He drove past Icarus’s place, past the driveway leading back to the apartment, but all he could see was darkness, no psychedelic lights burning this night. So he went back to his motel then, stopping off at the Galleon bar in the basement for another few drinks before turning in. Besides himself and the bartender, there were only two couples sitting at tables, a fat man at the bar and two girls alone, apparently waiting for their dates. The room was flooded with a ghastly green light from the swimming pool, whose depths a floor-to-ceiling window exposed. The pool was being used by a thirtyish married couple and their two children, all of whom stayed protectively in the heated water, which had to be a good thirty degrees warmer than the December night air.

Sitting at the bar, and staying with vodka, Hook tried to make conversation with the bartender, a heavy man about his own age, with slicked-down black hair and a pencil-line mustache and an air of aggrieved embarrassment, as if he were appearing on stage in a very bad play. Hook told him that he was from out of town and was thinking of opening a business in Santa Barbara but wanted some good public relations counseling before he did anything definite. Did the bartender know anything about local public relations firms, like say Jack Douglas Associates? No, the man didn’t know a thing, in fact wasn’t even sure what they meant by public relations. What the hell was it anyway? Pretty much what the words said, Hook explained. Maybe the bartender knew Douglas as a politician; he had run for Congress last year. But no, the man couldn’t help him there either. There were so goddamn many names and propositions on the ballots these days that a body just couldn’t keep it all straight anymore, so he didn’t even bother to vote. Had he ever heard of Mrs. Dorothy Rubin? No, never.

And that was that. The man had glasses to wash and moved down the bar to wash them. For a time Hook sat there looking down at the drink in his hand and tried not to think about anything at all, but he was just stalling and he knew it. The time had come finally, the time to face it, to think about it, deal with it. All through the late afternoon and evening, in fact ever since she had hit him with it on the beach, he had tried to pretend it was not there and simply had gone on about his business as if everything were still the same. But it was not the same.