Dean Koontz - (1994) Read online

  Winter Moon [067-037-5.0] By: Dean R. Koontz Synopsis: The #1 bestselling author of Dragon Tears returns with a thriller. A Hollywood director goes on a killing spree in the streets of L.A. while an old caretaker on a lonely Montana ranch witnesses a chilling vision. Connecting both incidents is policeman Jack McGarvey, who is drawn into a terrifying confrontation with something unearthly. Ballantine Books; ISBN: 0345386108 Copyright 1995 PART ONE. The City of the Dying Dy. Beaches, surfers, California girls. Wind scented with fabulous dreams. Bougainvillea, groves of oranges. Stars are born, everything gleams. A weather change. Shadows fall. New scent upon the wind--decay. Cocaine, Uzis, drive-by shootings. Death is a banker. Everyone pays. the Book of Counted Sorrows. CHAPTER ONE. Death was driving an emerald-green Lexus. It pulled off the street, passed the four self-service pumps, and stopped in one of the two full-service lanes. Standing in front of the station, Jack McGarvey noticed the car but not the driver. Even under a bruised and swollen sky that hid the sun, the Lexus gleamed like a jewel, a sleek and lustrous machine. The windows were darkly tinted, so he couldn't have seen the driver clearly even if he had tried. As a thirty-two-year-old cop with a wife, a child, and a big mortgage, Jack had no prospects of buying an expensive luxury car, but he didn't envy the owner of the Lexus. He often remembered his dad's admonition that envy was mental theft. If you coveted another man's possessions, Dad said, then you should be willing to take on his responsibilities, heartaches, and troubles along with his money. He stared at the car for a moment, admiring it as he might a priceless painting at the Getty Museum or a first edition of a James M. Cain.novel in a pristine dust jacket--with no strong desire to possess it, taking pleasure merely from the fact of its existence. In a society that often seemed to be spinning toward anarchy, where ugliness and decay made new inroads every day, his spirits were lifted by any proof that the hands of men and women were capable of producing things of beauty and quality. The Lexus, of course, was an import, designed and manufactured on foreign shores, however, it was the entire human species that seemed damned, not just his countrymen, and evidence of standards and dedication was heartening regardless of where he found it. An attendant in a gray uniform hurried out of the office and approached the gleaming car, and Jack gave his full attention, once more, to Hassam Arkadian. "My station is an island of cleanliness in a filthy sea, an eye of sanity in a storm of madness," Arkadian said, speaking earnestly, unaware of sounding melodramatic. He was slender, about forty, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. The creases in the legs of his gray cotton work pants were knife-sharp, and his matching work shirt and jacket were immaculate. "I had the aluminum siding and the brick treated with a new sealant," he said, indicating the facade of the service station with a sweep of his arm. "Paint won't stick to it. Not even metallic paint. Wasn't cheap. But now when these gang kids or crazy-stupid taggers come around at night and spray their trash all over the walls, we scrub it off, scrub it right off the next morning." With his meticulous grooming, singular intensity, and quick slender hands, Arkadian might have been a surgeon about to begin his workday in an operating theater. He was, instead, the owner-operator of the service station. "Do you know," he said incredulously, "there are professors who have written books on the value of graffiti? The value of graffiti? The value?" "They call it street art," said Luther Bryson, Jack's partner. Arkadian gazed up disbelievingly at the towering black cop. "You think what these punks do is art?" "Hey, no, not me," Luther said. At six three and two hundred ten pounds, he was three inches taller than Jack and forty pounds heavier, with maybe eight inches and seventy pounds on Arkadian. Though he was a good partner and a good man, his granite face seemed incapable of the flexibility required for a smile. His deeply set eyes were unwaveringly forthright. My Malcolm X glare, he called it. With or without his uniform, Luther Bryson could intimidate anyone from the Pope to a purse snatcher..He wasn't using the glare now, wasn't trying to intimidate Arkadian, was in complete agreement with him. "Not me. I'm just saying that's what the candy-ass crowd calls it. Street art." The service-station owner said, "These are professors. Educated men and women. Doctors of art and literature. They have the benefit of an education my parents couldn't afford to give me, but they're stupid. There's no other word for it. Stupid, stupid, stupid." His expressive face revealed the frustration and anger that Jack encountered with increasing frequency in the City of Angels. "What fools do universities produce these days?" Arkadian had labored to make his operation special. Bracketing the property were wedge-shaped brick planters in which grew queen palms, azaleas laden with clusters of red flowers, and impatients in pinks and purples. There was no gnme, no litter. The portico covering the pumps was supported by brick columns, and the whole station had a quaint colonial appearance. In any age, the station would have seemed misplaced in Los Angeles. Freshly painted and clean, it was doubly out of place in the grunge that had been spreading like a malignancy through the city during the nineties. "Come on, come look, look," Arkadian said, and headed toward the south end of the building. "Poor guy's gonna blow out an artery in the brain over this," Luther said. "Somebody should tell him it's not fashionable to give a damn these days," Jack said. A low and menacing rumble of thunder rolled through the distended sky. Looking at the dark clouds, Luther said, "Weatherman predicted it wouldn't rain today." "Maybe it wasn't thunder. Maybe somebody finally blew up city hall." "You think? Well, if the place was full of politicians," Luther said, "we should take the rest of the day off, find a bar, do some celebrating." "Come on, officers," Arkadian called to them. He had reached the south corner of the building, near where they had parked their patrol car. "Look at this, I want you to see this, I want you to see my bathrooms." "His bathrooms?" Luther said. Jack laughed. "Hell, you got anything better to do?"."A lot safer than chasing bad guys," Luther said, following Arkadian. Jack glanced at the Lexus again. Nice machine. Zero to sixty in how many seconds? Eight? Seven? Must handle like a dream. The driver had gotten out of the car and was standing beside it. Jack noticed little about the guy, only that he was wearing a loose-fitting, double-breasted Armani suit. The Lexus, on the other hand, had wire wheels and chrome guards around the wheel wells. Reflections of storm clouds moved slowly across its windshield and made mysterious smoky patterns in the depths of its jewel-green finish. Sighing, Jack followed Luther past the two open bays of the repair garage. The first stall was empty, but a gray BMW was on the hydraulic lift in the second space. A young Asian man in mechanic's coveralls was at work on the car. Tools and supplies were neatly racked along the walls, floor to ceiling, and the two bays looked cleaner than the average kitchen in a fourstar restaurant. At the corner of the building stood a pair of softdrink vending machines. They purred and clinked as if formulating and bottling the beverages within their own guts. Around the corner were the men's and women's rest rooms, where Arkadian had opened both doors. "Take a look, go ahead--I want you to see my bathrooms." Both small rooms had white ceramic-tile floors and walls, white commodes, white swing-top waste cans, white sinks, gleaming chrome fixtures, and large mirrors above the sinks. "Spotless," Arkadian said, talking fast, running his sentences together in his quiet anger. "No streaks on the mirrors, no stains in the sinks, we check them after every customer uses them, disinfect them every day, you could eat off those floors and it would be as safe as eating off the plates from your own mother's kitchen." Looking at Jack over Arkadian's head, Luther smiled and said, "I think I'll have a steak and baked potato. What about you?" "Just a salad," Jack said. "I'm trying to lose a few pounds." Even if he had been listening to them, Mr. Arkadian couldn't have been joked out of his bleak mood. He jangled a ring of keys. "I keep them locked, give the keys only to customers. City inspector stops around, he tells me a new rule says these a
re public facilities, so you've got to let them open for the public, whether they buy anything at your place or not." He jangled the keys again, harder, more angrily, then harder still. Neither Jack nor Luther tried to comment above the strident ring and raffle.."Let them fine me. I'll pay the fine. When these are unlocked, the drunks and junkie bums who live in alleys and parks, they use my bathrooms, urinate on the floor, vomit in the sinks. You wouldn't believe the mess they make, disgusting, things I'd be embarrassed to talk about." Arkadian was actually blushing at the thought of what he could have told them. He waved the jangling keys in the air in front of each open door, and he reminded Jack of nothing so much as a voodoo priest casting a spell--in this case, to ward off the riffraff who would despoil his rest rooms. His face was as mottled and turbulent as the stormy sky. "Let me tell you something. Hassam Arkadian works sixty and seventy hours a week, Hassam Arkadian employs eight people full time, and Hassam Arkadian pays half of what he earns in taxes, but Hassam Arkadian is not going to spend his life cleaning up vomit because a bunch of stupid bureaucrats have more compassion for some lazy-drunken-psychojunkie bums than they have for people who are trying their damnedest to lead decent lives." He finished his speech in a rush, breathless. Stopped jangling the keys. Sighed. He closed the doors and locked them. Jack felt useless. He could see that Luther was uncomfortable too. Sometimes a cop couldn't do much more for a victim than nod in sympathy and shake his head in sorry amazement at the depths into which the city was sinking. That was one of the worst things about the job. Mr. Arkadian went around the corner to the front of the station again. He wasn't walking as fast as before. His shoulders were slumped, and for the first time he looked more dejected than angry, as if he had decided, perhaps on a subconscious level, to give up the fight. Jack hoped that wasn't the case. In his daily life, Hassam was struggling to realize a dream of a better future, a better world. He was one of a dwindling number who still had enough guts to resist entropy. Civilization's soldiers, warring on the side of hope, were already too few to make a satisfactory army. Adjusting their gun belts, Jack and Luther followed Arkadian past the soft-drink dispensers. The man in the Armani suit was standing at the second vending machine, studying the selections. He was about Jack's age, tall, blond, clean-shaven, with a golden-bronze complexion that could have been gotten locally at that time of year only from a tanning bed. As they walked by him, he pulled a handful of change from one pocket of his.baggy trousers and picked through the coins. Out at the pumps, the attendant was washing the windshield of the Lexus, though it had looked freshly washed when the car first pulled in from the street. Arkadian stopped at the plate-glass window that occupied half the front wall of the station office. "Street art," he said softly, sadly, as Jack and Luther joined him. "Only a fool would call it anything but vandalism. Barbarians are loose." Lately, some vandals had traded spray cans for stencils and acid paste. They etched their symbols and slogans on the glass of parked cars and the windows of businesses that were unprotected by security shutters at night. Arkadian's front window was permanently marred by half a dozen different personal marks made by members of the same gang, some of them repeated two and three times. In four-inch-high letters, they had also etched the words THE BLOODBATH IS COMING. These antisocial acts often reminded Jack of an event in Nazi Germany about which he'd once read: Before the war had even begun, psychopathic thugs had roamed the streets during one long night, Kristallnacht, defacing walls with hateful words, smashing windows of homes and stores owned by Jews until the streets glittered as if paved with crystal. Sometimes it seemed to him that the barbarians to which Arkadian referred were the new fascists, from both ends of the political spectrum this time, hating not just Jews but anyone with a stake in social order and civility. Their vandalism was a slow-motion Kristallnacht, conducted over years instead of hours. "It's worse on the next window," Arkadian said, leading them around the corner to the north side of the station. That wall of the office featured another large sheet of glass, on which, in addition to gang symbols, etched block letters proclaimed Armenian SHITHEAD. Even the sight of the racial slur couldn't rekindle Hassam Arkadian's anger. He stared sad-eyed at the offensive words and said, "I've always tried to treat people well. I'm not perfect, not without sin. Who is? But I've done my best to be a good man, fair, honest--and now this." "Won't make you feel any better," Luther said, "but if it was up to me, the law would let us take the creeps who do this and stencil that second word right above their eyes. Shithead. Etch it into their skin with acid just like they did to your glass. Make em walk around like that for a couple of years and see how their attitude improves before maybe we give them some plastic surgery." "You think you can find who did it?" Arkadian asked, though he surely.knew the answer. Luther shook his head, and Jack said, "Not a chance. We'll file a report, of course, but there's no manpower to work on small crime like this. Best thing you can do is install roll-down metal shutters the same day you replace the windows, so they're covered at night." "Otherwise, you'll be putting in new glass every week," Luther said, "and pretty soon your insurance company will drop you." "They already dropped my vandalism coverage after one claim," Hassam Arkadian said. "About the only thing they'll cover me for now is earthquake, flood, and fire. Not even fire if it happens in a riot." They stood in silence, staring at the window, brooding about their powerlessness. A cool March wind sprang up. In the nearby planter, the queen palms rustled, and soft creaking noises arose from where the stems of the big fronds joined the trunks. "Well," Jack said at last, "it could be worse, Mr. Arkadian. I mean, at least you're in a pretty good part of the city here on the West Side." "Yeah, and doesn't it break your heart," Arkadian said, "this is a good neighborhood." Jack didn't even want to think about that. Luther started to speak but was interrupted by a loud crash and a shout of anger from the front of the station. As the three of them hurried around the corner, a violent gust of wind made the plate-glass windows thrum. Fifty feet away, the man in the Armani suit kicked the vending machine again. A foaming can of Pepsi lay behind him, contents spreading across the blacktop. "Poison," he shouted at the machine, "poison, damn it, damn you, damn you, poison!" Arkadian rushed toward the customer. "Sir, please, I'm sorry, if the machine gave you the wrong selection--" "Hey, wait right there," Luther said, speaking as much to the station owner as to the infuriated stranger. In front of the office door, Jack caught up with Arkadian, put a hand on his shoulder, stopped him, and said, "Better let us handle this." "Damn poison," the customer said furiously, and he made a fist as if he wanted to punch the vending machine. "It's just the machine," Arkadian told Jack and Luther. "They keep saying it's fixed, but it keeps giving you Pepsi when you push Orange.Crush." As bad as things were in the City of Angels these days, Jack found it difficult to believe that Arkadian was accustomed to seeing people fly off the handle every time an unwanted can of Pepsi dropped into the dispensing tray. The customer turned away from the machine and from them, as if he might walk off and leave his Lexus. He seemed to be shaking with anger, but it was mostly the blustery wind shivering the loosely fitted suit. "What's wrong here?" Luther asked, heading toward the guy as thunder tolled across the lowering sky and the palms in the south planter thrashed against a backdrop of black clouds. Jack started to follow Luther before he saw the suit jacket billow out behind the blond, flapping like bat wings. Except the coat had been buttoned a moment ago. Double-breasted, buttoned twice. The angry man faced away from them still, shoulders hunched, head lowered. Because of the loose and billowing fabric of his suit, he seemed less than human, like a hunchbacked troll. The guy began to turn, and Jack would not have been surprised to see the deformed muzzle of a beast, but it was the same tan and cleanshaven face as before. Why had the son of a bitch unbuttoned the coat unless there was something under it that he needed, and what might an irrational and angry man need that he kept under his jacket, his loose-fitting suit jacket, his roomy goddamned jacket? Jack called a warning to Luther. But Luther sensed trouble too. His right hand moved toward the gu
n holstered on his hip. The perp had the advantage because he was the initiator. No one knew violence was at hand until he unleashed it, so he swung all the way around to face them, holding a weapon in both hands, before Luther and Jack had even touched their revolvers. Automatic gunfire hammered the day. Bullets pounded Luther's chest, knocked the big man off his feet, hurled him backward, and Hassam Arkadian spun from the impact of one-two-three hits, went down hard, screaming in agony. Jack threw himself against the glass door to the office. He almost made it to cover before taking a hit to the left leg. He felt as if he'd been clubbed across the thigh with a tire iron, but it was a bullet, not a blow. He dropped facedown on the office floor. The door swung shut behind him, gunfire shattered it, and gummy chunks of tempered glass cascaded across his back. Hot pain boiled sweat from him..A radio was playing. Golden oldies. Dionne Warwick. Singing about the world needing love, sweet love. Outside, Arkadian was still screaming, but there wasn't a sound from Luther Bryson. Luther was dead. Jack couldn't think about that. Dead. Didn't dare think about it. Dead. Wouldn't think about it. The chatter of more gunfire. Someone else screamed. Probably the attendant at the Lexus. It wasn't a lasting scream. Brief, quickly choked off. Outside, Arkadian wasn't screaming anymore, either. He was sobbing and calling for Jesus. Hard, chill wind made the plate-glass windows vibrate. It hooted through the shattered door. The gunman would be coming. CHAPTER TWO. Jack was stunned at the quantity of his own blood on the vinyl-tile floor around him. Nausea squirmed through him, and greasy sweat streamed down his face. He couldn't take his eyes off the spreading stain that darkened his pants. He had never been shot before. The pain was terrible but not as bad as he would have expected. Worse than the pain was the sense of violation and vulne rability, a terrible frantic awareness of the true fragility of the human body. He might not be able to hold on to consciousness for long. A hungry darkness was already eating away at the edges of his vision. He probably couldn't put much weight on his left leg, and he didn't have time to pull himself up on his right alone, not while in such an exposed position. Shedding broken glass as a bright-scaled snake might shed an old skin, unavoidably leaving a trail of blood, he crawled fast on his belly alongside the L-shaped work counter behind which Arkadian kept the cash register. The gunman would be coming. From the sound the weapon made and the brief glimpse he'd gotten of it, Jack figured it was a submachine gun--maybe a Micro Uzi. The Micro was less than ten inches long with the wire stock folded forward but a lot heavier than a pistol, weighing about two kilos if it had a single magazine, heavier if it featured two magazines welded at right angles to give it a forty-round capacity. It would be like carrying a standard-size bag of sugar in a sling, it was sure to cause chronic neck pain, but not too big to fit an oversize shoulder holster under an.Armani suit--and worth the trouble if a man had snake-mean enemies. Could be an FN P90, too, or maybe a British Bushman 2, but probably not a Czech Skorpion, because a Skorpion fired only .32 ACP ammo. Judging by how hard Luther had gone down, this seemed to be a gun with more punch than a Skorpion, which the 9mm Micro Uzi provided. Forty rounds in the Uzi to start, and the son of a bitch had fired twelve, sixteen at most, so at least twenty-four rounds were left, and maybe a pocketful of spare cartridges. Thunder boomed, the air felt heavy with pent-up rain, wind shrieked through the ruined door, and the gun rattled again. Outside, Hassam Arkadian's cries to Jesus abruptly ended. Jack desperately pulled himself around the end of the counter, thinking the unthinkable. Luther Bryson dead. Arkadian dead. The attendant dead. Most likely the young Asian mechanic too. All of them wasted. The world had been turned upside down in less than a minute. Now it was one-on-one, survival of the fittest, and Jack wasn't afraid of that game. Though Darwinian selection tended to favor the guy with the biggest gun and best supply of ammunition, cleverness could outweigh caliber. He had been saved by his wits before and might be again. Surviving could be easier when he had his back to the wall, the odds were stacked high against him, and he had no one to worry about but himself. With only his own sorry ass on the line, he was more focused, free to risk inaction or recklessness, free to be a coward or a kamikaze fool, whatever the occasion demanded. Then he dragged himself entirely into the sheltered space behind the counter and discovered that he didn't, after all, enjoy the freedom of a sole survivor. A woman was huddled there: petite, long dark hair, attractive. Gray shirt, work pants, white socks, black shoes with thick rubber soles. She was in her mid-thirties, maybe five or six years younger than Hassam Arkadian. Could be his wife. No, not a wife any more. Widow. She was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her legs, trying to make herself as small as possible, straining for invisibility. Her presence changed everything for Jack, put him on the line and reduced his own chances of survival. He couldn't choose to hide, couldn't even opt for recklessness any longer. He had to think hard and clearly, determine the best course of action, and do the right thing. He was responsible for her. He had sworn an oath to serve and protect the public, and he was old-fashioned enough to take oaths seriously. The woman's eyes were wide with terror and shimmering with unspilled tears. Even in the midst of fear for her own life, she seemed to comprehend.the meaning of Arkadian's sudden lapse into silence. Jack drew his revolver. Serve and protect. He was shivering uncontrollably. His left leg was hot, but the rest of him was freezing, as if all his body heat was draining out through the wound. Outside, a sustained rattle of automatic-weapon fire ended in an explosion that rocked the service station, tipped over a candy-vending machine in the office, and blew in both big windows on which the gang symbols had been etched. The huddled woman covered her face with her hands, Jack squeezed his eyes shut, and glass spilled over the counter into the space where they had taken shelter. When he opened his eyes, endless phalanxes of shadows and light charged across the office. The wind coming through the shattered door was no longer chilly but hot, and the phantasms swarming over the walls were reflections of fire. The maniac with the Uzi had shot up one or more of the gasoline pumps. Cautiously Jack pulled himself up against the counter, putting no weight on his left leg. Though his misery still seemed inadequate to the wound, he figured it would get worse suddenly and soon. He didn't want to precipitate it by any action of his own for fear that a sufficiently fierce flash of pain would make him pass out. Under considerable pressure, jets of burning gasoline were squirting from one of the riddled pumps, splashing like molten lava onto the blacktop. The pavement sloped toward the busy street, and scintillant rivers of fire spread in that direction. The explosion had ignited the roof of the portico that sheltered the pumps. Flames licked rapidly toward the main building. The Lexus was on fire. The lunatic bastard had destroyed his own car, which in some strange way made him seem more completely out of control and dangerous than anything else he'd done. Amid the inferno, which became more panoramic by the second as the gasoline streamed across the blacktop, the killer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he'd regained at least some of his senses and fled on foot. More likely, he was in the two-bay garage, coming at them by that route rather than making a bold approach through the shattered front entrance. Less than fifteen feet from Jack, a painted metal door connected the garage to the office. It was closed. Leaning against the counter, he gripped his revolver in both hands and aimed at the door, arms extended rigidly in front of him, ready to blow.the perp to hell at the first opportunity. His hands were shaking. So cold. He strained to hold the gun steady, which helped, but he couldn't entirely repress the tremors. The darkness at the edges of his vision had retreated. Now it began to encroach again. He blinked furiously, trying to wash away the frightening peripheral blindness as he might have tried to expel a speck of dust, but to no avail. The air smelled of gasoline and hot tar. Shifting wind blew smoke into the room--not much, just enough to make him want to cough. He clenched his teeth, making only a low choking sound in his throat, because the killer might be on the far side of the door, hesitating and listening. Still directing the revolver squarely at the entranc
e from the garage, he glanced outside into whirlwinds of tempestuous fire and churning shrouds of black smoke, afraid he was wrong. The gunman might erupt, after all, from that conflagration, like a demon out of perdition. The metal door again. Painted the palest blue. Like deep clear water seen through a layer of crystalline ice. The color made him cold. Everything made him cold--the hollow iron-hard thunk-thunk of his laboring heart, the whisper-soft weeping of the woman huddled on the floor behind him, the glittering debris of broken glass. Even the roar and crackle of the fire chilled him. Outside, seething flames had traveled the length of the portico and reached the front of the service station. The roof must be ablaze by now. The pale-blue door. Open it, you crazy sonofabitch. Come on, come on, come on. Another explosion. He had to turn his head completely away from the door to the garage and look directly at the front of the station to see what had happened, because he had lost nearly all of his peripheral vision. The fuel tank of the Lexus. The vehicle was engulfed, reduced to just the black skeleton of a car enwrapped by greedy tongues of fire that stripped it of its lustrous emerald paint, fine leather upholstery, and other plush appointments. The blue door remained closed. The revolver seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. His arms ached. He couldn't hold the weapon steady. Could barely hold it at all. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes. Sleep a little. Dream a little dream green pastures, wildflowers, a blue sky, the city long forgotten. When he looked down at his leg, he discovered he was standing in a pool.of blood. An artery must have been nicked, maybe torn, and he was going fast, dizzy just from looking down, nausea swelling anew, a trembling in his gut. Fire on the roof. He could hear it overhead, distinctly different from the crackle and roar of the blaze in front of the station, shingles popping, rafters creaking as construction joints were tortured by the fierce, dry heat. They might have only seconds before the ceiling exploded into flames or caved in on them. He didn't understand how he could be getting colder by the moment when fire was all around them. The sweat streaming down his face was like ice water. Even if the roof didn't cave in for a couple of minutes, he might be dead or too weak to pull the trigger when at last the killer rushed them. He couldn't wait any longer. He had to give up the two-hand grip on the gun. He needed his left hand to brace himself against the For mica top of the counter as he circled the end of it, keeping all weight off his left leg. But when he reached the end of the counter, he was too dizzy to hop the ten or twelve feet to the blue door. He had to use the toe of his left foot as a balance point, applying the minimum pressure required to stay erect as he hitched across the office. Surprisingly, the pain was bearable. Then he realized it was tolerable only because his leg was going numb. A cool tingle coursed through the limb from hip to ankle. Even the wound itself was no longer hot, not even warm. The door. His left hand on the knob looked so far away, as if he were peering at it through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Revolver in the right hand. Hanging down at his side. Like a massive dumbbell. The effort required to raise the weapon caused his stomach to keel over on itself repeatedly. The killer might be waiting on the other side, watching the knob, so Jack pushed the door open and went through it fast, the revolver thrust out in front of him. He stumbled, almost fell, and stepped past the door, swinging the gun right and left, heart pounding so hard it jolted his weakening arms, but there was no target. He could see all the way across the garage because the BMW was up on the service rack. The only person in sight was the Asian mechanic, as dead as the concrete on which he was sprawled. Jack turned to the blue door. It was black on this side, which seemed ominous, glossy black, and it had gone shut behind him. He took a step toward it, meaning to pull it open. He fell against it instead..Harried by the changeable wind, a tide of bitter tarry smoke washed into the double-bay garage. Coughing, Jack wrenched open the door. The office was filled with smoke, an antechamber to hell. He shouted for the woman to come to him, and he was dismayed to hear that his shout was barely more than a thin wheeze. She was already on the move, however, and before he could try to shout again, she appeared out of the roiling smoke, with one hand clamped over her nose and mouth. At first, when she leaned against him, Jack thought she was seeking support, strength he didn't have to give, but he realized she was urging him to rely on her. He was the one who had taken the oath, who had sworn to serve and defend. He felt dismally inadequate because he couldn't scoop her up in his arms and carry her out of there as a hero might have done in a movie. He leaned on the woman as little as he dared and turned left with her in the direction of the open bay door, which was obscured by the smoke. He dragged his left leg. No longer any feeling in it whatsoever, no pain, not even a tingle. Dead weight. Eyes squeezed shut against the stinging smoke, bursts of color coruscating across the backs of his eyelids. Holding his breath, resisting a powerful urge to vomit. Somebody screaming, a shrill and terrible scream, on and on. No, not a scream. Sirens. Rapidly drawing closer. Then he and the woman were in the open, which he detected by a change in the wind, and he gasped for breath, which came cold and clean into his lungs. When he opened his eyes, the world was blurred by tears that the abrasive smoke had rubbed from him, and he blinked frantically until his sight cleared somewhat. Because of blood loss or shock, he was reduced to tunnel vision. It was like looking at the world through twin gun barrels, because the surrounding darkness was as smooth as the curve of a steel bore. To his left, everything was enveloped in flames. The Lexus. Portico. Service station. Arkadian's body was on fire. Luther's was not afire yet, but hot embers were falling on it, flaming bits of shingles and wood, and at any moment his uniform would ignite. Burning gasoline still arced from the riddled pumps and streamed toward the street. The blacktop along the perimeter of the blaze was melting, boiling. Churning masses of thick black smoke rose high above the city, blending into the pendulous black and gray storm clouds. Someone cursed..Jack jerked his head to the right, away from the terrible but hypnotically fascinating inferno, and focused his narrowed field of vision on the soft-drink machines at the corner of the station. The killer was standing there, as if oblivious of the destruction he had wrought, feeding coins into the first of the two vending machines. Two more discarded cans of Pepsi lay on the asphalt behind him. The Micro Uzi was in his left hand, at his side, muzzle pointing at the pavement. He slammed the flat of his fist against one of the buttons on the selection board. Feebly shoving the woman away, Jack whispered, "Get down!" He turned clumsily toward the killer, swaying, barely able to remain on his feet. The can of soda clattered into the delivery tray. The gunman leaned forward, squinting, then cursed again. Shuddering violently, Jack struggled to raise his revolver. It seemed to be shackled to the ground on a short length of chain, requiring him to lift the entire world in order to bring the weapon high enough to aim. Aware of him, responding with an arrogant leisureliness, the psychopath in the expensive suit turned and advanced a couple of steps, bringing up his own weapon. Jack squeezed off a shot. He was so weak, the recoil knocked him backward and off his feet. The killer loosed a burst of six or eight rounds. Jack was already falling out of the line of fire. As bullets cut the air over his head, he fired another shot, and then a third as he crumpled onto the blacktop. Incredibly, the third round slammed the killer in the chest and pitched him backward into the vending machine. He bounced off the machine and dropped onto his knees. He was badly hurt, perhaps mortally wounded, his white silk shirt turning red as swiftly as a trick scarf transformed by a magician's deft hands, but he wasn't dead yet, and he still had the Micro Uzi. The sirens were extremely loud. Help was nearly at hand, but it was probably going to come too late. A blast of thunder breached a dam in the sky, and torrents of icy rain suddenly fell by the megaton. With an effort that nearly caused him to black out, Jack sat up and clasped his revolver in both hands. He squeezed off a shot that was wide of the mark. The recoil induced a muscle spasm in his arms. All the strength went out of his hands, and he lost his grip on the revolver, which clattered.onto the blacktop between his spread legs. The killer loosed two-three-four
