"You need something," he told me, "call that number. I'll do what I can."

"Thanks, Larry."

After he left I took a lukewarm shower, then looked again at my father's notebook. I reread his notes for the testimonies against Guy White, the cryptic reminder at the bottom: Sabinal. Get whiskey. Fix fence. Clean fireplace. It still made no sense. I closed the notebook and tossed it on the table.

My girlfriend was missing. The other love of her life, who hadn't been a love of her life for several months, was driving around town with her business partner. And I was sitting on my futon reading my father's old grocery lists.

I decided to make my perfect day complete. I called my mother and asked for a loan. She was, of course, delighted. I felt about as good as that flyboy who'd just kissed something hairy.

20.

In my dreams that night I was hunting with my father at the family ranch in Sabinal. It was Christmas break, my seventh-grade year, one of the coldest winters South Texas ever had. The mesquite trees were bare as TV aerials, and the brush was a dull yellow-gray that matched the clouds. I was kneeling in an orange parka, holding a .22 rifle my father had given me as a gift that morning. The barrel was slightly warm from ten rounds of fire.

My father, next to me, was also dressed in hunting clothes. He looked like a fluorescent tent for six. His Stetson tilted over his eyes so all I could see were his huge bristly jowls, his nose webbed with red veins, his crooked wet smile half-hidden by a battered Cuban cigar. The mist from his breath mixed with the smoke. In the cold sharp air he smelled like a good meal that was burning.

Out in the clearing the javelina still quivered. It was a huge animal, all black hair and tooth, much too large and mean to kill with a .22. I'd shot it first out of surprise, second out of anger, then again and again out of desperation to finish the job. All the while my father just watched, only smiling at the end.

Finally the beast stopped dragging itself along the ground. It made a thick, liquid sound. Then even that stopped.

"Meanest animal on God's earth," my father said. "And the dirtiest. What you reckon you should do now, son?"

He could talk like a Harvard graduate when he wanted, but when he tested me, when he really wanted to distance himself, he put on that accent. The familiar, cracker barrel drawl was easy and slow the way a cottonmouth snake is slow, moving toward you in the river.

I said: "Can we use it?"

My father chewed his cigar.

"You can fix up some mighty fine javelina sausage, if you've got the mind to."

He let me take the knife and stood back as I moved up to the warm carcass. It took a long time to gut the thing. From the moment I touched it, my skin began to crawl, but I ignored the feeling at first. I remember the steam from the innards and then the indescribably bad smell-a sour blast of fear, rot, and excrement that beat the worst inner-city alley. That was my first lesson-the gas that a newly dead animal exudes. It nearly knocked me down, nearly forced me to double over, but then I saw my father watching sternly behind me, and knew I had to go on. I'd made my choice.

After gutting it I tied its feet and pulled it through the brush. Now the itch was intolerable. My father watched as I struggled to get the javelina into the bed of the pickup. My eyes were watering; my entire body crawled. Small red bites were breaking out on my arms like an acid wash. Finally, in desperation, I turned to my father, who was still standing a good distance away. In pain, humiliated, I waited to hear what I had done wrong.

When he spoke it was almost kind.

"Every hunter needs to make that mistake once," he said. "And he never makes it again. You get too close to a javelina that's just shot, the first thing you get is the smell for a good-bye present. But that's not the worst."

He dropped his cigar butt and smashed it into the dirt with one huge boot. When he spoke again, the pain was crawling across my scalp, under my armpits, around my groin. It caused a dull roar in my ears.

"The body heat," my father said. "It cools off right fast, and all them little fleas, all them chiggers and ticks and every other form of varmint that breeds in that hide, looks for the nearest warm thing to jump on to. You're it, son. Don't never approach a dead thing until it's as cool as the ground, son. Not ever."

I couldn't ride back in the truck. I had to walk behind it as my father led me home. I spent one day in the shower, another day bathed in cortisone. And I'd never fired a gun since that Christmas. The other lesson, the one about avoiding the dead, had been harder to learn.

Then the scene of the dream changed from Sabinal to the A & M campus. I saw Lillian at eighteen, leaning in the doorway of her freshman painting class, barefoot, her hands behind her. Her denim overalls and her short off-blond hair were both flecked with red acrylic.

A week earlier we'd had another one of our epic fights. I'd stormed out of the Dixie Chicken in the middle of dinner. Lillian shouted at my back that she'd never talk to me again. Now she just stared at me as I walked closer.

When I came up to her she brushed my face with her fingers, lightly, and left sticky red acrylic streaks on my left cheek. Then, keeping a straight face, she decorated the other side, like war paint. She laughed.

"Does this mean I'm forgiven?" I said.

Her eyes turned bright green. She put her head so close to mine that her lips brushed my chin as she talked. Her breath smelled like cherry Life Savers.

"Not even close," she said. "But you can't get rid of me. Remember that next time you walk away."

The phone was ringing.

I woke up sideways on the futon with the receiver already in my hand. The blinds above me were open and sunlight was pouring onto my face as strong and hot as gasoline. I squinted. Before I could make my voice work, Robert Johnson was on my head talking for me.

"Mur," he said.

Maia Lee said: "Oh, good, Robert Johnson, you're home."

"Sorry," I croaked. "Should I get off the line?"

She laughed. The sound was a hard one to wake up to; it brought back Sunday mornings on Potrero Hill, drinking Peet's coffee, watching the fog recede from the Bay. It made me remember a city for runaways where you didn't have to think about the past, or home, or who had disappeared from your life.

