He registered as David Miller of San Francisco and fabricated an address and zip code. You were supposed to include your license plate number, and he mixed up a couple of digits and put CA for the state instead of AZ. It was hardly worth the trouble, nobody was going to look at the registration card, but there were certain things he did out of habit, and this was one of them.

He always traveled light, never took along more than a small carry-on bag with a shirt or two and a couple changes of socks and underwear. That made sense when you were flying, and less sense when you had a car with an empty trunk and backseat at your disposal. By the time he got to Phoenix, he’d run through his socks and underwear. He picked up two three-packs of briefs and a six-pack of socks at a strip mall, and was looking for a trash bin for his dirty clothes when he spotted a Goodwill Industries collection box. He felt good dropping his soiled socks and underwear in the box, though not quite as good as he’d felt dishing out designer food to the smoke-stained rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Back at his motel, he called Dot on the prepaid cell phone he’d picked up on Twenty-third Street. He’d paid cash for it, and hadn’t even been asked his name, so as far as he could tell it was completely untraceable. At best someone could identify calls made from it as originating with a phone manufactured in Finland and sold at Radio Shack. Even if they managed to pin down the specific Radio Shack outlet, so what? There was nothing to tie it to Keller, or to Phoenix.

On the other hand, cell phone communications were about as secure as shouting. Any number of listening devices could pick up your conversation, and whatever you said was very likely being heard by half a dozen people on their car radios and one old fart who was catching every word on the fillings in his teeth. That didn’t bother Keller, who figured every phone was tapped, and acted accordingly.

He phoned Dot, and the phone rang seven or eight times, and he broke the connection. She was probably out, he decided, or in the shower. Or had he misdialed? Always a chance, he thought, and pressed Redial, then caught himself and realized that, if he had in fact misdialed, redialing would just repeat the mistake. He broke the connection again in midring and punched in the number afresh, and this time he got a busy signal.

He redialed, got another busy signal, frowned, waited, and tried again. It had barely begun to ring when she picked up, barking “Yes?” into the phone, and somehow fitting a full measure of irritation into the single syllable.

“It’s me,” he said.

“What a surprise.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I had somebody at the door,” she said, “and the teakettle was whistling, and I finally got to the phone and picked it up in time to listen to the dial tone.”

“I let it ring a long time.”

“That’s nice. So I put it down and turned away, and it rang again, and I picked it up in the middle of the first ring, and I was just in time to hear you hang up.”

He explained about pressing Redial, and realizing that wouldn’t work.

“Except it worked just fine,” she said, “since you hadn’t misdialed in the first place. I figured it had to be you, so I pressed star sixty-nine. But whatever phone you’re on, star sixty-nine doesn’t work. I got one of those weird tones and a canned message saying return calls to your number were blocked.”

“It’s a cell phone.”

“Say no more. Hello? Where’d you go?”

“I’m here. You said Say no more, and…”

“It’s an expression. Tell me it’s all wrapped up and you’re heading for home.”

“I just got here.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. How’s the weather?”

“Hot.”

“Not here. They say it might snow, but then again it might not. You’re just calling to check in, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s good to hear your voice, and I’d love to chat, but you’re on a cell phone.”

“Right.”

“Call anytime,” she said. “It’s always a treat to hear from you.”

Keller didn’t know the population or acreage of Sundowner Estates, although he had a hunch neither figure would be hard to come by. But what good would the information do him? The compound was large enough to contain a full-size eighteen-hole golf course, and enough homes adjacent to it to support the operation.

And there was a ten-foot adobe wall encircling the entire affair. Keller supposed it was easier to sell homes if you called it Sundowner Estates, but Fort Apache would have better conveyed the stockadelike feel of the place.

He drove around the compound a couple of times, establishing that there were in fact two gates, one at the east and the other not quite opposite, at the southwest corner. He parked where he could keep an eye on the southwest gate, and couldn’t tell much beyond the fact that every vehicle entering or leaving the compound had to stop for some sort of exchange with the uniformed guard. Maybe you flashed a pass at him, maybe he called to make sure you were expected, maybe they wanted a thumbprint and a semen sample. No way to tell, not from where Keller was watching, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t just drive up and bluff his way through. People who willingly lived behind a thick wall almost twice their own height probably expected a high level of security, and a guard who failed to provide that would be looking for a new job.

He drove back to his motel, sat in front of the TV, and watched a special on the Discovery Channel about scuba diving at Australia ’s Great Barrier Reef. Keller didn’t think it looked like something he wanted to do. He’d tried snorkeling once, on a vacation in Aruba, and kept having to stop because he was getting water in his snorkel, and under his mask. And he hadn’t been able to see much of anything, anyhow.

The divers on the Discovery Channel were having much better luck, and there were plenty of colorful fish for them (and Keller) to look at. After fifteen minutes, though, he’d seen as much as he wanted to and was ready to change the channel. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, flying all the way to Australia, then getting in the water with a mask and fins. Couldn’t you get pretty much the same effect staring into a fish tank at a pet shop or a Chinese restaurant?

“I’ll tell you this,” the woman said. “If you do make a decision to buy at Sundowner, you won’t regret it. Nobody ever has.”

“That’s quite a recommendation,” Keller said.

“Well, it’s quite an operation, Mr. Miller. I don’t suppose I have to ask if you play golf.”

“It’s somewhere between a pastime and an addiction,” he said.

“I hope you brought your clubs. Sundowner’s a championship course, you know. Robert Walker Wilson designed it, and Clay Bunis was a consultant. We’re in the middle of the desert, but you wouldn’t know it inside the walls at Sundowner. The course is as green as a pasture in the Irish midlands.”

Her name, Keller learned, was Michelle Prentice, but everyone called her Mitzi. And what about him? Did he prefer Dave or David?

That was a stumper, and Keller realized he was taking too long to answer it. “It depends,” he said, finally. “I answer to either one.”

“I’ll bet business associates call you Dave,” she said, “and really close friends call you David.”

“How on earth did you know that?”

She smiled broadly, delighted to be right. “Just a guess,” she said. “Just a lucky guess, David.”

So they were going to be close friends, he thought. Toward that end she proceeded to tell him a few things about herself, and by the time they reached the guard shack at the east gate of Sundowner Estates, he learned that she was thirty-nine years old, that she’d divorced her rat bastard of a husband three years ago and moved out here from Frankfort, Kentucky, which happened to be the state capital, although most people would guess it was Louisville. She’d sold houses in Frankfort, so she’d picked up an Arizona realtor’s license first chance she got, and it was a lot better selling houses here than it had ever been in Kentucky, because they just about sold themselves. The entire Phoenix area was growing like a house on fire, she assured him, and she was just plain excited to be a part of it all.