therefore more piercing.
Having lived in the country since the day I was born, I know that nature is one great killing ground, governed by the cruelest of all laws — the law of natural selection — and ruled by the ruthless. Many nights, I’ve heard the eerie, quavery yawling of coyote packs chasing prey and celebrating slaughter. The triumphant shriek of a mountain lion after it has torn the life out of a rabbit sometimes echoes out of the highlands, a sound which makes it easy to believe that Hell is real and that the damned have flung open the gates.
This cry that catches my attention as I lean out the window — and that silences the owl on the roof — comes not from a predator but from prey. It’s the voice of something weak, vulnerable. The forests and fields are filled with timid and meek creatures, which live only to perish violently, which do so every hour of every day without surcease, whose terror may actually be noticed by a god who knows of every sparrow’s fall but seems unmoved.
Suddenly the night is profoundly quiet, uncannily still, as if the distant bleat of fear was, in fact, the sound of creation’s engines grinding to a halt. The stars are hard points of light that have stopped twinkling, and the moon might well be painted on canvas. The landscape — trees, shrubs, summer flowers, fields, hills, and far mountains — appears to be nothing but crystalized shadows in various dark hues, as brittle as ice. The air must still be warm, but I am nonetheless frigid.
I quietly close the window, turn away from it, and move toward the bed again. I feel heavy- eyed, wearier than I’ve ever been.
But then I realize that I’m in a strange state of denial, that my weariness is less physical than psychological, that I desire sleep more than I really need it. Sleep is an escape. From fear. I’m shaking but not because I’m cold. The air is as warm as it was earlier. I’m shaking with fear.
Fear of what? I can’t quite identify the source of my anxiety.
I know that the thing I heard was no ordinary wild cry. It reverberates in my mind, an icy sound that recalls something I’ve heard once before, although I can’t remember what, when, where. The longer the forlorn wail echoes in my memory, the faster my heart beats.
I desperately want to lie down, forget the cry, the night, the owl and his question, but I know I can’t sleep.
I’m wearing only briefs, so I quickly pull on a pair of jeans. Now that I’m committed to act, denial and sleep have no attraction for me. In fact, I’m in the grip of an urgency at least as strange as the previous denial. Bare-chested and barefoot, I’m drawn out of my bedroom by intense curiosity, by the sense of post-midnight adventure that all boys share — and by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know.
Beyond my door, the house is cool, because my room is the only one not air-conditioned. For several summers, I’ve closed the vents against that chill flow because I prefer the benefits of fresh air even on a humid July night…and because, for some years, I’ve been unable to sleep with the hiss and hum that the icy air makes as it rushes through the ductwork and seethes through the vanes in the vent grille. I’ve long been afraid that this incessant if subtle noise will mask some other sound in the night that I must hear in order to survive. I have no idea what that other sound would be. It’s a groundless and childish fear, and I’m embarrassed by it. Yet it dictates my sleeping habits.
The upstairs hallway is silvered with moonlight, which streams through a pair of skylights. Here and there along both walls, the polished-pine floor glimmers softly. Down the middle of the hall is an intricately patterned Persian runner, in which the curved and curled and undulant shapes absorb the radiance of the full moon and glow dimly with it: Hundreds of pale, luminous coelenterate forms seem to be not immediately under my feet but well below me, as if I am not on a carpet but am walking Christlike on the surface of a tidepool while gazing down at the mysterious denizens at the bottom.
I pass my father’s room. The door is closed.
I reach the head of the stairs, where I hesitate.
The house is silent.
I descend the stairs, quaking, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, wondering at my inexplicable fear. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I am going down to a place from which I’ll never again quite be able to ascend….
With the dog as his confessor, Spencer spun his story all the way through that long-ago night, to the hidden door, to the secret place, to the beating heart of the nightmare. As he recounted the experience, step by barefoot step, his voice faded to a whisper.
When he finished, he was in a temporary state of grace that would burn away with the coming of the dawn, but it was even sweeter for being so tenuous and brief. Purged, he was at last able to close his eyes and know that dreamless sleep would come to him.
In the morning he would begin to search for the woman.
He had the uneasy feeling that he was walking into a living hell to rival the one that he had so often described to the patient dog. He could do nothing else. Only one acceptable road lay ahead of him, and he was compelled to follow it.
Now sleep.
Rain washed the world, and its susurration was the sound of absolution — though some stains could never be permanently removed.
In the morning, Spencer had a few tiny bruises and red marks on his face and hands, from the sting-grenade pellets. Compared with his scar, they would draw no comments.
For breakfast, he had English muffins and coffee at his desk in the living room while he hacked into the county tax collector’s computer. He discovered that the bungalow in Santa Monica, where Valerie had been living until the previous day, was owned by the Louis and Mae Lee Family Trust. Property tax bills were mailed in care of something called China Dream, in West Hollywood.
Out of curiosity, he requested a list of other properties — if any — owned by that trust. There were fourteen: five more homes in Santa Monica; a pair of eight-unit apartment buildings in Westwood; three single-family homes in Bel Air; and four adjacent commercial buildings in West Hollywood, including the address for China Dream.
Louis and Mae Lee had done all right for themselves.
After switching off the computer, Spencer stared at the blank screen and finished his coffee. It was bitter. He drank it anyway.
By ten o’clock, he and Rocky were heading south on the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic passed him at every opportunity, because he obeyed the speed limit.
The storm had moved east during the night, taking every cloud with it. The morning sun was white, and in its hard light, the westward-tilting shadows had edges as sharp as steel blades. The Pacific was bottle green and slate gray.
Spencer tuned the radio to an all-news station. He hoped to hear a story about the SWAT-team raid the night before and to learn who had been in charge of it and why Valerie was wanted.
The news reader informed him that taxes were going up again. The economy was slipping deeper into recession. The government was further restricting gun ownership and television violence. Robbery, rape, and homicide rates were at all-time highs. The Chinese were accusing us of possessing “orbiting laser death rays,” and we were accusing them of the same. Some people believed that the world would end in fire; others said ice; both were testifying before Congress on behalf of competing legislative agendas designed to save the world.
When he found himself listening to a story about a dog show that was being picketed by protesters who were demanding an end to selective breeding and to the “exploitation of animal beauty in an exhibitionistic performance no less repugnant than the degrading of young women in topless bars,” Spencer knew that there would be no report of the incident at the bungalow in Santa Monica. Surely a SWAT-team operation would rate higher on any reporter’s agenda than unseemly displays of canine comeliness.
Either the media had found nothing newsworthy in an assault on a private home by cops with machine guns
