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Morricone’s score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly greeted his ears after the line connected. Then he heard the voice of Dexter Grant say, “State the facts please at the tone.”
    Monk said, “Call me when you get in, got something I’d like for you to check on.” He severed the call. From the middle drawer of his desk he extracted a Cuban Monte Cristo cigar. Monk rolled the cigar between his thumb and the first two fingers of his left hand. He bit off the end, fished a match out of the desk and lit it.
    Shafts of late morning light illuminated the chalky vapor rising from the burning cigar. Monk leaned back in his padded stainless steel swivel chair, smoking and thinking. Two hours later, Delilah returned. The dead stump of the cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth.
    â€œHere you go.” She handed Monk a computer printout.
    â€œThank you.” He read the paper. “Was it much trouble?”
    â€œNot really. The folks down at the Alcoholic Beverage Control department are quite sensitive in these post rebellion days to residents’ complaints concerning liquor stores. After a little smoke and mirrors on my part, they showed me the liquor license for the Hi-Life Liquor and Mini mart. That print-out gives its history.”
    â€œIncluding the address for Bong Kim Suh, who originally took it over from a man named John Collier. And look here.” He showed her the sheet. “The current license is under the name of something called Jiang Holdings in Stanton out in Orange County.”
    â€œWhat do you make of that?”
    â€œI be finding out.” Monk threw the used cigar away. He asked Delilah to send the contract over to the Merchants Group. He grabbed his brown checked sport coat from the old fashioned coat rack in the corner, left his .45 locked in his desk and quit the office.
    The ’64 Ford Galaxie 500 had been restored to better than assembly line condition. It was a 289 cubic inch V8, 4 door hardtop, 3 speed automatic, Dearborn-issued muscle, built when the big, gas-guzzling car was supposed to be every American’s birthright. It wasn’t a practical car, as far as fuel economy or tailing someone was concerned, but rebuilding a classic had been a dream shared by Monk and his dad.
    They had discussed and planned which old car they were going to re-do, spending weekends awed at custom car shows and searching junk yards for just the right shell. Something of a long, low silhouette that bespoke of the legacy of the glory days of car styling. ’50s fins didn’t do much for either Monk, and they’d agreed that early ’60s cars, generally a little shorter in their wheel base than their Cold War compatriots and more understated in profile, yet containing road-gobbling mills, was the era for them.
    But then in the summer of ’69, Josiah Monk suddenly died. And the dream of father and son became a fleeting image for the younger Monk. It would be years later before Monk made the wish reality. In between he’d bombed out as a football player on scholarship, and found himself working under the PI license of ex-LAPD detective, Dexter Grant.
    Monk halted his musings as he drove east along Pico Boulevard in the Mid-City area. Nearing Fairfax, the vestiges of the uprising were evident here too. Several lots were still barren of structures, providing mute testimony to the difference between Los Angeles 1992 and Watts 1965.
    The wellspring of both unrests had been the same. Police abuse, dead-end or no jobs, and economic and social racism. But while Watts was contained both geographically and racially to African-Americans, the Spring of ’92 jumped off in South Central but spread to this area, the Latino Pico-Union, to Hollywood and parts of the Valley, and even into the gilded edges of Beverly Hills.
    Monk passed the Hi-Life liquor store on the southwest corner of Pico at Hauser. A middle-aged Korean woman, incongruously dressed in a black knee