He looked at Keenan Roberts’s picture and saw that he was not the shooter. Kelvin wasn’t either. They were too big and too heavy. And it was hard for Hood to imagine either of them getting their hands on a weapon like the M249 SAW. He had seen their destructive talents in Anbar. A properly working SAW throws a thousand rounds a minute.

He went outside to the deck and looked out at his Silver Lake neighborhood. When Hood had requested a transfer to the desert he had kept this apartment in L.A. because he liked the city, and because it gave him another hour of driving time each way, to and from the substation in Lancaster.

Hood smelled rain. He fingered the sharp pieces of safety glass still in his jacket pocket and for the hundredth time that night he wondered why Terry Laws had been murdered.

It wasn’t done in the heat of the moment. It was an execution. An execution of a sheriff’s deputy known to his friends as Mr. Wonderful.

Beach and wave.

Then he wondered something else for the hundredth time that night. Had the executioner let him live, or had his M249 jammed? They jammed in Iraq all the time from age and dust-it was an untrusted weapon.

If the gun had jammed, then he was lucky.

If the shooter had let him live, why?

The only explanation he could come up with was that Londell Dwayne-or whoever was hidden behind the sunglasses and the bandana-had wanted to be seen.

He’d wanted a witness to tell his tale.

3

“Listen and don’t interrupt. I invited you here to tell you a story. It’s about a friend of mine we called Mr. Wonderful, and the things that happened to him and why they had to happen to him. Your friend Hood plays a role in this story, too. But it’s bigger than both of them. It’s about chaos and opportunity.”