When you first heard it, it was exciting in a way, the sound of energy, of motion, of intention. But, like the kids out wild on Sunset, ten seconds later it felt like something else, something to turn away from before it pulled you down. He watched Angel and the men for a minute, listened to them teasing each other in Spanish, and then put down his beer, went down the steps to go.

He waved to Angel, started up the side of the house.

“Let’s make a run to Tecate some night,” Angel called after him. “Eat at that fish fry place.”

Jimmy walked up the sidewalk alongside the white house. He brushed aside a branch of trumpet vine that arched overhead. He looked at his fingers.

Wet, from the leaves.

* * *

A little TV offered up the first newscast of the morning. The sound was down but the visuals said enough: the school picture of the missing boy giving way to a live shot of helicopters combing brown hills somewhere in the Inland Empire, Verdugo or San Bernardino or Riverside. Jimmy sat at one end of the long table in the big dining room, eating toast, wearing the same clothes from last night.

The weather came on. Jimmy turned up the sound in time to hear, “A surprise trace of rain last night in parts of Hollywood …”

He left it on, walked away from it.

The bedroom was stark, a large room with expensive furnishings out of the past, huge pieces carved from some rain forest hardwood, dark, almost black. Jimmy stood at the tall windows, looking down at the backyard as the daylight burned off the dew. He yanked closed the blackout drapes and lay back on the bed, still in his clothes.

Three

Jean Kantke’s office was in an industrial building just east of downtown on a street of rag trade shops, down where they made bathing suits and neckties, kiddy backpacks and knockoff men’s jeans and underwear. The office was on the third floor, the top floor, and it was crisp and clean and high style, metal frame windows, old-style wide silver Venetian blinds dicing the morning light, and a desk that was silver, too, all curvy, looking like it came out of the purser’s office of an ocean liner.