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 compass 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 assassins? 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!