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me.”
    Could I? If I couldn’t . . . I had to. “Okay.”
    He leaned over and kissed me in a way he’d never done before, so hard and sudden he pressed my lip into my teeth. I could feel him shaking. Then, as suddenly, he let go. “That nagging horn out there for you?”
    “Omigod, is it eight already? That’s my sister. If I don’t move, she’ll be in here in a minute.”
    “Don’t you have a car?”
    It was such a California reaction. “I live downtown. Couldn’t find parking if I had one.”
    “Go, then. I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, getting up to open the door. Then, with a glance at my injured hands, he swung me to the ground.
    Automatically, I headed for the driver’s door of Gracie’s old station wagon and almost said, “Shove over,” as I and any sane person who’d driven with her did. But no way could I drive with my hands burned and covered in goo. “Pop the passenger side, will you?”
    “Hey, there’s a handle.” But she leaned over and shoved obligingly.

    I slid in and closed it with a yank that was over before I felt the pain. “We should move before the fog gets worse,” I said, to keep her from noticing my hands. Gracie’s a doctor, an epidemiologist. If she saw my burns, her only question would be which emergency room. She’d have the best intentions; she’d dig her heels in halfway to India.
    She’d stand over the ER doc. I’d get the best medicine in the Bay Area. But on this I was trusting Guthrie, the guy who knows what it takes to be back on the job in a couple of days.
    In the rearview mirror I could see him sliding behind the wheel of a big black convertible. Where’d he get that?
    “Stunt go okay?” Gracie asked.
    “Single take. In the can.” In fact, she hadn’t asked her real question: Are you okay? But we were doing the kind of stylized greeting that, were we Japanese, would have been a series of ever lower bows. In her mind, stunt work was akin to walking naked into a level 4 lab. She didn’t want to know the details—they just made the danger more blatant. And yet, in a way she could never admit, she was impressed.
    But she didn’t sound impressed now. “Didn’t you hear me honking?”
    I didn’t answer, but instead just eyed the rearview mirror, watching Guthrie drive off. “Are you going to sit here, or are you going to drive?”
    “So give!”
    I stared out the windshield at the slabs of port buildings across the vacant roadway, trying to figure how to divert Gracie from whatever details she was after. Most of the second unit guys had already cleared off, but Jed Elliot was headed in this direction. “That’s the second unit director. I’d better see what he wants.”
    Opening that wretched door sent a new wave of scalding pain through my hand. I shut my eyes against the pain and when I looked up, Elliot was almost in front of me.

    His normally creased brow was rutted deeper, his jaw tight. “That’s it for Guthrie. He’s not worth the risk.”
    “What? But the gag was a take,” I said, stunned.
    “No thanks to him. I only called him on your say-so. We could have lost a whole day. You could have been run—”
    “But I wasn’t. I’m fine. The gag’s fine. We’re on schedule. We’ve just got the clean-up end to do.”
    “I can’t chance it with him.”
    I couldn’t let Guthrie get canned, not in the middle of a shoot. Not now! “At least talk to him. It was fluke. You’ll see. You’ve got to give him a chance to explain.”
    “There’s no point—”
    “Hey, I trust him with my life! You want a rerun of the gag tomorrow, I’m ready.”
    “I don’t . . . Okay. But he calls me. ASAP. Gives me the kind of explanation that lets me sleep tonight.”
    “Sure.” Before he could reconsider, I turned, hurried back to Gracie’s car, and slid in the still-open door.
    “That your guy, in the convertible? He waved,” she added.
    “Yeah.”
    “Not half bad.”
    I couldn’t let him get canned. Word would spread like a