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and Guy looked at her through the open door. He said maybe he could stop long enough for a quick one. He stayed for five quick ones and most of the time he gave his attention to Mumsie.
    ‘He has a yen,’ Red said when Parker went away.
    ‘I don’t want it.’ Mumsie came over and sat in his lap. ‘I only want your yens.’
    ‘It might be fun sleeping with a cop.’
    ‘You’ve an evil mind.’
    ‘What’s evil about sleeping with cops? They’re limbs of the law. They’re whited sepulchers.’
    ‘Not that one. Don’t talk about him any more. Tell me a secret, darling.’
    ‘I adore you,’ Red whispered, and he meant it.
    He kept on meaning it through the coldest winter the town had ever known and the wettest spring that followed. Then Jack Fisher showed up to bring his world down around his ears.
    The cabin they found on Pyramid Creek, just off the American River road from Lake Tahoe to Placerville, belonged to the man who owned the store at Strawberry. It stood back from the creek a way and the bedroom windows looked up toward Horsetail Falls. At night you could hear the water pouring down the rocks.
    A clump of lodgepole pine grew in front of the cabin. If you cut into the bark it smelled like apples. Down the hill was the highway but you couldn’t see it and you couldn’t see the river. But you could see the gorge through which the river ran and you could see the snow-covered peaks off to the right. When the sun dropped low enough the peaks were red for a little while.
    They rented the cabin late in the afternoon and bought a lot of canned stuff and put it in the kitchen and cooked supper. They worked together, stopping now and then to look through the window at the dusk filling the canyon. After supper they took a cot out on the porch and lay on it, listening to the creek, with the husk of an old moon looking at them and the ghosts of a million lost worlds.
    ‘We should have come here right away,’ Mumsie said. ‘We never should have gone to Los Angeles.’ She pressed close to him.
    ‘He didn’t see you,’ Red said. ‘Anyway, he’s probably forgotten all about you.’
    ‘He saw you and he doesn’t forget.’
    ‘That dame who was with him won’t let him remember his past,’ Red said. ’A year is a long time. And he wasn’t in Los Angeles looking for you. He was opening a dog track.’
    ‘Then why did we run?’
    ’I don’t like Southern California.’
    ‘Even with me around?’
    ‘Even with you around.’
    ‘What do we do next?’
    ‘We stay here until snow flies,’ Red said. ‘Then we’ll go to Reno and I’ll open an office and we’ll live on the fat of the land.’
    ‘Like we did in Los Angeles?’ Mumsie asked skeptically.
    ‘Los Angeles is no place for a detective. Too much competition from the cops.’
    ‘You’re not telling the truth,’ Mumsie said. ‘You wouldn’t have left in such a hurry if you weren’t afraid.’
    ‘I’m not afraid of Sterling,’ Red said. That was true enough. Meeting the man in front of the Biltmore Hotel hadn’t worried him at all. Sterling had expressed surprise at seeing him. They had exchanged pleasantries, then Whit and his blonde friend had climbed into a waiting Cadillac and had driven away. What worried—or rather annoyed—him was a visitor he had had at five o’clock one evening a few days before. Red’s secretary had gone home and Red was alone in the dingy office on the fourth floor of an old building at Fifth and Main streets. He heard footsteps crossing the outer office. His door opened and Jack Fisher stood in the doorway.
    ‘Surprise,’ Jack Fisher said. He entered, closed the door behind him and stood there grinning at Red. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see your ex-partner, old boy?’
    Red got up, came around the desk and they shook hands. ‘What brings you out here?’
    ‘This and that.’
    ‘How’s Gertrude?’
    Fisher dismissed her with a shrug. ’Gone the way of all flesh.’
    ‘Working?’
    ‘Sort