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busted windshield. It was a busy night. Deacon had a deadline to meet and there were a dozen teams like me and Arn cruising the streets in the city. The only problem: half my team was missing.
    I couldn't put it off any longer. The office was down a hall back of the coolers, a tight passage with open ducts and a sputtering track light. I wiped my hands on my jeans, took a breath, then knocked on the door.
    "Yeah!" Deacon yelled from inside.
    I went in and closed the door behind me. The office was dark and stuffy, crowded with boxes of motor oil, engine parts and all kinds of junk. A ceiling fan stirred the smoke and dead air, but the room still smelled like an ash tray full of sump water. The only light came from a green banker's lamp on the desk and a portable TV flickering with the sound turned down. There was a fire safe in the corner, a bookshelf full of owner's manuals, a Goodwill sofa, a couple file cabinets, and a WWF Divas poster hanging on the back of the door. I stood under a picture of a lady wrestler with tits like dinner plates and triceps bigger than my head, waiting for permission to spill my guts.
    Sirens passed a couple blocks away.
    A Pennzoil clock ticked on the wall.
    Jeffrey "Jiggles" Deacon hunched over an adding machine on the desk in the middle of the room. My boss was a fat slob, maybe 300 pounds, with drooping eyelids and blubbery lips that made him look like a giant frog. Part Greek or something – curly black hair, jowls, big ears – he always needed a shave and a change of clothes, not to mention a strong belt and suspenders. Poking around in a drawer, his desk littered with coffee cups, empty pizza boxes and stacks of moldy papers, he shot me a look, grunted, then turned to a manual typewriter older than I was and started to peck at the keys.
    "Park it wherever," he said. "I'll be done in a minute."
    Heberto sprawled on the sofa next to the door, blowing smoke rings at the TV. He looked calm enough, but he'd look calm if he was drowning a bag of puppies. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes, yawned, then got to his feet and cracked his knuckles, scanning me like a robot. He was twenty-eight, maybe, lean and buff, a Mestizo with black hair, black eyes and knife scars on his pockmarked cheeks. Dignified and soft-spoken, he used to be a cop in Mexico City and he had connections in all kinds of pest holes: El Salvador, Brazil, Panama, Columbia. He talked like an English textbook with a couple of missing pages, always polite and formal, but nobody ever laughed at his Spanglish. I knew for a fact he'd clipped a couple guys in Oakland and there were all kinds of stories about his crew. Meat hooks and blowtorches. Crap like that.
    "Emma." He gave me a thin smile. "I hear you had some trouble."
    "That's why I'm here, Mr. Gonzalez."
    Kiss-up city. I sat down on a box of junk.
    "OK." Deacon ripped a form out of his typewriter, tossed it on the desk, then kicked back in his chair and lit a cigar. "Tell us what happened and make it fast. We got company's gonna show up any minute – if Jacobo ever manages to pull his head out of his ass, the greedy little weasel. The bastard's two hours late already. He's scared to be seen with us, but he's even more scared he'll miss a chance to rob us blind, so we always got to hang around while he makes up his fucking mind."
    I took my glasses off, cleaned them with my T-shirt, then put them on again, trying to act calm and collected.
    Heberto was watching me like a snake.
    #
    I gave them the story I'd worked out during my walk to the station. It was mostly true, but I changed some details to make the whole thing sound like an accident that could've happened to anybody. In my new version, the Lexus had already been parked when we happened to drive by and the rest was just a fluke of timing. Bad luck, that's all. My story was plausible, more or less, not that it really mattered. Arn knew enough to get everybody indicted and I was a corroborating witness if the cops ever tracked