ED GORMAN - Yesterday's dreams

ONE

THERE WAS A LITTLE BOY UP here one day, a soft and fertile spring day, and he said to his mother listen to the singing, listen to the singing and she said that's the wind in the trees, honey, that's not singing. But I agreed silently with the little boy. On this slope of hill, when the wind passes through the trees just right, it really does sound like singing, a sweet sad song, and sometimes I imagine that it sings the names of those I come here to see, my wife Susan and my daughters Cindy and Anne.

There was no singing today, not a Chicago hot and Chicago humid August day like this one, August 9.9 to be exact, Anne's twelfth birthday, or would have been if it all hadn't happened, if the three of them hadn't died.

I brought a few garden tools so I could clean everything up around the headstone, and I brought sunflowers, which Anne had always liked especially.

I started out the way I usually do, saying prayers, Hail Marys and Our Fathers, but then just sort of talking to them in my mind, and telling them how it's been going since I took early retirement on my forty-eighth birthday, and how the rest of the family is doing, all the aunts and uncles and cousins who had loved so much.

I stayed a couple of hours, spending the last twenty minutes or so watching a bright red family of cardinals building a nest on a low-slung branch nearby.

After I left, I drove over by Wrigley Field, where Susan lived when I first started dating her back in the early 60s, past the theaters where we used to see the romance movies she liked so much, you know, with Sandra Dee and Troy Donshue and people like that, and the dance hall where we saw a very young Jimi Hendrix, long before anybody had ever heard of him, or before anybody knew what to make of him, either.

Then I stopped in a bar and had a couple of Lites, me having started to lose that old boyish figure of mine, and then I stopped by a video rental store and picked up three episodes of "Maverick," James Garner being just about my favorite actor. I'd seen this particular batch before but I never seem to get tired of them.

I was supposed to eat dinner at my brother's that night but I canceled because he warned me that his wife Liz had invited one of her church friends along so we could meet. Don't get me wrong. Liz is a nice woman. I like her. But her friends don't appeal to me. They're a lot like Liz, big and purposeful and sure of themselves in ways that aren't always attractive. But then I'm probably not being fair to them. I always end up comparing them to Susan and not many women can stand up to that.

Anyway, I canceled dinner saying I had a sore throat and headache. Liz sounded irritated, and as if she didn't believe me -- and she shouldn't have; hell, I was lying -- but she finally forced herself to sound civil and say she hoped I got to feeling better.

So here I was at the microwave when the knock on the door came. I was having the Hungry Man minute steak dinner. When you eat enough of these jobbies, you get to know how to kill the worst of the taste on each particular dinner. For instance, the chicken dinner can be pretty well covered up with a little mustard on the breast, whereas the beans and franks takes a whole lot of ketchup. As yet I haven't figured out what to do with the fish dinner. No matter what you put on it, and I've tried just about everything, it tastes like it came direct from Lake Erie back when they found all those strange sad sea creatures floating dead on it.

The knock.

I transferred the dinner from the microwave to the plate I had waiting on the table and then I went to the front door.

Funny thing was, when I got the inside door opened, I didn't see anybody, just a purple dusk through the dusty screened-in porch.

Then I heard the sniffle.

"I'm real scared, Mr. Flannery."

She was somewhere between six and eight, a raggedy little white girl in scruffy shirt and jeans. She smelled hot and teary. Her mussed blonde hair looked sweaty.

I looked down and said, "What's the matter, honey?"

"People said you was a cop."

"I used to be a cop, honey."

"Somebody kilt my Daddy."

Being a cop is a little like being a doctor. You have to resist panic not only for your sake but the sake of the others.

"Where is he, sweetheart?"

"Down'n the garage. Somebody shot him. Right here." She tapped her thin little chest and started crying again.

"C'mon, honey, we'll go see."

I grabbed the flashlight I keep next to the front door in the little hutch next to the statue of the Virgin Mary Cindy made me when she was in fourth grade. At first I wasn't sure what it was but she was only too eager to tell me. "It's the Blessed Mother, Dad," sounding as if she had just suspected for the very first time that ole Dad might be a dunce. "Oh, yeah, sure," I said. "That's just what I thought it was." I can still see her smile that day, and how she held her arms out to me.

All these years later, I bent down and picked up a different little girl. But this one wasn't smiling. I held her tight as we went out the door, and just as the screen door slammed she started crying hot and hard into my neck.

In the moonlight and the heat, in the smell of hot car oil and dried dog droppings, the alley was a silver gravel path past neat rows of garbage cans and plump brown plastic bags of garbage for the city trucks come Thursday.

"That one?" I'd say, nodding to the girl I was carrying, who was still crying, and she'd just shake her head and say no not that garage.

We ran nearly to the end of the alley to a small beaten garage that could fit maybe one compact, and she just went hysterical on me, sobbing and kicking her hard little shoes against my legs. "He's in there! He's in there!"

I took her back down two garages and set her on moonlit grass still warm from the afternoon and said you stay there honey right there and don't move all right, and then went back to the little garage at the end of the block and got my flashlight going and found her daddy, who was dead all right, indeed.

I never got used to corpses. In detective stories cops always tell jokes around stiffs because according to the writers this is the only way cops can deal with it all. But I never told jokes and neither did the cops I worked with. If you found kids who were dead, you got mad and wanted to kill somebody right back; but if they were adults you got scared because you saw yourself down there. Like an Irish wake, I guess, the person you're really mourning is yourself.

Whoever shot him must've really hated him.

He had a bullet hole in his trachea, in his shoulder, in his chest and in his groin, most likely his balls.

He wore a white shirt that was soaked with pinkish blood, and dark slacks that smelled of where his bowels had let go. In life he'd probably been a decent enough looking blond guy -- dishwater blond, I guess they call it, like his daughter-- working class probably, like most of the people in the neighborhood, cheap little wedding ring on his left little finger and a messy dragon tattoo of red and blue on his inside right forearm at the base of his dirty rolled-up sleeve.

I didn't touch him. I didn't even go into the garage where he was propped up against the back bumper of one of the old Kaisers that that crazy millionaire had manufactured right after World War II.

I went back to the girl and said, "Honey, what's your name?"

She looked up and said, "He's dead, isn't he?"

"Honey, we'll talk about that later. But now I need to know your name and where you live."

"Somebody killed him."

I bent down and touched her cheek. "Honey, what's your name?"

"Sandy."

"What's your last name?"

"Myles."

"What's your Dad's name?"

"David."

"Where do you live?"

She raised a tiny pale arm and pointed. "Over there." She pointed to a house across the alley and two doors down.

"See that house behind us?"

She turned and looked. "Uh-huh."

"I'm going to run in there and call the police and then I'll come right back out. I'll take you in with me if you want to."

"He's dead," she said, and started crying again.

I reached down and scooped her up and carried her up to the house. An old and frightened Polish woman came to the door and opened up only after I told her six different times that I really was Nick Flannery, the ex-cop from down the street, and I really did need to use her phone.

