For a moment, he felt nothing strange, but then the centripetal force of these eyes seemed to pull him toward them. He felt his heart quickening, and his mind was bright with a perception of deep mystery and with the desire to understand it that had led him to draw so many studies of her eyes with such obsession.

In his memory rose the complex and enfolding sound: hiss, whizz, soft clicking, rustle and flump, deep throb and ruffle, crumpcrump-crumpcrump-

The sound stopped abruptly when the dog turned away from him and went forward into the cargo area.

Brian became aware of the traffic noise in the street rising slowly from the hush into which he had not until now realized that it had fallen.

He closed the tailgate and went around to the front passenger door. Amy had expressed the desire to drive.

In the car, on the open road, they would have privacy. Secrets could more easily be shared.

On the interstate, bound for the storied city, she was silent for a while but then said, “When I was eighteen, I married a man named Michael Cogland. He probably intended to kill me from the day that I accepted his proposal.”

The previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.

As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.

Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.

To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did mattered. Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to building something, to a legacy!

He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.

The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.

He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.

With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.

In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.

Then he cruised.

During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS and ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS.

When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.

In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.

He had never been so scared in his life.

When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.

The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.

He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.

At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.

Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.

Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.

Driving toward the city where so many people had claimed to have left their hearts, Amy unburdened hers.

In her senior year at Misericordiæ, she won a scholarship from a major university. Because it was partial, she had to support herself.

For two years in high school, she had worked part-time as a waitress. She had liked the job and had earned good tips.

When she went away to university, she landed a job in an upscale steakhouse. There she met Michael Cogland, a regular customer, when he was twenty-six, eight years her senior.

He was charming and intense, but when he asked her out, she did not initially accept the invitation. He proved to be indefatigable.

Amy thought she knew what she wanted: a first-rate education, including a doctorate, a career as a professor, a quiet academic life with many friends, and an opportunity to enrich the lives of students as the sisters of Misericordiæ had enriched hers.

Michael Cogland not only persisted until he swept her out of her waitressing shoes, but he also swept her into a world of wealth that she found irresistibly seductive.

Later she would realize that being abandoned at the age of two with only the clothes she wore, having lost the Harkinsons and the solid middle-class life they would have given her, and having been raised in an orphanage, she had grown up with a thirst for security that had not been quenched by all the love that the sisters had rained on her. She had gotten along for eighteen years without more than a few dollars in her wallet, and she had thought that poverty-and the comfort with which she lived in it-inoculated her against an unhealthy desire for money.

Cogland had recognized her subconscious yearning for security and, with subtlety and cunning, had presented her with a vision of a cozy future that she could not resist.

Because she was a modest Catholic-school girl, he treated her with respect, too, and delayed a physical relationship until they were married. He knew precisely how to play her.

They were engaged two months after they met, and were married in four. She dropped out of university and into a life of leisure.

He wanted a family. Soon she was pregnant. But there would be a nanny, maids.

Only much later did she learn that although Michael was a rich man by most standards, his greatest wealth was held in trust. By the terms of his grandfather’s will, those funds would pass to him only on two conditions: Before his thirtieth birthday, he must marry a girl acceptable to his parents, and he must father a child by her.