Down Here

^“Somebody down here, boss. Asking for you.” Gateman’s voice, prison-whispering to me up the intercom, all the way to the top floor of a decrepit flophouse.

This dump has been scheduled for a foundation-up rehab for years. In the meantime, the housing inspectors turn a money-blinded eye, and any derelict with a five-dollar bill can buy himself twenty-four hours off the streets.

But not on the top floor. That one is permanently closed. Unfit for Human Occupancy.

That’s where I live—unregistered and invisible. The only name anyone ever had for me was last seen attached to a body part in the morgue, before the City did whatever it does with unclaimed remains.

“Somebody” was Gateman’s way of saying that whoever was downstairs had come alone . . . and he’d seen them before. If it had been a stranger, he would have reached under the raw wood plank that holds a register nobody ever signs. A concealed button would set off the flashers behind the dinner-plate-sized red plastic disks I have on the walls in every room of my place. That’s only one of its custom features. Another is a private exit.

Anytime someone comes looking for me, it’s Gateman’s call. Even confined to his wheelchair, he’s got options. Instead of the button, he could reach for the handgun he always keeps right next to his colostomy bag.

“You get a name?” I asked.

“Pepper, right?” I heard him say to the visitor.

“Short girl, pretty, dark hair, kilowatt smile?” I asked.

“All but the last, boss,” Gateman said. “And she’s got company.”

“What’s he—?”

“It’s a dog, boss. Big-ass Rottweiler.”

That’s when I knew the wheels had come off.

Negotiating the narrow flights up to where I live is no job for anyone with an anxiety disorder. You have to make your way past crumbling walls covered with signs screaming DANGER! ASBESTOS REMOVAL IN PROGRESS, dangling exposed wires, and puddles of bio-filth on the unlit stairwells.

It’s a nasty trip, but Pepper made it in record time. She quick-stepped across the threshold, dragged forward by a barrel-chested Rottweiler she was barely restraining on a short, heavy lead.

The beast recognized me at once, treated me to his “Back the fuck up!” growl as he thrust his way into the room.

“Bruiser!” Pepper said, sharply. “Behave!”

The beast gave her a “Yeah, right!” look, but allowed her to walk him over to the futon couch.

She sat down, gave me a searching look.

I didn’t say anything, waiting like I always do. Usually, Pepper dresses like a sunburst, to match a personality that could cheer up an AIDS ward. But this time, it was a plain dark-blue business suit over a white blouse with a red string tie, and her famous smile was buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.

“Wolfe’s been arrested,” she said, no preamble.

“What?”

“Last night. They picked her up at her house, in Queens. She’s supposed to be arraigned—”

“Arrested for what?”

“Attempted murder, assault, criminal possession of—”

“Slow down,” I told her, breathing shallow through my nose to drop my heart rate. “Start at the beginning.”

Wolfe had been a career sex-crimes prosecutor, a veteran of

no-holds-barred combat with the bottom-dwellers in the crime chain—rapists, child molesters, wife beaters. And, sometimes, with certain judges—the ones she called “collaborators” to their faces. A few years ago, she had gotten fired for refusing to soft-hand a “sensitive” case.

Wolfe wouldn’t cross the street and represent the same freaks she used to put away. So she’d gone outlaw, and now she runs the best info-trafficking cell in the City.

I had wanted Wolfe for my own since the first time I saw her in battle. I’d had—I thought I’d had—a chance with her once. But I had done some things. . . .

“You and me, it’s not going to be,” she told me then. And I believed her.

All that changed was what I did, not how I felt. My love for Wolfe was a dead star. Lightless, invisible in the night sky. But always, always there.

Pepper’s big dark eyes told me she knew some of that. Enough to count on, anyway.

That’s the way it is down here. If you can’t be counted on, you can’t be counted in.

“Here’s all she could tell me on the phone,” Pepper said. “Some man was shot, more than once. He’s in a coma, and they don’t expect him to live.”

“So what connects Wolfe—?”

“He named her,” Pepper interrupted. “He told the police she was the one who shot him.”

“When was this supposed to have gone down?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything more about it, not even the man’s name. All I know is they’re holding her at the precinct, and they expect to arraign her tonight.”

“She’s got an alibi,” I said, holding Pepper’s eyes.

“She’s got plenty of those,” Pepper snapped back, telling me I was standing at the end of a long line. And those ahead of me would come across a lot better in court than a two-time felony loser who had been declared dead years ago. “That’s not what she needs, right this minute. She needs to—”

“You got a lawyer for her yet?”

“No. I thought you might—”

“Did she tell you to come to me, Pepper?”

As if to answer my stupid question, the Rottweiler made a gear-grinding noise deep in his chest.

“No! All she said was to pick up Bruiser and make sure he was all right until they set bail.”

“And you can make—?”

“I . . . guess so,” Pepper said. “But I don’t know a bondsman, either, except for that crook we used the time Mick was—”

“Never mind,” I told her. “Do you know where the arraignment’s going to be?”

“At 100 Centre. She said the . . . whatever the cops say happened, it happened in Manhattan, so . . .”

“Yeah.” I glanced at my watch. Three thirty-seven. With the usual backlog from the Tombs and the tour bus from Rikers, they probably wouldn’t get to Wolfe until the lobster shift, but I didn’t want to chance it. “Give me a minute,” I told Pepper.

I went into one of the back rooms and pulled a cloned-code cell phone out of its charging unit. I punched in the private number I have for the only criminal lawyer in the City I trust.

“What?” Davidson answered.

“You recognize my voice?” I asked. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. Not since NYPD found a severed skeletal hand in a Dumpster, right next to a pistol with my thumbprint on the stock.

“I believe so.” He spoke in the pompous voice he uses to distance himself from potential danger in conversations. “Help me out a little bit.”

“It’s not my ghost,” I said. “I’ve done some jobs for you, and you’ve done some for me.”

“Do you have some, uh, distinguishing characteristic I might recognize?”

“Yeah. I always pay. And that cigar I just heard you light, it’s probably from the batch I brought you, a few years back.”

“Very good,” he said, chuckling. “You should have been a detective.”

“I need a lawyer. Not for me. For a friend. Being arraigned tonight. Can you handle it?”

“Can I . . . ? Ah, you mean, will I? Are we talking just for tonight, or . . . ?”

“To the end of the road,” I said. “First-round TKO, or a decision on points. Any way it plays.”

“Would I know this ‘friend’ of yours?”

“Yeah. Her name is Wolfe.”

“Wolfe from City-Wide? Are you—?”

“I’m cancer-serious,” I said. “I’m also short on facts. It’s either an attempt murder or, by now, a homicide.”

“Wolfe? Are they floridly insane?” he said. “Unless you’re talking a DV?”

“Domestic violence? Wolfe? Come on, pal. Sure, she’s not the kind of woman who’d take a beating from a boyfriend. But with that dog of hers, what kind of psycho would even try? No, the vic was a stranger. But he supposedly made a statement.”

“Named her?”

“What I’m told.”

“Do they have forensics?”

“You know all I know.”

“And we both know she didn’t make a statement.”

“Right. Can you get right over there? I don’t know when they’re going to arraign her, and—”

“I’ll make some calls, see if I can find out,” Davidson said. “But don’t worry; I’ll be there when they bring her over. I should be able to speak to her in the pens before they—”

“Listen. She doesn’t know about this. Me hiring you, I mean. Just tell her Pepper set it up,” I said, looking over at Pepper, catching her nod of agreement, “okay?”

“Done. My fee will be—”

“Paid,” I said, cutting the connection.

^“Do you know if they tossed her place?” I asked Pepper.

“They didn’t have a no-knock warrant,” she said. “When they pounded on the door, Bruiser went ballistic. She told them she had to lock the dog up before she could let them in—that kept them out of there for a few more minutes.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s how I found out about it. She dialed the office, and left the connection open while she talked to the police. And when she finally let them in, she kept the phone going. I have the whole thing on tape, what they said to her, everything.”

“Did she sound—?”

“She sounded strong,” Pepper said. “One of the cops, he didn’t want to cuff her. Another one said it was procedure. Wolfe told him—the cop who wanted to cuff her—if they tried to perp-walk her she’d make someone pay for it.”

That was Wolfe. “She drinks blood for breakfast,” the Daily News once said of her, in an article about New York prosecutors.

“The cops were scared of Bruiser; but he wasn’t even barking, once she told him to stop. The one who wanted to cuff her said if Bruiser made a move he was going to blow him away. Wolfe told them if they wanted to arrest her she was ready to go. And if they didn’t, she was leaving, so they better shut up about shooting her dog.

“I heard the door close. Then I heard Bruiser making little noises, like he was . . . in mourning. But he stayed, right where she told him. So I ran over there and got him.”

“You did the right thing, Pepper. They’ll be back to vacuum her place. If you hadn’t gotten him out of there, it would have been a bloodbath.”

“Yes. She called me later, from the lockup. That’s when she told me about the man who—”

“But not his name, right?”

“No.”

“Okay, don’t worry. We’ll get that tonight, at the arraignment.”

“Burke . . .”

“Go back to the office, Pepper. Put your crew on alert. I’m sure Mick is—”

“Mick is crazy from this,” she said. “I’ve never seen him be so . . . I don’t know what.”

“Keep him close, then. If Wolfe wanted you to get anything out of her place, she would have found a way to tell you, right?”

“Sure. We have a code for—”

“Okay. I’m going to be carrying a cell phone twenty-four/seven until we know what’s going on. Write down the number. . . .”

Pepper gave me a withering look. Held it until I lamely recited the number. She nodded her head sharply, letting me know she had it . . . and it wouldn’t ever be on a piece of paper.

“Don’t show up at arraignment tonight,” I told her. “Mick, either. You two, you’re her hole card now.”

As soon as Pepper and the Rottweiler left, I started working the phones. First stop was Hauser, a reporter I went way back with. All the way back to my old pal Morelli, the dean of organized-crime reporting in New York. A hardcore reporter from the old school, he had been covering the Mob for so long they probably asked him for advice.

Morelli was off the set now. He’d finally hit it big. After years of threatening to do it, he wrote a book, and it blossomed out sweet. He’s been on the Holy Coast for a while now, tending the harvest.

But a pro like Morelli doesn’t move on until he’s trained new recruits. J. P. Hauser had been his choice.

“I ask the kid, go over and see this guy, supposed to be an informant, staying in some rat-trap over in Times Square,” Morelli had told me, years ago. “This guy, his story is that he’s got a bad ticker. So he wants to make his peace with God, give me all the inside dope on a muscle operation that Ciapietro’s crew is running out at the airport. So I tell J.P., get me everything, all right?”

Morelli smiled, taking a sip of his drink. When we were coming up, he lived on Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes. By then, he was down to red wine and off tobacco. “Okay, so, a few hours later, I get this frantic call from the informant. He’s screaming blue murder. Said J.P. rips his place up worse than any parole officer ever did, takes the serial number from this guy’s clock radio, looks at the labels in his coat, checks his shoe size.

“And then he whips out one of those little blood-pressure cuffs—you know, the kind you slip over your finger? Wants to see if this guy’s really got a bad heart. You ever hear anything like that?

“J.P., he’s a fucking vacuum cleaner, you understand? He’s going to pull the dirt out until they pull his plug. I fucking love this kid.”

Hauser wasn’t a kid anymore. And he hasn’t freelanced in years; he’s got a regular gig with the National Law Journal now, mostly covering major tort litigation. I didn’t have a direct line for him, but the switchboard put me through quick enough.

“Hauser!” he barked into the receiver.

“It’s me,” I said.

He went quiet for a second. Then said, “Not . . . ?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d heard you were . . . back, I guess is the word. But I haven’t worked the streets for a long time, so there wasn’t any way I could know for sure.”

“You don’t need to be on the street for what I need now,” I said. “Can you make a couple of calls for me?”

“I . . . suppose. Depends on what you want me to—”

“Nothing like that,” I assured him. “You know Wolfe’s been busted?”

“Wolfe? Get out of—”

“It’s righteous,” I said. “I wish it wasn’t. All I want is to find out if the cops are planning to splash it. She’ll be arraigned tonight. I need to know if there’s going to be coverage.”

“Something like that, it’ll certainly make the—”

“I don’t care about TV, or even the radio. I just want to know if there’re going to be reporters in the courtroom. Especially veterans.”

“Ones who might recognize you?”

“You wouldn’t recognize me,” I promised him. “I just need to know who’s going to be watching, you understand?”

“There’s a story in this,” Hauser said, an apostle reciting the creed.

“Thought you didn’t do crime anymore,” I said.

“I spend all my time covering lawyers,” he laughed. “How far away do you think that takes me?”

“The story is, Wolfe’s being set up. I don’t know anything else about it. Not yet, anyway.”

“But when you find out?”

“It’s all yours, pal.”

“Call back in twenty minutes,” Hauser said.

^“Everybody’s on it,” Hauser said when I called back. “But the DA isn’t making any statements . . . yet.”

“So there’ll be reporters on the set?”

“Guaranteed,” he said. “Come on by and say hello.”

I took a quick shower, shaved extra-carefully, and put on a slouchy black Armani suit over a midnight-blue silk shirt, buttoned to the throat. I added a pair of natural alligator shoes, a two-carat solitaire ring set in white gold, and an all-black Rado watch. There wasn’t enough time to get the right haircut, but a gel-and-mousse combination got me close enough to the look I wanted.

The emergency surgery that brought me back from what was supposed to be a coup de grâce bullet had changed my face forever. Once, I could have passed for a lawyer, with the right clothes and props. And I had done it, plenty of times. Now the best I could hope for was to be taken for a higher class of defendant.

I walked downstairs carefully, a Mini Mag lighting the way. Gateman was where he always is.

“Thanks, partner,” I said, palming a fifty in my handshake.

“We expecting more company, boss?”

“Could be. But not the blue boys,” I said, telling him what he needed to know. Gateman’s on parole. New York City parole, which means all he has to do is call in every few months, so they know he’s alive. But a visit from the cops would be a real problem for him. Gateman doesn’t like surprises. And he’s a shooter.

It was only a few blocks to my car. I keep it behind a ratty old two-pump gas station that scratches out a living from used tires, dented hubcaps, and tired batteries. They also sell some specialized parts for cab drivers . . . like recalibrated meters that tick off a mile for every four-fifths they run. Word is you can buy other things there too, but I never asked.

My ’69 Plymouth Roadrunner sat outdoors in a chain-link enclosure, under a roof made of woven concertina wire, protected by a combination lock thick enough to sneer at two-handed bolt cutters.

The setup had been built for the owner’s prize pit bull, a vicious old warrior who had been retired to stud a few years ago. The owner kept a couple of bitches, too, so his champion wouldn’t get bored and maybe chomp his way through the chain link. I’d talked the owner into letting me park the Plymouth inside the cage. It cost me three bills a month, and a few weeks’ daily investment in getting the pits to accept me enough to let me inside whenever I showed up, but it was worth it. The back of the gas station was always in darkness or shadow, and the dogs made sure nobody got too close a look at the anonymous junker stashed back there.

One of the bitches strolled over to the fence as I walked up. She snarled softly, just warming up.

“It’s me, stupid,” I said.

I didn’t know any of their names. But they knew me, and they knew I never came empty-handed. The big rooster trotted over, chesty and confident, knowing he was going to get first dibs.

I took a slab of porterhouse out of the plastic bag I’d been carrying and unwrapped it. Then I slipped it between the sections of metal tubing that framed the doors.

The pits went to work on their prize as I dialed the lock. I walked past them, leaving the doors open behind me. They never try to leave—the fence is just to keep people out.

I unlocked the Plymouth and climbed inside. I pulled out the ashtray, toggling the off-on switch so that the ignition key would work. When I fired up the engine, it was like pulling a heavy layer of dusty burlap off a marble statue—the torque-monster Mopar crackled into life, hungry for asphalt.

I let it warm up for a minute, checking the oil-pressure gauge, while I got the steak smell off my hands with a few scented towelettes I took from the glove compartment. Then I eased the Plymouth through the opening in the fence, jumped out, and relocked the gate. The two bitch pits sat on their haunches, watching. The old stud was already lying down, sleeping off his lion’s share of the booty I’d brought.

