The game changed over time. Technology made change inevitable: Racquets were larger and lighter and stronger, and even shoes got a little better every few years. And human technology had much the same effect; each generation of tennis players was taller and rangier than the one before it, and players improved on genetics by getting stronger through weight training and more durable through nutrition. So of course the game changed. It had to change.

But the players still — with rare exception — wore the traditional white clothing, and that was one thing he hoped would never change. Oh, some of them sported logos, and maybe that was inevitable, too, with all the money the corporations were throwing around. And you saw colored stripes on some of the white shirts and shorts, and periodically the self-appointed Brat of the Year would turn up in plaid shorts and a scarlet top, but by and large white prevailed.

And he liked it that way. For the women, especially. He didn’t really care what the men wore, and, truth to tell, found it difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the men’s game. Service played too great a role, and the top players scored too many aces. It was the long drawn-out points that most engaged him, with both players drawing on unsuspected reserves of strength and tenacity to reach impossible balls and make impossible returns. That was tennis, not a handful of 120-mile-an-hour serves and a round of applause.

And there was something about a girl dressed entirely in white, shifting her weight nervously as she waited for her opponent to serve, bouncing the ball before her own serve. Something pure and innocent and remarkably courageous, something that touched your heart as you watched, and wasn’t that what spectator sports were about? Yes, you admired the technique, you applauded the skill, but it was an emotional response of the viewer to some quality in the participant that made the game genuinely engaging, and even important.

Interesting how some of them engaged you and others did not.

The one who grunted, for example. Grunted like a little pig every time she hit the ball. Maybe she couldn’t help it, maybe it was some Eastern breathing technique that added energy to her stroke. He didn’t care. All he knew was that it put him right off Miss Piglet. Whenever he watched her play, he rooted for her opponent.

With others it was something subtler. The stance, the walk, the attitude. One responded or one didn’t.

And, of course, the game the woman played was paramount. Not just the raw ability but the heart, the soul, the inner strength that enabled one player to reach and return shots that drew no more than a futile wave from another.

He sat in his chair, drew on his cigarette, watched the television set.

This one, this Miranda DiStefano. Sixteen years old, her blond hair hanging in a ponytail, her face a perfect oval, her nose the slightest bit retroussé. She had a slight overbite, and one closeup revealed braces on her teeth.

How charming...

He’d seen her before, and now he watched her play a match she was not likely to win, a quarterfinal that pitted her against one of the sisters who seemed to win everything these days. He liked both sisters well enough, respected them as the dominant players of their generation, but they didn’t engage him the way Miranda did. She didn’t have to win, he just wanted to watch her play, and do the best she could.

A vision in white. Perfectly delightful and charming. He wished only the best for her.

Tarkauskas came to the attention of our company, California Operatives, Inc. (more colloquially, “Cal Ops”), when a chubby twenty-four-year-old computer geek was missed by his mother.

His dad, Barry Pincus, was a fifty-two-year-old attorney who specialized in family law. “Family law” sounds very wholesome, but believe me, it isn’t. It’s like being a divorce lawyer, only your clients are more vicious and less civilized. We had done a few background checks and some other routine investigative work for Pincus, and when his son Buddy hadn’t been heard from in over a week, Barry’s wife Helene called Cus Malone, mainly I guess because he was the only private detective she’d ever heard of. Barry wasn’t too thrilled that she called us in, but he knew better than to cross Helene.

Malone and I decided to send Stanley Stowicz, one of our more experienced ops, to interview Helene Pincus, because he has a very reassuring way about him and always manages to have a good rapport with nice middle-aged Jewish ladies. This time, it was a mistake. She sent him packing. By the time Stowicz got back to Cal Ops, he was fuming.

“She called me a clerk,” he said. “Twenty-six years a private detective, never a complaint, and you know before I came here, I worked for Continental, and Pinkerton also? — and yet she has the chutzpah to call me a clerk. Me! Says she’ll only deal with the boss.”

“Guess she wants the best,” said Malone drily, quickly adding: “I’m kidding, Stowicz.” He pulled out his PDA, checked it, and frowned. “I’m booked solid the rest of the afternoon — appearance downtown. How about it, Red? Feel like visiting the old yenta?”

“I’ll go,” I said. “Don’t take it personally, Stan. We all know what an asset to the firm you are.”

“You’re welcome to it,” he replied. “Yenta is right. Give me somebody polite, instead, like a hopped-up biker on crank, maybe.”

But Mrs. Pincus didn’t want to meet me at her Fairfax District condo. When I called, she asked me to meet her in the Palisades at her son’s home. A lot of the streets in Pacific Palisades are as tangled as a can of bait as they switch back on themselves up the hills north of the Pacific Coast Highway. It took me longer than I expected to find the house. It was one of those flat-roofed modern things painted a startling white with glass bricks and steel rails everywhere.

There was a spectacular two-story ocean view from the living room. A loft bigger than my entire apartment overlooked the room itself. In spite of its size, the house had the appearance of a bachelor’s place, like a set from a James Bond movie — all steel, chrome, and glass. Spare and clean.

Helene Pincus was an expensively dressed woman in her forties, her hard blue eyes unsoftened by liberally applied makeup. She had probably been extremely handsome in her twenties.

Her first words to me were, “You look like a Vegas lounge singer. Where’s the cowboy?”

“Mr. Malone had to be in court and couldn’t make it. I’m Carmine Ferrari. Stan said you wanted the boss, and Mr. Malone and I are partners.”

“What’s your background?”

“Six years as Cus Malone’s partner here in L.A., eight years with the NYPD before that. Bachelor’s and master’s from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.”

She nodded curtly. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something.”

I followed her up a series of carpeted steel slats coming out of the wall to the loft. She led me into what was obviously the master bedroom suite. It was very nice, with a 42-inch LCD HDTV mounted on the wall, a domed skylight big enough for Mount Palomar, and sliding doors leading to a teak deck. The king-size bed was made up. The walk-in closet contained jeans, black dickies, aloha and hip polo shirts, one cheap blue Men’s Wearhouse suit, and an assortment of expensive sneakers and Doc Martens. From the clothes, I judged Buddy to be about five eight, weighing somewhere around two hundred and twenty pounds. There were framed science-fiction-film 1-sheets and colorful travel posters of the Grand Canyon on the walls. The whole setup was fussily neat.

“I hate this room,” she said, crossing her arms. “It has all the charm of an operating theater. So, Mr. Ferrari, you’re a detective. What do you make of it?”

“He likes Star Trek.”

“Buddy is twenty-four. His idea of a nutritious meal is a pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of light beer.”

“You’re saying that it’s too clean.”

She nodded. “He was nineteen when he graduated from Stanford, summa cum laude. After he was accepted to do his master’s at Caltech, he moved back in with us, before he dropped out and got this place. Don’t think I’m just being a Jewish mother when I say he’s a genius. Brilliant, math whiz, and all that, but a pig, much as it pains me to admit it. He wouldn’t pick his briefs up off the floor where he dropped them unless he ran out of underwear.”

“He probably has a cleaning lady.”

She frowned. “As I said, he’s twenty-four — a young twenty-four. When he was a teenager, he was the kind of kid who put a ‘Keep Out’ sign on his door. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, at least not that I know about. Somebody cleaned up here, all right, but I don’t think it was any cleaning lady.”

“Then who?”

She turned on her heel and I followed her back out to the loft. She sat down in a Danish leather-and-chrome settee in front of a glass coffee table and I sat opposite her. She pulled out a case from her purse, deftly removed a cigarette, and lit up.

“He’s been gone over a week,” she said, sucking on her cigarette. “The message on his business phone says he’s away on business.” She gave a sharp little bark of a laugh, totally without mirth. “What Buddy knows about business would fit in a thimble. When he says he’s taking a business trip, it usually means he’s schlepping to Las Vegas or Hawaii with one of his friends to get away from it all. But he’s never been gone this long before. Not a whole week.”

She took another drag and looked around, noticing there wasn’t an ashtray.

“Tell me about Buddy’s business,” I said.

She shook her head, dumped her ash on the glass of the table, and looked directly in my eyes. “What do I know from computers? When Buddy decided to set up the business, he asked Barry for a good entertainment lawyer. Barry suggested this Armenian, Haig Yarjanian. I don’t like him. Too Hollywood. You should start with him.”

“Entertainment lawyer — whatever for?”

She shrugged and smashed her cigarette butt out on the surface of the table. “Like I should know?”

I felt his tight grip on my arm as I slumped into the passenger seat and when my hand went up to the blindfold he ordered me not to touch it. I did as I was told and clung to the soft leather of the seat, trying to work out where we were heading.

We travelled for hours on a fast, straight road and I guessed that we must be well out of London. When the roads started to wind I sensed that we were out in the country somewhere and we seemed to drive for miles before I felt the car swing sharply to the left. I heard the crunch of gravel beneath the tires as though we were on some sort of driveway, and when we stopped he told me to take the blindfold off. I could see my surprise at last.

I untied the blindfold and sat there blinking as my eyes got used to the light. I’m sure I swore when I realised where I was. But then I saw the excitement on Paul’s face — like a little boy at Christmas — and I forced my mouth into a smile until the muscles began to ache. I think I managed to say what he wanted to hear. I could hardly have let him know the truth.

I managed to keep the smile in place when he told me the house was called the Old Rectory, and I rushed up to the front door, forcing out enthusiastic oohs and aahs as he pointed out each new desirable feature. He expected excitement and that’s what he got. He had the Merc, the million-pound apartment in London, and now he had the place in the country he’d been promising himself for years. To have poured cold water on his triumph would have been like snatching away a kid’s birthday present... and I couldn’t have done that to him. Not when I saw how thrilled he was.

He was twenty years older than me and too many business lunches meant that what he’d lost in hair he’d gained in weight. But I was fond of him — I suppose I might even have said I loved him if I believed in love, which I don’t. We stayed in a hotel in Exeter that evening and he ordered a bottle of champagne to toast our new country life. After the bubbles had booted some of my inhibitions out of the window I asked him if he realised what life was really like in a place like Manton Worthy. But he just laughed and said he’d bought the best house in the village so the peasants could kiss his arse. People in the restaurant looked round and I felt myself blushing. Paul never worried about what people thought... unless he was doing business with them.

