Afterburn

Orient Point, Long Island, New York September 7, 1999

He liked to imagine his own death, oh yes he did-because it would never happen the way you imagined-and that is what he did now. The water was still warm enough to swim in, and he pressed toward the huge rocking red buoy and the three iron chains that held it fast, each hung with clusters of blue-black mussels and veils of seaweed. The sea pulled at his beard and rose against his lips; every few seconds he spat out salt water. Although he was thirty-seven, his torso remained thickly muscular from cutting firewood and working on the boat, so much so that his arms got heavy as he swam. If he were to have trouble, no one would hear his cries-for no one else knew where he was. It would be some time before his bloated, naked corpse was found bumping against the rocks. The gulls would have a time of it, Rick thought, not to mention the crabs. Hey, eat me up, you little fuckers. Eat my eyes out. Eat my balls. Chew off my tattoos. I won't feel a thing. A lobsterman pulling his pots near shore at high tide might spot him and that would be that. Rick Bocca, dead man.

On the map, Orient Point lay at the easternmost tip of Long Island's North Fork, a relatively unknown forty-mile stretch of flat, fertile soil that once supported hundreds of truck farms. Now people were planting vineyards, building vacation homes. But you could still see the green farm tractors rumble along the lanes pulling a load of cabbages or potatoes, you could still buy fish off the boat in the docks of Greenport, and the fork still sheltered forested tracts that hid abandoned and forgotten buildings where a man, if he wanted, could live out of sight of others. The place where Rick swam now was like that, off a rocky spit that tapered to a pebbled cove that rested below the small, wind-battered cottage that he rented for three hundred dollars a month. The red buoy clanged mournfully, and as he neared it, a gull flapped up and away. He avoided the huge dripping chains and grabbed the slimy metal edge. All you fucking sharks and garbage-fish can just leave me alone, he thought, don't bite my dick. A green skirt of plant growth floated out from the barnacle-encrusted can. The shoreline was lost in fog. His chest heaved, nipples stinging from the salt. It was sixteen minutes out and, carried by the waves, nine back. The buoy creaked against its chains, as if signaling displeasure with his presence. He took a breath deep into his lungs and then pushed off, stroking into the gloom.

Soon he waded out of the water, toes pressing the sandy bottom, eelgrass against his shins, and retrieved his eyeglasses from a slab of stone, making habitual adjustments to get the fit right, yet no longer really noticing that the lenses were scratched and speckled with paint, the broken frame taped at the bridge. He could see well enough with them, and after he climbed the high scaffold of wooden steps up the sea cliff, he could certainly see the blue-and-white police car parked next to his old shingled cottage, the car's windshield opaque with dust, a small maple branch caught under the wiper. He hunched in surprise, as if jabbed. A New York City police car, more than one hundred miles out of its jurisdiction. They never leave you alone, he thought, they never do. Everybody should have forgotten me by now.

He stood in the low bramble, naked and considering. The wind blew, and tiny airborne seeds caught in his beard and the long wet hair on his shoulders. Cornflower and milkweed. A yellow butterfly touched his penis, fluttered away. The cop would be on the other side of the cottage, perhaps peering in a window. Rick hurried along the edge of the cliff toward the deep shade of the woods. When he reached the trees, he looked again across the high grass. The police car, dented from minor collisions in the crowded streets of New York City, was streaked from the muddy ruts of the overgrown lane that led to the cottage and barn well off the main road. The unmarked drive was almost impossible to spot, which was the way Rick preferred it. Now some cop had decided to take a drive out from New York City. They got to fucking leave me alone, he thought, I didn't do anything lately.

He cut through the high grass, the sun warm now on his shoulders, his skin almost dry, and hurried toward the barn, a sagging, windowless structure set fifty yards back from the sea cliff that sheltered a sizable vegetable garden on the lee side. The shingled roof, damaged by ice the previous winter, needed work, and a climbing rose, perhaps once a small shrub planted by a farmer's wife next to the door, reached up over the barn, its main vine as thick as Rick's calf, roots feeding on an ancient manure pile and producing a geyser of pink blooms now attended by the dull hum of bees. He slipped inside, pulled on a pair of frayed cotton boxer shorts, and closed the barn's door, quietly locking it with a heavy iron hook.

Outside, a noise. Grass whisking against long pants. A hand pulled the handle of the door.

"Rick Bocca?"

He adjusted his glasses, waiting.

