“Stop!” she said. “I know those guys.”

Jimmy pulled to the curb.

She jumped out.

She threw the door closed and leaned all the way in. “You’re sweet,” she said in that way that doesn’t mean anything.

Then she kissed him on the cheek.

She pulled back, spooked. She stepped away from the car. She stood on the sidewalk. She touched her lips.

Jimmy drove away, up Sunset.

When he looked up in the mirror, she still stood on the side of the street where he left her, watching him go, holding herself as if from a sudden chill.

* * *

Angel’s house was halfway down an impossibly steep hill in Silver Lake in a neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows, some restored and almost too neat, the rest of them peeling under all the sun the hill took. Jimmy parked the Porsche, wheels canted to the curb. You could hear the music from here. The moon was still up. A couple made out against the fender of a cherry Camaro. They ignored him.

The partiers spilled out of the house onto the terraced backyard. Angel’s place was never closed, his friends and wards mostly Latinos with a few Cal Arts types. Three people danced to ska under a string of chili pepper lights hung in a grapefruit tree, its trunk painted white. Somebody on the steps recognized Jimmy as he came down around the side of the house and threw him a beer.

Angel Figueroa huddled at a picnic table with a skinny kid. Angel was in his forties, muscular, “cut,” clear-eyed, un-tattooed. He wore starched wide-leg jeans, stiff as cardboard, and a white T-shirt, a look they called California Penal. He spoke Spanish to the kid, fervent. The kid looked at the ground, nodding. In Angel’s lap was an open Bible with a homemade leather cover.