Choice of Evil

I nosed the Plymouth carefully around the corner, checking the street the way I always do when I’m heading home. The garage I use is cut into the closed-off base of an old twine factory, converted into upscale lofts years ago. Above the designer-massaged floor-through apartments is what the yuppie occupants think is crawl space. That’s where I live.

A pal had tapped into their electricity lines and installed a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combo. A fiberglass stall shower, a two-burner hot plate, a duct to the heating pipes below. . . and it turned into my home.

I’ve lived there for years, thanks to a deal I made with the landlord. His son got himself into a jackpot—an easy enough feat for a punk who thought ratting out his rich dope-dealing friends was a fun hobby—and ended up in the Witness Protection Program. I stumbled across him while I was looking for someone else, and I traded my silence for a special brand of rent control. Didn’t cost the landlord a penny, but it bought his punk kid an anonymous life. And safe harbor for me.

Some of my life is in that building. And when I saw the pack of blue-and-white NYPD squad cars surrounding the back entrance, I knew that part of it was over.

I just sat there and took it. The way I always do—fear and rage dancing inside me, nothing showing on my face. I’ve had a lot of practice, from the hospital where my whore of a mother dropped me—dropped me out of her, I mean—to the orphanage to the foster homes to the juvenile joints to prison to that war in Africa to prison again and. . . all of it.

It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did. Somebody had dimed me out. And the cops would find enough felony evidence up there to put me back Inside forever once they connected it up.

I watched the cops carry Pansy out on a litter, straining under the huge beast’s weight. Pansy’s my dog. My partner, not my pet. A Neapolitan mastiff, direct descendant of the original war dogs who crossed the Alps with Hannibal. I had dreamed of having my own dog every night in prison. They’d taken my beloved little terrier from me when I was a kid, that lying swine of a juvenile-court judge promising me there’d be another puppy in the foster home they were sentencing me to. I remember the court officer laughing then, but I didn’t get the joke until they dropped me off. There was no pup there, and I had to do the time alone, without anyone who loved me.

I never saw my dog again, but I did see that court officer. It was more than twenty years later, and he didn’t recognize me. When I was done, nobody would recognize him either. That’s the way I was then. I’m not the same now. But I’ve only changed my ways, not my heart.

I’d raised Pansy from a pup. Weaned her myself. She would die for me. And it looked like she had. Standing up all the way. She’d never let another human being into my place when I wasn’t there.

I said goodbye the way we do down here—promising her vengeance. I was using the little monocular I always carry to get a close-up when the screen shifted focus: I saw Pansy stir on the litter. She was still alive. The cops must have waited for the EMS Unit—they carry tranquilizer guns. So I didn’t need the badge numbers of the cops anymore—I needed my dog back. I U-turned the Plymouth slow and smooth and aimed it toward a place where I could make plans.

“Honey, I called around for hours. We know where she is,” Michelle said, her lustrous eyes shining, reflecting the pain in me. She’s my sister—my pain is hers.

“Where?”

“The new shelter. The one in Hunter’s Point, just across the river? In Long Island City.”

“Yeah, I heard about it. It’s private, right? Part of the fucking Mayor’s giveaway plan.”

“Baby, relax, okay? Crystal Beth ran over there the second I called her. It could get a little stupid. . . Pansy’s got no license, no papers. . . but Crystal knows how to act. Just sit tight, and—”

“When did she leave?”

“Honey, stop. You’re scaring me. She’s been gone almost. . . three hours now. You don’t expect her to haul that monster on the back of her motorcycle, do you?”

“I don’t care how she—”

Michelle put her hand on my forearm, willing me to centered calmness, reminding me of all the years I’d invested in learning the path to that place.

“Can you get Max for me?” I asked Mama. She’d been hovering nearby since the minute I’d come in.

“Sure. Get Max. Come soon, okay?”

I just nodded.

“Burke, you don’t need Max for this,” Michelle told me. “Jesus! It’s not like they’re gonna care, right? So she doesn’t have a license. So Crystal Beth has to pay a fine. . . or whatever. It won’t take long. . . .”

I stayed inside myself, waiting. Felt Crystal Beth’s small hand on my shoulder before I heard her approach. Smelled her orchid-and-dark-tobacco scent. Didn’t move. She came around the table and sat down across from me.

“Burke—”

“What happened?” I cut into whatever she was going to say, already knowing it was bad.

“The. . . license thing wasn’t a problem. Just like Michelle said. They were willing to let me take her. But they wouldn’t bring her out—they said I had to go back and get her myself.”

“And. . .?”

“And she was in a cage. A big steel cage. Like a tiger or something. There was a sign on it, in red; it said: DANGEROUS! DO NOT APPROACH! The. . . attendant, he told me she wouldn’t take food. Even when they shoved it into the cage, she wouldn’t eat. He warned me not to come near her, but I did anyway, and she. . .”

“What?”

“She tried to kill me. She lunged at the bars, snarling and snapping her teeth, and. . .”

“They don’t know the word,” I said, half to myself. I had poison-proofed Pansy when she was still small. Unless you said the right word, she wouldn’t touch food, no matter how hungry she was.

I had a friend who ran a little auto-parts joint. He had a shepherd, a real nice one. He used the dog to guard the place at night, so nobody could help themselves. Some degenerate tossed a strychnine-laced steak over the fence. When the dog helped himself, he died. In pain.

I’d trained Pansy so that would never happen to her. And I should have known she wouldn’t walk out with anyone but me.

They try and get dogs adopted at the shelter. If they can’t, they gas them. Who was going to adopt a sixteen-year-old, hundred-and-fifty-pound monster who could bite the top off a fire hydrant? But Pansy wasn’t going to wait to be gassed—she’d loyal herself to death first.

Not a chance. I owed her at least what I’d always promised myself. That I wouldn’t die caged.

“Michelle, go find the Prof for me,” I told her.

A few hours later, I was with a piece of my family, waiting on the rest.

“I can’t scam her out,” I told the women. “I mean, I could go there myself, and she’d come with me. But if I show up. . . the cops know where they got her from, and they might be expecting that. I’m surprised they didn’t try and follow Crystal Beth. . . .”

“I was on my bike, honey,” Crystal Beth said, her face calm with assurance.

I knew what she was telling me. There wasn’t a cop car made that could keep up with Crystal Beth on that motorcycle of hers, especially with the steady rain that had been falling for days. For the first time, I noticed what she was wearing—a full set of racing leathers.

“But how were you gonna get Pansy on—?”

“We had a car standing by. If I got her out, I was just going to load her in there and—”

“Whose car?”

“I don’t know, Burke. The Mole lent it to us. Some big dark thing. He made me a new license plate for my scooter too. Even if the cops saw it, they won’t make anything out of it.”

“The Mole was gonna drive? Jesus, I—”

“Not the Mole,” Michelle interrupted. “Terry.”

“He’s not—”

“Yes, he is,” she said, a trace of sadness in her voice. “My little boy’s almost a man now. He doesn’t have a license, but he can drive.”

Terry. Had it really been that long since I’d pulled him away from a kiddie pimp in Times Square? Since Michelle took him for her own? Since the Mole had raised him in his junkyard? Since. . .?

Then the door swung open and the Prof walked in, Clarence at his heels.

“What’s the plan, man? I got the word, came soon as I heard.”

“We have to get her out before they—”

“I said the plan, fool. You know I’m down with the hound. So gimme the four-one-one, son. They gonna be laying in the cut, waiting on you to make your move. We gotta be quick, but we also gotta be slick. Otherwise. . .”

“Let me think,” I told the only father I’d ever had—the one I met behind the Walls.

“Everybody got it?” I asked. It was almost nine o’clock at night by then, more than sixteen hours since my life had been torn apart.

Everybody nodded. Nobody spoke. I looked over at the big circular table in the corner, now piled high with what we needed.

“You sure they’re open twenty-four hours?” I asked Michelle.

“That’s what they said, honey. But I don’t know if they’ll actually open the doors, even if you say it’s an emergency. It’s not a medical place. All they do there is keep the dogs and. . .”

“Kill them,” I finished for her. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” I turned to look at Crystal Beth. “You got the floor plan?”

“Right here,” she said, unrolling it on the table in front of me.

“Mole,” I called, summoning him over. Then I started to explain what I needed.

“There have to be women there,” Crystal Beth said, standing to one side of the table, little hands on her big hips, face tightened against any argument.

“Look, this is—”

“You say ‘man’s work’ and I’m going to—”

“No, girl,” I said soothingly. “I wasn’t saying that. It’s just you don’t have any experience with—”

“With what, hijacking?” Michelle interrupted. “That isn’t the way to do it. You and the Prof, sure. I know you even got Max to go along sometimes on that crazy stuff you used to do, but if you think—”

“I am going too, Little Sister,” Clarence said in his dignified island voice, blue-black West Indian face set and resolute. “You are not to blame Burke for this. Yes, I would follow my father, wherever he walked. But I love that great animal too. She is not going to die,” he said softly, his hand caressing the 9mm semi-auto that was as much a part of his wardrobe as the peacock clothing he draped over his lean body every day.

“That’s not the point. I don’t want—”

“Michelle, I am going,” the Mole said. Soft and gentle, like always. But not, like always, deferring to her. “Not Terry. You are right. He is my boy too, not only yours. And he is too young to risk. . . whatever there is.”

“Will you morons fucking listen to me?” Michelle yelled, standing up so suddenly she knocked a couple of glasses to the floor. She walked over and stood next to Crystal Beth.

“This isn’t about what you imbeciles think I’m trying to tell you.” Her creamy complexion flushed red with anger. “It is not a hijacking, even with all those. . . guns and things you have. It’s still a scam, right? And they are not going to buy it unless you have a woman doing the talking, understand?”

“Girl’s telling it true,” the Prof said. “We don’t work it right, they ain’t gonna bite.”

The Mole nodded, slowly and reluctantly.

“Yeah,” I said, surrendering.

It was near 3 a.m. by the time we were ready to ride. Michelle and Crystal Beth were both dressed in military camo-fatigues, complete with combat boots. Max and I went for the generic look. Crystal Beth sat in the front seat right next to me, her left hand on my thigh, transmitting. Max and Michelle were in the back, Michelle yammering a nerve-edged blue streak, the mute Mongol warrior probably grateful he couldn’t hear. I had decided the Plymouth wasn’t much of a risk—I always keep the registration on me, and the car got a fresh coat of dull-cream primer last night.

I waved across to where Clarence sat behind the wheel of what would pass for a Con Ed truck if you didn’t look too close. If you did, you’d be looking at the wrong end of the Prof’s double-barreled sawed-off. Somewhere in the back of the truck, the Mole was preparing his potions.

We caravaned along until we got to the pull-off spot on the FDR. I pointed to a white semi-stretch limo with blacked-out glass. “That’s yours,” I told Crystal Beth. “The rollers won’t look twice at a car like that this time of morning. It’ll look like someone’s coming home from clubbing. Besides, it’ll hold everyone.”

“I’m staying with you,” she said.

“No, you are not, girl,” I told her. “Max can’t drive worth a damn, and the Mole would crash it for sure. Clarence is the best wheelman we got, but we need him in the truck. We’re leaving the truck when we’re done, and everyone can’t fit in the Plymouth. You just park it where I told you to, and we’ll all meet up before we hit the place.”

“Burke, I—”

“Crystal Beth, I swear I will throw your fat ass out of this car right now, no more playing. Drive the limo, or we’ll do this without you.”

She punched me hard on the right arm and got out. She walked over to the limo, opened it with the key I’d given her. I waited until I heard it start up, then I took off.

The Animal Shelter was freestanding—a long, low concrete building, T-shaped at the back end. I pointed out my window for Crystal Beth to pull over. She parked the big limo perfectly, left it with the nose aimed straight out. When she got into the front seat of the Plymouth, I said: “They’re going to take the truck around the back. Mole’ll stay with it. The Prof and Clarence will meet us out front. Then we do it. Ready?”

Everybody nodded. Nobody spoke.

I stashed the Plymouth just around the corner, out of sight from the front door. We all got out. The Prof and Clarence slipped around the corner and linked up with us.

“How we getting in, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked. “Scam or slam?”

“Slam,” I told him, showing the handful of Semtex I was holding. “Me first. Stand back.”

I walked up to the door. Put my ear to it. Nothing but a few random, doleful barks—the Captured Dog Blues—no sound of human activity. I patted the Semtex all around the knob and the lock, then made a long seam-tracer for the door’s edge. I jerked the string loose and ran back around the corner.

The second the door blew off the hinges, we all charged, faces covered with dark stocking masks, hands gloved. I was first in the door. The attendant was at his desk, face slack with shock. I showed him the pistol.

“Touch the phone and you’re dead,” I promised him.

Max slid past me, unslinging the huge set of bolt-cutters from over one massive shoulder. The Prof stepped into a corner, his scattergun weaving, a snake looking for a passing mouse. The lights flickered, then went out—the Mole saying he was on the job.

Crystal Beth stepped up, shoving me aside, shining a halogen flashlight in the attendant’s face.

“This is a message from the Wolfpack Cadre of the Canine Liberation Front,” she proclaimed in a perfect liberal-twit revolutionary’s voice. “You may no longer imprison our brothers and sisters without fear of consequences!”

“Look, I—”

“Silence, lackey!” Crystal Beth snarled at him. “This is a jailbreak, not a debate.”

A soft explosion rocked the back of the building. Then another.

The attendant moved his lips like he was praying, but no sound came out.

I walked past him. Saw Max’s broad back bent over as he severed the heavy lock on the door to the cage area. Then we both popped the cages open, one by one. The dogs milled about uncertainly, until one spotted the gaping hole in the side of the building. He ran for it, and the others followed.

Pansy was there, her cage standing open. On her feet, daring Max to come closer.

“Pansy!” I called to her. “Come here, sweetheart!”

The big beast’s head shot up. She bounded over to me. “Good girl!” I told her, patting her huge head. Then I gave her the hand signal to heel and we merged with the river of dogs flowing to freedom.

As soon as she saw the car, Pansy knew what to do. I popped the trunk and she jumped inside, curled up on the mat next to the padded fuel cell, and looked up expectantly. I handed her a giant marrow bone, whispering “Speak!” at the same time. I closed the trunk lid, knowing the air holes I’d punched in it years ago would let her breathe just fine. And if anyone heard her pulverizing the bone, they’d just think the old Plymouth had a bad differential.

Even with us working the wrong side of the river, some citizen could have called the cops by then. We had to move fast. I stepped back inside the front door just as Michelle was taping up a cardboard stencil warning the world against the unlawful imprisonment of dogs. Clarence sprayed the blood-red paint with one hand, the other holding his pistol steady.

“Don’t think about the phones after we’re gone,” I told the attendant, just to get his attention. As he looked up, Max materialized behind him and did something to his neck. He wouldn’t be making any calls for hours.

“They all out?” I asked Clarence.

“All gone, mahn. Every one.”

“Scoop the Mole—he’s back there somewhere. Then get in the limo and fly. I’ll be right behind you.”

I tossed a smoke grenade into the back of the joint and dashed for the Plymouth.

I read all about it in the afternoon paper, Pansy stretched out next to me in Crystal Beth’s apartment. On the top floor of her safehouse.

The papers were full of it—in all respects—for the next couple of days. The Mayor said it was terrorism. Pansy yawned when she saw his face. Even the camera was bored.

Most of the dogs made it to freedom. The waterfront’s not fully developed over on the Queens side. Yet. Maybe some of them will form a pack like their counterparts had in the South Bronx—go feral, evolve their own breed.

Like we have, the Children of the Secret.

Some of them will bond. Some of them will prey on anything that crosses their path.

Some of us do that too.

I started rebuilding my life.

