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take care of them, if not as many as there should be. But where I was going, I might be the only doctor. If I didn’t show up, no one else would.”
    Nora raised a graceful brow and smiled coolly. “That’s heady stuff, Dr. Schweitzer—tough to compete with. What did the missus say?”
    I shrugged. “As time went on, she minded less and less.”
    She chuckled. “I imagine. Still, there
are
other clinics downtown—good ones too, and better funded.”
    “My patients don’t go to them.”
    “If you weren’t there, maybe they would.”
    “Some of them would; some wouldn’t. Anyway, there are plenty of doctors in the Valley.”
    Nora poured more coffee into her mug. “Plenty of doctors,” she said, smiling, “and not so many lost causes.”
    “Don’t mock my good works,” I said. I drank some coffee and took some sections of an orange from a blue glass bowl.
    “Speaking of lost things…,” I said, and between bites of the orange I told Nora about the vanishing woman, and the little boy she left behind.
    Nora peeled another orange while I spoke, her long fingers pulling off the skin in a single curling ribbon. She listened without comment and was silent for a while after I finished. Then she sighed.
    “Lydia’s right—this is what DCFS is there for.”
    “Seriously? Am I the only one who thinks they’re useless?”
    “It’s a bureaucracy, like any—”
    “It’s not just any bureaucracy. It’s kids’ lives they fuck around with.”
    “And is there any better excuse for getting into a little trouble than trying to help out a kid? I mean, who could blame you for that?”
    I squinted at her. “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning, I think sometimes you get bored, or restless, or something. Maybe the clinic work gets predictable, and then you want to stir it up—add some risk to the mix. Or do I have that wrong?”
    “You studying for the psych boards?”
    She smiled. “I’m a gifted amateur. Are you going to ignore my advice and go looking for this woman?”
    “I am.”
    “Do you have some kind of plan, or are you going to put up fliers?”
    “I thought I’d ask around the neighborhood. Maybe someone’s seen her.”
    “Let me go on record that this is a bad idea.”
    I drank some more coffee. “I don’t see why.”
    “You tell me you think this girl is on the run from somebody. So it follows that she might be hiding, and that this might make her hard to find—no? Not to mention the risk that you might cross paths with the guys who are already looking for her.”
    “Maybe they could tell me something.”
    Nora shook her head. “And maybe they’d have questions for you. Maybe you could end up looking like she did.”

CHAPTER 6
    It was ten when Nora dropped me at home, and eleven when I went out again. The marine layer had burned off by then, and it was brighter and hotter on the street. I squinted through my sunglasses, tucked the still photos from the clinic video into the pocket of my shorts, and locked the door behind me.
    My neighborhood, a drunken trapezoid bounded roughly by the L.A. River in the east, Main Street in the west, and Fourth and Tenth Streets in the north and south—where the shiny new downtown faded into the warehouse district and Skid Row, and the main veins of gentrification dwindled to gritty, artsy capillaries—was an odd sort of small town, and definitely not of the Norman Rockwell variety. Not unless you accessorized his Main Street with coils of razor wire, security cameras, barred windows, and roll-down metal curtains, punctuated the blocks with trash-strewn lots and fire-gutted buildings, and for his rosy kids and smug burghers swapped battered working folks, streetwalkers, dopers, and dusty platoons of the homeless pushing mounded shopping carts or slumped in doorways. It was a decidedly unlovely place, as distant from the glossy Westside, or even from freshly scrubbed Pershing Square, as it was from Oslo or Mars. And there was nothing easy or secure in the