"Any idea where we're going?" Timmy said.

"I think so. I hate to think it, but I think so. Is the camera ready?"

"Don't tell me then. Yeah, I'm set."

Just after four the last customers straggled out of Trucky's, across the road from where we waited. We could see the fluorescent lights go on inside.

At four-twenty Mike Truckman came out in a black peacoat and knit cap and lowered himself into his dark green Volvo. He pulled out of the parking lot and turned right onto Western, away from Albany. We followed.

We stayed a hundred yards behind the Volvo, which, with a drunk at the wheel, was moving slowly down the far right lane, sometimes edging onto the shoulder and then back onto the road again. There were few cars out at that hour—an airport limo, a bakery delivery truck, a couple of others—and we had no trouble staying with the weaving Volvo's taillights.

After a mile we passed the darkened Rat's Nest. Truckman drove on, keeping well within the forty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. We passed chain motels and donut shops and fast-food joints. I accelerated slightly, so that by the time Truckman pulled off the road, we were just fifty yards behind him. I could see clearly that he'd turned into the parking lot of the Bergenfield police station.

I drove on by and pulled in on the far side of a "flavored dairy product" stand that was shut down for the season. We got out and walked through the weeds and debris behind the icecream stand. The Leica was strung around Timmy's neck, and I went first, feeling my way through the rubbish and dead vegetation. We passed the rear of a wholesale tire outlet and came within view of the police station, a small box of a building with gray corrugated plastic sides, a flat roof, and a pretty white sign in a "colonial" motif that said Police Headquarters— Bergenfield, N.Y.

We crouched behind a pile of tires. Sixty feet away, in a pool of light outside the police station's rear door, Mike Truckman was standing alongside his Volvo gesturing animatedly and shaking his head at the two men who stood facing him. From my encounter with them six hours earlier, I recognized the Bergenfield chief of police and the clown in the windbreaker who had frisked me and spoken rudely. Timmy eased out from behind the tires, adjusted his telephoto lens and light setting, and repeatedly snapped the shutter of the camera.

I whispered, "How's the light?"

"Good enough," Timmy said.

Still shaking his head, Truckman slid something from his jacket pocket and handed it to the chief, who held the thing in one hand and flipped through it with the other. Timmy got that, too. The chief counted out several bills and handed them to the guy in the windbreaker.

Truckman was saying something else, and now the chief was shaking his head. After a moment the police chief opened up his coat, and Truckman frisked him. The cop buttoned up his coat. The plainclothesman was next. Then Truckman nodded. Okay. No wire.

Truckman climbed back into his car and started the engine. We crouched low behind the tires as his headlights arced above us. He passed us and turned. I raised my head and saw the Volvo move back down Western toward Albany.

A second car engine came to life, and we saw the chief's unmarked Ford pull onto the highway and head west, away from the city. After a moment the third car, a silver-gray Trans-Am with black stripes, roared onto the avenue and sped off.

We walked back to the Rabbit under the cold stars and drove into town.

Timmy said, "I may throw up."

I said, "I can relate to that."

"Okay," he said, "but what's Eddie-Frank Zimka got to do with it? Or Blount? Or Kleckner?"

I said, "I'm not sure yet. Maybe I'll know tomorrow, in Denver."

19

The red and orange continental 727 from o'hare climbed out of the rusty haze over the Chicago suburbs and banked west. The tourist section was only half-filled; I had three seats to myself and did not have to sit like a mannequin in storage. The cheap seats in the four or five back rows were thigh-to-thigh with students and families on no-frill tickets, and when I walked past them en route to the lavatory they peered up at me like kittens in a box.

Chicken in brown jelly over Iowa, watery coffee across Nebraska, then southwest over the faded autumn fields and foothills until the Rockies loomed up off the right wing like Afghanistan.

By two-fifteen I had my bag in hand, had rented a Bobcat, and was in the car studying a map of greater Denver. I wanted York Street, in what the car-rental clerk had called the Capital Hill District, "the part of town where the city people live." That sounded right.

I drove west into the city on Colfax Avenue, found its intersection with York Street, then doubled back up Colfax and checked into a motel four blocks away. I phoned Timmy at his office in Albany and gave him the name and phone number of the motel. I put on my jogging gear, consulted my city map again, and headed back towards York. Denver, Timmy had told

me, was noted for its high, thin, filthy air. But on that day Denver was warm and odorless, and the mountains looked clean and serene off beyond the city skyline with its State Capital cupola and slab office towers a mile west of where I trotted along the sidewalk.

I turned up York, which was lined mainly with closely spaced, bulky old brick houses and, here and there, set close to the cottonwood-lined street, a newer three- or four-story apartment building of the California-nondescript style. The address for Kurt Zinsser was on a red brick Victorian manse with turrets and curved windows. I walked up the front steps and checked the big front door, which was locked. There were six mailboxes and buzzers, and I pressed the button under Zinsser's name. No response. I rang again. Nothing.

I jogged on up York, checking the parked cars along my route for Wyoming tags with a rental-car code. I saw none.

I cut right, then left up another street, and soon arrived at Cheesman Park, the big municipal swath of green I'd seen on my map. The still-fresh lawns sloped gradually down for a couple of blocks from where I stood, away from a granite neoclassical pavilion, from whose steps I had a dazzling view of the western sections of the city and the mountains beyond.

I rested for a while. I remarked on the weather to a chunky, sloe-eyed young Chicano, who walked me to his apartment, back toward York Street, and we had a Coors. He answered my questions about gay life in Denver—I wrote down the names of bars and organizations—and I told him about Albany. Our stories were similar, except homosexual Denver was much more populous, the gay mecca for all the Sneeds Pond boys from most of the plains states and half the Rockies. Boomtown.

In bed I became short of breath, and Luis said it was the altitude—it took a week or two to adjust. My inclination was to look for a calendar, but I didn't.

He said he hoped we'd run into each other again, and I said truthfully that I hoped so too but that it was unlikely, inasmuch as I'd be returning to Albany in a day or two. I gave him my Albany address, "in case you ever," etc. We kissed goodbye, and I jogged—ambled—back over to York Street.

I tried Zinsser's buzzer again, and again there was no

answer. It was five-fifteen. I walked back to the motel and took a nap, after asking for a wake-up call at eight.

I halved my exercise routine, showered, dressed, dined at Wendy's, walked back to the motel, looked up Kurt Zinsser's number in my notebook, and dialed it.

"Hello?" Chris Porterfield.

"Hi—Don Strachey. I'm in Cheyenne. How long does it take to drive down there—two hours, three?"