“You know who this is?” I asked.

“Yeah,” was all the answer I got.

“You want to meet me? In the alley?”

“Yeah.”

“Say when.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

I hit the off button. Even if they traced the call, all they’d get would be the bogus number of the stolen cell phone—the Mole had installed a cloned chip to make it work.

If anyone else had been listening to that few seconds of talk between me and a pit bull of a cop named Morales, they still wouldn’t know that “first thing tomorrow” meant midnight and the alley was Mama’s restaurant. And even if they did know it, they wouldn’t come there without a SWAT team—it’s not a safe place for strangers.

He strolled in five minutes past midnight, a cheap brown suit and wash-and-wear white shirt with clip-on tie covering the surgery scars from the bullet he’d taken a few years back. A bullet from another cop: that homicidally insane Belinda. I’d left her dead on the rooftop of the building where they’d had their last meeting, making my getaway while Morales was being carted off by the EMTs. Later, the brass made it a tidy package by declaring Morales a hero. In their version, he’d killed Belinda in a shootout.

Morales was an old-time harness bull, a dinosaur who couldn’t evolve but refused to die. He’d flake a drug dealer, phony-up probable cause, whatever it took. And he carried a throw-down piece in case he had to smoke a suspect. A brutal man who saw it all in black-and-white. Mostly black—my color in his eyes forever. He wouldn’t pay for information—thought that was what God made blackjacks for—but he’d trade for it. And the weight of the debt he owed me was heavy on him, so we didn’t waste time with prelims.

“What do they have?” I asked him, flat-out.

“They know you lived there. Didn’t fucking know it till they tossed the place, though.”

“I figured no landlord had enough juice to get NYPD to do evictions, so. . .?”

“So the cocksucker called in a nine-one-one. Said he just discovered some Arabs was secretly living in his building. And that the place was a bomb factory.”

“He didn’t warn them about my dog?”

“Not a word, pal. But as soon as they started with the battering ram, they could fucking hear about it, so they waited for the Animal Control guys to get there before they finished breaking in.”

“There weren’t any fucking bombs—”

“Uh, I know that, all right?” he cut me short. “What they found was. . . well, bottom line, that you lived there. I mean you, Burke, okay? Not from the papers, from the prints.”

“The papers. . .?”

“Yeah. You better forget about Juan Rodriguez, pal. That ain’t you no more. Not this Arnold Haines guy either. Or any of the others. Man, you sure had yourself some serious ID.”

“ ‘Had’ is right.”

“Yeah, well. . .” He dismissed my problems with a short chop of his stubby hand. “Look, the guys who tossed your joint said it was clean as a prison cell. It wasn’t till your prints came up that they made you.”

“And. . .?”

He shrugged. “And you ain’t been on parole for years. No wants, no warrants. They found a bunch of letters—somebody’s been stinging freaks, promising them kiddie porn, stuff like that—but it was all run out of some PO box in Jersey. . .”

That one’s gone too, I thought to myself.

“Only thing they found that looked like a crime they could connect to you was the tapped lines,” he continued, “from Con Ed and all.”

“I never did that. Probably the landlord himself.”

“Yeah. That’s the way they figure it. Probably an off-the-books rental. You paid him in cash, right?”

“Right. Speaking of cash. . .”

“They didn’t find any,” Morales said, flesh-pouched eyes steady on mine. “Didn’t find no guns either. You got a problem with that?”

“Not me,” I assured him.

“That motherfucking landlord,” Morales muttered. “Coulda gotten a couple a good cops killed, they’d a broken in there with that dog of yours. . . .”

“And they didn’t find any bombs.”

“That too. That piece of shit’s lucky they didn’t charge him. But the punk-ass ADA said the cocksucker had a ‘good-faith belief’ or some other such crap. Still, little weasel deserves to be fucked up.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned me. “Right now, you walk away. Start over, I guess. Something happens to that one, Ray Charles could see through any alibi you come up with.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to find him,” I said truthfully. “He sure doesn’t live in that building.”

Morales nodded, not speaking.

“Funny how people look at things,” I said softly. “This landlord, he never said a word about my dog. You guys, you’re mad because a couple of cops could have gotten chewed up. Me, I know what would have happened if it went down like that—they would have shot her.”

“Whatever,” Morales said, standing up to leave. He stuck out his hand for me to shake. That isn’t his usual thing, but I went with it.

As soon as he was out the door, I read the little piece of paper I’d palmed when we shook hands. Just a phone number, Westchester area code.

“He would have killed my dog,” I said to Crystal Beth later that night.

“Burke. . . stop it! You’re so. . .”

“Why did he have to do that? Pansy never did anything to him. We had a deal. A square deal. I always kept my piece of it.”

“Maybe he didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? He had to know I wasn’t around when he made the nine-one-one call. If the cops had knocked on the door with me inside, I would have let them in, let them look around, whatever they wanted. Or told them to come back with a search warrant, if I thought I could have gotten away with it. Or called Davidson, anyway. A lawyer comes over, the cops have to watch what they’re doing. He knows I would have told them something, and he didn’t want to take the chance. So he must have been watching, made sure I wasn’t there. But Pansy was. And he knew what she’d do. He was trying to get her killed.”

“Honey, you can’t know that.”

“I do know,” I told her. “What I don’t know is why. Not yet.”

“¡Buenos días!” the cheery voice at the other end of the line greeted me.

“You a Latina today, Pepper?” I asked her. “Pretty good.”

“Thanks, chief,” she answered. “It’s a lot easier than being an alien, like I was in the last show.” Pepper works with Wolfe’s crew. She’s an actress, among other things. When she’s not teaching kids gymnastics. Or singing in a choir. Or working the lifeline between Wolfe’s outlaw-info outfit and the players who pay for her services.

“I don’t need a meet for this,” I said. “Just some answers.” Then I gave her the landlord’s son’s name. “He’s in the Program,” I told her. “Can she get me—?”

“Okeydokey,” Pepper said, as if I’d said something else entirely. Then I was listening to the fiber-optic hum of a dead phone line.

“Call for you,” Mama said, nodding her head toward the bank of pay phones between the kitchen and my booth in the back.

“Who?”

“Girl. Say you know her.”

I walked back, picked up the phone. “What?” is all I said.

“He’s gone,” the woman said. Wolfe—I’d know her voice in a subway tunnel, even with the train coming.

“Disappeared?”

“Dead.”

“From?”

“The feds didn’t need an autopsy. He was Swiss cheese.”

“Ah. Any suspects?”

“Too many. He must have been big-time stupid to go into business for himself in Vegas.”

“Thanks. How much I owe you?”

“Two large will do it.”

“I’ll have Max drop it by.”

“No rush.”

“You think I ratted him out?” I asked softly.

“How did you get this number?” the landlord wanted to know, his voice trembling.

“Oh, I always had your number, pal. Just answer my question.”

“It had to be you. You were the only one who knew—”

“He went into business for himself. Out there, I mean. Your kid, he had a disease. He liked being an informant, even when his own case was over. I had nothing to do with it. You wanted me out of there, all you had to do was ask.”

“I. . .”

“You knew my dog was there,” I said quietly.

“Look, if I was wrong, I’m sorry. I mean, we can still work something—”

“You’ll never see it coming,” I promised him, cutting the connection on my last word.

That was it, then. Humans are the only pack that tolerates predators of its own species. Most think “family” is a biological term. Not my family. My family is my choice, and I belong to them like a wolf cub does to a pack. Only I’m grown now. All of us, grown. Only babies—some lucky babies—get that “unconditional love” the talk show psycho-flashers are always bleating about. We know better. For adults, there’s always conditions. And one of them is that the pack survive, that the house stay safe.

We had killed to do that, all of us, together. And when it was over, Crystal Beth asked me if I was going to stay. Not here, not in this cesspool of a city where I was born—stay with her.

I told her the truth then: I didn’t know.

But I was there now. Me and Pansy. Trying. Living in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, seeing if it could maybe be my house too. That’s when it started.

People don’t kill for no reason. What the cops don’t get is that sometimes no reason is the reason.

They thought it was random, that first one. A target of opportunity. Like the victim of a bomb dropped from above the clouds, the pilot certain everything down below was the enemy. Killing things, not people. Following orders.

But not all bombers are military. And some take orders only from inside their twisted-circuit heads.

When people from the other side started to fall, the cops got it all distorted. And once they worked it backward to me, they were sure they knew the motive.

It fit me like a good pair of handcuffs.

It’s hard to say it even now. Hard to say her name. When Crystal Beth died, so did my chances.

It didn’t happen the way she thought it might. It wasn’t one of the risks she knew she was taking. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. It didn’t have anything to do with that “purpose” she was always talking about; the one her mother had tribal-tattooed on Crystal Beth’s teenage face before she went out to meet her own destiny. Crystal Beth’s purpose was the safehouse. The network. Fighting stalkers and protecting their victims. Why even go to a gay-rights rally? I remember asking her, deep in the quiet darkness of her room on the top floor.

“It’s not you, girl,” I said.

“Why not?” she answered, her soft voice as rich and round as her thighs. “You know I have. . . I mean, you know I did. . . with Vyra and all. It wasn’t her who started that, it was me.”

Vyra was gone now. My old. . . what? Not girlfriend. Not even friend. Sex partner, I guess. I never saw any real piece of her until the wheels came off last year. When my own house was threatened by a pack of race-haters and my brother Hercules went into the fire to save us. Homicides happened. And when it was over, Vyra left with Hercules. To new lives, out of mine.

But before she went, I saw her and Crystal Beth make love to each other. Right in this room, on this bed. I wasn’t a spy or a voyeur. They wanted me to stay, wanted to show me something. Much later, when Crystal Beth was sure I’d seen what was really there, she asked me if I was going to love her.

I told her I didn’t know. Lying is encoded in my genes. I learned lying so I could keep them from hurting me. It didn’t always work, but it was all a little kid had. Later, I learned better ways.

Couples who want to make a baby tell everyone they’re “trying.” It always makes me sick to hear that. . . like they’re making me watch them try. But I understand what they mean. I was trying to love Crystal Beth then. I’ll never know if I was going to get it right.

“That doesn’t mean you’re gay,” is what I told her.

“Because I’m a woman? That’s the way men think. If you have sex with another man, even once, then you’re gay for life. That’s the fear, isn’t it? When a little boy is raped, he’s afraid he’s going to be just like the rapist. . . only he doesn’t think ‘rapist,’ he thinks ‘queer.’ But if you’re a woman, it’s like. . . okay, right? Just an experiment. Just playing. You know what, baby? Gay people don’t like my way either. I’m not out enough for them. Not for the lesbians, anyway. If I still have sex with men, I’m not really, see?”

“Really what?”

“Not really real. Not. . . myself, whatever that’s supposed to mean. You know, ‘yourself’. . . the person someone else wants you to be. For them, not for you. Funny. Gay people are discriminated against, hated, feared. . . and they do the same thing to themselves. I’m bisexual. And they have no tolerance for me just as straights have no tolerance for them.”

“So fuck them. Why go?”

“Because they’re wrong. I belong there too. And I’m going.”

“No, you’re not, bitch.”

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” she whispered, flashing her smile in the darkness. “I took your orders when we were in the middle of. . . that thing. But it’s over. That’s over, I mean. This is me, now. Me, no matter what a pack of fools think.”

“It’s not about being gay,” I said. “Who cares? But why go where you’re not wanted? It’s just another bullshit demonstration anyway—it’s not like it’s gonna change anything.”

“Tell that to the Freedom Riders.”

“Hard to talk to dead people,” I said, warningly.

“This isn’t Mississippi, Burke. It’s not even close. The climate has changed. And it didn’t change by itself. We helped make it change. I’m going.”

“Crystal Beth—”

“Shush up, now,” she mumbled against my chest. “I’ve got something better for you to do.”

It was just cracking light when I left the next morning. I looked down at Crystal Beth, sleeping on her belly, soft cheek against the pillow. Heavy-haunched and glistening in her own dew, her face open even with her eyes closed. I thought about giving her a kiss but I didn’t want to chance waking her up.

I never saw her again.

The papers had it pretty close to accurate. I know because I went down there. Not to the scene—to where I could find the people who saw it. People who wouldn’t talk to the law.

Crystal Beth wasn’t even one of the speakers. She was just in the crowd, toward the back. Not a big crowd, maybe a couple of hundred or so. Right on the rim of Central Park, west of the Ramble. Protesting another fag-bashing episode, demanding the Police Commissioner send some undercover cops in there to stop it. The speaker was saying something about how they used undercovers to bust straights looking for hooker sex, but they wouldn’t spare any to protect gays. Talking about voting as a bloc. . . knowing as he spoke that you might tip an election for a local City Council seat with a threat like that, but it wouldn’t make the Mayor blink.

A car swept by. Nobody saw it good enough to say much except that it was a dark color, moving fast. Gunfire poured from the windows. At least two guns—they found that from the ballistics lab later. Five people went down. Two dead. One of them was my Crystal Beth. The car flew north, disappeared somewhere in Harlem.

That didn’t prove anything—didn’t mean it was their home base. There’s a hundred ways out of Harlem: bridges, tunnels, alleys. Underground garages where you could stash a car and switch to the subway.

The first thought was that the drive-by had to be about the dope business—a typical triggerboy spray-and-pray hose-down job. One of the guns had been a Tec-9, so that sounded right. For about a minute. Then it went on the books the same way the streets already had it—as a hate crime.

Fag-bashers all over the city were high-fiving.

Then they started dropping.

The first three weren’t hard to connect. They’d been convicted of beating a gay man to death after luring him into a playground at night. Aluminum baseball bats and bicycle chains were all they needed, although one of them stabbed him a few times after he was dead. Didn’t take a psychologist to figure out that last part.

One rolled over immediately, took a short manslaughter hit in exchange for his testimony. The other two went to trial. The lawyers got a lot of camera time. And their clients got a lot of time Upstate—a pair of life sentences.

But then the appellate courts reversed all the convictions—said the cases should have been severed for trial. So everything was voided, even the guilty plea. All three got bail pending a retrial. The gay community protested. Got a lot of TV coverage. Changed nothing.

Then two of them got done. They’d been living together. Sleeping together too, I guess—they were found in the same bed, what was left of them.

The third one, the informer, he must have figured it out—or thought he did. He called the cops, asking them to take him back Inside while he waited for the trial. The cops said they were sending someone right over. I guess the guy opened the door himself. Whoever he opened it to stuck an ice pick into his spine. Then hacked his head off with a butcher knife while the fag-basher watched himself die, paralyzed.

The reason the cops knew that, they found the victim’s phone had been tapped into. And rerouted. When the third one had dialed 911, he’d been talking to his doom.

And while the cops were wasting time grilling the family and friends of the gay man who’d been murdered, some “Christian” organization took out a full-page ad saying homosexuals needed to “convert” or burn in hell.

That night, every TV news show ran clips of the organization’s spokesman saying, “AIDS is God’s cure for homos,” and other, similar sound bites.

The next day, the spokesman was napping in a hammock in the backyard of his estate when a long-distance rifle shot opened his left eye. Opened a bigger hole in the back of his head.

One of the picketers at the funeral of the murdered gay man—the one holding the sign saying his death was God’s Good Riddance—got a UPS package. And got a real bang out of it.

But it was the poisoned black-market steroids that killed the bodybuilder—the one who kept in shape with fag-bashing—that finally persuaded the cops.

They managed to keep the connection between the victims out of the papers. But the killer trumped them by going public.

Be warned! These attacks have not been indiscriminate. All the targets were predators, and homosexuals were their prey. Queer-bashing is no longer a risk-free sport. For too long, the gay community has tolerated assaults in the vain hope that protection would come from outsiders. Be warned: now we hunt.

