REAL TIME

THE TROUBLE STARTED FOR DEL AND LIZ WHEN HE INVESTED MONEY in an oil well that pumped nothing but saltwater. After that, it was a cattle breeding operation that produced diseased calves, a Florida orange grove that disappeared into a sinkhole. Finally, he lost so much money she had to sell the jewelry she had inherited from her mother—the brooches, necklaces, and rings Liz liked to call her “pretties.”

“Ah, my pretty,” she said the last time she wore any of her jewelry. She sat at her vanity table and lifted a strand of pearls from its velvet-lined case. She held the strand to her throat and asked Del to fasten it. He kneeled behind her and worked the delicate clasp with his clumsy fingers. Then he kissed her neck, and she drew away in mock annoyance. “Cool it, buster,” she said. “Dinner first and then dessert.”

Each Saturday, for years, they had gone to the Top Hat Supper Club and maybe later to Peg’s Piano Bar before driving home, Liz sliding over to sit close to Del, letting her hand come up to stroke the back of his neck.

“Imagine,” she had said one night. “I’m the age my mother was when she died, fifty-one. I’ve outlived my looks. Oh, don’t try to tell me it isn’t so. I need all the help I can get to make myself attractive. Thank God I’ve got my pretties.”

There were diamonds and sapphires and emeralds and amethysts. When she finally had to sell them, she told Del not to worry. Just a string of rotten luck, that was all. Couldn’t be helped. Chin up. But from time to time, he caught her staring at him, and he saw the heat in her eyes, and he had to look away.

One night, he left a window open. It was a window on the front porch near the door, and sometime in the night he woke and remembered the window and went downstairs to close it. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the front door opened, and a man stepped inside.

Del’s first move was toward him, and the man stumbled backward, turned, and fled. “Get out,” Del thought he was shouting at the man, but later, with a laugh, Liz told him the only sound from his mouth had been a goofy, guttural lowing—one of the funniest things she had ever heard. “Like a demented cow,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on. I thought, what in the world.”

She hadn’t heard the sound of the door unsticking from its rubber seal, or smelled the reek of cigar smoke clinging to the intruder, or seen his shadowy form fill the doorframe as suddenly as a nightmare. Del wanted to share all of those details with her, but the two of them were able to manage such a pleasant, what-the-hell mood as they waited for the police, he didn’t dare disturb it.

So he went along with her kidding that he had left himself “open” to criminals because of all those letters he wrote to prisoners in New York, Alabama, California, even there in Illinois to Vandalia and Marion and Menard. He got the convicts’ names from pen pal ads in a magazine called Real Time, a tabloid he had discovered when he still worked at the post office. Now he carried on regular correspondence with men named Clifford, Michael, Donald, even though Liz told him it was nutso to think anything he had to say to those jailbirds could possibly matter. She liked to give the convicts nicknames: “Dago,” “Honey-Boy,” “Chop.” She decided to call the man who had broken into their house “Sneaky Pete.”

“That’s not very intimidating,” Del said. “He deserves a scarier name than that.”

“You were the scary one,” she said. “You should have heard yourself. Mooing your head off. What a scream.”

She told the story again and again, to their friends, even to strangers in restaurants and grocery stores. And when she reached the part about the noise Del had made, she put her hand on his shoulder or his wrist, and she said in a coaxing voice he loved, “Go on, sweetie. Show them how you did it.”

He threw himself into it, thankful that Liz was being good-humored about the fact that he had left the window open. He made the garbled noise deep in his throat, revised it each time, and turned it into the bellow that would bring the most laughs from those who heard it.

“That’s it,” Liz would say, hugging him. “Oh, sweetie. That’s rich.”

Late one afternoon, on the steps outside the post office, he found a set of keys. His first thought was to pass on by. He was carrying a stack of envelopes he had to mail before the post office closed, and since the break-in and his own complicity in it, he could barely imagine becoming a witness now to someone else’s careless mistake.

Then he noticed a tarnished whistle on the key ring, the kind a woman might carry for safety, and he got the picture of this woman, frantic, afraid that some lunatic might find her keys and somehow, though the chances were nearly impossible, figure out where she lived.

