Suddenly, Christine turned and put her arms around me. The movement was graceful, but she took me by surprise.

“I have to find something out,” she said.

Christine kissed me, just as we had a few days before. We kissed sweetly at first, then harder. Her lips were soft and moist against mine, then firmer, more urgent. I could feel her breasts press against me; then her stomach, her strong legs.

She opened her eyes, looked at me, and she smiled. I loved that natural smile-loved it. That smile-no other one.

She gently pulled herself away from me. I felt the separation and I didn’t want her to go. I sensed, I knew, I should leave it at that.

Christine opened her front door and slowly backed inside. I didn’t want her to go in just yet. I wanted to know what she was thinking, all her thoughts.

“The first kiss wasn’t an accident,” she whispered.

“No, it wasn’t an accident,” I said.

GARY SONEJI was in the cellar again.

Whose dank, dark cellar was it, though?

That was the $64,000 question.

He didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be very early in the morning. The house upstairs was as quiet as death. He liked that image, the rub of it inside his mind.

He loved it in the dark. He went back to being a small boy. He could still feel it, as if it had happened only yesterday. His stepmother’s name was Fiona Morrison, and she was pretty, and everybody believed she was a good person, a good friend and neighbor, a good mother. It was all a lie! She had locked him away like a hateful animal-no, worse than an animal! He remembered shivering in the cellar, and peeing in his pants in the beginning, and sitting in his own urine as it turned from warm to icy cold. He remembered the feeling that he wasn’t like the rest of his family. He wasn’t like anybody else. There was nothing about him that anybody could love. There was nothing good about him. He had no inner core.

He sat in the dark cellar now and wondered if he was where he thought he was.

Which reality was he living in?

Which fantasy?

Which horror story?

He reached around on the floor in the dark. Hmmm. He wasn’t in the cellar in the old Princeton house. He could tell he wasn’t. Here the cold cement floor was smooth. And the smell was different. Dusty and musty. Where was he?

He turned on his flashlight. Ahhh!

No one was going to believe this one! No one would guess whose house this was, whose cellar he was hiding in now.

Soneji pushed himself up off the floor. He felt slightly nauseated and achy, but he ignored the feeling. The pain was incidental. He was ready to go upstairs now.

No one would believe what he was going to do next. How outrageous.

He was several steps ahead of everybody else.

He was way ahead.

As always.

SONEJI ENTERED the living room and saw the correct time on the Sony television’s digital clock. It was 3:24 in the morning. Another witching hour.

Once he reached the upstairs part of the house, he decided to crawl on his hands and knees.

The plan was good. Damn it, he wasn’t worthless and useless. He hadn’t deserved to be locked in the cellar. Tears welled in his eyes and they felt hot and all too familiar. His stepmother always called him a crybaby, a little pansy, a fairy. She never stopped calling him names, until he fried her mouth open in a scream.

The tears burned his cheeks as they ran down under his shirt collar. He was dying, and he didn’t deserve to die. He didn’t deserve any of this. So now someone had to pay.

He was silent and careful as he threaded his way through the house, slithering on his belly like a snake. The floorboards underneath him didn’t even creak as he moved forward. The darkness felt charged with electricity and infinite possibilities.

He thought about how frightened people were of intruders inside their houses and apartments. They ought to be afraid, too. There were monsters preying just outside their locked doors, often watching their windows at night. There were Peeping Garys in every town, small and large. And there were thousands more, twisted perverts, just waiting to come inside and feast. The people in their so-called safe houses were monster fodder.

He noticed that the upstairs part of the house had green walls. Green walls. What luck! Soneji had read somewhere that hospital operating walls were often painted green. If the walls were white, doctors and nurses sometimes saw ghost images of the ongoing operation, the blood and gore. It was called the “ghosting effect,” and green walls masked the blood.

No more intruding thoughts, no matter how relevant, Soneji told himself. No more interruptions. Be perfectly calm, be careful. The next few minutes were the dangerous ones.

This particular house was dangerous-which was why the game was so much fun, such a mind trip.

The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Soneji slowly, patiently, inched it open.

He heard a man softly snoring. He saw another digital clock on a bedside table. Three-twenty-three. He had lost time.

He rose to his full height. He was finally out of the cellar, and he felt an incredible surge of anger now. He felt rage, and it was justified.

Gary Soneji angrily sprang forward at the figure in bed. He clasped a metal pipe tightly in both his hands. He raised it like an ax. He swung the pipe down as hard as he could.

“Detective Goldman, so nice to meet you,” he whispered.

THE JOB was always there, waiting for me to catch up, demanding everything I could give it, and then demanding some more.

The next morning I found myself hurrying back to New York. The FBI had provided me with a helicopter. Kyle Craig was a good friend, but he was also working his tricks on me. I knew it, and he knew I did. Kyle was hoping that I would eventually get involved in the Mr. Smith case, that I would meet agent Thomas Pierce. I knew that I wouldn’t. Not for now anyway, maybe not ever. I had to meet Gary Soneji again first.

I arrived before 8:30 A.M. at the busy New York City heliport in the East Twenties. Some people call it “the New York Hellport.” The Bureau’s black Bell Jet floated in low over the congested FDR Drive and the East River. The craft dropped down as if it owned the city, but that was just FBI arrogance. No one could own New York -except maybe Gary Soneji.

Detective Carmine Groza was there to meet me and we got into his unmarked Mercury Marquis. We sped up the FDR Drive to the exit for the Major Deegan. As we crossed over into the Bronx, I remembered a funny line from the poet Ogden Nash: “The Bronx, no thonx.” I needed some more funny lines in my life.

I still had the irritating noise of the helicopter’s propellers roaring inside my head. It made me think of the nasty buzzing in the doghouse in Wilmington. Everything was happening too fast again. Gary Soneji had us off balance, the way he liked it, the way he always worked his nastiness.

Soneji got in your face, applied intense pressure, and then waited for you to make a crucial mistake. I was trying not to make one right now, not to end up like Manning Goldman.

The latest homicide scene was up in Riverdale. Detective Groza talked nervously as he drove the Deegan. His chattering reminded me of an old line I try to live by-never miss a good chance to shut up.

Logically, the Riverdale area should be part of Manhattan, he said, but it was actually part of the Bronx. To confuse matters further, Riverdale was the site of Manhattan College, a small private school having no affiliation with either Manhattan or the Bronx. New York ’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had attended Manhattan, Groza said.

I listened to the detective’s idle chitchat until I felt he had talked himself out. He seemed a different man from the one I’d met earlier in the week at Penn Station when he was partnered with Manning Goldman.