Strangers

In his apartment, he went directly to the walkin closet in the bedroom and removed the false partition at the rear of it. He pulled two bags from the secret, threefootdeep storage space and took them into the dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights. He piled the bags beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.

He got a bottle of Becks from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned to the living room. He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window, looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snowcovered ground and made strange shadows in the barelimbed trees.

He was stalling, and he knew it. Finally he switched on the reading lamp beside the chair. He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.

Jewels. Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond chokers. A diamond and emerald bracelet. Three diamond and sapphire bracelets. Rings, broaches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.

These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off singlehandedly six weeks ago. It should have been a twoman job, but with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it himself, and it had gone smoothly.

The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that heist. When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world, payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny. Until the age of twentynine, he had given much to society, to his country, but as a reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator's prison, where he had been left to rot. And Jenny . . . He could not bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at last, he had escaped and come home. Now, he no longer gave to society but took from it, and with intense pleasure. His greatest satisfaction was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with ituntil the jewelry heist six weeks ago. At the end of that operation, he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement scared him. It was, after all, what he lived for.

Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap, held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a feeling of accomplishment and revenge.

He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following the burglary. But he was reluctant to part with it until he had squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.

Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into the sack from which he had taken them.

The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at the fratellanza warehouse five days ago. They had been able to open only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000-more than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier's checks and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss accounts. However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.

He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held them, turned them over in his hands. He brought them to his face and smelled them. That singular scent of money was usually exciting in itselfbut not this time. But he did not feel triumphant, clever, lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried through society's maze exactly as they were taught. He just felt empty.

If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the straight world. But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business. It was his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on to another job sooner than he should have. Usually he pulled off one job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between his most recent operations.

All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent jobs because the money was no longer important to him. He had set aside enough to support himself in style for as long as he lived and to take care of Jenny even if she endured a normal lifespan in her coma, which was unlikely. Perhaps, all along, the most important thing about his work had not been the rebellion and defiance of it, as he had thought; perhaps, instead, he had done it all just for the money, and the rest of it had been merely cheap rationalization and selfdelusion.

But he could not believe that. He knew what he had felt, and he knew how much he missed those feelings now.

Something was happening to him, an inner shifting, a seachange. He felt empty, adrift, without purpose. He dared not lose his love of larceny. It was the only reason he had for living.

He put the money back into the bag. He turned out the light and sat in the darkness, sipping Beck's and staring down at Central Park.

In addition to his recent inability to find joy in his work, he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare more intense than any dream he had ever known. It had begun six weeks ago, before the jewelry store job, and he'd had it eight or ten times since. In the dream, he was fleeing from a man in a motorcycle helmet with a darkly tinted visor. At least he thought it was a motorcycle helmet, although he could not see many details of it or anything else of the man who wore it. The faceless stranger pursued him on foot through unknown rooms and along amorphous corridors and, most vividly, along a deserted highway that cut through an empty moonwashed landscape. On every occasion, Jack's panic built like steam pressure in a boiler, until it exploded and blew him awake.

The obvious interpretation was that the dream was a warning, that the man in the helmet was a cop, that Jack was going to get caught. But that was not the way the nightmare felt. In the dream, he never had the impression that the guy in the helmet was a cop. Something else.

He hoped to God he would not have the dream tonight. The day had been bad enough without that midnight terror.

He got another beer, returned to the chair by the window, and sat down in the darkness once more.

It was December 8, and Jack Twistformer officer in the elite United States Army Rangers, former POW in an undeclared war, a man who had helped save the lives of over a thousand Indians in Central America, a man who functioned under a burden of grief that might have broken some people, a daring thief whose reservoir of courage had always been bottomlesswondered if he had run out of the simple courage to go on living. If he could not regain the sense of purpose he had found in larceny, he needed to find a new purpose. Desperately.

7.

Elko County, Nevada

Ernie Block broke all the speed limits on the drive back from Elko to the Tranquility Motel.

The last time he had driven so fast and recklessly had been on a gloomy Monday morning during his hitch with Marine Intelligence in Vietnam. He had been behind the wheel of a Jeep, passing through what should have been friendly territory, and had unexpectedly come under enemy fire. The incoming shells had spewed up geysers of dirt and chunks of macadam only feet away from his front and rear bumpers. By the time he had broken out of the fire zone, he had escaped more than twenty nearmisses, had been hit by three small but painfully jagged pieces of mortar, had been rendered temporarily deaf from the thunderous explosions, and had found himself struggling to control a Jeep that was running on its wheel rims with four flat tires. Having survived, he figured he had known fear as profound as it could ever be.

But coming back from Elko, his fear was building toward a new peak. Nightfall was approaching. He had driven to the Elko freight office in the Dodge van to take delivery of a shipment of lighting fixtures for the motel. He had set out shortly after noon, leaving Faye in charge of the front desk, giving himself plenty of time to make the roundtrip before twilight. But he had a flat tire and lost time changing it. Then, once he reached Elko, he wasted almost an hour having the tire repaired because he had not wanted to start home without a spare. With one thing or another, he had left Elko almost two hours later than expected, and the sun had westered to the far edge of the Great Basin.

He kept the accelerator most of the way to the floor, whipping around other traffic on the superhighway. He did not think he would be able to finish the drive home if he had to do it in full darkness. In the morning they would find him behind the wheel of the van, still parked along the roadside, stark raving mad from having spent long hours in horrified contemplation of the perfectly black landscape.

