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plane, with blood dripping onto her collar from the ends of her zero-tolerance gray hair. Clay wasn’t a bit surprised that the last one standing had turned out to be the lady who looked like a librarian or Latin teacher a year or two away from a gold watch. He had taught with his share of such ladies, and the ones who made it to that age were, more often than not, next door to indestructible.
    He opened his mouth to say something like this to Tom—in his mind it sounded quite witty—and what came out was a watery croak. His vision had come over shimmery, too. Apparently Tom McCourt, the little man in the tweed suit, wasn’t the only one having trouble with his waterworks. Clay swiped an arm across his eyes, tried again to talk, and managed no more than another of those watery croaks.
    “That’s okay,” Tom said. “Better let it come.”
    And so, standing there in front of a shop window filled with old books surrounding a Royal typewriter hailing from long before the era of cellular communications, Clay did. He cried for Power Suit Woman, for Pixie Light and Pixie Dark, and he cried for himself, because Boston was not his home, and home had never seemed so far.
     
    6
    Above the Common Boylston Street narrowed and became so choked with cars—both those wrecked and those plain abandoned—that they no longer had to worry about kamikaze limos or rogue Duck Boats. Which was a relief. From all around them the city banged and crashed like New Year’s Eve in hell. There was plenty of noise close by, as well—car alarms and burglar alarms, mostly—but the street itself was for the moment eerily deserted. Get under cover, Officer Ulrich Ashland had said. You’ve been lucky once. You may not be lucky again.
    But, two blocks east of Colonial Books and still a block from Clay’s not-quite-fleabag hotel, they were lucky again. Another lunatic, this one a young man of perhaps twenty-five with muscles that looked tuned by Nautilus and Cybex, bolted from an alley just in front of them and went dashing across the street, hurdling the locked bumpers of two cars, foaming out an unceasing lava-flow of that nonsense-talk as he went. He held a car aerial in each hand and stabbed them rapidly back and forth in the air like daggers as he cruised his lethal course. He was naked except for a pair of what looked like brand-new Nikes with bright red swooshes. His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. He hit the far sidewalk and sidewheeled west, back toward the Common, his butt clenching and unclenching in fantastic rhythm.
    Tom McCourt clutched Clay’s arm, and hard, until this latest lunatic was gone, then slowly relaxed his grip. “If he’d seen us—” he began.
    “Yeah, but he didn’t,” Clay said. He felt suddenly, absurdly happy. He knew that the feeling would pass, but for the moment he was delighted to ride it. He felt like a man who has successfully drawn to an inside straight with the biggest pot of the night lying on the table in front of him.
    “I pity who he does see,” Tom said.
    “I pity who sees him,” Clay said. “Come on.”
     
    7
    The doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn were locked.
    Clay was so surprised that for a moment he could only stand there, trying to turn the knob and feeling it slip through his fingers, trying to get the idea through his head: locked. The doors of his hotel, locked against him.
    Tom stepped up beside him, leaned his forehead against the glass to cut the glare, and peered in. From the north—from Logan, surely—came another of those monster explosions, and this time Clay only twitched. He didn’t think Tom McCourt reacted at all. Tom was too absorbed in what he was seeing.
    “Dead guy on the floor,” he announced at last. “Wearing a uniform, but he really looks too old to be a bellhop.”
    “I don’t want anyone to carry my fucking luggage,” Clay said. “I just want to go up to my room.”
    Tom made an odd little snorting sound.