Crammed with vehicles, the enormous parking lot was largely still and quiet. By this tail-end of the afternoon, most people who intended to come to the mall had already arrived; and with two hours of window-shopping weather remaining, few were ready to go home.

As he found the row in which he had parked, as he walked toward the farther end where he had left his deuce coupe, Ryan dwelt on the look in Samantha’s eyes. He thought she pitied him, but now in his misery, he suspected it had been something even worse than pity.

Pity is pain felt at seeing the distress of others, joined with a desire to help. But Samantha could not help him; she made it clear that she could not. What he had seen in her eyes seemed more like commiseration, which might be as tender as pity, but was a compassion for the hopeless, for those who could not be reached or relieved.

The sun oppressed him, the glare of windshields, the heat rising from parked cars, the scent of tar wafting up from the hot blacktop, and he wanted to be home in the cool of the solarium.

“Hello,” said a voice behind him. “Hello, hello.”

He turned to discover the Asian woman with the bouquet of pale-pink lilies. She was in her twenties, petite, strikingly pretty, with long glossy black hair, not fully Asian but Eurasian, with celadon eyes.

“You know her, you know the author,” she said, her English without accent.

If he was too short with her, his rudeness would reflect on Sam, so he said, “Yes. I know her. Used to know her.”

“She is a very good writer, so talented.”

“Yes, she certainly is. I wish I had her talent.”

“So compassionate,” the woman said, stepping closer and with her glance indicating the book he carried.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’m afraid I have to be somewhere, I’m late.”

“A remarkable book, full of such insights.”

“Yes, it is, but I’m late.”

Holding the lilies with both hands, she thrust them toward him. “Here. I can see the sorrow between you and her, you need these more than I do.”

Startled, he said, “Oh, no, I can’t take them.”

“Please do, you must,” she said, pushing them against his chest with such insistence that one heavy bloom broke off its stem and fell to the blacktop.

With pungent pollen from the stamens abrasive in his nostrils, nonplussed, Ryan said, “No, see, I’m not going anywhere that I’ll be able to put them in water.”

“Here, here, you must,” she said, and if he had not taken the crackling cellophane cone in his free hand, she would have let the flowers fall to the ground.

Although he had accepted the lilies, he tried to pass them back to her.

He felt suddenly that he had been scorched, a line of fire searing along his left side. An instant later a sharper pain followed the hot shock of laceration-and only then he saw the switchblade knife.

As the lilies and the book dropped from Ryan’s hands, the woman said, “I can kill you any time I want.”

Stunned, clutching at his wound, Ryan collapsed back against a Ford Explorer.

She turned and walked away at a brisk pace toward the parallel row of cars, but she did not run.

The blade had been so sharp, it slit his shirt without pulling the threads, as cleanly as a straight razor slashing through one sheet of newspaper.

Reaching cross-body, right hand slick with blood, he frantically traced the wound. It was not ragged enough to be a laceration, more like an incision, about four inches long, too shallow to require stitches, not mortal, just a warning cut, but deep enough to have discernible lips.

He looked up and saw that, as petite as she was, she would swiftly disappear through the crowded rows of cars, perhaps in one of which she would escape.

Shock had silenced him. Now that he thought to shout for help, he could summon only a wheeze.

Looking for someone to call to his aid, Ryan surveyed the surrounding lot. In the distance, two cars moved away along the trunk road from which the rows of parking spaces branched. He saw three people on foot, but none nearby.

The woman with the knife vanished among the vehicles, as if she liquefied into the glass glare, into the heat rising off blacktop.

Ryan possessed his full voice now, but only cursed quietly, having had time for second thoughts about making a public spectacle of himself. Anyway, she was gone, beyond finding.

He crushed a few lilies underfoot, without intention, as he made his way to the dropped book, which he plucked off the pavement with his clean hand.

At his ’32 Ford coupe, perspiration dripped off his brow onto the trunk lid as he fumbled in a pants pocket for his keys. He had broken out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the warm day.

In the trunk he kept a tool kit for road repairs. With it were a moving blanket, a few clean chamois cloths, a roll of paper towels, and bottled water, among other items.

He stuffed a chamois through the tear in his shirt and pressed it to the wound, clutching his arm to his side to hold the cloth in place.

After he washed his bloody hand with bottled water, he half opened the folded moving blanket and draped it over the driver’s seat.

A Chevy Tahoe cruised along the parking lane, but Ryan didn’t hail the driver. He wanted only to get out of there and home.

He heard her voice in memory: I can kill you any time I want.

Having been excited by the drawing of his blood, maybe she would decide she needed to come back and kill him now.

The Ford single overhead cam 427, built solely for racing, had enough torque to rock the car as it idled. Behind the engine was a Ford C-6 transmission with 2,500-rpm stall converter.

Leaving the parking lot, Ryan was tempted to take the streets as if they were the race lanes of a Grand Prix, but he stayed at the posted speed limits, loath to be pulled over by the police.

The car was not a classic but a hot rod, totally customized, and Ryan had hands-free phone technology aboard. His cell rang, and even in his current state of mind, he automatically accepted the call. “Hello.”

The woman who had slashed him said, “How is the pain?”

“What do you want?”

“Do you never listen?”

“What do you want?”

“How could I make it any clearer?”

“Who are you?”

“I am the voice of the lilies.”

Angrily, he said, “Make sense.”

“They toil not, neither do they spin.”

“I said sense, not nonsense. Is Lee there? Is Kay?”

“The Tings?” She laughed softly. “Do you think this is about them?”

“You know them, huh? Yeah, you know them.”

“I know everything about you, who you fire and who you use.”

“I gave them two years’ severance. I treated them well.”

“You think this has to do with the Tings because my eyes are slanted like theirs? It has nothing to do with them.”

“Then tell me what this is about.”

“You know what it’s about. You know.”

“If I knew, you wouldn’t have gotten close enough to cut me.”

A red traffic light forced him to stop. The car rocked, and under the blood-soaked chamois, the stinging incision pulsed in time with the idling engine.

“Are you really so stupid?” she asked.

“I have a right to know.”

“You have a right to die,” she said.

He thought at once of Spencer Barghest in Las Vegas and the collection of preserved cadavers. But he had never found a connection between Dr. Death and anything that happened sixteen months previous.

“I’m not stupid,” he said. “I know you want something. Everyone wants something. I have money, a lot of it. I can give you anything you want.”

“If not stupid,” she said, “then grotesquely ignorant. At best, grotesquely ignorant.”

“Tell me what you want,” he insisted.

“Your heart belongs to me. I want it back.”

The irrationality of her demand left Ryan unable to respond.

“Your heart. Your heart belongs to me,” the woman repeated, and she began to cry.