– No problem. Didnt know how you liked it. Some creamers in the glove box.

I opened the glove box and found a couple creamers bouncing around on top of registration papers weighted down by a huge ring of at least a hundred keys, and a thick flipper of leather with a little plastic handle jutting from it. I closed the box and peeled back the top of my creamer and poured it in my cup.

Gabe pointed at the paper bag in the middle of the front seat.

– Garbage in there.

I dropped the empty creamer in the bag.

He drove us a couple blocks up Mansfield, past several two-story apartment buildings stacked like stucco cakeboxes in pink, aqua, terracotta, yellow and mint. Across Fountain the street gentrified slightly into a sprinkle of trendified craftsmans and renovated 1930s Spanish revival apartment blocks that were going to be squeezing out the drifters at the BHS Hollywood Recovery Center in due course. He stopped at the corner next to the Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse, and I watched some skater kids across the street working the steps of the Liberal Household Arts Building at Hollywood High. He found a hole in the commute traffic and turned right, the Hollywood Hills rising just north of us, early summer smog settled on their tops. We started and stopped our way down past a few motels and strip clubs and stopped for the light at Highland.

A school bus crossed the intersection.

I closed my eyes for a moment, when I opened them it was gone. I looked down the street, knowing it must have just turned the corner, but unable to keep myself from thinking other thoughts. Thinking about the Flying Dutchman. Ghost ships. Haunted freighters, lost souls that manifest and dissolve, unbidden. Just the usual.

The light changed and I sipped my coffee.

– So where we headed?

Gabe glanced at his right blind spot and changed lanes.

– Koreatown. Code enforcement. Second day. Guy had stuff piled floor to ceiling. No egress. Blocked himself out of his own bathroom. Been filling gallon milk jugs with piss. Shitting in little individual ziplock bags.