I made a few more arrangements, then called Sam on the number he’d given me and left a message, explaining what I was doing. It never hurts to have one competent person know what’s going on, and I was clearly short-handed in the intelligent accomplices department. It wasn’t that I needed Sam to do anything specific, but I was just sunk so deep in lies, complexities, and other people’s agendas that I wanted someone who’d be on my side when it all went tits up, as things usually did. Sam might have lied to me about a bunch of things, but as far as I could tell, he was still my friend.

Next I drove down to the Palo Alto district to Edward Walker’s big old house, where his granddaughter and her idiot boyfriend were currently camped out. G-Man opened the door, dressed like Hip-Hop’s Worst Nightmare. I’ve got nothing against white kids who want to dress like black kids—street culture is like that, especially appealing to haves who want to look like have-nots—but Garcia Windhover had a really striking absence of good taste. He was draped in oversized chains and necklaces like he’d ordered “Rap Star” from a novelty costume catalog. He wore a black San Judas Cougars minor league baseball cap turned sideways (I’m sure he pretended the “C” was for “Crips”) and the waistband of his pants was around his thighs.

I left his fist-bump hanging as I walked into the house. “Is there an upstairs guest room?” I asked him.

“Whoa. You need a secret hideout?”

“Something like that. Is there one here?”

Turned out that G-Man didn’t really know much about the house except for the kitchen, the living room (where the television was) and the downstairs room where he and Posie slept. We finally located an upstairs bedroom that suited my purposes, tricked out for guests but clearly not used in a while. I couldn’t very well tell G-Man that I needed to leave my regular body here while I visited Hell, so I spun him a ridiculous story about how I was going to be testing a top-secret drug, but that I couldn’t do it in the government lab because my employers were afraid there was a spy in the facility. Garcia Windhover flopped back and forth between believing I was a private detective or a government agent, but either way he didn’t seem to think this latest thing was beyond belief, which just goes to show you how scary his ignorance was. I mean, if it was you, wouldn’t you at least want a better reason why somebody was going to hide in your house while deep in an apparent coma? Of course you would. And that’s why you will never be the G-Man.