Shock Warning Read Online Free PDF

School to La Cienega and Stocker Street, blowing all of central Los Angeles to kingdom come? It might be fun to find out.
    One-twelve.
    He never used to smoke until . . . until.
    He lit up.
    One-thirteen.
    “Señor Harris?” Harris was the name he was using for this assignment. Like all his aliases, it was a name of a Jimmy Cagney character from one of his old movies, in this case, Blonde Crazy .
    It was nice to be right, for a change. Skin: light brown. Age: somewhere between thirty and ninety. Height: five feet in heels on a footstool. Weight: don’t ask, don’t tell. Ethnicity: illegal-American.
    Devlin turned his attention from the doomed behemoth to the small, supplicant woman. She was dressed all in black and wore an Angels baseball cap to ward off the broiling sun. “Jacinta?”
    Jacinta thrust a dog-eared manila folder at him, as if that were reply enough.
    “We have to know the truth.”
    A girl in low-rider jeans crossed his field of vision, her lower-back tattoo as visible as a circling buzzard in the desert. Wings of some kind, splayed across her small. No doubt her boyfriend enjoyed the view. Devlin wondered how the lad’s replacement, a decade down the line, was going to feel about the anonymous Venice Boardwalk artist’s handiwork when it was three times life size and fading even faster than the lady’s desirability.
    Pay attention. “We?”
    “About what’s happening. The padre—”
    His secure PDA buzzed. In a time of iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, and everything else, he still reflexively called whichever device he was using at the moment his PDA. Personal digital assistant. It made him feel like he had a friend in this world, even if he didn’t. “Excuse me for a moment, sister,” he said, glancing down at the display.
    Danny, although he never would call him that. His most trusted personal nondigital assistant, and yet they had never met face-to-face and had never exchanged any personal details. And yet he was, at this moment, the man whom Devlin felt closest to in the world. Still, it was not a secure location to answer.
    He pressed the IGNORE button, although with this particular caller, the call would be sent to a special voice mail that would be turned immediately into a text message and displayed. “You were saying?”
    “Padre Gonsalves. He wants to see you. About this.” She opened the folder and out tumbled a set of Polaroids, caked with powdery debris.
    “ Mira ,” she said. A command. He mira -ed.
    The blazing midday L.A. sun wasn’t helping. It glinted off the folder right back into his eyes; that was the downside of no clouds, ever, except when there were plenty of them. Living in Los Angeles for the past few months, Devlin more easily understood the parable of Paradise from the book of Genesis: feast or famine, my way or the highway. It never rained in California, but man did it ever pour.
    He shifted position to catch the tentative shade of a palm tree. As he did, he came once again face-to-face with the statue of the dying Mammuthus , perpetually frozen in the awful realization that its next bite was also going to be its last meal. If it could think that far ahead.
    The first picture: not as expected—
    A smudge of white light. A starburst against the backdrop of an infinite, threatening darkness. His mind raced, freeassociating as it always did when absorbing new information. Talk about Genesis: Let there be light. But was this the beginning, or the final flameout?
    He caught himself. It was the overexposure of an aperture, the misfire of an amateur accidentally aiming a camera at the noonday California sun, although for what reason he couldn’t guess. He was Rorschaching even before he had to.
    “The door? You see it?”
    He saw no such thing. Tijuana in a fair-weather cumulus; Megan Fox in a rain-threatening cumulonimbus. You saw what you wanted to see. And what you almost always saw was yourself. He moved on.
    Variations on the Theme of the Smudge: blurs,