The road headed west again, making a long loop toward the entrance to the park. When I checked the rearview mirror, I saw Guerrero coming off the tail of the S. Then I saw something else. A car had pulled up tight behind him. We were starting to look like a parade.

It was a dirty black Trans Am—just like the one the kid in Mexicali had said the Cuban drove!

Traffic was building up ahead. I hit the brakes, remembered a prayer I knew when I was a kid and slid into the tightest U-turn I could. For a sick moment the nose of my car headed for the edge of the cliff before I was able to pull it back under control. I heard the crazy honking behind me as new cars entering the park slammed on their brakes. I heard the crash of metal as someone behind me rear-ended someone else. Guerrero sailed past me in the opposite direction followed closely by the Cuban.

It was too late for them to turn around to follow me. They were stuck with following each other. I pulled the passenger door shut. I never for a moment considered going back to look for Monica Fullbright; I wanted to get out of the park as fast as possible, so I took the run down to Burbank. The park lets out near the Golden State freeway. I hopped on it heading for downtown and hit the gas again. I threw my head back and howled like a coyote.

It was a good twenty minutes of sweating, watching the rearview mirror and jumping each time a car from another lane cut in to pass me, before I made downtown. I exited on Hill Street which took me through Chinatown. I still didn’t feel safe. That’s when I decided to buy a gun.

I thought immediately of Tim Watson, the overweight armed robber Burt Schaefer had me make a couple of court appearances with at the beginning of the year. It was another one of those jobs that I had gotten from Burt’s gravy train, and he’d paid me nearly three hundred dollars to do two continuances and an interview of Mr. Watson, who’d made me meet him at a poolhall on the edge of Dogtown. There is a real Dogtown, although there is no sign demarcating it from the rest of the city. It is by the railroad tracks on the side where the SPCA has a big pound, across from Chinatown and in the shadows of the glass house where the county sends its bad boys. It’s a light industrial area in which illegal families are living in the backs of stores and in cardboard shacks they have built behind places where diesel trucks are repaired.