Los Angeles is behind them. Ahead is nothing but desert.

"John, give me some!" Tommy shouts. He repeats this twice before Pellam hears and four times before he chooses to answer.

"Please!" A moaning wail, a sound that the wind takes and instantly makes vanish.

Pellam tosses the salt shaker underhand. The wind plays hell with the trajectory, but Tommy catches it in desperate, fumbling grabs.

"Not funny."

"Improves your reflexes."

Tommy was trying to snort. "Too fast, I can't-"

Pellam hits the clutch and brake. The car skids and fishtails. When they slow to sixty Tommy can snort the coke. He gives the high sign. Pellam accelerates and refuses the offered shaker.

Pellam feels philosophical. He shouts, "You think the desert's minimal, right? Bullshit. It isn't. It's goddamn complex. Complex like a, you know, a crystal. Like the way colors spread under a microscope. Remember those science films in high school?"

"Yeah," Tommy shouts. "About gonads and seeds and ovum." He is grinning like the dirty little boy he likes to portray though he is clearly considering Pellam's comment. In fact he is considering it desperately. Pellam wishes he hadn't spoken.

Tommy suffers from terminally ill confidence. The actor had received one L.A. Film Critics' award and one from Cannes when he'd been courted and seduced by a big studio lot producer. The money was incredible, the movies worse than awful. His most recent, a critic wrote, could be stuffed and served at a Thanksgiving dinner for the population of the country. Tommy was trying to think of ways to redeem himself. "Don't be desperate," Pellam had told him. "This city don't love desperate men."

But Tommy snatched up even that advice like a life preserver.

Pellam drives in silence. A half hour later he notices a small road leading off the highway toward a huge rock eased out of the brush and dirty sand. He makes a fast turn and the car skids to a stop out of sight of the road.

They climb out, stretch, pee against rocks.

Tommy asks, "You bring the Geiger counter?"

"What do we need that for?"

"The fucking Army. They test atom bombs here."

"That's New Mexico."

"Fucking no," Tommy says. "Cruise missiles blasting sheep to hell and gone. I'm scared." He looks around cautiously.

Pellam says, "There're no sheep here."

"What I'm saying! They're dead. Got blasted into lambchops. We're in danger. Our kids'll glow in the dark."

"Let's go to work, hombre."

From the car they take two heavy garbage cans that ring with glass falling against itself. Pellam drags them toward the rock. There isn't much shade though there will be in an hour or two. Tommy, now pissed about his hat, rubs suntan lotion on his face and thinning scalp, then pulls a large cooler from the car. This he plants in the sand near the big rise of rock. He returns and struggles to get two lawnchairs out of what pretends to be a backseat.

"German cars, shit," Tommy says. He drives a Chevy Impala.

Pellam takes empty beer bottles out of the green bags and sets them carefully on a ridge of dirt and sand about thirty feet away from where Tommy plants the lawnchairs. He surveys his handiwork then opens a pineapple-printed beach umbrella and sticks it into the ground between the chairs.

Pellam finishes setting out the bottles. He calls, "How many pages?"

Tommy flips through a plastic-bound manuscript. "One seventeen,"

"Need one more."

Tommy pulls another bottle from the cooler, pops the lid with a church key and drinks it down. He tosses it to Pellam, who plants it at the end of the row.

One hundred seventeen bottles.

They sit in the chairs, facing the bottles. Tommy takes another snort from the shaker.

He says, "Can I have the Python. Please?"

From a large, battered attache case, Pellam takes two pistols. He keeps the Ruger.44 for himself and hands Tommy the Colt. He places yellow-and-green boxes of shells between them.

Two copies of the script appear. On the title page: "Central Standard Time. By John Pellam and Tommy Bernstein."

They begin reading aloud and rewriting the script. They correct each other, changing dialogue, argue. Pellam is quieter and grimmer. Tommy is boisterous. He'll shout, then stand and stalk around, sit again.

When they finish eleven pages-the end of the first scene-they stuff cotton into their ears, load the pistols and with fifteen shots between them take turns disintegrating the first eleven bottles. One for each page. The rules of their game.

Tommy says, spinning the cylinder of his gun, "You remember that scene, what was it from? Some old jungle movie? Stewart Granger's aiming at Deborah Kerr's head? She's scared, doesn't know what's going on. Then, blam! He wastes a boa constrictor right behind her. I always wanted to play that scene. Why don't you go sit over next to the rocks, Pellam? They got snakes in the rocks."

"Yeah, hell with snakes," Pellam says, pulling a beer from the cooler. "I always wanted to shoot me an actor."

They work until eleven that night, and blow the last three bottles apart in the headlight of the tiny German car surrounded by the sound of its bubbling exhaust. They are shivering and it takes ten rounds each to hit the last glistening bottle.

"This fucking movie's going to make us, Pellam!" Tommy shouts. "We're going right to the top!" And he empties the gun at the night sky.

The house was completely quiet.

Meg had a little time until Pellam would be back. She took her coffee and walked up the stairs. She paused, then sat on the landing for a long time, looking into the hall and those portions of the den and living room she could see. The parquet floor, the furniture. The house seemed different, a stranger's home. She didn't recognize it. There was nothing unpleasant about the sensation; it was one of those moments when you focus on a familiar object-a doorknob, a chair, your own little finger-and it seems absurd and alien to you. This was her house, the house she'd always loved. Hers and Keith's and Sam's. Only something was different.

Meg went into the bedroom, got dressed. She tied her hair in a pony tail. Her hands paused, holding the ribbon above her neck.

The doorbell rang. She bounded down the stairs like Sam on Christmas morning.

She swung the heavy door open. She'd already prepared a wry comment for Pellam about Janine and was ready to deliver it.

But she blinked in surprise.

Wexell Ambler stood there, looking shy, leaning against the jamb. "I was driving past. Saw your car was in the drive. The Cougar was gone. I couldn't wait till tomorrow."

Meg instinctively looked back, into the house to make certain they were alone. Then she looked behind Ambler.

"Is it Mr Pellam, Mommy?" Sam called. She wondered if Ambler could hear what the boy had asked. Didn't seem he had.

"No, honey. I'll be outside for a minute," she shouted. Her hand still on the doorknob Meg said to Ambler, "Keith's at work."

"I want to talk to you. I have to talk to you."

"I'm expecting some company."

Ambler had no reaction to this. She was trying to decide whether to tell him who the company was if he asked. He didn't. He said, "It won't take long." Though he said it slowly, the words full of meaning, as if he wanted their conversation to last for the entire evening.

She looked behind her again, up the stairs toward Sam's room, then stepped outside and closed the door behind her. It didn't latch.

He kissed her on the cheek and she kissed him back, though he'd have to be drunk or crazy not to sense the hesitancy.

"I had to see you."

"Is everything okay?"

He looked at her in surprise. "Okay, sure. I should be asking how Sam is. You never called to tell me if he's all right."