The first radio station to receive the tape with the machine-altered voice had played good citizen and turned it over to the cops. But it wasn’t long before another station decided it couldn’t pass up the chance for a ratings score. Once it went out over the airwaves, the dam was breached. The flood followed.

A short time after I met Crystal Beth, we got into a war. A war to keep our house safe. It took all of us. And all we had. Just before I left for the showdown, Crystal Beth said she wanted to have my baby. That last time, as we parted before I went out to do my work, she asked me. Of all the women in my life, she was the only one who’d ever asked. Flood had told me she’d thought about it, had been thinking about it, but she went back to Japan and I never saw her again. Belle loved me. Died for me. But she knew her blood was bad—she was her sister’s daughter, and she’d never pass that along. I’ve had sex with so many women. I liked some of them; some of them had liked me. But it was only Crystal Beth who’d wanted my child.

I’d told her the truth then. I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago. Not because my blood was bad, like Belle’s. I don’t know my blood. “Baby Boy Burke” is all it says on my birth certificate. It’s not my blood that stopped me—it’s that I know blood doesn’t mean anything.

But the cops had this much right: when Crystal Beth was taken from me, I needed to spill some.

Only I couldn’t find the shooters.

And while I was looking, this other guy kept killing the tribe they came from.

Trolling for freaks in this city is no different from poling a skiff through a swamp, hunting for gators. They don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. And you better not fall in the water.

The gay community already had one of the usual arrest-and-conviction bounties out on the drive-by killers. There was government money too. The lame Mayor caught so much heat the last time he opened the public coffers for reward money—for that “gay serial killer” who’d never even crossed our borders—that he was an easy mark. But even a total of more than a hundred grand didn’t turn up a trace. Oh yeah, the pay phones were clogged with quarters from informants, but not a single tip proved out.

Then a skinhead clubhouse in Queens blew up. The whole thing. Maybe a half-dozen of them inside. Impossible to tell—too many body parts to match into complete sets. The radio stations played his tape right away this time. Short and sweet:

Skinheads all hate fags. This was always stupid. Always a mistake. Now it’s a mistake to be a skinhead. A fatal mistake. See you soon, boys.

They should have known what would happen at the gay-pride parade. The cops, I mean. It takes them longer because they act as a herd.

Or maybe they thought he’d only react to actual violence. When the first two drunks jeering at the queers dropped like they’d suffered heart attacks, the cops started running toward them. But by the time they figured it was him—had to be him, firing from a rooftop, scoped and suppressed—he was gone.

So were the two drunks—heavy-caliber hollowpoints tend to do that to you.

A pervert who ran something called Homo-Haters Gazette—a website featuring news of “successful actions” against gays around the world—must have thought the letter he got was fan mail. The cops couldn’t determine from the few fragments that they found. And they couldn’t interview a guy with a severed brainstem.

“They want you for it.” Morales, on the phone, voice like a bulldozer in a garden.

“Get real,” I told him.

“Just did,” he said. “Straight up. They don’t know where you are, but they’re looking.”

“So. . .?”

“You should come in. I know this one ain’t yours.”

“Thanks.”

“For what? You not slick enough to be sending no letter bombs, pal.”

“I can find out,” Davidson said, puffing on his cigar. “But if I make the inquiry, that alone will. . .”

“I know,” I told him. “Do it.”

“Give me a call, uh, tomorrow. Before ten.”

“Done.”

“Burke. . .?”

“What?”

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“I got nothing to do with this one. Any of them.”

Davidson nodded, not doubting. If I’d killed anyone, I would have told him. He was sure of that—I’d done it before. He was a good lawyer, knew all the tricks. He wanted to get paid, but he did the work. Better than most, that last part.

“You can’t stay here,” Lorraine said, the second she crossed the threshold to Crystal Beth’s place.

“I know,” I replied.

She didn’t know what to say to that; a look of surprise froze on her face. “I. . . didn’t mean you had to get out this minute,” she said stiffly. “I just meant. . . I mean, you know why we set this place up. You know what we do. Having a man here. . .”

“I understand. I’ll be out in twenty-four hours. It’s not like I got a lot of stuff to pack.”

Pansy’s enormous head swiveled back and forth, following the conversation but dismissing the woman as a threat.

“Burke. . .”

“What?”

“I never liked you,” Lorraine said. “But I know what you did for. . . us. Before, I mean. And I know you loved. . . her.”

“Crystal Beth. You can say her name.”

“Maybe you can. It. . . hurts me just to. . .”

“All right. Never mind. I told you, I’ll be out in—”

“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

“The guy who killed her?”

“No. The guy who’s killing all of. . . them.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t care?” she asked, an extra-aggressive tone sliding into her already hard voice.

“What are you asking me, Lorraine?”

“If he were to. . . kill them all, he’d get the one who killed. . . her, right?”

“Kill every fucking fag-basher in the city? Right. That’d do it.”

“I wish he would. I wish I could.”

“So why don’t you give him a hand?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why? Because it’s a gay thing?”

“It’s a woman thing.”

“Yeah? Then how come you keep saying the killer’s a man? It’s easy enough to alter a voice on tape.”

“He is a man. Everyone knows that. I meant. . . Crystal Beth. Her. And me. Between us. You could never get that.”

“And that’s what you hate me for?”

“I didn’t say I hated you. I said I never liked you.”

“You know what, Lorraine? I never liked you either.”

“That matter we discussed the other day?” Davidson’s voice, treading carefully over the line at Mama’s.

“Yeah.”

“Your. . . surmise was, in fact, reasonably accurate. The individuals to whom you referred have expressed a desire for an interview, but they cannot seem to locate the. . . object of their interest.”

Meaning: yes, the cops want to talk to you, and no, they don’t know where you are.

“You think this ‘interview’ should take place?” I asked him.

“Assuming the factual content of the material you imparted during our prior conversation is unchanged, I do. If only to. . . reorient their interest.”

Meaning: yes, if I really had nothing to do with the murders, I should go in and talk to the cops, answer their questions, show them they were wasting their time so they’d leave me alone.

“Set it up,” I told him.

“What do you need a lawyer for, you coming in here to assist us with our investigation and all?” the sandy-haired plainclothes cop asked me, nodding his head in Davidson’s direction.

“Oh, I’d be scared to come here by myself,” I told him. “I heard you guys do terrible things to people when nobody’s watching.”

“A comedian, too?” his partner asked, a short guy with a round face and a boozer’s nose.

“Me? Nah. I even heard you guys sometimes put a telephone book on top of a guy’s head and whack it with a nightstick. Doesn’t leave marks, but it kind of scrambles your brains.”

“Where’d you hear that?” the sandy-haired one asked.

“My brains are still scrambled from the last one, and that was a long time ago,” I told him, nice and quiet, but letting him know I was done dancing. “You’ve been looking for me. Okay, here I am. You want to ask me some questions, do it. You don’t, see you around.”

“My client is here at the request of the DA’s Office,” Davidson put in. “Since he’s not a suspect, I assume you won’t be Miranda-izing him?”

“Sure, counselor,” the one with the boozer’s nose said. He opened a notebook, looked over at me. “Name?”

“See you around,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Hold it!” the sandy-haired one said. “What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. You guys do. I came here, in good faith, because I thought you thought I could help you. You know who I am. You got my rap sheet and my mug shots right there in front of you. What else you want to know?”

“A current address would be nice.”

“Sure as hell would,” I told him. “Problem is, I don’t have one.”

“You’re homeless, right?”

“Yep.”

“So you’re sleeping in the shelters?”

“I look that fucking stupid to you?”

“Hey, Johnny, relax,” the boozer-nosed one said to his partner. “Burke here, he got a lot of friends he could stay with. Besides, they don’t let no dogs in the shelters, right?”

“What dog?” I asked him.

“Ah, it’s gonna be like that.”

“Last chance,” I said, meaning it.

“Okay, okay. Relax. Come on. Let’s just deal like men, all right?” the sandy-haired one lied. “We know your girlfriend was one of the ones killed in that drive-by, at that queer rally.”

I looked at him like I was watching a TV test pattern.

“And we figured, maybe, you’d like to find the guys who did that.”

I kept looking at him.

“And we know you’ve been asking around. . . .”

“Do you?” I said, uninterested.

“Yeah, we do. We got a witness to it, all ready to walk in and talk to a grand jury.”

“And the crime is. . . what? Asking questions? That was true, all reporters would be doing life.”

“And we got a bunch of fucking murders,” he went on. “All fag-bashers. So, the way we figure, somebody don’t like fag-bashers. Brilliant so far, huh?”

“About up to par,” I acknowledged.

“And we figure, there’s at least one, maybe two, or even three fag-bashers that you don’t like.”

“Oh. You mean, you solved that case? You got the shooters.”

“You’re one sarcastic motherfucker, aren’t you? How about this one, Mister Burke. How about you tell us where you were on the thirteenth? Say, between four in the afternoon and eleven at night?”

“I can’t remember,” I said flatly. “You know how it is, drifting around, looking for a place to stay.”

“So you got no alibi for that time?”

“I got no alibi for any time,” I promised him.

“You fit,” boozer-nose said.

“Fit what?”

“The profile. Everyone knows you’re a revenge freak. They killed your girlfriend, so you. . .”

“I what? I don’t know who did it. You know, why don’t you tell me, find out if your theory’s correct?”

“We don’t know,” the sandy-haired one said. “And we figure, you don’t, either. So maybe you’re just working your way through the whole list.”

“You know why I came in here?” I asked him. “You know the real reason?”

“No. Why don’t you tell us.”

“I came in because I thought you guys were actually trying to get whoever killed Crystal Beth. I thought maybe you knew who it was, but you didn’t have enough to arrest them. And that maybe you were going to let that. . . slip, understand? Then you’d close the case. Call it ‘exceptional clearance’ and keep your stats up. But now I see what’s going on. All this bullshit game-playing crap. You think it’s me? That I’m a fucking serial killer? Jesus H.—”

“Hey, pal, it’s not like you never—”

“Never what? Went around whacking people for the freakish fun of it?”

“Nothing freakish about it,” boozer-nose assured me. “Somebody did my girlfriend, I’d wanna take ’em out too.”

“And if you knew it was a Spanish guy, you’d kill every Latino in New York?” I asked him.

“Gentlemen,” Davidson interjected. “It is quite obvious that my client is unable to meaningfully assist in your investigation. And that you are not going to arrest him. I am quite certain of the former. Unless I am mistaken about the latter, we are, in fact, leaving.”

I followed Davidson out the door. Neither of the cops said anything.

“That’s really why you wanted to come in?” Davidson asked me in the car on the way over to his office.

“Yeah. It happens. Some cases, they close ’em that way: ‘Exceptional clearance.’ Means they know who did it, but they can’t prove it. Every once in a while, it eats at a cop, and he lets a name slip out. . . to somebody who just might do something about it.”

“You figure they wanted you to kill the guys who—?”

“How could they lose? Not only do they close one case, they get a beautiful new felony handed them on a platter, complete with perpetrator. One step closer to that gold shield.”

“I thought I was cynical,” Davidson said.

“You are,” I assured him.

But nothing happened. Nothing changed. There’s a million places to live in this city, but it’s hard to find one off the radar screen. The Mole had done it. Even if you suspected he lived in an underground bunker in a Hunts Point junkyard, you wouldn’t go poking around there to make sure. The Prof used to live in the subways until he hooked up with Clarence. Then they found a crib over in East New York, right off one of the prairies. Bought the whole building, a gray brick eight-flat, for a song and started the rehab. Only they’re never going to have tenants. They offered to let me stay, but they blended into that neighborhood and I didn’t. It wouldn’t take long for somebody to notice.

Plenty of places I could hole up, but not for long. I even called a girl I knew from a few years ago on the off-chance. . . And I scored. She was by herself again, and wanted to have a try. Asked me if I was ready for a commitment. Not hard to lie to her—comes naturally to me, and I hate extortionists anyway—but once she saw the size of my commitment, all hundred and fifty pounds of Pansy, she decided the whole idea was overrated.

I know a lot about junkyards. Fact is, I own one. And Juan Rodriguez, he used to work there. Simple enough scheme: The guy who runs it for me, he writes me a check every two weeks. I cash it, kick back most of it, and I got that Visible Means of Support thing knocked. Being Juan Rodriguez is the same as being John Smith, only it doesn’t trip the IRS alarms, at least not coming out of New York. I protected that identity for years, never risked it doing anything wrong under that name. Always kept up the Social Security, Workman’s Comp. . . everything. Juan Rodriguez wasn’t just a citizen, he was a good citizen.

Such a good citizen, matter of fact, that the guy who runs the junkyard for me made a mistake about him. I dropped by, told him he’d be hiring someone else pretty soon. No big deal. But he got stupid. Told me, after all, it was his name on the title, right? So I gave him a history test. Asked him if maybe he remembered how his name got there. And who I got the place from. And how I got it.

He passed the test.

Now all I needed was a new set of papers, starting from scrap.

I know plenty of people who can make paper. Any kind you want: Passports. Birth certificates. Bearer bonds. Social Security cards. Only problem with them is that they’re merchants. I don’t trust merchants. Today you pitch, tomorrow you catch. Anyone who sells you outlaw stuff is always a risk to sell you if the Man makes the right offer. I never worried about that with the Juan Rodriguez stuff. I’d built it up myself over the years, slow and careful, starting with a dead baby’s birth certificate—a baby who’d be around my age if he’d lived. But I didn’t have time for that now.

Until last year, I didn’t know Wolfe could get paper made. But she’d shown me different, manufacturing a Jew in the background of a dead guy to buy my brother Hercules a ticket into the White Night underground. And she had one credential none of the other paper-makers did—I knew I could trust her.

I could never say why. Not out loud. And never to anyone who wasn’t part of me. But I know I’m not wrong. I’ve known Wolfe since she was a prosecutor. We worked opposite sides of the law then, but sometimes we got close enough to the line to hold hands over it. Never more than that. And never for long.

I guess I. . . I don’t know why I can’t say it different, say the truth: I always wanted her to be with me. But alligators don’t mate with egrets, even if they live right next to each other in the same swamp.

When Wolfe had been chief of City-Wide Special Victims, she was working in a counter-evolutionary world where you could travel faster on your knees than standing up. And if you stood up too long, they took you down. She’d sneered at the firing squad. Everyone on both sides of the line respected her for it.

I never could tell Flood I loved her. She went away from me knowing it, but never hearing me say the words. Women know it, somehow. Before you do. I did tell Belle—it was the last thing she asked for before she left, full of bullets she took for me.

I never told another woman since.

I couldn’t tell Wolfe. But I could call her.

“What?” A man’s voice, not Pepper’s. Not sweet either.

“How you doing, Mick?” I asked.

“What?” he said again, like he hadn’t heard me. I don’t know what Mick does, except it’s something with Wolfe’s crew. I know he’s Pepper’s man, know he’s some kind of fighter. Big guy, good-looking, like an actor. But his eyes are flat and he’s got that ki-alert radiating all the time.

“You know who this is?” I asked.

“No.”

Fine. All right: “It’s Burke. I want to see Wolfe. Can you tell her?”

“Yeah,” he said. And hung up.

I lost almost all my tapes too. Hundreds and hundreds of them, put together over more than a dozen years. Oh, I still had a whole bunch in the Plymouth—I circulated them between my major stash and the car so I always had a fresh batch to listen to—but most were gone forever. I didn’t know how I was going to replace some of them. Judy Henske, that probably hurt the worst. Magic Judy is hard to find on vinyl. And her voice. . . impossible to find anywhere else on earth, period. I had some bootleg stuff of a couple of her live club dates that were just plain unreal.

