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self-deception than most people did, but he could not claim, with a straight face, that he invariably told himself the truth. Or even that he invariably wanted to hear it. What it came down to was that he tried always to be truthful with himself, but he often accepted a half-truth and a wink instead of the real thing-and he could live comfortably with whatever omission the wink implied.
        But he never lied to the dog.
        Never.
        Theirs was the only entirely honest relationship that Spencer had ever known; therefore, it was special to him. No. More than merely special.
        Sacred.
        Rocky, with his hugely expressive eyes and guileless heart, with his body language and his soul-revealing tail, was incapable of deceit.
        If he'd been able to talk, he would have been perfectly ingenuous because he was a perfect innocent. Lying to the dog was worse than lying to a small child.
        Hell, he wouldn't have felt as bad if he had lied to God, because God unquestionably expected less of him than did poor Rocky.
        Never lie to the dog.
        "Okay," he said, braking for a red traffic light, "so I know why I went to her house. I know what I was looking for."
        Rocky regarded him with interest.
        "You want me to say it, huh?"
        The dog waited.
        "That's important to you, is it-for me to say it?"
        The dog chuffed, licked his chops, cocked his head.
        "All right. I went to her house because-" The dog stared. -because she's a very nice looking woman."
        The rain drummed. The windshield wipers thumped.
        "Okay, she's pretty but she's not gorgeous. It isn't her looks.
        There's just… something about her. She's special."
        The idling engine rumbled.
        Spencer sighed and said, "Okay, I'll be straight this time. Right to the heart of it, huh? No more dancing around the edges. I went to her house because-" Rocky stared.
        "-because I wanted to find a life."
        The dog looked away from him, toward the street ahead, evidently satisfied with that final explanation.
        Spencer thought about what he had revealed to himself by being honest with Rocky. I wanted to find a life.
        He didn't know whether to laugh at himself or weep. In the end, he did neither. He just moved on, which was what he'd been doing for at least the past sixteen years.
        The traffic light turned green.
        With Rocky looking ahead, only ahead, Spencer drove home through the streaming night, through the loneliness of the vast city, under a strangely mottled sky that was as yellow as a rancid egg yolk, as gray as crematorium ashes, and fearfully black along one far horizon.
        At NINE O'CLOCK, after the fiasco in Santa Monica, eastbound on the freeway, returning to his hotel in Westwood, Roy Miro noticed a Cadillac stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Serpents of red light from its emergency flashers wriggled across his rain-streaked windshield. The rear tire on the driver's side was flat.
        A woman sat behind the steering wheel, evidently waiting for help.
        She appeared to be the only person in the car.
        The thought of a woman alone in such circumstances, in any part of greater Los Angeles, worried Roy. These days, the City of Angels wasn't the easygoing place it had once been-and the hope of actually finding anyone living even an approximation of an angelic existence was slim indeed. Devils, yes: Those were relatively easy to locate.
        He stopped on the shoulder ahead of the Cadillac.
        The downpour was heavier than it had been earlier. A wind had sailed in from the ocean. Silvery sheets of rain, billowing like the transparent canvases of a ghost ship, flapped through the darkness.
        He plucked his floppy-brimmed vinyl hat off the passenger seat and squashed it down on his head. As always in bad weather, he was wearing a raincoat and galoshes. In spite of his