Talk Talk

One

“IT'S GOOD,” Bridger said, using his hands for emphasis. “I like it.” He nodded his head vigorously, chin up, chin down. His smile widened. “Really good.”

“Really?” she said, and felt the color rise to her face. “You're not just telling me that, are you?”

They were sitting in her car across from Mail Boxes Etc. in the town of Mill Valley, California, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. She'd never been here before, had never in fact done anything more than attach the name to a place she knew vaguely to be somewhere north of the city. It was a pleasant-enough town, she supposed, with its oaks and pines and the mountain that loomed over it, the streets that managed to seem urban and rural at the same time and the carefully cultivated small-town feel-just the sort of place a thief might want to live. Trees to hide behind. Money that spoke quietly. Anonymity.

They'd been here, in the parked car, for two hours now. The day before, they'd checked into a motel in Monterey-Bridger had insisted on taking her to the aquarium there, which she loved despite herself, sharks tapping some hidden energy source with the flick of a fin, fish floating like butterflies in the big two-story tank as if this were the Disneyland of the sea-and they'd got up early that morning and driven straight through to Mill Valley. Bridger's map, downloaded from Map-Quest, with a red star indicating the Mail Boxes franchise they were looking for, took them right to the place without fret or deviation, and if she'd expected it to look sinister, expected the criminal himself to be grinning at her from behind the copy machines, she was disappointed. The store looked no different from any other Mail Boxes Etc. There it was. People going in, people coming out.

But what to do next? Bridger wanted her to go right up to the counter and carry off an imposture, tell them she'd lost her key, show them some proof (if she wasn't Dana Halter of #31 Pacific View Court, then who was?) and see what was in the box, a bill, correspondence, a bank statement, anything that might show the residential address. Then they'd turn the tables. Then “they'd” go to “him.” She knew he was right. That was the logical thing to do, because they could sit here watching the place forever and still the guy might not show up or if he did they could miss him-all they had was a photograph, after all, and photographs offer up one version only, the version of the moment, and what if he'd grown a beard, dyed his hair? Or he might send somebody else for his mail-his wife, his daughter, his gay partner for all she knew. He could be wearing a hat, sunglasses, he could come in with a bag over his head. No, Bridger was right, but she was the one who had to go in there and break the law, not he. All her life she'd had to struggle with social situations, struggle to make herself understood while people gave her that don't-touch-me look, and what if the person behind the counter said, “What number?” “What number?” That would kill the whole thing-they'd probably call the police on her. A woman with a suspicious high bludgeoning voice trying to scam-that was the word, wasn't it? Scam? — some innocent citizen's mailbox key for what had to be a nefarious purpose. What could she say-that she'd forgotten the number of her own box? Another lie to layer it smooth: “I've been out of town and it just slipped my mind, well, because this is my second home up here, my vacation place, actually, and I, well, I don't”-“I just forgot…”

So they were sitting in the car, watching the door of the place-people coming, people going-hoping to get lucky. In the meanwhile, he'd asked her to read him what she'd been writing, because he was curious and wanted her to share it with him, and yes, he assured her, he could listen and keep his eyes on the door at the same time. And so she'd read to him and she watched his face when he told her it was good and maybe she'd flushed red, maybe she had.

“You know,” he said, “the writing's really” and she didn't catch the rest.

She leaned in close to him. “What? The writing is what?”

“Cinematic,” he said, contorting his face, his mouth, his lips, and he finger-spelled it just to be sure.

“Cinematic?” she repeated, secretly pleased. All at once, and she couldn't help herself, she saw the book as a movie, a whole parade of scenes, not the least of which featured the premiere, the red carpet, she and Bridger in tuxedos-or no, he in a tuxedo and she in a black strapless dress, or no, white, definitely white…

His face changed, his eyes sinking away from the smile. “There “was” a movie, you know. Like thirty years ago? By”-he finger-spelled it “François Truffaut. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” she said, holding his eyes, “of course. I've seen it.”

“It was called “L'Enfant Sauvage.” We saw it in film school.” He brought his hands up out of his lap, as if to use them, and then thought better of it. “And it was good, I remember. Truffaut himself played the teacher, what was his name?”

“Itard.”

“Right, Itard-but you haven't got that far yet, right? What you gave me is as far as it goes-where they find the kid wandering naked in the woods and nobody knows who he is or how he's managed to survive on his own?”

She nodded. It was easy to read him because he was her intimate, her man, and she knew his speech patterns as well as she knew her father's, her mother's-what was hard was reading strangers, especially if they talked fast or with an impediment or an accent. That was why her stomach felt light and her blood raced as if she'd just climbed a dozen flights of stairs: there was a stranger behind the counter in Mail Boxes Etc. and she was going to have to go in there and pretend to be someone she wasn't, pretend to be hearing, pretend to be entitled and maybe even cavalier. “Yes,” she signed, “that's as far as it goes.” And then, aloud: “I want to get to that part, where Itard tries to teach him to talk, to name things, to speak through an acquired language, but first I'm interested in how the child is perceived by the society around him-and how he perceives the world himself. That's the beginning. That's the groundwork.”

“He never did learn to talk, did he? I mean, after how many years of exercises like seven days a week and all that?”

“And all that.” The struggle, that was what it was about, the fight to overcome the deficit, the impairment, the loss. Itard and Victor, the Wild Child, who could barely pronounce his own name. “Five years,” she said. And then, finally, her throat constricting, she added, “No, he never did learn to speak.”

He ran a hand through his hair and it came away with a faint sheen of gel on his palm. She noticed because he raised both his hands, as if to speak in Sign-he tried for her sake, and it was more intimate, more giving, even than what they did in bed together; in that moment, she felt herself go out to him as if all her tethers had been cut. “Are you going to go to”-he paused, because he couldn't find the Sign and had to spell it out: “France? To see it. For research, I mean?”

She showed him: “Country, foreign country. Europe, European.” “Germany” “is the double eagle,” “for France you flick the wrist like this, like the flicking of a Frenchman's handkerchief out of his cuff. See? It's easy.”

His hands were in his lap. His face fell into what she liked to call his “hangdog” look, and she loved the reference, the picture it made in her mind of a dog called out on the carpet-right, on the carpet? — and the way its body collapsed under the weight of all that undisguised doggy emotion. “What?” she said. “What's wrong?”

“You didn't answer the question.”

“You mean France?”

A full minute must have gone by and neither of them had even glanced at the door across the street. His eyes were concentrated on her lips, as if he were the deaf one. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly, back and forth, heavy as the pendulum at the bottom of the grandfather clock in her parents' front hall, the one that announced the hour to everyone but her. “I'd love to, but-”

“But you can't afford it. Because you don't have a job. Right?”

She dropped her eyes. Used her hands: “Right”.

Both of them looked up then and studied the façade of Mail Boxes Etc. They might have been architectural students-and she should have thought of that, should have brought two sketch pads and an assortment of pencils, charcoal, gum erasers, the ones that smelled like tutti-frutti. Or maybe they were building inspectors. Or town planners. She wouldn't have put that ugly cookie-cutter thing there if she was on the board, no way in the world. In fact, she'd tear it down in a heartbeat and let the oaks creep back in, put in a fountain, a couple of benches. The frame collapsed and her eyes went to the movement inside, the vague bobbing of shapes screened by the reflection of the sun off the windows, people at work, packages being weighed, mail sent out and received, copies run, an amorphous huddle around the cash register. Her stomach sank. And then she felt his touch: two fingers at her chin, gently shifting her gaze back to him. “Have you thought about what you're going to do?”

“No, not with this hanging over me,” she said, gesturing toward the store. “I mean, I get paid through the end of August, but obviously I've got to start sending my resume out.” She watched his face change-he didn't want her to see what he was feeling, but he was a lousy actor. “I don't want to leave, if that's what you mean.”

“That's what I mean,” he said.

She leaned in to kiss him, the familiar taste and scent of him, lips that spoke in a different way altogether, and then drew back again. “I'd love to go to Aveyron, to Lacaune and Saint-Sernin-are you kidding me? — but the airfare's out of my range, I'm afraid, and with the dollar weak… Plus, they'd probably arrest me the minute they ran my passport through the computer.” She put on a face. “Dana Halter, batterer and assaulter-it even rhymes.”

“But how can you write about a place you've never seen?”

This was easy. She pointed a finger to her head. “I see it here. And I've been there, to the south of France, anyway-to Toulouse, which isn't that far from Aveyron. Didn't I ever tell you that?” She'd been there as a girl, a few years after she became deaf. She must have been ten, eleven-the age of the wild child. Her parents were vacationing in Europe that year and they brought the whole family along-her and her two brothers-for the educational opportunity. Her parents were practical in that way. Her mother especially. And especially with her, full immersion in both Sign and speech right from the beginning-what the people who make their living off the deaf call “total communication”-because there was no way her daughter was going to be a cripple or even the tiniest bit dependent on anybody or anything. Her mother was pretty then, her hair trailing down her back beneath the brim of the suede cowgirl's hat she'd bought on a trip to Mexico, her legs long and naked in a yellow sundress and two boy babies and a little deaf girl compressed in her arms-Dana didn't know whether her memories of that time came from the photographs in the family album or what she'd seen and smelled and felt. When she closed her eyes she could see the fingers of palms etched against pale stucco, a river like an avenue of light, the new bridge (a regional joke: Napoleon had built it) humped over the water as if it were trying to swim.

“You know,” she said, trying to hold on to the moment because in the next moment she was going to have to go into that store, “it's easier to learn foreign Sign than a spoken language. Much easier. I picked up FSL right away because my mother thought I should meet deaf French kids.”

“Iconicity,” Bridger said, surprising her. “Like when you sign 'cup.'” He demonstrated, his left palm the saucer, his right cupped over it. “We learned it in the class I took. German, French, Chinese, whatever-a cup is a cup, right? What about Marcel Marceau-I bet he would have been good at it. Did he know Sign, you think?”

Just then a movement on the far side of the street caught her eye, and she started. A man in a flowered shirt, baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses scrambled up to the door as if he were in a hurry-as if someone were chasing him, as if he were a fugitive-pulled back the door and disappeared inside. “Bridger!” she shouted (or might have shouted; she couldn't tell, but it felt like a shout). “Bridger, it's him!”

She was out of the car before he was, a deaf woman in the middle of the street, cars coming both ways and she staring down a UPS man in a boxy brown UPS truck that was right there in front of her though she couldn't hear his horn or the metallic keening of his brakes, and even as Bridger caught up to her and grabbed her arm she was telling herself to slow down, stay calm, focus. Then they were on the far side of the street, up on the sidewalk, and Bridger might have been saying something, but she wasn't paying attention-her eyes were fixed on the door ahead of them. She saw her own reflection there, a shifting of shapes, the gleaming metal handle of the door, and she took a deep breath and stepped inside, Bridger right behind her.

There were eight people in the place and she tried to take them all in simultaneously, including the heavyset woman behind the desk who looked up and gave her an expectant smile and the old man fumbling for change at one of the copy machines. Her heart slammed at her ribs. The overhead lights seemed to recede, painting a thin pale strip of illumination across the heads and shoulders of the eight figures in their various poses, bending, gesticulating, lips flapping on air-and where was he? Her eyes jumped from one to the other, and then suddenly there he was. There, at the back of the store, where the bank of mailboxes ran in a neat continuous file from waist- to shoulder-level: she saw the bright flash of the shirt first, then his profile under the bill of the cap as he stood over the wastebasket, discarding junk mail. Oblivious. Completely oblivious. As if he were the most innocent soul in the world. The son of a bitch. She couldn't believe it.

She felt Bridger wrap an arm round her waist, an admonitory tightness straining the ligaments of his wrist and fingers. “Calm,” he was telling her, “stay calm.” It took a moment-she was just staring, all the rage and disbelief she'd felt over the way she'd been violated rising in her till she was strung tight with it, ready for anything, the accusation, the physical assault, the spewing up of the deaf woman's shriek that was so caustic and inhuman it could set off all the alarms up and down the block-and then Bridger disengaged his arm and she felt his fingers on her chin, urgently tugging her face around. “That's not him,” he signed.

She looked harder. Small Sign, very quiet: “No, it is. It is.”

Bridger shook his head emphatically and her eyes went from him to the man in the cap and back again. “Not even close,” he said.

By this point the man had finished with his mail and abruptly pivoted on the ball of one foot to hurry up the aisle toward them, a sheaf of what looked to be bills and a manila envelope clutched to his chest, and she saw how wrong she'd been-even with the sunglasses and the bill of the cap pulled down low, this man was nothing like the one in the photograph. He was older, hair graying at the fringes of the cap, his nose splayed across his face as if it had been molded of clay, lips bunched round a look of eternal harassment. He wasn't the thief. He wasn't Frank Calabrese or whatever his name was. He was nobody. She watched him plunge impatiently through the door and scurry off down the street and still the blood pounded in her veins.

“All right,” Bridger said, swinging her round to face him, “we're going up to the counter now and you're going to be Dana Halter. Okay? You cool with that? Because I tell you, there's no other way.”

She wasn't cool with it. Wasn't down with the program or hip to it or copacetic or even just basically willing, but she let him guide her up to the counter and tried on a smile for the heavyset woman, who gave it right back to her. “Can I help you?” the woman said, and that was easy to read-context, context was all.

“Yes, please,” Dana said, and dropped her eyes a moment while she extracted her driver's license from her purse and laid it on the counter. “I'm Dana Halter?” she said, looking up again. “I just-I don't know, I guess I misplaced my mailbox key…”

The woman was younger than she'd first appeared. She was wearing a pink cable-knit sweater that gave an unfortunate emphasis to her shoulders and upper arms, her skin was pale to the point of anemia and she wore a pair of clunky-looking glasses with clear plastic frames. But her eyes were what mattered, and her eyes were nonjudgmental. She barely glanced at the license and then slid it back across the counter. “No problem,” she said, and her smile brightened, and then she said something else.

“I'm sorry, what?”

Dana saw the woman flick her eyes to Bridger and then Bridger said something.

