In ten minutes it would be twelve thirty, and in ten more his flight would start boarding. He’d timed the walk from the strip of fast-food restaurants to the terminal and he knew it wouldn’t take him more than five minutes. Security wouldn’t add more than another five. The Burbank airport’s main midweek function was as a commuter portal, and since even the most laid-back techie tried to get to work no later than noon, the lines were rarely long this time of day.

Better yet, Gus was leaving from the smaller of the two terminals. He’d decided to fly into San Francisco, even though it would cost half as much to land in Oakland. It wasn’t simply the convenience of being able to hop on a BART train at SFO that would take him to his ultimate destination-for the difference in ticket price Gus could have hired a limo in Oakland and still had money left over for a substantially better lunch than the one in front of him.

It was, in fact, the ridiculously higher ticket price that convinced Gus to fly from Burbank to San Francisco. He didn’t think he’d left any clues about his trip, even making his plane reservations from what might have been Santa Barbara’s last pay phone. If he’d been careless, though, he didn’t want to make it easy for Shawn to track him down. That meant doing the opposite of what his friend would know he’d normally do. Which was, of course, to take the easiest flight or the cheapest, those two rarely occurring together.

If he’d cared about cost, he would have flown out of LAX, where competition between airlines served to keep prices low. If convenience had been the key, there were frequent, if ludicrously costly, flights from Santa Barbara International to the Bay Area. Driving eighty miles down the always jammed 101 to Burbank only to spend as much as he would on a ticket from Santa Barbara was the dumbest thing he could have done.

He thought he’d made it out of Santa Barbara without being noticed.