Another jiggle of the handle, and a lonely echo came back from the other side, like a ghost trying to tap out a message in Morse Code.

"Hello? Anybody?"

Gabe leaned against the door a moment, frustration building, and when he pushed away, he slammed the heel of his foot into the metal surface. It made a hollow, reverberating sound. He kicked it again, again with the flat of his foot, again with no response from the other side.

After a while longer, he retreated back to his bed.

He sat there, brooding, and staring endlessly at the door.

Sooner or later it had to open.

[68].

"He keeps that up and next thing you know they're gonna have to put a cast on his foot," the man said lightheartedly. He was sitting in a small room, with a bank of video monitors across the wall in front of him. The lights were out. The screens cast a dull, gray mood into the room. Work shifts usually ran a maximum of four hours, anything longer and the cast of the screens had a tendency to wear heavily on the eyes. When the eyes got tired, the mind got tired, and that was when you missed things.

"They oughta cast his whole damn body," his partner said, placing an eight of hearts on a nine of spades and turning up his next card. It was a king, and there was nowhere to play it, so he buried it in the middle of the deck and turned up the next card. This one was a little better. A seven of spades.

"How do they do that?"

"What?"

"Cast your whole body? I mean, what do you do if you have to take a leak?"

"Catheter," his partner said, without looking up. He cleared a column and went searching through the deck for a king to drop there.

"Ugh!"

"You said it, man."

On the monitors, the boy plopped back into bed, looking restless and unhappy. He was fully awake now, and unless they gave him something to help him sleep again, he was going to be pacing like a caged animal the rest of the day.

"I think we're going to have to order up some nourishment for the little guy."

"You better clear it first."

Off to the left, the only door leading into the small room swung open and D.C. poked his head in. He was a man who liked to keep an eye on things, a coach who would much rather play the game himself if he were still as sharp as he had been when he was younger. Not to imply that he was old. That would be misleading. He was in his late thirties by appearances, his hair dark brown, his eyes intolerant, his face a mask that gave away nothing. Beneath the facade, he was a much older man, intelligent and no-nonsense, often cynical.

"How's the kid doing?"

"He just woke up; looks a little restless."

"Have one of the nurses bring something down for him to eat."

"Sure thing."

D.C. took a quick glance at the monitors, his face expressionless. When he wasn't looking straight at you, you wanted to keep an eye on him, to watch for the dangerous undercurrent that always seemed to be on the verge of breaking out. He nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever he had seen, and started to pop back out of the room. Before the door closed, he stopped and added this: "Oh, and put the fucking cards away, will you?"

[69].

Michael's paranoia had not receded much. In fact, as he gradually made his way down the street where he used to live when he and Teri and Gabe had still been a family, the paranoia began to rise in his throat again like the bile from a stubborn case of the flu.

The house came into view on the right, and he could see almost immediately that there were no lights on inside. Even if someone had been in the back bedroom, there would have been a soft glow detectable through the entryway window. Not this time, though.

He pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine and sat there a moment, debating if he should even bother getting out and knocking on the door. When he rolled down the window, the car filled with crisp night air. A chill snaked down his spine, and Michael opened the door and climbed out. He closed the door softly and made his way up the walk.

Teri had done a nice job of keeping things up. The lawn was beginning to look in need of a mowing, maybe, but that was the nature of a healthy lawn. In the corner, he noted how the junipers had overgrown the sedum, and in the shadowy night casts it appeared that Teri had replaced the ivy bed with white rock. Less maintenance, he supposed. It was strange being back.

On the porch, he cupped his hands and tried to peer into the entryway through the window next to the door. The other side was a jigsaw puzzle of light and shadow, indecipherable except for the fact that everything inside seemed still and quiet.

"Come on, Teri. Be home. Make this easy."

