“Fine,” she said, and rang for her cops.
They apologized for the case of mistaken identity and let me out of the building and turned me loose on Figueroa Street. It was late afternoon and the street was getting dark and the air was cool. Even in Los Angeles winter is winter, of a sort. I went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself and it came driving up, five or ten minutes later, and I told it to take me north. The going was slow, rush-hour stuff, but that was okay. We came to the wall at the Sylmar gate, fifty miles or so out of town. The gate asked me my name. “Richard Roe,” I said. “Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x. Destination San Francisco.”
It rains a lot in San Francisco in the winter. Still, it’s a pretty town. I would have preferred Los Angeles that time of year, but what the hell. Nobody gets all his first choices all the time.