LUKE FELT THE FIRST BULLET whistle by him before he hit the water. The gun’s report echoed so loud under the bridge it sounded like a cannon. A moving target was hardest to hit, so he knew he had to keep going. The shock of the cold water against his hot, sweaty body was numbing, but bullets hitting the water and a sharp pain on his shin as it scraped a rock sobered him. He expected the guy he’d punched to grab him and fight, but that didn’t happen as he pushed to get away from the shooter and lost the sense of where the man in the plaid shirt was.

His lungs felt like they were going to explode, but he kept swimming with a strong underwater stroke, helped along by the river’s current. His knee hit another rock, and Luke wanted to scream but he kept going. When he finally had no choice but to surface, he took a quick breath and submerged again, expecting more gunshots.

None sounded and he let the current carry him. When he surfaced again, he kept his head up long enough to get his bearings and saw that he was in the middle of the channel and that the current had carried him very nearly to the ocean. He was about even with the River’s End Café, at the bike path’s end. Something caught his eye: plaid. He pulled up. It was the man he’d punched, floating facedown, also carried by the current.

Changing tack, and ignoring the pain in his leg from where he’d scraped it, he reached out to grab the man, who was not moving, and swam hard for the shore. On the Seal Beach side just past River’s End, the bank was shallow and sandy. During low tide there were sandbanks visible where fishermen could stand and cast. Luke hit the sandbar, fighting the current and not wanting to pick up any more bruises. He held the man in the plaid shirt under the arms, pulling him up onto the sand. Fishermen on the rocks watched him with curiosity but none offered to help.

I didn’t hit him hard enough to knock him out, Luke thought. But as he got the man’s deadweight out of the water and took a closer look, he saw that this was not a drowning. There was a wound in the man’s chest.

Breathing hard, kneeling in wet sand, Luke looked back the way he’d come. Why is this guy dead when they were both after me?

Several people on the rocks seemed to realize what they were looking at and rushed down to offer Luke assistance.

“Hey, pal, you okay?” one of them asked.

He looked up to a face he recognized —Gus, the cook from River’s End —and shook his head. “Could you call 911?”

Gus pulled a cell phone out of a pocket.

Luke stood and brushed off his bloody, sandy legs, glad his shoes had stayed on when he went into the water. He stepped back from the dead man and checked himself to take inventory of his injuries. His left shin and knee both had deep, bloody gashes that were starting to ache.

He heard sirens and looked toward the Seal Beach Boulevard undercrossing. He was a good mile south thanks to the rapid current. But everything had happened in Seal Beach; familiar Long Beach cops would not be handling this crime.

Luke felt no satisfaction that the attempt on his life might be the thing that granted his dearest wish. Another body could just be the thing that reopens the case.

Crunchers occupied a few acres of industrial property north of Anaheim Street and west of the 710 freeway. Abby knew from Woody that there had always been a junkyard on the property. When he was a kid, it was rows and rows of wrecked cars. On Saturdays people could come in and search for usable parts from the cars. An accident involving a car falling on a child during one of those Saturdays ended that and caused the owner of the yard to go bankrupt. For a while environmentalists wanted the whole area cleaned up and made into a park, and a fight raged for years.

The city didn’t have the money for cleanup, and while the environmentalists tried to raise it, they were not successful before Sanders stepped in and bought the lot. That was nearly twenty years ago, Abby realized, because he’d owned the place longer than she’d been a cop.

The lot was still a repository for wrecked cars, but only on a small scale. The majority of the space was taken up by recyclable material: cardboard, plastic, and cans and bottles. As she pulled the plain car into the lot, they passed a lineup of street people and homeless with shopping carts and improvised wheelbarrows loaded with all types of recyclable material waiting their turn for it to be weighed and bought by Crunchers.

“Wonder how much stolen material is buried in among all that,” Bill commented as Abby parked the car.

She said nothing, concentrating instead on the tack she wanted to take with Sanders. He was cagey and slippery, and she fully expected he’d scream for a lawyer right off the bat. It was a warm day, and when she stepped out of the car, her nostrils were assaulted by the smell of old motor oil and musty cardboard.

