# The Good Guy

Dean Koontz

A stunning new thriller in the vein of Velocity and The Husband from one of the world’s bestselling authors.After a day's work hefting brick and stone, Tim Carrier slakes his thirst at The Lamplighter Tavern. Nothing heavy happens there. It's a friendly workingman's bar run by his good friend Rooney, who enjoys gathering eccentric customers. Working his deadpan humour on strangers is, for Tim, all part of the entertainment.But how could Tim have imagined that the stranger who sits down next to him one evening is about to unmake his world and enmesh him in a web of murder and deceit? The man has come there to meet someone and he thinks it's Tim. Tim's wayward sense of humour lets the misconception stand for a moment and that's all it takes: the stranger hands Tim a fat manila envelope, saying, 'Half of it's there; the rest when she's gone,' and then he's out the door.In the envelope Tim finds the photograph of a woman, her name and address written on the back; and several thick packets of hundred-dollar bills.When an intense-looking man sits down where the first stranger sat and glances at the manila envelope, Tim knows he's the one who was supposed to get it. Shaken, thinking fast, Tim says he's had a change of heart. He removes the picture of the woman and then hands the envelope to the stranger. 'Half what we agreed,' he says. 'For doing nothing. Call it a no-kill fee.'Tim is left holding a photo of a pretty woman, but his sense of fun has led him into a very dangerous world from which there is no way back. The company of strangers has cost him his peace of mind, and possibly his life.

## The Good Guy

DEAN KOONTZ


## Contents

Title Page Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Part Two Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Chapter Fifty Part Three Chapter Fifty-One Chapter Fifty-Two Chapter Fifty-Three Chapter Fifty-Four Chapter Fifty-Five Chapter Fifty-Six Chapter Fifty-Seven Chapter Fifty-Eight Chapter Fifty-Nine Chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty-One Chapter Sixty-Two Chapter Sixty-Three Chapter Sixty-Four Chapter Sixty-Five Chapter Sixty-Six Chapter Sixty-Seven About the Author Also By Dean Koontz Copyright About the Publisher

Part One

The Right Place

at the Wrong Time

One

Sometimes a mayfly skates across a pond, leaving a brief wake as thin as spider silk, and by staying low avoids those birds and bats that feed in flight.

At six feet three, weighing two hundred ten pounds, with big hands and bigger feet, Timothy Carrier could not maintain a profile as low as that of a skating mayfly, but he tried.

Shod in heavy work boots, with a John Wayne walk that came naturally to him and that he could not change, he nevertheless entered the Lamplighter Tavern and proceeded to the farther end of the room without drawing attention to himself. None of the three men near the door, at the short length of the “L”-shaped bar, glanced at him. Neither did the couples in two of the booths.

When he sat on the end stool, in shadows beyond the last of the downlights that polished the molasses-colored mahogany bar, he sighed with contentment. From the perspective of the front door, he was the smallest man in the room.

If the forward end of the Lamplighter was the driver’s deck of the locomotive, this was the caboose. Those who chose to sit here on a slow Monday evening would most likely be quiet company.

Liam Rooney—who was the owner and, tonight, the only barkeep—drew a draft beer from the tap and put it in front of Tim.

“Some night you’ll walk in here with a date,” Rooney said, “and the shock will kill me.”

“Why would I bring a date to this dump?”

“What else do you know but this dump?”

“I’ve also got a favorite doughnut shop.”

“Yeah. After the two of you scarf down a dozen glazed, you could take her to a big expensive restaurant in Newport Beach, sit on the curb, and watch the valets park all the fancy cars.”

Tim sipped his beer, and Rooney wiped the bar though it was clean, and Tim said, “You got lucky, finding Michelle. They don’t make them like her anymore.”

“Michelle’s thirty, same age as us. If they don’t make ’em like her anymore, where’d she come from?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“To be a winner, you gotta be in the game,” Rooney said.

“I’m in the game.”

“Shooting hoops alone isn’t a game.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got women beating on my door.”

“Yeah,” Rooney said, “but they come in pairs and they want to tell you about Jesus.”

“Nothing wrong with that. They care about my soul. Anybody ever tell you, you’re a sarcastic sonofabitch?”

“You did. Like a thousand times. I never get tired of hearing it. This guy was in here earlier, he’s forty, never been married, and now they cut off his testicles.”

“Who cut off his testicles?”

“Some doctors.”

“You get me the names of those doctors,” Tim said. “I don’t want to go to one by accident.”

“The guy had cancer. Point is, now he can never have kids.”

“What’s so great about having kids, the way the world is?”

Rooney looked like a black-belt wannabe who, though never having taken a karate lesson, had tried to break a lot of concrete blocks with his face. His eyes, however, were blue windows full of warm light, and his heart was good.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Rooney said. “A wife, kids, a place you can hold fast to while the rest of the world spins apart.”

“Methuselah lived to be nine hundred, and he was begetting kids right to the end.”

“Begetting?”

“That’s what they did in those days. They begot.”

“So you’re going to—what?—wait to start a family till you’re six hundred?”

“You and Michelle don’t have kids.”

“We’re workin’ on it.” Rooney bent over, folded his arms on the bar, and put himself face-to-face with Tim. “What’d you do today, Doorman?”

Tim frowned. “Don’t call me that.”

“So what’d you do today?”

“The usual. Built some wall.”

“What’ll you do tomorrow?”

“Build some more wall.”

“Who for?”

“For whoever pays me.”

“I work this place seventy hours a week, sometimes longer, but not for the customers.”

“Your customers are aware of that,” Tim assured him.

“Who’s the sarcastic sonofabitch now?”

“You still have the crown, but I’m a contender.”

“I work for Michelle and for the kids we’re gonna have. You need somebody to work for besides who pays you, somebody special to build something with, to share a future with.”

“Liam, you sure do have beautiful eyes.”

“Me and Michelle—we worry about you, bro.”

Tim puckered his lips.

Rooney said, “Alone doesn’t work for anybody.”

Tim made kissing noises.

Leaning closer, until their faces were mere inches apart, Rooney said, “You want to kiss me?”

“Well, you seem to care about me so much.”

“I’ll park my ass on the bar. You can kiss that.”

“No thanks. I don’t want to have to cut off my lips.”

“You know what your problem is, Doorman?”

“There you go again.”

“Autophobia.”

“Wrong. I’m not afraid of cars.”

“You’re afraid of yourself. No, that isn’t right, either. You’re afraid of your potential.”

“You’d make a great high-school guidance counselor,” Tim said. “I thought this place served free pretzels. Where’re my pretzels?”

“Some drunk threw up on them. I’ve almost finished wiping them off.”

“Okay. But I don’t want them if they’re soggy.”

Rooney fetched a bowl of pretzels from the backbar and put them beside Tim’s beer. “Michelle has this cousin, Shaydra, she’s sweet.”

“What kind of name is Shaydra? Isn’t anyone named Mary anymore?”

“I’m gonna set you up with Shaydra for a date.”

“No point to it. Tomorrow, I’m having my testicles cut off.”

“Put them in a jar, bring them on the date. It’ll be a great ice-breaker,” said Rooney, and returned to the other end of the bar, where the three lively customers were busy paying the college tuition for the as-yet-unborn Rooney children.

For a few minutes, Tim worked at convincing himself that beer and pretzels were all he needed. Conviction was assisted by picturing Shaydra as a bovine person with one eyebrow and foot-long braided nose hairs.

As usual, the tavern soothed him. He didn’t even need the beer to take the sharp edges off his day; the room itself did the job, though he did not fully understand the reason for its calming effect.

The air smelled of stale beer and fresh beer, of spilled brine from the big sausage jar, of bar wax and shuffleboard powder. From the small kitchen came the aroma of hamburgers frying on a griddle and onion rings crispening in hot oil.

The warm bath of agreeable scents, the illuminated Budweiser clock and the soft shadows in which he sat, the murmurs of the couples in the booths behind him and the immortal voice of Patsy Cline on the jukebox were so familiar that by comparison his own home would seem to be foreign territory.

Maybe the tavern comforted him because it represented, if not permanence, at least continuance. In a world rapidly and ceaselessly transforming, the Lamplighter resisted the slightest change.

Tim expected no surprises here, and wanted none. New experiences were overrated. Being run down by a bus would be a new experience.

He preferred the familiar, the routine. He would never be at risk of falling off a mountain because he would never climb one.

Some said he lacked a sense of adventure. Tim saw no point in suggesting to them that intrepid expeditions through exotic lands and across strange seas were the quests of crawling children compared to the adventures waiting in the eight inches between the left ear and the right.

If he made that observation, they would think him a fool. He was just a mason, after all, a bricklayer. He was expected not to think too much.

These days, most people avoided thinking, especially about the future. They preferred the comfort of blind convictions to clear-eyed thought.

Others accused him of being old-fashioned. Guilty as charged.

The past was rich with known beauty and fully rewarded a look backward. He was a hopeful man, but not presumptuous enough to assume that beauty lay, as well, in the unknown future.

An interesting guy came into the tavern. He was tall, although not as tall as Tim, solid but not formidable.

His manner, rather than his appearance, made him interesting. He entered like an animal with a predator on its trail, peering back through the door until it swung shut, and then warily surveying the premises, as though distrusting the promise of refuge.

When the newcomer approached and sat at the bar, Tim stared at his Pilsner glass as if it were a sacred chalice, as though he were brooding on the profound meaning of its contents. By assuming a devotional demeanor, rather than a pose of sullen solitude, he allowed strangers the option of conversation without encouraging it.

If the first words out of the newcomer’s mouth were those of a bigot or a political nut, or the wrong kind of fool, Tim could morph from a pose of spiritual or nostalgic reverie to one of bitter silence and barely repressed violence. Few people would try more than twice to break the ice when the only response was a glacial chill.

Tim preferred quiet contemplation at this altar, but he enjoyed the right kind of conversation, too. The right kind was uncommon.

When you initiated a conversation, you could have a hard time putting an end to it. When the other guy spoke first, however, and revealed his nature, you could shut him down by shutting him out.

Diligent in the support of his yet-to-be-conceived children, Rooney arrived. “What’ll it be?”

The stranger put a thick manila envelope on the bar and kept his left hand on it. “Maybe … a beer.”

Rooney waited, eyebrows raised.

“Yes. All right. A beer,” said the newcomer.

“On tap, I have Budweiser, Miller Lite, and Heineken.”

“Okay. Well … then … I guess … Heineken.”

His voice was as thin and taut as a telephone wire, his words like birds perched at discreet intervals, resonant with a plucked note that might have been dismay.

By the time Rooney brought the beer, the stranger had money on the bar. “Keep the change.”

Evidently a second round was out of the question.

When Rooney went away, the stranger wrapped his right hand around the beer glass. He did not take a sip.

Tim was a wet nurse. That was the mocking title Rooney had given him because of his ability to nurse two beers through a long evening. Sometimes he asked for ice to enliven a warm brew.

Even if you weren’t a heavy drinker, however, you wanted the first swallow of beer when it was at its coldest, fresh from the tap.

Like a sniper intent on a target, Tim focused on his Budweiser, but like a good sniper, he also had keen peripheral vision. He could see that the stranger had still not lifted the glass of Heineken.

The guy did not appear to be a habitué of taverns, and evidently he didn’t want to be in this one, on this night, at this hour.

At last he said, “I’m early.”

Tim wasn’t sure if this was a conversation he wanted.

“I guess,” said the stranger, “everyone wants to be early, size things up.”

Tim was getting a bad vibe. Not a look-out-he’s-a-werewolf kind of vibe, just a feeling that the guy might be tedious.

The stranger said, “I jumped out of an airplane with my dog.”

