Olivia said, “I usually go for a walk on the beach before dinner.”

“Sounds good.”

It was nearly sunset. The afternoon heat radiated up from the sidewalk. I stayed between Olivia and the street and kept my eyes moving constantly to observe a regular pattern around our parameter. The M11 was ready beneath the loose shirt tail at my hip.

She said, “If they see you with me, they won’t try anything.”

“Be fools if they did.”

“But we need them to come forward. How else are we going to find my mother and clear you of those charges?”

“I’m not letting you walk around out here alone.”

“Of course not. But maybe if you followed from across the street, they wouldn’t notice.”

“Olivia, these guys are very well trained. They could snatch you in five seconds, maximum. I might not be able to get to you until it’s too late.”

She put her hand on my arm for a moment. “You’d get to me. Please, just go across the street and be inconspicuous.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

“It’s not your decision.”

She was right. In the personal-security business, you tried to stay as close as the client would allow, but ultimately the safety level was up to the client.

I crossed the street and fell back about fifty feet. Olivia traversed the neighborhood to South Venice Boulevard, and then followed that over the canal bridge and across Pacific Avenue and Speedway. At the beach walk, she went right toward the pavilion. I hung back as far as I dared.

As always, all the Venice Beach stereotypes were on full display: kids with multicolored spiked hair, every form of piercing and tattoo imaginable, guys holding hands with each other, girls who looked like guys holding hands with each other, bodybuilders pumping iron on Muscle Beach, kids whipping past on skateboards, guys playing pickup games on the basketball courts, girls in next-to-nothing string bikinis playing volleyball, girls in next-to-nothing string bikinis gliding along on Rollerblades, and homeless people bundled up in everything they owned, as if it were ten degrees below freezing.

Black clouds towered above the Pacific, stretched across the horizon like a massive wall and moving our way.

I tried to figure out why a classy girl like Olivia would choose that kind of neighborhood. Then I remembered where she had grown up. There were a lot of similarities. Venice Beach was not what most people would consider upscale. Except for the blocks closest to the ocean, it had a blue-collar quality. Maybe Olivia felt comfortably at home there, as if she were back in Pico-Union, except with a beach and without the gang violence. Plus, of course it was only fifteen or twenty minutes from Beverly Hills, depending on the traffic, so that was convenient. And I had to admit, strange as they were, the people in her neighborhood kept things interesting.

Olivia turned inland at the pavilion, followed Windward past Pacific Avenue and the little roundabout, took Grand up to Dell, and then cut across the canals. Nothing suspicious happened whatsoever, but the looming clouds had reached the shore by the time we arrived back at her apartment. Darkness fell upon us suddenly.

I paused at the gate outside her front courtyard. “You should get the remote lock fixed on this thing,” I said.

She said, “I told the landlord that a month ago.”

Inside her place, we sat around in her living room for a while, listening to the rising wind, reading magazines, and drinking a nice merlot. At about eight o’clock, she went into her kitchen to make dinner. Meanwhile, I walked around her apartment, checking locks on windows, closing drapes, and trying to memorize everything in case it was pitch-black the next time I was there.

Dinner was a stir-fried beef lo mein, with egg drop soup. It was some of the best I’d ever had. As we sat down to eat, I said, “So, you’re also a chef. Is there anything you can’t do?”

She smiled. “There’s not a lot of difference between cooking and working on a car or writing computer code. It’s all about learning how things fit together.”

“You make it sound like there’s no art involved.”

“Do I? It’s hard for me to tell the difference between art and craftsmanship, I guess.”

“Doesn’t instinct come into it? Something indefinable, beyond just doing it by the numbers?”

“You’re the artist, Malcolm. You tell me. All I know is I don’t have much trust in instincts. What if the things we believe are really only things we hope? How would we know unless they can be measured or tested or proven somehow?”

My own vast emptiness came to mind, the random chaos that sometimes seemed to swirl around me, when even my most cherished memories betrayed me, unconnected ideas coming from all directions and trailing away again before I understood them, everything I tried to cling to vanishing through my fingers. I thought about trying to pass my broken fingers through a wall, while Haley ran screaming out into midair.

I said, “You have to have to have some kind of solid ground to stand on. Something that isn’t open for debate. If that ever disappears, there’s nothing left but madness.”

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

“But I also think if you go through life requiring that of everything, you’ll miss what’s most important.”

“Like what?”

“Friendship. Compassion. Forgiveness. Pretty much everything that has to do with relationships. How are you going to measure things like that? You can’t demand that they be proven or tested, because they start to disappear the minute you try to measure them or compare them to some standard.”

She stared at me. “What does that mean?”

I shrugged. “Life is hard to understand. Bigger than we are. Sometimes I think it was made that way on purpose. Sometimes I think it’s better to just assume the best. If you insist that everything has to make sense, that can make you crazy too.”

“You’re talking about faith.”

It seemed I had returned to what Bud Tanner had said to me. It seemed ironic that I was standing there saying something similar to her. But it also seemed true.

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess I am.”

“Well, I don’t have any faith.”

“Everything you decide to believe based on incomplete evidence is a leap of faith, even if you’ve decided not to believe.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“To me it does,” I said, “because it has to.”

After we had cleaned the dishes, she said she wanted me to sleep inside the apartment. I wanted to stop Medallion and the Other One before they could get inside, so I told her it was better if I kept watch from the street. I warned her not to answer the intercom at the front gate or a knock on her front door unless she knew for certain it was me outside.

She said, “I won’t.”

“This is very serious. No matter what they say, just don’t respond. Not to the intercom or through the door. Not even if they claim they’re the police. No matter who they say they are, just stay away from the door and call me. I’ll come fast. Just stay in here and wait.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Good. Promise you’ll pretend you aren’t even here unless you hear my voice and nobody else’s.”

“I promise.”

I went out, backed the Bentley out of her driveway, and parked at the curb about one hundred feet down the street. It was drizzling a little. From time to time, I let the windshield wipers clear my line of sight to Olivia’s apartment. On the radio, they were issuing mudslide warnings in the mountains. Apparently it was raining hard up where Haley died. I tried hard not to think about it. Mostly I succeeded.

At fifteen minutes after midnight, a small car rolled to a stop behind me and turned off its headlights. I saw two heads in silhouette, one behind the wheel and the other in the passenger seat. I pulled the M11 out of my holster, slipped the safety off, and held the gun in my lap. I waited for them to make a move.