THE Wayvone estate occupied a dozen hillside acres south of San Francisco, with a view of the Bay, the San Mateo Bridge, and Alameda County through the smog on certain days, though today was not one of them. The house, dating from the 1920s, was in Mediterranean Revival style, presenting to the street a face of single-story modesty while behind it and down the hill for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white stucco, with round-topped windows and red tile roofs, a belvedere, a couple of verandas, gardens and courtyards, a hillside full of fig and olive trees, apricot, peach, and plum, bougainvillea, mimosa, periwinkle, and, everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine, spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise all night, long after the last guests had been driven home.

Emerging from a pool the size of a small reservoir in plaid swim trunks from Brooks Brothers, unable even at first glance to be mistaken for any of the white marble statues surrounding it, Ralph Wayvone, Sr., caped himself with a towel stolen not that long ago from the Fairmont, ascended a short flight of steps, and stood looking out over a retaining wall that seemed in the morning fog to mark the edge of a precipice, or of the world. With only a few tree silhouettes, and both the freeways and El Camino Real miraculously silent, for just these moments Ralph Sr., appreciative of peace as anybody, could take another of what he'd come to think of as microvacations on an island of time fragile and precious as any Tahiti or one of them.

Registering upon strangers as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees under his desk, Ralph in fact was more considerate of others than at times was good for him. He liked, and was genuinely attentive to, the platoons of children who always showed up at family gatherings like the one today. The kids picked up on this, appreciated it, and flirted back. Friends he valued for their willingness to talk to him straight said things like, "Your problem, Ralph, is you're not enough of a control freak for the job you're in," or, "You're supposed to allow yourself the illusion that what you do matters, but it don't look like you really give a shit." His shrink told him the same things. What did Ralph know? He looked in mirrors and saw somebody in OK shape for his age, he went and put in his regular time at the spa and the tennis court, had in his mouth some high-ticket dental work, with which he ate carefully and in style. His lovely wife, Shondra, what could he say? His kids — well, there was still time, time would tell. Gelsomina, the baby, was getting married today to a college professor from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and even honorable business. Dominic, "the movie executive," as Ralph liked to call him, had flown in the night before from Indonesia, where he was line producer on a monster movie whose budget required readjusting on an hour-to-hour basis, so he'd been spending a lot of time on the phone, expensive but maybe managing to confuse whoever happened to be tapping it. And Ralph Jr., who was expected someday to take over Ralph Wayvone Enterprises, had driven down for a day off from his duties as manager of the Cucumber Lounge road-house up in Vineland.

"One thing you have to know," Ralph confided to his namesake the day the kid turned eighteen and got his ventunesimo party three years early, at the time a sensible move given the many talents then surfacing in his character for getting into trouble, "before you get too involved, is that we are a wholly-owned subsidiary."

"What's that?" inquired Ralph Jr. In olden times the father might have shrugged, turned without further talk, and gone away to enjoy his despair in private. The two Wayvones were down in the wine cellar, and Ralph could have just left him there, among the bottles. Instead he took the trouble to explain that strictly speaking, the family "owned" nothing. They received an annual operating budget from the corporation that owned them, was all.

"Like the royal family in England, you mean?"

"My firstborn son," Ralph rolling his eyes, "if it helps — please."

"I'd be like — Prince Charles?"

"Testa puntita, do me a favor."

But young Wayvone's anxious face was now smoothed by the sight of a dusty bottle of wine, a 1961 Brunello di Montalcino, put away the year he was born to be drunk this day of transition to adulthood, though his own share of it was to meet the same porcelain fate as the cheaper stuff he went on to drink too much of.

Gelsomina, being a daughter, didn't of course get any bottle. But did he hear her complaining? This wedding today was costing Ralph more than he'd paid for the house. After a full-scale nuptial Mass, the reception feast here would feature lobster, caviar, and tournedos Rossini, along with more down-home fare such as baked ziti and a complicated wedding soup only his sister-in-law Lolli, among her many virtues, knew how to make. The wine would run a full range from homemade red through Cristal champagne, and hundreds of dolled- and duded-up friends, relatives, and business acquaintances would populate the hillside, most of them in a mood to celebrate. The only piece of uncertainty, not a problem really, was the music, with the San Francisco Symphony on tour overseas, the society combo Ralph Sr. had booked originally having run into a little snag in Atlantic City, where their engagement had been involuntarily extended till they made up what they owed the Casino as the result of several foolish wagers, and these last-minute replacements, Gino Baglione and the Paisans, whom Ralph Jr. had hired up north without ever hearing, still an unknown quantity. Well — they had better be excellent, that's all Ralph had to say, or rather think, as the fog now began to lift to reveal not the borderlands of the eternal after all, but only quotidian California again, looking no different than it had when he left.

