Shackles

MORNING

Sluicebox Lane turned out to be a short, carelessly paved street a third of a mile from the Pine Rest Motel. Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating took up most of the second block on the north side-a good-sized combination of pipe yard, warehouse, showroom, and business office. It was twenty of nine when I walked into the office and showroom at the front.

Water heaters, sinks, and small color-coordinated mock-ups of a bathroom and a kitchen took up two-thirds of the interior; the other third was the office, with a couple of desks arranged behind a low counter. Only one of the desks was occupied, by a plump middle-aged woman with streaky, dyed blond hair and a demeanor that just missed being bovine. She stood when I approached the counter, smoothed out the tweed skirt she was wearing, and showed me teeth any dentist would have been proud of, real or not. “May I help you?”

“I hope so. I need some information?”

“Yes?”

“About a customer of yours six to eight years ago. The owner of a cabin up near Deer Run.”

Wrinkles appeared in her forehead, creating a V that pointed down the length of her nose. “I don’t understand…”

“I’d like the person’s name.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No, Ma’am. That’s why I’m here.”

“Why do you want to know his name?”

The impatience came crawling back; I could feel the muscles in my stomach draw tight. All right, then, I thought. Tell her who you are, show her the license. If she read or heard about the disappearance and makes the right connection, bluff it through.

I said, “I’m a private detective. Working on an investigation.” I got my wallet out and flipped it open to the photostat of my California PI license.

She said, “Oh,” with a small amount of surprise and nothing else in her voice, and looked at the license just about long enough to identify the state seal And if she noticed that I was clean-shaven in the photograph she didn’t comment on it. One of these placid types, born without much imagination or curiosity. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t give out information about our customers.”

“It’s very important-”

“Besides,” she said, “all our work orders and invoices are filed alphabetically. Without the customer’s name, I couldn’t very well… oh, Mr. Hennessey. Could you come over here a second?”

There was a door to the warehouse back beyond her desk and a silver-haired guy in his fifties, wearing a pair of overalls and duck-billed cap, had come through it. He angled over to the counter, smiled and nodded at me-I smiled and nodded back at him-and said to the woman, “What’s up, Wilma?”

“This man wants to know the name of one of our customers. He’s a private detective.”

The guy’s craggy face lit up at that, as if she’d told him I was somebody important or famous. He gave me a closer, appraising look and an even broader smile. “No kidding?” he said. “A private eye?”

“That’s right.”

“Like Magnum, huh? Mike Hammer, Spenser?”

“No,” I said, “not like them.”

“What, no fast cars and hot broads?”

“No.”

“Mean to tell me real private eyes aren’t like what you see on TV?”

“Not hardly. I’m just doing a job, the same as you.”

It was the truth and he liked it; it put him on my side. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. All that bang-bang, sexy stuff is so much crap, right?”

“Right.”

“Sure. It’s like I told my wife: Private eyes don’t get seduced any more than plumbers. I been in this business thirty years and I never had a customer try to get in my pants. Man or woman.” He laughed as though he’d made a joke, and winked at Wilma. She smiled dutifully, but without either humor or appreciation; the expression in her eyes said that as far as she was concerned, all men were little boys and sometimes it was a chore putting up with them.

I managed a small chuckle for his benefit. He liked that too. He said, “I’m Bert Hennessey, I own the place,” and poked a callused hand across the counter at me. I took it, gave him my right name-just the last one, in case he wanted to look at my license. But he didn’t. And the name didn’t seem to mean anything to him, any more than it had to Wilma. “So why do you want the name of one of my customers?”

“A case I’m working on.”

“What kind of case?”

“A confidential one.”

“Oh, sure. He live here in Sonora?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he owns a mountain cabin up near Deer Run, on Indian Hill Road-or he did six to eight years ago. You installed a water heater for him, maybe ran some copper piping and did some other work on the place.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“The water heater’s got your tag on it.”

“Ah. Deer Run, you say?”

“On Indian Hill Road. Six to eight years ago.”

“Deer Run, Deer Run… oh, yeah, I remember. I don’t get many jobs up that way. Only reason I got the one you mean, the customer called three or four shops for estimates and I gave him a low one, even with all the travel time, on account of it was a slow spring and I needed the work.”

“Do you recall his name?”

“Well, I’m not sure.” He frowned, thinking about it. “Seems to me it was a sports name.”

“The same as an athlete’s, you mean?”

“Yeah. Baseball or basketball player… no, both. White guy used to play for the Giants. And a black guy played in the NBA, does those Lite Beer commercials you see on TV. The guy with the big feet; you know, they keep making jokes about his big feet.”

Talk, talk, talk. The impatience had built a jangling inside me; I clenched my hands tight to keep them still. Hennessey was enjoying himself, playing a little riddle game with me, and the only thing to do was to play along with him. If I pushed him he might decide I wasn’t such an interesting specimen after all and close up on me. You either encourage people like him or you leave them be and let them get it out in their own sweet time.

I shook my head and shrugged and smiled and said, “Guess I don’t watch enough sports on TV.”

“My wife says I watch too much,” Hennessey said. “She says sports on TV breaks up more marriages than nookie. Not that she knows much about nookie,” and he winked at Wilma again.

She smiled her dutiful smile. I waited.

“Lanier,” he said finally, as if he were answering a big-prize question on a TV game show. Proud of himself, because he knew something a private eye didn’t. “Hal Lanier, pretty good infielder with the Giants once, manages the Astros now. Bob Lanier, the black basketball player with the big feet.”

“Lanier,” I said. It was a letdown because the name meant nothing to me. “You’re sure that was his name?”

“Pretty sure.”

“What was his first name?”

“That I don’t remember.”

“Did he live in the cabin year-round? Or did he give you another address?”

“Don’t remember that either,” Hennessey said. He glanced at the woman. “Look it up, Wilma, will you? Lanier. Must have been ’eighty-one. That was the year we had the slow spring.”

“Those files are in the storeroom,” she said. There was mild disapproval in her voice. But she was too placid to argue; and when he said, “Won’t take a minute, you know where they are,” she released a small sighing breath and went through the door into the warehouse.

I asked, “What did this Lanier look like?”

“Look like? Well, I don’t have much of a memory for faces…”

“It’s important, Mr. Hennessey.”

“Important case, huh?”

“Yes.”

“He do something crooked, this Lanier?”

“He might have.”

“Up at the cabin in Deer Run? Some kind of crime happen up there?”

“Yes,” I said, “some kind of crime.”

“Can’t say what it is, huh?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Sure, I understand. Well, let’s see. I think he was bald… yeah, that’s right, bald as an egg.”

“Big man? Medium? Small?”

“Kind of medium, I guess.”

“Was there anything unusual about him? Scars, moles, mannerisms, the way he talked?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“How old was he?”

“Oh… around our age.”

“You’re sure? In his fifties?”

“He was no spring chicken, that’s for sure.”

Not my man, then. If this Lanier had been in his fifties seven years ago, he would be close to or some past sixty now. The whisperer hadn’t been anywhere near that old; there had been a quality of relative youth about him, of that I was certain.

“What else can you tell me about Lanier?”

“That’s about all. Hell, it’s been so long…”

Wilma came back in from the warehouse, carrying a slender file folder in one hand. “Here it is,” she said in her placidly disapproving way. “James Lanier.”

“James, that’s right,” Hennessey said. “James Lanier.”

I asked Wilma, “What address did he give?”

She consulted the file. “Spruce Cabin, Indian Hill Road, Deer Run.”

“Is that the only one?”

“No. There’s another here. But it’s not local.”

Jesus, these people! “What is it, please?”

“It’s in Carmichael,” she said. “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”

I repeated it, committing it to memory: “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”

“That’s right.”

“Did he give a telephone number?”

“Yes, I think so…”

She found it and read it out, and I repeated it, too, so I wouldn’t forget it.

When I thanked the two of them for their help, Hennessey said, “Any time. Wait’ll I tell the wife we helped out a private eye. She’ll wet her pants.” He winked at me, winked at Wilma, and said, “She might even give me a little tonight.”

Wilma sighed, pursed her lips, and sat down at her desk. Hennessey grinned. And I went away from both of them.

AFTERNOON

There were no rental car agencies in Sonora; I had learned that last night, from the desk clerk when I checked into the motel. So after I left Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating, I found my way to the bus station. The next bus to Sacramento wasn’t until tomorrow morning, but there was a one o’clock coach to Stockton. I spent nearly ten of my remaining dollars on a one-way ticket. Stockton was some sixty miles south and a little west of Carmichael, a sprawling northern suburb of Sacramento; it was also about the same distance from Sonora. I could rent a car there this afternoon and be in Carmichael sometime early this evening. The sooner I had a car and the freedom of mobility it provided, the better off I would be.

From a phone booth I called Sacramento County information and asked for a Carmichael listing for James Lanier. I half expected to be told that there wasn’t one, after seven years, but the operator punched in his computer without comment and an electronic voice gave the same number Wilma had read to me. So Lanier was likely still at the same Roseville Avenue address. I could confirm that by checking the local directory when I got to Carmichael.

I had gotten several quarters and I used those to call Bates and Carpenter in San Francisco. I had tried dialing Kerry’s home number twice more last night, the last time at a quarter to eleven, and she still hadn’t answered. Nothing ominous in that, or even significant, but it preyed on my mind just the same.

When the call went through I said to the woman on the switchboard, “Kerry Wade, please.” There was a click, another ringing sound, and then another click and Kerry’s secretary, Ellen Stilwell, said cheerfully, “Ms. Wade’s office.”

She knew my voice, Ellen did-I had called Kerry often enough at the agency-so I deepened and roughened it when I asked, “Is Ms. Wade in?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Then she is in?”

“Yes, she is. Your name, please, sir?”

Relieved, I tapped the box with the handset, jiggled the cradle at the same time to make it seem as though there was something wrong with the line, and then hung up. All right. Kerry was alive, safe, well enough to be at her job; now I could put my mind at ease at least where she was concerned.

I went to a café not far away and drank coffee and made myself eat a piece of apple pie. Back at the bus station, I bought a newspaper and caught up on the news. Nothing much had changed in three months: political scandals, corporate scandals, religious scandals, small wars like rehearsals for another big one, all sorts of killing on the individual level. Lots of changes taking place everywhere-change is systemic in all walks of life, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle-and yet certain fundamental things never change. I thought of the line from the Peter, Paul, and Mary song: When will they ever learn? Rhetorical question; moot point. We’ll never learn. We’ll never learn our way smack into the middle of Armageddon, and then we’ll say, with the last words we’ll ever speak, “How could this have happened? How could we have let this happen?”

The bus left on time. I sat in the back and stared out the window and tried not to fidget. The impatience that Wilma and Hennessey had rearoused in me this morning wouldn’t go away. Outside the bus there were green trees and hillsides and then long, barren stretches of cattle graze as we came down out of the foothills into the upper reaches of the Central Valley; inside me there was turmoil, and the knowledge that I was no different from the rest of mankind. Each of us likes to believe we’re unique, special. But when something profound happens, something like being chained up alone in a mountain cabin for ninety days, you realize the truth-that in you, as in everyone, there is a thing that crawled up out of the primordial slime a hundred million years ago, a thing so savage and elemental that it can, if you let it loose, overwhelm your humanity and reduce you to its level. This is the thing that causes war, that brutalizes and destroys, that keeps us from ever really being civilized creatures. This was the one thing I was about to unleash… even though I knew what it was and what it might do to me. I hadn’t learned. I thought I had but I hadn’t and in a way that was the most terrible truth I had ever had to face about myself.

We arrived in Stockton a little past three-thirty. A cab driver took another three dollars of my money to deliver me to an Avis office, where I rented a Toyota Tercel-the only nonluxury car they had available-that I could drop off at any Avis outlet in northern California. The woman who waited on me examined my driver’s license, wrote down my name on the rental agreement, and ran off my MasterCard without a flicker of recognition.

It felt odd to be behind the wheel of a car again after so long a time. And I was not used to driving small foreign cars like this one. It wasn’t until I got out of Stockton proper and onto Highway 99 that I began to relax. And once I relaxed, I felt a sense of release. I was in control again. From here on in, until the hunt was finished, I would not have to rely on anybody but myself.

EVENING

I ran into rush hour traffic above Elk Grove and 99 stayed jammed all the way through Sacramento, so that it was six-thirty when I finally reached Carmichael. I stopped at a Union station just off the freeway and went to one of two public telephone booths to look up James Lanier. The directory had been vandalized in that booth, the whole middle section ripped out; and in the other booth there was no book at all. Life in the enlightened eighties. I talked one of the attendants into hunting up the station’s private directory, which turned out to be over a year old. Lanier was listed in there, at least, and at the same Roseville Avenue address.

