Valentine took the stack of two days' worth of mail brought from home - ignored during this round of deal making gone horribly sour - and slapped it back onto the driver's seat through the open window of his car. He stepped away from the door and stretched; autumn in the Ma.s.sachusetts countryside, there was really no place he would rather be. The pulse and throb of Boston was left behind - he could breathe up here, could take refuge among the trees and listen to the icy wind in the last of their leaves. In the city, wind was just that: wind. Up here it was a voice that all predators heeded, and all prey feared, for on it was borne the scent of hunger.

Valentine motioned Teddy to follow and they began to walk up the gentle slope of the drive, toward the barn. It was more than merely old, with low foundation walls of stone, and the upper wooden remainder had not seen a paintbrush in his lifetime. The barn sat in the center of his property in Ess.e.x County; the nearest neighbors were a mile distant, and if they were outdoors, it would only be chance if the shimmer of a cry of misery floated to them on the wind. They would wonder if wind was all the sound was, and go back to work.

"'A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.' Nietzsche said that." Valentine nodded and drew his longcoat tighter against the wind as husks of dead leaves crunched underfoot. He pointed toward the mouth of the barn as it resounded with a fresh warble of pain. "One more exhibition of living proof."

They entered the barn, shut the side door after them.

They walked past a small cl.u.s.ter of pens into the main clearing, dirt-floored beneath peaks and rafters where birds built nests and paid no heed to what transpired below. A scent of age clung to the air. No more horses, nor cows, nor other animals of the herd, just the smell of time.

The other three men were already inside. Two of them nodded at Valentine while standing a little straighter, and one of those still held a hammer. The third remained where he was, kneeling on the floor with hands wired behind his back, and his left ear nailed to one of the heavier posts.

"h.e.l.lo, Shay," Valentine said. "Don't get up."

He was answered with a little yelp, and could see one eye widen, roving in search of his voice. Valentine stepped around him, knelt to bring them face-to-face. A few smears of blood trailed down Shay Cavanaugh's cheek.

"We can work this out, can't we? Can't we?" Begging already, and Cavanaugh's unruly black hair, crow's hair, looked electric in his pain.

Valentine grabbed a sweaty fistful and gave the entire head a fierce shaking, side-to-side - no no no - and the man screeched with every tug of ear against nail.

"It's gone a little far for that, Shay. Put yourself in my place. And when's the last time you let a hostage cut a bargain with you?" Valentine shook his head at the glisten of tears in the man's blue eyes; here was a sorry sight. "Listen to you, you're a disgrace to your cause. Forgotten Long Kesh, have you? Doesn't the memory of Bobby Sands do anything for you anymore? If somebody's going to try to rip me off, I'd just as soon it be a Muslim. Give me somebody from Abu Nidal's group. Spend all day pounding nails into one of those sons of b.i.t.c.hes, and the only thing you'll hear is him cursing your entire family."

He shook his head again, and stepped away to take a coffee can from one of his men. A paintbrush with a two-inch width jutted against its rim, and Valentine stirred lazily on his way back, sniffed the heady fumes.

Shay Cavanaugh, the transatlantic point man for a breakaway cell from the Provisional IRA, had genuinely surprised him. A month ago Valentine had met with him in the back of a Chelsea pub to arrange the sale and dockside delivery of, among other sundry ordnance, several Heckler & Koch .308 a.s.sault rifles, a dozen drum-fed laser-sighted American 180s, several Ruger Mini-14s, and three cases of Semtex plastic explosive. The financing had been solid, had come from a few of the Manhattan Westies and some remnants of the old Emerald Society that Valentine knew were sympathetic to the rogue elements splitting from the traditional army. So what went wrong? Maybe Cavanaugh and his fellow travelers thought they could get away with both the weapons and the cash.

Last night, at the transfer drop in a warehouse along the docks of Gloucester harbor, Cavanaugh's people had turned greedy, treacherous, then bloodthirsty. Four of Valentine's freelancers were dead of head wounds. Others had been outside, a precautionary measure, and, for once, required.

The first time anyone had ever tried to blatantly rip him off and it had to be a countryman. They had gotten it all back, but then there was that small matter of disrespect.

Valentine squatted before the kneeling Cavanaugh and swirled the coffee can, wafted kerosene fumes to the man's nostrils like a chef teasing someone with the scent of his most savory meal.

