Cato opened his eyes, but he could see nothing. The glasses were large and tight fitting, and the lenses were black. “Who are you?”

“That’s not important,” she said. She had, apparently, sat down across from him.

“Who recommended me to you?”

“That person would prefer not to be known.”

“All right, what is this about? I have to be back at work.”

“There’s an envelope on the table in front of you,” she said.

He reached out and found it.

“It contains twenty-five thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills,” she said. “I want you to kill two men for me. They are in two different cities, and no one will connect them.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, lady.”

“Yes, I have. Now all that remains is to find out if you have enough nerve for this job.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Certainly not, and no cop has anything to do with this. Now listen to me carefully. Inside the envelope is a sheet of paper with the names and addresses of the two men. There is also an untraceable cell phone number. You have two weeks to get the jobs done. I don’t care how you do it. When you have killed the first man-it doesn’t matter which one is done first-you will receive another twenty-five thousand dollars in the mail at your home address. When you have killed the second man, you will receive another fifty thousand dollars by the same means. Do you understand?”

“Why do you think I will do this?”

“Because it’s not the first time you’ve done it, Jack, and you always need money. You have twenty-four hours to think it over. When you’ve decided, call the cell phone number and tell me. If you don’t want the job, we’ll arrange for the return of the money. Now count slowly to twenty, then you can take off the glasses.”

BARBARA WENT BACK into the restaurant, sat down and began eating her lobster salad.

JACK COUNTED TO twenty and took off the glasses. He opened the envelope and found the money there, as she had said. There were two names, one in Santa Fe and one in Palo Alto, and directions on how to find them. He looked around at the other patrons of the restaurant and didn’t see anyone he thought might be the woman, so he put a ten-dollar bill on the table, got into his truck and drove away.

He had been back in the stable office for an hour when the phone rang. “Jack Cato.”

“Mr. Cato,” a woman’s voice said, “this is Ms. Bishop at GMAC. You’re two payments behind on your truck loan, and unless we have payment immediately, we’re going to have to take the truck.”

Cato fingered the money in the envelope on the desk. “I’ll send you a money order today,” he said.

“Can we count on that?”

“Yes, you can.” He hung up and dialed the cell number on the paper in the envelope.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice said.

“This is the man you met in the restaurant.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll do the job.”

“You have two weeks,” she said. “If you’re late, I’ll have you killed.” She hung up.

Cato hung up, too, and found that he was sweating.

ALEX REESE GOT a call from Jeff Bender, at Centurion.

“Hello, Jeff. That was fast.”

“It only took a phone call. The two women’s names are Tina López and Soledad Rivera. Cato says they’re both in the L.A. phone book. Tina is the seamstress at Centurion who was on your list of possible suspects when you came to see me.”

“Thank you, Jeff; can you tell me any more about them?”

“One of my people knows her and says she’s a real looker, with a fabulous body. I haven’t checked it out, myself.”

“Maybe I’ll check it out for you,” Reese chuckled.

“You never know; it might be worth a trip back to L.A.”

“If it is, I’ll buy you lunch,” Reese said. He said goodbye and hung up. Immediately his phone rang.

“Detective Reese.”

It was the D.A.’s secretary. “He’d like to see you,” she said.

“I’ll be right there.” He walked over to the D.A.’s office and presented himself.

“Take a seat, Alex,” Martínez said. “Give me an update on your investigation into Donald Wells.”

“My trip to L.A. was productive,” Reese said. “Out of half a dozen crew members my research identified, two of them could very well be hired guns.” He told Martínez about Jack Cato and Grif Edwards.

“You like them?”

“Yes, but they have an alibi I’m going to have to crack.”

“Get on it.”

“It may require another trip to L.A.”

“Alex, you’re not going Hollywood on me, are you?”

“Could be.”

“All right. Send me the travel authorization. Any luck on tracing the Krugerrands from Wells’s safe?”

“They’re pretty much untraceable,” Reese replied. “I’ve checked with some dealers, and finding a gold dealer in L.A. who would testify to cashing them in would be next to impossible.”

“I was afraid of that,” Martínez said.

“I’m having trouble putting Cato and Edwards in Santa Fe, too; the airlines have no record of them having flown into Albuquerque, and, as you know, there’s no L.A.-Santa Fe connection.”

“They could have driven it,” Martínez pointed out.

“Possibly, but it’s a long hike, and there’s no way to prove it, unless we find a witness who saw them here, and that’s not in the cards.”

“Alex, I have to tell you, it’s beginning to sound like, if Wells did it, he’s going to get away with it.”

“Not just yet, Bob. I’m still on it.”

“Okay, Alex, but after talking to these two women, if you can’t break the alibi, I think we’re done.”

Reese went back to his office and made an airline reservation to L.A.

JACK CATO STAYED in his stable office after work. He managed to catch Grif Edwards before he left work.

“Grif, I need a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you to go over to my house right now and let yourself in. You know where the key is. Wave at the neighbors, if you see them; answer the phone if it rings. Tell anybody who calls that I’m down with something that seems like the flu: fever, chills, you know. If you need groceries or beer, pick them up on the way over there, because I don’t want you to leave the house until well after I get home.”

“You need an alibi, huh?”

“There’s five hundred in it for you.”

“Okay, will do.”

Around eight Cato drove his golf cart over to the studio commissary and had dinner, then he went back to his office and slept on a cot in a back room until a little after midnight.

He opened the little lockbox in the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a ring of a dozen keys that he had collected over his years at Centurion, just in case, then he got back into the golf cart, drove back to the commissary and parked among three or four other carts there. From the commissary he walked a couple of hundred yards to a long, low concrete-block building, then, at the door, began trying keys. Finally, he found one that worked in the lock of the armory.

He let himself into the building and locked it from inside, then he took out a small flashlight and went into the armorer’s office to a padlocked metal cabinet, where he began trying more keys, until one worked.

He opened the cabinet to display a wall full of handguns that were neatly hung on pegs. He selected a Walther PPK.380, and in one of the drawers at the bottom of the cabinet he found a silencer and screwed it into the Walther’s barrel, checking for fit. When he was satisfied that the two mated properly, he unscrewed the silencer and put it into a jacket pocket, then he put the Walther into another pocket, locked the cabinet, let himself out of the building and relocked the front door.

Keeping close to the building’s wall, he walked back to the commissary and drove the golf cart back to the stable. Once there, he got into his truck and drove to a back gate of the studio, unlocked it with another of his keys and drove away.

He stopped for gas, paying cash, took the opportunity to enter the target’s address into the GPS navigator in his truck, then began following its spoken directions. Soon he was on the freeway, headed north, and by early morning he was in Palo Alto.