Dark Rivers of the Heart

that, I figured I could keep moving and go just about anywhere."
        She began chewing the knuckles of her right hand.
        "I'll pay for the Rover."
        "That's not what I was after."
        "I know. But what's mine is yours anyway."
        "Oh? When did that happen?"
        "No strings attached," he said.
        "I like to pay my own way."
        "No point discussing it."
        "What you say is final, huh?"
        "No. What the dog says is final."
        "This was Rocky's decision?"
        "He takes care of all my finances."
        Rocky grinned. He liked hearing his name.
        "Because it's Rocky's idea," she said, "I'll keep an open mind."
        Spencer said, "Why do you call Summerton a cockroach? Why does that annoy him particularly?"
        "Tom's got a phobia about insects. All kinds of insects. Even a housefly can make him squirm. But he's especially uptight about cockroaches.
        When he sees one-and they used to have an infestation at the A.T.F when he was there-he goes off the deep end. It's almost comic. Like in a cartoon when an elephant spots a mouse. Anyway, a few weeks after… after Danny and my folks were killed, and after I gave up trying to approach reporters with what I knew, I called old Tom at his office in the Department of justice, just rang him up from a pay phone in midtown Chicago."
        "Good grief."
        "The most private of his private lines, the one he picks up himself.
        Surprised him. He tried to play innocent, keep me talking until he could have me whacked right at that pay phone. I told him he shouldn't be so afraid of cockroaches, since he was one himself. Told him that someday I'll stomp him flat, kill him. And I meant what I said.
        Someday, somehow, I'll send him straight to Hell."
        Spencer glanced at her. She was staring at the night ahead, still brooding. Slender, so pleasing to the eye, in some ways as delicate as any flower, she was nevertheless as fierce and tough as any special-forces soldier that Spencer had ever known.
        He loved her beyond all reason, without reservation, without qualification, with a passion immeasurable, loved every aspect of her face, loved the sound of her voice, loved her singular vitality, loved the kindness of her heart and the agility of her mind, loved her so purely and intensely that sometimes when he looked at her, a hush seemed to fall across the world. He prayed that she was a favored child of fate, destined to have a long life, because if she died before he did, there would be no hope for him no hope at all.
        He drove east into the night, past Rifle and Silt and New Castle and Glenwood Springs. The interstate highway frequently followed the bottoms of deep, narrow canyons with sheer walls of seamed stone. In daylight, it was some of the most breathtaking scenery on the planet.
        In February darkness, those soaring ramparts of rock pressed close, black monoliths that denied him the choice of going left or right and that funneled him toward higher places, toward dire confrontations so inevitable that they seemed to have been waiting to unfold since before the universe had exploded into existence. From the floor of that crevasse, only a ribbon of sky was visible, sprinkled with a meagerness of stars, as though Heaven could accommodate no more souls and would soon close its gates forever.
        Roy touched a button in the armrest. Beside him, the car window purred down. "Is it as you remember?" he asked the artist.
        As they turned off the two-lane country road, Ackblom leaned past Roy to look outside.
        Toward the front of the property, untrammeled snow mantled the paddocks that surrounded the stables. No horses had been boarded there in twenty-two years, sense Jennifer's death, because horses had been her love, not her husband's. The fencing was well maintained and so white that it was only dimly visible against the frosted fields.
        The bare driveway was flanked by waist-high walls of snow that had been pushed there by a plow. Its course was serpentine.
        At Steven Ackblom's request, the driver stopped at the house rather than proceeding directly to the barn.
        Roy put up the window while Fordyce removed the shackles from the artist's ankles. Then the handcuffs. Roy did not want his guest to suffer the further indignity of those bonds.
        In their journey across the mountains, he and the artist