“But you said the Littleton Flats Franklin Timmerman was a sluice operator.”

“Correct. He was listed as a sluice operator on the Aurora Dam. Meaning what? That two people had the same name-which, if you’ve ever Googled someone, happens like all the fucking time. I mean, you put in Quentin Tarantino and you’re suddenly reading about some sheep breeder in New Caledonia. So this was obviously the same deal, right? Because what would an expert on nuclear detonation be doing working a sluice on a federal dam?”

He stopped, took another puff of his cigarette.

“Was that a rhetorical question, Nate?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So maybe you want to continue.”

“Right. Anyway, I was going to ignore the whole thing; the only reason I read the whole entry on him was because I’m interested in that stuff-the birth of the bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But then I figure what the hell and I look up the Manhattan Project-I take all the names that worked out in Los Alamos, and just for the simple hell of it I cross-check them with the list from Littleton Flats.”

Nate had reached that moment-when the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, the ripped twenty made whole, the vanished woman brought back onto the stage.

“And what do I get, huh?” Nate said. “Ten hits. Ten fucking hits.”

“Have you seen a pickup truck circling us, Nate?”

“Huh? What pickup truck?”

“Never mind. Go ahead,” I said, even though I felt a sudden knot in my stomach. I leaned back against the Free Delivery sign posted in Foo Yang’s window.

“What do you mean, go ahead? I just told you I got ten hits. You understand what I’m saying? Littleton Flats was teeming with all these little nuclear geniuses. Experimentalists, theoreticians, engineers. That’s how one high school could have five kids vying for a Westinghouse. Can you imagine their science projects-Susie Timmerman is going to split the atom today, class. Right next to this poor kid from La Jolla who made a shortwave radio from a cigar box. It was like having this little Bronx High School of Science out in the middle of nowhere. Fuck high school-it was like having another MIT. Fucking unbelievable.”

“Yes,” I said, starting to understand something. Beginning to see. “Great job, Nate. Really.”

“Okay,” he said. “So why would ten nuclear geniuses-more than ten probably, because who knows who else didn’t come up when I cross-referenced-why would all these top-notch A-bomb guys be living in a little pissant power-dam town?”

I was going to answer him, to recite what any legitimate journalist should memorize by heart-that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. That we’d assumed Littleton Flats was just a town of dam workers and that we were wrong. That maybe we needed to stop assuming something else.

That there was just a dam.

Except a loud sound punctured the stillness.

Nate the Skate heard it, too. He turned and instinctively hunkered down.

“What the hell was that?” he said, perfectly normally.

The pickup truck, I was going to say. The one I just asked you about. A flash of blue darting down the street.

But blood was all over my hands, as if I’d been fingerpainting in it.

And Nate was staring at my bloody hands with a look of shocked concern, ready to say are you all right-I could see the words forming on his lips.

It wasn’t me he needed to be worried about.

Nate crumpled to the ground and stared up at the sky with curiously dead eyes.

I heard Norma screaming from far away.

THIRTY-FOUR

They dug the bullet out of the drywall in Foo Yang, the bullet that had apparently passed straight through Nate’s rib cage and out the other side, missing Foo Yang’s 13-year-old daughter by six infinitesimal inches or so.

Nate wasn’t dead after all. He’d looked a lot worse than he was.

All that blood.

He was taken to Pat Brown General Hospital, where they staunched the bleeding, sewed him back up, gave him two transfusions, and left him resting comfortably in ICU.

He was going to be fine, an Indian doctor named Dr. Plith informed us-Norma, Hinch, and myself.

Hinch had been maintaining his vigil up on the cancer ward when they’d wheeled Nate in. Of the three of us, he seemed the most calm-a wounded intern clearly not matching the emotional intensity of a dying wife.

Somehow I was elected to call Nate’s divorced mom in Rancho Mirage and break the news; I opted to start with the cheery prognosis and progress backward to the actual shooting.

After she took the name of the hospital-she’d be on the road as soon as I hung up-she asked me who in God’s name would want to shoot her son.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

I spent some quality time off the main ward with Sheriff Swenson discussing that very subject.

This time he treated me as if I were a bona fide witness instead of a convicted liar. He wrote down my account of what happened: the circling blue pickup-I had seen it; that awful noise, like a tire blowout; Nate suddenly crumpling to the ground.

It was time to tell the sheriff about Santa Monica-about everything. Someone had been shot.

I started with Sam Savage. About the Web site and the plumber and that morning on Highway 45.

“An actor?” he said.

He looked appropriately incredulous.

“Yeah,” I said. “The plumber isn’t just breaking into homes anymore. He’s hiring out-of-work actors for reality shows on Highway 45. He’s incinerating people.”

Then I told him whom it was I thought had been incinerated.

Benjy Washington.

Which is when his eyes glazed over. When he got that look.

“Huh?” he said.

I told him about the note in Belinda Washington’s picture frame.

“The kid who died in the flood? This is who you’re talking about? A dead kid?”

“He’s not a kid anymore. And I don’t think he’s dead. He called your deputy, remember?”

“Oh Jesus, Lucas… it was a prank.”

“Dr. Futillo said it was the body of a black person. The whole accident that day was choreographed.”

Swenson sighed, shook his head. “I see. Okay-just out of curiosity. Why? Why was it choreographed?”

“I don’t know yet. I think it has something to do with the town. With Littleton Flats.”

“Littleton Flats. Right.”

He got up, closed his notebook. “You have this actor’s number, Lucas?”

I WAS STILL AT THE HOSPITAL WHEN NATE’S MOM SHOWED UP.

Dr. Plith had told us to go home-Nate would be sleeping it off for hours, but I was responsible for him being there. You’re it, the plumber had whispered to me in the basement that day, but Nate had taken the bullet. What’s the government’s favorite buzzword these days? Collateral damage. Reducing murder to a term more appropriate to property destruction, to make it more palatable for a public that likes its blood at the Cineplex.

Nate’s mom looked as if she’d run all the way from Rancho Mirage. She was flushed and sweaty, in danger of needing medical attention herself.

I heard her ask the head nurse for her son-Nathaniel Cohen-barely managing to get his name out between gasps.

“Mrs. Cohen,” I walked up to her. “I’m Tom Valle-from the paper. I’m terribly sorry about this.”

She must’ve taken my apology to be the concerned empathy of a coworker and not the guilty plea of the person who’d put her son directly in someone’s crosshairs.

When I saw the pickup circling like that-why hadn’t I gone back inside?

She moved toward me in a kind of slow motion, then half collapsed in my arms, and I awkwardly held on to her, somewhere between an actual hug and something to lean on. That odd inclination of the bereaved to seek physical comfort from total strangers.