Everything but the Squeal

The curious life cycle of the botfly begins with an egg laid on a mammal's lip or fur. When the egg is licked and swallowed, its coating dissolves and a voracious larva is freed to float in the juices of the stomach. Eventually it begins to eat its way out, gaining weight as it goes. When it reaches the surface, usually through a flat muscle, the baby fly leaves behind an exit wound about the size of a.22 caliber bullet.

— Frederick Wendt, An Entomologist'sNotebook

Home is where you hang your head. -Groucho Marx

Oh, the little chickie hollered,

And the little chickie begged,

And they poured hot water

Up and down his leg. …

— Traditional American children's song

I

The Little Chickie Hollered

1 — Looking for Aimee

“H ey! No, no, no, no, no. How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You gitouta here. Gitouta here.” The Mountain's wooden geta sandals clattered over the concrete as he grabbed the Guitar Player by the frayed strap of the unstrung, bogus Stratocaster guitar he toted up and down Santa Monica Boulevard day and night. The Guitar Player's eyes, which had been closed in temporary bliss, opened as wide as they could, which is to say halfway, as the Mountain-three hundred quivering pounds of food-stained plaid shirt, scrubby beard, and yellow fangs-yanked him to his feet and launched him toward the sidewalk. The neck of the guitar knocked to the floor the dingy plastic tray containing the Guitar Player's cardinal sin: a package of store-bought sliced ham that he'd been surreptitiously dipping into somebody else's side order of the special teriyaki sauce, the one that Tommy, the Mountain's Okinawan boss, used only for teriyaki tacos.

There was no house rule against leaving leftovers for others-not much ever made it back into the kitchen-but bringing in food from outside was tantamount to kamikaze.

The eighty-six, which was part of the nightly floor show at the Oki-Burger, caught people's attention as though it were something new. At the other end of the Guitar Player's picnic-type table, the Toothless Man-two missing in front, top and bottom, nodded his head. “Maximum force,” he aspirated approvingly to the Young Old Woman, fourteen years old from behind and fifty from in front. The Young Old Woman, the only one who could understand him most of the time, cackled. She translated his conversation for the others and made his alibis to the cops. His speaking-tongue dog was what the others called her. When she wasn't being his speaking-tongue dog she worked the darker doorways with her back to the street, giving unpleasant surprises to fools on the prowl for pubescence.

One of the genuine teenage girls, seated at a table strategically near the sidewalk where a glimpse of her might make a straight hit the brakes, paused in a heroin nod-out long enough to giggle as the Mountain dispassionately lobbed the Guitar Player across the sidewalk and onto the back of a concrete bus bench. At the last possible instant, as he did almost every night, the Guitar Player managed to twist his body so that his ribs, rather than the imitation Stratocaster, cracked against the edge of the bench. “Wuff,” he said. He straightened up, wrapped himself in a tenuous shred of affronted dignity, and set off down the street toward the sheltering hedges of Plummer Park. The kids did a lot of business in Plummer Park.

The nodding girl continued to exceed the limits of her body's chemical tolerance long enough to giggle again and say something to an equally loaded friend through what sounded like a mouthful of highly glutinous mush. Me, I just took a sip on my very old Diet Coke and a sniff at my even older purple T-shirt and wondered how long it would be before everybody stopped thinking I was a cop.

It was three a.m. at Tommy's Oki-Burger, and all was as well as it was going to get. A little earlier the clatter of silverware two bright orange tables away had announced the fact that a skinhead in black leather had hit the bottom of the curve on downers. He'd bounced twice on the cement floor, and the Mountain had hauled him into the men's room to be treated to a refreshing dip in the toilet. A girl had broken out in bugs that no one else could see, and the Mountain had sprayed her with an imaginary can of Raid to calm her down. It worked. The LAPD cruised slowly by every fifteen minutes or so, one of them checking out the girls and trying to keep his tongue from hanging out the window while the other one drove. They switched seats and tongues on alternate passes.

“To protect and to serve,” the Mountain read off the side of the squad car, mopping down the table with a malodorous rag that might have been a recycled mummy wrapping. “Who they protecting, you think?”

“Each other,” I said. To my great relief, my Diet Coke had finally dried up. I pushed the empty cup away as though it had contained uranium.

“And who they serving?” The Mountain picked up the empty cup and rattled it and then snapped the rag at a fly guilty of being out after curfew. A vaguely cheesy and thoroughly unwholesome smell spread its leprous wings beneath my nose.

“They're not serving Diet Coke,” I said, fanning the vapor away. “And you're not either, not if you've got any pity in your soul. God, there must be something else to drink in this dump.”

The Mountain lowered his voice. “Don't spread it around,” he said, narrowing his eyes conspiratorially, “but I could offer you Diet Pepsi. And anyway, what do plainclothes cops care?”

On the whole, I liked the Mountain. He eighty-sixed people with style and he rarely held a grudge. I'd been hanging around the Oki-Burger four days and I'd told him at least twelve times that I wasn't a cop. I told him again now, scratching at my chin. My carefully cultivated four-day beard itched.

The Mountain gave me a knowing look and wiped his face with the damp mummy-wrap, making my skin crawl. “Nobody as grungy as you isn't a cop,” he said. “Whyn’t you go to Jack's? They're not as sharp there. You might pass for a human.”

I knew good advice when I heard it. I hauled my backside off the hardest wooden bench this side of bankruptcy court and headed for Jack's.

Jack's Triple-Burgers is on Hollywood, near La Brea, and Tommy's Oki-Burger is on Fountain, near Fairfax. It's easy to map the physical geography-they're about a mile and a half apart, and Jack's is farther north and east than Tommy's-but the emotional geography is more subtle. It had taken me a couple of days to figure out that Tommy's got the new runaways and Jack's got the Old Hands. The drugs of choice in Tommy's are downers, mainly codeine and other painkillers, but at Jack's nobody screws around with anything you don't enjoy at the sharp point of a needle. The occasional exceptions in both places are freebasers, folks whose idea of a day at the beach is a waterpipe filled with a brain-jolting mixture of cocaine and ether and, occasionally, PCP. The freebasers are rare in both establishments, though. Cocaine makes you alert and jumpy. By and large, both Tommy's and Jack's cater to a crowd that puts a high value on anesthesia.

The other difference is that the boys and girls at Tommy's sometimes-say no to a straight. He has to be pretty repulsive and not very prosperous-looking, and he's probably asking for something that would stun the Marquis de Sade, but the kids will say no. The boys and girls at Jack's don't. At Jack's, “Just say no” is a punch line.

To get to Jack's, I took the streets no one knows are there. Between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards there runs a network of narrow, pinched little avenues, paved when cars were smaller, and lined on either side by small houses, mostly stucco, built in the thirties. They were dark now, most of them, tucked away behind weedy lawns, climbing roses, and chained dogs. Here and there light spilled through a window, and at one point I heard the sad strains of Brahms' Double Concerto. There were few families. Most of the children in these neighborhoods come and go with the night, passing back and forth between the boulevards where the money is, looking at the houses from the wrong side of the chain-link fences.

