Talk Talk

One

SHE WAS RUNNING LATE, always running late, a failing of hers, she knew it, but then she couldn't find her purse and once she did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn't find her keys. They should have been in her purse, but they weren't, and so she'd made a circuit of the apartment-two circuits, three-before she thought to look through the pockets of the jeans she'd worn the day before, but where were “they?” No time for toast. Forget the toast, forget food. She was out of orange juice. Out of butter and cream cheese. The newspaper on the front mat was just another obstacle. Piss-warm-was that an acceptable term? Yes-“piss-warm” coffee in a stained mug, a quick check of lipstick and hair in the rearview mirror, and then she was putting the car in gear and backing out onto the street.

She may have been peripherally aware of a van flitting by in the opposite direction, the piebald dog sniffing at a stain on the edge of the pavement, someone's lawn sprinkler holding the light in a shimmer of translucent beads, but the persistent beat of adrenaline-or nerves, or whatever it was-wouldn't allow her to focus. Plus, the sun was in her eyes, and where were her sunglasses? She thought she remembered seeing them on the bureau, in a snarl of jewelry-or was it the kitchen table, next to the bananas, and she'd considered taking a banana with her, fast food, potassium, roughage, but then she figured she wouldn't because with Dr. Stroud it was better to have nothing at all in your stomach. Air. Air alone would sustain her.

“To rush, to hurry, to fret:” Old English and Latinate roots, the same sad connotative stab of meaning. She wasn't thinking clearly. She was stressed, stressed out, running late. And when she got to the four-way stop at the end of the block she felt momentarily blessed because there was no one there to stop for, yet even as she made a feint of slowing and shifted from neutral to second with a quick deft plunge of clutch and accelerator, she spotted the patrol car parked just up the street in the bruised shadow of an SUV.

There was a moment of suspended time, the cop frozen at the wheel of his car, she giving him a helpless exculpatory look, and then she was past him and cursing herself as she watched him pull a lazy U-turn behind her and activate the flashing lights. All at once she saw the world complete, the palms with their pineapple trunks and peeling skirts, the armored spines of the yucca plants climbing the hill, yellow rock, red rock, a gunmetal pickup slowing to gape at her where she'd pulled over on a tan strip of dirt, and below her, a descending expanse of tiled rooftops and the distant blue wallop of the Pacific, no hurry now, no hurry at all. She watched the cop-the patrolman-in her side mirror as he sliced open the door, hitched up his belt (they all did that, as if the belt with its Mace and handcuffs and the hard black-handled revolver were ail the badge they needed) and walked stiffly to her car.

She had her license and registration ready and held them out to him in offering, in supplication, but he didn't take them, not yet. He was saying something, lips flapping as if he were chewing a wad of gristle, but what was it? It wasn't “License and registration,” but what else could it be? “Is that the sun in the sky? What's the square root of a hundred forty-four? Do you know why I pulled you over?” Yes. That was it. And she did know. She'd run a stop sign. Because she was in a hurry-a hurry to get to the dentist's, of all places-and she was running late.

“I know,” she said, “I know, but… but I did shift down…”

He was young, this patrolman, no older than she, a coeval, a contemporary, somebody she might have danced alongside of-or with-at Velvet Jones or one of the other clubs on lower State. His eyes were too big for his head and they bulged out like a Boston terrier's-and what was that called? “Exophthalmia.” The word came to her and she felt a quick glow of satisfaction despite the circumstances. But the cop, the patrolman. There was a softness to his jaw, that when combined with the eyes-liquid and weepy-gave him an unfinished look, as if he weren't her age at all but an adolescent, a big-headed child all dressed up spick-and-span in his uniform and playing at authority. She saw his face change when she spoke, but she was used to that.

He said something then, and this time she read him correctly, handing him the laminated license and the thin wafer of the registration slip, and she couldn't help asking him what was the matter, though she knew her face would give her away. A question always flared her eyebrows as if she were being accusatory or angry, and she'd tried to work on that but with mixed success. He backed away from the car and said something further-probably that he was going to go back to his own vehicle and run a standard check on her license before writing out the standard ticket for running the standard stop sign-and this time she kept her mouth shut.

For the first few minutes she wasn't aware of the time passing. All she could think was what this was going to cost her, points on her license, the insurance-was it last year or the year before that she'd got her speeding ticket? — and that now she was definitely going to be late. For the dentist. All this for the dentist. And if she was late for the dentist and the procedure that was to take two hours minimum, as she'd been advised in writing to assure that there would be no misunderstanding, then she would be late for her class too and no one to cover for her. She thought of the problem of the telephone-she supposed she could use the dentist's receptionist as an intermediary, but what a hassle. “Hassle.” And what was the derivation of that? she wondered. She made a note to herself to look it up in her “Dictionary of American Slang” when she got home. But what was taking him so long? She had an urge to look over her shoulder, fix the glowing sun-blistered windshield with a withering stare, but she resisted the impulse and lowered her left shoulder to peer instead through the side mirror.

Nothing. There was a form there, the patrolman's form, a bulked-up shadow, head bent. She glanced at the clock on the dash. Ten minutes had passed since he'd left her. She wondered if he was a slow learner, dyslexic, the sort of person who would have trouble recollecting the particular statute of the motor vehicle code she stood in violation of, who would fumble with the nub of his pencil, pressing extra hard for the duplicate. A dope, a dummy, a half-wit. A “Neanderthal.” She tried out the word on her tongue, beating out the syllables-Ne-an-der-thal-and watched in the mirror as her lips pursed and drew back and pursed again.

She was thinking of her dentist, an inveterate talker, with eyebrows that seemed to crawl across his inverted face as he hung over her, oblivious to the fact that she couldn't respond except with grunts and deep-throated cries as the cotton wads throttled her tongue and the vacuum tube tugged at her lip, when the door of the police car caught the light as it swung open again and the patrolman emerged. Right away she could see that something was wrong. His body language was different, radically different, the stiffness gone out of his legs, his shoulders hunched forward and his feet stalking the gravel with exaggerated care. She watched till his face loomed up in the mirror-his mouth drawn tight, his eyes narrowed and deflated-and then turned to face him.

That was when she had her first shock.

He was standing three paces back from the driver's door and he had his weapon drawn and pointed at her and he was saying something about her hands-barking, his face discomposed, furious-and he had to repeat himself, more furious each time, until she understood: “Put your hands where I can see them.”

At first, she'd been too scared to speak, numbly complying, stung by the elemental violence of the moment. He'd jerked her out of the car, the gun still on her, shoved her face into the hot metal and glass of her own vehicle and twisted her arms round behind her to clamp the cuffs over her wrists, the weight of him pressing into her until she felt him forcing her legs apart with the anvil of his knee. His hands were on her then, gripping her ankles first, sliding up her legs to her hips, her abdomen, her armpits, patting, probing. There was the sharp hormonal smell of him, of his contempt and outrage, his hot breath exploding in her ear with the fricatives and plosives of speech. He was brisk, brutal, sparing nothing. There might have been questions, orders, a meliorating softness in his tone, but she couldn't hear and she couldn't see his face-and her hands, her hands were caught like fish on a stringer.

Now, in the patrol car, in the cage of the backseat that was exactly like the cage they put stray dogs in, she felt the way they wanted you to feel: small, helpless, without hope or recourse. Her heart was hammering. She was on the verge of tears. People were staring at her, slowing their cars to get a good look, and there was nothing she could do but turn away in shame and horror and pray that one of her students didn't happen to be passing by-or anybody she knew, her neighbors, the landlord. She slouched down in the seat, dropped her head till her hair shook loose. She'd always wondered why the accused shielded their faces on the courthouse steps, why they tried so hard to hide their identities even when everyone in the world knew who they were, but now she understood, now she felt it for herself.

The color rose to her face-she was being “arrested,” and in public no less-and for a moment she was paralyzed. All she could think of was the shame of it, a shame that stung like some physical hurt, like the bite of an insect, a thousand insects seething all over her body-she could still feel the hot clamp of his hands on her ankles, her thighs. It was as if he'd burned her, scored her flesh with acid. She studied the back of the seat, the floormat, her right foot tapping and jittering with the unobtainable pulse of her nerves, and then all at once, as if a switch had been thrown in her brain, she felt the anger rising in her. Why should she feel shame? What had she done?

It was the cop. He was the one. He was responsible for all this. She lifted her eyes and there he was, the idiot, the pig, a pair of squared-off shoulders in the tight blue-black uniform, the back of his head as flat and rigid as a paddle strapped to his neck, and he was saying something into his radio, the microphone at his mouth even as the cruiser lurched out into the street and she felt herself flung helplessly forward against the seat restraint. Suddenly she was furious, ready to explode. What was wrong with him? What did he think, she was a drug dealer or something? A thief? A terrorist? She'd run a stop sign, for Christ's sake, that was all-a stop sign. “Jesus.”

Before she knew it, the words were out of her mouth. “Are you crazy?” she demanded, and she didn't care if her voice was too loud, if it was toneless and ugly and made people wince. She didn't care what she sounded like, not now, not here. “I said, are you crazy?”

But he wasn't hearing her, he didn't understand. “Listen,” she said, “listen,” leaning forward as far as the seat restraint would allow her, struggling to enunciate as carefully as she could, though she was choked and wrought up and the manacles were too tight and her heart was throbbing like a trapped bird trying to beat its way out of the nest, “there must be some mistake. Don't you know who I am?”

The world chopped by in a harsh savage glide, the car jolting beneath her. She strained to see his face reflected in the rearview mirror, to see if his lips were moving, to get a clue-the smallest hint, anything-as to what was happening to her. He must have read her her rights as he handcuffed her-“You have the right to remain silent” and all the rest of it, the obligatory phrases she'd seen on the TV screen a hundred times and more. But “why?” What had she done? And why did his eyes keep leaping from the road to the mirror and back again as if she couldn't be trusted even in the cage and the cuffs, as if he expected her to change shape, vomit bile, ooze and leak and smell? Why the hate? The bitterness? The intransigence?

It took her a moment, the blood burning in her veins, her face flushed with shame and anger and frustration, until she understood: it was a case of mistaken identity. Of course it was. Obviously. What else could it be? Someone who looked like her-some other slim graceful dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three who wasn't on her way to the dentist with a sheaf of papers she had to finish grading by the time her class met-had robbed a bank at gunpoint, shot up the neighborhood, hit a child and run. It was the only explanation, because she'd never violated the law in her life except in the most ordinary and innocuous ways, speeding on the freeway alongside a hundred other speeders, smoking the occasional joint when she was a teenager (she and Carrie Cheung and later Richie Cohen, cruising the neighborhood, high as-well, “kites”-but no one ever knew or cared, least of all the police), collecting the odd parking ticket or moving violation-all of which had been duly registered, paid for and expunged from her record. At least she thought they'd been. That parking ticket in Venice, sixty bucks and she was maybe two minutes late, the meter maid already writing out the summons even as she stood there pleading with her-but she'd taken care of that, hadn't she?

No, it was too much. The whole thing, the shock of it, the scare-and these people were going to pay, they were, she'd get an attorney, police brutality, incompetence, false arrest, the whole works. All right. All right, fine. If that was what they wanted, she'd give it to them. The car rocked beneath her. The cop held rigid, like a mannequin. She closed her eyes a moment, an old habit, and took herself out of the world.

They booked her, fingerprinted her, took away her pager and cell phone and her rings and her jade pendant and her purse, made her stand against a wall-cowed and miserable and with her shoulders slumped and her eyes vacant-for the lingering humiliation of the mug shot, and still nothing. No charges. No sense. The lips of the policemen flailed at her and she let her voice go till it must have grown wings and careened round the room with the dull gray walls and framed certificates and the flag that hung from a shining brass pole in limp validation of the whole corrupt and tottering system. She was beside herself. Hurt. Furious. Stung. “There must be some mistake,” she insisted over and over again. “I'm Dana, Dana Halter. I teach at the San Roque School for the Deaf and I've never… I'm deaf, can't you see that? You've got the wrong person.” She watched them shift and shrug as if she were some sort of freak of nature, a talking dolphin or a ventriloquist's dummy come to life, but they gave her nothing. To them she was just another criminal-another perp-one more worthless case to be locked away and ignored.

But they didn't lock her away, not yet. She was handcuffed to a bench that gave onto a hallway behind the front desk, and she didn't catch the explanation offered her-the cop, the booking officer, a man in his thirties who looked almost apologetic as he took her by the arm, had averted his face as he gently but firmly pushed her down and readjusted the cuffs-but it became clear when a bleached-out wisp of a man with a labile face and the faintest pale trace of a mustache came through the door and made his way to her, his hands already in motion. His name-he finger-spelled it for her-was Charles Iverson and he was an interpreter for the deaf. “I work at the San Roque School sometimes,” he signed. “I've seen you around.”

She didn't recognize him-or maybe she did. There was something familiar in the smallness and neatness of him, and she seemed to recollect the image of him in the hallway, his head down, moving with swift, sure strides. She forced a smile. “I'm glad you're here,” she said aloud, lifting her cuffed hands in an attempt to sign simultaneously as she tended to do when she was agitated. “There's some huge mistake. All I did was run a four-way stop… and they, they”-she felt the injustice and the hurt of it building in her and struggled to control her face. And her voice. It must have jumped and planed off because people were staring-the booking officer, a secretary with an embellished figure and a hard plain face, two young Latinos stalled at the front desk in their canted baseball caps and voluminous shorts. “Put a lid on it,” that's what their body language told her.

Iverson took his time. His signing was rigid and inelegant but comprehensible for all that, and she focused her whole being on him as he explained the charges against her. “There are multiple outstanding warrants,” he began, “in Marin County, Tulare and L. A. Counties”-“and out of state too, in Nevada, Reno and Stateline.”

“Warrants? What warrants?”

He was wearing a sport coat over a T-shirt with the name of a basketball team emblazoned across the breast. His hair had been sprayed or gelled, but not very successfully-it curled up like the fluff of the chicks they'd kept under a heat lamp in elementary school, so blond it was nearly translucent. She watched him lift the lapel of his jacket and extract a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket. He seemed to consider it a moment, weighing it like a knife, before dropping it to his lap and signing, “Failure to appear on a number of charges, different courts, different dates, over the past two years. Passing bad checks, auto theft, possession of a controlled substance, assault with a deadly weapon”-“the list goes on.” He held her eyes. His mouth was drawn tight, no sympathy there. It came to her that he believed the charges, believed that she'd led a double life, that she'd violated every decent standard and let the deaf community down, one more hearing prejudice confirmed. Yes, his eyes said, the deaf live by their own rules, inferior rules, compromised rules, they live off of us and on us. It was a look she'd seen all her life.

He handed her the sheet and there it all was, dates, places, the police department codes and the charges brought. Incredibly, “her” name was there too, undeniably and indelibly, in caps, under Felony Complaint, Superior Court of this county or the other, and the warrant numbers marching down the margin of the page.

She looked up and it was as if he'd slapped her across the face. “I've never even been to Tulare County”-“I don't even know where it is. Or to Nevada either. It's crazy. It's wrong, a mistake, that's all. Tell them it's a mistake.”

The coldest look, the smallest Sign. “You get one phone call.”

Two

BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, the morning obliterated by Starbucks and the twilit irreality of the long cool room at Digital Dynasty, seeing and hearing and breathing in the world within a world that was the screen before him. The scene-a single frame-was frozen there in a deep gloom of mahogany and copper tones, and he was working on a head replacement. His boss-Radko Goric, a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur wrapped in two-hundred-dollar designer shades, off-color Pierro Quarto jackets and clunky vinyl shoes out of the bargain bin-had underbid three other special effects companies for the contract on this picture, the last installment of a trilogy set on a distant and inimical planet where saurian warlords battled for dominance and human mercenaries shifted allegiance in observance of the tenets of an ancient warrior code. All well and good. He was a fan of the series-had seen the first two episodes six or seven times each, in fact, marveling at the detail, the sweep, the seamlessness of the effects-and he'd gone into the project with the best of intentions, a kind of euphoria even. But Rad (as he insisted on being called, and not Radko or Mr. Goric or Your Royal Highness) had given them zero leeway as far as the time frame was concerned. The film was due to premiere in less than a month and Bridger and his five co-workers were putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week.

