Dark Rivers of the Heart

chances, as if they thought they were amidst people crazed on PCP or something worse.
        Spencer had reached the midpoint of the hall, where he stood between two doorways. A dim grayness beyond the right-hand door: the dining room.
        On his left: the bathroom.
        He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, hoping to buy time to think.
        The stinging in his face, hands, and legs was slowly subsiding.
        Rapidly, repeatedly, he clenched his hands, then relaxed them, trying to improve the circulation and work off the numbness.
        From the far end of the house came a wood-splintering crash, hard enough to make the walls shudder. It was probably the front door slamming open or going down.
        Another crash. The kitchen door.
        They were in the house.
        They were coming.
        No time to think. He had to move, relying on instinct and on military training that was, he hoped, at least as extensive as that of the men who were hunting him.
        In the back wall of the cramped room, above the bathtub, the blackness was broken by a rectangle of faint gray light. He stepped into the tub and, with both hands, quickly explored the frame of that small window.
        He wasn't convinced that it was big enough to provide a way out, but it was the only possible route of escape.
        If it had been fixed or jalousied, he would have been trapped.
        Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge. Collapsible elbow braces on both sides clicked softly when fully extended, locking the window open.
        He expected the faint squeak of the hinge and the click of the braces to elicit a shout from someone outside. But the unrelenting drone of the rain screened what sounds he made. No alarm was raised.
        Spencer gripped the window ledge and levered himself into the opening.
        Cold rain spattered his face. The humid air was heavy with the fecund smells of saturated earth, jasmine, and grass.
        The backyard was a tapestry of gloom, woven exclusively from shades of black and graveyard grays, washed by rain that blurred its details. At least one man-more likely two-from the swat team had to be covering the rear of the house. However, though Spencer's vision was keen, he could not force any of the interwoven shadows to resolve into a human form.
        For a moment his upper body seemed wider than the frame, but he hunched his shoulders, twisted, wriggled, and scraped through the opening. The ground was a short drop from the window. He rolled once on the wet grass and then lay flat on his stomach, head raised, surveying the night still unable to see signs of any adversaries.
        In the planting beds and along the property line, the shrubbery was overgrown. Several old fig trees, long untrimmed, were mighty towers of foliage.
        Glimpsed between the branches of those mammoth ficuses, the heavens were not black. The lights of the sprawling metropolis reflected off the bellies of the eastbound storm clouds, painting the vault of the night with deep and sour yellows that, toward the oceanic west, faded into charcoal gray.
        Though familiar to Spencer, the unnatural color of the city sky filled him with a surprising and superstitious dread, for it seemed to be a malevolent firmament under which men were meant to die-and to the sight of which they might wake in Hell. It was a mystery how the yard could remain unlit under that sulfurous glow, yet he could have sworn that it grew blacker the longer he squinted at it.
        The stinging in his legs subsided. His hands still ached but not disablingly, and the burning in his face was less intense than it had been.
        Inside the dark house, an automatic weapon stuttered briefly, spitting out several rounds. One of the cops must be trigger-happy, shooting at shadows or ghosts. Curious. Hair-trigger nerves were uncommon among special-forces officers.
        Spencer scuttled across the sodden grass to the shelter of a nearby triple-trunk ficus. Rising to his feet, with his back against the bark, he surveyed the lawn, the shrubs, and the line of trees along the rear property wall, half convinced he should make a break for it, but also half convinced that he would be spotted and brought down if he stepped into the open.
        Flexing his hands to work off the pain, he considered climbing into the web of wood above him and hiding in the