Frenzy

Part One

Tiff

Lax was a bitch he could live without. He thought of it as a she, thinking of her as one might think of a lady of the night who appeared sexy, flashy, bright from a distance, but proved to be soiled and unpleasant-smelling up close. Some airports were the essence of their respective cities. Rome and Paris, Dallas and D.C. — but none more than LAX.

Fresh off a contract hit, Frank Spain took in a cautious lungful of L.A.'s airport perfumes and detected traces of a life-supporting pungency. That good ole allotropic, triatomic, Southern California fresh air. He hated L.A. and thought of the airport as nothing but an overpriced hooker who sucked when you came and sparkled when you left. And he'd never been happier to kiss the bitch good-bye than this morning.

She looked rough without her makeup the glitz of the night-lights and the drama of darkness to cloak her in velvet and sparkle. Now she just looked busy and used. He was glad he was leaving. In fact he couldn't wait to get on the TWA flight, but he had stopped and bent to retie a lace that didn't need rety-ing. Something a little out of place. Something tickling his nose a little. At first he mistakenly thought it might be coming from the clot of cops obviously greeting some VIP at a nearby gate. He could sniff out copper the way some animals can smell a hunter. He tied the shoe and walked into a small shop at the edge of the concourse. Lay back a bit, he thought. Just check it out.

Natural to be a little tight. The thing he'd come out for had been problems from square one and he'd had to jump back and put somebody between himself and the target. Ended up jobbing the Greek out to a couple of local kids. Airheads. He told the one on the phone:

"You don't want to make anybody nervous on this," and the kid goes, "Shit. Ain't no nervous about it. Let's rodeo."

"Just don't come up shy," he'd said to the kid. Let's rodeo? Jesus. That should have told him right there. And sure enough they just about screwed it every which way but straight up, and Spain wanted nothing but lots of distance between himself and the gig.

Southern Califucking Fornia. Everybody running around getting "deeply into" whatever the latest thing was. Greek dude. Name like popcorn cooking. Something — plop — pop — populous. Heavyweight in one of the multilevel sales things like Herbalife or Amway. Makes lots of dough. Goes into this and that. Gets too big too fast for the banks. Borrows a wad from family people. Winds up busting out. The Greek had been "deeply into jogging." Now he was deeply into the fucking GROUND.

Spain had smelled it when he saw the cops. Knew what it was when he'd taken a big breath of that hydrocarbonous delight that is laughingly called air in Lala Land. Equal parts of sleaze, sludge, smog, smoke, diesel, deals, Perrier, Perignon, mimosa, mass flatulence, and — somewhere in there — ozone. But he'd also sniffed out the unmistakable scent of trouble. Smelled it right then and there. Smelled that sucker coming off the tarmac. And his beak never lied.

He pretended to be absorbed in a rack of paperbacks by the window of the gift shop as he watched them. Two in uniform. A guy in plainclothes shaking hands with a dark-haired guy, also obviously heat. He watched the way the first uniform cop put the one dude's bags in a car backed up to the gate. The way the plainclothes cop glad-handed the dark-haired dude as the other uniform came in and showed something to an airport official and they moved toward a waiting car.

A voice said, "Can we help you?" and he mumbled something to the woman about a birthday card for his daughter, turning as she directed him to the appropriate section so that he didn't see the dark-haired cop say, Wait a minute, and come inside to get a paper.

When he looked up to see the eyes of that same cop staring at him through the glass, it was a surprise and he had to work not to show it in his face as he slowly let his own eyes travel back to the card he was appearing to study. He had no way of knowing he was looking into the eyes of serial murder detective Jack Eichord, only that he was looking at heat, and Eichord saw the man glance back at a card, appearing to be totally absorbed in a caricature of the "see-no-evil" monkey.

But Jack had seen something else. Eichord had a habit of looking hard at everything. Cop habit. He'd come back in to buy a newspaper and seen a guy look up and make him for a cop. It was something cops and wise guys could do. A cop could spot the read. The flicker of recognition in wise-guy eyes that you didn't get off a straight Joe. You didn't have to be up close. State rods could catch it sometimes clear across a four-lane interstate. Eichord moved away but watched the man a bit longer from behind a magazine kiosk. He appeared to hear his plane announced, paid for the card, and quickly moved toward the boarding gate. It was probably nothing. Jack stored the scene away in his mind and dismissed it.

But as he went back to the waiting car, he had that tug that he had learned to listen to or give in to. A firm pull at the sleeve that said. Hey, Jack. Get with it. It's the copper's version of that little shot you get when you suddenly realize you're about to lock your keys in the car.

Jack Eichord was no genius cop. He'd solved the "Doctor Demented" thing, and the so-called "Lonely Hearts" killings in Chicago, and it had given him an international rep that bore scant relation to reality. He'd found himself to be the unwitting beneficiary of the imputation of super-sleuth, a rep his fellow detectives knew was ridiculous. Because of some luck, and a giant media spoon-fed by the Chicago brass, his involvement in the high-profile sex murders and mutilation killings had shot him into the hot limelight.

The press loves to pick up on ascriptions like "serial-murder expert," however imprecise they might be, and Jack Eichord had found himself to be so elected by the media mavens. They talked about his genius for crime solving and his Sherlockian brain, and like his colleagues who knew better, he laughed at the bullshit. He was lucky. He had a gift. Something. He got hunches. Whatever. The thing he had now. He thought of it as his shit detector. It was purring away and he didn't know why.

The one called Frank Spain had the same kind of instinct or intuition, only in reverse. Like two ships passing in the night, each shrugged off the cold feeling inside, but Spain had more difficulty getting the smell of trouble out of his nose. It dogged him as he left the concourse and climbed the stairs to find his seat in first class.

It was the troubling smell of a whore. Just professional paranoia, he thought, and the tired, heavy-lidded man with the LA/ST L ticket under the name Frank Spain closed his eyes and snuggled down as best he could into the seat.

He deplaned at Lambert Field at 12:21, and he had not adjusted his wrist-watch to Coast time because he hated the way the long trip out was only a couple of hours long if you did, and then it just added to the jet lag when you came home. His car was still there in the lot. That was something, anyway. The feeling hadn't left him. It was building. Like he'd forgotten something. A little detail left to come and kick his butt later. In his business that was not good. The paranoia was mounting.

Early afternoon he was on the top of the hill next to their home in Ladue, and he could see Buddy Blackburn's car in their drive, but he didn't think anything about it. Pat was always calling or writing the insurance companies about something or other. He tried to show her how it was all a big humbug, but she insisted that they have insurance out the kazoo, and mostly for Tiff's sake he let her do her thing.

He'd stopped at the top of the hill to rearrange some things in the attache case on the seat next to him and he saw the door of the house open and Buddy Blackburn come out. Just for a second, tired as he was from the trip, he thought he'd seen Buddy kiss Pat goodbye, which made no fucking sense at all. He shook it off and rubbed his eyes. Christ, he thought. Pat didn't even kiss him good-bye. Much less Buddy. Much less their insurance man, whom she could barely stand to talk to and . . . Oh oh, that's when he had the little zing and it dawned on him that he was back a day earlier than he'd told her.

Buddy was only three or four years younger than Spain but he wore his hair like a guitarist in a rock band, and Spain knew he had at least a couple of semi-platonic, flirting relationships with the younger married women among his clientele — but Pat? No fucking way.

He waited until the red sports car was out of sight and he shot down off the hill and into the drive, sprinting out of the car and into the house, fully intending to confront his wife in the bedroom, but there was no need. She was standing at the sink in the kitchen, looking out the window at nothing, standing there in high heels and a very sexy teddy he'd never seen before and wearing nothing else, her back to him, turning slowly as he burst in the door catching her in her fuck clothes in the early afternoon.

"I believe the phrase is flagrante delicto," he said coolly.

"You weren't supposed to be back today," she said, showing what he thought was an exceedingly good grasp of the obvious.

"Sorry about that." He was not having to fight to remain calm. That's what was surprising him. He was so calm even as he sensed everything crumbling about him. His life disintegrating, crashing down around his ankles. "I could go out and come back tomorrow if you think it'd help."

"Funny," she sighed, somewhat impatiently, and turned away from him.

"Oh. Sorry if my material isn't up to snuff. I could work on it and —"

"I don't want to fight," it sounded like she said, her back still to him. He hadn't even looked closely at his wife for a month or so. Oddly, she looked quite sexy to him at this moment. He said it before he thought.

"I don't suppose I could have sloppy seconds?"

She just sort of let her head move to one side and he saw her breathe deeply under the flimsy teddy, and with considerable grace she walked out of the kitchen.

"You owe me an explanation, bitch. Why, of all people. Buddy BLACKBURN?" he said to her moving back.

She said nothing and he followed her, catching an arm and spinning her around, still having no desire to slap her, which surprised both of them.

"Why Buddy Blackburn?"

"You'd never understand."

"It can't be because we didn't have great sex together."

"See what I mean?" She turned and he grabbed her again.

"Will you talk to me, goddamn you. Why?"

"Why? You must be kidding."

"It's always been good for us —" He was shaking his head.

"Sure," she said with heavy irony, at which she was past master.

"You never said it was bad — you acted like you enjoyed it between us. We had a great sex life."

"You call a two-minute quickie twice a month a SEX LIFE?" She laughed.

"That isn't fair."

"What do you mean, it isn't fair?"

"It isn't fair to me to say our sex life consisted of a two-minute quick —"

"See! It's a debate now. Okay, you win. Three minutes four times a month, eight minutes nine times a month. You win. It was great."

"Why BUDDY BLACKBURN?"

"You never cared if I was satisfied."

"What?" he asked, incredulously.

"You just wanted a fast wham-bam, and good night. When's the last time you did anything romantic or acted like you cared about me. Never. That's the last time. You don't care about anything or anybody except yourself."

"That's not true. Pat. How can you —"

"Why Buddy? It could have been anybody. A man. Not a wimp. You're not the kind of man who needs a woman. You should have been a . . . You should be gay or something. You don't even like it."

"You're crazy," he said. But the preposterousness of the situation, the ridiculousness of being inserted into the center of such a domestic cliche, had begun to numb him out. "You're nuts," he told her without an ounce of conviction.

"I want out."

"At least give us another chance together. I can change. I want to —"

"See what I mean? A WIMP! Why don't you slap me around. Scream. Break things. You want me to stay. You catch me unfaithful and you want another chance. Chance to what? To be more of a wimp? You want to watch me and Buddy from the closet, is that it?" She moved right in front of him, looking up at his reddened face, daring him to lash out at her. "You want me to tell you what it was like with Buddy? HUH? Will that get you off?"

"Pat. Come on." He could barely speak.

"You want to know if his is bigger than yours? It is, you know. A lot bigger. And he's a lot better. Better in the sack, Mr. Hotshot. How's that grab you? Is that what you want to hear? You want another chance at it — uh? Jesus! You make me sick." She stomped into the bedroom and slammed the door, indignant, as always the offended party, he thought.

Nice welcome back. He tried to swallow. There was a certain perverse gratification in discovering her infidelity, since it confirmed his secret fears of wimp-hood rather incontrovertibly. But the comfort was cold and fleeting.

He was dashed. That's the word. Dashed by it. And confused by the way his body chemistry had suddenly become independent of his brain in the face of the confrontation. Instantly benumbed, a growing hard-on had stiffened in counterpoint to the anesthesia of the dialogue. Undeniably, finding her desirable to another man had produced the curious effect of making him want his wife the way he hadn't in years. God, he was some kind of wimp.

The rest of the process of disintegration was rapid and heartless. She wanted out, goddammit, and the dissolution of the marriage was as much to blame on his coming home a day earlier than expected, as it was on his wimpification. It was his unforgivable indiscretion and his weakness and his lack of manhood that had destroyed what they had. She wanted out now. What could a wimp do but tearfully acquiesce?

And so she left him. And if you think there is an inconsistency in Spain's passive willingness to eat, as it were, such a dish of humble pie, considering his vocation and track record, you have understood the facts without knowing the truth.

The truth is that workers are just like you and I. They suffer from toothaches and the common cold. They sometimes become overdrawn at the bank and their cars won't start. If, like Spain, their life is compartmentalized to any degree, they can be quite ordinary-appearing family men who live the most prosaic and common home lives. The guy in the brake shop gets snotty with them, they don't whack him out; they go home and complain and suffer just like anybody else. They get fucked over just like we do.

And so he let her leave. And the idea of whacking Buddy Blackburn, or Pat, or the both of them, simply never occurred to him. What the hell would be the point? Besides, he knew that it hadn't been his ineptitude in bed nor his diminutive dick nor his wimpy ways that had turned them sour. It had been there in the cards all along.

The places where her clothes had been taken from closets, in the master bedroom and in the big walk-in closet, left gaping, black holes that sucked the juice out of his heart and mind. And each time he let himself be pulled by those forces, it took more out of him. For days everything in the house around him sapped his energies, and the most mundane act — opening a refrigerator and seeing a certain food — was enough to make him bleed inside.

It was all Eichord could do not to cry. He was not a man who spilled his tears easily. And the funny thing about it was there was absolutely nothing wrong. Career-wise he was firmly at the reins of an upwardly mobile skyrocket. And when they brought him out to Los Angeles on the case media had tagged the "Eyeball Murders," it was all carte blanche and first class all the way.

"You're a star in this business," the liaison guy had told him. They actually spoke that way out here. It was wild. Everybody in Southern California seemed to be plugged into the entertainment industry in some way. One of the detectives in the central bureau office had a book on the best-seller list and Jack had overheard him talking to someone on the phone about pass-through payouts and a second-lead store display, and for a second he thought he might have been taken to the wrong office.

They had VIP treatment ready for him at the airport and a car waiting; standard. Two street cops had been with the liaison guy and they took him to Studio City first, so the cops could walk him through the most recent crime scene on busy Ventura Boulevard. It was one in a series of what happened to be three gangland whacks, not enough to qualify as serial kills, but to prompt reaching for Jack because of the attendant notoriety. He found the LAPD people crisp, flawlessly groomed, hip, very smart, and insincere. Again, it was the movie business. All of California seemed to have it, a contagious virus of the ethics or something. It depressed him.

It depressed him that he was a star. He was welcomed as if he was somebody out here to plug a movie instead of to work on a murder investigation. He'd been on talk shows. "Very hip," somebody told him. He could sense there was nothing he could do here. It was all too sprawling, too mobile, too California. It was nobody's fault, it was San Andreas' fault. It was just Lala Land.

They took him through the Studio City thing, jerked him around for a couple of hours, and coming back, took him to lunch; not so standard. The meal had to have set somebody back two bills for the four of them, had there been a check presented at the end of it. Waiters hovering around threatening to burst into flame at the very suggestion of a cigarette — one of those kinds of meals. The food adequate and unspectacular. Eichord conscious of his out-of-style threads and aloneness in this crushingly strange place.

"Have you ever seen the Pink Pussycat?" Questions about what was on his agenda for the night. Never mind the investigation. That told him everything he wanted to know right there. They were as thrilled to have him as he was to be here. It would be one of those things where "a special agent of the Major Crimes Task Force aided in the investigation —" They would feed him to media if he didn't watch them tomorrow.

"Want to see the town tonight?" The liaison man said, resplendent in a blazer sweater and gray slacks, the two blue-suited cops and old Jack looking absurdly out of place in the fancy eatery. Eichord sipping chilled chablis like an idiot, feeling sorry for himself. He'd seen the town, thanks.

He'd begged off the Strip and the rest of it, and hoped for a quiet motel room, but someone he knew slightly had insisted in no uncertain terms that he be fed a home-cooked meal, and he let himself be more or less led by the hand to this darkening, alien California suburb, where he was overwhelmed by the déjà vu of feeling himself in the grip of forces over which he had no control.

Eichord, who seldom had either the time or the temperament to sit motionless in front of a television in prime time (he was an addict of ancient Late Show whodunits), was in someone's home half-watching a set and waiting to be called to dinner, watching a show that was supposed to be a "roast" of some elderly comedian, and the comic called upon to make the keynote speech began by spitting pea soup out in a mock-vomit. When the shocked laughter of the grossed-out audience subsided, the comic smiled innocently and said, "It just seemed like the right thing to do."

Eichord leaned back and shut his eyes for a moment, thinking about all the awful, gross, inane, fatuous, imbecilic, terrible, and stupid things that Eichord the man, as opposed to Eichord the cop, had lived to later regret. Burning humiliations and prickling embarrassments that had proved to be mercilessly unforgettable.

Always when he asked himself. Why — the same answer. Because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Eichord sat with his eyes and mind squeezed tight to shut out the memories as the television set of a relative stranger roared in his ears, and he felt a momentary icicle of fear for his own mortality jab him with a cold point, and suddenly he was overwhelmed with sadness and self-pity. He had to laugh at himself.

He was laughing at the absurdity of his thoughts. Feeling so fucking sorry for himself — so sorry that he had to die one day. Feeling so sad about the way everything had gone, about the way his life had gone, about the way Edie's life had gone. He wished he could call her right now.

And this is what his host saw when he walked into the room to ask about salad dressing. Did Jack want vinegar-and-oil or Thousand Island? There was Jack watching a has-been comedian whose toupee appeared to have been spray-painted in place, laughing and enjoying the television show.

His host was heartbroken Jack wouldn't accept a ride back to his motel. Never mind that it was forty minutes away and that at 90 miles an hour, bumper to bumper, traffic moving at its usual mad pace. But Jack was adamant, and after profuse thanks for the home-cooked chow, he was in a Los Angeles cab and headed for nowhere or oblivion or neither of the above, whichever they hit first.

The cabbie intruded on his thoughts with sudden silence. He realized the driver must have paused in his monologue and asked him something.

"Pardon me?" he said.

"The Springs. You ever been to Palm Springs?"

"Not for years."

"Yeah, well, my brother-in-law and me did some work on Frank's home there. We're in the pool business too, see. And we did a job on his pool. He was doing a picture for the director John Frankenheimer. It was the one where he costarred with Janet Leigh, who I had in the cab once. Anyway, this was at Frank's house in Palm Springs and ..."

Christ in heaven. Even the fucking cabdrivers out here were in show biz.

Dinner had turned into another family fiasco. Inside his head the man was Frank Spain, contract executioner. But to the girl at the dinner table he was only "Dad."

"Dad," she whined, giving it two syllables.

"Tiff, don't whine," he said as he chewed.

"You know I'm no whiner."

"No. You're no whiner. So please don't start now, okay?"

"Dad, why can't you like Greg? You didn't like Jeff. You don't like any boy I like."

"I like him fine."

"Come on, Dad. You know you hate Greg. And he's a good guy and all. He's from a nice family. How come you don't like him?"

"I like him already. Give it a rest, please. Let's eat in peace, can't we?"

"It's the only time I have you let me talk to you anymore. You won't ever talk to me. Dad. Please. I just want to go with him to games and shows and stuff like that. It's not like we'd be going out on real dates or, you know, staying out late and stuff." She was fourteen and flowering and he didn't know what to do.

"Do we have to think about it right this second while I'm trying to eat?"

"Can I see Greg, then?"

"When you're fifteen you can see Greg or any other nice boys just like we discussed. But until then I don't want to keep hearing about it, Tiff. Now that's it. Eat you dinner. Please."

She sulked in silence. This girl who was neither a whiner nor a sulker. And she wondered what would become of them.

The Archilochus colubris had not yet joined the avian migration southward. The young girl who was the daughter of the one who called himself Spain stared out through the elegant curtains where a pair of brightly iridescent hummingbirds darted and soared and dove in an incredible air ballet. The female was airborne, zooming up and out of sight, and the tired male stopped to refill from the nearly empty feeder outside the window. As he began to drink, the female sped down from out of nowhere driving him away from his hovering feed-position and they began their elaborate aerobatics again. But the girl saw none of this as her unfocused eyes welled up with tears.

