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“Oh yeah,” Travis heartily agreed. “You don’t have fires back east like they do out here.”

“Yeah, that was pretty bad. So, um, what you do in LA?”

“This and that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I work for a guy name of Lamming—Melton Lamming.” He was gazing into my eyes.

It was a pickup, all right—a lethal one.

“You workin’ now?” I wondered aloud.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“If you’re ready to go,” he replied, at the same time slapping a hundred-dollar bill down on the bar.

The valet brought Travis’s lime-colored Porsche to the bar entranceway.

“Hop in, Mr. Oliver.”

While I buckled my seat belt, he stepped on the gas.

With great dexterity he drove and wove, sped up and slowed down, made it through two amber lights and then, on a street named Warrington, pulled up into a private driveway and into a garage.

Travis jumped out, somehow flipped on a light, pulled down the garage door, and said, “Could you get out please, Mr. Oliver? I have to go over you.”

I heaved my body out of the low-slung sports car and allowed the human embodiment of Charon to run an electronic wand over me, looking for locator, listening, and/or recording devices. When I came up clean he threw the wand behind the driver’s seat, went to the back wall of the garage, and pushed it. To my surprise, the back wall was also the back door of the garage.

“Jump in,” he said, gesturing at his fancy sports car. “We got a ways yet to go.”

Once again we were on the move, down the driveway of the house behind the one that offered the front door of the drive-through garage. That house was on another residential street called Tyree. From then on, I was pretty sure we had lost any police tail.

“How come you don’t have a gun?” Travis asked as we were driving south along the ocean on the route to LAX.

“That wand was also a metal detector?”

“One-stop shopping,” he averred.

“If I had one, you’d just have taken it from me, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess. I mean, if I was in your situation, I’d at least try to keep a weapon on me.”

“You think I’ll need it?”

“No. He definitely wants to hear what you’ve got to say.”

“And I definitely wanna say it.”

Along the route to the airport there’s a hill that has a long row of homes, the back ends of which were set on stilts. Travis brought me on a road that led up to the access street for those houses. Once we’d achieved the summit, Travis entered the carport of the third dwelling on the right. This ultramodern house stood on a high platform overlooking western Los Angeles.

I remember thinking that there must have been a better way for me to get to the murderer-rapist. Something that would have afforded at least minimal protection. But it was too late. I had crossed the threshold and now all I could hope for was survival.

31.

THE SILHOUETTE OF a man stood just beyond the open side door of the bird’s nest of a home.