But he got a good look at her when the Sheriff ’s deputy stopped her-because her interior light was on-and another good look at her at the signal at Eastern.

“Describe her.”

“Light brown hair, dark eyes. Bonita. Unafraid. She looked directly at me both times.”

“Age?”

“Middle twenties, thirty maybe.”

“How far were you able to follow her?”

“I never even caught up with her tire smoke.”

The Bull rolled to the left side of his desk, appeared to be using a computer mouse. The casters rumbled on the hardwood dais. Then he rolled back to the right and pulled up a sheet of paper.

Lupercio watched him study the sheet, set it facedown on the desk, then pull up a handful more. The Bull took a long time flipping through these. Lupercio heard the air-conditioning click on, then felt a faint gust of cool air on his face.

“Here,” said the Bull, holding the sheets out to Lupercio.

Lupercio stepped forward and took them. Up this close he guessed the Bull to be fifty years old and strong. His neck was thick and his eyes were blue. There was something unusual about his legs.

The top sheet showed a blown-up California driver’s license in color.

“Suzanne Elizabeth Jones,” read Lupercio. “This is her.”

“Of course it’s her.”

The second sheet was a photograph, apparently from a high school yearbook, in which Suzanne Jones looked years younger, naive, and pointedly bored. Sheets three through thirteen were dense paragraphs of information: DOB; Social Security number; credit rating-very good; driving history-no accidents, no traffic citations; arrests-none; interviews with law enforcement-none. There was a ten-year residence history listing addresses in Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Torrance, Norwalk, Santa Ana and Valley Center. Also, school files from elementary through high school, abbreviated college transcripts and medical records. There was an employment history-Kentucky Fried Chicken (ages fifteen and sixteen), Taco Bell and Subway (ages sixteen and seventeen), Dominguez Hills State University (cafeteria food server while a student, ages eighteen through twenty-two), then the Los Angeles Unified School District as a teacher from age twenty-two through “current.” She taught history. There was an immediate family tree that was thorough enough to list Suzanne Jones’s two brothers and two sisters and their young children. Apparently she had not married.

“What grade education did you complete?” asked the Bull.

Lupercio looked up at the heavy face faceted by the recessed low-voltage lamps.

“High school.”

The Bull glanced at the pages. “Is it difficult for you to read and retain information?”

“No. I read slowly and I remember everything.”

“How did it feel to you, looking down at the dead Mara Salvatrucha?”

“I knew them.”

“But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“I am no longer a part of them. My business and my heart are not there.”

“Do you miss the structure, the friendship, the power of being a leader in the most feared street gang on Earth? Do you miss the respect?”

“Those were a child’s comforts.”

“And now you are grown.”

“Childhood ends.”

The Bull was nodding, the black shadows in his eye sockets elongating with each downward tilt of his head.

“If there was ever a time for you to be honest, this is it. I can work with honesty. Did you steal my diamonds, Lupercio?”

“I did not.”

“And why should I believe you?”

“Because I don’t lie.”

The Bull smiled, his open lips and the lines of his face catching the downward light at new angles. “Find the woman. Find the diamonds. One-half of what you recover is yours. I remind you that several men have stolen from me. But each only once.”

“This is simple and clear.”

“I wish you good luck, my lone wolf.”

“I would rather have information on the diamond broker.”

The Bull crossed his arms. “It will take five minutes. Go outside. Sit in the cool shade and face the great Port of Long Beach. Watch the sunlight on the cranes and the towers of containers. Say a prayer of thanks for your life this fine Sunday morning.”

Five minutes later Lupercio was back and the Bull was handing down to him another sheaf of papers.

Home.

Eight acres of scrub and savannah, a pasture and paddock, a pond, a stream, avocado, lemon and orange trees loaded with fruit.

The main house is for me and my three sons, and-at least for now-Ernest, father of the third. There is also a barn and four small cottages spread across the property for my friends. I’m never sure exactly who’s here and who’s not, but I’ve got good friends and watchful neighbors so it doesn’t really matter.

I bought this place six months ago, a year after I committed my first armed robbery-a Starbucks. It’s way off the beaten path. The whole compound was a filthy “fixer” with plywood for windows, insane derelicts cooking meth in the barn and rats nesting in the old mattresses. You could smell it before you got out of your car.

Across the stream is one Indian reservation and across the road is another, so when you drive in here you see how poor those people are, you see the junked appliances and broken-down cars and the trash and the burn piles and the grubby kids. You just want to keep driving, which is what most people do. Those big casinos you see out here now, they don’t aim much of that slot machine cash down at the poor. No, they sponsor this group and contribute to this cause, and they give lots of money to politicians who can help them; they have swank ads on TV, but how come the rez looks so bad once you leave the casino? Ask them that.

I like the natives. There’s a couple of big bad braves-they’re brothers, actually-who live across the stream. Gerald and Harold Little Chief, I kid you not. Eighteen and nineteen. They’re bikers. They keep an eye on my place when I’m gone, and I keep an eye on theirs. Once I saw some kids breaking into their garage so I called the rez cops. A week later the brothers brought over a minibike for my boys. They’d made it. It was a beautiful little thing, with a two-and-a-half-hp Briggs & Stratton and chrome shocks and a flame-red-and-yellow paint job. Gerald and Harold looked funny standing there at my back door, these two huge guys with a minibike between them, and Harold takes the bandana off his head and bends down and wipes a smudge off the handlebar then puts the bandana back on and picks up the minibike, must weigh a hundred pounds, and holds it out to me with two steady hands like it’s a puppy or a box of long-stemmed roses.

So anyway, my place came cheap and we’ve been working our asses off to clean it up ever since.

Some of the down payment came from my L.A. Unified School District Credit Union, where most of us teachers bank our small paychecks, maintain our checking accounts and, if we can hack our jobs long enough, take out loans for the overpriced and often crummy L.A. homes we can afford. Some of my down payment came from my early stickups: McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., Blockbuster, Sav-on, Payless Shoes-anybody whose signs I got sick of looking at. But most of it came from the cars I learned to boost and sell: grand theft auto beats armed robbery any day. You can pick up a gun and risk your life for a thousand bucks, or you can steal a good car and make thirty grand without encountering another human being. And the high-end stuff, man, it’s just beautiful material to work with.

Valley Center is just an hour and forty minutes from L.A., if you know when to make the drive. I get to school early and stay late, and when I’m home here I’m happy to be an hour and forty minutes away. When I retire, it’s going to be to an even bigger compound, with serious acreage, horse trails everywhere, a giant wall around it and a drawbridge-I’m serious about this bridge-so I can say exactly who gets in and out.