There were no women inside the post office. In fact, there were no customers at all, only the postmaster—“The Ogre,” Liz called him, because after Del had hurt his knee, the postmaster had taken him off his route and put him on the night shift, where he sorted mail under the watchful eye of a supervisor.

Del had missed being out on his route, where he could make his own decisions. If he wanted to duck into the Uptown Café for a cold drink, he could, and if someone on his route wanted to make small talk, he was glad to oblige. Sometimes the elderly residents asked him to help them with some chore, and he would go inside their houses and change furnace filters, open jars, raise storm windows. But then one day he stepped off a curb, landed on a pebble, and twisted his knee. He tried to explain to Liz what the night work did to him. He told her about the frenetic pace of the sorting machines, their loud clackety-clack, and the odd feeling of working under the fluorescent lights, the windows dark all around him. It made him feel like he had left the living and would never return.

“No one talks,” he told her. “Everything’s happening so fast, and there’s all that noise. We walk around like zombies.”

“Give it a chance,” she said. “Don’t jump the gun.”

But soon he decided to opt for early retirement, and then, too much time on his hands, he started risking cash on dicey business schemes.

The postmaster was counting money. He had a handful of fives, and he gave each bill a tug that made it pop before he slapped it down on the counter.

“These keys,” Del said, but then the postmaster held up his hand and furrowed his brow, making it clear he was engaged in important business and that Del should wait.

The postmaster wore mutton-chop sideburns and a thick-banded Masonic ring that clanked against the counter every time his hand came down. He smelled too strongly of cologne, an alpine scent Del supposed would be described as “rugged.” He watched the postmaster wrap the stack of fives with thick rubber bands, stretching each one back and snapping it to make sure it could be trusted.

“So, Del,” the postmaster finally said. “Liz says you had some excitement over at your place the other night.” He snugged the stack of fives away in a cash bag. “You should have closed the window. I check all my windows and doors every night before I turn in. Regular as clockwork.”

Del closed his hand around the keys he had found, and thought how small he would feel now if he had to turn them over to the postmaster. So he put the keys in his pants pocket and asked for a roll of stamps.

“Plenty of time for letter writing now, hey Del?” the postmaster said. “You’re living the life of Riley.”

Before he left the post office, Del took a spiral notepad from his shirt pocket, and with the Cross ballpoint he had always carried with him on his route, he printed, in his neat script, FOUND. KEYS. TO CLAIM: CALL 595-0819. He tacked the note to the bulletin board in the entryway, knowing it wasn’t the best way of handling the situation, but the only one that suited him at the time.

There were two keys on the ring, and Del could see from the pattern of the teeth that they were identical though one of them was newer, a duplicate of shiny gold. The other, its nickel plating dull and scratched, had a slight bend in its shaft, and Del imagined someone had been careless with it. He ran his finger along the crooked shaft and found himself suddenly undone with regret, overcome with remorse for all the times he had disappointed Liz. He meant to go home that instant and tell her how sorry he was that he had become the kind of man, unwise and ineffectual, she could turn into a piece of gossip, the boob in an anecdote told to someone like the postmaster.

But when he got there, she was gone, and standing alone in the quiet house, he thought again of the woman who had lost the keys and how upset she must be. He wished he’d had the courage to leave them with the postmaster in case the owner returned—perhaps even that afternoon, though the post office had been open only a few minutes more. Now it was too late.

Del hated being alone in the house. He hated the beeps and codes of the alarm system they had had installed after the break-in. He hated the wrought-iron grates over the windows and the way they darkened the rooms. He had insisted on the alarm and the grates and an answering machine so they could screen their calls, anything he could think of to make him feel safe. But still the slightest noise could spook him: a knock at the door, the phone ringing, a tree branch scraping across the roof.

Liz had told him to relax, but he believed she secretly enjoyed his anxiety, contributed to it, even, by opening windows and setting off the security alarm, or picking up the phone on the first ring, or answering the door without first looking through the peephole to see who was on the other side. He imagined she was glad, after he had squandered so much money on foolhardy investments, that he was finally being cautious, finally afraid to take a chance.

