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on the concrete as Jules sent the kid in the opposite direction.
    He used the basic principles of Newton’s second law to launch himself after that weapon, scooping it off the floor and holding it in a stance that was far less theatrical than the kid’s had been, but also far more effective.
    The kid rolled onto his ass, his face scraped and bleeding, and he looked at Jules with a mixture of disbelief and horror. “Who the fuck
are
you?”
    “You didn’t think a fag would fight back, huh?” Jules asked. Holding the gun steady with one hand, he took his cell phone from his pocket with his other and speed-dialed the LAPD number he’d programmed in—standard procedure for an out-of-town visit—on his flight from D.C. “Yeah,” he said into the phone as the line was picked up. “This is Agent Jules Cassidy, with the FBI.”
    “Ah, shit,” the kid said, too stupid to realize his mistake hadn’t been that he’d mugged the wrong man, but rather that he’d left his home this morning intending to commit felony armed robbery instead of checking himself into a rehab program.
    “I need immediate police assistance in the underground garage for the Stonewall Hotel in West Hollywood,” Jules told the police dispatcher. He looked at the kid. “You, sweetiecakes, have the right to remain silent. . . .”

C HAPTER T WO
    Producer J. Mercedes Chadwick’s house in the Hollywood Hills was an elegant old monster built back in the silent film era. But when Lawrence Decker followed Cosmo Richter and Tom Paoletti into the front hall, he’d realized that
old
was the defining word. The building probably hadn’t been renovated since the late 1940s.
    From the gate, it had looked impressive. From inside, with a collection of buckets strategically positioned under obvious signs of water damage on the ceiling, it was clear that the place was a major fixer-upper.
    “Someone else is paying the bill, right?” Cosmo had murmured to Tom as they stood in the foyer, waiting for the girl clutching the clipboard to fetch Ms. Chadwick from the back.
    “HeartBeat Studios,” Tom murmured back.
    Decker was well aware that securing HeartBeat as a regular client would be quite an accomplishment for Troubleshooters Incorporated. The work would be easy—silver-bullet assignments—compared to most of the operations Deck had been on overseas. While providing security for a Hollywood studio wouldn’t quite be paid R & R, it would be close.
    Easy assignments, good money. That’s why Tom himself was here today with Deck, and why he’d dragged Cosmo Richter along, too.
    The SEAL chief was tall and muscular, with a lean face and pale blue eyes he usually kept hidden behind sunglasses. Yeah, he was impressively dangerous-looking—something no one had ever been able to say about Decker, even during his own years with the Navy.
    Cosmo was here as a human exclamation mark, strategically in place for the client to gaze upon after Tom and Decker assured her that they would, indeed, be able to keep her safe.
    Of course, the first thing they needed to do was install a security system. Currently, there was nothing here—aside from a fading sign on the creaky automated gate at the end of the driveway: “Beware of Dogs.”
    This place dated from the time when state-of-the-art security meant a stone wall with bits of glass in the concrete on top, a front gate, and a matched set of big, loud, and ugly, with lots of sharp teeth.
    “We have a list of improvements a mile long that we’re planning to make,” Ms. Chadwick had told them breezily as she’d led the way to the suite of rooms she and her brother were using for their production company’s main offices. Her impossibly high heels had clicked on the marble tile floor. “But we’re wait-listed with the contractor. You know how hard it is to get work done these days. . . .”
    According to the file Tom had given Deck, she’d produced her first movie—a low-budget horror flick called
Hell or High