The Girl Who Cried Wolf is dedicated to my close friend, Steve Plesa, who checked out of the Hotel Flesh way too soon. We worked together at The Register, a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I got to write about anything I wanted, usually beach culture, fast cars, gun nuts, and petty crooks, and Steve stayed in the office and edited them. Everybody liked Steve and nobody liked me. I thought it was a fair deal.One day I was standing with Steve in the Register stairwell while he smoked a cigarette and he told me that he hated his job, but having a pal like me there to laugh at the same crazy stuff made it tolerable. I then had to tell him I was giving my two-weeks notice so that I could finish my first novel, The Horse Latitudes. We stayed friends, but he made me promise that I would put him in the book so that in the unlikely event it got published, he would have a bit of immortality.
