ONE BULLET can really fuck up your day.

He walked out of his house and into the white-light white heat of a bullet exploding out the end of a handgun. A bullet that flew out of a passing SUV and burned a perfect black hole in his jacket — the one he got at the thrift store on Sunset, the one that said "Tigers" in bright orange script — pushing bits of his T-shirt into his chest as it tore through his skin. One bullet, slicing through his body, puncturing his right lung, the soft metal expanding as it traveled through his chest, tearing and burning tissue, breaking two ribs on its way out. The bullet that almost killed him. One hundred and twenty grains of lead that fucked up his day.

The bullet didn't stop at his shattered ribs. It kept going, blasting out of his body, blowing a hole in the other side of his jacket, flying along Perlita Avenue until it embedded itself with a clank in the side of a clean white-and-orange van with the name GEORGE BRAZIL PLUMBING & HEATING painted on the side. The plumber thought someone had thrown a rock at him.

Miro blinked. He was looking at the world sideways, his face resting in the soft grass. He could feel something wet and warm, a sticky liquid flowing over him. The pain, the actual sensation of a burning hot piece of metal ripping through his flesh, was so extreme that he almost didn't feel anything. Maybe he was in shock.

He could hear people shouting, the distant sound of a siren, but he couldn't move. It took too much energy to move.

His neighbor's dog — a mangy old Pekinese whose body was riddled with hairless scabby patches from his constant chewing and clawing at his eczematic skin — walked up to him and started growling. Miro blinked. The dog crept closer and suddenly lunged forward and bit Miro on the arm. It was then that he had a thought, his first lucid moment since he saw the flash.

That fucking dog just bit me.

That's what he tried to tell the paramedics, the Los Angeles Fire Department emergency medical technicians who were flipping him over, urgently rapping in medical code, checking his ABCs — airways, breathing, circulation — sticking needles in his arm and tubes down his throat.

"A dog bite is the least of your worries, sir."

That's what the female paramedic said to him. She called him "sir." Like he was old.

Miro blinked. He saw his neighbors huddled on the other side of the street. He could hear the nosy Filipino granny who lived next door.

"He was up to something. I know that for sure."

That fucking dog bit me.

One of the paramedics injected something into a tube that was hooked to his arm.

"Try and relax."

Miro wasn't feeling particularly tense but he nodded; he'd take their advice, he would try and relax.

A large Asian man with a shaved head and a mustache loomed over him. A Los Angeles Police Department badge dangled from a chain around his neck. His shirt was brightly colored, patterned with little drawings of palm trees, tiki torches, and the iconic Duke Kahanamoku surfing at Waikiki. He stuck his face next to Miro's.

"Who shot you? Do you know?"

Miro smelled coffee. The smell triggered his second lucid thought of the afternoon.

Café pingo.

"We can catch the crumb who did this. But we need your help."

Miro blinked. A couple of young men wearing short-sleeved white shirts and ties stood off to the side. Their bicycles lay on the ground next to them. Mormons. One of them was praying out loud. Praying for him. The other, the one with a flattop crew cut, just stared wide-eyed.

As the paramedics hoisted the gurney into the back of the ambulance, Miro had his last lucid thought of the afternoon.

Elephant Crush.

IN AMSTERDAM, almost a month before the bullet, Miro looked up from his scrambled eggs and coffee and realized that he was totally baked.

He hadn't meant to get stoned at breakfast. But here it was, a Sativa buzz resonating through his cranium as he sat in the protective warmth of the coffeeshop surrounded by the smells of coffee and cake and skunk weed.

He was only slightly annoyed with himself. It was, after all, his first trip to Holland and he figured he'd need to give himself a couple of days to get into the rhythm of life in a foreign country. But it really wasn't much of a stretch to acclimate to the city; there was no language barrier really, and he found that sitting at a table in La Tertulia eating breakfast while smoking a joint and drinking an espresso was almost exactly like a slow Sunday morning in his kitchen at home. Even the music was the same.

Because he possessed offbeat good looks — the dark brown eyes and curly hair from his Jewish mother, the Roman nose and plump, almost girlish lips from his Greek father, coupled with a lean DJ physique — he attracted the attention of the cute Dutch waitress and was able to get the local perspective on which coffeeshops in the city offered the best cannabis. The waitress was tall, at least six foot one, with honey-colored hair and a warm, inviting smile that intimated, in his weed-tickled fantasies, an invitation to snuggle under a down comforter and explore her ridiculously long legs. Not that he would suggest something like that. For all his outward cool, Miro Basinas was actually quite shy.

He paid his bill, left a ridiculous tip, and shuffled out into the gray drizzle of the Amsterdam morning. Miro felt a blast of frigid air, which smelled of ocean and diesel exhaust, coming off the canal, causing him to shiver.

He stopped and looked at the strange Van Gogh–inspired mural on the side of the building as he flipped the collar of his leather jacket up around his neck and plugged in his earphones. He spun the wheel of his iPod, pushed the center, and felt the soft purr of a vibraslap in his ear as the sultry sugarcane voice of Freddie McGregor rose through a pulsing jungle of bass and drums. Miro smiled. He might be standing in the gloom and drizzle of a street in Amsterdam, but he had Jamaica in his pocket.

He hunched forward, leaning into the weather, his vintage Pumas slapping the wet sidewalk as he dodged bicycles and crossed the Prinsengracht canal towards his next destination.

* * *

Miro wasn't on vacation, he was in Amsterdam on business. He might not look it, his alt-rocker vibe disguising the fact that he was actually a successful underground botanist, one of the few propagators of ultra-high–grade and exotic marijuana in Los Angeles. He'd started off small, experimenting with plants, selling the successes to friends, and had even briefly considered a career in the import and distribution sector of the cannabis industry. But that occupation was fraught with dangers and consequences — like five to ten for possession with intent to distribute — so he'd stuck with the horticultural side of the business. Besides, that was the part he was good at, that was the part he loved.

He'd earned a BA from the University of California, Davis, studying plant biology and specializing in tropical agronomy — his senior paper on cassava crops and plantain farming in the Dominican Republic was even published in an obscure scientific publication — and it turned out to be a solid foundation for experimenting with cannabis. Using his understanding of the basics of genetic manipulation and his fieldwork in agronomy he was, through trial and error, able to grow...