Now, watching the old man as he wheeled the car through the December night, Hook reflected that in this age of cataclysmic change, things really had not changed all that much, not even in twenty-five years. The Mexican-Americans, like the blacks, were still serving the white man, only now the whites had been taught to feel guilt at that servitude.

He could not see much outside the cab. There were more houses than he remembered, more lights, and then suddenly they were past the lights, driving through darkness up a steep curve in the road until they came to a level again, and he was able to see lights out at sea. Trees, hills, a few houses kept moving between him and the ocean, blocking his view of it. After a while the driver slowed the cab and began checking the rural mailboxes along the road. Finally he turned in at a narrow blacktop lane where three mailboxes rested on an ornate wrought-iron frame.

“Man, I hope you got friends waiting for you up there,” he said.

In the darkness ahead a few dim lights burned forlornly. Hook asked him what he meant, wondering if the man had heard about the accident and was referring to it.

“It very dark is all.”

Hook asked the man to come back for him in an hour.

“That depend.”

Ahead, the headlights picked the name Rubin out of the darkness—a small reflector-type sign on the carport of the first of three houses spread along the cliff.

“On what?” Hook asked. “Your tip?”

Braking, the driver gave an affirmative shrug.

Hook looked at the meter. It read $3.05. He took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to him. “Will that do it?”

The old man was unimpressed, but he allowed that he would come back in an hour.

“At ten?”

The man nodded, bored by the discussion. Hook got out. The cab backed around and drove off, leaving him alone in the driveway facing the rear of the house. And suddenly Hook felt a tremor of panic, for it struck him that he had not prepared for this moment at all, had let his mind wander throughout the drive from downtown, as if there were no question that once he confronted the women they would both automatically break down and confess to him that truth which Sergeant Rider with all the powers and sanctions of his office had not been able to elicit in hours of questioning. Then just as suddenly Hook knew the way he would go, and figured he must have known all along in some secret circuit of his being, and that had been the reason for his aplomb in the cab. He would have to play the innocent, of course, the hick, the stolid bereft peasant come to view the site of his son’s passing, not unlike a typical Santa Barbara tourist making the rounds before glumly picking up his mementoes—in this case the broken body of his son—and going home to wherever it was he came from.