Before he gets here, there’s a couple of things I want to get straight.” The lieutenant stood in the doorway, filling it so completely that Danny Romero and I faced him from his shadow. He’d already expressed his surprise upon seeing me, and chewed me out for hanging up on him that morning. In th...
There was still time to beat the worst of the afternoon rush, which seemed to be starting earlier and ending later with each passing year. It made me think of that new high-rise complex that would be going up before too long next to Chinatown, filling the railyards with business towers and packin...
I saw it from a corner restaurant near the hotel, off the main boulevard, sitting in a leatherette booth with a cup of coffee and my notebook open in front of me. Beyond the big windows, shopkeepers were raising the folding metal doors on their paleterias while the ubiquitous taxis whisked people...
The two adult birds were nowhere in sight, which was all part of the plan. Fred, Maurice, and I watched from the patio as we so often had in past years, Maurice serving as the cheerleader. “Go, go, go,” he whispered. The half-grown bird flapped its wings tentatively a few times. Then it suddenly ...