He looked anxiously at Hook, as if for approval.

“Did she know why?” Hook asked. “What you had in mind?”

“What I had in mind? I just told you. Even I don’t know that.”

“How’d you know about Icarus?”

Parnelli shrugged indifference. “I guess Liz told us about him. I don’t know. I just knew he knew you, that’s all.”

“So you got to him.”

“But why, huh? Can you tell me that?” He looked eagerly at Hook, like a child expecting a gift. “What was I after, huh? You think maybe it was to beg? You think that could be it? That’s what I had in back of my mind all along? Get here alone with you and go down on my knees and beg? You think that was it?”

As he spoke, his voice had fallen to a whisper and Hook knew the man was going down into himself, into his rage as helplessly as a hooked shark sounding in the sea. Hook felt his own body begin to brace itself, tightening against the coming of the rage. But all Parnelli did was reach into his pocket and pull out a roll of bills, which he unfolded.

“And then there’s this,” he said. “The saddest part of all, I guess. The part where you laugh. But this afternoon, when I knew finally I wasn’t going to lean on you or kill you, I didn’t know what to do—besides drink, that is. So I decided to come with this. There’s ninety of them here—nine thousand bucks—all I got to show for fifteen years of work. It was my equity in a condominium up at Mammoth. I like to ski.”

His right hand closed on Hook’s arm, stopping him. With his left he offered the roll. It shook with his hand. “Take it,” he said. “Please, Mr. Hook. Maybe you don’t need it, but take it anyway. Take it and go home. Leave us be. Don’t ruin us. Please.”

Seeing the man’s desperation, Hook wished that he could have reached out and taken the money. For he knew that not to take it would be to step to the edge of an abyss, to walk along it. But his hands, freighted with the habits of a lifetime, would not rise. He pulled away from Parnelli and went on ahead, moving into the long shadow cast by the nephew standing in the center of the road.

“Bo?” the youth called. “What I do, Bo? Bo?”

Behind Hook there was no answer save the sound of footfalls finally, quick and heavy, and then came the rage, the huge hands dropping on Hook’s shoulders like felled trees. And immediately he was being spun around and thrown backwards into the nephew’s arms, which held him for perhaps a second, all the time Parnelli needed.

Hook was aware that he had been hit in the lower abdomen and that he had sagged in the young man’s grasp, that he had been let go of, that his face had slapped against asphalt. And he was aware of the big hands gathering the front of his sport coat together and pulling him to his feet and shoving him back into the arms of the nephew again. And finally he was aware of Parnelli crying, the big man standing in front of him crying openly and shaking his head.