I'd parked Sweet Alice, my car, on Cherokee, about halfway between Tommy's and Jack's. I won her in a game of chance that had begun in Malibu, not far from where I live, and ended in Pacoima. Her flamboyantly mustachioed owner, one Jaime, had painted her an indelible shade of iridescent horsefly blue, lowered her so far in front that she would have bounced going over a pack of Luckies, and hung a surrealistically large pair of furry dice from her rearview mirror. I'd removed the dice by way of expressing my individuality. Other than that I'd kept her, as they say in the used-car trade, as is. I patted her on the fender as I passed her and headed on up to Jack's. The sodium lights of Hollywood Boulevard gleamed luridly against the low-hanging April clouds. Jack's and the Boulevard were up the street, and Easter was around the corner.

Jack's squats on what L.A. realtors call a corner lot. Hollywood Boulevard runs vaguely east-west, and Gardner, the north-south street, culminates to the north in what the same L.A. realtors call a cul-de-sac. In English, that's a dead end. Normally, a cul-de-sac is regarded as an especially safe configuration by couples with young children. There weren't many couples on that little stretch of Gardner, but for the children who patronized the place, it was a terrific place to shoot up.

A heaviness in the air told me that it was about to drizzle. The week's weather had been all over the map. Normally in L.A., the weather is as orderly, and about as interesting, as a family tree: warm blue day breeds warm blue day. But this April, counting down toward Easter, was made up of days that arrived like runaways from other climates. The week had begun as clear and cold as North Dakota and then turned warm as a mass of tropical air wheeled up from Baja. Wednesday was marked by a chilly rain that had obviously made a wrong turn on its way to San Francisco and then decided it liked L.A. long enough to hang around through Thursday.

The drizzle started as I hit the Boulevard. At this hour, probably eighty percent of the people in Hollywood were holding, loaded, on illegal errands, or all three. There was the usual complement of parked bikers sneering on their black-and-chrome hogs, surrounded by the usual flock of biker girls. They were there day and night.

“So?” said Muhammad, the counterman. Unlike Tommy's, where there is a Tommy, there's no Jack at Jack's. The place was bought by Koreans several years ago, and the help is all either Hispanic or generically Middle Eastern. Muhammad was a generic Iranian.

“Coffee,” I said, sitting down. My back hurt. I was getting old for this stuff.

“How many sugars?” Muhammad said. Junkies eat a lot of sugar.

“Four,” I said, trying to turn my wince into a smile.

“You want fudge, say so,” Muhammad said. It was his standard rejoinder. I was too frayed for standard rejoinders, so I leaned across the counter and took his skinny black tie in my hand as he turned away. He jerked his head back to me, looking alarmed.

“If I want fudge,” I said, “I'll mug the Good Humor man. Give me a coffee with four sugars, and clamp the stirrer between your teeth until I leave.”

“Jesus,” Muhammad said, tugging at his tie, “what's with you tonight?”

“Lip,” I said, giving the tie a little yank. “There's too much lip on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“So call the Lip Squad,” he said. He wrapped the tie around his fist and pulled it free. Against my will, I laughed, and he gave me a bleak smile. “I'm tired too,” he said. “If I rub my face one more time tonight I think I'll hit bone.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Make it a large coffee. And hold the sugar.”

The smile went wise. “Knew you were a cop,” he said.

I gave up and drank it. Five years ago, no one would have taken me for a cop. I was obviously getting older. Behind me a fifteen-year-old girl fought fuzzily with her pimp. “I left them in the jar by the bed,” she said. “You didn't have to take them all.”

“Girl,” the pimp said, “there wasn't enough for both of us. You should be happy they made me happy.”

“You're a pig,” she said.

I heard a gagging, snuffling noise and turned to see the pimp push the girl's dish of soft ice cream into her face. He clamped the back of her head with one hand and held the dish over her nose and mouth with the other while she choked and kicked her feet under the table. “You want a extra mouth,” he said, “open the one you already got one more time.” He sat back and regarded her. Ice cream ran down her chin and neck, onto the lavender cloth of her cheap blouse. She began to cry.

I leaned forward onto the counter, rested my head on my arms, and listened to my heart beat in my ears. It almost drowned out the sound of the girl's sobbing. Once I might have wrapped the pimp's chair around his neck. That was a long time ago, four full days. After four days spending time with kids who had an average life expectancy of only three more years, all I wanted to do was drink my coffee and go home.

The girl kept on crying while the pimp finished her ice cream. I rubbed my chin bristle and felt sorry for myself. Four numbing days and nights, and not a glimpse or a whisper of Aimee Sorrell.

2 — Over the Rainbow

T hey called each other Mommy and Daddy, but it was sheer force of habit. The tone of voice into which the marriage had finally settled was scratchy and raw, a couple of light-years on the wrong side of polite. Basically, they were restraining the impulse to begin their remarks to each other, Oki-Burger style, with “HEY!”

They'd showed up at the bottom of my driveway six days before I'd made my first unconvincing appearance at the Oki-Burger, and the weather had just begun its runaway act. It was gray and crappy outside, neither raining nor not raining. Wood snapped and sputtered optimistically in the stove that heats the place. Mommy and Daddy, faced with a slate-gray day and a private detective with dubious credentials, were both trying to be good. They were working overtime to project the public image of their marriage, the image that satisfied their country club in Kansas City, and it was obviously something of an effort.

She had the ironclad serenity that comes with years of putting up with things. He had the kind of enforced control that builds permanent knuckle-size muscles in the corners of the jaw. You sometimes see them in military men. The muscles were well on the way to being thumb-size, even though I'd cleaned up the place before they arrived. If I hadn't, they'd probably have stuck out like Boris Karloff s neck plugs. He also had wet-looking hair, a rawboned bunchy face, and a tiny disapproving mouth. Mommy was smoother and probably tougher, although she didn't look it. She looked like hugging her would be like falling into a tub of very good butter. “Her name is Aimee,” she said, spelling it just like that. No shortcuts here. They'd used all the vowels they could think of, and thrown in a couple extra for good measure.

“Ah,” I'd said, wishing they would leave. “Coffee, anyone?” I was on my fifth cup. Three to fuel the effort of cleaning the living room and two to deal with Mommy and Daddy. Missing children are not my specialty, not by a long shot. If they want to stay missing, they will. And even if you hit enough dumb luck to find them, how do you know whether you should send them home? Home is a generic word. It can mean where the heart is or where the horror is. Looking at Daddy, I wasn't ready to guess which it had been for Aimee.

