Dark Rivers of the Heart Read Online Free PDF

think that he was involved as well. He would be taken into custody, detained for questioning, maybe even booked on suspicion of aiding and abetting Valerie in whatever she had done.
        They would find out who he was.
        The news media would dredge up his past. His face would be on television, in newspapers and magazines. He had lived many years in blessed anonymity, his new name unknown, his appearance altered by time, no longer recognizable. But his privacy was about to be stolen.
        He would be center ring at the circus again, harassed by reporters, whispered about every time he went out in public.
        No. Intolerable. He couldn't. go through that again. He would rather die.
        They were cops of some kind, and he was innocent of any serious offense; but they were not on his side right now. Without meaning to destroy him, they would do so simply by exposing him to the press.
        More shattering glass. Two explosions.
        The officers on the swat team were taking no chances, as if they thought they were amidst people crazed on PCP or something worse.
        Spencer had reached the midpoint of the hall, where he stood between two doorways. A dim grayness beyond the right-hand door: the dining room.
        On his left: the bathroom.
        He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, hoping to buy time to think.
        The stinging in his face, hands, and legs was slowly subsiding.
        Rapidly, repeatedly, he clenched his hands, then relaxed them, trying to improve the circulation and work off the numbness.
        From the far end of the house came a wood-splintering crash, hard enough to make the walls shudder. It was probably the front door slamming open or going down.
        Another crash. The kitchen door.
        They were in the house.
        They were coming.
        No time to think. He had to move, relying on instinct and on military training that was, he hoped, at least as extensive as that of the men who were hunting him.
        In the back wall of the cramped room, above the bathtub, the blackness was broken by a rectangle of faint gray light. He stepped into the tub and, with both hands, quickly explored the frame of that small window.
        He wasn't convinced that it was big enough to provide a way out, but it was the only possible route of escape.
        If it had been fixed or jalousied, he would have been trapped.
        Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge. Collapsible elbow braces on both sides clicked softly when fully extended, locking the window open.
        He expected the faint squeak of the hinge and the click of the braces to elicit a shout from someone outside. But the unrelenting drone of the rain screened what sounds he made. No alarm was raised.
        Spencer gripped the window ledge and levered himself into the opening.
        Cold rain spattered his face. The humid air was heavy with the fecund smells of saturated earth, jasmine, and grass.
        The backyard was a tapestry of gloom, woven exclusively from shades of black and graveyard grays, washed by rain that blurred its details. At least one man-more likely two-from the swat team had to be covering the rear of the house. However, though Spencer's vision was keen, he could not force any of the interwoven shadows to resolve into a human form.
        For a moment his upper body seemed wider than the frame, but he hunched his shoulders, twisted, wriggled, and scraped through the opening. The ground was a short drop from the window. He rolled once on the wet grass and then lay flat on his stomach, head raised, surveying the night still unable to see signs of any adversaries.
        In the planting beds and along the property line, the shrubbery was overgrown. Several old fig trees, long untrimmed, were mighty towers of foliage.
        Glimpsed between the branches of those mammoth ficuses, the heavens were