Mask Market

“I’m not the client,” the ferret seated across from me said. He was as thin as a garrote, with a library-paste complexion, the skin surrounding his veined-quartz eyes as papery as dried flowers. He was always room temperature. “You know me, Burke. I only work the middle.”

“I don’t know you,” I lied. “You knew—you say you knew—my brother. But if you did—”

“Yeah, I know he’s gone,” the ferret said, meeting my eyes, the way you do when you’ve got nothing to hide. With him, it was an invitation to search an empty room. “But you’ve got the same name, right? He never had any first name that I knew; so what would I call you, I meet you for the first time?”

It’s impossible to actually look into my eyes, because you have to do it one at a time. One eye is a lot lighter than the other, and they don’t track together anymore.

A few years ago, I was tricked into an ambush. The crossfire cost me my looks, and my partner her life. I mourn her every day—the hollow blue heart tattooed between the last two knuckles of my right hand is Pansy’s tombstone—but I don’t miss my old face. True, it was a lot more anonymous than the one I’ve got now. Back then, I was a walking John Doe: average height, average weight…generic lineup filler. But a lot of different people had seen that face in a lot of different places. And the State had a lot of photographs of it, too—they don’t throw out old mug shots.

I’d come into the ER without a trace of ID, dropped at the door by the Prof and Clarence—they knew I was way past risking the do-it-yourself kit we kept around for gunshot wounds.

Since the government doesn’t pay the freight for cosmetic surgery on derelicts, the hospital went into financial triage, no extras. So the neat, round keloid scar on my right cheek is still there, and the top of my left ear is still as flat as if it had been snipped off. And when the student surgeons repaired the cheekbone on the right side of my face, they pulled the skin so tight that it looked like one of the bullets I took had been laced with Botox. My once-black hair is steel-gray now—it turned that shade while I was in a coma from the slugs, and never went back.

The night man sitting across from me calls himself Charlie Jones—the kind of motel-register name you hear a lot down where I live. A long time ago, I’d done a few jobs he’d brought to me. The way Charlie works it, he makes his living from finder’s fees. Kind of a felonious matchmaker—you tell him the problem you need solved, he finds you a pro who specializes in it.

Charlie pointedly looked down at my hands. I kept them flat on the chipped blue Formica tabletop, palms down. He placed his own hands in the same position, showing me his ID.

The backs of his frail-looking hands were incongruously cabled with thick veins. The skin around his fingernails was beta-carotene orange. The tip of the little finger on his right hand was missing. I nodded my confirmation. Yeah, he was the man I remembered.

Charlie looked at my own hands for a minute, then up at me. The Burke he knew never had a tattoo, but he nodded, just as I had. Charlie was a tightrope dancer—perfect balance was his survival tool. His nod told me not to worry about whether he believed the story that I was Burke’s brother. By him, it was true enough. Where we live, that’s the same as good enough.

“It’s a nice story,” I said, watching as he lit his third cigarette of the meet. Burke was a heavy smoker. Me, I don’t smoke…except when I need to convince someone out of my past that I’m still me.

“It’s not my story,” Charlie reminded me. “Your brother, he was an ace at finding people. Best tracker in the city. I figure he must have taught you some things.”

Charlie never invested himself emotionally in any matches he made. He was way past indifferent, as colorless as the ice storm that grayed the window of the no-name diner where we were meeting. But Charlie had something besides balance going for him. He was a pure specialist, a middleman who never got middled. What that means is, Charlie wouldn’t do anything except make his matches.

Everyone in our world knows this. And for extra insurance, Charlie made sure he never knew the whole story. So, if he got swept up in a net, he wouldn’t have anything to trade, even if he wanted to make a deal. Sure, he could say a man told him about a problem. And he might have given the man a number to call. He had liked the guy, even if he’d only met him that one time. Felt sorry for him. In Charlie’s vast experience, drunks who babbled about hiring a hit man were just blowing off steam. You give them a number to call—any number at all, even one you remembered from a bathroom wall—it helps them play out the fantasy, that’s all. “What!? You mean, his wife’s really dead? Damn! I guess you just never know, huh, officer?”

“This guy, he must not be in a hurry,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Charlie replied. His mantra.

“It’s been three weeks since you reached out.”

“Yeah, it took you a long time to get back to me. I figured, with the phone number being the same and all…”

“Most of those calls are people looking for my brother. I can’t do a lot of the things he used to do.”

“Yeah,” he said, an unspoken I don’t want to know woven through his voice like the anchor thread in a tapestry.

“But, still, three weeks,” I reminded him. “I mean, how do you know the guy still wants…whatever he wants?”

Charlie shrugged.

“You get paid whether I ever call him or not?”

Charlie lit another cigarette. “He knows these things take time. You don’t call, someone else will.”

I waited a few seconds. Then said, “You want to write down his number for me?”

“I’ll say the number,” the ferret told me. “You want it on paper, you do the writing.”

City people call winter the Hawk. Not because of the way it swoops down, but because it hunts. Gets cold enough in this town, people die. Some freeze to death waiting for the landlord to get heat back into their building. Some use their ovens for warmth, and wake up in flames. Some don’t have buildings to die in.

I pulled out a prepaid cell phone, bought in a South Bronx bodega from a guy who had a dozen of them in a gym bag, and punched in the number Charlie had given me. A 718 area code—could be anywhere in the city except Manhattan, but a landline, for sure.

“Hello?” White male, somewhere in his forties.

“You were expecting my call,” I said.

“Who are—? Oh, okay, yeah.”

“I might be able to help you. But I can’t know unless we talk.”

“Just tell me—”

“You know the city?”

“If you mean Manhattan, sure.”

“You got transportation?”

“A car?”

“That’ll do,” I said. I gave him the information I wanted him to have, walked to the end of the alley I’d been using as an office, and put the cell phone on top of a garbage can. Whoever found it would see there were plenty of minutes left. Probably use it to call his parole officer.

I pulled the glove off my left hand, fished a Metrocard out of my side pocket, and dropped below the sidewalk.

“Charlie,” said the little black man with the ageless, aristocratic face. “That boy’s one diesel of a weasel. He might slouch, but he’d never vouch.”

“I know, Prof. But no matter who this guys turns out to be, there’s no way that it’s me he’s looking for. If anyone asked Charlie to put him in touch with a specific guy, it would have spooked him right out of the play.”

The only father I’d ever known closed his eyes, looking into the past. The ambush that had almost taken me off the count years ago had been set up by a middleman, too. Only, that time, I was told the client wanted me for the job. Me and only me.

“How much green just to make the scene?” he asked.

“Two to meet. For me to listen. That’s as far as it’s gone.”

“It’s a good number,” the little man mused. “That’s serious money, not crazy money.”

“The job is finding someone, Prof.”

“Charlie don’t find people,” the little man said. “He finds even one, he’s all done.”

“I did meet him, though.”

“Charlie?”

“Yeah. And I called the spot.”

“So, if he was fingering you…”

“Right. That diner, it’s down by the waterfront. All kinds of bums hanging around. And, in this weather, you could put a dozen men on the street in body armor, and nobody’d even look twice.”

“There’s something else about Charlie,” the Prof said, nodding to himself.

“What?”

“Maybe he’s going along with you being your own brother, maybe he’s not.” The little man’s voice dropped and hardened at the same time. “But he knows what number he called to get you to show up. You be Burke, you be his brother, don’t make no difference. Because Charlie, he knows you not by yourself. You got family. He can’t snap no trap on all of us. He double-crosses you, he’s out of the middle. For as long as he lives. No way our boy bets that number.”

Icicles fringed the bottom of the venom-yellow streetlight reflected in my rearview mirror, turning it into one of those old-fashioned parlor lamps, the kind with tassels hanging off the bottom of the shade.

I felt right at home. Waiting.

I’d set the meet for one in the morning, at a West Side bar in a building slated for demolition. New York is a big piece of machinery; it needs its gears greased to keep running. So the whole neighborhood was getting plowed over, like a field being readied for a different crop. That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

In the neighborhood I’d picked, strip joints where “upscale” meant five bucks for a bottle of Bud Light were driving out residential buildings. Only the rumors that our sports-whore mayor was going to find a way to green-light massive razing so he could build a gigantic football stadium near the Javits Center kept the whole area from being leveled. Building owners were laying in the cut, waiting to see the City’s hole card.

My ’69 Plymouth was huddled against the alley wall, its black-and-primer body mottled into an urban camouflage pattern. Anonymous, near-invisible. Like me, to most.