For a long while, he just stared at the screen, his chin propped on two pale fists that seemed to have gone boneless on him. The world was there, right there in front of him, much more immediate and real than this cubicle, these walls, the ceiling, the painted cement floor, and he was inside it, drifting, dreaming, sleeping with his eyes open. He was beat. Dead. His fingers were limp, his backside blistered. He'd been wearing the same socks three days running. And now he could feel an exhaustion headache building inside his skull like the turd-brown clouds that roiled Drex III, the planet he shaded and scored and polished to the gleam of a dagger's edge with the assistance of his Discreet software and a finger-worn mouse. The coffee did nothing for him. It had been Banjo's turn to go for Starbucks during coffee break, and he'd ordered a venti with a shot of espresso, and there it was, half-consumed, and all he felt was queasy. And sleepy, drowsy, narcoleptic. If only he could lay his head down, just for a minute…

But he had a message. From Deet-Deet. The icon popped up in the corner of his screen, and he opened it to find a cartoon image of a peg-legged pirate waving a cutlass, onto which Deet-Deet had grafted an outsized cutout of Radko's head. The text read: “Har-har-har, me hearties! You'll all walk the plank if this project isn't in the bag by the thirtieth”-“and no snoozing on the job!”

This was the way they kept their sanity. The work was drudgery, piecework, paint and roto at twenty-five dollars and seventy-two cents an hour, before taxes, and while it had its moments of artistic satisfaction-like painting out the wires on the tiny flying bodies hurled into the scabrous skies by one nasty extraterrestrial explosion or another-essentially it was a grind. The head replacement shot Bridger had been working on all the previous day and into this soporific morning involved superimposing the three-dimensionally photographed face of the film's action hero, Kade (or “The” Kade, as he was now being billed), over the white helmet of a stuntman on a futuristic blade-sprouting chopper that shot up a ramp and off a cliff to skim one of Drex Ill's lakes of fire and propel its driver into the heart of the enemy camp, where he would proceed to hack and gouge and face-kick one hapless lizard warrior after another. It wasn't exactly what Bridger had imagined himself doing six years out of film school-he'd pictured a trajectory more like Fincher's or Spielberg's-but it was a living. A good living. And it was in the industry.

What he did now was superimpose The Kade's head over Radko's-he had The Kade winking and grinning, then grimacing (the look when the bike lands amongst the saurian legions with a sacroiliac-jarring thump) and finally winking again-and messaged his reply: “Scuttle the ship and bring me coffee, my kingdom for a cup, another cup. ” He added a P. S., his favorite quotation from “Miss Lonelyhearts,” which he made a point of inserting wherever it applied: “Like a dead man, only friction could warm him or violence make him mobile.”

And then, from the physical distance of two cubicles over and the hurtling unbridgeable interstices of cyberspace, Plum chimed in, and then Lumpen, Pixel and Banjo, and everybody was awake again and the new day that was exactly like the preceding day and the day before that began to unfold.

He was painting out the vestigial white edges around The Kade's head and beginning to think about breakfast (bagel and cream cheese) or maybe lunch (bagel and cream cheese with lox, sprouts and mustard), when his cell began to vibrate. Radko didn't like to hear any buzzing or carillons during working hours because he didn't want his employees distracted by personal calls, just as he didn't want them surfing the Web, going to chat rooms or instant messaging, so Bridger always kept his cell phone on vibrate, and he always kept it in his right front pocket so that he could be instantly alerted to the odd crepitating motion of it and take his calls on the sly. “Hello?” he said, keeping his voice in the range of a propulsive whisper.

“Yes, hello. This is Charles Iverson with the San Roque Police Department. I'm an interpreter for the deaf and I have Dana Halter here.”

““Police?” What's the problem? Has there been an accident or something?”

“This is Dana,” the voice said, as if it were the instrument of a medium channeling a spirit. “I need you to come down here and bail me out.”

“For what? What did you do?”

“I don't know,” the voice said, the man's voice, low-pitched and with a handful of gravel in it, “but I ran a stop sign and now they think I-”

There was a pause. The Kade stared back at him from the screen, grimacing, the left side of his head still encumbered with three-quarters of his white halo. Overhead, the barely functional fluorescent lights briefly brightened and then dimmed again, one tube or another eternally going bad. Plum-the only female among them-got up from her cubicle and padded down the hall in the direction of the bathroom.

Iverson's voice came back: “-they think I committed all these crimes, but”-a pause-“I didn't.”

“Of course you didn't,” he said, and he pictured Dana there in some anonymous police precinct, her face angled away from the phone and the man with the voice signing to her amidst the mug shots and wanted posters, and the picture wasn't right. “I thought you were supposed to be at the dentist's,” he said. And then: “Crimes? What crimes?”

“I was,” Iverson said. “But I ran a stop sign and the police arrested me.” There was more-Bridger could hear Dana's voice in the background-but the interpreter was giving him the shorthand version. Without further elaboration he read off the list of charges as if he were a waiter reciting the specials of the day.

“But that's crazy,” Bridger said. “You didn't, I mean, she didn't-”

“Time's up,” Iverson said.

“Listen, I'll be right there. Ten minutes or less.” Bridger glanced up as Plum slipped back into her cubicle, dropping his voice to the breath of a whisper. “What's the bail? I mean, what does it cost?”

“What? Speak up. I can't hear you.”

Radko was coming down the hall now and Bridger leaned deeper into the cubicle to mask the phone. “The bail-how much?”

“It hasn't been set yet.”

“All right,” he said. “All right. I'll be right there. Love you.”

There was a pause. “Love you too,” Iverson said.

He'd never been to the San Roque Police Station and he had to look up the address in the phone book, and then, when he turned down the street indicated, he was startled to see it lined on both sides with idle patrol cars. It took him a while to find a parking spot, circling the block again and again till one of the cruisers finally pulled out and he cautiously signaled his intention and did an elaborate and constrained job of parallel parking between two black-and-whites. He was agitated. He was in a hurry. But this was hardly the time or place for a fender bender or even a bumper-kiss.

A puffing bloated woman who seemed to have a crust of dried blood rimming her eye sockets-or was that makeup? — was stumping up the steps ahead of him and he had the presence of mind to hold the door for her, which in turn gave him a moment to compose himself. His relations with the police over the course of his adult years had been minimal and strictly formal (“All right, out of the car”) and he'd been arrested exactly twice in his life, once for shoplifting when he was fourteen and then, in college, for driving under the influence. He understood theoretically that the police were the servants and protectors of the public-that is, “his” servants and protectors-but for all that he couldn't help experiencing a sudden rapid uptick of alarm and a queasy sense of culpability whenever he saw a cop on the street. Even rent-a-cops gave him pause. No matter: he followed the bloated woman through the door.

Inside, a waist-high counter divided the public space (flags, both state and federal, fierce overhead lights, linoleum that gleamed as if in defiance of the bodily fluids and street filth that were regularly deposited on its surface) from the inner sanctum, where the police and detectives had their desks and a discreet hallway led presumably to the holding cells. Where Dana was. Even as he walked up to the counter, he shifted his eyes to the hallway, as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of her there, but of course he couldn't. She was already locked up in some pen with a bunch of prostitutes, drunks, violent offenders, and the thought of it made him go cold. They'd be all over her. It wasn't as if she couldn't handle herself-she was the most insistently independent woman he'd ever met-but she was naïve, too sympathetic for her own good, and as soon as they discovered she was deaf they'd have a wedge to use against her. He thought of the way street people would hit on her whenever he took her anywhere, as if she were their special emissary, as if her handicap-he had to check himself: her “difference”-reduced her somehow to their level. Or lower. Lower still.

But this was all a misunderstanding. Obviously. And he would have her out before they could get their hooks in her, no matter what it took. He waited his turn behind the fat woman, checking his watch reflexively every five seconds. Ten past eleven. Eleven past. Twelve. The fat woman was complaining about her neighbor's dog-she couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't think, because it barked so relentlessly, and she'd called the police, this very precinct, twenty-two times already and had a log of each phone call going back fifteen months to prove it. And were they going to do anything about it? Or did she have to stand here at this desk till she dropped dead? Because she would if that's what it took. She'd stand right here.

Radko hadn't been pleased when he begged off work. “It's Dana,” Bridger had said, flagging him down on his way to the refrigerator. Bridger was already on his feet, already patting down his pockets for the car keys. “She's been arrested. It's an emergency.”

The lights fluttered, darkened. Drex III glowed menacingly from the screen-there were twenty-seven days left till it was due to take its place in the firmament among the other interstellar spheres. Radko took a step back and squinted at him out of his heavy-lidded eyes. “Emergency?” he repeated. “For what? People they get thrown in jail every day.”

“No,” Bridger said, “you don't understand. She didn't do anything. It's a mistake. I need to, well-I know this sounds crazy but I need to go down there and bail her out. Right now.”

Nothing. Radko compressed his lips and gave him a look Pixel had described in a sudden flare of inspiration as “Paranoia infests the frog.”

“I mean, I can't leave her there. In a cell. Would you want to be stuck in a cell?”

Wrong question. “In my country,” Radko intoned, “people they are born in cells, they give birth in cells, they die in cells.”

“Is that good?” Bridger threw back at him. “Is that why you came here?”

But Radko just turned away from him, waving a hand in the air. “Pffft!” was all he had to add.

“I'm going,” Bridger said, and he could see Plum leaning out of her carrel to savor the spectacle. “Just so you know-I don't have any choice.”

Heavily, one hand on the door of the refrigerator, the other describing a quick arc as he swung round to point an admonitory finger, Radko rumbled, “One hour. One hour max. Just so “you” know.”

The officer at the desk-balding on top, sideburns gone white, milky exasperated eyes glancing up over the reading glasses riding the bridge of his nose-reassured the fat woman in soft, placatory tones, but the fat woman wasn't there for reassurance; she was there for action. The more softly the policeman spoke, the more the woman's voice seemed to rise, till finally he turned away from her and gestured across the room. A moment later, a much younger officer-a ramrod Latino in a uniform that looked custom-fit-beckoned to her from a swinging door that led into the offices proper. The man at the desk said: “This is Officer Torres. He's going to help you. He's our dog expert. Isn't that right, Torres?”

The second man took the cue, not a hint of amusement on his face. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That's right. I'm the dog man.”

And then the man at the desk turned to Bridger. “Yes?” he said.

Bridger shuffled his Nikes, focused on a spot just to the left of the cop's head and said, “I'm here for Dana. Dana Halter?”

Two hours later, he was still waiting. This was a Friday, a Friday afternoon now, and things seemed to be moving slowly, in a quiet retrograde tumble toward the weekend and the fomenting parade of drunks and brawlers who could go ahead and set the place on fire for all these putty-faced men and women cared, these desk-hounds and functionaries and sleepwalkers with the thousand-yard stares. They were going home at five o'clock to drink a beer and put their feet up and until then they were going to shuffle back and forth to the filing cabinets and peck at their computers in a zone where nobody, least of all Bridger, could reach them. He had managed to pry a few essential nuggets of information from the cop with the white sideburns-Yes, they'd brought her in; No, bail hadn't been set yet; No, he couldn't see her; No, he couldn't talk to her-and after that he'd stationed himself on a bench by the doorway with nothing to read and nothing to do but wait.

There were four other people waiting along with him: a very old man in a heavy suit who held himself so perfectly erect his jacket never made contact with the back of the bench; a Middle Eastern woman of indeterminate age, dressed in what might have been a caftan or a sacramental robe of some sort, and beside her, her ceaselessly leg-kicking son who looked to be five or so, but Bridger wasn't much acquainted with kids and the more he observed this one the less certain he was about that estimate-actually, the kid could have been anywhere from three to twelve; and, seated farthest from him, a girl in her late teens/ early twenties who wasn't particularly attractive in either face or figure, but who began to take on a certain allure after two hours of surreptitious study. Beyond that, probably a hundred people had scuffed in and out of the place, most of them conferring in quiet deferential tones with the cop at the desk and then bowing their way back out the door. The fat woman had long since returned to her barking zone.

Bridger was profoundly bored. He had a difficult time sitting still under any circumstances, unless he was absorbed in a video game or letting his mind drift into the poisonous atmosphere of Drex III or some other digitized scenario, and he found himself fidgeting almost as much as the child (who had never ceased kicking his legs out and drawing them back again, as if the bench were an outsized swing and he was trying to lift them all up and away and out of this stupefying place). For long periods, Bridger stared into the middle distance, thinking nothing, thinking of bleakness and the void, and then, inevitably, his fears for Dana would materialize again, and he'd see her face, the sweet confusion of her mouth and the way she knitted her brows when she posed a question-“What time is it? Where did you say the omelet pan was? How many jiggers of triple sec?”-and his stomach would churn with anxiety. And hunger. Simple hunger. It occurred to him that he'd had neither the breakfast bagel nor the lunch-he'd had nothing but Starbucks, in fact-and he could feel the acidity creeping up his throat. What was wrong with these people? Couldn't they answer a simple question? Process a form? Dispense some information in a timely fashion?

He cautioned himself to stay calm, though that was difficult, given that he'd already called Radko six times and Radko had become increasingly impatient with each call in the sequence. “I'll work till midnight,” Bridger promised, “I swear.” Radko's voice, bottom-heavy and thick with the bludgeoning consonants of his transported English, came back at him in minor detonations of meaning: “You bedder,” he said. “You betcha. All through night, not just midnight.” But he was being selfish, he told himself. Imagine Dana, imagine what she was going through. He fought off the image of her locked up in a cell with half a dozen strangers, women who would mock her to her face, make demands, get physical with her. Dana would be all but helpless in that arena, the strange flat uninflected flutter of her voice that he found so compelling nothing but a provocation to them, angry women, hard women, needy women. It was all a mistake. It had to be.

And then he was focusing on nothing, the cop at the desk, his fellow sufferers in Purgatory, the dreary walls and glowing floors all melding in a blur, and he was revisiting the first time he'd laid eyes on her, just over a year ago. It was at a club. He'd gone out after work with Deet-Deet, both of them frazzled, their eyes swollen and twitching as an after-effect of fixating on their monitors from ten a. m. till past eight in the evening, the Visine they passed back and forth notwithstanding. First they'd gone for sushi and downed a couple of cold sakes each, and then, because they just had to unwind even though it was a Monday and the whole dreary week stretched out before them like a cinema-scape out of “Dune,” they decided to go clubbing and see what turned up. At the time, Deet-Deet had just broken up with his girlfriend and Bridger was unattached himself (going on three fruitless months), and so, especially after two sakes, this had seemed like a plan.

They were waiting in line in front of Doge, ten-thirty at night, the mist coming in off the sea to insert itself in the alleys and make the pavement shine under the headlights of the slow-rolling traffic, when Deet-Deet interrupted his monologue about the faults and excesses of his ex long enough to light a cigarette and Bridger took the opportunity to lift his head and check out their prospects. This particular club was open to the street so that the pulse of the music and the jumpy erratic flash of the strobe leaked out onto the sidewalk where the prospective patrons could get a look in advance and decide whether it was worth the five-dollar cover charge. Bridger observed the usual mass of bodies swaying under the assault of the music (or of the bass, which was about all you could hear), limbs flung out and retracted, people decapitated by a slash of the strobe even as their heads were restored in the next instant, knees lifted, butts thumping, the same scenario that had played out the night before and would play out the next night and the night after that. His eyes throbbed. The sake sucked the moisture from his brain. He was about to tell Deet-Deet he was having second thoughts about the club, about any club, because he could feel a headache coming on and it was only Monday and they had to keep sight of the fact that they were required to be in by ten to paint out the wires on the interminable martial arts movie they'd been working on for the past three weeks, when he spotted Dana.