I wheeled the Plymouth up Canal, then worked my way over to Mama’s restaurant. I parked under the pristine white square with Max the Silent’s chop painted in its center. The calligraphy sensei who created it comes by and renews his masterpiece every so often, so it always looks new.

Even without all the security devices and the fact that it didn’t look worth stealing, I wouldn’t have been worried about anyone making a move on the Plymouth. In this part of the City, everybody knows Max’s sign.

A thug in a white kitchen apron let me in the back door. I’d seen him plenty of times before, but I didn’t know his name, and he didn’t care about mine.

I walked over to the bank of pay phones along the wall that separates the kitchen from the restaurant seating area. Mama still keeps a Mason jar there, filled to the brim with quarters. More than enough for a half-hour call to Taiwan, but AT&T won’t let you do that anymore—they want everyone to use one of their pre-paid phone cards. Once a monopoly . . .

I picked out a coin, slotted it through, and punched in a 718 number.

“Yes?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Can you and your father please meet me at the spot?”

“My father is not here now, mahn. But he will call soon. Shall I come by my—?”

“I need you both,” I told him.

“I understand, mahn. Do we need to bring—?”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Sure,” Clarence said, hanging up.

I was reaching for more quarters when Mama appeared. Her round, ageless face was impassive under her perfectly coiffed hair. Her ceramic-black eyes were expressionless.

“Not visit?” she said, making a gesture with her jeweled hand to show me she wasn’t insulted that I hadn’t greeted her formally when I’d first come in.

“The Prof and Clarence are on their way over, Mama,” I said. “I have to reach out for Michelle now.”

“So—you want Max, yes?”

“Please,” I told her.

She nodded her head a fraction short of bowing, then turned and walked past me, heading toward the basement.

^“If you don’t know what to do, and when to do it, you’ve already left your message,” the hard-honey voice on Michelle’s answering tape said.

“It’s me,” I said, after the beep. “It’s . . . six-oh-five in the afternoon. I’m going to be here in the church for a little while, but I can’t stay long. I need to see you. If I’m not here when you call, leave a way for me to get in touch with you, probably past midnight.”

I reached for more coins . . . then stopped. I walked around the wall, through the beaded curtain, and into the restaurant.

My booth, the one against the back wall, was empty, as always. So was the rest of the place. Occasionally, some tourists would ignore the filthy, fly-specked front window and wander inside. If the service didn’t send them packing, the food they were served would guarantee they’d never come back.

I sat down, glanced at my watch. Not like me to do that—patience is the one card I always keep in my deck.

Mama came through the kitchen, carrying a heavy white tureen on a tray with three matching bowls, slightly larger than cups. She placed the tray on the table, uncovered the tureen, and ladled out a bowl for me. Hot-and-sour soup—Mama’s personal creation. I bowed my thanks, took a sip. “Perfect,” I said.

At that, Mama sat down across from me, and helped herself to a bowl.

“Not work, right?” she asked me. To Mama, “work” could mean anything, from stealing to scamming to smuggling. What all of us did, one way or another. Our family doesn’t care about crap like genetics, but it’s got no room for citizens.

“Not work, Mama,” I said. “Trouble.”

“Trouble for you?”

“Not for me. Not for any of us. It’s Wolfe. She just got arrested.”

“Police girl?” Mama said, raising a sculpted eyebrow.

“Yeah. I don’t have any real facts yet. She’s supposed to have shot some guy.”

“Not kill?”

“Not . . . yet, anyway. He’s in a coma; they don’t know if he’s going to make it.”

“So how talk?”

“Supposedly, he talked before he went out, Mama. And he named Wolfe as the shooter.”

“You say not work.”

“Not work, right. Nobody hired me. There’s no money in this.”

“You and police girl . . . ?”

“It’s not that, either, Mama. Look, there’s no money in this,” I repeated. “Probably end up costing money, okay? Only, I’m doing it. And it doesn’t matter why.”

“Not to me, matter,” she said, shrugging to add emphasis to her lie. “You have more soup, okay?”

^“I’ve got to split,” I told Mama a short while later. “Over to the courthouse. When Max—”

“Max wait here for you?”

“No,” I said. Then I told her what I wanted him to do.

“Okay, sure,” she said. “Come when you . . . ?”

“When I light a cigarette. Now, listen, Mama. The Prof and Clarence will be here, too. I’m not sure when. They don’t have to actually stick around, just leave numbers with you where I can reach them later tonight, okay?”

“Sure okay. What you think?”

“Sorry, Mama. I’m just . . . edgy. See you later.”

Night Court never changes. Years ago, when I was trying to make a living as an off-the-books investigator, I sometimes worked the corridors. I was a hovering hawk, searching for marks to steer over to one of the lawyers I had a fee-splitting arrangement with.

First I’d convince the wife or the mother or the girlfriend—90 percent of the crowd was always women—that the guy being arraigned would fare much better with a “private” lawyer than Legal Aid. Not a hard sell. Then I’d find out how much cash they were carrying—none of the lawyers I shilled for would touch a check—and make the connection.

Whatever lawyer I was working with that night would stand up on the case, make a bail argument or a quick deal, then move on. None of that breed ever actually tried cases. Most of them didn’t even have an office, just a business card and a mail drop.

Anytime you have a steady stream of people being arraigned, you’ll find lawyers like that . . . and men like me trolling for prospects. In the Bronx, some of the fishermen speak Spanish. I heard, over in Queens, there’s one who’s fluent in Korean, and Brooklyn even has a guy who does it in Russian. All working for two-bit grifters with law licenses.

Those “arraignment only” lawyers take some of the caseload off Legal Aid’s back. And the judges like them fine too, because they never make trouble. Even most of the people who hire them go home happy, convinced they did the right thing by their loved ones. Another piece of the “system” you’ll never see on Law and Order.

I moved through the crowd, looking for Davidson. Most of the people milling around had the dull, slightly anxious faces of cattle being herded down a chute, toward the sound of evenly spaced gunshots.

Davidson wasn’t in the hall. I pushed open the doors and walked into the courtroom. It was about half full; people sat distanced from one another, like they do in porno theaters. I didn’t recognize the judge on the bench, a dark-brown man with close-cropped gray hair.

I moved down the left side of the courtroom, looking for an aisle seat so I could scan without calling attention to myself.

A clot of gangbangers sat down front, eye-fucking everyone who looked their way. A young court officer, his short-sleeved white shirt tailored to show off impressive biceps, deliberately strolled by their area, playing his role.

A pair of whore lawyers were just over to my right. Those permanent-retainer lackeys spent every night pleading working girls to time served—usually two, three days—and paying their fines. They did volume business, representing the interests of a few pimps with good-sized stables of street girls. Higher-class hookers didn’t often get pinched. And when they did, whoever was running them would put real legal talent into the game.

A Spanish woman who looked like she’d just gotten off work—hard work—fingered a rosary. Waiting for them to bring her son out, I figured. A skinny, pasty-faced girl with barbell studs piercing her nose, eyebrow, and the top of one ear stared straight ahead, her face as bleak as her prospects.

A woman with a prominent black eye and swollen lip sat with her hands in her lap. Waiting to post bail for the guy who had beaten her up, my best guess.

A fat, sleekly dressed Chinese man was bracketed by two marble-eyed young guns, their leather fingertip jackets marking them as clearly as the tattoos under them.

A heavyset, weary-looking black woman held a sleeping baby on her lap.

A pair of guys in their thirties, dressed costly-casual, sprawled back in their seats, still glazed. I figured the one they were waiting for had been the driver.

I spotted a few press guys, sitting together. Way too many for a typical night arraignment. I was looking around for Hauser when Davidson came from the back, where the pens are, and headed for the door. I slipped out behind him.

Davidson moved through the crowd outside the courtroom with the assurance of an all-pro halfback in an open field. I thought he might be heading for the pay phones, but he passed them by and went out the door.

By the time I spotted him, he was leaning against one of the railings, firing up a cigar.

I walked over, moving deliberately slow.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

He took a long, deep puff on his cigar, gave me a professional appraiser’s look, not trying to hide what he was doing.

“Say a few more words,” he said, finally.

“You’ve got two little girls. Born the exact same day, only three years apart. The big one’s about twelve now. Natural leader, smarter than you ever imagined. Loves to read, an ace at archery. The little one’s going to be a gymnast. Or a sky-diver—she was still making up her mind the last time we talked. In your office. Where you have their pictures on your desk at an angle, so everyone who sits down has to see how beautiful they are.”

“Say more,” he said, not changing expression.

“A few years ago, a coalition of gay activists hired you to do some very specialized work. You brought me in to help with the investigative end of it,” I told him, not mentioning a significant fee that the IRS never heard about.

“The voice is the exact same,” he said. “But I never would have recognized you. Word is that you were—”

“I wasn’t. And I’m showing you a lot of trust, saying that, right?”

“If anyone’s looking for you, you are.”

“Someone’s always looking for me,” I said.

“Fair enough,” Davidson said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “But I’ve got a problem.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“You sound exactly like a . . . man I used to know. And somebody did call me about this case, or I wouldn’t be here tonight. But when I mentioned your name to my client, back in the pens, my client expressed some, shall we say, concern about your involvement.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning, she didn’t tell anyone to bring you into this. So she wants an explanation. And some proof that you’re . . . who you say you are.”

“The explanation is easy. Just repeat that Pepper came to see me. With Bruiser—she’ll know what that means. Pepper didn’t know what else to do, and Wolfe didn’t give her anything to work with. I think she was going to just pro se it when they called her name tonight.”

“That’d be like her,” Davidson said, nodding. “But after we talked, she agreed that having me do the talking is a better play.”

“Good.”

“Now, about that proof? What else can you—?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, reaching into my jacket. I extracted a single cigarette, said, “Got a light?”

By the time I took my second puff, Max the Silent was at my side. An old army jacket covered a gray sweatshirt; stain-blotched corduroy pants and an abandoned pair of once-white sneakers were topped off by a black watch cap. But even dressed in a vagrant’s costume, there was no mistaking the Mongol warrior. Not once he got close enough for you to see his hands.

Max’s eyes were as flat and hard as the slate bed of a tournament pool table. And as true. Even with all the assorted humans standing around outside the courthouse, his ki was a palpable force, creating a circle of empty air around the three of us.

“Oh!” was all Davidson said. Neither of us had seen him coming—people don’t call him Max the Silent because he can’t speak.

“Good enough?” I asked Davidson, snapping my cigarette away.

“Absolutely,” he assured me. “Let me get back inside. I want to talk to her before the fun starts. I’ll meet you right back here, soon as I can, all right?”

“Thanks,” I said. “You need any—?”

“Later,” he said, walking off.

I gestured to Max that I had to go back inside. Shrugged my shoulders to say that I didn’t have a clue what we were going to have to do when I came out. I knew Mama would have already told him why I was there.

I took my cell phone out of its shoulder holster, held it up for Max to see. Then I pulled out its mate—a new one, never used. I held it against my chest, patted my heart.

Max nodded. When I needed him, I’d call. The phone I gave him would throb soundlessly against his chest, the vibrations telling him it was time to move.

I tilted my head in a “come with me” gesture. We walked all the way around to the back of the courthouse. There’s never a place to park there, but it’s custom-made for lurking. I pointed to the spot I wanted, handed Max the keys to my Plymouth.

With Max, this was a high-risk move. He could tap an enemy’s carotid with surgical precision, but he drove like a man who reads the daily papers in Braille. Still, if I wanted a getaway car waiting for me when I called, Max was the only choice—if the Prof and Clarence had already shown up at Mama’s, they would have contacted me.

I touched the face of the watch, shrugged again.

Max put his hand on my shoulder for a split second, squeezed just enough to let me know he’d be there, no matter when. Then he was gone.

As I entered the courtroom, I saw Davidson’s broad pinstriped back, looming over a young guy seated at the DA’s table. It didn’t look like the conversation was going well.

Davidson stalked off, in the direction of the pens. I found the same seat I’d had before, settled in.

The parade went on. Most of the cases were disposed of on the spot. Conditional discharges, ACDs—Adjournments in Contemplation of Dismissal, a six-month “behave yourself” deal—misdemeanor probations, time-served walk-offs . . . bargain-basement justice. They even worked out a few bullets—Legal Aid’s term for a year on the Rock. Even one day more makes it felony time, and a trip Upstate.

Occasionally, some brief argument would break out, but you could see it was only the lawyer putting on a show for his client. Never affected the outcome.

Prostitution, lightweight drug possession, simple assault, trespass, violation of a restraining order, shoplifting, DUI, car-stripping—anything that could be pleaded down to misdemeanor weight, it was all fair game. The felony cases that didn’t plead out all ended in the Kabuki dance of bail arguments.

Davidson came out a little before midnight. Walked over and sat next to me.

“They’ll be bringing her up soon,” he said. “They weren’t jerking her around on the paperwork. Just volume. If they held women in the Tombs, it’d be faster to get them before the—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I cut him off, not interested in criminal-justice reform.

“I don’t have everything I’ll get out of the DA’s office with my motions,” Davidson said, “but Wolfe’s still got plenty of friends on the job, and I made some calls, picked up a few things.”

“Such as?”

“The name John Anson Wychek mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“That’s the alleged vic’s name. That much I got from the court papers. What they don’t mention is that Wychek was a serial rapist. That, I got from Wolfe. He worked the whole metro area for almost three years before they caught him. Suspect in at least a dozen, plus a couple of attempts, but they only bagged him for the one. Wolfe tried the case, over in Queens. Convicted on all counts—rape, sodomy, abduction, use of a weapon—enough to max him, easy. And that’s what the judge did. Couple of years later, he appeals. He had an 18-B at trial, but for the appeal he had Greuchel.”

“Huh! That’s big bucks.”

“Right. But it wasn’t a drug case, so Greuchel never got asked where his fee came from. Anyway, he raises all the usual: ineffective assistance, bad search—even though they never actually used anything they took from the place where Wychek was living—‘cross contamination’ at the crime scene, yadayadayada. Just blowing smoke, getting paid by the page.

“But then he throws in that the Queens cops used information they got from a Family Court case against the same defendant, out in Nassau County. Wychek had been charged with sexual abuse of his live-in girlfriend’s kid. It never went to trial. Wychek consented to a finding of neglect, agreed to move out of the house, have no contact with the victim, and that was it.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Supposedly, the CPS caseworker testified at some preliminary hearing. About a ski mask that the little girl said Wychek always put on when he was . . . molesting her. And the caseworker found the ski mask; it was still at the home of the live-in girlfriend.”

“But you said they never used—”

“They didn’t,” Davidson said. “The ski mask never came in, even though he wore one during the rape he was on trial for. Anyway, this wasn’t a search issue. Wychek was already out of the little girl’s home by then, and it was her mother who gave permission. But Greuchel claimed the whole case hinged on information the cops got from the Family Court case, and those records aren’t public. They’re confidential.”

“To protect the victim, not the—”

“Maybe that’s the intent of the law,” Davidson said, “but it’s not the application. You should know that.”

“You’re not telling me that he walked with that lame pitch?”

“He probably wouldn’t have. Greuchel never even raised the issue in the Appellate Division—they affirmed in a one-pager. But then, get this, Greuchel brings a federal habe, claiming that ‘newly discovered evidence’ showed that the caseworker had told the cops about the Family Court proceedings, so the entire investigation was fatally tainted. Fruit of the poisonous—”

“Yeah. So?”

“So the Queens DA comes into federal court and makes a ‘confession of error.’ At that time, there was all this media publicity about innocent men going to prison—you know, all that DNA-exoneration stuff—and the DA made this big speech about how his job was to prosecute the guilty, not incarcerate the innocent.”

“You’re saying they just tanked it?”

“I’m saying the DA’s Office did not oppose the federal appeal,” Davidson said, picking his words carefully. “And Wychek walked out of Attica a free man. Happened only a few weeks ago.”

“Pretty scummy, all right. But where does Wolfe come in? All she did was prosecute him. And she doesn’t work for the DA’s Office anymore.”

“No. But she got a letter there. From Wychek. After he got out.”

“And . . . ?”