The office was housed in a single-wide trailer. She walked up the steps ahead of Roper and opened the door. There was no one sitting at what Abby guessed was the receptionist’s desk. The area was packed with file cabinets, some looking older than Abby. Practically hidden between a couple of cabinets was a door with the words The Boss written across it.

Abby knocked and heard cursing, then the sound of footsteps as the trailer shook.

George Sanders threw the door open. “Chalky, what is —?” Anger faded to surprise. “Sorry; I thought it was someone else.” His guard went up like a shade. “What brings you here, Detective Hart?”

“I’d like to talk to you about Nadine Hoover.”

He scowled. “I already spoke to Murphy and her mother. I don’t know where the kid ran, never saw her that day. She left me in the lurch, that’s for sure.”

“We found her.”

“Great.” He threw his hands up. “Problem solved. So why bug me?”

“She was beaten half to death.” Roper spoke before Abby could stop him. “Probably by someone who works for you.”

Sanders cursed. “Nope, we ain’t going there. This conversation is over. Stay away from my business, my family, and me. Unless you got a warrant, you talk to my lawyer.” With that, the door was slammed in their faces.

Abby said nothing as they drove away from the junkyard. She wasn’t certain whether she could have gotten more out of Sanders or not, but it stung having a door slammed in her face. And they had nowhere near enough to ask a judge to issue a warrant for anything, certainly not security tapes.

“Sorry.”

“What?” Abby glanced across the car at Roper.

“I guess I jumped in his mug too quick.”

Taken aback because she wasn’t used to male partners admitting they’d jumped the gun, Abby collected her thoughts before she answered. “Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. Sanders didn’t just set up shop. It’s unlikely we would have gotten him to talk under the best of circumstances.”

She’d taken the freeway from Crunchers, deciding to talk to the widow Jenkins in person about Sanders. She lived in East Long Beach. Now as Abby made the transition from the northbound 710 to the southbound 405, she sighed and relaxed. Maybe Roper wouldn’t be a bad partner.

“Even if we have hard evidence against him, unless we have something to deal with, he’ll never give us the straight scoop about anything.”

“Thanks. I guess you’re right —”

The car radio beeped with emergency traffic as the dispatcher aired a shots-fired call on the flood control bike path. Though they were on the other side of the city, Abby turned it up to listen. Any kind of crime or violence was rare in that part of the flood control.

“Shots fired on the bike path?” Roper whistled. “My wife and her friends like to walk down there. I sure hope this is a case of someone hearing vehicle backfires.”

Abby found herself agreeing. She loved running and biking on the bike path as well, which was on the whole a safe place. The thought of violence down there was unsettling.

“It’s on the border. Might be a Seal Beach call.” Roper had leaned forward to listen and repeated what the dispatcher said.

Abby hiked a shoulder. “You want to head that way until it’s code 4?”

Roper looked up. “You don’t mind?”

“No.” Abby passed the exit for the Jenkins house and continued on the freeway, taking the exit that led toward the beach and the shots call. A minute later one of the responding units spoke up.

“Boy 10, I’m on scene and this looks like it’s a Seal Beach caper. They’re on scene.”

“10-4, Boy 10. Are you code 4?” An emergency code red beep sounded in the car as dispatchers waited for Boy 10 to tell them there was no immediate danger. The code red would keep the air clear of routine traffic. Was the threat still there or was it as Roper had postulated —a simple mistake?

“Boy 10, this is code 4. The shooter fled in an unknown direction. I have a male victim here. Seal Beach wants confirmation medics are rolling.”

“Paramedics are rolling. Can you advise about injuries?”

“GSW to the chest. Aw, this might be a 187.”

Abby had turned around once she’d heard that the crime was not in their city. Even though she felt a jolt when she heard 187, it wasn’t their city or their case. She and Bill were a short distance from the Jenkins house when Boy 10 came back on the air.

“The Seal Beach units have a request.” He stopped transmitting for a moment. “Officer Jensen is asking that Detectives Hart and Roper respond if they’re available.”

The dispatcher answered Boy 10 while Abby and Bill exchanged surprised looks. Was this shooting related to one of their current cases?

“David Henry 4, are you on the air?”

Roper grabbed the radio mike to answer the dispatcher. “10-4, we copied the request and are en route.”