I pulled out my cell phone and walked off a ways, lurking behind the mall directory and keeping an eye on the store. Anton answered on the third ring.

"Hey, Domino, you find the guy that skinned Jamal?"

"No, Anton, not yet. Listen, I need you to meet me at Beverly Center."

"Okay, what for?"

"I'll explain when you get here."

"Okay. There is the huge traffic outside, but I should get there in thirty minutes."

"Just hurry, Anton."

"Okay." A few seconds of silence. "Where are you?"

"Jesus, Anton, I'm at the fucking mall. Right now I'm standing by a fucking fountain, but I have no idea where I'll be in half an hour. Just call me when you get here." I usually tried to keep the ghetto out of my language as best I could, but I didn't have a lot of patience where Anton was concerned.

"Okay, okay, Domino, sorry. I'll hurry, and I'll call you."

Twenty-seven minutes and two stores later, I got a call from Anton. "I'm here, Domino. I'm at fountain, but I don't see you. Did you see the pretty girl working at Victoria's Secret?"

"No, Anton, I guess I missed that. I'm outside D amp;G."

Moments later, Anton ambled up to me, clutching an oversize waffle cone.

I glared at him. "Glad you had time to stop for a bite to eat, Anton."

"Domino, I'm sorry, I came in right by ice cream and they were giving the free samples." He nibbled guiltily on the cone. "It only took a minute."

"Okay, listen. Adan Rashan is in the store. I want you to follow him. If he leaves the mall, you stay on him. He's parked in the garage. You don't fucking lose him, Anton."

Anton let the instructions sink in. He nodded, but he looked doubtful. "You think Adan skinned Jamal?"

Yes, I thought. "No," I said. "Just stay with him. I have to take care of something. You stay on him until I can hook back up with you."

"Okay, Domino." Anton looked around and finally sat down on the edge of a planter, watching the store and eating his ice cream.

"And Anton," I said. "Whatever you do, don't let him see you."

"Okay, Domino." Anton scooted around the rim of the planter until he was partially obscured by the Cretaceous-size fern. He nodded at me and winked.

I found myself wishing for a spell that would pump a few extra watts into Anton's lightbulb. Some days we could all use one of those.

Back in the parking garage, I noticed a man dressed in black standing by a Ford Taurus station wagon parked a few rows behind my Lincoln. I remembered seeing the car at the driving range earlier. It was black except for a primer-gray hood. The man saw me looking and quickly got into his car. When I started walking over to him, he panicked and fumbled with the ignition. He finally got the car started and backed out of the parking space.

"All progress is experimental," I said, and killed the engine.

I leaned down and peered in the window at him. He was maybe twenty years old, with natural blond hair spiking from his head. He had a little blond soul patch on his chin and piercings in his eyebrow, nose and lip. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a red anarchy symbol.

"You should probably tell me why you're following me," I said.

"Fuck you, bitch." The kid was scared, but he obviously wasn't going to cooperate.

"Friends have all things in common," I said. The spell would make the kid trust me, feel like he could tell me anything.

"I…I…" the kid stammered. "The voice…it said…" His eyes rolled back in his head and his body jerked once. Then the kid died. A thin line of blood trickled out of his nose.

I swore and quickly dropped the wallflower spell over us. I pushed the kid over in the seat and checked his jeans. No wallet, no ID, nothing. I went around to the other side of the car and checked the glove compartment. A few parking tickets and some CDs, but that was it. I dropped the fingerprint spell on the car and walked away. The wallflower would last for maybe fifteen minutes. With a little luck, I'd be out of the area before someone noticed him and called the cops.

I'd recognized the magic on the kid immediately. I knew the smell of that black juice, and anyway, I'd run into vampire compulsions before. Fred was onto me.

When I got back to my condo, I went directly to my office-really just the second bedroom where I have a desk for my laptop-and fired up the TV.

I have two televisions in my house. The first is a forty-six-inch plasma bolted onto the wall in my living room. The second is a little thirteen-inch Zenith black-and-white that I've had since I was a kid.

One of the first real lessons Rashan had taught me when I joined the outfit was that a sorcerer needs a familiar. A familiar is a minor spirit the sorcerer binds to herself, a spirit that aids her when there's a big job to be done. The familiar's most useful role is to flow a little extra juice on the sorcerer's behalf, allowing her to work with magic that would otherwise be above her pay grade.

Rashan taught me how to summon a familiar spirit and then took me into the desert to perform the ritual. Traditionally you bind the spirit into an animal or an inanimate object such as a jewel, a lamp, a skull or whatever. I didn't have anything like that, so I brought my TV.

And that's how a jinn wound up in the Zenith. There are three things worth mentioning about this. First, I scored pretty high on the familiar-summoning final exam. Most sorcerers come up with a minor spirit with less intelligence than a mouse. The familiar is really nothing more than a spare set of batteries. I got an unimaginably ancient and powerful earth spirit-been around since the dawn of time, knows more about magic than I could learn in, well, do the math.

Second, while I might have hoped for a friendly genie in the Barbara Eden mold, what I got was Mr. Clean. That is, he looks like Mr. Clean, with the bald pate, the bushy eyebrows, the gold earrings, the rumbling voice and the steroidal musculature. His name is Abishanizad. I call him Mr. Clean.

And finally, genies cannot, in fact, grant wishes. At least Mr. Clean can't. Or won't. I tried.

I hit the power switch on the Zenith-this ancient artifact didn't come with a remote control-and the spirit appeared on the screen in all his thirteen-inch black-and-white glory.

"What do you want, mortal? Still wishing for a larger bra size?"

"I was fourteen when I made that wish. Let it go."

Mr. Clean is my familiar, but I don't think he's particularly satisfied with the arrangement. He's arrogant, overbearing, sarcastic, sexist and generally unpleasant. Then again, ancient earth spirit, unfathomable power, dawn of time-it could be worse.

"What do you want? I have things to do."

"Like what? You live in a TV."

"Springer is on." No wonder he's always in a bad mood.

"Tell me everything you know about possession. It's really important."

"It's nine-tenths of the law. Can I go now?"

"No, I mean the other kind."

"Oh. You don't have enough time."

"For what?"

Mr. Clean sighed, and it sounded like the Santa Ana winds wheezing in from the desert. "For me to tell you everything I know about possession," he said.

"How much time do I need?" I said, checking my watch.

"You'll be dead before I get to the good parts."

"Oh. Okay, how about I ask you specific questions, and you answer them as best you can in terms that a puny and barely sentient mortal woman can understand?"

"Fine. It is not an insignificant request," he said.

And so the bartering began. This is why I don't call on Mr. Clean more often. If there's a downside to having a jinn as a familiar rather than an extra set of batteries, this is it. Everything I ask of him is a favor he says I'll have to repay in kind someday.

The key, here, is someday. I won't have to do a favor for him immediately, and in fact I won't have to repay the favors for as long as he remains my familiar. So the exchange is never a simple "I'll do this for you if you do that for me" kind of thing. The price is set in hypothetical terms of the sorts of tasks I might someday do for him when he's no longer my familiar. It's kind of like using a credit card when you're not really sure how much you're spending or when you'll have to pay it back.