The rain had been falling for eleven days. Not hard rain. Just a steady, grey drip that turned everything to mud and made the sky look like an old photograph left out in the weather.

Frankie sat in the last row of the Paramount Theatre and watched the dust motes floating in the light from a hole in the ceiling. The projector was dead. The screen was torn. The seats had been ripped apart years ago, probably for firewood.

But the acoustics were good. That was the only thing that had kept Frankie coming back.

He closed his eyes.

And was somewhere else.

It was a movie. He knew that much. But he could not remember which one. The画面 was hazy, like looking through a dirty window. A man and a woman in a kitchen. The man was pouring coffee. The woman was crying. He could hear them talking, but the words were underwater—muffled, distorted, impossible to make out.

Frankie watched. He did not participate. He was just a body floating in someone else's memory, a ghost that had forgotten how to haunt.

The scene changed. Now they were in a car. Night. Rain on the windshield. The man was driving. The woman was in the passenger seat. They were arguing. He could feel the tension in the car like pressure in his ears.

Then the car went off the road.

Frankie felt the impact—a jolt, a crunch of metal, the sound of glass breaking. He felt the man's panic. He felt the woman's silence.

And then he was back in the Paramount, sitting in a torn seat, rain dripping through the ceiling, a half-empty bottle of rotgut whiskey in his jacket pocket.

He opened his eyes. The hole in the ceiling was still there. The dust motes were still floating. He was still alive.

He reached into his pocket for the bottle. His fingers brushed the glass. His hand was shaking. It always shook now.

Three years. It had been three years since Danny died. Three years since Frankie came home from work and found his son in the garage with the engine running and the door closed and the radio playing a song that Frankie would never be able to hear again without wanting to die.

He took a drink. The whiskey burned. It did not help.

The door at the front of the theatre creaked open. Frankie did not turn. He knew who it was.

"Mr. McCullough?"

The voice was young. Female. Officer Ramirez. Thirty-four, Irish-Italian mix, sharp eyes and a mouth that never smiled but never judged either. She had been trying to help Frankie for two years, and Frankie had been ignoring her for two years.

"What do you want, officer?"

"There was another body found. Behind the old steel mill. I thought—you might want to know."

Frankie did not move. "How many times do I have to tell you? I'm retired."

"You're suspended, actually. Not retired."

"Same thing."

Ramirez sat down in the seat next to him. He could smell rain on her coat, and something fainter—soap, or perfume, or the particular scent of a person who still believed in small rituals like washing their hands.

"The body is an old man. Male. Sixties, maybe. No identification. Cause of death appears to be strangulation." She paused. "He had blue rubber gloves on his hands."

Frankie's hand stopped halfway to the whiskey bottle.

In the movie—whatever movie it had been—that man in the car had been wearing blue rubber gloves. He had been holding the steering wheel with them. Why a man would drive a car with blue rubber gloves, Frankie had no idea. But he remembered it. He remembered because it was odd, and odd things stuck in your head like burrs in a dog's coat.

"Where's the body?" Frankie asked.

"Still there. I didn't want to touch it until—never mind. You don't have to come. I was just telling you because..." She trailed off. "Because you've seen things, Mr. McCullough. Things I haven't."

Frankie looked at her. She was looking at him with an expression he could not quite read. Not pity. Not respect. Something in between.

He stood up slowly. His knees cracked. His back ached. He was fifty-eight years old and every joint in his body complained when he moved.

"Lead the way," he said.

The body was behind the steel mill, in a patch of weeds that used to be a parking lot. The rain had made the ground soft, and Frankie's boots sank into the mud with each step.

Ramirez had taped off a small area. Two uniformed officers stood at the edge, smoking cigarettes and looking at the ground.

Frankie knelt beside the body. The old man was on his back, eyes closed, hands folded over his chest. The blue rubber gloves were exactly as Ramirez had described. Not the kind you buy at a drugstore. The heavier kind. The kind you buy at an industrial supply store.

Frankie stared at the gloves. In the movie, the man in the car had been wearing the same gloves. The exact same gloves. Blue, rubber, slightly too large for the hands inside them. The left index finger was torn at the tip.

Frankie reached out and touched the glove on the dead man's hand. The rubber was stiff. Dried out. It had been on for a while.

"Officer," Frankie said. "When was he found?"

"This morning. Around six."

"And the gloves... they were on him when you found him?"

"Yes."

Frankie sat back on his heels. The rain fell on his face. He did not wipe it away.

In his head, he was still in the car. The man with the blue gloves was driving. The woman was crying. The rain was hitting the windshield.

But this was not a movie. This was real. A real man was dead. And Frankie had seen this moment before—in a film that had no title, no credits, no explanation for why it existed.

"Mr. McCullough?" Ramirez said. "Are you all right?"

Frankie stood up. His knees popped. His back hurt. His jacket was wet.

"I'm fine," he said. And he was, in the way that fifty-eight-year-old men who have lost everything are fine. Not happy. Not sad. Just present.

He looked at the dead man's face. He was old, white, with a thinning grey beard and skin that had been in the sun too many times. He looked like thousands of men Frankie had seen in his twenty-eight years on the force. He looked like nobody in particular.

And yet Frankie had seen him before.

Not in the movie. In the man's face. In the set of his jaw. In the way his hands were folded.

Frankie had seen him somewhere else. Not in a film. In a life.

He did not know where. He did not know when. He only knew that this man, whoever he was, had worn those gloves and killed someone, and that Frankie would never forget the image of those blue gloves on a dead man's hands.

He turned and walked away, leaving Ramirez kneeling beside the body, the rain washing the mud from his boots, the whiskey waiting in his jacket pocket, and the movie still playing somewhere in the back of his mind, scene after scene, memory after memory, a life he had never lived playing on a screen that no longer existed.

The rain kept falling.

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