On the other hand, the best hope of a memorable barroom conversation is to have the good luck to encounter an eccentric.

Tim’s spirits lifted. Turning to the skydiver, he said, “What was his name?”

“Whose name?”

“The dog’s.”

“Larry.”

“Funny name for a dog.”

“I named him after my brother.”

“What did your brother think of that?”

“My brother is dead.”

Tim said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Did Larry like sky-diving?”

“He never went. He died when he was sixteen.”

“I mean Larry the dog.”

“Yeah. He seemed to like it. I bring it up only because my stomach is in knots like it was when we jumped.”

“This has been a bad day, huh?”

The stranger frowned. “What do you think?”

Tim nodded. “Bad day.”

Continuing to frown, the skydiver said, “You are him, aren’t you?”

The art of barroom banter is not like playing Mozart on the piano. It’s freestyle, a jam session. The rhythms are instinctual.

“Are you him?” the stranger asked again.

Tim said, “Who else would I be?”

“You look so … ordinary.”

“I work at it,” Tim assured him.

The skydiver stared intently at him for a moment, but then lowered his eyes. “I can’t imagine being you.”

“It’s no piece of cake,” Tim said less playfully, and frowned to hear a note of sincerity in his voice.

The stranger finally picked up his drink. Getting it to his lips, he slopped beer on the bar, then chugged half the contents of the glass.

“Anyway, I’m just in a phase,” Tim said more to himself than to his companion.

Eventually, this guy would realize his mistake, whereupon Tim would pretend that he, too, had been confused. Meanwhile, there was a little fun to be had.

Sliding the manila envelope across the bar, the guy said, “Half of it’s there. Ten thousand. The rest when she’s gone.”

As he finished speaking, the stranger turned on his stool, got to his feet, and headed toward the door.

As Tim was about to call the man back, the terrible meaning of those eleven words clarified for him: Half of it’s there. Ten thousand. The rest when she’s gone.

First astonishment—and then an uncharacteristic clutch of fear—choked off his voice.

The skydiver was intent on bailing out of the bar. He quickly crossed the room, went through the door, fell away into the night.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Tim said, too softly and too late. “Wait.”

When you skate across the days, leaving a wake as thin as spider silk, you’re not accustomed to shouting or to chasing after strangers with murder on their minds.

By the time Tim realized pursuit was obligatory and got up from his stool, a successful chase could not have been mounted. The quarry had covered too much ground.

He sat again and finished his beer in one long swallow.

Foam clung to the sides of the glass. Those ephemeral patterns had never before seemed mysterious to him. Now he studied them as if they embodied great meaning.

Feeling disoriented, he glanced at the manila envelope, which looked as portentous as a pipe bomb.

Carrying two plates of cheeseburgers and fries, Liam Rooney served a young couple in one of the booths. No waitress worked on a slow Monday.

Tim raised a hand to signal Rooney. The tavern keeper didn’t notice; he returned to the bar gate at the farther end of the room.

The envelope still had an ominous significance, but already Tim had begun to doubt that he had correctly understood what had happened between him and the stranger. A guy with a sky-diving dog named Larry wouldn’t pay to have someone killed. All this was a misunderstanding.

The rest when she’s gone. That could mean a lot of things. It didn’t necessarily mean when she was dead.

Determined that the world would quickly be put right, Tim pried up the prongs of the brass clasp, opened the flap of the envelope, and reached inside. He withdrew a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills bound together with a rubber band.

Maybe the money wasn’t greasy, but that was how it felt. He returned it at once to the envelope.

In addition to the cash, he found a five-by-seven photograph that might have been taken for a driver’s license or passport. She appeared to be in her late twenties. Attractive.

A name had been typed on the back of the photo: LINDA PAQUETTE. Under the name was an address in Laguna Beach.

Although he had just finished a beer, Tim’s mouth was salt-dry and lemon-sour. His heart beat slowly but unusually hard, booming in his ears.

Irrationally, he felt guilty looking at the photo, as though he had somehow participated in the planning of this woman’s death. He put away the picture. He slid the envelope aside.

Another man entered the bar. He was nearly Tim’s size, with brown hair cropped short like Tim’s.

Rooney arrived with a fresh beer and said to Tim, “You keep chugging them at that pace, you won’t qualify as furniture anymore. You’ll be a real customer.”

A persistent feeling of being caught in a dream slowed Tim’s thinking. He meant to tell Rooney what had just happened, but his tongue felt thick.

The newcomer approached, sat where the skydiver had sat, with an empty stool between him and Tim. He said to Rooney, “Budweiser.”

As Rooney went to draw the beer, the stranger stared at the manila envelope, and then met Tim’s gaze. He had brown eyes, just as Tim did.

“You’re early,” said the killer.

Two

Aman’s life can pivot on the smallest hinge of time. No minute is without potential for momentous change, and each tick of the clock might be the voice of Fate whispering a promise or a warning.

When the killer said, “You’re early,” Tim Carrier noticed that the Budweiser clock showed five minutes shy of the hour, and he made an educated guess: “So are you.”

The hinge had turned. The door stood open, and it could never be closed again.

“I’m no longer sure I want to hire you,” Tim said.

Rooney brought the killer’s beer, and then answered a call to the farther end of the bar.

A trick of light, reflecting off the mahogany, gave the contents of the glass a rubescent cast.

The stranger licked his chapped lips, and drank. He had a deep thirst.

When he put down the glass, he said amicably, “You can’t hire me. I’m no one’s employee.”

Tim considered excusing himself to the men’s room. He could call the police on his cell phone.

He worried that the stranger would interpret his departure as an invitation to take the manila envelope and leave.

Carrying the envelope to the lavatory would be a bad idea. Under the assumption that Tim wanted privacy for the transaction, the guy might follow him.

“I can’t be hired, and I’m not peddling anything, either,” said the killer. “You sell to me, not the other way around.”

“Yeah? What am I selling?”

“A concept. The concept of your world profoundly changed by one … alteration.”

In Tim’s mind rose the face of the woman in the photo.

His options weren’t clear. He needed time to think, so he said, “The seller sets the price. You set the price—twenty thousand.”

“That’s not the price. It’s a contribution.”

This conversation made no less sense than typical bar talk, and Tim found its rhythm. “But for my contribution I get your … service.”

“No. I have no service to sell. You receive my grace.”

“Your grace.”

“Yes. Once I accept the concept you’re selling, your world will be profoundly changed by my grace.”

Considering their ordinary color, the killer’s brown eyes were more compelling than they should have been.

When he had sat down at the bar, his face had appeared hard, but that had been a mistaken first impression. A dimple adorned his round chin. Smooth pink cheeks. No laugh lines. No furrows in the brow.

The whimsical quality of his half-smile suggested that he might be remembering a favorite childhood story about fairies. It appeared to be his default expression, as if he were not entirely connected to the moment, perpetually bemused.

“This is not a business transaction,” said the smiling man. “You petitioned me, and I’m the answer to your prayers.”

The vocabulary with which he discussed his work might have been an indication of caution, a technique to avoid incriminating himself. When delivered with a persistent smile, however, his genteel euphemisms were disquieting if not in fact creepy.

As Tim opened the manila envelope, the killer warned, “Not here.”

“Just chill.” Tim removed the photo from the envelope, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. “I’ve had a change of heart.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I was counting on you.”

Sliding the envelope in front of the empty stool that stood between them, Tim said, “Half of what we agreed. For doing nothing. Call it a no-kill fee.”

“You’d never be tied to it,” the killer said.

“I know. You’re good. I’m sure you’re good at this. The best. I just don’t want it anymore.”

Smiling, shaking his head, the killer said, “You want it, all right.”

“Not anymore.”

“You wanted it once. You don’t go as far as wanting it and then not want it anymore. A man’s mind doesn’t work that way.”

“Second thoughts,” said Tim.

“In a thing like this, the second thoughts always come after a man gets what he wants. He allows himself some remorse, so he feels better about himself. He got what he wanted and he feels good about himself, and a year from now it’s just a sad thing that happened.”

The brown-eyed stare disturbed, but Tim dared not look away. A lack of directness might inspire in the killer a sudden suspicion.

One reason those eyes were compelling became clear. The pupils were radically dilated. The black pool at the center of each iris appeared to equal the area of surrounding color.

The light at this end of the bar was reduced but not dim. The pupils were as dilated as they might have been in perfect darkness.

The hunger in his eyes, the greed for light, had the gravity of a black hole in space, of a collapsed star.

A blind man’s eyes might be perpetually dilated like this. But the killer was not blind, not blind to light, although perhaps to something else.

“Take the money,” Tim said.

That smile. “It’s half the money.”

“For doing nothing.”

“Oh, I’ve done some work.”

Tim frowned. “What have you done?”

“I’ve shown you what you are.”

“Yeah? What am I?”

“A man with the soul of a murderer but with the heart of a coward.”

The killer picked up the envelope, rose from the stool, and walked away.

Having successfully passed himself off as the man with a dog named Larry, having for the moment spared the life of the woman in the photograph, having avoided the violent confrontation that could have ensued if the killer had realized what had gone wrong, Tim ought to have been relieved. Instead, his throat tightened, and his heart swelled until it seemed to crowd his lungs and crimp his breath.

A brief dizziness made him feel as if he were spinning slowly on the bar stool. Vertigo threatened to revolve into nausea.

He realized that relief eluded him because this incident was not at an end. He didn’t need tea leaves to read his future. He clearly foresaw the prospects for tragedy.

With only a glance at any stone courtyard or driveway, he could name the pattern of the pavement: running bond, offset bond, coursed ashlar, basket weave, Flemish bond…. The pattern of the road before him was chaos. He could not know where it would lead.

The killer walked with a light step that could be achieved only by someone not weighed down with a conscience, and went out into the night’s embrace.

Tim hurried across the tavern, cautiously cracked the door, and peered outside.

Behind the steering wheel of a white sedan parked at an angle to the curb, half veiled by a windshield that reflected the tavern’s blue-neon sign, sat the smiling man. He riffled the packet of hundred-dollar bills.

Tim withdrew his slim cell phone from his shirt pocket.

In the car, the killer rolled down a window. He hung an object on the glass and cranked up the window to hold it in place.

Blindly feeling his way across the cell-phone keypad without looking at it, Tim began to dial 911.

The object pinched between the window frame and the glass was a detachable emergency beacon, which began to flash as the car reversed away from the curb.

“Cop,” Tim whispered, and hesitated to dial the second 1.

He risked stepping outside as the sedan pulled away from the tavern, and he read the license-plate number on the back of the dwindling vehicle.

The concrete underfoot seemed to have no more surface tension than the skin of water on a pond. Sometimes a skating mayfly, eluding birds and bats, is taken by a hungry bass rising from below.

Three

In the downfall of golden light from the dragon lamp, a simple iron railing guarded the rising concrete steps. The concrete had been worked with a screed when it was bleeding, and as a consequence, some edges had scaled badly; some treads were as crazed as crackle-glazed pottery.

Like a lot of things in life, concrete is unforgiving.

Through four framed panels, the copper dragon, still bright but greening at the edges, serpentined against a luminous backdrop of lacquered mica lenses.

In the wash of ruddy light, the aluminum screen door appeared to be copper, too. Behind it, the inner door stood open to a kitchen rich with the aromas of cinnamon and strong coffee.

Sitting at the table, Michelle Rooney looked up as Tim arrived. “You’re so quiet that I felt you coming.”

He eased the screen door shut behind him. “I almost know what that means.”

“The night outside quieted around you, the way a jungle does when a man passes through.”

“Didn’t see any crocodiles,” he said, but then thought of the man to whom he had given the ten thousand dollars.

