“It doesn’t matter,” Hook told her. “I’ll wait for him.”

And that was that. Hanging up, he got a scotch on ice at the bar and took it over to a table in the corner. At five-thirty, after a second drink, he left.

As Icarus had told him on the telephone, the road up to Mount Calvary Monastery was narrow and twisting, a lane of asphalt climbing back and forth between limestone boulders and withered old live oaks, which his car’s headlights kept picking out of the darkness like static explosions, wood forever bursting out of the ground. All the way up, Hook did not see any parked pickup truck or in fact any vehicle at all. But then he was early, he knew. It was only a quarter to six when he reached the monastery, which looked like a barracks in the darkness, a long white adobe building with an asphalt drive tightly bordering it at the front and one side, as if to keep the structure from tumbling down the mountain. If there was anyone in the building, Hook saw no evidence of them. There was not a light burning anywhere.

At the end of the drive he turned the car around and started back, moving slowly until he reached the parapet at the front, where he stopped. Far in the distance he could see the lights of the city and even those on the drilling platforms out at sea. But what commanded his attention was a single pair of headlights moving up the monastery road. He lit a cigarette and waited. Halfway up the drive, the lights stopped moving and he thought he saw something else for a moment, as if the person inside the vehicle had turned on the interior light. He could not be sure, however; the vehicle was too far away and was half obscured by the trees growing along the road.

Hook put the car in gear and started down, keeping his foot on the brake instead of the accelerator. When he rounded the last curve and saw the lights dead ahead he had to resist an urge to drive on past and settle for what he had, for there was something uniquely sinister about it now that he saw it, was part of it, this curious meeting on a lonely mountain road at night. Nevertheless, about fifty feet in front of the headlights he pulled off and parked, on the outside of the narrow road the same as the other vehicle, so any other traffic happening by would be able to pass with ease. Leaving the car’s motor running and the headlights on, he got out and walked forward into the glare. As he drew closer, he could make out that the vehicle was a pickup truck, a white one. And he could hear its motor running. Then the door clicked open and a light went on inside the truck and Hook saw the round swinish face of a young man with curly black hair and dark glasses and a handlebar mustache. As the door opened further and the man got out of the truck, Hook stopped short, out of some involuntary tic of caution. For an eternal three or four seconds he stood in the roadway waiting for the youth to say something, and when he did not, Hook finally ventured his own name.