Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

The Reluctant Op by Barbara Paul

©1999 by Barbara Paul

A prolific mystery writer with more than a dozen novels published in the genre, Barbara Paid has the flexibility to succeed brilliantly in other genres too; most notably, science fiction. Though she now resides in Pittsburgh, she hails from Maysville, Kentucky. You won’t find the setting for this new story on any map, however. She penned the tale as part of a project with other writers to construct a completely fictional world.

“Mr. Bass tells me I can’t fire you,” said Elinor Sykes.

Callie Darrow cracked her gum. “You lead a hard life.” The older woman narrowed her eyes, visibly trying to figure out a way to handle this recalcitrant employee. “Why do you stay here? You don’t like the work.”

Callie shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“And a very good one. I’ve never known Mr. Bass to pay an entry-level salary as high as yours. But then, he isn’t the one who has to deal with you on a daily basis.”

Big grin. “A real hard life.”

“Oh, stop it!” Elinor snapped. “Do you think that’s clever? Acting like a smart-mouth adolescent? Grow up, Callie. You have a job to do here, and I’m trying to teach you how to do it.”

Callie snorted. I’m twenty-eight years old, I’ve done time, and I’ve outlived two husbands. What are you going to teach me? “Look, this was supposed to be Tom Ferguson’s case. I was assigned to him.”

“No, you were not assigned to a detective,” Mr. Bass’s assistant explained with a show of great patience. “You were assigned to a case. The case is now being handled by Kevin Craig. Report to him and get your instructions.”

“Kevin Craig is a moron.”

“Live with it,” Elinor said shortly. “If you do not report to Kevin right now, I’m going to inform Mr. Bass that he’s paying you for doing nothing. I don’t know what kind of bargain you two have, but I do know you’re not keeping your end of it. Well? Do I call him?” She reached for the phone on

“Hell.” Callie stood up quickly, trying to knock over her leather chair — but the damned thing was too heavy. “I’m going, I’m going. You got a real knack for blackmail, Elinor.” She snatched her backpack up off the floor.

“Thank you,” the other woman said coolly.

Callie would have liked to stomp noisily out of the office, but the thick carpet made that impossible; she did manage to slam the door, though. Elinor Sykes was only doing her job; Callie’s real enemy here was Mr. High-and-Mighty-Bow-to-Me Bass. Telling herself that didn’t help.

Besides which, she couldn’t stand Kevin Craig. He was the only one of the detectives at the Bass Agency she wanted to hold by the heels and dip into the Wolfe River. The rest of them were just people, none of them particularly interested in prying into her life. She almost never saw Mr. I-Am-God Bass. But now she was going to have to work with that nitwit Kevin Craig.

The door to his office was standing open. Kevin himself was seated at his desk, facing a semicircle of six chairs crowded close together, one of them empty. The other five were occupied by operatives, all men. The detective’s expensive suit and impeccable grooming made the operatives look shabby... which they weren’t, particularly. Kevin was only a few years older than Callie, but he liked to think of himself as a kewl dude who was more in the know than mere lowly operatives. Which he was, unfortunately. Sometimes.

Kevin looked up and saw her. “Ah, Callie, I’ve been waiting for you. Close the door, will you?” Not we’ve been waiting for you, she noticed, already in a bad mood.

Callie closed the door and made her way to the empty chair, careful to avoid any eye contact. She sat and stared at her sneakers, waiting to be told what her next job would be. The man to her left was breathing noisily; asthma, sounded like.

Kevin placed the palms of his hands flat against his desktop. “This is an important case, so I want you to pay careful attention to what I say.” All of Kevin’s cases were important, to hear him tell it.

“Tail job?” one of the men asked.

Callie looked up to see Kevin’s mouth twitch: annoyed at being interrupted. “An especially discreet tail job. Our client is Memotek Systems, and they’re convinced they have a smuggler working for them. Recently they developed a new computer chip that was supposed to put the Pentium to shame. But before they’d finished testing, a German firm came out with the same identical chip. Memotek lost the European market... much to their relief.” He waited for their reaction.

No one said a word.

“Why were they relieved, you ask?” the detective went on imperviously. “Because the chip had a flaw. Memotek’s testing procedures uncovered it just days before the German chip appeared on the market. So when the same chip shows up in Europe with the same flaw, the only possible explanation is that Memotek’s chip was pirated.”

“But now they’ve licked the problem,” one of the operatives said.

The detective glowered at him for stealing his punch line.

“The flaw has been corrected, yes. If Memotek can go into the European market with their superchip and show it works, they’ll put the German firm that stole from them out of business. If the new chip isn’t smuggled out as well.”

“Security at the plant?” someone asked. “Metal detectors?”

Instead of answering directly, Kevin opened the lap drawer of his desk and pulled out a black plastic container about the size of a jeweler’s ring box. He opened the container and showed them a microchip smaller around than the tip of a pencil eraser and no thicker than a piece of paper. “This is an early prototype. The finished version is even smaller, I’m told. You see the problem? You could put something that small inside any personal item made of metal and no security check would catch it. The latch of a briefcase, or the handle of a pocket knife. Anything.”

The man with asthma was nodding vigorously.

“So you’re going to have to be especially sharp-eyed on this job. A thing that small could be exchanged in a handshake.” The phone rang; Kevin answered by saying his name and listened. “Yes, she’s here... all right, yes.” He replaced the handset and smiled nastily at Callie. “Elinor Sykes, checking up on you. Have you been naughty, Callie?”

She went back to staring at her sneakers.

“Memotek’s CEO informed me,” Kevin continued importantly, “that only six people had access to the flawed chip at the time it must have been smuggled out. And those are the six you’re going to follow. You’re to stick with your subjects from the time they leave work until they’re tucked in for the night. Mr. Bass himself reorganized Memotek’s internal security for surveillance during working hours. Write down everything, even when they go to take a leak. I don’t want any of these half-assed reports with big gaps of unaccounted-for time. Is that understood?”

No one answered.

“I said, is that understood?”

One of the men cleared his throat. “I don’t think any of us here has ever turned in a report like that, Mr. Craig.”

“Well, make sure that you don’t!” Kevin jerked open a desk drawer and pulled out six large manila envelopes. “Read these before you leave. If there are any questions, ask them now.” He distributed the six envelopes.

Callie opened hers and looked at a picture of a smiling, open-faced man in his mid thirties. Hal Stanwyck.

“Oh, Callie,” Kevin purred, “your man likes to haunt the waterfront dives during his off-hours. That’s your special turf, isn’t it? Slums and sailors?”

She cracked her gum.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that. Callie, look at me.” She raised her head and stared directly at his right earlobe. “I don’t want you chewing gum in this office,” Kevin said, trying vainly to catch her eye, “and you could do with a little attitude-adjustment if you want to work for me.”

The other operatives were pretending not to hear. Callie smiled, keeping her eyes fixed on his earlobe. “I don’t mind not working for you.”

“You’ll do the job you were assigned to!” The earlobe trick was working; he was getting tetchy. From Kevin’s point of view, she was facing him and appeared to be looking directly at him... but wasn’t quite, somehow.

“Whatever you say, Kevin.” He liked being called Mr. Craig.

None of them had any questions about their jobs or the people they were to follow. “Then you’d better get started,” Kevin said. “Memotek’s workday ends at five, and you have to drive out to Gilchrist Road. Callie, check everybody out at the front desk, that’s a good girl.”

She glared at his earlobe. “Check ’em out yourself, that’s a good boy.”

Kevin sighed. “All these bad vibes today. Callie, I’m asking as a favor. Will you save us a little time and check everyone out? Please?”

Amazing what a little courtesy could do. “Okeydoke.”

The six operatives trooped out, the men heading toward the underground parking garage of the Atlantic Building while Callie stopped by the front desk. Behind the desk was a somewhat disturbing presence, a hunk named Julian Woolrich who always made her smile when she saw him.

“Hello, Callie,” he said softly, almost intimately. “I hoped you’d be stopping by today.”

“Oh? Any special reason?”

“I just like seeing you, that’s all.”

Right answer. Callie glanced over at the security guard also seated behind the semicircular desk: He was watching a bank of monitors and paying no attention to Callie and Julian. But she didn’t follow through on the opening, tempting though it was; even hunks had to be kept at a distance if they worked at this place. Callie told him what she and the other five operatives would be doing.

“Let me check these names.” Julian read them back to her from the list he’d made.

“Right. And none of us is to be called after five P.M. — be sure to make a note of that, will you?”

Julian dutifully wrote it down. “May I ask why?”

Callie blinked. “Because it’s kind of hard to tail a guy unnoticed when your cell phone keeps ringing.”

He nodded, made a further note. “Yes, I see. I believe someone mentioned that before.”

“And Julian, check us out every day at five until Kevin Craig or I tell you otherwise.”

“Got it. Checked out every day at five until further notice, and no phone calls.”

“No phone calls after five.”

“Ah... yes, after five. That’s while you’re actually on surveillance, right?”

“That’s right.” She smiled a regretful goodbye and headed toward the elevator. Gawjus man, Julian Woolrich, but a bit of a dim bulb.

The first thing Callie did in the parking garage was get rid of her gum. No need to keep up the unreachable-adolescent act here.

When she got to Gilchrist Road, she could spot only two of the other operatives. One was parked on the shoulder almost directly across the road from the main entrance to the Memotek industrial park. He was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette, looking for all the world like a man waiting to give someone a ride home from work. The asthmatic man was parked a little farther along the road, facing town, pretending to read a newspaper. Callie shook her head. Man in a car holding a newspaper up in front of his face — it could only be a cop or a private. Dead giveaway.

She discovered a service road opposite Memotek and followed it to the top of a small rise... where she found the other three operatives; they grinned and waved as she braked hurriedly. A good spot. It was difficult to identify someone in a moving car, especially if you’d never seen that person in the flesh before. You needed to be practically on top of the car, as the operative smoking the cigarette would be. Or you needed a good pair of binoculars. Callie took hers out of her backpack and joined her fellow ops.

A few minutes after five, the cars started streaming out. They had only one chance at spotting their subjects, at the very moment the cars drove through the gates. Once they made the turn onto Gilchrist, the angle was wrong for seeing who was inside. Callie concentrated hard on finding the recently memorized face of Hal Stanwyck.

He didn’t come out until almost six, but he was still the first of the suspects to leave. These people must love their work, Callie thought as she jumped into her car and started down the rise after Stanwyck. She picked up his black BMW and dropped back to let another car pull in between them.

Stanwyck followed Gilchrist only to the turnoff south to Riverview Parkway. Not going home, then; Stanwyck lived in the Strawberry Hill section of town, north of Clement. Yupsville. Parkway traffic was heavy this time of day; Callie had to concentrate on not losing the BMW. When Stanwyck drove past the Seneca Street Bridge without turning, her heart sank. He was headed toward the waterfront.

