Frost reached for his gun and spun around, but the back of his skull erupted into a fire of pain. His eyes burst with light and went black, and he sank to his knees and then pitched into the mud. Through the roaring in his ears, he heard shouting and pounding steps, but the noise went wildly up and down. He tried to stand. Dizziness screwed through his head like a spike, and he collapsed again. When he opened his eyes, the world was upside down.

Somewhere, far away, he heard another gunshot.

He crawled toward the slope. Mud and leaves covered his face, and lights exploded behind his eyes like pinpoint fireworks. His fingernails scraped at the bark of a redwood tree, and he used the tree trunk to pull himself to a standing position. He leaned against it, feeling the world spin as it righted itself. He could hear the two men on the hillside below him. They were getting away.

Frost pushed off from the tree and took a step down. His brain felt sucked up into the cyclone. He opened his mouth to say something, but he couldn’t say anything at all. Rain trickled down his back, but it wasn’t rain. He tasted metallic wetness on his fingers, and it was blood.

He felt himself falling sideways, with no way to stop it; he fell, hit the slope, and rolled. His body slid, spun, slammed against tree roots, and the hill carried him shoulder over shoulder to the dirt of the next trail fifty feet below him.

He landed hard, and he passed out.

Lucy sat by the window with a mug of tea. She leaned her head against the cold glass and watched the rain sweep through the street. A MUNI bus plowed down Haight like a ship slicing through ocean waves. Three teenage girls splashed through puddles on the sidewalk. Lights had come on in the other apartment buildings, and she could see people inside.

She felt anxious, as if she’d walked into a room and couldn’t remember why she’d come here. She had something important to do, but she had no idea what it was. She’d felt that way all day, and the rain didn’t help.

She was depressed about Frost rejecting her. He would have been the perfect man for a rainy night like this. He was funny and serious, mature and playful, handsome and boy next door. That was exactly what she’d always wanted and what she’d thought she would never find. She’d let herself hope there might be something between them, so it hurt to find out that he was looking for a sister, not a girlfriend. She still wanted him. It was easy to imagine him kissing her and making love to her, even if it was never going to happen.

Where was her life going? Nowhere.