The next morning shined dully through his window, and he woke with the same shock he felt when he looked in a mirror and saw a stranger. ‘Good morning,’ he said to one of the kittens – he was pretty sure it was Painter’s Lane, though he hadn’t paid close attention when Sue Ellen told him which was which. He felt a weird joy at seeing the gray sky and hearing the stale heat hiss from the radiator. When he cooked breakfast, his eggs and toast tasted better than usual, and he told them so. Dr P had said some brain injury victims experienced sudden manias as they recovered. He’d never had that happen but wondered if he was feeling one now. He explained to the eggs that, no, happiness was perfectly reasonable after making it through the night.
The ringing of his phone startled him, but when Nancy’s irate voice spoke to him from the other end, he laughed. Sue Ellen was refusing to go to school. He’d upset her yesterday afternoon and now—
‘Put her on, put her on,’ he said. ‘Shut that luscious mouth of yours and give her the phone.’
‘Dad?’ Sue Ellen said when she picked up. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I acted like a bastard yesterday.’
‘You shouldn’t use words like that,’ she said. ‘They upset Mom.’
‘Then I’m sorry for being a dickhead.’
‘That’s better?’ she said.
‘And I need to know, which one is Payday and which is Painter’s Lane?’
When she told him, he swore again because he’d gotten it wrong. They hung up a minute later, having agreed that she would go to school and he would pick her up afterward. He consented to another game of Stump Dad when she warned him that once she hit puberty, she wouldn’t want to play games with him – at all.
As he put on his jacket, he looked out at the street again, and something bothered him about how the cars were parked at the curb – the dirty van in the tow-away zone, the two cars across the street idling with exhaust pumping into the cool morning air – and about the absence of pedestrians. ‘Slipping?’ he asked himself and kept staring at the street. ‘Imagining monsters?’ he said. ‘Nothing and nothing. Peek under the bed and find … kittens.’
He rode downstairs, went outside, and started up the sidewalk.
Then the side panel of the dirty van slid open and three men in green coveralls and black vests poured out, carrying rifles, running toward Kelson. Plainclothes cops with bulletproof vests over their jackets and service pistols in their hands got out of the idling cars and jogged toward him. He’d participated in similar maneuvers dozens of times himself on the narcotics squad.
So he put up his hands and leaned against the cold wall of his building.
One of the cops patted him down and caressed the inside and outside of his legs for guns, then yanked his hands behind him and snapped cuffs on his wrists.
Peters got out of a car Kelson hadn’t noticed from his window. The cop who cuffed Kelson spun him around to face the detective.
The big man peered down at him and said, ‘You’re under arrest for the murders of Christian Felbanks and Raima Minhas.’
Kelson said, ‘But—’
Peters shook his head. ‘Shut the hell up. Is that enough of a caution, or do you want the rest?’