Sometime later the phone rang. I got up, went to my desk, and answered it. "Elvis Cole Detective Agency. We never lie down on the job."

"Caught you sleeping, huh?" It was Rusty Swetaggen.

"Ha. We never sleep."

Rusty said, "I talked to a guy who knows about REACT."

"Yeah?" I sat in the chair and leaned back and put my feet up. It was quiet in the office. I looked at the water cooler and the couch and the two chairs opposite my desk and the file cabinet and the Pinocchio clock and the closed door to Joe Pike's office. The water machine hummed and little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse stared back at me and the coffee machine smelled of old coffee, but something was missing.

Rusty said, "Maybe I shouldn't even mention this."

"You've rethought our friendship and you want me to pay for lunch?"

"Nothing that important. This guy I talked with, he said something that's maybe a little funny about the REACT guys down at Seven-seven."

"Funny." I have seen these things in my office ten thousand times, and today something was different.

"Yeah. It's like he wouldn't've even mentioned it if I hadn't pushed him, like it's one of those things that doesn't matter unless you're looking, and it probably doesn't matter even then."

"Okay." I was only half listening. I picked up the phone and carried it around to the file cabinet and looked back at my desk. Nope. Nothing was off with the desk.

"He says their arrest pattern is maybe a little hinky for the past few months, like maybe these guys aren't making the arrests that they should be, and are making a lot of arrests that they shouldn't."

"Like what?" I looked at the file cabinet. I looked at the Pinocchio clock.

"REACT was always big on dope and stolen property, and they've always posted high arrest rates, but the past couple of months they haven't been making the big numbers. They've mostly been booking gang-bangers and stickup geeks. It's a different level of crime."

"We're not just talking Thurman? We're talking the team?"

"Yeah. It's a team thing. What I hear, Thurman's got a great record. That's why he got the early promotion." I looked at the French doors. I looked at the little refrigerator. Nope.

Rusty said, "Hell, Elvis, maybe it's just the off-season. I hear anything else, I'll let you know."

"Sure, Rusty. Thanks." I looked back at the Pinocchio clock.

Rusty Swetaggen hung up and then I hung up and that's when I saw it. The Pinocchio dock was still. Its eyes weren't moving. It wasn't making the tocking sound. The hands were stopped at eleven-nineteen.

I followed the cord to where it plugs into the wall behind the file cabinet. The plug was in the socket, but not all the way, as if someone had brushed the cord and pulled it partway out of the wall and hadn't noticed. I stood very still and looked around the office and, in the looking, the office now felt strange, as if an alien presence were a part of it. I went back to my desk, opened each drawer and looked at it without touching it. Everything appeared normal and as I had left it. Ditto the things on the desk top. I got up again and opened the file cabinet and looked at the files without touching them and tried to recall if they were positioned as I had last seen them, but I couldn't be sure. I keep all active files in the office cabinet as well as all cases in the current quarter. At the end of every quarter I box the closed files and put them in storage. There were twenty-seven files in the cabinet drawer. Not much if you're the Pinkertons but plenty if you're me. Each file contains a client sheet and day book entries where I've made notes along the way, as well as any photographs or paperwork I accumulate, and a conclusion sheet, which is usually just a copy of the letter I write to the client when the job is over. I hadn't yet made a file for Jennifer Sheridan. I fingered through the twenty-seven files that were there, but nothing seemed to be missing. I closed the cabinet and looked at the little figurines of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio on my desk and on top of the file cabinet. Jiminy doffing his top hat had been moved, but Mickey and Minnie riding in a Hupmobile had not. Sonofagun. Someone had searched my office.

I put Jiminy in his proper place, plugged in the Pinocchio dock and set it to the correct time, then went back to my desk and thought about Mark Thurman. The odds were large that whoever had come into my office wasn't Mark Thurman or anyone who knew Thurman, and that the timing had just been coincidental, but the timing still bothered me. I had thought the case was over, but apparently it wasn't. I wasn't exactly sure that the case was still on, but maybe that's what I had to prove. Hmm. Maybe I should ask Jennifer Sheridan to be a partner in the firm. Maybe she gave detective lessons.

I called this reporter I know who works for the Examiner named Eddie Ditko. He's about a million years old and he loves me like a son. He said, "Jesus Christ, I'm up to my ass in work. What the fuck do you want?" You see?

"I need to find out about the REACT unit deployed out of the Seventy-seventh Division down in South Central L.A."

Eddie said, "You think I know this shit off the top of my head?" Isn't Eddie grand?

"Nope. I was thinking maybe you could conjure it in your crystal ball."

"You got crystal balls, always imposing like this." Eddie went into a coughing fit and made a wet hacking noise that sounded like he was passing a sinus.

"You want I should call 911?"

"That's it. Be cute." I could hear keys tapping on his VDT. "This'll take some time. Why don'tchu swing around in a little while. I might have something by then."

"Sure."

I put on my jacket, looked around my office, then went to the door and locked up. I had once seen a James Bond movie where James Bond pasted a hair across the seam in the doorjamb so he could tell if anyone opened the door while he was gone. I thought about doing it, but figured that someone in the insurance office across the hall would come out while I was rigging the hair and then I'd have to explain and they'd probably think it was stupid. I'd probably have to agree with them.

I forgot about the hair and went to see Eddie Ditko.

CHAPTER 7

The Los Angeles Examiner is published out of a large, weathered red-brick building midway between downtown L.A. and Chinatown, in a part of the city that looks more like it belongs in Boston or Cincinnati than in Southern California. There are sidewalks and taxis and tall buildings of cement and glass and nary a palm tree in sight. Years ago, enterprising developers built a nest of low-rise condominiums, foolishly believing that Angelenos wanted to live near their work and would snap the places up to avoid the commute. What they didn't count on is that people were willing to work downtown but no one wanted to live there. If you're going to live in Southern California, why live in a place that looks like Chicago?

I put my car in the lot across the street, crossed at the light, then took the elevator up to the third floor and the pretty black receptionist who sits there. "Elvis Cole to see Eddie Ditko. He's expecting me."

She looked through her pass list and asked me to sign in. "He's in the city room. Do you know where that is?"

"Yep."

She gave me a peel-and-stick guest badge and went back to talking into the phone. I looked at the badge and felt like I was at a PTA meeting. Hello! My name is Elvis! I affixed the badge to my shirt and tried not to look embarrassed. Why risk the hall police?

I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors' offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn't bother glancing up. "Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?"