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“start with two million.”
    Ivory grinned.
    A FTER PAYING for an eight-pack of toothbrushes because I felt like I had to buy something for having loitered as long as I had in Costco’s air-conditioned splendor, I caught a German film with subtitles downtown at Rancho Bonita’s only art house movie theater, and only because it was air-conditioned. After that, I grabbed dinner at the air-conditioned International House of Pancakes on California Street. I couldn’t decide which left a worse taste in my mouth, a comedic biopic exploring the little-known humorous side of Franz Kafka or IHOP’s fried chicken. I was home by 1900 hours.
    My octogenarian landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, was visiting some of her former fellow junior high school teachers back East for a week and wouldn’t be returning until the next day. Kiddiot and I had the entire spread to ourselves—only it was too uncomfortably warm to stay indoors for very long. Mrs. Schmulowitz’s tidy, 1920s bungalow felt like a sauna. The two-car converted garage I rented out back was even hotter. I could’ve baked donuts in there. Had I not been on the wagon, I might’ve found refuge in an air-conditioned wine bar, of which there was no shortage in Rancho Bonita, and whiled away the evening in lubricated comfort. I took off my shirt instead amid the walled privacy of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s tiny backyard and lay down in the rope hammock under her oak tree. There was not even the hint of a breeze.
    Within seconds, Kiddiot jumped up on me.
    “It’s a hundred degrees out here. I don’t need some overheated pelt sitting on me right now. Please get off.”
    My rotund orange tabby, with his undersized brain and oversized ego, yawned dismissively, then began bathing himself on my chest.
    “Did you not hear what I just said?”
    He ignored me. He always did.
    Robert Heinlein, the great science fiction writer, once said that women and cats will always do as they please, and that men and dogs should just get used to it. Rooming with Kiddiot, I had struggled over the years to embrace Heinlein’s advice. Some days were more challenging than others. I had resigned myself to letting him stay where I was when the cell phone in my pocket vibrated, prompting Kiddiot to dig his claws into my stomach—ouch—before jumping off.
    I dug out my phone and read the caller’s name: Gil Carlisle, my former-father-in-law.
    “How’ve you been, Cordell Logan?” he asked in that West Texas twang of his.
    “No complaints, Gil. You?”
    “Wish I could say the same. Listen, you got a second or two?”
    “Sure.”
    When we’d last spoken, Carlisle had told me to burn in hell, or words to that effect. He’d had ample reason. My ex-wife, his daughter, Savannah, had died because of me, killed brutally in retribution after I had allowed myself to get sucked in to an investigation that I never should’ve. Savannah and I had been planning to remarry when it happened. I couldn’t save her and Carlisle couldn’t forgive me. Not that I could have expected him to. I couldn’t forgive myself. Two years had passed since Savannah’s death. The scars were still fresh. If there was a hole deep enough to bury that kind of pain, I had yet to find it.
    “I’m not calling to talk about Savannah,” he said, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
    “Hell,” he said with a little chuckle, “that pretty much sums up my state of mind most all the time.”
    He was lying, of course. Gil Carlisle knew what he was thinking and doing every waking minute of every day. One doesn’t become a megawealthy oil magnate, with penthouses in Houston and Las Vegas, a chalet in Aspen, and a chateau in Italy’s lake country, by being dazed and confused.
    “Let me ask you something,” he said. “You ever heard of an animal rights activist name of Dino Birch? He lives out in your neck of the woods.”
    “I know who he is. He’s all over the local news.”
    “National too.