She paid little attention to the splendor of her surroundings as she sat perched on a love seat in her expensively furnished bedroom. Her parents' house was a fine home, and their exclusive residential area was beautifully maintained, free of any offensive ugliness, a haven for the local wildlife, almost a miniature park. But having known nothing but the finest, she had little frame of reference with which to appreciate the elegance of her environment. Nor would she have cared.

Her eyes filled with tears and overflowed in a salty trickle blurring her vision and dripping down her tanned cheek, and she wiped at the little flood with the back of her hand and snuffled into a tissue. She wept in sadness and hurt and anger at her mother, who had abandoned them, and wept for her father, who was so devastated by what had happened and who, grief-stricken, had closed out everything else in his life-including his daughter. And yes, she wept for herself, at the shame and the bitter unfairness of it all. And as she sobbed she thought how ridiculous she must appear right now, curled up on the love seat wallowing in self-pity.

Outwardly she was a lithe, tanned, attractive teenager with long legs and the soft, lovely curves of womanhood beginning to flower and envelop the angular planes, and a stranger would believe her to be sixteen perhaps, and not fourteen. But she was a troubled fourteen-year-old, Spain's daughter. And as she sat oblivious to her richly decorated room, not seeing the courting dance of the hummingbirds, she felt an ancient fourteen. Ancient and lonely.

She snuffled and wiped her eyes and blew her reddened nose again and uncurled the long, tan legs from the cushions, got up, walked out of her bedroom, and went downstairs. Her dad's office door was not completely shut, and she pushed the door open soundlessly and peered in at him sitting at his desk, unmoving. She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of the phone ringing upstairs, and she ran back up and snatched it off the hook on the fourth ring.

"Hello."

"Tiff."

"Oh, hi." It was Greg. She'd been hoping he'd phone her all day. She felt her breath catch a little as she said, "I've missed you."

"Same here. I wish I could see you right now."

"Me too."

"Touch you. Just hold you. I could cuddle you for hours and never get tired of just holding you. You know that?" She loved his voice.

"Greg. I wish we were together right now too."

"Well, why can't you meet me somewhere? Can't you get out of the house?"

"Dad doesn't want me going out anywhere, you know, with boys. He says not till I'm fifteen."

"Oh, wow. Well, can I come over there?"

"Um. I guess you'd better not. He just doesn't understand that I'm grown up. I can't do anything. It's like being in prison since Mom . . . left. I miss you so much."

"Go over to Amber's and I'll pick you up over there. I got Roger's car, man, come on. He'll never find out. No way." Roger was an older boy who let Greg drive sometimes.

"Well, I guess I could get Amber to go with us and we could let her out at Herman's."

"Yeah, okay, let's go. Okay?"

"I'm so lonesome for you. I . . . Oh, all right. I'll be over there about three."

"See ya."

" 'Bye." She hung up and realized there was a thin sheen of perspiration under her hairline. She got all hot and flustered talking to Greg. He was so beautiful, like a movie star, with all that unruly hair and those eyes like two little blue pools. He belonged in Hollywood. Greg always reminded her of the one on that soap she used to watch. What was his name — the one with the unruly, curly hair? Except Greg was a whole lot better-looking.

She wished she could talk to her dad about him, but when she tried, he got furious with her. And Greg was so great. He was gentle. Soft-spoken. A well-educated boy from a nice home. Everything you could ask for.

She was not pretty in the conventional sense but was the sort of girl who would grow into a woman that other women would describe with envy. Eyes were just a bit too far apart. Nose not quite delicately enough shaped, chin just a bit too square to be pretty ever, but an interesting-looking girl with the beginnings of a great body. She wore her hair in a kind of sleek, feathery cap that she spent hours and hours working on to get it just so — and once someone had told her that her hair and eyes made her look like a cat.

She liked cats and had since she was a little girl. In fact, she had copied her current hairstyle out of a magazine because she had misread the caption under the picture. She'd thought it said "Layered Cat" style, when it had been "Layered Cap," and she'd copied it and then later read it correctly, liking it better when it had said cat. She did have a little of the feline look about her, and she knew it and saw it as a strength, rightfully enough, and played to it a little. This kitten was a pretty good cat. A nice kid. And she was going through a very tough time.

She still couldn't believe her mother had actually run off with that . . . that thing . . . and left them. She'd refused to talk to her on the phone each time she'd called the house to talk to Tiff. She despised her mom for what she'd done to them. Especially to Dad. He was ruined by her leaving them like that. She wanted to help somehow, to come to his rescue. It had brought out all of her latent maternal instincts and she'd tried to comfort him, to do things around the house to help him and she couldn't reach him. It's like he was in shock.

"Dad?" she said, sticking her head in the door of his study. "I'm going over to Amber's. I'll be home early. Okay?" He looked up with heavily lidded eyes and nodded yes, and she took off.

She remembered back about a couple of years or so ago, one day her mother had been brushing her hair and they'd started talking about that time of the month, and her mom was talking about why you bleed when you become sexually mature, and she'd said, just kidding around with her mother, "I don't see why we were made like that down there. Why would God want you to bleed every month?"

And her mom had been real serious and she goes, "God made us different from man so we could procreate, and make love, and have babies. And someday you'll be with your husband and you will conceive a baby together, and then in nine months your little newborn child will come out down there."

And Tiff had gone, "Down here? Oh, sorry. No way."

And her mother had been so amused by that. She'd laughed real hard. She thought that was really funny.

Back inside the study, the one called Spain felt the fog lift from his thoughts for a fraction of a second and he absentmindedly realized that his daughter had just stuck her head in the door and spoken to him, and he had looked up from his preoccupied stupor and seen her oval face in the doorway, framed there like a madonna, and the sunlight through the blinds had just for that instant settled around her head like a golden halo.

She knew she was going to let Greg go all the way with her the day they were washing the Trans-Am and Roger left them alone to go riding with some girl who had honked at him as she cruised by. Roger's folks were gone, as always, and she almost went for it right then but she had enough sense to hold him off until she could get The Pill. They'd been fooling around while they were soaping off the car and she was in real short cutoffs and a little T-shirt knotted in front and bare over her midriff, leaning way out over the hood with the shorts hiked way up on her butt and Greg came up behind her,

"AHHH!" She jumped when he pushed into the back of her. "You rat, you're getting me wet."

"Is that right," he said, letting her savor the double entendre as he reached around and cupped her breasts.

"I'm soaking."

"I'd like to soak you good, you know." He was pressed into her and she could feel him hard and insistent,

"OOOOHHHHH, shit?" She nipped the hose back and squirted him with it and they wrestled around, drenching each other in soapy water as they slid over the car's slick surface.

"I'll get you for that." He was nuzzling her gently now and she stopped struggling a little and enjoyed his embrace, and they laughed.

"You're a maniac," she said.

"Yeah, Absolutely," he whispered behind her, his lips in her hair.

"That feels good," she said.

"That does?" He was making little circles with his fingertips, little feathery circles, barely brushing his fingers up against the wet shirt.

"I like the look of your ass like that," he told her, his hand moving down and cupping her right cheek.

"Wet, you mean."

"Ummmm."

"If you're trying to poke a hole through me, you're doing a pretty good jo —" She was turning and his lips shut hers with a soft, velvety kiss.

"Who do you love?"

"Ummff."

"What?" He let her answer.

"You know who."

"Say it." He kissed her and pulled her close again.

"You."

"Yes?" Kissing her so gently.

"Yes."

"YES."

"Ummm."

"You taste good."

"Let's go inside."

"We'll get everything wet."

"Not if we leave our clothes in the kitchen."

"That's an idea."

They went in, shedding wet shirts and shorts and kissing some more, and with their arms around each other they tumbled onto the sofa in the Nunnalys' living room, still moist. And he began his usual ritual that was the next step whenever he got Tiff to undress with him.

"I do love you so, you know that?" Had she been older or wiser, with some mileage, she might have seen through the practiced, toothy artifice as the bogus, manipulative con that it was. But she was fourteen and experienced not at all. And when he opened his mouth and those full, seductive lips of his smiled at her, she could feel her heart miss a beat and her breath caught as she was dazzled by the white smile and perfect mouth — blinded by the light, you could say.

"I love you too, Greg," she said as they kissed. She saw what she wanted to see when she gazed deeply into those pretty-boy Hollywood blues, and she would sort of let herself go and feel her insides falling into the depth of them, splashing down into those sexy, delicious pools.

"Do you really love me?" he'd ask.

So desperately did Tiff love the idea, so total was her commitment to the concept of romance in general, hers in particular, that she began to give herself to him in direct proportion to her desire to be loved in return. And that is a dangerous mistake when you're dealing with a slick little stud like Greg Dawkins. An only child who'd been spoiled rotten, fussed over and pampered, made to feel he was better than everyone else, given too many compliments and too much spending money, and too few rules. A kid with good looks and too much time on his hands and a wide and nasty mean streak.

"Come on, doll. Don't," he'd say as she closed her legs, trapping his creeping fingers in the spreading warmth of her inner thighs, "don't stop me, please. I gotta have you." And the fingers would start moving again, insistently, creeping gently over her, up her long legs toward payday and bit o' honey.

"Please, Greg." She'd try to stop the fingers. "Please," she'd beg him with that hot, wet mouth of hers, her face all puffy and slack with desire, red through the tan, wanting him to please please please. "Please," she would say over and over.

"Please what?" he'd say, biting her a little as he kissed in all the right places where he could sense a heartbeat, kissing her racing pulse with that Hollywood mouth, putting those California-star lips all over her and searing her skin with the flame of his expert kiss as he laid down his con.

"Oh, please," she'd whisper back, urgently, letting him explore the newly discovered, uncharted regions with those adventurous fingers of his, and he would tell her, "Please, baby," pleasing her right back, giving the old please right back to her. "You gotta let me, angel, I'm gonna be sick if I don't get off." And his favorite standby, "Please let me show you the highest form of love," he'd say.

His con would echo in her ears and she'd remember his bullshit later. Later when it was too late. Later, when the most romantic thing he'd ever say to her was "Let's do lines."

But for now she was caught up in his carefully crafted romance. Greg had been put off over and over. There was a limit to how long he'd stand for it. He was the cutest boy in school and all the girls were doing it now. Lots of better-looking girls than Tiff would hop into bed with Greg in a second if he even blinked at them. And she was afraid if she said no much longer she would lose him.

"Please, baby. Please." Those hot fingers were moving and she wanted him. Why lie to herself?

"Don't." She pushed him back a little. "Just listen for a second, honey. Remember last time? How we got so hot and everything and you said it made you sick 'cause I wouldn't let you go ahead?"

"It's not fair, baby. I mean I'm so hot I'm gonna ex-plode." He breathed the flame out on her like a young dragon. "Please let me love you."

"Don't you know I want you to?"

"You don't act like it."

"I love you and I want you bad, believe me."

"Show me, then," he said, fingers moving again.

"Honey, listen. I can't take a chance of something, you know, going wrong."

"I won't let anything go wrong. I'll take care of it."

"I've got to be careful. Not yet, PLEASE. Just be patient a little longer. Greg, sweet, I want you too." She kissed him tenderly and he didn't respond. "After what Mom did to us, to Dad, her going off like that . . . God. If something would happen. It would totally bum Dad out for good. I can't take any chances. Just be patient."

"I don't know if I can," he said, darkly, with just the right degree of urgency. And the next morning they skipped classes and Tiff had him take her all the way downtown to the Free Clinic so she could get some birth control pills. It was the beginning of bad times.

She would be a long time forgetting that day. She could feel her face burning every time she thought about it for weeks afterward. She'd gone out of the house like she always did, heading for school. And Greg picked her up in Roger's wheels and they took off for downtown.

"Wow. It's truly gnarly." The Free Clinic was right out of Dickens and in a rough neighborhood. "You want me to go in with you?" She could tell by his tone he wasn't about to.

"No. Just wait for me, okay?"

"Yeah."

They kissed and she plunged ahead. You had to answer all these questions and this woman was going on and on telling her about everything and she sat there with a slowly building feeling of dread and apprehension creeping up on her, hearing the lady talk to her with half an ear —

"... and this is called an IUD, which means . . . " — and wishing it would all end. And wondering what it would be like between them. The dark cloud of her mother's guilt hovering over her all the while.

"... and this is a diaphragm . . . " And be sure to chew each bite 32 times, and look both ways before crossing the street.

And then it was over and she had The Pills and Tiff was excited and scared and very much fourteen years old as she hurried out of the Free Clinic and ohmigod, OH, NO, DAD!

Greg was nowhere in sight. Her dad, looking about ten feet tall, about to boil over with anger, was waiting for her.

"What are you doing here —"

And he cut her off with a thumb jerked at the car, meaning get your butt in here now. "Get in," he snarled.

"Where's Greg? What are YOU doin' here?"

"GET IN."

"Dad." Nothing. The car starts and he whips away from the curb and into the downtown traffic. "Dad? What's this all about?"

"That's really choice, Tiff. Shouldn't I be asking you?"

"Did you follow me. Dad? I mean, man, that's about the lowest —"

"No, dear. I didn't have to follow you. I knew exactly where you were going this morning."

"Did Amber —"

"Never mind how I found out. I could have picked up the phone and started to call out and heard you say birth-control pills and overheard by mistake, couldn't I? I could have seen you were acting suspicious as hell the last couple of days and I might have caught you in a couple of lies and I might have found out you were seeing this punk Greg when you were supposed to be at your friend's house — I mean, there's a hundred ways I could have found out. When you lie all the time you can expect to get caught. No?"

"Greg's not a punk. Don't call him that."

"Oh. I think he's a punk, all right. I think that is precisely, exactly, and absolutely what he is. A snot-nosed, lying, sneaking, no-good little punk who is about to get his butt in some serious trouble for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl. AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR?"

"You don't have to scream. I'm sitting right here next to you, Dad."

"You little lying whore!" And before he could control himself he lashed out at her, backhanding her and hearing her head crack against the window on the passenger side, hitting her a lot harder than he meant to, slapping her involuntarily, lashing out at her before he could think to stop himself, slapping his errant daughter, slapping Pat, slapping her lover Buddy, slapping the stewardess who had touched him on the plane, letting all his anger and rage and frustration whip out at his little girl.

"I HATE YOU," she screamed at him between sobs. It was a slap he could never take back. Not the smack with the back of his hand or the tooth-rattling headache. That was nothing. It was what he called her. No matter how much she would ever want to, she knew that would be the one thing she'd find the hardest to forgive.

"Do you know the kind of thoughts I had about you on the way down here? The things I thought about while I was parked over across from the clinic waiting for your to get your little slut pills so you could give yourself to that — that boy? It was like realizing for the first time that I'd never known you. You were a total stranger living under our roof. My roof," he corrected. "And now I'm going to have to treat you as if you were a stranger. I'm going to have to make rules. Firm rules."

"I hate you, you know that," she spat, glaring at him with her narrowed cat's eyes, still sobbing and out of control.

"And I love you, and that's why —"

"No you don't," she sobbed ruefully, "you lying old bastard," and the word bastard was the last word she spoke to him for a long, long time.

He went ahead to lay down his new, iron-clad rules, so ridiculous they made his previous constraints seem positively reasonable by comparison. The rigidity he'd shown toward Tiff since Pat ran off to be with her real lover man would appear benign when compared to the stern measures he was going to take to "control" his wayward, delinquent fourteen-year-old.

Spain continued talking, commanding, when he should have been listening, asking. Instead of understanding or gentle guidance, he was making demands she knew she couldn't swallow. He'd taken a loving daughter and used her as a release for his bottled-up anger. And the harsh abrasiveness of this confrontation slammed the door on her once and for all.

"How you could do something like this to me when you know this sort of crap is the last thing I need right now and ..." She only heard a blur of words. But wasn't that just like her father? The last thing HE needed. Never mind what anybody else needed. He could go to hell for all she cared.

She'd tried so hard to give him extra love when Mom had left. The little extras. Worked so hard to be home for him. Clean up after him. Feed him nourishing meals. Do all the things her mother had done around the house. She tried to talk to him, and he didn't want any part of it. When she was solicitous and sympathetic, he'd responded by pulling himself inside the shell of a shattered ego where she couldn't get at him. Now this.

They rode in silence for another half-hour and each kept their own raging counsel, sitting there unspeaking, seething with anger and frustration and self-pity, fuming with bitterness, and the hacksaw edge of their actions and words severed the last of the bonds between father and daughter.

When they pulled up in front of the house, she was out of the car and the front door was slamming before he's reached for the automatic garage-door opener up on the sun visor. And by the time she heard him come in the house, she'd already run upstairs and put some of her mother's old medicine in the case of birth-control pills and hidden her goodies safely away. Eventually he'd get around to asking for them. Or more likely, he'd open her purse and confiscate them without saying anything.

As soon as she heard him back in his office and she'd double-checked that the door to the office was shut, she quickly dialed the Dawkins number.

Greg's mom answered, "Hello?"

"Hi. Is Greg there?" she asked quietly.

"Sure, hon. Oh, do you know what your dad wants with Jerry?"

"Huh?"

"That's okay. I thought maybe this was about the other call. Just a second, Greg's on his way." And she heard him take the phone away from her.

"Yeah."

"What happened?"

"Came along while I was parked," he said in that abbreviated way he talked when he wanted her to know somebody was listening. Speaking so softly she couldn't hear all the words.

"What?"

"Said to get out of here or he'd call the cops on me. Underage. Throw me in. Get it?" He was whispering and not making sense.

"But we haven't done anything. I'm still a VIRGIN," she said, louder than she meant to, the word echoing in her bedroom like a pistol shot.

"Said if I did. Go to jail 'n' that. Going to tell my dad. See I never drive again. He thinks it was Dad's car. Called here and left word with Mom. You gotta stop him."

"I can't stop him. He's a madman. He hit me on the way home and called me a whore and a slut and all this stuff. Told me I was a stranger from now on and all this junk. And I can never see you again." She was sobbing again in spite of herself. "I told that bastard —" She heard the door downstairs. "Gotta go. I'll call you tonight," she whispered, and hung up quietly and waited for the footsteps on the carpeted stairway.

She said nothing when he knocked on the partially open door.

"We have to talk this out, Tiff. May I come in? There's no point in you sitting there not talking to me."

She sat perfectly still. Saying nothing. Looking at nothing. Trying not to show him anything. Let the bastard talk and then get out.

"I'm very sorry I slapped you but you pushed me too far, is all. I've never raised a hand to you in my life, as you well know. But I'm not sure that was the best way to raise a young lady, seeing how things worked out.

"Still. I love you very much, whether you want to accept that right now or not. I hope you'll understand that it was a combination of seeing you about to make a mistake that could ruin your life" — she allowed herself a smirk as he said this —"and the bad timing of it, coming right in the middle of what I think of as a marriage accident. I mean, here we are sitting in the middle of the wreckage of our home life. Mom leaving and all that, and you pull something like this." He shook his head in disbelief.

"I meant every word I said in the car. You've become a stranger to me. You're willful, self-centered, and this thing now — you've become wild. Dangerously so. And all the money and the luxury and no siblings — it's been a mistake. And we're both going to change.

"I'm going to have to start being a father to you for real. I'm going to start laying down the law, and even though it's for your own good, I know you're not going to like it. I allowed your mother to make the rules before, and she didn't care enough about you to do it, and I was too busy with my work. And you've been allowed to reach your teenage years without any parental controls. It isn't your fault. It's my fault. But all that is over now."

She took a deep breath, letting it out real slowly to show him how boring he was.

"We're going to start with the telephone. I don't want you to call Greg again. Is that perfectly clear? You just called him a few minutes ago, didn't you? I mean, even after what we just went through, you couldn't stand to not hear his voice, eh? So I can't trust you anymore with telephone privileges." He walked over to her bedroom phone and took out a large pocketknife.

She turned away while he sliced through the cord. She made her mind an absolute blank.