Looking back, I couldn’t complain about the house itself. It was like an oversized doll’s house to look at... symmetrical with long, square-paned windows painted in gleaming white. Paul said it was Georgian and it had a long gravel drive and a shiny black front door you could see your face in, with bright brass fittings. It had belonged to a TV executive from London who had spent a fortune on the place and only used it on weekends. Inside, the previous owners had kitted it out with gold and silk drapes and thick cream carpets. It hadn’t always been like that, of course — once it had been a draughty, rambling place where the old vicar lived; where the parish bigwigs held their long, boring meetings and where the vicar’s skinny wife organised her fetes and good works. But times change.

Paul had lived in London all his life and what he knew about the country came from watching old episodes of Miss Marple and reading the colour supplements. He said I should get to know the area, perhaps chat up a few locals... there was no harm in cultivating useful contacts. But I said no, thanks, I had better things to do, and began to paint my nails. There was no way I was going out there. Not in Manton Worthy.

I had an uncomfortable feeling that it wouldn’t be long before things began to go wrong... and it turned out I was right. The cockerel next-door started it: cock-a-doodle-bloody-doo over and over again at five o’clock every morning. I knew Paul would take it badly... he needed his sleep, and by the third day he was threatening to throttle the bird with his bare hands. I told him that crowing is what cockerels do... that it was all part of the country experience. But there was no reasoning with Paul when something annoyed him.

He dealt with it, of course... like he dealt with everything. He stormed round to see the farmer, who was called Carter — “an inbred lump in a flat cap and waxed jacket,” according to Paul. As soon as I heard Carter’s name I knew I had to take care not to get caught up in Paul’s little feud.

When the cockerel carried on I tried to convince Paul that you couldn’t stop the forces of nature. But he said he’d have a bloody good try if they kept him awake at night. I suggested moving into one of the bedrooms at the back of the house and to my relief he agreed. I started to hint about spending more time at the London apartment, but Paul said that no inbred yokel was going to drive him out of the home he’d worked his backside off for. He always had a stubborn streak.

So there we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere, and as I stared out of our old bedroom window across the rolling green landscape, the sight of Carter’s farmhouse squatting there in the field nearby made me shudder. I should have got out then... I know that now with hindsight. But how could I have hurt Paul?

Another thing that spoiled the rural peace Paul thought he’d bought was the noise of the church bells. They rang on Tuesday evenings and woke us up every Sunday morning. One Tuesday Paul fetched a pair of shears from the garden shed and I feared the worst. But I thought quickly and said that I loved the sound of the bells and how glad I was that we lived so near to the church. Paul looked at me as though I were mad, but the shears were returned to the shed.

When the bells stopped that evening, I walked to the bottom of the garden and hid myself behind the hedge to watch the ringers leave the church. I saw Carter, leading them down the church path — probably to the pub — and my body started to shake at the sight of him. He had hardly changed. He still had the slicked-down hair I remembered so well — although it was grey now rather than black — and he’d put on weight. I watched him until he disappeared round the corner, then I hurried back into the house, taking deep breaths, trying to still my trembling hands. I made for the downstairs cloakroom, where I threw up, scared that Paul would hear me... but he didn’t. I told him that I had been outside putting something in the bin and he seemed to believe me. I hated lying to him, but I had no choice.

From then on I made sure we stayed indoors on Tuesday evenings and the change of bedroom had dealt with the cockerel problem. After a couple of weeks I was becoming more confident that I could manage the situation. But being in Manton Worthy still made me nervous, and I woke up each morning dreading what the day ahead would bring. And yet I put on a smile for Paul’s sake.

Paul had decided to spend less time in London and run the business from the Old Rectory. I offered to act as his PA — after all, we’d met when I’d started work as his secretary... just as he was becoming bored with his first wife. And doing my bit for the business gave me the perfect excuse not to go out.

But I suppose it was inevitable that I would meet someone from the village sooner or later, and one Monday morning, as I was getting dressed, the doorbell rang. I let Paul answer it while I stood hidden at the top of the stairs, peering down into the hallway to see if the caller’s face and voice were familiar. Once I was sure that I had never seen the visitor before in my life, I walked down the stairs, smiling graciously, and invited her in. She introduced herself as Mandy Pettifer and she seemed nice enough in her way, although she wasn’t really our type... all floral dress and flat sandals. But I knew that a contact on the outside might be useful.

I took her through into the lounge — or the drawing room, as Paul insisted on calling it — and offered her a coffee. This was my chance to discover the lie of the land. Who was who now and what was what in Manton Worthy.

Mandy was the chatty type. In fact, once you started her on the subject of the locals it was hard to shut her up. She’d lived in Manton Worthy for ten years and she was married to an IT consultant who worked abroad a lot. She taught part-time at a primary school in the nearby town of Ashburn, the local school having closed down years ago, and I guessed that she had come visiting because she was at a loose end in the school holidays. She was one of those people who’ll tell you her life story before you can get a word in edgeways.

“I expect most people in the village have lived here for years,” I said when she paused to take a sip of coffee.

She looked disappointed, as though she wanted me to reveal as much about myself as she had... but I wasn’t playing that game.

“Actually the nice thing about Manton Worthy is that most of the people are newcomers like you and me.” She leaned forward, as if she was about to tell some great secret. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think most of the locals can afford the house prices. I know the people who used to have our cottage live in Ashburn now. In fact, I only know of one person who’s lived here all her life, apart from some of the local farmers, of course.”

“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Miss Downey: She lives next-door to me. She’s in her seventies now but she used to teach in the village school when there was one.”

“Nobody else?”

Mandy shook her head.

“What about the bell ringers?”

Mandy looked surprised, as though she’d never considered that human beings rang the church bells. “I’ve no idea. Perhaps they come in from Ashburn. Most of the cottages were owned by a local estate and when they were sold off the tenants couldn’t afford to buy at the prices they were asking. Most of them moved to the estate in Ashburn.”

“And the cottages?”

“Bought as second homes or by people like us.”

“So there’s nobody apart from Miss Downey?”

Mandy laughed... a tinkling, irritating sound. “You’ll have to meet her; she knows a lot about local history and all that. If you ever want to know what’s gone on in Manton Worthy in the past, she’s the person to ask.”

I smiled but didn’t answer. That afternoon I went for a walk through the village. It nestled in rolling, patchwork fields; chocolate-box pretty with its thatched cob cottages and ancient stone church next-door to the pub — everyone’s ideal English village. Perhaps I had been wrong to be afraid. Perhaps everything would be okay... as long as I avoided Carter.

Over the next weeks I became bolder. I walked through the village — well away from Carter’s land — and I even took Mandy up on her invitation to call round anytime for a coffee. Perhaps I needed to see someone other than Paul. Or perhaps I just felt I needed to know what was going on in the outside world.

One afternoon I found myself sitting in Mandy’s front room overlooking the main village street. She had done it up nicely, I’ll give her that. There was an old-fashioned inglenook fireplace and she’d taken up the carpet to reveal the original stone floor which she had promptly covered up again with a large abstract rug in shades of grey. There was a whiff of minimalism in the air, which surprised me as Mandy hadn’t seemed the type for that sort of thing. She talked at length about interior design... and I listened. She had gone for a fusion of old rustic and modern, she said. I nodded and let her rabbit on. But I had more important things to worry about.

She mentioned the murder just as I had bitten into a Danish pastry. I felt myself choking and grabbed at the mug of coffee. By the time Mandy had fetched me a glass of water from her new beech kitchen with its slate-tiled floor, I had composed myself, although my heart was still pounding against my ribs. Who could have thought that the mere mention of it would bring back all the old terrors? But Mandy can’t have noticed anything was wrong because she kept on talking, telling me how the girl had been found up by the woods, on the site of the old gallows. She’d been strangled, Mandy told me, enjoying every detail of the story. Strangled with a bell rope from the church. The police knew who’d done it, of course, but they could never prove anything. The boy had had learning difficulties and his mother had given him an alibi.

I asked her where she’d heard all this and she tapped the side of her nose. “A woman I work with used to live here. She told me.”

“Did she mention Mr. Carter who has the farm next-door to us?” I regretted the question as soon as I’d asked it. But Carter was on my mind. In fact, if Paul knew how scared I was of Carter, he’d have done something about it, so I kept quiet. Trouble was the last thing I wanted in Manton Worthy.

Mandy looked puzzled. “No, I don’t think she did. I can ask her about him if you like.” She leaned forward, eager to please. She reminded me of a dog we had once owned, a stupid animal who was all enthusiasm and no sense. It had been put down and we’d buried it in the back garden.

“No. It’s okay. It’s not important.” I hoped she couldn’t sense the fear in my voice.

We got through three cups of coffee before I looked at my watch and realised how late it was getting. Paul would start to worry if I wasn’t home soon. Perhaps it was the age gap between us that made him treat me like a child sometimes. Mandy tried to persuade me to stay — she was probably lonely there in that cottage, that cage of rustic minimalist chic, with her husband away so much — but I had to get away. She was beginning to get on my nerves.

Now that I knew the village was full of incomers like myself I felt more comfortable walking back. But as I hurried back down the main street towards the Old Rectory I heard a voice behind me.

“Karen? It is Karen, isn’t it?”

I stood there frozen to the spot for a few seconds before I took a deep, calming breath and turned round. I tried to smile but I felt my mouth forming into an expression more of pain than pleasure.

The woman was small, bent with age. Her hair was snowy white and her flesh looked like thin parchment stretched over the bones. But her sharp eyes hinted at an agile brain behind that mask of age. I heard myself saying, “Sorry, you’ve made a mistake. My name’s Petra.”

