each other. Maybe not much of a family, but it's more than nothing.'
My third margarita had started seeping into my bloodstream. A flash lit the sky and a peal of thunder rolled one way across the lake, then the other. God testing the balance on his speakers.
'This was your mom's place,' I said.
Jimmy nodded.
'Is it ever hard, living here?' I was thinking about the months after my father had died, when I'd been living alone in his house.
Jimmy cracked a twig, sent one half spinning into the dark. 'Getting divorced, watching my career fall apart. I start wonderingwhat have I got left, you know? In the end, there's just family and friends, and for me the family part has always been… difficult.
I've got a lot of time to make up for.'
He paused uncomfortably.
'What?' I asked.
'I was thinking. You could do a favour for me. You can do background checks, right?'
Most of my nightmares start with those words.
I immediately thought: Divorce. Jimmy's family money, the settlement with Ruby final, but maybe not on terms Jimmy wanted. Knowing him, he'd allowed himself to get bled dry. He'd want detective work in order to appeal the court decision, maybe make his ex look bad.
I said, 'Jimmy…'
'Forget it.'
'It's just, it's not a good idea working for a friend.'
He looked at me strangely, maybe because I'd used the word friend.
'You're right,' he said. 'Forget it.'
I wanted to say something else, something that didn't sound like an excuse, but nothing came.
We watched the storm roll above us, the air get heavier, and finally break with a sigh, the first few splatters of warm rain hissing at the edge of the fire.
Jimmy stood. 'It's too late to drive back to S.A. Take a couch in the dome. I got plenty of spare clothes and whatever.'
Staying overnight hadn't been part of my game plan, but when I tried to stand, I realized how the tequila had turned my legs and my anger into putty. I accepted Jimmy's offer.
'Go on, then,' he said. 'I'll take care of the fire and the dinner stuff.'
'I don't mind helping.'
'No. Go on.' More of a command now. 'I want to stay down here a little longer.'
'Fix your kiln goddess?'
He gave me an empty smile, picked up his Tupperware fajita bowl. 'Thanks for your help today, Tres.'
He headed toward the lake to wash his bowl.
I drove up the gravel road in the rain, parked behind Garrett's van, then got fairly well soaked running from the truck to Jimmy's front door.
Inside, the dome smelled like copal incense. One large room-a small kitchenette to the right, sleeping loft in the back, four high skylights like the slits of a sand dollar. The curve of the south wall was sheered perpendicular at the bottom to accommodate a fireplace and Jimmy's pottery display shelves.
Despite Jimmy's years as a programmer, there was no computer. No television. With Jimmy's jam box down at the lake, the most hightech appliance in the dome was probably his refrigerator.
Garrett's sleeping bag was spread out on one of the canvas sofas by the fireplace, but Garrett wasn't there. Probably in the outhouse.
I crashed on the opposite couch and listened to the thunder, watched the rain make milky starbursts on the windows above. Lightning flashed across Jimmy's pottery, turned the photos on his mantel into squares of gold. One of those photos showed Garrett before the accident that had made him a bilateral amputee. He was standing next to Jimmy on the Corpus Christi seawall. Another photo showed Jimmy's mother, Clara, a sadeyed woman I remembered vaguely, dead now for something like five years. Next to her was a picture of Jimmy with a redheaded woman I assumed was Ruby, his newly exwife. And in the middle of the mantel, taking the place of honour, was a signed publicity shot of Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefers.
I don't remember falling asleep at all.
I dreamt about the ranch. I was lying out in the wheat fields, rain falling on my face.
Standing over me was Luis, a drug dealer who'd once stabbed me in San Francisco.
We were having a pleasant conversation about property values until Luis drew the Balinese knife on me again and plunged it into my kidney. I heard paramedics, heard my old mentor, Maia Lee, chastising me for my carelessness.
Then a single, sharp report snapped me awake.
My eyes stared into darkness for several lifetimes before I realized I was out of the dream. My side still ached from the knife wound.
I sat up on the couch.
No light came in the windows. The rain seemed to have stopped. The room was lit only by the glow of a stovetop fluorescent.
Garrett's sleeping bag was mussed up but unoccupied. Open face down on the pillow was his wellworn copy of Richard Farina- Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. His wheelchair was nowhere in sight.
I climbed the stairs to the sleeping loft. Jimmy's bed hadn't been slept in. The red digital numbers on his alarm clock glowed 2:56 A.M.
Then I heard a car engine-Garrett's van.
I stumbled downstairs, pulled on my boots, and came out the door in time to see Garrett's taillights disappearing below the rise in the woods, heading toward the kiln.
Dry ice started burning in my stomach.
The sky above was a solid gray sheet of clouds, tinted orange in the east from the perpetual glow of Austin. I ran, every rainsoaked branch thwapping into me on my way downhill.
The VW safari van had been parked with its front wheel on the cement slab of Jimmy's future studio, slammed into the side of the kiln. The driver's door was open, the engine idling with its steady, tubercular cough.
The headlights cut a yellow oval in the woods, illuminating wet trees hung with Spanish moss, silver streaks of gnats, the back bumper of Jimmy Doebler's Chevy pickup.
The truck had rolled from where I'd last seen it-down the slope of the bank, over a few young saplings, and straight into the lake. Its nose was completely submerged, the cab just at the waterline.
Garrett's wheelchair was overturned in the mud about twelve feet away. Garrett was on the ground and something metal gleamed in the mud nearby.
When he saw me, Garrett tried to speak. In the dark, his eyes wild, his bearded face glazed with sweat, he looked like some sort of cornered night animal. He lifted one muddy hand and pointed toward the truck.
'I couldn't get down there. I couldn't-'
I focused on the Lorcin-Garrett's. 380-in the mud about three feet from him.
I ran past him, toward the truck.
The odour of gun discharge hit me. Then a fainter smell, like a breeze through a butcher's apron. I sank bootdeep into silty water, put my hand on the passenger's side door handle and looked in the open window.
My vision telescoped. It refused to register anything but the smallest details-the gurgle of lake water springing from the cracks at the bottom of the driver's door, glossing the parchmentcoloured boots a shiny brown. An upturned palm, callused fingers curled inward.
'Tres?' Garrett called, his voice brittle.
The driver'sside window was shattered, the frame and remaining shards painted burgundy and gray.
'Is he in there?' Garrett called.. 'Please to fucking Christ, tell me he's not in there.'
I tried to step back from the truck, but my boots wouldn't come free of the silt.
I want to stay down here a little longer.
Garrett called again. 'Tres?'
