A moment later, she came hurrying in for the mop. I grabbed it at the same instant she did, and with my other hand I pointed to the stairs to the third floor, Mary Cather-ine’s apartment.

“Out you go, Mary,” I said. “Whatever needs doing here, I’m all over it. You go have fun with somebody who’s old enough to vote. That’s an order.”

“Mike, you just got in, you need to relax a bit,” she said. “I can stay for a few more minutes.”

She pulled at the mop, but I held on to it. In the tug of war that followed, the water-filled pail went over with a splash, flooding across the hardwood.

I don’t know which of us started giggling first, but after a second, we were both full-out belly laughing.

“The floor needed a mop anyway,” I finally said. “Now for the last time, I’m giving you a police order to remove yourself from these premises. I have handcuffs, and I’ll use them on you.”

Mary Catherine stopped laughing abruptly. She let go of the mop and turned away hastily, like she’d done when we’d brushed against each other in the kitchen. This time, there was no doubt that she was blushing.

“I didn’t mean… that,” I said warily. “I…”

“It’s been a long day, Mike. There’ll be another tomorrow, so let’s both get some rest.” With her face still averted, she started to leave, pausing to tap a sheaf of paper on the coffee table. “This’ll be useful to you. Good night.”

I was setting a personal-best record for the number of times I’d put my foot in my mouth with women in one day, I thought. I decided to blame it on exhaustion. Or maybe I was coming down with the flu, too.

I looked at the papers she’d left me – a detailed computer printout, a medical chart of my quarantined family. Who needed which medicine, how much of it, and when. I shook my head in disbelief. This woman could do the impossible.

I should have asked her where the psycho killer was.

Chapter 22

The Teacher scrubbed his wet hair with a towel as he came out of the bathroom in his apartment. He stopped when he heard a strange sound outside the bedroom window. He hooked a finger to the drawn shade and peeked out.

Down on West 38th, a buggy driver was walking a beaten-down-looking gray horse into the tenement-turned-stable next door. His other neighbors included a greasy taxi garage and a check-cashing place with a steel grille over the windows and a perpetual litter of broken glass on the sidewalk out front.

He chuckled to himself. The corner of 38th and Eleventh Avenue was exceedingly crappy and run-down, even for Hell’s Kitchen. Maybe he was crazy, but he loved it anyway. At least it was authentic.

Still amped to the gills from the day’s adrenaline rush, he lay down on the weight bench beside his bed. The bar held two hundred-and-eighty pounders. He lifted it easily off its brackets, lowered it to touch his chest, and raised it back up until his elbows locked at full extension. He did this ten times with an exquisite slowness that burned through his throbbing muscles and brought tears to his eyes.

Much better, he thought, sitting up. What a day. What a freaking day.

He wetted a rag, put it on his forehead, and lay back on the bench. He had downtime now – time for everybody to catch up, like putting on the ol’ boob tube while waiting for mom and pop to get home from work.

The workout had helped to burn off some of his wired energy, and the cool damp cloth was soothing. He let his eyes shut. A little nap before dinner would be sweet. He’d wake up fresh and ready for the next phase.

But just as he was drifting off, a burst of loud laughter and the heavy, thumping bass of rap music made him sit up again. Angrily, he strode across the room and twitched the window shade aside. In the brightly lit, curtainless window of a loft across the street, a little Asian guy was taking pictures of two tall, anorexic white girls in long gowns. The girls started dancing like jackasses to the brainless noise of 50 Cent, bragging that he was a P-I-M-P.

What the hell? Last time he’d noticed, that building was a warehouse where some legless fat guy named Manny stored hot dog carts. Now it was some kind of fashion studio bullshit? There went the goddamn neighborhood.

In Iraq One, he’d been in a marine recon unit that had been given an experimental bazooka-like weapon called a SMAW. The SMAW had been outfitted with a new explosive thermobaric round. Leaking a fine mist of gas in the air microseconds before ignition, a thermobaric was capable not only of vaporizing masonry structures, but of actually igniting the oxygen within its blast zone.

He’d have given anything he had for one of those right now. His trigger finger actually tingled as he remembered the feeling of touching off one of those megarounds. His imagination kicked in, substituting the building across the street for the ones he’d destroyed back then, throwing a fireball and shock wave that would have torn off the top several floors.

He had plenty of other weapons on hand, though – half a dozen pistols, a Mac-9, a sawed-off tactical shotgun, a Colt AR-15 with an M203 grenade launcher, a selection of silencers. Behind them, appropriate cardboard ammunition boxes were stacked and arrayed in orderly little rows. A half-dozen each of fragmentation, smoke, and flashbang grenades sat in a Crate and Barrel carton beneath his worktable like an oversized container of lethal eggs.

But no. Trying to kill every annoying fool would be like pissing into a live volcano. He had to stick to the Plan and kill the ones who counted.

He stalked into the room he’d outfitted as an office, sat in a Pottery Barn retro office chair, and clicked on a green-shaded banker’s desk lamp. Every inch of the wall above the desk was covered. There were subway and street maps, photos of building lobbies and subway stations, and a framed poster of Tom Cruise from Top Gun in the center. More portraits of Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, and Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver were taped over the credits. The desk itself was covered with worn marble notebooks, a laptop, and a police scanner connected to a tape recorder. Alongside it was a heavy worktable that looked like one of those bust pictures cops took after a raid.

His telephone and answering machine sat on top of it. Lately, he’d hardly been bothering to check his messages. But when he glanced at the machine, he blinked in astonishment. Thirty-six messages? That couldn’t be right.

Then he remembered where he was supposed to have been earlier that morning. Ah, yes, it made sense now. That appointment had seemed so infinitely important when he’d first made it. But since he’d had his Epiphany, he couldn’t have cared less about it.

That thought improved his mood. Smiling, he deleted the messages without listening to them and stepped back into his bedroom. He popped a relaxation CD into the player beside the weight bench and hit Play.

The sound of waves washing gently against the shore and the soft caw of seagulls drowned out the rap from across the street. He stretched out on the bench again, jerked up the crushing weight, and lowered it toward his chest.