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again.”
    “Land sakes.” She laughed. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Every once in a while you get bushwhacked by the peculiar in this old town.”
    “My daughter and I trade examples we find of L.A. oddity. It’s a sort of game.”
    “How old’s your daughter?”
    “Thirteen in a month. She lives with her mom but I see her as much as I can.”
    “I hope she turns out okay for you. I never used to worry about Jimmy going bad. I worried about him feeling inadequate because he tried so hard and just couldn’t get As, but he didn’t have a single nutty gene anywhere in his DNA.” There was a moment of quiet. “Now I’m worrying a bit.”
    “I know what you mean. There’s just too much random in the world.”
    “You hit the nail right on the head.”
    Magnolia was one of those commercial wastelands that festered out along the big L.A. thoroughfares, constantly in nondescript transition from something to something else. Atlas World Famous Sausages was next door to Gurjian Rug Cleaners, and then Mr. Radiator/Señor Radiadores, Greenglow Hydroponic Vegetables, Abbarotes Tijuanas, the Great Wall Bar with the Institute of Paralegal and Metaphysics upstairs, Cash for Your Car bedecked with colored pennants and big dollar bills, Golden Touch Fire and Motoring Advice, a weedy lot with a big billboard that said STILL GUILTY, and then a welter of color called Almost Humanoid Pottery. When he drove past a liquor store, prosaically named Art’s Liquor, it was a mercy.
    “Random,” she said, “is what’s preying on me. Random killers and random muggers and random this and that.”
    They passed the Bahia Caporales, Joey’s Tattoos and Truck Lettering, a little theater doing Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, and a fern bar called Molly’s Toucan Play That Game. Just random places.
    T HIS time she was coming in, too, but separately, and after she’d agreed to give him a ten-minute head start. The Broom Closet was a coffeehouse and bookstore that exuded the New Age through every pore, like righteous indignation. He slid in past a skinny dark woman with green hair browsing the bookshelves at the door who excused herself and duckwalked out of his way rather than be touched. Just inside was a big sign that said AN YE HARM NONE, DO WHAT YE WILL. The walls were lavender where they weren’t covered with wavery watercolors of women blessing someone just out of frame. Display cases of trinkets sat around for browsers, but no one was browsing. A dozen women chatted away at round tables, mostly in long dresses with a lot of jewelry. The woman at the coffee counter thought about it for a moment before pointing out Jill Annunziata, who was sitting with two older women sipping what was undoubtedly bat-wing tea.
    She had Big Hair, jet-black and shiny and plumped out to the sides as if hit by sheet lightning, and her face was so regular and sharp-featured and beautiful it hurt your eyes. She wore turquoise on an overlarge plaque suspended around her neck and on every finger, and she had a calm about her that seemed to infect the other two women, who banked a little this way and that as she talked to them. She saw him coming across the room and took them all to silence with some gesture so small he couldn’t make it out. A New Age noise began to wail softly from a sound system, like a sinus being rasped away.
    “You’re looking for Jimmy,” she pronounced, before he could introduce himself.
    Of course, he thought, what else would a fiftyish male be doing there? But he could see she liked to play at omniscience. “Am I going to bark like a dog when you snap your fingers?” he said.
    She waited a long time, on the edge of a smile. “We don’t play tricks like that,” she said equably after he had been made to wait a suitable stretch. “Please sit down.”
    “But we could, couldn’t we?”
    Jill Annunziata dismissed the other two, but so politely and so subtly that they seemed happy to leave.
    “Everything you think you know about