"Let's find out." The lieutenant pressed the intercom so his voice would be heard in the next room. "Janos? Book the old bastard. And take your time. We got all night to dick around with him."

Jack Coffey smiled, for the attorney's expression of shock was worth the threat to his pension. It was slowly dawning on the old man that his incarceration was going to be dragged out a bit longer than he had previously supposed. He might be looking forward to lockup time in the company of prisoners with satanic delusions and head lice that were all too real.

"It was during a field trip to the downstairs laundry room that Riker made his first confession. While waiting for the washing machine to finish the spin cycle, he sat beside her on a bench by the window, his face bathed in late afternoon light, eyes in soft focus, looking inward.

"Insanity goes with the job," he said. "All the people in this town are smashed in together, stacked up like cordwood. I'm surprised they don't go nuts more often. And the things they do to each other, Jo. It's a horror show every night. And here's the scary part. Sometimes police go nuts, too. I'll never be a cop again."

"Because of what happened in the parking garage? And that day with the van?"

"Yeah, I froze. And those weren't the only times."

She waited out the silence as he loaded the wash into the dryer. When he sat down again, he would not look at her. He spoke of all the details to his waking nightmare. While the dryer ran round and round, she sat beside him, holding his hand and listening to the symptoms of his trauma, the paralysis of loud noises, the suffocation and panic that followed. It was a replay of his own death, replete with the weight of a psychotic teenager sitting upon his chest, making it impossible to breathe. Worst was the feeling of shame.

"That's what the burnouts do," he said. "They freeze up when guns go off. And then some other cop gets shot because they can't – " He lowered his eyes. "Every day, I wake up scared."

"And this is what you've been living with," she said, "every day for all these months." Johanna knew he was still holding back. The worst thing in his mind was still locked away from her. But this was a promising beginning, and she had come to share Mallory's concern for a quick solution – else she might lose him.

They sat there for a quiet hour. Her hand rested on his knee to anchor him to the solid world of the laundry room. His hand covered hers, holding on to save himself, holding on to his sanity by touch and force of will. The laundry in the dryer went round and round. The sun went down.

The elderly lawyer was pressed up against the wall of the lockup.

He was in fear of his new cellmate, a man much smaller than himself. Mallory sat at a table a few feet away and watched the performance of the perp who shared the lawyer's narrow cage. Another precinct had contributed the Central Park flasher, a bona fide pervert reportedly too shy to talk. The sex offender was wearing nothing underneath his overcoat, and now he exposed himself to the lawyer. According to the rap sheet, the man's gender preference ran to heterosexual liaisons, but a few dollars had inspired him to blow the old man a wet kiss.

"Did you see that? He spit on me," said the attorney.

"He must like you," said Mallory, though that little gesture would not get the flasher's charges dropped, and she did not intend to pay any more cash for anything less than skin contact.

They were folding laundry at the kitchen table when Johanna said, "You look ten years younger. Mrs. Ortega said that would happen."

Riker smiled against his will, liking this compliment from her. He was highly suggestible now, the lingering effect of her drugs. He took her orders and put his back into the work when they moved on to the gross problem of the tub and the shower stall. There he wiped away months of lethargy and sorrow with a sponge. The broken window glass had been replaced by a glazier, and Jo had swept the floor herself so he would not cut his shoeless feet. Next, she planned to teach him how to turn on a vacuum cleaner. By day's end, Riker would be tired and ready for a long and natural sleep, but she had yet to break down the rest of his walls.

Johanna resorted to a touch of shock therapy. "Your bouts of paralysis are a form of panic disorder."

He turned to her with a look that said, No, anything but that.

"Sorry," she said. "That sounds like a woman's affliction, doesn't it?" Ah, men – bigots every one of then. "When you hear the bang of a gun, you're always waiting for the next bullet, and the – "

He was shaking his head, not wanting to discuss this anymore.

Well, too bad, Riker.

"Last night, you opened the door on a dark room, you heard all four bullets – and you shut down. You were dead – again. That's what your mind told you, but the body rebelled. It demanded it. Your lungs filled up and you came back. This time, your brain was slow to catch up with what the body already knew. How much do you remember about last night?"

More head shaking. Riker did not want to remember. He opened the medicine cabinet and carefully examined a bottle of aspirin with an expiration date from the previous decade. To toss or not to toss? He never noticed that he was standing alone.

Treading softly into the living room, Johanna went to the closet and pulled the small silver pistol from the pocket of her jacket. She had never fired a gun in her life. She held it in both hands, bracing for the shot as she glanced toward the bathroom. Riker turned away from the medicine cabinet, and now he watched her through the open doorway. His jaw had gone slack, then he mouthed the word no. She squeezed the trigger and the bang stunned her as she felt the recoil of the weapon. She would have dropped the gun, but Riker was beside her and taking it from her hand.

"What the hell are you doing?" He pushed the heavy couch to one side and inspected the floorboards. "We got lucky. The upholstery stopped the bullet." He looked down at the gun in his hand. "Well, that figures – a peashooter. If you'd fired my gun, you could've taken out two tenants on two different floors."

"Riker, you didn't freeze up that time."

He looked down at the wonder of his body in motion. "So I'm cured?" "No. I'm good, but I don't do miracles. If it was that easy, I would've dragged you to a firing range. The drugs in your system dulled the panic response. And I should probably give some credit to the Reaper. He gave you what you've been waiting for since the day you left the hospital. He took the pressure off, the pressure that was killing you. Even without the drugs, you might've bypassed the paralysis this time. But a few visits to the firing range could be…"

She could tell that Riker was not listening to her anymore. His concentration was somewhere else as he stared at the silver gun in his hand.

"You know," he said, "most people think a small-caliber pistol is next to useless. But this little twenty-two of yours is a Mafia favorite. It's an executioner's gun. The bullet shatters and it stays in the body. No messy holes in the walls to mark a crime scene. But, Jo, if you want to kill a man with this, first you have to tie his hands. Then you force him to his knees, put the gun to the back of his head and squeeze the trigger." He glanced at the new hole in his couch. "That was the first time you ever fired a gun, wasn't it? Now, let's say your guy is on the loose and coming at you. If you can't place the shot in his head – and you can't – then you might just piss him off. But I'm betting you won't even get off one round."

He removed the clip from her pistol, then turned his back on her. He walked to the closet and placed the clip and the gun in the separate pockets of her jacket. "And it wasn't the Reaper who fired those blanks. He's a slasher, not a shooter. It was the same psycho kid who ambushed me six months ago." He gathered up a stack of clean sheets and walked off down the hall to make up his bed.