Imagination might have accounted for Amy’s impression that the air carried a subtle new energy, similar to the freighted atmosphere under storm clouds before the first flash of lightning. But she was not imagining when she felt the fine hairs on her arms and on the nape of her neck quiver as though responding to the silent flute of static electricity.

Mortimer rose to his three feet, blind Daisy to her four. The five dogs regarded one another, grinning, tails wagging, but still in some transported state.

In a voice subdued for him, Barry Packard said, “I knew this kid in college, Jack Dundy. Total party animal. Lived for beer and card games and girls and laughs. Skated through his studies with the minimum of work. Came from money, spoiled, irresponsible, but damn likable in his way.”

Whatever story Barry might be telling, it seemed to have no connection to what had just happened among the dogs. Nevertheless, Amy still felt a prickling along her arms, the back of her neck, her scalp.

“One Sunday night, Jack’s coming back to college from a weekend home. Just two blocks from the campus, he sees fire in the ground-floor windows of a three-story apartment building. He goes into the place, shouting fire, pounding on doors, the place filling fast with smoke.”

To Amy, it seemed that even the dogs were alert to the story.

“They say Jack led people out three times before the fire department arrived, saved at least five children whose parents had been trapped by flames and died. He heard other kids screaming, went in a fourth time, even though he heard sirens coming, went back in and up, broke out a third-story window, dropped two little girls to people on the lawn catching them in blankets, went back into that room for a third child but never made it to the window again, died in there, burned beyond recognition.”

The night sounds were returning. Faint music from another house. The songs of shore toads.

“I couldn’t understand how the Jack Dundy I knew, slacker and party animal, spoiled rich kid, quick to play the fool…could have done something so damn heroic and so selfless. For the longest time it seemed to me not only that I hadn’t understood Jack Dundy but also that I didn’t understand the world at all, that nothing was as simple as it seemed, as if I were an actor just realizing I was in a play, nothing but painted sets around me, and something else altogether behind the stage scenery.”

Barry fell silent, blinked, and looked around as though for a moment he had forgotten where he was.

“I haven’t thought about Jack Dundy in years. Why did he come to me now?”

Amy had no answer for him, but for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, the story nevertheless seemed appropriate to the moment.

Suddenly dogs were dogs again, each of them seeking the touch of human hands, the sweet-talk that told them they were beautiful and were loved.

The ocean receded into blackness. More blackness lay behind the moon, and still more beyond the stars.

Amy knelt to give Daisy a tummy rub, but because the blind dog could not meet her eyes, her gaze traveled instead to Nickie, who was watching her.

Through her memory, the flock of sea gulls startled into flight with a thunderous drumming of wings, feathers blazing white in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, sharply shrieking as they ascended, shrieking as if testifying to the terror below, as if crying Murder, murder! and Amy with the gun in both hands, standing in the blood-spotted snow, screaming with the gulls.

Billy Pilgrim walked twice past the building that housed Brian McCarthy’s company offices and apartment. The windows were dark on both floors.

The boss had confirmed by phone that the deal was made. McCarthy and Redwing were evidently on the road to Santa Barbara by now.

Billy returned to the Cadillac in which Pauline Shumpeter had died of a massive stroke but had not soiled herself. He boldly reparked it in the lot beside McCarthy’s building.

After sheathing his hands in latex gloves, he got out of the car and climbed the exterior stairs to the apartment door.

He needed gloves because he didn’t intend to reduce this place to molten metal and soot with exotic Russian incendiary weapons. He would have preferred to leave fingerprints and then burn the building because his hands sweated in the gloves, and they made him feel like a proctologist.

With a LockAid lock-release gun, he picked the deadbolt pins in twenty seconds, went inside, closed the door behind him, and stood listening for the sound of somebody he might need to kill.

Billy did not usually kill two people per day and assist in the murder and disposal of two others. If this had been a take-your-son-to-work day, and if he had had a son, the boy would have come to the conclusion that his dad’s job was a lot more glamorous than it really was.

Sometimes months would pass between killings. And Billy could go a year, even two years, without having to waste a friend like Georgie Jobbs or a complete stranger like Shumpeter.

Sure, in his line of work, every day required the commission of felonies, but mostly they were not capital crimes that could earn you a lethal injection and burial at public expense.

Episodes of life seldom had the body count of good novels in the everything-is-pointless-and-silly genre, which is why Billy still read so many books even after all these years.

Unnervingly, episodes of real life also were not reliably as meaningless as life was portrayed by his favorite writers. Once in a while, something would happen to suggest meaningful patterns in events, or he would encounter someone whose life seemed to be filled with purpose.

On those occasions, Billy would retreat to his books until his doubts were put to rest.

If his favorite books failed to encourage a full renewal of his comfortable cynicism, he would kill the person whose life had seemed to be meaningful, which at once proved that the meaning had been an illusion.

The apartment remained silent, and finally Billy moved room to room, switching on lights.

He disliked the minimalist decor. Too Zen. Too calm. Nothing here was real. Life was chaos. This decor was not authentic.

Authentic decor was a deranged old lady living with fifty years of daily newspapers and thousands of bags of trash stacked throughout the residence, her husband dead twelve years on the parlor sofa, and twenty-six cats with various seizure disorders. Authentic decor was bombed-out shells of buildings, tenements full of crack whores, and anything Vegas.

Billy loved Vegas. His ideal vacation, which he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, was to go to Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash, lose half of it at the tables, win the losses back, then lose the entire bankroll, and kill a perfect stranger chosen at random on the way out of town.

In McCarthy’s annoyingly clean neon-free study, Billy unplugged the brain of the computer, carried it from the room, and stood beside the front door. When he headed for Santa Barbara, this logic unit would be in the trunk of his car. Later, he would flood it with corrosive materials and burn it in a crematorium.

The architect had been instructed to take his laptop with him. Billy would have to destroy that machine after McCarthy was dead.

In the study again, he searched the file cabinets and found the printouts of all the e-mails that Vanessa had sent to the architect over the past ten years. Although the waste can was tall, those files filled it to the brim, and he put them by the front door.

Because McCarthy might have saved old e-mail files on diskettes when he updated computers, Billy searched boxes of those but found nothing that, judging by the labels, needed to be trashed.