“She said,” he repeated, speaking slowly so that she could read his lips, “that there is a twenty-five-dollar fee for replacement keys and I said that was okay. Right, honey?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously and holding the woman's eyes, “sure. That's only fair, and I'm sorry-it was my fault, not my fiancé's.” She was elaborating now-lies always required elaboration. “So stupid of me.” She turned to Bridger, playing the airhead, the doll-face, the bimbette. “My bad, honey,” she said. She was beginning to enjoy this, especially the aftershock of the term “fiancé” on Bridger's face. But then the woman said something else and she had to ask “What?” again.

“Number?” the woman was saying. “What number?”

This was what she'd been afraid of-any honest person, any normal person, would have had the number on the tip of her tongue, but Dana didn't have it because she was an imposter-she wasn't Dana Halter at all. Or not this Dana Halter. She felt her lips tighten. For a split second she looked away, averting her eyes like a criminal, a liar, a scam artist, and she struggled to control her voice as she repeated the version of the story she'd rehearsed about this being their second home and how they'd been away and how to her embarrassment-Can you believe it? — she'd forgotten the number. But here was her ID-she thrust the driver's license across the counter again, and dug out her social security card and a major credit card too-and she wondered sweetly if the woman could just look it up in her records?

The smile was gone now and the woman's eyes had lost their sympathy. She didn't look suspicious so much as uneasy-an understanding was awakening inside her and Dana recognized it and for the first time in her life played to it. She stood absolutely still, poised at the counter in the silence that was eternal, and let her eyes do the talking for her. “Yes,” her eyes said, “I'm different,” and it hardly hurt at all to see that this time it was the woman who had to look away.

Aside from the usual glut of flyers and one-time-only offers addressed hopefully to “Occupant,” there appeared to be three or four legitimate pieces of mail in the box. Dana caught the briefest glimpse of a commercial logo on one of the envelopes-was that a bill? — before bundling the whole business up in two trembling hands and willing herself to walk in a measured way to the exit, even turning to look over her shoulder and wave two appreciative fingers at the woman behind the counter. Bridger was waiting for her outside. Together, they crossed the street, careful to look both ways and present an air of calm to anybody who might be watching, and then they were in the car and the mail-Dana Halter's mail-was theirs.

The surprise was Bridger. He was so wound up he actually snatched the bundle out of her hands and began pawing through it, impatiently tossing newsprint flyers and glossy brochures to the floor at his feet. There was an expression of willed triumph on his face, something hard there she'd never recognized before-from the look of him you would have thought he was the one whose identity had been stolen. He came up with the letters-three of them, addressed to the postbox-but it was she who slipped the bill emblazoned with the PG&E logo out of the pile and lifted it exultantly to the light. He might have said “Bingo!” or “Eureka!” but he didn't have to. They both knew what it meant. They had him now. They had their man.

“Open it,” he said.

She could feel the smile aching on her lips. “It's a federal offense.”

“Horseshit,” he said, or something like it. “What about stealing somebody's identity-what kind of offense is that? Open it.” He made a snatch at the envelope then, but she was too quick for him, shifting it to her left hand and secreting it in the space between door and seat cushion. She was afraid suddenly, frightened at the prospect of what was about to be revealed. They were so close. The face of the thief, his mocking eyes, the cocky thrust of his chin, came back to her. So close. Her stomach clenched around nothing, around the remains of the stale croissant and sour coffee they'd got at a gas station hours ago. Bridger said something, terse and urgent-she could feel the force of his expelled breath-but she dropped her eyes and shut him out. He tried to turn her face to him, his fingers at her throat, and she shook him off. Silently, deep in her mind, she counted to ten. Then she tore open the envelope.

The address inside, the service address, stared out from the page, and it gave her a jolt that was almost physical, as if her auditory nerves had been suddenly restored and someone had screamed it in her ear: 109 Shelter Bay Village Mill Valley, CA 94941 Bridger slammed his hand down on the dash and raised his chin to howl in triumph, and then he pumped his fist twice in the air and pulled his lips back to emit what must have been a hiss of jubilation. Context told her what it was: “Yessss!”

The other envelopes revealed little-the first two proved, respectively, to be ads for real estate and equity loans, addressed in a neat computer-generated script meant to mimic human agency and dupe the addressee into opening it. The third one, though, was more interesting. It was addressed to “The Man, Box 2120, Mill Valley, California, ”and inside was a thrice-folded sheet of lined paper torn from a yellow legal pad. A cryptic message was scrawled across it at a forty-five-degree angle in a looping oversized longhand: “Hey, that thing we talked about is on, no problema. See you soon. Ciao, Sandman.”

“'See you soon,'” she read aloud, looking to Bridger.

He had on his wondering look, his features floating across the pale globe of his face like drifting continents. His hair bristled. He ran a hand through it. “Is he going someplace? I mean, Dana, Frank, whatever his name is-is he planning a trip maybe?”

“What's the postmark?”

Bridger turned the letter over. It had been postmarked in Garrison, New York, four days earlier. “Where's Garrison?”

“I think it's near Poughkeepsie,” she said. “Or maybe Peterskill. Maybe that's closer.”

“So what's that-an hour, hour and a half north of the city?”

She shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.”

The sun was on the car and though it was cool enough outside-in the low seventies, she guessed-she began to feel it and turned to crank down the window. When they'd come back to the car, she'd slid into the driver's seat-it was hers, after all, though Bridger had done nearly all the driving to this point-and now she looked out on the quietly bustling street and felt a tickle of emotion in her throat. “What now?” she wondered aloud, and Bridger pulled her to him, awkwardly, across the wheel. They embraced a moment and then he leaned back so she could see his face and the answer there: “We go after him.”

“Us?” Now she went cold, but it was a steadily blowing crystalline kind of cold, and her fear was gone. She made the argument for its own sake. “But what about the police? Shouldn't we just give them the information?”

He gave her a look of disgust. “The police? Right, yeah. And go through the same kind of crap we did back in San Roque? Plus, what if he “is” planning to light out for the”-it took her a minute to catch this-“territories? To”-he finger-spelled it-“Poughkeepsie or wherever? Or what if this isn't even his house?” He didn't blink. Just stared into her eyes, earnest, angry, fired up, all his frustration, his attitude, his “love” come boiling to the surface. But was it love? Or was it just some twitch of the male ego, the need to go mano a mano, the testosterone speaking?

No matter. She wasn't going to think past the moment. She had an address and there was a thief hiding behind it. Even as she twisted the key to turn the engine over and grind the starter-and here Bridger provided the ears for her and the facial expression too-she knew she was going to chase this thing down till there was nowhere left to go.

The fog on the hills had an apocalyptic look, as if it were composed of some fatal gas poised to descend over the trees and rob the breath of every living thing, and yet the sun was still high and vital and the breeze untainted. On another day, in another mood, she might have found the fog a palliative, the cornerstone of the Bay Area's charm, but not today, not now. It was five o'clock. They'd gone to Noah's Bagels for lunch, though she wasn't hungry (or she was, but when the food arrived she found she couldn't eat), and that had given them some time to decompress and think out their next move. Or at least consider it, because they both knew that nothing was going to stop them from driving over to Shelter Bay Village, a mere five minutes away. But then what? Would they confront him? Call 911? Knock him down and bind him up themselves?

What they decided, finally, was to reconnoitre the place (scope it out, as Bridger would say, and she had to assume the phrase derived from “telescope” in some way, but then wouldn't it have been more accurate to say “binoc it out”?), just to see what they could see. Now they were here, in front of a recessed bank of semi-detached redwood condominiums constructed to maximize the views, strolling hand in hand along the gravel path that edged the water in a gently sweeping arc beneath a promenade of palms. And yes, those were binoculars dangling from her neck, and if anyone were to ask, well, she was just another innocuous and slightly dotty birdwatcher, and wasn't that a great blue heron out there? And look at the egrets!

Bridger's eyes were fixed on the deck of the near building, the one they'd identified from the front as #109. Was there movement there? He touched her arm and she lifted the binoculars to her eyes, trying to be discreet. At first she saw nothing, sheets of light glancing off the big flat opaque windows till they went from silver to black, and then she recalibrated and a figure materialized before her, the figure of a woman hovering over a glass-topped table. A young woman. Pretty features, dark hair wound up in a coil at the crown of her head, blue top, black capris. She was wiping down the table, that was it, and now-suddenly, heart pounding, Dana swung the binoculars away and pointed a finger out over the water, as if she'd been tracking the descent of a flock of mergansers-the woman was staring right at her.

Dana felt Bridger's hand go to the binoculars and she let go of them-he was playing the mime too, jerking the instrument back and forth as if following the imaginary birds, but what his lips said was, “Who is that? The wife, you think?”

Still focused on the patch of water that lay just beyond the faded redwood deck of #109, she could only nod. “I guess,” she said. “If this is the right place.”

Bridger's eyes shot to the deck and then went back to the binoculars. “Did you see anyone else? A man? Is “he” there?”

In the end, the tension was too much for her to bear. She gently extracted the binoculars from his grip, let her gaze rove over the surface of the bay a moment, and then swung him round by one arm and led him off in the opposite direction, two bird lovers on the track of something elusive. When they'd gone fifty paces, she leaned into him and they both halted, looking out to the water. “What now?” she asked, and if she could have heard herself-if she were a character in a novel-she might have described her tone as forlorn. Certainly she felt that way. The woman had looked right at her-or had seemed to. There was a face to it now, another face, flesh and blood, dark eyes, dark hair, capris.

Bridger loomed into her field of vision. “I say we ring the doorbell.”

He was right. She knew he was. “Couldn't we just… wait? To see, I mean. If he shows up, gets out of his car-we could see his car and get the license plate…”

“And then what?” His mouth was drawn so thin it was like a paper cut. He was determined, she could see that. A breeze came up then, clean and sweet, and blew the hair across her face so that for a moment she was hidden and what he said next didn't register. But his fingers were there, gently probing, and he brought her back with a sweep of his hand. “Come on,” he urged. “We'll go together. Just ring the bell, that's all. We're visiting. Looking for the Goldsteins. Ask her do you know where the Goldsteins live and just see what happens, see if the son of a bitch is there-maybe he'll answer the door himself, and that's all we need. Just that.”

She didn't argue. All at once they were strolling again, following the gravel path as it looped back across the gentle grassy undulations and neatly recessed flowerbeds the landscaper had thought to provide so the denizens of Shelter Bay Village could delight in the contrast as they gazed out over the property to the flat shining void of the water and the hills beyond. A woman in jeans and a windbreaker emerged from behind the bank of buildings and jogged toward them, a small black dog scrambling ahead of her on the tether of its leash. Someone was getting out of a car in the lot-another woman, dipping forward to retrieve her purse and a bag of groceries. Dana felt as if she were about to lose consciousness. Something flitted before her eyes, but it wasn't palpable, and then they were on the doorstep-a deep-pile mat, two pots of begonias, brass knocker-and she was glad she couldn't hear the sound the buzzer made in response to the weight of Bridger's index finger.

The door pulled abruptly open and the woman was there, prettier even than she'd looked at a distance, and there was a child there too, four or five years old, a girl, tugging with all her weight at her mother's wrist-her mother, this was her mother, and anybody could have seen that. The woman gave them a blank look. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”

Bridger said something then and for a moment it seemed to immobilize her: “Is Dana here?”

The child kept tugging, chanting “Mommy, Mommy,” and something else Dana couldn't read, and the woman's face changed in that instant, the eyes retreating, lips hardening round the bitter savor of the lie. “No,” she said, “you must have the wrong house.” She glanced away to shoot her daughter an admonitory look and then came back to them. “There is no one of that name here.”

Two

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN they asked for me? By “name”?”

He'd just come through the front door, feeling harassed, his shirt soaked under the arms, and he hadn't had a drink yet or anything to eat either and the first thing she said to him was that somebody had been there looking for him. That snapped him to attention, all right. That froze him. Right there in the front hall, the three white plastic bags of takeout Chinese dangling from his fingertips and the unread newspaper pinned to his chest. He'd spent the better part of the afternoon and well into the evening hassling over things, the little details that prick you like multiple beestings till your flesh is scored and bleeding and you barely have the energy or will to do what you have to do-like take three carloads of Natalia's clothes and accessories to the storage unit in Larkspur she'd insisted on renting and FedEx six cardboard cartons of dresses, handbags, shoes and kiddie toys to Sandman's place in Croton-and now she'd sprung this on him. He stood there, stupefied.

She was wearing her martyred look, the look she'd put on two nights ago and hadn't taken off since, the savage dark strokes of her eyeliner crushing the life out of her eyes, her mouth set in a permanent pout, her nostrils flaring with self-pity. “No,” she said, “not you,” throwing it over her shoulder as she turned away from the door, padded across the room on bare feet and flung herself down on the couch that was strewn with the chaos of her packing. “Not you,” she repeated in a withering voice. “Da-na. They want Da-na.”

For two days and nights it had been going on like this, the aftermath of his confession a rain of ashes, the village gone and all the people in it, no-man's-land, and he'd had it. Enough. Enough already. Before he knew what he was doing he'd dropped the bags to the floor-and he didn't give a shit if the war wonton soup leaked into the Szechuan scallops and leached right on through to the carpet and if the carpet was ruined and the floorboards underneath and everything else all the way on down to the goddamn basement-and he was there and he had her by the arm, all the rage in him concentrated in the grip of the five fingers of his right hand. “Don't fuck with me,” he said, low and hard, tuning his voice to the register of violence the way he'd learned to do when he was inside, when people were holding their breath and listening and the whole place went suddenly quiet. “You just tell me, you understand? No more of this shit.”

She looked alarmed-scared-her eyes flaring up and then dwindling down to nothing, and that made him feel bad, but not enough to loosen his grip. He jerked her arm, shook her like one of the big fifty-pound sacks of flour stacked up on the shelves in the back room at Pizza Napoli. She didn't cry out. Didn't protest. She said, “A man and a woman. For you, they ask for you.”

Still he held her and he could feel the pressure beating at the sclera of his eyes as if it was too much to contain, as if it would all blow out of him like spew. “How old?” And when she tightened her mouth, a second's hesitation, he jerked at her arm again. “I said, how old?”