shots, and Jack took two hits in the chest. He was knocked flat. The back of his skull bounced painfully off the pavement. He tried to sit up again. He could only raise his head, and not far, just far enough to see that the killer had gone down after squeezing off that last barrage, facedown on the blacktop. The round in the chest had taken him out, though not fast enough. Jack's head lolled to his left. Even as his tunnel vision constricted further, he saw a black-and-white swing off the street, into the station at high speed, fishtailing to a stop as the driver stood on the brakes. Jack's vision closed down altogether. He was totally blind. He felt as helpless as a baby, and he began to cry. He heard doors opening, officers shouting. It was over. Luther was dead. Almost one year since Tommy Fernandez had been shot down beside him. Tommy, then Luther. Two good partners, good friends, in one year. But it was over. Voices. Sirens. A crash that might have been the portico collapsing over the service-station pumps. Sounds were increasingly muffled, as if someone was steadily packing his ears full of cotton. His hearing was fading in much the same way that his vision had gone. Other senses too. He repeatedly pursed his dry mouth, trying unsuccessfully to work up some saliva and get a taste of something, even the acrid fumes of gasoline and burning tar. He couldn't smell anything, either, although a moment ago the air had been ripe with foul odors. Couldn't feel the pavement under him. Or the blustery wind. No pain any more. Not even a tingle. Just cold. Deep, penetrating cold. Utter deafness overcame him. Holding desperately to the spark of life in a body that had become an insensate receptacle for his mind, he wondered if he would ever see Heather and Toby again. When he tried to summon their faces from memory, he could not recall what they looked like, his wife and son, two people he loved more than life itself, couldn't remember their eyes.or the color of their hair, which scared him, terrified him. He knew he was shaking with grief, as if they had died, but he couldn't feel the shakes, knew he was crying but couldn't feel the tears, strained harder to bring their precious faces to mind, Toby and Heather, Heather and Toby, but his imagination was as blind as his eyes. His interior world wasn't a bottomless pit of darkness but a blank wintry whiteness, like a vision of driving snow, a blizzard, frigid, glacial, arctic, unrelenting. CHAPTER THREE. Lightning flashed, followed by a crash of thunder so powerful it rattled the kitchen windows. The storm began not with a sprinkle or drizzle but with a sudden downpour, as if clouds were hollow structures that could shatter like eggshells and spill their entire contents at once. Heather was standing at the counter beside the refrigerator, scooping orange sherbet out of a carton into a bowl, and she turned to look at the window above the sink. Rain was falling so hard it almost appeared to be snow, a white deluge. The branches of the ficus benjamina in the backyard drooped under the weight of that vertical river, their longest trailers touching the ground. She was relieved she wouldn't be on the freeways later in the day, commuting home from work. Due to a lack of regular experience, Californians weren't good at driving in rain, they either slowed to a crawl and took such extreme precautions that they halted traffic, or they proceeded in their usual gonzo fashion and careened into one another with a recklessness approaching enthusiasm. Later, a lot of people would find their usual hour-long evening commute stret ching into a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal. There was, after all, a bright side to being unemployed. She just hadn't been looking hard enough for it. No doubt, if she put her mind to it, she'd think of a long list of other benefits. Like not having to buy any new clothes for work. Look how much she had saved right there. Didn't have to worry about the stability of the bank in which they had their savings account, either, because at the rate they were going, they wouldn't have a savings account in a few months, not on just Jack's salary, since the city's latest financial crisis had required him to take a pay cut. Taxes had gone up again too, both state and federal, so she was saving all the money that the government would have taken and squandered in her name if she'd been on someone's payroll. Gosh, when you really thought about it, being laid off after ten years at IBM wasn't a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual festival of life-enhancing change. "Give it a rest, Heather," she warned herself, closing up the carton of sherbet and returning it to the freezer. Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by dwelling on bad news, and he was right, of course. His upbeat nature, genial personality, and resilient heart had made it possible for him to endure a nightmarish childhood and adolescence that would have broken many people..More recently, his philosophy had served him well as he'd struggled through the worst year of his career with the Department. After almost a decade together on the streets, he and Tommy Fernandez had been as close as brothers. Tommy had been dead more than eleven months now, but at least one night a week Jack woke from vivid dreams in which his partner and friend was dying again. He always slipped from bed and went to the kitchen for a post-midnight beer or to the living room just to sit alone in the darkness awhile, unaware that Heather had been awakened by the soft cries that escaped him in his sleep. On other nights, months ago, she had learned that she could neither do nor say anything to help him, he needed to be by himself. After he left the room, she often reached out beneath the covers to put her hand on the sheets, which were still warm with his body heat and damp with the perspiration wrung out of him by anguish. In spite of everything, Jack remained a walking advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Heather was determined to match his cheerful disposition and his capacity for hope. At the sink, she rinsed the residue of sherbet off the scoop. Her own mother, Sally, was a world-class whiner who viewed every piece of bad news as a personal catastrophe, even if the event that disturbed her had occurred at the farthest end of the earth and had involved only total strangers. Political unrest in the Philippines could set Sally off on a despairing monologue about the higher prices she believed she would be forced to pay for sugar and for everything containing sugar if the Philippine cane crop was destroyed in a bloody civil war. A hangnail was as troublesome to her as a broken arm to an ordinary person, a headache invariably signaled an impending stroke, and a minor ulcer in the mouth was a sure sign of terminal cancer. The woman thrived on bad news and gloom. Eleven years ago, when Heather was twenty, she'd been delighted to cease being a Beckerman and to become a McGarvey--unlike some friends, in that era of burgeoning feminism, who had continued to use their maiden names after marriage or resorted to hyphenated surnames. She wasn't the first child in history who became determined to be nothing whatsoever like her parents, but she liked to think she was extraordinarily diligent about ridding herself of parental traits. As she got a spoon out of a drawer, picked up the bowl full of sherbet, and went into the living room, Heather realized another upside to being unemployed was that she didn't have to miss work to care for Toby when he was home sick from school or hire a sitter to look after him. She could be right there where he needed her and suffer none of the guilt of a working mom. Of course, their health insurance had covered only eighty percent of the cost of the visit to the doctor's office on Monday morning, and the twenty-percent copayment had caught her attention as never before. It had seemed huge. But that was Beckerman thinking, not McGarvey thinking. Toby was in his pajamas in an armchair in the living room, in front of the television, legs stretched out on a footstool, covered in blankets..He was watching cartoons on a cable channel that programmed exclusively for kids. Heather knew to the penny what the cable subscription cost. Back in October, when she'd still had a job, she'd have had to guess at the amount and might not have come within five dollars of it. On the TV, a tiny mouse was chasing a cat, which had apparently been hypnotized into believing that the mouse was six feet tall with fangs and blood-red eyes. "Gourmet orange sherbet," she said, handing Toby the bowl and spoon, "finest on the planet, brewed it up myself, hours upon hours of drudgery, had to kill and skin two dozen sherbets to make it." "Thanks, Mom," he said, grinning at her, then grinning even more broadly at the sherbet before raising his eyes to the TV screen and locking onto the cartoon again. Sunday through Tuesday, he had stayed in
bed without making a fuss, too miserable even to agitate for television time. He had slept so much that she'd begun to worry, but evidently sleep had been what he needed. Last night, for the first time since Sunday, he'd been able to keep more than clear liquids in his stomach, he'd asked for sherbet and hadn't gotten sick on it. This morning he'd risked two slices of unbuttered white toast, and now sherbet again. His fever had broken, the flu seemed to be running its course. Heather settled into another armchair. On the end table beside her, a coffee-pot-shaped thermos and a heavy white ceramic mug with red and purple flowers stood on a plastic tray. She uncapped the thermos and refilled the mug with a premium coffee flavored with almond and chocolate, relishing the fragrant steam, trying not to calculate the cost per cup of this indulgence. After curling her legs on the chair, pulling an afghan over her lap, and sipping the brew, she picked up a paperback edition of a Dick Francis novel. She opened to the page she had marked with a slip of paper, and she tried to return to a world of English manners, morals, and mysteries. She felt guilty, though she was not neglecting anything to spend time with a book. No housework needed to be done. When they'd both held jobs, she and Jack had shared chores at home. They still shared them. When she'd been laid off, she'd insisted on taking over his domestic duties, but he'd refused. He probably thought that letting her fill her time with housework would lead her to the depressing conviction that she would never find another job. He'd always been as sensitive about other people's feelings as he was optimistic about his own prospects. As a result, the house was clean, the laundry was done, and her only chore was to watch over Toby, which wasn't a chore at all.because he was such a good kid. Her guilt was the irrational if inescapable result of being, by nature and by choice, a working woman who, in this deep recession, was not permitted to work. She had submitted applications to twenty-six companies. Now all she could do was wait. And read Dick Francis. The melodramatic music and comic voices on the television didn't distract her. Indeed, the fragrant coffee, the comfort of the chair, and the cold sound of winter rain drumming on the roof combined to take her mind off her worries and let her slip into the novel. Heather had been reading fifteen minutes when Toby said, "Mom?" "Hmmm?" she said, without looking up from her book. "Why do cats always want to kill mice?" Marking her place in the book with her thumb, she glanced at the television, where a different cat and mouse were involved in another slapstick chase, the former pursuing the latter this time. "Why can't they be friends with mice," the boy asked, "instead of wanting to kill them all the time?" "It's just a cat's nature," she said. "But why?" "It's the way God made cats." "Doesn't God like mice?" "Well, He must, because He made mice too." "Then why make cats to kill them?" "If mice didn't have natural enemies like cats and owls and coyotes, they'd overrun the world." "Why would they overrun the world?" "Because they give birth to litters, not single babies." "So?" "So if they didn't have natural enemies to control their numbers, there'd be a trillion billion mice eating up all the food in the world, with nothing left for cats or us." "If God didn't want mice to overrun the world, why didn't He just make them so they have single babies at a time?" Adults always lost the Why Game, because eventually the train of questions led to a dead-end track with no answer..Heather said, "You got me there, kiddo." "I think it's mean to make mice have a lot of babies and then make cats to kill them." "You'll have to discuss that with God, I'm afraid." "You mean when I go to bed tonight and say my prayers?" "Best time," she said, freshening the coffee in her mug with the supply in the thermos. Toby said, "I always ask Him questions, then I always fall asleep before He answers me. Why does He let me fall asleep before I can get the answer?" "That's the way God works. He only talks to you in your sleep. If you listen, then you wake up with the answer." She was proud of that one. She seemed to be holding her own. Frowning, Toby said, "But usually I still don't know the answer when I wake up. Why don't I know it if He told me?" Heather took a few sips of coffee to gain time. Then she said, "Well , see, God doesn't want to just give you all the answers. The reason we're here on this world is to find the answers ourselves, to learn and gain understanding by our own efforts." Good. Very good. She felt modestly exhilarated, as if she'd held on longer than she'd any right to expect in a tennis match with a world-class player. Toby said, "Mice aren't the only things get chased and killed. For every animal, there's another animal wants to tear it to pieces." He glanced at the TV. "See, there, like dogs want to murder cats." The cat that had been chasing the mouse was now, in turn, being pursued by a fierce-looking bulldog in a spiked collar. Looking at his mother again, Toby said, "Why does every animal have another animal that wants to kill it? Would cats overrun the world without their natural enemies?" The Why Game train had come to another dead end in the track. Oh, yes, she could have discussed the concept of original sin, told him how the world had been a serene realm of peace and plenty until Eve and Adam had fallen from grace and let death into the world. But all of that seemed to be heavy stuff for an eight-year-old. Besides, she wasn't sure she believed any of it, though it was the explanation for evil, violence, and death with which she herself had grown up. Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no answer. "If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind.of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father golden retriever and one puppy." He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they'd been delaying because their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog. "Nothing would ever die or grow old," Toby said, continuing to describe the world he would have made, "so the puppy would always be a puppy, and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world, and then nothing would have to kill anything else." That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been. "I wouldn't make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes," he said, wrinkling his face in disgust. "That never made any sense. God musta been in a really weird mood that day." Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces. "Well, He musta been," Toby insisted, turning his attention to the television again. He looked so like Jack. He had Jack's beautiful gray-blue eyes and open guileless face. Jack's nose. But he had her blond hair, and he was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and solidly built, Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed miraculous. He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack's love for her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of procreation, then perhaps the bargain made in Eden wasn't as lopsided as it sometimes seemed. On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but unlike real life, the tiny bird was getting the best of the sputtering feline. The telephone rang. Heather put her book on the arm of the chair, flung the afghan aside, and got up. Toby had eaten all the sherbet, and she plucked the empty bowl from his lap on her way to the kitchen. The phone was on the wall beside the refrigerator. She put the bowl on the counter and picked up the receiver. "Hello?" "Heather?" "Speaking." "It's Lyle Crawford." Crawford was the captain of Jack's division, the man to whom he answered..Maybe it was the fact that Crawford had never called her before, maybe it was something in the tone of his voice, or maybe it was just the instincts of a cop's wife, -but she knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart began to race, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. Then suddenly she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, and expelling the same word with each exhalation: "No, no, no, no." Crawford was saying something, but Heather couldn't make herself listen to him, as if whatever had happened to Jack would not really have happened as long as she refused to hear the ugly facts put into words. Someone was knocking at the back door. She turned, looked. Through the window in the door, she saw a man in uniform, dripping rain, Louie Silverman, another cop from Jack's division, a good friend for eight years, nine years, maybe longer, Louie with the rubbery face and unruly red hair. Because he was a friend, he had come around to the back door in stead of knocking at the front, not
so formal that way, not so damn cold and horribly formal, just a friend at the back door, oh God, just a friend at the back door with some news. Louie said her name. Muffled by the glass. So forlorn, the way he said her name. "Wait, wait," she told Lyle Crawford, and she took the receiver away from her ear, held it against her breast. She closed her eyes too, so she wouldn't have to look at poor Louie's face pressed to the window in the door. So gray, his face, so drawn and gray. He loved Jack too. Poor Louie. She chewed on her lower lip and squeezed her eyes tightly shut and held the phone in both hands against her chest, searching for the strength she was going to need, praying for the strength. She heard a key in the back door. Louie knew where they hid the spare on the porch. The door opened. He came inside with the sound of rain swelling behind him. "Heather," he said. The sound of the rain. The rain. The cold merciless sound of the rain. CHAPTER FOUR. The Montana morning was high and blue, pierced by mountains with peaks as white as angels' robes, graced by forests green and by the smooth contours of lower meadows still asleep under winter's mantle. The air was pure and so clear it seemed possible to look all the way to China if not for the obstructing terrain. Eduardo Fernandez stood on the front porch of the ranch house, staring.across the down-sloping, snowcovered fields to the woods a hundred yards to the east. Sugar pines and yellow pines crowded close to one another and pinned inky shadows to the ground, as if the night never quite escaped their needled grasp even with the rising of a bright sun in a cloudless sky. The silence was deep. Eduardo lived alone, and his nearest neighbor was two miles away. The wind was still abed, and nothing moved across that vast panorama except for two birds of prey--hawks, perhaps--circling soundlessly high overhead. Shortly after one o'clock in the morning, when the night usually would have been equally steeped in silence, Eduardo had been awakened by a strange sound. The longer he had listened, the stranger it had seemed. As he had gotten out of bed to seek the source, he had been surprised to find he was afraid. After seven decades of taking what life threw at him, having attained spiritual peace and an acceptance of the inevitability of death, he'd not been frightened of anything in a long time. He was unnerved, therefore, when last night he had felt his heart thudding furiously and his gut clenching with dread merely because of a queer sound. Unlike many seventy-year-old men, Eduardo rarely had difficulty attaining plumbless sleep for a full eight hours. His days were filled with physical activity, his evenings with the solace of good books, a lifetime of measured habits and moderation left him vigorous in old age, without troubling regrets, content. Loneliness was the only curse of his life, since Margaret had died three years before, and on those infrequent occasions when he woke in the middle of the night, it was a dream of his lost wife that harried him from sleep. The sound had been less loud than all-pervasive. A low throbbing that swelled like a series of waves rushing toward a beach. Beneath the throbbing, an undertone that was almost subliminal, quaverous, an eerie electronic oscillation. He'd not only heard it but felt it, vibrating in his teeth, his bones. The glass in the windows hummed with it. When he placed a hand flat against the wall, he swore that he could feel the waves of sound cresting through the house itself, like the slow beating of a heart beneath the plaster. sure, as if he had been listening to someone or something rhythmically straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier. But who? Or what? Eventually, after scrambling out of bed, pulling on pants and shoes, he had gone onto the front porch, where he had seen the light in the woods. No, he had to be more honest with himself. It hadn't been merely a light in the woods, nothing as simple as that..He wasn't superstitious. Even as a young man, he had prided himself on his levelheadedness, common sense, and unsentimental grasp of the realities of life. The writers whose books lined his study were those with a crisp, simple style and with no patience for fantasy, men with a cold clear vision, who saw the world for what it was and not for what it might be: men like Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ford Madox Ford. The phenomenon in the lower woods was nothing that his favorite writers--every last one of them a realist--could have incorporated into their stories. The light had not been from an object within the forest, against which the pines had been silhouetted, rather, it had come from the pines themselves, mottled amber radiance that appeared to originate within the bark, within the boughs, as if the tree roots had siphoned water from a subterranean pool contaminated by a greater percentage of radium than the paint with which watch dials had once been coated to allow time to be told in the dark. Accompanying that pulse had been a sense of presi A cluster of ten to twenty pines had been involved. Like a glowing shrine in the otherwise night-black fastness of timber. Unquestionably, the mysterious source of the light was also the s ource of the sound. When the former had begun to fade, so had the latter. Quieter and dimmer, quieter and dimmer. The March night had become silent and dark again in the same instant, marked only by the sound of his own breathing and illuminated by nothing stranger than the silver crescent of a quarter moon and the pearly phosphorescence of the snow-shrouded fields. The event had lasted about seven minutes. It had seemed much longer. Back inside the house, he had stood at the windows, waiting to see what would happen next. Eventually, when that seemed to have been the sum of it, he returned to bed. He had not been able to get back to sleep. He had lain awake ... wondering. Every morning he sat down to breakfast at six-thirty, with his big shortwave radio tuned to a station in Chicago that provided international news twenty-four hours a day. The peculiar experience during the previous night hadn't been a sufficient interruption of the rhythms of his life to make him alter his schedule. This morning he'd eaten the entire contents of a large can of grapefruit sections, followed by two eggs over easy, home fries, a quarter pound of bacon, and four slices of buttered toast. He hadn't lost his hearty appetite with age, and a lifelong dedication to the foods that were hardest on the heart had only left him with the constitution of a man more than twenty years his junior..Finished eating, he always liked to linger over several cups of black coffee, listening to the endless troubles of the world. The news unfailingly confirmed the wisdom of living in a far place with no neighbors in view. This morning, though he had lingered longer than usual with his coffee, and though the radio had been on, he hadn't been able to remember a word of the news when he pushed back his chair and got up from breakfast. The entire time, he had been studying the woods through the window beside the table, trying to decide if he should go down to the foot of the meadow and search for evidence of the enigmatic visitation. Now, standing on the front porch in knee-high boots, jeans, sweater, and sheepskin-lined jacket, wearing a cap with fur-lined earflaps tied under his chin, he still hadn't decided what he was going to do. Incredibly, fear was still with him. Bizarre as they might have been, the tides of pulsating sound and the luminosity in the trees had not harmed him. Whatever threat he perceived was entirely subjective, no doubt more imaginary than real. Finally he became sufficiently angry with himself to break the chains of dread. He descended the porch steps and strode across the front yard. The transition from yard to meadow was hidden under a cloak of snow six to eight inches deep in some places and knee-high in others, depending on where the wind had scoured it away or piled it. After thirty years on the ranch, he was so familiar with the contours of the land and the ways of the wind that he unthinkingly chose the route that offered the least resistance. White plumes of breath steamed from him. The bitter air brought a pleasant flush to his cheeks. He calmed himself by concentrating on--and enjoying--the familiar effects of a winter day. He stood for a while at the end of the meadow, studying the very trees that, last night, had glowed a smoky amber against the black backdrop of the deeper woods, as if they had been imbued with a divine presence, like God in the bush that burned without being consumed. This morning they looked no more special than a million other sugar and ponderosa pines, the former somewhat greener than the latter. The specimens at the edge of the forest were younger than those rising behind them, only about thirty to thirty-five feet tall, as young a
