CHAPTER ONE
Raul Julia—no relation to the late, great actor—saw his first angel on a cold night in Caldwell in the middle of a December snowstorm.
And it was all because of a BMW.
He had come to a stop at the intersection of Main and Tenth, his long wool coat buttoned up to his throat, his scarf tucked in tight across his chest, the toes of his feet chilly even in his boots. Snowflakes, which had started out at lunchtime dancing in the winter air, had soon put on so much weight that they could no longer perform arabesques on the wind currents. They were also in a hurry now, wasting their freedom in a rush to get to the ground, not realizing that the fall was the very best part of their lives, and that once that descent was over, they were going to be trod upon, sped over, plowed into dirty piles like they were degenerates as opposed to floating miracles.
From one-in-a-million to a nuisance of overcrowding that had to be dealt with by Caldwell Public Works trucks.
It was a sad thing, really. Rather like children turning into adults.
As Raul stood on that corner, trapped in place by a red Do Not Cross palm that flashed in his direction, he got so tired of the cold gusts in his face that he turned and put his back to the traffic light. Due to the accommodation made to the visually impaired, a sound would alert him when it was time to go, but so would the traffic, which was slow and trudging, as if the cars didn’t like the weather any more than he did. In better conditions, he would have crowded the curb and eagle-eyed any opportunity to jaywalk—he had been born in Brooklyn back before Giuliani had cleaned up the five boroughs for a short while, so he was an expert at reading traffic patterns—but in winter, the rules changed. Four-wheel drive did not mean four-wheel stop, and the skidding potential added a dangerous element to any chances you took.
And Raul was the kind of person who had a lot to live for. Especially tonight.
In his pocket, he had a small black box, leather-bound on the outside, velvet-cushioned on the inside. He had married his Ivelisse thirty-two years ago, and though their anniversary wasn’t until April, and though it wasn’t a special one like twenty-five or thirty or even fifty, he had passed by a jewelry store at lunch and stopped. The window had been chocked full of gold and platinum wares that were wearable, bright lights inset into the frame to make the diamonds gleam. There had been a lot of engagement rings, in preparation for the season of asking—as opposed to the season of saying I do, which, according to his youngest daughter, Alondra, was in June—but there had also been a number of crosses.
Pretty as the show was, Raul had kept on going, determined to return on time to his job as an actuary at an insurance company. Going along the packed snow with the others who had dared to venture out at noontime, he had thought of the crosses, although not one of them in particular, but rather all of them in a group. They had been relegated to a cluster down low on the right, a congregation of perhaps ten, all of them overshadowed by those rings. For some reason, he couldn’t get them out of his mind, to the point where he began to become paranoid that something bad was going to happen. Even his normal workload, which was often too much, couldn’t distract him away from the preoccupation.
Maybe it was a sign. Maybe it was a portent.
He had those kinds of thoughts a lot, however. Then again, he analyzed people’s death rates for a living, performing the risk assessments on which life-insurance-premium calculations were based—and after you do that for twenty years, you did get a little flinchy. Every mole on his body was a melanoma, for example. Each skip of his heart was an impending myocardial infarction. Oh, and that headache he’d had when he’d been stuck in traffic coming into work this morning was definitely the precursor to a stroke.
Although put like that, maybe it was all a little crazy.
Maybe he needed to take some time off.
Still, as soon as he’d gotten his work done for the day, at a little past five, he’d put on his coat, said goodbye to his coworkers, and hurried out of the building. Instead of