Specimen Days

And yet, an image crept into her mind. She pictured Dick Harte roused from sleep, walking through a big, dark house in his pajamas (he'd have worn pajamas, wouldn't he; a balding fifty-three-year-old with no record of drug use or illicit sex, a man who paid his bills on time, whose pretty wife number two sent herself to Pluto every night with the help of a few key Pharmaceuticals), tracking down a suspicious nocturnal sound. What would it have been like, being Dick Harte? Was he satisfied; was he prospering in his heart? Had he had a premonition that night, out there in the stately abundance of Great Neck? Cat imagined him going down the staircase, walking barefoot over parquet and Oriental rugs, finding nothing amiss, but wondering. She pictured him going to a window make it a living-room window, Thermopane, with heavy brocade window treatments (the wife was a decorator, right?); say it looked out onto an expanse of black lawn, with hedges and rosebushes and the dark glitter of a pool. She saw Dick standing at the window, looking out. She saw him understanding he would sense more than see it that a child stood on his lawn, a boy, skinny and erect and alert, crazy and worshipful: a sentinel, watching Dick Harte's slumbering house the way a guerrilla fighter might take a last look at a village, its lamps extinguished and its people dreaming, before he set it on fire. The child would have vanished immediately, nothing more than a child-shaped shadow that resolved itself into a patch of darkness where a rosebush bore no blooms. Dick would have shrugged it off, gone back to bed, assured his zonked-out wife that there was nothing to fear.

Pete said, "Just wanted to let you know. See you later."

"I'll be right here. At my loom."

"Huh?"

"Nothing. See you later."

She sat at her desk, resumed her waiting. Was it possible that the kid had gone out to Dick Harte's house, to see his deathmate at home? Unlikely. She was projecting. Say it: you want Luke to be out there in the dark, watching you. You want that, and you fear it. She couldn't help imagining herself looking down at Fifth Street from her own window, late at night, and seeing him on the pavement, three years old, staring up at her window. There he'd be, dark-eyed, curious, prone to fits of inexplicable laughter, a little bit pigeon-toed, devoted to trucks and to anything red.

Would he be loving? Or would he be furious? Would he have forgiven her?

A nick in your heart. The settlement from the doctor sent me to Columbia. Which got me here.

What had she done to merit forgiveness? Nothing came immediately to mind.

* * *

It happened at ten minutes to five.

Cat heard it first from Aaron, the audio guy. He raced by her cubicle, stuck his small, otterish head in.

"There's been another one," he said.

"What?"

"It just came in. Central Park."

"What do you know?"

"Looks like the same thing. Bomb. Right by Bethesda Fountain."

He ran on. Cat bolted up out of her chair, ran into Pete on her way into the hall.

"Fuck," Pete said.

"What do we know?"

"Central fucking Park. Bethesda fucking Fountain."

"A kid?"

"Don't know yet. I'm on my way up there."

"I'm coming, too."

"You can't. You're here."

Right. She was on phone duty. There was no telling who might call, and her cell would pick up background noise if she went to the site. She knew better than to argue.

"Keep me posted," she said.

"Yeah."

She returned to her cubicle.

He'd done it, then. The little fucker had walked up to someone in the park and taken them both to behold the birth of stars.

She remained. There was nothing else for her to do. The office rocked and roiled around her; she was its still center. News filtered in. Victim was one Henry Coles, African-American, age twenty-two, married but separated. One son, five years old, who lived with the mother. Worked at Burger King. Perpetrator, according to witnesses, was a kid, eleven or twelve, wearing a Mets jersey and some sort of cap. Henry Coles had been out for a stroll, just sucking up a little light and air before his shift started. Kid came up behind him, hugged him, and detonated.

Fuck.

Cat heard snatches of the phone conversations going on in other cubicles. There was no lag factor today the citizens of the Bizarro Dimension were seriously unnerved. Why do you think the government would want to do this? Do you, personally, know members of Al Qaeda? When did your television first start warning you about the Aryan Nation?

Cat's phone did not ring. She waited. There was nothing else for her to do.