In the two and a half weeks since Thanksgiving, he had continued to conceal his irrational fear of darkness from Faye. After she returned from her visit to Wisconsin, Ernie found it more difficult to sleep without a lamp burning, having indulged himself with a night light while she was gone. Every morning he used Murine to clear his bloodshot eyes. Fortunately, she had not suggested going into Elko at night for a movie, so Ernie had not been required to make excuses. A few times, after sunset, he'd had to go from the office to the Tranquility Grille next door, and even though the walk was welllighted by the motel's outdoor lamps and signs, he had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fragility, vulnerability. But he had kept his secret.

All his life, in the Marine Corps and out of it, to the best of his ability, Ernie Block had done what was required of him, all that could be expected. And now, by God, he was not going to fail his own wife.

Behind the wheel of the Dodge van, racing westward toward the Tranquility Motel under a smeary orangepurple sky, Ernie Block wondered if his problem was premature senility, Alzheimer's disease. Even though he was only fiftytwo, it almost had to be something like Alzheimer's. Although it frightened him, at least he could understand it.

Understand it, yes, but he could not accept it. Faye depended on him. He could not become a mental invalid, a burden on her. The men in the Block family never let their womenfolk down. Never. Unthinkable.

The highway rounded a small hillock, and a mile ahead, north of the Interstate, lay the motel, the only building in that vast panorama. Its blue and green neon sign was already switched on, shining fiercely bright against the twilight sky. He'd never seen a more welcome sight.

Complete darkness was still ten minutes away, and he decided it was foolish to risk being stopped by a cop when he was this close to sanctuary. He eased up on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle swiftly dropped: ninety ... eightyfive . . . seventyfive . . . sixty . . .

He was threequarters of a mile from home when a curious thing happened: He glanced southward, away from the road, and his breath caught. He did not know what startled him. Something about the landscape. Something about the way the light and shadow played across those downsloping fields. He was suddenly gripped by the odd idea that a particular piece of grounda halfmile ahead, on the opposite side of the highwaywas of supreme importance in understanding the bizarre changes that had been taking place in him during the past few months.

. . . fifty . . . fortyfive ... forty . . .

He could see nothing to make that piece of land different from the tens of thousands of acres around it. Besides, he had seen it countless times before and had been unimpressed by it. Nevertheless, in the slope of the terrain, in the gently folded contours of the earth, in the bisecting wound of an arroyo, in the configuration of sagebrush and grass, and in the scattered gnarled outcroppings of rock, something seemed to cry out for investigation.

He felt as if the land itself were saying, "Here, here, here is part of the answer to your problem, part of the explanation for your fear of the night. Here. Here But that was ridiculous.

To his surprise, he found himself pulling to the shoulder of the highway, stopping a quartermile from home, not far from the exit ramp to the county road that led past the motel. He squinted south across the highway, at the place that had mysteriously captured his attention.

He was gripped by the most amazing sense of impending epiphany, an overwhelming feeling that something of monumental importance was about to happen to him. The skin prickled along the back of his neck.

He got out of the van, leaving it idling behind him. In a state of tremulous expectation that he could not understand, he headed toward the far side of the interstate, where he could have a better look at the plot of ground that fascinated him. He traversed two lanes of blacktop, clambered into the twentyfootwide gulley that divided the halves of the interstate, and scrambled up the far slope. He waited for three huge trucks to roar past, then crossed the eastbound lanes in the windy wake of those rigs. His heart was pounding with an inexplicable excitement, and for the moment he had forgotten the advent of night.

He stopped on the far berm, at the crest of the highway's elevated bed, looking south and slightly west. He wore a bulky suede jacket with sheepskin lining, but his brushcut gray hair provided little protection from the chilly wind, which scrubbed its cold knuckles across his skull.

He began to lose the feeling that something of immense importance was about to happen. Instead, he was seized by the even creepier notion that something had already happened to him on that patch of shadowbanded ground out there, something that accounted for his recent fear of the dark. Something he had assiduously banned from his memory.

But that made no sense. If important events had transpired here, they simply would not have slipped his mind. He was not forgetful. And he was not the kind of person who repressed unpleasant memories.

Still, the back of his neck continued to tingle. Out there, not far into those trackless Nevada plains, something had happened to him that he had forgotten but that now pricked him from his subconscious, where it was deeply embedded, much the way a needle, accidentally left in a quilt, might jab and startle a sleeper out of a dream.

With his legs spread wide and his feet planted firmly in the berm, with his blocky head hunched down on his blocky shoulders, Ernie seemed to be challenging the landscape to speak more clearly to him. He strained to resurrect the dead memory of this placeif, indeed, there was onebut the harder he tried to grasp the elusive revelation, the faster it receded from him. Then it was gone altogether.

The thought vu deserted him as completely as the sense of impending epiphany had evaporated before it. The tingle left his scalp and neck. His frantically pounding heart settled slowly into a more normal pace.

Bewildered and somewhat dizzy, he studied the fastfading scene before himthe angled land, the spines and teeth of rock, the brush and grass, the weathered convexities and concavities of the ancient earthand now he could not imagiNe why it had seemed special to him. It was just a portion of the high plains virtually indistinguishable from a thousand other spots from here to Elko or from here to Battle Mountain.

Disoriented by the suddenness of his plunge from the brink of transcendent awareness, he looked back toward the van, which waited on the north side of the interstate. He felt conspicuous and foolish when he thought of the way he had dashed from there to here in the grip of a strange excitement. He hoped Faye had not seen him. If by chance she had been looking out a window in this direction, she could not have missed his performance, for the motel was only a quarter of a mile away, and the flashing emergency blinkers on the truck made it by far the most noticeable thing in the swiftly descending darkness.