Ricky sat on a hard wooden bench in the middle of Pennsylvania Station with copies of both the News and the Post on his lap, oblivious to the flow of people surrounding him, hunched over like a single tree in a field bending to the force of a strong wind. Every word he read seemed to accelerate, slipping and skidding across his imagination like a car out of control, wheels locked and screeching impotently, unable to halt the careening, heading inevitably toward a crash.

Both stories had fundamentally the same details: Joanne Riggins, a thirty-four-year-old detective with the New York Transit Authority Police, had been the victim of a hit-and-run driver the night before, struck less than a half block from her home as she crossed the street. The detective remained on life support systems in a coma at Brooklyn Medical Center after emergency surgery. Prognosis questionable. Witnesses told both papers that a fire-engine red Pontiac Firebird had been seen fleeing the site of the accident. This was a vehicle similar to one owned by the detective’s estranged husband. Although the vehicle was still missing, the ex-husband was being questioned by police. The Post reported that he was claiming his highly distinctive car had been stolen the night before the hit-and-run accident. The News uncovered that the man had had a restraining order taken out against him by Detective Riggins during the divorce proceedings, a second restraining order taken out by another, unnamed female police officer, who was said to have rushed to Detective Riggins’s side in the seconds after the young woman was crushed by the speeding car. The paper also reported that the ex-husband had publicly threatened his wife during the final year of their marriage.

It was a tabloid dream story, filled with tawdry intimations of an unusual sexual triangle, a stormy infidelity, and out-of-control passions that eventually resulted in violence.

Ricky also knew that it was fundamentally untrue.

Not, of course, the majority of the story; only one small aspect: The driver of the car wasn’t the man the police were interviewing, although he was a wondrously obvious and convenient suspect. Ricky knew that it would take them a significant amount of time to come to believe the ex-husband’s protests of innocence and even longer to examine whatever alibi he claimed to have. Ricky thought the man was probably guilty of every thought and desire leading up to the act itself, and he guessed that the man who’d arranged this particular accident knew that, as well.

Ricky crushed and crumpled the News in anger, twisting the pages and then tossing them aside, scattering the sheets on the wooden bench, almost as if he’d wrung the neck of a small animal. He considered telephoning the detectives working the case. He considered calling Riggins’s boss at the Transit Police. He tried to imagine one of Riggins’s coworkers listening to his tale. He shook his head in growing despair. There was absolutely no chance whatsoever, he thought, that anyone would hear what he had to say. Not one word.

He lifted his head slowly, once again nearly overcome with the sense that he was being watched. Inspected. That his responses were being measured like the subject of some bizarre clinical study. The sensation made his skin grow cold and clammy. Goose bumps formed on his arms. He looked around the huge, cavernous station. In the course of a few seconds, dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people swept past him. But Ricky felt utterly alone.

He rose and, like a wounded man, started to make his way out of the station, heading toward the cabstand. There was a homeless man by the station entrance begging for loose change, which surprised Ricky; most of the disadvantaged were shooed away from prominent locations by the police. He stopped and dropped whatever loose change he had in the man’s empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

“Here,” Ricky said. “I don’t need it.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you,” the man said. “Bless you.”

Ricky stared at the man for a moment, taking note of the sores on his hands, the lesions, partially hidden by a scraggly beard, that marked his face. Dirt, grime, and tatters. Ravaged by the streets and mental illness. The man could have been anywhere between forty and sixty years old.

“Are you okay?” Ricky asked.

“Yes, sir, yes, sir. Thank you. God bless you, generous sir. God bless you. Spare change?” The homeless man’s head pivoted toward another person exiting the station. “Any spare change?” He kept up the refrain, almost singsong with his voice, now ignoring Ricky, who continued to stand in front of him.

“Where are you from?” Ricky suddenly asked.

The homeless man stared at him, filled with a sudden distrust.

“Here,” he said carefully, indicating his spot on the sidewalk. “There,” he continued, gesturing toward the street. “Everywhere.” He concluded by sweeping his arms in a circle around his head.

“Where’s home?” Ricky asked.

The man pointed at his forehead. This made sense to Ricky.

“Well, then,” Ricky said, “have a nice day.”

“Yes sir, yes sir, God bless you, sir,” the man continued melodically. “Spare change?”

Ricky stepped away, abruptly trying to decide whether he had cost the homeless man his life, merely by speaking with him. He walked toward the taxi stand, wondering if every person that he came in contact with would be targeted like the detective had, like Dr. Lewis might have been. Like Zimmerman. One injured, one missing, one dead. He realized: If I had a friend, I couldn’t call him. If I had a lover, I couldn’t go to her. If I had a lawyer, I couldn’t make an appointment. If I had a toothache, I couldn’t even go and get my cavity filled without putting the dentist in jeopardy. Whoever I touch is vulnerable.

Ricky stopped on the sidewalk and stared at his hands. Poison, he thought.

I’ve become poison.

Shaken by the thought, Ricky walked past the row of waiting cabs. He continued across town, heading up Park Avenue, the noises and flow of the city, incessant movement and sound, dropping away from him, so that he marched in what seemed to him to be complete silence, oblivious to the world around him, his own world narrowing, it seemed, with every stride he took. It was nearly sixty blocks to his apartment, and he walked them all, barely aware that he even took a breath of air on the trip.

Ricky locked himself into his apartment and slumped down into the armchair in his office. That was where he spent the remainder of that day and the entirety of the night, afraid to go out, afraid to stay still, afraid to remember, afraid to leave his mind blank, afraid to stay awake, afraid to sleep.

He must have nodded off sometime toward morning, because when he awakened the day was already blistering outside his windows. His neck was stiff and every joint in his body creaked with the irritation of spending the night in a chair. He rose gingerly and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, pausing to stare at himself in the mirror and to remark internally that tension seemed to have made inroads in every line and angle he presented to the world. He thought that not since his wife’s final days had he appeared so close to despair, which, he admitted ruefully to himself, was about as emotionally close to death as one could get.

The x-ed out calendar on his desk was now more than two-thirds filled.

He tried Dr. Lewis’s number in Rhinebeck again, only to get the same recording. He tried directory assistance for the same region, thinking perhaps there was a new listing, but came up with a blank. He thought of dialing the hospital or the morgue, to try to determine what was truth and what was fiction, but then stopped himself. He wasn’t certain that he really wanted that answer.