Dark Rivers of the Heart

every sun-filled day and the chill wind of every raging storm, weeds as much as flowers, the bitter and the sweet. She had never been a fraction as aware of her love of freedom — her need for freedom — as when she had been forced to fight to keep it. And in those fourteen months, she had been amazed to learn that she had the guts to walk precipices, leap chasms, and grin in the devil’s face; amazed to discover that she was not capable of losing hope; amazed to find that she was but one of many fugitives from an imploding world, all of them perpetually on the rim of a black hole and resisting its God-crushing gravity; amazed by how much fear she could tolerate and still thrive.

One day, of course, she would amaze herself straight into a sudden death. Maybe today. Leaning against the frame of the open door in the fuselage. Finished by a bullet or by a long, hard fall.

They traversed the building and moved over the fifty-foot-wide service alley. The other helicopter was down there, parked behind Hallmark. No gunmen were in the immediate vicinity of the craft. Evidently, they had already bailed out and had moved in on the back of the supermarket, under the twenty-foot overhang.

With Spencer giving orders to their own pilot, they hovered in position long enough for Ellie to use the Micro Uzi on the tail assembly of the craft on the ground. The weapon had two magazines, welded at right angles to each other, with a capacity of forty rounds — minus the few that Spencer had fired into the supermarket ceiling. She emptied both magazines, slapped in spares, emptied those too. The bullets destroyed the horizontal stabilizer, damaged the tail rotor, and punched holes in the tail pylon, disabling the aircraft.

If her assault was answered by any return fire, she was unaware of it. The gunmen who had moved off to cover the back of the market were probably too surprised and confused to be sure what to do.

Besides, the entire attack on the grounded chopper had taken only twenty seconds. Then she put the Uzi on the cabin deck and slid the door shut. The pilot, at Spencer’s direction, immediately took them due north at high speed.

Rocky was crouched between two of the passenger seats, watching her intently. He was not as exuberant as he had been since they’d fled their camp in Nevada shortly after dawn. He had slipped into his more familiar suit of fretfulness and timidity.

“It’s okay, pooch.”

His disbelief was unconcealed.

“Well, it sure could be worse,” she said.

He whimpered.

“Poor baby.”

With both ears drooping, racked by shivers, Rocky was the essence of misery.

“How can I say anything that’ll make you feel better,” she asked the dog, “if I’m not allowed to lie to you.”

From the nearby cockpit door, Spencer said, “That’s a pretty grim assessment of our situation, considering we just slipped loose of a damned tight knot.”

“We’re not out of this mess yet.”

“Well, there’s something I tell Mr. Rocky Dog now and then, when he’s down in the dumps. It’s something that helps me a little, though I can’t say whether it works for him.”

“What?” Ellie asked.

“You’ve got to remember, whatever happens — it’s only life, we all get through it.”

THIRTEEN

Monday morning, after his bail had been posted, crossing the parking lot to his brother’s BMW, Harris Descoteaux stopped twice to turn his face to the sun. He basked in its warmth. He had once read that black people, even those as midnight-dark as he was, could get skin cancer from too much sun. Being black was no absolute guarantee against melanoma. Being black, of course, was no guarantee against any misfortune, quite the opposite, so melanoma would have to wait in line with all the other horrors that might befall him. After spending fifty-eight hours in jail, where direct sunlight was more difficult to get than a hit of heroin, he felt as if he wanted to stand in the sun until his skin blistered, until his bones melted, until he became one giant pulsing melanoma. Anything was better than being locked away in a sunless prison. He inhaled deeply, too, because the smog-tainted air of Los Angeles smelled so sweet. Like the juice of an exotic fruit. The scent of freedom. He wanted to stretch, run, leap, twirl, whoop, and holler — but there were some things that a man of forty-four simply did not do, regardless of how giddy with freedom he might be.

In the car, as Darius started the engine, Harris put a hand on his arm, staying him for a moment. “Darius, I’ll never forget this — what you’ve done for me, what you’re still doing.”

“Hey, it’s nothing.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“Well, you’d have done the same for me.”

“I think I would’ve. I hope I would’ve.”

“There you go again, working on sainthood, putting on those robes of modesty. Man, whatever I know about doing the right thing, I learned from you. So what I did here, it’s what you would do.”

Harris grinned and lightly punched Darius on the shoulder. “I love you, little brother.”

“Love you, big brother.”

Darius lived in Westwood, and from downtown, the drive could take as little as thirty minutes on a Monday morning, after the rush hour, or more than twice that long. It was always a crapshoot. They had a choice between using Wilshire Boulevard, all the way across the city, or the Santa Monica Freeway. Darius chose Wilshire, because some days the rush hour never ended and the freeway became Hell with talk radio.

For a while, Harris was all right, enjoying his freedom if not the thought of the legal nightmare that lay ahead; however, as they were approaching Fairfax Boulevard, he began to feel ill. The first symptom was a mild but disturbing dizziness, a strange conviction that the city was ever so slowly revolving around them even as they drove through it. The sensation came and went, but each time that it gripped him, he suffered a spell of tachycardia more frantic than the one before it. When his heart fluttered through more beats in a half-minute seizure than the heart of a frightened hummingbird, he was overcome by the peculiar worry that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. When he tried to breathe deeply, he found he could barely breathe at all.

At first he thought that the air in the car was stale. Stuffy, too warm. He didn’t want to reveal his distress to his brother — who was on the car phone, taking care of business — so he casually fiddled with the vent controls, until he got a draft of cool air directed at his face. Ventilation didn’t help. The air wasn’t stuffy but thick, like the heavy vapors of something odorless but toxic.

He endured the city revolving around the BMW, his heart bursting into fits of tachycardia, the air so syrup- thick that he could inhale only an inadequate drizzle, the oppressive intensity of light that forced him to squint against the sunshine that he had so recently enjoyed, the feeling that a crushing weight was hovering over him — but then he was enveloped by nausea so intense that he cried out for his brother to pull to the curb. They were crossing Robertson Boulevard. Darius engaged the emergency flashers, swung out of traffic just past the intersection, and stopped in a no-parking zone.

Harris flung open his door, leaned out, regurgitated violently. He had eaten none of the jailhouse breakfast that he’d been offered, so he was racked only by the dry heaves, although they were no less distressing or less exhausting because of that.

The siege passed. He slumped back in his seat, pulled the door shut, and closed his eyes. Shaking.

“Are you all right?” Darius asked worriedly. “Harris? Harris, what’s wrong?”

With the spell past, Harris knew he’d been stricken by nothing more — and nothing less — than an attack of prison claustrophobia. It had been infinitely worse, however, than any panic attacks that had plagued him when he had actually been behind bars.

“Harris? Talk to me.”

“I’m in prison, little brother.”

“We’re standing together on this, remember. Together, we’re stronger than anybody, always were and always will be.”