not to think about the dead girls. And he didn’t.

FOUR

The morning broke eternal, bright, and fair.

Or so it looked to Jimmy. He was on the open top deck of the red-and-white ferry that crossed the Bay from Pier 41 to Sausalito. He’d gone back to the hotel to change, to shower, to go from the black linen suit he’d worn yesterday to another linen suit, this one the color of the little spoon of cream on the Irish coffee at the Buena Vista. A cream-colored suit over a black shirt, like today was going to be the opposite of last night. As if, as the kids say.

But it was a beautiful day; a few clouds pushed all the way back over to Oakland. Tiburon was in front of them, Alcatraz sliding by to the left. On the Rock, another red-and-white boat off-loaded the 10:10 crowd as the first-run-of-the-day people queued up for the trip back across to San Francisco. (Did they still call it that, “the Rock,” after the movie, after the wrestler who’d named himself after the movie and then become a movie star?) Jimmy could hear the voices of the kids on the Alcatraz dock, loud, vacation loud.

Down below him a deck, Lucy almost looked caught up in the new morning thing herself. She sat out in the open in the middle of the first row of fib erglass benches, ten feet back from the splash zone, the V of the bow. She’d made a friend, a white-haired lady in a spiffy blue-and-white Nautica windbreaker, a happy lady, a talker. Lucy said a few words in reply now and then and nodded every few seconds. Women liked her, Lucy. Jimmy wondered why, what it was that was in her eyes or the shape of her mouth or the way she held herself that made women like her. And want to help her. He hadn’t really looked her in the eye. Up close. Maybe it’d move him, too.

The boy Jimmy was calling Les Paul for the shape of his guitar case came out onto the deck with two hot chocolates in his hands and a frosted, sprinkled donut stuck in his mouth. It was a little cool out here on the water, but he was wearing just a T-shirt. He handed off one of the cocoas to his sister and sat a few places away on the end of the bench, so as not to intrude in the back-and-forth between the women. He sat there and went to work on his donut, eating the way kids do, taking a bite and then looking at the thing, studying it while he chewed. He looked over at Lucy and the Nautica lady. Jimmy got the sense that the boy knew his sister was hurting, off balance, and that he didn’t much relish the role of helpmate, was glad for some help.

Training for the women ahead for you, Jimmy thought.

Les only stayed on the bench a minute. Too much energy. Too much juice running through the lines. He took his breakfast snack up to the bow, lay forward into the angle of the hull on the port side. A gull found him immediately, with that bright donut, took up a position in the air two feet above the boy’s head, locked on, even when the boat rose or splashed to one side, powering through a swell. This is his job, Jimmy thought about the bird, as much as popping and locking for the tourists is Machine Shop’s job nights down on the waterfront.

Les broke off a piece of the donut and ate it very deliberately and then another and then another until it was gone, and then the bird moved on to the next mark.

Jimmy lifted his gaze to Tiburon, getting bigger in the frame. It was like another Alcatraz in size and the lift of its hump, but an island of a whole other order in its hospitality, its richness. And its freedom? It was green, for one thing, and dotted with houses. Old Money. San Francisco doctors and lawyers. Second and third generation. Maybe fourth.

He saw that Lucy was looking at it, too, even as the white-haired lady prattled on.

“Is that Tiburon?” Lucy interrupted her to ask.

“Yes, it is,” Jimmy saw the white-haired lady reply.

There was a change in pitch, and the boat slowed. It was a commuter ferry, with a stop in Tiburon before the turnaround in Sausalito. They were a good half mile out from Tiburon but, even