“So you have business with Mr. Darko.”

“If he’s good for Frank’s death, yes. Is that a problem?”

“So long as you stay with the Serbian sets, go with God, my friend.”

“More than one gun was fired that night.”

“I understand. Odessa won’t like losing Mr. Williams. These girls go to work on him, he’s an outrageous source of information.”

“I’m not asking permission, George.”

George smiled at the phone.

“That’s probably the best way.”

George told him where to find Moon Williams, then stood to indicate their meeting was over.

They shook again, and Pike looked around the store. The lamps were old, and ornate, and each had been lovingly and delicately restored.

Pike said, “Why lamps?”

George smiled softly, and now it was filled with warmth and sadness, and, Pike thought, more than a little loss.

“Oh, Joseph. There is so much darkness in the world. Why not bring light?”

Pike nodded.

“Udachi, my friend. Good luck.”

When Pike reached the door, he glanced back, but George was hidden by the lamps, wrapped in so many shadows the light could not reach him.

Chapter 18

18

EVEN WITH HIS SUNGLASSES, Pike squinted against the glare, scanning the cars parked along both sides of La Brea. He stood with his back to George’s door, searching until he was satisfied, then walked up the street to his Jeep. No Sentra.

Pike located Moon Williams’s address on his Thomas Guide map, then pulled into traffic.

According to George, Earvin “Moon” Williams was a D-Block Crip banger with a harsh reputation, two felony strikes, and five 187s tattooed in a neat column on his right forearm. Moon bragged to the Russian strippers that each 187 represented a body he knew for sure he put in the morgue, not the people he cut, stabbed, hit with a brick, beat down, or wounded—just the muthafuckas he saw die with his own eyes. Leaving some muthafucka hopping around in a pool of blood or screaming like a bitch didn’t count, he told the strippers. Shooting into a crowd of people on a porch didn’t count either. Moon had to see the bitch die with his own eyes or he didn’t claim the credit. Moon Williams, he told these girls, was a fearless, heartless, stone-cold killer.

Operatives of the Odessa Mafia, who followed him home on at least three occasions, twice without his knowledge and once to sell him drugs, determined that the stone-cold killer lived with his grandmother, a woman named Mildred Gertie Williams, who the killer called Maw-Maw.