When Callie first started working for Mr. Kiss-My-Ass Bass, he’d informed all his detectives that she knew the waterfront area like the back of her hand. But so far her excursions into the area had been brief — in and out with no harm done. Only Bass understood the risks she ran returning to the area where she’d spent most of her life, but that devil couldn’t care less. He wanted her knowledge of its warren of back streets and her contacts with the army of thieves and grifters and pushers and hustlers who operated there. The fact that he was putting her into the greatest danger of her life didn’t bother him a bit.

For a moment, Callie gave in to a loathing so intense that it blinded her; she didn’t see Stanwyck turn north onto Front Street. But she made the turn automatically; the alternative was to drive into the Atlantic Ocean. There he was, dawdling along.

Traffic never moved fast on Front Street; there wasn’t room, for one thing. The street had been widened a couple of times, but it couldn’t keep up with the amount of commercial traffic generated by all the piers jutting out into the ocean. Callie looked at the ships docked there; she’d always liked watching them loading and unloading, ever since she was a kid. She sniffed the salty tang of the water with pleasure. It was cool here, by the ocean, even for June.

Stanwyck had a goal in mind; he drove purposefully without any neck-craning or gawking. Callie followed him almost all the way to the north shore. Ah. He was going to the Sea King.

The pricey restaurant was built on a cliff overlooking the water. The building itself was wide and shallow with a glass wall facing the sea. Immediately below the building were four tiers of terraces, already beginning to fill up with evening diners. Every seat in the Sea King offered a breathtaking view of the harbor.

Callie pulled into a small gravel parking area between a photo shop and a drugstore. Through her binoculars she watched Stanwyck come down and take a table on the third terrace, martini glass in hand. He was carrying a little more weight than his picture indicated, and his movements weren’t particularly graceful. A waiter appeared and Stanwyck ordered from the menu. Great.

She found a burger joint a couple of blocks away and bought her dinner. She took the greasy bag to a cement bench at the land end of a small pier that had only a sailboat tied down there for the night. A quick check through the binocs: Stanwyck was still alone. Not meeting anyone, then.

The summer sun was only beginning to set behind her back; the water appeared gray with golden highlights, constantly moving and changing. There was still plenty of light for Callie to study more carefully the dossier that Kevin Craig had provided. Hal Stanwyck was thirty-three, a boy-genius type who was born understanding computers and who’d made it all the way to adulthood without once getting busted for destructive hacking. MIT, IBM, lured to Memotek four years ago, salary and options increased every year since. Nice face — friendly-looking. Married once, for... oh-oh, for only seven months. Not a loner, though. Stanwyck just enjoyed being a man in his prime, on the prowl, and with money in his pocket.

He was alone tonight, though. It was after eight when he finally rose from his table. Callie was in her car waiting for him when he drove down from the Sea King parking lot. Go home, she commanded.

No such luck. He drove back to the heavily commercial area of the waterfront, past the Harbor Patrol station and the loading cranes and the ships’ chandlers and the fish market, now closed for the night. Stanwyck turned off Front Street and left his car in a high-rise garage on Mitchum next to the dockworkers’ union hall. Callie parked in an alley with a slight feeling of relief. It was easier to tail someone on foot in the waterfront district, and yups like Hal Stanwyck normally didn’t venture too far into the interior. It ought to be all right.

This time he had no specific destination in mind. He just wandered, looking. The waterfront district was as safe as any place in Port Wolfe could reasonably be, as long as you stuck fairly close to the shoreline. Past Third Street, though, running parallel to Front, you might as well wear a sign saying “Victim.” The streets back there were dark, narrow, and twisty, sometimes changing their names for no discernible reason... those that had names. Some of the alleys were wider than the streets, the ones that backed on warehouses equipped with loading docks. It was an easy place to get lost in.

Stanwyck had stopped in front of a porno house. He looked at the photos on display and exchanged a few words and a laugh with the street shill urging him to buy an hour of Paradise. “Live Acts!” the pink neon screamed. Callie leaned against a utility pole and gaped. Before she’d gone into prison, that building had housed an outfit that provided laundry services for ships in the harbor. They were right on Third Street, the unofficial dividing line between normal and ghetto. She’d never seen a porn palace this close to the shore before. What else had changed while she was away?

Happy Hal bought a ticket and went in. Callie looked around for a place to perch.

Across the street was Salvatore’s Tattoo Parlor. Sal Gagliardo wasn’t a bad guy, but he was one of those people she’d be better off avoiding. Still, he wouldn’t think anything of it if she went in and sat for an hour. She wondered if his mother was still alive.

She was. A bell tinkled when Callie pushed open the door. Ever since his wife died, Sal had lived with his mother behind the shop. But right then, Mrs. Gagliardo was seated in her usual chair, nodding, unaware of their visitor. The old woman had been hard of hearing and intermittently senile the last time Callie had seen her.

“Be right with you,” Sal said without looking up. He was working on a bikini-clad girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen, tattooing a sprig of cherries high on her inner thigh.

Another girl was watching. “Ooh, way cool! Looks shrewd, Brittany!”

“Yeah? I wanna see. Gimme a mirror.”

“In a sec,” Sal said. “Almost done.”

He finished up and handed them a mirror. The two girls giggled at the reflection of Brittany’s crotch, but they agreed the cherries were hot stuff. The second girl paid Sal while Brittany slipped a dress twenty years too old for her on over her bikini. “Show your friends,” Sal said with a crooked smile. They left, chattering happily and banging the door after them.

The banging door woke up old Mrs. Gagliardo; she muttered something and made a birdlike movement with her hands. Her son turned to Callie and said, “Now, what can I do for you?”

“Hello, Sal.”

His eyebrows rose. “Callie? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

“Hey, I heard you were out. Come here, girl!” Callie went over for her hug. “Hey, Mama!” Sal shouted. “Look who’s here! It’s Callie Darrow!”

“Who is it?” the old woman asked.

Sal shouted even louder. “Callie Darrow! You remember Birdie’s girl, don’t you?”

Birdie’s girl. Callie yelled, “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Gagliardo!”

“Birdie’s girl?” The old woman reached a shaky hand out to her. “Why, hello, Callie. I haven’t seen you in the longest time!”

So she did remember. “I’ve been away,” Callie shouted.

Sal got them all coffee while Callie settled into a lumpy upholstered armchair that had a thin disguising afghan thrown over it. By dipping her head a little, Callie could peer through the lettering stenciled on the front glass and get a clear view of the porno house. It called itself The Garden of Eden, and one life-sized poster by the doorway did show a man and a woman wearing fig leaves.

“So, Callie.” Sal took a swallow of coffee. “Got anything going?”

Here it was. “Nothing major. I need to get reoriented first.” She jerked a thumb toward the window front. “That place across the street. What happened to the laundry?”

“Folded.” He grinned at his own weak joke, then turned serious. “Not enough demand for what they supplied. All the new ships have onboard laundries. Only old tramp steamers and like that need a shore laundry now, and there ain’t many of them left.”

Callie sighed. “That big old laundry was there since before I was born.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame.”

Mrs. Gagliardo said, “This is too hot.” Her son carefully removed the coffee cup from her frail fingers and set it on the small desk next to her. “Let it cool a little.” He looked at Callie. “Guy I know’s lookin’ for a bonnet.”

A female decoy. “When?”

“Friday, around noon.”

Callie shook her head. “That’s when I report to my probation officer.”

Mrs. Gagliardo’s body jerked. “Oh! I can’t sleep at night and keep drifting off.”

Callie grinned. “Happens to me, too, sometimes.”

The old woman leaned toward her. “How’s your mama, Callie? Is she over her cold yet?”

Callie and Sal exchanged a glance. Sal shouted, “Mama, Birdie died a long time ago. Callie was still a kid. You remember.”

“Oh.” The old woman looked confused.

The door opened and a sailor and his girl came in, laughing and flirting. He wanted her name tattooed over his heart.

While Sal tended to his customer, Callie stared through the glass at The Garden of Eden across the street. That was one reason she wanted to leave Port Wolfe. Here, she would always, always be Birdie’s girl.

Callie had been a thief and a con artist as long as she could remember. Her first lessons had come from her mother, who taught her to slip quietly into her bedroom while she was entertaining and remove cash from the john’s billfold — not all of it, just enough that he wouldn’t know immediately he’d been ripped off. Callie was a quick learner, finding ways on the street to bring home a little extra money. Birdie’s girl was known as a kid who could be trusted to deliver a message, lift a set of keys, finger a likely mark.

Birdie Darrow told people she was a singer... and she did sing, sometimes, whenever she could find a dive that would hire her for a night or two. But she wasn’t very good; even her young daughter could tell that. Callie often wondered whether Birdie had ever planned to teach her the tricks of that other profession she practiced, the one that kept the two of them clothed and fed. It was something she would never know. When she was eleven, Callie had watched, traumatized, as a drunken john beat her mother to death.

Callie had been put into the city’s foster-care program, which meant she grew to adulthood with virtually no supervision at all. To the various families to which she was sent, she meant an extra check in the mail every month, nothing more. So she’d built her own life, among her own kind. And like all thieves, she looked upon the straights as a bunch of fools.

Until she’d been caught.

Callie was no stranger to the inside of various juvie detention centers, but that was when she was still green and learning; never before had she done serious time. But during those endless days in prison, Callie had finally stopped hating her mother. Birdie had done the best she could; she didn’t know any other way to live. She’d taught her illegitimate daughter everything she knew about how to survive. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been enough. For either of them.

Sal finished with the sailor, whose girl was properly awestruck at seeing her name over his heart. Sal collected his money and hurried them out. “Show your friends,” he said automatically.

Mrs. Gagliardo let out a soft snore.

Sal plopped down in his chair and looked at Callie. “Know another guy needs a driver.”

She couldn’t get away with ducking out twice. “I got a car,” she said quickly.

“False plates?”

“Out-of-state. When’s this one?”

“Thursday night.” Sal went over to the small desk and pawed through a drawer until he came up with an index card with a phone number written on it. “Ask for Mario.”

Callie slipped the card into a back pocket of her jeans, knowing not to ask questions. “Thanks, Sal.”

“And yes, you can stay here until he comes out.”

“Who?”

“The mark you’re waiting for. Garden of Eden.”

She laughed shortly. “Rusty.”

“Naw, you hid it pretty good. You forget I’ve known you all your life.”

Sal was the biggest gossip on the waterfront. Callie didn’t have to feign an interest as she caught up on who was running what scam, who was doing time, who had dropped out of sight. Which new cops to watch out for and which were willing to do a little business. Then out of the comer of her eye she caught movement across the street. “There’s my mark.” She stood up and glanced at the old woman asleep in the chair. “Tell your mama I said goodbye.”

Sal nodded and waved her out.

Hal Stanwyck’s sojourn in The Garden of Eden had left him thirsty; he headed straight for Chez Stinky, a dive three blocks away. Callie followed him in; it was a good place to pass on a smuggled chip, as Stinky didn’t believe in bright lights. She thought the place had changed its decor from the last time she’d seen it, but she couldn’t be sure in that half-light.

Chez Stinky was a skinny rectangle, narrow and deep. Callie had to walk right past where Stanwyck was sitting at the bar to reach the tables in the back. She took one, in shadow against the wall, that gave her a good view of the bar, one of only two tables not occupied. Hal Stanwyck wasn’t acting like a man waiting to meet someone — no looking around, no consulting his watch.