A MALE-FEMALE TEAM of uniforms showed up first. I didn't recognize them and vice-versa. They were very young, probably no more than a year out of the Academy.

They reached the garage before I did. Sandy had started crying so hard that she'd thrown up. I'd stayed with her to get her washed and give her a couple of sips of the strawberry pop the old widow offered her.

I left Sandy inside and went out to the alley and when I got to the garage I saw the female inside with her flashlight and the male standing out on the gravel looking at me.

"You're Mr. Flannery?"

"Right."

"You called in about the murdered man?"

"Yes."

"Dispatcher said the body was in the garage."

"Right. It is."

He gave me a quizzical cop look -- the same kind of look I'd given hundreds of drunks, fakers and lunatics during my own career-- and said, "Maybe you'd like to show us where the body is then."

"It's not in the garage?"

"Not that we can see."

I took my flashlight and walked into the garage. Several old tires hung on the wall, laced up with silver cobwebbing. You could smell rain and sweet rot in the old wood.

The female officer had stacked three crates on top of each other and was exploring an attic-like shelf made from plywood sheeting.

"Nothing," she said. And then sneezed from the dust.

Heavy tires popped gravel outside. Car doors opened and slammed. I heard the young cop say, "Nothing here. No body we can find."

A familiar voice said, "Like we don't have enough to do already."

I went out and let him see me and he was just as surprised as I figured he'd be.

"Hey," he said, "what're you doing here?"

"I called it in."

"The dead guy?"

"Yeah."

"Then where is he?"

"I don't know."

Hodiak and I had started out as rookies together. I spent my nights with my kids and Hodiak, unmarried, spent his at night school. He got his BA, then his Masters in Criminology. He made detective about seven years before I retired. I hadn't seen him in a while, not since his hair had turned white.

"Let's go in and talk to the little girl," I said.

Hodiak spent fifteen minutes with Sandy in the kitchen. By this time, the old woman had fixed her up with more strawberry pop and a small dish of ice cream, at least half of which was white and sticky on her face and pink little hands.

She said that she and her Daddy had been walking home from the grocery store, taking the alley as they usually did, when this man appeared and started arguing with her daddy, saying he owed him money and everything, and then the guy got real mad and took out a gun and shot her daddy several times, and then the guy took off running. She cried and cried but she couldn't get her daddy to wake up. He'd managed to crawl into the garage but now he wasn't moving. And that's when she remembered that a cop named Flannery lived down the street -- people always told her to run to my place if she ever got in any trouble -- and that's how we met.

Hodiak left her in the kitchen and walked me back outside. He took his own flashlight and we went over the garage again.

"There's a lot of blood."

"There sure is," I said.

"So we know he was at least wounded pretty bad."

"He was more than wounded. He was dead."

"Then if he was dead -- and believe me, a cop like you, he'd know a dead guy when he saw one-- but if he was dead, then where the hell is he?" I shook my head again.

"No offense, Flannery, but if he was dead then he'd still be here."

"Somebody moved him."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

"And why?"

"I don't know that, either."

The uniformed cop came up. His female counterpart was sitting with her car door open filling out a couple forms. "I canceled everything. The ambulance and all."

"Thanks," Hodiak said. "You two start by checking that house over there, where the little girl lives. Then start looking around the neighborhood. He couldn't have gone very far if he was shot up so had."

The male cop nodded then walked back to the car to tell his partner their instructions.

"No body," Hodiak said. He sounded tired. "It never ends."

I'd been thinking the same thing. "No, it doesn't."

Hodiak shrugged. "Well, there are eight million stories in the Naked City, compadre, and this has been one of them." He clapped me on the back. "You get my note, about the funeral?"

"Yeah. Appreciated it."

"Sorry I couldn't make it. Some police convention in Arizona."

"Sounds like tough duty."

He smiled sadly. "Sorry about what happened, Flannery. You had one hell of a nice family. They ever nail anybody yet?"

"Not so far."

I walked him back to his car. The temperature had started to fall suddenly. You could see silver dew on the grass. There was a hint of fall in the air. September and its fiery leaves and harvest moons would be here soon enough.

"You doing all right with your leave and all, Flannery?"

"Pretty good. I do a little security work now and then. Gives me something to do."

He got in his car, started it, rolled the window down. His radio squawked with raspy dispatcher sounds. "I still get out to that old bowling alley couple times a month, see some of the old guys. You know. You should stop out there sometime."

"Maybe I will."

He nodded. "I'll keep you posted on all this. If we hear anything, I mean."

I smiled. "Yeah, if a dead guy checks himself into a hospital, be sure and let me know."

OVER THE next week, I walked back up the alley at least twice a day. Disappearing bodies were the stuff of mystery novels, not reality. The odd thing was, the blood tracks didn't leave the garage. He bled a lot while he was propped up against the Kaiser but when he left the garage --

All I could think of was that somebody had wrapped him up in tarpaulin and stashed him in a car trunk.

I suppose I enjoyed it, playing detective. Sure beat flat-footing it all over a busy Saturday afternoon mall in rubber-soled shoes and a uniform designed to look like a cop's. I went to Sandy's house several times, each time her neighbors telling me that Sandy was at her aunt's house, but she didn't know the aunt's name or address. Poor little kid, I wondered how she was doing.

Gradually, I gave it up. Hodiak phoned a few times to tell me that they'd had absolutely no leads, and to invite me out to the bowling alley again. And after skipping a few days, I walked to the garage again but found nothing helpful whatsoever.

Autumn came nine days following Sandy knocking on my door. You know how it is in the Midwest. The seasons rarely give warning. They sneak up on you and pounce. I drove to one of the piers and looked at Lake Michigan. When the sky is gray and the temperature face-numbing, there's a kind of bleak majesty to the big international freighters set against the line of horizon. At home, I turned on the heat and put the Lipton iced tea away and hauled out the Ovaltine.

On Tuesday of the following week, just at dusk, I saw Sandy. Or thought I did.

I was on my way back from the grocery store, making the six blocks afternoon walk, when I saw a little girl at the far end of the block. I called out for her and waved but instead of waving back, she seemed to recognize me, and then take off running.

After dinner, I went back up the alley with my flashlight. Checked out the garage. Noted where the blood trail ended. And then raised my eyes and looked at the back of Sandy's house, where a light shone in a small upstairs window, behind heavy drapes drawn tight.

I went over and knocked on the front door. The wind was up, a November wind in mid-September, and you could hear leaves scraping the sidewalk like a witch's fingernails on a blackboard, and hear the lone neighborhood owl cry out lonely in the chilly gloom. No answer. I looked at the curb. A red Honda sat there. I hadn't noticed it on my previous trips over here. I went out to the curb and opened the driver's door and rooted around until I found the registration. No help. Car belonged to one Jessica Williams. Sandy's last name was Myles, her father's name David.

I went around back and tried that. No answer there, either. I tried the doorknob. Locked.

