It was Saturday. I'd just biked to the top of the Bolinas-Fairfax Road and was turning onto Ridgecrest when I heard a car round the bend behind me — too fast and too close. The car was there before I could react. The bumper clipped my heel and sent me off onto the shoulder. As I went over the handlebars I saw a blue Pontiac convertible flash past.

I'd been pedaling uphill, so I hadn't been going fast; I rolled once and ended up sitting on my rear end in soft pine needles and dirt. As for the bike, the back wheel was bent and wouldn't turn. I was twenty miles from where I'd left my car, less than halfway through my ride.

It was eighty degrees in the shade, and the air was absolutely still. If the bumper had been a few inches to the right, I told myself ... While my hands were still shaking but my breath was starting to slow, the convertible came back.

The driver stretched her long legs as she got out of the car. Her hair was straightened, spider web–fine, and she wore a cream-colored blouse, khaki shorts, and sandals. A spray of freckles ran across her upper chest.

I knew I should be angry with her, but I was glad to be alive. "You're goddamn lucky you didn't kill me," I said.

She looked me over. "Not a scratch on you. Thank goodness." She clicked her tongue at the bike. "You're not going anywhere on this."

She opened the trunk and I put the bike in.

"Leo Maxwell," I said. "Thanks, it's the least you can do. My car's down in Mill Valley on Highway One."

She took my hand coolly. "Lavinia Martin. You know you swerved right in front of me."

"That's not the way I remember it."

She drove with both hands on the wheel, her eyes focused ahead. Alone with a beautiful woman in a convertible. It was a rare opportunity. These days I hardly ever talked with anyone who wasn't from work.

I tried again. "Is it my lucky day or do you have a habit of running down strange men on lonely roads?"

In response she reached back for her purse and opened it on the console between us. I looked down and saw a snub-nosed automatic, nickel-plated. "My husband bought that for me."

"So you're married," I said. After a moment she closed the purse and returned it to the back. It wasn't that I'd never seen a gun. I'd had guns pointed at me on occasion, even fired in my presence. It hadn't all been desk work. But still, I let a few miles go by before I spoke again.

"I prefer a forty-five," I finally said. "Revolver. But I'm also the kind of guy who owns a typewriter. It's just style, I guess, personal preference. A forty-five was the gun my brother always kept. I'm pretty confident that when I squeeze the trigger a bullet's gonna come."

Lavinia had her arm out of the car, her fingers spread in the wind. "Your brother a cop?"

"Criminal defense attorney. He was, anyway. His name is Teddy Maxwell. Maybe you heard of him."

She looked like she was about to say yes, then shook her head, distaste showing in the set of her lips. So she was one of those who see criminal defense lawyers as little better than criminal accessories after the fact. Too bad.

"He was one of the best defense attorneys around. Then about two years ago one of his clients shot him in the head while we were eating lunch right across from Civic Center in San Francisco."

She worked the gears, accelerating more aggressively into the curve, but otherwise showed no reaction.

"I was just out of law school, working for him." She didn't reply, which had the effect of making me fill the silence.

And so I ended up telling her more than I intended, about the months in the hospital, then the half year in the rehab clinic where Teddy'd had to relearn how to swallow his food, dress himself, speak coherently.

"What does he do now?"

"Comes to the office every day. Does this and that. A little research, sits in on client meetings. He had to give up his bar card. He can't practice. For now we've got a place together, but I'm hoping that someday he'll be ready to live alone. That's what he wants, I know."

We came out of the woods and into the sun. To our right, a green hillside sloped down toward the trees. As Ridgecrest Road climbs Mount Tamalpais, it offers some of the most glorious coastal views anywhere in California, sixteen hundred feet above the foaming sea. She didn't once turn her head.

At Panoramic she headed toward Mill Valley. I didn't try to talk to her again. You don't chat about the weather after you've told someone about your brother catching a bullet and relearning to feed himself. I would have liked to have gone on and told her how even now, two and a half years later, I still kept waiting for some flash of the old Teddy's formidable intelligence, how I suffered from the creeping illusion that he was faking it. Snap out of it, I kept wanting to tell him. Be yourself. Talk right.

I directed her to the parking area off Highway 1 at Stinson Beach where I'd left my car, Teddy's old Rabbit, not dead yet. "Look," I said as I got out. "I'm a nice guy. I'm not going to sue you, but a new wheel is going to set me back about two hundred bucks, and that story about me swerving in front of you is bullshit."

I did what nice guys do: I gave her my card and told her that she could send me a check.

By eleven thirty I'd been home, showered, changed, and walked over to our offices at 580 Grand. On weekdays I was usually at my desk before seven. Jeanie, who commuted from Walnut Creek, would arrive around eight, our assistant, Lynn, at nine, and Teddy by nine thirty or ten.

Weekends I usually had the place to myself, unless we had a meeting with a client or a witness. I was the eager beaver, looking to make a name for myself, so that I'd be ready to strike out on my own when Jeanie finally said the hell with private practice and went back to the PD's office. Along with being my boss she was my brother's ex-wife. My real legal education had begun with Teddy that summer before the shooting, and in the past three years she'd finished it. I had two dozen jury trials under my belt, half of them felonies — and I'd won most of them. I was on a roll, brimming with self-confidence.

From my desk I heard Teddy when he showed up around one. He'd been to his brain-injury rehab group and had taken the bus up Telegraph to Berkeley and back by himself. Unmindful of social niceties even before the shooting, he didn't look in to say hi, but I heard him puttering around in the conference room.

At one forty-five Jeanie bustled in, keys jangling, phone chirping its low-battery warning. As usual, her presence raised the office energy level twofold. She was my height, with fine brown hair and a broad face; her beauty was in the way she carried herself, in her intelligence, in how she looked at people.

"Are we ready to go?" she asked as she passed my door without glancing in. "Coffee brewing? Got your game face on?" I heard her keys hit the desk in her office. "This guy's gonna be thinking about folding," she went on. We couldn't see each other but we often held conversations from our desks, talking in raised voices through the doorways. "He's gonna be scared shitless. He's gonna ask you to call the DA and find out if that shitty deal's still on the table. What are you going to say?"

"Jeanie, relax."

"You going to tell him what happens to child molesters in prison? Or are you going to do a number, convince him Leo Maxwell's the...