“You been in El Paseo yet?” he asked now.

“Yesterday. At that sidewalk café they have in the courtyard.”

“Naw—I mean inside. The restaurant. The bar.”

“No. Not yet.”

“You’ll like it. Especially this time of year. No tourists.”

Throughout their short drive together, not one word was mentioned about Chris’s death or why Hook was here in this “paradise by the sea.” But it would come, Hook knew. He would wait for it, and it would come.

As Parnelli had predicted, Hook found that he did like the bar at El Paseo. Parnelli had chosen a table in the farthest corner, next to a small fireplace in which gas flames licked at a pair of metal logs. Hook had taken the short end of the L-shaped seat, so that in effect he sat alone, facing both Parnelli and Ferguson on his right. But it gave him a fine view of the rest of the bar and the empty restaurant, which was darkening rapidly as night fell, for like the courtyard café it sat in the open air, only canopied now, in December, a great long room surrounded on three sides by what looked like the exterior of an old Spanish fort with a wood veranda fronting the second story all the way around. Hook could imagine a mantillaed Ava Gardner leaning sexily against one of the vine-covered veranda posts while Tyrone Power in a Zorro outfit tossed up a rose from below; the place had that kind of authenticity. All this Hook saw through the three graceful arches that separated the restaurant from the bar, which itself was roofed over, with a dark wood ceiling resting on great hewn beams. Inside the arches was a row of black leather booths, then small tables, then the long bar behind which a grayhaired bartender in a red jacket presided with magisterial authority. Above him, on the back wall, hung a mural-size painting depicting Indians or Mexicans migrating somewhere en masse—out of Santa Barbara? Hook wondered.

There were only ten or twelve other patrons in the bar, most of whom had been the recipients of a clout on the back and some shout of greeting by Parnelli on his way back to the corner table. Now though he was settled in, the drinks had been served—a martini for him, scotch for Hook and Ferguson—and it was time to get down to business.

“Well now, Mr. Hook,” Parnelli said. “Where were we?”

“I believe we were trying to save the country.”

“Right,” Parnelli agreed. “And believe me, it needs it. It needs saving like it never has before.”

“And you’re afraid I might get in the way of that.”

Parnelli looked at him like a teacher whose slowest pupil had come up with a correct answer. Smiling, he looked at Ferguson. “Now I like that, I really do. See, Rich, everybody isn’t like you after all. I’m not the only one who likes to come right to the point. He puts his cards right on the table, same as me.” He turned back to Hook. “You see, Rich and me, we got this little difference of opinion. I’m a man who believes in saying what has to be said and doing what has to be done. But Rich here, he’s a little more cautious than I am—maybe because he’s a hell of a lot smarter, who knows? Got a master’s in poli sci at Stanford, Rich has, and believe me he can write position papers and articles and speeches that are goddamn works of art. But he’s got this cautious streak, haven’t you, kid? So when the Doc called this afternoon, well, we had this little difference of opinion about what to do. Jack’s down in L.A. on business, so it was up to us, see? And I said let’s talk with the man. Right? What can it hurt?” He grinned now at Hook as if it were the two of them, partners, ranged against laughable little Ferguson.