Dark Rivers of the Heart

dimly, and Roy looked down at the computer on his lap. According to Mama, Spencer Grant's name did not appear in telephone billing records, either.
        First, the guy had gone back into his employment files in the LAPD computer and inserted the Zelinsky address, evidently chosen at random, in place of his own. And now, although he still lived in the L.A. area and almost certainly had a telephone, he had expunged his name from the records of whichever company-Pacific Bell or GTE-provided his local service.
        Grant seemed to be trying to make himself invisible.
        "Who the hell is this guy?" Roy wondered aloud.
        Because of what Nella Shire had found, Roy had been convinced that he knew the man he was seeking. Now he suddenly felt that he didn't know Spencer Grant at all, not in any fundamental sense. He knew only generalities, superficialities-but it was in the details where his damnation might lie.
        What had Grant been doing at the bungalow in Santa Monica? How was he involved with the woman? What did he know?
        Getting answers to those questions was of increasing urgency.
        Two more cars disappeared into garages at different houses.
        Roy sensed that his chances of finding Grant were diminishing with the passage of time.
        Feverishly, he considered his options, and then went through Mama to penetrate the computer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. In moments, a picture of Grant was on his display screen, one taken by the DMV specifically for a new driver's license. All vital statistics were provided. And a street address.
        "All right," Roy said softly, as if to speak loudly would be to undo this bit of good luck.
        He ordered and received three printouts of the data on the screen, exited the DMV, said good-bye to Mama, switched off the computer, and house.
        Mary, Peter, and the daughter sat on the living room sofa. They were pale, silent, holding hands. They looked like three ghosts in a celestial waiting room, anticipating the imminent arrival of their judgment documents, more than half expecting to be served with one-way tickets to Hell.
        Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio stood guard, heavily armed and expressionless. Without comment, Roy gave them printouts of the new address for Grant that he had gotten from the DMV With a few questions, he established that both Mary and Peter Zelinsky were out of work and on unemployment compensation. That was why they were at home, about to have dinner, when most neighbors were still in schools of steel fish on the concrete seas of the freeway system. They had been searching the want ads in the Los Angeles Times every day, applying for new jobs at numerous companies, and worrying so unrelentingly about the future that the explosive arrival of Dormon, Johnson, Vecchio, and Roy had seemed, on some level, not surprising but a natural progression of their ongoing catastrophe.
        Roy was prepared to flash his Drug Enforcement Agency ID and to use every technique of intimidation in his repertoire to reduce the Zelinsky family to total submission and to ensure that they never filed a complaint, either with the local police or with the federal government.
        However, they were obviously already so cowed by the economic turmoil that had taken their jobs-and by city life in general-that Roy did not need to provide even phony identification.
        They would be grateful to escape from this encounter with their lives.
        They would meekly repair their front door, clean up the mess, and probably conclude that they had been terrorized by drug dealers who had burst into the wrong house in search of a hated competitor.
        No one filed complaints against drug dealers. Drug dealers in modern America were akin to a force of nature. It made as much sense-and was far safer-to file an angry complaint about a hurricane, a tornado, a lightning storm.
        Adopting the imperious manner of a cocaine king, Roy warned them:
        "Unless you want to see what it's like having your brains blown out, better sit still for ten minutes after we leave. Zelinsky, you have a watch. You think you can count off ten minutes?"
        "Yes, sir," Peter Zelinsky said.
        Mary would not look at Roy. She kept her head down. He could not see much of her splendid nose.
        "You know I'm serious?" Roy asked the husband, and was answered with a nod. "Are you going to