Strangers

welcome.
        He said, "What the hell are you doing under there?"
        Ginger was filled with self-pity. She realized how she had looked, running crazily through the neighborhood like some demented freak. All dignity had been stolen from her.
        She squirmed toward the man who had spoken to her, grasped the gloved hand he offered, and allowed him to help her slide out from beneath the truck, which proved to be a Mayflower Moving Company van. The rear doors were open. She glanced inside and saw boxes, furniture. The guy who had pulled her out was young, brawny, and dressed in quilted thermal coveralls with the Mayflower logo stitched across the chest.
        "What's going on?" he asked. "Whore you hiding from, lady?"
        As the Mayflower man spoke, Ginger noticed a policeman standing in the middle of the intersection half a block away, directing traffic, where a signal light had failed. She ran toward him.
        The Mayflower man called after her.
        She was surprised she could run at all. She felt as if she were a creature constructed of nothing but aches and pains and chills. Yet she ran with a dreamy effortlessness into the shrieking wind. The gutters were full of icy slush, but the street itself was relatively dry and calcimine-streaked with deicing compounds. Dodging out of the way of a couple of oncoming cars, she even found the strength to call out to the cop as she drew near him. "There's been a man killed! Murder! You've got to come! Murder!" Then, when he started toward her with a look of concern on his broad Irish face, she saw the shiny brass buttons on his heavy, winter-weight uniform coat, and all was lost again. They were not exactly like the buttons on the leather topcoat the killer had been wearing; they were not decorated with a lion passant, but with some other raised figure. But one glimpse sent her thoughts flashing toward remembrance of buttons she had seen then, during the mysterious events at the Tranquility Motel. Some forbidden recollection began to surface, and that pulled the Azrael Trigger.
        As she lost control and ran off into her private darkness, the last thing she heard was her own pathetic cry of despair.
        

    ***
        
        Coldest.
        That morning, at least for Ginger Weiss, Boston was the coldest place on earth. Bitter, polar, piercing, marrow-freezing, the January day induced a glaciation of the spirit as well as the flesh. When the fugue receded, she was sitting on the ground in ice and snow. Her hands and feet were numb, stiff. Her lips were chapped and cracked.
        This time she had taken refuge in the narrow space between a row of well-manicured bushes and a brick building, in a shadowy corner where the angled wall of a bay-windowed tower met a flat portion of the main facade. The former Hotel Agassiz. Where Pablo had his apartment. Where he had been killed. She had come nearly full circle.
        She heard someone approaching. Between the hoary branches of the snow-dressed and ice-laced shrubs, she saw someone climbing over the low wrought-iron fence that separated the front lawn from the sidewalk. She did not see the person himself, merely his booted feet, legs clad in blue trousers, and the flaps of a long, heavy, navy-blue coat. But as he came across the narrow strip of lawn toward the shrubbery, she knew who he was: the traffic cop from whom she had turned and run.
        Fearing yet another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, Ginger closed her eyes.
        Perhaps irreversible psychological damage was a side-effect of the brainwashing she had undergone, an inevitable result of the tremendous and constant stress generated by the artificially repressed memories struggling mightily to make themselves known. Even if she could find another hypnotist to do for her what Pablo had done, perhaps there was no way the block could be broken or the pressure relieved, in which case she was destined to deteriorate further. If she was stricken by three fugues in one morning, what was to prevent three more in the next hour?
        The policeman's boots crunched noisily through the sleetskinned snow. He stopped in front of her. She heard him pressing against the low bushes and parting them to look into her hiding place. "Miss? Hey, what's wrong? What were you shouting about murder? Miss?"
        Maybe she would fall into a fugue and remain there forever.
        "Oh, now, what're you crying about?" the cop