But the woman’s bright grey eyes were focussed on mine like searchlights. She hesitated, a knowing smile playing on her lips. “I’m so sorry, my dear, you just reminded me of one of my old pupils. I’m Edith Downey. I live in Beech Cottage... just over there.” She waved a gnarled finger in the vague direction of a row of thatched, pastel-painted cottages straight off a picture postcard. I shuffled my feet, anxious to get away. “So you’ve moved here recently?”

“Yes.” She looked at me expectantly. She wanted more. “We’ve moved into the Old Rectory... me and my husband... Paul. We’ve come from London.” I tried to smile but I don’t think I quite managed it.

Miss Downey took a step closer. Her eyes were still on mine, as though she were reading my thoughts. “It’s all new people now... apart from the Carters and myself. I taught at the village school... when there was a village school.”

“Really.” I tried to sound interested but I felt the adrenalin pumping around my body as I prepared for flight.

“Have you been to the church yet?”

I shook my head.

“It’s worth seeing. It has a medieval screen with some fine angel carvings. Some of the people who used to live here still come for Sunday service... most of them live in Ashburn now but they still feel they have ties here.”

There was a hint of recrimination in her voice; a subtle criticism, as though she was hinting that I was personally responsible for driving up the village house prices and evicting people from their homes. But I said nothing. I wanted the encounter to be over. I wanted to get back to Paul.

I remember running back to the Old Rectory as though the hounds of hell were after me. I sank three large gin and tonics before I began the supper. Paul was busy in his office so I don’t think he noticed.

It was awhile before I summoned up the courage to walk through the village again. I made excuses to myself: I had to use my new Range Rover because I wanted to do some shopping in Exeter or visit a supermarket ten miles away... I didn’t dare risk the one at Ashburn. I was making any excuse not to walk past Miss Downey’s cottage. But how could I avoid the woman forever?

Somehow I had to persuade Paul that moving to Manton Worthy had been a mistake. But as I wondered how to go about it, I carried on day after day, driving through the village in the Range Rover wearing my dark glasses. The days passed, and before I knew it the lanes were filled with farm vehicles and the fields hummed day and night with the noise of combine harvesters. When Paul complained, as I knew he would, I took my chance and said that farms were noisy places and we might be better off somewhere else. But he was determined to stay put. Once Paul had made a decision, he would never admit he was wrong.

Soon after that a leaflet came through the door. It was an invitation to the church’s harvest festival, followed by a hot-pot supper in the church hall. Naturally I threw it straight in the bin and I had the shock of my life when Paul found it there and said he wanted to go. He said he’d decided it was about time we became part of the community. My mouth went dry and my hands began to shake. This was the last thing I wanted.

I was thinking how to talk Paul out of it when I went out into the hall and found the note lying on the doormat.

Leopold went back to his motel and phoned Captain Fletcher. “I’ve made contact,” he said. “Wein liked the color of our money. He’s making the delivery at nine tomorrow morning, in the parking lot of the Homestead restaurant. I tried to shift him to the casino but it was no-go.”

“Good work,” Fletcher told him. “I have to contact Lieutenant Oaken of the tribal police and tell him, off the record, what we’re doing. The state police will be ready to move in, too.”

“Some of these tribal police could be on Wein’s payroll,” Leopold pointed out. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Fletcher sighed. “That’s a chance we’ll have to take. Are you armed?”

“Ankle holster, if I have time to reach it.”

“Be careful, for God’s sake! If anything happens to you, Molly would never forgive me.”

“Neither would I.”

Leopold phoned his wife next. “How’s the trial going?”

“Wrapping up,” she said, sounding tired. “I miss you.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow night if all goes well.”

He slept soundly but woke early, well before the seven o’clock alarm he’d set. He showered and dressed, thankful that it wasn’t snowing. April weather in northern New York could be uncertain and the morning’s gray clouds promised nothing but trouble. But this Tuesday was different. By the time he’d grabbed a quick breakfast and headed for the meeting with Rosco Wein, the sun was trying to break through.

The Homestead parking lot was empty when he pulled in at ten to nine. A half-hour later Wein still hadn’t appeared and he was beginning to feel uneasy. At ten o’clock he phoned Fletcher. “He’s a no-show.”

“You think he smelled a rat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sit tight. I’ll phone Lieutenant Oaken and get back to you.”

Leopold waited another half-hour before his cell phone rang. “Oaken just called me back,” Fletcher said. “He’s located Wein’s SUV in the casino parking lot. You’d better get over there.”

“Right,” Leopold said. Something had gone wrong, but he didn’t know what.

At the casino he spotted the tribal police vehicle parked by one of the rows of cars. A uniformed officer stood talking to a white-haired man in a business suit. Both were Native Americans. The officer’s uniform had lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders. He turned as Leopold approached. “You’re Mr. Leopold?”

“That’s right. Lieutenant Oaken?”

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said, extending his hand. “This is Dan Littlewolf, the casino owner.”

Littlewolf was a short, stocky man, probably past fifty. He looked unhappy as he said, “I don’t know what this is all about. If Rosco Wein is involved in anything illegal, I know nothing about it.”

“Have you found him?” Leopold asked.

“Mr. Littlewolf has his security people searching the casino right now,” Oaken said. “If he’s in there, they’ll find him.”

Leopold glanced at the SUV. “Is it locked?”

The officer nodded. “And there are no packages visible on the floor or seats.”

“What are you looking for?” Littlewolf demanded. “Drugs? I run a legit business here, and show a good profit. I don’t need Wein or anyone else peddling drugs on my premises.”

Leopold waited till he’d finished and then asked, “You own the Homestead, too, don’t you?”

“That’s right. Something wrong there, too?”

“No. In fact I had dinner there last night. It’s just that I was supposed to meet Wein in the parking lot at nine o’clock and he didn’t show up.”

Littlewolf shrugged. “I guess he found the casino more profitable. I’m sure my security people will find him at the roulette wheel or the blackjack table.”

But that didn’t happen. At noon Rosco Wein was still missing and Lieutenant Oaken requested that the state police join in the search. Leopold remained close to the lieutenant, hoping for some news he could pass on to Fletcher, but all through the afternoon there was nothing. “He seems to have left the reservation,” Leopold said at last.

“Without his car? That’s doubtful.”

Late in the afternoon Littlewolf directed his men to break into the car and search it. There were no drugs, no weapons, no bloodstains, nothing.

Whipping around the sharp bends, tires squealing on wet asphalt, Simon pushed his little Miata close to eighty. The wall of pine trees on both sides, as well as the black sky above, created a dark tunnel into the hills. He was thinking about making it to the coast before midnight, early enough to squeeze in a few hands with the late-night poker crowd at the casino, and he didn’t see the motorcycle until he was almost on top of it. With no taillight, and with its rider clad in black, the bike emerged from the dreary gloom like a moth alighting on his windshield.

“Holy mother of—” he cried, stomping on his brakes.

The shoulder belt snapped taut against his chest. His car fishtailed, back tires screaming, front end coming inches from the bike’s mud-caked license plate.

Up close, the Miata’s headlights slashed through the rain and the dark, illuminating the man and his bike in vivid detail. The guy’s glistening jacket bore a striking design: a white bear head in profile, glowing as if luminescent. It was the only thing on the rider that wasn’t black; pants, boots, even the helmet melded with the stormy night, making the bear appear to hover over the road.

Simon didn’t know much about motorcycles, but the bike was definitely too sleek and compact to be a Harley. It looked like it belonged on a racetrack, not a highway.

Heart pounding, Simon eased off the biker. He would have expected the commotion to startle the guy, maybe cause him to swerve, but the biker’s only re-action was to turn his head halfway around, just far enough that Simon’s headlights appeared on the helmet’s mirrored faceplate like a pair of hot ember eyes. The guy looked for a moment, then turned back to the road.

And dropped his speed down to thirty.

Son of a gun. Simon could understand the guy being pissed — Simon had nearly plowed over him — but going half the speed limit, even in these conditions, seemed petty.

The squeaking wipers struggled to keep the windshield clear. Dashboard fans roared out a steady stream of warm air. There were few opportunities to pass on Highway 18, but Simon knew there was a passing lane in a few miles. He’d driven this road so many times, every pothole and mile marker was burned in his memory. He’d wait a few minutes, give the guy a chance to cool down. He really wanted to get to that poker game — he was already imagining the rush of tossing in his first ante — but he didn’t want to get into some kind of stupid road game. In these conditions, one of them could end up dead in a ditch.

As his heart slowed, he felt a pang of remorse. What if he had died out here? Tomorrow — Saturday — was Jana’s second birthday. He could just imagine the look on her face as she sat on their crappy lima-bean couch in their mousetrap apartment — an apartment that should have been packed with children laughing and making noises with party favors, but instead would be empty and deathly quiet as her mother explained why Daddy wasn’t coming home.

She was so young... In a few years would she even remember him?

Guilt — it was the worst kind of feeling, a feeling Simon had come to dread because he knew it always lurked somewhere around the corner. The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that Tracy would know, if he died on this stretch of road at this time of night (when he was supposed to be hanging out at Steve’s watching horror flicks) that he had broken his word.

Promising to give up gambling forever was the only way he had been able to keep her from leaving him.

But what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. After all, he wasn’t playing like last year when his losses forced them to file for bankruptcy. No, it was nothing like that. Just an occasional game here and there. For fun, really. Spare change he earned from his tips, money Tracy never saw. He’d never dip into his bank account again. He was in control now.

His radio, turned low, was losing its Rexton signal to static, and Simon clicked it off. When he did, he noticed his hand was shaking. Apparently the incident had gotten to him more than he thought it had. The biker went on puttering at thirty, the spray from his back tire misting in the beams from Simon’s headlights. Not a single car passed from the other direction, but Simon knew the road was way too popular, even on nights like this, to chance passing with a double yellow.

Jana’s birthday, he kept telling himself. Jana’s birthday.

He honked his horn a few times, but the guy didn’t react. A few minutes later, they crested a rise and rounded a bend, entering a brief downhill straight stretch. Ah, now here was the passing lane. The road opened up, the dotted white line appearing. Accelerating, Simon moved to the left. The biker stayed on the right and in a few seconds Simon was alongside him.

