Peril

He decided on the park, and after a few minutes found himself seated on a large gray stone, watching dully as the park’s 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 man’s 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 he’s 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 who’d 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, he’d hardly been around at all. Was that not reason enough to leave her something to make up for the thirty wintry years she’d 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 couldn’t 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, Where’s Sara Labriola off to?

The driver placed the suitcase in the trunk. “Getting an early start,” he said.

She nodded briskly, then got into the cab, careful to gaze straight ahead as it pulled away, afraid that if she didn’t, 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 demand—Kill him!—growing 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. “Have a nice trip,” 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 son’s 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 Labriola’s 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.

“New York,” 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. “One way or round-trip?” 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.

“One way,” she said, lifting her head, choking back her fear, pronouncing the words loudly, determinedly, as a soldier might call out Charge!

The woman told her the price. She paid in cash, her credit cards left behind because she knew Leo Labriola would trace her if she used them.

“Bus leaves at ten-fourteen,” the woman said.

She walked to the departing gate and waited for the bus, the fear rising steadily so that she continually glanced about nervously, wondering if Labriola had somehow guessed she was leaving, already assigned people all along the route to keep track of her. She could hear their voices in her mind, Leo Labriola’s minions. Her bus is just pulling out now. She’s headed down Sunset Highway. She just reached Cold Spring Harbor. Her bus just pulled into Port Authority. She’s hailing a cab at Forty-second and Ninth. Looks like she’s headed downtown.