“Damn!”
Reacting to his master’s fear, no longer amused, Rocky huddled timidly in the corner formed by the passenger seat and the door. He made a thin, interrogatory sound of concern.
Though Spencer’s hands tingled from the rubber pellets that had stung them, they were no longer numb. Yet he fumbled after the keys for what seemed an age.
Maybe it was best to lie on the seats, out of sight, and keep Rocky below window level. Wait for the cops to come…and go. If they arrived just as he was pulling away from the curb, they would suspect he was the one who had been in Valerie’s house, and they would stop him one way or another.
On the other hand, he had stumbled into a major operation with a lot of manpower. They weren’t going to give up easily. While he was hiding in the truck, they might cordon off the area and initiate a house-to-house search. They would also inspect parked cars as best they could, peering in windows; he would be pinned by a flashlight beam, trapped in his own vehicle.
The engine started with a roar.
He popped the hand brake, shifted gears, and pulled away from the curb, switching on windshield wipers and headlights as he went. He had parked near the corner, so he hung a U-turn.
He glanced at the rearview mirror, the side mirror. No armed men in black uniforms.
A couple of cars sped through the intersection, heading south on the other avenue. Plumes of spray fanned behind them.
Without even pausing at the stop sign, Spencer turned right and entered the southbound flow of traffic, away from Valerie’s neighborhood. He resisted the urge to tramp the accelerator into the floorboards. He couldn’t risk being stopped for speeding.
“What the hell?” he asked shakily.
The dog replied with a soft whine.
“What’s she done, why’re they after her?”
Water trickled down his brow into his eyes. He was soaked. He shook his head, and a spray of cold water flew from his hair, spattering the dashboard, the upholstery, and the dog.
Rocky flinched.
Spencer turned up the heater.
He drove five blocks and made two changes of direction before he began to feel safe.
“Who is she? What the
Rocky had adopted his master’s change of mood. He no longer huddled in the corner. Having resumed his vigilant posture in the center of his seat, he was wary but not fearful. He divided his attention between the storm- drenched city ahead and Spencer, favoring the former with guarded anticipation and the latter with a cocked-head expression of puzzlement.
“Jesus, what was I doing there anyway?” Spencer wondered aloud.
Though bathed in hot air from the dashboard vents, he continued to shiver. Part of his chill had nothing to do with being rain-soaked, and no quantity of heat could dispel it.
“Didn’t belong there, shouldn’t have gone. Do
He reduced speed to negotiate a flooded intersection, where an armada of trash was adrift on the dirty water.
His face felt hot. He glanced at Rocky.
He had just lied to the dog.
Long ago he had sworn never to lie to himself. He kept that oath only somewhat more faithfully than the average drunkard kept his New Year’s Eve resolution never to allow demon rum to touch his lips again. In fact, he probably indulged in less self-delusion and self-deception than most people did, but he could not claim, with a straight face, that he invariably told himself the truth. Or even that he invariably wanted to hear it. What it came down to was that he
But he never lied to the dog.
Never.
Theirs was the only entirely honest relationship that Spencer had ever known; therefore, it was special to him. No. More than merely special. Sacred.
Rocky, with his hugely expressive eyes and guileless heart, with his body language and his soul-revealing tail, was incapable of deceit. If he’d been able to talk, he would have been perfectly ingenuous because he was a perfect innocent. Lying to the dog was worse than lying to a small child. Hell, he wouldn’t have felt as bad if he had lied to God, because God unquestionably expected less of him than did poor Rocky.
Never lie to the dog.
“Okay,” he said, braking for a red traffic light, “so I know why I went to her house. I know what I was looking for.”
Rocky regarded him with interest.
“You want me to say it, huh?”
The dog waited.
“That’s important to you, is it — for me to say it?”
The dog chuffed, licked his chops, cocked his head.
“All right. I went to her house because—”
The dog stared.
“—because she’s a very nice-looking woman.”
The rain drummed. The windshield wipers thumped.
“Okay, she’s pretty but she’s not gorgeous. It isn’t her looks. There’s just…something about her. She’s special.”
The idling engine rumbled.
Spencer sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll be straight this time. Right to the heart of it, huh? No more dancing around the edges. I went to her house because—”
Rocky stared.
“—because I wanted to find a life.”
The dog looked away from him, toward the street ahead, evidently satisfied with that final explanation.
Spencer thought about what he had revealed to himself by being honest with Rocky.
He didn’t know whether to laugh at himself or weep. In the end, he did neither. He just moved on, which was what he’d been doing for at least the past sixteen years.
The traffic light turned green.
With Rocky looking ahead, only ahead, Spencer drove home through the streaming night, through the loneliness of the vast city, under a strangely mottled sky that was as yellow as a rancid egg yolk, as gray as crematorium ashes, and fearfully black along one far horizon.
TWO
At nine o’clock, after the fiasco in Santa Monica, eastbound on the freeway, returning to his hotel in Westwood, Roy Miro noticed a Cadillac stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Serpents of red light from its emergency flashers wriggled across his rain-streaked windshield. The rear tire on the driver’s side was flat.
A woman sat behind the steering wheel, evidently waiting for help. She appeared to be the only person in the car.
The thought of a woman alone in such circumstances, in
