During that time, she became pregnant.

I waited. I had finished my wine, but when Jimmy tried to refill my glass I covered it with my hand. I felt light-headed, but it was nothing to do with the wine.

“Pregnant?” I said.

“That’s right.” He lifted the wine bottle. “You mind if I do? It makes all this easier. I’ve been waiting a long time to get rid of it.”

He filled the glass halfway.

“She had something, that Caroline Carr,” said Jimmy. “Even I could see that.”

“Even you?” Despite myself, I smiled.

“She wasn’t to my taste,” he said, smiling back. “I hope I don’t need to say any more than that.”

I nodded.

“That wasn’t all of it, though. Your father was a good-looking man. There were a lot of women out there who’d have been happy to ease him of some of his burdens, no strings attached. He wouldn’t have been obliged to buy them more than a drink. Instead, here he was finding a place for this woman and lying to his wife about where he was going so that he could help her move.”

“You think he was infatuated with her?”

“That’s what I believed at the start. She was younger than he was, though not by much and, like I said, she had a certain allure. I think it R a. I think was tied up with her size, and the impression of fragility that she gave, even if it was deceptive. So, yeah, sure, I thought it was an infatuation, and maybe it was, at the start. But later, Will told me the rest of it, or as much of it as he wanted to tell me. That was when I started to understand, and that’s when I started to worry.”

His brow furrowed, and I could tell that, even now, decades later, he struggled with this part of the story.

“We were in Cal ’s on the night Will told me that Caroline Carr was convinced she was being hunted. I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. Then I started to wonder if the girl had spun him some kind of line of bullshit. You know, damsel in distress, bad men on the horizon: shitty boyfriend, maybe, or psycho ex-husband.

“But that wasn’t it. She was convinced that whoever, whatever, was hunting her wasn’t human. She talked about two people, a man and a woman. She told your father that they’d started hunting her years before. She’d been running from them ever since.”

“And my father believed her?”

Jimmy laughed. “Are you kidding me? He might have been a sentimentalist, but he wasn’t a fool. He thought she was a wacko. He figured he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had visions of her stalking him, arriving at his house decked out in garlic and crucifixes. Your old man might have gone off the rails a little, but he was still capable of driving the train. So, no, he didn’t believe her, and I think he started trying to disentangle himself from the whole mess. I guess he also realized that he ought to be with his wife, that leaving her wouldn’t solve any of his problems but would just give him a whole new set of them to deal with.

“Then Caroline told him she was pregnant, and his world collapsed around him. They had a long talk on the evening of her visit to the clinic to get checked out. She never even mentioned abortion, and your father, to his credit, never raised it either. It wasn’t just because he was Catholic. I think he still recalled that little girl buried under the pile of coats, and his wife’s miscarriages. Even if it meant the end of his marriage, and a life of debt, he wasn’t going to suggest that the pregnancy should be terminated. And Caroline, you know, she was really calm about the whole thing. Not happy, exactly, but calm, as if the pregnancy was a minor medical procedure or something, a thing that was worrying but necessary.

“Your father, well, he was kind of shocked. He needed some air, so he left her and went to take a walk. He decided, after thirty minutes of his own company, that he wanted to talk to someone, so he stopped at a pay phone across from her apartment and started to call me.

“And that was when he saw them.”

They were standing in a doorway close by a convenience store, hand in hand: a man and a woman, both in their early thirties. The woman had mousy hair that brushed her shoulders, and she wore no makeup. She was slim, and dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt that clung to her legs before flaring slightly at her shins. A matching black jacket hung open over a white blouse that was buttoned to the neck. The man wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. His hair was short at the back and long in front, parted on the left and hanging greasily over one eye. Both of them were staring up at the window of Caroline Carr’s apart R asquo;s apment.

Strangely, it was their very stillness that drew Will’s attention to them. They were like pieces of statuary that had been positioned in the shadows, a temporary art installation on a busy street. Their appearance reminded him of those sects in Pennsylvania, the ones who frowned upon buttons as signs of vanity. In their utter focus on the windows of the apartment, he saw a fanaticism that bordered on the religious.

And then, as Will watched them, they began to move. They crossed the street, the man reaching beneath his jacket as he went, and Will saw the gun appear in his hand.

He ran. He had his own.38 with him, and he drew it. The couple was halfway across the street when something in the manner of the stranger’s approach drew the man’s attention. He registered the approaching threat, and turned to face it. The woman continued moving, her attention fixed only on the apartment building before her and the girl who was hiding within, but the man stared straight at Parker, and the policeman felt a slow tightening in his gut, as though someone had just pumped cold water into his system and it was responding with the urge to void itself. Even at this distance, he could tell that the man’s eyes were not right. They were at once too dark, like twin voids in the pallor of the gunman’s face, and yet too small, chips of black glass in a borrowed skin pulled too tightly over a larger skull.

Then the woman looked around, only now becoming aware that her partner was no longer beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, and Parker saw the panic on her face.

The truck hit the gunman hard from behind, briefly pitching him forward and upward, his feet leaving the ground before he was dragged beneath the front wheels as the driver braked, his body disintegrating beneath the massive weight of the truck, his life ending in a smear of red and black. The force of the impact knocked him out of his shoes. They lay nearby, one upside down, the other on its side. A tendril of blood seeped out toward the shoes from the broken form under the truck, as though the body were trying to reconstitute itself, to build itself once again from the feet up. Somebody screamed.

By the time Will reached the body, the woman had disappeared. He glanced under the truck. The man’s head was gone, crushed by the left-front wheel of the truck. Will showed his shield, and told an ashen-faced man standing nearby to call in the accident. The driver climbed down from his cab and tried to grab hold of Will, but he slipped by him and was only barely aware of the driver falling to the ground behind him. He ran to Caroline’s building, but the front door was still locked. He inserted the key and opened the door by touch, his attention fixed on the street, not the keyhole. As the key turned he slipped inside and closed the door hard behind him. When he got to the apartment, he stood to one side, breathing hard, and knocked once.

“Caroline?” he called.

There was no reply for a moment, then, softly, “Yes.”

“You okay, honey?”

“I think so.”

“Open up.”

His eyes searched the shadows. He thought that he could sm R a he couldell a strange perfume on the air. It was sharp and metallic. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the smell of the dead man’s blood. He looked down and saw that it was on his shoes.