I took a few steps back so I could get a better look up at the window where the light had shone. There was no light now. Somebody had turned it off. I sensed somebody watching me from upstairs.

I trained my light on the upstairs window. The curtains fluttered slightly.

Hide and seek. But whoever was up there sure wasn't about to come down. I stood there staring up at the window for a while, wondering who Jessica Williams might be, and where Sandy was and if she was all right.

After awhile I went home and made myself some Ovaltine and found a Randolph Scott western on one of the cable stations and went to bed around midnight. I didn't sleep well. I was too excited about the coming day.

I was up at 5:30. I made some instant coffee in the microwave and took it out the door with me. It was overcast and cold enough for frost.

At 5:45 I parked six spaces down the street from Sandy's house. The red Honda was still there. A yellow rental trailer had been added. Sandy, a woman of about thirty, and David Myles, the same man I'd seen dead in the garage, were carrying overloaded cardboard boxes from house to trailer.

I picked up my Smith and Wesson, the one I'd kept from my days in uniform, and got out of the car and walked up to the trailer. Sandy and the woman were inside. Myles was rearranging boxes in one corner of the trailer.

"I'd like to talk to you, Mr. Myles."

He jerked around as if he were going to clip my jaw with his elbow. He wore a shortsleeve shirt. His splotchy red and blue dragon tattoo was easy to see.

"Who the hell are you?"

"You want to talk out here or you want to go inside?"

"You didn't answer my question."

He came at me but he wasn't much good at violence. I grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around and wrenched his tattooed arm into a hammerlock.

"You leave my daddy alone."

Sandy was hack, scared. She pounded my hip with her tiny fists.

"I don't want to hurt him, honey. I just want to talk to him." I put more pressure on his arm. "Tell her, Myles."

He spoke through gritted teeth. "It'll be all right, sweetheart. You and Jessie just wait inside."

"Jessie's scared, daddy."

"Tell her I'm fine."

I let go of him. "We're just going to talk, honey. See?"

She looked sleepy as she glanced from her father to me. "You won't hurt him no more?"

"I won't, honey. I promise."

"Jessie, she's got a gun, Mr. Flannery, and she could shoot you."

I smiled. "Then I'll be sure to be real careful."

She watched us a little while longer, thinking things she didn't express, or maybe didn't know how to express, and then turned and ran fast back up the walk and steps and inside the house where she called "Jessie! Jessie!"

"You've got a nice daughter."

"Cut the crap. What's this all about?"

He had the sullen dumb good looks of half the grifters you see in prison. "I want to know how you came back from the dead."

"Back from the dead? Gimme a break."

The street was awakening. Cars and trucks and motorcycles rumbled past on the ancient brick streets, and bass speakers announced the day. A boxy white milk truck, the kind you don't see very often anymore, stopped on the far corner and a woman in a white uniform jumped down to the street; walking fast to an apartment house.

"The last time I saw you, Myles, you had four gunshot wounds."

"You're crazy."

"Sandy said she saw a man shoot you."

"Kids make things up."

"Am I making it up about seeing you with four bullet holes?"

"You got the wrong guy, mister. Do I look like somebody who's been shot four times recently?"

Not much I could say to that. I had no idea what I was dealing with here.

Jessie and Sandy came down the walk, both carrying boxes. Jessie slammed the door behind her. They got the boxes in the trailer then stood watching us. Jessie was pretty in a weary way.

"Who is he?" Jessie said to Myles.

"He's Mr. Flannery," Sandy said. "A cop."

Myles said, "You know what he's trying to tell me?"

"Huh-uh," Jessie said.

"He's trying to tell me that somebody shot me four times a couple of weeks ago."

I bent down to Sandy. "You saw somebody shoot your Dad, didn't you, sweetie?"

Sandy glanced up at Jessica, then at Myles. She shook her head. "No."

Myles said, "You and Jessie get in the car now, honey."

He was leaving. I'd never find out what happened. As the ladies went around and got in the car, I grabbed Myles and said, "I've got your license number. I can get an APB put on you in five minutes."

"What the hell is your problem, man? I'm not hurting nobody. My girlfriend and I got jobs in another city and so we're moving. What's the big deal?"

"You coming back from the dead, that's the big problem. And I wasn't bluffing about that APB."

"Just walk away from him, David," Jessie called. "Just walk back here and get in the car and we'll drive away."

Myles looked confused and exasperated now. "I knew I couldn't get away clean from this."

He did kind of a James Dean thing where he hung his head and kind of muttered to himself. "I told her this'd happen."

"Told who?"

He looked up. Leaned closer. "I gave her my word."

"I still don't know who 'her' is."

"The blind girl. 3117. That pink stucco apartment building halfway down the block."

"What's she got to do with all this?"

"What's she got to do with all this? Who do you think healed me?"

"So you were shot four times?"

He nodded. "Yeah, you got the right guy." He made a face. "It sounds crazy but it's the truth. This guy shot me point blank-- I owed him a little bit of money -- and then all of a sudden I can feel myself dying and then all of a sudden-- Well, I woke up and there was this really pretty blind girl, probably eighteen, nineteen, somethin' like that, leaning over me and helping me to my feet."

"What about your wounds?"

He shrugged. "I know how it sounds, but they were all gone. I mean I still had blood all over me but the wounds were all healed. You couldn't even see any scarring. It was just like I'd never been shot."

"And this blind girl did it?"

He nodded. "I guess. I mean, I don't know who else it would've been. She made me promise not to tell anybody and I really feel bad, you know, even telling you. But I guess I didn't have much choice, huh?"

"No, you didn't."

He glanced back at his car. "We've got to get going. Our jobs start tomorrow and we'll be driving all night as it is. Plus I don't want this guy to find out I didn't die. He'd kill me again."

"You know I don't believe you."

He grinned. "That's what I told her, the blind girl. I said, even if I did tell anybody, who'd believe it? Just like you, man. You don't believe it."

He walked back to his car, started it up, the muffler needing some immediate repairs, and took off.

Without quite knowing why, I walked down the block to 3117, the pink stucco apartment house. A bald man in a blue work shirt and tan work pants came whistling out the front door. He swung his black lunch pail in time to a tune I couldn't hear.

I wanted to go over to him and ask him if there was a blind girl in the apartment house who could heal people the way Jesus used to. But I figured the guy would probably think I was just some drunk rambling past.

TWO

That day, I called Hodiak three times but he wasn't in and I left no message. In the afternoon, I raked leaves in the back yard and then cleaned out the west side of the garage. Every once in a while, I'd look over at the back of 3117, the rusty fire stairs that climbed four floors, and all the flower pots people had setting in their rear windows.

In the evening I drove over and parked several spaces away from 3117. I sat there until around 8:00 and then I gave it up and went home and had a Hungry Man I needed both catsup and mustard for. It was a new model and I hadn't figured out how to deal with it yet.

In the morning it rained, and I went back to my post at 3117. I spent three hours there, mostly listening to callers on a talk show arguing about all the new taxes.

