He didn't talk about most issues, large or small. He definitely didn't ask how other people felt about them. He avoided even thinking about them. He just set himself a task, from cooking dinner to running an investigation to making love with Sammie, and then he did it. The trick was to get down that corridor between conception and goal without wasting time, without opening doors along the way, and without suffering fools who might try to make him do so. That's how he'd finally dealt with the nightmares after 'Nam, how he'd beaten off the alcohol, and how he'd learned to cope with the crippled arm. It's how he'd partitioned off what he'd done to Mary and what the attending loss of self-respect had cost him.

He'd finally concluded at the diner that he would therefore cut his ties to Vermont and to Joe Gunther, Sammie Martens, and the hope they represented. That way, if he didn't survive this trip down memory lane, if he slipped and was dragged under as was already beginning to happen, at least he'd have gone down alone, leaving behind only the memory of the world's most irascible colleague, friend, and lover.

And there was a hardheaded correctness to this that he willed himself to believe: He'd be goddamned if he was going to be the kind of excess emotional baggage for others that he'd always claimed others were for him.

However, as he crossed the Harlem River on the Henry Hudson Bridge with his pager off, and passed the very neighborhood he grew up in and where his mother still lived, he knew in his gut there would be enough baggage to go around for everybody.

And it wouldn't be long in coming. The visit to Bellevue only aggravated the roiling anxieties Willy was trying so hard to tamp down. Even with a recent and extensive remodeling, the huge hospital and the familiar journey to the morgue reached up like a stifling fog to constrict his throat.