The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas, Sarah Paretsky Page A

the cylinder into a pneumatic tube that shot it up to the cashier’s office on either the second or third floor.
    When they were again in the Mercedes, Adair said, “Makes you believe in time travel, doesn’t it? What do you think we warped into back there—nineteen fifty?”
    “’Fifty-three,” Vines said, “since that’s as far back as I can remember.”
    After a last stop at a liquor store, where Vines bought two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, they drove to the Holiday Inn and went up to adjoining oceanside rooms on the fourth floor. Vines stood at the window in Adair’s room, again staring out at the Pacific that now seemed more green than blue. From the bathroom he could hear Adair splashing around in the tub, taking his first bath in fifteen months and singing in a surprisingly true baritone about leaving on a jet plane.
    Vines turned from the window when Adair came out of the bathroom, wearing gray corduroy pants and a blue oxford-cloth shirt that still had the fold creases in it. Adair joined Vines at the window, where they stared out at the ocean for nearly a minute. When the minute was almost up, Adair turned and went to the desk, where the whiskey stood next to the bucket of ice that Vines had fetched from the machine down the hall.
    “Want one?” Adair said as he dropped ice cubes into a glass and poured in the bourbon.
    “Not yet,” Vines said, still staring at the ocean.
    “So. When’d you last see her?”
    “Two weeks ago.”
    “And?”
    Vines turned. “I drove up to Agoura from La Jolla to pay the monthly bill. I pay it in cash every month on the fifteenth.”
    Adair nodded. “Where’s Agoura exactly—in relation to L.A.?”
    “North end of the San Fernando Valley. It’s hilly out there—low round hills that’re turning brown now but’ll turn green again when it rains. Some nice old oaks. It’s all very—” Vines searched for the word the doctor had used. “Nonthreatening.”
    “Soothing,” Adair translated.
    “Soothing. From her window she sometimes can see deer and even a coyote or two.”
    “Dannie always did like coyotes for some reason,” Adair said. Dannie was Danielle Adair Vines, wife of the disbarred lawyer; daughter of the jailbird justice. The topic of coyotes exhausted, Vines waited for Adair’s next question, confident of what it would be since it was the logical one to ask.
    “What do the doctors say?”
    “They’re guardedly optimistic,” Vines said. “But they’re being paid six thousand in cash each month, so they would be, wouldn’t they?”
    “But you’re not.”
    “What I am, Jack,” said Vines, his voice resigned, “is the messenger. I drive up there every month on the fifteenth and hand over the money envelope they’re too polite to count in my presence. While they’re counting it, I go sit in a nice little conference room with a big picture window. They bring Dannie in. She sits at the far end of the table and smiles the way she always smiled, as if you’re the most wonderful thing in her life. Then she says, ‘Who’re you? I don’t think I know you.’”
    Adair closed his eyes so he could rub them and the bridge of his meandering nose with thumb and middle finger. “No possibility of her faking it, is there?” he asked, opening his eyes and wincing as he realized that a yes would be worse than a no.
    “I wasn’t sure,” Vines said. “So after a couple of months of that who-are-you stuff, I started telling her I was Warren Beatty or Jerry Brown—who she always had half a crush on—or even Springsteen. But all she ever said was, ‘I don’t think I know you.’”
    “Well, shit, Kelly,” Adair said, turned back to the desk, started to pour himself more bourbon, thought better of it, put the glass down and again faced Vines. “Think she’d know me?”
    “We could find out.”
    “I take that for a no.”
    Vines nodded.
    Deciding he wanted another drink after all, Adair turned, picked up the glass and dropped more ice cubes