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Lincoln, right onto what looked like an access road beside the overpass. It was really old South Seventh Avenue, which once crossed the railroad at grade, and was frequently blocked by trains. After the overpass was built, it was blocked off at the tracks, making a street that went nowhere. We hadn’t checked back here for a lead on Weed or whatever the hell his name was.
    The area under the overpass was still seedy with industrial castoffs. I pulled back as far as the road went, letting my eyes adjust and feeling the temperature drop instantly when the sun went away. I slipped the car into park and looked at the lovely old mission-style building of Union Station, a hundred yards to the east and across the tracks. My grandmother had taken me there as a boy to see passenger trains like the Sunset Limited, the Imperial, and the Golden State. Now they were all history. The tracks were empty, torn out or sprouting weeds. It made me sad.
    My eyes adjusted to the dark and I realized we had landed in a little colony of some kind. Groups of men watched us from a distance, men whose clothes and skin had all been turned the same color of brown-black by the sun. I counted a dozen I could see. We had landed in their world, cut off from the street grid, shaded from the sun. I couldn’t believe we were welcome.
    Just outside my peripheral vision, I saw movement. I turned to see three men walking toward us from a squat building under the concrete pilings. They were younger, moving without the beaten down arthritic shuffle of the transients a block over. They weren’t walking past. They were walking toward us. Something in their expressions…
    “What are you doing?” Kate closed her phone.
    “I was a Boy Scout,” I said, pulling my Colt Python .357 magnum revolver from the locked console compartment and concealing it between my legs. “‘Be Prepared.’”
    “You got the time?” asked a muscular black man in a white sleeveless T-shirt coming to my side of the car. I told him the time. He said, “Nice car.” I agreed it was. His buddies surrounded us. I couldn’t see each of them at once. I felt my heart rate take off.
    “So what you want down here?” he asked. I kept my hands in my lap, covering the butt of the Python. He went on, “Score some crack? Never seen you before.”
    His buddy said, “Lots of white folks come in from the suburbs to buy crack from the brothers, but we never seen you here before.”
    Another voice, high-pitched, said, “Maybe they just lost.”
    “Lost, my ass!” came a call from the gloomy periphery of the street.
    The leader, Muscle Man, thought about that, looking at us intently. “You lost, we give you directions. But you got to pay the toll.”
    The high-pitched voice behind me said, “Pay the toll to the troll.” Everybody laughed except Muscle Man. Even I laughed.
    Kate flashed her badge. “Get lost, asshole. We’re busy.”
    “Sure, Officer,” Muscle Man said. He walked in a small circle, breathing in and out deeply. He came to face us again. “You heard her, let’s get lost.”
    “Maybe I don’t want to get lost.” This from the Tenor. I turned my head enough to take him in. He was the biggest of the bunch, a giant with walnut-colored skin, wearing a very long lime green T-shirt and long-short pants. He also sported a sideways green ball cap atop what looked to my unhip eyes like a skullcap. His sneakers were smaller than destroyers. In other words, he looked like every suburban kid at the mall. He walked over to Kate’s side of the car.
    I let my eyes again take in our surroundings. The street around us was really not much more than an alley. Old warehouses rose up on either side of us. Traffic rolled over us on the overpass. In the distance I could hear jets taking off from Sky Harbor. A train whistle came from the west. We might as well have been a hundred miles from any help.
    “You hear?” said Muscle Man. “We don’t want to get lost.”
    “Maybe we’ll take this