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“You can work with him as an unpaid intern. We’ll see from there.”

“Awesome.”

Julie slips the bag over her shoulder and looks at me.

“I’ll call you. Keep an eye on our guest.”

“My guest.”

“Call me if anything changes.”

“Bye. Thanks,” says Candy as Julie weaves her way through the crowd.

When she’s gone, Candy finishes her drink.

“Seriously,” she says. “We have to talk about some kind of timetable for me coming back to Max Overdrive. I love Brigitte, but I can’t live without a plan.”

“Trust me. I know how you feel.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I wasn’t sure for a while there.”

She pushes her leg against mine under the table. I look around, making sure no one can see. I think we’re okay and she feels good, so I don’t try to stop her.

“Look,” I say. “If we work together we’ll see each other all the time. Aside from that, give it until the later part of the month before you come back. Okay? Maybe by then I’ll have Sleeping Beauty out of the store.”

“Can I come over now?” she says. “Seeing as how we’re colleagues, I should have a look at the dead man.”

“I don’t see why not. But we can’t leave at the same time. I’ll go. You go and order another drink. Take off in, say, twenty minutes.”

She picks up the shot glass and rolls it between her palms.

“Twenty minutes is a long time to be all on my own. What if someone asks me for a date?”

“Do what you think is best, but remember that your guitar amp is still at Max Overdrive.”

“What do I have to do to get it back?” she says.

“Awful things. Depraved things.”

“You bad man.”

I get up from the table.

“Forget twenty minutes. Make it ten.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.”

She heads back to the bar. I go out the door.

LOS ANGELES IS a busted jukebox in a forgotten bar at the ass end of the high desert. The city only exists between the pops, skips, and scratches of the old 45s. Snatches of ancient songs. Lost voices. The jagged artifacts of a few demented geniuses, one-­hit wonders, and lip-­synching frauds. Charlie Manson thought he was going to be the next Beatles and we know how that turned out. This city is built on a bedrock of high crimes and rotten death. The Black Dahlia. Bugsy Siegel. The Night Stalker. We’ve buried and forgotten more bodies than all the cemeteries of Europe. Someday the water is going to run out and the desert will strip this town down to its Technicolor bones. Even the buzzards won’t want it and the city knows it. Maybe that’s why I like it.

It’s not a long walk back to Max Overdrive and I can let my mind wander.

It’s funny to be thinking about the desert when there’s still so much water around, cutting off streets with blocked sewer drains. Signs of the weird floods that nearly drowned the city at Christmas are fading fast, but not completely gone. L.A. doesn’t have the luxury of hundred-­year flood warnings. We don’t have that kind of relationship with water or the past. And this flood wasn’t anything to do with global warming or