“I haven’t seen a copy, but it pretty much laughed at her. ‘You stupid fucking cunt’ was one of his favorite phrases. He walked the line pretty good. Said someone ‘should’ fuck her to death for how she prosecuted an innocent man, but he didn’t say he was going to do it. And he danced around a lot, hinting that he had done a lot of women, and could do more. Nothing you could prosecute him on, but real scary stuff.”

“And the cops say Wolfe gunned him down for writing that letter? Hell, if she shot every freak who wrote her a letter like that, she’d make Charles Manson look like a jaywalker.”

“The timing is bad,” Davidson said. “But, by itself, it’s nothing, you’re right. Only thing is, whoever shot him didn’t do a good enough job. The EMTs got him going, but then they lost him again, into a coma. Supposedly, before he lapsed out, he said it was Wolfe who shot him. That’s their case.”

^“I’m taking a guess,” a man said, behind us.

Both Davidson and I turned around.

Hauser. Dressed in a blue chalk-striped suit, with a white shirt and a wine-colored tie. His beard was gone, but I’d have known him anywhere.

“What’s up?” Davidson asked, reaching over to shake hands. He and Hauser went way back. Not close, but friendly.

“I was supposed to meet someone here tonight,” Hauser said. “Figured I might find him where I found you.”

“You did,” I told him. “Come on over.”

Hauser got up, walked around, and sat down next to me.

“You got something?” I asked him.

“I—”

“They’re bringing her out!” Davidson hard-whispered, getting to his feet.

A tall, lanky court officer walked Wolfe over to the counsel table like he was escorting a prom date. Her long dark hair glistened as if she’d just stepped out of a salon, trademark white wings flowing back from her high forehead. She was wearing a white silk sheath, adorned only with a single black spiral stripe, weaving around her body like a protective snake.

Wolfe always wore black-and-white outfits when she summed up before a jury. Combat clothes, hammering home her message: No “shades of gray” here, people. Bruiser’s performance must have bought her enough time to change.

“Christ, look at her!” Hauser said admiringly. “It’s like it’s her courtroom.”

The ADA who had been at the counsel table all night was suddenly replaced by a much older man, all spiffed out. They read out the charges: attempted murder, assault one, and a bunch of other tacked-on crap nobody paid any attention to.

“That’s Russ Lansing,” Hauser whispered to me. “Been with the DA’s Office a hundred years. He’s no trial man, but he won’t make any mistakes with the press, I promise you that.”

“You know the judge?” I asked him.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Hauser said. “But only because I covered a trial he presided over. Leonard Hutto.”

“You covered a case in criminal court?”

“Brooklyn Supreme,” Hauser said. “A celebrity divorce. Hutto’s a cut above the usual politico that ends up with a bench seat as a reward for loyalty. A good law man. Probably just here tonight on rotation.”

“I’ll hear from the People on bail,” the judge said.

“Given the extraordinary circumstances of this case, the People ask for the defendant to be remanded, Your Honor,” the spiffy man intoned.

“What’s extraordinary is that Ms. Wolfe has even been arrested,” Davidson bellowed. “These charges are absurd on their face. In addition, Ms. Wolfe has significant roots in the community. She is a homeowner, a taxpayer, a woman with a long record of public service and no criminal history of any kind. Remand, judge? This nonsense should be ROR’ed.”

“What is the basis of the People’s application?” the judge asked, the soul of judicialness, playing to the press.

“The victim was shot three times!” the spiffy old ADA said. “Clearly, the intent was to kill him. But the basis of our application for remand is that this may well become a homicide, even as we stand here before this court. The victim lapsed into a coma, from which he may not recover. And if he does not, the charge will be murder in the second degree, for which remand is mandatory.”

“That’s a speech,” Davidson said. “Not evidence.”

“The evidence . . .” the ADA said, pausing for effect, “is that, just before the victim lost consciousness, he specifically identified the defendant as the shooter.”

“How do we know that?” Davidson demanded. “The People don’t have the victim’s statement, Your Honor. They’ve got some cop’s statement, saying what the victim allegedly said. And even if such a statement was actually made,” he went on, his voice so heavy with sarcasm that it would have taken a team of Clydesdales to pull it, “it’s garbage on its face.”

The ADA jumped from his seat. “A dying declaration—”

“—has to be made by someone who’s dead,” Davidson finished for him. “I haven’t been given a scrap of discovery, judge. I thought the DA’s Office had this new policy. You know, the one they did all the press releases about? They were going to front-end everything, try and get all the pleas pre-indictment. I guess they don’t bother when they know they don’t have a case.”

“Your Honor!”

“Yes, Mr. Lansing? It seems counsel for the defendant has a point, don’t you agree? Has it not been the policy of your office to offer at least basic discovery at arraignments, for the purpose of expediting the process?”

“It . . . it has, Your Honor. But because things happened so quickly in this matter—”

Davidson fired back, “So quick you don’t know where or when the so-called victim was shot? Judge,” he said, spreading his arms wide, as if to encompass the entire courthouse, “if we even knew when this supposed assault took place, we could probably walk out of here tonight, and the police could go back to looking for the actual assailant. For example, if the assault took place this past Thursday, Ms. Wolfe was delivering the keynote address at the national VAWA Conference in Washington, D.C.”

“What’s this ‘VAWA’?” the ADA said.

“Fucking moron,” Hauser muttered under his breath.

“That would be the Violence Against Women Act, counselor,” Davidson sneered at him. “You know, the federal legislation?” He turned back to the bench. “But that isn’t the point, Your Honor. What we are saying is that Ms. Wolfe may well have the kind of alibi that would convince even this office to concentrate its efforts elsewhere, but the DA’s deliberate withholding of basic discovery while simultaneously asking for a remand is a joke. A dirty joke.”

“Mr. Lansing?” the judge said, in a voice that told you he was raising his eyebrows as he spoke.

“We . . . we don’t know the exact time of the shooting, Your Honor. The victim was . . . discovered by a visitor, lying in a comatose state.”

“So that’s why you didn’t put my client in a lineup, huh?” Davidson half shouted. “Because there isn’t one single eyewitness to any of this. You’re asking to lock up my client with no bail, and you’ve got nothing.”

“Judge,” Lansing squawked, “I don’t have to—”

“How about forensics?” Davidson boomed, on full boil now. “Got any of that? You got a weapon? Fingerprints? Fibers? Blood spatter? What? Come on! If you’ve got it, bring it! Give this court one lousy piece of evidence besides what some scumbag supposedly said to some unnamed cop, I’ll drop my bail application right now, how’s that?”

“Oh, this is perfect,” Hauser said, scribbling and chuckling at the same time. “Lansing’s trying to do push-ups in quicksand, and Davidson keeps stepping on his head.”

“Your Honor! I must protest. Counsel’s description of a gunshot victim as a ‘scumbag’ is well beyond the bounds of—”

“Tell this court that this ‘victim’ of yours isn’t a convicted rapist, and I’ll apologize,” Davidson said. “You think just because you conveniently forget to mention it we couldn’t find out on our own?”

“Good one!” Hauser said, absently, intent on his writing.

“He’s a serial rapist, judge,” Davidson said, passionately. “With victims scattered all over the city. If you’re looking for someone with a good motive to shoot Wychek, you don’t have to look past—”

Wolfe stood up quickly, tugged sharply at Davidson’s sleeve, shutting off the lava flow. She pulled at his lapel, whispered something in his ear.

“Judge,” the DA said, “there’s the statement. . . .”

“What damn statement?” Davidson shot back. “There’s nothing in writing. All the People have is a word he spoke. Supposedly spoke. One word. ‘Wolf.’ That could mean anything, Your Honor. ‘Wolf’ can be a first name, too. There’s probably a couple of thousand of them in the Manhattan phone book alone. And it’s a common street name, too.”

“That’s ridic—” the DA said.

“I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous,” Davidson stepped in. “Charging a citizen on crap that’s not even going to get past the Grand Jury. For all we know, the victim was saying he sold one too many ‘wolf’ tickets, and someone popped him for it.”

“Your Honor!” the DA protested.

Davidson rolled on, undeterred, spreading his arms wide in a “look how reasonable I’m being” gesture. “Judge, the purpose of bail is to ensure the defendant’s presence at trial. The People aren’t even going to pretend they believe my client is going to flee the jurisdiction. The so-called victim could be in a coma for months, for all we know. When he recovers, or when the DA’s Office finally kicks loose enough information for us to prove Ms. Wolfe couldn’t possibly have done this, who is going to compensate my client for all that time out of her life then?”

“Do you have an updated medical report?” the judge asked the DA.

“As of . . .” Lansing replied, glancing at his watch, “two hours ago, the victim’s condition was unchanged.”

The judge eye-swept the front rows, picking out the press like a pigeon pecking edible morsels off an alley floor. “In view of all the competing considerations placed before this court, bail is set . . .” He paused for effect. “. . . in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Judge . . .” Davidson began.

“That’s all, counsel,” the judge said, banging his gavel lightly.

“Very cute,” Hauser said, in disgust. “He knows any remand would get overturned by the Appellate Division, but he doesn’t want anyone saying he gave special consideration to a former prosecutor. So he sets bail, but makes it a monster. How is Wolfe going to raise—?”

“Your Honor,” Wolfe said, on her feet, “may I be heard?”

“Is the defendant discharging her counsel and going pro se?” Lansing asked snidely, playing to the gallery.

“Ms. Wolfe is my co-counsel, judge,” Davidson shot back. “As such, she is—”

“I will hear you, Ms. Wolfe,” Hutto said. “Briefly.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Wolfe said, her courtroom-honed voice knifing through the buzz and hum from the back benches. “I understand you’ve already made your ruling concerning bail. And though I anticipate, with all respect, that your decision will not withstand appeal, my purpose in addressing this court concerns my conditions of confinement while awaiting release.”

“Do you wish to be held in protective custody?” Hutto asked.

“No, judge. That doesn’t concern me. I have every confidence that the Department of Corrections will see to my safety.”

Wolfe deliberately turned sideways, making it clear she wasn’t speaking only to the judge. “What I wish to place on the record is that I am not going to discuss this so-called case with anyone other than my own attorney. I am not going to be having any private conversations with inmates, correctional officers, or anyone else while I am confined.”

Wolfe shifted her body some more, virtually turning her back on the judge. “So, if the DA’s Office trots out some jailhouse snitch who claims I ‘confessed’ to them, everyone will know that such a statement is pure perjury.”

“Christ, she’s beautiful!” Hauser whispered to me.

“Judge, that is an outrage,” Lansing yelled. “The defendant has just accused our office of—”

“—trying to rescue your garbage cases with testimony from jailhouse informants?” Wolfe sneered at him. “You’ve got that right.”

“Ms. Wolfe,” the judge said, mildly, “you have placed your statement on the record. And now, if there are no further—”

“The People demand an apology!” Lansing shouted.

“You going to give me one, when the truth comes out?” Wolfe shouted back.

“You mean, when they let it out!” Davidson out-volumed her.

“Take the defendant,” the judge told the court officer.

“Talk to you later,” I told Hauser, pulling out my cell phone and hitting the speed-dial number.

My Plymouth was waiting out back. When I saw Clarence behind the wheel, I knew Mama had passed the word.

I climbed in next to him. The Prof and Max were in the backseat.

“Did she get to go, bro?” the Prof asked me.

“No,” I said, shaking my head so Max would pick up on it, too. “They set her bail at a half-million.” For Max, I held up both hands, fingers spread, to indicate “ten.” Then I pointed toward the sky, for “power,” and held up one hand plus one thumb. “Ten to the sixth” means a million to anyone raised on street-shorthand. I sliced my hand down, signifying “half.” Max nodded.

“Mama’s holding enough of mine for the points,” I told them. “But I don’t know how long it would take for her to put her hands on the green. And we’ll still need a bondsman who’ll write the paper for a number that high.”

“Big Nate?” the Prof said.

“He’s the only one I know I could lean on that hard,” I agreed.

“You who?” the Prof said. “Big Nate won’t get on the case if he don’t know your face, Schoolboy. Burke be dead, remember?”

“That’s what they say about Wesley, too, Prof,” I said, very soft. “What some say?”

“You going to be the ghost with the most, huh? All right, son. Let’s ride.”

That night, Wesley was riding with us. He had once been the most feared assassin in the city. An artist of death. His reputation went all the way back, and not a word of it was a lie. Wesley was the ultimate contract man. The only way he ever interacted with the human race was to remove some of it.

Wesley didn’t make statements. He just made people dead. And he only did it for money. Nobody ever saw him; nobody ever wanted to. Everything was done over phones and dead-drops.

I’d known Wesley since we were little kids. Both State-raised, without parents we ever knew. Back then, I was always scared. I was incubated in terror, and it took only a glance, a gesture, or even a smell to open the floodgates inside me.

But nothing scared Wesley. Fear is a feeling. “I’m not a man,” he told me once. “I’m a bomb.”

When I was a young man, he was everything I ever wanted to be. Ice-cold, remorseless, never-miss efficient. You could kill Wesley—at least, that’s what some people thought—but you could never hurt him.

I finally found my family. The one I chose; the one that chose me. Wesley never looked for kin. Only for targets. No friends, no family, no home. And, finally, no reason to be here anymore.

The end kicked off when a Mafia don named Torenelli didn’t pay Wesley for some work. Bodies started dropping all over the city, all family men. Torenelli went into hiding. Wesley kept killing, sending the message. When that didn’t make the Mob give him up, Wesley decapitated Torenelli’s daughter, right in her own upscale co-op. Telling them he didn’t play by their Hollywood “code.” Rules and roles didn’t matter to a man who believed the difference between a priest and a pimp wasn’t what they sold, only what they charged.

Then Torenelli played his last card. An old viper named Julio I’d known since prison. Years before, Julio had hired me to do something about a freak who was sex-stalking his niece. That was a straightforward job, and I got it done easy enough. Julio said he had hired me, instead of using one of his own men, because he was Old School—you never mixed private business with family business. It had sounded right when he said it.

But when Julio hired me to meet Wesley, offer him whatever money the assassin wanted to call off the hit on Torenelli, I knew I was being middled. Just carrying the offer would be enough to convince Wesley I had gone over.

It didn’t happen like that. Julio thought Wesley and I were stalking each other, but what we were doing was making a trade.

After a while, they all got dead.

That should have ended it. But by then, Wesley’s hell-bound train had finally jumped the tracks. A decade before Columbine became an American nightmare, Wesley walked into a suburban high school with enough ordnance to take out every living creature in the place. After lobbing some grenades, then gunning down dozens of random victims, he released a deadly gas from the truck he had driven to the scene.

While the cops thought they were still negotiating with the maniac they had trapped inside, Wesley climbed to the roof of the high school. Before the police helicopters could even get off a shot, he held a bunch of dynamite sticks taped together over his head, like a psycho version of the Statue of Liberty, and blew himself into atoms.

We watched him go. Live on TV. It was on every channel, just like when they cover a war.

The package arrived a couple of weeks later: a nine-by-twelve flat envelope, thick with paper. His dark thumbprint was at the bottom of the last page.

That part of the package found its way to the cops. My inheritance from Wesley, a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, taking the weight for some of the things I’d done.

But there was another part to it, one the cops had never seen. A pocket-sized notebook, filled with Wesley’s precise printing. His accounts book.

Our kind don’t make out wills. But we do leave legacies.

We went over the plan as Clarence drove. At that hour, even the FDR wasn’t crowded; we were over the Willis Avenue Bridge and into the South Bronx badlands in minutes. The Plymouth blended right in.

My cell phone buzzed.

“What?” I answered.

“You tell me, sweetheart.” Michelle.

“Honey, have we got anybody out on the Rock, in the Women’s House?”

“I can find out. What’s up?”

“Wolfe’s been arrested. Just got arraigned. Judge put a half-million bail on her. She may be there for a while. I don’t want anything to—”

“Wolfe? They’ll probably build a throne for her, as many wife beaters as she’s put away.”

“Still . . .”

“I’m on it, baby.”

Michelle rang off just as we found what we were looking for. Big Nate’s place was a freestanding cinder-block building with cross-barred windows—it looked like a small-town jailhouse sitting on a prairie. A faint dirty-yellow glow came through the glass. Red neon promised bail bonds in several languages.

We gave it one slow circuit before Clarence docked the Plymouth, backing it into getaway position.

“Everybody set?” I asked.