I spent the first half of the afternoon at the library checking out more books on Chicago history. These days the past is a lot more restful to contemplate. Chicago was just as violent then as it is now but even the atrocities of yesteryear have a glow about them. Even killers look kinder when you set them back a hundred years or so.

This time I was there twenty minutes when the blind girl came down the steps, her white cane leading the way. She was slender and pretty in a summery blue dress with a blue sweater over her shoulders. She moved with the jerky speed of blind people making their way through a dark universe filled with land mines and booby traps, the white cane her flicking antenna. When she reached the sidewalk, she turned right.

In the next half hour, a strange time when the sun would make an appearance in three minute segments then disappear behind rolling black thunderheads, she went three places-- the corner grocery store where she bought a small sack of groceries, the corner pharmacy where she bought something that fit into her grocery sack, and a large stone Catholic church built back in the early part of this century. She stayed in church fifteen minutes, then walked back home.

I parked and got out of the car and was within ten feet of her when a man in his thirties came out of the apartment house door and said, "I wondered where you went. You should've told me you were going somewhere." He had paint daubs all over his T-shirt and there were a few yellow streaks on his jeans. In his hand he held, with surprising delicacy, a paint brush. The kind Degas used; not the sort the Acme House Painting Co. prefers.

He met her halfway down the walk, took her in his arms and then, for the first time, became aware of me. He had good instincts. I could tell right away he was suspicious. He glared at me then turned away and walked the blind girl inside.

When I got back to my car, I noticed something curious. Four spaces back from where I'd parked was another car, a blue Saab. A man with a dress hat sat inside. He was pulling surveillance and I figured I knew which house he was watching. He caught me looking right away and pulled a paperback up over his face.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who'd heard about the blind girl.

"You saw this man yourself?"

"Yes, Father, I did."

"And he was dead?"

"Definitely."

"You couldn't have made a mistake?"

"He'd been shot four times. Including a shot right here." I tapped my throat.

"And then you saw him a few weeks later?"

"Yes."

"And he was alive?"

I nodded.

"And there was no evidence of any wounds?"

"All I could see was his throat but it was clear. No sign of a wound at all."

"This is pretty strange, I sure have to say that."

He was a young priest, thirty-five at most, with the face of an earnest young altar boy who was suddenly old, sitting in a dusty den in a dusty rectory next to the same dusty church where my girls had been baptized and from which, too few years later, they'd been buried. I recalled the first time I'd ever been inside a rectory, how disillusioning it was. In my Catholic boy's mind I'd imagined that priests spent all their time praying and discussing urgent theological matters. But when I came inside that day, I must have been twelve, I saw a Cubs game on TV being watched by the Monsignor himself. He wore a T-shirt and smoked a cigar and had a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon balanced in his lap. This was a long way from Jesus and the twelve apostles.

"And the girl?"

"The blind girl," I said.

"You don't know anything about her?"

"No; nothing."

"But the man -- Myles -- he said she was the one who healed him?"

"That's what he said."

The priest thought for a long moment. "I guess you're asking me if it's possible?"

"Right. I mean, have you ever heard of this before, of healing like this?"

"Oh, sure, I've heard of it. But I've never witnessed it, if that's what you mean. And I have to say, Rome is very skeptical of things like this. Especially these days." He smiled sadly. "Between pedophile priests and the church going broke, we don't need to play a role in a hoax."

"Is that what you think this is?"

"I think it's a possibility."

"With four bullet wounds in him?"

"There have been hoaxes a lot more complex than something like this." The sad smile again. "I'm not being much help, am I?"

"I appreciate you being honest."

"Maybe it's better to just let this go."

"You mean forget it?"

The priest nodded. "You strike me as a man who needs to relax and forget about things for a while. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that your family -- Well, you know what I mean."

I stood up, laughed. "I thought you'd call Rome and tell them that you had another Miracle of Fatima on your hands."

He stood up, shook his head. "There are people who say that was a hoax, too."

"Fatima? But hundreds of people said that they saw the Virgin."

"Mass hypnosis. It happens. Look at Hitler."

He walked me to the door. "You ever think of going on a vacation?"

"I've thought about it."

He grinned. "Well, think some more about it, all right?"

Twice that night I drove past 3117. The blue Saab was there both times. He might not be a master of disguise but he sure was dogged.

Later on, sleeping, I got all wound up in the covers and woke myself up. The girls were with me, and their mother, present in the dark room somehow. I had tears in my eyes and I was scared but I wasn't sure of what, and I was so lonely that I needed to be held like a child or a small scared animal. I got up and straightened the covers and lay back down. I slept but when I woke I wasn't rested at all.

At nine that morning, I sat at the kitchen window watching the bright autumn leaves in the gray autumn rain, and saw a tiny wren drenched on the sill, and then I got up and put on my fedora and my rain coat and walked up the soggy alley to the corner where I turned right and walked to the end of the next block.

The blue Saab sat just about where it had been last night. He had the engine running. Probably using his heater. It was cold enough.

I walked back to the alley, then cut in the yard behind 3117. There was a rear door leading down five concrete steps to a laundry room. The air smelled of detergent and heat from the drier.

At the far end of the laundry were five more steps, these leading up to the apartment house proper. I checked the row of twelve mail boxes in the lobby. Everybody was Mr. and Mrs. somebody except for a Vic McRea and Jenny Conners. They lived on the third floor, to the back.

I was starting up the stairs when I heard a male voice two floors above me. "Jenny, you think I like going out in the rain? You think I'd go if I didn't have to?"

The girl said something, but she spoke so softly I couldn't pick it up.

I hurried back-to the basement where I stood in the shadows waiting for Vic to pass by.

His steps were heavy on the stairs. Halfway down, he paused. I heard the snick of a match head being struck. The heavy footsteps picked up again.

When he passed me, I saw he was the same young guy who'd given me the big glower yesterday afternoon.

He turned the collar up on his London Fog and went out into the rain.

I waited ten minutes and then I went upstairs and knocked on the door where the blonde girl lived.

"Yes?" she said from behind the closed door. The hallway carpet was worn to wood in places, and everything smelled of dust.

"There's been an accident, ma'am."

"What?" Panic fluted her voice already.

"A man named Vic McRea. Do you know him?"

"Know him? Why--"

Chains were unchained, locks unlocked.

She was much prettier close up, long blonde hair to her shoulders framing a face both lovely and eager, a child hoping to please. She had dark blue eyes and only when you studied them carefully did they reveal their blindness. She wore a white blouse and blue cardigan sweater, big enough that I suspected it was Vic's, and a pair of jeans that fit her well.

When I got inside the door, I said, "I'm sorry I had to do that to you."

"But you said Vic --"

"I was lying. I'm sorry."

She started to say something but then stopped herself. Then, "You're here to rob me, aren't you? Vic said someday somebody would trick me into opening that door."

"I'm not going to rob you, I just want to talk to you."

"About what?"

