I put the package under my arm and walked to my car. Just that moment, the wind kicked up. Not an ordinary wind, though. Anyone who’s lived in Angel City can tell the difference between a night breeze that comes cool from the west and this—a Santa Ana, that furnace blow from the desert to the Pacific. Some say Santa Anas set your teeth on edge, like nails on the chalkboard of life. Husband-killing weather, they used to call it back when I was on the inside. But not me. To me, Santa Anas are Angel City’s Nor’easter, the closest we get to weather with its own personality.

I lay the package in back and lowered the top on the Porsche. If you’re in Angel City and don’t drive with the top down during a Santa Ana, you might as well go to the beach in brown loafers and black socks.

To get to the Whisky, I headed south on Beverly Glen, intending to turn left at Sunset toward the strip. But in the distance and getting nearer I could hear sirens, several of them. Then came flashing lights. I slowed to a crawl at the sight of black and whites and fire trucks across the road. A cop waved a hand.

“Road’s closed,” he shouted. “Turn around.”

That’s when I smelled the smoke. The only thing surer than the Santa Anas is a fire when they blow.

I sped north and hung a right on Mulholland. Instead of turning down Coldwater, I kept going, figuring that whatever was going wrong on Beverly Glen might be in Coldwater Canyon, too.

Laurel Canyon was a better choice. I could take it down to the Sunset Strip right near the Whisky. Lost in the sirens, the wind, and the smoke, I almost passed the hitchhiker, her thumb pointing up. I slowed till I was close enough to see she was the woman of my dreams, and to this day I’m not sure I didn’t dream her up.

I asked where she was going.

“Same place you are,” she said, “Laurel Canyon.”

“How’d you know that?” I said.

“Where else would you be going on a night like this?” she said in a way that should’ve scared me.

She climbed in, and we pulled away.

“Nice night,” she said. “An Angel City exclusive. Santa Ana under the stars.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” I said.

“Mind if I vape?” she asked.

“Not at all,” I said. But she didn’t open her purse. Was she waiting for me? I handed her a pen from my door panel. “I think you’ll like this.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, rolling the taste around her mouth like a fine Bordeaux. “Angel City Laurel Canyon. I’d know it anywhere.”

“You have a good palate,” I said.

“And you have good taste.”

“Thanks.” The night was getting better and better.

As soon as I turned south on Laurel Canyon, letting the Porsche straighten the curves, she began telling me the canyon’s past—how it had been home to the Tongva tribe before the ranchers moved in, and then how an electric trolley bus that ran for a few years before World War I opened it up to people who wanted to live by the city but not in it, like bohemians and artists and musicians. It was a fast history of Laurel Canyon’s rock stars, porn stars, and gangsters.

She said, “That’s what makes Laurel Canyon the coolest place in Angel City.”

There was no point in arguing, even if I’d wanted to. I asked where she wanted me to drop her.

“I live at the top of Wonderland,” she said. Was that an invitation? “But my car’s parked on Lookout Mountain.”

I was going to ask why she’d been hitchhiking when she said, “What’s your name?” Then, before I could answer: “No, don’t tell me. Keep it a mystery.”

“So that means don’t ask your name either?”

“My car’s right around the corner,” she said.

I turned at Lookout Mountain Road and stopped on the shoulder turnout, behind a parked classic Rolls. “Yours?”

She nodded and tried to hand me back the vape pen loaded with the Laurel Canyon. “Keep it,” I said. “A memento of our adventure.”

“Thanks, I’ll think of you every time I fire up,” she said, followed by the sexiest pause I’d ever heard. “So I’ll think of you often.”

She smiled and winked and got out. My head was spinning as I watched her get into the Rolls and drive off to Wonderland in a Silver Cloud. I laughed.

Then I panicked that I’d been conned. Had she stolen the package? No, there it was in back, where I’d put it. In Angel City, nothing is as it seems, even when it seems to be nothing.

Now for sure I needed to get to the Whisky and make my delivery before nothing happened.

It was getting late. I had to clear my head of what had just happened. No, there’d be no making sense of it but I still had a job to get done, so I needed to get back some sense of perspective. A good place to do that fast was Mt. Olympus, near the mouth of Laurel Canyon and then up a hill. It was one of Angel City’s original high-end housing tracts, sold as a view fit for the gods. Get it? There used to be a guard, usually a little old lady with a cold sore on her lip, who wouldn’t know what to do if there was ever any real trouble.

I drove for a while, got out to look at the view, and fired up some ACV Whisky, not caring about anything, including not carrying about anything. That lasted about five minutes. I drove back down to the mouth of the canyon, merging onto Crescent Heights, then hung a right at Sunset.

