He went back to the bed and stretched out next to the girl. The window remained a black hole in deeper blackness. A creaking sound, like a twig breaking, made him jump, and the girl stirred beside him. Then silence.

It was just the house settling.

He drifted back off into sleep.

It was only a hunch, but Hardy thought it was better than trying to cover twelve exits at one time.

He thought he would give it two more days and then start the long haul back home. This morning, still pretty fatigued from the drive down, he had slept in, but tomorrow he planned to get in one run at deep-sea fishing, maybe get a nice picture of himself and a sailfish to brag about back at the Shamrock.

He got to the stadium well after the games had started. He heard the loudspeaker and the applause from the edges of the parking lot. There’d been no blue Volkswagen Jettas parked in the street he had taken leading up to the stadium. Tomorrow, if nothing worked today, he would hire a lucky cab driver and put on some miles covering the streets all around the neighborhood. But today he would start with the parking lot.

There was no concrete. It was a dusty, grassless, pot-holed couple of square blocks surrounding the stadium, into which people had driven and parked in pretty much random order. If you were near the stadium, Hardy figured it would take at least an hour to let the lot clear enough to make your way out. There wasn’t anything resembling a lane where traffic should go, no white lines for parking areas. If your car fit, jam it in there.

Twenty-five minutes of walking in the bright hot sun got pretty depressing. The Volkswagen was a popular car in Mexico. The old Beetle was as common as it had been in the United States in the sixties. But there were also Rabbits and, unfortunately, Jettas. And two of them light blue in his first pass at the outside border of the lot.

Wonderful, he thought. A dozen exits to the stadium. Probably a dozen blue Jettas in the parking lot. He needed twenty guys, a week, and a ton of luck. And even then…

He sat on somebody’s fender near the entrance to the lot, sucking down an ice-cold Fanta, trying to come up with some plan that might work. The landscape of automobiles shimmered and glared in the heat.

California plates!

Acapulco was a long way from California, and almost no one, except for the lunatic fringe among whom Hardy was beginning to count himself, drove. There wouldn’t be more than twenty cars in the lot with California plates, and he guessed the odds of finding more than one blue Jetta with them were significantly on his side.

Whistling, he started walking through the lot.

“Woo, I’m dizzy.”

She pressed her body up against his good side.

She was fantastic. Long, leggy, a face for the movies. Hair a deep chestnut, green eyes. She was a secretary from Washington, D.C., and wore a white T-shirt from the Hard Times Café that said ‘I like mine all the way wet.’ The T-shirt was a little small-her breasts held the front up high enough to show her navel in the slim waist. Maybe she was twenty-two, and with a couple of margaritas already in her. Look out.

“Watch out for the potholes,” Rusty said. “Just lean against me.”

“Could you believe those bodies?” she said.

“Pretty amazing.”

“I mean, I’ve seen jocks before, but these guys…”

He let her go on. Fantasize all you want, he was thinking. And he’d been studying the guys, too. Getting to know them a little now, what to watch for. And getting lucky, hitting two, then three, four in a row, clearing over a thousand U.S. today, more than making up for last week’s disaster.

He was glad the hurricane had enforced the time off. He had been starting to press. Just down here and thinking he had to make his mark right away. Wrong. He had time. He kept telling himself he had time. All the time in the world. So he took a few days off, met Atlanta, stayed indoors. It had been good for him. Now, starting a new week fresh, hitting it right away, this was it.

Most of the cars were out of the lot. He and D.C. were laughing, watching out for potholes. They were going to go down to the Esplanade and have turtle soup and a lobster dinner and blow a wad of this money, then maybe hit a cock fight. Or anyway, something with a cock.

He smiled. Whatever they did, it didn’t matter. He was loaded. After being down here ten days, he had more than he had come with. And that’s the way it would keep rolling. No more getting behind the eight ball. Study the game. Bet cautiously until you hit your roll. Then, like today, run it.

And he thought he was seeing it already. Some pattern. Some way to make a steady income. It wasn’t exactly like the ponies, where there were all these variables. Horses were dumb animals. Jai alai was people, momentum, things you could understand, predict.

It was late afternoon. The green hill had a sepia tone through the dust of the lot. They got to his car and heard footsteps coming up behind them.

“Hey, Rusty! Rusty!” Hardy closed the distance between them. He took off his sunglasses. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

Rusty was good, Hardy gave him that. Barely a flicker of panic. “Diz!” He reached out his good arm and pulled Hardy into an embrace. “God, it’s great to see you.”

“Me? It’s great to see you. I thought you were dead.”

“Dead?” the girl said.

“Oh, hey, excuse me, this is D.C. D.C, an old friend, Dismas Hardy.”

She nodded. “What do you mean, dead?”

Rusty laughed. “I’m not dead, thank God.”

“Me, neither.”

“I can see that. What are you doing down here?”

“Maybe great minds think alike. I’m waiting for your first call and watching the news and I see some girl has been killed on a barge in China Basin, and-”

“What? Who was killed?”

Hardy shrugged. “I don’t know. But I knew that’s where you lived, so I went down to check it out and it was the slip you’d given me. I didn’t want to wait around so Louis Baker could find me. I just went back home, threw some things together and lit out.”

“It was Maxine…” Rusty leaned up against the fender of his car. He put his hand up, shading his eyes.

“Who’s Maxine?” D.C. asked.

“She was a friend, just a friend.” His eyes were actually glazing, near tears. “God, Diz, she must have come over to visit and was there when Baker got there.”

“That’s what I figured. I just split. Especially since you didn’t call me, I figured-”

“I know. I just spooked, same as you. When I got home from seeing you I sat around for an hour and realized I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t just wait there for Baker to come and kill me. What was the point? But I should have called you. I’m sorry.”

“What are you guys talking about?”

Rusty was making a point of recovering from the shock of Maxine’s death. He told a good story while Hardy and D.C. listened. It sounded romantic, frightening, kind of cool.

“So what happened to this guy Baker?” D.C. asked.

Hardy looked at Rusty and shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope he’s back in jail by now. He probably left some prints, don’t you think, Rusty? Something, anyway.” He turned to the girl. “They usually do. I figured I had some vacation, I’d take it and give the cops a month or so to figure it out. If not, time I get back, I can tell them what I think and they’ll go get him, but I thought it would be safer to get away first. So I’ve been bumming in Mexico a couple of weeks.”

“It’s only my second day,” she said.

“Hey, you eaten yet, Diz? We were going to go down and blow some of my winnings. You want to join us?”

“You win at this game?”

Rusty grinned now. He opened the passenger door. “Big time.”

They were leaving the lot, bouncing over the dirt. “So what happened to your arm?” Hardy asked.

After he had located the car, Hardy had a good long time to work on the plan. Though it had still been early enough to get back to the El Sol and return with his gun, what good would that have done? He wasn’t planning on kidnapping Rusty. It was a long way back home and they’d have to drive-there was no way Hardy could board a plane with the gun.