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This was very unusual, Agent Ramirez thought, and after inspecting the documents further, he
decided he would go out to the Fifteenth Avenue address and try to find Andrew Ford to question him
about the fake licenses.
• • •
While months earlier Ross had sworn off Julia, vowing never to speak to her again for telling Erica
his secret, he was still undeniably attracted to her. So after they reconnected, he invited her out to
visit—a weekend of romance and diversion that Ross needed to take the edge off things. It was at
least a month before she’d fly out to San Francisco, so he had time to work out the details, but it was
highly unlikely that he’d bring her to his sublet.
The home along Fifteenth Avenue where Ross was subletting wasn’t much to look at. It was a
medley of Spanish elements, with a white exterior and brown terra-cotta roof combined with five
whatever-was-on-sale-at-Home-Depot-that-week windows in the front of the house. The front door
was glass, and the front yard was a pathetic patch of stark green plants that stood about six inches tall.
Ross, being Ross, didn’t care how things looked. For him it was all about the privacy of the
house, which was close to the edge of the city, near the beach.
• • •
Agent Ramirez looked at the map on his phone as he pulled up to 2260 Fifteenth Street in San
Francisco. He parked and then scanned the building, wondering if “Andrew Ford” was home.
The house was situated in Duboce Triangle, smack in the middle of the city, and was a long
rectangular shape, painted blue and gray on the outside. There was no yard in the front, and the
entrance to the house was a thick wooden door. Agent Ramirez spent several hours staking out the
place, waiting to see if the man in the fake IDs would walk outside to check his mailbox so they could
talk to him. But he never showed up.
So the agent got out of his cruiser and knocked on the bright blue door with one hand as he held a
photo of the fake IDs in the other.
• • •
The packages Ross had been waiting for should have arrived days earlier, but they still weren’t there.
He had walked down the orange brick steps to check the mailbox daily. But nothing. Of course, he
wasn’t looking for mail that had his name on it but rather anything that had been sent to Andrew Ford,
the man Ross was subletting his room from, and that had come from Vancouver.
The Canada Post Web site wasn’t much help, either. When Ross typed in the tracking number he
had been given for the packages of fake IDs he had bought, all he could see was that the envelope was
“still in transit.”
• • •
After Agent Ramirez waited for a few minutes, the door to 2260 Fifteenth Street opened and an older
Asian man stepped outside.
“Hi, my name is Agent Ramirez,” the officer said. “Is Andrew Ford home?”
The older Asian man looked at Agent Ramirez, assuming that he was trying to sell him
something, and tried to shoo him away. “No!” the Asian man yelled angrily. “No! He no live here!”