way as he seeks a threat.

Clutching the caretaker by the arm, Curtis urges him onward.

Towards the south end of town, two men are screaming. Now three or even four. How suddenly the horror struck, and how rapidly it escalates.

“Criminy! What’s that?” Gabby wonders, his voice quaking.

Curtis tugs at him, and the caretaker starts to move again, but then the screams are punctuated by the rattle and crack of automatic-weapons fire.

“The fools blastin’ at each other’?”

“Go, go, go,” Curtis demands, guided now by panic that overrides all sense of diplomacy, trying to muscle the old man into motion once more.

Men being torn apart, men being gutted, men being eaten alive would scream no more chillingly than this.

In skittles and lurches, the caretaker heads north again, Curtis at his side rather than behind him, the dog preceding them, as if, by some psychic perception, she knows where to find the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn.

With only half the town behind them, as they arrive at another passageway between buildings, a strange light flares to their right, out in the street, framed for their view by a tunnel of plank walls. Sapphire and scintillant, as brief as fireworks, it twice pulses, the way that a luminous jellyfish propels itself through the sea. Out of the subsequent gloom, while a negative image of the pyrotechnic burst still blossoms like a black flower in Curtis’s vision, a smoldering dark mass hurtles from the street into the passage, tumbling end-over-end toward them.

Spry but graceless in the manner of a marionette jerked backward on its control strings, all bony shoulders and sharp elbows and knobby knees, Gabby springs out of the way with surprising alacrity. Curtis jukes, and the dog bolts for cover.

With shot-out-of-a-cannon velocity, a stone-dead man caroms off the flanking buildings, extremities noisily flailing the palisades of the narrow passageway, as though he’s the apparition in a high-speed seance, rapping out a dire warning from the Other Side. He bursts into the open and explodes past Curtis. A lightning-struck scarecrow, spat out by a raging tornado, could not have been cast off with any greater force than this, and the carcass finally comes to rest in the tattered, bristling, yet boneless posture of a cast-down cornfield guardian. The steaming stink of him, however, is indescribably worse than a scarecrow’s wet straw, moldering clothes, and moth-infested flour- sack face.

On the victim’s sprung chest, scorched and wrinkled but still readable, a large white F and a large white I bracket the missing, blown-out B.

Ornery cuss or not, arthritic or not, the grizzled caretaker recognizes big trouble when he sees it, and he finds in himself the comparatively more youthful energy and nimbleness that his famous elder had shown in earlier films like Bells of Rosarita and The Arizona Kid. He sets out spang for the barn, as if challenging the dog to a race, and Curtis hurries after him, playing the sidekick’s sidekick.

Screams, anxious shouts, and gunfire echo among the buildings, and then comes an eerie sound — priong, priong, priong, priong — such as the stiff steel tines of a garden rake might produce if they could be plucked as easily as the strings of a fiddle.

One Curtis Hammond lies dead in Colorado, and another now runs headlong toward a grave of his own.

Chapter 31

Buttons gleamed, badges flashed, buckles shone on the khaki uniforms of the cops milling outside the front door of Cielo Vista Care Home.

Martin Vasquez, general manager of this facility, stood apart from the police, beside one of the columns that supported the loggia trellis. Called from bed at a bleak hour, he had nonetheless taken time, as an expression of respect, to dress in a dark suit.

In his forties, Vasquez had the smooth face and the guileless eyes of a pious young novitiate. As he watched Noah Farrel approach, he looked as though he would have gladly traded this night’s duty for vows of poverty and celibacy. “I’m so sorry, so sick about this. If you’ll come to my office, I’ll try to make sense of it for you, as much as can be made.”

Noah had been a cop for only three years, but he’d been present at four homicide scenes in that time. The expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these attending officers matched the look that he had once turned upon the grieving relatives in those cases. Sympathy formed part of it, but also a simmering suspicion that persisted even after a perpetrator was identified. In certain types of homicides, a family member is more likely to be involved than a stranger, and regardless of what the facts of the case appear to be, it’s always wise to consider who might gain financially or be freed of an onerous responsibility by the death in question.

Paying for Laura’s care had been not a burden, but the purpose of his existence. Even if these men believed him, however, he would till see the keen edge of suspicion sheathed in their sympathy.

One of the cops stepped forward as Noah followed Vasquez to the front door. “Mr. Farrel, I’ve got to ask you if you’re carrying.”

He had pulled on chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. The holster was in the small of his back. “Yeah, but I’ve got a permit for it.”

“Yes, sir, I know. If you’ll trust me with it, I’ll return it to you when you leave.”

Noah hesitated.

“You were in my shoes once, Mr. Farrel. If you think about it, you’ll realize you’d do the same.”

Noah wasn’t sure why he had strapped on the pistol. He didn’t always carry it. He didn’t usually carry it. When he’d left home, after Martin Vasquez’s call, he hadn’t been thinking clearly.

He surrendered the handgun to the young officer.

Although the lobby was deserted, Vasquez said, “We’ll have privacy in my office,” and indicated a short hallway off to the left.

Noah didn’t follow him.

Directly ahead, the door stood open between the lobby and the long main corridor of the ground-floor residential wing. At the far end, more men gathered outside of Laura’s room. None wore a uniform. Detectives. Specialists with the scientific-investigation division.

Returning to Noah’s side, Vasquez said, “They’ll let us know when you can see your sister.”

A morgue gurney waited near her room.

“Wendy Quail,” Noah guessed, referring to the perky raven-haired nurse who had been serving ice cream sundaes a few hours ago.

On the phone, he had been given only the essence of the tragedy. Laura dead. Gone quickly. No suffering.

Now, Martin Vasquez expressed surprise. “Who told you?”

So his instinct had been right. And he hadn’t trusted it. Ice cream wasn’t the answer, after all. Love was the answer. Tough love, in this case. One of the Circle of Friends had indulged in a little tough love, teaching Noah what happens to the sisters of men who think they’re too good to accept airsickness bags full of cash.

In his mind’s eye, Noah imagined himself squeezing the trigger and the congressman contorting in agony around a gut wound.

He could do it, too. He was without a purpose now. A man needed worthwhile work to occupy his time. In the absence of anything more meaningful, maybe revenge would suffice.

Receiving no answer to his question, Vasquez said, “Her resume was impressive. And her commitment to nursing. Several excellent letters of recommendation. She said she wanted to work in a less stressful atmosphere than a hospital.”

For seventeen years, since Laura was beaten out of this world but not all the way into the next, Noah had pretended that he wasn’t a Farrel, that he was an outsider in his criminal family, just as Laura had been an outsider, that he was cleaner of heart than those who had conceived him, capable of being redeemed. But with his sister twice lost and beyond recovery, he could see no reason to resist embracing his true dark nature.

“But caught,” said Vasquez, “she admitted everything. She’s been a nurse in neonatal-care units at three

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