After setting his alarm, Gurney lay there pondering Bullard’s motives and how they might play out in the Sasparilla meeting. She seemed to view him as an ally, or at least a useful tool, in her anticipated conflict with Trout and company. He didn’t mind being used, so long as it didn’t obstruct his own purposes. He knew that his alliance with her was very ad hoc, with no roots, so he’d need to be sensitive to any shifting winds at the meeting. Hardly a new experience. At the NYPD the winds were always shifting.

An hour later, as his mind was drifting into a state of pleasantly numb emptiness, Madeleine put her book aside and asked, “Were you ever able to get back in contact with that depressed accountant you were worried about—the one with the big gun?”

“Not yet.”

The question refilled his mind with a tangle of questions and anxieties, and all hope of a restful night vanished. His thoughts and fitful dreams were infested with repetitive images of guns, ice picks, burning buildings, black umbrellas, smashed heads.

At sunrise he fell into a deep sleep, from which the sharp trill of his alarm roused him an hour later.

By the time he’d showered, dressed, and had his wake-up coffee in hand, Madeleine was already outside, loosening the soil in one of the garden beds.

He recalled she’d said something recently about getting the sugar-snap peas planted.

How bland the morning felt—in the way that mornings often felt bland, unthreatening, uncomplicated. Each morning—assuming that some minimal intervention of sleep had demarcated it from the day before—created the illusion of a new beginning, a kind of freedom from the past. Humans, it seemed, were truly diurnal creatures, not simply in the sense of being non-nocturnal but in the sense of being designed for living one day at a time—one separated day at a time. Uninterrupted consciousness could tear a man to pieces. No wonder the CIA used sleep deprivation as a torture. A mere seventy-two hours of uninterrupted living—seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking—could make a man wish he were dead.

The sun sets and we sleep. The sun rises and we wake. We wake and, ever so briefly, ever so blindly, we enjoy the fantasy of beginning anew. Then, without fail, reality reasserts its presence.

That morning, as he stood at the kitchen window with his coffee, gazing contemplatively down over the stubbly pasture, reality reasserted itself in the form of a dark figure astride a dark motorcycle, motionless, between the pond and the burned timbers of the barn.

Gurney put down his coffee, slipped on a jacket and a pair of low boots, and stepped outside. The figure on the motorcycle remained still. The air smelled more like winter than like spring. Four days after the fire, it still carried a hint of ashiness.