“I mean, I’ll drop you off there,” Jimmy said.

She ignored him, fumbled in her bag, found her cigarettes.

“Don’t,” he said. “Please.”

She pouted another half second then closed her bag and turned in the seat to face him, to let him see her legs, if he wanted to look.

Jimmy looked up at the crossroads behind him in the mirror. The Sailor had turned away to walk back up Sunset. On the prowl.

“So. What do you do, Mr. No Names Please?” she said.

“Just drive around.”

“Looking for trouble.”

“No, I know where that is,” Jimmy said.

She bit her lip and said, “I bet.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV,” Jimmy said.

He drove two more blocks, looking ahead. It was after midnight now and the night was coming into its own, shaking itself awake like a dog, the whores and their men, the hyper teens, pierced runaways on bus benches, their legs jumping, laughing and hitting each other, all of it looking like fun, for about the first ten seconds. The All American Burger was ahead, red, white, and blue and way too bright.

“This car is cool but it’s like older than you are, right?”

“It’s a ’64.”

“And that’s like older than you are, right?”

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“I have a ’99 Corvette back home in Ohio up on blocks with only a hundred miles on it. I was a Gerber baby.” She said it all in one breath.

“A what?”

“A Corvette.”

“No, I mean — ”

“A Gerber baby. In ads. In Good Housekeeping.”

There was something sweet about her lies, something that made him want to try to pretend he was her brother, take her along with him for a few hours and try to beat back the night.

But before they made it to the All American Burger they came up on a tricked-out pickup on the other side of the wide street. Another girl like this girl leaned in the window, talking to three teenagers wedged into the front seat shoulder to shoulder, El Camino High linebackers.