He heard doors opening, officers shouting.
It was over.
Luther was dead. Almost one year since Tommy Fernandez had been shot
down beside him. Tommy, then Luther. Two good partners, good friends,
in one year.
But it was over.
Voices. Sirens. A crash that might have been the portico collapsing
over the service-station pumps.
Sounds were increasingly muffled, as if someone was steadily packing
his ears full of cotton. His hearing was fading in much the same way
that his vision had gone.
Other senses too. He repeatedly pursed his dry mouth, trying
unsuccessfully to work up some saliva and get a taste of something,
even the acrid fumes of gasoline and burning tar. He couldn’t smell
anything, either, although a moment ago the air had been ripe with foul
odors.
Couldn’t feel the pavement under him. Or the blustery wind. No pain
any more.
Not even a tingle. Just cold. Deep, penetrating cold.
Utter deafness overcame him.
Holding desperately to the spark of life in a body that had become an
insensate receptacle for his mind, he wondered if he would ever see
Heather and Toby again. When he tried to summon their faces from
memory, he could not recall what they looked like, his wife and son,
two people he loved more than life itself, couldn’t remember their eyes
or the color of their hair, which scared him, terrified him. He knew
he was shaking with grief, as if they had died, but he couldn’t feel
the shakes, knew he was crying but couldn’t feel the tears, strained
harder to bring their precious faces to mind, Toby and Heather, Heather
and Toby, but his imagination was as blind as his eyes. His interior
world wasn’t a bottomless pit of darkness but a blank wintry whiteness,
like a vision of driving snow, a blizzard, frigid, glacial, arctic,
unrelenting.
CHAPTER THREE.
Lightning flashed, followed by a crash of thunder so powerful it
rattled the kitchen windows. The storm began not with a sprinkle or
drizzle but with a sudden downpour, as if clouds were hollow structures
that could shatter like eggshells and spill their entire contents at
once.
Heather was standing at the counter beside the refrigerator, scooping
orange sherbet out of a carton into a bowl, and she turned to look at
the window above the sink. Rain was falling so hard it almost appeared
to be snow, a white deluge. The branches of the ficus benjamina in the
backyard drooped under the weight of that vertical river, their longest
trailers touching the ground.
She was relieved she wouldn’t be on the freeways later in the day,
commuting home from work. Due to a lack of regular experience,
Californians weren’t good at driving in rain, they either slowed to a
crawl and took such extreme precautions that they halted traffic, or
they proceeded in their usual gonzo fashion and careened into one
another with a recklessness approaching enthusiasm. Later, a lot of
people would find their usual hour-long evening commute stretching into
a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal.
There was, after all, a bright side to being unemployed. She just
hadn’t been looking hard enough for it. No doubt, if she put her mind
to it, she’d think of a long list of other benefits. Like not having
to buy any new clothes for work. Look how much she had saved right
there. Didn’t have to worry about the stability of the bank in which
they had their savings account, either, because at the rate they were
going, they wouldn’t have a savings account in a few months, not on
just Jack’s salary, since the city’s latest financial crisis had
required him to take a pay cut. Taxes had gone up again too, both
state and federal, so she was saving all the money that the government
would have taken and squandered in her name if she’d been on someone’s
payroll. Gosh, when you really thought about it, being laid off after
ten years at IBM wasn’t a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual
festival of life-enhancing change.
“Give it a rest, Heather,” she warned herself, closing up the carton of
sherbet and returning it to the freezer.
Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by