“Sarah?”

She didn’t stop.

“Sarah, wait.”

From behind him, Jolie’s voice, shrill with alarm: “Mike! You need to get back here, now!”

He spun around and saw the cops and Dr. Walker charging into the hall with Frank Snow on a stretcher. Even from this distance, Mike could see Snow’s body convulsing so violently that the cops had to hold him down on either side. One of his prison shoes sailed off his foot and hit the wall.

“Get the elevator!” Walker yelled.

“What happened?” Mike hit the button. “Where are you going?”

“There’s a ventilator up on six.” Walker bent, tilted Snow’s chin back, and put his mouth against the plastic protective ring he’d placed over the other man’s lips, giving Snow a breath. Snow’s chest went up and down. His arms dangled down limp, and Mike saw that the man’s eyes were rolled so far back in his head that they showed only glossy whites. The smell rolling off his skin was more redolent than ever, throbbing up Mike’s nasal passages until his eye sockets ached.

“Jolie’s done for the night. We’re going to need you to go with us,” Walker said.

Mike hesitated, trying to put his thoughts in order. What is going on around here? In the midst of all this, he found his attention drawn back to the door where he’d last seen Sarah and Eli. But he knew they were already gone.

6.

Steve Calhoun was again staring at the Sports page, trying to make the box scores line up, when Mike’s wife and kid came hurrying out the emergency exit, her long legs scissoring, the boy’s little legs scurrying to keep up.

“Leaving already?”

That didn’t even slow her down. Calhoun had a nice buzz going from the Old Crow he’d been tippling into his coffee since around three, first a couple drops and then a little more until his mind felt light and buoyant, a long pop fly sailing upward in the summer night.

“Hey,” he said louder. “Everything okay?”

This time she did stop, holding the boy’s hand, and looked back over her shoulder. Eight o’clock light was reaching up the hallway, golden hues illuminating the individual strands of hair that had come loose from her ponytail, and Calhoun thought, Why the hell would anybody want to cheat on that?

“Excuse me?”

“You all right?”

Funny how things clicked together—how had he missed it before? Marching through here a few minutes earlier, she’d been all business. Three minutes later she and the kid were back. Nothing good ever ended that fast. Three minutes was all the time it had taken for Steve Calhoun’s own parents’ marriage to explode, spraying shrapnel that still hadn’t been found. Three minutes and half his childhood, the half he could remember.

She was still looking at him. In his half-lit state, it didn’t seem weird to be looking at Mike Hughes’s pretty wife and thinking of his own mother throwing a bottle of whiskey at his old man as she grabbed little Stevie’s arm and yanked him out the door so hard he’d felt his shoulder pop.