had to make up the part about her being sad.

“Tell him,” Angel said to her. “It’s all right, he’s cool.”

“I couldn’t see how anyone would get hurt,” Lucy Valdez said. She had almost no accent. L.A. raised. L.A. Unified School District. “I tried to think it through. I couldn’t see how anyone would get hurt by it.”

Jimmy wanted to hit her. He knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, knew his anger had other targets. One of them the man in the mirror.

“They come to her,” Angel said. “A guy.”

“Let her tell it,” Jimmy said.

Lucy took a step back, a step that put her halfway behind Angel.

“A man called me, from up here,” she said. Lucy said. “But he didn’t say where he was. The phone said four-one-five. He said, ‘A man will come see you.’ He said that when the other man came, he would tell me what it was, the details. And how I would be paid.”

Jimmy said, “Do you have a brother?”

The girl shook her head and started to cry.

Jimmy turned his back on them and walked away, halfway up the block.

Angel came after him.

Jimmy turned.

“They gave her five grand,” Angel said. “The guy who came down to L.A. did. All she had to do was be there at her house that one night, the night I saw her in the window from the street, and be out of there at two that next morning. The guy would take things over from there. And she had to leave the keys to the Skylark.”

“Who was the girl I was following?”

“A friend of Lucy’s. From an acting class she took. They asked her if she had a friend.”

“What did they tell her it was about?” Jimmy said.

Angel didn’t want to say the next word. “Me.”

“How?”

“They told her that some men wanted me in San Francisco.”

“They thought you’d tail her? It doesn’t make sense. Like you didn’t know what she looked like?”

“They knew I’d send somebody, one of my guys or somebody, and then I’d come up here eventually.”

“When the bait was dead,” Jimmy said.

“She didn’t think that far,” Angel said. “She’s just a kid. She’s convicted, man. She knows she did wrong. I found her still out at her cousin’s in Duarte. She can’t even go home. She can’t stand to be there.”

“You have enemies here?”

“I didn’t think so until now.”

Jimmy turned and started back toward the cars, with a sense of purpose that sent Angel after him. “What are you doing?”

Lucy backed up when she saw Jimmy coming, the look on his face.

He grabbed her by the wrist. “Come on,” he said, already pulling her up the street, toward the waterfront. “We’re going to find the man you met with. You’re going to point the finger at him. Lucky for us, seems like everybody’s here . . .”

“Maybe he isn’t even a Sailor,” Angel said.

“It’s a start,” Jimmy said.

“I never said anybody was in the navy,” Lucy said.

“Shut up,” Jimmy said.

They were all there. It was like a living mug book of Sailor suspects.

Jimmy still had Lucy by the arm. Angel was on the other side of her.

Things had gotten even rougher. It was all in boldface now. The segregation had only become more pronounced, the lines drawn clearer. Each knot of Sailors had a speaker at its center, only most of them weren’t speaking, just on display, like a dictator on his palace balcony with his arms outstretched to receive the love of the people. But it wasn’t love exactly. For some, it was fear. Or that crash at the intersection of admiration and fear that is respect.

Fights were breaking out everywhere. There was Steadman, with the L.A. Sailors around him, bad and good, and a few converts from the north. And a few undecideds, whatever that meant in this context. They’d brought one of the tricked-out buses over from Fort Point, positioned it in the middle of the parking lot. Steadman stood atop it. On the polished, curved aluminum of the bus like that, he looked like Howard Hughes on the wing of a plane. He looked like what he had been in life, an airplane man.

Jimmy didn’t imagine that Steadman was behind bringing him or Angel north, but he still made Lucy look at his face and at the faces of his men. The fat man was beside the bus. The hat man was there. And Steadman’s muscles, L.A. handlers, one named Boney M and a particularly singular-minded little man they called Perversito.

Lucy just kept shaking her head