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impulsively. He'd had a girlfriend, Wendy, last summer; he'd played softball with the bar team, and Wendy, and Cronin, had come to the games. Playing softball, bowling, playing pool—those things anchored him in the mortal world; kept him from drifting, mentally, into the Hidden. Helped him maintain that vital compartmentalization. And it felt good to be out in a park on a warm day, feeling all the parts of his body working together; the satisfaction of throwing a pretty good pitch. Once, though, in a rushed moment trying to stop someone from stealing a base, he'd thrown a ball to a ghost playing shortstop. Hadn't realized it was the ghost of a softball player; the ghost had a glove and everything. Embarrassing. Of course the ball had gone right through the glove. To the living players, who couldn't see the ghost, Bleak had just thrown the ball wildly wrong. But still...it made him wince, thinking of it.
    “No good to think of the past, and wish for it, this an old man learns,” Cronin said. “But that was good, you playing in Central Park. You were happy. You don't see that girl anymore? Nice girl.” Bleak shook his head. “No.” And he didn't want to talk about her. “I'd better go.” “But where do you go, now? You will call?”
    “Sure. I gave you that cell phone. Just keep it charged. No one but me has the number. I'll call that. Not the landline.”
    “Sometimes I think you're hallucinating, boy,” Cronin muttered, shaking his head. “You have to hide, all the time. And for what?”
    “You want me to show you again?”
    “No. No! I don't want to see that again. Not...no. When my time comes, God will show me, you are not to show me. That is the commandment, the mitzvah, to wait for God to show Himself, His way More beer? This is a masterpiece for me, this beer.”
    “Still got half a glass. I'm trying to drink less.”
    “Moderation in all things, this is smart.”
    “To hell with moderation.” Bleak drained his beer and stood up. “I'll put this in the sink. I've gotta go.”
    “But where?”
    “Honest, it's best you don't know. And I'm not a hundred percent sure.”
    “You think you can run from them, who run the whole country?” Cronin stood, his back audibly creaking. He only came up to Bleak's collarbone.
    “Only for a while. I'll make some kind of deal with them, maybe. When I come back, I'll cut your grass for you.”
    Cronin smiled sadly and Bleak saw the old man had lost another tooth. The corners of his small brown eyes crinkled. “Sure. I fix the machine, you will cut. And we will drink beer.”
     
    ***
     
    AFEWHOURSLATER . The sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.
    There was a marina in Hoboken, New Jersey, near where Riverview Drive meets Harbor Drive. It's across the river from the Westside Highway, and Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan. Most of the time, Bleak lived in the marina, in a tired, old thirty-five-foot Chris-Craft fiberglass cabin cruiser. Unregistered, so he couldn't be traced to it. Technically you weren't supposed to live in the marina either, but he had a friend, Donner, an old stoner who ran the place from his combo office and studio apartment overlooking the docks, and Donner pretended he didn't know Bleak lived there. He valued Bleak's chess game—Bleak could usually be counted on to lose, in the end, even though Donner was smoking pot while he played. But then, Bleak didn't try very hard to win.
    Looking at the marina, now, from the screen of trees in the park across Harbor Boulevard, Bleak didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Didn't see any police cars, didn't see any obvious CCA agents over there. But they knew who he was. They'd been tracking him. So they might know where he lived, registered or not. They could be waiting in his cabin cruiser. Or watching from the small