Most of the time, all you found was mud. Murky and insubstantial. You couldn’t sling it without two-sourced and verifiable proof.

There were exceptions, of course. Occasional investigations that actually uncovered something half-interesting. Nothing major, nothing incendiary enough to burn a hole into the public consciousness, but worthy enough to land me somewhere north of page 10.

On those mornings, when I perused my byline with awe and gratitude and even humility, I thought it was just possible I was on the side of the angels.

I was hearing alarms again.

Someone had tripped the wire, set off the circuitry, and jarring bells were going off in my head.

Seth stopped by.

“What’s shaking?” he said, hopping up on the next stool.

Me, I wanted to say. I’m shaking, rattling, and rolling.

“Working on a story,” I said.

“That’s funny. It looks like you’re working on a margarita. Heh-heh.”

I kind of liked Seth, in the way one fuckup feels genuine empathy for another, but tonight I felt this, well… distance between us. Wasn’t I back in the saddle, and wasn’t he still stuck in the mud?

“I need ten,” I said to him.

“Barking up the wrong tree, amigo,” he said. “I’m tapped out. Honest.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Oh.” He looked embarrassed, momentarily he did, and I suddenly felt kind of rotten for relegating a bowling team member to the ranks of the annoying and superfluous-even one with a noticeable mullet.

“Okay,” he said, sliding off the stool with feigned indifference. “That’s cool.”

“Buy you a drink when I finish,” I said.

“No problem.”

The question was, finish what?

I asked BJ’s cousin for a pen. I used my napkin to jot things down-basically everything I knew.

I was in the Acropolis Diner playing connect-the-dots again.

What has no testicles, no skid marks, and two races?

Got me.

I even threw in the assault in the basement for good measure-scribbled it there at the bottom of the napkin as a kind of addendum.

Still no clue.

Or many clues, but no answers.

Or simply random incidences.

Which would make them coincidences.

I doodled in the margins. I drew lines from one thing to another. I Etch A Sketched.

I drew two cars and blackened one till it disappeared.

I wrote down their names. Ed Crannell and Dennis Flaherty-who might or might not have been a black man.

I’d start with him, I decided.

The dead man.

When Seth came back and asked for his drink-7 and 7, a leftover from high school days, I imagined, when Seth was still hot shit and maybe the future even looked promising-I stared at him with what must’ve been a curiously blank expression.

“My drink, man. Did you or did you not offer me a cocktail?”

“Oh, sure. Just order it. I gotta run.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Writing an obituary,” I said.

That’s how I began.

Stuffed in a cluttered cubicle preparing obits for still-living, breathing people-mostly famous ones, of course-chiseling their headstones for that time when they’d be needed. The hardest part was remembering the right tense, to relegate legions of the still upright to the recent past.

Is into was. Doing into did. Living into lived.

My first professional lies.

NINE

My Miata didn’t start.

I gave it the gas, once, twice, three times.

I must’ve flooded the engine.

I got out, opened up the hood, and stared at the tangle of wires, tubes, and metal as if I knew what I was doing.

I didn’t. I couldn’t tell a carburetor from a transmission.

It doesn’t matter. That’s what you do when your car doesn’t start. You open up the hood and stare knowingly at the engine.

I was hoping one of the parts might speak to me. Over here, Tom-it’s me. I’m the culprit.

No such luck.

I was agitated, pissed off, finally on a roll and suddenly no wheels.

I was wondering where my friend Marv the Exxon owner was when I really needed him. I was going to head back into Muhammed Alley and ask Seth for a lift.

Then I didn’t have to.

A cherry red Beetle pulled into the parking lot. A woman got out, began walking in the general direction of the alley entrance, turned, and noticed me.

“Car problems?”

“That would account for the open hood,” I said, more caustically than I’d intended.

She swiveled around and continued on her way in.

“Wait a second. Yes. Car problems. Big car problems.”

She stopped and turned back toward me.

I recognized her.

I felt that little flutter. That unexpected bump in the biorhythms.

“I saw you at Belinda Washington’s birthday party,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right.” She’d stopped about five feet from me. She was wearing a skirt this time-denim, ending just above her calves. It was hard not to notice those calves were tan, toned, and gently rounded. “The reporter, right?”

“I used to be.”

“Used to be? I thought you were doing a story?”

“I was. I’m being self-deprecating.”

“You might want to leave that to someone else,” she said.

Her smile accented the soft dimple on her left cheek. I used to have one, too. My mom, in one of her sentimental moments, as opposed to her terrifyingly volcanic ones-both of them alcohol-induced with no way to predict which one she’d slide into any given day-told me God had stuck his finger in my cheek when he was done molding me. After a certain age, I couldn’t find it anymore. It just disappeared.

“My car won’t start,” I said.

“Yeah, I kind of got that.” She walked over and peeked under the hood.

It was around 8 p.m. on what had been a sizzling June day, still light enough to see but growing dimmer by the second. The kind of light that softens everything, that might’ve sent an impressionist sprinting for the canvas and brushes. That makes a woman bent over at the waist a thing of rare and numbing beauty.

Clang. Bang. Clink.

She unscrewed something, poked inside the engine.

“Your coil wire’s loose,” she said after a few minutes. “Try it now.”

I crawled into the front seat, gave it some gas.

Vroooooooooooooom.

“I guess this is what they call role reversal,” I said, once I’d extricated myself from the car and shaken her hand. “Thanks.”

“My pop was a mechanic,” she said. “He basically lived under the hood. It was the only way I could spend time with him.”

“You must’ve been paying attention.” Her hand was back by her side, but I could still feel the impression of her fingers-hot flesh and cool lacquer.

“Enough to spot a loose coil wire,” she said. “It’s really not that hard.”

At least she smiled when she said it.

“Tom Valle,” I introduced myself, cognizant that the flutter hadn’t gone away, that it was still flitting madly around my chest like a butterfly caught in a net.

“Anna Graham,” she said.

“Were you visiting someone? At the home?”

“My pop. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

Silence. I was trying to stare and not stare at the same time. The kind of thing you do your first time at a nude beach. It’s easier with sunglasses on.

“Well,” she said, “I was on my way in.”

For a moment, I was going to say, what a coincidence, me, too. I was on my way in, too. Clearly, I’d been on my way out.

“Are you… uhh…?”

“What?” She was shading her eyes against the sun’s glare, but even squinting, her eyes were wide enough to meander around in.

“Are you staying here? In Littleton?”

“Just for a few days. I live in Santa Monica.”

“Santa Monica, huh.”

“On Fifth, right off the promenade.”

“Ever had drinks at Shutters?”