And I had an enemy I couldn’t identify.

I stopped on the way home to finish up the last of the holiday shopping. Bakery, groceries, wine. Everything took twice as long as it should have, of course. The butcher had our turkey listed under Allen, not Gregory, and I wasted almost half an hour trying to help him track down the bird while at least a dozen other joyous citizens waited behind me for their turkeys.

They expressed their holiday cheer to me via a well-rehearsed melody of sighs, nasal snorts, and whispers of “dear Lord” and “Jesus.”

They weren’t praying.

Sam once warned me that I would rue the day my parents decided to burden me with two first names. Maybe he was right. It wouldn’t be the first time Sam had been right.

I wondered how he would spend the holiday.

The buffalo cap was out of Lauren’s arm when I got home. That was her holiday gift, although the steroid misery wasn’t completely over. She’d go from getting a gram a day of Solumedrol directly into her veins to getting eighty milligrams of prednisone into her mouth. Gradually eighty would become sixty and sixty would become forty and forty would become… and two or three weeks from now-I hoped by Christmas, for sure-she’d be completely finished with the steroidal assault on her metabolism. A few weeks later the side effects would dissipate to zero, and she and I would begin the familiar low-grade worry about the next time the elephant would camp out in our living room.

We had a light dinner as a family-actually I had a light dinner; Lauren was suffering the kind of munchies usually associated with chronic cannabis use but also common among steroid users, so she put down an unusual quantity of food-and then I read stories and got Grace down for the night. Lauren spent the whole time playing pool-the repetitive, endless nature of the game was one of the few things that seemed to help her outlast the Solumedrol.

After Grace was asleep, I joined Lauren in the dining room, where her pool table took up the space that an architect once envisaged for a dining room table. She didn’t invite me to join her game. Lauren was once a highly rated amateur pool player. Let’s just say that I wasn’t. My opposing her in pool was as ludicrous a match-up as my lining up against Lance Armstrong for a quick sprint up Coal Creek Canyon to Wondervu on bikes.

Her strokes economical, Lauren dropped ball after ball into the leather pockets.

Through the steroid clatter in her brain she listened as attentively as she could to my story about Tayisha and the surreptitious device that was discovered in my sofa cushion. Other than offering empathy and wondering why I hadn’t already involved the police, Lauren didn’t have much to say in reply.

She was still playing pool when I retired to bed around ten.

I missed her.

The phone rang minutes after I flicked off the lights. I pounced on it so the ringing wouldn’t stir Grace. As I lifted the receiver, I could still hear thethwop-crackof the pool balls coming from the dining room.

My “hello” earned me a “hey, buddy” from Sam.

“You okay?” I asked a little too urgently. I’d already convinced myself he was calling from some emergency room in some hospital. I was in a state of mind where I didn’t have any confidence that anyone I cared about was okay.

“Yeah, fine, considering. Guess where I am?”

Given the mood I was in, I didn’t want to play along, but Sam sounded happier than I’d heard him sound since his MI, so I tried to remember where he’d been the last time we talked. I thought Georgia, so I guessed, “Atlanta.”

“South Bend.”

My pulse jumped, just like that.

I was tired, but not so tired that my brain was unable to make the associations necessary to take me back to Gibbs’s psychotherapy session the day before and to her revelation that Sterling had once been involved with a woman who lived in South Bend, Indiana.

Notre Dame University. The Sports Information Office.

Sam went on, filling the void. “Carmen Reynoso tracked me down. Remember her? It was her idea to come to South Bend.”

Sam was telling me something. Given the hour, I had to believe it was something important. Maybe because of how close I’d been to REM time when he phoned, I wasn’t getting it. Not quite.

“Yeah? How’s South Bend?”

“I’m not a big Notre Dame fan. I liked Indianapolis, though. I didn’t expect to, but I did.”

“I’m not a Notre Dame fan, either. It’s like the Yankees, I think. You either love the Irish or you hate ’em.” I was still drawing a blank. I wished I weren’t so tired. God, I was tired.

Sam said, “There’s a woman here that Carmen thinks we should go see.”

Carmen?Sam called her Carmen. That’s when I got it.

Carmen Reynoso knew what I knew about South Bend. My next line in the script? “I guess I’m wondering how Carmen heard about the woman in South Bend.”

“Tip from Crime Stoppers. A guy.”

“Anonymous?”

“You know how people are; they don’t like to get involved. Listen, I don’t need any details or anything, but-you know me-I’m curious whether you’ve had any conversations at work lately about any women in South Bend.”

“Turns out I have, Sam. Just yesterday, as a matter of fact, I had a conversation about a young woman who lives in South Bend. Can’t say any more, because of how I heard it, but yeah.”

“Any reason to believe she might be in some danger?” Sam asked.

“The woman in South Bend or the woman who told me about the woman in South Bend?”

Damn!I’d just exceeded the parameters of the game I was playing. I’d told Sam that I’d heard about South Bend from a woman. He could have guessed it on his own. He probably had, of course. That would have been okay. What wasn’t okay was that I’d told him.

“Either. Both,” he said. “Listen, you ever heard of a guy named Brian Miles?”

“Don’t think so. Why?”

“He’s some old friend of Sterling Storey’s. And it turns out his background is in microelectronics. Given your conundrum, that might be important.”

Yeah, it might be.“An awful lot depends on what really happened in that river in Georgia, doesn’t it?”

“The Ochlockonee,” Sam said. “Funny, but it’s gotten to the point where I like saying it. Och-lock-onee. Ochlockonee. You know it’s yellow? The river?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“It is. Anyway, I figure it about the same way you do. It’s all going to come down to Sterling and the Ochlockonee.” He paused. “How’s Lauren feeling? Any change?”

“Her leg’s a little better. The medicine’s making her nuts, though. Thanks for asking.”

“Tell her I’m thinking about her.”

“I will. Sam, it was Crime Stoppers, huh? That’s how you knew about South Bend?”

“Yeah.”

“Hard to trace, those Crime Stoppers calls?”

“We don’t trace them. Did I say it was a guy who called?”

“Yeah, you did. And you said that this Brian Miles guy is in microelectronics. I’m grateful.”

“Well, I hope it helps you with your puzzle.”

“The fact that it’s a guy cuts the number of suspects in half, roughly.”

“There you go. Process of elimination. Just like a real cop.”

Did I fall back to sleep right away? Hardly. I was consumed with thoughts of Gibbs and Sterling and St. Tropez and a balcony on Wilshire Boulevard and women in Augusta and Indianapolis and Laguna Beach and West Point and a guy named Brian Miles in microelectronics and mostly-mostly-Sterling saying “catch me.”

“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”

Maybe Sam would catch him after all.

Maybe in South Bend.

Maybe.

I listened to the mutedthwop-crackof the pool balls for a while and toyed with counting sheep.

Instead, recalling Diane’s admonishment, I conjured images of me jumping hurdles, and I numbered each one as it passed beneath my feet.