where they stored the garbage cans, behind a white latticework shield. They really were fixing up the Haight. Even the alleys looked healthy.

“How many times you done this?” Jimmy said, when they were standing in the middle of the living room.

“I’ve done it. Seeing what’s in the icebox, that’s what creeps me out,” Shop said. “Or a half an apple, on the table.”

“Like the people at Pompeii,” Jimmy said.

“Pompeii. I used to put that shit on my hair,” Shop said, which was another way of saying, Can we talk about something else? He walked off toward the bedroom.

There were two toothbrushes in a Coke glass on the back of the white old-style pedestal porcelain sink. Hygiene, right up to the end. For Lucy, anyway. The boy had left his behind, wherever he’d gone. Jimmy had to find him. He had a special worry for the people left behind. The faucet was dripping, slow, three seconds apart. With the kind of sound that yanks you out of bed at midnight, that a Sailor can hear when nobody else does, day or night, anywhere. Anything like a clock.

Jimmy tightened it down. And then stood there until the last drop formed and fell.

“The Wind Cries Mary,” Shop said behind him.

Jimmy felt like he’d been stuck in the chest.

“What? What did you say?”

Machine Shop held up a square bar coaster. And then, in the other hand, five more, all the same. “Your boy’s been hanging at The Wind Cries Mary, a guitar joint over in the Fillmore. He had these all laid out on a little table beside his bed.”

The Wind Cries Mary. Doesn’t it though.

It said “Open @ Eight” on the door of the club, but ten was probably more likely. It was painted purple, a box that had expanded into the windowless box beside it. An expressionistic suggestion of a Fender Stratocaster stretched in broken neon across the face of it, like a poor man’s Hard Rock Café. A marquee spelled out the name of the guitar slinger of the moment, if the moment was ten years ago. Or twenty. One-night stands. A different player for the next three nights. Maybe the place looked better at night.

Jimmy parked at the curb out front, and he and Shop got out. They split up to circle the club and check out the alleyways. They met up again in back. Nothing, though there were a couple of street people living around the trash bins.

“I don’t like to think about him, just being out there somewhere,” Shop said. “It’s not good.”

They were about to get back into the Porsche.

“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said.

He had seen a face, a part of a face. A young face, in the window of a liquor store across the street and down a couple of numbers.

A kid in a hat.

Jimmy crossed between a speeding bus and lagging truck and made it into the liquor store in time to see the form of the kid duck into a hallway in back, between the coolers. (He was wearing a knit hat.) The boy went through a door and slammed it behind him but it banged back open, and Jimmy went after him.

“Hey!” a hard voice said behind him. “What the—”

The kid had run into a storage room. There was another door out, on the back. The room was stacked to the ceiling with cases of booze. The gaps between the towers were more the kid’s size than Jimmy’s size, and the boy threaded the needle, ten feet ahead of his pursuer, and got his hand on the knob of what looked like an exit.

“It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “Wait.”

The exit door opened. Light blew in. Jimmy found his own way through the boxes and ran outside.

He caught the kid in the paved space behind the store.

It was somebody else’s little brother.

“What?” the boy said, that way only fifteen-year-olds can. “What?”

“Sorry,” Jimmy said to the kid.

He didn’t know what to say to the clerk with the shotgun standing in the doorway, the gun held down low and braced against his hip like he knew what it was.

When they all settled down, Jimmy apologized, said he was looking for his brother.

“You forgot what your brother looks like?” the clerk said.

EIGHTEEN

Sailors never flew, unless drugged and bound and gagged, so Angel came north on the train. The Coast Starlight. Two of his guys had dropped him off at Union Station in downtown L.A. Then it was across through the San Fernando Valley, coming out at Oxnard,