Ah, the Sunset Strip. It was cool before being cool was cool. Angel City can be a mean place. But at times and in places it can be whatever you want it to be, too, and the Strip is always one of those places. It’s where people have been coming since the ‘50s to see other people seeing them, and when TV was new and wanted to look hip, somebody set a detective series there and called it 77 Sunset Strip—the perfect address for characters who lived the life that nobody didn’t want in the place nobody didn’t want to be.

A few years later the Strip was crawling (literally: you couldn’t walk a straight line, let alone drive) with young people looking for other young people, and older people who believed that every minute spent on the Strip was a minute off their age.

The Strip had it all, music, movie stars, money, madness—the kind of madness you pay good money to get. But the draw for it all was music, and the music was there thanks to the Whisky. It opened in ’64, and by ’66 it was the uterus of rock’s music scene. New York had the folkies, San Francisco comedy, but Angel City had rock to itself because it had the Whisky.

And it still does. The Whisky is like Peter Pan. It never grows up, never gives in, and is never not cool.

I had to park and didn’t want to walk far. The gods of Mt. Olympus where I’d just been must have been with me. I found a spot on the street, fed my credit card, and picked up the package from the seat. Tim, the door guy, waved me in. The place was packed, people listening to a retro punk new-wave hip-hop band, the Who Bang Klan.

I made my way through the crowd like water creates trails on the sidewalk, finding the line of least resistance. The sooner I made the drop-off, the better I’d be. But I didn’t see anybody I recognized, at least nobody I needed to recognize.

Near the stage I felt somebody tap my shoulder. I turned. The guy was about my height but twice as wide, with a neck the size of my thigh, half of which was tatted, just like half his head was shaved and the other side Mohawked. I didn’t know where to put my eyes. His face had the totems of all the music genres being mined by the band.

“You the Angel City Vaper?” he asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“Who doesn’t?”

Ah, the password. Good. He smiled, looked down at the package under my arm, and said, “Follow me.”

Soon would come the moment.

He led me through a curtain, around a corner that turned out to be the backstage area, and into an alcove with a door that opened onto the alley. When we reached it he stepped aside, to let me through first.

“A real gentleman,” I said, and the next thing I knew I’d been pushed outside, the door slammed and locked behind me, and the package was missing from my hand.

Alone in the alley, I could still hear the band’s bass and drums pulsating through the walls. There was no point in yelling or pounding on the door, but I did anyway just to make a show of it. It made me laugh, letting the dude think he was getting away with it. He needed to so that I could buy more time before he realized he’d stolen nothing.

I patted just below my waist where I’d stashed the real package on the ride up to Mulholland, a ride that seemed like days ago instead of an hour. Yep. It was still there, safe and ready to reach its destination without the wrong guys getting in the way.

But where was the destination? The answer lay right at my feet, written in electric chalk on the asphalt. I walked to the corner then back onto Sunset and leaned against my car, enjoying the passing parade on the Strip—and a kayfun full of where I was heading next: the El Rey.

Getting off the Sunset Strip can be brutal in a car. Take the wrong street and you might end up in a traffic jam that lasts long enough to sing A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Every verse. Good thing I know the few side streets that don’t lead to dead ends and get you down the hill easily.

Soon enough I was on La Cienega, heading south to Wilshire, where the El Rey is a little east of Fairfax. It was built in Angel City’s golden era of movie palaces, 1936, the depths of the Depression, a few years after Grauman’s Chinese opened. Everyone was finally sure that silents were dead and talkies were the present and future, and the only entertainment most people could afford was a night at the movies. It held 700 people who paid a quarter each to watch a double feature, so producers and directors and stars and studio heads on their way home to Beverly Hills used to sneak in there and watch their masterpieces to get a feel for how the hoi polloi liked them, and sometimes even stuck around afterward to feel the love. All these years later, the El Rey is still one of the best-looking theaters in Angel City, a deco-moderne palace fit for a king. No wonder they called it El Rey—the King. For twenty years it’s been one of Angel City’s best live-music venues, large enough to be a big deal but still cozy, with great acoustics. Anyone who’s anyone in Angel City has spent a lot happy of nights stretching till morning there.

I turned up Third Street to get to Fairfax. The area’s changed a lot over the years. Not as many old people as there used to be, and those who are left remember Angel City in a way that makes you wonder what they’d say if magically the whole place went back in time to just the way it used be. Maybe they’d bitch about what happened to the air conditioning.

What they don’t get—what most people don’t get—is that Angel City can never be the way it used to be, because it never used to be anything other than changing. Same isn’t an option here. You know what Angel City is? It’s always a chrysalis becoming what it’s becoming. The only question is whether it’s becoming a moth or a butterfly, and unless the world ends we’ll never know how it ended up.

The Santa Anas were still blowing, but down here in the flats it’s more gusts than howling winds, so you’re less aware of them.

