“Lots of folks are quitting these days.”

  “What century are you in, guy? I’m the last smoker on earth.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “You don’t remember yesterday?”

  “When was yesterday?”

  “You were walking and talking.”

  “Walking?”

  “And swearing. In a real creative style. I poked my head into that culvert, and you hopped right up and walked right to my car. Then,” she said, “I couldn’t get you out of the car. I had to do the whole thing in the back seat. Debrided the wound and all the rest. The back seat of a Chevy Lumina is not the place for that.”

  Gambol closed his eyes. “I feel like I weigh ten tons.”

  “You lost a lot of blood. A lot. I scored one liter of plasma. Nothing else but glucose and water.”

  “Feels like he shot me through the bone.”

  “He missed the bone. Or you’d be in the ER right now getting your leg saved and probably talking to a detective.”

  “I don’t talk to detectives.”

  “And he missed the big artery, or you’d be dead.”

  •

  At the Time Out Lounge in the Oroville Mall they sat in the rearmost booth, and Jimmy who called himself Franklin only stared at her, never sipping once from his Coke. She took a long swallow of vodka-and-Seven and said, “Oh, well . . . was I on TV again?”

  “How did you steal two-point-three million bucks?”

  “Didn’t the TV tell you? You run a bond election for a new high school, you float the loan, turn on the computers, transfer it here and there—zip, all yours.”

  “That’s greedy.”

  “Then the money gets missed right away, and the list of suspects is extremely short. Then somebody gets arrested.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well, what?”

  “I guess you were greedy enough to take it, but not mean enough to frame an asshole. Excuse my language,” he added, “but where I come from that’s what they call the guy who gets sacrificed—the asshole.”

  She laughed without feeling amused. “There was definitely an asshole,” she said.

  “If you’ve got it stashed, you’re doing it right, wandering around acting broke. That’s doing it right. But if you’ve got it, why don’t you just disappear?”

  “For one thing, I’m due in court to enter a plea and take a deal. Probation and lifelong restitution. If I miss that date, the judge’ll void the deal and max me out. That’s six years at least.”

  “Kind of a long time to wait to spend your two million.”

  “Have you lost count already? Two-point-three.”

  “What’s a point or three among friends?”

  “I haven’t got any friends. And I’m flat broke.”

  “Not according to the Federal Bureau of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “I haven’t got the money. I just know who has it and how to get it.”

  No more flip commentary from Mr. Jimmy.

  “Doesn’t that interest you?”

  “You’re interesting every way there is.”

  •

  This Jimmy was your basic bus-station javelina, but a nice enough guy. He insisted on handing her two Ben Franklin hundreds before they left the lounge. “You’re with me now.”

  “That’s not established.”

  “By ‘now’ I just mean now—right this second. That gets you at least a couple hundred.”

  He led her into JCPenney’s, where he stacked generic-looking items on one of his arms and went into the dressing room wearing his shiny black pants and white tuxedo and came out in khaki chinos and a flannel Pendleton.

  “Where’s your fancy threads?”

  “On the floor in there. I shed those babies like a sunburn.”

  “You’re fast.”

  “These days, life is fast.”

  She picked out a JCPenney pantsuit, a JCPenney blouse, a JCPenney skirt, and the best underwear they had, which wasn’t much. While Jimmy stood around waiting for her she sat in the dressing room momentarily naked with these latest humiliations at her feet and rage in her heart. JCPenney.

  She changed into the pantsuit, gray pinstripe, and made sure she had her shoulders back and her smile on before she swept aside the curtain. “Does it fit?”

  He stared, and then he went for his Camels and put one between his lips, realized where he was, dropped the cigarette into his shopping bag. “It fits.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. “You’re homeless, right?”

  “I have a home. I’m just not going back there, is all.”

  “So right in that shopping bag is everything you own.”

  “Everything I need.”

  “And your white canvas bag—what’s in that one?”