The attendant sold me a Carmichael street map for two of my last five dollars. I sat in the car with it for ten minutes, first locating Roseville Avenue and then tracing a route from where I was. The distance was three or four miles. Just a short hop… but it took me half an hour to get there, because I made a wrong turn somewhere and got lost and had to stop and study the map again to retrace and refigure the route. I was sweating and drawn tight when I finally pulled up in front of 21963 Roseville Avenue.

Nobody was home.

The house was dark, no car under the carport to one side; and nobody answered when I went up and rang the bell.

I sat in the car for a time, still hot and tense, and stared at the house. Typical tract rancher, nothing special about it under its night cover except that the front yard was neatly and lushly landscaped. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find a madman living in, or a link to a madman either. Except that madmen and those who nurture them live in the same places sane people do, from any city’s Skid Row to the stately homes and expensive flats of Washington, D.C., and McLean, Virginia. You can’t always tell a book by its cover, you can’t always tell the lunatics of the world by their cover.

Pretty soon I started the car, drove around until I noticed a Denny’s, went in there and ate something-I don’t remember what-and killed more time over three coffee refills. It was 9:15 when I pulled up in front of the Roseville Avenue house for the second time.

Still dark, still nobody home.

Now what? I could sit here and wait, but there were people in the neighboring houses, lights blazing in the two flanking Lanier’s. A man sitting in a strange car in a neighborhood like this would have a cop asking him hard questions inside of half an hour. A better idea was to drive around some more, keep checking back periodically-for a while, anyway. I was already tired, headachy, gritty-eyed: the long day and the constant tension taking their toll. Make eleven o’clock the cutoff, then. If nobody showed up by eleven, go find a motel and try to get some sleep and then come back early in the morning.

So I drove aimlessly, keeping to major thoroughfares so I wouldn’t get lost again. And I returned to 21963 Roseville Avenue three more times, the last one at five minutes past eleven. And still nobody was home.

I’d seen a motel near the Denny’s where I’d eaten; I went there, took a room. The woman at the desk was fat and middle-aged and friendly, and it was plain that she found me at least a little attractive. She smiled when she handed over my key. I smiled back, turned away-and as I did that I was conscious of the weight of the.22 in my jacket pocket and I found myself thinking, with a flash of self-hatred: No, you can’t always tell a lunatic by his cover.

EARLY MORNING

Someone was home when I returned to 21963 Roseville Avenue at 8:30 A.M. A ten-year-old Buick stood under the carport, and down on his knees among the flowers and shrubs in the front yard was a man in gardening clothes-a bald man who looked to be in his early sixties.

I parked across the street. It was a warmish, sunny morning and there was a good deal of activity along the block: kids on their way to school, men and women backing cars out of driveways, mothers with toddlers in tow and babies in carriages. By daylight, it had the look of an older, once attractive and solidly middle-class neighborhood that was now starting to slide a little; some homes needed cosmetic and structural repairs, some yards had been allowed to deteriorate into weed patches; even the shade trees that lined its sidewalks had a ragged appearance. The middle class was a rapidly diminishing segment of this country’s population; in another ten years, those families that still qualified would have moved elsewhere, upscale or maybe just sidescale, and this neighborhood would be on its way to becoming a suburban slum tract. Another of the Great American Dreams in remission.

Lanier’s was the best kept house on the block. It had been repainted and reroofed not long ago, the lawn was a thick healthy green and well barbered, the flower beds were weed-free. The yard of a meticulous person, one who enjoyed gardening enough to be doing it at 8:30 in the morning.

The bald man was transplanting a nursery tray full of small yellow flowers; and he was so engrossed in the task that he didn’t seem to hear me a. I walked up the brick path toward him. It was only when I stopped a few feet away and said, “Mr. Lanier?” that he straightened on his knees and looked my way.

“Yes?”

No recognition on his face or in his voice; just a small smile and a mild curiosity in mild blue eyes. Everything about him was mild and nondescript: Mr. Average American working in his garden. I reminded myself that you can’t judge a man by his cover-but I had the feeling that if he was involved in what had been done to me, it was in the most peripheral of ways.

“You’re James Lanier?”

“Yes, that’s right?”

“Do you or did you own a summer cabin on Indian Hill Road near Deer Run?”

“Why… yes.” He put down the trowel he’d been using, got slowly to his feet. There was an odd methodical quality about his movements, as if it wasn’t natural to him to move that way; as if he had once been a quick, energetic man who had undergone some kind of physiological or maybe psychological change. “Has something happened?”

“Happened?”

“At the cabin.”

“Then you still do own it?”

“Yes, I do. But I haven’t been there since… in more than three years. Has the new tenant done something to the place?”

“Tenant. Meaning you’ve rented it to someone?”

“I haven’t, no. Richards and Kirk handled the transaction for me, as they always do.”

“Who would Richards and Kirk be?”

“My realtors. And you? Who would you be?”

I told him my name. And I showed him the photostat of my investigator’s license.

“I don’t understand,” he said. His curiosity was a little stronger now, but I had the impression that it was superficial-that he didn’t really care who I was or why I was here or what might have happened at his Deer Run cabin. “Is the new tenant some sort of criminal?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Lanier. That’s why I’m trying to find him. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me his name.”

“I don’t remember it, I’m sorry. Susan has all the paperwork on the transaction.”

“Susan?”

“The woman I deal with at Richards and Kirk. Susan Belford.”

“Can you tell me when the cabin was rented?”

“In October, I think it was. No, early November. Susan was very pleased because it was for six months over the winter. That was the first time she was able to rent it over the winter.”

“Would you do me a favor, Mr. Lanier?”

“Favor?”

“Call Susan Belford and ask her to give me the name of the man who rented the cabin. His name and address.”

Lanier considered that. “All right,” he said at length. “If the man is a criminal… yes, all right.” He started toward the house, stopped after half a dozen steps, and turned to me again. “Is it nine o’clock yet?”

I looked at my watch. “No, not yet. Fifteen minutes.”

“Richards and Kirk doesn’t open until nine. Would you like to come in and have a cup of coffee while we wait?”

“If it’s no trouble.”

“Not at all.”

He went onto a narrow porch, opened the door, led me into a bright, clean, comfortably furnished living room that had the stamp of an old-fashioned woman on it: antimacassars on the arms of a couch and two chairs, knick-knacks on tables and wall shelves, a framed embroidered wall motto that said: Dear House, You Are Very Small-Enough Room for Love, That’s All On an end table was an overlarge photograph of a woman in an ornate silver frame. I glanced at it as we walked by. Smiling, buxom woman of about sixty, as nondescript in her way as Lanier was in his.

I said politely, indicating the photo, “Your wife?”

It stopped him as suddenly as if I had caught his arm and yanked him still. And such an expression of naked pain came over his face that it made me wince. It lasted only a moment or two; then the mildness smoothed his features again, like a veneer over scarred wood. “My wife Clara,” he said in his emotionless voice. “She… died three years ago last December.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. She was…” He broke off, stood rigidly for a few seconds, lost in some brief, sharp memory. Then he smiled his small smile and said, “Please sit down,” and went through an archway toward the rear of the house.

I sat on one of the chairs. I could see the wall motto from there: Enough Room for Love, That’s All. And I looked elsewhere, because it made me feel Lanier’s pain again. There was no impatience in me today, for some reason; it seemed to come and go, like a malarial fever.

Lanier came back with a full coffee service on a silver tray, set in on a coffee table, poured for both of us. I said I would have mine black, and as he handed me my cup he said, “I always load mine with cream and sugar. You learn to do that in the service.”

“What branch were you in?”

“Air force. Twenty years. I probably should have stayed in; Clara thought I should have. She never minded the travel…” He broke off as he had before, as a memory took hold of his mind. Pretty soon he said, as if there had been no long pause, “But I had a good job offer. Electronics company in Sacramento. Design work, good salary-jobs like that don’t come along every day.”

“No,” I said, “they don’t.”

He sat down with his coffee. “Bought this place, bought the cabin in Deer Run, sent our daughter to college. Ruth’s.married now, lives in Menlo Park-her husband teaches history at the junior college there. I tried to give them the cabin after Clara… well, I knew I wouldn’t go back up there alone. But they didn’t want it. Too isolated, Ruth said. She never did like it much and Jim, well, he prefers water to mountains. They have a sailboat, spend most of their free time sailing on the Bay-” Abruptly he quit talking. Blinked, seemed to shake himself, and then said in a different voice, “I’m babbling. Bad habit of mine. I don’t know why I do it.”

I knew. But I said, “Don’t apologize, Mr. Lanier.”

“Ruth says I should get out more, see people, do things. She’s right, of course. I belong to the Moose Lodge and I go down there two nights a week now, play cards, play chess. Bowl one night a week too. But that’s only three nights. Movies once in a while, but what else can I do? Go to seniors dances, try to meet someone else? My God, I-” He stopped again, took a breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear my tale of woe.”

“I don’t mind. I know what it’s like for you.”

He raised his head. “You’ve lost someone too? Someone you loved deeply?”

“Not the way you have. Not permanently.”

“Cancer,” he said with sudden savage anger, “goddamn cancer. I watched her die. I watched her waste away and die and there was nothing I could do. She was always such a strong woman, rosy-cheeked, healthy… she weighed ninety-six pounds when she died. Ninety-six pounds.” And he began to cry.

There was nothing for me to do or say. I sat there with the coffee cup and saucer in my hands and watched him mourn and thought about Kerry, what she’d been through the past three months, because that is what you do in this kind of situation: You turn a stranger’s grief inward, personalize it.

Lanier’s breakdown lasted less than a minute. I watched him take control of himself, the way you take hold of something with both hands. When he looked at me again it was with embarrassment. I wanted to tell him not to be embarrassed, there was no shame in weeping over the tragic loss of a loved one; but those words from me would have sounded hollow, and he wouldn’t have listened to them anyway because he was already on his feet, moving away from me. He stood facing the empty fireplace, drying his eyes and face with a handkerchief. When he turned back toward me his movements were once more slow and methodical and his expression was a studied blank. The emotion had been dammed up again behind the wall of mildness and disinterest.

“It must be nine o’clock,” he said. “I’ll try Richards and Kirk now. Susan always comes in at nine, unless she happens to have a showing.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want to speak to her yourself?”

“That might be best. If you’ll explain who I am first.”

He nodded and went to where a telephone sat on a rattan table. Susan Belford had come in on schedule, it developed. She gave Lanier an argument when he told her what he wanted and what I wanted, but only a small one: There were maybe two minutes of discussion before he said, “I’ll put him on, Susan, thank you,” and motioned for me to come take the receiver.

“Ms. Belford?”

“Susan Belford, yes. Mr. Lanier said… you’re a private detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you know, we… it isn’t out policy… I’m only doing this as a favor to Mr. Lanier.” She had a twitchy, middle-aged voice that kept going up and down register so that some words had a shrill intonation, as if they were being goosed out of her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, well… about the man who rented Mr. Lanier’s property in Deer Run… what did you want to know? I have the file here in front of me.”

“His name, first of all.”

“Lawrence Jacobs.”

Another one that meant nothing to me. “And his address?”

“Forty-seven nineteen K Street, Sacramento.”

I repeated it and then asked, “Would you know if that’s a private home, an apartment building, a hotel?”

“It’s an apartment building.”

“So you did call to verify that Lawrence Jacobs lived there?”

“Of course. We… it’s standard procedure in all our transactions…”

“Do you remember who you talked to?”

“The building manager.”

“I mean the person’s name.”

“No, I don’t… I didn’t write it down.”

“Man or woman?”

“Man? Yes, a man.”

“And he confirmed Jacobs’s tenancy?”

“Well, certainly.”

“Did you also call Jacobs’s employer?”

“No. He said he was self-employed.”

“Doing what?”

“Consultancy work.”

Yeah, I thought. “Can you describe him for me?”

“Describe him? Well, really, I meet so many people…”

“Please try, Ms. Belford.”

“Oh, all right. He… well, he just wasn’t very memorable. Average. Not tall, not short, not fat or thin… average.”

“Slender build, would you say?”

“… I suppose so, yes.”

“How old?”

“Mid-thirties? Yes, about that.”

“What color hair?”

“Brown.”

“Dark brown, light brown, reddish highlights?”

“Just… brown.”

“Curly or straight?”

“Straight.”

“Worn long or short?”

“Short.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“Blue? Gray? I’m not sure.”

“Was there anything distinctive about his voice?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Did he have any moles, scars, tattoos?”

“No.”

“How was he dressed?”

“In a suit and tie.”

“Expensive suit?”

“No. An inexpensive one.”

“What kind of car did he drive?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“You never saw it?”

