and got in.

“She wasn’t there?” Angel said.

Jimmy shook his head. Angel pulled out.

“She had a phone,” Jimmy said after a minute. “She probably had somebody come get her.”

He called her office. She was in a meeting.

Jimmy tossed the phone onto the seat between them. Angel looked at him.

“She’s all right.”

Angel stopped at the bottom of the hill. “Where do you want to go?”

“Home. I’ll get a car.”

They rode along in silence another four or five blocks, then Jimmy said, “Maybe you can run down the Dodge, take it to the shop, see if you can put it right. I guess the cops towed it.”

Angel nodded. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

Angel turned right. “You might want to get cleaned up a little, too.”

Jimmy dropped the visor on his side and got his first look at himself in the mirror. He flipped the visor back up. It was better not to know.

“So what’s happening with this lady?” Angel said.

“I hadn’t talked to her since that night we picked up the kid,” he said. “She was spooked then. I don’t know what she’s thinking now. Maybe she’s figured it out.”

“I doubt that,” Angel said. “She’s still around.”

Jimmy fell silent.

“It was the same Sailors?” Angel said.

“The goofy guys and the leader from the thing up on the roof of the Roosevelt. And there’s something else going on. There’s a man in the middle of it, too, not a Sailor but maybe a kindred spirit.”

“Who?”

“His name is Harry Turner. The lawyer behind the scenes in the murder trial. He put a tail on me. He might have been there last night.”

Jimmy wished again he’d gotten a better look at him, at the big man in the backseat of the Lincoln. If I could be sure. It was how Jimmy knew he had passed over into the land of the secret, the territory of the unknown that always came in the middle of the case, when he heard himself saying, again and again, If I could be sure.

“She was there, the tail. In a 745 BMW. She’s German. She’s not a Sailor either. Neither of them are.”

“She’s the one ran you into a tree?”

“No, I did that all by myself.”

“How do you know this guy hired her?”

“I saw him in the morning and she was there the same night. Up in Idyllwild.”

“Tailing you?”

After a moment, Jimmy said, “Yeah, very close.”

Jimmy thought about her lips, about the way she’d put her hands over his eyes when she kissed him. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d said to her, what he might have revealed. He hadn’t said much of anything. And neither had she. She was good. In that bad kind of way.

Harry Turner had read him right. Jimmy remembered Rosemary Danko’s line, They knew his weakness.

“Why does this guy still care about some old settled murder case?”

“That I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

They rode along another block.

“God had his hand on you,” Angel said.

Jimmy nodded, never looking at him. They were on Sunset now, going past Tower Records yellow and red and then The Whisky and then the Hustler store full of tourist shoppers. In daylight. Was there any more secular place on the face of the earth?

Jimmy had a decision to make, to go toward it or away from it.

“So what are you going to do now?” Angel said, just as Jimmy was wondering the same thing.

SIXTEEN

Some things look like what they are. Jimmy and Jean were heading north on California 1, the coast road, approaching the southern end of Big Sur. This was the edge of a continent and it looked it. The road was just now climbing into the high section, coming up off of the grasslands and cattle ranches past Hearst Castle and Cambria. The massive mountains, long and brown and only crowned with evergreens at the highest reaches where the fog was, broke off jagged into the ocean, ending big.

It had cooled off as soon as they’d rolled over the mountain from Thousand Oaks into Camarillo, Oxnard, and then Ventura. They had the windows down. If you knew what to listen for, what to separate out, you could hear the wind off the ocean, singing, constant, blowing through the dull leaves and the slick red trunks of the manzanita covering the foothills.

Jimmy dropped it down into second as he steered into the first tight climbing curve. They were in the Mustang. He went in hotter than he could have, the C-force snugging him into the bucket seat. At the first switchback, there was