Creek and Louis had dropped her at the corner of Dell and Linnie just after dawn. The truck couldn't conveniently turn around on Linnie, a dead-end street no wider than most city alleys.

'Sorry about the Witch,' Louis said. The Witch would be calling her. Anna hated to bring work back to her house.

That's okay,' Anna said. 'For this one time, anyway.' She waved good-bye with the cell phone, and walked down the narrow street to her house. A neighbor in his pajamas, out to pick up the paper, said, 'Hey, Anna. Anything interesting?'

'Guy jumped off a building,' Anna said.

'Nasty.' He smiled, though, as he shook his head, and said, 'I'll watch for it,' and padded back inside.

Anna had sold thirteen packages of the jumper wrapped with the animal rights raid. At fifteen hundred dollars for local transmission, she'd sold to nine stations, and at three thousand for the networks Southern California stations outshe'd sold four. Hatton at Channel Three had called back twice, pushing. They wanted it, had to have it. Finally said the Witch would call.

She did, five minutes after Anna got home. The cell phone buzzed, and Anna went to the kitchen table and picked it up.

'Screw us on this, we'll never use your stuff again.' The Witch opened as she usually did, with a direct threat.

'We can live with that,' Anna said. She looked out the kitchen window, at the dark line of the canal. In a couple of hours, the reflected ball of the morning sun would start crawling down its length, steaming the water, bringing up the rich smell of algae soup. She'd been asleep in bed, this whole conversation no more than a pleasant memory. 'We already told Hatton that. I only agreed to talk to you as a courtesy.'

'Courtesy my large white Lithuanian butt,' the Witch snapped. Anna could hear the pause as she hit on a cigarette. 'If we don't buy, you lose a big source of your income. Gone,' she said. Exhaling. 'Outa here. I promise you, we won't buy again.'

'You take a bigger hit than we do,' Anna said. 'You never know when we're gonna come up with something like this jumper.'

'You're not thatgood.'

'Yeah, we are: we're the best crew on the street. And your career life at Three is what? Four or five years? And you've been there three? You'll be gone in a year or two, and we'll sell to your replacement. And we'll make our point: You don't steal from us. Even if it's swimming cats.'

'I apologized for that,' the Witch shrilled.

'What?' Anna shouted. She banged the cell phone three times on the table top, then yelled into the mouthpiece. 'Did I hear that right? You laughedat us.'

'So I'm sorry now,' the Witch shouted back. 'Name the price.'

'Network price,' Anna said. She sipped at the soup. 'Three thousand for the package. Plus two grand for the cats.'

'Fuck that,' the Witch said. 'Network for the package, okay, but the cats we did, we did with our own crew.'

'C'mon, c'mon,' Anna shouted. 'I'm making a point here.'

'So'm I. Five hundred for the cats.'

'I'm serious, we don't need you. Network plus a thousand for the cats.'

'Deal,' the Witch said. 'I want to see the fuckin' pictures in ten fuckin' minutes.' She slammed down the receiver.

Anna called the truck, and spoke to Louis. 'Send it to Three.'

'How much you get?'

'Four thousandI got a thousand for the cats.'

Louis said, 'Examonte, dude,' and repeated the price to Creek, whose laughter filled the background. Anna grinned and said, 'We're dropping thirty-five thousand bucks in the potthat's three times the record.'

Creek shouted at the phone, 'We might as well quit, we'll never do this again.'

'How're the radios, Louis?' Anna asked.

'Good. Nothing happening.'

'Call me.'

Anna hung up with Creek still laughing about the money. She'd wait until Creek had dropped Louis, and there was no chance of recovering for a quick run. Good stuff sometimes broke just at dawn, although the regular station trucks would be out prowling around fairly soon.

Waiting for bed, Anna trailed by the Steinway, touched a few keys, yawned, flipped through the sheets for Liszt's Sonata in B Minor. She'd been trying to clarify the fingerwork in the fast passages.

She didn't sit downher head wasn't quite right yet. She put the music on the piano, said hello to a couple of plants, enjoyed the quiet. Went into the utility room and got a plastic watering can and filled it.

Barefoot, humming to herselfsomething stupid from Les Mis‚rablesthat she couldn't get out of her mindAnna took the watering can out to the porch, and started watering the potted plants. Geraniums, and some daisies: plants with an old-fashioned feel, bright touches in the shade of the jungle.

Back inside, she refilled the can and walked through the house, checking with two fingers the soil in a hundred more plants: some of them were named after movie stars or singers, like Paul, Robert, Faye, Susan, Julia, Jack. Most were small, from a desert somewhere.

On a broken-down Salvation Army table, the first piece of furniture she'd bought in California, she kept a piece of Wisconsin: a clump of birdsfoot violets, dug from the banks of the Whitewater River, and a flat of lilies-of-the-valley. Just now, the lilies-of-the-valley were blooming, their tiny white bell flowers producing a delicate perfume that reminded her of the smell of dooryard lilacs in the Midwestern spring.

Behind the California tan, Anna was a Midwestern farm kid, born and raised on a corn farm in Wisconsin.

The farm was part of her toughness: She had a farm kid's lack of fear when it came to physical confrontation. She'd even been in a couple of fights, in her twenties, in the good old days of music school and late-night prowls down Sunset. As she climbed into her thirties, the adrenaline charge diminished, though her reputation hadn't: The big guys still waved to her from the muscle pen on the beach, and told people, 'You don't fuck with Anna, if you wanna keep your face on straight.'

The toughness extended to the psychological. Farm kids knew how the world worked, right from the start. She'd taken the fuzzy-coated big-eyed lambs to the locker, and brought them back in little white packages.

That's the way it was.

Anna finished watering the plants, yawned again, and stopped at the piano. Liszt was hard. Deliberately hard. Her home phone rang, and she turned away from the piano and stepped into the small kitchen and picked it up. This would be the sign-off from Louis and Creek: 'Hello?'

'Anna: Louis.'

'All done?'

'Yeah, but I was talking to a guy at Seventeen about the animal rescue tape. I don't know what they did, but it sounds a little weird.'

'Like how, weird?' Anna asked.

'Like they're making some kind of cartoon out of it.'

'What?' She was annoyed, but only mildly. Strange things happened in the world of broadcast television.

'He said they'll be running it on the Worm,' Louis said. Channel Seventeen called it the Early Bird News; everybody else called it the Worm.

Anna glanced at the kitchen clock: the broadcast was just a few minutes away. 'I'll take a look at it,' she said.

She went back to the piano and worked on the Liszt until five o'clock in the morning, then pointed the remote at the TV and punched in seventeen. A carefully-coiffed blonde, dressed like it was midafternoon on Rodeo, looked out and said, 'If you have any small children watching this show, the film we are about to show you.'

And there was the jumper, up on the wall like a fly.

Anna held her breath, fearing for him, though she'd been there, and knew what was about to happen. But seeing it this way, with the TV, was like looking out a window and seeing it all over again. The man seemed unsure of where he was, of what to do; he might have been trying, at the last moment, to get inside.