for, just so he’d remember it. “You’re here until it’s time for you to go—”

“Yeah, I know . . .”

“But you can’t bring it on yourself and nobody else can bring it on you.”

Drew threw his weight against the machine to force the steel ball uphill.

“Even if like a bullet went through my head, I wouldn’t die.”

“No.”

“If I was shredding down a mountain and pulled a full-on Sonny Bono, I wouldn’t die.”

“No. You could get messed up, but you wouldn’t die.”

The pinball machine clattered wildly. Something had happened.

“The pathetic thing is I don’t know if that’s good news or bad,” Drew said.

Jimmy said, “That’s why there are—”

“Yeah, ‘two ways to go . . .’ ” Drew said. “ ‘Use The Force, Luke.’ ”

Jimmy knew most of the story and a phone call to a friend in politics brought the rest. Harry Turner was a “kingmaker,” one of the men—or, depending on whom you talked to, the man—you went to if you wanted to be governor or a federal judge. Or, if you believed everything you heard, the anchorman on the local news in Santa Barbara where one of Harry Turner’s five big houses was. It was one of those stories that over the years got better and better. To run things in California, you had to wait in line. The man at the head of the line, hand on the gate, for the last twenty years anyway, was Harry Turner. He’d been the real lawyer who ran Jack Kantke’s defense, behind the scenes, behind Upland or Overland or Upchurch or whatever his name was, the Long Beach lawyer whose name nobody could remember but who had to sit at the table next to defendant Kantke and take the loss when it came. When Harry Turner stopped practicing law himself, “retired” in the nineties, he still kept his firm open with a half dozen lawyers angling to be his favorite, his heir, the son he never had. He went even further behind the curtain. He was on a dozen boards of directors. He owned car dealerships. He owned a chain of smog inspection stations. He owned billboard companies. He held patents for devices he couldn’t point to on a table, for “processes” he couldn’t begin to explain. He owned a restaurant. He owned airports. He made money while he slept.

And twenty years ago, with a new dogleg in the aqueduct to bring in water from the Colorado, he became one of the “visionaries” turning green the Coachella Valley out past Palm Springs and Indian Wells. Desert into farmland. He had a thousand acres of winter lettuce and another five hundred in table grapes.

He was eleven feet tall, on the back of his horse.

He rode, not that fast but steady, out of a block of date palms planted in rows and then along the edge of a fie ld of something so green it clashed with the sky. He rode without changing his pace right straight at the black pickup with the ranch logo on the door, came up fast enough to make them all turn their heads aside. He wore chinos and short brown Wellington boots and a long-sleeve white shirt. He stayed in the saddle, all eleven feet of him.

Jimmy had been hand-delivered by a pair of robust cowboys who made the Sailors on the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel look anorexic. These men were Basque, real cowboys. They’d stopped Jimmy even before he made it to the gates of the ranch, sixty seconds after a black helicopter had overflown him in the Mustang on the mile-long road in off of the highway. They’d shown him where to leave his car in front of one of the very clean outbuildings. One of them nodded toward the front seat of the black truck and then got behind the wheel and the other man climbed in back and sat against the tailgate and rode that way all the way out into the fields.

They were strong and their suspiciousness was industrial-strength, but they weren’t smart. Jimmy had told them he was the mayor of Rancho Cucamonga.

Harry Turner looked him over, looked at his sissy shoes, his Prada suit, and smiled a little sourly.

“Mr. Mayor,” he said. He had a walkie-talkie hanging off his wide brown belt. They’d called ahead.

Turner climbed down out of the saddle and took off his hat, a flat-brim Stetson that made him look like a mounted cop. His hand came out and Jimmy thought it might be the start