Ah, fuck it. I know where to get more. But it just. . . hurt, somehow. I mean, I knew the thieving cops would appreciate the cash and the guns they “found” there, but the tapes. . . They were probably already in some Dumpster. Or maybe some techno-geek was patiently listening to every one, hoping for something incriminating. Well, good luck, sucker. You’ll never find anything, but you’ll be in love with Magic Judy by the time you’re through.

Replacing the guns was nothing. I’m not one of those loons who has a favorite piece. When it comes to firearms, I’m strictly a use-it-and-lose-it man. This city’s got some of the toughest gun-control laws in the country. Some of the harshest penalties for dealing drugs, too. And every drug-boy in town packs heat.

Michelle was more upset about the clothes than anything else. “Oh, baby, not your alligator boots? And your beautiful suits, the ones I bought you? And the lovely—”

“It’s all gone, Michelle,” I told her, not insane enough to mention that she’d bought it all with my money. “They got it all. Everything I didn’t have on my back.”

“Well, you know what, baby? That’s really a good omen.”

“Huh?”

“Honey, even with my careful, meticulous shopping, your wardrobe was hopelessly out of date. Now we can start over.”

If there was a God, I would have cursed him.

I tried the area around the Greenpoint riverfront, but even with the HAZARD buoys floating everywhere in the slime that passed for a piece of the East River, the area was lousy with artists and entrepreneurs. Next thing would be a Starbucks on the corner. I kept looking.

The reclaimed swampland out around JFK had too many other operations going, besides the quick-trick motels and the topless joints. Too many warehouses without signs on them, too many rotting big rigs parked together like an elephants’ graveyard.

South Ozone Park was good once, but it’s chop-shop heaven all along Atlantic Avenue, and too many neighborly citizens in the little houses just beyond.

Most of Queens is lousy, in fact. The DA out there is so lame he can’t even make an organized-crime case at the airports. Pitiful. The feds have to do all of that stuff.

And you’re always reading about rapists and murderers who capture their victims in another county and truck them into Queens because it’s a softer spot if you get caught.

Everybody knows. And, sooner or later, dead meat brings flies.

I finally found a place. Not far from the Eastern District High School in Bushwick, right in the middle of the badlands. Just over the Brooklyn line, past a foul little river that ran under a rusting drawbridge beside a concrete plant. It was an old factory that the sweatshops hadn’t taken over because it needed way too much work—the life-support systems were all gone; even the copper tubing had been stripped for cash. No danger of pedestrian traffic in daylight. The area was deserted except for the buses that ran along Metropolitan Avenue, like spot-labor vans that cruised the corners picking up whoever wanted a day’s work. Only the bus cargo was all regulars—born-unlucky refugees who couldn’t even say “green card” in English.

And after dark, the only signs of life were the strip bars and the fast-food joints. Once you left the main drag, you could see more action in a graveyard.

I got Pansy used to our new home by camping there with her for a few nights. The Mole welded some steel stairs to the roof, and Pansy was accustomed to depositing her loads up there at the last place, so there wasn’t really any learning curve. One thing was different—a two-pump gas station on the Avenue had a little fenced-off area with dogs walking patrol, so the night was never quiet. But Pansy didn’t seem to care.

I put the place together slow. Real careful. Worked at night, coming and going. When I was finished, it still looked abandoned, but if you checked the city property records, you’d find out it was owned by a corporation. If you traced that corporation, you’d eventually dead-end. But it was mine, and I wasn’t worried about a surprise condemnation proceeding from the city, because Davidson was listed as the corporation’s agent, and he’d get notice in plenty of time.

The first floor was empty, and I left it that way. For a while, the occasional wino would try and catch some sleep there, but it was too full of rats big enough to hunt cats. . . and dogs hungry enough to go after them. A swirling river of predators. Didn’t smell great either, especially with the pigeons who visited through the broken windows, looking for leavings and leaving more than they took every time.

The rust-covered steel door on the side of the building got brand-new locks, multiple spikes driven deeply into the four-inch frame. The best pick man in the world might have beaten it without a key, but even if you could convince thieves of that class there was anything worth stealing in this neighborhood, even if they put together a watch-your-back team while one worked on the door, even if they got inside, they’d just see a blinking red light and a keypad. And a digital counter, working its way down from 30. At that point, they could start punching numbers or start running.

Past all that was another staircase, with a motion-sensor-and-trip-wire combo that would stop a counter-terrorist sweep team.

On the top floor was Pansy, roaming loose. That’s where I lived. Different from the last place. Lots more room, lots less light—a trade-off for the one-way glass. I used a generator for electricity, so nothing registered with Con Ed. No phone, but I had a steady supply of cloned cellulars from the Mole. And a bunch of fresh extra-sweet pineapples for deodorizers that I replaced every couple of days.

I parked indoors, using a million-candlepower hand-held spot to clear the area every time I pulled in. It always drove whatever was there back far enough for me to make it to the stairs. Nobody could get into the Plymouth, even with a crowbar, so I didn’t worry about that much either.

None of the rats made it upstairs, but occasionally a mouse would flit past in the corner of my vision. Mice and rats don’t coexist, so I guess the rats preferred the lower bunk.

Mice aren’t the real problem in city apartments anyway. I remember one day in the joint, we were all out in the yard, swapping stories. Throwdown was telling us about a place he once had. I never knew his citizen name. We all called him Throwdown because he was the sweetest guy in the world, big black dude with a lot of miles on him. But if you challenged him, he’d just go off. He was one of those anesthetics, didn’t feel pain. The hacks discovered that when they tried to club him out once. And mace only made him mad. After that, one of the Goon Squad always carried a hypo full of Thorazine when they came for him.

“Rather have mice than roaches any day,” Throwdown said. “Mice at least got the good taste to stay away when you got company over, you understand what I’m saying? Motherfucking roaches, they see people, they think it’s a business meeting, and they all invited. Now, I had ’em both, okay? So I figure, I’ll do somethin’ about them mice first. They was in the closet. I could hear ’em moving around. So I get me this trap. Now, I know you supposed to use peanut butter, ’cause the little motherfuckers’ll just pick the cheese right out, but I didn’t have none, so I used a piece a salami, okay? Anyway, I’m kicking, doing a dube, waiting for my woman to show, and I hear the trap snap!, right? So I figure, I gotta get that dead mouse outa there before I get company. I opens the door, and there’s this big-ass roach hauling the fucking salami away!”

“Damn! What’d you do?” one of the guys asked.

“Booked,” he said, grinning.

The Mole could have hooked me up with air conditioning too, but window units would have given away the game. And I wasn’t looking forward to winter, even with the space heaters we had lining the walls. But, right then, the asphalt was boiling and getting out was the best way to deal with the weather, so I saddled up the Plymouth and took Pansy to the park.

We got settled in and watched. One guy was going through a complex ritual with himself—stretching, flexing, getting ready for. . . whatever. One of those boys who thinks his body is a temple, I guessed. I lit another cigarette, scratched Pansy behind the ears, both of us grateful for the shade.

A gorgeous redhead with legs longer than a bust-out gambler’s last hope swiveled by. She took a glance at the temple and decided she was an atheist. Watching her walk away was almost enough to make me do some jogging of my own.

The day went on. Close to that special twilight where everything is outlined in black against the sky. Wolfe said she might meet me there, but not to count on it. I’d give her another hour and roll down to Mama’s, hang out there until the commuter traffic vanished.

I wanted a woman. Not the hard-eyed ones I’d been playing with ever since Crystal Beth was taken. Yeah, those were the ones I thought I wanted—as far away from love as I could get, now that mine was gone. But. . . I can’t explain it. Women can fake orgasms, but they can’t fake that wonderful big-eyed look they give you when you’d done something fine.

I wanted to do something fine. See that look.

I don’t buy what citizens mean by “faithful.” Sex isn’t love. But I had to be faithful to Crystal Beth my way. So, before I could search for that look in a woman’s eyes again, I needed to see some dead bodies.

Pansy spotted a squirrel hauling a hunk of discarded pizza back to its nest. An hors d’oeuvre in motion, but even Pansy’s brick brain knew she’d never score, so she contented herself with just watching.

Like I was.

Wolfe never showed.

The heat got worse, visible waves hovering just above the ground. TV cranked it up more. CNN especially. Not the weather reports—the footage of Hutu and Tutsi slaughtering each other on both sides of the Rwanda border again. The mass-homicide images flashed me back. Headaches. Fevers. Night sweats. And that terrifying visitor they call ague: cold, bone-marrow-deep, so bad you can’t close your jaw or your teeth will crack like dry twigs from the chattering, an electric shaking that has to work its way through your body before there’s any peace. It never announces its coming—it’s just there, and all you can do is ride it out. Biafra, that genocidal nightmare, intruding now like it never had before. Pansy recoiled at the smell coming off me.

I took some of the quinine they’d given me years ago, but it just made my ears ring. I went to a doctor who specialized in tropical diseases. She said the ringing was tinnitus. Common thing for malaria victims—the tiny cilia in the ear become brittle and snap. Nothing can be done about it. The ringing would just come and go for the rest of my life. Like the rest of my life.

I asked Mama. The herbalist she sent me to was so ancient he would have been New Age in the Roaring Twenties. He made about a dozen piles of stuff, then dealt a heavy pinch of each into six little brown paper bags. It looked like: thick white Popsicle sticks, basil leaves like they use for topping veal marsala in Tuscan restaurants, tiny clumps of twigs like from a finch’s nest, sections of tree bark—dark outside, pure clean white inside—gnarled lumps of dark reddish roots, big rubbery slabs of mushroom cap.

“You have malaria, yes?”

“Once.”

“Africa or Asia?”

“Africa.”

“Never go away,” he promised. “You soldier?”

“What difference?” I asked him.

He shrugged at that truth. Said, “Parasites, back now. Go away soon, you do medicine. You put this in big pot, okay? Boil into tea, drink three times every day. Two, three weeks, all gone.”

So I did it. Washed each glass down with a hit of dark chocolate between sips.

And he was right.

I’d met with Wolfe by then, too. She backed her hammered maroon Audi sedan into a spot between my Plymouth and a Dumpster, managing to scrape a little off each.

“Nice work,” I told her.

“Parking a car is like docking a ship,” she said. “It’s a controlled collision. You do it slow enough, you can’t hurt anything, not really.”

“Terrific,” I said, indifferent to another welt in the Plymouth’s flanks. Then I told her what I needed.

“You’re talking a big number,” Wolfe said, eyebrows going up for emphasis, the white wings in her long dark hair flaring along for the ride.

“I have no choice. The cops got everything when they took my place away.”

“You’re really going to start over?”

“Not. . .”

Her gray eyes watched me, waiting.

“Not my life,” I answered her question.

“Too bad,” she said, so softly I almost didn’t hear it.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because you. . . it would be. . . I mean, it would be cheaper. There is a real you, right? A real Burke, I mean. There’s a legit birth certificate somewhere. You could apply for a Social Security number, start over. . . .”

“I’m not changing my ways,” I told her, making it clear. Meaning: I was going to thieve. Maybe not at gunpoint anymore, but I was going to take stuff from other people and I needed a shield-screen of fake ID to do that. And still more to keep the IRS off me if I ever stepped on the wrong land mine.

“You hear about that Canine Liberation Front thing?” Wolfe asked, a sorceress smile on her lips.

“No. What the hell is that?”

“Ah. I figured you don’t read the papers much. Never mind. I can understand. If somebody ever took my Bruiser from me, I’d do. . . whatever to get him back.”

The stallion Rottweiler stuck his head out the side window of Wolfe’s Audi and snarled agreement.

“You can do it?” I asked her. Not really a question.

“You have the cash, sure.”

“You need it all up front?”

“It’s not like, say, a shipment of guns,” Wolfe said, her smile thinner now that she knew I was going back to my old ways, making it clear she knew what some of those were. “You know, ID; it’s not something you can just turn around and sell to somebody else if the buyer defaults.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“And a lot of it has to be fronted at my end. Besides, you never know if your client’s going to be around. . . .”

“Yeah.” Nothing much else to say. Wolfe was telling me that, no matter what I called myself, she’d always know who I was. Truth is, she’d always known. Only now she’d know the names I’d be using, too.

“Want to set up a—?”

“No need. I got it right here,” I told her, nodding at the trunk of the Plymouth. “You okay carrying that much? I don’t see any of your crew around. . . .”

Bruiser growled at me again. I got the picture.

Her price was actually a few grand short of what I’d guessed. I popped the trunk, opened the false bottom next to the NASCAR fuel cell, and handed her enough cash to buy a new car. A nice new car. She opened her sling purse and I dropped it in. She never glanced at it. Even trust is a different thing down here. I’d never stiff Wolfe a penny on the fee, never slip her funny money or a Chicago bankroll. And she knew that. But. . . who’d stiff anyone holding the key to your whole new ID anyway?

“Could take a while,” she said.

I shrugged. It was out of my hands.

“I’ll get word to you,” Wolfe promised.

The Audi belched oily black smoke as she fired it up. She waved a quick goodbye and pulled out. The Rottweiler’s head swiveled to watch me until they were out of sight.

The new place felt safe, but it wasn’t. . . the same. Anyway, I didn’t spend much time there, so Pansy started riding with me a lot.

She was with me for that first meeting on West Street. And she wasn’t the only one in the joint wearing a collar and leash.

It had taken them a long time to get in touch. Mail was stacking up in PO boxes of mine all over the city, but they were never going to be emptied. I hadn’t left the keys or the addresses in my old place, but a lifetime of playing it to the far side of safe kept me away.

So a few wannabe mercenaries wouldn’t get stung, a few kiddie-porn collectors wouldn’t get a ticket to the slammer instead of more trophies, some assorted chumps wouldn’t get taken. No loss.

All the names I used for stings were gone. But anyone who wanted Burke bad enough could find a phone number if they asked in the right places. The number for a Chinese laundry in Brooklyn, set on permanent bounce to the pay phone at Mama’s.

The ones who wanted the meet, they didn’t know me. The only ticket they had was a name. A dead man’s name. It was me they wanted, but they didn’t know where to look. So it took a while before the word came in. I returned the guy’s call, told him I’d meet him, and he told me where. I figured it was a job. And a job was one of a lot of things I didn’t have, then.

“You can’t bring. . . that in here,” the bouncer said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Pansy took my hand signal and stood rock-steady. She watched the bouncer with disdain, her ears slightly perked in case I told her to sit. If I did, she’d nail the muscleman before he could scream—high-thigh chomps are her specialty. And then all he’d do is scream until he passed out from pain or blood loss—Pansy’s a one-bite beast.

“I’m supposed to meet someone here,” I said mildly. “He’ll okay it.”

“Who would that be?” the bouncer asked, arms still crossed, flexing hard, unable to keep his gaze away from Pansy’s ice-water eyes, and wishing he could.

“Lincoln’s all he told me.”

“You mind waiting outside?”

“Me? No. I don’t mind where I wait, pal. I just mind how long I wait, understand?”

I made another hand signal. Pansy wheeled and followed me outside. I lit a cigarette and leaned against the outside of the one-story black-walled building. The traffic was all gay, mostly leather, a few tourists in business clothes. Some looked at me; none spoke. I wasn’t sporting a handkerchief in a back pocket, wasn’t pierced, not even a lousy earring, and I was dressed in what people went to work in when they got paid by the hour. Pansy lay down at my feet. She doesn’t like concrete much at her age, but the sidewalk was still warm from the day’s heat and it probably felt good against her arthritis.

I wasn’t halfway done with the smoke when the bouncer came outside. “You mind going around the back way?” he asked. Polite now, not like before.

“Nah.”

“Okay. You just walk toward the corner. You’ll see an alley. You turn left and—”

“Ah, that sounds complicated,” I told him. “Maybe you’d better show me the way, huh?”