“No coffee,” Mommy said, pushing down gently on my wrist. I put the cup back on the table, and she allowed her hand to remain on mine. “And don't blame me for the name.” Despite the gentleness of her touch, as she turned her gaze to Daddy there was enough acid in her tone to etch glass. “All their names begin with A. His name is Alan, you see.”

There were two boys, she said, and another girl. She spelled their names. Wherever possible, they all had extraneous vowels tucked here and there, sad little head starts on distinction. She finished the litany and looked over at him out of luminous blue eyes. “Isn't that cute?” she said to me. He concentrated on the bright squares of his plaid madras sport coat, paying particular attention to a kelly-green area on his right cuff.

“Aimee’s the youngest,” I said neutrally. It was Saturday, and I wanted to be out of the house.

“She's the baby,” Mommy said. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her, just a slender, expensively maintained woman well-wrapped in a sleeveless dress, long delicate tendons in her forearms, a big sapphire glittering on one hand, as dry and bright as her eyes. “She's also the problem child.”

Daddy grunted something that could have been a negative. It could also have been gas.

“How do you know she ran away?”

“Well, she's missing.” She gave me the cool blue eyes full-bore. Daddy fidgeted impatiently in his chair, plucking at a button.

“As opposed to, well, foul play,” I said. Inwardly I cursed Janie Gordon, whom I'd once brought kicking and screaming home to her mother, for telling her distant cousins the Sorrells where I lived and what a whiz I was.

“She left a note, of sorts,” Mommy said. “Aimee’s not much of a writer.” She reached into the enormous Louis Vuitton purse on the floor at her feet and pulled out a much-creased piece of paper. Mommy, it read, I alwayshateditwhenyouplayedyourfartyoldmusic. AbunchofoldgeezersactingliketheirYoung. Butthere'sonesongIlike. PushPlay.

“Play?” I said.

“This is pretty cute,” Mommy said with obscure pride. “I have to give Aimee credit for it.”

Out of the purse came a little chrome cassette player. She put it on the coffee table in front of me. “It's the big black button,” she said. I pushed it.

Paul McCartney's voice, distorted by the small speaker, sang the opening verse of “She's Leaving Home.” When he got to the words “stepping outside, she is free,” there was a click, and a young girl's voice, too close to the microphone, said, “Here's another one.” Four raucous, unmistakable guitar chords, and even before I heard the singer's voice, I knew it was the Kinks.

“I can make the most ordinary little man in the world into a star”-Ray Davies leered, all pinky rings and cigar-smoke flash, while his brother Dave chopped the air into fuzzy heavy-metal chords. Then there was another click, and the young girl was back, a little farther from the mike this time. “That's all, folks,” she said. Then she giggled. And a bank of strings cut the giggle short, and Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow” all the way through. Then there was nothing.

Daddy cleared his throat in the silence. “She's crazy about TheWizardofOz” he said, shaking his head. “Punk music and TheWizardofOz.”

“Why wouldn't she be?” Mommy said with a rasp you could have struck a match on. “Dorothy got out of Kansas.”

“She wants to be an actress?” I asked.

“At her age, who doesn't?” Mommy said. “I sure as hell did.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen.” That was Daddy. “But she's mature for her age. She can take care of herself. I know she's okay.”

Mommy and I looked at him in disbelief.

“Well, I have to believe that, don't I?” he said defensively. “Stop staring at me like that, Mommy. Otherwise, where would I be?” It was his longest speech to date.

“Where you should be, maybe,” Mommy said. “Worrying about her instead of yourself.”

Daddy subsided. He looked back down at the bold squares in his plaid coat, moving a finger from one to another like someone tracing the moves in a classic chess game. His bony face worked slightly.

“Got any pictures?” I asked.

“They're almost a year old.” Mommy scooped out four little color shots taken for a yearbook: crumpled blue-paper background and the kind of lighting Joan Crawford made lifetime enemies to get. Daddy notwithstanding, Aimee was a young-looking twelve, a pretty little blond with a hopeful smile, but also with something knowing around the eyes, an expression that could have been either premature confidence or something much less attractive.

I let out a sigh. I didn't want any part of it. “How long has she been gone?”

“Six weeks,” Mommy said.

“Any communication since she left?”

“One note.” She pulled it out of the ubiquitous bag.

“The note is how you know she's in L.A.?” I asked, opening it.

“Yes.”

“She's a good girl,” Daddy said suddenly. He sat up, buffed a cufflink, and crossed his ankles. “She and Mommy don't always see eye to eye, like women don't sometimes, but she can always talk to me. Always. If she has homework trouble or gets a crush on some little jerk, she'll always come to me with it. The boys really like her, though. They really like her.”

Mommy's foot tapped the carpet as I opened the note. If Aimee was on the loose in Hollywood, being attractive to the boys was going to be a mixed blessing at best.

The note was written in pencil on blue-lined paper. It said: OvertheRainbow. Then there was a telephone number.

“Have you called?”

“Five or six times,” she said. “No one had ever heard of her. I think a different man answered every time I called. Some of them sounded, well, like they were drunk or something. There was loud music and people talking and laughing in the background. It sounded kind of noisy and frantic.” She reached out and moved the tape recorder about a quarter of an inch to make it exactly parallel with the edge of the coffee table. Her hand shook very slightly. “It sounded awful,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “let's give it a try.”

First I had to find my phone. It was wedged on one of the bookshelves, behind a warped and rippled copy of Gibbon's DeclineandFalloftheRomanEmpire, a casualty of the perpetual leak in the living-room ceiling. I'd opened it up and leaned it against the phone to dry it out. The phone cord is long enough to let you place a call from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, so I took it over to the couch and sat, giving Mommy a grimace that was intended as an encouraging smile as I dialed. She was looking at her fingernails. Daddy cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a ton of popcorn.

The phone rang two, three, four times, and then someone picked it up and dropped it. There was an interval of clattering and a thick male voice said something that sounded like “Yunh?”

“Hi,” I said brightly. “Is Aimee there?”

Mommy was still looking at her fingernails, but she was as still as an insect in amber. Daddy was gazing intently at the opposite wall and he'd poked his tongue into his cheek, adding one more lump to an already lumpy face.

“Who?” the voice on the other end said. Head-banger music filtered through the wire. “Who the fuck you want, Jack?”

“Aimee,” I said. “Aimee Sorrell. She gave me this number.”

“I don't care if she gave you the clap, I never heard of her. Good-bye.”

“Wait,” I said. “Tell me one thing, okay?”

He paused. A woman made a sound in the background that could have been a laugh or a cry.

“Depends,” he finally said.

“Where are you? Where's this phone?”

“It's a pay phone,” he said reluctantly.

“Yeah, but where?” The woman in the background made that sound again. This time it sounded like a bray.

The guy at the other end breathed heavily. “It's the pay phone at the end of the world,” he said. He hung up.

