She hesitated as her eyes scanned his face. “She did. And all of you police, too. I told everyone.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry what happened to your boys. I truly am.”

She closed the door on him not impolitely. Hood touched the wood with his fingers before he walked away.

In the streambed he found the small boot prints and followed them down the stream on one side then back up the stream on the other. Where there was a view of the Joneses’ meadow and pond, the toes faced another set of prints in the soft earth and these were certainly a child’s athletic shoe of some kind. The child had walked from the direction of the Joneses’ property. Hood wondered what they had talked about. Fishing, maybe. A child and a man. He retraced the child’s steps toward the pond, then lost them in the dead summer stubble of the meadow.

On the way to his car he dialed the number he’d gotten from Felton and listened to the computerized voice telling him to leave a message.

He asked Suzanne Jones to call him and left his numbers. He said it was important.

Five minutes later Ernest called back to say that Suzanne was out of town and not available.

“I want to talk to your child,” said Hood. “The middle one.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

So I’m up in the Hotel Laguna and Ernest and the boys are safely stashed in Oceanside. I still can’t believe that flat-topped Lincoln-driving machete-wielding son of a bitch tracked me to my home in less than one day and killed two of my neighbors. Fishing. Yeah, Jordan’s an observant boy. I’ve got the diamonds, and in my satchel plenty of cash and a very nice.45-caliber Colt Gold Cup that shoots like a dream.

I’ve already called the people who might know about this man, this violent collector, and I’ve gotten not one single call back. I think he’s MS-13, maybe the boss, and he knew about the diamonds and came sniffing around Miracle Auto Body when none of his boys returned. Now he wants my rocks and I’ve seen what he’ll do to get them. But I’m betting on me.

My son Bradley found the bodies late last night and he was still clammy and near silent when I kissed him good-bye in Oceanside a few hours ago. This from a kid who skateboarded two miles home with a compound fracture of his arm when he was ten. I will not forgive that man for making Bradley see what he saw. It was indescribable. Something in Bradley was changed by it. The look on his face. They were Gerald and Harold and then they were hacked meat. Buckets of blood. The cop said it happened with tremendous speed.

I’m still betting on me.

It’s evening now and the sun is still up over the water, but I turn on every light anyway. My heart is beating quickly and not deeply. I upend the red backpack and shake the parcels to the bed.

I study them. There are only six. According to the wholesaler’s writing on the paper, one parcel contains sixteen one-and-a-half-carat diamonds, near colorless, SI1 and SI2. They are a mix of round and princess cuts. Another parcel contains a like amount of one-carat stones, same color, clarity and cut. Three others contain the same stones, but in diminishing sizes, from three-quarters down to one-third carats. The sixth parcel contains one round-cut two-carat diamond, near colorless, SI1 in clarity. It’s beautiful and it’s worth twenty grand if you want to buy it in a store.

I set one of my black leather gloves on the bed pillow, swing out the reading light, then unfold the gemstone paper and place this rock on the glove. There’s an explosion of light and color. The red of the sun and the blue of the sky and the deep green of the Pacific and the electric lights of the hotel all find their way through this stone. The diamond doesn’t just reflect light, it radiates the light. I see this with my own eyes, though I know it can’t be true. The facets shift up and down the color spectrum as I slowly pivot the glove atop the pillow-fresh detonations of blues and reds and yellows. Does a diamond shine if there is no one there to see it? Dear Joaquin in heaven-it must. I can’t take my eyes off it, and I think it’s watching me, too. Besides a very few men and maybe three cars, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Millions of years in the making. Harder than steel. Sharper than the blade that killed the Little Chiefs. Extremely difficult to find. Unseen by the masses and untouched but by the few. Stunning. Brilliant. Hypnotic. Seductive. Pure. Eternal. Worth a potload.

Mine.

I put it in the palm of my hand and walk around the hotel room, watching the plays of light. I drop it and catch it in my other waiting hand. I toss it back up to the first. I foxtrot as my great-uncle Jack taught me, with the diamond in my right hand, then I flick it to my left hand as I one-two-three-four into the corner near the entertainment center then one-two-three-four back out of the corner then balance the heavy jewel-yes, two carats have heft-in both cupped hands as I do an unhurried spin like Jordan’s daddy Joe used to do to me and I’ll tell you I miss that man, reminds me of Charlie Hood, not so much the way they look but they both have that good man thing inside them that you can’t move no matter how much woman thing you push against it; then I glide between the window and the couch and watch myself as I pass the mirror, nice-looking woman there, then I’m into the alcove with the closet and the bathroom, and the diamond rolls from hand to hand, one-two-three-four, I, Allison Murrieta.

An hour later the papers are laid out open on the bedspread, each gem gleaming in the light. There’s a total of eighty-one stones. The two-carat whopper sits in the middle of the bed, shining like a beacon on all the little twinkling ships around it.

The buyer is named Cavore but he has no idea I know this. I saw his car once when I arrived early for a meeting, and later gave the plate numbers to my DMV acquaintance. The registered owner was Carl Cavore. I’ve dealt with him before and he is just barely tolerable. He calls himself Jason.

I make the Jack in the Box in Redondo Beach in an hour twenty minutes in the light traffic. He pulls up in his conversion van, a hulking black GM with cobalt blue pin-striping along each flank. No windows except the ones up front. I step up and put one knee on the captain’s chair and swivel around for a look in. He says hi and I ignore him. The van smells like a man’s bed, not recently laundered. I’ve been here before: up front is the cockpit, then a small built-in table with two folding chairs facing each other, a very small bathroom, and at the rear, poorly lit and unmade, the bed. We’re alone, so far as I can tell. I swivel forward and drop the satchel between my legs.

Cavore pulls out of the lot. I still haven’t said a word to him. He takes us up Pacific Coast Highway half a mile, to the Beachside Center parking lot. He parks up close to the stores with the other cars tight around us. As soon as the engine and lights go off, he motions me to the back.

“No. You know I sit closest to the exits, Jason. Claustrophobia.”

He chuckles and moves past me. The van shifts with his great weight. I don’t take my eyes off him. He steps down into the pit of the vehicle, lifts the table in order to get around it, then lowers it behind him.

When he’s settled in at the far end, I lug my satchel back to one of the folding chairs and I sit.

I clap my hands and the lights come on. Cavore snaps his fingers and they go out.

I clap again.

“You’re cute,” he says. He smiles.

“Thanks, but I’m really not.”

“I know cute when I see it.”

Cavore is big, fat and wears his hair in a pompadour. The pompadour is orange on top and brown down at the roots. The rest of him is pale and moist. Large gums and small teeth. His yellow Hawaiian shirt is tight to his enormous arms and the tail rides up over the revolver he carries in a holster approximately at his waist. I don’t know how he could find that gun under all his blubber. But I’ve seen the benches and weights and the heavy bag in the warehouse he used to rent, and by the stacks of fifty pounders I think Cavore has something capable under all that fat.