His older son, Rob, would have appreciated the empty highway. Rob spent much more time on the road than Colin did. He’d taken five expensive years getting an engineering degree from UC Santa Barbara. Since then, he’d made his living-when he’d made a living-playing bass in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. “Best damn outfit nobody’s ever heard of,” was how he described it, not without pride.

Colin didn’t hate the music. Some of the band’s songs were funny. Some were clever. A few managed both at once. He did hope Rob wore earplugs at every gig and every rehearsal. Otherwise, his son wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he hit thirty-five. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles liked turning it up to eleven.

The guys in the band liked smoking dope, too. They liked it a lot, Rob no less than any of the others. He didn’t waste any time pretending he didn’t smoke it, either. Hypocrisy wasn’t in him, any more than it was in Colin. If such things came down through the gene pool, he’d got it from his old man.

“I could bust you for that,” Colin had said the first time he smelled sweet smoke and walked in on Rob toking.

“Go ahead, then,” his son had answered. He didn’t yell Fascist swine! but he might as well have.

And, of course, Colin had done no such thing. He’d woken up the next morning with a hangover at least as vicious as this one, though. Rob hadn’t pointed out that pot didn’t hurt you the morning after. For such small mercies, Colin was grateful. With a cop’s cynical certainty, he was sure he wouldn’t get the larger ones.

Several cars sat by the side of the road at an oxbow bend in the Snake River. People with binoculars and spotting scopes and cameras with long lenses peered out across the water. Colin kept going. He was only a halfhearted birder. A bald eagle he would have stopped for, but those seemed unlikely here. He couldn’t get excited about some duck species he hadn’t seen before.