"I'm sorry I have to treat you this way. But you obviously are unwilling to meet me halfway. I can no longer allow you to have money of your own. You'll be given a small weekly allowance for your school things. I don't want you going out of the house except for . . . "

She had tuned it all completely out. She let herself think about Greg and those eyes and those soft hands and sweet ways, and let her mind daydream about how it would be that first time. It was going to be soon, she promised herself. No matter what she had to do.

"... while I'm at it I'll take the pills and whatever they gave you in the clinic today."

And she heard him searching for her purse and opening it and going through it and taking things, and she had to fight to keep from laughing out loud.

She had terminal cabin fever by the time the weekend rolled around, and her dad finally left the house for the first time in days. She ran downstairs and phoned Greg's number and held her breath, fingers crossed, praying he'd be home. She heard him pick up the phone and say hello on the second ring.

"Don't ask questions," she urged him breathlessly. "If you want to make love to me, hurry over to the house and pick me up. I'll be down by the highway where you turn off, okay?"

"Huh? Oh, oh, yeah. Okay. I'll be right there."

"Hurry," she said, hanging up while he was saying, "Don't worry. I will." And she dashed back upstairs and put some fresh lip gloss on, which she didn't need, and a little eye shadow, which she almost never wore, and checked her hair, and sprinkled some more perfume on, and made sure the pills were in her purse, and scampered off across Ruffstone Terrace to the highway. One great-looking fourteen-year-old virgin-but-not-for-long.

"Hey," he shouted through the open window.

"You got here fast."

"I don't mess around," he said as she ran to the car and got in.

"You got your dad's car." She was surprised.

"He's not home. I didn't ask. He and Mom took the wagon."

"Where do you want to go?" She said it almost absentmindedly.

"Huh?"

"I want to make love to you," she said, turning in the seat beside him, snuggling as close as she could. "Now."

In less than five minutes he was pulling off the road behind a motel-and-restaurant he knew about, and popping open the trunk. He gestured for her to get out. "Come on," he said. He'd produced an old army blanket.

"Where'd you get that?"

"We keep it in the trunk. For medical emergencies." He smiled.

"Is that what we are — a medical emergency?"

"It is for me, angel," he said, helping her step over the barbed-wire fence at the edge of a little triangle of woods.

"I'll nurse you back to health," she told him saucily, taking his hand.

"Yeah," he said, husky-voiced, looking at the way the soft cords gathered around that beautiful, high, perfect ass of hers. He crushed her against him. "Let's get you out of those pants."

"Ummmmm."

"God."

"Oh."

"Jesus."

"Oooooooooohhhhh." Suddenly it all burst loose like a damn being dynamited. All the weeks of wanting and waiting. And he was trying to get her clothes off, pull the damn pants down, she was tearing at his shirt, and the traffic was whizzing by in the distance, and they fell down on the old blanket in the woods behind where the motel-and-greasy-spoon dumped its garbage, which was at this moment in the scheme of events just about the sexiest, hottest, most wonderful and lovely spot in the wide world of sports.

"You know how . . . long —"

"Nnnnnn."

"How long . . . I've been —"

"Oh. Oh, God." She'd waited so long for this. She'd always known that they were going to be together someday; she just hadn't dreamed it might be so soon.

"Oh, baby." His mouth was a hot fire and she let him burn her tongue with it and tried to match the inferno with her wetness.

"Jesus, God, oh." She was smooth and golden tan. He loved the feel of those long, sleek, perfectly smooth legs and he eased into her for the first time. Was there anything like a cherry, sexy-legged, tight little fourteen-year-old pony who was in love with your ass. Oh, she was so tight.

"I'll be gentle baby." Oh, yeah. I'll bust that cherry for serious. Oh, yes. Ram this big mother home. Man, a cat could scratch on that hard-on. "Oh."

"You're so beautiful," he told her, kissing her gently now as he banged into her, "you're — so — beau-tee- fullllll."

"I've wanted you for so long."

"Kiss." Her tanned skin was flawless, velvety, baby-soft, and so incredibly smooth.

Their lips touched, he kept brushing up against her mouth lightly with each stroke, pile-driving her back into the mashed bed of weeds the blanket was covering, driving into her, over and over, putting it to the foxy little lady.

"... wanted you so long I've ..."

"Yeah."

"... I've ... I ... "

"Oh, yeah."

"Yes." He was running his soft hands over those little childlike breasts with their small nipples. Little hot circles on the flesh.

"Ahhhh."

"You like this."

"Yes."

"Oh, yeah, baby."

"Unnnh. Greg."

"Kiss. Give me that hot, wet tongue." He speared down into her mouth, tonguing her, frenching her as he slid in and out.

"God. Oh, I love you."

"Come on. Oh. Come ON, DO IT OHHHHHHHH-HHH."

"AAAAAHHHHHH." He was almost laughing into her mouth. Into her hot, wet fourteen-year-old mouth. Burning his cock in that fiery, mellifluous tightness.

"Awwwww."

He didn't have to hold on for long. She came like a damn runaway train. God, he loved it all. Everything was coming together, in more ways than one. And they cuddled and snuggled and nuzzled, and before long, he was getting turned on by the situation, by the girl and the legs and the tight pussy and the bloody smear on the old blanket, and he was hardening again, and as he kissed her, he reached for the long, tanned legs and she opened herself to him, wetly.

"I need you," he whispered, gently, running his hot fingers down the fourteen-year-old chest. She could feel the burning heat all the way to her heart.

"I need you too."

"Are you mine?" He kissed her and then she answered.

"You know I am," she vowed.

"Tiff, I need to know you love me as much as I love you," he whispered in his soft but urgent way, his fingers moving down to her long, bare legs.

"I do love you," telling him between the kisses.

"Show me how much," he said to her. "Do you want me, Tiff?" He was playing Hal Hunk again now and guiding himself back into the cherry bowl.

"Yesssss. Oh, be easy, ohhhhhh. Oh, God, I'm so hot." Her cat's eyes closed in ecstasy.

"Tell me. Show me. How much."

"I want you. Now NOW NOWWWWWWWWWWW-WWWWWW."

"Say it. SAY IT."

"NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN." He'd settle for that.

After the second time. Lying there spent. Soaked. Bodies cooling in the open air. Listening to the muted traffic noise and thinking. Was there anything as good as that nice, fresh fourteen-year-old snatch. Hot damn, Sam. I am jam — and Chocolate Thunder, he said to himself, smiling.

"What's so funny?" she said, trying to cuddle.

"I was just remembering something else we could share." And with the big Hollywood grin on his good-looking puss, he brought out his blow. "Ever do any of this?"

"What is it?" Her cat's eyes open wide again.

"It's the Real Thing," he sang off-key. He wore a little gold thing on a chain and he used it to take just a little bit out and he said, "Do it like this," and snorted it.

"I can't do that."

"You can eat it, too."

"God."

"Try it. It's wild. Come on. We're going to share goodies, right?"

"Right. Okay." He put a little on the spoon and she cautiously inhaled. "Oooooofffff. Oh! GOD, Greg. GROSS! She sneezed.

"You'll see," he said, one of the only true things he'd said that day.

And she looked over at her hunk and laughed happily.

* * *

Frank Spain, who was then still just a kid named Frank Spanhower, had never been much of a cocksman. His childhood had been typical but sexually neuter. He also had a minor speech impediment that had not been any great asset with the young ladies. And when you're a kid, a speech problem can put you pretty far down in the pecking order. Even the severe acne cases, the freckle factories, the fat kids, the out-of-synch nerds, can look down on somebody with that sort of a defect.

As he matured, his initial sexual experiences had been embarrassing fiascos. Drawn to girls, he knew he was normal, just inexperienced, and this lack of self-confidence made him unduly shy. The work had a way of changing all that.

In the beginning he had been a gofer. The mob then operated from the fresh-vegetable storefronts along Produce Row in St. Louis, using their legit fronts to launder racket bucks. Frank started working for Mr. Ciprioni because they liked the kid, felt sorry for him, and had him run errands around the office. The kid knew nothing from mobs. But they paid him well, and he and Vince Ciprioni, the youngest son of The Man, were school chums and fellow gun nuts. Vince was always trying to get him to teach him how to shoot.

"Damn, you're good with a rifle," he told him one day. Frank had talked his mom into letting him finally junk his Red Ryder BB gun and get a.22, and within a week there wasn't a living shitbird within ten blocks of their house.

"Not too bad, I guess," he said. He knew he was good. He'd gone to Boy Scout camp one year and beat all the other boys easily first time he'd ever shot skeet.

He never bragged about it, but when the boys found out they shared a genuine interest in and fascination with weapons Frank admitted to Vince that he'd started packing.

"You're carrying! In school?"

"Yep." He explained his cousin had "got beat up real bad" by a gang who ran the streets near his house.

"They fuck with me," he said, taking care with the difficult consonants, "I'm ready." He patted his pocket.

Vince's eyes were rivited to the pocket where the hardware rested.

"Were you in school when Jarrod's revolver fell out in art class?"

"Yeah. I 'bout shit." They laughed over the kid who'd moved to Missouri from San Berdoo, and who affected the California teen-gang style replete to outmoded D.A. and the much discussed pawnshop.38 he carried with him to class.

"I don't think Old Lady Shindleford ever even caught it," Vince said, laughing, "the fuckin' thing dropped out like a damn bomb. I'm surprised it didn't go off." They both roared. "Can I see it?" he said with eyes glued to the pocket.

"Umm." Frank smiled and pulled out the piece. A Smith & Wesson with the short barrel and the hammer filed off.

"Can you hit anything with it?" Vince asked, aiming the gun.

"Once inna while," Frank said quietly. And that was the only time Vince Ciprioni ever saw the gun until the day Frank shot the four boys who'd jumped Vince down in back of the Rialto. Four of them. All with metal pipes. Frank shot the four of them deader than dogs right there in the alley down in back of the Rialto. And he didn't know what to do with the gun, so Vince made him give it to him and he took it to his father and told him what had happened and what Frank had done, and his old man just took the piece from him and told the boys never to say anything about it again.

The Man called Frank in by himself. Frank figured he'd tell him how grateful he was for saving his son's life and that shit, but all he did was say, "You're a good kid. But can you keep your mouth shut?" Frank nodded yes. "Okay," he said, the hard Ciprioni eyes boring into him for a long time until he'd seen whatever he'd been hoping to see. "Take 'er easy," he said, and that was all. No thank you for saving Vincent's ass. Nothing. Ehh. Frank shrugged and went about his business.

Vincent, on the other hand, couldn't shut up about it. Vince would tell him thanks about five times a day until after a week or so Frank finally had to ask him to please for crissakes shaddup about it. And the event didn't make him feel tough, or recklessly invulnerable, the way it affects some people, nor did he have any desire to clip out the stories about the killings and start a scrap-book. Oddly, it meant nothing to him. He handled it the way some kids would climb a tall tree or knock a softball over the left-field wall. He was a shooter. But soon after the incident he started calling himself Frank Spain.

Secretly he figured one day he'd be hoisting a box of fresh lettuce and the boss would come up and slip a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket, but it never happened. What Mr. Ciprioni gave him turned out to be something much more valuable. He gave him his trust.

A few months after the shooting The Man called him back into a storeroom and told him he was having a problem. A guy was creating some problems for him. It was a situation that required a solution. A final solution, he said. A piece of work like Frank had done in back of the Rialto. That kind of work.

"Well, now, then, there," Spain said, in his best James Dean.

"You understand what I'm saying to you?"

Frank nodded that he understood.

"I need somebody good. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut and do a piece of work like that. The money I pay for that is ... " He pulled an envelope out and started counting. He'd never seen so much money in all his life.

"I'll do it," Spain said.

"You sure about that? I know you're good but you're very young. It's one thing to stop some punks hurting a friend of yours, another thing to clip somebody cold. If you're not sure, don't take it."

Spain said nothing, but he returned Mr. Ciprioni's stare for a full beat and reached slowly for the envelope. He let him take it and put it in his pocket, and then he told Frank the name and where the man lived. It was a downtown hotel. And that night Frank went down to the Milburn and walked in and took the elevator up to the fourth floor and knocked, and when the door opened, he asked the man if he was who the contract was for, and the guy said he was, and the kid pulled out the hammerless Smith and put a round right in his heart, turning and going down the emergency stairs, deciding this time he'd get rid of the piece himself. And from then on he became Mr. Ciprioni's shooter.

Gaetano Ciprioni was not in Tony Gee's family, which was the St. Louis mob of that time. The boss man explained the hierarchy to Spain.

"This is nothing here. It's shit. All the action is in Kansas City far as Missouri goes, and Kansas City doesn't have shit. St. Louis isn't anything serious in the organization. It's all run by Chicago anyway. The big man there is gonna retire soon. When he does, the man gonna inherit the whole middlewest country is my main man. He is to me what I am to you, you understand?"

"Yeah."

"He's gonna change things. When he does, I'll be moving up to The Council. You don't knew what that is, do you?" Frank shook his head no. "It's the head of all the families. ALL the families, even the big New York families. The Council controls everything. I'll be working there. I'm going to be needing someone here I can trust. To do jobs of work for me. Mostly here in the Midwest. The pay will be outstanding, I can promise you."

"Okay."

"Okay, we understand each other." They shook hands. Spain never could get used to how the Italianos liked to shake hands all the time. But one thing about The Man: if he told you something like this, well, you could take it to the bank.

Spain was what his sainted mother would have called a late bloomer. He'd already worked his way to the top level of his chosen profession by the time he met Pat, and his new self-confidence allowed him to approach someone for the first time.

She was an ordinary girl, although he saw her as quite beautiful. Mary Pat Gardner, who worked for his neighborhood dry-cleaner, which — many years later — he wanted to tell her had been a family operation, a family laundry for money as well as clothing, but he never told her about his work. He "traveled." He was in "sales."

One day he walked in and she looked especially radiant and he told her so.

"You look real pretty today."

"Thank you," she beamed. "How's life treating you?" She took his dry-cleaning sack and started writing on a pad. "I'll get your things in just a second."

"No hurry." He'd seen her in there when he brought his clothing in each week for a year or so, and finally he'd worked up enough nerve to ask her out. His speech impediment was almost gone. Frank no longer stammered if he concentrated on what he was saying. He was prepared to say, "Would you like to go to the movies with me Friday night?" That's what he planned to ask her. But what he said was, "Mary Pat?"

And she looked up from the order she was writing and said, "Uh-huh?"

"Would you like to know to the noovie, MOW to the noovie, GO to the MOVIE WITH ME?" Christ christ christ, is there no mercy no justice no rest no slack?

He could still recall how he shriveled with the hopelessness of it as she smiled at him and said, "Sure. When?"

"Mmmm. Okay," he mumbled, starting to pick up his dry-cleaning, so nervous, so blown away by his bungled attempt that it took a few beats before he realized she'd said yes. He couldn't believe it. It was a major victory of his life. The only conquest he could remember being genuinely proud of. More challenging and frightening than a dozen contracts.

She hadn't said "I guess so," even. Nothing tentative or halfhearted. A big smile and a warm, quick "Sure. When?" He loved it. He fell instantly in love with her. To him she was beauty, smoldering desire, femininity, and sex incarnate. And he thought she liked him too.

He proposed to her on their second date, surprising her with a ring he'd been carrying with him. She accepted, surprising both of them, somewhat bemused by the size of the stone, which she suspected was glass. The next day she was walking by a jewelry shop and just happened to take it in.

"Mr. Plotkin?"

"Yes?"

"Remember me? Mary Pat Gardner?"

"Shirley Goodell's cousin?"

"The same. Mr. Plotkin, I want your opinion on a family heirloom." She thrust a hand under his wrinkled puss. "My aunt left me this. I was told it had some value." He screwed something into his eye and peered at it, holding her hand.

"Oi veh. That's about five karats of perfect diamond you got there, child. Yes. I'd have to say that had some value." He looked again. "Nice color. Not a bubble. Nothing. It's a show-stopper," he said.

They were married not long after. Within a year Spain had fathered a little girl. Outwardly he maintained a family life of seeming normalcy. A salesman or consultant or troubleshooter (he loved that one!), depending on who he was talking to, with a checkable "legend," a complete fake background that had been prepared by experts to withstand fed-level scrutiny, with the appearance of upwardly mobile, upper-middle-class wealth. A typical, if atypically rich, American mercantile transient.

Had he been a normal man to begin with, or even in a normal profession, it might have been different. An accountant with seasonal work overloads, a car dealer with long hours, every line has its occupational drawbacks. But Spain's vocation took him out of the city unexpectedly, sometimes for long periods, and the nature of the business made him secretive.

"You never talk to me," Pat so often would say.

"I talk. I just don't have that much to say."

"I don't even know what you do. Most men share their work with their wives. It can't be that boring."

"Believe me," he say, shaking his head in exasperation, "you don't know how lucky you are. Just be glad I don't bring my work home with me like some guys." Wasn't that the truth? "I decided a long time ago I'd seen too many marriages sour because the guy was always taking his job to bed with him. I leave my work outside. I'll take care of the selling, the money to put the food on the table. You take care of making us a good home." And so on.

And time has a way of passing so quickly. And before you know it, if you aren't careful, you can dedicate yourself to your calling but sacrifice your personal life in the bargain. He let his family slip through his fingers.

"I like a dedicated man. That's one thing about you, Frank," The Man said to him. "And you keep your mouth shut. It's a rare commodity in this day and age. Even my own guys. I hear 'em goin' around putting their mouth all over themselves, callin' each other guinea this and greaseball that. And worst of all, this son of mine talks about wops, which is a word sets my teeth on edge. I don't even like to hear the colored called niggers. You — I don't think I ever heard you say dago even, am I right?"

Frank shrugged. "I just don't think like that."

"My son. My youngest. He looks up to you so much. Ever since that time you whacked those boys. It's all I hear. Papa, Frank shot all four of 'em, he'd say. Hit four moving targets and three head shots. How many times I've heard that when the kid and I talk about you. You never said shit to me. You never asked him for nothin'. Never asked me for a dime."

"I was glad I was there that day."

"Yeah. Me too," It was a father talking to his son after the baseball game. Telling him how proud he was of the homer the kid clobbered in the bottom of the ninth. And the kind of dedication he gave to The Man was the kind you only give to family. Perhaps, when you think about it, that was his real family. It was certainly the one he devoted his time and energies to.

First, when he failed to hold his wife, it was as if the bedrock on which he was standing suddenly cracked open, and now . . . the thing with his daughter, he felt himself slipping into the abyss.

He was sitting there in the living room in the darkness, waiting for his little girl and thinking about what he could have done to keep Pat, and he heard her coming up the steps and opening the front door.

"You could have had him drive right up. No reason for you to walk all the way from the highway. I wasn't going to go after him with a ball bat. Of course it's not a bad idea."

She didn't even look at him, just started up the stairs.

"That's the last time you'll be allowed out," he said to her. "You get three strikes like everybody else. You've had two. One more and I call the juvenile authorities and turn you over to them. I can't chain you in your room. If the authorities can't take care of you I'll have to hire special guards. Whatever it takes, we'll make sure —" And the sound of Tiff's bedroom door slamming shut on his words put a period to his thought.

Inside her room, Tiff made her decision. She had asked Greg about what they were going to do and he wanted to cut out for Florida. She said, Let's sleep on the idea and they'd talk at school tomorrow. Roger Nunnaly had his fill of school and they could go with Roger in his car. They'd all take off for the South. Lots of fun in the sun. Lots of wild scenes on the beach. It sounded great to Tiff. She started packing and then realized she'd never get the clothes out of the house past . . . him. She dumped her books out of her voluminous book bag and began to pack the essentials into the bag and her biggest purse.

She had some money saved. Quite a bit, in fact. And there was the jewelry. She packed her dowery in silence.

And downstairs, the man who calls himself Spain sits quietly in the shadows.

"Are we really going to leave? I just can't believe it," she had asked Greg, her cat's eyes blinking as she looked at her white knight.

