Her eyes cooled, but stayed on me. Mud trickled from the blade of her shovel onto my shirt. My only motion was the curl of an eyebrow. She eyed the remains of the burrito in my hand. For a second her face sank with weariness. My hand twitched. Our eyes met. Rage twisted her lips. Her eyes burned again with deep chemical fires.

I slapped the shovel aside with my left hand, tucking the burrito into by coat with my right. With a kick of my legs I pulled myself out the door and into a shapeless pile at her feet. A reflex later I was on my feet, bounding towards my Honda.

"You bastard!"

The shovel struck my shoulder. I crumpled under its weight, but momentum splattered me against my car hood.

"Look, they're broken! Look!"

Not chancing a backwards look into a possible second blow, I flanked my vehicle. I yanked open the door, dove inside, and turned on the ignition.

"You bastard!" Clang-umth -- the bell-chime of invincible steel muted in the pliant folds of my car hood. I still couldn't see jack through the windshield, but it was no time for caution. I hit the gas and started rolling forward.

"Stop! Stop! You bastard, stop--" it came from behind me now. I slammed the brake and took a deep breath. I picked up the first serviceable weapon at my disposal--a rolled up magazine--and stepped outside my car again.

My bumper was now just inches from the back of the red truck. The hood of my Honda was dented from impact with the shovel, which had apparently been hurled at it. It skulked several yards away, suspended in a bush. Now the blond brandished only her tongue. But crouched on the ground fifteen feet back past by car, she didn't look up for a fight.

"You maniac! You fucking, bastard maniac--"

I approached slowly with the magazine readied.

"Look, Miss. My windshield wipers are broken. I can't see a damn thing."

"You asshole! You--"

"I could really use a ride." I cautiously extended the last soggy third of her burrito. She standing up and glaring at me pridefully, she snatched it with feline precision then walked away like a ballerina to retrieve the shovel. My shoulder ached now; while her back was turned I coddled it. She threw the implement into the back of her truck, and got into the front seat.

The truck's engine dumped thick exhaust at me. I didn't much mind; I was thinking about how to spend the night. Leaping into the back of the red truck and stowing away didn't seem like a viable option any more. I calculated that nights spent shivering in the the damp, dark interior of one's Honda have a much lower mortality rate.

"Hey, Mister Rockhead!" she shouted out her window. "You gonna get in or what?"

Deciding to risk it, I got into the passenger seat.

"Thanks," I said.

"Don't mention it."

What the night lacked in dry warmth it made up for in a transparency far surpassing that of my soupy windshield. In the choosy light I saw the fringe of unmanicured wilderness that protruded from beyond the uneven edge of the bike lane like an imperial moustache. I discovered I had parked my Honda Civic just twenty feet behind the tail of a russet pickup that looked as if it were a proud veteran of a moose stampede. Its posterior flap lay open, allowing the rain to drain out leisurely.

The people who own trucks like that are practical, proud, and wouldn't be caught dead on the side of the road on account of a broken windshield wiper. Hence, such a truck must contain the means to repair a windshield. But the owner of the vehicle was nowhere to be seen. After several minutes of nonchalant reconnaissance to verify that I was alone, Rick Rockford -- private eye-- climbed into the back of the truck to investigate.

There was a spare tire and some heavy duty bungee cords in the cargo bed, but no wrench or Windshield Wipers for Dummies. The lock was broken on the partly-caved-in passenger door. The front seats, though not clean, contained nothing of interest except the remains of a burrito in a cardboard take-out container and a Styrofoam cup in the left cup holder. The front seat was decorated like my jaw: with a bristly five o'clock shadow outdimmed by the greater ten o'clock milieu. The burrito's warmth had waned, but the coffee--a French roast, black but sweetened--was almost hot enough to scald my tongue.

A mechanical clangor errupted to my left. I spewed coffee out onto the dashboard.

"Who the fuck are you?"

She sounded angry. Slowly turning my head left, I found myself looking down the flat end of a shovel and into her furious eyes.

