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to consider the very real possibility that in a few days, he’s going to be managing a whole region-or even better.

One thing’s for sure-this is not a delivery to be entrusted to any Kourier, any punk on a skateboard. Jason is going to trundle his Oldsmobile into Compton personally to drop this stuff off.

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He’s there an hour ahead of schedule, He was shooting for half an hour early, but once he gets a load of Compton-he’s heard stories about the place, of course, but my Cod-he starts driving like a maniac. Cheap, nasty franchises all tend to adopt logos with a lot of bright, hideous yellow in them, and so Alameda Street is clearly marked out before him, a gout of radioactive urine ejected south from the dead center of LA. Jason aims himself right down the middle, ignoring lane markings and red lights, and puts the hammer down.

Most of the franchises are yellow-logoed, wrong-side-of-the-tracks operations like Uptown, Narcolombia, Caymans Plus, Metazania, and The Clink. But standing out like rocky islands in this swamp are the Nova Siciia franchulates-beachheads for the Mafia’s effort to outduel the overwhelmingly strong Narcolombia.

Shitty lots that even The Clink wouldn’t buy always tend to get picked up by economy-minded three-ringers who have just shelled out a million yen for a Narcolombia license and who need some real estate, any real estate, that they can throw a fence around and extraterritorialize. These local franchulates send most of their gross to Medellin in franchising fees and keep barely enough to pay overhead.

Some of them try to scam, to sneak a few bills into their pocket when they think the security camera isn’t watching, and run down the street to the nearest Caymans Plus or The Alps franchulate, which hover in these areas like flies on road kill. But these people rapidly find out that in Narcolombia, just about everything is a capital offense, and there is no judicial system to speak of, just flying justice squads that have the right to blow into

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