"Believe it," he told her, starting to load the car. Are we really gonna turn out a sweet little pussy like this? Does a snake have lips? he thought to himself, grinning and whistling softly as he packed the last of their meager belongings in Roger's car. He'd put this little fox to work for him.

Within twenty-four hours of the kids' departure everyone involved in the respective families knew they'd left together, including Pat and her insurance lothario, not to mention the cops. Too many people were involved in this. Whole families had suddenly been turned upside down. Spain had ended up having to talk to the police several times, which to him was the equivalent of repeatedly plunging his hands into boiling water, but anathema or not, his daughter had disappeared. He had to find her.

"They'll catch them before the day is out," Roger Nunnaly's father had assured everyone, "that car will stand out a mile."

The private Spain had suddenly become very public, sharing secrets with perfect strangers, not to mention the cops, all of whom were now involved in his personal decision-making.

People he'd never seen in his life were seated in his living room telling him ridiculous things about runaway hotlines and dope and how young girls can use sex to ensare a poor, innocent boy like Greg Dawkins, whom Spain had nailed for what he was first time he saw him, and some kid named Roger who sounded like a crackhead known to everyone but his own parents. And Spain sat there letting it all lap over him as they talked about how his wife and daughter had both run away from him, and almost overnight life had become a steamroller that was crushing the shards of what remained of his shattered ego.

But there was no loving wife to take him aside and say, There, there now, honey, it's going to be all right. You tried your best, Daddy. You just forgot that fathering is a skill as well as an art. And it's a skill that demands practice as well as good intentions. And nobody was there to tell him that Tiff was hurting too. That when you're fourteen years old, frustrations and humiliations are deep knife wounds. Wounds that can be fatal if not treated in time.

He was alone to take it all and deal with it. And that next night, after all the Dawkinses and Nunnalys and police and juvenile authorities had cleared out, he sat there in the dark feeling like he was having a heart attack, and it all came to sit on him with its enormous weight of guilt, and he sat there sobbing and hurting in the darkness of his fine home and began paying dues with currency he didn't even know he had.

And he was still there the next morning, sitting there on the carpeted stairway, racked with the dry heaves, on the edge of breakdown, consumed with guilt, nailed by despair, and absolutely, painfully, heartbreakingly alone.

And half of him was sorry for himself and the other half wasn't, and slowly, like the hard, seemingly stout heart of a diseased gum tree, he began to crack apart deep inside.

So Spain sits there on the edge of his reality, in the gathering debris of his life, well and truly screwed, blued, and subdued.

And the shadow of death edges closer.

Eichord fingered the edges of a few cards and scowled slightly. Christian's Cards and the ritzy mall in which it was situated — both brimming with purposeful, moneyed Californians and a smattering of ordinary commoners like himself — were as far removed and remote as the constellation of Andromeda. Another distant and far-removed spot on the planet, Chicago by name, kept nudging him.

He felt totally out of place in the shop, among genteel, immaculate women clerks and genteel, immaculate customers who regularly frequented such a place. Eichord stood looking at humorous greeting cards in the midst of the L.A. work day, such as it was; a homicide cop feeling the proverbial bull-in-china-shop as he sweated through his short-sleeved shirt, handgun harness, and stylish polyester.

The weight of the heavy revolver in the shoulder rig, the incongruity of the surroundings, the knowledge he was looking at cutesy cards with all that bad steel under his arm, made him feel ludicrous, out of place, quite uncomfortable. A trickle of perspiration trailed down his spine as a small and perfectly coined woman with a slightly rodentlike face asked him pleasantly, "Can I help you with something?"

He smiled automatically as he shook his head. "Just looking. Thanks." Brilliant. She would never have guessed you were looking. He was standing there trying to figure out which of the crazy cards a little girl would like. He was trying to recall what her age was now. He had her birthdate written down somewhere, but he'd forgotten where. He looked at another card and it made even less sense than the last one.

What would a little girl like to get in the mail? He'd tuck a twenty in there. Kids that age (what age?) would like money better than anything else. But would she be uncomfortable getting money? Would she remember him?

And what would her mother say when Lee Anne asked her who this man was?

"Oh, you remember Jack, Uncle Jack the cop?

What kind of a favor would he be doing a little girl whom he never saw anymore. Somebody into whose life he'd insert himself once or twice a year with a phone call where neither party had anything to say. Somebody growing up so fast. She'd been what? Fifty inches tall when he'd seen her last. A year ago when he'd called she told him how big she was, and she seemed to have sprung up a couple7 of feet overnight. They'd be unrecognizable if they saw each other again. But he couldn't let go.

He pulled another card from the rack, a ridiculous-looking caricature saying "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you. So this year, when your birthday rolls around again ..." And you opened the accordion fold and the caricature assured the recipient, "... that's what I'm going to do for you: NOTHING." He sighed and pulled the card and its envelope off the rack and went over to pay the lady.

Eichord thanked her and put his change in his pocket and walked out into the sunlight. He opened his car door and pitched the sport coat onto the back of the seat next to him. He was already drenched. Why was he so hot? It was just a card.

He wondered what Edie would say or what she would think when she saw a letter from him to her daughter. He thought about how she'd react to the twenty and he decided against sending any money. He'd write a note instead.

He was going to lose them, he knew. He was losing that sweet little girl too. The distance and time would do it, if nothing else. Life can be a bitch, he thought, wondering what would happen to him next. Would the fault crack open swallowing the shopping mall, the cars, him, the rat lady — all of us? Would the whole fucking thing fall into the ocean?

Eichord took the transmission lever out of Park and drove out of the expansive and posh shopping center, and as he drove by a metal trash barrel, he lowered the window and threw the card, envelope, and the sack into the trash and drove slowly out into the traffic, shaking his head as he shivered in the icy blast of AC.

What he ought to do was, he should go back and pluck that card out of the trash. But in that half-second he felt the chill of the eyes of the man at the airport. The man looking at him over the top of a greeting card. A wise guy's eyes. And Eichord shivered again, sweat chilling on him like the foreboding of death frightening the soul of some fey visionary. And the case intruded on the flash of imagery, as he realized he was leaving L.A. knowing less than when he'd started.

Somebody once asked Eichord, "What do you do? I mean, you know, what does a detective do?"

And Eichord said, "You look for footprints in the cottage cheese." It got a laugh at the time, but hell, who's kidding who? There it was.

The "Eyeball Murders" were anybody's guess. Unrelated kills except for the assassin's trademark. The victims had their eyes shot out. It could be the old mob-style punishment hit. Or one of those and a couple of copycat kills. Or any damn thing. Whatever it was. Jack hadn't even a glimmer of a clue. It was, by the looks of it, another fine fucking mess and he couldn't wait to be away from Lala Land, and back to Buckhead, where NOBODY knew who the fuck John Frankenheimer was.

She had inherited her mother's skin, the kind of pigment that tanned to a golden coppery lustrousness, skin so smooth and pliant as to bedazzle and cause grown men to get a little catch in the throat at the sight of it when it appeared in any degree of expanse, such as displayed in a string bikini or a tiny halter top and short shorts. And that was Greg's next move, to get as much of that lovely skin showing as possible.

She had her father's eyes of many colors. Slate-gray to blue-green depending on the light. Greg gave her eyes his biggest smile and a wide sparkle of Hollywood white gleamed in his dark, beautiful face.

"Ummmm." He nuzzled her, roughly licking at her like a big puppy, leaving little love marks on her neck and moving down the side of her throat as he gently eased the little top off. "I could eat you up, you know that?" he said.

She made a contented murmur as he ran the tip of his tongue across her chest and down toward the still-rather-flat breasts and small nipples. He said something softly to her, but it was muffled in her chest and she said, "What?"

"I said you know where I want to take you?" he repeated, looking up at her as his tongue flicked out at her in little darting moves like a bullfrog after June bugs.

"Where? To bed again?"

"Of course. For sure. But I want to take you to one of those great ski places like Vail or Aspen. You know — get a little cabin of some kind all alone up there where the powder is really bitchin'. Like on the advanced slope and like, uh, you know, just kick back."

"Oh, Greg," she purred, "it's just like I thought it would be between us." He nuzzled her again and she gazed down at him with her wide-set cat's eyes and let her hand tangle in his curly hair.

"Do you know I love you?"

"Yes," she breathed. "And I love you, too."

"Ummm." He nuzzled and kept talking into her body and she laughed softly. God, how she adored him. It was working out, after all. It was so good, and he was gentle and considerate, and she knew it was going to be wonderful between them now.

"What?" She laughed.

"Can't you understand English, girl?"

"No. Not when you're talking into my belly button, I can't."

"Hello," he said. "Anybody home?" he said to her navel.

"Yeah, I'm home."

"Uh huh. Me too." He kissed her stomach tenderly and along her tanned rib cage.

"Ah! That tickles."

"Hah," he said, licking her side and making her laugh. She couldn't believe how beautiful he was.

"You're my movie-star hunk, you know that."

"I've got a hunk for you, all right."

"Now be a good boy and don't talk dirty," she said as he started working his way up her chest again. Nuzzling, chewing, licking, taking her in his teeth very gently. Blowing his hot Hollywood breath over her, bewitching her with his soap-opera eyes and his magic tongue. Working her. Playing her the way you tire a fish before you net it, keeping his rod stiff and high, taking his time, playing it out, never losing his patience, making the act a little art form all its own.

"Ummmm." He kissed her hard on the mouth and said softly in his super-con voice, "Oh, baby, we could like be skiing the advanced slope and then we go back to our little ski chalet, our cabin on the mountaintop, a Swiss lodge like in the movies, and like we get snowbound and just make love for weeks on end. Lay in a nice supply of goodies and get in a big old fur coat or some-thin' and snuggle down in front of the fire" — and she kissed him on the mouth as he spoke "— get logs once in a while, and sip some brandy and toot a little stuff and, um, you know, just watch the snow fall."

"Watch the snow fall," she said, a twinkle in her eye.

"Does that sound good?"

"It sounds wonderful, Greg."

"Yeah. It sounds good to me, too." He kissed her very gently, kissing the corners of her mouth and then below her nose, then in the hollow of her chin, then in her dimples, and then boxing the compass around her lips and then letting his long, Harry Hollywood tongue dart between those lips, and even her mouth tasted wet and hot like a warm honeypot.

"Oh, Greg — I want you now." She was breathing her hot breath against his throat and cheek and her eyes were closed.

"Oh, yeah? Let's just see about that." And he touched her. "Baby. Ouch. You burned my hand." And she said something he couldn't catch and he let his hand go back in again and said, "Hey, you're all wet down here. Did I tell you to get all wet like that?"

"I couldn't help it. You make me that way."

"Do you really want me, Tiff?" He was watching himself now as he always liked to do, chumping some little bitch off with his slick-stud number, not looking in a mirror but going off somewhere in his head and watching his performance. Pimping a girl off. Getting her off with his Charlie Charm shit. Smooth as stuff and double tough as Memphis Garrett Snuff. Run that game right down her throat, understand? Oh, he liked it when it was like this, when he could play the girl like a musical instrument, make her hum and sing. Make her jump and shout and knock herself out. It was making him so hard to watch himself inside his good-looking head and he held himself on his elbows right over her. "You really want me, baby?"

"Yes. Yes. YES."

"Ask me nice, then. Beg me for it if you want it."

"Please."

"What?" He let the head go in, it was already slick and it seared him with her cherry-red fire.

"YES, YES, YEEEESSSSSS."

Don't ever doubt there are some boss players out there who know how to take a little girl and make her a love slave. Just 'cause a few of 'em are thirteen, fourteen, don't think they don't got the ole diamond-cutter's touch for the big O. Cold got to be. Down, Jim. He could see himself getting her off now and hanging in there where a lesser stud would let 'er buck and kick loose. Hanging in and gritting his pearly whites in concentration, Stayhard Incorporated, and if you think I'm sexy, if you really, truly DO want my body, come on, girl, and tell me about it. Tell me more. Work with me, Annie.

"Nnnnnnnn," she responded to Dr. Feelgood's teen romance.

"Yes," he said, twenty-four hours a day and we're up all night.

"Uh." Slick as seals.

"Yeah." Fall in love with some of this. And Fourth of Julysville.

Oh, my. This is what they were talking about at school. Oh. No wonder. God. Oh. Oh, yes. Greg. Oh, you sweet, you perfect . . . oh . . . OH GOD . . . OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH!

It's all he can do to make himself stay in her and keep the kisses going, a little soft reggae posturepedic boom-chickaboom-chickaboom-and TCOB, the doctor is still on the job, a few little gentle nuzzlings into the sweaty shadows, an endearment or two. Nice J.O.B., he thinks, and he's up and away and off chopping up some Hollywood high on the Formica.

"Let's do some lines, angel." Superstud.

Spain's first nightmares are gentle and deceptively lacking portent.

Even though it was only a nightmare, he saw it clearly, brightly, transcribed lucidly on the dream screen of his mind, a vivid and incredible scenario that was remarkably detailed and agonizingly real. And because of the absence of threat, it was all the more frightening to him. Unlike a dream where you're pursued by bad guys through a temple, jump into a waiting car, and just as you speed off down the hill, you run out of gas, and the nightmare comprises those seconds of fear as you hope the car's momentum from the downhill slope will carry it over the top of the hill to safety, but as it reaches the last few inches, the car begins to inch to a stop then starts rolling backward and the dream is your struggle to get out of the car as it rolls back toward them . . . unlike that sort of a dream, the nightmare he sees carried no overt threat. And later, when the violent dreams begin to assail him, he will remember this dream as benign and harmless, but when he has this dream, one of his first bad nightmares, it shakes him to the quick.

Here is the dream: it is afternoon. He is the sports-caster on a local radio station. No, he doesn't know why either, he was never on the air in his life and has little interest in sports. He is the color man, half of a famous color-and-play-by-play team, and the radio station is in the basement of a large metropolitan bank. The walls of the studio are lime green. He is quite successful and popular, and he enjoys a reputation for being adept at baseball, excellent at basketball, and the number-one color man for football games. These are all well-delineated details.

He is on the air. It is halftime at a big game. Saturday afternoon, and he can smell the smoke there in the hot, sweaty pressbox of the ball club.

The roar of the crowd.

"Unitas drops back," his play-by-play man says, "he's going to throw the bomb! Three seconds to half-time on the clock, Frank."

He responds without a trace of a lisp or hint of a stammer as he says, "That's right, Gil, three seconds and Unitas is in trouble, he's got to let it go now or — WOW! There it goes! What a cannon! Johnny Unitas gets off a perfect, textbook-classic spiral, what a gorgeous ball, and . . . unbelievable, Raymond Berry's got it in the end zone! A ninety-five-yard bullet out of the Unitas rifle and the Baltimore Colts end the half with a six-point lead over the Green Bay Packers as the gun sounds, twenty to fourteen."

"Into the spot, and you guys are sounding good in the truck," the voice says over the nightmare intercom. Dream logic confuses television and radio, but Spain is unaware of this and dreams on.

"Telegram, Frank," an engineer says, handing him the yellow Western Union envelope. He opens it and reads:

FRANK YOU ARE A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT. I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. And it is signed Sylvester P. Landis III, and there is an address.

"Gil," he asks his phantom colleague, "who is Sylvester P. Landis the third?"

"Never heard of him. What's the matter, Frank?"

"Here," he says, "read this."

"Damn," the man says. "And you don't know this guy?"

"Never saw the name before. What ya think? Think this might be a prank?"

"Oh, hell, yes. Just some whacko out there listening to us. Throw it in the trash. Come on — forget it, man. Let's get the stats and go to work. You take care of the halftime and I'll pick up at the end of the color, okay?"

"Fine," Spain says, and he does a flawless halftime job. The baton twirlers, the marching bands, the Sousa music, he makes it all flow like fine wine. The rest of the game goes beautifully. At the end of the game he goes back to the station and there is a big fuss made by someone out in the parking lot. The men all go outside and find that the police have apprehended a weird-looking crazy who has defaced Frank's new BMW with a spray can of red paint. He has printed "piece of shit" on the trunk and "Frank sucks" on the passenger door in neatly sprayed aerosol Day-Glo.

"Do you know this man, Frank?" one of the uniformed cops says to him.

"No. Who the hell is he?"

"Claims he knows you. He says his name is Sylvester P. Landis."

"Some whacko. Look." He shows the cop the telegram.

"Did you send this?" The cops are looking at the weird crazy. He is a goofy-looking guy with a crazed, spaced-out expression. Thick, Coke-bottle glasses, horrible acne, bad teeth, a total loser.

"Sure, pig, so what? I wish Frank was dead."

"Uh huh. Mr. Landis . . . you are under arrest." And they drag the weirdo off reading him his rights, handcuffed, and ease into the back of a waiting squad car.

Time passes. Frank (Spain) learns the guy is a harmless crank who likes to send sportscasters hate mail. Spain seems to realize he is dreaming at this point and wonders what the hell all of this has to do with anything. But the dream plays on. The spray painting of the BMW is the first act of vandalism the crazy has ever engaged in, and he is released. There are calls and mail, but Frank ignores it all. Then, one night he returns home and finds his apartment trashed. Across the wall in red Day-Glo is the legend I WISH FRANK WAS DEAD. The police arrest Landis. He confesses. There is a trial. He is found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail for Defacing A Sportscaster's Property, but before he can serve time, he commits suicide in his cell. He has left a suicide note. Spray-painted in red on the cell wall it says: FRANK IS A PIECE OF SHIT.

The radio management sense that Prank is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but now this horrible crazy is gone and perhaps he will be able to lead a normal life again without someone bothering him constantly. They insist Frank take a week off. He does so. A few days later, back from a relaxing few days in the Bahamas, tanned and refreshed, he drops by the station.

"Er, uh, hullo, Frank," one of the newsmen says sheepishly. "What a, uh, nice surprise." He acts nervous and evasive.

"Frank! Oh! How nice," another of the employees says. "Did you enjoy your vacation?" Everyone is so uptight to see him. Down in the newsroom he is standing there idly, relaxing, just grooving around, reading the wire copy, when he notices part of a mailing tube there in the trash. As he sees the crude printing on the torn cardboard tube, the dream sort of shifts into high gear and begins to take on a glow, as if a light had just come on saying IMPORTANT PART OF DREAM . . . BEWARE! The bogeyman part is coming.

It is the unmistakable handwriting of the one called Sylvester P. Landis. And suddenly, even before Spain/Frank knows what is in the tube, his legs and arms are covered in icy, fear-inspired pinpricks of apprehension and paranoia.

"Hey," he collars a newsman, "what came in this tube?"

"Huh?" The newsman shifts his gaze uneasily, refusing to look him in the eye. "I dunno."

"Come on, Bill. What the hell is going on?"

"See Schmertz." So realistic. Another station employee named Sid Mertz. They call him Schmertz. All the details crystal clear. Right down to the mundane trivia and who-cares minutiae.

"Okay, Sid," Frank confronts the man, "what's the deal here?"

"We weren't going to show you, Frank. You know. It's probably a prank." He's sweating now. "Go down in the boiler room."

"The boiler room?" Schmertz nods affirmative and Frank races down the stairs. The boiler room looks just like the basement of the school he went to when he was a kid. And there in the trash, waiting to be burned, is the rest of the mailing tube filled with papers. He retrieves the package from the trash bin and reads the address on the torn tube. It says, in part, FRANK — THE PIECE OF SHIT c/o the radio station. And the printing is unmistakably that of the dead man Landis.

The first piece of paper inside the tube is an ugly, primitive, crayon sketch of a crudely drawn clown. He remembers he drew it back in the second grade and they laughed at him. Now it is so bizarre and frightening to see there in the tube addressed by the crazy. Landis has penciled all kinds of filth around the clown drawing saying things like THIS IS YOU, SHIT FACE, I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. All the usual. Then the rest of the package is what really scares him. It frightens him so badly he wakes up, shivering, wide awake from the folds of the nightmare. Because inside the remnants of the tube are photos of his mother and father that were burned up when their home burned to the ground back in Agency, Missouri, over thirty years ago, at least five years before Sylvester P. Landis III was born.

