Across from us a skinny, ancient man slumbered under a blanket of newspaper. A headline shouted, INCUMBENT SURGE-BILTON COMING ON STRONG. The consequences of what I carried in the rucksack sent my thoughts rippling outward until the implications grew too vast to comprehend. As the sun descended to the glittering plain of the Pacific, our shadows stretched grotesquely up the curved tunnel walls.

I tilted my head back until it tapped the sweaty concrete. Buried in a piss-drenched tunnel beneath a freeway, on the lam with a homeless alcoholic whose name was an alias. I'd been seen leaving the burning apartment by numerous eyewitnesses.

They could hang Mack's murder on me. They'd been ready to hang Frank's on me for less.

The shooter on the opposing roof could have killed me. But instead of launching the rocket into the bedroom at me, he'd shot it through the open window into the front room. Sever had been waiting in position to grab me. They were planning to sit me in an interrogation room like the one they'd put me in seventeen years ago and use their newfound leverage to squeeze me for answers. Or maybe they had a different plan to make me talk-a chair, restraints, and a gallon of gasoline.

I tugged the two pieces of Mack's key from my pocket. They lined up perfectly at a skinny part between teeth-no missing slivers. A stutter-beat of stress at my temples. I said, "We gotta go."

Homer's breath whistled through his nostrils. "Wait for dark," he said. "For dark." He patted my knee, an uncharacteristically avuncular gesture.

His head nodded forward, and I couldn't help thinking of Charlie's son. The dead weight in my hand as I'd pulled his face up to reveal the gash across his windpipe. Mack hadn't told them what they needed to know, and now they needed me to produce it.

At the tunnel's end, in the constricted, desperate glimpse of sky, the sun dropped from view. Silhouettes disappeared into blackness. All around, the rustle of humanity heightened, somehow connected, bodies rasping and murmuring in concert, an elaborate windup toy. Among the faceless shadows, all fleeing, all fallen, I felt my eyes well and then tears spill. I kept my throat locked, a hand clamped over my mouth to stanch the dread. Not a sound, just trickles of moisture across my knuckles and an invisible fist in my throat. It wasn't fear, not exactly, but something denser and more awful. It was a cold kind of horror and the weight of a pressure I couldn't withstand.

I'd been kidding myself that I could ever enjoy a normal life. I needed to walk away while I was still on this side of dead, shoulder the rucksack of cash and hop a bus to another city, another state. Leave it all behind again. No matter how awful the prospect, I could start over. I'd done it before.

But then I'd never know. Then maybe no one would ever know.

It was dark now, the tunnel filled with grumbling and snoring. I glanced over and prodded Homer awake. "Can you get me to Montana Avenue without being seen?"

"Of course."

"How?"

"I'm the only person who's not a cleaning lady who actually rides public transportation in this town." He grumbled his way to his feet, then swayed a bit, rocked by malnutrition or boozy fallout. "And nobody sees anyone who's riding a bus in Los Angeles." He belched, pressing both hands to his enormous gut. "What's our business there?"

The jagged pieces of the post-office key poked at the inside of my fist. "I need to see a man about a lock."

Chapter 31

I caught Raz closing up. Stepping from the shadows, I clutched his arm and said, "Can you make a whole out of these halves?" I opened my fist and let the brass pieces glitter. "I'll pay you well."

His burly arms paused from securing the shop's front door. "You into some crazy shit, bro."

He pinched his dense mustache with a thumb and forefinger and led me back inside. I'd left Homer up the street outside the Duck Blind liquor store with a forty of King Cobra. He'd drunk it before I'd finished paying, and he'd elected to stay out back, digging through the trash cans in case anyone had left a swig in the bottom of a discarded bottle.

The shop was dark and cramped, and Raz kept the overheads off, out of respect for the illicit nature of the undertaking. Clicking on a boom-mounted light, he held up the pieces of the key and made a big show of squinting at them. "This will be tough to remake for working key. I do not have seven-pin blank, bro. I told you I must order from Canada."

"I didn't know I'd need it."

"Yes." He sighed sadly. "Yes, they never know until they need. I will use other type. I will try. I will try for you." His wide fingers fussed over a tackle box filled with key blanks. "This is illegal, to copy this key."

"Yes," I said, "it is. But I need to get into that P.O. box."

"Like other P.O. box?"

"Yes."

"What is inside these very important P.O. boxes?"

"I don't know what's inside this one."