She was poised at the edge of the dance floor, right up against one of the big standing speakers, lifting and dropping her feet-her bare feet-to the pulse of the bass and working her elbows as if she were doing aerobics or climbing the StairMaster. Or maybe, somewhere in her mind, she was square dancing, do-si-do and swing your partner. Her eyes were closed tight. Her knees jerked and her feet rose and fell. The red filter caught her hair and set it afire.

“So what do you think, anything worthwhile?” Deet-Deet was saying. Deet-Deet was five foot four and a half inches tall, he was twenty-five years old and he affected the Goth style, despite the fact that most of the SFX world had long since moved on to a modified geek/Indie look. His real name was Ian Fleischer, but at Digital Dynasty people went by their online aliases only, whether they liked it or not. Bridger himself was known as “Sharper” because when he'd first started as a dust-buster, when he was earnest and committed and excited about the work they were doing, he was always hounding the Scan-Record people for sharper plates to clean. “Because I don't know if I want to stay out too late,” Deet-Deet added, by way of elucidation, “and that sake, I think, is really starting to hit me. What do you mix with that, anyway-beer? Beer, I guess, right? Stick to beer?”

Bridger wasn't listening. He was letting the lights trigger something inside him, allowing the music to seep in and transfigure his mood. The line moved forward-maybe ten people between him and the bouncer-and he moved with it. He had a new angle now-a new perspective from which to study this girl, this woman, heroically fighting her way against the music at the edge of the dance floor. Up came her knees, down went her fists, out swung her elbows. Her movements weren't jerky or spastic or out of sync with the beat-or not exactly. It was as if she were attuned to some deeper rhythm, a counter-rhythm, some hidden matrix beneath the surface of the music that no one else-not the dancers, the DJ or the musicians who'd laid down the tracks-was aware of. It fascinated him. She fascinated him.

“Sharper? You with me?” Deet-Deet was gaping up at him like a child lost at the fair. “I was saying, I don't know if I-you see anything worthwhile in there?” He raised himself up on his toes to get a better look. The music collapsed suddenly and then reassembled around the bass line of the next tune. “Her? Is that what you're looking at?”

They were almost at the door, twenty-five or thirty people gathered behind them, the mist shining on everything now, on the streetlights, the palms, people's hair.

Deet-Deet tried one last time: “You want to go in? Think it's worth the five bucks tonight?”

It took him a moment, because he was distracted-or no, he was mesmerized. He'd been involved in two major relationships in his life, one in college and the one-with Melissa-that had died off three months ago with the sound of a tree falling in the woods when no one's there to hear it. Something tugged at him, the irresistible force, an intuition that sparked across the eroded pan of his consciousness like the flash of the strobe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I'm going in.”

Now, as he pulled himself up out of the haze of recollection to see that the woman with the child had vaporized and the cop with the white sideburns had been replaced by a female with drooping, possibly sympathetic eyes, he got to his feet. What time was it? Past four. Radko would have a fit. He'd had a fit. He was having a fit now. Bridger had missed an entire afternoon at work just when the team needed him most-and what had he accomplished aside from having a nice nap at the public's expense on a choice buttock-smoothed bench in the downtown San Roque Police Station? Nothing. Nothing at all. Dana was still locked up back there someplace and he was still here, clueless. He felt the irritation rise in him, a sudden spike of anger he could barely contain, and in order to calm himself he strode over to a display of pamphlets-“How to Protect Yourself on the Street; How to Burglar-Proof Your Home; Identity Theft: What Is It?”-and made a pretense of absorbing the sage information dispensed there. He gave it a moment, then casually turned to the desk.

“Hello,” he said, and the woman lifted her eyes from the form she was filling out. “My name's Bridger Martin and I've been waiting here since just past eleven-in the morning-and I was just wondering if you could maybe help me…”

She said nothing, because why bother? He was a petitioner, a special pleader, a creature of wants and needs and demands, no different from the thousands of others who'd stood here before him, and he would get to the point in his own way and in his own time, she knew that. The prospect seemed to bore her. The counter and the computers and the walls and the floors and the lights bored her too-Bridger bored her. Her fellow officers. Her shoes, her uniform: everything was a bore and a trial, ritualized, clichéd, without beginning or end. Her eyes told him that, and they weren't nearly as sympathetic as he'd thought, not up close, anyway. And her lips-her lips were tightly constricted, as if she were fighting some facial tic.

“It's my-my “girlfriend.” She's been arrested and we don't really know why. I took the whole afternoon off from work just to come down here and”-this was movie dialogue and the phrase stuck to the roof of his mouth-“bail her out, but nobody knows what the bail is or even what the charges are?” He made a question of it, a plea.

She surprised him. Her lips softened. The humanity-the fellow-feeling and sympathy-came back into her eyes. She was going to help. She was going to help, after all. “Name?” she queried.

“Dana,” he said. “Dana Halter, H-a-l-t-e-r.”

She was hitting the keys even as he superfluously spelled out the name and he watched her face as she studied the screen. She was pretty for a middle-aged woman, or almost pretty, now that the vise of her mouth had come unclamped. But he wanted to be charitable, wanted to be helped, babied, led by the hand-she was beautiful, wielder of the sword of justice, radiant with truth. At least for the few seconds it took to bring up the information. Then she lost her animation and became less than pretty all over again. Her eyes were hard suddenly, her mouth small and bitter. “We don't know what we've got here,” she said tersely, “-the charges are still coming in. And because of the Nevada thing, it looks like the Feds are going to be interested.”

“Nevada thing?”

“Interstate. Passing bad checks.”

“Bad checks?” he echoed in disbelief. “She never-” he began, and then caught himself. “Listen,” he said, “help me out here: what does it mean, because it's obviously all a mistake, mistaken identity or something explicable like that. I just want to know when I can get her out on bail? And where do I go?”

The faintest flicker of amusement lifted the corners of her mouth. “She's got no-bail holds in at least two counties because she walked in the past, which means I don't see anything happening till Monday-”

“Monday?” he echoed, and it was almost a yelp, he couldn't help himself.

A beat. Two. Then her lips were moving again: “At the earliest.”

Three

THEY PUT HER IN A CELL that had been freshly scoured by some unseen presence, the caged lights glaring down from above, a residuum of drying mop strokes fanning out from the stainless-steel toilet set like a display model in the center of the room. The smell of the disinfectant, a chemical burn lingering on the clamped close air of the place, made her eyes water, and for the first few minutes she tried to breathe through her mouth only, but that just seemed to make it worse. She backed up against the gray cement wall with its hieroglyphs of furtive graffiti and rubbed at her eyes-and these were not tears, definitely not tears, because she wasn't intimidated and she wasn't scared or sorrowful in the least. She was-what was the word she wanted? — “frustrated,” that was all. Maddened. Outraged. Why wouldn't anyone listen to her? She could have written a deposition for them if somebody had thought to hand her a pen and a sheet of paper. And the interpreter, Iverson-he was all but useless, because in his eyes she was guilty until proven innocent, and that was wrong, just plain wrong. She needed somebody sympathetic. She needed a lawyer. An advocate. She needed Bridger.

He was here now-she could feel it. In this very building, in the front office with all those vacant policemen and hardedged secretaries, straightening things out. He'd explain it all to them, he'd talk for her, do whatever it took to get her out-go to the bank, the bail bondsman, harangue the judge and the district attorney and anybody else whose ear he could bend. If he could just show them their mistake-it was some other Dana Halter they wanted; you'd have to be blind not to see that-they'd understand and come and release her. Any minute now. Any minute now the warder would shove through the heavy steel door at the end of the hallway and unlock the cell and lead her back into the light of day and they'd all bend over backward apologizing to her, the cop at the desk, the arresting officer, Iverson, with his punctilious mouth and accusatory eyes and his unforgivably sloppy signing…

In her agitation-in her fury and sickness at heart-she found that she was pacing round and round the toilet, which was the single amenity in that strictly and minimally functional space aside from the two bunks bolted to the walls, and she wasn't ready to sit down yet. She spoke to herself, told herself to calm down, and maybe she moved her lips, maybe she was speaking aloud, maybe she was. Not that it mattered. There was no one there to hear her, Friday morning an unlikely time to be arrested and locked away. The real criminals were in bed still, and the rest of them-the wife beaters, binge drinkers, motorcycle freaks-were at work, warming up for Friday night. TGIF. She remembered how in college she treasured Friday night above all, as the one time she could get really loose, looser than Saturday because Saturday gave onto Sunday and Sunday was diminished by the prospect of Monday and the whole round of classes and papers and tests starting up all over again. She would go out with her girlfriends on Fridays, drink a few beers, a shot of Cuervo, dance till the pulse of the music branched up from the soles of her feet and radiated through her body so she almost felt she could hear it just like anybody else. The release was what she craved, just that, because she'd had to work so hard to overcome her disability-and she still worked harder than anybody she knew, driving herself with an internal whip that kept all her childhood wounds open and grieving in the flesh, alive to the mockery of her classmates at school, the onus of being branded slow, one of the deaf and dumb. Dumb. They called “her” dumb when she was the equal of anybody in the hearing world, anybody out there beyond these walls. They were the idiots. The cops. The judges. The interpreters.

Friday night. She and Bridger were planning to go out for Thai and then to a movie he'd worked on, some kung fu extravaganza with actors flying around like Peter Pan on invisible wires. She'd been looking forward to it all through her long crazy work week, final papers coming in from her students, endless conferences and department meetings and hardly a moment to focus on her own writing, bills piling up and no time to sit down and balance her checkbook let alone mollify the gas and electric and American Express and Visa, and on top of it all the ceaseless fulminating throb of that molar on the bottom left-and she wondered if anybody had gotten word to Dr. Stroud?

But there was the toilet. Or the throne, as her mother used to call it. She couldn't help musing over the expression (was that jailhouse jargon, was that where the trope had come from?), and then she realized that she had to use it, the piss-warm coffee converted to urine-to “piss” itself-and she looked to the adjoining cell and the empty hallway and to the big steel door. Did they have cameras here? Was some dirty jailer or infantile cop watching a monitor in a musty back office and waiting for the moment when she would lift her skirt and perch on the stainless-steel seat? The thought of it made her burn all over again. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction-she'd rather reabsorb her own wastes, die of a burst bladder. She kept pacing round and round the throne, practicing thought control and comforting herself with the notion that she'd be out before she knew it, and then she'd use the ladies' room in the courthouse like any other innocent.

Time passed. How much, she couldn't say. There were no windows here and they'd taken her watch from her and in her world there were no church towers marking off the quarter hour or birds calling down the close of day. For her, it was as quiet at rush hour as it was for the hearing in the dead of night-or no: quieter, quieter by far. They heard crickets, didn't they? Ambient noise, the sound of the refrigerator starting up, the piping distant howl of a coyote on its prey, a car lost somewhere in the glutinous web of the night? They heard all that in books. They heard it on TV and in horror films. “Loud noise,” prompted the closed captioning. “Sound of glass shattering. A scream.” She didn't hear it. She heard nothing. She lived in a world apart, her own world, a better world, and silence was her refuge and her hard immutable shell and she spoke to herself from deep in the unyielding core of it. That was her essence, her true self, the voice no one could detect even if they wore the highest-decibel hearing aids or cochlear implants or marched thunderously through the world of the hearing. That they couldn't touch. Nobody could.

At some point, she stopped pacing. She was tired suddenly, overburdened, and she eased herself down on the edge of the bunk. For a long while she just sat there, her back slumped, one foot jiggling as she slipped the heel of her shoe off and on, off and on. It was all too much. Here she was, caged up like an animal, and for what? For stupidity. Incompetence. Some paper-shuffler's error. The thing that irritated her the most, more than the injustice and inanity of the whole business, more than Iverson and the cops and everybody else who supported this faltering twisted half-witted bureaucracy, was the waste of her time. Her student papers were in her car-which had no doubt been impounded at this point-and she'd have to skip dinner and the movie and any notion of spending the night at Bridger's, because now she'd have to stay up half the night correcting them. Which she could be doing right now, right here, in her enforced solitude. And her book. She'd vowed to herself-and to Bridger too-that she'd stick with it, a page a day, until it was done. What a joke. She'd been behind all month-it was more like a paragraph a day, if she was lucky-and she'd been looking forward to making up for it over the weekend, tapping away at her laptop while Bridger slept in, a cup of chai to grease the wheels, the morning unfolding in a sure steady flow of inspiration and the promise of summer break on the horizon.

Or now. What was wrong with now? Hadn't Jean Genet written “Our Lady of the Flowers” in prison? On scraps of toilet paper, no less? She wanted to get up and rattle the bars like Cagney or Edward G. Robinson in one of those old movies she revered and Bridger hated, rattle the bars and holler till they came running with a ballpoint pen and a spiral notebook. It was almost funny. And it would be riotous in the telling, her own personal reality show: “Use a Car and Go to Jail.” Dr. Stroud would find it hilarious, wouldn't he, with two hours of dead time on his hands? And her students. And the headmaster, Dr. Koch-wouldn't he find it a scream, one of his teachers in the calaboose instead of the classroom?

Lots of laughs, oh, yeah. But she had to pee. It was an imperative now, no mere feeling of congestion or malaise or a vague gnawing urge-if she didn't use the toilet this very minute she was going to lose control, and how would Bridger feel taking her in his arms in front of all those cops and secretaries with a long dark stain trailing down the front of her skirt?

Her back was to the door when it opened, but she turned immediately, just as if she'd heard the slap of the approaching footsteps, the chime of the keys and the ratcheting groan of the iron hinges. All her life she'd been attuned to the slightest changes in the currents of the air, to rhythms and vibrations, to the vaguest scent or the faintest fleeting rumor of a touch the hearing wouldn't even begin to notice. She had to be, just to survive. And it was no parlor trick, as her hearing friends suspected, especially in grade school when her mother immersed her in the hearing world, mainstreamed her in a school where she was the only deaf child among eight hundred and more, the neighborhood kids creeping up the steps to her bedroom to stealthily push open the door and find her staring at them-no, it was elementary biology. When you were deprived of one sense, the neural pathways reconfigured themselves to boost the others, nature's synesthesia, and how many times had she adduced Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder as examples?

She looked up now to witness a moment of drama at the open door of the cell: two policewomen, blocky, clumsy, heavy in the breasts and buttocks, their faces bright with duress, were leaning into a third woman as if she were a stalled car they were pushing down the street. Hands flew like birds, shoulders stiffened, and the third woman-the prisoner-stood erect against her jailers, wedging her own right shoulder between the bars and jerking her wrists against the grip of the handcuffs. All three were shouting and cursing-the familiar lip-pop of “fuck you” running from mouth to mouth, as if it were contagious, like a yawn-and the policewomen were grunting with the effort to force the prisoner into the cell. “Ugh, ugh, ugh”-Dana had no idea what a grunt sounded like, but she saw it as it was written on the page and put it in their gasping mouths. The whole thing, the whole “danse macabre” with its kicks and flailings and ugly exploding violence, went on far longer than she would have imagined, a rocking back and forth, ground gained and lost, until finally the big-shouldered women prevailed and the prisoner was flung spinning into the cell. She took three reeling steps and then collided with the toilet and went down as if she'd been shot.