“You going heeled, mahn?” Clarence asked, patting his chest to the left of his heart, where his nine-millimeter always rested.

“No,” I said. “We’ll do it the way I laid it out.” I had a never-registered .357 Mag in a hidden compartment next to the Plymouth’s fuel cell, but I didn’t want to chance a pat-down at the door.

The Prof held up a small bundle, wrapped in an old army blanket. He didn’t have to say any more. When I first met him, he was on his last prison stretch, and part of his rep was as a master of the twelve-gauge sawed-off.

“All right,” I said. “One more time. Me and Max go in. I’m the front man for a sweatshop that just got raided. I’m looking for someone to write a lot of little bonds—get the workers out and gone before they say something stupid and put INS on alert. Max is with me, covering the tong’s end of the deal . . . if they even ask.

“If we come piling out the door, you know what to do. Keep it high, Prof. Soon as they hear your scattergun, they’ll probably get back inside. And, around here, nobody’s calling 911.”

“You drop the name, you gotta carry the game, son,” the Prof warned. He unwrapped the sawed-off and laid it on the seat next to him.

I rang the bell. Waited for whoever was running the security camera to buzz us in.

The place hadn’t changed. A pair of low-grade industrial desks, a wall of khaki file cabinets. A splattering of hand-lettered signs, all warnings of one kind or another.

There was a man at each desk. One was in a cheap brown suit jacket, sitting behind some kind of ledger. The other was in a black nylon windbreaker, feet on the desk, a copy of Soldier of Fortune open in front of him. I figured the suit for the money man, the windbreaker for a bounty hunter.

The bounty hunter looked barroom-tough. The money man looked weasel-dangerous.

Max moved so he was standing against the left-hand wall. I walked over to the money man.

“I want to see Nate,” I told him.

“There’s no Nate here, friend,” he said. “You want a bond, you came to the right place. Otherwise . . .”

“He’s here,” I said, letting my eyes drift over to the door against the back wall. The one that said “Men” on it, with a “Closed for Repairs” sign plastered across its face. “He doesn’t let anyone else drive his Rolls,” letting him know I’d seen the immaculate old Silver Cloud sitting out back.

“Give me a name,” the money man said, not blinking.

“Nate wouldn’t like that,” I said. “And he wouldn’t like you looking at me that close,” I said, turning to face the bounty hunter.

The bounty hunter gave it about a second’s thought, then he dropped his eyes.

“Just tell him someone’s out here asking for him,” I said, keeping my voice a monotone. “Don’t be thinking crazy, because I’m not. Everyone knows you don’t keep cash around here.”

“I can’t do that,” the money man said.

I stepped close to the money man’s desk. “Then tell him this,” I said, very softly. “Tell him, if I wanted to do him, I wouldn’t let people see me, like I’m letting you, right now. I’d just turn this place into a barbecue pit, and pick him off when it got too hot for him inside.”

The money man looked everyplace but my eyes.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You tell Nate what I said, it won’t make him nervous: it’ll calm him down. He’ll know who I am then. We’re old pals. Tell the tough guy over there to go ahead and pull his piece, keep me covered, if it’ll make you feel better, okay?”

The money man slitted his eyes. I counted to six in my head. “Step back,” he said. “Just a few feet, all right? I need some privacy. This is a long-distance call.”

I did what he wanted. He picked up the receiver, covered the mouthpiece with his hand. I looked over at the bounty hunter. He was a real professional: too busy playing stare-down with me to notice Max closing the gap between them.

“Go on back,” the money man said.

I turned to Max, barked something in quasi-Chinese. Even after all those years at Mama’s, I didn’t understand one word of the Cantonese and Mandarin she spoke interchangeably, but I could imitate the sounds enough to fool anyone who didn’t speak either one. It helped that Max nodded, like he was acknowledging what I said.

“I told him to wait out here for me,” I said to the money man. “He doesn’t speak English.”

The money man didn’t say anything. Max slid along the wall, just a few inches, to improve his angle of attack if the bounty hunter decided to role-play.

I walked over to the men’s room, tapped lightly. Heard a seriously solid deadbolt snap open. Turned the knob, and walked inside.

Big Nate was behind a flimsy little wood desk . . . and a transparent wall of Lexan thick enough to bounce a bullet, even at that close range.

“Come closer,” he said, speaking into a microphone he held in one tiny hand. “Talk into the speaker.”

I moved forward slowly, sat down on a chrome barstool with a cracked red leather top. That brought my mouth level with the speaking grid.

Nate was looking down at me. Behind his desk was a raised platform. It compensated for his four-and-a-half-foot height, the same way the specially built-up pedals on his Rolls let him drive.

“I need a bond,” I said. “A big one.”

“Never mind that,” he said, his frail voice amplified into resonant strength by the microphone he was holding. “You said something outside, to my man. Can you back it up?”

“Lucien Lagrande,” I said, pulling the name from my ghost brother’s accounts book. “You want more?”

The silence between us was thicker than the Lexan. But, from the moment I’d said that name, Big Nate knew he was done. Wesley had started his walk.

“You’re not saying you’re . . . ?”

“I’m his brother,” I said. The blood-truth.

Even as I said those words, I remembered the “home” they’d sent me to when I was an orphaned kid. What they did to me there. And what Wesley had whispered to me one night when we were together in the institution: “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” the baby monster told me. “Fire works.”

It was all down in Wesley’s accounts book. Big Nate had been a visionary. Between the Jakes running ganja, the DRs moving powder, bikers cranking crystal, college kids selling Q, and everyone else slinging rock, money was stacking all over the city. The Italians had a hundred different laundries, but even if they had been willing to take in outsiders, nobody trusted a “family” that didn’t trust its own relatives.

That had become Nate’s real business, setting up custom-tailored laundries. Had them everywhere, and kept all the records in his head. His stock in trade was honesty. You gave Nate a hundred K cash, you got back whatever percentage he promised . . . and a string of receipts that would give a CPA an orgasm.

One night, a man named Lucien Lagrande came to visit Big Nate. Lagrande told him he knew the bail bonds weren’t the little man’s real business.

“You sitting on gold with this bail-bond front,” Lagrande had told him. “But that all finished now. You being . . . encompassed.”

Big Nate had laughed at him. Which Lagrande expected. Then he dropped the hammer. Big Nate had a piece of a Vegas casino. A little piece, but in his own name. If that came to light, Big Nate would lose both licenses—it’s illegal for a bondsman to have a piece of a casino, in either direction.

Big Nate felt his heart stop. “Actually fucking stop,” is what he told people, later.

“You got a week,” Lagrande told him. “Then you turn it over, or I turn you over. That simple, my man. Don’t worry, now. You get a taste. You keep on getting a taste. Once you encompassed, you part of my operation. A partner, even.

“You don’t play, you lose it all. Everyone scramble for pieces. I get some, but not all, I know that. This way, you go with me, I get the pie, sure, but you get to keep a nice fat slice.”

Lagrande lived in a three-story frame house in Brooklyn. It stood alone on a large vacant lot, the last in a row of condemned-then-razed derelict buildings. Word was, the whole thing was slated to become what the Mayor called an “oasis of greenery.”

The place was a fortress, surrounded by iron fencing, patrolled by dogs, lit by klieg lights at night, and occupied by no less than a dozen of Lagrande’s heavily armed crew. Nobody could get within a hundred yards without being spotted.

It was broad daylight when the house exploded into flames. Lagrande didn’t even make it to the fence before a sniper picked him off.

The police later figured that the shots must have come from a certain rooftop, more than a quarter-mile from the scene. Seven shots. Three into Lagrande, the other four into the men who had run out the front door with him.

“We know this much,” the press conference cop told his audience. “The recovered slugs were all fired from the same weapon. It’s as if whoever was shooting put one into each of them to bring them down, then scanned the field to make sure which one was Lagrande, before he finished him off with those head shots. As impossible as that sounds . . .” he finished, lamely.

That was a lot of years ago. But crime time runs different than citizen time. For permanent outsiders like us, time only matters when you’re doing it.

“I’m not a blackmailer,” I said to Big Nate. “And I didn’t come here to make threats. That name I said, it was just to prove in, okay? So you know where I’ve been, and what I know.”

And what I can do, I said in my mind, vibrating the unspoken words out to him.

The little man looked at the ceiling, as if he was considering a proposal. Then he picked up the microphone and whispered what everyone is too terrified to ask out loud. “Is Wesl—? Is he really . . . ?”

“Nobody knows,” I told him. A face-down hole card. The whisper-stream had it that Wesley was a falcon on my glove. Nobody knew for sure, and nobody liked the odds.

I watched his eyes. Stayed gentle inside myself, showing him respect by acting like I believed he was actually considering calling my bet.

“How big a number I need to write?” he finally said, tossing in his hand.

^“That’s a huge-ass bond,” the Prof said on the drive back. “Sure hope that fucking dwarf don’t think he too big to drop the vig.” The Prof was a couple of inches taller than Big Nate, on a good day.

“I ran it all down for him,” I said. “He knows Wolfe’s not going to jump. And she’s got a nice house, out in Forest Hills Gardens; cover him for more than the nut, it came to that.”

“So we don’t have to put up the fifty large?”

“Not a dime.”

“Honeyboy, listen to me for a minute. You wearing a murder face now. Not like you mad, like you . . . the way Wesley looked all the time. Got those straight-line lips and glass-cutter eyes, you hear what I’m saying?”

“I don’t care—”

“Right. Know you don’t. Know you won’t. Only thing is, you know how people get when you scare them deep enough. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

“Meaning, you don’t think Nate’s actually going to write the bond?”

“He’s either going to write it, or he’s going to run, son. Get down, go to ground, not be around. Not until this one’s all done.”

“If he—”

“Yo! Ice up, youngblood! What’s wrong with you? The little midget pulls a burn, he gets to learn. But that’s down the line, another time. What we’re here for is to get your girl the door. Say I’m on time with all that rhyme.”

“You’re right, Prof,” I assured him.

I didn’t want to take a chance on calling Davidson at his home. I had the number, but it was almost five in the morning by then, and I didn’t want to spook his kids—that kind of move could cost me some ground. Figured he wouldn’t have his cell turned on, either, so I called his office number and spoke into the tape.

“Go spring her; it’s covered. Surety is Korlok Bonding Company, in the Bronx.” I gave him the rest of the particulars, including the phone number and who to ask for.

“What’s next, mahn?” Clarence asked as I got back into the Plymouth.

“We have to wait a few hours,” I told him, signing the same message to Max. “Make sure Wolfe gets bailed, first. I have to find out some stuff. Figure, another twenty-four hours, we know exactly what we have to do. I’ll leave word at—”

Max tapped my chest. Shook his head “no” at me. Made the sign of a man eating with chopsticks.

“All right,” I told them all. “Mama’s at five this afternoon. Tell Michelle, too, okay?”

^“She came back, boss,” Gateman greeted me as I walked in the door of the flophouse.

“How long ago?”

“Around midnight. Had the Rottweiler with her again, too. Plus a guy. He’s been up before, last year. I remember him. Big guy. Looks like a farm boy, but he’s no Hoosier, I could tell.”

Mick, I thought. Good. If he was with Pepper, he wasn’t prowling the city, looking for someone to hurt.

“What did you tell them?”

“Boss, I told them you wasn’t in. The girl, she gave me two choices. I mean, she didn’t say the choices, but that’s what they was. I could either let them go on up and wait for you, or I could shoot them all.”

I nodded my head, telling Gateman he’d done the right thing. “Which one would you have gone for first?” I asked him.

“Got to be the Rottie,” Gateman said, professionally. “I could have cleared leather before any of them could move. That usually stuns them for a second, gives you some options. And they weren’t standing that close. But that only works with people, not dogs. And that fucking Rottie was ready, if you get my drift.”

Bruiser was ready. I heard his warning snarl as I came up the last flight of stairs.

“It’s me,” I said.

The beast didn’t recognize my voice. Or, more likely, he did. I heard Pepper say, “Bruiser, down!”

She was sitting on the futon, Bruiser at her feet. Mick was standing off to one side, so he could see if there was anyone coming up behind me.

“We didn’t want to risk a cell call,” Pepper said. “And we only have—”

“I already got the bail secured,” I cut her off. “She’ll be out later on today.”

“That’s great!” Pepper said, clapping her hands. The Rottweiler jumped to his feet. “No!” she said, jerking the dog’s short lead. “It’s all right, Bruiser.”

“You’re sure?” Mick asked me, his voice thick with threat.

“I’m not walking in there with a half-mil in cash,” I said. “It’ll be a bondsman. I went to see him myself. Just got back. And I don’t think there’s much doubt.”

Mick made a noise in his throat. Bruiser looked up at him like a kindred spirit.

“Listen, listen!” Pepper said, excitedly. “This is what I couldn’t say on the phone. There’s a detective, Sands. He was working Special Victims when Wolfe was head of City-Wide. Do you know him?”

“Never heard his name,” I said, truthfully.

“He called us. At the office number. He wants someone to meet him. At seven in the morning. This morning. A bar called the Four-Leaf. Do you know it?”

“If he means the one around here, I know where it is,” I said. And I did. If you went westbound on Chambers Street, past the little park and all the way across the West Side Highway, you could find it, tucked into a corner, right near the river. “But I’ve never been there.”

“He says he has some things for us. Things that could help Wolfe.”

“Probably working for the DA. Hoping you’d be dumb enough to have a landline in the office, so they could find out where to serve the search warrant,” I said. Wolfe’s operation didn’t have a street address. She met with her clients the same way I did—anyplace else. “Or maybe he just wants to pump you. The cops have to know that Wolfe has a network, and that you’re with her.”

“No, no,” Pepper said. “He’s not with them. He’s for Wolfe. For real.”

“And you would know that exactly . . . how?”

“Because . . . All right, I don’t know it. Not for sure.”

“You ask Wolfe?”

“How could I? I haven’t talked to her since . . . since this happened.”

“So?”

“So that’s why I’m . . . why we’re here. Why we waited. Detective Sands said he wanted to meet—”

“You told me that.”

“Here’s what I didn’t tell you,” she said, lips tight with self-control. “He didn’t ask for me. What he said was, ‘Send anyone you want. Ask whatever questions you want. Or don’t say a word—I’ll do all the talking. You understand? I could be wired like a radio station, it wouldn’t do the other side any good.’ Now what does that sound like to you?”

“Like he’s for Wolfe. Or he’s smarter than the average cop.”

“Or both, right?” Pepper said, eagerly.

“We have to go,” Mick cut through it, his voice no-dispute hard. “If he’s got anything that could—”

“Pepper’s right,” I said to him, getting it for the first time. “If he’s working for the other side, even getting a look at you or Pepper would be another round in their cylinder. Especially if you’re going to be her alibi, down the road. But my face won’t mean anything. . . .”

“You’ll go, right?” Pepper asked, big dark eyes pressuring and pleading at the same time.

“Seven? You mean, in less than two hours, then?”

“Yes. That’s why we waited here. It’s pretty close by. If you hadn’t shown up, we would have had to—”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “But I don’t know when Davidson’s going to call and—”

They were already on their way out, the Rottweiler leading the way.

Less than two hours before the meet. A half-hour walk from my place, max.

I don’t drink coffee. And stims scare me, the way they throw off my pulse rate.

So I took a long hot shower, followed by a fifteen-second blast of only-cold spray. A quick, careful shave. A glass of grape juice and some rye toast, to settle my stomach. I threw down the motley assortment of vitamins and minerals and Devil-knows-what-else I swallow every morning, a habit I’d gotten into when I was holed up in the Pacific Northwest, after the ambush that was supposed to have totaled me. I wasn’t running from the shooters; I was staying down to make sure there weren’t any of them left. Besides the ones I’d already found.

I let the whisper-stream declare me dead and gone, and just . . . waited.

I was home only a short time before I got involved in a case. A case for real, like I used to have when I first was trying to make it as something other than what I am—a criminal in my heart. Wolfe helped me on that one. Oh, she got paid. Said that was why she did it, for the money.

But I never believed her, not completely. That case was a lot of things for me, but, for me and Wolfe, I thought it was a test. The prize I was playing for wasn’t as big as a promise, just something to let me know I could get back in the game.

