The night hung over Van Nuys like a damp overcoat nobody wanted to wear.
It was 11:30 p.m. in March, and the thermometer outside a pawnshop on Ventura Boulevard insisted it was ninety-six degrees. The Valley baked like a cheap pie left too long in the oven. But Jonny M. always played whatever part fate cast him in to perfection, right down to the costume. That meant a wool three-piece suit, a trench coat heavy enough to stop a .38 slug, and a fedora tilted low enough to make a choirboy suspicious.
The sweat ran down his spine like a criminal fleeing the scene, but Jonny didn’t notice.
He was staring into the most beautiful pair of eyes he’d ever seen.
They belonged to Ingrid.
Ingrid the Swedish knockout. Ingrid with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and lips that could make a bishop forget the Ten Commandments. And right now those lips were close enough to make Jonny forget every case he’d ever worked—except the one that had just wrapped up behind him.
Across the street, the gallows creaked in the warm night breeze. Robert Vestal’s murderer was still doing a slow dance at the end of the rope.
Hardest case Jonny and his partner Boris had ever cracked. Every crook, skirt, and two-bit chiseler in Van Nuys had wanted Vestal dead. But only one had the guts to pull the trigger.
Now justice had its pound of flesh.
And Jonny was about to collect his reward.
Ingrid leaned close, her voice soft and sad like a violin playing in a smoky bar.
“But what about us?”
Jonny tipped his hat back and looked at her like a man studying the last good thing in a rotten world.
“We’ll always have Tarzana,” he said. “We didn’t have it. We lost it… until you came to Van Nuys. Then we got it back last night.”
Her eyes shimmered.
“When I said I would never leave you.”
For a moment the whole world held its breath.
There was only one thing missing.
Rain.
A proper farewell like this needed rain—sheets of it, cascading down like the heavens themselves were crying into their whiskey. But the Valley hadn’t seen so much as a drizzle in thirty years. Not since the refinery went up on Oxnard Street and chased the clouds away like unpaid bookies.
Jonny leaned in anyway. Some moments were too perfect to wait for weather reports.
He stuck out his tongue, ready to seal the deal—
—and felt a drop of water land on it.
Then another.
Within seconds the sky opened up like Niagara Falls. Water poured down in thick romantic sheets, soaking Jonny’s trench coat and plastering Ingrid’s hair to her perfect face.
Jonny blinked.
He slowly looked up.
Perched on top of a nearby streetlamp was Boris—the toughest pug detective in the San Fernando Valley—holding a garden hose fitted with a chrome shower head. The anthropomorphic canine grinned down through the artificial monsoon like a plumber who’d just fixed the world.
“Mother Nature may not have shown up for you,” Boris called down in his gravelly accent. “But I’ve got your back.”
Jonny smiled.
Across the street, a handful of unlucky stiffs stood sweating at a bus stop in the brutal heat, wearing the least amount of clothing the law would allow. They watched the rain-drenched lovers with the bitter envy of empty souls who knew romance had passed them by.
Jonny didn’t care.
He grabbed Ingrid, pulled her close, and planted a kiss that would’ve made the devil himself take notes. His nicotine-stained tongue dove into her mouth while the fake rain danced across their heads like confetti at a crooked wedding.
Sure, he was losing the most beautiful woman God ever put on this lousy planet.
But Jonny still had the most perfect partner a guy could ask for.
And in Van Nuys, that counted for everything.