"Let's wait twenty years," I said. "Then we'll all be dead."

My voice sounded strange in my own ears, high and angry.

Mackendrick lowered his voice, as if to set me an example. "What's the trouble, Archer, are you stuck on the girl or something?"

"I'm worried about her."

"Okay, I'll tell my people to be on the lookout for her. Good night."

I sat with the dead receiver in my hand, feeling an angry pain that I had felt before. I lived at the intersection of two worlds. One was the actual world where danger was seldom far from people's lives, where reality threatened them with its cutting edge. The other was the world where Mackendrick had to operate in a maze of tradition and a grid of rules-a world where nothing officially happened until it was reported through channels.

From where I sat in the dark kitchen, I could see the grave-diggers putting the final touches to the hole they had filled in. They seemed to be gathering up armfuls of cuttings and scattering them over the raw dirt. Finally Rico picked up a brown sack, swung it over his shoulder, and carried it out to a car standing in the courtyard. He opened the trunk of the car and slung the brown sack in.

Mrs. Chantry turned out the lights in the greenhouse and followed Rico into the main house.

I went out to my car and drove it down the hill, parking just around the corner from Mrs. Chantry's street. Though the movements of the night and its people were far beyond the range of my understanding, I was beginning to pick up some of the smaller rhythms. In less than fifteen minutes, there was a glow of headlights from the direction of the Chantry house.

The Chantry car, with Rico driving alone in the front seat, passed me and turned toward the freeway.

I followed at a distance, but close enough to see him enter the northbound lane. There was fairly heavy traffic at this mid-evening hour, crawling like an endless luminescent worm into the tunneled darkness. We passed the university's lighted towers, the crowded buildings of the student annex where I had first met Doris, the narrow entrance to the dark beach where Jake Whitmore's body had been found.

Rico stayed on the freeway, and so did I. The traffic was dwindling down to its intercity components, trucks and night-driving tourists and the like. I let the distance between us lengthen out, and almost lost him. He made an unexpected right turn off the freeway, then a quick left through an underpass. I left the highway and waited out of sight for a minute, then followed him down to the sea with my car lights out.

The object of his journey was a wooden pier that extended out over the water for a couple of hundred yards. Three or four miles beyond the end of the pier, a half-dozen oil platforms blazed with lights like leafless Christmas trees. And off to the north, like a menacing West Coast Statue of Liberty, a giant gas flame flared.

Against the several lights I could see Rico approaching the foot of the pier, hunchbacked by the sack he had slung across his shoulder. I left my car and followed him on foot, walking softly and narrowing my distance. By the time Rico had reached the seaward end, I was close behind him.

"Drop it, Rico," I said. "Get your hands up." He made a move to heave the sack overside. It struck the top rail and fell clanking on the deck of the pier. Rico turned on me swinging. I moved inside his flailing arms and hit him several times in the belly, then once on the jaw. He went down and stayed for a while. I searched his clothes. No gun.

I untied the twine that closed the mouth of his sack, and spilled some of its contents on the planking. There were human bones caked with dirt, a damaged human skull, rusted engine parts from an old car. Rico sighed and rolled over. Then he was on me, heavy and strong but dull in his reactions. His head swung loose and undefended. I didn't hit him again. I backed away and got out my gun and told him to calm down.

Instead he turned and ran staggering to the outer end of the pier. He started to climb over the railing, or try to. His feet kept slipping. The tide was low and the water was a long way down.

For some reason, it became important to me that Rico shouldn't make it into the black water. I pocketed my gun and got my arms around his waist. Dragged him back onto the deck and held him down.

As I marched Rico back to my car and got him safely inside of it, I understood one source of my satisfaction. Twenty-odd years ago, near an oil-stained pier like this, I had fought in the water with a man named Puddler and drowned him.

Rico, whatever his sins, had served as an equalizer for one of mine.

XXXI

Captain Mackendrick was glad to see Rico, too. The three of us convened in Mackendrick's office with a male police stenotypist ready to record what was said. Rico didn't say anything at all until we brought in the sack of bones and iron. Mackendrick held it up in front of Rico's face and shook it. It made a strange dull clatter.

Mackendrick brought out the damaged skull and placed it on his desk. It looked empty-eyed at Rico. Rico returned the stare for a long moment. He tried to wet his lips with his dry tongue. Then he tried to scratch his head, but his fingers got tangled in the bandages he was now wearing.

"You used to be a pretty good young fellow," Mackendrick said. "I remember when you used to play volleyball on the beach, you liked good clean sport. You liked good clean work-mowing the lawn, washing the car. You thought Mr. Chantry was the greatest boss a young fellow ever had. You said so to me, remember?"

Tears had begun to roll from Rico's eyes and find twin downward channels on either side of his nose.

He said, "I'm sorry."

"What are you sorry for, Rico? Did you kill him?"

He shook his head, and the tears flew out from his face. "I don't even know who he is."

"Then why did you dig up his poor bones and try to get rid of them?"

"I don't know."

"You mean you do things without knowing why?"

"Sometimes. When people tell me."

"Who told you to get rid of these bones, weight them with iron, and chunk them in the sea? Who told you to do that?" Mackendrick said.

"I don't remember."

"Was it your own idea?"

The man recoiled from the suggestion. "No."

"Whose idea was it?"

Rico stared into the empty eyes of the skull. His face became even more sober, as if he had looked into a mirror and recognized his own mortal condition. He raised his hands and touched his cheeks with his fingertips, feeling the skull behind them.

"Is this Mr. Richard Chantry's skull?" Mackendrick said. "I don't know. Honest to God, I don't know."

"What do you know?"

He looked at the floor. "Nothing much. I always was a dumbhead."

"That's true, but not that dumb. You used to look out for yourself in the old days, Rico. You went for the girls, but you didn't let them lead you around by the nose. You didn't go out and commit a crime because a woman jiggled her hips at you. You used to have more sense than to do that."

The stenotypist's fingertips danced a rapid minuet on the keys of his machine. Rico was watching them as if they were miming a dance of death, telling his past or perhaps foretelling his future. His mouth opened and closed several times in an effort to find words. Then he began to whisper to himself, too low to be heard.

Mackendrick leaned forward, speaking quietly: "What did you say, Rico? Speak up, man, it may be important."

Rico nodded. "It is important. I had nothing to do with it."

"Nothing to do with the murder, you mean?"

"That's right. It was all her doing. My conscience is clear on that. She told me to bury him, which I did. Then twenty-five years later she told me to dig him up. That's all I did."