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it, but a little optimistic from where I am."
    He put on his helmet and pointed at the pedestrian bridge that crossed Los Feliz Boulevard where it jumped over the bone-dry bed of the Los Angeles River.
    "See that?"
    They could see it.
    Hanging from the bridge, pinned in the light from one of the checkpoint halogens, a corpse, arms bound behind its back, skin blackened by fire, dangling by a chain that snaked down to what was left of its neck.
    "That's a sixteen-year-old cousin of the Cyprus Park warlord. Avenues hung him up there this morning. Checkpoint commander, he said leave it up. Said he ain't gonna fucking antagonize Avenues as long as this is his post. Says he gives a fuck, just wants to stop watching his officers die. So you tell me."
    He buckled the chin strap of his helmet.
    "Who's dealing with whose scumbags over here? Cuz I don't fucking know."
    "What do those fucking fashion plates have to do with it?"
    Hounds pointed at a small group of men and women dressed in fitted black short-sleeve fatigues and Dragon Skin armor, Masada assault rifles at the ready, clustered around two armored Saab 9-7X SUVs with swooping white door stickers that matched the patches on their shoulders.
    The SWAT spit.
    "Thousand Storks? They got fuck all to do with it. Waiting here to escort some assholes from city hall on a tour of Glassell Park. Local council-woman wants to show how the situation has been normalized. Fucking showboaters will end up all over the evening news, speeding around, jumping out of their vehicles, securing perimeters and shit. Everyone will think they really deserve those huge security contracts. Tape won't show the three gunships they got hovering overhead giving cover. Know why they won't shoot that? Because a hovering helicopter isn't good TV. Fuck this shit."
    The SWAT snapped his visor down and waved to the side of the road.
    "Pull on in here, I'll move the wire."
    Hounds rolled slowly forward as the SWAT carefully pulled aside one of the corkscrews of wire, giving the cop a nod as they accelerated toward the checkpoint.
    "That fucking guy and this duty he's on, I got one thing to say about that guy."
    He nodded to himself.
    "Better him than me, man. Better him than me."
    Park was looking out the right side window, down at the I-5.
    Some stretches were still entirely open. This one, directly under a checkpoint, was sealed by barricades of abandoned cars a quarter mile to the north and the south. From what Park heard, the middle sections of the barricades would be rigged with charges to blow the cars out of the way if a military or law enforcement column needed to pass. Through most of the length of the 5, from the Mexican to the Canadian borders, a lane was supposed to be kept open for military traffic, but there were long unpoliced stretches of the interstate where road gangs set tariffs, using the lane to cruise north and south, pulling motorists over and siphoning their gas. Down here that kind of thing wasn't much of a worry. There was the more basic worry regarding the many choke points where abandoned cars had accumulated like plaque in an artery.
    Like the plaques left behind on a sleepless brain, blocking its normal function, leading it to Baroque variations on its usual course of business.
    Park thought about all these accretions of debris, within the body and without, driving it to more bizarre extremes. The Crown Vic rolled to a stop at the checkpoint, and he looked up at the hanged man twisting slightly to and fro in a hot shaft of air rising from the generators.
    The cops in the front seat showed ID and badges to the cops manning the checkpoint, showed the ID they'd taken off Park, and were waved along with specific instructions about how to approach Silverlake Station.
    Coming off the overpass, the bed of the Los Angeles River behind them, they passed the Los Feliz Golf Course, only slightly more brown now than it had been before severe water rationing became mandatory.
    The boulevard here was