My office is on the third floor of a Hollywood walk-up, a structure retrofit to within an inch of collapse. The lease says not to stomp too hard on the stairs. The building itself, like most of L.A., is the inevitable result of zoning restrictions, slow depreciation and an overlapping and contradictory hash of earthquake, tsunami, riot, space debris and alien infestation regulations. They basically add up to an unofficial income supplement to bribe-taking city inspectors. The rumor is that last building that legally passed inspection fell down twenty years ago.

The door to my office is a ceramic composite that’s held in place by eight tungsten throw bolts, the whole two-ton mess covered over with a thin facade designed to look like dinged hardwood with frosted glass.

“Truman Baxter,” the glass says. “Chartered Accountancy.”

The wooden-door thing is both a feeble attempt at a joke and a way to reassure nervous first-timers. You give them what they expect. Spook a newber with aggressive technology and they’re off to bungle the job themselves — the old-movie rat-hole thing calms them down. Inside, though, wouldn’t be a bad place to be if you wanted to survive anything short of the complete nuclear destruction of the city. There’s booze, pornography and a deck of cards.

Next to the door is a standard biometrics hand-scanner. I take a quick look up and down the hall — catch a glimpse of Mrs. Weevil ducking her curlered head back into her doorway — and stoop to press my tongue to the cool metal, closing my eyes against a quick blue flash. Inside the door, there’s a faint grinding as the bolts draw back.

I use my tongue because almost nobody cuts it off any more — it became a cliche after a decade of Jamaican gangs doing things to freak whitey. If my hand were actually pressed against the scanner, high-frequency microwaves — emitters are mounted in the ceiling and the floor — would do their best to cook everything in the hall, save a small circle where I should be standing if someone were sticking a gun in my back. If the hand doesn’t have a pulse — either because I’m dead or the rest of me is somewhere else — the hole closes up and several automated and intricate plans for revenge against various parties start rolling out. If I’m not a corpse when this happens, I will be soon enough, but a bunch of people who like breathing a whole lot more than I do will go down, too. The risk-reward thing works in your favor if your life sucks.

The bolts finish their withdrawal and the door slides in before swinging aside. Chet’s at his desk, the caved-in part of head held awkwardly to the left. He’s practicing.

“Hey, Boss,” he said. “How’d it go at Koizumi’s?”

“He doesn’t have an implant.”

“And good morning.”

“He doesn’t have an implant,” I said again. “You’re not giving me the details I need, Chet.”

His rolled his eyes upward, to the left. “Okay. First, he does have an implant, just like the standard says. He broadcasts location data when he’s off-site for security. I’ve got logs going back six weeks. Two, good morning.”

“There was a headset on his desk. Why would he need a headset if he’s got an implant?”

“You’re the luddite freak,” he said. “Not me.”

“Excellent point.”

“And good morning.”

I ignored him. “I think I’ll get the job if he lives.”

“Again? Jesus, Boss. Have you ever considered the possibility that violence isn’t the appropriate response to every unexpected situation?”

I pulled my coat back and palmed the butt of the .44. “Why, Chet, I’m startled to hear you say that.”

“Okay, all right!” Chet said. “It is! It is, it is!”

I lowered my coat. Uppity employees.

“Briefing?” Chet said, changing the subject. His fingers hovered in the air, over a chordboard projected against the inside of his eyeball by his implant. His hands danced slightly as he brought up the file.

“Oaks, the head guy, seems good enough, but the rest of the security staff are goons. It’s weird. I shouldn’t have been able to get away with what I did today. He’s not hiring the right people.”

Chet twitched, or twitched more than usual, at least. His head hung far to one side, out over his shoulder.

“And the headset. That doesn’t make any sense. And he’s got the changing-color eye thing. Not in the reports either, I note for your benefit. That’s weird, isn’t it? The eye thing? That’s weird.”

“Some people, Boss,” Chet said, “are just off.”

Numbering pretty highly among the people who are just off is Chet himself. He’s in the late stages of a lawsuit against U.C.L.A. and the team of surgeons that separated him from the twin that was fused to his head when they were born. Bernard, his brother — a mathematician, happily married and living in Carlsbad — wants nothing to do with it. But Chet’s got plans.

He’s claiming assault, that he and his brother never consented to the operation and it amounted to a sophisticated and coordinated attack on a couple of two-year-olds. Chet, thirty years later, wants the procedure reversed. He claims that he’s missing — physically missing — an important part of his life, and nobody has been able to prove otherwise. At stake are the cost of the operation, a very specialized body of potential new law and at least three hundred million dollars in punitive damages for pain and emotional distress. The suit’s gotten surprisingly far given that everybody concerned has responded identically — “What the fuck are you talking about?” — when informed of their involvement. U.C.L.A. is not happy. The doctors are not happy. A couple of dozen charity organizations that collect money to perform these kinds of operations are not happy. Every judge and lawyer who has ever argued en loco parentis is not happy. Bernard, especially, is not ha ppy.

But Chet is overjoyed. He’s gotten far enough along in the legal process to practice the sideways tilt he’ll need to use should he and Bernie ever get stuck back together. I haven’t given any thought to what would happen to office security, but the possibility is no longer totally insane. Bernard’s got kids and couldn’t be trusted. Chet might get his wish, only to have his brother executed as part of office policy.