“You are leaving a mark.” Her voice was cold, distant, as if she were alluding to an arm that was attached to someone else in another apartment altogether. He became aware then of the constricted burst of cartoon voices emanating from Madison's room, a sudden crazed drawn-out cackle of a laugh, crepitating music. He let go. Natalia gave him a look of resentment, as if he were the one at fault. She wouldn't rub at her arm-she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She was going to suffer. She was a martyr. “The man maybe twenty-five, I don't know,” she said finally. “The woman thirty. Tall, pretty. Blue jeans she was wearing and a tan jacket from bebe, one hundred and thirty-nine dollars on special sale. Okay?”

“They weren't selling anything? You're sure, right? They asked for me by name, not 'Mr. Halter' or 'the man of the house' or anything like that?”

In one swift sure movement she snaked away from him, sliding over the arm of the couch and spinning to her feet like an acrobat. Her eyes lashed at him. She clenched her fists at her sides. “What do you tell me-for months, what do you tell me? You want me to be Mrs. Halter. Mrs. Halter! And who am I to be now? Mrs. Nobody? Yes?”

He took a step toward her and she backed up against the double doors that gave onto the deck. “Shut it,” he said. “Just shut it. We leave in the morning, first thing. So get this shit”-and here he snatched an armful of clothes from the couch-“in your fucking suitcase and get your fucking suitcase in the fucking car, you hear me?”

“Oh, I hear you,” and she was rubbing her arm now, ““Mister” Martin. If that is even your name. Is that your name? Huh, “Bridger?” Is that your name?”

He had no time for this. “A man and a woman,” two nouns that beat in his head with the force of revelation. They knew what he looked like, knew where he lived. They could be out there now, watching him. He looked past her, through the windows and out beyond the deck where the colors were neutering down toward night and the water had blackened along the gray fading shore. Something released in him then-“he had no time”-just as Madison appeared in the doorway calling “Ma-ma” in a piteous attenuated voice and both of them turned to her. “It's all right,” he heard himself say. “I got the food. It's right here. Right here in the hallway.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, an interval of peace, lingering, the candles lit, wine poured, the chopsticks at their lips, and Madison, revitalized, telling them the plot of a movie she'd seen about a dog and a cat on a cross-country trek, when the doorbell rang. If he'd allowed his internal motor to idle over dinner-and he didn't care how crazy things got, dinner was sacrosanct, because if you didn't sit down over dinner you weren't even civilized-now it revved suddenly, so suddenly he didn't even know how he'd got through the double doors and out onto the deck, ready to drop down a story into the flower bed below. “I'm not here,” he called to Natalia, slipping a leg over the rail, “you never even heard of me.” And he eased himself down till he was dangling by his arms, then dropped to the ground.

It took all of sixty seconds, legs and arms pumping, and he was around front, letting the fronds and tendrils of the vegetation conceal him. There were two figures on the doorstep-a man and a woman-and Natalia was just opening the door. The man-he was in his twenties, soft-looking, with spiked hair, a two-tone jacket and the oversized black jeans the street punks and club aficionados affected-was the one who spoke up, because the woman (and here it hit him: “Dana Halter,” she was “Dana Halter,” in the flesh) just stood there as if she'd been molded out of wax. And she “was” something to look at. She had Natalia's hair, thick and dark, though it twisted out and away from her scalp and hung loose over the collar of her tan jacket and she was taller, slumping her shoulders awkwardly because this was no fun for her. Somebody had assumed her identity, fucked with her life, and she was slumping her shoulders because she was embarrassed by the whole thing. But not so embarrassed she was about to just give it up and let the credit card companies and the insurance people sort it out. That gave him pause. Who was she? Why was she doing this to him? Was it payback, was that what she wanted? And the guy, Bridger-what was it to him?

“You again?” Natalia's tone was peevish, hard. “I told you. I already told you.”

“Frank Calabrese,” the man said. “Is Frank here?”

“Who?”

He repeated himself. His voice took on a pleading quality. “Look, we've been victims of a crime-or she has.” He pointed to the woman. “My fiancée. She-somebody stole her identity. We're looking for Dana Halter. Or Frank Calabrese. You sure he's not here? Frank?”

From where he was hiding, crouched in the bushes, and he would not go down on one knee and stain a good pair of Hugo Boss twill trousers for nothing, he made sure to take a clean mental snapshot of these two, because they were going to pay for this-he was going to make them pay, both of them-and that was a promise.

The light in the entryway shone weakly, casting a jaundiced glow over the little gathering on the doorstep. Natalia's face hardened. She looked ready to do battle, and that was a good sign-she was on his side, at least, and he felt in that moment that she was going to stay there, no matter what he wound up telling her. “Listen,” she said, her voice gone higher now, pinched and querulous, “there is nobody of this name, no Da-na, no Frank, nobody. This is not the correct house, understand?” A car pulled into the lot-the cream-colored Lexus that belonged to the Atkinsons, in one-eleven-and for a moment he felt his pulse leap as the headlights swept the bushes and then died. “If you come here to this house again,” Natalia was saying, her face a sallow over-laid mask in the rinse of yellow light, “to, to “discommode” me and my daughter, I will call the policeman.”

“Yeah, you do that,” the guy snarled, trying to tough it out, but this was the same voice that had come at him over the phone and it had nothing behind it, nothing at all, and the door slammed and the night went quiet but for the solitary receding footsteps of Rick Atkinson on the gravel walk.

And then the strangest thing: the two figures stayed there on the doorstep a long moment, conferring, but without saying a word. Their hands-they were working their hands like ghostly shrouded puppets, and it took him a moment to understand. They were deaf. Or she was deaf. She was the one who hadn't spoken and so here she was juggling her hands as if she were molding something out of the air and passing it to him and then he juggled it and passed it back. It was so unexpected, so private and intimate, that Peck lost all consciousness of the moment. He felt like a voyeur-he “was” a voyeur-and his rage at what had just taken place cooked down into a sort of wonder as he watched them walk down the steps and up the path to the parking area. He was going to leave it at that-they were going, that was enough, and by morning he'd be gone too and all this would be behind him-but he recovered his wits in time to slip out of the shadows and follow them. Just to see what they would do next.

Somehow they'd traced him to the condo, but what did that mean? He wasn't Dana Halter anymore, he wasn't Frank Calabrese. “Frank Calabrese”-that gave him a chill. How in Christ's name did they get hold of that? But still, even if they called the cops and the cops came-a remote possibility-nothing would happen, or at least not immediately. Where was the proof? He'd deny everything, act bewildered. And then, if he had to, incensed. The cops could see just by looking at him, by the way he was dressed, by the way he held his ground at the door of his three-quarters-of-a-million-dollar luxury condo, that they were out of their league. These two must have known that. But then what were they doing-playing amateur detective? Looking to run him down, confront him, settle this outside the law? For all he knew they could have a gun. Anybody could have a gun, the rangiest no-chin kid on the street, the old lady pushing a shopping cart, housewives, mothers-guns were the currency of society, and he, personally, wanted nothing to do with them, especially not on the receiving end.

The shadows played to him. He stayed out of sight, following the scrape of their shoes on the gravel path, watching their silhouettes bob against the hard fixed umbrella of light opening out of the pole at the far end of the lot. He saw them juggle their hands again when they reached their car-a black Jetta, California plates-and then they were speaking aloud, but he couldn't make out what they were saying, her voice blurred and thumping at the syllables as if she had a blanket over her head, his voice blending with hers in a way that made them both indistinct. After a while, they climbed into the car and the doors slammed with two soft detonations, one on the tail of the other.

And what was he thinking? He was thinking he could just step out of the bushes and lay the guy out, break him up, and her too, some applied discouragement to end it right here. But no, that wasn't the way. The way was just to cut his losses and move on. He still had Natalia, he still had money-and a new Mercedes S500 in Bordeaux Red. Peterskill wasn't Mill Valley, maybe, but he'd missed the leaves changing in the fall, snow for Christmas, all of that, and it wouldn't be so bad, not once he got settled. Plus there'd be Florida, Florida in the winter, and they had this whole trip ahead of them with nothing to do but see the country and kick back and enjoy themselves.

For a long while he crouched there in the bushes, watching the back end of the car, letting his mind run-Natalia would be in a state, no doubt about it, and there'd be no rest at all, not till he got her in the Mercedes and pulled the door shut behind him. The story, as it was evolving in his head, the one he would refine at length as they rolled cross-country, had to do with his bankruptcy, the failed restaurants, a fictitious name to smooth things out so he could track his investments, and yes, of course they were going to keep the condo for a summer place, no need to pack the dishes, towels, cutlery, and did she really think he was going to leave his wine cellar behind? He put a fist down in the wet to ease the pressure on his knees. There was a smell of rankness, of knife-shaped leaves and eucalyptus buds going over to rot. Across the lawn, up against the buildings, a bank of sprinklers started up with a hiss of released air. And then, finally, the Jetta's brake lights flashed and the engine turned over and he watched the car back out and glide across the lot to pass on into the black grip of the night.

When he got out of prison he didn't spend a whole lot of time dwelling on his hurts and sorrows, on what could have been and what Gina had done to him and all the wasted effort and sweat and blood he'd put into Pizza Napoli and Lugano or the fact that he was bankrupt and an ex-offender who didn't even have his silver Mustang anymore because he'd sold it and everything else he owned to pay his fish-faced lawyer. No, he was too wise for that. His wisdom had been accumulated through the twelve-ton nights in his bunk and the zombie days doing food preparation and staying out of trouble-and he had to work hard at that. Had to work to rein himself in. Dwell deep. Control the rage that beat in him like a hammer every minute of every day. Because there were some very twisted people inside and the sole meaning and extent of their lives was to fuck with you, and to respond in kind was a lock on extending your sentence. He'd heard the stories. And he put his head down and counted the days off the calendar and when push came to shove he let his hands speak for him, hard and fast, so fast nobody saw it coming and if some dickhead had to go to the infirmary with a pair of sausage eyes and a broken nose, it was nothing to him. He wasn't like the rest of them-of all the put-upon victims of circumstance in the place he was the single one who really truly didn't belong because he hadn't done anything anybody else wouldn't have done in his place and there was no way he was going to complicate things by letting people get to him. That was the beginning of wisdom.

And then there was Sandman. The College of Sandman.

Sandman had been around. His most recent infraction had, regrettably, involved a certain degree of forcible persuasion, which was why he'd been locked up here amongst the violent offenders. As Peck had. The rest of the inmates, to a man, were losers, the kind of scumbuckets and degenerates who deserved what was coming to them-after a year inside Peck felt like a Republican: lock them up and throw away the key-but Sandman was different. He was educated. He believed in things-the environment, clean air, clean water. The man could go on for hours about restoration ecology or the reintroduction of the wolf and how capitalism had sucked up all the resources of the world just to spit them back out as hair dryers-he had a real thing for hair dryers-and greenback dollars. Six-three, tattooed over most of his body, with a physique honed in the weight room, Sandman, who wasn't much older than he was, showed him the way. “You know how they say, 'Be all you can be'? In those Army recruiting ads? Well, I say, 'Be anybody you can be.'”

He was talking about the Internet. He was talking about the greed of the credit card companies, online auto loans, instant credit, social security numbers skimmed at the fast-food outlet and the gas station and up for sale on half a dozen sites for twenty-five dollars per. He was talking about Photoshop and color copiers, government seals, icons, base identifiers. The whole smorgasbord. “Be anybody you can be.”

Two hundred dollars. That was the gate money they gave you when you walked out the door after eleven and a half months of chopping cabbage, dicing onions and sucking up the reek of the grill, burgers, dogs, sloppy Joe on a bun, strip steak that was like jerky softened in water and then jerked all over again. Most of the morons blew the whole two hundred the first day on women and drugs and then they were out on the street trying on one scam or another and the probation officer just begging for a chance to send them back up. But not Peck, not William Peck Wilson.

He went straight back to Peterskill-to the office park on Route 6 where the orthopedists and urologists and pediatricians had their offices. Out back were the Dumpsters. It took him maybe an hour, slinking around like an immigrant bagging cans for redemption, and he had what he wanted: a sheaf of discarded medical forms, replete with names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers. Then he sat in a bar over a scotch and made a phone call to Dudley, the busboy, because he needed two things: a ride and a connection. Dudley, he reasoned, was the very man to hook him up with a false ID because Dudley had been clubbing since he was sixteen in a state where the drinking age was twenty-one, and he wasn't disappointed. For less than half his gate money, Peck was able to get himself a social security card and driver's license, with color photo, in the name of one of the patients at A&O Medical, and after that it was easy. He opened a checking account with the remaining hundred dollars and started writing checks for merchandise, which he turned around and sold for cash, installed himself in a hotel and applied for Visa and American Express cards. Once the cards arrived he took a cab out to the local Harley dealer. He'd always wanted a Harley, ever since he'd seen “Easy Rider” on TV as a kid, and Sandman had stoked him on the idea during their late-night fantasy excursions, a whole vista opening up in the shadows, blooming like a radiant perfect flower, the vision so intense he could feel the wind in his hair and see the sun spread like liquid gold across the road in front of him.

The dealer was a fat-faced longhair with what they called a hitch in his git-along, wearing a leather Harley jacket over an embroidered white shirt and some sort of racing medallion dangling on a cord from his throat. He was clueless, absolutely clueless. And Peck Wilson sat down with him and neatly signed all the paperwork in his new name, the credit references sterling, the bike-an Electra Glide in black with the Harley logo a sweet blaze of red on the swell of the fuel tank-being prepped even as they ran each other a line of bullshit about unholy speeds and wrecks and wild men they'd known, and then he swung a leg over the thing, fired it up with an annunciatory roar and blew on down the road and out of town. For good.

It wasn't quite dawn yet, the stars gone a shade paler in the eastern sky and Mount Tam to the west still an absence in the deep slough of dark and fog. Nothing had been moving fifteen minutes earlier when he'd backed out of the garage for a run to the coffee shop, and now, as the heavy wooden door slapped shut behind him, he eased himself out of the car with the cardboard tray-the same stuff they made egg cartons out of, and how was it he'd never noticed that before? Balanced there, in the molded slots, were two large double lattes and a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a white paper bag of assorted croissants and half a dozen éclairs to glut Madison into a sugary road-enhanced daze. She didn't travel well, and that was going to be a problem, but Natalia had spent a couple hundred bucks on coloring books and a miniature farm set and videos for the TV monitor built into the back of the seat.

