When Joe came up the stairs with the woman across his shoulders, the old man waited for him. Joe stood in front of him and looked into his face. It came to him to kill the man. The man sat in his wheelchair with his hands under a blanket, and returning Joe's stare, his lips cracked open and from his throat creaked the word yeah. What he was in agreement with not even he knew. It was something close to what a man's will whispers to him in his sleep, what bites at Joe's heels and writes the rules that men such as him operate in, like the wind that stomped the door against the frame until the men ascended from the basement and locked it against him.