"About how you can heal people."

She waited a long time before she spoke again. "That's ridiculous, healing people, I mean. Nobody can heal people except God."

"How about if we sit down?"

"Who are you? You scare me."

"My name's Nick Flannery. I used to be a Chicago cop. There's no reason to be afraid of me."

She sighed. "I really have a headache. And anyway, I don't know anything about healing people."

"Please," I said. "Let's sit down."

We sat. She navigated the room quickly, moving over to a green couch as worn as the runner in the hallway.

I took a vinyl recliner that had a cigarette burn in the left arm and several cuts on the right one. The place had the personality of a decent motel that had been allowed to deteriorate badly. The air was filled with a kind of weary history. You could hear WWII couples in this room dancing to Glen Miller, and their eager bright offspring, long years later, toking up a joint and listening to Jefferson Airplane.

Jenny was too nervous to sit back. She stayed right on the edge of the couch, her fingers tearing at the edges of a magazine as she spoke. "Why did you come here!"

"I told you."

"The healing thing? But that's crazy."

"I know a man named David Myles. He said you healed him." "I've never heard of him before."

"I can understand why you wouldn't want people to find out about you."

"I'm just a plain, ordinary person. I'm blind, as you can see, but that's the only difference between me and everybody else."

She tore the magazine edges with quiet fury.

"What happens, people find out about you and you have to run away?"

"What would they find out?"

I sighed. "Jenny, I'm not going to hurt you; I'm not even going to tell anybody about you. But I did see David Myles the night somebody shot him-- and then I saw him several days later. There weren't even any scars. It was as if he was never shot."

"Do you really think that somebody could do that -- heal somebody that way?"

"Well, somebody did. And the man who was healed said that you were the one who did it."

For the first time she sat back on the couch, as if she were exhausted. She dropped her head slightly and put her hands together in her lap.

After a long silence, I said, "Jenny."

"I wish you'd just leave."

"I want to know the truth, Jenny."

She raised her head. Her beautiful but blind eyes seemed to be looking directly at me. "Why is it so important to you?"

"I -- I'm not sure I could explain it so that it'd make any sense."

She said nothing. Just stared.

"A while back, my wife and two daughters were murdered in a robbery. One of those wrong time-wrong place situations. They happened to be in this store buying some school clothes when this guy came in all coked up. He killed six people in the store. "I Shuffled up tears. "She was my partner, my wife I mean. I'd never had a partner before. And I really miss her."

"I'm sorry for you -- and them. But I still don't see --"

"I'm not sure there's a higher power, Jenny. God or whatever you want to call it. I want to believe but I can't -- not most of the time anyway. I kneel down and I close my eyes and I pray as hard as I can but -- But then I get self-conscious and I hear my own prayers echo back at me and I think, Hell, I'm just repeating a bunch of mumbo-jumbo I heard when I was a kid. None of it's true. You're born and you die -- that's all there is. And that's what I believe, most of the time."

Softly, she said, "That's not all there is. I know it's not, Mr. Flannery."

"That's what I mean, Jenny. Maybe if I could believe in you -- well, maybe then I could believe in some kind of higher power -- and believe that someday I'll see my wife and daughter again."

"Would you get me a Diet Pepsi?"

"Sure," I said, standing up.

"In the kitchen. In the fridge. And -- take your time."

"All right."

"I need some silence. Silence is good for people."

"Yeah -- yeah it is."

I took my time getting her the Diet Pepsi, finding a glass and dropping three cubes in it, and then stopping in the bathroom before returning to the living room.

I set glass and can on the coffee table in front of her and filled the glass with fizzing cola.

I went over and sat down. I was careful not to speak.

"I really can't talk to you without Vic being here, Mr. Flannery."

"Who is Vic exactly, anyway?"

"My fiance."

"I see."

"The way you say that, I take it you don't approve of him."

"It's just that he doesn't look like the kind of guy you'd be with."

She smiled. "That's one thing you learn from being blind, Mr. Flannery. You have to learn to see inside because you can't see outside. I don't mean that I'm any kind of mind-reader or anything -- but Vic isn't as rough as he seems. Not inside, anyway."

"He knows about your -- ability?"

"He knows everything about me that matters, Mr. Flannery, including any special talents I might have." She brought her glass to. her lips and sipped cola. "You seem like a very decent man, Mr. Flannery."

"Thank you."

"But I had a very different impression of you when you lied to me at the door," she said. "Vic isn't a bad man."

I laughed. "All right, Vic's an angel. You've convinced me."

"Hardly an angel. He's made mistakes -- one very, very bad one in fact. It almost broke us up."

"Can you talk about it?"

She shrugged. "He doesn't have much money. He saw a way to make what he thought was a fortune and he took it." She shrugged again. "There was a man who had a very sick wife and Vic decided to --" She shook her head. "Vic wasn't a very honorable man in that situation."

"He wanted to charge the man money for what you do?"

"It doesn't matter anymore. Vic learned his lesson. He's changed completely now."

"What time will he be back?"

"Probably around three."

"Why don't I call you around four then. All I want is to talk to you. Learn some things about you. It'll help me, I know it will."

I got up and went over to the couch and lifted her hand and held it in mine. "This is very important to me, Jenny."

"I know it is, Mr. Flannery, and I think if I approach Vic in the right way, he'll let me do it."

She brought her other hand over and covered mine. "I'll be waiting for your call."

But I wasn't the one who called.

Two hours later, my phone rang and I picked up and a harsh whiskey voice said, "You stay god damn away from her, you understand?"

"Who is this?"

"Who is this my ass. You know who it is."

As of course I did.

"You understand me, jerk off?"

"Yeah," I said. "I understand."

"You'd better," he said, and slammed the phone.

THAT NIGHT, I watched a couple more "Mavericks" and had a Hungry Man that took a whole lot of mustard. But I was distracted. I just kept thinking about her sweet dignified little face and the great wise peace I felt within her. I wanted to go back and see her some more, ask her more questions about life beyond this one, but there would be Vic, and with Vic there would be a fight, and I would likely hurt him and then she'd never talk to me again, not the way she loved Vic she wouldn't.

A knock came at the door about the time the second "Maverick" ended. I went and opened the door and there she was.

She wore a transparent plastic rain scarf and a white rain coat that looked soaked. The rain had been pounding down for the past three hours. In her right hand, she clutched an umbrella, in her left her white cane.

"I decided to go for a walk," she said, and shrugged. "I just wanted to stop by and apologize for the way Vic talked to you." She started to say something else and then abruptly started crying. "He's got somebody on the side again -- and I just needed to talk to somebody."

"C'mon in," I said, and took her around the shoulder and led her into the living room.

In the next fifteen minutes, I hung up her coat to dry, set her wet shoes in front of the small crackling fireplace, got us some Ovaltine and then listened to the problems she was having with Vic. She smelled of rain and perfume that made me sentimental.

She told me about Vic.