For just a moment, no more than a few seconds, Simon eased off the accelerator to look at the biker.

From the side, it was easier to get a good look. He was a big guy, not tall but broad, wide across the shoulders, thick in the middle. If he had a neck, Simon couldn’t see it — his helmet sat right on his linebacker shoulders. His pants tucked snuggly into his boots, pulling tight around his bulging calves. His hands, covered with black leather gloves, were also huge. Clenching the handlebars, they made the bike seem undersized beneath him, like a toy.

Simon realized this guy didn’t seem like a guy at all. He seemed more like the creature on the back of his jacket — a bear. He suddenly wished he could see the guy’s face. Would he look like Grizzly Adams, hair all over the place? He chuckled at the thought.

As if sensing he was being mocked, the biker turned and looked. It was then that Simon realized he had made a terrible mistake, lingering like this; imagining the eyes staring at him from behind the face shield sent a chill up his spine. He did not know this man, had no idea where he was going or why, but he sensed that this was not somebody to mess with. This was not a man you stared at, not for five seconds, not even for one. He wasn’t threatening in a Hell’s Angel sort of way, all bravado and bullying. Most bikers acted tough because they didn’t want to fight, hoping their image of toughness would be enough to scare you away. No, Simon got the feeling this guy didn’t care about projecting an image of toughness.

He didn’t need to act tough because he was.

As if he had just come face-to-face with a rattlesnake, Simon turned slowly toward the road, applying gentle pressure to the accelerator.

But as he accelerated, the biker also increased his speed. Forty-five miles an hour... Fifty... Fifty-five...

The end of the passing lane was coming up in a hurry. The guy stayed right there, across from his window. Simon didn’t dare look, but he saw well enough with his peripheral vision that the guy was still looking at him.

A yellow sign warned of the end of the passing lane. Sixty... Sixty-five... Seventy... For Christ’s sake, the guy would not back off. The dotted white line vanished, the two lanes merging into one. His heart racing, Simon punched the accelerator and his Miata jerked forward.

He hoped one last burst of speed would propel him past the biker, but the guy stayed neck and neck. Worse, the road brought them together like two canoes in a narrowing river, and soon the guy was so close to his passenger-side window that Simon couldn’t help but look. There, beyond the rain-streaked glass, lost in all that black leather, was the shiny faceplate still looking straight at him.

Cursing, Simon hit his brakes.

The biker sped past. Immediately the guy started to slow down — dropping, dropping some more, forcing Simon to keep tapping the brakes, until they were all the way back down to thirty again.

“I don’t believe this,” Simon said aloud.

He honked his horn a few more times. Again, the guy puttered along, not once turning to look back at his follower. There wasn’t another passing lane for at least ten miles. At this pace, the poker games would be shut down for the night by the time he got there.

Simon thought about taking his chances across the double yellow line, but as if in response to his thought, a pair of headlights emerged from the gloom and a van whipped past, rocking his car and spraying his windshield.

He laid on his horn, then gave the guy’s back a double bird. Still nothing. Maybe the guy was deaf. He drummed his fingers on his steering wheel. He’d just have to bide his time. There was a place to pass in a few minutes, and if he had even a hint of open road, he’d go for it. Show this punk what real speed was all about.

But when he reached the area to pass, and started to make his move, the guy sped up again.

Totally unbelievable. The guy was determined to be an absolute prick. This went on for another ten minutes — slowing in the double yellows, speeding up in the passing areas — until finally Simon couldn’t take it anymore. He was going to pass and damn the consequences. The jerk was on a motorcycle, for Christ’s sake. He would have to back off or he’d end up flying over his handlebars.

The nachos and cheese he’d had an hour earlier now came back to haunt him; his stomach churned and gurgled. He’d need a bathroom before too long. He was halfway to the coast now, in one of the darker stretches; the dense forest on both sides crowded the twisting road, the branches reaching overhead, creating a canopy. They passed a wooden sign indicating they were in the Van Duzen National Forest. Simon knew that except for a rest stop and a campground, there wouldn’t be any other sign of people for twenty miles.

At least the rain had lessened to a light drizzle, allowing him to turn down his wipers. He passed up a couple of opportunities to pass until he hit the spot he wanted — another downhill slope with a passing lane. Then he bore down on the gas. His quick move got him alongside his companion, but as expected, the biker matched him.

Simon clamped down on the steering wheel. He felt his pulse in his hands. They streaked down the hill, the forest a blur on both sides. The extra speed increased the moisture spattering his windshield, making the glass blurry for seconds at a time, but Simon didn’t want to take his hands off the wheel to speed up the wipers.

They barreled along, his speedometer passing over seventy, then eighty, then ninety...

As his engine screamed, Simon held his breath. The dotted white line vanished. The road narrowed. The punk still wasn’t backing off, and there was no way Simon was letting off the juice now. He took a quick glance at the biker and, with a chill, saw the guy look over at the same time.

The extra lane disappeared, and then the two of them shared a lane, Simon partially over the double yellow. A bend in the road loomed ahead, a wall of trees beyond it.

Knowing his Miata cornered well, he kept his speed high and squealed around the bend. The biker stayed right with him, leaning into the curve, his shoulder nearly touching Simon’s passenger-side window. That’s when a pair of headlights appeared.

Simon had only a second to react. The gap between the lights made him think the vehicle was a semi or a motor home, and he jerked his wheel to the right. He knew the biker was there, but he had no other choice. As the truck — and it was indeed a semi truck — rumbled past, shaking his little car with its wall of wind, the Miata bumped the motorcycle.

The guy swerved onto the shoulder and beyond, kicking up a shower of mud. Simon’s momentum drifted him toward the shoulder, and for a second he thought he was going to hit the guy again, but the biker suddenly dropped behind. By then they had rounded the corner and Simon had the Miata under control.

He gasped for breath, finally remembering to breathe. Heart pounding in his ears, he roared up a hill in the storm, nothing but open road in front of him. The surge of adrenaline lit every one of his senses on fire. He’d done it. He’d actually done it. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he saw only blurry darkness behind him. The guy was gone. He must have pulled off, shaken up by the whole thing. Simon had actually proven the cooler customer.

“Hot damn,” he said.

The glass splintered instantly into a spider web of cracks, the sound as loud as a gunshot. Simon yelped and ducked to the right, car swerving. He glanced up just in time to see a fist strike the window — a black leather fist wearing gleaming brass knuckles.

This time the glass gave way in the center, shards landing on Simon’s lap. The wind roared in his ears. Wet air rushed into the car, smelling of pine and mud. Simon saw the outline of the biker outside the window, and seeing the shine of the leather through the broken glass suddenly made the guy more real — as if before he was merely a projection of Simon’s tired mind, or a villain in a video game.

They neared the top of the hill. Leaning away from the window, Simon edged closer to the edge of the road, but the biker followed, punching the glass again. More glass went flying, and this time a piece struck him above his mouth.

Tasting blood on his lips, Simon hit the brakes, hoping his attacker would race by, but the guy slowed along with him. The fist came through the window again, and this time the burly hand struck him on the cheek. It was only a glancing blow, more leather than brass making contact, but it was still powerful enough to jerk his head to the right. Purple and red stars flashed in front of his eyes.

When his vision cleared, the Miata was halfway in the ditch. As it plowed over the uneven ground, the car trembled and shook. The side of his face throbbing, the skin around his left eye already swelling, Simon steered the car back onto the highway. The biker was there, but Simon wasn’t going to get punched again. As they roared over the hill, the night a swirl of black and green around them, he let out a primal scream and swerved at the biker.

The guy was too fast. He moved even farther to the left. They banked around a gentle curve, and it was then that a white motor home emerged from the night like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean.

Just in time, Simon whipped the Miata back into his own lane. He cringed, expecting to hear a sickening crunch.

But there was no such sound.

After the motor home roared past, blaring its horn, there was the biker on the far left shoulder, keeping pace. He turned and looked at Simon.

Simon’s stomach churned even worse — now he really needed a bathroom. As they hit another straight stretch, not a car in sight, the biker barreled across the lanes. Simon swerved back and forth, trying to keep his attacker at bay, but these feints didn’t fool him. He turned along with Simon, and then deftly sidled up to him. Simon leaned away, expecting another blow, but this time the fist grabbed his steering wheel.

The brass knuckles, shiny with moisture, were still there. The leather glove was covered with hundreds of pin-sized holes. Simon had no idea what the guy was doing until the wheel moved to the right. Along this stretch, the pine trees grew awfully close to the road, and if he hit one of them at this speed...

Slamming on the brakes was the most obvious thing to do, and he almost did it, but then he had a flash of insight.

With his left hand, he grabbed the door handle and jerked the door open, putting his forearm behind it.

It worked better than he expected. The door struck the motorcycle’s handlebars, sending them careening in the other direction. The biker obviously hadn’t expected this move; he held onto the steering wheel a split second too long. His weight was going one way, his bike the other, and the bike began to tilt.

In the next instant the biker was gone. This time Simon did hear the sound of a wreck — a series of bangs and thuds. Swerving into the center of his lane, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw, through the smear of black and gray, a flickering headlight in the middle of the road, receding behind him. Then he rounded the corner and was alone with the rain and the highway.

In addition to his throbbing cheek, his whole body was trembling. Nobody could survive a crash like that. He had killed a man. He had actually killed. Dear God... His life was over. Even if it was manslaughter, he’d go away for years. His wife... his daughter...

He tasted bile. He clamped his hand over his mouth, and only through force of will did he keep from throwing up in the car. He descended a slight hill and, with fortunate timing, saw the sign for the Van Duzen National Forest Campground — and then another: Rest Area — 1 Mile Ahead. He’d stupidly left his cell phone at home, so a pay phone was his best bet.

He could make it to the rest area.

The rain sliced into his car, dampening his left arm. The highway widened, a lane appearing in the center for a turnoff to the left, for the campground, and another lane on the right, to the rest area. Still shaking, he turned to the right, slowing gently, turning into the gap in the trees.

