Across the street was the liquor store, window broken but bars, and he had to make do reaching through, pulling maybe twenty, thirty bottles out, the ones he could reach by hand or hook with his tire iron.

He kept moving steadily up the street, seeing no one, hearing nothing but his own footfalls over the broken glass. The thrift store was hanging open, but who wanted anything in there? He just lifted a couple of suits that might look good for himself, two or three dresses for Carrie and threw them into the car. Then, thinking about it, he reentered and grabbed a large toy truck for Damien, some scary looking guys with swords, couple of realistic submachine guns. The kid would think it was Christmas.

It wasn't much of a street, but hey, he wasn't complaining. It was all his. Couple more shops – bulk grains and canned goods that he piled in the trunk, a whole passel of what looked like good food stamps in the cash register.

Eighteen minutes. That was enough. He got back into the car, rolling back down Silver, turned onto Palou. Hadn't seen a living soul, which is what he'd told Carrie would happen. Curfew, he told her. People hang inside. Scared of getting shot at, which he wasn't.

But she worried. That was her. Let her. She'd be glad enough to see it when he got it all home.

He knew better, how it worked. You did things when you had to or when it was easy. And tonight was easy.

Wes Farrell had vague memories of no sleep.

If he recalled correctly, and he thought he did, Susan – Moses McGuire's wife – wasn't enthralled with the idea of her husband bringing home from his bar a drunk guy she didn't know to spend the night on their couch.

The baby woke up at least three times, although that assumed that she'd been asleep to wake up, and you couldn't have proved it by Wes. He had kept hearing noises all night, one or both of them shuffling around, opening the refrigerator, arguing – 'Would you please bring her in here? I'm not walking around in my nightgown with your friend out there on the couch.' To say nothing of the baby's cries.

As rosy-fingered dawn had lightened the sky, a bleary-eyed Moses McGuire had come into the room and dropped Wes's keys on the floor by the side of the couch. Subtle.

Lydia – Wes's ex-wife – had wanted the dog for companionship because Wes spent so much time away from the house, in the courtroom, and once the kids were gone she did not want to be all alone in the big house. A dog would make her feel safer, too.

But, during the divorce negotiations, Lydia had decided she didn't want the dog anymore. Well, Wes didn't want the boxer either. He'd never wanted it in the first place. It was always Lydia 's dog – Bartholomew D. (for 'Dog') Farrell, Bart for short. Bart, the sixty-five pound dog-doo machine.

And Lydia had said, 'Okay, then he's going to the pound.' It amazed him how Lydia could cut things like that. Had she always been able to? He just didn't know anymore, maybe had never known.

Wes couldn't let that happen. Too many other things had fallen apart in the short years after his youngest – Michelle – had moved out. For some reason he found himself incapable of allowing Bart to go to the pound.

This particular morning he figured that Bart would be pissed off at him. After all, he had been gone close to eighteen hours. He turned the key and there was Bart, whining.

'Hey, guy. Sorry.' He gave him a scratch between the ears. The dog, tail between his legs, leaned into him for a few seconds, then led him to the kitchen. Wes had to be proud of him – Bart had pulled yesterday's Chronicle onto the floor from the table and used it properly. But Wes could tell he was embarrassed.

He really wasn't in the mood to take Bart for his walk in the trolley tracks that ran down 19th Avenue, but he felt it was his duty. His care for Bart was somehow his psychic life raft – his connection to the person he'd been when there had still been a home, kids, wife, a job – responsibilities that had sustained him and given him some day-to-day meaning. Now there was just Bart, and Wes knew he was just a dumb dog, but he wasn't really ready to give up on taking care of him.

Not that he was especially good at it – as the past hours had proved. But he hadn't been particularly successful at the earlier efforts with his family either.

Bart, turned loose, ran ahead, found a likely spot, took care of business. Shivering, still in his shorts and T-shirt, Wes walked on the black asphalt path along the tracks.

There had been feeble sunlight while he was driving back from where he had parked near the Shamrock last night, but as the earth turned the sun had hidden itself behind a lowering cloud cover. Now no one else was out. There were no shadows because there was no sun. No wind. The place, the normally humming thoroughfare – the whole city, come to think of it – seemed unnaturally, eerily silent. Wes stopped, listening. Bart reappeared from somewhere and sat beside him.

Turning, he caught a flutter of white in the corner of his eye and left the path and went over to it. He tore the makeshift wanted poster down from where it had been tacked to a telephone pole.

Maybe Kevin hadn't intentionally blown him off, after all. Maybe he hadn't had a choice. He stared at the poster – that was Kevin, all right. The boy was in some deep shit.

Back in his apartment, Wes took a hot shower, put on a pair of heavy flannel pajamas and – congratulating himself for his self-control – drank down two large glasses of tabasco-spiked Clamato juice without any vodka. Then poured himself a third.

He was in what he referred to as his living salon, waiting for Morpheus to call him, drinking his Clamato juice, absently petting Bart behind the ears, across his neck. He hated to admit it, but the damn dog gave him a great deal of comfort.

Part of him didn't really want to hear from Kevin. Probably the boy had just been out tying one on, got confused, then figured out what he was going to do all by himself. That was probably it.

But, as of late last night, he was still at large. What if he was not only in trouble but really did need him? Wes looked again at the poster he had brought up with him – there wasn't any doubt Kevin was in big trouble. The only question was whether or not he deserved to be. Wes was reserving judgment, but the fact remained that Kevin's call yesterday wasn't just some youthful confusion, some drunken delusion. The poster was real enough, scary enough. And the young man clearly was under the impression that he might need his services, that Wes might be able to help him…

Well, now…

Wes drank some juice and thought that if that were the case it was a whole different can of worms, wasn't it? Because the little whispering voice inside him had been nagging for weeks now – since the semester had ended in June – that he didn't care all that much about getting a doctorate in history. That had mostly been something to fill up the time while he tried to chart a new direction after his wife's, Lydia 's, departure and his best friend's, Mark Dooher's, betrayal.

Wes and Lydia had been sweethearts when they'd been young, then partners-going-on-strangers through the child-rearing years. And then, after Michelle had moved out, the silences in the big house had lengthened and deepened into trenches that neither of them could easily have crossed even if they had wanted to. And it turned out that they hadn't.

He had been a lawyer for so long, going to court, hanging around the Hall of Justice, occasionally chasing the ambulance, while she had been a mom, a PTA person, then a real-estate broker who had started her own company. In the end there wasn't anything much to talk about. He had put on twenty pounds, she had lost almost thirty. She saw her life as beginning a new phase – exciting, challenging, filled with freedom. And Wes…?