s twenty years. They had grown from seeds fallen to the earth when he had already been on the ranch a decade, and he felt as if he knew them more intimately than he had known most people in his life. The woods had always seemed like a cathedral to him. The trunks of the great evergreens were reminiscent of the granite columns of a nave, soaring high to support a vaulted ceiling of green boughs. The.pine-scented silence was ideal for meditation. Walking the meandering deer trails, he often had a sense that he was in a sacred place, that he was not just a man of flesh and bone but an heir to eternity. He had always felt safe in the woods. Until now. Stepping out of the meadow and into the random-patterned mosaic of shadows and sunlight beneath the interlaced pine branches, Eduardo found nothing out of the ordinary. Neither the trunks nor the boughs showed signs of heat damage, no charring, not even a singed curl of bark or blackened cluster of needles. The thin layer of snow under the trees had not melted anywhere, and the only tracks in it were those of deer, raccoon, and smaller animals. He broke off a piece of bark from a sugar pine and crumbled it between the thumb and forefinger of his gloved right hand. Nothing unusual about it. He moved deeper into the woods, past the place where the trees had stood in radiant splendor in the night. Some of the older pines were over two hundred feet tall. The shadows grew more numerous and blacker than ash buds in the front of March, while the sun found fewer places to intrude. His heart would not be still. It thudded hard and fast. He could find nothing in the woods but what had always been there, yet his heart would not be still. His mouth was dry. The full curve of his spine was clad in a chill that had nothing to do with the wintry air. Annoyed with himself, Eduardo turned back toward the meadow, following the tracks he had left in the patches of snow and the thick carpet of dead pine needles. The crunch of his footsteps disturbed a slumbering owl from its secret perch in some high bower. He felt a wrongness in the woods. He couldn't put a finer point on it than that. Which sharpened his annoyance. A wrongness. What the hell did that mean? A wrongness. The hooting owl. Spiny black pine cones on white snow. Pale beams of sunlight lancing through the gaps in the gray-green branches. All of it ordinary. Peaceful. Yet wrong. As he returned to the perimeter of the forest, with snow-covered fields visible between the trunks of the trees ahead, he was suddenly certain that he was not going to reach open ground, that something was rushing at him from behind, some creature as indefinable as the wrongness that.he sensed around him. He began to move faster. Fear swelled step by step. The hooting of the owl seemed to sour into a cry as alien as the shriek of a nemesis in a nightmare. He stumbled on an exposed root, his heart trip-hammered, and he spun around with a cry of terror to confront whatever demon was in pursuit of him. He was, of course, alone. Shadows and sunlight. The hoot of an owl. A soft and lonely sound. As ever. Cursing himself, he headed for the meadow again. Reached it. The trees were behind him. He was safe. Then, dear sweet Jesus, the fear again, worse than ever, the absolute dead certainty that it was coming-- what?--that it was for sure gaining on him, that it would drag him down, that it was bent upon committing an act infinitely worse than murder, that it had an inhuman purpose and unknown uses for him so strange they were beyond both his understanding and conception. This time he was in the grip of a terror so black and profound, so mindless, that he could not summon the courage to turn and confront the empty day behind him--if, indeed, it proved to be empty this time. He raced toward the house, which appeared far more distant than a hundred yards, a citadel beyond his reach. He kicked through shallow snow, blundered into deeper drifts, ran and churned and staggered and flailed uphill, making wordless sounds of blind panic--"Uh, uh, uhhhhh, uh, uh"--all intellect repressed by instinct, until he found himself at the porch steps, up which he scrambled, at the top of which he turned, at last, to scream--"No!"--at the clear, crisp, blue Montana day. The pristine mantle of snow across the broad field was marred only by his own trail to and from the woods. He went inside. He bolted the door. In the big kitchen he stood for a long time in front of the brick fireplace, still dressed for the outdoors, basking in the heat that poured across the hearth--yet unable to get warm. Old. He was an old man. Seventy. An old man who had lived alone too long, who sorely missed his wife. If senility had crept up on him, who was around to notice? An old, lonely man with cabin fever, imagining things. "Bullshit," he said after a while. He was lonely, all right, but he wasn't senile. After stripping out of his hat, coat, gloves, and boots, he got the hunting rifles and shotguns out of the locked cabinet in the study. He loaded all of them..Mae Hong, who lived across the street, came over to take care of Toby. Her husband was a cop too, though not in the same division as Jack. Because the Hongs had no children of their own yet, Mae was free to stay as late as necessary, in the event Heather needed to put in a long vigil at the hospital. While Louie Silverman and Mae remained in the kitchen, Heather lowered the sound on the television and told Toby what had happened. She sat on the foot-stool, and after tossing the blankets aside, he perched on the edge of the chair. She held his small hands in hers. She didn't share the grimmest details with him, in part because she didn't know all of them herself but also because an eight-year-old could handle only so much. On the other hand, she couldn't gloss over the situation, either, because they were a police family. They lived with the repressed expectation of JUSt such a disaster as had struck that morning, and even a child had the need and the right to know when his father had been seriously wounded. "Can I go to the hospital with y ou?" Toby asked, holding more tightly to her hands than he probably realized. "It's best for you to stay here right now, honey." "I'm not sick any more." "Yes, you are." "I feel good." "You don't want to give your germs to your dad." "He'll be all right, won't he?" She could give him only one answer even if she couldn't be certain it would prove to be correct. "Yes, baby, he's going to be all right." His gaze was direct. He wanted the truth. Right at that moment he seemed to be far older than eight. Maybe cops' kids grew up faster than others, faster than they should. "You're sure?" he said. "Yes. I'm sure." "Where was he shot?" "In the leg." Not a lie. It was one of the places he was shot. In the leg and two hits in the torso, Crawford had said. Two hits in the torso. Jesus. What did that mean? Take out a lung? Gutshot? The heart? At least.he hadn't sustained head wounds. Tommy Fernandez had been shot in the head, no chance. She felt a sob of anguish rising in her, and she strained to force it down, didn't dare give voice to it, not in front of Toby. "That's not so bad, in the leg," Toby said, but his lower lip was trembling. "What about the bad guy?" "He's dead." "Daddy got him?" "Yes, he got him." "Good," Toby said solemnly. "Daddy did what was right, and now we have to do what's right too, we have to be strong. Okay?" "Yeah." He was so small. It wasn't fair to put such a weight on a boy so small. She said, "Daddy needs to know we're okay, that we're strong, so he doesn't have to worry about us and can concentrate on getting well." "Sure." "That's my boy." She squeezed his hands. "I'm real proud of you, do you know that?" Suddenly shy, he looked at the floor. "Well ... I'm ... I'm proud of Daddy." "You should be, Toby. Your dad's a hero." He nodded but couldn't speak. His face was screwed up as he strained to avoid tears. "You be good for Mae." "Yeah." "I'll be back as soon as I can." "When?" "As soon as I can." He sprang off the chair, into her arms, so fast and with such force he almost knocked her off the stool. She hugged him fiercely. He was shuddering as if with fever chills, though that stage of his illness had passed almost two days ago. Heather squeezed her eyes shut, bit.down on her tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, being strong, being strong even if, damn it, no one should ever have to be so strong. "Gotta go," she said softly. Toby pulled back from her. She smiled at him, smoothed his tousled hair. He settled into the armchair and propped his legs on the stool again. She tucked the blankets around him, then turned the sound up on the television once more. Elmer Fudd trying to terminate Bugs Bunny. Cwazy wabbit. Boom-boom, bang-bang, whapitta-whapittawhap, thud, clunk, hoo-ha, around and around in perpetual pursuit. In the kitchen, Heather hugged Mae Hong and whispered, "Don't let him watch any regular chan
nels, where he might see a news brief." Mae nodded. "If he gets tired of cartoons, we'll play games." "Those bastards on the TV news, they always have to show you the blood, get the ratings. I don't want him seeing his father's blood on the ground." The storm washed all the color out of the day. The sky was as charry as burned-out ruins, and from a distance of even half a block, the palm trees looked black. Wind-driven rain, gray as iron nails, hammered every surface, and gutters overflowed with filthy water. Louie Silverman was in uniform, driving a squad car, so he used the emergency beacons and siren to clear the surface streets ahead of them, staying off the freeways. Sitting in the shotgun seat beside Louie, hands clasped between her thighs, shoulders hunched, shivering, Heather said, "Okay, it's just us now, Toby can't overhear, so tell me straight." "It's bad. Left leg, lower right abdomen, upper right side of the chest. The perp was armed with a Micro Uzi, nine-millimeter ammunition, so they weren't light rounds. Jack was unconscious when we hit the scene, paramedics couldn't bring him around." "And Luther's dead." "Yeah." "Luther always seemed ..." "Like a rock." "Yeah. Always going to be there. Like a mountain." They rode in silence for a block..Then she asked, "How many others?" "Three. One of the station owners, mechanic, pump jockey. But because of Jack, the other owner, Mrs. Arkadian, she's alive." They were still a mile or so from the hospital when a Pontiac ahead of them refused to pull over to let the black-and-white pass. It had oversize tires, a jacked-up front end, and air scoops front and back. Louie waited for a break in oncoming traffic, then crossed the solid yellow line to get around the car. Passing the Pontiac, Heather saw four angry-looking young men in it, hair slicked back and tied behind, affecting a modern version of the gangster look, faces hard with hostility and defiance. "Jack's going to make it, Heather." The wet black streets glimmered with serpentine patterns of frost-cold light, reflections of the headlights of oncoming traffic. "He's tough," Louie said. "We all are," she said. Jack was still in surgery at Westside General Hospital when Heather arrived at a quarter past ten. The woman at the information desk supplied the surgeon's name--Dr. Emil Procnow--and suggested waiting in the visitors' lounge outside the intensive care unit rather than in the main lobby. Theories of the psychological effects of color were at work in the lounge. The walls were lemon yellow, and the padded vinyl seats and backrests of the gray tubular steel chairs were bright orange--as if any intensity of worry, fear, or grief could be dramatically relieved by a sufficiently cheerful decor. Heather wasn't alone in that circus-hued room. Besides Louie, three cops were present--two in uniform, one in street clothes--all of whom she knew. They hugged her, said Jack was going to make it, offered to get her coffee, and in general tried to keep her spirits up. They were the first of a stream of friends and fellow officers from the Department who would participate in the vigil because Jack was well liked but also because, in an increasingly violent society where respect for the law wasn't cool in some circles, cops found it more necessary than ever to take care of their own. In spite of the well-meaning and welcome company, the wait was excruciating. Heather seemed no less alone than if she had been by herself. Bathed in an abundance of harsh fluorescent light, the yellow walls and the shiny orange chairs seemed to grow brighter minute by minute. Rather than diluting her anxiety, the decor made her twitchy, and periodically she had to close her eyes. By 11:15, she had been in the hospital for an hour, and Jack had been.in surgery an hour and a half. Those in the support group--which now numbered six--were unanimous in their judgment that so much time under the knife was a good sign. If Jack had been mortally wounded, they said, he would have been in the operating room only a short while, and bad news would have come quickly. Heather wasn't so sure about that. She wouldn't allow her hopes to rise because that would just leave her farther to fall if the news was bad after all. Torrents of hard-driven rain clattered against the windows and streamed down the glass. Through the distorting lens of water, the city outside appeared to be utterly without straight lines and sharp edges, a surreal metropolis of molten forms. Strangers arrived, some red-eyed from crying, all quietly tense, waiting for news about other patients, their friends and relatives. Some of them were damp from the storm, and they brought with them the odors of wet wool and cotton. She paced. She looked out the window. She drank bitter coffee from a vending machine. She sat with a month-old copy of Newsweek, trying to read a story about the hottest new actress in Hollywood, but every time she reached the end of a paragraph, she couldn't recall a word of it. By 12:15, when Jack had been under the knife for two and a half hours, everyone in the support group continued to pretend no news was good news and that Jack's prognosis improved with every minute the doctors spent on him. Some, including Louie, found it more difficult to meet Heather's eyes, however, and they were speaking softly, as if in a funeral parlor instead of a hospital. The grayness of the storm outside had seeped into their faces and voices. Staring at Newsweek without seeing it, she began to wonder what she'd do if Jack didn't make it. Such thoughts seemed traitorous, and at first she suppressed them, as if the very act of imagining life without Jack would contribute to his death. He couldn't die. She needed him, and Toby needed him. The thought of conveying the news of Jack's death to Toby made her nauseous. A thin cold sweat broke out along the nape of her neck. She felt as if she might throw up, ridding herself of the bad coffee. At last a man in surgical greens entered the lounge. "Mrs. McGarvey?" As heads turned toward her, Heather put the magazine on the end table beside her chair and got to her feet. "I'm Dr. Procnow," he said as he approached her. The surgeon who had been working on Jack. He was in his forties, slender, with curly black hair and dark yet limpid eyes that were--or that she imagined were-compassionate and wise. "Your husband's in the post-op recovery room..We'll be moving him into I.C.U shortly." Jack was alive. "Is he going to be all right?" "He's got a good chance," Procnow said. The support group reacted with enthusiasm, but Heather was more cautious, not quick to embrace optimism. Nevertheless, relief made her legs weak. She thought she might crumple to the floor. As if reading her mind, Procnow guided her to a chair. He pulled another chair up at a right angle to hers and sat facing her. "Two of the wounds were especially serious," he said. "One in the leg and one in the abdomen, lower right side. He lost a lot of blood and was in deep shock by the time paramedics got to him." "But he'll be all right?" she asked again, sensing that Procnow had news he was reluctant to deliver. "Like I said, he's got a good chance. I really mean that. But he's not out of the woods yet." Emil Procnow's deep concern was visible in his kind face and eyes, and Heather couldn't tolerate being the object of such profound sympathy because it meant that surviving surgery might have been the least of the challenges facing Jack. She lowered her eyes, unable to meet the surgeon's gaze. "I had to remove his right kidney," Procnow said, "but otherwise there was remarkably little internal damage. Some minor blood-vessel problems, a nicked colon. But we've cleaned that up, done repairs, put in temporary abdominal drains, and we'll keep him on antibiotics to prevent infection. No trouble there." "A person can live ... can live on one kidney, right?" "Yes, certainly. He won't notice any difference in his quality of life from that." What will make a difference in the quality of his life, what other wound, what damage? she wanted to ask, but she didn't have the courage. The surgeon had long, supple fingers. His hands looked lean but strong, like those of a concert pianist. She told herself that Jack could have received neither better care nor more tender mercy than those skilled hands had provided. "Two things concern us now," Procnow continued. . "Severe shock combined with a heavy loss of blood can sometimes have ... cerebral consequences.".Oh, God, please. Not this. He said, "It depends on how long there was a decrease in the supply of blood to the brain and how severe the decrease was, how deoxygenated the tissues became." She closed her eyes. "His E.E.G looks good, and if I were to base a prognosis on that, I'd say there's been no brain damage. We have every reason to be optimistic. But we won't know until he regains consciousness." "When?" "No way of telling. We'll have to wait and see." Maybe never.
She opened her eyes, fighting back tears but not with complete success. She took her purse off the end table and opened it. As she blew her nose and blotted her eyes, the surgeon said, "There's one more thing. When you visit him in the I.C.U, you'll see he's been immobilized with a restraining jacket and bed straps." At last Heather met his eyes again. He said, "A bullet or fragment struck the spinal cord. There's bruising of the spine, but we don't see a fracture." "Bruising. Is that serious?" "It depends on whether any nerve structures were crushed." "Paralysis?" "Until he's conscious and we can run some simple tests, we can't know. If there is paralysis, we'll take another look for a fracture. The important thing is, the cord hasn't been severed, nothing as bad as that. If there's paralysis and we find a fracture, we'll get him into a body cast, apply traction to the legs to get the pressure off the sacrum. We can treat a fracture. It isn't catastrophic. There's an excellent chance we can get him on his feet again." "But no guarantees," she said softly. He hesitated. Then he said, "There never are." CHAPTER SIX..The cubicle, one of eight, had large windows that looked into the staff area of the I.C.U. The drapes had been pulled aside so the nurses could keep a direct watch on the patient even from their station in the center of the wheel-shaped chamber. Jack was attached to a cardiac monitor that transmitted continuous data to a terminal at the central desk, an intravenous drip that provided him with glucose and antibiotics, and a bifurcated oxygen tube that clipped gently to the septum between his nostrils. Heather was prepared to be shocked by Jack's condition--but he looked even worse than she expected. He was unconscious, so his face was slack, of course, but the lack of animation was not the only reason for his frightening appearance. His skin was bone-white, with dark-blue circles around his sunken eyes. His lips were so gray that she thought of ashes, and a Biblical quote passed through her mind with unsettling resonance, as if it had actually been spoken aloud--ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He seemed ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when he had left home that morning, as if his struggle for survival had taken place over a week, not just a few hours. A lump in her throat made it difficult for her to swallow as she stood at the side of the bed, and she was unable to speak. Though he was unconscious, she didn't want to talk to him until she was sure she could control her speech. She'd read somewhere that even patients in comas might be able to hear people around them, on some deep level, they might understand what was said and benefit from encouragement. She didn't want Jack to hear a tremor of fear or doubt in her voice--or anything else that might upset him or exacerbate what fear and depression already gripped him. The cubicle was unnervingly quiet. The heart-monitor sound had been turned off, leaving only a visual display. The oxygen-rich air escaping through the nasal inserts hissed so faintly she could hear it only when she leaned close to him, and the sound of his shallow breathing was as soft as that of a sleeping child. Rain drummed on the world outside, ticked and tapped against the single window, but that quickly became a gray noise, just another form of silence. She wanted to hold his hand more than she'd ever wanted anything. But his hands were hidden in the long sleeves of the restraining jacket. The IV line, which was probably inserted in a vein on the back of his hand, disappeared under the cuff. Hesitantly she touched his cheek. He looked cold but felt feverish. Eventually she said, "I'm here, babe." He gave no sign he had heard her. His eyes didn't move under their lids. His gray lips remained slightly parted. "Dr. Procnow says everything's looking good," she told him. "You're going to come out of this just fine. Together we can handle this, no sweat. Hell, two years ago, when my folks came to stay with us for a week? Now, that was a disaster and an ordeal, my mother whining nonstop for seven days, my dad drunk and moody. This is just a bee.sting by comparison, don't you think?" No response. "I'm here," she said. "I'll stay here. I'm not going anywhere. You and me, okay?" On the screen of the cardiac monitor, a moving line of bright green light displayed the jagged and critical patterns of atrial and ventricular activity, which proceeded without a single disruptive blip, weak but steady. If Jack had heard what she'd said, his heart did not respond to her words. A straight-backed chair stood in one corner. She moved it next to the bed. She watched him through the gaps in the railing. Visitors in the I.C.U were limited to ten minutes every two hours, so as not to exhaust patients and interfere with the nurses. However, the head nurse of the unit, Maria Alicante, was the daughter of a policeman. She gave Heather a dispensation from the rules. "You stay with him as long as you want," Maria said. "Thank God, nothing like this ever happened to my dad. We always expected it would, but it never did. Of course, he retired a few years ago, just as everything started getting even crazier out there." Every hour or so, Heather left the I.C.U to spend a few minutes with the members of the support group in the lounge. The faces kept changing, but there were never fewer than three, as many as six or seven, male and female officers in uniform, plainclothes detectives. Other cops' wives stopped by too. Each of them hugged her. At one moment or another, each of them was on the verge of tears. They were sincerely sympathetic, shared the anguish. But Heather knew that every last one of them was glad it had been Jack and not her husband who'd taken the call at Arkadian's service station. Heather didn't blame them for that. She'd have sold her soul to have Jack change places with any of their husbands--and would have visited them in an equally sincere spirit of sorrow and sympathy. The Department was a closely knit community, especially in this age of social dissolution, but every community was formed of smaller units, of families with shared experiences, mutual needs, similar values and hopes. Regardless of how tightly woven the fabric of the community, each family first protected and cherished its own. Without the intense and all-excluding love of wife for husband, husband for wife, parents for children, and children for parents, there would be no compassion for people in the larger community beyond the home. In the I.C.U cubicle with Jack, she relived their life together in memory, from their first date, to the night Toby had been born, to breakfast this morning. More than twelve years. But it seemed so short a span. Sometimes she put her head against the bed railing and spoke to him, recalling a special moment, reminding him of how much laughter they had shared, how.much joy. Shortly before five o'clock, she was jolted from her memories by the sudden awareness that something had changed. Alarmed, she got up and leaned over the bed to see if Jack was still breathing. Then she realized he must be all right, because the cardiac monitor showed no change in the rhythms of his heart. What had changed was the sound of the rain. It was gone. The storm had ended. She stared at the opaque window. The city beyond, which she couldn't see, would be glimmering in the aftermath of the day-long downpour. She had always been enchanted by Los Angeles after a rain--sparkling drops of water dripping off the points of palm fronds as if the trees were exuding jewels, streets washed clean, the air so clear that the distant mountains reappeared from out of the usual haze of smog, everything fresh. If the window had been clear and the ci ty had been there for her to see, she wondered if it would seem enchanting this time. She didn't think so. This city would never gleam for her again, even if rain scrubbed it for forty days and forty nights. In that moment she knew their future--Jack's, Toby's, and her own--lay in some far place. This wasn't home any more. When Jack recovered, they would sell the house and go . . . somewhere, anywhere, to new lives, a fresh start. There was a sadness in that decision, but it gave her hope as well. When she turned away from the window, she discovered that Jack's eyes were open and that he was watching her. Her heart stuttered. She remembered Procnow's bleak words. Massive blood loss. Deep shock. Cerebral consequence. Brain damage. She was afraid to speak for fear his response would be slurred, tortured, and meaningless. He licked his gray, chapped lips. His breathing was wheezy. Leaning against the side of the bed, bending over him, summoning all her courage, she said, "Honey?" Confusion and fear played across his face as he turned his head slightly left, then slightly right, surveying the room. "Jack? Are you with me, baby?".He focused on the cardiac monitor, seemed transfixed by the moving green line, which wa
s spiking higher and far more often than at any time since Heather had first entered the cubicle. Her own heart was pounding so hard that it shook her. His failure to respond was terrifying. "Jack, are you okay, can you hear me?" Slowly he turned his head to face her again. He licked his lips, grimaced. His voice was weak, whispery. "Sorry about this." Startled, she said, "Sorry?" "Warned you. Night I proposed. I've always been . . . a little bit of a fuck-up." The laugh that escaped her was perilously close to a sob. She leaned so hard against the bed railing that it pressed painfully into her midriff, but she managed to kiss his cheek, his pale and feverish cheek, and then the corner of his gray lips. "Yeah, but you're my fuck-up," she said. "Thirsty," he said. "Sure, okay, I'll get a nurse, see what you're allowed to have." Maria Alicante hurried through the door, alerted to Jack's change of condition by telemetry data on the cardiac monitor at the central desk. "He's awake, alert, he says he's thirsty," Heather reported, running her words together in quiet jubilation. "A man has a right to be a little thirsty after a hard day, doesn't he?" Maria said to Jack, rounding the bed to the nightstand, on which stood an insulated carafe of ice water. "Beer," Jack said. Tapping the IV bag, Maria said, "What do you think we've been dripping into your veins all day?" "Not Heineken." "Oh, you like Heineken, huh? Well, we have to control medical costs, you know. Can't use that imported stuff." She poured a third of a glass of water from the carafe. "From us you get Budweiser intravenously, take it or leave it." "Take it." Opening a nightstand drawer and plucking out a flexible plastic straw, Maria said to Heather, "Dr. Procnow's back in the hospital, making his evening rounds, and Dr. Delaney just got here too. As soon as I saw.the change on Jack's E.E.G, I had them paged." Walter Delaney was their family doctor. Though Procnow was nice and obviously competent, Heather felt better just knowing there was about to be a familiar face on the medical team dealing with Jack. "Jack," Maria said, "I can't put the bed up because you have to keep lying flat. And I don't want you to try to raise your head by yourself, all right? Let me lift your head for you." Maria put one hand behind his neck and raised his head a few inches off the thin pillow. With her other hand, she held the glass. Heather reached across the railing and put the straw to Jack's lips. "Small sips," Maria warned him. "You don't want to choke." After six or seven sips, with a pause to breathe between each, he'd had enough. Heather was delighted out of all proportion to her husband's modest accomplishment. However, his ability to swallow a thin liquid without choking probably meant there was no paralysis of his throat muscles, not even minimal. She realized how profoundly their lives had changed when such a mundane act as drinking water without choking was a triumph, but that grim awareness did not diminish her delight. As long as Jack was alive, there was a road back to the life they had known. A long road. One step at a time. Small, small steps. But there was a road, and nothing else mattered right now. While Emil Procnow and Walter Delaney examined Jack, Heather used the phone at the nurse's station to call home. She talked to Mae Hong first, then Toby, and told them that Jack was going to be all right. She knew she was putting a rose tint on reality, but a little positive thinking was good for all of them. "Can I see him?" Toby asked. "In a few days, honey." "I'm much better. Got better all day. I'm not sick any more." "I'll be the judge of that. Anyway, your dad needs a few days to get his strength back." bring peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. That's his favorite. They won't have that in a hospital, will they?" "No, nothing like that." "Tell Dad I'm gonna bring him some."."All right," she said. "I want to buy it myself. I have money, from my allowance." "You're a good boy, Toby. You know that?" His voice became soft and shy. "When you coming home?" "I don't know, honey. I'll be here awhile. Probably after you're in bed." "Will you bring me something from Dad's room?" "What do you mean?" "Something from his room. Anything. Just something was in his room, so I can have it and know there's a room where he is." The chasm of insecurity and fear revealed by the boy's request was almost more than Heather could bear without losing the emotional control she had thus far maintained with such iron-willed success. Her chest tightened, and she had to swallow hard before she dared to speak. "Sure, okay, I'll bring you something." "If I'm asleep, wake me." "Okay." "Promise?" "I promise, peanut. Now I gotta go. You be good for Mae." "We're playing five hundred rummy." "You're not betting, are you?" "Just pretzel sticks." "Good. I wouldn't want to see you bankrupt a good friend like Mae," Heather said, and the boy's giggle was sweet music. To be sure she didn't interfere with the nurses, Heather leaned against the wall beside the door that led out of the I.C.U. She could see Jack's cubicle from there. His door was closed, privacy curtains drawn at the big observation windows. The air in the I.C.U smelled of various antiseptics. She ought to have been used to those astringent and metallic odors by now. Instead, they became increasingly noxious and left a bitter taste as well. When at last the doctors stepped out of Jack's cubicle and walked toward her, they were smiling, but she had the disquieting feeling they had bad news. Their smiles ended at the corners of their mouths, in their eyes was something worse than sorrow--perhaps pity..Dr. Walter Delaney was in his fifties and would have been perfect as the wise father in a television sitcom in the early sixties. Brown hair going to gray at the temples. A handsome if soft-featured face. He radiated quiet authority, vet was as relaxed and mellow as Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young. "You okay, Heather?" Delaney asked. She nodded. "I'm holding up." "I don't know if you've heard the latest news," Emil Procnow said, "but the man who shot up the service station this morning was carrying cocaine and PCP in his pockets. If he was using both drugs simultaneously ... well, that's psycho soup for sure." "Like nuking your own brain, for God's sake," Delaney said disgustedly. Heather knew they were genuinely frustrated and angry, but she also suspected they were delaying the bad news. To the surgeon, she said, "He came through without brain damage. You were worried about that, but he came through." "He's not aphasic," Procnow said. "He can speak, read, spell, do basic math in his head. Mental faculties appear intact." "Which means there's not likely to be any brain-related physical incapacity, either," Walter Delaney said, "but it'll be at least a day or two before we can be sure of that." Emil Procnow ran one slender hand through his curly black hair. "He's coming through this really well, Mrs. Mcgarvey. He really is." "But?" she said. The physicians glanced at each other. "Right now," Delaney said, "there's paralysis in both legs." "From the waist down," Procnow said. "Upper body?" she asked. "That's fine," Delaney assured her. "Full function." "In the morning," Procnow said, "we'll look again for a spinal fracture. If we find it, then we make up a plaster bed, line it with felt, immobilize Jack from below the neck all the way past the filum terminale, below the buttocks, and put his legs in traction." "But he'll walk again?" "Almost certainly." She looked from Procnow to Delaney to Procnow again, waiting for the.rest of it, and then she said, "That's all?" The doctors exchanged a glance again. Delaney said, "Heather, I'm not sure you understand what lies ahead for Jack and for you." "Tell me." "He'll be in a body cast between three and four months. By the time the cast comes off, he'll have severe muscle atrophy from the waist down. He won't have the strength to walk. In fact, his body will have forgotten how to walk, so he'll undergo weeks of physical therapy in a rehab hospital. It's going to be more frustrating and painful than anything most of us will ever have to face." "That's it?" she asked. Procnow said, "That's more than enough." "But it could have been so much worse," she reminded them. Alone with Jack again, she put down the side railing on the bed and smoothed his damp hair back from his forehead. "You look beautiful," he said, his voice still weak and soft. "Liar." "Beautiful" "I look like shit." He smiled. "Just before I blacke d out, I wondered if I'd ever see you again." "Can't get rid of me that easy." "Have to actually die, huh?" "Even that wouldn't work. I'd find you wherever you went." "I love you, Heather." "I love you," she said, "more than life." Heat rose in her eyes, but she was determined not to cry in front of him. Positive thinking. Keep the spirits up. -His eyelids fluttered, and he said, "I'm so tired." "Can't imagine why.
