As soon as the segment ended Klara was pounding on my door. I opened it immediately.

‘Quite the fucking performance,’ she said in a low, angry voice. ‘He should win an Oscar as Best Jiveass Immoral Priest.’

I ushered her inside.

‘At least he kept us out of it. Thank Christ you grabbed your gun and he reminded us to find the bullet Amber fired. Todor gave us a Get Out of Jail Free card.’

‘That asshole is now going to be celebrated and honored for getting shot and probably saving Amber’s life. No doubt, as soon as we left the trailer, he called Kelleher and told him everything that happened – and Kelleher immediately had his lawyers on to it. Creating an alibi. Putting all the blame on that now-dead bodyguard. Everyone will think Ricky was the father of Amber’s dead baby. Whereas I know from Amber herself that Kelleher and only Kelleher had sex with her. No doubt he’s having someone visit Amber in the hospital to offer her a small fortune in exchange for her silence. No doubt the police have been paid off. Everyone’s going to buy into the storyline they’ve put out there … because it means they can close the case quickly and without any of the truth coming out. Most of all Patrick Kelleher is going to come out of this with clean hands. Welcome to Modern America. The bad guy wins.’

I didn’t know what to stay to that. Except:

‘Maybe having wrapped it up like this Kelleher and his people won’t be looking for you.’

‘The police still haven’t found that security guard who helped Amber then went missing. I’m taking no chances, Poppa.’

It was another insanely long day. As we finally came closer to the coast we stopped in a shopping center and Klara went into a branch of Staples and bought time on one of their computers there. Twenty minutes later she emerged holding a printout of her flight at 6.45 p.m. that night. When I asked her how much it cost she said:

‘Don’t worry about the money, Poppa. I just got paid last week and have around two thousand in my checking account. Enough to cover the ticket and live for a month or so over there.’

‘I feel a failure.’

‘For not having money?’

‘For not being able to help you.’

‘Stop talking shit. You are the best. Know that.’

‘But I still have no money.’

‘You have a bag of money in the trunk.’

‘Which I won’t touch.’

‘And that’s why you are the best.’

A few minutes later I made the suggestion that we could risk the highway north from Prunedale to the airport. Klara agreed. She also slept for an hour. I nudged her awake when we were around twenty minutes away from San Francisco International, just as the 2 p.m. NPR news was coming on the air. The third item was ‘about a horrendous shooting in the desert region of Twentynine Palms near the Joshua Tree National Park’.