He could see the moonlight gleaming on the surface of the narrow stream that flowed along the bottom. Across the other side, he could make out the lights of a police car flashing along a road that skirted the ravine’s edge. The hillside was thickly wooded and the spaces between trees filled with ferns and shrubbery. At least now, he thought, he ought to be able to find his way back to civilization easily enough.

He heard a noise lower down the hillside and realized there was another path, running parallel to his, about fifty yards below, closer to the water. Again, he froze. This sound was far too loud to be a squirrel or a bird; it certainly wasn’t the sound of a small animal running away, but more like a large one coming towards him.

He crouched by the edge of the dirt path and peered down through the bushes. He couldn’t make much out at first, but something was moving through the undergrowth. A few moments later, his heart beating fast again, he saw the eyes, not more than thirty yards away down the slope. What was it? A fox? A wolf? Then he heard the woman’s voice: ‘Jason! Jason! Where are you, boy? Come on.’ And she whistled. So it was a dog! But Jason took no notice of her. It seemed to have caught his scent and was making its way cautiously up the hillside to check him out.

He couldn’t tell from that distance in the dark, but he was worried that it might be a pit bull or a Rottweiler. Surely no woman would go walking alone in the park at night without a vicious dog to guard her? He felt beside him on the path and his hand grasped a large stone, just small enough to hold. The dog came closer. ‘Come on, Jason,’ he whispered. ‘Come on, boy!’ The dog barked and made the last few yards in a dash. He swung the rock hard at its head, and the dog whimpered, then let out a low wail and collapsed.

‘Jason?’ the woman called from below. ‘Jason! Where are you?’ She sounded worried now. He could just about make her out in the faint light. She looked youngish, with long hair tied behind her neck in a ponytail, and she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She called for the dog again, then left the path and started climbing the hill through the shrubbery to the place she’d heard it wail.

Thirty yards. Twenty-five. Twenty. He could see the moonlight glint on her bracelet. Fifteen. He could hear her panting with effort. Ten. She ran the back of her hand over her brow and pushed back a stray tress of hair. ‘Jason?’ Five. He glanced around and listened. Nothing. So close to civilization, yet so far. There was nobody around but him and her.

Four. He held his breath. Three yards. She slipped back but managed to grasp a root and keep her balance. Two. He gripped the rock tight in his hand and felt it sticky and warm with the dog’s blood. She was almost there now. Just a few more steps. One. He gripped the rock tighter, raising his arm. Suddenly he felt himself filled with strange joy and he knew he was grinning like an idiot. So this was why he had come. He didn’t have a death wish, after all. What on earth had those fools who wrote the guidebooks meant? Of course it was safe after dark. Perfectly safe.

Los Angeles was the last place Walter Dimchuk would have chosen for the convention. A confirmed Torontonian, Walter had never been able to take California seriously. It seemed to him that the people there merely played at life under the palm trees and came up with loony-tune ideas.

Take the cuisine, if you could call it that: it was either Mexican, which gave Walter the runs, or so-called ‘Californian’: watercress, alfalfa sprouts and avocado with everything, even a burger. Faggot food, more like. He’d had a house salad just yesterday in which he hadn’t recognized one single ingredient. Cilantro, arugula, fresh basil, sun-dried tomatoes and goat’s cheese, the waiter had told him. With a dressing of tarragon, balsamic vinegar, cardamom oil and toasted pine nuts, for Christ’s sake. Just his luck. Couldn’t a person get a simple grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk in this state?

Smog, killer freeways, serial-killer bubblegum cards, earthquakes, Rodney King riots, more fruit loops per square mile than an asylum… the list went on. He hadn’t been happy about leaving Kate and Maria alone in the house either. They might not be as close a family as they had once been – what could you expect after thirty-five years of marriage and three children grown up to adults – but they still got on all right, mostly thanks to Maria, a late blessing when Kate was forty-five, and now a gawky thirteen-year-old.

The only good thing about the trip that Walter had been able to come up with on the plane over (Air Canada, three hours late, sweet Jesus, just Walter’s fucking luck) was a brief respite from a cool Toronto October.

But he hadn’t banked on the Santa Ana. When Toronto got hot, you sweated; here you dried to dust, dehydrated in seconds. He had once read a story about the hot, desert wind, the way it made meek wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. The writer was right: it did make you edgy and crazy. Walter felt as if he’d had a steel band around his forehead for two days. It was getting tighter.

‘Wally!’

Walter came out of his reverie. He was sitting in the hotel lobby taking a smoke break between sessions. Nobody seemed to smoke these days. In California it was hardly surprising: you couldn’t find many places where it was legal to do so. Damn government health warnings on everything now, even the wine. And he had seen the way the young hotshots with their white teeth turned up their noses when he lit up, even if they were sitting in a goddamn bar. Christ, who was this coming towards him, hand outstretched, teeth bared in a predatory smile? Should he remember? Awkwardly, he got to his feet.

‘Hi, good to see you,’ he said.

‘Good to see you!’ the stranger said. ‘It’s been years.’

‘Yeah.’ Walter scratched the side of his right eye and frowned. ‘Now where the hell was it…?’

‘Baltimore. Baltimore, ’seventy-nine. Jimmy Lavalli. Remember, we closed down that bar together?’

‘Yeah, of course. How you doing, Jimmy?’

And so it went on, the empty greetings, inane conversations, tales of triple bypasses, and all the time Walter knew, deep inside, that they were all out to get him, were all laughing at him. ‘Oh, old Wally Woodchuk, Wally Dump-truck, Wally Up-chuck, fucking dinosaur, sales have been down for years.’ No one had said it to his face, but they didn’t need to. Wally knew. At fifty-nine, he was too old for the pool supplies business. And it was obvious from the number of tanned young men around the convention that the company thought so too. You’d almost think the new breed were chosen because they’d look good sitting around a swimming pool, like the way auto manufacturers used curvaceous women to sell cars. Wally’s curves were in all the wrong places. Ungrateful bastards. He’d given his life to Hudson’s Pools and Supplies, and this was how they paid him back. He felt like that salesman in the play must have done, the one that guy who’d been married to Marilyn Monroe – not the baseball player, one of the others – had written for Dustin Hoffman.

He had heard the talk around the office, noticed the muted conversations and insincere greetings as he passed couples chatting in the corridor. They were putting him out to pasture. That was why they sent him to California. He wouldn’t be surprised if his office – if you could call a screened-off corner in an open plan an office – was cleaned out when he got back and someone else was sitting there in his place. Some tanned young asshole with white teeth and a wolfish smile. Maybe called Scott.

He got rid of Jimmy with promises to look him up if he was ever in Baltimore (not if he could help it!) and looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Shit. Time for another boring session, then up to get changed for the convention banquet. Tofu burgers again, most likely. Maybe grab a few minutes in between and call Kate…