It was late when she came home, long past the hour when they would have normally eaten their dinner. She was carrying a cardboard pizza box from Caesar’s, and the security alarm was beeping, the signal that they had thirty seconds to punch in their code and disarm it.

“Beep, beep, beep,” Liz called out on her way to the kitchen with the pizza. “Beep, beep, beep.”

“The code,” Del said, but she was already opening cabinets and drawers, rattling dishes and silverware, and trying to tell him something about a trip she had made to a Super 8 motel.

He punched in their code, 1964, the year they had gotten married, but his fingers were too fast, and it didn’t take. He had to start again, and all the while he imagined time was almost out, and the alarm, its blaring siren, was about to sound. But it didn’t. Finally, the system accepted the cancellation code. The beeping stopped in time for him to hear Liz say, “Oh, it might have been risky, but I did it anyway.”

“Did what?” Del walked up to the breakfast counter and sat down on one of the rattan stools.

Liz tossed two saucers onto the counter. “You haven’t been listening to me,” she said. “Not a word.”

She raised her head to look at him, and he noticed, then, the flames of rouge scoring her cheekbones, and the scarlet lipstick, and the lavender eye shadow. Her hair had been fixed in some way that made it look like the wild hair he saw on young girls, a tangled mop of ropy strands, shiny with gel.

“For Pete’s sake,” he said, thinking that if he had met her in a foreign land where he wouldn’t have been expecting to see anyone he knew, he might have walked right by her, just for an instant, before he realized who she was.

“Like it?” She gave her head a shake.

She looked, he hesitated to say—and he knew, too late, he had made this clear to her with his silence—sluttish. She looked like the women on his route, the ones past their primes, who tried too hard to look young and provocative. “Desperate women,” Liz had always called them. One of them, a home economics teacher, ended up strangled by an ex-boyfriend, and Liz had dubbed the incident “Betty Crocker Croaked.”

She put a slice of pizza on a saucer. “Willum said it would float your boat.”

“William?”

“Will-um,” she said. “He’s the photographer who did my shoot.”

She had gone to the Super 8, where a company called Private Pics had been offering boudoir photos. She told Del how she had gone into a room where a girl had styled her hair and “done her face,” and into another room where she had chosen an outfit. There had been silky peignoirs and feather boas and, for the especially daring, g-strings and garter belts.

“What do you think I wore?” she asked Del. “Go ahead. Guess.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She licked tomato sauce from her finger. “You’ll see,” she told him, “when the photos come.”

After she had chosen the outfit, she had gone into yet another room, where Willum, the photographer, had been waiting with his cameras, and his cloth-draped platforms, and his backdrops of lace and velvet and mirrors.

“Just the two of you?” Del said.

“That’s right.”

“Were you afraid?”

Liz put her hands on her hips and stared at him. “I say live a little, sweetie.”

The phone on the breakfast counter rang, and Liz started to answer it.

“No,” Del put his hand over hers. “Let the machine get it.”

They listened to the caller’s voice. It was raspy and severe, but nervous, too, clearly a young boy who was trying to be menacing but wasn’t quite succeeding. With great deliberation, a pause between each word, he said, “This…is…a…prank…call.”

“What kind of joke is that?” Del said.

Liz was laughing. “He said it’s a prank call. What a hoot. He’s trying so hard to be mean, but all he can do is tell us it’s a prank.”

“I don’t think there’s anything funny about it.” Del pressed the delete button and erased the message. “That takes nerve.”

Liz slapped her hand down on the counter. “Don’t tell me you’re spooked by that.”

“I didn’t say I was spooked.”

“Del, it’s just a kid.”

They were eating their pizza when the phone rang once, and then went still. A few minutes later, it happened again.

“It’s that kid,” Del said. “He’s one-ringing us.”

“So, what’s it hurt? Sooner or later, he’ll get tired of it.”

“I wish I knew who that kid was. If I knew where he lived, I’d do something.”

“What?” Liz said, her voice steeled with challenge. “What would you do?”

Del realized that whatever he said, he would appear foolish, a coward picking on a kid.

