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Acknowledgments

As always, I have a number of people to thank for helping me with either technical, psychological, or moral support during the writing of this book. So here goes.

My sincere thanks to Detective 2 Jeffrey Sandefur, LAPD, and Detective 2 Humberto Fajardo, LAPD, to whom I was directed by way of John Petovich, LAPD, retired; Jim Stith, Esq. , simple country lawyer and international man of mystery; Eileen Dreyer, who always knows the answers to the questions about the gross, the sick, and the weirdly perverted.

To Dr. Toni Bernay and Dr. Robert Gerner. Gray O’Brien and the staff at Robert Forster Physical Therapy. You all know what your contributions were. My mind and body thank you.

To Nita, Irwyn, Danielle, Andrea, et al. , for your extreme patience. You may have been pissed as hell, but not in my face, and I appreciate that more than you know. The muse waits for no one, but everyone must wait for the muse.

And finally, to Lynn Cardoso, Betsy Steiner, and the Divas—Eileen, Karyn, Kim—for the hand-holding, the listening, the sympathy, the empathy, the counseling, and for being the inner circle. Friends in need, friends indeed. Seasons and men come and go, but girlfriends are forever.

                     1

LA traffic.

Rush hour.

Rush hour at four hours and counting. Every Angelino busting it to get home before the heavens opened up like a bursting bladder and the rains came in a gush.

Legs pumping. Fingers tight on the handlebars. Fingertips numb. Eyes on the gap between a Jag and a FedEx truck. Quads burning. Calves like rocks. The taste of exhaust. Eyes dry and stinging behind a pair of swim goggles. A bag full of blueprints in cardboard cylinders riding his back.

The two-way strapped to his thigh like a six-gun barked out bursts of static and the rock-crusted voice of Eta Fitzgerald, the base dispatcher. He didn’t know her real name. They called her Eta because that was what they heard out of her all day, every day: ETA? ETA sixteen? Base to Jace. ETA? What’s your twenty, honey?

He had three minutes to make it to the developer’s office on the seventeenth floor of a building still blocks away. The guard at the front desk was a jerk. He locked the doors at six on the dot and had no sympathy for anyone standing on the street trying to get in. The guy would have turned his back on his own mother, if he had one, which Jace doubted. He looked like something that had sprouted up out of the ground. A human toadstool.

Shift his weight to the right. Cut around the Jag.

He caught the blast of its horn as he ran on his pedals to put a few inches between his back wheel and the car’s front bumper. Just ahead of him the traffic light had turned yellow, but the FedEx truck was running the intersection. Coming up on the right side of the truck, Jace reached out and caught hold above the wheel, letting the truck carry him through the intersection and down the block.