"You're a hard person to get in touch with, Tres," Maia said.

I sat up, knocking over the empty tequila bottle. Then I looked across the room and noticed the kitchen window.

Maia was waiting for a snide remark. When I didn't offer one, her tone changed. "Tres?"

I walked into the kitchen as far as the phone cord would go. The rusty metal frame window above the sink was hanging wide open at a crazy angle. Its bottom hinge had been neatly pried away, so the ancient turn-crank that was supposed to hold the window shut could be stripped.

"Tres?" Maia said again. "What is it?"

I sat on the kitchen counter and stared out into the crape myrtles. A few of their pink petals were floating in yesterday's coffee cup next to the soap dish. A few more were smashed into the single muddy footprint that was in my sink-no grooves, pointed toe, a large boot, maybe a ten and a half wide.

"Maia," I said, "how much time have you got?"

21.

I blamed Robert Johnson for not being a Great Dane. Maia blamed me for being a heavy sleeper.

"I told you so often," she complained, "if a burglar had ever come in while we were sleeping-" She caught the we part of that statement a little too late. Her voice tangled on it like silk on barbed wire.

When she spoke again it was in her professional tone, careful and even. "All right. Tell me the whole story."

I told her what little I'd learned about my father's death. I told her about Lillian's disappearance, my talk with Guy White, the threats against me, Beau Karnau's mystery photos and his ride with Dan Sheff, the boot print at the gallery and in my sink.

Maia was silent for a minute. Behind her somewhere, a foghorn sounded.

"Did they take anything? These photos you found, for instance?"

"Whoever it was came and left quickly. I don't think they were looking for paperwork. None of it was touched. Nothing else was taken."

"Not even your life."

I tried to believe there was no disappointment in her voice.

"It's nice to be loved," I said.

After she had fumed silently for a while, she said: "Tres, your friend Drapiewski is right. Leave this to the police. Get the hell out of there."

I didn't answer.

"But naturally," she said, "you're not going to."

I didn't answer.

She sighed. "I should've left you where I found you-tending bar in Berkeley."

"I was the best person you ever trained."

"You were the only person I ever trained."

It's hard for a Texan to argue with someone who insists on sticking to the truth. Robert Johnson jumped onto the counter and started smelling the boot print in the sink. He gave me an insulted look that was probably a close approximation of Maia's expression right then. Two against one.

"All right," Maia said, "let's assume, even if I don't agree, that you pull on the two ends of this, Lillian's disappearance and your father's death, and you find out they connect somewhere in the middle. That would mean someone besides this dead convict-"

"Halcomb."

"-it would mean someone besides him was involved in the killing ten years ago, and is now nervous about your questions. Whoever it is, they're worried enough to threaten you, perhaps to kidnap someone you-someone you know, but not willing to kill you. Why?"

I picked a crushed crape myrtle petal out of the sink and looked at it. Thinking about why I was alive this morning didn't help the empty acidic feeling the tequila had left in my stomach. The half memory of somebody looking down at me in the night had started to crawl across my skin like the smell of dead javelina and the sticky feel of red acrylic paint.

"I don't know," I said. "Why does someone search the art gallery, then Lillian's house, then my apartment? Why does Dan Sheff hang around Lillian's front yard ready to beat up new boyfriends when Lillian's datebook declared the relationship dead months ago? Why does Sheff give Karnau a ride? I don't know yet."

Maia hesitated. "Tres, I know you want to find the connection between this and your father."

"But?"

"But maybe there isn't one."

I stared at the ceiling. Just above the stove, there was a water stain in the shape of Australia, bowing in the middle like it was desperately clinging to the bottom of the world. When I spoke I tried to keep my voice even.

"You think I want it that way?"

"You want it to be your problem and your responsibility to fix," she said. "I know you. But maybe Lillian was into something all by herself. It happens, Tres."

I know you. The three most irritating words in the English language. When I didn't answer, Maia muttered a few curses in Mandarin. I think she switched the receiver to her other ear.

"All right then," she said. "Let's talk about your father. Do you really think one of his political enemies could be involved?"

For a moment I envisioned Councilman Fernando Asante in an extra large brown leisure suit trying to squeeze himself through my kitchen window, his Lucchese boot in my sink, his well-fed belly wedged between crape myrtle branches. It almost cheered me up.

"Even in Texas the politics aren't usually that colorful," I told her. "Asante, the most likely candidate, has enough trouble just keeping his dick in his pants."

"The drug trafficker, then, the man whose house you so debonairly barged into at gunpoint?"

I had to think longer about that one. "If it was Guy White, I can't figure his logic. Why murder a retiring sheriff, especially when you know you're going to get the heat for it? And why get nervous about me now when the Feds couldn't find anything?"

"You don't sound convinced."

"Maybe it's worth another visit."

She paused. "But you can't just walk up to a Mafia boss twice in one week and start shaking him down for information on assorted felonies-"

I was quiet.

"Oh, Christ," she said. "Don't even think about it, Tres."

"It's either that or retrace some leads from these police files I stole."

"Excuse me?"

"Okay, you didn't hear it."

"Christ," she said.

"Urrr," said Robert Johnson, in sympathy.

"This is information about my father. I consider it an inheritance."

"Insanity was your only inheritance, Navarre."

I protested. "I worked hard for my insanity, Ms. Lee. Nobody handed it to me on a silver platter."

"How the hell did I ever fall for you?" she wondered.

Things were awkwardly quiet for a while after that.