Reeves loved Antares, seven hundred times the size of our sun, the giant red star in the constellation Scorpius. Five hundred and fifty light years away sounds like a lot but only when constrained by gravity. The distance shrinks to nothing when freed by death, the opposite of gravity, serving as a celestial catapult to quickly orbit the scorpion’s heart. Antares glowed just above a smudge on his bedroom window where a Jacques Cousteau sticker used to advertise adventures on the roving research vessel, The Calypso. Reeves had won the sticker and a magazine subscription many years ago during a seventh-grade celebrity auction. He was the only kid with any inkling that Jacques Cousteau explored the oceans and invented SCUBA gear. The sticker had withered and long since peeled off and away like a strip of sunburned skin. He could hear the mechanical breathing of his father’s oxygen machine in the adjacent bedroom, delaying the smothering just a while longer. The machine sounded like Darth Vader inhaling and exhaling as it plotted how to murder Luke. Outside, a local pond’s frogs peeped and crickets rubbed their legs together and a feral cat, either mating or fighting, screamed for love, mercy or justice. Reeves had returned home to care for his dying father not out of a sense of nobility but because there simply was no one else. He had no sisters and his twin brother, Ronald, had died a hero fighting in the first Gulf War; his mother had died from a diabetic related heart attack years earlier. Retired from teaching high school English—thank you Jesus Christ!—Reeves didn’t have any other obligations save for popping his depression pills. Fifty-eight years old and free as can be—that was Reeves until he became his father’s caretaker.

“Reeves?” Thomas called out.

Reeves checked his watch, a Hamilton automatic that had been Ronald’s, who’d died with it on his right wrist as he’d been left-handed: 1:45 a.m.

“Goddamnit!” yelled Thomas. “Where are you?”

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