“I know. It was one of those mechanical checks, to make sure all my track points were functional, which they were. But meanwhile one of the Chippies walks over to me and looks in, right at the container. He says, ‘What’s that?’”

“Sandy!” Erica cries, scolding him for getting into such a situation.

“Well, what could I do? I told him it was olive oil.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I said I worked for a Greek restaurant in Laguna and that this was a whole lot of olive oil. And there was so much of it there, he couldn’t imagine that it would be anything illegal! So he just nodded and let me go.”

“Sandy, sometimes I can’t believe you.”

Tash agrees. “You should be more careful. What if he had asked to taste it?”

After Sandy and Erica have left to get back to work, Tash operates on a circuit board and shakes his head, recalling Sandy’s tale. Sandy’s dealing is getting a little crazier all the time. For a while there he was talking about making a bundle, investing it, and retiring. He might have, too; but then his father’s liver failed after a lifetime of abuse, and since then Sandy has been paying for regeneration treatments in Dallas, Mexico City, Toronto, Miami Beach.… Radically expensive stuff, and Sandy’s been pushing hard for almost a year now, about to untrack under the stresses of his schedule. Only his closest friends know why; everyone else assumes it’s just Sandy’s manic personality, magnified by the effects of his products. Well, that might be part of it, actually. A tough situation.

Tash sighs. Sandy, Jim. Abe too. Everyone in the machine. Even if you aren’t you are.

Chapter 18

18

After a morning’s work at the church, Lucy McPherson tracks under the Newport Freeway and into the depths of Santa Ana. Poor city. More than half of it is under the upper level of the freeway triangle, and the ground level, under a sky of concrete, has inevitably gone to slums. Lucy looks nervously through the windshield at the shadowy, paper-filled streets; she doesn’t much trust the people who live down here.

She certainly doesn’t approve of the woman she’s been called to help. Her name is Anastasia, she’s about twenty years old, Mexican-American, and she has two small children, although she’s never been married. She lives in a run-down old applex under the upper mall at Tustin and 4th.

There’s a sidewalk that crosses a dirty astroturf lawn to the front door of the beige stucco building; some fierce and unkempt young men are sitting on the lawn on both sides of the sidewalk. Lucy grits her teeth, leaves her car and walks past them, enters the smelly, olive-green hallway of the complex. Walking down it she can barely see a thing. Knock on the battered door.