Strangers

went through the material with the unstoppable power of a locomotive. The impact was tremendous, sending a devastating shock across his shoulder and through his chest, but something gave way with a crack and a screech and a crash of glass, and he was through into daylight, vaguely aware that the doors had been French rather than sliding panels and that he had been lucky the lock was flimsy.
        He found himself on a second-floor balcony with a pair of redwood lounge chairs and a glass-topped table, over which he fell. Even as he was going down on top of chairs, banging knees and barking shins, he was already coming up again, up and over the balcony rail, leaping out into space, praying he would not land in a particularly woody shrub and be castrated by a sharp, sturdy branch. He fell only twelve feet onto bare lawn, jarring his other shoulder and his back but breaking no bones. He rolled, scrambled to his feet, and ran.
        Suddenly, in front of his eyes, foliage snapped-fluttered-shredded, and he didn't know what was happening, and then as he continued to run, pieces of bark exploded off a tree, and he realized they were shooting at him. He heard no gunfire. Silencer-equipped weapons. He zigzagged toward the perimeter of the property, fell in an azalea bed, scrambled up, ran on, reached a hedge, threw himself over it, and kept on running.
        They had been ready to kill him to stop him from spreading the news of what he had seen in the Salcoe house. Right now, they were probably hastily moving - or killing - the Salcoes. If he found a phone and called the police, and if the killers were agents of the U S. government, whose side would the police be on? And who would they believe? One eccentric and rather curiously dressed artist with a woolly beard and flyaway hair? Or three neatly attired FBI men claiming they were in the Salcoe house on a legitimate stakeout of some kind, and that Parker Faine was, in fact, the felon they had attempted to arrest. If they demanded custody of him, would the police cooperate?
        Jesus.
        He ran. Abandoning the Tempo, he sprinted down the sloped wall of a shallow glen, along the rocky course of a narrow brook, between trees, through underbrush, up another wall of the same glen, into someone's back yard, across that lawn and into another yard, alongside a house, out into a street, from that street to another. He slowed to a fast walk to avoid drawing attention to himself, but he continued to follow a twisty route away from the Salcoe house.
        He knew what he had to do. The horror he had just seen had made the extremity of Dom's plight clearer than ever. Parker had known his friend was in danger, deep in a conspiracy of monumental proportions, but knowing it in his mind was not the same as knowing it in his guts. There was nothing for him to do but go to Elko County. Dom Corvaisis was his friend, perhaps his best friend, and this was what friends did for each other: shared their trouble, fought back the darkness together. He could walk away, go back to Laguna Beach to continue work on the painting that he had begun yesterday. But if he chose that course, he would never like himself very much again - which would be an intolerable circumstance, for he had always liked himself immensely!
        He had to find a ride back to the Monterey Airport, catch a flight to San Francisco International, and head east from there toward Nevada. He was not concerned that the men in the Salcoes' house would be looking for him at the airport. The only words any of them had spoken in his presence were: "And who the fuck are you?" If they did not know who he was, they would most likely figure he was a local. The keys to the Tempo had a rental-company tag on them, but they were in his pocket. In an hour or two, of course, the bad guys would trace the car to the airport, but by then he should have taken off for San Francisco.
        He kept walking. On a quiet residential street he saw a young man, about nineteen or twenty, in the driveway of a more modest house than the Salcoes', carefully scrubbing the whitewalls on the tires of a meticulously restored, banana yellow, 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of those long jobs with a plenitude of grille and big sharky fins. The kid had a slicked-back ducktail haircut to match the era of his vehicle. Parker went up to him and said, "Listen, my car broke down, and I've got to get to the airport. I'm in a big hurry, so would you drive me