And I brought it home. Got it done. Found out who had killed the teenage daughter who was a gangster’s darkest secret. I did it all the right way. Investigated, interrogated, interviewed. Came up with a plan. Put together a team. And spooked the truth out of the shadows.

Along the way, some people got dead.

They didn’t die for justice, and they didn’t die for money. I’m no vigilante, and I’m not a hit man—although the whisper-stream has made me out to be both over the years.

Wolfe knew about some of it. Figured it out for herself. But I never got the chance to tell her the ending.

An hour later, I was walking down Hudson toward Chambers. Dressed in a worn leather jacket over a dark-blue hooded sweatshirt, jeans, scuffed ankle-high boots on my feet, a pair of canvas gloves in my back pocket. A man going to work.

I couldn’t do anything about my face. Once, I was so generic-looking that I could get past almost anyone who wasn’t raised where I was. But now I had two different-color eyes, which no longer tracked exactly parallel. One bullet had made a keloid beauty mark on my right cheek; another had neatly sliced off the top of the opposite ear. Now I had a face people would remember.

Worse, they could see me coming.

Burke had never had a tattoo. Most guys who start to jail early end up covered with ink by the time they’re on their second or third bit, but that depends on who schools you—gang kids or pros.

With kids, it’s all about owning something. Something they can’t take away, even when they beat you for the fun of it, and toss you in a tiny dark room with only the stink of sorrow for company. Some kids know who “they” are from birth—only the faces change.

There’s other reasons to ink up. Jailhouse tattoos aren’t painless. And a tattooed tear for each time you’ve been down marks you as a veteran.

When you’re done with the juvie joints, when they put you Inside for real, sometimes you have to take a mark just to stay alive. The White Night crews make you fly their flag on your body, and the Latins are even harder about it. Some of their bosses are so heavily inked, it takes over their skin, makes them into some different race.

But the Prof had pulled my coat early. “You ain’t got but one trick for when you hit the bricks,” the little man had counseled me. “You’re going to do crime, all the time. That stuff you see motherfuckers put on themselves? That’s ’cause they going to stay here, understand? But you, you’re still a young boy. The gate’s in your fate. You know what you going to do, so do it true,” he said. “Body art ain’t smart, Schoolboy. It’s like using vanity plates on a getaway car.”

But the man walking down Hudson that morning had a tattoo. A tiny blue heart, between the last two knuckles of his right hand. A hollow heart.

That was for Pansy, my partner. A Neopolitan mastiff I’d raised from a tiny pup. She had taken some of the bullets meant for me when I walked into that ambush. Taken one of the enemy with her, too, before she went over.

“You’re still the same,” my people kept telling me.

Maybe I was.

I wasn’t worried about recognizing this supposed cop. A lot of waterfront bars open early, to catch the crowd who hadn’t been picked in the morning shape-up. But this joint wasn’t close enough to any of the working piers, and the crews prepping the Twin Towers site for new construction would already be on the job by seven.

The caller had told Pepper whoever she sent would recognize him by his white hair . . . and he’d be sitting in the corner booth farthest from the door. I checked my watch: 6:58. Close enough.

As soon as I walked in the place, I understood why the cop had picked it. To my right was a flat wall, broken only by the clearly marked doors to the toilets. Dead ahead, a long, straight bar with a murky mirror behind it. Only four of the stools were occupied. To my left, running almost the full length of the window, a row of booths—all wood, no padding anywhere in sight.

The second booth and the last were the only ones with people in them. A guy nursing a beer while studying the Racing Form was closest to me. All the way in the back was a man in a dark-tweed sports jacket. He had a thick mop of white hair, and eyes I could feel even at that distance.

I walked over to where he was sitting. Noticed the last booth was just beyond the length of the window. A nice precaution, even though it would have taken a radiologist to read anything through that grimy glass.

I sat down, uninvited, my back to the door. No point being cute—if it was a trap, it was already sprung.

“What do you have?” I said.

“I’ve got mine,” he said, holding up a double shot glass of something amber.

“Not what will you have,” I said. “What do you have.”

He nodded, as if I’d given him some secret code word.

“How do I know you’re from—?”

“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “I don’t have any questions. You said you wouldn’t have any, either. All I had to do was listen. That’s what I’m doing.”

The cop tossed down his drink, rapped his glass on the table. “You want . . . ?” he asked.

I just shook my head.

A man in what looked like a butcher’s apron came over. He took away the cop’s shot glass and replaced it with another. Neither of us said anything until the barkeep had gone back to his post.

“My name’s Sands,” the cop said. “Molton James Sands, Jr. My friends call me Molly.”

I didn’t call him anything.

“I worked with Wolfe,” he continued. “For years. Best prosecutor I ever knew. She was one of us. In Sex Crimes, I mean. One of the squad. She’s getting railroaded by that candyass DA. Not the Manhattan guy—the head of City-Wide. The same faggot who fired her.”

I hadn’t come there for an editorial, especially from a lush. “Tell me something we can use,” I said.

His blue eyes darkened as he narrowed in on me. The veins in his slightly spread nose got redder. “Here’s fucking something,” he said. “That mutt who got shot, he’s no more in a coma than I am.”

“Wychek?”

“Wychek. Oh, he was unconscious all right. But as of a few hours ago, he’s come around. Whoever’s representing Wolfe . . .”

“Davidson.”

“Good! That’s a man. Now, listen. This should get her bail dropped all the way down to—”

“Her bail’s covered,” I said, cutting him off. “This Wychek, he’s conscious now, right? You telling me he changed his statement?”

“I don’t know about that,” the cop said, leaning closer to me. “But I do know this. He doesn’t want to be discharged.”

“The wounds—”

“—are bullshit,” he finished for me. “He got hit three times. Front of the right thigh, upper left arm, and right shoulder.”

“That could still be—”

“—with a fucking twenty-five,” he said. “What does that tell you?”

“Nothing by itself.”

“You don’t want to say, a twenty-five, that’s a woman’s gun, right? Well, it’s also a punk’s gun. Little piece-of-shit nothing, make a Saturday Night Special look like a Glock. Street Crimes probably confiscates more Raven twenty-fives a year than all the other pieces put together. Anyway, they got the bullets out like pulling a bad tooth, big deal. Cocksucker won’t even be walking with a limp.”

“The coma was a fake?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” the cop said, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “I don’t think so, from what I heard. But this part is gospel—Wychek’s scared. Big scared. Demanding a police guard, the whole works.”

“Scared Wolfe’s going over the wall at Rikers, swim to the Bronx, steal a car, pick up a real gun this time, and hunt him down at the hospital?” I said, not a trace of sarcasm in my voice.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” he said, showing me his street roller’s stare. “Look, I don’t have a lot of time; I’m supposed to be on a case in the Jamaica courthouse at nine—not that the fucking pussy ADA is ever on time himself—so listen up. For right now, the DA’s going along with it. You understand what I’m telling you? Full police guard. Why? Because the official story is that Wolfe’s put out a contract on him.”

“Yeah, that’d be smart,” I said. “Believe me, if there’s one person in this city who wants that scumbag alive, it’s Wolfe. Davidson’s going to dice and slice him so bad on the stand, the case will never get to the jury.”

“I’m not arguing,” the cop said. “Something else is going on. I just don’t know what. But him not being in a coma anymore, that’s worth something, right?”

“How much?” I said, slipping my hand inside my jacket.

Sands’ eyes snapped into violence. One of his big fists clenched. When he spoke, his voice was tightly constricted, like an overwound spring.

“Listen, pal. You don’t know me. And I don’t know you. So I’m going to be real fucking patient. This once. I meant, worth something to Wolfe. You think I don’t go way back with her? You think I don’t know what a filthy little maggot this Wychek is? How many rapes he got away with because, in this whole stinking town, only Wolfe had the stones to take the case to trial, even when it wasn’t a slam-dunk?”

I nodded, not affirming his connection to Wolfe, just the truth he spoke about her. When Wolfe was running City-Wide, if there had been any damn way to bring the other victims in, she would have done it.

“I know something else, too,” he said, leaning even closer. “That ‘Ha ha!’ letter he sent Wolfe? He must have sent other ones, too. ’Cause that’s the kind of fucking degenerate filth he is. You want to know who really tried to kill him, that’s where you start.”

“Where would I get—”

“Been nice meeting you,” the cop said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime. You ever go out to Platinum Pussycats? The strip joint, out by JFK?”

“No,” I said, arranging my face into a mute question, as I palmed the piece of paper he had slipped to me.

“Ah, you can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s behind that giant storage-unit place they have out there.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, in a dismissive voice. “Anything you want me to tell—?”

“Anything I want to tell her, she already knows,” the cop said.

As I was walking back over to my place, the cell phone in my pocket rang.

“What?” I answered.

“Got your message.” Davidson’s voice. “Nice work. I’ll have her out by—”

“There’s new stuff,” I said. “Call me as soon as you get her sprung, so we can meet.”

I was starting to feel the fatigue knocking at all my doors by then, but I had to pick up whatever the cop had in that storage locker, and do it fast. If he was being straight, if he really was with Wolfe, I couldn’t leave him hanging out there, exposed. And if it was a trap, if they had a camera on the unit so they could get a look at the members of Wolfe’s crew, I couldn’t turn the job over to Pepper.

The Prof and Clarence were probably back in their crib, over in East New York. Which was kind of on the way to the airport, if I took Atlantic Avenue all the way through Brooklyn into Queens. But with the key in my hand, I didn’t need the Prof for the locks. And this had to be a no-guns deal, which meant Clarence wasn’t coming.

The Mole was all the way up in the South Bronx. But even if he’d lived close by, he wouldn’t be the man for this job—his idea of personal protection is heavy explosives. And I still wasn’t sure where Michelle was.

But Max’s place was off Division Street, and I knew everybody in his house would be awake.

I liberated my Plymouth, drove over to the warehouse where Max has his dojo on one floor and his family home on the next. I probed until I found the hidden switch that raised the metal doors to the loading bay, drove inside, and closed it behind me.

By then, I knew Max was watching, from somewhere. As I got out, a dark shape vaulted over the second-floor railing, dropping next to me as lightly as a Kleenex on velour.

Max. Not showing off, showing up.

I started to gesture out what we had to do, but he held one finger in the air for silence, then used it to point upstairs before he flowed his hands together in a prayerful gesture. I took a quick glance at my watch, to tell him we didn’t have a lot of time, and then I followed him upstairs.

“Burke!” the teenage girl shouted, as she ran to me. Flower, the only child of Max and his wife, Immaculata.

The girl slammed into me like a linebacker making a goal-line stop, knocking me back a few feet as I held on to her. “Hey, kiddo,” I said. “Easy!”

She stood on her toes, gave me a messy kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so used to Daddy.”

“Daddy?”

“That is what she persists in calling her father lately,” Immaculata said, her voice mock-severe. “Flower’s manners have suffered greatly, now that she is so grown up.”

“Mom!”

“You see?” Immaculata smiled at me. She turned to her beautiful, glowing daughter. “Have you invited your uncle Burke to come into our home, child? To sit down? To share our breakfast with us?”

“Aaaargh!” the girl said, rolling her eyes. She stepped back a couple of paces, bowed formally, said, “Uncle, please come into our home and share our meal with us. We would be honored.”

“It would be my honor,” I said, bowing back.

Max regarded his wife and daughter with his standard mixture of stunned amazement and fierce love.

Immaculata was in a plum-colored robe heavily brocaded with silver. Her hair was tied in a chignon. Her daughter was wearing pink jeans and a black sweatshirt that came almost to her knees. Her hair was pulled into three pigtails, with two on the right.

We all sat around the teak table with rosewood inlays that the family used for all its meals. I don’t know what was in the eggs Immaculata served, but they tasted wonderful.

“Drink,” she said, putting a glass of some ginger-colored stuff she had just mixed up in front of me. “For energy.”

“Thank you,” I said, not remotely surprised that she could tell I needed it.

Max disappeared. Came back in a few seconds with a framed document of some kind.

“Oh my god!” Flower exclaimed, dramatically.

I took the document from Max, read through the glass. Flower’s PSAT scores. Verbal: 80. Math: 78. Writing: 80. Spending all that time with teenagers last year had schooled me enough to understand that those scores, coupled with Flower’s school activities, made her a mortal lock for a National Merit Scholarship.

“Congratulations!” I said to her.

“Oh, this is so embarrassing,” the girl said. “I mean, it isn’t a Nobel Prize, for goodness’ sake!”

“When you win one of those, will you still throw a fit if your father wants to show it off?” I asked her.

“Burke! You’re supposed to be on my side.”

“Honey, it’s not like Max is making a window display out of it.”

“Well, he wanted to, I think. And when he showed it to Grandmother, she wanted to build a shrine to it. I’m serious!”

“‘Grandmother,’ huh?” I teased her. “You don’t call her ‘Granny,’ then?”

“She wouldn’t dare,” Immaculata laughed. “This child has always been able to bully her poor father, but Mama . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “Mama’s like me. She doesn’t put up with any guff from the younger generation.”

“You are so tough,” Flower said, getting up from the table. She bent forward to give me a kiss, slipping her hand into the side pocket of my jacket, as I had taught her to do when she was just a little girl. Back then, she always found candy. Later, it was the kind of junk jewelry preteens love . . . or pretend to, anyway. Now it’s a fifty-dollar bill. “I must get ready for school now,” she announced.

“Hold on a damn minute,” I said. “I want to tell you something. Something important. You’re old enough to hear it now.”

Flower’s eyes were rapt. There was nothing she treasured more than vindication of her status as a mature young woman.

“I’ve known your father for a long time,” I said. “He is my brother. I love him. You know the amazing skills your father has. But I was never jealous of him. Not until now. Do you understand?”

“Oh, Burke,” she said. She gave me another quick kiss, then fled to her room, tears flowing.

Even though we were heading away from Manhattan, the inbound HOV lane cut down our options. That, plus the reverse-commuters and airport traffic, clogged the artery enough to keep us below the speed limit for pretty much the entire trip.

The highways that crisscross the city during rush hour carry a United Nations of passengers. Perfect for the kind of traveling I like to do—nothing stands out. Besides, the average commuter is either talking on a cell phone, eating his breakfast, or staring blankly through the windshield like an overtranq’d mental patient. A zebra-striped stretch limo with a palm tree growing out of its sunroof wouldn’t get more than a passing glance, never mind my purposely anonymous Plymouth.

We took the long right-hand sweeper exiting the BQE for the LIE connector to the Grand Central. Behind us, some congenital defective, in a white Mustang with blue racing stripes, decided we weren’t moving quick enough. He jumped into the service lane, shot past us, then whipped back to his left to cut us off. A gentle tap on the four-piston brakes, concealed behind the dog-dish hubcaps on the Plymouth’s modest sixteen-inch steel wheels, was enough to keep us out of his trunk.

Max gave me a “Should we?” look. I shrugged, not expecting we’d get a chance.

But the Mustang was going the same way we were, so we stayed right with him until the highway forked—left for Long Island, right for JFK.

The Mustang went right. Max looked upward, then nodded in agreement. It was true—I usually don’t like to call attention to myself when I’m driving, but fate had made the decision for us.

The Mustang cut across two rows, looking for the outside lane. As he made his move, I dropped the Plymouth down a gear and nailed it. The Roadrunner exploded past his left quarter panel like a train past a tree. By the time the full-on roar of the Plymouth’s stump-puller motor registered in his ears, the Mustang was behind us, stunned.

I glanced in the mirror, caught the driver looking frantically to his right, trying to figure out what had happened. The ancient bucket of bolts he’d cut off so easily couldn’t have just blasted past him like that, but . . .

Past JFK, traffic lightened up considerably. The Mustang tailgated relentlessly, flashing his brights, making it clear he wanted that left lane for himself. I glanced at the tach—3200 rpm, about 70 miles an hour. Nothing ahead for quite a distance. Even Miss Cleo could figure out what would happen as soon as the lane next to us cleared.

I watched the mirrors. When the Mustang swung out and made his move to pass on my right, I let him get a half-length on me before I gave it the gun, keeping him pinned in the middle lane.

At 105, the Mustang was still coming, but he was a man trying to scale a Teflon wall with greasy hands—the Plymouth had enough left to run away and hide anytime I asked.