He sat across from her at the pale-blue Formica-topped table and studied the drawing on which she worked. It was upside-down from his point of view.

Out of the jukebox in the tavern downstairs rose the muffled but lovely voice of Martina McBride.

When Tim recognized the drawing as a panorama of silhouetted trees, he said, “What’s it going to be?”

“A table lamp. Bronze and stained glass.”

“You’ll be famous someday, Michelle.”

“I’d stop right now if I thought so.”

He looked at her left hand, which lay palm-up on the counter near the refrigerator.

“Want a cup?” she asked, indicating the coffeemaker near the cooktop. “It’s fresh.”

“Looks like something you wrung out of a squid.”

“Who in his right mind wants to sleep?”

He poured a mugful and returned with it to the table.

As was true of many other chairs, this one seemed like toy furniture to him. Michelle was petite, and the same kind of chair appeared large under her, yet Tim was the one who felt as if he were a child playing at coffee klatch.

This perception had less to do with chairs than with Michelle. Sometimes, all unaware, she made him feel like an awkward boy.

She finessed the pencil with her right hand, holding the drawing tablet steady with the stump of her left forearm.

“ETA on the coffeecake,” she said, nodding toward the oven, “is ten minutes.”

“Smells good, but I can’t stay.”

“Don’t pretend you’ve gotten a life.”

A shadow danced across the table. Tim looked up. A yellow butterfly fluttered at the silvered hooves of the leaping bronze gazelles in a small chandelier by Michelle.

“It slipped in this afternoon,” she said. “For a while I left the door open, tried to chase it out, but it seems at home here.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

A tree branch whispered into existence between the pencil point and the paper.

“How did you make it up the stairs, carrying all that?” Michelle asked.

“All what?”

“Whatever it is that has you so weighed down.”

The table was the blue of a pale sky, and the shadow seemed to glide behind it, a graceful mystery.

“I won’t be coming around for a while,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“A few weeks, maybe a month.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s this thing I have to take care of.”

The butterfly found a perch and closed its wings. As though the shadow were the quivering dark reflection of a burning candle, it vanished as suddenly as a flame from a pinched wick.

“‘This thing,’” she echoed. Her pencil fell silent on the paper.

When his attention rose from the table to Michelle, he found her staring at him. Her eyes were a matched blue and equally convincing.

“If a man comes around with a description of me, looking for a name, just say the description doesn’t ring a bell with you.”

“What man?”

“Any man. Whoever. Liam will say, ‘Big guy on the end stool? Never saw him before. Kind of a smart-ass. Didn’t like him.’”

“Liam knows what this is about?”

Tim shrugged. He had told Liam no more than he intended to tell Michelle. “Nothing much. It’s about a woman, that’s all.”

“This guy who comes around to the bar, why would he also come up here?”

“Maybe he won’t. But he’s probably thorough. Anyway, you might be down in the bar when he comes around.”

Her left eye, the artificial one, the blind one, seemed to pierce him more thoroughly than did her right eye, as if it were possessed of major mojo.

“It’s not about a woman,” she said.

“It really is.”

“Not the way you’re implying. This is trouble.”

“Not trouble. Just embarrassing.”

“No. You’ll never embarrass yourself. Or a friend.”

He looked for the butterfly and saw it perched on the chain from which hung the gazelle chandelier, slowly flexing its wings in the warm air rising from the incandescent bulbs.

“You don’t have the right,” she said, “to go it alone, whatever it is.”

“You’re making too much of this,” he assured her. “It’s just an embarrassing personal thing. I’ll deal with it.”

They sat in the silence of the stilled pencil, no music on the jukebox in the tavern below, no sound issuing from the throat of the night at the screen door.

Then she said, “What are you now—a lepidopterist?”

“Don’t even know what that is.”

“A butterfly collector. Try looking at me.”

He lowered his gaze from the butterfly.

Michelle said, “I’ve been making a lamp for you.”

He glanced at the drawing of stylized trees.

“Not this. Another one. It’s already under way.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’ll be done by the end of the month. You’ll see it then.”

“All right.”

“Come back and see it then.”

“I will. I’ll come back for it.”

“Come back for it,” she said, and reached out to him with the stump of her left arm.

She seemed to hold tight to him, as if with ghost fingers, and she kissed the back of his hand.

“Thank you for Liam,” she said softly.

“God gave you Liam, not me.”

“Thank you for Liam,” she insisted.

Tim kissed the top of her bent head. “I wish I had a sister, and I wish she was you. But you’ve got this trouble thing all wrong.”

“No lies,” she said. “Evasions, if it has to be that way, but no lies. You’re not a liar, and I’m not a fool.”

She raised her head and met his eyes.

“All right,” he said.

“Don’t I know bad trouble when I see it?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Yes, you know it.”

“The coffeecake must be nearly done.”

He glanced at the prosthesis on the counter by the refrigerator, palm turned up, fingers relaxed. “I’ll get it from the oven for you.”

“I can manage. I never wear the hand when I’m baking. If it burned, I wouldn’t feel it.”

Using oven mitts, she transferred the cake to a cooling rack.

By the time Michelle took off the mitts and turned from the cake, Tim had moved to the door.

“I’ll look forward to seeing the lamp,” he said.

Because her lacrimal glands and tear ducts had not been damaged, both her living eye and the dead one glimmered.

Tim stepped onto the landing at the head of the stairs, but before he let the screen door fall shut behind him, Michelle said, “It’s lions.”

“What?”

“The lamp. It’s lions.”

“I bet it’ll be terrific.”

“If I do it right, you’ll get a sense of their great hearts, their courage.”

He closed the screen door and descended the steps, seeming to make no noise on the scaling concrete.

Gliding by in the street, the traffic surely was not quiet, but Tim remained deaf to its chorus. Headlights approached and taillights receded like luminous fish in the silence of an oceanic abyss.

As he neared the bottom of the steps, the noise of the city began to rise to him, softly at first, but then loud, louder. The sounds were mostly made by machines, yet they had a savage rhythm.

Four

The woman marked for death lived in a modest bungalow in the hills of Laguna Beach, on a street that lacked a money view but that was being gentrified nonetheless. Compared to the aging structures, the land under them had such value that every house sold would be torn down regardless of its condition and its charm, to make way for a larger residence.

Southern California was shedding all its yesterdays. When the future proved to be a cruel place, no evidence of a better past would exist, and therefore the loss would be less painful.

The small white house, huddled under tall eucalyptuses, had plenty of charm, but to Tim the place looked embattled, more bunker than bungalow.

Lamplight warmed the windows. Sheer curtains made mysteries of the rooms beyond.

He parked his Ford Explorer across the street from—and four doors north of—Linda Paquette’s property, at another house.

Tim knew this place: three years old, in the Craftsman style, with stacked stone and cedar siding. He had been the head mason on the job.

The walkway was random flagstone bordered by a double row of three-inch-square cobbles. Tim found this combination unattractive; but he had executed it with care and precision.

Owners of three-million-dollar homes seldom ask masons for design advice. Architects never do.

He pressed the doorbell once and stood listening to the faint susurration of the palm trees.

The offshore flow was less a breeze than a premonition of a breeze. The mild May night breathed as shallowly as an anesthetized patient waiting for the surgeon.

The porch light came on, the door opened, and Max Jabowski said, “Timothy, old bear! What a surprise.”

If spirit could be weighed and measured, Max would have proved to be bigger than his house.

“Come in, come in.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Tim said.

“Nonsense. How could you intrude in a place you built?”

Having clasped Tim’s shoulder, Max seemed to transfer him from porch to foyer by some power of levitation.

“I only need a minute of your time, sir.”

“Can I get you a beer, something?”

“No, thank you, I’m all right. It’s about a neighbor of yours.”

“I know them all, this block and the next. I’m president of our Neighborhood Watch.”

Tim had expected as much.

“Coffee? I have one of those machines that makes it a cup at a time, anything from cappuccino to plain old plain old.”

“No, really, but that’s very kind, sir. She lives at fourteen twenty-five, the bungalow among the eucalyptuses.”

“Linda Paquette. I didn’t know she was going to build. She seems like a solid person. I think you’d enjoy working with her.”

“Do you know her husband, what he does?”

“She isn’t married. She lives there alone.”

“So she’s divorced?”

“Not that I’m aware. Is she going to tear down or remodel?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Tim said. “It’s a personal matter. I was hoping you’d speak to her about me, let her know I’m okay.”

The bushy eyebrows rose, and the rubbery lips stretched into an arc of delight. “I’ve been a lot of things, but never before a matchmaker.”

Although he should have foreseen this interpretation of his questions, Tim was surprised by it. He hadn’t dated anyone in a long time. He had assumed that he’d lost the telltale glint of eye and had stopped producing whatever subtle pheromones might have allowed him to be mistaken for a man still in the game.

“No, no. It’s not that.”

“She’s easy on the eyes,” said Max.

“Truly, it’s not that. I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me, but we have a… mutual acquaintance. I have some news about him. I think she’ll want to know it.”

The rubbery smile loosened only a little. Max didn’t want to let go of the image of himself as a facilitator of true romance.

Everyone, Tim thought, had seen too many movies. They believed that a meet-cute relationship awaited every good heart. Because of movies, they believed a lot of other improba ble things, as well, some of them dangerous.

“It’s a sad business,” Tim said. “Some depressing news.”

“About your mutual acquaintance.”

“Yes. He’s not a well man.”

This could not be counted as a lie. The skydiver was not physically ill, but his mental condition was suspect; and his moral health had fallen to disease.

Consideration of death relaxed all the delight out of Max Jabowski’s smile. His mouth shrank to a grim shape, and he nodded.

Tim expected to be asked the name of the mutual acquaintance. He would have had to say that he didn’t want to provide it for fear of alarming the woman before he could be at her side to comfort her.

The fuller truth was that he had no name to give.

Max did not ask for a name, sparing Tim from resorting to that deception. Bushy brows beetling now over solemn eyes, he once more offered coffee, and then went away to call the woman.

The coffered ceiling and wood-paneled walls of the foyer were dark, and the limestone floor was so light, by contrast, that the support it provided seemed illusory, as if he might at any moment fall through it like a man stepping out of a plane in flight.

Two small chairs flanked a console, above which hung a mirror.

He did not look at his reflection. If he met his eyes, he would see the hard truth from which he preferred to remain diverted.

Directly met, his gaze would tell him what was coming. It was the same thing that was always coming toward him, that always would be, as long as he was alive.

He needed to prepare for it. He did not need, however, to dwell on it.

From elsewhere in the house arose Max’s muted voice as he spoke on the phone.

Here at the center of the foyer, Tim stood straight, and felt as if he were suspended from the dark ceiling, like a clapper in a bell, with empty air below him, in silent anticipation of a sudden tolling.

Max returned and said, “She’s curious. I didn’t say much, just vouched for you.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“It isn’t any bother, but it is kind of peculiar.”

“Yes, it is. I know.”

“Why didn’t your friend call Linda and vouch for you himself? He wouldn’t have to tell her why he’s sending you around—the bad news.”

“He’s very ill and very confused,” said Tim. “He knows the right thing to do, but he doesn’t any longer know how to do it.”

“That’s maybe the thing I fear the most,” said Max. “The mind going, the loss of control.”

“It’s life,” Tim said. “We all get through it.”

They shook hands, and Max walked him out onto the porch. “She’s a nice woman. I hope this won’t be too painful.”

“I’ll do my best for her,” Tim said.

He returned to his Explorer and drove to Linda Paquette’s bungalow.

The herringbone brick of the front walkway had been laid on a bed of sand. The air was fragrant with eucalyptus essence, and dry leaves crunched underfoot.

