MANHUNTER.(bail-bond agent Mackenzie Green)

Mackenzie Green opened the trunk of her sports car and tossed her gun inside. Green, a San Francisco bail-bond agent, was looking for one of her clients, and on this February evening the search had led her here, to a crummy neighborhood in East Oakland, where her Beretta was safer in the trunk. Green leaned back on the car's hood and told her three companions, "O.K., here's what's up with Juan Zabala.”

Juan Zabala is a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican whom the San Francisco police charged with breaking into a 1991 Honda Accord. The police said that Zabala was carrying a master key and a pry bar, and on his subsequent bail application he described himself as a "self-employed mechanic."But bondsmen don't judge a defendant's metier; they judge his checkbook. For a fee--a nonrefundable payment of ten per cent of the bail assessed by the judge--bondsmen underwrite a defendant's release from jail, essentially taking over responsibility for his legal obligations. So, in return for Zabala's payment of thirty-one hundred dollars, Green had bailed him out, guaranteeing that she would pay the full bail if he didn't show up in court. Then he didn't show up in court.

Usually, when a defendant absconds, a bondsman hires a bounty hunter to find and arrest him within the grace period (which, in California, is six months). If that fails, the bondsman tries to seize any collateral that the defendant put down to secure the bond, or sues the defendant's "indemnitors,"who signed the bail application as guarantors. But Zabala hadn't put down any collateral, and so far Green--one of the few bondsmen who always do their own bounty hunting--had found neither him nor his indemnitors. The grace period was nearly up. Soon, she would have to pay the court thirty-one thousand dollars.

Green waved at the gray stucco apartment building behind her. "The guy we're going in on here,"she said, "is Rodrigo Hernandez, one of Zabala's indemnitors."That afternoon, Green had visited the building and, speaking her pidgin Spanish to a neighbor, had come to understand that Hernandez should be home after 8 p.m. "Rodrigo's the best friend, so he'll know where Juan is. We threaten to cuff him, search his room, violate his rights. Maybe he has dope, maybe he's illegal. Tell him, 'You can talk to us, or I.N.S.' ”

Five feet tall, Green is sixty years old, with hair dyed tiger-lily red and eyes the color of sea glass. On a manhunt, her focus is so intense that she often forgets the name of the person she's after, where she's going, and the significance of those curious octagonal signs at intersections. Driving down Oakland's Ninety-eighth Avenue on her expired license earlier that day, craning her neck to locate the home address given by Zabala's other indemnitor, Green suddenly realized that that address was actually the Oakland Airport--"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”--and crashed into a row of construction pylons.

Despite her Mr. Magoo-like behavior, Green is one of the best bounty hunters in the country. In the nineties, Chickie Leventhal, a Santa Monica bondsman who often bails out celebrities (including, recently, the record producer Phil Spector), hired Green to bounty-hunt eight times on high-exposure lost causes. "Mackenzie found the skip”--a client who has gone missing--"seven times, and the eighth time she established such good relations with the Feds that the court let us off the bond,"Leventhal told me. "She's expensive--I once had to pay her one hundred and five thousand dollars for finding a date rapist twice--but she works miracles.”

On the night in Oakland, Green had brought along her regular "pickup guys”: Bob Shandrew, a former Army sergeant with a salt-and-pepper beard, and Kirk Daise, a muscular black man with a bouncy step. Also along was Sergio Rosales, one of the four bail agents who work in Green's office writing up defendants' applications. Rosales is slight, with a gentle smile--Green worries that he doesn't make tough guys tremble--but he speaks Spanish.