Dark Rivers of the Heart

were running for their lives.
        At the end of the aisle, three men rushed into sight from the left and halted when they saw Ellie, Spencer, the dog, the guns. Two were in white uniforms: names stitched on their shirt pockets, employees of the market.
        The third-in street clothes, with a loaf of French bread in one handmust have been a customer.
        With an alacrity and sinuosity more like that of a cat, Rocky transformed his headlong plunge into an immediate retreat. Eeling around on himself, tail between his legs, almost on his belly, he waddled back toward his master for protection.
        The men were startled, not aggressive. But they froze, blocking the way.
        "Back off!" Spencer shouted.
        Aiming at the ceiling, he punctuated his demand with a short burst from the Uzi, blowing out a fluorescent strip and precipitating a shower of lightbulb glass and chopped-up acoustic tiles.
        'Ferrified, the three men scattered.
        A pair of swinging doors at the back of the market was recessed between dairy cases to the left and lunch-meat-and-cheese coolers to the right.
        Ellie slammed through the doors. Spencer followed with Rocky.
        They were in a short hallway, with rooms to both sides.
        The sound of the helicopters was muffled there.
        At the end of the hallway, they burst into a cavernous room that extended the width of the building: bare concrete walls, fluorescent lights, open rafters instead of a suspended ceiling. An area in the center of the chamber was open, but merchandise in shipping cartons was stacked sixteen feet high in aisles on both sides-additional stock of products from shampoo to fresh produce.
        Spencer spotted a few stockroom employees watching warily from between the storage aisles.
        Directly ahead, beyond the open work area, was an enormous metal roll-up door through which big trucks could be backed inside and unloaded. To the right of the shipping entrance was a man-size door.
        They ran to it, opened it, and went outside into the fifty-foot-wide service alley.
        No one in sight.
        A twenty-foot-deep overhang sprouted from the wall above the rollup. It extended the length of the market, jutting nearly halfway across the alley, to allow additional trucks to pull under it and unload while protected from the elements. It was also protection from eyes in the sky.
        The morning was surprisingly chilly. Though the market and stockroom had been cool, Spencer wasn't prepared for the briskness of the outside air. The temperature must have been in the mid-forties.
        In more than two hours of breakneck travel, they had come from the edge of a desert into higher altitudes and a different climate.
        He saw no point in following the service alley left or right.
        Both ways, they would only be going around the U-shaped structure to the parking lot out front.
        On three sides of the shopping center, a nine-foot-high privacy wall separated it from its neighbors: concrete blocks, painted white, capped with bricks. If it had been six feet, they might have scaled it fast enough to escape. Nine feet, no way in hell. They could throw the canvas bag across, easy enough, but they couldn't simply heave a seventy-pound dog to the other side and hope he landed well.
        Out at the front of the supermarket, the pitch of engines from at least one of the helicopters changed. The clatter of its props grew louder.
        It was coming to the rear of the building.
        Ellie dashed to the right, along the shaded back of the market.
        Spencer knew what she intended. They had one hope. He followed her.
        She stopped at the limit of the overhang, which marked the end of the supermarket. Beyond was that portion of the back wall of the shopping center belonging to neighboring businesses.
        Ellie glowered at Rocky. "Stay close the building, tight against it," she told him, as if he could understand.
        Maybe he could. Ellie hurried out into the sunshine, heeding her own advice, and Rocky trotted between her and Spencer, staying close to the back wall of the shopping center.
        Spencer didn't know if satellite surveillance was acute enough to differentiate between them and the structure. He didn't know if the two-foot overhang on the main roof, high above, provided cover. But even if Ellie's strategy was smart, Spencer still felt