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nodded and changed the subject. “You used to move around a lot, didn’t you?” she said. “Overseas, I mean.”
    “Yes. A lot.”
    “Why’d you come back here? I mean to L.A. You’re not from here.”
    “No.”
    Craigie Grey waited for him to answer her latest question. Citron seemed to be thinking about it. “The weather,” he said finally, as though the answer came as a surprise even to him. “I got used to a warm climate. I don’t much like the cold anymore.”
    The answer seemed to satisfy her, because she raised the wineglass to her mouth again, drank, put the glass down, and turned back to Citron, her attitude suddenly crisp and businesslike.
    “I’ll tell you what it pays,” she said.
    “All right.”
    “It pays four hundred a month and you get the grungy downstairs back unit free—that's the one on the highway.”
    Citron decided he should at least appear to consider it. He counted to five and said, “Okay. Fine.”
    “If something goes kaput, call a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. Whatever. I’ll give you a list of numbers. It's cheaper in the long run. Professional maintenance, I mean.”
    “All right.”
    “I’ve only got two rules. Maybe three. Don’t rent to any coke dealers or whore ladies. And anyone who doesn’t come up with their rent by the tenth of the month is out on their ass. No exceptions. Okay?”
    Citron nodded. “Okay.”
    “Then you’re hired,” she said.
    Out of loyalty and gratitude to his new employer, Citron sat through her speech, which turned out to be predictably gloomy and uncommonly trenchant. When the pledge cards were passed around, he pocketed his and told a vaguely familiar-looking young television actress that he’d mail his check in.

CHAPTER 4
    The name that Jack Replogle signed to checks and contracts was John T. Replogle. The T stood for Townsend. He built things. Or rather Replogle Construction, Inc., did. With its headquarters in Denver and offices in Jidda and Rome and Singapore, it built things all over the world—roads, docks, airfields, hospitals, pipelines, virtually anything. Replogle was the firm's president and chief executive officer. He was both very rich and very smart, and if he had a hobby, it was politics.
    Over the years Replogle had come to specialize in political fund-raising, which he always called “shaking down the flush-bottoms back East”—although back East to Replogle could mean Dallas or Tulsa or Kansas City or Chicago. Over the years he had shaken them down for close to forty million dollars.
    It was around 10:00 when he and Draper Haere stopped in Idaho Springs for breakfast, a meal Haere had never been able to do without. Although he regularly skipped lunch, Haere could never deny himself breakfast, which was invariably the same: two eggs over easy; bacon or sausage; toast and hash browns, or—if he was in the South—grits. He had grown fond of grits in Birmingham.
    Haere noticed the big high-sprung dark-blue pickup truck whenthey pulled into the cafe. It was a Dodge. He noticed it because of the angle parking that made it almost impossible not to read the sticker plastered across the pickup's tailgate. The sticker read: “Is There Life After Death? Fuck with This Truck and Find Out.”
    Replogle ordered only coffee, which he scarcely touched. He told Haere he didn’t eat much anymore and that the drugs he had to take made everything taste like brass. For some reason, however, the drugs didn’t affect the taste of liquor, so he was drinking more than he probably should, although at this point in his life he didn’t think anyone was bothering to keep score.
    Back in the station wagon, Replogle again buckled his seat belt, and again Haere didn’t. But this time Replogle failed to go through the fighter-pilot-goggles business, either because he forgot, or because he thought that once a day for the old joke was enough.
    They drove in silence for five minutes or so admiring the scenery. It had also snowed