Mommy and Daddy were both staring at me. “It's a pay phone,” I said, “with a single-digit IQ answering it. Sounds like a very public place, not ’21’ or Spago maybe, but not anyplace illegal either. It's a hangout.” Neither of them looked very impressed. Well, it wasn't very impressive. It was so unimpressive that it nettled me,sol picked up the phone again and called Al Hammond at home.

Hammond is my pet cop. He'd kill me with his teeth if he knew I thought of him that way, but I can't help it. He's two hundred twenty-five pounds of whiskers, bass voice, and bigotry, tempered only by an uncontrollable desire to put the bad ones away and tuck the good ones safely into bed.

“Yeah?” Hammond belched into the phone.

“Jeez,” I said, “sorry to interrupt the well-digging or log-splitting, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“I was waxing the kitchen floor,” Hammond said.

“Oh, Al,” I crooned. “How domestic.”

“Well, I haven't really gotten to the waxing yet. Right now I'm in the middle of skinning a sheep so I'll have something to buff it with.”

“Can you get me an address to go with a phone number?”

“Could Einstein count to ten?”

“And some idea of what's at that address?”

“Some idea?” Hammond said. “Yeah, I guess I can manage to give you some idea.”

“Five-five-five-one-four-two-four.”

“Two-thirteen area?”

“Yes.”

“You at home?”

“Just waiting for the sun to come out.”

“Give me ten minutes. What do I get out of this?”

“How about a big chocolate Easter bunny with your name on it?”

“How about a drink at the Red Dog?”

“Only one?”

“Hold the phone.” He hung up without saying good-bye. He always does. He learned it from the movies.

Mommy and Daddy were both watching me with a kind of repressed anticipation that made me feel like a broken TV set. It was time to disappoint them.

“Listen,” I said. “I don't really think I can help you. This just isn't the kind of thing I do.”

“I told you, Mommy,” Daddy said with grim satisfaction.

“But Janie. .” Mommy said. She wasn't going to give up.

I held up a hand. “Janie was a couple of years ago. I found her because she wanted to be found. Her mother, I hope this doesn't offend you because you're related to her somehow, her mother is a bucket of loose marbles. She'd driven everyone else in her life crazy enough to leave, so she aimed it all at Janie, and then Janie left too. I brought her home twice because she was living wrong when she was on her own. That's the end of my experience with missing children.”

Daddy got up. “Let's go,” he said.

“Sit down, Al,” Mommy said. She pointed to his chair with an arm that was all muscle tone and electrical energy. Al sat.

“There are about twenty-five thousand missing kids in L. A. at any given time,” I said. “I'm one man. The cops are better at this than I am. Have you gone to them?”

“They made us fill out a report,” Mommy said. “As long as they have a report, they seemed to say, they'd done their job. They didn't even dial the number. At least you dialed the number.”

“I'm going to get you an address, too,” I said. “But I'm afraid that's it.”

“That's it, all right,” Daddy said, getting up again. “Look at this dump.” He glanced around my living room. It looked okay to me, but I could see his point. He hadn't seen it the night before. “You can stay and waste your time if you want,” he said without giving me a look. “I'll be in the car.”

“I'll walk you down,” Mommy said, “but I want to talk with Mr. Grist for a moment or two more.” She took his arm and steered him to the door, throwing me a glance over her shoulder as she went. The glance said wait.

I used the time to drop the coffee cups into the sink and to put the copy of Gibbon under the woodburner where it would dry more quickly. Five minutes later I'd decided on a jog at the beach followed by a sauna at UCLA, and she was back.

“He's resting,” she said.

“He looks like he could use it.”

“Be quiet,” she said. “Just clam up.” She sat down again, reached into a pocket, and tossed onto the table three bright, hard little color Polaroids. I knew before I picked them up that I didn't want to. After I looked at them, I let out a slow, labored breath. “Oh,” I said.

All three pictures showed Aimee, naked, standing up against a wall. There was a man's hand in the picture. The hand was reaching up, doing something obscene. Her eyelids in one of the shots drooped lopsidedly, one much lower than the other.

I knew that look. It was the blink of someone who's deeply stoned. The eyes come down at different rates of speed. She had bruises on her arms and an angry, swollen mark in her navel that looked like a burn. The man's hand was just a man's hand. No watch, no rings, no tattoos, just five nasty fingers sprouting from the end of a hairy forearm. The wall behind Aimee was white and featureless.

“He doesn't know about these,” I said, meaning Daddy.

She held my eyes with hers. “No. They'd kill him. He had heart bypass surgery a few months ago. He weighed two-eighty then. There isn't enough of him left for something like this.”

“When did they arrive?”

“Last week. I was home when the mailman came. I'm always home. I had to leave so I wouldn't be there when he got back. I drove around for hours before I could face him without giving it away.”

“Was there a note with them?”

“It just said, ‘Don't do anything stupid. I'll be in touch.’ Nothing since.”

“Have you got it?”

She pulled a wallet out of her purse and a piece of paper out of the wallet. It was a single line, printed on what looked like a cheap dot-matrix printer, the most anonymous of all printing media. No envelope.

“Who's seen the pictures?”

“No one.”

“No cops?”

“Why would I show them to the cops in Kansas? She's here. And if I had showed them to the cops here, Daddy would have learned about them, wouldn't he?”

“So you're carrying this alone.”

She flicked the edge of the top picture with a painted nail. It made a sharp click. “I'm stronger than I look.”

“I guess you are.” There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

“But I don't know for how long,” she said. She made a sudden stab at her hair with her right hand, and her nails scraped her forehead. She was bleeding immediately. The phone rang.

“Go into the bathroom,” I said, picking it up. “Press toilet paper to the cut until it stops. Hello?”

She walked toward the bathroom as though her spine were made of steel. She took very small steps. The blood ran in a thin red line down her cheek.

“Missing kid, huh?” Hammond said.

“Why?” I could barely understand him. I was fighting the ghost-image of the photographs.

“Tommy's Oki-Burger. Fountain, near Gardner. That's one of the places the kids go. It's a pay phone. And it's no place for somebody's baby. You plan to talk to your friendly neighborhood cop about this?”

“Later.”

“Whatever you say, pal. Got to go. The sheep's bleating.” He hung up again.

I stacked the Polaroids into a neat little pile and aligned their edges precisely. Then I picked up the top one and studied it. Aimee's hair, so meticulously unfashionable in the yearbook photos, was matted and greasy-looking. There were dirt smudges on her wrists and elbows and a scab on her knee. She'd traveled a long way from Kansas City.

After Mrs. Sorrell came out, tissue pressed to her forehead, I told her I'd do what I could. I forgot to ask about the fee. When she was gone, I studied the Polaroids again, trying to learn anything I could about Aimee's first starring role.

3 — One After Thirty-nine

“T he problem,” Bernie Siegel was saying as he stood on one leg, closed his eyes, and tried to touch the tip of his nose with his index finger, “is that the amount of intelligence on the planet is a constant, and the population is increasing.” Then he frowned in concentration and stuck his finger into his eye. He'd just failed the roadside sobriety test.

