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“Where did you get this?”

“What wouldn't surprise you?”

She blinked several times with muscular effort, slow and tense. “I'm not sure. It wasn't just this one, was it?”

“No.”

“I don't know where you would've gotten them, or what they would have to do with anything. My mom took them to send to relatives in Korea.”

The contours of a new twist hardened as I read the honest puzzlement in the echo of her voice, the ridge between her brows.

“So … your mom took pictures of you wearing a kimono to send to your relatives in Korea? Why?”

“I haven't been back to Korea since I was a baby, so she updates the family once in a while.”

“With photo shoots?”

“News, pictures, sure, whatever.”

“And how about the kimono? Where did you even get that thing?”

She bit down on her lower lip with the crooked tooth and a shade of apology. “It was a gift.”

“So if your mom took these pictures for people who don't live in this country, how did the files end up in Greg Miller's office desk?”

Her lower lip gave a dry, stuttering tremble as she said, “I don't know. I've never—” she paused to verify in her head, “I've never even touched the files.”

I remembered the flash drive, hidden away at Stokel, and I remembered that Hector Lopez of IT had gone missing. “Someone thought Greg might want them. He didn't find them. Someone gave them to him. You said everyone knew he was obsessed with you? Did you mean everyone?”

“It was well known.”

“So all that had to happen was for one person to find them and give, or rather sell them to Greg. But they had to get found first.”

Relief rippled her features as her cell phone sang something peppy and manic. She made a ceremony of extracting and answering her phone, fingers pointed and deliberate.

I gave my coffee some attention. It had lost every last hint of scorching heat, but I knocked it back bean-black. I looked at the remains of my sandwich but had no appetite. I kept one ear keyed in as Lori apologized to her mother. Her voice was drunker than she was, running sweet as plum wine in a dribbling stream of Konglish.

She shut her phone with a gentle click like she was turning it off in a movie theater. She gave me a mask of apology that lacked every shade of the requisite emotion. “I have to get back to the club. My mom is furious.” She tapped her tongue to her tooth and played with the curls.

I smiled, indulgent as a grade-school teacher insisting on first-name basis. “All right, I'll walk you back. But don't get silly. This is just the beginning of a very long conversation.”

*   *   *

I remembered that Luke had abandoned me in the middle of Koreatown and I called for a cab. I gave the company the address for the Red Palace.

I left a twenty-dollar bill on the table and Lori and I made our way back to the hostess club. I pulled two new cigarettes from the carton, shoved one in my face, and held the other out to Lori. “Smoke?” I asked through the side of my mouth. She waved hand and head in unison with coy earnest and I stuck the loner in the pocket of my shorts. “It's a nasty habit. You get yourself in enough trouble as it is.”

Her voice came out high-pitched and gaspy. “Am I in trouble?”

“I don't know.” I struck a match, lit up, and shook it out. “Is there anything you haven't told me?”

She shook her head with ingratiating vigor.

I thought about bringing up Albert's story about prostitution in the Red Palace. But there was no way to put that without losing her altogether, and I didn't put that much stock in the words of a slut-shamer.

“You haven't told me much.” I gave her head a light muss. “I like you alright. I can't help it, you remind me of my sister.”

I tried Luke again. His automated secretary didn't sound any happier to hear from me. I finished the Lucky with a peripheral view of Lori's moping brown head turned to the sidewalk.

When we reached the Red Palace, my cab was waiting.

“I'm sorry to drop this on you all at once,” I said. “But you're right in the middle of something serious, whether you know it or not. I'm going to need your number.”

She mumbled her phone number, and I noticed she was shaking. She curled her fingers around mine and locked them together with twitchy strength. “Are you safe?”

I smiled. “I sure hope so.”

“Please be careful.” She squeezed my hand and disappeared through the Palace doors.

I slid into the cab and asked for Rossmore and Beverly. The clock over the radio read 1:46
A.M
. I slumped in one corner of the car and watched the light and dark of the city run by. I kept my mouth shut until we hit Rossmore, where I asked the driver to turn and directed him to my car on Lillian.

