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the gun. A single shot just past the four-minute mark and Hughes wasn’t moving anymore.
    Matt stared at the screen. He could feel the sweat percolating on his forehead. The shallow and uneven rhythm of his breathing.
    The robbery itself took no more than twenty seconds, with everything stolen tossed into what looked like a small backpack or grocery bag. Matt watched the killer slam the door shut and back away. Then the muzzle flashed for another fifteen seconds before going dark. After that the killer fled toward the northwest corner of the lot and vanished. Thirty seconds later, Hank Andrews and Travis Green entered the lot with their guns drawn. A group of five more cops from the community station stepped in behind them. But in the end it didn’t matter. They were entering the lot from the other side and moving forward the way they were trained to approach an active crime scene—smart and cautious buys everybody another day. By the time they reached the SUV and saw Hughes’s body, the three-piece bandit, the cop killer in the hooded sweatshirt, was long gone.
    Matt noticed the sound of the rain beating against the windows again. He listened to it for a while. When he finally looked up from the blank screen, he caught Grace staring at him. His supervisor had been studying his reaction to the video. He had been measuring Matt while he watched his best friend being gunned down with heat.
    “You’re all I’ve got, Jones. Robbery-Homicide doesn’t want this one. I checked. Their plate’s already full. It’s the same story here in Hollywood. Budget cutbacks, early retirement—days are only twenty-four hours long and my guys have all the meat they can eat right now. The autopsy’s set for seven. Your partner thinks you’re in a jam. You’re in the middle of a personal crisis. Your best buddy got himself murdered last night. Your pal. Your bro. I get it, Jones. Believe me, I get it. Your new partner thinks that you can’t handle the load. But before I put you out on the street, I need to know that he’s wrong. I need some sign that he’s wrong. Some sign that you can eat fire and not get burned. I need to get the shithead who did this off the fucking street, and I need to do it in a hurry. He’s killing people now.”
    Some sign that you can eat fire and not get burned.
    Matt played back the words in his mind, with just the sound of the storm outside filling the room. After several moments he met his supervisor’s eyes and held the gaze as he climbed out of the chair and leaned over the desk.
    “Here’s the sign, Lieutenant. Here’s the signal. You ready?”
    Grace nodded without saying anything.
    “It’s my case.”

CHAPTER 8
    Matt figured that the waitress knew something was up the moment she got a look at their faces and grabbed a couple of menus. Now, as she set down their plates and topped off their coffees, her eyes went straight to Cabrera and stayed there.
    The anger still showing on his face was plain enough.
    They were sitting in a booth at the Denny’s restaurant on the corner of Sunset and Gower. They hadn’t spoken to each other since the meeting in Grace’s office went south except to come to an understanding. The autopsy was due to begin in just over an hour. Matt didn’t want to watch a medical examiner cut open his best friend’s dead body and catalog the parts. Cabrera agreed that it was over the top and said that Matt should wait upstairs. Then he suggested that they get something to eat before heading downtown, because neither one of them would be hungry after leaving the coroner’s office, no matter where they had been in the building. Since becoming a homicide detective last July, Cabrera had attended two autopsies. Death permeated every inch of the place, he had told Matt. Both times it followed him out to his car.
    The pact they’d reached had been accomplished with less than six sentences. At no point during the exchange did Cabrera meet Matt’s eyes or even look in his