Strangers

which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its reeking depths. Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down into the drain, dispose of him. Might be a garbage disposal in there, something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away-
        He woke, screaming. He was in his bathroom. He had walked in his sleep. He was at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain. He leapt back from that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.
        Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to the sink and look into it. Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim and a dome-shaped brass stopper. Nothing else, nothing worse.
        The room in his nightmare had not been this room.
        Dominick washed his face and returned to the bedroom.
        According to the clock on the nightstand, it was only two-twenty-five A. M.
        Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing. However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.
        In fact, it might be a sign of improvement. If he remembered his dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him. Then he would be better able to deal with it.
        Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to that strange place in his dream. The bottle of Dalmane was in the top drawer of the nightstand. He was not supposed to take more than one tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn't hurt.
        He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas Regal. With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the Chivas, and returned to bed.
        He was improving. Soon, the sleepwalking would stop. A week from now, he'd be back to normal. In a month, this would seem like a curious aberration, and he'd wonder how he'd allowed it to get the better of him.
        Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance. It was a pleasant feeling, a soft slipping away. But as he floated down into sleep, he heard himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.
        "The moon," he whispered thickly. "The moon, the moon."
        He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words. The moon? "The moon," he whispered again, and then he was gone.
        It was three-eleven A. M., Sunday, December 8.
        

    6.
        

    New York, New York
        
        Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.
        At one o'clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby. He signed in with the receptionist and was given a visitor's pass.
        One would not think the place was a hospital. The public area was tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building's period. There were two small Erté originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s' look.
        It was too damn luxurious. The Ends were unnecessary. A hundred other economies were obvious. But the management felt that image was important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep the annual profit around the hundred percent mark. The patients were of all types - middle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the long-term comatose both young and old - but they all had two things in common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.
        Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price. In spite of huge expenditures of tax money, New York's