– I’m Erin McKenna.

– After the last set tonight, we need to talk.

– Oh do we need to, Brad Jones?

– Yes.

– What are you going to talk with if you’re short on words?

– I’ll find something.

She smiled and that was her first real smile only for him and that is what Bradley pictured as he listened to the last remarks about next Saturday’s training sessions. There were to be 184 hours of instruction over eighteen weeks.

Two weeks down, thought Bradley, and less than a million more to go.

Still in his Explorer uniform, Bradley slouched in a chair in the women’s shoe department at Nordstrom. He listened to the music and smelled the medley of perfumes and shoe leather wafting over, and stared at Erin. She was modeling stage boots. She wore a tan miniskirt and her legs were long and pale and the heels of the boots elongated them and coaxed the muscle beneath the skin. She passed so close, he could smell the lotion on her legs. He sighed.

“Too high a heel?”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Too rhinestony?”

“More the merrier.”

“Too something. These are too something.”

Erin strode away from him and left a soft feminine eddy of scent behind her. She pointed out three more pair, and the salesman carried the boxes back to the stock room.

“Four pairs and no dice,” she said. She stood in front of the floor mirror, turning her legs to it this way and that, examining them as if they were accessories and not a part of her.

“It’s impossible to watch you do this,” he said.

“Oh?”

“You know it’s impossible. That’s why you’re with me.”

He heaved up from the chair, went to the couture department and found three beautiful dresses in her size and carried them back to shoes and laid them over the seat beside him. He sat and watched her finger one.

“They’re beautiful. I know what you’re doing.”

“Yes, you do.”

She looked down at him and set her hand on the back of his neck as she flexed her legs again for the mirror. The current boots were black and lightly studded.

“Keepers,” said Bradley.

“I found these, too.” She knelt on both knees in front of him and pulled from a box a short red boot in faux crocodile with little chains for laces. She leaned in and set one hand on Bradley’s leg and held up the red boot with the other.

“It was made for you,” he said.

“I think so, too.”

She looked at the boot, then up at him. The most beautiful room in the world. Bradley felt the surge of emotion, stronger than adrenaline, stronger than violence, stronger than drugs or alcohol.

He took her hand and stood. “We’ll take these two pair,” he said to the salesman.

Erin took off the black boots and handed them to the clerk and followed Bradley to the fitting rooms in couture. He held out the three hangers with the expensive dresses as if bearing a flag or the colors of some exotic authority. He nodded crisply to the couture saleswoman and stood aside to allow Erin to enter first the hallway of fitting rooms. The door to room seven squeaked as Erin pushed through. Bradley hung the dresses on the wall hook, then closed the door and slid the lock. Erin turned his head hard with both hands and rose on her toes to lock her mouth to his.

An hour later, Bradley sat in Rocky Carrasco’s new lair in El Monte. Rocky was Herredia’s California distribution chief, a second-generation Eme captain, compact and knotted with muscle, and covered head to toe in tattoos. He had bullet scars on his arms, and knife scars on his stomach, and a twinkle in his eyes.

“El Tigre will be happy,” he said. “I’m always happy to make money. How about you, Bradley? Are you happy?”

“Fully satisfied and happy.”

“You’ll make a good husband.”

Bradley studied the illustrated Rocky. There were numbers and letters and an Aztec warrior and a sacrificial maiden and a dripping heart between two hands and knives and the sun, all in color. The chain links around his biceps were etched in rough black, prison-style, and Bradley figured were probably the first tattoos Rocky ever got.

“Did you ever think that you put too much faith in one thing?” asked Bradley.

“You mean like Jesus or money?”

“In a person.”

“Like a brother, man?”

“Like a woman.”

“A woman? Sure, when I was your age. A young man needs to believe. He needs to worship with all of his big heart and small brain. So he dies for love or for his god and country. But can all love and all gods and countries be worth dying for? No. Then you get older and you become disappointed. In her. In yourself. The Mexicans have a saying-it’s not what a woman is worth, it’s what she costs.”

“I don’t understand that. It sounds clever, but I don’t know what it means.”

“It means that you will pay a price for your lovely red-haired tesoro.”

“I believe she really is a treasure. I’d pay everything for her.”

“Then you will pay everything, if that’s what she costs. Simple!”

Rocky drank rum and Coke, and Bradley drank iced tea, as they weighed and pressed and vacuum-packed the cash. Rocky played corridos and love songs on a commercial-grade jukebox brightly illuminated by colored neon lights. From the far corners of the warehouse, gunmen watched.

The cash was drug payment from throughout Southern California, Herredia’s largest market, earned a few dollars at a time by thousands of young homeboys and passed up the line to Rocky’s soldiers and lieutenants and captains until once a week it was consolidated here in the old El Monte warehouse, the last stop before heading south to Mexico. Bradley and Rocky used two expensive digital scales to do the weighing. A pound of twenties was worth $9,600. A pound of hundreds was worth $48,000. Bradley’s first and only partner in this business had once told him that the weights and values made him believe in a just and merciful god, though Bradley saw no god in them at all.

“You need a partner to help you with this job,” said Rocky. “There’s too much at stake for one man. I’m surprised that Herredia doesn’t supply you with one. I can.”

“I don’t work for you.”

Rocky smiled and shrugged. “It’s no less for me. I’m thinking of you, my friend.”

“I understand, Rocky. And I respect that. But I don’t have anyone quite right for this job.”

“You have other partners.”

“They have other skills.”

Bradley thought of Clayton the forger and Stone the car thief and Preston the phone fraud master. Good men but not action men. Men with criminal records, in fact, lightning rods for trouble. Not who you needed sitting next to you on a run through the border into Mexico with hundreds of thousands of dollars at hand. You needed someone capable and calm, someone who would not arouse suspicion. Someone distracting, even. Someone manifestly not guilty. And of course, someone who could pull a trigger if they had to. He thought of Caroline Vega, with her uniform and badge and her avowed passion to burn through L.A. one way or another.

“You need the help,” said Rocky. “If you get tired or sick or late, you can become careless. One mistake and El Tigre is out a lot of money. And he loses trust in you and loses trust in me and we know what happens when trust is gone.”

They compressed and sealed the bills with a vacuum packer made for game meat. This minimized scent and bulk. Finally, they stashed the packs in three large rolling suitcases, then buried them with brand-new clothing still tagged and folded, in case the Federales decided to snoop. Bradley always took several more tubs of the new clothing as a donation to various Baja parishes, along with a note on Los Angeles Diocese letterhead forged by Clayton and identifying Bradley Jones as a representative of All Saints, an El Monte Catholic charity. He had never had a problem heading south through the border, and now that he could wear his Explorer uniform and present a replica LASD badge also made for him by Clayton, he felt even more confident.