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the counter. He looked at the chalkboard where the daily menu was written, then looked at what was left of the geoduck lying beside the grill and made a face. He turned away and walked back to a pay phone they had in the rear. Some guys you can never please.
    Twenty minutes later I was on my second pot of tea when Nobu Ishida came out and started up the street toward the parking garage. I paid, left a nice tip, then went out onto the sidewalk. When Ishida disappeared into the garage, I trotted back down to my car, got in, and waited. Maybe Ishida had a secret vaultdug into the core of a mountain where he kept stolen treasure. Maybe he called this secret place The Fortress of Solitude. Maybe he was going there now and I could follow him and find the Hagakure and solve several heretofore unsolved art thefts. Then again, maybe not. I was three cars behind him when he pulled out in a black Cadillac Eldorado and turned right toward downtown.
    We left Little Tokyo and went past Union Station and Olvera Street with its gaudy Mexican colors and food booths and souvenir shops. There were about nine million tourists, all desperately snapping pictures of how “the Mexicans” lived, and buying sombreros and ponchos and stuffed iguanas that would start to ripen about a week after they got home. We swung around the Civic Center and were sitting in traffic at Pershing Square, me now four cars behind and counting the homeless bag ladies around the Square, when I spotted the guy in the Grateful Dead tee shirt from the yakitori grill. He was sitting behind the wheel of a maroon Ford Taurus two cars in back of me and one lane over. There was another Asian guy with him. Hmmmm. When the light changed and Ishida went straight, I hung a left onto Sixth. Two cars later, the Taurus followed. I stayed on Sixth to San Pedro and went south. The Taurus came south, too. I took the Dan Wesson out of the glove box and put it between my legs. Freud would’ve loved that.
    At a spotlight on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Commerce, the Taurus pulled up on my left. I looked over. The guy in the Grateful Dead shirt and the other guy were staring at me and they were not smiling. I gripped the Dan Wesson in my right hand and said, “Sony makes a fine TV.”
    The guy on the passenger side said something to the driver, then turned back to me and flipped open a small black leather case with a silver and gold L.A.P.D. badge in it. “Put it over to the curb, asshole.”
    “Moi?”
    The Taurus bucked out ahead under the red light and jerked to the right, blocking me. They were out and coming before the Taurus stopped rocking. I put both hands on the top of the steering wheel and left them there.
    The guy who had shown me the badge came directly at me. The other guy walked the long way around the car and came up from behind. The car behind us blew its horn. I said, “I swear to God, Officer. I came to a full stop.”
    The one with the badge had the sort of face they hand out to bantamweights, all flat planes and busted nose, and a knotty build to go with it. I made him for forty but he could’ve been younger. He said, “Get out of the car.”
    I kept my hands on the wheel. “There’s a Dan Wesson .38 sitting here between my legs.”
    Grateful Dead had a gun under my ear before I finished the sentence. The other cop brought his gun out, too, and put it in my face and reached through the window and lifted out the Dan Wesson. Grateful Dead pulled me out of the Corvette and shoved me against the fender and frisked me and took my wallet. Other horns were blowing but nobody seemed to give a damn.
    I said, “Why are you guys watching Nobu Ishida?”
    The bantamweight saw the license and said, “PI.”
    Grateful Dead said, “Shit.” He put away his gun.
    The boxer tossed my wallet into the Corvette and dropped the Dan Wesson into the roof bay behind thedriver’s seat. I said, “How about those search and seizure laws, huh?”
    They got back in their Taurus