I can't really hear her, I can just see her lips moving, just make out the words-"I told you so!"

Martha, oh Martha, you hid your heart from me.

Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

So here I am, I'm crouched with Martha Milano and the door of the Easy-Bake oven is slightly ajar, and together we're feeling the warmth of the one little bulb on our faces. I'm lying in the shadow of the blockhouse staring at Brett's blasted skull. I'm slouched slack-jawed in a helicopter and my sister is slapping me, trying to keep me awake. I'm awake. Strange smells are drifting out of the Easy-Bake oven. There are low murmurs somewhere in the back of my brain, people talking in another part of the house.

I open my eyes. The strange white room is dim and candlelit, but my corneas burn with the brightness. I shut my eyes.

Martha, oh Martha, oh why?

She lied. A sin of omission, at the very least.

Where am I? What happened to Nico? The helicopter-the fort-the dog, where's the dog?

She had a lover-Martha did. His name was N. Who was N.? She was untrue. She was the one who broke her marriage vow, who abrogated the contract, who risked her own salvation. There was a man who came into Rock 'n' Bowl just as I was leaving. Norman. Wasn't it? "Mr. Norman is here." "No kidding? Already?"

I'm floating through textured air, bobbing and dipping. The smell is bad now, strong and acrid, like disinfectant, like maybe Martha and I are baking a mop head. Where am I? My God, and how?

Is there anything else you need to tell me, Martha-didn't I say that? Didn't I ask her? Anything else about your husband, your marriage? I try to peer from this distance into Martha's secret heart: She must have felt that it didn't matter, whatever she had done and with whom. She must have thought it irrelevant to the task at hand: her husband had gone, it didn't matter why, and she just wanted him back.

But Martha, oh Martha, he's not coming back.

I see Brett's face again, the empty cratered space and the sharp sickly clean odor is all around me now. I sniff gingerly, my eyes still closed, like a newborn bunny rabbit, tasting air with the dew of the womb still drying on my nose. Bleach? Cleaning fluid?

More murmuring, more quiet voices.

And then suddenly a giant has got hold of my right side and is squeezing, huge brutal fingers digging into my flesh, trying to yank my arm off my torso like a flower petal. I writhe, remembering my injury. I feel like a broken toy, like I've been hurled from a height down onto cobblestones.

"Hank." One of the voices, clear and loud. "Hank."

I've never noticed before how sharp and clinical that name sounds, HANK, how curt and cold, HANK, onomatopoetic for the clink of a metal chain on a metal desk. My mind is moving, fast and strange. "Hank," says the voice again, and it's real; there's a voice in the room. I'm in a room and there's a voice in it, a person in it, standing close by me, saying my name.

I decide to go one eye at a time. I crack the right eye, and the light floods in. Silhouetted in the glare is a face I recognize. Two eyes, each encased in a glass circle, peering down at me like an amoeba on a slide. Above the pair of glasses a slash of bangs, a skeptical irritated face.

"Dr. Fenton?" I whisper. I open the other eye.

"What happened to you?" asks Alice Fenton.

"I was shot."

"Thanks," she says. "That's literally the only part of the story I already know."

"You're upstairs," I tell her.

"Yes. I quit the morgue," she says. "Not enough doctors. Too many people who need help. Plenty of idiots getting themselves shot."

I try to banter back at her but our conversation thus far has already exhausted me. I let my eyes drift closed again. Alice Fenton is a legend. She is or was the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire, and for a long time I idolized her from afar, her technical mastery and perspicacity. A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with her for the first time, and her forensic skill helped me figure out who it was that killed some people. Naomi Eddes, for example, whom I loved. She is-Fenton is a legend.

"Dr. Fenton," I say. "You're a legend."

"That's great," she says. "Go to sleep. We'll talk later."

"Wait. Hold. Wait."

"What?"

"Just one second."

I inhale. I get my eyes to open. I prop myself on my elbows and look around. The bedsheets and blankets are yellow-green in the pale light of the room. I'm in a flimsy powder-blue gown. I'm home. There's an iron arm that once held an in-room television, now angling uselessly out of the wall like a metal tree branch. I need to go to Albin Street. I have to check in with my client. Hey, Martha? I've got a couple questions for you.

Dr. Fenton stands at the side of the bed, a stack of clipboards under one arm, her short compact form quivering with impatience.

"What?" she says again.

"I have to get going."

"Sure," she says. "Nice to see you."

"Oh," I say. "Great."

She waits as I shift my legs toward the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves and thickens inside my body. Visions roll across my brainpan, double time: Martha crying; Brett staring; Nico smoking; Rocky in his office with his feet up. Naomi Eddes unmoving in the darkness where they found her. I stop moving my legs and tuck my chin down into my neck and manage not to vomit.

