"They haven't found a body. I mean, there's no way of telling ..."

She poured for both of us, handed me a glass, and sat at the far end of the sofa, curling her legs under her. "He's gone. I can feel it, Jake, an emptiness spreading inside me."

There was sorrow in her voice. My look shot her a question.

"He's still my brother, el es mi unica familia." She stopped, and we both thought our private thoughts about her brother.

"You know I wouldn't hurt Blinky," I said. It was more of a question than a statement.

"Of course, Jake. I told Abe that, but so far, you're his only lead. Abe has that cop mentality. A shaky case is better than none."

Distancing herself from Abe Socolow, showing affection for Blinky, trusting me, what was happening here?

"I wish everything were different," she said. "With Luis, with you, with me. I wish I could turn back the clock."

Her eyes were moist. It was so unlike her, at least unlike the Jo Jo Baroso of the past decade. How long had it been since I'd seen her display any emotion, other than total indifference tinged with antipathy?

"I tried to change the world and change you, and I couldn't do either one," she said.

"You reminded me of an assistant coach who wanted to move me from linebacker to fullback, even though I couldn't hang onto the ball."

"I don't blame you for leaving me, not anymore."

"At the time, you called me a commitment-phobic coward."

"I was impossible. What we had was real."

Was it?

I didn't know, because I always cut and ran from what was real. Real symbolized a mortgage and a pension plan, a morning commute, and evening meetings with the civic beautification committee. Real was for suckers, not for me, a guy who could leap tall linemen in a single bound.

As I thought back now, it was such a brief slice of our lives, and our playback equipment shows the past through a soft focus. Days were sunny, winds were cool, a young woman loved me, and the future was without limits. In a sailboat anchored off Elliott Key, we shared a bottle of wine. I remembered the slipitty-slap of water against the hull and the scent of salt in the air. I remembered Jo Jo saying she loved me, so why didn't it work?

"Our timing was off," I said. "We always had different goals, or maybe I didn't have any."

"You had potential, Jake."

"Granny always used to say I'd grow old having potential."

It had grown dark outside the windows. The first thunder rumbled in the distance. Jo Jo trembled at the sound. "I wanted you to reach for the stars, and you ..."

"Short-armed it," I said, using the disparaging term for chickenhearted wide receivers.

She moved closer to me on the sofa, closing time as well as space. "You cared for me, Jake, I know that. But something inside of you tightened up when it came time to show it. Maybe you were afraid that if you cared too much and lost me, you'd be hurt again, like when you lost your father and mother."

Maybe she was right, I didn't know. I've always found introspection to be painful, and analysis from someone else is downright excruciating.

"Why did you leave me?" she asked.

I thought about it. Really thought. And it was agonizing. But in the reflected glare of intermittent flashes of lightning I looked at her face and tried to remember what it had been like.

After a moment, I said, "I was a fool. I hadn't grown up. You were right about me, and I didn't like hearing the truth."

"Oh, Jake!" She breathed the words, and in that graceful way women move, she was in my arms. I don't remember turning toward her. I don't remember putting my arms around her, but I held her close, my face pressed to her neck, inhaling the scent of warm flesh, and in a moment, I felt a warm tear trickle from her cheek to mine.

Then, it was just like the old times, or was it? Could it have been, when each of us had traveled so far. Her breath was warm and sweet as I kissed her, cradling her head in my hands. Her full lips parted, and we kissed again. She delicately rubbed her face against mine, catlike, and nipped at my earlobe, then ran a hand through my hair, tugging at it. In a moment, she slipped out of her halter and her shorts, and it was all so familiar. Had it really been all these years?

Her nimble fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and she ran her hands over my chest, tracing figure eights with her nails. Then she unbuttoned my pants, and I fumbled with my shoes, kicking them off, as she tugged at my belt. My hands explored the slopes and curves of her, and she whispered something in Spanish.