“I can’t leave my—”

“Sure. I understand. Tell this Lincoln guy that I came by to see him, okay?”

I gave an imperceptible tug on Pansy’s leash. She lumbered to her feet. “Wait a minute,” the bouncer said.

I stopped.

His face looked like he was making up his mind. “I’ll show you,” he finally said.

“Lead on,” I told him.

He started walking in the direction he’d told me to go. Suddenly he stopped, turned, looked at me: “You gonna walk behind me all the way?”

“Sure,” I said; meaning, “What else?”

He nodded, as if confirming a deeply held suspicion, but he started up again. When he turned into the alley, I unsnapped Pansy’s lead and she trotted ahead of him. He practically slammed himself into the alley wall to get out of the way as her dark-gray shadow flitted past. He whirled around and said: “Wha—?”

And then he saw the pistol I was holding. “Just a simple precaution, pal,” I reassured him. “You’re taking me someplace nice, I’m gonna thank you for it. Otherwise, you’re not gonna need to look up ‘crossfire’ in the dictionary, understand?”

He put his hands up.

“Put ’em down,” I told him. “Relax. Just do whatever you were gonna do.”

He walked down the length of the alley, fast now, Pansy trotting alongside him like she was heeling. I could barely make out her shape, but I knew the hair was up on the back of her neck, ears flattened, tail whipped between her legs to protect her genitals. Ready to deal out a more certain death than anything I was holding. Guns jam. Shooters miss. Pansy never did either one.

The bouncer rapped a couple of times on a bright-yellow door. It opened immediately. There was light coming from inside. I could see maybe half a dozen people. Except for the guy answering the door, they were all sitting down.

“All right?” the bouncer asked me over his shoulder.

“Sure, pal. Thanks for your help.”

I stepped inside, Pansy’s bulk against my leg. I could feel her vibrating, still ready.

“My name is Lincoln,” the man said as he closed the door behind us. “I’m the one who called.”

He was medium height, early thirties; his body looked trim in a pastel T-shirt and white pleated pants, but his face was older. Prominent cheekbones, thin lips, a full set of capped teeth, brownish hair frosted a lighter shade at the forelock. He wore a diamond stud in his right ear, and his grip was strong, self-assured.

He walked over to a sofa where some other people were sitting, nodded his head at an armchair off to one side. “Okay with you?”

I sat down without saying anything, Pansy dropping down on my left. Farther in that same direction, a pair of women at a café table. One, a busty brunette in a pink tank top, showing off her muscular arms among other things; the other, a slender blonde with long, lank hair falling on either side of her head, bangs covering her eyes, wearing some kind of middy blouse.

“We didn’t expect you’d bring. . . company,” the guy who called himself Lincoln said.

“You worried she’s gonna talk?” I asked.

The brunette laughed. Nobody else made a sound.

“No. I was just. . . Forget it. Vincent didn’t say anything about you having a. . . partner.” Making sure I heard the name, keeping the connection alive. Vincent was an old friend. A gay man, emphasis on the second word. Heavy emphasis.

A lot of gay guys I’d met over the years said they started with being molested. I was ignorant enough to think that was the root until I met Vincent. His family was the real thing—loving and warm and supportive. He explained to me how being gay was hardwired, present at birth. Genetic. “It’s not a ‘choice,’ ” he said, explaining it to me. “It’s not a ‘preference’ either. It’s what we are. It’s what I am.”

Vincent was in what he called the “literary world.” I never understood what he did. Or maybe I never paid attention. What I remember most was how he hated. . . them. Baby-rapers. I was hunting one when we crossed paths, that’s when I found out. But he didn’t hate them because he was one of us. The Children of the Secret, we’re a big tribe, but we’re not united. We don’t fight under the same flag. Vincent wasn’t a draftee in that war; he was a volunteer. He hated them for what they did to children. . . not what was done to him. That was the kind of man he was.

Vincent was a man in a lot of ways, it turned out. He had to do some jail time. Not much, a few months. He wouldn’t talk about something the grand jury wanted to know, and some pontificating pervert of a judge locked him up for contempt of court. The black-robed ass-kisser told Vincent he’d stay there until he talked. Once the appellate court figured out that was a life sentence, they cut Vincent loose.

I couldn’t help it. I was young then. So I asked him if he had sex in there.

“No,” is all he said.

I remembered what it was like Inside. How guys who weren’t close to gay on the bricks got turned in there. “Turned out” is what the cons called it. Turned over is what it was. I didn’t know how to ask him about that. . . rape thing, so I just said, “How come?”

“I didn’t meet anyone I fancied,” he said, his deep-blue eyes telling me that someone in there had mistaken gay for weak. And learned the difference.

That was a long time ago. Vincent’s gone now. But his name would still key my lock. . . at least enough to make me listen.

“What did Vincent tell you?” I asked the guy who called himself Lincoln.

“He said you could. . . that you were some kind of private investigator. But. . . off the books.”

“Meaning I don’t have a license, or I get paid in cash?”

“Both, I guess. But that’s not what I meant. I mean, what Vincent meant. He said you could. . . find someone. Even if they didn’t want to be found.”

“Okay. That’s what you want?”

“Vincent said you’d never go to the police,” Lincoln said, meaning it as a question.

“You’re tap-dancing,” I told him. “I don’t know what you asked Vincent. I wasn’t there when you talked to him. . . if you did. And nobody can ask him now, right? My résumé is in the street—that’s where you have to ask whatever you want to know. You gonna ask a liar if he lies? How would you know anything comes from my mouth is righteous? Either go with what Vincent told you, or get somebody else, friend.”

The guy who called himself Lincoln glanced around the room like he was taking a vote. I couldn’t see anyone respond, but he went on like it had been unanimous.

“We want. . . the man who’s killing all the. . . gay-bashers. The ‘Avenger’ or whatever name the tabloids are calling him this week.”

“You want him. . .?”

“We want to find him,” Lincoln said. “We want to. . .” He glanced around the room again, waited until he was satisfied. “. . . to help him get away.”

The whole place went quiet, like a bomb had just dropped and they were waiting for the smoke to clear to determine the body count. But I’d had a lifetime of knowing how to answer the question he never asked, so I aborted their pregnant pause and said: “Why tell me?”

Then they really went quiet.

Another mistake. I just sat there—a frog on a lily pad, waiting to see if they were flies. I reached down, scratched behind Pansy’s ears, my face just this side of bored.

Waiting.

“Vincent told us—” Lincoln started.

I held up my hand in a “stop” gesture. “Vincent’s not here,” I reminded him.

“Not about. . . you. Vincent was the first one who. . . Look, gay-bashing is. . . lynching, okay? Like that poor kid in Wyoming. I mean, what happened to him, it’s always happened. But it doesn’t get reported much. Not for what it is. And—”

“And you’re all over the map,” I cut in. “Lynching is when they string a guy up for stealing horses without waiting for a trial. When they total a gay guy for being gay, that’s a hate kill. And those’re never about individuals.”

“I—”

“He’s right, Lincoln,” the brunette in the tank top said, her voice harder than her face. “Save the politics, okay? If I listen to one more dumb-fuck discussion about whether we’re ‘queers’ or ‘gays’ or ‘homosexuals,’ I’ll hurl. Just tell him what Vincent told us. . . told some of us, anyway—I wasn’t there.” Reminding him. A smart, tough girl, that one. I couldn’t tell where she was from. There’s no such thing as a “New York” accent. Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. . . they all carry speech-markers. Her voice didn’t have any of them.

Lincoln made a gesture like he was wiping sweat off his brow, but he wasn’t sweating, so I took it for some kind of prelude-habit. Then he said: “Vincent said it was never going to stop by itself. He said we had to. . . hit back.”

I waited, but he’d obviously said his piece. Or thought he had, anyway.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of test, pal?” I asked him. “Am I supposed to guess the rest? Or maybe you want some. . . what, credentials? Look, far as I’m concerned, you can all—”

“Vincent said that,” he cut in. “That’s what he said about you. He said you were the most unprejudiced straight man he ever met in his life.”

“So you went through all this to give me some kind of award?”

“What Vincent said,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, “was that you just plain didn’t give a fuck. One way or the other.”

“That hasn’t changed,” I told him. “So what? You got something to say, let me hear it. And it better end in cash.”

“To maintain your wardrobe?” some little twerp in a Godfather-movie gangster suit threw in.

I looked over at him, still patting Pansy. “No, pal. To feed my dog. She eats a lot. And she’s not the only bitch in this room, I see. Look, I don’t do dish, okay? Show me some cash or show me the door.”

“That’s enough, Sean,” Lincoln told the twerp in the gangster suit. “Mr. Burke, what Vincent told us was that we needed to. . . practice violence. Deliberate violence, not self-defense. That we needed to patrol our own streets and. . . interdict the enemy.”

“Sounds smart to me,” I told him.

“Maybe it was,” Lincoln said. “But none of us would go for it. It sounded too. . . ugly. We didn’t want to turn the other cheek or”—some fool cackled far in the back, but I couldn’t make out what he said—“anything, but we’re just not. . . like that.”

I guess Vincent hadn’t told them everything about our past dealings. One of his friends had ended up with a steel plate in his head after a night in the Ramble. Vincent convinced the guy to go to the cops. They caught the perps easy enough—the little freaks were trophy-takers, and one of them still had the gold chain he’d pulled off the guy whose skull they’d bashed in. And the DA even prosecuted. But only one of them got time, and he didn’t get much of it. That’s when Vincent first came to me. Later, I was working a job and I needed a place to meet a guy. A place I could haul him out of against his will, if it came to that. Vincent set that one up for me. He was glad to do it. He hated baby-rapers worse than fag-bashers, and that was a lot of hate.

“Who’s ‘we’?” The brunette challenged the silence Lincoln’s little speech had produced. “If I had been there, I would have—”

“Sure, Nadine, we know. We heard it all from you, a thousand times,” Lincoln told her without taking his eyes from me. “Anyway, we took a vote. And Vincent lost. That was the end of it.”

“So?” I asked him.

“I mean, it was the end of. . . ‘us,’ I guess. Vincent said he didn’t want anything to do with us. He. . . mocked us. He said, when we traded in our leather drag for lavender bullets he’d be back.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So he. . . died. From a heart attack. But now it’s like he’s. . . back.”

“You think it’s Vincent taking out all these freaks?” I asked him. “You should’ve gone to Ghostbusters, chump.”

The brunette laughed again, more harshly this time. Her body went along for the ride—quite a sight, and she knew it. When she caught my eye, she shrugged her shoulders to write that in italics.

“Look,” Lincoln said, “you’re not making this any easier. But I. . . we didn’t expect you would. We don’t want you to do anything illegal, all right? There’s nothing against the law in looking for somebody. Or solving crimes either.”

“You said a lot more than that,” I reminded him.

“Lincoln always says more than he has to,” the brunette he’d called Nadine said, snorting. She got to her feet, walked over to stand next to him. She was shorter than I’d thought she’d be, legs as heavily developed as her arms. “What we want you to do is find him,” she went on. “That’s all. Just find him, and tell us where we can find him too.”

“Vincent said—” Lincoln started, but Nadine chopped him down quick with: “Nobody fucking cares, okay, Lincoln?” She turned to face me, hip-shot, her eyes asking me if I liked her as much from the waist down. “Vincent told them you had contacts outside the country. That you’d been a mercenary, and that there was a. . . ‘pipeline’ or something you could send somebody down if they wanted to disappear.”

I let my eyes tell her she was, in fact, just as fine from the waist down. “Now you are talking about committing a crime,” I said. “Whole bunch of crimes if I remember my legal training.”

“You’re a lawyer?” she asked.

“No,” I told her truthfully, “but I’ve been in plenty of courtrooms.”

“So you’re not interested?” she asked, a quick lick of her lips telling me she knew how double-edged her words were.

“In what? Solving some crimes? Or committing some?”

“Right now, I’ll settle for either.”

“I might be. . . in the first. If the money was right.”

“What makes you think you could solve. . . I mean, find him?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t know, pal. What makes you think I can? Vincent?”

“Vincent said you. . . do things for money. He said he. . . helped you with one, once.”

“That’s nice,” I replied. “Only thing is, I don’t have any old stories for you, friend. You want to check me out, do what you have to do. Or maybe you already did that. But I don’t have a crystal ball. Or promises either.”

“But you could try, couldn’t you?”

“Sure. I could try. But I don’t do bounty hunting.”

“What does that mean?” Nadine asked.

“It means I don’t do COD, understand?” I said, holding her eyes. “I get paid for work, not for results. You want to pay me to look, I might do that. You want to pay me only if I turn him up—if it’s a ‘him’ at all—forget it.”

They all went silent again. Nadine turned and walked back to her little table, showing off what every man on the planet was missing. I could tell she’d had a lot of practice.

I went back to scratching behind Pansy’s ears. If they didn’t learn anything else from all this, they’d at least discover I could outwait a tree.

Lincoln went over to a far corner. A number of them clustered around. The skinny blonde at Nadine’s table started to get up, but Nadine grabbed her wrist and wrenched her back down.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Nadine and I played with each other across the distance. It was as good a way to pass the time as any.

Lincoln finally came back. “We. . . can’t decide,” he said. “But we will. Soon. If we agree to your. . . terms, we’ll reach out for you.”

“You don’t even know my terms,” I told him. “The money has to—”

“The money, the money,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry about money. Your terms are that you’ll. . . work. Like you said. Yes?”

“Sure.”

“You can find your own way out?”

“Sure,” I said again, getting up. Pansy slowly got to her feet, then we walked toward the door. As we passed her table, Nadine shot out one hand, grabbed at my jacket.

“Ahhh,” she said, mock-sorrowfully, “you didn’t even ask for my number.”

“I already know it,” I told her. “And it’s a wrong one.”

I went through the door into the alley. It was empty. Pansy was the only one disappointed.

“I do not like them, mahn,” Clarence said, back inside Mama’s an hour later.

“Them?” Michelle’s voice, scorpion-under-glass if you knew how to read it.

Clarence did. And he wasn’t going anywhere near there. “No, my little sister, I do not mean their. . . sex. That is their business. I mean, I do not trust these people who come to Burke. Something is wrong with all. . . this.”

For Clarence, that was a long speech. And for him to start a conversation was rarer still. I exchanged a long look with the Prof. Max just waited, as always.

“You make the call, you got to tell it all,” the Prof finally said.

“Yes, Father, that is what I am saying,” Clarence agreed, not understanding that the Prof was talking about him, not about the crew I’d just visited. “Why don’t they. . . fight the ones who attack them?”

“Remember the Haitian guy over at the Seven-Oh in Brooklyn?” I asked Clarence.

I didn’t have to say anything more. A couple of cops supposedly took him in the back room and sodomized him with a nightstick. An ugly-filthy Tontons Macoutes–style power display. Ruptured his bladder. Told him if he screamed they’d kill his whole family, muttering about “teaching niggers a lesson.” There’s a big Haitian community here, and they sure aren’t all nonviolent. But they stayed with peaceful demonstrations, expressing confidence that the authorities would get the job done.

The young man nodded, his face unreadable.

“Maybe it’s the same thing,” I said. “Maybe they’re waiting for the public to fucking get it, I don’t know.”

“Mahn, they do not get it. The Haitian guy, it happened when the Mayor was running for re-election, yes? And it was on the front page of the papers. Every day. Big coverage. TV, radio. No place to hide. Most of the time, when the. . . homosexuals get attacked, it never even gets out, you know? They don’t even go to the cops. Those little demonstrations, they are nothing.”

I nodded, against my will, agreeing with him. Thinking of Crystal Beth. Dead and gone. Just because some freak who couldn’t face what was in himself had to go and. . .