The hand yanked hard on the door, rattling the frame. "Rick!" the man called fiercely. Then, muttered with disgust: "Fucking bastard."

Rick waited. His hair dripped dark coins onto the bleached planks beneath him. A minute, and then a minute more. He discovered a piece of green kelp in his beard and raked it out with his fingers. If they find you, they'll pull you back. He'd worked too hard to let them do that to him. Maybe something had happened to-well, it could be a lot of people. The dried salt of the ocean was caught in the swirls of black hair on his chest and belly, the creases in his elbows, behind his ears. He told himself to wait longer. Count to one hundred. Finally, the only sound was the wind begging along the shingles outside. Still he waited-nothing. Fuck them all. When he emerged into the bright midday sun, so suddenly hot and dry that the begonias next to the cottage drooped, the police car was gone.

But not for long. Three hours later he was standing in the forward hold of the rust-eaten trawler he worked on, hip boots knee-deep in fish, some still alive, kissing at their death, when the blue-and-white cruiser nosed up, right out onto Greenport's municipal dock, tires drumming over the boards to a stop not two feet from the bow of the trawler. A trim man of about thirty eased out. He wore a jacket and an unknotted necktie thrown over one shoulder, which meant he was a detective.

"Hey," the man called.

"Yeah?"

"Rick Bocca?"

"Yes."

"You got a minute?"

Rick nodded and climbed up out of the fish onto the dock.

"I'm Detective Peck."

"Right."

The detective pulled a photo out of his breast pocket, flashed it at Rick-one of the old bodybuilding shots, local contests maybe six, seven years back. Weight two-sixty, body fat five percent. No beard, crew cut, tanned, buffed, shaved, contact lenses, toenails trimmed.

"Looks like you lost some of that weight."

"It got old, man. I got old."

"You don't remember me, do you?"

"No," Rick answered.

"I was the one put Christina Welles away. Undercover."

"Okay, yeah. You look different. You got the gold shield, I see."

"You should have gone down with her, Rick."

He'd spent a long time thinking about that, but he didn't wish to say so.

"Just want to make sure you know that somebody else knows," said Peck.

"Lot of people should have done a lot of things," answered Rick.

"Right, right." The detective nodded dismissively. "Of course, she never told us her system, which made it more serious for her."

Rick listened to the wind saw against the boat's rusted edges. A fish flopped a tail.

"I said she never told us her system."

Rick looked back at the detective. "It was too complicated for you to understand."

The detective shrugged this away. "I heard all those steroids make your balls shrink up."

Here we go, Rick thought.

"You got your balls back now, Rick?" The detective smiled, waiting for a response. "I hope you do, because you're gonna need them. See, all your old pals in Brooklyn didn't forget Christina. How could they? She's a sexy girl, sort of the mysterious type, not with the big hair and all. Tony Verducci remembers her. And he got Mickey Simms to call up the Manhattan D.A. and tell them that he was lying, that everything he said about her on the record was a lie." The detective lifted his eyebrows in disgust. "Now, they don't have to believe that, of course, but Tony Verducci says, I can give you somebody else-who exactly, I don't know, but it could be a lot of people. This is just maybe a week ago. Mickey Simms recants his whole testimony. They make a deal. They actually sit in a room and drink coffee and say, This is a deal. You do this, we do that." The detective retrieved a small box of raisins from his pocket. "I worked like a motherfucker to pull that testimony out of him, and then they go and tear it up and say it was a mistake and Christina Welles and her boyfriend Rick Bocca and the rest of those assholes had nothing to do with a tractor trailer full of air conditioners. 'Course, the fact that I saw the truck, counted the boxes, that doesn't matter. You with me so far?"

"Yeah," Rick said. "I get it." Which he didn't. None of it made any sense to him, in fact. All he had so far was a story. Anybody could make up a story. He sat against the hood of the police car.

