He was still barking out instructions as he left the bedroom. He threw the phone back on the receiver cradle, and left the house at a run.

He didn’t say good-bye to Jennine.

Jennine lay there, trying to summon up sleep. It didn’t work.

She felt as if something was cracking inside her, as if she was one of JK’s goddamn oxidant tanks, pumped full of pressure.

She got out of bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom. She had a couple of bottles of tranquilizers there.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a slack, sagging woman, with worry lines etched into her face and tired, graying, mousy hair.

She took the pills, popping them into her mouth like jelly beans. Viewing the image in the mirror, the little pills pushing into the small sour-looking mouth, was like watching somebody else, someone on TV maybe. She couldn’t feel anything.

When she’d done, she threw the empty bottles into the trash and went back to bed.

Even then, sleep wouldn’t come.

After a time, she reached out for the phone and dialed Jack Morgan’s home number. By a miracle he was there, and not throwing rum down his throat in some bar. She told him what she’d done.

At around 6 A.M., JK came running in, with his hair mussed and no tie and his shirt sticking out of his pants.

Jack Morgan was sitting on the bed, with an overcoat thrown over his pajamas, rubbing Jennine’s limbs. “Where the hell have you been? I called you an hour ago.”

JK started talking about the oxygen tank, and batches of contaminated nitrogen tet, and all the rest of it; but Jack just glared at him.

So JK broke off, and then he started trying to take command. “Have you called a hospital? What about a stomach pump?” It was typical JK. Arrive too late, then order everyone else around.

“She doesn’t need a pump,” Jack snapped back at him. “But she’s going to sleep for a hell of a long time. She should be asleep now. And then I want her to go into the hospital, for observation.” He nodded at the bedside table. “I’ve left a number there.”

JK, looking restless and bewildered, sat on the bed. Then he took Jennine’s hand and began to rub, as Jack had been doing, along the length of her forearm. His hands were warm, but they were trembling, and his touch was uncertain, wavering between too hard and too soft. She managed to smile at him, and he seemed to get a little confidence, and the strokes evened out.

“This is a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice thin. “A hell of a thing.”