The Analyst

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ricky fled.

Bag hurriedly packed, tires squealing, accelerating down the highway, he raced away from the motel in New Jersey and the familiar voice on the phone. He barely took the time to wash the fake scar from his cheek. In the space of one morning, by asking a few questions in the wrong places, he had managed to compress time, turning it from his ally into his enemy. He had thought he would slowly scrape away at Rumplestiltskin’s identity, and then, when he’d managed to discover everything he needed, he would take a slow and sturdy approach to designing his own revenge. Make certain that everything was in place, traps set, and then emerge on an equal footing. Now, he understood, that luxury had disappeared.

He did not know what the connection was between the man at the kennel and Rumplestiltskin, but it surely existed, for following his departure, while Ricky was idly inspecting the grave site of a dead couple, the kennel owner had been making telephone calls. The ease with which the man had found the motel where Ricky had been staying was daunting. He told himself that he needed to be far more careful covering his tracks.

He drove hard and fast, heading back to New Hampshire, trying to assess how compromised his existence truly was. Random fears and contentious thoughts reverberated throughout him.

But one idea was paramount. Ricky could not return to the passivity of the psychoanalyst. That was a world where one waited for something to happen, and then, before acting again, tried to interpret and understand all the forces within. It was a world of reaction, of delay. Of calm and reason.

If he fell into its trap, it would cost him his life. He knew that he had to act.

If nothing else, he had to create the illusion that he was as dangerous as Rumplestiltskin.

He had just passed the welcome to massachusetts sign on the roadway, when an idea came to him. He saw an exit up ahead, and just beyond that the common American landscape marker: a shopping mall. He steered the rental car off the thruway, and into the mall’s parking lot. Within a few minutes, he was shoulder to shoulder with all the other people, heading in to the array of stores, all selling more or less the same things for more or less the same prices, but packaged in different manners, giving shoppers the sensation they were finding something unique amid all the similarity. Ricky, seeing some dark humor in it, thought it a wildly appropriate spot for what he was about to do.

It did not take him long to find a gathering of telephones, near the food court. He remembered the first number easily. Behind him, there was a low buzz of people at tables eating and speaking, and he half covered the receiver with his hand as he dialed the number.

“New York Times classified.”

“Yes,” Ricky said, pleasantly. “I’d like to purchase one of those small one-column ads for the front page.”

In rapid order, he read off a credit card number. The clerk took the information and then asked, “Okay, Mr. Lazarus, what’s the message?”

Ricky hesitated then said:

Mr. R. game on. A new Voice.

The clerk read it back. “That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s it,” Ricky said. “Make sure you uppercase the word Voice, okay?”

The clerk acknowledged the request and Ricky disconnected the line. He then walked over to a fast-food outlet, purchased himself a cup of coffee, and grabbed a handful of napkins. He found a table a little ways apart from most of the crowds, and settled in, with a pen in his hand, sipping at the hot liquid. He shut out the noise and the activity and concentrated on what he was about to write, tapping the pen occasionally against his teeth, then taking a drink, all the time calming himself, planning. He used the napkins as scratch paper, and finally, after a few fits and starts, came up with the following:

You know who I was, not who I am.

That is why you’re in a jam.

Ricky’s gone, he’s very dead.

I am here, in his stead.

Lazarus rose, and so have I,

And now it’s time for someone else to die.

A new game, in an old place,

Will eventually bring us face-to-face.

Then we’ll see who draws the last breath,

Because, Mr. R., even bad poets love death.

Ricky admired his work for a moment, then returned to the bank of telephones. Within a few moments, he’d connected with the classified department at the Village Voice. “I’d like to place an ad in the personals section,” he said.

“No problem-o. I can take that information,” this new clerk said. Ricky was mildly amused that the person in classified at the Voice seemed significantly less stuffy than their counterparts at the Times, which, when he considered it, was more or less as expected. “What sort of heading do you want on the message?”

“Heading?” Ricky asked.

“Ah,” said the clerk. “A first-timer. You know, the abbreviations like WM for white male, SM for sadomasochism…”

“I see what you mean,” Ricky replied. He thought a moment, then said, “The top should read: WM, 50s, seeks Mr. Right for special fun and games…”

The clerk repeated this to Ricky. “Okay,” he said, “something else?”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” Ricky said. He then read off the poem to the clerk, making the man repeat the message twice, to be certain that he had it correctly. When he’d finished reading, the clerk paused.

“Well,” he said, “that’s different. Way different. This will probably bring them all out of the woodwork. The curious, at least. And maybe a few of the crazies. Now, do you want to pay for a box reply? We give you a box number, and you can access the replies by phone. The way it works, while you’re paying for the box, only you can get the answers.”

“Please,” Ricky said. He heard the clerk clicking on a computer keyboard. “All right,” he said. “You’re box number 1313. Hope you’re not superstitious.”

“Not in the slightest,” Ricky said. He wrote down the number for accessing the answers on his napkin and hung up the phone.

For a moment, he considered calling the number that he had for Virgil. But he resisted this temptation. He had a few more things to arrange first.

In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu discusses the importance of the general choosing his battleground. Occupying a position of mystery, seizing a location of superiority. Taking the high ground. Being able to conceal one’s strength. Creating advantages out of topographical familiarity. Ricky thought these lessons applied to him, as well. The poem in the Village Voice was like a shot across the bows of his adversary, an opening salvo designed to get his attention.

Ricky realized it would not take long for someone to arrive in Durham searching for him. The license plate number noticed by the dog kennel owner fairly guaranteed that. He didn’t think it would be particularly difficult to discover that the plate belonged to Rent-A-Wreck, and soon enough, someone would show up, asking for the name of the man who’d rented that car. The issue he faced, he thought, was complex, but wrapped up in the single question: where did he want to fight the next battle? He had to choose his arena.

He returned the rental car, stopped briefly at his room, and then went directly in to his night job at the crisis hot line distracted by these questions, thinking that he did not know how much time he had purchased for himself with the ads in the Times and the Voice, but a little. The Times would run the following morning, the Voice at the end of the week. There was a reasonable likelihood that Rumplestiltskin would not act until he’d seen both. All the man knew, so far, was that an overweight and physically scarred private investigator had arrived at a dog kennel in New Jersey asking disjointed questions about the couple that records showed had adopted him and his siblings years earlier. A man hunting a lie. Ricky did not delude himself that Rumplestiltskin wouldn’t see the links, find other signs of Ricky’s existence rapidly. Frederick Lazarus, priest, would show up in inquiries in Florida. Frederick Lazarus, private investigator, arrived in New Jersey. The advantage Ricky had, he thought, was that there would be no clear-cut link between Frederick Lazarus and either Dr. Frederick Starks or Richard Lively. One was presumed dead. The other still clung to anonymity. As he took his seat at a desk in the darkened office, behind a multiline telephone, he was glad that the semester was wrapping up at the university. He expected callers with the usual stressed out, final exams despair, which he was comfortable dealing with. He did not think that anyone would kill themselves over a chemistry final, although he had heard of sillier things. And, in the deep of night, he found that he was able to concentrate clearly.

He asked himself: What do I want to achieve?

Did he want to kill the man who had driven him to fake his own death? Who threatened his distant family and destroyed everything that had made him who he was? Ricky thought that in some of the mystery novels and thrillers that he’d devoured over the past months, the answer would have been a simple yes. Someone caused him great harm, so he should turn the tables on that someone. Kill him. An eye for an eye, the essence of all revenges.

Ricky pursed his lips and told himself: There are many ways to kill someone. Indeed, he’d experienced one. There had to be others, ranging from the assassin’s bullet to the ravages of a disease.

Finding the right murder was critical. And, to do that, he needed to know his adversary. Not merely know who he was, but what he was.

And he had to emerge from this death with his own life intact. He wasn’t some sort of kamikaze pilot, drinking a ritual cup of sake, then going to his own death with nary a care in the world. Ricky wanted to survive.

Ricky held no illusion that he would ever be able to return to Dr. Frederick Starks. No comfortable practice listening to the whinings of the rich and discomfited on a daily basis, for an easy forty-eight weeks of the year. That was gone, and he knew it.

He looked around himself, at the small office where the crisis hot line was located. It was in a room off the main corridor of the student health services building. It was a narrow spot, not particularly comfortable, with a single desk, three telephones, and a few posters celebrating the schedules of the football, lacrosse, and soccer teams, with pictures of athletes. There was also a large campus map and a typed list of emergency services and security numbers. In slightly larger print, there was a protocol to be followed in the case where the person manning the suicide prevention line became convinced that someone had actually attempted to kill themselves. The protocol explained the steps to take, to call police, and have the 911 operator run a line check, which would trace a call back to a location. This was to be used only in the direst of emergencies, when a life was at stake, and rescue services needed to be dispatched. Ricky had never availed himself of this capacity. In the weeks he’d worked the graveyard shift, he’d always been able to talk, if not common sense, at least delay, into even the most frantic of callers. He had wondered whether any of the young people he’d helped would have been astonished to know that the calm voice speaking reason to them belonged to a janitor in the chemistry department.

Ricky told himself: This is worth protecting.

A conclusion, he recognized, brought him to a decision. He would have to lead Rumplestiltskin away from Durham. If he was to survive the upcoming confrontation, Richard Lively needed to be safe and remain anonymous.

He whispered to himself: “Back to New York.”

As he was reaching this realization, the phone on the desktop rang. He punched the proper line and picked up the receiver.

“Crisis,” he said. “How can I help you?”

There was a momentary pause, and then he heard a muffled sob. This was followed by a string of disconnected words, that separately meant little, but taken together, said much. “I can’t, I just can’t, it’s all too much, I don’t want, oh, I just don’t know…”

A young woman, Ricky thought. He heard no slurring beyond the sobs of emotion, so he didn’t think there were any drugs or alcohol involved in the call. Just middle-of-the-night loneliness and low-rent despair. “Can you slow down,” he said gently, “and try to fill me in on what is going on? You don’t have to give me the big picture. Just right now, right this moment. Where are you?”

A pause, then a response: “In my dormitory room.”

“Okay,” Ricky said, gently, starting to probe. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“No roommate? Friends?”

“No. All alone.”

“Is that the way you are all the time? Or does it just feel that way?”

This question seemed to cause the young woman to think hard. “Well, my boyfriend and I broke up and my classes are all terrible and when I get home, my folks are going to kill me because I’ve dropped off the honors list. In fact, I might not pass my comp lit course and it all seems to have come to a head and…”

“And so something made you call this line, right?”

“I wanted to talk. I didn’t want to do something to myself…”

“That makes eminently good sense. It sounds like this hasn’t been the best of semesters.”

The young woman laughed, a little bitterly. “You could say that.”

“But there are other semesters to come, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“And the boyfriend, why did he say he left you?”

“He said he didn’t like being tied down right now…”

“And this reply made you, what? Depressed?”

“Yes. It was like a slap in the face. I felt like he’d just been using me, you know, for sex, and then with summer coming, well, he figured I wasn’t worth it anymore. It was just like I was some sort of candy bar. Taste me and throw me away…”

“That’s well put,” Ricky said. “An insult, then. A blow to your sense of who you are.”

Again the young woman paused. “I guess, but I hadn’t really seen it that way.”

“So,” Ricky continued, still speaking in a solid, soft voice, “really instead of being depressed and thinking that there’s something wrong with you, you should be angry with the son of a bitch, because clearly the problem is with him. And the problem is selfishness, right?”

He could hear the young woman nodding in agreement. This was the most typical of telephone calls, he thought. She called in a state of boyfriend- and school-related despair, but really wasn’t anywhere close to that state, when examined a little more closely.

“I think that’s a fair statement,” she said. “The bastard.”

“So, maybe you’re better off without him. It’s not like there aren’t other fish in that sea,” Ricky said.

“I thought I loved him,” the young woman said.

“And so it hurts a bit, doesn’t it? But the hurt isn’t because you actually have had your heart broken. It’s more because you feel that you engaged in a lie. And now you’ve had your sense of trust staggered.”

“You make sense,” she said. Ricky could sense the tears drying up on the other end of the line. After a minute, she added, “You must get a lot of calls like this one. It all seemed so important and so awful a minute or two ago. I was crying and sobbing and now…”

“There’s still the grades. What will happen when you get home?”

“They’ll be pissed. My dad will say, ‘I’m not spending my hard-earned dollars on a bunch of C’s…’ ”

The young lady did a passable harrumph and deepened her voice, capturing her father pretty effectively. Ricky laughed, and she joined him.

“He’ll get over it,” he said. “Just be honest. Tell him about your stresses, and about the boyfriend, and that you’ll try to do better. He’ll come around.”

“You’re right.”

“So,” Ricky said, “here’s the prescription for this evening. Get a good night’s sleep. Put the books away. Get up in the morning and go buy yourself one of those really sweet frothy coffees, one with all the calories in it. Take the coffee outside to one of the quads, sit on a bench, sip the drink slowly and admire the weather. And, if you happen to see the boy in question, well, ignore him. And if he wants to talk, walk away. Find a new bench. Think a little bit about what the summer holds. There’s always some hope that things will get better. You just have to find it.”

“All right,” she said. “Thanks for talking with me.”

“If you’re still feeling stressed, like to the point where you don’t think you can handle things, then you should make an appointment with a counselor at health services. They’ll help you through problems.”

“You know a lot about depression,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” Ricky replied, “I do. Usually it is transitory. Sometimes it isn’t. The first is an ordinary condition of life. The second is a true and terrible disease. You sound like you’ve just got the first.”

“I feel better,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get a sweet roll with that cup of coffee. Calories be damned.”

“That’s the attitude,” Ricky said. He was about to hang up, but stopped. “Hey,” he said, “help me out with something…”

The young woman sounded a bit surprised, but replied, “Huh? What? You need help?”

“This is the crisis hot line,” Ricky said, allowing humor to seep into his voice. “What makes you think that the folks on this end don’t have their own crises?”

The young woman paused, as if digesting the obviousness of this statement. “Okay,” she said, “how can I help?”

“When you were little,” Ricky said, “what games did you play?”

“Games? Like board games, you know, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland…”

“No. Outdoor, playground-type games.”

“Like Ring Around the Rosie or Freeze Tag?”

“Yes. But what if you wanted to play a game with other kids, a game where one person has to hunt the other, while at the same time being hunted, what would that be?”

“Not exactly hide-and-seek, right? Sounds a little bit nastier.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

The young woman hesitated, then started thinking more or less out loud, “Well, there was Red Rover, Red Rover, but that had more of a physical challenge. There were scavenger hunts, but that was a pursuit of objects. Tag and Mother May I and Simon Says…”

“No. I’m looking for something a little more challenging…”

“The best I can think of is Foxes and Hounds,” she said abruptly. “That was the hardest to win.”

“How did you play it?” Ricky asked.

“In the summer, out in the countryside. There were two teams, Foxes and Hounds, obviously. The foxes took off, fifteen-minute head start. They carried paper bags filled with ripped-up newspaper. Every ten yards, they had to put a handful down. The hounds followed the trail. The key thing was to leave false trails, double back, put the hounds into the swamp, whatever. The foxes won if they made it back to the starting point after a designated time, like two or three hours later. The hounds won if they caught up with the foxes. If they spotted the foxes across a field, they could act like dogs, and take off after them. And the foxes had to hide. So, sometimes the foxes made certain that they knew where the hounds were, you know, spying on them…”

“That’s the game I’m looking for,” Ricky said quietly. “Which side usually won?”

“That was the beauty of it,” the young woman said. “It depended on the ingenuity of the foxes and the determination of the hounds. So either side could win at any given time.”

“Thank you,” Ricky said. His mind was churning with ideas.

“Good luck,” the young woman said, as she hung up the phone.

Ricky thought that was precisely what he was going to need: some good luck.

He began making arrangements the following morning. He paid his rent for the following month, but told his landladies that he was likely to be out of town on some family business. He had put a plant in his room, and he made certain they agreed to water it regularly. It was, he thought, the simplest way of playing on the psychology of the women; no man who wants his plant watered was likely to run out on them. He spoke to his supervisor at the janitorial staff at the university, and received permission to take some accumulated overtime and sick days. His boss was equally understanding, and aided by the end of the semester slowdown, willing to cut him loose without jeopardizing his job.

At the local bank where Frederick Lazarus had his account, Ricky made a wire transfer to an account he opened electronically at a Manhattan bank.

He also made a series of hotel reservations around the city, for successive days. These were at less than desirable hotels, the sorts of places that didn’t show up on anyone’s tourist guide to New York City. He guaranteed each reservation with Frederick Lazarus’s credit cards, except for the last hotel he selected. The final two of the hotels he’d selected were located on West 22nd Street, more or less directly across from each other. At one, he simply reserved a two-night stay for Frederick Lazarus. The other had the advantage of offering efficiency apartments by the week. He reserved a two-week block. But for this second hotel, he used Richard Lively’s Visa card.

He closed Frederick Lazarus’s Mailboxes Etc. mail drop, leaving a forwarding address of the second-to-last hotel.

The final thing he did was pack his weapon and extra ammunition and several changes of clothing into a bag, and return to Rent-A-Wreck. As before, he rented a modest, dated car. But on this occasion, he was careful to leave more of a trail.

“That has unlimited mileage, right?” he asked the clerk. “Because I need to drive to New York City, and I don’t want to get stuck with some ten cent per mile charge…”

The clerk was a college-aged kid, obviously starting up a summer job, and already, with only a few days in the office, bored out of his head. “Right. Unlimited mileage. As far as we’re concerned, you can drive to California and back.”

“No, business in Manhattan,” Ricky repeated deliberately. “I’m going to put my business address in the city down on the rental agreement.” Ricky wrote the name and telephone number of the first of the hotels where he’d made a reservation for Frederick Lazarus.

The clerk eyed Ricky’s jeans and sport shirt. “Sure. Business. Whatever.”

“And if I have to extend my stay…”

“There’s a number on the rental agreement. Just call. We’ll charge your credit card for extra, but we need to have a record, otherwise after forty-eight hours, we call the cops and report the car stolen.”

“Don’t want that.”

“Who would?” replied the clerk.

“There’s just one other thing,” Ricky said, slowly, choosing his words with some caution.

“What’s that?” the clerk answered.

“I left a message with my friend to rent a car here, as well. You know-good rates, good, solid vehicles, no hassle like with the big rental companies…”

“Sure,” said the kid, as if he was surprised anyone would waste their time having any opinions whatsoever about rental vehicles.

“But I’m not totally sure he got the message right…”

“Who?”

“My friend. He does a lot of business traveling, like I do, so he’s always on the lookout for a good deal.”

“So?”

“So,” said Ricky carefully, “if he should happen to come in here in the next couple of days, checking to see whether this is the place where I rented my car, you be sure to steer him right, and give him a good deal, okay?”

The clerk nodded. “If I’m on duty…”

“You’re here during the day, right?”

The clerk nodded again, making a motion that seemed to indicate being stuck behind a counter during the first warm days of summer was something akin to being in prison, which, Ricky thought, it probably was.

“So, chances are, you’re going to be the guy he’ll see.”

“Chances are.”

“So, if he asks about me, you just tell him I took off on business. In New York City. He’ll know my schedule.”

The clerk shrugged. “No problem, if he asks. Otherwise…”

“Sure. Just if someone comes in asking, you’ll know it’s my friend.”

“Does he have a name?” the clerk asked.

Ricky smiled. “Sure. R. S. Skin. Easy to remember. Mr. R. Skin.”

On the drive down Route 95 toward New York City, Ricky stopped at three separate shopping malls, all located right off the highway. One was just below Boston, the other two in Connecticut near Bridgeport and New Haven. At each of the malls, he wandered idly down the central corridors amid the rows of clothing stores and chocolate cookie outlets until he found a location selling cellular telephones. By the time he’d finished shopping, Ricky had acquired five different cell phones, all in the name of Frederick Lazarus, all promising hundreds of free minutes and cheap long distance rates. The phones were with four different companies, and although each salesman filling out the year-long purchase and use agreement asked Ricky whether he had any other cell accounts, none bothered to double-check after he told them he didn’t. Ricky took all the extras on each phone, with caller ID and call waiting and as many services as he could collect, which made the salesmen eager to complete the orders.

He also stopped at a strip mall, where, after a little searching, he was able to find a large office warehouse outlet. There he purchased himself a relatively cheap laptop computer and the necessary hardware to accompany it. He also bought a bag to place it in.

It was early evening, when he arrived at the first of the hotels. He left his rental car at an outdoor lot over by the Hudson River, in the West ’50s, then took a subway to the hotel, located in Chinatown. He checked in with a desk clerk named Ralph who had suffered from runaway acne as a child, and wore the pockmarked scars on his cheeks, giving him a sunken, nasty appearance. Ralph had little to say, other than to look mildly surprised when the credit card in Frederick Lazarus’s name actually worked. The word reservation also surprised him. Ricky thought it wasn’t the sort of place that got many reservations. A prostitute working the room down the hall from Ricky smiled at him, suggesting and inviting in the same glance, but he shook his head and opened up the door to his room. It was as desultory a spot as Ricky guessed it would be. It was also the type of place where the mere fact that Ricky walked in with no bags, and then walked out again, fifteen minutes later, wouldn’t gather much attention.

He took another subway over to the last of the hotels on his list, where he had his efficiency apartment rented. Here, he became Richard Lively, although he was quiet and monosyllabic with the man behind that desk. He drew as little attention to himself as possible, as he headed up to the room.

He went out once that night to a deli for some sandwich makings and a couple of sodas. The rest of the night he spent in quiet, planning, except for a single sortie out at midnight.

A passing shower had left the street glistening. Yellow streetlamps threw arcs of wan light across the black macadam. There was a little heat in the nighttime air, a thickness that spoke of the summer to come. He stared down the sidewalk, and thought that he’d never really been aware how many shadows there were at midnight in Manhattan. Then he guessed that he was one, as well.

He crossed town, walking blocks rapidly, until he found an isolated pay telephone. It was time, he thought, to check his messages.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A siren creased the nighttime air perhaps a block away from the pay phone where Ricky stood. He couldn’t tell whether it was the police or an ambulance. Fire trucks, he knew, had a deeper, blaring sound, unmistakable in raucous energy. But police and ambulances sounded much the same. For a moment, he thought that there were few noises on the earth that spelled out the promise of trouble quite as much as siren sounds. Something unsettling and fierce, as if compromise and hope were being reduced by the harshness of the sound. He waited until the racket faded into the darkness, and the Manhattan standard quiet returned: just the steady noise of cars and buses working their way on the streets and the occasional rumble below the surface of a subway careening through the subterranean tunnels that crisscrossed the city.

He dialed the number at the Village Voice and accessed the replies to his personal ad at box 1313. There were nearly three dozen.

The majority were come-ons and promises of sexual adventure. Most of the respondents mentioned Ricky’s “… special fun and games” from his ad, which seemed to speak, as he suspected it would, in a particular direction. A number of people had concocted rhyming couplets to accompany his own, but, again, these promised sex and energy. He could hear unbridled eagerness in their voices.

The thirtieth, as he’d expected, was far different. The voice was cold, almost flat, filled with menace. It also had a metallic, tinny sound to it, making it seem nearly mechanical. Ricky guessed that the speaker was using an electronic masking device. But there was no concealing the psychological thrust of the reply.

Ricky’s clever, Ricky’s smart…

But here’s a rhyme he should take to heart:

He thinks he’s safe, he wants to play,

But where he hid, is where he should stay.

He escaped once, impressive, no doubt.

But this success, he shouldn’t flout.

A second chance, another game,

Will likely just end up the same.

Only this time the debt owed me,

Will be paid in full, this I guarantee.

Ricky listened to the response three times, until it was well printed on his memory. There was something additional about the sound of the voice that unsettled him, as if the words spoken weren’t enough, even the tones were filled with hatred. But, beyond that, it seemed to him that there was something recognizable in the voice, almost familiar, that seeped past the hollowness of the masking device. This thought pierced him, especially when he realized that this was the first time that he’d actually heard Rumplestiltskin speak. Every other bit of contact had been a step removed, on paper, or repeated by Merlin or Virgil. Hearing the man’s voice created nightmarish visions within him, and Ricky shuddered slightly. He told himself not to underestimate the depth of the challenge he’d created for himself.

He played the other message responses in the mailbox, knowing that there would eventually be another, far more familiar voice. He was not surprised to hear her speak. Immediately following the silence that accompanied the brief poem, Ricky heard Virgil’s voice on the recording. He listened carefully for the nuances that might tell him something.

“Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, how nice to hear from you. How truly special. And genuinely surprising, too, I might add…”

“Sure,” Ricky mumbled to himself. “I’ll bet it was.” He continued to listen, as the young woman went on. The tones she employed were the same as before, tough one instant, cajoling, teasing, then harsh and uncompromising. Virgil, Ricky thought, played this game just as hard as did her employer. Her danger lay in the chameleon colors she adopted; one minute trying to be helpful, the next, angry and direct. If Rumplestiltskin was singleness of purpose, cold and focused, Virgil was mercurial. And Merlin, whom he’d yet to hear from, was like an accountant, passionless, with all the iron danger that implied.

“… How you escaped, well, that certainly has some people in important circles reviewing their approach to things, I must say. A head to toe reexamination of what was thought to be the case. Shows just how elusive the truth can be, doesn’t it, Ricky? I warned them, you know. I really did. I told them, ‘Ricky’s a very clever sort. Intuitive and fast-thinking… ‘ but they didn’t want to believe me. They thought you would be as stupid and careless as all the others. And now look where it has landed us. Why, you are the very alpha and omega of loose ends, Ricky. The pièce de résistance. Very dangerous for all connected, I would suspect…”

She sighed, deeply, as if her own words told her something. Then she continued:

“Well, personally, I can’t imagine why you want to go another round or two with Mr. R. I would have thought watching your deeply beloved summer home go up in flames-that was a genuinely nice touch, Ricky, a really smooth and wonderfully smart move. Burning up all that happiness along with all those memories, I mean, what other message could there have been for us? From a psychoanalyst, no less. Didn’t see that one coming, not in the slightest-but, I would have guessed that experience alone would have taught you that Mr. R. is a very difficult man to best in any contest, especially contests that he designs himself. You should have stayed where you were, Ricky, under whatever rock you found to hide yourself. Or perhaps you should run now. Run and hide forever. Start digging a hole someplace distant and far away and cold and dark and then keep on digging. Because my suspicion is that Mr. R. will need better proof of victory this time around. Very conclusive proof… He’s a very thorough individual. Or so I’m told…”

Virgil’s voice disappeared, as if she’d hung up her telephone abruptly. He listened to an electronic hissing noise, then accessed the subsequent telephone message. It was Virgil for a second time.

“So, Ricky, I’d hate to see you have to repeat the outcome of the first game, but if that’s what it’s going to take, well, the choice is yours. What is the ‘new game’ you speak of, and what are the rules? I’ll be reading my Village Voice with greater care now. And my employer is-well, eager doesn’t exactly seem like the right word, Ricky. Champing at the bit, like some racehorse, perhaps. So, Ricky, we await the opening move.”

Ricky hung up the telephone and said out loud, “It’s already happened.”

Foxes and hounds, he thought. Think like the fox. Need to leave a trail so you know where they are, but stay just far enough ahead so to avoid capture and detection. And then, he thought, lead them directly into the briar patch.

In the morning, Ricky took the subway uptown to the first of the hotels where he’d checked in, but not stayed. He returned the room key to a disinterested clerk reading a pornographic magazine called Large Ladies of Love behind the counter. The man had an undeniable seediness to him, with ill-fitting clothes, a pockmarked face, and a lip marred by a scar. Ricky thought that you couldn’t have found a better choice for the room clerk at that particular hotel in central casting. The man took the key with hardly a word, more or less engrossed by the bulk displayed in vibrant and explicit color on the pages in front of him.

“Hey,” Ricky said, getting the barest bit of attention response from the clerk. “Hey, there’s a chance a man might come looking for me with a package.”

The clerk nodded, but still not particularly focused, preferring, obviously, the cavorting creatures of the magazine.

“Package means something,” Ricky persisted.

“Sure,” said the clerk. A reply only the barest step beyond ignoring everything Ricky was saying.

Ricky smiled. He couldn’t have defined a conversation better suited for what he intended. He glanced around, determining that they were alone in the drab and threadbare lobby, then he reached into his jacket pocket, and keeping his hands below the counter front, removed his semi-automatic pistol and chambered a round, making a distinctive sound.

The clerk abruptly looked up, his eyes widening slightly.

Ricky grinned nastily in his direction. “You know that sound, don’t you, asshole?”

The clerk left his hands out in front of him, flat on the table. “Perhaps I have your attention, now?” Ricky asked.

“I’m listening,” the man replied.

Ricky thought he seemed practiced at the art of being robbed or threatened.

“So, let me try again,” Ricky said. “A man with a package. For me. He comes asking, you’re gonna give him this number. Take hold of that pencil and write this down: 212-555-2798. That’s where he can reach me. Got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

“Make him give you a fifty,” Ricky said. “Maybe a hundred. It’s worth it.”

The man looked sullen, but nodded. “What if I ain’t here?” he asked. “Suppose the night guy is here?”

“You want the hundred, you be here,” Ricky answered. He paused, then added, “Now, here’s the tricky part. Anyone else comes asking. I mean anyone, right. Anyone who doesn’t have a package-well, you make sure to tell that person that you don’t know where I went, or who I am or anything. Not one word. No help at all. Got it?”

“Man with the package only. Right. What’s in the package?”

“You don’t want to know. And you sure as hell don’t really expect me to tell you.”

This answer seemed to speak volumes.

“Suppose I don’t see no package. How ’m I supposed to know it’s the right guy?”

Ricky nodded. “You got a point, buddy,” he said. “Tell you what. You ask him how he knows Mr. Lazarus, and he’ll reply something like, ‘Everyone knows that Lazarus rose on the third day.’ Then you can give out the number, like I said. You do this right, probably more than a hundred in it.”

“The third day. Lazarus rose. Sounds like some kind of Bible stuff.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. I got it.”

“Good,” Ricky said, returning the weapon to his pocket, after lowering the hammer down to rest with a clicking noise as distinctive as the chambering sound which lifted it. “I’m glad we had this little conversation. I feel much better about my stay here, now.” Ricky smiled at the clerk and pointed at the pornographic magazine. “Don’t let me keep you from advancing your education any longer,” he said, as he turned to leave.

There was, of course, no man with any package looking for Ricky. Someone different would arrive at the hotel soon, he thought. And, in all likelihood, the clerk would give all the relevant information to the person who came looking for him, especially when presented with the polar suggestions created by cash or bodily harm, which Ricky was certain Mr. R. or Merlin or Virgil, or whoever was sent, would employ in relatively short order. And then after the clerk had relayed the replies that Ricky had planted, Rumplestiltskin would have something to think about. A package that doesn’t exist. Containing some information that was equally nonexistent. Delivered to a person who never was. Ricky liked that. Give him something to worry about that was utter fiction.

He headed across town to check in at the next of his hotels.

In decor, this hotel was much the same as the first, which reassured him. An inattentive and desultory clerk seated behind a large, scarred, wooden desk. A room that was singularly simple, depressing, and threadbare. He had passed two women, short skirts, glossy makeup, spiked heels and black net stockings, unmistakable in their profession, hanging in the hallway, who had eyed him with financial eagerness as he cruised past. He had shaken his head in their direction when one of them had offered an inviting glance his way. He heard one of them remark, “Cop…” and then they left, which surprised him. He thought he was doing a good job of at least visually accommodating the world he’d descended into. But perhaps, Ricky thought to himself, it is harder to shed where one has been in his life than he thought. You wear who you are both inwardly and outwardly.

He plopped down on the bed, feeling the springs sag beneath him. The walls were thin, and he could hear the results of one of the women’s coworkers’ success filtering through the plasterboard, a series of moans and bangs, as the bed was used to advantage. Had he not been so directed, he would have been singularly depressed by the sounds and smells-a faint odor of urine seeping through the air passages. But the milieu was precisely what Ricky wanted. He needed Rumplestiltskin to think that Ricky had somehow become familiar with the netherworld, just as Mr. R. was.

There was a telephone beside the bed, and Ricky pulled it toward him.

The first call he made was to the broker who had handled his modest investment accounts when he was still alive. He reached the man’s secretary.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ricky said. “My name is Diogenes…” He spelled the Greek out for the woman slowly, said, “Write that down,” then continued, “and I represent Mister Frederick Lazarus, who is the executor of the estate of the late Doctor Frederick Starks. Please be advised that the substantial irregularities concerning his financial situation prior to his unfortunate death are now under our investigation.”

“I believe our security people looked into that situation…”

“Not to our satisfaction. I wanted you to know we would be sending someone around to inspect those records and eventually find those missing funds so that they may be distributed to their rightful owners. People are very upset with the way this was handled, I might add.”

“I see, but who…” The secretary was momentarily flustered, put off by the clipped, authoritarian tones that Ricky employed.

“Diogenes is the name. Please keep that in mind. I’ll be in touch in the next day or so. Please inform your employer to collect all relevant records of all transactions, especially the wire and electronic transfers, so that we won’t be wasting time at our appointment. I will not be accompanied by the SEC detectives on this initial examination, but that might become necessary in the future. It’s a matter of cooperation, you see.”

Ricky guessed that the initials so cavalierly used as a threat would have an immediate and significant impact. No broker likes hearing about SEC investigators.

“I think you’d better speak with-”

He interrupted the secretary. “Certainly. When I call back in the next day or so. I have an appointment, and another series of calls to make on this matter, so I will say goodbye. Thank you.”

And with that, he hung up, an evil sense of satisfaction creeping into his heart. He did not think that his onetime broker, a boring man intrigued only by money and making it or losing it, would recognize the name of the character who wandered the ancient world fruitlessly searching for an honest man. But Ricky did know someone who would instantly understand it.

His next call was to the head of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

He had met the doctor only once or twice in the past at the sort of medical establishment gatherings that he’d tried so hard to avoid, and had thought him then to be a priggish and wildly conceited Freudian, given to speaking even to his colleagues in long silences, and vacant pauses. The man was a veteran New York psychoanalyst, and had treated many famous people with the techniques of couch and quiet, and somehow had added all those prominent treatments into an exaggerated sense of self-importance, as if having an Oscar-winning actor or Pulitzer Prize-winning author or multimillionaire financier on the couch actually made him into a better therapist or a better human being. Ricky, who had lived and practiced in so much isolation and loneliness right up to his suicide, did not think that there was the remotest chance that the man would recognize his voice, and so he did not even attempt to alter it.

He waited until it was nine minutes before the hour. He knew that the best likelihood of the doctor picking up his own telephone was right at the break between patients.

The phone was answered on the second ring. A flat, gruff, no-nonsense voice that dropped even a greeting from the reply: “This is Doctor Roth…”

“Doctor,” Ricky said slowly, “I’m delighted to have reached you. This is Mr. Diogenes. I represent Mr. Frederick Lazarus, who is the executor for the estate of the late Doctor Frederick Starks.”

“How may I help you?” Roth interrupted. Ricky paused, a bit of silence that would make the doctor uncomfortable, more or less the same technique the man was accustomed to using himself.

“We are interested in knowing precisely how the complaints against the late Doctor Starks were resolved,” Ricky said with an aggressiveness that surprised himself.

“The complaints?”

“Yes. The complaints. As you are completely aware, shortly before his death, there were some charges made against him concerning sexual impropriety with a female patient. We are interested in learning how that investigation of those allegations was resolved.”

“I don’t know that there was any official resolution,” Roth said briskly. “Certainly none on the part of the Psychoanalytic Society. When Doctor Starks killed himself, it rendered further inquiry pointless.”

“Really?” Ricky said. “Did it occur to you, or anyone else in the society you head up, that perhaps his suicide was prompted by the unfairness and the falseness of those allegations, instead of his suicide being some sort of verification by self-murder?”

Roth paused. “We, of course, considered that likelihood,” he answered.

Sure you did, Ricky thought. Liar.

“Would it surprise you, doctor, to learn that the young woman who made the allegations has subsequently disappeared?”

“I beg your pardon…”

“She never returned for follow-up therapy with the physician in Boston whom she made the initial charges to.”

“That is curious…”

“And that his efforts to locate her turned up the unsettling fact that her identity-who she claimed to be, doctor-was fake.”

“A fake?”

“And it was further learned that her charges were part of a hoax. Did you know this, doctor?”

“But no, no, I didn’t… as I said, we didn’t follow up, after the suicide…”

“In other words, you washed your hands of the entire matter.”

“It was turned over to the proper authorities…”

“But that suicide certainly saved you and your profession a great deal of negative and embarrassing publicity, did it not?”

“I don’t know-well, of course, but…”

“Did it occur to you that perhaps the heirs of Doctor Starks would want his reputation restored? That exoneration, even after death, might be important to them?”

“I did not consider that.”

“Do you know you could be considered liable for that death?”

This statement drew a predictable, blustery response. “Not in the slightest! We didn’t-”

Ricky interrupted. “There are more sorts of liability in this world than legal, are there not, doctor?”

He liked this question. It went to the core of what a psychoanalyst is all about. He could envision the man on the other end of the telephone line shifting about uncomfortably in his chair. Perhaps a little sweat formed on his forehead or dripped down beneath his armpits.

“Of course, but…”

“But no one in the society really wanted to know the truth, did they? It was better if it just disappeared into the ocean with Doctor Starks, correct?”

“I don’t think I should answer any more questions, Mr. uh…”

“Of course not. Not at this moment. Perhaps at a later time. But it is curious, isn’t it, doctor?”

“What?”

“That truth is far stronger than death.”

With that statement, Ricky hung up the phone.

He lay back on the bed, staring up at the white ceiling and a bare lightbulb. He could feel some of his own sweat beneath his arms, as if he’d exerted himself in that conversation, but it wasn’t a nervous dampness, rather a wet and satisfactory righteousness. In the next room, the couple had started up again, and for a moment he listened to the unmistakable rhythms of sex, finding it amusing and not altogether unpleasurable. More than one person having a little workday amusement, he thought. After a moment, he rose and searched around until he found a small pad of paper in the bedside table desk drawer and a cheap ballpoint pen.

On the paper, he wrote the names and numbers of the two men he had just called. Beneath those, he wrote the words: Money. Reputation. He placed check marks by these words, then wrote, the name of the third seedy hotel where he had a reservation. Beneath that, he scribbled the word: Home.

Then he crumpled the paper up and threw it into a metal wastebasket. He doubted that the room was cleaned all that regularly and thought there was a better than even chance that whoever came searching for him there would find it. Regardless, they would undoubtedly be clever enough to check the telephone records for that room, which would turn up the numbers he had just dialed. Connecting numbers to conversations wasn’t all that difficult.

The best game to play, he thought, is the game you don’t realize you are playing.

Chapter Thirty

Ricky found an army-navy surplus store on his walk across the city, where he purchased a few items that he thought he might need for the next stage of the game he had in mind. These included a small crowbar, an inexpensive bicycle lock, some surgical gloves, a miniflashlight, a roll of gray-colored duct tape, and the cheapest pair of binoculars that they had. As an after-thought, he also bought a modest squeeze spray container of Ben’s Bug Juice, with one hundred percent DEET, which, he thought ruefully, was about as close to poison as he’d ever considered putting on his body. It was an odd collection of items, he realized, but he wasn’t certain precisely what the task he had in mind would require, and so he obtained a variety to compensate for his uncertainty.

Early that afternoon, he returned to his room and packed these, along with his pistol and two of his newly acquired cell phones, into a small backpack. He used the third cell phone to call the next hotel on his list, the one he had not checked into yet. There he left an urgent message for Frederick Lazarus to return the call as soon as he checked in. He gave the cell phone number to a clerk, then thrust that phone into an outside pocket of the knapsack, after carefully marking it with a pen. When he reached his rental car, he took out the phone and gruffly called the hotel a second time, leaving yet another urgent message for himself. He did this three more times as he drove out of the city, heading toward New Jersey, each time growing more strident and more insistent that Mr. Lazarus get back to him instantly, as he had important information to pass on.

After the third message on that cell phone, he pulled into the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the Jersey turnpike. He went into the men’s room, washed his hands, and left the telephone on the edge of the sink. He noted that several teenagers passed him on his way out, heading to the bathroom. He thought there was the likelihood that they would grab the phone and start using it pretty quickly, which was what he wanted.

It was on the edge of evening when he arrived in West Windsor. The traffic had been crowded the entire length of the turnpike, cars lined up a length or two apart, traveling at excessive rates of speed, until everything slowed to a horn-honking, raised-voices, overheated crawl past an accident near Exit 11. Rubbernecking further limited the pace, as cars maneuvered past two ambulances, a half-dozen state police cars, and the twisted, impact-shredded shells of two compact cars. He could see a man in a white shirt and tie sitting in a half crouch by the breakdown lane, his head in his hands, obscuring his face. As Ricky crept past, the first of the ambulances took off, its siren starting up insistently, and Ricky saw a state trooper with a measuring wheel start to walk a skid mark on the highway. Another was poised by flares stuck in the black macadam surface, waving people on, wearing a solid, stern, and disapproving look, as if curiosity, that most human of emotions, was somehow out of place, or inappropriate at this moment, when, in actuality, it was merely inconvenient for him. Ricky thought that an analyst’s sort of insight, as telling about who he’d once been, was like the current glare on the trooper’s face.

He found a diner along Route One not far from Princeton where he stopped and killed some time eating a cheeseburger and fries that were actually cooked by a person and not by machines and timers. The day was stretched long with June light, and when he emerged there was still some time before darkness settled in. He drove over to the grave site where he’d been two weeks earlier. The old caretaker was gone, which he’d counted on. He was fortunate that the entrance to the cemetery wasn’t locked or barred, so he pulled the rental car over behind the small white clapboard storage shack, and left it there, more or less concealed from the roadway and certainly appearing innocuous enough to anyone who might spot it.

Before slinging the backpack over his shoulder, Ricky took the time to slather himself in the Ben’s Bug Juice and don the surgical gloves. These wouldn’t conceal his scent, he knew, but at least they would help keep off the deer ticks. The daylight was beginning to fade, turning the New Jersey sky a sickly gray-brown, as if the edges of the world had been burned by the heat from the afternoon. Ricky threw the backpack over his shoulder, and with a single glance down the deserted rural road, started jogging toward the kennel where he knew the information he needed was waiting. There was still plenty of warmth rising above the black macadam, and it crept into his lungs rapidly. He was breathing hard, but he knew it wasn’t from the exertion of running.

He turned off the roadway and ducked beneath the canopy of trees, sliding past the kennel sign and the picture of the barrel-chested Rottweiler. Then he stepped off the driveway, into the shrub brush and greenery that hid the kennel from the highway, and carefully picked his way closer to the home and the pens. Still hidden by the foliage, staying back in the first dark shadows of the approaching night, Ricky removed the binoculars from the backpack and used them to survey the exterior, taking a better look at the layout than he had during his first, truncated visit there.

His eyes went first to the pen beside the main entrance, where he spotted Brutus on his feet and pacing back and forth nervously. He smells the DEET, Ricky thought. And behind that, my scent. But he doesn’t know what to make of it yet. For the dog, it was still simply in the category of out of the ordinary. He hadn’t yet approached close enough to be considered a threat. For a moment, he envied the dog’s simpler world, defined by smells and instincts and uncluttered by the vagaries of emotions.

Sweeping the glasses in an arc, Ricky saw a light click on inside the main house. He watched steadily for a minute or two, then saw the unmistakable wan glow of a television set fill a room near the front. The kennel office a little ways to his left remained dark, and, he guessed, locked. He made a final visual survey and saw a large rectangular spotlight near the roofline of the house. He guessed that it was motion-activated and that the field of range was directly in front of the house. Ricky replaced the glasses in his bag, and maneuvered parallel to the home, staying on the fringe of the underbrush, until he reached the edge of the property. A quick sprint would get him to the front of the kennel office, and perhaps would keep him away from triggering the exterior lights.

Not only Brutus was aroused by his presence. Some of the other dogs in their pens were moving around, sniffing the air. A few had barked nervously once or twice. Unsettled and unsure by a scent that was new.

Ricky knew precisely what he wanted to do, and thought that as a plan, it had virtues. Whether he could pull it off or not, he didn’t know. He was aware of one thing, which was that up to this point he’d only skirted illegality. This was a step of a different sort. Ricky was aware of another detail: For a man who liked to play games, Rumplestiltskin had no rules. At least none that were constrained by any morality that he was familiar with. Ricky knew that even if Mr. R. didn’t yet realize it, he was about to enter a little deeper into that arena.

He took a deep breath. The old Ricky would never have imagined being in this position, he thought. The new Ricky felt a single-minded, and coldhearted purpose. He whispered to himself: “What I was, isn’t what I am. And what I am, isn’t yet what I can be.” He wondered whether he had ever been anything that he was, or anything he was about to become. A complicated question, he told himself. He smiled inwardly. A question that once upon a time you might have spent hours, days, on the couch, examining. No more. He shunted it away deep within him.

Lifting his eyes to the sky, he saw that the day’s last light had finally slid away, and darkness was only moments from descending. It is the most unsettled time of day, he thought, and perfect for what he was about to deliver.

With that in mind, Ricky removed the small crowbar and the bicycle lock, and placed them in his right hand, gripping them tightly. Then he returned the backpack to his back, took a deep breath, and burst from the bushes, sprinting hard for the front of the building.

A bedlam of aroused dogs instantly creased the growing shadows. Yelps, howls, barks, and growls of all sorts and sizes pierced the air, obscuring the scrabbling sound his running shoes made against the gravel driveway. He was peripherally aware that all the animals were racing about in their small pen enclosures, twisting and turning with sudden dog excitement. A world of spastic marionettes, strings pulled by confusion.

Within a few seconds, he’d reached the front of Brutus’s kennel. The huge dog seemed to be the only animal at the kennel with any sort of composure and his was filled with menace. He was pacing back and forth across the cement floor, but stopped when Ricky reached the gate. For a second, Brutus eyed Ricky, his mouth open in a growl, his teeth bared. Then, with shocking speed, the dog leaped across the area, throwing all hundred-plus pounds against the chain-link fencing that kept him contained. The force of the attack nearly knocked Ricky over. Brutus fell back, now frothing with rage, then again thrust at the steel chains, his teeth clacking against the metal.

Ricky moved quickly, rapidly threading the bicycle lock around the twin posts of the kennel door, snatching his hands back before the animal had time to seize one, then securing it, spinning the lock combination and dropping it. Brutus immediately tore at the black rubber-encased steel of the chain. “Screw you,” Ricky whispered in a mocking tough guy accent. “At least you ain’t going nowhere.” Then he rose up and jumped over to the front of the kennel office. He thought he had only a few seconds left before the owner finally responded to the growing racket and din of arousal. Ricky assumed the man would be armed, but wasn’t sure of this. Perhaps his confidence in Brutus at his side would minimize his own need for weapons.

He thrust the crowbar into the doorjamb and snapped out the lock with a creaking, splintering noise as the wood broke. It was old, and showed some warping with age and broke easily. Ricky guessed that the kennel owner didn’t keep much of value in the office anyway, and didn’t really envision a burglar testing Brutus. The door swung open, and Ricky stepped inside. He swung the backpack around to his front, stuffed the crowbar inside and removed his pistol, quickly chambering a round.

Inside was an opera of dog anxiety. The racket filled the air, making it hard to think, but giving Ricky an idea. Clicking on his flashlight, he raced down the musty, foul-smelling corridor where all the dogs were penned, stopping to open each cage as he ran past.

Within seconds, Ricky was surrounded by a leaping, barking tangle of breeds. Some were terrified, some were overjoyed. Smelling, yelping, confused but all aware they were free. Some three dozen dogs, of all different shapes and sizes, unsure what was happening, but more or less determined to be a part of it nonetheless. Ricky was counting on that basic dog-think that doesn’t really understand all that much, but wants to be included in whatever is happening nevertheless. The sniffing and snuffling that flowed around and between his legs made him smile right through the nervousness of what he was doing. Surrounded by the pack of leaping, bouncing animals, Ricky returned to the kennel office. He was waving his arms, shooing the animals along, like some wildly impatient Moses at the edge of the Red Sea.

He saw the floodlight click on outdoors and heard a door slamming.

The kennel owner, he thought, finally roused by the racket, wondering what the hell has gotten into all the animals and not yet fully understanding that there might be a threat involved. Ricky counted to ten. Enough time for the man to approach Brutus’s pen. He heard a second noise, above the roused dogs: The man was trying to open the Rottweiler’s cage. A rattle of chain metal links and then a curse, as the man slowly grasped that the cage wasn’t about to open.

It was at that moment that Ricky threw open the front door to the kennel office.

