24

For a couple of seconds, Brent glimpsed the lights of a town below him. Then the helicopter roared over it, and all he saw was darkness again. At once a cluster of flashing lights appeared ahead.

A lot of flashing lights.

Through headphones, he heard the pilot’s voice. “There it is.”

Smoke rose from a burned-out shell of a bus. Firefighters, police officers, and medical personnel swarmed everywhere he looked.

“Do you see any bodies on the ground?” Brent asked the pilot. “Yes! There!”

Body bags covered human shapes on a gravel parking lot. Brent counted twelve. Others were being placed in ambulances.

His news producer was waiting back at the station, at the other end of a two-way radio. Brent flicked a switch and spoke into his microphone. “I made it here in time. They’re just starting to remove the bodies.”

“Any other news choppers?”

“None.”

“Good. You know what to do.”

“Did you find the background material I asked for?” Brent asked. “You didn’t give me a chance to do any research. I need to know about this town.”

“There’s not much,” the producer’s voice said through the earphones.

“‘Not much’ is better than ‘nothing.’”

“Wikipedia has a small item. Seems the town’s main claim to fame is that it was the location for the James Deacon movie Birthright.”

“It was released on DVD last month. I watched it,” Brent said.

“Well, I don’t know how that’s going to help you.”

“Rostov. What kind of name is that? Sounds foreign.”

“Russian,” the producer’s voice answered. “The railroad that was built there in 1889 was owned by a husband and wife who stopped in the area when the place was only a water-refilling station. The wife happened to be reading a translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. One of the characters is Count Rostov, so that’s the name she gave to the place. If you want to put our viewers to sleep, go ahead and mention that. Also, there’s an abandoned military base-just a ruin, really, where they used to train bomber pilots. There are so many unexploded bombs that they had to fence off the area and post warning signs, but there hasn’t been an incident in years.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing. Except…”

“What?” Page asked. “I need anything you’ve got.”

“There’s something about lights.”

“Lights?”

“It calls them, and I quote, ‘the mysterious Rostov lights.’”

“What the hell are those?”

“All it says is ‘colored balls of light in a field.’ Along with the old movie set from Birthright, they’re the big local attraction. Any bets the good citizens of Rostov go out in the field and wave colored flash- lights around to attract gullible tourists? But how you’re going to use any of that is beyond me.”

“You’ll be surprised. Get ready.”

The pilot had told Brent how to work the camera that was mounted on the chopper’s nose. Now he maneuvered controls that allowed him to aim the exterior lens wherever he wanted and zoom in on any detail.

“Transmitting in five, four, three, two, one, now,” he said. A cockpit monitor showed the images he sent to the station: the flashing lights, the emergency vehicles, the police, the firefighters, the medical team, and the bodies.

If that jerk-off thinks I’m going to play nice and let Sharon have most of the airtime, he’s out of his mind. I’ll give him stuff that’s so much better than she can do, he’ll be forced to put me on camera more than her. I’ve got a feeling this story is big enough to take me to Atlanta.

He let the scene achieve its impact, then gathered his thoughts around the meager information the producer had given him.

“This is Brent Loft reporting from the First-on-the-Scene News chopper. The carnage below me might be mistaken for the aftermath of an attack in a war zone, but this isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s peaceful west Texas cattle country, near the sleepy town of Rostov. That name comes from a character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace-but peace is exactly what Rostov doesn’t have tonight. The senseless gun- fire that broke out at this scenic vista two and a half hours ago left at least twenty people dead and prompts the question, ‘Is any place truly safe anymore?’”

Below, a vehicle backed away from the police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck. Brent aimed the camera toward it, hoping it was an emergency vehicle whose roof lights would suddenly come to life as it raced toward town. But he quickly realized that the vehicle was a civilian SUV, so he redirected the camera toward the firefighters spraying foam on the smoking shell of the bus.

“A half century ago, not far from here, James Deacon starred in the classic film Birthright, about a lifelong bitter feud between a wildcat oil driller and a prominent Texas cattle family. It’s a gripping saga about how the Old West became the New West. But even in the lawlessness of the Old West, the unspeakable massacre that occurred here tonight would have been unimaginable. The New West, as it turns out, is far more violent than the Old. Early reports indicate that the as-yet-unidentified killer was shot by someone on the scene, one of the innocent bystanders he was trying to slaughter. If so, his motive for this shocking outrage might remain as elusive and unexplained as the mysterious Rostov lights that draw tourists to this area.”

25

Hearing the roar of the chopper above him, Page drove Tori’s Saturn away from the turmoil of the crime scene. As he left the flashing emergency lights behind, he peered over at his wife, troubled by the way she stared straight ahead toward the darkness of the narrow road beyond the car’s headlights. Her face was tight. She looked dazed.

“You didn’t have a choice,” he told her. He kept remembering her frenzied shouts as she repeatedly pulled the trigger, even after the gunman had stopped moving. “You did the right thing. Never forget that.”

Tori might have nodded slightly, but perhaps it was only the motion of the car.

“Imagine the alternative,” Page said. “If he’d grabbed me, I might have been burned to death. Those people on the bus would have burned to death as well.”

“Maybe I shot him once to save you,” Tori murmured. Her lips barely moved. As she continued staring ahead, he had to concentrate to decipher what she told him.

“And maybe I shot him a second time to save those other people.” She drew a breath, her features more stark. “But I shot him the other times… so many…”

Page waited.

“… because he made the lights go away. He ruined the night, the son of a bitch.”

The interior of the car became tensely silent.

When they reached the motel, a neon sign said, NO VACANCY. Page stopped in front of unit 11 and recognized one of the cars farther along. The Audi belonged to the mother and father who’d brought their children to the observation area and then had become impatient, wanting to move on. Or at least the mother and the children had wanted to move on. Page remembered how defeated the father had sounded.

Your wife and kids saved your life, he thought.

In the harshly lit parking lot, he helped Tori from the Saturn, took the motel key from her purse, and unlocked the room. The place smelled old and musty.

He switched on the overhead light and saw that the room had two beds. Just as well, he thought.

When he secured the deadbolt on the door, the noise made her turn to him. Page was afraid she was going to say, “I don’t want you here.” But instead she told him numbly, “I’m going to take a shower.”

She opened a suitcase, removed boxer shorts and a T-shirt-her usual pajamas-and went into the bathroom.

She locked it.

Feeling empty, Page studied each bed and noticed that one had books on the table next to it. Choosing the other, he lay on a thin blanket and listened to the sound of the shower. He smelled smoke on his denim shirt and felt a spreading pain where he’d been kicked in the side.