Both of the policewomen worked their mouths in an angry tearing way while the shorter and stouter one twisted the key in the lock, and then they squared their shoulders and stamped angrily up the hall, where the bolted steel door swung open for them on cue. As for the woman on the floor, she didn't move. She was stunned-or worse. Dana rose tentatively from the cot. Was there blood? No, no blood. What she was seeing was the woman's hair, dark and matted, pooling under the cheek that was pressed to the floor.

She didn't know what to do. The woman needed help, obviously, but what if she was violent or drunk-or both? She was breathing, that much was evident from the rise and fall of her rib cage, and there didn't seem to be any bruise or swelling where her head had struck the scuffed tile of the floor, or not that Dana could see from this angle. She wouldn't have gone down so hard if the police had bothered to remove the handcuffs, but they hadn't-it was a kind of punishment, Dana supposed, tit for tat-and so she'd hit the toilet in mid-stride and pitched headlong to the floor without bringing her hands into play. Dana was bent over her now, trying to control her voice. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need help? Should I call someone?”

It was then that the smell hit her, a savage working odor of the streets, of festering clothes, body secretions, food gone rancid. The woman was wearing a pair of dirty maroon polyester pants that rode up her ankles, a plaid shirt six sizes too big for her and what looked to be men's brogans, cheap and clunky and without laces. She wore no socks, the dirt clinging to her ankles like lichen on a rock. Dana laid a hand on her arm. “Hello?” she said. “Are you awake?”

Suddenly the eyes flashed open, dark eyes, muddy, the color of knots in a pine board, and the lips curled round a snarl. She said something then, something hard and defensive-“Back off!” yes, that was what it was-and attempted to sit up. It took her three tries, her legs sprawled out in front of her, her hands pinned at her back, and Dana said, “Do you need a hand?” and the woman just repeated herself: “I said, 'Back off!'”

Using her elbows for traction, she dug her way across the tile to the near bunk and braced herself against it. In a moment, she was standing, though shakily. She said something else then-“What do you think you're looking at?”-though Dana couldn't be sure because even the Einstein of lip-readers got no more than maybe thirty percent of what was said, despite what the hearing world might think, but what did they know? They knew movies, some waif-like actress pretending to be deaf and holding a conversation like anybody else while her huge imploring eyes consumed the screen in a parody of compassion and need. But it didn't work that way. So many English sounds were monophonous-so many words formed identically on the lips-that it was impossible to tell them apart. Context, context was all. That and guesswork. Dana said nothing. She gave a weak smile and eased down on the opposite bunk, hoping that her body language would speak for her: “I'm no threat; I just want to help.”

For a long while the woman just stared at her. There was a lump on her forehead, visible now just over her left eye, and the skin there was stretched and abraded. Dana held her eyes because there was nothing else she could do-if the woman were to speak to her again it was her only chance of comprehending and the last thing she wanted under the circumstances was for the woman to think she was ignoring her. Or dissing her, as they said. “Dissing,” from disrespecting.

But now the woman was talking again, asking her for something-her eyebrows lifting with the interrogative. But what was it? Dana said, “I don't understand.”

“What, are you deaf or something?” the woman said, and Dana got every word of that because she'd seen the question a thousand times on a thousand pairs of lips. She tried to make her voice soft and non-threatening, though no matter how many sessions she had with the speech therapist it was always a gamble: “Yes,” she said.

The look on the woman's face, disbelief wedded to a flare of anger. She might have said, “Are you putting me on?” Or: “No shit-really?” Her lips moved, but she was clearly intoxicated-“Drunk and Disorderly,” wasn't that the way they phrased it in the police reports? — and the faulty mechanics of her lips and tongue would have slurred the words in any case. But here came the interrogative again, tied this time to a gesture, a universal gesture-she worked her hands round to one side, held up two fingers in a V and dropped her head to purse her lips as if she were inhaling: “Smoke,” she was saying. “You got a smoke?”

Dana shook her head, shook it with more emphasis than usual. And then, in case her fellow prisoner might misinterpret the gesture, might think she was holding out or maybe even “dissing” her, she said aloud, “Sorry, I don't smoke.”

As it turned out, the hours wore on and nobody came for her, not Bridger, not the booking officer or Iverson or a hired attorney inflated with outrage. Nobody came, nothing happened. The drunken woman-her name was Angela-made a number of long, lip-flapping speeches, little of which registered on Dana, and eventually the matron or warder or whoever she was came to the cell with a set of keys, said something to Angela and released her from the handcuffs. A short while later the woman returned with two brown paper bags and handed them through the bars. This was dinner-two slices of white bread encasing a thin sliver of bologna with a dab of ketchup painted like a bull's-eye in the middle of it, spotted yellow apple, sugary fruit drink in a wax carton with malleable straw attached-and when she took the bag, when she held it in her hand and felt the palpable weight of it, Dana came close to breaking down. And she would have broken down if she'd been in private, but there was no privacy here, the warder standing right there with her null-and-void expression, and Angela, at the bars, taking the bag from the warder's hand as if it were filled to the neck with human excrement.

It wasn't so much the contrast between bologna-on-white and pad thai or the ambience of the cell as opposed to the restaurant with its exotic smells and the fish tanks and scurrying waiters and all the rest, or even the absurdity of the situation, the wrongness, the waste, but the fact that if this was dinner it was the first marker of time she'd had since they'd led her in here and locked her up. If this was dinner, then it must be six o'clock, six at least, and nobody had come for her, not Bridger, not a lawyer, not her mother in New York who could have made phone calls, pulled strings, shaken the earth to its molten core in her deaf daughter's behalf. There was nothing. Nothing but the walls and the bars and Angela, who, after an interval, curled up on the bunk opposite and absented herself in a deep drugged sleep.

If she'd been impatient and angry, now she was scared, lonely, distracted. She wanted out, only that, and she found herself pacing again, round and round the confines of the cell, one foot in the trace of the other, like some neurotic animal in a zoo. Something had gone wrong. Bridger couldn't get through to them. He couldn't raise the bail money, couldn't find a lawyer because all the lawyers in town had shut down their offices for the weekend. Worse: more charges kept coming in, this other Dana Halter, whoever she was, off on a regular crime spree. Tulare County. Where in God's name was Tulare County, anyway? Couldn't they see-couldn't “anybody” see-that it didn't have anything to do with her? She hugged her arms to herself and kept pacing. There was nothing else she could do.

At some point-it might have been an hour later or even two: there was no way to know in this place-the door at the end of the corridor swung open and the taller of the two policewomen appeared, her right arm supporting the elbow of a blond woman who looked to be in her late thirties/early forties and who seemed to be having trouble standing upright. Down the corridor they came, the woman leaning heavily into her escort, and then the door to the cell stood briefly open, Angela rousing herself to fire off a few random curses before dropping her head to the cradle of her arms, and their number had grown to three. The door slammed shut with what must have been a boom-doors were always booming in books-and then the policewoman was gone and the blond woman stood there befuddled, as if she couldn't quite make sense of the sequence of events, the arm at the elbow, the opening and shutting of the door, the turning of the key in the lock and the interposition of vertical cylinders of steel between her and the naked gray wall of the corridor.

She looked round her in bewilderment, both hands clinging to the bars, before slowly subsiding to the floor. She was drunk, that much was evident, but as a drunk per se she was the antithesis of Angela. Her hair, which looked as if it had been washed, set and dried at the salon ten minutes earlier, was parted just to the right of center and fell glistening to her shoulders. She was wearing a matching navy blue skirt and jacket, very business-like, with a fresh white carnation pinned to the breast, a white silk blouse and sheer hose, but no shoes-they must have taken her heels away when they booked her. Dana was trying to decide whether she was a lawyer or maybe a real estate lady when the woman fixed her eyes on her and gave her a full, dazzling wide-lipped smile. “Hi,” she said. “My name's Marcie, what's yours?”

Angela stirred herself, raised her head and said something in response. Dana watched her lips round and draw back in a grimace. “She's deaf,” that was what it was.

Dana ignored her. “I'm Dana,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Marcie said. And added something she didn't catch.

Angela said something then. “I'm telling you,” it looked like. “She's deaf.” And then something else. And then, to Marcie, she made the sign for a smoke.

Marcie was still grinning. “I'm drunk,” she said, ignoring Angela and staring into Dana's eyes from where she sat on the floor with her knees tucked up under her. She moved her lips mechanically, enunciating as slowly and exactly as she could. “They made me walk the line and sing the alphabet. Isn't that a riot?”

Neither of them had anything to say to that. Even if Dana had interpreted her correctly, and there was no assurance of that, the rhetoric was questionable: they were in jail, all three of them, whether guilty or innocent, drunk or sober. And that was no riot-it wasn't even funny.

At the county jail-a bus had come for them in some dead hour of the night and they were made to line up, submit to leg restraints and handcuffs and shuffle aboard-the three of them were put into a larger cell already occupied by six sleep-deprived, angry-looking women in various stages of degradation and despair. Two of them had the faded blue outline of a scorpion tattooed on the right side of their throats, and one, a massive baby-faced teenager whose head had been shaved to stubble, looked as if she could break through the wall without working up a sweat. The other three-thin Asian girls wearing heavy makeup and all but lost in the orange prison jumpsuits-might have been prostitutes. They all might have been prostitutes for all Dana knew. And what difference did it make? She was one of them now, and if she had to sleep on the floor because a quick calculation showed nine people sharing six bunks, she would. She'd do whatever it took if only she could get through this, if only the nightmare would end.

She was wearing her own orange jumpsuit by now, her clothes-even her shoes and underwear-taken from her and replaced with well-washed easy-care cotton (SAN ROQUE COUNTY JAIL was emblazoned across the shoulders in six-inch letters) and a pair of cheap flip-flops, courtesy of the taxpayers of San Roque County. Angela had come to life the minute they entered the cell-she embraced the big girl as if they were sisters, then immediately trolled for cigarettes, employing the same pantomime gesture she'd used on Dana and Marcie. That was the last thing Dana remembered clearly, because what followed were two nights and two interminable days of focused aggression. She was repeatedly backed up against the wall trying to explain herself with her lips and her hands while one woman or another breathed some sort of malcontent's tirade in her face. “Didn't she have anything to offer, no cigarettes, lozenges, gum, makeup, nothing? What was she, stupid? Deaf and dumb, right?” And then there'd be an arch look for the rest of the cell and all their faces (except Marcie's: she'd been bailed out the first morning) would twist with the kind of cruel glee Dana had endured all her life. But this was worse. It was special. It was like being on the playground at Burgess Elementary all over again, and they never got tired of the routine because she couldn't answer them, or not quickly enough and not in any recognizably human accent, and so she was their pincushion, their totem, the only animate thing in sight that could make them feel better about themselves through all the long hours of brooding and hate.

On Monday morning, at four a. m. by the clock at the end of a long hall that led to the fresh air and the sick-sweet punishing smell of exhaust that rode heavily atop it, they were herded back onto the buses, women on one side, men on the other. Dana was beyond despair. She felt numb to everything, cauterized against the humiliation of using the toilet in the middle of a brightly lit room while seven other women watched her, dead to the clasp of the chains round her ankles and the cuffs that pinned her left wrist to the big girl's right, rinsed clean of any memory of student papers, her apartment, her job, her boyfriend, even innocence. This was her life, these chains, these abusive, ignorant and foul-smelling women, two slices of white bread, a sliver of bologna, one red squirt of ketchup. This, only this.

Four

THAT NIGHT, the night they met, Bridger had stood beside Deet-Deet at the bar and ordered a beer he never tasted. He was trying to look casual, his back to the shining mahogany surface and his weight supported on the props of his elbows, cultivating an air of unconcern, what he liked to call “terminal cool,” the beat dragging everyone down as if sound were heavier than air, as if it were some other medium altogether, glue, lead, volcanic ash, but he wasn't succeeding. In fact, as anyone observing him would have seen in an instant, he was locked in on Dana as if he'd been hypnotized. Certainly he looked casual, in his not-hardly-ever-washed jeans, mostly destroyed Nikes and the Digital Dynasty T-shirt with its flaming orange extraterrestrial grinning lickerishly over one shoulder, not to mention his hair, which was growing back in to the point at which random spikes of it projected toothily from his crown, but casual was the last thing he was feeling. What he was feeling, even before Deet-Deet reached out almost blindly for the hand of a doll-sized girl in a yellow tank top and found himself sucked out onto the dance floor, was a peculiar kind of tension-call it anxiety, fear of rejection, the punishment of attraction-he hadn't felt in a very long time.

He waited through three anonymous dance tunes till he was reasonably sure she wasn't with anybody, except maybe a girlfriend with a white-blond ponytail tied up in a high knot on the crown of her head, and then he began to move his shoulders and let the beat infest him as he worked his way through the crowd on the dance floor. He danced opposite her through an entire interminable number, generating a real sweat and working the dregs of the sake back up from his legs to his head, before she noticed him, and when she did notice him it was with a look of surprise tailed by an unguarded smile. Which he took to be a good sign. After the next tune he shouted a few things at her and she shouted back-“Love the way you move; Hot tune, huh?; What'd you say your name was?”-and the wonderful thing, the amazing and insuperable thing, the thing that echoed in his brain even now was that he had no idea she was deaf. Because he was deaf too-everybody was deaf, at least until the lights went up and the DJ took away the thunder.

Deet-Deet was gone and he was standing there in the dissipating crowd and he had Dana by the hand, feeling the gentle pressure of her palm in his while she introduced the girl-woman-with the ponytail and another woman he hadn't registered, Mindy and Sarah, friends of hers from the apartments, and he was lucky, very lucky, because she never would have been out on a Monday except that it was her birthday. Yes, she was thirty-two-she made a face-and wasn't that ancient? Thirty-two? No, he protested, not at all. It was nothing. “Oh, yeah,” she said, her whole face opening up to him, the most expressive face he'd ever seen, the most sensual, the prettiest, and he noticed her accent, he did, but thought it was Scandinavian or maybe Eastern European, “then how old are you?” Well, he was twenty-eight. She was still grinning, her eyes crawling all over his face, “You see?” she crowed, and looked to Mindy and Sarah before coming back to him. “You're just a baby.”

They didn't get around to exchanging phone numbers, but despite the residual effects of the sake he did manage to commit her name to memory, and when he got home he looked her up in the phone book (D. “Halter, #31 Pacific View Court).” He called the next morning to ask her to dinner but there was no answer and the message on her machine, delivered in her hollow monotone, instructed him not to leave a message but to e-mail her, and gave a Hotmail address. As soon as he got to work he shot off an e-mail, relieved in a way to duck the uncertainty and potential embarrassment of direct contact-he barely knew her and she could turn him down, she could be married, engaged, actively uninterested or so pathologically dedicated to her career she excluded all else-and after typing in a witty line or two about the previous night he made his pitch. To his surprise, she answered within seconds-“Yes, it's just what I want, Italian, but only if you promise not to make me dance off all that pasta afterward,” and gave him directions to her apartment.

The complex was nice, nicer than his, and it sprawled over a hillside with mature plantings-birds-of-paradise, plantains, palms of every size and variety-but the numbers seemed to run in random patterns and he couldn't for the life of him find number 31, which, as far as he could tell, bore no relation to numbers 29 and 30, in front of which he'd already washed up twice. After he'd made three circuits of the place without luck, he stopped a woman about Dana's age who was just going down the steps with a cat on a leash. “Excuse me,” he said, “but do you know which apartment is Dana Halter's?”

She gave him a blank look.

“You know,” he said, ““Dana?” She's early thirties, about your height, dark hair, really pretty?”

He watched the light come into her face. “Oh, sure, yeah-sorry, sorry. You mean the deaf woman, right?”