“Yes. I mean no… no, I didn’t see it.”

Based on her answers, the picture of Lawrence Jacobs that had formed in my mind was just as unfamiliar as the name. But he sounded like my man; the age and build were right. I said, “How did he happen to come to you about Mr. Lanier’s cabin? Did he just walk in off the street? Was he recommended by someone?”

“He saw our ad in the Bee.”

“A specific ad for Mr. Lanier’s cabin?”

“No, it… there were other rental properties…”

“What did he say when he came in?”

She made a breathy sound; she was becoming annoyed by my persistence. “He said he’d noticed the ad. I just told you that.”

“What else did he say? Please, Ms. Belford, try to remember.”

Another sigh. “He… let me think a moment…” She took ten moments. Then, “He said he was looking for a quiet, isolated mountain cabin because he… some sort of project he was working on and he didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone. He said he wanted to hole up for the winter… those were his exact words.”

“Did he want to see the cabin before renting it?”

“No. He asked me several questions… I showed him photographs, we always prepare multiple photos of our listings. When I told him the price he said it would do just fine.”

“How did he pay?”

“With a cashier’s check.”

“Went away and got it and came back?”

“Yes.”

“Which bank?”

Still another breathy sound. “The Bank of Alex Brown, a branch in downtown Sacramento. Now really, I… we’re closing on a property later this morning and I have to… I can’t take any more time to answer questions…”

“Just one more. What was the date?”

“Date?”

“That he came in. That he signed the rental agreement.”

“November second, last year. Now is that all?”

“Yes, ma’am. I appreciate your time-”

“Thank Mr. Lanier,” she said, and hung up on me.

I put the receiver down. November second. Almost five weeks before he’d abducted me-plenty of time to buy all the things he would need, make two or three or four trips to the cabin, install the ringbolt and the chain, complete the rest of his preparations. But how long before November second had he got his idea? How long had it been in the planning stages? Not sixteen years, not anywhere near that long, or he’d have acted on it years ago… unless he couldn’t act on it. Suppose he’d been in prison, or some sort of mental facility? That could be it. But then where had he gotten the money for the cabin rental, for all the provisions and the rest of the stuff he’d needed? Had it before he was put away? Borrowed it from friends or relatives? Stole it? Probably didn’t matter-but then again, could be it did.

One thing I knew for sure: Lawrence Jacobs wasn’t his name. He would not have wanted his real name on the rental agreement in case anything went haywire with his plan. That was one of the reasons he’d paid with a cashier’s check. The other was that handing over a large amount of cash might have made Susan Belford curious, if not actively suspicious.

James Lanier and I had little to say to each other. He showed me to the door, and we spent a few seconds wishing each other well before I went across to the car. When I drove away he was walking back to his garden, a slow-moving, solitary figure marking time, trying to find ways to fill up the rest of his days until-faith and hope being what they are-he could be with his Clara again.

LATE MORNING

K Street was one of Sacramento’s central thoroughfares, and 4719 was no more than a couple of miles from the capitol building and all the other not-so-hallowed halls of state government. Still, it was a marginal neighborhood of lower income apartment houses and small business establishments. The building I wanted was an old three-story apartment house, narrow and fronted by two of the city’s wealth of shade trees, wedged between another apartment house and a cut-rate liquor store. I parked down the block, went up into the vestibule. Six mailboxes, each with a name Dymo-labeled on the front. None of the names was Lawrence Jacobs; none of them was familiar. The one on the box marked with the numeral 1, O. Barnwell, had the letters “Mgr” after it.

I tried the entrance door. Locked. But through its leaded glass panels I could see someone in the dim hallway inside-a man up on an aluminum stepladder next to a flight of stairs, changing a light bulb in a ceiling fixture. I rapped on the door with my knuckles, and when he heard that and leaned down to look my way, I gestured for him to let me in. He didn’t do it. He must have been able to see me well enough through the glass to decide I was nobody he knew or particularly cared to deal with: He made a go-away gesture and leaned back up to the ceiling fixture.

I did some more knocking, this time with my fist. And I kept on doing it, harder and louder, until the racket finally brought him down off the ladder and over to the door. He took another, scowling look at me through the glass, yanked the door open, and said angrily, “Chrissake, what’s the fuggin idea?”

“You the manager? Mr. Barnwell?”

“Yeah. But we got no vacancies-”

“I’m not looking for an apartment. I’m looking for a man who calls himself Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Who?”

“Lawrence Jacobs. He lived here around the first of November last year.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Were you the manager back then?”

“I said I never heard of him.”

He started to push the door closed. I got a shoulder up against it and pushed harder than he did, hard enough to crowd him backward and let me slide in through the opening. The hallway was clean enough but it stank of disinfectant, old wood, somebody’s chicken and garlic recipe. It stank of Barnwell, too-sweat and beer and the too-sweet odor of cheap aftershave.

Behind him, down the hall past the ladder, a door to the ground-floor front apartment opened and a skinny blond woman poked her head out. But Barnwell was too busy glaring at me to notice. He was in his late forties, lard-bellied, balding, with a tattoo on one bare forearm-the name Maggie intertwined with blue-stemmed red roses. He had eaten something with ketchup on it in the past few days: There was a streak of dried tomato red across the front of his sleeveless sweatshirt.

“What the hell you think you’re doin, pal?”

“Looking for Lawrence Jacobs. I told you that.”

“And I already told you-”

“Sure you did. Now tell me the truth.”

“Listen-”

“I will, as soon as you start to talk.”

“I don’t have to fuggin talk to you.”

“Don’t you?” I said, soft.

We looked at each other for a time. His features softened first, like wax under a flame; then the anger in his eyes cooled; and then his gaze slid away and a tic began to jump on one puffy cheek. He said, “What are you, a cop?”

“Could be. And maybe I’m somebody you want to mess with even less than a cop. Capisce, mi amico?”

He didn’t like that; I had meant it to scare him and it did. Enough so that there would be no need for me to show him the.22. He backed up a step, and he must have seen the woman hanging out of the open doorway because her jerked his head toward her and snapped, “Goddamn it, Maggie, get your ass back inside!” She gave him the finger, but she didn’t argue or waste any time pulling her head in and slamming the door. So much for blue-stemmed red roses and the sentiment that went with them.

Barnwell put his eyes back on me, still didn’t like what he saw, and let his gaze slide off sideways again. He was nervous now; the tic on his cheek had worsened. He lifted a hand to poke at it, kept the hand there as if it and the arm were a protective shield between us.

He said, “Lawrence Jacobs, right?”

“That was the name he was using.”

“Okay. Okay. But I dunno his real name, I swear it.”

“How long was he here?”

“A week or so, that’s all.”

“Come on, Mr. Barnwell, you don’t rent out apartments for a week or so. We both know that.”

“He didn’t live here, he was just stayin here.”

“With one of the other tenants?”

“Frank Tucker. He was a pal of Tucker’s.”

“Tucker isn’t one of the names on the mailboxes.”

“He moved out back in December.”

“Did he? Where to?”

“Vacaville, I think. Yeah, Vacaville.”

“Where in Vacaville?”

“I dunno.” But then he paused, and something dark and bitter flickered in his expression. “My old lady might,” he said. “I can ask her, you want.”

“You do that. But not just yet. How well do you know this Frank Tucker?”

“I don’t know him. I don’t wanna know him.”

“Why not?”

“I got reasons.”

His old lady being one of them, I thought. Maggie of the blue-stemmed roses. But there was nothing for me in his domestic problems. I asked him, “Frank Tucker his real name?”

“Far as I know.”

“What does he look like?”

“Big bastard, must weigh two-fifty, two-sixty. Arms like fuggin cement posts. Black greasy hair, like Presley used to wear his. You know?”

I knew-and I didn’t know. The description meant nothing to me. “How old?”

“Forty, forty-five.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Said he was a truck driver.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“None of my business what he does.”

“Talk to me, Mr. Barnwell. What do you think Tucker does for his money, if it isn’t driving a truck?”

“Strong-arm stuff, okay? That’s what I think.”

“What kind of strong-arm stuff?”

“Any kind. Strikebreakin, head-bustin, shit like that.”

“What about Lawrence Jacobs? That his line of work too?”

“Nah, not him. Too small, not mean enough.”

“What does he do for a living, then?”

“He never said and I never asked.”

“He just stayed here with Tucker for a week of so. Stayed in Tucker’s apartment the whole time?”

“Well, he went out most days.”

“With Tucker?”

“Nah, alone. Just crashin with Tucker. Or maybe…” Barnwell let the sentence trail away.

“Or maybe what?”

“I always thought there was somethin funny about him. Tucker, too, kind of. Queer, you know?”

“Meaning you think they had a homosexual relationship?”

“Could be. Tucker likes broads too”-the dark and bitter thing touched his face again-“but Jacobs, he looked pure fuggin fag to me.”

The gospel according to O. Barnwell, philosopher and sage. But how much truth was in it? I put it away for the time being-until, if, and when I could find somebody more reliable to bear witness.

I said, “Were Jacobs and Tucker old friends or new friends? How did it look to you?”

He thought about it. “Old friends, I guess. Yeah, they knew each other a while.”

“From where? Here in Sacramento, someplace else?”

“I dunno. They never said.”

“Is Tucker a Sacramento native?”

“He never said that neither.”

“How long had he been living here when Jacobs moved in?”

“Few months. He’s the kind moves around a lot.”

“He tell you beforehand Jacobs was moving in or did Jacobs just show up?”

“He told me. Said he had this buddy needed a place to crash for a week or two, till he found a place of his own. Didn’t ask if it was all right, just told me Jacobs was comin. But what the hell, why should I care? I don’t own the fuggin building.”

“You talk to Jacobs much while he was here?”

“Nah, I don’t like fags.”

“Then how come you lied for him?”

Barnwell hadn’t been looking at me much, had done most of his talking to the floor or to spots to my left and right. But now his gaze slithered back to my face, held there long enough for him to say, “Hah?” and then went roving again.

“You told a woman at a Carmichael real estate firm that Jacobs lived here, had an apartment in this building. You told her he’d been here for some time, paid his rent promptly, had a steady job.”

“Oh yeah, that. Sure. But it wasn’t no big deal. He give me twenty bucks, so why not?”

“He tell you what his reasons were?”

“So he could get a place he wanted up there. Carmichael. Said the real estate outfit wouldn’t rent it to him if they knew he didn’t have an address and was out of work.”

“If he was out of work, where did he get the money to rent a place?”

“He never said.”

“And you didn’t ask.”

“Why should I? It wasn’t none of my business.”

“How long after that did Jacobs move out?”

“Couple of days. He must of got the place he wanted in Carmichael, hah?”

Yeah, I thought, he got the place he wanted, but not in Carmichael. “You ever hear from him again?”

“Nossir, never.”

“Or from Tucker since he moved?”

“Not me.” His mouth turned down at the corners: anger, bitterness, self-pity. “Maybe my old lady heard. You want me to ask her now? Or you want to?”

“You do it, in private.” It was easier that way. He could get things out of her that she’d be reluctant to tell a stranger, even a stranger playing the kind of role I was. Besides, if he was alone when he told her about me, he’d build me up into something pretty nasty-use me as a club to punish her for her real or imagined dallying with Frank Tucker. O. Barnwell, loving husband. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “One thing, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t call anybody while you’re inside. And don’t call anybody after I leave.”

“I won’t. Who would I call?”

“Because if you do,” I said, “I’ll find out and I’ll come back. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“Nossir,” he said to a point three feet on my left. “You don’t have to worry, I won’t want no trouble. I’m just a guy tryin to get along, that’s all.”

“Sure you are. Don’t be long, Mr. Barnwell.”

He went back past the ladder, moving sideways as if he were afraid to put his back to me, and disappeared inside the ground-floor apartment. A little time passed. I leaned against the wall next to the front door and smelled the building’s secretions and thought about Lawrence Jacobs and Frank Tucker. Names, just names. And meaningless descriptions that fit dozens of people whose paths had crossed mine at one time or another. Where did Jacobs fit into the short, unpleasant life of Jackie Timmons? And did Tucker fit into it at all?

Voices began to filter out through the wall from Apartment 1-loud voices that kept getting louder. Barnwell shouting, Maggie shouting back. Then there were other voices, something falling over, a yell of pain, a screech that evolved into the words “You stinking animal!” and finally, when the door down there opened and Barnwell reappeared, the steady sound of sobbing.

Barnwell looked pleased with himself as he approached me: The fat worm had turned, and in the process had discovered he still had some sting in his tail. He was a sweetheart, he was. People like him… what made them that way? But I knew the answer; the answer was simple. Life made them that way. The hard, bad, sad, grinding task of living the lives they had constructed for themselves.

