The first call came on a Thursday, which was the day I usually spent drinking in my office because drinking at home was too lonely and drinking in bars was too expensive. My name is Raymond Cross. I used to be a cop. Now I was a private detective, which is what cops become when they can't be cops anymore but don't know how to be anything else.

"This is a client," the voice on the phone said. "I have work for you."

"I don't take jobs from voices," I said.

"There will be an envelope at your door tomorrow morning. Open it. Do what it says. You will be paid."

The line went dead.

The envelope was under my door when I woke up at noon. Inside was a key and an address in Wilmington. The address belonged to a motel that rented rooms by the hour and asked no questions. Room 14 was on the ground floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of bleach and regret.

Inside the room was a suitcase. Inside the suitcase was two hundred thousand dollars in used hundreds and a dead man I recognized from the papers. His name was Vincent Caruso, and the papers said he had been missing for six months. He had been shot twice in the chest. The money was in a false bottom beneath his body.

I took the money. I left the body.

The second envelope arrived a month later, by which time I had spent thirty thousand of the two hundred thousand on debts, whiskey, and a woman named Dolores who sang at the Blue Pelican and never asked me where the money came from. The second envelope contained a photograph of a man I did not know and an address in Glendale. The note said: "Follow him. Document everything. Deliver the results to the address below."

I followed him. He was a city councilman named Arthur Hodge. Over six weeks, I documented his meetings with a woman who was not his wife, his payments to a contractor who was not on the city's payroll, and his conversations with a man who was, I later learned, connected to the same organization Vincent Caruso had once worked for. I delivered the documentation to a post office box in Van Nuys.

Two days later, Arthur Hodge resigned. A week later, I received fifty thousand dollars in a paper bag left on the hood of my car.

I used the money to buy a stake in the Blue Pelican. Dolores moved in with me. For six months, I almost believed I had escaped whatever trap I had walked into.

The third envelope came in December, on a night when the Santa Ana winds were blowing hot and dry and the whole city felt like kindling. Inside was a photograph. It showed a man I recognized: myself, younger, clean-shaven, in my police uniform. Beside me was Vincent Caruso, also younger, also alive. We were shaking hands.

On the back of the photograph, in handwriting I now recognized from a police report I had once filed: "Vincent Caruso was not murdered. He was executed. His brother ordered it. The brother's name is Anthony Caruso. He has been your client since the first call. Everything you have done since then has been at his command. The councilman you destroyed was the man who ordered Anthony's father killed twenty years ago. The money you took was Anthony's inheritance. And the final payment, for services rendered, is the photograph in your hand. You arrested Vincent ten years ago on a charge that would have sent him to prison for life. He was acquitted because you falsified the evidence. You have been a dead man since that day. You just did not know it."

The photograph was not evidence. It was a death sentence, and I had handed it to myself.

Dolores was at the Blue Pelican when the men came. She was not supposed to be there that night. She had switched shifts with another singer. They shot her anyway.

I was not there. I was at the police station, trying to explain to a detective I used to know why I had a photograph of myself with a dead mobster. They held me overnight. When they released me in the morning, the Blue Pelican was a crime scene and Dolores was at the morgue.

Anthony Caruso never called again. I never expected him to. The contract was complete.

I still have the photograph. I keep it in my wallet, next to one of Dolores. Every few months, I move to a new apartment, a new city, a new name. But I know Anthony knows where I am. That's the point. He doesn't want to kill me. He wants me to wait.

I am waiting.

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