Step by step, urgency overcame him. Time seemed to quicken, and he sensed trouble coming sooner rather than later.

As he climbed the front steps, the door opened, and she greeted him. “Are you Tim?”

“Yes. Ms. Paquette?”

“Call me Linda.”

In the porch light, her eyes were Egyptian green.

She said, “Your mama must have had a hard nine months carrying all of you around.”

“I was smaller then.”

Stepping back from the door, she said, “Duck your head and come on in.”

He crossed the threshold, and after that nothing was ever the same for him.

Five

Golden honey poured wall to wall, a wood floor so lustrous and warm that the humble living room appeared spacious, quietly grand.

Built in the 1930s, the bungalow had either been meticulously maintained or restored. The small fireplace and flanking wall sconces were simple but elegant examples of Art Deco style.

The glossy white tongue-and-groove ceiling lowered over Tim, but not unpleasantly. The place felt cozy instead of claustrophobic.

Linda had a lot of books. With one exception, their spines were the only art in the room, an abstract tapestry of words and colors.

The exception was a six-by-four-foot image of a television with a blank gray screen.

“Modern art baffles me,” Tim said.

“That’s not art. I had it done at a photo shop. To remind me why I don’t own a TV.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because life is too short.”

Tim gave the photo a chance, then said, “I don’t understand.”

“Eventually you will. A head as big as yours has to have some brains in it.”

He wasn’t sure if her manner indicated a breezy kind of charm or a flippancy bordering on rudeness.

Or she might be a little screwy. Lots of people were these days.

“Linda, the reason I’m here—”

“Come along. I’m working in the kitchen.” Leading him across the living room, she said over her shoulder, “Max assured me you’re not the type to stab me in the back and rape my corpse.”

“I ask him to vouch for me, and that’s what he tells you?”

As he followed her along a hallway, she said, “He told me you were a talented mason and an honest man. I had to squeeze the rest of it out of him. He really didn’t want to commit to an opinion about your possible homicidal and necrophilic tendencies.”

A car was parked in the kitchen.

The wall between the kitchen and the two-car garage had been removed. The wood floor had been extended throughout the garage, as had the glossy white tongue-and-groove ceiling.

Three precisely focused pin spots showcased a black 1939 Ford.

“Your kitchen is in the garage,” he said.

“No, no. My garage is in my kitchen.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Huge. I’m having coffee. You want some? Cream? Sugar?”

“Black, please. Why is your car in your kitchen?”

“I like to look at it while I’m eating. Isn’t it beautiful? The 1939 Ford coupe is the most beautiful car ever made.”

“I’m not going to argue for the Pinto.”

Pouring coffee into a mug, she said, “It’s not a classic. It’s a hot rod. Chopped, channeled, fully sparkled out with cool details.”

“You worked on it yourself?”

“Some. Mostly a guy up in Sacramento, he’s a genius at this.”

“Had to cost a bunch.”

She served the coffee. “Should I be saving for the future?”

“What future did you have in mind?”

“If I could answer that, maybe I’d open a savings account.”

His mug had a ceramic parrot for a handle, and bore the words BALBOA ISLAND. It looked old, like a souvenir from the 1930s.

Her mug was doubly a mug, in that it was also a ceramic head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt biting on his famous cigarette holder.

She moved to the ’39 Ford. “This is what I live for.”

“You live for a car?”

“It’s a hope machine. Or a time machine that takes you back to an age when people found it easier to hope.”

On the floor, on a drip pan, stood a bottle of chrome polish and a few rags. The bumpers, grill, and trim glimmered like quicksilver.

She opened the driver’s door and, with her coffee, got behind the steering wheel. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“I really need to talk to you about something.”

“A virtual ride. Just a mind trip.”

When she pulled the door shut, Tim went around the coupe and got in through the passenger’s door.

Because of the chopped roof, headroom was inadequate for a tall man. Tim slid down in his seat, holding the parrot mug in both hands.

In that cramped interior, he still loomed over the woman as though she were an elf and he a troll.

Instead of mohair upholstery, common to the 1930s, he sat on black leather. Gauges gleamed in a checked-steel dashboard billet.

Beyond the windshield lay the kitchen. Surreal.

The keys were in the ignition, but Linda didn’t switch on the engine for this virtual ride. Maybe when her mug was empty, she would fire up the Ford and drive over to the coffee brewer near the oven.

She smiled at him. “Isn’t this nice?”

“It’s like being at a drive-in theater, watching a movie about a kitchen.”

“The drive-in theaters have been gone for years. Don’t you think that’s like tearing down the Colosseum in Rome to build a mall?”

“Maybe not entirely like.”

“Yeah, you’re right. There never was a drive-in theater where they fed Christians to lions. So what did you want to see me about?”

The coffee was excellent. He sipped it, blew on it, and sipped some more, wondering how best to explain his mission.

Crunching through dry eucalyptus leaves on the front walk, he had known how he would tell her. When he met her, however, she was different from anyone he expected. His planned approach seemed wrong.

He knew little about Linda Paquette, but he sensed that she did not need to have her hand held while receiving bad news, that in fact too much concern might strike her as condescension.

Opting for directness, he said, “Somebody wants you dead.”

She smiled again. “What’s the gag?”

“He’s paying twenty thousand to get it done.”

She remained puzzled. “Dead in what sense?”

“Dead in the sense of shot in the head, dead forever.”

Succinctly, he told her about the events at the tavern: first being mistaken for the killer, then being mistaken for the man hiring the killer, then discovering that the killer was a cop.

She listened open-mouthed at first, but her astonishment faded rapidly. Her green eyes clouded, as if his words stirred long-settled sediment in those previously limpid pools.

When Tim finished, the woman sat in silence, sipping coffee, staring through the windshield.

He waited, but finally grew uneasy. “You do believe me?”

“I’ve known a lot of liars. You don’t sound like any of them.”

The pin spots, in which the car gleamed but also darkled, did not much brighten the interior. Though her face was softly shadowed, her eyes found light and gave it back.

He said, “You don’t seem surprised by what I’ve told you.”

“No.”

“So … then you know who he is, the one who wants you dead?”

“Not a clue.”

“An ex-husband? A boyfriend?”

“I’ve never been married. No boyfriend at the moment, and I never did have a crazy one.”

“A dispute with someone at work?”

“I’m self-employed. I work at home.”

“What do you do?”

“I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately,” she said. “What did this guy look like, the one who gave you the money?”

The description didn’t electrify her. She shook her head.

Tim said, “He has a dog named Larry. He once went skydiving with the dog. He had a brother named Larry, died at sixteen.”

“A guy capable of naming his dog after his dead brother—I’d know who he was even if he’d never told me about Larry or Larry.”

This was not playing out in any way that Tim had imagined it might. “But the skydiver can’t be a stranger.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wants you dead.”

“People are killed by strangers all the time.”

“But nobody hires someone to kill a perfect stranger.” He fished the folded photograph from his shirt pocket. “Where did he get this?”

“It’s my driver’s-license picture.”

“So he’s someone with access to the DMV digital-photo files.”

She returned the photograph. Tim put it in his shirt pocket again before he realized that it belonged to her more than to him.

He said, “You don’t know anyone who’d want you dead—yet you aren’t surprised.”

“There are people who want everybody dead. When you get over being surprised about that, you have a high amazement threshold.”

Direct, intense, her green gaze seemed to fillet his serried thoughts and to fold them aside like layers of dissected tissue, yet somehow it was an inviting rather than a cold stare.

“I’m curious,” she said, “about the way you’ve handled this.”

Taking her comment as disapproval or suspicion, he said, “I’m not aware of any other options.”

“You could have kept the ten thousand for yourself.”

“Somebody would have come looking for me.”

“Maybe not. Now … for sure someone will. You could have just passed my photo to the killer, with the money, and done a fade, got out of the way and let things unfold as they would have done if you’d never been there.”

“And then … where would I go?”

“To dinner. To a movie. Home to bed.”

“Is that what you’d have done?” he asked.

“I don’t interest me. You interest me.”

“I’m not an interesting guy.”

“Not the way you present yourself, no. What you’re hiding is what makes you interesting.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“About what happened in the bar. But … about you?”

The rearview mirror was angled toward him. He had avoided his eyes by meeting hers. Now he looked at his narrow reflection, and at once away, down at the ceramic parrot choked in his right hand.

“My coffee’s cold,” he said.

“Mine, too. When the killer left the tavern, you could have called the police.”

“Not after I saw he was a cop.”

“The tavern’s in Huntington Beach. I’m in Laguna Beach. He’s a cop in a different jurisdiction.”

“I don’t know his jurisdiction. The car was an unmarked sedan. He could be a Laguna Beach cop for all I know.”

“So. Now what, Tim?”

He needed to look at her and he dreaded looking at her, and he didn’t know why or how, within minutes of their meeting, she should have become the focus of either need or dread. He had never felt like this before, and although a thousand songs and movies had programmed him to call it love, he knew it wasn’t love. He wasn’t a man who fell in love at first sight. Besides, love didn’t have such an element of mortal terror as was a part of this feeling.

He said, “The only evidence I have to give the cops is the photo of you, but that’s no evidence at all.”

“The license number of the unmarked sedan,” she reminded him.

“That’s not evidence. It’s just a lead. I know someone who might be able to trace it for me and get me the driver’s name. Someone I can trust.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll figure something.”

Her gaze, which had not turned from him, had the gravitational force of twin moons, and inevitably the tide of his attention was pulled toward her.

Eye to eye again with her, he told himself to remember this moment, this tightening knot of terror that was also a loosening knot of wild exaltation, for when he realized the name for it, he would understand why he was suddenly walking out of the life he had known—and had sought—into a new life that he could not know and that he might come desperately to regret.

“You should leave this house tonight,” he said. “Stay somewhere you’ve never been before. Not with a friend or relative.”

“You think the killer’s coming?”

“Tomorrow, the next day, sooner or later, when he and the guy who hired him realize what happened.”

She didn’t appear to be afraid. “All right,” she said.

Her equanimity perplexed him.

His cell phone rang.

After Linda took his coffee mug, he answered the call.

Liam Rooney said, “He was just here, asking who was the big guy on the last stool.”

“Already. Damn. I figured a day or two. Was it the first or second guy?”

“The second. I took a closer look at him this time. Tim, he’s a freak. He’s a shark in shoes.”

Tim remembered the killer’s persistent dreamy smile, the dilated eyes hungry for light.

“What’s going on?” Liam asked.

“It’s about a woman,” Tim said, as he had said before. “I’ll take care of it.”

In retrospect, the killer had realized that something about the encounter in the tavern had not been right. He had probably called a contact number for the skydiver.

Through the windshield, the kitchen looked warm and cozy. On a wall hung a rack of cutlery.

“You can’t freeze me out like this,” said Rooney.

“I’m not thinking about you,” Tim said, opening the door and getting out of the coupe. “I’m thinking about Michelle. Keep your neck out of this—for her.”

Carrying both coffee mugs, Linda exited the Ford from the driver’s door.

“Exactly how long ago did the guy leave?” Tim asked Rooney.

“I waited maybe five minutes before calling you—in case he might come back and see me on the phone, and wonder. He looks like a guy who always puts two and two together.”

“Gotta go,” Tim said, pressed END, and pocketed the phone.

As Linda took the mugs to the sink, Tim selected a knife from the wall rack. He passed over the butcher knife for a shorter and pointier blade.

The Pacific Coast Highway offered the most direct route from the Lamplighter Tavern to this street in Laguna Beach. Even on a Monday evening, traffic could be unpredictable. Door to door, the trip might take forty minutes.

In addition to a detachable emergency beacon, maybe the unmarked sedan had a siren. In the last few miles of approach, the siren would not be used; they would never hear the killer coming.