When he got to where I was he looked me straight in the eye. He had beat up on his wife and that had dissolved most of his fear, made him a man again for a little while. He said, “She had Tucker’s address, all right I knocked it right out of her, the two-timing bitch.”

“Well?”

“Two-ten Poplar Street.”

“In Vacaville?”

“Yeah. He called her with it after he moved. She said it was innocent, he just wanted us to know in case any of his friends come around or mail showed up for him. But that’s bullshit. He never had no friends except Jacobs and he never got no mail.”

“When did she last hear from Tucker?”

“Right after he moved, she said. Maybe that’s bullshit too. She might of seen him yesterday, for all I know.”

“One more thing. What kind of car does Tucker drive?”

“Chrysler. New one. I dunno the model.”

“What color?”

“Brown.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed the license number?”

“Nab. Who notices license numbers?”

“All right, Mr. Barnwell. Just remember what I told you about making phone calls.”

“I’ll remember. Like I said before, I got nobody to call. And I’ll see to it she don’t call nobody neither, least of all Tucker. Make sure she don’t if I have to bust her fuggin arm for her.”

O. Barnwell, humanitarian. O. Barnwell, the Christian ideal.

AFTERNOON

Vacaville is a farming and ranching community off Highway 80, some thirty-five miles west of Sacramento. The literal translation of the name is cowtown, which is appropriate enough, but in fact the town was named after the Vacas, a family of Hispanic settlers in the area. A quiet place, Vacaville, plain and old-fashioned in looks and outlook, hot and dusty in the summer-one of those towns with plenty of history and yet no particular historical attraction for the modern tourist. The only reasons you’d go there were to visit friends or relatives, or business, or to see one of the inmates at the California Medical Correctional Facility nearby. On first reflection, you wouldn’t think somebody like Frank Tucker would want to live there. But if he was the kind of man Barnwell had painted him-hired muscle, more brawn than brain-it was exactly the type of town he might pick. For one thing, a few ranchers and farm owners still believed in taking a hard line with recalcitrant laborers, the ones who had the gall to fight for better than starvation wages; such bosses weren’t above hiring somebody to knock heads when the “wetbacks” and the “greasers” and the “chihuahuas” got out of hand. Another reason for Tucker to pick Vacaville was that the cost of living was relatively low, by California standards these days; and a third was that as long as you didn’t mug old ladies on the street or break up bars on Saturday nights, the local law probably wouldn’t pay any attention to you. It was also possible that Tucker had some reason-contacts, a close friend-for wanting to be close to the prison facility.

It was just one o’clock when I drove into the smallish downtown area. I stopped at a convenience store to ask directions to Poplar Street. It was a few blocks off the main drag-an older residential neighborhood, the sidewalks shaded by big leafy oaks and elms. The private houses were mostly of pre-World War II vintage, but a few newer homes and small apartment complexes had sprung up here and there, none of them particularly aesthetic: weeds in a mossy old garden. The apartment building at number 210 was a two-story, brown stucco affair that looked more like a cut-rate motel. Eight units, four up and four down, all the doors facing the street, the ones on the second level reachable by outside staircases and a long low-railed balcony along the front.

There was an asphalt parking area, just as you’d find at a motel; no trees, no shrubs, no flowers except for some potted plants next to one of the street-level apartments. I put the Toyota into a painted parking slot and went looking for mailboxes. No mailboxes. Each apartment bore a number and each one had a private mail slot. Number 2 downstairs, the one with the potted plants next to it, also bore a neatly hand-printed card in a brass holder: Manager. There was no doorbell, so I banged on the panel a couple of times. Nobody came to see what I wanted.

I turned away with the intention of talking to one of the other residents; there were three cars in the lot besides my rental. No, make that four: a green, low-slung Firebird with a woman at the wheel was just turning in off the street. It skidded into a space next to the Toyota and a round brown Spanish face topped by piles of shiny black hair poked out of the window and said in a gravelly voice with not much accent, “You looking for me?”

“I am if you’re the manager.”

“Hold on a minute.”

She got out of the Firebird in wiggly, puffing movements-a big woman in an orange flowered dress that made her look even bigger. She leaned back in for a bag of groceries, then waddled over to where I waited.

“I’m Mrs. Ruiz,” she said good-naturedly. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it.” She paused for a beat and then said, “Not that you look much like a salesman.”

“I’m not. I’m looking for one of your neighbors.”

“Which one?”

“Frank Tucker.”

Her mouth got puckery, as if I’d squirted lemon juice along with the name. “Him,” she said. “You a friend of that bum?”

“No. I just want to talk to him.”

“Some kind of cop, right?”

“How did you guess that?”

“Only two kinds want to talk to Frank Tucker-cops and other bums. But you’re too late.”

“Too late?”

“He’s gone. Moved out.”

“When?”

“Couple of weeks ago, like a thief in the night.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Straight to hell, I hope.”

“No forwarding address?”

“Hah!” Mrs. Ruiz said. “He owed two weeks’ rent, the bum. So who do you think takes all the crap from the owner of this place? Me, that’s who. Like it’s my fault Frank Tucker is a bum. My ex-husband warned me, he said ‘Don’t volunteer to be manager, querida, it’s nothing but headaches.’ Well, he was right for once, the only time he was ever right about anything. And I didn’t listen.”

“Can you tell me-”

“The owner’s got some nerve,” she said, still indignant. “I told him in the beginning Frank Tucker was a bum and we shouldn’t rent to him. He said rent to him anyway. I told him Tucker was an ex-convict too, as soon as I found out, but he-”

“How did you find out?”

“What, that he’s an ex-convict? I heard him talking to one of his friends. He was drunk or he wouldn’t have said it so loud.”

“Which prison was he in? The medical facility here?”

“No. Folsom.”

Folsom was a maximum security prison off Highway 50 east of Sacramento, not as well known outside the state as San Quentin but with the same kind of hard-core inmate population. I had helped send a few men to Folsom over the years… Folsom, Folsom. And a slender man in his thirties, with straight brown hair…

I said, “Did he say how long he’d been in Folsom?”

“No.”

“Or when he got out?”

“No.”

“This friend he was talking to-what did he look like?”

“Like a bum,” Mrs. Ruiz said, “what else?”

“Could you describe him?”

“Big, no neck, black curly hair. Forty or so.”

“You happen to catch his name?”

“Dino. That’s an Italian name.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, he looked Italian, that bum.”

“Any idea where he lives?”

“No. I never saw him before or since.”

“Did you ever see Tucker with a man in his thirties, brown hair, average height, slim build?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention the name Lawrence Jacobs?”

“Not to me. He didn’t talk to me and I didn’t talk to him.”

“Can you give me the names of any of Tucker’s other friends?”

“He kept to himself, mostly,” Mrs. Ruiz said. “I only saw him with one other bum, the day before he moved out.”

“What did that one look like?”

“Fat. Fatter than me and that’s fat.”

I wondered if the fat man had had anything to do with Tucker’s decision to pull up stakes. “Do you know what they talked about?”

“No. The fatty showed up in a big car and went up to Tucker’s apartment and Tucker let him in. I never heard him say a word.”

“So you don’t know his name.”

“No.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Search me. I went out shopping and when I came back, the fatty was gone.”

“The big car he drove-any idea what kind?”

“Cadillac. Cream-colored Seville. ’Eighty-five.” I must have looked a little surprised, because she grinned and said, “I know cars. My ex-husband is an auto mechanic.”

“You didn’t happen to get the license number?”

“No. Now I wish I’d looked.”

“You said Tucker kept mostly to himself-”

“That’s right, he did.”

“-but did he ever talk to any of the other neighbors? Somebody who might give me a line on where he is now?”

“No way,” she said positively. “I know everybody here, I get along with everybody, we’re always yakking with each other. That bum didn’t talk to anybody around here except the bums that came to visit him.”

“He drives a Chrysler, is that right?”

“Right. ’Eight-six LeBaron. Tobacco brown.”

“License number?”

“Personalized. MR F T. MR BUM would have been better.” She shifted the bag of groceries from one arm to the other. “Anything else you want to know? This bag is getting heavy.”

“Not unless you can think of something, some little detail, that might help me find him.”

She tried. I watched her round face screw up, the heavy flesh around her eyes draw tight and the eyes themselves disappear behind slits so narrow they might have been incisions. Then her whole face seemed to pop open again, like some kind of exotic flower, the eyes reappearing wide and black-an effect that was almost startling-and she said with genuine regret, “No, nothing. I wish I could, that bum ought to be back in jail, but I already told you everything I know.”

Dead end.

Now what was I going to do?

I left Mrs. Ruiz to her groceries and her managerial woes and drove around for a while, aimlessly. Then, because I hadn’t eaten yet today, I stopped at a cafe on Merchant Street that accepted credit cards and brooded over coffee and a steak sandwich. Lawrence Jacobs, Frank Tucker, an Italian guy with no neck named Dino, a fat man who drives an ’85 cream-colored Cadillac Seville… but where were they now? A possible Folsom prison connection… but I didn’t have enough information yet to identify Jacobs or his motives. And no way to get it soon unless I picked up his or Frank Tucker’s trail again.

Three options, as far as I could see. There was a fourth-go back up to Deer Run and stake out the Indian Hill cabin-but I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Would do it only as a last resort. It might be another three to four weeks before Jacobs decided to return to the cabin; I couldn’t live up there anywhere near that long, alone, doing nothing except waiting. It would be almost as much of an ordeal as the one I had already been through. It would put me right over the edge.

Three options. One: Canvass the other residents at 210 Poplar Street, even though Mrs. Ruiz had seemed certain that none of them knew any more than she did about Frank Tucker and his activities. Two: Return to Sacramento, to 4719 K Street, and find out if Maggie Barnwell had held anything back from her husband. Three: Run a DMV check on Tucker’s Chrysler LeBaron with the MR F T license plate, see what address turned up. The first two choices struck me as a waste of time. And the only way I could accomplish the third was to contact Harry Fletcher at the DMV’s San Francisco office. I could swear Harry to secrecy-but he had a big mouth and he might let something slip, something that would get back to Eberhardt or Kerry or into the news media. Besides, Tucker had owned the car while he was living in Sacramento, might have put the K Street address or some other old address on the registration. And if he moved around as much as it seemed he did, he wouldn’t bother to notify the DMV each time he changed residences.

One person he probably would notify was his parole officer… if he was out on parole. In the old days I could have gone through channels, got hold of his prison record, and if he’d been paroled, the name of his parole officer. But these weren’t the old days. I had fewer resources available to me now, and therefore fewer options than I would have had on a normal investigation-

Susan Belford, I thought.

Something I should have asked Susan Belford and hadn’t.

Her name and the question popped into my head at the same time, an obvious question that had somehow failed to occur to me when I spoke to her on the phone. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been myself-my old self, the one with the sharply honed professional instincts. Maybe the answer to the question was no, but if it was yes…

I pushed up from the table, paid my check, and followed the cashier’s directions to a public telephone back by the restrooms. I spent most of my change on a call to Richards and Kirk in Carmichael. Susan Belford wasn’t in, but the man I spoke to, a Mr. Unger, said she was due to “check back in around three.” It was two-thirty now. I gave him my name and asked him to tell Ms. Belford that I’d called, that I was on my way up to see her, and would she please wait until I got there. He said he would relay the message.

It was twenty minutes to four when I finally found my way to the shopping center where Richards and Kirk had their offices. Susan Belford wasn’t there. Yes, she’d checked in as expected. Yes, Mr. Unger had given her my message but she’d chosen not to wait. No, Mr. Unger would not give me her home address or telephone number… which meant that she’d told him not to. Usually real estate agents are more than willing to give out their home numbers, to the point of listing them on their business cards.

I drove to a service station and looked in the telephone directories for Carmichael and several other nearby communities, including Sacramento. If she lived in one of those places, she was either unlisted or listed under another name. The only Belford in any of the books was Leon Belford and Son, Manufacturers of Quality Brass Fittings.

MORNING

Susan Belford showed up for work at five minutes to ten the next morning. I had been waiting since nine, when Richards and Kirk opened for business, and I was fidgety and trying hard to conceal my irritation when she walked in.

Today I wore a hound’s-tooth sports jacket, the loose-fitting kind with deep pockets so I could carry the.22 without any telltale bulges, and a white shirt and a pair of gray slacks-items I had bought the night before at a cut-rate clothing store in this same shopping center. One reason was that the too-tight clothing I’d taken from the Carder A-frame was beginning to both chafe and smell after three days of constant wear; the other reason was that if I was going to convince the uncooperative Ms. Belford to answer another question, I would need to look as well as act like a reputable private investigator. I had thought so last night, anyway. One look at her, and I knew that neither I nor anyone else would ever have to dress up on her account.

