The catch was, he was in hock to Giles Gulliver in London, and the bugger was refusing to front him any more cash until he’d seen a story he could run with. Catch-22. He needed more money if he was going to be able to give Giles that story. So now he was looking for a spin-off, something he could sell elsewhere. Jesus, he’d already pitched at a couple of travel editors, pieces about San Diego, the border, Tijuana, La Jolla. He ’d do the zoo or Sea World if they wanted it! But they didn’t want anything from him. They knew his reputation. Knew several of his reputations. They knew he was bad with deadlines, and didn’t write nice little travel articles to be read over the Sunday cornflakes and coffee. That wasn’t journalism anyway-it was filler, an excuse for a cramming of ads, and he’d told three travel editors exactly that. Also that they could go bugger themselves.

Which left him running out of money fast, and reduced to cheap motels where they cleaned the rooms once a week and skimped on the towels. He had to work faster. Either that or take CWC’s money, use it to placate Giles, and buy a holiday with whatever was left. Everyone would be happier that way. Maybe even he’d be happier. But it didn’t work like that. There was a story out there, and if he didn’t get it, it would nag him for months, years even. Like the time he had to give up on the Faslane story. He’d been working for a London paper then, and the proprietor had told the editor to rein him in. He’d fumed, then resigned, then decided he didn’t want to resign-so they fired him. He’d gone back to the story, working freelance, but couldn’t get any further with it, and no one wanted to publish what he had except Private Eye, who’d given it half a page at the back of the mag.

God bless the Fourth Estate!

He had another cigarette, then pulled the phone off the bedside cabinet.

Once, he would have been living in a Hyatt or Holiday Inn, maybe even a Marriott. But times had changed, and James Reeve with them. He was meaner now; meaner in both senses. He left smaller tips (when he tipped at all: that guy in Reservoir Dogs had a point), and he was less pleasant. Poor people can’t afford to be pleasant; they’re too busy barely getting by.

Eddie’s phone kept ringing and ringing, and Reeve let it ring until it was answered.

“What? What?”

“Good morning, sir,” Reeve said sweetly, smoke pouring down his nose, “this is your requested alarm call.”

There were groans and hacking coughs at the other end of the line. It was good to feel you weren’t alone in your afflictions.

“You scumbag, you loathsome string of shit, you complete and utter douchehead.”

“What is this?” said Reeve. “Dial-a-Foulmouth?”

Eddie Cantona wheezed, trying to speak and laugh and light a cigarette all at the same time. “So what’s our schedule?” he finally said.

“Just get over here and pick me up. I’ll think of something.”

“Thirty minutes, okay?”

“Make it half an hour.” James Reeve hung up the phone. He liked Eddie, liked him a lot. They’d met in a bar in the Gaslamp Quarter. The bar had a western theme and sold ribs and steaks. You ate at a long, hewn wooden bench, or at hewn wooden tables, and at the bar they served the tap beer in Mason jars. It was an affectation, yes, and it meant you didn’t get a lot of beer for your money-but it was good beer, almost good enough and dark enough to be English.

Reeve had come into the dark, cool bar after a hot, unprofitable walk in the sunshine; and he’d drunk too many beers too quickly. And he’d got talking to the man on the stool beside him, who introduced himself as Eddie Cantona. Reeve started off by saying there was a football player called Cantona, then had to explain that he meant soccer, and that the player himself was French.

“It’s a Spanish name,” Eddie persisted. And it was, too, the way he said it, turning the middle syllable into toe and dragging the whole name out-whereas in England the commentators would try to abbreviate it to two syllables at most.

The conversation could only improve from there, and it did, especially when Eddie announced that he was “between appointments” and owned a car. Reeve had been spending a fortune on cabs and other modes of transport. Here was a driver looking for short-term employment. And a big man at that-someone who just might double as bodyguard should the need arise. By that point, Reeve had figured on the need arising.

Since then he’d been offered money to quit the story. And when he’d turned the offer down, there had been a silent beating in a back alley. They’d caught him while Eddie was off somewhere. They hadn’t said a word, which was the clearest message they could have given.

And still James Reeve wanted the story. He wanted it more than ever.

They drove out to La Jolla first to visit the retired pharmacist unannounced.

It was a white-painted clapboard house (Eddie pronounced the word “clabbard”), a bungalow with not much land around it. It had a green picket fence, which was being freshly redecorated by a whistling workman in overalls. His van was parked with two wheels on the curb, its back doors open to show a range of paint cans, ladders, and brushes. He smiled and said, “Good morning to you” as James Reeve pushed open the stubborn gate. There were bells hanging from the latch, and they chimed as he closed it behind him.

He’d been here before, and the old man hadn’t answered any of his questions. But persistence was a journalist’s main line of attack. He rang the doorbell and took one pace back onto the path. The street wasn’t close to La Jolla ’s seafront, but he guessed the houses would still be worth at least a hundred and fifty thou apiece. It was that kind of town. Eddie’d told him that Raymond Chandler used to live in La Jolla. To James’s eye, there didn’t seem much worth writing about in La Jolla.

He stepped up to the door again, tried the bell, then squatted to peer through the mail slot. But there was no mail slot. Instead, Dr. Killin had one of those mailboxes on a post near the gate, with a red flag beside it for when there was mail. The flag was down. James went to the only window fronting the bungalow and looked in at a comfortable living room, lots of old photographs on the walls, a three-seat sofa with floral covers taking up way too much room. He remembered Dr. Killin from their first, only, and very brief meeting. Killin had reminded him physically of Giles Gulliver, a knotted strength beneath an apparently frail exterior. He had a shiny domed bald head, the skull out of proportion to the frame supporting it, and thick-lensed glasses behind which the eyes were magnified, the eyelashes thick and curling.

The old fart wasn’t home.

He walked back down the path and wrestled with the gate again. The painter stopped whistling and smiled up at him from his half-kneeling position.

“Ain’t in,” he informed James Reeve, like this was news.

“You might have said before I went three rounds with that damned gate.”

The painter chuckled, wiping his green fingers on a rag. “Might’ve,” he agreed.

“Do you know where he is?”

The man shook his head, then scratched his ear. “I was told something about a vacation. But how do you take a vacation when you live in paradise?” And he laughed, turning back to his task.

James Reeve took a step towards him. “When did he leave?”

“That I don’t know, sir.”

“Any idea when he’ll be back?”

The painter shrugged.

The journalist cursed under his breath and leaned over the fence to open the mailbox, looking for something, anything.

“Shouldn’t do that,” the painter said.

“I know,” said Reeve, “tampering with the U.S. Mail.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. But see, you got green paint on your shirt.”

And so he had.

Dismissing the offer of mineral spirits, in need of another kind of spirit altogether, he stomped back to the car where Eddie was waiting for him. He got into the passenger seat.