out in the front yard beside the Porsche at the curb. It was almost three in the morning.

“Sprinklers are going to come on in a minute here,” Dill said.

“When do you work next?”

“Six. Third shift.”

“So what should I do?” Jimmy said. “About this girl.”

“Your sister.”

“Got any ideas?” Jimmy said.

“You moved?”

Jimmy told him a limited version of where he’d gone.

“Stay there,” Dill said. “There is more shit hidden in Angeles Forest than even God knows. Stay up there. Let her forget about it, or at least file it away. Kill your TV. Let the panic blow over. It’ll come to trial.”

Jimmy nodded. The scene felt so empty, so desert, it was hard to remember there were a couple of thousand others sleeping all around them. Norms.

“In my experience, people—and by ‘people’ I mean ‘women’—are always afraid of the wrong things. Afraid when they shouldn’t be, not afraid when they should be. Of course, when I said that to my wife one time, when we were out with some friends, she said, ‘What I’m afraid of is twenty-odd more years of that rich of bullshit.’ So there’s that.”

“What about the men?”

“They’re afraid of everything,” Dill said. “At least the ones I have any respect for.”

It was still hot. The streetlights staggered down the streets in the subdivision were the yellow/orange kind, the kind that gave everything that sickly look city planners seem to prefer. Even the Porsche looked tired, out-of-date, sad, there in the driveway.

Jimmy was staring at something out in the road, something four or five feet long, stretched out, like a strip of shredded tire or something. There was another a few feet away.

“Those are rattlers,” Dill said. “They like the heat soaked up in the asphalt all day. I used to run over them but then I . . .” He trailed off. “Live and let live. Some time of year, I forget when, they shed their skins. You find them under the bushes and hedges and shit. They look like the rubbers in the parking lots out at the beach.”

Jimmy said, “Got any idea what’s up with Sailors these days?” Dill hadn’t been a Sailor all that long as these things went, four or five years, but he’d been on the streets as a cop a lot of years before that. One thing Sailors all did, the good and the bad ones, was respect experience.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” the cop said. “I’ve never seen it like this. People I trust say they haven’t seen anything like this for a lot of years.”

“Since when? When was the last time?”

“When the man stepped up, the Passing. Fifty years ago.”

Jimmy dug in his pocket for the loose key to the Porsche.

“I know your man in black with the dog,” Dill said.

It stopped Jimmy.

“They call him Kingman. For Kingman, Arizona. Bad town for a Sailor.”

“He’s a Sailor?”

“Old salt. Made his way out here twenty years ago.”

“But he has a dog.”

“I don’t get it, either,” Dill said. “Maybe it’s the one dog in the world that likes us. Maybe it’s a Sailor dog, something new. I hate new.”

“What time is it?” Mary said when she felt him move in against her in bed.

“After midnight,” Jimmy said.

“It was after midnight when I went to bed.”

“That was the last song on the radio, coming up the road. ‘After Midnight. ’ ”

She made a sound like a laugh. “Don’t wake me up,” she said, dreamy.

TWENTY-SIX

There was a place called the Pipe in Long Beach. Jimmy waited until late afternoon before he rode down out of Angeles Forest. There wasn’t much use in going in earlier.

He figured he’d start at the sea, out on the edge, and work his way inland, looking for Kingman.

Just because. Because the son of a bitch had stood in his yard, looking up at his troubled girl in the kitchen window.

Because maybe he’d planted a gun in Jimmy’s house, where Mary could find it.

Just because.

There was still a little light left in the sky. It was pretty, the last light of the day, the light of surrender, as night moved in. The light was pretty, but nothing else was. The Pipe was wetlands, soggy marsh littered with what floats, whatever is cast aside and floats. Sailors, a certain kind of them, lived down here in the hulls of beached boats, boats on their sides, demasted sailboats and the rusting iron skin of a trawler. The “leaders” would be there, the dominant ones. There was a chance Kingman would be among