He’d never been to this particular rest stop. He’d passed it lots of times, even a few times when he had to take a leak, but by the time he reached it the pull of the casino had always carried him the last twenty miles. But this time he couldn’t wait, and he was glad when he entered the pothole-infested parking lot and saw no other cars. He didn’t want anyone to see him in his present condition — or his smashed window. He still hadn’t decided if he was going to go back and fess up to what he did.

His mind raced, trying to understand how it all had happened. He had just wanted to pass. He didn’t even see what he had done wrong. Honked the horn a few times, maybe. Had that really been enough for the guy to want to kill him?

The rest stop was a lonely place, a few chipped picnic tables and a drab concrete box in a small clearing carved out of the forest; the pine trees, with their long, slender trunks and thick green branches high above, loomed a few dozen feet beyond a grassy area like a wall of spears. A single lamp shed its pale yellow light on the area. As he parked in front of the little building, the rain turned into a fierce downpour, and it sounded so much louder when he turned off his engine.

He had killed a man.

Stomach clenching, he threw open the door and ran toward the building. The frigid rain instantly soaked his hair, cutting through his thin cotton shirt like icy needles. The wind whispered through the trees, stirring up the paper plates and cups on the ground near the overflowing garbage can. The phone booth was on the far side, near the women’s door, but he couldn’t wait. Dodging the puddles in the sidewalk, he sprinted to the green door marked Men. When he grabbed the cold metal handle, the door opened (thank God, thank God) and he sprinted inside.

The room was dank and cramped, smelling of piss and mold. A single amber light above the cracked mirror and the metal sink was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay. There were two urinals to the left of the sink, two green stalls immediately to the left of the urinals. Gritty tile floor, lots of small white squares streaked with mud. Shoebox-sized vents near the ceiling. Stumbling into the first stall, he took it all in with a glance.

He barely made it down to the bowl before the contents of his stomach surged out of his mouth. Again and again, he threw up, until there was nothing left but dry heaves and the horrible acid burn in his throat and his nose. He hugged the cold metal, his head bent into the bowl and all its foulness, sobbing now. The damp ground soaked through his pants and chilled his knees.

The restroom door swung open.

There was no creak, just the distinctive swoosh of the door and the increasing loudness of the rain. Simon froze. The stall door had shut behind him, but he knew whoever it was could see his knees. They would have seen his car. Might have seen the wreck. Maybe it was a policeman, already come to haul him away.

Simon didn’t make a sound. The restroom door swung shut, muting the storm. Only a dripping faucet broke the silence. After a few seconds, he heard footsteps, water dripping on the tiles, the rustle of heavy clothing. He half expected his stall door to swing open, but instead he saw a glistening black boot appear on the ground, only inches from his knee. The mud-coated toe pointed in the direction of the urinal Simon knew was right next to the stall.

A black boot.

Simon’s despair was quickly washed away by an all-consuming dread. His breath caught in his throat. It couldn’t be... The man could never have survived. It had to be someone else. It had to be.

As Simon remained absolutely rigid, he heard a zipper, then the tinkle of fluid hitting the metal urinal.

He felt himself relax slightly. It was just some traveler, stopping to relieve himself of his coffee. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed Simon. If Simon just waited, maybe he would go away.

But then Simon felt a splash of warm liquid hitting his knee, and he realized, with a shock, that the man was pissing on him. With a startled cry, he scooted away from the line of piss, which continued splashing against the tiles. His heart thundered in his ears. The piss dribbled to a stop, and then he heard the zipper. He saw the boot turn, two boots appearing, both facing his direction.

Simon pressed his back against the other side of the stall, his body shaking. The boots didn’t move for the longest time. Simon waited for a gloved fist to smash through the stall, right in the middle of all the Johnny+Suzie and For a Good Time Call messages scratched on the green metal. But instead, the boots turned away. As Simon sat rigid, waiting for his stall door to bang open, he heard the footsteps move away. The restroom door swung open.

Soon he heard nothing but the tinking faucet. Simon had no idea how long he knelt there, but it was a long time. Then, when he actually wanted to move, he found he couldn’t. Would the biker be waiting outside? Or had it merely been a mistake, pissing on him like that? Maybe it wasn’t the biker. Maybe...

The roar of an engine out in the parking lot made him jump. He knew the sound. It was the biker. He heard the screech of tires, and then the sound of the engine moving away. He breathed a sigh. The guy was just toying with him one last time.

He was going away. It was over.

Shakily, Simon rose. He flushed the toilet, washed his mouth in the sink, then used damp paper towels to wipe off the piss on his pants. Breathing a sigh, he pushed through the restroom door and out into the rain. He didn’t mind the water drenching him — he wished he could be submerged in it, like jumping into the ocean. He walked toward the phone booth, and as he neared, he saw that the metal cord had actually been severed. Had the biker cut it? The rain suddenly felt colder, and he turned, taking a few cautious steps down the sidewalk toward his car.

Until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he was holding his breath. He took several long, shuddering gulps of air, then continued on to his car. Why would the biker cut the cord? Unless...

That’s when he heard a roar from the trees.

He stopped. At first, he thought it was an animal, a mountain lion or a black bear, and he turned in the sound’s direction. It was coming from somewhere in the forest beyond the asphalt. Then he caught a glint of metal, and he saw a black shadow emerge from the darkness. A wheel appeared. Chrome. And then he saw the biker rolling out of the trees, like an apparition of death itself.

The rain created tiny white explosions on the blacktop between them. The biker, front tire poised at the curb, gunned his engine. His headlamp was smashed. Simon was halfway between his car and the restroom, and he knew this was exactly what the biker had wanted.

He broke into a run, heading for his Miata.

The biker gunned his engine, his back tire spitting up grass and dirt as he barreled into the parking lot.

Simon was only a few steps away from his car. He was going to make it. Remembering he had left the door unlocked in his haste, he grabbed the door handle and pulled.

But the door was locked.

He didn’t understand. As the biker roared toward him, he fumbled for his key, but couldn’t find it in either pocket. Then he remembered that he hadn’t only left the door unlocked, he had left his key inside as well — and he realized, as he heard the sound of the biker’s tires squealing, exactly who had it.

No...!

Sensing he had no time to turn, he jumped toward the front of his car. The biker, his back end swinging around as he banked into the turn, smashed into the driver’s-side door. Simon landed on the pavement, scraping his hands, but he was up instantly and running.

He headed for the narrow line of trees separating the rest area from the highway. Through the darkness and the rain, he saw glimpses of the road, like a giant black serpent.

He would cross the road. Get to the campground on the other side. Find someone. It was his only chance.

He made it up over the sidewalk and onto the soggy grass, but then the roar was right behind him and something struck his shoulder. As he went sprawling, the biker thundered past, spinning around, his back tire carving a brown half-circle on the grass. Simon struggled to his feet, but a searing pain lanced through his right knee, and he collapsed onto the wet earth again.

He heard the engine die, the kickstand pop down. He raised his head to see the biker dismount. Simon rolled onto his back and scrambled backwards, the moisture soaking through the seat of his pants. Rain ran into his eyes, blurring his vision. The biker loomed over him like a black shadow. Gloves descended, grabbed his shirt, pulled him off the ground.

Blinking away the water in his eyes, he looked up at the faceplate inches from the end of his nose.

The black helmet now bore a jagged silver scratch on the right side. Simon tried to peer beyond the mirror, but he saw only his own face reflected back at him: his left eye purple and swollen, a line of blood dribbling from his bottom lip across his chin, his soaked hair plastered against his scalp. It was the face of a small and frightened man. It was the face of a man Simon didn’t know.

“Please,” he begged. “Please... I have a wife... a daughter.”

The biker’s grip on his shirt tightened. For the longest time, he held Simon there, the faceplate so close Simon’s breath fogged the glass. He got whiffs of motor oil and leather. The rain lessened, a gust of wind shaking the trees, starting as a whisper and ending as a low moan.

Finally, the biker released him. He fell hard on his backside, and looked up, too scared to move. The biker looked down at him another moment, then reached into his pocket and tossed a pair of keys between Simon’s legs.

As if he was in a dream, Simon watched the man turn and walk back to his bike, a bike Simon now noticed was scratched, the fuselage dented, one of the handlebars twisted. He watched as the man started the engine and, without so much as a glance in Simon’s direction, drove away.

Exhausted, Simon laid his head on the grass, listening as the roar of the biker’s engine moved beyond the rest area, out into the road, and then blended with the storm. He lay there for a long time, then finally rose, retrieved his keys, and made his way back to his car.

As if he were floating outside his body, he watched as he put the key in the door, climbed inside, started the engine, and drove his car toward the exit. He thought the moisture on his face was rain until he tasted the tears on his lips.

With his car idling at the entrance to the highway, the road stretching into darkness on both sides, he knew he had a choice.

To the right lay the casino, where a group of strangers waited around a green felt table, the dimly lit room hazy with smoke. In his mind’s eye he saw an empty chair, a stack of chips in front of it, five cards facedown. He saw himself sit, pick up the cards, and toss his ante into the pot. The pull was there. Even with his bloodied face and aching chest, he felt it. He wanted to go there. He wanted to join that table. There was still time. Nobody would care how he looked. Nobody.

But to the left, somewhere beyond the shadowy hill, he saw something else: his daughter’s dark room, the street lamp in the parking lot breaking through the gaps in the blinds. It was as if he were standing there in the doorway, his clothes still dripping. The room smelled so much different than the casino — no smoke, but instead the faint stench from her soiled diapers, an odor her diaper pail couldn’t quite contain. It didn’t smell bad to him, though. It smelled wonderful. He saw himself move quietly into the room, navigating around dolls and blocks and board books littering the floor. He saw himself ease down in the glider across from her bed, cringing when it squeaked. He saw his trembling hand reach for her sleeping form, his fingers inches from her hair.

He closed his eyes. He saw her so much more vividly this way. If he concentrated, he could almost feel his fingers brushing against her hair. Soft, like the finest silk. If he thought about how it felt, if he didn’t allow himself to think about anything else, not even for a second, the feeling could save him. He knew it could. It had power. All he had to do was surrender himself to it. All he had to do was turn his hands to the left.

