“What’s the story with the hat?” Shumpeter asked.

“Tyrolean,” Billy said.

“I was a Shriner for years, but a Shriner doesn’t wear his fez except at club functions.”

“I’m on my way to a club meeting from here,” Billy said.

“Never heard of the Tyroleans.”

“We’re relatively new. We’re a social club, but we want to make a difference, too. We’re going to find a cure for prostate cancer.”

“Tofu,” said Shumpeter. “Eat tofu three times a week, you’ll never get prostate cancer.”

“The guys will be sorry to hear that. We’ll have to find another disease. Sir, I gotta say this is a lovely home. Fantastic kitchen.”

“I’m selling the place. It was too big for the two of us, but she just had to have it, now it’s damned sure too big for just me.”

“And it must be hard, alone with all the memories.”

“Not going to use a damn real-estate agent, either. They take six percent, and all you get for it is bullshit.”

Billy followed Shumpeter through a laundry room-where the widower snared a set of keys from a pegboard-and then into the garage. A new Mercedes stood beside the year-old Cadillac.

Registering Billy’s surprise, Shumpeter said, “There was life insurance. The damn IRS doesn’t get a cut of life insurance.”

Nodding his head at the Cadillac, Billy said, “It looks sweet.”

“Full disclosure. She died in it. Massive stroke, gone in two minutes.”

“That doesn’t spook me, Mr. Shumpeter.”

“She didn’t lose control of her bowels or bladder, nothing like that, so it’s not a reason to bargain.”

“I don’t want to bargain. Not me. This is just what I’m looking for.”

Shumpeter smiled, and his face didn’t crack. “Organ broker, you said, Mr. Hoover. Is that like pianos, organs?”

“No, sir. It’s like kidneys, livers, lungs.”

“Oh. You’re a doctor.”

“No, just a middleman. But in our aging population, it’s a fast-growing business. You yourself are going to need a heart.”

Shumpeter’s eyes widened. “On what evidence did you come up with that diagnosis?” He thumped his chest. “I’m sixty, but I’ve been a vegetarian for forty years, zero animal fat in the diet, rock-bottom cholesterol.”

“Well, being an organ broker, I can tell you with authority, statistics show that vegetarians commit suicide at a higher rate than meat eaters.”

Shumpeter glowered. “I read that, too, and they say we’re more often victims of homicide than meat eaters. That’s bullshit. It’s the meat industry buying phony research, nothing but propaganda.” He fisted his hands and puffed out his chest to proclaim his fitness. “When that Cadillac is ready for the junk pile, I’ll still be pleasing the ladies.”

“I don’t know about that,” Billy said, “but I’m sure this would have pleased your wife.” He drew the pistol with the sound suppressor and shot Shumpeter through the heart.

He dragged the corpse around to the front of the Mercedes, where it couldn’t be seen from the street, picked up the car keys that had fallen from the dead man’s hand to the floor, and opened the garage door.

After he backed the Cadillac down the driveway and parked it at the curb, he drove the Land Rover into the garage. He closed the big door in case a pedophile wandered by and saw what he was doing.

He opened the four doors of the Land Rover to vent the initial explosion.

The only thing that he took from the Rover was the white plastic trash bag. It contained everything Vernon Lesley had gathered at the woman’s bungalow earlier in the day, as well as the ID for Lesley, Onions, and Georgie Jobbs.

He left the house by the front door, walked out to the street, and got behind the wheel of the Cadillac. He put the bag on the floor, in front of the passenger seat.

At the end of the block, he turned right, then right again at the next intersection. On the street parallel to Shumpeter’s street, and behind his property, Billy parked at the curb in front of two houses where other American families were preoccupied with their own joys and problems.

He took off the Tyrolean hat and the horn-rimmed glasses. He pocketed the clip-on gold dental cap. Good-bye Dwayne Hoover.

He got out of the Cadillac, stood on the sidewalk, and withdrew a remote control from his jacket pocket.

Between these two handsome houses, he could see the roof of the Shumpeter residence on the next street to the west. He pointed the remote control, which had plenty of range for the job, pressed the button, and heard the soft whump of the initial detonation.

The two suitcases supplied to him by Georgie Jobbs, which he had stored on the floor behind the front seats of the Rover, contained a small initial explosive charge for the purpose of ignition, but held mostly bricks of a ferociously incendiary substance developed by the weaponry wizards of the former Soviet Union, who were currently the weaponry wizards of the new Russia.

Behind the wheel of the Cadillac again, Billy Pilgrim watched the dark roof of the Shumpeter house on the parallel street.

His intention was not to blow up the Land Rover and all of the evidence in it. Rather, he intended to burn everything to ashes and slag: the brains from the two detectives’ computers, their files and appointment calendars, and Georgie’s corpse.

The incendiary material would produce temperatures as high as 42,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which was less than half as hot as the surface of the sun, not hot at all compared to the eighteen million degrees at the core of the sun. Nevertheless, it would be hot enough and sustained long enough virtually to vaporize everything in the Rover and to reduce the vehicle itself to molten steel from which the make, model, and owner could never be identified.

Of Georgie Jobbs, nothing whatsoever would remain, not even a bone fragment, nothing except Billy’s fond memories of him.

On the next street, the night brightened. The first flames broke through the garage roof. They were white with blue edges.

Billy drove out of that neighborhood. The situation there would shortly be untenable.

When Amy Redwing went missing or subsequently turned up dead, nothing in her house would remain to connect her to her previous life; consequently, the authorities would have no reason to suspect Billy’s boss of her murder.

Vernon Lesley, who had searched Redwing’s house, was dead, and the man whom he had hired for backup, Bobby Onions, was dead, and the man who cleaned out their offices of any possible reference to Redwing was also dead, and all those items from their offices would shortly be smoke and fumes and soot.

If the fire department failed to arrive quickly, houses flanking the Shumpeter residence would either be set afire by traveling flames or, possibly, would be ignited solely by the intense heat of the pyre next door.

In Billy’s experience, a truly thorough job usually required some collateral damage.

He drove toward Newport Beach. Although hungry, Billy could wait for dinner until he had done one more job here in Orange County and then had driven to Santa Barbara.

He and Gunther Schloss, who had shot Lesley and Onions, would have a late dinner together, whereafter Billy would kill him. When Gunny was dead, the next to the last connection between Redwing and Billy’s boss would have been erased.

The last connection was Billy. This fact had not been lost on him. He had given it much hard thought.

In Santa Barbara, he had booked a luxurious hotel suite in the name of Tyrone Slothrop, a pseudonym that he had not used previously, that he had been saving for a special occasion.

Billy liked extreme luxury and especially enjoyed over-the-top hotels that provided amenities so extravagant that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, given a chance to experience such establishments, would have been embarrassed by the comparative grubbiness of their life at the palace.