Turning away from the sink, Linda saw the knife in Tim’s fist. She did not misinterpret the moment or need an explanation.

She said, “How long do we have?”

“Can you pack a suitcase in five minutes?”

“Quicker.”

“Do it.”

She glanced at the ’39 Ford.

“It’s too attention-getting,” Tim said. “You should leave it.”

“It’s my only car.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Her green gaze was as sharp as a shard of bottle glass. “What’s in this for you? Now you’ve told me, you could split.”

“This guy—he’ll want to waste me, too. If he gets my name.”

“And you think I’ll spill it, when he finds me.”

“Whether you spill it or not, he’ll get it. I need to know who he is, but more important, I need to know who hired him. Maybe when you’ve had more time to think about it, you’ll figure it out.”

She shook her head. “There’s nobody. If the only thing in this for you is the chance I’ll figure who wants me dead, then there’s nothing in this for you.”

“There’s something,” he disagreed. “Come on, pack what you need.”

She glanced at the ’39 Ford again. “I’ll be back for it.”

“When this is done.”

“I’m going to drive it all over, to wherever there’s something left from those days, something you can still see that they haven’t torn down yet or desecrated.”

Tim said, “The good old days.”

“They were good and they were bad. But they were different.” She hurried away to pack.

Tim turned off the kitchen lights. He went down the hall to the living room, and he switched off those lights, too.

At a window, he pulled back a sheer curtain and stood watching a scene that had gone as still as a miniature village in a glass paperweight.

He, too, had been glassed-in for a long time, by choice. Now and then he had lifted a hammer to shatter through to something, but he had never struck the blow because he didn’t know what he wanted on the other side of the glass.

Having strayed from a nearby canyon, perhaps emboldened by the round risen moon, a coyote climbed the gently sloping street. When it passed through lamplight, its eyes shone silver as if cataracted, but in shadows its gaze was luminous and red, and blind to nothing.

Six

As if following the spoor of the now vanished coyote, Tim drove north. He turned left at the stop sign and headed downhill toward the Pacific Coast Highway.

He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror. No one followed them.

“Where do you want to stay?” he asked.

“I’ll figure that out later.”

Still in blue jeans and a midnight-blue sweater, she had added a camel-colored corduroy jacket. She held her purse on her lap, and her carryall was in the backseat.

“Later when?”

“After we’ve seen the guy you can trust, the one who can trace that license-plate number.”

“I figured to go to him alone.”

“Aren’t I presentable?”

She was not as pretty as she had been in the photo, yet she struck him as somehow better looking. Her hair, such a dark brown that it seemed black, had been shorter than this, and calculatedly shaggy, when she had stood before the DMV camera.

“Totally presentable,” he assured her. “But with you there, he’ll be uneasy. He’ll want to know more of what it’s about.”

“So we tell him whatever sounds good.”

“This isn’t a guy that I lie to.”

“Is there one?”

“One what?”

“Never mind. Leave it to me. I’ll shine him up something he’ll like.”

“Not you, either,” Tim said. “We walk the line with this guy.”

“Who is he—your dad or something?”

“I owe him a lot. He’s solid. Pedro Santo. Pete. He’s a robbery-homicide detective.”

“So we’re going to the cops, after all?”

“Unofficially.”

They headed north along the coast. Southbound traffic was light. A few cars rocketed past them in excess of the speed limit, but none featured an emergency beacon.

To the west, the house-crowded bluffs descended to unpopulated lowlands. Beyond coastal scrub and wide beaches, the Pacific folded the sky down to itself at a black horizon.

Under the night-light of the sentinel moon, ruffled hems of surf and a decorative stitching that fringed the incoming waves suggested billows of fancy bedding under which the sea turned restlessly in sleep.

After a silence, Linda said, “The thing is, I don’t much like cops.”

She stared forward at the highway, but in the wash of headlights from approaching traffic, her unblinking eyes seemed to be focused on some other scene.

He waited for her to continue, but when she lapsed into silence again, he said, “Is there something I should know? Have you been in trouble sometime?”

She blinked. “Not me. I’m as straight as a new nail that never met a hammer.”

“Why does that sound to me like there was a hammer, maybe a lot of hammers, but you didn’t bend?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why it sounds that way to you. Maybe you’re always inferring hidden meaning when none is implied.”

“I’m just a bricklayer.”

“Most car mechanics I know—they think deeper than any college professor I’ve ever met. They have to. They live in the real world. A lot of masons must be the same.”

“There’s a reason we call ourselves stoneheads.”

She smiled. “Nice try.”

At Newport Coast Road, he turned right and headed inland. The land rose ahead, and behind them the sea was pressed down under a growing weight of night.

“I know this carpenter,” she said, “who loves metaphors because he thinks life itself is a metaphor, with mystery and hidden meaning in every moment. You know what a metaphor is?”

He said, “‘My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.’”

“Not bad for a stonehead.”

“It’s not mine. I heard it somewhere.”

“You remember where. The way you said it, you remember. Anyway, if this Santo is sharp, he’ll know I don’t like cops.”

“He’s sharp. But there’s nothing not to like about him.”

“I’m sure he’s a great guy. It’s not his fault if sometimes the law has no humility.”

Tim sifted those words a few times but was left with no meaning in his net.

“Maybe your friend is a boy scout with a badge,” she said, “but cops spook me. And not just cops.”

“Want to tell me what this is about?”

“It’s not about anything. It’s just the way I am.”

“We need help, and Pete Santo can give it.”

“I know. I’m just saying.”

When they topped the last of a series of hills, inland Orange County shimmered below them, a great panoply of millions of lights, a challenge to the stars, which were dimmed by this dazzle.

She said, “It seems so formidable, so solid, so enduring.”

“What does?”

“Civilization. But it’s as fragile as glass.” She glanced at him. “I better shut up. You’re starting to think I’m a nut case.”

“No,” Tim said. “Glass makes sense to me. Glass makes perfect sense.”

They traveled miles without speaking, and after a while he realized that theirs had become a comfortable silence. The night beyond the windows was an oblivion machine waiting to be triggered, but here in the Explorer, a kind of peace took temporary residence in his heart, and he felt that something good could happen, even something fine.

Seven

After walking through the entire bungalow, boldly turning on lights as he went, Krait returned to the bedroom.

The inexpensive white chenille bedspread was as smooth as the bedding of a military man. Not one tangle spoiled the fringed hem.

Krait had been in houses where the beds were unmade and the sheets were too seldom changed. Sloppiness offended him.

If a gun were allowed, an untidy person could be killed from a distance of at least a few feet. Then it mattered less that the target didn’t change underwear every day.

Often, however, the contract specified strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning, or another more intimate method of execution. If the victim turned out to be a slob, a potentially enjoyable task could become a distasteful chore.

When a person was being garroted from behind, for instance, he would in desperation attempt to reach back and blind his assailant. You could easily keep your eyes safe, but the victim might pull at your cheek, grip your chin, brush fingers across your lips, and if you suspected he was the type who didn’t always wash his hands after using the men’s room, you sometimes wondered if the good pay and the many benefits of your job really outweighed the negatives.

Linda Paquette’s closet was small and orderly. She didn’t have a lot of clothes.

Krait liked the simplicity of her wardrobe. He himself had always been a person of simple tastes.

From the shelf above the hanging garments, he took down a few boxes. None of them contained anything enlightening.

Curiosity about his target was forbidden. He wasn’t supposed to know any more about her than her name, address, and appearance.

Usually he would respect such a criterion in an assignment. The events at the tavern, however, required new rules for this project.

He hoped to find snapshots of family and friends, high-school yearbooks, mementos of holiday travels and of faded romances. No photographs stood on the dust-free dresser or on the nicely polished nightstands, either.

She seemed to have cut herself loose from her past. Krait did not know why she had done so, but he approved. He could deal more easily with people who were adrift, and alone.

He had been expected to stage the incident to look like a break-in, rape her, then kill her in some fashion that would encourage the police to believe he had been nothing more than a sexual psychopath and that she had been a randomly chosen victim.

The details of such a killing were invariably left to him. He had a genius for creating tableaus that convinced the best police profilers.

At the dresser, he opened drawers, searching for the photos and the revealing personal items that he had not discovered in the closet.

In spite of being forbidden, curiosity had infected Krait. He wanted to know why the big guy in the bar had played spoiler. What about the woman had encouraged the barfly to take such risks?

Krait’s work was usually cut-and-dried. A lesser man, incapable of enjoying the subtle nuances of this profession, would have been bored after a few years. Krait found his work satisfying, in part because of the comforting sameness of his assignments.

After cleanliness, familiarity was the quality that Krait valued most highly in any experience. When he found a film that he enjoyed, he would watch it once or twice a month, sometimes twice in an evening. Often he ate the same dinner every night for a week or two.

For all their variety of appearance, people were as predictable as the plot turns in a film that he had committed to heart. A man whom Krait admired had once said that human beings were sheep, and in most matters, that was true.

In Krait’s experience, however, as regarded his most intimate work with the species, human beings were inferior to sheep. Sheep were docile, yes, but vigilant. Unlike many people, sheep were always aware that predators existed and were alert for the scent and the schemes of wolves.

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves that it was a dog.

They denied real threats by focusing their fear on the least likely of armageddons: a massive asteroid striking the earth, superhurricanes twice as big as Texas, the Y2K implosion of civilization, nuclear power plants melting holes all the way through the planet, a new Hitler suddenly rising from the ranks of hapless televangelists with bad hair.

Krait found people to be less like sheep than like cattle. He moved among them as if invisible. They grazed dreamily, confident in the security of the herd, even as he butchered them one by one.

His work was his pleasure, and he would have both in abundance until such a day as some more flamboyant murderer hurled fire at the herd, stampeding them by the tens of thousands over a cliff. Then the cattle might be wary, and for a while Krait would find his job more difficult.

He wanted to know more about the woman, Linda Paquette, because he hoped that through her he might learn about the man who had intervened to spare her from execution. Soon he would receive a name for that interloper, but he didn’t have one yet.

In her dresser drawers he found only clothes, but they told him things about her. She had many socks in various colors but only two pairs of nylons. Her underwear were simple cotton, much like men’s briefs, without lace or other frills.

The simplicity of these garments charmed him.

And they smelled so fresh. He wondered what detergent she used, and hoped it was a brand friendly to the environment.

After closing the last of the drawers, he regarded his face in the mirror above the dresser, and he liked what he saw. No flush had risen to his cheeks. His mouth was neither tight with tension nor loose with desire.

The reflection of a framed painting drew his attention from his face before he finished admiring himself. Smile faltering, he turned away from the mirror and toward the true image.

He should have noticed the painting immediately on entering the room. No other art adorned the walls, and the only decorative items on the pair of nightstands were a luminous clock and an old Motorola radio, both from the 1930s and made out of Bakelite.

He took no offense at the clock or the radio, but the painting—a cheap print—vexed him. He took it off the wall, smashed the glass on the footboard of the bed, and peeled the artwork from the frame.

After folding the print three times, he slipped it into an inner pocket of his sports coat. He would save it until he found the woman.

When he had stripped away her clothes and her defenses, he would shove the wadded poster down her throat, clamp her mouth shut, and insist that she swallow it, and when it proved too much to swallow, he would let her gag it up, only so that he could shove it somewhere else, and then somewhere else again, and shove other things, too, shove in anything he wanted, until she pleaded with him to kill her.

Unfortunately, he lived in an age when such measures were sometimes necessary.

Returning to the mirror, he liked what he saw, as before. Judging by his reflection, he possessed a blameless heart, and his thoughts were full of charity.

Appearances were important. Appearances were all that really mattered. And his work.

