Hit List

was recent. A few months ago.”
    “Because the period of danger would have begun during the fall.”
    “That’s when it was.” And, without getting into specifics at all, he talked about his trip to Louisville, and how everything had seemed to be going wrong. “And there was a knock on the door of my room,” he said, “and I panicked, which is not like me at all.”
    “No.”
    “I grabbed something”—a gun—“and stood next to the door, and my heart was hammering, and it was nothing but some drunk who couldn’t find his friend. I was all set to kill him in self-defense, and all he did was knock on the wrong door.”
    “It must have been upsetting.”
    “The most upsetting part was seeing how upset I got. That didn’t get my pulse racing like the knock on the door did, but the effects lasted longer. It still bothers me, to tell the truth.”
    “Because the reaction was unwarranted. But maybe you really were in danger, John. Not from the drunk, but from something invisible.”
    “Like what, anthrax spores?”
    “Invisible to you, but not necessarily to the naked eye. Some unknown adversary, some secret enemy.”
    “That’s how it felt. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Do you want to tell me about it?”
    Did he?
    “I changed my room,” he said.
    “Because of the drunk who knocked on your door?”
    “No, why would I do that? But a couple of nights later I couldn’t sleep because of noise from the people upstairs. I had to keep my room that night, the place was full, but I let them put me in a new room first thing the next morning. And that night . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “Two people checked into my old room. A man and a woman. They were murdered.”
    “In the room you’d just moved out of.”
    “It was her husband. She was there with somebody else, and the husband must have followed them. Shot them both. But I couldn’t get past the fact that it was my room. Like if I hadn’t changed my room, her husband would have come after me.”
    “But he wasn’t anyone you knew.”
    “No, far from it.”
    “And yet you felt as though you’d had a narrow escape.”
    “But of course that’s ridiculous.”
    She shook her head. “You could have been killed, John.”
    “How? I kept thinking the same thing myself, but it’s just not true. The only reason the killer came to the room was because of the two people who were in it. They were what drew him, not the room itself. So how could he have ever been a danger to me?”
    “There was a danger, though.”
    “The chart tells you that?”
    She nodded solemnly, holding up one hand with the thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “You and Death,” she said, “came this close to one another.”
    “That’s how it felt ! But—“
    “Forget the husband, forget what happened in that room. The woman’s husband was never a threat to you, but someone else was. You were out there where the ice was very thin, John, and that’s a good metaphor, because a skater never realizes the ice is thin until it cracks.”
    “But—“
    “But it didn’t,” she said. “Whatever endangered you, the danger passed. Then those two people were killed, and that got your attention.”
    “Like ice cracking,” he said, “but on another pond. I’ll have to think about this.”
    “I’m sure you will.”
    He cleared his throat. “Louise? Is it all written in the stars, and do we just walk through it down here on earth?”
    “No.”
    “You can look at that piece of paper,” he said, “and you can say, ‘Well, you’ll come very close to death on such and such of a day, but you’ll get through it safe and sound.’ “
    “Only the first part. ‘You’ll come very close to death’—I could have looked at this and told you that much. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that you’d survive. The stars show propensities and dictate probabilities, but the future is never entirely predictable. And we do have free will.”
    “If those people hadn’t been killed, and if I’d just gone on home—“
    “Yes?”
    “Well, I’d be here having this conversation, and you’d tell me what a close shave I’d had, and I’d figure it for just so much starshine. I’d had a feeling, but I would have forgotten all about it. So I’d look at you and say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and turn the page.”
    “You can be grateful to the man and woman.”
    “And to the guy who shot them, as far as that goes. And to the bikers who made all the noise in the first