“Okay, guys, you’re free,” he said, waving his arms. Nearly three dozen dogs bolted through the door, heading toward the warm New Jersey night, their voices raised in a confused song of joyous freedom.

He heard the kennel owner swearing wildly, and then Ricky stepped out into the darkness himself, remaining in a shadow at the edge of the spotlight’s arc.

The man had been bowled over by the rush of animals, knocked back and down to one knee by the wave of dogs. He scrambled up, partially regaining his feet, searching for his balance. He was trying to catch them at the same time that they were jumping all over him, knocking him about. A welter of mixed beastly emotions-some dogs afraid, some joyous, some confused, all uncertain what was going on, knowing only that it was far out of the ordinary routine of kennel life, and eager to take advantage of it, whatever it was. Ricky smiled wickedly. It was, Ricky surmised, a pretty effective distraction.

When the kennel owner looked up, what he saw just behind the leaping, snuffling, tangled mass of animals was Ricky’s pistol leveled at his face. He gasped, rocking backward in surprise, as if the hole at the end of the barrel was as forceful as the flood of dogs.

“Are you alone?” Ricky asked just loud enough to reach past the dogs’ barking.

“Huh?”

“Are you alone? Is there anyone else in the house?”

The man caught on. He shook his head.

“Is Brutus’s buddy in the house? His brother or mother or father?”

“No. Just me.”

Ricky thrust the pistol closer to the man, close enough so that the pungent odor of steel and oil and maybe death could fill his nostrils, without needing to own a dog’s sensitive nose to understand what the potential was. “Persuading me that you’re telling the truth is important to staying alive,” Ricky said. He was a little surprised at how easy it was to threaten someone, but he had no illusion that he would be able to call his own bluff.

Behind the steel fencing, Brutus was in a paroxysm of fury. He continued to thrust himself at the metal, his teeth pressed up against the barrier. Foam streaked his jowls and his growl singed the air. Ricky eyed the dog warily. A hard thing, he thought, to be bred and raised for one single purpose, and then, when that moment came where all that training was supposed to coalesce, to be restrained by the frustration of a gate locked by a child’s bicycle chain. The dog seemed to be almost overwhelmed by impotence, and Ricky thought that it was a little bit of a microcosm for the lives of some of his ex-patients.

“It’s just me. Nobody else.”

“Good. Now we can have a conversation.”

“Who are you?” the man asked. It took a second for Ricky to remember that he’d been wearing a disguise on his first visit to the kennel. He rubbed his hand across his cheek.

I’m someone you’re going to wish you’d been more pleasant to on our first meeting, Ricky thought, but what he said was: “I’m someone you would probably rather not know,” simultaneously gesturing at the man’s face with his weapon.

It took a few seconds for Ricky to get the kennel owner where he wanted him, which was seated on the ground, with his back up against the gate to Brutus’s pen, hands out on his knees where Ricky could see them. The other dogs were wary of getting too close to the furious Rottweiler. By now, some had disappeared into the darkness and the countryside, others had collected near the owner’s feet, and still others were jumping about, playing with one another, on the gravel driveway.

“I still don’t know who you are,” the man said. He was squinting up at Ricky, trying to place him. The combination of the shadows, and the change in appearance worked to Ricky’s advantage. “What’s all this about? I don’t keep any cash here, and…”

“This isn’t a robbery, unless you think of taking information as a theft, which I used to imagine was in some ways the same,” Ricky answered cryptically.

The man shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said flatly. “What do you want?”

“A while ago, a private detective came to see you with a few questions.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“I would like the same questions answered.”

“Who are you?” the man asked again.

“I told you. But right now, all you really need to know is that I’m a man with a gun, and you’re not. And the sole means you have of defending yourself is locked behind a fence and feeling pretty damn bad about it, too, from the looks of him.”

The kennel owner nodded, but seemed, in those few moments, to gain a wary confidence and a good deal of composure. “You don’t sound much like the type who will use that thing. So maybe I won’t say a damn thing about whatever it is you’re so damn interested in. Screw you, whoever you are.”

“I want to know about the couple that died and are buried down the road there. And how you acquired this place. And especially the three kids that they adopted, that you said they didn’t. And I would like to know about the phone call that you made after my friend Lazarus came to visit you the other day. Who did you call?”

The man shook his head. “I’ll tell you this: I got paid to make that call. And it was also worth my business to try to keep that guy here, whoever the hell he was. Too bad he split. I woulda had a bonus.”

“From who?”

The man shook his head. “My business, mister tough guy. Like I said, screw you.”

Ricky leveled the pistol at the man’s face. The kennel owner grinned. “I’ve seen guys who will use that thing, and fella, I’m betting you ain’t one of ’em.” There was a little bit of the nervous gambler in his voice. Ricky knew the man wasn’t completely certain one way or the other.

The gun remained steady in Ricky’s hand. He sighted down to a spot between the kennel owner’s eyes. The longer he held his position, the more uncomfortable the man seemed, which, Ricky thought, wasn’t unreasonable. He could see sweat on the man’s forehead. But, in the same respect, Ricky thought, every second he delayed buttressed the man’s reading of him. He thought to himself that he might yet need to become a killer, but didn’t know if he could kill someone other than the primary target. Someone merely extraneous and ancillary, even if obnoxious. Ricky considered this for a second, then smiled coldly at the kennel owner. There’s a noticeable difference, Ricky thought, between shooting the man who ruined your life, and shooting some cog in that machine.

“You know,” he said slowly, “you’re one hundred percent right. I haven’t really been in this position all that much. It’s pretty clear, to you, is it, that I don’t have a great deal of experience in this area?”

“Yeah,” the man said. “It’s damn clear.” He shifted his position slightly, as if he was relaxing.

“Maybe,” Ricky said with a singularly flat voice, “I should practice some.”

“What?”

“I said I should practice. I mean, how do I really know I will be able to use this thing on you, until I give it a bit of a workout on something a little less meaningful. Maybe significantly less meaningful.”

“I still don’t follow,” the kennel owner said.

“Sure you do,” Ricky answered. “You’re just not concentrating. What I’m telling you is that I’m not an animal lover.”

As he said this, he lifted the pistol slightly, and keeping all the hours on the practice range up in New Hampshire in mind, Ricky slowly took in a deep breath, calmed himself utterly, and squeezed the trigger a single time.

The gun bucked harshly in his hand. A single report scoured the air. It whined into the darkness.

Ricky guessed that the bullet struck a bit of the fencing and split apart. He could not tell if the Rottweiler was hit or not. The kennel owner looked astonished, almost as if he’d been slapped, and he covered one ear with a hand, checking to see whether the bullet had sliced him as it raced past.

Dog bedlam returned to the yard, a siren of combined howling, barking, racing about. Brutus, the only animal confined, understood the threat he faced, and once again threw himself savagely at the chain links barring his path.

“Musta missed,” Ricky said nonchalantly. “Damn. And to think I’m such a good shot.”

He sighted down the pistol at the frantic, furious dog.

“Jesus Christ!” the kennel owner finally spat out.

Ricky smiled again. “Not here. Not now. Why, I daresay, this has nothing to do with religion. The more important issue is: Do you love your dog, there?”

“Christ! Hang on!” The kennel owner was nearly as frantic as the other animals tearing around the driveway. He held up his hand, as if to make Ricky pause.

Ricky eyed him with the same curiosity one might have if an insect started begging for its life before being subjected to a slap from the palm of one’s hand. Interested, but insignificant.

“Just hang on for a second!” the man insisted.

“You have something to say?” Ricky asked.

“Yes, damn it! Just hang on.”

“I’m waiting.”

“That dog is worth thousands,” the kennel owner said. “He’s the alpha male, and I’ve spent hours, Christ, half my fucking life training him. He’s a goddamn champion and you’re gonna shoot him?”

“Don’t see that you give me much alternative. I could shoot you, but then, I wouldn’t find out what I need to know, and if, by some immense accident of police work, the cops ever managed to find me, why, I’d be facing significant charges-although you, of course, would find little satisfaction in that, being dead. On the other hand, well, as I told you, I’m not much of an animal lover. And Brutus there, well, to you he might be a paycheck, and maybe more, he might represent hours of time, and maybe even you might have some affection for him-but to me, why he’s just an angry, slobbering mutt eager to chew my throat out, and the world will be far better off without him. So, given the choice, I’m thinking that maybe it’s time for Brutus to head to that great old kennel in the sky.”

Ricky’s voice was filled with mocking amusement. He wanted the man to think he was as cruel as he sounded, which wasn’t hard.

“Just hold it for a second,” the kennel owner said.

“You see,” Ricky replied, “now you’ve got something to think about. Is withholding information worth the dog’s life? Your call, asshole. But make your mind up right away, because I’m losing my patience. I mean, ask yourself the question: Where are my loyalties? To the dog, who has been my companion and my meal ticket for so many years… or to some strangers who pay me for silence? Make a choice.”

“I don’t know who they are…,” the man started, causing Ricky to take aim at the dog. This time he held up both hands. “Okay… I’ll tell you what I know.”

“That would be wise. And Brutus will probably repay your generosity with devotion and by siring many litters of equally dumb and wondrously savage beasts.”

“I don’t know much…,” the kennel owner said.

“Bad start,” Ricky said. “Making an excuse before you’ve even said anything.”

He immediately fired a second shot in the direction of the furious beast. This shot cracked into the dog’s wooden hut in the rear of the pen. Brutus howled in insult and rage.

“Damn it! Stop! I’ll tell you.”

“Then begin, please. This session has gone on long enough.”

The man paused, considering. “It goes back a ways,” he began.

“I’m aware of that.”

“You’re right about the old couple that owned this place. I don’t know exactly how the scam was run, but they adopted those three kids on paper only. The kids were never here. I don’t know exactly who they fronted for, because I came in after the couple was killed. Both of them in a car accident. I’d tried to buy this place from them a year before they died, and after they smashed up that car, I got a call from a man who said he was the executor of their estate, asking me if I wanted the place and the business. The price, too, was unbelievable…”

“Low or high.”

“I’m here, ain’t I? Low. It was bargain basement, especially with all the property thrown in. A helluva good deal. We signed papers right quick.”

“Who did you deal with? Some lawyer?”

“Yeah. As soon as I said yes, a local guy took over. An idiot. Just does real estate closings and traffic offenses. And he was plenty miffed, too, because all he could say was I was getting a steal. But he kept his mouth shut, because I figure he was being overpaid, too.”

“Do you know who sold the property?”

“I saw the name only once. I think I recall the lawyer saying it was the old couple’s next of kin. A cousin. Pretty distant. I don’t remember the name, except that it was a doctor something or another.”

“A doctor?”

“That’s right. And I was told one thing, absolutely clear, too.”

“What was that?”

“If anyone ever, anytime that day or years ahead, ever came asking about the deal or the old couple or the three children that nobody ever saw, I was supposed to call a number.”

“Did they give you a name?”

“No, just a number in Manhattan. And then about six, seven years later, a man calls me one day, out of the blue, and tells me that the number has changed. Gives me another New York City number. Then, maybe a few years after that, same guy, calls up, gives me another number, only this time it’s in upstate New York. He asks me if anyone has ever come visiting. I tell him no. He says great. Reminds me of the arrangement, and says there will be a bonus if anyone ever does. But it never happens until the other day when this guy Lazarus shows up. Asks his questions, and I run him out. Then I call the number. Man picks up the phone. Old man, now, you can hear it in his voice. Real old. Says thank you for the information. Maybe two minutes later, I get another call. This time it’s some young woman. She says she’s sending me some cash, like a grand, and that if I can find Lazarus and keep him there, there’s another grand. I tell her he’s probably staying at one of maybe three or four motels. And that’s it, until you show up. And I still don’t know who the hell you are, mister.”

“Lazarus is my brother,” Ricky said quietly.

He hesitated, thinking, adding years to an equation that reverberated deep within him. Finally he asked, “The number you called, what is it?”

The man rattled off all ten numbers rapidly.

“Thank you,” Ricky said coldly. He didn’t need to write it down. It was a number he knew.

He gestured with the pistol for the man to roll over.

“Place your hands behind your back,” Ricky instructed.

“Oh, come on, man. I told you everything. Whatever this is all about, hell, I ain’t important.”

“That’s for certain.”

“So, just let me go.”

“I just need to restrict your activity for a few minutes. Like long enough to depart, before you can get up, find some bolt cutters, and let Brutus there loose. I’m thinking that perhaps he’d like to have a moment or two alone with me in the dark.”

This made the kennel owner grin. “He’s the only dog I ever known that carries a grudge. Okay. Do what you got to.”

Ricky secured the man’s hands with duct tape. Then he stood up.

“You’ll call them, won’t you?”

The man nodded. “If I said I wouldn’t you’d just get pissed because you’d know I was lying.”

Ricky smiled. “A bit of insight. Quite correct.”

He paused, considering precisely what he wanted the kennel owner to say. Rhymes leaped into his imagination. “All right, here’s what you need to tell them:

Lazarus rises, he’s closer still.

No longer pushing up the hill.

He’s here. He’s there.

He could be anywhere.

The game’s afoot, and closing in.

Lazarus believes he’s going to win.

It may no longer be your choice,

But better check this week’s Voice.”

“That sounds like a poem,” the man said, as he lay on his stomach on the gravel, trying to turn his head to see Ricky.

“A kind of poem. Now we’re going to have a lesson. Repeat it for me.”

It took several efforts for the kennel owner to get it more or less straight.

“I don’t get it,” the man said, after mastering the poem. “What’s going on?”

“Do you play chess?” Ricky asked.

The man nodded. “Not too good, though.”

“Well,” Ricky said, “be thankful that you are just a pawn. And you don’t need to know any more than a pawn needs to know. Because what’s the object of chess?”

“Capture the queen and kill the king.”

Ricky smiled. “Close enough. Nice speaking to you and Brutus there. Can I give you one piece of advice?”

“What’s that?”

“Make the call. Recite the poem. Go out and try to collect all the dogs that have run away. That should take you some time. Then tomorrow wake up and forget any of this ever happened. Go back to the life you have for yourself, and don’t think about all this ever again.”

The kennel owner shifted about uncomfortably, making a scrabbling sound in the gravel driveway. “That might be hard.”

“Perhaps,” Ricky said. “But it might be wise to make the effort.”

He stood up, leaving the man on the ground. Some of the other dogs had stretched out, and they stirred when he moved. Replacing the weapon in the backpack, Ricky kept the flashlight in his hand, and started to jog down the driveway. When he disappeared from any of the light that flooded the front area of the kennel, he picked up his pace, turning onto the darkened roadway, and heading fast toward the cemetery where he’d parked his car. His feet made slapping sounds against the black pavement beneath him, and he switched off the flashlight, so that he ran in the pitch-dark country. It was a little like swimming in a storm-tossed sea, he thought, cutting through waves that tugged at him from every direction. Despite the night that swallowed him, he felt illuminated by a single, glowing piece of information. The telephone number. It was, to Ricky in that second, as if everything from the first letter delivered to his office, right through that instant, was suddenly part of the same great, sweeping current. And then, he realized, perhaps it went much further. Months and years into his past, where something was catching him up and sweeping him along, but he had been unaware of it. The knowledge should have exhausted him, he thought, but instead, he felt an odd energy, and an equally odd release. He thought the understanding that he’d been surrounded by lies, and suddenly had seen some truth, was like a fuel, pushing him ahead.

He had miles to travel that night, he thought. Highway miles and heart miles. Both leading into his past, and pointing the way to his future. He hurried, like a marathon racer who senses the finish line ahead, beyond his sight, but measured in the pain in his feet and legs, the exhaustion creeping into his every breath.

Chapter Thirty-One

It was a little after midnight when Ricky reached the tollbooth on the western side of the Hudson River, just to the north of Kingston, New York. He had driven quickly, pushing right to the limit of where he thought he could, but not be pulled over by some irritated New York state trooper. It was, he imagined, a bit of a microcosm for much of his past life. He wanted to speed, but wasn’t quite willing to take the chance of truly flying. He thought the created persona of Frederick Lazarus would have pumped the rental car up to a hundred miles per hour, but he couldn’t bring himself to that. It was as if both men, Richard Lively, who hid, and Frederick Lazarus, who was willing to fight, were on this particular drive. He realized that since he’d constructed his own death, he’d balanced between the uncertainty of taking risks, and the security of hiding. But he knew that he was probably no longer as invisible as he once believed he was. He guessed that the man searching for him was close behind, that all the crumbs and threads of clues and indications had been found, from New Hampshire straight back down the highway to New York City, and then over to New Jersey.

But he knew he was close, too.

It was the most deadly of races. A ghost pursuing a dead man. A dead man hunting a ghost.

He paid his toll, the only car crossing the bridge at that late hour. The tollbooth collector was in the midst of a copy of Playboy magazine, staring not reading, and barely looked in his direction. The bridge itself is a curiosity of architecture, rising hundreds of feet above the ribbon of black water that is the Hudson, illuminated by a string of green-yellow sodium vapor lights, descending to meet the earth on the Rhinebeck side in a rural, darkened bit of farmland, so that from the distance it appears like a glowing necklace suspended above an ebony throat, swallowed up by the pitch black of the shore. It was an unsettling ride, Ricky thought, as he steered toward the road that seemed to disappear into a pit. His headlights carved out weak cones of wan light against the surrounding night.

He found a place to pull over and removed one of his two remaining cell phones. He then dialed the front desk number at the last hotel where Frederick Lazarus was scheduled to be staying. It was a desultory, shabby, and cheap place, the sort of hotel that is only a single, fragile step above those that cater to prostitutes and their dates on an hourly basis. He guessed that the night deskman would have little to do, assuming no one had been shot or beaten that night on the premises, which, Ricky knew was a large assumption.

“Excelsior Hotel, how can I help you?”

“My name is Frederick Lazarus,” Ricky said. “I had a reservation for tonight. But I won’t make it there until tomorrow.”

“No problem,” the man said, laughing a little at the thought of a reservation. “There will be as much room then as there is now. We’re not exactly overbooked this tourist season.”

“Can you check to see if anyone left any messages for me?”

“Hang on…,” the man said. Ricky could hear the telephone being placed on the counter. The man came on in a moment or two. “Christ yes,” he said. “You must be a popular guy. There’s at least three or four…”

“Read them to me,” Ricky said. “And I’ll take care of you when I get there.”

The man read off the messages. They were the bunch that Ricky had left for himself, but no others. This made him pause.

“Has anyone been there, looking for me? I was supposed to have a meeting…”

The night clerk hesitated again, and in that hesitation Ricky learned what he needed. Before the clerk could lie by saying no, Ricky told him, “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? The type that gets what they want, when they want it, no questions asked, right? A lot more high-class than you usually get coming through the front door there, right?”

The clerk coughed.

“Is she there now?” Ricky demanded.

After a second or two, the clerk whispered, “No. She left. A little less than an hour ago, right after she got a call on her cell phone. Took off real quick. And so did the guy she was with. They’ve been in and out of here all evening asking for you.”

“The guy she’s with?” Ricky asked. “Kinda round and pasty, looks a little bit like the kid you used to beat up on in junior high school?”

“You got it,” the clerk said. He laughed. “That’s the guy. Perfect description.”

Hello, Merlin, Ricky thought.

“They leave a number or an address?”

“No. Just said they’d come back. And didn’t want me to let on that they’d been here. What’s this all about?”

“Just a business arrangement. Tell you what, if they show, you give them this number…” Ricky read off the last of his remaining cell phone exchanges. “But make them slip you some cash in return. They’re loaded.”

“Okay. Should I tell them you’re going to be here tomorrow?”

“Yes. Might as well. And tell them that I called for my messages. That’s it. Did they look at the messages?”

The man hesitated again. “No,” he lied. “Those are private. I wouldn’t share them with strangers without your authorization.”

Sure, Ricky thought. Not for a penny less than fifty bucks. He was pleased that the man at the hotel had done precisely what he expected him to do. He disconnected the call, and sat back in the seat. They won’t be certain, he thought. They won’t know exactly who else is looking for Frederick Lazarus, or why, or what connection he has to what is going on. It will worry them and make their next step a little uncertain. Which is what he wanted. He looked down at his watch. He was sure that the kennel owner had finally gotten free from the duct tape handcuffs and after placating Brutus and rounding up as many of the other dogs as he could, had finally made his call, so Ricky expected at least one light to be on at the house where he was headed.

As he had earlier that night, Ricky left the rental car parked off a side road, out of sight from anyone who might have passed by. He was a good mile from his destination, but he thought he could use the time on foot to consider what his plan was. He could feel some excitement within him, as if he’d closed in finally on some answers to some questions. But it was coupled with a sense of outrage that might have been fury were he not struggling to restrain it. Betrayal, he thought to himself, has the potential to become far stronger than love. He felt a little queasy in his stomach, and recognized it for disappointment mingling freely with unbridled anger.

Ricky, once upon a time a man of introspection, checked the weapon he carried to make certain it was fully loaded, thinking that he had no real plan other than confrontation, which is an approach that defines itself, and realizing that he was closing in quickly on one of those moments where thoughts and actions coalesce. He jogged forward through the surrounding blackness, his running shoes slapping at the macadam, joining with the ordinary sounds of a country night: the opossum scrabbling through the underbrush, the cicadas buzzing in a nearby field. He wanted to be a part of the air.

As he ran, he asked himself: Are you going to kill someone this night?

He did not know the answer.

Then he asked: Are you willing to kill someone tonight?

The answer to that question seemed much easier. He realized that a large part of him was ready to. It was the part that he’d constructed out of bits and pieces of identity in the months after his life had been ruined. The part that had studied all the methods of murder and mayhem available in the local library, and developed an expertise on the firing range. The invented part.

He pulled up short when he reached the drive to the house. Inside was the telephone with the number that he’d recognized. For a moment he recalled coming there almost a year earlier, expectant and almost panicked, hoping for any kind of help, desperate for any sort of answers. They were here, waiting for me, Ricky thought, obscured by lies. I just couldn’t see them. It never occurred to me that the man who he believed had been the greatest help in his life turned out to be the man trying to kill him.

From the drive, he saw, as he’d expected, a single light in the study.

He knows I’m coming, Ricky thought. And Virgil and Merlin, who might have helped him, are still in New York. Even if they’d driven hard after he’d called, racing out of the city, they were still probably a good hour away. He took a step forward, hearing the sound of his feet against the loose stones of the gravel drive. Perhaps he even knows I’m here. Ricky searched around, trying to see a way of sneaking in. But he wasn’t certain that the element of surprise was truly called for.

So, instead, he put the pistol in his right hand and chambered a round. He clicked the safety off and then walked nonchalantly up to the front door, like a friendly neighbor might in the midst of a summer afternoon. He didn’t knock, he simply turned the handle. As he’d guessed, the door was open.

He walked in. A voice came from the study to his right.

“In here, Ricky.”

He took a single stride forward, raising the pistol in front of him, readying himself to fire. Then he stepped into the light that flowed through the doorway.

“Hello, Ricky. You are lucky to be alive.”

“Hello, Doctor Lewis,” Ricky replied. The old man was standing behind his desk, his hands flat on the surface, leaning expectantly forward. “Shall I kill you now, or perhaps in a moment or two?” Ricky asked, voice flat with the hard restraints he’d looped around his rage.

The old psychoanalyst smiled. “You would, I suspect, be justified in shooting in some courts. But there are questions you want answered, and I have waited up this long night to answer what I can. That is, after all, what we do, is it not, Ricky? Answer questions.”

“Maybe once I did,” Ricky replied. “But no longer.”

He leveled the gun at the man who’d been his mentor. The man who’d trained him. Dr. Lewis seemed a little surprised. “Did you really come all this way just to murder me?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ricky said, though this was a lie.

“Then go ahead.” The old doctor eyed him intensely.

“Rumplestiltskin,” Ricky said. “All along it was you.”

Dr. Lewis shook his head. “No, you are wrong. But I am the man who created him. At least in part.”

Ricky moved sideways, coming deeper into the office, keeping his back to the wall. The same bookcases lined the walls. The same artwork. For a second, he could almost imagine that the year between visits hadn’t actually taken place. It was a cold place, that seemed to speak of neutrality and opaque personality; nothing on the walls or the desk said anything about the man who occupied the office, which, Ricky thought darkly, probably said as much as anything. You don’t need a diploma on the wall to certify being evil. He wondered how he had missed seeing it before. He gestured with his weapon for the old man to take a seat in the swiveling leather desk chair.

Dr. Lewis slumped down, sighing.