"Ether," says Dr. Fenton with the barest trace of merriment. "You're coming down out of a cloud of ether. My colleagues and I are down to the dregs of our pain meds. The DOJ promised a shipment of morphine and MS Contin by Friday, along with new fuel for the generators. I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, ether. Everything that's old is new again."

I nod. I focus on not being sick. My arm feels like one big tender bruise. I try to move it, to see if that would hurt it more or less, and I discover that it won't move at all.

"I should say, Hank," says Dr. Fenton, and I note that there is no remaining amusement in her voice, "it is very much within the realm of possibility that you are going to lose that limb."

I listen, numb. Lose the limb. Sure. Of course. My pillow smells like dust, like other men's blood.

Fenton is still talking. "I repaired the blood vessels in the ruptured brachial artery by excising the injured segment and performing a graft. But I-" She stops, gives a quick shake of her head. "I don't know what I'm doing. I was cutting up corpses for the past twenty-five years, and now I've been doing general surgeries for approximately two weeks. Plus, you probably haven't noticed, but it's fucking dark in here."

"Dr. Fenton," I say. "I'm sure you did your best." I reach laboriously across the bed with my good hand and pat her on the arm.

"I'm sure I did, too," she says. "But you still might lose the limb."

I try again to move my legs, and this time I get them a little closer to the edge of the bed. I'm visualizing my swiftest route from here, Concord Hospital at Pleasant Street and Langley Parkway, all the way to Albin Street in North Concord. I'm not cross with you, Martha. I just want to know the truth. The machines around us beep dully, their blinking lights dim and pale, feeble back-up-generator lights. My legs refuse to go any farther for the time being. My arm throbs and my body aches. The world swells up and gently spins around me. I feel myself slipping down, not unpleasantly, back into my cloud of ether. Naomi is standing where Fenton just was, gazing sweetly down at me, and my heart shivers in my chest. Naomi was bald, in life; apparently in the world to come she's growing out her hair and it looks beautiful, like soft moss on a sea-washed stone.

I let my head fall back onto the pillow and the helicopter roars into view, Nico hollering from the hatchway, and then I'm in it, on it, feverish and confused, the wind rushing in and around us, Nico's choppy hair fluttering like a field of black grass. The pilot is nervous and unsure-and young, so terribly young, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing aviator glasses and jerking the levers uncertainly.

Nico and I fought for the whole trip: forty-five minutes of arguing, voices raised, screaming to be heard over the clatter of the copter blades and the deafening wind, telling each other not to be stupid. I told her she had to get out with me in Concord and stay with me at the farmhouse on Little Pond Road until the end, like we'd discussed. Nico refused, urged me instead to stay with her, went on and on about the asteroid, the bombs, hydrodynamic simulations and necessary changes in velocity. And through all of this we're jerking back and forth in the skies over New Hampshire and my fever is climbing and then suddenly were descending haphazardly toward the landing pad atop Concord Hospital.

And as I was clambering out Nico said-what did she say? Something insane. As I stepped uncertainly onto the landing pad and turned around and pleaded with my sister through my haze of fever and pain to remain under my protection until the end-she told me not to worry.

"I'll be fine," she hollered, her hands cupped together. "Just e-mail me."

I wake myself up laughing in the hospital bed. Just e-mail me. The words, the concept, like something from an unfamiliar language: Urdu or Farsi or the Latin of the Romans.

I ease my head back onto the pillow and breathe and try to steady myself a little. I can't believe I let her go.

The insistent noise and fuss we have learned to expect from hospital rooms is absent now. No one charges down the hallway outside, no nurses in scrubs slip in and out of the door to check my fluid levels or bring dinner or adjust the bed. Every once in a while I hear a scream, or the squeaking wheel of a rolling cart, from some other room or from around some corner.

Eventually I get my legs off the bed and my feet on the floor, and I make my way over to where my clothes are heaped in a pile.

My arm is in a sling, wrapped elaborately in bandages and cinched tightly against my side. I find my watch. I find my shoes. I survey my clothing. The pants are wearable, but my blood-soaked shirt and jacket must be left behind, and I will stay in the hospital gown until I can stop at home and change.

After Martha's house. First I'm going to stop at Albin Street and ask Martha a few questions.

Dr. Fenton is at the nurses' station in the hallway, writing rapidly on the top clipboard on her pile. She looks up at me, shambling along the hall toward her, and looks down again.

"So-" I say.

"I get it," she says. "You're going."

From an examination room behind Dr. Fenton there's a steady anguished groaning. From another, someone is saying, "Just take it easy-just take it easy-just take it easy."

