“I heard,” Crissy said. “I got up early to do yoga and turned on the radio. It was on the news. I’m just so relieved they caught them.”

Hub poured the coffee. “Janet was a nice girl,” he said, “even if she did get involved with Munz. Nobody deserves to die like she did. Her or my daughter.”

He stared out at the pool, pursing his lips. Crissy caressed his arm, said she’d be back from her run in forty-five minutes, and gave him a departing peck on the cheek. I waited until I heard the front door open and latch closed.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Hub.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Janet Bollinger was stabbed two days ago. Somebody drove onto the flight line at Montgomery Field that night and tinkered with the engine on my airplane. That’s why I crashed.”

“And you think I had something to do with that?”

I said nothing and watched him.

Walker began pacing angrily. “You got no right saying something like that to me in my own house. No right at all.”

“Did you go out that night, Hub?”

“I told you. I couldn’t sleep that night. I took a pill.”

He strode across the kitchen to a gumwood desk built into a small alcove and yanked opened a side drawer. Fearing he might be going for a weapon, I reached across the counter for a steak knife from a butcher block carving set — paranoia wasn’t a mental disorder among Alpha operators, it was a job requirement — when I realized that Walker wasn’t attempting to arm himself. He was reaching for his checkbook and a pen.

He scribbled out a check like he couldn’t do it fast enough, tore it off, and slapped it on the counter in front of me. The amount was $5,000.

“Time for you to hit the road, Mr. Logan.”

I brushed my teeth, gathered together my kit, and returned to the main house. I wanted to apologize to Hub for casting aspersions, but there was no one home. Walker, I assumed, had driven his granddaughter to school, and Crissy was not yet back from jogging. I jotted a note that said simply, “Blue skies — Logan,” placed it on the kitchen counter, and left through the front door, making sure it was locked behind me.

Across the street, Major Kilgore, U.S. Marine Corps retired, was hosing down a silver Lincoln Town Car sporting a bumper sticker that proclaimed global warming to be a hoax of the liberal left. He paused to watch me toss my duffel in the back of the Escalade.

“Your pal’s no hero,” Kilgore yelled. “He’s a jerk.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

I climbed in, cranked the ignition, turned to look over my shoulder, and began backing out of the Walkers’ long driveway. Kilgore slammed down his hose with the water still running and came storming toward the Escalade before I’d reached the street.

His eyes were like pinballs, bouncing around in their sockets. My sightline went instinctively to his hands, which appeared empty. But as we converged, he dug into the right front pocket of his Bermuda shorts. I had no intention of waiting to find out if he was packing or merely playing pocket pool. I cut the wheel sharply and drove off the driveway in reverse, onto the Walkers’ lawn, angling straight for him. He was a half-second from being flattened by 5,800 pounds of Motor City metal when I cut the wheel again, just missing him, as he leapt sideways to avoid being hit, like Superman jumping through a window.

I stood on the brakes, slammed the SUV into park and jumped out. Kilgore was lying on the grass, stunned and gasping but otherwise unscathed. In his right hand was a piece of paper he’d removed from his pocket.

“You could’ve killed me!”

“The operative word being could’ve.”

I tried to help him up, but the major would have none of it. He got to his feet, dusting himself off, livid. The paper in his hand was some story he’d snagged off the Internet detailing how Georgia’s Congressional delegation had expended no shortage of political juice to help get Hub Walker the Medal of Honor.

“They call him a hero,” Kilgore said, “but a real hero would never block his neighbor’s view with his goddamn trees!”

I assured the major that I would blast off letters straight away to the White House, the Pentagon, and, time permitting, the International Court in the Hague, supporting his assertion that Walker be stripped of his medal given such egregious violations of neighborhood decorum.

“Thanks,” Kilgore said, a bit surprised that I saw things his way.

“Don’t mention it.”

Hub Walker was right about one thing: his neighbor was crazier than a three-day weekend in Reno.

I called Mrs. Schmulowitz as I drove away. Her answering machine picked up. The message was unmistakably hers:

“You have reached the Schmulowitz residence. This call may be recorded or monitored for quality and training purposes. If you do not wish for this call to be monitored or recorded, then let this facacta machine — which has too many buttons and numbers that are too small for me to read them all — know that you do not wish to be recorded or monitored when you leave your message. Thank you for calling.”

Beep.

“Hello, Mrs. Schmulowitz, Cordell Logan here. I’m calling to find out how you’re doing after your surgery. Hope you’re doing great. Also, I’m wondering whether that cat who lets me live with him ever showed up. Please let me know if you get a chance. You have my number. Shalom.”

I found an ATM machine not far from the Taco Bell I’d visited the night before and deposited Walker’s check before he changed his mind and put a stop-payment on it. It took me three tries to punch in my PIN correctly. I was more tired than I realized.

The beach was two blocks away. I hooked a right past Hornblend Street, found abundant free parking outside a CVS pharmacy, secured the Escalade with the key chain remote, and was soon lying on soft, warm sand. The ocean was sapphire. I closed my eyes and tried not to think. All I wanted to do was sleep. And I did, for five minutes, until retired airline pilot Dutch Holland called.

“I lied to you,” he said. “I was running my mouth. I didn’t see anybody tinkering with your airplane. I can’t hardly see my hands in front of my face anymore. Macular degeneration. You got any idea what that feels like, knowing you’ll never fly again?”

“No, sir, I don’t. But I’m sure it’s not pleasant.”

“It was my pal, Al Demaerschalk. He was the one who saw your airplane that night. He can’t hear worth a hoot anymore but his eyes are still sharp. He told me what he saw and I told you like I’d seen it myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to feel like a big man. Been awhile since I was.”

Holland said he’d been sitting outside his hangar the night before the crash, just as he’d told me originally, only he’d left out the fact that Al had been there, too. It was around nine o’clock, Holland said, when Al noticed the pickup truck drive onto the tarmac. Somebody got out, opened the Ruptured Duck’s cowling, did something to the engine, got back in and drove off. Vehicles of all kinds come and go on the flight line at all hours. Neither man thought much about it until the next day, Dutch said, after my crash. And even then, he and Demaerschalk failed to make a connection between the crash and what they’d seen the night before until after I happened to meet them at lunch.

“I couldn’t tell you for sure,” Holland said, “but with those eyes of his, I wouldn’t be surprised if Al saw more’n he let on, even to me. Hard to say, though. He didn’t want to get into it. You can’t really have a conversation with him these days. He just can’t hear.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Dutch?”

“Al keeps a room with his son and daughter-in-law, over at their house in Point Loma. They’ve been talking about taking away his car before he hurts himself, and putting him in the home. So he’s been staying in my hangar with me. He didn’t want anybody to know where he was at.”