I remembered the night terrors I had after liberating my second concentration camp; the animated skeletons of men and women dancing around the corpses of the Germans we’d killed.

“It was just a sonic boom,” I said, and Craig raised his head.

He looked around in confusion. It was as if he didn’t know how he got there crouched on the floor with some black man kneeling before him.

“What happened?” he asked me.

“Some fool broke the sound barrier and you had a flashback to the war.”

He nodded and I held out a hand, pulling us both to our feet.

“One of my partners keeps a fair bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer,” I said. “Why don’t we get us a shot?”

Whisper always had a fifth of Cabin Still sour mash bourbon in his bottom drawer. He had glasses there too. I downed my first shot in one draft. Craig did the same. It made him cough pretty hard. I sipped the second shot but he downed that one too, this time merely gagging a bit.

He held out the glass for a third go-round but I shook my head and said, “First let’s go back to my office and find out what you need an honest detective for.”

We were seated again, silent again, with Craig looking everywhere but at me. After letting this go on for a while I said, “So what do you want, Craig?”

He made a sour face and turned away, fidgeting so much that for a moment it looked as if he might crawl right out of his chair.

Then he went still.

“Have you ever heard of Blood Grove?” he asked.

“Can’t say I have. That some battle in Vietnam?”

“No. It’s a, it’s a orange grove out at the far end of the San Fernando Valley. They specialize in blood oranges.”

“Okay. Is that your problem?” I wasn’t impatient but Craig had to be spurred on or he would stall.

“I like, I like to go camping out there when the nightmares start coming even when I’m awake, you know?”

I nodded.

“Out there it’s mostly just farms. And if you climb up to this place called Knowles Rock there’s a cabin nobody uses and a campsite where you can build a fire and be so alone that it’s like you’re the only man in the world. I usually only go to the campsite because I like sleepin’ outside. The cabin is maybe a quarter mile from there.”

“And whatever problem you got has to do with out there?”

Craig blinked at me.