There was an accident at the Wilshire-Fairfax intersection, the kind you don’t see often in the middle of the city unless it’s 4 am and two guys in their Ferraris leaving a party in the hills decide to see who can get to Dogtown first. What a mess. I couldn’t even make out what kind of cars they were. Cops and emergency people and coroner’s vans were everywhere. The whole area was shut down. That meant I’d have to go down to Olympic to make the left and then double back on Hauser.

For whatever reason, something didn’t smell right—and it wasn’t my brakes. I checked the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following me. They weren’t but that didn’t mean anything. Why was I being sent to the El Rey? I happened to know that tonight was dark. No music, no act. As in closed. Cerrado. Fermé. Which made me suspicious. Yeah, sure, I’m paid to be suspicious. But this was something else. This was a sixth sense, a feeling, an instinct. Or was it paranoia?

At the corner I pulled over and parked. The best way to collect myself was to fire up some more El Rey and mull things over.

Ah. Just what the head doctor ordered.

It helped. It helped a lot. It clarified.

There was no getting around the fact that the package was still in my belt, and I still had to do what I’d been hired to do: deliver it on time and intact. If I didn’t, my reputation would be shot. And if you didn’t know that about me, I value my rep more than anything else.

I turned onto Wilshire and parked on the other side of the street from the El Rey about five buildings east, then jaywalked Wilshire and carefully made my way to the theater. No one was out front. I checked the doors. All were locked except the one on the left. I went in. The lobby was dark. Like I said, dark tonight.

No point in calling out that I was here. The people expecting me were expecting me, and if anyone there wasn’t expecting me, why tell them?

I opened the main auditorium door. It was black as pitch inside. I felt my way down the first aisle, toward the stage, smiling about maybe jumping up on it and playing some Stevie Ray Vaughan air guitar.

That smile died as fast as Stevie Ray did when a man’s voice—baritone, it sounded like—said, “Sit down.”

No point arguing. I sat in the closest seat off the aisle. Whoever it was had an advantage on me, having been in the dark longer, his eyes adjusted to it. Either that or he was a cat. He sat behind me, one row back. Did he have a gun?

“Who are you?” he said.

I said I was the guy he’d sent for—“if you are who you’re supposed to be.”

“Who am I supposed to be?”

“The guy who sent for me.”

“Who sent for you?”

“You did, if you’re expecting me.”

I could’ve kept that up all night, and I wanted to, hoping to drag it out long enough so that my eyes adjusted to the dark as well as his. That way I could see his face. I could tell in his voice how pissed he was getting.

“Enough, dude,” he said, “You better tell who are you.”

“The guy you sent for,” I said, “if you are—”

“Cut the crap,” he said.

“If you insist,” I said. “I’m the Angel City Vaper.”

“No you’re not.”

“Who says I’m not?”

“I say.”

“And who are you?”

“No way, we’re not doing this again,” he said.

“Look, pal,” I said, “I told you who I am. Now it’s your turn to tell me who you are. Or shall we go another few rounds of Who’s On First?”

He said, “You can’t be the Angel City Vaper.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Angel City Vaper was already here.”

It’s weird being told you’re not who you are. You obviously know who you are, and yet for a second you wonder if you’ve fallen into a rabbit hole. Or maybe only people who live in Angel City wonder that, because in Angel City nothing is for sure. Remember David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive? That was no fantastical-voyage movie. It was a documentary.

The guy at the El Rey had said I couldn’t be the Angel City Vaper. He said the Angel City Vaper had already been there and dropped off the package.

And been paid.

I told him there was a sure way to prove that whoever had claimed to be me wasn’t me: open the package. At first he said he couldn’t do that; said the Big Boss would have his head. I pointed out that if he waited till the Big Boss opened it, saw it wasn’t what he’d ordered, and found out he’d paid for it, too, the Big Boss would probably cut out his heart with a grapefruit spoon.

This was a dilemma for him. Should he trust me, the guy who might be playing him for reasons he didn’t understand? Or should he trust the guy he’d paid for something that might not be what it was.

He took a long time. I didn’t rush him, though I was losing time. If I wanted to find the imposter, make the delivery, and save this guy’s skin—and my reputation—I needed to get moving.

After one last look in my eyes—I gave him that sweet I-wouldn’t-lie-to-you puppy stare—he began unwrapping the package. And unwrapping. And unwrapping. And unwrapping. It turned out to be paper inside of paper inside of paper. What a perfect metaphor for this whole adventure. He seemed relieved I hadn’t played him, but that meant he’d already been played. Which was worse. Now the only person who could bail him out was me.

I told him to sit down and think hard about anything the guy pretending to be me had said, something that might give me a clue about where to look.

“Dogtown,” he said. “The guy mumbled Dogtown. That’s it.”

