Welch gave his best professional smile.

'Miss, I'm Officer Mike Welch. Did you happen to see three young men running through the area?'

'No.'

Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her. Welch noted that she appeared upset, and wondered about that.

'It would've been five or ten minutes ago. Something like that. I have reason to believe that they jumped the wall into your backyard.'

'No.'

The red-rimmed eyes filled. Welch watched her eyes blur, watched twin tears roll in slow motion down her cheeks, and knew that they were in the house with her. They were probably standing right on the other side of the door. Mike Welch's heart began to pound. His fingers tingled.

'Okay, miss, like I said, I was just checking. You have a good day.'

He quietly unsnapped the release on his holster and rested his hand on his gun. He shifted his eyes pointedly to the door, then mouthed a silent question, asking if anyone was there. She did not have time to respond.

Inside, someone that Mike Welch could not see shouted, 'He's going for his gun!'

Loud explosions blew through the door and window. Something hit Mike Welch in the chest, knocking him backward. His Kevlar vest stopped the first bullet, but another punched into his belly below the vest, and a third slipped over the top of his vest to lodge high in his chest. He tried to keep his feet under him, but they fell away. The girl screamed, and someone else inside the house screamed, too.

Mike Welch found himself flat on his back in the front yard. He sat up, then realized that he'd been shot and fell over again. He heard more shots, but he couldn't get up or duck or run for cover. He pulled his gun and fired toward the house without thinking who he might be hitting. His only thought was to survive.

He heard more shots, and screaming, but then he could no longer hold his gun. It was all he could do to key his shoulder mike.

'Officer down. Officer down. Jesus, I've been shot.'

'Say again? Mike? Mike, what's going on?'

Mike Welch stared at the sky, but could not answer.

Friday, 3:24 P.M.

Two-point-one miles from York Estates, Jeff Talley was parked in an avocado orchard, talking to his daughter on his cell phone, his command radio tuned to a whisper. He often left his office in the afternoon and came to this orchard, which he had discovered not long after he had taken the job as the chief of Bristo Camino's fourteen-member police department. Rows of trees, each tree the same as the last, each a measured distance from the next, standing without motion in the clean desert air like a chorus of silent witnesses. He found peace in the sameness of it.

His daughter, Amanda, now fourteen, broke that peace.

'Why can't I bring Derek with me? At least I would have someone to hang with.'

Her voice reeked of coldness. He had called Amanda because today was Friday, she would be coming up for the weekend.

'I thought we would go to a movie together.'

'We go to a movie every time I come up there. We can still go to the movies. We'll just bring Derek.'

'Maybe another time.'

'When?'

'Maybe next time. I don't know.'

She made an exaggerated sigh that left him feeling defensive.

'Mandy? It's okay if you bring friends. But I enjoy our alone time, too. I want us to talk about things.'

'Mom wants to talk to you.'

'I love you.'

She didn't answer.

'I love you, Amanda.'

'You always say you want to talk, but then we go sit in a movie so we can't talk. Here's Mom.'

Jane Talley came on the line. They had separated five months after he resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department, took up residence on their couch, and stared at the television for twenty hours a day until neither of them could take it anymore and he had moved out. That was two years ago.

'Hey, Chief. She's not in the greatest mood.'

'I know.'

'How you doing?'

Talley thought about it.

'She's not liking me very much.'

'It's hard for her right now. She's fourteen.'

'I know.'

'She's still trying to understand. Sometimes she's fine with it, but other times everything sweeps over her.'

'I try to talk to her.'

He could hear the frustration in Jane's voice, and his own.

'Jeffrey, you've been trying to talk for two years, but nothing comes out. Just like that, you left and started a new life and we weren't a part of it. Now you have this new life up there and she's making a new life down here. You understand that, don't you?'

Talley didn't say anything, because he didn't know what to say. Every day since he moved to Bristo Camino he told himself that he would ask them to join him but he hadn't been able to do it. He knew that Jane had spent the past two years waiting for him. He thought that if he asked right now she would come to him, but all he managed to do was stare at the silent, immobile trees.

Finally, Jane had had enough of the silence.

'I don't want to go on like this anymore, just being separated. You and Mandy aren't the only ones who need to make a life.'

'I know. I understand.'

'I'm not asking you to understand. I don't care if you understand.'

Her voice came out sharp and hurt, then both of them were silent. Talley thought of her on the day they were married; against the white country wedding gown, her skin had been golden.

Jane finally broke the silence, her voice resigned. She would learn no more today than yesterday; her husband would offer nothing new. Talley felt embarrassed and guilty.

'Do you want me to drop her at your house or at the office?'

'The house would be fine.'

'Six o'clock?'

'Six. We can have dinner, maybe.'

'I won't be staying.'

When the phone went dead, Talley put it aside, and thought of the dream. The dream was always the same, a small clapboard house surrounded by a full SWAT tactical team, helicopters overhead, media beyond the cordon. Talley was the primary negotiator, but the nightmare reality of the dream left him standing in the open without cover or protection while Jane and Amanda watched him from the cordon. Talley was in a life-or-death negotiation with an unknown male subject who had barricaded himself in the house and was threatening suicide. Over and over, the man screamed, 'I'm going to do it! I'm going to do it!' Talley talked him back from the brink each time, but, each time, knew that the man had stepped closer to the edge. It was only a matter of time. No one had seen this man. No neighbors or family had been found to provide an ID. The subject would not reveal his name. He was a voice behind walls to everyone except Talley, who knew with a numbing dread that the man in the house was himself. He had become the subject in the house, locked in time and frozen in place, negotiating with himself to spare his own life.

In those first weeks, Brendan Malik's eyes watched him from every shadow. He saw the light in them die over and over, dimming like a television with its plug pulled, the spark that had been Brendan Malik growing smaller, falling away until it was gone. After a while, Talley felt nothing, watching the dying eyes the same way he would watch Wheel of Fortune: Because it was there.

Talley resigned from the LAPD, then sat on his couch for almost a year, first in his home and later in the cheap apartment he had rented in Silver Lake after Jane threw him out. Talley told himself that he had left his job and his family because he couldn't stand having them witness his own self-destruction, but after a while he grew to believe that his reasons were simpler, and less noble: He believed that his former life was killing him, and he was scared. The incorporated township of Bristo Camino was looking for a chief of police for their fourteen-member police force, and they were glad to have him. They liked it that he was SWAT, even though the job was no more demanding than writing traffic citations and speaking at local schools. He told himself that it was a good place to heal. Jane had been willing to wait for the healing, but the healing never quite seemed to happen. Talley believed that it never would.