A fat SUV in the middle lane finished it. The screech of the Mustang’s brakes was ugly—I guessed the chump hadn’t seen the need for big brakes to go along with his giant chrome rims.

I shot past the SUV, sliced across the highway, and disappeared into the next exit ramp.

We circled back toward the storage facility. Once we had it spotted, I pulled over. We took out a pair of bogus Jersey plates—backed with Velcro bands so they could snap on and off in seconds—and put them in place, just in case there was some sort of surveillance cam working.

The facility was a huge grid formed by lines of connected units, like windowless row houses. I’d been in smaller towns.

There was no fence, just a billboard-sized warning sign at the entrance. All I caught with a quick glance was: NO LIVING OR SLEEPING IN THE UNITS.

We motored through slowly, navigating by the alphanumeric on the piece of paper Sands had given me. A brown Chevy sedan with white doors rolled past us. The quasi–police shield decal on the doors didn’t exactly give me the tremors. All those patrols ever did was watch for people prying open the units that management sealed up when the rent hadn’t been paid.

Some of the units were bigger than apartments people paid a fortune for in Manhattan. Even the smallest ones would hold anything you could stuff in a pickup.

People keep everything in places like this, from toys to treasures. If you were evicted, you could stash your furniture while you slept in your car and tried to put together enough money for a new crib. If your collection of vintage paperback books was too much for your apartment—or your wife—one of these units could be the solution.

For that matter, all you needed was a chainsaw and an ice chest and you could keep a body in one of them for long enough to be in another country by the time it was discovered.

Sands’ unit was near the end of a long row. I backed the Plymouth up to the door, and Max and I got out.

The lock yielded to the three-number sequence that was on the piece of paper Sands had slipped me. I’d brought a flashlight with me, but I didn’t need it: a switch on the wall lit the place nicely.

The inside of the storage unit looked like the loser’s share of a divorce settlement. An old La-Z-Boy recliner, upholstered in seasick-green Naugahyde. A swaybacked couch the husband had probably spent most of his nights on before the breakup. A fold-up workbench. A set of black iron free weights. Two bowling-ball bags that looked full. A pair of metal file cabinets someone had once painted white, with a brush. A decent assortment of power tools—looked in good condition. Stacks of magazines. A nineteen-inch TV. A mid-range stereo receiver, with matching speakers.

And seven large file boxes of heavy cardboard, designed for transport. They were in two stacks, ready to go.

I grabbed the top one. It was full—had to weigh a good thirty, thirty-five pounds. Inside, nothing but paper. Case files; every single page a photocopy. I leafed through them quickly. As soon as I saw the name “Wychek” a dozen times in thirty seconds, I knew we were home.

Even with the fuel cell and the relocated battery hogging part of the space, there was still enough room in the Plymouth’s cavernous trunk for all seven cartons. I kept watch while Max did the loading, the best use of both our skills.

Before I turned off the light to the storage unit, I took a quick glance around. Removing the boxes didn’t create a visually empty space—it looked like everything else had been there for a while. I wondered where Sands lived.

I dropped Max and the cartons in front of my building. By the time I’d stashed the Plymouth and walked on back, a quick jerk of Gateman’s head told me the Mongol had already gotten them all upstairs.

As I walked in the door to my place, the cell phone chirped in its holster.

“What?”

“They’re . . . ‘producing’ her, is what the lawyer said.” Pepper, sounding more like her usual upbeat self.

“When?”

“Today, for sure. Probably not until late afternoon, or even tonight. But it might be quicker. It depends—”

“—on the bus, I know. Look, I’m not going to be there this time. And you shouldn’t be, either. None of you, understand?”

“Yes.”

“As for going out to her house, you—”

“I got it,” Pepper said, voice edged with annoyance. “We didn’t start doing this yesterday, okay? I didn’t call for advice; I called to give you some information. Like I said. I got it. Now you got it.”

Max had laid the cartons out on the floor, waiting for me to decide what we were going to do with all the paper inside.

There were a hundred things I wanted to do. But I had this overwhelming feeling of stumbling blind, trying to disarm a bomb in the dark. I knew what my system was telling me. I put my palms together, held them to one side, and laid my cheek against them. Telling Max I needed sleep.

I pointed to my watch, gestured that I wasn’t going to be able to make the meet at Mama’s. There wasn’t enough to tell anyone yet, anyway.

Max scanned my face, a cartographer reading a map. He nodded agreement, signed that Mama would know where to find him, I should leave word when I wanted us all to get together.

I went into the back room, took off my jacket, and . . .

The phone buzzed, somewhere close. I reached out, flipped it open.

“What?”

“It took a bit longer than I anticipated.” Davidson’s voice. “Longer than it should have. The whole thing . . . Never mind. My client’s been released.”

“Is she with you?”

“I have no idea where she is. But I thought you and I might profit from a meeting.”

“Say where and when.”

“My office. ASAP.”

“One hour, no more,” I promised.

Where I live, most of the light is artificial. Oh, there are windows, but they haven’t been cleaned for generations. Even the skylights are encrusted, and the surrounding buildings block off direct sunlight, anyway. I knew it was late, but seeing my watch read 10:44 knocked me back a bit. I’d been out for a long time.

A quick shower and change of clothes and I was on my way. I’d promised an hour, so the car was out of the question. I walked over to the subway on Varick, swiped my Metrocard through the turnstile, and grabbed an uptown 1-9 train. Davidson’s building was on Lex, just off Forty-second. The 1-9 is a stone local, but even with the crosstown walk when I got out, I beat the deadline with ten minutes to spare.

All the dull-eyed “security guard” at the front desk in Davidson’s office building wanted was for me to sign the register, so he could go back to his mini-TV.

Davidson’s office is on the twenty-eighth floor. I took the elevator to nineteen and walked up the rest of the way, on the off-chance that not everyone in the lobby was watching television.

The door to the suite was open. The receptionist’s cage was deserted. I walked on back, past where Davidson’s own secretary would normally be working. His door was open. So was one of the windows, but the air was still thick with cigar smoke.

“This case is dirt,” he greeted me.

“I know it is,” I said, taking a seat. “I just don’t know how deep it goes.”

“Me first,” Davidson said. “Once I verified the bond was in place, I was all set to spring her. Then, out of the blue, I get a call from Lansing at the DA’s Office. The little fuck tells me they’re bringing her down tonight, so I can make an application for bail reduction.”

He leaned back, took a deep drag, face dark with anger.

“Then he says, here’s the deal: Just make the same application I made before. Ask for something reasonable, like fifty, and his office will consent to it.”

“Maybe the judge thought it over, had his law secretary make a few discreet calls,” I said.

“It’s possible, but I think this was their own play. Question is, why?”

“Because they know she didn’t do it,” I said. “And they’re afraid she’s going to find out who did.”

“Why would they give a damn if . . . ? Wait! You’re saying they already know Wolfe wasn’t the shooter? Not that they suspect it, they know?”

“Do I think the skell admitted it wasn’t Wolfe who shot him?” I said. “I don’t know. But here’s what I do know. Never mind Wolfe, it’s their so-called victim who doesn’t want out.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How could he admit anything, much less ask to stay in the hospital?” Davidson said. “He’s in a coma, right?”

“Not anymore, he’s not,” I said.

Davidson shook his head, like a fighter who had just taken a hard shot but wouldn’t go down. “How could you possibly—?”

I told him what Sands had told me, word for word. I can do that. Always could, even when I was a little kid. I would have made a perfect witness against the people who did those things to me. Only, back then, they didn’t bring stuff like that into court.

“Christ on a crutch, Burke!” Davidson said, when I was finished. “That’s more questions than answers.”

“Yeah.”

“Those fucking cocksuckers. They didn’t say word one about this guy being out of his coma. They just consented to my application for a bail reduction.”

“What did you get?”

“Since I knew it was wired, I repeated the ROR app. Bail money’s just for showtime now—no reason they couldn’t just release her on her own recognizance and be done with it. But instead of just going along quiet, they weasel back with the fifty K.

“The judge looks over at me like somebody should let him in on the joke. So I figured, fuck Lansing and his deals. I say to the judge, If something isn’t real wrong with the case, how come the DA’s Office itself had just dropped their bail demand so radically?

“By now, Hutto’s looking at Lansing very strange. Then Lansing goes into a whole speech about needing time to develop their case in full, and since Ms. Wolfe isn’t considered a flight risk . . .

“So I immediately start stomping on him like a fucking grape. It was pitiful. Anyway, bottom line, Hutto’s off the hook now, so he sets it at the fifty the DA asked for.”

“Beautiful.”

“And we don’t need that bondsman of yours,” Davidson said. “That amount, Wolfe put it up herself. In cash, from nice clean assets. That’s what took so long: getting the damn paperwork done.”

“You’ve still got your discovery coming,” I told him. “And I’ve got some of my own to do. But so far, everything this Sands has told me has been gospel.”

“You want me to run his name past Wolfe?”

“I’d rather ask her myself.”

“I don’t know if she—”

“Ask her,” I said.

The next day I called Big Nate on one of my cells.

“You heard?” I asked him.

“I heard,” his amplified voice said. “But—”

“You and me, we’re both the same,” I said, very softly. “Sometimes, there’s things you don’t want to do, but you do them, because all the other choices are worse. You were ready to do what you had to do. So was I.”

“Yeah. So—we’re quits?”

“You’ll never see me again,” I said, cutting the connection.

I was in my booth when Michelle came in, dressed in that princess/slut style only she can bring off.

She sashayed over and took a seat. Mama was only a few steps behind her, clapping her hands for more soup.

“I took care of it,” Michelle said. “Turns out I was right. Anyone tried to hurt Wolfe out there, it would have been a major mistake. I got that just off the first phone call.

“Then I found that they’d brought Hortense down from Bedford Hills to testify in some other case. As if. So I went out and visited her myself. No problems after that, guaranteed.

“On my way out, I left money on the books for ’Tense. I didn’t do the same for Wolfe, just in case anyone was . . .”

“Thanks, honey. You’re perfect.”

“This is true.”

“And Wolfe’s already sprung.”

“Yes! They dropped that bogus—?”

“No. Not even close. But Wolfe’s got friends on the other side, too.”

“Sure, friends?” Mama asked.

“Looks like, so far, anyway,” I told them. Then I filled them in on what I’d gotten from Sands, and what happened when Davidson went back to court.

“Have you looked through all that paperwork yet, honey?” Michelle asked.

“Just a quick glance. That cop must have spent all night at the photocopier. Took some big-time risks.”

“If the stuff’s real, he did.”

“Wolfe’s out,” I reminded her. “Soon enough, we’ll get a straight answer. And—I had an idea. Remember when we had all that paper, on that girl who got killed out on—?”

“Yes,” Michelle interrupted. “You want Terry to scan it all into a computer for you again?”

“That, and maybe do some sorting programs. . . .”

“Well, let’s go get him,” she said, flashing her gorgeous smile.

“Michelle, he’s all grown up now, remember? He drives his own car. We don’t need to go all the way up to the Bronx. Why can’t he just—?”

“You know why,” she said, winking at me.

I’d been out to the Mole’s place so many times, my eyes didn’t even register the burnt-out buildings, or the burnt-out humans who staggered between them, pipe-dreaming.

They say real estate in the city is so precious that every square inch of it is going to be gentrified someday. If that ever happens in Hunts Point, I’ll believe it.

Michelle’s cat’s-eye makeup didn’t mask her excitement. She was going to people she loved.

Terry was her son. I had street-snatched him from a kiddie pimp years ago, and Michelle had adopted him in that same minute. Back then, she was still pre-op, and still working car tricks, fire-walking with freaks every night. Michelle came from the same litter I did. Our hate made us kin.

Michelle had claimed Terry for her own. But it was the Mole—a for-real mad scientist, living in an underground bunker beneath the junkyard he owned—who really raised the kid.

For years, Michelle and the Mole orbited around each other, never touching.

Finally, she had the operation. She had been talking about getting it done for as long as I’d known her, but it wasn’t until the Mole became Terry’s father that Michelle became his wife. I remember, a long time ago, when she asked the Mole if he could ever understand how it felt, to be a woman trapped in a man’s body.

“I understand trapped,” is all the Mole said. It was enough.

The surgery didn’t change Michelle to any of us. She was always my sister, from the beginning. Always Terry’s mother. But maybe it meant something between her and the Mole. I don’t know.

The Mole doesn’t like to leave his work, and his work isn’t portable. Michelle didn’t even like visiting the junkyard.

None of that mattered.

I pulled up to the entrance, a wall of razor wire, growing like killer ivy through the chain link. The pack of feral dogs that inhabit the place assembled quickly, but I knew the Mole’s sensors would have announced us way before I brought the Plymouth to a stop.

The dogs watched, too self-confident to bark, except for a few of the younger ones, who were still learning.

“Looks like Terry’s not here, honey,” I said. “He would have been out to pick us up in the shuttle by now.”

“Then Mole will just have to come himself,” she said. “The exercise certainly won’t kill him.”

Not being clinically insane, I didn’t say anything.

Eventually, we spotted the Mole’s stubby figure, making his way toward us. He was wearing his usual dirt-colored jumpsuit, Coke-bottle lenses on his glasses catching the late-afternoon sun. He shambled over to the sally port, threw open the first gate, then moved aside to let us through.

I drove the Plymouth in, extra-slow. The Mole locked up behind us.

He came around to my side of the car, standing in the river of killer dogs like a kid in a wading pool.

“Mole!” I said.

He answered me the way he usually does—a few rapid blinks behind his glasses, waiting for me to get to the point.

“We’re looking for Terry,” I said. I could feel the cold heat from Michelle’s ice-pick eyes at the back of my neck, but I knew they weren’t aimed at me. Mole had gone to the wrong window, and the poor bastard would have to pay that toll by himself.

“Not here,” he said.

“Right. But I’ve got Michelle with me—”

“Oh,” he said.

“—and I thought we could hang out a bit, while we wait for Terry to show.”

“Where is that . . . Jeep thing you use?” Michelle demanded, over my right shoulder.

“Back at the—”

“Well, go get it,” she said, tartly. “I’m not going to—”

“I can drive this one back there,” I told her, trying to pinch off the burning fuse before it reached the dynamite. “Mole, you want to—?”

But he was already moving. Away from the firing line.

I drove gingerly around the obstacle course of mortar-sized craters and rusted chunks of metal. The Plymouth was no off-roader, but its Viper-donated independent rear suspension and gas shocks handled the trip easily enough. Even the occasional thunk didn’t upset the rollbar-anchored chassis with its heavy subframe connectors.

I pulled up to the Mole’s lanai—a set of cut-down oil drums with haphazard cushions and a sisal mat big enough to play shuffleboard on.

The Mole was waiting for us, sitting down. He was awkwardly smacking a scarred old beast on top of its triangular head, in what the two of them had mutually decided constituted “patting the dog.”

“Simba!” I said.

The dog’s ears perked, a lot more trustworthy than his ancient eyes. A bull mastiff–shepherd cross, Simba was still the reigning king of the pack, despite being somewhere around twenty years old. “Hound’s so bad, probably even scares off Father Time’s ass,” the Prof said once.

Michelle pranced over on her four-inch ankle-strapped burnt-orange stilettos. She bent to give the Mole a kiss on his cheek, which turned him the same approximate color, and said, “Well?”

The Mole looked at her the way he always does—stunned and strangle-tongued.

“Mole! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am always—”

“You like my new shoes,” Michelle said, torturing him unmercifully, making him pay. Asking the Mole if he liked a pair of shoes was like asking a cat if it liked algebra.

“They are . . . very nice,” he tried.

“Nice? Nice! They are absolutely gorgeous, you dunce! They are stunning. Magnificent. Perfect. Yes?”

“Yes. I—”

“Oh, never mind.” Michelle probed in her purse, handed the Mole her cell phone. “Call my boy, please,” she said. “Tell him we need to see him.”

The Mole didn’t move.

“You do know where he is, don’t you?”

“He has a cell phone, too,” the Mole said, defensively.

“Well, then?”

“He is still at school. Is this—?”

“Yeah, it kind of is, Mole,” I assured him.

While he was dialing, Michelle took out one of her extra-long, ultra-thin cigarettes. Pink was the color of the day, apparently. I lit it for her.

