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JANE HAWK WOKE in the cool dark and for a moment could not remember where she had gone to sleep, only that as always she was in a queen- or king-size bed and that her pistol lay under the pillow on which the head of a companion would have rested had she not been traveling alone.
ONE NIGHT the previous November, six days before Nick’s death, while she’d been waiting in bed for him as he brushed his teeth, she had seen a story on the TV news that intrigued her and that lately had circled back again and again in her memory, as though it must be pertinent to what she was currently enduring.
Experiments were being done in which cerebral implants could take the brain’s instructions and transmit them past points of communication breakdown, such as stroke and spinal-nerve damage, making it possible for a paraplegic to operate prosthetic limbs just by thinking about moving them.
Philadelphia
San Diego
“Ideas shouldn’t matter more than people.”
“People should matter more than ideas.”
that flensed them layer by layer.
“Who the hell ‘they’ are that we’re always hearing about.”
Thriving banana palms sculled the air with their large paddlelike fronds, as if to row the building backward in time to a more serene era.
Wild witches’ broom of dark hair, street-corner-prophet beard bristling and woven through with a white streak as though stiffened and selectively bleached by a lightning bolt, wearing lace-up boots and camouflage pants and green flannel shirt and voluminous black quilted-nylon jacket, the hulking man had apparently defeated the library’s block on obscene websites and was watching pornography with the sound off.
For people with malicious intentions, no better cover existed than a nonprofit organization dedicated to bettering the human condition.
his time-beaten face as expressionless as a clock.
He had the voice of a bear with strep throat.
Sometimes both weather and history broke far too slowly for those who were impatient for what came next.
quarrels used by crossbows.
she learned that not all cops were on the side of the righteous, that in this dangerous time when shadows cast shadows of their own, when darkness often passed for light, the just and the unjust wore the same face.
As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.
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When the wipers swept the blearing rain from the windshield, she saw the nearby Pacific, storm-lashed and misted, rolling toward shore less like water than like a sea of gray smoke pouring off the fires of some vast nuclear holocaust.
A rural world that seemed isolate.
Lush meadows and valley scrub.
Jane pulled to a stop behind Gavin’s prized apple-green ’48 Ford pickup that he had chopped and channeled and sectioned himself, adding ’37 La Salle fenders and a highly customized La Salle nose section with stainless-steel grillwork, making it a street rod of singular style.
the dogs whidded this way and that, whacking the wicker chairs with their tails, whimpering with pleasure
TO THE MUSIC of Windham Hill
Added a Windham Hill Holiday station to Pandora. Very nice.
Even in the darkest darkness, hope was a lifeline, though sometimes as thin as a thread.
ennui.
gubbish.”
pellucid
She undressed, went to the queen-size bed, and tucked the pistol under the pillow that would have been Nick’s.
When she did ascend briefly from sleep, it was to the dire serenade of sirens waxing and waning, more sirens than would have pierced the suburban peace only a decade or two earlier, as though some wicked master of a form of origami akin to quantum mechanics spent the night folding the evils of the world into places that had once been less afflicted by them.
When there had been questions about her father,
Wow. Left turn out of nowhere .
LATE SNOW FELL in Telluride, the Colorado night breathing softly, so that the storm had no bite, the flakes slanting at the slightest angle, an inch of ermine on the ground, Nature knitting lace on the rough bark of the conifers.
It was a tree taller than the night, reaching through the storm, all the way to the stars, a conceit that pleased her and made her smile.
it is what it is.
She drew the pistol from under the pillow where no head had rested.
She put the pistol under the pillow once more.
death ticket.
escutcheon.
trephined
aniline
Jane stepped off Overton’s driveway and onto the public sidewalk, the moon watched blinkless, a milky and accusing eye.
Later, lying on her back in bed, the Heckler & Koch under the neighboring pillow, she thought about how she had killed two perps in almost seven years as an FBI special agent, about how she had killed two more in just the past two days, and she wondered who she would be a year from now, or tomorrow.
And this happened to be a bizarre age, a strange time when great numbers of people believed every manipulative junk-science claim, dreading armageddons of infinite variety, yet denied the most common-sense truths that lay luminous before them.
“Nothing I can do for you.” “There is if you want to do it.” “My wars were a long time ago.” “All wars are one war. And it never ends.” “I’m not the man I was then.” “Any man who earned the Distinguished Service Cross is always going to be that man, somewhere in himself.” He met her stare. “That’s just rah-rah bullshit.” “Maybe to an Army prick, but not to a Marine’s widow.” After a silence, he said, “Are you always this way?” “What other way is there to be?”
Experience and intuition—and perhaps the unconscious awareness of a subtle malodor—told him this must be the silence of death, coiling through the fashionable house from the slack-jawed mouth of a screamer no longer capable of screaming.
comportment
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