“This ‘Avenger’ guy, he is speaking sense to me, mahn,” Clarence finished my thought. “They kill your people, you kill them.”

“Like the Israelis and the Arabs?” Michelle challenged, pink beginning to creep into her peaches-and-cream.

“Israel is still standing, Little Sister,” Clarence said. “Would it be so if she waited for the United Nations to protect her from her enemies?”

“That clue is true,” the Prof said. “Ain’t a motherfucker on the planet don’t know the Israeli bible.”

Michelle looked a question at the little man.

“Two eyes for an eye,” he answered her. Then he turned to the rest of us. “Been pretty quiet since this ‘Avenger’ guy started playing his number. . . .”

“And that is who they want you to find, mahn?” Clarence asked me.

“That’s what they say,” I told him.

“But. . . what?” Michelle asked.

“Clarence has got a point,” I said. “Why me? Sure, I was tight with Vincent, and he might have told them a few things. But they got beaucoup cash. Made that clear. Why not just. . .?”

“They told you that part, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “I think they’re for real on it. The Man wants to stop him before he hits again. But these boys, they want you to stop him before he gets caught. Better than wasting their cash on a lawyer.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter for now,” I told everyone. “They’ll get back to me if they want to play.”

I didn’t want to play. I wanted to watch the slime who killed my woman die. I thought about that. A lot. Would Crystal Beth have wanted revenge? She was raised a hippie. Peace and love. But her father died protecting a runaway from a biker pack who said they owned her. And her mother followed him later, taking his killers along for the ride. Much later, Crystal Beth got into the business too. Running that safehouse for stalking victims. Until she became one herself. That’s when I came in. And by the time we were all done, the walls were splattered.

Would she have wanted it? I couldn’t puzzle it out. So I faced the truth. I did. Me.

But I didn’t have a clue. And if the cops did, they weren’t saying. So I thought I’d get myself an alibi and see if the Avenger would do some of his work while I was covered.

I hadn’t been in the basement poolroom for years, but the old man nodded like he’d seen me yesterday. My cue was still in the rack, held in place by a tiny little lock. I took it down, unscrewed it, checked the hollowed-out compartment in the heavily taped butt. Empty. Nobody’d left me a message there for a long time.

Been a long time since I’d played too, and it showed—only took ten minutes to attract one of the slowly circling sharks. I waved him off. I wanted witnesses, sure, but I wasn’t going to pay for them.

Hours slipped by. Toward the end, the cue ball was finally starting to obey orders. I spent the whole night working on my stroke, not paying any attention to pocketing the balls. It was after three in the morning when I settled my tab with the old man.

Nothing on the news next day. Maybe he’d really gone quiet. Or, like one of the tabloids speculated, taken his own life. Dying of AIDS, that was another rumor.

I didn’t buy any of it.

I went to the track that night. Been years since I’d been to Yonkers. The whole place had changed. NO SMOKING signs everywhere. Quiet. Damn near empty. The horses were a sorry collection of low-rent claimers and nonwinners, with a few burnt-out old campaigners thrown in. Purses were real low too. Handicapping wasn’t the same either. They’d added a flexible rail, so the short stretch wasn’t the big factor it used to be—horses could pass on the inside coming home. And they ran at a mile and a sixteenth for some stupid reason. I had no experience with any of that, but I invested a few bucks, making sure I went to the same window every time.

I didn’t hit one all night.

Neither did he.

The way to establish an alibi is to be visible. But I’d spent my whole life being the opposite—even in prison, where profile maintenance can get you dead real quick—and when I made my list, I didn’t come up with much. I’m not known as a gambler, so making the rounds of the various games in town would get me too noticed.

If I wanted to play the slots, I could always go to one of the strip clubs, but those siliconed androids wouldn’t remember one john from another if the cops ever asked, and they sure don’t give receipts. Baseball interests me about as much as antique-collecting. And the movies are a good place to hide, not be seen. My crew would always stand up in court, but there wasn’t one of them that didn’t have a sheet or wasn’t known to be my partner. Not good.

I asked around. Got offered a sure-fire deal from a sleazoid lawyer I know. His client wanted some video of his wife in the sack. . . with anyone but him, he wasn’t particular. All I had to do was romance the woman—“She’s an ugly old pig,” the lawyer told me, “probably even go for a guy like you”—and they’d get me an alibi that’d pass anywhere. It was good money. I hated to let it slide. But I recouped a bit by going to see the woman and telling her what her husband had planned. She was real grateful. And she wasn’t anything like what the lawyer had described. I might have gone back to see her again if she hadn’t offered me major money to kill her husband.

I thought about getting locked up for something petty, but that bullshit only works in movies. Nobody who’d ever been Inside for a minute would go back just to prove his whereabouts. Besides, the killer was off the job. Or quiet, anyway. And I couldn’t alibi myself twenty-four-seven if I was sleeping alone.

I was still thinking it over when he went back to work.

This one was harder to connect. Fact is, the cops probably wouldn’t have put it together on their own. It was at a college residence, uptown. The usual stuff:

ALL FAGS MUST DIE!

spray-painted on a dorm door. The same door someone had been slipping nasty little notes under. Somebody threw a rock through the kid’s window too. All reported to the campus cops, but not to NYPD. They had some suspects, but not enough proof to go to the Student Court or whatever other impotent nonsense they used there. The gay kids had a demonstration in the Quad. Got some local coverage. But nothing happened—no ID on the perps.

But the hunter must have figured it out. The target was alone in his room. On the third floor. It was a hot night—I guess he left the window open while he slept. Maybe he felt the first burning slice of the razor, maybe not. In the morning, they found him in strips.

Turned out the kid who died was one of the suspects. But that wasn’t enough for a connect until the hunter launched another communiqué at the papers.

Night will not protect you. The darkness holds no safety. Your shield is now my sword. Another of you has joined his cowardly comrades. Do not deceive yourselves. The design is not deterrence—it is extinction. Either we will be allowed to live in peace or you will not be allowed to live. The next one will be close to home. Welcome to a new food chain, prey.

There was one big difference to this note. Apparently he didn’t care for the “Avenger” title the media came up with. So this time it was signed: “Homo Erectus.”

The tabs went crazy. “Profilers” filled the talk show stages. Gay groups got center stage. . . and used it to go on and on: They understood how this killer felt, blah-blah, but they were very careful to denounce violence, playing their role. All the editorials read the same: Fag-bashing is bad, so is killing. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The kind of trenchant, cutting-edge stuff that makes them so relevant. The “re-enactment” shows ran fake violence-video of the murders, but they didn’t have an image of the killer, so the “Most Wanted” stuff went unanswered. Rewards increased.

The father of the kid who got razor-ripped called a press conference, saying his son was the innocent victim of a maniac. That can of spray paint the cops found in his room—the one with his fingerprints all over it—so what if it was the exact same brand that had been used on the gay kid’s dorm door? Was that proof? Even Jeffrey Dahmer got a trial, for God’s sake! What kind of country was this, anyway?

And, of course, he sued the school.

I kept adding to my new refuge. Never anything bigger than I could lug in the Plymouth. The Mole looked like one of those TV aliens with his huge goggles as he arc-welded away. Max wasn’t any good with techno-stuff, but he understood mechanics and leverage as perfectly as he did his own kinetics, and the loading-bay door he designed pulled up into the roof, silent as cancer, when I touched the dashboard switch the Mole installed. Now I could turn the corner, cut my lights, and, if I timed it right, slip inside the building as if I’d just vanished. Much easier than in my old. . . place. I didn’t have to carry the spotlight anymore either. A pair of them blasted on automatically as soon as the Plymouth’s front end broke the motion-detector beams. If you weren’t ready for it, you’d go instantly blind. Nice for uninvited visitors.

I spent some of the money I’d stashed, fixing the place up. Gave a little chunk of it to Michelle for clothes, and she went through it like a dope fiend the night before detox.

And I kept the lines out too, but I didn’t hook anything. When you’re in the freak-scamming business, you meet a lot of humans who hate gays, but you also meet a lot who hide behind them. . . like those “man-boy love” groups who masquerade as homosexual and try and march in the gay-pride parades—as if fucking a boy is the same as making love with a grown man.

I was at the table, ready to play, but all I drew was blanks.

If I got a hint, I was ready to do some ugly things. If I thought anyone in particular knew the answer, they were going to tell me. But I didn’t have. . . anything.

I knew better than to go back to working my scams until I got the new ID. And I didn’t really need the alibi anymore. Morales had nailed it—mail bombs weren’t my style, and whoever took out that last one was either a ninja or in a lot better shape than I was. The federales knew I had the horses in my stable—the Mole could fit enough bang-stuff into a suitcase to take down a big building. And Max could climb walls like I could climb stairs. But they weren’t showing any interest, and I didn’t expect any. Whoever—or whatever—this Homo Erectus was, it was all local.

Still, I made the rounds. Shot a lot more pool than I had in years. Took Max with me down to Freehold to watch some real trotters—the Meadowlands is closer, but only the half-mile tracks really show you any action—and even hung out in some after-hours joints.

After a while, I didn’t know what I was waiting for, so I told myself it was the ID.

I was in the restaurant, playing another round of our life-sentence card game with Max. It was gin for a long time, but we’d switched to casino ever since Max had a once-in-forever winning streak and refused to play anymore for fear of insulting the gods.

For once, Mama wasn’t lambasting him with her incompetent advice—he’d brought his daughter Flower with him and the little girl was watching, patient and quiet. Like her mother, except the child was actually interested in the game, missing nothing. Max was convinced she’d bring him luck. But casino’s not like gin, and there was no wave of fortune for him to catch. Oh, he could win a hand once in a while, but he’d never get close to breaking even. The trick was making my deliberate blunders slick enough so he wouldn’t snap that I was tanking the game. I don’t do that often, but, with Flower sitting there watching me with those grave and glistening eyes. . . no choice. He got back a couple of thousand off his deficit before Immaculata came in there to collect the little girl.

“Are you ready for the museum, child?” she asked, her face blazing with love.

“Could we wait a bit, Mother?” Flower asked politely. “I am helping Daddy.”

“And how are you doing that?” Immaculata asked.

Max signed “good luck” to her. She bowed, and took a seat next to me. Mama brought her some tea, serving it personally, a sign of deep respect. Their elaborate thank-you ritual took long enough for us to play another couple of hands.

“Are you. . . all right now? In your new place?” Immaculata asked me.

“Yeah, it’s fine, Mac,” I told her. “Better, even. It was time to go anyway.”

“Ah,” she said, as if she understood. That I was lying.

Needless to say, with Immaculata added to Max’s arsenal, I started losing every damn hand. Max would have sat there for hours—when he hit a winning streak, he went absolutely immobile, convinced that any alteration would change his luck. But Immaculata wasn’t having any. “It is time to go now, Flower,” she said.

“Yes, Mother,” the child said. She stood up and kissed Max on the cheek. Max signed that he loved her, that he would always protect her, that she was the most precious thing in his life. The child’s face reddened slightly, just a trace of embarrassment showing.

Watching them took me away.

When I was little, I was in custody. They called it an orphanage, but we all knew what it was. All except those chumps who thought they were going to get adopted one day by the privileged people who came around and looked us over like it was a petting zoo. They didn’t want any of us—they just wanted babies—but we got displayed anyway. I hated them all. By that time, hate came easy.

Once they took us to watch some Little League game. Out in the suburbs, all us State kids on a bus. Same kind of bus they used to take me to prison years later, only this one didn’t have that steel mesh over the windows. Anyway, it wasn’t like we were going to play or anything; we just got to watch.

This one kid, he was a fat clumsy little goof. Every time they hit the ball to him, he flubbed it. And when he got up to bat, his swing was spastic. But his father was running around the stands cheering like the kid was the second coming of DiMaggio, shouting encouragement, applauding everything. I could see it embarrassed the fat kid, his father making such a fuss over him and all.

I hated that kid.

I wanted to kill him.

And take his place.

I wanted to. . .

“Burke. Call for you.”

Mama, tapping me on the shoulder, that look on her face telling me it wasn’t the first time she’d tried, but I hadn’t been there.

I shook my head to clear it. Immaculata and Flower were gone. Max was sitting across from me. Cards still on the table. Score sheet to my right. But it was—damn!—half an hour since I’d been in the room.

“Thanks, Mama,” I said, like nothing was going on. I saw her exchange looks with Max.

“What?” I said into the phone.

“Aw, you never did call, huh?” A woman’s voice. But not one I. . .

“Nadine,” I said.

“Sure. Who else? You have other girlfriends?”

“What do you want?” I asked, flat-voiced, just this side of harsh.

“Ah, what a list that is. But, for now, I’ll settle for this: We want to meet with you again.”

“Lincoln—”

“Yes, Lincoln. All of us.”

“What’s the—?”

“The point,” she interrupted again, “is that we’ve come to an agreement. And we want to propose it to you.”

“I told you—”

“Yes, and we listened, okay? You can have what you want. How many times a day do you hear that?” she mock-purred.

“I hear it all the time,” I told her.

“Well, you play your cards right, you’ll get to see it too,” she said, a play-sexy catch in her low voice.

“You want entertainment, watch TV, bitch.”

“You scared?” she challenged.

“Sure,” I said indifferently.

“Hmm. . . that works on most men,” she said, whispering now, breathy. “What works on you, Burke?”

“Money,” I said, neutral-voiced.

“Well, then, you got your wish, mister. Interested now?”

I didn’t bother with the bouncer this time. Or backup either. If there was going to be trouble, it would have been last time. Anyway, my crew knew who everyone was, and where to find the place. If those people knew enough about me to offer me a job, they knew enough to figure out that double-crossing me was a sure ticket to Payback City. And that it wouldn’t be a round trip.

The yellow door opened a split-second after I rapped. Nadine. In baggy pink jersey sweats, her thick dark hair tied behind her head.

“You ever go anyplace without her?” she asked, nodding at Pansy.

“Sometimes,” I replied, looking over her shoulder. The place was empty. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Oh, they’ll be along. Don’t worry. I just wanted to talk to you first. Alone.”

“Talk,” I told her, walking past her and sitting down at the same table she’d been at the first time.

She strolled slowly over, hauling the sweatshirt over her head with both hands as she moved. Underneath was a white jersey bra with heavy shoulder straps. She needed them. Pansy watched her, not moving. She doesn’t rely on smell like most dogs, never makes guesses. If I told her to, she’d let the strange woman pat her head and not make a sound. Or lock on to her like a crocodile with an antelope that ventured too near the water’s edge. All the same to Pansy—she’s a pro.

Nadine sat down, rummaged in a small black nylon bag sitting on the table. The only light was somewhere in the back room. No noise. She came out with a hypo, hit herself on a fleshy part of her upper arm, and pushed the plunger. If she felt the spike go in, I couldn’t see it in her eyes.

And if she expected a reaction from me, she didn’t see it either. “What is it you want?” I asked her.

“To find out. . . something. They’re going to hire you, but I have a. . . proposition. Maybe. I need to find out. . . . Did you ever know a lesbian? I mean, really know one, not watch a couple do it in some movie?”

“I live with one,” I told her.

“Huh? You? Who is she?”

“She’s right there,” I said, pointing at Pansy.

“I guess I don’t like your sense of humor much,” she said, her voice sharp around the edges.

“Pansy’s gay,” I said, telling her the truth. “Or whatever it is that means she wants nothing to do with male dogs. She’s a Neapolitan mastiff, from one of the finest lines. I could get an easy fifteen hundred bucks for one pup, and they usually have real big litters. So I paid a ridiculous stud fee for this famous brute Neo, over in Brooklyn. And even though Pansy was in heat, she wouldn’t get busy with him. No matter what he did, she wasn’t having any.”

