He offered the packet to Milton. “It wasn’t,” he said, taking a cigarette and accepting Trip’s light. “At the very least, he’ll file a report that says that you came in tonight and said she was missing. Now, when you call them back tomorrow, they’ll have something to work with. And the clock will have started. I wouldn’t be surprised if they treat it more seriously then.”

“So what do I do now? How long do we have to wait before they’ll do something? Two days? Three days? What’s the right time before they accept that something is wrong?”

“If she’s not back in the morning I’d call again. I’d make a real nuisance of myself. You know what they say about the squeaky hinge?”

“No.”

“It gets the oil. You keep calling. Do that until ten or eleven. If it doesn’t work, and if she’s still not back by then, go back to the precinct and demand to see a detective. Don’t leave until you’ve seen one. Authority’s the same the world over: you give them enough of a headache, eventually they’ll listen to you even if it’s just to shut you up.”

“And until then? It’s not like I’m gonna be able to sleep.”

“There are some things you can do. Do you know anything about the agency she was working for?”

“No. She never said.”

“Never mind. Google all the Emergency rooms in a twenty mile radius. There’s one in Marin City, another in Sausalito, go as far north as San Rafael. That’s the first place to look. If something’s happened to her, if last night was some sort of episode or if she’s hurt herself somehow then that’s probably where she’ll be. And when you’ve tried those, try all the nearby police stations. Belvedere, Tiburon, the Sheriff’s Department at Marin. You never know. Someone might’ve said something.”

“Okay.”

“Does she have a laptop?”

“Sure.”

“There might be emails. Can you get into it?”

“I don’t know. There’ll be a password. I might be able to guess it.”

“Try. Whoever booked her is someone we’ll want to talk to. The police will get to it eventually, assuming they need to, but there’s nothing to stop us having a look first.”

He looked at him, confused. “Us?”

“Of course.”

“What — you’re going to help me?”

He was almost pitifully grateful.

“Of course I’m going to help.”

“But you don’t even know us. Why would you do that?”

“Let’s just say I like helping people and leave it at that, alright?”

His time in A.A. had taught him plenty of things. One of them was that it was important to make amends; recovering alcoholics considered that almost as important as staying away from the first drink. It wasn’t as easy for him to do that as it was for others. Most of the people that he would have had to make amends to were already dead, often because he had killed them. He had to make do with this. It wasn’t perfect, but it was still the best salve he had yet discovered for soothing his uneasy conscience.

7

Governor Joseph Jack Robinson II was a born talker. It was just what he did. Everyone had a talent: some men had a facility for numbers, some for making things, some for language; hell, others could swing a bat and send a ball screaming away to the fences. Governor Robinson was a speaker and Arlen Crawford had known it within five seconds of hearing him for the first time. That was why he had given up what could have been very a profitable career in law, turned down the offer of a partnership and the millions of dollars he would have been able to make. He had postponed the chance to take an early retirement and the house on the coast he and his wife had always hankered after. The Governor’s gift was why he had given all that up and thrown in his lot with him. That was back then, two years ago, back when Robinson was governor, just starting out on this phase of his political career, but he had never regretted his decision, not even for a second. It could have gone wrong, a spectacular flame-out that took everyone and everything around him down too. But it hadn’t, and now J.J.’s star was in the ascendant, climbing into the heavens, streaking across the sky.

Arlen Crawford had seen nothing to make him think that he had misjudged him.

He took his usual place at the back of the room and waited for the Governor to do his thing. There had been plenty of similar rooms over the course of the last few months all the way across the country from the Midwest to the coast of the Pacific: school gymnasia, town halls, factory dining rooms, warehouses, anywhere where you could put a few hundred seats and fill them with enthusiastic voters who were prepared to come and listen to what the candidate had to say. It was like that today: they were in the gymnasium where the Woodside Cougars shot hoops, a polished floor that squeaked when he turned his shoe on it, a banked row of seats where moms and pops and alumni and backers of the school would gather to cheer on the kids, a scoreboard at one end that said COUGARS and AWAY, the neon numerals set to zero. A lectern had been placed against the wall that faced the bleachers with enough space for six rows of folded chairs to be arranged between the two. A poster that they had fixed to the lectern said AMERICA FIRST. A larger banner that they had fixed to the wall behind it read ROBINSON FOR PRESIDENT. The room was full: Crawford guessed there were five hundred people inside. There were a few curious students, not Robinson’s normal constituency, but Crawford had insisted: it made him look more hip, helped in his campaign to broaden his appeal to a younger audience. He knew, too, that the Governor was occasionally prone to phoning it in if the room was too friendly; it did him no harm at all to think that there was the possibility of awkward questions in the Q&A that would follow his speech. The rest of the audience were naturally right-leaning voters from the area, all of them given a little vim and vigour by the dozen or so backers that the campaign brought with them on the bus. They were doing their thing now, hooting and hollering as they watched a video of the Governor’s achievements as it played on the large video screen that had been fixed to the wall.

The video ended and Robinson walked through a storm of applause to the lectern.

“Thank you, Woodside. Thank you so much. The sign over there that says, “Thank you, Joe,” no, I thank you. You are what keeps me going, keeps so many of us going. Your love of country keeps us going. Thank you so much. Woodside, you are good people. You are all good people. Thank you.”

Crawford looked around the room: five hundred avid faces, hanging on every word.

“So, what brought us here today? Why aren’t we catching a game, the 49ers or the Raiders, grilling up some venison and corn-on-the-cob, maybe some steak with some friends on this Labor Day weekend? What brought us together is a love of our country, isn’t it? Because America is hurting. You know it. I know it. We all know it. And we’re not willing to just sit back and watch the demise of the greatest country on Earth. We’re here to stop that demise and to begin the restoration of the country that we love. We’re here because America faces a crisis and this crisis will rage until we restore all that is free and good and right about America. It’s not just fear of another recession. It’s not the shame of a credit downgrade for the first time in U.S. history. It’s deeper than that. More fundamental. This is a crisis due to failed policies and incompetent leadership. That may be hard to admit but we can’t afford to be polite. We’re going to speak truth today because we need to start talking about what hasn’t worked, and we’re going to start talking about what will work for America.”

Robinson stopped. He waited. One of the women in the audience called out, “We’re listening!”

He grinned. “Some of us saw this day coming. I delivered the same message when I gave my acceptance speech after I was re-elected as Governor. And in my speech I asked: ‘When the dust has settled and when the great speeches have been forgotten … what exactly is the President’s plan?’ His answer has been to make government bigger, to take more of your money and to reduce the strength of America’s military in a dangerous world. I warned against that back then, you’ll remember it, but not as many people were listening to me then as are listening today. So I’m going to repeat that message, and I’m going to say it as loud as I can: the President is destroying our country. You’ve seen the proof yourself. He rode in on a cloud of hope and rhetoric and he didn’t have a record, but, my goodness, he has a record now. We know what he promised. He promised a lot of things. He promised to transform America and, for all the failures and the broken promises, that’s the one thing he has delivered on, and I wish that he hadn’t. He has transformed us from a country of hope to one of anxiety and fear. People are poorer now than they were before. Some are on food stamps. Unemployment is up. Mortgages are underwater. Some places are suffering worse than they did in the Great Depression. The President promised to get rid of the deficit but instead he tripled it. You know that our national debt is growing at $3 million a minute? That’s $4.3 billion a day. Mr. President, I’m here to tell you that this will not stand. The American people will not stand for this any longer. You told us it was all about change, and it is. I’m going to bring real change. Lasting change. With the support of all these good people, I pledge to turn this country around and restore all that is good about it once again. We can make America better. We will make America better.”