In the night room Page 0,56

horn, and the service door flies open. Out onto West Sixty-first Street tumbles Willy Patrick, scrambling to stay on her feet. She is carrying her suitcase and the duffel, and her white shirt glares like a flag.

“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I was so worried.” She wobbles toward him. “Did you see them? Are they still around?”

“We’d better hurry.” He grabs her arm to hold her steady, and reaches down with his other hand for the suitcase. The cab driver is watching all of this with glum, gathering suspicion.

“You won’t believe this,” Willy says, “but they really did teach me how to make veal Bolognese in there.”

Tom pitches the money bag into the back of the cab and waits for Willy to step up and in. Now the cabbie is looking straight ahead and pointing toward the windshield.

When Tom looks up the street, he sees the two men who had been standing in front of an apartment entrance running pell-mell toward them, the larger of the two reaching under his jacket for what is probably not his wallet. It’s an awkward business, because the man has a cast on his right arm, and he is forced to use his left hand, which makes reaching his holster difficult.

Standing beside Tom, Willy freezes. Tom tries to push her into the cab, but has no luck until Roman Richard at last has extracted his pistol from its holster and begins to take aim. At the sight of the weapon in Roman Richard’s massive hand, Willy vaults into the spacious back of the taxi, taking her suitcase with her.

“Come on, get in!” she screams, reaching out for Tom.

“Tom Hartland!” yells Giles Coverley. “Stop right now! If you do, my friend won’t shoot. You’re never going to get away, so you might as well cooperate.”

The cab driver rams his vehicle into reverse, and Tom sees Willy lurching, bent over, toward the opening in the side of the vehicle. Her face seems to widen with panic.

Twenty feet down the otherwise empty street, Roman Richard Spilka steadies his left arm upon his plaster-encased right and squeezes the trigger. Flame seems to jump from the end of the barrel, and a low, flat crack widens out around the two running men and the reversing taxi. Tom Hartland sees a spatter of blood appear on Willy’s dazzling shirtfront at the same moment what feels like a horse’s hoof slams into his chest. Then the cab has flown backward past him, and he realizes that he is lying flat on his back with the impression that the taxi’s door slid shut at the moment he hit the deck.

Another soft, minimalist explosion goes off in the air above him, and he says to himself, Oh, a silencer, that makes a lot of sense. Tom Hartland has written about silencers but never seen one, and he’s sorry he did not get a better look. Willy’s screaming, and the driver is cursing, presumably in some Indian dialect. Or would it be Gujarati? Tom has no idea. He regrets never having gone to Bombay or Hyderabad, he’s sorry that he never learned even a little bit of the language. If he had, over the past ten or fifteen years he could have had lots of interesting conversations with cab drivers.

Directly above him, Roman Richard Spilka’s immense body moves into the frame of unclouded sky and looms over him. Giles Coverley strolls into view. A lopsided frown disturbs the symmetry of his sleek face. “Did you really think we didn’t know who you were?” he asks, as if this were a perfectly reasonable question.

“Dumb fuck,” says Spilka, glaring down.

“Shoot him in the head, and we’ll get his body off the street,” Coverley says.

The entire top of Spilka’s body tilts over like a derrick, and the pistol comes abruptly, enormously into view, allowing Tom Hartland to observe that the silencer has a decidedly homemade look about it. It occurs to him that he is miraculously not afraid, for which he is deeply grateful. He hopes Willy can get away from these monstrous men. The silencer flickers and jumps back, but Tom does not see it move, for he is already elsewhere, confused and astounded, trying to find his way, like all new sasha.

19

In a town called Haleyville, which is located in a kind of generic midwestern landscape with woods and streams and distant farms, a sixteen-year-old boy named Teddy Barton awakens to a world that has been altered in some subtle yet unmistakable fashion. The air