Cole stared at the city as he thought it through.

“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to crime fiction-I get to work through my fears. Maybe I need you to reassure me.”

Cole didn’t look pleased.

“Like I’m what, some kind of hero?”

“People need heroes, bro. Always have and always will. Heroes give us the hope.”

Cole still didn’t look happy with me, like he knew I had dodged the hero question.

He said, “Life isn’t fair.”

“No, but I guess, down deep, I think it should be.”

Cole nodded.

“Me too. Gotta tell you, though, all this makes me uncomfortable. Like I have some standard to live up to.”

“Don’t freak out. Watching you live it through makes you worth writing about.”

He stared at the city again.

“Do people really think you look like me?” Cole asked.

“Ha.”

“You don’t look anything like me.”

“I kinda think I look like Pike.”

“Writers.”

“Have I answered your question? Let’s head back. Unlike one of us, I’m real. My legs are getting stiff.”

He frowned.

“You keep saying I’m fictional. Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m real and you’re the fiction?”

“It’s my name on the books.”

“Uh-huh. So if I’m just someone you imagined, and here you are talking to me, maybe you’re crazy.”

What can you say to something like that?

Cole said, “Maybe you’re a figment of my need to be chronicled. Maybe I’m writing books about a guy who writes books about a private investigator.”

“Who would write about a guy who spends all day typing? Talk about yawn.”

“You joke about me calling myself the World’s Greatest Detective. Maybe I’m not joking. Maybe I need to be famous so badly I’ve imagined there’s a guy writing books about me and that guy is you. Think about it.”

Cole will say things like this with a straight face.

I said, “Elvis Cole, Mentally Ill Detective?”

“I can’t believe people think you look like me.”

“Listen. Let’s start back. My legs.”

Los Angeles spread out before us in all directions as far as we could see. Down below, other hikers were coming up the trail. We made our way back through brush that was dry and brittle from the heat. I looked for Pike, thinking he might be watching us, but I did not see him.

Cole said, “You think I could have a few extra games this year?”

I knew it. He’s like that.

The sunglasses, twenty-four/seven. The empty, humorless expression. The sleeveless sweatshirt. The arrow tattoos that move him forward. The silence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Joe Pike.

I first saw Joe Pike at the Florida Drive-in Theater in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Would have been the late ’60s, one of those triple-bill nights southern drive-ins are famous for. Me, I would have been a kid, carted to the drive-in by my mom to get me out of the house, or maybe alone, having snuck across the marshy fields and cane reeds on foot to slip between the rows of cars. I remembered him years later when I was creating the characters and story that would become The Monkey’s Raincoat. Gunfighter eyes peered out of a face burned dark by the sun, so cold they went beyond cold into the empty void of deep space. The thin, humorless lips. Your worst nightmare if he paints you with his rattlesnake gaze. Clint Eastwood. A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A walking can of whup ass. I could have left it there, but I never leave well enough alone.

Mr. Eastwood, the God Priest of manliness back in the day, was not the flash-image inspiration for Joe Pike-he was what I imagined when I first imagined Elvis Cole. In those early days of thinking about Elvis, I envisioned Cole as the stereotypical loner, and those first notions were as clichéd as they come. Cole listened to moody jazz. He had an apartment in Hollywood with a window looking out at a neon sign. He smoked, liked cheap bourbon in a shot glass, and was big on smoking and sipping the bourbon as he watched the neon sign blink. Yawn. When I came to my senses a few days later, I dropped all that and created the character you know as Elvis Cole.

Even as I developed Cole (and the themes worth spending a year of my life writing about), I knew I wanted Cole to have a friend. Butch and Sundance. Batman and Robin. Lucky Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Thelma and Louise. Spenser and Hawk. Spade and Archer (even though Archer was dead). Before I wrote The Monkey’s Raincoat, I wrote a lot of television, and watched even more. Cagney & Lacey. Miami Vice with Crockett and Tubbs. These friendships had always inspired me (both as a reader and a writer). Cole was not going to be part of a formal organization like the police-I identified more closely with an outsider who did not have the power and authority that come with the badge-but I also had no interest in writing about a character who was so disaffected that he was empty of friends. Elvis Cole needed a friend. Note that I am using the word friend, not partner. The human stuff of friendship was-and is-important in all of this.

That image of the man with no name appeared, but that’s where it ended. The image reappeared but quickly changed. The narrowed eyes and sharp-cut jaw evolved within Elvis Cole’s house in the Hollywood hills and became something much more compelling. I was once aboard a ship in the South Pacific where the water was seventeen thousand feet deep. Water that deep grows dark as it swallows the light. It is bottomless. When you see a shadow move in that darkness, the hair will stand up on the back of your neck. You know all the way down in your DNA that something dangerous swims in those waters. I was drawn to it. Out there at sea, I leaned across the rail again and again, trying to see into the depths. I still do, only now the water is Pike.

For a piece like this, I find it easier to describe Elvis Cole than Joe Pike. Armchair psychologists will no doubt pipe up with the certain opinions that this is because I identify more with Cole or that he is my alter ego (he isn’t), but I think it is less a factor of identification than understanding. Pike is an iceberg, and I am trying to understand the parts of him beneath the water. Careless swimmers have disturbed the silt. The waters are murky, the shadows indistinct and shifting, the darkness increases as the water deepens, and Pike is a very deep presence.

Listen. I wanted the fun and kickass good time of this enigmatic character-the twitch is there for you to enjoy-but Pike and Cole were always more. My fiction is about underdogs. And because I want there to be justice in this world, underdogs must have heroes… or they must become heroes. In many ways, the more I thought about Elvis, and who he was, and how he came to be Elvis, the more I thought he might have taken another road that could have led him to become someone like Pike. Elvis has chosen to engage life; Pike, in many ways, has stepped outside it. Somewhere in his past, he became “other.”

Once upon a time for, I guess, advertising purposes, a publisher dubbed Joe Pike a “sociopath.” He isn’t. I once thought of Elvis and Joe as a kind of yin and yang, a view that has been echoed by more than a few readers and reviewers. They are not. Nor is Pike simply Elvis Cole’s assassin; a handy-dandy, guilty-pleasure author’s device for getting Cole out of the morally queasy side waters of dropping the hammer on bad guys without benefit of judge, jury, constitutional protections, or hand-wringing after-action remorse. Pike is Pike. Like Elvis Cole, he is an underdog who has turned himself into a hero.

My books are about self-creation. I’m big on that. You can either be the victim of your past or rise above it. Both Elvis and Joe have done just that, but having risen isn’t a done-deal, over-and-out, now-I-can-relax kind of thing. Having risen, you have to maintain, because that whole “rising” business, well, it’s an ongoing process.