The radio station with its busy teletype machines, and the offices he conjures up in the basement of a bank, actually were those of a finance company. They were places the boy, now the man who calls himself Spain, had run in terror to hide. Places that had spawned oppressive fears and memories of painfully vivid horrors.

Halftime at a football game had been another moment of heart-stopping fright for the child. Names and places of the past meant to conjure up stinging humiliation as he remembered the rankling cachinnation of his tormentors. Unforgivable wrongs once experienced in a boiler room just like the one in his dream. Fears, terrors, embarrassments, and cruelties that had led him down that alley toward his first kills.

Even the name — Sylvester P. Landis III, in truth a freely associated amalgam of humiliating and dread memories from his childhood past. A past shaped of events that had pointed him, like a gun, whenever his masters had directed him toward another target. A past that had rebound like a freak ricochet blasting apart his own family.

And Spain shook the dream off instantly upon awakening, with at first only the vaguest eidolons lingering in his mind. But he wouldn't let it alone and he was haunted by the evanescent image of that obscene clown, and he worried it in his mind the way your tongue keeps darting into the hollows of a newly broken tooth. You know better, but some things you just can't leave alone.

For over five weeks he'd wooed her, played her, bedded her repeatedly, romanced her, dazzled her with his fancy tonguework, done his whole repertoire of rap dances, all the while this gentle, handsome, soft-spoken, intelligent youngster is introducing her to cocaine and progressively kinkier sex and the fast lane. And he is getting her primed, ready, willing. Waiting for the right moment when he can turn her just so, take her out onto the dangerous shoulder of the road outside the fast lane, where only the special players run.

For more than five weeks he'd worked her like a twelve-pound outlaw cat precariously attached to a #303 Zebco, the monofilament stretched to the breaking point, and no net in hand, working her over into the shallows by the bank, sinking that hook in deeper and deeper, that cruelly barbed hook that only the hardiest fish could ever work loose, careful to keep that rod pointing skyward, taking up all the slack, but never too much, never forcing it. Watching himself play his new fish. All pro and totally up for it every time. Enslaving her with drugs and sex and romantic desire and promise. Letting the jism of his healthy, horny, Hollywood hotshots lubricate their one-way love affair, greasing her body for the long, hot slide down the dope banister.

"Greg, I love you so much," she purred to him.

"You're one sweet pussycat. You know that?"

"Do you love me as much as I love you?"

"You know I do, angel." He only needed to touch her around the throat and chin and mouth a few times and those full movie-star lips had her rarin' to go. He was an expert at measuring the response time and he was proud of how quickly she opened her petals to him now, a few seconds and she was hot to trot. He'd brought her a long way in just a few weeks. But he was already beginning to bore of the game, and the more he tired of her treasures, the more difficult it would be for him to sustain the illusion.

"Have you loved these weeks together as much as I have, Tiff?"

"Oh, God. You know I have. I've almost forgotten what it was like before. I want you for my husband, Greg. I want us to settle down and raise a family together," she said, her cat's eyes blinking. Her maternal instincts were very strong.

"That's what I want too. Look, I can just see us in that little snowbound log cabin up in the mountains, and the snow is falling, and we put another log on the fire, cuddle close together under the blankets, and make our first child together. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"

"Ummmm."

They kiss. First soft, little tender smooches that he knows will light her fire, and then he's going to work with his hands and the hard, probing, wet kisses begin, and just as she starts lighting up, he pulls back a little and looks at her with his sexy California blues and says, "If you help me, doll baby, we can have all that right away."

"What do you mean? Of course I'll help you." She smiles.

He kisses her and goes over and gets something out of his pocket and brings it back to the bed and shows it to her.

"What's that?"

"That is our ticket outta here, Tiff. That's our nest egg. That's what's going to let us be together and raise a family."

She looks at the little vial with her wide cat's eyes. "Yeah?"

"Dynamite White," he tells her. "Serpico, White Cloud Nine, Supersnow! I've got a way for us to get it all, baby doll, and I mean now. Me and Roger have this guy who can get us enough of this shit that one big sale will set us up and you and I can cut. We'll be out of this forever."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Thing is it is going to take one shitload of bucks to get us together. And we are stoney, man."

"I thought we had lots of money. I gave you all I had and the jewelry and you had the —"

"Yeah. Right. But we been in the Deuville for thirty-eight days. Double occupancy is a bitch. Just our motel bill alone has tapped us out. And we've got to get a score while we can or we'll lose our man here, and I'll end up a bag boy somewhere and you'll be waiting tables in a greasy spoon."

"I don't mind waiting tables, Greg. At least you can't get arrested waiting tables, ya know?"

"Yeah, well just forget that. We've got to move some shit, and I need bucks."

"I gave you everything I had, except for maybe fifteen dollars or so. You can have that." She starts to get up and get her purse.

"Hey, Tiff. Forget the fifteen bucks. Come on, man. Be serious with me. This is our future we're talking about."

"I was being serious. I thought you needed money."

"Yeah. Well, I need money. Not fifteen fucking dollars. I need three thousand bucks."

"Honey, I don't have three thousand bucks."

"Listen to me." He comes back over on her with the curls and the beautiful eyes right in her face, talking very fast, almost in a whisper. "You told me you wanted us to be a family. Look. Both of us are gonna have to make a big sacrifice if we're going to be together always and take care of each other. I got you. You're my only resource, Tiff. You gotta help me, baby. I'm going to ask you to do something that you're not going to want to do, but when I explain it all to you, you'll see it is the best way for us. I don't want you doing what I'm going to ask of you, but, baby, it's the only way, believe me. We've got to have enough to get our nest egg together, right? And I've got to be able to protect you — to keep you out of that prison you were in — and I'm the only one who can do that for you. Just like you're the only one who can do this for me."

"What do you want me to do?" she whispered.

"We've got to get some good bucks together fast. You're all I've got. Listen, I need you to pull a couple of dates with guys. Now don't hit the ceiling. I —"

"You WHAT?" She starts laughing. "You want me to what?'

"I don't want it any more than you do. I don't particularly get off on the idea of my future wife having sex with other guys. But if you just —"

"Come on. Don't talk like this. You're nutsy."

"Like it's not such a big deal, anyway. Roger has this guy, nice-looking older dude with lots of money always wanting to get some young stuff. All you got to do is let him do it for a few minutes and we can —"

"GREG! Stop it."

"Everybody hustles. Couple, three minutes with a guy. It's not like it was a big deal, and you'll come back to me and we'll do lines and fuckin' forget it. And pretty soon we'd have enough I can make our score."

"Fuckin' forget it, all right. You got that part right." She's still laughing at the absurdity of it. "You crazy nut."

"I'm not kidding you. You've got to do it to help us. I don't like the idea either, but we've got a big chance here. I love you, doll. I want to get a home for us. A new start. But it's never going to work if you keep telling me to forget it. How would you like it if, uh, when you told me you wanted me to take you away from that old man of yours, I'd said, Bullshit — forget about it. You wouldn't have liked it much, am I right?"

She looked over at him. He was serious about this. "I want us to be together but I want it to be right. This wouldn't make it right. If you're really serious, just put it out of your mind. I couldn't do it if I wanted to, which I don't. I'm not that kind of girl."

"I know that, angel. I know you're not that kind of girl." He began backing off it as he always did. He'd accomplished all he'd set out to do — put the germ of the idea in there for her to play with. He gave her a big smile. "We'll find a way. Don't worry about it." He lit the rock and took a lungful of the wonderful Dynamite White. A little piece of the rock.

"Ooof. Awesome," he said.

"Bastard," she chided him with a smile as he offered her the little glass pipe. "You really had me going." Greg looked as handsome as a movie star to her, she thought.

"Ummm." He smiled noncommittally.

She let out a big hit of it and they sat there on the edge of the bed together, listening to it crack as it cooked away, blowing both their minds with its magic, and they sat there quietly smoking, awed by the instant transformation. And the smoke made them both supremely intelligent, brilliantly wise, and impervious to the slings and arrows that wound lesser mortals.

As long as we're together we're never going to die, she thought, by chance quite correctly.

"How good is his shit?" Greg asked Roger.

"This is Cocaine MacNugget, my man."

"Do what?"

"Superpure and superpotent. Guaran-fuckin'-teed to kick your brain in the ass, and it's our shot."

"How cool is this guy?"

"Hey. He's fucking golden, man. He's never burned any damn body with this good shit of his. We can come out on top with this one. He's got the most unstoppable, unstepped-on Dynamite White you can buy. Shit we can cook up into the best crack on the street. Two ounces will make enough pellets for five hundred fucking vials, Greg, and that's not even counting our own smoke. It's a beautiful deal, man. But we gotta move on it.

"Fuck it. Let's do it."

"Turn the bitch out, champ. We need it soon as you get it."

"No sweat," he said, grinning. "She'll be a fuckin' gold mine down here."

The new junk disease was endemic to neither ghetto, barrio, locale, region, country, nor people. It was ubiquitous, nondiscriminatory, and omnipotent. It could be found everywhere from East Forty-second Street to East L.A., and it was available to everyone from street animals to Granny. It would write some beautiful stuff on the slate of your mind for a heavenly quarter-hour and then take you back down on a roller-coaster rush ninety floors down to the basement.

The problem is that your brain loves the shit, and when you come down almost as fast as you went up, your brain says, WHOA! Wait a minute now. Do some MORE of that. That was good. You want that rush again, and right away. And you don't stop to be logical. You just want the rush. And that's the place the kid was taking her, the first pit stop on the race to hell. And he was loving every minute of it. His friend was nudging him.

"So?" Roger said with his sly grin.

"Yeah?"

"Let's move on it."

"Yeah," Greg said impatiently. "I just said fine. No sweat. You say he's golden, he's golden. Do it."

"Shit, man, I DONE my part. I mean, you got to get the bitch cunt pullin' the train. I mean he ain't gonna wait forever."

"What the fuck you want a goddamn instant fucking miracle. You just told me about the deal and like I'm supposed to snap my fingers and produce the money in TWO FUCKIN' SECONDS?"

"Yeah." He laughed. "I'm the candy man, you're the dandy man. You got to get your fuckin' end earnin', champ."

"You tellin' me how to turn a bitch out, are ya?"

"Hey, take it easy asshole."

"YOU take it easy, ASSHOLE."

"I put up MY fuckin' end, champ. I got you down here, in whose fuckin' ride, right? I'm the one got us prime to score, nifty. YOU got the bitch. YOU got to get her ass off the dime."

"Whyncha' FUCKIN' RUSH ME a little more f'r crissakes." When Greg lost his cool he sounded like he was about ten years old, Roger thought. "She's OFF it awready."

"Calm down, Wonder Warthog. I just fuckin' with your head. But seriously, man, I know you realize if we want the double ounce we got to get up and POUNCE." He held out his hand and Greg didn't slap it for him. He was still pissed but Roger knew he'd get the message. The bitch was going onto the set.

It was celebration time after her decision last night and they were smoking, letting it take them right on out there and she was sailing and soaring, flying higher than she'd ever flown before, working without a net, smart and tough enough to do it, and the rush was so wonderful that all she could do was just sit there and look at it happening and go, "Ohhhhh."

And he said, "Ummm."

And she giggled and toked, holding it in as he took a hit and they went, "Mmmm . . . " at the same time, and smiled, laughing on the inside as they let all that white smoke out thinking how awesome it was.

And Greg thought three things, oh, yes — it is good, and flat little-boy tits, and let this awesome shit turn you out, darlin' — all three thoughts simultaneously. And with crack, thought is deed.

"Umm," she said softly as he pulled up her shirt and ran his fingers softly over the boyish chest feeling the nipples harden as his fingertips lightly brushed over them, looking at her breasts.

"Ummmmmm." She was flying way, way out there, and it was all so good and so right for the moment and so magical.

"Oh, yeah," he whispered to her, absentmindedly taking the nipple gently and just holding it between thumb and finger, holding it tenderly and knowing that he could squeeze, not squeeze pull touch kiss suck lick do any fucking thing he wanted they were all his and his power surged through his fingertips and she felt and sensed the heat as it penetrated the smoke and she winced a little as the hotness of it surprised her, and he let the magic flow from his touch and through her breast, a suffusive warmth spreading instantly up her chest and throat and into her face, and he saw it and leaned forward to kiss the hot places, expertly, laughing his cracked laughter and thrilled by the enormity of his power.

Last night there had been a candlelight-and-wine dinner, but that would soon be only white wine under the bridge, because she was going "on the set" for the first time. Even now she sat there in what he called her "ho outfit," a ridiculously short mini hiked all the way up to her treasures, and high stiletto-heel boots. The hooker wet-look. She hadn't stopped to question where he got the money for the clothes, or the wine, or the candles, or the smoke. The commitment had been made.

It wasn't the con that had worn her resistance down so much as the crack. Her whole being loved and craved it. She had to have it again and again. It made things so beautiful and right and warm and wonderfully manageable. It made order out of disorder and gave life a new meaning; it was the master plan of the addict religion. The purpose and joy of life in two words: get more.

It was what made her a princess again, and safe, and in the arms of a lover who was going to protect her and hold her and give her all the love in the world and never leave her. And for that kind of a lover you have to make a few sacrifices.

"Easy money, doll." That's what he'd said to Tiff. It was one of his key phrases, constantly repeated, that would keep echoing. He used it to describe the prostitution and the dope deal, interchangeably. It was like his "highest form of love" con, used as a mini-argument in itself, reinforced by repetition, and later she'd have time to realize the heavy irony as easy money's resonance rang in her ears.

"Movie-star money," was the phrase the john had used. She'd remember what these men said later. Her men, she thinks. The men who helped her earn that easy, movie-star money.

But bathed in the cracking, white smoke screen of a new love, the prospects of her frightening new career had lost a lot of the former onerous-ness. It was now merely oppressive as opposed to unthinkable. Crack was self-propelling. It generated serious money. All it took was that initial nest-egg score. She needed to make some fast money. Easy money. And she was fourteen, and what had been ludicrous was now reality, and she looked at the curls and heard him say, "Pretty pussy," and her cat's eyes blinked, and she looked up at the magic mirror on the wall. And the mirror was clouded with smoke and did not reply to her stare.

And Greg watched her, looking over at her in her work clothes, looking at her with his West Coast eyes with the improbable lashes and smiling his white, Beverly Hills grin, thinking how boring little girls always became. He already had his eye on someone else. He'd cut Tiff loose just as soon as he got some fuck-you money.

"Stand up a minute," he commanded. Obediently she stood. "C'mere. Walk over here and let me look."

She stood right in front of him, standing between his spread legs. Her eyes closed and she tilted her head from side to side as he nuzzled her, moving her head the way you do when you have a stiff neck. Her fingers tangled in his long, curly hair.

"Ummmf." She couldn't hear what he said as he held her up close against him, running his smooth, hot hands up and down her tanned legs, cupping her cheeks and running his hand down her thighs and the back of her legs and feeling the tops of the slick, high-heeled boots, saying something to her, and the words muffled and lost as he pressed his mouth against her. Thinking to himself, What a guy.

Disconsolate, and for the first time in his adult life in fear of losing the only thing he has ever valued, Spain dedicates himself to finding her and bringing her back. Even he has no idea as to the vast amounts of time and energy, or the staggering sum of money that such an exhaustive search entails. He only knows he wants Tiff back. His daughter has disappeared like a puff of smoke. And he must use what tools he has at hand: the hunter's eye, enormous financial resources, and a web of contacts in the dark places.

When Spain did a piece of work he generally did not have to track an individual down to — as the jargon has it —"access" them. However, the few exceptions involved his subcontracting that aspect of the job to some ancillary worker or agency. He could not remember a time when he worked otherwise, even early in his career. There were so-called bounty-hunters around the country working for or as bail bondsmen. A number of these were notoriously willing to travel less-legal avenues if the fees were righteous enough. He had a couple of former cops working in other fields whom he'd also farmed subordinate action out to, and he considered the options confronting him.

He knew what he had to do. He'd stay legal with it. There was too much open here. He was too vulnerable already because of all the notoriety involved. Too many people had come into this no-longer-private matter. There would be a paper trail. Questions. Police intervention, perhaps. He would have to go the legit route. Find a top private-detective firm and put them on some outrageous retainer. Let them reach out for her. The trail was already cold and the clock was ticking.

He knew the sort of private sleuth he was wanting. Spain called an attorney who was connected and who owed him, and added a few names to the list of possibilities he'd already worked on. He narrowed it down to a list of five firms who had big reps in child-custody work, deprogrammings, kidnapping cases, and the like, and then he got on the phone and started touching base.

Within a few hours he'd eliminated two of the names, one of whom was into big security work now, and the other an agency run by someone who struck Spain as too stupid. There were three left. He eliminated one of those in the course of conversation; the manager appeared to be too enamored of electronic gadgetry and Spain always went with his vibes in these matters. He ended up flying two guys in.

Each of them had a substantial national rep. He sent each man a down payment consisting of five crisp hundreds, just to get their attention, with ticket for a round-trip turnaround, and he was picking up the whole first-class tab: hotel, food, all expenses. Two thousand easy bucks, cash, for a twenty-four-hour consultancy and back home. No strings. An easy deuce.

His first interview was with "Beechie" Meeks, a Detroit private op who'd been with Wells and Pinkerton, two of the big four, and then gone out on his own with good success. He'd become famous for rescuing the fifteen-year-old son of a senior executive who'd been lured out to the West Coast by a religious cult, and whom Meeks had also subsequently managed to get deprogrammed from his former zombielike state. The kid proved to be actively, vocally antizealot and was sufficiently articulate and newsworthy that media gave it lots of ink and the odd name "Beechie" Meeks got a week of heavy press.

Beechie Meeks made a great first impression. He looked like a private eye in the movies. Good-looking guy with a tough, intelligent appearance and demeanor. Dressed to the nines in a beautifully tailored three-piece banker's charcoal-gray and a conservative Countess Mara under a snowy-white shirt collar, he looked like he might be a successful young attorney who was a former rodeo cowboy, now specializing in corporate mergers — the Marlboro man dressed up for church.

And then he had to spoil the initial impression by opening his mouth. Isn't that always the way? Superficially at least, Beechie Meeks was overly assertive, offensively venal, and absurdly hyper. A kind of megalomaniacal, Napoleonic little dude who sat there pontificating to Spain in his toy-store suit and diminutive wing tips, letting him hear the unabridged, complete Beechie Meeks Story, chapter and verse.

Still, he could probably get the job done. He didn't rule the little man out just because he was a self-promoter or because he acted like Jimmy Cricket wired on speed. Sometimes these cocky little guys were good. And that was the main thing here, getting it done. The problem was Beechie didn't strike Spain as trustworthy. Number one, he'd be a money funnel, no question. That was acceptable, but the serious problem would be later. What guarantee would he have that Meeks wouldn't tell all ex post facto? He was too fond of media. Too much the entrepreneurial hype man. And Spain didn't want publicity. Pass.

He brought in a private investigator from Cleveland whose name was Mel Troxell. The lawyer had told him, "Troxell is damn good but he's gonna be hog-high."

Spain said, "Mr. Troxell, you come highly recommended. But to give us a place to start, what can you do for me that I can't do myself?"

"First I'd like to know who recommended me," the man replied, somewhat crisply.

"I have to protect my sources just as I'm sure you do. But let's just say it was someone I trust."

"Well" — he shrugged —"fair enough. I always like to know who makes a recommendation. That's valuable information."

Spain was already making his judgment call. He clocked the guy as practiced, very experienced, touchy maybe, a hard case, not too smooth. Spain thought he'd use him. He smiled a little and said, "Can we just say it was someone I have faith in — somebody in the law-enforcement community."

That seemed to placate him and he tilted his head a bit, shrugging again with a little imperceptible movement of the upper torso and saying, "Sure. Yeah. Okay. Answer your question. I can do a hell of a lot of things you can't do."