The band arrived at around midday, after two days of leisurely detours through the wine country, coastal Marin, and Berkeley. They had at last ascended a confusing network of winding streets, putting the last touches to their costuming and makeup, the glossy black, short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches, just before rolling to a stop at the main gate of the exclusive community of Lugares Altos and all being ordered out of the van and subjected each to a discrete bodyfrisk, plus scans for metal objects down to badge size and for electronic devices active and passive. Young Ralph was waiting nervously at the Wayvone parking area, where everybody piled out again. The Vomitone ladies, Prairie included, had likewise made an effort to tone down their extravagance of image, with the help of wigs, clothes, and makeup borrowed from their straighter friends. Billy Barf, whose acquaintance with anything Italian was limited to the deuteragonist of Donkey Kong and a few canned-pasta commercials, insisted on speaking with his imperfect idea of an ethnic accent until Isaiah Two Four, detecting not only its inauthenticity but also its potential for insult, drew the young band eponym aside for a word or two, though Ralph Jr., who had talked Californian all his life, had only taken it for some kind of speech impediment. "You guys have done this before, right?" he kept asking as they off-loaded their instruments, amps, and digital interfaces and proceeded down to a huge airy tent at the edge of a small meadow, where liveried servants bustled everywhere, setting out glassware and napery, hauling tons of shaved ice, high-rent hors d'oeuvres, flowers, and folding chairs, discussing at top volume the fine points of chores they had all performed around here a thousand times already.

"Wedding gigs are our life," Billy assured him.

"Just be cool, OK?" Isaiah murmured.

"Yah, rilly," cackled Lester, the rhythm guitarist. "You blow this, Bill, we all gonna git wasted."

They got through the first set on inoffensive pop tunes, rock and roll oldies, even one or two Broadway standards. But during the break, a large emissary with a distinct taper to his head, Ralph Sr.'s trusted lieutenant "Two-Ton" Carmine Torpidini, arrived with a message for Billy. "Mr. Wayvone's compliments, says thank you for the contemporary flavor of the music, which all the young people have enjoyed fabulously. But he wonders if in the upcoming set you might play something the older generations could more readily relate to, something more . .. Italian?"

More than eager to please, the Vomitones led off the set with a medley they'd been practicing of Italian tunes on a common theme of transcendence — a salsa treatment of "More" from Mondo Cane (1963), slowing to ? with "Senza Fine," from Flight of the Phoenix (1966), and to wrap it an English-language version, in Billy's nasal tenor, of the favorite "Al Di La," from any number of television specials.

No one was more surprised than Billy when Two-Ton Carmine appeared once again, this time with hurried breathing, flushed face, a look of excitement, as if he sensed a chance to do some of the untidy work he received his paycheck for. "Mr. Wayvone says he was hoping he wouldn't have to go into too many details with you, but that he was thinking more along the lines of 'C'e la Luna,' 'Way Marie' — you know, sing-along stuff, plus maybe a little opera, 'Cielo e Mar,' right? Mr. Wayvone's brother Vincent, as you know, being a very fine singer. . . ."

"Yah," Billy now with a slow and blunted sort of comprehension, "uh, well. Sure! I think we have those arrangements —"

"In the van," muttered Isaiah.

"—in the van," said Billy Barf. "All I have to do's just—" sliding one arm out of his guitar strap. But Carmine reached over, removed the guitar from Billy's grasp, and began to turn it end over end, so as to twist the strap, now around Billy's neck, tighter and tighter.

"Arrangements." Carmine laughed, embarrassed and mean. " 'Way Marie,' what kind of arrangement do you need? You gentlemen are Italian, are you not?"

