"We may only be here a few days."

"And then what? Where else you got to go?"

"I only came here to give us a chance to get our wind back."

"Where do you go afterward? Why not stay right here?"

Mathieson only shook his head, mute. They stopped along the edge of a mountain track that pa.s.sed for a road. Roger said, "Jeep trail. The fire rangers use it. I brought in a grader last year, smoothed it out down to the county road. See, the reason we didn't spend anything on work up here, we don't own it. It's National Forest land. We got temporary possession-tag end of a forty-nine-year lease. When the thing expires the land reverts to the government. They'll demolish the cabin. They want to go back to virgin forest, all these old lumber and mining leases. Matter of fact that's why I figured we ought to meet up here. My name's not on any public record."

Roger hunkered down with his back against a pine. He balanced the drink carelessly on his knee. "Old horse, you want to talk?"

"I don't know, Roger."

"You never did wear your feelings on your sleeve but this thing's got you clamped up tighter than a schoolmarm's c.u.n.t. You keep it all bottled up it'll start to rot inside you."

The stillness and the whiskey began to relax him. He watched the late sun rays flicker through the high trees. Needles and cones made a crisp resin fragrance.

Finally he said, "When you think about hiding out it looks like retirement. Pension, sixty-five years old and a gold watch. Spending the rest of your life trying to think of ways to kill time until you crumble away of old age. That's the vision I keep having and I can't stand the sight of it."

Roger tipped his head back against the tree and watched him. Mathieson said, "You know I grew up in New York. We had, you know, La Guardia and the Yankees and the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. We were about a half a block from the Second Avenue El. My father was a druggist, we lived in the top two floors of a converted brownstone. It wasn't an elegant neighborhood then. It is now. But it was just middle cla.s.s at the time. A lot of grit and that G.o.d-awful noise from the El trains. It was just New York, h.e.l.l, n.o.body thought of it as a pesthole in those days."

"Uh-huh."

"We grew up on stickball and comic books and movie matinees, you know. Gangsters-to me a gangster was the same thing as the crooked banker in the Western movie, the guy that twists his moustache and forecloses on the girl's ranch. Bad guys-all right. But as far as I was concerned they were pure comic-book fictions. Something Hollywood dreamed up for the B-movie formula. To give Alan Ladd and Pat O'Brien somebody to fight it out with."

"I was raised on Jesse James, myself."

"The whole idea of willful evil was a comic-book fantasy. I guess I didn't grow up for the longest time. I mean, even combat in the army was like a movie. The reality was a bunch of ordinary people digging holes and eating out of mess kits and swapping dull stories to pa.s.s the time. It was like getting through your junior year. Waiting for mail, waiting for new orders. Thinking about girls. Lying a lot. h.e.l.l, there was an enemy army out there, there was a lot of noise and confusion but that was all part of the unreality. Am I making any sense?"

"Reckon you are, some."

"Frank Pastor, that whole world. Inside my head it's still a B movie. I keep thinking all I need to do is tell the writer to do a script rewrite."

Mathieson leaned forward and coiled his arms around his knees. "I want a crack at rewriting this script."

"Now I ain't sure I see what you're talking about there."

"Frank Pastor's had all the initiatives. He acts, I react. He shoots, I duck. He's the star, the writer and the director-the h.e.l.l with it, Roger, I'm sick of being an extra in Frank Pastor's grade-B programmer."

"Well you had those cards dealt to you, old horse."

"If you're the mouse in the shooting gallery, sooner or later you're bound to get an urge to pick up one of the rifles and start shooting back."

Roger rolled his gla.s.s between his palms. "You mean that literally? I mean, picking up a gun and going after the son of a b.i.t.c.h?"

"That's not my line. I wouldn't stand a chance."

"Then that kind of thinking, it's only going to misery you. Torturing yourself ain't going to help."

"I'm not doing that."

"Amy must just about have supper on the table. Let's us go eat. Look here-you got a plan of some kind kicking around back there inside your head?"

"It's beginning to."

"You know there's one man you ought to go and see. You know who that is."

"Yes." Mathieson knew.

PART TWO.

TURNABOUT.

CHAPTER NINE.

Los Angeles: 22 August

1.

THE RECEPTIONIST HAD ABUNDANT DARK RED HAIR AND frosty eye makeup; she had the look of a c.o.c.ktail hostess in a pricey lounge. "Yes, sir?"

"My name's Edward Merle. I phoned yesterday."

"Yes, sir. Your appointment was for ten-thirty."

"I know, I'm early. I took a chance ..."