"Such as?"

"Such as ask questions. I can put operatives on the girl's friends. You can't approach them yourself and hope to get much. Obviously the girl . . . What's your daughter's name?"

"Tiff. T-I-F-F."

"Obviously Tiff ran away from home. For whatever reason. You've told me a little about the situation here at home with your wife leaving. That may play a part in it. Whatever. Point is, her friends are not going to open up to you the way they will to my people. So the first thing I would do is try to build up a background of information from her friends and acquaintances. I have ways we can do that that you would find impracical if not impossible. The boys she apparently went with, they're going to have talked to somebody. Kids like to brag about where they're going. It just takes work, but that's the kind of thing we're able to do."

"What else do you plan to do to locate her?"

"Oh, I don't know offhand particularly." He was right, the guy was touchy and defensive. "I have a lot of standard places I look for clues, but every case is so different. Every case is totally unique. I'd go through her room, examine everything she left behind. We go through her papers, scrapbooks, just a lot of things that take time and work. Anything that gives us a starting place." He was brusque, somewhat hurried. He was telling Spain with body language. Come on, quit the bullshit, let's go.

"I notice you said clues. What kind of clues is a kid going to leave?"

"Oh . . . Hell, I dunno. The phone bill, for example. I take a look at the phone bill. You'd be surprised at how often we can find somebody just by looking at the unusual long-distance calls. It's all right there in black and white for you if you know how to look for the clues. You don't. I do. My operatives do."

"I'm sorry to want to know all this stuff," Spain said. "It probably is a little Mickey Mouse to be asking you how you're going to find Tiff, but all I know about private detectives is what I've seen on TV" — he let himself smile a little —"you know, the old skip-tracer image."

"Well, I don't even use the phrase skip-tracing. I mean, that went out in the 1940s, I think. We leave the bounty-hunting and the divorce frames and all that shit to the little mom-and-pop shops all over the country. Guy calls the one in the Yellow Pages with the ad that has a big eye emblem or something. He thinks he's gonna get Sam Spade."

"What kinds of jobs are you mostly involved with?"

"We work for big corporations, as you probably already know. I do a lot of security stuff, video surveillance, industrial stuff."

"Homicides?"

"Jesus!" Troxell chuckled. "You know how many homicide cases I've been on in thirteen years? One. That's the television bullshit. That crap is all bullshit. The police do homicides. PI firms don't touch 'em. Oh, once in a blue moon some aspect of a murder might, uh, have to do with insurance liability, but I ..."

As he spoke, Spain concentrated on the man, not the words, as he had been doing as he asked the first random questions that had occurred to him. This was what Spain had learned to do. He could read you as you responded, and he did it visually and intuitively. And suddenly he got the clear picture on this man. He could see this man was extremely intelligent. He was having to work not to use larger words in his responses. He was having to alter his vocabulary as he spoke, and the bluff, touchy exterior was role-playing. He used this, Spain figured, to create a slightly false impression. To help you drop your guard while he assessed you himself. At that instant Spain decided he'd use him for sure.

"Well, the only reason I asked, I noticed you were wearing a firearm there." He glanced toward the gun and the man slightly pulled his sport coat over the piece. "And I didn't know private individuals could still get gun permits."

Spain noticed he looked rough, but in the facial features. The clothes said smooth. He knew the shoes must have gone for about a hundred and a half. The guy was making money or dressing like it.

"Yeah. We can carry in Cleveland. Got a thing there called the Private Police Commission, licensed by the City of Cleveland. You take these firearms courses 'n' that, and when you graduate, they let you apply to carry. And you can get a permit, and you can operate in that fashion ..." He trailed off.

"These boys that took her. I have no idea if they are dangerous or what problems your people might encounter in getting her back safely. Is it legal, then, for you to" — he glanced toward where the man carried the gun — "protect yourself or someone else in that kind of situation?"

"The same laws apply toward us as anyone else. We're private citizens who in this case have the ordinary misdemeanor arrest powers or powers to ensure the reasonable safety or well-being of another person. If an individual threatens that safety openly, uh, or is exhibiting hostile or aggressive actions, naturally we got to act in defense. Just as you would if somebody menaced you at the supermarket. You would protect yourself or your daughter. We have the right to act in that same manner. You have to use your head, you know."

"I've heard about some of these cults and how the deprogrammers have to use force and I wondered —"

"We're empowered to utilize a reasonable degree of force in protecting ourselves or our clients."

"How difficult do you think it will be to get my daughter back?"

"The degree of difficulty depends on luck. How much hard work we have to do. The breaks. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you have to pour the man-hours in. It's all how fast the clues develop. Did they have a car? On the phone you said, Yes, they did. That might make it harder, it might make it easier. Usually kids that age go down to the bus station or whatever and they're easy to trace. If they hitch rides, if they do this, or that — see, it's always different. But eventually we find them."

"It just seems so hopeless to me," Spain said truthfully. "I just don't see how you can find a fourteen-year-old girl when we don't even have an idea which direction she went."

"All I can tell you is that it depends on you more than me. I always make my clients a guarantee. If you bankroll me — and by that I mean, if you are willing to keep shoveling the buckets of money in to me, and I warn you it does take buckets of money — if you bank-roll me to that extent, I can find anybody. Anywhere on earth. I guarantee it."

"I can't imagine how," Spain said rather quietly.

"Money. Like I just told you. That's how I find 'em. The same way you got me here. You give me enough money to do the job, and you got her back. I mean, if you're willing to give me an open bankroll. No problem. We'll find her and bring her back."

Spain just looked at him, his face a cold, blank, and immobile stare.

"Money talks."

The experienced hooker would have wondered about the john whose first act on entering a motel room was to turn up the volume on the bolted-down television set.

"We gonna watch soaps?" She'd asked him the question semiseriously, the kid inside her hoping they could kick back and watch the latest As the World Turns or some nitwit game show, anything instead of the thing she was having to do to get Greg his easy money.

An experienced whore would have been on her guard. But this was no forty-five-year-old bimbo with ten years' pros experience at dodging freaks, vice cops, and the whips and scorns of time. We're taking about a fourteen-year-old girl. She hadn't even looked up at the guy's face she was so scared and nervous.

It hadn't been so bad so far. Roger and Greg had set her up on the first one. He came on like Mr. Suave. They'd made a deal with him — a freebie if he'd take it super-easy. Yeah, sure, he said. No problem. He loved fourteen-year-olds. He could damn near get off on just the idea. A good-lookin' little piece of tail like that for free? Hell's bells, boys, he promised, I'll be gentle as a lamb.

The second dude had been a married guy she'd picked up outside the bar of a hotel downtown. He couldn't believe his luck. She was so young and innocent looking. And it was such a refreshing change from all the aging broads and uglies that he shot like a skyrocket. All of two minutes on top of her banging away and that's all she wrote. If they were all as fast as the first two, it was going to be easy money, she decided. If she could just keep herself from thinking about it. A little girl dressed in Mommy's clothes and four pounds of eye shadow.

She'd picked the next one, or rather he'd hit on her when she was back on the street a few minutes after leaving the second john's hotel. Just walking around like a little kid. Not thinking about the fact her clothes were selling the product and surprised when this old dude goes, "How much for a party?" And she almost told him to fuck off but caught herself in time.

Greg would be so happy. She already had a wallet filled with money and it was easy money just like that man of hers promised it would be.

"Movie-star money," the john told her in the room. But she could not foresee what was in store. She could not read the signs that a woman of experience might have seen and understood. She was Spain's mixed-up child of a fourteen-year-old daughter. Pure cherry and the third horse out of the chute is a bad one.

It is a business of numbers pure and simple. Hooking is all math. Bucks. Numbers. Sex numbers. Minutes in the saddle. Speed. Fast service and turnover, like a fast burger franchise. All by the old numbers. And the probabilities of problems are numbers again. It becomes a percentage thing. So much chance of getting ripped off. So much chance of a vice bust. So much chance of being hurt. So much of a percent you'll be crippled or offed by a psycho. Numbers.

Rip-offs. Johns. Whackos. Vice collars. Pimps. The life of a street ho is obviously marvelous. One reason why they do it. The bucks. Numbers again. Hers could have would have should have been number three hundred and seventeen or something. That was the john she might have been street-wise enough to protect herself against. But he was number three.

He moved in front of her and inserted the key in the lock and turned the knob and held the door open for her as she moved in, thinking in her mind how much she'd be bringing Greg tonight and wondering how many times she'd have to do this before she could go to him. Idly she speculated on the time of day it would be, hoping he'd take her out to a fancy dinner like last night. She would want to put all of this out of her mind.

It wasn't too bad if you thought about something else. She thought guys would take an hour or something like the kids did when they balled each other in their folks' cars. She didn't know that screwing and lovemaking were two separate things. The john would seldom need more than three or four minutes of a pro's expertise, and that would be it.

The main thing was she had to remember what Greg had taught her, the saying they'd rehearsed over and over, and his clever words kept playing back to her as she popped her gum and entered the strange room.

"Get money first, clean him off, get him off, get out fast. Get the money first, clean him off, get him off, get out fast .... Get the —" Saying it over and over to herself like a speed litany, chewing her sugar-free and feeling her palms get sticky, and then getting the saying mixed up in her head already in the nervous excitement of the moment, fear smearing it. "Get out fast, get the money —"

"Um. Hey, uh, could I like have the money now, please?" she said sweetly, not liking to ask like that but saying it so it wouldn't be just a question either, a tricky moment she thought, a tricky moment with a trick; she still hadn't looked at him.

"Sure, baby." He reached in for a huge roll and peeled a hundred off the outside, but she couldn't see what was in the roll. For all she knew or cared it could be newspaper in there. All she wanted was the hundred to put in Greg's trap money. "But now I gotta li'l favor to ask in return. No offense, but lose the gum, okay?"

"Huh?" she said, thinking he'd said lose the gun.

"The gum in your mouth, sweetheart. Get rid of the gum, please. It's like a little turnoff, okay, dear?"

"Oh. Yeah. The gum. Oh, sure." She plucked it out with her teenybopper fingernails and threw it into the wastebasket next to the bed.

"Excuse me. I have to go in the bathroom a minute, please," she said, and he smiled and nodded as he gestured expansively at the door. Get the money first, clean him off . . .

"While I'm getting undressed, would you please take your pants off? Thanks." She blurted it out as she closed the door behind her. What embarrassment. She'd never get used to asking a stranger to undress, but she knew what she had to do. Get the money clean him off get him off. One thing at a time. She wished that her case of nerves would ease up before she did something dumb. She tried to think calm, and then, as she was running water, she realized she had some Libriums in her purse. Mother's Librium. She came out of the bathroom with the hot washcloth, lightly soaped, the cloth dripping as she walked, still repeating her litany over and over to herself, and the guy hasn't budged. He's standing just where she left him like he's in shock.

"Come on now. Please let Tiff wash you off nice, huh?"

He pulled her over to him and took the cloth from her. "I'll sure do that in a second, hon, and I'll skin it back and clean that big ole devil real good for ya, but before we git to that, I jes' gotta have a little kiss from my sweet ole sugarbuns." He pulled her in close and she pushed away a little involuntarily as he relaxed his death grip on her arms. He was muscled like a weight lifter.

"Hey, easy, chief," she said, trying to remember what Greg had told her was the best way to handle this. He stunk of booze.

"C'mon. One kiss. One little kiss, whatcher name? Tiff? Tiff?" She nodded. "Tiff. Short for Tiffany." He laughed into her cat's eyes. "Oh, Christ almighty, that's great. I really like that one." He started kissing her on the mouth. "Yeah. That's real original. I only ever met one other working girl with the name Tiffany. Marvy."

"That's my real name," she said, slightly angry. "I use Tiff mostly."

"Tiff the Quiff. Hell, I like it. I might get you and my other Tiff the quiff together and we'd like get into something. A little double-Tiff menage a trois?"

"Menagerie what?" she said, trying to pull free a little.

"It means whore sandwich in French, love." He was kissing her now on the mouth, but more and more he was taking her whole mouth in his when he kissed, big sloppy wet smackings suckings as he sucked her lips into his boozy mouth. He was as strong as an ox and she was starting to get angry. He took two powerful fingers and pinched her lips together in an ex-aggerated pucker, saying, "Ummm. Not menagerie what. Menage a twaaaah." Saying it pedantically and drawing it out, speaking almost into her mouth, his sour tequila breath about making her gag. "Now you repeat after me, Tiff-quiff, say it. Muh-naaaaahhh-hhhj ..."

"RRRRmmmmmgg."

This broke him up and he breathed more sour breath and tequila in her face and he squeezed the lips together more. "Oh, puss. You're so damn cute. I just gotta bite that little ole saucy mouth of yours, okay?"

"Rrrrr," she tried to pull back, unsuccessfully. It reminded her of an old aunt on her mom's side who always was going gitchee-goo to her when she was little and pinching her cheeks real hard. And even when she got older, the aunt would try to pinch her like that. But it only hurt a little bit and Tiff always tried to smile because her aunt was nice except for that. And suddenly his big, hard, yellow teeth are sinking into her lips and biting her mouth practically off and she is trying to scream but she can't get anything out except "AAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMM-MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM-MMMMMGGGG-GGGGGGGGGGG" as he bites into her and she can't stand the pain and her mouth is caught in that awful vise and it is like pushing against a brick wall and by reflex she has enough presence of mind to lash out with one of her pointy-toed high-hell boots, kicking him with all her might right in the leg and he yelps and she manages to tear free from his grasp as he makes a little noise like "Waaaauuuugggg."

And she is crying and screaming and almost hyper-ventilating, screaming in pain as she runs into the bathroom to see if her mouth is in tattered shreds or what. Oh my God oh Jeez it hurts so bad, she cries. It feels like her lips are bit clear through, and she's sobbing almost out of control and trying to get her breath and he's saying something this maniac is mumbling some garbage and she isn't listening she's holding a cold, wet towel gently against her bruised mouth and crying and looking at the deep teeth marks in her face there in the motel bathroom mirror, but the john is in the next room and he doesn't care.

He's in the room where he bit her and he has his penis out now and he's standing there grinning and whacking off and squinting his eyes shut, grunting, making a strained, groaning noise as he climaxes almost within thirty seconds shooting a hot arc of milky white sperm to die amid the filth of the worn, burned, stained, sleazebag carpet.

"Waaaaaaaauuuuuggg," again as he shoots his wad, immediately rubbing his leg again where the bitch kicked him. She'll pay dearly for this oh sweet Mary and Joseph yes she'll pay.

He smiles darkly and in a mock-conciliatory tone says through the door, "GOD dammit! Oh, I'm SO sorry, little Tiffy." He can hear her still bawling her lungs out in there. He knows he shouldn't bite them but by the blessed Virgin it's hard. And you lose control sometimes when the real young stuff has a nice sexy mouth like that one. Oh God he could cum right now, cum again just thinking about it, and he touches himself all smeared and wet with his orgasm and keeps apologizing through the door to the young hooker.

In the bathroom she is still sobbing, but between sobs and blowing her nose she is trying to tell him off and he is asking her to forgive him in the next room and the madder it's making her. And she's getting as mad as fury as she feels the pain and looks at the ugly teeth marks burning red around the sides of her mouth, and all she can think of is how mad Greg is going to be and she runs out of the bathroom trying to catch her breath as she sobs and yells at the crazy john, "LOOKWHATYOUDIDTA ME YOU, UH, YOU-UHUHUH, MY BOYFRIEND'S GONNA KILL —"

"HERE!" He scares her yelling back at her as he holds up a handful of money and she swings at his hand, but he's fast and he jerks his hand back before she can knock the money out of his hand and he screams again, "WAIT. JESUS. DAMMIT. WAIT. LOOK HERE, WILLYA!" He fans out all the hundreds. A handful of hundred-dollar bills again right here in her face. It looked like over a thousand dollars all spread out like that. "Oh, I'm so very sorry, honey," he says, very sincere and contrite-looking as he sells it to her. "This is to make up for that. I don't know what came over me. This is yours, dear; take it, please." The fan of money again. It was the only thing that would have worked for him and somehow he knew to push the right button. The money stopped her dead-cold. "It's a grand, Tiff. A thousand bucks. Plus the hundred I was about to pay you."

She reaches out, still angry and hurting, and snatches the money from his grip, snapping, "You should have to pay that and more. Look at me. Are you nuts or what? I'm not going to be able to work for days looking like this." She fingers the tooth marks.

And he keeps talking, conning her, lulling her with a big, dopey, apologetic look on his face. "... so very, very sorry for losing control of myself, I don't know what came over me to —"

And she's thinking to herself. One hundred and one hundred is two hundred dollars ....

"Don't expect you to forgive me but let me make up for the amount of time you can't work. It's only fair that I pay for —"

And she thinks, And two hundred and eleven hundred is thirteen hundred, that's one THOUSAND, three hundred dollars!

"Know how much that must have hurt," and he keeps gentling her down, but she's not listening, and then she sees his hand come back out of that pants pocket and it is just loaded with money and she hears him rattling on, "Want to give you some more to make up for it, okay?"

And all she can do is examine the math in her mind and suddenly the pain is totally gone. This is a fourteen-year-old child sitting here in her goofy whore outfit with some maniac who reeks of booze, trying to press more money on her. And all she can do is think about Greg and what he would say, how he sent her out today saying, Don't come back without at least six hundred bucks for me, six tricks. And she's got it all for today AND tomorrow, she thinks as he sits there begging her, but she only hears his apologies with half an ear as she continues her computations.

No way would she have done ten more hundred-dollar "dates." She knows this full well. With the two bills she already has, thirteen hundred, Greg could put over a thousand dollars into their nest egg. And she might not even have to go back out tomorrow.

That would still leave plenty of money to party with, and the thought of escaping from the pain and memories of this became very strong. A desire to smoke suddenly engulfed her from out of nowhere and she realized she could buy a dozen crack vials on the way back to the motel and still hand her man twelve hundred dollars. She ran into the bathroom again, idly wondering if makeup would hide the deep bite marks, and she took a little plastic bottle out of her purse and did a couple of lines right there. Sniffing and running her tongue over her sore, reddened lips. The angry red bruises looked so ugly and scary.

"Could make it up to you," his harsh, slurred voice intruded on her thoughts as she came back in the room, "and I was thinking . . . Hey, come over here a second." She stopped where she was. "I have a way to make it up to you right now." He had his big roll of money back out again.

"Party with me for just fifteen minutes more so I can get off — I'll be gentle as a lamb, I swear — and I'll give you fifteen hundred dollars more. How's that sound?"

"You kidding me or what?" She was almost speechless.

"Hey, Tiff. Does it look like I'm kidding? I'll pay ya up front. And here's the whole thing right now, in advance. Jes' so you know I'm not kidding you." He had fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills counted out and was extending his arm toward her. She still didn't move.

"You mean including the eleven hundred — you'll pay me four hundred more if I let you ball me?" It hadn't quite sunk in.

"Hell, no. Tiffany girl. I will give you ONE THOUSAND FIVE hundred dollars MORE jes' so Ah can git off. That's a hundred bucks a minute, kid. Plus the eleven I gave ya by way of showin' how sorry I am for biting like that. You get what that means? That equals twenty-six hundred for a li'l ole fifteen-minute party — that'd make your pussy the most valuable twat in history. That's movie-star money."

"I don't know," she said, looking at his outstretched hand suspiciously. He dropped the money hand down in front of him and she went over and started to take the money from him. Looking at him real hard. Feeling how sore her mouth was.

"And you won't touch my mouth again. No kissing, no touching, no biting me anywhere. " The lines had bolstered her courage.

"I swear." He was shaking his head like it was about to fall off his body. "I jus' wanna git off and go home. Fifteen minutes. Straight ball. Nothin' else. No kissing. Nothing. Jes' let me put it in."

"You guarantee me no kissing or anything?" Very suspicious.