How old was Shay, anyway? Thirty, thirty-five, around there. Valentine knew that, ten or fifteen years ago, he himself might have done just the same. Might even have tested his luck and skill for no better reason than to see if he could have gotten away with it, not really caring one way or another in the end. Though he would have had a better excuse than Shay Cavanaugh.

He listened to the last shreds of dignity come stammering from the man's bruised mouth, all please and don't and failed persuasion. For a moment, a fresh seizure clouded thoughts and gripped muscles and made him itch to inflict punishments more savage still, and Valentine simply could not think straight.

Down with you, he told it, down with you, I'm better than that...

He breathed deeply, and the kerosene made his head swim.

And so Valentine began to paint.

He slathered kerosene along the heavy post, from the ground up to Cavanaugh's perforated ear. It would be cold, surely, having sat in this barn all through an early November night; cold and stinging on the perforated ear. More and more he added, letting it soak into the wood while tears flowed just as freely.

"I've got a question for you, Shay..."

Valentine flicked the brush clean, returned it to a waiting hand.

"You tried to rip me off. You killed four people who worked for me..."

From the can he poured a thin trail from the base of the post to a larger puddle five feet away, out of reach of a wildly swinging hand.

"But I'm not going to ask you why. Nothing you could say about that would much interest me..."

Tossing the empty can aside.

"No, what I really want to know is: How steady is your hand?"

From Teddy he accepted a heavy pair of cutters and stepped behind Cavanaugh to snip through the wire binding his wrists; gave them back as Cavanaugh pulled his hands around and began to ma.s.sage the raw chafing burns glistening with blood blisters.

Valentine tossed a single-edged razor blade onto the dirt and waited until Cavanaugh picked it up, staring at it with a mute and terrible comprehension. There was always that silence, the silence that transcended circ.u.mstance. The silence of knowing - "If you're steady, you can cut around the nail head and save most of your ear" - followed by the worst cries of all.

Kneeling again, taking no pleasure in this, just as he felt no remorse, Valentine lowered a lighter to his end of the kerosene's liquid fuse. "Outside, a few minutes ago, I quoted Nietzsche, but here's one for your benefit: 'Whoever rejoices on the very stake triumphs not over pain, but at the absence of pain that he had expected.' So rejoice, Shay. I could've made it a lot worse for you."

And he set flame to the trail.

Valentine had already walked out the door, was halfway to the car on this crisp and sunny November afternoon, before he heard the sound of gunshots finishing the job. These would attract no more attention than a faint, faraway cry. They were sporting men. They loved and appreciated fine weaponry. They shot targets and test-fired guns here all the time.

"So how much you got riding on the Bruins tonight?" he asked Teddy a few minutes later.

"Double or nothing on what I was down last week." He hunched his big sloping shoulders.

Valentine conked him on the side of the skull. "Happy just to call it even, after all that? Ought to have your head examined."

They rolled away with Teddy behind the wheel of his car for the drive back down to Boston, and Valentine resumed shuffling through his stack of mail. People went to an awful lot of trouble to send an awful lot of nothing. Except for one, which he tore into as soon as he noticed the return address.

He hurriedly read the hand-scribbled cover letter, devoured the attached pages. Scanned photocopies of information that had been sent by fax. Lovingly crushed them like roses to his chest as he stared out the window at a pa.s.sing countryside that seemed very far removed.

"They found another," he said, in reverence, in awe, in grat.i.tude. "Clay Palmer, his name. Hmm. If I have to, I'll play this one as carefully as a prize marlin."

"And land him by when?" Teddy asked.

"Valentine's Day, when else? This time it'll work out. I can feel it. I'll have my legacy."

Patrick Valentine leaned back against the seat, and the look that settled over his face - those wary eyes, those contoured cheekbones and jawline that seemed to sweep around to either side of his streamlined skull - was a look very close to serenity.

Twelve.

They left Tempe at the end of the week, the first weekend in November, Adrienne's car packed modestly considering her plans for an indefinite stay, ample room up front for herself and Clay. He had pa.s.sed Friday night at her house without incident, so they could get started all the earlier, before dawn.

Northeast into the sunrise, the road soon blazed with desert fire, while at its other end beckoned mountains that would outlast them and their every hope and dream and granule of dust in death - G.o.ds of rock, the face of nature's indifference.

