“You can understand? You?”

“If a man lost everything. His self. His idea of himself.”

Rider shook his head in scorn. “Naaw. Oh, I could buy it under certain circumstances maybe—like if you chickened out, say, in war. If you let your buddies down and got some of them killed. Something real. But not this. Whose good opinion was he so worried about, for Christ sake? A bunch of country-club drunks. Leeches.”

“There was his family,” Hook suggested.

Rider mauled his face. “Yeah. But I still can’t buy it. It was a chickenshit act. And I ain’t gonna lose a second’s sleep over him ever—that I can promise. And you shouldn’t either.”

Hook regarded the sergeant’s blood-ridden eyes, the exhaustion that showed like a week’s growth of beard on his blocky face, and said nothing. He finished his coffee and waited, and finally Rider checked his watch and said he had to be on his way.

Hook’s flight was not due in for another quarter-hour, which he figured would stretch into thirty minutes and more because of the heavy holiday traffic, the students flying home on this last day before Christmas. So he took the time to walk with the sergeant back to the terminal entrance, where they shook hands goodbye, Rider barely glancing at him before turning away and striding briskly across the curving blacktop drive, heading for his car. As Hook watched the burly figure move through the crowded parking lot he wondered if the man had been less his ally than his victim, another of his victims.

Hook was so deeply lost in himself that the flight home passed almost unnoticed by him, including the time spent transferring to another jet in Los Angeles. Later he would remember being served champagne with a lunch he had not been able to eat. He would remember an excessively sweet old lady sitting next to him trying vainly to draw him into conversation. And he would recall seeing land occasionally under a vast white cloud cover below. But most of all he would remember reading the newspapers over and over: the Los Angeles Times, which he had bought at the motel in the morning, and the Santa Barbara paper, which he had picked up at the airport. The Times had gone to press before Douglas had killed himself, so he did not figure at all in their story, which ran under a three-column headline on the third page:

Ex-USC FOOTBALL STAR SLAIN IN SANTA BARBARA

Bo Parnelli Shot in Apparent Assault On Illinois Man Investigating Son’s Alleged Suicide on Coast

Hook was amazed by the accuracy of the story that followed, for he knew how little cooperation he had given the reporters at the hospital and outside the courthouse, and he had not seen Liz or Rider offer them anything at all. Yet the Times reporter had dug it up from somewhere or pieced it together, for it was all there, the details of the assault on Hook by Parnelli and his nephew, the accidental shooting of Parnelli by the nephew and the youth’s subsequent confession, which “alleged that Parnelli was in some way responsible for the death of Mr. Hook’s son, Christopher, 19, till now considered a suicide by the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department.” The story did not mention Liz Madera, though she was in a photo with Rider and Hook coming out of the hospital, a picture that looked brutally real and immediate compared to the one adjoining it, an antique publicity shot of Parnelli posturing violently in a USC football uniform. So, except for the fact of Parnelli’s death and the reporting of it, the story was all Hook could have asked for, everything for which he had come to the coast in the first place. It was his certificate of injustice redressed, his sheepskin in revenge.