“What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”

Graham shook his head. “No. You first. Are you on?”

You owe, Neal told himself. And not just money. You were a lost kid yourself once, and the only person in the world who gave a good goddamn was Joe Graham, who’s sitting here now, wearing out his one good hand.

“Yeah, I’m on.”

The rubbing stopped. Graham palmed one of the little whiskey bottles and opened it with his thumb and forefinger. He took a sip straight from the bottle.

“I didn’t want to tell you too much until I saw you in action again. I had to make sure you were…”

“‘Okay’?”

“Three years is a long time, son.”

“So did I pass?”

“Yeah.”

“So tell me the whole story.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“After church.”

The driver looked back in the mirror and sneered. “What the hell kind of church is at Hollywood and Vine?”

A placard board read the true CHRISTIAN IDENTITY CHURCH, REVEREND C. WESLEY CARTER, MINISTER. Its big white plastic cross loomed above a sidewalk festooned with broken wine bottles, free-floating newspaper pages, crumpled cans, and greasy sandwich wrappers. Pimps in all their sartorial splendor leaned on their Caddies and Lincoln Town Cars watching their little girls in white leather hot pants munch on doughnuts as they vamped passing cars. Pretty teenage boys dressed in tight denims and T-shirts sat on bus benches and peeked out from under their long bangs in a more subtle form of advertising, visible only to the informed.

If you took the view that a church was supposed to be a hospital for sinners, the corner of Hollywood and Vine was a great location for a church.

The church was immaculate, not in the immaculate conception sense, but in a utilitarian-, Protestant way. The highly varnished wood shone with righteous energy, the modest carpeting was vacuumed to within an inch of its life. Pamphlets had been laid out in precise order on a table in the foyer.