A cinnamon Audi sedan—a big one, probably an A8—circled the block for the third time, cruising for a place to park. I figured it for the guy I had been waiting for. There was an open space in front of a fire hydrant just across from me, but parking tickets can cost you more than money—ask David Berkowitz.

My watch read six minutes short of the meet time when a man came up the sidewalk toward the bar. He was bareheaded, hunched over against the razoring wind, wearing a camel’s-hair topcoat with a white scarf. The kind of guy who would drive a hundred-grand car, and be used to parking it indoors.

I let him get inside before I made my move. I hadn’t seen enough of his face to pick him out of a crowd, but I wasn’t worried—it wasn’t the kind of joint where you checked your coat.

He was standing at the bar, facing the doorway, the camel’s-hair coat opened to reveal a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and geometric-pattern tie that flashed green-gold in the dim light. He had a shot glass in his right hand, a pair of butter-colored gloves in his left.

I walked toward him. He saw a man in a well-traveled army jacket, winter jeans, and work boots. If anyone asked him later, he would say the man’s hair was covered with a watch cap that came down over the top of his ears, and his eyes were unreadable behind the heavy lenses of horn-rimmed glasses. My face was temporarily unscarred, thanks to Michelle’s deft touch with the tube of Cover-mark she always carries.

The man coming toward him had a pair of gloves, too…on his hands.

I nodded my head to my left. He stepped away from the bar and walked in the direction I had indicated. I slipped past him and took a seat in an empty wood booth, facing the door. He sat down across from me.

Up close, he was older than his voice, but a guy who took care of himself, or had people do it for him: hundred-dollar haircuts, facials, manicures. I was guessing a heavy pill regimen, regular workouts, maybe even a little nip-and-tuck, too.

“Are you—?”

I held up two fingers.

He nodded, reached into the inside pocket of his coat, and brought out a plain white envelope. He put it on the table between us. I picked it up, slipped it into a side pocket.

“You’re not going to count it?”

“You want something done, what’s in it for you to stiff me on the front end?” I told him.

“That’s right,” he said, nodding vigorously.

I waited.

“Uh, is this a good place to talk?” he said, looking over his right shoulder.

“Depends on what you’re going to say.”

“I wouldn’t want the waiter to—”

“They don’t have any here,” I told him. “Go to the bar, get a refill on whatever you’re drinking, a whiskey double for me, and bring them back. Nobody’ll bother us.”

It was warm in the bar, but, even all wrapped up, I wasn’t uncomfortable. When I was a young man, I had done some time in Africa. I was on the ground as the Nigerian military slaughtered a million people, made the whole “independent” country that tried to call itself Biafra disappear. The UN, that useless herd of toothless tigers, wouldn’t call it genocide—that would mean they might have to send in troops. Didn’t call what went down in Rwanda by its right name, either. Same for the Sudan. But they drew the line in Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing? Go ahead; just remember to keep it dark.

I got out of Biafra just before it fell, and I took home malaria as a permanent souvenir. Ever since, I can wear a leather jacket in July and not break a sweat. But the Hawk can find my bone marrow under the heaviest cover.

The man came back, sat down, put my whiskey in front of me, held up his own drink. “To a successful partnership,” he said.

I didn’t raise my glass, or my eyes.

He put down his drink without taking a sip. “I was told you specialize in finding people.”

“Okay.”

“Yes. Well…I, I need someone found.”

If life was a movie, I would have asked him why he wanted the person found. He would have told me a long story. Being hard-bitten and cynical, I wouldn’t have believed him. But, being down on my luck, I would have taken the case anyway. Unless he’d been a gorgeous girl—then I would have taken it for nothing, of course.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Can you tell me how much it would cost to do that? Find…the person, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t tell you that. Here’s how it works: You pay me by the day. I keep looking until I find whoever you’re looking for, or until you tell me to quit trying.”

“Well, how much is it a day, then?”

“Same as you just paid me. I cover all expenses out of that. And there’s a twenty-G bonus if I turn up what you want.”

“Ten thousand a week,” he said, the slightest trace of a question mark at the end of the sentence.

“We don’t take weekends off,” I told him. “One week, that’s fourteen. Payable in advance.”

“That could run into a lot of money.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll have to think that one over.”

“You know where to find me,” I said.

“Well, actually, I don’t. I mean, the man who I…spoke to, he just took my number, and you called me, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“So how do I…? Oh. You mean, now or never, right?”

“Right.”

He took a hit off his drink. “I don’t walk around with that kind of cash,” he said. “Who does?”

“Best of luck with your search,” I said, moving my untouched glass to the side as I started to stand up.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

I settled back into my seat. If we were still in that movie, I would have told him that lying was a bad way to start a relationship. If we were going to work together, I would need the truth, all the way. Down here, we play it different: “true” means you can spend it.

“Not on me,” he said. “But close by. In my car. I keep an emergency stash. You never know….”

I let my mouth twitch. Let him guess what that meant.

“Hold on to this,” he said, handing me a black CD in a pale-pink plastic jewel case, as if it sealed a bargain between us. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll go over everything.”

I pocketed the CD. Folded my gloved hands like a kid waiting for the teacher to come back.

He got up and left. I counted to thirty; then I got up, too, heading for the restrooms. I walked past the twin doors until I found myself in the open space behind the bar. I crossed the space, moving like the Prof had taught me a million years ago. I can’t phantom through a room without displacing the air like he does, but I can move smooth enough not to disrupt the visuals unless someone’s staring directly at me.

The back door had a heavy alarm box next to it, but I could see it was unplugged. I opened the door just wide enough to slide through, clicked it soft behind me, and made my way down a short flight of metal steps to the alley.

I didn’t want my car. I knew what direction he’d come from; if I cut the alley right, I’d come out close enough to see that camel’s-hair coat.

Nothing.

Quick choice: was he still behind me, or ahead? I felt the Hawk’s bite, remembered how the guy was dressed, and figured he’d be moving as quick as he could. I took off the glasses, switched my black watch cap for a red one, hunched my shoulders against the wind, and started covering ground.

I saw him cross ahead of me, moving toward the river. I gambled on another alley, and drew the right card. I marked the direction he was going in, and moved out ahead.

The big Audi was parked mid-block, a purebred among mutts. I floated into a doorway, wrapping the shadows around my shoulders. If he just took off, instead of getting something from inside his ride and walking back to the bar, I’d figure he was busy on a cell phone, and company was coming—I wouldn’t be there when it arrived. But if he really kept that kind of cash in his car, I wanted that license number.

He walked past me on the opposite side of the street. I stayed motionless, but he never glanced my way.

Two men came toward him from the far end of the block, walking with too much space between them to be having a conversation. The guy in the camel’s-hair coat was almost to his car before he saw them. He put his hands up and started backing away, making a warding-off motion with his palms.

A car door opened. A man in a black-and-gold warm-up suit stepped onto the sidewalk behind the man in the camel’s-hair coat. He brought his two hands together and spread his feet in one flowing motion. The man in the camel’s-hair coat went down. The shooter waved the other two back with his free hand, then walked over to the man lying on the sidewalk, an extended-barrel pistol held in profile. The whole thing was over in seconds, as choreographed as an MTV video, on mute.

A vapor-colored sedan pulled out of its parking spot. The shooter got into the back seat, and it drove off. The two men who had blocked the target were gone.

The street stayed quiet.

I took a long deep breath through my nose, filling my stomach. I let it out slowly, expanding my chest as I did.

Then I got gone.

My Plymouth looks like a candidate for the junkyard. But it’s a Rolex under all the rust, including an independent rear suspension transplanted from a wrecked Viper some rich guy had thought made him immune to physics, and a hogged-out Mopar big-block with enough torque to compete in a tractor pull. So I feathered the throttle, even though I wasn’t worried about snow on the streets.

The same year my car had been born, the mayor had been a guy named Lindsay. He was the ideal politician, a tall, good-looking, Yale-graduate, war-veteran, “fusion” Republican who ran on the Liberal ticket. He got a lot of credit for New York not going the way of Newark or Detroit or Los Angeles during the riots the year before. But when the big blizzard hit in February of ’69 and paralyzed the city, Lindsay took the heat for the Sanitation Department being caught napping, and that was the end of his career.

Every mayor that followed him got the message. New Yorkers will tolerate just about anything on their streets, from projectile-vomiting drunks to mumbling lunatics, but snow is un-fucking-acceptable.

