Now, in Duke Pellafino’s kitchen, as Jeffy measured coffee into the filter of the brewer, he wondered if he would ever again be able to lose himself in the common tasks of everyday life and allow part of his mind to float free as before, or whether what he now knew of the multiverse would always weigh his mind down with worries about what might be happening in those infinite elsewheres. He could try his best to protect Amity and ensure her happiness in this world that she shared with him. But what of all those other Amitys in so many timelines? Scores of Amitys? Hundreds? Thousands? Inevitably, in some places, she was orphaned, and he was not there to look over her. In still other worlds, she might be ill or lost or tormented in any of the myriad ways that indifferent nature allowed her children to suffer in a fallen world. He loved this child more than he loved life itself, but it seemed to him that his love must be bestowed on all the Amitys who were without him elsewhere, if it were to be a true and worthy love.

That was madness. He couldn’t possibly be father to a thousand now fatherless Amitys, or to a hundred, or even to fifty Amitys in different worlds. If they survived their current predicament, he would somehow have to be father to this version of her, as if she were the only one, and put from his mind what travails and horrors other Amitys might be enduring, though at the moment, he was unable to see how this could be done.

These thoughts troubled Jeffy as the coffee began brewing in a fragrant rush and as he took a package of bacon from the freezer, which was when Duke Pellafino entered the kitchen from the hallway, accompanied by a man at once strange and familiar.

“Spooky Ed,” said Amity.

At the same moment, Jeffy recognized the scientist. The shock of this development was sufficient to distract him from wondering how the old man had come to be with Duke. In spite of their year of camaraderie on the front porch, a flush of anger warmed his face, and he confronted Harkenbach. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Ed? How could you call yourself my friend and yet leave that gismo with me, knowing Falkirk might land on me with both feet, knowing I might have to use the damn thing?”

Harkenbach held up one hand as though to sue for peace. “You’ve got me all wrong. I was never your friend, Jeffrey. I never left it with you.”

“What’s the point of denying it? We both know exactly what you did. There’s no point in denying it, Ed.” Jeffy took a deep breath. “What happened to your hair?”

“I thought baldness and no bow tie constituted an effective disguise. Apparently I was wrong. I seldom am. It’s humbling. But I’m not wrong about the key. That was another Ed, another me who’s less responsible than I am. I was never your friend. I’m her friend in a different world and now in this one.”

“Her? Her who?”

Michelle entered the kitchen.

For seven years, Jeffy had hoped for a reunion before finally dissolving their marriage. When the key to everything had thrown his and Amity’s lives into chaos, he’d known that if stability returned, he would recklessly risk renewed chaos by using the key to search for her in a world where she needed him. Love was not an act of reason, but a leap of faith, a belief that some mysterious meaning must lie behind existence and that two particular lives were fated to be one; love was an expression of trust in the truth of the heart’s yearning and the mind’s keen intuition. In the absence of love, the heart might be deceitful above all things, but profound love was an antivenin that cured deceit. Although Jeffy had long dreamed of this moment, dreamed of it while asleep and awake, though he’d so often thought about what he would say and do if ever she were returned to him, he was not able to speak or act, as if to do so would reveal her sudden appearance to be an illusion.

Amity was the first to move. She crossed the room to Michelle and, without a word, put her arms around her mother.

Michelle’s eyes filled with tears. As she smoothed Amity’s hair with one hand, she met Jeffy’s gaze and said softly, “You died.”

“You left,” he replied.

“We’re here,” Amity said. “We’re here.”

76

Although Falkirk had popped a painkiller, it hadn’t kicked in yet, and the local that Dr. Burnside supposedly administered to his thigh before closing his wound didn’t help much. His badly bruised chest hurt like a sonofabitch, because Kevlar could stop a slug but couldn’t fully diffuse the power of its punch. Nonetheless, he caned himself out of the hospital to the waiting Suburban, spitting curses as he went, and climbed into the back seat, relying on Vince Canker’s assistance.

As they drove away with Louis Wong behind the wheel and Canker riding shotgun, Falkirk’s phone rang. Jason Foot-Long Frankfurt, the hacker’s hacker, was calling.

“How’re you doing, boss?”

“I was shot. How do you think I’m doing?”