In her well-ordered bathroom vanity, he didn’t find anything of interest except a brand of lip balm that he had never used.

Lately, humidity had been low, and his lips had been constantly chapped. The product that he usually relied upon had not helped much.

He smelled the balm and detected no offensive perfume, licked it and tasted an acceptably bland orange-cream flavor. He greased his lips, which at once felt cooler, and pocketed the tube.

In the living room, Krait pulled from the shelves some of the old hardcover books in the woman’s collection. They had quaint but colorful jackets, and were all fiction by popular novelists of the 1920s and ’30s: Earl Derr Biggers, Mary Roberts Rinehart, E. Phillips Oppenheim, J. B. Priestley, Frank Swinnerton…. With the exceptions of Somerset Maugham and P.G. Wodehouse, most were forgotten.

Krait might have taken a book that looked interesting, except that these authors were all dead. When he read a book that expressed inappropriate views, Krait sometimes felt obliged to search out the author and correct him. He never read books by dead authors because the satisfaction of a face-to-face discussion with a living wordsmith could not be equaled by exhumation and desecration of an author’s corpse.

In the kitchen, he found two dirty coffee mugs in the sink. He stood for a while, considering them.

As neat as she was, Linda would not have left this mess unless she had an urgent reason to get out of the house. A companion had joined her for coffee. Perhaps the companion had convinced her that she dared not delay long enough to wash the mugs.

In addition to what the mugs suggested, Krait was interested in the one with the parrot handle. He found it charming. He washed it, dried it, and wrapped it in a dishtowel to take it with him.

A knife was missing from the rack of fine cutlery, and that was interesting, too.

From the refrigerator, he withdrew the remaining half of a cinnamon-dusted homemade egg-custard pie. He cut a generous slice for himself and put it on a plate. He put the plate on the kitchen table, with a fork.

He poured a cup of coffee from the pot that stood on the warming plate. The brew had not yet turned bitter. He laced it with milk.

Sitting at the table, he studied the ’39 Ford while he ate the pie and drank the coffee. The egg custard was excellent. He would have to remember to compliment her on it.

As he finished the coffee, his cell phone vibrated. When he checked, he had received a text message.

Earlier, when Krait had returned to the Lamplighter Tavern, seeking the name of the big man on the end stool, the bartender had pleaded ignorance.

Five minutes after Krait left the joint, however, Liam Rooney had phoned someone. In this text message were the number that had been called and the name of the person to whom that telephone was registered—TIMOTHY CARRIER.

On screen appeared an address for Carrier, too, although Krait doubted that it would be of immediate use to him. If Carrier was the barfly and if he had hurried to Laguna Beach to warn the woman, he would not be witless enough to return home.

In addition to a name and address, Krait had wanted to know the occupation of this guy. Carrier was a licensed masonry contractor.

Krait stored the data, and the phone vibrated again. A photo of the mason appeared with megapixel clarity, and he was without doubt the man in the tavern.

In the wet of business, Krait worked alone, but he had awesome data and technical support.

He pocketed the phone without saving the photo. He might need to know more about Carrier, but not yet.

A final cup of coffee remained in the pot, and he sweetened the brew with a generous slug of milk. He drank it at the table.

In spite of the boldness with which the kitchen and garage had been combined, the space was cozy.

He liked the entire bungalow, the clean simplicity of it. Anyone could live here, and you wouldn’t know who he really was.

Sooner or later, it would come on the market. Acquiring the property of a person he had murdered would be too risky, but the thought pleased him.

Krait washed his cup, his plate, his fork, the coffeepot, and the FDR mug that had been used by either Linda or her guest. He dried them and put them away. He rinsed the stainless-steel sink, then wiped it dry with paper towels.

Just before he left, he went to the Ford, opened the driver’s door, stepped back just far enough to avoid being splashed, unzipped his pants and urinated in the vehicle. This didn’t please him, but it was necessary.

Eight

Pete Santo lived in a modest stucco house with a shy dog named Zoey and a dead fish named Lucille.

Handsomely stuffed and mounted, Lucille, a marlin, hung above the desk in the study.

Pete wasn’t a fisherman. The marlin had come with the house when he bought it.

He had named it after his ex-wife, who had divorced him when, after two years of marriage, she realized that she couldn’t change him. She wanted him to leave the police department, to become a real-estate agent, to dress with more style, and to have his scar fixed.

The marriage collapsed when she bought him a pair of tasseled loafers. He wouldn’t wear them. She wouldn’t return them to the store. He wouldn’t allow them in his closet. She tried to put one of them down the garbage disposal. The Roto-Rooter bill was huge.

Now, as sharp-toothed Lucille peered down at him with one glaring gimlet eye, Pete Santo stood at his desk, watching as the Department of Motor Vehicles home page appeared on the computer screen. “If you can’t tell me what it’s about, who could you tell?”

Tim said, “Nobody. Not yet. Maybe in a day, two days, when things … clarify.”

“What things?”

“The unclarified things.”

“Oh. That’s clear now. When the unclarified things clarify, then you can tell me.”

“Maybe. Look, I know this might get your ass in a sling.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters,” Tim said.

“Don’t insult me. It doesn’t matter.” Pete sat at the computer. “If they bust me out of the department, I’ll be a real-estate agent.”

He entered his name, badge number, and access code, whereupon the Department of Motor Vehicles records surrendered to him as a nubile maiden to a lover.

Bashful Zoey, a black Lab, watched from behind an armchair, while Linda dropped to one knee and, with cooing sounds and declarations of adoration, tried to coax the dog into the open.

Pete typed the license number that Tim had given him, and the DMV database revealed that the plates had been issued for a white Chevrolet registered not to any law-enforcement agency but to one Richard Lee Kravet.

“You know him?” Pete asked.

Tim shook his head. “Never heard of him. I thought the car would turn out to be a plainwrap department sedan.”

Surprised, Pete said, “This guy you want to know about—he’s a cop? I’m scoping out a cop for you?”

“If he’s a cop, he’s a bad cop.”

“Look at me here, what I’m doing for you, using police power for a private inquiry. I’m a bad cop.”

“This guy, if he’s a cop, he’s seriously bad. At worst, Petey, by comparison, you’re a naughty cop.”

“Richard Lee Kravet. Don’t know him. If he has a shield, I don’t think it’s one of ours.”

Pete worked for the Newport Beach Police Department, but he lived in an unincorporated part of the county, nearer to Irvine than to Newport Beach, because even pre-divorce, he couldn’t afford a house in the city that he served.

“Can you get me this guy’s driver’s license?” Tim asked.

“Yeah, why not, but when I’m a real-estate agent, I’m going to wear whatever shoes I want.”

On her belly, Zoey had crawled halfway around the armchair. Her tail thumped the floor in response to Linda’s coaxing.

The one small lamp left most of the room dusted with shadows, and the alchemic light from the monitor gave Pete a tin man’s face, his smooth scar shining like a bad weld.

He was handsome enough that a half-inch-wide slash of pale tissue, curving from ear to chin, did not make him ugly. Plastic surgery would reduce or even eliminate his disfigurement, but he chose not to submit to the healing scalpel.

A scar is not always a flaw. Sometimes a scar may be redemption inscribed in the flesh, a memorial to something endured, to something lost.

The driver’s license appeared on the screen. The photo was of the killer with the Mona Lisa smile.

When the printer produced a copy, Pete handed it to Tim.

According to the license, Kravet was thirty-six years old. His street address was in Anaheim.

Having rolled onto her back and put all four paws in the air, Zoey purred like a cat as she received a gentle tummy rub.

Tim still had no evidence of a murder-for-hire plot. Richard Kravet would deny every detail of their meeting in the tavern.

“Now what?” Pete asked.

As she charmed the dog, Linda looked up at Tim. Her green eyes, though remaining wells of mystery, floated to him the clear desire to keep the nature of their dilemma strictly between them, at least for the time being.

He had known Pete for more than eleven years, this woman for less than two hours, yet he chose the discretion for which she wordlessly pleaded.

“Thanks, Pete. You didn’t need to climb out on this limb.”

“That’s where I’m most comfortable.”

This was true. Pete Santo had always been a risk-taker, though never reckless.

As Linda rose from the dog, Pete said to her, “You and Tim known each other long?”

“Not long,” she said.

“How’d you meet?”

“Over coffee.”

“Like at Starbucks?”

“No, not there,” she said.

“Paquette. That’s an unusual name.”

“Not in my family.”

“It’s lovely. P-a-c-k-e-t-t-e?”

She didn’t confirm the spelling.

“So you’re the strong silent type.”

She smiled. “And you’re always a detective.”

Shy Zoey stayed close to Linda all the way to the front door.

From various points in the night yard, a hidden choir of toads harmonized.

Linda rubbed the dog gently behind the ears, kissed it on the head, and walked across the lawn to the Explorer in the driveway.

“She doesn’t like me,” Pete said.

“She likes you. She just doesn’t like cops.”

“If you marry her, do I have to change jobs?”

“I’m not going to marry her.”

“I think she’s the kind, you don’t get a thing without a ring.”

“I don’t want a thing. There’s nothing between us.”

“There will be,” Pete predicted. “She’s got something.”

“Something what?”

“I don’t know. But it sure is something.”

Tim watched Linda get into the Explorer. As she pulled the door shut behind her, he said, “She makes good coffee.”

“I’ll bet she does.”

Although the secreted toads had continued singing when Linda had walked among them, they fell silent when Tim set foot on the grass.

“Class,” Pete said. “That’s part of the something.” And when Tim had taken two further steps, Pete added, “Sangfroid.”

Tim stopped, looked back at the detective. “Sang what?”

“Sangfroid. It’s French. Self-possession, poise, steadiness.”

“Since when do you know French?”

“This college professor, taught French literature, killed a girl with a chisel. Dismembered her with a stone-cutter.”

“Stone-cutter?”

“He was also a sculptor. He almost got away with it ’cause he had such sangfroid. But I nailed him.”

“I’m pretty sure Linda hasn’t dismembered anyone.”

“I’m just saying she’s self-possessed. But if she ever wants to dismember me, I’m okay with that.”

“Compadre, you disappoint me.”

Pete grinned. “I knew there was something between you.”

“There’s nothing,” Tim assured him, and went to the Explorer in a silence of toads.

Nine

As Tim reversed out of the driveway, Linda said, “He seems all right for a cop. He has a sweet pooch.”

“He’s also got a dead fish named for his ex-wife.”

“Well, maybe she was a cold fish.”

“He says he won’t mind if you want to dismember him.”

“What does that mean?”

Shifting into drive, Tim said, “It’s sand-dog humor.”

“Sand dog?”

Surprised that he had opened this door, he at once closed it. “Never mind.”

“What’s a sand dog?”

His cell phone rang, sparing him the need to respond to her. Thinking this might be Rooney with some additional news, Tim had it on the third ring. The screen didn’t reveal the caller’s ID.

“Hello?”

“Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“Is she there with you?”

Tim said nothing.

“Tell her she makes an excellent egg-custard pie.”

Conjured by the voice, into memory rose those impossibly dilated eyes, greedy for light.

“Her coffee isn’t bad, either,” said Richard Lee Kravet. “And I liked the mug with the parrot handle so much that I took it with me.”

This residential neighborhood had little traffic; at the moment, none. Tim came to a stop in the middle of the street, half a block from Pete Santo’s house.

The killer had gotten Tim’s name from someone other than Rooney. How he had obtained the unlisted cell-phone number was a mystery.

Although she couldn’t hear the killer, Linda clearly knew who had called.

“I’m back on track, Tim, no thanks to you. I’ve been given another picture of her, to replace the one you kept.”

