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Herbie or had boiled away, but one way or the other, I hadn’t missed them by much. That thought was enough to take me out of the bedroom again and through the entire house, gun in hand, opening every closet, sliding aside every bath curtain, checking the garage, which opened into the kitchen and peering through the front windows at the curb for an idling car. I looked at the street for three or four empty minutes, just trying to locate the strength I needed, and then I went back into the bedroom.
    What they had done to Herbie had been simple, brutally, heartlessly effective, and even creative, making improvisational use of things they’d found in the condo. They had simply forced the rubber gloves onto Herbie’s hands, hung him over the edge of the bed like a sack of oats, and filled the gloves with boiling water. I took a closer look, but it didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds.
    I was suddenly aware of black flowers blooming in the air in front of me, like the malign blossoms that erupt on motion-picture film just before it burns. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the carpet, which was wet even six feet from the bed. They must have filled the gloves to overflowing many times. At some point during the questioning Herbie’d had a nosebleed, and the water had thinned the blood to a pink blush, like a watercolor wash, on the white carpet all around the bed.
    At God knows which refilling of the gloves, he also appeared to have had a heart attack. There weren’t any bullets, no head trauma, nothing.
    So there was one slender comfort. Herbie, as always, had followed Rule Number Three: He’d gotten out fast.
    There’s no way for me to know how long I sat there in that rose-pink, stinking damp. I don’t even remember getting up. By the time I was back inside myself again, I was driving south on Pacific Coast Highway with the hard blue line of the sea to my right, threading my way automatically between cars filled with beach-goers: bathing suits, beach-towel shawls, women in straw sun hats. It wasn’t until I turned left onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard that I realized I was still wearing the disposable plastic gloves, and when I saw them, I screamed.

I pulled into the little shopping center where Topanga and Old Topanga intersect, ordered a pizza at Rocco’s, and let it cool. It was hot in the Canyon, and the sun sifted itself through the leaves of the sycamores, carving biblical beams in the dusty air.
    The pizza sat in front of me, neglected, as I tried to put myself back together.
    Crooks aren’t like orchestra conductors; we tend to die early. I’d personally known half a dozen criminals, including a couple of friends, who no longer walked among us—I’d actually directed one of them to the exit—but this was the first time I’d lost someone who was truly close to me, crook or straight. My parents were both alive, if emotionally distant, the friends and lovers I’d kept track of were above ground, and my daughter and ex-wife were thriving without me.
    But Herbie had crossed categories: he was a friend, a crook, a mentor, a surrogate father. He’d also been the first to warn me that friendships among those of us on the shady side of the street could end suddenly. He’d lost a friend to a meth addict with a broken bottle, who’d killed Herbie’s acquaintance for the $400 the two of them had scored in a liquor-store robbery. Several days later, the tweaker had gone down under a car with no plates on it.
When you can’t get closure
, Herbie had said to me,
get even
. I’d followed that advice once already, evening the score for a friend who got killed on a surveillance he was doing for me, a surveillance I hadn’t thought could get lethal.
    And now it looked like I was going to do it again. For Herbie.
    As soon as I could walk.
    Since I couldn’t manage that yet, I used the phone.
    “I can’t ask him anything,” Janice said. “He’s gone. He called to tell me the office would be locked up