When Callie pulled the billfold from her back pocket to pay for the drink she’d ordered, she also pulled out the index card Sal Gagliardo had given her. She wouldn’t call this Mario, whoever he was, but she wouldn’t throw away his number, either. A contact was a contact. And that’s what Mr. Upright-Citizen Bass was paying her for, her contacts.

Again it came, that wave of hatred that blinded and incapacitated her. She fought it off with an effort and gave in to a moment of despair. Was it always going to be like this? Instant paralysis every time she thought of the man?

Hal Stanwyck got up from the bar and went to the Gents. Callie gave a mental cheer; she’d been feeling the need herself. On her way to the Ladies, she passed a table where two couples were sitting and laughing. One of the men had taken off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, leaving his billfold in the jacket pocket, the stupid jerk. Just by flexing her knees slightly, Callie was able to lift the billfold without even breaking stride.

Inside one of the stalls in the Ladies, she examined her pickings. Over three hundred in twenty-dollar bills plus a few ones. But the plastic the jerk carried was worth ten times that.

Who was fencing credit cards now? The last she heard — Callie broke off her line of thought, appalled. My God. That easily. That easily, she’d slipped right back into her old pattern. She gritted her teeth and squeezed the billfold with both hands as hard as she could. Strangling temptation.

When she’d recovered her composure, she left the Ladies and on the way to her table slipped the jerk’s billfold back into his jacket pocket, keeping a couple of the twenties for her trouble.

Hal Stanwyck was already back in his place at the bar. Callie settled down to wait.

A young couple at the next table started quarreling loudly. Callie shrank back against the wall as customers at the bar started craning back to see what the ruckus was. But Stanwyck wasn’t one of them; he sat staring into his glass, oblivious to everything around him. Callie relaxed a little and shot a dirty look at the noisy couple at the next table.

And got a shock: The man looked disturbingly like Billy. A little older, but they could have been brothers. Billy, sweet Billy, whom Callie had married when she was not yet eighteen and he only a year older. The quarreling couple got up from their table to leave. Callie watched them until they went through the door and disappeared. Which was very much what she would have liked to do herself.

She’d turned a sort of corner in prison. One day, after an especially humiliating full-body search for drugs, Callie had taken an honest look at herself for the first time in her life. She was supposed to be in her prime, but look at her! Locked up as felon, owning nothing... the food she ate and the very clothes on her back were paid for by the state. She was alone — no family or friends. Callie Darrow didn’t have friends; she had contacts.

The conclusion was obvious: If the way she’d been living wasn’t working, then find a different way. The idea of living life as a straight so bemused and disturbed Callie that it was three or four days before she could settle down to making plans. It wouldn’t be easy. She had no marketable skills, no work record. She’d never paid income tax. She didn’t even have a Social Security card.

She could say she was born in Port Wolfe but lived most of her adult life in Australia, until her husband died — that would account for her lack of a work history. It would not account for her American speech. Oh, this could be tricky! But it was doable, Callie felt. There was much to be taken care of. She was surprised to find that her days in prison had suddenly become bearable, now that she had a plan.

A major part of that plan was getting away from Port Wolfe. It might mean violating her parole, if she ever got parole. But her best chance for survival lay in disappearing from Port Wolfe forever. Too many people knew her, knew what she did. There were too many traps for her here... and too many temptations. Callie wasn’t sure of her ability to stop being a thief. But she was sure of her determination to try. A fresh start, where no one knew her. She started daydreaming about where she’d like to live. Someplace clear on the other side of the country. San Francisco sounded good.

Then the day finally came when that iron door clanged shut behind her. She was wearing a cheap prison-issue suit and blouse, and she had only a few bucks in her dime-store handbag — but she was free. San Francisco, here I come!

But a man had been waiting for her... silver-haired, shrewd-looking, with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Standing by his car parked near the prison entrance, he’d said he ran a detective agency and was there to offer her a job. Sam Bass was having trouble finding women operatives who could go into the dangerous parts of town without drawing attention to themselves. His background check on her told him she could blend into the waterfront district as well as anyone, and it was that ability that he wanted to hire.

Callie declined, emphatically. He insisted. Callie told him to get lost. He told her he had evidence she had driven the getaway car during the robbery of a pawnshop in which the owner had been killed.

That stopped her cold. The pawnshop job was supposed to be a quickie — in and out, no trouble. She’d driven a rental car for two guys named Marty and Jangles that she’d worked with before. They both carried guns but were kind of proud of the fact that they’d never had to use them. We’re so tough, we don’t need to shoot nobody. But the old man in the pawnshop had surprised them; instead of meekly handing over his stash, he’d pulled out a shotgun and pointed it straight at Marty. Marty shot him.

Those two idiots hadn’t even spotted the surveillance camera when they cased the place. Marty and Jangles had been caught, but neither one of them turned over on Callie. If they had, she would have been tried right along with them. The law said a murder occurring during the commission of a felony was chargeable to all participating in that felony. Callie hadn’t even set foot inside the pawnshop; but in the eyes of the law, she was as guilty of that old man’s death as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.

Callie demanded to see Bass’s evidence.

He’d showed her a photocopy of a letter Jangles had written to his brother from prison. “Me and Marty ran out of luck,” he’d said, “but Callie got away.” Bass wouldn’t say how he got the letter, but instead pointed out that there weren’t all that many Callies in Port Wolfe in her particular profession. She hadn’t been hard to track down.

Next he’d handed her an enlarged copy of her police mug shot — how had he gotten hold of that? It was the only photograph of Callie in existence. Bass waited while she read a signed statement by a clerk at the car rental; he named the woman in the photo as the one who’d rented the Ford the police had been able to identify as the “escape vehicle.” The phony ID she’d used couldn’t protect her from eyewitness testimony.

Bass had raised an eyebrow and pointed back toward the prison door she’d just walked through. So there it was. She either went to work for him, or she went back inside.

Callie didn’t plead. She knew it would do no good, and she was too proud to plead anyway. There was nothing she could do to stop him. Bass was going to force her back into the very environment that had made her what she was, the environment she so desperately wanted to escape.

She’d never been owned before. In both her marriages she’d stayed her own woman. Even in prison she’d remained remote, avoiding alliances with the other prisoners and enduring what was, after all, only a temporary setback. Never before had her life been under the total control of another person.

“I’ll find a way,” Callie whispered, staring at Hal Stanwyck sitting at the bar. “Somehow I’ll get you, Sam Bass.” She smiled at the melodramatic sound of that, but her resolution didn’t waver. She would get him. Somehow.

“And that’s it?” Kevin Craig asked. “Eat, drink, and be merry?”

“That’s it,” Callie replied. “Dinner at a harbor restaurant, followed by a couple of hours of entertainment and then home. Monday, when he was alone, the porn palace. Tuesday, a buddy from the office came with him and they spent the evening bar-hopping. Wednesday, he took a date dancing at The Lotus House. But no all-night binges or secret meetings or anything.”

“Damn.” Kevin scowled until he remembered he didn’t look good scowling. “Hal Stanwyck’s our best bet.”

“He is? How?”

“Passed over at Memotek. Big project coming up that he wanted to head. He’s the only one of the six possibles with reason to bear a grudge against the company.”

“He doesn’t act like a man with a grudge.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, would he?” Kevin snapped. “Thieves don’t advertise that they’re thieves.”

Not if we can help it, Callie thought. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Stick with him. Maybe something will break over the weekend. You don’t mind a little overtime, do you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. And Callie... stay sharp.”

She nodded and left.

That night Hal Stanwyck was alone again.

Callie decided to try something she’d been thinking of, a little close-in investigating that Kevin Craig would have her boiled in oil for if he knew about it. Operatives were not only supposed to be invisible, they were supposed to stay invisible. But tonight Callie was going to go visible. She wanted to meet this man she’d been following for four nights. Big no-no for operatives. Mr. Do-Every-thing-My-Way Bass would pee his pants.

Stanwyck had varied his routine slightly this time. Instead of lingering over a leisurely dinner as usual, he’d wolfed down his food at the Ocean View restaurant and headed straight for Chez Stinky, where he seemed settled in for an evening of heavy drinking. He looked depressed. Bad day at work? Last night’s date said no? Depressed people often wanted to be left alone. But it could mean he was vulnerable... and approachable?

Callie backed her car into an alley that caught some of the illumination of a street lamp, but she took a flashlight and checked the part that dead-ended against a grimy brick wall. No bums sleeping among the garbage bags. With the lid of the trunk up, she was hidden from the street but still had enough light to see by.

She stripped down to her panties, tossing jeans, shirt, bra, and sneakers into the trunk. She opened one of the boxes of spare outfits she kept in the car, a habit left over from her earlier profession. On with the short skirt and low-heeled dress shoes. A sleeveless top that left her midriff bare. Money and a few odds and ends moved from the backpack to black match-everything purse. A small roll of cotton under her upper lip to give her mouth a pouty look. Bright red lipstick, which she hated. Finally she tucked her mouse-colored hair under a blond wig and added a pair of lightly tinted glasses. Even Sal Gagliardo wouldn’t know her in that get-up.

She slammed the trunk lid shut and was starting out of the alley when she heard the sound of faint applause. After a moment she spotted an old man leaning on the sill of a high second-story window. “Thank you very much, girlie,” he said. Callie laughed and went her way.

Hal Stanwyck was seated at one end of the bar in Chez Stinky, staring at a muted ball game on the TV. Callie took a seat two stools away and ordered a bourbon on the rocks. The barman tried to strike up a conversation but she cut him short. She lit a cigarette and turned to Stanwyck. “Darlin’, you look like you’re carryin’ the weight of the world on your shoulders, but could you manage to pass me that ashtray? Unless you’re plannin’ on usin’ it?”

Stanwyck came to with a start and pushed the ashtray toward her. “No, I don’t smoke”

Not much of an opening. “I didn’t either, last week,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve quit three times now.”

“And started again three times.”

“You got it.” Aha, he was cooperating. “I’m thinkin’ about gettin’ one of those patches.”

The talk proceeded — tentative, man/woman pickup talk — until they reached the point Callie could ask him why he was so gloomy.

That’s all it took.

The gates opened and the complaints came flooding out. It was his work: He was surrounded by talentless dorks, he had to take orders from people less intelligent than he, he had to give orders to spaceheads who were constitutionally incapable of following even the simplest directions. Every time he came up with a new systems modification, he had to get his work plans notarized to keep his ideas from being stolen. No one appreciated his contributions. His bosses took him for granted.

Callie listened carefully, but could hear nothing but just another guy bitching about his job. If Stanwyck had indeed smuggled out the earlier chip, she was willing to bet it was the first time he’d ever done anything like that. This guy was no pro. He told too much about himself.

Finally he stopped for breath. “By the way, my name’s Hal.” He stuck out a hand.

She shook his hand. “Carolyn.”

“Carolyn, do you have anything planned tonight?” He held on to her hand. “Let’s go someplace else. This joint’s getting too noisy.”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it? Okay... where we goin’?”

