a mounted cowboy. All in the same second, the cowboy turned two silver reflecting eyes toward the car howling down the straightaway at him and the last animal in the line reared and leapt sideways into the road, and then the next in front of it followed.

Jimmy yanked the wheel. The Challenger skidded and smoked and screeched and then slammed against the stout trunk of a eucalyptus.

He was thrown against the window, knocked out.

The first minute passed.

The Hemi engine raced, roaring, then died.

The horses whinnied wildly, all of them rearing now, shredding the air with their front hooves in the wash of the Challenger’s headlights still burning through the stirred up dust.

The BMW was first to arrive. The driver got out.

The cowboy fought to gather and control the six horses and himself.

“He was—”

“Yeah,” the BMW driver said, cool and calm. “Go to the phone. Get some help.” She had an accent.

The cowboy did as he was told and let go of the spooked horses and pulled himself into the saddle of his own horse and rode away down the path. The trail horses tried to scatter but were still lashed together and pulled in different directions so that none of them escaped.

The wrecked, smoking Taurus arrived. Lon and Vince. They got out, pumped up, ready to hurt someone but Jimmy was bloodied and looked dead.

Another minute passed.

A black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Lon and Vince straightened, almost came to attention.

The backdoor opened.

Jimmy had started to come around. He was bleeding from a cut on the side of his face. He tried to focus, the headlights, the images through the shattered glass, through his own blood which streaked the window: the cars, one white, two black, figures moving.

He saw the red-haired man with the long fingers, Boney M, get out of the back of the Lincoln Town Car. And, with the door open, another man in the backseat, under the spot of the reading light, a big man, familiar.

Then someone was walking toward him.

It was the BMW driver, the man in the expensive suit, slicked-back hair.

But it was a woman in a dark expensive suit.

It was the German girl from the Evergreen Club, from the dark beer, from the kisses in his cabin. He even heard her voice, her accent, as she said something to Lon and Vince.

But then things got darker and faded out.

FIFTEEN

The sun was just up, the air smoky with a warm fog.

Jimmy was backed against a tree, sitting in the eucalyptus leaves and brown grass. It looked like deep woods. You couldn’t see the road from here, or anything else. It was like he was in Australia, or wherever it was that eucalyptus trees came from.

There was blood, dry and almost black, all around him, so much of it that he wondered how it could all be his.

He thought of Jean. He got to his feet.

Everything ached. One eye was sealed shut some way he didn’t want to see. A finger was broken. A few teeth felt loose.

“Let me ask you something,” Drew said. “Can I die? I mean, again?”

“You can get hurt,” Jimmy said, “bad, but you won’t die.”

“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, bad, but you wouldn’t die.”

They’d pulled him out of the car and dragged him away and worked him over, Lon and Vince and maybe even the German woman, hoping for maximum mayhem, hoping to mess him up good, to try to make their point another way.

Or maybe they did it just because they enjoyed it.

He came out of the trees and found the straightaway road and then the scarred trunk that told him where he’d crashed, the skidmarks on the pavement and the furrows in the leaf-covered ground of the bridle path.

The yellow Dodge was long gone, but his shoe was there.

And the scars from the hooves of the trail horses.

He thought maybe he’d dreamed them.

He found the tracks where the black Lincoln had stopped and then turned around to go back up the straightaway. Somewhere in the fog, he’d decided the big familiar man glimpsed in the backseat had to be Harry Turner.

But maybe he’d dreamed him.

Jimmy and Angel went first to Jean’s apartment.

Angel waited behind the wheel of his truck, the one with the blue moon over the city and the woman’s eyes airbrushed on the tailgate.

There was no answer. Jimmy came back