Dennis liked this time of night. He knew what time the nurse would come by. Sometimes he would pretend to be asleep, then a few minutes later he would sneak out of his room and roam around in the dark. He liked the idea that just about everyone else was asleep and he could pretend he had the place to himself and could do anything he wanted.

Sometimes he would sneak into other people’s rooms and just stand there watching them sleep, imagining the things he could do to them if he still had his knife.

Sometimes he would hide in the lounge near the nurses’ station, waiting. Arlene, the skinny head nurse on the night shift, smoked, and she would go outside to do it because smoking wasn’t allowed in the building. The short, fat nurse, Betty, would go with her, and then no one was at the desk.

They were never gone for more than ten minutes, but in ten minutes Dennis could sneak behind the desk and steal stuff. He never took big things. He would steal a pen or some paperclips or candy the nurses kept stashed. Or he would go into the trash and steal a newspaper someone had already thrown away.

He had never been a very good reader, but now it was the only way he could find out what was going on in the world outside the hospital—other than his preferred method of eavesdropping. He always looked for articles about Peter Crane or the Dodgers.

Nowadays the stories with Crane in them were about the trial that would happen sometime soon. There had been all kinds of delays already, and pretrial motions—which Dennis really didn’t understand. But there would always be a paragraph about Dr. Crane and what he had all-ed-ged-ly done to Miss Navarre, and how he was suspected in those murders where the women had their eyes and mouths glued shut. That was the part Dennis liked to read about.

He imagined now what it would be like to glue Miss Navarre’s eyes and mouth shut so she couldn’t look at him or tell him what he shouldn’t do. That would be cool.

Nurse Betty walked past his door without looking in.

Dennis slipped out of his bed. He counted under his breath to a hundred, then cracked the door open and stuck his head out to see if the coast was clear. The hall was empty.

He went out into the hall in his stocking feet because that way he didn’t make any noise at all, and he could run and slide on the slippery floor. He scurried from shadowed doorway to shadowed doorway to the intersection of hallways where the nurses’ station was.

The two nurses were at the desk yakking away while Arlene dug in her purse for her cigarettes. Then they were on the way down the hall away from Dennis, going for the front door.