"The police department recommended me?" He was puzzled.

"Yes. I talked to a Lieutenant Matthews. He said you had the qualifications necessary for a job I need done."

Lieutenant Steve Matthews had been Jack's CO back when he worked the Homicide table at Rampart. Jack had been in the Valley interviewing a witness on a triple drive-by gang killing when the bank shooting went down, heard the call on the scanner, and had rolled on it. He was the second blue on the scene. Not knowing the bandits were already out of the bank with assault weapons and full body armor, he'd walked right into a barrage of gunfire with only his puny little police-issue Beretta. That's how he ended up stopping the Parabellum. It had gone through his oblique and shattered two vertebrae-miraculously missing his spinal cord, or he would have finished out his life whizzing around in a motorized wheelchair. When Jack finally retired on a medical, Matthews put him up for the Medal of Valor, but it hadn't been approved. Cops who went down and didn't die or manage to neutralize the target rarely won the MOV. Instead he'd gotten the Certificate of Merit. All these years later it looked as if the lieutenant was still trying to even the score and throw some work his way.

"What qualifications are we talking about?" Jack asked, fully prepared to lie like a street junkie to get his first job.

"I understand you worked a lot of cases up in San Francisco."

"More than my share," he said, wondering what on earth she was talking about. L.A. cops hardly ever worked up north. A few extradites, or the occasional nomadic criminal who started here and ended up there, or vice versa. But those were mostly phone jobs. The department rarely sprang to send you anywhere.

"Could you be slightly more specific?" he asked, his back pain now so bad he couldn't bear to go on for another moment. He reached into his pocket while she was fiddling in her briefcase for something, planning to use this moment to sneak a few more pills. He retrieved the bottle, quickly shook two into his hand, then swallowed them dry, but she looked up and caught him. "Allergies," he smiled. " Santa Ana winds really get to me."

"Oh," she said, and handed him a newspaper article from the San Francisco Chronicle, headlined:

Computer Hacker Found Dead in Hotel Room

While he read it he could see her out of the corner of his eye surveying the chipped walls, eyeing the faded furniture, taking inventory. It was a loser's hangout. Jim Rock-ford only lived in a trailer, but at least he had a nice view of the ocean. Rockford would spit on this place.

He finished scanning the rest of the article. It was boilerplate reportage, no real info. It told how somebody named Roland Minton, who had a history of computer crime, was killed at the New Fairview Hotel in San Francisco. No details. Typical police b.s. Foul play suspected… No suspects… no leads. That sort of thing.

"Okay," he said quickly, trying to get her to look back at him and stop surveying this sinkhole where he'd set up shop.

"The lieutenant said you had good contacts on the San Francisco Police Department," she said.

"Excellent. Among the best." He wondered what the hell Matthews was talking about. He knew no one up there.

"Roland Minton was working for our legal institute when he was killed. My father, Herman Strockmire, is the director and founder, and he wants to make sure the investigation is adequately pursued."

Jack liked that word, institute. Institutes were commercially secure, abundantly funded organizations, so Jack tacked another five hundred a day onto his price.

Then it hit him who he knew in San Francisco. He had told the lieutenant about it almost three years ago. It was one of his old love affairs that hadn't ended well. He'd dated a sergeant who worked the juvie detail up there. He'd picked her up in a cop bar while she was in L.A. visiting her family. It ended like all of Jack's important female relationships-with recriminations and threats. Her name was Sergeant Eleanor-If I ever see you again, you better run, you prick-Drake.

"I think the lieutenant was referring to my extremely close working relationship with a Sergeant Drake of the SFPD."

"Do you think Sergeant Drake might be able to help us view some of the official case material related to Roland's death?"

"If I'm the one to ask her, I think I can say, without hesitation, no problemo." Another lie. But he reasoned now that he was in business that a lie was really just a sales promise.

The pills were beginning to take his pain threshold down below nine. At least that gave him hope for the next ten minutes.

"How much do you charge?" she asked.

"Tell you what, I need some coffee. There's a nice outdoor restaurant right downstairs. Whatta you say?" Jack needed to get out of his depressing office before he broke into tears.

She looked at her watch as if this was already taking too much of her time, but then she smiled-a hesitant little smile, so adorable that Jack had to stifle the urge to grab her hand and stroke it.

"Why not?" she finally said.

They sat in a patio restaurant called The All-American Boy, surrounded by gay trophy exhibits-musclemen in workout tanks and short shorts with plucked eyebrows and shaved bodies. Jack, with his rugged blonde attractiveness, was getting all the sidelong glances while Susan Strockmire was being ignored. She might as well have been wearing a Janet Reno mask. This neighborhood was going to take some getting used to.

"What exactly is your fee structure?" she inquired again.

He had called around after he got his license and found out that a good working rate for P.I.s in L.A. was a thousand a day. Long-range employment contracted out at between thirty-five hundred and four thousand on a weekly guarantee. But, for an institute he was compelled to charge a little more. Fifteen hundred is what he told her.

"It seems awfully high," she said, wrinkling her adorable nose, scowling slightly, bringing her laugh lines into play.

"You might think it's high, until you break it down," he said, launching into his pitch. "To begin with, I'm a trained police officer fifteen years on the force, both in squad cars and at the detective division. You can't buy that kind of on-the-job experience at any price. If you were hiring a psychiatrist, some guy in Armani with a Vandyke who got his doctorate through the mail, you wouldn't think twice about paying him a hundred and fifty dollars an hour. There are personal trainers in this town who get twice that."

"It's not that I'm questioning your fee structure…"

"I should hope not," he said, trying to look indignant.

"It's just that the Institute for Planetary Justice is a nonprofit institute and we have to watch expenses carefully."

If institute was a good word, nonprofit was a bad one. When they were in the same sentence it was disastrous. "Nonprofit institute" was a phrase as depressing as "fatal collision" or "aggressive malignancy."

"I see," he finally said. "Well, I guess because I'm sort of open at the moment I could take a small cut on my normal rate-say, down to a thousand dollars a day. But that's really the base number."

"Deal," she said, and reached out and shook his hand. Her grip was warm, her grasp firm. "I'll give you our local phone numbers." She dug into her purse and handed him a business card. He looked down at it: cheesy-the kind you get printed at Kinko's. She had crossed out the Washington, D.C., phone number and written a local one in pencil. Of course, he didn't even have a business card. It was on his list of things to do, right after setting up some metal chairs in the hall to piss off Miro.

"Lemme write my number down," he said, grabbing a paper napkin, even though he wasn't dead sure of the number. The phone had only been installed yesterday. He thought for a minute, then wrote it down, 323-555-7890. "Either that or 7809," he told her with a wave of his hand, as if it really didn't matter. "New office, new number." But the same old bullshit, he thought.