HOWLERS by Kent Harrington

seeing her ex-husband and thought it sounded in her voice. She hadn’t told Quentin about her daughter or her ex-husband, and regretted that.
    “What?”
    “I said, where are you on the mountain?”
    “How the fuck—Oh my God ... . ”
    “I said, where are you on the mountain?” Patty said.
    The speaker on the desk went quiet, just the white noise of an open cell line. She waited a moment and then hung up.
    “They’ll call back,” her boss said, not looking up from his desk. “They probably used their phone’s GPS and are on the way to the parking lot.”
    She tried calling the cell number back, but got no answer; the call went to voice mail.
    Twenty minutes later, while she and another ranger were deciding whether or not to send a second helicopter up to Mount Baldy, the lights in the office dimmed and went out. Her computer screen went blank. Patty heard one of the other rangers swear from his office down the hall.
    She looked out her office window. The lights in the Denny’s, across the road, were out. She could see the stream of headlights on Highway 50 and snow, which was falling more gently now, but steady. She saw her husband’s face again and tried to forget it.
    Just what I need right now, a felon in my life who says we’re going to be overrun by—what had he called them? Howlers? Jesus!

    The Hotel De Ford had been built in 1932. The lobby smelled of dirty carpets that hadn’t been cleaned in years. The hotel’s lobby walls were the color of hot cereal. In the Sixties someone had bought plastic Danish furniture and set it down in the lobby. The once-white plastic chairs had turned a gray color. It was, Dillon had thought when he’d first walked into the lobby, the kind of place you saw in nightmares. He went to the front desk and got a single room.
    “Is Mr. Kelloggs in room twelve?” Dillon asked the young desk clerk.
    “I’m sorry, sir. You can ring if you want, but we can’t give out guests’ names or room numbers.”
    Dillon picked up the white courtesy phone and punched in twelve.
    “Hello,” a man’s voice said.
    “It’s me,” Dillon said.
    “Okay, we’re waiting,” the man said.
    Dillon put down the phone and crossed the lobby to the elevator. The elevator was very small; a picture of a smiling piano player with a bad toupee was hung on the back of the elevator.

        The King of Croon, nightly, Hotel De Ford, Timberline

    The three men, all with long criminal records, stood in the window of the hotel. It was the old-fashioned double-hung type window that you could open. A fire escape landing partially obscured the view of the gold-mining era town’s main street. From the room, the men could see a good portion of downtown Timberline.
    “Hey, look at that kid,” one of them said. The men looked down. A pickup truck was forcing a cyclist off the street. The cyclist jumped the curb and almost hit an old lady coming out of the bank the men planned to rob in a few hours.
    “I say three o’clock is good,” Dillon said. They had robbed banks all over the state of California, all of the heists in small towns with tiny police forces. This was physically the biggest bank they’d tackled. The stone building across the street housed the Bank of America branch; the building’s solid stone facade gave it the appearance of a big-city bank. It was only one story, but it was built high off the street with a wide granite steps leading up to two tall old-school glass doors. The bank was sitting at the busiest intersection in town, which wasn’t saying much.
    “What’s the security like?” Dillon asked.
    “There is none. No guard. Just the regular alarms. The town never incorporated, there’s just a sheriff’s office, across the street. They police the whole damn county. They’ve had a lot of cut backs since ‘08.”
    Dillon looked up at Kelloggs. He was a tall man, heavy set, with very white skin. Kelloggs had that jail-bird quality that seemed to say “Graduate of Penal