"As long as you can avoid it," Clay said, "could you not take the interstate? I hate the interstate."

"I'll try," she said. An atlas lay curled and wedged in the gap between their seats. Eight hundred miles. She had sworn to herself that she would do her best to avoid any conversation that resembled session work. In the car, it could be too much confined to too small an area, too pressurized.

Still, this seemed benign enough.

"What's wrong with the interstate?"

"I didn't touch an interstate after I left Denver." He stared ahead toward the corona of the rising sun. "I came on secondary roads. They're more interesting. Something about them seems true. If you keep off the interstates, you tend to see the people who travel for its own sake."

Gently, slowly, Clay was squeezing a rubber ball, therapy for muscles long unused. In the hospital he had seemed to relax after she'd told him that no one would challenge his discharge. She had been able to talk him into waiting a couple of days so he could leave with hands unburdened.

Just to see his hands at all seemed foreign, as if he should have remained in those twin casts forever. Both hands and lower arms had that unnaturally pale, pasty quality that skin sometimes takes on beneath a cast. His hands themselves, now emerged like chrysalids, shone with the angry red of new scars from the compound fractures.

Hands were so very vital, so telling of a person and the life led. And here now were Clay's, new to her, some facet of him once concealed, now revealed. She could glance at them - squeezing the ball, thumbing through the atlas, at rest - and wonder things she'd not considered before: They had known brutality, but had they ever known tenderness? He claimed to dislike being touched, but did he use them to caress, or stroke, or bring pleasure to someone else? Were they ever held, fondled, kissed? Such simple acts, but those who were denied them must be terribly lonely.

So much ground they had yet to cover.

"You never told me you were a lesbian," he said, miles later.

Adrienne had been waiting for that, in one form or another. "I never saw it as being relevant." She did not bother correcting him: You're half-right, at least, just caught me on that side of the pendulum's arc. If it served to discourage any transference of misdirected s.e.xuality, all the better. "That's not suddenly going to be a problem, is it?"

"No. It was just a surprise. You know the way we fill in the blanks for people we don't know much about, and imagine things." He tired of squeezing the ball and took to tossing it, catching it, one-handed, over and over. "I noticed you never wore a ring, but I pictured you ... I don't know ... trading off sleepovers with some businessman, somebody like that. Not another doctor. I don't think you could stand another doctor."

Patients. Sometimes they could pick up the d.a.m.nedest things.

"But it was good to be surprised," he went on, still tossing, catching. "Things like that remind me not to take anything for granted. Is this bugging you?" Holding up the ball, suddenly.

"A little."

Clay went back to squeezing. "It's easy to see why you were attracted to Sarah. It's like big parts of each of you are things the other isn't."

She weighed this a moment. Last night Clay had spent little time in actual conversation with them, quiet and withdrawn mostly, spending at least an hour sitting in the gathering darkness on the patio, alone, watching night seize the backyard. Still, it would have taken little observation, she supposed, to decide who was the extrovert and who the introvert, who made sure the bills were paid on time and who planned the parties.

They might have been friends, Clay and Sarah, under other circ.u.mstances, or at least as close to friends as he thought he could be. Adrienne knew it, just knew they shared elements of a common core, had at one point watched them briefly converse and resonate like both p.r.o.ngs of a tuning fork. He had already spent a couple of minutes enchanted by the rainstick, then set it aside while wandering over to a bookcase filled predominantly with Sarah's t.i.tles, mostly anthropology texts and compendiums of multicultural mythic beliefs and the like. He scanned the spines, finally removing one from her small collection of art books.

"Salvador Dali, you like him?" he asked.

"Oh, are you kidding?" Sarah said. "He's only about my favorite twentieth-century artist. Adrienne and I were in Florida last year, and for two days I was inconsolable until we got over to St. Petersburg to the Dali Museum."

Watching from the kitchen, Adrienne caught the brief and uneasy hesitation with which Clay opened the book, flipped through pages. Close as Sarah was, it could never have escaped her.

"What, you don't like him?" she asked, looking that way she sometimes did, as if she'd be crushed if the answer was no.

"That's not it." Replacing the book, bruised brow furrowing beneath its bandage. "He hits too close to the bone sometimes. I ... there are nights I have dreams like this. A lot, really. Some of those pieces, they're like home movies."

