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why would they call him that?”
    Stallings smiled. “Because some other guy always did it, didn’t he? Whatever it was.”
    â€œExactly,” Howard Mott said.

CHAPTER 5
    A shirtless Otherguy Overby, wearing only baggy chino walking shorts and a pair of laceless New Balance jogging shoes, stood in front of the open four-door garage, waiting for water and trying to decide what to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport. He could choose from a Mercedes 560 SEC sedan; a Porsche 911 cabriolet; a seven-passenger Oldsmobile station wagon; or a high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup.
    He had almost decided on the Mercedes when he heard the truck grinding up the long gravel drive. He turned to watch as the Peterbilt tractor-cab nosed around the corner of the enormous house and shuddered to a stop, air brakes hissing. Coupled to the Peterbilt was a tanker containing ten thousand gallons of fairly pure water that wholesaled at two cents a gallon.
    Luis Garfias, the young Mexican driver, lit a cigarette and stared down at Overby for several seconds, as if trying to place him. He finally nodded in the self-satisfied way some do when they’ve managed to match a face to a name. “Your water, Señor Otherguy.”
    â€œYou’re late, Luis.”
    Luis Garfias smiled and blew out some smoke. “Your mother,” he said, put the Peterbilt in gear, and started creeping toward the ten-thousand-gallon
water tank that rested on a man-made earth mound just to the right of the drive. The mound was high enough to raise the bottom of the tank level with the roofline of the two-story house, thus permitting gravity to do its work and send water flowing to the nine bathrooms, two kitchens, three wet bars, two Jacuzzis and one laundry room, not to mention the octagonal swimming pool that twice a year required twenty thousand gallons all for itself.
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    Now wearing a paisley tie, starched white broadcloth shirt, well-tended black oxfords and what he thought of as his gloom-blue suit, which seemed a size or so too large, Overby opened one of the two large refrigerators, removed two bottles of San Miguel beer, snapped off their caps and served one of them to Luis Garfias who sat slumped in a chair at the round kitchen table whose top had been fashioned out of two pieces of invisibly bonded rare old maple and would easily seat eight.
    Garfias looked at the beer’s label. “Who likes this Flip beer—you or Billy?”
    â€œMe,” Overby said, pouring his own beer into a tall glass. “Billy doesn’t drink.”
    â€œAnymore.”
    â€œAnymore.”
    Garfias drank two swallows of beer from the bottle. “Mex beer is better.” He had another swallow. “But this ain’t bad. So when’s Billy getting out?”
    â€œFriday,” Overby said, sitting down on one of the custom cane-bottomed chairs that surrounded the table.
    â€œShe coming back?”
    â€œNo.”
    Garfias glanced around the huge kitchen, obviously pricing an O’Keefe & Merritt restaurant-size gas range, two microwave ovens, a commercial freezer, the twin refrigerators, a double rack of copper
pots and pans, and an assortment of other appliances that may or may not have been used in the past year or two. “Christ,” Garfias said, “he built this fucking place for her.”
    â€œHe’s going to sell it,” Overby said.
    â€œHow much it cost him—to build and everything?”
    â€œAbout two point seven.”
    â€œWhat’s he asking?”
    â€œOne point nine, I think.”
    Garfias shook his head regretfully, as if he had just decided not to make a counteroffer after all. “Never get it. Not without water. Tell me this. How come somebody smart as Billy, when he’s not on the shit anyway, how come he builds a place without no water?”
    â€œThere was water when he built it. Four wells.”
    â€œHow long’d it take ’em