Free Light Before Day by Christopher Rice Page A

bedroom and entertain yourself with the Men of Falcon.
    But you don't leave this apartment until two A.M. Deal?"
    Two A.M. was when the bars and liquor stores closed. I nodded. "What do you guys talk about at your meetings?" I heard myself ask.
    "Everything." He sipped his tea. "There's a midnight meeting I know of over in Hollywood.
    You want to go?"
    When I didn't respond, he smiled slightly and rose from the table.
    "I don't want to die like my mother."
    I heard his footsteps stop behind me and realized I had given voice to the thought.
    "You won't, honey," he said gently. "You'll die just like you."
    A few seconds later, he raised the volume on the television. The apartment filled with the sound of enervated British people discussing petty trifles as if they were of global consequence. The longer I listened, the less petty their trifles seemed. After a while, I joined my strange companion on the sofa. Eventually I nodded off, and when I awoke, my guardian was tugging gently on my shoulder. It was ten after two, and he was telling me that I had made it through another day.
    He closed the door behind me before I could thank him or ask him his name. As I walked back to my apartment, I cried for my mother for the first time since she died. My tears didn't last as long as I had feared they would.

    Coalinga, California Same Night

    In 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company established the small town of Coalinga at the northern end of the narrow valley that lies between the Coast Ranges and the Kettleman Hills. It was named for the coal discovered under its soil, and today it is the only mining boom-town in California to have survived into the twenty-first century. Over the years, it had subsisted off what was once the largest oil field in California, the cattle ranches that lie in the hills to the west, and one of the only small-town medical centers to be constructed with a federal grant in recent memory.
    At night, the sodium vapor lights of Avenal State Prison throw an orange glow across the tule-blanketed hills to the south. Highway 198 marks the town's southern border before it travels into the rolling landscape of grassy plateaus and rounded hills that make up the Inner Coast Ranges.
    Lucy Vernon was the only clerk on duty when a young woman named Caroline Hughes pulled her silver Chevy Tahoe into the service station's parking lot, bypassed the gas pumps, and slid into the parking spot next to Mike Harberson's pickup. For the past hour, Mike and his partner in crime, Joey Murdoch, had been sitting at one of the tables next to the coffee machines, shouting things about how the Ding Dongs didn't look fresh and how it must have been a bad season for Twinkies. Lucy wasn't responding, and they had returned to snickering like South Park characters and taking sips from squeeze bottles that smelled like they were full of Drakkar Noir.
    When Caroline entered the gas station, Lucy recognized the spray of freckles across the woman's nose and forehead and the pupils that reminded her of frozen amber. There had been a picture of the woman on the front page of the Coalinga Record a few weeks earlier, taken just as Caroline Hughes emerged from the Kings County sheriff's station after identifying her mother's burned corpse.
    Lucy figured the woman's expression must have been what her grandfather referred to as a thousand-yard stare. Caroline pulled a basket from the stack without acknowledging anyone else inside the service station and disappeared into the racks.
    "Whatsa matter, Luce?" Mike Harberson called out. "You see a ghost?"
    Lucy returned her attention to the copy of US Weekly she had been flipping through and listened to Mike's shuffling footsteps. He leaned on the counter with both elbows. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his latest attempt at a beard looked like a swarm of fleas clinging to his chin.
    Mike was a nice enough guy when you got him alone. He had an almost childish affection for the nearby foothills and he liked