Water, water, everywhere, and the roof of my Honda creaked under the sky's contemptuous barrage. The interior atmosphere of the car enriched itself with the miasma seeping from my damp clothing. The darkness broke with each indifferently passing vehicle; sharp lights set ablaze the windshield's varnish of bilious rain.

In those moments, I gauged precisely how much the object before me was failing to be a window. Driving would be suicide, but I couldn't just sit there suffocating in my Japanese-made submarine casket. Rick Rockford, Private Eye, needed to take action. With the determination of a man who knows that pluck is his last and only resource, I unhitched the door, slipped out, deftly opened my umbrella, and slammed the door shut behind me.

Except I had no umbrella.

The wonders of the Woodstern foyer only began with the towering suits of armor, dating to the Feudal periods on two continents, that stood guard on either side of the main doors. The walls were decorated with braces of Civil War-era pistols and arrays of cavalry sabers. Interspersed with these hung American landscapes in baroque frames. A wide staircase twisted up the lefthand corner. A darkly varnished banister chased the stairs up to the second-floor landing, from which, through the lathed posts of the banister, two long, smooth legs dangled like barefooted bolts of lightning. How long was it before the legs retracted, their anonymous bearer retreating out of sight, and I found myself standing, limp armed and mouth ajar, roused from reverie by a shoulder-tap from smirking Mrs. Woodstern?

"This way, Mr. Rockford. I'm a busy woman, so I'll cut to the chase. I want you to locate for me a missing person by the name of Sydney Symanski."

"Friend? Relation?"

"An art broker who owes me money."

She led the way from the foyer down a hallway lined with luminist landscapes. We entered a small, peach sitting room. It was sparsely furnished with a circular wooden table, on which there was a silver tray and a porcelain tea set, and two plush chairs which were identical except that one was several inches taller.

"Your choice of tea?" she asked, sitting in the higher chair.

"Earl Grey."

"I prefer Lapsang." She poured smoky red liquid from the pot into the two available cups. "I comissioned Symansky to sell an original Silva. He did so, but before returning the proceeds he purchased a Bierstadt, with which he absconded. I have reason to believe that he will return to Boston shortly, likely in secret, but need you to discover where he will be so that we can remind him of what he owes us."

"Us?"

"The estate, Mr. Rockford."

I counted my blessings. My partner, Toby, is dependable the way a coin spinning in the air is dependable; he doesn't ask questions and will give you the right answer half the time. That's half-the-time better than my old partner, who had given his last answer as an apology in red ink on white paper. After he wrote it, he flung himself from a twelfth story hotel window.

That's what the DA's office will tell you, anyway.

That had been four months earlier. For three of them, a letter from Mrs. Andromeda Woodstern, heiress and widow, requesting the services of a PI in exchange for an absurd sum of money, lay crushed at the bottom of a cardboard box full of the dead man's records.

When she had written that letter, she had been the perfect client: wealthy, desperate, pushing towards senility. But whatever her problems were, whatever stings stung or burdens bore on her for those long months, they had ground her to razor sharpness. Or so I thought after I had discovered the letter, called the number she had provided, and heard her Ginsu voice dicing the ripe tomatoes of my pecuniary dreams.

"I demand to speak to Conrad!" That was my partner--Conrad Chandler.
"He's dead, ma'am."
"Don't get fresh with me. Patch me through to him! I need to talk to a man with credentials."

Twenty minutes later, I had haggled her into hiring the quick over the dead, but for a fifth of the original price.

A man in my position needs able to think flexibly about the meanings of phrases like "gainful employ" and "possible eviction." I took the job drove to meet her at her mansion in Wellesley the next day.

"Good sense is the master of human life," I read aloud from the curled slip of paper while crumbling the moist cookie in my left hand. With a sudden anxiety, I turned my head back to make sure I wasn't being watched, but the clientele of that factory-made Pan-Asian joint were all reading the instructions of their chopstick packages. Shoving the paper into the third of my nine pockets, I paid for my meal and an eight-percent tip in Sacajaweas, and removed myself from the room with characteristic stealth.