“It wasn’t so bad. I mean, what’s the big deal. No one got hurt.”

Jack raised a fist and Alicia thought he was going to hit Thomas, but he glanced at her and she shook her head. All her life she’d wanted never to talk about this part of their childhoods—now she couldn’t stop.

“No one got hurt? What about you? What’s your life been like? Have you had even one intimate relationship?”

I know I haven’t, she thought.

“You think I don’t know what a loser I am?” he said, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her. “I know. Believe me, I goddamn well know. And it’s Dad’s fault. That’s why I deserve the house. I need it. You don’t. You’ve done fine for yourself. You’re a doctor.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” Alicia said softly.

That overcoming line she’d fed Jack was just that—a line. A mantra. Maybe if she kept repeating it, she’d come to believe it. Maybe it might even become the truth. But she had a long way to go.

I may look “okay” on the outside, she thought, but inside I… I look like this apartment.

“You ‘deserve,’ “ Jack said, his voice acid. “You ‘need.’ You make me sick. You wouldn’t know what to do with the windfall you’d get from broadcast power.”

Alicia caught her breath, wishing Jack hadn’t let that slip, but then she saw Thomas’s legs buckle. He dropped into the chair behind him. If his face had been white before at his first sight of Jack, it was even paler now. And when Thomas started babbling, she realized Jack’s “slip” had been calculated.

“You know? Oh, dear Christ! How’d you find out? It was last night, wasn’t it.” The words tumbled out. “God-damm it! We turned that house upside down and couldn’t find shit! You two waltz in and—wait—do you know where the transmitter is?”

“Come on,” Jack said, grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the chair. “We’re going for a walk.”

“What?” Thomas’s knees looked rubbery as he got to his feet. “Where?”

“Outside.”

“Wh-why?”

Alicia was asking herself that same question.

“Because you don’t have a fireplace here.” He held up Thomas’s .32. “I’ll leave your training pistol here. But bring those boxes with you.”

14.

14.

“Give us about an hour with the fire, guys, and I promise you it’ll be nice and hot when you get back.”

Alicia had followed Jack farther west, down the slope toward the Hudson River, as much in the dark as Thomas as to where he was going. He’d stopped at a trash can fire in the mouth of an alley and handed a twenty to each of the three men warming themselves by the flames.