  “Everything else I need.”

  “I know what’s in it. A sawed-off shotgun.”

  He seemed completely unsurprised. “It’s not a sawed-off. It’s a pistol-grip. And it isn’t mine.”

  “I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower.”

  “You zipped it up real nice,” he said. “Good for you.”

  •

  Jimmy Luntz drove the Caddy north. He watched the dial and kept under the limit. Again they passed through the blond country. Some vineyards here and there, lots of vineyards. Either vineyards, or orchards with very small trees. He asked her if those were vineyards.

  “What do you care? Are you a wino?” Anita drank from an extra-large Sprite in a go-cup, doctoring it with vodka.

  Orchards. A roadside stand selling Asian pears spelled ASIAIN PEARS. Then higher country, the road winding. They lost the jazz station. He found another, just geezer rock. Tight curves, tall pines, and geezer rock. “Is that the Feather River?”

  By way of answer, she took a swig and coughed.

  “Hell of a lot of trees,” he said.

  “That’s why they call it the forest. I hope we’re not going camping.”

  “We are if I can’t find this place before dark.”

  “Look, Jimmy—who is this guy?”

  “I knew him in Alhambra.”

  “Is that a prison?”

  “It’s a city a few hundred miles from here. In your state. California.”

  She pushed the button and her window came down and the wind thudded in the car as she pitched her empty and listened for the small musical sound of the bottle shattering behind them.

  “You’re nice,” he said, “when you’re sober.”

  “Have you ever seen me sober?”

  “I think I did for about a minute.”

  She lay her head back on the headrest and closed her eyes.

  Luntz turned down the radio and kept his eyes going left and right, looking for a building, a sign, anything.

  After a while she opened her eyes. “What’s the plan?”

  “So far the plan is I can’t go back and I can’t stay here. That’s the plan so far.”

  “You know what I mean. What’s the plan?”

  Luntz stalled for twenty seconds, starting a cigarette. He set his lighter between them on the console. “I think if you’re looking for a gunslinger, you better keep looking.”

  “You said you shot Gambol.”

  “Only in the leg. I should’ve put two more in his head, just in proper observance of the rules. Instead I took pity. You don’t want a guy with pity in his heart.”

  “I’d like to know what the plan is.”

  “I didn’t say yes yet. Let’s sit down with a paper and pen and map out the pros and cons.”

  “Great.”

  “Don’t say great yet. Say great when I say yes.”

  “I just hope I chose the right guy.” When Luntz said nothing, she added, “Don’t be insulted.”

  “I’m not insulted. I just think it’s bullshit for you to act like you had a choice.”

  •

  The woman was what they called a hefty blonde, in jeans and a sweatshirt and big pink fuzzy slippers. She smoked cigarettes and watched crime shows and fake judges on TV while Gambol nodded out and watched cartoons in his head. She laughed a lot at the shows, and when she laughed it woke him up, and he watched her.

  “Where’s the vet?”

  “Vet?”

  “Juarez said he knew a vet could fix me.”

  “A vet, huh? I guess that’s me.”

  “What kind of animals? Large? Like cattle? Or small like pets?”

  She laughed, took a drink from her glass—some kind of booze—and set it down and lit a cigarette. “I’m a veteran. I was an army nurse for twenty-one years, three months, and six days. Dealt with lots of combat trauma.” She exhaled straight upward to avoid blowing smoke in his face. “I’m a veteran. Not a veterinarian.”

  “What’s your name, lady?”

  “Mary. What’s yours?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He nodded off and shot Luntz four times in the crotch, waited while he suffered, and then left him with two in the head.

  •

  In the last light they parked the Caddy and got out. Behind the building the ground sloped toward a tiny shantytown by the river, half a dozen trailers, pickup trucks, a couple motorcycles. She asked him if this was some sort of gang hideout, and he said it was the Feather River Tavern, that’s all.

