I headed north and out of the inferno.

■■■

Ash blackened the hood of the compact. I stopped at a ramshackle gas station between Philo and Navarro, squeegeed the windshield and headlights, and topped off the tank. The proprietor was a weathered man with a heavy beard who, judging by his accent, had emigrated from somewhere north of the U.S. border. A steel-gray conure with a red crest and red cheeks hopped atop the spinner racks and cocked her head at me. The proprietor said the conure’s name was Zora; she’d flown into the shop during another long-ago firestorm and decided to stay. He asked where I’d come from. I said New York. I poured coffee from a pot and fixed it the way I liked. News of the disaster cycled nonstop on the crummy television jammed on a high shelf. He went to the door and gazed south, where an orange and black charcoal smudge wavered over the mountains.

“The East gets snow in winter. We get fire.”

He obviously noticed my black eye and swollen cheek, but didn’t comment. Had I ever been all the way up the coast to the Pacific Northwest? I shrugged noncommittally and he explained how he’d lived there for a few years after bailing on the scene in British Columbia.

Zora alighted on my shoulder. She nibbled my ear.

The proprietor accepted the twenty-dollar bill I gave him and put it in his pocket without offering to make change. I tried to escape. He segued into the epic recounting of a monstrous forest fire suffered by his hometown in the “Territories.” Wildfires burned for a week. Several days after they’d cooled to blown ash, brown bears came down from the mountains and shambled among the charcoal hulks of the buildings, foraging.

The shop phone rang and I was able to shoo his bird and hoof it to the car while he answered. A green four-door sedan was parked on the shoulder fifty feet before the turnoff. I placed my hands on my hips and glared. The car crept into the road, executed a three-point turn, and disappeared around a bend. The conure glided out of the shop, circled me twice, and flew after the car.

“Oh, no,” I said. I went back and told the owner the bad news.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, the phone pressed to his ear. “Zora’s chasing off evil spirits.”

“What?”

“Some dog breeds catch rats; my bird catches spirits. She always returns. You should hurry up and move on. Sometimes she brings one back.”

■■■

The lights of Mendocino were glowing in the dark when I arrived. The Blue Shell Motel occupied a rocky terrace with a view of the town and the ocean. Doubles were all they had left. I told the clerk I wasn’t picky and booked one at the far end of the main building. An alley separated the wall of my room from a locked shed with an ice machine on the side. Thoughts of Ichabod and his buddies waiting in the wings, maybe tooling the countryside in a green sedan, were on my mind as I called Beasley and then turned off the lamp and watched the parking lot and the highway through slightly parted drapes. This move put me in the same category as Badja Adeyemi hiding on Elkhorn Lake, waiting for Russians in ski masks to sneak through the trees. At least Adeyemi had been loaded for bear. California didn’t reciprocate my PI license or weapon permits. I hadn’t even packed a folding knife.