"Absolutely. I promise. And you got my money up front." He wore his best contrite look. "Look, Tiff, I can see I bruised y'r mouth. This will make up for you not being able to work awhile. A paid vacation. Just fifteen minutes inna saddle and you've got twenty-six hundred." This time she reached over and took the money and he knew he had her.

"And no more of this goddamn biting," she reprimanded, cat's eyes asparkle

"And no more biting. I'll be a gentle pussycat, I swear."

"Well, okay," she said, taking the money and starting to strip. "Clean that thing off first." The money looked real.

He had the washcloth even as he was shaking his head in compliance, and was dropping his pants and skivvies and cleaning himself there in front of her. He hobbled into the motel bathroom dragging his pants around his ankles to wash off the warm soapsuds. She had to smile through her bruised mouth as she rubbed her sore face and thought about the money. God. Greg would be so proud of her. Scoring like this her first day out on the set. Um. Wow. $2,800! Get the money first . . . clean him off . . . get him off . . .

"Now. Daddy's all clean," he said as he came back out of the bathroom, wearing only a T-shirt and his socks. Carrying his pants and shirt and shoes in his hand like a clod.

"And NO MORE KISSING!" Just stand it for three or four more minutes!

"You got it, sugar. No smoochin' and no bitin'. Promise. Just in and out and easy money for Tiff."

"Okay," she said as they crawled into bed, and he dropped his socks by the bedside and reached for her gently, moving forward against her and beginning a soft rocking motion as she felt him stiffen against her body. She was deciding whether or not to moisten him like Greg had said or to let him wet it himself for insertion as he rocked back and forth, and she didn't see him bring the thing out and put it behind them, sliding the metal thing behind and under the pillow beside them, then making the transfer to his other hand, then easing out the other one out and having it all set to go.

"OOOOHHHH! Baby." He was good. He knew how to make a real loud noise just as he moved the cuffs. The one was in a little rinky-dink washcloth he'd got when he went in the bathroom, and as he snicked one cuff to the bed, he made a loud groaning noise that halfway covered up the metallic noise and before she had a chance to wonder what was that she'd just heard SNNNNIKKKK! Cold steel catching her around the wrist and his body weight pressing down on her with her struggling against him as he captured the other wrist easily, snikking the cuff up tight and then moving off her to fasten the other cuff and spread-eagle her out there, and that was her chance and she kicked out at him but with no shoe and he only suffered a toenail scratch and he was stoked way beyond that and still it torqued him off and he pounded her twice with a big, hard, mean right fist and shoved the little washcloth down in her mouth.

"That's the one I washed my little thing with, TIFFANY or whatever the fuck your whorehouse name is, cunt. And here's a couple socks to go in there too." He stuffed a filthy sock into her mouth. She could feel bile rising in her throat and she was afraid she'd gag. Gag on the gag. Get the gag, she thought inanely as she struggled against the cuffs and tried to kick out again. He pounded her another hard right. This time catching her squarely in the solar plexus and taking all the rest of the fight right out of her. He pulled the gag out of her mouth and let her choke for a little, then wiped off her face and shoved the sock back in. Then changed his mind and pulled the sock out and took her sore face in his hand and made her pucker up for another special kiss.

She was scared now. Real scared for the first time in a long while. She remembered thinking to herself, Well, I guess this is it. And being so scared as he gently took her mouth in his, in those big yellow teeth of his, and then released her mouth and with the greatest tenderness kissed her unyielding lips and forced the rag and sock back in, pushing off her and going over to the television set and turning up the volume quite loud.

"You know how these motel walls are, Tiff. Paper-thin. We don't want all our neighbors eavesdropping on our fun now, do we?" He approached the bed cautiously and grabbed the leg nearest to him and held it against the bed as he caught hold of the other leg and started working his way back to her, easing up her body. He seemed to weigh a ton and she prayed she wouldn't start gagging again and choke to death.

"Tiffany is a nice name, very very pretty. Pretty puss," he purred in his there-there-now tones. She had a scream all ready but before he even pulled the gag out he let one go across her head and suddenly all she felt was blinding pain and shock and she was seeing a black velvet sky full of blue and red and yellow exploding stars, but she stayed conscious and as she opened her eyes again she felt the gag come out and he took her mouth in his again and this time it was as if she'd bent over a workbench vise and cranked the vise shut on her lips and tongue and had somebody jump up and down on the vise handle to crank it down as far as it would go and in the fierce and screaming unendurable agony she blacked out before he started to work on her with his hands.

An experienced soldier would have taken a look at the battleground and he would have should have could have recognized the thing curled up in the blood-soaked sheets. An experienced soldier would have recognized Spain's daughter perhaps, but from some sixth sense, some intuition, not from the physical appearance because there was no similarity between the swollen, blood-encrusted, battered thing there in the streaked and splattered bed sheets and the lively, lithe young girl who'd walked into this motel room only a few hours earlier, all full of her own nervous energy and undamaged youth.

She awoke in the darkened, strange surroundings, wrapped in a stinking sheet that seemed to be stuck to her, and there was a roaring so loud that she couldn't hear the noise of the traffic right outside the ground-floor motel room barely a stone's throw from the highway. And she was filled with terror as she tried to open her eyes and she couldn't get them open, and in her dis-orientation and panic she opened her mouth to scream and heard nothing and the child who was the daughter of the one who called himself Spain lay in a bloody sheet soaking herself in her own urine and fear sweat and sobbing soundlessly — tears welling up inside bruised lids so puffy they could not should not would not open.

He has gone two days without sleep and he is very tired when he looks up and sees a police car pull into the cul-de-sac that leads to his driveway, and as always he prays, this man who never prays, he prays to God it will not be bad news. And there is also that little catch in the gut and in the chest that he instinctively feels when he sees the law. And for the moment his prayers are answered and it is not bad news, only an officer coming with more of the endless questions and paperwork.

They sit in the spotless, unused living room that Pat kept covered in transparent plastic for some reason he could never fathom, a beautifully designed, interior decorator's "concept" room, kept pristine and untouched by the inhabitants of 10 Ruffstone Terrace in Ladue. Now they sit there and he answers more routine questions, keeping his concentration because although his work was always compartmentalized, his private life sanitized, these are the police.

The cop sits on plastic, writing with a plastic pen, asking about plastic. They write numbers and more numbers. Expiration dates. Request copies of things. Examine old records. Every question is asked twelve different ways like a movie where the same take is shot in reverse angle, then from above, below, up through the ashtray, in the reflection of somebody's glasses, in the hubcaps of a car. Enough already. The cops hope to unearth a plastic trail. Spain suffers through it and the officer finally leaves, temporarily content with his newly acquired wealth of credit-card numbers. Some other cop is getting the same identical data from the credit-card companies. Why did they bother coming out, then? Because they are cops. Why didn't they just phone? Because they are cops. Why is the sky blue?

"When did you first think your daughter had run away, Mr. Spain?" the officer asked, writing. He had one of those flat, redneck voices that show boredom easily. Spain told him. He wondered when it was she had run away. She had run away from him a long, long time ago, he suspected.

"And you didn't report it until ..." Another question in a list of by-the-numbers rhetoricals that would be asked from a clipboard full of numbers. Everything came down to numbers. That's what he called the shots he'd taken for Ciprioni and the family, his OTHER family. Numbers. Funny how they liked to call things by other names, these Sicilians and Italianos he worked for. You didn't plan a robbery, you "made a move." You didn't hit some guy or whack him out, you "did a number." You "clipped" him. They didn't want their hands dirtied by it. Didn't want to connect themselves to the "numbers." Somebody else could watch those people bleed. Someone else could get that last breath blown into their face as the number became a cipher.

"Mr. Spain, who did you speak with at the Bank Card Center?"

"Just some woman. I didn't write her name down." This cop was calling him mister, a cold, bored tone in his redneck voice. Just a little suspicious, automatically, as they all are. The last one had called him Frank and been fake-hearty-hail-fellow with a phony, automatic rictus of a smile that would wink on and off as he spoke. Fucking cops.

"Had your daughter ever threatened to run away from home before?"

"No," he said quietly, his heavy-lidded eyes drooping. Christ almighty, he thought, get it done and get the hell out of here.

The questions continued. He was going over every fucking credit card. Plastic Man. Hey, cop, why don't you get a job with Visa? He sat there yess-ing and noing with the surface of his mind, stifling a yawn, and let himself think about what had put him here. Ciprioni had used him. These people who assured him he was like a son to them, they took his life and twisted it out of shape so that he could have nothing. He could not keep his own wife. Worse, he couldn't even keep his child. His own goddamn kid. They had done this to him with their fucking NUMBERS. He thought of all the chances he'd taken for them, all the bullshit he'd had to swallow — and here was the bottom line. Here is what he had to show for his years of dedication. A black hole of nothing.

The cop finally left and Spain got up and went to the door with him. He told Spain, "[something] find her soon," and Spain nodded and they shook hands, Spain looking down as they touched, and the car pulled away. The cop had middle-aged hands like his own, but they were worn from manual labor and the backs of the hands had freckles that looked like liver spots. Spain looked at his large, hairy hands, at the pattern of pores and wrinkles and scars on the backs of the hands. They were large, powerful hands but they didn't look as if they ever tilled soil or barked knuckles trying to work with a wrench in tight places or sweated pipe together or used a welder or ran a metal lathe.

He thought of the things he'd done with those hands. It made his eyes sting, as if from smoke.

He had not smoked since the 70s. One pack he'd puffed on. It was on a job. He'd taken this weird contract the details of which were no longer fresh, but he'd found himself in a situation where he had to make some sort of crude, homemade time bomb. It was something he had to throw together quickly, jury-rigged from available materials at hand. He was nothing if not field-expedient. The fuse had been a cigarette from a pack of Winstons he'd found. He'd pocketed the pack automatically and later, driving through the night, he'd allowed himself the indulgence of smoking the rest of the pack. He had not found a single moment of pleasure from inhaling the hot, throat-parching smoke. He'd faced some kind of a mini-demon and prevailed. One always assumed time would bring a remission, even for the four-pack-a-day gang. Not a minor victory.

He tried to imagine a cigarette in his fingers and couldn't, so he picked up a fountain pen like a cigarette and just as he did a pang of terrible fear stabbed at him. Something was wrong. It was that kind of awful and consuming paranoia that cannot be denied or ignored. He could feel his heart thumping and perspiration trickling down his sides and back and covering his forehead like a fever.

It was not read as a foreshadowing omen, but as a presence. Something was there. Pinpricks dotted his back. It was a strong aura, not foreboding so much as it was just . . . there. He clenched his teeth. Something or someone in back of him ... A presence. Somebody there in the empty house with him.

He walked very quietly, carefully, moving through the big rooms. He was suddenly aware of all the mirrors and glass, and he used this and was methodical as he let his hunter's eyes scan across all the glittering expanse of back bar, chandelier, breakfront, bookcase, mirror, picture tube, window, cabinet, picture-frame glass, anything that reflected, as he moved through the large rooms soundlessly, looking for a hint of shadow or movement as his mind quickly sorted out the random possibilities. Who would be a most likely candidate to want him hurt? The relative of a victim? A cop, coming in the back while the two of them talked up in the front of the house? Somebody high up in the family who would now view him as a threat in some way? Buddy Blackburn? He choked back a laugh as he realized what he was doing, looking up at the tired image in the reflection of the empty dining room.

He knew how the mind works under stress. He was very tired. He would take a couple of aspirin, drink a cup of coffee — caffeine perversely made him sleepy — and take the phone off the hook. And he knew he would sleep. And in that sleep. Yes. Dreams would come.

That was the nice thing about being back home, Eichord thought. You didn't have to produce any results. Just sit here in the grungy squad room smelling used smoke and listening to Lee and Tuny, the two-man uncomedy team who had been his friends since before the dawn of recorded time. These long-time partners who were so close they could piss in the same beer can.

He realized he'd been staring at the same page in the homicide report for about ten minutes. Reading it over and over again and still not seeing the words. Nothing registering. Out to lunch.

"I'm out to lunch," he told the room.

"What else is new?" his friend James Lee muttered.

"Hey, Jimmie," he said, tilting his head in the direction of fat Dana, "your girlfriend's startin' to look pretty good to me, man."

"Yeah? Well, she's allllllll mine."

"That's right, I'm already spoken for, so eatcher heart out, ya fuckin' wino."

Eichord was an alcoholic, and his friends handled it — as they did all things — with taste and diplomacy, and by calling Eichord a fucking wino. If you couldn't take a joke you didn't hang around.

So good to be back home, Eichord thought with a sigh. Back here where I belong with the rest of the rocket scientists.

Back in his safe and smelly cubbyhole in the bowels of Buckhead Station, Eichord felt far removed from a world where a mob assassin shoots his/her victims' eyes out. Had each unrelated decedent seen something they should not? Is this what the killer was saying with those two awful pulls of the trigger, You've seen too much? One thing was clear: when you take aim and shoot someone's eyes out, you are not just committing murder. You are making one helluva statement.

She was unconscious and she stayed out for a long time, awakening to a sense of being drugged but with a pain of such throbbing intensity the dope couldn't cancel it out. Imagine an impacted wisdom tooth, broken off in the extrication process by an inept oral surgeon, and raw nerve ends screaming for whatever solace waits beyond codeine, Demerol, Dilaudid. What high is next? The righteous heroin stone? Free-basing? A leaded baseball bat? You don't care. You just want the lights out.

The next time she came to, she could identify some of the sounds. Roger Nunnaly's voice, an older woman. The voices took shapes in the discrete colors within the variegated darkness and she saw through a camera lens layered thick with Vaseline. Then she went away again to sleep.

Greg had found her and debated whether to take her to the emergency ward of the nearest hospital but he knew the police would become involved.

What a bother this girl had become. Such a hassle. One of Nunnaly's street friends knew a woman nurse who didn't ask questions, and the problem was temporarily solved. Private care. Of sorts.

Tiff was young and strong and healthy. She was a fast healer. But without proper medical treatment the bones did not set properly. She would have problems. The spine is also a funny thing. A blow to the back had impaired the motor nerves controlling lateral movement of the right foot. She would not walk as well as she had. The facial scars would recede to some extent. All in all, not so bad. Better a crippled dog than a dead lioness.

The RN the boys had hired cost money. The dope she was hitting Tiff with also wasn't free. And there was the problem of the impending score. Greg and Roger did what they had to do. There was a couple who needed a young girl for "a live-in domestic," as they put it, and Greg sold them Tiffany for sixteen hundred dollars cash. It was touch and go for a while. The Freunds almost backed out on the deal when they saw the extent of damage to their merch, but they gave her a thorough examination, slept on it, and finally reached a decision. What the hell. They had plenty of disposable income and it might be worth a shot.

Tiff was not consulted in the matter, needless to say. She had not only lost the $2,800 gold mine, she'd cost them a bundle to boot, and jeopardized an important score. There was nothing to talk about. If she could generate some income it was her place to do so. She'd be expected to do whatever the Freunds told her to do. Light maid work, probably, and sex anyway they wanted it. Anytime. With whoever they said. In return, the Freunds were picking up her "medical expenses." Fair is fair.

Charlie Freund had been into stags there in Hollywood, Florida, way back when it was dirty little loops of cellulite queens and skinny dudes in black socks. Broads corralled off street corners. Bimbos scouted at poolside. "Dirty Feet flicks," named after the hallmark of the old-time porn quickie.

But the burgeoning market exploded and stag loops went the way of the sex shops and mail catalogs as production values accelerated, the new video technology bringing with it the mainstream money. And the cheapie porno film was obsolete almost overnight in a world where the next-door neighbors were taping their own action. Consumer need was reassessed.

The video boom signified megabucks, and soon the adult-movie market was the biggest enterprise going in America. When stag films dried up, he and his partner went their own ways, his partner going the massage-parlor route, Charlie concentrating on direct-mail specialties. He knew there'd always be a living just on the two hundred names he had. Pedophiles, people wanting circus shit, fans of heavy duty S&M. They had nowhere else to go for it but the small, kitchen-table porn merchants.

Charlie had cultivated a small stable of ladies who were into tit torture, spankings, humiliation, and the lighter forms of bondage and discipline. The rest of it was faked, and sometimes rather inexpertly. But the market was there just as he said. And since he was into it himself, he could see that the potential was astounding for quality stuff.

Porno entrepreneurs go under for the same reasons any other small business fails: undercapitalization, lack of management knowledge, unwillingness to change with the marketplace, failing to maintain a fair share of the active business, refusing to work hard enough. Charlie went to some people who had money and management knowledge, and offered his willingness to shoot at a new bull's-eye, work hard, and carve out a virgin mini-market for them. He convinced them he knew his specialty, which was pain, and Charlie Freund was on his way.

Charlie was married — well, not married exactly — but he lived with a mean, vicious malcontent of a diesel dyke named Bobbie. They made a good team. They liked hurting women, but not exclusively. They had Catholic tastes in these areas. They had a surprisingly capacious repertoire and an insatiable appetite for punishing and hurting and dominating.

It began on the level of the barbed invective and the punishing insult, which they both cultivated as an art form. They had poisonous and deadly verbal skills. Caustic, biting, unforgiving tongues — both of them — capable of the most acrimonious linguistic surgery. Nonanesthetized probes homing in on the soft spots. Critiques of dripping, acidulous harshness. Scorn of the most withering and unforgettable acerbity. The problem is, they needed recipients for the abuse. Someone, preferably, who wouldn't fight back.

They went for prepubescent targets who could be dressed up as foxy little cheerleaders, virginal 4H girls, rosy-cheeked homecoming-queen fantasies from either sex. But they usually had to make do with tired hookers playacting, divorcees on the third bounce, doltish hash-slingers. They lusted for the animation and thrills of a yet-to-be-vanquished but vulnerable recipient for their gifts.

They were spoilers. It began with words, always. Scathing sarcasm that could puncture and deflate with surgical precision or pummel the target with crude bludgeons; devastating onslaughts of mockery and derision. Mercilessly savage rancor designed to cripple and maim. And Tiff wore the designation VICTIM like a banner.

They used Tiff in some of the lower-budget affairs. Customized specialty orders where the camera might need to see the angry, red welts appear, or even a little blood dotting the skin in a "pincushion" movie. But the mainstream stuff called for pros. They used models for the tormented tit titillation, the fantasies catering to the clothespin-and-rubber-band crowd, the teen stewardess spanking sessions (See Patty paddled by Tara in this steaming bestseller featuring the stars of Teddy Torture). Tiff was okay for the untitled junk. The hardcore work went to a grossly overweight dominatrix in Pennsylvania, who regularly sent them Polaroids of her guilt-ridden hubby, a weight hanging dumbly from his flaccid cock-ringed dong. Custom jobs for the whackaroonies.

One physical act held unique appeal for Charlie and Bobbie. DBC was a subcategory of discipline and punishment that rivaled even the boundless thrills of creating an emotional basket case. It was a bizarre tangential tributary of S & M called Disfigurement by Consent. A young and soft victim would be drawn into this with sufficient drugs and time and the proper increments of humiliation and force. "But the fun was in getting the child to want it herself.

"Do you know what we keep in here, slave?" Bobbie asked Tiff in her sexiest, most dangerous contralto.

"Hmm-mmm." Tiff shook her head in the negative.

"Get those eyes off of me, you freak," Bobbie hissed, and Tiff cast her eyes to the floor obediently. "There, you cunt. That's much better. Now. In this little rosewood box your mistress keeps her silver branding iron. If you want us to keep feeding you all that dope, you greedy little bitch, you'd better show us you want to become one of the family. Soon you'll be begging your mistress for the privilege of wearing our brand on your ass." Tiff appeared to be nodding off and Bobbie slapped her somewhat absentmindedly. "If you could only learn to behave more like Ginger. Junkie cunt."

