"If she's gonna be around here, she's gonna need somebody looking out for her," LuEllen said, talking to me as if Lane weren't there.

I nodded. "You know who I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about John Smith. He's in on this already, and he lived in Oakland. I bet he'd know somebody."

"Who's John Smith?" Lane asked.

"He's a guy, an artist," I told her. "He was a young kid in Oakland back in the early seventies when the Black Panthers were going. He's still out there on the left, still knows a lot of hard people."

"How'd you meet him?"

"We helped him organize a Communist revolution in the Mississippi delta," I said.

"Unsuccessfully, I take it."

"No, no, it worked out fine," LuEllen said. That might have been an overstatement. Bobby had convinced us that there might be some money involved in overthrowing a little strong-arm dictatorship in a small town of the Mississippi River. By the time we finished, we'd made some money, all right, and our friends were running the place, but there was blood on the ground, and some of the dead were good people. LuEllen doesn't always seem to remember that part of it; or she does, but finds no point in dwelling on it. She looked at me. "So we call him." She'd finished with the film, got the little cabin projector, plugged it in, and projected a slide against the white front of Lane's refrigerator.

"That's the guy," I said. "I'd bet on it."

Lane shivered and said, "He looks mean."

She was right. He had that thick-necked, tight-mouthed line-backer look, with a crew cut to make the point. "I'm sure he is," I said.

The next slide showed the same man caught as he climbed into a red Toyota Camry with California plates. I jotted down the number: "Who does Camrys?" I asked LuEllen.

"Hertz," she said.

"Time to make some calls," I said.

LuEllen and I drove out to the pay phone again, and I hooked up my laptop, called Bobby and gave him the tag number for the Camry: "Rental car, could be Hertz. Need to know the driver's name and anything else you can find. Driver probably lives in Dallas area, probably flew into San Francisco in the last day or two. Dump to my cache site, I'll pick it up later. Plan to call John Smith for some help, talk to him."

Then we called John.

"Kidd, goddamnit, it's been a while." He pulled his mouth away from the phone long enough to yell, "You guys be quiet for a minute, okay? Daddy's on the telephonehey, Marvel, it's Kidd." Then he was back: "What's up?"

Then Marvel picked up, and I said, "How's the commie state senator?" and she laughed and the bullshit rolled on for a few minutes. Then LuEllen wanted to talk, and we had a long-distance old-home week. I finally took the phone back and said, "Listen, John, we've got a problem out here in Californiawe're in Palo Altoand I was hoping you might be able to hook me up with somebody."

"What kind of trouble?"

I gave him a quick and slightly vague answer, and mentioned Bobby. He didn't press for details, since he knew what we all did for a living, and finally said, "I don't know a guy, but I know a guy who'd know a guy."

"That's cool. We can pay whatever."

"Probably be at least two hundred dollars a day, don't ask, don't tell." Cash, no tax.

"Fine. Let me give you the phone number." I gave him Lane's number and John said somebody would call that afternoon. "Listen," I added, "if you need to get in touch, drop mail at Bobby's. But don't call that number yourself; things could get tricky."

"Home?"

LuEllen shook her head. "We need to go into San Francisco. the Jimmy Cricket Golf Shop, and Lanny Rose's Beauty Boutique. I got directions."

"Golf shop?"

"Yeah. I'm taking up the game. And I want to look good while I'm playing."

Jimmy Crickethe claimed that was his real namewas a nicely weathered gent wearing a black Polo sweatshirt over a golf shirt and jeans, with tassels on his loafers. He was regripping a Ping driver when we came through the door. He smiled and asked, "What can I do for you folks?"

"Weenie called you earlier today," LuEllen said.

"The Gray twosome," he said, as though we'd just shown up for our tee-time, "I thought you were a single."

"Nope," LuEllen said, "Mr. and Mrs. Gray. Weenie said to tell you that all cats are gray in the dark."

"Okay. Well, Weenie's word is good with me. If you'll step into the back."

We went through a flip-up countertop into the back room. Cricket extracted a tan duffel bag from a pile of empty golf-club shipping boxes, placed it on a workbench, and dug out five rag-wrapped hand guns: four.357 Magnum revolvers and a 9mm semi-auto. "I brought the auto just in case," he told LuEllen.

"We're not gonna need it," she said. She picked up one of the guns, flipped out the cylinder, pointed it at one of her eyes, and held her thumbnail under the open chamber, to reflect light back up the barrel. Picked up another and did the same thing. "Can't tell much, but they look okay."

"They're all perfect mechanically," Cricket said. "They are clean and cold."

LuEllen looked at all five, then pushed one at Cricket and asked, "How much?"

"Six." He wouldn't come down on the price but he threw in two boxes of shells, one of.38 Special and one.357. On the way out the door LuEllen spotted a pair of shooter's earmuffs, and gave Cricket another ten dollars.

"Now we can play guns," she said.

Lanny Rose's Beauty Boutique looked like it was permanently closed, with fifteen-year-old pastel green "Walk-Ins Accepted" signs fading and badly askew in the windows. LuEllen insisted on banging on the door anyway, and a minute later, Lanny peered out from behind the "Closed" sign. He saw us, popped the door, and said, "Jesus Christ, you almost knocked the front of the bidnis in."

"Weenie said the world looks better through rose-colored glasses," LuEllen said.

"Yeah, yeah, fuck a bunch of weenies," Lanny said, but he pushed the door open a bit, and LuEllen and I followed him through the gloomy beauty parlor into a back room. When we got there, he was hanging a pale blue drape on a wall, using pushpins.

"Stand there. Smile, but only a little," he said.

I stood, and he took my picture, twice, with a Polaroid passport camera. Then he took two pictures of LuEllen and said, "I'll be back in a minute."

LuEllen said, "I think I'll come along and watch."

She had her hand in her pocket, and Lanny said, "Weenie promised you wouldn't be no trouble."

"We won't be; I'm just coming along to watch," LuEllen said. "My friend will sit out here in front and read a magazine."

They were gone for twenty minutes. I sat in a dusty beauty-parlor chair and read a story in a four-year-old Cosmo about how women can keep their men interested by learning the latest in blow-job techniquesthe techniques themselves were described blow by blow, so to speak, by a panel of successful New York advertising and media women. I was not only convinced, I was supportive.

When LuEllen and Lanny came back, Lanny was complaining. "I never make copies of any faces. Weenie knows that."

"I don't trust Weenie," LuEllen said.

Back in the car, she handed me four cards: two Texas driver's licenses, and two credit cards. One credit card matched each license. "Will they stand up?"

"Unless you're busted, in which case they'll get your prints anyway," she said. "They're both real people, and the accounts are real, although we don't know the credit limits or the billing dates. We could use them in an emergency, but then they'd only be good until the guy's next bill came in."

"Bobby could get us credit limits and billing dates," I said.

"Might be worth doing."

On the way to Lane's, LuEllen launched a little philosophical discussion.

"You know, Kidd, you told me once that revenge doesn't make any sense, because the dead guy won't know what you're doing and won't care, because he's dead. So what I'm wondering is, What are we doing? Jack won't know, and Jack won't care."