ON A THURSDAY MORNING in early May, I fell into the ruminative routine I'd been honing since I had returned from Texas. I went out and bought the papers, made Pauline some coffee, and kissed her good-bye as she left for her new job at the boutique law firm MacMilan and Hart. Then, after twenty minutes of push-ups and crunches on the living-room carpet, I hit the street.

First, I checked in with Philip K, a former senior magazine editor. He was a recovering heroin addict and now a regular at a methadone outpatient clinic who ran a tidy used-book store from a card table inside the northeast corner of Tompkins Square Park. An aesthete and a snob, Philip sold only books he deemed worthy of being read. Many mornings there would be no more than three or four battered volumes on the table.

That morning, Philip was touting a coffee-stained paperback novel called Night Dogs. I gave him his asking price and carried it in my back pocket to a Second Avenue diner, where I started it at the counter with my coffee and matzo brei.

Although unpierced and untattooed, I was becoming an East Villager in subtler ways. I'd acquired a taste for pierogi and blintzes and other sweet Eastern European foods sold in narrow, enduring eateries from Second to Avenue C. I loved the dark local bars whose jukeboxes were stocked with songs I'd never heard before. Mack loved them, too, and every once in a while he'd take the bus and join me and Pauline on a local pub crawl.

Macklin was such a natural hipster, he seemed more at home in the Village than I did. Wearing this funky fedora I'd bought him, he looked like Henry Miller come back from the dead for one last tour of bohemia.

Speaking of fedoras, I was buying my clothes secondhand now. That morning nothing I was wearing cost more than six dollars, so after breakfast and fifty pages of Philip's latest, I decided to wander over to Ferdi's Vintage on Seventh, where I'd made some of my better finds.

I had just started going through the rack of shirts in the back when a little guy with short hair and a goatee, both dyed peroxide white, walked in.

I watched him rummage through the old suits. It made me miss Sammy. He was around the same height and build. He even had the same cocky carriage.

The resemblance was so uncanny that I began to wonder if we didn't all have clones walking the streets in various cities around the world.

The skinny guy must have sensed my gaze because he turned to face me. I began to sputter an apology when his startled expression gave him away.

"Sammy!"

He threw a punch, and I found myself on the floor, looking up at the tattered tails of old shirts.

SAMMY WAS ALIVE? He couldn't be. But, goddamnit, he was!

I was up about as fast as I'd gone down. I ran out of Ferdi's and saw him sprinting west on Seventh. He cut south on First and vanished from sight. He was moving as if he'd just seen a ghost, but so was I.

There was a gay bar on the corner, its front window shrouded with dark red curtains. When I opened the door, the light from First Avenue caught Sammy scrambling out the back.

"Sammy, stop!" I yelled. "I have to talk to you."

I started after him through the shadows until I nearly collided with a massive bartender who had nimbly jumped from behind the bar. He was blocking my path.

"I'm just trying to talk to an old friend I thought was dead."

"Aren't we all, honey," he said. "But sometimes we got to take no for an answer."

I turned and dashed back out the front door. Sammy was crossing First, one block south. The shock I'd felt when I first saw him was turning to anger.

I hurried after him. By the time I saw the back of his white head again, he'd slowed to a brisk walk.

I kept him barely in sight all the way up Sixth Street, past the Indian curry parlors, the old Ukrainian church, and a Guatemalan gift shop. Then I followed him across Second and Third, around Cooper Union, and through the punk skateboarders doing ollies in the shadow of the bright anthracite cube on Astor Place.

Now Sammy headed up the canyon of Fourth, his white head bobbing in the swarm of e-commerce worker bees just released for lunch.

Every time he peered back over his shoulder, I dropped to one knee or ducked into a shop. Separated by about a ten-second lag, I crossed Fourteenth by Circuit City, then traversed Union Square, where I nearly lost him in the swarm of chic, black-clad women clamoring for fresh fruit and veggies.

The reality that Sammy was alive was just starting to sink in. What happened at his house that night? Who died in the fire? Why had Sammy run away? And what was he doing in New York?

I put my questions on hold and focused on the back of Sammy's blond head. A block short of Paragon he turned west again. I followed him toward Chelsea, where all the bars are gay and window-front mannequins have shaved heads and hold hands.

At the corner of Eighth and Eighteenth, near Covenant House, I got cut off by movers delivering a pair of Art Deco couches. By the time I maneuvered around them, Sammy had vanished once again.

AFTER HE LEFT UNION SQUARE, Sammy snuck another backward peek and spotted Jack a little more than a block behind, near City Bakery.

Without changing his pace, he proceeded west. Just before Seventh, he ducked under a low cement stairway and waited for his old townie friend to hustle past.

Once Jack had crossed the avenue, Sammy sprinted uptown. He didn't look back for five blocks. Then he turned west one last time. At the end of the next crossblock was a small park. He found a bench in the corner and stretched out on his back.

For an hour he lay in the shadows as invisible as the homeless. He listened to the whoosh of the cabs shooting up Tenth four abreast and the cries of the toddlers brought into the park and released like pigeons by their large, calm Caribbean nannies.

What were the odds, Sammy was thinking, of seeing Jack rifling the racks in a used-clothing store in the East Village? About the same as tripping over him in a leather bar? Well, the world was full of surprises, and guess what? Most suck. He'd have to be more careful. Really careful. Lately he'd had the feeling he was being followed.

He cooled his heels long enough for two shifts of nannies to come and go. Then he edged out of the park and walked down Tenth on the leafy seminary blocks. He wandered through the shadow of the train crossing, where even in the early afternoon the leggy, wide-shouldered transvestites were trawling for commuters inclined to take the long way home.

At Eighteenth he turned east past the taxi garages, and minutes later he entered his apartment. He had a sublet in one of Chelsea 's block-long housing projects, and his was the only white face in the building. But, as his neighbors put it, it was a nice crib. Where else but the PJ's were you going to get a one-bedroom on the twenty-fourth floor with a little terrace for fourteen hundred a month? In Akron?

He rode the empty elevator up to the twenty-fourth floor and thought about his chance encounter with Jack Mullen. Jesus! Maybe it was an omen to leave town, go to South Beach, and get a chair in an outré salon on Collins Avenue. He got off at twenty-four, which was also his age for three more days, and walked down the endless corridor, the one thing about the building that creeped him out.

As he turned his key in the lock, two men emerged from the space by the incinerator chute. He recognized Frank Volpi. "Jeez, you need a haircut, Frank."

Volpi pushed Sammy's face against the door, and the other asshole kicked him in the side. The second guy was one of the creeps who had killed Peter. Suddenly he knew he wasn't going to make it to South Beach.