'Where're we going?'

'Malibu,' he said.

'What for?'

'See a guy.'

'Jake, goddammit.'

'Look: I don't know what's going to happen.'

Ronnie's houseor Tony and Ronnie's, or whatever it waslooked abandoned behind its gate. Fluorescent-yellow crime-scene tape was wrapped around the stone posts, with a notice forbidding entry to anyone who wasn't a cop.

Harper pulled into the driveway, climbed out, stuck a key in a lock at the side of the gate. As the gate silently rolled back, Harper got into the car and drove up the driveway to the garage, where he parked. He walked around behind the car, pressed a button on his key and the trunk popped open. He took out a small brown-paper grocery sack, with a rolled top, like a kid's lunch bag.

'Let's go,' he said. Anna started toward the house, but he said, 'This waywe're just parking here.'

He was walking away from the house, up the hillside.

'Where're we going?'

'The next house up is Tony's. There's a pathway up here somewhere, through the plantings.'

'Your friends,' Anna said. 'Do they know what you're doing?'

'They think they do,' Harper said. He turned and looked down at her. 'Listen, I sorta wish you weren't here, but. I can use the help. My friends'll help me out from a distance, because they know I'd never talk about it. But they won't be here when the shit hits the fan and I might need somebody to be here.'

She shrugged: 'So I'm here. If this is the jerk who shot Creek, who's been chasing me around.'

'Probably not this guy,' Harper said. He started up the hill again, then pointed: 'There's the break in the brush, that's the path. This isn't our guy, but he knows our guy, I think.'

He took a few more steps up the hill, then stopped again. 'Whatever happens here, you do two things: you don't freak out, and you stand there with your gun and you watch everything and don't say shit, no matter what happens. No matter what happens. If we bump into somebody, you're this tough methedrine chick and you keep your mouth shut.'

They climbed through a hedge and up the hill, Harper still carrying the sack, then broke into a grassy slope below a pool patio. The house, a white concrete Mediterranean-modern, loomed over the patio. Harper never hesitated, but with Anna hurrying behind, climbed straight ahead, crossed the patio, took another key out of his pocket and pushed it into a back-door lock.

'Alarms are off,' he said, as he turned the key. 'No dogs.'

'Your friends tell you that?'

'Yeah. Don't touch anything.' He stuck his head inside and hollered, 'Hello? Anybody home? Anybody?' No answer. He took a few more steps into a red-tiled wet room: 'Hello? Anybody home?'

The house answered with the silence of emptiness. 'We're okay,' he said. He unrolled the sack, took out a pair of yellow plastic household gloves and handed them to her. 'Put these on.' She took the gloves and he took out a pair for himself, stuck the bag under an arm and pulled the gloves on, wiggling his fingers. 'Good,' he muttered. He opened the sack again, took out a brown fabric wad, shook it into the recognizable form of two dark nylons and said, 'For your head.' He pulled his on like a stocking cap, so that he'd pull it down over his face with one move.

Then he opened the sack a last time, and took out a gun, a black revolver.

'Jake?'

'Yeah. Now we both get one,' he said, and she felt the weight of the pistol in her pocket. 'These are bad people. C'mon.'

'What're we doing?'

'Look around the house. Probably won't be much, but you can't tell.'

The house might have been elegant, in a certain California-nouveau way, but it wasn't. The furniture looked like it had been rented, complete with the phony modern graphics on the walls; the pale green carpets were stained and the exposed hardwood near one row of windows was raw and warped, as though the windows had been left open for several weeks, and rain had come in; and the curtains stank with tobaccocigars, Anna thought. The basement was empty except for a pile of cardboard appliance boxes at the bottom of the stairsboxes for TVs, stereos, computers, Xerox machines, satellite dishes, VCRs, an electric piano. 'Haul the packing boxes to the top of the stairs and fire it down,' Harper said as he peered at the mess.

The master bedroom contained a circular bed with a circular headboard and custom rayon sheets; it faced a projection TV. Beside the TV was a rack of porno tapes, along with a few Westerns and music videos. The chest of drawers held perhaps two hundred sets of Jockey underwear and almost nothing else. A dozen suits hung in a closet, along with a pile of blue boxes full of dry-cleaned shirts and more underwear. The other four bedrooms had been slept inthe beds were unmadebut neither the bedrooms nor the adjoining baths showed much in the way of personal effectsnothing feminineand only the most basic shaving and washing supplies.

They found nothing of special interestno paper. The house was eerily devoid of records of any kind. 'He doesn't do business here,' Harper said.

'I don't think he really lives here,' Anna agreed. 'He must have a place somewhere elsethis is like a motel room. You notice in the bathroom, his shaving stuff is still in a Dopp kit.'

'Yeah.'

Harper glanced at his watch: 'Let's go.'

'We're done?'

'Not exactly.'

He led the way downstairs, looked around once more, then pulled her into a book-lined office. All the books were in sets: none of them, as far as Anna could tell, had been opened. Harper started pulling them off the shelves, letting them drop to the floor. He did it almost idly.

'Jake?' Anna asked. 'What're we doing?'

'Waiting,' he said. 'Tony ought to be here any minute.'

'What?' She turned and looked out of the library; the front door was out of sight, but it was right around the corner.

'We'll hear the car,' he said. 'He'll either put it in the garage and come in through the kitchen, or he'll leave it in the drive and come through the front door.'

Anna was confused. 'What? We're gonna jump him?'

'More or less,' Harper said. He pushed a few more books on the floor. One of them was a fake: the cover fell open to reveal a hollowed-out interior packed with money. Harper turned and gazed at her for a moment, weighing her, and then said, 'That's why we're here.'

She thought she could talk him out of it: 'Jake, we can't do thistoo much could go wrong. Somebody could get hurt, bad.'

But he wouldn't move. 'I've done stuff like this two hundred times. Tony oughta be paranoid enough that. And then they felt, rather than heard, arrival sounds from outside. Harper said, 'Quiet now. just stick with this.'

He dropped to his hands and knees and crab-walked into the front room. From her angle in the office, she could see him easing up to a crack in the drapes.

Five seconds later he was back: 'Shit. He's with somebody. Another guy. Stay with me, Anna.'

'Aw.' She was trapped: a bad idea that she'd ridden too far, and now it was too late to get out. So she crouched, tense, and Harper pulled the nylon over his face, and waved a hand at her, and she pulled hers down. Then Harper took the gun out of his pocket and they waited.

Tony came through the door and he was shouting when he came through: 'You don't tell me that shit, you don't tell me, you just fuckin' well better.' He was a short, paunchy man in his late thirties, wearing a gray dress suit, a striped tie over a blue silk shirt; the man with him was tall, thin, with a mustache, a deep tan and a black leather briefcase; in good shape, like a serious tennis player. When Harper, with the mask and gun, stepped out of the office, his double-take spun Tony around in midsentence.

'If either one of you fuckin' move, I'm gonna blow your fuckin' heart right through your fuckin' spine,' Harper growled. His gun, held in both hands, was pointed at Tony's chest. 'Lay down on the floor, on your backs, heads toward each other, top of your head toward the top of his head, arms stretched out so they overlap.'