"See, I know that Tony Verducci is behind all of this," the detective went on, chewing a wad of raisins. "He's still running his crew. All over the city. I know you don't talk to these people anymore, Rick, but you remember them. You know all these people, Rick, I know you do. You guys practically had your dicks in each other's butts. So I hear about this thing and start wondering, What the fuck's it about? Why does Tony Verducci want Christina Welles out of prison? That's a good question. But it's not for a good reason, Rick. It's not for her health." Peck stopped to chew; his mouth appeared to be full of bugs. "He wants something off that poor girl and he's gone to a lot of trouble to get it. He's put Mickey Simms on a stick and stuck him in everybody's face like a marshmallow, and that makes him somebody who I now personally want a piece of, for fucking up all my work, and he's also delivered some other poor asswipe to the D.A. I told them, Don't do it, don't make the deal, you're hanging that poor girl out to dry, because she doesn't know who is doing what anymore. I called the prison, she's putting in her time, okay? No big fights, not much time in the hole, you know? That strikes me as basically unfair. See, this is actually a pretty decent college girl who never should have gotten mixed up with a scumbag mope named Ricky Bocca. She helped him out because she loved him or whatever…" The detective paused, eyes full of hate. "This is a girl who never got a break from fucking nobody, never, and probably all she wants to do is just put her life back together, and now they're setting her up."

Rick put his hands down on the hood of the car, as if about to be arrested. He felt heavy, heavier than in years. His anxieties from the old days had receded, but, like black ants moving regularly up and down the dark trunk of a tree, remained just perceptible; always he'd known they were there, somewhere-the old connections, the unfinished animosities, the gravity of mutual hatreds.

"See," continued Peck, "I'm thinking Tony Verducci is getting frustrated with the cell phones. He hates them. He drives around with like fifty phones in his backseat, always driving and talking. Uses one, throws it back, uses another. Very hard for us to keep track of his conversations, but it can be done. If we put enough meat into it, we can do it. He knows that, everyone knows that. Plus, lot of people aren't as careful as Verducci. He studies the Colombians, admires them. Shit, I admire them, too. But he knows what he got isn't safe. A lot of these cellular encryption technologies can be beat. He's worried, he's getting pretty old to think about doing time. Man's got grandchildren, one of them with some kind of heart condition. He's paying for the doctors, we know everything. It's time to settle up, consolidate. It's time to put on the slippers. So I think he's got some kind of one last monster deal coming up and he needs the best system he ever had. He needs Christina. It didn't go bad because of her, you remember."

Rick remembered. The whole thing had collapsed because he had not noticed the surveillance, felt so comfortable with the off-loading of the air conditioners that he'd even walked down the block to get a sandwich and some cigarettes, and well, the rest of it was one giant fuck-up, with cops everywhere and the crew melting away into the street crowds and Christina sitting in the truck without the keys, having honked the horn to warn everyone and waiting loyally for Rick to come back, which he couldn't do, since Mickey Simms had pulled Rick into the first doorway he could find and stuck his gun in Rick's ear, saying, Don't go back, man, they already got her, you can't save her, and I'm fucking not going to let you.

"Now, the other thing," continued the detective, "is that Tony Verducci has a new guy working for him, named Morris. Got kicked out of medical school or something, used to drive an ambulance. I don't know where they found him. Somebody said Vancouver, somebody said San Diego. I don't know, and I don't care. Morris is their go-to guy, you know? Gets in there and actually takes the football over the line-" The detective popped him in the shoulder. "Hey, you know what I'm saying, Ricky?"

Rick nodded.

"Nobody knows how many he's done. He's been around, that's all I can say. We'll get him one of these days, but right now he's out there, he's the dog on the chain. So you see my problem, Rick. I got the D.A.'s Office cutting Christina Welles loose, and she's got no family I can talk to-mother lives somewhere in Florida but never hears from her daughter-I got Tony Verducci still in business, with his new guy Morris in the picture, and I got you, babe."

Rick gazed past the detective. Across the bay cut a magnificent sixty-foot sailboat, full of people who didn't have Rick's problems. He looked back at Peck. "Why don't you talk to Christina yourself?"

"It's fucking impossible to call anybody up at the prison, have a decent conversation. And I just heard all this at eight this morning anyway. And"-here the detective himself looked toward the bright distance of the ocean-"be honest with you, my wife is going into the shop tomorrow, have a breast taken off. St. Vincent's Hospital. I got to be there, see. I'd drive up to Bedford Hills tomorrow real early, I really would, but it's my wife, I got to be there, see where the cancer is, hold her hand when they tell her. Christina is going to be gone by the time I could get up there."

"So you-"

"So, yeah, I came to you, because you're the only card I got, Rick. She's walking out of that prison tomorrow morning, probably around 9:00 a.m."

"Does Tony know that?"