“He’s coming,” the Mole announced, handing back Michelle’s phone.

“What are you working on now?” she asked him.

“A new polymer,” the Mole said. “It is—”

“Well, I can’t understand all that,” Michelle cut him off. “While we’re waiting for Terry, you’ll just have to show me. Come on.”

The Mole followed obediently, his face flaming.

I sat down with Simba, and we told each other lies about when we’d been young.

It took Terry over an hour to show up. I took a tenth of that to tell him what I wanted.

“Sure!” he said. “I can do it, easy. The scanning’s pretty much mechanical. Take some time, though, even with the setup I’ve got. But you might want something better than a simple-sort.”

“Go slow, kid,” I cautioned him. “Remember who you’re talking to here.”

“I can write a program, but you’d have to spell out for me what fields—never mind, just the kind of things you want to connect, okay?”

“I’m not sure I’m . . .”

“Look,” he said, enthusiastically, “it would be nothing to sort by, say, time of day, or if he used a weapon, like that, see? But if you wanted to make an ANOVA . . . Never mind. If you wanted to know the extent to which different factors impacted on the model . . .”

“Terry . . .”

“Okay, wait. I got it. Look, let’s say the ‘standard’ attack was between four and six in the afternoon, and the guy used a knife, all right?

“But in some of the attacks he was, I don’t know, dressed all in black. Does him dressing in black affect the time of day or the weapon? See? The more . . . factors I have, the more I can help you find the pattern.”

“Could you superimpose?” I asked him.

“Now you’ve got me confused,” he said, grinning.

“If you had all the addresses where the rapes occurred, could you put a map of the metro area over it, somehow?”

“Sure. But what would you want that for?”

“The rapes went down in a lot of different counties. But no one was ever actually arrested, so the different offices probably didn’t share information. In fact, I can’t figure out where . . . Wolfe’s friend got them all. Anyway, maybe there’s some main highway that gets him in and out of all the areas, so, if you look at where he hits, you might get an idea where he’s striking from, where his home base is.”

“No problem,” the kid assured me. “If it’s in the data you’ve got, I’ll write a program that will tell you a lot more than what’s already on paper, I promise.”

“Isn’t he a genius?” Michelle said, beaming.

“Pop taught me all of it,” Terry quickly disclaimed.

“Well, you certainly didn’t get your fashion sense from him,” Michelle snapped back. “Or those good looks, either.”

“All from you, Mom,” Terry said, putting his arm around her. “And a ton more.”

The kid was a scientist in his soul. He understood that if a lab ran his DNA, they’d know he hadn’t come from the Mole and Michelle. But he knew something else, too. Something we all know down here—some of the truest truths never make the textbooks.

On the return trip—Michelle still glowing, humming to herself like a happy little girl—my cell phone buzzed.

“What?”

“She wants to talk to you.” Pepper, no-nonsense voice.

“Wherever she—”

“Do you remember the last place you met with her?”

“Yes.”

“There.”

“When?”

“Soon as you can make it. She’s waiting.”

As if it had been eavesdropping, the Plymouth’s engine answered.

The office building was on lower Broadway, a few blocks north of what outsiders keep calling “ground zero.” Since 9/11, you don’t want to be bringing a car into that area after dark. Too many eyes.

Last time I’d been there, Mick had been working the lobby desk. Wolfe’s crew had some kind of deal with the people who ran the building: they rented out little pieces of it for a few hours at a time.

I tried the front door. Locked. I buzzed for the night man. Not surprised to see Mick, wearing a pair of dark-green pants and matching Eisenhower jacket, with some company’s name stitched in gold on the front.

He let me in, relocked the door.

“Same place?” I asked him.

He turned his back on me without answering, walking toward the freight elevator. I followed, got in the car. Mick threw a lever, and the car dropped, slow and noisy.

He let me out in the basement. I heard the door close behind me, so I walked around the corner to where Wolfe had been the last time.

And there she was, sitting on a double-height set of lateral file cabinets. She was dressed in denim overalls and a red pullover, her long, dark hair tied behind her, no makeup.

“Behave!” she said to the Rottweiler, before he could even threaten me.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“You mean the lockup?” she said. “Sure. It’s been years since I was putting people away, and those ones wouldn’t be on Rikers, anyway.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Rikers Island was a jail, not a prison. People were sent there to await trial, or to serve misdemeanor sentences. Wolfe hadn’t won all her bouts as a prosecutor, but when she landed her Sunday punch, the opponent always went down for the count.

“It doesn’t need to be personal,” I said. “It’s a bad joint. Things happen.”

“Something did happen,” she said, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. “A very large woman came up to me while I was waiting on the chow line. In fact, she bulled her way in, right in front of me.

“I just ignored it—I wasn’t going to fight over a place in line. Then she turned around and spoke to me. Not shouting, exactly, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I know you’re not about talking. Just wanted you to know you got friends here. So, if anyone gets stupid with you, all you got to do is point them out. Not even with your finger. Just nod your head, and it’ll be taken care of.’ Wasn’t that nice of her?”

“Hortense is a righteous woman,” I said. “Always has been.”

“I appreciate what you . . . I appreciate what she did,” Wolfe said. “But it wasn’t me who told Pepper to—”

“Pepper did the right thing, and you know it,” I said. “And Davidson’s the right man for the job.”

“The job,” she repeated, bitterly.

“Look, I know you didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? Didn’t shoot that maggot? How do you know?”

“It’s not you.”

“What’s not me?” she challenged. “Maybe I read that letter he sent me, and went over to his house to tell him to step off. Maybe he got aggressive, and I panicked. Pulled out a gun and shot him. And then ran.”

“Right. As if you’d go to meet a freak like him without backup.”

“What if my backup helped me get away?”

“He was shot with a twenty-five.”

“Isn’t that a woman’s gun?” she said, unknowingly echoing Sands. “And three shots—sounds like panic, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t carry,” I said. “And if you did, it wouldn’t be a toy like that one.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Oh, I’m a lot surer than that,” I said. “A person can change their habits, but not their personality.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t walk around packing, although I suppose you could, if you thought you had to. But one thing I know you’d never do.”

“Shoot?”

“No. Panic.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling for real now.

“Besides, there’s one other thing that seals the deal,” I said, pointing at the Rottweiler. “Him. Maybe those little bullets didn’t have enough to get the job done, but no way Bruiser didn’t.”

“You’re right,” Wolfe said. “If I had sent him.”

“A situation like that, I don’t think he’d give a damn whether you sent him or not,” I told her. “He’s a dog, not a robot.”

“He’s also a big bully, aren’t you, Bruisey?” Wolfe said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “He gained ten pounds in the few days Pepper had him.”

“Pepper probably stuffed him because she felt bad for him,” I said. “Besides, she’s an actress, so she appreciates a good performance, and he probably went around pretending he was starving.”

“Maybe . . .”

“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.

“And I need to ask you some,” she shot back.

“Go,” I told her.

“Why are you in this? Still in this, I mean. I know Pepper . . .”

“You want me to tell you a story about my religious conversion? How I’m going to devote the rest of my life to protecting the innocent? You know why. You’ve always known.

“If you had drilled the miserable little fuck, you think that would matter to me? If you didn’t have a dozen better ones, I’d be your alibi. And if I had known about him threatening you, this never would have happened at all.”

“You’re not my protector,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Self-appointed or otherwise.”

“I’m not anything to you,” I told her. “You think I don’t know that? But what I do, I’m good at, and you know that, too. Tell me you want me off this thing, and I’ll walk out of here right now, never say another word about it.”

Wolfe tapped a cigarette from her pack, lit it with a long-flamed butane lighter.

I just stood there, watching her.

The Rottweiler watched me.

Wolfe took a deep drag, blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling.

“You’re lying,” she said.

^“Sands, he’s for real?” I asked her, finally breaking the silence.

“Molly? He’s a piece of gold. When he first made detective, he was assigned to my squad. He loved the job. Loved making cases against the dirtbags that my bureau specialized in putting away.

“He didn’t come with any bullshit cop prejudices. Or, if he did, he left them at the door. He got it, right from the start. In my shop, we didn’t play the ‘good victim, bad victim’ game. If a hooker got raped, if a retarded girl got molested—same as if it were a nun, or a Mensa member. He was a real man on the DV stuff, too. And cold death on child molesters.”

Wolfe took a hit off her cigarette, gray gunfighter’s eyes watching me through the smoke. When I kept quiet, she picked up her own thread.

“Molly worked his cases. Double- and triple-checked everything. Turned over every rock. He never played TV detective on the stand, never tried to out-cute the defense. But there wasn’t one jury that didn’t believe him.

“And then the job broke his heart,” Wolfe said, her voice thick with sadness. “When they fired me, everything changed. All they wanted was stats.

“You know what that means. Some of the ‘shaky’ cases don’t get pursued, so you never get the chance to make them solid. The last thing they needed was a cop like Molly. He went from thinking he was a soldier in a holy war to feeling like a report-writing fake.”

“That’s when he started the heavy drinking?” I asked.

“When he went back to it, yeah,” she said, her eyes daring me to make judgments.

“You know he had copies of every single one of Wychek’s cases. Possible cases, I mean. Every case in which Wychek was a suspect.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I can’t even figure out where he got all that stuff from. There never was a ‘task force’ thing, right?”

“Right,” Wolfe said, disgustedly. “Wychek was a classic pattern-rapist, but he stayed so far off the screen that he never even got himself a press nickname. You know, a ‘Night Stalker’ kind of thing. No media pressure, no task force; simple as that. But we were working him, preparing for trial, and we grabbed every scrap we could get our hands on. After the trial, the whole package must have gone into dead storage.”

“Still, if they ever found out he was making copies—”

“They won’t,” she said, flatly.

“He got other stuff, too,” I said. “The most important thing of all, in fact. Davidson told you—?”

“That Wychek’s not in a coma anymore? And that he doesn’t want to leave the hospital? Yes.”

“So the DA knows it wasn’t you, no matter what bullshit ‘statement’ Wychek supposedly made, am I right?”

“How does that compute?”

“Come on. Wychek believes you’ve got a hit squad out looking for him? No way the DA buys that. There has to be another reason for them playing along. You got anything on them?”

“On City-Wide? Sure, there’s stuff they wouldn’t want to get out. Sexual harassment—not pressure to have sex; trading sex for promotion—stuff like that.”

“That’s not sexual harassment,” I said. “That’s a whore and a trick.”

“Not alw— Never mind, it’s not important. Not right now. Anything else I know—politicians’ kids getting guaranteed jobs over better-qualified applicants, special treatment for celebrity defendants, ADAs being pushed to work in re-election campaigns, how a judge gets ‘made’ in this town—everybody else knows, too.

“Sure, I’ve made them look like the clowns they are a few times over the years. But if they went after everyone who’s done that, they’d have to frame more people than they’ve got cells.”

“So, if the answer isn’t you, there’s only one other thing it could be,” I said.

“What?”

“Wychek,” I told her. “It’s not you they want. It’s him.”

In the next hour, we held everything we knew up to the brightest light we could find—a pair of diamond-cutters, looking for the perfect place to start our work.

But all we found were flaws.

“What in hell could a lowlife piece of garbage like Wychek do for the DA’s Office?” I asked the empty air.

“Maybe they do believe him?” Wolfe said, dubiously.

“What if they did?” I put it to her. “What if they actually fucking believed you put a few rounds into that freak? They reserve the kind of protection they’re giving him for witnesses who can take down a mob boss or the head of a drug cartel. You sure you haven’t been working anything that could blow up all over them if it came out?”

“Nothing,” Wolfe said, with an undertone of regret. “I haven’t worked a real investigation in years. You know the kind of stuff I do now.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But you deal in information. . . .”

“You think I didn’t go over that in my mind a thousand times since they grabbed me?” she said. “And, trust me, that was hard work. Lockup’s supposed to be good for deep thinking, but the noise level is ungodly. And it never stops. You’d need the concentration of a yoga master just to read a newspaper in there.”

“You think your friend would do you another favor?”

“Molly? He’d do anything,” she said, confidently.

“Could he find out where they’re keeping Wychek?”

“Forget it, Burke,” she snapped out at me. “What are you going to do, put on a white coat and go visit him in the hospital?”

“I wouldn’t do anything like that,” I said, meaning it. I’d never been past the ninth grade, on paper, but I was always a great reader. And I had a working felon’s functional knowledge of the law. Slipping a little good-bye juice into that freak’s IV drip would bother me about as much as an Osama bin Laden heart attack, but it would only make Wolfe a bigger suspect.

“Never mind,” she told me. “I don’t need any help. Sooner or later, the prosecution is going to have to answer the discovery motions. We get a TPO, that’s the end of their case.”

“We already know the place. So you’re telling me, even if the time of occurrence turns out to be four in the morning, you’re covered, no matter what night it was.”

“At that hour, I’d be asleep,” she said, gray eyes level.

“That’s not an iron-clad—”

“Not alone,” she said.

^“Someone down here, boss. Asking for you. By name.”

“Good-looking young guy, light-brown hair, brown eyes, says he’s Terry?”

“Bull’s-eye.”

“Let him pass, okay? Thanks, Gateman.”

^“Damn, boy! What they feeding you at that fancy college? You must have growed half a foot since I last saw you!” the Prof greeted Terry as the kid stepped into my place.

“Hey, Prof!” the kid said, giving the little man a hug. He shook hands with Clarence almost formally, then turned to me. “Can I get a hand with some of my stuff? Pop dropped me off, but I couldn’t carry it all up myself. The guy downstairs, the one in the wheelchair, he said it would be safe down there with him. . . .”

“Oh, Gateman’s clue is true,” the Prof assured him. “Man can’t stand, but he can stand up, you with me?”

“Sure, but . . .”

“Plus, he can outdraw Billy the fucking Kid, he has to. That’s not trash, that’s cash. You underestimate the Gateman, you gonna choke on the joke, boy.”

“I will come with you, mahn,” Clarence told Terry, realizing the Prof would maintain the debate about the absolute security of Gateman’s domain for hours rather than spend ten minutes lugging heavy equipment up the stairs.

Terry took over one of the back rooms, and instantly drafted Clarence into assisting him. When they started talking a language the Prof and I didn’t understand, we strolled into the front room.

“Have a smoke with me, son?”

This was a real role reversal for the Prof. Ever since I was a kid, his idea of smoking was to smoke one of mine. The little man had hands faster than a cobra on crystal meth—he could usually get to my own shirt pocket before I could, even though he always gave me the first move.

But ever since I was shot, I haven’t really smoked. It’s not religious, and it’s not about health. Cigarettes just don’t taste like they used to. A lot of things don’t.

I still always carry a pack or two, and I’ll have one once in a while. Sometimes, it’s to remind people that it’s really me. The Burke they knew always smoked, and, with the new face, I’d had to work hard at convincing some people when I’d first come back. Sometimes, it’s misdirection. Like the way I drink. I order a shot of vodka with ice water on the side, and swallow the water, leaving just the ice cubes. Then I dump the vodka into the water glass, and let it melt out. When the bartender brings me a refill, the money I let ride on the counter automatically brings me fresh water, too.

Now, sometimes when I’m with an old friend, it just feels . . . companionable to share a smoke. A cigarette tastes pretty good then.

I took the Prof’s pack of Kools, still the favorite behind the Walls, and nodded approvingly at the lack of a New York tax stamp. I fired one up, handed him the still-burning wooden match so he could light his own.

As if the Kool brought back old memories, the Prof leaned way back in his wooden chair, balancing on its two rear legs, and said, “You know, back in the day, it never would have gotten this far. Skinner like that one, somebody would have shanked him on the yard, just for the practice.”

“Maybe he did it all in PC.”

“Punk City’s the right place for a fucking freak like him. But, you know, somebody wanted him bad enough, they could do him in there. Remember when Wesley—”

“Yeah.”

“Unless he was a real badass, maybe?” the Prof mused. “Big enough to run a wing by himself.”

“Wolfe says he’s about five-eight, a hundred and forty pounds, and flabby at that. ‘A chinless, beady-eyed little weasel-faced punk,’ I think she called him.”

“My girl probably nailed how he look, but that don’t say nothing about how he cook,” the Prof said, solemnly. “She don’t know the show, Schoolboy. Not like we do. We both done time with guys, look like they couldn’t break glass, but bad enough to make a gorilla kiss their ass, right?”

