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forward until my forehead was resting on the steering wheel.
    Just as I was getting my breathing under control, something cold touched the back of my neck, and a man’s voice said, “Well, look who’s here.”

The face in the rear-view mirror possessed more distinctive characteristics than you’d normally find in a whole room full of faces. The eyes, black as a curse, were so close to each other they nearly touched, barely bisected by the tiniest nose ever to adorn an adult male face. I’d seen bigger noses on a pizza. The guy had no eyebrows and a mouth that looked like it was assembled in the dark: no upper lip to speak of, and a lower that plumped out like a throw pillow, above a chin as sharp as an elbow.
    It wasn’t a nice face, but that was misleading. The man who owned it wasn’t just not nice: he was a venal, calculating, corrupt son of a bitch.
    I said, “Hello, Hacker.”
    “Is the painting in the box?” Hacker asked.
    “What painting? I just delivered a refrigerator. I’m exploring the dignity of honest labor.”
    The gun pushed its way between a couple of vertebrae. “Okay,” I said. “What do you think, I forgot it?”
    “Sounded like a bunch of werewolves in there. And you got little cuts all over you, you know that? If I pull this gun back a couple inches, you going to be stupid?”
    “I’ve already been stupid,” I said. “I try to keep it to once a day.”
    “Good. Well, I can’t tell you what a thrill this is. Catching Junior Bender in the act.”
    “For someone with your record, it must be.”
    “I should read you your rights,” Hacker said.
    “If you could.”
    “You ain’t taking this seriously, bro.”
    “I’m thinking about it.”
    “What’s to think about. I got you.”
    I checked the side mirrors again. Sure enough, something was missing. “Okay, you got me,” I said. “But why?”
    “Whaddya mean, why? I’m a cop, you’re a crook.”
    “With no record at all. And where’s your black-and-white?”
    Hacker’s eyes flicked away from mine in the mirror. “Somebody’s prolly driving it.”
    “And your partner?”
    “Charlie? He’s got the day off.” He lifted the barrel of the automatic to his face and scratched his chin with the sight. I could hear the scrape of metal over whiskers. “In fact, we both got the day off.”
    “Maybe I should have taken the day off, too.”
    “Little late for that,” Hacker said.
    Hope, the slut, springs eternal. “No partner. No black-and-white. So this isn’t a bust.”
    “Oh, no,” Hacker said, settling happily back on the seat. “This is
much
worse than a bust.”
    With Hacker contributing some backseat driving, I navigated down the curving hillside streets to Ventura Boulevard, a largely charmless four-lane throughway that was orphaned several decades back by the Hollywood Freeway, which parallels it, but has since developed a seedy appeal all its own as the main drag of the southern end of the San Fernando Valley. By now it was a little after four, which meant that we were bumper-to-bumper with all the people who make rush hour start early by trying to get home before rushhour. The air conditioning in the van, which I had rented for the day, couldn’t have cooled a coat closet, so we had the windows open and got a chance to breathe in all the exhaust two or three hundred expensive cars can put out. It’s interesting, I guess; with all the work automakers put into making deluxe cars different from the instant wrecks they sell the proletariat, no one seems to have looked into making the expensive exhaust smell better. I said something to that effect to Hacker, and got a grunt by return mail.
    “So why don’t you tell me what we’re doing?”
    “We’re going north on Ventura,” Hacker said.
    “How’d you know I was going to be there?”
    “Circles in circles.”
    “I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” I said, “but this feels just the teensiest bit like a setup.”
    “Change lanes,” Hacker