The phone rang again, and Liz reached across the breakfast counter and unplugged the line from the jack. “If it bothers you so much, that’s all you have to do.” She got up and went into the living room to unplug the phone there, and then moved upstairs, where Del knew she was doing the same to the one in their bedroom. When she returned, she was smiling. She sat down on her stool and spread her napkin over her lap. “There,” she said. “He can’t bother you now. Happy?”

Del was thinking about Liz, scantily dressed, posing for a strange man in a motel room.

He imagined her telling him, this Willum, about the night of the break-in and how her lamebrain husband had left a window open so the burglar could waltz right in.

“I suppose you told him the story,” Del said. “That photographer. He probably got a kick out of your idiot husband.”

Del could imagine Willum’s smirk, his bemused chuckle. What a shame, he had probably been thinking as he studied Liz through the camera’s lens, a woman with such spunk stuck with a dolt like Del.

“No,” Liz said. “I didn’t tell him.” “You didn’t tell him?”

Now it all seemed even sadder to Del, the fact that Liz had been unable to speak of him. He wanted to tell her what the convicts had taught him in their letters, how easy it was to lose the lives they once thought they would have forever. “Some nights, I dream I’m a boy again.” He could recall bits and pieces from the letters he had read. “I slept on ironed sheets.” “My mother made French toast for breakfast.” “I had a collie dog named Scout.”

Early on, he had tried to read parts of the letters to Liz, but she had pooh-poohed them. “Please,” she said. “What a snow job. They’re yanking your chain.”

Deep down, he imagined that was the case, and though it shamed him to be the convicts’ patsy, he couldn’t resist the small, clear truth in all their stories: once they had been different people, perhaps no more loved or hopeful than they were now, but, at the least, innocent. They hadn’t stolen yet, or assaulted, or killed. There had been this time when they had the chance to live regular, decent lives, and that was the time Del tried to remind them of in his letters. He wrote of ordinary things—the scent of a wood fire, the sound of rain dripping from leaves, the white blossoms of pear trees in the spring—all the things he missed from his days on the mail route.

And when the convicts asked, he sometimes sent money so they could know some small pleasure: candy, cigarettes, perhaps a fresh apple bought in the prison commissary.

Then there were the ones like the Korean boy, Kim Ye, who claimed he’d been convicted of a murder he hadn’t committed and waited now on death row at the state penitentiary in Nebraska. If he could raise enough money to secure competent representation, he would prove his innocence in the appeal case. “Mr. Del,” he had written, “I could not do this thing they say. Won’t you help to save me?”

Del was sitting at the desk in the living room writing Kim Ye a check for five hundred dollars when Liz came in to plug in the phone. She put her hands on Del’s shoulders and gave them a sharp squeeze. He heard her sigh. “Oh, Del,” she said, her voice weary with disappointment, and he knew it was useless to try to explain.

Then the phone rang. Liz took her hands from Del’s shoulders. The phone rang again and again.

“All right,” Del finally said. “I’ll answer it.”

The man on the other end of the line sounded like one of those late-night talk radio hosts, his voice low-pitched and soothing. “Chief,” he said, “I’ve been trying to get you. Two hours I’ve been trying.”

“There’s been a problem here,” Del said. “A screw-up with our phones.”

“You get a problem, chief, you fix it.”

“Things are all right now. We’re back in the pink.”

“All right for you,” the man said. “But me? I’m in Dutch.”

“Who are you?” Del asked. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“Everything, chief. You’ve got my keys.”

For a moment, Del was disappointed that the owner of the keys wasn’t a woman, as he had first imagined, an anxious woman he had planned to reassure by returning her keys. But then he heard something new in the man’s voice, a hint of desperation—“tell me where you live”—and he knew the man was in something up to his ears and that Del was the one between him and whatever it was.

“You’re lucky I’m the one who found them,” Del said.

“All right. Yes, I’m lucky. Now tell me. Please. Where do you live?”

After he hung up the phone, Del told Liz about the keys and the man who was coming to claim them.

“Coming here?” Liz said.

