The younger guy's jaw flexed, and now he said something to the older guy. 'You're not going away?'

'No.'

The younger guy nodded. 'Big mistake.'

He dropped the Ferrari into first gear and rocketed away, tires screaming and filling the air with smoke and burning rubber. Guess he'd seen someone do that in a movie.

The Mercedes left, too.

I waited. I had found the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, and I had found some people who clearly knew Clark Hewitt. I was making gangbuster progress, and I was feeling proud of myself. Elvis Cole, Smug Detective.

Ninety seconds after the Ferrari roared away three men came out of the alley and approached me. They weren't in Italian business suits, and they didn't look as if they would've been any more impressed by a kid peeling out than I had been. They looked hard and lean and focused with flat, expressionless faces, and all three were wearing long coats. They walked with their hands in their coat pockets, and when they reached the car the one in the middle pulled back his coat enough to reveal a stubby black Benelli combat shotgun. He said, 'Guess what you're going to do?'

'Leave?'

He nodded.

'Tell Clark I'll be back.'

I started the car and drove away.

Honesty might be the best policy, but leaving is the better part of valor.

CHAPTER 22

I drove back to Belmont Pier, parked in front of a shop that sold whale-watching tickets, and used a pay phone there to call Lou Poitras. He said, 'Bubba, you really take advantage.'

'Funny. Your wife said the same thing.'

Poitras sighed. 'Just tell me what you want.' Humor. You break them down with humor, and victory is yours.

I gave him the two license numbers, asked for an ID, and waited while he brought it up on his computer. It took less than twenty seconds. 'The Mercedes is registered to a Nguyen Dak of Seal Beach.' Seal Beach is one of the wealthier communities along the south beach.

'What about the Ferrari?'

'Guy named Walter Tran. He's down in Newport Beach.' Another big-money community.

I said, 'These guys show a history?' Asking him if they'd ever been arrested.

'Couple of speeding tickets on the Ferrari, but that's it. You want to tell me what this is about?'

'Nope.' I hung up, bought an iced tea from a sausage grill, then stared at the bay. The water was clean and blue, and Catalina was in sharp relief twenty-six miles away. A young woman in short-shorts and a metallic blue bikini top Rollerbladed past on the bicycle path. I followed her motion but did not see her. The detective in thoughtful mode. I had never heard of Nguyen Dak or Walter Tran, but that didn't mean anything. Multicultural crime was flourishing with the Southland's growing diversity, and it was impossible to keep up. I had also never heard of the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, but I was pretty sure I knew someone who had.

I went back to the pay phone, and called this reporter I know named Eddie Ditko. Eddie is old and cranky and sour, but he is nothing if not a joy. 'Christ, I got gas. You get to be my age, even water makes you cut the cheese.' You see?

'You ever heard of the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal?'

He went into a coughing fit.

'Eddie?' He was coughing pretty bad.

'Jesus, I'm choking to death.'

'I'll hang up and call nine-one-one.' The coughing was getting worse.

'Screw nine-one-one. They'd probably just put you on hold.' He made a gakking sound, then got the coughing under control. 'Christ, I just popped up something looks like a hairball.'

'That's more than I needed to know.'

'Yeah, well, try living with it. Getting old is hell.'

'Pacific Rim Weekly Journal.' Sometimes you have to prompt him.

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold your water and lemme see what we got.' He was probably scanning the Examiner's computer database.

'Check out Nguyen Dak and Walter Tran while you're at it.'

'Christ, you're pushy.' He made a hawking sound, then he spit. Sweet. 'Here we go. It's a political soapbox for nationalist Vietnamese who want their country back. LAPD's Antiterrorist Task Force has them on the monitor list.'

The blader with the metallic top rolled past in the opposite direction. I said, 'Political terrorists?'

'You know how the Cubans in South Florida want to overthrow Castro? It's the same thing. The Pacific Rim Weekly Journal raises money and lobbies politicians to discourage normalization with the Commies.' Commies. 'They also advocate the overthrow of the Communist government over there, and under our statutes that qualifies as terrorism, so LAPD has to waste money watching them.'

'What do you mean, 'waste'?'

More coughing. Another hawking sound, and then the spitting. 'Christ, that one had legs.'

'Why a waste, Eddie?'

'We did a feature on these guys in the Orange County edition a couple of years back. Dak and Tran and some of their pals fund the paper, but it's not how they make their living. They're self-made millionaires. Dak washed dishes until he scraped together the money to open a noodle shop. That led to more noodle shops, and pretty soon he was building strip malls. Tran bought a goddamned carpet shampooer to wash rugs after the day shift, and now he's got six hundred employees.'

I thought about Tran in his Ferrari. 'Tran's a young guy.'

'You must be talkin' about his kid, Walter Junior. Walter Senior's gotta be in his sixties. These guys came here with nothing, and now they're living the American dream.'

'Except that they're listed as terrorists.'

'Yeah, well, they didn't come over here for the oranges. They fled Vietnam to escape the Communists, and they damn well want the Commies out so they can go home.'

'Thanks, Eddie.'

I put down the phone and stared at the Rollerbladers and thought about self-made men without criminal records who just want to go home. Good Republicans with a raggy little newspaper and a career counterfeiter on the payroll. Maybe they couldn't quite raise enough money for the cause through strip malls and carpet cleaning and political action committees, so now they were branching out into crime. Crime, after all, is America 's largest growth industry.

I made one more call, this time to Joe Pike. 'You hear from Lucy?'

'Yes.' She had given him her flight information, and he passed it to me. She would be arriving on a Delta flight from New Orleans in a little less than two hours, and she would expect me to pick her up. She had made arrangements to stay with Tracy, and, if I couldn't make it, I was to call Tracy.

'Kids okay?'

Pike hung up. I guess too much time with Charles will do that to you.

I worked my way back onto the freeway and made the long drive north to LAX, periodically checking the mirror for Russians, federal agents, and Vietnamese thugs with Benelli autoloading shotguns. If I could bring these guys together, we could have quite a party.

The traffic was dense and sluggish, but I found myself smiling more often than not, and feeling pretty good about things. I was getting closer to Clark, and I was only minutes away from seeing Lucy. I had been neither shot nor beaten in almost three days. Happy is as happy does.

I was still happy when Lucy Chenier came out of the jetway, saw me, and opened her arms. She was wearing a charcoal suit and carrying an overnight bag. She wasn't smiling, but that was okay. I was smiling enough for both of us.

We hugged, and I could feel the tension in her back and shoulders, and the strength there. I whispered into her hair, 'It is so good to see you. Even for a rotten reason like this.' Her hair smelled of peaches.

She hugged harder, and an overweight man with no hair scowled because we were blocking his way.