“I am getting old, and I do not have the energy I once had,” he said flatly.

“Please keep your hands where I can see them,” Ricky said.

The old man lifted his hands up. Then he pointed at his forehead, tapping it with an index finger. “It is never what is in our hands that is truly dangerous, Ricky. You should know that. Ultimately, it is what is in our heads.”

“I might have agreed with you once, doctor, but now I have some doubts. And a clear-cut and enthusiastic reliance on this device, which, if you don’t know, is a Ruger semiautomatic pistol. It fires a high velocity, hollow point, three-hundred-and-eighty-grain cartridge. There are fifteen shots in the clip, any one of which will remove a goodly portion of your skull, perhaps even the piece you just pointed to, killing you rapidly. And you know what’s truly intriguing about this weapon, doctor?”

“What is that?”

“It is in the hands of a man who has already died once. Who no longer exists on this earth we share. Why don’t you consider the implications of that existential event for a moment or two.”

Dr. Lewis paused, eyeing the gun. After a moment, he smiled.

“Ricky, what you say is interesting. But I know you. I know the inner you. You were on my couch four times a week for nearly four years. Every fear. Every doubt. Every hope. Every dream. Every aspiration. Every anxiety. I know you as well as you know yourself, and probably much better, and I know you are not a killer despite all your posturing. You are merely a deeply troubled man who made some extremely poor choices in his life. I doubt homicide will prove to be another.”

Ricky shook his head. “The man you knew as Doctor Frederick Starks was on your couch. But he’s dead and gone and you don’t know me. Not the new me. Not in the slightest.”

Then he fired the pistol.

The single shot echoed in the small room, deafening him for a moment. The bullet tore through the air above Dr. Lewis’s head, slapping into a bookcase directly behind him. Ricky saw a thick medical tome, spine out, suddenly shred, as it absorbed the shot. It was a work on abnormal psychology, a detail that almost brought Ricky to laughter.

Dr. Lewis paled, staggered, rocked momentarily side to side, then gasped out loud.

He steadied himself carefully. “My God,” he blurted. Ricky could see something in the man’s eyes that wasn’t precisely fear, but more a sense of astonishment, as if something utterly unexpected had taken place. “I did not think-” he started.

Ricky cut him off with a small wave of the pistol. “A dog taught me how to do that.”

Dr. Lewis rotated slightly in his seat and inspected the location where the bullet had landed. He burst out a half laugh, half gasp, then shook his head. “Quite a shot, Ricky,” he said slowly. “A remarkable shot. Closer to the truth than my head. You might want to keep what I said in mind over the next few moments.”

Ricky eyed the old physician. “Stop being so obtuse,” he said briskly. “We were going to talk about answers. Remarkable how a weapon like this helps focus one on the issues at hand. Think of all those hours with all those patients, myself included, doctor. All those lies and distractions and tangents and thick systems of delusions and detours. All that painstaking time spent in sorting out truths. Who would have thought that things could be uncomplicated so quickly by a device such as this. A little bit like Alexander and the Gordian knot, don’t you think, doctor?”

Dr. Lewis seemed to have regained his composure. Rapidly his countenance changed, and he was now staring at Ricky with a narrow, angry gaze, as if he could still impose some control over the situation. Ricky ignored all the look implied, then, much as he had nearly a year earlier, he arranged an armchair in front of the old doctor.

“If not you,” Ricky asked coldly, “then who is Rumplestiltskin?”

“You know, do you not?”

“Enlighten me.”

“The eldest child of your onetime patient. The woman you failed to help.”

“That I discovered on my own. Keep going.”

Dr. Lewis shrugged. “My adopted child.”

“This I learned earlier tonight. And the two others?”

“His younger brother and sister. You know them as Merlin and Virgil. Of course they have other names.”

“Adopted, as well?”

“Yes. We took all three in. First as foster children, through the state of New York. Then I arranged for my cousins in New Jersey to front for us in an adoption. It was really pathetically simple outwitting the bureaucracy, which, I am sure you have already learned, did not really care all that much anyway what happened to the three children.”

“So, they carry your name? You discarded Tyson and gave them your own?”

“No.” The old man shook his head. “Not so fortunate, Ricky. They are not in any phone book listing under Lewis. They were reinvented completely. Different names for each. Different identities. Different designs. Different schools. Different education and different treatment. But brothers and sister at heart, where it is important. That you know.”

“Why? Why the elaborate scheme to cover up their past? Why didn’t you…”

“My wife was already ill, and we were beyond the age guidelines for the state. My cousins were convenient. And for a fee, willing to help. Help and forget.”

“Sure,” Ricky replied sarcastically. “And their little accident? A domestic dispute?”

Dr. Lewis shook his head. “A coincidence,” he said.

Ricky wasn’t sure he believed that. He couldn’t resist one small dig: “Freud said there are no accidents.”

Dr. Lewis nodded. “True. But there is a difference between wishing and acting.”

“Really? I think you’re wrong there. But never mind. Why them? Why those three children?”

The old psychoanalyst shrugged again. “Conceit. Arrogance. Egotism.”

“Those are just words, doctor.”

“Yes, but they explain much. Tell me Ricky: A killer… a truly remorseless, murderous psychopath… is this someone created by their environment? Or are they born to it, some infinitesimal little screwup in the gene pool? Which is it, Ricky?”

“Environment. That’s what we’re taught. Any analyst would say the same. The genetic guys might disagree, though. But we are a product of where we come from, psychologically.”

“And I would agree. So, I took in a child-and his two siblings-who was a laboratory rat for evil. Abandoned by birth father. Rejected by his other relatives. Never given any semblance of stability. Exposed to all sorts of sexual perversities. Beaten endlessly by any series of his mother’s sociopathic boyfriends, who eventually saw his own mother kill herself in poverty and despair, helpless to save the only person he trusted in the world. A formula for evil, would you not agree?”

“Yes.”

“And I thought I could take that child and reverse all that weight of wrong. I helped set up the system where he would be cut off from his terrifying past. Then I thought I could turn him into a productive member of society. That was my arrogance, Ricky.”

“And you couldn’t?”

“No. But I did engender loyalty, curiously enough. And perhaps an odd sort of affection. It is a terrible and yet truly fascinating thing, Ricky, to be loved and respected by a man devoted to death. And that is what you have in Rumplestiltskin. He is a professional. A consummate killer. One equipped with as fine an education as I could provide. Exeter. Harvard. Columbia Law. Also a short stint in the military for a little extra training. You know what the curious aspect of all this is, Ricky?”

“Tell me.”

“His job is not that different from ours. People come to him with problems. They pay him well for solutions. The patient who arrives on our couch is desperate to rid himself of some burden. So are his clients. His means is just, well, more immediate than ours. But hardly less intimate.”

Ricky found himself breathing hard. Dr. Lewis shook his head.

“And, you know what else, Ricky, other than being extremely wealthy, do you know what other quality he has?”

“What?”

“He is relentless.”

The old psychoanalyst sighed and added, “But perhaps you have seen that already? How he waited years, preparing himself, and then singled out and pursued everyone who ever did his mother harm, and destroyed them, just as surely as they destroyed her. I suppose, in an odd way, you should find it touching. A son’s love. A mother’s legacy. Was he wrong to do that, Ricky? To punish all those people who systematically or ignorantly ruined her life? Who left her adrift with three small needy children in the harshest of worlds? I do not exactly think so, Ricky. Not at all. Why even the most irritating politicians opine endlessly how we live in a society that shirks responsibility. Is not revenge merely accepting one’s debts and cloaking them in a different solution? The people he has singled out truly deserved punishment. They-like you-ignored someone who pleaded for help. That is what is wrong with our profession, Ricky. Sometimes we want to explain so much, when the real answer lies in one of those…” The doctor gestured at the weapon in Ricky’s hand.

“But why me?” Ricky blurted. “I didn’t…”

“Of course you did. She went to you desperate for help, and you were too wrapped up with the direction in which your own career was heading to pay enough attention and give her the assistance she needed. Surely, Ricky, a patient who kills herself when under your care-even if only for a few sessions-well, do you not feel some remorse of your own? Some sense of guilt? Do you not deserve to pay some price? Why would you think that gaining revenge is somehow less a responsibility than any other human act?”

Ricky did not answer. After a moment, he asked, “When did you learn…”

“Of your connection to my adopted experiment? Near the end of your own analysis. I simply decided to see how it would play out over the years.”

Ricky could feel rage mingling with sweat within him. His mouth was dry.

“And when he came after me? You could have warned me.”

“Betray my adopted child in favor of my onetime patient? And not even my favorite patient, at that…”

These words stung Ricky. He could see the old man was every bit as evil as the child he’d adopted. Perhaps even worse.

“… I thought one might consider it justice.” The old analyst laughed out loud. “But you do not know the half of it, Ricky.”

“What is the half I don’t know?”

“I think that is something you will have to discover for yourself.”

“And the other two?”

“The man you know as Merlin is indeed an attorney, and a capable one at that. The woman you know as Virgil is an actress with quite a career ahead of her. Especially now that they have almost completed tying up all the loose ends of their lives. I think, Ricky, that perhaps you and I are the only loose ends remaining for the three of them. The other thing you should know, Ricky, is that they both believe it was their older brother, the man you know as Rumplestiltskin, who saved their lives. Not I, really, though I contributed to their salvation. No, it was he who kept them together, who kept them from straying, who insisted on their going to school and getting straight A’s and then accomplishing much with their lives. So, if nothing else, Ricky, understand this: They are devoted. They are utterly loyal to the man who will kill you. Who did kill you once, and will do so again. Is that not intriguing, Ricky, from the psychiatric point of view? A man without scruples who engenders blind and total devotion. A psychopath who will kill you just as surely as you might step on a spider crossing your path. But who is loved, and in turn loves. But loves only those two. None other. Except, perhaps, me, a little bit, because I rescued him and helped him. So, perhaps I have gained a loyalist’s love. Which is important for you to keep in mind, Ricky, because you have so little chance of surviving your connection to Rumplestiltskin.”

“Who is he?” Ricky demanded. Each word that the old analyst spoke seemed to blacken the world around him.

“You want his name? His address? His place of business?”

“Yes.” Ricky leveled the weapon at the old man.

Dr. Lewis shook his head. “Just like in the fairy tale, right? The princess’s messenger overhears the troll dancing about his fire, and blurting out his name. She doesn’t really do anything clever or wise, or even sophisticated. She’s just lucky, and so when he comes for his third question, she has the answer by dumb, blind luck, and thus survives, and retains her firstborn child, and lives happily ever after. You think this will be the same? The luck you have acquired which has you here, right now, waving a weapon in an old man’s face will win you the game?”

“Give me his name,” Ricky said quietly, voice as cold and evil as he could make it. “I want all their names.”

“What makes you think you don’t know them already?”

“I am so tired of games,” Ricky said.

The old analyst shook his head. “That is all life is. One game after another. And death is the greatest game of all.”

The two men stared across the room at each other.

“I wonder,” Dr. Lewis said cautiously, lifting his eyes for a moment and examining a wall clock, then pausing with each word, “how much time you have remaining?”

“Enough,” Ricky replied.

“Really?” the old analyst responded. “Time is elastic, isn’t it? Moments can last forever, or else evaporate instantly. Time is really a function of our own view of the world. Is that not something we learn in analysis?”

“Yes,” Ricky said. “That’s true.”

“And tonight, there are all sorts of questions about time, are there not? I mean, Ricky, here we are, alone in this house. But for how much longer? Knowing as I did that you were heading this way, do you not think I took the precaution of summoning help? How long before it arrives?”

“Long enough.”

“Ah, there is a wager I am not sure I would be so confident about.” The old analyst smiled again. “But perhaps we should make it slightly more complicated.”

“How so?”

“Suppose I were to tell you that somewhere here in this room is the information you seek. Could you find it in time? Before help arrives to rescue me?”

“I told you, I’m tired of playing games.”

“It is in plain sight. And you have already come closer to it than even I guessed you might. There. Enough clues.”

“I won’t play.”

“Well, I think you are wrong. I think you are going to have to play a bit longer Ricky, because this game has not concluded.” Dr. Lewis held both his hands up abruptly, and then said, “Ricky, I need to remove something from the top drawer of this desk. It is something which will certainly change the manner that this game is being played. Something that you will want to see. May I do that?”

Ricky aimed the pistol at Dr. Lewis’s forehead and nodded. “Go ahead.”

The doctor smiled again, a nasty, cold smile that had nothing to do with humor. An executioner’s grin. He removed an envelope from the drawer and placed it on the desktop in front of him.

“What’s that?”

“Perhaps, Ricky, it is the information you came here seeking. Names. Addresses. Identities.”

“Hand it to me.”

Dr. Lewis shrugged. “As you wish…,” he said. He thrust the envelope across the desktop and Ricky eagerly grabbed at it. It was sealed and Ricky took his eyes off the old physician for an instant while he inspected the letter. This was a mistake, which he realized as soon as he’d done it.

He lifted his eyes and saw that the old man now had a grin on his face and a small, snub-nosed.38 caliber revolver in his right hand.

“Not quite as big as yours, is it, Ricky?” The doctor laughed out loud. “But probably just as efficient. You see, you just made a mistake that none of the three people you are involved with would. And certainly not the man you know as Rumplestiltskin. He would never have taken his eyes off his target. Not for a second. No matter how well he knew the person he had targeted, he would never have trusted them enough to remove his eyes from them for even the briefest of times. Perhaps that should tell you how little chance you really have.” The two men were facing across the desktop, weapons aimed squarely at each other.

Ricky narrowed his gaze, feeling sweat gathering beneath his arms.

“This,” Dr. Lewis whispered, “is an analytic fantasy, is it not? In the system of transference, do we not want to kill, just as we want to kill our mother or our father or everyone who has come to symbolize all that is wrong with our lives? And the analyst, in return, does he not have a murderous passion that he would like to exploit at much the same time?”

Ricky didn’t reply at first. Finally, he muttered, “The child may have been a laboratory rat for evil, like you say. But he could have been turned around. You could have done it, but you did not, right? It was more intriguing to see what would happen if you left him adrift emotionally, wasn’t it? And it was far easier for you to blame all the evil in the world and ignore your own, wasn’t it?”

Dr. Lewis paled slightly.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Ricky continued, “that you were as much the psychopath as he was? You wanted a killer, and so you found one, because that was what you always wanted to be: a killer.”

The old man scowled. “You always were astute, Ricky. Think of what you could have made with your life had you been a bit more ambitious. A little more subtle.”

“Put the weapon down, doctor. You’re not going to shoot me,” Ricky said.

Dr. Lewis kept the revolver trained on Ricky’s face, but nodded. “I do not really have to, do I?” he said. “The man who killed you once will do it again. And this time he will not accept an obituary in the paper. I think he will actually need to see your death. Do you not?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it. And perhaps, once I find this great array of clues as to who he is that you say are here, perhaps I’ll just disappear again. I succeeded once, and I suspect I can evaporate a second time. Perhaps Rumplestiltskin will simply have to settle for what he achieved the first time we played. Doctor Starks is dead and gone. He won that round. But I will go on and become whatever I want. I can win by running. I win by hiding. By staying alive and anonymous. Isn’t that an oddity, doctor? We, who worked so hard to help ourselves and our patients confront the demons that pursue and torment them, can actually preserve ourselves by fleeing. We helped patients become something, but I can become nothing, and thus win. An irony, don’t you think?”

Dr. Lewis nodded his head.

“I anticipated your response,” he said slowly. “I imagined that you would see the answer that you have just provided me.”

“So,” Ricky said, “I repeat: Put your weapon down, and I will take my leave. Assuming the information I need is in this envelope.”

“In a way, it is,” the old man said. He was whispering, with a nasty smile. “But I have just a final question or two for you, Ricky… if you do not mind.”

Ricky nodded.

“I have told you of the man’s past. And told you far more than you yet understand. And what did I tell you of his relationship with me?”

“You spoke of a kind of odd loyalty and love. A psychopath’s love.”

“One killer’s love for another. Most intriguing, do you not think?”

“Fascinating,” Ricky said briskly. “And were I still a psychoanalyst, I would likely be intrigued and eager to investigate. But I am not. No longer.”

“Ah, but I think you are wrong.” Dr. Lewis shrugged his shoulders. “I think one cannot walk away from being a physician of the heart quite as easily as you seem to think it can be done.” The old man shook his head in a negative. He still had not relaxed his grip on the revolver, nor had it wavered from Ricky’s face. “I think our time is up for the evening, Ricky. One last session. The fifty-minute hour. Perhaps now your own analysis is nearly complete. But the real question I have for you to take away from this is this, Ricky: If he was so devoted to seeing you kill yourself after you failed his mother, what will he want to happen to you when he believes you have killed me?”

“What do you mean?” Ricky asked.

But the old physician didn’t reply. Instead, in a single sweeping gesture, he lifted the revolver up to his temple, grinned maniacally, and then fired a single shot.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ricky half shouted, half screamed, in surprise and shock. His voice seemed to blend with the echo of the revolver’s report.

He rocked back hard in the chair, almost as if the bullet that exploded into the old psychoanalyst’s head had actually been diverted and struck him in the chest. By the time the reverberation from the gunshot had faded into the night air, Ricky was on his feet, standing at the edge of the desk, staring down at the man who once he’d trusted so implicitly. Dr. Lewis had slammed backward, twisted slightly by the force of death delivered to his temple. His eyes had remained open, and now they stared out with macabre intensity. A scarlet mist of blood and brain matter had painted the bookcase, and deep, maroon blood was seeping from the gaping wound down across the physician’s face and chin, staining his shirt. The revolver that had delivered the fatal shot slipped from his fingers to the floor, its weight muffled by the fine Persian carpet beneath their feet. Ricky gasped out loud, as the old man’s body twitched once with muscles coming into tune with death.

He breathed in harshly. It wasn’t, he realized, the first time he’d seen death. When he’d been an intern, doing rotations in internal medicine and the emergency room, more than one person had died in his presence. But that was always surrounded by equipment, and teams of people trying to save life and fight off dying. Even when his wife had finally succumbed to cancer, that had still been part of a process that he was familiar with, and provided a context, even if awful, for what took place.

This was different. It was savage. It was murder, specialized. He felt his own hands shake with an old man’s palsy. He fought hard against the overwhelming instinct to panic and run.

Ricky tried to organize his thoughts. The room was silent, and he could hear his own labored breathing, like a man at the top of a high mountain, sucking in cold air without significant relief. It seemed that every sinew inside of him had tightened, knotted, and that only fleeing would loosen the tension. He gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady himself.

“What have you done to me, old man?” he said out loud. His voice seemed out of place, like a cough in the midst of a solemn church service.

Then he realized the answer to his own question: He’s tried to kill me. One bullet that can kill two people, because the old physician’s death was likely to be taken hard by three people on this earth who had no restrictions on how they would respond. And they would blame Ricky, regardless of what evidence of suicide stared them in the face.

Only it was even more complicated than that. Dr. Lewis wanted to do more than simply murder him. He’d had the gun leveled at Ricky’s face, and he could easily have pulled the trigger, even knowing that Ricky might return fire before dying. What the old man wanted was to endow all the people playing out the murderous game with a moral depravity that equaled his own. That was far more important than simply killing Ricky and himself. Ricky tried to breathe past the thoughts which flooded him. All along, he thought, this hasn’t only been about death. It’s been about the process. It’s been about how death was reached.

An appropriate game for a psychoanalyst to invent.

Again he sucked at the thin air of the study. Rumplestiltskin may have been the agent of revenge and the instigator, as well, Ricky thought. But the design of the game came from the man dead before him. Of that he was certain.

Which meant that when he spoke of knowledge, he was likely telling the truth. Or at least some perverted, twisted version of the same.

It took Ricky a second or two to realize that he still clutched the envelope that his onetime mentor had handed him. It was difficult for him to strip his eyes away from the body of the old man. It was as if the suicide was hypnotic. But he finally did, tearing open the flap and pulling a single sheet of paper from the envelope. He read rapidly:

Ricky: The wages of evil are death. Think of this last moment as a tax I have paid on all I have done wrong. The information you seek is in front of you, but can you find it? Is not that what we do? Probe the mystery that is obvious? Find the clues that stare at us directly and shout out to us?

I wonder if you have enough time and are clever enough to see what you need to see. I doubt it. I think it is far more likely that you will die tonight in more or less the same fashion that I have. Only your death is likely to be far more painful, because your guilt is far less than my own.

The letter wasn’t signed.

Ricky sucked in a new and seemingly unique panic with every breath.

He lifted his eyes and began to search around the office. A wall clock clicked quietly with each passing second, the sound suddenly penetrating Ricky’s consciousness. He tried to do the travel math: When did the old man call and tell Merlin and Virgil and perhaps Rumplestiltskin that Ricky was on his way? From the city to the country home was two hours. Maybe a little less. Did he have seconds? Minutes? A quarter hour? He knew he had to get away, to distance himself from the death sitting in the seat before him, if only to gather his thoughts and try to determine what move he had left, if any. It was like being in a chess game with a grand master, he thought suddenly, moving pieces around a board haphazardly, all the time knowing that the opponent can see two, three, four, or more moves ahead.

His throat was dry and he felt flushed.

Right in front, he thought.

Sliding gingerly around the desk, trying to avoid even brushing up against the dead analyst’s body, he started to reach for the top drawer, then stopped. What am I leaving behind, he thought? Hair fibers? Fingerprints? DNA? Have I even committed a crime?

Then he thought: There are two kinds of crimes. The first brings out the police and prosecutors and the weight of the state demanding justice. The second strikes at the hearts of individuals. Sometimes the two blend together, he knew. But so much of what had happened was predominantly the second, and it was the judge, jury, and executioner who were heading his way that truly concerned him.

There was no way around these questions. He told himself to have confidence in the single fact that the man whose prints and other substances were being left in the dead man’s room was dead, too, and that might afford him some protection, if only from the police who would likely be there at some point that night. He put his hand on the drawer and pulled it open.

It was empty.

He moved swiftly to all the other drawers. They, too, were barren. Dr. Lewis had clearly taken the time to clean out anything that had been accumulated there. Ricky ran his fingers under the desk surface, thinking perhaps something was concealed there. He bent down and searched, but saw nothing. Then he turned his attention to the dead man. Breathing in sharply, he let his fingers travel inside the man’s pockets. They, too, were clear. Nothing on the body. Nothing in the desk. It was as if the old analyst had taken pains to wipe his world clean. Ricky nodded in agreement. A psychoanalyst, better than anyone, he thought, knows what speaks about who one is. And it follows that seeking to wipe that identity slate clear, he would know better than most how to eradicate the telltale signs of personality.

Again, Ricky swept his eyes over the office. He wondered whether there was a safe. He spotted the clock, and that gave him an idea. Dr. Lewis had spoken about time. Perhaps, Ricky thought, that was the clue. He jumped to the wall and searched behind the clock.

Nothing.

He wanted to bellow in rage. It’s here, he insisted.

Ricky took another deep breath. Perhaps it isn’t, he thought, and all the old man wanted me to do was to be here when his murderous adopted offspring arrive. Was that the game? Perhaps he wanted this to be the end, tonight. Ricky seized his own weapon and spun back toward the door.

Then he shook his head. No, that would be a simple lie, and Dr. Lewis’s lies were far more complex. There is something here.

Ricky turned to the bookcase. Rows of medical and psychiatric texts, collected writings of Freud and Jung, some modern studies and clinical trials in book form. Books on depression. Books on anxiety. Books on dreams. Dozens of books, filled with only a modest portion of the accumulated knowledge of man’s emotions. Including the book that housed Ricky’s bullet. He looked at the title, riding the spine: The Encyclopedia of Abnormal Psychology, only the ology of the last word had been shredded by his shot.

He stopped, staring forward.

Why did a psychoanalyst need a text on abnormal psychology? Their profession dealt almost exclusively with the modestly displaced emotions. Not the truly dark and twisted ones. Of all the books lined up on the shelves, it was the only one slightly out of place, but this was a distinction only another analyst would notice.

The man had laughed. He’d turned and saw the place the bullet landed and laughed and said it was appropriate.

Ricky jumped to the bookcase and grasped the text from the shelf. It was heavy and thick, bound in black with vibrant gold writing on the jacket. He opened the book to the title page.

Written in thick red with a Flair pen right across the title were the words: Good choice, Ricky. Now can you find the right entries?

He looked up and heard the clock ticking. He did not think he had time to answer that question at that moment.

