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were parked at curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of some of them, and he could have jump-started any he chose. However, he noted that the cinderblock walls between the properties—as well as the walls of a decrepit and abandoned house—shimmered with the spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosphorescent graffiti of Latino gangs, and he didn’t want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one of their members. Those guys didn’t bother rushing to a phone to call the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck. Frank had enough trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured, so he kept walking.
    Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to boost. The tenth vehicle he tried was a one-year-old green Chevy, parked near a streetlamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the driver’s seat.
    Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer, Frank switched on the Chevy’s heater, drove from Anaheim to Santa Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his familiarity with the streets. He seemed to know the area well. He recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past which he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his burnt-out memory. He still could not recall who he was, where he lived, what he did for a living, what he was running from, or how he had come to wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.
    Even at that dead hour—the car clock indicated it was 2:48—he figured his chances of encountering a traffic cop were greater on a freeway, so he stayed on the surface streets through Costa Mesa and the eastern and southern fringes of Newport Beach. At Corona Del Mar he picked up the Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach, encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed southward.
    Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists’ colony, shelved down a series of steep hillsides and canyon walls to the sea, most of it cloaked now in the thick fog. Only an occasional car passed him, and the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.
    Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two-story, gabled, Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes. He wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere, he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards. For the first time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well. He searched the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.
    He switched on the overhead light, pulled the leather flight bag onto his lap and opened it. The satchel was filled with tightly banded stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

8
    THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker stew. A couple of miles closer to the ocean, the night probably was clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.
    Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown leather jacket. He never got tired of looking at her. They had been married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked and played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bobby had never been the kind who liked to hang out with a bunch of guys at a bar or ball game—partly because it was difficult to find other guys in their middle thirties who were