Blow Fly

He sat, perfectly well behaved, in the backseat of a white Ford LTD, manacled like Houdini. The motorcade turned onto a deserted road overgrown with brush that thickened into dense forests on either side, and when they reached the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Polunsky Unit, he felt the sun reclaim gray skies, and the day turned bright. Jean-Baptiste took it as a sign.

He waits patiently. He imagines meteor showers and great battalions marching because he wills it. How simple! People are fools! They set up such foolish rules! Prison officials can take away his radio and punish him by grinding up his meals and cooking them into food loaves, but no one can neutralize his magnetism and legal right to send and receive uncen-sored mail. If he marks an envelope or package Legal Mail or Media Mail, no prison employee can open it. Jean-Baptiste sends mail to Rocco Caggiano whenever he pleases. Now and then he receives mail the same way. That is the most special treat of all, especially when Madame Scarpetta wrote him recently because she ca

/ will see you again.

Jean-Baptiste has enough information to topple the entire Chando

If that is what she wants, why not? When she comes, he will find a way to finish her release, to bless her with what she wants. The ecstasy. The ecstasy!

He tore her letter into small pieces and ate each word, chewing so hard he cut his gums.

Jean-Baptiste lifts himself off the toilet and doesn't bother flushing. He yanks up his pants.

"Who's there?"

The white V-neck shirt has DR for Death Row in large letters stenciled in black on the back. It is the abbreviation for doctor. Another sign. He is hers for now, and she is his forever. His prison fatigues are soaking wet with sweat. They stink. He sweats constantly and smells like a dirty animal. He smiles as he thinks of the last inmate executed several weeks ago, an old man named Pitt who killed a policeman in Atlanta. Pitt murdered prostitutes for years without mishap, dumping his victims in parking lots or the middle of the road. He broke the code when he stabbed a policeman thirteen times.

The rumor in the pod is that when the doctor sent the fatal cocktail speeding through Pitt's IV tube like a train through a tu

It arouses Jean-Baptiste to fantasize about a woman doctor invisible in a small secret room, waiting for the signal to kill his strapped-down body. He does not fear the death of his body, for his mind is his soul and ca

How observant he has become! Whenever his soul visits Paris, the most beautiful city on Earth, he discovers another old building wrapped in green netting, and men blasting limestone with air hoses to clean away centuries of pollution. It has taken years to restore Notre Dame's creamy complexion. Monitoring the work is how Jean-Baptiste measures time. He never stays in Paris more than a few days, and each night he sets out toward the Gare de Lyon, then to the Quai de la Rapйe to gaze at the Institut Mйdico-Lйgal, where some of his earlier chosen ones were autopsied. He can see the women's faces and bodies, and he remembers their names. He waits until the last Bateau-Mouche thrums by, until the last ripple of wake laps over his shoes before he strips naked on the cold stones of the Quai de Bourbon.

All his life he has braved the murky cold currents of the Seine to wash away the curse of le Loup-Garou.

The werewolf.

His nocturnal bathing has not cured his hypertrichosis, the extremely rare birth defect that causes babylike hair to cover his body, and continues its cruelty by adding a deformed face, abnormal teeth and stunted genitalia. Jean-Baptiste immerses himself in the river. He drifts along the Quai d'Orlйans and the Quai de Bйthune to the eastern tip of the Ile St.-Louis. There on the Quai d'Anjou is the seventeenth-century four-story town house with its carved front doors and gilded drainpipes, the hotel particulier where his prominent parents live in obscene luxury. When chandeliers are ablaze with crystal and silver, his parents are in, but often they socialize with friends or drink their nightcaps in a sitting room that ca

During Jean-Baptiste's disembodied travels, he can go into any room of the hotel particulier. He moves about as he pleases. The other night when he visited the Ile St.-Louis, his obese mother had several more folds of fat beneath her chin, and her eyes were as small as raisins in her bloated face. She had wrapped herself in a black silk robe and wore matching slippers on her stubby feet. She smoked strong French cigarettes nonstop as she complained and chattered to her husband while he watched the news, talked on the phone and went through paperwork.

Just as Jean-Baptiste can hear without ears, his father can become deaf at will. It is no wonder he seeks relief and pleasure in the arms of many beautiful young women and only remains married to Madame Chan-do

It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother's is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it. "Who's there!" he screams.