'I can't.' She was looking into a stream of cars coming up from the south.

BAK!

'Go, that's a fuckin' gun.'

She jumped on the gas, still on the shoulder, blinked her lights a few times to intimidate a small white northbound car and swerved across the highway.

'Are you all right?'

'Yeah.' He was out of breath, and his shirt was ripped. 'Boy, was that stupid.' He was looking out the back window.

'No kidding,' she said, angrily. 'What did you.'

'Yell at me later.' He was looking out the back window. 'Right now, I think they're coming after us. A Cadillac just cleared the bottom of the hill coming this way, I heard them yelling about getting a car.'

'Oh, boy.' The highway was not particularly busy. The northbound cars arrived in short packs, with open stretches between the packs. In the rearview mirror, she saw headlights slewing left to pass a slow moving southbound car, taking advantage of a break in the oncoming traffic.'

'You're gonna have to drive a little faster,' Harper said.

'Hold onto your socks.' She floored it. Anna always liked speed, and the big BMW accelerated like an unwinding spring, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred, all without hesitation. She blew past two cars, had five seconds of peace in the right-hand lane, then squeezed past an idling Jaguar in the face of an oncoming pickup.

Harper winced, then reached up to the overhead and found a handle to hang onto. 'Maybe not this fast,' he said.

'They're still back there,' she said. The Cadillac was cutting through the traffic like a shark through a school of tunabut its lights seemed to be getting smaller.

They blazed through Malibu, past the shopping center, the garage doors of the beach houses blurring into one long gray line. 'Anna, for Christ's sake, you're doing a hundred and twelve. Slow down.'

She shook her head: she was mad, and she could drive. He deserved to be scared. She took another car, pushed a little harder on the gas, glanced down at the speedometer: a hundred and eighteen. 'This thing rolls.'

'Jesus,' Harper said. He turned to look behind them: 'Anna, they're out of sight. They're out of sight.'

'Keep watching for them,' she said. She let the car out for a few more seconds, feeling the speed, then eased off the gas, watched the speed drop below a hundred. Fifteen minutes later, they burned through the Sunset intersection; two minutes later, she turned up Temescal, dropped to a cruise and looked at Harper.

'You were limping.'

'I might've sprained my knee. I banged myself up coming down the hill.'

'And got shot at.'

'But nothing happened.'

'Jake.' she said in exasperation.

'I was standing there, and I could see some people moving inside a window and there was a crack in the drapes. And I just thought I could take a look. and I got in and there was another window down the side. And then everybody started yelling,' he said, talking fast. 'There must've been some kind of alarm, and I was stuck in the back and people were coming out the front. I ran right past the pool in back, there was a woman out there, she started yelling and I went over the edge and some asshole started shooting.'

'What do you expect, prowling a house? I used a fish-whacker on a guy who was doing that.'

'Yeah, well.' After a moment he said, 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

Anna laughed aloud, the first time since she'd heard that Jason was dead. She liked the speed.

Harper made her stop at a gas station pay phone, got a number for the Malibu cops, dialed it and said, There's been a shooting.' He gave them the address, and hung up. 'Stir up the bees' nest,' he said.

'What for?'

'See what happens.'

There was no point in even trying to go to BJ's; Harper was a mess from the fall down the hill. He looked, as he said, like he'd been whipped through hell with a soot-bag.

At Anna's house, Harper hobbled up the walk: 'It's not really damaged. It just hurts; but nothing's loose.'

'I've got some of that blue ice stuff you can put on it,' she said.

'That'd be good.'

She kept the ice packs in the refrigerator, and went to get one while Harper disappeared into the bathroom. She stood outside the door with the ice pack and said, 'Okay?'

Harper opened the door. He'd pulled his golf shirt over his head, and turned around to show her his back. He looked like he'd been scourged, long fiery rips running down his back. 'Not so good,' he said.

'You must've run into some thorn trees up there.' She walked around him to the medicine cabinet, found some antiseptic cream. 'C'mon, I'll put some of this stuff on.'

He sat shirtless in a kitchen chair, while she pulled a desk lamp around, focused it on his back. Some of the scratches were deep, but none were still bleeding; he also showed a scrape on his shoulder and a large red-blue bruise on his forearm.

She dabbed on the antiseptic cream and he flinched and said, 'Ow,' and 'Is there a sliver in there?'

She touched the spot again and he flinched and she said, 'Maybe. I'm gonna have to wipe this off.'

'Well, take it easy.'

'Hey, I'm doing the best I can.'

She wiped the cream away with a Kleenex, spotted a broken thornand then, further down his back, three more of them. 'Sit still,' she said. 'I need tweezers.'

The thorns took quite a while, but she got them all, and layered on the antiseptic cream. 'You'll make a mess out of a shirt,' she said.

'I've got a couple of old T-shirts,' he said. He stood up, turned around once in his tracks, stretched, flexed, testing his back, and said, 'I'm gonna be a little sore in the morning.'

Anna could suddenly smell him, sweat and some kind of musky deodorant and blood, maybe, a salty smell; and realized that she was standing very close to a large half-naked man in her kitchen, and that patching up his back might have broken down a wall a little before she'd intended.

Harper picked up the sudden change of atmosphere and laughed, lightly, and said, 'Suddenly got a little close in here.'

'Yeah.' She flushed.

She reached over to pick up the first-aid cream and he caught her arm and said, 'So. could you kiss me once to make it feel better?'

'Well.'

He kissed her very easily, and she kissed back, again, just a little out of her control, for that extra half-second that she hadn't intended. She pulled away and said, 'Oh, boy,' and Harper said, 'Maybe I better get that T-shirt.'

The T-shirt put a little distance between them, but not much: at least, she thought, there wasn't so much skin around. He brought a kitchen chair into the hallway, next to the piano, and said, 'You were gonna play a Satie for me.'

'It's late.'

'I can't lie down until my back dries up a little,' he said.

So she played for him: the delicate, familiar, simple little 'First Gymnopedie'. The final chords hung in the hall, and when they died, she said, 'There. Like it?'

He bobbed his head: 'Yeah.'

Sticky silence.

'I don't suppose you'd want to come sit on my lap for a minute, over on the couch,' he said.

'Maybe just for a minute,' she said.

So they necked, for a while, and he was careful with his hands; held on tight, but didn't presume; or not too much.

'You don't presume,' she said, after a while. 'Too much.'

'I'm a subtle guy; I've got you figured out, and not presuming is my way of worming myself into your confidence. Then, just when you're looking the other way, bang!'

'Could have picked a better word,' she said.

'Hmm.'

Harper's father had worked at a bank for forty years, he said, just high enough up to get a golf club membership back when that was done. His mother had been a housewife and a better golfer than her husband. Harper had taken the game up early, gone to college on a golf scholarship and was 'last man at UCLA'.