That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.

The Verdugo Mountains above Glendale were burning. A column of brown smoke rose off the ridgeline there where it was caught by the Santa Anas and spread south across the city, painting the sky with the color of dried blood. If you were in Burbank, say, or up along the Mulholland Snake over the Sunset Strip, you could see the big multiengine fire bombers diving in with their cargoes of bright red fire retardant as news choppers crisscrossed the scene. Or you could just watch the whole thing on television. In L.A., next to riots and earthquakes, fires are our largest spectator sport.

We couldn't see the smoke column from Lucy Chenier's second-floor apartment in Beverly Hills, but the sky had an orange tint that made Lucy stop in her door long enough to frown. We were bringing cardboard moving boxes up from her car.

"Is that the fire?"

"The Santa Anas are bringing the smoke south. Couple of hours, the ash will begin to fall. It'll look like gray snow." The fire was forty miles away. We were in no danger.

Lucy shifted the frown to her Lexus, parked below us at the curb. "Will it hurt the paint?"

"By the time it settles it'll be cool, just like powder. We'll wash it off with the hose." Elvis Cole, Professional Angeleno, educating the recent transplant, who also happens to be his girlfriend. Wait'll we get a big temblor.

Lucy didn't seem convinced, but then she stepped inside, and called her son. "Ben!"

Less than a week before, Lucille Chenier and her nine-year-old son had left Louisiana and settled into the apartment that they had taken in Beverly Hills, just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Lucy had been a practicing attorney in Baton Rouge, but was beginning a new career as a legal analyst for a local television station (a nouveau occupational fruit growing from the ugly tree that was the Simpson trial). Trading Baton Rouge for Los Angeles, she gained a larger salary, more free time to spend with her son, and closer proximity to moi. I had spent all of Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday morning arranging and rearranging the living room. That's love for you.

The television was tuned to the station she now worked for, KROK-8 ("Real News for Real People!"), which, like every other station in town, had interrupted regular programming with live coverage of the fire. Twenty-eight homes were threatened and had been evacuated.

Lucy handed Ben the box. "Too heavy?"

"No way."

"Your room. Your closet. Neatly."

When he was gone I slipped my hand around her waist, and whispered, "Your room. Your bed. Messy."

She stepped away and considered the couch. "First we have to get this house in order. Would you please move the couch again?"

I stared at the couch. I had moved it maybe eight hundred times in the last two days.

"Which wall?"

She chewed at her thumb, thinking. "Over there."

"That's where it was two moves ago." It was a big couch. It probably weighed three thousand pounds.

"Yes, but that was when the entertainment center was by the fireplace. Now that we've put the entertainment center by the entry, the look will be completely different."

"We?"

"Yes. We."

I bent into the couch and dragged it to the opposite wall. Four thousand pounds.

I was squaring the couch when the phone rang. Lucy spoke for a minute, then held out the phone.

"Joe."

Joe Pike and I are partners in the detective agency that bears my name. He could have his name on it if he wanted, but he doesn't. He's like that.

I took the phone. "Hernias R Us." Lucy rolled her eyes and turned away, already contemplating new sofa arrangements.

Pike said, "How's the move going?"

I walked the phone out onto the balcony. "It's a big change. I think she's finally realizing how big. What's up?"

"You heard of Frank Garcia?"

"The tortilla guy. Regular, large, and Monsterito sizes. I prefer the Monsterito myself." You could walk into any food store in Los Angeles and see Frank Garcia smiling at you from the packages of his tortillas, eyes bright, bushy black mustache, big smile.

Pike said, "Frank's a friend of mine and he's got a problem. I'm on my way there now. Can you meet me?"

Pike and I have owned a detective agency for twelve years, and I have known him even longer since his days as a Los Angeles police officer. He had never once asked a favor, or asked for my help on a personal problem in all of that time.

"I'm helping Lucy set up her house. I'm wearing shorts, and I've spent the morning wrestling a ten-thousand-pound couch."

Pike didn't answer.

"Joe?"

"Frank's daughter is missing, Elvis. She's a friend of mine, too. I hope you can make it." He gave an address in Hancock Park, then hung up without another word. Pike is like that, too.

I stayed out on the balcony and watched Lucy. She was moving from box to box as if she could no more decide what to unpack next than where to put the couch. She had been like that since she arrived from Louisiana, and it wasn't like her. We had had a long-distance relationship for two years, but now we had made a very real move to further that relationship, and she had carried the weight of it. She's the one who had left her friends. She's the one who had left her home. She was the one taking the risk.

I turned off the phone, went back inside, and waited for her to look at me.

"Hey."

She smiled, but seemed troubled.

I stroked her upper arms and smiled back. She has beautiful amber-green eyes.

"You okay?"

She looked embarrassed. "I'm fine."

"It's a big move. Big changes for both of us."

She glanced back at the boxes as if something might be hiding in them.

"It's going to work out, Luce."

She snuggled against me, and I could feel her smile. I didn't want to leave.

She said, "What did Joe want?"

"The daughter of a friend of his is missing. He wants me to help check it out."

Lucy looked up at me, her face now serious. "A child?"

"He didn't say. You mind if I go?"

She glanced at the couch again. "You'll do anything to avoid this couch, won't you?"

"Yeah. I hate that damned couch."

Lucy laughed, then looked into my eyes again.

"I'd mind if you didn't go. Take a shower and go save the world."

Hancock Park is an older area south of the Wilshire Country Club, lesser known to outsiders than Beverly Hills or Bel Air, but every bit as rich. Frank Garcia lived in an adobe-walled Spanish villa set behind a wrought-iron fence just west of the country club. It was a big place, hidden by lush green tree ferns and bird-of-paradise plants as big as dinosaurs and leafy calla lilies that were wilting from the heat.

Forty minutes after Pike gave me Garcia's address, I followed an older Latina with a thick waist and nervous hands through Garcia's rambling home and out to where Frank Garcia and Joe Pike waited beside a tile-lined pool.

As I approached, Pike said, "Frank, this is Elvis Cole. We own the agency together."

"Mr. Garcia."

Frank Garcia wasn't the smiling man with the bushy mustache you see on his tortillas. This Frank Garcia looked small and worried, and it had nothing to do with him being in a wheelchair. "You don't look like a private investigator."

I was wearing one of those terrific Jam's World print shirts over the shorts. Orange, yellow, pink, and green. "Gee, did I wear this on a Sunday?"