They went to four other places. Hal was restless, unable to settle. And he talked compulsively, about all the things that were wrong in his life. It didn’t take long for the talking to turn into just plain bellyaching. Callie began to see why his marriage had lasted only seven months. That woman must have been a saint; Callie had had enough after seven minutes.

“Randall has the most selective memory of anyone I know,” Hal complained bitterly. Randall was the vice president he reported to. “He remembers only those things that make him look good. The first whiff of trouble, he doesn’t remember the conversation, he doesn’t remember seeing your memo. He just laughs and says, ‘Oh well, you know my memory!’ He’s so damned transparent about it — and everyone lets him get away with it!”

Not once did he ask “Carolyn” anything about herself, what she did for a living, how she came to be at Chez Stinky. Callie had a cover story all made up that she never got to use. His only interest in her was as an audience.

She considered him carefully. A little on the plump side, but nice-looking. Successful. Gifted in a high-profile profession. And what was he? A whiner, totally self-absorbed. And feeling unappreciated.

Yep. Mr. Hal Stanwyck was a good candidate for the role of chip-smuggler.

Callie finally put an end to it by pleading the need to get up early for work the next day.

At noon on Friday Callie made her weekly trudge down to Civic Plaza, a copious open space dominated by the new police headquarters building on the west side — all glass and steel and sharp angles. It stood in sharp contrast to the city jail off to one side, an elderly, patched-together structure where Callie had been held during her trial. Civic Plaza was surrounded by office buildings; walk away in any direction and you’d bump into a lawyer before you’d gone ten feet.

Callie’s destination was a graceful old building directly across the plaza from police headquarters; it had some fancy new name now, but everyone still called it the old county courthouse. The building was rundown, because the city didn’t have the funds to maintain it properly. But it was earning its keep, housing overflow city, county, and state offices until it was straining at the seams.

The whole first floor of the county courthouse was given over to the Welfare Department. Callie rode the elevator up past the second floor (Motor Vehicles Bureau, City Parks Authority) and got off on the third. In their collective wisdom, the planners of the new police headquarters building had neglected to allow room for the parole department.

Mr. Leave-It-to-Me Bass had signed papers saying that Callie was working at the Bass Agency as a mail clerk. Parolees were not allowed to associate with known criminals, but operatives were often in contact with “undesirables” — an unavoidable circumstance that would have the parole department screaming bloody murder. Callie was glad of the fiction; it made her weekly check-ins relatively free of hassle. She had no problem acting the honest citizen; it was a role she’d played in many of her scams. What’s more, she even had a Social Security number now.

Callie’s parole officer was a fortyish woman named Rosemary Barnes who thought of herself as Friend and Advisor Extraordinaire to all her charges. Most parole officers checked you in and out as fast as they could; it was the only way they could keep up with their caseloads. But Rosemary Barnes always took time to add A Personal Touch.

Today she folded her hands on her desk and leaned forward toward Case #19Y-645311A. “Tell me, Callie,” she said in a tone meant to invite confidences, “do you like working at the Bass Agency?”

Callie shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“But do you enjoy your work?”

Make it real. “It’s boring. Sorting the mail, pushing that damned cart around.”

The friendly voice now contained a hint of reprimand. “You aren’t thinking of quitting, are you?”

“To do what? I got no place else to go.”

That was the right answer; the Rosemary woman smiled smugly and nodded. “You know, Callie, you’re a bright girl. You could go far in office work if you put your mind to it. Have you ever thought of taking night classes to learn shorthand and word processing?”

“No,” Callie said truthfully.

“Then perhaps you should. Employers watch to see which of their employees are working at improving their skills. Secretarial training — that’s the way to advancement!”

Callie blinked. “I’ll think about it.”

That was all Rosemary Barnes needed to hear. “There are a number of business colleges in Port Wolfe with full curricula for night students. Why don’t you check into a few of them?” She took Callie’s mumble for assent and told her that would be all for this time. As Callie left, the probation officer was making a note in a folder, good deed done for the day.

Callie drove through the old Colonial section of Port Wolfe where she rented an apartment in a restored three-story building but didn’t stop. Nor did she stop at the Atlantic Building on the corner of Hawthorne and Seneca; no need to check in at the Bass Agency. She took the bridge to the northern part of town and looked for an eatery on Seneca.

Callie liked Seneca Street. It was a long commercial street running north-south through town, crossing the Wolfe River. To the immediate east of Seneca were the slums that formed the inland part of the waterfront district. To the west were a number of neighborhoods undergoing facelifts and filled with overpriced condos and townhouses. The most posh of those regenerated neighborhoods was Strawberry Hill, where Hal Stanwyck lived. Seneca Street, dividing the two extremes of slums and upwardly mobile, partook of both elements. A cheap liquor store right next to a place selling imported lighting fixtures, a junky souvenir shop across the street from a ritzy jeweler’s establishment. Callie found a soup-and-salad place that played videos on the walls and went in.

She lingered over her lunch, killing time. Unless Sal Gagliardo had changed his routine, he wouldn’t open up his tattoo parlor until midafternoon. Callie had a little protect-your-ass work to do. If Sal ever suspected that she had joined the straights and was in fact spying for them, he and her other old cronies would toss her off Front Street Bridge without a second thought. Sal was a good guy only up to a point.

Daytime traffic on the waterfront was murder, so she left the car on Seneca and took a bus down to Third Street. She was early, but she had to wait only ten minutes until Sal was open for business.

Callie went charging in, breathing fire, secretly relieved that Sal’s elderly mother was nowhere in sight. “Thursday night, Sal,” she said angrily. “That’s what you told me. Your buddy Mario needed a driver Thursday night.”

“Callie?” he said, surprised. “What—”

“You know what today is, Sal?” she plowed on. “It’s Friday. The day after good old Mario needed his driver.”

“Well, hey, when you didn’t call, he got somebody—”

“When I didn’t call? Is that what you said... when I didn’t call? Sal, I punched out that damned number thirty times! Thirty times, Sal!”

“You left a message on his answering machine?”

“What answering machine? All I got was ring-ring-ring. I tell you, I was so pissed today I could barely talk to my probation officer. I know she thinks I’m on drugs.”

“But Mario does have an answering machine! I keep telling him to get a cell phone but he—”

“Sal, listen to me. At the other end of 624-5516 there is no answering machine.”

“Whoa, whoa — wait a minute!” He was patting the air with his hands. “That’s 624-5510. Zero, not six.”

She stared at him for a beat and then fished the index card out of her hip pocket. “See that little stem going up on the left? That’s a six!”

“Naw, Callie, that’s a zero. So I’m a little sloppy about the way I close up circles — it still looks a zero to me.”

She threw up her arms. “Are you telling me that all that time I was calling a wrong number? I actually missed out on a job because of your lousy handwriting? Sal, I am going to kill you.”

“Aw, c’mon, it’s not that big a deal — it was just a restaurant heist.”

“Which I did not get a piece of!”

“Hey, it’s not the end of the world — there’ll be more jobs. C’mon, Callie!”

She let him gradually jolly her into a better mood. He apologized four times. He promised her a better job soon. He wanted to know if they were still friends. Callie reluctantly allowed as how they were. Eventually they shook hands and parted on good terms.

Ass protected.

Hal Stanwyck finally scored, on Friday, spending the night in the woman’s apartment. Kevin Craig was convinced that was when the new computer chip exchanged hands. Callie sighed and pointed out that handing over a chip was not exactly an all-night job. Besides, the woman wasn’t a pickup; Stanwyck had brought her with him from work to the waterfront. He could have handed over the chip in the car during the drive in from Memotek, if she were his contact. But Kevin wouldn’t budge from his conclusion... until confronted with personnel records that showed the woman was a new employee and, in fact, hadn’t even been living in Port Wolfe at the time the earlier, flawed chip had been smuggled out.

Hal-Baby spent Saturday and Sunday doing chores and playing. Kevin had brought in additional operatives to help with the surveillance, so Callie had to work no more than one eight-hour shift each day. And Monday night she was on Riverview Parkway once again, following Stanwyck toward the waterfront.

But this time was different. For one thing, Stanwyck hadn’t left Memotek until nearly seven. For another, he was riding in the backseat of a taxi instead of driving his BMW. Could just be car trouble. Or he could be trying to avoid being followed. If the latter, the guy really was an amateur. It hadn’t occurred to him that the sudden appearance of one bright yellow taxicab where no cab had appeared before just might attract a little attention.

The taxi let him out on Front Street; Callie parked under a Deliveries Only sign and took off after him. Stanwyck bought fish and chips from a takeout place and wandered the streets, eating and checking his watch. Then he went into a fried-chicken place for a second bag of sustenance and sat on the front stoop of a featureless building while he ate. And checked his watch. At a quarter to nine, he jumped up and moved off at a fast clip.

Callie wanted to laugh. Stanwyck’s idea of how to check for a tail had to come from old Charlie Chan movies. He’d walk along briskly for a while and then whirl to face those behind him, looking for a face he’d seen before. Then he’d pretend to be absorbed in a poster advertising a boxing match that had taken place a year ago, all the while sneaking peeks over his shoulder in what he thought was a casual manner. Once he ventured a block past Third Street into no man’s land, turned around, and ventured right back out again.

All this went on for no more than twenty minutes; Stanwyck didn’t have the patience to play the game right. He led her to Chung’s Palace on Bell Flower Street, a club Callie knew well. She waited five minutes until a couple showed up at the door and fell in behind them, the three of them entering together.

The dinner crowd was thinning out and it was too early for the night revelers, so Chung’s was only sparsely occupied at the moment. Stanwyck was seated at a black enameled table in the lounge area that formed a semicircle around the bar, under a papier-mâché dragon suspended from the ceiling. Later in the evening when the place began to fill up, the dragon would belch harmless puffs of orange smoke. Meet me under Chung’s dragon. Callie had said that herself often enough in the past.

She took a seat at the bar and ordered a Tsingtao beer. The mirror behind the bar gave her an unobstructed view of Hal Stanwyck... who was clearly nervous and waiting for someone.

Finally, she arrived. The newcomer was a stunning, smallboned Chinese woman wearing a delicately embroidered turquoise dress. This was no first contact; Stanwyck knew her. He was glad to see her, but still nervous.

Callie couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was clear from watching their reflections that what started as an amicable conversation had quickly turned adversarial. Those two were not in accord at all. Finally the woman slapped her small hand on the table and said something that made Stanwyck’s face turn pink.

After a pause, he dipped his right shoulder. Opposite him, the Chinese woman dipped her left shoulder.

He’d passed her something under the table.

Callie’s instructions were clear: Follow the chip. She paid for her beer and left. Across the street from Chung’s Palace was an appliance store, locked up for the night with an iron grille over its glass front. Callie stood with her back against the grille and took her phone out of her backpack.

Kevin Craig would be gone by now, so she’d have to call the night number. Oh, what was his name? The man in charge of night security.

He told her. “Bass Agency, Gene Maxwell speaking.”