I drove to Park La Brea, as sober as I had ever been. I steeled myself against the dread of entering my home. I had to believe I could sleep in my bed, and I remembered I had a deadbolt I didn't always use, and good ears, and a decent set of kitchen knives. I pulled into the parking lot and drove through it slowly, but it gave nothing away. The elevator in the lobby was still broken and I took my time with the stairs. My studio was the right kind of quiet, and I bolted the door and grabbed the bat. I slipped out of my shoes and picked up my laptop on the way to bed.

I propped two pillows against the headboard and sank into them with a creak. I brought my knees up so my thighs made a cool bed for the computer and burrowed my feet under the covers. I checked my e-mail. Among the junk mail from various names selling various things was a whole lot of nothing from Luke and an e-mail from Jackie. It was time-stamped at 12:15
A.M.
and asked, “Do you know where Diego is?”

I felt myself straighten, my shoulder blades pushing up on wood behind the pillows. I had enough to worry about with one rogue friend on the loose, and it would have taken a lot of worrying for Jackie to reach out to me. Diego unaccounted for and away from a fully charged cell phone with e-mail access after 8:00
P.M.
was not quite as alarming as a confirmed terrorist attack, but it wasn't unworthy of the comparison. I tried his cell. It was becoming a night of courting voice mail. I sent three e-mails. The first was an angry inquiry to Luke as to his whereabouts. The second was a gentler missive to Diego, letting him know his wife was worried and that I would call him again later. The third was to the worried wife, declaring my utter uselessness. All three were signed with a bad taste hounding the back of my tongue.

I called Luke and Diego once more each, just to get it through my head that they weren't about to pick up. I tried Chaz again, with the same result. I googled a couple of gossip rags to subdue my brain waves, but it was no use, and all that was sordid just made me think of Lori's strange pictures. I closed the laptop and placed it on the other side of the bed. I thought about washing up, but suspected I was on a path that ended in slumber and felt disinclined to disturb it. I wormed out of my shorts, cuddled a pillow, and drifted. It was no steady raft, but somewhere it evened out and I slipped asleep like a stowaway on inky waters.

 

Eleven

My dreams were miasmic tarantulous things full of sticky voices and glinting teeth, but they dissolved in the morning sun without aftertaste. All things considered, my unconscious got off light. I hadn't moved more than an inch in my sleep.

My day lay before me, a balled-up tangle of delicate chains that I didn't know where to start yanking. I pushed down on the mattress with my shoulder and craned my neck to look at the clock. It was 9:40
A.M.
and the sun poured through my window like it had been knocking impatiently for some time. I looked at the door. It was undisturbed.

I let my head fall back onto the pillow and let myself believe for just one second that I didn't have to get up to face this day. I filled my chest with hot air and sprang to postured attention. I slumped my way to the kitchenette and brewed myself a cup of drip strong enough to paint my nostrils black. It tasted like punishment and I took it like medicine, standing all the while over the counter. My head ached and a hand to a jellyfish scalp confirmed that it hadn't done a lot in the way of healing. I took a cup of yogurt and a triple dose of Advil for breakfast.

I brought my computer and my iPhone to the coffee table and sat forward on the couch. I set about evaluating my tasks.

I roused my laptop and refreshed the e-mail screen, and for a moment I felt a screaming gleam of hope flash behind my eyes. It lasted for the second it took me to scan the lonely, bolded newcomers in my in-box. Sunday morning meant even the vendors were shy in knocking, and the lack of response to any of my personal e-mails was unmitigated by the usual spam cushions.

I dialed Diego. I dialed Luke. I thought about dialing Chaz, but decided he could wait until I'd collected my friends.

I tried Jackie. After four long rings I heard the end of a quick and earnest inhalation followed by a voice that was tired, gasping, unfamiliar.

“Hi, who is this?”

“Jackie? It's Song. New number.”

Silence pounded in my ear.

“Is something wrong?”

I thought I heard a hiccup from a hundred yards away.

“Where's Diego?”

And with that, the girdle came undone and she started to cry.

