Which is when an odd thing happened.

I was greeted by empty sidewalk.

Nothing.

There was a car illegally parked on Fifth, but when I peeked through the window, no one was sitting in it.

I felt the panic of walking into a dark and unfamiliar room when you have no idea where the light switch is.

When you lose something, retrace your steps.

I staggered back to the corner-looking for a doorway I might’ve missed. Somewhere they might’ve ducked inside.

I felt his forearm smashing into my lower back before I actually saw him. Then I was on my knees, staring straight into very blurry pavement.

“Okay, motherfucker, why are you following us?”

My lower back was on fire. When I tried to get to my feet, he pressed his knuckles into my shoulders and shoved me back down. I felt his hot spittle spray against my neck.

“Answer me, asshole!”

“I had a follow-up question,” I said.

“Huh?”

“There was something I forgot to ask you.” I could see the girl now. They must’ve been hiding behind the quaint, retro lamppost, waiting for me to come sauntering by.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.

“I’m talking about the story.”

“What story? Who the hell are you?”

“I want to get up.” I was this close to throwing up. Too many Excellentes.

He hesitated, then said: “Okay. But slowly, right, chief?”

I managed to push myself up to a standing position without falling over. My left pants knee was ripped and bloody.

When I turned and looked at him, I saw someone who’d simply been taking on a role before-that of the tough, streetwise hombre-but who now looked pretty much like an actor uncertain of his lines. For one thing, he’d stepped back as I turned around, a physical surrender of previously hard-won territory.

Maybe he’d recognized me.

“Hey there, Ed,” I said.

He didn’t answer me.

“He’s not Ed,” his girlfriend said, looking wary and spooked. “He’s Sam. You obviously have the wrong person. We thought you were trying to mug us. So we’ll just continue on our way home, okay?”

“I know his name’s not Ed,” I said. “But he played someone named Ed. You remember, don’t you? A pharmaceutical salesman named Edward Crannell. On a highway outside Littleton.”

L.A. doesn’t have a lot of after-hour clubs like New York. L.A. wrapped up earlier. Maybe it was all that healthy living-everyone needing to be pumping their legs up on Mulholland Drive at 6 a.m.

But there was at least one after-hours club in L.A.

I followed Sam’s gray Mustang there.

Sam had denied and denied and denied, and then pretty much given up when I told him I’d be happy to send him the story in the Littleton Journal with his picture in it. I hadn’t taken his picture that morning.

He didn’t know that.

We pulled up at storefront with completely blackened windows, stuck between a Live Nude Girls strip bar and an outdoor taco stand. Both appeared long closed. So did the store, but when Sam knocked on its door, someone answered and let us in.

There seemed to be a lot of actor types in there-in that they were all various shades of beautiful and somewhat desperate-looking.

We settled into a red leather banquette that might’ve come straight out of Goodfellas. The tables were a hodgepodge of styles, art deco to fifties luncheonette.

“The owner ran props at Paramount,” Sam explained.

Sam had his request for a dirty martini countermanded by his girlfriend-Trudy, she said her name was, who instead ordered him a ginger ale with no ice.

“I don’t want to be carrying you home,” she said. “I saw you sneaking drinks at the Piñata.”

Sam meekly acquiesced.

After his ginger ale was delivered by a waitress in a black catsuit, I asked him, “Okay, who hired you?”

“Some guy.”

“Some guy. That’s it? Did the guy have a name?”

“I don’t remember. I’m not shitting you. He was just some guy who needed an actor.”

“Okay-fine. Where did you meet him?”

“He got my name from a bulletin board. On the Web. You know, you place your headshots there and lie about all the productions you’ve been in, and sometimes you get a call. Mostly extra stuff.”

“What did he say to you? This guy whose name you don’t know?”

“That he needed an actor for one day’s work. Not even a day-a morning. An out-of-town job.”

“Did you ask him what the work was? A film, a commercial?”

“Sure. He said it was live theater.”

“For one day? For one morning? Didn’t that strike you as kind of unusual?”

“Yeah.”

“But you still went?”

“He was paying me five thousand dollars.”

“That’s where you got the money?” Trudy said. “You said you sold your bar mitzvah bonds-liar.”

Sam looked suddenly sheepish. I couldn’t help feeling-just for a moment-the empathy that one liar feels for another. In another context, I might’ve bought him a drink and commiserated with him like two kindred souls.

“You know what extra work pays?” he asked me. “Two fifty a day. If you can get it. And that’s more than they’re paying me for that moronic play. This was five thousand, okay? I have bills to pay.”

“Did you drive out to Littleton with this generous benefactor? Or just meet him there?”

“I drove out myself.”

“To Highway 45?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you find there?”

He’d begun playing with a matchbook, flipping it back and forth between his middle finger and thumb-flip, flip, flip. “The car was already on fire,” he said softly.

“So, what’d you do-call 9-1-1. Flag down a passing car?”

“He said it was empty. Just a dummy in there-part of the show. I swear to God, on my mother’s life.”

“Your mother’s dead,” Trudy said flatly.

“It’s an expression. Okay, fine, I swear to God on my life…” He was staring at me in full pleading mode, as if it was very important for me to believe him. “Nobody was in there. That’s what he said. Nobody real. You think I would’ve gotten involved in any kind of…” His voice trailed off.

“Any kind of what?” his girlfriend said, looking more disgusted by the second.

“Well, you know… crime or something. The guy needed an actor and he paid me five thousand to act. That’s it.”

“He was there when you got out there?” I asked. “The man who paid you?”

Sam nodded.

“What did he look like?”

Sam took a sip of his ginger ale. “Weird. You know… like, it’s hard to put into words exactly… he had a sort of pushed-in face… No, not pushed in, just not fully pushed out… Understand what I’m saying? He had this really high voice, too. Like a girl’s…”

You’re it.

“Okay,” I said. “There’s a burning car there. And him-anyone else?”

“Not yet. He said other people would be coming-just like a regular accident. You know, the police, an ambulance-I should play it like we’d collided, me and this car, even though no one was really in there. It was just for show.”

“And you believed him?”

Sam nodded.

“I was there, Sam. Remember?”

Sam looked away, down at the floor, at the smoky throng by the bar, at the walls plastered with old Peter Max prints, scanning the room as if searching for the nearest exit.

“Remember the smell, Sam? Remember that odor coming from the car? You knew what that was, didn’t you? You knew what it meant? Who’s the dummy here, Sam?”

Sam had redirected his stare at his lonely glass of ginger ale, as if he wanted to dive in and drown. His eyes began tearing up. For the first time that night, I knew he wasn’t acting.

“I…” He picked his hands up in a gesture of hopeless remorse. “Look, I tried to believe him, okay. The guy said it was an act. I’d driven all the way out there already, he tells me no one’s in the car, then suddenly the police drive up, and an ambulance, and then you show up…”