“No.”

“Well then, I’ll just have to tell you, won’t I? You know what it seems like to me, you coming out here, all this way? It’s the ego trip of the century, man—if you’ll excuse the pun. But that’s what it is, all right. You just made the ego trip to end all ego trips.”

“Oh lay off, Joe.” It was the girl.

After passing the cigarette to the Negro, he turned to the girl. “Why, huh? Tell me why I should. He’s just like all his generation. Just like my old man, for Christ sake. They’re so fucking perfect, you know—such paragons of perfection it wouldn’t ever dawn on them they might’ve screwed up someplace. Like say in raising a kid. That would never dawn on them. No, it’s got to be something else—somebody else’s fault. Ain’t that right, man? Huh? Ain’t that right, Mr. Hook or Kook or whatever the fuck your name is? You’re not here for your kid, are you? You’re here for yourself. For your own precious fucking good name. And that, mister—that I call that an ego trip. One big fucking ego trip.”

Hook asked him if he was finished.

The youth shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.” Then he winked at the Negro. “But if I get any more opinions on the subject, I’ll let you know, okay?”

The girl spoke up again. “Sometimes you’re all mouth, Joe. You know that?”

“Up yours, baby.”

He sat down again and leaned his head back against her hip, and her hand fled into his hair.

“Getting back,” Hook said to Icarus. “You don’t remember when the paper said the woman picked him up? It was Wednesday morning, according to her. And the death occurred that same night, slightly after midnight—early Thursday morning. And it was in the paper that afternoon, Thursday afternoon.”

Icarus looked uncomprehending. “So?”

“So you said it was a couple of days later you read about it. A couple of days after he left here.”

The young man shrugged. “Well, you know how time is. I mean, like, it depends on what you’re doing—how it goes.”

“Like right now,” Rooney drawled. “It’s kind of dragging, man.”

But Hook persisted. “Tell me this. When you read about it—was it the first story, or a follow-up?”

Icarus was not in doubt about that. “It was the first one. The original story.”

“And you read it a couple of days after Chris left?”

Icarus nodded thoughtfully, apparently beginning to understand. “Yeah, that is kind of weird, isn’t it? I never thought about it before.”

Hook felt an immense sense of relief, for he had been afraid that after mailing his letter home Chris might have returned to Icarus’s apartment for something he had forgotten, and then might have stayed on another day, which would have put him on Route 101 on Wednesday, the day Elizabeth Madera claimed to have picked him up. And that would have strengthened the rest of her story, the larger lies.