Dark Rivers of the Heart

country had the compassionate government that it deserved and was on the threshold of Utopia, he would like to spend the rest of his life serving in a suicide-assistance program for infants. He could not imagine anything more rewarding than holding a defective baby in his arms while a lethal injection was administered, comforting the child as it passed from imperfect flesh to a transcendent spiritual plane.
        His heart swelled with love for those less fortunate than he. The halt and blind. The maimed and the ill and the elderly and the depressed and the learning impaired.
        After two hours on the ound in Fla tall, by the time McCarran reopened and the Learjet departed for a second try at Las Vegas, the documentary had ended. Kevorkian's smile was no longer to be seen.
        Nevertheless, Roy remained in a state of rapture that he was sure would last for at least several days.
        The power was now in him. He would experience no more failure, no more setbacks.
        In flight, he received a telephone call from the agent seeking Ethel and George Porth, the grandparents who had raised Spencer Grant after the death of his mother. According to county property records, the Porths had once owned the house at the San Francisco address in Grant's military records, but they had sold it ten years ago. The buyers had resold it seven years thereafter, and the new owners, in residence just three years, had never heard of the Porths and had no clue as to their whereabouts.
        The agent was continuing the search.
        Roy had every confidence that they would find the Porths. The tide had turned in their favor. Feel the power.
        By the time the Learjet landed in Las Vegas, night had fallen.
        Although the sky was overcast, the rain had stopped.
        Roy was met at the debarkation gate by a driver who looked like a Spam loaf in a suit. He said only that his name was Prock and that the car was in front of the terminal. Glowering, he stalked away, expecting to be followed, clearly uninterested in small talk, as rude as the most arrogant maitre d' in New York City.
        Roy decided to be amused rather than insulted.
        The nondescript Chevrolet was parked illegally in the loading zone.
        Although Prock seemed bigger than the car that he was driving, somehow he fit inside.
        The air was chilly, but Roy found it invigorating.
        Because Prock kept the heater turned up high, the interior of the Chevy was stuffy, but Roy chose to think of it as cozy.
        He was in a brilliant mood.
        They went downtown with illegal haste.
        Though Prock stayed on secondary streets and kept away from the busy hotels and casinos, the glare of those neon-lined avenues was reflected on the bellies of the low clouds. The red-orange-green-yellow sky might have seemed like a vision of Hell to a gambler who had just lost next week's grocery money, but Roy found it festive.
        After delivering Roy to the agency's downtown headquarters, Prock drove off to deliver his baggage to the hotel for him.
        On the fifth floor of the high rise, Bobby Dubois was waiting.
        Dubois, the evening duty officer, was a tall, lanky Texan with mud-brown eyes and hair the color of range dust, on whom clothes hung like thrift-store castaways on a stick-and-straw scarecrow. Although big-boned, rough-hewn, with a mottled complexion, with jug-handle ears, with teeth as crooked as the tombstones in a cow-town cemetery, with not a single feature that even the kindest critic could deem perfect, Dubois had a good-old-boy charm and an easy manner that distracted attention from the fact he was a biological tragedy.
        Sometimes Roy was surprised that he could be around Dubois for long periods, yet resist the urge to commit a mercy killing.
        "That boy, he's some cute sonofabitch, the way he drove out of that roadblock and into the amusement park," Dubois said as he led Roy down the hall from his office to the satellite-surveillance room. "And that dog of his, just bobbin' its head up and down, up and down, like one of them spring-necked novelties that people put on the rear-window shelves in their cars. That dog, he got palsy or what?"
        "I don't know," Roy said.
        "My granpap, he once had a dog with palsy. Name was Scooter, but we called him Boomer 'cause he could cut the godawfulest loud farts.
        I'm talking' about the dog, you understand, not