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Finding nothing, it takes off again and glides toward the beach on stiffly arched wings.
    “What’s your girl’s name?” Malone asks Pablo.
    “What?” he replies.
    “Your new girlfriend.”
    “I met her on the Internet,” Pablo says. “She lives in Dallas. Come over tonight, and I’ll show you naked pictures.”
    They stand silently then, the sun warming their backs, the breeze ruffling their hair. They often go an hour or more without speaking, and Malone is always grateful for the quiet. He’s had talk enough to last him a lifetime.
      
    He heads for home a while later, to kill the rest of the afternoon there. His place is a couple of blocks inland, a guesthouse in the backyard of a slightly larger house. The guesthouse was a toolshed until someone drywalled and added a bathroom, and there’s barely enough space in it for a futon and a television, but Malone is okay with that. The beach is there when he wants to stretch out.
    The yard of the house is an overgrown jungle prowled by feral cats as wild as tigers. On his way back to the shed, Malone rousts the big gray one he calls Smoke, interrupting the cat’s snooze in a patch of sunlight. The cat crouches and hisses at him before diving into the bushes.
    Inside his room, Malone kicks off his flip-flops and snags a beer from the mini-fridge. That and a microwave are the extent of the kitchen facilities. After opening the windows to get the air moving, he stretches out on the futon and turns on the TV. He runs through the channels until he happens upon Jaws, a film he knows by heart but still watches whenever he comes across it.
    Quint is in the middle of his story about the USS Indianapolis when Gail calls Malone’s name. She presses her face to the screen of his side window in order to peer inside.
    “You decent?” she says.
    “No,” he says. “But come on in.”
    Gail rents the front house with her teenage son Seth. She’s forty, a skinny blonde who’s starting to wrinkle from too much sun but still has a nice smile and kind blue eyes. She’s been divorced for years but isn’t bitter, doesn’t blame all men for her troubles with one of them. She opens the door and pokes her head inside.
    “You gonna be around later?” she says.
    “Could be,” Malone says.
    “Seth’s going to his dad’s.”
    “Yeah?”
    “So…?”
    “I’ll be around.”
    Once or twice a month she sneaks back to Malone’s place with a joint and a bottle of wine, and they make each other feel good for a night. It’s straight-up sex, and both of them know that’s all it’ll ever be. She wants someone more stable than him, and he doesn’t want anyone at all. He gave everything he had the first time around, emptied himself out.
    “Care for a beer?” he says.
    “Come on,” she says. “How are we ever gonna get to Maui if you keep spending all your money on booze?”
    It’s their running joke—sad in a way—sneaking off together to Hawaii, starting over.
    “I’m gonna hit the Mega Millions this week,” he says. “Jackpot’s up to what?”
    “One hundred seven million.”
    “The numbers came to me in a dream. You watch.”
    “You’re fucking nuts,” Gail says. “You hear about Jordan and Nikki?”
    “No.”
    “They finally split for Alaska last night.”
    “No shit.”
    “Yeah, and then Nikki called me this morning and said the apartment was unlocked and whatever they’d left behind was up for grabs. I went over a couple hours ago, and it looked like everything they owned was still there. Furniture, clothes, everything. I scored a blender and a set of knives. You should go see what’s left.”
    Probably nothing but junk, but you never know. When the next commercial comes on, Malone hauls himself up off the futon, grabs another beer, and strolls over to the gray stucco apartment building across the street. Jordan and Nikki’s place is on the second floor. Two guys he’s never seen before are struggling to carry a sofa out of the apartment, and