I made my way over to the West Side Highway, rolled north to Ninety-sixth, exited, and looped back, heading downtown. Even at two in the morning, I couldn’t be sure I didn’t have company—in this city, there’s always enough traffic for cover. But I knew a lot of places that would expose a shadow real quick, some as flat and empty as the Sahara, others as clogged as a ready-to-rupture artery.

I opted for density. Took a left on Canal, motored leisurely east, then ducked into the Chinatown maze. Made two slow circuits before I finally docked in the alley behind Mama’s joint, right under a white square with a freshly painted black ideogram. My spot. Empty as always—the Chinese calligraphy marked the territory of Max the Silent, a message even the baby-faced gangsters who infested the area understood.

I flat-handed the steel door twice. Seconds later, I found myself staring into the face of a man I’d never seen before. That didn’t matter—he knew who I was, and I knew what he was there for.

The restaurant never changes, just the personnel. Like an army base with a high turnover. I went through the kitchen, past the bank of payphones, and sat down in my booth. The place was empty. No surprise—the white-dragon tapestry had been on display in the filthy, streaked front window when I had driven past. If it had been blue, I would have kept on rolling. Red, I would have found a phone, made some calls.

Mama appeared from somewhere behind me, a heavy white tureen in both hands. “Come for visit?” she said.

“For soup.”

“Sure, this weather, good, have soup,” Mama said. She used a ladle to dole out a steaming portion into a red mug with BARNARD in big white letters curling around the side. Mama is no more a cook than the place she runs is a restaurant, but her hot-and-sour soup is her pride and joy. Failure to consume less than three portions per visit would be considered a gross lack of respect.

I took a sip, touched two fingers to my lips, said, “Perfect!”—the minimally acceptable response.

Mama made a satisfied sound, her ceramic face yielding to some version of a smile. “You working?”

“I was,” I said. I told her what had happened. When I got to the part about the shooting, Mama held up a hand for silence, barked out a long string of harsh-sounding Cantonese. Two men in white aprons came out of the kitchen. One went to the front door, crouched down, and positioned himself so he had a commanding view of the narrow street. The other vigorously nodded his head twice, then vanished.

I went back to my story and my soup.

A few minutes later, the front door opened, and the man who had gone back to the kitchen area walked in. He conferred with the man by the window. They came over to where we were sitting. Rapid-fire conversation. I didn’t need a translator to understand “all clear.”

“So?” Mama said.

“I don’t think it had anything to do with me, Mama. The way I see it, whoever this guy was, he was important enough for someone to have a hunter-killer team on his trail. Once the spotter had him pinned, he called in the others.”

“We do that, too, now, yes?”

“Right,” I agreed. I got up and headed for the payphones.

Everyone was there in less than an hour. The Prof and Clarence drove in from their crib in East New York. The warehouse where Max the Silent lives with his wife, Immaculata, was only a short walk away.

I’d been on the scene when they first met, on a late-night subway train, a lifetime ago. Immaculata was part Vietnamese, part who-knows? First dismissed as a “bar girl” by Mama, she was instantly elevated to Heaven’s Own Blessing when she gave birth to Max’s baby, Flower. The moment her sacred granddaughter decided on Barnard College, Mama had personally emptied the school’s merchandise catalogue.

Apparently, she considered the sweatshirt she had presented to me last year to be adequate compensation for the fortune she’d extorted from me over the years “for baby’s college.”

I told the story of my meet, gesturing it out for Max, even though he can read my lips like they were printing out words.

“The boss pay for a toss?” the little man asked, miming a man bent over a victim, rifling through his pockets. Max nodded, to let us know he was following along.

“Didn’t look like it, Prof. The shooter plugged him once, then walked over and made sure,” I said, gesturing to act out my words. “But I didn’t see him search the body, and the other two were already in the wind.”

“If he had a silencer, it must have been a semi-auto,” Clarence said. The young man usually didn’t speak until he thought the rest of us were finished. But when he was on sure ground, he would.

“My son knows his guns,” the Prof said, approvingly. “The shooter pick up his brass?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “The street was too dark, and he fired at least three times.”

“The police, they will know it was an execution,” Clarence said, his West Indian accent adding formality to his speech. “If the killers did not search the dead man, he will still have everything with him.”

“If the street skells don’t loot the body before the cops get on the scene,” I said. “That neighborhood, that hour, who’s going to call it in, some good citizen? Besides, you couldn’t hear the shots, even as close as I was.”

“They couldn’t be counting on all that,” the Prof said. “Even if nobody did a wallet-and-watch on the dead guy, that pistol’s in two different rivers by now.”

“Somebody spent a lot of money on this one,” I agreed. “That means it’ll make the papers. We might be able to find out something then.”

“The way I see it, whoever this guy wanted you to find, they found him first,” the Prof said, leaning back in his chair and lighting a smoke. “That ain’t us, Gus. None of our gelt’s on the felt.”

“My father is right,” Clarence said, more for the chance to say “my father” than to add anything. He used to do that all the time after the Prof first found him; now it’s only once in a while. “The money you got from that man, whoever he was, there will not be any more.”

“Maybe,” I told them, putting the jewel-cased CD on the table.

I used my key to work the brick-sized padlock, opened the chain-link gate, and drove my Plymouth inside the enclosure behind the darkened gas station. While I was jockeying the big car into the narrow space, the three pit bulls who live there politely divided up the half-gallon container of beef in oyster sauce I had brought from Mama’s. It sounded like alligators tearing at a pig who had wandered too close to the riverbank. If they hadn’t recognized me, no bribe would have stopped them. By the time I finished stowing the Plymouth, they were back inside their insulated dog condo, probably watching the Weather Channel on their big-screen.

It was almost four when I walked into the flophouse. There was a man behind the wooden plank that held the register nobody ever signs. He looked up at me from his wheelchair and shook his head, the equivalent of the white-dragon tapestry in Mama’s window.

“All quiet, Gateman?”

“Dead as the governor’s heart at Christmas, boss.”

All cons know what Christmas means—pardon time. Last year, Sweet Joe, an old pal of ours, had sent us a kite, saying he was sure to make it this time. “Finally got my ticket to the door,” is what he wrote. His ticket was terminal cancer—the prison medicos had given him six months to live. The parole board responded with a two-year hit, meaning Sweet Joe was going to die behind the walls unless the governor did the right thing.

Sure. When Joe got the bad news, he took it like he had taken the twenty-to-life they threw at him thirty years ago—standing up. He’s gone now. Didn’t even last the six months.

I climbed the foul, verminous stairs, past signs that warn of all kinds of DANGER! The top floor is “Under Construction”—there’s all this asbestos to remove, never mind the mutated rats staring hungrily out from the posters on the walls. That’s where I live.

While I was away the last time, my family knocked down every wall that wasn’t load-bearing and built me a huge apartment. It’s got everything a man like me could ever want, including a back way out.

I never get lonely.

I woke up at eleven, flicked the radio into life, and took a long, hot shower. While I was shaving, the mirror confronted me with the truth. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me. That’s okay—I wouldn’t recognize her, either. A teenage hooker, she had hung around just long enough to pop me out. Then she fled the hospital before they could run her through the system. Decades later, as soon as they unplugged me from the machines, I’d done the same thing.

“Baby Boy Burke” is what it says on my birth certificate. The rest of it is blanks, guesses, and lies. For “father” it says “Unk.” It should say “The State of New York.” That’s who raised me. Raised me to hate all of them: scum who spend their lives looking the other way…and getting paid to do it.

Having the State as your father bends your chromosomes like no inherited DNA ever could. You come up knowing that faith is for suckers. The only god I ever worshiped was the only one who ever answered my prayers. My religion is revenge.

That’s why, as soon as I escaped the hospital, I went on a pilgrimage. By the time I reached the end, I’d squared things for Pansy.

Getting that done had cost me my retirement fund, and I’d been scratching around for another score ever since—a nice, safe one. I haven’t been Inside since I was a young man, and I don’t get nostalgic for being caged.

While I was gone, a cop named Morales had found a human hand—just the bones, not the flesh—in a Dumpster. There was a pistol there, too. With my thumbprint on it. Far as NYPD was concerned, that upgraded me from “missing and presumed” to “dead and gone.” And the longer I stayed away, the deeper the whisper-stream carried that message into the underground.

I was halfway through shaving when the story came on: Unidentified man found shot to death on the sidewalk, in a quiet neighborhood just a couple of blocks from West Street. The body had been discovered by a building super who had gone out to rock-salt the concrete so his tenants wouldn’t break their necks going to work in the morning. A landlord could get sued for that. The announcer said the police were not releasing any details, pending notification to next of kin. Meaning they knew who the dead man was but they weren’t telling.