It should be so simple.

It should be so easy.

And yet, as he opened his eyes, and with a last convulsive shudder forced the wheel to the left, he knew it was both the hardest and the greatest thing he had ever done.

When I came down for breakfast the next morning, my father was sitting at the table, hidden behind his morning paper. A half-eaten plate of waffles sat in front of him. I sat down at the empty plate beside him as Mom fished another batch of waffles out of the toaster and set them down in front of me.

“You see this, Meg? Looks like another coupla animals went missing from the neighborhood again. Coyotes, they’re saying. Says here the heat drives ‘em out of the woods looking for food. They’re telling folks to make sure to bring their pets in at night.”

Mom said nothing. I concentrated on my breakfast. Dad continued from behind his paper, “Only I was talking to Mark Holbrook the other day, and he says that isn’t so. His brother works over at Animal Control, and he says the ones they found were taken apart, but there wasn’t anything missing. Way he tells it, no animal coulda done it. You ask me...”

“David,” Mom replied sharply. “We do not need that kind of talk at the table.” At the table is what she said. In front of Timothy is what she meant.

“What?” Dad glanced over the top of his paper. “Oh geez, kiddo, I didn’t know you were up yet. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sure Thurston’s fine.”

“That’s okay,” I mumbled. It wasn’t, though. Thurston was our cat, a four-year-old tabby. Earlier that summer, she had wandered off. Nobody’d seen her in weeks. Mom insisted she was all right, that some nice family had taken her in, but I knew the truth. Thurston wasn’t coming back.

“So,” Mom said, “I was thinking you could ride your bike over to Ben’s today if you like, maybe go for a swim? Ben’s mom says she’d love to have you.”

Ben’s house was half a neighborhood away. The route took me right past Billy McMahon’s house. “I don’t feel like it,” I said, pushing waffles around the plate.

“Well, I’ve got a house to show, and you can’t just lie about all day. You’re going to Ben’s.”

“Fine.” I pushed back from the table, leaving behind a congealing mess of waffles and syrup. I threw my swim trunks and a towel in a bag and headed for the door. As the screen door clanged shut behind me, Mom called out.

“Timothy?”

“Yeah?”

“Be safe!”

Safe. Right. I grabbed my bike from the garage and rode off down the street.

When Sean climbed out of bed, he felt sore and tired, as if he had relived the experience his dream commemorated. Even so, the excitement the police sergeant’s warning had engendered remained, and he felt unaccustomedly cheerful and optimistic. The possibility of a threat to his life had somehow reconnected him to the living world, awakened him as if from a deep, deep slumber. As he poured milk over his cereal and gazed out his kitchen window, he could see children returning from school, chattering like jays and darting this way and that over the sidewalk, the energy of youth rendering them unable to walk the sad straight line of adults, and for the first time in many, many years, he thought of Ibrahim.

In the days following the bombing, Sean had found himself more and more frequently manning Combat Post 69. This was directly due to the loss of personnel, and had the bombing not happened, he would have complained bitterly at such long pulls of hazardous duty. CP 69 was not sentry duty. CP 69 was where you provided target practice for the Shiite militia in “Hooterville,” a slum otherwise known to its inhabitants as Hay-Es-Salaam. It was rumored that in the early days of the Marines’ peacekeeping mission, when all had been well betwixt the peacekeepers and the Muslims, two lovely Lebanese girls had made a habit of undressing in front of their window, which faced the Americans’ outpost. Hence the name Hooterville. Sean suspected this had been wishful thinking on the part of some lonely marines, as the Muslim girls were known to be notoriously, and disappointingly, strait-laced. Nonetheless, the name stuck.

But in the months of August and September, relations between the Marines and all the factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War deteriorated rapidly and violently, and CP 69 had become an extremely hot spot. They were routinely shot at and rocketed from every quarter. Infuriatingly, the rules of engagement laid down from on high made it nearly impossible for the beleaguered troops to properly defend themselves. After the bombing, the marines, and Sean, found ways.

One of the rules that Sean and the other surviving members of his company quickly dispensed with was the prohibition on returning fire at a combatant who could not be clearly seen actively firing at them. As the enemy usually chose to shoot from the upper windows of the bombed-out buildings that looked down on CP 69, and then ducked back inside, this had always been extremely impractical. Now, they always “saw” the militiaman, and after chasing him away from the window with a hail of bullets, they would follow up with a few carefully placed grenades. This had the effect of silencing that particular room, and the marines could rest assured that at least one, if not more, of the militiamen would fail to answer roll call the following morning.

After several days of this, there was a dramatic lessening of incoming fire. From several thousand rounds of small-arms fire a day, and hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades and frequent mortar barrages, they were faced with what, as seen in comparison, was a desultory few hundred rounds and only the occasional grenade. The Shiite militiamen seemed to be thinking things over.

It was during this lull that Sean and his newly constituted squad discovered Ibrahim. Sean first saw him at the Lebanese army checkpoint located across the street from CP 69. He appeared to be entertaining the soldiers with some kind of story that involved episodes of break dancing, and the government troops were enjoying the show immensely. These soldiers were ostensibly the Americans’ allies in their failing mission to keep the peace between all the warring factions in their country. However, experience had taught the marines that their commitment to that mission varied wildly, and appeared to be based on the quality of the opposition they faced. When they fought, they fought ferociously, but often they would stay their hand for reasons known only to them, much to the marines’ consternation.

To Sean’s eyes, the boy appeared to be about nine years old, small and spindly, with the large dark eyes and jet-black hair characteristic of so many Lebanese. He was assured, however, by a new member of his squad (a quick, nervous private first class from Indiana named Randy Colquitt) that Ibrahim was at least fourteen years of age. Randy had been temporarily transferred from his company to make up the losses Sean’s had suffered in the bombing. It seemed the Corps was robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the unit that was supposed to relieve the marines currently on duty in Beirut had been diverted to a spot of trouble in someplace called Grenada.

“How d’ya know that?” Sean had inquired absently, while scanning the seemingly empty buildings in Hooterville. He had noticed several women cross an alleyway and enter one of them a few minutes before. They had all been draped in the traditional Muslim clothing. Sean thought they walked funny.

“Used to hang out in our AO. They say his parents were killed by the PLA... or the Shiites, or somebody.”

Sean threw a look his way, then returned to scanning the blown-out windows across from their sandbagged position. “That right?” he asked laconically. “Why’s that?”

Colquitt turned away and slid down into their hole with his back against the wall. In the midst of firing up a cigarette, he answered in a puzzled way, “Christians, I guess. That’s what they say,” he continued, blowing out a lungful of smoke. “I don’t know.”

Sean glanced once more at the Lebanese Army position. The kid had finished his dance and was looking in the marines’ direction. He caught Sean looking at him. “Marines kick ass!” he shouted cheerfully in passable English, and waved.

Involuntarily, Sean waved back. The kid started their way. “Damn,” Sean muttered. “That little bastard’s comin’ over here.”

He rose up from his crouch to wave him off and caught a movement in the corner of his eye. He ducked so fast that he crashed into Colquitt and toppled him over onto his side. “What the—” the PFC spluttered.

Several shots rang out in rapid succession and Sean could hear them pinging off the street and the ricochets whining wildly away. The “women” had walked funny for a reason. He dared a peek over the side of their emplacement, and his mouth fell open.

The boy was doing his break-dancing routine in the middle of the street. It was generally agreed that the Shiites were terrible marksmen, but Sean knew from experience that what they lacked in accuracy they made up for in volume. Every second the kid delayed brought him closer to that lucky bullet.

“Lay down some fire on that position,” Sean demanded. Colquitt reluctantly obeyed and began taking shots at the window. The fighters, who had doffed their previous attire, ducked away from the opening. One appeared to be clutching his throat.

“Good one,” Sean said. “Keep it up!” He risked rising to a crouch and saw that the boy was now on his back spinning like a top, with his legs raised up in the air. “Get your ass in here, kid!” he shouted. The Lebanese soldiers had disappeared.

The boy leapt suddenly to his feet, even as he spun, and landed facing the militiamen’s position, one arm raised defiantly in the air. From his small fist popped a middle finger. “You suck!” he assured the fighters, and then, with a grin at Sean, began a mad dash for the marines’ bunker.

“Sonofabitch,” Sean muttered unbelievingly. Then they opened up.

Sean had never seen so many flashes from so many windows in all his time in The Root. The sheer volume was deafening, and the whining of passing rounds was like being in a jar of wasps. The only problem was that they were all aimed at him as he stood slack-jawed watching the kid’s race for safety. Colquitt snagged him by the belt and yanked him down into the hole. The firing ceased immediately, and moments later the kid vaulted the sand-bags and landed, laughing and panting, amongst them.

“I do not believe you!” Sean gasped. “Kid, you’ve got some big ones.”

“I guess,” Colquitt agreed.

“What’s your name?” he asked the panting youngster as he tossed him his canteen.

“Ibrahim,” the boy informed him proudly, his black eyes sparking with excitement.

Philip turned tired eyes once more to his notebook: passages from Chekhov’s story copied verbatim in his own handwriting, notes penned in red ink all around the margins. What had begun as an exercise (hone craft by analyzing the master, reading is writing) had gradually sparked a passion in him, something he hadn’t quite felt with the stories he’d tried to write before, had never felt in front of a classroom of dull gazes. In only one sentence Chekhov hints at husband’s point of view, Philip had written early on, “believed her, didn’t believe her,” and then the words that had set the whole process in motion: A story of its own there? Throughout, the red ink threatened to overwhelm the black, staining his skin when the pen had bled on his fingers.

An entire page of clues and conjectures about the husband: Surname p. 574 is Von Diderits... First name not given: perhaps Aloysha, Evgeniy (nickname Zhenya), Gavril, Piotr... Crown Department or Provincial Government? Anna does not know. Check Britannica for background... How large is their house? How many servants? Elsewhere he’d jotted, Anna’s “internal complaint” intended as double entendre? And on another page, a chronology of the story’s scenes: Yalta where Anna and Gurov meet; the city of S — where The Geisha premieres; Moscow where the affair continues...