He took a step away from the bookcase, almost starting to run, and then stopped. He turned back and carefully took another text from a different shelf and placed it into the open space of the book he had removed, covering the textbook’s absence.

Ricky took another quick look around, but saw nothing that spoke loudly to him. He took a final glance at the old analyst’s body, which seemed to have grayed in the few moments that death had been there with him. He thought he should say or feel something, but no longer was sure what that could be, so instead, Ricky ran.

The deep onyx of night blanketed him as he slid from Dr. Lewis’s country home. Within a few strides he was away from the front door, the light that seeped from the study, swallowed by the summer darkness. Standing in the black shadows, Ricky was able to look back quickly. The benign sounds of the rural area played the usual midnight music, no discordant tones to indicate that violent death was a part of the landscape. For a second he stopped and tried to assess how every piece of himself had been systematically erased over the past year. Identity is a quilt of experience, but it seemed to Ricky that so little existed of what he’d come to believe was himself. What he had left was his childhood. His adult life was in tatters. But both halves of his existence were cut away from him, with no apparent access. He thought this understanding left him part dizzy, part nauseous.

He turned and continued to flee.

Settling into a comfortable jog, footsteps mingling with the night sounds, Ricky headed back toward his car. He carried the abnormal psychology encyclopedia in one hand, his weapon in the other. He had traveled only half the distance, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a vehicle moving fast on a country road, heading in his direction. He looked up and saw the glow of headlights sweeping around a distant corner, mingling with the deep throaty sound of a large engine accelerating.

He did not hesitate. He knew immediately who was heading in that direction in such a hurry. Ricky pitched himself to the earth and scrambled behind a stand of trees. He ducked down, but lifted his head as a large, black Mercedes roared past. The tires sharpened the noise at the next corner.

When he raised himself up, he was already sprinting. This was flight in earnest, muscles complaining, lungs red-hot with exertion, moving as fast as he could through the night. Getting away was the only importance, the only concern. With an ear cocked behind him, listening for the telltale sound of the huge car, he raced forward. He told himself to find distance. They will not stay long at the country house, he said to himself, urging his feet forward. A few moments only to measure the death in the study and to search for signs that he was still there. Or close by. They will know that only moments elapsed between the self-murder and their arrival, and they will want to close the gap.

Within minutes, he’d reached the rental car. He fumbled for the keys, dropping them once, but seizing them from the ground, gasping with tension. He threw himself behind the wheel and started the engine. Every instinct he had told him to accelerate. To escape. To run away. But he fought against these urges, trying hard to keep his wits about him.

Ricky made himself think. I cannot outrun them in this car. There are two routes back to New York City, the thruway on the western side of the Hudson and the Taconic Parkway on the eastern side. They will have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right, and spotting me in the car. The out-of-state New Hampshire plate on the tail of the cheap rental car was a telltale sign indicating who was behind the wheel. They might have acquired a description of the vehicle and the license plate number from the rental agency in Durham. In fact, he thought this likely.

What he understood was in that moment he had to do something unexpected.

Something that defied what the three in the car would anticipate.

He thought his hands were shaking as he decided what to do. He wondered whether it was easier to gamble with his life now that he’d died once already.

He put the car in gear and slowly began to drive back in the direction of the old analyst’s house. He scrunched himself down as low in the seat as he could get, without being obvious. He forced himself to maintain the speed limit, heading north on the old country road, when the relative safety of the city was to the south.

He was closing on the driveway to the place he’d just been, when he saw the headlights of the Mercedes sweeping down toward the roadway. He could hear the crunch of the big tires against the gravel. He slowed slightly-he did not want to pass directly in the big car’s lights-giving them time to swing out onto the road, and head toward him, accelerating quickly. He had his high beams on, and as the Mercedes closed the space, he dimmed his lights, as one is supposed to, then just as they closed, blinked them on high again, like any motorist signaling with irritation at the approaching car. The effect was that both vehicles narrowly swept past each other with high beams on. Just as Ricky knew that he was blinded momentarily, so were they. He punched the accelerator as he passed, slinking rapidly around a corner. Too fast, he hoped, for someone in the other car to turn and make the license plate on the back.

He took the first side road he spotted, turning to his right, immediately switching off the car lights. He made a U-turn in the black, his way lit only by the moonlight. He reminded himself to keep his foot off the brake pedal, so that the red lights wouldn’t light in the rear. Then he waited to see if he was followed.

The road remained empty. He made himself wait five, then ten minutes. Long enough for the occupants of the Mercedes to decide on one of the two alternative routes, and rachet the big car up to a hundred miles per hour, trying to catch up with him.

Ricky put the car back in gear, and continued to drive north almost aimlessly, on side roads and streets. Heading nowhere special. After nearly an hour, he finally turned the car around and changed direction again, finally steering back to the city. It was deep into the night and few other vehicles were around. Ricky drove steadily, thinking how close his world had become, and how dark, and trying to devise a way to restore light to it.

It was deep into the predawn morning when he reached the city. New York at that hour seems to be taken over by shifting shapes, as the electricity of the late-night crowds, whether they are the beautiful or the decrepit, seeking adventure, give way to the workday throngs. The fish market and trucking beasts looking to take over the day. The transition is unsettling, made on streets slicked by moisture and neon lights. It is, Ricky thought, a dangerous time of the night. A time when inhibitions and restraints seem lessened, and the world is willing to take chances.

He had returned to his rented room, fighting the urge to throw himself onto the bed and devour sleep. Answers, he told himself. He clutched answers in the book on abnormal psychology, he just needed to read them. The question was, where?

The encyclopedia contained 779 pages of text. It was organized alphabetically. He flipped through some pages, but initially could find nothing to indicate anything. Still, poring over the book like some monk in an ancient monastery, he knew somewhere within the pages was what he needed to know.

Ricky rocked back in his seat, taking a stray pencil and tapping it against his teeth. I am in the right location, he thought. But short of examining every page, he was unsure what to do. He told himself that he needed to think like the man who’d died earlier that night. A game. A challenge. A puzzle.

They are here, Ricky thought. Inside a text on abnormal psychology.

What did he tell me? Virgil is an actress. Merlin is an attorney. Rumplestiltskin is a professional assassin. Three professions working together. As he flipped almost haphazardly through the pages, trying to think through the problem in front of him, he passed the few pages devoted to the letter V. Almost by luck, his eyes caught a mark on the initial page of the section, which started with 559. In the upper corner, written in the same pen that Dr. Lewis had used for his greeting on the title page was the fraction one and three. One-third.

That was all.

Ricky turned to the entries under M. In a similar location was another pair of numbers, but written differently. These were 1 4, written one slash four. On the opening page of the letter R, he found a third signature, two-fifths. Two dash five.

There was no doubt in Ricky’s mind that these were keys. Now he had to uncover the locks.

Ricky bent forward slightly in his seat, rocking back and forth gently, as if trying to accommodate a slight upset stomach, movements that were almost involuntary, as he concentrated on the problem in front of him. It was a conundrum of personality as complex as any he’d ever experienced in his years as an analyst. The man who had treated him to chart his own way through his own personality, who had been his guide into the profession, and who had provided the means of Ricky’s own death, had delivered a final message. Ricky felt like some ancient Chinese mathematician, working on an abacus, the black stones making clicking noises as they were shunted speedily from one side to the other, calculations made and then discarded as the equation grew.

He asked himself: What do I really know?

A portrait began to form in his imagination, starting with Virgil. Dr. Lewis said she was an actress, which made sense, for she had constantly been performing. The child of poverty, the youngest of the three, who had gone from so little to so much with such dizzying speed. How would that have affected her? Ricky demanded of himself. Lurking in her unconscious would be issues of identity, of who she truly was. Hence the decision to enter a profession that constantly called for redesigning one’s self. A chameleon, where roles dominated truths. Ricky nodded. A streak of aggressiveness, as well, and an edginess that spoke of bitterness. He thought of all the factors that went into her becoming who she was, and how eager she’d been to be the point player in the drama that had swept him to his death.

Ricky shifted in his seat. Make a guess, he told himself. An educated guess.

Narcissistic personality disorder.

He turned to the encyclopedia entry for N and then to that particular diagnosis.

His pulse quickened. He saw that Dr. Lewis had touched several letters in the midst of words with a yellow highlighter pen. Ricky grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote down the letters. Then he sat back sharply, staring at gobbledygook. It made no sense. He went back to the encyclopedia definition, and recalled the one-third key. This time he wrote down letters three spaces away from the marked ones. Again, useless.

He considered the dilemma again. On this occasion, he looked at letters that were three words away. But before writing these down, he thought to himself one over three, so he went instead to letters three lines below.

By doing this, the first three dots produced a word: the.

He continued rapidly, producing a second word: jones.

There were six more dots. Using the same scheme, they translated to: agency.

Ricky stood and walked to the bedside table, where, beneath the telephone there was a New York City telephone book. He looked up the section for theatrical talent, and found in the midst of a number of listings, a small advertisement and telephone exchange for “The Jones Agency-A theatrical and talent agency catering to the up-and-coming stars of tomorrow…”

One down. Now, Merlin the attorney.

He pictured the man in his mind’s eye: hair carefully combed; suits without wrinkles, tailored to the nuances of his body. Even his casual dress had been formal. Ricky considered the man’s hands. The fingernails had been manicured. A middle child, who wanted everything to be in order, who couldn’t tolerate the messiness of the disruptive life he’d come from. He must have hated his past, adored the safety of his adopted father, even as the old analyst had systematically twisted him. He was the arranger, the enabler, the man who had dealt with threats and money and savaged Ricky’s life with ease.

This diagnosis came more easily: obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He turned rapidly to that section of the encyclopedia, and saw the same series of highlighted letters. Using the key provided, he swiftly came up with a word that surprised him: arneson. It wasn’t exactly a jumble of letters, nor was it something that he recognized.

He paused, because this seemed to make no sense. Then he persisted, and found the next letter was V.

Ricky went back, checked the key again, knitted his brows, and then understood what he was being given. The remaining letters spelled out the word: fortier.

A court case.

He wasn’t certain which court he would find Arneson v. Fortier in, but a trip to a clerk with a computer and access to current dockets would likely turn it up.

Turning back to the encyclopedia, Ricky thought of the man at the core of everything that had happened: Rumplestiltskin. He turned to the section under P which dealt with psychopaths. There was a subsection, for homicidal.

And there were the series of dots that he’d come to expect.

Using the key already given him, Ricky quickly deciphered the letters, writing them down on a sheet of paper. When he finished, he sat up straight, sighing deeply. Then he clenched the paper in his hand, crumpling it into a ball, and angrily throwing it toward the wastebasket.

He let loose a string of epithets, which only masked what he’d half expected.

The message he’d come up with had been: not this one.

Ricky had not had much sleep, but adrenaline energized him. He showered, shaved, and dressed himself in a jacket and tie. A lunch-hour trip to a court clerk’s office and some modest cajoling of one of the impatient assistants behind the counter had provided him with some information about Arneson v. Fortier. It was a civil dispute in superior court, scheduled for a pretrial hearing the following morning. As best as he could tell, the two parties were arguing over a real estate transaction that had gone bad. There were claims and counterclaims and substantial sums of money gone astray between a pair of well-heeled midtown Manhattan developers. The kind of case, Ricky imagined, where everyone was angry and wealthy and unwilling to compromise, which meant that everyone would end up losing, except for the lawyers representing each side, who would walk away with a considerable paycheck. It was so utterly mundane and ordinary, Ricky almost felt contemptuous. But with a black streak of nastiness coursing through him, Ricky knew that in the midst of all that posturing, pleading, and back and forth threats and posing between a handful of attorneys, he would find Merlin.

The court docket gave him the names of all the parties. None stood out. But one was the man he was seeking.

The hearing was not set until the following morning, but Ricky went to the courthouse that afternoon. For a few moments he stood outside the huge gray-stone building, looking up at the sweep of steps leading up to the columns that marked the entranceway. He thought that the building’s architects dozens of years earlier had sought to endow justice with some sort of grandeur and stature, but after all that had happened to him, Ricky thought justice was really a much smaller and far less noble concept, the kind of concept that could fit into a small cardboard box.

He went inside, walking through the corridors, between courtrooms, fitting into the ebb and flow of people, noting elevator systems and emergency stairwells. It occurred to him that he could find the judge assigned to Arneson v. Fortier and probably discover who Merlin was merely by providing a description to the judge’s secretary. But, he understood, that simple act would likely turn suspicious in quick order. Someone might remember later, after he’d achieved what he wanted.

Ricky-thinking all along like Frederick Lazarus-wanted what he had in mind to do to be utterly anonymous.

He saw one thing that he thought would help: There were many distinct types wandering through the courthouse building. The three-piece suits were clearly the attorneys with business within the walls. Then there were some less well heeled, but still presentable types. Ricky put these into a category that included the police, jurors, plaintiffs, accused, and courtroom personnel. All the folks that seemed to more or less have a reason for being there, and an understanding about what role they were to play. Then there was a third, fringe category, that intrigued Ricky: the buzzards. His wife had once described them to him, long before she was diagnosed, and long before her life had become nothing more than appointments and medications and pain and helplessness. They were the old pensioners and hangers-on, who found watching courtrooms and lawyers to be entertaining. They functioned a little like bird-watchers in the forest, moving from case to case, searching out dramatic testimony, intriguing conflict, perhaps staking out seats in courtrooms where high-profile, publicity-laden cases were taking place. In appearance, they were modest, sometimes only a cut above the folks who lived on the streets. They were a step away from a VA hospital or a retirement home, and wore polyester no matter how hot it was outdoors. An easy group, Ricky thought, to infiltrate for a few moments.

He left the courthouse with his plan already forming in his head. He took a cab first to Times Square, where he entered one of the many novelty stores where one can buy a fake edition of the New York Times with one’s name in a headline. There he had the man with the printing machine make up a half-dozen phony business cards. Then he flagged another cab which bore him to a glass and steel office building on the East Side. There was a guard at the entranceway, who made him sign in, which he did with a flourish, signing Frederick Lazarus, and listing his occupation on the sheet as Producer. The guard issued him a small plastic clip-on badge with the number six on it, which designated the floor he was traveling to. The man didn’t even glance at the sign-in sheet after Ricky handed it back to him. Security, Ricky thought, operates on perceptions. He looked the part and handled himself with a brusque confidence that defied being questioned by a man at the door. It was a small performance, he believed, but one that Virgil would likely appreciate.

An attractive receptionist greeted him when he entered the office of The Jones Agency.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I spoke with someone earlier,” Ricky lied. “About a commercial shoot we’ve got coming up. We’re looking for some fresh faces and checking out some of the new talent available. I was going to have a look through your portfolio…”

The receptionist looked slightly askance. “Do you remember who you spoke with?”

“No, sorry. It was my assistant who made the call,” Ricky said. The receptionist nodded. “But perhaps I could just flip through some headshots, and then you could steer me?”

The young woman smiled. “No problem,” she said. She reached beneath the desk and came up with a large leather binder. “These are the current clients,” she said. “If you see anyone, then I can direct you to the agent who handles their bookings.” She gestured toward a leather couch, in the corner of the room. Ricky took the portfolio over and started flipping through it.

Virgil was the seventh photo in the book.

“Hello,” Ricky said under his voice, as he flipped the page and saw that her real name, address, phone number, and agent’s name were listed on the back along with a list of off-Broadway theater performances and advertising credits. He wrote all this down on a pad of paper. Then he did precisely the same for two other actresses. He took the portfolio back to the receptionist, checking his wristwatch as he did so.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m late for another appointment. There are a couple of people who seem to have the right look, but we’re going to need to have a face-to-face before committing to anything.”

“Of course,” the young woman said.

Ricky continued to appear harried and hurried. “Look, I’m in a terrible bind here, with time. Perhaps you could call these three and set up meetings for me? Let’s see, this one at lunch tomorrow at noon at Vincent’s over on East 82nd. Then the other two, say at two and four in the afternoon, same place? I would appreciate it. We’re a little under the gun, here, if you know what I mean…”

The receptionist looked discomfited. “Usually the agents have to set up every meeting,” she said reluctantly, “mister…”

“I understand,” he said. “But I’m only in town until tomorrow, then back to Los Angeles. Sorry to be so rushed on all this…”

“I’ll see what I can do… but your name?”

“It’s Ulysses,” Ricky said. “Mister Richard Ulysses. And I can be reached at this number…”

He pulled out one of the fake business cards. They were emblazoned with the title: penelope’s shroud productions. Acting as if this was the most natural thing in the world, he took a pen from the desk and crossed out a phony California exchange, and wrote in his last remaining cell number. He made certain that he obscured the fake number. He also doubted whether any of the agents had a classical education.

“See what you can do,” he said. “If there’s some problem, call me at that number. Come on, bigger breaks have occurred on less. Remember Lana Turner in the drugstore? Anyway, I have to run. More pictures to see, if you know what I mean. Lots of actresses out there. Hate to see someone miss a chance because they passed up a free meal.”

And with that, Ricky turned and exited. He wasn’t sure whether his breezy, devil-may-care approach would work.

But he thought it might.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Before Ricky left for the courthouse the following morning, he confirmed with Virgil’s agent the luncheon appointment, as well as the subsequent meetings with the two other actress-models that Ricky had no intention of attending. The man had asked a few questions about the commercials Ricky the producer was intending to shoot, and Ricky had answered breezily, lying elaborately about product placement in the Far East and Eastern Europe, and the new markets opening up in these areas, therefore the need for new faces to be established by the advertising industry. Ricky thought that he’d become adept at saying much that amounted to nothing, which he realized was one of the most effective sorts of lies one could tell. Any skepticism that the agent might have held dissipated rapidly in the fabric of Ricky’s fictions. After all, the meeting might amount to something, for which he’d get ten percent, or it might amount to nothing, which left him no worse than he was already. Ricky knew that if Virgil had been a more established star, he might have had a problem. But she wasn’t yet, which had helped her when it came time for her to help ruin his life, and he played on the necessity of her ambition easily and guiltlessly.

In his rented room, he reluctantly left behind his handgun. He knew he couldn’t risk setting off a metal detector at the courthouse, but he had grown accustomed to the reassurance that the pistol gave him, although he still did not know whether he would be able to use it for its true purpose-a moment he believed was quickly closing in on him. Before leaving, though, he stared at himself in the mirror in the bathroom. He had dressed nicely, in blazer and tie, dress shirt and slacks. Well enough to slide easily into the crowds that would be sweeping in and out of the courthouse corridors, which, in an odd way, was the same kind of protection that the handgun offered, although less final in its actions. He knew what he had in mind to do, and he understood it was all a balancing act.

The edge, for him, he understood, between killing, dying, and being free was very narrow.

As he stared at himself in the mirror, he recalled one of the first lectures he’d ever heard on psychiatry, where the physician at the medical school had explained that no matter how much was known about behavior and emotions, and no matter how confident one was in diagnosis and in the course of action that neurosis and psychosis created, ultimately, one could never predict with total certainty how any one individual would react. There were predictors, the lecturer had explained, and more often than not, people would play out the scene that one expected. But sometimes they defied prediction, and this happened enough to make the entire profession often resemble guesswork.

He wondered whether he’d guessed right on this occasion.

If he did, he would be free. If not, he would be dead.

Ricky searched the corners of his image in the mirror. Who are you now? he asked himself. Someone or no one?

These thoughts made him grin. He felt a wondrous surge of almost hilarious release. Free or dead. Like the license plate on his New Hampshire rental car. Live Free or Die. It finally made some sense to him.

His thoughts crept over to the three people who had stalked him. The children of his failure. Raised to hate everyone who’d failed to help.

“I know you now,” he said out loud, picturing Virgil in his mind. “And you, I’m about to know,” he continued, conjuring up a portrait of Merlin.

But Rumplestiltskin remained elusive, a shadow in his imagination.

This was the only fear he had left, he understood. But it was a substantial fear.

Ricky nodded to the image of himself in the mirror. Time to perform, he told himself.

There was a large drugstore on the corner, one of a chain, with rows of over-the-counter cold remedies, shampoo, and batteries. What he intended for Merlin that morning was something he remembered from a book he’d read about mobsters in South Philadelphia. He found what he needed in a section that contained cheap children’s toys. Then the second element in a portion of the store that carried a modest selection of office supplies. He paid cash and after placing these items in his jacket pocket, Ricky walked back out on the street and hailed a cab.

He breezed into the courthouse building as he had the day before, appearing like a man with a purpose far different from that which he actually had in mind. He stopped in the second-floor bathroom and took out the items that he’d purchased, and prepared them in a few seconds. Then he killed some time before heading to the courtroom where the man he knew as Merlin was arguing a motion.

As he suspected, the room itself was only partially filled. Some other attorneys lounged about waiting for their cases to be called. A dozen or so of the courthouse buzzards occupied seats in the middle portion of the cavernous arena, some dozing, others listening intently. Ricky slipped quietly through the door, past the baliff who guarded it, and into a seat behind several of the old folks. He slid down, making himself as unobtrusive as possible.

There were a half-dozen lawyers and plaintiffs inside the bar, seated at sturdy oaken tables in front of the judge’s bench. The area in front of both teams was filled with papers and boxes of pleadings. They were all men, and they were intent upon the reactions of the judge to what they had to say. There was no jury, in this preliminary stage, which meant that everything they spoke was directed forward. Nor was there any need to turn and play to the audience, because it would have had no discernible impact on the proceedings. Consequently, none of the men paid the slightest attention to the folks seated haphazardly about in the rows of seats behind them. Instead, they took notes, checked citations from legal texts, and busied themselves with the task at hand, which was trying to win some money for their client, but more critically, for themselves. It was, Ricky thought, a type of stylized theater, where no one cared anything about the audience, only the drama critic in front of them, wearing the black robes. Ricky shifted in his seat and remained hidden and anonymous, which was what he expected.

A surge of excitement raced through him, when Merlin stood.

“You have an objection, Mr. Thomas?” the judge demanded sharply.

“Indeed, I do,” Merlin replied smugly.

Ricky looked down at the list he’d made of all the lawyers involved in the case. Mark Thomas, Esquire, with offices downtown, was in the middle of the group.

“Then what is it?” the judge demanded.

Ricky listened for a few moments. The self-assured, self-satisfied tones of the attorney were the same that he’d remembered from their meetings. He spoke with a confidence that was the same, whether what he was saying had any basis in truth or the law or not. Merlin was the exact man who had come into Ricky’s life so disastrously.

Only now he had a name. And an address.

And just as it had for Ricky, this would be like opening a door on who Merlin was.

He pictured the lawyer’s hands again. Especially the manicured fingernails. Then Ricky smiled. Because in the same mental image, he noted the presence of a wedding ring. That meant a house. A wife. Perhaps children. All the trappings of the upwardly mobile, the young urban professional, heading aggressively for success.

Only Merlin the attorney had a few ghosts in his past. And he was brother to a ghost of the first degree. Ricky listened to the man speak, thinking what a complicated system of psychology was on display in front of him. Sorting through it all would have been an intriguing challenge for the psychoanalyst he once was. Sorting through it for the man he’d been forced to become was a significantly simpler issue. He reached into his pocket and fingered the children’s toy he’d placed there.

On the bench, the judge was shaking his head, and beginning to suggest that the matters be continued over into the afternoon session. This was Ricky’s cue to exit, which he did quietly.

He took up a position next to the emergency stairwell, waiting across from a bank of elevators. As soon as he spotted the group of lawyers exiting the courtroom, he ducked into the stairwell. He had lingered just long enough to see that Merlin was carrying two heavily stuffed briefcases, no doubt filled to overflowing with endless documents and court papers. Too heavy to carry beyond the closest elevator, Ricky knew.

He took the stairs two at a time, emerging on the second floor. There were several people waiting by the elevators for rides down the single flight. Ricky joined them, keeping his hand around the handle of the toy in his pocket. He stared up at the electronic device that shows the location of the car and saw that the elevator was stopped on the floor above. Then it began to descend. Ricky knew one thing: Merlin wasn’t the type to move to the back and make room for anyone else.

The elevator stopped, and the doors swung open with a swooshing sound.

Ricky stepped up, behind the people getting on. Merlin was in the direct center.

The attorney lifted his eyes, and Ricky stared right into them.

There was a flash of recognition, and Ricky saw a momentary panic slide onto the attorney’s face.

“Hello, Merlin,” Ricky said quietly. “And now I know who you are.”