Nice voice. “This is Callie Darrow. I’m on a surveillance job for Kevin Craig and I need to get a message to him. Like right now.”

“Please spell your first name, and then tell me the message.”

She spelled Callie and said, “Tell him the transfer took place and I’m on it.”

“Got it. Where are you now, Callie?”

“Outside Chung’s Palace, on the waterfront. My subject’s going to be coming out any minute.”

“Right. Kevin will want you to report in again.”

“As soon as I can. And, Gene, tell him not to call me.”

“I’m sure Kevin knows not to call while you’re on a tail job.”

“I’m sure he does too. But tell him anyway.”

A soft laugh. “I’ll tell him.”

Callie broke the connection when she saw the Chinese woman come out of Chung’s Palace — alone.

She was more subtle about checking to see if she was being followed than Hal Stanwyck had been, but Callie had one thing going for her: The Chinese woman would be expecting a man. Thank Mr. I-Think-of-Everything Bass for that.

They hadn’t gone more than a few blocks past Third Street when Callie realized where they were headed. A few more blocks proved her right: Yep, they were going to China Alley.

China Alley was the widest alley in the waterfront, running from Seneca all the way down to Front Street, lined with warehouse loading docks and service entrances and the backs of soot-blackened buildings with steel doors and boarded-over windows. During the day it was filled with monster trucks disgorging and engorging, men in coveralls straining themselves moving heavy cartons and shipping barrels, other men manipulating loading machines for the really heavy stuff.

But once the commercial working day ended, China Alley changed its nature completely. Out of the surrounding mixture of slums and toney apartments disguised as slums came literally hundreds of vendors to sell their wares. On the loading docks and in the alley itself they set up their booths — some, elaborate folding mini-structures; others, no more than a plank across two crates. Junk jewelry and real jewelry, foods of a dozen different ethnic persuasions, laptop computers of unidentifiable origin, cloth from the Orient that might be pure silk, perfumes that said Chanel on the labels, porcelain figurines that could be Meissen or K-Mart. None of these people were licensed street vendors, but the police pretty much left them alone so long as they confined their dealing to China Alley.

Nobody remembered or cared what the alley had been called originally. Although members of a dozen nationalities worked at buying and selling in the night market, the alley took its name from the preponderance of Orientals there. The booths began at the Seneca Street end of China Alley and ran eastward for about twenty blocks toward the shoreline — and then abruptly stopped, as if some unwritten law dictated that the night market go no farther than Jimson Way, a narrow cross street of no importance. Thus the tourists who never wandered out of sight of the ships in the harbor had no way of knowing of that market flourishing deep inside the zone they’d been warned to stay away from. Casual sightseers were not welcome in China Alley.

The yuppies in Strawberry Hill got a kick out of knowing all they had to do was cross Seneca Street to find themselves in a world that was both exotic and shady. But it was more than that. Underneath the huckstering that was going on openly, there was another level of business being conducted. Wares didn’t have to be displayed on a counter to be available. The old Russian selling painted wooden Petroika nesting dolls could get you a tsarist antique, for a fee. The Korean family selling cheap musical instruments was said to have arranged the theft of a Stradivarius from a touring concert violinist. All but the most innocent citizens of Port Wolfe knew that anything they wanted — drugs, weapons, sex — could be found in China Alley.

Callie knew at least two of the vendors here were undercover cops. Unfortunately for the cops, everyone else knew as well. So discretion was the order of the day; there was no open flaunting of illegal goods. The Chinese woman Callie was following headed straight up the alley, glancing neither right nor left, her turquoise dress making her easy to keep in sight. Callie moved from one cluster of people to another, hidden from view both times the other woman checked behind her.

The Chinese woman stopped at a booth selling jade. It was one of the better booths in the alley, with locked glass cases on the counter; Callie caught a glimpse of a credit-card machine on a small table at right angles to one end of the counter. A youngish Chinese man with a small goatee was behind the counter, and he was clearly expecting the woman in the turquoise dress.

Callie stopped at a food stall a little farther along the alley. An elderly Chinese sold her a bowl of noodles, and she sank down on one of the two upended wooden crates the vendor had thoughtfully supplied for his customers. The noodles were good, hot and tangy.

If Callie had blinked, she would have missed it. The Chinese woman passed a small package to the goateed man so swiftly that someone not looking for it would have seen nothing. Both the man and the woman were talking intensely, even looking a bit upset. Not arguing, though.

“Cal, my gal,” said a familiar voice. “I heard they couldn’t hold you any longer!”

Callie looked up at an enormous Oriental beaming down at her, so fat his eyes were mere slits. “Hey, Jimmy!” she replied with fake enthusiasm. “And I heard you’d moved to the West Coast.”

“Did. Didn’t like it. Came back.” And that, Callie knew, was all the explanation she’d ever get. He lowered his voice and said, “I’ve been wondering when you’d be coming to see me.”

Jimmy Kwan was a fence, the best Callie had ever known.

“Soon, I hope. I... I’m having a little trouble. Readjusting, you know.”

He tut-tutted. “Back on the horse, gal.”

She nodded. “I know. Sal says he’ll have something for me next week.”

“Good, good.” He patted her paternalistically on the shoulder and moved off down the alley, graceful in spite of his avoirdupois, nodding to the jade sellers as he passed. Now she had Jimmy Kwan to worry about as well as Sal Gagliardo.

The Chinese couple had traded places, the woman now behind the jade counter, minding the store... while the man delivered the computer chip? Where?

Callie dropped her plastic noodle bowl and fork into a trash container and strolled along with a trio of men speaking some language she didn’t recognize; they looked like middle-Europeans experiencing America for the first time, but they were too shabby to be tourists. Callie had noticed quite a few new immigrants in town since her release from prison. Why Port Wolfe?

Once they were past the jade booth, she hurried ahead of the trio of immigrants, keeping the man with the goatee in sight. He led her all the way down China Alley, past Jimson Way, and into the warren of dark streets that twisted and curved every which way.

Callie liked the area because it was so full of hiding places that she could turn invisible on a second’s notice. Several times the goateed man stopped, listening for footsteps. He never heard any.

It was a long walk. The man reached Third Street and kept on going. On Front Street he turned left and covered six more blocks at a steady pace. Then he came to a narrow set of steps leading to the water’s edge and started down.

There was little open docking area left in the harbor; most of the frontage was owned by big firms that kept their turf fenced off, locked, and guarded. But the stairway ran down a narrow wedge of land between Global Freight and Sony to a small pier where someone stood waiting.

Callie watched from the top of the steps as the two men climbed into a small motorboat. She started cautiously down the steps as the boat pulled away into the darkness. They seemed to be on a line toward a freighter anchored not too far out in the bay. She pulled the binoculars out of her backpack.

The names painted on the sides of ships had to be kept illuminated and legible at all times, or the harbor master would slap the owners with a stiff fine. The freighter was the Sofia. The flag it was flying was also illuminated, but Callie couldn’t identify it. She kept the binoculars trained on the ship until she saw the motorboat pull up alongside a ship’s ladder draped down the hull. Only one of the men climbed the ladder. She couldn’t make out who it was, but it had to be the Chinaman with the goatee. The other man was just the driver.

Callie sank down wearily on the bottom step and took out her phone to report in to Kevin Craig via Gene Maxwell. Her feet were protesting all the walking she’d done; but unless Kevin wanted to call in the Marines for a night attack on the Sofia, her work was done for the day.

The hunk behind the reception desk, a.k.a. Julian Woolrich, looked truly sorry to give her the bad news. “Mr. Craig isn’t in yet,” he said.

Callie felt like pounding her fists on the desk. The break they’d all been waiting for, and that creep Kevin Craig hadn’t even shown up yet! He should have been here hours ago, making plans, giving orders, doing something. “What about Elinor Sykes?”

“Mrs. Sykes called in sick this morning,” Julian said apologetically.

Callie ground her teeth. Damned if she’d call the bigga cheese himself for help. She thought a moment. “Gail, computers — what about her?”

“Gail Forrester? She’s in.”

“Thanks, Julian.” Callie headed off down the hallway. She knew Gail Forrester only to say hello to, as one of the office staff that did mysterious but undoubtedly important things to help keep the Bass Agency the efficient money-making machine it was. Gail’s office had more papers, not too neatly stacked, than any other office in the agency. She lived surrounded by papers. The only unpapered surface was occupied by a coffee cup and a half-eaten doughnut.

Gail Forrester herself was licking a finger and looked surprised to see Callie standing in the doorway. “Hiya... what’s up?”

Callie avoided eye contact. “I hate to interrupt your breakfast, Gail, but I need some information.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” the other woman answered cheerfully. “This is for...?”

“Memotek case. Kevin Craig.”

“Okay.” She made a note in a log book that she was able to pull out of the mountain of papers without even looking for it. “Now, what do you want to find?”

“Can you break into the harbor master’s computer?”

“Whoosh!” Gail laughed. “You want me to do a little illegal hacking?”

“Only slightly illegal. All that information is a matter of public record. But it’s current information I want, and that means filling out request forms and going through a lot of red tape. We don’t have time for all that.” Kevin Craig should have had the info they needed on the Sofia ready and waiting by the time she’d come in. “Can you do it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. Have a seat, Callie. This may take awhile.”

Callie sat on the only other chair in the room and watched Gail as she worked. She was an attractive woman in her thirties who was neat and precise in her movements, a trait somewhat at odds with the paper mess around her. She also had a tendency to mutter to herself as she worked. No sub-menus? Where does that lead? What the...? Oh, very clever!

At one point she turned quickly in her chair and caught Callie’s eye before Callie had a chance to glance away. “Are the harbor master and the harbor patrol under the same jurisdiction?”

Callie shook her head, breaking the eye contact. “The harbor master is God. He’s his own jurisdiction.”

Gail turned back to her screen. “Well, there’s no option for ‘God’ here... let me try this.” She went back to typing and muttering.

A strange feeling had been growing in Callie, an unfamiliar feeling that she slowly recognized as envy. Now Gail was humming to herself, leaning forward eagerly in her chair. How fortunate she was, to be doing work she so obviously loved. Gail was not only able to enter a world that was alien to Callie, but she could even make that world behave the way she wanted it to. Callie would have given ten years of her life for that kind of control.

For the first time ever, Callie wondered what it was like to go anywhere in the world through a machine. How long did it take to learn computers? Was she too old to start?

Gail leaned back and smiled. “We’re in.”

“Hey, nice going.” Callie pulled her chair closer. “Look for the records on a freighter named Sofia.” A window opened and Gail typed in Sophia. “ ‘F,’ not ‘ph,’ ” Callie said. Gail made the change and the record they were looking for clicked onto the screen. Callie read through the first few lines. “Registry granted in Togo. Where’s Togo?”

“Beats me,” Gail replied. “A Pacific island? Let’s check the encyclopedia.” The Sofia record left the screen and after a few seconds a map of Togo appeared: A narrow strip of land in Africa, only the southernmost tip touching on the Gulf of Guinea. A small republic. Adjective form and name of inhabitant: Togolese.