That wasn’t news, just a collection of maybes. Maybe the cops found the cash the man in the camel’s-hair coat said was in his car. Maybe they divided it up among themselves; maybe they were holding back the info to use as a polygraph key once they had suspects to question. Maybe the money was in the car, but in a hidden compartment, one they hadn’t found yet. Maybe it was never there at all, and the guy was just heading to his car to make a getaway. Maybe the cops still hadn’t connected him to the Audi….

The print journalists would take a deeper look—they always do—but it would take them longer to come up with anything.

I walked downstairs, picked up my copy of Harness Lines and a couple of fresh bagels from Gateman—he’s got a guy who delivers every morning—and ate my breakfast while I decided which horses were worthy of my investment. I only bet the trotters. Like me, they haul weight for their money, and they usually earn it after dark.

I smeared a thick slab of cream cheese on the last of a poppy-seed bagel, and held it under the table.

“You want…?” I started to say, before I choked on the words. Pansy wasn’t lurking by my feet, waiting for the treat she knew was always going to come.

I thought I had stopped…feeling her with me. Stopped seeing her looming dark-gray shadow in the corner by the window. Stopped hearing the special sound she always made before dropping off to sleep, like a big semi downshifting to climb a hill.

“This late in the day, you’re probably on your third quart of French vanilla up there, huh, girl?” I said aloud.

If you think I’m crazy to be talking to my dog like I do, fuck you. And if you don’t get how that’s better than crying over her, fuck you twice.

My little sister called a couple of hours later.

“That bar you recommended? Well, baby, let me tell you, it is beyond tacky. Imagine, putting ice in a Bloody Mary!”

So the stash we had gotten word about was from Sierra Leone. That shifted the risk-reward odds too far to the wrong side for us to take the shot. Stealing a load of “blood diamonds” would be like hijacking counterfeit bills. Sure, we could find someone to take the loot off our hands, but the discount would shred our profit down to cigarette money.

“I thought it sounded too good to be true, the way it was described to me,” I said, not surprised.

“Maybe we should open our own place,” Michelle said, switching to the liquid-honey voice she earned her living with.

“I was about to,” I said. “But the financing fell through.”

“That, too, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s this weather, sweetie. Winter is the suicide season. Like it’s raining depression. But it won’t last, you’ll see.”

“Sure.”

“All right, Mr. Grouch. Want to buy me dinner?”

“Okay. I’ll see you at—”

But I was talking to a dead line.

Driving through Chinatown at night is like riding the subway past one of those abandoned stations. You feel the life beyond the shadows, but all you ever get is a glimpse—then it’s gone, and you’re not really sure if you actually saw anything. You might be curious, but not enough to leave the safety of your steel-and-glass cocoon to get a closer look.

I was explaining to Max why we might want to consider investing a significant chunk of our betting kitty in a ten-dollar exacta wheel tomorrow night. For seventy bucks, we could have all the possibilities covered, provided this six-year-old we’d been following since he was a bust-out flop in his freshman season came home on top.

With Max, this is never a hard sell. Anytime he falls in love with a horse, he’s ready to go all-in. And Max gets there faster than a high school kid in a whorehouse.

This particular horse, a gelding named Little Eric, was a fractious animal who was prone to breaking stride, a move that takes a trotter out of any chance to win. But Max and I had watched some of those races, and we had marked every single time it happened. We decided the breaks weren’t because Little Eric was naturally rough-gaited. He couldn’t handle the tight turns at Yonkers very well, so he usually spent a lot of every race parked out. He was okay on the outside, but every time he tried for a big brush to get clear, he’d go off-stride. He didn’t have the early foot to grab the lead right out of the gate, but he was a freight train of a closer. And he liked the cold weather, too.

The reason I fancied him so much for tomorrow night was that he was moving to The Meadowlands. That’s a mile track, with only two turns to negotiate, as opposed to the four at Yonkers. Little Eric could take his time, settle in, and make his move late, down that long stretch. He was in pretty tough, but he could beat that field if he ran his number. And the outside post he drew wouldn’t be as much of a handicap at The Big M.

Nothing close to a sure thing, but a genuine overlay at the twelve-to-one Morning Line price; maybe even more if the favorite drew a lot of late action.

Michelle made her entrance in a lipstick-red jacket with shoes to match. She glistened like a cardinal in a snow-covered tree, defying winter to dull her beauty.

“I’m such a sucker,” she said, as Max held a chair for her to sit down. “I’m still a young girl, but I’ve been around long enough to know better.”

Max and I put on matching quizzical looks—Michelle sometimes loops around a story like a pilot circling a fogged-in airport.

“You know what’s the stupidest thing about racism?” she said.

Max and I shrugged.

“That it’s stupid,” she said, grinning. “Racism, it makes you think you know a person just because you know his race, see?”

“Sure,” I agreed, thinking of some of the bogus wisdom I’d been raised on, passed along by the older street boys I was sure were the smartest people on the planet. After all, they lived on their own. And they never seemed afraid. “Niggers are all yellow inside,” they’d counseled me. “In a crowd, they act like they got balls, but get one of them alone…”

I got one alone once. We both wanted the same shoeshine corner. He was a little bigger; I was a little faster.

“You didn’t run,” I told him, a few minutes later. It was hard to talk—my mouth was all bloody, and my tongue was swollen to twice its size.

“You didn’t pussy out, neither,” the colored kid—I’d already stopped thinking of him as “nigger” in my mind, even though I didn’t realize it—said, sounding as surprised as I was.

I guess some older guys had lied to him, too.

“Well, you know the hard-core Jews? The ones who dress like the Amish?” Michelle said, accepting a light for her cigarette—a thin black one with a gold filter tip.

“Hasidim? Like the ones who control a piece of Crown Heights?”

“Whatever,” Michelle said, airily. “You know who I mean…the ones who handle diamonds. For them, it’s all a handshake business, right? No paper. Everyone knows you can trust those guys. It’s always been that way.”

“So?”

“So the guy I trusted, the one who was setting up that job for us? He never said the diamonds were dirty.”

“You didn’t really trust him, girl. Otherwise, we would just have gone on ahead, right?”

“Oh, I know. But still. I mean, who would ever think one of those super-straight Jews would go anywhere near dirty stuff.”

“They bought diamonds from South Africa even when the boycott was on,” I said. “And uranium, too.”

“Mole says—”

“—they just did what they had to do,” I finished for her. I’ve known the Mole since we were kids. By him, Israel drops a nuke on one of its neighbors, it’s just doing what they had to do.

You could say it’s people like the Mole who keep Israel from finding peace. Or you could say it’s people like the Mole who keep it from disappearing. Me, I don’t care. The only country I care about is about the size of Mama’s restaurant—that’s enough space to hold every member of my family.

“This one was going to be so juicy,” Michelle said, regretfully.

“Been lots of those,” I told her.

By the time the morning light was making a run against the grimy windows, we weren’t any closer to a good scheme. This was the third plan that had gone sour in the past couple of months.

Good scams are harder and harder to come by these days. Too many thieves fishing in the same pool of chumps. Colloidal silver for longevity, “form books” for tax evasion, orgasm enhancers for patheticos who think a lap dance is a relationship. Online auctions for collector cars that don’t exist…and every bidder’s a winner. Even some neo-Nazis were going into the penis-enlargement business to finance their operations—skinheads aren’t much for paying their membership dues, and the self-appointed Führers are too afraid of their own followers to get heavy about collecting.

I used to do violence-for-money. But the older I get, the less it’s worth playing for those stakes. “The gun’s fun, but the sting’s the thing,” the Prof called it, when he first started schooling me.

For lifelong outlaws like us, crime is all about cash. We’re not psychopaths—we don’t need the action to feel alive. Crime’s not about the buzz; it’s a business.

Anyone who’s been running on our track for long enough has learned a few things. Like, you’ll get more time for a gas-station holdup than for taking a few million out of a company pension fund. And a double-nickel jolt for a young man is a very different trip than it is for a guy with a lot of miles on his odometer.

A generation ago, our whole crew got involved with hijacking a load of dope. It was a foolproof scheme. The people we took it from wouldn’t run to the Law—they’d just buy it back from us. Nobody gets hurt, we make a fortune, and they chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

The first half clicked as sweet as stiletto heels on a marble floor. Then the wheels came off. If we’d known how deep some NYPD boys were involved with the dope trade back in the day, we wouldn’t have gone near the job.

