started coming to life.

Go.

He let the Lucky Strike burn all the way down, pinching it like a jay, staring at the car sitting there. He thought about the day he bought it. The car. He thought about who was with him. He thought about the ninety-year-old lady. He thought about the German tourist, about the wine-country wine she didn’t drink that day. He thought about the young man dying of AIDS, until he died stepping off the wrong side of the Golden Gate. Everything he thought was complicated. None of it was self-evident. The voice in his head—the voice of himself, Jimmy Miles—was a dozen voices. He was like Machine Shop. But with Shop, at least what was in his head was a debate. With Jimmy, it was ten points of view. Twenty. It was like being in a bus station at midnight listening to crazy people, all of whom think they know you. It was like being in a room with every version of yourself you’ve ever been, hearing every lying man and boy you’ve ever been turning on you.

Maybe that was the gathering he’d dreamed of that morning.

Two ways to go.

He came down off the mountain and went north. To Tiburon.

A few minutes before seven, the babysitter drove up to the big Craftsman house in a yellow Volkswagen convertible. She looked college age. She parked on a curve just below the house. She got out, locked the car, started toward the gate in the hedge, then remembered something and went back to the bug. A book. In case her boyfriend wasn’t home when she called. Mary’s husband answered the door, stood there in the frame. White shirt, dark pants, tie around his neck waiting to be tied. He was a good-looking man. Jimmy still didn’t know what his name was. He hadn’t seen him again since the first time out in the park until now. He had a glass of red wine in his hand. Even from across the street, Jimmy could guess the lines in the joke he made with the young girl about it.

Mary was upstairs in the boy’s room. Jimmy didn’t know his name yet, either. She was getting him into PJs. Or trying to. He was jumping on the bed, taking advantage of the special circumstances, a weeknight left with a sitter. She caught him in midair on one jump and hugged him with such devotion it might have scared him a little. There must have been a voice they both heard from downstairs, mother and son, because they suddenly looked at each other and made the same funny face and turned for the door. A second later, the light went out.

There were two ways off the tip of Tiburon, two ends of the same road, but one way was more direct than the other. Jimmy couldn’t keep himself from making assumptions about Mary’s husband, filling the blanks. He didn’t seem like the take-the-long-way kind of guy.

Jimmy guessed right; here came the X-5. Somebody had gotten it washed since the late afternoon. With the dark trees of Tiburon behind it on the dark street with its tasteful lighting, it was all black on black, glistening. Everything today looked like an upscale car ad.

Jimmy waited, let them get a ways up the road. He was parked in the lot of a closed gas station. The lights were out except for three moons of backlit white plastic, the signs over the pumps on the three bays.

Self Self Full, they said. Take your pick.

Jimmy was a little underdressed, a suit, no tie, but didn’t have any trouble crashing the do in the St. Francis ballroom. It was a fund-raiser for some charity, something with Heart in the name. He wasn’t on the list. He wrote a thousand-dollar check. Suddenly they knew him. A smiling woman who reminded him of Patricia Hatch from Graceful Exits pinned a red ceramic heart on his lapel.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thank you,” Jimmy said. He was looking down at his new lapel jewelry.

“I mean in the auction,” she said.

It wasn’t hard to blend in, stay concealed. He had put on a black suit that morning and looked like every other man in the room, even the ones who’d thrown on a tux. You had to get close to see that Jimmy’s shirt was taupe and that he wasn’t wearing socks with the loafers. He hit the hosted bar for a champagne and crème de cassis, which is what everyone else seemed to be