" He smiled again. "Hard day at work." "Yeah? I thought you cops didn't do anything all day except sit around in doughnut shops, chowing down, and collect protection money from drug.dealers." "Sometimes we beat up innocent citizens." "Well, yeah, that can be tiring." His eyes had closed. She kept smoothing his hair. His hands were still concealed by the sleeves of the restraining jacket, and she wanted desperately to keep touching him. Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he said, "Luther's dead?" She hesitated. "Yes." "I thought so, but . . . I hoped ..." "You saved the woman, Mrs. Arkadian." "That's something." His eyelids fluttered again, drooped heavily, and she said, "You better rest, babe." "You seen Alma?" That was Alma Bryson, Luther's wife. "Not yet, babe. I've been sort of tied up here, you know." "Go see her," he whispered. "I will." "Now. I'm okay. She's the one ... needs you." "All right." "So tired," he said, and slipped into sleep again. The support group in the I.C.U lounge numbered three when Heather left Jack for the evening--two uniformed officers whose names she didn't know and Gina Tendero, the wife of another officer. They were elated when she reported that Jack had come around, and she knew they would put the word on the department grapevine. Unlike the doctors, they understood when she refused to focus gloomily on the paralysis and the treatment required to overcome it. "I need someone to take me home," Heather said, "so I can get my car. I want to go see Alma Bryson." "I'll take you there and then home," Gina said. "I want to see Alma myself." Gina Tendero was the most colorful spouse in the division and perhaps in the entire Los Angeles Police Department. She was twenty-three years old but looked fourteen. Tonight she was wearing five-inch heels, tight black leather pants, red sweater, black leather jacket, an.enormous silver medallion with a brightly colored enamel portrait of Elvis in the center, and large multiple-hoop earrings so complex they might have been variations of those puzzles that were supposed to relax harried businessmen if they concentrated totally on disassembling them. Her fingernails were painted neon purple, a shade reflected slightly more subtly in her eye shadow. Her jet-black hair was a mass of curls that spilled over her shoulders, it looked as much like a wig as any Dolly Parton had ever worn, but it was all her own. Though she was only five three without shoes and weighed maybe a hundred and five pounds dripping wet, Gina always seemed bigger than anyone around her. As she walked along the hospital corridors with Heather, her footsteps were louder than those of a man twice her size, and nurses turned to frown disapprovingly at the tock-tock-tock of her high heels on the tile floors. "You okay, Heth?" Gina asked as they headed for the four-story parking garage attached to the hospital. "Yeah." "I mean really." "I'll make it." At the end of a corridor they went through a green metal door into the parking garage. It was bare gray concrete, chilly, with low ceilings. A third of the fluorescent lights were broken in spite of the wire cages that protected them, and the shadows among the cars offered countless places of concealment. Gina fished a small aerosol can from her purse, holding it with her index finger on the trigger, and Heather said,"What's that?" "Red-pepper Mace. You don't carry?" "No." "Where you think you're living, girl -- Disneyland?" As they walked up a concrete ramp with cars parked on both sides, Heather said, "Maybe I should buy some." "Can't. The bastard politicians made it illegal. Wouldn't want to give some poor misguided rapist a skin rash, would you? Ask Jack or one of the guys-they can still get it for you." Gina was driving an inexpensive blue Ford compact, but it had an alarm system, which she disengaged from a distance with a remote-control device on her key ring. The headlights flashed, the alarm beeped once, and the doors unlocked. Looking around at the shadows, they got in and immediately locked up.again. After starting the car, Gina hesitated before putting it in gear. "You know, Heth, you want to cry on my shoulder, my clothes are all drip-dry." "I'm all right. I really am." "Sure you're not into denial?" "He's alive, Gina. I can handle anything else." "Forty years, Jack in a wheelchair?" "Doesn't matter if it comes to that, as long as I have him to talk to, hold him at night." Gina stared hard at her for long seconds. Then: "You mean it. You know what it's gonna be like, but you still mean it. Good. I always figured you for one, but it's good to know I was right." "One what?" Popping the hand brake and shifting the Ford into reverse, Gina said, "One tough damned bitch." Heather laughed. "I guess that's a compliment." "Fuckin' A, it's a compliment." When Gina paid the parking fee at the exit booth and pulled out of the garage, a glorious gold-and-orange sunset gilded the patchy clouds to the west. However, as they crossed the metropolis through lengthening shadows and a twilight that gradually filled with blood red light, the familiar streets and buildings were as alien as any on a distant planet. She had lived her entire adult life in Los Angeles, but Heather Mcgarvey felt like a stranger in a strange land. The Brysons' two-story Spanish house was in the Valley, on the edge of Burbank, lucky number 777 on a street lined with sycamores. The leafless limbs of the big trees made spiky arachnid patterns against the muddy yellow-black night sky, which was filled with too much ambient light from the urban sprawl ever to be perfectly inky. Cars were clustered in the driveway and street in front of 777, including one black-and-white. The house was filled with relatives and friends of the Brysons. A few of the former and most of the latter were cops in uniforms or civilian clothes. Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, and Asians had come together in companionship and mutual support in a way they seldom seemed capable of associating in the larger community - any more. Heather felt at home the moment she crossed the threshold, so much.safer than she had felt in the world outside. As she made her way through the living room and dining room, seeking Alma, she paused to speak briefly with old friends-and discovered that word of Jack's improved condition was already on the grapevine. More acutely than ever, she was aware of how completely she had come to think of herself as part of the police family rather than as an Angeleno or a Californian. It hadn't always been that way. But it was difficult to maintain a spiritual allegiance to a city swimming in drugs and pornography, shattered by gang violence, steeped in Hollywood-style cynicism, and controlled by politicians as venal and demagogic as they were incompetent. Destructive social forces were fracturing the city--and the country--into clans, and even as she took comfort in her police family, she recognized the danger of descending into an us-against-them view of life. Alma was in the kitchen with her sister, Faye, and two other women, all of whom were busy at culinary tasks. Chopping vegetables, peeling fruit, grating cheese. Alma was rolling out pie dough on a marble slab, working at it vigorously. The kitchen was filled with the delicious aromas of cakes baking. When Heather touched Alma's shoulder, the woman looked up from the pie dough, and her eyes were as blank as those of a mannequin. Then she blinked and wiped her flour-coated hands on her apron. "Heather, you didn't have to come--you should've stayed with Jack." They embraced, and Heather said, "I wish there was something I could do, Alma." "So do I, girl. So do I." As they leaned back from each other, Heather said, "What's all this cooking?" "We're going to have the funeral tomorrow afternoon. No delay. Get the hard part over with. A lot of family and friends will be by tomorrow after the services. Got to feed them." "Others will do this for you." "I'd rather help," Alma said. "What else am I going to do? Sit and think? I sure don't want to think. If I don't stay busy, keep my mind occupied, then I'm just going to go stark raving crazy. You know what I mean?" Heather nodded. "Yes. I know." "The word is," Alma said, "Jack's going to be in the hospital, then rehab, for maybe months, and you and Toby are going to be alone. Are you ready for that?" "We'll see him every day. We're in this together." "That's not what I mean." "Well, I know it's going to be lonely but--"."That's not what I mean, either. Come on, I want to show you something." Heather followed Alma into the master bedroom, and Alma closed the door. "Luther always worried about me being alone if anything happened to him, so he made sure I knew how to take care of myself." Sitting on the vanity bench, Heather watched with amazement as Alma retrieved a variety of weapons from concealment. She got a pistol-grip shotgun from under the bed. , "This is the best home-defense weapon you can get. Twelve-gauge. P
owerful enough to knock down some creep high on PCP, thinks he's Superman. You don't ? have to be able to aim perfectly, just point it and pull the trigger, and the spread will get him." She placed the shotgun on the beige chenille bedspread. From the back of a closet Alma fetched a heavy, wicked-looking rifle with a vented barrel, a scope, and a large magazine. "Heckler and Koch HK91 assault r ifle," she said. "You can't buy these in California so easy any more." She put it on the bed beside the shotgun. She opened a nightstand drawer and plucked out a formidable handgun. "Browning nine-millimeter semi automatic. There's one like it in the other nightstand." Heather said, "My God, you've got an arsenal here." . "Just different guns for different uses." Alma Bryson was five feet eight but by no means an Amazon. She was attractive, willowy, with delicate features, a swanlike neck, and wrists almost as thin and fragile as those of a ten-year-old girl. Her slender, graceful hands appeared incapable of controlling some - of the heavy weaponry she possessed, but she was evidently proficient with all of it. Getting up from the vanity bench, Heather said, "I can see having a handgun for protection, maybe even that shotgun. But an assault rifle?" Looking at the Heckler and Koch, Alma said, "Accurate enough at a hundred yards to put a three-shot group in a half-inch circle. Fires a 7.62 NATO cartridge so powerful it'll penetrate a tree, a brick wall, even a car, and still take out the guy who's hiding on the other side. Very reliable. You can fire hundreds of rounds, until it's almost too hot to touch, and it still won't jam. I think you should have one, Heather..You should be ready." Heather felt as if she had followed the white rabbit down a burrow into a strange, dark world. "Ready for what?" Alma's gentle face hardened, and her voice was tight with anger. "Luther saw it coming years ago. Said politicians were tearing down a thousand years of civilization brick by brick but weren't building anything to replace it." "True enough, but--" "Said cops would be expected to hold it all together when it started to collapse, but by then cops would've been blamed for so much and been painted as the villains so often, no one would respect them enough to let them hold it together." Rage was Alma Bryson's refuge from grief. She was able to hold off tears only with fury. Although Heather worried that her friend's method of coping wasn't healthy, he could think of nothing to offer in its place. Sympathy was inadequate. Alma and Luther had been married sixteen years and had been devoted to each other. Because they'd been unable to have children, they were especially close. Heather could only imagine the depth of Alma's pain. It was a hard world. Real love, true and deep, wasn't easy to find even once. Nearly impossible to find it twice. Alma must feel the best times of her life were past, though she was only thirty-eight. She needed more than kind words, more than just a shoulder to cry on. She needed someone or something at which to be furious--politicians, the system. Perhaps her anger wasn't unhealthy, after all. Maybe if a lot more people had gotten angry enough decades ago, the country wouldn't have reached such perilous straits. "You have guns?" Alma asked. "One." "What is it?" "A pistol." "You know how to use it?" "Yes." "You need more than just a pistol."."I feel uncomfortable with guns, Alma." "It's on the TV now, going to be all over the papers tomorrow--what happened at Arkadian's station. People are going to know you and Toby are alone, people who don't like cops or cops' wives. Some jackass reporter will probably even print your address. You've got to be ready for anything these days, anything." Alma's paranoia, which came as such a surprise and which seemed so out of character, chilled Heather. Even as she shivered at the icy glint in her friend's eyes, however, a part of her wondered if Alma's assessment of the situation was more rational than it sounded. That she could seriously consider such a paranoid view was enough to make her shiver again, harder than before. "You've got to prepare for the worst," Alma Bryson said, picking up the shotgun, turning it over in her hands. "It's not just your life on the line. You've got Toby to think about too." She stood there, a slender and pretty black woman, an aficionado of jazz and opera, a lover of museums, educated and refined, as warm and loving a person as anyone Heather had ever known, capable of a smile that would charm wild beasts and a musical laugh that angels might have envied, holding a shotgun that looked absurdly large and evil in the hands of someone so lovely and delicate, who had embraced rage because the only alternative to rage was suicidal despair. Alma was like a figure on a poster urging revolution, not a real person but a wildly romanticized symbol. Heather had the disquieting feeling that she was not looking at merely one troubled woman struggling to elude the grasp of bitter grief and disabling hopelessness but at the grim future of their entire troubled society, a harbinger of an all-obliterating storm. "Tearing it down brick by brick," Alma said solemnly, "but building nothing to replace it." CHAPTER SEVEN. For twenty-nine uneventful nights, the Montana stillness was disturbed only by periodic fits of winter wind, the hoot of a hunting owl, and the distant forlorn howling of timber wolves. Gradually Eduardo Fernandez regained his usual confidence and ceased to regard each oncoming dusk with quiet dread. He might have recovered his equilibrium more quickly if he'd had more work to occupy him. Inclement weather prevented him from performing routine maintenance around the ranch, with electric heat and plenty of cord wood for the fireplaces, he had little to do during the winter months except hunker down and wait for spring. It had never been a working ranch since he had managed it. Thirty-four years ago, he and Margaret had : been hired by Stanley Quartermass, a wealthy film producer, who had fallen in love with Montana and wanted a second home there. No animals or crops were raised for profit, the ranch was strictly a secluded hideaway..Quartermass loved horses, so he built a comfortable, , heated stable with ten stalls a hundred yards south of the house. He spent about two months per year at the ranch, in one- and two-week visits, and it was Eduardo's duty, in the producer's absence, to ensure that the horses received first-rate care and plenty of exercise. Tending to the animals and keeping the property in good repair had constituted the largest part of his job, and Margaret had been the housekeeper. Until eight years ago, Eduardo and Margaret had lived in the cozy, two-bedroom, single-story caretaker's house. That fieldstone structure stood eighty or ninety yards behind--and due west of--the main house, cloistered among pines at the edge of the higher woods. Tommy, their only child, had been raised there until city life exerted its fatal attraction when he was eighteen. When Stanley Quartermass died in a private-plane crash, Eduardo and Margaret had been surprised to learn that the ranch had been left to them, along with sufficient funds to allow immediate retirement. The producer had taken care of his four ex-wives while he was alive and had fathered no children from any of his marriages, so he used the greater part of his estate to provide generously for key employees. They had sold the horses, closed up the caretaker's house, and moved into the Victorian-style main house, with its gables, decorative shutters, scalloped eaves, and wide porches. It felt strange to be a person of property, but the security was welcome even--or perhaps especially--when it came late in life. Now Eduardo was a widowed retiree with plenty of security but with too little work to occupy him. And with too many strange thoughts preying on his mind Luminous trees ... On three occasions during March, he drove his Jeep Cherokee into Eagle's Roost, the nearest town. He ate at Jasper's Diner because he liked their Salisbury steak, home fries, and pepper slaw. He bought magazines and a few paperback books at the High Plains Pharmacy, and he shopped for groceries at the only supermarket. His ranch was just sixteen miles from Eagle's Roost, so he could have gone daily if he'd wished, but three times a month was usually enough. The town was small, three to four thousand souls, however, even in its isolation, it was too much a part of the modern world to appeal to a man as accustomed to rural peace as he was. Each time he'd gone shopping, he'd considered stopping at the county sheriff's substation to report the peculiar noise and strange lights in the woods. But he was sure the deputy would figure him for an old fool and do nothing but file the report in a folder labeled CRACKPOTS. In the third week of March, spring officially arrived--and the following day a storm put down eight inches of new snow. Wi
nter was not quick to relinquish its grasp there on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. He took daily walks, as had been his habit all his life, but he stayed on the long driveway, which he plowed himself after each snow, or he crossed the open fields south of the house and stables. He avoided the.lower woods, which lay east and downhill from the house, but he also stayed away from those to the north and even the higher forests to the west. His cowardice irritated him, not least of all because he was unable to understand it. He'd always been an advocate of reason and logic, always said there was too little of either in the world. He was scornful of people who operated more from emotion than from intellect. But reason failed him now, and logic could not overcome the instinctual awareness of danger that caused him to avoid the trees and the perpetual twilight under their boughs. By the end of March, he began to think that the phenomenon had been a singular occurrence without notable consequences. A rare but natural event. Perhaps an electromagnetic disturbance of some kind. No more threat to him than a summer thunderstorm. On April first, he unloaded the two rifles and two shotguns. After cleaning them, he returne d the guns to the cabinet in the study. However, still slightly uneasy, he kept the .22 target pistol on his nightstand. It didn't pack a tremendous punch but, loaded with hollow-point cartridges, it could do some damage. In the dark hours of the morning of April fourth, Eduardo was awakened by the low throbbing that swelled and faded, swelled and faded. As in early March, that pulsating sound was accompanied by an eerie electronic oscillation. He sat straight up in bed, blinking at the window. During the three years since Margaret had died, he'd not slept in the master bedroom at the front of the house, which they had shared. Instead, he bunked down in one of two back bedrooms. Consequently, the window faced west, a hundred and eighty degrees around the compass from the eastern woods where he had seen the strange light. The night sky was deep and black beyond the window. The Stiffel lamp on the nightstand had a pull-chain instead of a thumb switch. Just before he turned it on, he had the feeling that something was in the room with him, something he would be better off not seeing. He hesitated, fingers tightly pinching the metal beads of the pull. Intently he searched the darkness, his heart pounding, as if he had wakened into a nightmare replete with a monster. When at last he tugged the chain, however, the light revealed that he was alone. He picked up his wristwatch from the nightstand and checked the time. Nineteen minutes past one o'clock. He threw off the covers and got out of bed. He was in his long underwear. His blue jeans and a flannel shirt were close at hand,.folded over the back of an armchair, beside which stood a pair of boots. He was already wearing socks, because his feet often got cold during the night if he slept without them. The sound was louder than it had been a month before, and it pulsed through the house with noticeably greater effect than before. In March, Eduardo had experienced a sense of pressure along with the rhythmic pounding-- which, like the sound, crested repeatedly in a series of waves. Now the pressure had increased dramatically. He didn't merely sense it but felt it, indescribably different from the pressure of turbulent air, more like the invisible tides of a cold sea washing across his body. By the time he hurriedly dressed and snatched the loaded .22 pistol from the nightstand, the pull-chain was swinging wildly and clinking against the burnished brass body of the lamp. The windowpanes vibrated. The paintings rattled against the walls, askew on their wires. He rushed downstairs into the foyer, where there was no need to switch on a light. In the front door, the beveled edges of the leaded panes in the oval window sparkled with reflections of the mysterious glow outside. It was far brighter than it had been the previous month. The bevels broke down the amber radiance into all the colors of the spectrum, projecting bright prismatic patterns of blue and green and yellow and red across the ceiling and walls, so it seemed as if he was in a church with stained-glass murals. In the dark living room to his left, where no light penetrated from outside because the drapes were drawn, a collection of crystal paperweights and other bibelots rattled and clinked against the end tables on which they stood and against one another. Porcelains vibrated on the glass shelves of a display cabinet. To his right, in the book-lined study, the marble-and-brass desk set bounced on the blotter, a pencil drawer popped open and banged shut in time with the pressure waves, and the executive chair behind the desk wobbled around enough to make its wheels creak. As Eduardo opened the front door, most of the spots and spears of colored light flew away, vanished as if into another dimension, and the rest fled to the right-hand wall of the foyer, where they melted together in a vibrant mosaic. The woods were luminous precisely where they had been luminous last month. The amber glow emanated from the same group of closely packed trees and from the ground beneath, as if the evergreen needles and cones and bark and dirt and stones and snow were the incandescent elements of a lamp, shining brightly without being consumed. This time the light was more dazzling than before, just as the throbbing was louder and the waves of pressure more forceful. He found himself at the head of the steps but did not remember exiting the house or crossing the porch. He looked back and saw that he had closed the front door behind him. Punishing waves of bass sound throbbed through the night at the rate of.perhaps thirty a minute, but his heart was beating six times faster. He wanted to turn and run back into the house. He looked down at the pistol in his hand. He wished the shotgun had been loaded and beside his bed. When he raised his head and turned his eyes away from the gun, he was startled to see that the woods had moved closer to him. The glowing trees loomed. Then he realized that he, not the woods, had moved. He glanced back again and saw the house thirty to forty feet behind him. He had descended the steps without being aware of it. His tracks marred the snow. "No," he said shakily The swelling sound was like a surf with an undertow that pulled him relentlessly from the safety of the shore. The ululant electronic wail seemed like a siren's song, penetrating him, speaking to him on a level so deep that he seemed to understand the message without hearing the words, a music in his blood, luring him toward the cold fire in the woods. His thoughts grew fuzzy. He peered up at the star-punctured sky, trying to clear his head. A delicate filigree of clouds shone against the black vault, rendered luminous by the silver light of the quarter moon. He closed his eyes. Found the strength to resist the pull of each ebbing wave of sound. But when he opened his eyes, he discovered his resistance was imaginary. He was even closer to the trees than before, only thirty feet from the perimeter of the forest, so close he had to squint against the blinding brightness emanating from the branches, the trunks, and the ground under the pines. The moody amber light was now threaded with red, like blood in an egg yolk. Eduardo was scared, miles past fear into sheer terror, fighting a looseness in his bowels and a weakness in his bladder, shaking so violently that he would not have been surprised to hear his bones rattling together--yet his heart was no longer racing. It had slowed drastically and now matched the steady thirty-beats-per-minute of the pulsating sound that seemed to issue from every radiant surface. He couldn't possibly stay on his feet when his heartbeat was so slow, the blood supply to his brain so diminished. He ought to be either in severe shock or unconscious. His perceptions must be untrustworthy. Perhaps the throbbing had escalated to match the pace of his hammering heart. Curiously, he was no longer aware of the frigid air. Yet no heat.accompanied the enigmatic light. He was neither hot nor cold. He couldn't feel the earth under his feet. No sense of gravity, weight, or weariness of muscle. Might as well have been floating. The odors of the winter were no longer perceptible. Gone was the faint, crisp, ozone-like scent of snow. Gone, the fresh smell of the pine forest that rose just in front of him. Gone, the faint sour stink of his own icy sweat. No taste on his tongue. That was the weirdest of all. He had never before realized there was always an endless and subtly changing series of tastes in his mouth even when he wasn't eating anything. Now a blandness. Neither sweet nor sour. Neither salty nor bitter. Not even a blandness. Beyond blandness. Nothing. Nada. He worked his mouth, felt saliva flooding it, but still no taste. All of his po
wers of sensory perception seemed to be focused solely on the ghost light shining from within the trees and on the punishing, insistent sound. He no longer felt the throbbing bass washing in cold waves across his body, rather, the sound was coming from within him now, and it surged out of him in the same way that it issued from the trees. Suddenly he was standing at the edge of the woods, on ground as effulgent as molten lava. Inside the phenomenon. Gazing down, he saw that his feet seemed to be planted on a sheet of glass beneath which a sea of fire churned, a sea as deep as the stars were distant. The extent of that abyss made him cry out in panic, although no thinnest whisper escaped him. Fearfully and reluctantly, yet wonderingly, Eduardo looked at his legs and body, and saw that the amber light also radiated from him and was riddled with bursts of red. He appeared to be a man from another world, filled with alien energy, or a holy Indian spirit that had walked out of the high mountains in search of the ancient nations once in dominion over the vast Montana wilderness but long lost: Blackfeet? Crow, Sioux, Assiniboin, Cheyenne. He raised his left hand to examine it more closely. His skin was transparent, his flesh translucent. At first he could see the bones of his hand and fingers, well-articulated gray-red forms within the molten amber substance of which he seemed to be made. Even as he watched, his bones became transparent too, and he was entirely a man of glass, no substance to him at all any more, he had become a window through which could be seen an unearthly fire, just as the ground under him was a window, just as the stones and trees were windows. The crashing waves of sound and the electronic squeal arose from within the currents of fire, ever more insistent. As on that night in March, he had an almost clairvoyant perception of something straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier..Something trying to force open a door. He was standing in the intended doorway. On the threshold. He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms as if he'd never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller would enter through him, out of the fire and through him. Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn't a religious man. He tried to move. Paralyzed. Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star. The malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder, pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal, pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and thunder, fire and thunder-Blackness. Silence. Cold. When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and still. He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat--and urine. He had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he'd fallen, he must have bitten his tongue. Evidently, the door in the night had not opened. CHAPTER EIGHT. That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so one firearm or another would always be within reach. The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle's Roost, but he didn't go to the sheriff's substation. He still had no evidence to back up his story. He went, instead, to Custer's Appliance. Custer's was housed in a yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering.high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as tennis shoes on a Neanderthal. Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a dozen blank tapes. The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that he seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn't care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a pedicure. The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV worked. From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James. He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley's faked death and sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste in fiction. After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and unpacked his purchases. He needed two full days and more beers than he would ordinarily have allowed himself in order to get the hang of the video system. The damned equipment had more buttons and switches and readouts than the cockpit of an airliner, and at times it seemed the manufacturers had complicated their products for no good reason, out of a sheer love of complication. The instruction books read as if they'd been written by someone for whom English was a second language--which was very likely the case, as both the VCR and the camcorder were made by the Japanese. "Either I'm getting feebleminded," he groused aloud in one fit of frustration, "or the world's going to hell in a hand-basket." Maybe both. Warmer weather arrived sooner than usual. April was often a winter month at that latitude and altitude, but this year the daytime.temperatures rose into the forties. The season-long accumulation of snow melted, and gurgling freshets filled every gully and declivity. The nights remained peaceful. Eduardo read most of the books he'd borrowed from the library. Blackwood and especially James wrote in a style that was far too mannered for his taste, heavy on atmosphere and light on substance. They were purveyors of ghost stories, and he had trouble suspending disbelief long enough to become involved in their tales. If hell existed, he supposed the unknown entity trying to open a door in the fabric of the night might have been a damned soul or a demon forcing its way out of that fiery realm. But that was the sticking point: he didn't believe hell existed, at least not as the carnival gaudy kingdom of evil portrayed in cheap films and books. To his surprise, he found Heinlein and Clarke to be entertaining and thought-provoking. He preferred the crustiness of the former to the sometimes naive humanism of the latter, but they both had value. He wasn't sure what he hoped to discover in their books that would help him to deal with the phenomenon in the woods. Had he harbored, in the back of his mind, the absurd expectation that one of these writers had produced a story about an old man who lived in an isolated place and who made contact with something not of this earth? If such was the case, then he was so far around the bend that he would meet himself coming the other way at any moment. Nevertheless, it was more likely that the presence he sensed beyond the phantom fire and pulsating sound was extraterrestrial rather than hell-born. The universe contained an infinite number of stars. An infinite number of planets, circling those stars, might have provided the right conditions for life to have arisen. That was scientific fact, not fantasy. He might also have imagined the whole business. Hardening of the arteries that supplied blood to the brain. An Alzheimer-induced hallucination. He found it easier to believe in that explanation than in demons or aliens. He had bought the video camera more to assuage self-doubt than to gather evidence for the authorities. If the phenomenon could be captured on tape, he wasn't dotty, after all, and was competent to continue to live alone. Until he was killed by whatever