I said thanks and walked out. It wasn’t much to go on, but you work with what you have, not with what you want to have. Dogtown was a start.

Climbing in the Porsche, I sped south on Hauser to Venice Blvd, hung a right, then a left on Fairfax to the Santa Monica Freeway. The wind was behind me now and the traffic easy, so I reached the Lincoln exit in just a few minutes. The off-ramp ends right in front of the huge penguin on a sign that over the years has been a dozen businesses, all of them with the good sense to keep the penguin.

I still had a couple of miles to go to reach Dogtown, and no idea what to do or where to go when I got there, but the fact I was hitting all the green lights—and the night had been eventful—allowed me to just give in to instinct, convinced that the pieces would come together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Dogtown is one of the best parts of Angel City because in some ways it’s not like any other part of Angel City, and because in some ways it’s just like the Angel City of your imagination—after a lobotomy. It was founded over a century ago by Abbot Kinney, whom the locals repaid with a street named after him, though not till about ninety years later. Kinney was another of those visionaries, dreamers, explorers and adventurers who built Angel City, someone who imagined things that never were and said, “Why not?”

On a walking tour of Europe, he’d visited Venice and decided to re-create it here, complete with canals, gondolas, and entertainment for the whole family on a pier that stretched 1200 feet into the Pacific. It had an auditorium, a restaurant shaped like a ship, a dance hall, a saltwater plunge, an aquarium, a racing derby, and game booths. Tourists arrived on the Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway, then rode a miniature railroad through the two-mile area and gondolas along the canals. It was the place no one wanted to leave—but everyone with money wanted to compete with. So for a long time there was plenty to do and plenty of places to do them all.

And then came the Depression.

Soon the only people left were those who couldn’t get out any other way. For a long time Dogtown’s biggest attraction was the boardwalk, where people from everywhere else in Angel City and anywhere else in the world came to watch the parade of weirdos do and act and say things that would get you committed most other places. And the only real action, unless you were a cop, was either on the boardwalk’s no-autopsy-no-foul basketball courts, or in the water.

Surfers loved the swell in the spot where Kinney’s old bridge had been, and they didn’t want anyone else to know about this area of rotting pilings that formed what they called the “cove.” It was a stupidly dangerous place to surf, but it had a great right break, and they did whatever it took to keep out anyone who wasn’t them. Like Dogtown, they were tough.

On days when the ocean was dead calm, they skateboarded by the boardwalk, and were just as hostile and just as in love with cheating death. Soon they were skateboarding even during swells. Dogtown had itself another attraction.

I drove down Pacific, my eyes scanning both sides of the street, not knowing what I was looking for. So maybe I needed to park. Turning right on Market I pulled into the lot at the foot of the street that during the day would’ve been jammed with tourists’ cars, filled my tank with some Dogtown juice, and fired up as I sat there watching the white water of the waves reflected in the moon. It was the perfect complement. The whole time I couldn’t help thinking how stupid it was to walk down the boardwalk after midnight without being accompanied by a Marine platoon. In tanks.

But what choice did I have?

Fortified, I stepped out of the car and left the top down. If someone wanted to get in bad enough, he’d rip the convertible top anyway. My neighbor leaves his front door unlocked knowing that if bad guys want to get in, they’ll just kick it in, and then he’ll be out a front door in addition to whatever else is stolen.

Hands in my pockets, I walked down the boardwalk, feeling better after seeing how many ordinary attractions were out and about. It must’ve been the Santa Anas. There were two jugglers competing about twenty feet apart, also an a cappella soul singer trying to drown out a blues guitarist with a battery-powered amp—neither of them any good.

Further down was an old guy quoting Shakespeare, one quote after another, all of them lines from Hamlet. He must’ve once been an actor, or maybe a teacher.

“This above all,” he bellowed in what was left of his voice: “to thine own self be true/And it must follow, as the night the day/Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Then: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” When I passed him, he was beginning the whole “To be or not to be” soliloquy, all fifty lines. I nodded at him as I passed.

For another five minutes, I didn’t see or hear anything that might’ve given me a clue to anything, so I suddenly I pivoted one-eighty and began walking back faster than before. What foolishness was this? I’d been thinking magically, not realistically, driving down here on a whim, convincing myself that I’d find what I was looking for. It was embarrassing. I started laughing at myself.

By the time I could hear Mr. Shakespeare, he was on, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” which made me laugh even harder.

Just as I passed him, nodding yet again, he boomed, “Good-night, sweet prince.” I was about to say, “And good night to you, too,” when he followed with the next line: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

I stopped in my tracks. That was it. Yes!

Angel’s Flight was where I had to go.

I dropped a ten spot in his hat and said thanks. He nodded and without a breath moved on to the next quote, this time in a whisper: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Call me Horatio.