"You should stay for twenty-four hours at least," says Fenton. "You need to be observed. You need a course of antibiotics."

"Oh," I say, and look back over my shoulder at the desolate room. "Well, can I get that now?"

"I said you need a course of antibiotics," she says, grabbing her clipboard and striding off. "We don't have any."

Houdini is waiting just outside the main lobby door of Concord Hospital, like a mafia bodyguard stationed at the sickbed of the capo. As soon as I emerge blinking into the parking lot in my pale blue gown he nods at me, I swear to God he does, and off we go.

My watch says it's 11:15, and I know that means 11:15 a.m. because the sun is high and bright as Houdini and I make our way north across Concord. But I don't know what day it is-I literally have no idea. I was dead in the dirt at Fort Riley for who knows how long, and then I was on a helicopter and then I was in a bed on the fourth floor of Concord Hospital floating in and out of ether for years and years.

I walk as fast as I can manage across the city toward Martha's house, my dead arm tight in its harness, sweat dripping down my back and plastering my hospital gown against my spine. Looking around, examining the city after being gone, it's like one of those puzzle pages in a children's magazine: Look at these two pictures and spot what's changed. Down Pleasant Street and then up along Rumford. Walls with new graffiti; cars that had one wheel gone and the hood popped open are now down to the rims all the way around, or the glass of the windshield's been pried out with a crowbar. Or they're actually burning, thick black smoke pouring out of the engine. More houses that have been left behind, front doors yawning wide. Telephone poles made into stumps.

Last week Pirelli's Deli on Wilde Street was bustling, a cheerful violence-free dry goods rummage, with a couple of guys giving haircuts, of all things, in the back. Now the chain grate is pulled down over the doors and windows, and Pirelli stands on the sidewalk scowling, a strip of ammunition across his chest like a bandito.

Houdini is growling as we walk, bounding out ahead of me, his eyes fierce yellow slits. The sun beats on the sidewalks.

"Martha?" I bang on the door with my left hand, pause for a moment, then bang again. "Martha, are you in there?"

The Cavatones' lawn had been the only one mowed, but now it's starting to catch up with the others, wildness creeping in, the trim green fuzz growing out like uncut hair. My arm pulses suddenly, painfully, and I wince.

I knock again, waiting to hear those locks being thrown open, one by one. Nothing. I shout. "Hey, Martha?"

Across the street a window blind snaps open, a wary face peers out. "Excuse me?" I call. "Hey-" The blinds shoot closed again. A dog barks somewhere, down the street, and Houdini twitches his small head around in search of the challenger.

My fist is raised to knock again when the door jerks open and a strong hand grabs my wrist, and somebody in one quick motion drags me inside and kicks the door closed behind me. I'm pushed against a wall, my right arm sending out spasms of pain, and there's hot breath in my face. A tumble of hair, a crooked chin.

"Cortez," I say. "Hello."

"Oh, shit," he says, the good-humored voice, the laughing eyes. "I know you."

Cortez lets go of my wrist, steps back, embraces me like I'm an old friend he's picking up at the airport. "Policeman!"

His staple gun is dangling from his right hand, but he leaves it angled down, pointed at the ground. Houdini is out on the porch, barking like a madman, so I step over and open the door, let him in.

"Where did you come from?" Cortez asks. "Why are you dressed for the mental asylum?"

"Where's Martha?"

"Oh, hell," he says, and flings himself into the Cavatones' fat leather Barcalounger. "I thought you were going to tell me."

"She's not here?"

"I don't lie, Policeman."

Cortez watches with amusement while I search the small house, working my way through the closets of the living room, opening all the ones in the bedroom and peering under the bed, looking for Martha or evidence of Martha. Nothing. She's gone, and her clothes are gone: her dressers empty, wooden hangers dangling on her side of the closet. Brett's sidearm is also gone, the SIG Sauer he left behind for his wife's protection when he went off to play crusader in the woods. In the kitchen, sunbeams still play across the warm wood table, and the brass kettle sits happily in its place on the stove. But there's no sign of Martha, and my case has come full circle: It's a missing person, just a different person than before.

I return to the living room and point an angry finger at Cortez.

"I thought you were supposed to be watching her?"

"I was," he says, the staple gun lying across his lap like a kitten. "I am."

"So?"

"So, I failed," he says, and looks up at the ceiling with theatrical misery, as if to ask what kind of God could allow this to happen. "I absolutely failed."

"Okay," I say, "okay," patting my pockets for a notebook, but of course I have no notebook-I have no pockets-and my right hand is my writing hand. "Just tell me the story."

Cortez needs no prompting. He stands, gestures animatedly while he talks.