1.

IN THE MORNING, I took George and walked up the street to the Beachwood Market, a throwback little grocery, owned by the same family for seventy-odd years, and picked up kitty litter, pet food, and coffee.

On the way back to the house, George was happy to be in his old stomping grounds, sniffing for traces of dog urine like his life depended on it. And for each sniff, he left his own message, letting the neighborhood know that he was back and wouldn’t be taking shit from anybody should they pass each other on the street.

Then, as we headed up Glen Alder, the sun, after a night of rain, suddenly emerged, and the light was glorious, like a prism had been wiped clean.

We climbed the stairs to my gate, and on the other side of the fence, I said hello to everyone, all the flora and fauna, which I always do when I come home, and the whole place was high on chlorophyll and photosynthesis. The bougainvillea bushes, creeping up the hill, had gone especially mad, forming a thirty-foot carpet of the most radiant purple flowers, and the numerous trees were bright green and still dripping wet after a night’s soaking.

Towering over everything, to the right of the house, like the god of the slope, was the giant eucalyptus tree, a truly mythic figure, at least a hundred feet tall and probably a hundred years old.

It was all a sylvan paradise in the middle of Hollywood, my own little forest, and George and I marched up the thirty-odd stairs to the front door.

Once inside, I set up Walter’s kitty litter in a plastic pan and made some coffee.

Then it was right back out into the day. To begin my murderous hunt for Sebastian and Kunian, I needed two things: a phone and a car. In that order.

From Beachwood, I walked down to a Verizon store on Hollywood Boulevard. I had kept my cell phone number alive—had paid a minimum monthly fee for three years—but the phone itself had died a few months back.

So I got a new phone, paid for with cash from Poole’s money belt, and this gave me access to my contacts again.

I left the store and pulled up the number of an old friend, Claude Brax. We had been cops together back in the ’90s, and after he retired, Claude had opened a bodyguard service, which he was still running. Part of his operation has always been a small fleet of retired police vehicles, detective class—black Mercury Marquises, tricked out with tinted windows and side lamps—and I was hoping Claude could lend me one. I tapped his number, and after several rings I left a voice mail, apologizing for going off the radar for a few years, and could he call me back?

After doing that, I decided to walk a mile down to Vermont, where I still had a small office, half a block from the Dresden Bar. I still had my key, and while I was in Mexico, I’d been in touch over email with my landlord, Phil Murrin, who had kindly suspended my rent for three years, partly because of COVID, but also because the building, which is old and falling apart, is mostly a tax write-off and Mr. Murrin likes to lose money on it.

On top of that, nobody else in their right mind would rent my office: it’s long and narrow and makes you feel like you’re having a strange dream where the world’s proportions are all off. Originally, it had been one side of a storeroom that had been cut in half to make two offices, but the architect had screwed up, and it’s less like an office and more like a gangplank with aspirations to be a walk-in closet.

Anyway, that day, it was sunny and chilly, January in Los Angeles, and Hollywood had gotten spiffed up quite a bit since I had left town. There were no visible homeless encampments and there were at least a dozen new apartment buildings, not a single one with character or flair.

But what do I know? I’m not exactly a beacon of style, and as I walked east on Hollywood, I was back in my LA work clothes: blue-sponge sport coat, blue pullover sweater, white button-down shirt, and khaki pants. Each piece was old and coffee-stained and smelled like it had been in a closet for three years, and topping off my wardrobe was an old black watch cap, which kept my head warm.

So everything about me was the same as it used to be.

Except for my face, which I was reminded of a few minutes later when I ran into Monica, the last woman I had ever made love to, and she didn’t know who I was.