Linda picked up the printout of Kravet’s driver’s license and held it to the window, studying his face in the glow of a nearby streetlamp.

“Before the coup de grâce,” said Kravet, “I’m supposed to rape her. She looks sweet. Is that why you sent me away with half my money? Did you see this skank’s picture, want to rape her yourself?”

“This is over,” Tim said. “You can’t put it together again.”

“What—you’ll never go home, she’ll never go home, you’ll both run forever?”

“We’re going to the police.”

“I have no problem with that, Tim. You should go to the police at once. It’s the responsible thing to do.”

Tim considered saying I know you’re a cop, I saw you drive away from the tavern, now I know your name, but revealing this knowledge to Kravet would diminish its value.

“Why are you doing this, Tim? What is she to you?”

“I admire her sangfroid.”

“Don’t be silly now.”

“It’s a French word.”

“Spend the night with her if you want. Do her a couple of times. Enjoy yourself. Then drop her off at her place in the morning. I’ll take it from there, and I’ll forget you ever interfered.”

“I’ll consider your suggestion.”

“You better do more than that, Tim. You better make a deal with me, and convince me you mean it. Because I’m still coming, you know.”

“Have fun combing through the haystack.”

“The haystack isn’t as large as you think, Tim. And you’re a lot bigger than a needle. I’ll find you soon. Sooner than you can imagine—and then no deal is possible.”

Kravet terminated the call.

At once, Tim pressed *69, but Kravet’s cell was shielded against a call-back.

Ahead, a car ran the stop sign, roared through the intersection. As it bounced through a drainage swale, its headlights swept up across the Explorer’s windshield, then down.

Tim shifted his foot from brake to accelerator, and swung away from the center line, expecting the oncoming vehicle to angle into his lane and attempt to block him.

The car shot past, taillights dwindling in the rearview mirror.

Having swerved into the parking lane, Tim braked hard to a halt just short of the intersection.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“I thought maybe it was him.”

“That car? How could it be him?”

“I don’t know. It couldn’t be, I guess.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Sure.” A sudden breeze shook the ficus tree that overhung the streetlamp, and leaf shadows swarmed like black butterflies across the windshield. “If they sell sangfroid at 7-Eleven, I should stop and buy a six-pack.”

Ten

The residence in Anaheim proved to be a single-story structure dating to the 1950s. Pierced and scalloped eave boards, rococo carved shutters, and patterned Alpine door surrounds failed to convince that this California ranch house belonged in Switzerland, or anywhere.

Penetrating the branches of two huge stone pines, moonlight painted scattered patches of faux ice on the age-silvered cedar-shingle roof, but not a single lamp brightened any window.

Flanking Kravet’s house were a Spanish casita and a New England cottage. Lights were on in the cottage, but the casita appeared to be uninhabited, the windows dark, the yard in need of mowing.

Tim twice drove past the Kravet house, then parked around the corner, on a side street.

He compared his wristwatch to the SUV’s clock. Both read 9:32.

“I’ll need maybe fifteen minutes,” he said.

“What if he’s in there?”

“Just sitting in the dark? No. If he’s anywhere, he’s staking out my place—or searching it.”

“He might come back. You shouldn’t go in without a gun.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

From her open purse, she withdrew a pistol. “I’ll go with you.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“From my nightstand drawer. It’s a Kahr K9 semi-auto.”

The thing was coming, all right, the thing that was always coming for him, that could never be escaped.

At the tavern, he had been in a place that had always been right for him, where he was just another guy on a bar stool, where from the perspective of the front door, he was the smallest man in the room. But this evening it had been the right place at the wrong time.

He had found a way of living that was like train wheels on a track, turning on a known path, toward a predictable future. The thing pursuing him, however, was not only his past but also his fate, and the rails that led away from it also led inexorably to it.

“I don’t want to kill him,” Tim said.

“Me neither. The gun is just insurance. We’ve got to find something in his place the cops can hang him with.”

Leaning closer to see the weapon, he said, “I’m not familiar with that gun.” She didn’t wear perfume, but she had a faint scent he liked. The scent of clean hair, well-scrubbed skin.

She said, “Eight-shot 9-millimeter. Smooth action.”

“You’ve used it.”

“On targets. A shooting range.”

“There’s nobody you fear, yet you keep a pistol by your bed.”

“I said nobody I know would want me dead,” she corrected. “But I don’t know everybody.”

“You have a concealed-carry permit?”

“No. Do you have a permit to break into his house?”

“I don’t think you should go in there with me.”

“I’m not sitting here alone, with or without the gun.”

He sighed. “You don’t exactly have attitude….”

“What do I have, exactly?”

“Something,” he said, and got out of the Explorer.

He opened the tailgate and retrieved a long-handled flashlight from the shallow well in which the car jack was stored.

Together they walked to Kravet’s house. The neighborhood was quiet. A dog barked, but in the distance.

As iridescent as a snake’s skin, thin ravels of silvery clouds peeled off the face of a molting moon.

A wall defined the property line between the dark casita and the Alpine house. A gate opened onto a passageway alongside the garage.

Suddenly soughing through the stone pines, the inconstant breeze shook dry needles down onto the concrete path.

At the side door to the garage, Tim switched on the flashlight just long enough to determine that there was no deadbolt.

Linda held the extinguished flashlight while he slipped a credit card between the door and frame. He quickly popped the simple latch.

In the two-car garage, with the door closed behind them, Linda switched on the flashlight again. No vehicles were present.

“Masonry’s not your only skill,” she whispered.

“Everybody knows how to do that door thing.”

“I don’t.”

Most likely the front and back entrances featured deadbolts, but the door between the garage and the house had only a cheap lockset. Many people think the appearance of having defenses is good enough.

“What kind of prison time do you get for burglary?” she asked.

“This is housebreaking, not burglary. Maybe ten years?”

The lock disengaged, and she said, “Let’s be quick.”

“First, let’s be sure there’s not a pit bull.”

Taking the flashlight from her, he eased the door open. He played the beam through the narrow gap, but saw no animal eyeshine.

The kitchen was not what he expected. The flashlight found chintz curtains. A canister set painted like teddy bears. The wall clock, in the form of a cat, featured a swinging tail for a pendulum.

In the dining room, the linen tablecloth was trimmed with lace. A bowl of ceramic fruit stood in the center of the table.

Colorful afghans protected the living-room sofa. A pair of well-used recliners faced a big-screen TV. The art was reproductions of paintings of big-eyed children popular about the year Tim was born.

Turning to follow the sweep and probe of the light, Linda said, “Would a hit man live at home with his mom and dad?”

The larger bedroom offered a rose-patterned comforter, silk flowers, and a vanity with mother-of-pearl combs and brushes. In the closet were men’s and women’s clothes.

The second bedroom served as a combination sewing room and home office. In a desk drawer, Tim found a checkbook and several bills—telephone, electrical, TV cable—awaiting payment.

Linda whispered, “Did you hear something?”

He switched off the light. They stood in darkness, listening.

The house wore silence like a coat of armor, with an occasional click or creak of gauntlet and gusset. None of the small noises seemed to be more than the settling pains of an aging structure.

When Tim had convinced himself that nothing in the silence was listening to him, he switched on the flashlight.

In the darkness, Linda had drawn the pistol from her purse.

Examining the checkbook, Tim found that the account was in the name of Doris and Leonard Halberstock. The bills awaiting payment were for the Halberstocks, as well.

“He doesn’t live here,” Tim said.

“Maybe he used to.”

“More likely, he’s never seen this place.”

“So what’re we doing here?”

“Housebreaking.”

Eleven

Linda drove while Tim sat with her open purse on his lap, the gun in the purse. He was on the phone with Pete Santo.

Having gone back into the DMV database as they spoke, Pete said, “Actually, the car that’s registered to Kravet isn’t at the Anaheim address. In that case, it’s Santa Ana.”

Tim repeated the address aloud as he wrote it on the printout of Kravet’s driver’s license. “It’s no more real than the other one.”

“You ready to tell me what this is about?” Pete asked.

“It’s not about anything that happened in your jurisdiction.”

“I think of myself as a detective to the world.”

“Nobody’s been killed,” Tim said, and mentally added yet.

“Remember, I’m in the robbery-homicide division.”

“The only thing that’s been stolen is a coffee mug with a ceramic parrot for a handle.”

Scowling, Linda declared, “I loved that mug.”

“What’d she say?” Pete asked.

“She says she loved that mug.”

Pete said, “You want me to believe this is all about a stolen coffee mug?”

“And an egg-custard pie.”

“There was only half a pie left,” she said.

On the phone, Pete said, “What’d she say?”

“She says it was only half a pie.”

“But it’s still not right,” she said.

“She says,” Tim reported, “even half a pie, it’s not right.”

“It’s not just the cost of the ingredients,” she said.

“It’s not the cost of the ingredients,” Tim repeated to Pete.

“He’s stolen my labor, too, and my sense of security.”

“He’s stolen her labor, too, and her sense of security.”

“So you want me to believe,” Pete said, “this is about nothing more than a stolen coffee mug and half an egg-custard pie?”

“No. It’s about something else entirely. The mug and the pie are just associated crimes.”

“What’s the something else entirely?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Listen, is there any way to find out if Kravet has another driver’s license under a different name?”

“What name?”

“I don’t know. But if the address in Anaheim was bogus, then maybe the name is, too. Does the DMV have any facial-recognition software that could search its files for a repeat of Kravet’s image?”

“This is California, dude. The DMV can’t keep its public restrooms clean.”

“Sometimes,” Tim said, “I wonder if The Incredible Hulk had been a bigger hit on TV, ran a few more years—maybe Lou Ferrigno would be governor. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I think I would trust Lou Ferrigno,” Pete said.

To Linda, Tim said, “He says he would trust Lou Ferrigno.”

“I would, too,” she said. “There’s a humility about him.”

“She says Lou Ferrigno has humility.”

Pete said, “That’s probably because he had to overcome deafness and a speech impediment to become an actor.”

“If Lou Ferrigno were governor, the state wouldn’t be bankrupt, DMV restrooms would be clean, and you’d have that facial-recognition software. But since he’s not the governor, is there any other way you can search to see if Kravet has a license under a different name?”

“I’ve been thinking about that while we’ve been talking about Lou Ferrigno,” Pete said.

“I’m impressed.”

“I’ve also been rubbing Zoey’s ears the way she likes.”

“You’re a full-on multitasker.”

“There’s something I can try. It might work. Keep your cell charged, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Ten-four, holy one.”

As Tim terminated the call, Linda said, “Holy one?”

“Santo means ‘saint.’ Sometimes we call him holy one.”

“We?”

Tim shrugged. “Some of us guys.”

While Tim had been on the phone, Linda had set out for Santa Ana. They were ten minutes from the address where, according to the DMV, the Chevy sedan registered to Kravet might be found.

“You and Santo,” she said, “you’ve been through something together.”

“We’ve known each other a long time.”

“Yeah, but you’ve been through something, too.”

“It wasn’t college. Neither of us went to college.”

“I didn’t think it was college.”

“It wasn’t an experimental gay relationship, either.”

“I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t a gay relationship.” She stopped at a red traffic light and turned that analytic green gaze on him.

“There you go again with those things,” he said.

“What things?”

“Those eyes. That look. When you go carving at somebody with that look, you should have a medic standing by to sew up the wound.”

“Have I wounded you?”

“Not mortally.”

The traffic light didn’t change. She continued to stare at him.

“Okay,” he said. “Me and Pete, we went to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert once. It was hell. We got through that hell together.”

“If you don’t like Peter, Paul and Mary, why did you go?”

He said, “The holy one was dating this girl, Barbara Ellen, she was into retro-folk groups.”

