This excerpt is from Chapter 5 of In a Family Way. Bill Damen is the narrator. Other characters mentioned are:

Chris: Bill's cousin and client
Janet: Chris's wife
Cole: Chris's father, head of Claypool Construction Engineering

The sun sank behind Twin Peaks as I climbed the hill from 16th Street to my flat. My Scout, parked on the street a few doors down, radiated more orange glory than usual in the sunset glow. But for all its rust-hued radiance, it gave the odd impression of having gone blind. As I approached, I saw what created that impression. The headlights had been smashed. So had both of the front windows. And the taillights. My stomach fell. Opening the front door, I discovered that something, in addition to the myriad tiny jewels of shattered glass, had been left behind on the driver's seat. It was only a sliver, about six inches long, honed to a point, with a small plug at the end. A blowgun dart. None of the items--screwdriver, pliers, wrench, maps, registration--in the glove compartment had been taken.

I gaped at the damage and thought about what it meant. My house had been broken into before, but this was more personal, more of a punch to the gut. I carried the dart by the plug end into my flat. I came back out with duct tape and cardboard, hand vacuum and brush, dustpan and paper sack. The dart, I thought as I swept the glass from the metal floor and vacuumed the crevices of the cracked vinyl seats, was an act of intimidation. But an odd one: Was I meant to think a gang of headhunters was after me? The dart could be poisoned, I supposed, with a substance used in the Amazon, or Borneo, or... Indonesia. Checking out Cole's theory about his company's rival for the Jakarta contract jumped to the top of my list.

I reported the crime over the phone, then called Chris. He answered in a clotted voice. I told him about the Scout and advised him to make sure his house and cars were secure. As we hung up, I realized the froggy sound in his voice was not from sleep. He'd been crying. I wondered if Janet was still out.

The quiet in my flat felt vaguely ominous. Darkness had long since fallen. I paced from one end to the other, putting away clothes, books, magazines, video and digital tapes--things that had needed stowing for weeks. It was a little hard to tell, in the mess, if my belongings had been rifled. I secured the doors and windows, kept the porch lights on, and glanced compulsively out to the street.

Eventually I forced myself to eat some leftover pizza from the refrigerator and sat down at my computer. There turned out to be a scary number of places from which you could order a blowpipe and darts. Sifting through an image search, I came upon a dart close to the type that had been left on my seat. The Dayak people of Indonesia used bamboo shaved to a deadly barbed sliver to hunt monkeys, birds, and squirrels. Their blowpipes had a range of up to 150 feet. The next question would be whether mine was tipped with poison. A job for a research assistant.

From blowpipes I surfed over to the Jobs page of the legendary San Francisco bulletin board site Craigslist.org. This was where I'd put out the call. I posted my ad under three headings: Film, Legal, and Etc.

Research assistant for films and investigations. Office in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. Vehicle required. Mediocre pay. Start immediately. Send résumé with reply.

I looked it over. The job description was meager, but that was all right. I didn't want it to sound glamorous. Still, it seemed incomplete, not quite accurate. I thought about the Scout's broken windows and smashed lights, and added to the end of it, Dangerous.

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I awoke well before my alarm Wednesday morning, my mind hopping with tasks to be done and a tinge of apprehension about who or what was waiting for me. All was quiet out the front door and back. I logged on to the Internet to look up Dr. Sabell. An email was waiting. Someone named Clem had already responded to my job listing. He failed to attach a résumé but did give a phone number. I started to write it down for later, until I noticed the time of the message. Five-twenty A.M. He'd been up before me. I called him.

A woman answered. I asked for Clem. She, as it turned out, was Clem, and she was interested in the job. I proposed that we meet at Scoby's, my local café, for an interview. She agreed.

It seemed a promising start to the day. She'd responded quickly and had an intriguing voice. I found nothing on Sabell, but took care of some more email, then walked over to Scoby's in the leaden gray of an overcast dawn.

