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passenger seat, felt the smashed beads of glass.
    Lane grabbed a fistful—
    —and smashed it into her attacker’s eyes.
    There was a horrible scream of rage and suddenly the needle was wobbling loose, hanging off Lane’s arm. She plucked it out it, threw it to the side, then tried to crawl out of the car. Meanwhile her attacker flailed around, blind, looking for her. Cursing, raging at her.
    As Lane’s palms dug into the asphalt of the 101, she realized that her right ankle wasn’t working properly. The damned chunky metal weight strapped to it didn’t make it any easier. Her heart was racing way too fast, her skin slick with sweat. The world looked like it had been wrapped in gauze. Lane crawled away on her hands and one good knee, all the way to the fence at the edge of the 101.
    And then she hurled herself over it.

2
     
    California is a beautiful fraud.
    —Marc Reisner
     
     
    W HEELS WERE supposed to be up at 5:30 a.m., but by 5:55 it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen.
    The captain told everyone it was just a little trouble with a valve. Once that was fixed and the paperwork was filed, they’d be taking off and headed to LAX. Fifteen minutes, tops. Half hour later, the captain more or less said he’d been full of shit, but really, honest, folks, now it was fixed, and they’d be taking off by 6:45. Thirty minutes later, the captain admitted he was pretty much yanking off / finger-fucking everyone in the airplane, and the likely departure time would be 8 a.m.—something about a sensor needing replacing. Nothing serious.
    No, of course not.
    So after two hours of being baked alive in a narrow tube, Charlie Hardie took the advice of the flight crew and stepped off to stretch his legs. After an eternity of standing around, his belly rumbling, he decided to make a run to a bakery over at the mall between Terminals B and C. Hardie had taken exactly one bite of his dry bagel when the announcement came over the loudspeakers: Flight fourteen seventeen ready for takeoff. All passengers must report immediately to Terminal B, Gate…
    By the time Hardie returned to his seat, carry-on in hand, someone had already commandeered his space in the overhead bin. Hardie glanced forward and back to see if there were any gaps in the luggage where he could slide his bag. Nope. Everything was jammed in tight. Irritated passengers tried to squeeze by him in the aisle, but Hardie wasn’t moving until he found a place for his carry-on. He refused to check it. He’d carefully planned his seat assignments so that he’d be one of the first on the plane, guaranteeing him overhead bin space. It didn’t matter what happened to the rest of his stuff; Hardie just couldn’t lose sight of this carry-on.
    “Everything okay?” a gentle voice asked.
    A flight attendant—young, smiling, wearing too much makeup, trying to ease the bottleneck in the middle of the plane. Trying to avoid some kind of incident.
    Hardie lifted the duffel.
    “Just trying to find a place for this.”
    “Well, I can check it for you.”
    “No, you can’t.”
    The attendant stared back at him, catching the raw stubbornness in his eyes. She looked uneasy for a moment but quickly recovered:
    “Why don’t you slide it under the seat in front of you?”
    Hardie had tried that once—during his first flight. Some snotass flight attendant had given him crap about height and width and keeping the aisle clear.
    “You sure that’s allowed?” he asked.
    She touched his wrist and leaned in close. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
    The flight was quiet, monotonous, boring. Landing, too—a soft touchdown in the early-morning gloom. Hardie was thankful that the hard part was over. Within a few hours he would be back to work in a stranger’s home, where he could sink down into a nice fuzzy alcoholic oblivion, just the way he liked it.
    Hardie stumbled into his house-sitting career two years ago. He was between budget residence hotels and a friend of a