Seems every city they moved to, Vic found himself a new girlfriend. The pattern was pretty much the same. At first it would be just a kind of dalliance. But then gradually it would get more and more serious. Vic would start staying out later and later. Eventually, he'd start staying out all night. He always had the same excuse. Poker. But she'd never been aware of him winning or losing any appreciable amount so she had no reason to. believe his story.

"But he always comes back to you?"

"In his way, I suppose."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"He comes back and makes all kinds of promises but I don't think he means to keep them. He's just biding his time till his next girl."

"I'm sure you don't want to hear this, but maybe you'd be better off without him."

"I love him."

"Trust is a big part of love. For me, anyway. And it sure doesn't sound like you can trust him."

"He's only twenty-nine. Maybe he'll change someday. That's what I keep hoping anyway."

"How's the Ovaltine?"

She smiled. "I haven't had this since I was a little girl at the convent."

"The convent?"

"Well, actually, it was an orphanage but a very small one. There were more nuns than kids. So we always called it the convent."

"Your folks put you there?"

She shook her head, staring into the fireplace. I had to keep reminding myself that she was blind. "I don't know anything about my folks. Nothing at all. I was left with the nuns when I was six days old. That's why -- well, that's why I don't know anything about my -- gift. I just have it. I don't know how I got it or where it came from. It's just always been there. And maybe it'll go away some day."

"Have you ever talked to a doctor about it?"

"Right after I got out of high school, this was when I was living in New Mexico with a foster family, I went to visit a parapsychologist at the state university. He told me that there's a tradition of psychic healing in nearly every culture, dating back to earliest man and the shaman and the Babas of Africa. He told me there's a man named Dawson in Montana who can 'influence' the course of somebody's illness if not exactly 'heal' it. He also said that most of psychic healing is a fraud and that if I ever went public, the press would attack me and discredit me -- and that if I ever demonstrated that God used me to heal others -- well, I'd be a freak all my life and I'd never be left alone.

"The thing we talked about this afternoon, when Vic tried to 'rent' me to the rich man with the sick wife?"

"Right."

"That proved just what the parapsychologist told me. How they'd never let me alone. When I found out that Vic was asking the rich man for money, I got furious and told the rich man that I would try and help his wife but that I didn't want any money at all. Then Vic got furious."

"You helped her?"

She shook her head. "She was so sick. I just couldn't believe that Vic would do anything like that. I was able to help her. I thanked God I could do it. But it didn't end there. The rich man saw a way to get even richer. What if I worked for him and he sold my services to the highest bidder? That's what he wanted to do. Vic and I ran away. That was four months ago. The rich man probably has people looking for us. I just wanted to hide out when we got here, But six weeks ago, I saw a boy hit by a car and I went out and helped mend his leg. And his mother knew what I was doing. She started telling people around the neighborhood. The mother ran up here and told me about David Myles being shot."

"So what's next?"

A sad smile. "I guess I just wait for Vic to get over his latest crush."

There was no point in my railing about Vic again. She'd just get defensive. "How's the Ovaltine?"

"The Ovaltine's fine. But I sense that you're not,"

"I'm all right."

"You mentioned your wife and daughters were killed."

"Yes."

"Why don't you come over and sit next to me?" This time the smile was bright. "I promise I won't make a pass at you."

"That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, you know."

I went over and sat next to her on the couch. And I told her about my wife and kids, not their dying but their living. How Susan had gone back and gotten her BA in English at night and had planned to get her teaching certificate, how we bought a horse for Cindy on her eighth birthday and kept "Lady" out in a stable in the farmlands; how Anne was a very gifted ballet dancer, and how her teachers talked of her going to New York to study when she reached ninth grade. And a lot of other things, too, the odds and ends that make up family life, the birthday parties when Daddy dresses up in silly hats, the puppie who poops everywhere, the vacation to Yellowstone, the terrifying weekend when Susan found a lump on her breast but it proved to be nothing serious, the times when I found myself falling in love all over again with my wife, the life we planned for when the girls grew up and left home.

I must have talked for an hour. She spoke only rarely, and then little more than a word or two to indicate that she was still paying full attention. At first I tried to stop myself from crying but somehow with her I wasn't ashamed, and so when I was overcome by my terrible loss and the great sorrow that had followed, I cried, full and open.

During this time, we never touched, no consoling hands, no reassuring pats.

When I was done, I was exhausted. I put my head back and closed my eyes and she said, "Just stay like that. I want to help you."

I wasn't sure what she was talking about. No broken bones, no illness that I knew of, where I was concerned.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her situate herself pretty much as I had, leaning her head against the back of the couch, closing her eyes.

She felt around the open space between us until she found my hand.

"This will probably scare you a little bit at first but just give in to it, all right? Close your eyes now."

I closed my eyes.

There was a minute or two of absolute self-conscious silence. I felt the way I did when I prayed sometimes, that I was performing a charade, hurling pathetic words into the cosmic and uncaring darkness.

And then I felt it.

A few years ago, I had a hospital exam where the doctor gave me a shot of valium. I couldn't even count backwards from ten before a great roaring sense of well-being overcame me. The nervous, anxious person I was too often was gone, replaced by this beatific man of inner peace.

I felt this now, though a hundred times more, as I sat on the couch next to Jenny, and when I saw Susan and the kids I cried, yes, but they were tears of joy, celebrating all the sunny days and gentle nights and faithful love we'd shared for so many years.

I don't know how long it was before I felt Jenny's hand leave me, I just knew that I never wanted to come back to reality. I wanted to be in college again with Susan, and in the delivery room when Anne came along, and watching Cindy wobble down the block on her bike the day we took the training wheels off. So much to remember . . .

"I'm sorry," Jenny said. "I need to get back in case Vic gets home early."

"I don't know what you did there, on the couch I mean, but --"

She touched my cheek, her blind eyes seeming to search my face. "You're a decent man. You should take comfort from that."

I stood up, helped her up. "I'm walking you back. And no arguments. This isn't the neighborhood it used to be. It's not real safe."

This late at night, ten o'clock, lights were out in most houses, and the night air smelled of cold rain.

For a time we walked without saying anything. Then I said, "How'd you learn to do that?"

"To make you feel better?"

"Uh-huh."

She wasn't using her cane. She had her arm tucked through mine. It felt good.

"A few years ago, I visited this friend of mine in the hospital. Down the hall from her was this man dying of cancer. He was very angry and very frightened. And he was very abusive to the nurses. When I passed by his door one day, I heard him weeping. I'd never heard anybody cry like that before. I went in to his room and went over and took his hand and I felt this -- energy-- I don't know how else to describe it -- this great warm feeling in me that I was able to transfer to him simply by holding his hand. I didn't help him with his disease at all -- he was in his early nineties and it was his time to go, I suppose -- but I did comfort him. He died peacefully a few weeks later."

"And since then -- ?"

"Since then, when I sense that somebody's in great pain, I try to help them."

"You're quite a woman."

