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can blindfold them with dental floss.”
    They spluttered and laughed.
    “Let’s hit it,” Beef said. “I always hated that sign.”
    The car screeched to a stop just off Garvey, the main drag at two a.m. They jumped out and ran toward the stack of business signs promoting eight shops in the mini-mall. The bottom segment was just two huge Chinese letters. The next one up translated its Chinese to BBQ Queen.
    There was a special animus affixed to this spot, since it used be their holy Dixie’s Diner. They lined up like an execution squad, aiming the paintball rifles upward—a Tippman Custom 98, an Extreme Rage ER3, and a BT Omega. Marly Tom had reloaded the paintball shells with permanent oil paint.
    A few cars were passing but nobody stopped to gawk.
    “For white men with big dicks!” Beef shouted.
    The pressure tanks of their guns were fully charged and they fired again and again until the bottom placard was unreadable.
    “Up!”
    They hit Prestigious Learning Center, then Café Happy and they were working on Da Zhen Asian Travel when they heard a siren, and discretion ruled. A few random shots disfigured the top signs.
    “Out comes the Beef-phone!”
    Beef always documented their mayhem with his cellphone camera. He shot two snaps and followed it up with a haw-haw bray.
    As they trotted back to the car, they noticed a shadow up the side road, watching them.
    “Hey, what’s he want, looking at us?”
    “Chrissakes, Beef, go ask him.”
    Instead Beef launched a quick series of shots and the shadow took off.

THREE
Better Living Through Chemistry
    Not a pro, but at least somebody smart enough not to barbecue himself, he thought. The torcher had used the most common timer of all: a cigarette shoved into a book of matches. Walt Roski of the county’s Fire Investigation Unit bent down to point out the shiny ash flakes to his team of half a dozen recruits in white work suits.
    He explained that the immediate fuel load had been bulked up with newspapers as his finger traced lines of accelerant sear, probably charcoal lighter. The student team had been on the scene for half an hour studying the presumed heel of the fire in Sheepshead Canyon, and two of them were documenting everything with big digital cameras.
    His cell phone called him away from the scene—the voice of he who must be obeyed—and Roski left the recruits to pound in posts and string off meter squares like an archeological dig. He was annoyed, but he knew a fed smokejumper had died the day before and another badly burned, and he was sure the call had to do with that.
    He charted his course carefully along the fire roads. The main burn was flaring due east again, still only sixty percent contained, with the open end of the firebox above Monrovia six or seven miles away. He was perfectly safe here, but all the landmarks were altered and the burnout still smoldered in spots.
    It saddened him to see big charred-off trees. A house could be rebuilt in a year, chaparral grew back in a season or two, but ponderosas and firs took a generation. Finally he came upon a half-dozen glum-looking men standing around—clearly desk jockeys, wearing ill-fitting firecoats over their J.C. Penney suits. A motionless bright yellow Jet Ranger rested nearby, a federal chopper, not county. The Shiny Shoes had dropped in from the sky.
    “Gentlemen, Walt Roski. County Arson.” He shook hands all around, not remembering a single name, except Kenya from a handsome black guy. He never did remember names unless he wrote them down. Bad trait for an investigator, but he was getting old and several varieties of rage from a bad divorce and other life calamities had burned through him, leaving his own ecosystem pretty charred.
    A short man with Forest Service patches on his coat stalked toward him, an aging gamecock. You could feel the political buoyancy, an ass-kisser who’d risen through the bureaucracy like a turd in a toilet. He’d taken off his tie, but he still wore black