was still a joke. The traffic was light and Jimmy was a little down and almost glad for the company. He wasn’t going anywhere, he was just out, knocking around in the present, or trying to.

He let them stay close behind him for a mile or so and then took a quick right.

Where, it turned out, they wanted him to take a right.

When he came around the corner, the side street was blocked by a pair of black Chevys, nose to nose.

And four more Sailors. All of them had the blue edge of light around them, what you’d call halos if they were angels, which they decidedly weren’t. The Escort came in behind Jimmy and closed the backdoor.

The new men got out of the Chevys and started toward him at the same moment the tall pale man and the one with the bad blond hair got out of the Escort.

Jimmy turned off the engine. He opened the door, but before he could get out, they pulled him from the Dodge, rough, even though he wasn’t resisting and they knew it.

Now he resisted. He tried to break away from them but there were too many of them and they were too sure of what they were supposed to do. When Sailors were involved in anything in L.A., it wasn’t personal. They didn’t act alone. A stray single one might throw a foot out to trip you going down the sidewalk of a night, say something sour behind your back, but when three or four came after you, got in your face, it was because they meant something by it. It was because they’d been told to. It was because you were in violation, busted in the part of dark things they ran. Jimmy assumed that it was about the Kantke murders, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was about the last one. The last case. Or the one before. Unfinished business. He upset people all the time.

But not ever Sailors, until now. They dragged him the half block down to the Roosevelt Hotel, nobody saying anything, right into the underground parking. There was an elevator there, and nobody to stop them from going where they wanted to go.

And then they were all on the roof. Sailors had a thing about roofs. High places, lookouts.

One of the four new ones was a foot taller than the tall pale man Jimmy had made fun of and weighed twenty pounds less. This one was like a tall stick in a suit, though his suit was a better suit than what the Escort boys wore. He had red hair. He had long, long fingers. He pointed one at Jimmy. And said nothing.

“I get it,” Jimmy said. “You want me to stop.”

Two of the other new ones, big ones who wore peacoats and watch caps, took turns pushing Jimmy backwards. There was an ugly rhythm to it, almost like the three of them were dancing across the roof. They slammed him backwards into the base of an iron radio tower left over from what now seemed like a whole other age.

“You’re the Disco Antidefamation League.”

One of the big ones hit him in the face.

Long-F ingers came a few steps closer. On his cue, the two big men yanked Jimmy up off his feet and carried him over to the parapet and stood him up there and turned him around and then leaned him out over the drop, holding him by the back of his black undertaker’s suitcoat like a puppet. A wind blew up the side of the hotel, almost strong enough to hold him up if they let go. Almost.

Jimmy looked down, way down on the street, the people walking, the tour buses parked in front of the Chinese, a few cruisers out on the wrong night in their perfect lowriders, the lights. He thought of the line, from the Bible, Cast yourself down. But this wasn’t the pinnacle of the temple and he sure wasn’t Christ and Long-Fingers wasn’t exactly Satan.

“Look down there,” Long-Fingers said. “Can you see them?”

He didn’t mean the tourists or the cruisers. He meant what was in the shadows, in the alleyways, behind the buildings. Who.

“Can you see them?”

“Yeah, I see them,” Jimmy said.

“You want to walk around forever?” He said it again, the same words, as if he’d been told to say them, this time so loud the people down on the boulevard could have heard him. “You want to walk around forever?”

There was another kind of Sailor.