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She folded her arms on the table and put her head down on the about hi of his talent was not enough to bring tears, it did at least cast a pall of despair over her

"Sooner or later," Hatch said, "the son of a bitch is going to coh it felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds "But why?"

"I don’t know Maybe we’ll never knohy, never understand it But somehow he and I are linked, and eventually he’ll come"

"Let the cops handle him," she said, painfully aware that there was no help for theo of that hope

"Cops can’t find hirimly "He’s s it to be true

"Maybe not tomorrow Maybe not next week or even next , he’ll come And we’ll be ready for him"

"Will we?" she wondered

"Very ready"

"Reht"

He looked up froain and met her eyes "What?"

"That ht have hitchhiked back with you froht you dismissed that theory"

"I did I can’t believe it But do you? Really?"

Instead of answering, he resu

She said, "If you believe it, even half believe it, put any credence in it at all--then what good is a gun?"

He didn’t reply

"How can bullets stop an evil spirit?" she pressed, feeling as if her ina to school was just part of a continuing dreaht in a real-life dilerave be stopped with just a gun?"

"It’s all I have," he said

Like many doctors, Jonas Nyebern did not ery on Wednesday However, he never spent the afternoon golfing, sailing, or playing cards at the country club He used Wednesdays to catch up on paperwork, or to write research papers and case studies related to the Resuscitation Medicine Project at Orange County General

That first Wednesday in May, he planned to spend eight or ten busy hours in the study of his house on Spyglass Hill, where he had lived for almost two years, since the loss of his fa to deliver at a conference in San Francisco on the eighth of May

The big s in the teak-paneled room looked out on Corona Del Mar and Newport Beach below Across twenty-six reen and blue, the dark palisades of Santa Catalina Island rose against the sky, but they were unable to make the vast Pacific Ocean see than if they had not been there

He did not bother to draw the drapes because the panoraht the property because he had hoped that the luxuries of the house and the nificence of the vieould reat tragedy But only his work had ed to do that for hilance out of the s

That ainst the blue background on his cohts were not pulled toward Pacific vistas, however, but toward his son, Jereo, when he had come home to find Marion and Stephanie stabbed so often and so brutally that they were beyond revival, when he had found an unconscious Jeree and rapidly bleeding to death, Jonas had not blaht by surprise in the act He had known at once that the ainst the workbench with his life drizzling onto the concrete floor So in him--all his life, a difference that had becoh Jonas had tried for so long to convince himself the boy’s attitudes and actions were manifestations of ordinary rebelliousness But the eneration, had appeared again in Jereenes

The boy survived the extraction of the knife and the frantic ae County General, which was only minutes away But he died on the stretcher as they heeling hi a hospital corridor

Jonas had recently convinced the hospital to establish a special resuscitation tea the bypass machine to warm the dead boy’s blood, they employed it to recirculate cooled blood into his body, hastening to lower his body temperature drastically to delay cell deterioration and brain daery could be performed The air conditioner was set all the way down at fifty, bags of crushed ice were packed along the sides of the patient, and Jonas personally opened the knife wound to search for--and repair--the daht have known at the time why he wanted so desperately to save Jeremy, but afterwards he was never able to understand his motivations fully, clearly

Because he was ht, and was therefore my responsibility

But what parental responsibility did he owe to the slaughterer of his daughter and wife?

I saved him to ask him why, to pry from him an explanation, Jonas told himself at other times

But he knew there was no answer that would ists--not even the murderers themselves--had ever, in all of history, been able to provide an adequate explanation for a single act of ent answer, really, was that the human species was imperfect, stained, and carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction The Church would call it the legacy of the Serpent, dating back to the Garden and the Fall Scientists would refer to the enetics, biochemistry, the funda about the sa it in different terms To Jonas it seemed that this anshether provided by scientists or theologians, was always unsatisfying in precisely the saested no solution, prescribed no preventative Except faith in God or in the potential of science

Regardless of his reasons for taking the action he did, Jonas had saved Jeremy The boy had been dead for thirty-one minutes, not an absolute record even in those days, because the young girl in Utah had already been reani in the arms of Death for sixty-six minutes But she’d been severely hypothermic, while Jeremy had died warm, which made the feat a record of one kind, anyway Actually, revival after thirty-one hty minutes of cold death His own son and Hatch Harrison were Jonas’ssuccesses to date--if the first one qualified as a success

For tenintravenously but able to breathe on his own and otherwise in need of no life-support machines Early in that period, he washome