the bedroom at the end of the hallway in his house. Behind him Drew was on his back on the black covering on the bed, eyes open.

TEN

In the morning paper there was an article about last night’s accident, a picture of the overturned Honda, a headline:TWO DEAD, ONE CRITICAL

IN CANYON CRASH

There was a school picture of Drew, probably from two or three grades ago, a straight-faced, trying-to-look-older pose. His last name was Hastings. The other dead boy had been a runner, had held some state record so he got more ink. And a smiling picture, taken from the sports pages of the Notre Dame High School paper.

An adjacent article showed the same photo they were using of the young Latino boy lost in the brown hills out in what they called the Inland Empire and, now, a picture of a man in handcuffs, a Mexican man who looked as if he’d never smiled.

“The news is always the same,” Jimmy said. “It just happens to different people.”

Angel came into the dining room from the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

“I almost drove him down to The Pipe last night,” Jimmy said. “Maybe he should see that first.”

“He’ll know about it soon enough,” Angel said.

Jimmy picked up a phone and dialed the number for Jean’s office. She wasn’t expected in all day. Jimmy called her apartment. After three rings, the machine picked up. Jimmy hung up.

“She was with you?” Angel said.

Jimmy nodded.

“What’s her name?”

“Jean.”

“What’s her last name?”

“I told you, Kantke.”

“What did she see?”

“A car wreck,” Jimmy said.

Angel took a sip of his coffee, waited for Jimmy to remember who he was talking to.

“I don’t know what she thought,” Jimmy said. “She didn’t say anything. I took her back to her office to get her car and then followed her home.”

Jimmy went into the study. Angel followed him.

“So she’s the Long Beach thing. The murders.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s more than the case. With her. For you.”

“I guess it was getting to be. I don’t know what it’s going to be now.”

Jimmy sat behind the desk and pulled the keyboard closer and rewound the digital machines that recorded output from the security cameras that ringed his property. Between midnight and one, the pale men and the big men from the other night on the hotel roof had made an appearance at the back gate, testing the iron bars, hanging out for twenty minutes.

Jimmy put the picture onto a flat screen monitor on the wall.

“You know these guys?”

Angel looked at the screen and shook his head. Jimmy froze the image and clicked a few keys and the printer printed out a hard copy.

“Maybe they were selling magazines,” Angel said.

“I played a little road tag with the two on the left the other day. They were in an Escort.”

Angel got the joke.

“Lon and Vince,” Jimmy said, looking at their pale faces. “And then the other night I met the other two and a leader, a guy close to seven foot. They showed me the view from the Roosevelt.”

“And that has to do with this?” Angel said.

Jimmy didn’t know. Or wasn’t ready to say. He shrugged.

Drew was in the game room playing pinball, a bottle of Dos Equis sitting on top of the glass. A TV was on, big screen, street luge skaters ripping down a too steep canyon road somewhere, crisscrossing, losing it, spinning out, crashing into hay bales. Drew apparently didn’t get the connection or he would have turned it off.

Jimmy stepped into the doorway.

“I have to go somewhere. You want to go with me?”

“Go where?”

“I’m an investigator. I’m working on something.”

“A what?”

“An investigator.”

“What’s the point?”

“You’ll feel better if you do something, if you go out there and try to find some answers to the questions that there are answers for. Like I said, there are two ways to go.”

“Yeah, I know,” Drew said. “Everybody’s gotta believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer . . .”

Jimmy turned to go.

“Let me ask you something,” Drew said to stop him, not looking up from his game. “Can I die? I mean, again?” Maybe he did get the connection between the crashing luge skaters and what had happened to him on the canyon road.

“You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “bad, but you won’t die.” Here was another chance to tell the kid about the third thing that could happen, about how your spirit could die and you’d be left with even less, how they could take your spirit away, the thing they’d hauled him up to the roof