finally opened that doorway in the night. On the fifteenth of April, he drove into Eagle's Roost to buy fresh milk and produce--and a Sony Discman with quality headphones. Custer's Appliance also had a selection of audiotapes and compact discs..Eduardo asked the Mozart lookalike for the loudest music to which teenagers were listening these days. "Gift for your grand-kid?" the clerk asked. It was easier to agree than to explain. "That's right." "Heavy metal." Eduardo had no idea what the man was talking about. "Here's a new group that's getting really hot," the clerk said, selecting a disc from the display bins. "Call themselves Wormheart." Back at the ranch, after putting away the groceries, Eduardo sat at the kitchen table to listen to the disc. He installed batteries in the Discman, inserted the disc, put on the headphones, and pressed the Play button. The blast of sound nearly burst his eardrums, and he hastily lowered the volume. He listened for a minute or so, half convinced he'd been sold a faulty disc. But the clarity of the sound argued that he was hearing exactly what Wormheart had intended to record. He listened for another minute or two, waiting for the cacophony to become music, before realizing it apparently was music by the modern definition. He felt old. He remembered, as a young man, necking with Margaret to the music of Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Tommy Dorsey. Did young people still neck? Did they know what the word meant? Did they cuddle? Did they pet? Or did they just get naked and tear at each other straightaway? It sure didn't sound like music you'd play as background to lovemaking. What it sounded like, to him anyway, was music you'd play as background to violent homicide, maybe to drown out the victim's screams. He felt ancient. Aside from not being able to hear music in the music, he didn't understand why any group would call itself Wormheart. Groups should have names like The Four Freshmen, The Andrews Sisters, The Mills Brothers. He could even handle The Four Tops or James Brown and the Famous Flames. Loved James Brown. But Wormheart? It brought disgusting images to mind. Well, he wasn't hip and didn't try to be. They probably didn't even use the word "hip" any more. In fact, he was sure they didn't. He hadn't a clue as to what word meant "hip" these days. Older than the sands of Egypt..He listened to the music for another minute, then switched it off and removed the headphones. Wormheart was exactly what he needed. By the last day of April, the winter shroud had melted except for deeper drifts that enjoyed the protection of shadows during a large part of the day, although even they were dwindling steadily. The ground was damp but not muddy any longer. Dead brown grass, crushed and matted from the weight of the vanished snow, covered hills and fields, within a week, however, a carpet of tender green shoots would brighten every corner of the now dreary land. Eduardo's daily walk took him past the east end of the stables and across open fields to the south. At eleven in the morning, the day was sunny, the temperature near fifty, with a receding armada of high white clouds to the north. He wore khakis and a flannel shirt, and was so warmed by exertion that he rolled up his sleeves. On the return trip he visited the three graves that lay west of the stables. Until recently, the State of Montana had been liberal about allowing the establishment of family cemeteries on private property. Soon after acquiring the ranch, Stanley Quartermass had decided he wanted to spend eternity there, and he had obtained a permit for as many as twelve burial plots. The graveyard was on a small knoll near the higher woods. That hallowed ground was defined only by a foot-high fieldstone wall and by a pair of four-foot-high columns at the entrance. Quartermass had not wanted to obstruct the panoramic view of the valley and mountains--as if he thought his spirit would sit upon his grave and enjoy the scenery like a ghost in that old, lighthearted movie Topper. Only three granite headstones occupied a space designed to accommodate twelve. Quartermass. Tommy. Margaret. pecified by the producer's will, the inscription on the first monument read: "Here lies Stanley Quartermass / dead before his time / because he had to work / with so damned many / actors and writers"-followed by the dates of his birth and death. He had been sixty-six when his plane crashed. However, if he'd been five hundred years old, he still would have felt that his span had been too short, for he had been a man who embraced life with great energy and passion. Tommy's and Margarite's stones bore no humorous epitaphs--just "beloved son" and "beloved wife." Eduardo missed them. The hardest blow had been the death of his son, who had been killed in the line of duty only a little more than a year ago, at the age of thirty-two. At least Eduardo and Margaret had enjoyed a long life together. It was a terrible thing for a man to outlive his own child. He wished they were with him again. That was a wish frequently made,.and the fact that it could never be fulfilled usually reduced him to a melancholy mood which he found difficult to shake. At best, longing to see his wife and son again, he drifted into nostalgic mists, reliving favorite days of years gone by. This time, however, the familiar wish had no sooner - flickered through his mind than he was inexplicably overcome by dread. A chill wind seemed to whistle through his spine as if it were hollow end to end. Turning, he wouldn't have been surprised to find someone looming behind him. He was alone. The sky was entirely blue, the last of the clouds having slipped across the northern horizon, and the air was warmer than it had been at any time since last autumn. Nonetheless, the chill persisted. He rolled down his sleeves, buttoned the cuffs. When he looked at the headstones again, Eduardo's imagination was suddenly crowded with unwanted images of Tommy and Margaret, not as they had been in life but as they might be in their coffins: decaying, worm-riddled, eye sockets empty, lips shriveled back from yellow-toothed grins. Trembling uncontrollably, he was gripped by an absolute conviction that the earth in front of the granite markers was going to shift and cave inward, that the corrupted hands of their corpses were going to appear in the crumbling soil, digging fiercely and then their faces, their eyeless faces, as they pulled themselves out of the ground. He backed away from the graves a few steps but refused to flee. He was too old to believe in the living dead or in ghosts. The dead brown grass and spring-thawed earth did not move. After a while he stopped expecting it to move. When he was in full control of himself again, he walked between the low stone columns and out of the graveyard. All the way to the house, he wanted to spin around and look back. He didn't do it. He entered the house through the back door and locked it behind him. Ordinarily he never locked doors. Though it was time for lunch, he had no appetite. Instead, he opened a bottle of Corona. He was a three-beers-a-day man. That was his usual limit, not a minimum requirement. There were days when he didn't drink at all. Though not lately. Recently, in spite of his limit, he had been downing more than three a day. Some days, a lot more..Later that afternoon, sitting in a living-room armchair, trying to read Thomas Wolfe and sipping a third bottle of Corona, he became convinced, against his will, that the experience in the graveyard had been a vivid premonition. A warning. But a warning of what? As April passed with no recurrence of the phenomenon in the lower woods, Eduardo had become more-- not less--tense. Each of the previous events had transpired when the moon was in the same phase, a quarter full. That celestial condition seemed increasingly pertinent as the April moon waxed and waned without another disturbance. The lunar cycle might have nothing whatsoever to do with these peculiar events-yet still be a calendar by which to anticipate them. Beginning the night of May first, which boasted a sliver of the new moon, he slept fully clothed. The .22 was in a soft leather holster on the nightstand. Beside it was the Discman with headphones, Wormheart album inserted. A loaded Remington twelve-gauge shotgun lay under the bed, within easy reach. The video camera was equipped with fresh batteries and a blank cassette. He was prepared to move fast. He slept only fitfully, but the night passed without incident. He didn't actually expect trouble until the early-morning hours of May fourth. Of course, the strange spectacle might never be repeated. In fact, he hoped he wouldn't have to witness it again. In his heart, however, he knew what his mind could not entirely admit: that events of significance had been set in motion, that they were gathering momentum, and that he could no more avoid playing a role in them than a condemned man, in shackles, c
ould avoid the noose or guillotine. As it turned out, he didn't have to wait quite as long as he had expected. Because he'd had little sleep the night before, he went to bed early on May second--and was awakened past midnight, in the first hour of May third, by those ominous and rhythmic pulsations. The sound was no louder than it had been before, but the wave of pressure that accompanied each beat was half again as powerful as anything he had previously experienced. The house shook all the way into its foundations, the rocking chair in the corner arced back and forth as if a hyperactive ghost was working off a superhuman rage, and one of the paintings flew off the wall and crashed to the floor. By the time he turned on the lamp, threw back the covers, and got out of bed, Eduardo felt himself being lulled into a trancelike state similar to the one that had gripped him a month earlier. If he fully succumbed, he might blink and discover he'd left the house without being aware of having taken a single step from the bed. He snatched up the Discman, slipped the headphones over his ears, and hit the Play button. The music of Wormheart assaulted him..He suspected that the unearthly throbbing sound operated on a frequency with a natural hypnotic influence. If so, the trancelike effect might be countered by blocking the mesmeric sound with sufficient chaotic noise. He raised the volume of Wormheart until he could hear neither the bass throbbing nor the underlying electronic oscillation. He was sure his eardrums were in danger of bursting, however, with the heavy-metal band in full shriek, he was able to shrug off the trance before he was entirely enthralled. He could still feel the waves of pressure surging over him and see the effects on objects around him. As he had suspected, however, only the sound itself elicited a lemming-like response, by blocking it, he was safe. After clipping the Discman to his belt, so he wouldn't have to hold it, he strapped on the hip holster with the .22 pistol. He retrieved the shotgun from under the bed, slung it over his shoulder by its field strap, grabbed the camcorder, and rushed downstairs, outside. The night was chilly. The quarter moon gleamed like a silver scimitar. The light emanating from the cluster of trees and the ground at the edge of the lower woods was already blood red, no amber in it whatsoever. Standing on the front porch, Eduardo taped the eerie luminosity from a distance. He panned back and forth to get it in perspective to the landscape. Then he plunged down the porch steps, hurried across the brown lawn, and raced into the field. He was afraid that the phenomenon was going to be of shorter duration than it had been a month before, just as that second occurrence had been noticeably shorter but more intense than the first. He stopped twice in the meadow to tape for a few seconds from different distances. By the time he halted warily within ten yards of the uncanny radiance, he wondered if the camcorder was getting anything or was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of light. The heatless fire was fiercely bright, shining through from some other place or time or dimension. Pressure waves battered Eduardo. No longer like a crashing storm surf. Hard, punishing. Rocking him so forcefully he had to concentrate on keeping his balance. Again he was aware of something struggling to be free of constraint, break loose of confinement, and burst full-born into the world. The apocalyptic roar of Wormheart was the ideal accompaniment to the.moment, brutal as a sledgehammer yet thrilling, atonal yet compelling, anthems to animal need, shattering the frustrations of human limitations, liberating. It was the darkly gleeful music of doomsda y. The throbbing and the electronic whine must have grown to match the brilliance of the light and the power of the escalating pressure waves. He began to hear them again and was aware of being seduced. He cranked up the volume on Wormheart. The sugar and ponderosa pines, previously as still as trees on a painted stage backdrop, suddenly began to thrash, though no wind had risen. The air was filled with whirling needles. The pressure waves grew so fierce that he was pushed backward, stumbled, fell on his ass. He stopped recording, dropped the video camera on the ground beside him. The Discman, clipped to his belt, began to vibrate against his left hip. A wail of Wormheart guitars escalated into a shrill electronic shriek that replaced the music and was as painful as jamming nails into his ears might have been. Screaming in agony, he stripped off the headphones. Against his hip, the vibrating Discman was smoking. He tore it loose, threw it to the ground, scorching his fingers on the hot metal case. The metronomic throbbing surrounded him, as if he were adrift inside the beating heart of a leviathan. Resisting the urge to walk into the light and become part of it forever, Eduardo struggled to his feet. Shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder, Blinding light forcing him to squint, serial shock waves knocking the breath out of him, evergreen boughs churning, a trembling in the earth, the electronic oscillation like the high-pitched squeal of a surgeon's bone saw, and the whole night throbbing, the sky and the earth throbbing as something pushed repeatedly and relentlessly at the fabric of reality, throbbing, throbbing-Whoooosh. The new sound was like--but enormously louder than--the gasp of a vacuum-packed can of coffee or peanuts being opened, air rushing to fill a void. Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant. , Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon, staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him, like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge. Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the.radiant pine trees and earth. A ship. For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship with a windowless hull as smooth as pooled oil. He waited in paralytic terror for a seam of light to appear, a portal to crack open, a ramp to extrude. In spite of the fear that clouded his thinking, Eduardo quickly realized he was not looking at a solid object. The moon-glow wasn't reflected on its surface. Light just fell into it as it would fall into a well. Or tunnel. Except that it revealed no curving walls within. Instinctively, without needing to touch that smooth inky surface, he knew the sphere had no weight, no mass at all, he had no primitive sense whatsoever that it was looming over him, as he should have had if it had been solid. The object wasn't an object, it was not a sphere but a circle. Not three dimensional but two. A doorway. Open. The dark beyond the threshold was unrelieved by gleam, glint, or faintest glimmer. Such perfect blackness was neither natural nor within human experience, and staring at it made Eduardo's eyes ache with the strain of seeking dimension and detail where none existed. He wanted to run. He approached the doorway instead. His heart thudded, and his blood pressure no doubt pushed him toward a stroke. He clutched the shotgun with what he knew was pathetic faith in its efficacy, shoving it out in front of him as a primitive tribesman might brandish a talismanic staff carved with runes, inset with wild-animal teeth, lacquered with sacrificial blood, and crowned with a shock of a witch doctor's hair. However, his fear of the door--and of the unknown realms and entities beyond it--was not as debilitating as the fear of senility and the self-doubt with which he had been living lately. While the chance existed to gather proof of this experience, he intended to explore as far and as long as his nerves would hold out. He hoped never to wake another morning with the suspicion that his brain was addled and his perceptions were no longer trustworthy. Moving cautiously across the dead and flattened meadow grass, feet sinking slightly into the spring-softened soil, he remained alert for any change within the circle of exceptional darkness: a lesser blackness, shadows within the gloom, a spark, a hint of movement, anything that might signal the approach of ... a traveler. He stopped three feet from the brink of that eye-baffling tenebrity, leaning.forward slightly, as wonder-struck as a man in a fairy tale gazing into a magical mirror, the biggest damned magical mirror the Brothers Grimm ever imagined, one that offered no reflections--enchanted or otherwise-but that gave him a hair-raising glimpse of eternity. Holding the shotgun in one hand, he reached down and picked up a stone as large as a lemon. He tossed it gently at the portal. He more than half expected the stone to bounce off the bl
ackness with a hard metallic tonk, for it was still easier to believe he was looking at an object rather than peering into infinity. But it crossed the vertical plane of the doorway and vanished without a sound. He edged closer. Experimentally, he pushed the barrel of the Remington shotgun across the threshold. It didn't fade into the gloom. Instead, the blackness so totally claimed the forward part of the weapon that it appeared as if someone had run a high-speed saw through the barrel and the forearm slide handle, neatly truncating them. He pulled back on the Remington, and the forward part of the gun reappeared. It seemed to be intact. He touched the steel barrel and the checkered wood grip on the slide. Everything felt as it should feel. Taking a deep breath, not sure whether he was brave or insane, he raised one trembling hand, as if signaling "hello" to someone, and eased it forward, feeling for the transition point between this world and . . . whatever lay beyond the doorway. A tingle against his palm and the pads of his fingers. A coolness. It felt almost as if his hand rested on a pool of water but too lightly to break the surface tension. He hesitated. "You're seventy years old," he grumbled. "What've you got to lose?" Swallowing hard, he pushed his hand through the portal, and it disappeared in the same manner as the shotgun. He encountered no resistance, and his wrist terminated in a neat stump. "Jesus," he said softly. He made a fist, opened and closed it, but he couldn't tell if his hand responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist. When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it. Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again. Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest.flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward, palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against the post-midnight sky. The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented. He returned his attention to the doorway again--and suddenly wondered what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space, a tunnel to the stars. When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from--but quite as strange as-- the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could tell: the moon shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade. He walked all the way around to the back of it. Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge. He moved to take another look at the side of it. From that angle, he couldn't make out even the finest filament of supernatural blackness against the lesser darkness of the night. He felt for the edge with one hand, but he encountered only empty air. From the side, the doorway simply didn't exist-- which was a concept that made him dizzy. He faced the invisible edge of the damned thing, then leaned to his left, looking around at what he thought of as the "front" of the doorway. He shoved his left hand into it as deeply as before. He was surprised at his boldness and knew he was being too quick to assume that the phenomenon was, after all, harmless. Curiosity, that old killer of cats--and not a few human beings--had him in i ts grip. Without withdrawing his left hand, he leaned to the right and looked at the "back" of the doorway. His fingers had not poked through the far side. He pushed his hand deeper into the front of the portal, but it still.did not appear out of the back. The doorway was as thin as a razor blade, yet he had fourteen to sixteen inches of hand and forearm thrust into it. Where had his hand gone? Shivering, he withdrew his hand from the enigma and returned to the meadow, once more facing the "front" of the portal. He wondered what would happen to him if he stepped through the doorway, both feet, all the way, with no tether to the world he knew. What would he discover beyond? Would he be able to get back if he didn't like what he found? He didn't have enough curiosity to take such a fateful step. He stood at the brink, wondering--and gradually he began to feel that something was coming. Before he could decide what to do, that pure essence of darkness seemed to pour out of the doorway, an ocean of night that sucked him down into a dry but drowning sea. When he regained consciousness, Eduardo was facedown in the dead and matted grass, head turned to his left, gazing up the long meadow toward the house. Dawn had not yet come, but time had passed. The moon had set, and the night was dull and bleak without its silvery enhancement. He was initially confused, but his mind cleared. He remembered the doorway. He rolled onto his back, sat up, looked toward the woods. The razor-thin coin of blackness was gone. The forest stood where it had always stood, unchanged. He crawled to where the doorway had been, stupidly wondering if it had fallen over and was now flat on the ground, transformed from a doorway into a bottomless well. But it was just gone. Shaky and weak, wincing at a headache as intense as a hot wire through his brain, he got laboriously to his feet. He swayed like a drunkard sobering from a week-long binge. He staggered to where he remembered putting down the video camera. It wasn't there. He searched in circles, steadily widening the pattern from the point where the camcorder should have been, until he was certain that he was venturing into areas where he had not gone earlier. He couldn't find the camera. The shotgun was missing as well. And the discarded Discman with its headphones. Reluctantly he returned to the house. He made a pot of strong.coffee. Almost as bitter and black as espresso. With the first cup, he washed down two aspirin. He usually made a weak brew and limited himself to two or three cups. Too much caffeine could cause prostate problems. This morning he didn't care if his prostate swelled as big as a basketball. He needed coffee. He took off the holster, with the pistol still in it, and put it on the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair and sat within easy reach of the weapon. He repeatedly examined his left hand, which he had thrust through the doorway, as if he thought it might abruptly turn to dust. And why not? Was that any more fantastic than anything else that had happened? At first light, he strapped on the holster and returned to the meadow at the perimeter of the lower woods, where he conducted another search for the camera, the shotgun, and the Discman. Gone. He could do without the shotgun. It wasn't his only defense. The Discman had served its purpose. He didn't need it any more. Besides, he remembered how smoke had seeped from its innards and how hot the casing had been when he'd unclipped it from his belt. It was probably ruined. However, he badly wanted the camcorder, because without it, he had no proof of what he'd seen. Maybe that was why it had been taken. In the house again, he made a fresh pot of coffee. What the hell did he need a prostate for, anyway? From the desk in the study, he fetched a legal-size tablet of ruled yellow paper and a couple of ballpoint pens. He sat at the kitchen table, working on the second pot of coffee and filling up tablet pages with his neat, strong handwriting. On the first page, he began with: My name is Eduardo Fernandez, and I have witnessed a series of strange and unsettling events. I am not much of a diarist. Often, I've resolved to start a diary with the new year, but I have always lost interest before the end of January. However, I am sufficiently worried to put down here everything that I've seen and may yet see in the days to come, so there will be a record in the event that
something happens to me. He strove to recount his peculiar story in simple terms, with a minimum.of adjectives and no sensationalism. He even avoided speculating about the nature of the phenomenon or the power behind the creation of the doorway. In fact, he hesitated to call it a doorway, but he finally used that term because he knew, on a deep level beyond language and logic, that a doorway was precisely what it had been. If he died--face it, if he was killed--before he could obtain proof of these bizarre goings-on, he hoped that whoever read his account would be impressed by its cool, calm style and would not disregard it as the ravings of a demented old man. He became so involved in his writing that he worked through the lunch hour and well into the afternoon before pausing to prepare a bite to eat. Because he'd skipped breakfast too, he had quite an appetite. He sliced a cold chicken breast left over from dinner the previous night, and he built a couple of tall sandwiches with cheese, tomato, lettuce, and mustard. Sandwiches and beer were the perfect meal because that was something he could eat while still composing in the yellow legal tablet. By twilight, he had brought the story up to date. He finished with: I don't expect to see the doorway again because I suspect it has already served its purpose. Something has come through it. I wish I knew what that something was. Or perhaps I don't. CHAPTER NINE. A sound woke Heather. A soft thunk, then a brief scraping, the source unidentifiable. She sat straight up in bed, instantly alert. The night was silent again. She looked at the clock. Ten minutes past two in the morning. A few months ago, she would have attributed her apprehension to some frightening an unremembered dream, and she would have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Not any more. She had fallen asleep atop the covers. Now she didn't have to disentangle herself from the blankets before getting out of bed. For weeks, she had been sleeping in sweat-suits instead of her usual T-shirt and panties. Even in pyjamas, she would have felt too vulnerable. Sweats were comfortable enough in bed, and she was dressed for trouble if something happened in the middle of the night. Like now. In spite of the continued silence, she picked up the gun from the nightstand. It was a Korth .38 revolver, 120 made in Germany by Waffenfabrik Korth and perhaps the finest handgun in the world, with tolerances unmatched by any other maker..The revolver was one of the weapons she had purchased since the day Jack had been shot, with the consultation of Alma Bryson. She'd spent hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it felt like a natural extension of her hand. The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma's, which sometimes amazed her. More amazing still: she worried that she was not well enough armed for every eventuality. New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove to be too optimistic. Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was now sober realism. She didn't like to think about that. It depressed her. When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to the hall door. She didn't need to turn on any lights. During the past few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as swiftly and silently as a cat. On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm system she'd had installed a week after the events at Arkadian's service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital monitor strip informed her that all was secure. It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her hadn't been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected dwelling. Police have been called. Leave at once. Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved along to Toby's room. Every evening she made sure both his and her doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her. For a few seconds she stood by her son's bed, listening to his soft snoring. The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn't have been the source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams. Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to the first floor. In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window.to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house, either. Heather began to think the suspicious sound had been part of a nightmare, after all. S he seldom slept well any more, but usually she remembered her dreams. They were more often than not about Arkadian's service station, though she'd driven by the place only once, on the day after the shootout. The dreams were operatic spectacles of bullets and blood and fire, in which Jack was sometimes burned alive, in which she and Toby were often present during the gunplay, one or both of them shot down with Jack, one or both of them afire, and sometimes the well-groomed blond man in the Armani suit knelt beside her where she lay riddled with bullets, put his mouth to her wounds, and drank her blood. The killer was frequently blind, with hollow eye sockets full of roiling flames. His smile revealed teeth as sharp as the fangs of a viper, and once he said to her, I'm taking Toby down to hell with me--put the little bastard on a leash and use him as a guide dog. Considering that her remembered nightmares were so bad, how gruesome must be the ones she blocked from memory? By the time she had circled the living room, returned to the archway, and crossed the hall to the dining room, she decided that her imagination had gotten the better of her. There was no immediate danger. She no longer held the Korth in front of her but held it at her side, with the muzzle aimed at the floor and her finger on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself. The sight of someone outside, moving past a dinningroom window, brought her to full alert again. The drapes were open, but the sheers under them were drawn all the way shut. Backlit by a streetlamp, the prowler cast a shadow that pierced the glass and rippled across the soft folds of the translucent chiffon. It passed quickly, like the shadow of a night bird, but she suffered no doubt that it had been made by a man. She hurried into the kitchen. The tile floor was cold under her bare feet. Another alarm-system control panel was on the wall beside the connecting door to the garage. She punched in the deactivating code. With Jack in the hospital for an unthinkably long convalescence, herself out of work, and their financial future uncertain, Heather had been hesitant to spend precious savings on a burglar alarm. She had always assumed security systems were for mansions in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, not for middle-class families like theirs. Then she'd.learned that six homes out of the sixteen on their block already relied on high-tech protection. Now the glowing green letters on the readout strip changed from SECURE to the less comforting READY TO ARM. She could have set off the alarm, summoning the police. But if she did that, the creeps outside would run. By the time a patrol car arrived, there would be no one to arrest. She was pretty sure she knew what they were--though not who-and what mischief they were up to. She wanted to surprise them and hold them at gunpoint until help arrived. As she quietly disengaged the dead-bolt lock, opened the door--NOT READY TO ARM, the system warned-- and stepped into the garage, she knew she was out of control. Fear should have had her in its thrall. She was afraid, yes, but fear was not what made her heart beat hard and fast. Anger was the engine that drove her. She was infuriated by repeated victimization and determined to make her tormentors pay regardless of the risks. The concrete floor of the garage was even colder than the kitchen tiles. She rounded the back end of the nearer car. Stopping between the fenders of the two vehicles, she waited, listened. The only light came through a series of six-inch-square windows high in the double-wide garage doors: th
e sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps. The deep shadows seemed contemptuous of it, refusing to withdraw. There. Whispering outside. Soft footfalls on the service walkway along the south side of the house. Then the telltale hiss for which she'd been waiting. Bastards. Heather walked quickly between the cars to the mansize door in the back wall of the garage. The lock had a thumb-turn on the inside. She twisted it slowly, easing the dead bolt out of the striker plate without the clack that it made if opened unthinkingly. She turned the knob, carefully pulled the door inward, and stepped onto the sidewalk behind the house. The May night was mild. The full moon, well on its westward course, was mostly hidden by an overcast. She was being irresponsible. She wasn't protecting Toby. If anything, she was putting him in greater jeopardy. Over the top. Out of control. She knew it. Couldn't help it. She'd had enough. Couldn't take any more. Couldn't stop. To her right lay the covered rear porch, the patio in front of it. The backyard was lit only patchily by what moonlight penetrated the ragged veil of clouds. Tall eucalyptuses, smaller benjaminas, and low shrubs were dappled with lunar silver. She was on the west side of the house. She moved to her left along the.walkway, toward the south. At the corner she halted, listening. Because there was no wind, she could clearly hear the vicious hissing, a sound that only stoked her anger. Murmurs of conversation. Couldn't catch the words. Stealthy footsteps hurrying toward the back of the house. A low, suppressed laugh, almost a giggle. Having such a good time at their game. Judging the moment of his appearance by the sound of his swiftly approaching footsteps, intending to scare the living hell out of him, Heather moved forward. With perfect timing, she met him at the turn in the sidewalk. She was surprised to see he was taller than she was. She had expected them to be ten years old, eleven, twelve at the oldest. The prowler let out a faint "Ah!" of alarm. Putting the fear of God into them was going to be a harder proposition than if they'd been younger. And no retreating now. They'd drag her down. And then . . She kept moving, collided with him, rammed him backward across the eight-foot-wide setback and into the ivy-covered concrete-block wall that marked the southern property line. The can of spray paint flew out of his hand, clattered against the sidewalk. The impact knocked the wind out of him. His mouth sagged open, and he gasped for breath. Footsteps. The second one. Running toward her. Pressed against the first boy, face-to-face, even in the darkness, she saw that he was sixteen or seventeen, maybe older. Plenty old enough to know better. She rammed her right knee up between his spread legs and turned away from him as he fell, wheezing and retching, into the flower bed along the wall. The second boy was coming at her fast. He didn't see the gun, and she didn't have time to stop him with a threat. She stepped toward him instead of away, spun on her left foot, and kicked him in the crotch with her right. Because she'd moved into him, it was a deep kick, she caught him with her ankle and the upper part of the bridge of her foot instead of with her toes..He crashed past her, slammed into the sidewalk, and rolled against the first boy, afflicted by an identical fit of retching. A third one was coming at her along the sidewalk from the front of the house, but he skidded to a halt fifteen feet away and started to back up. "Stop right there," she said. "I've got a gun." Though she raised the Korth, holding it in a two-hand grip, she did not raise her voice, and her calm control made the order more menacing than if she had shouted it in an He stopped, but maybe he couldn't see the revolver in the dark. His body language said he was still contemplating making a break for it. "So help me God," she said, still at a conversational level, "I'll blow your brains out." She was surprised by the cold hatred in her voice. She wouldn't really have shot him. She was sure of that. Yet the sound of her own voice frightened her . . . and made her wonder. His shoulders sagged. His entire posture changed. He believed her threat. A dark exhilaration filled her. Nearly three months of intense taste kwon do and women's defense classes, provided free to members of police families three times a week at the division gym, had paid off. Her right foot hurt like blazes, probably almost as badly as the second boy's crotch hurt him. She might have broken a bone in it, would certainly be hobbling around for a week even if there wasn't a fracture, but she felt so good about nailing the three vandals that she was happy to suffer for her triumph. "Come here," she said. "Now, come on, come on." The third kid raised his hands over his head. He was holding a spray can in each of them. "Get down on the ground with your buddies," she demanded, and he did as he was told. The moon sailed out from behind the clouds, which was like slowly bringing up the stage lights to quarter power on a darkened set. She could see well enough to be sure that they were all older teenagers, sixteen to eighteen. She could also see that they didn't fit any popular stereotypes of taggers. They weren't black or Hispanic. They were white boys. And they didn't look poor, either. One of them wore a well-cut leather jacket, and another wore a cable-knit cotton sweater with what appeared to be a complicated and beautifully knitted pattern. The night quiet was broken only by the miserable gagging and groaning of the two she'd disabled. The confrontation had unfolded so swiftly in the eight-foot-wide space between the house and the property wall, and in such relative silence, that they hadn't even awakened any.neighbors. Keeping the gun on them, Heather said, "You been here before?" Two of them couldn't yet have answered her if they'd wanted to, but the third was also unresponsive. "I asked if you'd been here before," she said sharply, "done this kind of crap here before." "Bitch," the third kid said. She realized it was possible to lose control of the situation even when she was the only one with a gun, especially if the crotch-bashed pair reco vered more easily than she expected. She resorted to a lie that might convince them she was more than just a cop's wife with a few smart moves: "Listen, you little snots--I can kill all of you, go in the house and get a couple of knives, plant them in your hands before the first black-and-white gets here. Maybe they'll drag me into court and maybe they won't. But what jury's going to put the wife of a hero cop and the mother of a little eight-year-old boy in prison?" "You wouldn't do that," the third kid said, although he spoke only after a hesitation. A thread of uncertainty fluttered in his voice. She continued to surprise herself by speaking with an intensity and bitterness she didn't have to fake. "Wouldn't I, huh? Wouldn't I? My Jack, two partners shot down beside him in one year, and him lying in the hospital since the first of March, going to be in there weeks yet, months yet, God knows what pain he might have the rest of his life, whether he'll ever walk entirely right, and here I am out of work since October, savings almost gone, can't sleep for worrying, being harassed by crud like you. You think I wouldn't like to see somebody else hurting for a change, think I wouldn't actually get a kick out of hurting you, hurting you real bad? Wouldn't I? Huh? Huh? Wouldn't I, you little snot?" Jesus. She was shaking. She hadn't been aware that anything this dark was in her. She felt her gorge rising in the back of her throat and had to fight hard to keep it down. From all appearances, she had scared the three taggers even more than she had scared herself. Their eyes were wide with fright in the moonlight. "We . . . been here . . . before," gasped the kid whom she'd kicked. "How often?" "T-twice." The house had been hit twice before, once in late March, once in the middle of April..Glowering down at them, she said, "Where you from?" "Here," said the kid she hadn't hurt. "Not from this neighborhood, you aren't." "L.A." he said. "It's a big city," she pressed. "The Hills." "Beverly Hills?" "Yeah." "All three of you?" "Yeah." "Don't screw around with me." "It's true, that's where we're from--why wouldn't it be true?" The unhurt boy put his hands to his temples as if he'd just been overcome with remorse, though it was far more likely to be a sudden headache. Moonlight glinted off his wristwatch and the beveled edges of the shiny metal band. "What's that watch?" she demanded. "Huh?" "What make is it?" "Rolex," he said. That was what she'd thought it was, although she couldn't help but express astonishment: "Rolex?" "I'm not lying. I got it for Christmas." "Jesus." He started to take it off. "Here, you can have it." "Leave it on," she said scornfully. "No, really." "Who gave it to you?" "My folks. It's the gold one." He had taken
it off. He held it out, offering it to her. "No diamonds, but all gold, the watch and the band." "What is that," she asked incredulously, "fifteen thousand bucks,.twenty thousand?" "Something like that," one of the hurt boys said. "It's not the most expensive model." "You can have it," the owner of the watch repeated. Heather said, "How old are you?" "Seventeen." "You're still in high school?" "Senior. Here, take the watch." "You're still in high school, you get a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch for Christmas?" "It's yours." Crouching in front of the huddled trio, refusing to acknowledge the pain in her right foot, she leveled the Korth at the face of the boy with the watch. All three drew back in terror. She said, "I might blow your head off, you spoiled little creep, I sure might, but I wouldn't steal your watch even if it was worth a million. Put it on." The gold links of the Rolex band rattled as he nervously slipped it onto his wrist again and fumbled with the clasp. She wanted to know why, with all the privileges and advantages their families could give them, three boys from Beverly Hills would sneak around at night defacing the hard-earned property of a cop who had nearly been killed trying to preserve the very social stability that made it possible for them to have enough food to eat, let alone Rolex watches. Where did their meanness come from, their twisted values, their nihilism? Couldn't blame it on deprivation. Then who or what was to blame? "Show me your wallets," she said harshly. They fumbled wallets from hip pockets, held them out to her. They kept glancing back and forth from her to the Korth. The muzzle of the .38 must have looked like a cannon to them. She said, "Take out whatever cash you're carrying." Maybe the trouble with them was just that they'd been raised in a time when the media assaulted them, first, with endless predictions of nuclear war and then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, with ceaseless warnings of a fast-approaching worldwide environmental catastrophe. Maybe the unremitting but stylishly produced gloom and.doom that got high Nielsen ratings for electronic news had convinced them that they had no future. And black kids had it even worse, because they were also being told they couldn't make it, the system was against them, unfair, no justice, no use even trying. Or maybe none of that had anything to do with it. She didn't know. She wasn't sure she even cared. Nothing she could say or do would turn them around. Each boy was holding cash in one hand, a wallet in the other, waiting expectantly. She almost didn't ask the next question, then decided she'd better: "Any of you have credit cards?" Incredibly, two of them did. High-school students with credit cards. The boy she had driven backward into the wall had American Express and Visa cards. The boy with the Rolex had a Mastercard. Staring at them, meeting their troubled eyes in the moonlight, she took solace from the certainty that most kids weren't like these three. Most were struggling to deal with an immoral world in a moral fashion, and they would finish growing up to be good people. Maybe even these brats would be all right eventually, one or two of them, anyway. But what was the percentage who'd lost their moral compass these days, not merely among teenagers but in any age group? Ten percent? Surely more. So much street crime and white-collar crime, so much lying and cheating, greed and envy. Twenty percent? And what percentage could a democracy tolerate before it collapsed? "Throw your wallets on the sidewalk," she said, indicating a spot beside her. They did as instructed. "Put the cash and credit cards in your pockets." Looking perplexed, they did that too. "I don't want your money. I'm no petty criminal like you." Holding the revolver in her right hand, she gathered up the wallets with her left. She stood and backed away from them, refusing to favor her right foot, until she came up against the garage wall. She didn't ask them any of the questions that had been running through her mind. Their answers--if they had any answers--would be glib. She was sick of glibness. The modern world creaked along on a lubricant of facile lies, oily evasions, slick self-justifications. "All I want is your identification," Heather said, raising the fist in which she clenched the wallets. "This'll tell me who you are, where I can find you. You ever give us any more grief, you so much as drive by and spit on the front lawn, I'll come after all of you, take my time,.catch you at just the right moment." She cocked the hammer on the Korth, and their gazes all dropped from her eyes to the gun. "Bigger gun than this, higher-caliber ammunition, something with a hollow point, shoot you in the leg and it shatters the bone so bad they have to amputate. Shoot you in both legs, you're in a wheelchair the rest of your life. Maybe one of you gets it in the balls, so you can't bring any more like you into the world." The moon slid behind clouds. The night was deep. From the backyard came the coarse singing of toads. The three boys stared at her, not sure that she meant for them to go. They had expected to be turned over to the police. That, of course, was. out of the question. She had hurt two of them. Each of the injured still had a hand cupped tenderly over his crotch, and both were grimacing with pain. Furthermore, she had threatened them with a gun outside her home. The argument against her would be that they had represented no real threat because they hadn't crossed her threshold. Although they had spraypainted her house with hateful and obscene graffiti on three separate occasions, though they had done financial and emotional damage to her and her child, she knew that being the wife of a heroic cop was no guarantee against prosecution on a variety of charges that inevitably would result in her imprisonment instead of theirs. "Get out of here," she said. They rose to their feet but then hesitated as if afraid she would shoot them in the back. "Go," she said. "Now." At last they hurried past her, along the side of the house, and she followed at a distance to be sure they actually cleared out. They kept glancing back at her. On the front lawn, standing in the dew-damp grass, she got a good look at what they had done to at least two and possibly three sides of the house. The red, yellow, and sour-apple-green paint seemed to glow in the light of the streetlamps. They had scrawled their personal tagger symbols everywhere, and they had favored the F-word with and without a variety of suffixes, as noun and verb and adjective. But the central message was as it had been the previous two times they'd struck: KILLER COP. The three boys--two of them limping--reached their car, which was parked nearly a block to the north. A black Infinity. They took off with a squeal of spinning tires, leaving clouds of blue smoke in their wake..KILLER COP. WIDOWMAKER. ORPHANMAKER. Heather was more deeply disturbed by the irrationality of the graffiti than by the confro ntation with the three taggers. Jack had not been to blame. He'd been doing his duty. How was he supposed to have taken a machine gun from a homicidal maniac without resorting to lethal force? She was overcome with a feeling that civilization was sinking in a sea of mindless hatred. ANSON OLIVER LIVES! Anson Oliver was the maniac with the Micro Uzi, a promising young film director with three features released in the past four years. Not surprisingly, he made angry movies about angry people. Since the shootout, Heather had seen all three films. Oliver had made excellent use of the camera and had had a powerful narrative style. Some of his scenes were dazzling. He might even have been a genius and, in time, might have been honored with Oscars and other awards. But there was a disquieting moral arrogance in his work, a smugness and bullying, that now appeared to have been an early sign of much deeper problems exacerbated by too many drugs. ASSASSIN . She wished that Toby didn't have to see his father labeled a murderer. Well, he'd seen it before. Twice before, all over his own house. He had heard it at school, as well, and had been in two fights because of it. He was a little guy, but he had guts. Though he'd lost both of the fights, he would no doubt disregard her advice to turn the other cheek and would wade into more battles. In the morning, after she drove him to school, she would paint over the graffiti. As before, some of the neighbors would probably help. Multiple coats were required over the affected areas because their house was a pale yellow-beige. Even so, it was a temporary repair, because the spray paint had a chemical composition that ate through the house paint. Over a few weeks, each defacement gradually reappeared like spirit writing on a medium's tablet at a seance, messages from souls in hell. In spite of the mess on her house, her anger faded. She didn't have the energy to sustain it. These last few months
had worn her down. She was tired, so very tired. Limping, she reentered the house by the back garage door and locked up after herself. She also locked the connecting door between the garage.and the kitchen, and punched in the activating code to arm the alarm system again. SECURE. Not really. Not ever. She went upstairs to check on Toby. He was still sound asleep. Standing in the doorway of her son's room, listening to him snore, she understood why Anson Oliver's mother and father had been unable to accept that their son had been capable of mass murder. He had been their baby, their little boy, their fine young man, the embodiment of the best of their own qualities, a source of pride and hope, heart of their heart. She sympathized with them, pitied them, prayed that she would never have to experience a pain like theirs--but she wished they would shut up and go away. Oliver's parents had conducted an effective media campaign to portray their son as a kind, talented man incapable of what he was said to have done. They claimed the Uzi found at the scene had not belonged to him. No record existed to prove he had purchased or registered such a weapon. But the fully automatic Micro Uzi was an illegal gun these days, and Oliver no doubt paid cash for it on the black market. No mystery about the lack of a receipt or registration. Heather left Toby's room and returned to her own. She sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the lamp. She put down the revolver and occupied herself with the contents of the three wallets. From their driver's licenses, she learned that one of the boys was sixteen years old and two were seventeen. They did, indeed, live in Beverly Hills. In one wallet, among snapshots of a cute high school-age blonde and a grinning Irish setter, Heather found a two-inch-diameter decal at which she stared in disbelief for a moment before she fished it out of the plastic window. It was the kind of thing often sold on novelty racks in stationery stores, pharmacies, record shops, and bookstores, kids decorated school notebooks and countless other items with them. A paper backing could be peeled off to reveal an adhesive surface. This one was glossy black with embossed silver-foil letters: ANSON OLIVER LIVES. Someone was already merchandising his death. Sick. Sick and strange. What unnerved Heather most was that, apparently, a market existed for Anson Oliver as legendary figure, perhaps even as martyr. Maybe she should have seen it coming. Oliver's parents weren't the only people assiduously polishing his image since the shootout. The director's fiancee, pregnant with his child, claimed he didn't use drugs any more. He'd been arrested twice for driving under the.influence of narcotics, however, those slips from the pedestal were said to have been a thing of the past. The fiancee was an actress, not merely beautiful but with a fey and vulnerable quality that ensured plenty of TV-news time, her large, lovely eyes always seemed on the verge of filling with tears. Various film-community associates of the director had taken out full-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, mourning the loss of such a creative talent, making the observation that his controversial films had angered a lot of people in positions of power, and suggesting that he had lived and died for his art. The implications of all this were that the Uzi had been planted on him, as had the cocaine and PCP. Because everyone up and down the street from Arkadian's station had dived for cover at the sound of all that gunfire, no one had witnessed Anson Oliver with a gun in his hands except the people who died--and Jack. Mrs. Arkadian had never seen the gunman while she'd been hiding in the office, when she'd come out of the service station with Jack, she'd been virtually blind because smoke and soot had mucked up her contact lenses. Within two days of the shootout, Heather had been forced to change their phone number for a new, unlisted one, because fans of Anson Oliver were calling at all hours. Many had made accusations of sinister conspiracies in which Jack figured as the triggerman. It was nuts. The guy was just a filmmaker, for God's sake, not President of the United States. Politicians, corporate chiefs, military leaders, and police officials didn't quiver in terror and plot murder out of fear that some crusading Hollywood film director was going to take a swipe at them in a movie. Hell, if they were that sensitive, there would hardly be any directors left. And did these people actually believe that Jack had shot his own partner and three other men at the service station, then pumped three rounds into himself, all of this in broad daylight where there well might have been witnesses, risking death, subjecting himself to enormous pain and suffering and an arduous rehabilitation merely to make his story about Anson Oliver's death look more credible? The answer, of course, was yes. They did believe such nonsense. She found proof in another plastic window in the same wallet. Another decal, also a two-inch-diameter circle. Black background, red letters, three names stacked above one another: OSWALD, CHAPMAN, Mcgarvey? She was filled with revulsion. To compare a troubled film director who'd made three flawed movies to John Kennedy (Oswald's victim) or even to John Lennon (Mark David Chapman's victim) was disgusting. But to liken Jack to a pair of infamous murderers was an abomination. OSWALD, CHAPMAN, Mcgarvey? Her first thought was to call an attorney in the morning, find out who was producing this trash, and sue them for every penny they had. As.she stared at the hateful decal, however, she had a sinking feeling that the purveyor of this crap had protected himself by the use of that question mark. OSWALD, CHAPMAN, MCGARVY? Speculation wasn't the same thing as accusation. The question mark made it speculation and probably provided protection against a successful prosecution for slander or libel. Suddenly she had enough energy to sustain her anger, after all. She gathered up the wallets and threw them into the bottom drawer of the nightstand, along with the decals. She slammed the drawer shut--then hoped she hadn't wakened Toby. It was an age when a great many people would rather embrace a patently absurd conspiracy theory than bother to research the facts and accept a simple, observable truth. They seemed to have confused real life with fiction, eagerly seeking Byzantine schemes and cabals of maniacal villains straight out of Ludlum novels. But the reality was nearly always far less dramatic and immeasurably less flamboyant. It was probably a coping mechanism, a means by which they tried to bring order to and make sense of--a high-tech world in which the pace of social and technological change dizzied and frightened them. Coping mechanism or not, it was sick. And speaking of sick, she had hurt two of those boys. Never mind that they deserved it. She had never hurt anyone in her life before. Now that the heat of the moment was past, she felt ... not remorse, exactly, because they had earned what she'd done to them . . . but a sadness that it had been necessary. She felt soiled. Her exhilaration had fallen with her adrenaline level. She examined her right foot. It was beginning to swell, but the pain was tolerable. "Good God, woman," she admonished herself, "who did you think you were--one of the Ninja Turtles?" She got two Excedrin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, washed them down with tepid water. In the bedroom again, she switched off the bedside lamp. She wasn't afraid of the darkness. What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one another either in darkness or at high noon. CHAPTER TEN. The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had not yet seared the grass..Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a bentwood hickory rocking chair on the front porch. A new video camera, loaded with tape and fully charged batteries, lay on the porch floor beside the rocker. Next to the camera was a shotgun. He got up a couple of times to fetch a fresh bottle of beer or to use the bathroom. And once he went for a half-hour walk around the nearer fields, carrying the camera. For the most part, however, he remained in the chair-waiting. It was in the woods. Eduardo knew in his bones that something had come through the black doorway in the first hour of May third, over five weeks ago. Knew it, felt it. He had no idea what it was or where it had begun its journey, but he knew it had traveled from some strange world into that Montana night. Thereafter, it must have found a hiding place, into which it had crawled. No other analysis of the situation made sense. Hiding. If it had wanted its presence to be known, it would have revealed itself to him that night or later. The woods, vast and dense, of
