flowers. I didn’t actually see them, but I understand they had their own delivery persons. For all of them.”

“Other people got these?”

“Yes, sir. The men on the sixteenth floor. Above you. From L.A.”

Jimmy had half talked himself into the idea that the flower had come from Mary.

He took a shower. A midnight shower. He was going to go look for Angel. He felt bad about the way he’d left him the last time he’d seen him, never even looked back as he walked away from him down on the docks on the second stretch of waterfront, the old navy base or whatever it was. When Jimmy had followed the two cute girls into the mess hall full of women.

Over the downpour of the shower, he heard a thud, the outside door slamming closed. It shook the wall. He listened, but there wasn’t anything else. He turned off the water.

He’d left the bathroom door standing open, the door into the bedroom. He wrapped a robe around himself and came out.

The door to the living room was open. There was Angel.

Angel stood looking at the rose.

“What’s this shit?” Angel said, feeling Jimmy’s presence behind him.

“I thought maybe you’d know,” Jimmy said.

“Did she send it?” Angel was changed. He turned with a look on his face Jimmy had never seen before. He looked like he’d been beat up. And left ready to dish some out.

Angel didn’t look like Angel.

“I’m sorry I left you back down there, at the navy base, or whatever it was,” Jimmy said. After the scene with the women in the dining hall, he’d looked for Angel but couldn’t find him.

“Is that what you’re sorry for?”

Jimmy didn’t say anything.

Angel advanced on him, shoved him. “Is that what you’re sorry for?” he said again.

“What happened? Where have you been?”

Angel pushed him again. Jimmy stayed on his feet.

“You go chasing after her, and Lucy dies!”

It hit Jimmy like an iron bar, hurt all the more because Angel had waited so long to throw it in Jimmy’s face. Jimmy didn’t say anything, didn’t try to counterpunch. Because Angel was right. Once Jimmy had seen Mary, everything else had fallen away. He had wrapped himself in the past from then on, walked those streets again, not these. He had looked for her, not for Lucy. He worried about her, not Lucy. Before long Lucy had her new best friends whispering in her ear, and he was glad. Let them take care of her. He had stood by and watched a slow-motion murder. Was it only in that moment, standing there in his hotel room, that he was able to admit what was obvious, that the two women were agents of . . . Of what? Of something that wanted death.

And that he had stood by and watched it, like it was slow-motion crash test footage, projected drive-in style onto the end of a building. Onto Pier 35.

“Tell me what you know,” Angel said. “About Lucy. What happened to her?” Angel was shorter than Jimmy, but somehow now he loomed over him. “All of it.” His fists were still clenched at his sides.

So Jimmy told him.

He told him all of it. About the first day, about Sexy Sadie and then Polythene Pam outside the Golden Gate gift shop, felt foolish using the nicknames, but what else was he going to say? The woman in the yellow dress, matching purse? The cutie in the too-short skirt and Doc Martens? He could have taken the trouble that first day to find out their names, but he was content calling them Beatles names, from The White Album. Because that was the trip he was on. He told Angel the real deal on the two women, how they’d started out looking like helpmates for Lucy, sympathetic ears, but then transmuted into something else. Into the opposite. (He left out the part about not fig uring it out in time.) He told Angel about the last night when he had seen Lucy with the two of them, down at Fisherman’s Wharf, the night the man had been cleaved in two by the streetcar. On the suicide list, it would have been number . . . What was it? He even told Angel about the second time he’d tailed Lucy and the women to the grass out on Tiburon, how he never looked over at Lucy again once he’d seen Mary and her boy playing fifty yards away.

That day.

They were in the Porsche, Jimmy and Angel, just driving, a loop around