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on the end table beside the sofa, propping it against a Stickley-style lamp with a green stained-glass shade, so it was sitting with its round white head cocked to the right and its arms straight down at its side. Its mitten-like hands were open, as they had been since he had first seen it on the porch, but now they seemed to be seeking something.
    He put the pin on the table beside the doll. Its black enamel head glistened like a drop of oil, and silvery light glinted off the sharp point.
    He closed the drapes over each of the three living-room windows. He did the same in the dining room and family room. In the kitchen, he twisted shut the slats on the Levolor blinds.
    He still felt watched.
    Upstairs in the bedroom that he had outfitted as an office, where he wrote his novels, he sat at the desk without turning on a lamp. The only light came through the open door from the hall. He picked up the phone, hesitated, and then called the home number of Sal Delano, who was a reporter at the Register, where Tommy had worked until yesterday. He got an answering machine but left no message.
    He called Sal's pager. After inputting his own number, he marked it urgent.
    Less than five minutes later, Sal returned the call. “What's so urgent, cheese head?” he asked. “You forget where you put your dick?”
    “Where are you?” Tommy asked.
    “In the sweatshop.”
    “At the office?”
    “Wrangling the news.”
    “Late on another deadline,” Tommy guessed.
    “You called just to question my professionalism? You're out of the news racket one day and already you've lost all sense of brotherhood?”
    Leaning forward in his chair, hunched over his desk, Tommy said, “Listen, Sal, I need to know something about the gangs.”
    “You mean the fat cats who run Washington or the punks that lean on the businessmen in Little Saigon?”
    “Local Vietnamese gangs.”
    “The Santa Ana Boys… Cheap Boys, Natoma Boys. You already know about them.”
    “Not as much as you do,” Tommy said. Sal was a crime reporter with a deep knowledge of the Vietnamese gangs that operated not only in Orange County but nationwide. While with the newspaper, Tommy had written primarily about the arts and entertainment.
    “Sal, you ever hear about Natoma or the Cheap Boys threatening anybody by mailing them an imprint of a black hand or, you know, a skull-and-crossbones or something like that?”
    “Or maybe leaving a severed horse's head in their bed?”
    “Yeah. Anything like that.”
    “You have your cultures confused, boy wonder. These guys aren't courteous enough to leave warnings. They make the Mafia seem like a chamber-music society.”
    “What about the older gangs, not the teenage street thugs, the more organized guys—the Black Eagles, the Eagle Seven?”
    “The Black Eagles have the hard action in San Francisco, the Eagle Seven in Chicago. Here it's the Frogmen.”
    Tommy leaned back in his chair, which creaked under him. “No horse's head from them either, huh?”
    “Tommy boy, if the Frogmen leave a severed head in your bed, it's going to be your own.”
    “Comforting.”
    “What's this all about? You're starting to worry me.” Tommy sighed and looked at the nearest window. Clotting clouds had begun to cover the moon, and fading silver light filigreed their vaporous edges. “That piece I wrote for the Show section last week—I think maybe somebody's threatening to retaliate for it.”
    “The piece about the little girl figure skater?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And the little boy who's a piano prodigy? What's to retaliate for?”
    “Well—”
    “Who could've been pissed off by that—some other six-year-old pianist thinks he should have gotten the coverage, now he's going to run you down with his tricycle?”
    “Well,” Tommy said, beginning to feel foolish, “the piece did make the point that most kids in the Vietnamese community don't get mixed up in gangs.”
    “Oooh, yeah, that's controversial journalism, alright”
    “I had some hard things to say about the ones who do join gangs, especially the