“Turn right!” she said. “Can’t you go no faster?”

I went faster. We were out in Cherry Creek now, and it was starting to get really light. The snowstorm was apparently over. The sky was turning a faint lavender-blue.

“Now right, up there,” she said, and I saw where we were going. This road led past Cherry Creek High School and then up along the top of the dam. A nice isolated place for a robbery.

We went past the last houses and pulled out onto the dam road. Rosa turned in her seat to peer out my window and the back, obviously looking for something. There wasn’t much to see. The water wasn’t visible from this point, and she was looking the wrong direction, out towards Denver. There were still a few lights, the early-bird traffic down on I-225 and the last few orangish street lights that hadn’t gone off automatically. The snow had taken on the bluish-lavender color of the sky.

I stopped the car.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Go all the way up.”

“I can’t,” I said, pointing ahead. “The road’s closed.”

She peered at the chain strung across the road as if she couldn’t figure out what it was, and then opened the door and got out.

Now it was my turn to say, “What are you doing?”

“We gotta walk,” she said. “We’ll miss it otherwise.”

“Miss what? Are you telling me there’s going to be a time warp up there on top of the dam?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Time warp?” she said. Her grin glittered in my headlights. “No. Come on.”

Even Coronado had finally said, “All right, enough,” and ordered his men to strangle El Turco. But not until he’d been lured all the way up to Kansas. And, according to Rosa, Colorado. The Seven Cities of Cibola were not going to be up on top of Cherry Creek dam, no matter what Rosa said, and I wasn’t even going to get a story out of this, but I switched off my lights and got out of the car and climbed over the chain.