"No, I already thought of that and got the regular discharge time changed for her. I'm looking out for this girl, okay? Once she disappears into the city, it could take a while to find her." Peck pulled a business card out of his pocket. "I was thinking maybe, since you got your balls back, and since you've spent four years out here remembering that you should be doing the time just like Christina, that maybe it would be the fucking morally appropriate thing to forget about the fucking fish for a little while"-he flicked the card at Rick-"and go to the prison and be there when she gets out."

He took his dinner in the village every night, driving his patched quarter-ton pickup along the lane, bumping over the same roots each time, grinding the gears a bit, crunching along the curving, up-and-down gravel, slowing once to let a deer gambol across the road, tail flashing flag-white, flag-white, then continuing until a church steeple rose in view and the shingled houses of the village lay before him. He pulled up in front of the restaurant-a place of local people, farmers taking their wives out, teenage boys shoving burgers into their mouths, the occasional stray artist renting a house through the winter-and parked next to a rusted-out school bus packed with cut firewood. Inside, he slid into his regular booth. The waitressing staff consisted of the woman who had worked there seventeen years and whatever three or four teenage girls from the village currently needed to make money for community college or abortions or getting the hell out. The waitresses long ago had quit bringing Rick a menu and instead, on his instructions, set the same chicken breast platter before him every night. If he was a curiosity to them-a large, bearded man in worn overalls and taped glasses who said little-they knew not to show it. He was old enough that they expected that he would look at them with a certain frank sexual attention, as did most of the older men, yet he remained young enough, dark and muscular and self-composed, that he elicited something in them they didn't quite understand. They knew he lived alone, worked on a fishing boat out of Greenport. They were plain girls, but healthy from outdoor lives, and yet he seemed uninterested in their young bodies, their teenage breasts and slender ankles and hair smelling of cheap shampoo. Sometimes one of the girls got up her courage and asked him his name, but he just shook his head. Their innocence bored him.

Sunset. His ruined truck bounced back down the long lane, and a few minutes later he spent the last light of the day picking the tomatoes in the garden. He ate the ripest ones, getting juice in his beard, and slipped the green ones into his pockets. It was a seventy-nine-day variety. The pumpkin vines curled all over the place; they'd be ready when he got back. Some corn, too. He'd planted twenty rows of thirty plants-enough for the wind to swirl the tassel pollen from plant to plant. He yanked one ear off a stalk, shucked it halfway, and bit the white-yellow kernels, his beard rasping the rough green husk. The raw corn was unseasonably sweet, and this was no small pleasure to him. Rain tomorrow, he figured, looking at the sky-don't have to water. His sunflowers, a ten-foot variety with huge heads, stooped toward the earth, beginning to die. Above him the bats wheeled and dove as the air cooled. In a month or so he would start to burn a few chunks of scrub oak in the woodstove at night. Behind the cottage he yanked the starter on the pump engine next to the well and let it run five minutes, long enough to fill the water tank in the basement of the cottage. Inside, he brushed his teeth under a bare bulb. He examined the splayed bristles of the toothbrush, then slipped out of his overalls and work shirt.

He wanted to go find Christina. But the prudent thing would be to do nothing. Tony always said, Learn from the Colombians, they know how to do nothing. They would drop a five-million-dollar shipment into a warehouse, lock it up, and then do nothing. For months. A year, even. Just let it sit there, shrink-wrapped, metal-belted to a pallet. They would watch it, of course, to see if anyone else was watching. And if nobody showed up, still they might do nothing. Doing nothing was a course of action, doing nothing was choosing to do what you were already planning to do, staying inside the original plan. Rick's original plan was to do nothing for a very long time until everybody forgot about him. The problem with his plan was that it assumed that Christina was in prison. Peck understood this, somehow. Or maybe it was a lucky guess, but detectives were paid to make lucky guesses. Then again, Peck had been working undercover at the time; he might have seen Christina and Rick together; you didn't have to be that smart to see what's going on between a man and a woman. Not if it was craziness, obsession. No, that wasn't necessarily true. Peck didn't know anything. Rick was overthinking it. Peck was an ambitious asshole, working some line of bullshit. Rick had been out of the game so long he didn't have a feel for the nuances of bullshit: What was truth, what was a near-truth, what was a lie, what was interpretation, what was the lie that was meant to draw attention to itself so that the other, crucial lie would go unseen, what was the truth with a lie inside it. All he knew was that Peck was trying to jump him back into something. Why else track him down, why else drive three hours out from the city and then back again? But of course these questions led nowhere. Peck would assume that Rick would think all of these things. That meant that Peck felt very good about his contraption of cleverness, that he believed Rick couldn't pull it apart. Which was true. So, all that was left was the fact that Christina was getting out. She was walking her hot little ass and her cold dark eyes right on out of there, into who knew what. It was an emotional thing, which Peck rightly saw. Once you got your emotions involved, you had a problem.

