony Scarapetto.
    “Oh,” Michael said.
    Scarapetto grinned and then walked around the table and sat facing Michael.
    There was an immediate change in the air. Tension perhaps, a coolness, a feeling of imminent danger, and it emanated from Scarapetto like a bad smell.
    “Hey, fucknuts,” Scarapetto said.
    Scarapetto was a little shorter than Michael, a little narrower in the shoulder, but there was not a great deal between them. His hair was shorn close to his scalp, and here and there punctuation marks of scar tissue evidenced collisions with objects that were harder than his head. A further scar followed a narrow line from behind his right ear and out across his cheek toward his nose. It was thin, no doubt a knife or razor wound, and when Scarapetto smiled, the scar made a fold in his face as neat as a sheet of paper.
    “You’re new here, right?” Scarapetto asked.
    “I am, yes,” Michael said.
    Scarapetto put his right index finger in his mouth and then proceeded