There's Simon Rainey. His skinny, pinch-faced wife leads you through a huge mansion overlooking the ocean on Palos Verdes Drive. In a bedroom big as your whole apartment, Simon is plugged into a machine with tubes running under the covers. His eyes are glassy and his face seems made of wax. He barely has strength to lift his mummy's hand and take the summons.

There's one who won't admit she's who you know she is.

You ring the doorbell of a tidy frame house in Wilmington. When the door opens on a chubby, fortyish woman trying to look thirty, you ask: "Colleen Qualls?"

"What is it?"

"Are you Colleen Qualls?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Look, I've got something to give Colleen Qualls. You that person?"

"What have you got for m-- her?"

"I can only give it to Colleen."

"Can't you tell me what it is?"

"Nope. Sorry. Not unless you're Colleen."

"Why? Is it a secret or something?"

"Let's just say it's a surprise."

Her heavily shadowed eyes light up. She brushes a lacquered curl that immediately springs back into place. "I love surprises. Give me a hint."

"Okay. Maybe I've got a residual check for Colleen. Maybe I found something she lost. Maybe--"

Her face goes through a series of changes, starting with hope and ending with suspicion. "Maybe you're full of crap." She shuts the door in your face, looking as though she wants to bite you.

You break for lunch at a fast-food chain, eager to get back into action, to plow through the day's chaff and get to the kernel: the paper at the bottom of the pile. After downing a tasteless burger and bitter iced tea, you head out again.

Next target is one Oscar Dill, who works at Ace's Barbershop in Compton. You find the place sandwiched between a porn store and a bar, and walk in, feeling the comforting weight of a roll of nickels in your pocket. It's a hedge against the only real difference between the rich and the poor: people with nothing to lose are more unpredictable in the face of adversity.

To the right, four young black dudes, all wearing mirrored shades and tats and pants slung low so their underwear shows, slouch in high-backed chairs. You feel their eyes as you approach the first of two black barbers. A tall, thin, light-skinned guy, he is running electric clippers over a teen's gourd-shaped head.

"Excuse me," you say to him, "Oscar here?"

He waves the clippers towards the back.

You start that way, passing the other barber, a very dark man built like a NFL football lineman. He has a straight-edged razor and is giving side-walls to an elderly black gentleman asleep in the chair. The second barber tracks you without moving his head.

A small, chocolate-colored man with graying hair emerges from a room in the rear of the shop. He wears coveralls and carries push broom and dustpan.

Ask him: "You Oscar Dill?"

He looks at your mouth. The whites of his eyes are bloodshot and yellowish, like Tabasco-laced egg yolks. He nods.

"Mind stepping outside with me, Mr. Dill? Like to speak in private with you a sec."

Oscar's head tilts up and down. He props tools against a wall, shuffles towards the door leading outside. You follow, glad to be away from the silver-eyed customers and wooden-faced barbers. On the sidewalk ten feet from the shop the little man faces you, eyes fixed on the knot of your fifty-dollar tie.

"Mr. Dill," you say, pulling out the paper, "I'm here to deliver this sum--"

The door to the shop opens and the larger barber glides over. He still holds the open razor in a fist the size of a coconut. Sunlight glints off the foam-flecked blade. "Don't give him that." His voice is so soft you have to strain to hear. Over his breast pocket, at your eye level, is embroidered ACE.

Take a step back, your heels crunching broken glass, give him the line, the load of B.S. "Sir, I'm a duly empowered process server, legally serving this paper on Mr. Dill, and--"

"Don't give him that," Ace whispers, his breath all minty.

Take another backward step, suddenly aware of black faces pressed against the insides of shop windows and gathered along the sidewalk to watch the action.

A dark fat man with a pool cue steps out of the bar.

Beside him, a slender guy tall enough to play pro hoops for the Clippers shifts his grip on a beer bottle.

A very light-skinned young man with acne stands at the door of the porn store, his magazine open to a photo that shows an Afro-American male and a Caucasian female engaged in an act that would have been cause for lynching in the South a few decades back.

Two little girls carrying a jump rope between them, their pigtailed hair done up in dozens of bright bows, pause a yard away.

"Is whitey gone get cut?" one asks.

"Look to be," the other says matter-of-factly.

Talk fast to the barber. "Wait. You don't understand, Mr. -- Ace. This is a summons. Says Mr. Dill here owes somebody money." You feel sweat gathering in the wings of your nose and in the hollow beneath your lower lip. "I'm not here to collect the cash, don't get me wrong." You wave the paper, your other hand tight and damp about two dollars' worth of nickels. "Just delivering bills, like the mailman." Try on a grin, wondering what your lips are really doing. "You don't get mad at the mailman, do you?"

Ace leans forward from the waist, like a building about to fall.

"Don't give him that."

You look from Ace to Oscar.

The little man stares at the sidewalk as though an image of the Virgin is materializing there, in Technicolor. He doesn't say zip.

Give it one last try. "Believe me, brother," you say to the barber, "if I don't hand him this paper today, it'll be served by the sheriff. You don't want that, do you? It'll be more of a hassle. And it'll cost Oscar more in the end." Your shirt sticks to your back.

Ace flicks the razor with a quick motion. A glob of lime-scented shaving cream lands on your cheek.

The little girls laugh.

"Go away," Ace says, forming words carefully with thick lips.

You walk off, to impolite applause and catcalls. Let the law fool with them.

It goes smoother with Marta Ramirez, a fat young Hispanic woman with six or eight squalling, snot-nosed kids making a racket behind her. She lives in a rundown East L.A. apartment building that smells like it's survived a recent fire. "Que?" she says, thick eyebrows twisting as she turns the paper this way and that. "Que?"

The rest of the afternoon, weaving north through Monterey Park, Rosemead, Alhambra, Temple City, Arcadia, you meet with varying success, but catch a few welshers in Pasadena during the early evening, around dinnertime.

At last, there's only one summons unaccounted for. The one you've saved for last. The one you always save for last, like dessert, with the name on it almost as familiar as your own: Brent Wixom.

You'd been given Wixom's paper back when you first began as a process server, when you still felt bad about bringing people legal misery, when he only owed a few hundred to a loan company. You've dogged his trail ever since, following him to dozens of different ramshackle dwellings scattered around the city and surrounding suburbs. Each time, the amount of his debt grew, thanks to lawyer's fees and interest. Now, instead of hundreds, he owes thousands. You'd find his latest address. He'd be gone. You'd dig up a new lead.

From a former neighbor in Irvine, a white-haired man with a bulldog's face and an educated voice, still living beside a house Wixom once rented: "Brent? He hasn't lived next door in more than a year. If I recall correctly, he mentioned something about moving in with a friend in Pomona. Garey Avenue, perhaps?"

From the landlord of a fleabag hotel in Norwalk, a gaunt little guy with suitcases under his eyes: "S.O.B. sneaked out in the middle of the night last December. Owed two months rent. Left beer cans and pizza boxes piled two feet deep in there. Ants had a field day. Probably went to sponge off his sister, over to Tustin."