  They entered a large café with a torn-up floor and secondhand tables and a view of spectacular cottonwoods dropping their seed tufts on the river in the dusk, and the trailers.

  Jimmy glanced at the man behind the counter and said, “Wow,” and sat down at a table with his back to the counter. “Sit there,” he told Anita.

  She sat across from him. “Is that him?”

  “He’s not the one I want.” Jimmy sat touching his fingertips together. “He looking?”

  “No.”

  Jimmy glanced over his shoulder at the man once more, quickly, and said, “Okay, I’ll hit the head. Ask him about selling a Harley. Like we’ve got a bike to sell. Don’t mention any names.”

  “He’s coming over.”

  Jimmy stood. “Get me a Coke, okay?” He touched her arm with two fingers as he walked past her.

  The other man approached. He was slumped and bony and the knees of his jeans brushed together as he walked. “Got a special today. Trout.” He wore a red headband around a shaggy gray mullet.

  “Maybe just a couple Cokes, please.”

  Behind the counter he opened two cans and poured them into glasses with ice, all the while looking at her with something other than the hunger of a man. Something more like envy. After she’d reached puberty, her mother had looked at her like that.

  He brought her the Cokes and set them down, each with a cocktail napkin. His fingers were long, the fingernails too. On his left ring finger he wore a large turquoise.

  Anita said, “I have a Harley I might like to sell. Do you know anybody who could point me in the right direction?”

  “John’s out back. He’d be the one.”

  She sipped her Coke and wished for vodka. Jimmy came back from the can, hiding his face by wiping his nose with a paper towel, and sat down across from Anita again. “What did he say?”

  “He said John’s out back.”

  “That’s the one I want.”

  He tossed down a five, and they left their Cokes and cocktail napkins and went out the front way and around the side of the building. Jimmy headed down the slope. She removed her high heels and followed, taking each step toes-first and dangling the pumps from the fingers of either hand.

  Beside a teardrop aluminum trailer, a bearded biker in denim overalls sat on a flat-back chair, messing with an old guitar, the guitar flat on his lap and his head bent low. He didn’t raise his face from this operation but said, “Getting too dark to see this shit.”

  Jimmy said, “Can you actually play that thing, Jay? I didn’t know that.”

  “Got to get the strings in it first.”

  Jimmy said nothing more. The man raised his head. He placed his hands flat on his guitar. “I think what I want to say right here is, ‘What is the meaning of this?’”

  Jimmy took a white handkerchief from his back pocket, spread it on the trailer’s step, seated himself, and said, “First of all.”

  The biker looked Anita over and then turned facing Jimmy and said nothing.

  Jimmy said, “I’m not out to snitch on anybody, that’s the first thing. All secrets remain completely secret.”

  “So far so good.”

  “This is Anita. This is my friend John Capra. We call him Jay.”

  The man rose halfway and said to Anita, “You want to sit down?” She shook her head. He sat back down and held the guitar gently in his lap. “It’s a strange world.”

  “Did you notice Santa Claus stopping by here one time last spring? That guy we call Santa Claus?”

  “With the white beard.”

  “Works in a mall every Christmas.”

  “I saw him,” Capra said. “I didn’t think he saw me.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “Say hi to him next time.”

  “No,” Luntz said, “no next time for me.”

  Capra kept quiet.

  Jimmy placed his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “Who’s that dude in there, Capra? In the café. That’s Sally Fuck.”

  “Just possibly. If so, his name would be Sol Fuchs. He’s against being called Fuck. But the thing is—last names, man.” Capra plucked one of the strings and turned a key on the instrument’s neck and tightened it to a whine. “This is a pretty fucked-up situation. We’re incognito here, you know?”

  “All of us. All of us.”

  Anita held out her hand and said, “Anita Desilvera. And this is my friend Jimmy Luntz.”

  Capra took her hand gently and said, “Okay. Now all our dicks are hanging out.”

