The warm-up band was Los Straitjackets, who played surf music and wore Mexican wrestling costumes. Hood was a guitar lover and he had played unpromisingly as a boy and always liked the reverbdrenched, double-lead twang of the Ventures and the Surfaris. When Los Straitjackets found a groove, Hood felt a giant metallic wave had broken over him, and notes of music were shearing off the walls to splash him.

He saw Bradley’s half brother, Kenny, just three years old now, race onto the dance floor and begin flailing about. His father, Ernest, watched him from the crowd, his big Hawaiian face stoic as an Easter Island statue’s. Hood had met them right here at this ranch two years ago. He could see that day. It had been his first assignment as an LASD homicide team trainee. He had driven way down here from L.A. to interview Suzanne Jones, whom he suspected of having witnessed a crime, and by the time he drove off forty minutes later, the path of his life had changed.

The dance floor filled, and Hood and Beth worked their way to the bar, where the dance hall girls were making drinks. The drinkers were two thick the length of the bar. Hood watched one of the bar-tenders take an ornate faceted goblet and pour an ounce of pale green liquid into it. Then she balanced a flat perforated spoon across the opening and set a sugar cube on it. Next she moved the drink to a small but elaborate stainless steel fountain. It looked something like a hookah. There were six of these bright contraptions set up down the bar. But instead of drawing smoke through the tube, the bartender set the drink under it and began dispensing drops of clear liquid over the sugar cube and into the green fluid.

“What’s the green stuff?” asked Beth.

“Absinthe. It was banned a few years ago. Now they’re selling it again.”

“Why the ban?”

“It was supposed to make you hallucinate, then go crazy.”

“Permanently?”

“Temporarily.”

“What’s in the dispenser?”

“Ice water,” said the bartender. She was blond and bustiered and pretty. “The sugar melts slowly and makes the absinthe taste better. It was a popular drink with European artists and writers.”

“What’s it taste like?” asked Beth.

“Licorice. From the anise.”

“I love licorice.”

Hood watched Beth talk to the bartender and wondered if she was perhaps fascinated by the science behind the ritual. Beth was curious about the way things worked. She loved learning new facts. Maybe this took her back to med school. Hood watched as the dripping ice water slowly turned the pale green drink a milky white.

“This is called the louche effect,” said the bartender. “It’s the precipitation of herbal essential oils used in distillation. This is what gives absinthe its color. There.”

“What proof is it?” asked Beth.

“This is one forty-eight, or seventy-four percent.”

“I could prep a kid for a tetanus shot with it.”

“The unique ingredient in absinthe isn’t alcohol but a toxin called thujone. This is derived from the bitter wormwood the liquor is made from. Oscar Wilde said of absinthe: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’”

“Can we have one?” asked Beth.

Hood held up two fingers, and the woman looked at Beth and smiled wickedly as she pushed forward the first drink. “Slowly. Let the thujone do its magic before the alcohol charges in.”

Beth turned to Hood and sipped it and smiled. “Licorice, Charlie.”

While Hood waited for his drink, he saw Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams and Jakob Dylan and James McMurtry among the revelers and he realized that Erin and the Inmates were getting their music to some important ears. The bartender handed him his drink with a wink and he tipped her well. It tasted like licorice and racing fuel, extrapolating from the smell of dragsters he watched run at Pomona.

Hood and Beth danced two songs. The thujone made him feel as if his feet weren’t quite touching the floor, that he was light and swift. Sound was rearranged without spatial logic: The laugh of a woman across the room became a shriek in his ear while Beth right next to him was hard to hear and the music broke apart into shards of sound and rained down. But memories jumped him like muggers from the darkness and he saw Luna in the river and he pushed this memory away and he saw the soldiers piled on the dirt road to Batopilas and these he pushed away also and he saw Jimmy’s blank stare and Jenny’s tears as she begged for his life on TV and he tried to vanquish these, too, but they were strong and wouldn’t go away.

Then the Inmates walked onstage, followed by Erin in her wedding dress. The guests roared. The players took their stations, and Erin announced a song she’d written for Bradley. It was sweet and up-tempo and hopeful. The crowd quieted and Hood closed his eyes, and for three minutes, he believed what Erin believed, that the best was yet to come, that there would be love and hope in the world. For three minutes the bad memories couldn’t get in. They hit against Erin ’s voice like raindrops against a window and ran off dispersed and unnamed.

“Just beautiful,” said Beth.

Hood opened his eyes to see Owens Finnegan gliding through across the dance floor alone, on her way toward the bar. At first he wondered if it was the absinthe. Owens wore a silver gray dress the same color of her eyes and she gave Hood a glance as she disappeared into the drinkers.

“Who is she?”

“Mike Finnegan’s daughter,” he said.

“Do you know her?”

“We’ve met.”

“What is Mike’s daughter doing here?”

“Mike knows the groom.”

“Mike knows everyone, doesn’t he?”

“Apparently, yes.”

“Let’s have another drink, Charlie.”

She smiled at him and held up her empty absinthe goblet. Hood bore through the revelers to get two more drinks and when he got back to Beth, Owens was with her. They were laughing. Hood gave Beth her drink and offered his to Owens, who accepted. He introduced the women.

“Nice to see you, Owens.”

“What a surprise,” she said. “Do you know the groom or the-”

“I know them both,” said Hood. “Beth is Mike’s doctor at Imperial Mercy.”

“One of them,” Beth said.

Owens looked at Beth with her nickel eyes. “Thank you for taking such good care of him. I just left his room a couple of hours ago and he looked, well… bandaged. Anyway, I’m going to come and visit again next week. If I survive this drink. Wow.”

“Yeah, wow is right,” said Beth.

Hood went to fetch a drink for himself and when he came back, Owens was gone and Beth had a strange look on her face.

“What did that poor woman do to herself?”

“Mike said she lost all reason to live.”

Beth shook her head and sipped her drink, looking over the rim of the absinthe goblet at Hood.

They walked across the barnyard toward the ranch house. Revelers pounded down the dock of the pond and splashed into the black water. Two tractors with livestock trailers came up the dirt road toward the rodeo arena, and Hood saw the moonlit dust rise, then settle in its wake. Up near the ranch house, they walked among the hard-walled tents set up in the grass. Each had an unlit electric lantern waiting outside the door. There were already party guests inside some of them, their lantern light glowing through the thick fabric and spilling out from the mesh vents at the rooflines, and their laughter bouncing out into the night. Hood let go of Beth’s hand and clicked on the lantern and held open the tent door. Inside were two cots made up and a stand with folded towels and a wash basin and a soap dish and a water pitcher and cut flowers in a cobalt blue vase.