"Ralph has a rental house nearby," I said. "I've used it before."

Miranda looked beyond the cemetery, into the surrounding neighbourhood of rundown stores and multicoloured oneroom houses. The tears were still coming.

"Is it safe?"

Ralph started laughing quietly.

"Nobody you know would ever look here," I said. "That's the whole point. You stay with Ralph, you'll be safe."

Miranda thought about that, then looked at Mama Arguello, who was offering her some lemon tea.

"All right," Miranda said. And then, like her timer had run out, she curled her head against her knees and shivered.

Mama Arguello smiled, not at all like she knew what we were talking about, then she told Yvette's tombstone how nice it was to have visitors, how fresh the pan muerte tasted this year.

50

When I got back to 90 Queen Anne a gold foil package the size of two glass bricks was sitting on the porch. The card said: This will look perfect on your desk at UTSA. Good luck today. Happy Birthday.

Mother's writing. She made no mention of my failure to come to her Halloween/bythewayit'sTres'birthday party the night before. Inside the wrapping was the Riverside Chaucer, new edition. A seventyfivedollar book.

I took it inside.

I stared at some tentative notes I'd made two mornings ago for the demo class I was about to do. After last night, the whole idea seemed absurd, trivial—and oddly comforting. Students were going to attend classes today. Assistant professors were going to yawn and drink coffee and stumble through boring routines and most of them wouldn't even smell like house fires. They wouldn't see blackened bones every time they closed their eyes. They wouldn't catch themselves humming songs by the recently murdered.

With a kind of dread, I realized I wanted the class to go well.

Robert Johnson was of course sleeping on the outfit I needed to wear, so I did the tablecloth trick. Robert Johnson flipped, got to his feet, and glared at me. It took me five minutes and a full roll of Scotch tape to remove the black hair from the white shirt.

Five more minutes to tie the tie with Robert Johnson helping.

After that it's a blur.

The demo lesson did go well, I guess. I chose "Complaint to His Purse" and did the most radical things I could remember from graduate seminars—break the class into small groups, ask them to read the poem aloud while holding their wallets, ask them to write a modernday interpretation. We had a few laughs comparing Chaucer to a phone solicitor, then trying to find a Middle English phrase that was the equivalent of

"suck up." Most of the students didn't even fall asleep.

Despite my dress clothes I probably looked like I had slept on the floor the night before and spent my morning in a cemetery, but that was okay. Most of the students looked that way too.

Professor Mitchell shook my hand a lot in the hallway afterward and told me how he was sure I'd get the job. The other professors filed out without saying anything. They frowned just as much as they did during my earlier interview. Maybe tracing the etymology of "suck up" had been too much.

I drove out of the UTSA visitor parking lot feeling tingly and hollow. I was halfway down I10, doing an impossible seventy miles per hour, before I even realized I had gotten on the highway.

I took the first exit, pulled the VW into a strip mall parking lot, and shut the ignition.

I tried to get my heartbeat under control. I didn't have much luck.

I couldn't place the feeling right away—sort of like an electric generator spinning in my intestines. Not going anywhere, not hooked to anything, just making useless electricity. It was a few more minutes before I recognized it as shock. I'd felt this way a year ago, after I'd killed a man. I'd woken up a few nights afterward with this same feeling—disconnected inside, like someone else had just vacated my body and left me the shell. I told myself this was only a college lesson, for God's sake.

I started the car again. I decided to take comfort in the mundane and drove next door to Taco Cabana for enchiladas to go.

When I got back to 90 Queen Anne my favourite car was parked conspicuously across the street. Deputy Frank had the window down on his black Ford Festiva and was rubbing a finger along the top of his moustache while he read a magazine.

He might've been a little more obvious if he put wavy hands on his windshield wipers, but only slightly.

I parked the VW and walked across to his car. Frank pretended to ignore me.

In his passenger's seat was your normal stakeout gear—junk food, a camera, bottled water, a tape recorder and shotgun mike. He had his suit jacket off so the shoulder holster was in plain view. There was a black briefcase between Frank's knees.

He flipped a page of Today's Parent.

"Colic," he said, like he was talking to himself. "It's driving me crazy."

"That's rough," I agreed.

I waited. Frank turned a couple more pages. He read like he was looking at assembly instructions, his eyes flicking back and forth around the pages in no particular order, looking for the schematics on proper babybuilding.

"You supposed to be keeping tabs on me?" I asked.

Frank nodded, tapping his thumb on a picture of a new superabsorbent diaper.

"Sheckly?"

Frank nodded again.

"You want to come in for some enchiladas?"

Three times was a charm.

Frank put down his magazine, picked up his briefcase, and got out of the car.

We walked around the side of the house. My landlord Gary Hales was standing in his living room, watching out the window as I brought the man with the shoulder holstered gun and the black briefcase onto his property. Gary loves it when I do stuff like that.

I opened the door of the inlaw and Robert Johnson padded up, bumped into Frank's leg, then stepped back indignantly, his superkeen animal senses suddenly warning him that I wasn't alone.

"Hey, blackie." Frank bent down and scratched Robert Johnson's ear.

Frank apparently passed inspection. Robert Johnson began rubbing the side of his face vigorously on Frank's shoe.

Frank glanced around the room, still in read schematic mode, until his eyes came to rest on the exhibition sword in the wall mount. "Tai chi?"

I nodded, surprised. Nobody guesses correctly.

Frank waved at the futon. "Okay?"

"Sure," I said.

He sat, putting his briefcase on the coffee table. I went into the kitchen and took out the two foam boxes of enchilada dinners. Robert Johnson materialized on the counter instantly.

I got out three paper plates in wicker plate holders. Two enchiladas for me, one for Frank, one for Robert Johnson. Flour tortillas and beans and rice and grease all around.

I took the food into the main room, set Robert Johnson's on the rug, and handed Frank his.

Frank sat forward on the futon. He rolled a tortilla into a tube, dipped it in enchilada sauce, and bit the end off.

"Enough's enough," he said. "The briefcase has some prelims from the M.E. on Brent Daniels, some paperwork I borrowed from Hollywood Park on Alex Blanceagle.

There's also some other cases from the Avalon Department where"—he stopped, considering—"where Sheckly's name has figured prominently."

"And you're showing all this to me?"

Frank read the wall. He chewed his tortilla. "Some guys I know at Bexar County—Larry Drapiewski, Shel Masters—they tell me you're solid."

I tried not to look surprised. Larry and Shel didn't always tell me I was solid. The adjectives they used about me much more frequently had to do with gas or liquid.