It was too late to call Savannah and too early to turn in the Escalade. I’d do both come morning.

Mission Boulevard was dotted with budget motels, the kind with towels you can see through and walls so thin you can listen to the porn flicks the guests next door are renting. Tired as I was, I would’ve settled for a room in any one of them, but every vacancy sign was preceded by an illuminated neon “No.” I pulled into a sparsely occupied parking lot a block from the beach off of Reed Avenue, behind a sign that said, “The Beach Cottages, Day Week Month.” There was another, smaller sign below it that said, “Tenants Only. No Overnight Parking. Violators Will Be Towed.” I rolled up the windows, leaned my seat all the way back, and dozed off.

I was dreaming about machine guns when I was awakened by a loud banging sound. The sun was up. A pudgy San Diego police officer was looking down at me, rapping on the glass with his baton. I raised my seat back and rolled down the window.

“Top of the morning, Constable.”

He was Latino, young, squared away. “Did you not see that sign?”

“What sign would that be?”

“The one that says no overnight parking,” he said, pointing.

“I did.”

“And you parked here anyway?”

“It was late. There was no room at the inn. I just needed somewhere to catch a couple hours of rack time. I’m out of here right now, if that works for you.”

I’m pretty sure it had been awhile since he’d had to roust any scofflaws camped out in $70,000 SUVs.

“Just don’t let me catch you overnight here again.”

“Roger that.”

I watched him walk back to his patrol car.

It was 6:20 A.M. My phone rang. The man on the other end spoke with an impenetrable Indian accent. He said his name was “Khan,” then repeated it when I said, “Who?”

“Jahangir Khan. Your student.”

Not merely my student. My only student.

“Jahangir. Of course. How could I forget? What’s shaking, buddy?”

He apologized for calling so early, but said he was anxious to know when I would be returning to Rancho Bonita so he could resume his flight training.

“As you are no doubt remembering, Mr. Cordell, I am keenly interested in obtaining my official pilot’s license certificate because you see, sir, it is of the utmost interest to me that I—”

“—I get it, Jahangir,” I said, cutting him off before he got really cranked up. “I’ll be back this week. I’ll call you. We’ll get it going, OK?”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Cordell, thank you. You are a most kind and generous man — and, might I say, a fine pilot. If I could one day be only half as skilled as you are, sir, I will regard myself as a lucky man. You know, in the city where I am from, very few people will ever know the joy of flight, being in the air, above the teeming masses, and I—”

It was way too early in the morning to be that enthusiastic about anything, including flying.

“You’re breaking up, Jahangir,” I said, running the phone up and down my beard. “I’ll call as soon as I get back. You take care now, buddy. Talk soon. Peace out.”

I rubbed my eyes, yawned and stretched. Almost immediately, my phone rang again.

“I didn’t have much to do last night after you left,” Alicia Rosario said, “so I started reading up on your friend, Hub Walker.” Her tone was all business, tinged with the bitterness of a good woman scorned. “He carried a German Luger pistol in Vietnam.”

“His father fought in World War I. He inherited the pistol from him.”

“The Luger’s not exactly standard U.S. military issue.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Walker, by chance, hasn’t shown you the pistol, has he?”

“What reason would he have had to do that?”

I waited for Rosario to respond. She sneezed.

“Gesundheit.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Must’ve caught a bug from somebody last night.”

I let the slap pass. “Why the interest in Walker’s Luger?”

“One of our forensics people recovered a spent 9-millimeter round last night from the Sheen homicide scene,” Rosario said. “I just got a call from the lab. They think they matched the make and model of the weapon.”

“Was it a Luger?”

“How’d you guess?”

No county sheriff with career ambitions would ever rush right out and throw handcuffs on a Medal of Honor recipient suspected of homicide without careful tactical planning, especially in a military town like San Diego. You don’t simply cordon off the neighborhood, break out the bullhorn, and demand that the suspect surrender or else. You set about your work quietly and unobtrusively, hoping not to alert the breathless bobbleheads over at Action News, because if things go sour, you’ll never be elected sheriff again. Or anything else.

Detective Rosario’s plan, which her chain of command apparently had approved, was that I go in first. She was certain that Hub Walker trusted me by virtue of having saved his granddaughter from drowning, and by my having guided him to a safe landing on that fogged-in approach to the Rancho Bonita airport, when his airplane was running low on fuel. I could talk some sense into him, Rosario reasoned, and persuade him to surrender peaceably. He would have fifteen minutes to ponder his options before the SWAT team took over and took him by force. First, though, I’d have to sign a waiver absolving San Diego County of any liability in the event rounds start flying and I caught one or more of them.

Arresting a legitimate war hero for murder, discreetly or otherwise, had national news story written all over it. As soon as the story leaked, the military bashers would use it to perpetuate the myth that every veteran who sees combat comes home messed up in the head. Some do, but certainly not all. How much of Walker’s alleged bloodlust, if any, was influenced by his exploits in Vietnam forty years earlier was unknown. I’d once idolized the man. Now, I didn’t know what to think of him. The knot in my stomach was the size of a grenade.

“You do have health insurance, correct?” Rosario asked me as I waited in the backseat of her unmarked unit, two sun-splashed blocks up the street from Hub Walker’s house.

“I’m covered by the VA.”

“Good luck with that,” Rosario’s partner, Lawless, said derisively from the front passenger seat. He yawned, heavy-lidded, like he’d been up all night.

I asked if his wife had given birth yet.

“None of your business, Logan.”

“And on that cheery note…”

I opened the door and stepped out.

“Just be careful,” Rosario said like she meant it.

“Always.”

Two black Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows hunkered on the opposite side of the street, facing in the direction of Hub and Crissy’s house — the SWAT team ready to roll in should my efforts to diffuse the situation prove unsuccessful.

Just don’t leave me hanging, boys.

The well-heeled residents of La Jolla tended their bug-resistant roses. They walked their little yapper dogs. They pulled out of their driveways in their fine, impeccably detailed Beemers and Benzes. No one said a word to me or looked my way as I strolled toward the home of their celebrated neighbor, a suspected murderer — no one except Major Kilgore, who watched me through parted blinds as I passed by his house, then crossed the street. I flashed him a peace sign. Kilgore just stared.

The brass knocker on the Walkers’ towering front door echoed like gunshots.

“Who is it?” Crissy called from inside after a few seconds.

“Logan.”

Locks were unlocked. The door cracked open. Crissy smiled at me as though relieved. She was wrapped in a Japanese print kimono, red, her hair up.

“You scared me. With all this stuff going on around here, you can’t be too careful, you know?”