over the sounds of the water, the engines, the wind across the decks, they could hear hammering. And old-school hammering, too, with a hammer, not an air gun. Jimmy scanned the houses up and down the hill and down to the rocks, the water’s edge, until he found it, the grand old moss-green Craftsman “cottage” with a scar of new wood on one side of its face and a carpenter, now a third of a mile away, in khakis and a white sleeveless tee, raising and dropping that hammer, a half beat off from the sound that crossed the water.

Sausalito was Sausalito. You had to look hard to see how it could be a real place to real people, a place to live and not a happy hologram that zapped back into the projector once the last tourist turned his back to go up the ramp to the boat.

Lucy and Les had fish and chips at an H Salt Esquire that faced the waterfront and the marina. It was early yet, right at twelve, and there wasn’t much of a line. They brought the food outside, very accommodating for the investigator tailing them. Lucy seemed to fall back into herself over lunch. She stopped eating and pushed away her little newspaper-lined basket of greasy fish.

Jimmy hated to say it, but he was already tired of her here-we-go-again soul-sink act. Les reacted to it immediately. Maybe that was what irritated Jimmy, how the boy scrambled each time to find in himself some sense of what to do to help.

“It’s just a piece of fish,” Jimmy said aloud.

The panhandler on a break on the bench beside him stirred. “You sure you can’t help me out with gas money, man?” he said. “I’m stranded.”

Jimmy got up, never even really looked at him.

“God bless you,” the panhandler said.

Next, there was some jewelry for Lucy to look through, a rack out under the perfect sun alongside the very clean sidewalk in the bank of stores and bars along Bridgeway, the main drag. Jimmy strolled along across the street, stopping when she stopped, catching the mundane details to pass on to Angel. Lucy fingered a necklace while the bosomy young hippie woman who’d made it told her how good it looked on her. Les stood by, patient, putting on a good show of having no place he’d rather be than with his depressed sister in Disneyland. The boy pointed to another necklace, and the hippie girl took it down and handed it to Lucy. Lucy undid the clasp and held it up around her neck, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it anymore.

A passerby offered an opinion. “It looks good on you,” Jimmy saw her say.

She was a real beauty, the passerby. Alone, too. With an expensive, trendy, flat leather bag over her shoulder, matching her expensive, trendy, pointy shoes, Jimmy guessed. The bag and shoes were bold yellow, golden-rod. She took off her sunglasses, shook out her hair. It was women like this with hair like this who made them come up with a new name for brown. She wore a white dress, full in the skirt, belted, V-necked, summery, so white it splashed light onto the storefront. She was Lucy’s age, maybe a little older. The dress was long and had something of a Town & Country classy modesty about it. But it didn’t stop Jimmy from imagining her legs pretty much all the way up to the top.

Lucy smiled and thanked the passerby but didn’t want to talk. The woman smiled in return and walked on.

Lucy and Les took the bus.

Jimmy took a cab.

Right across the Golden Gate.

There was the city, off to the left. The day was still wonderfully, deceptively beautiful, clear and blue. And that moon. A daylight moon, almost full, sitting atop the point of the TransAmerica Pyramid like a balloon. The window was down, and the air smelled good. Jimmy realized he was happy. Go figure.

It was even a nice taxicab, patchouli and all. The driver was a Mr. Natural with dishwater blond dreads. The picture on his license had him with the same look, five or six years earlier. In the movie playing in Jimmy’s head, here was the long-term live-in “husband” of the busty jewelry maker on the street back in Sausalito. He had the Pacifica station on the radio. They were against the war.

Lucy and Les’s bus was four car lengths ahead. It was a commuter. With a rainbow running down the side. It