Sarah looked enthralled, respectful. "Some people take drugs to see that clearly and make those leaps of connection, and don't even get close."

Clay nodded, then looked at Adrienne in the kitchen doorway. "And some people prescribe drugs to make it stop."

Sarah looked at Adrienne, too, and burst into laughter, clapping a companionable hand against Clay's upper arm - he didn't flinch, Adrienne noticed - Sarah's unexpected and sincere delight even bringing a smile from him. The two of them, just standing there sharing what felt even worse than a private joke. Am I reading this right? she'd thought. They just met and they're ganging up on me? Turning away, finally, momentarily petulant and grumbling something about Dali being the Liberace of modern art.

Or was it just an irrational twinge of jealousy, made even more confusing by her not knowing which of the pair of them had caused it?

Regardless, it had pa.s.sed.

Behind the wheel, sun now higher and yellow, lifted from the fiery red desert bath of its rising, Adrienne gripped harder and tuned in the highway. In retrospect, how pointless that small flare of anger now seemed. Despite the virulence of the yearnings that had driven him south to begin with, Clay had instinctively been right about one thing: The road could heal.

It rolled on, grinding morning and afternoon and evening into dust that was taken by the wind. The land northeast was no less barren than the desert, just barren in a different way, brown hillsides dotted with pines. They climbed from the low Arizona alt.i.tudes into the higher reaches of mountain country, and the temperature must have slid more than thirty degrees. Denver often had its first snowfall by this time of year.

But the freeways and streets were clear and dry when they reached them that night. Clay directed her through the urban maze and the atlas was forgotten. Many more miles and her nerves would have whined like the highway beneath her tires. Earlier she had accepted his offer to share the driving; without his help she doubted they could have made it in one day's haul. She had taken care to consult the maps as to when they traded, to make sure he wouldn't be driving in cities. As long as he was on the open road, the danger seemed minimal that a stranger's carelessness would shove him into blind rage and mechanized retribution.

The neighborhood to which he directed her seemed, so far as she could discern with her directional sense dulled by hours of monotony, close to the heart of the city. Houses built tall, decades ago, three stories to accommodate all the offspring of families vast and prodigious, when big families were the norm in a younger city and a younger nation. They would be lonelier dwellings now, interiors gutted and rearranged and walled off into isolated compartments for one or two, who might never even know the names of those living beneath the same roof. The walls would no longer recognize the sound of laughter from sprawling holiday gatherings, and the music that followed family feasts would only be an echo lodged in some aged rafter.

Adrienne parked at the curb, idling, headlights shining upon a tree just before the car, one of a blockful whose stark branches sc.r.a.ped at the neighborhood's sky, defiant and gnarled like the fists of G.o.ds who had been forgotten to death.

"What next?" whispered Clay.

"You go in, you take a hot shower, and you sleep in your own bed for a change."

"Right." He looked unconvinced, turned in his seat and facing her but half of him thrown into shadow. "That's not what I mean."

"I know."

It'll be all right, she wanted to soothe him. Something about him in this moment made her want to push aside all formality of the therapist-patient relationship - or was it now researcher-subject? - and rea.s.sure him as a friend.

"We keep going," she finally said.

"You're in my world now." He spoke as if regretting the fact. "I'm not in yours. It could make a difference."

"I'll try to find a neutral corner."

A thin smile touched the half of his mouth she could see, and while he said nothing she could almost hear him anyway, what he must have been thinking: There is no such thing as neutrality. We just fool ourselves into thinking some regions are immune to our influence.

"You're going to need some time to settle back in and readjust to being home. And I don't want to push you. But we need to decide on a day for me to call you and see when we should start our sessions again."

"Just give me the rest of the weekend, that's all I should need. Try me Monday afternoon." He laughed mockingly. "I guess I still have a phone."

"I can find my way back if you don't."

He nodded. "There's ... someone ... she's used to this kind of s.h.i.t out of me. She probably came by and brought in my mail. If I'm lucky maybe she opened the bills."

It was the first real indication of a woman in his life. In therapy he had been evasive around the issue, more comfortable discussing past relationships than those of the present.

"What's her name?"

"Erin."

"I think I should hear more about Erin sometime soon."