He glanced at me. “Do you mean it?”

“Mean what? Spending the rest of my life with you or killing you if you hurt me? I mean both.”

At last his smile was large and genuine. “Now that sounds like the Cynthia I know and love.” He broke into musical laughter. “Now I feelsogood.”

I continued to caress his thigh. “These stupid people… it wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

He shrugged. Light had returned to his eyes. “So we learn to live with ignorance.”

“Exactly. And let’s be happy it’s now and not fifty years ago. What the heck? Every relationship has sticky points.”

“Even relationships with God. Like Avraham Avinu and his ten trials.”

“Sorry,” I told him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Abraham. His faith in God was tested by ten trials.”

“Oh, like Hercules?”

“Who is Hercules?”

“He also had trials.”

“He was Jewish?”

“Greek. Anyway, go on. What happened to Abraham?”

“Avraham lived when Nimrod was the leader of the civilized world. A sound ruler, but a cruel man. He didavodah zarah… idol worship. Avraham believed only inHashem.Nimrod put Avraham through ten trials to test his faith in God. I forget all of them, only each one grew in severity, and the last was trial by fire. Nimrod threw Avraham into a furnace.”

He stopped talking.

I said, “And I take it that God saved him.”

“Naturally. Otherwise there is no Bible.”

I waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. I giggled. “Is this a shaggy-dog story?”

“A what?”

“A shaggy-dog story-a story without a punch line.”

“No, not at all. I’m saying that if a relationship is strong, it survives anything. I think that is you and me.”

My hand was still resting on his knee. “I think so, too.” I moved my fingers to between his legs.

He gasped. “If you do that, I will crash the car. Already your father looks for a reason to shoot me. This will be his excuse.”

“Stop that! He loves you!”

“Nonsense! I have sex with his daughter: He wants to shoot me.”

I smiled, noticing he made no effort to pull my hand away. By now, he was hard: I loved making him hard. Then I retracted my hand and sat back up in my seat.

He groaned. “You are socruel.”

“Koby, do you have any idea where we are?”

“No, it is all unfamiliar. But if we find a motel, I think we should stop.”

I smiled. “I think we took a wrong turn.”

“In a metaphysical sense, there is no wrong turn.”

“Yeah, but we’re in a physical world, so how about we retrace our steps.”

He smiled, but then his eyes narrowed. I was attuned enough to his nuances to recognize residual resentment. He was still smoldering. He said, “You know, in Israel, there aren’t these racial problems.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not in Israel, we’re in America. Welcome to the melting pot!”

42

If a chemist combined115 degrees Fahrenheit with the accommodations of steerage, the result would be Cochise Penitentiary-a medium-security installation deep in the desert where the sands of the Mojave sank below sea level. The site was as fiery as the bowels of the earth, the surrounding terrain flat, bleak, and tan, broken up by occasional spindly cacti and roadkill. Brill and I had the luxury of doing most of the trip in an air-conditioned Ford Escort, but then the temperature needle started nudging the red zone. Since we weren’t on a survival show and there was no million-dollar check waiting, the idea of being marooned in this godforsaken land wasn’t at all pleasant. Brill turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows.

Immediately, we were sandblasted by scorching air and grit. Brill went profane, pounding his fist on the dash. “Asshole couldn’t have waited a couple months before he fucked up?”

“Asshole” was Joseph Nicholas Fedek. Like all rotten apples, he eventually made it to the compost pile, picked up on a B-and-E charge in Rampart Division, home of scandal and Dodger Stadium. And Brill had a point. The Inland Valley area in late August was hell.

“Look on the bright side,” I said cheerfully. “Germando El Paso would probably give up a nut to get out of Cochise early. That gives us real bargaining power.”

“What a dumb shit! All he had to do was stay clean forsixweeks on a stupid traffic bust. The jerk plays hotshot dealing X from his County cell, then buys himself a year and a half of misery in this inferno.”

“How did El Paso get the bag into County?”

“Rumor says his girlfriend sneaked it in way up in dark places.”

“Didn’t someone pat her down?”

“You take a peek; you don’t fist fuck her. I can’t believe I gave up my Saturday forthis!”

“At least you’re getting paid.”

“Yeah, time-and-a-half along with a bad case of crotch rot.”

He adjusted his butt in the seat. He wore a pair of ecru linen pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, both articles of clothing darkened with sweat stains. I had on a white blouse and a dark blue cotton skirt that fell below my knees. My hair was tied back, knotted into a tight braid. I looked like a parochial-school girl.

“That’s the turnoff.” I pointed to the sign.

Brill took a swig from his water bottle. We had two cases sitting on dry ice in the back. “I see, I see.”

It took us another twenty minutes to arrive at the institution-a three-story cinder-block edifice surrounded by six guard towers and a sea of barbed wire. Cochise wasn’t very big, and it didn’t house the more violent criminals. It had an infirmary but no hospital and it didn’t have a psycho ward. Whenever someone freaked, he was immediately transferred out to San Quentin or some other maximum-security facility.

We checked in with the parking-booth guard, who assigned Brill’s Escort a space in a sizzling lot of dirt and pebbles. Asphalt in this heat would have been a tar pit.

“Keep the windows down,” Brill told me. “Just remind me not to touch the steering wheel when we come back.”

It took us about a half hour to go through all the sign-in procedures. We checked our weapons into a gun locker and walked through a double-door sally port into the main facilities. There was some minimal air-conditioning, but inside was still hot and dry and smelled of sweat, piss, and barely controlled fury. The cell doors were open, but the hallways were almost entirely empty. Most of the blue-shirted inmates lazed on their cots, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ball game, or playing a torpid game of solitaire.

Rest time, the guard explained.

He led us into the interview cell-hot and smelly-with a wall clock and a barred window showing a view of heat waves rising off the sand. The area had the requisite metal table and chairs, the furniture bolted into place. We sat and waited and drank tepid water.

Germando came in around ten minutes later, dressed in prison blues-a uniform not a lot different from Koby’s blue scrubs, reminding me once again that it was all context. Sweat coated his face, and the tiger tattoo on his neck looked as if it were stalking prey in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia. El Paso’s expression was one of contempt. He still had his dinky mustache and a plug of beard under his lower lip. He slouched in one of the metal chairs.

Brill gave him a cup of water.

El Paso didn’t drink.

Brill rubbed his eyes. “This is the story. We picked up Juice Fedek, got him on a solid B-and-E, so he’s going to do time. We’re in the process of getting a warrant for his place. And when we do, we’re going to find his gun. And then that means Juice is going to do lots of time and not in Cochise. He’s going upstate to San Quentin. Because once we find the gun-and we will find the gun-we’re going to connect it to an attempted-murder indictment. He’s going away for a long time because the idiot was popping lead at acop.And anyone associated with him is going away for a long time.”