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sit tight.
    Driving down the narrow, twisting roads, I opened all the windows to get at some of that storm-sweetened air. It felt good, bracing. I was starting to wake up.
    Pennsylvania is a green state, never greener than after a heavy rain. Trees glisten, leaves studded with tears. Puffs of wind push around the big clouds, sun-spackled, intensely white. The old Appalachian Hills, sloping away before spreading urban tendrils, looking as pristine and timeless as when the first settlers came over four hundred years ago.
    I turned off Grandview and headed down toward the Fort Pitt bridge. Traffic was forming in clusters, soon to be backed up on the highway all the way to the airport.
    I popped a Jimmy Smith CD into the player and cranked up the volume. Organ Grinder’s Swing. With Kenny Burrell on guitar, Grady Tate holding the sticks. For a lapsed Catholic boy, the only Holy Trinity left to believe in.
    I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. My fingers drummed on the wheel in time to the music. I was awake, all right. The surreal, dream-like quality of the past twenty-four hours was gone.
    In its place was an aching clarity about the obscenity of Kevin’s death, and my commitment to doing something about it. Somehow making things right. But first—
    I felt the rhythmic bumps from the steel plates as I drove over the old bridge spanning the Monongahela River. I saw my exit up ahead, to the right.
    I had to smile. Not for the first time, I was driving down to the river to tell my troubles to a crazy man.

Chapter Nine
     
    “So,” he said. “You gonna start talkin’ or what?”
    Noah Frye took another pull from his beer, then went back to noodling at the piano. Built like a bear, he gave equally bear-like grunts as he played, private chortles of delight and encouragement. Like a white Oscar Peterson.
    Out here on the deck of the converted barge, the breeze was cool coming up through the oiled boards. The riverfront bar, called Noah’s Ark, was moored at a bank below 2nd Avenue. Every afternoon before the bar opened, Noah sat out here at his old Baldwin upright and played.
    Occasionally, like today, I joined him.
    “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess you know about—”
    “Yeah, I saw it on the noon news. Never miss it. I got a thing for the weather girl.”
    “Kevin was my patient, Noah. My responsibility.”
    “’Cause he was jumped comin’ out of your office?”
    “Because he was wearing my jacket. He’d been trying to look like me, dress like me…”
    His hands paused above the keys. “So you figure the killer was really after you ?”
    “It’s a real possibility. Cops think so too.”
    “So what can you do about it?”
    “I don’t know. Some thing. I…owe him.”
    Noah shrugged. Just then, a shift in the wind lifted his shirt collar, leaving one flap up. He’d never notice it, nor the way his belt had missed a few loops so that his pants bunched at the waist.
    Noah Frye was a paranoid schizophrenic. Without his meds, he suffered from delusions of persecution and gruesome death. So every day he swallowed 100 milligrams of Thorazine. Followed by a Cogentin chaser to quell the Parkinsonian-like tremors caused by the Thorazine.
    I met Noah eight years ago, when I was working full-time at Ten Oaks. In and out of mental hospitals since his teens, he was a gifted musician who supported himself doing construction work and odd jobs—in between bouts of delusional terror, homelessness, and street violence.
    One night, Noah was standing just inside the clinic’s rear gate when he saw one of the staff shrinks, Dr. Nancy Mendors, being manhandled in the parking lot. Her estranged husband had Nancy backed against the hood of her car. Noah ran over, spun him around, and gave him an elbow smash to the face. The crack of jawbone sounded like a rifle shot.
    After that, Noah assumed a kind of mythic status at the clinic. It was as if he’d become a trustee, instead of just a patient. After a while, you almost