My name is Lalo Diaz. Long ago, before I became a killer for hire, I was given the nickname Cuban Pete, after the Desi Arnaz song. Desi had brought the Conga craze to America, become a stage and screen star, and a popular bandleader. My nickname proved ironic after Desi himself decided to hire me as his personal bodyguard during the third season of I Love Lucy. I was his trusted problem solver at a time when he and Lucy were living very different lives from the couple they played every Monday night at nine.

Sexuality and Gender Studies Professor Gardner Graham hadn’t left home in weeks because of the public controversy over her recent stances. She turned down most visitors and all requests for interviews. Her days were full of reading, buttery Chardonnay, and occasionally a Klonopin.

Jet streams whirred around the tub. I begin each morning with a bath. My second wife and I split up two months ago and I’ve been staying on the 31st floor of the downtown Westin. My name is Pete Zolochevskaya (Pete Zolo if you aren’t good with long Russian names) and I’m a Detective Lieutenant Grade Three in the LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division. I’ve got fifteen years on the job, nine in RHD.

John walked into his office. He poured two fingers of Rebel Yell, his second of the morning, and stepped into his character of Pierce McCarthy, Morongo Valley Private Investigator.

Even before her baby was born, it was clear Arden Thatcher would be a lioness of a mother. She was compassionate, direct, clear-headed, and devoted to the spiritual realm, which was how our paths crossed. Arden and her fiancé Albert, one of my parishioners, asked me to marry them before the baby inside her was born.

Tino Vaca is a thirteen-year-old record collector from Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. A thin mustache grows above his lip and a Dodger cap sits on his head. He seems tall for his age. It’s six p.m. on a Saturday and we are in Elysian Park. The stadium rests just behind us, to our east. The sun is setting. There’s a home game tonight.

The peculiar mass shooting of October 17th occurred at the gender reveal party of a yoga studio owner and former actress named Diana Prentice. Forty guests had been invited to celebrate her coming child at her Silver Lake home and most of the party highlights were posted online through their various social media accounts. Diana’s coming baby would be a boy. Diana’s musician husband Holden Coltrane wore a light blue suit in honor of his unborn son. Servers dressed in Hindu-style saris roamed with trays of vegan appetizers and organic rosé.

William Whelan pulled the cloth away and saw that her forehead had been cracked open and that black blood had seeped into her curly black hair. Her eyes were open. Mario Escalante, the Echo Park Maniaco behind him, winced. “Jesus,” Mario said. William dropped the wet cloth and looked at her. Maybe it was that she could have been related to any number of the girls he’d been with in the brothels of Amman or maybe it had something to do with his broader suspicion that there was really just one woman with a world’s full of different faces, but he began to feel responsible for her lying there dead on the ground, all alone, with her head caved in.

In the beginning, Diana Figueroa was whoring for an Armenian pimp named Mario Garabadian who held court in the Casito Del Corazon in East Hollywood. Lucas Mullins looked unsettled today as he waited for Mario outside the Corazon. It was just past eleven in the morning when Mario finally stepped out and saw Lucas standing there, up the block. He went to him.

COINTELPRO (derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations.

Before me is a picture. In it, two Finns, Tuomo Prättälä and Markus Nordenstreng, sit in a 1950 Mist Green Chevrolet Fleetline, a car with modified mufflers that produce a distinct rumbling that’s been turning heads in Southern California since the late fifties. It sits parked near Olvera Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Both wear shades and fedoras, the beginnings of an old school East L.A. Chicano style, the kind of style cars like this are so commonly associated with.