The hippies were working hard in the yard and greenhouse. I noted a man walking from the black sedan down toward Pico. Taking a pair of binoculars from the window ledge, I studied the man. At least that felt like I was doing something.

He was maybe five ten with short brown hair, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt that had little designs on it but I couldn’t make them out. He had on khaki shorts and incongruous black leather shoes.

“Hm!” I grunted and then turned to my phone.

“McCourt,” he answered.

“You got to Ketch?”

Anatole paused and then said, “We did.”

“He still alive?”

“Don’t ask me how.”

“So where’s he at?” I asked then.

“I don’t work for you, Rawlins.”

“I know. But Suggs wants me to find out some things. Ketch is a big part’a that.”

“When I sent his name up the line I got a call from the Organized Crime Taskforce.”

“What they want?”

“They say that Ketch and two of his friends are on their radar.”

“For what?”

“They wouldn’t tell me. Why were you on him?”

As a rule I don’t share information with most cops. But rules are sometimes meant to be broken.

“As far as I’ve heard they’re heist men.”

“LAPD doesn’t have a thing on them.”

“I can’t be sure about this but I believe they don’t shit where they sleep.”

It was a fair lead. He could do things with it. He might even end up helping me.

“Well?” I said after a moment or two.

“At Mercy,” he said and then he hung up.

I made it downtown to Mercy General Hospital’s emergency care wing in under an hour.

Ketch had been given his own room to die in. He had oxygen tubes attached to his nose and two IV stands feeding medicine and sustenance into his veins, drop by drop. There was a big electrical console set up next to him, taking readings through wires that were somehow attached to two fingers of his left hand.

Four other people were crowded in there with him, each one ministering in their own way. One nurse was standing off to the side writing something on a pink sheet of paper attached to a dark brown clipboard. Another white-suited sister of mercy studied his attachments and readings. In the farthest corner Lily Evangeline Dasher sat rubbing garnet prayer beads in her left hand and muttering prayers or curses under her breath.

Standing over Lily was a sturdy black man in work clothes designed for heavy labor.

When I came in, the man looked up and approached me.

“This is just the family,” he explained, holding up a big hand swollen with muscle developed over many years of physical labor.

“I’m Rawlins, the one that called the police to come save him.”