That was still the hope, of course that Teri would open the door and invite him in and sitting on the couch, he would find some ten-year-old neighborhood kid who had been drawn into Teri's fantasy without even knowing it. Then Michael would send the poor kid on his way and help Teri to see how she had turned her pain into a happy ending, only it had all been in her mind. And then he would help her to get some counseling. And that would be that. It would be over. Gabe's memory would be preserved, as it rightfully should, and that... would be... that.

Michael stepped back and gave the door a rap.

It wasn't going to be that easy, he knew that.

Nothing ever was.

He knocked again, then turned and glanced across the street, where a dog had begun to bark somewhere in the distance. When he had parked in the driveway, the neighborhood had seemed almost preternaturally quiet, and because of that he had only absently noted the black Olds parked at the curb across the street. But now, with the streetlight at a different angle, Michael realized he was not alone. There were two silhouettes in the front seat of that car. Men, he thought at a glance.

The house was being watched.

He was being watched.

Michael turned back to the door and knocked a third time. Mostly for show this time, but also for the opportunity to take control of the sudden rush of adrenaline that was coursing through his body. Teri's fantasy had not been a fantasy after all. In an instant, that realization came to nestle in his thoughts as if it had always been there, never questioned. He might have been able to rationalize Teri's phone call, might even have been able to rationalize the van in Tennessee, but there was no rationalizing these two guys. Not here. Not at this time of night. Coincidence, overwhelming coincidence, was the nourishment of fools.

He didn't bother to knock a fourth time. Instead, Michael found the needed strength to make his way back down the walk to his car. He rolled the new Taurus, the only car they had available at Budget, down the driveway and swung the rear end in the direction of the black Olds, stopping maybe six or seven feet short. Then he shifted out of reverse and into drive, and he watched in the rearview mirror as the Olds was gradually reduced to a mere dot in the distance.

As he rounded the corner, Michael became aware of the pounding in his chest. Maybe a little paranoia had its place.

[70].

It was nearly two full days before Teri was able to return to the here and now. She had slept most of that time, curled into a fetal position, tossing and turning and fighting with her dreams.

Walt drew the drapes in the bedroom to keep the daylight out, and he did his best to tiptoe around the apartment so he wouldn't disturb her. The one time she emerged from the bedroom, hungry, he sat her down at the counter in the kitchen and made her a plate of bacon and eggs and toast. She wasn't really hungry, though. She picked at the food with her fork, until she started to cry. Then Walt held her in his arms and tried his best to comfort her.

"I let him get away again," she said, her eyes red and swollen.

Walt still didn't have the whole picture, but he knew enough to know she had done everything she could have done. "It wasn't your fault, Teri."

"I should have known better. Why would the FBI be involved?"

"Hey, we're taught to trust a badge."

"But I'm not a little girl. I should have questioned them. I should have insisted they wait for you."

"It's over," he said, doing his best to soothe her. He felt completely incompetent, a man trying to shine a bright light over the mouth of a deep, dark hole. What he didn't understand until much later was that sometimes you have to let the hole completely engulf you before you can find your way out again. "It's in the past. You can't change that."

Teri went over and over how she had let the boy slip out of her grasp and how much she hated herself for allowing that to happen. She would cry, then sniffle awhile, then talk awhile longer, then cry again. And Walt learned to listen without saying anything. That's all she seemed to need. Just someone to listen.

She never did eat more than a forkful or two of her breakfast. It turned cold after awhile, and the eggs turned runny. Gradually, the conversation-what there had been of it-died out and it seemed there was nothing left to be said.

Teri stared emptily across the kitchen, her fingers working at the edges of her napkin. "I think I'll go back to bed."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"I can put some coffee on?"

She smiled numbly. "No. But thank you for listening."

Walt returned her smile, a hesitant, awkward turn of the corner of his mouth, and he watched her climb out of her chair and shuffle back down the hall to the bedroom and close the door behind her.

That had been yesterday morning.

And now Teri was up again.