fered an infinite number of places to go to ground. Although the doorway had been enormous, that didn't mean the traveler--or the vessel carrying it, if a vessel existed--was also large. Eduardo had once been to New York City and driven through the Holland Tunnel, which had been a lot bigger than any car that used it. Whatever had come out of that death-black portal might be no larger than a man, perhaps even smaller, and able to hide almost anywhere among those timbered vales and ridges. The doorway indicated nothing about the traveler, in fact, except that it was undoubtedly intelligent. Sophisticated science and engineering lay behind the creation of that gate. He had read enough Heinlein and Clarke--and selected others in their vein--to have exercised his imagination, and he had realized that the intruder might have a variety of origins. More likely than not, it was extraterrestrial. However, it might also be something from another dimension or from a parallel world. It might even be a human being, opening a passage into this age from the far future. The numerous possibilities were dizzying, and he no longer felt like a fool when he speculated about them. He also had ceased being embarrassed about borrowing fantastical literature from the library--though the cover art was often trashy even when well drawn--and his appetite for it had become voracious. Indeed, he found that he no longer had the patience to read the realist writers who had been his lifelong favorites. Their work simply wasn't as realistic as it had seemed before. Hell, it wasn't realistic at all to him any longer. Now, when he was just a few pages into a book or story by one of them, Eduardo got the distinct feeling that their point.of view consisted of an extremely narrow slice of reality, as if they looked at life through the slit of a welder's hood. They wrote well, certainly, but they were writing about only the tiniest sliver of the human experience in a big world and an infinite universe. He now preferred writers who could look beyond this horizon, who knew that humanity would one day reach childhood's end, who believed intellect could triumph over superstition and ignorance, and who dared to dream. He was also thinking about buying a second Discman and giving Wormheart another try. He finished a beer, put the bottle on the porch beside the rocker, and wished he could believe the thing that had come through the doorway was just a person from the distant future, or at least something benign. But it had gone into hiding for more than five weeks, and its secretiveness did not seem to indicate benevolent intentions. He was trying not to be xenophobic. But instinct told him that he'd had a brush with something not merely different from humanity but inherently hostile to it. Although his attention was focused, more often than not, on the lower woods to the east, at the edge of which the doorway had opened, Eduardo wasn't comfortable venturing near the northern and western woods, either, because the evergreen wilderness on three sides of the ranch house was contiguous, broken only by the fields to the south. Whatever had entered the lower woods could easily make its way under the cover of the trees into any arm of the forest. He supposed it was possible that the traveler had not chosen to hide anywhere nearby but had circled into the pines on the western foothills and from there into the mountains. It might long ago have retreated into some high redoubt, secluded ravine, or cavern in the remote reaches of the Rocky Mountains, many miles from Quartermass Ranch. But he didn't think that was the case. Sometimes, when he was walking near the forest, studying the shadows under the trees, looking for anything out of the ordinary, he was aware of ... a presence. Simple as that. Inexplicable as that. A presence. On those occasions, though he neither saw nor heard anything unusual, he was aware that he was no longer alone. So he waited. Sooner or later something new would happen. On those days when he grew impatient, he reminded himself of two things. First, he was well accustomed to waiting, since Margaret had died three years ago, he hadn't been doing anything but waiting for the time to come when he could join her again. Second, when at last something did happen, when the traveler finally chose to reveal itself in some fashion, Eduardo more likely than not would wish that it had remained.concealed and secretive. Now he picked up the empty beer bottle, rose from the rocking chair, intending to get another brew--and saw the raccoon. It was standing in the yard, about eight or ten feet from the porch, staring at him. He hadn't noticed it before because he'd been focused on the distant trees--the once-luminous trees--at the foot of the meadow. The woods and fields were heavily populated with wildlife. The frequent appearance of squirrels, rabbits, foxes, possums, deer, horned sheep, and other animals was one of the charms of such a deeply rural life. Raccoons, perhaps the most adventurous and interesting of all the creatures in the neighborhood, were highly intelligent and rated higher still on any scale of cuteness. However, their intelligence and aggressive scavenging made them a nuisance, and the dexterity of their almost hand-like paws facilitated their mischief. In the days when horses had been kept in the stables, before Stanley Quartermass died, raccoons--although primarily carnivores--had been endlessly inventive in the raids they launched on apples and other equestrian supplies. Now, as then, trash cans had to be fitted with raccoon-proof lids, though these masked bandits still made an occasional assault on the containers, as if they'd been in their dens, brooding about the situation for weeks, and had devised a new technique they wanted to try out. The specimen in the front yard was an adult, sleek and fat, with a shiny coat that was somewhat thinner than the thick fur of winter. It sat on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high, watching Eduardo. Though raccoons were communal and usually roamed in pairs or groups, no others were visible either in the front yard or along the edge of the meadow. They were also nocturnal. They were rarely seen in the open in broad daylight. With no horses in the stables and the trash cans well secured, Eduardo had long ago stopped chasing raccoons away--unless they got onto the roof at night. Engaged in raucous play or mouse chasing across the top of the house, they could make sleeping impossible. He moved to the head of the porch steps, taking advantage of this uncommon opportunity to study one of the critters in bright sunlight at such close range. The raccoon moved its head to follow him. Nature had cursed the rascals with exceptionally beautiful fur, doing them the tragic disservice of making them valuable to the human species, which was ceaselessly engaged in a narcissistic search for materials with which to bedeck and ornament itself. This one had a particularly bushy tail, ringed with black, glossy and glorious. "What're you doing out and about on a sunny afternoon?" Eduardo asked..The animal's anthracite-black eyes regarded him with almost palpable curiosity. "Must be having an identity crisis, think you're a squirrel or something." With a flurry of paws, the raccoon busily combed its facial fur for maybe half a minute, then froze again and regarded Eduardo intently. Wild animals--even species as aggressive as raccoons--seldom made such direct eye contact as this fellow. They usually tracked people furtively, with peripheral vision or quick glances. Some said this reluctance to meet a direct gaze for more than a few seconds was an acknowledgment of human superiority, the animal's way of humbling itself as a commoner might do before a king, while others said it indicated that animals--innocent creatures of God--saw in men's eyes the stain of sin and were ashamed for humanity. Eduardo had his own theory: animals recognized that people were the most vicious and unrelenting beasts of all, violent and unpredictable, and avoided direct eye contact out of fear and prudence. Except for this raccoon. It seemed to have no fear whatsoever, to feel no humility in the presence of a human being. "At least not this particular sorry old human being, huh?" The raccoon just watched him. Finally the coon was less compelling than his thirst, and Eduardo went inside to get another beer. The hinge springs sang when he pulled open the screen door-- which he'd hung for the season only two weeks before--and again when he eased it shut behind him. He expected the strange sound to startle the coon and send it scurrying away, but when he looked back t hrough the screen, he saw the critter had come a couple , of feet closer to the porch steps and more directly in line with the door, keeping him in sight. "Funny little bugger," he said. He walked to the kitchen, at the end of the hall, and, first thing, looked at the clock above t
he double ovens because he wasn't wearing a watch. Twenty past three. He had a pleasing buzz on, and he was in the mood to sustain it all the way to bedtime. However, he didn't want to get downright sloppy. He decided to have dinner an hour early, at six instead of seven, get some food on his stomach. He might take a book to bed and turn in early as well. This waiting for something to happen was getting on his nerves. He took another Corona from the refrigerator. It had a twist-off cap, but he had a touch of arthritis in his hands. The bottle opener was on the cutting board by the sink..As he popped the cap off the bottle, he happened to glance out the window above the sink--and saw the raccoon in the backyard. It was twelve or fourteen feet from the rear porch. Sitting on its hindquarters, forepaws against its chest, head held high. Because the yard rose toward the western woods, the coon was in a position to look over the porch railing, directly at the kitchen window. It was watching him. Eduardo went to the back door, unlocked and opened it. The raccoon moved from its previous position to another from which it could continue to study him. He pushed open the screen door, which made the same screaky sound as the one at the front of the house. He went onto the porch, hesitated, then descended the three back steps to the yard. The animal's dark eyes glittered. When Eduardo closed half the distance between them, the raccoon dropped to all fours, turned, and scampered twenty feet farther up the slope. There it stopped, turned to face him again, sat erect on its hindquarters, and regarded him as before. Until then he had thought it was the same raccoon that had been watching him from the front yard. Suddenly he wondered if, in fact, it was a different beast altogether. He walked quickly around the north side of the house, cutting a wide enough berth to keep the raccoon at the back in sight. He came to a point, well to the north of the house, from which he could see the front and back yards--and two ring-tailed sentinels. They were both staring at him. He proceeded toward the raccoon in front of the house. When he drew close, the coon put its tail to him and ran across the front yard. At what it evidently regarded as a safe distance, it stopped and sat watching him with its back against the higher, unmown grass of the meadow. "I'll be damned," he said. He returned to the front porch and sat in the rocker. The waiting was over. After more than five weeks, things were beginning to happen. Eventually he realized he'd left his open beer by the kitchen sink. He went inside to retrieve it because, now more than ever, he needed it. He had left the back door standing open, though the screen door had closed behind him when he'd gone outside. He locked up, got his beer,.stood at the window watching the backyard raccoon for a moment, and then returned to the front porch. The first raccoon had crept forward from the edge of the meadow and was again only ten feet from the porch. Eduardo picked up the video camera and recorded the critter for a couple of minutes. It wasn't anything amazing enough to convince skeptics that a doorway from beyond had opened in the early-morning hours of May third, however, it was peculiar for a nocturnal animal to pose so long in broad daylight, making such obviously direct eye contact with the operator of the camcorder, and it might prove to be the first small fragment in a mosaic of evidence. After he finished with the camera, he sat in the rocker, sipping beer and watching the raccoon as it watched him, waiting to see what would happen next. Occasionally the ring-tailed sentinel smoothed its whiskers, combed its face fur, scratched behind its ears, or performed some other small act of grooming. Otherwise, there were no new developments. At five-thirty he went inside to make dinner, taking his empty beer bottle, camcorder, and shotgun with him. He closed and locked the front door. Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on duty. At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate, wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon. He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass. When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him. He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet. Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery. The clicking he'd heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor. They rattled against the wood again, though it didn't move. Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and cornered. He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space..The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in pain, injured or ill. His first reaction was: Rabies. The .22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to kill the raccoon in the house. He saw now that the creature's eyes were protruding unnaturally and that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent. Dead. "Dear Jesus," Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his hairline. The dead raccoon didn't seem as large as either of the sentinels he'd seen outside, and he didn't think that it looked smaller merely because death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual, perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this was a female. He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he'd walked around the house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide enough to insinuate its snout, its head, and then its body, sneaking into the house before he'd returned to close the inner door. Where had it hidden in the house when he'd been passing the late afternoon in the rocking chair? What had it been up to while he was cooking dinner? He went to the window at the sink. Because he had eaten early and because the summer sunset was late, twilight had not yet arrived, so he could clearly see the masked observer. It was in the backyard, sitting on its hindquarters, dutifully watching the house. Stepping carefully around the pitiful creature on the floor, Eduardo went down the hall, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside to see if the other sentry was still in place. It was not in the front yard, where he'd left it, but on the porch, a few feet from the door. It was lying on its side, blood pooled in the one ear that he could see, blood at its nostrils, eyes wide and glazed. Eduardo raised his attention from the coon to the lower woods at the bottom of the meadow. The declining sun, balanced on the peaks of the.mountains in the west, threw slanting orange beams between the trunks of those trees but was incapable of dispelling the stubborn shadows. By the time he returned to the kitchen and looked out the window again, the backyard coon was running frantically in circles. When he went out onto the porch, he could hear it squealing in pain. Within seconds it fell, tumbled. It lay with its sides heaving for a moment, and then it was motionless. He looked uphill, past the dead raccoon on the grass, to the woods that flanked the fieldstone house where he had lived when he'd been the caretaker. The darkness among those trees was deeper than in the lower forest because the westering sun illuminated only their highest boughs as it slid slowly behind the Rockies. Something was in the woods. Eduardo didn't think the raccoons' strange behavior resulted from rabies or, in fact, from an illness of any kind. Something was ... controlling them. Maybe the means by which that control was exerted had proved so physically taxing to the animals that it had resulted in their sudden, spasmodic deaths. Or maybe the entity in the woods had purposefully k
illed them to exhibit the extent of its control, to impress Eduardo with its power, and to suggest that it might be able to waste him as easily as it had destroyed the raccoons. He felt he was being watched--and not just through the eyes of other raccoons. The bare peaks of the highest mountains loomed like a tidal wave of granite. The orange sun slowly submerged into that sea of stone. A steadily inkier darkness rose under the evergreen boughs, but Eduardo didn't think that even the blackest condition in nature could match the darkness in the heart of the watcher in the woods--if, in fact, it had a heart at all. Although he was convinced that disease had not played a role in the behavior and death of the raccoons, Eduardo could not be certain of his diagnosis, so he took precautions when handling the bodies. He tied a bandanna over his nose and mouth, and wore a pair of rubber gloves. He didn't handle the carcasses directly but lifted each with a short-handled shovel and slipped it into its own large plastic trash bag. He twisted the top of each bag, tied a knot in it, and put it in the cargo area of the Cherokee station wagon in the garage. After hosing off the small smears of blood on the front porch, he used several cotton cloths to scrub the kitchen floor with pure Lysol. Finally he threw the cleaning rags into a bucket, stripped off the.gloves and dropped them on top of the rags, and set the bucket on the back porch to be dealt with later. He also put a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun and the .22 pistol in the Cherokee. He took the video camera with him, because he didn't know when he might need it. Besides, the tape currently in the camera contained the footage of the raccoons, and he didn't want that to disappear as had the tape he'd taken of the luminous woods and the black doorway. For the same reason, he took the yellow tablet that was half filled with his handwritten account of these recent events. By the time he was ready to drive into Eagle's Roost, the long twilight had surrendered to night. He didn't relish returning to a dark house, though he had never been skittish about that before. He turned on lights in the kitchen and the downstairs hall. After further thought, he switched on lamps in the living room and study. He locked up, backed the Cherokee out of the garage--and thought too much of the house remained dark. He went back inside to turn on a couple of upstairs lights. By the time he returned to the Cherokee and headed down the half-mile driveway toward the county road to the south, every window on both floors of the house glowed. The Montana vastness appeared to be emptier than ever before. Mile after mile, up into the black hills on one hand and across the timeless plains on the other, the few tiny clusters of lights that he saw were always in the distance. They seemed adrift on a sea, as if they were the lights of ships moving inexorably away toward one horizon or another. Though the moon had not yet risen, he didn't think its glimmer would have made the night seem any less enormous or more welcoming. The sense of isolation that troubled him had more to do with his interior landscape than with the Montana countryside. He was a widower, childless, and most likely in the last decade of his life, separated from so many of his fellow men and women by age, fate, and inclination. He had never needed anyone but Margaret and Tommy. After losing them, he had been resigned to living out his years in an almost monkish existence--and had been confident that he could do so without succumbing to boredom or despair. Until recently he'd gotten along well enough. Now, however, he wished that he had reached out to make friends, at least one, and had not so single-mindedly obeyed his hermit heart. Mile by lonely mile, he waited for the distinctive rustle of plastic in the cargo space behind the back seat. He was certain the raccoons were dead. He didn't understand why he should expect them to revive and tear their way out of the bags, but he did. Worse, he knew that if he heard them ripping at the plastic, sharp little claws busily slicing, they would not be the raccoons he had.shoveled into the bags, not exactly, maybe not much like them at all, but changed. "Foolish old coot," he said, trying to shame himself out of such morbid and peculiar contemplations. Eight miles after leaving his driveway, he finally encountered other traffic on the county route. Thereafter, the closer he drew to Eagle's Roost, the busier the two-lane blacktop became, though no one would ever have mistaken it for the approach road to New York City--or even Missoula. He had to drive through town to the far side, where Dr. Lester Yeats maintained his professional offices and his home on the same five-acre property where Eagle's Roost again met rural fields. Yeats was a veterinarian who, for years, had cared for Stanley Quartermass' horses--a white-haired, white-bearded, jolly man who would have made a good Santa Claus if he'd been heavy instead of whip-thin. The house was a rambling gray clapboard structure with blue shutters and a slate roof. Because there were also lights on in the one-story barn-like building that housed Yeats's offices and in the adjacent stables where four-legged patients were kept, he drove a few hundred feet past the house to the end of the graveled lane. As Eduardo was getting out of the Cherokee, the front door of the office barn opened, and a man came out in a wash of fluorescent light, leaving the door ajar behind him. He was tall, in his early thirties, rugged-looking, with thick brown hair. He had a broad and easy smile. "Howdy. What can I do for you?" "Looking' for Lester Yeats," Eduardo said. "Dr. Yeats?" The smile faded. "You an old friend or something?" "Business," Eduardo said. "Got some animals I'd like him to take a look at." Clearly puzzled, the stranger said, "Well, sir, I'm afraid Les Yeats isn't doing business any more." "Oh? He retire?" "Died," the young man said. "He did? Yeats?" "More than six years ago." That startled Eduardo. "Sorry to hear it." He hadn't quite realized so much time had passed since he'd last seen Yeats. A warm breeze sprang up, stirring the larches that were grouped at various points around the buildings..The stranger said, "My name's Travis Potter. I bought the house and practice from Mrs. Yeats. She moved to a smaller place in town." They shook hands, and instead of identifying himself, Eduardo said, "Dr. Yeats took care of our horses out at the ranch." "What ranch would that be?" "Quartermass Ranch." "Ah," Travis Potter said, "then you must be the . . . Mr. Fernandez, is it?" "Oh, sorry, yeah, Ed Fernandez," he replied, and had the uneasy feeling that the vet had been about to say "the one they talk about" or something of the sort, as if he was a local eccentric. He supposed that might, in fact, be the case. Inheriting his spread from his rich employer, living alone, a recluse with seldom a word for anyone even when he ventured into town on errands, he might have become a minor enigma about whom townspeople were curious. The thought of it made him cringe. "How many years since you've had horses?" Potter asked. "Eight. Since Mr. Quartermass died." He realized how odd it was--not having spoken with Yeats in eight years, then showing up six years after he died, as if only a week had gone by. They stood in silence a moment. The June night around them was filled with cricket songs. "Well," Potter said, "where are these animals?" "Animals?" "You said you had some animals for Dr. Yeats to look at." "Oh. Yeah." "He was a good vet, but I assure you I'm his equal." "I'm sure you are, Dr. Potter. But these are dead animals." "Dead animals?" "Raccoons." "Dead raccoons?" "Three of them." "Three dead raccoons?" Eduardo realized that if he did have a reputation as a local eccentric,.he was only adding to it now. He was so out of practice at conversation that he couldn't get to the point. He took a deep breath and said what was necessary without going into the story of the doorway and other oddities: "They were acting funny, out in broad daylight, running in circles. Then one by one they dropped over." He succinctly described their death throes, the blood in their nostrils and ears. "What I wondered was'ould they be rabid?" "You're up against those foothills," Potter said. "There's always a little rabies working its way through the wild populations. That's natural. But we haven't seen evidence of it around here for a while. Blood in the ears? Not a rabies symptom. Were they foaming at the mouth?" "Not that I saw." "Running in a straight line?" "Circles." A pickup truck drove by on the highway, country music so loud on its radio that the tune carried all the way to the back of Potter's property. Loud or not, it was a mournful song. "Where are they?" Potter asked. "Got them bagged in plastic in the Cherokee here." "You get bitten?" "No," Eduardo said. "Scratched?" "No." "Any contact with them whatsoever?"
Eduardo explained about the precautions he'd taken: the shovel, bandanna, rubber gloves. Cocking his head, looking puzzled, Travis Potter said, "You telling me everything?" "Well, I think so," he lied. "I mean, their behavior was pretty strange, but I've told you everything important, no other symptoms I noticed." Potter's gaze was forthright and penetrating, and for a moment Eduardo considered opening up and revealing the whole bizarre story. Instead, he said, "If it isn't rabies, does it sound like maybe it could be plague?".Potter frowned. "Doubtful. Bleeding from the ears? That's an uncommon symptom. You get any flea bites being around them?" "I'm not itchy." The warm breeze pumped itself into a gust of wind, rattling the larches and startling a night bird out of the branches. It flew low over their heads with a shriek that startled them. Potter said, "Well, why don't you leave these raccoons with me, and I'll have a look." They removed the three green plastic bags from the Cherokee and carried them inside. The waiting room was deserted, Potter had evidently been doing paperwork in his office. They went through a door and down a short hallway to the white-tiled surgery, where they put the bags on the floor beside a stainless-steel examination table. The room felt cool and looked cold. Harsh white light fell on the enamel, steel, and glass sur faces. Everything gleamed like snow and ice. "What'll you do with them?" Eduardo asked. "I don't have the means to test for rabies here. I'll take tissue samples, send them up to the state lab, and we'll have the results in a few days." "That's all?" "What do you mean?" Poking one of the bags with the toe of his boot, Eduardo said, "You going to dissect one of them?" "I'll store them in one of my cold lockers and wait for the state lab's report. If they're negative for rabies, then, yeah, I'll perform an autopsy on one of them." "Let me know what you find?" Potter gave him that penetrating stare again. "You sure you weren't bitten or scratched? Because if you were, and if there's any reason at all to suspect rabies, you should get to a doctor now and start the vaccine right away, tonight--" "I'm no fool," Eduardo said. "I'd tell you if there was any chance I'd been infected." Potter continued to stare at him. Looking around the surgery, Eduardo said, "You really modernized the place from the way it was."."Come on," the veterinarian said, turning to the door. "I have something I want to give you." Eduardo followed him into the hall and through another door into Potter's private office. The vet rummaged in the drawers of a white, enameled-metal storage cabinet and handed him a pair of pamphlets-- one on rabies, one on bubonic plague. "Read up on the symptoms for both," Potter said. "You notice anything similar in yourself, even similar, get to your doctor." "Don't like doctors much." "That's not the point. You have a doctor?" "Never need one." "Then you call me, and I'll get a doctor to you, one way or the other. Understand?" "All right." "You'll do it?" "Sure will." Potter said, "You have a telephone out there?" "Of course. Who doesn't have a phone these days?" The question seemed to confirm that he had an image as a hermit and an eccentric. Which maybe he deserved. Because now that he thought about it, he hadn't used the phone to receive or place a call in at least five or six months. He doubted if it'd rung more than three times in the past year, and one of those was a wrong number. Potter went to his desk, picked up a pen, pulled a notepad in front of him, and wrote the number down as Eduardo recited it. He tore off another sheet of notepaper and gave it to Eduardo because it was imprinted with his office address and his own phone numbers. Eduardo folded the paper into his wallet. "What do I owe you?" "Nothing," Potter said. "These weren't your pet raccoons, so why should you pay? Rabies is a community problem." Potter accompanied him out to the Cherokee. The larches rustled in the warm breeze, crickets chirruped, and a frog croaked like a dead man trying to talk. As he opened the driver's door, Eduardo turned to the vet and said, "When you do that autopsy ..." "Yes?"."Will you look just for signs of known diseases?" "Disease pathologies, trauma." "That's all?" "What else would I look for?" Eduardo hesitated, shrugged, and said, "Anything . . . strange." That stare again. "Well, sir," Potter said, "I will now." All the way home through that dark and forlorn land, Eduardo wondered if he had done the right thing. As far as he could see, there were only two alternatives to the course of action he'd taken, and both were problematic. He could have disposed of the raccoons on the ranch and waited to see what would happen next. But he might have been destroying important evidence that something not of this earth was hiding in the Montana woods. Or he could have explained to Travis Potter about the luminous trees, throbbing sounds, waves of pressure, and black doorway. He could have told him about the raccoons keeping him under surveillance--and the sense he'd had that they were serving as surrogate eyes for the unknown watcher in the woods. If he was generally regarded as the old hermit of Quartermass Ranch, however, he wouldn't be taken seriously. Worse, once the veterinarian had spread the story, some busybody public official might get it in his head that poor old Ed Fernandez was senile or even flat-out deranged, a danger to himself and others. With all the compassion in the world, sorrowful-eyed and softvoiced, shaking their heads sadly and telling themselves they were doing it for his own good, they might commit him against his will for medical examinations and a psychiatric review. He was loath to be carted away to a hospital, poked and prodded and spoken to as if he had reverted to infancy. He wouldn't react well. He knew himself. He would respond to them with stubbornness and contempt, irritating the do-gooders to such an extent that they might induce a court to take charge of his affairs and order him transferred to a nursing home or some other facility for the rest of his days. He had lived a long time and had seen how many lives were ntined by people operating with the best intentions and a smug assurance of their own superiority and wisdom. The destruction of one more old man wouldn't be noticed, and he had no wife or children, no friend or relative, to stand with him against the killing kindness of the state. Giving the dead animals to Potter to be tested and autopsied was, therefore, as far as Eduardo had dared to go. He only worried that, considering the inhuman nature of the entity that controlled the coons, he might have put Travis Potter at risk in some way he couldn't.foresee. Eduardo had hinted at a strangeness, however, and Potter had seemed to have his share of common sense. The vet knew the risks associated with disease. He would take every precaution against contamination, which would probably also be effective against whatever unguessable and unearthly peril the carcasses might pose in addition to microbiotic infection. Beyond the Cherokee, the home lights of unmet families shone far out on the sea of night. For the first time in his life, Eduardo wished that he knew them, their names and faces, their histories and hopes. He wondered if some child might be sitting on a distant porch or at a window, staring across the rising plains at the headlights of the Cherokee progressing westward through the June darkness. A young boy or girl, full of plans and dreams, might wonder who was in the vehicle behind those lights, where he was bound, and what his life was like. The thought of such a child out there in the night gave Eduardo the strangest sense of community, an utterly unexpected feeling that he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared. For him, that was an unusually optimistic and philosophically generous view of his fellow men and women, uncomfortably close to sentimentality. But he was warmed as well as astonished by it. He was convinced that whatever had come through the doorway was inimical to humankind, and his brush with it had reminded him that all of nature was, in fact, hostile. It was a cold and uncaring universe, either because God had made it that way as a test to determine good souls from bad, or simply because that's the way it was. No man could survive in civilized comfort without the struggles and hard-won successes of all the people who had gone before him and who shared his time on earth with him. If a new evil had entered the world, one to dwarf the evil of which some men and women were capable, humanity would need a sense of community more desperately than ever before in its long and troubled journey. The house came into view when he w
