Dark Rivers of the Heart

established.
        All governments, even democracies, maintained control by the threat of violence and imprisonment. When that threat was divorced from the rule of law, however, even if with the best of intentions, there was a fearfully thin line between a federal agent and a thug.
        If Spencer located Valerie and learned why she was on the run, helping her would not be simply a matter of dipping into his cash reserves and finding the best attorney to represent her. Naively, that had been his nebulous plan, on those few occasions when he had bothered to think about what he might do if he tracked her down.
        But the ruthlessness of these enemies ruled out a solution in any court of law.
        Faced with the choice of violence or flight, he would always choose to flee and risk a bullet in the back-at least when no life but his own was at stake. When he eventually took responsibility for this woman's life, however, he could not expect her to turn her own back on a gun; sooner or later he would have to meet the violence of those men with violence of his own.
        Brooding about that, Spencer drove south between the too-solid desert and the amorphous sky. The distant highway was only barely visible to the east, and no clear path lay before him.
        Out of the west came rain in blinding cataracts of rare ferocity for the Mo'ave, a towering gray tide behind which the desert began to disappear.
        Spencer could smell the rain even though it hadn't reached them yet.
        It was a cold, wet, ozone-tainted scent, refreshing at first but then strange and profoundly chilling.
        "It's not that I'm worried about being able to kill someone if it comes to that," he told the huddled dog.
        The gray wall rushed toward them, faster by the second, and it seemed to be more than mere rain that loomed. It was the future too, and it was all that he feared knowing about the past.
        "I've done it before. I can do it again if I have to."
        Over the rumble of the Explorer's engine, he could hear the rain now, like a million pounding hearts.
        "And if some sonofabitch deserves killing, I can do him and feel no guilt, no remorse. Sometimes it's right. It's justice. I don't have a problem with that."
        The rain swept over them, billowing like a magician's scarves, bringing sorcerous change. The pale land darkened dramatically with the first splash. In the peculiar storm light, the desiccated vegetation, more brown than green, suddenly became glossy, verdant; in seconds, withered leaves and grass appeared to swell into plump tropical forms, though it was all illusion.
        Switching on the windshield wipers, shifting the Explorer into fourwheel drive, Spencer said, "What worries me… what scares me is… maybe I waste some sonofabitch who deserves it… some piece of walking garbage… and this time I like it."
        The downpour could have been no less cataclysmic than that which had launched Noah upon the Flood, and the fierce drumming of ran on the truck was deafening. The storm-cowed dog probably could not hear his master above the roar, yet Spencer used Rocky's presence as an excuse to acknowledge a truth that he preferred not to hear, speaking aloud because he might lie if he spoke only to himself.
        "I never liked it before. Never felt like a hero for doing it.
        But it didn't sicken me, either. I didn't puke or lose any sleep over it. So… what if the next time… or the time after that… ?"
        Beneath the glowering thunderheads, in the velvet-heavy shrouds of rain, the early afternoon had grown as dark as twilight. Driving out of murk into mystery, he switched on the headlights, surprised to find that both had survived the impact with the amusement-park gate.
        Rain fell straight to the earth in such tremendous tonnage that it dissolved and washed away the wind that had previously stirred the desert into sand spouts.
        They came to a ten-foot-deep wash with gently sloping walls. In the headlight beams, a stream of silvery water, a foot wide and a few inches deep, glimmered along the center of that depression. Spencer crossed the twenty-foot-wide arroyo to higher ground on the far side.
        As the Explorer crested the second bank, a series of massive lightning bolts blazed across the desert, accompanied by crashes of thunder that vibrated through the truck. The rain came down even harder than before, harder than he had