Chapter One

Chadwick struggled with his bow tie.

He was thinking about what he would say, how he would break the news that would end his marriage, when Norma came up behind him and told him about the heroin in their daughter's underwear drawer.

He turned, the bow tie unraveling in his fingers.

Norma wore only her slip, her bare arms as smooth and perfectly muscled as they'd been when she was nineteen. Her eyes glowed with that black heat she saved for lovemaking and really huge arguments, and he was pretty sure which she was planning for.

"Heroin," he said.

"In a Ziploc, yeah. Looked like brown sugar."

"What'd you do with it?"

"I smoked it. What do you think? I flushed it down the toilet."

"You flushed it down the toilet. Jesus, Norma."

"It wasn't hers. She was keeping it for a friend."

"You believed that?"

"She's my daughter. Yes, I believed her."

Chadwick stared out the window, down at Mission Street, where the Christmas lights popped and sparked under the sudden weight of ice.

He'd lived in this house almost all of his thirty-seven years, and he couldn't remember a November night this cold. The glass storefront of the corner taquer'a was greasy with steam. Lowriders cruised the boulevard billowing smoke from their exhaust pipes. Twenty-fourth Street station was swept clean of the homeless-all gone to shelters, leaving behind piles of summer clothes like insect husks. Next door, the Romos had turned up their music the way other people turn up the heater-the sorrowful heartbeat of narcocorrido pulsing through the townhouse's wal