“The other car-your car. The smashed-in Sable. Whose was it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was there when I got there. I think he drove it.”

“Okay. What about after?”

“After what?”

“After I left? After you politely answered my questions about the accident? By the way-were you improvising, or was there some kind of script you were supposed to follow?”

“He told me what to say. More or less. The basic idea of it-how the accident happened. I just riffed on it.”

“To the sheriff?”

He nodded. “And you.”

“Right. That didn’t bother you, making things up to a policeman? You weren’t concerned you might get in trouble?”

A black girl on six-inch heels had wandered over to our banquette. She reached down and hugged Trudy.

“Rudey…” she said. “You haven’t called me in a dog’s age, girl. What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Trudy said.

“I heard you’re doing the-a-ter.”

“Yeah,” Trudy said without much enthusiasm.

“With your significant other, huh?”

“He’s not as significant as you think,” Trudy said.

Sam turned to look at her with a hangdog expression of pure agony.

“Look,” Trudy said to her, “we’re engaged in something kind of private here. Promise to call you, okay?”

The girl said: “Private, huh?” giving me a glance that seemed mildly lascivious. “Okay, see ya.”

“After I left, what happened?” I asked Sam.

“Nothing. I got paid. That’s it.”

“That’s it. You didn’t ask him what the little play was about? You get called to the middle of the California desert and find a car on fire with the obvious smell of burning human being in the air, and you lie to a sheriff and a local reporter and you take your money and you don’t ask him, not even once, what the hell was going on?”

“I asked him,” Sam said, an almost whisper.

“And what did he say?”

“He said it was a reality show. Have a nice life.”

“That’s it. You didn’t ask him again?”

Sam shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t want to know. Okay?”

Like someone else, I suddenly remembered. There’d been moments, when this someone else had sat there and listened to my overheated explanations, my rationalizing away one inconsistency or another, and I thought, he knows, it’s right there on the tip of his tongue, but he will not say it. He won’t.

“So you drove back and that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Never picked up a paper or looked on the Web to see if anybody really died out there? No curiosity at all?”

He shook his head. “I told you. I wanted to forget about it.”

The first gray glimmer of morning was beginning to poke through the front window where the black paint had flecked off; it looked like a canopy of washed-out stars.

“Tell me about that place on the Web again. Where he just happened to pick you.”

“What about it?”

“How did he know you wouldn’t get out there and just turn around and leave?”

“I told you. It was a lot of money to me.”

“Yeah, you told me. But there’s a limit to what people will do, even for a lot of money. How did he know you’d go along with it?”

Trudy folded her arms and fixed him with a withering stare.

Sam shrugged.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“Sure you do. I’m asking you why he picked you. Come on, Sam. What kind of Web site are we talking about here?”

“I told you. Just an actors’ bulletin board.”

“What kind of actors?”

Sam sighed, squirmed in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for divine guidance, maybe.

“I heard about it from another actor, okay-this new Web site that helps actors, you know, who need a little extra cash…”

“Yeah?”

“Actors who are willing to act in nontraditional formats.”

“Nontraditional formats. Is that what you call it?”

“What’s he talking about?” Trudy didn’t get it; maybe she’d had to swallow a lot in this relationship, but she couldn’t digest this. Not yet.

“Tell her, Sam. Say it.”

“Well, you know…”

I said it for him. “Cons. For enough money you loaned yourself out for con jobs. That’s the only kind of acting that would pay five thousand dollars for one morning, isn’t it?”

Sam didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to.

A chill was slowly working its way up my spine, one vertebra at a time.

I turned to Trudy.

“I would watch your back if I were you.”

When Sam looked up at me with a suddenly queasy expression, I said: “The man who paid you. He might not like the fact that you’re walking around. Not anymore. Okay?”

THAT SHOCK OF RECOGNITION.

Confronted with something half-familiar and half-remembered.

A group of desperate Hollywood actors selling themselves to the Russian mob for cons.

Remember?

One of my stories.

Only it was one of those stories.

Currently featured on a certain online Web site courtesy of a great American newspaper that I’d almost brought to its knees.

Fodder from Valle’s prodigious canon of deceit.

Dramatically constructed. Exquisitely detailed. Rigorously recounted.

But not true.

Not true.

Not one single fucking word of it.

TWENTY-NINE

I can hear helicopters outside my motel room.

They sound military. If I had to guess, I’d say Black Hawks, buzzing low in formation, out on a search-and-destroy.

My first instinct is to hide, to dive under the bed and stay put until they pass.

I can’t move. I am frozen stiff. I am stuck in quicksand.

Then I wake up.

My TV’s on. It’s 4 a.m. They’re showing a movie about Vietnam. Bursts of napalm and the rat-a-tat of hopped-up machine gunners as thatch-hatted villagers run for their lives.

Okay, no helicopters.

Still, it reminds me.

They’re looking for me.

I have a deadline.

I am writing as fast as I can.

I am.

I’ll get no extensions. Either I’ll make it, or I won’t.

I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty. No better than that.

I’ve taken to peeking out the window to see if that man is there.

The one Luiza said asked about me.

When I asked her what he looked like, she shrugged and made a distasteful face.

I asked her what he wanted to know.

How long you be here, Luiza said.

Did you tell him?

She shook her head. I say I no know.

That’s it?

He ask what you look like.

Okay, fine. Did you tell him what I look like?

Yes.

Luiza remembered he had a badge.

She didn’t know if it was a policeman’s badge or a dogcatcher’s.

Only that she was afraid of them. Badges.

There was Immigration, after all.

Which is why I don’t 100 percent trust her. I can’t.

They can do things to an illegal. She’d confided in me when she understood I didn’t care and couldn’t hurt her. Her torturous journey up the Central American isthmus and across the Rio Grande at the mercy of a nineteen-year-old coyote high on mesquite. The paper mill that will supply you with a very legitimate-looking license. Not to someone from the INS, though. No. Not to them.

And I’m at a crucial part of the story-the crux of it.

You can sense it, can’t you?

You’re sitting there connecting the dots like I did. I need to present it to you this way, chronologically, so you can follow along and see the way it unfolded, piece by piece. So in the end, you’ll believe. As much as you distrust the messenger, you’ll believe the message.

You’ll know what to do.