It hit him with the force of epiphany. Suddenly it all made sense: her atonal voice, the non sequiturs, the fluidity of her face when she spoke, as if every muscle under the skin were a separate organ of communication. When he pushed the buzzer at her door it produced a persistent mechanical hum like any other buzzer, but at the same time a light began to flash in the apartment. And suddenly there she was, looking beautiful, her hands fluttering, her voice too loud as she greeted him, and she never took her eyes from his face, a kind of unwavering eye contact that made him feel either irresistible or self-conscious, he couldn't tell which. Then there was the CD he'd agonized over in the car (Would she judge him by it? Did she know the band? Did she like them?) but which she never mentioned, and there were the specials she didn't order, the dinner conversation that drifted from autobiography to mutual interests to politics and the environment and bogged down when he got excited and tried to talk too fast or with food in his mouth, but still he couldn't bring himself to broach the subject of her deafness. No one asked the blind kid at school how he'd lost his sight-he'd tell you in his own time (basement, pipe bomb)-and it would have been unthinkable to quiz the swimmer with the prosthetic leg at the health club. It just wasn't done. It was rude, a way of calling attention to their difference.

For her part, Dana waited till the meal was finished, till the waiter had cleared away their plates and they were both frowning over the dessert menu, before she lifted her head and said, “You know, I don't know if you noticed, but I have to tell you something”-she paused, holding him with her eyes, and then her voice boomed out so that the people two tables over turned to stare-“I'm deaf. Profoundly deaf. They put my hearing loss at close to a hundred decibels. You know what that means?”

He shook his head. The whole restaurant was listening.

“I can't hear a thing.”

He fumbled with the response-what could he say: “I'm sorry; It doesn't matter; The tiramisù looks good?”-and she thought it was hilarious. Her shoulders twitched, her eyes caught fire. She was beaming at him across the table, as triumphant as the grand prize winner on a quiz show. “I really put one over on you, didn't I?” she gasped, and laughed till he joined her and they both had to pound the table to keep from floating away.

Things moved slowly from there-she was busy; he was busy-but they graduated from dating (sushi, Thai, the art museum, movies, the beach) to a less formal arrangement, and before either of them realized it they'd come to depend on each other. San Roque was a small coastal city-89,000, if you could believe the population estimate posted at the city limits; perhaps twice that at the height of tourist season-and his apartment was ten minutes from hers on the quiet, uncongested streets. It was nothing to drop by, leave a message, meet for coffee or an impromptu concert (and yes, she loved concerts, classical, jazz, rock, fixated on the body language of the musicians as if she were watching a silent ballet). Rarely did a day go by when they didn't either see each other or at least communicate through e-mail and instant messaging. She was there suddenly, and she filled a hole in his life. He was in love. And so was she, because he could read the signs-her eyes, her hands, the expression on her face when he stepped into the room-and the signs were favorable, they made him feel god-like, as if he were The Kade himself. She'd watch his lips across the table in a coffeehouse and laugh out of all proportion to what he was saying. “Oh, yeah,” she'd say in her curious uninflected tones, her voice wavering and tossing till it smoothed out all the bumps, “you're a funny guy. You know that, don't you?” And then she'd quote some statistic she'd found in “Dear Abby” about how the majority of single women above all prized a sense of humor in their prospective mates.

Of course, at the same time, she was quick to point out that in ninety percent of all cases the deaf married their own kind and when they did get attached to the hearing, the divorce rate was stratospheric, and then, needless to say, there was the problem of children. One deaf couple she knew had agonized when the wife became pregnant-“All they could talk about was “'Will it be deaf, will it be deaf?'”” And they had a girl, slick and red and fat and with all her fingers and toes in the expected places, and the parents clapped their hands in her face and shouted till the nurse came running and the whole place was in an uproar, but the child never reacted. “'Thank God,' they said, 'she's one of us.'”

“And what do you mean by that?” Bridger had asked.

She dropped her eyes and her face became immobile. “Nothing.”

They were in her apartment at the time, working on their second bottle of wine after she'd whipped up her special crab salad and he'd pitched in with its perfect complement, a bag of Lay's barbecue potato chips. It took him a moment, struggling to decode what she was trying to tell him, and then he reached across the table and took her hands in his till she lifted her eyes again. “But that isn't you,” he said, fumbling around the issue. “I mean, you're not like that.”

“I don't understand.”

“You're not-I mean, you weren't born like that. Right?”

She'd looked as if she were going to cry, but now she forced a smile. “Born like what?”

“Deaf.”

She'd gotten up then and left the room. When she came back a moment later she was wearing a T-shirt she'd preserved from her student days at Gallaudet, one he'd seen before, one she wore when the mood took her, when she felt conflicted or defiant. It featured an upraised fist, reminiscent of the old Black Panther logo, and above it the legend DEAF POWER.

At the age of four and a half she'd been stricken with spinal meningitis and barely survived it, her temperature as high as 105 degrees for three days running. The doctors explained to her parents that her aural nerves had been irreparably damaged, that she was now and always would be profoundly deaf. But she was lucky, she insisted, because she was post-lingually deaf, which made it a thousand times easier for her to learn to speak and read and function in the hearing world. What did she remember from that brief period before the fever set in? Words. Stories. Voices. And her father taking her to see “Yellow Submarine” at a revival house.

“Yes,” she told him, reaching to bury her hand in the bag of potato chips as if to hide it from him, as if she were afraid of what it might say otherwise, “that's not me.” And then, in the flattest tuneless disconnected echo of a voice, she began to sing: “We all live in a yellow sum-marine, yellow summarine…”

He didn't leave the police station till they told him she'd been transferred to the county jail in Thompsonville, and by then it was past nine. Earlier, from his cell phone, he'd called the only lawyer he knew, a friend from college who was practicing entertainment law with a firm in Las Vegas. “Steve,” he'd crooned into the phone, “it's me, Bridger,” and Steve had instantly begun schmoozing and catching up and pouring the syrup of his top-drawer voice into the receiver until they'd exhausted the trivia and he cleared his throat in a way that indicated that the ticker was running, or should have been running, and Bridger said, “Well, really, the reason I called is I've got a problem.” He explained the situation.

“Not good,” Steve said. “Not good at all.”

“It's not her. She didn't do it. She ran a stop sign, that's all-you understand that, right?”

"You look into identity theft?

“I don't know: mistaken identity, identity theft-what's the difference?”

Bridger could hear someone else talking in the background. “Yeah, yeah,” Steve was saying, “I'll make it short.” And then: “Bridger? Yeah, well, the difference is money, big money, because if it's ID theft, you've got to clear the records in whatever jurisdiction this other woman's been committing fraud, and then you've got to go to the CRAs and it can be a real hassle, believe me.”

“I hear you,” Bridger said, “but what do I do right now? I mean, I can't just leave her in jail.”

“You need to call a lawyer.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.”

“A “criminal” lawyer. Somebody local. You don't know anybody who knows anybody?”

“Nope.”

“All right, so you go to the yellow pages, start making calls. But I got to warn you, once they hear the charges they're going to want in the neighborhood of fifty thousand as a retainer and probably ten just to talk to her, and that guarantees nothing, especially with extradition to Nevada and these no-bail holds. But you give them the money and they'll promise you anything.”

“But I don't-I mean, I'm doing okay, but…”

“What “is” paint and roto, anyway?”

“Hey, it would take too long to explain-it's special effects, that's all. I'll show you next time you're in town, promise. And I like the job, the money's good, but what I'm saying is I don't really have a whole lot in the bank and there's no way I could, well, you know, come up with anywhere near that figure…”

There was the voice in the background again, a wash of voices now. Steve shifted from honey to vinegar. “She's in jail for the weekend, nothing anybody can do about that. Monday they'll arraign her and assign a public defender, some troll out of a cave in a cheap suit with a cheap briefcase and a look of terminal harassment, and then you just hope for the best. But hey, listen, great talking to you. Luck, huh?”

On Monday morning, he called in sick (Radko: “Pliss liv a message)” and drove down to the county courthouse, a showcase building erected in the twenties to resemble something out of the Alhambra. It was all stone, stucco and tile with a monumental clock tower and an observation deck on the roof that gave tourists a view of downtown San Roque, from the blue rug of the ocean to the hazy arras of the mountains. At the information kiosk, a beaming old lady with a long flaring nose and the trace of a British accent told him to consult the daily calendar at the far end of the hall, and he saw Dana's name listed there with some eighty or a hundred others. Her arraignment on charges was scheduled for eight-thirty a.m. in Courtroom 2.

The courtroom was the sort of place that inspired confidence in the legal system: vaulted ceilings, dark pews with the rich grain of history worked into them, the elevated jury box to the left, the judge's buffed and burnished high-flown bench in the center under the great seal of the state of California, and a long file of lesser furniture-desks for the court recorders and clerks-tucked in along the right-hand wall, everything very hushed and efficient-looking at five past eight in the morning. Bridger took a seat in the last row. Aside from the bailiff-a tall, muscular, eager-looking cop in a tan cop's shirt with some sort of walkie-talkie pinned to the collar-there were only two other people present, a young couple who might have been college students huddled in the front row over the comics page from the morning newspaper. For his part, Bridger was exhausted. He'd worked all weekend trying to catch up, fueled exclusively by Red Bull, coffee and pizza, The Kade's face so bleakly familiar to him it was like a hallucination, the too-small eyes and the ape-like bone structure of the skull visible to him even when he wasn't staring at the screen. It was a good thing the work didn't require even the smallest modicum of thought, because his mind was as far from Drex III as it possibly could be. All weekend he'd thought of nothing but Dana, Dana locked away in a cell, Dana scared and vulnerable, Dana eating some slop out of a bucket, harassed, put upon, unable to explain herself.

He'd called every attorney in the phone book and got nothing but recordings, “You've reached the law offices of Merker, Stillman; our hours are ten a.m. to five p.m., Monday through Friday; if this is an emergency, please call 565-1608.” It was an emergency and he did call-some fifty-four different attorneys at law-and all but one of the emergency numbers fed him a recording as well. The one that didn't-this was Saturday morning-was answered by an overwrought woman who demanded to know who in hell had referred Bridger to her private number and what was so goddamned earth-shattering that he had to interrupt her on her day off. There were shouts in the background, the thwack of a tennis ball connecting with the sweet spot of a racket. He explained the situation to her and suddenly she was the most reasonable and beneficent woman in the world, outraged over what the legal system had done to his significant other-Dana, that was her name, right? Dana? — and willing to fight for her till she dropped… as soon as she got her retainer in the amount of $75,000, that is.

At eight twenty-five the room began to fill, people of all ages ducking through the door with a nervous glance at the judge's dais before sliding noiselessly into one or another of the pews. Their demeanor indicated how modest, submissive and blameless they were, men and women alike, each of them a dutiful citizen who wouldn't dream of causing the least disturbance or questioning the authority of the court. Their hair was freshly shampooed and they'd made an effort to dress for the occasion, the men in clean pressed shirts, some even with ties knotted meekly round their necks, the women in muted colors and clutching their best purses: these were the people who'd been arrested for brawling in the streets, public intoxication, domestic disturbances and DUIs, the ones who'd been bailed out to sleep in their own beds and see to their grooming and makeup. The others, the ones like Dana, were waiting in the wings somewhere, and Bridger felt his pulse jump each time the door behind the judge's desk swung open.

The cop had been joined by a colleague now-same shirt, muscles, walkie-talkie, but shorter and darker, with a hard incriminatory gaze-and the two of them stood sentry while the clerks filed in from stage left as if this were the opening of a play, which, in some sense, Bridger supposed, it was. When everyone had taken his place, the judge's door flew open and shut and the judge was amongst them and the taller cop cried out, “All please rise and come to order, the Honorable Kathleen McIntyre presiding.”

Bridger's hopes rose: a female judge. He studied her face even as he lifted himself from the seat and subsided again, and it was an interesting face, sympathetic, kindly even, poignant eyes, tasteful makeup, tasteful hair. He felt sure this whole fiasco would be resolved as soon as she got a look at Dana-she'd see in an instant that the woman before her was no forger, thief, batterer, no assaulter with a deadly weapon or fugitive from justice. Not Dana. Dana was lithe and beautiful. She was a teacher. She had no record of any kind. She was deaf. And innocent, purely innocent. Surely, Justice McIntyre would see that. Anybody would.

But Dana didn't appear. First a whole squad of lawyers in expensive suits, perfectly groomed, signed in and conferred with the judge on one motion or another or on behalf of so and so, and then the Spanish interpreter gave his spiel to the courtroom and everyone was admonished to watch the fifteen-minute video-first in Spanish, then in English-that explained their rights. Once the video was over, the judge started hurtling through the docket, people stepping forward as their names were called, the judge reading the charges aloud, apprising them of what the DA (cocky, square-shouldered, young, his hair right out of a fashion magazine) advised in their case and asking how they pled. Most, including the male half of the young couple with the comic pages, were charged with public intoxication and/or driving under the influence and most pleaded no contest and got off with time served, a fine and a contribution to the Victims' Assistance Fund. There were more compelling cases-an old woman with madhouse hair and staring eyes who'd been accused of driving on a suspended license, leaving the scene of an accident and failure to appear; a gangbanger sporting the ritual tattoos who'd been charged with distributing drugs in prison and who was there after surrendering on a warrant, only to be handcuffed and led away-but the real meat of the calendar, the serious charges, had to wait until after the noon-hour recess. Bridger couldn't believe it-he'd wasted a whole morning and Radko would have his ass-and for what? He still hadn't laid eyes on Dana since the night before she'd been arrested. He wanted to hit something with a mallet-with the judge's hammer, with a plank torn from one of the pews-hit it and hit it till it splintered.

Then came the afternoon. More lawyers, more criminals, suits, hangdog looks, Justice McIntyre growing sharper and more irritated as the day wore on. Finally, at a quarter past two, the door to the rear of the jury box opened and two long rattling files of prisoners in orange jumpsuits and leg restraints shuffled into the room, men and women taking seats in alternating rows. Bridger half-rose, straining to see as the face of one woman after another appeared framed in the doorway and was replaced by the next. When he did ultimately spot Dana coming through the door sandwiched between a rangy black-eyed woman with a teetering head and angry shoulders and a big butterball of a girl with her scalp shaved to stubble and a silver stud punched through her right eyebrow, he barely recognized her. Her shoulders were slumped, her head down, her hair unwashed and uncombed. There seemed to be a smear of something on her chin.

She sat with the others, her legs shackled, and she never even lifted her eyes to scan the gallery for him. He was riveted with anger, with horror. It was all he could do to stop from shouting out, and he saw too the insidious way the system worked, varnished wood and the grain of history notwithstanding-if you spent the weekend in jail, no matter how innocent you might be, you were doomed to the jailhouse look, to the look of incrimination and guilt. You were dirty, your spirit had been crushed, and if you weren't guilty of the charges against you, you were guilty all the same, of being accused, of being listless, hopeless, dirty and alienated. He made a promise to himself in that moment: never, no matter how much time passed, would he let this rest, never.

When the judge called her name, Dana rose to her feet and cried out that she was present, her voice ricocheting from one side of the courtroom to the other, and there standing beside her and responding in a high redemptive singsong, was her court-appointed attorney, a woman of fifty in a skirt and blazer and with a face that shouted out for justice. “Your honor,” the woman sang and it was a song she'd practiced on a hundred other afternoons in court, “I'm Marie Eustace from the Public Defender's office appearing for Dana Halter, who is in custody here beside me, and I'd like to request an immediate identity hearing in this case-it's obviously a TODDI. My client is locally known as an educator here in San Roque, she suffers from a disability and has no record whatever. She's been falsely arrested, Your Honor, and endured a weekend in County, and I'm confident we can fax these jurisdictions for fingerprint and photo ID and have her out of here this afternoon.”

And now Bridger saw the second figure there, standing in the row in front of her, a little windup toy of a man almost as short as Deet-Deet, who was interpreting for her in ASL. His hands worked and twisted in small Sign, elbows pressed to his side, and he paused for the judge's response.