So that was a Togolese flag Callie had seen last night. “Look at that,” she said. “One seaport. One. Is there any way to find out if other ships in the harbor are flying Togolese flags?”

“Ought to be.” Back to the harbor master’s system. A search turned up five more ships. “Wow,” said Gail, “that must be one important seaport.”

“I’d be surprised if any of those ships have ever been there,” Callie mused. “It used to be that Libya would grant registry to any ship willing to pay the extortionate fee — no questions asked. Then some Central American country started doing the same thing, and now it looks as if other countries are getting in on the act as well.”

Gail raised an eyebrow. “Which means...?”

“That the owners don’t want their ship looked at too closely.”

Up went the other eyebrow. “Smugglers?”

“Maybe. More likely the ship just doesn’t meet some international safety standard. Or Togo is included in some excise-free treaty. I don’t really know — I’m out of my league here. Could I have a printout of that?”

While the Sofia record was printing out, Gail suddenly said, “Tongo. That’s the Pacific island I was thinking of. Tongo, not Togo.”

“Ah.” Callie had never heard of it. She took the pages from the printer. “Thanks, Gail — you’ve saved me a lot of hassle.”

“My pleasure. I may take a look at the harbor patrol’s system... you know, just to see what’s there?”

Callie grinned. “Have fun.”

Gail grinned back. “Are you going to be here, around noon? We could ‘do’ lunch, or even eat it.”

Automatically, Callie’s defense system clicked into gear. “I’m leaving in about an hour. Maybe next week.” Gail Forrester seemed like a nice woman, but she still worked for Sam Bass.

“Okay,” Gail said agreeably. When Callie left, Gail was twisting a strand of hair around one finger as she stared at her computer screen, still showing the Sofia record.

Callie went into Kevin Craig’s office and sat down to read the printout. The Sofia was owned by a consortium called Tolbukhin that had a Zurich address. The ship had been built thirty-one years ago in the shipyards at Istanbul. It had sailed from Athens with a cargo of heavy machinery, mostly farming equipment made in Bulgaria.

So. A Swiss-owned Turkish ship sailing from Greece and flying a Togolese flag. And carrying Bulgarian farm machinery.

Bulgarian farm machinery?

Callie shook her head. The whole thing could be perfectly legitimate, with only one member of the crew involved in the lucrative business of smuggling computer chips. Hal Stanwyck stole the chip, the Chinese couple acted as go-betweens, and someone on board the Sofia would get the chip to the German company that had pirated Memotek’s earlier chip.

The Sofia had left Athens nearly a month ago, but she’d developed engine trouble and came limping into Port Wolfe harbor almost two weeks late. Her assigned docking slip was now occupied by another vessel, which explained why the Sofia was anchored out in the bay. And it meant that that world-famous Bulgarian farm machinery hadn’t yet been unloaded. Callie wished Kevin Craig would hurry up and get there.

Finally he did come strutting in, dapper and handsome and pleased with the world. “Ah, Callie,” he said, beaming at her as he sat down behind his desk. “That was a nice piece of work last night. Good show.”

She mumbled something.

“I’m glad to wrap this one up. Memotek will be pleased to learn who their culprit is.”

Will be pleased? “Wait a minute — you haven’t told them yet?”

He laughed easily. “It was rather late when you reported in. I’m going to call the CEO now.”

“You haven’t alerted the harbor patrol?”

“To do what? Our job is finished. We were hired to find out who the smuggler at Memotek is, and we’ve done that. Now, I want you to go write your report — five copies, you know the drill.”

She was gaping at him. “I don’t believe this! You’re just going to let the whole thing drop? That chip’s on its way to Germany. If we don’t stop it from leaving now, Memotek’s lost another bundle!”

“That’s up to Memotek,” he said sharply. “Don’t argue with me, Callie. Go write that report.”

She was in a daze as she left. The legal machinery for handling the Sofia situation should have been put into operation last night. What the hell was the matter with Kevin?

Then she stopped short. No. The real question was: What was the matter with her? What did she care whether the Bass Agency did the job right or not? Why should she worry that Memotek might not get its chip back? How did she get so involved in this case? It was nothing to her.

Write the report.

Callie stopped by the employees’ kitchen for a cup of coffee that she took with her into the ops’ room, a windowless square with a few chairs and tables with typewriters; no computers for the operatives. And one sofa, on which one of the other Memotek ops was snoring away. Callie sat down at one of the typewriters.

A hunt-and-peck typist, she started plugging away. Thirty minutes later she gave the finished report to one of the secretaries and went home to catch up on her sleep.

The ringing phone woke her; her watch said a quarter to two.

It was Kevin Craig. “Get back in here,” he ordered. “There’s been a development.”

“What development?” Callie asked, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Hal Stanwyck’s been murdered. His body was found floating under a pier this morning.”

That shocked her awake. “I’ll be right there.”

She took a quick shower before grabbing the printout of the Sofia’s record and driving in to the Atlantic Building, a sense of outrage growing in her all the while. You didn’t murder the Hal Stanwycks of the world; you just slapped their wrists. And why would the chip-smugglers kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Unless... that argument Stanwyck had with the Chinese woman in Chung’s Palace. Had Stanwyck demanded too much? Had he threatened to expose her if he was not given a bigger cut? He’d turned over the chip in the end, but the Chinese couple — or whoever gave them their orders, more likely — might have decided that this loose-lipped malcontent was just too big a risk to the operation.

Kevin Craig was waiting in his office, looking like a thunderstorm about to break. “Shut the door.”

She shut the door and asked, “How was he killed?”

“Garroted. It must have happened shortly after you reported in for the second time last night. Where was Stanwyck the last time you saw him?”

Under Chung’s dragon. “In the club where he handed over the chip. He and the Chinese woman argued — he probably wanted more money. But he was still there when she left.”

“So why would he hang around the waterfront after he’d made the transfer?”

Callie shrugged. “Waiting for his payoff? The woman didn’t hand him anything.”

Kevin bit his bottom lip. “Could be. But that’s the police’s business, not ours. We have a different problem.” He glowered at her. “You should have told me you’d already researched the Sofia,” he said snappishly.

“But—”

“I had to learn it from Gail Forrester! But never mind that now. Memotek wants to stop that computer chip from leaving Port Wolfe.”

“I told you that this morning.”

He chose not to hear. “Mr. Bass and the Memotek CEO are conferring right now. They’re looking into a search warrant and for legal ways to stop the Sofia from sailing—”

“That’s not an immediate problem. She’s a crippled ship. The Sofia won’t be going anywhere right away.” Callie handed him the printout of the harbor master’s record.

He read through it quickly and grunted. “That buys us some time. I never thought that CEO could get so antsy. He wants that chip on his desk right now.”

So Kevin had gotten chewed out for not reporting immediately last night. Callie didn’t murmur any comforting phrases.

Kevin leaned back in his chair, tapping a forefinger against his chin. “If we play this right, we ought to bring in all of them. Memotek ought to be grateful if we put the smuggling ring out of business. Can you identify the Chinese couple?”

“Sure. They sell jade in China Alley. They’re the ones who killed Stanwyck, you know. Or the man did, rather. The woman’s kind of small to garrote a good-sized fellow like Stanwyck.”

Kevin lifted the corner of his mouth in what came close to being a sneer. “How can you possibly know he killed Stanwyck?”

“Look, this isn’t a big gang we’re dealing with here,” Callie said. “Only four people are involved in the chip smuggling. Hal Stanwyck, the two Chinese, and someone aboard the Sofia. The man on the ship would never even have seen Stanwyck — he wouldn’t know what he looked like. So he just told the jade seller to take care of it.”

“Hmm. Well, we’re not being paid to finger a killer. Let the police worry about that.” He suddenly leaned forward. “This is what we’re going to do. Tonight you and I are going to board the Sofia and steal back that computer chip.”

Callie gaped. “I’ve got to get my hearing checked. I would have sworn you said we were going to board the Sofia.”

“It’s the simplest way to wind this thing up. While the CEO and Mr. Bass are fussing with warrants, we just go get the chip. No one will be expecting that.”

“Kevin,” she said hotly, “that is about the stupidest thing I have ever heard! It’s a freighter, for crying out loud! You know — a great... big... ship.”

“We don’t have to search the entire ship. Just the crew’s quarters.”

“Uh-huh. And if you had a computer chip potentially worth millions, you’d just leave it in your quarters? You’d carry it with you all the time!”

He didn’t like that. “No, I’d conceal it somewhere. In case I was searched.”

Callie was exasperated. “Kevin, this is downright lamebrained. I know you’re in hot water because you didn’t follow up last night, but this is no way to put things right! There’s a guy on the Sofia who ordered a man’s death, in case you’ve forgotten! Not to mention the fact that sneaking aboard a ship is against the law. And that’s another thing — how do you plan to get on board? The Sofia’s parked out in the bay.”

He showed her his teeth. “That, I’m happy to say, is your job.”

“My job!”

“Mr. Bass told us you had connections all over the waterfront. So, use those connections. Get us aboard the Sofia.”

Thank you very much, Mr. Large-Mouth Bass. Callie argued with Kevin some more, but he wouldn’t budge. He finally got tired of listening to her call him an idiot and pulled rank on her. They were going, and that was that.

“This is suicide,” Callie moaned.

“We’ll board exactly at midnight,” the man in charge said firmly. “That should give us plenty of time to search.”

“Oh, good plan. Midnight. Eight bells. Right when they’re changing the watch. People coming and going. Midnight it is, Skipper.”

He glowered at her. “All right, one o’clock. Meet me in the parking garage here at twelve-thirty. And make sure you have transport to the Sofia waiting for us.”

“It’s going to cost.”

“Draw some cash from Accounting. I’ll phone.”

That was the one bright spot Callie could see. She liked the idea of sticking Sam Bass with the bill for this ill-considered, doomed-to-failure, totally imbecilic outing.

The dive called itself The Crow’s Nest, even though it was a cellar bar. Callie walked down the six steps from the sidewalk and pushed open the door. It was only five o’clock, but the place was dark. It was always dark at the Crow’s Nest. Callie waited until her eyes adjusted and took a cautious look around. Not a tourist in sight, but quite a few seamen. The Crow’s Nest was for serious drinking... and for making deals.

It was one place that hadn’t changed during Callie’s time away. The two street-level windows were still painted black. Still no TV, no jukebox. Solitary drinkers staring into their glasses; huddles of two or three men talking in low voices. Not many women. Two college boys who’d wandered in by accident.

Callie was wrong: One thing was different. New bartender. Young, muscular, stolid-looking; must double as a bouncer.

Over at her usual table in the corner was Bette Wylie, the owner. Bette was a bulletproof old gal whose appearance had never changed in the more than twenty years Callie had known her. Always just a little overweight, but never quite fat. Black hair pulled straight back into a bun — was it dyed now? She was wearing an old lightweight gray sweater that Callie was sure she remembered. Bette ran a lucrative sideline out of her bar, the buying and selling of information; that was one reason Callie had come to see her. The other was that Bette cohabited with a tugboat captain.

Bette was writing checks, paying bills. Callie slid into the chair opposite her and waited. “Heard you were back,” Bette said without looking up.