Neither the gesture nor the sentence was as precisely articulated as Bernie might have liked, but most of us were three or four notches beyond the point where we would have noticed. The one exception was Bernie's girlfriend and sole source of support, Joyce, who was pregnant. She was following her doctor's advice, or maybe it was her own advice, since she was a doctor, and not drinking. She had the glow that comes with early pregnancy. The rest of us had the glow that comes with advanced intoxication.

A fortieth birthday party is like trying to cut your wrists with an electric razor. It takes longer than you'd hoped it would, and there's no payoff. Although most of us had been doing our best, this evening was no exception.

The candles were burning in Wyatt and Annie's living room, just as they had in the late sixties and early seventies, and the food, most of it fearsomely healthy, smelled the same as it had then. The birthday cake was carob. Annie thought that carob tasted like chocolate. She also thought that near-beer tasted like beer. The cake was enormous and slightly lopsided, and it said Forty is better than nothing. Most of us in attendance, if we'd been polled when Wyatt was twenty-five, wouldn't have put small amounts of money at favorable odds on his reaching twenty-six, much less forty. When Wyatt was twenty-five, any vampire sufficiently ill-advised to bite into his neck would have OD'd long before sunrise.

Of course, that was before Wyatt had married Annie and straightened out his act. It had been more than a decade since he'd sought either cosmic enlightenment or comic relief in anything that had to be snorted or injected. Jessica and Luke, the kids on whom he and Annie had collaborated, had a lot to do with that.

I was the least interesting person present. For one thing, I was drunker than Wyatt. For another, I was thick and stupid from lack of sleep. Even if I'd been at my best, though, I'd have thought twice, or at least one and a half times, before I opened my mouth. The folks who'd gathered to celebrate Wyatt's unlikely survival into his forties could be a critical bunch. Everybody had lived through something that emphatically did not have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

“Looking around this room,” said Miles Brand, who'd been our graduate adviser when Wyatt and I had been taking our doctorates in English, “I feel like I'm with the survivors of the Children's Crusade.” Miles, as ever, both glittered and soothed. The glitter was candlelight refracted off his steel-rimmed spectacles, and the soothe was the influence of yet another of his apparently infinite number of cashmere tweed sport coats. Miles was the only member of the UCLA faculty whose family owned a Texas bank, and the town that went with it. He made the most of it.

“The Children's Crusade?” asked Joyce as Bernie gave up trying to stand on one leg and collapsed to the floor beside her. “What was that?” Joyce, a gerontologist, had come relatively late into Bernie's life. Bernie had gone to college with Wyatt and me. The difference among us was that Bernie was still going to college, working on his fifth or sixth degree, and would probably stay until Gabriel blew the trumpet for the Great Matriculation. Thanks to Joyce, he now lived in an actual apartment. For years, the address for Bernie in the UCLA alumni handbook had been the gas station where they'd let him sleep in his car. At the moment, he looked like he was thinking about going to sleep on Joyce's shoulder.

“One of history's sadder footnotes,” Miles said, a bit more dramatically than was probably necessary. “Twelve-twelve or thereabouts, wasn't it, Wyatt?” Miles believed in sharing the stage.

Wyatt looked up from pitching lengths of pine and oak imprecisely into the cast-iron stove. There were large pieces of wood on the floor. “Poor little buggers,” he said. “A bunch of French and German kids, wandering around in the rain trying to find the Holy Land.”

“Well,” Bernie said, reviving, “at least they were foreigners.”

“Pipe down, Bernie,” Joyce said in the tone of one who paid the rent. She folded her arms across her swelling stomach. “What happened to them?”

“They were eaten alive. Not literally, or at least I don't think so.” Wyatt looked over at Miles, who made a show of searching his cluttered mind and then shook his head no. “But that was about all they weren't. Betrayed by Christians and captured by infidels. No leadership except a couple of cracked kids.”

“Sounds like the Democratic party,” Bernie said in a melancholy tone. He closed his eyes.

“Steven the something or other,” I said from what seemed like a great distance. I felt like I had to say something. After all, I'd been invited.

“Of Cloyes,” Miles said. “That was the French one. And Nicholas of Cologne leading the Kraut column,” he added, secure in the knowledge that there were no Germans in the room.

“Where were their parents?” Joyce said indignantly. “How come I've never heard of this?”

“You're a gerontologist,” Bernie said. “If there'd been a senior citizens' crusade, you'd probably be dazzling the whole room now.”

Wyatt slammed the door of the stove and looked to Annie for approval, but she'd gone into the kitchen in search of yet another bowl of her avocado-and-clam dip, with a bunch of mean little red chilies thrown into it as an unwelcome surprise. Two bowls had already turned brown at the edges and there was still no sign of dinner. I was almost hungry enough to attack the carob cake.

“But their families,” said Joyce, who supported, in addition to Bernie, a happily idle mother and father. “There have always been families. Where were their families?”

“The family is largely a literary invention,” Miles said cheerfully. He was a bachelor. “In the tenth century, painters depicted the children who were lucky enough to live as little adults, and that's what they were. They died so often in infancy that the Koreans, for example, held a birthday party on the child's hundredth day to celebrate its having survived so long. The Chinese did it at the end of the first month.”

“They still do,” I said. “I went to a one-month party with Eleanor a couple of weeks ago. There were lots of red eggs, sort of a Chinese Easter, except that the kids didn't have to die and get resurrected first.”

“And where is Eleanor?” Miles asked. “I didn't want to intrude into what might be touchy territory.”

“In China,” I said, wishing I hadn't brought her up.

“Doing what? Seems rather a long way to go to escape your admittedly peculiar charm.”

“Research on the extended family. Looking at ancestral shrines. She's going to write something,” I added, both to change the subject and to forestall the question I saw forming in Miles's mind.

Joyce wasn't interested in China. She folded two hands defensively over her swelling stomach. “What do you mean, the family is a literary invention?” she demanded.

Miles held up his empty glass, sighted through it, and poured some more red wine into it. He'd brought four bottles with him. “In medieval times, the family was purely and simply a unit of economic survival. The more kids, the more hands for harvest or for work, the greater the chance of passing along whatever miserable property the family might have managed to accumulate. Otherwise, when papa passed on, the neighbors would divide it, or the local lord- which is to say the closest armed thug-might simply annex it, just as he was likely to annex the prettiest daughter. Except that he'd keep the land, whereas he'd return the daughter after he'd had his way with her. ‘Had his way with her,’ ” he repeated, rolling the words and about twenty cc's of wine around in his mouth. “Such a delicious phrase.”

Joyce was one of the few humans of either sex I'd met who could ruffle, and she ruffled now. “I guess it's delicious to some,” she said.

