T rumpets… church bells… ghostly voices… a Morricone score out of an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.

In semidarkness, a crouching figure holds the pistol in a two-handed combat grip, aiming it into even darker shadows. A lightning flash. Skeeter Hodges sits in the Huey Newton wicker chair.

Motionless as a manikin, he sits… waiting.

Blood erupts. Skeeter’s head explodes.

In slow motion, the shooter turns.

The bells and the voices surge.

And the figure faces him. And a lone trumpet searches his soul. The pistol finds his eyes. And the bore of the muzzle reaches out and engulfs him, and he stares into the darkness at the end of the world.

The trumpets… the bells… the voices… pound in a hellish apocalyptic crescendo…

Frank opened his eyes as the first jet of the morning from Reagan National screamed overhead, clawing its way north above the Potomac.

He lay twisted in the sheets. Motionless, he stared at the ceiling. His pulse beat furiously in his throat. The jet engines faded and his pulse slowed and the dream fragments drifted away.

He rolled over and shut his eyes, but his legs had cramped during the night, and his lungs felt musty, like a room that’d been shut too long. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He yawned, stretched, and looked around the bedroom, eyes coming to rest on the two windows overlooking the courtyard garden at the back of the house. Blue sky framed a sun-dappled oak. Plaster walls and heart-pine floors glowed from sunlight coming down the hallway from the front of the house.

Sixteen years before, when he’d bought the dilapidated row house on Olive Street, all the windows had been painted shut. A contractor had wanted to install thermopaned windows. The more Frank thought about it, the less he’d liked it. Old houses had old windows. So he’d learned how to disassemble the original windows, strip layers of paint, replace pulleys and sash cords, and he’d put everything back together so it worked as it had when the house had been new and Grover Cleveland had been president.