of the runway.

Jimmy was in a sea of Cub Scouts surrounding a restored ST-10, the bomber in the picture on Angel’s office wall. The boys jumped up and down below the wings, swatting at the undercarriage, trying to touch the teardrop tanks that hung down.

He went up to the top level.

Clover Field forty years ago. There was a wall of photos: the hangars, the workmen like Angel, the bombers coming off the assembly line.

It was also a history of Steadman Industries. As you walked along, the company moved into the fifties and sixties and then the seventies, props disappearing, wings angling back, nothing ahead but a bright, high-flying future. Or so said the PR.

There was a commotion behind Jimmy as half of the Cubs arrived. They pressed their faces against the glass of a display, the re-created Steadman boardroom of the sixties. Jimmy crossed the hallway and looked over their shoulders. It was complete: the original furniture—a great oblong mahogany table and leather chairs—Coke bottles, coffee cups, pads and pens, pictures on the walls, an ST-10 taking off outside a “window”—and ten wax figures seated around the table, their glass eyes fixed on the big man standing before them.

The plaque read:WALTER E. C. “RED” STEADMAN

FOUNDER

1911-1973

He looked like the kind of man who could get his name painted in fifty-foot letters across the top of a hangar.

Jimmy thought he saw the old guy blink.

When he came back down to the first floor, his tails were back, the pale men who’d been at Canter’s. Today, the short one even had on a peacoat and watch cap. It was easy to make fun of them, but there wasn’t any fun in it today for Jimmy. Maybe it was all the scouts, all the innocents. He tried to make it through to the front door without them spotting him, but the tall one saw him and shot a look up at the second man on the higher flo or. The two-tone blonde came down the staircase fast and joined the other, the two of them “hiding” behind a stacked rack of bombs, a pyramid of dummies.

Jimmy went after them. Why were Sailors interested in this? Maybe he could shake it out of one of them. The two of them tried to get lost in the crowd. They looked bewildered. When you were tailing someone, he wasn’t supposed to come after you. They ducked behind planes, pretended to look at the shiny models of 747s and then at the mannequins of stews in pastel seventies uniforms. The Cubs had all descended from the top floor and made the two stand out all the more. Even the short one stood tall over them.

Jimmy kept coming. There was a flight simulator in one corner on the ground floor, a twenty-seater big as a bus mounted on hydraulic lifters. The two pale men cut in line, just making it through the simulator doors before they whooshed closed.

He got close enough to see the name of the ride: “Turbulence Over Tucson.” The hydraulics sighed and then went to work.

Jimmy’s ’70 Dodge Challenger, painted school bus yellow, eight coats, hand-rubbed, was parked all by itself in the last row in the lot. He got in, buckled himself in, lit it up. It had a Hemi 454 V-8 under the bulge in the hood. At idle it made a sound a little like a tiger at the zoo in the middle of the afternoon, sleepy, not all that happy. There was a four speed on the flo or. Jimmy backed around, pulled out. He eased up and over three speed bumps and moved onto the street, never spinning the tires once.

Westbound on Pico, he looked up in the mirror. Here they were, two heads in a white Ford Escort a quarter mile back. He slowed, let them close the gap. As they drew near, he pulled it down into second, punched it and hung a right.

They tried to keep up. Three blocks into a neighborhood of pastel Mediterranean houses with tender little yards, they stopped in the middle of the street. They’d lost him. The short one slapped the dash.

The tall one, who was driving, looked in the mirror.

The yellow Challenger was right behind them.

Jimmy pulled around the dinky Escort, looked over as he came alongside, then gunned it, leaving a perfect pair of wide black streaks.

But they came back and they caught him that night.

It started on Hollywood Boulevard. They were still in the Escort so for a minute it