• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“That’s not the only reason,” Megan says crossly. “You forget. I was speaking out against the power companies that were destroying the West, one of which was owned by the Abbott family.”

I remember the surveillance photo Peter Abbott displayed at the conference table in Los Angeles. Megan, wrapped in an American flag, was shouting nose-to-nose with his congressman father at the building site of a dam along the Columbia Gorge.

Nice sideburns, Dad.

“They were given a free pass to own the Northwest electric grid by destroying the natural rivers. People in the movement knew it. Knew it was totally corrupt. They used every obscene trick in the book to persecute us, and eventually, sickeningly, we gave up and ran.”

Stone’s voice is rising. “I warned him when he was my supervisor: If he didn’t lay off you, I’d bring him down. The yachts, the mansions, the whole damn empire—”

Megan is scornful. “Yachts? Now you’re talking nonsense.”

And Stone’s eyes take on a vacant look, meaning that he’s shifting gears. Even his voice is throaty when he says, “I’ve got the goods on Abbott.”

I ask, “What goods?”

“Illegal contracts.”

“How?”

“Pay attention. I said I had an impeccable source on the inside.”

“Rooney Berwick? He works in the lab.”

“He’s a computer wonk, a master hacker. It’s a game to him: Beat the assholes. It took us years.”

“This impeccable intel—where is it?”

“Buried. For now.”

“You always go too far,” Megan scolds. “You get stuck on these obsessions, and what good does it do?”

Stone is conspiratorial. “Megan Tewksbury wasn’t her real name. It was Laurel Williams.”

Megan begins to cry. “Oh my God. I haven’t heard that said out loud in thirty years.”

There is a sick lump in my throat. Dick Stone takes off his glasses and rubs his small damp eyes. After a while he says, “It’s time.”

Megan looks over from the sink, where she has splashed her flaming cheeks.

“Are you still with me?” he asks her with a heart-wrenching look of disembodied loneliness.

Megan reaches for a dish towel and dries her hands. She rests in that gesture of finality, fingers kneading the cloth.

The white cat stalks along the windowsill, neatly avoiding the plants. Stone sits with his eyes out of focus and shoulders slumped, a mountain of weightiness. I look back and forth between them. The limpid light from the window washes over us with incongruous peace.

When I was in college, I once stayed up all night, driving the Pacific Coast Highway with a wealthy girlfriend who owned an MG convertible. We forced ourselves to stay awake because neither of us had ever actually seen the dawn. We wanted to mark the very instant the darkness crossed that line in the sky into day.

I learned that night there is no marker, no precise delineation for change, but as the sun rose over the red tile roofs of Santa Barbara, I witnessed for the first time how the world slowly blushes open, the way it has just now, in this long moment of disengagement—without words and without a look—as Megan and Stone have begun their good-byes to a long shared life on the run.

When the service of the warrant and the assault begin, Sara and McCord are still in the barn.

“This is an ice boot.” He secures the neoprene wrap around Geronimo’s leg. “You keep it in the freezer, then it goes on the swelling.”

Sara kneels beside him in the straw. “How come you know everything?”

“Because I care. I make it my business. Just like I care about you and your welfare.”

“You do?”

“You’re a good kid. Just in with the wrong folks.”

She glances furtively toward the house. “Something’s going on.”

“All right.”

“I don’t understand it. This morning, Slammer disappeared without telling me where he was going.”

Sirocco is pawing and pulling violently on the cross ties. The baby’s ears are up. Alerted, McCord glances through the open barn doors.

“Get out, now,” he says and hauls Sara to her feet.

They reach the yard as the surveillance helicopter breaks over the trees. McCord has only time to grab