"My name is Flor. Carl, wipe this off." She passed the Detonics to Lyons. He turned and grinned to his old friend.

"Should have seen what just happened!" Lyons used a rental-company brochure to wipe saliva from the muzzle of the autopistol. "This punk thought he'd abuse the pretty lady. Turned out he got a forty-five in the mouth."

"You shot someone? On the street there?" Towers looked back.

"No shooting." Lyons used his thumbnail to scrape a bit of flesh out of the hairline space between the Detonics's slide and the frame. "Just low-velocity steel."

Towers laughed. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and reached inside his coat for his cigarettes. He tapped one out of the pack. He counted the cigarettes remaining and then put the cigarette back.

"Glad you showed up, hardman. This man needs some laughs. You read the newspapers?"

"Can't be true."

"It's worse." The detective stared out at the parking lots and shop fronts. The heat and mid-morning smog created a gray day without colors or horizons. The boulevards faded into the near distance, the buildings and cars becoming only shadows within the gray.

"Much worse. I thought Manson was the ultimate. But these punks, these gangs made Charlie and his little girls look like Bo Peep and the sheep. You two work together?"

"Flor's coming in as… what did you call it?"

"We can talk?" Flor questioned Lyons before she answered.

"Bill was in on the Hydra op," Lyons said. "He knows enough to be a superstar at any congressional hearing. But only about Los Angeles."

"I'll be an interface between the DEA and his group," she said. "The terrorists seem to be funding their forces with dope money. Follow the dope, find the terrorists. Follow the terrorists, find the dope. It is natural that I work with Carl."

"There's drugs in this. The punks were up on some crazy drug."