The garage. There would be no electric power, because surely the circuit breakers had all been tripped when the truck rammed into the residence. But the big tilt-up garage door could be manually operated.

As Jane turned toward the connecting door where her telltale shard of glass was undisturbed, the maniacal driver tramped the accelerator all the way down and didn’t let up this time. The truck’s voice escalated until it sounded less like a machine and more like some denizen of a Jurassic swamp, expressing its mindless fury in a world where intelligence and reason counted for nothing, where the only guarantors of life were brute strength and ferocity. A reeking pale-blue cloud of exhaust fumes flooded out of the living room, into the kitchen. Under Jane’s feet, under the vinyl tiles, slabs of plywood began to shift and stress against one another like those tectonic plates in the earth that could crack open the faults in continents and shove mountain ranges from the bowels of the planet, creating towering alps where once there were flat plains.

She moved toward the door between kitchen and garage, and a more profound shudder passed through the house, a thunderous quaking, followed by tortured sounds of structure deconstructing. She thought the immense truck was about to plunge entirely into the basement, but instead the garage broke loose of the residence and collapsed. The connecting door burst inward, debris—including a large rafter—erupting toward Jane. She leaped sideways and jumped back, and the four-by-six came to a stop where she had been standing, gouging a wide ribbon of vinyl skin off the subflooring. The door to the garage was blocked now by lumber and sharp-edged sheets of corrugated-metal roofing and masses of pink fiberglass insulation acrawl with highly agitated silverfish.

The house tweaked again. Windows shattered. The valve stem in the ancient sink faucet must have failed; the handle and spindle and packing nut and faucet guts blew loose, and a high-pressure stream of water shot into the air. The truck screamed. The air thickened with fumes. Frosted-plastic panels buckled and cracked and fell out of the ceiling light box, the floor sagged, and the back door rattled violently in its frame.

If it’s still wedged tight, it wouldn’t rattle. Rattling means loose.

She stepped across the intruding garage rafter and yanked on the door, yanked again, and it opened. Rushing onto the back porch, down the steps, onto the pea gravel, she exhaled the bitter exhaust fumes and sucked in fresh air and heard herself saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Wheeling along the weedy ruts that served as the driveway, the Chevy Suburban approached from the barn.

As Jane hurried to the vehicle, a black helicopter clattered past at an altitude of no more than two hundred feet. She looked up, visoring her eyes with one hand, and watched it turn east and then circle west.

Luther braked to a stop.

Jane opened the passenger door but didn’t get aboard. She stood watching the helo as it executed a 180.

An Airbus H120. Manufactured in Canada. Seating for the pilot and four passengers. Used by various agencies of the United States government.

The Airbus was coming back for another look.

“Luther, get out of the car,” she said urgently.

“What’s happening?”

“Get out, hurry! Just Luther. Not you, Cornell, not Travis.”

Inside the house, the garbage truck shrieked, and the building continued to come apart.

The helicopter had almost executed its turn. It was perhaps a quarter mile directly south of their position.

Luther opened his door and got out of the Suburban and regarded Jane across the roof. “What’re we doing?”

The helicopter had completed its turn. Heading for them now.

“Wave,” she said.

Luther looked toward the approaching aircraft.

“Wave at them. Remember the white FBI on our roof. We aren’t leaving here. Just arrived. We have this covered, checking it out.”

2

BERNIE ROUNDED THE END OF THE POOL, which blazed with reflected sunshine. The bobbling lounge chairs looked as if they were being smelted down so that their aluminum could be recycled.

In spite of the fact that the monkey-quick maniac was smaller than his victim, he had dragged Holden Hammersmith down. He now straddled his prey’s chest like the conjured demon out of that fearsome painting The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, which had haunted Miriam after they had seen it in a museum. Hammersmith couldn’t seem to throw the guy off. The attacker endured the bigger man’s blows as if he no longer had the capacity to feel pain, and he struck blows of his own. Like a vulture pecking at carrion, he darted his head between the flying fists to bite Holden’s face.

