fast.”

“It would have been rush hour,” Jimmy said.

“It was a Saturday,” Turner said. “But you knew that.”

Jimmy did know that.

He put his fork and knife on top of his plate.

“So,” Jimmy said. “What’s for dessert?”

“None of us eat dessert,” Turner said, looking straight across the table at him. “Vanity. Young wives.”

“Did you see him executed?” Jimmy said, right back to his eyes.

“You make it sound like an obligation.”

Jimmy didn’t know how he was supposed to take that.

“You lose the case, you have to watch the man die?” Turner said.

“I guess it’s a long way up to San Quentin.”

“Jack Kantke and I weren’t friends,” Turner said. “I was just a lawyer trying to help a fellow member of the California Bar.”

“ ‘In good standing . . .’ ”

“All of us,” Turner said.

When Jimmy came out of the dining hall into the glare of the sun, into what was now the hundred and ten degree heat, his Mustang was sitting there waiting for him.

And Jimmy had the keys in his pocket.

He looked up at the utterly clear sky. There wasn’t even a daylight moon. He hadn’t seen Turner come out behind him and hadn’t heard anything, but now the black Mercedes pulled out of the lot and onto the road, followed by the men in the pickup in their black txapela Basque berets.

And then Jimmy was alone out there.

ELEVEN

When Jimmy stepped out of the farmers’ and ranchers’ private dining room in the middle of their made-over desert and looked up at the rich blue of the empty sky, for some reason he remembered something he’d heard a NASA scientist say once on a television program, that space wasn’t all that far away, that if you could drive there in a car, you’d be there in an hour. And he remembered something else from the program, that way way out, a few billion miles past that first edge of space, sometimes they would identify a body by the negative evidence, know something was there because everything pointed away from it, because there was a too clear expanse of nothing.

What Harry Turner had said—and what he hadn’t—had turned Jimmy’s mind. Turner had stated outright that Jack Kantke had killed his wife and Bill Danko, then driven hard and fast out of L.A. to cobble together an alibi. What Turner had said, had confessed on behalf of his client, was meant to convey the same message to Jimmy as the trip to the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel with the Sailors. Nothing to see here, move right along. . . . Harry Turner had read Jimmy Miles as wrong as the tall bony redheaded Sailor and whoever had sent him. What was meant to drive him away only drew him in closer.

Maybe it was just the look in Harry Turner’s eye.

Whatever it was, Jimmy now guessed, just for himself, that Jack Kantke hadn’t killed his wife and her lover. He didn’t know who did, didn’t know why, but, just for himself, he was all but sure it had been somebody else standing with the gun behind the wisp of a curtain in the white front bedroom in the Rivo Alto house and that they’d gassed the wrong man.

If you still believed in the notion of right and wrong men.

California 74 was a winding, climbing two-lane road highlighted in the AAA tourist guides as something special, the Palms to Pines Highway, slithering its way up off the desert floor into the San Bernardino Mountains, toward Mount San Jacinto, “from a desert oasis to snow capped mountains.” And, though it was June, almost July and the valley behind him was baking, there would be snow on the sides of the road when he got to the higher elevations, up to the top, into the evergreens, eight thousand feet.

But he wasn’t there yet and he was enjoying the drive. He came to the first of the tall stick trees and pulled off the road and got out. The air smelled cool and green, like the world wouldn’t mind if you lived another day or so. That was the way it was in the mountains. Back down behind him in the desert, Nature didn’t much care if you were there or not, regarded you the way a tortoise looks at you, Are you another rock?

Jimmy opened the hatchback and pulled the soft, worn red plaid Pendleton shirt out of the grocery bag. He was alone on the highway, hadn’t seen another soul for twenty minutes. He took off his