The coffee was hot, the croissants still warm, but instead of going right upstairs with them, he set the cardboard tray on the hood of the car and eased open the side door next to the garage. For a long moment he stood there, watching, listening, taking in the cold rich damp scent of the sea for the last time. And then, just to satisfy himself, he took a quick stroll through the lot, checking the cars that sat inert under the thin skin of the dew. He was calm, breathing easily, feeling optimistic about what lay ahead, though he hated having to leave-hated being forced out, hated the miserable interfering sons of bitches who'd come after him and turned everything upside down-and when he'd gone through the lot, he walked the gravel path all the way round the perimeter, the mist (what was it Madison called it? — the breath of the bay) rising up to envelop him and let him go again.

Natalia was perched on the edge of the couch, in a green velvet suit jacket, skirt, stockings, heels, waiting for him. She was applying her makeup-she never went anywhere, not even down to the corner store for a box of crackers, without her makeup-when he came through the door. She didn't smile. Didn't even look up from her compact. “Madison is still sleeping,” she said.

He set the tray down before her like the offering it was. “Good. Maybe I can just carry her out to the car and she won't wake up till we get to Tahoe, what do you think?”

She didn't answer. He'd packed everything the night before-early into the morning, actually, and he was exhausted, looking forward to the hotel, the fresh sheets, room service, the blissful anonymity-and he noticed with a tick of satisfaction that the new matching overnight bags, Natalia's and Madison's, had been set by the door. The hassling was over, the pouting, the arguments, the tears, the pleading and the demands, and the new phase was about to begin. They were minutes from being out of here, turn the key and never look back.

“I got her hot chocolate,” he said, “the kind she likes, from the bakery? And éclairs. For a special treat.”

Natalia was not the sort of mother to buzz over a child's sugar intake. To her mind, whatever you could squeeze out of a glutted overblown capitalistic society was a good in itself, and éclairs were the smallest expression of it. A look for him now, above the mirror. “Yes,” she said, faintly amused, conciliatory, “that is very nice. You are a very nice man”-and he could see she wanted to speak his name, wanted to say “Da-na,” but checked herself. She bent forward to remove the plastic lid of the takeout cup. “This is the double latte?”

“They both are.”

She brought the cup to her lips, the white foam clinging like drift to the waxen sheen of her lipstick before her tongue melted it away. The simple animal satisfactions, sugar, cream, caffeine. He reached for his own cup. The smell of coffee, reminiscent and forward-looking at the same time, filled the room. “Very nice,” she concluded, the fingers of one hand probing at the neck of the confectioner's bag even as she sipped at the latte and gave him a glossy uncomplicated smile.

They were complicit. He felt gratitude for that, for what she was giving up for him, for her trust and faith, and he swore to himself in that moment that he'd do everything in his power to live up to it. Easing himself down on the back of the sofa, he ran a hand over the side of her face, caressing an ear, letting her hair sift through his fingers. “I am,” he said. “I am a nice guy.” And he meant it.

The coffee was still warm in the pit of his stomach when he lifted Madison out of her bed and carried her down to the car. She'd folded herself up in the fetal position, her thumb in her mouth, hair fallen across her face in a silken swirl, and he took the blankets and bedding with her, one big bundle, the warmth rising from the furnace of her, her pupils roaming beneath the lids in dreamtime, and how could he not think of Sukie, of his own daughter, back in Peterskill and as remote from him as an alien on another planet? As he laid Madison across the backseat and folded the blankets over her bare feet, he had a fleeting picture of the two of them together, the two girls, at the park-at Depew Park, in Peterskill-running hand in hand through the dandelions and the long amber grass, white legs flashing in concert.

It was a mistake to go back to Peterskill, he knew it-he'd known it all along. But it sang to him in his blood-it was what he knew-and his daughter was there. And Sandman. There was a house in Garrison, up in the woods and with a view of the Hudson, late nineteenth century, stone, with hand-hewn beams, remodeled in what Sandman called the prevailing bourgeois fashion and dernier cri of consumer convenience, and it was his for the taking, fifty-five hundred a month with an option to buy, Sandman contributing the deposit and talking up the owners, who were retiring to Florida but not yet entirely sure they wanted to give up the house for good, the credit check done and the papers just waiting there for Bridger Martin to blow into town and affix his signature. That was all to the good, and after vagabonding around the country on a nice extended vacation, it would be a relief to get there and start over-the schools “were” good and Natalia could shop till she dropped in Manhattan. He wouldn't want to hit any of the old haunts, though, wouldn't want to run into anybody, even his mother-especially her. Or Gina. It wouldn't do to have people calling him Peck, not anymore. But Garrison was the next town up the line and he figured he'd be spending most of his time in the City, anyway, and with Sukie it was just a matter of hooking back up with the lawyer and getting those Sunday visits quietly arranged again. He was just “Dad” to her, not Peck or Dana or Frank or Bridger, just “Dad,” and no one the wiser. Or maybe that was a dream. Maybe the cops would be waiting for him at McDonald's, because why wouldn't Gina sell him out, why wouldn't her mother?

“You are ready?” Natalia slid into the seat beside him. She was wearing a pink visor with a designer logo that had probably cost fifty bucks, fifty bucks at least. When she saw he was looking at it, she said, “For travel. For the sun. Is there not sun in Las Vegas?”

“Yeah,” he said, distracted, “yeah, there is. Good thinking.” He flicked the remote for the garage door and the pallid light flooded in. He was thinking of what they were leaving behind, of how everything, from his knives to his saucepans to the Viking convection oven and the new microwave, would occupy their niches until the place was sold and everything the new owners didn't want or couldn't use was dumped in the trash. No regrets, he told himself as he started up the car-one of the finest production cars in the world, in the history of the world-and backed out into the morning.

What he didn't notice-what he failed to notice because he was still there, upstairs, roaming the uninhabited rooms of the condo, lingering in his mind over all the dispensable things they'd accumulated and left in their wake-was the black Jetta, pulling out behind him.

Three

HE'D FALLEN ASLEEP, couldn't help himself, so exhausted he might as well have been drugged, and when he woke the side of his face was pressed up against the window of the car and Dana was clinging to him like a spare set of clothes, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized with his own. There was a faint gray infusion of light. Nothing moved. The yellow lamp at the end of the lot was a blur, perched somewhere in intermediate space, the fog wiping away everything else. His left arm had gone numb where he'd slept on it, and his shirt felt damp and gummy, the price of sleeping in the car. Which smelled stale, as if they'd been living in it for months and not just overnight, and he wondered about that, about the odors of confinement, and for a moment he closed his eyes and the car was a bathyscaphe dangling over an abyss in the dark canyons of the sea, the twisting shapes of the deep fish, the wolf fish and coelacanth, passing in review. Then he opened them again on nothing, on a seep of grayness, and thought to check his watch.

Slowly, with exaggerated care-no reason to wake her yet-he extricated his dead arm and brought his wrist into view. He wasn't surprised particularly to see that it was just before six in the morning-a horrendous hour, an hour he encountered maybe two or three times a year when he lost his head partying with Deet-Deet or Pixel and fell into the old ineluctable videogame trance-but he did feel just the slightest tic of irritation with the fact that he wasn't in a bed in a motel sleeping till noon, noon at least. He'd been the one for giving it up the night before-they had the wrong condo; the guy had moved or died or been jettisoned into outer space-but Dana had been insistent. Even as he was wheeling out of the lot, bent on finding a place to eat and a motel with cable, she was brandishing her worn file folder, inside of which were the affidavit from the San Roque courthouse and the faxes with the thief's police record and photo. “This,” she said, spitting it out, “is all we need. Show this to the police and we've got him.”

“Right, but we have to find him first,” he'd said, exasperated, but still turning his face to her so she could see him form the words. “And when we find him, then what? Where are the cops? You think they'll just happen to be driving by?”

“I dial 911. As soon as I see him. I dial 911 and say there's a crime in progress, a-a burglary, okay? A crime in progress.”

“And then what?”

“Then I show them this”-the folder-“because isn't this a crime? In progress? Isn't it?”

They were out on the main road by then, the headlights of the oncoming cars illuminating her face in flashes, as if they were back under the strobe at Doge and he was seeing her for the first time. For a moment, he felt himself slipping into nostalgia, into tenderness-she'd never seemed more beautiful, her eyes struck with light, her lips parted with the onrush of her rhetoric, her face held aloft and glowing in the excelsior of her hair, like a gift in a box-but he resisted it. He was hungry, tired. He was looking for a place to eat, nothing fancy, a burger, anything. She was right, he knew it, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet, not until he had something in his stomach, anyway.

“What are you doing?” she demanded then. “Giving up?”

A fast-food place loomed up on the left and he flicked on the blinker and hit the gas to spin into the lot ahead of the oncoming traffic. All in one motion he nosed into a parking space, jammed the lever into park and swung round to face her. “No,” he said, “I'm not giving up. I'm just hungry, that's all. It's been a long day, don't you think? Can't we just sit here for half an hour and have a Big Mac and a Filet o' Fish-no, no, forget the calories, forget the cholesterol and trans fats, let's just gorge for once-and think things out? Because we're close, I know it, you're right, and we can nail this bastard, absolutely, but let's just take a minute to regroup, okay? And eat?”

He didn't know how much of that she got-he never did know with her, but he was always conscious of his lips and his tongue and he liked to think they were communicating. That was the case now. They sat there a moment under the yellow-and-red glare of the big M and he watched her flip the hair away from her face with a quick thrust of her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Her voice went low, so low it was as if she'd just been punched in the stomach. “She was lying, you know.”

And so here they were.

They'd stocked up on grease and nitrates and sugar, Dana so anxious she was lifting right out of her shoes while he ordered and paid and then she looked at him as if he were a pedophile when he told her he had to use the men's-“What if we miss him?” she signed. “What if he's coming in right now? Right this minute?” In the car, the brown bag in her lap, her fish sandwich as yet untouched, she kept saying, “You know he's in there, you know it-or wherever he is, he'll be back-and what we need to do is just sit there all night, all day tomorrow, all week if necessary, and keep the binoculars on those windows till we see him for sure. Positive identification, isn't that what they call it? And that's it. We see him, he's”-one of her favorite expressions-“dead meat.”

But they hadn't seen him. The curtains were closed when they got back-they hadn't been gone more than half an hour, forty-five minutes-and the curtains stayed closed all night long, though the lights had burned late, very late. So late they were the last thing Bridger remembered, seared into his consciousness like the afterimage of a whole raft of flashbulbs going off simultaneously. He glanced up now. The fog bellied, drifted, pressed and released. The cars were dark humps, the trees erased. Above and beyond him, cutting perfect rectangles out of the shadow of something larger, were the windows-Frank Calabrese's windows-still lit.

When finally the garage door became visible beneath the glow of the windows and finally-suddenly, abruptly-it began to rise in silent levitation to reveal the rear lights of the car glowing there like a visual affront, he thought he was dreaming. It was like a trompe l'oeil, the flat plane of the door there one minute and effaced the next. Was he seeing things? But no, there was the back end of the car, a Mercedes, dealer plates, the exhaust leaching from the tailpipe to vanish in the fog, and now the double punch of the brake lights-and the thing was moving, backing out. He shoved Dana, hard. Pushed her from him and took hold of her face in both his hands, working the swivel of her delicately jointed neck as if it were some instrument he'd found and calibrated, as if it were his: “Look,” he was saying, “look.”

Her hair, her eyes, the sourness of sleep on her breath-none of it mattered. She was there instantaneously, up out of the depths, with him. Her body tensed and she was sitting upright, staring into the mist, her mouth gone slack in concentration. And then, instinctively, she sank down in the seat-and her hands were on him, pulling him down too, her voice blunted and featureless, forced into use before she was ready: “It's him.”

The Mercedes had pulled out now, the rear wheels swinging to the left as the driver brought the car around, and there was a figure at the wheel, indistinct behind the windshield and the tatters of the fog, and was it a man? Was it him? Bridger was transfixed. He was sunk so low in the seat his chin was on a level with the armrest, adrenaline surging, hide-and-seek, and then the car righted its course and sliced up the drive in the silence of dreamtime and there he was-unmistakable-the thief, the son of a bitch, his chin cocked, eyes fixed on the road ahead, and the woman, the liar, beside him. For a moment Bridger was frozen there, watching the taillights lift and dip over the speed bumps, and then Dana's hand was on his wrist and her voice was hammering at him in all its weird unmodulated hyperventilating urgency: “Start-the-car-start-the-car!”

Already the brake lights were vanishing in the fog. His hand trembled at the ignition. Once, twice, then the engine turned over and he slammed the thing into reverse, lurched out of the spot and forced it into drive even as he jerked at the wheel and reached for the lights-but her hand was there, her face looming into his field of vision: “No, no-no lights, no lights!”

There wasn't any traffic, and that was a good thing, because he was so intent on the taillights ahead of him he didn't even give a glance as he swung out of the drive and onto the blacktop road. He hit the gas. The wheels spun and grabbed with a chirp, and there was that familiar feeling of the headlong rush, the g-forces, the sudden heaviness in the flesh. Two red spots. He was chasing two red spots. The fog parted, jumped and swayed and gave up its substance, and then it closed in again, and he was having trouble gauging where the road gave way to the shoulder, to the ditch running alongside it, and that would be something, wouldn't it, to veer off the road and blow a tire, break an axle, ram a tree-a whole forest? She was saying something, the words garbled with her excitement, and her hands were moving in frantic semaphore, but it was all he could do to keep going, no lights, no lights, the two red spots his only means of orientation.

The road swept round to the right, then a hairpin to the left, and the lights vanished and came back again. “Stay back!” Dana was saying. That was what it was: “Stay back!”