I was the only one of us they caught. In an abandoned subway tunnel, with enough heroin to give a small town a collective overdose. The dope never got vouchered; I got to plead to some assaults, avoiding the telephone numbers a possession-with-intent charge would have brought. And best of all, I got to go down alone.

I’m a two-time felony loser. The Prof has three bits under his belt. If either of us ever falls again, we’re looking at the life-without they throw at habitual offenders in this state.

Clarence and the Mole have never been Inside. Max has, but not for long. Just arrests, no convictions. Why plea-bargain when you know the witnesses are never going to show up for the trial?

Michelle was locked up back when she was pre-op. About the hardest time you can do, unless you’re willing to whore out or daddy-up.

She spent most of her time binged, in solitary. Not PC, Ad Seg. You go to Protective Custody—aka Punk City—as a volunteer, to keep yourself safe. You go to Ad Seg—Administrative Segregation, aka The Hole—when you commit a crime inside. Michelle wasn’t big, and she wasn’t fast, but she would cut you, and she was real good at always finding something to do that with.

In our world, showing you can do time counts for something only when you’re young. After that, what earns you the points is showing you can avoid it.

I spent most of my childhood caged. The rest of the time, I was on the run—from the foster parents they “placed” me with, the “group homes” they sentenced me to, and the “training schools” I’d been destined for since birth.

In the juvie joints, it seemed like nobody was ever there for the worst things they did. One guy, he was in for stealing fireworks. He wanted the cherry bombs and ashcans to torture animals with. Another guy was a fire-setter. They caught him doing that a year after they caught him raping his baby sister. He got counseling for the rape, but destruction of property, that was something they couldn’t let slide.

Most of the gang kids were there for fighting, but, to hear them tell it, they’d all gone much further down the violence road. One little Puerto Rican guy was talking about how he chopped an enemy’s hand off with a machete in a rumble. A white kid laughed out loud at the story, as deep a diss as a bitch-slap.

The Puerto Rican kid went back to his bunk, came over to where we were all standing around, and hooked the white kid to the stomach with a needle-sharp file. Gutted him like a fish. The white kid didn’t die, so, instead of going back to court with a new charge, the Puerto Rican kid got shipped to another juvie joint. With a bigger rep.

It was inside that kiddie prison that I first claimed another human being as family. I told the others that Wesley was my brother. I wasn’t worried that anyone would ever ask Wesley if it was true—nobody ever asked Wesley anything. But a kid who called himself Tiger called me on it.

Tiger was twice my size, plus he never walked around alone. So he should have been safe. But, one night, he got shanked in his sleep.

Everyone thought Wesley had done it—that was what Wesley did, even then. But it wasn’t him. It was his brother.

“You have anything, honey?” Michelle asked. “Anything at all?”

“Little Eric in the fifth,” I told her, just to see her smile.

The noon sun was a throbbing blood-orange blob, pulsating against the mesh screen of a pollution-gray sky. For once, it actually made an impact on my permanently crusted windows. I figured I’d better get it while I could.

“You want something from down the way?” I asked Gateman.

“Which way is that, boss?”

“Diner?”

“Sold. I could really go for some of their bull’s-eye meatloaf today.”

“Two sides?”

“You’re singing my song,” he said, grinning. “Make mine mashed potatoes and spinach, okay?”

I got the same for myself, and brought the whole thing back, hot. Gateman and I admired the way the half-cut hard-boiled egg looked embedded in the thick slab of heavy-crusted meatloaf before we dug in.

“Ever wonder how come this is the only good thing they make in that dive, boss?”

“I figure it’s what they call a ‘signature dish,’ Gate. Every restaurant’s got one. It’s how the chef shows off.”

“Yeah? Well, I been in that joint plenty of times, boss. And if they got a ‘chef,’ I’m a fucking ballerina.”

“Got to look past the cover, bro,” I said mildly, holding out a clenched fist.

Gateman tapped my fist with his own, acknowledging the mistake more than one man had made about him. Dead men now. Gateman is one of the reasons they have to make prisons wheelchair-accessible. He was a pure shooter, and he could conjure up the pistol he wore next to his colostomy bag like a fatal magic trick.

A couple of years back, the Prof had bet Max that Gateman could drill the center out of the ace of hearts at ten yards. Took a couple of weeks to set up the match, trucking sandbags down to the basement. The lighting down there was so lousy I could barely make out the white card, never mind the red heart in its center.

I should have known something was up when Clarence put down a hundred on Gateman. The Prof and Max were both hunch-players, but Clarence was a gunman. Still, I faded his action, saying, “No disrespect” to Gateman first.

Gateman braced himself in his chair, holding his compact 9mm Kahr in both hands, turning himself into a human tripod. He exhaled a soft sigh, then he punched out the center of the card with his first shot.

“Got something for tonight?” he asked.

“Just a guess,” I cautioned him.

“That’s all there ever is, right?”

“At the track, sure.”

“It’s all a bet,” Gateman said. “Everything. All that changes is the stakes, boss.”

I started telling him what I liked about Little Eric. By the time I was up to my two favorite trotters of all time, Nevele Pride and Une de Mai, duking it out at the International—I never saw that race; that was the year I spent in Biafra—Gateman’s eyes were starting to glaze over. He wanted action, not ancient history.

“On the nose, okay?” he said, shoving a twenty over to me.

As I let myself back into my apartment, one of the half-dozen cell phones I keep on a shelf in separate charging cradles rang. I have each one marked with a different-colored piece of vinyl tape so I don’t make a mistake, but I don’t really need that system anymore, since I finally figured out how to give each one a different ring tone.

I pushed the button, said, “Lewis.”

“It’s me.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound happy, honey.”

“I was expecting another call,” I lied. Only one person had the number to the phone I was holding, and she was at the other end of the conversation.

“I won’t keep you. I just thought you might like to come over and see me later.”

“How much later?”

“In time to take me to dinner?”

“Ah…”

“Oh, come on, sugar. We all have to eat, don’t we? So why can’t we do it together?”

“I’m a private person.”

“There’s plenty of places we can go where you won’t—”

“There’s no place where you won’t draw a damn crowd,” I said, trying for the soft deflection.

“I won’t dress up, I promise. Please? You won’t be sorry.”

I let the cellular silence play over us for a minute. Then I said, “Eight, okay?”

“Okay!”

I hung up without saying goodbye. She was used to it.

The easiest person in the world to lie to is yourself. Anyone who’s done time knows how seductive that call can be. The Prof warned me about it, back when I was still a young thug, idolizing the big-time hijackers who pulled major jobs and lived like kingsuntil the money ran out. Then they went looking for another armored car.

“You pick up a pattern, it’s harder to shake than a hundred-dollar-a-day Jones, Schoolboy. You let motherfuckers read your book, they always know where to look.”

I had a few hours before dinner, and I knew I wasn’t going to sleep where I’d be spending the night, so I grabbed a quilt and curled up on my couch.

One of the cells woke me. The ring tone told me it was family.

“What?” I said.

“There was a lot on that CD, mahn.”

“A lot of stuff, or stuff that’s worth a lot?” I asked Clarence.

“A lot of stuff for sure. I cannot tell you about the other, mahn. You probably want to look for yourself, yes?”

I glanced at my wristwatch. Couple of minutes after six.

“Could you bring it by tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

I cut the call. Showered and shaved. Put on a pair of dark cords with a leather belt polished with mink oil—a trick I learned from a couple of working girls whose private joke was that I’m a closet dom. A rose silk shirt—I know a sweet girl who gets them made in Bali for a tiny percentage of what I used to pay Sulka—a black tie, and a bone leather sport coat that was pulled out of inventory before it ever got the chance to fall off a truck. Alligator boots with winter treads and steel toes, and I was ready to walk.

I strapped a heavy Kobold diver’s watch on my left wrist, fitted a flat-topped ring onto my right hand: a custom-made hunk of silver housing a tiny watch battery that powers a series of micro-LEDs on its surface in random patterns. I slipped a black calfskin wallet into my jacket. It held a complete set of ID for Kenneth Ivan Lewis.

I shrugged into a Napapijri Geographic coat, a Finnish beauty like the ones they used in the Antarctic Research Mapping Survey. It’s made of some kind of synthetic, with enough zippers, straps, hooks, and Velcro closings to stock a hardware store. Weighs nothing, but it sneers at the wind and sheds water like Teflon.

By seven-fifteen, I was on the uptown 6 train.

