“Keep it slow,” said Milo. Doing the cop-laser thing with his eyes. Nothing to see but dense walls of oak and more sycamores, a skimpy triangle of light on the horizon suggesting an end point.

Then, two acres in, the land flattened to a mesa curtained by mountains and canopied by a cumulus-flecked sky. Uncultivated acres had given way to bunchgrass, coastal sage, yellow mustard, a few struggling loner oaks in the distance. The asphalt drive cut through the meadow, straight and black as a draftsman’s line. Three-quarters of the way to the back of the property stood a massive barn. Flanks of redwood board silvered by time. Dour slab-face unbroken by windows, shingle roof wind-blunted at the corners. A ludicrously small front door.

Cool air carried some of the mustard tang our way.

Milo said, “No building permits issued.”

“Folks round these parts don’t truck with no guv-ment.”

* * *

Nowhere to conceal the Seville completely. I left it parked off the asphalt, partially hidden by tree boughs, and we walked. Milo’s hand dangled over his jacket.

When we were fifty feet away, the building’s dimensions asserted themselves. Three stories high, a couple hundred feet wide.

He said, “Thing that size but the door’s too small to get a car through. Wait here while I check the back.”

He took out his gun, sidled around the barn’s north side, was gone a few minutes, returned with the weapon reholstered. “Show-and-tell time.”

* * *

Double rear doors, ten feet high, were wide enough for a flatbed to drive through. Clean, oiled hinges looked freshly installed. A generator large enough to power a trailer park chugged. Behind us some kind of bird trilled but didn’t show itself. Tire tracks scored the dirt, a frenzy of tread marks, too many to make sense of.

Near the right-hand door a padlock lay on the dirt.

I said, “You found it that way?”

“That’s the official story.”

The barn had no hayloft. Just a three-story cavity, cathedral-sized, vaulted by stout, weathered rafters, walls tacked with white drywall. Dust filters like the one we’d seen in the PlayHouse garage whirred every twenty feet or so. An antique gravity gas pump stood to the right of an immaculate worktable. Shiny tools in a punchboard rack, chamois cloths folded into neat squares, tins of paste wax, chrome polish, saddle soap.

A flagstone spine wide enough for a four-horse march ran up the center of the room. Both sides were lined with what Dr. Walter Maclntyre had conceived as horse stalls.

The doors were gone and the concrete floors were swept clean. Each compartment held a gas-eating steed.

Milo and I walked up the flagstone. He looked into each car, placed his hand on the hoods.