By the light of the moon

gunfire, and
many sharp bony knuckles knocked fiercely against the front door,
as if a score of determined demons with death warrants were
demanding admission, splitting the wood, punching holes, and
vibrations passed through the staircase underfoot as round after
round smashed into the risers between the lower treads.

39
    Once they reached the landing and started to climb
the second flight, Dylan felt safer, but his relief immediately
proved to be premature. A bullet cracked up through a tread three
steps ahead of them, and slammed into the stairwell
ceiling.
    He realized that the underside of this second flight of stairs
faced the front door. Essentially, beneath their feet lay the back
wall of a shooting gallery.
    Proceeding was dangerous, retreating made no sense whatsoever,
and halting in midflight meant certain death later if not sooner.
So they hauled more aggressively on Shepherd's belt, Jilly with
both hands, Dylan with one, dragged-heaved-bounced him up the
second set of stairs, and this time 'Where's all the ice?' squeaked
from him in a semifalsetto.
    Dylan expected to be shot through the soles of his feet, in an
arm, through the bottom of his chin, or all of the above. When they
arrived in the upper hall without any of them yet resembling a
morgue photo in a forensic-pathology textbook, he let go of his
brother and leaned with one hand on the newel post to catch his
breath.
    Evidently, Vonetta Beesley, their housekeeper, had put her hand
on the newel cap earlier in the day, for when Dylan made contact
with her psychic trace, images of the woman flared through his
mind. He felt compelled to seek her out at once.
    If this had occurred the previous evening, if he hadn't learned
to control his response to such stimuli, he might have plunged down
the stairs, into the maelstrom below, as he had raced recklessly to
Marjorie's house on Eucalyptus Avenue. Instead, he snatched his
hand off the post and dialed down his sensitivity to the spoor.
    Already Jilly had pulled Shepherd farther into the hall, away
from the head of the stairs. Raising her voice to compete with the
explosive tumult below, she pleaded with him to fold them out of
here.
    Joining them, Dylan saw that his brother remained icebound. The
issue of ice continued to bounce around inside Shep's head to the
exclusion of virtually everything else.
    No formula existed to determine how long Shepherd would take to
extract himself from the tar pit of this latest obsession, but wise
money would have to take short odds on a long period of
distraction. He was more likely to awaken to the world around him
in an hour than in two minutes.
    Focusing tightly on one narrow question or area of interest was,
after all, another way to insulate himself when the inflow of
sensory stimuli became overwhelming. In the midst of gunfire, he
couldn't choose a safe corner and turn his back to the chaos behind
him, but he could flee to a symbolic corner in a dark room deep in
the castle of his mind, a corner that contained nothing to consider
except ice, ice, ice.
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'When they're done downstairs,' Jilly asked, 'what's next?'
    'They blast the second floor. Maybe come up on the porch roofs
to do it.'
    'Maybe they come inside,' she said.
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    'We've got to get him off this ice,' Jilly worried.
    'That'll only happen with time and quiet.'
    'We're screwed.'
    'We're not screwed.'
    'Screwed.'
    'Not screwed.'
    'You got a plan?' she demanded.
    Dylan's only plan, which Jilly in fact suggested, had been to
get above the gunfire. Now he realized that the gunfire would come
to them wherever they went, not to mention the gunmen.
    The ferocious clatter-bang downstairs, the fear of a stray
bullet finding its way up the stairwell or even through the ceiling
of the lower hall and the floor of the upper hall: All this made
concentrating on tactics and strategy no easier than lassoing
snakes. Once again, circumstances thrust upon Dylan a deeper
understanding of how his brother must feel when overwhelmed by
life, which in Shep's case was nearly all the time.
    Okay, forget about the money he kept in a lockbox. The Beatles
had been right: Money can't buy you love. Or stop a bullet.
    Forget about the 9-mm pistol that he'd bought after his mother's
murder. Against these assailants' artillery, the handgun might as
well have been a stick.
    'Ice, ice, ice.'
    Jilly coaxed Shepherd to skate out of the ice and rejoin them,
so he could fold them to someplace safe, but with