"The guy who gave you the wig and the cane – the young one – where is he?"

"Oh, I really couldn't tell you. Sorry," he said, though his grinning face put a lie to that. "Well, I expect you'll want to arrest me now. Obstruction of justice or some such thing? As if the city doesn't have enough lawsuits for false arrests." He put out his hands awaiting the manacles, entirely too gleeful.

Mallory regarded him as she would a bag of snakes and cockroaches, for she suspected him of being a lawyer. Near his feet was the cigar he had dropped, but littering was only worth a ticket. She stepped closer to him and feigned a swoon, eyes closing. He reached out to break her fall, grabbing her by both arms.

"That's assault!" Her voice was loud. Heads turned all around the hall. "You just assaulted a cop!"

The old man's eyes were bulging, and he lacked the presence of mind to take his hands off her shoulders. He was staring at all the faces turning his way. People were slowing down, then stopping to watch, and two young policemen were running toward him.

Johanna Apollo opened the door to find Mrs. Ortega standing in the hall, clutching a large plastic bag with a pharmacy logo. The cleaning woman wordlessly moved into the room and dumped out the medical supplies on the coffee table. Then, breathless from running all the way, she hurried down the short hall to the bedroom. Johanna followed, intending to approach this wiry little person with greater caution than she had taken with Riker's other protectors.

In the bedroom, Mrs. Ortega was fretting over the sleeping man, tucking the blanket under his chin and smoothing stray hairs from his brow. Such simple services – and done so awkwardly. Clearly, acts of tenderness were outside the character of this rough-spoken New Yorker. The cleaning woman exuded anxiety, and she no longer had her mask of bravado to disguise the fact that she was coming undone.

"He's in deep trouble." Mrs. Ortega continued to fuss with the blanket, picking off tiny wadded balls of wool as she spoke her piece. "All the drugs in the world ain't gonna help him."

"I know," said Johanna, and not in any condescending manner. "But the prescriptions always make the friends and family feel better."

"Gotcha." Mrs. Ortega nodded as one conspirator to another, but her sorry eyes remained concentrated on Riker. "I should've got to him sooner. I seen this kind of thing before." The cleaning woman waved one hand in the air to say that she had borne witness to the whole sorry range of humanity. "Riker's got nothin' and nobody. Holes up like a hermit since he got shot. I mean the time he was really shot, real bullets. Now look at him. I seen it before – maybe not this bad. Say one of my customers loses his job. Well, life gets a little crazy, sure, but that guy's still got his nice clean home – real clean." She pressed one hand to her bosom and said with great pride, " I do windows." She turned back to the man on the bed. "Most people in trouble, they still got friends, family – something normal. You know what I'm sayin'?"

"I know," said Johanna.

"Riker's home was in Brooklyn." Mrs. Ortega pulled a rag from an apron pocket. "He can't go back." She absently polished an uncluttered corner of the small table by the bed, the rag running round and round as she spoke. "So how does this happen – gettin' ambushed again?" She wagged one finger at Johanna. "I'll tell you how. He cut off his friends, lost his job. He's off his game. If he'd gotten one piece of his life together just a day sooner, nobody could've taken him down this way. Not Riker. No, ma'am. If I'd only got to him sooner." She sat down at the edge of the bed, slowly folding her lean frame, as if deflating, losing air and will, and her voice was smaller when she said, "I could've fixed him."

"How?"

Mrs. Ortega looked up, suspecting derision. Instead she found compassion in Johanna's eyes and also the encouragement to keep going, and so she continued. "It's like everybody's life sits on three legs. You got your home – that's a big one. And then there's work, then friends. Well, say one thing goes wrong, maybe two – you can still stand on one leg, right? But what's Riker got?" Mrs. Ortega's eyes were unfocused, looking inside where the guilt was stored. "No wonder he fell down. I should've got to him sooner."

"He's still fixable." Johanna pulled a wad of money from the back pocket of her jeans. "I'd like to rent your cart of supplies for the rest of the day."

"Naw." The woman waved away the proffered money. "This is my day off. That's why I stopped by to finish up with my charity case here." The old New Yorker attitude was creeping back into Mrs. Ortega's voice, and her face showed the more normal state of contempt as she threw up her hands. "You think this slob would ever pay for a cleaning woman? Never. So I'll stay and finish the job – for free."

"I've got a better idea," said Johanna. "You'll like it." And Mrs. Ortega did like the plan. She loved it. It reeked of the pop-psychology cures found in her self-help books and television programs. For Johanna's part, it was merely an entree, a means of walking around inside Riker's head.

The elderly lawyer stood in the company of policemen and a hundred other people.

He was not the focus of everyone's attention, for the most dedicated travelers, obviously out-of-towners, were bent on catching trains of overground rail and underground subway, and selectively blind to the show.

But a hardcore New York crowd was assembling in a wide circle, maintaining the distance of an experienced audience for live theater.

The old man waited with great trepidation as the two young officers spoke with the pretty blond police who had accused him of assault. Detective Mallory smiled as she turned his way, and he took this as a good sign that their recent misunderstanding would be presently and pleasantly resolved.

She looked down at one of her black running shoes, and her face was somewhat petulant when she said, "You scuffed it. Do you have a handkerchief?"

"Ah, yes." What a small price to pay for freedom, a very small price indeed. With a courtly bow, the old man pulled a folded square of mono-grammed Irish linen from his pocket and handed it to her. She held it for a moment, her eyes meeting his with a cold stare. When she opened the handkerchief, a twenty-dollar bill appeared in the fold of material. He stared at it aghast. There was no way it could have -

"A bribe?" The young woman held up the handkerchief and the mysterious twenty-dollar bill. She handed the money to one of the men in uniform. "The bill is evidence. Bag it."

"That's not my twenty," said the incredulous lawyer. "I can prove it." He opened his wallet. "See? I don't have anything smaller than a fifty."

"So now you're trying to bribe all of us?" She turned to the officers. "That's probable cause for a search. Pat him down for weapons."

The brief foray into his clothing turned up the odd contents of his pockets and what was hidden under his folded coat. A red wig, a white cane and dark glasses were confiscated as the audience of civilians stepped closer. This show kept getting better and better.

The detective had a very unnerving smile. "This better be a good story. What are you up to, old man?"

It was the tapping of the blind man's cane that woke Riker. No, not that. Jo was lightly rapping the floor with her soles, a sit-down tap dance, an old soft shoe to the rhythm of Wake up, wake up. He opened his eyes a bit wider when he saw the long tube that began with a needle in his arm and led up to a bag of fluid hanging from the bedpost.

"That's a Valium drip," she said.

Valium? How humiliating – the drug of choice for old ladies and other sissies. A cluster of pharmacy bottles on his nightstand completed the image of an invalid's sickroom. He looked down at his chest, where four new bullet holes should be, and saw that his clothes had been changed. He wore a black T-shirt. His pants were also black, part of a suit that he seldom wore, and that accounted for the lack of stains and cigarette burns in the material. And his feet were bare. He was all laid out like a corpse at his own wake.