Mr. Murder

it a slab of sky-like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope, separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.
        He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound vehicles.
        Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him, making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he feels compelled to explore.
        He dresses, and packs his clothes.
        Outside, the motor courtyard and walkways are deserted.
        Faced toward the rooms, cars wait for morning travel. In a nearby vending-machine alcove, a soft-drink dispenser clicks-clinks as if conducting repairs upon itself. The killer feels as if he is the only living creature in a world now run by-and for the benefit of-machines.
        Moments later, he is on Interstate 70, heading toward Topeka, the pistol on the seat beside him but covered with a motel towel.
        Something west of Kansas City calls him. He doesn't know what it is, but he feels inexorably drawn westward in the way that iron is pulled toward a magnet.
        Strange as it might be, none of this alarms him, and he accedes to this compulsion to drive west. After all, for as long as he can remember, he has gone places without knowing the purpose of his trip until he has reached his destination, and he has killed people with no clue as to why they have to die or for whom the killing is done.
        He is certain, however, that this sudden departure from Kansas City is not expected of him. He is supposed to stay at the motel until morning and catch an early flight out to… Seattle.
        Perhaps in Seattle he would have received instructions from the bosses he cannot recall. But he will never know what might have happened because Seattle is now stricken from his itinerary.
        He wonders how much time will pass before his superiors-whatever their names and identities-will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?
        At two o'clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.
        With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he's muttering to himself, "I need, I need." This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.
        "I need… to be… I need to be… I need to be…"
        As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.
        "I need to be… to be… I need to be someone." At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By "to be someone," he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words, he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties.
        Someone who has more substance than a ghost.
        The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile.
        He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.
        Beyond the horizon, in a town he can't yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose.
        And a future in which he can be like other people accepted.
        The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.
        Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls' room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.
        Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He'd had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or