The band sat silent, feckless, watching their leader being garrotted. Few Anglos, some Scotch-Irish, one Jewish guy, no actual Italians. "Well, then, how about Catholic?" Carmine went on, punctuating his remarks with sharp yanks on the strap. "Maybe I could let yiz off with ten choruses of 'Ave Maria' and a Act of Contrition? No? So tell me, while you can, what's goin' on? Didn' Little Ralph say nothin' ta yiz? Hey! Wait a minute! What's this?" In the course of having the head on which it sat shaken back and forth, Billy's "Italian" wig had begun to slide off, revealing his real hairstyle, dyed today a vivid turquoise. "You guys ain't Gino Baglione and the Paisans!" Carmine shook his head, cracked his knuckles. "That's false pretenses, fellas! Don't you know you can end up in small-claims for that?"

Seeing that Billy Barf, enjoying a surrender to panic, had forgotten all about the quick-release clips at the ends of the guitar strap he was being strangled with, Isaiah came over and popped them loose for him, allowing the bandleader to stagger away trying to croak some air back into his lungs. "Actually," Isaiah began, "I'm a percussion person, my job is to take hard knocks and rude surprises, line 'em up in a row in some way folks can dance to, 's all I do, rilly, but as a connoisseur and from the story your face seems to tell a recipient of some of Life's hard knocks yourself, you can see the present crisis may not be worth emotional investment on the scale you contemplate, not to mention the bruises on Gino aka Billy here's neck, which will have him wearing bandannas for weeks, with crossover implications musically and also generating with numerous ol' ladies hickey suspicions you can well imagine, no, far from bein' a hard knock here, why, it's not even a brushstroke on Life's top cymbal, come on! Eh!"

"Ah," blurted the oversize gorilla, hypnotized, "yes you're right, kid, and I'm disappointed to say so 'cause I was all set for a multiple confrontation."

"Good," Billy Barf somewhere behind an amp, searching frantically for the keys to the van, "you're talking it out, that's good."

Fortunately Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a copy of the indispensable Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari, which Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possible unlucky omens as blood on the wedding cake, had the presence of mind to slip indoors and bring back out to Billy Barfs attention. Inconveniently by then, Billy, keys in fist, was on his single-minded way up to the parking area, so that the new bride, in her grandmother's wedding gown, was observed to go running after a non-Italian musician with unusual hair — not a breach of decency, according to more traditional-minded elements close to Ralph Wayvone, to be left unavenged. So despite the revival of music, dancing, and good cheer and the salvation of Gelsomina Wayvone's wedding day, this latent threat was enough to paralyze Billy for the rest of the gig, convinced as he now was that a hit order had gone out on him from the highest levels.

"Hey, 'f they want to ice you, Bill, they gonna do it," advised the Vomitories' bass player, who went by the professional name Meathook. "Best you can do's get you a li'l .22 caliber assault rifle and a full-auto drop-in fer it, when they come for you you can at least take a couple with you."

"Naw," disagreed the horn virtuoso 187, who'd named himself after the California Penal Code section for murder, "only wimps depend on machinery, what Bill needs is some close-combat skills, some knife, 'chuks, li'l jeet kune do —"

"Fun time's over, Bill, either leave town or hire some heavy security," put in Bad, the synthesizerist.

"Isaiah mah man, help me out here," Billy pleaded.

"On the other hand," Isaiah said, "they loved 'Volare.' "

During all this commotion, Prairie was up the hill a level or two, standing semidistraught in front of an ornately framed gold-veined mirror, one of a whole row, in a powder room or ladies' lounge of stupefying tastelessness, having an attack of THO, or Teen Hair Obsession. While the other Vomitonettes were running around with hair color or wigs, all Prairie'd had to do to look straight was brush hers. "Perfect!" tactful Billy had told her, "no-body'll look twice."

She stared into her reflection, at the face that had always been half a mystery to her, despite photos of her mother that Zoyd and Sasha had shown her. It was easy to see Zoyd in her face — that turn of chin, slope of eyebrows — but she'd known for a long time how to filter these out, as a way to find the face of her mother in what was left. She started picking again at her hair, with a coral plastic ratting brush a friend had shoplifted for her. Mirrors made her nervous, especially all these, each set over a marble sink with mermaids for tap handles, in a space lit like a bus station, walls covered in gold velvet with a raised heraldic pattern, pink and cream accents everyplace, a fountain in the middle, some scaled-down Roman repro, concealed speakers playing FM stereo locked to some easy-listening frequency in the area, seething quietly, like insect song.

