Pike eased into the thicket. A shroud of ferns, devilclub, and saplings closed around him. Something large but unseeable moved ahead and to his right.

Huff!

Pike raised the gun, but the devilclub clawed at the barrel and was stronger than his bad arm.

Huff!

The boar blew air through its mouth to taste Pike's smell. It knew that something else was in the thicket, but it didn't know what. Pike wrestled the gun to his shoulder, but could not see where to aim.

SNAP!

The boar snapped its jaws in warning. It was setting itself to charge.

SNAPSNAP!

It could split this brush like tissue; its attack might come from anywhere. Pike braced himself. He would not retreat; he would not turn away. That was the single immutable law of Joe Pike's faith – he would always meet the charge.

SNAPSNAPSNAP!

Pike's strength failed. His shoulder quivered, then lost feeling. His arm trembled. He willed himself to hold firm, but the rifle grew heavy and the brush pulled it down.

SNAP!

Pike crept backwards out of the thicket and into the water. The snapping of steel jaws faded into the patter of rain.

Pike did not stop until he reached the bay. He pressed his back to a towering spruce and worked to bury his feelings, but he could not hide from his shame or his pain, or the certainty that he was lost.

Two days later he returned to Los Angeles.

The headstone anchors me in the dream with a weight I cannot escape. It is a small black rectangle let into the earth, kissed red by the setting sun. I stare down at the hard marble, burning with a hunger to know who lies within the earth, but the headstone is blank. No name marks this resting place. My only clue is this: The grave is small. I am standing over a child.

I have the dream often now, almost every night, some nights more than once. I sleep little on those nights; instead, I rise to sit in the darkness of my empty home. Even then, I am a prisoner of the dream.

Here is what happens: The sky darkens as a mist settles across the cemetery. The twisted limbs of an ancient oak drip with moss, swaying in the night breeze. I do not know where this place is, or how I got there. I am alone, and I am scared. Shadows flicker at the edge of light; voices whisper, but I cannot understand. One shade might be my mother, another the father I never knew. I want to ask them who lies in this grave, but when I turn for their help I find only darkness. No one remains to ask, no one to help. I am on my own.

The nameless headstone waits for me.

What lies here?

Who has left this child alone?

I am desperate to escape this place. I want to beat feet, boogie, truck, book, haul ass, motor, shred, jet, jam, split, cut out, blow, roll, abandon, get away, get gone, scram, RUN… but in the strange way of dreams a shovel appears in my hands. My feet will not move, my body will not obey. A voice in my head tells me to throw the blade aside, but a power I cannot resist forces my hand: If I dig, I will find; if I find, I will know. The voice pleads with me to stop, but I am possessed. The voice warns that I will not want to see the secrets that lie below, but I dig deep and true to expose the grave.

The black earth opens.

The casket is revealed.

The voice shrieks for me to stop, to look away, to save myself, and so I clench my eyes. I have recognized the voice. It is my own.

I fear what lies at my feet, but I have no choice. I must see the truth.

My eyes open.

I look.

A silence filled the canyon below my house that fall; no hawks floated overhead, the coyotes did not sing, the owl that lived in the tall pine outside my door no longer asked my name. A smarter person would have taken these things as a warning, but the air was chill and clear in that magnified way it can be in the winter, letting me see beyond the houses sprinkled on the hillsides below and out into the great basin city of Los Angeles. On days like those when you can see so far, you often forget to look at what is right in front of you, what is next to you, what is so close that it is part of you. I should have seen the silence as a warning, but I did not.

"How many people has she killed?"

Grunts, curses, and the snap of punches came from the next room.

Ben Chenier shouted, "What?"

"How many people has she killed?"

We were twenty feet apart, me in the kitchen and Ben in the living room, shouting at the tops of our lungs; Ben Chenier, also known as my girlfriend's ten- year- old son, and me, also known as Elvis Cole, the World's Greatest Detective and Ben's caretaker while his mother, Lucy Chenier, was away on business. This was our fifth and final day together.

I went to the door.

"Is there a volume control on that thing?"

Ben was so involved with something called a Game Freak that he did not look up. You held the Game Freak like a pistol with one hand and worked the controls with the other while the action unfolded on a built-in computer screen. The salesman told me that it was a hot seller with boys ages ten to fourteen. He hadn't told me that it was louder than a shoot-out at rush hour.

Ben had been playing the game since I had given it to him the day before, but I knew he wasn't enjoying himself, and that bothered me. He had hiked with me in the hills and let me teach him some of the things I knew about martial arts and had come with me to my office because he thought private investigators did more than phone deadbeat clients and clean pigeon crap off balcony rails. I had brought him to school in the mornings and home in the afternoons, and between those times we had cooked Thai food, watched Bruce Willis movies, and laughed a lot together. But now he used the game to hide from me with an absolute lack of joy. I knew why, and seeing him like that left me feeling badly, not only for him, but for my part in it. Fighting it out with Yakuza spree killers was easier than talking to boys.

I went over and dropped onto the couch next to him.

"We could go for a hike up on Mulholland."

He ignored me.

"You want to work out? I could show you another tae kwon do kata before your mom gets home."

"Uh-uh."

I said, "You want to talk about me and your mom?"

I am a private investigator. My work brings me into contact with dangerous people, and early last summer that danger rolled over my shores when a murderer named Laurence Sobek threatened Lucy and Ben. Lucy was having a tough time with that, and Ben had heard our words. Lucy and Ben's father had divorced when Ben was six, and now he worried that it was happening again. We had tried to talk to him, Lucy and I, but boys – like men – find it hard to open their hearts.

Instead of answering me, Ben thumbed the game harder and nodded toward the action on the screen.

"Check it out. This is the Queen of Blame."

Perfect.

A young Asian woman with spiky hair, breasts the size of casaba melons, and an angry snarl jumped over a Dumpster to face three musclebound steroid-juicers in what appeared to be a devastated urban landscape. A tiny halter barely covered her breasts, sprayed-on shorts showed her butt cheeks, and her voice growled electronically from the Game Freak's little speaker.

"'You're my toilet!"

She let loose with a martial arts sidekick that spun the first attacker into the air.

I said, "Some woman."

"Uh-huh. A bad guy named Modus sold her sister into slavery, and now the Queen is going to make him pay the ultimate price."