But the move hadn’t worked then, and didn’t work now.

Mauricio glanced toward Donnally’s hip. “Why don’t you just get a new one?” He licked his lips and swallowed hard. “I heard the nurse talking about her father… titanium.” He struggled to smile. “Like a golf club. He can square dance again…” He raised his eyebrows. “And everything.”

Donnally shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

Mauricio stared up at the ceiling fixture set into the sound-muting tiles, and then said, “You’ve got to let go of the past, Harlan.”

Donnally knew Mauricio wasn’t talking only about the Mission District shootout that had ended his career ten years earlier, for there always had been a duality in their conversations, one that sometimes left Donnally stranded in the shadowed gap between Mauricio’s words and his thoughts.

“Give me a good reason,” Donnally said.

“I’ll tell you what I figured out lying here all these weeks. If you’re going to be dead to the present, you might as well not be alive at all.”

Donnally slipped his. 32 semiautomatic from the pocket of his jeans and extended it butt-first toward Mauricio.

“You want to shoot me and get it over with?” Donnally asked.

Mauricio waved it off. “Been there. Done that.”

Donnally lowered the gun and squinted at Mauricio, trying to detect a killer behind the mask of the gentle man who fed stray dogs, freed kitchen spiders into his backyard, and gave shelter to the homeless passing through town.

“You what?” Donnally asked.

In a decade of running their businesses side by side, Donnally figured he’d heard all of Mauricio’s stories. Knew each step in his migration from Guadalajara to Tijuana, to the pima cotton fields in Southern Arizona, to the California Central Valley, and then to Sacramento. Attending adult school at night, and then community college, working toward the American Dream. And finally moving north to Mount Shasta after he’d saved enough money to open his own business: an unnamed fix-it shop and junkyard next to Donnally’s Lone Mountain Cafe.