I nodded. It was true. There are some men who can turn your spine to water with a look. But I had seen those same men drop their eyes whenever Wesley came down the corridor.

“You gave me an idea, though, Prof. A place to get started. Be right back.”

Terry and Clarence were meshing like Formula One gears, paper flying from the stacked cartons to a long table. A giant scanner rested on its surface, cable-linked to a laptop computer with all kinds of wires running out of its back.

“You guys run across anything about Wychek’s prison record?” I asked.

“We have his . . . Where is that . . . Yeah!” Terry said. “Is this what you mean?”

“No. That’ll show he was committed, but not where he landed. We know he went Upstate somewhere, but not which institution. That’s what we’re looking for.”

“If it is in here, we will find it, mahn,” Clarence promised.

“There’s an easier way,” Terry said. “New York State’s got a Web site for it. ‘Inmate Lookup Service,’ or something like that. All we need is a guy’s name and we can get his prison record.”

“You mean his whole rap sheet?” I asked.

“No, no, I mean, his . . . ‘institutional status,’ I think they call it. Where he’s being kept, what his sentence is, when he sees the parole board . . .”

“But Wychek’s out,” I reminded him.

“Sure. They’ll show him as ‘discharged.’ But they’ll still have the place he was discharged from, see?”

“Damn.”

“Sure. We just need a phone line. A landline,” he said, quickly, before I could offer him one of my cells.

“Not up here, kid.”

“What about the man downstairs?”

“Gateman? Sure, he’s wired up. But won’t you need—?”

“This is enough,” Terry said, holding up a laptop and some cords. “I’ll tell him you said it was okay, right?”

“Right.”

“Come on,” Terry said to Clarence. The two of them took off, Wally and the Beaver, on an adventure.

^“It was just like Terry said, mahn,” Clarence exclaimed, deeply impressed. “Only took maybe fifteen minutes and we got all

the—”

“It would have taken a lot less than that if your friend downstairs had anything but a molasses dial-up,” Terry cut in. “I’m not nuts about the DSL they’ve got around here, but—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, when I’m ready for stuff like that, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I am ready, mahn,” Clarence announced. “There is so much . . . value in it. Tell Burke and my father how you knew there was this place to find information about prisoners,” he said to Terry.

“It’s not such a . . .”

“Come on with it,” the Prof urged him. “If my son says it’s fun, I got to know how it’s done.”

“Well,” Terry said, sitting down, “there was this girl. At school.” He saw me exchanging looks with the Prof, said, “Not my girl. I wasn’t . . . interested in her like that. She was . . . my friend. Anyway, Tatrine’s very socially active. Mostly green stuff, but she never saw a cause she didn’t like.

“She met this guy at a teach-in she went to. It was all about prison conditions. This guy, he told her that he was an ex-con, right up front. Tatrine, she treated it like it was a credential. . . .”

Terry caught himself, turning red as he realized who he was talking to. And where his mother had spent some of her youth. “I didn’t mean it . . . I didn’t mean it was a . . . bad thing, all by itself. Just . . . what you always say, Prof.”

“Only thing that’s true is what you do,” the Prof acknowledged. “The Walls don’t make the calls.”

“Right. So, anyway, Tatrine was getting all caught up in this guy. I mean, quoting him, like he was an oracle or something. It made me nervous. So I asked her, just casual one day, what had he done time for.

“Tatrine said it had been an armed robbery. This guy—her boyfriend by then, I guess—said he had done it when he was, you ready for this, ‘pre–socially conscious.’ He had some half-baked idea that the merchant was ripping off the community, so he figured he’d do a little justice by stealing from him.

“He told her he came to realize later that the merchant was part of a system, pre-programmed to act a certain way, and robbing him wasn’t the right thing to do. Tatrine told me this guy, he was a ‘change-agent’ now.”

“You didn’t buy his riff, so you thought you’d take a sniff?” the Prof said, nodding.

“It . . . I don’t know how to explain this, exactly. Mom says, sometimes, when people talk, you just know they’re wrong. Not about the facts—I mean they’re wrong people. I never heard him talk myself, but, even secondhand from Tatrine, I was . . .

“So I poked around until I found the Web site. And I put in his name. There were actually four guys with the same name in their system, but one was still incarcerated, and the other two were white, so they couldn’t be him. His date of birth sounded about right, from the way Tatrine described him, too.

“But it wasn’t any armed robbery he’d been sent away for. It was sodomy in the second degree. I looked that one up, too. The only way he could have been convicted of that is if the victim couldn’t consent because they were drunk, or drugged, or . . .”

“Or a kid,” I finished for him.

“Yeah,” he said, teeth clenched.

“You showed this all to Tatrine?”

“Yeah.”

“And she didn’t believe you?”

“Not . . . not at first. After a while, she did, I know.”

“How?”

“Because she came over to where I was sitting, in the library, and asked me to come outside. She told me I had been right. About her . . . about him, I mean. He admitted it. He told her the whole thing had been a pack of lies, cooked up by his little stepsister, because she resented her mother’s new husband. That was his father—they were all living together.

“He told Tatrine he had pleaded guilty—he must have thought she knew more than she really did—because they promised him only a four-year max. And he couldn’t take a chance on a jury believing the little liar; then they might have put him away forever.

“He said he never told people about it because they wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t ashamed of being in prison, but he knew nobody would ever give him a chance to tell his side of the story.”

“But Tatrine did, huh?” I said, reading his face.

“Yeah.”

And you wanted to tell her a few things yourself, didn’t you, kid? I thought, into the silence.

“How did it end up?” Clarence asked. Obviously, he had only heard the beginning of the story.

“I don’t know,” Terry said, not hearing the desolation in his own voice. “I see Tatrine around campus once in a while. But she never comes anywhere near me. And the number I had for her—it’s no good anymore.”

Three nights later. The trackdown I was working on was taking a lot longer than I had expected. I knew that the woman I was looking for had to be somewhere in New York State. And that she owned a house, most likely in a rural area.

But what I really needed was a phone number. When I have to approach people who knew my old face, voice contact is the smartest first move.

Any other time, I would have gone to Wolfe’s network. But I figured they wouldn’t be operational, not with all this hanging over her.

I couldn’t see the DA’s Office investing in full-time surveillance, and I didn’t think anyone they had was good enough to shadow Wolfe without her picking it up, anyway. But I wanted to be sure I was the first one to see whatever got turned up.

The phone made its noise.

“What?” I said.

“Hi, chief!” Pepper, almost back to full bounce. “Got time to meet with an old friend?”

“If it’s a good enough friend, I’ve always got the time.”

“Great! She’s a very good friend, but not an old one. In fact, you just met her recently.”

“Is there going to be anyone else there?”

“Oh, no,” Pepper said. “You know how third wheels always spoil dates.”

“Right. Same place?”

“No. She’ll be at the message center—say, eleven?”

“Do you really think that’s an appropriate spot?”

“Why not?” Pepper said, a faint giggle under her voice. “It’s a nice, intimate little place. And you can decide where you want to go from there.”

“Eleven,” I promised.

“Okey-dokey,” she said.

I admired Pepper’s professionalism. Even if there was a wiretap order—which was way past unlikely—and even if they somehow knew which phone Pepper was using that night, nothing in our conversation would tell a listener that my date for the night was named Molly.

I started to make myself some soup, and sat down to think things through.

A few years back, Max and I were sitting in my booth at Mama’s. It was late afternoon, and we had already spent hours handicapping the night’s races at Yonkers. Mama had finally lost her patience. If we had been playing cards, she would have been fine with it. Mama loves gambling, but betting on horses always struck her as downright degenerate.

“No work today, right?” she demanded.

“We’re waiting, Mama,” I explained, for the fourth time. “We can’t go to work until tonight.”

“Work for making money. What you do, you lose money. Big circle, no end.”

Max hotly defended our two-man gambling syndicate, pulling out his notebook, with our fully documented record for the year to date. We had wagered a total of six thousand four hundred and twenty dollars, and had a solid sixty-five hundred in the kitty.

“So?” Mama sneered, profoundly unimpressed. “You not lose money, not lose money yet anyway. What is that? Just—how you say it?—big . . . hobby. Men always have hobby. Woman’s hobby is work.”

“We are working, Mama. It’s just not time yet to—”

“Sure, sure. Okay for you, Burke. You have no wife,” she said, adding a new accusation to her endless list. “And no baby. But you,” she said, pointing a gun-barrel finger at Max, “no excuse.”

When Immaculata first came into Max’s life, Mama dismissed her as a “bar girl,” a wide-ranging insult that could mean just about anything. But a nanosecond after Max announced he was going to be a father, Immaculata went from no-status to goddess in Mama’s eyes. And ever since, Mama had been pounding Max’s blessed fortune in finding such a perfect woman into his head.

Max spread his hands, put a “What the hell did I do?” expression on his face.

“You know how cook? Make food?” Mama asked, miming the question as she spoke.

Max made a stirring motion with his fist.

“What you make?” Mama demanded.

Max sipped from an imaginary spoon.

“Soup? You make soup?”

Max grinned, gesturing a man opening a can, pouring into a pot, turning on a stove, stirring.

“That not make soup. In kitchen, here, make soup. Where you get soup?”

Max gestured his way into a grocery store.

“So! You not make soup, you buy soup, right?”

Max nodded, glumly.

“What you get soup with? Money. How you get money? Work. Not play games, work. Okay?”

Max and I decided we’d start a little early that evening.

Now I waited for the soup to warm up on my hotplate. It had come from a container I keep in the refrigerator. Mama’s soup, sure. But at least it wasn’t from a can.

The “message center” is a basement poolroom, in a building no reputation could be low enough to live up to. Inside, it’s like the Fifties never went away. They’ve got a few top-shelf tables—all heavy, carved wood, with green felt and leather pockets. Lights suspended from the ceiling on long chains hang over the tables; overhead wires are strung with beads, for scorekeeping. It’s no Julian’s, but not even Julian’s is, anymore.

The guy who runs the joint has been an old man since I was a kid. Rumor has it that he was a pro once, but nobody’s ever seen him pick up a stick. He keeps the tables beautifully maintained—tight, grippy cloth, fresh rails, and dead level. But that’s strictly a labor of love; people who come to his basement mostly don’t give a damn.

The old man is a human telegraph machine. You drop your money in the slot, you send a message. Someone wants to reach out for you, they do the same.

There are other services, too. I have my own cue, a custom job. It was built back before they used special breaking cues for nine-ball. Weighed in at a svelte thirty-two ounces even before I wrapped the butt end in several layers of friction tape. Like all of the good ones, it unscrews in the middle.

But mine has another feature, a little compartment in the fat end. If you know which cue is mine, you come in and ask the old man to rent number thirteen, and he hands it to you . . . after you put up a thousand-dollar deposit.

When you’re done playing with my cue, you bring it back. The old man gives you nine hundred and fifty bucks, and removes your message. And whenever I drift down to the basement, I can read whatever you paid the half-century to write down for me . . . after I pay the old man the storage fee that’s always past due.

The system is no good for emergencies, and everyone knows it. Even telling the old man direct is only going to work if I call in. He won’t make calls, not for any kind of money. Not to anybody, which is why he’s been in business so long.

The poolroom may have regulars—I don’t go there enough to know—but it’s not Cheers. Greeting anyone coming in by name would be a mistake, one the old man never makes.

I got there around ten, ransomed my cue, and pointed at one of the two tables that are set at opposite ends of the basement, each in a separate corner. I walked over, took the triangular RESERVED sign off the felt, and started knocking the balls around, getting the feel.

If I’d taken any table but one of the two corner ones, sooner or later someone would have drifted over, asked me if I wanted to play something for something. But everyone knew what the corner tables were for. You rent those, too.

It only took a few minutes for me to realize that it wasn’t just a case of me being rusty—I wasn’t the same, and I never would be. My eyes aren’t just two different colors now—they don’t work as a team anymore. When you lose binocular vision, you lose depth perception, too. Not such a big deal driving a car—which is why they’ll give a one-eyed man a license—but you’ll never get work threading needles.

I tell myself that I’m a man who doesn’t mourn his losses, just cherishes his memories. Sometimes, that’s the truth. And sometimes, when I think of Pansy, or of Belle, it’s a lie.

If you believe only a crazy man would miss a dog and a woman with equal pain, you don’t know what love-driven loyalty means to our tribe. Or what we’ll do for it. Do to you, if you get in its way.

I couldn’t ever hope to find the cops who shot Belle. Anyway, that hadn’t been personal. She had drawn their fire on purpose, to keep them off me, out-driving the whole pack of them, heading for the junkyard. She won that race, but it was her last one. I found her, riddled, hanging on until I could get there and tell her I loved her. The only time I ever did.

Belle’s mother was her sister. She had sent Belle running when her father put Belle next on his list. Belle was still running when I met her. A pro getaway driver, as good behind the wheel as any I had ever known. When she put her heart in my hands, she put her trust in me, too.

After she left me, what I had to do was written as clear and clean as her love had been. I found her father, and I killed him.

Years later, people who’d been paid to cancel my ticket set up an ambush. They sprung their trap on me, never expecting a hellhound to come charging out of the trunk of my car. By the time Pansy had ripped out the throat of one of them, they were shooting in self-defense.

As soon as I escaped from the hospital, I went looking for them. That took a lot longer, because I didn’t know who they were. But I found them. When I did, the pain didn’t stop. But it changed.

I’ll never truly know if I’d done all that for them, or for me. Not for sure. What I did know is, they wouldn’t have cared.

You’re here now, I said in my mind. Get what you came for.

I didn’t concentrate on pocketing balls, only worked the white one, focusing on my stroke. I was just starting to feel okay about my draw when Molly Sands came downstairs.

It only took a second for his cop’s eyes to pick me out. It took less than that for everyone else there to make him for what he was.

“A little nine-ball?” I asked him.

“Eight-ball’s my game,” he said. “And I’m used to smaller tables.”

Bar tables, I thought, keeping it off my face. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll rack them, you break.”

Sands was an appalling player. He managed to pocket a solid, then muffed an easy shot on the three ball.

“What’s new?” I asked him, as I chalked up.

“The techs got a good look at the slugs.”

“And?”

“They can’t tell for sure, without a barrel to match them to, but the guy they have in charge says he’d bet a year’s pay it didn’t come from any cheap piece. He says you can always tell the workmanship, and whatever the shooter was using was quality.”

“Doesn’t mean much,” I said, pocketing the ten in the corner, then deliberately blowing a shot on the fifteen.

“Well, a gangbanger might use a cheap-ass twenty-five—in some neighborhoods, they sell them like hot dogs. But a baby caliber in a good gun, that’s something a pro might use.”

“A twenty-two, sure,” I agreed. “They hit hard enough, if you place them perfect. But a twenty-five? Never heard of it.”

“I did,” Sands said. “After I checked around, I heard of something even smaller, too. Beretta used to make a twenty-two short. Smaller than a twenty-five. The whole piece, I mean, not just the bullet. Fucking tiny. The gun guy I spoke with even said it was called an ‘assassin’s special.’ Mossad used to use it, all the time.”

“Mossad? Yeah, I’m so fucking sure. Every gun nut around has got a Mossad story, but you’re grasping at straws with this one, pal.”

“Is that right?” he demanded, face flushing in the overhead lights. “How can you be so positive? You take subsonic ammo, put a silencer on the piece, you could probably do someone in church, nobody’d even look up from praying. And, remember, the shooter picked up his brass; that’s a pro touch.”

“You’re riding the wrong bus,” I said. “A pro wouldn’t use a bullet like that anywhere but a head shot. Never mind fucking Mossad, okay? Caliber like that, those guys would have gone for a triple-tap. Unless you’re saying the ammo was tipped?”

“No, it was all hardball.”

“No hollowpoints, no cyanide for a make-sure, and no head shots. Plus, whoever tried to do him didn’t stay around long enough to finish the job. Yeah, you’re right—a professional assassin would be my first guess, too.”

“They could have heard someone coming,” he said, lamely.

“Not from the way you laid it out the first time. Anyway, we both know, someone walks into the middle of a pro hit, there would have been one more body.”