"Is there anything else I can arrange? An audience with the Pope?" I said.

She turned from the drainboard and dried her hands on a towel.

"That woman's after something else. I just don't know what it is," she said.

"The Flynns are complicated people."

"They have a way of finding war zones to play in. Don't let her take you over the hurdles, Streak."

I hit her on the rump with the palm of my hand. She wadded up the dish towel and threw it past my head.

We ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the back yard. Beyond the duck pond at the back of our property my neighbor's sugarcane was tall and green and marbled with the shadows of clouds. The bamboo and periwinkles that grew along our coulee rippled in the wind, and I could smell rain and electricity in the south.

"What's in that brown envelope you brought home?" Bootsie asked.

"Pictures of a mainline sociopath in the Colorado pen."

"Why bring them home?"

"I've seen the guy. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember where."

"Around here?"

"No. Somewhere else. The top of his head looks like a yellow cake but he has no jaws. An obnoxious FBI agent told me he's pals with Cisco Flynn."

"A head like a yellow cake? A mainline con? Friends with Cisco Flynn?"

"Yeah."

"Wonderful."

That night I dreamed of the man named Swede Boxleiter. He was crouched on his haunches in the darkened exercise yard of a prison, smoking a cigarette, his granny glasses glinting in the humid glow of lights on the guard towers. The predawn hours were cool and filled with the smells of sage, water coursing over boulders in a canyon riverbed, pine needles layered on the forest floor. A wet, red dust hung in the air, and the moon seemed to rise through it, above the mountain's rim, like ivory skeined with dyed thread.