“I know!” Bob replies. “It’s a tricky area. But so far it’s been working really well. There are customers out there, if you can find them. But it’s murky water, I’ll tell you. Almost as bad as the drug scene. And now he thinks he’s been noticed by another group who are into the same thing.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I know. So he’s all wrapped up in that now, trying to find out who exactly is out there, and whether he can come to terms with them.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Sandy says.

Bob shrugs. “Everything’s dangerous. But anyway, you can see why Ray isn’t interested in this smuggling deal. His mind is occupied with other things these days.”

“You bet.”

Manfred comes back from the bathroom. They try a few more puffs of the harsh black smoke, talk some more. Manfred presses Sandy to commit himself to the aphrodisiac smuggling enterprise, and carefully, ever so diplomatically, Sandy refuses to make the commitment. What he has just heard from Bob isn’t any encouragement. “I’m going to have to think about it, Manfred. It’s really far out of my usual line.”

Manfred accepts this with grace: “I still hope you’ll go for it, man. Think about it some more and then let me know—we’ve still got a week or so.”

Sandy looks at his watch, rises. “I’ve got a working day tomorrow, starts in about four hours actually. I should get back home.” Farewells all around and he’s off, into the living room where Tashi, Jim, Humphrey, Abe and Arthur are sitting around talking to people. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 27

27

Tracking back north Jim dozes. He’s sitting in the middle seat, leaning against the right window. Arthur is beside him, Abe and Tash behind him in the backseat. Jim finds it difficult to joke around with Arthur; easier to doze. The act of falling asleep often brings hypnagogic visions to him, and the sensation of falling down a black cliff jerks him awake. “Whoah!” Arthur and Raymond, on the cliffside platform. Snatches of a conversation. Warm body in the ocean’s chill. It’s been a strange night.

Out the window is the single stretch of southern California’s coast left undeveloped: the center of U.S. Marine Camp Joseph H. Pendleton. Dark hills, a narrow coastal plain cut by dry ravines, covered with dark brush. Grass gray in the moonlight. Something about it is so quiet, so empty, so pure.… My God, he thinks. The land. A pang of loss pierces him: this land that they live on, under its caking of concrete and steel and light—it was a beautiful place, once. And now there’s no way back.