“That’s right.” Del took the keys from his pocket, tossed them into the air and caught them. He shook his fist as if he were rattling dice. “We’ve got what he needs.”

“A visitor,” said Liz. “Goodness, there’s been no one but us in this house since the night Sneaky Pete broke in.”

“We don’t need to talk about that anymore,” said Del. “That’s ancient history.”

But it was the first thing she told the man, and she told it all, the part about the window Del had left open, the goofy noise he had made when Sneaky Pete stepped into their house. They were standing just inside the doorway, and Del said to her, “He doesn’t want to hear that. God, Liz. Don’t be a pain. He’s just here to pick up his keys.”

“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s do it together.” She lifted her head, stretched out her neck, and bellowed. “Was it like that, Del?”

“All right,” he said. “That’s enough.”

She clapped her hands together and laughed. She shook those ropy strands of hair that didn’t seem to Del like her hair at all. Then she said to the man, “Isn’t that a scream?”

The man was thin with a shaved head just starting to ash over with stubble. There was a bruise on one of his cheekbones, and above it, a streak of blood muddied the white of his eye. He winked that eye at Liz. “Sis, that’s fine. I need a good laugh. I tell you, I’ve been on the skinny side of paradise quite a good little bit.”

“Trouble?” Liz said.

“Sis, like you don’t know.”

It was his wife, he said. One morning, she bumped her head on a cabinet door. “Just a tap,” he said. “She didn’t give it another thought. A few weeks later? She’s telling me she can hardly see out of her left eye. ‘Sonny,’ she tells me, ‘it’s like someone pulled a curtain over half of my eye.’ Now she’s having surgery tomorrow. Detached retina.”

“All because of a little bump?” Liz said.

Sonny nodded. “Like I told you. Just a tap.”

“That was enough,” Del said. He knew how little it took to throw everything out of whack. He remembered stepping from the curb that day on his mail route and feeling the small lump of the pebble beneath his foot. For a moment, he balanced on it—then it rolled, and his ankle turned, and his knee twisted, and he heard the tendon break with a pop.

Sonny reached up to the security alarm’s control panel on the wall beside him and traced his finger lightly over the keys. Then he turned back to Del and winked again. “Life can get strange. Can’t it, chief? You think you’re just rolling along, and then out of nowhere there’s something you didn’t expect. Like this joker who broke into your house. He saw that open window and thought he’d take a chance. Now you’re all closed in here.”

“Yes,” said Liz. She put her hand on Sonny’s arm and gave it a squeeze. “Closed in. That’s exactly how I feel.”

Del handed the keys to Sonny, then, just so Sonny’s arm would move and Liz’s hand would slip away from it.

“I was on my way to the hospital.” Sonny curled his fingers around the keys. “I stopped by the post office to pick up a package. Then I was going to make a stop at the storage unit I keep out on University Drive.”

“ELF Storage,” Liz said.

“That’s right,” said Sonny. “The ‘S’ is missing on the sign.” Del cleared his throat. “Why do you need a storage unit?” “Business,” said Sonny. “I’m a businessman.” “Del knows all about business,” Liz said. “Don’t you, Del? Del’s an investor.”

“A man with money,” Sonny said.

“Money?” said Liz. “Del’s thrown it away by the fistfuls.”

Sonny put the keys in his pocket and then reached out his hand to Del. “Put her there,” he said. “Chief, this is your lucky night.”

His business, as Sonny explained it, involved wrapping people with bandages. “Head to foot,” he said. “Even your face. Just like a mummy. It’s all done with these plastic bandages soaked in a special mineral solution. Forgive me for not revealing the ingredients, but I can’t give away my secret.” The objective of the wrap was to reduce fat cells and the toxins and fluid around them. “Squeezing out the poison. When my wife had it done in California, she lost fourteen inches all around. I’m going to call my salon Suddenly Slender.”

Del could remember as a kid standing in a doorway, stretching his arms out to the sides, and pressing against the jamb until his muscles gave out and started to tingle. When he stepped back, his arms, which he could no longer feel, lifted into the air as if they were filled with helium. Now he could imagine the body wrap Sonny had described—the tight bandages and the incredible lightness customers would feel once they were released.

