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midnight-blue sweater, she had added a camel-colored corduroy jacket. She held her purse on her lap, and her carryall was in the backseat.
    “Later when?”
    “After we’ve seen the guy you can trust, the one who can trace that license-plate number.”
    “I figured to go to him alone.”
    “Aren’t I presentable?”
    She was not as pretty as she had been in the photo, yet she struck him as somehow better looking. Her hair, such a dark brown that it seemed black, had been shorter than this, and calculatedly shaggy, when she had stood before the DMV camera.
    “Totally presentable,” he assured her. “But with you there, he’ll be uneasy. He’ll want to know more of what it’s about.”
    “So we tell him whatever sounds good.”
    “This isn’t a guy that I lie to.”
    “Is there one?”
    “One what?”
    “Never mind. Leave it to me. I’ll shine him up something he’ll like.”
    “Not you, either,” Tim said. “We walk the line with this guy.”
    “Who is he—your dad or something?”
    “I owe him a lot. He’s solid. Pedro Santo. Pete. He’s a robbery-homicide detective.”
    “So we’re going to the cops, after all?”
    “Unofficially.”
    They headed north along the coast. Southbound traffic was light. A few cars rocketed past them in excess of the speed limit, but none featured an emergency beacon.
    To the west, the house-crowded bluffs descended to unpopulated lowlands. Beyond coastal scrub and wide beaches, the Pacific folded the sky down to itself at a black horizon.
    Under the night-light of the sentinel moon, ruffled hems of surf and a decorative stitching that fringed the incoming waves suggested billows of fancy bedding under which the sea turned restlessly in sleep.
    After a silence, Linda said, “The thing is, I don’t much like cops.”
    She stared forward at the highway, but in the wash of headlights from approaching traffic, her unblinking eyes seemed to be focused on some other scene.
    He waited for her to continue, but when she lapsed into silence again, he said, “Is there something I should know? Have you been in trouble sometime?”
    She blinked. “Not me. I’m as straight as a new nail that never met a hammer.”
    “Why does that sound to me like there was a hammer, maybe a lot of hammers, but you didn’t bend?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know why it sounds that way to you. Maybe you’re always inferring hidden meaning when none is implied.”
    “I’m just a bricklayer.”
    “Most car mechanics I know—they think deeper than any college professor I’ve ever met. They have to. They live in the real world. A lot of masons must be the same.”
    “There’s a reason we call ourselves
stoneheads
.”
    She smiled. “Nice try.”
    At Newport Coast Road, he turned right and headed inland. The land rose ahead, and behind them the sea was pressed down under a growing weight of night.
    “I know this carpenter,” she said, “who loves metaphors because he thinks life itself is a metaphor, with mystery and hidden meaning in every moment. You know what a metaphor is?”
    He said, “‘My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.’”
    “Not bad for a stonehead.”
    “It’s not mine. I heard it somewhere.”
    “You remember where. The way you said it, you remember. Anyway, if this Santo is sharp, he’ll know I don’t like cops.”
    “He’s sharp. But there’s nothing not to like about him.”
    “I’m sure he’s a great guy. It’s not his fault if sometimes the law has no humility.”
    Tim sifted those words a few times but was left with no meaning in his net.
    “Maybe your friend is a boy scout with a badge,” she said, “but cops spook me. And not just cops.”
    “Want to tell me what this is about?”
    “It’s not about anything. It’s just the way I am.”
    “We need help, and Pete Santo can give it.”
    “I know. I’m just saying.”
    When they topped the last of a series of hills, inland Orange County shimmered below them, a great