Hood circled the area with his flashlight. He picked up a few of the shards of windshield safety glass and rubbed their edges with his thumb, then dropped them into a jacket pocket. He could see where the crime scene investigators had dug into the asphalt to retrieve bullets and bullet fragments.

He shined the light up into the peppertree and watched the loose branches swaying in and out of the beam. He walked across the front yard to the fence that the shooter had so easily cleared, counting his steps: ten. Then he ran the light up the fence, then along the top, wondering if the man might have snagged something on the rough wood. If he had, the investigators had found it first.

He drove around the block to where he’d heard the car start up, and he sat there a minute with the windows down and the heater turned up high.

At home, Hood showered and dressed his wound and scrolled through the LASD enforcement-only Gangfire site. He could picture the familiar face he was looking for, and now, after the great slow settling of his adrenaline, the name came to him. He was an Antelope Valley Blood named Londell Dwayne.

Hood had shaken him down a few times and Dwayne was unpredictable. Once he ran. Once he smiled and offered Hood a Kool. Once he told Hood that if his johnson was as big as his ears then Hood must have happy ladies. Hood had told him his ears were nothing compared to his johnson and Dwayne liked that. On that occasion, Dwayne had been wearing a Detroit Tigers hoodie.

Hood looked at the picture of Dwayne and a chill registered across his shoulders. He wrote down Dwayne’s numbers on a small notebook he carried in his pocket.

Hood thought. L.A. County had fifty thousand gangsters, he knew, and more than two hundred clicks. The killer’s red bandana meant a Blood affiliation, but sometimes shooters flew enemy colors to mislead witnesses and to implicate rivals.