The boy, Sammy, hovered close, shouting, in great distress, but he’d suffered bites on a hand and forearm, and he was too terrified to throw himself on the assailant and try to drag him off.

Bernie realized at once that this wasn’t a cease-and-desist stop-or-I’ll-shoot situation, like he hoped it might be. Whether the crazed man might be one of the misfortunates who had been injected with a nanomachine brain implant or was something else altogether, he was for sure a meshugener—insane, obsessed, bizarre. He wasn’t going to respond to either reason or threat.

Back in the day when Bernie pretended to be a hard-boiled hard-ass to prevent the mob pigs from taking a slice of his business, he had never needed to shoot anyone, baruch ha-Shem. He didn’t want to shoot anyone now. But he couldn’t stand by and watch Hammersmith be murdered.

When Sammy dared to grab at the would-be killer, Bernie said, “No, stay back,” and he quickly acted in the boy’s stead. He could not hope to inflict just an arm or leg wound, because he was likely to shoot the struggling victim as well as the attacker. With his left hand, he seized a fistful of the crazed person’s thick dark hair. Twisted. Pulled hard. Forced the madman’s head up, back, away from Hammersmith. “Enough already, enough.” Entreaty proved useless. The demon glared, its twisted mouth wet with blood, its blue eyes as empty of humanity as the eyes of those who long ago operated gas chambers in which millions died and furnaces in which others were burned alive. The thing snapped at him, teeth like chisels. Bernie jammed the muzzle of the Springfield TRP-Pro against the side of its head—“Sholem aleichem, peace unto you”—and with horror but without remorse, he squeezed the trigger. The hollow-point .45 round went clear through the head and struck the thick bole of a palm tree, from which it tore a chunk the size of a fist.

3

HAVING DESCENDED to about a hundred feet, the helicopter approached for a second look. Both front seats were occupied behind the cockpit glass.

“Walk with me, Luther. We’re checking the place out, doing our job, just two Bureau grunts.”

“We’re not dressed FBI, especially me.”

As they hurried toward the house, Jane said, “Yeah, but they know this shit going down today isn’t a legit Bureau operation. It’s an occasion to dress street.”

Inside the house, the truck still screamed like some behemoth floundering in quicksand and raging at its inevitable descent.

As the helo passed over, its fleet shadow shading them for an instant, the back porch collapsed. Sheets of metal roofing sprang loose and were caught in the chopper’s downblast, twanging as they flexed like the great wings of a flock borne out of a dream about bodiless robot birds.

Still the truck engine raced.

Arriving at the front of the house, as the helo arced back to follow them, Jane and Luther surveyed the scene as if they were first responders. She drew her pistol so this might look real. Luther did the same. Together they stepped tentatively into the ruins of the porch, which was still overhung by a damaged roof.

When the front wheels had broken through the living room floorboards, the joists blocked the axle, at least temporarily stopping the truck from diving into the basement. But the vehicle had tipped forward, and the rear wheels, which remained this side of the breech in the wall, had lifted off the rubble; they spun without effect.

Luther raised his voice over the engine roar and the clatter of the hovering Airbus. “What if they put down?”

“They’re not backup,” Jane said. “Just chopper jockeys, search and surveillance.”

They had flown over the house twice, so they must have seen something of the truck through the hole where part of the main roof had fallen in on it. However, because a couple of strategic posts still supported the torn and sagging front-porch roof, the men in the helo were not at an angle to be able to see the rear wheels spinning uselessly. The noise made by the Airbus would, for those aboard it, mask the noise of the truck, and they might also be wearing headphones. If Jane and Luther acted as though whatever crazy thing had happened here was over except for the cleanup, the helo boys would have every reason to believe it.

“Better get out there,” Luther said, “before they decide to call backup for us.”

“Let them see you put away the gun.”