The café was quiet. I parked myself with the newspaper, a large coffee, and a pastry at a table by the window. A few minutes later, a woman opened the door. I prayed it was not her. She scanned the café. Her gaze settled on me, and my hopes sank. She wore a tawny suede jacket with leather fringe running across the back and down the arms. A flake, I feared. Below the jacket she had on low-riding jeans and cowboy boots. Clearly she had her own peculiar sense of style. The boots were beauties, black custom-stitched leather.

I stood to shake her hand. Her deep honey-tinged hazel eyes, flecked with mischief and some degree of buried pain, met mine. I offered to get coffee. She said she'd get it herself. I sat back down and watched her go to the counter. She walked with an insouciant kind of authority, not trying to impress anyone.

To my relief, she removed the jacket when she returned. I wasn't hiring Annie Oakley to ride the range. Underneath was a Western shirt with pearl buttons.

She took a healthy gulp of coffee. "So you're Bill." She said my name as if its old-fashioned, pedestrian sound amused her.

"That's right. And you're Clem. Short for Clementine?"

"Yes," she said, daring me to make a crack about it.

I accepted and said, "Oh my darling."

She batted her lashes. "Only my name doesn't rhyme with nine."

"Mean?"

"Queen," she said, her mouth curling into a smile. She had full lips, a strong triangle of a nose, and luminous olive skin. Her black hair covered her neck in curls. "Is this how you interview all your applicants?"

"You're the first, to be honest. Did you bring a résumé?"

"Résumé? I'm sitting right in front of you."

I sipped my coffee. We were either going to wring each other's necks or get along famously. "What makes you interested in this job?"

"The last line in your ad."

"I'm not kidding about the danger. After we talk, if you're still interested, I'll show you what happened to my car last night."

"All right. I want something that will keep me on my toes."

"There's plenty of tedium, too. Searching databases. Waiting around on sets."

She tucked her chin into her neck and regarded me with suspicion. "You think I'm flighty, don't you? That I can't stay focused."

I took in a slightly exasperated breath. An aroma of cigarettes and liquor wafted from somewhere near her. That damn jacket.

"You've been out all night," I said.

The suspicion gave way to an open-jawed, conspiratorial grin. "Congratulations, Detective. Now you know I've got stamina."

I couldn't stop myself from smiling back. The truth was, she looked like she could keep going for another eighteen hours. "Tell me about your background," I said. "Education, previous work."

"Tell me about yours."

I nearly dismissed her then and there. But something about her lips and her manner, the warm earthiness in her voice, like fresh coffee grounds, the depth in her eyes you could get lost in, made me indulge her. I gave as honest an account of myself as I could. I'd grown up in Oakland. My mother was an internist at a community hospital, my father a teacher of anthropology, although the less said about him the better. An early memory, one that defined me, was of seeing a Polaroid he'd taken of me diving to catch a Frisbee. I marveled at how the photograph captured that moment, retrieved it for us and at the same time enlarged it, made it more real than it had been in real life. It was a form of magic. I'd been in love with cameras ever since. I had an older sister who lived in New York. I went to Cal and then to the graduate film program at San Francisco State. I'd had a great cohort there; almost all of us went on to work in the business. I made a few small pieces of my own. It was the camera I loved most, though, so I worked primarily as a DP. Documentaries were my preferred genre, but I liked fiction, too, and the occasional experimental film, if the director knew what he or she was doing. Like most film workers, I paid the bills by taking industrial and corporate work when necessary. I was stupid enough to let myself get caught up in the dot-com swell of the late nineties. Ever since it deposited me back onshore, soggy and groggy, three years ago, I'd been searching to find my way back into whatever it was I was really meant to be doing. I stumbled into detective work when a researcher named Sheila died from anaphylactic shock at my ex-girlfriend's dinner party. My most recent case involved an engineer named Rod, who was murdered in the middle of a film I was making about him.

"That's very touching," Clem said with a straight face. I expected a crack, but she went on, "I like that you cared enough about these people, Sheila and Rod, to find out who killed them. You didn't know them very well, but you put yourself out for them."

"Just making a living," I said. "Now it's your turn."

"I know how to use the Internet. I read fast. I can talk most anyone into telling me most anything." She switched on a dazzling, phony smile. "I can be as charming as necessary. I'll warn you, though, what you're seeing this morning is the real me."

