“A witness said he did, a Dorothy Rubin. You know anything about her?”

“Never heard of her. Why?”

“Just checking. That’s it, then. Thank you.”

“Sure man. Take it easy now.” Immediately the kid was off and running again, this time toward a green light.

Hook checked into the first motel he came to, and as soon as he was in his room he began to feel ill as well as exhausted. He went into the bathroom to get a drink of water and suddenly found himself on his knees, vomiting his steak dinner into the toilet. Afterwards, dousing cold water on his face at the sink, he stared into the fluorescent-lit mirror at an older version of himself. Normally he thought of himself as a fairly young-looking forty-five, weatherbeaten and lined perhaps, but still lean and hard, still basically young. But the image in the mirror was that of an old man, a survivor of some ultimate calamity. Hook turned from it. He would have liked to take a shower before going to bed, but he did not have the strength and in fact managed only to get off his coat and shoes and trousers before collapsing into the too-soft bed. He did not expect to sleep at all but it came in time. It came off and on throughout the night, like recurring spells of madness.

Once he dreamed he was on the deck of Mrs. Rubin’s house, lying on his back with Liz Madera sitting astride him, naked under her shiny black raincoat and smiling sadly down at him as she guided his sex into her body and began to move against him. There was a muffled shouting in the distance, the cursing and panting of men fighting, and Hook wanted desperately to find out what was going on but he could not move except in answer to the rhythms of his rider. Near the deck railing the little girl from the Los Angeles airport bar watched him gravely.

The dream ended in exhaustion, not orgasm. But even then it was preferable to another, in which he found himself back in the identification room at the Bowman mortuary, sitting in a steel-tube chair with Chris’s broken body draped in his lap. In a kind of paternal pietà, he sat there crooning and talking to the boy, rocking him, stroking his face, trying to manipulate his eyes and mouth in order to get them working again, for the idea seemed to be that the boy was merely in some sort of profound sleep and that if Hook only had time enough he would be able to wake him finally. It seemed like hours that he kept at it, even trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at the end. Then a harsh bell sounded and the fight was over.

It was his seven o’clock call. It was day. It was time to take Chris home.

3

When he left the cemetery and started down the hill through the darkness toward the gate to his farm, Hook found no real consolation in the knowledge that he had even more to go on now, more reason for being convinced that Elizabeth Madera and her friends had deliberately lied about Chris’s death. The same day he had flown home with the body, a letter from Chris had arrived at the farm. In the three days since then Hook had read the letter so many times he could almost have recited it from memory: