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glory.”
    The only way to be sure that Skeet went off the roof precisely above the fall-break was to grab him at the right instant and hurl him to the ideal point along the brink. Which meant going down the roof and over the edge with him.
    The wind tossed and whipped Skeet’s long blond hair, which was the last attractive physical quality that he had left. Once, he’d been a good-looking boy, a girl magnet. Now his body was wasted; his face was gray and haggard; and his eyes were as burnt out as the bottom of a crack pipe. His thick, slightly curly, golden hair was so out of sync with the rest of his appearance that it seemed to be a wig.
    Except for his hair, Skeet stood motionless. In spite of being more stoned than a witch in Salem, he was alert and wary, deciding how best to break away from Dusty and execute a clean running dive headfirst into the cobblestones below.
    Hoping to distract the kid or at least to buy a little time, Dusty said, “Something I’ve always wondered…. What does the angel of death look like?”
    “Why?”
    “You saw him, right?”
    Frowning, Skeet said, “Yeah, well, he looked okay.”
    A hard gust of wind tore off Dusty’s white cap and spun it to Oz, but he didn’t take his attention off Skeet. “Did he look like Brad Pitt?”
    “Why would he look like Brad Pitt?” Skeet asked, and his eyes slid sideways and back to Dusty again, as he glanced surreptitiously toward the brink.
    “Brad Pitt played him in that movie,
Meet Joe Black.
”
    “Didn’t see it.”
    With growing desperation, Dusty said, “Did he look like Jack Benny?”
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “Jack Benny played him once in a really old movie. Remember? We watched it together.”
    “I don’t remember much. You’re the one with the photographic memory.”
    “Eidetic. Not photographic. Eidetic and audile memory.”
    “See? I can’t even remember what it’s called. You remember what you had for dinner five years ago. I don’t remember yesterday.”
    “It’s just a trick thing, eidetic memory. Useless, anyway.”
    The first fat drops of rain spattered across the top of the house.
    Dusty didn’t have to look down to see the dead lichen being transformed into a thin film of slime, because he could
smell
it, a subtle but singular musty odor, and he could smell the wet clay tiles, too.
    A daunting image flickered through his mind:
He and Skeet were sliding off the roof, then tumbling wildly, Skeet landing on the mattresses without sustaining a single cut or bruise, but Dusty overshooting and fracturing his spine on the cobblestones.
    “Billy Crystal,” Skeet said.
    “What—you mean Death? The angel of death looked like Billy Crystal?”
    “Something wrong with that?”
    “For God’s sake, Skeet, you can’t trust some wise-ass, maudlin, shtick-spouting Billy Crystal angel of death!”
    “I liked him,” Skeet said, and he ran for the edge.

5
    As though the great guns of battleships were providing cover fire for invading troops, hard hollow explosions echoed along the southfacing beaches. Enormous waves slammed onto the shore, and bullets of water, skimmed off the breakers by a growing wind, rattled inland through the low dunes and sparse stalks of grass.
    Martie Rhodes hurried along the Balboa Peninsula boardwalk, which was a wide concrete promenade with ocean-facing houses on one side and deep beaches on the other. She hoped the rain would hold off for half an hour.
    Susan Jagger’s narrow, three-story house was sandwiched between similar structures. The weather-silvered, cedar-shingle siding and the white shutters vaguely suggested a house on Cape Cod, although the pinched lot did not allow for a full expression of that style of architecture.
    The house, like its neighbors, had no front yard, no raised porch, only a shallow patio with a few potted plants. This one was paved with bricks and set behind a white picket fence. The gate in the fence was unlocked, and the hinges creaked.
    Susan had