Mona falls silent. Over the past few days, he’s learned that when Mona falls silent, it’s his job to fill the silence.

He’s descending toward town now—a small grid of sloping rooftops in the midst of a Mediterranean-looking valley, protected from cold Pacific winds by the mountains he’s just passed through.

To the east the hills are low, rolling, and golden, and on either side of the road the scrubby coastal woods give way to more golden grasslands dotted by stately lone oaks. It’s the kind of landscape they like to use in car commercials, and if his hometown was a smidge closer to either Los Angeles or San Francisco, it’d probably be overrun with tourists. But most of the road trippers coming up from the south don’t feel the need to go much farther than San Simeon and Lake Nacimiento.

The Lodge, perched at the tip of Altamira’s lone finger to the sea, was supposed to change all that, of course. The investors were even in talks to widen 293 in hopes of bringing more folks to town. But it wasn’t to be, and now most people in Altamira feel the place is hemorrhaging promise, thanks to the wounds inflicted by shady investors and an ever-shrinking army fort to the south.

“Luke?” Mona asks.

“You could say he got a little personal.”

“How so?”

“Brought up something from my past. That’s all.”

“I see . . . but things didn’t escalate?” Mona asks.

“Not really, no.”

“Define ‘not really,’ Luke. This is Altamira.”

“He claimed the moral high ground. Said he was installing the stuff he stole in women’s shelters and recovery homes. I said if I caught him, I’d arrest him and run all the guys in his crew.”

Mona takes a sip of something. “I see. Anything else?”

“I asked him not to call me kid.”

“Small town. There’s gonna be a lot of that.”

“A lot of what?” he asks.

“You had a mouth on you, Luke.”

“So I was a prick is what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“And you hired me anyway?”

“Sometimes pricks do well in law enforcement.”

“Do we?”

“If you put yourself on the right side of things. Absolutely.”

“Well, OK then.”

“Was he right?”

“Excuse me?”

“Martin Cahill. Whatever he brought up, this thing out of your past, was he in the right?”

Burning Girl, he thinks again, remembering how he’d used the words as a kind of whispered slur.

“Yes,” he answers.

“Well, you got some clarity about it, at least.”

“You don’t even know what he brought up,” he says.

“Do I need to?”

“Did you even care that Marty and his crew are looting the Lodge?”

“Hell, no. Fuck those Silver Shore assholes. I got five businesses on Center Street closed this month because of the mess they left this town in. Bastards went all over the state, drawing new businesses here, the whole time they knew their funding was all spit and vinegar. They want to protect all the stuff they left out there like trash? Let ’em hire private security with the money they never had. Marty’s crew can strip that place to the studs for all I care. I just wanted us to look like we’re doing our job. And you needed something to do,” she tells him.

“Well, all right then.”

“Sounds like you’re far away.”

“I actually just pulled up to the station.”

“No, I mean in your head.”

“Oh, well. There’s that.”

The sheriff’s station is a small redbrick building on the corner of a block containing some of the empty frontage left by the ruined businesses Mona’s still angry about. On the opposite corner, a couple of army girls from the fort sit at the cast-iron tables out front of Katy’s Coffee, sunning their bare arms.

The sight of them stirs something in him, but it feels more like acid indigestion.

It’s been a while since he’s been with a woman. Nothing since that drunken bar hookup a few nights after the disaster that was his final FBI interview. He can’t even remember the girl’s name now. Only that she worked in tech, seemed a little less drunk than him, and appeared as disinterested in chitchat as he was. Wham, bam, don’t bother leaving your number, ma’am. That’s never been his style, so thinking of it now makes him feel creepy. Some of the guys he went to SF State with, they could do that kind of stuff every week. But he’s a bigger fan of actually getting to know a woman, and relieving himself with porn until the time’s right to hop into bed with her.

But even a date now seems like an insurmountable task. Like something only a younger, more vigorous version of himself would be capable of.

