Abe and Xavier have been sitting around headquarters for a good half of their shift, a rare event indeed. They’ve been playing video football, pumping weights, napping, and playing more football. Xavier is killer at the game, he plays for money at the Boathouse, and he hits the keys of his control board like a typist going at two hundred words a minute, so that all eleven of his men play like inspired all-stars. On offense Abe is constantly being tackled for a loss, sacked, intercepted, or having his punts blocked, and once on defense he gets steamrolled every way possible. In the latest game the stat board shows him with minus 389 yards rushing, in a game he is losing 98–7. And he got the seven by screaming, “Look out!” just after beginning a play, actually fooling Xavier into glancing around while he tossed a successful bomb.

So Abe quits.

“No, Abe, no! I’ll play with my eyes shut, I swear!”

“No way.”

And Abe is napping again when the alarm goes, a high, not-so-loud ringing that squeezes every adrenal gland in his body. He’s up and out and fastening his seat belt before he’s even awake, and only as they zip out onto Edinger and into traffic does his heart rate sink back to a halfway reasonable patter. Another year off his life, no doubt; firemen and paramedics have a really high heart attack rate, as a result of the damage caused by these sudden leaps of adrenal acceleration. “Where’m I going?”

“Proceed northward on the Newport until encountering the Garbage Grove Freeway, west to the Orange Freeway, north to Nutwood and over to State. We have been called to render assistance at a car crash.”

“You’re kidding.”

Abe notices that Xavier’s hand is clamped on the radio microphone so tight that the yellowy palm is almost completely white. And the joky rapid-fire patter has an edge in it, it always did of course, but now it burrs X’s voice to the point where the dispatcher asks him to repeat things sometimes. Xavier needs a long vacation, no doubt about it. Or a change of work. He’s burning out, Abe can see it happening shift by shift. But with his own family, and the dependency of what sounds like a good chunk of Santa Ana’s populace, he can’t afford to quit or to take a long break. Pretty obviously he won’t stop until it’s him that breaks.