asked.
âNo,â Mortimer answered. Not you. Not anybody.
Once outside the office, Mortimer glanced down Eighty-fifth Street, trying to decide what would do him the most good now, the bustle of Broadway or some secluded corner of Central Park.
He decided on the park, and after a few minutes found himself seated on a large gray stone, watching dully as the parkâs other visitors made their way down its many winding paths. Not far away a fat black woman bumpily pushed a wheelchair across the lawn. An old man sat in the chair, his legs wrapped in a burgundy blanket. The old manâs eyes were blue, but milky, and little wisps of white hair trembled each time the wheelchair rocked. He was deathly thin, his long, bony fingers little more than skeletal.
Even that fucking guy,
Mortimer thought,
ninety if heâs a day, but even that fucking guy will outlive me.
But it was not the speed of his approaching death that rocked Mortimer now. It was how little time he had to make things right with Dottie. Poor Dottie Smith, the girl whoâd been desperate enough or hopeless enough or just plain dumb enough to marry him. He had no illusion that she would miss him. He had not been an attentive husband. In fact, heâd hardly been around at all. Was that not reason enough to leave her something to make up for the thirty wintry years sheâd spent with him, a guy who had never taken her out dancing, or even given her a little kiss when he left in the morning or came back at night. What could her life have been, he wondered, without that kiss? And now, after so many dull, dead years, the only kiss he had to leave her was his kiss of death.
No, he decided. No, he couldnât do that. He had to find a way to leave something for Dottie. That, he concluded, was his mission now.
SARA
When the cab arrived, she opened the door and strode swiftly down the walkway, the click of her heels so loud she felt sure it would alert the neighbors, summon them to their windows, all eyes on her now, intent, quizzical,
Whereâs Sara Labriola off to?
The driver placed the suitcase in the trunk. âGetting an early start,â he said.
She nodded briskly, then got into the cab, careful to gaze straight ahead as it pulled away, afraid that if she didnât, the fear would reach out like a grappling hook and haul her back across the lawn and into the house, where the voice would begin to make its hard demandâ
Kill him!
âgrowing louder with each passing day until, inevitably, she would obey it.
At the station, the driver placed the suitcase on the curb and touched his cap. âHave a nice trip,â he said.
Her fear spiked as the cab pulled away, and she was seized with the irrational suspicion that the driver worked for her father-in-law, that he was even then reaching for a cell phone,
Hello, Mr. Labriola, I just dropped your sonâs wife at the bus station in Montauk.
Her hands were trembling, and she struggled to still them. Her fear had reached the panic stage, so that she had to remind herself that it was the long years of listening to Labriolaâs stories that had created this paranoid sense that his henchmen were everywhere, whispering into cell phones, tracking her every move.
But none of that mattered now. The only thing that mattered was that she had to leave. She grabbed the suitcase and marched to the ticket counter.
âNew York,â she said.
The woman at the booth wore glasses so thick they magnified her eyes. The frames were bright red plastic, a gaudy splash of color in the gray bus station. âOne way or round-trip?â the woman asked.
So that was what it came to, Sara thought, whether you stopped at the brink of action or pressed on against all odds, boldly took the outbound road or the circular one that forever wound you back to the scene of the crime.
âOne way,â she said, lifting her head, choking back her fear, pronouncing the words loudly, determinedly, as a