There’d been no sound coming out of her mouth, only the unnaturally silent, almost sibilant noises of her convulsing body, overpowered by the loud wood-on-wood sound of the headboard hitting the wall, but now there was a low humming coming from somewhere deep within her throat, a humming broken by vibrato as the sound escaped her wildly shaking head.

He let go, got off her, leaped from the bed. This had gone too far. It wasn’t slowing or abating, and it was obvious that his attempt to hold her still, to force her body to stop shaking, to will her convulsions to end, was not working at all.

He ran out of the bedroom, ran for the phone, picked it up from the alcove in the hall, dialing 911 at the same 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. Carole had stopped convulsing.

She was dead.

FOUR

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 for carjackings 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.