"You know what's wrong with nature," I asked her, "with all its poison plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods?"

"You're upsetting yourself, sweetie."

"When we envied, when we killed for what we envied, we fell. And when we fell, we broke the whole shebang, nature, too."

A kitchen worker whom I knew, who had worked part time at the Grille, Manuel Nuñez, arrived with a fresh beer.

"I don't think he should have that," Karla worried.

Taking the beer from him, I said, "Manuel, how're you doing?"

"Looks like better than you."

"I was just dead for a while, that's all. Manuel, do you know what's wrong with cosmic time, as we know it, which steals everything from us?"

"Isn't it 'spring forward, fall back'?" Manuel asked, thinking that we were talking about Daylight Savings Time.

"When we fell and broke," I said, "we broke nature, too, and when we broke nature, we broke time."

"Is that from Star Trek?" Manuel asked.

"Probably. But it's true."

"I liked that show. It helped me learn English."

"You speak it well," I told him.

"I had a brogue for a while because I got so into Scotty's character," Manuel said.

"Once, there were no predators, no prey. Only harmony. There were no quakes, no storms, everything in balance. In the beginning, time was all at once and forever-no past, present, and future, no death. We broke it all."

Chief Porter tried to take the fresh Heineken from me.

I held on to it. "Sir, do you know what sucks the worst about the human condition?"

Bill Burton said, "Taxes."

"It's even worse than that," I told him.

Manuel said, "Gasoline costs too much, and low mortgage rates are gone."

"What sucks the worst is…this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't."

I started to cry. The tears surprised me. I thought I was done with tears for the duration.

Manuel put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Maybe we can fix it, Odd. You know? Maybe."

I shook my head. "No. We're broken. A broken thing can't fix itself."

"Maybe it can," Karla said, putting a hand on my other shoulder.

I sat there, just a faucet. All snot and tears. Embarrassed but not enough to get my act together.

"Son," said Chief Porter, "it's not your job alone, you know."

"I know."

"So the broken world's not all on your shoulders."

"Lucky for the world."

The chief crouched beside me. "I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that at all."

"Or me," Karla agreed.

"I'm a mess," I apologized.

Karla said, "Me too."

"I could use a beer," Manuel said.

"You're working," Bill Burton reminded him. Then he said, "Get me one, too."

To the chief, I said, "There're two dead at the Panamint and two more in the flood-control tunnel."

"You just tell me what," he said, "and we'll handle it."

"What had to be done… it was so bad. Real bad. But the hard thing is…"

Karla gave me a wad of tissues.

The chief said, "What's the hard thing, son?"

"The hard thing is, I was dead, too, but somebody didn't want me to be, so I'm back."

"Yes. You said before."

My chest swelled. My throat thickened. I could hardly breathe. "Chief, I was this close to Stormy, this close to service."

He cupped my wet face in his hands and made me look at him. "Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule."

"I guess so."

"You know that's true."

"This was a very hard day, sir. I had to do… terrible things. Things no one should have to live with."

Karla whispered, "Oh, God, Oddie. Oh, sweetie, don't." To her husband, she said plaintively, "Wyatt?"

"Son, you can't fix a broken thing by breaking another part of it. You understand me?"

I nodded. I did understand. But understanding doesn't always help.

"Giving up-that would be breaking another part of yourself."

"Perseverance," I said.

"That's right."

At the end of the block, with flashing emergency beacons but without a siren, the ambulance turned into the alley.

"I think Danny had some broken bones but was trying not to let me know," I told the chief.

"We'll get him. We'll handle him like glass, son."

"He doesn't know about his dad."

“All right."

"That's going to be so hard, sir. Telling him. Very hard."

"I'll tell him, son. Leave that to me."

"No, sir. I'd be grateful if you're there with me, but I have to tell him. He's going to think it's all his fault. He's going to be devastated. He's going to need to lean, sir."

"He can lean on you."

"I hope so, sir."

"He can lean hard on you, son. Who could he lean on any harder?"

And so we went to the Panamint, where Death had gone to gamble and had, as always, won.

SIXTY-TWO

WITH FOUR POLICE CRUISERS, ONE AMBULANCE, A county-morgue wagon, three crime-scene specialists, two paramedics, six cops, one chief, and one Karla, I returned to the Panamint.

I felt whipped, but not exhausted to the point of collapse, as I had felt earlier. Being dead for a while had refreshed me.

When we pried open the elevator doors on the twelfth floor, Danny was glad to see us. He had eaten neither of the coconut-raisin power bars, and he insisted on returning them to me.

He had drunk the water I left with him, but not because he had been thirsty. “After all the shotgun fire," he said, "I really needed the bottles to pee in."

Karla went with Danny in the ambulance to the hospital. Later, in a room at County General, she, instead of the chief, stayed with me when I told Danny about his dad. The wives of Spartans are the secret pillars of the world.

In the dark and ashy vastness of the burned-out second floor, we found Datura's remains. The mountain lion had gone.

As I expected, her malignant spirit had not lingered. Her will was no longer hers to wield, her freedom surrendered to a demanding collector.

In the living room of the twelfth-floor suite, blood spray and buckshot proved that I'd wounded Robert. On the balcony lay a loosely tied shoe, 'which apparently had been pulled off his foot when he had stumbled backward across the metal track of the sliding doors.

Immediately below that balcony, in the parking lot, we found his pistol and his other shoe, as if he no longer needed the former and had taken off the latter to be able to travel with an even step.

Such a long fall onto a hard surface would have left him lying in a lake of blood. But the storm had washed the pavement clean.

The consensus was that Datura and Andre had moved the body to a dry place.

I did not share that opinion. Datura and Andre had been guarding the stairs. They would have had neither the time nor the inclination to treat their dead with dignity.

I looked up from the shoe and surveyed the Mojave night beyond the grounds of the hotel, wondering what need-or hope-and what power had compelled him.

Perhaps one day a hiker will find mummified remains dressed in black but shoeless, in the fetal position, inside a den from which foxes had been evicted to provide a refuge to a man who wished to rest in peace beyond the reach of his demanding goddess.

The disappearance of Robert prepared me for the failure of the authorities to recover the bodies of Andre and the snaky man.

Near the end of the flood-control system, the portcullis-style gates, twisted and sagging, were found open. Beyond, a falls cascaded into a cavern, the first of many caverns that formed an archipelago of subterranean seas bound all around by land, a realm that was largely unexplored and too treacherous to justify a search for bodies.