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news. Already, an e-blast had gone out to political and advocacy blogs about the action, and buzz was building.
    â€œYou gonna mention SubbaKhan tomorrow?” Magrady asked.
    â€œI should,” she answered, taking a long pull on her drink.It was already past one in the morning. “But yeah, I know that would be irresponsible, wouldn’t it?” Bonilla had already had this discussion with her executive director. There was, at this moment, no evidence indicating the blitzkrieg originated within the Stygian inner sanctum of the all-consuming kraken that as far as Bonilla was concerned, was headed by the tentacled triumvirate of Dick Cheney, William Kristol, and the truly scary eviscerating automaton, Ann Coulter.
    â€œPlus you’d get fired,” Magrady offered. “You’d be breaking the detente. Y’all gotta be lining up for your free drinks at the Emerald Shoals opening like the other community partners and unions.”
    â€œBut it can’t just be coincidence,” she insisted, glaring at him.
    â€œLook, my boy Stover could have alerted his buddies to keep their antennas tuned to your doings.”
    She said, “He does have a fierce hard-on about you, that’s for sure. I mean, it wasn’t your fault about what went down in ’Nam.”
    â€œThere’s that,” he said, gesturing with his hand in an effort to halt her from going into painful history. One service-related and guilt-wracked visit to the past was all he could take for an evening. “The other thing to consider is that you have a snitch in your midst.”
    â€œWhat, like a police spy? Like back in the day of Chief Gates and his Public Disorder Intelligence Division?”
    PDID undercover cops had infiltrated community groups as agent provocateurs. Bonilla was a student of L.A.’s activist archives. She’d spent hours reading through such files and articles from the ’70s and ’80s down at a place in South Central called the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a repository of that kind of material. Magrady had accompanied her on more than one outing there to read through old papers from such now defunct groups like the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA.
    â€œI was wondering if it wasn’t some turncoat secretly on the payroll of your arch enemies,” he opined.
    Bonilla didn’t say anything.
    â€œMaybe I’m being paranoid, but if I were the head of SubbaKhan, kicked back at my desk puffing on my Arturo Fuente maduro, I’d be figuring out how to stay one step ahead of you Hugo Chavez-quotin’ subversives.”
    â€œThat would be illegal,” she remarked.
    â€œI’m not sure it is. And even if that were so, how would you prove it?”
    â€œIt worries me the way your mind works.”
    He smiled broadly. “Me, too.”
    Bonilla, who’d been pacing, sat down. They were in the small kitchen of her apartment in a 1920s-era building, replete with Zig-Zag Moderne touches on the façade. It was situated on Catalina in a blended area of Koreatown and Pico-Union. Where one could spot
carnicerías
with life-sized plastic bulls on their roofs next door to Korean wedding gown shops, whose display windows contained ice beauty mannequins with thousand mile stares looking out past the neon Hangul onto the changing city.
    â€œThat would be some shady shit, ya know?” Bonilla stated.
    â€œI ain’t saying you gotta go all black-ops and start waterboardin’ fools to talk, but you do have low-income and poor folk you’re working with.”
    â€œThat’s bourgeois thinking, Magrady,” she groused. “I’ll have to send your monkey ass to the re-education camp.”
    He chuckled. “Or am I being the real Stalinist here? You got people who are barely getting by, Janis. Maybe they have a medical condition or their kid is in trouble with the law yet again. It’s not hard to find