Dark Rivers of the Heart

be a good boy?"
        "We don't want any trouble."
        "I'm glad to hear that."
        The reflexive meekness of these people was a sorry comment on the brutalization of American society. It depressed Roy.
        On the other hand, their pliability made his job a hell of a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.
        He followed Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio outside, and he was the last to drive away. He glanced repeatedly at the house, but no faces appeared at the door or at any of the windows.
        A disaster had been narrowly averted.
        Roy, who prided himself on his generally even temper, could not remember being as angry with anyone in a long time as he was with Spencer Grant.
        He couldn't wait to get his hands on the guy.
        Spencer packed a canvas satchel with several cans of dog food, a box of biscuit treats, a new rawhide bone, Rocky's water and food bowls, and a rubber toy that looked convincingly like a cheeseburger in a sesame-seed bun.
        He stood the satchel beside his own suitcase, near the front door.
        The dog was still checking the windows from time to time, but not as obsessively as before. For the most part, he had overcome the nameless terror that propelled him out of his dream. Now his fear was of a more mundane and quieter variety: the anxiety that always possessed him when he sensed that they were about to do something out of their daily routine, a wariness of change. He padded after Spencer to see if any alarming actions were being taken, returned repeatedly to the suitcase to sniff it, and visited his favorite corners of the house to sigh over them as though he suspected that he might never have the chance to enjoy their comforts again.
        Spencer removed a laptop computer from a storage shelf above his desk and put it beside the satchel and suitcase. He'd purchased it in September, so he could develop his own programs while sitting on the porch, enjoying the fresh air and the soothing susurration of autumn breezes stirring the eucalyptus grove. Now it would keep him wired into the great American info network during his travels.
        He returned to his desk and switched on the larger computer. He made floppy-disk copies of some of the programs he had designed, including the one that could detect the faint electronic signature of an eavesdropper on a phone line being used for a computer-to-computer dialogue. Another would warn him if, while he was hacking, someone began hunting him down with sophisticated trace-back technology.
        Rocky was at a window again, alternately grumbling and whining sore at the night.
        At the west end of the San Fernando Valley, Roy drove into hills and across canyons. He was not yet beyond the web of interlocking cities, but there were pockets of primordial blackness between the clustered lights of the suburban blaze.
        This time, he would proceed with more caution than he had shown previously. If the address from the DMV proved to be the home of another family who, like the Zelinskys, had never heard of Spencer Grant, Roy preferred to find that out before he smashed down their door, terrorized them with guns, ruined the spaghetti sauce that was on the stove, and risked being shot by an irate homeowner who perhaps also happened to be a heavily armed fanatic of one kind or another.
        In this age of impending social chaos, breaking into a private home-whether behind the authority of a genuine badge or not-was a riskier business than it had once been. The residents might be anything from child-molesting worshipers of Satan to cohabiting serial killers with cannibalistic tendencies, refrigerators full of body parts, and eating utensils prettily hand-carved out of human bones. On the cusp of the millennium, some damned strange people were loose out there in fun-house America.
        Following a two-lane road into a dark hollow that was threaded with gossamer fog, Roy began to suspect he wouldn't be confronted with an ordinary suburban house or with the simple question of whether or not it was occupied by Spencer Grant. Something else awaited him.
        The blacktop became one lane of loose gravel, flanked by sickly palms that had not been trimmed in years and that sported long ruffs of dead fronds. At last it came to a gate in a chain-link fence.
        The phony pizza-shop truck was already there; its red taillights were refracted by the thin mist. Roy checked his