“We were all so pissed off when we heard.”

“Pissed off that I was hit once or that Kevlar stopped the other four?”

“Good to hear you’ve kept your sense of humor through it. I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“Philip Esterhaus received two calls this morning from this guy named Charles Pellafino. He’s head of security at Hotel Suavidad, an ex–San Diego cop. They’re friends.”

Chief Phil Esterhaus was one of those straight-arrow small-time cops who chafed at the bit when any federal agent jammed one in his mouth and claimed the right to operate freely in his jurisdiction. Falkirk encountered their type all the time, and he despised them almost as much as he despised English teachers. He looked forward to the day when all law enforcement was federal, when the Esterhauses of the world were packed off to reeducation camps and had their nuts chopped off. As usual in cases like this, Falkirk’s crew had installed an unauthorized telecom mirror line on the police chief’s official and personal phones, so that Esterhaus’s every word was reflected to Foot Long’s computer.

Now Jason said, “Pellafino is asking the chief about you, what you’re doing here. He knows about Harkenbach. He says he’s got some friends in Shadow Canyon that got ‘caught up’ in this, he’s trying to figure out what they should do. It’s obvious these friends of his are Coltrane and his brat.”

“What did Esterhaus say to him?”

“He wasn’t discreet. He called you an egg-sucking snake and an arrogant piece of shit. Just so you know.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“He also said you’re a sleazeball and that the rest of us are your clown posse.”

“You feel the need to tell me all this—why?”

“He also told Pellafino that the collective IQ of your entire team is eighty. That hurt. That cut deep, man. I don’t like that kind of nasty shit. He’s a cracker-town parking-patrol flatfoot who’s not ten percent as smart as he thinks he is. My IQ alone is one hundred seventy.”

Falkirk figured that 170 was as much of a lie as the nickname “Foot-Long.”

“What I think,” Jason continued, “is that wherever Coltrane and his brat jumped to from the Bonner house, they’re now back in this timeline, and they’re hiding out at Pellafino’s place.”

Having reached that conclusion even before he’d been told that Esterhaus had called him an egg-sucking snake, Falkirk said, “You have the address?”

The hacker gave it to him. “Coltrane has the key to everything, so we’ll have to ghost our way inside and come down on him like a ton of bricks before he knows we’re there, blow off the fucker’s head before he can port.”

Jason Foot-Long Frankfurt was a workstation keyboard guy who spent every operation on his ass, but he seemed to half believe he was a boots-on-the-ground participant when he said “we” and “our” and talked tough about blowing people’s heads off.

“So,” he continued, “you want us to haunt the street, quietly slide the neighbors out of collateral-damage distance?”

When a building harbored a heavily armed lunatic or a cluster of terrorists, with the likelihood that hundreds or even thousands of rounds of deep-penetrating ammunition might be expended and pass through the walls of nearby homes, neighbors were often secretly extracted through back doors and side exits before a hard-core SWAT assault was launched against the structure. Although this usually could be done without alerting the targets about what was coming, there was always a possibility of doing just that. In this case, because Coltrane had the key and could port out of this world with as little as a twenty-second warning, they could not take the chance that he or his daughter or this Charles Pellafino might look out a window at the wrong moment and see an evacuation taking place.

Anyway, Jeffrey Coltrane didn’t have an arsenal, at most merely a single pistol that he’d bought years earlier. The firefight, if it occurred, would be one-sided and brief. Maybe this Charles Pellafino had a gun, being a former cop, but that was only one more shooter to worry about, and he wasn’t likely to be armed with a fully automatic carbine with a drum magazine. Falkirk’s crew would do reconnaissance and then hit the residence suddenly and hard. In less than a minute, maybe a lot less, there would be three dead—Coltrane, Pellafino, and the girl—and the key to everything would be his.

“You just sit tight,” he told Jason. “I’ll organize the hit.”

Falkirk terminated the call and brooded for a minute or two as Louis Wong piloted the Suburban on a random tour of town, waiting for instructions.

Before Falkirk seemed to lie a one-lane straight-as-a-ruler highway to success.

There were only two wild cards.

He had already figured out that the Edwin Harkenbach who’d shot him was not the Ed of this world, but a version from elsewhere.