La Belford was a frumpy blond in her late forties, sloppily outfitted in a baggy gray skirt and a white sweater with little spots and streaks of cigarette ash on the front of it. She had mannerisms that were as twitchy as her voice, and such a preoccupied air that she almost ran into me before she realized I had moved into the path she was taking from the front entrance. And in almost running into me, she also came within an inch of setting fire to my new sports jacket with the lighted cigarette she was brandishing in one hand.

She was not glad to see me. She scowled when I identified myself, and made a violent waving gesture with the cigarette that sent particles of ash flying. “You again,” she said. “Why do you persist in… what is it you want now?”

“Five minutes of your time, that’s all.”

“I answered all your questions yesterday-”

“Not quite. There’s one other I should have asked.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m a busy woman, I don’t have time for this sort of thing…”

“One question, Ms. Belford. Please, it may be important.”

“Important, it’s always important. Well? What is it, then?”

“Did the man who rented Mr. Lanier’s cabin supply any personal references?”

“The man who… you mean Lawrence Jacobs?”

“Yes, ma’am. Lawrence Jacobs?”

“Don’t call me ma’am,” she said. “I hate that… ma’am is short for madam, don’t you know that? Do I look like a madam?”

She did, as a matter of fact. But I said, “No, of course you don’t. My apologies. Now about Lawrence Jacobs-”

“Yes, yes, we usually ask for… I’m sure he must have given at least one personal reference. Yes, I know he did, I saw it in the file yesterday.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the person’s name and address.”

She thought that over for maybe ten seconds, sighed, and then made one of her fluttery gestures and turned on her heel and stalked off across the room. I took that for an affirmative and trailed after her, dodging smoke and more ash from her cigarette. She plunked herself down behind a cluttered desk, aimed the remains of the cancer stick at a cut-glass ashtray; it caught the edge and showered sparks, a couple of which fell on a loose pile of papers. She didn’t seem to notice, so I reached over and smudged out the sparks before they started a fire. She didn’t notice that either; she was already turning toward a metal file cabinet to one side. But in the process she whacked her elbow into an onyx pen set and knocked the whole thing off onto the floor. That she noticed, along with everybody else in the office. She muttered something under her breath, and without any hesitation or pretense at decorum she slid off the chair onto her hands and knees, crawled under the desk with her skirt riding up on plump thighs to retrieve one of the pens, gathered up the rest of the set, hauled her pudgy body back into the chair, and threw the pens and base unit onto the desktop without looking at me or any of her co-workers. Then she swiveled around as if nothing had happened, fumbled open one of the file drawers, and began rummaging inside.

If I had a place to sell or rent, I thought, Susan Belford would be the last person I’d let handle the deal. It was even money she would either wreck or set fire to one out of every ten houses she entered.

It didn’t take her long to find the proper file. She even managed to get it out of the drawer and back onto her desk without doing any more damage. I watched her riffle through the papers inside, jerk one out with an unintentional flourish, and peer at it myopically for a few seconds before she said, “Here it is. Mmm, yes, now I remember… yes.”

She didn’t seem inclined to continue on her own initiative, so I made a throat-clearing noise to prod her.

“… Elmer Rix. Odd name, isn’t it?”

And just as meaningless as the others. “How do you spell the surname?”

“R-i-x.”

“What address?”

“The Catchall Shop, Yuba City.”

“No street or number?”

“No.”

“Telephone number?”

“Just a… yes, here it is.”

She read it off to me and I repeated it twice to memorize it. Then I asked, “Do you know the relationship between Lawrence Jacobs and this Elmer Rix?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Did you call Elmer Rix to check the reference?”

“Well, of course.” La Belford knocked over her purse reaching inside it for another cigarette; several items besides a pack of Salems fell out-comb, brush, compact, a Heath bar-but she left them scattered where they lay.

“Do you have any idea what the Catchall Shop is?”

She had fished a cigarette out of the pack and was bringing it to her mouth-but backward, so that it was the tobacco end she put between her lips. I thought she was going to light the filter, but she realized the mistake in time and reversed the thing. The flame on her lighter was turned up too high: She almost singed her bangs firing up the weed.

“Ms. Belford.”

“What?”

“I asked if you have any idea what the Catchall Shop is.”

“None whatsoever.” She scowled and blew smoke in my face-obliviously, not intentionally. I batted it away with my hand. “One question, you said… a dozen is more like it. Now really, if you don’t… I have work to do.”

“So do I,” I said, and got up on my feet.

She made a dismissive gesture with the cigarette. And smacked the burning end against her desk lamp and sent another fallout of sparks to the litter of papers strewn over the surface. One of the sparks started to smolder; she didn’t notice because she had swiveled her chair around to replace the file folder in the cabinet. This time I didn’t bother to smother the sparks. I went away from her instead. There was a thumping sound behind me as I crossed the office, but I did not turn around to see what it was. I didn’t want to know.

It takes all kinds, sure. But some kinds are harder to take than others.

EARLY AFTERNOON

I hadn’t been to Yuba City in twenty years. As with Vacaville, there was little reason to go there unless you had friends or relatives or business in the area. It is forty miles or so north of Sacramento, across the Feather River from Marysville, and to get to it you take arrow-straight Highway 99 through a dozen miles of rice fields-a crop that isn’t usually associated with California agriculture but that grows well in that part of the state-and then either a continuation of 99 or the quicker Highway 70 through Marysville. The countryside around Yuba City nurtures crops of a different kind: peaches, nectarines, apricots, walnuts. Mile after mile of orchards extend away to the south, west, and north.

Yuba City has two other claims to fame. One is provocative: In a couple of quality-of-life polls to determine the most desirable place in California to live, it had come in dead last. The other is notorious: In the early seventies it had been the scene of one of the more shocking mass-murder cases-the one in which Juan Corona was convicted of cold-bloodedly slaughtering twenty-five migrant workers after having had homosexual relations with them.

Visually, Marysville is a Cinderella compared to its stepsister across the river. Its downtown is filled with attractive old buildings and it sports a huge shady part with a lake in the middle. Yuba City, on the other hand, has an unaesthetic downtown area sans park and lake, plus a couple of miles of southern California-style shopping centers and fast-food joints. But looks can be deceiving where cities are concerned, too. Marysville also harbors a well-populated skid row and has larger crime and substance-abuse problems than its neighbor. Despite Yuba’s tarnished image, if you had to live in one town or the other, and you weighed the pros and cons carefully, Yuba City would be the one to pick.

The Toyota’s buy-gas light was on when I drove into Marysville a little past noon. I took the bridge across into Yuba City and stopped at an Exxon station off Bridge Street to fill the tank and to look up Elmer Rix and the Catchall Shop in the local directory. No entry for Rix; but the Catchall Shop was listed at 2610 Percy Avenue. According to the kid working the pumps, that address was less than a mile from here, out past the nearby Del Monte packing plant. “You’ll find it real easy,” he said. And for once, somebody who told me that was right.

The building at 2610 Percy Avenue was big, sprawling, and on the brink of condemnation as a fire hazard. A cyclone-fenced yard to one side was full of things like claw-foot bathtubs, random lengths of pipe, car parts, pottery urns and ceramic garden statues, rusty stoves, a twenty-foot-high carved oak likeness of a snarling grizzly bear. On the warped wood front of the building were several signs, some large and some small, some metal and some wood, all hand-painted by somebody with not much of an artistic eye. THE CATCHALL SHOP, over the double-doored entrance. SECONDHAND ITEMS OF ALL KINDS. BURIED TREASURES. TOOLS OUR SPECIALTY. PAPERBACK BOOKS, 25¢. IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU WON’T FIND IT ANYWHERE ELSE. BROWSERS WELCOME. CASH ACCEPTED FROM ANYONE.

But the most interesting thing about the place, at least externally, was the car parked inside the yard gates-a cream-colored Cadillac Seville, no more than a few years old and probably a 1985 model.

I made a U-turn and parked in front of the building. Walking inside was like entering an incredibly cluttered hermit’s cave: gloomy, dank-smelling, jammed to the exposed rafters with shelves and piles and tiers of every imaginable kind of junk. There was nobody moving around in there; but through an open side door I could see someone maneuvering an ancient forklift in the adjacent yard. I could also see what happened to be a dimly lighted office over that way.

There were no aisles as such; I had to blaze a roundabout path to the office. Along the way I saw the remains of an ancient buckboard, a beat-up Chinese gong with a faded dragon painted on it, at least a thousand dust-laden and mildewed paperbacks on bowed shelves, a wine cask that somebody had made into a child’s playhouse, bins overflowing with age-crusted hand tools, a Rube Goldberg machine with arms and legs and wires and a use I couldn’t even begin to guess at, horse collars and pickle crocks and rows of cobwebbed mason jars and radios with broken cases and a Stop sign that had been used for target practice and a mannikin with a crumbling maroon velvet dress draped over it. The whole place had the look of a madman’s museum filled with exhibits that made no sense and that had lain unattended and unviewed for decades. There ought to have been another sign on the front of the building: WE HAVE IT, BUT NOBODY IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT IT.

The office was a wallboard and glass affair, small and as cluttered as the rest of the place, the glass so fly-specked and grime-streaked that it was mostly opaque. One of the jumble of objects inside was a desk; another was a man in the chair behind it. “Fatter than me and that’s fat,” Mrs. Ruiz had said of Frank Tucker’s last visitor in Vacaville. Her description and the Cadillac Seville outside made that man and this one the same. He must have weighed close to 350 pounds, and in the weak light from a gooseneck lamp he looked like nothing so much as a huge toad sitting on a stump. Bald brown head, rutted and warty brown face, little half-lidded eyes that looked sleepy but would miss little or nothing of what they surveyed. When he opened his mouth I would not have been surprised to see a long, thin tongue flick out and snag one of the flies that moved sluggishly through the air around him.

The only part of him that moved when I walked in was his mouth: It curved upward at the corners in a professional smile-a moneylender’s smile. He said in a deep, throaty toad’s voice, “Howdy, friend. Thanks for stopping in. Tell you right off you picked a good day. Bargain specials galore, no reasonable offer refused. What-all you interested in?”

“Elmer Rix, for starters,” I said. “Would that be you?”

“Sure would. You got business with me?”

“With someone you know.”

“Who would that be?”

“Frank Tucker.”

A change came over him, the subtle kind that you might miss unless you were looking for it. Outwardly, nothing at all happened; the smile stayed fixed, the expression otherwise blank and the eyes half-lidded. But beneath the surface he got hard, rock hard: Fat turned to stone so suddenly that he might have gazed upon the face of Medusa. Those amphibian eyes measured me, dissected me with the same emotionless precision a biology teacher uses to dissect a real toad.

He said with false geniality, “Hey, do I look like the missing persons bureau? I sell junk, not information.”

“Are you telling me you don’t know Frank Tucker?”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. I looked back, not giving him any more or any less than he was giving me. I had my hand in my jacket pocket, touching the butt of the.22, but it would have been a mistake to put him under the gun. Elmer Rix was no O. Barnwell; intimidation and threats wouldn’t work with him. The hardness was strength as well as stubbornness and probable veniality. A tub of guts with guts.

I said, playing it a different way, “Look, I need to talk to Tucker. As soon as possible. He won’t mind when he hears what I’ve got to say.”

“What would that be?”

“I’ve got a job for him.”

“That so? What kind of job?”

“Do I need to spell it out?”

“I’m a good listener, friend. Try me.”

“Muscle work.”

“Bodybuilding, that what you mean?”

“Come on, Rix, let’s cut the bullshit, okay? We both know what Tucker hires out to do.”

“Man in my business gets to know a lot of things,” he said. “Point is, how do you know?”

“Somebody I know knows Dino.”

“Dino who?”

“Friend of Tucker’s,” I said, and I didn’t have to feign the impatience in my voice. “The word I got was that if I wanted to talk to Tucker, I should come over here and see Elmer Rix at the Catchall Shop. So here I am. Now do you point me to Tucker or do I find somebody else to give my dough to?”

He watched me a while longer before he said, “What kind of job and how much you paying?”

So far, so good. “I own a trucking outfit in Winters. For a while I didn’t have much competition; now I got heavy competition and I don’t like it. I want the competition to close up shop, go somewheres else. I want Tucker to fix it so that happens.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Rix said through his smile. “You didn’t say how much.”

“Top dollar. Plus a bonus if my competition is gone within three months. I’ll work out the exact numbers with Tucker.”

“Uh-huh. You know my name-what’s yours?”

I said, “Canino. Art Canino.” And I thought: If he asks for ID, I’ll have to put him under the gun after all.