In the same instant, he lifted the child’s toy from his pocket and brought it to bear on the attorney’s chest. It was a water pistol, in the shape of a World War II German Luger. He squeezed the trigger and a stream of black ink shot out, striking Merlin in the chest.

Before anyone could react, the doors slid shut.

Ricky jumped back to the stairwell. He didn’t run down, because he knew he couldn’t outrace the elevator. Instead, he climbed up to the fifth floor, walked out and found the men’s room. There he disposed of the water pistol in a wastebasket after wiping it clean of any fingerprints, just as he might have done with a real weapon, and washed his hands. He waited a few moments, then exited, walking through the corridors to the opposite end of the courthouse. As he had learned the day before, there were more elevators, more stairs, and another exit. Attaching himself surreptitiously to another group of attorneys exiting from other hearings, Ricky maneuvered down. As he expected, there was no sign of Merlin in the portion of the lobby he entered. Merlin wasn’t in the position where he would want to do any explaining whatsoever about the real nature of the stains on his shirt and suit.

And, Ricky thought, he will come soon enough to understand that the ink Ricky had used was indelible. He hoped that he had ruined far more than a shirt, suit, and tie that morning.

The restaurant Ricky had chosen for luncheon with the ambitious actress had been a favorite of his late wife’s though he doubted that Virgil had made that connection. He had selected it because it had one important feature: a large plate glass window that separated the sidewalk from the diners. Ricky remembered that the lighting in the restaurant made it difficult to see out, but not nearly as hard to see in. And the placement of the tables was such that one was more often being seen, than seeing. This was how he wanted it.

He waited until a group of tourists, perhaps a dozen German-speaking men and women wearing loud shirts and necklaces of cameras, sailed past the front of the restaurant. He simply tagged along with them, much as he’d done in the courthouse earlier. It is difficult, he thought, to pick one familiar face out of a group of strangers when not expecting it. As the gaggle of tourists cruised past, he quickly turned and saw Virgil sitting, as he’d expected, in a corner of the restaurant, waiting eagerly. And alone.

He stepped past the window and took a single deep breath.

The call will come any second now, Ricky thought. Merlin had delayed, just as he’d suspected he would. He’d have cleaned himself up, made his apologies to the other attorneys, all of whom had been shocked. What excuse had he come up with? Disgruntled opponent, bested in a lawsuit. The others could identify with that. He’d persuaded them all that calling the police was inappropriate, that he would contact the crazy man with the ink pistol’s attorney-maybe seek a restraining order. But he would handle it all himself. The other men would have nodded in agreement and offered to testify at any moment, or even provide statements to the police, if requested. But this had taken some time, as had getting himself cleaned up, because he knew, no matter what, he still had to be back in court that afternoon. When Merlin finally made his first call, it would be to the older brother. This would have been a substantial conversation, not merely recounting what had happened, but trying to assess the implications. They would analyze their position and begin to consider their alternatives. Finally, still unsure precisely what they wanted to do, they would hang up. Then, next in line for a second phone call, would be Virgil, but Ricky had beaten that call.

He smiled, turned around sharply and headed straight through the restaurant’s front door, moving swiftly. There was a hostess at the front, who looked up at him and began to ask the inevitable question, but he waved her off, saying, “My date is already here…” and striding quickly across the restaurant.

Virgil was turned away, then shifted when she sensed movement.

“Hello,” Ricky said. “Remember me?”

Surprise struck her face.

“Because,” Ricky said, sliding into his seat, “I remember you.”

Virgil said nothing, although she had rocked back in surprise. She had placed a portfolio of pictures and résumé on the table in anticipation of the meeting with the producer. Now, slowly, deliberately, she took it and slipped it to the floor. “I guess I won’t be needing that,” she said. He heard two things in her reply: tentativeness and a need to regain some composure. They teach that in acting class, Ricky thought, and right now she’s reaching into that particular storage box, searching for it.

Before Ricky responded, a buzzing sound went off in her pocketbook. A cell phone. Ricky shook his head. “That would be your middle brother the lawyer calling to warn you that I appeared in his life this morning already. And there will be another call, soon enough, from the older brother who kills for a living. Because, he, too, will want to protect you. Don’t answer it.”

Her hand stopped.

“Or what?”

“Well, you should be asking yourself the question ‘How desperate is Ricky?’ and then the obvious follow-up: ‘What might he do?’ ”

Virgil ignored the phone, which stopped buzzing.

“What might Ricky do?” she asked.

He smiled at her. “Ricky died once. And now he might have nothing left to live for. Which would make dying a second time far less painful and perhaps even welcome, don’t you think?”

He looked hard at Virgil, scouring her with his gaze.

“I might just do anything.”

Virgil shifted uncomfortably. Every tone Ricky used was harsh. Uncompromising. He reminded himself that the strength in his performance that day was to be a different man from the one so easily manipulated and terrified into suicide a year earlier. This, he realized, wasn’t far from the truth.

“And so, unpredictability. Instability. A little manic streak, as well. Dangerous combination, no? A potentially volatile concoction.”

She nodded. “Yes. True.” She was regaining some of her elusive composure as she spoke, which is what he’d expected would happen. Virgil, he knew, was a very centered young woman. “But you’re not going to shoot me here in this restaurant in front of all these other people. I don’t think so.”

Ricky shrugged. “Al Pacino does. In The Godfather. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. Anyone eager to act for a living has seen it. He comes out of the men’s room with the revolver in his pocket and he shoots the other mobster and the corrupt police captain right in the forehead, then tosses the revolver aside and walks out. Remember?”

“Yes,” she said uneasily. “I remember.”

“But I like this restaurant. Once when I used to be Ricky, I came here with someone I loved, but whose presence I never really appreciated. And why would I want to ruin the fine luncheon these other folks have planned? But mostly, I don’t need to shoot you here, Virgil. I can shoot you any number of places. Because now I know who you are. I know your name. Your agency. Your address. But more important, I know who you want to become. I know your ambition. And from that, I can extrapolate your desires. Your needs. Do you think that now that I know who and what and where about you, that I cannot deduce whatever I need to know in the future? You could change your address. You could even change your name. But you cannot change who you are, nor who you want to become. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? You’re as trapped as Ricky was. And so is brother Merlin, a detail that he learned this morning quite messily. You played the game with me, once, knowing every step I would take and why. And now, I will play a new game with you.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a game called How Do I Stay Alive? It’s a game about revenge. I think you already know some of the rules.”

Virgil had paled. She reached for a glass of ice water, took a long sip, staring at Ricky.

“He’ll find you, Ricky,” she whispered. “He’ll find you and kill you and protect me-because he always has.”

Ricky leaned forward, like a priest sharing a dark secret in a confessional. “Like any older brother? Well, he can try. But, you see, now he knows next to nothing of who I have become. The three of you have been chasing around after Mr. Lazarus, and thinking that you had him cornered, what-once? Twice? Three times maybe? Did you think you missed him by seconds in the home of the one man who crossed both our paths the other night? But guess what? Poof! He’s about to disappear. Any second now, because he’s just about used up every little bit of usefulness in this life. But before he goes, perhaps he will tell whoever else it is I have lined up to become everything I will need to know about you and Merlin and now Mr. R. as well. And all that put together, well, Virgil, I think that makes me a very dangerous adversary.”

He paused, then added: “Whoever I am today. Whoever I might be tomorrow.”

Ricky leaned back, slightly, watching the words he spoke register on Virgil’s face. “What did you tell me, once, Virgil? About your chosen name? ‘Everyone needs a guide upon the road to Hell.’ ”

She took another long sip of water, nodding. “That’s what I said,” she replied softly.

Ricky smiled nastily. “I think you chose your words well,” he answered.

Then he rose sharply, pushing the chair back quickly.

“Goodbye, Virgil,” he said, leaning toward the young woman. “I think you will never want to see my face again, because then it might be the last thing you will ever see.”

Without waiting for her response, Ricky turned and walked briskly out of the restaurant. He did not need to see her hand shake, or her jaw quiver, though he knew these reactions were likely. Fear is an odd thing, he thought. It displays itself in so many external ways, but none is nearly as powerful as the blade it slices through the heart and stomach, or the current it puts into the imagination. He thought that for one reason or another much of his life had been spent being afraid of many things, a never-ending sequence of fears and doubts. But now he was delivering fear, and he wasn’t sure he didn’t like that sensation. Ricky let the noontime crowds absorb him, as he melted away from Virgil, leaving her behind, just as he had her one brother, trying to assess just what sort of danger they were truly in. Ricky cut swiftly through the throngs of people, dodging the bodies like a skater on a crowded rink, but his mind’s eye was elsewhere. He was trying to picture the man who’d once stalked him to perfect death. How, Ricky wondered, will the psychopath react, when the only two people left on this earth he truly holds dear have been threatened to their core.

Ricky pushed forward rapidly on the sidewalk, and thought: He will want to move fast. He will want to resolve the matter immediately. He will not want to prepare or plan, as once he did. Now he will let cold rage utterly overcome all his instincts and all his training.

But most important: Now he will make a mistake.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Usually, once or twice each summer back in the years and vacations that seemed so distant to him, when his life was fit into normal, recognizable patterns, Ricky would make a reservation with one of the old and particularly accomplished fishing guides who worked the Cape waters hunting for big stripers and schools of bluefish. It was not that Ricky thought of himself as an expert fisherman, nor was he an outdoors type of any special note. But what he’d enjoyed was heading out in a small, open boat in the early morning, when mist still hung over the gray-black ocean, feeling a damp chill that defied the first streaks of bright morning light leaping across the horizon, and watching the guide pilot the skiff through channels, past shoals, to fishing grounds. And what he’d appreciated was the sensation that amid the acres of constantly changing waves, the guide would know which seascape held fish, even as they concealed themselves in the somber colors of the deep water. To slide a bait through so much cold space, taking so many variables of tide and current, temperature and light into the equation, and then to find the target, was an act that Ricky the psychoanalyst had admired, and constantly found fascinating.

Collecting his thoughts in his cheap New York room, he thought he had embarked on much the same process. The bait was in the water. Now he had to sharpen the hook. He did not think he would get more than a single opportunity with Rumplestiltskin.

It had occurred to him that after confronting the younger brother and sister, he could flee, but he knew instantly that would be useless. Then he would spend the entirety of his remaining life being startled by every unusual noise in the dark, nervous at any sound behind his back, afraid of every stranger who happened into his line of sight. An impossible life, spent running away from something and someone impossible to discern, always with him, ghosting every step Ricky ever took.

Ricky knew, as much as he’d ever known anything with certainty, that he had to best Rumplestiltskin in this final phase. It was the only way he’d really regain a grip on any semblance of life as he hoped to live it.

He thought he knew how to accomplish this. The first elements of his scheme had already been put in place. He could easily imagine the conversation between brothers and sister that was happening even as he sat in the cheap rented room. It wouldn’t be a telephone conversation. They would have to meet, because they would have to see one another to reassure themselves that they were safe. Voices would be raised. There would be a few tears and considerable anger, perhaps even some insult and blame tossed about the room. Everything had gone smoothly for the three of them, wreaking murderous revenge on all the obvious targets of their past. Only one had come up a cropper, and that one was now the source of significant anxiety. He could hear the phrase “You got us into this!” shouted across the room at the shadowy figure who had meant so much to them over so many years. Ricky thought, with some satisfaction, that there would be panic in that accusation, because he had managed to drive a small wedge into the bonds that linked the trio together. No matter how persuasive the need for revenge had been, no matter how cunning the plot was against Ricky and all the others, there was one element that Rumplestiltskin had not foreseen: Even with their compulsion to go along with him, the younger brother and younger sister still had aspirations of lives in the mainstream. Normal, in their own ways: A life onstage and a life in court, playing by certain rules, with recognizable strictures. Rumplestiltskin, alone of the three, was willing to live outside certain boundaries. But the two others were not, and that was how they became vulnerable.

It was that distinction that Ricky had found. And it was, he knew, their greatest weakness.

There would be harsh words between them, Ricky knew. As cruel as the game had been, and as murderous, the actual pushing, shooting, and killing had been left to only one of them. Ruining a reputation or savaging investment accounts were some nasty works. But none that actually saw blood. There had been a separation of evils, with the most suspect left in a single pair of hands.

Those jobs had fallen to Mr. R. Just as he had borne the brunt of beatings and cruelty as they grew up, so the actual violence had belonged to him. The others had merely helped him, reaping the psychological satisfaction that revenge provides. The difference between being an enabler and being the performer, Ricky thought. Only now, they understand, their complicity has come back to bite them.

They thought they were home free, Ricky thought. But they are not.

He smiled inwardly. There is nothing, Ricky decided, quite as devastating as realizing that now perhaps it is you who is being hunted, when you are so accustomed to being the hunter. And that, he hoped, was the trap he had set, because even the psychopath would leap for the opportunity to regain the position of superiority that was so natural for the predator. He would be pushed in that direction by the threat to Virgil and Merlin. What few threads of normalcy that Mr. R. retained were those that connected him to his brother and sister. If, deep in his psychopathological world, he had any remaining links to humanity, they came from his relationship with his siblings. He would be desperate to protect those. It is simple, really, Ricky insisted to himself. Make the hunter think he is hunting, closing in on his prey, when in reality, he is being drawn into an ambush.

An ambush, Ricky thought with some irony, that is defined by love.

Ricky found some scratch paper, and worked for a few moments on a rhyme. When he had it the way he wanted, he called the Village Voice classified section. Once again, as before, he found himself speaking with a clerk in Personals. He made some small talk, as he had on numerous occasions before. But this time he was careful to ask the clerk several key questions and deliver some critical information:

“Look, if I’m out of town, can I still call in and get the responses?”

“Sure,” said the clerk. “Just dial the access code. You can call from anywhere.”

“Great,” Ricky replied. “You see I have some business up on the Cape this weekend, so I have to head up there for a few days, and I still want to get the responses.”

“It won’t be a problem,” the clerk said.

“I hope the weather is good. The forecast is for rain. You ever go up to Cape Cod?”

“Been to Provincetown,” the clerk said. “It’s pretty wild up there after the Fourth of July weekend.”

“No kidding,” Ricky said. “My place is in Wellfleet. Or, at least it used to be. Had to sell it. A fire sale. Going up just to settle a few leftover matters, then back to the city and back to the grind.”

“I hear you,” the clerk said. “I wish I had a place on the Cape.”

“The Cape is special,” Ricky spoke carefully, lingering over each word. “You only really go in the summer, maybe a little in the fall or spring, but each season gets inside you in its own way. It becomes home. More than home, really. A place for starting and ending. When I die, that’s where I want them to bury me.”

“I can only wish,” the clerk said, slightly envious.

“Maybe someday,” Ricky added. He cleared his throat to deliver the message for the classifieds. He had it run under the modest headline: Seeking Mr. R.

“Don’t you mean ‘Mr. Right ’?” the clerk asked.

“No,” Ricky said. “Mr. R. is fine.” Then he launched into what he hoped would be the last rhyme he would ever need to concoct:

Ricky’s here. Ricky’s there.

Ricky could be anywhere.

Ricky maybe likes to roam,

Ricky maybe has gone home.

Perhaps Ricky has gone to ground,

But Ricky likely can’t be found.

Someplace old, someplace new,

Ricky will always elude you.

Mr. R. can search high and low,

Still he will never know,

When Ricky might return again,

As an adversary, not a friend,

Carrying evil, toting death,

Ready to steal someone’s last breath.

“Intense,” the clerk said, with a long, slow whistle. “You say this is a game?”

“Yes,” Ricky answered. “But not one too many people should be eager to play.”

The ad was scheduled for the following Friday, which gave Ricky little time. He knew what would happen: The paper actually hit the newsstands the evening before, and that would be when all three of them would read the message. But this time, they wouldn’t respond in the paper. It will be Merlin, Ricky thought, using his brusque and demanding lawyer’s tones and obliquely threatening manner. Merlin will call the ad supervisor and work his way rapidly down through the paper’s hierarchy until he finds the clerk who took the poem over the telephone. And he will question him closely about the man who called it in. And the clerk will quickly recall the conversation about the Cape. Maybe, Ricky wondered, the young man will even recall that Ricky said it was where he wanted someday to be buried, a small desire, in a way, but one that will trigger much in Merlin. After he acquires the information he will pass it to his brother. A modest act of insulation, to be sure, but a necessary one. Then the three of them will argue once again. The two younger ones have been frightened, probably more frightened than they have been since they were children and abandoned by self-murder by the mother they loved. They will say they want to join Mr. R. on his hunt, and they will say they feel responsible for the danger, and guilty, too, he thought, for making him take care of them once more. But they will not truly mean it, and the older brother will have none of it, anyway. This is a killing he will want to handle alone.

And so, Ricky thought, alone is how he will proceed.

Alone and wanting to finish once and for all what he had been led to believe had been completed. He will hurry toward another death.

He checked out of the cheap room, scouring it first for any signs of his existence. Then, before departing the city, he performed one other series of tasks. He closed out his domestic banking accounts at New York branches, then went into a midtown office for a bank located in the Caribbean. There he opened a simple checking and savings account for Richard Lively. When he’d completed the transaction, depositing a modest sum from his remaining cash, he exited the bank and walked two blocks up Madison Avenue to the Crédit Suisse office that he had passed many times back in the days when he was merely another New Yorker.

A low-level bank official was more than willing to open a new account for Mr. Lively. This was merely a traditional savings account, but it had a single interesting feature. On one day, each year, the bank was to transfer ninety percent of the accumulated funds directly, by wire, to the account number that Ricky provided for the Caribbean bank. They were to deduct their fees from the remainder. The date he selected for this transfer was chosen with a rough sort of haphazard care: At first he’d thought to use his birthday, then he’d thought of his wife’s birthday. Then, he’d considered the day that he’d faked his own death. He also considered using Richard Lively’s birthday. But finally, he’d asked the executive opening the account, a rather pleasant young woman who had taken pains to reassure him of the complete secrecy and compelling sanctity of Swiss banking regulations, and asked her what her birthday was. As he’d hoped, it had no connection to any date that he could remember. A late March day. He liked that. March was the month that actually saw the end of winter and suggested the beginning of spring, but was filled with false promise and deceptive winds. An unsettled month. He thanked the young woman and told her that was the day he selected for any transfers.

After finishing his business, Ricky returned to the rental car. He did not look behind once, as he slid through the city streets, up onto the Henry Hudson Parkway heading north. He had much to do, he thought, and little time.

He returned the rental car and spent the day killing off Frederick Lazarus. Every membership, credit card, phone account-anything having to do with that particular persona was shut down, canceled, or closed out. He even swung around the gun shop where he’d learned to shoot, and purchasing a box of shells, spent a productive hour on the firing range squeezing off shots at a black silhouette target of a man that was easily configured in his imagination to be the man he knew who would close in on him swiftly enough. Afterward, he made a little small talk with the gun shop owners, dropping on them the news that he was expecting to move away from the area for several months. The man behind the counter shrugged, but, Ricky realized, still noted the departure.

And with that, Frederick Lazarus evaporated. At least on paper and in documents. He departed, too, from the few relationships that the character had. By the time he had finished, Ricky thought that all that remained of the persona he’d created was whatever murderous streaks he had absorbed within himself. At least, that was what he hoped still weighed within him.

Richard Lively was a little more difficult, because Richard Lively was a little more human. And it was Richard Lively who needed to live. But he also needed to fade away from his life in Durham, New Hampshire, with a minimum of fanfare and little notice. He had to leave it all behind, but not appear to be doing so, on the off chance that someone, someday, might come asking questions and connect the disappearance with that particular weekend.

Ricky considered this dilemma, and thought that the best way to disappear is to imply the opposite. Make people think your exit is only momentary. Richard Lively’s bank account was left intact, with only a minimum deposit. He didn’t cancel any credit cards or library memberships. He told his supervisor at the university maintenance department that family trouble on the West Coast was going to require his presence for a few weeks. The boss understood, reluctantly told Ricky that he couldn’t promise that his job would wait for him, but told him he would do everything he could to see that it was left open. He had a similar conversation with his landladies, explaining that he wasn’t sure how long he would be absent. He paid an extra month’s rent in advance. They had become accustomed to his comings and goings, and said little, although Ricky suspected the older woman knew he would never return, simply in the way she eyed him and the manner in which she absorbed what he said. Ricky admired this quality. A New Hampshire quality, he thought, one that accepts on the face what another person says, but harbors an understanding of the truth hidden within. Still, to underscore the illusion of return, even if not fully believed, Ricky left behind as many of his belongings as possible. Clothes, books, a bedside radio, the modest things he had collected while rebuilding his life. What he took with him was a couple of changes of clothing, and his weapon. He thought that what he needed to leave behind was evidence that he’d been there, and might return-but nothing that truly spoke about who he was or where he might actually have gone.

As he walked down the street, he felt a momentary pang of regret. If he lived through the weekend, he thought, which was really only a fifty-fifty proposition, he knew he would never return. He had developed an ease and a familiarity with the small world he’d participated in, and it saddened him to walk away. But he restructured the emotion within himself, trying to re-form it into a strength to carry him through what was about to happen.

He caught a midday Trailways bus to Boston, retracing a familiar route. He did not spend long in the Boston terminal, just long enough to wonder whether the real Richard Lively was still living, and half thinking that it might be interesting to head toward Charlestown to see if he could spot the man in any of the parks or alleyways where Ricky had once trailed him so diligently. Of course, Ricky knew he had nothing to say to the man, other than to thank him for providing an avenue into a questionable future. Regardless, he did not have time. The Friday afternoon Bonanza bus was heading to the Cape, and he slid into a seat in the back, excitement picking up within him. They have read the poem by now, he thought. And Merlin has questioned the ad clerk.

At this moment, they are talking. Ricky could imagine the words flying back and forth. But he knew he didn’t actually have to hear them, because he knew what they would do. He glanced down at his wristwatch.

He will take off soon, Ricky thought. He will be driving hard, compelled to find a conclusion to a story that was written differently than he’d expected.

Ricky smiled. He saw one immense advantage he had. Rumplestiltskin’s world was one accustomed to conclusions. Ricky’s was the opposite. One of the tenets of psychoanalysis is that even though the sessions draw to a close, and the daily therapy finally finishes, the process never is completed. What the therapy brings, at its best, is a new way of looking at who one is, and allowing that new definition of one’s life to influence the decisions and choices that come with the future. At best, then those moments are not crippled by the events of the past, and the selections made are oddly relieved of the debts everyone owes to their upbringing.

He had the sensation that he was reaching the same sort of non-end ending.

It was either dying time, or continuing time. And whichever it was would be defined by the next hours.

Ricky accepted the coldness of his situation, and stared out the window at the scenery. As the bus droned on toward the Cape, Ricky noted that the trees and shrub bushes seemed to lessen in stature. It was as if life in the sandy soil not far from the ocean was a little harsher, and that it was harder to grow high when pummeled by the sea winds in the winter.

Outside of Provincetown, Ricky spotted a motel on the strip that is Route Six, that hadn’t already blinked on its no vacancy sign, probably a result of the desultory weather forecast. He paid cash for the weekend, the desk clerk taking the money in a bored and disinterested fashion, assuming, Ricky guessed, that he was nothing more than a confused middle-aged Boston businessman, finally giving into fantasies, descending upon the town with its gaudy summertime nightlife for a few days of sex and guilt. He didn’t do anything to discourage this presumption, and, in fact, asked the clerk where the best clubs were in town. The types of places where single folks went searching for companionship. The man gave him some names and left it at that.

Ricky found a camping goods store, and purchased more bug repellent, a powerful flashlight, and an oversized olive drab pullover poncho. He also bought a wide-brimmed camouflage hat that was clearly ridiculous in appearance, but which had one critical feature: Attached to the brim was a shroud of mosquito netting, which could drop over the head and shoulders. Once again, the weather forecast for the weekend helped: humid, thunderstorms, gray skies, and warm temperatures. A sickly sort of weekend. Ricky told the man behind the counter that he was still going to be doing some gardening, which made each of the purchases establish perfect and unforgettable sense within that context.

He walked back outside and saw the first of what he suspected would be a line of huge thunderheads building up in the west. He listened for a distant rumble of thunder and surveyed the graying skies above him that seemed to usher in the arrival of evening. He could taste the coming rain on his tongue, and he hurried to make his preparations.

