“Willis. Please, whatever happened, I can help you,” Marvin said, staring in horror.

“No, you can’t. You’ll see when they get here. You’ll see when it happens to your family.” Willis’ hand trembled violently as he sunk the short blade into his carotid artery.

Poole froze. The two locked eyes. Willis closed his eyes and drew the blade across his throat. A long stain of blood started to run down Good’s neck. Marvin ran to him as he collapsed; he held Willis as the blood pulsated out of both severed arteries.

Willis opened his eyes. He tried to say something to Poole, but the doctor couldn’t hear it. Willis dropped off into unconsciousness. Marvin lowered Willis to the floor and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, knowing it was impossible, and that Willis would die, and quickly.

Marvin walked under the twinkling green and red Christmas lights hanging over Main Street. Cars moved like metallic bugs partially obscured by the snowstorm. Marvin could feel his blood-soaked sweater stick to his skin where he’d held Willis as he tried in vain to shut the man’s gaping neck wound. His cell phone began to ring as he waited to cross the snow-covered street. Car headlights looked oddly dim, and then became sharper as they approached. Still in shock, he didn’t realize he was leaving bloody footprints on the antique wooden sidewalk. He noticed his Volvo, parked only a few hours before; it seemed much longer now since he’d driven into town. He tried to stay calm, but the agonizing death throes of the young man, as he held him, were played back in a herky-jerky film in his head. Poole forced himself to turn away from what had just happened, but it was as if Good still held him, his convulsive bloody hand holding him close while he died in Marvin’s arms.

Marvin pulled his coat up around his face. He waited for the traffic to pass, then trotted across the street and walked into the Timberline’s sheriff’s office. The doctor was so well known in town, the sheriff’s deputies waved to him as soon as he came in. Then one of the deputies noticed the bloodstain on the doctor’s white sweater and cheek and stopped smiling.

“I have to speak to Quentin,” Poole said. The deputies all knew from the sound of the doctor’s voice that it was bad, whatever had happened. No one knew yet just how bad.

CHAPTER 6

It was useless trying to warn people. They only laugh at you, he thought, taking a deep drag off a fresh Camel cigarette. James Dillon looked out on the traffic from his seat in the Denny’s on Highway 50. He’d lit the filterless cigarette with a Zippo lighter his grandfather had given him on his twenty-first birthday. The old man had carried the lighter with him during the Korean War. It was one of Dillon’s few personal possessions; he’d been able to retrieve it, along with his wedding ring, from a box of things his aunt had kept for him when he got out of San Quentin.

That same year he was released from prison, he started to rob banks for a living. It had been going well enough. He worked with five other professionals. They took few risks, hitting only out-of-the-way banks, many in the Central Valley of California. All the small-town banks they robbed had easy access to major freeways and were mostly unprotected, with nothing more than surveillance cameras and small-town police forces to rely on. The police departments in rural small-town America were spread too thin to respond quickly to bank’s alarms, especially since the financial crisis. It was the first time since he’d been a Boy Scout that he had a savings account.

It was an off hour, between breakfast and lunch at the Denny’s. The restaurant was quiet. The surrounding booths were mostly empty. He knocked an ash onto the floor and remembered it was illegal to smoke inside a restaurant. He dropped his cigarette onto the dirty linoleum floor and smashed it out with the heel of his new Redwing boot. The last thing he needed was to be arrested for smoking.

A few truck drivers from a busy truck stop across the street sat at one of the tables behind him, talking in sleepy low voices. Dillon looked out at the nearly empty restaurant’s parking lot and saw the snow falling outside. It all seemed cold and dismal, and he felt lonely. He turned back from the windows and saw a waitress standing in front of him in her ill-fitting Denny’s uniform. He debated warning her of the things he’d seen. He wanted to grab her by the arm and explain that everyone sitting in the restaurant was in danger of losing their life, but he didn’t. He’d done it before, at a Denny’s in Fresno, and people there had just laughed at him.

“Warm that up for you?” the waitress said politely, not really looking at him.

Dillon looked up at the woman, at her makeup and her double chin, and behind her at the short-order cook who was diligently scraping burnt meat from the grill, getting ready for the lunch crowds that would soon fill the place. He put his hand over the top of the cup. Not seeing his hand cover the cup, the waitress started to pour coffee. The hot coffee spilled over Dillon’s hand. He didn’t feel a thing.

   “Oh my God! I’m so sorry,” the waitress said, shocked. She pulled back the glass coffee pot immediately, the coffee spilling onto the greasy brown Formica table.

“Yeah, fine. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”  He pulled his hand away and wiped it with a napkin, the burn finally registering.

“That was hot . . .  coffee,” the waitress said, looking at him as if he weren’t real.

Dillon looked at his hand. The skin around his knuckles was turning red, but he didn’t feel much pain yet. He had trained himself not to feel pain. That was what prison did for you. You trained yourself to be a gladiator. If he was anything, after seven very long years spent in San Quentin, James Dillon was a bona fide gladiator, with the scars, hard countenance—rarely able to find a smile—and crude blue-ink prison tattoos that marked him to civilians as a scary outlaw.

“Check, please,” he said.

“Sure. I’m really sorry, honey. I’ve been here since 5:00 a.m. You put it on automatic,” the waitress said, horrified by what she’d done.

“Don’t worry. It’s okay. If you could just please bring me the check,” Dillon said. He’d pocketed his lighter. “And don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.” He couldn’t look at the blousy older woman and not think of his own mother, who’d died while he was in prison. His mother had been a waitress in roadhouses all over West Texas and Southern California when he’d been a boy. It had just been she and he while he’d been growing up, and he missed her. She was the only person in his life who’d ever really, truly loved him. He had no one in his life, since his wife had left him.

His intense loneliness was starting to make him feel somewhat ghostly. He’d picked up girls—and some whores—along the way, but didn’t like it. It was just sex, and that wasn’t what he wanted.

The pain from his scalded hand began to register, but he cut it off like a yogi who could walk on fire.

“How far is the ranger station at Emigrant Gap?” he asked the waitress. He took out his wallet with his burnt hand.

The waitress was still staring at him, still in shock that he hadn’t even flinched when the coffee had hit his hand. “Over there,” she said, pointing with the coffee pot. “On the other side of the highway, there, where the flagpole is. You can’t miss it.”