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had told him that, but he didn’t want to bring it up. Jess didn’t object to the idea of ex-policemen moving in. In fact, if he had to choose the kind of people to move into the valley—not that he
had
a choice—he would have opted for retired police officers. It seemed to him that ex-cops were similar to the original settlers, men like his grandfather. They had been workingmen in crowded cities with blue-collar backgrounds. After years of dealing with the dark underbelly of crowded conditions and the worst of civilization, they’d opted to move to fresh, green country where they could be left alone.
Better ex-cops than actors or dot-com heirs
, he thought. The kind who came in, took over, and transformed the place. There were some of them, for sure. Too many for Jess’s taste.
    “Hundreds,” she said. “Buying up everything. But it sort of makes you feel safer, doesn’t it?”
    Jess said nothing. She went on, “But I don’t like the way some of them keep to themselves, you know? Like they think they’re better than everybody else. Why did they move here if they just wanted to keep to themselves? They could have moved anywhere for that. You’d think they’d want to be friendlier, you know, since a lot of them are divorced and all. I mean:
Here I am!
” She did a clumsy little twirl that made Jess cringe. “One of them might steal me away from you, Jess Rawlins, if they pulled their heads out of their butts long enough to, you know, look around….”
    Enough
, he thought. Seeing Karen had filled him with darkness. He didn’t want to talk with Fiona Pritzle, but he didn’t want to be rude, either.
    “I better get back,” he said, gesturing toward his mail as if he couldn’t wait to read through it.
    “You wouldn’t believe how many retirement checks and LAPD newsletters I deliver these days,” she said, repeating herself. “They’re all up and down this road.”
    “Then you better get after it,” he said cheerfully.
    She reacted as if he’d slapped her. “Just being neighborly,” she huffed. “I guess I caught you in one of your moods, Jess.”
    He didn’t like it when she used his first name, or that she studied his mail before she gave it to him. She was too familiar with him, he thought. She should be more professional.
    Her back tires spit gravel as she roared away.
Maybe if I pick up my mail at night?
he wondered.
    He had turned back to his road when he heard another vehicle coming. She was right about the traffic. He looked over his shoulder and saw a red pickup with a male driver. Jess didn’t know him. As he passed, the driver appeared to be talking to someone or something in the passenger seat or on the floor, but Jess saw no passengers, and no dog. He waved at the driver, but the driver didn’t wave back. These new ones didn’t wave back.
    As he walked down the hill toward his ranch house, he listened to the silence and the soft watery sound of a breeze in the treetops. He heard no more shots.

Friday, 4:45 P.M.

    E DUARDO VILLATORO pressed his nose against the window of the Southwest Airlines flight to Spokane from Los Angeles, via Boise. Below him was an ocean of green broken up only by lozenge-shaped lakes that reflected the sky, and snowcapped mountains that rose in the distance, the tops of the peaks at eye level as the 737 descended. He had only seen so much green once in his life, years before, when he had flown to El Salvador to bring back his mother. But that was jungle, and this was not, and El Salvador had silvery roads slicing through the green and an ocean holding it in, and he could see no roads, and that realization began to create anxiety in him that was only released, slightly, when squares and circles of farmland finally appeared and the flight attendant asked the passengers to put their tray tables in the full-upright and locked position.
    He had been keenly aware as he boarded the connecting flight in Boise that he was the only passenger wearing a suit, even