I answered the doorman’s polite question with “Lewis.” He opened his mouth to ask if that was my first or last name, caught my eye, changed his mind.

“I’ll be right with you, sir,” he said, making it clear he wanted me to stay where I was while he walked over and picked up the house phone.

I couldn’t hear his end of the conversation…which was the whole point.

“Please go on up, sir.”

“Thanks.”

I took the elevator. The building was new enough so that it actually had the thirteenth floor marked.

I stood outside the door to 13-D, waiting. I didn’t touch the tiny brass knocker, or the discreet black button set into the doorframe.

“How come you never knock?” she said as the door opened.

“You’re going to look through the peephole before you open the door, right? And you knew I—or someone, anyway—was on the way up, so you’d be on the watch.”

“What do you mean, ‘someone’?” she said, standing aside to let me into the apartment.

“You don’t use video in this building. All the doorman had was a name. Anyone can use a name.”

“He described you, too,” she said, slightly sulky.

“And that description would fit—what?—a million or so guys in Manhattan alone.”

“Oh, don’t be so suspicious,” she said, standing on her toes to kiss me on the cheek, right over the bullet scar. “That’s how you get lines on your face, being suspicious of everything.”

“Then my face should look like a piece of graph paper,” I said, putting my coat in her outstretched hands.

“I’m not dressed yet,” she announced, as if coming to the door in a lacy red bra and matching panties hadn’t been enough of a hint. “Go sit down; I’ll only be a few minutes.”

She turned and walked down the hall with the confidence of a woman who expects to be watched and is ready for it. I sat down in a slingback azure leather chair and watched tropical fish cavort in the flat-screen virtual aquarium on the far wall. I slitted my eyes against the vibrant pixel display until it became the kind of kaleidoscope you get when you press your fingers against your eyelids. I don’t mind waiting; it’s one of the things I do best.

The lady I was waiting for was a zaftig blonde without a straight line anywhere on her body, like a pinup girl from the fifties; the kind of woman who turns a walk to the grocery store into an audition. A sweet little biscuit, bosomy and wasp-waisted, with big hazel eyes like a pair of jeweler’s loupes. Her idea of foreplay is what she calls “presents,” and the right ones make her arch her back like a bitch cat in heat.

I met her in a BMW showroom on Park Avenue. I was there to see a guy who does beautiful custom work…on VIN numbers. She was just window-shopping, keeping in practice.

I was dressed for the part I was playing, all Zegna and Bruno Magli. She was wearing white toreador pants, a fire-engine-red silk plain-front blouse, and matching spike heels with ankle straps, holding a belted white coat in her right hand. As soon as she was sure she had my attention, she turned around to caress the gleaming fender of a Z8. Instead of back pockets, the white pants had a pair of red arrows, pointing left and right. I wished she’d get mad at something, and walk away.

Instead, she walked over to where I was standing.

“Want to buy me a car?” she said, flashing a homicidal smile.

“I never buy cars on the first date,” I said.

“Ooh!” she squealed, softly.

That’s where it started. She doesn’t know what I do for a living, but she’s sure it’s something shady. She’s real sure I’m married—you wear a wedding ring long enough, when you take it off it leaves a telltale mark a woman like her could spot at a hundred yards.

She’s so gorgeous she can show off just by showing up. Keeps a big mirror on her bed, where the headboard should be. Her favorite way is to get on all fours and wiggle a little first. She wants it so that the last thing she sees before she lets go is herself, watching me doing her.

When I pretend to go to sleep afterwards, she vacuums my clothes with a feather touch. She’s not looking for money, just information.

She thinks my name is Ken Lewis. She calls me Lew. I never asked her why.

There’s a dirty elegance about her. She looks as lush as an orchid, and comes across just about as smart. But that’s just another kind of makeup for her. She’s got the dumb-blonde thing down so slick that trying to get a straight answer out of her is like cross-examining a mynah bird with ADD.

Her name is Loyal.

I never sleep over.

“Call you a cab, sir?” a different doorman asked, as if getting a cab at three in the morning in that neighborhood required a professional’s touch.

“Thanks,” I lied, “but I’m parked around the corner.”

The next day started out like the beginning of a long winning streak. Before I could even take a look at the paper, the TV called to me with a breaking story. A guide dog was walking with his person just before daybreak when a couple of muggers descended. Probably junkies who’d spent the whole night trying to score, I thought. The muggers kicked the blind man’s cane out of his hand. When he went down, they dropped to their knees to rip at his jacket. Apparently, that was a major mistake. When the cops arrived, the blind man still had one of the muggers in a painful joint lock. The other one got away, but left a lot of blood on the sidewalk.

The newscaster said the blind man was a veteran of World War II. They showed a photo of a man who looked vaguely Asian, with a stiff white crew cut and a prominent tattoo on one biceps that I couldn’t make out. As the camera panned down, my earlier guess was confirmed: who but a desperate junkie would try to put a move on a blind man whose seeing-eye dog was a Doberman?

I raised my glass of guava juice in a silent toast to the man and his dog.

The day got better when I saw the race results. Little Eric had gotten away cleanly and settled back in the pack, letting the favorite and another horse battle for the lead. The first quarter went in a blistering .28 flat. While the lead horses dueled on the front end, Little Eric moved to the outside, picking up cover just past the half. The three-quarter went in 1:26.2, with Little Eric still two deep on the outside. He made his move at the top of the stretch, going three wide to calmly gun down the rest of the field, nailing the win and taking a lifetime mark of 1:54.4 in the bargain.

He paid $27.40 to win. Even with the two-to-five favorite hanging tough for second, the exacta returned a sweet $89.50. Our seventy-buck investment was going to net well over four hundred.

Damn!

I switched on the bootleg satellite radio the Mole had hooked up for me, and was instantly rewarded with Albert King’s “Laundromat Blues,” the Sue Foley version of “Two Trains,” and, to cap the trifecta, Magic Judy Henske’s new cut of “Easy Rider.”

Today’s the day to play my number, I remember thinking. Then I made the mistake of opening the paper from the front.

MURDERED MAN IDENTIFIED, BUT MYSTERY DEEPENS, the headline read. I scanned the article quickly, then reread it carefully, culling the facts away from the adjectives the way you have to do to translate the tabloids.

The dead man was a “financial planner” named Daniel Parks. He was forty-four years old, an Ivy League M.B.A. who lived on a “multimillion-dollar” waterfront estate in Belle Harbor with his wife and three children, the oldest a teenage girl who tearfully told the reporters that her father couldn’t have had an enemy in the world.

They hadn’t ID’ed him from prints; his wallet—containing several hundred dollars, the reporter noted—had provided a wealth of information. Not just his driver’s license and the registration and insurance papers for the Audi, but a permit for the “automatic pistol” they found in his coat.

New York’s very stingy with carry permits. There’s only about forty thousand active ones at any time—you’ve got better odds of finding a landlord who voluntarily cuts your rent. Almost all those permits go to celebrities—they’re an important status symbol in a town where status is more important than oxygen. Of course, if you’re one of those “honorary police commissioners”—the “honor” comes from a heavy annual contribution to some murky “police fund”—you get to walk around with all the iron you want. Park anywhere you want, too—another one of the perks is an official NYPD placard for your windshield.

I didn’t like any of that. When I got to the part about Parks being “rumored” to have recently testified before a grand jury investigating money laundering, I liked it even less. If the hunter-killer team had been shadowing him, they might have sent a man inside to see who he was going to meet.

The scenario was bad enough, but it wasn’t worst-case. The federales aren’t the only ones who can tap phones. If the shooting team had a heads-up for where the target had been headed that night, they could have had the place covered for hours before I even showed up. It didn’t look as if they had, so I was probably in the clear.

Probably.

Even if they’d had a man inside, I told myself, they wouldn’t know anything but my face—and you have to get real close to see anything distinctive about it. I didn’t think they had seen my car, and even if they had, the license was a welded-up fake. A trace-back on the number I had called Parks from would dead-end no matter how deep they looked.

So I was clear unless…unless Charlie had been offered enough cash to stray out of his home territory, take a vacation from the middle. If there was a bounty on the dead man, Charlie would know about it. So, when the target came to ask Charlie to put him together with someone who could help with his problem, Charlie could have sold him.

Bad. That little ferret practiced a dark martial art, the kind that lets you kill a man with a phone call. But if I asked him about it…very fucking bad. Word gets out you were looking for Charlie, it could make a lot of people nervous. Where I live, it’s a lot cheaper to kill the hunter than hide the prey.

