Moonglow, Texas. Mary McBride

consumed. He and his partner, Carrie Gray, had just taken over escort duty from Deputies Underhill and Roarke. Hector Morales, their witness, was finishing his room service breakfast of steak and eggs, and in no particular hurry to put on the Kevlar vest that would protect his traitorous heart between the hotel and the federal courtroom where he was due to testify in a little over an hour.

      As dreams tended to do, the scene shifted suddenly and they were walking down a long corridor, Carrie and Morales in front, Dan just a step or two behind them, his right hand itching as it always did in situations like this, and his brain measuring distances, delineating shadows, processing everything and labeling it threat or inconsequential, friend or foe.

      Carrie pressed the down button on the elevator with the pad of her index finger, her long nail making a little clacking sound on the brass plaque behind the lit button. Then all of them—Dan and Morales and Carrie—gazed up at the light panel overhead.

      Was that his mistake? Was that the moment when he let down his guard and all of his instincts failed him?

      The elevator door slid open. Dan never saw the men, only the muzzle flashes—fierce, perpetual flames—from their semiautomatics. At such close range, those rifles worked with the efficiency of a Veg-O-Matic. In a heartbeat, Carrie and Morales were no longer identifiable even as they fell.

      In this edition of the dream, Dan took a bullet in his ankle rather than his leg, but he continued to empty his gun into the open elevator and he put a dozen holes in the bronzed doors after they swooshed closed.

      They said a woman fainted in the lobby when those doors opened on the two dead Colombians inside.

      They also said that Dan was crying when the first NYPD cops arrived on the scene. Babbling incoherently was written in his file.

      But that was never part of his dream.

      Molly was glad that Dan was sleeping in. The more he slept, she figured, the less pain he’d have to endure. Also, the more he slept, the less chance she’d have of making a fool of herself again as she had the night before. She’d practically begged the man to kiss her. Now, the morning after, she was relieved he’d turned her down.

      While she graded essays, she kept an ear out for the knock she was expecting at her front door. She had promised Raylene to tutor Buddy Jr. in English composition. The boy, it seemed, was mechanically inclined like his father, but unless he passed English and received his high school diploma, there would be no technical school in his future.

      “Besides,” Raylene had said, “every hour Buddy Jr. spends with you, Molly, will be one less hour I’ll have to worry about him getting into trouble. He might even take a look at what Danny’s become and realize there’s no future in earning a bad reputation instead of a diploma.”

      “There’s nothing wrong with Dan,” Molly had said defensively.

      “Well, I didn’t say there was, honey. He’s just not exactly chairman of the board of General Motors, now, is he?”

      “Who’d want to be?” Molly muttered at her monitor. Then, a second later, realizing what she’d said, Molly almost laughed out loud.

      As an associate professor of business, Kathryn Claiborn had spent the last six or seven years attempting to convince her students that being chairman of the board of General Motors was a worthy, if not the ultimate goal for which to strive. She had lauded the glories of the balance sheet and sung the praises of tax credits, debentures and initial public offerings.