Patience of the Spider

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THE PATIENCE OF THE SPIDER

01

He jolted awake, sweaty and short of breath. For a few seconds he didn’t know where he was. Then the soft, regular breathing of Livia, who lay asleep beside him, brought him back to a familiar, reassuring reality. He was in his bedroom in Marinella.

What had yanked him from his sleep was a sharp pang, cold as a knife blade, in his wounded shoulder. He didn’t need to look at the clock on the nightstand to know that it was three-thirty in the morning—actually, three-twenty-seven and forty seconds.

The same thing had been happening to him for the last twenty days, ever since the night Jamil Zarzis, a trafficker in small third world children, had shot and wounded him, and he had reacted by killing the man. Twenty days, but it was as though the mechanism of time had got stuck at that moment. Some gear in the part of his brain that measures the passing hours and days had gone “clack,” and ever since, if he was asleep, he would wake up, and if he was awake, everything around him would stop in a sort of imperceptible freeze-frame.

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