Dark Rivers of the Heart
that you disposed of two competitors who tried to muscle in on your territory, and you wiped out the wife, girlfriend, and kids just to teach other dealers a hard lesson."
Harris's heart was pounding so fiercely that he would not have been surprised to see his breast shuddering visibly with each hard beat.
Instead of pumping warm blood, it seemed to be circulating liquid freon through his body. He was colder than a dead man.
Fear regressed him to the vulnerability and helplessness of childhood.
He heard himself seeking solace in the faith of his beloved, gospel-singing mother, a faith from which he had slipped away through the years but to which he now suddenly reached out with a sincerity that surprised him: "Jesus, dear sweet jesus, help me."
"Perhaps He will," the woman said as Darius approached them. "But in the meantime, we're ready to help as well. If you're smart, you'll call that number, use those passwords, and get on with your life-instead of getting on with your death."
As Darius joined them, he said, "What's up, Harris?"
The redhead returned the slip of paper to her coat pocket.
Harris said, "But that's just it. How can I ever get on with my life after what's happened to me?"
"You can," she said, "though you won't be Harris Descoteaux any more."
She smiled and nodded at Darius, and she walked away.
Harris watched her go, overcome by that here-we-are-in-the-magickingdom-of-Oz feeling again.
Long ago those acres had been beautiful. As a boy with another name, Spencer had been especially fond of the ranch in wintertime, swaddled in white. By day, it was a bright empire of snow forts, tunnels, and sled runs that had been tamped down with great care and patience. On clear nights, the Rocky Mountain sky was deeper than eternity, deeper even than the mind could imagine, and starlight sparkled in the icicles.
Returning after his own eternity in exile, he found nothing that was pleasing to the eye. Each slope and curve of land, each building, each tree was the same as it had been in that distant age, but for the fact that the pines and maples and birches were taller than before.
Changeless though it might be, the ranch now impressed him as the ugliest place that he had ever seen, even when flattered by its winter dress. They were harsh acres, and the stark geometry of those fields and hills were designed, at every turn, to offend the eye, like the architecture of Hell. The trees were only ordinary specimens, but they looked to him as though they were malformed and gnarled by disease, nurtured on horrors that had leeched into the soil and into their roots from the nearby catacombs. The buildingsstables, house, barn-were all graceless hulks, looming and haunted, the windows as black and menacing as open graves.
Spencer parked at the house. His heart was pounding. His mouth was so dry and his throat was so tight that he could hardly swallow.
The door of the pickup opened with the resistance of a massive portal on a bank vault.
Ellie remained in the truck, with the computer on her lap. If trouble came, she was on-line and ready for whatever strange purpose she had prepared. Through the microwave transceiver, she had linked to a satellite and from there into a computer system that she hadn't identified to Spencer and that could be anywhere on the surface of the earth. Information might be power, as she had said, but Spencer couldn't imagine how information would shield them from bullets, if the agency was nearby and lying in wait for them.
As though he were a deep-sea diver, encased in a cumbersome pressure suit and steel helmet, burdened by an incalculable tonnage of water, he walked to the front steps, crossed the porch, and stood at the door. He rang the bell.
He heard the chimes inside, the same five notes that had marked a visitor's arrival when he'd lived there as a boy, and even as they rang out, he had to struggle against an urge to turn and run. He was a grown man, and the hobgoblins that terrorized children should have had no power over him. Irrationally, however, he was afraid that the chimes would be answered by his mother, dead but walking, as naked as she'd been found in that ditch, all her wounds revealed.
He found the willpower to censor the mental image of the corpse.
He rang the bell again.
The night was so
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