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with it, I said, “What time do things pick up?” I gave her the nice smile. The Kevin Costner.
    She smiled back and I saw her eyes flick to my hands. Nope. No wedding ring. I made the smile wider. She said, “Mostly after dinner. We get a lot of cops in here and they don’t get off until later.”
    I nodded. “You know an officer named Mark Thurman?”
    She tried to remember. “What’s he look like?”
    “Big. Like a jock. He probably comes around with a guy named Floyd Riggens. They work together.”
    Now she remembered and her face grew hard. “I know Floyd.” Floyd must be a real pip all the way around.
    I grinned like it was an old joke. “That Floyd is something, isn’t he?”
    “Uh-huh.” She wasn’t seeing much humor in it.
    “What time do they usually get here?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe eight. Something like that.” Like she was getting tired of talking about it. Maybe even pissed. Floyd must be something, all right. “Look, I’ve got to get back to work.”
    “Sure.”
    She went back to the bar and I sipped the beer and pretty soon I ordered another. There didn’t seem to be a lot to do until eight o’clock, so sipping Falstaff seemed like a good way to pass the time.
    Dwight Yoakam stopped and Hank Williams, Jr., came on and pretty soon the day-shift waitresses left and the night shift cranked up the Garth Brooks and the Kentucky Headhunters. The night-shift dancers were younger and moved better in the cage, but maybe that was because of the music. Or maybe it just seemed that way because of the Falstaff. Maybe if you drank enough Falstaff your personal time scale would grind to a stop and everyone around you would move faster and faster until they looked like a Chip ’n Dale cartoon running at fast forward and you looked like a still picture frozen in time. Maybe they would continue to age but you would stay young and pretty soon they’d be dead and you’d have the last laugh. That Falstaff is something, isn’t it? Maybe I was just drunk. Occupational hazard.
    By seven o’clock the crowd had grown and I didn’t want to be there if Riggens or Thurman walked in early, so I paid for the beer, went back to the McDonald’s, and bought a couple of cheeseburgers to eat in the car.
    At fourteen minutes after eight, Mark Thurman’s blue Ford Mustang turned into Cody’s parking lot. There were three other people in the car. A brown-haired woman was sitting in the front passenger seat beside Thurman. Riggens and an overweight blonde were shoehorned into the back. The overweight blonde was loud and laughing and pulling at Riggens’s pants as they got out of the car. The brown-haired woman was tall and slender and looked like a thirty-six C. They walked across the parking lot, Riggens and the blonde together, Thurman and the brunette together, and then the four of them went into the bar.
    I sat in my car for a long time after they disappeared, smelling the McDonald’s and tasting the beer and watching the neon cowgirl blink. My head hurt and I was tired from all the sitting, but I wasn’t anxious to get home. Getting home meant going to bed and sleepwouldn’t come easy tonight. Tomorrow I would have to speak with Jennifer Sheridan and tell her what I had found.
    Sleep never comes easy when you’re going to break someone’s heart.

CHAPTER
5
    I woke the next morning with a dull ache behind my right eye and the sound of finches on my deck. I have a little A-frame off Woodrow Wilson Drive in Laurel Canyon, in the hills above Hollywood. I don’t have a yard because the A-frame is perched on a hillside, but I’ve got a deck, and a nice view of the canyon. A woman I know gave me a build-it-yourself bird-feeder kit for Christmas, so I built it, and hung it from the eve of my roof high enough to keep the birds safe from my cat. But the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck to eat the seed. They know there’s a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When