time he tried to lift the receiver to his head. He told the robotically calm woman at the other end of the line who he was, where he was, and what was happening, and though the entire conversation probably took no more than one minute, it felt like fifteen. The woman promised to immediately dispatch paramedics and an ambulance, and he dropped the phone without bothering to hang up and ran back down the hallway to the bedroom.
By the time he returned, the attack was all over. Car ole had stopped convulsing.
She was dead.
Stormy Stormy Salinger drove back from Taos along the series of interconnected roads that led through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The highway was faster, but he preferred the back way, and he hauled ass on the stretches between villages to make up the time.
Through the windshield, the huge sky was light blue, the ever-present white clouds retreating to infinity like a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.
He loved this drive. The meadows, the streams, the trees, the ranches. This was why he had moved here, why he had left Los Angeles. He shut off the air conditioning, rolled down the car window, felt the wind in his face, smelled pine and hay, dust and water.
In L.A., he'd been afraid to roll down his windows as he drove. Not just because of the potential forcarjackings and robberies, not just because he'd be hit up for money by the homeless vets who staked out intersections and on-ramps, but because the air itself was poisonous.
The dirtiest air in the country, year in and year out.
Hell, even on days that had what southern California's TV weathermen called 'good air quality,' it was still rare to see the San Gabriel Mountains until you were almost on top of them.
That was not a way to live.
He'd grown tired of Los Angeles: the place, the people, the lifestyle. He'd grown tired of his friends as well, their smugness, their self-absorption, their condescending attitude toward anyone outside their clique, the mandatory elitism that afflicted what passed for their culture.
He'd fallen in with a group of film snobs--hip writers for entertainment publications, young academics from prestigious film schools, wannabe indie figures--people with little in common save their interest in cinema. As a successful video distributor, a lifelong movie fan who had made millions working on the fringes of filmdom, he himself was an inspiration to his friends, proof that the wall could be breached, yet he knew that while they pretended to be supportive of him and had no qualms about taking advantage of his generosity, they were, at the same time, jealous, and when a serious discussion of film came about--as it often did--his opinions were treated with slightly less respect, just to let him know that he was not really in their intellectual league.
That had always irritated the hell out of him.
He was the only member of the group who exhibited even the least bit of independence, who did not automatically fall in with the prevailing opinion and conform to preexisting tastes with lockstep homogeneity. They were nobodies, really, but they always acted as though they were society's arbiters of filmic quality, and it was a given that any film of which they approved was a work of art. They'd sit around and summarily dismiss contemporary comedies, yet rhapsodize about a Laurel and Hardy pie fight. It wasn't that the pie fight was intrinsically better than, say, the slapstick antics in a Jim Carrey movie, it was just that they considered it 'classic,' and that was automatically supposed to elevate its level of quality.
He'd grown increasingly tired of this intellectual incestuousness over the years, weary of the monotonic interests and attitudes. It was partly his fault. They were his friends and he had chosen them. He'd made his bed and had to lie in it.
So he'd simply pulled up stakes one day, sold off his Brentwood estate, and relocated to Santa Fe.
Now he conducted his business from here.
Stormy sped through Truchas, the small village where Robert Redford had filmed The Milagro Beanfield War.
He'd first visited New Mexico as a teenager, on a trip with his family, and he had never forgotten the place.
They'd done the tourist loop--White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Santa Fe, Taos Pueblo--and it had made a big impression on him. He was a city kid, born and bred in Chicago, and the dry heat, the open space, and the spectacular sky had all spoken to him in a way that nothing else had. He'd realized even then that this was where he wanted to live when he grew up, where he wanted to spend his life.
But the movie and video business was centered in southern California, and by the time he'd made enough money to move here, he'd gotten sucked into that L.A.
lifestyle, and it was not until several years later that he finally made the break.
It was a decision he'd never regretted.
He passed through Chimayo and could not help glancing down the small one-lane road that led to El Santuario .
The small adobe church had always creeped him out. All those crutches and braces hanging in the small dark room with the miracle dirt. Legend had it that the church was built on dirt that had healing powers, and each year, hordes of believers flocked to the spot to have their diseases and deformities cured, the ones who claimed to find relief from infirmity leaving their walking aides behind. He wasn't a religious man himself, he neither believed nor disbelieved, but there seemed something paganistic and primitive, something pre-Christian about this sort of Christianity. Maybe he'd just been watching too many of the movies he distributed, but the whole thing made him uneasy.
Ten minutes later, he hit the highway and was speeding toward downtown Santa Fe.
He arrived back at his office before three.
'How'd it go?' Joan asked as he walked through the door.
'Who knows? That bastard's impossible to read.' He sat down in the oversized chair behind his desk, opened the jar of candy next to his computer, and popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth. He'd been in Taos talking to the organizer of the film festival, trying to get one of his properties shown in competition this year. He had what he thought was a legitimate find, a retelling of Macbeth on an Indian reservation, made by an untrained twenty- five-year-old Hopi kid who'd financed the film by working as a park ranger at Betatakin and saving his money over several summers.
It was one of those success stories that the entertainment media seemed to love so much these days, and he knew he could get a lot of hype out of it. The movie was part of a package deal he'd made with Four Corners, a local distributor that'd gone belly-up, and while most of the titles were routine action flicks, this was an honest to- God film, and for the first time in his life, Stormy saw the opportunity to present to the viewing public a legitimate work by an undiscovered talent.
Maybe he'd try to take it to Sundance.
That would certainly up his cache in the business.
And, besides, the kid deserved it.
He tried to imagine the reaction of his old L.A. friends when they discovered that he was distributing a film that had been shown in competition at Sundance, and the pictures in his mind made him smile.
'You want me to call back tomorrow?' Joan asked.
'Apply a little pressure?'
Stormy nodded. 'Tell him to make sure he watches the tape. And tell him he has forty-eight hours. Sun dance is interested.'
Her eyes widened. 'Really?'
Stormy grinned. 'No.' He paused dramatically. 'At least not yet.'
'We have a winner here, don't we?'
'I think we do,' he said.
He worked late sorting through contracts. Joan had already left, so Stormy closed up the office and locked up. Roberta would be at her class by the time he got home, so on the way back, he pulled into the drive-thru lane at Burger King and ordered a Whopper, fries, and a chocolate shake. Roberta was constantly harping on him about his dietary habits, claiming that a person who ate the way he did didn't deserve to be wealthy, as though it were his moral obligation to eat gourmet meals all the time, but he failed to see how the fact that his taste in food was different from hers made him a deserving candidate for poverty. Like most overweight people, she put far too much
