anything.

He got her out of the corner and held her. He said the words to calm her, to dismiss it, the way men do to women.

She pulled away from him.

“They were here,” she said. “They came an hour after you left. There were two of them. They wore black. Black pants and coats and black sneakers . . .”

FOURTEEN

It became Jimmy’s first case.

He got up that morning and moved Mary to another house, a friend of Angel’s down so deep into Latino territory that it’d be next to impossible for anybody who wasn’t Latino to get to her.

Now it was noon, and he was headed west on Sunset, west all the way out to Temescal Canyon.

He had “looked into things” for people before, tracked down a lost soul here or there for Angel or for some other Sailor or friend. Or friend of a friend. He had tailed people, to make sure they were all right. To make sure they had made it home, made it back to a safe place. He had tucked in his share of desperate, hurting people, sat up all night with people who needed someone there to keep them from falling apart. Others, he had “looked into” to see just how bad they were. To confirm that here was someone for an innocent, a friend, a Sailor to steer clear of.

But this was something new. Something closer, with higher stakes.

The first of the Road Cut Killings had come in a cabin out at the end of a tight, twisting road, a road that all but turned into a footpath as it climbed higher into the hills. The farther you went, the narrower it got, like a capillary. Temescal, Benedict. Maybe there was a canyon connection. It was a one-bedroom cabin. She was young. An actress. Or would-be. Like everybody else, she’d been in a few commercials, was up for a pilot or a continuing role on an episodic. Or at least that’s what she’d probably told the folks back home. Maybe there was a Hollywood connection, but that was too easy. Everyone was connected to Hollywood. Jimmy had spent nearly the entirety of his existence here. From time to time he had to remind himself that dry cleaners and hot dog stands and churches in other parts of the country didn’t brag on the famous people they served. Some places weren’t about the show. Some people just watched movies and television shows.

There was a bleached-out plastic For Rent sign out front stapled to an oak, as if anyone could just happen by the place. Word must have gotten out. There had been no takers in three months. Jimmy parked the Cadillac, turned off the engine and the music with it.

There was a cicada somewhere, with that high-tension sound, like a rattler on crank. He left the driver’s door open, stood in place, turned a full circle. You could see the rooftop of another cabin halfway up the side of another canyon across the way, but that was it. Nothing else that had anything of a human stamp on it. Hard to believe the towers of Century City were three or four miles from here, in the air anyway. It was a good place to kill somebody.

“Hello?” he said, louder than he’d intended.

There was a little yodel slapback from the other hillside, but nothing else, not even a dog barking back at him. As he started toward the cabin, he stopped to pick up a straight length of branch dropped out of one of the oaks. What was he going to do with a stick? Use it the way a kid uses a stick to poke a dead thing? To make sure? He was more spooked than he’d thought he’d be. Detective Dill had done too good a job at painting a picture of what had gone down inside.

He tried the knob on the front door. It was locked. The door was baby blue with hand-painted flowers, years old. Temescal had been a favorite hippie canyon in the ’70s. Hippies and bikers. After that, it was rich Hollywood types, weekenders, weed smokers. Who told themselves their new jobs hadn’t changed them. It hadn’t changed them. Then they got bored, and the drive was too much trouble. (It won.) And the next wave moved in, whatever it was. That the actress lived up here told Jimmy she’d probably come from someplace real and missed it, real like trees and birds that go to sleep and shut up