open air.

He got in the Mustang. Jean looked at him and he shook his head, though it wasn’t clear what he meant by that.

It just meant no.

Nine o’clock at night and the traffic on the 405 north was still clogged. It should have opened up hours ago. They were stopped cold in the fast lane at the top of Sepulveda Pass, up where Mulholland crossed overhead with a high bridge. The line of cars ahead of them stretched for two miles down across the San Fernando Valley, the spaces between the sets of red taillights never expanding beyond a car length.

Jean had a beach house north of Malibu at Point Dume. Jimmy was taking her there the back way over Kanan Dume Road, the fast way he had thought, until a half hour ago. This time she hadn’t said no when he told her what to do, when he told her she had to leave town because they’d kill her, too, if they thought she knew something, if they thought she was in their way, cut her out of the story, too. He had said she should go to San Francisco, had said something that made no sense to her—They won’t follow you out of the city—but she told him about her house at the beach.

Both of them could still smell the smoke on their clothes.

“That was my room,” Jean said.

There was nothing to say to that.

“How old was she?” Jean asked.

“In her forties.”

“What was she like?”

“Crazy.”

It wasn’t enough for Jean. She looked at him.

“Lost,” he said. “Haunted.”

He had plenty more words where those came from. His life had been filled with Rosemary Dankos.

“What was the other place?”

“It was her mother’s.”

“I’d like to think she lived there most of the time. At her mother’s.”

“She probably did,” Jimmy said.

“Are you sure she’s dead?”

“No. Not sure. But I don’t know where she’d be if she wasn’t, where they would have taken her, why.”

“So she’s dead.”

“I would guess she is.”

“What do you think caused her to come to my house?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was when her mother died. She had nowhere else to go for family. Her father had ‘lived’ there in a way, had history there. She sat around thinking about it. Sometimes you have an idea in your head about something like that—and then it just starts growing, like a potato under the sink.”

A car edged up beside them. The man looked over at them, at Jean, liked her looks, kept his eyes on her as if they were in a bar.

“So you think they killed her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is my brother involved in this?”

“Rath-Steadman is,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me.”

They had inched up over the crest of the mountain to where they could look down on the scene ahead, the shimmering valley lights and the traffic stilled in both directions, red taillights down, white headlights up in the opposite lane.

Now they could see what it was. A mile down the steep run of the freeway where the 405 met the 101 there were clustered spinning lights, red and blue, an accident.

Her hand was on the seat beside her. He took it.

“You’ll be all right at the beach,” he said. That was all he would tell her. For now.

“This could all be over in a few days,” he said.

She wondered what difference a day or two made now but she didn’t ask and the two of them said nothing for a long time, watching the dead traffic in front of them, the accident far below, the TV news helicopters that flo ated, turning, high above the scene, red lights blinking, like sparks above a fire.

TWENTY-ONE

He felt like running, as if this was something he could outrun. After he left Jean at her Malibu house, Jimmy drove north, not south, up California 1, then back inland through the mountains to Thousand Oaks and the 101 East, a great loop onto the 210 to cross the base of the Angeles Forest and the mountains above Glendale.

Now it was way after midnight.

When he turned back down into it, when he was riding down out of the foothills, it was like L.A. was on the bottom of a dark ocean, the spikes of downtown still a half mile below the surface, the green copper dome of Griffith Observatory a decorative toy on the floor of a midnight aquarium. And the air was bad, even in the middle of the night. The air was heavy. He felt compressed. The feeling was so