On the day Frank Meyer saved Lonny Tang’s life, an RPG explosion sent a rock the size of a golf ball through Lonny Tang’s abdomen. Lonny lost his left kidney, a foot of large intestine, two feet of small intestine, his spleen, part of his liver, half of his stomach, and his health. He was left with a growing addiction to painkillers and no way to pay for them. The Perco cets led to harder drugs, and finally to a bar in Long Beach, which Lonny robbed. When two longshoremen tried to stop him, Lonny shot and killed the bar’s owner and an innocent bystander. Lonny Tang was arrested less than three hours later, passed out in his car after scoring enough dope to deaden the pain. He was tried on two counts of first-degree murder, convicted, and was currently serving twenty-five years to life at the California State Prison in Corcoran.

Pike didn’t know what else to say, so he decided to tie off the conversation.

“Lonny, listen, the police are investigating Frank—”

“They’re not going to find anything.”

“When they go through his phone records, they’ll see he talked to you.”

“I don’t care. I’ll tell’m just what I told you.”

“Tell them whatever you want about Frank. Don’t tell them about me.”

“You didn’t call me. My lawyer called.”

“That’s right.”

“You going after these people?”

“I gotta get going.”

“I hear you, brother.”

Pike was about to hang up when he remembered something else.

“Lonny, you there?”

“I’m here. Where else am I going?”

“One more thing. The police told me Frank had my ink.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

“That was years ago, man. This time he came to visit, he showed me. He’d just had’m done.”

“The arrows.”

“Big ol’ red arrows like yours. Cindy was livid. She damn near threw him out of the house.”

Lonny laughed, but Pike felt embarrassed.

“He say anything?”

“Why he got them?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember all the shit she gave him about being a contractor, and how she wouldn’t marry him unless he settled down?”

“Sure.”

“The rest of us were all over him to dump her—what, you’re going to give this chick your balls? But Frank said you told him to go for it. Told him, if he wanted that kind of life, he had to make it happen. He really appreciated that, Joe. It was like you gave him permission.”

Pike considered that for a moment.

“Was he happy?”

“Yeah, brother. Hell, yeah, he was happy. It was like he woke up in someone else’s life. What’s the word? He was content, man.”

Pike said, “Good.”