But he didn’t ask for ID. He said, still smiling, “Well, you sure do tell a wild story, Mr. Canino. If I did know somebody named Frank Tucker, and I ain’t saying I do, I don’t know as I could recommend he take on a job like the one you’re offering.”

“Suppose we let him decide that.”

“Sure. If I knew him and how to get hold of him.”

Now I saw what he was after. Still a little slow on the uptake; still a little rusty. But the important thing was that it meant I had him hooked.

I asked, “How much do you want?”

“Some of the stuff you see in here, I’m selling it for somebody else. On consignment, like they say. I get ten percent.”

“From Tucker? Or from me, extra?”

“From the customer,” he said. “Always.”

I put up a mild protest to make it look good. “What the hell? That means I got to pay a hundred and ten percent.”

“Everything costs these days, Mr. Canino. You want a job done right, you go to the best people. You go to the best people, you pay high prices right down the line.”

“Okay, okay. But I’m not putting up any cash until I see Tucker and we settle on a price.”

“Hey, nobody’s asking you to.”

“So where do I find him?”

“Tell you what,” Rix said. “You go away someplace, come back here in an hour. No, make that an hour and a half.”

“How come so long?”

“I ain’t had my lunch yet.”

“Listen, this deal is important-”

“So’s my lunch,” he said, and he was dead serious.

“Will Tucker be here when I come back?”

“Ninety minutes and then you find out, right?”

We traded another long look, him with that amphibian smile pulling up the corners of his fat mouth. Only now it was genuine. Big toad king sitting on the throne in his cave full of decaying junk, holding court and enjoying every minute of it because in this place, this little kingdom, he made the rules and levied high tariffs for the privilege of his favors. I wondered if the local cops knew what kind of business His Bloated Highness was really in. I thought that maybe, when I was done with all this, I would find out.

There was nothing more to say to him, not just now. So I let him win this round of the staring match, nodded once, and left him sitting there looking royally pleased with himself.

It was a quarter of one when I got into the Toyota. I drove downtown, found a Denny’s, and picked my way through a taco salad. Not much appetite since I’d come out of the mountains above Deer Run; it would probably be a while before I had one again. But that was all right. I liked the shape I was in now, leaned down and hard-bellied. Once I was home, back into a daily routine, I would have to take steps to ensure that I didn’t put weight on again.

When I finished eating I paid the check right away and returned to the car. I had been spending too much time in restaurants lately, drinking too much coffee, brooding too much, and listening to too many trite conversations among strangers. Better to kill the half hour I had left by driving around instead. I took the bridge over to Marysville, toured around there, went up Highway 70 a ways and then turned around and came back. My watch said 2:10 when I recrossed the bridge into Yuba City, and 2:15 when I pulled up in front of the Catchall Shop.

Rix was right where I’d left him-fat toad king on his throne. But there was nobody else in the office, nobody else in the kingdom except for a long-haired kid struggling to load a cast-iron sink onto a dolly: slave or serf, and nobody I was interested in.

“Where’s Tucker?”

“Nobody here named Tucker,” Rix said through one of his smiles.

“I can see that. What’s the idea?”

“Tell you what you might do. You might drive over to Highway 99 and on down there, south, about eight miles. A road’ll come up on your left, next to a closed-up fruit stand-Herman’s, it’s called. Road runs through some orchards toward the river. After a mile or so it hooks to the left, and right there where it hooks you’ll see another road, dirt one, that runs straight ahead to the river bank. Plenty of parking space back where the dirt one ends.”

“Tucker’ll meet me there, is that it?”

The smile, and a delicate shrug to go with it.

I said, “Why not here or at his place?”

“Real private out there by the river. Fishermen and kids and farm workers in the summer, gets pretty crowded. Nobody goes there this time of year.”

So Tucker was being cautious. Cautious enough to bring somebody with him as a backup, just in case? Somebody like Lawrence Jacobs? Be just fine if it worked out that way. If it didn’t, if he brought somebody else or came alone, that was okay too. I was taking my own company along, my own little backup in case of trouble: the.22 Sentinel.

“All right,” I said. “If that’s the way it has to be.”

The smile, the shrug.

“You’ll be hearing from me, Rix.”

“Real soon, I hope,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Real soon.”

MIDAFTERNOON

The side road and Herman’s Fruit Stand were easy enough to find. I turned onto the narrow blacktop, past the boarded-up shanty, and drove in among the orchards-peach trees on my left, walnut trees on my right, both kinds just starting to show their spring buds. There had been plenty of winter rain up here; the ground under the trees was soggy in places. I passed one group of farm buildings tucked back among the peach trees, saw no one there or in the orchards or on the road.

The Toyota’s odometer had clicked off nine-tenths of a mile when the hard left bend appeared ahead, just beyond where the orchards ended on both sides. The unpaved track that extended off the paved one was narrow, rutted, and muddy; it ran in a series of little dips across a brushy expanse of sand and broken rock and then vanished among scattered scrub oak. Beyond and through those trees I had glimpses of the Feather River: brownish sparkles where the afternoon sun struck the water.

I eased off onto the track. Its condition wasn’t as bad as it had looked from a distance; I had no problem getting across the open ground and in among the scrub oak. The track dipped sharply and at an angle then, into another cleared area of sand and gravel some ten feet above the level of the river. You could tell that it was used for a lover’s lane as well as a parking lot; there were used condoms and a pair of girl’s underpants among the beer cans and other litter. You could also tell that in the summer, when the Feather shrank in size, it would be half again as large as it was now. At the moment it was deserted. And I saw no sign of a person or a car anywhere else in the vicinity.

I turned the Toyota around to face the track, braked in the shadow of a scrub oak, and shut off the engine. From this spot you couldn’t see either the country road or the orchards. I looked at my watch: five past three. When the hands showed ten past I yielded to impulse and got out of the car; I was edgy and sitting there was causing crimps in my neck and shoulders.

A brisk wind blew here, almost cold and strong enough to make sighing, rattling sounds among the oak branches. Clouds had begun to pile up in the west; some of them moved across the face of the sun, so that the daylight was successively bright and a dull metallic gray. I walked over to where the ground sloped muddily to the water. The river was maybe seventy-five yards wide at this point, a hundred yards wide where it bellied inland farther south. Willows grew down that way, past a fan of driftwood that spread upward against a hump in the bank. Somebody-kids, probably-had fashioned a water swing out of two pieces of rope and a truck tire and hung it from one of the willow branches: swimming hole in the summer. Now the water was heavy with silt, swollen and swift-moving from the winter rains. More driftwood and other flotsam bobbed along on the surface, running down toward where the Feather joined the wider and deeper Sacramento River.

For a time I stood alternately watching the water and the place where the track bled into the parking ground. Stillness, except for the movement of the river and the tree branches. Silence, except for the soughing of the wind. It wasn’t long before the cold prodded me away, back to the car-the cold and the mounting tension.

3:20.

Come on, Tucker, I thought.

I got back into the Toyota, sat with my hand kneading the butt of the .22 in my jacket pocket. The track stayed empty, this side of the river stayed deserted. On the other side, half a dozen crows came from somewhere and began wheeling above another walnut orchard over there, creating a shrill racket that penetrated the closed car and scratched at my nerves.

3:25.

3:30.

Maybe he’s not coming, I thought-and that was when he finally showed up.

I saw his car before I heard it, because of the wind and the crows. Newish Chrysler, its brown and chrome surfaces dulled by a layering of dirt and mud. The windshield glass was streaked, too, but I could see through well enough to tell that the driver was the only apparent occupant. Somebody hunkered down in back? Not likely. Unless he was the paranoid type, Tucker wouldn’t have any cause for that much caution.

He parked twenty yards from the Toyota and a little to one side. But he didn’t get out right away: waiting for me to show myself first. I obliged him, straightening up behind the open door. When he followed suit I stepped around and shut the door and walked toward him, slowly. He edged forward to meet me. There was a kind of ritualism to it all, like a couple of street dogs working each other in an alley.

We stopped with a few feet separating us, about halfway between the two cars. He was four or five inches above six feet and big all over. “Arms like cement blocks,” Barnwell had said. Yeah. Popeye forearms, and biceps that bulged and rippled and stretched taut the sleeves of his blue T-shirt. The T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s and heavy workman’s boots were all he wore: Mr. Macho, Mr. Bad Ass. Maybe so, but his head under its covering of black slicked-back hair was undersized and his eyes, like chips of brown glass, betrayed its relative emptiness. Thinking would never be a hobby with him. Whenever he did have a thought, if he ever had one, it would soon curl up and die a solitary death, like a babe lost in a wasteland.

I said, “Frank Tucker?”

“Yeah. You Canino?”

“That’s right.”

“I hear you got a job for me.”

“Right. An easy one.”

“Kind I like best. What you want me to do?”

“Answer a question.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me where I can find Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Huh?”

I took the.22 out and pointed it at his sternum. “Pal of yours, the one who calls himself Lawrence Jacobs. Where can I find him?”

He stared at the gun for five seconds, not moving. It took him that long to shift gears, to come to terms with the sudden twist in the situation. Then he got mad. His muscles rippled, his hands closed into fists, his eyes got mean and his mouth got ugly, and he said, predictably, “What the fuck’s the idea?”

“Lawrence Jacobs. He’s the idea.”

“You’re talkin shit.”

“Lawrence Jacobs,” I said again. “He lived with you on K Street in Sacramento last November. Slender, brown hair, in his thirties. Called himself Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Brit? What you want with him?”

Brit. Another name I didn’t recognize. “Is that his first or his last name?”

“Huh?”

“Tell me his full name.”

“Blow it out your ass, cowboy.”

“Wrong answer. His full name and where I can find him-those are the right answers.”

“Blow it out your ass.”

“Tell me what I want to know or I’ll put a bullet in your knee. You’ve busted some kneecaps in your time, right? You know how much it hurts.”

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“Sure I am. Now make up your mind. Talk to me or spend the rest of your life on crutches.”

But I wasn’t scaring him; he was either too tough or too much of a Cro-Magnon to be scared. The only emotion in him was rage. His face was blood-dark and pinched up with it, the eyes hot and bright. “You ain’t gonna shoot me,” he said. “Not with that little popgun.”

I thumbed the.22’s hammer back. “Try me.”

And he did, by God. The stupid son of a bitch said, “I’ll make you eat that fuckin gun,” and charged me.

I would have shot him, I had every intention of putting a bullet in his leg, if not his kneecap, but I made the mistake of first taking a step backward and to one side to give myself more room. When I did that my foot slipped on the loose mix of sand and broken rock; my arm bumped out to the side and when I yanked it back and squeezed off at him, the round didn’t even come close. I had no time for a second shot. He was on me by then, bellowing something, swatting at my right arm, launching a blow with his other fist. That one scraped the side of my head but his other hand hammered into my wrist, broke my grip on the.22 and sent it skittering free. I reeled away from him, still trying to regain my balance. But he was fast on his feet and he caught up with me, swung again and hit me high on the left shoulder when I pulled my head back. The blow knocked me sprawling on hands and knees.

When I came up shaking my head he was right there, trying to stomp me with his goddamn boots. I lunged into him while he had one foot off the ground, staggered him away from me far enough so that I could get back on my feet. Through a haze of sweat I saw him grinning as he came back toward me, not in a rush but in slow gliding movements. He was in no hurry now. This was his kind of fight, this was what he was good at and what he liked to do. “I’m gonna tear your fuckin head off, old man,” he said and he meant it. He would kill me if I let him get enough of an advantage.

I took a quick look around for the gun; didn’t see it and forgot about it. Tucker was still advancing on me, almost within arm’s reach now. I backed off a couple of steps, to gain more room to maneuver, and that made him laugh; he thought I was afraid of him, starting to back down. So I retreated another step and put up a hand, as if to ward him off. He laughed again and then charged me as he had before.

It was just what I wanted him to do. Instead of backing off again I moved in on him, crouching, ducking under the first of his swings, and threw my shoulder into his upper body. Good solid contact, part of it on his chest and part of it on his jawline: He staggered backward four or five steps, to the edge of the sloping river bank. Before he could check his momentum his feet went out from under him and he fell belly-flat, went sliding feet first down the short muddy incline-almost into the river before he could drag himself to a stop.

He came up onto his knees, spitting mud and obscenities. But by then I was on my way to the fan of driftwood along the bank farther down. Tucker scrambled up through the mud, still bellowing; reached firm ground just as my hand closed around a three-foot chunk of tree branch with its bark peeling off. I yanked the wood free of the tangle, came around with it.

Tucker shook himself like a bear, spraying drops of water and flecks of mud, and rushed me again.