An hour later, he was alone in a small room by the sea, the window lit by stars. The edge of the sheet brightened in the dark and his eyes were open. For the first year or two the night sky had made him lonely. Certain visions appeared and he would whisper for forgiveness. I did bad things. I never killed anybody, but I did bad things. He had tried to read the Bible, but there was nothing in there about eighteen-wheelers full of stolen fax machines. Or unstamped cigarettes, or industrial elevator panels that cost a quarter million a pop, or French wine, or expensive perfume, or big Japanese motorcycles, or any of the stuff landing in Kennedy Airport twenty-four hours a day, items to be consumed in the roaring maw of New York City. Christina had helped them because he had asked her. Of course Tony wanted to use her again. He knew how smart she was, had tried to get her to run one of his operations. He'd probably suffered some fuck-up in his deliveries and remembered how good Christina's system had been. Very effective when the buyers were Russians or Chinese gangsters, distrustful assholes who barely spoke English, who wanted to keep as much distance as possible. The pickups were never directly arranged on the phone. The contact person was just faxed a single digit on a piece of paper. It must have driven the cops wild. She would always fax the number from and to a public copy shop, a different one each time. The cops couldn't wire-tap all the public fax machines in the city. The number did not correspond to the pickup time or place but to a public spot in midtown Manhattan. There the contact person looked at something that was open to view from the street-that was the genius part-and then understood where and when the pickup was. The two parties did not have to talk on the phone, they did not have to meet ahead of time in person, they did not even need to know each other's identity. It had never failed. They'd moved three dozen jobs using her system.

If you were smart, you fell in love with a woman who could do that, and you packed up all the other operations. You told your dick no more other women, because this one is the real thing. You make a promise to your dick that in the long run, it would be worth it. And then you go get all the money that you hid in Aunt Eva's basement in Brooklyn (he'd kept her front-door key in his wallet for four years) and you pay for Christina to finish college and get a law degree or whatever else she wanted and get her into the civilized world. If you were smart, that is.

If you were stupid, you got her to do things she shouldn't be doing. But Rick hadn't been smart; he had been crazy for the steroids and had become a joke, a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound clown who could bench-press four-twenty and had two chicks on the side whom he'd told he owned a car dealership on Long Island. More like a body shop that sold secondhand junkers. Dick-wax, his whole life had been dick-wax.

Why Christina had put up with him was a mystery; maybe she saw what he could have been, with the drugs out of him; she was a woman who made her mind up about things and then did them. You'd be okay if you just stayed with me, she'd said once, not in anger but by way of observation. A true statement. She'd decided she would stick with him and she did. And then, once arrested, she'd decided that all contact between them would cease. She'd never answered his letters to her in prison-not that he blamed her. (Now, of course, he didn't get any mail at all. Had no address.) He'd never been good enough for her, knew it even then, although he acted like he was fucking king of the world. The last thing she'd said to him, on the day she was convicted-being walked away in handcuffs back to Rikers Island, her dark eyes glancing into his-was this: "You should get out of the city, Rick." She'd meant it. She had taken everything she knew about him and everything she expected might happen to him and distilled it into one short utterance of wisdom. You should get out of the city, Rick. Get the hell out of the city, Rick. And so he did.

When he found Orient Point one day, just driving out of Brooklyn for kicks, he had not expected that he would stay so long, get dug in, find work on a boat catching garbage-fish, learn to grow tomatoes. He'd only known that he needed solitude and removal. If there was pain and difficulty in this, good; it was penance. In the beginning, in fact, it had been the most he could do to simply live in his own skin. The cottage had an ancient phone line strung along the lane, and in the early days after moving there he would pick up the old black receiver, cracked and heavy as a hammer, and listen to the far buzz of the universe. He would think of the people he could call, the many people in the city who would say, Yo, Rick, man, you been away too long, you gotta come back, do some business, and he'd see the uselessness of the conversation. He missed Christina, yes, he could admit that. Even four years later. And not just the sex; that wasn't what he thought about so much, except for the one night in the SoHo Grand Hotel, when he got beaten up. It was those mornings, Sundays, when she would buy the paper and they would go for a walk in the city, see a movie. She loved the movies. Always reading, too. One of those people who had a secret life with books. Reading to escape herself, reading to find herself. Swept the floor to relax. She was a girl with some old hurts. She carried them hard, too, he'd always known, not getting anywhere with them. I can't trust anybody, she'd once confessed to him, almost mournfully, I want to but it got stolen from me. Of course she meant the rape when she was a teenager. She'd told him once, only once, and then seemed to wish she could take it back inside her. You told me, he'd said. I shouldn't have, she'd answered, you don't understand, you don't know what that kind of thing does to somebody. She'd gotten the broom from the closet and started. You don't know. You don't know me.

