the patrol car.
He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels.
It was decidedly not a good feeling.
The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling
static and tinny voices of police-band radios.
“You have any photo ID in here?” asked the cop who had taken his
wallet.
Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above
knee-level. “Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a
driver’s license.”
In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they
hadn’t committed, they were often worried and afraid.
But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience.
Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers,.he was
mortified as never before in his life, even though he’d done nothing
wrong. The situation itself–being in a position of utter submission
while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority–seemed to
trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability identified,
feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he
knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.
“How old is this picture on your license?” asked the cop with his
wallet.
“Uh, I don’t know, two years, three.”
“Doesn’t look much like you.”
“You know what DMV photos are like,” Marty said, dismayed to hear more
plea than anger in his voice.
“Let him up, it’s all right, he’s my husband, he’s Marty Stillwater,”
Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios’ house.
Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense
of reality to the nightmarish moment.
He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops
would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the
house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive
at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could
sense the cops staring at her as she approached.
He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at
even when rain-soaked and distraught, she wasn’t merely attractive but
smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great
kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly
enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet,
even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was
acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to
nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed
places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next
attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been
sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if
he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the
battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to
come.
No.
No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive
imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always
searching for the next plot twist.
Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third
acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements.
Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life
went on as usual.
The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
Another siren swelled in the distance.
He was so cold.
The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both
sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was
so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an
enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the
sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle.
Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with
which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New
York, but he had never visited Central Park, those fields and vales were