“This is wonderful wine,” Miles said, congratulating himself. “Where were we?”

“We were listening to you,” Joyce said a trifle ungraciously.

Annie bustled in through the door, bowl in hand, looking domestic. “As the mother of two,” she said to Miles with a disarming smile, “I'd like to hear the rest even if it is a bunch of shit.”

“You were more respectful in college,” Miles said.

“I hadn't had kids then,” Annie said. “I thought the world was something real, and that people could explain it to you. I didn't know that it was something you invented as you went along.”

“Anyway,” Joyce said, “what about mother love? You can't tell me that mothers haven't always loved their children. It's the central fact of the female principle.” Bernie put his hand possessively and approximately on her stomach, and she gave his wrist a pat. He lifted his glass to his mouth with his other hand. “I'm driving,” she said.

“Of course they loved them,” Miles said soothingly. “They just couldn't get too attached to them. They were too likely to die.”

“Mine,” Wyatt said, pulling the cork from a bottle of cognac, “are going to live forever. Sometimes I think Jessica already has.” Jessica, his daughter, was thirteen years old and too pretty for her own good. Her little brother, Luke, was nine.

“Child mortality was fifty, sixty percent up through the seventeenth century,” Miles said. “Visit any old European graveyard and look at all the little stones.”

“No, thanks,” Annie said.

“It wasn't just child mortality,” Bernie said, surfacing from what had begun to look like a comfortable snooze. “Children were sacrificed, too. The archaeologists poking through the ruins of Carthage found the remains of more than twenty thousand children sacrificed to Baal and Tanit to avert bad fortune. In mitigation,” he added as Joyce gave him the kind of stare that Benedict Arnold must have seen a lot of, “they sacrificed sheep instead when things weren't so rough-say, to ward off a bad weather forecast.” Joyce got up, and Bernie, who had been leaning on her, toppled to the floor on his side. “Then there were the Polynesians,” he continued from his new position, ”ritually exposing kids on mountaintops or dropping them off cliffs every time the population reached overload, sort of Malthus as an active verb. Greek plays are full of children exposed on mountain-tops. Oedipus, right?”

Joyce went into the bathroom and pulled the door closed sharply behind her.

“I'd sell my girl right now,” Wyatt said, setting down a glass that had been full of cognac only moments earlier. “Anyone want to make an offer?”

“The point, if there is a point,” Miles said, “is that the disintegration of the family that people make such a fuss about these days is highly misleading. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the family as we know it took shape. That was the first time that children were treated as children, that they wore different kinds of clothing, that they began to be sentimentalized. The trend reached its zenith in Victorian England about the time of the invention of the Christmas card, when children were transformed into symbols of innocence and it became the responsibility of adults to protect them from the evils of the world. Of course, we're talking about upper-class children here. The children of the lower classes were on their own. Or at the mercy of their parents, which was sometimes worse. Not much sentimentalizing over the little angels among the gin-drinkers. Child prostitution was a boom industry in Victorian England, and no one wanted to know about it.”

“They still don't,” I said. “Go down to Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood any night, and they're out on the sidewalk. Boys, girls, and kids who haven't figured out what they are.”

“Something tells me you're working again,” Wyatt said.

“I wish I weren't,” I said, meaning it.

“I still think it's a bunch of junk,” said Joyce, coming back in from the bathroom. “What about all those fairy tales?”

“Exactly,” Miles said with the air of someone who'd been waiting patiently for someone else to fall into a trap. “The most damning evidence of all. Find me a happy family in the fairy tales. They're about wicked stepmothers and children abandoned in the forest, boys and girls cooked for dinner, sisters separated from their brothers. Good Lord, they're a catalog of child abuse. No writers in history were ever more aptly named than the brothers Grimm.”

“The family is the basic unit of society,” Joyce said defiantly.

“It is these days,” Miles said. “Back then, it was the village. What are you working on, Simeon?”

It was just one more thing I didn't want to think about. “A little girl,” I said, wishing I were at home with all the doors locked, a safe distance from my friends. “She ran away.”

“From what?” That was Joyce.

“How the hell do I know? Her father has a face that looks like he shaves by slamming himself with a two-by-four to drive the whiskers in so he can bite them off inside. Maybe she wanted to go somewhere where people had smooth faces.”

“Well, Lordamighty, excuse me,” Joyce said, lifting her eyebrows all the way into the southern reaches of her hairline.

“I'm apologizing a lot lately,” I said. “I'm sorry. She found her way here from Kansas City. She seems to have settled in with a bunch of kids who think so little of themselves that they seek their common level at the point where the scum surfaces on the pool. They're killing themselves, right out there in front of everybody. What else can I say? What I want right now is a house in the woods, about three hundred miles from the nearest neon light. I'd also like a nice, stupid dog. A spayed dog.”

“So excuse me,” Joyce said, meaning it this time.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I should just go home and chew on the furniture.”

Annie came into the room. I hadn't even seen her leave. “Dinner,” she announced.

People made unsteady attempts to stand up. “Don't go home, Simeon,” Wyatt said. “Otherwise, we'll just worry about you. This party is already weird enough without that.”

“You're the birthday boy,” I said. “I'll even cheer up, if that's what you want.”

“Don't go overboard,” Wyatt said, clutching his cognac bottle to his chest.

“Would you like to call your children?” Annie asked him.

“They're my children, if you noticed,” Wyatt said. “That's a sure sign of how things are around here. If they get straight A's and they haven't killed anything lately, they're Annie's. If their mug shots are pinned to the telephone poles in the canyon, they're mine.” He went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed, “Luke. Jessica. Dinner, believe it or not.”

He turned away from the stairs and threw an arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Simeon. If you get to the table without saying anything else that's depressing, I'll share my cognac with you.”

The table, which Annie waxed obsessively as an outlet for nervous energy, of which she had an abundance, glowed supernaturally. The fireplace crackled. “It's so nice to eat someplace where people don't say grace first,” Miles was saying, ladling onto Joyce's plate something that looked disconcertingly like beef stew. “I never know what to do with my hands, not to mention my soul. And look, the salad has real lettuce in it, not arugula or radicchio or rocket, whatever that is. What in the world is rocket?” he said, looking up as we came in.

“The only lettuce that's not supposed to extinguish sexual desire,” I said. “In the Middle Ages, lettuce was prescribed for nymphomaniacs. Sort of the edible equivalent of a flannel nightgown.”

“I've known people who could eat their way through a flannel nightgown,” Joyce said. “Of course, they're all in jail now.”

“The Doctrine of Signatures,” Miles said, slopping food onto Bernie's plate. “Lettuce is limp, you see. According to the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a very hot theory in the fourteenth century, the way food looked was supposed to be a key to what it was good for. Walnuts looked like little brains, so they were good for brain fever, whatever that actually was. Oysters, because you had to pry them open, were supposed to help women conceive. Asparagus was erect, so it was-”

“We get the point,” Annie said. “Hello, Luke.”

