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he was panting. He looked down at the street. “Nice day,” he said.
    “It was,” I said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
    “Me?” Wattles said. “I don’t need nothing. I’m a broker, not a principal. You’re gonna be working for Trey.”
    I suddenly remembered my parents’ old TV. When you turned it off, the picture shrunk to a bright little dot before the screen went black. I felt my life do that. “No,” I said hopelessly. “Not Trey.”
    “You know Trey?”
    “I know Trey the same way I know the herpes virus. I’ve never laid eyes on it, but I’ve seen what it does.”
    “You’re a lucky boy,” Wattles said. “Here’s your chance to see it up close.”

A zillion years ago, the San Fernando Valley basin held a warm saltwater sea. It’s easy to imagine it as you crest the hill on the 405, and the Valley spreads itself below you. Squint a little, and you can see the ghosts of plesiosaurs swimming languidly through the smog, looking for the nearest McDonald’s.
    Then, a little less than a zillion years ago, the sea dried up. A bunch of history happened in other places, but not here. Eventually, some people crossed over from Asia, pronounced themselves Native Americans, and headed for California like everybody else. Then there was a wave of people who spoke Spanish and stole the land from the Native Americans, and they were followed, in the 1910s, by Anglos who invented new kinds of legal documents to steal the land from the Spanish speakers. They parceled the Valley out into millions of acres of orange groves and tomato farms, and the air was perfumed with oranges. Then the movies came, looking for the same things they always looked for: cheap land and sunlight. Warner Brothers and Universal set up shop over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood and started cranking out dreams for people who’d never smelled an orange blossom. With the studios came the production crews, makeup people, extras, directors, and even a few stars. Finally, the rich old guys who already owned most of downtown made it a clean sweep by buying the Valley, too. They knocked down the orange grovesand plowed the tomatoes under and gave the world Instant Suburb. The stucco capital of the world.
    Today, Spanish has returned: The Valley is overwhelmingly Hispanic across broad swathes of the flats, but white affluence clings to the hills south of Ventura. The water’s long gone, but there’s a new sea, at least metaphorically, a sea of bad money with several new species of beasts swimming through it. Lots of drug running, lots of chem labs cooking up the psychosis
du jour
, a few highly visible, emphatically for-profit religions. And, of course, the Valley is the epicenter of the American pornography industry, generating billions in phantom, untaxed dollars yearly. If you could get it all in one place and spread it around evenly, the bad money would cover the entire floor of the Valley, roughly hip-deep.
    And Trey, whom I was being taken to see, was in the middle of that.
All
of it. A third-generation hood and the heir to the Valley’s most diversified crime family. A finger in every poisonous pot. Maybe thirty, thirty-five, reputedly Stanford-educated, notoriously reclusive and famously icy, Trey was rumored to have paid for the emphatically fatal shooting of the family’s previous top dog, Deuce, in a Korean nightclub on Western Avenue, where Deuce had an affectionate commercial relationship with a couple of hostesses. The shooter was so enthusiastic that he put more than thirty holes in Deuce and divided another couple dozen between the hostesses.
    Deuce had been Trey’s father.
    “Left on Vanowen,” Hacker said. He opened his cell phone and began pushing buttons.
    I made the turn, past what has become a normal Valley strip mall: dry cleaner, Mexican restaurant, Korean restaurant, liquor store, massage parlor, check cashing outlet. Then there were pepper trees on either side of the road, old ones, trailing long green