'What the fuck.'

'LAY ON THE FUCKIN' FLOOR,' Harper screamed, and the pistol began to shake and jerk, and Anna could see him chewing on the nylon mask; if he was acting, he was terrific. If he wasn't, he was crazy. 'LAY DOWN, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, OR I'LL.' Saliva and anger seemed to choke him and he gnashed at the nylon, and suddenly his teeth broke through and he ran three steps toward Tony, the gun poking out at Tony's forehead, and Tony screamed back, 'No, no, no.' and the two men got shakily down on the floor, lying on their backs, arms stretched over their heads.

Harper, gun fixed on Tony's head, fished a pair of open handcuffs out of his pocket and dropped them on Tony's face. 'Put them on. I want to hear them snap shut.' Tony put them on. The tall man was next: 'Thread ' em through Tony's, then snap 'em.'

'I'm just a lawyer.'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. you fuckin' scum, you fuckin' lawyers. You fuckin' lay there.' The language had been stolen from Tarpatkin, but had a drug-fired sound to it, a crazy emotional edge. Harper stepped to the door and pushed it shutslammed it. Then he bent over the men, patted them down, found a cell phone in Tony's coat pocket, tossed it aside. To Tony: 'You got a dealer working the Westwood area. He was selling wizards down to the Shamrock Hotel last week.'

He was a street thug, Anna thought: he was doing it perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. He moved to one side, put his foot on the lawyer's chest.

'. I'm gonna give you the convincer. I'm gonna shoot your lawyer here, free of charge. Just to show you that I'm serious. Shoot him right in the fuckin' brain, so you're attached to a dead man, you can explain to the cops later, YOU FUCKIN' CREEP.' He was shouting again, and the lawyer was screaming, 'No, no, no,' trying to sit up, but pinned by his hands over his head and the weight of Tony on the cuffs.

Then Harper, looking down at the lawyer, stepped back far enough that Tony couldn't see him, looked at the frantic lawyer, put one finger over his lips, pointed the gun at the floor beside the lawyer's head and fired once.

The lawyer jerked forward, convulsing with the muzzle blast, then fell back, understood instantly: He went limp and silent.

'NOW YOU BELIEVE ME?' Harper screamed.

'You'll fuckin' kill me anyway,' Tony screamed back. 'So fuck you.'

'Not before I peel your fuckin' skin off with a potato peeler I seen in your kitchen,' Harper said. Tony twisted, and Harper kicked him in the chest and Tony shouted, 'Stan, goddamn, are you dead? Stan, goddammit.' And Harper kicked him again, and Anna, out of sight, tried to wave him off, but he ignored her. He had the gun pointing at Tony's head and he was shouting again, 'ALL RIGHT, MOTHER FUCKER, I DON'T HAVE THE PATIENCE TO SKIN YOU ALIVE, SO I'M GONNA KILL YOU NOW. GOOD FUCKIN' BYE.'

Tony was thrashing against Stan's dead weight and Harper pointed the gun and Tony screamed, 'John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, for Christ's sake.'

Harper's voice went suddenly soft, and somehow more threatening. 'You better be telling me the truth,' he said. 'If you're not, I won't be coming back.'

'What?' Tony was confused.

'Get on your feet, lawyer.' Harper kicked the lawyer once, and the tall man rolled over, started to blubber. Tony shouted, 'You asshole, whyn't you say something.'

The lawyer, stooping over him, pulled down by the short play of the cuffs, shouted back, 'You crazy fuck, they were gonna kill us, I saved our lives.'

'You bullshit.' Tony tried to get up, but Harper pushed him down. 'Stay down.' And to the lawyer, 'Drag him over to the basement stairs.'

As the lawyer dragged Tony toward the stairs, Anna noticed the cell phone, picked it up, put in her pocket. In the basement, Harper put them on either side of a steel support pole and threaded the cuffs through. 'Like I said, if there's no John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, I ain't coming back.'

The lawyer had followed this thought, but Tony hadn't: 'So fuck you,' Tony said.

'Tony.' the lawyer said.

'Fuck you, too, you fuckin' snotty Yale asshole.'

The lawyer took a deep breath, and said, 'Look, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, Tony.'

Tony was amazed: 'What'd you say?'

'I said, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, you dumb shit. What he's saying is, if he leaves us here, what're we gonna do? Chew our arms off, like rats? We won't break these handcuff chains or this pipe.'

Tony finally caught it, looked once around the blank walls of the basement, and turned to Harper, 'Hey, man.'

'Is Maran right?'

After a moment of judgment. 'No. Ask for Rik Maran. You ask for John Maran and. you won't get him.'

'Better be right,' Harper said.

They went up the stairs, Anna first, and at the top, they peeled off the stockings. When Harper started past her to the door, she set her feet and hit him in the solar plexus as hard as she could: Harper's abdomen wasn't his toughest part. He half caved in and took an involuntary step back, eyes wide, and wheezed, 'Jesus, Anna.'

'You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,' Anna whispered harshly, not even knowing why she was whispering. 'I didn't know what you were gonna do. You should have told me ahead of time.'

'I was afraid you wouldn't go along.'

'Oh, bullshitwhat haven't I gone along with?'

'Well, anyway, we got the name,' he said, trying to straighten up. He got going again, and led the way out the back, across the patio and down the hill. And when they got to the car, he avoided her eyes, but said again, 'We got the name.'

'Yeah, we've had four names. We've been on a name safari all week and we haven't gotten anything but a chain letter,' she snarled at him over the top of the car. 'We haven't found out anything.'

He got in the car and she climbed in, still furious, and pulled the safety belt down and snapped herself in, and sat with the palms of her hands flat on her thighs.

'You gotta pretty mean punch.'

'Don't patronize me,' she spat back. 'Don't try to humor me; just shut up.'

They eased out of the driveway, down the hill; the ocean looked as green and lazy as ever, as though it didn't know, she thought, that Creek was coughing up lung tissue.

Halfway into town, Harper broke the unpleasant silence to say, 'We've got to find a phone book somewhere, and figure out where this hotel is.'

Anna took out her cell phone, punched the speed dial for Louis. Louis was apparently sitting next to the phone: he snapped it up halfway through the first ring. He'd been to see Creek; he didn't want to think about it.

'I know,' Anna said. 'Is the laptop handy?'

'Yeah?'

'Punch up the Marshall Hotel on Pico and route us there from the PCH up in Malibu. And give me the number.'

'Just a sec.' He took more than a second, but less than a minute, and Anna repeated his directions to Harper. Then she dug in her pocket, pulled out Tony's cell phone. 'When you talk to this Rik Maran, tell him that a guy is bringing a box for him. that you're at the courthouse, waiting for Tony to get out, is the only reason you're answering the phone. Use the voice you used with Tony and the lawyer.'

'What?'

She repeated it as she punched the number for the Marshall Hotel into her own phone. When the clerk at the hotel answered, she said, 'You have a Mr Rik Maran as a guest. I'd like to speak to him.'

'Just a moment.'

Maran came on ten seconds later, his voice, dry, reedy, like he might have spent a childhood in Oklahoma, a long time ago: 'This is Rik.'

'Call Tony now, on his cellular,' Anna said, and punched off.

A minute later, Tony's phone rang, and Harper picked it up. 'He ain't here. who's this? Okay. We're at the courthouse, we got a big problem, but I ain't got time to talk about it. There's a guy coming over, he's got a box for ya. I can't talk, this fuckin' thing's a radio, man.'