t’s the rain’s fault. Must be two inches deep, suctioning him toward the gutter. Lashing the windshield with dizzying ecliptics that make him misjudge the turn. The movie theater springs into view, its thousands of lights smudged like drizzled yellow paint. He cranks the wheel at the adjacent alley, relying on the ballyhooed power steering, but too late. The bashed-in back end muffs the simplest maneuvers, and his Caddy—his beloved teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville, two-point-three tons and eighteen and a half feet of palatial leisure, zero to sixty in ten-point-seven seconds, AM/FM stereo sound, crisp as a fresh dollar bill—rams into the side of the theater.

Strickland shoves his way out. He tries to shut the door, force of habit, but he’s not used to missing two fingers. He misses the door entirely, his hand slicing through rain. He takes stock of the disaster. Front end smashed, back end smashed. The American dream demolished from both ends. It doesn’t matter. He’s the Jungle-god now, the monkeys ripping apart his stupid human skull. He stomps through ankle-deep puddles. A man with a name tag rushes at him from the box office, gesturing in dismay at the broken bricks strewn across the sidewalk.

In the jungle, this man is just a buzzing carapanã. Strickland lashes out with the Beretta, strikes him in the nose. A pennant of blood flaps before the rain splatters it to the sidewalk. Strickland stalks past the writhing body, hunts beneath the waterlogged glitz of the marquee bulbs. Finally, back in the alley, he spots it. An alcove, a door to the overhead apartments. Elisa, his voiceless vision, his hope of the future, his betrayer, his prey. The Caddy blocks the whole alley. He has to climb over the indented hood. The bifurcated engine spews steam, and Strickland pauses inside it. The heat of the Amazon, the leprous thrill, the warm viper squirm, the sweltering swirl of piranha, all of it picking him down to the hard, clean, sharp, efficient bone. What’s that he sees at the other end of the alley beneath a moth-flickered light? A white van missing its front bumper, painted with the words MILICENT LAUNDRY. Strickland pushes from the scorching steam and grins, feeling a million hard darts of rain bouncing off his skull.