“I’m going to be in the back,” I tell Chet, “thinking.” This, he knows, means drinking and looking at pornography. “Let me know if you find the cards.”

“On it, Boss,” he says. This, also, is code for drinking and looking at pornography. In the end, Chet and I understand each other.

After maybe an hour of assiduous thinking, I was lightly drunk and heavily aroused and Chet buzzed through on the intracom to tell me that someone was out in the hall, knocking on the door.

That had never happened before.

Nobody knocks. The only places worth getting into have doors that won’t register a knock from anything less than a rocket-propelled grenade. The only reason Chet noticed was because the seismographs detected several small earthquakes, three floors above ground, in our hallway. Assassinations are not a walk-in business. Neither is accounting.

I stumbled out into the main office and brought the visuals up on the overhead. “He’s clean,” Chet said, running down the list of scans displayed next to an off-angle shot of the person outside. “Standard cochlear implant. No shielded cavities. No unexpected biologicals. No bonegun signature. He had salmon for lunch.”

“Real salmon?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” I said. “Is he broadcasting any ID?”

“Nope. No match on a D.N.A. search either.”

I needed to get a “No Soliciting” sign. “Open up,” I said and Chet flicked a finger at nothing. The door began its grinding and swung aside.

Standing in the hall was the sort of person that brings to mind some ugly combination of rodential genomes and a profound disinterest in bioethics. He was small and hunched and pointed, and was wearing an awkward brown suit that looked like the mathematical average of every awkward brown suit produced in the last half-century. It was doing at least as much work holding him up as he was doing for it. His eyes seemed to dart without actually moving.

“Hello, Mr. Baxter,” he said, his voice a series of drawn out vowels and unhappy punctuation. “May I come in?”

“I’m not buying any magazines,” I said.

“I think you misunderstand me, sir. I wish to make you an offer that you will find most lucrative.”

“I’m not selling any magazines.”

He was suddenly standing in the office, next to me, without having covered the space in between, as far as I could tell. “Again,” he said, “I think you misunderstand me. My business has to do with an assassination.”

“Ah. Well then, Mr.—?”

He blinked at me with large, watery eyes.

“Mr. Unresponsive. Why don’t we go into my office and talk about your concerns?”

“Yes. Yes,” he said, and didn’t so much walk as blink between positions on his way to a teetering chair opposite my desk. He moved like the world was strobing, like he only barely remembered that most people pass through Point B on their way somewhere and it was probably smart to keep up appearances. I don’t know if he was dull enough to just fade into the background occasionally or he was causing minor narcoleptic seizures or he had some voodoo tech or what. Strange man.

I hunched down in my chair, pulled up to the desk and knotted my hands in front of me. “So. What can I do for you?”

“My name, sir, is Edgar Unresponsive, and I am pleased that you have heard of me,” he said. “It will save me the time of having to convince you that I have resources at my disposal. I represent several very powerful entities and they have a collective interest in seeing that you do not fulfill the contract you entered into earlier today with a Mr. Yukio Koizumi.”

“I—” I said, and his hand blinked up, palm out, to stop me.

“We are prepared to offer you many orders of magnitude more compensation than Mr. Koizumi, simply not to perform the task.”

“I—” I said again, and again he cut me off.

“If you intend to follow through with his orders,” he said, “we will be forced to bring considerable powers to bear against you. It is a decision you will regret.”

“I,” I said, and stopped.

He stared at me with those eyes. I found myself wishing that they’d change color so I’d have an excuse to shoot him.

“Aren’t you going to stop me?”

“No,” he said.

“Good. First, are you threatening me?”

“I think that is abundantly clear, Mr. Baxter,” Unresponsive said.

“All right,” I said. “Then you should probably know that I haven’t accepted a contract with Mr. Koizumi. Bet you feel silly, coming in here all gung-ho.”

He looked surprised. “You had an appointment with him today?”

“Yep.”

“And he offered you a contract?”

“We never got that far. I ended up killing him before he could.”

“Oh,” Unresponsive said. “Dear.” His eyes blinked several times in rapid succession and he looked like a man who wanted to check his notes. He glanced towards the door to my office and his suit almost got up without him. “Do you expect a retaliatory—?”

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m going to take him a get-well card tomorrow, and I figure we’ll talk about the contract then.”

Unresponsive blinked up out of the chair. “I see. My error. I apologize. I will be back after you have met with Mr. Koizumi to threaten you at a more appropriate time.” He turned quickly and flitted out of my office and towards the front door as it swung wide.

“I shall see you soon, Mr. Baxter,” he said and disappeared out the door and down the hall.

Chet and I stared after him for a moment or two.

“I’ve got to start remembering to take my social inhibitors,” I said. “I shouldn’t be used to this much weirdness.”

I turned to head back to my office and continue thinking when Chet twitched and stopped the door from closing. “He’s back.”

Unresponsive’s oddly angled head appeared — just appeared — in the gap and he said, “I forgot to ask, Mr. Baxter. Do you validate?”