The mayor was an imposing figure in spite of considerable physical drawbacks for a politician – he stood only five-foot-seven and was so thin that the joke was when he stood sideways, unless he stuck out his tongue you couldn't see him. He was also nearly bald, with a half-dollar-sized port-wine stain that ran under his left eye and halfway across the bridge of an aquiline nose with a bump in the middle of it.

Most people put him a decade younger than his stated age of sixty-two. He had that spring in his step, contained energy and piercing gray-blue eyes. He had all his teeth, and they were pearly white, though he wasn't flashing any of them now.

With him in the office were Locke, Assistant DA Elaine Wager, Police Chief Dan Rigby, Assistant Chief Frank Batiste, County Sheriff Dale Boles (pronounced Bolus), who was in charge of the jail and its prisoners, Aiken's administrative assistant, a young man named Donald, and Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, a forty-four-year-old Jewish mulatto who headed San Francisco's homicide detail.

Aiken had started off by wanting to get a report on the status of the riots from Chief Rigby – the affected areas, what measures were being taken, how many men were on the street and so on. Rigby was in the middle of running it down for him.

'… mostly containment at this stage. We don't have a hope of any real control until we get more people on the streets, and of course we've got the usual looting-'

'We're not gonna have that,' the mayor said. 'I want you to put out the word. We're not tolerating looting. This isn't Los Angeles.' He looked around the room for effect, his port-wine stain glowing. 'This isn't Los Angeles,' he repeated.

'No, sir,' the chief replied, 'but how are we planning to stop it, the looting?'

'I'm in favor of shooting to kill.'