Sheen’s phone rang with the opening bars to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” He glanced down at the number displayed on the phone as he drove, then put the call on speaker.

“Hello?”

“Where are you right now?”

“You don’t need to know that,” Sheen said.

“Look, I just got a frantic call from Frank Jervis’s wife. He’s at Scripps Memorial. They think he had a heart attack.”

I recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Sheen’s boss, Greg Castle.

“I dropped him off there,” Sheen said. “I was with him when it happened.”

“You should’ve called me, Ray.”

“I’m trying to minimize your exposure in all of this. I’m trying to protect you, Greg. Plausible deniability. The less you know, the better.”

“You’re right. I certainly appreciate your efforts, Ray.”

Castle indicated that his own wife was out of town with their children, visiting his in-laws outside Salt Lake City. He’d called Sheen, he said, hoping to get a lift to the hospital, to be with Jervis and his family.

“Take a cab.”

“I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do,” Castle said. “I just wish I could see well enough to drive myself at night.”

Greg Castle couldn’t see at night.

Someone else I’d recently met couldn’t see at night, I realized as I lay contorted in the backseat of Sheen’s clown-tiny car: Hub Walker’s granddaughter, Ryder. Congenital stationary night blindness. Isn’t that what Crissy Walker said Ryder had? I’m no geneticist, but I certainly knew what “congenital” meant — that the little girl had likely inherited the exceedingly rare condition genetically. If Greg Castle couldn’t see well enough to drive after dark, and Ryder Walker could barely see in the dark, what were the odds that the two could be anything other than related by blood?

In the final moments of his life Dorian Munz claimed that Castle had murdered Ruth Walker, or arranged to have her killed, after she’d refused to terminate her pregnancy, and before she could spill the beans about what she supposedly knew of Castle Robotics’ alleged financial improprieties. But hadn’t Castle voluntarily taken, and passed, a paternity test? And why, if his company was dirty, would he have agreed to open Castle Robotics’ books to an independent audit? My head pounded trying to figure it all out as Sheen continued driving east, toward that great dumping ground for dead bodies that is the Anza-Borrego Desert.

“I’ll call you,” he told Castle, “as soon as I’m done taking out the trash. Keep me posted on how Frank’s doing.”

“Just be careful, Ray.”

“Oh, it’s way past that,” Sheen said, and hung up.

At first I thought it was my imagination, but it wasn’t: the tape around my wrists was starting to loosen a little. I fought off the pain and kept twisting.

Sheen reached back and ripped the tape off my mouth.

“Tell me about the truck.”

“What truck?”

“You know what truck, Logan. The one registered to Lazarus. How did you find out?”

I bluffed.

“Actually, the cops did. They’re looking for you, Ray. You’re just making things worse for yourself. Turn yourself in and let’s call it a day.”

“You’re lying,” Sheen said. “If the cops knew about the truck, they would’ve already tried to contact me.”

I bluffed some more.

“They also know that C.W. Lazarus is an alias for Ray Sheen.”

Sheen smiled up at me in the mirror.

“Now I definitely know you’re lying.”

“Then who is he?”

Sheen said nothing, staring straight ahead as he drove, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching. I kept twisting and pulling at the tape.

“How much is Hub Walker involved in all of this?”

“Hub Walker is a has-been who has no idea how lucky he is to be with the lady he’s with. Crissy deserves better. She always wanted kids, but he didn’t. Said one for him was enough.”

“You got any bambinos, Ray?”

Sheen said nothing.

“Your boss has a passel of ’em.”

Stony silence. A few more tugs and my hands would be free.

“OK, maybe you can answer this one for me: how is it that Greg Castle and Ruth Walker’s daughter can’t see at night, but the paternity test showed Greg wasn’t her father?”

Maybe it was the way Sheen looked back at me in the rear-view mirror and smiled smugly, but that’s when I knew.

“You took the test for him. You passed yourself off as Castle.”

Sheen cut the wheel and exited the freeway. We turned south onto a two-lane highway, wending past an Indian gambling casino and, within minutes, through dark, desolate hills.

“The least you could do is tell me where you’re taking me to die.”

“I don’t owe you any explanations, Logan.”

The duct tape binding my wrists tore apart. I was good to go.

“OK, Ray, be that way.”

I sat up and rammed my elbow into his right ear, then nailed him with a knife-edged left to the right side of his neck — your basic judo chop.

The tiny car veered sideways, careened off the road and flipped over, coming to rest on its right side in a concrete drainage culvert. Only I was no longer occupying the backseat. I was sitting in a daze on the side of the road, about seventy-five feet behind the wreck, having been ejected through the MINI’s now-mangled convertible roof. That I was uninjured beyond some scrapes, a pain in my lower left leg, and a throbbing left thumb, was not what amazed me. It was the fact that my ankles were no longer bound. The force of the crash had apparently ripped the duct tape clean away, along with my left shoe.

A bee buzzed past my head. Then another, this one closer. In my stupor, it took me a half-second to remember that bees navigate by the sun. They rarely fly at night. Casually, I looked down the culvert at Sheen and realized those weren’t bees zipping past. They were bullets.

He was standing in a two-handed combat crouch beside his wrecked car, blasting at me with a .45 caliber pistol. Another round sparked off the pavement inches away.

I got up and hobbled for the cover of a copse of scrub oaks across the road, as Sheen climbed out of the culvert, firing at me on the run.

The Buddha teaches that all things in life are to be treasured no matter how mundane. This includes Saturday mail service, two-ply toilet paper, and, I came to realize as I fled, a matching pair of shoes. Outdistancing a gunman bent on killing you is no easy task with bleeding wrists, an aching lower leg, and a possible broken thumb; it’s even harder in inky darkness over rock-strewn ground, when all you’ve got protecting one foot is a crew sock from Costco. I vowed never again to take shoes for granted. Assuming I survived the night.

A bullet clipped a low-hanging branch to my right, followed a split-second later by the sharp report of Sheen’s pistol. Turning to face an onrushing enemy is often the most effective means of defeating him. But given my physical condition, discretion at that moment seemed the better part of valor. I zigzagged through the trees, angling upslope toward a dense forest of pines.

Another gunshot. This one thudded into the trunk of an oak just as I passed by it, stumbling uphill, gasping for breath. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I could see Sheen, a shapeless form in the darkness. He was less than fifty meters behind me.

“Save yourself the trouble, Logan!”

Three more shots ripped past.

The pines towered above me on the steeply rising slope. All I had to do was get there and I’d be home free. Find a place to hide and regroup. Hell, maybe I’d even fashion a makeshift wooden spear and go on the offensive.

Thirty meters.

My legs and lungs were on fire.

Twenty meters.

Exhausted and dizzy, I began crawling.

The tree line was now less than fifteen feet ahead, the pines looming sentries, beckoning safety. They could have just as easily been fifteen miles away for all the good they offered me. I was spent. Out of steam. Done.