He glanced at his watch… ten minutes more. Some things he couldn't share. He couldn't talk about Matt.

He felt so goddamned guilty.

"That mess at NBC… I can clean that up. After all, I'm the guy who gave them The Mechanic and Dangerous Company. Those two shows made the network hundreds of millions." But that was four years ago, and back then he'd have found a way to get Marty Lanier laughing at his own ideas, instead of calling him a cocksucker and threatening his life in front of the assembled network Jedi. Marty's ideas were creative arsenic. Thoughts delivered from the hip with no real reasons, just "interesting notions" he called them-this from a man who probably got erections playing Nintendo.

"I want you to think about why we can't discuss Matthew," she was saying. "I want you to work on a reason."

"Okay." He looked at his watch: eight more minutes. "Look, Ellen, I don't want to cut this short, but Elizabeth is picking me up and she has to get back to the studio by three. So I better leave now."

"If that's what you want."

He made it out the door, his eyelid doing the fandango. He got in the elevator.

Too small. It felt like a coffin, out of control, cableless, falling down the side of the steel and glass building, about to bury itself and Ryan in the oil shale deep below Century City.

He walked into the sunshine. The fifty-minute hour was over. He just hoped Elizabeth wasn't late and he could make it home without cracking up.

Chapter 3.

THE FISHING PARTY

"MAN, THIS THING SMELLS LIKE SOMEBODY HURLED IN it," Little Pussy said, wrinkling his nose in the backseat of the ten-year-old rusted-out Chevy wagon they had stolen in town. It was eight P. M. and they were heading back to the Sporting Club. New York Tony was driving with the headlights out.