He threw the burning paper, and the flames of revolution whooshed over the pile. There was no elation, no rush of freedom as he backed away from the pyre. Instead of the triumph of revolution, he felt a sense of sickening loss, loneliness, and guilt: Judas at the base of the Cross. No wonder communism had failed.

He went into the cabin, retrieved the box from the shelf in the closet, and was beating his bong collection into shrapnel with a ballpeen hammer when he heard automatic weapons fire coming from the ranch.

Ignacio was lying in the shade just outside the metal shed, smoking a cigarette, while Miguel labored away inside, cooking the chemicals down into methamphetamine crystals. Beakers the size of basketballs boiled over electric burners, the fumes routed through glass tubes to a vent in the wall.

Miguel was short and wiry, just thirty years old, but the lines in his face and the grim expression he always wore made him look fifty. Ignacio was only twenty, fat and full of machismo, taken with his own success and toughness, and convinced that he was on his way to being the new godfath-er of the Mexican Mafia. They had crossed the border together six months ago, smuggled in by a coyote to do exactly what they were doing. And what a sweet deal it had turned out to be. Because the lab was protected by the big sheriff, they were never raided, they never had to move on a moment’s notice like the other labs in California, or bolt across the border until things cooled off. Only six months, and Miguel had sent home enough money for his wife to buy a ranch in Michoacán, and Ignacio was driving a flashy Dodge four-wheel drive and wearing five-hundred-dollar alligator-skin Tony Lama boots. All of this for only eight hours of work a day, for they were only one of three crews that kept the lab running twenty-four hours a day. And there was no danger of being stopped on the road while transporting drugs, because the big sheriff had a gringo in a little van come every few days to drop off supplies and take the drugs away.

“Put out that cigarette, cabrone!” Miguel shouted. “Do you want to blow us up?”

Ignacio scoffed and flicked his cigarette into the pasture. “You worry too much, Miguel.” Ignacio was tired of Miguel’s whining. He missed his family, he worried about getting caught, he didn’t know if the mix was right. When the older man wasn’t working, he was brooding, and no amount of money or consoling seemed to satisfy him.

Miguel appeared at the doorway and stood over Ignacio. “Do you feel that?”

“What?” Ignacio reached for the AK-47 that was leaning against the shed. “What?”

Miguel was staring across the pasture, but seemed to be seeing nothing. “I don’t know.”

“It is nothing. You worry too much.”

Miguel started walking across the pasture toward the tree line. “I have to go over there. Watch my stove.”

Ignacio stood up and hitched his silver-studded belt up under his belly. “I don’t how to watch the stove. I’m the guard. You stay and watch the stove.”

Miguel strode over the hill without looking back. Ignacio sat back down and pulled another cigarette from the pocket of his leather vest. “Loco,” he mumbled under his breath as he lit up. He smoked for several minutes, dreaming and scheming about a time when he would run the whole oper-ation, but by the time he finished the cigarette he was starting to worry about his partner. He stood to get a better look, but couldn’t see anything beyond the top of the hill over which Miguel had disappeared.

“Miguel?” he called. But there was no answer.

He glanced inside the shed to see that everything was in order, and as far as he could tell, it was. Then he picked up his assault rifle and started across the pasture. Before he got three steps, he saw a white woman coming over the hill. She had the face and body of a hot senorita, but the wild gray-blonde hair of an old woman, and he wondered for the thousandth time what in the hell was wrong with American women. Were they all crazy? He lowered the assault rifle, but smiled as he did it, hoping to warn the woman off without making her suspicious.

“You stop,” he said in English. “No trespass.” He heard the cell phone ringing back in the shed and glanced back for a second.

The woman kept coming. “We met your friend,” Molly said.

“Who is we?” Ignacio asked.

His answer came over the hill behind the woman, first looking like two burned scrub oak trees, then the giant cat’s eyes. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Ignacio said as he wrestled with the bolt on the assault rifle.

Eight years of living at the edge of the ranch and never once had Theo so much as taken a walk down the dirt road. He had been under orders not to. But now what? He’d seen the trucks going in and out over the years, occasionally heard men shouting, but somehow he’d managed to ignore it all, and there had never been gunfire. Going onto the ranch to investigate automatic weapons fire seemed an especially stupid way to exercise his newfound freedom, but not investigating, well, that said something about him he wasn’t willing to face. Was he, in fact, a coward?

The sound of a man screaming in the distance made the decision for him. It wasn’t the sound of someone blowing off steam, it was a throat-stripping scream of pure terror. Theo kicked the shards of his bong collection off the front steps and went back to the closet to get his pistol.

The Smith & Wesson was wrapped in an oily cloth on the top shelf of his closet next to a box of shells. He unwrapped it, snapped open the cylin-der, and dropped in six cartridges, fighting the shake that was moving from his hands to his entire body. He dumped another six shells into his shirt pocket and headed out to the Volvo.

He started the Volvo, then grabbed the radio mike to call for some backup. A lot of good that would do. Response time from the Sheriff’s Department could run as long as thirty minutes in Pine Cove, which was one of the reasons there was a town constable in the first place. And what would he say? He was still under orders not to go onto the ranch.

He dropped the mike on the seat next to his gun, put the Volvo in gear, and was starting to back out when a Dodge minivan pulled in beside him. Joseph Leander waved and smiled at him from the driver’s seat.

Theo put the Volvo in park. Leander climbed out of his van and leaned into the passenger window and looked at the .357 lying on the seat. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

“You weren’t much for talking an hour ago.”

“I am now.”

“Later. I’m just going to check something out on the ranch.”

“That’s perfect,” Leander said, shoving a small automatic pistol through the window into Theo’s face. “We’ll go together.”

Eighteen

The bust of Hippocrates stared up at Val Riordan from the desk. “First, do no harm…”

“Yeah, bite me,” said the psychiatrist, throwing her Versace scarf over the Greek’s face.

Val was having a bad day. The call from Constable Crowe, revealing that her treatment, or lack of it, had not caused Bess Leander’s suicide, had thrown Val into a quandary. She’d zombied her way through her morning appointments, answering questions with questions, pretending to take notes, and not catching a word that anyone said to her.

Five years ago there had been a flood of stories in the media about the dangers of Prozac and similar antidepressants, but those stories had been set off by sensational lawsuits against the drug companies, and the follow-ups, the fact that not one jury found antidepressants to cause destructive behavior, had been buried in the back pages. One powerful religious group (whose prophet was a hack science fiction writer and whose followers in-cluded masses of deluded movie stars and supermodels) had fielded a media attack against antidepressants, recommending instead that the de-pressed should just cheer up, buck up, and send in some gas money to keep the Mother Ship running. The various professional journals had re ported no studies that proved that antidepressants increased the incidence of suicidal or violent behavior. Val had read the religious propaganda (it had the endorsement of the rich and famous), but she hadn’t read the professional journals. Yes, automatically treating her patients with antide-pressants had been wrong, but her attempt to atone by taking them all off the drugs was just as wrong. Now she had to deal with the fact that she might be hurting them.