Remembering her words, he'd softly set the old receiver on its cradle. Later he'd had the phone shut off, and then, to guard against his own backsliding, taken a wooden ladder he found in the barn and cut the wire that ran from the cottage all the way down the lane and rolled it up, a quarter-mile of it, in the bed of his truck. He strung a piece of the wire between two pines and hung his clothes on it to dry.

You did things like that. You made a new world for yourself. Small and clean. You didn't talk to people much. He'd spent about six months seeing a huge, heavy-assed, forty-three-year-old divorcee whose kids were already out of the house, fat with amused eyes, and at first it was something that made him not so lonely. They'd met on the Greenport dock, when he was standing there in his waders and a T-shirt. She was eating an ice cream cone. "Hey, Bob," she'd said, "or Bill or Biff or whatever your big old name is, you stink like fish." She wiped her lips with a napkin and put her fingers around his arm, measuring. "I can't even get my hand halfway around it." He'd looked at her. "Lady, you don't want to talk to me." She grabbed his arm with both hands now. "Oh, maybe I do." He saw she didn't need for him to like her, which was fine. He didn't want to be inside a woman's head, he could barely find his way around his own. All she wanted was sex, she told him. Honestly. He would drive over two or three times a week, playing with his dick in the truck, walk in half-hard already, and just push himself into her for all he was worth. Try to fuck his way over to the other side of something, which, all men learned, always failed. He did not find her attractive, yet this made her desirable in another way. She had great handfuls of flesh, everywhere, nipples big as coffee-cup saucers, and he found himself liking it, the enormity of her. Her ass was something like fifty inches around, you had to press the cheeks apart. He understood that she wanted a big man who could push her around, who made her feel small. Once she lit a cigarette and told him to keep going. "I don't want to talk about anything," she'd say. His orders were just to do it, and he'd never stayed the night, never been invited to, just pulled on his old boxers after washing his dick with soap like his older half brother, Paul, taught him as a kid and gotten back in the truck, sometimes driven around the dark roads with the radio on. But it hadn't worked out. One night she'd casually asked why he'd left the city and he'd said, "You really want to know?" And she'd answered, "Yeah," daring him, and he'd started to talk about Christina and their apartment and the restaurants they used to go to. The woman looked at Rick, eyes distraught, as if she had heard something in his voice that she did not suspect of him-a sound, a tone of remembrance of how it was when you loved someone without reservation-and then she started to weep. "I never heard you talk like this. I thought you were some big dumb fisherman." She choked on her sudden grief, lit a cigarette but could not smoke it. "You ruined it for me," she said. "I want you to leave." So he had stopped seeing anybody, except the crew from the boat. Bunch of fuckwads and drunks and losers, so he fit in well. In the winters he'd listened to the icy tree limbs rasp the cedar shakes on the outside of the cottage. Wondering if he was going crazy. But no longer. The work helped, getting on the boat, just doing the work. He had come around, he was okay.

And now this. The prudent thing was to do nothing, to go nowhere.

An edge of gray light high up on the wall, a man heavy on a mattress, sweat around his neck, under his arms. Work boots on the floor, laces loose. The beginning of a breeze, the red buoy clanging softly out there in the flat gloom. He stirred, the dream leaving him, he a Staten Island schoolboy in a neat Catholic-school tie and collar, bending down to inspect something large and dark, unknowable-a shape slumped and monstrous. He pulled back the sheet and slipped on his glasses. His joints were stiff now when he rose. The bed stood next to the window, and the three fat tomatoes from the garden sat there on the sill, dirty and green. He set his feet on the floor, pushed up from the bed, feeling the heaviness.