The day was stretched long by light that lingered, as if contending with the sweep of weather heading toward him. By the time he reached the road that led to his old house, the sky had taken on an almost crippled brownish hue. The bus that traveled Route Six had dropped him a couple of miles away, and he had jogged the distance easily, his backpack crammed with his purchases and his weapon riding comfortably on his back. Ricky remembered running the same route nearly a year earlier, and he recalled the sharpness in his breath, the way the wind was sucked out of his lungs by panic and the shock of what he’d done and what he still had to do. This run was oddly different. He felt a sense of strength, and at the same time, a sense of isolation tinged with complacency, as if what he was racing toward wasn’t so much a place where he had parked so many memories, as much as a place that spoke of change. Each step of his route was familiar, yet surreal, as if it existed on a different plane of existence. He picked up his pace, pleased that he was stronger than he was when last he’d run the race, eager that no onetime neighbor would come rolling out of a driveway and spot the dead man running toward the burned-out home.

Ricky was lucky, the road was deserted at this the dinner hour. He pulled in to the driveway, slowing his pace to a walk, and was immediately concealed by the stands of trees and shrub brush that spring up quickly on the Cape in the warmer months. He did not know exactly what to expect. It half occurred to him that whatever relative had managed to seize hold of Ricky’s property might have cleared the area, even started construction of a new place. His suicide letter had designated the land be turned over to a conservation group, but he expected that when the members of his distant family had caught wind of what the actual value of a prime slice of buildable Cape property was worth, that it had been tied up in lawsuits. The thought made him grin, struck by the irony that it was likely people he barely knew who were fighting over his estate, when he’d died the first time months earlier to protect one of them from the man Ricky believed was hurrying toward him that night.

When he came out from beneath the trees, he saw what he’d hoped for: the still-charred remains of his home. Even with the growing season upon the land, the earth was still blackened for yards around the gaunt skeleton of the old farmhouse.

Ricky walked up to where the front door had once stood, passing through the weeds of what had once been his garden. He stepped inside, moving slowly midst the ruins of the home. Even after a year, he could still smell the gasoline and burnt wood, but then, realized that was nothing more than his mind playing tricks on him. There was a roll of thunder in the distance, but he ignored it, and maneuvered as best he could through the spaces, allowing his memory to fill in walls and furniture, artwork and carpets. And when all those recollections had built his old home up around him, he allowed his memory to paint in moments with his wife, long before she sickened, and before she was robbed of strength, vitality, and finally life, by disease. It was both pleasant and eerie for Ricky, as he wandered through the wreckage. It was, in an odd way, both a return and a departure, and he felt a little as if he was embarking that night upon something that would take him somewhere far different, and that finally, he was able to say goodbye to everything that had been Dr. Frederick Starks, and ready himself to greet whatever person emerged from the night that was falling swiftly around him.

The spot he’d hoped to find was waiting for him, directly to the side of the center chimney that had graced the fireplace in the living room. A slab of ceiling and thick wooden beams had tumbled to the side, making a sort of decrepit lean-to, almost a cave. Ricky donned the poncho, seated the bug hat on his head, and removed the flashlight and semiautomatic pistol from his backpack. Then he crawled back into the darkness of the wreckage, concealed himself, and waited for night, the approaching thunderstorm, and a killer to arrive.

He saw some humor in it: What had he done? He had behaved like a psychoanalyst. He had provoked electric, runaway emotions in the person he wanted to see. Even the psychopath was vulnerable, Ricky thought, to his own desires. And now, just as he had for so many years of his own analytic practice, he was waiting for this last patient to come through the door, bearing with him all the anger, hatred, and fury, all directed at Ricky the therapist.

He fingered the trigger guard on his weapon and clicked off the safety. This session, however, wasn’t intended to be quite so benign.

He leaned back and measured every sound, and memorized every shadow as they lengthened into darkness around him. Vision was going to be a problem that night. The moon would be obscured by clouds. The ambient light from other homes and distant Provincetown, would fade beneath the coming rain. What Ricky expected to rely upon was both certainty and uncertainty: The ground where he’d selected to wait was the most familiar tract in his life. This would be an advantage. And, more important, he was relying upon Rumplestiltskin’s uncertainty. He won’t know precisely where Ricky is. He is a man accustomed to controlling the environment in which he operates, and this, ultimately, Ricky hoped, was the least-controlled situation he could be placed in. A world the killer was unfamiliar with. A good place to wait for him that night.

Ricky was supremely confident that the killer would arrive, and soon enough, searching for him. As the man drove east from New York, he will understand that there were really only two potential locations for Ricky’s presence. The beach where he’d faked drowning, and the home he’d burned down. He will come to these two spots, hunting, because despite what he might have learned from the clerk at the Village Voice, he will not really believe that there was any business other than the business of dying planned for the trip to the Cape. He will know that everything else was merely illusion, and that the real game was simply about one set of memories facing off against the other set.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The rain came in spurts throughout the first part of the night, falling heavily, with cracks of thunder and lightning strikes out over the ocean for the initial hours of his wait, before tapering off into a steady irritating drizzle. As the storm passed overhead, the temperature dropped a half-dozen or more degrees, giving the darkness a chill that seemed perversely out of place. There had been some wind with the line of thunderstorms, strong currents that tugged at the edges of his poncho, and made the rubble and charred remains around him creak, as if they, too, had unsettled business that night. Ricky remained hidden, like a hunter in a blind, waiting for the quarry to come into sight. He thought of all the hours he had spent silently seated behind the heads of patients on his couch, barely moving, rarely speaking, and thought it funny that all that time spent in contemplation had prepared him well for the wait that night.

He moved only occasionally, and then just to stretch and flex his muscles enough so that they wouldn’t seize up with disuse but be available to him when needed. Mostly, he leaned back, the mosquito netting about his head, the poncho spread over his body, more a shapeless lump than human. From where he was concealed, he could still see across the open field that had welcomed visitors to his home, especially when the sky was streaked by bolts of electricity. He was situated in a position that allowed him to spot slices of headlights penetrating the stands of trees out by the main road, and he found that he could hear the car engines above the thick folds of black darkness.

He had only one fear: that Rumplestiltskin would find more patience than he had.

Ricky doubted this, but wasn’t completely certain. After all, the child had harbored so much hatred for years, and waited so long before springing his traps, it was possible that now, in this last stage, he might hesitate, and simply take up a position in the tree line and do more or less what Ricky was doing, which was waiting for some telltale motion before closing in. This was the gamble that Ricky was taking that night. But he thought his bet was well hedged. Everything he’d done was designed to provoke Mr. R. Anger, fear, and threats demand responses. A professional killer was a man of action. An analyst was not. Ricky believed that he had created a situation where his own strengths compensated for those of his adversary. His own training countered the killer’s training. He will move first, Ricky insisted. Everything you know about behavior tells you this is true. In the game of memory and death that the two men were locked in, Ricky held the higher ground. He was fighting on land he knew.

It was, he thought, the best he could do.

By ten p.m. the world around him had funneled itself into a damp, musty arena of blackness. He found his senses heightened, his mind alert to all the nuances of the night. He hadn’t heard a car, or spotted distant headlights in over an hour, and the rain seemed to have driven all the nocturnal beasts into their dens, so not even the scratching sound of an opossum or skunk searching for something to eat penetrated the air about him. It was, he thought, right at the moment when his heart and his determination should fail him, that doubt should creep into his imagination, trying to persuade him that he was waiting foolishly for someone who would not arrive. He mocked this sensation within him, insisting that the only thing he knew for certain was that Rumplestiltskin was close, and would be closer still, if only he persevered and waited. He wished that he’d had the sense to bring a bottle of water, or a thermos of coffee, but he hadn’t. It is hard to plot murder, he thought, and remember the mundane at the same time.

He wiggled his fingers occasionally, and silently drummed his index finger along the side of the trigger guard. Once he was startled by a bat swooping through the air above him; another time a pair of deer emerged for a second or two from the woods. He could make out only the vaguest elements of their shapes, until they spooked and turned white tails and bounded away with unmistakable ballet leaps.

Ricky continued to wait. The assassin was likely a man accustomed to the night, and comfortable in it, Ricky thought. Daytime compromises much for a killer. It gives him vision, but makes him recognizable, as well. He thought: I know you, Mr. R. You will want to end all this in the dark. You will be here soon enough.

Some thirty minutes after the last car’s headlights had swooped past in the distance, shrouded by the trees, a cone of light heading steadily away, Ricky spotted another car approach on the roadway. This one traveled a little slower, almost hesitant. Just the slightest element of indecision in the speed it traveled.

The glow paused near the dirt road entrance to his property, then sped up, and disappeared around a corner some ways away.

Ricky shrank back, burrowing deeper into the hole that concealed him.

Someone found what they were searching for, he thought, but did not want to display the discovery.

He continued to wait. Twenty more minutes passed in utter darkness, but Ricky now was curled like a snake, waiting. The glow of his wristwatch helped him to measure what was happening just beyond what little sight he had. Five minutes, time enough to find a spot where he could leave the car unseen. Ten minutes, time to walk back to the entranceway to Ricky’s property. Another five minutes to slide along quietly, beneath the canopy of branches. Now, he’s in the last line of trees, Ricky thought. Surveying the ruin of the house from a safe distance. He drew back into his lair, pulling his feet under the edge of the poncho.

Ricky looped tendrils of patience around his heart. He could feel adrenaline pumping wildly through his ears, and his pulse racing like an athlete’s, but he calmed himself by silently reciting passages from literature to himself. Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” A line from Camus: “Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.” This recollection made him smile through the terror that lurked within him. An appropriate passage, he thought. His eyes darted back and forth, searching the darkness. It was a little like opening one’s eyes underwater. Shapes were in motion, but not recognizable. Still, he waited, because he knew that his only chance was to see before he was seen.

The drizzle had finally stopped, leaving the world slick and glistening. The chill that had first accompanied the thunderstorms fled, and Ricky could feel a thick, humid warmth seize hold of the world around him. He was breathing slowly, afraid that the asthmatic raspiness in every breath could be heard for miles. He glanced at the sky, and saw the outline of a cloud, showing up billowing gray against the black, scudding across the air, almost as if it was being rowed by some unseen oarsman. A little bit of moonlight slid into a hole carved by the cloud’s passing, dropping like a shaft through the night. Ricky pulled his eyes from right to left, and saw a shape step away from the trees.

Ricky fixed on the figure, who stood outlined for just an instant by the wan light, more a shape of darkness that was colored a richer black than the night surrounding them. In that time, he saw the person lift something to his eyes, and then slowly pivot, like a lookout high on a boat’s tower, searching for icebergs in the waters ahead.

Ricky shrank back farther, pressing himself back against the ruins. He bit down hard on his lip, for he knew immediately what he was facing: a man with night vision binoculars.

He froze in position, realizing that the outlandish costume of poncho and bug hat was his greatest defense. Amid the charred slabs of wood and piles of burned rubble, he would appear as just another shape of twisted wreckage. Like a chameleon who can change his color depending on the shade of leaf that it occupies, Ricky remained in position, hoping that there was nothing outward that presented even the smallest suggestion of humanity.

The shape moved subtly.

Ricky caught his breath. He did not know whether he’d been spotted.

It took every bit of mental energy he could collect to maintain his position. Panic lapped at the edges of his imagination screaming at him to run while he still had a chance. But he replied inwardly that his only chance lay in doing what he was doing. After so much that had happened, he had to bring the man moving through the darkness toward him within arm’s reach. The dark shape moved obliquely across Ricky’s field of vision. Moving cautiously, slowly, but not fearfully, slightly crouched over, presenting little profile, an experienced predator.

Ricky let out a long slow whistle of air. He did not see me.

The shape reached the onetime garden, and Ricky watched the man hesitate. He could see that he wore some cover over his head and face, matching his dark clothing. The shape seemed far more a part of the night than a person. Again something was lifted up, and again Ricky burned with tension as the night vision spyglasses swept over the wreckage of the place where he’d once enjoyed happiness. But again, the poncho hid his form, made him into a piece of debris, and the man hesitated, as if frustrated. He could see the hand holding the night vision glasses drop to his side, as if dismissing the surroundings.

The shape stepped forward more aggressively, standing now in what was once the doorway, searching the ruin. Then he stepped forward, stumbling slightly, and Ricky heard a muffled curse.

He knows I should be here, Ricky thought. But now he has doubts.

Ricky gritted his teeth together. He could feel a cold, murderous shaft within himself. He thought: Now you are unsure. It is not what you expected. And now you are doubting yourself. Doubt, frustration, and all the built-up anger you have for failing to kill me once when I made it so easy for you. This is a dangerous combination, because it is forcing you to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. You are shedding precautions with every stride and uncertainty is in your every step, and now, suddenly, you are playing the game on my field. Because Dr. Starks knows you, now, and knows everything that is in your head, because everything you are feeling, all that indecision and confusion, is the currency of his life, not yours. You are a killer whose target isn’t clear, and all because of the situation I’ve staged.

Ricky eyed the shape. Come closer, he said to himself.

The man stepped forward, stumbling slightly on a chunk of what was once a roof beam, trying to walk through a room that he did not know.

He stopped and kicked at the detritus.

“Doctor Starks,” the man whispered, like an actor on a stage, a secret meant to be shared. “I know you’re here.”

The voice seemed like dull razors scraped across the night.

“Come on out, doctor. It’s time for an ending.”

Ricky did not move. Did not reply. He could feel every muscle he had tighten, pulled taut. But Ricky had not spent years behind the couch greeting the most provocative and demanding statements with silence to fall into the invitation that the shape urged.

“Where are you, doctor?” the man continued, turning back and forth. “You weren’t on the beach. So you should be here, because you are a man of your word. And this is where you said you would be.”

The man stepped forward, moving from shadow to shadow. He tripped again, banging a knee against what had once been a stairway riser. He cursed a second time, and straightened up. Ricky could see confusion and irritation, mingled with frustration, in the shrug of the man’s shoulders.

The man turned right and left one more time, then sighed.

When he spoke, it was loudly, with resignation. “If not here, doctor, then just where the hell are you?”

With a final shrug, the man finally turned his back to Ricky. And as the man turned, Ricky lifted his hand holding the semiautomatic pistol out from where it was concealed beneath the poncho, lifting it up as he’d been taught at the gun store in New Hampshire, holding it with both hands and bringing the barrel sight squarely in line with the middle of Rumplestiltskin’s back.

“I’m behind you,” Ricky said quietly.

Now time seemed truly to lose its grip on the world around Ricky. Seconds that would ordinarily have collected themselves in an orderly progression into minutes seemed to scatter like flower petals caught in a strong breeze. He remained frozen in position, weapon bearing directly on the killer’s back, his own breathing shallow and labored. He could feel surges of electricity racing through his veins and it took an immense amount of energy to keep himself calm.

The man in front of him stood immobile.

“I have a gun,” Ricky croaked, voice raw with tension. “It is pointing at your back. It is a.380 caliber semiautomatic pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets, and if you move even in the slightest, I will fire. I will get off two, maybe three shots before you can turn and bring your own weapon to bear. At least one of these will find the target and will likely kill you. But you know that, don’t you, because you are familiar with the weapon, and the ammunition, and you know what they are capable of, so you have already made these calculations in your head, haven’t you?”

“As soon as I heard your voice, doctor,” Rumplestiltskin replied. His tone was unruffled and even. If he had been surprised, it was not readily apparent. Then he laughed out loud, adding quickly, “To think that I waltzed right into your aim. Ah, I suppose it was inevitable. You have played well, far better than I ever expected, and you have displayed resources I didn’t think you possessed. But our little game is now down to its final moves, isn’t it?” He paused, then said, “I think, Doctor Starks, you would be wise to shoot me now. Right in the back. You currently have the advantage. But every few seconds that pass, your position weakens. As a professional having dealt with these sorts of situations before, I would strongly recommend that you not waste the opportunity that you’ve created. Shoot me now, doctor. While you still have the chance.”

Ricky did not reply.

The man laughed. “Come on, doctor. Channel all that anger. Focus all your rage. You’ve got to bring these things together in your head, concentrate them into a single, centered entity, and then you can pull that trigger with nary a twitch of guilt. Do it now, doctor, because every second you let me live, is another second you may be taking off your own life.”

Ricky aimed straight ahead, but did not fire.

“Hold up your hands where I can see them,” he demanded instead.

Rumplestiltskin snorted another laugh. “What? Did you see that on a television show? Or in the movies? Is doesn’t work that way in real life.”

“Drop your weapon,” Ricky insisted.

The man shook his head slowly back and forth. “No. I won’t be doing that, either. It’s a cliché, anyway. You see, if I drop my weapon to the ground, then I give up any options I might have. Examine the situation, doctor: In my professional judgment, you’ve already blown your chance. I know what is in your head. I know that if you could fire, you would have done so already. But it is a little more difficult to murder a man, even someone who has given you plenty of reasons for death, than even you thought. Doctor, your world is one of fantasy death. All those murderous impulses that you’ve listened to for all those years, and helped defuse. Because, to you, they exist in the realm of fantasy. But here, tonight, there is nothing but reality surrounding us. And right now, you’re searching for the strength to kill. And, I’m wagering, not finding it rapidly. I, on the other hand, haven’t quite the same journey to travel before finding the same strength. I wouldn’t have worried even a bit about the moral ambiguity of shooting someone in the back. Or the front, for that matter. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, doctor. As long as the target is dead, who cares? So, I won’t be dropping my weapon to the ground, not now, not ever. Instead, it will stay in my right hand, cocked and ready. Will I spin around now? Take my best chance at this moment? Or shall I wait a bit?”

Ricky again remained silent, his mind churning.

“One thing you should know, doctor: If you want to be a successful killer, you need to not worry about your own sorry life.”

Ricky listened to the words that flitted through the darkness. A great unsettled sensation crept into his heart.

“I know you,” he said. “I know your voice.”

“Yes, you do,” Rumplestiltskin replied, with a slight mocking tone. “You’ve heard it often enough.”

Ricky felt suddenly as if he were standing on a sheet of slippery ice. Unsteadiness crept into his own voice. “Turn around,” he said.

Rumplestiltskin hesitated, shaking his head negatively. “You don’t want to ask me to do that. Because once I turn around almost every advantage you have will be erased. I will see your precise position, and, trust me on this one, doctor, once I have you located, it will only be a short time before I kill you.”

“I know you,” Ricky repeated, whispering.

“Is it that hard? The voice is the same. The posture. All the inflections and tones, nuances and mannerisms. You should recognize them all,” Rumplestiltskin said. “After all, we were in more or less the same physical relationship five times each week for nearly a year. And I wouldn’t have turned around then. And the psychoanalytic process, isn’t it more or less the same as this? The doctor with the knowledge, the power, dare I say it, the weapons, right behind the back of the poor patient, who can’t see what is going on, but only has his paltry and pathetic memories to work with. Have things changed all that much for us, doctor?”

Ricky’s throat was completely dry, but he still choked out the name.

“Zimmerman?”

Rumplestiltskin laughed again. “Zimmerman is very dead.”

“But you’re…”

“I’m the man you knew as Roger Zimmerman. With the invalided mother and the couldn’t-care-less brother, and the job that went nowhere, and all that anger that never seemed to get resolved in the slightest despite all the yakkety-yak that filled up your office to no great advantage. That’s the Zimmerman you knew, Doctor Starks. And that’s the Zimmerman that died.”

Ricky felt dizzy. He was grasping inwardly at lies.

“But the subway…”

“That is indeed where Zimmerman-the real Zimmerman, who was indeed quite suicidal-died. Nudged to his demise. A timely death.”

“But I don’t…”

Rumplestiltskin shrugged. “Doctor, a man comes to your office and says he is Roger Zimmerman and he is suffering from this and that and presents as a proper patient for analysis and has the financial wherewithal to pay your bills. Did you ever check to be certain that the man who arrived at your door was in truth the man he said he was?”

Ricky was silent.

“I didn’t think so. Because, had you done so, you would have found that the real Zimmerman was more or less as I presented him to you. The only difference was that he wasn’t the person coming to see you. I was. And when it came time for him to die, he’d already provided what I needed. I simply borrowed his life and death. Because, doctor, I had to know you. I had to see you and study you. And I had to do that in the best way possible. It took some time. But I learned what I needed. Slowly, to be sure, but, as you’ve learned, I can be a patient man.”

“Who are you?” Ricky asked.

“You will never know,” the man replied. “And, then again, you already know. You know of my past. You know of my upbringing. You know of my brother and sister. You know much about me, doctor. But you will never know who I truly am.”

“Why did you do this to me?” Ricky asked.

Rumplestiltskin shook his head, as if astonished at the simple audacity of the question. “You already know the answers. Is it so unreasonable to think that a child would see so much evil delivered to someone he loved, see them beaten down and thrown into despair so profound that they eventually had to murder themselves to find salvation, and when this child reached a position where he could exact a measure of revenge from all the people who failed to help out-yourself included, doctor-that he wouldn’t seize that chance?”

“Revenge solves nothing,” Ricky said.

“Spoken like a man who never indulged,” Rumplestiltskin snorted. “You are, of course, mistaken, doctor. Like you have been so often. Revenge serves to cleanse the heart and soul. It has been around since the first caveman climbed down out of a tree and bashed his brother over the head for some slight of honor. But, knowing all that you know, about what happened to my mother and her three children, why is it that you think we are not owed something in return from all the people who neglected us? Children who were innocent of any wrongdoings, but summarily dismissed and abandoned and left to die by so many folks who should have known better, had they the slightest bit of compassion or empathy or even just a drop or two of the milk of human kindness within their hearts. Are we not, having come through those fires, owed something in return? Really, that is by far the more provocative question.”

He paused, listening to Ricky’s silence in reply, then spoke coldly: “You see, doctor, the true question before us this night isn’t why would I pursue you to your death, it’s why wouldn’t I?”

Again, Ricky had no answer.

“Does it surprise you that I have become a killer?”

It did not, but Ricky didn’t speak this out loud.

The silence slipped around the two men for a moment, and then, just as it would in the sanctity of his office, with a couch and quiet, one man broke the eerie stillness with another question.

“Let me ask you this? Why is it that you don’t think you deserve to die?”

Ricky could sense the man’s smile on his face. It would be a soul-dead, cold smile.

“Everyone deserves to die for something. No one is actually innocent, doctor. Not you. Not me. No one.”

Rumplestiltskin seemed to shake slightly, at that moment. Ricky imagined he could see the man’s fingers curl around the grip of his weapon.

“I think, Doctor Starks,” the killer said, with a cold resolve that spoke of what was going through his imagination, “as interesting as this last session has been, and even if you think there is still much more to be said, the time for talk has passed by. It is now time for someone to die. The odds are it is about to be you.”

Ricky sighted down the pistol, taking a deep breath. He was wedged against the rubble, unable to move either to the right or to the left, his route behind him blocked as well, the entirety of his life lived and life to live dismissed in so many moments, all for a single act of neglect when he was young and should indeed have known better, but did not. In a world of options, he had none remaining. He squeezed back on the pistol trigger, mustering strength and channeling will.

“You forget something,” he said slowly. Coldly. “Doctor Starks has already died.”

Then he fired.

It was as if the man responded to the slightest change in the inflection in Ricky’s voice, recognized at the first harsh tone of the first word, and training and understanding of the situation took over, so that his actions were incisive and immediate and taken without hesitation. As Ricky pulled the trigger, Rumplestiltskin dropped obliquely, spinning as he did, so that Ricky’s first shot aimed at the direct center of his back, instead tore savagely through the killer’s shoulder blade and Ricky’s second shot sliced through the collected muscles of his right arm, making a ripping sound through the air, thudding as it hit flesh, and cracking as it pulverized bone.

Ricky fired a third time, but this time wildly, the bullet like a siren, disappearing into the darkness.

Rumplestiltskin twisted around, immediately gasping with pain, a surge of adrenaline overcoming the force of the blows that had struck him, trying to lift his own weapon with his instantly mangled arm. He grasped at the weapon with his left hand, trying to steady it as he staggered back, balance precarious. Ricky froze, watching the barrel of the automatic pistol rise, like a cobra’s head, darting back and forth, its single eye seeking him out, the man holding it, tottering, as if on an a steep cliffside edge of loose stones.

The roar of the pistol was dreamlike, as if it were happening to someone else, someone far away and not connected to him. But the shriek of the bullet scoring the air above his head was real enough, and it catapulted Ricky back to action. A second shot cracked the air, and he could feel the hot wind of the bullet pass through the shapeless form of the poncho hanging from his shoulders. Ricky sucked in air, tasting the cordite and smoke, and again sighted down the barrel of his gun, fighting the electric sweep of combat shock that threatened to turn his hands palsied, and brought the barrel to bear on Rumplestiltskin’s face as the killer crumpled to the earth in front of him.