I stepped toward him, drawing the branch back over my right shoulder, sliding my hands up on the bottom end like a baseball player choking up on his bat. He thought I was going to swing it like a bat too, and threw his left arm up to protect his head, groping toward me with his right. That opened him up wide from chin to sternum. Instead of swinging the wood I met his charge with a lunge of my own and jabbed the short end hard against his collarbone, felt it glance upward and take him in the throat. I meant the blow to stop him and it did-did some damage to his windpipe and started him gagging-but it didn’t hurt him enough to end it. One of his flailing hands clawed at the shoulder of my jacket, found purchase and hung on and swung me around off balance. If he’d let go, momentum would have sent me spinning off my feet, probably caused me to lose the branch when I went down. But he didn’t let go. He hauled me in against him, still gagging, trying to hurt me the way I had hurt him. He swiped at my head with his free hand and hit me a solid lick over the left eye, cut me with a ring he had on one finger. The blow rocked me backward, but because he still had hold of my coat it didn’t put me down or off stride. And that worked in my favor: It gave me just enough space and just enough leverage to use the branch on him again.

My first jab went in under his breastbone, stiffened him and knocked out what air he had left in his lungs. The second jab made him release my coat, staggered him. I got the club up over my head then and whacked it straight down the side of his head, almost tearing off an ear, and hard against the joining of his neck and shoulder. He grunted like a pig in a wallow. His knees buckled and he went down on them, hands scrabbling at the air, drool and blood coming out of one corner of his mouth. I pulled the wood back and this time I did swing it like a baseball bat: home run swing, all the power I had left in my arms and upper body. Too much power: The impact of the branch with the side of his head created a pulpy cracking sound and the wood splintered in my hands. Tucker went over on his back and skidded down the muddy bank again-headfirst, like an upended tortoise down a greased slide.

When he splashed into the brown water his head and shoulders went under and stayed there. No way it could be a ploy to draw me down to him so he could get his hands on me again; I had hit him too hard for that. I half slid down to where he lay, took hold of his belt, and dragged him out before he drowned or the current sucked him free of the bank and carried him off.

His mouth was open and there was silt-heavy water inside it, water in his throat that was choking him. I flipped him over onto his stomach, sank to the mud beside him, and did some CPR work until the last of the water dribbled out of his mouth. By then his breath was coming in a faint rasping gurgle. I put my fingers against the artery in his neck, felt his pulsebeat. Irregular but strong enough. I rolled him onto his side, pried one of his eyelids back. The eye had rolled up in its socket and the white had a glazed cast. Concussion. And maybe I had scrambled what few brain cells he had, too. The side of his head where I’d clouted him was pulpy and bright with blood, most of it from what was left of his ear.

Looking down at the ruin of him, I felt nothing except frustration. He was out and out good; it would be a long while before he was able to talk. If he could talk at all after what I’d done to his windpipe. Would I have felt anything else-remorse, regret-if I’d killed him? Probably not. Funny, but I had gone through the whole fight, start to finish, without fear or anger or emotion of any sort. And so far, none of the usual physical aftereffects of this kind of hand-to-hand combat had set in.

Wetness on my face, dripping down into my left eye: blood from the cut Tucker had opened on my forehead. I wiped it away, got up on my feet and climbed the bank, humped over and using my hands monkey-fashion to maintain my footing. At the top I paused for a few seconds to look around, to listen. Emptiness and silence. The crows were apparently the only ones who had heard the shot and the sounds of the fight, and they were long gone.

It took me the better part of five minutes to locate the.22. When Tucker banged it out of my hand it had skidded over against one of the scrub oaks and was partially hidden by the lower branches. I checked the inside of the barrel, the cylinder, the action; it hadn’t been mud-blocked or damaged. I started to put it into my jacket pocket, but the jacket was torn and caked with mud. So I took it to the Toyota, set it on the seat inside. Any man who walks around with a loaded revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants, the way you see them do it on TV, is a damned fool.

There was nothing in the Toyota that I could use to tie Tucker up. The keys were still in the Chrysler’s ignition; I took them out, found one that would open the trunk. Plenty of stuff in there, most of it tools of the professional slugger’s trade: a couple of lengths of galvanized pipe, an axe handle, some heavy chain, a coil of strong hemp rope. I took the rope down to the river’s edge, looped it around Tucker’s hands, tied his feet, tied the four appendages together. Then I slithered him up the bank and left him lying on his belly at the top, making little liquidy purling sounds in his throat.

Among the other items in the Chrysler’s trunk was a bunch of rags. I used a couple of them to clean mud off my hands. The hound’s-tooth jacket was a ruin; so were the rest of my new clothes and my new pair of shoes. But I hadn’t thrown away the outfit I’d taken from the Carder A-frame; it was bundled up in the Toyota’s trunk. I got it out, changed, threw the muddy stuff inside. Then I went to Tucker again, pried his wallet out of his Levi’s. A hundred and nine dollars in cash, a driver’s license-that was all. Nothing to tell me where he was living in this area. The address on the license was an unfamiliar street in West Sacramento. Old address, the one he’d had in 1987 when the license was issued.

Back to the Chrysler. The glove compartment was full of junk; I rummaged around in it until I came up with a folded piece of pink paper. It was what I was looking for-a receipt from a Yuba City realty outfit, dated twelve days ago and made out to Frank M. Tucker for payment of three months of a one-year lease on property located at 1411 Freestone Street, Yuba City. The total of the payment was $2250. Nice piece of change for somebody in Tucker’s line of work, somebody who had been living in a low-income apartment building in Vacaville two weeks ago, to be shelling out in a lump sum. The year’s lease was interesting, too, considering Tucker’s penchant for moving around from place to place. Mixed up in something with Elmer Rix, I thought-something a lot more lucrative, and a hell of a lot more illegal, than buying and selling junk.

Nothing else in the glove box told me anything. Nor did any of the car’s other contents. On the dash was a Genie garage door opener, I looked at it for a couple of seconds and then put it into my pants pocket. In a pouch on the driver’s door I found a Yuba City-Marysville street map, put that into my pocket as well.

The trunk yielded one more item I could use-a car blanket, new and from the looks of it, never opened. I brought it over to the Toyota, set it on the roof, opened the rear door, then went and got Tucker. He was too big, too much dead weight to carry; I took a wrestler’s grip on him, under the arms from behind his head, and dragged him to the car and muscled him in across the seat. I checked to make sure he was still breathing-he was-and then shook the blanket out and covered him with it.

Reaction was beginning to set in now, though not nearly as much as in the past. A little weakness in my legs, some shortness of breath, sweat running on my face. Or maybe the wetness was more blood; I pawed at it, looked at the fingers. A little of both.

I got in under the wheel. Thought about taking a look at myself in the rear-view mirror and didn’t do it. The hell with what I looked like. No, that wasn’t smart. What if a cop saw me driving with a bloody face and stopped me to ask questions? I stepped out again, found one of the rags I’d used earlier, took it back into the Toyota and held it against my forehead until the bleeding began to diminish. Then I persuaded myself to look in the mirror. Inch-long gash above the eyebrow, not too deep and not too noticeable as long as I kept blotting it with the rag. Spots of mud here and there that I’d missed, a blob of it matting the beard on my left cheek; I rubbed those away. My eyes… I refused to look at my eyes. Instead I took out the area street map and concentrated on locating Freestone Street.

It was in the southern part of town, not all that far from the Catchall Shop. Easy enough to get to from here. I put the map on the seat, leaned up and around and lifted a corner of the blanket for another look at Tucker. Still out, still making those purling sounds in his throat. The whole left side of his face was wet with leaking blood and his torn ear had swelled up to twice its normal size. I said aloud, “I wish you were Brit, tough guy,” and let the blanket fall again.

Then I started the engine and went to find out what awaited me at 1411 Freestone Street.

LATE AFTERNOON

It was a brown wood and stucco house in a quiet, older residential neighborhood. Attached garage, wide front porch, budding tulip tree in the front yard and an acacia tree at the rear. Not fancy; substantial, respectable. The kind of place somebody like Tucker would never choose for himself, but just the sort somebody like Elmer Rix would choose for him.

I drove by once, slowly, made a U-turn at the corner, and came back for another look. No car in the driveway or on the street in front, no sign of activity inside or out. But that did not necessarily mean the house was unoccupied. Tucker had lived alone in Sacramento except for Brit’s brief stay, and alone in Vacaville, but this place was a couple of rungs up the ladder from either of those. If he liked company, and now that he was in the money, he might have moved a friend or two in with him.

I circled the block. When I came back along Freestone Street to 1411 I had the.22 on the seat beside me and the garage door opener in my left hand. Without hesitating, just like somebody who belonged there, I turned into 1411’s drive and pushed the Genie at the same time. The garage door went up-the interior was empty-and I pulled inside, braked, hit the Genie again as soon as the up cycle ended, and was out of the Toyota and leaning over the hood, the.22 aimed at the inside door to the house, before the garage door was halfway down.

Nobody appeared at the inner door. The garage door clicked shut and the Genie switched off; I stood listening to the tick of the Toyota’s engine, the faint fluttery rattle of a furnace… nothing else. But I stayed where I was for another three minutes, waiting in the thick shadows. No sounds from the house. Nobody home-maybe.

I moved around the car, went to the inside door, pushed it open. Empty alcove leading to an empty kitchen. I eased through the rest of the house, using the gun as a pointer: living room, dining room, two bedrooms, one and a half baths, rear porch.

Nobody home.

After I checked the porch I relaxed a little, letting the revolver hang down at my side. All right so far. The place had a vaguely musty odor, an unlived in look, and clutches of old, mismatched, bargain-basement furniture. Furnished house that had sat unrented for a while before Tucker signed his lease; and since he’d taken possession, he hadn’t spent much time on the premises. For one thing, there were no dirty dishes anywhere in the kitchen and Tucker was the kind who would always leave dirty dishes lying around. The only room that showed signs of much habitation was the smaller of the bedrooms, and it was a mess of blankets, sheets, and soiled underwear.

It was the other, larger bedroom that I searched first. That one had a desk in it, as well as a TV and VCR combo and an eight-millimeter film projector and portable screen to boot. There wasn’t much in the desk, and only one item of any interest: a spiral-bound notebook containing a dozen names and addresses. But it wasn’t an address book. In addition to the names, street numbers, and towns-all in this general area-there were dates at the top of each page, along with dollar amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000. And at the bottom of each page were more dates and smaller dollar amounts. You didn’t have to be a cryptographer to figure out what all of this meant, or why Tucker had it in this nice respectable house he’d rented.

Tally book for a loan-sharking operation. Not Tucker’s; he wasn’t bright enough to have set up that kind of business. The toad king’s-Elmer Rix’s. How right I’d been when I thought of Rix as having a moneylender’s smile. Tucker had been brought in to do the collecting, and the enforcing if anybody got behind in his payment.

But loan-sharking wasn’t the only scam Rix and Tucker were working. They had at least one other, and it was far nastier than lending money at back-breaking interest rates. When I opened the closet door in there I found a cache of videocassettes, cans of eight-millimeter film, color photographs and color slides-all of it the worst kind of pornography, manufactured by and distributed to degenerates. Kiddie porn. Grown men engaged in atrocities with young children, some no older than two or three, most of them boys. High-priced filth for the exotic-minded voyeur and the discerning pedophile. No wonder there were TV and VCR, movie projector and screen in here. If Tucker didn’t watch this sort of garbage for kicks, he damned well used the machines to entertain potential buyers.

Rix and Tucker, entrepreneurs. Rix and Tucker, slimebags.

I slammed the closet door, went out of there with a sour taste in my mouth. Nothing in the other bedroom but Tucker’s mess. Nothing in the living room. But in the kitchen, in a drawer under a wall phone, I found a cheap Leatherette address book. Most of the entries were written in pencil in a childish hand. And under the letter B-

Brit

62 Cordilleras

Elk Grove

916-555-4438

I stood looking at the entry for several seconds. Brit, Brit. First name or last? I still had no idea. But one thing I did know now: If the address in this book was current, he wasn’t far away. Elk Grove was off Highway 99 south of Sacramento, a town I’d passed on my way to Carmichael from Stockton two days ago. Sixty miles or so from here-not far at all.

There was no need to copy down the address and telephone number; they were burned into my memory. I paged through the rest of the book, but the only names I recognized were Elmer Rix and “Maggie, Sacramento,” probably Maggie Barnwell. No entry for a Lawrence Jacobs or any other Jacobs.

I returned the book to the drawer, finished searching the house in case there was anything else for me here. There wasn’t. I went back into the garage, opened up the Toyota, and hauled Tucker out from under the blanket and across the garage floor and the kitchen floor to the living room floor, where I deposited him in the middle of an imitation oriental rug. He was still breathing painfully; I wouldn’t have cared much if he had stopped breathing altogether. I’d done a good job with the ropes: They were knotted so tightly that I couldn’t work them lose with my fingers. In the kitchen I found a butcher knife and used that to cut the ropes off his hands and feet. Then I gathered up the pieces, took them to the Toyota, and pitched them onto the floor in back.

