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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 south-facing 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 once lived on the first and second floors with her husband, Eric, who had used the third floor—complete with its own bath and kitchen—as a home office. They were currently separated. Eric had moved out a year ago, and Susan had moved up, renting the lower two floors to a quiet retired couple whose only vice seemed to be two martinis each before dinner, and whose only pets were four parakeets.
    A steep exterior set of stairs led along the side of the house to the third story. As Martie climbed to the small covered landing, shrieking seagulls wheeled in from the Pacific and passed overhead, crossing the peninsula, flying toward the harbor, where they would ride out the storm in sheltered roosts.
    Martie knocked, but then unlocked the door without waiting for a