hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it
felt like a natural extension of her hand.
The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma’s, which sometimes amazed
her. More amazing still: she worried that she was not well enough
armed for every eventuality.
New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to
purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of
spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need
against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove
to be too optimistic.
Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut
case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was
now sober realism.
She didn’t like to think about that. It depressed her.
When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to
the hall door. She didn’t need to turn on any lights. During the past
few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the
house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as
swiftly and silently as a cat.
On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm
system she’d had installed a week after the events at Arkadian’s
service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital
monitor strip informed her that all was secure.
It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior
door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her
hadn’t been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a
siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian
male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected
dwelling. Police have been called.
Leave at once.
Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved
along to Toby’s room. Every evening she made sure both his and her
doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her.
For a few seconds she stood by her son’s bed, listening to his soft
snoring.
The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient
light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the
Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn’t have been the
source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams.
Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to
the first floor.
In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window
to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street
looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small
Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on
the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house,
either.
Heather began to think the suspicious sound had been part of a
nightmare, after all.
She seldom slept well any more, but usually she remembered her
dreams.
They were more often than not about Arkadian’s service station, though
she’d driven by the place only once, on the day after the shootout.
The dreams were operatic spectacles of bullets and blood and fire, in
which Jack was sometimes burned alive, in which she and Toby were often
present during the gunplay, one or both of them shot down with Jack,
one or both of them afire, and sometimes the well-groomed blond man in
the Armani suit knelt beside her where she lay riddled with bullets,
put his mouth to her wounds, and drank her blood. The killer was
frequently blind, with hollow eye sockets full of roiling flames.
His smile revealed teeth as sharp as the fangs of a viper, and once he
said to her, I’m taking Toby down to hell with me–put the little
bastard on a leash and use him as a guide dog.
Considering that her remembered nightmares were so bad, how gruesome
must be the ones she blocked from memory?
By the time she had circled the living room, returned to the archway,
and crossed the hall to the dining room, she decided that her
imagination had gotten the better of her. There was no immediate