“No kidding.”

“You gonna keep looking for the kid?”

I shrugged because I didn’t know now if I wanted to or not.

We sat there staring for a few minutes at the bouquet of purples and yellows in the sky at the far edge of the water. The crowd on the boardwalk was slowly dissipating as the evening trudged in.

“You wanna go out?” Carter asked, gesturing at the water. “Decent swells should be here soon.”

I closed my eyes. “Nah.”

We sat there again quietly for a few moments.

“You saw her, didn’t you?” he said finally.

“Saw who?”

“The Virgin Mary. Who the hell do you think I mean? Liz.”

I didn’t say anything. Of all the annoying things about Carter, perhaps the one that bugged me the most was his ability to read me like an eye chart.

“Did you talk to her?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t feel like it.”

“Right.”

The truth was I didn’t know why I hadn’t just gone over to talk to Liz. Maybe it was because I was afraid of what she’d say to me. Not talking to her had become weirdly comfortable and I wasn’t sure I was ready to give that up.

Carter stood, yanked off his tank top, and grabbed the eight-foot G&S surfboard next to the sliding door. He tucked it under his arm and stepped over the small stone wall onto the boardwalk.

He turned around. “You know I can’t stand her, dude. I really can’t. It would be fine with me if I never saw her again, never had to hear her name again.” He shook his head. “But if you’re in love with her, or whatever, you’re just being chickenshit. Flat out. So she’s pissed at you. Big deal. Liz is pissed at everyone, as far as I can tell. Deal with it and quit sulking. I’ve watched it for too long now and I’m tired of it.” He shook his head. “I’ve never thought of you as a coward, Noah, and I don’t really wanna start.”

He turned and walked down the sand toward the water and the exploding hues of the horizon and left me to think about that.

After a night of restless sleep, Rachel’s eyes, Liz’s face, and Carter’s words rattling around in my brain, I decided I needed a few more details from Peter Pluto. I needed to see what specifically he’d meant by maybe Linc getting hooked up with a bad crowd. Did he know about the gang or was there another crowd I needed to be aware of?

And as much as I wanted to avoid the subject, I wanted to know more about their father. Nothing he’d told me about his brother had added up and I ended up watching a girl I’d just met take a bullet. I didn’t know whether the shooting was tied directly to Linc Pluto’s disappearance, but it sure seemed like an awfully big coincidence.

I walked up Mission to the Enterprise rental office, and after fifteen minutes drove away in a rented Ford Taurus. My car was still impounded and I didn’t mind sticking a few more dollars on Peter Pluto’s tab.

His home was in Clairemont, a nondescript suburb north of the downtown area and twenty minutes from my house. The community rests on the hills just above Mission Bay and stretches two dozen miles to the east. Middle-class housing, strip malls, and neighborhoods that had deteriorated marked what had once been a desired address. Most of the original residents had vacated to the sprawling suburbs of the east and north, seeking newer homes and newer schools, leaving most of Clairemont in search of an identity.

His address was just off Balboa, in the Mount streets, so named because the streets were named after the mountains of the world. I turned right on Mt. Arafat and then right again on Mt. Everest.

Not something you do every day.

I found Pluto’s house near the end of a cul-de-sac on Mt. Everest. The ranch home was a faded gray, with a giant plum tree in the front yard. A beat-up basketball hoop rested above the garage and the grass in the yard was a mix of green and brown. A bright blue Ford pickup was parked in the driveway.

I walked up the drive to find both the screen door and front door wide open.

I poked my head in the entryway. “Hello?”

No one responded. I stepped onto the small tiled area just inside the door.

The living room had been ransacked. A TV was on the carpeting, smashed to pieces. The furniture was flipped over, pushed into a pile in the middle of the room.

I turned to the dining room. The table was dumped on its side, the oak chairs splintered into jagged hunks of wood. An overhead light had been yanked off the ceiling and crushed into glass shards.

My heart picked up speed.

Someone had issues with Peter Pluto’s house.

I heard footsteps down the hallway off the dining room and stepped back, reaching for my gun, then realizing it was stuck in the glove box, impounded with my Jeep.

A guy somewhere in his twenties with a shaved head emerged. He was about my height at six-three, but thicker. He wore a gray T-shirt, dirty jeans, and scuffed black boots. The scowl on his face didn’t detract from the quarter-sized black swastika tattooed just above his left eyebrow.

He paused when he saw me, then took a step in my direction. “Who the fuck are you?”

“That was gonna be my question for you.”

The scowl on his face tightened and I noticed what looked like blood on the knuckles of his right hand.

He took another step toward me, his small eyes narrowing. “You fuckin’ with me?”

I held up my hands. “Just wondering if you were the one who did the redecorating in here.”

He stared at me for a moment, completely unafraid and completely angry. He glanced down the hallway from where he’d come, then back at me. His expression slowly changed. The snarl morphed into an arrogant, evil grin exposing yellow teeth. He shook his head. “Dude, you walked into the wrong house.”

Not the wrong house, but maybe the wrong time. “Did I?”

He laughed, as if I didn’t realize how stupid I actually was. “Yeah, you did. Wanna tell me why you’re here?”

“Not really.”

He shook his head again. “I’m not asking, dude. Why you here?”

He looked meaner than me, a veteran of fights that he’d probably instigated. But he was younger, which meant he wasn’t wiser.

I followed his lead and stepped toward him. “Tell you what. Before I kick your ass and call the cops, why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

His eyes flared and he stepped forward, a right hook coming at my head. I stepped inside of it and jammed the heel of my hand into his jaw. He fell backward against the wall of the dining room and slumped to the floor.

I stood over him for a moment. He refocused his eyes and brought his hand to his mouth, a thick stream of blood now coming out onto his chin.

“You done talking back now?” I asked him.

He looked at the blood on his hand, then at me. The slow, ugly grin came back, his teeth now red rather than yellow. “Yeah, I guess I am.” He looked past me and lifted his chin. “Mo’s gonna take over.”

I turned around and after getting a look at the guy, I just assumed Mo was short for Mountain.

He was about six-foot-seven and a minimum of three hundred pounds of muscle. His nose was so crooked, it had to have been broken half a dozen times in half a dozen places. His gray eyes were empty, just staring at me. He wore a thick silver hoop in each ear. The dirty white tank top on his body exposed arms that were covered completely in tattoos. Women, birds, and swords, from what I could make out. His black jeans were torn in multiple places and the toes of his construction boots were caked in blood.

His head was also shaved and the phrase WHITE IS RIGHT was tattooed just above his forehead in simple black letters.

He looked around me at his partner. “You alright, Lonnie?”

“I’m fine,” Lonnie said from behind me.

“Want me to hurt him?” Mo asked, much in the same way one would ask if you needed a ride somewhere.