In the kitchen again I lifted the wall phone off its hook, dialed 911 and asked for the police, got through to a sergeant named Eales. “Two things,” I said to him. “I’m only going to say them once, so listen carefully. First, an ex-con named Frank Tucker, fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City-somebody beat him up and he’s in a pretty bad way. You’d better send an ambulance. Second, Tucker and a man named Elmer Rix, R-i-x, owner of the Catchall Shop on Percy Avenue, are involved in at least two illegal activities: loan-sharking and distributing child pornography. Some of the porn is in a back bedroom, in the desk, there’s a notebook full of information on the loan-sharking operation. Have you got all that?”

“I’ve got it. Who is this, please?”

I said, “Fourteen-eleven Freestone Street, Yuba City, don’t waste any time,” and hung up.

I went out to the car, leaned in for the Genie and pushed its button to raise the garage door, then tossed the thing onto a nearby workbench. Might as well leave the door up, make the cops’ job easier when they got here. I had the car started by the time the opener finished its up cycle; I backed out and drove off along the street without seeing anybody except a couple of housewives who weren’t paying any attention to me. Drove out of the neighborhood without seeing any police cars. If they used sirens getting to Tucker’s house I never heard them. But then, I might not have heard sirens if they had been a block away. I was too intent on my driving, on getting out of Yuba City, on covering the distance between here and Elk Grove.

Here I come, Brit.

Here I come.

NIGHT

Sixty-two Cordilleras Street, Elk Grove.

I had trouble finding it, not because Elk Grove is a big place-it isn’t-but because neither of the two Elk Grove Boulevard service stations I stopped at had a local street map and none of the people I talked to knew where the hell Cordilleras Street was. My third stop was a 7-Eleven store; the woman clerk said she thought Cordilleras was on the south side, by the cattle auction yard, but she just wasn’t sure. She did tell me how to get to that part of town, and once I got there I found somebody-a liquor store clerk-who could pinpoint it for me. It was 7:35, almost two and a half hours after I’d left Tucker’s house, when I made the turn onto the street where Brit lived.

It wasn’t much of a street. If he was mixed up with Rix and Tucker in their loan-sharking and child-porn scams, or into some other kind of crooked deal, he wasn’t making much money out of it. Two blocks long, Cordilleras, dead-ending in a fence beyond which was the cattle auction yard and some kind of rental facility for heavy equipment. Run-down, low-income houses and trailers on both sides, a couple with the rusting corpses of automobiles in their weedy front yards, one with a boxy-looking homemade boat up on davits. Number 62 was a squat wood-shingled cottage with an uneven roof line and the remains of some long dead flowering vine climbing a trellis to one side of the front door. On the other side was a plate glass window, undraped, so I could look into the lighted front room as I drove past. Nobody occupying it just now. But somebody was home: The light and a car obscured in shadow at the rear of a gravel drive made that plain enough.

I went on to the corner, U-turned, came back for another look. Still nobody in the front room. Across the street and a little way down was a vacant lot choked with weeds and high grass and a scattering of refuse; an ancient black oak grew at the near end, its gnarled branches overhanging a cracked sidewalk and root-buckled curb. I made another U-turn at that end of the block, came back and parked under the low-hanging oak branches. It was the best kind of place for a stakeout: dark, protected. And the angle was such that I could still see into most of Number 62’s lamp-lit front room.

I shut off the lights and the engine, rolled down my window to let some air into the car. It was warmer here than it had been in Yuba City, the sky clear and bright with stars and a three-quarter moon, but the night breeze was still cool. And I was tired, keyed up, stiff from driving and from the fight with Tucker.

I sat low on the seat, staring across at the cottage. What if he wasn’t alone? What if he had a visitor, or he was living with somebody? This thing was between him and me, just the two of us-beginning to end, just the two of us. No way I was going to hurt an innocent bystander. If I did that I would be no better than he was, no better than Tucker and Rix and all the other predators that walk the earth in human skin. Stupid to involve another person anyway-let somebody here get a look at me, maybe identify me to the police later on.

So before I could even think about bracing him over there, I had to make sure he was alone. Another few minutes, another few hours, even another day or two… what did it matter? Locating him had been the big job, and now that that was done, he wasn’t going to get away.

Five minutes passed. Ten.

And somebody walked into the lighted room-walked in and sat down in a chair and picked up a magazine. A woman. Thin, angular blond wearing a quilted housecoat and of an age that I couldn’t determine at this distance.

My hands were damp; I scrubbed them dry on the legs of Tom Carder’s Levi’s. Relative of Brit’s? Girlfriend? Barnwell had claimed the man was a homosexual, but Barnwell was a dimwit and dimwits make lousy witnesses. Was Brit in there with her, in one of the other rooms? Could be. But it could be, too, that he was out for the evening, or away from Elk Grove altogether, or even in another damn state. If he was on some kind of trip I could sit here waiting for days…

On impulse I started the engine, swung the car around, drove back to the same liquor store I’d stopped at a while ago to ask directions. There was a phone box out front; I put a quarter in the slot and punched out the number that had been in Tucker’s address book.

A woman’s low-pitched voice said, “Hello?”

“Is Brit there?”

“No, not right now.”

“You expect him back tonight?”

“I guess. He comes and goes.”

“What time do you think he’ll be home?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“Who is this?”

“Midge.”

“Midge who?”

“… Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of Brit’s.”

“Uh-huh. You want to leave a message?”

“No,” I said, “no message.”

I cradled the receiver. Midge. Girlfriend, probably. The important thing was that he wasn’t out of town or out of state, that he was due back home tonight. But how was I going to get him alone? Lure him out by phone? Foolish move; if I didn’t handle it just right it might put him on his guard. Chances were, he hadn’t been back to the Deer Run cabin yet. In which case he believed I was still chained up inside, and as long as he believed that he had no reason to be looking over his shoulder, to stay cooped up at home with Midge. Sooner or later he would go out again-sometime tomorrow, probably. Sooner or later there would be a time and a place where he was alone and I could take him the way he’d taken me that long ago night in San Francisco.

I debated finding a room for the night, coming back and staking out the cottage early in the morning. No point in returning to Cordilleras Street now, was there? No… except that I wasn’t ready yet to close myself up in some box of a motel room, do my waiting in absentia. I ached for a look at him, at his face without the ski mask to hide it. Maybe I could accomplish that much tonight, at least.

Back to Cordilleras, back into the tree shadows next to the vacant lot. The cottage’s front window was still un-draped, and the blond woman was still sitting there reading her magazine. Brit hadn’t come home in the brief interval between my phone call and now: The driveway still had just one car parked on it and the curb in front was deserted.

I waited. I have always hated stakeouts-the monotony, the dribbling passage of time, the tension-and this one was twice as bad as any other in thirty years. I was so tired my eyes ached and watered and I had to keep knuckling them to clear my vision. So wired already that my neck and shoulders felt as though they were being compressed in a vise. Hunger pangs under my breastbone, too… I should have bought something to eat at the liquor store. Still not thinking things out as carefully as I used to, still not planning ahead. But Jesus, I was so close to the end of it now, so close. It was like an obstruction in my mind that I had to keep squeezing past to get at anything else.

8:30. Headlights behind me, turning into Cordilleras. I eased farther down on the seat, watched the lights approach in the side mirror. But the car went on past Number 62, ahead into the next block, and turned into a driveway midway along.

8:45. The woman, Midge, got up and left the front room. It was ten minutes before she came back, carrying a plate of something and a glass, and sat down again.

8:55. A man came out of a mobile home adjacent to the cottage and directly opposite where I was sitting, took something from his car and then went back inside without looking my way. If he knew I was there he didn’t want to know it. That was one good thing about staking out an area like this, as opposed to a middle-class residential district: no neighborhood watch program, no overwrought fear of strangers who might have designs on the family silver, no self-righteous busybodies eager to pick up the phone and call the police at the slightest provocation. People here minded their own business. They had no family silver to protect, shunned the law except in cases of emergency, and avoided hassles whenever they could because their daily lives, scratching out existences on streets like this one, were hassle enough, thank you.

9:20. Another pair of headlights turning in behind me-and another destination on the second block.

9:30. Midge got up and switched on a black and white TV. Sat down again, only to stand a minute later and walk to the window and draw thin patterned drapes: There had probably been some kind of glare from outside that affected her view of the television. I said aloud, “Shit!” Now maybe I wouldn’t get a look at Brit tonight after all.

9:50. Cramp in my right leg. I had to go through contortions to pull the leg up, maneuver it past the gearshift and straighten it out across the passenger seat.

10:05. Why didn’t he come? Out enjoying himself, probably; taking in a movie, playing cards, having sex… damn him! Damn his rotten soul to hell!

10:15. God, how I wanted this to be over with. Not just this waiting tonight-all of it. So I could stop hating, so I could go home, so I could see Kerry. So I could lick my wounds and start the healing process. So I could begin to live again.

10:30. Another cramp in my leg. I couldn’t keep on sitting here much longer…

I didn’t have to. Two minutes after I massaged the knot out of my leg, a third set of headlamps appeared behind me-and this time the car turned into Number 62’s driveway.

I sat up, gripping the bottom of the steering wheel with both hands. The car over there-I couldn’t tell the make, just that it was an older model-went dark and a slender man shape got out. The dome light was too dim and the night too dark for me to see him clearly. I watched him walk through the weedy front yard to the door, let himself in with a key. There was light inside, and when he stepped through the open doorway I had a quick glimpse of lank brown hair, pale face in profile, dark blue Windbreaker. Then the door closed off the light and he was gone.

Frustration was sharp in me for a few seconds, but then the edge of it rubbed off against the grindstone of fatigue. So close to him now, just a hundred yards or so separating us. And yet there was nothing I could do about it tonight. Tomorrow, but not tonight. Get out of here, go get some sleep, I thought, come back in the morning… but I could not seem to make my body respond. I didn’t trust myself to drive yet anyway. My hands twitched when I took them away from the wheel, as if I had contracted some sort of neurological disease: too much stress, too much time cramped up in this small space. I gripped the wheel again, harder this time. Sat like that, waiting until I felt able to handle the car without risk to myself or someone else.

More minutes crawled away-not many, ten at the most. When I let go of the wheel this time my hands were still. I had been taking deep slow breaths; I took several more, ran my tongue over dry lips, tested my reactions by pushing in the clutch, tapping the brake, working the gearshift. Okay now. I reached for the ignition key-

And the cottage’s front door opened and he came back out.

I froze with my fingers on the key. In the two or three seconds he was in the light I saw that he had changed clothes, or at least put on a different coat-something heavy and plaid-and some kind of cap on his head. Then he was a shadow shape walking across the yard, opening the car door, ducking inside. The starter ground, a whiny sound in the night’s stillness; the headlights came on. He backed the car out of the driveway and turned my way.

I drifted low on the seat, straightened immediately after he rolled past and reached again for the ignition key. He turned left at the corner behind me. I had the engine going by then, and I made a sharp U-turn and hit the headlight switch before I reached the corner. When I completed the turn after him he was only a block and a half away.

Adrenaline had taken away some of the dragging tiredness, made me alert again. I thought: Going after a pack of cigarettes or liquor, maybe. That was fine, as long as he went somewhere that wasn’t too crowded. I could wait in his car while he made his purchase; or if he locked it I could hang around in the shadows nearby until he came back.

But he wasn’t out on a late-night shopping errand. He led me to Elk Grove Boulevard, along it through the middle of town, and out past the chain of shopping centers and service stations and fast-food joints on the western outskirts. I knew by then that his car was an old green Mercury with a piece chipped off one of the taillights: easy enough to keep in sight.

Highway 99 came up ahead. He led me across the overpass, then onto the southbound entrance ramp. He drove in the fast lane; I stayed in the slow lane at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. But wherever he was going, he wasn’t in any particular hurry. His speed hovered between sixty and sixty-five.

We traveled down the freeway about ten miles. Then an exit sign loomed ahead-Highway 104, Jackson-and when he put on his directional signal and started off onto the ramp, I realized suddenly where he was going. Knew it in that instant the way you know or intuit certain things, with a sense of utter inevitability. Knew it with a feeling too dark, too full of bitter irony to be elation but close to elation just the same because it was fitting, it was a kind of cosmic justice. I could not have picked a better night to catch up with him or asked for a better place to have it all end.

Highway 104 leads to the central Mother Lode, connecting with Highway 49 just north of Jackson. And there could only be one possible reason for him to drive up to the Sierras alone at this time of night.

He was going to the cabin at Deer Run.