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yacht tied up in the next berth. They could be a lot of places.
    And he felt something. A faint sense that someone close by was thinking about him—and not Donner.
    He was cautious enough to keep a small metal boat tied up, little more than a skiff with a one-cylinder, barely functional outboard motor, about a quarter mile downstream on the Hudson. There was enough gas in that little vessel to get up to the cabin cruiser, check it out from the water where they might not see him coming. He'd feel them for sure, if they were in there, once he got close enough.
    He looked around, before leaving the park, though he knew they hadn't spotted him. If anyone was looking at him in any fixed and purposeful way, he'd have felt it.
     
    ***
     
    IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT o'clock when Bleak got the boat out from under the crumbling pier downstream, started it upriver, hugging the Jersey shore. It seemed to take a long time to push against the current up to the marina. He stayed inshore, in the long shadows of the buildings with the sunset behind them.
    The boat rocked in the wash from a barge. He was tired and didn't want to end up rowing. Now and then the boat's putt-putting engine missed a putt, like an old man's failing heart. And he wondered how long Cronin would be around for him.
    The river oozed past. The field of the Hidden whispered.
    Usually he kept his consciousness of the Hidden bottled up. But being out on the river, in the slow, contemplative living stream, his senses tended to flow out of him, to widen, to reach out...
    Until finally—a face looked up at him, from just under the dark surface of the river.
    He was used to seeing them out here. Lots of guys had been dropped into the river, disposed of, i weighted but alive when the water closed over their head. Funny to see the clean-shaven man in his suit, complete with a wide, checked tie; his hair smoothed back, his features quite intact, his prominent nose not nibbled by fish. His eyes looking at Bleak from under a thin sheet of dirty water. But he wasn't a corpse; only a confused ghost.
    “Pal,” Bleak said, “that tie is way out of fashion. You've been under there too long. You gotta get to a mall.”
    The man's mouth moved. No bubbles came out of it, no sound.
    “Can't hear you, bro,” Bleak said. “Just let go and drift with the stream. Your body's long gone. Just drift, and once you get far enough from the spot where you died, someone'll tell you where to go next.”
    The man sank away, emanating disappointment. Bleak remembered another river ghost, a couple years back, when he'd been out in his cabin cruiser. The perfectly preserved body of a chunky, bald man in a jogging suit, maybe from the 1990s, talking to him. Unheard. He had decided to see what this one had to say, and he'd tuned in to its mind—to its mindless muttering, really. An uncomfortable, tiring, risky process. And he'd heard, “Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him off, he don't have to do nothing. I'm gonna get all the shit for him. My wife took it and sold it in L.A., it's gone, but I'm gonna get some more, I'm gonna replace all seven ounces, he don't have to do nothing. Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him. Tell Buddy... “
    “Buddy already did you,” Bleak had tried to tell him. “Or somebody sent by Buddy. You're already dead. Hey, if you're gonna be a ghost, try to remember yourself slimmer and, like, in a better outfit.” Bleak sometimes tried to kid the ghosts out of their self-centeredness. But they clung to it— though their fixations kept them ghosts.
    “Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him off, he don't have to do nothing. I'm gonna get all the shit for him. My wife...”
    Feeling headachy and sick to his stomach, Bleak had cut the connection, like hanging up on a phone call.
    Remembering the jogging-suit ghost, Bleak shook himself, looking around to reboot his mind. He was really good at keeping bad memories at bay. It was a skill a combat vet learned.
    Bleak looked up from the river, saw that