Now in the moonlight the sand hills were pale and dotted with sagebrush, and he remembered that they could be steep-sided and softly packed and treacherous to climb.

He turned off the flashlight and walked toward the hills. Gradually the sand under his boots hardened into a dirt road. He didn’t like the crunch of the road so he moved off to one side of it, and as he got closer to the sand hills, he saw that they were higher than he had thought. The faint dirt road wound into them and vanished.

The road comes out of the sand hills, Hood thought, so it probably comes in on the other side of them. But he also remembered the odd incompletion of man-made things in this desert: a section of fence connected to nothing, a foundation slab poured but never framed, a mine abandoned after eight feet of progress, and everywhere fragments of dirt roads connecting nothing to nothing.

He walked the road between two of the lower sand hills. The moonlight diminished while the shadows deepened, and Hood had trouble clearly seeing the hills ahead. He stumbled in a rut and caught himself but the sound was sudden and loud. He stood for a moment feeling his heart race.

At the foot of the next hill Hood jumped onto the slope, leaned forward and wide-stepped his way up, sand giving way, gun and flashlight out for balance. Thirteen steps. On top the moonlight was stronger, and he clearly saw the old black Lincoln Continental parked on the road between the hills.

He swung around as fast as he could, gun first.

A bad taste rushed into his throat-of hot spoiled antacid pooled on top of fear-the taste of Hamdaniya and Miracle Auto Body and the Valley Center barn.

But all he saw was darkness and the way he had come and in the near distance the lights of Madeline Jones’s driveway.

Hood turned back and looked again at the car. Then he crouched and scuttled across the hilltop. From the far side he could look almost straight down on the Lincoln. The windows were darkly smoked and revealed nothing, but through the windshield he could see the glint of moonlight on the dashboard and on the upper circumference of the steering wheel.

He knelt with the unlit flashlight braced in the sand for balance and let his eyes wander the desert around the car. He thought of the carnage that Lupercio had left behind in the barn, and of the dozen men he’d killed before the most violent gang in L.A. had sued him for peace, and how Lupercio seemed to be prescient and ubiquitous.

Hood used his flashlight hand to slip the phone off his belt, punch it on and dial the Bakersfield PD number they’d given Marlon.

He gave the sergeant Madeline’s address and his location, said he had reason to believe a violent felon was in the vicinity. He asked for the car to run with no color, no sirens. The sergeant sounded skeptical and he took Hood’s cell number.

Five minutes went by.

Protect me, Hood thought.

He rose and hopped off the top onto the slope, leaning back and stepping big down the flank of the hill, his heels sliding through the loose sand and sending the gravel down with a hissing sound that he could not prevent.

He jumped onto the dirt road and used his momentum to jog toward the car.

His flashlight was in his left hand, his.38 Mustang in his right, wrist on wrist for control. Hood sighted down the barrel of the pistol. Up close to the car the flashlight beam passed through the windshield and diffused. Through it Hood could see inside the car-rearview mirror and empty front seats and the dome light and the glistening buckles of the shoulder restraints that were folded neatly as bat wings beside the rear seats.

Crouching, he shuffled counterclockwise around the car. Empty, no alarm lights flashing on the dash, door locks down, the driver’s seat positioned up close to the wheel for a short man. When he came back to where he’d started, Hood lowered the gun and swung the flashlight beam up to the top of the nearest dune. Then the dune on the other side of the road. Nothing moved except what was moved by the wind.

Hood sensed something behind him. He spun around and aimed the beam into the empty desert, his gun steady and his chest knocking against his shirt. Then he swung hard right where the pale flash at the edge of his vision was only the darkness pulling an owl back in.

Be still, he thought: still.

He turned off the light and lowered both it and the gun and stood in the road in the bare moonlight. He turned slowly in a circle, moving his head to keep the wind from blowing straight into his ears.

Owls have wings and men have feet.

With the beam pointed down to the road, the tracks were easy to see and distinguish from his own. They were boot prints, small-like the ones Hood had seen by the stream in Valley Center, where Lupercio had talked with Jordan Jones and surrendered his precious identity.

The prints led away from the car then down the road toward Madeline’s house then disappeared where Lupercio had given up road for desert.

It took Hood a while to find the trail again but when he did the footprints were easy to follow.

He was halfway back to the house when he saw the cruiser coming up the road from the signal. A moment later it bounced onto the driveway and started up the hill toward the house.

He turned on his cell phone and it rang almost immediately.

“Hood? This is Officer Jackson, Bakersfield PD, here at the Jones residence. Talk to me.”

“He’s there. He’s close.”

“Whoa, podner-what are you talking about?”

“Lupercio Maygar. Ex-Mara Salvatrucha. We like him for two murders down in San Diego four days ago.”

“What’s your ten-twenty?”

“The middle of the desert about two hundred yards north of the driveway you’re coming up. His car is out here but he isn’t. His footprints are aimed straight at the house. He’s armed and extremely dangerous.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He’s after the Jones daughter. She’s a possible witness. The house off to your right belongs to the mother.”

“We’ll have a look. Maybe you should get back here.”

“If he gets around you, he’ll head back to his car.”

“I’ve got a good partner and a twelve-gauge. He’s not getting around us.”

“Get backup.”

Hood saw the cruiser stop outside the Jones house. A spotlight blasted on, bleaching the adobe wall white. He turned and looked back in the direction of the Lincoln. He couldn’t see it, but he could see the two sand hills that it was parked between.

“It’s Friday night in Bakersfield, Hood-we’re thin. We’ve got a spot on the place right now. We’ll look around. If we see anything interesting, we’ll get backup. If you want to stand out in that desert and watch a car go nowhere, be my guest.”

Hood punched off as he watched the spotlight roam the wall, and the garage outside the wall, then the courtyard entryway.

The cruiser headlights went out and the doors opened. In the interior lights Hood watched the two officers climb out, flashlights on, one patrolman carrying a combat shotgun, the other with his sidearm drawn. Their beams searched the wall and together they disappeared around one side of it. A minute later they had come full circle. No Lupercio scattering into the night. The shotgun cop turned and looked into the desert in Hood’s direction.

The one with the pistol swung open the wooden gate to the courtyard, backing up and using it for cover. The cop with the shotgun stood with his back to the adobe, and when the opening was wide, he crouched low and followed his light inside. It looked like the pistol cop was trying to secure the gate open, but he gave up and followed his partner in.

The gate slammed shut in the wind.

Hood saw the dull explosion of light behind the courtyard wall, then another. A second later came the muffled reports of the shotgun.

He ran for the house, gun still drawn, flashlight still in his left hand.