Chapter One

It was one of those special late June days that the Greater Los Angeles
Area Chamber of Commerce tries to bronze and preserve for all eternity--as
well as for the sake of civic advertising. Semitropically hot but not
suffocating, multicolumnar traffic on the freeways actually free of
vehicular stasis by nine o'clock in the morning, no major sigalerts, and
the limpid turquoise sky brandishing a lovely pink tint thanks to a
wispier-than-usual permeation of smog.

Other than in his highly restricted capacity as a civic-minded citizen,
Maxwell Parker could not have cared less about the current condition of
the metastasizing megalopolis's vaunted but frequently arteriosclerotic
freeway system. As one of those fortunate folk who could commute from home
to office on the overstressed but still highly preferable surface streets,
he was immune to such vehicular concerns. All he had to do was drive the
few blocks from his apartment building up to Lincoln Boulevard, cross the
Santa Monica Freeway, turn right on Wilshire, and mosey his leisurely way
up to Bundy Drive, occasionally shaking his head in empathetic but
distanced wonder at the traffic reports that periodically interrupted the
morning news.

He would have preferred keeping the Aurora's stereo set to one of L.A.'s
innumerable small specialty FM music stations, but starting the day by
listening to one of the several all-news channels was one way of getting a
jump on work. After all, the news was his business. Or rather, a certain
fringe element of it was. Max worked, unabashedly, in the journalistic
freak zone. His job was to make the news--not read about it.<...