“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know you’re bigger than me. I know you can kick my ass. But if I ever run into you and you ever try it, I will shoot you until you are dead. I will shoot you in the face, and you’ll have a closed-casket funeral.’”

Budgie said, “When I was a boot I used to say to creepy vermin like that, ‘You don’t get any status points for hitting a girl. But if you try it, my partners will pepper-spray you and kick your ass big time.’”

“Whadda you tell them these days?”

“I don’t. If nobody’s looking, I just take out the OC spray and give them a shot of Liquid Jesus. For a while my partners were calling me ‘OC Polk.’”

Mag said, “The only really scary moment I had tonight was when one trick pulled a little too far off Sunset, and I had to walk past the parking lot. And a big rat ran right across my foot!”

“Oh, my god!” Budgie said. “What’d you do, girl?”

“I screamed. And then I had to quick tell the cover team that everything was okay. I didn’t want to admit it was only a rat.”

Budgie said, “I’m terrified of rats. Spiders too. I would’ve cried.”

“I almost did,” Mag said. “I just had to hang on.”

“How’s your sashimi?”

“Not as fresh as I like it. How’s your sushi?”

“Healthy,” Budgie said. “With Fausto I eat burritos and get more fat grams than the whole female population of Laurel Canyon consumes in a week.”

“But they burn calories shopping for plastic surgeons and prepping their meals,” Mag said. “Imagine laying out a weekly diet of celery stalks and carrot strips according to feng shui.”

Budgie thought about how pleasant and restful it was just to sit there and drink tea and talk to another girl.

During the last hour, Budgie hooked one more trick, and Mag wanted to soar past her with two, but business was slowing. They had only thirty minutes to go when Mag saw a cherry-red Mercedes SUV with chrome wheels drive slowly past. The driver was a young black man in a three-hundred-dollar warm-up suit and pricey Adidas. He made one pass, then another.

Mag didn’t return his smile the way she had been doing to other tricks that night, including two who were black. This guy made her think one word: “pimp.” Then she realized that if she was right, this could be the topper of the evening. A felony bust for pimping. So on his next pass, she returned the smile and he pointed just around the corner and parked the SUV. A hip-hop album was blasting out, and he turned it down to talk.

When she approached cautiously, he said, “What’s a matter, Momma, ain’t you into chocolate delight?”

Yeah, he’s a pimp, she thought, saying, “I like all kind of delights.”

“I bet you do,” he said. “Jump on in here and le’s talk bidness.”

“I’m okay out here.”

“What’s wrong?” he said. “You a cop or somethin’?”

He smiled big when he said it, and she knew he didn’t believe it. She said, “I can talk out here.”

“Come on in, baby,” he said, and his pupils looked dilated. “I might got somethin’ for you.”

“What?” she said.

“Somethin’.”

“What something?”

“Get in,” he said, and she didn’t like the way he said it this time. He was amped, all right. Maybe crack, maybe crystal.

“I don’t think so,” she said and started to walk away. This wasn’t going right.

He opened the door of the SUV and jumped out, striding around the back and standing between her and Sunset Boulevard.

She was about to use the code word “slick” but thought about what it would mean if she brought down a pimp. She said, “You better talk fast because I don’t have time for bullshit.”

And he said, “You think you gonna come and work this corner? You ain’t, not without somebody lookin’ out for you. And that ain’t no bullshit. That is righteous.”

“Whadda you mean?” Mag said.

“I’m gonna be your protector,” he said.

“Like my old man?” she said. “I don’t need one.”

“Yes, you do, bitch,” he said. “And the protection has started. So how much you made tonight so far? Workin’ on my corner. On my boulevard.”

“I think you better get outta the way, Slick,” Mag said. And now she was definitely scared and could see one of the vice cops running across Sunset Boulevard in her direction.

She was still looking for her mobile cover team when he said, “I’m gonna show you what is slick.”

And she was shocked when his fist struck. She hadn’t seen it coming at all. Her face had been turned toward the boulevard while she waited for her security, thinking, Hurry up. Her head hit the pavement when she fell. Mag felt dizzy and sick to her stomach and tried to get up, but he was sitting on top of her, big hands all over her, looking for her money stash.

“In yo pussy?” he said, and she felt his hands down there. Felt his fingers exploring inside her.

Then she heard car doors slam and voices shouting and the pimp screaming, and she got so sick she vomited all over her bondage bitch costume. And the curtain descended on the last performance of the evening.

Fausto Gamboa was driving when he heard the gut-churning “Officer down” and that an ambulance was racing code 3 to the Sunset Boulevard whore track. He almost gave Benny Brewster whiplash cranking the steering wheel hard left and blowing a stop sign like it wasn’t there. Speeding toward Sunset Boulevard.

“Oh, god!” he said. “It’s one of the girls. I knew it. I knew it.”

Benny Brewster, who had worked with Mag Takara for most of the deployment period, said, “I hope it’s not Mag.”

Fausto glanced sharply at him and felt a rush of anger but then thought, I can’t blame Benny for hoping it’s Budgie. I’m hoping it’s Mag. That was an awful feeling, but there was no time to sort it out. When he made the next left he felt two wheels almost lifting.

The Oracle had been taking code 7 at his favorite taco joint on Hollywood Boulevard when the call came out. He was standing beside his car, working on his second carne asada taco and sucking down an enormous cup of horchata, Mexican rice water and cinnamon, when he heard “Officer down.”

He was the first one at the scene other than all the security teams and the paramedics loading Mag into the ambulance. Budgie was sitting in the backseat of a vice car, weeping, and the pimp was handcuffed and lying on the sidewalk near the alley, crying out in pain.

Simmons, the oldest of the vice cops, said to the Oracle, “We got another ambulance coming.”

“How’s Mag?”

“Pretty bad, Sarge,” Simmons said. “Her left eye was lying out on her cheek. The bones around the eye socket were just about crushed, from what I could see.”

“Oh no,” the Oracle said.

“He hit her once and she fell back and her head bounced off the sidewalk. I think she was awake sort of when we first rolled up, but not now.”

The Oracle pointed to the pimp and said, “How about him?” And then he saw it in the vice cop’s face when Simmons hesitated and said, “He resisted.”

“Do you know if FID has been notified?”

“Yeah, we called our boss,” Simmons said. “They’ll all be here soon.”

The vice cop’s eyes didn’t meet the Oracle’s when he finally said, “There’s a guy in the liquor store might want to make a complaint about… how we handled the arrest. He was yammering about it. I told him to wait until Force Investigation Division arrives. I’m hoping he’ll change his mind before then.”

“I’ll talk to him,” the Oracle said. “Maybe I can calm him down.”

When the Oracle was walking toward the liquor store, he saw a young vice cop pacing nervously and being spoken to very earnestly by one of the other vice cops. The second ambulance arrived, and the Oracle heard the pimp moan when they put him on the litter.

In the liquor store, the elderly Pakistani proprietor completed a transaction for a customer, then turned to the Oracle and said, “Are you here for my report?”