Dark Rivers of the Heart

door shut.
        The pilot, at Spencer's direction, immediately took them due north at high speed.
        Rocky was crouched between two of the passenger seats, watching her intently. He was not as exuberant as he had been since they'd fled their camp in Nevada shortly after dawn. He had slipped into his more familiar suit of fretfulness and timidity.
        "It's okay, pooch."
        His disbelief was unconcealed.
        "Well, it sure could be worse," she said.
        He whimpered.
        "Poor baby."
        With both ears drooping, racked by shivers, Rocky was the essence of misery.
        "How can I say anything that'll make you feel better," she asked the dog, "if I'm not allowed to lie to you."
        My assessment of our situation, considering we just slipped loose of a damned tight knot."
        "We're not out of this mess yet."
        "Well, there's something I tell Mr. Rocky Dog now and then, when he's down in the dumps. It's something that helps me a little, though I can't say whether it works for him."
        "What?" Ellie asked.
        "You've got to remember, whatever happens-it's only life, we all get through it."
        MONDAY MORNING, after his bail had been posted, crossing the parking lot to his brother's BMW, Harris Descoteaux stopped twice to turn his face to the sun. He basked in its warmth. He had once read that black people, even those as midnight-dark as he was, could get skin cancer from too much sun. Being black was no absolute guarantee against melanoma. Being black, of course, was no guarantee against any misfortune, quite the opposite, so melanoma would have to wait in line with all the other horrors that might befall him. After spending fifty-eight hours in Jail, where direct sunlight was more difficult to get than a hit of heroin, he felt as if he wanted to stand in the sun until his skin blistered, until his bones melted, until he became one giant pulsing melanoma. Anything was better than being locked away in a sunless prison. He inhaled deeply, too, because the smog-tainted air of Los Angeles smelled so sweet. Like the juice of an exotic fruit.
        The scent of freedom. He wanted to stretch, run, leap, twirl, whoop, and holler-but there were some things that a man of forty-four simply did not do, regardless of how giddy with freedom he might be.
        In the car, as Darius started the engine, Harris put a hand on his arm, staying him for a moment. "Darius, I'll never forget this-what you've done for me, what you're still doing."
        "Hey, it's nothing."
        "The hell it isn't."
        "Well, you'd have done the same for me."
        "I think I would've. I hope I would've."
        "There you go again, working on sainthood, putting on those robes of modesty. Man, whatever I know about doing the right thing, I learned from you. So what I did here, it's what you would do."
        Harris grinned and lightly punched Darius on the shoulder. "I love you, little brother."
        "Love you, big brother."
        Darius lived in Westwood, and from downtown, the drive could take as little as thirty minutes on a Monday morning, after the rush hour, or more than between using Wilshire Boulevard, all the way across the city, or the Santa Monica Freeway. Darius chose Wilshire, because some days the rush hour never ended and the freeway became Hell with talk radio.
        For a while, Harris was all right, enjoying his freedom if not the i thought of the legal nightmare that lay ahead; however, as they were approaching Fairfax Boulevard, he began to feel ill. The first symptom was 'id but disturbing dizziness, a strange conviction that the city was ever a mi so slowly revolving around them even as they drove through it.
        The sensation came and went, but each time that it gripped him, he suffered a spell of tachycardia more frantic than the one before it.
        When his heart fluttered through more beats in a half-minute seizure than the heart of a frightened hummingbird, he was overcome by the peculiar worry that he wasn't getting enough oxygen.
        When he tried to breathe deeply, he found he could barely breathe at all.
        At first he thought that the air in the car was stale. Stuffy, too warm.
        He didn't want to reveal his distress to his brother-who was on the car phone, taking care of business-so he casually fiddled with the vent controls, until he got a draft of cool air directed at his