A bolt of lightning, followed by the crackle of nearby thunder, lit up the sky and rattled the windowpanes. We changed positions on the sofa, and she emerged on top. The rest was a blur of mouths and hands, the fullness of her breasts, the ripeness of her hips. Again, we tumbled over one another, and this time she was beneath me, our bodies pressed together. When she spoke, her voice was low, the words throaty, "Quiereme, te necesito!"

I obliged, and she wrapped her long legs around me. We lay there, rocking in perfect harmony on the sofa like a sailboat in gentle seas, and she exhaled several short gasps, then opened her eyes long enough to let them roll back in her head. "Jake, te amo," she said finally. "Siempre te he amado."

Fat raindrops were plopping off the tin roof now, and driven by the gale, pounding into the windows. Tree branches strained, whined, then snapped and fell against the house. We listened to the wind and the echoing thunder as the storm sat above us. "Thunder and lightning, clouds and rain," she said.

"Are you giving a weather report?"

"With you, Jake, I feel the lightning and the thunder. Then I drift above the earth in the clouds and the rain."

Later, as the storm moved on, we lay there, limbs still entwined, and she said, "I didn't know how much I missed you. We could have been so much to each other, Jake. We could have changed each other's lives."

"Maybe we still can," I said, smoothing her dark hair from her face, not knowing just how true that was.

We were snuggled into a bed a bit too short for me when I said, "Tell me about Kit Carson Cimarron."

I felt her body stiffen.

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything.

In the darkness of the small bedroom, she sighed. Outside the pounding rain had let up, and a light drizzle pinged against the roof. I was on my back, and she lay with one knee over my leg, her head on my chest, breathing in time with my heartbeat. "It was so stupid of me that I'm embarrassed by it, even now. I was so alone then, and he seemed so attentive, so caring. Simmy's a powerful man, very determined, very strong. It's quite a combination, Jake, and I just fell for it, very hard."

"Simmy?"

"It doesn't fit at all. I mean, he's as big as the side of a barn, but I thought I detected a gentle side to him. I was wrong. He's an egotistical manipulator and a master operator. He makes my brother look like the pope. In fact, Simmy is what Luis always wanted to be."

"What about Rocky Mountain Treasures?"

"It's Simmy's deal. He brought my brother in on it."

"Blinky told me it was legitimate."

Jo Jo laughed. "Only in the sense that neither one is likely to go to jail. It's a great, legal scam. You've seen the prospectus. It's got all the exculpatory language: 'Be advised this investment is highly risky, and you may lose part or all of your capital investment.'

"That ought to keep people out."

I felt her hair swishing across my chest as if she was shaking her head. "You'd be shocked how many people read those clauses and still put money into oil wells filled with sand and mountaintop property with no access roads. People are greedy and gullible. When I prosecuted consumer frauds, I was constantly amazed how easy it was to separate people from their money with a great sales pitch."

"Which is where your brother fits into the deal."

"Exactly. And something I learned from Luis, the more outlandish the promises, the easier the sale."

"I don't get it."

"Either do I, but it's true. Buried treasure is easier to sell than bushels of apples."

"Wait a second," I said. "Back up. Does Cimarron own these mines or not?"

"Sure, he's got mineral rights to thousands of acres. He bought up hundreds of leases over the past fifteen years or so. He tried mining for gold and copper and silver, and he lost his shirt. Not that he couldn't find the minerals. He could, but the price of excavation and smelting or refining exceeds market price. At the same time, Simmy was always a nut about the old West. He collects the stories-legends really-about the lost gold mines and buried treasures. He can sit around a campfire and tell twenty different stories. There's the Lost Padre in California, the Lost Dutchman in Arizona, the Lost Pitchblende in Colorado. Everything's lost, but none of it's ever found."

"Never?"

"Well, not exactly never. When Simmy was barely out of his teens, he stumbled onto a cache of double eagles. That's what got him started."

"Whoa. Double eagles?"

