Part 2: Three's a Problem

After 25 years on the force, San Francisco Detective Joe Blisflix rarely gets that stomach-dropping feeling anymore. But it almost knocks the wind out of him when he sees the name Ajax Rhodes under Victim in the homicide report on his computer screen. That makes three of the ten people on the detective's personal Most Dangerous list gone. Murdered. And not just any three, but numbers one, two, and three. In order. About a month apart.

He has just settled into his chair and opened the daily arrest log in his browser. The top entry is a homicide on Moscow Street in the Excelsior. He clicks the link and scans the report. Two shots to the back of the head, just like number one Raymond David Evans and number two Jericho Lewis, both leaders of rival neighborhood gangs involved in just about every street crime imaginable. But Rhodes was nothing but drugs -- mainly meth, though he was diversifying lately. And lots of ties to the Central Valley.

Bet it's a different gun, Blisflix thinks -- maybe a .38 -- not the .22 used first or the 9mm used next.

Used by who?

There's no other way to see it. The first two you could chalk up to eerie coincidence. Or maybe not such a coincidence. After all, Blisflix thinks, those were two violent people -- and their murders were easy to write off as scores evening up. But Rhodes changes everything. Somebody must've seen the list and done something stupid -- three times.

It was supposed to be just a way to pass some slow time at the office. Nothing but a simple list comprised of ten names: the people in the City Blisflix considered the ones most likely to do serious bodily harm. He would just as soon have had all ten of the miscreants permanently removed from society, politely or otherwise. But not like this.

As far as Blisflix knows, the file with the ten names never left the hard drive of the PC on his desk in the middle of the Fifth Floor of the Hall of Justice on friggin' Bryant Street surrounded by half the cops in the City, for Christ sake. He never even emailed the list to himself. Yet somebody found it and went all Charlie Bronson.

Blisflix doesn't have to open the file to know who is fourth on the list: Clay Parlaman, a denizen of the Tenderloin, a sexual predator and creep of the first order. The detective hesitates just a moment before opening the incriminating file anyway. His eyes run down the other six names on the list. All full- or part-time residents of San Francisco -- when not serving a stretch at one of the area's penal institutions.

How is he going to spin this to the Commander? He better have some plan to offer when he fesses up to his boss Villa Lobos. Jaime will be cool, but the Commander is going to jump all over this.

Three minutes later -- the framework of a strategy in mind -- Blisflix pokes his head into Jaime Villa Lobos's postage-stamp office.

"Got a second?"

Part 3: Ninth Avenue