Skeet ran exuberantly down the steeply pitched roof, toward the brink, angling for a point of departure that would ensure he landed on skull-cracking pavement rather than on mattresses, bounding along the convex orange-brown tiles as though he were a kid racing across a cobbled street to an ice-cream vendor, and Dusty ran grimly after him.

To those watching from below, it must have appeared that the two men were equally deranged, fulfilling a suicide pact.

More than halfway down the slope, Dusty caught up with Skeet, grabbed him, wrenched him off his intended trajectory, and stumbled diagonally across the incline with him.  Some clay tiles cracked underfoot, dislodging small chunks of roofer's mortar, which rattled toward the rain gutter.  Remaining upright on this rolling debris was no less difficult than walking on marbles, with the added challenges of the rain and the slimy lichen and Skeet's energetic and gleeful resistance, which he waged with flailing arms and spiking elbows and disturbing childlike giggles.  Skeet's invisible dance partner, Death, seemed to give him supernatural grace and balance, but then Dusty fell and took Skeet down with him, and entwined they rolled the last ten feet, perhaps toward the mattresses or perhaps not - Dusty had lost his bearings - and across the copper gutter, which twanged like a plucked bass string.

Airborne, plummeting, letting go of Skeet, Dusty thought of Martie: the clean smell of silky black hair, the mischievous curve of her smile, the honesty of her eyes.

Thirty-two feet wasn't far, merely three stories, but far enough to split open the most stubborn head, far enough to crack a spine as easily as one might snap a pretzel stick, so when Dusty fell flat on his back on the piled mattresses, he thanked God as he bounced.  Then he realized that in free fall, when each lightning-quick thought could have been his last, his mind had been filled with Martie, and that God had occurred to him after the fact.

The Sorensons had purchased first-rate mattresses.  The impact didn't even knock the wind out of Dusty.

Skeet, too, had crashed into the safety zone.  Now he lay as he had landed, face planted in the satin-weave ticking, arms over his head, motionless, as though he had been so fragile that even a fall into layers of cotton batting, foam rubber, and airy eiderdown had shattered his eggshell bones.

As the top mattress quickly became sodden with rain, Dusty got onto his hands and knees.  He rolled the kid faceup.

Skeet's left cheek was abraded, and a small cut bisected the shallow cleft in his chin.  Both injuries had probably occurred as he had rolled across the roof tiles; neither produced much blood.

"Where am I?" Skeet asked.

"Not where you wanted to be."

The kid's bronze eyes had a dark patina of anguish that hadn't been evident during the manic minutes on the roof.  "Heaven?"

"I'll make it seem like Hell, you smacked-out creep," Motherwell said, looming over them, grabbing Skeet by his sweater and hauling him to his feet.  If the sky had been split by lightning and shaken by thunder, Motherwell could have passed for Thor, Scandinavian god of the storm.  "You're off my crew, you're finished, you hopeless screwup!"