I went into myself. All the way down the mine shaft where the only ore is truth and pain. Like when I was a kid, and those words were synonyms.

I had one hand to play. I was holding it in my mind, turning it over, seeing the aces-and-eights full house, the only one my ghost brother ever dealt. Then Clarence walked in the door, and made things worse.

“It’s a dossier, mahn,” he said, holding out the CD I’d given him.

“The person who put this together, he had a lot of time on his hands. Spent some money, too.”

“Any money in it?” I asked, hoping for something to get me back to my winning streak.

“Maybe,” the West Indian said dubiously, tossing his cream cashmere topcoat over the back of my futon couch, the better to display a fuchsia satin shirt with black nacre buttons worn outside a pair of black slacks with balloon knees and pegged cuffs. “There’s account numbers and all, but no access codes or PIN numbers.”

“How do I—”

“Got it right here, mahn,” Clarence said, removing a narrow silver notebook computer from a black brushed-aluminum case. “I downloaded the CD to a USB key, so all I have to do is—”

Catching the expression on my face, he clamped down on the geek-speak long enough to hit some keys and bring the machine to life.

The first screen was all vital statistics. Peta Bellingham, DOB September 9, 1972, five foot seven, 119 pounds, and a note to “see photos.” Whoever had put together the package had her home and cell phones, fax, e-mail, Social Security number, three local bank accounts—checking, savings, and a handful of sub-jumbo CDs, all showing balances as of a couple of months ago—plus one in the Caymans and another in Nauru, with a series of “????” where the balances should have been. Two cars registered, a Porsche Carrera and a Mazda Miata…which didn’t make sense, for some reason I couldn’t quite touch. A co-op on West End, recent purchase; estimated value a million four, against a seven-hundred-grand mortgage. A one-bedroom condo in Battery Park, free and clear. A mixed-bag portfolio, weighted in favor of biotech stocks, managed by…Daniel Parks, MBA, CPA, CFP.

So this woman had—what?—skipped out on a big pile of money she owed to this guy Parks? That didn’t add up. Walking away from all those assets would have to cost her a cubic ton more than any commission she could owe a money manager.

I shrugged my shoulders at Clarence.

He tapped a key, and another screen popped up, displaying a whole page of thumbnails. “Put the pointer on the one you want to see, double-click, and it will blow right up, like enlarging a photograph.”

The first one was a young woman—hard to tell her age without a tighter close-up—standing next to a fireplace, one hand on the mantel. She was fair-skinned, willowy, with long, slightly wavy dark hair. I couldn’t see much else.

I scanned the thumbnails with my eyes, looking for a full-face shot. Found it. Clicked it open.

And went back twenty years.

“You know her, mahn?” Clarence said, reading my face.

“Let me look at a few more,” I told him, moving the cursor and clicking the mouse.

I flicked past the ones with her in outfits—everything from French maid to English riding costume—and the nudes, which were all posed as if she was sitting for an artist’s portrait. It was the close-ups that sealed the deal. Those icy topaz eyes hadn’t changed at all.

“Yeah, I know her,” I said.

Beryl Eunice Preston had just turned thirteen when she disappeared from her parents’ mansion in one of Westchester’s Old Money enclaves. It was her father who came to see me, back when I had an office carved out of what was once crawlspace at the top of a building in what the real-estate hucksters had just started to call “Tribeca.” I lived in that office, in a little apartment concealed behind a fake Persian rug that looked like it covered a solid wall.

Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.

The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.

That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.

Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.

Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.

So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent for the Animal Control guys.

Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.

After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.

“I’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.

“You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”

“I don’t want the police….”

“I don’t want them, either.”

“Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”

“It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”

He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.

“My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.

“How do you know?”

“What…what do you mean by that?”

“You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”

“Beryl is a troubled child,” he said, as if the empty phrase explained everything.

I blew smoke at the low ceiling to tell him that it didn’t.

“She’s done it before. Run away, I mean.”

“How’d you find her those other times?”

“She always came back on her own. That’s what’s different now.”

“How long’s she been gone?”

“It will be two weeks tomorrow. If school wasn’t out for the summer, it would be difficult for us—my wife and me—to explain. As it is…”

“You did all the usual stuff, right?”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“Contacted her school friends, checked with any relatives who might be willing to let her hide out at their place, read her diary…”

“Yes. Yes, we did all that. Under normal circumstances, we would never—”

“Does she have a pet?”

“You mean,” he said, glancing involuntarily at Pansy, “like a dog or a cat?”

“Yeah.”

“What difference would that make?”

“A kid that’s going to run away permanently, you’d expect them to take their pet with them.”

“Beryl never had a pet,” he said flatly, his tone making it clear that, if they had deemed one advisable, her devoted parents would have run out and gotten her one. The very best.

“Okay. What about clothes? Did she take enough to last her awhile?”

“It’s…hard to tell, to be honest. She has so many clothes that we couldn’t determine if anything was missing.”

“What makes you think she’s in Manhattan?”

“One of the private detectives we hired was able to trace her movements on the day it…happened. We don’t know how she got to the train station—it’s about twenty minutes from our house, and the local car service hadn’t been called—but there’s no question that she bought a ticket to Penn Station.”

“Penn Station’s a hub. She could have connected with another train to anywhere in the country. Did she have enough money for a ticket?”

“I…don’t know how much money she had. None of the cash we keep in the house was missing, but we’ve always been very generous with her allowance, and she could have been saving up to…do this. But the last detective agency we retained was very thorough, and they are quite certain she didn’t catch a train out…at least, on the day she left.”

“So you hired this ‘agency,’ and…?”

“Agencies,” he corrected. “Two of them rather strongly suggested we call in the police. The third place we consulted told us about you.”

“Told you what, exactly?”

“They said you were a man who…who could do things they wouldn’t be comfortable doing.”

“What makes you think your daughter is with a pimp, Mr. Preston?”

“What?!”

“You didn’t want to come here,” I said, calmly. “Now that you showed up, you don’t like being here. You want to waste your money lying to me, that’s up to you. But there isn’t a PI agency in this town that would have recommended me—they don’t even know I exist.”

He sat there in silence, not denying anything. Back then, NYPD had a Runaway Squad, and I went back a long ways with the best street cop they had, a nectar-voiced Irishman named McGowan. His partner was a thug with so many CCRB complaints against him that the only thing keeping him on the job was that all the complaints came from certified maggots: baby-rapers a specialty. Guy named Morales. So the Commissioner teamed him with McGowan, and, somehow, they meshed into a high-results unit. Word was, if they had partnered Morales with the devil, it would be Satan who played the good cop in tag-team interrogations.

Years later, when McGowan finally retired, Morales went off by himself. He was an old-school street beast, a badge-carrying brute who’d always pick a blackjack over a warrant. He’d been dinosaured to the sidelines because nobody wanted to partner with a bull who knew every china shop in town.

In his eyes, I was always a suspect—which was nothing special for Morales—but I’d saved his life once, and he hated the debt more than he did me. It was Morales who planted the pistol and the bone hand, calling things square in whatever crazy language he used when he talked to himself.

It wasn’t just his feral honor that guaranteed Morales would never change the story he’d made up. When 9/11 hit, he was one of the first cops into the World Trade Center. When his body was recovered from the wreckage, the papers called him a hero. Down here, we know they got the answer right, but had figured it all wrong. Morales had charged into the flames with a semi-auto in one hand, a lead-weighted flashlight in the other, and a throw-down piece in his pocket, like always. The old street roller hadn’t been on any rescue mission; he’d been looking for the bad guys.

Jeremy Preston wasn’t the first parent McGowan had sent my way. He never came right out and recommended me, exactly—he just wove my name into one of his long, rambling accounts of the shark tank that was the Port Authority Bus Terminal then, each newly arriving bus discharging chum into the water, the pimps circling.

We’re not talking Iceberg Slim here. The Port Authority trollers were the low end of the scale: polyestered punks with CZ rings and 10K gold, not a Cadillac among them. They didn’t turn a girl out with smooth talk and sweet promises. For that breed, “game” was coat-hanger whips and cigarette burns. And gang rape.

I lit another cigarette, watched Preston’s derma-glazed face through the bluish smoke. Said, “Well?”

“Look, I don’t know for a fact that my daughter is with some…pimp.”

“I understand,” I said. “Just tell me what you do know, okay?”

By the time he was done, we’d agreed on a price. And I went hunting.