“Maybe she just didn’t like him?”

“Like him? A bitch in heat? Sure. Anyway, I tried it again. Couple of times, in fact. No Sale.”

“Didn’t they want you to tie her down so he could—?”

“Yeah, they did. You think I’d let anyone rape my dog?”

“Well. . . you were going to breed her, right?”

“I was going to let her have sex, then let her have puppies. That’s it. I thought she wanted to. And I was wrong. Truth is, I thought she would—she loves puppies.”

“You really think she’s gay?” she asked, leaning forward, moving her elbows in to display the cleavage.

“Sure.”

“I didn’t think dogs could be—”

“Why not? Some monkeys are. It’s just brain chemistry, right? Hormones trigger differently. I heard it from other guys too, about their dogs.”

“How about male dogs?”

“I. . . don’t know. I don’t see why not. Be harder to tell with them, though.”

“Why?”

“They’re pack animals. When the bitches go into season, the males fight. The winners get to mate. At least, mate first. Maybe their blood gets up even if they don’t want to have sex, and they fight anyway. I don’t know. Never paid much attention.”

“But you seem to know a lot about them.”

“Dogs? Sure. Pansy’s my. . . partner.”

“Is she. . . trained, like?”

“You mean, can she do tricks?”

“Yes. I mean, I guess so. What else could—?”

“They got food in that joint? The one around the side?”

“Sure. What would—?”

“Go get a nice piece of raw steak, no bone, I’ll show you a trick.”

She gave me a quizzical look for a long second. Then got up and walked out the door. If running around in her bra bothered her, you couldn’t see any evidence of it.

I lit a cigarette. “Ready to show off, girl?” I asked Pansy.

She didn’t say anything.

I was almost done with the smoke when Nadine came back in, a big slab of bloody steak in one hand. “Now what?” she asked.

“Just give it to her,” I said.

“She won’t. . . bite me?”

“She won’t do anything unless I tell her to. Go ahead.”

She handed the steak to Pansy. The big Neo sniffed it appreciatively and immediately started to slobber. With Pansy, that means quarts, not drops. But she didn’t move a muscle.

“How come she won’t—?”

“Drape it right over her snout,” I told her. “Go ahead—it’s perfectly safe.”

She did what I told her. I got up, walked behind Nadine. Pansy’s eyes were only on me. “Tell her she’s beautiful,” I whispered into Nadine’s ear.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, just as I made the hand signal for “Speak!” to Pansy. The beast expertly spun her huge head, dewlaps sending a spray of drool all across the room as the steak disappeared into her maw. It was gone in a few chomps. She sat up alertly, waiting for more.

“That’s enough, you pig,” I told her, walking back to the table.

“She only takes food when you tell her she’s beautiful?” Nadine asked, a tone of wonderment in her voice. Really curious now, not playing.

“You know how some women are about their weight,” I said.

“That’s. . . amazing. Does she do other stuff?”

“Lots of stuff. But I couldn’t show you most of it.”

“Why not?”

“There’s nobody here to show it on.”

“Oh. She’s a. . . what do you call them. . . attack dog?”

“She’s a protection dog,” I said. “Just about all her tricks have something to do with that.”

“She doesn’t, like. . . I don’t know. . . roll over or play dead or anything?”

“What good would any of that be?”

“I don’t know. I see people with their dogs. . . in the park. . . . Does she play fetch? Or Frisbee?”

“Pansy doesn’t play anything. She works. Just like me.”

“Oh, you never play?” she asked, a wicked grin making her face look softer.

“Not word games.”

“Me either. No matter what you think of me.”

“How do you know what I think of you?”

“Oh, that’s not hard. I’m a cock-teasing queer cunt, right?”

“ ‘Queer,’ that’s your word. I don’t know anything about the rest.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think you want something. And that you’re going to tell me what it is.”

“Because. . .?”

“Because, unless you’re lying, the others are going to show up, and you don’t want to ask me whatever it is in front of them.”

“A lot of strippers are gay,” she said, as if that was an answer to a question.

“Why tell me?”

“To explain what I said before. I have girlfriends who strip. They have to. . . sit with the guys, it’s part of the job.”

“You mean sit on them, right?”

“Yes. But it’s not a whorehouse.”

“You take off your pants for money, then you’re a. . . what? Actress?”

“Men hate that,” she said, as if I hadn’t said a word. “They find out you’re gay, it’s like they’ve been. . . tricked or something.”

“ ‘Tricked’ is exactly what they’ve been. You pay some broad to wiggle on your lap, what are you except a trick?”

“You don’t understand. They wouldn’t care. . . . I mean, they wouldn’t get mad, if the girl was straight. I can’t explain it. They just—”

“Yeah, whatever. You got a point to all this?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I do have a point. You already have one gay partner. You want another?”

I watched her face, staying on her eyes, little chunks of cobalt, looking for. . . I don’t know what. But I came up empty.

“What’s that mean?” I finally asked her.

“If you’re really going to look for him, there’d be places you’d have to go. It would be a lot easier. . . easier for you. . . if you had someone with you, understand?”

“You think I’m going to look for a serial killer in gay bars?”

“No,” she said. Eyes alive, mouth tense. “That’s what they think. I mean the. . . others. Lincoln and all. Or maybe not. I don’t have any idea. But. . . neither do they. That’s the point. All they know about you is. . . what they heard. They don’t know what to do, but they want to do something, okay? It’s more. . . symbolic to them, I think. I mean, they can’t expect you to really find this guy. How could you? Every cop in the city is looking for him, and. . . Anyway, they just want to be able to tell themselves they tried . . . like they were being ‘supportive’ or whatever the hot word is this week. I mean, with that deal you wanted, how would they even know if you ever looked at all?”

“Ah. So the idea is, you tag along, you make sure I’m earning the money?”

“No. I think. . . I know about you too. And not from where they do.”

“Which means. . .?”

“You think the only gay cops on the force are in GOAL?”

I knew what she meant—Gay Officers Action League. Like the Guardians, the organization for black cops. Every group inside the department has got some kind of organization of its own. It took major cojones to come out in the open like the cops at GOAL had, but it wasn’t news, not anymore. I just shrugged an answer at her.

“They’re not,” she said, firmly. “I mean, they’re not all. . . out. Not because they’re afraid, but because they have. . . work to do. And it wouldn’t get done if the brass knew the truth, no matter what NYPD’s PR people say.”

“So?”

“So I have a friend. And I got to learn a little about you from. . . my friend.”

“I’m giddy with anticipation,” I told her.

Pansy grunted, convinced, finally, that she’d seen the last of the steak.

“You’ve been arrested dozens of times,” she said. “And you’ve been in prison too.”

“That’s your idea of a secret?”

“No,” she said, leaning closer, dropping her voice. “This is: A cop was killed a couple of years ago. A woman cop. Belinda Rogers. She was bent. Bent bad. Killed some women to make it look like a rapist did it. Her boyfriend was in prison. In New Jersey. He was just finishing up there, for some other crimes, and then he was coming here for trial. It was copycat killing she was doing—like that crazy woman in California who tried to copy one of the Hillside Strangler’s crimes because she was in love with one of the guys who actually did it.”

“What’s this got to do with—?”

“The cop who killed her? It was a shootout. His name is Morales. He’s still on the job.”

“If you say so.”

“You had something to do with it,” she said flatly.

“With killing a cop?” I asked, raising my eyebrows with the ridiculousness of the idea.

“No. But the word is that you were the one who found her. Found her out, I mean. That you were the one who tracked her down.”

“That’s some weird ‘word’ you got,” I said gently, just shy of mocking her.

“No, it isn’t. I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not trying to get you to admit anything. I’m not wired,” she said, sticking her chest out as if that would prove she was telling the truth, “and this isn’t a game. What I’m telling you is. . . I know you could find this man. And you might get into places where you’d have to. . . convince people that you weren’t a bounty hunter, understand?”

“No.”

“Look. A lot of people are trying to find him. There’s some major reward money out there. And word is that there’s a mercenary team looking. That’s another thing I know about you too. You could hook him up. . . get him out of here if you wanted to.”

“If your source for that is as good as—”

“Never mind. You know whatever your truth is. All I can do is tell you mine. Bottom line: If you get in. . . contact with him, why should he trust you? But if I’m there, if I’m in it, then he’d know it was legit.”

“So I’m gonna call him on the phone, tell him I’m really a nice guy, and prove it by bringing you to our next meeting?”

“I know it won’t be like that,” she said, biting at her lip, trying for patience. “I don’t know how it would happen. But if it comes down to. . . credentials. . . if I was there, I could answer any questions. You see what I’m saying?”

“I hear it. But I can’t see it,” I told her. “You got some ragtime story from some loony pal of yours on the force; you got some pssst-pssst bullshit about mercenaries; you think it adds up to you partnering up with me? Not this year.”

“You don’t trust me.”

It wasn’t a question, but I still answered it for her. “No.”

“I don’t blame you for that. You don’t know me. But I’m telling you the truth. Not about”—she waved her hands as if dismissing those stories about me she’d heard—&rlquo;that stuff. About this: I want to find him. And I want to help him get away before they bring him down. The others, they’re just role-playing. Even Lincoln. All that macho rap, it’s just for style points. That’s what it’ll come down to if he’s ever caught: courthouse vigils, talk shows, letters to the editor. . . not what they say they want.”

“Why you?”

“You know how gay people always wonder if some part of them isn’t straight? No, I guess you wouldn’t. Well, we do. I don’t mean we want it. . . although some pray for it. . . but we always. . . wonder. I don’t even know how it works. If you have sex with. . . you know what I mean, does that make you bi?”

“You’re asking the wrong man.”

“Meaning you never did. Or you just don’t know.”

“Both.”

“I didn’t come out right away. It was. . . years. Before I figured out. . . before I. . . Never mind. If I had sex with men once, and I have sex with women now, what am I?”

“I’m the wrong man to ask.”

“You’re the wrong man to ask a lot of things, seems like.”

“True.”

“I love him,” she said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“The. . . executioner. I love him. I never met him. Or maybe I did. None of us could know that. Maybe he was right in one of the. . . places we go. But it doesn’t matter. I know I love him. And I want to be with him. Even if he’s. . . even if we could never have. . . I mean. . . It doesn’t matter. I love him and I want to be with him. So I’ll. . . do things. Whatever things, it doesn’t matter. Things that could help you find him. Understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. I always seem to have the same problem with you, Nadine. I understand what you’re saying. I just have problems with believing any of it.”

“What kind of proof could I show you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if there is any. It’s not the kind of thing where you—”

“Just think about it, okay?” she whispered, her hand on my forearm, nodding her head sharply to tell me what Pansy’s pricked-up ears had told me a few seconds ago—the rest of them were coming.

I never turned my back, letting Nadine’s eyes mirror their approach for me. She was the first to speak too.

“About time!”

“We are on time.” Lincoln’s voice. “How long have you been here?”

“About five minutes,” she lied smoothly.

Lincoln walked around behind me and took a seat next to Nadine. “We want to do business,” he said, no preamble.

“Everybody wants to do business,” I told him. “It’s the terms and conditions that hold things up.”

“What do you want?” Lincoln asked, as shadowy figures filled in behind him. Some of them stopped behind me. . . no way of telling how many. Pansy was alert, but relaxed, still within herself, not feeling any heat.

“I want you to understand what we’re all doing here,” I told him. “Me, I’m a public-spirited citizen. Or maybe I’m a treasure hunter. For the reward. Yeah. . . I like that better. You all, you’re. . . investors. You finance my investigation, and you get a piece of the pie when and if I turn him up. How’s that?”

“Wait!” A voice behind me, male. “I thought you said we were going to—”

Lincoln held up his hand for silence. “But since we’re the. . . investors. . . you’d naturally report your findings to us before you. . .”

“Naturally,” I told him, straight-faced.

“How do we know he wouldn’t just go to the—?” Another male voice, this one from somewhere in the shadows to Lincoln’s left.

“I’m sure Mr. Burke has professional standards,” Lincoln said, cutting him off, trying to put an aura of threat around his voice.

“Oh, I do,” I assured him. “But I don’t have a private investigator’s license. I don’t need one if I’m working for a lawyer, though.”

“We have—”

“Me too,” I told him. “And I want to use mine. What you have to do, see, is hire my guy. Then he hires me.”

“That seems like a good deal of trouble for—”

“For who? Not for me. And I’m the only one I got to look out for here.”

“Fine,” Lincoln said. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way we’ll do it.”

I slid Davidson’s card across the table to him, not saying another word.

“And the money. . .?” he asked.

“What money? Me, I’m not taking any money. Not from you. If this lawyer you’re going to hire decides he wants to compensate me for my trouble, that’s his business. Not yours.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“Yeah. And forget progress reports. This happens or it doesn’t. Understand?”

I could feel the electric current crackle around the room, call-and-response, question-and-answer, voting in silence. I went back to patience, watching only Nadine’s hard bright eyes.

“All right,” Lincoln finally said.

“How am I supposed to set a fee for something like this?” Davidson asked me later.

“You charge by the hour, right?”

“Not for tort litigation. That’s all contingency. And I front the investigation costs. The client doesn’t pay anything until it’s all done.”

“But in a matrimonial. . .?”

“Sure. That’s an hourly rate. But if I’m representing the non-moneyed spouse, it all has to come from a counsel-fees award. And that’s never guaranteed, I assure you. The only time I get paid in a lump up front is for criminal defense,” he said, nodding at me to indicate that I should know that part real well.

“And that’s all cash, right?” I said, reminding him that I’d always paid him that exact way. And that I’d been a lot of things in my life, but IRS-informant was never going to be one of them.

He nodded, waiting.

“Let’s say you were approached by someone who fears he might be a. . . target of a police investigation, okay? Let’s say he’s totally innocent. Got nothing to do with whatever the Man is looking at. But, still, he’s worried. Let’s say he knows there has to be a bust soon. The media’s all over the cops, and that means the politicians can’t be far behind. So this guy, he’s worried. He could hire you, right? For a flat fee? And he’d need an investigation too. From your end. Just in case.”

“That hypothetical has a certain structural validity to it,” Davidson acknowledged warily.

“And the new IRS rules, they can make you disclose who paid you any fee in excess of ten grand, right?”

“Yes. That was just ratified by the—”

“Sure. So, maybe, just to protect a client, you wouldn’t want to report a fee. . . immediately. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I do not,” Davidson said, primly.

“Let’s just. . . take a number, okay? Say, a hundred thousand, all right? Now, this client, this hypothetical client, he thinks he may be the target of an investigation, okay? But he also has other legal issues. Maybe real complex ones. . . like he wants to get married and—”

“—he needs a prenuptial agreement?”

“No. And he’s gay. So he needs some kind of highly complex ‘partnership’ agreement. Something that would protect his interests no matter how it turns out. Let’s say he. . . and his partner. . . they want to adopt a child too. After they. . . formalize their relationship. Raises a lot of legal issues, doesn’t it?”

“Certainly. Although I must tell you, I would not myself participate in any premarital agreement concerning custody of children. The courts won’t uphold them. . . and they shouldn’t. Children aren’t property, and their best interests cannot be determined prior to—”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, stopping the flow before he got really wound up and spewed for hours. “Pay attention, okay? So this guy comes in and he plunks down a hundred large. In cash. You report it—report it all, no problem. What it’s for is the partnership stuff. And then you need a partner. For the investigation. That costs you, say, fifty. Half.”

“And that’s for you?”

“Sure. What do you care? You’re declaring it all as income, and you can freely disclose the name of your client. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I would be declaring a hundred—and paying tax on it—but I would only be getting half of that.”

“You’d be paying tax on whatever you declare,” I told him. “A hundred large is a pretty big fee for what I described.”

“So is fifty.”

