The Darkest Evening of the Year

Cutter before you’d call me?”
    “At least that’s his real name, he didn’t change it. I used him because he had a four-wheel drive. You didn’t have the Rover then.”
    “Yeah. All right. I was still driving that crappy Honda.”
    “And my Chevy couldn’t handle this terrain. How do you afford a Rover, anyway?”
    Bobby grinned and winked. “A grateful lady.”
    Wincing, Vern said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”
    “I’ll tell you on the way home,” Bobby promised, and pressed gently on the accelerator. “So why the architect?”
    “You never shut up, do you? You never stop.”
    “I’m a procto. I bore right in. I’m all curiosity.”
    Because he didn’t want to give Bobby the satisfaction of asking him what procto meant, and because he worried that he would ask him if he didn’t say something else, Vern relented: “The architect has a thing with the bounce. This guy wanted to know all about him because he was dating the bounce.”
    “The bounce from today?” Bobby asked.
    “What other bounce do I know?”
    Letting their speed fall, Bobby said, “He wants to know about the architect because the architect’s bouncing the bounce, then eight months later he has you do a job on the bounce. What’s that about?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It’s real interesting, isn’t it?”
    “Not that interesting,” Vern said.
    “You could ask him.”
    “If he didn’t tell me up front, it’s none of my business. You don’t ask the client why.”
    “Get out of the Stone Age, Vern. He’s the wallet .”
    “The client, the wallet—it doesn’t matter. I don’t ask if he doesn’t volunteer.”
    “Where’s he fly in from?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
    “It’s really mysterious, isn’t it?”
    “Not that mysterious,” Vern said. “And don’t you ask him anything, either. You do, he won’t throw more business my way.”
    “He must pay well.”
    “Brilliant deduction. I don’t agree to burglarize a place for chump change.”
    “The plane’s too far away to read the registration number.”
    “Forget about the plane. You’re making me crazy.”
    As Bobby braked to a stop near the Quonset hut, he said, “Hey, he’s a nobody.”
    “He pays like a somebody.”
    “I mean, he’s harmless. He’s a fat-faced bald guy like you.”
    “The lady is an idiot.”
    “What lady?”
    “The grateful one behind the Rover.”
    Bobby actually glanced at the rearview mirror, as if expecting to see a woman standing behind them, and then said, “Oh. Yeah. Well, she’s not an idiot, but she’s not that smart, either.”
    Carrying the white trash bag that contained everything he had confiscated at Redwing’s house, Vernon Lesley walked forward from the Land Rover. “Mr. Rosewater, I hope we didn’t keep you waiting.”
    “No, no, Mr. Lesley. I like the desert. The air’s invigorating.”
    The air was hot, dry enough to chap lips in thirty seconds, and tainted by both an alkaline trace odor and exotic desert pollen that made Vern’s eyes burn.
    He had not been born for the outdoors. He didn’t much like the indoors, either. He just wanted to get this finished, go home, and step into Second Life, where there were no tarantulas or scorpions.
    He had forgotten to tell Bobby Onions to stay in the Rover, and now the procto swaggered forward to join them.
    Eliot Rosewater had the good sense to pretend that Bobby wasn’t there. “Did you find what I hoped, Mr. Lesley?”
    Tendering the trash bag, Vern said, “Yes, sir, and maybe a bit more than you hoped for.”
    “Splendid,” Rosewater said, accepting the bag. “She would have taken pains to hide evidence of her past.”
    “Nobody could’ve used a finer comb in that bungalow than I did, Mr. Rosewater. I didn’t miss anything.”
    “You’re quite sure.”
    “I value your business, sir. I’m dead sure.”
    Bobby started to say something that would no doubt have been inane, and then his head exploded.
    Maybe Vern heard a sound issue from within the nearest Quonset hut or saw a glimmer of movement in the darkness beyond the open door, because a split second before Bobby’s skull came apart, Vern was reaching under his shirt for the holstered revolver in the small of his back.
    While the blood spray still hung in the air, he squatted and squeezed off three rounds through the open door.
    Rosewater flung himself down, and rolled, as though he’d had some experience at this kind of thing.
    Vern wanted to run to him and