"Twenty-dollar gold pieces, San Francisco mint, about three thousand of them, worth about one-point-five million today. And he wasn't even looking for them. He was camping out on Devil's Head Mountain in Colorado. He didn't know it then, but there was a legend about a gang that robbed a government train near there in the 1870s. They were chased by a posse and buried the loot at the foot of a towering spruce tree. They marked the tree by sticking a long knife into it, then took off on horseback. Winter came, and the next spring the gang tried to find the tree, but couldn't. After all, the forest probably had fifty thousand spruce trees that looked just alike. They kept looking through the summer. Then a thunderstorm started a forest fire and burned most of the trees to the ground."

"So what happened to the gold?"

"A hundred years or so went by, and Simmy was riding the backcountry by himself, hunting and camping out. The way he tells the story, he was pounding some stakes into the ground to pitch a tent when he hit a rotting old saddlebag that had been brought to the surface by erosion. The wonderful thing is that gold doesn't rot. The eagles polished up just fine, and Simmy had his first nest egg."

"No wonder he believes in secret treasures."

"The worst thing that ever happened to him. He got a taste of treasure, and he became obsessed. He was always dabbling in mining, but for the next twenty years, it was buried gold, not mined gold, that consumed him."

"And you don't believe treasure exists."

"Look, I've done some reading. Simmy's personal library has just about everything ever written about buried treasure in the West. Four hundred years ago, Coronado set out with five hundred conquistadors and a thousand Indians from Mexico looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola. What they found were Zuni Indians growing corn in a dusty village in what is now New Mexico. Then an Indian guide tells Coronado of the fabulous city of Quivera where the streets were paved with gold, and a marble palace was hung with golden bells, and the royal canoes had oarlocks of solid gold."

"Gold seems to be the operative word."

"Right. It drives men mad. All Coronado had to do was take his men north, the Indian tells him. Of course, the Indian just wanted to get Coronado the hell out of New Mexico where he was taking slaves and doing the traditional macho conquistador stuff. So Coronado falls for it and sets out with his army in plumes and shining armor with a thousand mules to carry back the loot."

"That's optimism."

"Verdad, or stupidity. Anyway, they get all the way to Kansas, and all they see are hot, dusty plains. But Coronado believed till the day he died that there were cities of gold out there somewhere."

"And Cimarron does, too. Is that what you're saying?"

"Who knows? He studies mining claims and trappers' maps as if they're holy works. He's bought diaries from the families of frontiersmen and borrowed family Bibles with crude drawings of mines and graveyards. He's scoured the files of newspapers from western towns that don't even exist anymore. He's spent months in museums, and he's filled a hundred notebooks with his plans. He's not willing to admit he's chasing legends. He figures if one in twenty is legitimate, it's still worth the search."

"So he believes in Rocky Mountain Treasures. To Cimarron, it's not a scam."

"Either way, it's a good deal for Simmy. He's got all these leases, and other than the ranch, that's about all he's got left. It doesn't make any sense to dig for gold that costs more to extract than to sell. But they can form a company with suckers' money, take fees as consultants and managers, and sell Simmy's maps to the company at a price they set. If they find the Caverna de Oro of Marble Mountain, then everybody's happy. If not, Blinky and Simmy still make money. Unlike Coronado, it's a no-lose situation."

I was dreaming of conquistadors in heavy armor and helmet plumes when I awoke suddenly without knowing why. Next to me, Jo Jo was breathing deeply, a slight whistling sound accompanying each exhalation of warm breath. Outside, crickets made their night music, and overhead, a lone jet made its way toward the airport. I looked at the digital clock and watched 3:13 magically become 3:14.

Before we turned in, I had called Cindy, my loyal secretary, and asked if she would extend her baby-sitting through the night. She whined and said she was meeting Dottie the Disco Queen at a South Beach bar, and I told her to take Kip along but make sure he got home by one a.m., because I promised he could watch Burt Lancaster in The Killers on the all-night classics channel. How's that for parental guidance?

Now I was awake, and Burt Lancaster had long since been plugged by William Conrad, and I hoped Kip was sleeping soundly and Cindy was sleeping alone.

