the end of it announcing Sunshine Air, a charter company. The sign hung half off. What was left of a painted sign was underneath: Danko “Flying School”—just like that, quotation marks and all, like it was a pretend flying school.

“He never could make a go of it, as far as anybody could tell,” Kirk said, as if the look of the building didn’t get that idea across. “And then Steadman Industries bought him out. For a good price, some said.” The old man shrugged. He had lived long enough to see a thousand things he didn’t get. “And then Danko was dead, before he could enjoy the money. Well, he bought himself a new plane right off, I guess he enjoyed that. And her.”

Everybody seemed to understand how you could enjoy Elaine Kantke.

“You want to look around, go ahead,” Kirk said. “Nobody’ll hassle you. There’s nothing back here now. Now in the old days, on the other side of Hangar Six was—” Another jet roared into the sky, drowning out the last of it.

Jimmy stood there thinking of her, Elaine Kantke in her hat, maybe standing right where he was standing now. He thought again about the detail he’d learned, how the bullet that had killed her, went through her, had creased Bill Danko’s cheek. It had probably carried some of her to him, a last kiss.

Maybe Jimmy did this for the poetry.

Kirk walked away, leaving Jimmy there to knock around in the past. The front door was locked. He looked in through the dirty windows. The room was bare, cleared of everything but the old newspapers on the floor, a bed for somebody from the way they were shaped, and faded posters of Cabo and La Paz on the walls. On the back wall was an open rectangle where an air conditioner had been. Jimmy went around to the weedy lot behind the building and crawled in through the hole.

There was a small room off the main room. In it, a desk and a pair of chairs and a water cooler with a dusty glass bottle were stacked at odd angles up to the ceiling. There was a file cabinet. Jimmy opened it. It was empty except for rat droppings and a book of matches from a cocktail lounge.

The desk was on its end against the wall. It was as old as the building. He pulled it down, set it back on its feet, rolled over the wheeled office chair. The drawers were empty. There was a phone number written in pencil on the bottom of one, a number with a two letter prefix, from some business in the forties or fifties. Geologists had the right idea about history: it was just layers of sediment, one on top of the other. And, given enough time, any sad piece of shit becomes precious.

Jimmy ran his hands along the underside of the wide center drawer and found a manila envelope wedged into a hiding place. He opened it. It was a bodybuilder magazine from the sixties, big-chested men preening on So Cal beaches.

In the ceiling was an access hatch. Jimmy arranged the desk and the chair, climbed up and pushed the square door up and over and stuck his head through to the crawl space. Screened vents at the two ends of the roof let in enough light to see. There were two cardboard boxes. He took off his suit jacket, folded it and put it over the chair back, climbed through the hatch and crawled toward them.

Both boxes were empty, but scattered among the ceiling joists were a few dozen pale green cancelled checks. With his head against the roof, Jimmy went through them. Ten or twelve were made out to “Beachside Market,” each for five dollars, spending money, Danko’s allowance. One paid the phone bill. There were rent checks. Steadman Industries owned the building. There were four to an aviation fuel company, three of them with notations about “Late Penalty ($10) Included.”

And two to “Chip’s Fashion House” for those Nik-Niks.

The museum of flight was across the main runway in a cavernous metal building, a new building. A yellow biplane hung from wires from the ceiling, suspended over three open decks of displays, models and full-sized airplanes. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass on the backside of it you could watch takeoffs and landings, listen in on the radio traffic on a bank of headphones. It was the modern opposite of the old men in their lawn chairs on the other side