2

MY KITCHEN WAS AN UNFINISHED BACK porch furnished with a butcher-block table and a twelve-foot counter that held three hot plates, a flat pan toaster, and an electric rotisserie oven. I boiled water and filtered it through a cheesecloth bag wrapped around a five-tablespoon mixture of chicory and coffee.

“Damn, Paris,” Fearless said after his first sip. “You sure can make a cup’a coffee taste good.”

The back wall of my kitchen was just a two-ply screen. It was the tail end of summer and not too cool. Moths and other night insects were bouncing off the screen, trying to get at the light. A thousand crickets hid our words from any spy that might be hiding in the darkness.

I sat up on the table while Fearless leaned his chair against the wall.

“What about this Kit?” I asked.

“Like I said, Paris. The boy was hollerin’ and cryin’ for his daddy. I felt bad for him. Leora said that she didn’t know what to do, so what was I supposed to say?”

“That you don’t know where the man is,” I suggested. “That you wished her luck.”

“Yeah. Maybe that’s what I should’a did, but I didn’t. I told her that I’d ask around, and that if I found him I’d tell her where to go.”

“Then what?”

“Well, you know I’d been out there in Oxnard most the time. Harvestin’ all day and camped out on guard at night —”

“Guard for what?”

“Kit had a lease on the property, but it was way out in the middle’a nowhere. He was worried that somebody’d come steal his trucks. So he paid me seventeen dollars a day to keep guard and pick melons.”

A dark shadow appeared at the screen door, about the size of a sparrow. After a moment I realized that it was a bat come to feast on those juicy bugs. The bat bobbled and dipped in the air like an ungainly puppet. But as silly as he looked, I felt that chill again. This time it made its way down into my gut.