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"Come on, Henry That’s not the point I said I’d do ed "Hey, so I’m a liar What can I say?"

"Would you quit? I don’t need a mother"

"You need a keeper I’ve said so for months

You don’t have a clue how to take care of yourself

You eat junk Get beat up Place gets blown to bits I told you to get a dog, but you refuse So now you got ht"

How irksos inexplicably bonded to a mother cat My parents had been killed in a car wreck when I was five In the absence of real family, I’d simply done without Now, apparently, old dependencies had surfaced I knehat thathe’d live? Just about the tiet attached to hiain

"I don’t want a parent I want you as a friend"

"I a n as he checked his watch "You’ve got ti off"

That stopped et a run in before dark It was allance at the kitchen ed I didn’t have long I abandonedsweats

The beach that day was odd The passing storm clouds had stained the horizon a sepia shade Thetincture of iodine Maybe Los Angeles was burning to the ground, sending up this e I ran along the bike path that borders the sand

The Santa Teresa coastline actually runs east and west On a ed terrain takes a sudden left turn, heading briefly out to sea before the currents force it back The islands were visible, hovering offshore, the channel dotted with oil rigs that sparkled with light It’s worrisos have taken on an eerie beauty of their own, as natural to the eye now as orbiting satellites

By the time I ht had descended and the streetlights were ablaze It was getting cold and the air s the beach There were boats anchored beyond the breakers, the poor man’s yacht harbor The traffic was a corassy strip between the sidewalk and the bike path I try to run every day, not from passion, but because it’s saved , I usually lift weights three times a week, but I’d had to discontinue that teot home, I was in a better mood There’s no way to sustain anxiety or depression when you’re out of breath So cheer in its wake We ate supper, chatting co for the trip I hadn’t begun to think about the situation up in Floral Beach, but I took a minute to open a file folder, which I labeled with Bailey Fowler’s nah the newspapers stacked up in the utility roo to the article, he’d been out on parole on an armed-robbery conviction at the tiled to death Residents of the resort town reported that Fowler, then twenty-three, had been involved in drugs off and on for years, and speculated that he’d killed the girl when he learned of her roain, he’d been sentenced to six years in the state prison He’d served less than a year at the Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo when he engineered his escape He left California, assu the alias of Peter Laone to work for a clothing manufacturer with outlets in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and California In 1979, the coer He was transferred to Los Angeles, where he’d been residing ever since The newspaper indicated that his colleagues were stunned to learn he’d ever been in trouble They described hi, articulate, active in church and coraph of Bailey Fowler showed a man maybe forty years old, half-turned toward the ca, a refined version of his father’s, with the saraph taken of him seventeen years before, when he was booked for the murder of Jean Tihtly and there was a suggestion that he ht have been a function of age or the quality of the photograph He’d been a handso now