Luke came into the room wearing a Superman T-shirt and red shorts. His knobby little legs ended in a pair of incongruously large furry slippers.

“Everybody looks pretty happy,” Luke said suspiciously. He was a well-known drug nihilist, a preadolescent Carrie Nation who had single-handedly reduced his father's marijuana habit from half an ounce a day, smoked in public, to a furtive joint or two snatched behind the woodpile when the little cop was in school.

“Happy?” Wyatt said as he surreptitiously put the cognac on the floor. “That's the first time this evening that anyone's used that word.”

“Have you been smoking?” Luke said, pulling himself up onto a chair. “Jesus,” he added, looking at the serving dish, “beef stew?”

“It's ropavieja” Annie said a little defensively.

“That's what I said,” Luke insisted. “Beef stew. The Ochoas serve it all the time.”

“Rachel Ochoa is his current girlfriend,” Annie announced to the table at large.

“Rachel is my only girlfriend,” Luke corrected her gravely.

“Yeah?” I said unwisely. “What happened to Ariel?”

“Ariel?” Miles said in tempered disbelief. Shakespeare was one of his specialties.

“Ancient history,” Luke said, throwing him a mean little glance. “Just give me some salad.”

“The kid is a born polygamist,” Wyatt said as Miles put a couple of glops of salad onto Luke's plate. “With a career like yours in front of you, you want to be careful with all that lettuce,” he added.

“Why?” Luke said, fork poised.

“Never mind,” Annie said, “and I know you hate it when I say that. Too bad. I'm still bigger than you.”

Wyatt took a slug off the cognac. “Where's your sister?”

Luke made a neat little pile of his salad, putting a piece of avocado on top like a green and suicidal skier poised for a run. His attention was focused entirely on his plate. Then he mashed the whole hill flat with his fork.

Annie had put down her silverware.

“Luke,” she said. “Your father asked you a question. Where's Jessica?”

“She's at Blister's,” Luke said in a small voice.

The silence in the room couldn't have been more profound if the moving finger had suddenly appeared and writ Luke's words large in letters of fire on the wall. Miles was carefully examining his salad. Bernie was leaning far back in his chair and gazing at the ceiling, on the final downhill stretch toward comatose, and Joyce was busy having second thoughts about parenthood.

“Blister,” I said brightly. “What an interesting name.”

“His real name is Lester,” Luke said in an artificially high voice that I recognized as a parody of his sister's. “We call him Blister because he's so hot.”

“That's enough,” Annie said. “When did she go?”

“A while ago. She said she'd be back for dinner.” Luke mashed his avocado into a puree fine enough to satisfy Wolfgang Puck.

“Well, she's not,” Wyatt said, gouging long angry scratches into the table's polished surface with the tip of his knife. “And I've had enough.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, then tossed the knife onto his plate, which promptly split in two. Luke looked down at his lap.

“Wyatt, don't,” Annie said, tight-lipped.

“Like hell I won't.” He grabbed a blue parka off a chair and started to put it on.

“Then take Simeon.”

“What am I, the Big Bad Wolf?” Wyatt said. There were small pinched white lines at the wings of his nostrils.

“Please,” Annie said. “Take him.”

“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” I said, rising. “I've never met anyone named Blister.”

Wyatt glared at me as though he'd never seen me before. It's a very peculiar feeling when your oldest friend suddenly looks dangerous.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “I'm going.”

As I followed him out, I heard Annie say in her Perfect Hostess voice, “Please. Eat your dinner.” Then I heard a chair slam to the floor, and Joyce said, “Bernie.”

In the Jeep Wyatt slugged the steering wheel a couple of times before he turned the key. The horn coughed each time. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch.1’ Then the motor caught and we jerked backward over the bridge across the creek. A Chevy van, heading north on Old Canyon Road, hit its brakes and slithered around us, its driver shouting one-syllable words with ancient Old English pedigrees that didn't make them sound any less rude.

“Double damn,” Wyatt said, accelerating and raising the cognac bottle to his lips. I hadn't realized he'd brought it, and the new knowledge wasn't reassuring. “I can handle enemies. What do you do about your own kids?”

“I've never had any.”

“So you're lucky. So shut up.”

I shut up for three or four miles that would have made Wyatt's insurance agent, had he been there, give serious thought to a new career. After we'd passed everything in the vicinity, and after Wyatt had settled the bottle between his thighs, I crossed my fingers and said, “So who's Blister?”

“A dealer,” Wyatt said, jerking the wheel to the right to avoid a plummet down to the creek, which was by then three hundred feet below us.

“Dealing what?”

“Mainly crack. Also regular old coke. Free-enterprise system, you know? Whatever the little kids want to buy.”

“How old?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?” I asked, shocked in spite of myself. “Jessica's only thirteen.” She was, after all, my goddaughter. “How long has this been going on?”

“A month. Son of a bitch,” he said again. This time he pounded the dashboard with a closed fist.

“What happens if you maim him?” I asked.

“My daughter hates me.”

“Not for long.”

Wyatt caught up with something with four wheels, a Starion or a Jetta or a Sentra or something else with a name that was chosen because it sounded good to someone with an accent, and passed it on the right. Gravel rattled beneath the fenderguards, and the horizon took a dizzy spin. The creek, with its ample complement of hard sharp rocks, yawned beneath us, and then we were on the road again.

“Not for long,” I repeated when I could trust my voice.

“What? A week? Two weeks? Do you know how long that is when you're thirteen?”

At least he was conversing in whole sentences. Pushing my luck, I said, “Then let me be the heavy.”

He glanced over at me, and I instantly wished he hadn't.

“Wyatt” I mewed. He looked back at the road, crooked the wheel, and somehow managed to navigate between a car that was turning right and another that was coming straight toward us. Various brakes screeched, and he laughed for the first time in five minutes. “Another coat of paint on any of us,” he said, “and we'd be a memory.”

He slowed to maybe seventy. “Anyway,” he said, “we're almost there.”

He wrenched the wheel to the right and we jolted up Entrada, a goat path that can be called a street only by courtesy of L.A. County, which marks it as such on its maps. By anyone else's standards, it is a treacherous, precipitous collection of gaping potholes, so narrow that kids on two-wheelers have frequent head-on collisions. The tops of eucalyptus trees waltzed overhead in the wind, and the stars were as cold and bright as Mrs. Sorrell's sapphire. The scent of sage filled the air. Cold or not, it was too nice a night to die.

Wyatt said, “We’rehere.”

He pulled the car to the left side of the road. Sage scraped at the paint job and the tires squealed. Wyatt looked out his window and swore. Vegetation was pressed against the glass like man-eating plants that smelled blood. “I'll get out on your side,” he said.

