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whatever it is, and one tall, lean laughing lunatic palm tree looming over him and shaking its unhinged head.
    “I’m okay,” Jay says, and nods for some reason, though he most assuredly is anything but.

| 5 |
    HE TRIES TO MAKE IT A GAME.
    All the unrelenting stress has sharpened his senses to a kind of jittering hyperlucidity that feels almost like a superpower.
    Or just too much coffee.
    His fall has taken the fight out of him. He’s a stick in the gutter after a storm, caught in the current of runoff, hurtling helplessly toward a drain.
    They’re on their way to what Public has called a transfer point; a black cloth bag is loosely draped over Jay’s head, his hands are free. Where daylight bleeds into the darkness at his neck and shoulders, a bright clutter of what Jay guesses is landscape passes outside. And what else? The press against his shoulders of two fleshy U.S. Marshals in the backseat of a vehicle that smells of vanilla air freshener and cigarettes and french fries. He could take the hood off, but they’ve asked him not to in a way that precludes arguing about it. The mewling hum of the car means it can’t, he decides, be more than four cylinders, and a murmur of low front-seat voices, and the wheezy muffled shoop shoop shoop of traffic passing in the opposite direction suggests they’re still on city streets, windows up: muffled talk radio bleatsfor a moment from an adjacent car, then bus brakes wheeze, a distant siren tails away and the tires click and pop across rents and seams in the roadway. Must be the 101. A turn indicator ticks. Now they’re taking an exit ramp. Stale frozen air blows back from the air conditioner; it’s been unseasonably hot.
    One of the marshals wears an unfortunate cologne. Everything goes dark as they pass through a tunnel, or freeway underpass. A greenish flicker belies a canopy of trees, and the car slows to residential speeds, slows, stops. Hot, sweet fresh air floods the backseat as both doors gape, and the marshals on either side of him slide away, one of them pulling Jay with him, and helping him find his feet on a sidewalk.
    His arm, shoulder, and hip are really starting to ache from the hard landing in the garbage bin.
    They’re walking, and he’s trying not to stumble.
    Leaves shiver around his feet in light breeze, the midwinter sun reflects up at him from flagstone pavers, brown shoes beneath khaki chinos on one side of him, sneakers and new jeans on the other.
    “Step up.”
    More flagstone.
    “Step up.”
    Sun, shade, some kind of porch; he’s at the mercy of their lead. Someone knocking on wood. The wheeze of a screen door, the hands on his upper arms urge him over the threshold and inside.
    Someone’s house? Wall-to-wall carpet, a suggestion of sectional sofa, the legs of a table. Sound of a television, more voices from another room, overlapping, and the
Scooby-Doo
theme song. Jay knows all the words.
    “We ran into gridlock again on the four-level, got off at Silver Lake,” Public is explaining to whoever is immediately in the room with them, “took Beverly to Highland, then cut down to Olympic,which was, I don’t know, so messed up. They’re putting in storm drains, it’s backed up from Hauser. Pack a snack.”
    “You should have dropped down to Pico,” someone says.
    “Yeah, but Pico sucks when you hit Robertson. That whole Cheviot Hills run? Brutal.”
    Jay’s hood is pulled up and off.
    He stands in a modest, sparsely furnished living room filled with strangers bathed in soft light. Jay’s focus whipsawing as Public makes introductions: “Jay, this is Gavin Patterson . . . that’s Julia Del Valle. Mark Meyers from the Justice Department—” There are hands to shake, and the faces, one after the other. Jay can’t possibly keep them all straight. “—Ms. Doe you’re acquainted with; the marshals, Rodriguez and Kelly, who escorted you here and who are only temporarily assigned to this location, so say hello and good-bye, you