Prairie tried bringing her hair forward in long bangs, brushing the rest down in front of her shoulders, the surest way she knew, her eyes now burning so blue through the fringes and shadows, to creep herself out, no matter what time of the day or night, by imagining that what she saw was her mother's ghost. And that if she looked half a second too long, it would begin to blink while her own eyes stayed open, its lips would start to move, and then speak to her stuff she was sure she'd rather not hear. . ..

Or maybe that you've ached all your life to hear but you're still scared of? the other face seemed to ask, lifting one eyebrow a fraction more than Prairie could feel in her own face. Suddenly, then, behind herself, she saw another reflection, one that might've been there for a while, one, strangely, that she almost knew. She turned quickly, and here was this live solid woman, standing a little too close, tall and fair, wearing a green party dress that might have gone with her hair but not with the way she carried herself, athletic, even warriorlike, watching the girl in a weirdly familiar, defensive way, as if they were about to continue a conversation.

Prairie shifted the brush around so the pointed handle was now its business end. "Problem, ma'am?"

All at once, from the stranger's battered cowhide shoulder bag, which she'd set down right next to Prairie's earth-toned canvas one, on the tile counter, came a thin piping tune in three-part harmony, all sixteen bars of the theme from "Hawaii Five-O," which it then kept repeating, potentially forever.

"Excuse me, but would that be one of Takeshi Fumimota's old business cards in your bag there, by any chance?" the woman meanwhile digging down in her own bag to find and come out with a small silvery unit, still chiming the stop-frame hula dancer, the hundred different shots of the water, Danno looking through the hole in the glass, McGarrett on the building.

"Here —" Prairie handing over her iridescent oblong, "my dad gave me this."

"Scanner here's still programmed to pick 'em up, but I thought these old-timers had all been called in by now." She shut off the music right after the part that goes,

Down in the streets of Honolu-lu, Just bookin' folks and bein' patched through, what a Lu-wow!. . . Hawaii Five-Oh!

Putting out her hand, "I'm Darryl Louise Chastain. Me and Takeshi are partners."

"Name's Prairie."

"Just for a minute in the mirror there I thought you were somebody you couldn't possibly be."

"Uh-huh, well, I know I've seen you before too — whoa, wait a minute, was that DL Chastain, I always thought it meant Disabled List, sure it's you, you look different, my grandma showed me old snapshots of you. You and my mom."

"Your mom." Prairie saw her taking a breath in a controlled and deliberate way she recognized from the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple. "Oh, mercy." She nodded, faintly smiling, one side of the smile maybe a little higher than the other. "You're Frenesi's kid." She said the name with some effort, as if she hadn't pronounced it out loud for a while. "Your mom and me ... we ran together, back in the old days."

They went outside and found a quiet piece of terrace and Prairie told DL about her mother's rumored return, and the DEA guy who might be crazy and his movie scheme, and the seizing of her home by a paramilitary force from the Justice Department.

DL looked serious. "And you're sure that name was Brock Vond."

"Yep. My dad says that he's bad shit."

"He's both. We still have some unbalanced karma, me and Brock. Now it sounds like you've got some too." She laid the Japanese amulet on the tabletop between them. "Takeshi calls these things giri chits, sorta karmic IOU's. Takes a lot of speed, gets grandiose, wants to base a world currency system on them, so forth — but if you present one to him, he's got to honor it. Were you planning on using this?"

"I'm feeling like Dumbo with that feather, I would clutch to anything right now. Why? What can your partner do for me? Can he find my mom?"

Which put DL in a pickle. Years with Takeshi, and she was still finding out what he could do. And couldn't. If Frenesi really was surfacing, anybody could find her. But with Brock Vond out tearing up the pea patch too, her movements might be less certain.

And whatever story DL told this kid must not, maybe could never, be the story she knew. She temporized. "Is, it's been what, 15 years, just about your lifetime, full of playin' make-believe, acting on faiths in things that sound crazy now, lying, turning each other in, too much time passed, everybody remembering a different story —"

"And you want to hear mine before you'll tell me yours."

"Knew you'd understand." A liveried waiter passed by with a tray full of champagne in glasses, and Prairie, who didn't even like beer, and DL, who objected philosophically to all drugs, each took one. "Frenesi Gates," DL touching her glass to the girl's, and a chill rode Prairie's shoulders.