Bridger looked to the judge. She was frowning, glancing from the attorney to the interpreter to Dana, her brow creased under a descending wave of professionally dyed and blow-dried hair. “All right, Counselor,” she said, letting out a long exasperated breath, “see what you can do and when you've got something to show me we'll proceed.”

It was then that he finally caught Dana's eye-she saw him, locked on him; it was unmistakable; she saw him right there in the courtroom doing everything he could do-but the look she gave him wasn't a look of love, gratitude or even relief. She looked into his eyes, burned into him, and then she looked away.

Five

THEY LEFT THE COUNTY JAIL at four a. m., a breakfast of white bread and processed cheese with a dried-out tangerine and the fruit drink distributed to them in the brown paper sack as they boarded the bus, and she ate every morsel, though she had to chew gingerly around the bad tooth, and licked her fingers afterward. She even felt the smallest pulse of optimism-they were moving, the wheels of justice grinding forward as the bus lurched and bounced and the safety glass rattled like a machine gun against the steel mesh, and she didn't care where they were going as long as it put distance between her and the hellhole she'd just vacated. People let their heads loll against the backs of the seats, their eyes closed and legs splayed. There was a taint of exhaust leaching in from under the floorboards and it was a small mercy because it cut through the human smell. The only light came from the green glow of the dash and the pale wash of the headlights beyond and Dana focused on it. The others might have been asleep, but she sat rigid with anticipation, staring out over the driver's silhouette to where the dark slick of the roadway unraveled before them and the hills and trees opened up on amber streetlights and the shadowy roofs of condos and tract homes where people lay dreaming.

The bus deposited them at the courthouse, a policeman with a shotgun standing guard while they shuffled through a corridor and into a holding cell located somewhere in proximity to the courtroom itself. Once they were safely inside the cell, a guard released the handcuffs and they were allowed to mingle and gather as they saw fit. Dana kept to herself, or tried to. She made her way to the far corner of the cell, eased herself down on the floor and was careful to avoid eye contact with anyone, but the fat girl was there like a picked scab, dodging into her frame of reference every two minutes, and Angela careened from one group of women to the next, her fingers locked in the nicotine gesture, until finally she collapsed beside Dana and began a long spittle-flecked monologue on a subject-or subjects-that remained mysterious. Nothing happened through the long morning and into the early afternoon, when everyone began to bristle and stir as if an electric current had been switched on, and a man from the Public Defender's office swept into the cell and gave a speech Dana didn't catch at all. Shortly thereafter Iverson appeared, weaving his way through the clutch of prisoners, a woman with a briefcase at his side.

And what did she feel when she spotted him there amidst the crowd swiveling his head from side to side, looking for her? Elation. Pure elation. She might not have liked him, might have assigned him a good measure of the blame for what had happened to her-he should have intervened, should have explained to them that they'd got the wrong person, should have persisted and used his influence and got her out-but she gazed on him now as if he were her savior. Finally, finally something was happening. He introduced the woman, who handed her her card-“Marie Eustace, Public Defender”-and leaned in close to quiz her sufficiently enough to understand that this was all a mistake, Iverson simultaneously translating in his rigid mechanical Sign. It took no more than five minutes. They would establish the identity of the true criminal and have her out of here ASAP, that was the promise, and Marie Eustace put on a look of high dudgeon and told her how outraged she was that the court had fallen asleep on this one. “Don't you worry,” she told her, “we'll have you out in no time,” and then she moved on to huddle with Angela.

Dana had never been in court before and the flags and the arras and the great seal and all the rest might have impressed her under other circumstances, but all she felt as she sat there in the dock (that was the term, wasn't it? — yes, from the Flemish for “hutch, pen, cage)” was the same shame and anger she'd felt on the morning of her arrest, though it was multiplied now. By the power of ten, ten at least. She couldn't lift her head, couldn't scan the cluster of spectators for Bridger's face, couldn't do anything but go deep and close herself down. All through the weekend she'd distracted herself by mentally conjuring the poems she made a practice of beating out in class for her students so they could feel the music of them, the dactyls, iambs and trochees singing in their heads even as her hands thumped the rhythm on one desktop after another. She did it now, head bowed, vanished from the scene: “Just as my fingers on these keys / Make music, so the self-same sounds / On my spirit make a music too.”

When they finally got to her, after Angela, after the big girl with the shaven head (with the unlikely name of Beatrice Flowers), after half a dozen men who tightened their jaws and flexed their shoulders as they stood before the judge, she came out of her trance long enough to startle the whole courtroom with the unleashed power of her voice: “Yes,” she said, standing as Iverson signed that they'd called her name, “I'm present.” That was when she looked up and saw Bridger, his face crying out to her, and he was the only one in the courtroom who didn't flinch at the sound of her voice. She gave him nothing, not hope or joy or love. Then she sat down again and dropped her head.

More waiting. Eternal waiting. Cases came and went, charges were read aloud, pleas made and recorded, bail set and fines levied. At four-fifteen Marie Eustace reappeared to confer with the judge and present into evidence faxes from each of the jurisdictions in question, and the judge put on her reading glasses while the court went lax and people studied the ceiling or ducked in and out of the door on urgent business. Then the judge removed her glasses and called Dana's name again, Iverson signing, and Dana found herself edging past people to approach the bench, and at least they'd released her shackles, at least there was that.

The judge's eyes were a milky blue, faded and blanched as if all the vitality had gone out of them, yet she had a smile in reserve, a rueful smile, which she somehow managed to summon for the occasion of this, Dana Halter's exoneration. Dana could see it all before it happened-yes, it was a case of mistaken identity, or worse, identity theft-and the lethargy she'd felt was replaced suddenly by anger, by a rage that built in her till she couldn't contain it. “The court must offer you our deepest apologies,” the judge was saying, as Iverson's hands worked and twisted before her, “because this was an ordeal you've been through, I know that, but until the evidence came in”-and here she held up a handful of faxes, the first of which, from Tulare County, showed the shadowy likeness of a stranger, a white male nonetheless, under the tag Dana Halter-“there was nothing we could do. But we do apologize-I apologize-and we will give you every consideration we can in straightening this out. Our victims' assistance people are as good as they come and will be available to you immediately on release.”

But she had to speak, had to push it. “Is that it?” she said, and she had no idea whether she was shouting or whispering. “Is that all you're going to do?”

Marie Eustace blanched. Iverson signed frantically, “That's enough. No more. She's going to dismiss.”

Dana swung round on him, signing back, big Sign, angry Sign, her arms looping and elbows jabbing: “You shut up because I don't need you”-“and when I did need you you weren't there.” All of it came out then, all the hurt and confusion, and she turned back to the judge and let her voice lash out like a physical extension of herself, of her furiously signing hands: “I've been locked up, I've been abused-I missed two days of work with no way even to call anybody-and you give me this, this “apology” and it's supposed to make everything all right?” Her face twisted. She felt absurd, hateful, a clown in an orange jumpsuit, and she could see the judge's eyes hardening, and what word was on her lips, what curse? — “Shit, shit,” that was what it was, she was about to proclaim it all “shit”-but before she could spew it out Marie Eustace stepped forward and said something to the judge and the judge looked directly at Dana and her lips said, “Case dismissed.”

She had no intention of sitting in an airless office disclosing herself to the victims' assistance people, answering their idiotic questions, filling out forms, lip-reading the banality of their clichés while Charles Iverson juggled his hands-she didn't have one more second to waste. Not one. She wanted out of the jumpsuit, wanted her clothes back, her keys, her car-and the papers, the student papers. And she had to call the school and explain herself, had to go in in person and throw herself on Dr. Koch's mercy, had to meet her class and do her job-if she still had a job. Because who was going to believe her? People didn't just get thrown in jail for no reason, not in this country, anyway. Even as they began the paperwork to process her out, even as Marie Eustace arranged for the court to provide her with an affidavit proclaiming her innocence, she could picture the look of incredulity and anger on Dr. Koch's face, less than a week left in the term and one of his teachers skipping out early…

But what she wanted most of all, sitting mutely in a colorless anteroom somewhere in the depths of the building and waiting for them to file their papers and rescind the charges and give her back her life, was a shower. She worked at her fingernails, one nail under the other, and they were black with the filth of that place, with the filth of those ugly jeering women, the prostitutes and street people and addicts and drunks, common drunks. She'd passed them in the street a hundred times, felt sorry for them, always one to reach into her purse for a handful of change or a dollar bill, but never again. They “were” common, she knew that now, common as in “not refined; vulgar; low; coarse.” And petty. Nasty. With no human feeling and no love but for themselves. The “menu peuple,” the mob, the hoi polloi. That was what they were-it was “Lord of the Flies” in that cell, on the streets, everywhere she turned, and where did that leave her? Where it left Ralph, where it left Piggy. But she was no victim, she refused to be, and once she got home, once she shut the door behind her and locked out the world, she was going to stand under the shower and scrub the dirt off her till the water ran cold and then she was going to call Dr. Koch and go straight to the impound yard, wherever that was, and get those papers out of the backseat of the car. Just the thought of it gave her a pang-she was so far behind. It was insane. Like the nightmares she'd have in the moments before waking, the ones in which she appeared in front of the class with no lesson, no plan, her hair a mess, her clothes fallen in a heap at her feet. Naked. Frozen. Unable to speak with her hands or her tongue either.

She was so wound up she almost forgot Bridger. But there he was, rushing toward her in the hallway as she stepped through the door with Marie Eustace, Iverson and her freshly issued affidavit, his face bleeding sympathy and love. She let him hold her, though she was embarrassed by her odor and furious with him-why hadn't he “done” anything? He was saying something, saying it uselessly-she could feel his breath at her ear as he squeezed her to him-and then she pushed away from him and signed, “How could you leave me in there?”

His signing was clumsy, nearly illiterate-he'd taken a course in ASL just for her, but his hands were like sledgehammers, bludgeoning the language. “I tried.”

“Well you didn't try hard enough.”

That was when a cop in a brown shirt-the bailiff-intervened. He, Iverson and Marie Eustace conferred for a moment, and then Marie turned to give her a look of consternation. She let her eyes roll and stamped her foot. “What?” Dana said. “What is it now?”

“You're not going to believe this,” she said, and she looked to Iverson to interpret, her eyes skittering apologetically between them, “but, well, I'm afraid you're going to have to go back to County to get processed out.”

Dana shook her head. Violently. Jerked it back and forth, and they could read that, couldn't they? “No,” she said, and she felt her voice go loud, the force of it constricting her larynx till it felt like a hard compressed ball in her throat, and she turned her back on the lawyer and the cop and signed furiously to Iverson: “I am innocent and here's the document to prove it and I will not go back there, never, and don't you or anyone else try to make me.”

Iverson, with the face of a bad actor and his hands that stalled and stuttered, translated for the lawyer and Dana refused to look at her, though Marie Eustace was speaking to her, though she put a hand on her arm till Dana shook it off. She looked to Iverson alone. “There's no way around it,” he signed, “It's the law, guilty or innocent. They brought you here on the bus and they have to take you back on the bus. You need to change out of those clothes and get your own things back, there's paperwork”- “No,” she signed, “no. I won't go.” In a fury, she let her hands go silent and began to tear at the jumpsuit, to tear it from her, and she shouted aloud so they could all hear her, the cop and Bridger and the judge in her chambers, “Just take the shitty thing and I'll walk out of here naked, I don't care, I don't care-”

Ultimately, she did care-she was made to care. The bailiff stepped forward and informed her that she was still in custody and that he would have to use the restraints if necessary. Marie Eustace's face was livid. She blew air in the direction of the bailiff and Iverson signed his threats and Bridger just took hold of Dana, as if to shield her with his body. She'd never been so enraged in her life-the absurdity of it, like something out of Kafka, or worse, out of some police state, Cuba, North Korea, Liberia-but what calmed her, what took all the fight out of her in an instant, was the sight of the bailiff's hand on Bridger's wrist. She couldn't make out what they were saying, their lips gyrating, faces red, but she understood in an instant that Bridger himself was a heartbeat away from being arrested for interfering with the duties of an officer of the law or some such nonsense. “It's okay,” she said aloud, “it's okay,” and the officer took her by the elbow and escorted her down the hallway, through a pair of heavy doors, and then back to the cell itself, back to Angela and Beatrice Flowers and all the rest.

It was nearly midnight by the time they finally released her from the county jail in Thompsonville, seventeen miles from San Roque, and Bridger was there waiting for her in a crowded over-lit anteroom. For a long moment she just held him. She hadn't wanted to cry, but the minute she saw him there, the minute it was over, she couldn't hold back. Then they were moving toward the door and she broke away from him and lunged through it to stand there on the steps feeling the air on her face-salt and faintly fishy, refrigerated by the sea, clean air, the first clean air she'd taken into her lungs since Friday morning. Bridger came up behind her and put an arm round her shoulders, but she pushed him away. She was angry suddenly, angry all over again. “Can you even imagine what it was like in there?” she demanded. “Can you?”

All the way home, all the way to her shower and her bed and the door that locked people out instead of in, he tried to explain himself, but she was getting very little of it because his hands were on the wheel and his mouth was venting like any other hearing person's and that made her more unforgiving still. Finally, her hair in a towel and the beer he'd got her and the sandwich he'd made her set out on the coffee table, he led her to the computer and pecked furiously at the keys, typing out a whole long unfolding apologia that could have been the epilogue of a Russian novel, and she saw what he'd done and how hard he'd tried and that it wasn't him but the system that was to blame-or no, the “thief,” the thief was to blame, and for the first time the image of that face, that dark blur on a slick sheet affixed above her own name, came careening into her mind, a “man,” a “man” no less-and after a while she leaned into him, wrapped her arms round him and began to forgive.

In the morning, Bridger drove her to work. She hadn't got much sleep, her dreams poisoned and antithetical, and every time she woke she had to catch her breath, thinking she was back there again, under the lights, on the hard floor of the cell. As it was, she was twenty minutes late, and if it weren't for Bridger she might have been later still-she'd trained herself to respond to the flash of the alarm clock, but she'd never been so exhausted in her life and would have slept right through it if he hadn't been there to wake her. The first thing she'd done on getting out of the shower the night before, even before she chugged the beer cold from the bottle and devoured the sandwich and half a thirty-two-ounce bag of potato chips, and cookies, a whole bag of cookies, was to e-mail Dr. Koch. The e-mail ran to three pages. She gave him a blow-by-blow account from the moment she was pulled over for running the stop sign to her release in Thompsonville some eighty-three hours later, because she knew she could communicate better on the page than in person, or more fully at any rate, and she had to make her case-Koch was a brooding, tough, sour little man who thought of himself in inflated terms and brooked no nonsense, and he was as demanding with the deaf teachers as with the hearing. Maybe more so. She needed his understanding, that was what she said in conclusion, and she promised to come to him before her first class and bring the affidavit with her too. But there was the problem: she was twenty minutes late and her class started without her-and Dr. Koch was there in the classroom, covering for her, and she'd never seen him look sourer.

He rose from her desk the minute she stepped through the door-he'd had the students reading in their texts while he put his head down and made his way through a pile of paperwork his secretary had handed him as he fled the office-and he gave her a look that needed no translation. The students were seniors, and this was a college-prep course, one of her best classes. There were twelve of them, each with his or her own nascent gift to take out into the hearing world, and she knew their secrets and their strengths and their failings too. “Sorry I'm late,” she signed, flinging her purse and briefcase on the desk. She was out of breath. Her color was high. She pinched her shoulders in apology: “I overslept.”

Koch gave her nothing. He was already at the door, a stripe of sun fallen across the first row of desks as if to slice the room in two. Every one of her twelve students sat riveted, watchful and tense, and Robby Rodriguez, always emotional, looked as if he were about to collapse under the weight of his private agony. For a long moment Koch just stood there, his hand on the latch. Then he signed abruptly that he'd see her in his office during the lunch hour, jerked the door open and stalked out of the room.