“Sure. But you have to get paid for representing me, right?”

He nodded.

“And there’s no way you’re declaring that,” I told him, not a question.

He didn’t move his head an inch, but I took that for what it was.

“So if a guy calls you, name of Lincoln, then you’ll know what to do?”

This time he nodded, slightly.

“Can you find him?” I asked the delicate-featured young woman. She had taxicab-yellow hair, short and straight, with a black X dyed into the left side. Her face was symmetrical, with just a trace of baby fat. She wore a silver ring in her puggish nose. And her dark eyes looked as sharp as the razor-blade earrings she sported. I didn’t know her, never met her before then.

Lorraine was the only link I had left to Crystal Beth, but it wasn’t a real link until I finally went over to the safehouse and told her I was hunting the humans who’d killed my woman. She didn’t blink, just asked me if I wanted any help.

“I looked everywhere I could think of,” I told her. “And I drew blanks. I need a tracker.”

“I don’t know any—”

“Crystal Beth said you did,” I told her. Then I told her what I meant. And how I knew they’d have what I needed.

“Her name is Xyla,” Lorraine finally said. “She’ll be in touch.”

So now this Xyla was sitting across from me in my booth at Mama’s.

“Can you find him?” I asked again.

“If he’s in Cyberville, I can,” she said. Not bragging, confident. “But I can tell you, people are already looking.”

“Looking?”

“Posting open messages for him. On newsgroups, bulletin boards, like that.”

“What kind of messages?” I asked her.

“The whole range: journalists who want an interview, gays saying ‘Go for it!,’ threats, challenges, target suggestions. . . everything.”

“And they think he’s going to answer them?”

“Netizens are real naïve,” she replied. “Most of them are kids. In their minds, anyway. There’s over a thousand profiles with the name ‘Avenger’ in them on AOL alone. That’s what the papers called him. Until he wrote that last letter. So now the geeks will just search under this ‘Homo Erectus’ handle. And there’ll be a ton of matches there too.”

“And they think he’s got an. . . address?”

“Sure. Someplace. And it’s already happening—there’s messages posted that are supposed to be from him. As if the FBI isn’t watching all that traffic,” she said contemptuously.

“So how could you find him?”

“I think he’s on-line. I think he lurks.”

“Lurks?”

“Watches. Hops on the Net and visits these different places. As long as he doesn’t post, he’s pretty safe.”

“Pretty. . .?”

“If he stays on long enough, or hits a website with our software on it, we can finger him.”

I looked a question over at her.

“Locate him. His cyber-addy, anyway. That wouldn’t find him—he could be using any ISP, and the server could even be out of the country.”

“So what good would—?”

“If you found his addy. . . if it was really him, then, if you could hack into the ISP’s own files, you could get his billing info. You know, the credit card he uses—you can’t buy ISP services for cash, you need a credit card just to sign up.”

“But anyone can get a phony credit card. As long as you pay the bills, they won’t care what name you use.”

“Sure. And some of the ISPs give out e-mail addys for free just to build their lists too. That’s where. . . someone else comes in,” she said.

“Okay. You’ll take a shot?”

“I’m with Lorraine and the others,” she answered, like that was all the answer I needed. “But there’s something else too. Another way, maybe. I don’t know if he’s high-cyber or not. But if he is, I could send a message myself. Send it encrypted, so you’d need a program to open it.”

“What happens if you don’t have this program?”

“You just get a bunch of gibberish—numbers and symbols—it wouldn’t mean anything. But if he is lurking, he might be intrigued enough to open it up.”

“And. . .?”

“Then I could find him,” Xyla said, flashing a quick smile. “And you know what? I don’t think he’d mind.”

“Huh?”

“Look, he writes to the newspapers, doesn’t he? It’s not as if he’s being quiet about the whole thing. But he hasn’t posted to Cyberville yet. How come?”

“I can answer that one for you,” I told her. “The newspapers are turning over everything to the cops before they print it. This many murders, even the tabloids wouldn’t screw around.”

“So what?”

“So he has to be authenticating his communications somehow. Telling them some detail about the crime that wasn’t in the papers, enclosing something from the crime scene. . . like that. No way he could get that done over the Internet.”

“That’s true,” she said. “Cyberville is nothing but Impostor City. So I’d need something myself. . . some, what did you call it, authentication, right?”

“Right.”

“Can you get that for me?”

“I’ll see,” I told her.

But she wasn’t done. “You’re not trying to. . . catch this guy, are you?”

“Why?”

“Because, if you were, I wouldn’t help you.”

“I thought you said—”

“I said I was with the network. But I don’t know if anyone asked you that question.”

“If I was trying to. . . You like this guy or something?”

“I don’t know if I like him,” Xyla said calmly, dark eyes steady on mine. “I haven’t met him. But I wouldn’t be part of trying to stop him.”

“You like what he’s doing, then?”

“Not even. But I sure don’t like the people he’s doing it to,” she said, standing up to leave.

“Hi.” A woman’s voice answered the phone, soft and sexy. But the disguise wasn’t even a good try.

“You know who this is, Nadine?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she replied, shifting texture. “You change your mind about wanting a partner?”

“Maybe. Depends on what you can bring to the table.”

“I told you. I—”

“Not now. Not on the phone. Not ever,” I told her. “You got a car?”

“No.”

“Want a ride in a nice one?”

“Is she going to be along?” Like Pansy was the other woman.

“Yep.”

“Why? You scared to be alone with me?”

“Yep.”

“Ah. Okay. You know where I—?”

“No,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up in front of the same place we met last time, okay?”

“Sure. What time?”

“Say. . . midnight?”

“Ooh. It’s dark then.”

I hung up on her.

I was there at a little past eleven, parked across the highway, the Plymouth lost in the shadows, watching the front of the joint through the night-vision spotting scope I’d held out of an order I’d middle-manned. A little inventory shrinkage is something you have to expect when you deal with crooks.

The scope worked even better than the seller had promised—kind of a greenish wash over the whole scene, but bright and clear enough to pick out individual faces. Nadine showed way early, around eleven-forty-five, the skinny blonde girl with her, Nadine holding her wrist as if she expected the other girl to bolt. Or maybe just making a status statement. Ten minutes later, she said something to the blonde and let go of her wrist. The blonde went inside the joint. Nadine stood there, arms folded under her breasts, shoulders squared, waiting.

I wheeled around and came from the downtown direction, pulled up just before midnight. Nadine walked over to the passenger side of the car boldly, stuck her face inside as the window slid down.

“You’re on time,” she said.

“Just get in,” I told her.

“Where’s the seat belt?” she asked me as I pulled away.

“It doesn’t have shoulder straps. There’s a lap belt right on the seat next to you.”

“Geez. How old is this thing, anyway?”

“About your age,” I told her.

“You’re sure not,” she shot back.

“Damn! You don’t miss much, huh?”

“Why are you so nasty to me?” she asked as we passed the Meat Market and forked left for the West Side Highway.

“I play them the way they’re dealt,” I said.

“So if I was sweet to you. . .”

“I’d take it for sarcasm.”

“So, I’m. . . stuck, right?”

“What’s your beef?” I asked. “This is what you want, isn’t it? You made your point, first time I met you. You want to keep making it over and over, get your kicks that way, it’s all right with me.”

“You don’t know anything about the way I get my kicks.”

“And I don’t have to, right?” We were into the Thirties by then, in the sleaze zone that surrounds the Port Authority Terminal. You don’t see much hooker traffic there anymore, although it’s still around, but it’s a good place to buy whatever they don’t sell in stores. “You got a friend on the force,” I said, setting her up for what I was going to pitch later. “You got some info, heard some rumors. . . and you made all your decisions. One of those decisions was that I was judging you. . . and you started out with an attitude just for that. Now you want to do. . . what? Flirt with me? Do your little Mae West thing? You don’t like men. Straight men, anyway. That’s your privilege. Me, I don’t give a good goddamn what you are. All I care about is what you do. You’re not pro enough to play it the same, sit there and pout. Or snarl if that makes you feel more top. You said you could do something. Now I want to find out if you can. That’s all this is about. . . all it’s ever gonna be about.”

“Wow! That’s the most I ever heard you talk.”

“Don’t get used to it.” We were on the upper roadway by then, Riverside Drive on the right, the Hudson on the left.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace where we can talk. Privately.”

“I know better places. And why can’t we just talk now?”

“We can, if you want. I can just cruise around while we talk. Or I can go where I was headed and park. Pick one. But we’re not going anyplace I haven’t been before, case closed.”

“Oh, go ahead,” she said.

We drove in silence until the Cloisters loomed ahead. I pulled over. It’s a kind of Lovers Lane up there. Cops wouldn’t pay much attention to a couple talking outside a car. A sex-sniper would. Or any of the wolfpacks that roam occasionally. But I docked the Plymouth back end in first, and I had something else to even the odds.

“Come on, girl,” I told Pansy, opening the back door. She took off at her usual slow amble, circling, mildly interested in the new turf, but not about to go running off into the woods. Pansy’s a tight-perimeter beast, more comfortable in small circles.

Nadine let herself out, stood next to me as I leaned against the Plymouth’s flank and lit a smoke.

“Those make me sick,” she said. “I don’t see how you could poison your body like that.”

“The doctor prescribed them,” I told her. “There’s a chemical—lecithin—in cigarettes. Improves concentration. My mind kind of wanders sometimes. These help.”

She gave me a wondering look, trying to read my face. Good luck.

“If that’s true, how come the cigarette companies don’t advertise it?” she finally asked.

“You can get it other places besides cigarettes,” I told her. “In stronger doses too. Over-the-counter, any health-food store.”

“So why would you—?”

“These taste better,” I said.

“Oh. So what you really are is a junkie, huh?”

“Nah,” I told her, “I could stop anytime I wanted.”

She folded her arms again and stared hard at me. I wondered if she’d go for it. For me, quitting cigarettes is a sucker bet. I can do it. Done it a bunch of times. It’s just a shuck. There was a girl once. In another town. Another world. Her name was Blossom, and she was a doctor. She bet me I couldn’t stop smoking for a week. I still remember the payoff. And her promise—the one she made when she left. The one I’d never hold her to.

But Nadine wasn’t having any. Or maybe she wasn’t a gambler. “Sure,” is all she said, not leaving the door open enough.

Pansy strolled around, sniffing occasionally just for the fun of it. She knew she couldn’t snarf something off the ground—I’d trained her never to do that—but she liked the smell of discarded fast-food containers anyway.

“So what’s this about?” Nadine asked, once she realized I was just going to relax and have my smoke without saying anything to her until I was done.

“There might be a way you could help,” I told her. “It all depends on whether you’re telling me the truth. And if your pal was telling you the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“And how good a pal he really is,” I continued, like I hadn’t heard her.

“She’s a really good pal,” Nadine said.

“We’ll see. There’s no risk pulling up a guy’s rap sheet. Even if they check the computer log-on record, she wouldn’t need much of an excuse to explain why she wanted to know more about me. . . especially with this open pattern-killer running. But taking a look at those cases themselves. . . “

“What do you mean?”

“Is this pal of yours actually assigned? I mean, is she on the task force they got or whatever?”

“I don’t under—”

“There’s a case running, right? A bunch of them. The killings in the park, that’s one. I already talked to the two slugs who’re working it. But the others—the ones this Homo Erectus guy is doing—no way there’s only a two-man team assigned to that. There’s got to be more. A lot more. Too much press for it to be otherwise. So, first thing, is your pal involved in that, yes or no?”

“I. . . don’t know.”

“Jesus. Look, like I said, I don’t know how you play. And that’s none of my business. But I also don’t know how you talk, and that is, understand?”

“No, I don’t,” she snapped back, turning toward me, face tilted up, jaw out-thrust, hands on hips.

“Well, then, I’ll explain it to you,” I said, keeping my voice as measured as my words. “Every crew has its own language. Sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it doesn’t. In prison, they call everything outside ‘the World.’ That’s what they call it in the army too. But if someone told you they were ‘waiting to get back to the World,’ it wouldn’t mean squat, right? Okay, you say someone’s your friend, what does it mean? Depends on your own language, see? I need to know what words mean to you if I’m going to do anything with you. Otherwise, we’re walking down a trail, I say ‘Duck!,’ and you think I’m pointing out a fucking mallard.”

“You think gay people—?”

“How about if you actually try listening to me, okay? I’m not talking about subcultural crap, I’m talking. . . just you, all right? Just tell me, Nadine. Tell me this. When you say this woman’s your ‘pal,’ what’s that mean? You took a roll with her one time? You’re in love? You go back to high school together? You can trust her? How much? With what? You understand what I’m saying now?”

She moved her hands to behind her back, flexing so her biceps popped. Took a step back. Looked up at me. “She’s my. . . you know that skinny blonde I was with? The first time you came to the place?”

“I remember her.”

“This one’s like. . . her. She’ll do what I tell her.”

“That doesn’t overlap,” I told her.

“And what does that mean?”

“It means just because she’ll lick your boots or whatever master-slave games you play doesn’t mean she’ll do what you tell her outside of sex.”

“You don’t know—”

“Yeah, I do. I know it enough not to trust it. And that’s all I ever need to know.”

“You think she wouldn’t obey me? I could walk her on a leash right up Broadway if I wanted.”

“Yeah, how very dom of you. It’s not the same.”

“Maybe not between men and women. Or even men and men. But with me, they all—”

“Sure. Look, I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not about arguing.”

“So what are you about?”

“Testing.”

“And what’s the test?” she said, moonlight glinting in her cobalt eyes, lips slightly apart, excited now, eager to show me how much control she had over her pets.

“I might have a way to get in contact with this guy,” I said softly. “A long shot. But I’d need a credential. Something to prove I was in the know. And something to test him with too—make sure I was dealing with the right guy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ever since they started working these murders as a group, they’ve been keeping all the evidence in one place. Forensic stuff, I’m talking about. Crime-scene photos too. The papers say a guy was stabbed to death, all right? But they don’t say anything about how many times he got stuck, or in what places, or even whether it was a Bowie knife or an ice pick. . . . You get the picture?”

“I. . . think so.”

“When something like this happens, it brings out the loons. I promise you, guys with loose wing-nuts have been confessing for weeks. On top of that, you get freaks who thrill themselves pretending to be the killer. No way the letters the papers have been printing are the only ones they got. So how would they know which ones were righteous and which ones were scams? Details. He sends them a little something each time. Just so they know they’re dealing with the real thing. That’s what I need too.”

“How come? Why would you need—?”

“Look, let’s say there’s a place I could leave a message. Not for him, specifically, but a place where he might look for messages. I tell him I want to talk, okay? He’s got to know I’m the real deal. And if he answers, I’ve got to know he is too, see?”

“I don’t see. How could you. . .?”

“That’s my problem. Your problem is whether you can make this other girl do what you tell her outside the bedroom.”

“Just tell me what you want,” Nadine said, voice hardening.

“Just a piece,” I lied. “A little piece. Something they’d use as a polygraph key—tell your pal that, she’ll know what you mean.”

“Yes, but I don’t.”

“Then ask her, okay? Or order her, however it is that you all communicate. I don’t have time to screw around with this. Either you really have something to ante up or you don’t.”

“I. . . All right, you’re saying I get this ‘polygraph key’ and then I’m in?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“And if I don’t, I’m out?”

“That too.”

“Even after what I told you?”

“What? That fairy story about how you love this guy? You’re a power freak, so what? I already figured that one out.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“The only thing I want to do with your ass is watch it walk away,” I told her.

She stepped close to me, stood on her toes, her chest brushing mine. “You’re a liar,” she said softly.

“Behavior is the truth,” I answered, blocking her game-player’s jab. Then I turned away and snapped my fingers for Pansy to come.