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and Arty.
    She flipped the biker onto his stomach and got the other sleeve off.
    From there it was no problem to pack the sacks in the jacket.
    She began to feel better. No voice now, oh, maybe just a whisper, but it was overtaken by a sense of — what was it? — flow. Being carried along on a wave but also causing that wave. Surfing on an ocean of her own making.
    Her mind was buzzing and alive.
    Wait . . . Fingerprints.
    That thought brought her up short. All that CSI stuff. She knew what she’d touched. She took some dirt in her hands and spit on it. She had a red bandana in her back pocket. She spread the mud around on the saddlebags, especially the metal parts, and wiped those places down.
    Footprints.
    It was mostly rock around here, just a little dirt where the body was. No problem there. She used the jewel-stuffed jacket to smooth over the prints her hiking boots made and backed away onto rock again.
    She laughed. She was going to get away with it. At least the carrying-off part. That much was a high. The best she’d felt in years.
    Control was intoxicating. Bring it on, more and more.
    And keep moving.
    Because somebody may happen along and spoil everything.

    “He did what ?”
    “Keep your eyes on the road, Geena. Last thing I need today is an accident.”
    Rocky and Geena were heading into Silver Lake, Geena driving.
    “Well then, tell me,” Geena said.
    “Let’s wait until — ”
    “He set your clothes on fire? And you want me to wait? Here’s a red light.”
    Geena stopped. The white dome of the Angelus Temple was just to the right. Rocky remembered something about it. Some woman evangelist had set it up in the 1920s, and here it still was.
    “Smashed my car window, too,” Rocky said. “I’ll leave it there for Exhibit A.” She’d call in a report later. Now she just wanted to be away from the place, away from the vicinity of Boyd Martin.
    The one thing he didn’t get was her kit from the trunk. Her tools of the trade, which included a mini tape recorder, camera, binoculars, lock-pick set, and her nanocam in sunglasses. Her secret weapon. She could do so much with those, and they actually looked good on her.
    Also, her laptop from the apartment. With these things, at least, she was still in business.
    Geena said nothing. Rocky was looking straight ahead but she could see, from the corner of her eye, the unmistakable dropping of the jaw.
    “I don’t believe this,” Geena said.
    “If you’ll just relax,” Rocky said, “I’ll go over the whole thing in gory detail. Let’s go to Franco’s.” The bar near the freeway.
    The light turned green, but Geena didn’t move the car. “What if we go see Swami T instead?”
    “If you mention any more swamis, I swear — ”
    The angry blare of a car horn cut her off. Geena gunned through the intersection.
    Rocky held on for dear life.

    Liz thought she must have gone at least a football field away from the dead biker. She came to a grove of knotty oak trees, the kind that used to be all over this end of the valley until they started mowing them down for houses.
    But the Packers — what Pack Canyon residents liked to call themselves, Liz found out, and without any apology to Green Bay — put up a major stink when developers started getting too close. They won battle after zoning battle, and Liz could kiss them because this was all land she could use now.
    There were lots of places to choose from, including a little creek bed. Here the water trickled by through a long trough of weeds.
    No, too mushy. She needed something with more cover.
    Maybe she’d have to dig a hole.
    Just get this over with. Somebody was going to find Arty, and she’d have to cook up some story about why she wasn’t with him. Shouldn’t be too hard, but who needed the trouble?
    Trouble is for losers, her mother had told her. Trouble was something you didn’t need to keep. There was always a way out of trouble, and money was usually the quickest way. If you had plenty