"Please have a seat? I'll see if he's free."

The reception office was old-fashioned like the lobby of a rail-depot hotel.

The red-haired woman put her headphone down and pulled a cord. "Would you come this way, Mr. Merle?" She gave him a quick smile.

He followed her down a short paneled corridor. She showed him through a door into the corner office.

Diego Vasquez came to his feet.

Shirt-sleeved, tie at half-mast, long sidewise shock of glossy black hair. Vasquez had the incongruous face of an intellectual gone to seed.

The redhead vanished silently. Vasquez sized up his visitor with sad dark eyes. "Mr. Merle."

The handshake was perfunctory as if Vasquez disliked the touch of flesh. He was thin and not very tall; he looked fragile. How old was he? Fifty?

Vasquez circled his desk and got into the high-backed leather swivel chair, seating himself as if he were a pilot settling at the controls. "How may I be of service?" Courtly, low-voiced-as contrivedly old-fashioned as his surroundings. But the redhead was a giveaway: This was Hollywood country and Image was rarely truthful.

On the wall in a gla.s.sed frame was the headline from the Times. FOUR EX-CONVICTS REVEALED DEAD IN VASQUEZ RESCUE OF ACTOR'S KIDNAPPED SON.

Vasquez pinned him with a speculative scrutiny. He prompted: "Sir?"

"It's rather a confidential matter." A lame beginning; he wished he hadn't said it.

"They usually are." A quick smile that vanished abruptly.

"I want to contract for your services."

"So I gathered." Patient, polite; but the eyes became harder.

Spit it out. Get on with it.

But it was the point of no return. Beyond this moment he would be committed.

"My family and I are being-hara.s.sed. By gangsters. Members of organized crime."

"Indeed."

"I testified against one of them. Some years ago."

"You're seeking protection? There are federal agencies that--"

"I'm not seeking protection, Mr. Vasquez."

"I see." The brown eyes narrowed. "Wear your hair longer, and take off that recently grown moustache, and yes. The photograph in the Examiner. It's Mathieson, isn't it? Fredric Mathieson?"

It jolted him. "Are you always that quick?"

"I read the newspapers, Mr. Mathieson. It's not every day that a house is blown up in Los Angeles. Why did you come here under a false name?"

"Edward Merle is my real name."

"Have you got any identification?"

"I've got papers in the name of Paul Baxter."

"Yet a third name. It must be rather confusing for you."

"Until a few days ago I was Jason W. Greene." He managed a sliver of a smile.

"I once knew a writer who used nine pen names. Sometimes he forgot his real name."

"My name is Edward Merle. That's my real name, it's the name the mobsters know me under."

"Then Mathieson is an alias, but you used it for rather a long time, didn't you."

"Until a few weeks ago, yes. More than eight years."

"I see. Let's see if I can reconstruct this. Your house is bombed by contract killers, presumably. Now it turns out the intended victim has been living under an a.s.sumed name and reveals that he testified against a criminal some years ago. You're not a Valachi type-you don't have the earmarks of a gangster gone rogue. You're not a defector from the syndicate, so I must a.s.sume you were an innocent witness to some criminal act. Correct?"

"Yes."

"The whimsies of fate allowed you and your family to survive; but you've lost your house and you've had to go into hiding again. You've had to give up your job and your name for the second time. And apparently the law can't do a thing to prevent this situation. So you've come to Vasquez. Is that a fair summation?"

"Close enough, yes."

Vasquez searched his face. "What you've got in mind takes more than resolve, Mr. Merle."

"I've got more than resolve."

"What have you got?"

"Time. A great deal of hate." He reached into his pocket. "And money." He laid the check on the desk.

Vasquez picked up a pencil and used its eraser to pull the check across the desk to him. He glanced at it. "Twenty thousand dollars. Rather impressive." He left the check where it was and tapped the pencil against his teeth. "Hate can wear off."

Mathieson said nothing to that.

"You're what, an agent for screenwriters?"

"I was, yes."

"And what was your profession before? When you were Edward Merle."

"I was a lawyer in New York."

"Criminal practice?"

"The firm I worked for had mainly business clients."

"But you did practice criminal law to some extent at least?"

"Now and then. Trivial matters. Sometimes a client would be arrested for a.s.sault in a bar, that kind of thing. Once or twice a year we'd take on a felony case for the Legal Aid Society."

"You had a fairly good practice?"

"I was a junior staff member. Not a very brilliant lawyer, I guess. But yes, I kept busy."

"Making, say, fifteen or sixteen thousand a year?"