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Hollins,” Gaines said. “Said he was a fighter out of Detroit, Golden Glove just turned pro in the featherweight division, but he didn’t look like no fighter to me.” He winked at Lilly and the two of them had a good laugh.
    Gunner asked what Hollins did look like, and Gaines told him, sketching yet another vivid picture of a perfect stranger.
    “Sheila likes those skinny ones, I think,” he said, chuckling.
    Gunner was putting his notebook away. He put Lilly’s pen in his pocket, too, and got away with it.
    Gaines asked, “You gonna go see her, huh?”
    Gunner nodded. “Why not?”
    “Hey, if you got to, you got to. Maybe she’s tellin’ the truth for once in her life, who knows? But I tell you what—you go over there, you better step light.” He took the detective’s hand again and said, “ ’Cause that girl was crazy to begin with. Now she’s all wound up, she could be dangerous. Downright dangerous.”
    “I hear you, Howard,” Gunner said.
    “Besides, you know what she always says: ‘Just ’cause I’m paranoid …’”
    “‘… that don’t mean they ain’t out to get me.’ Yeah, I remember.”
    Gunner made it to his feet and winked at his friends, grinning.
    “I say it all the time myself,” he said, and walked out before it could dawn on Lilly that he was starting up a new tab, after all.

he name on her California driver’s license—which had expired more than two years ago—was Sheila Denise Pulliam, but everybody called her Mean Sheila. Those who were unaware of the story behind the nickname could not understand how she could have possibly earned it, for in truth she was a pussycat, warm and outgoing and generous to a fault. They didn’t know about the four-year stretch she had pulled at the Georgia Rehabilitation Center for Women in the late seventies, or the boyfriend-turned-pimp she had murdered to get there.
    Back in the late spring of ‘83, Sheila had come west following her early release from prison with the vague hope that she could make the kind of money on her back in Los Angeles no whore could aspire to in Athens, Georgia. She fully expected something less than the paradise propaganda consistently promised, but the overcrowded world of has-beens and losers she came to find dealt her a devastating blow nevertheless. The City of Angels’s reputation as the motherlode of opportunity turned out to be one it deserved, to her mild surprise, but her advisers in Georgia had failed to acquaint her with a fact simple mathematics could have easily pointed out: where opportunity knocks, desperate people rush en masse to answer its call. Hookers like Sheila, pouring forth in daily waves from the terminals at LAX and boarding platforms at Grand Central Station, were as rare in California as a good tan, and just as valuable.
    And there was only so much Solid Gold to go around.
    So Sheila had settled into impoverished mediocrity without a great deal of struggle and made L.A. her home. At thirty-three she was too tired to do anything else. She worked the Inglewood district for two years under the guidance of a rookie flesh peddler named Pee Wee, then went independent and moved her wares thirteen miles south to Compton, where she enjoyed a fair amount of prosperity. Independence would have cost most working girls some teeth, but Sheila wasn’t the youngest piece in Pee Wee’s stable and he was constantly having to apologize for her refusal to perform a good third of the day’s most popular acts of perversion. He let her go almost gladly. She played around in Hollywood for a while, but the fierce competition and high risk of arrest drove her back to the inner city. She bought a tiny house that sat behind a larger one on the 2200 block of 153rd and let a trickle of steady neighborhood business supplement the wages of welfare.
    Gunner had known Sheila for well over two years, but had never made the trip to her place of residence until now. She was hot for his body, always had been, and