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the car. There was a confusion of embraces: He couldn’t stop touching them, he had to keep reassuring himself that they were alive.
    They were inside the Gilfillans’ house but he didn’t remember getting there. Bradleigh was on the phone. Two ambulance doctors were filling syringes. Ronny sat subdued on the couch with his hands in his lap, holding Jan’s hand. Billy and Roger stood around like funeral mourners, uncertain what to do with their hands. Cops flowed in and out of the house endlessly. A plainclothes sergeant with a notebook and pencil was talking to Roger.
    Mathieson refused sedation and the white-uniformed doctor moved away. Mathieson sat on Roger’s cowhide ottoman right back in the corner of the room with his shoulders wedged against the intersecting walls. Words flew past and he tried to catch them.
    The nurse with Amy glanced at him. He felt her stare and dragged his eyes around. The nurse was young and pretty and had one of those meaningless professional smiles that clicked on whenever anyone looked at her. She was pretending to listen to Amy’s drugged babblings: Amy was flat on the divan, struggling to communicate something.
    A cop lifted back an end of the drape to look outside. Mathieson saw past his arm through the window. He had no reckoning of time: It was after dark but the Gilfillans’ lawn glared with a blaze of television lights. He saw a TV-remote panel truck and a reporter on the lawn talking into a camera.
    The cop dropped the drape back in place and turned toward Mathieson. “Anything I can get you, sir?”
    â€œNo.”
    Bradleigh cupped the phone in his palm and spoke to the cop: “Get him a drink. Straight booze and an ice cube.”
    â€œYes, sir.” The cop moved briskly. Mathieson watched everything; it all swayed around him and never seemed to touch him—he felt weightless.
    Uniformed cops shifted in the room like organisms under a microscope.
    There was a drink in his hand and someone was forcing his arm up toward his mouth. “Come on, drink it.” Bradleigh.
    He took a swallow. He couldn’t taste it. “Glenn—what’s the matter with me?”
    â€œShock. Go on, drink up. You want a coat or a blanket or anything?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œChug-a-lug. Come on, attaboy.”
    The nurse put a blanket over Amy Gilfillan. Mathieson had never seen Amy so pale—like a death mask. She was muttering, scowling with a little-girl frown of concentration.
    Bradleigh was back on the phone. “The hell with that. I want both of them tucked away out of circulation, right now this minute. Arrest them if you have to; I don’t care what they want. Pass it on, all right? … Right. Switch me over to the DAC, will you? … Dan, me again. Did you ask the police to cover L.A. International? All right, let’s try to cover the rest of the area airports too—everything from Burbank and Santa Barbara to San Diego. And get teams out to the New York airports.… What? … Hell, because we know who set this up and they’re from New York.… Maybe not but we’ve got to cover it. … No. No positive make on it. Couple people saw a dark sedan going like hell—one makes it green, the other blue. You know how those are. No make on the motorcycle but what the hell, how many people can tell one motorcycle from another? … No, the car was probably boosted an hour before the hit anyway. We’ll find it abandoned five miles from here. They must have switched cars four times on the way in and out, these guys aren’t tyros. See if you can run a make on Vietnam combat veterans in the New York mobs. They used plastique, they must have learned how somewhere … Frank Pastor what? Jesus H. Christ, doesn’t that just figure. … All right, you’ve got the number here.”
    The alcohol was getting to Mathieson. Jan was sitting on the edge of the ottoman holding his hands.