The colloquy came to my ears with detached lucidity, as when you’re prattling at a cocktail party and suddenly hear the sound of your own emptiness so clearly it seems someone else’s. But now there was numbness in my feet, nausea, a ringing skull. My crotch felt swollen. “Get me a chair,” I mumbled.

Bast slid one over. I pushed off the table and sat. But I couldn’t retrieve the pounding of my subconscious, why I awoke believing that I shouldn’t be here, that I couldn’t tell Rayfield about Jason. Better to stick with Lee. “Listen—”

“Where you been?” Bast demanded.

“Searching—”

The paramedic broke in. “You’re concussed, man. You’re slurring words.”

“He’s a stupid fuck,” Bast said, “who’s going to get himself killed.”

“I don’t think it was Lee—”

“Who’s the gray-haired man?” Rayfield cut in.

“What man?” Then I remembered Mooring.

Rayfield’s face reddened. Bast leaned over me. “If anyone’s killed out of this, asshole, it’s on you.”

The place smelled of raw nerve ends. “Better take him to the E.R.,” the paramedic said nervously.

“Get Bast out of here,” I told Rayfield.

Rayfield’s jaw worked. He pulled the ball-point pen from his shirt pocket as he nodded toward Bast. Bast and the paramedic disappeared. A fluorescent ceiling light blinked above me. In the open room silent figures moved at the corners of my eyes. Rayfield seemed distant, on the wrong end of a telescope. He shoved coffee at me. I drank some and lit a cigarette, constructing a small manageable world where I did the same things, smoke and drink coffee. Rayfield’s pen began clicking. “What about Lee?”

“He didn’t kill me. He didn’t rape Mrs. Cantwell …” My voice fell off.

“So you say to let him go.” The question was taunting, silken.

I tried to concentrate. “I don’t think you can hold him.”

“You don’t see the mayor, my captain, or all those people who need a killer. Just the idea of who Lee is makes people anxious. Some people want him burned.”

My teeth ached. The pen noise was like dripping water. “I don’t.”

“But you’d do that to protect Henry Cantwell.”

I couldn’t answer. I righted myself and tried reaching for my jacket.

“You know, I’ve wondered.” He said it behind me, musingly. “I guess the worrying over your wife was crap.”

I turned back to his long, speculative look. The look and something new in his voice kept me there. He placed a chair with its back to me and straddled it leaning forward, eyes curious and disdainful as he said quietly, “You’re queer, aren’t you?”

It was like falling in a dream. I wasn’t sure where I was or how the fall would end. “Aren’t you?” he spat.

“Just graceful.”