“This can be a real moneymaker,” Del said.

“You’ve got that right,” said Sonny. “This is going to be killer. That is, if my wife doesn’t kill me first.” Since yesterday, she had lain in a hospital bed, only on her right side, so the corner of the retina in her left eye could fold back into place before her surgery. “She’s been waiting for me, and now I’m afraid she’s never going to believe why I’m late.”

“Why wouldn’t she believe you?” Del said.

“Long story. Let’s just say I’ve been late before. The thing about this detached retina is, it’s my chance to finally prove I can be dependable.”

“We could help you,” Liz said. “We could go to the hospital with you, and Del could tell your wife how he found your keys.”

“Would you do that, chief?”

“Sure,” Liz moved over to Del and slipped her arm around his waist. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the forehead. “Won’t you, Del?”

He thought of Kim Ye and how he claimed on the night of the murder he had just happened to pass by the alley where later the woman’s body was found, and someone driving past had seen him. “Wrong place, wrong time, Mr. Del,” he had written. “A minute early, a minute late—no problem.”

Even if Kim Ye was lying, Del couldn’t help but marvel over the mesh of movement and time, and how only one second, given the proper witness, could mean salvation or doom.

He kissed Liz on the cheek and tasted the oil of her makeup. “Glad to,” he said. “Sure thing. Whatever I can do to help.”

Sonny’s panel truck, an old Ford Econoline, was parked in front of Del and Liz’s house. The streetlight was shining through the windshield, and Del could see a pair of panties—baby blue lace—hanging from the rearview mirror. The top of the dashboard was littered with tools: screwdrivers, pliers, a carpet knife.

Liz was chattering away, talking too loudly, the way she had to the police officer the night of the break-in. “Del can tell your wife about the keys,” she said. “And then I’ll explain how we unplugged our phones and you couldn’t get through.”

Del could see she had concocted this plan, both of them working together to help smooth things out between Sonny and his wife.

But Sonny didn’t look pleased. He ran his hand over his shaved head. “You told me there was a problem with the phone,” he said to Del.

“It was this kid,” Del tried to explain. “He was one-ringing us. You know. Being a pest.”

“So you were being a snob.”

“No,” Del said. “We just wanted some quiet.”

“Now I’m in Dutch.” Sonny slapped the side of the panel truck. “All because you were a stuck-up SOB. Goddamn it, chief. You’ve put me in a bind.”

“Don’t worry,” Liz told him. “Calm down. We’re going to help you. We’re going to get in our car right now, Del and me, and we’re going to follow you to the hospital, and we’re going to take care of everything.”

“Okay,” said Sonny. “Right. You’re going to follow me.”

That’s what they did. Out Bonnie Brae, then right on University. Del kept his eyes on Sonny’s panel truck—the dull chrome of its bumper, the two squares of glass in its back doors. “Well, I’m glad we can do this,” Liz said.

“Yes,” said Del. “It’s the least we can do.”

“His poor wife.” Liz tilted her head to the side and held it there. “Imagine having to lie on one side so long. I’d go nuts.”

“Healing takes a lot of patience,” Del told her.

“I don’t know if I could do it.”

“You’d do it because you’d want to be you again.”

He was about to try to explain to her why he had shouted at the burglar the way he had, but then Sonny’s panel truck slowed and his turn signal started to blink, and Del, who had gotten too close, had to slam on his brakes.

Liz pitched forward and caught herself by grabbing onto the dash. “Del,” she said, “be careful.”

Sonny turned his panel truck into the lot of ELF Storage, and Del followed because it was what he had promised to do, and from here on, he had decided he was going to be the kind of man people could count on. He remembered all the times he and Liz had driven by and joked about the missing S in the sign, and how one day—he couldn’t recall when—they had stopped joking, the sign just as familiar as any other they expected to see.

So now it didn’t seem unusual to be driving through the gravel lot, turning down an aisle flanked by rows of storage sheds with red sectioned fronts that could be raised like garage doors.