“How are you, Bette?”

Bette raised her head and twitched one corner of her mouth, her idea of smiling. “Same as ever. But you look different.”

“Yeah, well, being locked up ages you real fast.” Callie tipped her head toward the bar. “Who’s the new boy?”

Bette looked over at the young man leaning both elbows on the bar, listening to some story a shaky old man was telling. “Calls himself Howard Running-Horse,” Bette said. “Light-heavy, training at Max’s. The Battling Brave when he can get a bout.” Mouth-twitch. “Guy’s got maybe one drop of Iroquois blood in his veins.”

Callie grinned. “Does he win?”

“Now and then. Good punch, but he’s slow-footed.”

Enough amenities. “Two things. One big, one little.”

“Big first,” Bette said.

“Captain Jack’s tug,” Callie explained. “To take two people out to a freighter moored in the bay without being seen. And back again.”

“When?”

“Tonight. One o’clock.”

“Price has gone up. Three thousand, half now.”

Callie counted out thirty hundred-dollar bills. “Here’s the whole thing. And tell Captain Jack to ask the taller of the two he’ll be taking aboard for the other thousand that’s owed him.”

Bette raised an eyebrow.

“Not my money,” Callie said. “I’m the go-between.”

“I figured that.” Bette slid one of the hundreds back to Callie. “What’s the ship?”

“The Sofia. She’s standing off Pier Seventeen.”

“Jack will wait twenty minutes, no more. Don’t be late. What’s the other thing?”

“A name and address. Chinese couple. They sell jade in China Alley. Nice booth, with locked glass cases.”

“Window dressing, most likely. Where in China Alley?”

“Between Marquette and Fowler. Across and down a bit from a noodles seller.” The China Alley vendors were very proprietary about their space; the jade sellers would be in the same spot. “I think Jimmy Kwan knows them.” The fence had nodded to the jade sellers as he passed their booth.

Bette tilted her head. “Why not ask Jimmy yourself?”

Callie smiled. “I need to avoid Jimmy for the next two weeks.”

The other woman asked no more questions. And she could be counted on not to reveal who wanted the information. “Check back later tonight.”

Callie said she would. She could have found out the Chinese couple’s names herself easily enough; but if they were arrested right after she’d been asking about them, there went her cover.

Callie glanced over at the new barman. “This Howard Running-Horse. Does he ever do odd jobs?”

“You need some muscle?”

“Don’t know yet. I may.”

“Then go over and introduce yourself,” Bette said. “He won’t work for people he don’t know. And Callie,” she added, “don’t call him Howie. He gets violent when you call him Howie.”

Callie nodded her thanks and moved over to the bar. Howard Running-Horse left the shaky old man and came up to her. “Hello, Howard,” she said. “My name’s Callie.”

“Helloooooo, Callie,” he replied, frankly sizing up her bedworthiness. “And what can I do for you?”

“You can memorize my name. I hear you’re not averse to picking up a spare buck or two.” Since he’d just seen her in hush-hush with Bette Wylie, he’d make the right connection.

“Depends,” he said. “What you got in mind?”

“Nothing at the moment. I’d just like to know whether I can call you if I need to.”

He leaned forward on the bar. “Honey, you can call me any time you like.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” she said cheerfully, and ordered a beer.

But it was all for naught; Kevin Craig wouldn’t hear of taking hired protection along on their illicit night excursion. Some waterfront thug you found? I don’t know this guy! No, this was Kevin’s private tea party, and Howard Running-Horse was not invited. It occurred to Callie that she should have just told Howard to show up; Kevin wouldn’t have been so inclined to argue with the light-heavyweight looming over him. Well, next time she’d know better.

When they met in the parking garage of the Atlantic Building at 12:30, Callie had collapsed across the hood of Kevin’s car in helpless laughter. Kevin was dressed all in black — black watch cap, black turtleneck, black gloves, black trousers, black crepe-soled shoes (which looked new). He’d even painted black smudges under his eyes. In the office, Kevin Craig worked hard at projecting the very image of the dapper, high-tech, new-wave style of detective who wouldn’t be caught dead in a trench coat and who openly scorned old-timey melodramatics and physical derring-do. And here all the time he really wanted to be Bruce Willis.

Not too surprisingly, Kevin was a bit testy following her reaction to his ship-boarding outfit and tended to snap as he drove them to the waterfront. “Yes, yes, I’ve got the thousand for the tugboat captain. I said I’d bring it!”

“His name’s Captain Jack,” Callie said, “but I’m not going to introduce you. He doesn’t want to know your name. He’ll deny ever having seen you, if someone asks. You’re buying silence as well as transportation.”

“For four thousand dollars, I should hope so.”

“I mean it, Kevin. Don’t try to chat with him. Say nothing at all if you can manage it.”

“All right, all right, I’ve got it!”

Captain Jack McNulty was the most taciturn man Callie knew. And he was even better at avoiding eye contact than she was. The man kept to himself, and he never spoke about his night errands. He wouldn’t even tell his housemate Bette Wylie that Callie was one of the two he’d picked up this night.

Kevin refused to leave his car on the street, so they had to walk eight blocks from a parking garage to the dock where Captain Jack’s tug was moored. On the way they passed two men, both drunk, apparently trying to kill each other. One was wielding an empty bottle as a weapon.

“Watch out for the bottle,” Callie said and broke into a trot. The sound of shattering glass reached her ears.

Kevin was right behind her. “God, I hate this place.”

They reached the end of the dock; Captain Jack’s tug bobbed in the water ten feet below. Kevin started down the ladder.

“Wait,” Callie said. “We need permission to board.” Kevin stopped on the ladder, halfway down.

Captain Jack stepped out of the pilot house onto the narrow strip of deck. Dark, bearded, nondescript. “Thousand,” he said tonelessly.

It took Kevin a beat, but he held onto the ladder with one hand while he fished out an envelope and handed it down to the skipper of the tug. Captain Jack opened the envelope to count the money, grunted, and then went back into the pilot house.

“That’s permission to board,” Callie said. “Go ahead.” The tug started moving the minute her feet touched the deck. Neither by word nor glance had Captain Jack indicated that he’d ever seen Callie before in his life.

Between the two of them, Captain Jack McNulty and Bette Wylie made enough that they could be living in one of the choice riverside homes out toward the western city limits. But they stayed in the waterfront district, both of them wearing clothes that looked as if they came from the Salvation Army. Captain Jack and Bette squeezed the eagle until it screamed.

The one exception to their tight-fistedness was Captain Jack’s tug. The Mary Sue was not one of the new larger tugs, but she always looked as if she’d come straight from the showroom. A shiny yellow and white craft without a spot of rust on her, she blended in well with the larger ships in the harbor. Kevin was crouched down, holding onto the deck rail with both hands. “I didn’t know there’d be so much motion,” he complained.

Pitiful. Callie said, “Have you figured out yet how we’re going to search the crew’s quarters while the crew are sleeping in them?” She was counting on Kevin’s turning back once he came face-to-face with the enormity of the job he’d planned.

But he just set his jaw. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Callie sighed. And pointed: “There she is.” The Sofia lay dead ahead.

Suddenly the Mary Sue veered to starboard on a new course that would take them out to sea. “What’s happening?” Kevin asked, alarmed. “Where’s he taking us?”

“I imagine he’s going out to catch the tide. So we can drift in without the engines roaring.”

The tug made an easy turn and headed back toward the Sofia. When the freighter appeared about the size of a football in the distance, Captain Jack cut the engines and the running lights. They drifted silently through the darkness, their only illumination the glow of the instrument panel inside the pilot house. Then they felt the slightest of jars as the tug’s side bumpers touched against the Sofia’s hull. Captain Jack knew his stuff.

He went to the foredeck, to what looked like an oversized harpoon gun. It shot out a rope ladder that hooked neatly over the freighter’s deck rail. “Three short, one long,” said Captain Jack.

“Got it,” Callie said.

“What?” Kevin asked.

“Flashlight signal. For him to come back for us.”

Ever the gentleman, Kevin allowed Callie to go up the wobbly rope ladder first. When they were both on board, the ladder’s hooks snapped out straight and the ladder retracted. Below, Captain Jack pushed off and drifted away.

Callie crouched down low, listening. There’d be a watch fore and aft, but maybe this crew wasn’t too conscientious about patrolling the decks amidships.

“Where are the crew quarters?” Kevin hissed in her ear.

“I don’t know.”

“Damn it, Callie, the night’s half gone! Where?”

“Listen carefully, Kevin. I. Don’t. Know.”

He swore.

Wherever the crew quarters were, they sure as hell weren’t up here on deck. The only thing to do was go below and start looking. “Come on,” she said.

They went down the first hatchway they came to, into a poorly lighted area that seemed to consist mostly of tunnels of pipes running off in all directions. Callie picked one and they moved forward.

It took them half an hour, but finally they found the crew quarters. The ship seemed dead; only once did they have to duck out of sight when they heard someone coming. The place certainly wasn’t bristling with armed guards, protecting something precious. That convinced Callie that only one man on board was involved in smuggling computer chips to Germany. The Sofia herself was concerned only with her cargo of good old Bulgarian farm machinery. They discovered one crewman snoring away, dead to the world, but the rest of the quarters were empty — leading to an inexcusable amount of smirking on Kevin’s part. Seamen lived in incredibly cramped quarters, so the searching didn’t take long. The snoring crewman didn’t wake up even when Kevin dropped his flashlight.

One hatchway led to a little cul-de-sac with two tiny cabins facing each other. The first was the captain’s cabin. He had a Middle-European name and he kept his log in a language Callie couldn’t even recognize. But no computer chip was to be found. The other cabin belonged to the mate. Kevin searched the arrow locker and the bunk, still thinking a little box holding the chip was lying around somewhere waiting to be found.

Callie looked through what papers she could find. The mate’s name was Heinrich Eisler, a German mate on a Swiss-Turkish-Greek-Togolese freighter with cargo from Bulgaria. After a moment she said, “What’s the name of the German company that ripped off Memotek’s earlier chip?”

“Berendsohn. Why?”

Silently she handed him a sheet of paper. It was a Berendsohn memo to Eisler.

Kevin crowed when he saw the name Berendsohn at the top, but then complained, T can’t read German.”

“Neither can I, but what it says isn’t important. That’s a memo, Kevin... not a regular letter. See — no full address or fax number or anything else you find on letterhead stationery. A memo.”

He got it. “The mate... er, Heinrich Eisler — he’s a Berendsohn employee. A plant on this ship?”

“Looks like it. And what do you want to bet Hal Stanwyck wasn’t the only string on his banjo? Eisler’s the key man. Nail him and the rest of the smuggling ring collapses.” She tucked the memo into her backpack. “Time to go, Kevin.”

“But we haven’t found the—”

“And we’re not going to find it. We’ve looked in all the logical places and it’s not there. But we have got evidence linking Eisler to Stanwyck.”

He looked dubious. “Illegally-obtained evidence.”

“Not evidence for court, but evidence for Memotek. Now that we know who Eisler is, it should be easy to—” She broke off in midsentence. “Listen!”

