The Darkest Evening of the Year

him—the void where fun had been—made him nervous.
    Since the eerie incident with the drawings in Brian McCarthy’s kitchen, fun had eluded him. He had been moving at his usual fast pace, as always capering gaily—figuratively speaking—along the brink of the abyss, committing crimes as insouciantly as ever; but the magic was gone.
    His life was a novel, a black comedy, a rollicking narrative that mocked all authority, an existential lark. He had just hit a bad chapter, that was all. He needed to turn the page, begin a new scene.
    Maybe the new novel on the nightstand would shift him out of neutral. One of the suitcases contained clothes and personal effects, but the other one was packed with weapons; maybe playing with guns for a while would get him in gear.
    He sat in an armchair in the bedroom, alternately staring at the book and at the suitcase filled with lethal devices.
    He worried that if he tried the book and it didn’t lift him out of his funk, and then if he disassembled and reassembled the weapons with no improvement of mood, he would be at an impasse.
    An impasse was a terrible place to be, a dead end, but in a truly existential life, it should be an impossible place to be. Since only he made the rules by which he lived, he could make new rules if the old ones began to bore him, and off he would go again, zipping along, having fun.
    He was thinking too much, making himself nervous.
    All that mattered were the motion and the act, not any meaning in the motion nor any consequences to the act. No meaning existed; no consequences were important.
    He tried the book. That was his first mistake.

 
    Chapter
48
    A t a few minutes past two in the morning, Amy woke from a dream full of the sound of wings. Her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment she did not recognize her surroundings.
    An end-table lamp draped with a towel served as a night-light.
    Santa Barbara. The motel. They had found accommodations that accepted dogs, one room that had not been taken for the night.
    Brian had finally gotten her into bed; but it was her own bed, one of two in the room. And a watchdog slept with her.
    As she had shaken off sleep, she had thought that the thrumming of wings was in the room, not in the dream. That could not be true because both Brian in the other bed and Nickie beside her remained asleep.
    She remembered nothing of the dream, only the sound of pinions plying the air. In sleep, she must have returned to Connecticut, and the gulls must have been startled into flight yet again.
    According to psychologists and sleep specialists, you could never see yourself die in a dream. You might be in prolonged high jeopardy, but at the penultimate moment, you would wake. Even in dreams, they claimed, the human ego remained too stubborn to admit to its mortality.
    Amy, however, had seen herself die in dreams. Several times, always in that Connecticut night.
    Perhaps subconsciously she had a death wish. That didn’t surprise her.
    On that winter night almost nine years before, she had fought for her life and survived. Then for a while, ironically, she’d had no compelling reason to live.
    In the days immediately after, she wondered why she had fought back. Death would have been easier than living. The pain that nearly tore her apart could have been avoided by submitting to the knife.
    Even in her darkest moments, she would never have committed suicide. Murder included self-destruction.
    Her faith got her through, but not faith alone. Her ability to see patterns in chaos, when others saw more chaos, served her well.
    Patterns implied meaning. No matter how inscrutable the meaning might seem, no matter that an understanding of it might forever elude her, she was encouraged by the perception that meaning existed.
    She read the patterns in life the way other people might read tea leaves and palms and crystal balls. But her interpretation wasn’t guided by a code of superstitions.
    Intuition alone determined for her what the patterns meant and what they suggested she should do. To her way of thinking, intuition was a word for perceptions that were received on a level far below the subconscious. Intuition was seeing with the soul.
    Plugged in and charging on the nightstand, her phone rang. She disliked all the musical tones and the cartoon-voice tones and the raucous sounds with which phones “rang” these days. Hers just burred quietly.
    Surprised to get a call at this hour, she snatched up the phone before it