tend not to even try to explain things to third parties.”

“That works, too.”

“It never helps.”

“No, it never does,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy liked him. All Sailors were good liars, if they made it through the first weeks, months, without falling apart. You had to learn fast how to read each other and then trust what your instinct was telling you.

“So who’s next?” Jimmy said and bit his stalk of celery in half.

Groner let a half minute go by. “Maybe it’s you,” he said.

“Or you,” Jimmy said.

Groner laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

“What are you going to say about the Leonidas girls?”

“Mother of God, I saw their room,” Groner said and shook his head. “It was like an explosion in a Dubble Bubble factory. They slept in matching canopy beds. One liked Justin, one liked Clay.”

“That was probably last year,” Jimmy said.

“They change so fast.” The way Groner said the cliché, sour and sincere at the same time, made Jimmy wonder if the grizzled old cynic had been, of all things, a daddy once. “George had just bought them both a Kia. Two Kias. They came into the City in Melina’s. It was in the covered parking lot across from Pier 41. It had a hundred and eleven miles on it.”

“Did you find out why they wanted to die?” Jimmy said.

“You were there,” Groner said. “I wasn’t. What did you see?”

“In the moment, it was hard to get past the nakedness.”

“The assumption was they were loaded, but they weren’t. What they had in their stomachs was essentially a Jamba Juice mango smoothie. They’d each had one. One had some Midol in her blood. She was menstruating. Funny, you’d think the two girls would be in sync, but they weren’t. There’s always a detail like that. Maybe it’s why I do this.”

Jimmy said, “There hadn’t been any signs of depression? High drama?”

“Happy and healthy.”

“You said you were ‘tying this in.’ To what?”

The bartender came past. He pointed at Groner. Groner shook his head, though his glass was empty.

“In the last five days, there have been twenty-six suicides in the City. Usually, there are one or two a day. And more than half of them have been, as you say, the ‘high drama’ kind. Two off the Golden Gate last night, five minutes apart. Three last week. They usually get one jumper every two or three weeks. People are killing themselves spectacularly all over the city. Not the head-in-the-oven kind, alone in the garage with the Nova.” He sucked the bitters-dashed sugar off the cubes at the bottom of his rocks glass.

“That’s not what you meant when you said, ‘Who’s next?’ is it?” he said, and looked at Jimmy.

Jimmy didn’t answer.

“Why would a Sailor be up there with them, whispering in their ear just before they jumped?” he said instead.

“First I heard of it,” the reporter said and almost made it sound like the truth.

Groner changed his mind about that second drink and, while he waited for it, asked Jimmy what had brought him to San Francisco.

Jimmy surprised himself with how much he said. About Lucy and Les. About Angel back home. About the boat ride over to Sausalito. About what he had thought had almost happened on the Golden Gate. About the park on Tiburon. About the two women who always seemed to be hovering.

It’s getting to me, that’s what he was thinking as he heard himself summarize the last days. There was too much death here, and it didn’t have anything to do with him, however much they tried to make it be about him, however much he seemed to be right there when the bodies dropped. Sailors had their own kind of agoraphobia and for their own special reasons. They never liked to be too far from the home port. They started getting antsy. Maybe it was time to go home.

“Go to her, this Lucy, talk to her, tell her people are worried about her, take her home,” he heard Groner say.

The Haight. Lucy wasn’t there. And the Skylark was gone. Maybe she’d figured it out on her own. Maybe she’d packed up and was headed south.

But he knew that wasn’t true.

He drove across the Golden Gate, blew past the spot where the dropped drinks had splashed into the oncoming traffic, where Lucy had stopped almost in the middle of the bridge, where Les had caught up to her. A couple was handing off their camera to another tourist for a shot of the two of them with the backdrop of the city,