“You did, Mr. Sturgis,” said the shorter white boy. He had a crushed nose, puffy lips, a very deep voice, and a slight lisp. The confession seemed to relieve him and he gave a big grin. One of his canines was missing.

“And who didn't charge you his usual private fee because you'd run out of trust fund that month, Keenan?”

“You didn't, sir.”

“Was that a gift?”

“No, sir.”

“Am I a chump?”

Shake of the thick head.

“What did I demand in return, boys?”

“Slave labor!” they shouted in unison.

He nodded and rapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other. “Payoff time. All this stuff goes into the Deathmobile. The really heavy gear's over in Venice—Pacific Avenue. Know where that is?”

“Sure,” said Keenan. “Near Muscle Beach, right?”

“Very good. Follow me there and we'll see what you're made of. Once you're finished, you'll keep your mouths shut about it. Period. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And be careful with it—pretend it's bottles of liver shake or something.”

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER

10

We met up with Robin and loaded her pickup. Watching her shop empty made her blink, but she wiped her eyes quickly and said, “Let's go.”

We set up a caravan—Milo in the lead, Robin and the dog in the truck, me in the Seville, the van trailing—and headed back to Sunset, passing Beverly Glen as if it were someone else's neighborhood, entering Beverly Hills, and driving north onto Benedict Canyon.

Milo turned off on a narrow road, poorly paved and sided with eucalyptus. A cheerless, white iron gate appeared fifty feet up. He slipped a card key into a slot and it opened. The caravan continued up a steep pebbled drive hedged with very high columns of Italian cypress that looked slightly moth-eaten. Then the road kinked and we descended another two or three hundred feet, toward a shallow bowl of an unshaded lot, maybe half an acre wide.

A low, off-white one-story house sat in the bowl. A long, straight, concrete drive led to the front door. As I got closer I saw that the entire property was hilltop, the depression an artificial crater scalped from the tip.

Canyon and mountain views surrounded the property. Lots of brown slopes and a few green spots, flecked with the lint of occasional houses. I wondered if mine could be seen from up here, looked around but couldn't get my bearings.

The house was wide and free of detail, roofed too heavily with deep brown aluminum tile supposed to simulate shake, and windowed with aluminum-cased rectangles.

A flat-topped detached garage was separated from the main building by an unfenced paddle tennis court. A ten-foot satellite dish perched atop it, aimed at the cosmos.