  “Pleased and charmed.”

  Capra laughed. He stopped laughing. “Fucking Santa Claus. Who else knows?”

  “Whoever he told. Nobody believed him.”

  “You did.”

  “Not really. But I’m in a wild mood, so I’m taking any long shot, anything looks like action.”

  “What do you need, Jimmy?”

  “Remember that time I let you stay with me and Shelly?”

  “I owe you, Jimmy. That’s a fact.”

  “We need to hunker down a minute. Get some options figured out.”

  Capra tangled his fingers in his beard and yanked at it. “How many days? I hope it’s days, man, and not weeks.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t matter none. I owe you. But it’s Sol’s place, not mine. All I can do is talk to Sol.”

  Anita said, “Till next Wednesday.”

  “What’s today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Saturday,” Jimmy said.

  “Wednesday’s probably acceptable.” Capra stood and set his guitar down on the seat of his chair and started up the hill. By now it was dark.

  At the bottom of the staircase up the building’s side Jimmy waited while she brushed the soles of her feet and put her shoes on, and then they climbed behind Capra up to the small landing. Capra worked a key and let them in and flipped a wall switch. A bed, a stove, a fridge. Wooden floor with the finish scratched off. For a curtain, a bedsheet. “You can eat in the restaurant for the usual price, or you can make a list and I’ll bring you shit from the store in a box. It’s up to you. I’ll get Sol to go along as far as Wednesday.”

  From beneath them, Anita felt the gigantic quiet of the empty establishment downstairs. “Is the restaurant closed?”

  “Open for business. But most of the folks who come here are down in Bolinas for the biker convention.” Capra looked her up and down and seemed to examine her face carefully. “So what happens Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday I go to court.”

  “Yeah. I know you.”

  “Nobody knows me.”

  “You’re slightly infamous.”

  “All lies,” Anita said.

  “So!” Jimmy said. “John Capra didn’t die.”

  “Nope. My old lady wanted alimony. That’s unacceptable. I cut her some slack. I walked.”

  “Like a real gentleman,” Anita said.

  “Yeah, it was, lady. I know twenty dudes would’ve taken her out to the Mojave and buried her alive for that shit.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Anita said.

  Capra put his hand on the doorknob and stared at her, but he was speaking to Jimmy. “This one got the beauty that goes down to the bone. High heels or barefoot, don’t matter.”

  “She can sing too.”

  “I can’t tell if she’s powered by a lot of soul or a lot of psycho electricity.”

  Anita said, “Do you always talk about people like they’re invisible?”

  “Usually just women.”

  It was one of those hippie-student pads smelling like cat shit, incense, a little dirty laundry, dirty dishes. She said, “Does somebody, you know—clean?” just to be a bitch.

  “I said I owe him. I didn’t say I was his slave.” Capra shut the door softly behind him, and the windowpanes rattled as he went down the stairs.

  Jimmy lit a cigarette and said, “Honey? I’m home!”

  Anita said, “Is this a smoking room?”

  “Yeah. I smoke.”

  “Well, fine. Smoke.”

  He blew smoke and opened what looked like a closet door. “Even a bathroom. No tub.”

  Anita sat on the bed. “Jeez, the mattress is like quicksand, help!”

  “Don’t get lost. I’ll be back.” He went out the door, and she listened to the panes rattle while he descended, and then she settled back onto the bare feather pillow. It stank. A few minutes, and someone shook the panes again coming up the stairs.

  It was Sally—Sol—with sheets and a blanket. “Funky, funky, funky,” he said, “but it’s bigger than mine. I have a studio downstairs off the kitchen.” He stood by the bed looking haggard, though he smiled. “Might as well live near the job—I have to be in the kitchen by six a.m. anyhow. Can you stand it, honey?”

  “Sure.”

  “The renter just moved out. The plan is we clean it up and move in next week. Me and Jay.”

  “You mean—you and Jay? Move in?”