An Air Force jet went over with a sound like a long piece of canvas being ripped. Mike walked by me and gestured with his gun. I stepped over the broken glass on the porch and followed him inside, noticing that the warped chipped-paint door scraped across the floor when he pushed, leaving part-circle scratches where it dragged sharp bits of sand and glass across the concrete.

He backed in, holding the gun on me, looked around quickly and beckoned. The airless room was hot, thick with heavy body sweat. Mike, or somebody else, had spent some time in the place recently.

I said, “What happened to Aiello, Mike?”

“I think I’ll ask the questions. Come in here.”

I walked in. He made the mistake of letting me get too close, and I went for him.

I grabbed his wrist, got the left hand when he shot it up, and bore down hard. The gun was pointed at the ground and I held his right hand that way; I twisted, grinding the grip on both his wrists, forcing him to his knees. He wouldn’t let go. He made no sound; his breathing was quick and shallow, his eyes very large, his teeth grinding.

Abruptly I let go his left hand and batted across to the gun, wrenching it away. Curiously, he had removed his finger from the trigger, so it didn’t go off when I yanked. It wouldn’t have hit anything but the floor anyway; maybe he preferred to take a chance on me rather than run the risk of attracting attention with the noise.

He was on his knees, twisted down. I put my shoe in his chest and shoved. He went backward onto the stone floor. His head hit back with a blunt noise.

I reversed the gun in my grasp. The crack on the head hadn’t completely knocked him out but he was dazed, stunned; he would be limp and useless for a while. I peeled back one eyelid to make sure there was no concussion. He made little grunting noises with each breath.

There wasn’t much furniture—an old couch, a broken table, a lawn chair. An ancient refrigerator stood by one wall, its door crumpled and bent open on the hinges. I got him up and carried him over to the couch and put him down. There wouldn’t be any water in the place anyway; all I could do was make sure the skin wasn’t broken. Then I went back toward the door, where the air was better. I kept his gun in my fist.

From the open door I could hear only cactus wrens and robins and an occasional airplane; none of the city sounds reached this backwater neighborhood. For a moment faint voices reached me and I tensed before I realized what it was—the hippies we had passed, coming to me on the wind. I listened to their voices and guitars, soft-singing their cris de coeur of alienation in the heat, and turned to have another look at Mike. His eyes were closed; he breathed evenly. Haggard and sallow, he looked like a weak youth grown prematurely old. He was thirty, perhaps a bit older, but he appeared both younger and more ancient than that.

He would come around but it would take time. Jumpy and irritable, I felt his forehead and then settled down to wait in the lawn chair. Until I talked with him I wouldn’t know how this nightmare was going to end. It was possible all of us would be dead soon—Mike and Joanne and me. I sat watching him, remembering how this had begun, this morning, just a few hours ago.

The phone had rung. It had lifted me from a wallowing sleep; it rang three times before I shook off the fragments of a paranoid dream and groped for the receiver.

“Simon? Were you asleep?”

Shock of recognition: it was Joanne. Her voice, which I hadn’t heard in months, made me instantly defensive: “I still am.”

She spoke before I could get the phone away from my ear. “Please don’t hang up.” She sounded taut—agitated, close to the edge.

“What is it?”

I heard her breathing; after a moment, during which she seemed to pull herself together with an effort of will, she said, “No. You’re too groggy to listen. Wake yourself up—I’ll hold on.”

I grunted, put the receiver on the bed, got up and padded to the window. Slits of white light chiseled past the edges of the doubled Army blanket I used for a drape. I pulled it aside and blinked away the morning blaze that came in hard off the desert hills.

It took time before I could keep my eyes open without squinting. The blaze of lemon sunlight struck the window obliquely. Particles of mica and pyrites in the earth made the hills shimmer where they fell away toward the city, eight miles and two thousand feet below. The mountain-ringed city sprawled wide and flat, a pale checkerboard of shopping centers, cardboard houses, Laundromats, drive-in movies. The old quarter, Mexican adobe, was distinguished by heavy trees, green-gray in the distance. River and railroad sliced through on a bias, one pouring down from piney mountains to the northeast, the other rolling through from Texas to California.

It was a big town, dusty and low to the ground, and very, very hot. Two hundred thousand predigested people in three hundred square miles of standardized houses, cars, supermarkets and bowling alleys.

I blinked and stood grinding knuckles into my eye sockets, wishing I had never had a phone installed. The image through the window undulated in hazy waves, heat-smog over the city. Beyond, toward Texas and Mexico, the foothills were studded with dots of creosote, cactus, creek-bank cottonwoods; farther away the high ranges loomed, dark timber peaks slashed by faces of white rock that reflected the sun like fields of snow. The sky, dusty at the horizon, deepened into cobalt clarity overhead.

By the time I could look that high without squinting, I was awake. I turned back from the window.

The bed was rumpled from alcoholic sleep. I picked up the phone and glanced at the clock—it was almost nine. “Okay. Good morning.”

“That’s better. Are you all right, Simon?”

“Hung over some.”

Joanne said in her husky, practical voice, “I’d be flattered if I thought you were still tying one on because of me.”

Six months ago, I thought, she would have added a comma and “darling.” Now it was just a polite question, edged with remote concern and crowded by her obvious agitation. I had an image of her face, framed tight by short dark hair. Acidly resentful, I said, “I’m surprised they let you get near a phone. Where are you?”

“In a phone booth on Corral Drive. Simon, I have to see you—but now I think it would be better not to talk about it on the phone. Something’s happened at—at the place where I work.”

“I’m not having any, Joanne—I’m keeping out of it.”

“I don’t know if you can.” She did sound terribly subdued. “You may already be involved. Look, if it was just something personal—do you honestly think after what we went through last winter that I’d come running to you to hold my hand? Simon, if I could think of another soul on earth—God knows I don’t want to impose on you, but there just isn’t anyone else. I’m in trouble, I need help.”

“What is it, then?”

She said, almost in a whisper, “I’m shaking like a leaf.”

“Trouble with the organization?” I said stupidly.

“Trouble isn’t the word for it. Simon, you used to be a policeman, you’d know what to—”

“I told you,” I said dully, “I don’t intend to get within a mile of the cops or your boy friends, either one.”

“I can’t talk on the phone,” she said, sounding drained. “Please, Simon.”

I closed my eyes. “Suit yourself. I’ll be here.”

When she hung up I sat on the side of the bed with my eyes shut, pinching the bridge of my nose. After a stretch of time I batted into the bathroom to shower and shave and scrape thickness off my teeth. The face in the mirror was weathered more square than long, not remarkable. A textured face that took a dark tan and kept it; scarred and busted here and there because I was once a cop, subscribing to the idea of justice before realities had canceled my subscription.