'Two minutes to Mission,' Anna said.

'Get off, go east,' Louis said. He was punching numbers into the laptop. 'Okay, three blocks east, right side, we should see it, they got one guy down and one of the clerks threw a pot of boiling coffee on the holdup guy, he's still in the street, he might be blind, he's still armed, cops on the way.'

'Could be good,' Anna said to Coughlin, 'but we gotta hurry.'

'I am hurrying,' he said. 'I'm doing seventy.'

'I mean hurry,' Anna said. She took the pistol out of her pocket, popped the lock box with the Nagra, took the tape recorder out and put the gun in the box and relocked it. When she turned back, they were hurtling down an off-ramp toward a stoplight and she stretched out over the dashboard, looking to the left, and said, 'Nothing coming, nothing coming, forget the light, go.'

Coughlin took it sedately through the curve and Anna said, 'Damn it, you gotta drive.'

'Jesus,' Coughlin said, but he floored it and the truck took off.

Three blocks ahead, there were people in the street: 'That's gotta be it,' she said.

Louis was fumbling with the main camera, and said to Coughlin, 'All right, the camera's all set. Just pull the trigger.'

'Yeah, yeah.'

Louis reached over the seat and put the headset over the top of Coughlin's head. 'Pull it down over your ears.'

'Right therepull right up on that curb,' Anna shouted. 'Put two wheels up, get up there.'

'Fuckin' people are nuts,' Coughlin said, but he put two wheels on the curb, stood on the brake, and Anna was out the door.

A man was lying on the street with his hands on his face, moaning, bleeding from the face, a revolver on the sidewalk ten feet away. A tough-looking teenager in a letter jacket was standing over him. Sirens began screaming in. Coughlin was out with the camera, but not moving fast enough. Anna screamed at him on the headset: 'This way, move! Move! Run, for Christ's sake.'

Coughlin broke into a trot, the camera bouncing on his shoulder, and Anna pointed at the man on the street, and the teenager. 'What happened? What happened? Tell the camera what happened.'

'Guy come running out of the store and ran right into that door and cracked his head open,' the teenager told Coughlin's camera. 'He had the gun and people were inside yelling to get out of the way, he shot somebody, so I kicked the gun over there and he tried to get up and I set him down again.'

Anna allowed a second's space as Coughlin panned from the man on the street to the teenager and back, and Anna said, 'What's your name? Where do you come from? What were you doing here?'

As the teenager started talking again, she ran inside the store. Another man was on the floor, and a half-dozen Starbucks counterpeople were gathered around him. She said, 'Coughlin, get in here, right now. Get the scene on the floor. Hurry, goddammit, the cops are almost here.'

The cops werethere. Coughlin trotted into the store and began walking sideways, working around the group on the floor, and one of the counterwomen stood up and pointed a finger at him and said, 'Get out of here, that's not allowed, that's not allowed.'

Anna shouted at the woman, 'Look at the guy, he's bleeding, help him,' and the woman looked back down, and then grabbed a napkin holder and dropped onto her knees and pulled out a four-inch loaf of napkins and handed it to another woman who was apparently trying to staunch a wound. Coughlin was looking past the camera and Anna shouted, 'Keep running for Christ's sake.'

Three cops hurried in the door. One spotted the camera and waved it away, and Coughlin took it down again. Anna said, 'Okay, come this way, come toward me, toward the side door.' As they went, she asked the crowd of coffee-drinkers, 'Did anyone see this? Any witnesses?'

Two or three nodded, and she said, 'We'd like to get statements outside, if anyone has time.'

'Will this be in the newspaper tomorrow?' somebody asked.

'Maybe TV,' Anna said.

A paramedic truck arrived as they did the interviews, and Coughlin moved away again to catch the wounded man being carried out. The shooter with the burned face was cuffed and put in another ambulance, and then there was nothing but a crowd of gawkers and the flashing lights on the cop car.

'This way, back to the truck,' Anna told Coughlin. 'Hurry.'

'I'm running my ass off,' he snarled.

She shook her head: 'Still not moving fast enough,' she said.

Coughlin caught up with her halfway to the truck, pulled the headset off and said, 'What's the rush?'

'Cops might give us a hard time, especially if the Starbucks people complain. Might want to look at the tape: we gotta get out of here before they start thinking about it.'

He nodded, and hurried along with her. Louis took the camera and Coughlin jumped into the driver's seat. 'Kind of a rush,' he said, starting the truck.

'Yeah, but you gotta move,' Anna said. 'You were way too slow.'

'Hey, I'm a beginner,' he said. He took the truck out into the street, as Louis popped the tape out of the camera. 'I did all right for a beginner.'

She shrugged, then smiled. 'Yeah, I guess. For a guy who doesn't know the rules. But next time, rules number one and two: drive fast, then run.'

'Yes, ma'am.' He laughed, a little giddy. Then: 'How come nobody else showed up? No competition?'

Anna shrugged: ''Cause this didn't amount to anything. The victim wasn't even killedthough getting the shooter was a little different. I hope you shot the gun on the street.'

'Yeah, yeah.'

'Anyway, there's no way this would make the papers, much less TV news, just on what happened. Routine holdup shooting. We might have a couple of good images, so maybe it'll make itnot because it means anything, but because the images are good.'

'I hope I got some,' Coughlin said nervously, looking over his shoulder at Louis. 'I just kept pulling the trigger.'

'You did okay,' Louis said from the back of the truck. He had the tape up on a monitor. 'It's not great, but it's usable.'

Anna watched as Louis rolled through it, then turned to Coughlin. 'A couple of things: You move too fast from one subject to the next. You show the guy on the ground, the shooter, and the gun, but only for a couple of seconds each time. You have to dwell on them for a moment. Remember, we can always cut, but we can't get more. Same with the wounded guy inside. You gotta stay on him: he's the interest, and the women working on him. But mostly the wounded guy.'

'I was thinking I should help,' Coughlin said.

'No,' Anna said. 'You can't think that way if you ride with us. You're making the movie, not acting in it. You're an eye.'

'That's cold,' Coughlin said.

'That's the way it is,' said Anna.

A couple of minutes later, Coughlin took the radio out of his pocket, pushed the transmit button and asked, 'Anything?'

He listened, then said to Anna, 'Nothing.'

Anna got out her phone and started dialling TV stations.

Two kids, motorheads from a valley technical school, were chasing each other down the Ventura, when one lost it and rolled his rebuilt Charger off the freeway and down an embankment. They started that way, but when Anna got an exact location from Louis, she called it off. 'If we get up there, we're trapped in traffic,' she said. 'Not worth the time.'

'The kid's dead,' Coughlin said.

'Yeah, but we can't get in and out, and that's the main thing,' Anna said.

A chase started on the Santa Monica, the highway patrol running after a Porsche 928. Anna pointed them down the San Diego as Louis monitored the chase.

'He's probably gonna have to make a decision when he gets to the San Diego,' she said. 'Either north or south. If he comes this way, we might have a shot. A nine twenty-eight means there's some money. Could be a movie tie-in.'