As he stared at the words and figures, Philip’s mind raced to pull the pieces, the possibilities, together. He could write this. This was the one, he knew it.

“So, how are things with the Russians?”

Catherine’s voice, behind him. How long had she been in the room? Philip detected a floral scent and hints of fruit — pears, perhaps? Grapes? She couldn’t have been standing there long, or he would have noticed it — unlike his wife to wear perfume. She usually smelled of finger paints and crayons, carried home from the art classes she taught at Ligon. He hooked his pen through the top of the clipboard, closed his eyes, and inhaled slowly. Grapes, definitely.

“It’s so dark in here,” she said, and he felt her hands on his shoulders. “But I’ll bet you haven’t even noticed.”

“I hadn’t really.” He opened his eyes again. Except for the glow of the computer screen — Britannica.com — the only light came from the mica-shade lamp on the desk, shining down on the open copy of Chekhov. Through the window, he saw that the sun had gone down and the night was pitch black, and he was reminded of Chekhov’s counsel: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on the broken glass. The window sill was steeped in shadows from the streetlight. A blur of buds bloomed on the bush beyond. Still, no moon. The CD had run out as well — how long before, he didn’t know. Monk, he’d been listening to. “In Walked Bud,” “ ’Round Midnight,” “Evidence.”

“But the Russians are good.” He leaned his head forward as she kneaded his shoulders. “Or at least the one I’m working with. It’ll be a good story when I’m done, I just feel it. But I’m really still just making notes. Looking for the key into the whole thing.”

“But you’ve been in here for hours.”

“Oh, it couldn’t have been that long,” he said. “After all, what time did we have dinner?”

She laughed. “I ate some leftover pizza about a half-hour ago,” she said. “But unless you have a stash of food in here...” And she was right. He couldn’t remember having eaten.

“Oh, well,” he shrugged. She stopped touching him.

“Well, try to eat something. I’m going out for a while.”

“Anyplace special?” he asked, turning in his chair to see her. She wore a bandana print skirt, sleeveless denim top. Black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Scant light came from elsewhere in the house through the open doorway behind her, falling lightly on the edge of the bookcase, a pile of mail, the guest bed that shared this room. Catherine herself was caught half-in, half-out of the mica-tinted glow, and he tried to think what word she might be: not luminous, not scintillant ... evanescent?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Target, maybe? We don’t really need anything, but I’m just feeling a little restless tonight. Just want to get out.” The top edge of her face was shadowed (he knew this word: chiaroscuro; she had been captured in chiaroscuro), but from the turn of her chin, he imagined that her brow must have furrowed. “I may stop by Borders afterwards, flip through some magazines, get a cup of coffee. Maybe pick up a new book for the kids at school. They stay open pretty late, right?”

He nodded. “New perfume?”

“It’s French,” she said. “Annick Goutal. It’s called ‘Ce Soir Ou Jamais.’ The woman at Belk’s described it as Turkish rose gardens, wildflowers, and black currants. You like?”

Black currants. He hadn’t been far off with grapes.

“I feel... enthralled,” he said, grinning. “Fragrance is a seductive thing.”

She leaned over to kiss his forehead. “I left a couple of pieces of that pizza for you in the microwave,” she whispered. “Don’t forget them.” And then she was gone.

Her scent lingered in the air as he picked up his pen, and for a moment he was unable to remember where he had been in his notes. Then, turning a new thought over in his mind, turning the key he had found, he once more began to write: Fragrance is a significant thing.

A.J. shifted in his seat to ease the stiffness in his lower back and glanced at the clock, wondering where the detectives were. It was almost midnight, shift’s end. Usually he could gauge the time pretty well without looking, and he was surprised it was this late. He raised his hand to the flickering computer screen to check his watch. The crystal was a little fogged and he blew on it to clear it. Sometimes that worked.

The watch was probably in its final days, but it had been a good watch, the kind a cop needed. Something that could get smacked against a wall, dropped in a lake, and even stepped on, and still just keep on ticking, like the old commercial said. When it died, he wouldn’t throw it away. He would lay it to rest in his jewelry box along with all his old service pins and outdated badges.

It had been his daughter Sheila’s last gift to him, given to him in June of 1998. He had thought it was a Father’s Day gift until he realized it was wrapped in Christmas paper, left over from six months earlier when he hadn’t shown up in Knoxville at the dentist’s house like he promised he would.

Sheila didn’t understand too many things back then, like how long it took to remove crumpled cars, wet Christmas presents, and dead bodies from a freeway interchange. She didn’t understand that he had called the next morning to apologize and wish her a good Christmas. And she didn’t understand that ex-wives had their own reasons for not giving daughters messages from their fathers.

He supposed most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t understand stuff like that. They saw the world only through their own narrow, selfish prisms, and sometimes one tiny mistake could be that one thing they thought ruined their life forever. His not being there that Christmas was that one thing for Sheila.

He hadn’t made it to Knoxville the following Christmas, either, but he had called and asked Sheila to come see him. The day before, she canceled, leaving a message on his answering machine telling him she had places to go and cool people she wanted to see over the holidays. A.J. wasn’t one of them.

He tapped on the watch. The crystal was still clouded.

He wondered if the Seikos clouded up. Probably not. Those beauties were sterling silver, emblazoned with the police department logo, and inscribed with the officer’s name on the back. They were given to officers after twenty-five years of service, presented in a satin-lined case by the chief at a ten-minute ceremony that the wives and children could attend.

A.J. reached down and picked up a half-eaten Hershey’s bar off the console and broke off a square of chocolate.

The department had stopped giving out the watches last November. Said they couldn’t afford it anymore, what with all the recent pay increases, EEOC-mandated promotions, lawsuits on excessive force, worker’s-comp injuries, and the high cost of computers, radar guns, patrol cars, tin badges, and gasoline.

A.J.’s twenty-fifth anniversary was next month. He had mentioned that to Andy a few days ago, and Andy had asked why he didn’t just buy a watch and have it inscribed to himself.

Don’t ya think it loses just a little meaning that way, kid?

He looked back at Andy, hitting the wipers again to clear his view.

Suddenly Andy leaned over the railing and lost the rest of his country-fried steak dinner into the river. He coughed a few times, drew himself tall, and with trembling hands used a neatly folded handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his mouth.

A.J. peered up at the sky. It was still raining, the drops floating from the sky like Lorraine’s love dust, but not hard enough, he guessed, to drive the kid back inside the cruiser. He’d let him stay out there awhile.

In the pale glow of the lone streetlight, A.J. studied Andy’s slender face. It looked ghostly and pained, and A.J. knew the ghostly part came from what lay under the bridge. But the pained part, well, that was something else.

It was embarrassment, something A.J. understood. No one wanted to lose their cookies in front of a senior officer. It was pretty damn undignified to puke all over your crisp blue trousers and your just-out-of-the-box Rockports.

A.J.’s eyes drifted along the empty bridge. Maybe there was something that happened to men when they stood on bridges, like standing in the middle of a bridge put them halfway in-between something good or bad. Or weak or strong. Or between yesterday and tomorrow.

He had stood on a bridge once. A high-arcing overpass near the airport. It had been his assigned post back in — when was it? — nineteen eighty-seven? Eighty-eight?

The ice had started dripping from the sky about nine A.M. By nine-thirty, two cars had slid off the overpass into the snowy banks below.

A.J. had been sent to the bridge to monitor traffic, slow speeders, and call ambulances for idiots who still thought they could race their way across a high patch of ice fifty feet in the air.

He had a ride-along passenger that day, some woman from a neighborhood-watch committee who the chief thought needed a tour of duty in order to gain a greater awareness of how hard the police were working on community relations.

It would have been a fine day, normally, with the ice storm a perfect setting to allow an epic display of police compassion. Except for the fact that A.J. had a touch of the flu that had settled in his intestines and he knew the moment he stopped the cruiser next to the overpass guardrail that it was going to be a long morning.

The stomach cramps started around ten, and by noon he was covered in a suit of ice, his fingers so frozen he could barely key the radio to ask to be briefly relieved.

The request was denied. Three times. He was needed, they said. There was no one else.

So he had toughed it out. Four hours, standing on the side of the overpass, waving his flashlight at the foggy, slow-moving headlights, his body shivering uncontrollably, shoes frozen to the road, and watery, burning shit running down the back of his legs.

The neighborhood-watch woman never asked what the smell in the cruiser was. But there was a look of disgust in her eyes as they made their way back to the precinct, like she thought he was some sort of animal who was too lazy or too uncivilized to use the toilet like decent human beings do.

The easy chatter of the radio pulled him back to the moment. Andy was still bent over the concrete wall, head in his hands. A.J. thought about going to him, but decided not to. He’d come back when he was ready.

The car was growing cold. A.J. reached over to flip up the heat. The fan rattled and the vent puffed out lukewarm air.

He was tapping on the vent when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a folded paper on the passenger floorboard. He picked it up, and in the dim light he unfolded it. It was Andy’s paycheck stub.

A.J. knew how much money Andy made. Because of the union, starting salaries were common knowledge, and were even posted on the department’s Web site. But still, A.J. wanted to look.

Thirty-two thousand, one hundred and seventy-four dollars and three cents. Awful lot of money for a rookie who didn’t know shit about what he was doing, or why.

His gaze moved to the deductions.

A hundred-buck automatic deposit to the First Bank of Tennessee. Union dues. Federal taxes. Social security. 401k contributions. Payroll-deducted equipment costs. The kid had bought himself a Kevlar vest.

A.J. looked to the dashboard, at the picture Andy had clipped there earlier tonight. The photo was of Andy’s wife and baby. The woman, a wide-eyed beauty, looked a lot younger than Andy did, and the baby was so new it was still wrinkled.

He folded the check stub and set it on the seat. Thirty-two thousand was nowhere near enough.

