'I don't know. It sounds like it.' He took one hand off the wheel, tapped me on the forearm. 'I don't mean to bust b.a.l.l.s,' he said. 'I see something like that, somebody chopped up like that, I try to clamp a lid on it and it comes out in other directions. You did a lot of good work.'

'Did I?'

'No question. There were things we missed. It might give us a little jump on the psycho, some of the stuff you came up with. Who knows?'

Not I. All I knew was how tired I was.

He fell silent as we drove across town. In front of my hotel he braked to a stop and said, 'What Garfein said there. Maybe Ricone means something in Italian.'

'It won't be hard to check.'

'Oh, of course not. Everything should be that easy to run down. No, we'll check, and you know what we'll find? It'll turn out it means Jones.'

I went upstairs and got out of my clothes and into bed. Ten minutes later I got up again. I felt unclean and my scalp itched. I stood under a too-hot shower and scrubbed myself raw. I got out of the shower, told myself it didn't make any sense to shave before going to bed, then lathered up and shaved anyway. When I was done I put a robe on and sat down on the edge of my bed, then moved to the chair.

They tell you not to let yourself get too hungry, too angry, too lonely or too tired. Any of the four can put you off balance and turn you in the direction of a drink. It seemed to me that I'd touched all four bases, I'd boxed that particular compa.s.s in the course of the day and night. Oddly enough, I didn't feel the urge for a drink.

I got the gun from my coat pocket, I started to return it to the dresser drawer, then changed my mind and sat in the chair again, turning the gun in my hands.

When was the last time I'd fired a gun?

I didn't really have to think very hard. It had been that night in Washington Heights when I chased two holdup men into the street, shot them down and killed that little girl in the process. In the time I remained on the force after that incident, I never had occasion to draw my service revolver, let alone discharge it. And I certainly hadn't fired a gun since I left the force.

And tonight I'd been unable to do it. Because something clued me that the car I was aiming at held drunken kids instead of a.s.sa.s.sins? Because some subtle intuitive perception made me wait until I was certain what I was shooting at?

No. I couldn't make myself believe that.

I had frozen. If instead of a kid with a whiskey bottle I'd seen a thug with a tommy gun, I wouldn't have been any more capable of squeezing the trigger. My finger'd been paralyzed.

I broke the gun, shook the bullets out of the cylinder, closed it up again. I pointed the empty weapon at the wastebasket across the room and squeezed the trigger a couple of times. The click the hammer made as it fell upon an empty chamber was surprisingly loud and sharp in my little room.

I aimed at the mirror over the dresser. Click!

Proved nothing. It was empty, I knew it was empty. I could take the thing to a pistol range, load it and fire at targets, and that wouldn't prove anything either.

It bothered me that I'd been unable to fire the gun. And yet I was grateful it had happened that way, because otherwise I'd have emptied the gun into that car of kids, probably killed a few of them, and what would that have done to my peace of mind? Tired as I was, I went a few hard rounds with that particular conundrum. I was glad I hadn't shot anyone and frightened of the implications of not shooting, and my mind went around and around, chasing its tail.

I took off the robe, got into bed, and couldn't even begin to loosen up. I got dressed again in street clothes, used the back end of a nail file as a screwdriver, and took the revolver apart for cleaning. I put its parts in one pocket, and in another I stowed the four live cartridges along with the two knives I'd taken from the mugger.

It was morning and the sky was bright. I walked over to Ninth Avenue and up to Fifty-eighth Street, where I dropped both knives into a sewer grating. I crossed the street and walked to another grating and stood near it with my hands in my pockets, one holding the four cartridges, the other touching the pieces of the disa.s.sembled revolver.

Why carry a gun you're not going to shoot? Why own a gun you can't carry?

I stopped in a deli on the way back to the hotel. The customer ahead of me bought two six-packs of Old English 800 Malt Liquor. I picked out four candy bars and paid for them, ate one as I walked and the other three in my room. Then I took the revolver's parts from my pocket and put them back together again. I loaded four of the six chambers and put the gun in the dresser drawer.

I got into bed, told myself I'd stay there whether I could sleep or not, and smiled at the thought as I felt myself drifting off.

TWENTY-NINE.

The telephone woke me. I fought my way out of sleep like an underwater swimmer coming up for air. I sat up, blinking and trying to catch my breath. The phone was still ringing and I couldn't figure out what was making that d.a.m.ned sound. Then I caught on and answered it.

It was Chance. 'Just saw the paper,' he said. 'What do you figure? That the same guy as got Kim?'

'Give me a minute,' I said.

'You asleep?'

'I'm awake now.'

'Then you don't know what I'm talkin' about. There was another killing, this time in Queens, some s.e.x-change streetwalker cut to ribbons.'

'I know.'

'How do you know if you been sleeping?'

'I was out there last night.'

'Out there in Queens?'

He sounded impressed. 'Out there on Queens Boulevard,' I told him. 'With a couple of cops. It was the same killer.'

'You sure of that?'

'They didn't have the scientific evidence sorted out when I was there. But yes, I'm sure of it.'

He thought about it. 'Then Kim was just unlucky,' he said. 'Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'Maybe.'

'Just maybe?'

I got my watch from the nightstand. It was almost noon.

'There are elements that don't fit,' I said. 'At least it seems that way to me. A cop last night told me my problem is I'm too stubborn. I've only got the one case and I don't want to let go of it.'

'So?'

'He could be right, but there are still some things that don't fit. What happened to Kim's ring?'

'What ring?'

'She had a ring with a green stone.'

'Ring,' he said, and thought about it. 'Was it Kim had that ring? I guess it was.'

'What happened to it?'