night for their audience with Wayne Whitehead. Jimmy snatched up a three-foot wrench propped against a mooring winch and went aboard, Angel behind him.

Nobody home.

And no bent guitar notes sustaining in the air.

The oil lamps on the walls burned. Just enough light to illumine the oval, black marble-topped table in the center of the room and the white rose in the vase of milk.

Jimmy gripped the wrench a little tighter.

He yelled. “Hey!”

They waited.

“We should have took him that night, instead of playing whatever game that was,” Angel said. He meant Les Paul.

When they came out through the hatch again, they weren’t alone. Twenty or thirty of the Sailors from outside had come into the warehouse. They were still not saying a word, quiet enough to make it creepy.

Just staring at the two out-of-towners.

Jimmy shifted the wrench to the other hand, but they weren’t any threat.

“We follow Wayne,” one of them said without much behind it. A few of the others gave him a look.

They were staring at Jimmy as if he was somebody. As if his reputation had preceded him. As far as Jimmy knew, he didn’t have a reputation. Not here.

“Go,” he said.

Surprisingly, they went.

Maybe it was the wrench.

“Come on,” he said to Angel. “We’ll go south, to the shipyards where we were before. It was where all the women were.”

“She’s not dead,” Angel said. He said it in an odd way, different from before.

“Maybe he’s there,” Jimmy answered. “Maybe he’s looking for her there.”

Angel was looking into the shadows.

“What?” Jimmy said.

Angel waited a second, still looking into the shadows, then said, “We know she’s not dead, son. Where is she?”

There was a rope locker on the dock. “Come on out, it’s all right,” Angel said. “We’re the good guys. We just want to find her, too, get you guys home.”

There was a scurrying rat sound, and the kid exploded up out of the plywood bin. Angel charged in, crossed twenty feet in two seconds, but it was only fast enough to catch an ankle.

“I’m Angel, man, Lucy’s friend!”

But the ankle was slick, wet from sweat. The boy escaped Angel’s grip but fell hard, on his face, onto the dock. He didn’t stop moving. He jumped to his feet and made it another ten yards before Angel was even sure he wasn’t still holding him.

“Stop! Come on, man!” Angel said. “You gotta stay with us! We know she’s still alive!”

The kid turned with a look of hurt and confusion and anger and suspicion all at once, but only slowed for a second.

And then he was out, through an open door at the far end of the long room, lost into the night again.

When Jimmy and Angel came out of the warehouse building, things had changed yet again. The numbers had swelled. It looked and felt and even smelled like the exercise yard at a prison.

Familiar faces. Some of the L.A. Sailors had come calling, had come over from Fort Point. Some of the roughest ones. Angel knew most of their names. Jimmy knew to stay away from them. The ranks of the San Francisco Sailors had grown. There was a face-off going on, maybe just starting. Some of them, on both sides, had weapons in hand, clubs, lengths of chain, or heavy marine rope. There was an ugly sound in the air, ugly anticipation, like the sound in the auditorium before a heavyweight fight.

But then it stopped. When they saw Jimmy and Angel.

They followed them with their eyes.

Or was it just Jimmy?

They split open a path before him. Yea, though I walk through the parking lot of the shadow of death . . .

A woman they’d seen earlier stepped in front of Jimmy again and said her line again. “We serve the Russian . . .”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jimmy said.

To answer, she pointed. Across the skyline, the winking cityscape behind them, like a backdrop in a play.

“I don’t understand,” Jimmy said again. She was right in his face.

She kept pointing. Now he saw it. Maybe. Was that what she wanted him to see?

A violet light atop one of the hills, brighter than anything around it, brighter than there was an immediate explanation for. It burned with the intensity of an airport runway light.

Violet.

The Porsche had been left unmolested.

Jimmy got in the car, but Angel didn’t.

“I’m going to stay down here,” he said after a second. “In case Lucy’s here. In case the kid pops out again. Maybe he’ll lead me to her.”

“We should stay together,” Jimmy