Now, my keycard was a piece of dead polyvinyl chloride resting on the center console.
I looked down at my hands.
My right sleeve—the cuff of my crisp, ironed white dress shirt that my wife, Clara, had pressed for me at six o’clock this morning—was stained.
Not with ink. Not with burnt office coffee.
A smear of dried, brownish-red arterial blood, three inches long, was caked into the fibers of the cotton, stiff as dried parchment. And mixed with the blood was a faint, chemical scent that had lingered in my nostrils since seven-forty-five:
The sharp, synthetic odor of aerosolized nitroglycerin and cold mountain loam.
I closed my eyes.
The highway came back behind my retinas with the concussive violence of an incoming artillery shell:
Route 6, winding through the foothills between Golden and Lakewood.
The early morning traffic had been thin—a gray river of commuters rushing down toward the Denver central business district.