They were always talking to her about Ginger. She should try to act more like Ginger. Ginger Deaton had learned to really like it, they assured her. She had been extremely plain, with a personality still embryonic, but Charlie and Bobbie had brought her along with all the artifice their collective perversion could muster, gentling this quiet, passive creature further into their nightmare swamp because they smelled the strong scent of victim on her. She became a favorite protegee in time.

One cannot be hypnotized against one's will. But Ginger's own needs were such that a notoriously unscrupulous hypnotist was able to further enslave her on the Freunds' behalf. Once Bobbie heard a noise in their bedroom closet, to illustrate the extent of their dark proclivities, and jumped out of bed in alarm. It was Ginger, unable to control a sneeze, for which she was later whipped to the edge of her pain threshold, the girl's head visible from hair down to upper lip. The rest of Ginger Deaton mummified in four and a half feet of tightly wrapped bandages.

Charlie remembered then that Ginger had requested discipline "a few days ago," and he'd forgotten about the quiet little slave who was silently dehydrating to death in their closet. Devoted Ginger bore cruel Freund brands on both legs, the inner thighs, the cheeks of her ass, her armpits, tits — the rest of her a living dart board of disfigurement from cigarette burns, pin and needle holes. God knows what. Why can't you learn to be more like Ginger? they'd taunt Tiff. Learn to serve us.

But Denise was their piece of least resistance. Their masterwork of depravity. They had spent over two years working their magic on a gay, twenty-year-old boy named Dennis Majors. They were ardent, persuasive, and very cunning. Their love affair with Dennis would survive the test of time only if he would be willing to meet them halfway. By which they meant if he would allow the woman within him-her to finally, fully emerge from the cruel joke that life had played on him-her-it.

It required the greatest concentration, effort, and planning on their part, not to mention personal risk, while they scammed their victim for the eighteen months Dennis spent under the observation of a reputable psychiatrist and a physician. But Dennis-Denise, who had been living as a woman for years, now with the benefit of a year and a half of hormone injections et al, was allowed to go under the scalpel.

Several weeks later, to the Freunds' great amusement, the youth committed suicide after they unceremoniously dumped her in a scathing, derisive, blistering attack by telephone. They had informed her, with never a second's hesitation or moment's remorse, that his-her gender reassignment surgery had been the punch line of a hilarious practical joke. They had reached a level of vituperation and scorn that surprised even them, and Denise's self-immolation was an exciting payoff.

These were the hands into which Spain's daughter had been placed for care and feeding.

Later, with seldom if ever a tender moment, Spain's daughter, branded and fully hooked, was working "love shows," the euphemism for live sex acts, having celebrated a birthday by performing in a particularly nasty S & M show in which she was listed as "golden shower-receiving."

But the quality of mercy droppeth as the gentle rains. Tiff's addiction and crippled body they could accept. Her stubborn streak was a continual irritant to the Freunds. Her owners now regarded Tiff as worthless chattel, fast becoming a tiresome liability. When the Freunds are approached by some mob-connected people who need an untraceable live target for a snuff movie being shot out of the country, she is sold for what will be the last time.

Maybe it was around the time his daughter disappeared that the bad dreams began, he thinks. Or was it earlier — when he came home from the trip to the coast and discovered Pat and Buddy Blackburn were sharing his bed? Spain cannot recall the precise instant the nightmares began. Only the dreams themselves, which are bloody real and etch themselves into his memory banks.

The large picture window framed a vista of falling autumn leaves that dropped from the tall oak, maple, and sycamore across his landscaped lawn. The leaves and grass appeared to have lost all chlorophyll content overnight, the lush look becoming sparse as the dead, brittle leaves floated down to turn to mulch. The Archilochus colubris had long disappeared, and it was just as well, since there was no longer anyone to tend the feeders.

All the losses were building deep within Spain, and about the time he thinks the awful, aching hurts have become a dull, throbbing pain, some new shock wave of recognition hits his core. Ever the realist, he senses that his child is gone for good.

One day she'd been buying Cabbage Patch dolls and Care Bears and the next day she's hitchhiking and getting birth-control pills. Why couldn't he have spotted all of this coming and done something to ward it off? Over and over he makes himself look at things that had happened between himself and Pat, between father and daughter, the harshness and coldness that had alienated a wife and then a daughter.

He could sense now that there would be no reunion or eventual reconciliation. No firm but fair fatherly attentions to put his wayward child back on the track. There would be no reprieves for them. No second chance to become a family again.

He'd been in the family room, staring out the window at the falling leaves, when he'd seen the shadow again or a sense of some movement there in back of him and he'd whirled, instinctively, his right hand going for the small automatic he carried and then catching himself all in the same moment.

That feeling again. The eerie feeling that someone was there in the big, empty house with him. Watching him. Jesus. He felt the skin on his arms and shoulders prickle with what his dear mother had called "goose bumps." And this man who feared nothing shrugged it off. He knew the tricks that stress and lack of sleep could play.

He tried to mentally add up how many hours of sleep he'd actually had so far that week. It was Thursday morning, he thought, and since Sunday night he didn't think he'd had sixteen hours' sleep, and much of that furtive. Still, he told himself, Edison invented the light bulb on less. He was very tired.

His eyes stung and he decided he'd take something and hit the sack. Good night, his mom would say tucking him in, sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake . . . CHRIST, he saw it again, a movement of some kind behind him as he headed up the richly carpeted stairs. He had to catch himself to keep from saying something out loud. Get a grip on yourself, man, he told himself and headed for bed.

He had begun to dream the moment he put his head on the pillow, sleeping on his face with his arms under him, the blood cut off. And the dream was very bad this time. One of the worst, in fact.

It is the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. He is driving down a black-topped service road somewhere in the country. The road runs parallel to a set of railroad tracks not far from a busy interstate. A crop duster periodically dives low over the road to spray the adjacent fields of milo and soybeans, and Spain admires the grace of the small, yellow biplane.

A train is approaching in the distance and the appearance of the countryside, the flat farmland, the old-time plane, the train approaching, it all combines to give the atmosphere a kind of quaint, old-fashioned feel, as if it should be photographed in a freeze frame and made into a calendar scene for a drug company.

The crop duster zooms down across the road again, leaving another trail of white spray through the azure of the crystal-clear sky, and Spain and his companion drive through the falling, dissipating chemicals where the blacktop bisects two halves of a field.

The monstrosity beside Spain says, "What a beautiful day, eh?"

"Yes. It's nice."

"The kind of day you really feel glad to be alive."

"Sure do."

"Just beautiful." The monstrosity leans back expansively, the car seat creaking under his massive weight. "Really pretty."

"Yep."

"Hey," the thing asks Spain, "d'ya know what a kris is?"

"Chris?"

"Yeah. A kris. A Malaysian dagger. Ever seen one?"

"No, I don't bel —" And before he can answer, the monstrosity reaches over and pries one of Spain's fingers — his right thumb, actually, — loose from the wheel and slices something across it, squirting a gush of blood like the end of a garden hose squirting bright red over the dashboard and the wheel as Spain cries out in agony. The thing has sliced his right thumb off with a ridged, serpentine dagger and the pain is just unbearable now as Spain fights to stanch the flow of blood and the monstrosity laughs.

"Oh, wow. I wouldn't worry about that too much if I were you. You ain't gonna have time to bleed to death," it says, and the kris bites into his neck, the thing slashing the sharp, wavy edge across Spain's jugular, then tossing the blade down and picking up a club as the bloodspurt bathes the interior of the car, and saying, "Adi—s, motherfucker," as he slams a home run using Spain's head for a ball, and just as the club slams into his screaming face, the car coming in the opposite direction hits them head-on and they are spun around and back-ended by an eighteen-wheeler loaded with steel and in the crushing impact they are smacked out on to the railroad tracks and the train grinds down on them just as the crop duster crashes down out of the sky on the deadly tableau and Spain sits up in the grinding, crushing, pulverizing meat grinder shaking and bathed in nightmare terror, and the thing in the shadows there with him in the empty house speaks for the first time as he jerks out of the dream, and Spain feels his whole body cover in chill bumps as the ancient and horrible voice says, "Hello there."

"Who, uh, how did you get in here?" Spain dreams.

"Who how did I get in here? You sure have a way with words."

"You're the one who's been watching me."

"Bingo."

"Why don't you come out of the shadows? You scared?"

"Uh-huh."

"What are you scared of?"

"What are I scared of? Not you, big fella."

"Are you a demon of some kind?"

"Will you just listen to yourself? You're getting all worked up over nothing."

"Motherfucker."

"Oh, no. I'd never fuck her. My mother is sin and you never fuck sin. Sin fucks you. Sin and madness."

"Go to hell."

"From your lips to God's ear."

"Horseshit."

"Sin, madness, hell, and horseshit. The four horseshits of the apocalypse."

"Fuckyou!" Spain screams, lurching out of the dream in the empty darkness of his bedroom, waking as the abrasive echo of his curse resonates in his mind. The shadows are very near now and soon they will find him and enclose him, enveloping him in a shroud of insanity and death.

"Come on, man," Morales said to the slim, dark-haired man as he adjusted one of the large, heavy-duty lights for the third time.

"An' wash whe' jew put dose feet, baby, jew knock this motherfucking light over jew buy it, man." He was fussy about his expensive lights.

Big fucking deal, Belmonte thought. It looked like a "real" movie set with all the lights and cameras and shit around. Cables running everywhere.

"Hey, these fuckers burn out I leave 'em on too long, man. Come on, mano, jew look real pretty. Let's get this motherfucking chit over with, eh?"

"Yaaaa," Jon Belmonte grunted noncommittally as he carefully brushed his dark hair. Even if he was being shot from the back, he wanted to look good. He'd watch this shit later with the new bitch. When he was satisfied he slipped his shirt off and pulled on an old shirt that he could burn afterward. This bitch wasn't going to splatter a new sixty-eight-dollar shirt.

"Jew ready now, Marlon."

"Here we are man, Spic and Span." They laughed. "Le's do it."

"Hey, li'l mama," Belmonte said as they walked into the room where the girl was resting on the bed. "It's star time," he said with a giggle as he spread his arms out expansively. "Right?"

"Nnn." She nodded dumbly, eyes heavy-lidded, features slack.

"Hey?" Nothing. "HEY, bitch. Talk to me."

"What?" she said.

"You ain't gon' fuck this up now, are ya?" He smiled. She shook her head slowly, nodding. "Wake up now, li'l mama. You remember your big line, now, doncha?"

"Mmmm," she grunted.

"Say?"

"Yeah. Umm. Yeah, I remember."

"Say it." She gazed off into space, a smile fixed on her face. "SAY IT, damn you .... You stupid li'l bitch." Nothing.

"Ay, chihuahua, jew hit her with too much. She ain't gonna even look like she's alive."

"Fuck it, man, let's get it done." They started kicking on the rest of the lights. A powerful bounce-light and a light that looked like it was surrounded by a silver umbrella, and a bank of small lights on a portable stand.

Tiff, blinded momentarily, put her hand over her face and said, "Shit. Hey, the light hurts my eyes," and both of the men broke up laughing.

The photographer, Morales, said, "Hey, li'l puta, jew ain't going to have to worry about having nothing hurt jew eyes for much longer, so don't worry about it."

"Cool it, goddammit," Belmont said as they laughed, jiving around as they set up for the payoff shot.

"Make sure we got film in the motherfucker and that nothin's fucked up 'cause you ain't got a second take on this one, C.B."

"Yeah. I hear dat chit all right." He double-checked the monitor. He was shooting a video master with a rinky-dink portable generator, but the picture looked to be all right and the cats bought this shit they weren't too choosy about Panaflex cams and Scope. Just let 'em see it nice 'n' clear, you know. See the little chiquita get fucked up in a nice color close-up. No big fucking deal just as long as everything showed good.

"Jew miked?" Morales asked Belmonte.

"Unnn," he said, making sure the cord from the lavaliere was tucked down on the side the camera wouldn't see. Cheap shit wouldn't even have a fuckin' boom on it.

"How's this look?"

"Looking good," Morales said. He made a last-minute adjustment as he squinted through the camera apparatus. "Yeah. Okay."

"Yeah."

"I'm ready. You got your chit together?"

"Nnnn. Tape rollin'?"

"Yo. Mark it."

"Teenage Snuff, fucking TAKE ONE!" He was in the lower right of the shot. A two-shot of Tiff in close-up, back to a medium shot where you could see Belmonte's back, and the long metal thing in his left hand.

"I told you that you'd pay for displeasing me, you cunt," he emoted into the mike clipped to his shirt. Nothing. The dumb cunt had forgotten her line. "DON'T STOP THE TAPE. KEEP THE FUCKER ROLLING," he shouted and stepped close.

"No sweat," Morales said. He slapped her with the free hand but she just held her head a little differently, the same dumb smile on her face. He could see she was out of it. Fuck it.

"Teenage Snuff, TAKE TWO!" he said his line again. "I told you that you'd pay for displeasing me, you cunt," and he started plunging the metal thing into her and she screamed.

Morales thought to himself the blood was looking damn good. Best damn blood squibs you ever wanna see. The good part was just starting. He couldn't wait. He was anxious to see Jon put her eyes out with the thing. He loved to see a little white honey get all fucked up like this.

Jon Belmonte, a.k.a. Juan La Bellamonde, was seldom in the wet vid they cranked out at Rhapsody Video. He'd do a little off-cam thing now and then, but this was a special exception. It would take some expertise. You didn't want to go too far. It would be easy to lose your head, get carried away, and off the bitch before you get to the good stuff. Expendables were expensive. He also couldn't see laying out good coin for some dude with a big cock just for something they could shoot over the shoulder in a little back-lit quickie two-shot. And he knew he could keep her alive at least till he got to her eyes.

He knew just how far to stick her in the tits to look good on cam. Get the freaks up for it. Stick her plenty of times but nice little shallow jabs. He knew he could trust himself not to go crazy and blow it. He'd done plenty of this kind of shit himself. He just hadn't filmed all of it. No problem.

He was a packager. He had the whole production thing, the last stop on the pain line. Rhapsody, ironically titled by the former owner, was just one of the indies feeding the Blue Kriegal operation, which was tied to St. Louis people. He didn't know who was involved and didn't want to know. It was bad enough having to deal with a freak like Kriegal. Kriegal's thing was run by St. Louis, who was under Chicago, and them fuckers — the less you know about them, the longer you live.

Porn was a family operation as far as he was concerned. And his level of the family, the remora sucking up to the big fish that could get you through the heavy surface scum, really was a family. A freak family but still a family. A small circle of people all involved in the same shit. The people he bought the girl from, the Fruends — shit, they sold to Blue Kriegal. There were indies all over the country. The production end wasn't shit on the little cheapie stuff like this. All that bogus bullshit about how the mob controlled pornography, that was just newspaper jive.

Pervs controlled that shit. Kinks like Jon Belmonte, who got off on little kids, or torture, or whatever circus love you were into. What the mob controlled was the distribution end, which was where the bucks came from, the guys who pulled the exhibitor's strings. The one way you always knew where the mob was, you follow the money. The little stuff, the nickel-and-dime skin house, nobody cared. But get into some serious money and it was the family.

Blue Kriegal was always braggin' about how well-connected he was in the St. Louis operation, but Jesus Christ, anybody with half a brain would have sense enough to know that was about 90 percent bullshit. Who in their right fucking mind would have anything to do with a stone whackadoo like Blue Kriegal if they didn't have to? He was a fucking maniac. Little tiny kids 'n' shit. Damn. It was enough to make you sick.

Belmonte had to deal with him a couple times a year when Kriegal would come down through McAllen and want Belmonte to get him some Mexican stuff. And he'd have to take the weird son of a bitch over and get him straight with some poor little baby. Crazy fucker. That was the kind of maniac you had to deal with sometimes.

Personally Belmonte got off on young chicks. Even a good-looking young boy once in a while. Take 'em down real good. He could dig that. But not no little babies 'n' shit. He was a little kinky sure. Plenty twisted and whatnot. But he wasn't fucking CRAZY.

The loud voices echoed through the Homicide squad room at Buekhead Station.

"It's your turn, that's why," the fat detective snarled at his friend as he produced a couple of withered ones from a disreputable-looking billfold. He leaned over with some effort and tossed the folded bills onto his partner's desk. "Large coffee-with and one "of them big long things looks like a schvatza's pecker."

"Say ya want a big long thing that looks like Arnold Schwartzenegger?"

"Missing out on life?" fat Dana Tuny announced to the room, cupping his ear like a radio broadcaster and pushing his voice down an octave. "Why go another day without the revolutionary new hearing aid from Say What Incorporated. It's the exciting hearing aid made for assholes! That's right! You heard me correctly. It's the new miracle hearing aid shaped like a suppository. You stick it in your ass instead of your ear —"

"What's a five-letter word beginning with S that means Athenian lawgiver?" Jack Eichord interrupted from across the squad room where he was engrossed in a crossword puzzle.

"Schmuck," James Lee said helpfully.

"Schmuck is six letters, you schmuck. Hey, Eichord, Lee's goin' across the street. You wanna banana daiquiri or anything? Or is the sun over the yardarm yet? I mean, it's eight-forty-five in the morning, hey?" The partners began to giggle like little girls.

"Sorry, I didn't hear that, I have a banana daiquiri in my ear," Eichord muttered.

"You ain't supposed to be diddlin' around any-whichway," Lee told him. "I heard you were on some big-mob thing."

"Yeah. Tryin' to find out who wasted Dutch Schultz."

"I'm workin' on it right now," Eichord mumbled-"SOLON — that's the mother." He filled the word in.

"What'd he say?" Lee said to his partner.

"Say what?"

"Say WHAT? What do I look like anyway, a hearing aid for assholes?"

"I said Solon," Eichord told them.

"Okay," Lee said, getting up and heading for the door, "so long."

"Yeah," Tuny called to him, "write if you get work and hang by your balls."

Long ago Jack had learned to tune them out. If you worked out of Buckhead it was a thing you developed early on. A hearing aid for assholes, he thought as he doodled the word Solon with a black pen. He shook his head.

He had learned a trick about detective work from a writer. A nice old gent by the name of Carlton E. Morse. Guy used to write I Love a Mystery and One Man's Family on radio. Morse had taught him the secret of opening your mind to the flow of ideas. Another dude who was in the intelligence racket had shown him a trick or two to make the flow come easier. Eichord appeared to be doodling aimlessly but his spongelike mind was soaking up whatever trickled over the top of the dam.

He had drawn a huge S O L O N and made the two Os into old-time pie-cut eyes. Given them eyebrows. And as he blacked in the eyes pushing hard with the felt-tip pen over and over, the paper tore and his pen plunged through one of the eyes and he saw the eyes of the first cadaver, the bloody sockets, the headline EYEBALL MURDERS, the eyes of a little monkey holding its hands over its eyes, SEE NO EVIL printed on a greeting card, and a man looking up from a card, casually, but with a flicker of recognition in the wiseguy eyes, and it all merged in Eichord's mental storehouse as he picked up the phone to call the Major Crimes Task Force, his employer of record.

Eichord had looked into many unusual mob assassinations because they had drawn lots of ink in a given jurisdictional area. Jack was just one of the people the feds would pull in on crimes of homicide that would draw what might be termed "undue notoriety." Potential scandals, in other words. Sensitive homicides. Most of these were not technically serial killings. A serial kill, at least the way MCTF played it, was when there were four or more related murders. That was the official Quantico definition. Who ever decided three weren't but four were — that nobody could ever quite pin down, but the definition stuck.

Three men down. Eyes blasted out. Payback, West Coast Mafioso-style. Wise-guy eyes. SEE NO EVIL. A too-casual glance away after the flash of visual recognition.

"Hey, homeboy, what's to it?" he says into the phone. "Yeah. I got a biggie." Pause. "Don't say can do until I lay it on you." Polite chuckle. "What I need is — I need to know the name of every male passenger who left for St. Louis from LAX between five-thirty and six A.M. on —" He glances at a calendar and gives the man a date.

"Huh uh. No, I'm not sure what gate either." But then in that open sponge a metallic voice resonates: