“I’m tired of your bull, my friend,” Jack said. “The delays. The stalling. You guys took your best shot and missed, and now it’s time for you to pay for messing with us. Piss me off a little more and instead of one dead celeb, I’ll make things so bad, Prada will be coming out with a body bag this season.

“You receiving my transmission loud and clear, Mike? I repeat, there will be another famous body at midnight. No more easy ones like the worthless mayor either. I’ve already made my selection. You’ll like this one. Oh, and stop that singing right now, or I believe I will kill all the female hostages.”

WITH ANOTHER BLOCK of excruciating downtime in front of us, I grabbed the opportunity to hand over the crisis phone to Ned Mason. Then I headed uptown to see Maeve.

I noticed a change when I came into her room. The sheets were different, flannel, new, and crisp. There was a vase full of fresh flowers, and she was wearing a new bathrobe. They were nice additions, so why did they creep me out?

Maeve was awake, watching CNN, which now had ongoing coverage of the siege. What ever happened to the Yule log? I found the remote and clicked off the set before I took her hand.

“Hey, you,” I said.

“I saw you on the tube,” Maeve said, smiling. “You always look so handsome in that suit. Whose christening did you wear it to? Shawna’s?”

“Chrissy’s,” I said.

“Chrissy,” my wife said with a sigh. “How is my little Peep?”

“She came into the nest the other night,” I said. “I forgot to tell you. I forgot to tell you a lot of things, Maeve. I…”

My wife raised her hand and put her finger to my lips.

“I know,” she said.

“I shouldn’t have been so concerned with my stupid job. I wish…”

She stopped me with a hurt look.

“Please don’t wish,” she said quietly. “It hurts more than cancer. I knew full well how dedicated you were to your job when we first met. It was one of the reasons I married you. I was so proud, seeing you speak to the press. My God. You were inspiring.”

“Who do you think inspires me?” I said, tearing up.

“No, not on these nice new sheets. Wait. I have your present.”

We always exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve, usually around 3:00 a.m., after putting together a bike or train set or some other god-awful toy.

“Me first,” I said, taking a wrapped box out of the bag I had stashed in the trunk of my car. “Allow me.”

I tore off the paper and showed Maeve the portable DVD player and the stack of DVDs I’d gotten her. The movies were old black-and-white noirs, Maeve’s favorites.

“So you don’t have to constantly watch the idiot box,” I said. “Look, Double Indemnity. I’ll sneak us up some Atomic Wings. It’ll be just like old times.”

“How awesomely devilish of you,” Maeve said. “Now mine.”

She produced a black velvet jewelry box from under her pillow and handed it to me. I opened the box. It was an earring. A single gold hoop. I used to wear one back in the late “Guns N’ Roses” eighties when we first met.

I started to laugh. Then both of us were laughing hard, and it was wonderful.

“Put it in. Put it in,” Maeve cried through her laughing fit.

I maneuvered the earring into the latent hole of my left ear. Miraculously, after nearly two decades, it slipped right in.

“How do I look? Totally tubular?”

“Like a well-dressed pirate,” my wife said, wiping a rare happy tear from her eye.

“Arrrrrrr, matey,” I said, burying my face in her neck.

I backed away when I felt her stiffen. Then I shuddered at the distant look in her eyes. Her breathing became irregular, as if she was hyperventilating without any hesitation. I blasted the nurse’s button half a dozen times.

“I’ve spilled the water from the spring, Mother,” I heard my wife say in the Irish accent she’d fought so hard to erase. “The lambs are all in the ditch, every last one.”

What was happening? Oh God no, Maeve! Not today, not now-not ever!

Sally Hitchens, the head of the Nursing Department, came rushing in. She shined a light into Maeve’s eye and reached under her robe for her pain pack.

“Doctor upped her meds this morning,” Sally said. Maeve closed her eyes when the nurse put her hand on her forehead. “We have to watch her closely until she adjusts. Can I speak to you a second, Mike?”

I KISSED the top of my wife’s head and followed Sally out into the hall. The nurse looked directly into my eyes. Bad sign. I quickly thought of the unsettling difference in my wife’s room. The nice new sheets. The fresh flowers. Some kind of preparations were being made.

No. Not acceptable.

“We’re getting very close to the end now, Mike,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“How long?” I said, looking at the hall carpet first, then back up at Sally.

“A week,” the nurse said gently. “Probably less.”

“A week?” I said. Even I knew I sounded like a spoiled child. It wasn’t the nurse’s fault. The lady was an angel of mercy.

“Impossible as it is, you have to prepare yourself,” Sally said. “Didn’t you read the book I gave you?”

She’d given me Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous book On Death and Dying. It described the stages in the death process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

“I guess I’m stuck in the anger part,” I said.

“You’re going to have to unstick yourself, Mike,” the nurse said, annoyed. “Let me tell you something. I’ve seen some cases in this place that, I’m ashamed to say, haven’t affected me all that much. Your wife is not one of those cases. Maeve needs you to be strong now. It’s time to deal. Oh, and Mike, love your earring.”

I closed my eyes and felt my face flush red with anger and embarrassment as I heard the nurse walk off. There was something unending about the pain I felt pass through me then. It seemed incredibly powerful, as if it would burst out of my chest like a bomb blast, stop the world, stop all life everywhere.

It passed after a moment when I heard someone in one of the other rooms click on a TV.

Apparently not, I thought as I opened my burning eyes and headed for the elevators.

I CALLED HOME on my cell phone as I left the hospital and hurried toward my car. Julia picked up.

“How’s Mom?” she said.

In homicide interrogations, sometimes it takes lying very convincingly in order to extract a confession. At that moment, I was glad I’d had some practice.

“She looks great, Julia,” I said. “She sends her love. To you, especially. She’s so proud of the way you’ve been taking care of your sisters. So am I, by the way.”

“How are you, Dad?” Julia said. Was that static or extremely mature concern in my baby’s voice? I remembered that she’d be heading to high school next year. How the heck had my little girl grown up without me noticing?

“You know me, Julia,” I said into my cell. “If I’m not actually freaking out, I guess I’m doing pretty good.”

Julia laughed. She’d been front row center for my classic comedy, Dad Meltdowns.

“Remember that time when everyone was fighting on the way to the Poconos, and you told me to ‘close my eyes and look out the window’?” Julia said.

“I wish I could forget it,” I said with a laugh. “How are things in the barracks?”

“There’s quite a line behind me, waiting to tell you,” she said.

As I drove through the cold city streets, I spoke briefly to each of my kids, telling them how much their mother and I loved them. I apologized for not being there for their pageant or Christmas Eve. I’d missed holidays working cases before, but there was never a time when neither Maeve nor I had been there. As usual, the kids were taking things in stride. Chrissy was sniffling when she got on the line.