She laughed. "Oh, yes, I'm a regular role model. I'm blind and I'm broke and I have a fiance who keeps stepping out on me."

"But your gift. You --"

"Not 'my' gift. God's gift. You asked me if I believed there was some plane of reality beyond ours. Yes, I believe there is. I mean, I'm not sure it's 'God' as we think of him but there's something out there, a place where we survive what we think of as death. And whatever that force is, it's chosen to use me as one of its tools. I'm sure there are a lot more people like me in the world, all hiding out, all afraid of any exposure because they don't want to be treated like freaks."

We reached her comer.

"It smells so clean. The wind and the rain," she said.

I saw the blue Saab parked a few spaces from her apartment house. I thought of what she told me about the rich man trying to find her.

I took her arm a little tighter.

"Is everything all right? You seem tense all of a sudden."

"I just don't want you to get blown away in this wind."

The man in the Saab shrunk down some.

We reached her apartment house. By now I knew what I needed to do.

I walked her to the door.

"This is sort of like a date, isn't it? Walking me to the door, saying good night." She leaned forward and kissed me on the chin. She smiled. "I meant to kiss you on the cheek. Bad aim."

"I really want to thank you for --"

"I'm the one who should be grateful. I had a very nice time tonight."

She turned and opened the door. "Good night."

"Good night," I said.

I watched through the glass door as she climbed the steps, her white cane leading the way.

Ten minutes later I slid my car into the last space on Jenny's block. The blue Saab was still there. I wanted to see where he went after leaving here.

Thirty-five minutes later, his headlights came on and he drove away. I let him get to the comer and then I went after him, staying a half block away. With so little traffic at night, following him was not easy.

He took the Dan Ryan. If he was aware of me, he didn't let on. Fifteen minutes later, he took the exit he'd been looking for, and drove over to a motel that sat on the east edge of a grim little strip mall.

He pulled up to his room and went inside. The lights were already on. He stayed twenty minutes. When he came out, another man accompanied him. The man carried a small black leather doctor's bag.

I gave them ten minutes before I went up to the door and put some of my old Burglary knowledge to work. A cop picks up a lot of skills in the course of his career.

The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the moist walls of the shower stall. I used a flashlight to go through three different suitcases and a bureau full of drawers. The red eye of the answering machine blinked, signaling a message had been left. It must have come in between the time they left the room and I entered.

I went over and picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. "Yes?"

"There's a message for you, Mr. Banyon."

"Yes."

"From a man named Vic. He said things won't be ready till eleven. That's all he said."

"I appreciate that." According to my watch, it was 10:30. I had a terrible feeling that I knew what was going on here. I just hoped I wasn't too late.

Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled into the same space I'd used earlier that night.

The blue Saab was in place.

I saw Vic helping Jenny out the door.

She didn't know that anything was wrong. She loved Vic and trusted him and if he suggested that they go for a late-night stroll, or maybe plant themselves in the Chicago-style pizzeria around the block, why that would be just fine with her.

Vic led her to the sidewalk just as the two men were leaving the Saab. The second man had lost his black leather bag but he seemed to be carrying something with great delicacy in his black gloved fingers.

I had to move fast to reach them just as they reached Jenny and Vic. Cold mist whipped my face in the dark windy night.

When I reached them, I saw what the man held in his hand. A hypodermic needle. He was going to drug Jenny.

"Jenny!" I said.

They had been so intent on what they were doing that they didn't notice me until now.

"Who is this?" the man with the needle said. He spoke in a European accent, German maybe. Then, "Quickly, give me her arm!" he said to Vic.

Vic pushed Jenny forward.

I had my Smith and Wesson in hand and I said, "Stop right there. I mean everybody."

The man with the needle held Jenny's arm. He could easily jab her with the needle and accomplish his task. I put the gun barrel inside his ear.

"Drop the needle."

"You have no business here," said the other man, in an identical accent.

Both men looked at Vic.

"Who is this?" the man with the needle asked.

"Some clown; some ex-cop. He's nobody."

"Perhaps you haven't noticed, my friend," said the other man, "but he has a gun."

"He's no friend of yours, Jenny," Vic said. "You have to trust me. These men are going to help us."

"It's the rich man, isn't it? That's who they're working for."

"We just got off to a bad start, Jenny. With him, I mean. He wants to help us, put us in a nice new home and have some doctors study you-- but privately, so nobody else will know."

Silently, she raised his hand, felt through the darkness for his face. When she found his cheek, she said, "They paid you to help them, didn't they, Vic?"

"I never claimed I was an angel, Jenny."

"No. But you did claim you loved me."

I was caught up enough in their words that I didn't hear the driver take two steps to my right and then bring down a blackjack with considerable force on the back of my head.

I heard Jenny scream, and somebody clamp his hand over her mouth, and feet scuffle on the rainy sidewalk. I smelled autumn and cold and night; and then I just smelled darkness.

I didn't go all the way down, just to my knees, and I quickly started reviving myself, forcing myself to take deep breaths, forcing my eyes to focus. There was blood on the back of my neck but not much and not serious.

Car doors opened and slammed; the Saab, I knew. They'd left the motor running and when the doors opened I heard a Frank Sinatra song. Briefly.

Then they were gone.

I was starting the long and painful process of standing up when I heard somebody nearby moaning.

Vic was propped up against a tree. They must have hit him very hard in the seconds when I was unconscious. Blood streamed down his face from a wound on top of his skull.

I stood up and wobbled over to him.

"Where did they take her?"

"Can't you see I'm bleeding, man? Maybe I have a concussion or something."

I kicked him in the ribs, and a lot harder than was necessary, I suppose.

This time he didn't moan, he cried. "Shit, man, I just wanted a little money and the whole goddamned thing went wrong." He looked up at me with puppy dog eyes. I wanted to kick him even harder. "They didn't even pay me, man. They didn't even keep their word."

I reached down and yanked him to his feet. It took me five good shoves to get him to my car. He started crying again when I opened the door and pushed him inside.

I got behind the wheel. "Where're we going?"

"You think I'm gonna tell you? They'll kill me, man."

"Yeah, well I'll kill you first so you'd better keep that in mind."

I gave him a hard slap directly across the mouth to make my point.

He started crying again. Only now did I realize he was all coked up. Everything was probably very crazy to him, fast and spooky. "You probably don't think I care about her, do you?"

"Vic, I want to know where they took her."

"I was gonna give her half the money. I really was. I mean, I really like Jenny. She's marriage material, man. It's just that right now I'm not ready --"

This slap cut his mouth so that blood trickled out. He put his head down and sobbed.

I didn't want to feel sorry for him but I couldn't help myself. "Vic, just tell me where they took her. This may come as a surprise, but I really don't enjoy slapping you."

He tilted his head in my direction and laughed. "You could've fooled me."

I laughed, too. "Vic, you're out of your league, don't you understand that ?"

He shrugged, daubing at the blood in the corner of his mouth. "That's what Jenny always says. That I'm out of my league." He shook his head. "What a miserable bastard I am."

