Skylark girl (he’d learn in a minute her name was Lucy, Lucille) had taken the exit off the 5 onto California 46, headed west toward Lost Hills and Paso Robles, and now she blew right by the intersection where Dean had died and then on past the memorial, a granite marker and a bend of stainless steel wrapped around an oak next to a café six miles along at Cholame.

Jimmy didn’t stop either, just hung back a mile. A little two-car caravan traversing central Cal. There was enough rise and fall on the highway to give him a good look down at her every minute or so, to keep her in front of him without her seeing him.

He pulled off after ten or twelve miles of that.

“Did you do the Skylark?”

He was on the shoulder, directly under a whistling cell tower “camouflaged” to look like a spindly evergreen, which was particularly stupid given that this was in the middle of bare brown rolling hills, it the only “tree” for miles. Unless you counted the occasional oil derrick.

But the reception was good.

“I painted it for her,” Angel said. “For her boyfriend, actually. He give it to her.”

“Is he the problem?”

“You really are a detective.”

“So he let her keep it when he left?”

“I guess. She kept it.”

“I don’t know, bud,” Jimmy said, “I might be on his side, taking a man’s car.”

“He’s dead.”

“What’s her name?”

When Angel told him, Jimmy sang, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille . . .”

“Loose wheel,” Angel said.

Back in the day on those Saturday nights at Saugus Speedway, when one of the old clunker stockers would kick loose a wheel, send it bouncing across the infield, the announcer—Jimmy remembered his name, Virgil Kirkpat rick—would wait a beat and then say the line: “You picked a fin e time to leave me, loose wheel . . .” And the crowd would laugh, like he was Jay Leno.

“I drove on out there,” Jimmy said. “The speedway. Jumped the fence.”

“And it was sad,” Angel said back to him.

“I can take sad,” Jimmy said.

“Not so much as you think,” Angel said.

“She’s headed toward Paso Robles, unless she just wanted to cut over to the 101 or the coast. Any idea why?”

“That’s why I’m paying you the big dollar,” Angel said.

“I haven’t been out of town in a while,” Jimmy said. “It’s nice out here.” A wind had blown over the hill, and the air smelled good, like the inside of a wooden box.

“Where did you pick her up?”

“She was right where you said she’d be, bright and early.”

“Eagle Rock.”

“Eagle Rock,” Jimmy repeated. “She took a long time to pack the car, like she was waiting for me.”

Nothing whistled down the line for a second or two.

“How does she look?” Angel said.

“Like they all do,” Jimmy said. “One kind of them.”

“Lost.”

“Spooked. Alone. Running,” Jimmy said. “Trying to get from what was to what’s next. Way young to be so hurt. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many of them.”

“Or maybe you’re getting old in the soul,” Angel said.

“It’s about time.”

“She’s good-looking, huh?”

“She’s not a Sailor,” Jimmy said, almost a question.

“No.”

“Tell me who she is to you,” Jimmy said.

“Nobody,” Angel lied. “Just a kid I wish wasn’t so down.”

Lucy in the Skylark stopped in Paso Robles all right, parked on the street, the main street, beside a pay phone. Pas was a pretty little town, out of the way enough to have slept through most of the booster efforts to improve it. There were a lot of Victorian B and Bs, ten thousand oaks, more brown grass hills ringing it. They’d all flush green in another month or so when the rain started. Father Junipero Serra had stopped here, planted the flag a few miles north, Mission San Miguel Archangel.

But nobody was going out by the mission today.

Lucy made a call and then got back behind the wheel and waited.

She seemed a little fidgety. She put the top down, out of nervousness, the way a girl straightens her skirt as the boy is coming back to the car. Or the way girls did when they still wore skirts, when the baby-blue Skylark was new. She kept her eyes straight ahead, except for looking up in the mirror every once in a while.

Jimmy was out of the Porsche, up the street a half block and on the other side. He’d gone into a wood-front store and bought a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked in ten years. A pack cost what it