Like most deaf schools, San Roque was residential, the student body drawn from all over the country, though the majority came from the West Coast. It was run along the lines of a college campus rather than the standard high school (which to Dana's mind wasn't much better than a reformatory in any case), and when the students weren't in class or attending speech therapy, they were free to do as they pleased-within limits, of course. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Dana met with three classes, one in the morning, two in the afternoon, and in the interval she held office hours, ran errands or stole the odd hour to work on her book. She had a secret hope for this book, an ambition that drove her to obsess over its smallest details, to make it right, to communicate in a way that might have been second nature to the hearing but which for her at least was as new and intoxicating as love itself-not erotic love, but agape, a flowing unstoppable love for all creation. Just to think of it, to think of what she'd accomplished so far and the hazy uncharted territory to come, gave her a secret rush of fulfillment and pride. She wouldn't talk about it, not with anyone except Bridger. It was too close, too personal. Even the title-“Wild Child”-was like an incantation, a way of summoning a spirit and a voice she'd never before been aware of, and at the oddest times she'd find herself chanting it, deep inside, over and over.

As soon as she dismissed the morning class (she gave the group a shorthand version of what had happened to her-“and” to their final papers, which she vowed to have back the next day without fail), she went straight to Koch's office to explain herself. His secretary signed that he was in conference and she signed back that she would wait, taking a chair in the corner of the main office and flipping through the underscored pages of her classroom anthology in an effort to calm herself, but she remained far from calm. Her tooth was bothering her, for one thing-the distant throb had been replaced now with a sharp intermittent pain that seemed to accelerate along with the racing of her pulse-and sitting there in the bright molded plastic chair with her elbows tucked in while the rest of the world went about its business was like being back in the jail cell all over again.

When Dr. Koch did finally see her-at noon, precisely-he was brusque and impersonal, as if she were just another delinquent student. She hadn't expected sympathy, not from him, but courtesy was the one thing she demanded-of anybody, especially the hearing. She'd spent too much of her life trying to communicate with people who turned hostile the minute she opened her mouth to put up with anything less. “Look at me,” she demanded. “Just look at me. And listen.” That was her social contract, and if people didn't like it she was ready to turn her back on them. No exceptions. Not anymore.

He was seated at his desk when she stepped in the door, and he waved a hand to indicate the hard oaken supplicant's chair at the foot of it. She gave him a neutral smile as she slipped into the chair, the affidavit tucked under one arm in a stained manila folder she'd dug out of her filing cabinet in the rush to get to work in the morning. “Good afternoon,” she said aloud, but he didn't answer. He was bent over the desk, impressing his precise infinitesimal signature on the diplomas the school would give out at commencement Saturday morning, shifting them from one pile to another, and every time it seemed as if he were about to pause and look up, he reached for another and then another.

The office was pretty much standard issue: a tumult of books and papers everywhere, various certificates and framed photos of graduates leaching out of the walls, the multicolored pennants of colleges the school's students had gone on to-USC, Yale, Stanford, Gallaudet. She was trying to remember when she'd last been in this room-could it have been as long as a year ago, when she was hired? — and her gaze came to rest on a very small portrait, in oil, of Dr. Koch signing to an ill-defined audience in a sketchy auditorium somewhere. The artist seemed to have had a thing for red, and the result gave the subject's face the texture and coloration of a slab of raw meat.

“So this is all very unfortunate,” he said, glancing up sharply and signing simultaneously to get her attention. “A real mess. And the timing couldn't have been worse. Really, I mean, “finals” week.” A pause, his hands at rest. “Did you even give finals?”

Maybe it was that she was wrought up-her car was still in the impound yard, there was a criminal out there impersonating her, she'd barely slept in three days and if someone had stuck an electric prod in her mouth it couldn't have felt any worse than her own natural dentition did-but his words hit her the wrong way. They entered her eyes and then her brain and there they set off a chemical reaction that caused her to stand up so abruptly the chair fell out from under her and hit the floor with what might have been a thud, if only she could have heard it. “You talk as if I'm the one at fault,” she signed.

He regarded her steadily, his hands folded on the desk before him. He was hearing, but he'd been in deaf education all his life and his signing would have been as proficient as a native speaker's if he hadn't lacked expression. And there was no way to teach that, not that she knew anyway. “I don't know who else is,” he said, and his hands never moved.

“Didn't you get my e-mail”? she demanded.

“I got it. But it still doesn't begin to explain how you could just not show up for classes on Friday and Monday both-and be late today on top of it. You couldn't have called in at least? Couldn't have had the courtesy?”

“I was in jail.”

“I know. That's why we're having this discussion.” He looked down at the desk a moment, picked up a paperweight in the shape of a football (Second Place, Division III Playoffs, 2001) and set it down again. “Don't they give you a phone call?”

“One. One only. I used it to call my boyfriend”- “Well, good for you. But couldn't he have called? Couldn't anybody?”

“So I could get bailed out.”

“You know, your students were upset-the Rogers girl, what's her name, Crystal, especially. We all were. And I think it's pretty unprofessional of you-and inconsiderate as well-to just disappear like that. Finals week too. But you didn't get bailed out, did you?”

“You read the e-mail. There was nothing I could do. It was a case of mistaken identity”-“worse, identity theft”-here she brandished the manila folder-“and if you think it's a joy being locked up you just try it, you'll see. It was the worst nightmare of my life. And now you have the gall to blame me?”

“I don't like your tone.”

“I don't like yours either.”

He brought both palms down on the desk with enough kinetic energy to dislodge a stack of papers and then, as if the impulse had just come into his head, jumped to his feet even as the papers settled silently round his shoes. “Enough!” he shouted, and he was signing now, signing angrily, punching out his hands like a prizefighter. “It's not for you to like or dislike. Let me remind you that you're the employee here, not me”-“and an untenured employee at that. One that comes in late half the time as it is”- “Bullshit!” she said, and then repeated it for emphasis-“Bullshit!”-before turning her back on him and slamming the door behind her with such force she could feel the concussion radiating all the way up her arm as she strode past the secretary, down the hall and out of the building.

Six

BRIDGER WAS AT WORK, dwelling deep in Drex III, cruising right along, the mouse a disembodied extension of his brain and his blood circulating in a steady, sure, tranquil squeeze and release, when Dana called. He'd come in early, directly after dropping her off at school, hoping to make up some of the ground he'd lost over the past four days, and he'd already got two hours in before anyone else showed up. Which didn't prevent Radko from lecturing him in front of the whole crew about “the impordance of deamwork” and how he was letting everyone down. This struck him as unfair, grossly unfair, especially when Deet-Deet leaned out of his cubicle and made Radko faces at him throughout his dressing-down, but he didn't say anything in his own defense other than that he'd been there since eight and would stay on through dinner-whatever it took-until he finished up every last frame of this sequence (another head replacement, this time of The Kade's co-star, Lara Sikorsky, whose stand-in did a triple-gainer off one of Drex Ill's needle-like pillars and into a lake of fire, from which she emerged unscathed, of course, because of a genetic adaptation that allowed her skin, hair and meticulously buffed and polished nails to survive temperatures as high as a thousand degrees Fahrenheit). In fact, he'd been so absorbed in the work he hadn't opened any of the pop-ups from his co-workers or even put anything on his stomach yet, other than coffee, that is.

His cell began to vibrate and he surreptitiously slipped it from his pocket and leaned deep into his cubicle to screen it from anyone-i. e., Radko-who might be passing by on the way to the refrigerator or rest-room. Dana had a tendency to text messages that went on for paragraphs, but this time she was terse: “Koch is a real A-hole! I'm quitting. I swear.”

He punched in a response: “Do you want to talk?”

“Nothing to talk about. I'm going home.”

“Don't. You only have four more days.”

Nothing. He held the phone a moment as if it were totemic, as if it could project meaning apart from any human agency, and then she retransmitted the original message: “Koch is a real A-hole!”

All else aside, this was a proposition he couldn't deny. He'd met the man four or five times now, at one grindingly dull school function or another (which Dana was required to attend on pain of forfeiture of administrative patience and goodwill), and he was as stiff and formal and unsympathetic as one of the helmeted palace guards on Drex III. And the way he condescended to the deaf teachers-and to the students too-you would have thought his special talent was for humiliation rather than education. Still, he was the man in charge and it wasn't as if she had a whole lot of options: the San Roque School was the only show in town-in fact, it was the only school for the deaf on the Central Coast, as far as he knew. He phoned her back, but there was no answer.

He called every fifteen minutes after that, but she wouldn't pick up, and he took a moment to peer out of his cubicle and determine Radko's whereabouts before e-mailing her as well “(Don't do anything rash,” was the message he left on cell and PC alike). As the morning wore on, though, he couldn't seem to recover his concentration, the mouse moving so slowly it might have been made of kryptonite, the frame before him frozen in an instant that wasn't appreciably different from the instant that had preceded it, the whole movie turning to sludge before his eyes. All he could think about was what would happen to her if she lost her job. At the very least she'd have to move God knew where to find another one-there was a deaf school in Berkeley, he was pretty sure, but the others might have been anyplace, Texas, North Dakota, Alabama. The thought of it-“Alabama”-made his stomach skip, and he dialed her yet again.

When Radko left at three-thirty to drive down to L. A. for “a meeding,” Bridger slipped out too. Despite his assurances to the contrary, he had no intention of working straight through, not today-he had to drive Dana to the impound yard to retrieve her car and then sit down with the victims' assistance people and start the process of reclaiming her life, because there was no guarantee she wouldn't be arrested again, not until they caught this jerk who'd stolen her identity. When he pulled into the parking lot at the school, she was sitting on the front steps waiting for him, and that was a relief, though he never really believed she'd just walk out on her classes, no matter what degree of ass-holery the headmaster attained. That wouldn't be like Dana. She never gave up on anything.

She was having an animated discussion in Sign with one of her students, a weasel-faced kid of seventeen or so who seemed to have given an inordinate degree of thought to his hairstyle (bi-colored, heavy on the gel, naked skin round the ears and too far up the nape), and she looked like her old self as she rose to her feet, gathered up her things and slid into the car. But then her eyes went cold and the first thing she said wasn't “How was your day?” or “I love you” or even “Thanks for picking me up,” but “I'm really at the end of my rope.”

He lifted his eyebrows in what he hoped was an inquisitive look, though he wasn't much good at pantomime.

“With Koch, I mean.”

“Why?” he asked, careful to exaggerate the movement of his lips. “What happened?”

The car-a '96 Chevy pickup he'd bought used when he was in college and had been meaning to service ever since-stuttered, died and caught again. “Never mind,” she said. “It would take me a week to explain.” The weasel-faced kid gave them a tragic look, a look that ratified what Bridger had already surmised-that he was burning up with the delirium of love and would walk through fire for his teacher, as soon as he could eliminate the competition, that is. She gave the kid a farewell wave and turned back to him: “Just drive. I've got to get my car back-I mean, I'm helpless without it. And the papers”-she did a characteristic thing then, a Dana thing, a sort of hyperactive writhing from the waist as if the seat were on fire and she couldn't escape it-“oh, Jesus, the papers.”

At the impound yard-CASH OR CREDIT CARD ONLY ABSOLUTELY NO CHECKS-they waited in line for twenty minutes while the people ahead of them put on a demonstration of the limits and varieties of hominid rage. The office, to which they were guided by a series of insistent arrows painted on the outer wall, was made of concrete block and had the feel of a bunker, dark and diminished and utterly impregnable. Immediately on entering they were confronted with a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas, behind which sat a skinny sallow grim-faced cashier with hair dyed the color of engine oil. She might have been forty, forty-five-an age, at any rate, beyond which there is neither hope nor even the pretense of it-and she wore a blue work shirt with some sort of badge affixed to the shoulder. Her job was to accept payment through a courtesy slit and then, at her leisure, stamp a form to release the vehicle in question. From early morning till closing time at six, people spoke to her-cursed, raved, foamed at her-through a scuffed metal grille. There were no cars in sight. The cars were out back somewhere, secreted behind a ten-foot-high concrete-and-stucco wall surmounted with concertina wire.

The couple who were stalled at the window when they arrived inquired as to whether the woman on the other side of the Plexiglas would take a personal check and the woman didn't bother with a reply, merely raising a lifeless finger to point to the NO CHECKS sign nearest her. There was some further negotiation-Could she accept the major part of the amount on a credit card and the rest in a check? — followed by a second objectification of the finger, after which there was a rumble of uncontained threats (a mention of lawsuits, the mayor, the governor himself) before the couple swung round, murder stamped across their brows, and slammed out the door, vehicleless. Next in line was a man so tall-six-six or more-that he had to bend nearly double and lean into the counter in order to speak through the grille. He was calm at first-or at least he made an effort to suppress the rage and consternation in his voice-but when the cashier handed him the bill for towing and two days' storage, he lost it. “What is this?” he demanded. “What the fuck is this?”

The woman fastened on him with two dead eyes. She never moved, never flinched, even when he began to pound at the Plexiglas with both fists. When he was done, when he'd exhausted himself, she said only, “Cash or charge?”

Dana had observed all this, of course, though she was spared the details, the whole business a kind of mute Punch and Judy show to her, Bridger supposed, but when it was her turn she stepped forward, slid the impound notice and her driver's license through the courtesy slit and waited for the woman to return her keys. But the woman didn't return the keys. Instead she pushed an invoice through the slit and said, “That'll be four hundred eighty-seven dollars, towing fee plus four days' storage. Cash or charge?”

“But you don't understand,” Dana said, her voice like an electric drill, “I'm innocent. It's all a mistake. It was somebody else they wanted, not me. Look”-and she held up the affidavit, pressed it to the glass. “You see? This exonerates me.”

Bridger couldn't be sure, but it seemed as if the smallest flare of interest awakened in the cashier's eyes. There was something unusual here, something out of the ordinary, and for a moment he almost thought she was going to act on it, but no such luck. “Cash or charge?” she repeated.

“Listen,” he said, stepping forward, though Dana hated for him to interfere, as if his acting as interpreter somehow exposed or diminished her. She didn't need an interpreter, she always insisted-she'd got on just fine all her life without him or anyone else conducting her business for her. Dana gave him a savage look, but he couldn't help himself. “You don't get it,” he said. “I mean, ma'am, if you would only listen a minute-they got the wrong person, is all, she didn't do anything… You saw the affidavit.”

The cashier leaned forward now. “Four hundred eighty-seven dollars,” she repeated, enunciating slowly and carefully so there would be no mistake. “You pay or you walk.”

Next it was the victims' assistance office in the back annex of the police station. They were fifteen minutes late for their appointment with the counselor because even after Bridger convinced Dana to go ahead and pay the impound fee and put in a claim with the police later on, there was a delay of over an hour before the car was released, and no one-not a clairvoyant or a president's astrologer or even the public defender-could have said why. As a result, Dana was pretty well worked up by the time they stepped through the door-mad at the world, at the headmaster, the torturer's assistant in the impound office and Bridger too, for daring to speak up for her-and things went badly, at least at first. To give her credit, the woman behind the desk (middle-aged, creases under the eyes, every mother's face) was a living shrine to patience. Her name, displayed on a plaque in the center of the desk, was Mrs. Helen Bart Hoffmeir-“Call me Helen,” she murmured, though neither of them could bring themselves to do it. She let Dana vent for a while, offering sympathy at what seemed the appropriate junctures, but of course the soothing soft gurgle of her voice was lost on Dana.

At some point-Dana was clonic with anger; she wouldn't take a seat; she wouldn't be mollified-the woman extracted a three-tiered box of fancy chocolates from the filing cabinet behind her and set it out on the desk. “Would you like a cup of chamomile tea?” she asked, lifting the top from the box and looking from Dana to Bridger with a doting smile. “It helps,” she added. “Very soothing, you know?”

