tor jerked his head around.

"Who's that?" he said.

"Me," a bass voice said, unhelpfully.

The emergency-room door opened a crack and a face peered in. It took
Malone a second to recognize Bill, the waffle-faced cop who had picked
him up next to the lamp post three years or so before. "Long time no
see," Malone said at random.

"What?" Bill said, and opened the door wider. He came in and closed it
behind him. "It's okay, Doc," he said to the attendant. "I'm a cop."

"Been hurt?" the doctor said.

Bill shook his head. "Not recently," he said. "I came to see this
guy." He looked at Malone. "They told me you were still here," he
said.

"Who's they?" Malone said.

"Outside," Bill said. "The attendants out there. They said you were
still getting stitched up."

"And quite right, too," Malone said solemnly.

"Oh," Bill said. "Sure." He fished in his pockets. "You dropped your
notebook, though, and I came to give it back to you." He located the
object he was hunting for and brought it out with the triumphant
gesture of a man displaying the head of a dragon he had slain. "Here,"
he said, waving the book.

"Notebook?" Malone said. He stared at it. It was a small looseleaf
book bound in cheap black plastic.

"We found it in the gutter," Bill said.

Malone took a tentative step forward and managed not to fall. He
stepped back again and looked at Bill scornfully. "I wasn't even in
the gutter," he said. "There are limits."

"Sure," Bill said. "But the notebook was, so I brought it along to
you. I thought you might need it or something." He handed it over to
Malone with a flourish.

It wasn't Malone's notebook. In the first place, he had never owned a
notebook that looked anything like that, and in the second place he
hadn't had any notebooks on him when he went for his walk. _Mine not
to question why_, Malone told himself with a shrug, and flipped the
book open.

At once he saw why the cop had mistaken it for his.

It had his name in it.

On the very first page were two names, written out in a careful,
semieducated scrawl:

_Mr. Kenneth J. Malone, FBI_
_Lt. Peter Lynch, NYPD_

The rest of the page was blank. Malone wondered who Lieutenant Lynch
was, and made a mental note to find out. Then he wondered what his
name was doing in somebody else's notebook. Maybe, he thought, it was
a list of people to slug, and the car had made it up. But he hadn't
heard of anybody named Lynch being hit on the hea