"Right now I wouldn't disagree."

He sighed. "They're taking her to their Lear jet. We'd better hurry."

I knew the airport he named.

On the way, he said, "Maybe she's an angel."

"What?"

I was driving fast but allowing for the wet streets.

"An angel. From heaven, you know. I mean, maybe that's what Jenny is. Maybe that's why she can heal people."

"Maybe," I said, having no idea what else to say, and being embarrassed by talking about angels.

The airport was toward Waukegan. The rain had started again and the dark rolling Midwestern night made the few lights on seem distant and frail, like desperate prayers no one hears.

"Or a Martian," Vic said. He had a handkerchief and he kept daubing his lips.

"A Martian?"

"Yeah, I don't mean from Mars necessarily but from outer space, anyway. I saw this 'Star Trek' deal once where they found this girl who could heal people. I think she was a Klingon."

"I thought Klingons were the bad guys," I said. "At least that's what my two daughters used to tell me."

"Yeah? Well, maybe there were some good Klingons they didn't know about."

What could I say?

IN THE RAIN and the gloom, the small airport had the look of a concentration camp about it. The cyclone fencing, the mercury vapor lights, the signs indicating that attack dogs were on the prowl -- nice friendly place.

I pulled up to the gate and flashed the badge I knew I shouldn't be carrying.

"Some problem?" the uniformed guard said.

"Not sure yet."

"You'd better check in with the office before you do anything."

"Fine."

He nodded and waved me through.

I didn't check with the office. I drove straight out to the landing strip.

"There," he said.

The Lear jet was fired up and just getting ready to go. The passenger door was still open. Apparently not everybody was aboard.

I swung the car wide so that we came around from behind the graceful white plane.

I pulled around to the front, parking in front of the wheels, and got out. Vic was a few minutes behind me.

"I don't want to get in anything with guns'n shit, man. I mean, that's not my style."

"I just want to get Jenny away from them."

"They're bad dudes, man. They really are."

I saw the man with the doctor's bag walking across the tarmac to the Lear jet. We were hiding behind the car. I didn't think he saw us.

I moved fast, running toward him so that there was no chance for him to get away.

He tried, of course, turning around and running in a bulky way back toward the office.

I got him by the collar and spun him around. He smelled of expensive cologne.

"Let's go get Jenny."

"There are six people aboard that plane," he said in his European accent. "The odds aren't very good in your favor." He glared at Vic and shook his head. "And certainly this lounge lizard will be no help to you."

"Let's go," I said, putting the gun into his ribs.

The three of us walked to the plane.

We climbed the stairs and went inside where two men in black turtlenecks and black Levis held Mausers on us.

"I want Jenny," I said.

"Not going to happen, babe," said Mauser number one. "Hand over the doc and we'll let you go."

Vic said, "They got us, man. Just let them have the doc."

"Where's Jenny?" I said.

"Here," she said, and appeared in the doorway behind the Mauser twins.

"Are you all right?" I said.

"So far."

They hadn't drugged her, probably deciding they didn't need to. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair was mussed. Her mouth was drawn tight. She was scared.

The doc made his move, then, and it was a bad move. He tried to jerk free of me and when he did, the Mauser twins, who had been trained for split-second action, opened fire, no doubt figuring they would hit me instead of him.

But they hit the doc, and several times, and right in the chest.

Vic dove left, I dove right.

After the first burst, the Mauser twins quit firing so they could assess the damage.

"Oh, God, babe," said one Mauser twin to the other, "we shot the doe."

"The old man is going to kill us," the second Mauser twin said.

By then, the shooting over, the pilot and co-pilot had drifted up to the front of the plane. So did the stake-out driver.

They all stood around and looked down at the doc. He was dying. He was already an ashen color, his breathing in tattered gasps.

"Man," said one Mauser twin to the other. "You really got our tit in the wringer."

"Me? Listen, babe, that was your bullet, not mine."

Jenny stepped forward, saying, "I would appreciate it if everybody would leave this plane."

"What's that supposed to mean?" said the first Mauser twin.

The stake-out driver said, "It means just what she said." With the doc down, he was apparently the man in charge. "I want everybody off this plane."

Took twenty minutes, during which all of us stood on the tarmac in the mist and fog. The Mauser Twins went and got coffee for everybody from a vending machine.

Vic, pacing around in little circles to stay warm, said, "She could make a lot of money."

"I thought you said she was an angel."

"Angels can't make money?"

I just shook my head.

The stake-out driver came over. He looked sad. "The doc, he's my cousin." He spoke with his cousin's accent.

"I see," I said.

"The girl," he said, "if she saves him, I'm going to let her go."

"That's the right thing to do."

"Do you understand any of this, the way she heals people?"

"Not a bit."

"I still say she's an angel," Vic said. "Or a Martian."

Just as he started to scowl at Vic, Jenny appeared in the passenger door. "You may come back now."

Five minutes later, we were feeding the doc some of the tepid vending machine coffee we'd had earlier.

I can't say he looked great -- he was still very shaky and pale -- but he was awake and talking.

He sat in one of the passenger seats, Jenny next to him.

"I wish you would let me learn about you," the doc said.

She sat there so pretty and sad and said, "I just accept it, Doctor. It's a gift and you don't question gifts."

I went over and said, "You look tired, Jenny, how about if I take you back?"

She stared up at me through her blindness and said, "Thank you. I really need to rest."

The three of us sat in the front seat. Vic had his arm around Jenny. I wanted my arm to be around Jenny. I wanted Vic to be on the other side of the world.

"We really owe you for this, man," Vic was saying. "I mean, you really came through for us."

"He's right," Jenny said gently, speaking above the hot blast of the car heater. "We really are very grateful."

"I'm gonna change, man. I really am. I'm taking this pledge right now. Vic McRea is a brand-new man. And I mean that, babe."

My God, I thought, is she really going to buy into this bilge?

When we reached their apartment house, I pulled over to the curb. I felt great sorrow and rage. I was losing her.

"Jenny, I --" I started to say.

But Vie already had the door open and was climbing out.

Jenny quickly took my hand and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "You're really a remarkable man, I hope you know that."

"C'mon, babe," Vic said from outside, "I'm freezing my tush."

And then they were gone.

I didn't sleep well. I had all the old bad dreams and then I had a new bad dream, that Jenny and Vic were on an airplane and flying away and I was standing on the tarmac feeling an icy emptiness and a kind of animal panic.

And then somebody was knocking at my door and I was looking at the sunlight in my bedroom window.

I got my robe on and answered the knock and there she was.

"I heard you were looking for a new partner," she said, "so I thought I'd apply for the job."

I kept my lips pressed tight so nothing of my morning mouth would escape and then I took her in my arms and held her right there in the doorway.

Inside, she said, "I told Vic goodbye this morning. He took it a lot better than I thought he would. Especially after I gave him my last $500."

"Good old Vic," I said.

"Yes, good ole Vic," she said. "Now how about some coffee?"