“Who were you dating?”

“Her cousin. Just that one night. It was hell. They sang ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’ and ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,’ and ‘Lemon Tree’ and ‘Tom Dooley,’ they just wouldn’t stop. We’re lucky we got out of there with our sanity.”

“I didn’t know Peter, Paul and Mary performed anymore. I didn’t even know they were all still alive.”

“These were Peter, Paul and Mary impersonators. You know, like Beatlemania.” He glanced at the traffic light. “A car could rust waiting for this light to change.”

“What was her name?”

“Whose name?”

“The cousin you were dating.”

“She wasn’t my cousin. She was Barbara Ellen’s cousin.”

“So what was her name?” she persisted.

“Susannah.”

“Did she come from Alabama with a banjo on her knee?”

“I’m just telling you what happened, since you wanted to know.”

“It must be true. You couldn’t make it up.”

“It’s too weird, isn’t it?”

“What I’m saying,” she said, “is I don’t think you could make anything up.”

“All right then. So now you know—me and Pete, our bonding experience, that night of hell. They sang ‘If I Had a Hammer’ twice.” He pointed to the traffic signal. “Light’s green.”

Crossing the intersection, she said, “You’ve been through something together, but it wasn’t just Peter Pauland Marymania.”

He decided to go on the offensive. “So what do you do for a living, besides being self-employed and working at home?”

“I’m a writer.”

“What do you write?”

“Books.”

“What kind of books?”

“Painful books. Depressing, stupid, gut-wrenching books.”

“Just the thing for the beach. Have they been published?”

“Unfortunately. And the critics love them.”

“Would I know any titles?”

“No.”

“You want to try me?”

“No. I’m not going to write them anymore, especially not if I end up dead, but even if I don’t end up dead, I’m going to write something else.”

“What’re you going to write?”

“Something that isn’t full of anger. Something in which the sentences don’t drip with bitterness.”

“Put that quote on the cover. ‘The sentences don’t drip with bitterness.’ I’d buy a book like that in a minute. Do you write under the name Linda Paquette, or do you use a pen name?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing.”

“I didn’t clam up on you.”

She glanced sideways at him, cocking one eyebrow.

For a while they rode in silence through an area where the prostitutes dressed only slightly less brazenly than Britney Spears, where the winos sat with their backs against the building walls instead of sprawling full-length on the pavement. Then they came into a less-nice precinct, where even the young gangsters didn’t venture in their low-rider street rods and glitterized Cadillac Escalades.

They passed grungy one-story buildings and fenced storage yards, scrap-metal dealers that were probably chop-shop operators, a sports bar with windows painted black and the air of a place that included cockfights in its definition of sports, before Linda pulled to the curb in front of a vacant lot.

“According to the numbers on the flanking buildings,” she said, “this is the address on the registration for that Chevy.” A chain-link fence surrounded a weed-filled empty lot.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Let’s get something to eat.”

“He said he’d find us sooner than you think,” she reminded Tim.

“Hired killers,” he said, “are so full of big talk.”

“You know about hired killers, do you?”

“They act so tough, so big-bad-wolf-here-I-come. You said you hadn’t eaten. Neither have I. Let’s have dinner.”

She drove to a middle-class area of Tustin. Here, the winos sucked down their poison in barrooms, where they belonged, and the prostitutes were not encouraged to strut half-naked in public as if they were pop-music divas.

The coffee shop was open all night. The air smelled of bacon and French fries, and good coffee.

They sat in a window booth with a view of the Explorer in the parking lot, the traffic passing in the street beyond, and the moon silently drowning in a sudden sea of clouds.

She ordered a bacon cheeseburger and fries—plus a buttered muffin to eat while she was waiting for the rest of it.

After Tim ordered his bacon cheeseburger with mayonnaise and requested that the fries be well done, he said to Linda, “Trim as you are, I was sure you’d order a salad.”

“Right. I’m going to graze on arugula so I’ll feel good about myself when some terrorist vaporizes me tomorrow with a nuke.”

“Does a coffee shop like this have arugula?”

“These days, arugula is everywhere. It’s even easier to get than a venereal disease.”

The waitress returned with a root beer for Linda and a cherry Coke for Tim.

Outside, a car pulled off the street, drove past the Explorer, and parked in the farther end of the lot.

“You must exercise,” Tim said. “What do you do for exercise?”

“I brood.”

“That burns up calories, does it?”

“If you think about how the world’s coming apart, you can easily get the ticker above a hundred thirty and keep it there for hours.”

The headlights of the recently arrived car switched off. Nobody got out of the vehicle.

The buttered muffin was served, and Tim watched her eat it while he sipped his cherry Coke. He wished he were a buttered muffin.

He said, “This sort of feels like a date, doesn’t it?”

“If this feels like a date to you,” she said, “your social life is even more pathetic than mine.”

“I’m not proud. This feels nice, having dinner with a girl.”

“Don’t tell me this is how you get dates. The old a-hit-man-is-after-you-come-with-me-at-once gambit.”

Even by the time the burgers and fries arrived, no one had gotten out of the car at the farther end of the parking lot.

“Dating isn’t easy anymore,” Tim said. “Finding someone, I mean. Everybody wants to talk about American Idol and Pilates.”

She said, “And I don’t want to listen to a guy talk about his designer socks and what he’s thinking of doing with his hair.”

“Guys talk about that?” he asked dubiously.

“And about where he gets his chest waxed. When they finally make a move on you, it’s like fighting off your girlfriend.”

The distance and the shadows prevented Tim from seeing who was in the car. Maybe it was just some unhappy couple having an argument before a late dinner.

After an enjoyable conversation and a satisfying meal, Tim said, “I’m going to need your gun.”

“If you don’t have money, I’ll pay. There’s no reason to shoot our way out of here.”

“Well, there might be,” he said.

“You mean the white Chevy sedan in the parking lot.”

Surprised, he said, “I guess writers are pretty observant.”

“Not in my experience. How did he find us? Was the sonofabitch there somewhere when we stopped at that vacant lot? He must have followed us from there.”

“I can’t see the license plate. Maybe this isn’t him. Just a similar car.”

“Yeah, right. Maybe it’s Peter, Paul and Mary.”

Tim said, “I’d like you to leave ahead of me, but by the back door, through the kitchen.”

“That’s what I usually say to a date.”

“There’s an alley behind this place. Turn right, run to the end of the block. I’ll pick you up there.”

“Why don’t we both go out the back way, leave your SUV?”

“We’re dead on foot. And stealing a car doubles our trouble.”

“So you’re just going to go shoot it out with him?”

“He doesn’t know I’ve seen his car. He thinks he’s anonymous. When you don’t come out with me, he’ll think you’re in the restroom, you’ll be along any moment.”

“What’s he going to do when you drive off without me?”

“Maybe he’ll come in here looking for you. Maybe he’ll follow me. I don’t know. What I do know is if we go out the front door together, he’ll shoot us both.”

As she considered the situation, she chewed her lower lip.

Tim realized that he was staring too intently at her lip. When he raised his eyes, he saw that she had been watching him stare, so he said, “If you want, I could chew that for you.”

“If you’re not going to shoot him,” she said, “why can’t I take the pistol with me?”

“I’m not going to start the shooting. But if he opens fire on me, I’d like to have some option besides throwing my shoes at him.”

“I really like this little gun.”

“I promise I won’t break it.”

“Do you know how to use a pistol?”

“I’m not one of those guys who waxes his chest.”

Reluctantly, she passed her purse across the table.

Tim put the purse on the booth beside him, glanced around to be certain that he wasn’t watched by one of the few other customers or a waitress, fished out the pistol, and slipped it under his Hawaiian shirt, under his belt.

Her stare was not sharp any longer, but as solemn and knowing as the sea, and it seemed to him that right then she took down into her depths a new understanding of him.

“They’re open twenty-four hours,” she said. “We could just sit here until he goes away.”

“We could tell ourselves he isn’t really out there, it’s someone else, nothing to do with us. We could tell ourselves all the way out the door, just walk into it and get it over with. A lot of people would.”

She said, “Not a lot would have in 1939.”

“Too bad your Ford isn’t a real time machine.”

“I’d go back there. I’d go back all the way. Jack Benny on the radio, Benny Goodman from the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria…”

He reminded her: “Hitler in Czechoslovakia, in Poland…”

“I’d go back to it all.”

The waitress asked if they wanted anything more. Tim requested the check.

Still no one had gotten out of the white Chevy. Traffic on the street had diminished. The incoming tide of clouds had extinguished the moon.

When the waitress brought the check, Tim had the money ready to pay it and to tip her.

“Turn right in the alley,” he reminded Linda. “Run to the end of the block. Look for me coming west on the main street.”

They slid out of the booth. She put a hand on his arm, and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek, but then she turned away.

Under his belt, the gun felt cold against his abdomen.

Twelve

When Tim Carrier pushed through the glass door and exited the coffee shop, all the air seemed to have escaped the night, leaving a vacuum that could not sustain him.

Along the street, with swish and clatter, queen palms shuddered in a freshening breeze that belied the impression of airlessness.

After a shallow breath gave way to a deeper one, he was all right, and he was ready.

His paralysis had not been caused by fear of Kravet, but by dread of what would come after he dealt with Kravet. Over the years, he had successfully sought anonymity. This time it might elude him.

Pretending to be at ease, showing no interest in the distant Chevy, he walked directly to the Explorer. Behind the wheel, when the interior lights went off, he glanced once toward the suspect vehicle.

From this better vantage point, he could see a man in the car, the gray smear of a face. He was not close enough to discern any details, and couldn’t tell if this might be the man to whom he had given ten thousand dollars in the tavern.

Tim withdrew the pistol from under his belt and put it on the passenger’s seat.

He started the engine but didn’t switch on the headlights. At little more than an idle, he coasted toward the restaurant, as though intending to pick up Linda near the entrance.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the driver’s door of the Chevy open. A tall man got out.

As the Explorer neared the restaurant and began to pull parallel to it, the man from the Chevy approached. He kept his head down, as if in thought.

When the guy came out of the shadows and into the parking-lot lights, he proved to be of a size and a physical type that matched the killer.

Tim braked to a stop, apparently waiting for Linda, but in fact luring his adversary as far from the Chevrolet as he dared. If he delayed too long, the gunman might suddenly sprint to the Explorer and shoot him dead in the driver’s seat.

About forty yards directly ahead was an exit from the parking lot. Tim waited perhaps a beat longer than he should have, then switched on the headlights, tramped the accelerator, and raced toward the street.

Fate plays with loaded dice, so of course the light traffic abruptly became heavier. An eastbound trio of vehicles brightened toward him in excess of the speed limit.

Expecting a gunshot, glittering glass, and a bullet to the brain, Tim remained committed to flight. As the Explorer shot into the street, however, he realized that the momentum lost in a right turn would ensure that one or all of the approaching vehicles would tail-end him.

Brakes shrieked, horns blared, headlights seemed to sear him. Instead of turning right, he highballed straight across the two eastbound lanes.

Without a further scream of brakes, although with a vigorous condemnation of horns, two cars and a panel truck sailed past behind him. Not one vehicle so much as kissed the Explorer’s bumper, but their turbulent breath buffeted it.

When he barreled into the westbound lanes, oncoming traffic was at a safe distance but closing fast. Turning west, he glanced south, and saw that Kravet had sprinted back to the Chevrolet. The killer was in the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut.

Tim continued turning, out of the westbound lanes, crossing the yellow median lines. He drove east, into the wake of the traffic with which he had almost collided.

As he drew near the next major intersection, he checked the rearview mirror, then a side mirror, and saw the Chevy exiting the coffee-shop parking lot.