"Just as well. I couldn't stomach the charm. But isn't there something else you'd like to be doing in your life, something you're supporting?"

"You mean a habit? A deadbeat boyfriend?"

"Or a band, or acting, or surfing--the kind of stuff half the people our age do around here. You seem like a real San Francisco type."

"I don't know what you mean by that, but it better be good."

"Just tell me about your previous work, what interests you. Do you have any experience in film?"

She put her elbow on the table, looked down, and pressed her knuckles to her forehead for longer than was polite. When she looked up, she said, "I'm a professional busybody. How's that?"

"I'm a professional pain in the ass."

She clicked her tongue, then talked fast. "I've done serious, way too serious, academic work and burned out. I've played guitar in a cowboy-punk band. I'm a fast learner. You give me a sound gizmo, a camera gizmo, I'll bring it to its knees. Look, Bill Damen, I can do this job. You can be smart and hire me, or you can stick to protocol. My guess is that filmmakers and PIs who stick to protocol don't get very far."

"What kind of academic work?"

She folded her hands in a manner that implied reprimand. "Does it really matter? If you've got any intelligence at all, you've got a feeling about me by now. Either you know it'll work or you don't."

The feeling I had was that it was about time to stick a fork in this one. She seemed to think she was interviewing me, not the other way around. "Are you even interested in the job? The pay's--"

"Mediocre. Use your powers of observation. I've been sitting here for forty-five minutes. If I wasn't interested, you'd be working on the crossword puzzle right now."

We stared across the table at each other. I said, "You've probably got too much experience. The position's a better fit for someone younger."

"Oh." She flinched from my gaze for half a second. I'd hit a nerve. "By position, you mean bottom. A young thing who'll look up to you and believe everything you say."

"No," I said, irritated, although to be fair, I shouldn't have implied she was too old. We were both at an age where we ought to know what we were doing with our lives. "What I mean is that, in terms of pay, it's entry-level. You have a right to expect more."

"You've decoded what I expect from life but not whether I want the job?"

I broke down and laughed. I didn't know what it was--the mock-petulant tone of her rebuke, the way we both kept drinking from our coffee cups even though they were empty, or her generally ornery nature. I didn't want to part ways with her just yet.

"Let's take a walk," I said.

She stood up. The leather fringes danced as she shrugged on the jacket. "You mentioned some damage to your car," she said.

"We'll go see the Scout."

"What kind of case are you working on, anyway?"

"A very young girl. We don't know if it was murder or an accident."

We walked the few blocks to my flat in silence. Clem stifled a yawn. She didn't really care about the job. This was just a game she was playing after her night out on the town. She knew less about me than she thought, though, because when I stopped in front of the Scout, she was still looking around for my car. I told her this was it.

She focused on it. She didn't see the vacant, smashed windows. She didn't see the sightless light sockets. She saw the same beautiful, honorable, hardy piece of machinery I did. "Sweet Jesus, it is a Scout. An old International Harvester! It runs?"

"A little blind in the dark right now, but yeah."

She ran her hand across the IH emblem on the grille, smudged her thumb against the faded orange paint, patted the rim of the broken light well. "This is a crime. Truly a crime."

I'd been wrong. She was perfect for the job. The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop. "You're hired."

"Good." But then, realizing how much her delight pleased me, she pulled back. "Don't you want to wait and see who else applies?"

"I don't have time. You want it or not?"

"I'll try it," she said with a shrug, as if ordering a drink.

I gestured to the Scout. "You know what the message here was?"

Clem nodded crisply. "The next body to be damaged may be your own. Who did it?"

"All I know is they left a blowgun dart on the driver's seat. My client is involved with a project in Indonesia."

"Ah. That does make a point."

"I want you to get the dart analyzed for poison."

It was a little test. She surprised me by answering, "I can do that."

"Good," I said. "You're on the clock now. I'll show you our office this afternoon. It needs a little work."

"Don't we all," she murmured. We froze, looking at each other, wondering exactly what it was we were getting into, both together and separately.