“Leave Billy Joel out of this, okay? Knew a guy whose best years were in-country. Like me, he only got a good night’s sleep on patrol in hostile territory. He cashed out. Right away, home life went wrong. He wanted out from under the peacetime regime. Tried to re-enlist. Uncle Sam didn’t want him. Attempted suicide. Got drunk and stabbed himself with a pocket knife. His lungs filled with blood; he gasped and faded to black. Woke the next day with a hangover and a knife stuck in his chest. There’s an embarrassing hospital visit.”

The going was sludgy and we rested on a log whose exposed surface was sun-dried and warm to the touch. Lionel dug a bottle of beer out of his coat pocket. I wasn’t in the mood, but had a swig to be sociable.

“Provenance,” I said. “Fate minus mysticism. Like the song says, where you begin and where you wind up aren’t always far apart.”

“No shit, it’s provenance.”

“In a past life, maybe I didn’t run around killing people,” I said.

“Are all you Coleridges comedians?” he said. “If anything, our past selves probably ran around killing a hell of a lot more people. The bag limits were higher.”

“There you go, obliterating my romantic illusions.”

Lionel regarded the bottle.

“Me and my wet blanket. It coulda been a christening gift. The people who raised me were hard-core alkies. Cigarette in one hand, a glass of hooch in the other.”

My ears pricked up. He wasn’t what you would call an open book when it came to his family.

“Your parents sound like pieces of work.”

He precariously clutched the bottle in his left fist and drew a cigarette to illustrate his point.

“I said the people who raised me. Hustlers too. Bet on anything. And I mean any fucking thing. Semi-pros, but they never knew when to cash in. Spent half the year in Vegas pissing away their retirement. Rose at the crack of noon, slobbered off to bed at two A.M. and nothing between except sports on the tube, penny ante blackjack, two packs of Winston, and a quart of the cheap stuff. Apiece. I got a real education from that pair.”

“What did they eat?” I lit his smoke.

“The light. Time and space.”

“You go to Vegas with them?”

“Nah. Well, twice. That went over like a lead balloon. Cramped their style. Rancher friends of theirs ran a spread in the Northwest. Put me to work.” He finished his beer. “That was okay.”

We watched our fellow travelers slosh and slide past for a while.

“Been turning it over in my mind and I can’t understand what’s going on at the Jeffers site,” I said. “Are we onto something in regard to Sean Pruitt or did those bogeys come at us because we snooped around the facility?”

“What if the answer is A and B?”

“Separate yet connected.”

“Everything is connected. Then there’s the Valley. Place is fucked. The Jeffers site is fucked. While you were down there playing grab-ass in the tunnel, I had a case of the willies. Haven’t been that spooked since the war. Man, if some nimrod would’ve stepped from behind a tree and said boo!, I would’ve put a round between his eyes.”