He slid his chair back, leaving his napkin on the table, and walked out into the bright afternoon sun without ordering.
I paid six dollars for my cold brew and drove back to Wilshire Boulevard, the traffic on the freeway moving in a sluggish, metallic crawl.
The office of the Watchdog Initiative was quiet when I returned, the old window air conditioner on the back wall humming its usual low, vibrating tune. I sat at my desk and pulled up the draft of our formal public records request on the monitor, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
If we wanted the name behind Pacific Coast Consulting, we needed the official bank routing numbers from the county treasury.
I typed the statutory language, citing the California Public Records Act, and clicked the attachment button to upload the two conflicting ledgers.
The screen flickered once, the blue light turning to a solid, flat grey.
I clicked the mouse, but the cursor did not move.
A small white box appeared in the center of the monitor, displaying a generic system error code.