They both heard it: the sound of footsteps on the hatchway steps leading to their cul-de-sac.

Kevin looked around the cramped cabin with an air of panic.

“There’s no place to hide!”

“Stay here!” Callie hissed, and darted across to the captain’s cabin. One of them was going to get caught, but the other would be free to go for help. Who was coming, the mate or the captain?

It was the mate. Callie could hear Eisler’s surprised roar when he found the interloper in his cabin. Then there was some shouting in German, and then in English, and then a cry of pain from Kevin. Aw, jeez.

She slipped quietly out of the captain’s cabin and was just starting up the hatchway when a Teutonic voice cried out, “Halt!” She turned to see a man standing between the two cabins — big, blond, hard-faced. They locked eyes for a microsecond... and then Callie scrambled up to the next deck.

She turned left because most people automatically turn right and ran as fast as her legs would carry her. She could hear Eisler thundering up the hatchway steps and yelling. Worse, she could hear the sound of running feet directly over her head. She took the next hatchway below she came to, jumping down the last five steps.

And almost lost her balance when a woo-woo klaxon went off, scaring her even more; Eisler had sounded the alarm. Callie ran again, listening to the sounds of her pursuers. She was being forced aft, toward the cargo holds. The Sofia was a container ship; there’d be no hiding in an open hold here. But it was dark where she was; that would help her. Callie’s flashlight showed her an open hatchway. She stepped through...

... and almost keeled over from the stench. Urine, smoke, garlic, sweat — the place was thick with it. Callie stepped back out again, almost stumbling in her haste. The klaxon suddenly shut off — and Callie heard the sound of voices. She flashed her light around and spotted a footlocker. Inside were two coils of rope; she tossed them behind something that looked like an overgrown water heater and climbed inside the locker. It wasn’t quite big enough; the lid wouldn’t go all the way shut. But it would have to do.

Callie listened to the mutter of voices coming closer.

Through the slit left open by the lid of the locker, she could see lights bobbing in the darkness. Four men, as well as she could make out, each of them carrying a large lanternlike flashlight. They headed straight for the hatchway that led to the bad smells. Callie concentrated on ignoring the cramp in her left calf and persuading herself she didn’t really need to scratch those hundred places on her body that had suddenly started itching. Why were those men taking so long? She wasn’t in there, she was out here.

Finally they came back out. They passed the footlocker without a glance and disappeared into the darkness. They weren’t searching every little nook and cranny? They just wanted to know if she’d found the Place of Disgusting Odors?

Very curious, that was. Callie eased out of the footlocker and spent a minute massaging her calf. Then she went back to the open hatchway and took a deep breath.

Inside, what her flashlight showed her were bunk beds. Row after row of them, stacked eight high, going as far back as she could see. Callie covered her mouth and nose with her hand and stepped cautiously between two rows of the bunks; they were placed so close together that someone with wide shoulders would have to move sideways. There was other evidence of recent human habitation, aside from the terrible reek. A torn shirt left on one of the bunks, a forgotten book, a few empty food cans.

People. The ship’s real cargo was people. The Sofia was smuggling illegal aliens into Port Wolfe.

So that’s why she and Kevin had run into no armed guards above; the crew had already unloaded their cargo. In longboats, in the dead of night? The beam of her flashlight caught a thick, upright steel post. Ah, that’s what they’d done. They’d knocked out the bulkheads between container sections and substituted steel supports, turning the whole area into one cavernous dormitory. How many other mobs of displaced people had the Sofia turned loose in Port Wolfe? And how desperate those people must be to go through this to get here.

She’d seen enough... and smelled enough. She left the human-cargo area and made her way forward, pausing to listen every few minutes. No portholes this far belowdecks, and most portholes were too small to climb through anyway. She was going to have to go back up.

It took her a nerve-wracking thirty minutes to reach the main deck. She stopped to listen every few seconds, hesitating to advance when no ready place of concealment presented itself. But eventually she worked her way to the spot on deck where they’d climbed Captain Jack’s ladder. Her hands were shaking so much she almost dropped the flashlight. Three short, one long. What if Captain Jack had been scared off by the klaxon?

No! There it was, an answering flash of light. He was on his way.

Then all the Sofia’s deck lights came on.

Callie immediately crouched down, her heart pounding and her back pushed hard against one of the davits supporting a lifeboat. Voices came from the foredeck. Staying low, she risked a look. Two men were unfastening the covers over the lifeboats to see if she was hiding inside one.

Hurry, Captain Jack!

The Mary Sue throttled down as she bumped the freighter’s hull. No silent drifting in this time. Captain Jack knew something was up; he had to have heard the klaxon. And no time for the ladder. But if she dropped that far down to the deck of the tug, she’d break every bone in her body.

Captain Jack came out of the pilot house. Callie tossed him her backpack with its nonwaterproof contents, held her nose, and jumped.

The slap of the water shocked her into momentary paralysis, but then she was fighting her way back upward. She could make out the white bottom of the Mary Sue and headed toward that. The second she broke the surface, Captain Jack’s big hand grabbed her arm and hauled her roughly aboard. He left her panting on the foredeck as he stepped back into the pilot house and opened the throttle. There was shouting from the Sofia, followed by the crack of two rifle shots. Terrified, Callie hugged the deck as the Mary Sue slipped away into the darkness.

Kevin Craig. They won’t kill him. They’ll keep him alive to find out about me.

Callie dragged herself to the pilot house. The Mary Sue was running without lights, Captain Jack squinting into the darkness ahead. If he wondered about Kevin, he gave no sign. Without moving his head, he pointed to a locker in the corner. Callie took out a blanket and wrapped herself up, shivering more from fear than from wet and cold.

Think. Help for Kevin first. That nincompoop. She ought to call the agency’s night man, Gene something, Gene Maxwell. The agency would know how to keep Kevin from looking an utter fool in tonight’s muck-up.

That decided her. She’d call the agency last.

Which meant the police, for whom Callie had no great love. And did the Immigration and Naturalization Service know this wholesale people-smuggling was going on? Personally, she didn’t give a hoot how many illegals were in Port Wolfe; but if she could hand the INS a prize like the Sofia, they might put in a good word for her with the police. She’d broken a law or two herself this night.

“Captain Jack,” she said, “take me to the harbor patrol station.”

“No.” Nothing else, just no.

“Then put me ashore within walking distance.”

The boat veered a little as he changed course. Soon they were in the heavily trafficked area of the harbor, and Captain Jack turned on the running lights. He let her off at a repair dock south of the harbor patrol. And before she could say a word, the Mary Sue was gone.

Callie ran all the way to the station, her wet sneakers squishing uncomfortably. There was more than a little turmoil inside her; for the first time in her life, she was going to the police for help.

The harbor patrol didn’t believe her at first; she’d expected that. Only when the officer in charge called Gene Maxwell and confirmed that Callie did indeed work for the Bass Agency, did they move into action. Callie had told them that a Bass detective was being held aboard the Sofia and his life was in danger, that the Sofia was being used to smuggle in illegal immigrants, and that the ship’s mate had in his possession a new computer-chip prototype stolen from Memotek. Details later.

The officer had notified INS immediately, and then the station had emptied of all but two people — one to handle the phone and radio, the other to “make sure the lady doesn’t leave.”

The station had a glass front, and outside a narrow deck ran around three sides of the structure. Callie went out and leaned on the deck rail, her guard following discreetly. She took the phone out of her backpack and punched in Bette Wylie’s number.

Bette was furious at being awakened at four in the morning; Captain Jack wasn’t home yet, then. Callie cut through the complaints with an urgency that Bette reluctantly responded to. The Chinese couple were named John and Nancy Ling, and they lived at 1042 Jumonville Street, apartment 404.

Callie broke the connection and called police headquarters. This time she said that a jade-seller named John Ling of such-and-such an address had killed Hal Stanwyck, that he did so on the orders of a man named Heinrich Eisler, who was even now being arrested by the harbor patrol aboard the Sofia, and that they’d better shake a leg if they wanted to get in on the bust. When she said she was with the Bass Agency and was calling from the harbor patrol station, they listened.

Callie stood for a moment holding the phone. Harbor patrol, the Immigration people, regular city police — was that enough witnesses to Kevin Craig’s foolishness? The big brave private detective who needed the resources of three law-enforcement agencies to rescue him? Would that embarrass Mr. I-Am-God Bass enough?

Nah. Callie called Information and got the numbers of Port Wolfe’s two big daily newspapers and three of its television stations. Only when those calls were done did she make the call she should have made first.

“Bass Agency, Gene Maxwell speaking.”

“Gene, this is Callie. I—”

“Callie! The harbor patrol just called about you.”

“I know, I know. Listen, grab a pencil. I have got a lot to tell you.”

“Mr. Bass tells me I’m to give you a raise,” said Elinor Sykes.

Callie wasn’t expecting that. “No shit!”

The other woman’s face was blank. “No shit,” she replied drily. “He says the kind of publicity you got the agency last night couldn’t be bought with love nor money.”

“He’s not pissed off?”

“On the contrary, he’s well pleased.” She looked at Callie curiously. “Did you really jump off that freighter into the bay?”

“Yeah, well, it beat the alternative.”

Elinor shook her head in amazement. “Mr. Bass also told me to say that was a smart move... going after his weakest link.”

Callie grinned. “How’s Kevin doing?”

“He’ll recover. Those thugs on the Sofia gave him a pretty rough going-over, but nothing was hurt that won’t heal. In time.”

“No more than he deserves,” Callie said cheerfully.

Elinor frowned. “Are you really that callous?” She took a deep breath. “Mr. Bass further instructed me to say that even though it was a smart move on your part, it didn’t work. Kevin is going to come out of this a hero. He’s going to be a media darling. The noon news has already done one awestruck piece about him. One man by himself, taking on the baddies all alone—”

“He wasn’t alone!”

A sigh. “I’m to say two words to you. I don’t know what they mean. Mail clerk.”

Callie sucked in her breath; she knew what they meant, all right. If her name was plastered all over the papers, her parole officer would want to know what a mail clerk was doing boarding freighters in the middle of the night. “Damn!” After all she went through last night, that bitty-brain Kevin was going to get the credit? She stood up angrily. “Dammit to hell!”

“Please don’t shout. He said you’d take it badly.”

Damn, damn, damn! Callie walked aimlessly in a circle, flapping her arms. She had never felt more frustrated.

“But Mr. Bass understands what you did,” Elinor Sykes went on, “and you won’t find him ungrateful. He’s already squared things with the harbor patrol, and he suggests you take some time off. With pay, of course.”

“Afraid I’ll talk?” Callie snapped.

“He’s just trying to make it up to you.”

Like hell he was, Mr. Goddam-Paternalistic Bass. He was rubbing her nose in it. She grabbed her backpack off the floor and headed for the door.

“Callie, a word of advice,” Elinor Sykes said kindly. “Don’t lock horns with Mr. Bass. He always wins. Always.”

“Nobody always wins.”

“Mr. Bass does. He won this time, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Callie admitted, opening the office door. “This time.”

She slammed the door behind her.