His own voice was strangled with the tension, and his tone-the abruptness of it, the quick snap and release-startled him. “I am, for shit's sake. What do you think I'm doing?” And then, the wheel riding through the clench of his fingers: “I can't see. Shit. Fuck. You want to wind up in a ditch?”

But then the taillights dilated suddenly, right there, right there ahead of him, and his foot slammed at the brake-it was a stop sign, a stop sign emerging fuzzily from the mist, and the man in the Mercedes was observing the law, full stop, though there wasn't another car on the road-and here was Dana, unbelted and lurching forward like a loose sack of groceries. The sound of her head striking the windshield was like a thunderclap, an explosion. He heard himself curse even as the wheels locked on the fog-slick pavement and the car spun across the road, the taillights of the Mercedes moving away now, dwindling, and he wanted to say “Are you all right?” but she wouldn't have heard him, anyway.

The car was running. They were on the road-in the wrong lane, maybe, but on the road. His eyes swiped at her and he saw the blood there, just beneath her hairline, a fresh wet shock of it, but his foot was on the accelerator-he couldn't help himself-and she, clapping both palms to her head so he couldn't see anything of her eyes or the wound either, let her voice jerk free: “Just go!”

There were other cars now, dragged forward on chains of light, moving like submarines in a reconfigured sea. The wheel felt heavy in his hands. There was the muffled hiss of the tires, his heart in high gear still, a pair of yellow fog lights glowing in the rearview, the Mercedes just ahead. He must have asked Dana twenty times if she was all right-did she need a doctor, should he take her to the hospital-but she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the back end of the Mercedes. She was belted in now and she'd dug a T-shirt out of her bag and pressed it to the wound at her hairline; when he glanced at her, all he could see was that shirt, and it wasn't white any longer. On the inside of the windshield, where her head had hit, a crystal star had formed, a thin tracery of lines radiating from its center in rays of prismatic light. He took one hand from the wheel and tugged at her knee till she turned her face to him. “You're bleeding,” he said. “The shirt is full of blood.”

Her voice wafted to him as if from a great distance, the tires hissing, the wipers beating time: “It's nothing. A bump, that's all.”

“A bump? Didn't you hear me? You're bleeding.”

“We can't stop now,” she said, turning away from him, and that was that. Discussion over. For a moment they went on in silence, cars emerging out of the gloom, a Safeway truck humping along in the opposite lane, its hazard lights flashing. And then suddenly she was doing something with her hands, something manic, and the shirt dropped away from the wound, a raw spot there, a slit like a mouth, red and raw. “But look, look,” she was saying, and his eyes jerked back to the road, “his blinker. He's heading for the freeway.”

The wheel was concrete, it was lead, it weighed more than the car itself, but Bridger managed to crank it round and follow the Mercedes up the ramp and onto 101, headed north, the roadway opening up across its lanes to a jerking unsteady convoy of trucks and the sleek shot arrows of pickups and cars homing in on some unseen target in the distance. “Eureka,” she said, her voice charged with excitement. “He's going to Eureka. Or Oregon.”

He said, “Yeah, maybe,” and fell back to allow a battered blue pickup to insert itself between him and the Mercedes.

“He's leaving town. He's running.”

Was he? Had they got to him? Had they put a scare in him?

Suddenly he felt exhilarated, felt as if he could do anything-he was The Kade and this guy, this bad guy, was an extra in a lizard mask, a walk-on, nothing. He gritted his teeth, bore down on the wheel. “This time, brother,” he said to himself, “you're the one going to jail, and we'll just see how you like it.” But then what was the plan? Should they call 911? His mind was racing. What would they say? That there was a criminal loose, that he'd stolen someone's identity-Dana's identity, a young woman's, a deaf woman's-and he was right ahead of them on 101 in a red Mercedes with dealer plates? That he was running. That he was getting away. But where was the proof? They would have to be there when he was pulled over, because if they weren't the cops would just let him go-he wasn't even speeding. This guy-and Bridger could just make him out in silhouette through the back window of the pickup and the intervening lenses of the pickup's windshield and the slanted rear window of the Mercedes-was driving as if he was on his way to church. And maybe he was. Maybe he'd pull off the freeway and amble up to some big glass and stucco cathedral and they'd roll in behind him and have the cops nail him right there when he was down on his knees cleansing his soul. Wouldn't that be ironic? Because that was him, definitely him, and as long as they stayed with him there was no way he was going to get out of this.

“Yeah,” he said, but he was saying it to himself because she wasn't looking, “maybe.”

Before he could think, before he could put together two consecutive thoughts, the Mercedes swung onto Sir Francis Drake and merged onto the 580, heading for the Richmond Bridge. The blue pickup veered off and Bridger fell back as the fog began to dissipate and the Mercedes picked up speed. “Call the cops,” Dana said, “call the cops,” but he flicked his turn signal and moved out a lane, accelerating to keep pace and yet careful not to attract notice-if it came to it the Mercedes would leave them in the dust. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to see where he's going, we have to be there.”

It was only after they'd followed him onto I-80, going east toward Sacramento, that Bridger thought to glance down at the fuel gauge-there it was, right there in front of him, a simple continuum from empty to full, from go to no-go, and at first it didn't register on him. He was dull, he was unfocused, he wasn't thinking of gas-gas was a given. And so it took him a moment, his adrenaline surging, to understand that the needle was pinned all the way to the left; even as he watched, the warning light blinked to life. Empty. He was incredulous. Outraged. And his first thought was to blame someone, to blame her-“Who'd been driving last? Out of gas? He never let his car dip below half a tank, never”-but he put his foot down instead, his heart rattling, and heard himself say, “Quick, give me your phone!”

They shot up on the Mercedes before he let off on the gas, and he saw the back of the thief's head quite clearly, an average head, oblivious beneath its Mr. Hipster haircut, and the thief's shoulders and the long swaying fringe of the thief's wife's hair as she leaned forward to adjust the radio, and he had to make a snatch for Dana's arm because she wasn't hearing him. “The phone! Quick, the phone!” He was one lane out, falling back now, drifting, allowing a silver Toyota to interpose itself between him and the Mercedes, the warning light on the fuel gauge burning a hole in the dash. Then the phone was in his hand and he punched in 911.

It picked up on the first ring and a woman's voice said, “Nine-one-one, can you hold, please?”

“No!” he shouted, but the connection gave back static and the needle held fast and the thief cruised along in the inside lane as if it had been funded, surveyed, poured and striped for his exclusive use. There was an exit coming up fast on the right, gas, food and lodging, a Chevron station showing its badge, and he didn't know what to do. Dana was watching him, her eyes wide with excitement, a thin red furrow of blood leaching out of the black slit at her hairline. “What do they say?”

“Hold,” he shouted. “I'm on hold. And we need gas. Didn't you-?”

“Nine-one-one,” the voice came back at him. “What is your emergency?”

“A thief,” he said, and he was shouting still, he couldn't help himself. “A theft. Identity theft. He's-he stole my girlfriend's, my fiancée's, identity, and he's here, we have him in sight, we-”

Dana's voice, fluting in its highest register, clambered atop his: “A red Mercedes. Tell them a red Mercedes!”

“What is your location?”

At first the question didn't register. Location? “We're in a car,” he said. “On the freeway, the I-80, and he's-we're running out of gas…”

“You're running out of gas?”

“Yes, and he's-”

“Sir, this is an emergency line only. I'm sorry. You're going to have to hang up immediately.”

The connection went dead, the exit blew past. A crazy thought of battering the Mercedes off the road flew in and out of his head, something he'd seen in a movie, a dozen movies, but there was no one to paint out the wires here, and the blood on Dana's forehead was real. “How accurate is this gauge?” he demanded, flinging the phone back at her. “How many miles do we have? Does it go right out or is it just a warning and you get twenty miles or something? Do you know?”

She said, “What?”

He repeated himself slowly, and she said, “You mean the gas gauge?”

He nodded.

She was leaning over him to check the gauge for herself, to get the angle on it, when the Mercedes suddenly swung out into their lane and he was so startled he nearly let go of the wheel. Had he seen them? Was that it? Bridger tapped the brake, drew back until the car behind him sped up to pass. But no, the guy wasn't looking in his mirrors, wasn't doing anything but staring straight ahead except to dip his head toward his wife's, as if they were conversing. He didn't have a clue. They were okay. Everything was okay. Until they ran out of gas.

When it happened, he was almost surprised, expecting miracles, the loaves and fishes, the Hanukkah oil, good triumphing over evil despite the odds. The car suddenly seemed to waver, as if a gale had swept up off the roadway to fling it back, then the engine choked and died and he was coasting to a stop on the shoulder, as powerless as one of the lizard lords of Drex III.

For a moment he just sat there, his hands trembling on the wheel. Beside him, her knees drawn up to her chin as if she were bracing herself against some unseen force, Dana gave him a long slow look that cut right into him. Disbelief was there-that was part of it; he felt it himself. Disappointment. Sorrow. And something else too: disgust. She looked disgusted. With him. He couldn't suppress a quick flare of anger. “What? What is it? You want me to get out and run him down on foot?”

The gash on her forehead had begun to crust over, a yellowish contusion swelling beneath a ragged badge of dried blood. Her hands snapped at him: “No, I want you to get out and get gas.” And then she was pointing to a building in the near distance, on a side street that ran parallel to the freeway, a gas station, Shell, and how far was it? A quarter mile?

He'd already cracked the door-he was already on his way-but he couldn't resist coming back at her because he was as wrought up and furious as she was and how dare she blame him, as if this whole mess was his idea, as if he were the one who should have seen to the maintenance of the car when it wasn't even his in the first place. “What's the point?” he said aloud. “You think he pulled off to wait for us? You think we'll ever see him again? Huh? Do you?”

A truck blasted by, sucking all the air with it, and the car shook on its springs. Her face twisted. Her hands flew at him and she was signing angrily and forcing out the words at the same time: “Shit,” she said, “shit, shit, shit! Just go, you idiot, you jerk, you-” But he was already gone, the door slamming behind him, and he hadn't walked ten feet before he broke into a sprint, as angry as he'd ever been-murderous, crazed-but for all that glad to be out of the car and away from her.

The whole thing-the whole fiasco-cost them maybe twenty minutes, half an hour, he couldn't say. He jogged back to the car with a gallon can that was as heavy and awkward as a cannonball, and then he left a strip of rubber burning on up the freeway to the next exit so he could double back and fill up the car, and he had to ask her for cash because they wouldn't take his credit card and he was in no mood for an argument. And then, without discussion, without debating whether they should call the cops with a description of the car, fill out a police report, drive to the hospital to see if she needed stitches or sit down to some breakfast, some nourishment, bacon, eggs, Tabasco, coffee for Christ's sake, they were hurtling up the freeway, uselessly, hopelessly, and the Jetta hardly rattled at all when he hit a hundred and left it there.

Neither of them spoke. He felt strangely calm, beyond the law, beyond the grasp of the pedestrian drivers in the slow boats of their sedans and convertibles and pickups as he blew by them, shedding their quick startled looks of bewilderment and outrage, hammering the car from one lane to another, using one pedal only. The day was clear now, sun glancing off the hoods of the line of cars and trucks stretching off into infinity, the roadside a blur of golden-brown vegetation and the searing intermittent flashes of aluminum cans hidden in the weeds. He was sweating. His fingers ran loosely over the wheel, attuned to the slightest variation, manipulating it with all the finesse and superior hand-eye coordination he brought to his PlayStation, and what game was he playing now?

Twenty minutes into it, twenty minutes after he'd pinned the accelerator to the floor, she spoke for the first time since they'd left the gas station. And what she said was, “Take this exit-U.S. 50, to Lake Tahoe. He's going to Lake Tahoe, I know it. I feel it. Pull off, pull off!”

Why would he go to Tahoe? He was running, and he was on I-80, heading east-he was going back to New York, obviously. To hide out. To get away from them. They'd been to his house, they'd knocked on his door, and now he was running. “That's crazy,” he said.

Her face floated there, inches from his, and it was clear that she wasn't concerned about reason or logic or even likelihood. “Just do it.”

“Shit, why not just use a Ouija board?”

“Do it.”

He took his foot off the accelerator and it was as if they'd been flying ten feet above the roadway and come crashing to the ground. Everything was moving in slow motion. Cars began to overtake them. Signal lights flashed. People's faces cohered behind planes of glass. He was on a highway, he could see that now, the sun in his eyes, tires rippling beneath him, the air conditioner wheezing in his face. An SUV slid by on the left and two kids, brother and sister, waved to him from the rear window as their dog-some sort of terrier that looked as if it were wearing a false mustache-popped up between them. And then, and he didn't know why, he merged with the traffic heading for Tahoe.

And what was it-luck? Fate? A fine-tuning of the music of the spheres? He couldn't say, and all his life he'd remember the moment, because when they came up on the first exit, right there, as if it had been parked purposely in front of the family restaurant with a FOR SALE sign scrawled on the side window, was a Bordeaux-red Mercedes, dealer plates attached.

Four

MADISON SLEPT the whole way to Sacramento, past San Quentin and over the bridge, through Richmond, Vallejo, Cordelia and Vacaville, the hot chocolate gone cold, the éclairs untouched. He'd kept the music low so as not to wake her-a reggae mix he'd downloaded himself, mostly Marley, built around live and studio versions of “Rebel Music,” a tune he couldn't get enough of-and that was a real onus because he felt so loose and liberated, so purely on fire, and he wanted to make his new top-of-the-line Bose speakers just burn with it. But Madison asleep was infinitely preferable to Madison awake, and he restrained himself. And though he wanted to open the car up, see what it could do, he kept to the inside lane and held it at seventy-there'd be plenty of open road on the way down to Vegas and across the high desert, heading east. He saw himself for a moment then, a snapshot of the future, purpleedged clouds closing over the claws of the hoodoos and the dead dry mountains, Natalia asleep with her head in his lap and Madison silent in back, the beat driving the speakers and the unbridled horses under the hood all pounding in unison. Who was that masked man? Was that a jet or just thunder?

He was feeling good. Better than good. He laid a hand on Natalia's thigh, where the skirt rode up over the dark silk of her stockings. “You know what I want to do, first thing, when we get there?”

