4
Like a shark cruising cold currents in a night sea, the killer drives.
This is his first time in Kansas City, but he knows the streets. Total mastery of the layout is part of his preparation for every assignment, in case he becomes the subject of a police pursuit and needs to make a hasty escape under pressure.
Curiously, he has no recollection of having seen—let alone studied—a map, and he can’t imagine from where this highly detailed information was acquired. But he doesn’t like to consider the holes in his memory because thinking about them opens the door on a black abyss that terrifies him.
So he just drives.
Usually he likes to drive. Having a powerful and responsive machine at his command gives him a sense of control and purpose.
But once in a while, as happens now, the motion of the car and the sights of a strange city—regardless of how familiar he may be with the layout of its streets—make him feel small, alone, adrift. His heart begins to beat fast. His palms are suddenly so damp, the steering wheel slips through them.
Then, as he brakes at a traffic light, he looks at the car in the lane beside him and sees a family revealed by the street lamps. The father is driving. The mother sits in the passenger seat, an attractive woman. A boy of about ten and a girl of six or seven are in the back seat. On their way home from a night out. Maybe a movie. Talking, laughing, parents and children together, sharing.
In his deteriorating condition, that sight is a merciless hammer blow, and he makes a thin wordless sound of anguish.
He pulls off the street, into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant. Slumps in his seat. Breathes in quick shallow gasps.
The emptiness. He dreads the emptiness.
And now it is upon him.
He feels as if he is a hollow man, made of the thinnest blown glass, fragile, only slightly more substantial than a ghost.
At times like this, he desperately needs a mirror. His reflection is one of the few things that can confirm his existence.
The restaurant’s elaborate red and green neon sign illuminates the interior of the Ford. When he tilts the rearview mirror to look at himself, his skin has a cadaverous cast, and his eyes are alight with changing crimson shapes, as if fires burn within him.
Tonight, his reflection is not enough to diminish his agitation. He feels less substantial by the moment. Perhaps he will breathe out one last time, expelling the final thin substance of himself in that exhalation.
Tears blur his vision. He is overwhelmed by his loneliness, and tortured by the meaninglessness of his life.
He folds his arms across his chest, hugs himself, leans forward, and rests his forehead against the steering wheel. He sobs as if he is a small child.
He doesn’t know his name, only the names he will use while in Kansas City. He wants so much to have a name of his own that is not as counterfeit as the credit cards on which it appears. He has no family, no friends, no home. He cannot recall who gave him this assignment—or any of the jobs before it—and he doesn’t know why his targets must die. Incredibly, he has no idea who pays him, does not remember where he got the money in his wallet or where he bought the clothes he wears.
On a more profound level, he does not know who he is. He has no memory of a time when his profession was anything other than murder. He has no politics, no religion, no personal philosophy whatsoever. Whenever he tries to take an interest in current affairs, he finds himself unable to retain what he reads in the newspapers; he can’t even focus his attention on television news. He is intelligent, yet he permits himself—or is permitted—only satisfactions of a physical nature: food, sex, the savage exhilaration of homicide. Vast regions of his mind remain uncharted.
A few minutes pass in green and red neon.
His tears dry. Gradually he stops trembling.
He will be all right. Back on the rails. Steady, controlled.
In fact he ascends with remarkable speed from the depths of despair. Surprising, how readily he is willing to continue with his latest assignment—and with the mere shadow of a life that he leads. Sometimes it seems to him that he operates as if programmed in the manner of a dumb and obedient machine.
On the other hand, if he were not to continue, what else would he do? This shadow of a life is the only life he has.
5
While the girls were upstairs, brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, Marty methodically went from room to room on the first floor, making sure all of the doors and windows were locked.
He had circled half the downstairs—and was testing the latch on the window above the kitchen sink—before he realized what a peculiar task he had set for himself. Prior to turning in every night, he checked the front and back doors, of course, plus the sliding doors between the family room and patio, but he did not ordinarily verify that any particular window was secure unless he knew that it had been open for ventilation during the day. Nevertheless, he was confirming the integrity of the house perimeter as conscientiously as a sentry might certify the outer defenses of a fortress besieged by enemies.
As he was finishing in the kitchen, he heard Paige enter, and a moment later she slid both arms around his waist, embracing him from behind. “You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, well . . .”
“Bad day?”
“Not really. Just one bad moment.”
Marty turned in her arms to embrace her. She felt wonderful, so warm and strong, so alive.
That he loved her more now than when they had met in college was no surprise. The triumphs and failures they had shared, the years of daily struggle to make a place in the world and to seek the meaning of it, was rich soil in which love could grow.
However, in an age when ideal beauty was supposedly embodied in nineteen-year-old professional cheerleaders for major-league football teams, Marty knew a lot of guys who would be surprised to hear he’d found his wife increasingly attractive as she had aged from nineteen to thirty-three. Her eyes were no bluer than they had been when he’d first met her, her hair was not a richer shade of gold, and her skin was neither smoother nor more supple. Nevertheless, experience had given her character, depth. Corny as it sounded in this era of knee-jerk cynicism, she sometimes seemed to shine with an inner light, as radiant as the venerated subject of a painting by Raphael.
So, yeah, maybe he had a heart as soft as butter, maybe he was a sucker for romance, but he found her smile and the challenge of her eyes infinitely more exciting than a six-pack of naked cheerleaders.
He kissed her brow.
She said, “One bad moment? What happened?”
He hadn’t decided how much he should tell her about those seven lost minutes. For now it might be best to minimize the deep weirdness of the experience, see the doctor Monday morning, and even have some tests done. If he was in good health, what had happened in the office this afternoon might prove to be an inexplicable singularity. He didn’t want to alarm Paige unnecessarily.
“Well?” she persisted.
With the inflection she gave that single word, she reminded him that twelve years of marriage forbade serious secrets, no matter what good intentions motivated his reticence.
He said, “You remember Audrey Aimes?”
“Who? Oh, you mean in One Dead Bishop?”
One Dead Bishop was a novel he had written. Audrey Aimes was the lead character.
“Remember what her problem was?” he asked.
“She found a dead priest hanging on a hook in her foyer closet.”
“Aside from that.”