I stood there on the front step where his killer had stood, a rectangle of cracked concrete no bigger than a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, and waited for divine inspiration to strike, but none came. I decided to force the lock. I slid my ATM card out of my wallet and was working it into the doorjamb when, from behind, a deep voice intoned, “The fuck you doing, man?”

I glanced back over my shoulder as casually as surprise would allow. Standing there was a light-skinned African-American fellow in a black sweat suit. He was staring at me down the barrel of a sawed-off, pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun.

“House hunting,” I said.

“House hunting? What kind of crazy-ass motherfucker goes house hunting at eleven o’clock in the middle of the motherfuckin’ night? Get them hands up, fool.”

I raised my hands.

He was billiard-ball bald, probably close to sixty, but still formidable enough to be a threat even without the shotgun. A gold hoop glinted from his left earlobe in the street light. He resembled what I imagined Mr. Clean might look like someday when he’s eligible for the senior discount at IHOP.

“Now,” Mr. Clean said, “y’all wanna tell me what you’re really doing out here?”

“I used to know the man who lived here. We were…” I swallowed hard and forced the word, “… friends. I’m trying to find out where he went.”

“Where he went? He’s dead, that’s where he went. Somebody capped his ass. Maybe you, for all I know. Now, put them hands down and start walking across the lawn, normal-like — and nice and slow.”

“Normal-like?”

“Walk! To the sidewalk — and don’t be thinking about running, neither, cuz I will put a fuckin’ hole in you. Now, walk.”

I stepped off the porch and walked across the weeds toward the sidewalk. Mr. Clean stayed put, pivoting, tracking me with the barrel of his gun.

“Now turn around and walk back to me.”

“And the point of these calisthenics would be…?”

“This ain’t Twenty Questions, motherfucker. Do it.”

I turned and walked back toward him slowly. He kept the 12-gauge trained on me the entire way. Whatever he was hoping to discern by me strutting my stuff, I had no idea. The Buddha said that the greatest prayer is patience, but my patience with Mr. Clean was waning rapidly. I noticed that his trigger finger was extended, resting on the trigger guard, not curled around the trigger itself. This told me that he was schooled in the use of firearms. Or watched a lot of war movies. It also told me that it would take him an extra split second to move that finger off the guard and onto the trigger when I moved to take the shotgun away from him.

“Always a good idea to slide your weapon off safe when you’re planning to put a hole in somebody,” I said, nodding toward the safety button forward of the gun’s trigger guard.

He looked instinctively, checking to see if the safety was on. I sidestepped the barrel as he glanced down, grabbed the shotgun, twisted it out of his grasp, flipped it around, and leveled it at him.

A smile came to his face. “Ain’t that a bitch. You Special Forces, ain’t you? Some sort of Chuck Norris Ranger Delta motherfucker. I can tell by the way you move. Like a goddamn cat.”

“Not my cat.”

“Yeah, I was a SEAL myself,” he said with a nonchalant sniff. “Saw some shit in the ’Nam, man, you wouldn’t believe. ’Course, that was back in the day. I must be pretty goddamn rusty, letting you get the jump on me like that.”

I asked him what SEAL team he’d been with.

“Which team? Team Six. Best of the best, baby.” The same team that greased Osama bin Laden. Mr. Clean rubbed his nose with his thumb and index finger. When people feel anxious, their blood pressure rises, prompting soft tissue to swell, which makes their skin tingle, which causes them to scratch or rub. People feel anxious when they lie. His rubbing and hesitation in answering my question were easy giveaways.

I asked him why he made me walk back and forth across the lawn.

“Wanted to see if you was him.”

“Him who?”

“The dude who capped the fella who used to live here. But you ain’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Ever watch Gomer Pyle?”

“A bit before my time. Caught a few reruns, though. An intellectually challenged Marine. Now, there’s a novel concept.”

“You know Big Foot?”

“Not personally. But I hear his feet are, like, huge.”

“Shooter, he walked like Big Foot, or Gomer Pyle. Big rangy motherfucker, hunched over, like this.” Mr. Clean demonstrated how the killer moved, stooped at the waist, arms swinging loosely. “I seen him gettin’ away. With my own eyes. You walk different from him. More white boy. All stiff and shit. Like you got starch in your armpits.”

I pumped out six shells, then tossed him back the empty 12-gauge.

“I lied,” I said. “The weapon was off safety.”

Mr. Clean grinned. “You bad as hell.”

He told me he couldn’t remember ever having had a conversation with Echevarria. They might’ve nodded to each other once or twice getting in or out of their cars, he said, or getting the mail, but that was about it.

“People around here, they ain’t too neighborly cuz they be coming around, asking to borrow a couple eggs. Pretty soon it’s ten bucks for baby milk or diapers. Then a C-note for the rent, just until next pay day, some shit like that. Then the moving van shows, motherfucker splits in the middle of the night and you ain’t never gonna see one nickel of that money back.”

Mr. Clean said he had no clue who might’ve murdered Echevarria or why, but expressed no surprise about the shooting. The neighborhood, he said, had been going to hell for as long as he’d been living there.

“The week before Arlo got it, there was some retired schoolteacher got shot one block over. I know two women been raped in the last six months, walking down Ventura Boulevard in broad fuckin’ daylight. I mean, damn, the whole city’s going to hell, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Where’s the Lone Ranger when you need him?”

“Or Batman,” Mr. Clean said.

I gave him my card and told him to call if he came up with any superhero crime-fighting ideas.

I awoke early the next morning, made coffee, took a quick dip in my ex-wife’s lagoon, an even quicker shower, and called the listing agent on Echevarria’s house. We made arrangements to meet there at nine-thirty a.m. I was out the door by nine a.m. Savannah was still asleep.

A few deviations onto side streets assured me there was still no one tailing me. I got on the freeway. The westbound 101 was moving at a respectable fifty miles an hour. A raven-haired hottie in a convertible Saab glanced my way and smiled as she passed on the left. I decided I was in a good mood. The mood lasted all of five seconds.

“Prepare to exit,” the GPS announced.

“That’ll be enough out of you.”

I didn’t need The Voice harshing my mellow. Good pilots have innate navigational skills. I knew where I was going. I’d been there the night before. I turned off the GPS.

I was northbound on Reseda when my phone rang. Caller ID showed a private number.

“This is Logan.”

“This conversation never happened,” Buzz said.

“What conversation?” I said.

My DIA buddy had done some snooping. Made a few backchannel calls “across the river” to Langley, he said, where he learned that the CIA had concluded its investigation of Echevarria’s murder. The agency’s Counterterrorism Center could find no connection between the interests of their directorate and Echevarria’s untimely demise.

“They could give a giant shit about him,” Buzz said. “As far as Christians in Action are concerned, the guy never existed.”

“A lot of help you are.”

“Did I say I was done, dickweed?”

Buzz had logged into ALIEN, the DIA’s super secret squirrel computer system, and queried whether Echevarria’s name had appeared in any recent requests for intelligence information. The computer spit back a hit.