He stood up and picked up something from the road and dropped it at my feet. He turned to look back down the road, back west, the way he’d come from, picked up the thing and dropped it again.

“He wants us to go thataway,” Mr. Contreras said. “He’s found something, he wants us to go with him.”

I held the thing he’d been dropping under the flashlight. It was some kind of fabric, but so caked in mud, I couldn’t tell what it was.

“You want to follow us in the car while I see where he wants to get to?” I said dubiously. Maybe he’d killed one of the punks and wanted me to see the body. Maybe he’d found Josie, drawn by the scent from the T-shirt he’d been lying on, although this rag was too small to be a shirt.

I found a bottle of water in my car and poured some into an empty paper cup I found in the grass. Mitch was so urgent to get me going west that I persuaded him to drink only with difficulty. I finished the bottle myself, and gave him his head. He insisted on carrying his filthy piece of fabric.

More cars were passing us now, people heading for work in the dreary predawn. I took the flashlight in my right hand so oncoming cars could see us. With Mr. Contreras crawling in our wake, we padded along 100th Street, Mitch looking anxiously from me to the ground in front of him. At Torrence, about half a mile along, he got confused for a few minutes, darting up and down the ditch along the road before deciding to head south.

We turned west again at 103rd, passing in front of the giant By-Smart warehouse. The endless stream of trucks was coming and going, and a dense parade of people was walking up the drive from the bus stop. The morning shift must be starting. The sky had lightened during our march; it was morning now.

I was moving like a lead statue, one numb, heavy foot in front of the other. We were close to the expressway and the traffic was thick, but everything seemed remote to me, the cars and trucks, the dead marsh grasses on either side of us, even the dog. Mitch was a phantom, a black wraith I was dumbly following. Cars honked at Mr. Contreras, inching behind us, but even that couldn’t rouse me from my stupor.

All at once, Mitch gave a short bark and plunged from the side of the road into the swamp. I was so startled that I lost my balance and fell heavily into the cold mud. I lay there dizzily, not wanting to make the effort to get back up, but Mitch nipped at me until I struggled back to my feet. I didn’t try to pick up the leash again.