“I say three o’clock is good,” Dillon said. They had robbed banks all over the state of California, all of the heists in small towns with tiny police forces. This was physically the biggest bank they’d tackled. The stone building across the street housed the Bank of America branch; the building’s solid stone facade gave it the appearance of a big-city bank. It was only one story, but it was built high off the street with a wide granite steps leading up to two tall old-school glass doors. The bank was sitting at the busiest intersection in town, which wasn’t saying much.

“What’s the security like?” Dillon asked.

“There is none. No guard. Just the regular alarms. The town never incorporated, there’s just a sheriff’s office, across the street. They police the whole damn county. They’ve had a lot of cut backs since ‘08.”

Dillon looked up at Kelloggs. He was a tall man, heavy set, with very white skin. Kelloggs had that jail-bird quality that seemed to say “Graduate of Penal Institution,” stamped on his face. Kelloggs was wearing a cheap green Sears suit and a black tie and white shirt. It was the cheapest looking suit Dillon had ever seen. The gang posed as magazine salesmen—or, in Southern California, roofing salesmen—and dressed accordingly.

“Look, I have to tell you something,” Dillon said.

A black man named Earnest Flood, once an NFL linebacker in the ‘80s, had gone into the bathroom and was pouring himself a glass of water. He walked back into the room. A Taco Bell bag lay open on the unmade bed. Flood was a junk-food freak and always ate the same thing before a robbery. The black man was wearing two .45s: one tucked in the small of his back, the other in a shoulder harness.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dillon said, “but I’m going to tell you anyway. There’s something happening to people.”

“What do you mean?” Flood said. The California State Prison system had marked him as a Class One Felon, which meant that if he was arrested again he would spend the rest of his life at the state’s infamous maximum-security prison at Pelican Bay. “People starting to like magazine salesmen?”

“I saw something in Elko. Your wife’s in Elko, isn’t she?” Dillon said to Kelloggs.

“Close, in the desert, about twenty miles away. Why?”

“Try calling her,” Dillon said. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Go ahead. Try calling her.”

“Hey, is this a joke?” Kelloggs said. He went to the desk and sat down.

“No. There’s some kind of—I don’t know how to explain it, exactly,” Dillon said. He looked across the room at Flood. Flood had sat on the room’s ratty sunk-down-in-the-middle couch. “Just try and call her,” Dillon said.

“Are you saying something’s happened to my wife?”

“I’m saying that if you try and call on a land line you won’t get through, that’s what I’m saying. You’re not going to get through because they took over down there. The things took over. The Howlers,” Dillon said.

Flood smiled. It was the kind of smile cons get when someone bugged out in the yard, or some pretty eighteen-year-old punk said he wasn’t going to blow you. “White boy lost it,” he said. “White boy gone crazy.”

They watched Kelloggs dial the room’s phone. He ran his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. He had been born in East Texas; his father had been a Texas Ranger, no less. The room was quiet. Kelloggs looked at Dillon in a strange way while he dialed the phone. He held the old-school black receiver for a long time before he put it back down on its cradle.

“Lines are down, it says,” Kelloggs said. “They said to try later.”

“The lines are fine,” Dillon said. That’s not the problem.”

“Yeah? So what’s the problem, then?” Kelloggs asked.

Dillon sat down on the edge of the bed, opened a pint bottle of brandy he’d bought on Main Street and took a long pull. Then he told them what exactly he’d seen the day before.

CHAPTER 7

Lacy Collier looked up from her medical textbook. She was alone in the big knotty-pine living room at her family’s ranch. The morning had a stillness she had not experienced in years. She’d lost her cell phone on a horseback ride and didn’t miss it, she decided, putting the book down. It was liberating to go without it. There were dimensions to morning she’d forgotten existed. It was liberating not to be interrupted by a random text message. The idea of being cut off completely—from her friends at school, from her boyfriend, from everyone—was liberating.

A light was on by the couch where she’d been trying to read, but the decision she had to make distracted her. Go back to medical school—or not?

She got up and walked to the picture windows that looked out on the barn, and the Sierra Madre behind in the distance. It was snowing hard, the bad weather obscuring almost everything.

I couldn’t be happy living here in Timberline again.

She would go back to school in San Francisco. As soon as Robin came, she would tell him. As much as she loved Timberline, she loved San Francisco, too. The city was full of young people and exciting. Timberline would always be home, but the City would be where she’d make a life for herself.

And I want to be a doctor. Medical school has to come first.

She could see Mount Baldy in the distance through the white haze of snow. They’d gone up to the state park and camped as a family before her mother had been diagnosed, three years before. Lacy pulled her hair down, unhooking it from the clip, and turned toward the coat rack by the front door.

The coat rack, with its pile of coats and hats, was one of her earliest memories from childhood. The rack said more about the people who lived there than anything else about the house. It was piled with weather-beaten cowboy hats, yellow slickers, jean jackets, Patagonia vests, and one of her father’s extra black-leather service holsters. She smiled and walked to the rack. Fishing through the layers of heavy coats, slickers and sweaters, one of her grandfather’s sheepskin-lined jackets fell on the floor. Then Lacy found it: the simple white windbreaker her mother had worn on their last camping trip, near the bottom of the pile.

Her mother had worn it on that last trip to the hospital, too. Lacy had found it and brought it home after she’d died. Looking at it, she remembered her mother running along a creek on the camping trip with a fishing rod in her hand, so alive. It was a week before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, before the shadow of death stalked her mother and all of them, changing their lives forever. Her mother had talked to her from right there by the front door as she slid her jacket on, not saying that she was going to the hospital. Lacy, on her iPad, had missed what her mother had said—something about fixing dinner in case she was late.

Her father’s empty holster fell on the floor at her feet, startling her. She picked it up and hung it back on one of the crowded old-fashioned wooden pegs. She took her mother’s coat to the couch and sat with it on her lap. She watched the snow fall from the window on the paddock outside, holding the coat.

“Mom, I’m pregnant and I don’t want to be,” she said aloud. She wanted to cry but decided she couldn’t, that it wasn’t right to cry.