“Where is he?” I heard a voice that was barely mine.

“He—he—he—”

“Jackie, where is Diego?”

“He—he—he—”

“Dammit, Jackie, talk to me. Where is he?” The voice that wasn't mine was yelling. “Jackie, where are you? I'm coming.”

“I'm at a police station.” She sobbed like a woman on the verge of drowning. “Juniper, my husband is dead.”

*   *   *

I dropped the phone. It fell to the wood floor and made the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest. Jackie's wails were swallowed in the wormhole between me and the rest of the world.

I sat for a while, still and barely breathing. After some time, I stood and slunk into the shower and turned the water to scalding. I went through the routine—shampoo, conditioner, soap—with a drawn meticulousness like I was being watched and graded. I made the mistake of shaving and gave myself a savage nick at the kneecap. With the water beating down, the blood didn't have time to bead and it ran ruby and dilute down my leg. I stared at it and felt my cheeks tense and my eyes burn. In the confusion of running fluids and of the muddle of my mind, I couldn't count the tears but I cried.

I'd forgotten to draw the curtain and my floor was flooded but I didn't care. I patted myself dry with the wilted energy I might use to clean an overripe fruit. I threw on new underwear and a T-shirt and slumped back onto the couch. My eyes felt beat and my mouth felt dry. The silence sounded more like static than absence of noise.

Jackie was at the police station. Diego didn't die in his sleep. And the way things were going, I would've eaten my hat if he wasn't involved in whatever mess had sprouted around me since Friday night. I ground my teeth and sent Jackie a text: “What's the address, I'm coming.”

I set the iPhone on the table and pushed myself up with all the strength in the heels of my hands, which didn't amount to much. I forgot for a moment whether I'd brushed my teeth, but a quick taste of my mouth answered that for me and I scrubbed the whole cavity short of bleeding. I felt my contacts like a thick film in my eyes and I doused them with a few drops of solution and a lot of hard blinks. I picked yesterday's shorts off the floor and put them on, then fastened a bra on under my baggy black V-neck. I was sitting on the couch, looking at my shoes, when the phone sang out with the notice of a new text.

She was at the LAPD headquarters downtown, at Second and Spring. I could make it there in twenty-five minutes. I texted her: “Don't move.” I put on my flip-flops, grabbed what I needed, and flowed to my car quick and heavy as floodwater.

Sunday morning. Slim traffic. I turned the stereo on and my brain off. Third Street took me there smooth and undemanding as a conveyor belt.

The station stood eleven stories tall on the western border of Little Tokyo. Scant palm trees played nice in front, dwarfed by the station's height, darkened by its dark glass. I parked illegally, blinkers on.

It didn't take me long to find Jackie, and when I did, I wished I hadn't. She had never warmed to me but when she caught my image among the unfamiliar bustlers, suits, and deadbeats in the station, her features melted with the yield of cold ice hitting cold water, and I was her raft, her crutch, her best friend. She threw her arms around my neck and plunged her nose into my shoulder like she was searching for the scent of suffocation. Her sobs pulsed through me in currents. I put a hand in her hair with all the knightly reassurance I could gather.

“Can we go outside? I need air.”

She nodded. When she lifted her head I felt the cotton of my T-shirt stick to my skin where she had left a puddle of tears.

We sat outside the station like a couple of lost kids. What I really needed was a cigarette, but I remembered the ultrasound, the last and only recipient of Diego's DNA, fatherless now.

“Have you seen him?” I asked.

She wheezed as she nodded.

“How did it happen?”

“Shot. Diego.” She almost laughed, a limp flutter of irony shaking her lower lip. “Shot.”

“What do you mean he was shot?”

“I don't know. He was shot. It's what they said.” She was sobbing.

“Where? How?”

“They said he was downtown outside some abandoned warehouse. Skid Row, Juniper. And they said…” She sobbed again. “They said they found drugs in his pocket.”

“Drugs? What, he was carrying a doggy bag of crack?”

She bit the inside of her lower lip and convulsed in the shape of a nod.