Free The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan Page A

become Chinese, and they'd built a wall around their crisis that only a Chinese could pass through. I didn't have the password.
    As I drove I asked myself whether my feelings were hurt and answered the question untruthfully in the negative. What was burning a hole in my stomach, I persuaded myself, was that they had done so much for me—they'd opened my life emotionally, they'd given me their love without asking themselves whether I was worth it—and here was an opportunity for me to do something for them, something I was reasonably good at, and my help was being refused.
    I wanted desperately to see Eleanor.
    Colored Christmas bulbs gleamed and winked in the gathering November dusk, framing the houses of the impatient. We picked up a little drizzle halfway to Santa Monica, not really rain but low fog sliding in from the ocean. Bravo put his head out the back window and let the wind pin his ears back, and I fought the temptation to do the same as the windshield slowly went from transparent to translucent to opaque. “Maybe you'd like to drive,” I said to him as I pulled over on Santa Monica Boulevard and got out to wipe the glass. He barked.
    “You've been watching too much TV,” I grumbled, climbing back in. “It isn't funny there, and it's not funny here.” He maintained a dignified silence until we turned south onto Ocean, when his ears went up straight.
    “Well, aren't you the navigational genius,” I said. Normally I didn't go to see Eleanor unannounced—especially since Burt emerged from the ether—but under the circumstances I figured it would be all right. Anyway, Burt was in New York. Bravo whined, and his tail thumped against the seat as I made the right onto Windswept Court and pulled up in front of Eleanor's house. As I came to a stop he put both front paws against the window and panted loudly.
    “Slow down,” I said. “Do you see her car?” He turned his muzzle over his shoulder to look at me. “Do you see a light in the window?” His tail whapped the seat back. “God, what a stupid dog,” I said, feeling desolate. “Anybody can tell she's not here.”
    He looked away and made a hunching motion with his hind legs, ready to jump out of the car.
    “Hold it,” I said, putting my hand on his rump. “We'll go up and check, but you've got to get out of the car like a gentleman.”
    I opened my door, and he scrambled over the seat back and across my lap and out, waiting for me by running short, impatient circles in the driveway. I climbed out with exaggerated slowness, and the moment I had both feet on the driveway, he charged up the sidewalk to the front door. I joined him and rang the bell three times, as much for me as for him.
    “See?” I said, trying to sound happy about it. “Nobody home.”
    We got back into the car together, both disappointed. He lay down on the backseat, dispirited, with his ears flat. “I know,” I said. “I love her, too.” We made the long slow drive to Topanga in silence.
    The fog had preceded us. Topanga Skyline was blocked by a police car parked lengthwise across the street, its flashers firing red and blue into the mist.
    “You can't get up,” the cop said. “Fire equipment.”
    “I live there.” I showed him my driver's license.
    He shrugged. He had small, uninterested eyes and nostrils you could have saved quarters in. “Back it up. Go somewhere else.”
    I started to say something snarky and then remembered that I still had the Vietnamese kids' semiautomatics in the trunk. “Thank you, Officer,” I said. “Always nice to talk with a servant of the people.”
    I took Alice around the back way, up an unpaved fire road and then down again until it struck Burson, which in turn intersected Topanga Skyline at the top of its arc. We were above the fog here, and I could see it brimming silver like a ballet lake below us, cradled in the cup created by the sides of the hills. It wasn't hard to imagine the ghosts of plesiosaurs paddling through it.
    I