She was reading a magazine, her hair thick and shining as she bent over it, her features alive. “What you always want to do?” she said, giving him a coy sidelong glance.

“That's for tonight.” He slid his hand down, gave her knee a squeeze. “No, I want to go straight to the pool and then the hot tub and the sauna, sweat a little, and then get a rubdown-a massage, twin massages, you and me. How's that sound?”

Her smile was for him and him alone, the sharp perfect cut of her lips, down-dwelling and in-dwelling, pure invitation, pure lust. “Will we not eat first?”

“And then cocktails,” he said, running on ahead of her, “early cocktails, maybe even a piña colada or something in the massage room, dress for dinner, of course, best place in town, and then over to Stateline to hit the blackjack tables.”

“And Madison? What of Madison?”

A glance to the rearview mirror: a pickup there, half a dozen cars behind that, spread out across the roadway, a big off-white eighteen-wheeler gearing up to pass on the left. “Oh, hell-I don't care, we'll load her up with videos and get one of those in-hotel babysitters. We're celebrating, right? No expense spared? This is a vacation, baby, and we'll make it last as long as you want-”

“Yes,” and the smile began to fade though she tried to keep it intact, “and that will be when we arrive in a new home, yes, a house in the forest, a house all to ourselves-and Madison is enrolled for her school. That is when the vacation will finish.” She paused, glanced beyond him to the road and addressed her words to the windshield: “It is a nice house?”

“You've seen the pictures, are you kidding me? It's class, pure class. Two acres, it sits on. With a pool. And a built-in bar.”

“Nicer than the condo?”

“You kidding? It's like an estate.”

“And this option to buy?” He watched her lips as she formed the words; she always homed in on the central proposition, infallibly. “You will exercise it if I like the place-“we” will exercise it, yes? In my name too?”

She was making her bid, and he couldn't blame her. He didn't mind. Sure, why not? He'd need to turn over the profit on the condo, anyway, and he had a few things going, this scheme Sandman had outlined for him, for one thing, and he might get lucky at the tables-in fact, he knew he would. He could feel it, the whole trajectory of it, up, up and up. He couldn't lose. And there was the car-he'd get clear of that, pick up another one. Two cars, a new Z-4 for her, and something for him too, not a Mustang, though-and not a Harley either. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, of course. And you're going to love the shopping-there's no place in the world like Manhattan.”

“Not even Jaroslavl?”

“Well, I don't know. Is that the place with twenty million people and Bergdorf's and Macy's and Tiffany's and the Diamond District?”

She was grinning. She shook her head. “I don't think so.”

“Grand Central. The Empire State Building? Le Cirque and Babbo and the Oyster Bar?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head till her hair swung free, side to side, “no, I don't think so.”

He loved this kind of banter, loved to see her like this, all the shrewd compacted energy of her wired to the moment, smiling, loose-limbed, beautiful. And content. Content, for once. He felt his cock stir. He wanted her in bed.

“Tell me about Bergdorf's,” she said.

The Mercedes hummed, the sun painted the highway before him on into the distance. He was aware of Bob Marley, faintly delineating his rage under the sweet fractured musicality of her voice as she shifted from one subject to the next, from Manhattan to drainage problems with the basements of old houses to the cat she wanted to get-a Bengal cat; had he ever heard of the breed? Just four generations out of the wild. A beautiful animal. Exquisite. And maybe she'd get two of them, a male and female, to breed them, and she'd send a kitten to Kaylee and maybe one to her brother in Toronto. FedEx. Did they FedEx live animals?

He felt the pulse of the music, nodded, touched her, kept his eyes on the road. And before he knew it they hit the turnoff for Tahoe.

He didn't realize Madison was awake until he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the etiolated little kernel of her face centered there. She was sitting up, perched on the edge of the seat, straining the limits of the seat belt-which he'd insisted on fastening while she was asleep. There was a red crease on one side of her face and her hair looked like something washed up out of the sea. For the moment she was recalibrating, wearing that dazed and disoriented look of children everywhere when they climb up out of the caverns of sleep, but he knew that it was just a matter of time before the whining started in. He was no child psychologist and he couldn't begin to imagine what it must have been like with the last jerk Natalia was attached to, but the kid seemed excessively needy, a complainer, a whiner. Not at all like Sukie. Sukie was a stalwart. Even as a baby she settled into herself, slept through the night, ate when she was fed and gurgled at the mobile over the crib for hours at a time. She walked early, talked early, knew how to entertain herself, and right from the start seemed to understand that adults sometimes needed a few minutes of peace in their lives. But not Madison. She wanted and wanted and wanted. Just like her mother.

Maybe ten seconds passed before she started in. “Mommy, I have to pee,” she announced, her voice reduced to its doleful essence. Of course she had to pee. He understood that, he was no monster, but he'd been hoping to make it as far as Rancho Cordova, to the hotel there, for lunch, and once he got going he didn't like to stop. And once they stopped she'd be hungry-and, perversely, and just this once, not for éclairs, because they were warm now and mushy-and they'd wind up eating some third-rate roadside crap and he could forget about the filet he'd had on his mind for the past half hour. He cranked the music a notch and watched the road as Natalia swung round in the seat.

“Can you hold it, honey?”

“No.”

“Dana-I mean “Bridger”-got you some” nice éclairs. You want an éclair?"

“I have to pee.”

He was staring straight ahead, absorbing Marley, but he could feel her turning her face to him. “We must stop. Next exit.”

Softly, because he didn't want to spoil the mood, he let out a curse.

“I know,” she said, “but what can we do-wet her pants?”

“Mom-“my”!”

He said nothing, but already he was flipping the turn signal, looking for the next exit, even as Natalia added, “And she will need to eat something.” To Madison: “You want eggs, honey? Scrambled eggs and sausage, your favorite? With ketchup? All the ketchup you want?”

There was no answer, no answer was immediately forthcoming, but the whining struck a new note of urgency and he gave it up, merging smoothly with the line of cars pulling off the highway and into the lot of Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, Open 24 Hours. “Hey, Mister Cop / Ain't got no birth cerfiticate on me now.”

“So,” Natalia said, leaning into him with the sway of the car, her voice rich with satisfaction, as it always was when he did what she wanted him to, “we must forbear your filet mignon in Rancho Cordova-”

“Forgo.”

“Right, forgo. And instead we dine at the family restaurant. How is it you say? No big thing, yes?”

He took the exit ramp maybe a hair too fast and something-a toy-skittered across the dash, struck the window and caromed to the floor at his feet. He gave her a look-he was irritated, despite himself, but he wasn't going to show it. “No big thing,” he said, and he even managed a smile.

It was worse than he'd expected, one of those hokey theme places (wagon wheels on the wall, sepia photographs of prospectors and the hind ends of their mules, waitresses in cowgirl hats and outfits that could have been lifted out of the Dale Evans Museum). Natalia took the kid straight to the restroom while he put in their name with the hostess and then they had to wait fifteen minutes in line with an assortment of copper-haired old ladies and clowns with bolo ties and checked shirts while Madison squirmed and jerked at her mother's hand and fell to the floor and refused to get up because she was hungry, the non-stop chant of “When, Mommy, when are we going to get a table?” rising up out of the forest of old people's legs like the squall of some misplaced sylvan thing that was dying or about to be killed. The buoyancy he'd felt earlier, the high that was compounded in equal parts of relief at getting out of Shelter Bay Village before things went disastrously and irreparably wrong and the anticipation of kicking loose on the road, was gone now. Breakfast on the road was always the weakest link in the culinary chain, a kind of deprivation of the senses that reduced every possibility to a variant on eggs/sausage links/silver-dollar pancakes and maple-colored Karo syrup. It bored him. Made him angry. Even in a decent hotel, where you could get quiche, eggs Benedict, a crab-and-feta omelet, fresh-squeezed orange juice, the meal was still a bore. But this-he looked round him with a sudden cymbal-clang of hate-this was the worst.

“Martin?” the hostess called out, and the line stirred, heads swiveling round, feet shuffling impatiently, and for a moment he didn't realize she was summoning him till Natalia nudged him and he raised his hand like a third grader in the back of the classroom. By the time they were sliding into the booth with its butt-warmed benches and the red Formica tabletop strewn with the refuse of the previous party, he was feeling murderous.

“I want a sundae,” Madison announced, her face composed, eyes wide and unblinking and perfectly serious. “Like that girl.” She pointed to the next booth over, where a whole rat-pack of kids-six or seven of them-dug into various ice cream concoctions while their parents, two interchangeable couples with porcine faces and a lack of style that was nothing short of brutal, roared over their coffee and grease-spattered plates as if they'd been drunk for days.

“No sundae,” Natalia said automatically. “Eggs.”

Madison repeated her demand, her voice pinched higher.

“Shut it,” he hissed, leaning into the table, because you could only take so much shit in this life, one dried and cubed block of it stacked atop another till the whole thing came tumbling down, and he'd been under some pressure lately, he realized that. “And because he realized it, he was able to restrain himself from reaching out for her boneless little wrist and giving it the kind of squeeze that would have opened up a whole new world for her. But he didn't have to get physical-one look, the look he'd laid on Stuart Yan on the courthouse steps-was enough to silence her. It was a look he'd practiced, the don't-fuck-with-me look he'd worn for eleven and a half months at Greenhaven. ”You'll eat what you get."

The compromise was something called Pancakes Jubilee, three rubbery thin wafers of griddle-compacted dough buried under a mound of strawberries and about three feet of whipped cream. Natalia, whose appetite always astounded him, had the Cattleman's Breakfast, four eggs sunny-side up with a sixteen-ounce steak, ranch beans, pico de gallo and a basket of flour tortillas. He had coffee, black.

“Do you not want to try a bite of my steak?” Natalia kept asking him. “Did you not say you wanted a steak? Here, try. It's good.”

He was furious-acting like a child himself, he knew it. “No,” he said, “I don't want your steak. Tahoe. I'll eat in Tahoe. Okay?”

Across the table, Madison wore a beard of whipped cream, whipped cream to her nostrils and beyond. Her eyes were glazed with the sugar fix and the fork was stuck to her hand. Breakfast was over.

Outside, where people stood around on the faux ranch-house porch picking their teeth and grinding mints between their molars, the heat seized him. It must have been a hundred already, though his watch showed just past nine-thirty in the morning. The sun was a hammer. It wanted to take everything down, flatten it right to the ground. There was a smell of incineration, of grease blown out through the kitchen fans, of the kind of death that mummified you before you hit the ground. He watched a crow, its feathers the color of coal dust, dance around something crushed on the pavement as he shrugged out of his sport coat and folded it over one arm. Jesus. How could people stand this shit? How could anybody actually live here? he wondered, tensing up all over again, and no, the coffee hadn't helped, not a bit. He took Natalia by the arm. Down the three bleached wooden steps they went, to the burning lake of the parking lot. Predictably, Madison said, “Mommy, I'm “hot.””

It was then, at that precise moment, that the black Jetta pulled into the lot and he saw the two faces suspended there behind the sunstruck windshield. “A man and a woman.” Everything went silent, the speakers hidden up under the support beams piping out a thin tinny jangle of country guitars, the whoosh of the traffic on the highway, the jet poised overhead. He'd trained himself to stay cool, be cool, to hide the least tic of emotion behind an immobile face and the stark stabbing outraged sheen of his eyes, pure aggression, and he stared right at them, stared hard, though he was scared, afraid they might swing out in front of the restaurant and try to run him down, and spooked on a deeper level too: how in Christ's name did they know he was here? Here, of all places? Even he hadn't known he was going to be here.

Seconds, that was all he had, because the woman-Dana Halter, Dr. Dana Halter-was bent over her cell phone and if the cops stepped in and checked his ID against hers “or his, Bridger's,” there was no hope of talking his way clear of this. Even as he increased the pressure on Natalia's arm, even as she said, “What is the hurry?” and he silenced her with a look, snatched up Madison as if she were an overnight bag and set a brisk pace for the car, it came to him that they must have been hidden somewhere in the lot and followed him when he pulled out of the condo. He cursed himself. He was lax, he was stupid. All of this shit-and he was so wired suddenly it was as if he'd grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable with his bare hands-all of it, all of it, he'd called down on his own head.

But there was the car, a hundred feet away, Madison squirming in his grip, Natalia gone white with the fear that sprang up full-blown out of his frantic headlong urgency, seventy-five feet, fifty, and the two of them were out of the car now, shouting something, brandishing cell phones-both of them, they both had phones, as if Cingular wireless was the supreme force in the universe. “No,” he spat, “no,” as he flung Madison sprawling into the back, jerked Natalia in beside him and slammed the door, “no time”-he meant the belts, the seatbelts-and so what if the buzzer cried out to warn him, and these people, these creeps, were looming up in the rearview, the doors were locked, the engine cranked, and with a flick of the wrist he was out of the parking space, straight ahead, up over the concrete bumper and on into the dirt lot beyond it, heading for the highway in a plume of crushed weed, flying cans and airborne dust.

Strangely, perversely, he found himself worrying about the paint job as he caromed across the vacant lot, thumped through a gully and bore up onto the ramp, cutting off two dickheads in an old hearse with a band logo filigreed across the back panel even as the tires took hold of the pavement and began to sing. The car didn't matter. It was nothing. He'd have to lose it anyway, and soon. There was the blast of the dickheads' horn and then he was right up on the rear end of a Winnebago doing about two miles an hour where the ramp narrowed before merging onto the highway. A glance at Natalia's grim bloodless face, and then his eyes went to the rearview, where the hearse was gunning up on him, horn squalling and the two dickheads stabbing their middle fingers at the windshield. They didn't interest him. What interested him was the black Jetta tearing out of the parking lot and up onto the ramp behind them.

Natalia didn't say a word. Even Madison, rough handling and all, seemed to be holding her breath. Directly ahead of them was the creeping beige, white and lemon-yellow wall of the Winnebago, bicycles, lawn chairs and cooking grills strapped to it as if in some frenzy of reenactment, and right there on their bumper was the hearse. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the ramp fell under the wheels, no room to maneuver on either side because the narrow sweeping arc of it had been cut through rock the color of dried blood, and there were two horns competing now, the Jetta on the bumper of the hearse, arms waving, mouths flung open in rigid oral display. He heard his own voice then, just as the ramp began to broaden out to the highway: “Put your seat belts on.”