Rising from the distant meadow came the music of the Vom-itones, twanging and crashing their way through a suite from Tosca. "Well — my dad and my grandma both tell the same story. I cross-examine 'em, try to trick 'em, but except for picky details and memory loss from dope and so on, either it's true or they got together long ago and cooked something up, right?" waiting for DL to tell her she was too young to be so paranoid. But DL only smiled back over the rim of the slender glass. "OK — my mom made movies for that Revolution you guys tried to have, she was on the run, warrants out on her, FBI put her pictures in the post office, Zoyd was her cover for a while, and then they had me . .. and we were a family until the feds found out where she was and she had to disappear — go underground." There was a small defiant tremor in her voice.

Underground. Right. That's the story DL should have known they'd tell the kid. Underground. Now, how could DL tell her what she knew, and how could she not? "Brock Vond," very carefully, "had his own grand jury back then. They were all over the place, popping antiwar people, student radicals, getting indictments, including at least one against your mother. There's no statute of limitations, so it's still in force."

Prairie made an I-don't-get-it face. "You saying he's still chasing her, 15 years down the line, taxpayers' money, not enough real criminals around?"

"My best guess from what you tell me is, is that your mom is in some deep shit, Brock's after her, and if he came and took away your house, then he's after you too, maybe as a bargaining point against her." But this was going to be like trying to explain rape to a child and not talk about sex.

"But why?" Yeah. The girl's eyelids, in the afternoon shade, lay half open as she hung, so filled with innocence, with stupefied daughterly need, on each word, each space between words. But DL only gazed back, as if Prairie was supposed to be figuring things out too. Prairie hated to admit it, but so far what it sounded like was something dangerously personal between Brock Vond and her mother, territory she was as nervous about stepping into as DL appeared to be. Up on the table the other night at Bodhi Dharma Pizza, Hector had been screaming something about Brock Vond "taking away Zoyd's old lady." Prairie must have thought he meant making an arrest, forcing her mother to flee, something like that. But then what else?

In the orange sunlight, guests in gowns from the upper reaches of Magnin's and ruffled shirtfronts, tuxes, and tails, throwing ever longer shadows up the hillside, wandered, grouped and regrouped, ate, drank, smoked, danced, fought, staggered to the mike to do guest vocals with the band. Prairie found her glass empty, and a little bit later, a full one in its place. At some point this older guy showed up, looking a little ragged, kissed DL's hand, and tried a grab for her ass that she must have been expecting because he never made contact, lurching instead past Prairie and nearly over a low wall onto the buffet table the next level down. "Shondra and the kids look wonderful," DL remarked as he came slowly back, and she introduced Prairie to their host, Ralph Wayvone. "I don't want to be the one to piss in the punch bowl," DL added, "but better you know sooner than later, Prairie here has just had a run-in with your old pinochle partner Brock Vond."

"Porca miseria." Ralph had a seat. "Just when I was starting to forget all that. Even thought you might be finally letting go of it. Wrong again, huh?"

"Maybe it won't let go of me."

"The past—" darting his eyeballs around. "Shrink says I'm supposed to be leaving it behind. He's right. Isn't he?"

"Well, Ralph," DL drawled, "matter of fact, see, Brock ain't in the past right now, he's in the present tense again, badassin' around up in Vineland County, actin' like a li'l fuckin' army o' occupation."

"Hey — I got nothing to do with pot growers, all right? You know that. As soon as I saw all this drug hysteria coming, I diversified on out of that whole market. Plus it's a Republican Justice Department, come on. I'm copacetic with all these people."

"Yeah — sometime they might not know how to stop. Anyway, I doubt it's pot, 'cause it's still too early in the season. Brock's not answering his calls, apparently, and nobody knows just what's goin' on, except there's a nut case leading a heavily armed strike force loose in California."

Ralph Wayvone swayed to his feet, looking glum. He patted DL's arm a couple of times. "I'll have 'em get on the computer, make a few phone calls. You be around?"

"Heading up the mountain, got to rendezvous with Takeshi."

"Say hello." He headed off into the house. Sunset was coming, and the two women still had a list of things to make up their minds about.

"You think I'm one of these kids on Phil Donahue," Prairie blurted, "shows up at some woman's door fifteen years later goin' 'Mommy, Mommy!' Hey. I have my privacy, had to fight for it sometimes, I know what that's worth, I ain't about to go bargin' in on hers."

"But Prairie, that would be small shit next to this Brock problem. He's dangerous."