I lay there a moment, wondering why I had awakened. No indigestion, despite putting away three plates of Jo Jo's picadillo. Cooking was not a skill passed down from her mother. Jo Jo dried out the ground beef, and the raisins were as moist as BBs. The flan was fine. It came from a local bakery.

And then I remembered why I woke up. The groan of the pine floor planks did all the remembering for me.

Someone was in the house, someone besides the sleeping woman and me.

In the depths of sleep, I had heard a noise, and there it was again. Or was it? Old houses are full of sounds. Pipes clang, walls moan, floors . . .

Creak.

Again, the sound. It seemed louder, or was it my imagination?

I swung out of bed, my bare feet touching the cool floor. The rest of me was bare, too, and it did not inspire the fighting parts-arms and legs, hands and feet-to know that another part of me was exposed to the air, useless and vulnerable. I tried to take a step without making a sound, but it didn't work. The floor gave under my feet, too, with what sounded to me like a wail, but was probably no louder than a yawn.

I stopped and listened again.

Silence.

Except for me. My breathing chugged like a locomotive. My heart was running a marathon.

I tiptoed toward the closed bedroom door. No light shone from beneath it. The night had cleared, and moonlight streamed in from outside the window, casting my shadow across the floor and up the door. I took another step toward the door, heard a sound from the other side . . .

I spun backward.

Not of my own accord. The door had opened with a rush, catching me across the shoulder, surprising me, bouncing me, hop-skip-lurch toward the window. My knee sideswiped the dresser, and when I was off-balance, teetering like a drunk, an anvil caught me on the side of the head, just above the right ear. Okay, so it wasn't an anvil, but a fist that felt like iron, and it dropped me to the floor.

I yelled something unintelligible, and Jo Jo woke up screaming, and then I tried to get to my feet, but a knee came up and just missed my dimpled chin and caught me on the shoulder. It did no damage, but set me down again.

I came off the floor, adrenaline flowing. Before I could get off a punch, he threw a looping left hook. I blocked it with my right forearm, and he came at me with a right. Now I was in the defensive position of the double forearm block, sort of like Floyd Patterson's peek-a-boo defense. His punches kept coming, landing like concrete blocks on my triceps and forearms, and so far, I hadn't even swung.

I backed up a step and tossed a jab. So did he, and his reach exceeded mine. He peppered my face with two more stinging straight lefts. I wanted to get a clear shot at him, but unlike almost any brawl I'd ever been in, he was bigger and stronger, and for all I knew, could beat me in the forty-yard dash.

I feinted with the left, came across the top with a right and hit him on the side of the nose. I heard cartilage splinter, and I was showered with blood. His eyes would be closed and watering now, so I came in close, tucked my head into his chest, and shot upward, butting him under the chin. I heard a snap and hoped I broke his jaw. He grunted and gagged.

I took a step back and went for his chin again, this time with a long left hook. I had a lot of hip behind it, but I was too slow. Story of my life.

He stepped to his left and hit me squarely in the solar plexus with a short right I never saw. I doubled over and fell to the floor, gasping for breath that wouldn't come. I dipped a shoulder and rolled into him just as he lifted a foot to kick me. The foot was encased in pointed burgundy cowboy boots that shimmered in the moonlight. The toe skimmed the top of my skull, and the heel slammed me in the forehead. Still, the weight of my body pinned his other foot to the floor. I kept rolling, trying to hyperextend his knee and tear his anterior cruciate ligaments into strands of spaghetti. It would have worked, too, if he hadn't had the legs of an ox.

I weigh two hundred twenty-two pounds, and I didn't budge him. This left me at his feet. He locked his hands and brought them down hard on the back of my neck, and I saw the Milky Way and Orion, with Betelgeuse particularly bright. I reached into the dazzling light to fight my way into the next galaxy, but just floated for a while. I tried to grab him behind one knee and buckle his leg, but I couldn't have squeezed the breath out of a kitten.

I heard Jo Jo screaming. Que demonios haces aqui? Vete ahora mismo!" She came off the bed at him, but he lifted her effortlessly and tossed her across the room.