They pass over the ten foot high barbed wire fence that marks the boundaries of the government’s farmland. In vain, Sarah scans the fence row for signs of a break. She sees none. If T.K. did, as she suspects, take his car through the fence, he did it in such a way as to cover all traces of his action.

Mile after mile of the crazy quilt pattern that is farmland passes beneath, brown dissolving to tan, tan to mottled green. Nowhere on any part of the crumbling slab of highway cutting across it does Sarah see a car. They’re barely three miles from the deserted town of Armona. She’s almost ready to concede defeat, when she sees it, gleaming red in the sunlight, half buried in an irrigation ditch, tilted forward at a crazy angle, T.K.’s Porsche.

“There.” She points down to it. “There. Come in as close to it as you can.”

In a welcome display of taciturnity, the pilot refrains from commenting on the legal implications of their discovery. Expertly, he settles his helicopter in barely ten feet overhead, close enough for Sarah to confirm that T.K. is not still inside.

“O.K., go back up. Not too high. We’re looking for a house.”

The pilot, his eyesight far keener than hers, spots it first. “Off north,” he says, “about five miles.”

“Take me there,” she commands.

They reach it in less than four minutes, a simple, unpretentious house, turned pocked and decrepit by years of neglect. A dusty green ring of what must have once been grass encircles the house for twenty yards all around. At the ring’s edge, T.K. Mann, clad only in a pair of shorts, hunches over a shovel, adding one more to the string of deep holes trailing off behind him.

“Set it down,” she says, pointing, “just on the other side of that tree.”

The pilot complies.

“Go off a few hundred yards. Someplace where you can see me if I wave. I want to be alone with him.”

The helicopter takes off in a rich cloud of loam.

Sarah walks toward T.K. He continues with his digging, not even pausing to greet her.

In spite of the brisk chill in the air, his body, shaven bare to protect him from the ravages of adhesive tape, glistens with sweat. A bandage, covering the shoulder wound he incurred in the last game of the season, barely hangs on, flapping with each motion of his arm. His clothes lie in a disheveled heap at the green-brown edge of what once marked the boundaries of his childhood.

She stands beside him, waiting for him to speak.