Outside in the wind, he held a cup of milk. He turned to look at the cottage. Built in 1805, one of the farmers at the restaurant had said, and undergone innumerable additions and renovations since then. He finished his milk. You are going to help her, he told himself, you are going to do only good things.

Back inside, he slipped on his watch and searched for his old belt; the mice had gotten into his bottom drawer and left him three short chewed pieces of leather and the buckle. He had one suitcase-something rattling around inside. He popped the case open. A pair of shoes, good Italian leather ones, cut narrowly with a new heel. He hadn't worn them in four years. They'd probably cost him a couple of hundred dollars, a criminal amount of money. Well, he'd been a criminal. He sat on the low camp bed and set the shoes on the floor. Then he took the left shoe and slipped it on his foot. Didn't quite fit. He could barely jam the foot in. He pulled off the shoe and tried the other foot. Same thing. Maybe his feet had collapsed, maybe it was the calluses, going barefoot so much that his feet were wider. The shoes he wore each day were a pair of old farmer's clodhoppers he'd bought by the side of the road down a few miles, where, among the usual household utensils, cheap wooden furniture, and worn-out hand tools, a woman had sold off her late husband's effects. One of those tough old women who didn't cry as they cashed out their lives.

Now he set the good shoes aside and folded a few clothes into the suitcase, then made his bed, turned off the propane, disconnected the refrigerator, throwing some old rice and beans into the weeds, locked the shutters across the windows of the cottage, washed out his dishes, and put them in the drainer next to the sink. It was 4:00 a.m.; he had to beat the Manhattan rush hour. He put the three tomatoes in his coat pocket, locked the door, and stuck the key under an old oyster shell in the weeds. In the barn he found his bow saw, dull now after four years of cutting firewood, and as he closed the door, he confronted the dark stand of humped sunflowers, watching him leave like disapproving old men.

While his truck idled just off the public road, the tomatoes on the dashboard, he walked back along the drive and cut a sizable oak-a foot wide at the base-so that it fell across the lane leading to the cottage. You'd have to use a chain saw or a bulldozer to get up the drive in a vehicle, and if somebody did cut up or drag away the tree, then Rick would know when he returned. He had enough boat money to last a few days; beyond that he would have to retrieve some of his cash in Aunt Eva's basement. He slid the saw behind the seat in the truck and drove west. Thirty miles on Route 25, then seventy-odd miles on the Long Island Expressway, the needle right into the heart of New York City. He would run into some traffic, then head north toward the prison. Even stopping for breakfast, he'd get there well before 9:00 a.m., just to be safe. Christina would not want to see him, he knew. But she wasn't expecting him, either, and he hoped that, in the moment of recognition, she might understand that he'd been imprisoned, too, in his own way, certainly not as badly as she had been, but caged by remorse and grief for the time lost. Their time lost.

When he arrived at the prison, he pulled the truck into the visitors' parking lot and gazed toward the brick buildings on the hill. It didn't look like a prison, not really, more like an old factory or abandoned school surrounded by the meanest fence he had ever seen in his life-savage razor wire coiled everywhere. The state wasn't spending much money here, except for the wire. He watched a few women in green uniforms walk slowly up the hill. In the cement-block building attached to the prison's main gate, a heavyset guard looked up from a table.

"Sign in and put your keys and coins anything made of metal in the tray step through the detector."

"I'm not going in," Rick answered, anxious at the idea of visiting even a women's prison. "I'm just waiting for someone to come out."

"Who?"

"Christina Welles."

"I just got on my shift. Let me look at the log. Maybe she left."

"How do they leave if no one's here to pick them up?"

"Prison gives them forty dollars and generally they call a cab," the guard replied. "Cab takes them up to the train station about a mile away, then they go into New York."

"I think she probably hasn't come down yet," Rick said. "You mind calling inside?"

When the guard hung up the phone, he shook his head. "No, you got it wrong."

"I was told she was being released here."

"You got bad information."

"Why, what's wrong with it?"

"She be at court today, State Supreme Court."

"In Manhattan?"

"Think so."

He realized that he couldn't see his truck from where he stood, couldn't see who was sitting in what car in the prison parking lot, waiting for him to return. "I was told she'd be here, at 9:00 a.m."

"That was wrong, too. She left before that."

"I was told 9:00 a.m. on very good authority."

"They telling everybody that, I guess."

He didn't like this. "What do you mean?"

"I mean"-the guard mustered a cruel little smile-"you already the second guy come looking for her this morning. She's gone, pal."