as a third of the way along the half-mile driveway, and he continued uphill, approaching to within sixty or eighty yards of it before realizing that something was wrong. He braked to a full stop. Prior to leaving for Eagle's Roost, he had turned on lights in every room. He clearly remembered all of the glowing windows as he had driven away. He had been embarrassed by his childlike reluctance to return to a dark house. Well, it was dark now. As black as the inside of the devil's bowels. Before he quite realized what he was doing, Eduardo pressed the master.lock switch, simultaneously securing all the doors on the station wagon. He sat for a while, just staring at the house. The front door was closed, and all the windows he could see were unbroken. Nothing appeared out of order. Except that every light in every room had been turned off. By whom? By what? He supposed a power failure could have been responsible--but he didn't believe it. Sometimes, a Montana thunderstorm could be a real sternwinder, in the winter, blizzard winds and accumulated ice could play havoc with electrical service. But there had been no bad weather tonight and only the mildest breeze. He hadn't noticed any downed power lines on the way home. The house waited. Couldn't sit in the car all night. Couldn't live in it, for God's sake. He drove slowly along the last stretch of driveway and stopped in front of the garage. He picked up the remote control and pressed the single button. The automatic garage door rolled up. Inside the three-vehicle space, the overhead convenience lamp, which was on a three-minute timer, shed enough light to reveal that nothing was amiss in the garage. So much for the power-failure theory. Instead of pulling forward ten feet and into the garage, he stayed where he was. He put the Cherokee in Park but didn't switch off the engine. He left the headlights on too. He picked up the shotgun from where it was angled muzzle-down in the knee space in front of the passenger seat, and he got out of the station wagon. He left the driver's door wide open. Door open, lights on, engine running. He didn't like to think that he would cut and run at the first sign of trouble. But i f it was run or die, he was sure as hell going to be faster than anything that might be chasing him. Although the pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun contained only five rounds--one already in the breech and four in the magazine tube--he was unconcerned that he hadn't brought any spare shells. If he was unlucky enough to encounter something that couldn't be brought down with five shots at close range, he wouldn't live long enough to reload, anyway. He went to the front of the house, climbed the porch steps, and tried the front door. It was locked. His house key was on a bead chain, separate from the car keys. He.fished it out of his jeans and unlocked the door. Standing outside, holding the shotgun in his right hand, he reached cross-body with his left, inside the half-open door, fumbling for the light switch. He expected something to rush at him from out of the night. downstairs hallway--or to put its hand over his as he patted the wall in search of the switch plate. He flipped the switch, and light filled the hall, spilled over him onto the front porch. He crossed the threshold and took a couple of steps inside, leaving the door open behind him. The house was quiet. Dark rooms on both sides of the hallway. Study to his left. Living room to his right. He hated to turn his back on either room, but finally he moved to the right, through the archway, the shotgun held in front of him. When he turned on the overhead light, the expansive living room proved to be deserted. No intruder. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then he noticed a dark clump lying on the white fringe at the edge of the Chinese carpet. At first glance he thought it was feces, that an animal had gotten in the house and done its business right there. But when he stood over it and looked closer, he saw it was only a caked wad of damp earth. A couple of blades of grass bristled from it. Back in the hallway, he noticed, for the first time, smaller crumbs of dirt littering the polished oak floor. He ventured cautiously into the study, where there was no ceiling fixture. The influx of light from the hallway dispelled enough shadows to allow him to find and click on the desk lamp. Crumbs and smears of dirt, now dry, soiled the blotter on the desk. More of it on the red leather seat of the chair. "What the hell?" he wondered softly. Warily he rolled aside the mirrored doors on the study closet, but no one was hiding in there. In the hall he checked the foyer closet too. Nobody. The front door was still standing open. He couldn't decide what to do about it. He liked it open because it offered an unobstructed exit if he wanted to get out fast. On the other hand, if he searched the house top to bottom and found no one in it, he would have to come back, lock the door, and search every room again to guard against the possibility that someone had slipped in behind his back. Reluctantly he closed it and engaged the dead bolt..The beige wall-to-wall carpet that was used through the upstairs also extended down the inlaid-oak staircase, with its heavy handrail. In the center of a few of the lower treads were crumbled chunks of dry earth, not much, just enough to catch his eye. He peered up at the second floor. No. First, the downstairs. He found nothing in the powder room, in the closet under the stairs, in the large dining room, in the laundry room, in the service bath. But there was dirt again in the kitchen, more than elsewhere. His unfinished dinner of rigatoni, sausage, and butter bread was on the table, for he'd been interrupted in mid-meal by the intrusion of the raccoon--and by its spasmodic death. Smudges of now dry mud marked the rim of his dinner plate. The table around the plate was littered with pea-size lumps of dry earth, a spadeshaped brown leaf curled into a miniature scroll, and a dead beetle the size of a penny. The beetle was on its back, six stiff legs in the air. When he flicked it over with one finger, he saw that its shell was iridescent blue-green. Two flattened wads of dirt, like dollar pancakes, were stuck to the seat of the chair. On the oak floor around the chair was more detritus. Another concentration of soil lay in front of the refrigerator. Altogether, it amounted to a couple of tablespoons' worth, but there were also a few blades of grass, another dead leaf, and an earthworm. The worm was still alive but curled up on itself, suffering from a lack of moisture. A crawling sensation along the nape of his neck and a sudden conviction that he was being watched made him clutch the shotgun with both hands and spin toward one window, then the other. No pale, ghastly face was pressed to either pane of glass, as he had imagined. Only the night. The chrome handle on the refrigerator was dulled by filth, and he did not touch it. He opened the door by gripping the edge. The food and beverages inside seemed untouched, everything just as he'd left it. The doors of both double ovens were hanging open. He closed them without touching the handles, which were also smeared in places with unidentifiable crud. Caught on a sharp edge of the oven door was a torn scrap of fabric, half an inch wide and less than an inch long. It was pale blue, with a fragmentary curve of darker blue that might have been a portion of a repeating pattern against the lighter background..Eduardo stared at the fragment of cloth for a personal eternity. Time seemed to-stop, and the universe hung as still as the pendulum of a broken grandfather clock-- until icy spicules of profound fear formed in his blood and made him shudder so violently that his teeth actually chattered. The graveyard ... He whipped around again, toward one window, the other, but nothing was there. Only the night. The night. The blind, featureless, uncaring face of the night. He searched the upstairs. Telltale chunks, crumbs, and smears of earth--once moist, now dry--could be found in most rooms. Another leaf. Two more dead beetles as dry as ancient papyrus. A pebble the size of a cherry pit, smooth and gray. He realized that some of the switch plates and light switches were soiled. Thereafter, he flicked the lights on with his sleeve-covered arm or the shotgun barrel. When he had examined every chamber, probed to the back of every closet, inspected behind and under every piece of furniture where a hollow space might conceivably offer concealment even to something as large as a seven- or eight-year-old child, and when he was satisfied that nothing was hiding on the second floor, he returned to the end of the upstairs hall and pulled on the dangling release cord that lowered the attic trapdoor. He pulled down the folding ladder fixed to the back of the trap. The attic lights could be turned on from the hall, so he didn't have to ascend into darkness. He searched every shadowed niche
in the deep and dusty eaves, where snowflake moths hung in webs like laces of ice and feeding spiders loomed as cold and black as winter shadows. Downstairs in the kitchen again, he slid aside the brass bolt on the cellar door. It worked only from the kitchen. Nothing could have gone down there and relocked from the far side. On the other hand, the front and back doors of the house had been bolted when he'd driven into town. No one could have gotten inside--or locked up again upon leaving--without a key, and he had the only keys in existence. Yet the damned bolts were engaged when he'd come home, his search had revealed no broken or unlatched window, yet an intruder definitely had come and gone. He went into the cellar and searched the two large, windowless rooms. They were cool, slightly musty, and deserted. For the moment, the house was secure. He was the only resident. He went outside, locking the front entrance after him, and drove the Cherokee into the garage. He put down the door with the remote control.before getting out of the wagon. For the next several hours, he scrubbed and vacuumed the mess in the house with an urgency and unflagging energy that approached a state of frenzy. He used liquid soap, strong ammonia water, and Lysol spray, determined that every soiled surface should be not merely clean but disinfected, as close to sterile as possible outside of a hospital surgery or laboratory. He broke into a sustained sweat that soaked his shirt and pasted his hair to his scalp. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms began to ache from the repetitive scouring motions. The mild arthritis in his hands flared up, his knuckles swelled and reddened from gripping the scrub brushes and rags with almost manic ferocity, but his response was to grip them tighter still, until the pain dizzied him and brought tears to his eyes. Eduardo knew he was striving not merely to sanitize the house but to cleanse himself of certain terrible ideas that he could not tolerate, would not explore, absolutely would not. He made himself into a cleaning machine, an insensate robot, focusing so intently and narrowly on the menial task at hand that he was purged of all unwanted thoughts, breathing deeply of the ammonia fumes as if they could disinfect his mind, seeking to exhaust himself so thoroughly that he would be able to sleep and, perhaps, even forget. As he cleaned, he disposed of all used paper towels, rags, brushes, and sponges in a large plastic bag. When he was finished, he knotted the top of the bag and deposited it outside in a trash can. Ordinarily, he would have rinsed and saved sponges and brushes for reuse, but not this time. Instead of removing the disposable paper bag from the vacuum sweeper, he put the entire machine out with the trash. He didn't want to think about the origin of the microscopic particles now trapped in its brushes and stuck to the inside of its plastic suction hose, most of them so tiny that he could never be sure they were expunged unless he disassembled th e sweeper to scrub every inch and reachable crevice with bleach, and maybe not even then. From the refrigerator, he removed all the foods and beverages that might have been touched by . . . the intruder. Anything in plastic wrap or aluminum foil had to go, even if it didn't appear to have been tampered with: Swiss cheese, cheddar, leftover ham, half a Bermuda onion. Resealable containers had to be tossed: a one-pound tub of soft butter with a snap-on plastic lid, jars of dill and sweet pickles, olives, maraschino cherries, mayonnaise, mustard, and more, bottles with screw-top caps--salad dressing, soy sauce, ketchup. An open box of raisins, an open carton of milk. The thought of anything touching his lips that had first been touched by the intruder made him gag and shudder. By the time he finished with the refrigerator, it held little more than unopened cans of soft drinks and bottles of beer. But after all, he was dealing with contamination. Couldn't be too careful. No measure was too extreme..Not merely bacterial contamination, either. If only it was that simple. God, if only. Spiritual contamination. A darkness capable of spreading through the heart, seeping deep into the soul. Don't even think about it. Don't. Don't. Too tired to think. Too old to think. Too scared. From the garage he fetched a blue Styrofoam cooler, into which he emptied the entire contents of the bin under the automatic ice-maker in the freezer. He wedged eight bottles of beer into the ice and stuck a bottle opener in his hip pocket. Leaving all the lights on, he carried the cooler and the shotgun upstairs to the back bedroom, where he had been sleeping for the past three years. He put the beer and the gun beside the bed. The bedroom door had only a flimsy privacy latch in the knob, which he engaged by pushing a brass button. All that was needed to break through from the hallway was one good kick, so he tilted a straight-backed chair under the knob and jammed it tightly in place. Don't think about what might come through the door. Shut the mind down. Focus on the arthritis, muscle pain, sore neck, let it blot out thought. He took a shower, washing himself as assiduously as he had scoured the soiled portions of the house. He finished only when he had used the entire supply of hot water. He dressed but not for bed. Socks, chinos, a T-shirt. He stood his boots beside the bed, next to the shotgun. Although the nightstand clock and his watch agreed that it was two-fifty in the morning, Eduardo was not sleepy. He sat on the bed, propped against a pile of pillows and the headboard. Using the remote control, he switched on the television and checked out the seemingly endless array of channels provided by the satellite dish behind the stables. He found an action movie, cops and drug dealers, lots of running and jumping and shooting, fistfights and car chases and explosions. He turned the volume all the way off because he wanted to be able to hear whatever sounds might arise elsewhere in the house. He drank the first beer fast, staring at the television. He was not trying to follow the plot of the movie, just letting his mind fill with the abstract whirl of motion and the bright ripple-flare of changing colors. Scrubbing at the dark stains of those terrible thoughts. Those stubborn stains. Something ticked against the west-facing window. He looked at the draperies, which he had drawn tightly shut. Another tick. Like a pebble thrown against the glass..His heart began to pound. He forced himself to look at the TV again. Motion. Color. He finished the beer. Opened a second. Tick. And again, almost at once. Tick. Perhaps it was just a moth or a scarab beetle trying to reach the light that the closed drapes couldn't entirely contain. He could get up, go to the window, discover it was just a flying beetle that was banging against the glass, relieve his mind. Don't even think about it. He took a long swallow of the second beer. Tick. Something standing on the dark lawn below, looking up at the window. Something that knew exactly where he was, wanted to make contact. But not a raccoon this time. Don't, don't, don't. No cute furry face with a little black mask this time. No beautiful coat and black-ringed tail. Motion, color, beer. Scrub out the diseased thought, purge the contamination. Tick. Because if he didn't rid himself of the monstrous thought that soiled his mind, he would sooner or later lose his grip on sanity. Sooner. Tick. If he went to the window and parted the draperies and looked down at the thing on the lawn, even insanity would be no refuge. Once he had seen, once he knew, then there would be only a single way out. Shotgun barrel in his mouth, one toe hooked in the trigger. Tick. . He turned up the volume control on the television. Loud. Louder. He finished the second beer. Turned the volume up even louder, until the raucous soundtrack of the violent movie seemed to shake the room. Popped the cap off a third beer. Purging his thoughts. Maybe in the morning he would have forgotten the sick, demented considerations that plagued him so persistently tonight,.forgotten them or washed them away in tides of alcohol. Or perhaps he would die in his sleep. He almost didn't care which. He poured down a long swallow of the third beer, seeking one form of oblivion or another. CHAPTER ELEVEN. Through March, April, and May, as Jack lay cupped in felt-lined plaster with his legs often in traction, he suffered pain, cramps, spastic muscle twitches, uncontrollable nerve tics, and itchy skin where it could not be scratched inside a cast. He endured those discomforts and others with few complaints, and he thanked God that he would live to hold his wife again and see his son grow up. His health worries were even more numerous than his discomforts. The risk of bedsores was ever-present, though the body cast had been formed with great care and though most of the nurses were concerned, solicitous, and skille
d. Once a pressure sore became ulcerated, it would not heal easily, and gangrene could set in quickly. Because he was periodically catheterized, his chances of contracting an infection of the urethra were increased, which could lead to a more serious case of cystitis. Any patient immobilized for long periods was in jeopardy of developing blood clots that could break loose and spin through the body, lodge in the heart or brain, killing him or causing substantial brain damage, though Jack was medicated to reduce the danger of that complication, it was the one that most deeply concerned him. He worried, as well, about Heather and Toby. They were alone, which troubled him in spite of the fact that Heather, under Alma Bryson's guidance, seemed to be prepared to handle everything from a lone burglar to a foreign invasion. Actually, the thought of all those weapons in the house--and what the need for them said about Heather's state of mind--disturbed him nearly as much as the thought of someone breaking into the place. Money worried him more than cerebral embolisms. He was on disability and had no idea when he might be able to work again full time. Heather was still unemployed, the economy showed no signs of emerging from the recession, and their savings were virtually exhausted. Friends in the Department had opened a trust account for his family at a branch of Wells Fargo Bank, and contributions from policemen and the public at large now totaled more than twenty-five thousand dollars. But medical and rehabilitation expenses were never entirely covered by insurance, and he suspected that even the trust fund would not return them to the modest level of financial security they had enjoyed before the shootout at Arkadian's service station. By September or October, making the mortgage payment might be impossible. However, he was able to keep all those worries to himself, partly because he knew that other people had worries of their own and that some of them might be more serious than his, but also because he was an optimist, a believer in the healing power of laughter and positive thinking. Though some of his friends thought his response to adversity.was cockeyed, he couldn't help it. As far as he could recall, he had been born that way. Where a pessimist looked at a glass of wine and saw it as half empty, Jack not only saw it as half full but also figured there was the better part of a bottle still to be drunk. He was in a body cast and temporarily disabled, but he felt he was blessed to have escaped permanent disability and death. He was in pain, sure, but there were people in the same hospital in more pain than he was. Until the glass was empty and the bottle as well, he would always anticipate the next sip of wine rather than regret that so little was left. On his first visit to the hospital back in March, Toby had been frightened to see his father so immobilized, and his eyes had filled with tears even as he bit his lip and kept his chin up and struggled to be brave. Jack had done his best to minimize the seriousness of his condition, insisted he looked in worse shape than he was, and strove with growing desperation to lift his son's spirits. Finally he got the boy to laugh by claiming he wasn't really hurt at all, was in the hospital as a participant in a secret new police program, and would emerge in a few months as a member of their new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Task Force. "Yeah," he said, "it's true. See, that's what all this plaster is, a shell, a turtle shell that's being applied to my back. When it's dry and coated with Kevlar, bullets will just bounce off." Smiling in spite of himself, wiping at his eyes with one hand, Toby said, "Get real, Dad." "It's true." "You don't know taste kwon do." "I'll be taking lessons, soon as the shell's dry." "A Ninja has to know how to use swords too, swords and all kinda stuff." "More lessons, that's all." "Big problem." "What's that?" "You're not a real turtle." "Well, of course I'm not a real turtle. Don't be silly. The department isn't allowed to hire anything but human beings. People don't much like it when they're given traffic tickets by members of another species. So we have to make do with an imitation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Task Force. So what? Is Spider-Man really a spider? Is Batman really a bat?" "You got a point there." "You're damned right I do."."But." "But what?" Grinning, the boy said, "You're no teenager." "I can pass for one." "No way. You're an old guy." "Is that so?" "A real old guy." "You're in big trouble when I get out of this bed, mister." "Yeah, but until your shell's dry, I'm safe." The next time Toby came to the hospital--Heather visited every day, but Toby was limited to once or twice a week--Jack was wearing a colorful headband. Heather had gotten him a red-and-yellow scarf, which he'd folded and tied around his head. The ends of the knot hung rakishly over his right ear. "Rest of the uniform is still being designed." he told Toby. A few weeks later, one day in mid-April, Heather pulled the privacy curtain around Jack's bed and gave him a sponge bath and damp-sponge shampoo to save the nurses a little work. She said, "I'm not sure I like other women bathing you. I'm getting jealous." He said, "I swear I can explain where I was last night." "There's not a nurse in the hospital hasn't gone out of her way to tell me that you're their favorite patient." "Well, honey, that's meaningless. Anybody can be their favorite patient. It's easy. All you've got to do is avoid puking on them and don't make fun of their little hats." "That easy, huh?" she said, sponging his left arm. "Well, you also have to eat everything on your dinner tray, never hassle them to give you massive injections of heroin without a doctor's prescription, and never ever fake cardiac arrest just to get attention." "They say you're so sweet, brave, and funny." "Aw, shucks," he said with exaggerated shyness, but he was genuinely embarrassed. "A couple of them told me how lucky I am, married to you."."You punch them?" "Managed to control myself." "Good. They'd only take it out on me." "I am lucky," she said. "And some of these nurses are strong, they probably pack a pretty hard punch." "I love you, Jack," she said, leaning over the bed and kissing him full on the mouth. The kiss took his breath away. Her hair fell across his face, it smelled of a lemony shampoo. "Heather," he said softly, putting one hand against her cheek, "Heather, Heather," repeating the name as if it was sacred, which it was, not only a name but a prayer that sustained him, the name and face that made his nights less dark, that made his pain-filled days pass more quickly. "I'm so lucky," she repeated. "Me too. Finding you." "You'll be home with me again." "Soon," he said, though he knew he would be weeks in that bed and weeks more in a rehabilitation hospital. "No more lonely nights," she said. "No more." "Always together." "Always." His throat was tight, and he was afraid he was going to cry. He was not ashamed to cry, but he didn't think either of them dared indulge in tears yet. They needed all their strength and resolve for the struggles that still lay ahead. He swallowed hard and whispered, "When I get home. . . ?" "Yes?" "And we can go to bed together again?" Face-to-face with him, she whispered too: "Yes?" "Will you do something special for me?" "Of course, silly." "Would you dress up like a nurse? That really turns me on.".She blinked in surprise for a moment, burst out laughing, and shoved a cold sponge in his face. "Beast." "Well, then, how about a nun?" "Pervert." "A girl scout?" "But a sweet, brave, and funny pervert." If he hadn't possessed a good sense of humor, he wouldn't have been able to be a cop. Laughter, sometimes dark laughter, was the shield that made it possible to wade, without being stained, through the filth and madness in which most cops had to function these days. A sense of humor aided his recovery, too, and made it possible not to be consumed by pain and worry, although there was one thing about which he had difficulty laughing--his helplessness. He was embarrassed about being assisted with his basic bodily functions and subjected to regular enemas to counteract the effects of extreme inactivity. Week after week, the lack of privacy in those matters became more rather than less humiliating. It was even worse to be trapped in bed, in the rigid grip of the cast, unable to run or walk or even crawl if a sudden catastrophe struck. Periodically he became convinced that the hospital was going to be swept by fire or damaged in an earthquake. Although he knew the staff was well trained in emergency procedures and that he would not be abandoned to the ravages of flames or the mortal weight of collapsing walls, he was occasionally seized by an irrational panic, often in the dead of night, a blind terror that squeezed him tighter and tighter, hour after hour, and that succumbed only gradually to reason or exh
austion. By the middle of May, he had acquired a deep appreciation and limitless admiration for quadriplegics who did not let life get the best of them. At least he had the use of his hands and arms, and he could exercise by rhythmically squeezing rubber balls and doing curls with light hand weights. He could scratch his nose if it itched, feed himself to some extent, blow his nose. He was in awe of people who suffered permanent below-the-neck paralysis but held fast to their joy in life and faced the future with hope, because he knew he didn't possess their courage or character, no matter whether he was voted favorite patient of the week, month, or century. If he'd been deprived of his legs and hands for three months, he would have been weighed down by despair. And if he hadn't known that he would get out of the bed and be learning to walk again by the time spring became summer, the prospect of long-term helplessness would have broken his sanity..Beyond the window of his third-floor room, he could see little more than the crown of a tall palm tree. Over the weeks, he spent countless hours watching its fronds shiver in mild breezes, toss violently in storm winds, bright green against sunny skies, dull green against somber clouds. Sometimes birds wheeled across that framed section of the heavens, and Jack thrilled to each brief glimpse of their flight. He swore that, once back on his feet, he would never be helpless again. He was aware of the hubris of such an oath, his ability to fulfill it depended on the whims of fate. Man proposes, God disposes. But on this subject he could not laugh at himself. He would never be helpless again. Never. It was a challenge to God: Leave me alone or kill me, but don't put me in this vise again. Jack's division captain, Lyle Crawford, visited him for the third time in the hospital on the evening of June third. Crawford was a nondescript man, of average height and average weight, with close-cropped brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin, all of virtually the same shade. He was wearing Hush Puppies, chocolate-brown slacks, tan shirt, and a chocolate-brown jacket, as if his fondest desire was to be so nondescript that he would blend into any background and perhaps even attain invisibility. He also wore a brown cap, which he took off and held in both hands as he stood by the bed. He was soft-spoken and quick to smile, but he also had more commendations for bravery than any two other cops in the entire department, and he was the best natural-born leader of men that Jack had ever encountered. "How you doing?" Crawford asked. "My serve has improved, but my backhand's still lousy," Jack said. "Don't choke the racket." "You think that's my problem?" "That and not being able to stand up." Jack laughed. "How're things in the division, Captain?" "The fun never stops. Two guys walk into a jewelry store on Westwood Boulevard this morning, right after opening, silencers on their guns, shoot the owner and two employees, kill em deader than old King Tut before anyone can set off an alarm. No one outside hears a thing. Cases full of jewelry, big safe's open in the back room, full of estate pieces, millions worth. Looks like a cakewalk from there on. Then the two perps start to argue about what to take first and whether they have time to take everything. One of them makes a comment about the other one's old lady, and the next thing you know, they shoot each other." "Jesus." "So a little time passes, and a customer walks in on this. Four dead.people plus a half-conscious perp sprawled on the floor, wounded so bad he can't even crawl out of the place and try to get away. The customer stands there, shocked by the blood, which is splattered all to hell over. He's just paralyzed by the sight of this mess. The wounded perp waits for the customer to do something, and when the guy just stands there, gaping, frozen, the perp says, For the love of God, mister, call an ambulance!" "For the love of God," Jack said. " For the love of God." When the paramedics show up, first thing he asks them for is a Bible." Jack rolled his head back and forth on the pillow in disbelief. "Nice to know not all the scum out there are godless scum, isn't it?" "Warms my heart," Crawford said. Jack was the only patient in the room. His most recent roommate, a fifty-year-old estate-planning specialist, in residence for three days, had died the previous day of complications from routine gallbladder surgery. Crawford sat on the edge of the vacant bed. "I got some good news for you." "I can use it." "Internal Affairs submitted its final report on the shootings, and you're cleared across the board. Better yet, both the ch ief and the commission are going to accept it as definitive." "Why don't I feel like dancing?" "We both know the whole demand for a special investigation was bullshit. But we also both know ... once they open that door, they don't always close it again without slamming it on some poor innocent bastard's fingers. So we'll count our blessings." "They clear Luther too?" "Yes, of course." "All right." Crawford said, "I put your name in for a commendation--Luther too, posthumously. Both are going to be approved." "Thank you, Captain." "Deserved." "I don't give a damn about the dickheads on the commission, and the chief can take a hike to hell too, for all I care. But it means something to me because it was you put in our names." Lowering his gaze to his brown cap, which he turned around and around.in his brown hands, Crawford said, "I appreciate that." They were both silent awhile. Jack was remembering Luther. He figured Crawford was too. Finally Crawford looked up from his cap and said, "Now for the bad news." "Always has to be some." "Not actively bad, just irritating. You hear about the Anson Oliver movie?" "Which one? There were three." "So you haven't heard. His parents and his pregnant fiancee made a deal with Warner Brothers." "Deal?" "Sold the rights to Anson Oliver's life story for one million dollars?" Jack was speechless. Crawford said, "The way they tell it, they made the deal for two reasons. First, they want to provide for Oliver's unborn son, make sure the kid's future is secure." "What about my kid's future?" Jack asked angrily. Crawford cocked his head. "You really pissed?" "Yes !" "Hell, Jack, since when did our kids ever matter to people like them?" "Since never." "Exactly. You and me and our kids, we're here to applaud them when they do something artistic or high minded--and clean up after them when they make a mess." "It isn't fair," Jack said. He laughed at his own words, as if any experienced cop could still expect life to be fair, virtue to be rewarded, and villainy to be punished. "Ah, hell." "You can't hate them for that. It's just the way they are, the way they think. They'll never change. Might as well hate lightning, hate ice being cold and fire being hot.".Jack sighed, still angry but only smoldering. "You said they had two reasons for making the deal. What's number two?" "To make a movie that will be a monument to the genius of Anson Oliver," " Crawford said. "That's how the father put it. A monument to the genius of Anson Oliver."