What amazed him about it later was the way the Jetta had stayed with him. The hearse fell back as if it were hooked to a chain and the Winnebago was just part of the scenery, but the Jetta came on even as he put his foot to the floor and cut everything else away from him. When he hit a hundred and ten, he was aware of a movement beside him-Natalia, her mouth clamped and her eyes in retreat, sliding in back to cling to her daughter-but the gesture meant nothing, not now. At a hundred twenty the car discovered what it was made for, all those German horses, the Autobahn, “cruising speed.” There was a part of him that knew he was in trouble, knew that they could be punching in 911 and telling the dispatcher anything, that there was a drunk driver up ahead, a reckless driver, a deranged life-endangering criminal in a wine-colored Mercedes with dealer placards that might as well have been flags whipping in the wind, but there was another part, a larger part, that just didn't give a shit, the part that ran on adrenaline and pushed his foot to the floor.

Later, after the Jetta had become a memory and Natalia had run out of breath bitching at him and he'd filled whole cauldrons with qualifications and sophistries and outright lies (Oh, hey, they were bad people, people he'd done a real estate deal with who didn't want to honor their contractual obligations, and didn't she know real estate people were the worst?), after she fell asleep wrapped up in back with her daughter and he eased off the main road at Placerville to take the Gold Country Highway back on up to I-80, he began to think about the immediate future. Tahoe was out, definitely out, and he'd have to ditch the car as soon as he could, but 80 would take him to Reno and from Reno he could find a road south to Vegas-it would be a long drive, a lot longer than he'd counted on, and it would involve some elaborate explanation and days of worship at the altar of her, but it was necessary at this point. He'd had a close call. A learning experience.

That was behind him now. The scenery was improving. He cranked the music, let the wheels roll under him. After a while he found himself singing along, keeping time with the flat of his hand against the dash, the adrenaline slowly draining from his veins even as the road climbed and the trees thickened and the naked faces of the mountains began to catch and shape the light. He hit the accelerator to blow past an RV sleepily towing a car behind it and made himself a promise: there was no way anybody was ever going to find him again.

Five

ANGER DIDN'T BEGIN to describe what she was feeling. It was rage, cold and clear-eyed, unwavering, ecstatic, the rage of the psychopath, the soldier under fire, the wielder of the blade. Never in her life had she felt anything like it, not when she was a child sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table in her witch's black rags and the ghoul-green facepaint she'd spent half an hour on, burning to fly out the door on her broom and go trick-or-treating with her school friends, and her mother making her sit there through ten repetitions of her vowel drill, ten full repetitions, though it was Halloween and she pleaded and spat and stormed up to her room and felt the house shudder with the violence of the door splintering the frame; not when she'd been locked up in the county jail with the drunks and degenerates and no one to listen to her; not when she'd stood in the hallway at the courthouse and watched her lawyer's face go slack as they took her back into custody though she'd been cleared of all charges and everyone knew it was a farce and she could have screamed till the walls came crashing down around them. This was different. This was incendiary.

Just the sight of him, that was all it took. The look on his face, the way he walked, the clothes he was wearing. After all the tension and anticipation, after working herself up so she could barely breathe, after taking it out on Bridger and feeling her stomach clench with loss and hate and frustration, there he was, standing right there in front of them-Frank Calabrese, or whatever his name was-in his pin-striped designer shirt and buffed red leather Docs, his jacket thrown carelessly over one arm, his wife the liar and their kid at his side, and “he” tried to stare “them” down as if they were the ones who'd stolen from him. And then he'd turned his back and ignored them, ignored their shouts and accusations as if he were deaf too-“Thief!” she'd screamed, over and over, bursting from the car and charging across the lot, her arms waving as if she were calling down an airstrike, and she thought they had him, finally had him, because people were beginning to turn their heads and somebody would call the police, she would, Bridger would, and he was trapped there in the parking lot in the unforgiving blaze of nine-thirty in the morning and nothing he could do about it. She felt a thrill go through her. He was doomed. Dead in the water. “Dead meat.”

Yet everything about him, from the sway of his shoulders to the thrust-back arrogance of his face, said it was no trouble at all, no problem, somebody else's affair. He was steady, brisk, steering his numb-faced wife and the kid toward the car with quick efficient strides, for all the world no more concerned than if he were out taking a little exercise after church in the languid hundred-degree heat. She and Bridger were nothing to him, less than nothing, and the thought of it made her seize with hatred. If she'd had a gun, she would have used it. Or she could have. She really believed she could have.

She had something on him, though-evidence, a totem, an artifact. Even as he mounted the cement curb in the Mercedes and took off across the vacant lot, she saw it lying there on the pavement, right where he'd slid into the car and slammed the door behind him. His jacket. Marooned in the rush to escape. Dropped. Forgotten. She was sweating, her heart pounding, already shortening her stride, and she bent without thinking to snatch it up before reversing direction and breaking for her own car with everything she had.

All the while, caught behind the Winnebago as Bridger pounded the horn and she leaned out the window shrieking and gesticulating as if she'd come unhinged and the road opened up and the Mercedes pulled steadily away from them until it was a faint gleam in the distance and then, heartbreakingly, gone altogether, the jacket lay on the floor at her feet. It was there as Bridger swerved in and out of traffic, dialing 911 to shout lies to the dispatcher-“Drunk driver!” he yelled into the phone, “Drunk driver!”-there all the way through the long ascent to South Lake Tahoe while she fixed her eyes on the road, rounding each curve with the expectation of seeing the blinking lights of the highway patrol and Frank Calabrese up against the car with the handcuffs on him. Then they were in the town itself, cruising the streets, scanning the parking lots and back alleys, rolling in and out of motel lots, scrutinizing every red car they came across, and she was so intent on the chase, so wound up in what she was doing, she never gave the jacket a thought. Or the slash on her head either. It was just there, part of the world in its new configuration.

The altitude at Tahoe was 6,225 feet, according to the sign posted at the town limits, and the weather was radically different here. There were streaks of snow on the mountains above the lake, the sky was socked-in and the air coming through the vent felt chilly against her face. Bridger was hunched over the wheel, steering with his wrists, looking beaten. For a long while they said nothing, the car creeping past shops, supermarkets, gas stations, condos, one street after another. “Let's face it, we lost him,” he said finally, his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “He could be visiting a friend in one of these condos, he could be in a casino in Stateline, he could-” He shrugged, said something she didn't quite get. “The license-you know, the dealer plates-do you remember what they said, I mean, the dealer name? I think it was Bob-Something Mercedes?”

“Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW,” she said. “Larkspur.”

He'd put on his thoughtful look. They were going so slowly they might as well have been walking. “Because I was thinking-I mean, this isn't getting us anywhere-we could call Milos and he could maybe check out the dealer and see who bought the car, what name, I mean-”

“I don't want to go back there,” she said, surprising herself. “And besides, he wouldn't use his real name, would he?”

“Get a serial number or something-a vehicle identification number.”

“What good's that going to do?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he said, “What about the jacket?”

The jacket, yes. It was flung at her feet like one of those mats they put down to protect the carpet. She reached for it, smoothed it in her lap: raw silk, in black, with red detailing. A smell of cologne rose to her nostrils, and something else too, something deeper, denser: the smell of him, the smell of his body, his underarms, his skin. “Hugo Boss,” she announced, turning over the label. “Nice to know the bastard has taste, huh? Did you see him,” she said, running a hand through the inside pocket, “the way he looked at us? The balls?” There was something there, something hard-sunglasses, Revo, two hundred fifty dollars a pair. She held them up so Bridger could see.

He gave them a cursory glance and then his eyes jumped suddenly to the mirror-someone must have beeped at him-and he hit the blinker and pulled into a No Parking/No Standing Zone as a little black car, a Mini, shot past them. After a moment, he took the glasses from her and held them at length as if examining some dead thing he'd found under the sink, then clapped them on his face. They were wraparounds, metallic silver. “Yeah,” he said, checking himself out in the rearview, “I hear you.”

She plunged her hand into the outer pocket on the left side and came up with a comb to which a straggle of dense dark hairs adhered, a Sharpie pen that looked unused and a thin wad of tissue. An odd feeling came over her, even as Bridger turned to her and said, “How do I look?” She slid her fingers over the teeth of the comb, lifted it to her nostrils-there was the smell of him again, of his scalp and the shampoo he used, and it was as if she knew him in some elemental way, as if she'd been with him, the violation mutual.

A light rain began to spot the windshield. Bridger's head floated there beside her, but he wasn't Bridger exactly, not with the slit reptilian orbits of his eyes, the reflective lenses slashing at his features, reducing him. “Take them off,” she said.

He swiveled his head and removed the sunglasses, and even as he said, “Is that it?” she dug into the other pocket and came up with a slip of paper, a receipt from Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, and held it up to the light.

“What is it, a credit card receipt? That could be something. What does it say?”

It took her a moment, the print blurred and pointillated, but then it came together, the total, the tax, the account number and the slashing confident signature under the cardholder's name: “Bridger Martin.”

“We have to get rational about this,” he was saying, or at least that was what she thought he was saying. “Rational,” wasn't that it? Of course he might have been talking about “Rashomon,” the Kurosawa film, and for the tiniest sliver of a second she wondered just how the three of them-she, Bridger and the thief-fit into that scenario, with its shifting perspective and deconstructed narrative. She saw Toshiro Mifune, his mouth a rictus of fear and aggression, flailing his sword, and then she was back to Bridger, who was saying something else now, something she was too tired to process.

They were in a nondescript restaurant, fake wood paneling, lights so dim you could barely make out the menu, tuna on rye with a sliver of dill pickle for $9.95 and three dollars for iced tea. It was late in the afternoon now, high summer but wintry for all that, a damp high-altitude gloom hanging over the town as if this weren't California at all, but someplace perennially dreary. Like Tibet. Was Tibet dreary? Her mind was wandering. She was exhausted-and hungry-and here was the tuna sandwich she'd ordered herself in a voice that must have lost all control of the long vowels and those nearly impossible fricatives (a side of french fries) because the waitress had given her the interplanetary stare and she felt like some animal on a leash, but she didn't care: this was her life and there was nothing she could do about it. Not in her present condition. Plus she had Bridger to deal with-she'd dragged him into this, and now he was a victim too “(I don't even have a Citibank card,” he protested, and she imagined him whining, his voice reduced, plaintive, weak). Bridger was upset-she couldn't blame him-but her eyes dropped to the sandwich and shut him out.

He hadn't stopped talking even to draw breath since she'd pulled that charge slip out of the jacket pocket, and what was the term for that? “Logorrhea.” Yes, another SAT word to drill her students with, but she didn't have any students, not anymore. She was wandering, again she was wandering, and she was thinking, unaccountably, of the talk fests they used to have in the dorm at Gallaudet, in Sign mainly, but with people speaking aloud too in a way that was all but unintelligible to a hearie, a kind of sing-along moan that underscored the signs. “Talk talk.” That was what happened when the deaf got together, a direct translation into English-they talked a lot, talked all the time, talked the way Bridger was talking now, only with their hands. Index finger of the four hand at the mouth, tapping, tapping to show the words coming out. “When deaf get together talk talk all the time.” Communication, the universal need. Information. Access. Escape from the prison of silence. Talk, talk, talk.

Bridger's hand was on her wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the tuna sandwich as it moved to her lips. “You're making those noises,” he said.

She looked around her. People were watching. She tried to suppress the impulse, but it was almost unconscious, autonomic, a reaction to stress that most deaf people shared: she was emitting, had been emitting, a soft high-pitched keening sound, as if she were a dolphin washed ashore, and it embarrassed her. Her own throat produced these noises, her own larynx, and she had no control over them. “Sorry,” she said, and signed it too, right hand, palm facing in, the slow circle over her heart.

“You're not listening,” he said.

“I am,” she lied.

He looked away in exasperation, his features pinched, eyes rolling upward, and that made her angry, but she didn't want to make a scene, or any more of a scene than she'd already made with her dolphin noises, so she wiped her face of expression and focused on him. What he was talking about, the gist of it anyway, was that they were both tired and incapable of making a decision at this point (“I'm not going back,” she interrupted him, “and that son of a bitch is not going to get away with this, I swear, even if I have to crawl on my belly-or my abdomen, my abdomen-from here to New York, I'm going to nail him, you hear me?”), and that they needed to check into a motel, get some rest and decide what to do in the morning, because they were just frustrating themselves driving around looking for nothing, for a car that was a hundred miles away by now.

“I found him before,” she countered. “Didn't I?”

“Yeah, I know-the deaf have some kind of ESP, right? And it “was” amazing, I admit it, but you don't really believe in all that, do you?”

“No,” she said.

“Because if you do, maybe you can tell me what this jerk is going to do next, maybe you can visualize it, picture him cruising down the open road with our money in his pockets, free money, everything free-he doesn't have to worry about looking for the cheapest motel in town, does he? No, he's going to stay at the Ritz Carlton, he's going to-”

She set the sandwich down so she could use her hands. “He's Frank Calabrese,” she said, finger-spelling it beneath the words, “and he's going back to New York. And you know what?”

He lifted his eyebrows, leaned in close on the twin props of his elbows so that his face was inches from hers. The waitress, probably nineteen or twenty but so petite and baby-faced she looked more like twelve, darted her eyes nervously at them, and Dana felt distracted. There was a TV mounted on the near wall, ghost figures going through their silent motions. She felt a wave of depression crash over her even as Bridger threw it back at her: “What?”

“There's nothing to discuss. I don't care if I have a hundred nights' sleep in a row, I'm not going to change my mind.” Then she closed her mouth, shot a withering glance round the restaurant, and used her hands exclusively: “Whether you come along or not, I'm going after him.”