The killer seemed to rock back, trying to hold himself upright, as if expecting the final, killing shot. His own weapon had slid toward the ground, hanging loosely by his side after his second effort, held only by twitching fingertips no longer responding to destroyed and bleeding muscles. He lifted his good hand to his face, as if hoping to deflect the coming blow.

Adrenaline, anger, hatred, fear, the sum of all that had happened to him came together right then, in that single instant, demanding, insisting, reaching within him and shouting commands, and Ricky thought wildly that finally at that precise moment he was about to win.

And then he stopped, because abruptly he realized he would not.

Rumplestiltskin had paled, face white as if moonlight was illuminating it. Blood that seemed like streaks of black ink was coursing down his arm and chest. He tried once more, feebly, to grasp his weapon and lift it up, but was unable. Shock was taking over rapidly, clouding his every motion and fogging his grip on events. It was as if the quiet that had settled on the two men, as the gunshot echoes faded, was palpable, blanketing every movement they made.

Ricky stared at the man whom he had once known and yet not known as a patient, and realized that Rumplestiltskin would bleed to death in relatively short order. Or succumb to shock. It’s only in movies, Ricky thought, that a man can be shot with a high-powered round at close range and still be strong enough to dance a jig. Rumplestiltskin’s chances could be measured in minutes, he guessed.

A part of him he had never heard before insisted he simply watch the man die.

He did not. He struggled to his feet and jumped forward. He kicked the pistol away from the killer’s hand, then took his own and slipped it into his backpack. Then, as Rumplestiltskin mumbled something, as the man battled against the unconsciousness that would herald death, Ricky reached down and grasped his adversary around the chest. Struggling against the weight, Ricky lifted the killer up and with as great a burst as he could muster, threw him over his own shoulder, in a fireman’s carry. He straightened slowly, adjusting himself against the weight, half struck by the ironies that seemed as dense as the humid air around him, and then he staggered forward, through the wreckage, carrying the man who wanted him dead out of the rubble of the farmhouse.

Sweat stung at his eyes, and he struggled with each stride. What he carried seemed far greater than anything Ricky ever remembered lifting before. He could feel Rumplestiltskin lose consciousness, and heard his breathing grow wheezy and labored, asthmatic with death lurking close by. Ricky sucked in great drafts of humid air himself, powering himself forward in sturdy, unimaginative steps, each harder than the previous one, each mountainous in challenge. He told himself that this was the only way to walk to freedom.

He stopped at the edge of the road. Night surrounded both men with anonymity. He dropped Rumplestiltskin to the ground, and ran his hands over the man’s clothing. To his relief he found what he’d expected: a cell phone.

Rumplestiltskin’s breath was coming in shallow, pained spurts. Ricky suspected that his first shot had fragmented as it struck the scapula, and that the burbling sound he could distinguish was from a torn lung. He stanched the man’s wounds as best he could, then called the number long remembered for Wellfleet fire and rescue.

“Nine-one-one Cape Emergency,” came a clipped, efficient voice.

“Listen very carefully,” Ricky said slowly, deliberately, pausing between words, enunciating each with deliberate pace. “I am only going to say this one time, so get it straight. There has been a shooting accident. The victim is located on Old Beach Road at the entrance to the late Doctor Starks’s vacation home, the place that burned down last summer. He’s right on the driveway. The victim has multiple gunshot wounds to the back shoulder and right upper arm extremity, and is in shock. He will die rapidly if you are not here within minutes. Do you understand what I’ve just told you?”

“Who is this?”

“Do you understand!”

“Yes. I’m dispatching rescue now. Old Beach Road. Who is this?”

“Are you familiar with the location I’ve given you?”

“Yes. But I need to know: Who is this?”

Ricky thought for a moment, then answered: “No one who is anyone anymore.”

He disconnected the phone. He took his own weapon out and ejected the remaining bullets from the clip. These he tossed as far into the woods as he could. Then he dropped the pistol on the ground next to the wounded man. He also removed his flashlight from the backpack, switched it on and placed it on the unconscious killer’s chest. Ricky lifted his head. He could hear a distant siren starting up. Fire rescue was located only a few miles away, on Route Six. It would not take them long to reach the location. He guessed that the trip to the hospital was another fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. He did not know whether the EMTs would be able to stabilize the wounded man or if the emergency room staff was capable of dealing with serious gunshot wounds. Nor did he know whether a suitable surgical team was on call. He looked down at the killer one more time, and could not tell whether the man would live through the next few hours. He might. He might not. For the first time, perhaps, in his entire life, Ricky enjoyed uncertainty.

The ambulance sound quickly grew closer, and Ricky turned and started to jog away, slowly for the first few steps, but then gathering pace rapidly until he was flat-out sprinting forward, feet pounding against the road surface with a steady rhythm, letting the nighttime darkness swallow his presence utterly, until he was completely hidden from sight.

Like a newly inspired ghost, Ricky disappeared.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Outside Port-au-prince

It was about an hour past dawn and Ricky was watching a small lime green gecko dart about on the wall, defying gravity with every step. He watched the tiny animal move in spurts, occasionally pausing to extend its orange throat sac, before dashing forward a few strides, then stopping, pivoting its head to the right and then left, as it checked for danger. Ricky admired and envied the wondrous simplicity of the gecko’s day-to-day world: find something to eat, and avoid being eaten.

Above him an old brown four-bladed paddle fan creaked slightly with each revolution, spinning the hot, dull air of the small room. As Ricky shifted his legs, swinging them out of bed, the mattress springs matched the paddle fan noise. He stretched wildly, yawning, running a hand through his thinning hair, grasping the pair of weathered khaki hiking shorts that hung from the bed stand and searching for his glasses. He rose and poured himself a small basin of water from a pitcher standing on a swaying wooden table. He splashed the water onto his face, letting some of the liquid run down his chest, then he took a threadbare washcloth and soaped it from a pungent bar that he kept on the table. He dipped the cloth into the water and washed himself as best he could.

The room Ricky occupied was nearly square, and more or less undecorated, with stucco walls once a flat vibrant white, but faded over the years into a color that seemed only one step away from the dust that hung above the street outside. He had few possessions: a radio which brought in spring training games on the Armed Forces channels, some clothes. An up-to-date calendar sporting a bare-breasted young woman with an inviting look in her eyes had that day circled in black pen. It hung from a nail a few feet away from a hand-carved wooden crucifix that he suspected had belonged to the prior occupant, but which he had not removed, because it seemed to him that taking down a religious icon in a country where religion in so many weird and conflicting ways was so critical to so many people, invited bad luck, and, so far, he thought, his luck, on balance, had been quite good. He had built two shelves against one wall. These were crammed with a number of worn and well-used medical texts, as well as some brand-new ones. The titles of these ranged from the practical (Tropical Diseases and Their Treatments) to the more esoteric (Case Studies in Mental Illness Patterns for Developing Nations). He had a thick faux leather notebook and some pencils, as well, which he used for jotting down observations and treatment plans, which he kept on a small desk next to a laptop computer and printer. Above the printer he kept a handwritten list of wholesale drug outlets in south Florida. He also had a small, black canvas duffel bag, big enough for a two- to three-day trip, which he had packed with some clothing. Ricky looked about the room, and thought that it wasn’t much, but it suited his mood and his sense of himself, and though he suspected he could easily move into far nicer digs, he wasn’t sure that he would do so, even after he ran the errands that would take up the remainder of the week.

He went to the window and stared out at the street. It was only a half block to the clinic, and already he could see people gathered outside. There was a small grocery across the street, and the proprietor and his wife, two incongruously large middle-aged folks, were setting out some wooden crates and barrels that contained fresh fruits and vegetables. They were brewing coffee, as well, and the smell reached up to him more or less the same time that the proprietor’s wife turned and saw him standing in the window. She waved gaily, smiling, and gestured at the coffee simmering over an open fire, inviting Ricky to join them. He held up a couple of fingers, to indicate he would be along in a moment or two, and she returned to work. The street was already beginning to crowd with people, and Ricky suspected it would be a busy day at the clinic. The heat for early March was oddly potent, mingling with a distant flavor of bougainvillea, market fruits, and humanity, temperatures rising as quickly as the morning did.

He looked off at the hills, which alternated a lush and enthusiastic green with barren brown. They rose high above the city and he thought to himself that Haiti was truly one of the most intriguing countries on the planet. It was the poorest spot he’d ever seen, but in some ways the most dignified, as well. He knew that when he walked down the street toward the clinic, he would be the only white face for miles. This might have unsettled him once, in his past, but no longer. He reveled in being different, and knew there was an odd sort of mystery that accompanied his every step.

What he particularly enjoyed was that despite the mystery, the people on the street were willing to accept his odd presence without question. Or, at least, no questions to his face, which, when he considered it, seemed both a compliment and a compromise and one of each that he was willing to live with.

He descended from his room and joined the market proprietor and his wife in a cup of bitter, strong coffee, thick and sweetened with raw sugar. He ate a crust of bread that had been baked that morning, and took the opportunity to examine the abscessed boil on the proprietor’s back that he had lanced and drained three days earlier. The wound seemed to be healing rapidly and he reminded the man in half-English, half-French, to keep it clean and to change the bandage again that day.

The proprietor nodded, grinned, spoke for a few moments about the local soccer team’s erratic fortunes, and begged Ricky to attend their match the following week. The team was called the Soaring Eagles and carried much of the neighborhood’s passions into each contest, with decidedly mixed and noticeably un-soaring results. The proprietor refused Ricky’s offer to pay for his breakfast, meager as it had been. This was already a routine between the two men. Ricky would reach into his pocket, and the proprietor would wave anything that emerged away. As always, Ricky thanked him, promised to be at the soccer match wearing red and green Eagle colors, and stepped off briskly toward the clinic, the taste of the coffee still strong in his mouth.

The people crowded around the entranceway, obscuring the handwritten sign that read in large, black, uneven letters, with several misspellings: doctor dumondais excelent medical clinic. hours 7 to 7 and by appointment. call 067-8975. Ricky passed through the mob, which parted to let him through. More than one man tipped his cap in his direction. He recognized some faces from some of the more regular customers, and he smiled greetings in their directions. Faces flashed replies and he heard more than one whispered “Bonjour, monsieur le docteur…” He shook hands with one old man, the tailor named Dupont, who had made him a tan linen suit far more elegant than anything Ricky thought he might need after Ricky had obtained some Vioxx for the arthritis which afflicted his fingers. As he’d suspected, the drug had done wonders.

As he entered the clinic door, he saw Doctor Dumondais’s nurse, an imposing woman who seemed to measure five feet two both vertically and horizontally, but who possessed undeniable strength in her large body, and a voluminous knowledge of folk remedies and voodoo cures applicable to any number of tropical diseases.

“Bonjour, Hélène,” Ricky said. “Tout le monde est arrivé ce jour.”

“Ah, yes, doctor, we will be busy all day…”

Ricky shook his head. He practiced his island French on her, and she, in return, practiced her English on him, preparing for the hope, he knew, that someday she would gather enough money in the strongbox she kept buried in her backyard to pay her cousin for a place on his old fishing boat, so that he would risk the treacherous Florida Straits and carry her to Miami and she could start over again there, where she had been reliably informed, the streets were cluttered with money.

“No, no, Hélène, pas docteur. C ’est monsieur Lively. Je ne suis plus un médecin…”

“Yes, yes, Mister Lively. I know what you do say to me this so many times. I am sorry, for I am forgetting once again another time…”

She smiled widely, as if she didn’t quite understand but still wanted to join in with the great joke that Ricky played, to bring so much medical knowledge to the clinic, and yet, not want to be called a doctor. Ricky believed that Hélène simply ascribed this behavior to the odd, and mysterious mannerisms of all white people, and, like the folks crowded at the clinic door, she could not care less what Ricky wanted to be called. She knew what she knew.

“Le Docteur Dumondais, il est arrivé ce matin?”

“Ah, yes, Monsieur Lively. In his, ah, bureau.”

“Office is the word…”

“Yes, yes, j ’oublie. I forget. Office. Yes. He is there. Il vous attend…”

Ricky knocked on the wooden door and stepped inside. Auguste Dumondais, a wispy, small man, who wore bifocals and had a shaved head, was inside, behind his battered wooden desk, across from the examination table. He was pulling on a white clinical coat, and he looked up and smiled as Ricky entered. “Ah, Ricky, we shall be busy today, no?”

“Oui,” Ricky replied. “Bien sûr.”

“But, is not this day the day you are leaving us?”

“Only for a brief visit home. Less than a week.”

The gnomelike doctor nodded. Ricky could see lingering doubt in his eyes. Auguste Dumondais had not asked many questions when Ricky had arrived at the clinic door six months earlier, offering his services for the most modest salary. The clinic had thrived after Ricky was set up with an office much like the one he was standing in at that moment, nudging le Docteur Dumondais out of his own, self-imposed poverty, and allowing him to invest in more equipment and more medicines. Lately, the two men had discussed obtaining a secondhand X-ray machine from a clearinghouse in the states that Ricky had discovered. Ricky could see that the doctor was afraid that the serendipity that had delivered Ricky to his door was going to steal him away.

“A week at the most. I promise to you.”

Auguste Dumondais shook his head. “Do not promise me, Ricky. You must do whatever it is that you have to do, for whatever purpose that you have. When you return, we will continue our work.” He smiled, as if to display that he had so many questions that it was impossible for him to find one with which to start.

Ricky nodded. He removed his notebook from the bellows pocket of his shorts.

“There is a case…,” he said slowly. “The little boy I saw the other week.”

“Ah, yes,” the doctor said, smiling. “Of course, I recall. I suspected this would interest you, no? He is what, five years old?”

“A little older,” Ricky said. “Six. And indeed, Auguste, you are correct. It interests me greatly. The child has not yet spoken a single word, according to his mother.”

“That is what I, too, understood. Intriguing, I think, no?”

“Unusual. Yes, very true.”

“And your diagnosis?”

Ricky could picture a small child, wiry like so many of the islanders, and slightly undernourished, which was also a typical statement, but not tragically so. The boy had a furtive look in his eyes as he’d sat across from Ricky, scared even though he occupied his mother’s lap. The mother had cried bitterly, tears streaking down dark cheeks, as Ricky had asked her questions, because the woman thought her boy to be the brightest of her seven children, quick to learn, quick to read, quick with numbers-but never speaking a word. A special child, she thought, in most every way. Ricky had been aware that the woman had a considerable reputation in the community for magical powers, and made some extra money on the side selling love potions and amulets that were said to ward off evil, and so, he understood, for her to bring the child to see the odd white man in the clinic must have been a truly hard-reached concession that spoke of her frustration over native medicines, and her love for the boy.

“I do not think his difficulty is organic,” Ricky said slowly.

Auguste Dumondais grimaced. “His lack of speech is…?” This became a question.

“A hysterical response.”

The small black doctor rubbed his chin, and then ran his hand across his glistening skull. “I remember this, just a little bit, from my studies. Perhaps. Why do you think this?”

“The mother would only hint at some tragedy. When he was younger. There were seven children in the family, but now, only five. Do you know the family history?”

“Two children died. Yes. And the father, too. An accident, I recall, during a great storm. Yes, this child was there, that I remember, too. This could be the origin. But what treatment can we perform?”

“I will come up with a plan after some research. We will have to persuade the mother, of course. I don’t know how easy that will be.”

“Will it be expensive for her?”

“No,” Ricky said. He realized that there was some design in Auguste Dumandais’s request for him to examine the child at the same time that Ricky had a trip out of the country planned. It was a transparent design, but a good one, nonetheless. He suspected he might have done more or less the same. “I think it will cost them nothing to bring him to see me after I return. But I must learn much more, first.”

Doctor Dumandais smiled and nodded. “Excellent,” he said, as he hung a stethoscope around his neck, and then handed Ricky a white clinical jacket of his own to wear.

The day went by rapidly, busily, so much so that Ricky almost missed his CaribeAir flight to Miami. A middle-aged businessman named Richard Lively, traveling on a recently issued American passport with only a few modest stamps from various Caribbean nations, was waved through U.S. customs without much delay. He realized he didn’t fit any of the obvious criminal profiles, which were invented primarily to identify drug smugglers. Ricky thought he was a most unique criminal, and one that defied categorization. He was booked on the eight a.m. plane north to La Guardia, so Ricky spent the night in the airport Holiday Inn. He took a lengthy, hot, soapy shower, which he enjoyed from both a sanitary and sensual point of view, and thought bordered on true luxury after the spartan accommodations he was accustomed to. The air-conditioning that defied the heat outside and cooled his room was a remembered treat. But he slept fitfully, in starts, tossing for an hour before his eyes closed, then waking twice, once in the midst of a dream about the fire at his vacation home, then again, when he dreamed of Haiti, and the boy who could not speak. He lay in the bed in the darkness, a little surprised that the sheets seemed too soft and the mattress too springy, listening to the hum of the ice machine down the hall, and an occasional footstep passing by in the hallway, muted by the carpet, but not completely so. In the quiet, he reconstructed the last call he’d made to Virgil, nearly nine months earlier.

It was midnight, when he’d finally covered the distance to the cheap room on the outskirts of Provincetown. He had felt an odd, contradictory sense of exhaustion and energy, tired from the long run, enthused by the thought that he had come through a night very much alive that should have seen his death. He had slumped down on the bed, and dialed the number of her apartment in Manhattan.

When Virgil picked up the call on the first ring, she said only, “Yes?”

“This isn’t the voice you expected,” he replied.

She fell instantly quiet.

“Your brother, the attorney is there, isn’t he? Sitting across the room from you, waiting for the same phone call.”

“Yes.”

“Then have him pick up the extension and listen in.”

Within a few seconds, Merlin, too, was on the line. “Look,” the lawyer started, blustery with false bravado, “You have no idea-”

Ricky interrupted him. “I have many ideas. Now be quiet and listen to me, because everyone’s lives depend upon it.”

Merlin started to say something, but he could sense that Virgil had thrown a glance in his direction, shutting him up.

“First, your brother. He is currently in the Mid Cape Medical Center. Depending on their abilities, he will either remain there, or be airlifted to Boston for surgery. The police will have many questions for him, should he survive his wounds, but I think they will have difficulty understanding what crime, if any, was committed this night. They will have questions for you, as well, but I think that he will need both the support of the sister and brother he loves, as well as some legal advice before too long, assuming he makes it. So, I think the first task ahead of you is to deal with his situation.”

Both remained silent.

“Of course, that is for you to decide. Perhaps you will leave him to handle things by himself. Perhaps not. It is your choice, and you will have to live with your decision. But there are a few other matters that need to be dealt with.”

“What sort of matters?” Virgil asked, her voice flat, trying to not betray any emotion, which, Ricky noted, was just as revealing as any other tone might be.

“First, the truly mundane: The money you stole from my retirement and other investment accounts. You will replace that sum into Crédit Suisse account number 01-00976-2. Write that down. You will do this promptly…”

“Or?” Merlin asked.

Ricky smiled. “I thought it was an old truism that no lawyer should ever ask a question they don’t already know the answer to. So, I shall assume you know the answer already.”

This silenced the attorney.

“What else?” Virgil asked.

“We have a new game,” Ricky said. “It’s called the game of staying alive. It’s designed for all of us to play. Simultaneously.”

Neither brother nor sister responded.

“The rules are simple,” Ricky said.

“What are they?” Virgil asked softly.

Ricky smiled to himself. “At the time I took my last vacation, I was charging patients between $75 and $125 per hour for analysis. On average, I saw each patient four, sometimes five times each week, generally forty-eight weeks each year. You can do the math yourselves.”

“Yes,” she said. “We’re familiar with your professional life.”

“Great,” Ricky said briskly. “So, this is the way the game of staying alive works: Everyone who wants to keep breathing enters therapy. With me. You pay, you live. The more people who enter the immediate sphere of your life, the more you pay, because that will buy their safety, as well.”

“What do you mean ‘more people’…?” Virgil asked.

“I’ll leave that up to you to define,” Ricky said coldly.

“If we don’t do as you say?” Merlin sharply demanded.

Ricky replied with a blank, level harshness. “As soon as the money stops, I will assume that your brother has recovered from his wounds and is hunting me once again. And I will be forced to start hunting you.”

Ricky paused, then added, “Or someone close to you. A wife. A child. A lover. A partner. Someone who helps your life be ordinary.”

Again, they were quiet.

“How much do you want to have a normal life?” Ricky asked.

They did not answer this question, though he already knew what they would say.

“It is,” Ricky continued, “more or less the same choice you once gave me. Only this time it is about balance. You can maintain the equilibrium between yourselves and me. And you can signal that equity with the easiest and really the most unimportant of things: the payment of some money. So, ask yourselves this: How much is the life I want to live worth?”

Ricky coughed, to give them a moment, then continued, “This is, in some ways, the same question I would pose to anyone who sought me out for therapy.”

Then he had hung up.

It was clear above New York, and from his window seat he could make out the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, as the plane swept over the city and approached La Guardia. He had the odd sensation that he wasn’t returning home as much as he was visiting some long forgotten dream space, more like seeing the wilderness camp where one had spent a single unhappy summer as a child, crying his way through some long parentally imposed vacation.

Ricky wanted to move swiftly. He was booked back to Miami on the last flight that night, and he didn’t have much time. There was a line at the rental counter, and it took some time to extricate the car reserved for Mr. Lively. He used his New Hampshire license, which was due to expire in another half year and thought that perhaps it would be wise to relocate fictionally to Miami before returning to the islands.

It took about ninety minutes through modest traffic to get to Greenwich, Connecticut, but he discovered that the directions obtained over the Internet were accurate down to the last tenth of a mile. This amused him, because, he thought, life is never actually that precise.

He stopped in the center of town and purchased an expensive bottle of wine at a gourmet shop. Then he drove out to a home on a street that was, perhaps by the inflated standards of one of the nation’s richest communities, fairly modest. The houses were simply ostentatious, not obscene. Those that fit this second category were located a few blocks over.

He parked at the bottom of the driveway outside a fake Tudor-style home. There was a swimming pool in back and a large oak tree in the front that had yet to bloom. The mid-March sun wasn’t insistent enough, he thought, although it did have some weak promise as it filtered between branches that were still to blossom. An oddly unsettled time of year, he decided.

With the bottle of wine in hand, he rang the doorbell.

It did not take long for a young woman, no older than her early thirties, to answer. She wore jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, and had sandy hair that was swept back from her face, displaying eyes that were lined at the corners and some wrinkles, probably prompted by exhaustion, around the edges of her mouth. But her voice was soft and inviting, and she spoke, as she swung the door open, in a near-whisper. Before he could say anything, she said, “Shhhh, please. I’ve just gotten the twins down for a nap…”

Ricky smiled back. “They must be a handful,” he said pleasantly enough.

“You have no idea,” the young woman replied. She kept her voice very low. “Now, how can I help you?”

Ricky held out the bottle of wine. “You don’t remember meeting me?” he asked. This was a lie, of course. They had never met. “At that cocktail party with your husband’s partners about six months back?”

The young woman looked carefully at him. He knew the answer should be no, she had no recollection, but she was brought up more properly than her husband had been, so she responded, “Of course, ah, Mr…”

“It’s doctor,” Ricky said. “But you should call me Ricky.” He shook her hand, and then held out the bottle of wine. “Your husband is owed this,” Ricky said. “We had some business together a year or so ago, and I just wanted to thank him, and remind him of the successful outcome of the case.”

She took the bottle, a little nonplussed. “Well, thank you, ah, doctor…”

“Ricky,” he said. “He’ll remember.”

Then he turned and with a little devil-may-care wave, walked back down the drive to his rental car. He had seen all he needed, learned all he’d needed. It was a nice life that Merlin had carved out for his family, one that held out much promise for being nicer still, in the days to come. But this evening, at least, Merlin would have a sleepless night, after uncorking the wine. Ricky knew it would taste bitter. Fear does that.

He thought of visiting Virgil as well, but instead merely had a florist deliver a dozen lilies to the film set where she had acquired a modest, but important role on a big-budget Hollywood production. It was a good part, he’d learned, one that, if handled well, might lead to much bigger and better roles in the future, although he had his doubts that she would ever play a character more interesting than Virgil. White lilies were perfect. One usually sent them to a funeral with a note expressing deep condolences. He suspected she would know that. He had the flowers wrapped with a black satin bow and enclosed a card, which read simply:

Still thinking of you.

s/Dr. S.

He had, he thought, become a man of far fewer words.