The thing I’ll always remember when I think of that night are the pale sidewalks glistening cold. It doesn’t get cold in San Diego, but it was cold that night. She was a vision, full lips, deep brown eyes, and a body that curved so much you wanted to be strapped in. But it wasn’t her I remember from that night. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t. It was the sidewalk. The crazy mist was falling. It was cold. Forty maybe. And my lightweight wasn’t covering it. But it wasn’t that. I shivered. When I looked at her. Maybe from the cold too. I couldn’t tell. It was too hard to look. I looked away. The sidewalk. Always the sidewalk. All I see when I think of that night is that white sidewalk, glistening, like God had pissed on it. I never could look at her. Not without shutting off all kinds of parts inside me, parts that screamed. Danger. Screamed. Danger. I didn’t look at her. Then I did. No one has ever been so foolish as to get involved with a woman trained in the black arts and deft with a dagger.

You’re probably wondering about the dagger. I’ll get to that. There’s back story, though. Today, this morning, early this morning, too early really, there’s nobody out at the end of the pier with me but a big pelican, a couple of gulls, and an old Asian man saying prayers into his bucket of bait. It’s cold out here. And I’m shivering a bit, but I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. The late morning sun is just burning the haze off the dark water. It’ll be a beautiful day. It usually is in San Diego, even in late winter. My wife, my ex-wife, didn’t like it. She said she missed the snow. Sara. I still can’t say her name without a grimace, or a useless shrug, like the ground trying to shrug off the mountain that sits on top of it, as if I could shrug the searing pain off of me. Out of me. Sara. Maybe that’s why I took this case. To push away, to push out the pain that rings my cell walls like an old clothes wringer. Nothing else had worked, not even sleeping with that nineteen year old. And I was sure that would. She didn’t just leave. She went home. It was so fucking painful that she had to leave the state. That was six months ago. No. Wait. What’s the date? Eight months, and a little more. Almost three quarters of a year. That was the first time I wandered into that little witchcraft store. I don’t even know why.

Now you’re probably wondering about that, too. But to explain it, Id have to tell you a little bit about Southern California. This place has gotten a reputation, wrongly, I believe, as a place where individuality is prized, as a place where weirdos go who don’t fit in anywhere else to be themselves. But it’s not true. Southern Californians don’t prize individuality any more than anywhere else in the world. Maybe less. Here, you’re just as expected to belong to an accepted social group, to dress, act, speak, and religiously obey the unwritten laws of that group, or accept the severe penalties saved for outcasts. It’s just that here, the groups are more narrowly and specifically defined. Anywhere else in the world, you have blue collar, middle class, upper class, liberals, conservatives, and maybe a small enclave of artist-types, and that’s about it. Here, it’s different. Here there’s a whole rainbow of differently ordered subcultures that you have to choose from. But choose you must. Here, in addition to the usual few you’ll find everywhere else, there’s bikers, hippies, surfers, rednecks, and all the varied subcultures that these have fractured into over the years. For example, in the surfers subculture, you have, among others, the “at peace with nature” surfers, the angry surfers, the old school surfers, the “into hard-core music scene” surfers, the straight-laced “lifeguard surfers” and the skateboarders. In the Hippie subculture, which has sprouted many branches over the past forty years, there’s the “adopted a non Judeo-Christian religion” branch, of which some are Wiccans. Not that you won’t find people here and there practicing witchcraft in other parts of the country. They just won’t announce it by opening a store.

So that was how it started. Like I said, I don’t know why. I just walked in. One month after Sara had gone, and the day after the moving van had come to pick up all the stuff that her sister had come from fucking Ohio and packed up for her. Once, years ago, all of the furniture in our little beach house had all been mine, simple, unpretentious, functional. But she’d gradually replaced most of it over those eight years with cute little antique pieces, except that some of them hadn’t been that little. Now it was empty, except for my piles of clothes where the ugly forest green and gold King James, or King Edward, or King you paid way too much for this faux-antique piece of crap of a dresser had been, and the ugly mahogany bed and headboard with the roses painted on it which had replaced my utilitarian futon couch/bed, and which she’d apparently decided she didn’t want anymore, and which I kicked, hard, when the moving van turned up at the corner. That night I got drunk, on a fifth of scotch that had been a Christmas present from my old partner just before I’d quit the force years back, and who I’d pretty much lost touch with. Sara didn’t like when I drank hard liquor, so it had sat all those years in the back of the closet in the bedroom on the top shelf gathering dust. Now there was no reason not to. And I did.

The next morning, late morning, it was hot and bright, not like now. June gloom, that hazy time between the end of May and the end of June was over, but mine had just begun, and I set out for breakfast at my usual place on Newport -- the one on Cable, not the one further down -- to try to fill the pit in my stomach, because I thought maybe I could do at least that. When I walked out, forty five minutes later, my stomach feeling better, but my heart felling worse, I thought for a second on walking down to the pier, or even the cliffs, which in the past, even all my life, had made me feel better in even the worst of times. But then almost being clocked in the head by some college kid frat-boy type coming around the corner with a surfboard made me stop. It was summer. Usually I braced myself for it, mentally prepared myself for the onslaught, but this time I’d been preoccupied. This time, this worst time of all, I was not ready. Like it or not, my quiet beach town would not be quiet again until after Labor Day. With a soothing walk by the ocean out, I headed north on Cable, away from my house, not knowing where I was going. And there it was. I’d walked or driven by it a million times since it had opened ten or twelve years before, even peeked my head in once, smelled the incense, and retreated. Now, I don’t know why. It pulled me in. Maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was the great void where my heart had been, maybe it was just an intense desire to just get away from the procession of obnoxious people in flip-flops who didn’t’ live here, but that day, it was probably around noon, I walked in. In through the beads, in to the incense, the soothing, gently lit dark. In.

When my eyes had adjusted, I surveyed the place. In front of me was a small table with books and cards, and what appeared to be some hand-made crafts. Next to that was a neatly arranged stack of posters and prints leaning against the wall. Past the table were the shelves of candles and incense and some small glass canisters of herbs or tinctures. Beyond the candles were bookshelves that ran the rest of the length of the wall to the back. In the middle of the back was a card table draped in an ornate covering with a candle burning in the middle of it, and with three folding chairs placed around it. Along the far wall, toward the back was one more shelf of books and one with much larger glass canisters apparently also filled with powders and herbs. Three quarters of the way clockwise around the place was a desk, and next to it a counter with jewelry, semi-precious stones and such, and a register, but no one was there. All around the walls were paintings, which I suppose you could classify as “spiritual,” or “new age,” but I really didn’t know how to classify them.

“Hi.” I heard the voice before I saw her. I had walked over to the table in front of me and was fingering a leather necklace with a five-pointed star inside a circle, right side up, not the other way around, and I saw her, having walked in from the back. Not the dark one. Her celestial twin. She was all light and beauty and goodness, with more than a touch of pretty. And in spite of myself, and I mean in spite of all of myself, I smiled. When she smiled back, I was hooked. We didn’t talk that day. I made a slow circle around the store, which went a little farther back than I had ever imagined. When I got around to where she was sitting behind the desk next to the counter, she asked me if I was looking for anything. I lied, and said no. But as I turned to walk out and she smiled and said, “Come again,” I knew I would be back.

CHAPTER 2 COMING 10/1!!