Sonny stopped his panel truck at the end of the aisle, got out, and came back to the car. He motioned for Del to roll down his window. “Sorry for the detour.” Sonny rested his arms on the car door and leaned in toward Del. “I just happened to think I needed to load up some cartons of that mineral solution. Heavy suckers, chief. Can you give me a hand?”

“But your wife,” Del said.

“We’ll just be a minute. Besides, she’s not going anywhere.”

Liz put her hand on the back of Del’s neck and stroked him the way she had always done when they drove home on Saturday nights after dinner and dancing and maybe a nightcap at Peg’s Piano Bar. Sometimes he would take the long way home—down Riverside and out Bellemeade until it curved into Bonnie Brae—just so he could have her there beside him a few minutes longer, so he could feel her hand on his neck, breathe in the scent of her perfume, and catch from time to time the exciting glint of gold from a necklace or pendant or earring as the car slipped through the soft glow of the streetlights.

“Go ahead, Del,” she said. “Take a look at Sonny’s operation. It might be just the winner you’ve been looking for.”

Del noticed she had picked up Sonny’s soothing way of talking, and it filled him with a great hope. “All right,” he said. “Sure. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

At the storage unit, Sonny took the keys from his pocket and put the shiny gold one into the padlock. He yanked it open and then lifted the door. The sections clacked over the rollers as they folded and disappeared overhead.

“Step on in, chief.” Sonny smacked his hands together. “Make yourself at home.”

Del walked into the storage unit and let his eyes adjust to the dark. A dim glow from the vapor lights outside washed over the walls and the floor, and he could see that the unit was empty except for an Army footlocker at the rear against the wall. Because it comforted him to think it, he imagined Liz had felt a similar uncertainty when she first stepped into Willum’s motel room for her boudoir shots—just a brief panic as she wondered what she was getting herself into.

“You told me there were cartons,” Del said to Sonny.

Sonny chuckled. “You fell for that, didn’t you? I’m not surprised. I could tell right away you were that kind of dope.”

“No body wraps?” Del said.

“I read about it in the paper.”

“And your wife?”

“Sorry, chief. No wife.”

Del heard Sonny pulling down the overhead door. The light faded, and Del stood there in the dark. Then he felt a sharp blade against his throat, and he knew it was the carpet knife he had seen on Sonny’s dashboard.

“I want you to get down on your knees,” Sonny said, and his voice was so gentle and kind. Del felt a hand on his shoulder pushing him down to the floor. “I want you to stay here. Just like you’re praying.”

The knife blade came away from his throat, and he heard Sonny’s footsteps on the cement floor.

For a moment, Del thought about trying to run—nothing seemed as sweet to him, then, as the idea of him and Liz alone in their car driving through the night—but then Sonny said, “It’s a hell of a story for a man’s wife to tell on him. What was that noise you made? Like a cow? She made you out to be a fool.”

“Don’t hurt her,” Del said.

“Give me a break.” The footlocker’s lid slammed shut. “I watched you when she told that story. You wanted her to pay.”

Del bowed his head. Suddenly he felt guilty, a criminal at heart. Since the night of the break-in, what he had wished more than anything was that Liz could know the same alarm that had overwhelmed him the moment he had seen the burglar come into their house. Then she would know why he had shouted. He had been afraid, yes, but more than that, he had loved the world too much to leave it. He had loved himself and Liz and the life, though imperfect, they had together. There had been no words for all this, only a fierce and strangled bawl.

Now he heard Sonny moving toward him in the dark. “Put your hands behind your back,” Sonny said, and Del did. He heard the ripping sound of duct tape unwinding from its roll, felt it sticking to the hairs on his arms as Sonny wrapped it around them where his wrists were crossed. “There are people,” Sonny said. He whispered it in Del’s ear. “People like me.”

Del imagined Liz waiting in the car. Sooner or later she would hear the door to the storage unit open and see Sonny coming toward her. How long would it be before she would know she was in trouble? And once she did, would she call out? Would she say, “Del?”

“Del,” he imagined her saying again and again until it wasn’t “Del” at all, but a wail so high and thin it could barely hold the weight of such fear—at last, something private and intimate between them.