Mr. Murder

going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors' yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
        "He's my husband," Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her as she approached.
        He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught, she wasn't merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
        Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he'd gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.
        No.
        No, that wasn't instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer's imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.
        Life wasn't like fiction. Real stories didn't have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements.
        Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.
        The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
        He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
        Another siren swelled in the distance.
        He was so cold.
        The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
        He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle.
        Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New York, but he had never visited Central Park, those fields and vales were encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and introspection.
        Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.
        Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.
        The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television set, mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background, interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in yellow, and county roads in blue, unpaved dirt and gravel byways were represented by broken black lines. Population centers-precious few in this part of the world-were pink.
        Their vehicle was a red dot of