Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

"Look at the photographs."

"Okay, yeah, it's gorgeous. But what would we do there? It's a lot of money but not enough to last forever. Besides, we're young-we can't vegetate, we need to do something."

"Maybe we can start a business in Eagle's Roost."

"What sort of business?"

"I don't know. Anything," she said. "We can go, see what it's like, and maybe we'll spot an opportunity right off the bat. And if not.

well, we don't have to live there forever. A year, two years, and if we don't like it, we can sell." He finished his champagne, poured refreshers for both of them.

"Toby starts school in two weeks…"

"They have schools in Montana," she said, though she knew that was not what concerned him. He was no doubt thinking about the eleven-year-old girl who'd been shot to death one block from the elementary school that Toby would be attending.

She nudged him: "He'll have six hundred acres to play on, Jack. How long has he wanted a dog, a golden retriever, and it just seemed like this place was too small for one?"

Staring at one of the snapshots, Jack said, "At work today, we were talking about all the names this city has, more than other places.

Like New York is the Big Apple, and that's it. But L.A. has lots of names-and none of them fit any more, none of them mean anything. Like the Big Orange. But there aren't any orange groves any more, all gone to tract houses and mini-malls and car lots.

You can call it the City of Angels, but not much angelic happens here any more, not the way it once did, too many devils on the streets."

"The City Where Stars Are Born," she said. "And nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand kids who come here to be movie stars-what happens to them? Wind up used, abused, broke, and hooked on drugs."

"The City Where the Sun Goes Down."

"Well, it still does set in the west," he acknowledged, picking up.another photo from Montana.

"City Where the Sun Goes Down… That makes you think of the thirties and forties, swing music, men tipping their hats to one another and holding doors open for ladies in black cocktail dresses, elegant nightclubs overlooking the ocean, Bogart and Bacall, Gable and Lombard, people sipping martinis and watching golden sunsets. All gone. Mostly gone. These days, call it the City of the Dying Day."

He fell silent. Shuming the photographs, studying them. She waited.

At last he looked up and said, "Let's do it."

In the distant age of the dinosaurs, fearful creatures as mighty as the Tyrannosaurus rex had perished in treacherous tar pits upon which the visionary builders of Los Angeles later erected freeways, shopping centers, houses, office buildings, theaters, topless bars, restaurants shaped like hot dogs and derby hats, churches, automated car washes, and so much more. Deep beneath parts of the metropolis, those fossilized monsters lay in eternal sleep. Through September and October, Jack felt the city was still a pit in which he was mired.

He believed he was obligated to give Lyle Crawford a thirty-day notice.

And at the advice of their Realtor, before listing the house for sale, they painted it inside and out, installed new carpet, and made minor repairs. The moment Jack made the decision to leave the city, he'd mentally packed and decamped. Now his heart was in the Montana highlands east of the Rockies, while he was still trying to pull his feet out of the L.A. tar. Because they no longer needed every dollar of equity in the house, they priced it below market value. In spite of poor economic conditions, it moved quickly. By the twenty-eighth of October, they were in a sixty-day escrow with a buyer who appeared qualified, and they felt reasonably confident about embarking upon a new life and leaving the finalization of the sale to their Realtor. On November fourth, they set out for their new home in a Ford Explorer purchased with some of their inheritance. Jack insisted on leaving at six in the morning, determined that his last day in the city would not include the frustrating crawl of rush-hour traffic. They took only suitcases and a few boxes of personal effects, and shipped little more than books. Additional photographs sent by Paul Youngblood had.revealed that their new house was already furnished in a style to which they could easily adjust.

They might have to replace a few upholstered pieces, but many items were antiques of high quality and considerable beauty. Departing the city on Interstate 5, they never looked back as they crested the Hollywood Hills and went north past Burbank, San Fernando, Valencia, Castaic far out of the suburbs, into the Angeles National Forest across Pyramid Lake, and up through the Tejon Pass between the Sierra Madre and the Tehachapi Mountains. Mile by mile, Jack felt himself rising out of an emotional and mental darkness. He was like a swimmer who had been weighed down with iron shackles and blocks, drowning in oceanic depths, now freed and soaring toward the surface, light, air. Toby was amazed by the vast farmlands flanking the highway, so Heather quoted figures from a travel book. The San Joaquin Valley was more than a hundred fifty miles long, defined by the Diablo Range on the west and Sierra foothills to the distant east. Those thousands of square miles were the most fertile in the world, producing eighty percent of the entire country's fresh vegetables and melons, half its fresh fruit and almonds, and much more.

They stopped at a roadside produce stand and bought a one-pound bag of roasted almonds for a quarter of what the cost would have been in a supermarket. Jack stood beside the Explorer, eating a handful of nuts, staring at vistas of productive fields and orchards. The day was blessedly quiet, and the air was clean…- Residing in the city, it was easy to forget there were other ways to live, worlds beyond the teeming streets of the human hive. He was a sleeper waking to a real world more diverse and interesting than the dream he had mistaken for reality. In pursuit of their new life, they reached Reno that night, Salt Lake City the next, and Eagle's Roost, Montana, at three o'clock in the afternoon on the sixth of… November.

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of Jack's favorite novels, and Atticus Finch, the courageous lawyer of that book, would have been at home in Paul Youngblood's office on the top floor of the only three-story building in Eagle's Roost. The wooden blinds surely dated from mid-century. The mahogany wainscoting, bookshelves, and cabinets were glass-smooth from decades of hand polishing. The room had an air of gentility, a learned quietude, and the shelves held volumes of history and philosophy as well as lawbooks.

The attorney actually greeted them with, "Howdy, neighbors! What a pleasure this is, a genuine pleasure." He had a firm handshake and a smile like soft sunshine on mountain crags.

Paul Youngblood would never have been recognized as a lawyer in L.A. and he might have been removed discreetly but forcefully if he had ever visited the swanky offices of the powerhouse firms quartered in Century City. He was fifty, tall, lanky, with closecropped iron-gray hair.