He waited, but I didn't reach for the door handle.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm not going to tell you I know how you feel, but listen anyway. We're here to get Jessica. If anyone has to do anything unpleasant, let it be me. It's time to think about short-term goals. All we want is for her to come home with us. If you spread good old Blister's brains all over the wall, she might decide not to. If I do it, on the other hand, she'll just hate me for a while, and I think I can live with that.”

“Open the door,” he growled.

“Eat the big patootie,” I said. “Are you going to behave?”

He lifted his shoulders almost to his ears and blew air out through his mouth. Then he shook his head several times as though he were clearing it, and when he looked at me he was Wyatt again.

“Okay,” he said, “you're the tough guy.”

“Good at heart, though.”

“Whatever you say. Can we go? That bloodsucker could be on top of my daughter right now.”

“If he is,” I said, “you get her out from under, and I'll put him on top of something else. Like a broken aquarium, okay?”

He nodded, and I opened the door.

I was out and he was past me so fast that I barely saw him. He sprinted up a series of stone steps that put a permanent part in the sagebrush, and I followed as best I could. By the time I got to the top of the steps I was winded, and Wyatt was pounding at the door of a surprisingly nice house that commanded a panoramic view of hills and sky.

I grabbed his hand in mid-pound, and it was a good thing I did, because it opened at precisely that moment and Wyatt would have begun the negotiations by hitting his daughter in the face. He tried to jerk his hand away from me, then focused and let it drop to his side.

“Daddy,” Jessica said coolly. “Is dinner ready?”

I hadn't seen her in a few months, and I wasn't prepared. Sure, she was still a baby to anyone who'd known her as long as I had, but she was a woman too. Most of the baby fat that makes children look so tentative had dropped away, revealing a face that had made up its mind to be beautiful. She wore a raggedly slashed T-shirt, shrunk bleached jeans, and a cloud of light brown hair with golden highlights. She sighted behind her father to look at me, and her hazel eyes narrowed slightly.

“Yes, it is,” Wyatt said tightly. “In fact, it's getting cold.”

“Mommy's ropavieja never gets cold,” she said. “Even when it's a week old, it'll blow your pants off.”

“And I'm glad to see that yours are on,” he said.

“Oh, please,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say.

Wyatt grabbed her arm and gave her a shake that almost lifted her off her feet. “We're going,” he said.

“So go,” said a male voice from behind her, and a lanky young man pulled the door the rest of the way open. “Take her with you. She was going home anyway.”

“I don't need your fucking permission to take my daughter home,” Wyatt said.

Blister passed a hand through limp hair that dangled over a narrow forehead. He was wearing white drawstring pants and slippers, and his stomach muscles looked like something you wouldn't want to hit your head on. His eyebrows collided above his nose. The air from the room inside was overripe with cigarette smoke.

“This is boring,” Blister said. “Oh, and happy birthday, Dad.”

My hand was on Wyatt's shoulder, and I felt him tense to lunge at Blister, but Jessica defused the moment. Without turning around, she said, “Don't call him Dad.” It was not a tone that invited discussion.

“So what am I supposed to call him?” Blister asked indolently.

“Call me Wyatt,” Wyatt said after a massive effort.

“Yo, Blister,” I said softly. Blister's eyes went to me for the first time. “Hi,” I said. I made a small confidential pointing gesture at Wyatt. “Call him Mr. Wilmington.”

“Who's this?” Blister asked the world in general.

“Nobody much,” I said, smiling. “You can call me The Man with No Name.”

Jessica looked from Wyatt to me and misjudged the degree to which the conversation had become civilized. “How about you give me half an hour, Daddy?” she asked. “Blister will drive me home.”

Wyatt looked at me and exhaled slowly. Then he arranged his features into what might have passed for an open smile at a nuclear-disarmament conference, turned back to Jessica, and said, “In a pig's ass.”

“Huh?” Jessica said, except that she didn't even have time to finish saying that. Wyatt crouched down, grabbed her knees, and straightened up without so much as a grunt of effort. Jessica dangled over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, her blue-clad bottom pointing at the sky. I stepped aside to let them go. Jessica was squealing and hitting at her father's back with her fists.

“Hey,” Blister said, stepping all the way into the doorway. “Put her down, you jerk.”

“Blister,” I said, putting a hand gently on his chest. “Remember me?”

“Get out of my way, shithead,” he said. “He can't do that.” Jessica's squeals echoed up through the sagebrush. He pushed against my arm.

“Wrong on two counts,” I said. “He can, and I'm not a shithead.” I looked past him. “And how come there's another woman in your house?”

He looked confused. “There isn't. .“he said, and then he turned his head to check. I hoisted a steel-toed cowboy boot and cracked him right below the kneecap. Blister made a gurgling sound and involuntarily grabbed his right knee and lifted it. As the gurgle turned into a moan I kicked his left knee, and it buckled beneath him, hitting the floor with a reassuring crack. He rolled on the floor, holding a knee in each hand and emitting high puppylike yelps.

He'd forgotten I was there, so I stretched out a foot and tapped his groin with the toe of my right boot.

“Have I got your attention?” I asked. He screwed his eyes up and nodded.

“For a couple of days you're going to walk like you're on stilts,” I told him. “After that, you'll be fine. And remember, the next time you're screwing around with Jessica, or anybody less than sixteen years old, that The Man with No Name might be just outside the window.” I wiggled my eyebrows for emphasis. “Got that?”

“You asshole,” he said in a choked voice.

I lifted my right foot. He winced, and I looked down and examined the boot. “You've made me scuff it,” I said. “Now say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

He let his head slump to the floor. “Yes, sir,” he said, squeezing back tears.

“Much better,” I said. “Also, you might think about where else the boot might have landed. I don't think a scrotum with the word Frye permanently printed on it backward is much of a selling point. Anyway,” I added, “for the future-and this is free advice, okay? — don’t call anybody shithead unless you know where both his feet and both his hands are. And never, never look behind you.” I bent down and chucked him under the chin with my index finger. ” ‘Bye, now.”

I went down to the car, where Wyatt had dumped a sullen Jessica into the back seat. When we got to the Wilmingtons’ house, I said good-bye. Neither of them had much to say to me.

Leaving Alice parked at the side of the road, I scaled the driveway to my house. It was cold and dark and empty. The light on the answering machine blinked a red semaphore while I uncapped a bottle of Singha beer from Thailand, a brew so sublimely lethal that it regularly loses its import privileges. With the first two gulps dizzily chasing each other down my esophagus, I pushed the Play button on the machine.

“One,” the machine announced. It says that on the twelfth message too. I ignored it for the moment and looked around the living room. Eleanor's curtains, left over from the time when we'd lived together, still hung over the windows. Patches of damp glowered at me from the rug. Then the machine whirred and I finally got to the message.

“Out and about as usual, are you?” Hammond's voice said. “Well, we've got one, and she may be yours. Problem is, she's in the morgue.”