Everything in his history supports a Screw-you approach to life: the up-from-nothing ascent, the graduate degree at an Ivy League university he disparages as “an asylum for rich brats.” War heroism followed by clawing up the ranks of a notoriously corrupt East Coast police force, the combative years spent kicking bureaucratic ass and clearing out departmental deadweight. Defying the brass and the police union with equal-opportunity contempt, he arm-twisted his way to dramatically lowered felony rates in a city considered “ungovernable” by pundits he dismissed as “fat-assed brats with mental constipation and verbal diarrhea.” Stunning success was exploited to demand and receive the highest law enforcement salary in U.S. history.

A month later, he quit unceremoniously, when L.A. upped the ante.

Everyone said L.A. would be his fatal challenge.

Within a year of arriving, he’d divorced his third wife ten years his junior, married a fourth twenty years his junior, attended a lot of Hollywood parties and premieres, and lowered felony rates by twenty-eight percent.

When he’d taken the job, departmental wienies had bad-mouthed Milo as “a notorious troublemaker and a deviant,” and urged demotion or worse.

The chief checked the solve-stats, most of the wienies ended up taking early retirement, Milo got the freedom to do his job with relative flexibility. As long as he produced.

I’d met the chief once before, when he’d invited me to his office, showed off his collection of psych texts, expounded on the finer points of cognitive behavior therapy, then made me an offer: full-time job heading the department’s department of behavioral sciences. Even with his promise to raise the pay scale by forty percent, the salary didn’t come close to what I earned working privately. Even if he’d tripled the money, it would never be an option. I know how to play well with others, but prefer my own rulebook.

During that meeting, he was dressed exactly as he was today: slim-cut black silk suit, aqua-blue spread-collar shirt, five-hundred-dollar red Stefano Ricci tie embedded with tiny crystals. On a lesser man it would’ve screamed Trying too hard. On him, all that polish emphasized the roughness of his complexion.

My terms.

He faced Milo and me across a booth at a steak house downtown on Seventh Street. A pair of massive plainclothes cops watched the front door; three more had staked out positions inside the restaurant. A velvet rope blocked other diners in this remote, dim section. The waiter assigned to us was attentive, vaguely frightened.

The chief’s lunch was a chicken breast sandwich, seven-grain bread, side salad, no dressing. He’d ordered a thirty-ounce T-bone, medium-rare, all the fixings, for Milo; a more moderate rib eye for me. The food arrived just as we did.

Milo said, “Good guess, sir.”

The chief’s smile was crooked. “In the gulag, we keep files on dissidents.”