Charley freed his shirt and got out. His chest was tight and he couldn’t suck any breath into his lungs. Wouldn’t that be the shits: spared a free fall to oblivion only to drop dead of a damned heart attack.

He gasped and swallowed air, felt his field of vision grow black and braced himself against the truck. The chassis creaked and Charley jumped back, felt himself going down again.

A scream pierced the morning. Charley opened his eyes and straightened and saw the girl. Red marks around her wrists and ankles. Bruises around her neck.

Beautiful young body, those healthy knockers bobbing as she came running toward him— sinful to think like that, she was scared, but with knockers like that what else was there to notice?

She kept coming, arms wide, like she wanted Charley to hold her.

But screaming, those wild eyes, he wasn’t sure what to do.

First time in a long time he’d been this close to bare female flesh.

He forgot about the knockers, nothing sexy about this. She was a kid, young enough to be his daughter. Granddaughter.

Those marks on her wrists and ankles, around her neck.

She screamed again.

“Ohgodohgoohgod.”

She was right up to him, now, yellow hair whipping his face. He could smell the fear on her. See the goose bumps on her pretty tan shoulders.

“Help me!”

Poor kid was shivering.

Charley held her.

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

L.A.’s where you end up when you have nowhere else to go.

A long time ago I’d driven west from Missouri, a sixteen-year-old high school graduate armed with a head full of desperation and a partial academic scholarship to the U.

Only son of a moody, hard drinker and a chronic depressive. Nothing to keep me in the flatlands.

Living like a pauper on work-study and occasional guitar gigs in wedding bands, I managed to get educated. Made some money as a psychologist, and a lot more from lucky investments. Got The House In The Hills.

Relationships were another story, but that would’ve been true no matter where I lived.

Back when I treated children, I routinely took histories from parents and learned what family life could be like in L.A. People packing up and moving every year or two, the surrender to impulse, the death of domestic ritual.

Many of the patients I saw lived in sun-baked tracts with no other kids nearby and spent hours each day being bused to and from beige corrals that claimed to be schools. Long, electronic nights were bleached by cathode and thump-thumped by the current angry music. Bedroom windows looked out to hazy miles of neighborhoods that couldn’t really be called that.

Lots of imaginary friends in L.A. That, I supposed, was inevitable. It’s a company town and the product is fantasy.