They checked into the Gold Country Motel with her credit card-neither of Bridger's was good, both maxed out thanks to Frank Calabrese-and she showered and then stretched herself across the white slab of the queen-size bed and stared at the ceiling like a zombie while Bridger paced back and forth, one hand pinning the phone to his ear while the other swooped, plunged and snatched at the air to underline the specifics of his distress. First he dialed the credit card companies, and then the CRAs, and it seemed to take him forever. She couldn't sleep. Couldn't even close her eyes. Her head throbbed where she'd hit the windshield and she seemed to have irritated something in her left knee when she slammed her way into the car in the parking lot of the restaurant outside Sacramento. At Bridger's insistence they'd stopped at a drugstore and picked up a tube of Neosporin and a package of Band-Aid sport strips, and she'd spent ten minutes dabbing at the wound-it was a purple blotch, like a birthmark, with a crusted gash in the center of it-but it was superficial and it was already healing and she didn't really want to call even more attention to herself by walking around with a shining square flesh-colored patch stuck to her head, so she'd parted her hair and combed it over to at least partially hide the contusion.

At some point, exhausted, she did manage to fall asleep, and when she woke some indeterminate time later, she found Bridger lying unconscious beside her. He was on his back, his mouth open wide, and he was breathing with the ponderous tranquillity of the heavy snorer, though it was nothing to her. She remembered his warning her that he snored when they'd first started sleeping together-other people had complained about it (i. e., girlfriends), but she wouldn't complain, would she? He'd offered up the proposition with a smile and she'd given him the smile back and said that she was afraid she'd just have to tough it out.

She'd pulled the blinds for privacy when they'd checked in, but the spaces between the slats still showed the same insubstantial light she'd fallen asleep to, so unless she'd slept through the night and this was dawn she was looking at, it must have been eight or nine or so. Well past dinnertime. She felt her stomach rumble-“peristalsis,” and there was another word-and realized with a sudden keen apprehension that she was hungry. Starved, actually. She'd been too keyed up to eat much of the ten-dollar tuna sandwich and the last time she'd eaten before that was the previous night when they went out for fast food and left Frank Calabrese his window of opportunity to slip back into his garage-or maybe he'd been there all along, lying low. Plotting. Stealing. Working himself up for his big car-chase scene. The thought of him stuck in her mind like a dart-he was right there in her moment of waking, the last thing she thought about when she fell off to sleep and the first when she opened her eyes; before long she'd be dreaming about him.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position. The motel was so cheap there was no clock radio, with its LED display, to orient her-they'd scouted three other places before settling on this one, which was twelve dollars less with her Triple-A discount-and she wondered what she'd done with her watch. She'd taken it off, hadn't she, when she'd showered? That was the first thing she'd done, the minute the man behind the counter (bearded, with a turban and a nose ring clamped round a red stone, a garnet, or maybe it was just glass) had given them the key and she'd flung open the door and dumped her suitcase on the bed, because the whole business of the past two days had made her feel unclean, dirty right down to her bones, and at least the water had been hot. Now she let her feet find the floor and went into the bathroom to look for her watch, because the first rule of motels was that everything had to be put away at all times or you'd wind up leaving half of it behind. She was in her bra and panties, her clothes balled up on the wet linoleum of the bathroom floor, and there was her watch, on the cracked, vaguely white porcelain of the bathroom sink: eight forty-five. Her stomach stirred again, and as she strapped the watch round her wrist, she was already moving back into the room to wake Bridger.

He hadn't moved. He was stretched out atop the covers, his limbs splayed, looking helpless and bereft, a faint quivering about his lips and nostrils as the expelled air shook through him. She felt bad for him. Felt bad for herself. But he was there for her, at least there was that-if ever anyone had passed the test, it was him. She spent a moment standing over the bed, gazing down at him, not thinking about love, not consciously, but stirred nonetheless by a rush of hormonal assertions, imperatives, desires. After a while, she bent forward and pressed her mouth to his and held it there, just held it, as if she were resuscitating him.

The restaurant they chose for dinner was a bit more upscale than the lunch place-softly lit, big Kentia palms in earthenware pots, linen-covered tables, clean plaster walls painted a shade of apricot-and when they'd paused outside before the recessed shrine that displayed the menu, she liked not only the prices but the vegetarian bill of fare. “Enough fast food,” she said, swinging round on Bridger as couples strolled by and the light began to fade over the mountains, “enough burgers and fries. Let's have something healthy for a change.”

He shrugged, in full passive mode. He'd canceled his cards, put a security alert on his credit reports, slept, showered and used the toilet, but he was still in shock. As they pushed through the door, her arm looped through his, he said something she didn't catch, and in the momentary distraction of addressing the hostess and following her to their table, he didn't repeat it.

Now, as they sat there over the menus-she'd ordered a glass of white wine; he was having a beer-she said, “I didn't catch what you said back there at the door.”

Another shrug. “Oh, it was nothing. I just-I don't think I have more than fifty bucks on me. Toto.”

“No problem. My treat.” Her hands unfolded to harmonize with her words. “It's all on me, everything-at least until you get your new cards. They can overnight them, right? And you can still use the cash machine-”

“Overnight them where?”

That was when the waitress returned with their drinks, and on her face the look Dana knew so intimately. It was a look borne out of the drink order and maybe some long-distance reconnaissance from the waitress' station, the probing look, the ready judgment. “Who had the white wine?” the waitress asked, just to hear Dana say, “That's me,” though with a party of two-one man, one woman-even a mental defective on her first day on the job would have divined that the wine was for the lady and the beer for the gentleman. Not to mention the fact that she was the one who'd taken the order in the first place.

“Are you ready to order?” she asked, and that was easy to read, because what else would she be asking, poised as she was over her little notation pad, one hip cocked forward, a look of spurious interest on her face. And the next thing she would say, once they'd made their selections, would be “Oh, excellent choice” or “That's the best thing on the menu.” “Hearing people.” Sometimes she couldn't help thinking the world would be a better place if everybody were deaf.

But yes, they were hungry. And yes, they were ready to order-the veggie shish kebab on basmati rice for Bridger, the hummus/couscous/ baba ghanoush pita platter for her-and the conversation died while Dana fought with the pronunciation and finally resorted to using her finger to point out the item on the menu. Every six months or so she went back to the speech therapist for a couple of weeks just to keep herself sharp-and she tried to practice regularly before the mirror, but with the insane pace of her life, teaching, writing and now this, the practice was the first thing to go. Really, though, “baba ghanoush?” Even the speech therapist had to have problems with that one.

She looked back to Bridger as the waitress drifted away. He was saying something, and he stopped, seeing she hadn't understood him, and began again. “I was saying, yeah, I do have, maybe, I don't know, a couple thousand bucks in my account-unless this creep has got to it-and I will try the cash machine, just to see. Because I don't-”

“Don't?” she echoed. “Don't what?”

“I don't want you to have to pay for me, because if we, if we're-”

“We're going to.”

“Yeah, well, I'm going to have to phone Radko-and you can bet I'll be out of a job when we get back.” He grimaced, then lifted the bottle of beer to his lips, ignoring the frosted mug that had come with it.

“How long does it take to drive cross-country-a week?” She took a sip of the wine-it was bitter, tannic. She was watching him intently.

“I don't know. Four and a half, five days if you drive straight through.”

“Could you stand that?”

“No. Could you?”

She thought about that a moment, one person asleep while the other drives, the shell of the car so fragile against the night, the eternal silence and nothing to distract her, and what if she nodded off? What was the name of that band, years back-Asleep at the Wheel? Bridger had his music, the radio, books on tape, and she had her laptop, but not at night, not when she was driving. And what if the car breaks down? What if it overheats in the desert or-what was the term-throws a rod? She was about to ask him that, about the car, about the rods, whatever they were, but she didn't get the chance because there were two other people hovering over them suddenly, a man and a woman in their twenties, dressed nearly identically in big jeans and big jackets over T-shirts trumpeting some band, and Bridger was up out of his seat as if he'd been launched, clasping the man to him in a bear hug.

She watched with a puzzled smile-or bemused, a bemused smile. “Bear hug,” she was thinking distractedly, and where had that come from? Who had actually seen bears hugging? “Did” bears hug? Or did they do it doggie style-or bearie style?

The man's name-Bridger was lit up, beaming, trembling with the information-was Matt Kralik, and he finger-spelled it for her while Matt Kralik and his girlfriend, Patricia, stood there gaping at her. Matt, he said, looking from Matt to her and back again, had been his roommate and best bud at SC, and what was he doing here? His parents had a place on the lake. But what a coincidence! Awesome! No, no, no, they had to join them for dinner. Bridger insisted.

There was the usual clumsy shuffle of place settings and chairs, the waitress looking on while a darting dark quick-blooded busboy studiously set them up and then they were all seated and Matt Kralik and Patricia had matching martinis in front of them, except that Matt's was officially a Gibson because he had a cocktail onion in his and Patricia preferred the traditional olive. For a moment no one spoke-this was what hearing people referred to as an “awkward silence,” but then no silence was awkward for Dana and her gaze quietly passed from Matt Kralik, seated on her left, to Bridger, across the table from her, and finally to Patricia, on her right. Patricia had an eager, almost ribald expression, her features too heavy for the taut athletic body that supported them-she looked cartoonish, all the weight above her shoulders, nothing below. “So,” she said, pursing her lips, “Dana-it's Dana, isn't it? I mean, I'm terrible with names-”

“Yes, that's right.”

“What do you, ah-do? For a living, I mean.”

All three of them were watching her as if she were one of the seals from Sea World propped up in a chair and about to balance a cane on her nose in expectation of the slippery reward of a fresh sardine from the trainer's hand, even Bridger, who was wearing his blunted look where a moment before he'd been transported, giddier than she'd seen him in a week, a month. She said, enunciating as clearly as she could, “I'm deaf. I teach in a deaf school. Or at least I used to.”

“Oh, deaf,” Patricia said. “That's interesting. That's really interesting.”

Matt Kralik was saying something. He'd once known a deaf kid, in high school, and the kid had been a super baseball player, center fielder, ran like the wind-and something, and something-and he made triple-A ball, but not the majors. “Like that guy that was on the Angels last year, what was his name?”

Bridger supplied the name. And he thought to finger-spell it for her: “Pride,” that was his last name, but he couldn't remember the guy's first name.

“Not Charlie Pride,” Matt Kralik said, and she would have missed it-everyone burst out laughing-if Bridger hadn't finger-spelled it too.

“No,” Patricia said, gulping back her laugh and steadying herself with a delicate sip of the martini. “He was that black country-and-western singer. My father used to have his records, I remember.”

“But this guy on the Angels, they could heckle him all they wanted and it was nothing to him. Can you imagine that? They could be cursing his mother and he wouldn't know it.”

Bridger shrugged. “Yeah, but what about when they cheered?”

And then Matt Kralik said something and Bridger said something back and Patricia joined in, the conversation wheeling off in unforeseen directions even as the food came and Bridger's hands got busy with his shish kebab and Dana lost track of what they were saying. Eventually, she just lowered her eyes and concentrated on the plate before her.

After dinner, there was chai sweetened with honey and condensed milk and more talk and then they all insisted on going out to a bar-Matt Kralik knew this place with the best music in town-and she went along though her head had begun to throb until the term “concussion” rose up in her mind as if written in big looping letters on the blackboard in her classroom, a medical term: “jarring of the brain, spinal cord, etc., from a blow, fall, etc., derived from the Latin” concussio, “meaning shock.” But no. She was just tired. And defeated. And angry. And the bar-it was like any other bar anywhere else in the world-was a place she didn't want to be. It was loud and raucous, she supposed, and Matt Kralik, Patricia and Bridger responded to it by jigging their heads to the beat of the music that was most likely pounding through the big speakers hung in the corners and opening their mouths wide to (presumably) shout at one another. She took her shoes off and danced twice with Bridger and once with Matt Kralik, but some clod stepped on her right foot with one of his engineer's boots and the liberation of movement, which usually made her experience a kind of boundless high, did nothing for her. She just couldn't shake loose of the image of Frank Calabrese. Bridger could, though-he was having a time, she could see that, and she didn't begrudge him. Or maybe she did. At any rate, after half an hour of watching everybody's mouths chew air, she told him she wanted to go back to the motel and he gave her a look she didn't like and she walked the six blocks alone and let herself into the sterile little box of a room, got under the covers and turned on the TV.

She was awake still when he came in two hours later, drunk, with his sweatshirt misaligned and wearing a stifled little grin caught somewhere between repentance and defiance. She watched with cold indifference as he fumbled into the bathroom and peed, not bothering to shut the door, and she didn't say anything when he stepped back into the room, watching his feet as if he were walking a tightrope, and stood just to the side of the TV, mesmerized by the movement there. A slasher flick was playing, the only thing she could find at this hour aside from the late-night talk shows that seemed to define their own vacuum of irrelevance, and she was no fan of the genre and wouldn't have given it a second glance if she weren't stuck here, bored and agitated and unable to sleep. “We need to get up early,” she said, trying to control her voice. “We need to leave this place. We need to get on the road. Get out of here.”

She watched him scratch the back of his head, reach down to hike up his oversized jeans. He said something to the TV, mumbling no doubt, then swung round so she could read him. “I don't know,” he said, making a half-hearted attempt to sign under his words. “I don't know, I hate this.”

“You hate it? How do you think I feel?”

“I've got to get back. Got to call Radko.”

She gave it a minute. “You don't have to do anything,” she said finally, and she was angry suddenly. Her voice might have risen, she couldn't say. “You claim you love me, you'll stand by me, but it's just words, because if you do-if you did-you wouldn't hesitate.”

And now his face flared with his own anger, a deep gouge slicing into the furrow between his eyes, his lips pulling back from his teeth, the scene brightening to an orangey yellow on the TV and imparting the color to his skin so that he looked jaundiced. “Yeah?” he said. “If it wasn't for you,” he said, but she dropped her eyes to the screen and shut him out.

The yellow there darkened to gold, to honey, to a deep hungering sepia as the killer in his mask flailed the too-white blade at his victim, the heroine in her midnight-blue teddy, who could only run and crouch and hide, bare-legged, her painted toenails gathering in every particle of light as if to shut the camera down. “Dog barking,” the caption read.

“Glass breaking.”

A quick close-up of the victim, her makeup smeared, eyes dilated with terror.

“Sobbing continues.”