She came down the hall, still looking a little on the tired side. Two days of tossing and turning, of nightmares and sweats, had not been good to her. Her hair was a rat's nest, twined and clumped and all out of sorts. Her eyes were still dull from sleep, though beneath them, the dark rings were gone now. She yawned, placing the back of her hand over her mouth, and leaned against the nearest wall.

"How are you feeling?" Walt asked.

"So-so."

He nodded. "Hungry?"

"Yeah, a little."

"What would you like?"

"Anything. It doesn't matter." Teri yawned again, and ran a hand through her hair, flattening it against her scalp. "What time is it?"

He had to check his watch. "A little after two."

"Another day wasted, huh?"

"I wouldn't call it wasted." He got up and went into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes from yesterday were still in the sink, where he had simply forgotten about them. He turned the water on and let it run, waiting for it to make the long trip from the heater through the pipes. So many things hadn't gotten done the past couple of days. In a way, he had been sleeping as much as she had.

Teri came up and stood in the kitchen doorway. "I'm ready now."

He glanced at her.

"I've done my crying, and I'm done feeling sorry for myself. I want my son back."

He smiled. "That's all I wanted to hear."

[71].

"Where do we go from here?" Teri asked. She brought a cup of coffee to the table and sat across from Walt.

"After the bad guys, I guess."

"And how do we do that?"

"First off, we have to figure out who the hell they are."

She nodded. She was beginning to feel better now. After he had made lunch and she had showered and cleaned up, she had taken a few extra minutes to sit down and close her eyes, to try to gather up whatever strength she could find inside herself. Walt had been right about what had happened. It was in the past, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. The future, however, was still in the making, and that was something she wasn't going to let herself forget.

"Have any guesses?" he asked.

"I don't know who they are," she said. She took a sip of coffee, which had been the last of a pot that Walt had made earlier. It was bitter and only lukewarm. "But they're tied to Gabe somehow. They're the ones who took him the first time; I know they are."

"You have any ideas why they might be interested in him?"

"No, it doesn't make any sense."

"Okay," he said, looking away. He picked up the pencil he had brought with him to the table and tapped an absent meter against the yellow legal pad underneath. "What do you know about Dr. Childs?"

"You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. There's something about that man."

Teri had known the doctor for twenty, maybe twenty-five years, ever since she had first met him at a community health clinic, where he volunteered his time on weekends. That had been long before he had started his own private practice, and long before Gabe had even been born. "I don't know. I know he's a good doctor."

"Uh-huh."

"Why him? I mean, why not this Mitch guy? He's the one who's showing up everywhere."

"Mitch is just a stooge. There's someone else behind this."

"I've known Childs a long time," Teri said, feeling suddenly uneasy. She took another sip of coffee, trying not to let herself runaway with the idea that the doctor might actually be involved somehow. There weren't but a handful of people you could trust in your life, and you desperately wanted to make sure one of those was your doctor. If you couldn't trust your doctor...

"I don't want to leave any avenues open," Walt said.

"I know. And I understand that. It's just that..." It was just that what? Suddenly it was hitting too close to home? In her mind, she had always imagined that the source of their trouble was someone or something out there, some external, faceless enemy that had picked them at random. This, though, wasn't like that at all.

"He may not have anything to do with it at all," Walt said. "But we've gotta make sure."

She nodded, knowing he was right.

"So why don't you tell me what you know about him."

"Like what?"

"Like how you first met," he said evenly. He appeared only mildly interested, but that wasn't the case here at all. At least not in Teri's eyes. Walt had done this before. He knew how to keep an even tone in the conversation, how to listen without spooking the person who was doing all the talking. It had all been part of his job at one time.

"It was the first time I ever thought I was pregnant," she said. "Michael and I were going together, and I had missed my period. We were both in college then, and the chance that I might be pregnant... neither one of us was ready for that. We talked about it and talked about it, and it was like running into a mine field. You think you have everything under control and then suddenly there's this out of nowhere explosion and all your dreams start disappearing out from under you. It was..."