Which is nuts because he’s twenty-five.

“Hey. Look up.”

He follows the sheriff’s order, sees his boss waving at him from her office window. She’s a stout woman, but much of it’s solid, the kind of body former gymnasts get as they age, although in her case, she’s got the rigors of her military service to thank. Today, as always, she wears her jet-black hair in a tight bun against the back of her neck.

“Put the Jeep in park,” she says.

He thought he had.

“I’m just going to say this. Every day at four o’clock, Marty has a slice of pie at the Copper Pot before he heads over to the AA meeting at the clubhouse.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you know he was right, so I figure you’ll keep it civilized. You know, when you go and apologize for whatever it is you did. In the past. But four o’clock’s a couple hours away, and I got plenty of paperwork for you to do until then. So turn the Jeep off and come inside.”

He does as instructed, because sometimes that’s the only thing you can do.

His mom used to love the name of Altamira’s most popular diner.

She’d been a big fan of that TV movie they made about Martha Stewart, the one where Cybill Shepherd played her like a fire-breathing dragon. There’s a scene where Cybill Shepherd chases her business partner down the front walk of her house just so she can hurl a piece of cookware at her before screaming, “Every good cook deserves a copper pot!” It’s a nasty repeat of words she had said to the same woman earlier in the movie when they were first becoming friends, and every time his mother watched the scene again, she howled with laughter.

And even though the movie hadn’t been released when Abe and Dinah Crane first opened the place, his mother repeated the line, complete with a mimed pot toss, every time she set foot inside.

Luke can hear her saying it even now as he scans the mostly empty booths along the street-facing windows.

It’s the lull between the lunch and dinner rush, a time when the other three restaurants on Center Street lock their doors and mop the floors. But the Copper Pot’s pie case is so popular customers dribble in throughout the day. Customers like Marty, who’s sitting by himself in the farthest booth, talking into his cell phone in a voice so low as to be inaudible.

He’s changed clothes and showered. He looks ready for a nice night on the town. But if Mona’s correct, only his sober friends will be treated to the sight of his pressed long-sleeve denim shirt and his snowy mane, which he’s brushed out over his back and shoulders like some knight from a medieval fantasy epic.

Nothing in Luke’s life at present feels worth dressing up for the way Martin Cahill’s dressed for his AA meeting, and this realization stabs him with envy.

Finally, Marty sees him lingering inside the front door.

When Luke points to the empty bench seat across from him, the man ends his call, then gestures for Luke to come over. Changing out of his uniform was probably the right call, Luke thinks. Otherwise Marty might’ve shot out of his booth and demanded they talk outside.

“You here to arrest me?” he asks once Luke sits. There’s no edge to his tone, and Luke feels as if he’s being parented all of a sudden. And it’s not such a bad feeling.

“You just make up that stuff about the women’s shelter and the recovery home?”

“We on the record?” Marty asks.

“Record’s for journalists. But I’m off duty, if that answers your question.”

“You wearing a wire?”

“Over a bunch of AC units left behind by some jackasses who took the whole town for a ride? Hardly.”

“Silver Shore’s got powerful friends.”

“Altamira Sheriff’s doesn’t have wires, Marty.”

“Good to know. What are you doing here, Luke?”

“I’m here to apologize.”

“For what?”

Fat chance Marty’s letting him off the hook, more like asking him to put it in his own words.

“I might have come down a little too hard on you today,” Luke says.

“Maybe so.”

“Maybe so?”

“I don’t know. If you thought I was stealing . . .” Marty sips his coffee, stares out the window. The elm tree on the corner sends stained-glass windows of dusky-orange sunlight across the sidewalk. Altamira’s version of rush hour consists of a pickup, a minivan, and a PT Cruiser taking their time deciding whose turn it is at the four-way stop that marks the intersection of Center Street and Apple Avenue.

“Threatening to run your crew—that was out of line,” Luke says.