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on in here.”
    “No,” said Eustace, “I wasn’t. I can
see
what’s going on in here. What’s going on in here is either a class C felony or a violation of several elements of the Fourth Amendment.”
    “Look … aah …”
    Meagher held up one elegant pink-palmed hand. More gold glittered from his FBI Academy ring.
    “Beau, you only call me lieutenant when you’re gonna tell me something I don’t wanna hear. Like when you’ve shot the wrong guy or something. Is this gonna be one of those times?”
    “Well … Lieutenant …”

2
1500 Hours–June 14–Los Angeles, California
    Braced against the wind, Gabriel Picketwire walked back to the edge of the roof and looked out at the Pacific. One hundred feet gave you a lot to look at. The sun was still high in a sky the color of sulphur. On the windward shore of Catalina Island a heavy sea boiled along the rocky shores. Gulls screamed and dipped at the rockline, snatching at crabs and dead fish. The sun broke up on the whitecaps like yellow glass. In the San Pedro channel, butting like rams through the surge, bluewater trawlers heading in to Long Beach harbor dumped their old bait into the churning current. Yellow lances of sunlight shimmered in the hazy water.
    Gabriel knew that twenty feet down, drawn by the chum and the smell of blood washing off the trawler decks, bulls and makos and whitetips circled and darted, jaws working, gills extended, dead eyes swiveling in powder-blue flesh. He had seen them. Once, on a shoot at Catalina, he had killed a bull shark with a compressor-gun. Broken at the spine, it had slashed and twisted at the wound. It had been eaten by the others before it could die. He remembered its one black eye and his image in it as a whitetip struck from beneath and tore out its stomach.
    A hot wind thick with dust and the iron smell of the open sea drove a flutter of white sails over the hammered bronze surface of the water. Close to the shoreline at Sunset Beach, a few surfers in acid greens and hot pink rubber cut lacy arcs into the green shoulders of ocean rollers, and the hot wind drove the salt spray back north along the edge of the waves.Along the beaches a few sunbathers dug in behind dunes and jerry-built windbreaks, working through Styrofoam boxes of warm beer, chasing the old dream of sunset days and California nights. Across the coast, highway oil derricks rusted into ruin in a clutter of warehouses, dead cars, and empty lots.
    Gabriel looked down at the second-unit film crew working at the dumpster a hundred feet below him. They were trying to get the air bag pumped up, and it looked as if they were having trouble with the compressor again. He could hear them yelling at each other, a strange high sound like the cry of the gulls out there on the ocean.
    The lot below was a crowded litter of trailers and cars and catering trucks and lighting rigs. Black cables snaked everywhere from a big transformer truck near the chain link fence. As usual, the talent was hiding out in their Winnebagos, four in a row, one for each of them, the size and placement of each Winnebago the consequence of weeks of talk and six full pages of legal terminology.
    Around the set, hundreds of people were in constant motion with clipboards and radios. From a hundred feet up they all looked like brightly feathered birds in a box. They were like that when you were down there with them, too—all herky-jerky motions and chatter and that same kind of birdbrain self-satisfaction you could see in a budgy or a parrot.
    Well, if you don’t like the company, find another line of work. Stop whining to yourself. What was bothering him wasn’t putting up with the people or even an asshole director like Nigel Hampton. It was that hot wind from the south that was whipping up the ocean out there and tugging at his flak jacket and flaring his thick black hair. He had a hundred feet to cover, at thirty-two feet per second squared every thirty-two feet. He was carrying an M-16