The tree at the edge of the golf course was halfway between two streetlights, along a commercial strip. Across the street from the tree, a paint-and-wallpaper place closed at eight o'clock, and the adjoining high-end stereo place at nine. At ten, with a good space between cars, we jogged across the street. LuEllen tossed the blanket over the top of the fence, and I lifted her up to it, and she was over. I did a quick climb, pivoted on my belly on the blanket, and dropped to the other side. We both squatted behind the tree, to look at the passing cars. Nobody slowed. We waited, out of sight, for ten minutes, and then headed across the golf course.

Once we were away from the strip, the golf course was dark as a coal sack. I'd never had a mental image of Dallas as a place with trees, but it has about a billion of them: from the air, the city looks like a forest. Golf courses are even denser with them, and most of them seem to have thorns. We crossed a fairway, moving slowly, I stepped into a thorn bush, backed out, fell in behind LuEllen, and we groped our way toward the apartment light three hundred yards away.

Fifty yards out of the clubhouse, we found a soft patch of grass between two trees, spread the blanket, and hunkered down. We could see lights both at the front of the clubhouse and at the back. The upstairs windows were dark.

The back of the clubhouse was framed by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. We could see a line of soda and snack machines along one wall, and a bunch of soft leather chairs, like the first-class lounge in an airport. There were a half-dozen people in the lounge. Two had apparently just come out of the exercise room; they were putting on tennis shoes. The other four were sitting in a group of chairs, talking.

"Could be a while," LuEllen said.

About three hours, in fact. The group in the lounge stayed for an hour and a half, an animated conversation that seemed to go on forever. When they finally left, a couple of other people had settled in. More came and went from the exercise room. Traffic slowed down after midnight, but every time we thought to move, somebody else would show up. At one-fifteen, we hadn't seen anybody for fifteen minutes.

"Let's try," LuEllen said.

We left the blanket and started through the dark to the clubhouse door. Twenty yards out, at the edge of the golf course, we came to a line of head-high shrubs. After we passed them, we'd be out in the open and committed. We stopped, looked around, then LuEllen touched my arm and we moved.

Slowly, LuEllen on my arm. We got to the clubhouse, stepped inside. No sound, except a refrigerator gurgle from one of the soda machines. We waited another second; then LuEllen slipped the dinner knife out of her pocket, walked to the door connecting with the executive suite, slipped the lock with the knife blade, and we were in. And up.

Ralph's office door had the same crappy lock. We slipped it and LuEllen led the way inside. I shut the door behind us and she turned on the penlight. The flat files were not locked; didn't have locks. The architect's drawings for Poinsettia were right where they were supposed to be, in the Poinsettia drawer, with drawings for Wild Rose, Black-Eyed Susan, and Hollyhock. The drawings for Poinsettia made up a pad a half-inch thick, and probably three feet long by two and a half wide.

"Take the whole thing?" she asked.

"Might as well. Hope nobody goes looking for them."

"They're dusty; we should be okay," she said.

We put the room back together, and walked out. As we crossed the paved area toward the parking lot, another couple was coming off the parking lot, carrying a blanket, but not ours. We never got closer than fifty yards, but they waved, and LuEllen waved back, and then said, "Jesus Christ, Kidd, the golf course is the local lover's lane. We're lucky we didn't trip over somebody."

"Better cover for us," I said.

We saw nobody on the course. We crossed the fence, strolled back to the car, and were out of there.

LuEllen tends to wrestle herself around pillows, and wind up in odd positions. When I woke up the next morning, her bare bottom was sticking out of a tangle of sheets, and a glorious sight it was, like a new peach, round and firm and slightly pink. I will confess to an inordinate fondness for that portion of the female anatomy, and after a few minutes I reached over and gave it a little pat. A little stroke.

"If you touch me, I'll rip your fuckin' heart out," she groaned.

"But it's so interesting."

"Shut up."

"Can't. Time to get up."

She propped herself on her elbows and looked at the bedside clock. "Bullshit," she said, and dropped straight down. "Be quiet. I need another hour."

I went to the window and stuck my face into the crack between the curtains. "Nice day out. Blue skies, no clouds."

"This is Dallas, you moron, it's supposed to be like that," she said. "Now go away."

Not a morning person. I got cleaned up, humming to myself. Thought about LuEllen's assall right, I'm not just fond of it, I actually contemplate itand remembered Clancy.

Clancy's the woman back in St. Paul, who was building a computer with me. Very nice woman. Smart, interesting, sexy. Too young for meI'm eight years older than she isand the difference troubled me, though it didn't seem to bother her much. And we weren't finished with each other; there was more to say.

Clancy in St. Paul, LuEllen in Dallas. Hmm.

When we were done in Dallas, LuEllen would most likely take off again. She had a tendency to winter in warm places, like Mexico, Venezuela, or the Islands, and to hang with the indolent rich. I, on the other hand, would be back in St. Paul, in snow drifts six feet deep, with wolves, and would need the comfort of a woman like Clancy.

I would probably try to hide this moment with LuEllen. Given my past track record, I'd probably succeed. The thing was, LuEllen wasn't just sex: she was a friend. Our time in bed was an expression of friendship. I worked over that line of thought as I shaved. This whole sex thing with LuEllen would take some seriously hypocritical rationalization, I thought, if I wanted to keep my feet warm over the winter.

LuEllen was still in bed when I finished cleaning up, so I went downstairs to the restaurant, had eggs, bacon, and toast, read the paperFirewall was still on the attack. The IRS had no idea of how to screen them out without losing billions and billions. In Germany, the cops raided the apartment of a kid who had an Internet handle that translated as Cheese (so said USA Today), but Cheese had been in the bathroom at the time and that apparently gave him some kind of immunity from prosecution: he wasn't actually hacking when they came through the door. In any case, USA Today said that Cheese was the rat in the DoS attack.

When I got back upstairs, LuEllen was dressed: "Green called. He and Lane are checking into a Radisson Hotel up in Denton, which is like twenty miles from here."

"Why there?"

"Because Green plays golf, and it's a golf resort."

"Silly goddamn game," I said.

"You don't know the first thing about it," she said.

"Chasing a white ball around a cow pasture."

"Look at a list of people who play it, and tell me they're chasing a ball around a cow pasture. If you gotta brain in your head, you gotta suspect that there's something else going on, even if you don't play yourself."

My eyebrows went up: she actually sounded a little passionate on the subject. Not like LuEllen, eternal cynic. "Mmm," I said.

"Fuck you."

LuEllen drove. I sat in the passenger seat, looking through the architect's drawings and trying not to get carsick. Eventually, I gave up; but I'd found one interesting thing.

"There's a silent alarm wired into Corbeil's apartment. The console is in a closet."