So they had chocolates and tea and Dana calmed down enough to take a seat and attune herself to what the counselor had to say. They made small talk for a few minutes while they sipped tea and worked their jaws around nougat and caramel and cherry centers, and then the woman looked to Dana. “You do read lips, then, dear? Or would you be more comfortable with an interpreter? Or your husband-?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Of course, yes. Does he-can he translate?”

“Sure,” Bridger said. “I can try. I took a course last semester in adult ed, but I'm pretty clumsy with it-” He gave a laugh and the woman took it up. Briefly. Very briefly. Because suddenly she was all business.

“Now, Dana,” she said, spreading open the file before her, “as you've already no doubt gathered, you've been the victim of identity theft. ” She removed four faxes from the file and pushed them across the table. The mug shot of the same man gazed out at them from all four, and Bridger felt a jolt of anger. Here he was, a white male who looked to be thirty or so, with a short slick hipster's haircut and dagger sideburns, his eyes steady and smug even there in that diminished moment in the Tulare County Sheriff's Department, in Marin, L. A., Reno, here he was, the shithead who'd put Dana in jail. “Unfortunately,” the counselor was saying, a little wince of regret decorating the corners of her mouth, “the onus is on you to defend yourself.”

“Is that him?” Bridger said. His voice was hard, so hard it nearly choked him getting it out. All his life he'd cruised along, high school, college, film school, Digital Dynasty, living a video existence, easy in everything and never happier than when he was sunk into the couch with a DVD or spooned into a plush seat in the theater with the opening credits rolling-Melissa used to call him a video mole, and it was no compliment-but in that moment he felt something come up in him he'd never felt before, because now everything was different, now the film had slipped off the reel and the couch was overturned. It was hate, that was what it was. It was rage. And it was focused and incendiary: “So this was the son of a bitch.”

The woman nodded. A pair of reading glasses dangled from a cord round her throat and she lifted them now to her face and peered down at the photos. “We don't know his real name and he could have been arrested under any number of aliases in the past-”

Dana spoke up suddenly. “What about fingerprints?”

“We haven't run a fingerprint trace. They haven't, I mean. It's because”-here she paused, looking to Bridger to carry her past the sad truth of the moment-“well, I'm sorry to say that a crime like this, a victimless crime, just doesn't merit the resources…”

Bridger's hands were traumatized. He had to fingerspell most of it-“victimless” took him forever-but Dana picked right up on it. “Victimless?” she said. “What about me? My job? My students? What about the four hundred and eighty-seven dollars-who's going to pay that?”

Who indeed?

The explanation was circuitous, dodging away from the issue and coming back to it again, and it took a while to unfold. First of all, Dana was a victim, of course she was, but she had to understand just how much violent crime there was in the state of California-in the country as a whole-and how limited law enforcement resources were. There were rapists out there, murderers, serial killers. Sadists. Child molesters. But this in no way diminished what had happened to her and there was a growing awareness of the problem (the counselor-what was her name? — dispensed clichés like confections, like tea, because they were soothing) and there were a number of steps Dana could take to restore her good name and maybe even bring the criminal to justice. At this point, the woman drew a pad and pencil from the top drawer of her desk. “Now,” she said, “do you have any idea who this man is or how he might have got hold of your base identifiers?”

Dana hesitated a moment till Bridger had laboriously spelled out “base identifiers,” a term neither of them had previously come across. “No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “I've never seen him before.”

“Have you lost your purse or had it stolen anytime in the past few months?”

She read this on the woman's lips and shook her head again.

“What about your mailbox-is it secure? Locked, I mean?”

It was, yes. The mailboxes at her apartment complex were located in a special alcove, and everybody had a key to his or her own box.

“What about at work? Do you receive mail at the”-here the woman brought the glasses back into play and glanced down a moment at the sheet before her-“the San Roque School for the Deaf?”

Dana did. And no, the mailboxes there were in the main office and anyone could have access to them. But Dana hadn't missed anything-her pay stubs were there every two weeks on schedule and there had been no interruption of her mail at home, or not that she knew of, anyway.

The woman looked to Bridger a moment. He'd been so rigidly focused on what she'd been saying and the effort to communicate it to Dana that he'd forgotten where he was. Now he saw that it was getting late, past six anyway, the venetian blinds pregnant with color, thin fingers of sunlight marking the wall like the vestiges of a thief. He thought of Radko. He thought of Drex III. He'd have to go back after dinner, he was thinking, and that thought-of dinner-made his stomach churn in an anticipatory way. When was the last time he'd eaten?

“You see, the reason I ask,” the woman went on, holding Bridger's eyes a moment before shifting back to Dana, just to be sure he was with them so that none of this-her spiel, her words, her professional empathy-would be wasted, “is because the vast majority of identity fraud cases come from a lost or stolen wallet or misappropriated mail. In fact, one of the thieves' favorite modus operandi is to get your name and address-out of the phone book, off your business card-and put in a change of address request with the post office. Then they get your mail sent to a drop box in Mailboxes R Us or some such, and there's all your financial information, credit card bills, bank statements, paychecks and what have you.”

She paused to see what effect she was having. The fingers of light crept higher up the wall. On her face was a look of transport or maybe of triumph-she knew the ropes and she was in no danger and never would be. “Then all they have to do is make up a driver's license in your name, order new checks, replacement Visa cards, and voilà-you're out an average of something like five thousand dollars nationwide.”

Bridger was thinking about his own mailbox, just a slot with his apartment number under it, and how many times had the cretins at the U.S. Postal Service stuffed it with his neighbors' mail by mistake? Or what about the time he wound up with half a dozen mutual fund statements addressed to a woman on the other side of town who had only a street address-196 Berton instead of 196 Manzanita-and a zip code in common with him? What if he'd been a crook? What then?

Dana broke into his reverie. She was getting impatient. She wanted action. That was Dana: cut to the chase, no time to spare. “Yeah,” she said, her voice even hollower and more startling than usual, “but what do I do now, that's what we want to know.”

The woman looked flustered a moment-this was a departure from the orthodoxy, from the ritual that soothed and absolved-but she recovered herself. “Well, you'll want to file a police report right away and you'll need to include that in any correspondence with creditors, and the credit reporting agencies should be notified if there are any irregularities. Your credit reports. You should order copies and check them over carefully-your Visa and MasterCard and what-have-you as well. But we'll get to all that. What I want you to know, what I want to tell you, is how these things happen-so you'll be prepared next time around.” The look of rapture again. She arched her back and gazed into Dana's eyes. “An ounce of prevention, right?”

She held them there for half an hour more, and by the end of it Bridger began to wonder exactly what she was trying to convey. Or even how she felt about it. Her eyes seemed to flare and she became increasingly animated as she trotted out one horror story after another: the woman who had her rental application swiped from the desk in her landlord's office and wound up with some thirty thousand dollars in charges for elaborate meals and services in a hotel in a city she'd never been to, as well as the lease on a new Cadillac, the purchase price and registry of two standard poodles and $4,500 for liposuction; the twelve-year-old whose mother's boyfriend assumed his identity till the kid turned sixteen and was arrested when he applied for a driver's license for crimes the boyfriend had committed; the retiree whose mail mysteriously stopped coming and who eventually discovered that thieves had not only filed a change of address but requested his credit reports from the three credit reporting agencies so that they could drain his retirement account, cash his social security checks and even appropriate the 200,000 frequent flier miles he'd accumulated. And it got worse: deprived of income, the old man in question-a disabled Korean War veteran-wound up being evicted from his apartment for non-payment of rent and was reduced to living on the street and foraging from Dumpsters.

“That's terrible,” Bridger said, just to say something. Dana sat rigid beside him.

“Tip of the iceberg,” the counselor sang out. “And in your case, honey”-turning to Dana-“it's even worse, or potentially worse, because this isn't simple ID theft, where a drug user or ex-con tries to make a quick score and move on, but what we call identity takeover.”

“I don't understand,” Dana said, her face lit from beneath as the sun crept up the wall behind her. “Something's over, you're saying?” She turned to Bridger and he was trying to help as best he could when the woman simply scrawled the term on her pad and slid it across the desk.

“Identity takeover,” she repeated. “It's when somebody becomes a second you-lives as you, under your name, for months, sometimes years. And if they live quietly and don't get in trouble with the law, they might never be detected-”

“Now “I” don't understand,” Bridger heard himself saying. “Why would anyone want to do that-assume somebody's identity-if it wasn't for some credit card scam or something? I mean, what's the point?”

The woman shrugged. Looked down at the telephone on her desk as if she expected it somehow to provide the answer. She began boxing the photocopies between her hands in a brisk valedictory way, then looked up. Her eyes were gray and clear and lit with a strange excitement and they went from Bridger's face to Dana's and settled there. “Think about it,” she said in a soft voice. “You're broke, uneducated, you owe child support payments, you've got a criminal record and your credit report stinks-maybe you've defaulted on a loan or gone bankrupt or driven your business into the ground. You find somebody solid-somebody like you, Dana-with good credit references, higher education, no criminal record of any kind at all. You said you had a Ph. D., right?”

Dana looked to Bridger for a translation and he did the best he could: “She says you have a Ph. D., right?”

“From Gallaudet,” Dana said after a moment, her voice echoing tonelessly off the walls. She sat up, squared her shoulders. For the first time all afternoon the hint of a smile settled on her lips-she was proud of what she'd accomplished, proud of the recognition it gave her in a world full of slackers and underachievers, and she saw it as a springboard to more, much more. Her ambition was to move up to a four-year college, and not a deaf college like Gallaudet, but a hearing college where she could teach the contemporary American novel and poetry and maybe even creative writing to hearing students. “In English/ American studies. I did my thesis on Poe and won the Morris Lassiter Award for Scholarship two years ago, the year before I came here to teach at San Roque.” Her voice ruptured-she was tired, he could see that-and she chopped and elided the syllables. “It is un-der consideration at a ve-ry pres-ti-gious univ-ersity press my the-sis dir-ec-tor gave me an introduction to-to which, I mean-but I don't really feel comfortable mentioning the name until things are finalized. It wouldn't be right somehow…”

“Yes,” the woman was saying, and she wasn't really listening, just trying to make a point. She had one of the photocopies in her hand, the one that showed the imposter, the smug thief with his shoplifter's eyes, in sharpest detail. “You see”-she tapped a glittering red fingernail on the stretched skin of the page-“this is Dr. Dana Halter. And you can bet he didn't have to write any thesis to get his degree.”

Though he knew he should get back to Digital Dynasty, let himself in quietly and see to The Kade's unfinished business, he couldn't let Dana suffer all this alone. The news had been exclusively bad-No, the counselor had informed them, the city was not liable for the towing and impound fees and the police were within their rights for having arrested her because her base identifiers were the same as the thief's and they could try a lawsuit but it was just about as unlikely to fly as the San Roque phone book on her desk, though they “might” try small claims court for the towing and impound costs, but of course that would depend on the whim of the judge-and he wanted to be with her, even if it was only to order out pizza and sit in front of the TV while she put her head down and plunged through her student papers. Which was just what happened. They drove separately to her place and while he went out for the pizza (extra large, half garlic and chicken, half veggie) and two dinner salads with Italian dressing, she threw down her briefcase and got to work.

It was just after eight when the phone rang-or flashed, actually. He'd been sipping Chianti and watching a re-run of “Alien,” a movie he must have seen at least twenty times (Dana loved the tag line for the trailer: “In space no one can hear you scream),” trying not to feel too guilty about work. His feet were propped up on the coffee table, the fifth slice of pizza had plugged the hole in him, and he was enjoying the fact that he could crank the sound as loud as he liked without having to worry about distracting her. Every once in a while, as the creature retreated in a tail-whipping blur or mugged to the thunder of the score preparatory to ending the existence of one clueless crewmember or another, he would glance up at Dana. She was sitting across the room at her desk, the buttery glow of the lamp catching and releasing her face as she hovered close with her red pencil and then leaned back again, order restored and everything finally at peace-but for the creature, which was doing its thing now with the saliva machine and the multi-hinged jaws. Yes, and then the phone began to flash.

Dana glanced up. “Would you get that?”

He lifted his knitted ankles off the coffee table without shifting his gaze from the screen-they were going to commercial, a direct cut from the drooling teeth to a baby's naked bottom sans irony or even the faintest glimmer of network awareness-stood and crossed the room to the phone. Like most of the deaf, Dana had a TTY, an assistive listening device that was compatible with her cell and allowed her to send and receive both text and audio messages. He depressed the on button and the light stopped flashing, but instead of a text message, a high querulous whine of a voice came stabbing through the speakers: “Dana Halter? This is John J. J. Simmonds, accounts payable, down here at T-M? I'm calling about your delinquent account-”

““Who”?” Bridger said.

“Because if you're having financial difficulties, I'm sure we can work out some sort of payment schedule, but you have to understand that payment in full must be made each month under the terms of the agreement you signed-”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Bridger said. “Hold on now-what account?” He glanced up at Dana; she was frowning over one of her papers, the red pencil poised at her lips.

“Don't give me that crap-”

“I'm not-I mean, we, I mean she-”

“-because deadbeats are one thing we just do not tolerate and I'm sure you can appreciate that.”

“I can, yes, but-”

“Good, now we're getting someplace. ” The voice came right back at him, hard-charging, impenetrable. “Let me give you the straight facts: we're going to need a certified cashier's check in the amount of eight hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents overnighted to our offices by closing time at five p. m. Pacific Coast Time or we “will” discontinue service and we “will” take legal action, and this is no idle threat, believe me.”

Bridger could feel the irritation rising in him. “Hold on just one second, will you? What account are we talking about here-can you please just tell me that, “please?””

“T-M Cellular.”

“But she doesn't-we don't even use T-M. Both our phones are with Cingular.”

“Don't give me that crap. I've got the past-due deadbeat bills right here in front of me. You understand what I'm saying? Eight hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents. FedEx. Five p. m. tomorrow. This is no game, let me assure you of that.”

“Okay, okay.” He was watching Dana, her brow furrowed in concentration, the red pencil dancing-she was oblivious to the whole thing. On the screen, the monster was back, the camera gave a sudden jerk, and there was blood everywhere. “Listen, this is probably a mistake-she's just been the victim of identity theft-and if you would just send the bill so we can iron things out-”

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is her boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? You're telling me you're not Dana Halter? Then why in Christ's name did you say you were?”

“But I didn't-”

“You put her on right this minute, you hear me? I mean “now!” You think this is some kind of joke here? You think I'm a clown? Put her on or I'll have your ass too-for, for-“obstruction!””

“I can't.”

“What do you mean 'you can't'?”

“She's deaf.”

There was a pause. Then the voice came back, harsher, louder, a theatrical bray of outrage and puffed-up sanctimony. “I thought I'd heard it all, but you got balls, you really do. What do you think, I'm stupid here? We're talking fraud, felonies, we are going to take legal action-”

“Wait, wait, wait”-an inchoate idea had begun to form in Bridger's head-“can you just tell me what the number is, the number on the account? I mean, the number of the phone itself?”

The voice was exhausted, exasperated, drenched with contempt. “You don't know your own phone number?”

“Just give it to me.”

Heavy irony, the world-weary sigh of disgust: “Four-one-five…”

As soon as he had the number, the instant the man on the other end of the line gave up the last digit, Bridger shouted “Check's in the mail!” and pulled the phone cable out of the wall. Then, his heart pounding with the audacity-the balls, yes-of what he was about to do, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Dana was still at her desk, still bent over the papers with a red pencil and a wondering frown, before he pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed the number. There was the distant faintly echoing hum of the connection being made, of the satellite revolving in the sunstruck void, and then the click of the talk button and a man's voice saying, “Hello?”