“But you’re not?”

“I am not wrong.”

“Does Ernest know?”

“I would find it frightening if he didn’t, but possible. She doesn’t let him be the man in her life because of his high intelligence.”

Again Hood thought of Lupercio. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Suzanne’s address book could lead him to this place, just as the telephone bill had led Hood to it. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Lupercio would do when he got here. If Marlon petitioned nicely, Bakersfield PD might step up patrol of this area, but that would almost certainly not be enough to deter Lupercio. Hood had a bad feeling about this day and he believed he should act on it.

“Have you had any calls recently about Suzanne?” he asked.

“Just yours.”

“Any vague or unusual calls from a man with a Hispanic accent?”

“No.”

“Any unusual visitors or solicitors?”

“I would have told you immediately.”

“Can you leave this house? Go stay with someone who doesn’t know Suzanne? You’d need to take your mother. Say five days. Maybe less. Hopefully less.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“Mary, Mother of Jesus.”

Madeline left the room and Hood heard voices from the alcove. They spoke in Spanish and Hood caught only some of it. It went from a discussion to an argument back to a discussion. A moment later Madeline was back.

“I’ll pack.”

“There’s one more thing.” Hood took out his notebook and pen again. “Every place she might go. Every place she likes. Hotels or resorts she’s mentioned. Vacation spots. Favorite restaurants, bars, clubs. Friends. Relatives.”

Madeline talked and Hood wrote. It took some time. Later, while she packed, Hood called the first five places on Madeline’s list. No one had seen Suzanne; she was not a recent guest. When Madeline was packed, he put her bags and her mother’s bags into a dark blue Durango.

Outside the vehicle Madeline took his hands in hers. They were warm and strong. Her eyes were wet and Hood saw the tremble in her chin.

“Don’t let them kill her, Mr. Hood. That’s really what everyone wants, because that’s how outlaws are supposed to end. And it’s such good entertainment-a real person dying a real death. Maybe she’ll listen to you. Maybe she’ll stop. Maybe she won’t.”

“I’ll do all I can.”

“I’m not expecting a promise. I don’t require theater. I used to but now I do not.”

“Don’t tell her that you told me. Tell her you sent me the wrong way. It might leave us something to work with.”

“Of course.” She climbed into the SUV and started it up. “Are you going to wait for him here? For this collector?”

“For a while, yes.”

Madeline hoisted her purse from the console and produced a house key, which she handed to Hood.

“Eat the food and drink the coffee.”

“Thank you. Call here when you get where you’re going. Don’t leave your location on the machine. If you find out where she is-”

“I know.”

Hood watched the Durango lumber down the drive then turn toward Bakersfield. In the dusty windblown distance he saw it join a line of traffic. Standing in the heat he dialed Suzanne on the new number and no one answered so he left a message. He said he was just leaving her mother’s house and she was a nice woman but she wouldn’t tell him where Suzanne had gone or much of anything about her. All she’d conceded was this number. He tried Ernest again but Ernest didn’t answer. He got his.25-caliber autoloader, ankle holster and big flashlight from the trunk of his Camaro.

For a long while he stood leaning against his car, letting the dry, hot wind press against him. It was nice to feel it again. He had loved the Bakersfield wind when he was a kid, sending plastic kites up into it and feeling the string unspool in a steady rush while the kite urgently vanished into the blue brown sky. And he’d loved the Bakersfield wind when he went out riding a borrowed horse with friends along the roads between the cotton farms and the oil fields, the way the wind shivered the white fluffy balls and whistled through the derricks. It was the same wind that blew through Anbar province, but he had few pleasant memories of Iraq with which to associate it. He wondered if Lupercio had ever felt that wind down in El Salvador.

Hood slung the holster and gun over his shoulder and stepped back into the courtyard. He stopped in front of the fireplace. He touched the big black kettle and confirmed that it was made of plastic. The canna lilies were paper.

That evening Hood went into the city. He bought food, underwear and shampoo at a Kmart. Then he turned the Bill Woods music down low in the Camaro and drove slowly past the Blackboard and the Corral, where Woods and Owens and Haggard had created the Bakersfield Sound-electric twang, raw and rough, “too country for country” according to the Nashville smoothies.

This had all happened decades before he was even born. But as a boy Hood had loved the sound of their recordings, and their straightforward tales of prison, drinking, working the rigs, truck driving. To teenaged Charlie Hood the music had seemed truthful and moving-dispatches from a pained world of which he caught glimpses in the Bakersfield all around him. And this is what he heard in it still.

He swung by his old high school, home of the Drillers, then the house where he’d grown up. The house hadn’t changed much in ten years. The paint was new and the trees were taller and the campaign signs on the bumper of the pickup in the driveway were for Hillary Clinton instead of Bill.

He was back in Madeline Jones’s home before sunset. He checked the answering machine: Madeline had checked in and that was all.

At dusk he sat for a while in Suzanne’s room. It appeared to have been abandoned about 1994, Suzanne’s senior year of high school, when Suzanne wasn’t really a graduating girl of eighteen but a mother with a small child and a job in a fast-food place and plans for college so she could teach history. There was a small plastic infant’s bed in one corner. There were teenagers’ clothes and infant clothes still hanging in the closet. How had she managed all that?

Hood ate his dinner in the darkness of the courtyard, with the fountain turned off and his.38 next to the cat on the chair beside him, waiting for Lupercio.

An hour later the cat had taken up position on Hood’s lap and he was petting it when he heard a light concussive thud from the desert beyond the driveway.

Hood froze and listened. It might have been a car door opening, or a gate tapping against its post, or an errant foam food container slapping up against a fence, or some other faint event within the play of wind and silence and the purring of the cat. He knew how far sound could travel in clear, dry desert air.

Hood picked up his gun, and when the wind died for a moment, he turned his ear toward the desert and listened.

Opened car doors usually get shut, he thought.

Silence.

The cat slipped away when Hood reached over and picked up his flashlight off the floor.

He stood just inside the entrance to the courtyard, saw the moon low in the west and the glint of the moonlight on the fender of his Camaro and the stars flickering in the canopy of the night like diamonds caught in black mesh, and he thought of Suzanne then dropped her from his mind.

He followed his flashlight beam across the driveway, boots crunching on the gravel, gun in his right hand. At the fence he stopped and aimed the light into the desert, which easily consumed it but revealed little of itself. Within the limited beam the branches of the sage and creosote shivered white.

In the middle distance Hood made out the shapes of sand hills. He had chased lizards through such sand hills when he was a boy. On the dunes their tails left long, straight lines and their feet left pointillist claw dots on either side of the lines. Sometimes Hood would follow a track for hundreds of yards, over hill and dune, until it ended at a hole.