A.J. made decent money now, decent enough, he guessed, for a single guy long past child support. But in the early years, when Lorraine was young and raising Sheila and trying to make a home for them, it had been a struggle. Later, after he lost track of Sheila, he had started sticking almost a third of his paycheck into a savings account. He had found a nice little cabin on Lake Arkabutla down in Mississippi and he wanted to buy it.

Eight grand into the plan, he met Spider Jackson, a trash-talking street germ with a big attitude and a bigger father who wielded one of the sharpest legal swords in the city and who had other political attachments, like the mayor’s sister.

Spider had been caught red-handed selling stolen guns and, as all dirtbags do when they’re high and scared, he resisted arrest. Bit a chunk of flesh out of one officer’s hand, kneed another in the groin, and sliced open the abdomen of a third before he found himself in the back of the patrol car, alive but hurting.

A.J. never hit Spider. Didn’t get there in time to do anything except drive him to the jail and escort him inside. All the way in, Spider was hollering how his daddy was going to sue everyone, but A.J. had heard it all before, and hadn’t given it another thought until a few weeks later when his name showed up on a subpoena in a brutality lawsuit.

The car was too warm now. A.J. reached down and turned off the heat and used his sleeve to rub the condensation off the glass so he could keep an eye on Andy.

In the old days, people sued the city. Nowadays, they could sue officers, and that’s what Spider’s father did. In the end, the city settled their part of the lawsuit, and the jury divided the balance of the settlement up among the officers.

Later, the lawyer explained that since all the officers denied any culpability, the jury had no reason to believe that A.J. was the only one who was really innocent, and besides, he said, you know better than anyone that to some people you’re all just white faces in blue uniforms.

The court took the eight thousand in one lump sum, and set up a payment plan for the rest. His final payment was due in August of this year.

A.J. reached down to pick up his coffee cup. His fingers had stiffened up again and he couldn’t grab the cup the way most folks grabbed things, so he picked it up with his index finger and his thumb, transferring it to his left hand to drink it.

He looked down at his hand. His pinkie finger was gone, shot off by a punk-ass armed robber firing blindly as he tumbled his way down a fire escape. The bullet had ripped through A.J.’s palm, mangling the tendons and severing the pinkie.

Another cop had been on the fire escape that day. His partner, dead from a shot to the head, lying there on the black iron, his blue eyes open toward the sky, his gun still in his holster.

A.J. had seen it happen. But even now, he couldn’t remember it well. All he could remember feeling at that moment was his pain and his fear and all those other selfish emotions that come when you think you’re going to die.

He could remember the funeral a few days later. The long line of police cars crawling along the freeway and the smell of the white mums and the saddest damn music he ever heard at a grave site.

And he remembered the endless rows of uniforms, and the stiff, solemn faces looking at him from the other side of the casket, silently wondering why two veteran cops hadn’t been able to catch one sixteen-year-old dirtbag. Wondering why A.J. hadn’t managed to fire off one single round from his weapon, because he was, they knew, the first one out the window. Wondering all of that, but never saying a word.

A.J. laid his head back against the seat and took a second to close his eyes.

His dead partner had four ex-wives, but not one came to the funeral, so it had been A.J. who had accepted the folded American flag afterwards. Lorraine had put the flag on the top shelf of the closet. Said she put it there so she wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded every day of just how suddenly she could be a widow, too.

Right after, the department had stuck A.J. behind a desk in the traffic division, saying that because of the finger, he couldn’t shoot accurately anymore. Maybe afraid, too, he couldn’t pull his gun quickly enough to keep from getting shot himself. That year they had paid out three hundred grand in widow’s pensions, they said, and they couldn’t afford any more.

He had stayed at the desk in the traffic division for over a year, silently slogging through paperwork. Every night, he’d uncap the bottle of Jim Beam and try to tune out Lorraine’s whining and find some peace. Finally, Lorraine told him if he wanted some peace, she’d be happy to give it to him. The next day she was gone.

Days after, when he was looking for his old revolver, he found the folded flag behind some Rolling Stones records. He stood there in his bedroom, holding it in his hands, thinking he needed to find some place of honor for it, somewhere better than in the top of a dusty closet.

He bought a new case for it, a triangular one with polished oak edges that the flag could just sit right in, and he set it on the kitchen counter, next to the ever-present bottle of Jim Beam.

A few weeks later, the flag was still there. The bottle was gone and he had not replaced it.

He practiced at the range for a month, always alone, too embarrassed to let anyone see his fumbling. Finally, he found enough agility in his hand and enough confidence in himself to ask for another shot at requalifying. A week later, he was back behind the wheel of a cruiser.

That’s when he finally understood what Lorraine felt, trapped in a life and feeling second-rate, so invisible that you plan honeymoons you’re never going to take.

A calm female voice came from the radio, calling to him. A.J. keyed his mike and acknowledged her.

“Looks like the detectives are about five minutes out,” she said.

A.J. thanked her and clicked off.

Andy was leaning against the half-wall, staring out at the darkness. A.J. figured he was done throwing up, and was now probably just trying to unscramble things in his head. A wisp of fog curled around Andy’s legs, then disappeared. For a second, everything was clear and silent, as if the darkness was holding its breath.

Andy would be different in the morning, A.J. knew. He wouldn’t know why, because he didn’t understand that this was the kind of moment that you lose a piece of yourself in, a sliver of something taken away by that invisible thing that crawls inside you and leaves just as quickly, without letting you know what it took.

Andy wouldn’t miss it much right away, but over time, one day, if he found himself sleepless and alone, he might wonder where it went and if he could get it back.

Andy gave out a sigh deep enough to raise his shoulders, then he turned and looked toward the cruiser. He was ready now.

A.J. pushed out of the car and started across the bridge. Andy stepped forward under the light. He had some color back, but his forehead was still beaded with sweat or rain. He lowered his eyes, then forced himself to look back up.

“How ya feeling?” A.J. asked.

When Andy found his voice, it was still thick with the scorch of vomit. “Don’t tell the guys I lost my dinner, okay?”

“Not a problem,” A.J. said.

Andy’s eyes drifted reluctantly back to the edge of the railing, then down toward the water, but he didn’t move from his spot. He looked lost as to how he should behave or where he should keep his eyes. A.J. stepped forward and placed a hand on the wet concrete railing. He looked down.

The inky water slithered alongside a bank of thick brush, rounded rocks, and cypress trees. One of the trees had been shattered a lifetime ago by a powerful bolt of lightning. In the dim light, the branches looked burnt.

That’s where she lay. In the arms of the dead tree.

Her name was Tammy.

They had gotten the missing person’s report almost two weeks ago, just another thirteen-year-old girl with a juvenile record, a know-it-all attitude, and a boyfriend who thought it was sexy to cover her neck in hickeys.

A.J. and Andy had been called to take the initial report, and he had let Andy take the lead. They had stood in the dirty, cramped living room, Andy’s pen poised over his notebook. The mother had been unable to remember much about her daughter, except that maybe recently she had dyed her hair red, but she wasn’t sure if it was still red now, or some other color. She didn’t know the last names of any of her daughter’s friends. She wasn’t even sure if her daughter had attended school that day. Sometimes she skipped, the mother said.

Andy had stood there, looking down at an almost blank page in his notebook. Later, on the way to the cruiser, Andy had paused and looked back at the house.

It’s like she was lost long before she was lost, Andy had said.

Then, the mother had come to the porch, calling to them, offering one final recollection.

Hey, officers... she had this pink T-shirt she loved, something with rhinestones on the front that said Too Hot to Handle. She’s probably wearing that.

A.J. turned on his flashlight and shined it down into the black branches. In the thin beam of white light, the pink T-shirt looked more like a rag, the fabric eaten away by eleven days of cold, rushing water. The ribbed collar hung loose around her black, decaying neck.

For a second, he thought he could see the glint of one of the rhinestones, but he knew he must be wrong. The stones would be moldy now, their shine lost in the muddy water, if they were even still there.

The T-shirt was the only piece of clothing on her body.

He looked back at Andy.

Andy had finally come to the edge and was staring down at her, the look on his face a mix of morbid curiosity and horror.

“Not going to get sick on me again, are you?” A.J. asked.

“No, sir,” Andy said, drawing a deep breath. “It’s a little easier the third and fourth time.”

A.J. clicked off the flashlight. “It’s never easier.”

They both turned away from the body and leaned their hips against the railing. In the distance, A.J. could hear a siren, and knew in a few minutes the road would be lit with half a dozen sets of headlights.

“If it doesn’t get easier,” Andy said, “how does anyone do this for twenty-five years?”

“You just find ways,” A.J. said. “And you find things. Like finding this girl. If you hadn’t needed to take a leak, we wouldn’t have found her. But you did need to take a leak and we did find her. And now she can go home. And that’s what you think about.”

“So finding her is a good thing?” Andy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Will we get any recognition for finding her?”

“Nope.”

Andy thought about that for a minute, then took the flashlight from A.J.’s hand. He shined it back down into the tree limbs, holding it on the pink shirt for a long time. From the brush and trees below, the chirr of crickets was starting up and they both stood there for a moment, listening.

“I don’t ever want to forget this moment,” Andy said.

“You won’t.”

Andy set the flashlight down, pointing it so the beam ran along the top of the half-wall. He drew a pocketknife from his pants and flipped it open.

“What are you doing?” A.J. asked.

Andy bent over the railing and started carving in the concrete. A.J. glanced down the road for the cruisers, then back at Andy. Andy’s knife was scraping furiously against the hard surface.

The first headlights were coming down the road when Andy brushed away the gray dust and put his knife in his pocket. Then he walked off to meet the arriving cruiser.

A.J. picked up the flashlight and shined it down on Andy’s scratchings to see what he had written.

A.J. turned to look at Andy as he walked down the bridge toward the flashing blue lights. Despite the mud and rain that spattered his sleeves and trousers, his step was sure and his shoulders were straight.

A.J. watched him for a moment, then looked back to the carving. After a moment, he pulled out his own pocketknife and worked the rusty blade open.

Under Andy’s inscription, he wrote one of his own.