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alley behind Susanna’s apartment. It took less than four minutes for the car to pass the sign that read EAST END HARBOR, TOWN LIMITS .
    It had been a totally professional hit. There was no hint that a crime, much less a murder, had even taken place in the town of East End Harbor.
    Nothing had been overlooked.
    Except for one thing.
    That thing was still up on the roof of Susanna Morgan’s building. And it wasn’t exactly a thing. It was a person.
    It was a woman who had been sitting quietly, as still as could be, cross-legged, in the corner of the flat roof, as she often did in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She had been sitting peacefully, breathing in, breathing out, appreciating the misty night and the hazy half-moon. She had been thinking about life in general and her life in particular, and what direction it might be taking in the next few months. Up until the blond man had appeared on the roof, she was thinking that her life could move in just about any direction she decided to move it in. After the man had climbed down the fire escape, after she’d looked down to see the car drive away, after she’d seen her friend Susanna murdered, she had a terrible, sickening feeling that that decision had just been taken out of her hands.

1
    The breeze floated in off the bay, bringing in the faint odor of brine and fish and gasoline fumes. Justin Westwood tilted his head ever so slightly, taking a deep breath. His eyes closed, shutting out the world for, at most, a second or two. But it gave him just enough time to think, once again, how nice it would be to shut that world out for a much longer time. Like forever.
    Half of his face caught the full impact of the hot morning sun, half was cooled by the soft wind off the water. A vague confluence of words began to float through his brain. Then they crystallized, and he realized it was a rock lyric. Elvis Costello.
What shall we do with all this useless beauty?
The plaintive music that went with the words also began to play inside his head. That’s what was usually playing inside him: haunting, mournful songs; rough, ragged rock and roll. Harsh, melancholy words, often blunt and full of undiluted rage. Driving music that fueled his anger and overpowered him with sadness. He pushed the song out of his thoughts. Told himself to force some silence until he could get home, smoke a joint, and let some scotch slide down his throat, then let some real music overwhelm him. He told himself to wait. It was the word he repeated more than any other throughout his days:
Wait
.
    His eyes fluttered open. Squinting directly into the harsh glare through a heat-distorted haze that made it seem as if he was looking into some other dimension, he could see the glittering outline of a sailboat glide away from the dock that jutted from the end of Main Street.
    “Hey, Westwood! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    Westwood allowed himself to slowly come out of his self-induced fog and shifted his gaze in the direction of the two cops twenty yards away from him on Main.
Cops
, he thought, with contempt.
They weren’t cops. They were children. Summer help. They were lifeguards let loose on un-suspecting motorists who might, heaven help us all, back up several feet to try to catch a precious parking space or, even worse, park in a public space for one second longer than the allotted two hours.
    “Westwood! Seriously, man. What the hell’s goin’ on? There’re
two
cars that’ve been here more than two hours and you didn’t slap a ticket on either one! What’s up with that, man?”
    Justin Westwood was thirty-seven years old. These summer cops were maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and they not only thought he was duller than shit, they thought he was a total loser.
They
wouldn’t be handing out parking tickets in a half-assed, middle-class resort town when they were thirty-seven.
They
would be police chiefs somewhere where there was real action. Or retire early and