"Can't we find her before he does?" So blatantly longing that DL had to stare down at her feet, like an amateur tap dancer.

"You ought to at least have Takeshi's input on this. Any reason you can't come with me?"

She took the amulet Zoyd had given her and moved it inside the perimeter of DL's scanner unit, and the McGarrett theme piped up again, melody, obbligato, and accompaniment. "I'll have to trust you."

"You'll have to trust yourself. If it feels too weird, don't, 's all."

"Come on and meet Isaiah."

They found him up in the van with Meathook, snorting a couple of lines just to perk up for what looked like some late-night overtime. "He-e-e-y, there she is!" Isaiah with a wet grin. "Great news, Ralph Jr. just hired us to play at the Cucumber Lounge. Things work out, we could be the house band."

"So you'll be heading back to Vineland now?"

He frowned, a huge hand on her shoulder, trying to solve a puzzle. "You're not gonna come?" He looked over at DL, and Prairie introduced them and told him about the amulet and the Japanese guy who was now obliged to help her. "But I promised your dad—"

"Just tell him what happened with the card he gave me and it'll be all right. Plus the longer I stick with you guys the more I could get you in trouble. APB's out on the van, I don't know. . . ." Isaiah was looking over at DL, eyebrows going like wings trying to pick up some lift. "She's cool, rilly," Prairie said.

"You sing?" is what Meathook wanted to know, his upper lip glistening and loose.

"If you're good boys," DL beamed, "I'll sing you the story of my life." So it was that as a breeze came up to send all the leaves in the landscape flickering, as low-voltage lighting bloomed along the walks and through the trees in citric green and yellow, and as Ralph Wayvone, for whom the gun-moll anthem was a great favorite, danced a kind of fox-trot with his newlywed daughter, DL came sauntering up to the mike in front of the reassembled Vom-itones, having with kunoichi deftness removed an Uzi from its owner's sheath — "Hi, handsome, mind if I borrow this?" — to use as a prop, and, twirling it like a six-gun in a movie, taking time steps and shaking her hair around, sang, to the band's accompaniment,

Just a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi. . .

Just a girlie, with-a-gun . . .

When I could have been a mo-del,

And I should have been a nu-un.. ..

Oh, just what was it about that

Little Israeli machine?...

Play all day in the sand,

Nothin' gets, jammed, under-

Stand . . . what I mean —

So Mis-ter, you can keep yer len-ses,

And Sis-ter, you can keep yer beads . . .

I'm ridin' in Mercedes Ben-zes,

I'm takin' care of all my needs. . . .

I'll lose my blues, in some Jacuz-zi,

Life's just a lotta good clean fun,

For a floo-zy with-an U-U-zi,

For a girlie, with-a-gun. .. .

Ralph loved it, screaming, "One more time!" DL tossed the weapon back to the bewildered gunsel, Isaiah slowed the rhythm down and on the final eight bars hit every other beat with a heavy rimshot, an old show-tune tactic American audiences are conditioned to meet with wild applause, which is what happened, along with cries of "Who's your agent?" and "Are you married?"

Though all the Vomitones were eager to continue, DL, with regrets, left the mike and with Prairie and Isaiah made her way up through the low lights and night awakenings of jasmine to where she'd parked her car, a black '84 Trans-Am with extra fairings, side pipes, scoops, and coves not on the standard model, plus awesomely important pinstriping by the legendary Ramón of La Habra in several motifs, including explosions and serpents.

"Megabad, rilly," delighted Isaiah crooned. "What'll this do?"

"Just cruisin' or on a good night?"

"Prairie, if I teach you real quick to play drums — ?"

She looked up from her seat at him, towering against light smog that only a few stars shone through. "When you see my dad —"

"Sure. We go up and eyeball your house too, if you want."

"Sorry about it, Stretch Pants."

"Be all right again soon." He knelt to kiss her goodbye through the window. "Only a couple more commercials, just hold on, Prair."

DL allowed the youngsters another beat and then hit the ignition, producing a menacing yet musical exhaust that sent Isaiah Two Four into head-clutching ecstasy. The Trans-Am backed, turned, and, to the stately Neo-glasspack wind chorale, combustion shaped to music, varying as she shifted gears, departed, the sound diminishing down the long maze of switchbacks, pausing for the gate, resuming the melody, blending finally into the ground hum of freeway traffic far below.