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car, two driveways down.”

3
    The God of Spring
    I think it was the immortal Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, who invented the trope in which a character runs off the edge of a cliff and keeps right on running on thin air until it looks down, at which point it falls like a stone.
    As busy as I’d been trying to stay alive in the Slugger’s house, the moment I heard that car hit the gate, I had the unmistakable sensation that I’d just left the cliff behind and that there was probably a considerable drop beneath me. But I hadn’t had time to look down and see just how far the fall might be.
    Now I did have the time, and as much as I wanted to speed-walk up Tigertail and get into that car with Ronnie so we could motor out of the Slugger’s orbit, I stepped back into a hedge instead and thought for a couple of minutes about the person who had just snatched my butt off the barbie.
    The question was simple: Who the hell was she?
    When I met Ronnie, she was a suspect in a situation I’d been forced into working on. My assignment was to make sure that my client wouldn’t be charged with the murder of someone he’d had a lot of reasons to murder. The victim had been Ronnie’s husband, and the first rule of murder when the victim is married is look at the spouse . So, during that first week we knew each other, even as we were falling in love, we were both lying for all we were worth, me trying to figure out whether she was guilty and her trying to look as innocent as lamb’s fleece. It was, let’s say, a layered relationship.
    Eventually I figured out who’d killed Ronnie’s ex, and that would have straightened it all out between us except that she refused to tell me anything about her past, including where she’d come from or what she’d been doing with all the crooks she’d been hanging around with back wherever it was. I knew they were crooks because she’d come to Los Angeles from some dreary East Coast town—Trenton and Albany had been claimed at various times—by being lateraled every thousand miles or so, like a living football, from a car thief to a drug dealer to a blackmailer, the last of whom she’d married.
    I know it feels like it must have taken me some time to consider all this, but I was cranked up pretty good and my mind moves fast when it needs to. I knew I’d missed something in the past couple of minutes, and I was trying to dig that out when headlights swept the street, turning down from Tigertail, not up from the Slugger’s. I stepped farther back into the hedge as my inoffensive, inconspicuous little white Toyota glided by instead of the Jaguar I’d been expecting, the one we’d stolen so we’d blend into the neighborhood better and which had undoubtedly been the heavy beast that had hit the gates. As it went by, my mind replayed Ronnie saying, I’m in your car.
    For a moment I thought about zigzagging surface streets, avoiding her completely, until I got someplace where I could call a cab. Just to give me some time to sort out what had just happened and what it might suggest.
    Also, I realized I was shivering, a delayed reaction to what had nearly happened at the Slugger’s. Ducking Ronnie for a while would also let me get that under control. But then I heard Herbie saying, The longer you delay facing something important, the longer you give it to kill you , so when I pushed myself out of the hedge and started uphill, figuring she’d turn around and pass me on the way back up to Tigertail, I still had no idea what I should say once I got into the car.
    â€œSo?” she said, pulling away from the curb.
    I sat back and worked on not shaking. “Piece of cake.”
    â€œI ask because you look like the god of spring, with green stuff all over you, twigs in your hair, and bleeding knuckles.”
    â€œPiece of cake,” I said again.
    â€œAnd you’re