empty dark path. 'Please, Donald, we have to hurry.'
'What?' he asked.
More sirens, and the thunder, and the first spatter of rain.
'No more until we get you home.'
He balked, suddenly panicked. 'Home? Mom? Is it Mom? My father?'
'Until we get you there,' Quintero repeated. 'Be patient. I will help you.'
FIFTEEN
A patrol car was parked askew at the boulevard exit, and Don started for it at Quintero's gentle urging. Tracey was already gone, looking through the rear window of a departing cruiser, one palm pressed against the glass, her face obscured in glaring fragments by the streetlights sweeping over it. Then, as a patrolman opened the door and gestured him in, he looked up the avenue and saw two other police cars angled across the mouth of his street, lights spinning while three officers put up a sawhorse barricade.
'Mr. Quintero, what's going on?'
'Don, please,' Quintero said.
Don gaped, then looked in the opposite direction and saw the cars, the lights, a handful of people walking hurriedly toward his block. With a cry no one heard he yanked his arm free and started to run, heedless of the traffic as he bolted across to the islands, crashed through the shrubs and out the other side. A bus swerved barely in time to avoid him. Quintero shouted several yards behind.
At the mouth of the street he vaulted the barricade and ran a dozen feet before slowing and taking to the righthand pavement, walking stiff-legged, his arms flapping at his sides.
In the yards his neighbors were standing alone and in small groups, porch lights brightly white behind them and masking their faces; in the street was a fire engine angled in toward his driveway, and at the curb were two cruisers whose radios filled the air with abrupt bursts of static, whose lights bounced off the dead branches, flared off the windows, while an ambulance van backed onto the lawn.
He walked on, half-stumbled, until a policeman grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He protested and was released when Quintero barked an order; he breathed through his mouth as he stepped off the curb and stared at his house-at the ragged hole of the bay window, at the lamps on in every room with shadows on the walls, in the garage, at the roof bleached by spotlights on the sides of the cruisers.
'What?' he gasped to Quintero when the man reached his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. 'What?'
A siren. Firemen standing around the engine, smoking while they waited for the word to go home. Flashlights. Voices in raised-whisper instructions.
'What, Mr. Quintero?' he said, turning to Tracey's father with anguish in his eyes.
'It is all still very confused,' the man said, trying to watch Don and the house at the same time. 'Someone-Mr. Delfield, you know him, I think-saw smoke coming out of the house a little while ago. He called us, he called the fire department.'
White-jacketed men backed out the front door, stretcher in hand, on the stretcher a green plastic bag tied shut at the top.
'Oh, my god!' Don sobbed, and took a step to run.
'No!' Quintero snapped. 'Not your mother, Don.'
It was the voice, not the hand, that stopped him again; it was the voice, not the hand that told him who it was.
In his house. That bastard had been with his mother, in his house.
'H-how?'
Quintero scratched his thick mustache nervously. 'I don't know. Sergeant Verona is inside. I was for a while, and I saw no fire, nothing charred.
Just ...' He gestured toward the body being loaded into the van. As it pulled away and another took its place, he said, 'Do you know about Tar?'
Don nodded as his hope to believe this wasn't real failed.
'Like that.'
The window was smashed inward, and as he watched, a section of frame wobbled and broke free and tumbled to the ground.
A man in a tuxedo started up the front walk, and paused when he saw Don by the curb. He waved and hurried over, and Don felt his stomach begin to lurch. It was Dr. Naugle, and he was talking before he even reached them.
'... called me and I came right over. Donald, are you all right? Were you-' He looked to Quintero, who shook his head. Then he put a hand to Don's face and felt the cold, the sweat, felt the chest begin to heave.
'Bring him over here,' he told the policeman, and for the moment Don didn't argue-he let them walk him to the curb, where he was forced to sit down, forced to look over his shoulder at the wreckage of the house, at the station wagon still in the drive. 'I'll be right back, Don. Stay right here. Can you hear me, Don? You stay right here.'
Don thought he nodded; he wasn't sure.
'Mom?'
'She is not hurt,' Quintero assured him. 'I promise you, she is not hurt.'
'Then where ...'
'In her bedroom. The door ...' He looked around, searching for someone to tell him to stop, to tell him this boy had no right to know how his mother was found behind a barricaded door that had been almost bashed in.
'Dad,' Don said suddenly, straightening and looking around.
'He's not here.'
He stood and tried to pick out his father's face in the crowd growing on the lawns opposite the house. The voices were clearer now, subdued and excited, a post-game show to keep their spirits high. 'Where's my father?' he demanded. 'Why isn't he here?'
'Don,' Quintero said, seeing the look on his face. 'Don, do you know what happened here? Do you know who did this?'
'No!' he said, angry he should be asked, afraid he would be blamed. 'No, I was with Tracey since the game ended.'
A voice stopped him. He spun to his right and saw Norman skirting the fire engine, nearly tripping over a length of thick hose being wound into place. He ran, and they collided, and his father hugged him tightly, asking over his shoulder what was going on?
'Where were you?' Don asked into the man's neck. 'God, Dad, where were you?'
Norman thumped his back a couple of times and turned him away, keeping one hand around his shoulder. 'I was at the Starlite with the goddamn mayor. Your mother was supposed to-Sergeant Quintero, what's going on?
Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?'
The ambulance attendants reappeared at the door, Dr. Naugle beside them.
Joyce was on the stretcher, only her face visible above the sheet; Norman brushed the police aside as he ran for his wife.
Don started after him, then turned to Quintero. 'You said she was all right,' he accused through a spray of spittle.
'She is not hurt,' the man repeated.
'Then why ... ?'
The stretcher was wheeled to the ambulance's back doors, and Norman watched helplessly as they lifted her in. Then he said a word to Naugle and returned to his son.
'She was sitting on the floor,' Quintero said, and said it a second time when Norman drew near. 'Her eyes were open, but she was in shock. That is all I know, Mr. Boyd,' he said loudly when Norman started to question. 'But there is still the matter of the other man. I-'
'Why didn't you go with her?' Don asked his father. 'Dad, why didn't you go with her?'
Norman's eyes were red-rimmed and puffed, the neck of his sweater sagging where he'd pulled on it. He looked back at Naugle standing by the van, then stiffened and Don saw Sergeant Verona making his way down the
