Lucina looked right through him and into the crowd behind him as if he were the clear glass window of a department store.

“Nice line,” she said to herself with a nod. Then she turned back to her girls. “Let’s go inside.”

Ivan watched them all walk into the hotel party past the doormen, and he missed them already, especially Lucina. As he continued to stand there on the sidewalk, he felt as cold as a lone man at the North Pole.

“Shit,” he mumbled to himself. He thought again about what it would take to become an insider with the movers and shakers of San Diego. The doormen then snapped him out of his daydream.

“There’s no Ivan David on the list.”

Ivan said, “Well, can one of you go get Emilio and let him know that I’m here?”

The lead doorman shook his head. “That’s not our job. Call him up on his cell phone.” He was finally ready to let the twins in. “Okay, you can go,” he told them.

Ivan watched the girls pay their twenty-five dollars inside the doorway, and he realized the only way he was getting into the party free was if Emilio happened to walk outside for some reason. But why would he do that in the middle of a jam-packed party?

Ivan looked to the back of the line again. It had grown longer since the last time he looked. The doormen didn’t pay him any more attention. His case was closed. They had jobs to do. So Ivan shook it off and accepted his defeat.

Let me get the hell out of here, he told himself. He figured that going through too much hassle to get in would kill his excitement at being there.

Just as he began to walk away, the lead doorman called out his name again in jest. “All right, Ivan David. You make sure you make that list next time.”

A few of the other doormen laughed, but Ivan didn’t find it funny. The joke registered in his mind as a challenge. So he responded to it that way.

“All right. You can count on that.”

Two

Back to the Office

IVAN MADE IT to his car in the Horton Plaza parking lot and was still grumbling to himself about the doorman’s slight outside the party.

“So he thinks it’s all a joke, hunh? We’ll see,” he told himself as he climbed back behind the wheel of his Altima. Then he thought about the slight from a different perspective.

“At least they know my name now,” he stated. “They’re gonna know it a lot more real soon, too. Watch what I tell you.”

He was that irritated by it. How dare some lowly doorman make fun of him? Who the hell was he to joke? All he did was watch the door like a human guard dog.