“There shouldn’t be a time limit you have to tell the truth by.”

“You’re going to name the six?”

“Yes, myself first. I fired once, just like your test said I did. I shot the father. I hit him square, too.”

Hood stopped and Lenny stopped and Hood looked into the corporal’s placid eyes.

“I gave you a chance to tell the truth,” said Hood. “And I gave you a chance to let it go.”

“I don’t want to let it go. I murdered, sir. My heart needs to tell it.”

“Tell it to who, Lenny?”

“You, Mr. Hood.”

I wish I hadn’t seen that, soldier.

“I’m nobody, Lenny. I’m just a guy who saw something once. But go ahead. We’ll walk and you can tell me what happened.”

Hood leaned into the breeze coming off the ocean. Overbrook was hunched in his jacket and looked like he weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds. Hood saw that since the discharge Overbrook hadn’t put on weight, hadn’t grown out his hair, hadn’t changed really one bit since Hood had first laid eyes on him in the bloody Hamdaniya living room.

“We followed some bombers off the street but they got away. There were voices inside. Loud voices. I was the first one in. One of them moved his hands and I shot him. After that there was no sense. It got mighty loud. We were furious at the bombers that got away. We had a lot of hate inside us.”

They cut across the sand toward the beach. A flock of seagulls standing in the sand regarded them but didn’t move.

“It was Cowder what had the AK. Called it his throw-down gun. Cowder told me what to do with it and said if anybody told, they’d get personally killed by him and that went for me, too.”

Hood recalled Cowder, a PFC with a cool look in his eyes who told Hood later that maybe the Racks had it coming.

“See, Mr. Hood, the thing is I was raised by churchgo ing folks and I believed what I was taught back then and I believe it now. I don’t know how to get this blood off my hands except by suffering the consequences of what I did.”

“You did as good as you could do, Lenny. You never asked to go to there.”

“Yes, I did ask. I wasn’t old enough after 9/11 but I made up my mind when the buildings came down I was going to do something.”

“I can’t reopen the investigation, Lenny. I wouldn’t even if I could. I did the closest thing to right that I could come up with.”

“Letting four men get murdered and nobody pays is right?”

“You’re paying, Lenny. We all are.”

“I don’t think it’s enough.”

“You’re not the judge of that.”

“It’s about consequences and terrible dreams. I have the most awful dreams you can imagine and they never stop.”

Lenny turned around and looked down at the gun in his hand.

Hood dove for it.

Never took his eyes off it. He hit the sand gut-first with his arms extended and the pistol locked between them, and when he rolled over and aimed up, Overbrook was looking down at him with an expression of crushing hopelessness on his face. Hood popped to his feet and Overbrook charged him, screaming. Hood threw the gun to the sand behind him and got Overbrook in a bear hug and took him down. Hood used his weight and held tight, and Overbrook’s screams slowly devolved into moans, and his struggling ceased, and Hood loosened his grip enough so the man could cry but not break away for the gun.

A while later Hood untangled himself from the still-blubbering Overbrook and retrieved the pistol. It was a Smith & Wesson.22-caliber rimfire revolver, each of its eight cylinders containing a live load.

Hood blew the sand off the gun. A family dragging towels and bodyboards and swim fins stared unabashedly at him and the gun, then at the man lying faceup in the sand breathing hard and sobbing quietly. Hood slipped the gun into the right front pocket of his chinos.

Then he walked back over to Overbrook and squatted in the sand. “So what am I going to do with you, Lenny?”

“I thought I’d be dead by now.”

“I’m glad you were wrong.”

“I hope you don’t think I was going to shoot you, Mr. Hood.”

“I don’t. But it worries me that you were going to shoot you.”

Lenny struggled to his knees, then sat back on them. He wiped the sand off his sleeves, then his thighs. The fine beach silica had stuck to the tears on his face to form a dark sludge that framed his bright blue eyes.

For a long time Lenny stared out at the heavy orange sun beginning its melt into the Pacific. “Okay.”

“Yes, it’s okay.”

More time passed.

“Something’s different, Mr. Hood.”

“What’s different?”

“It’s hard to describe. Like something got lifted off.”

“Yeah,” said Hood. He wondered if grappling with Lenny had left him light-headed, or if maybe the charge of adrenaline had made him giddy. But what he really thought was the truth had lightened their burdens, at least for a moment.

Lenny pulled a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket then stood and walked it over. “These are them. The six. They should say what really happened, too. They were my friends. I did my part.”

Hood took the paper and put it in his shirt pocket without opening it.

“Lenny?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hang in there. I’m keeping the gun.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go home. Take care of yourself. I like you.”

Hood backpedaled away from Lenny Overbrook, then turned and jogged back to the boardwalk.

That night in his small Silver Lake apartment Hood watched and recorded a TV news special on Allison Murrieta. He ate his dinner and drank beer. The windows were open for the cool air, which in August smelled like nightshade and frying tortillas.

The show was hosted by Dave Boyer. It had jolting edits and a soundtrack of very loud and sudden noises, like bullet trains passing or maybe cell doors slamming. The images were of Allison robbing businesses, intercut with the self-promotional video that Boyer had played at the interagency task force briefing.

There was a still shot of an old drawing of Joaquin Murrieta. He was long-haired and appeared crazed. Then the screen split and a still image of masked Allison appeared beside that of her alleged great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. If there was a resemblance, it was faint at best to Hood.

But again he thought he saw Suzanne Jones behind Allison Murrieta’s jeweled mask. When they showed a clip of Allison leaving a McDonald’s after robbing it, Hood watched the way the back of her blouse creased in alternate directions with each step, and he remembered comparable creases in the nightshirt Suzanne wore that Sunday after she’d smelled his face up close then walked away, waving over her shoulder.

As evidence I now present comparable creases, he thought. He burped and shook his head. What were the hundreds of people who knew Suzanne Jones thinking when they saw Allison Murrieta on TV? Good question. Apparently not what he was thinking.

He got out the copy of Suzanne Jones’s phone bill and flattened it against his knee so he could read it.

He chose a Los Angeles number and a woman answered. Hood identified himself as a Los Angeles County deputy and said that he was trying to locate Suzanne Jones. She had suddenly gone out of contact and he was concerned. Hood offered his badge number and a number to call at LASD if she wanted to verify that he was a deputy on official business.

“Did you talk to Ernest?” she asked.

“He’s out of contact, too.”

“And she’s not at home?”

“The family moved out suddenly on Sunday night,” said Hood. “There was an incident in the neighborhood.”

“Incident?”

“She was fine. Her children and Ernest were fine. Then-she stopped returning our calls.”

Then, thought Hood-I almost got her murdered at a motel up in Torrance and I can’t figure out why she hit the wind.