The Streets

He liked the streets … driving the streets. He was not a big fan of the freeway. If he was going to be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, he'd rather have something interesting to look at.

Sure, you got the vistas of Southern California from the elevated freeways. You could see the mountains, the ocean sometimes. There were studios and subdivisions, towering buildings and the Hollywood sign. You could see it all from the freeways. Unless the freeways were up to speed, in which case you zipped by it all so fast that you wouldn't have noticed what was going on unless something was on fire. And if the freeways were stopped, there was no way to get off the freeway until you hit the next exit. No jockeying your car to the next corner and taking a right, hoping for better luck the next block down. He didn't like the freeways.

Except maybe the PCH, since it was open-ended ocean on one side, and even if you were flat out stopped you could see beyond the city's borders.

But he preferred the streets. There was nothing better than driving down Olvera Street in the springtime or along Carroll Avenue at Christmas, when the Victorians were decked out for the holidays. He'd even been known to take a detour over to South Central just to see the Watts Towers or to Stan's on Weyburn for donuts in the morning. You couldn't do any of that from the freeways. On the freeways, you were a slave to concrete.

On the streets you saw neighborhoods and people. You discovered cafes and diners, warehouses and electronics stores. You found apartments, laundromats and locksmiths. You could look down alleys and around corners. You found stake-out locations and hidden escape routes. While you were stuck at the light, you could watch people. You could notice things. He knew Chinatown and Little Tokyo, Echo Park and Filipinotown. He spent hours driving through those neighborhoods and more, learning the speech patterns, seeing the people and watching how they lived day-to-day. Call it research.

And if none of that was good enough for you, there was this.

They hadn't lost Dom on the freeways. They had lost Dom on the streets. And he would find Dom on the streets.

He looked. Every day.