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and siren, exiting the freeway on the same cloverleaf—alerted but no longer an immediate threat. Kubion had had his gun out and hidden beneath the bottom folds of his coat, but now he slid it back into the pocket. He lit a cigarette and made sucking sounds on the filter, pulling smoke into his lungs.
    Brodie accelerated to pass a slow-moving truck. “So far so good,” he said, to break the tense silence.
    “We’re not out of it yet,” Kubion said thinly.
    “Don’t I know it?”
    “Hold your speed down, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Take it easy, Earl. You don’t have to tell me how to drive.”
    From the back seat Loxner said, “You got anything in the glove box for this arm? It hurts like hell, and it’s still bleeding.”
    “No,” Kubion said.
    “The bullet went clean through, but Jesus, it hurts.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I never been shot before,” Loxner said defensively. “That’s why I maybe froze up a little back there. You get shot like that, for the first time, it shakes the crap out of you.”
    “Yeah, yeah, shut up about it.”
    “Fucking security cop, fucking cop,” Loxner said, and lapsed into silence.
    Brodie held the speedometer needle on sixty. “A hundred grand, maybe more, shot straight up the ass. And we’re out better than ten on top of it. Now what the hell do we do for a stake?”
    “We’ll make a score somewhere,” Kubion said.
    “Sure—but where?”
    “You leave that to me. I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something, all right.”

Four
     
    The light began to go out of the somber afternoon sky at four o’clock, dimming rapidly behind a thick curtain of snow, turning the pines and fir trees into wraithlike silhouettes on the steep slopes of Hidden Valley. Distorted by the snowfall, the brightening village lights—the multihued Christmas bulbs strung across Sierra Street—were hazy aureoles that seemed somehow to lack warmth and comfort in the encroaching darkness. And the thin, sharp wind sang lonely and bitter, like something lost in the wilderness and resigned to its fate.
    That’s me, Rebecca Hughes thought as she sat listening to the wind in the big, empty Lassen Drive house: something lonely and bitter and lost and resigned. A dull candle sitting in the window, waiting for the return of the prodigal. Alas, poor Rebecca, I knew her well. . . .
    She reached out in the darkness and located her cigarettes on the coffee table. In the flame of her lighter, the six-foot Christmas tree across the living room looked bleak and forlorn —colored ornaments gleaming blackly, silver tinsel like opalescent worms hanging from the dark branches: a symbol of joy that was completely joyless in the shadowed room. The furnishings, too, seemed strange and unused, as if they were parts of a museum exhibit; she had picked out the decor herself when she and Matt were married seven years before—Pennsylvania Dutch with copper accessories—and she had loved it then, it represented home and happiness then. Now it was meaningless, like the tree, perhaps even like life itself.
    Turning slightly to light her cigarette, Rebecca saw her reflection in the hoar-frosted window behind the couch. She paused, staring at herself in the flickering glow. A pretty face once, an animated face, with laughter in the gray eyes and a suggestion of passion in the soft mouth. But in this moment, with her chestnut-colored hair pulled back into a tight chignon at the back of her neck, the face looked severe and weary and deeply lined; in this moment, she was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who was forty years of age.
    She moved her gaze from the window, snapping the lighter shut and putting the room in heavy darkness again, thinking: I wonder who she is this time? Not that it matters, but you can’t help wondering. Probably not a valley resident; Matt has always been so very careful to preserve his saintly image here. Young, of course. Large breasts, of course, he always did like large breasts, mine never quite