at Jimmy for approval. Jimmy nodded.

“Lloyd Hart. Lloyd-the-Void. He called himself Popper or Rocker or something but everybody called him Lloyd-the-Void. He was the DJ in the main room upstairs with the lights in the floor and the Is-Everybody-Having-A-Good-Time? jive. Slip Tone was in the serious room downstairs.” He wrote something else on another three-by-five card and handed it to Jimmy. “I guess you could say he’s alive.”

Chris dug his way down to the bottom of the second bowl of soup and put his spoon aside. He looked out the window again and then drew one last musical note.

He handed the three-by-five card to Jimmy.

“I don’t read music,” Jimmy said when he looked at it.

Chris whistled an odd little twelve-n ote tune.

“You just wrote that?”

Chris shook his head, nodded out at the street.

“What?” Jimmy said.

“The palm trees. Other side of the street. Up and down, different heights. If they were notes on a scale, it’d sound like that.”

Jimmy held up the card. “Can I keep this?”

“No,” Chris said and took it back.

The Love Storm was the name of the overnight program at KLVV, fifth in the ratings for its time slot. The show had a cosmopolitan L.A. feel to it, slanting noir shadows and cigarette smoke curling out of your radio, but the studios were actually in a squat three-story box of a building on Van Nuys Boulevard in Van Nuys, the transmitter ten miles farther out in the Valley, almost to the mountains in a field of sunflowers. This time of night, the flowers would be closed up tight.

Lloyd Hart was now Darren Price.

He was working alone. There wasn’t even a janitor around. Jimmy talked his way in, past the squawk box down at street level. Price had said hello, had said something quick and sharp and funny actually, hope in his voice that it was some young girls out cruising around. When Jimmy said what he wanted to talk about, Price buzzed him up, another case of “Now it’s been years since anyone asked . . .”

He was still good-looking, in a game show host way, and he had a good, deep, round voice and a way of putting the sound of a warm smile in every word he said. Jimmy thought he recognized the voice from a TV commercial for headache relief, the kind where you got the idea somebody really cared about you and your pain. He wore a velveteen running suit, almost purple, and perfect white shoes, Capezio dance shoes. He rocked back and forth in a chair that didn’t squeak. His hand kept reaching for cigarettes he didn’t smoke anymore, hadn’t smoked for ten years.

“Hold on a sec,” he said and lifted the cans off of his neck and up over his ears. He leaned to the mic. The song was ending.

Half of the show’s audience were love-struck kids dedicating sappy songs to each other, to break up or to get back together or just to say to each other, and to the world and to ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, that this love was real and would stand the test of time. The other half was people at work, at 7-Elevens with a portable on the counter they weren’t supposed to have, people at bakeries and tortillarias, in emergency rooms, in factories where they chromed wheels or assembled meals for airlines, people cleaning offices, driving cabs, writing screenplays—and cops and suicide hotline answerers and dope-dealers and whores all waiting around for something to go down. There was a KISS station in town. Listeners were encouraged to call and repeat the money phrase, that they were “Kissing at Work . . .” At an hour like this, one other midweek night like this, Jimmy had heard a listener call in a request to The Love Storm saying he was “Storming at Work . . .”

A jingle played. A saxophone. A woman’s voice. The sound of soft, rolling, distant thunder.

It made Jimmy wish it would rain, really rain.

“Andrea is up studying, studying for her nursing finals,” Darren Price said, so close to the mic you could hear the breath going over his teeth. Jimmy felt like he wasn’t there now, that it was just Price and Andrea and . . .

“Carmen, she just wants you to know that she’s sorry she said what she said, sorry that it hurt you, and that she didn’t mean it. And that the whole future is ahead for you two and she doesn’t want to jeopardize that because she loves you