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eyes with his hands. Shapes in the right and blurry vision in the left, but both eyes still burned like the bitch had stuck hot pokers in them. He heard footsteps in the hall and then someone walked into the room. He looked, a cop.
    “You okay?” the cop said. Stark remembered he was wearing the NYPD uniform. “Man, what the hell happened?” The cop crossed the room to him.
    Stark didn’t need some cop blundering into him. He saw a block of kitchen knives on the counter, grabbed one, turned and swiped the blade across the cop’s throat. As the cop went to his knees, gagged and bled out, Stark jammed the knife into the cop’s heart. He found the Ruger on the floor where he’d dropped it and ran out. He took the elevator down to the basement, located the service door near the Dumpster and ran out the back of the building into the alley.
    What a mess. He was afraid to take the subway without knowing what he looked like, so he hailed a cab. He slumped in the back out of sight of the driver and told him to drive to Grand Central. His heart was pumping, but not from exertion. He was pissed beyond belief. This girl was trouble. Even if the client wouldn’t pay for it, she was toast. Fuck. His eyes still burned like open sores.
    Dani opened the ground level door to see if anyone was in the entry hall. Nobody. Her heart was knocking against her ribs, her breath coming in gasps. She walked through the entry hall to the lobby door, pushed it open and saw a police car double-parked in front of the building. The killer’s accomplice or a real cop? Or were the cops the killers? She descended the stairs and walked across 88 th Street, lowered her head and scratched the side of her face, covering it. When she reached the corner at Broadway she glanced back to see the police car was still sitting there, no one moving near it. She started counting, “One, two, three…,” forcing herself to walk normally, stay calm until she was certain she was out of sight of the police car. Then she broke into a run.

    Cindy Jackson waited to be the last to leave the chapel adjacent to the main sanctuary at Holy Trinity in Hackensack, where the noon mass in honor of her husband, Ray, just ended. She wasn’t waiting because she felt particularly full of the Holy Spirit, or penitent, even though she’d carried one of the offerings to the altar for communion. In fact, she was angry, as she always wason this day. Angry at God for taking Ray. It wasn’t fair, and no matter how she looked at it, prayed over it, talked to Father Alain about it, it would never be fair, and she’d never get over it. Even now, with Ray gone, that God was the major anchor in her life, Cindy believed it was okay to be a little pissed off at God on this one day every year, good Catholic or not.
    She leaned back in the first pew, imagining she would look to others as if she were praying. But she was thinking. Thinking about Ray, a big, vibrant man of 50, a battleship of a man. A former New York Giants left tackle—with one Super Bowl ring, for beating the Broncos in ‘81—who died in a dentist chair from the anesthesia while having a wisdom tooth pulled. What an irony. And what a waste.
    She’d had four great kids, a loving man who didn’t mess around even on the road as a Giant, or afterward as a sportscaster. Okay, she never got the Moonstruck brownstone in Brooklyn Heights she’d always wanted, but so what? That was a teenage dream of a French-Canadian baker’s daughter from Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. Thinking that made her smile. The scent of the incense from the Mass now rose in her nostrils, the quiet of the chapel enveloping her in calm. She slid her feet out of her pumps and rested them on the cool granite floor, like she’d done as a girl in Cobble Hill. It brought a pang of nostalgia, then sadness. Her own father had died young, too. And as the oldest, she’d been the one to step in and help raise Mary Claire and Brenda while Mom ran the bakery. It was no