My first rescue had been an accident. One thing I had learned from my last stretch Inside: steal from people who can’t go to the Law. And stick to cash. I had lurked for days, watching for what I thought was a good target. When he made his move, I followed him and the teenager he had plucked off a bus from the Midwest. The derelict building he took her to was a couple of notches below slum, the kind of place where the mailboxes were all wrenched open on check day, and the despair stench had penetrated down to the last molecule. There was no lock on the front door. I followed them up a few flights, listening to the pimp saying something about how this was “just for tonight.”

The top floor was all X-flats—cleared of occupants because the building was waiting on the wrecking ball. The pimp had put his own padlock on the door. I figured he had another one on the inside, so I didn’t wait. I came up fast behind them, shouldered them both into the apartment, and let the pimp see my pistol—a short-barreled .357 Mag—before he could make a move.

“What is this, man?”

“I’m collecting for the Red Cross,” I said. “They take money or blood, your choice.”

“Oh,” he said, visibly relaxing as the message that this was a stickup penetrated. “Look, man, I’m not carrying no real coin, you understand?”

“A major mack like you? Come on, let’s see the roll. And move slow—this piece could punch a hole in you the size of a manhole cover.”

The girl stood rooted to the spot, her eyes darting around the vile room, taking in the stained, rotted mattress in one corner, the white hurricane candle in a wide glass jar, the huge boom box, and the word “Prince” spray-painted in red on a nicotine-colored wall.

The pimp reached…slowly…into the side pocket of his slime-green slacks, came out with a fist-sized wad of bills. At a nod from me, he gently tossed it over.

I slipped the rubber band with my left thumb. A Kansas City bankroll: a single hundred on the outside, with a bunch of singles at the core.

“Where’s the rest?” I said, gently.

“Ain’t no ‘rest,’ man. I’m still working on my stake.”

The girl walked over to the closet, head down, as if some instinct told her not to look at my face. She opened the door, gasped, and jumped back. I glanced in her direction. Inside the closet was a single straight chair. Draped over the back were several strands of rope and two pairs of handcuffs. On the seat of the chair was a thick roll of duct tape, and one of those cheap Rambo knives they sold all over Times Square.

“Get the picture?” I said to her, nodding my head at the other item in the closet—a Polaroid camera.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

But she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

So much for my big score.

“Turn around,” I told the pimp.

“Look, man, you don’t gotta—”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m a professional, just like you. Thought you’d be carrying heavy coin. Now I’ve got to get out of here. So I’m going to put those handcuffs on you. Your friends will get you loose soon as they show up.”

“I ain’t got no—”

“Friends? Yeah, that’s right, you probably don’t. But you’re expecting some company, aren’t you, Prince?”

“Shit, man,” he said, resignedly. He turned around, put his hands behind his back.

The Magnum was a heavy little steel ingot in my right hand. I stepped close to him, tipped his floppy hat forward with my left hand. He was still saying “What you—?” as I chopped down at his exposed cervical vertebrae with all my strength. He dropped soundlessly—his head bounced off the wood floor and settled at an angle that looked permanent.

“Come on,” I said to the girl.

She followed me without a word.

On the walk back to the Port Authority, I said, “You know what was going to happen to you, right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t say another word,” I told her. “Not until you get back where you came from.”

“I don’t have any—”

“Where did you come from?”

“St. Paul. I thought I—”

“Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” I said.

Inside the terminal, I bought her a one-way ticket to St. Paul, handed her two ten-dollar bills, said, “I’m going to watch you get on that bus, understand? If you ever come back here, you’re going to get hurt worse than you ever imagined.”

“I’m—”

“I told you to shut up. Don’t say another word until you’re talking to someone you know.”

I watched the bus pull out. She didn’t wave goodbye.

I never got paid for that one.

Like I said, that was back in the day. In Times Square, you could buy anything on the back streets, from a hooker to heroin, and some of the stores sold magazines with photos so foul you wanted to find the people who took them and make them dead. Today, Times Square is another planet: Disney World.

You can’t buy porn from Disney. They’re all about family. Of course, they’ve got no problem hiring a convicted child-molester to make horror movies…about kids. Tourists think things have changed. People who live here, they know all that ever changes are the addresses.

But even back then, freaks had to know their way around to find a baby pross. A girl pross, anyway; the little-boy hustlers were pretty much out in the open, working the arcades.

You won’t find kids hooking in Times Square now. But it’s just like what happens anytime the cops crank up the heat on a drug corner—the traffic just moves to another location. You want an underage girl, there’s always Queens Plaza after dark, and dozens of other spots.

A while back, two dirtbags grabbed a fifteen-year-old runaway, raped and sodomized her until she had nothing left, then put her out on the street. She wasn’t working back alleys, either. Last arrest was on Queens Boulevard, in a nice section of Elmhurst. They took the girl to Florida for the winter, where the local cops grabbed her…and probably saved her life.

Extradited to Queens, the dirtbags got the usual sweetheart deal from the tough-talking clown who calls himself the District Attorney. He threw out the rape, sodomy, and kidnapping charges, let them plead to “promoting prostitution.” Now they can prance around the yard Upstate, jacketed as pimps, not kiddie-rapists. When they get out, they won’t even have to register as sex offenders. With all the heavy cred they’ll have accumulated—what’s more max than being a player and an ex-con?—they’ll probably start their own rap label.

I didn’t know where Beryl was, but I had a good idea of where she wasn’t. A snatched-up runaway wasn’t going to end up in a high-end house. Kiddie sex is a specialized business, and—back then, before the Internet—that meant a lot of risk for the money.

I had the girl’s picture, half a dozen different shots. And a one-two punch: not only the promise of heavy coin if you turned her up, but the guarantee that, if you saw her and I didn’t get word, you better be carrying a lot of Blue Cross.

It wasn’t me that scared anyone. It was Max at my side. And Wesley in the shadows. On top of that, the city was full of bad guys who thought kiddie pimps were a disgrace to their good name, and I knew a lot of them.

I was a different man then. I was just making the transition from armed robber to scam artist, and if you pushed me anywhere close to a corner, violence was still Option One. I was still learning how to sting freaks: promising everything from kiddie porn to mercenary contracts, never delivering. Once I took your money, good luck finding me. And bad luck if you did.

This part never changes: The best way to track someone down is to plant the word, burying the trip wires under sweet promises. Then you put on a lot of pressure, and wait for whoever you’re tracking to stumble over one of them. But when you’re looking for a kid who’s in the wrong hands, too much patience can be fatal.

So I started in Hunts Point, the lowest end of the scale for working whores, then. They were all turning scag-tricks. Their only customers were truckers who had dropped off their cargo at the Meat Market, or serial killers who liked the odds of a desolate piece of flatland where you could find anything on earth except a cop.

Getting any of that sorry collection of broken-veined junkies to talk was easy—for money they’d do anything you could imagine, and plenty that would give you nightmares if you did—but getting them to talk sense was near impossible.

So I just cruised, with the girl’s photo taped to my dashboard. I came up empty a few days in a row—Hunts Point was a daylight stroll. Nights, I worked lower Lex, which was racehorse territory then. Fine, young, sleek girls, with much stronger, smarter pimps running them.

I didn’t waste time down there, just showed Beryl’s picture around, told every working girl who came over to my rolled-down car window about the bounty, and moved on.

Next stop, under the West Side Highway. Back then, it ran all the way downtown, and below Canal was Hookerville. Michelle worked that stroll in those days, when she was still pre-op. She got into the front seat of my car, listened to my story, and promised if Beryl showed she’d make sure she didn’t leave until I got there.

That should have sounded like big talk, coming from a small, fine-boned little tranny. But Michelle hated humans who fucked kids as only a kid who’d been fucked could, and she’d learned a lot since prison. Now she was snake-quick with the straight razor she never left home without.

It was almost two weeks before I got word that someone had a girl to sell. Not to rent, sell. Supposedly, an eleven-year-old virgin with a hairless pussy who loved to suck cocks and was looking for a permanent home with the right man.

I called the number I had gotten from a guy who ran a private camera club—“The girls will pose any way you tell them, gentlemen. No film allowed.” As soon as I heard the voice on the other end, I knew this could be for real: He was a young guy with a sociopath’s chilly voice, talking from a payphone.

“I don’t know you, man. All I know, you could be The Man, you know what I’m saying?”

“So meet me, wherever you say, and I’ll prove I’m a legitimate purchaser,” I said, softening my voice as I pictured myself as the seal-sleek, middle-aged man who had told me how much money there was in “unbroken” little girls.

The sleek man had come into my life just after I first got out. I thought he’d be the start of my career as a scam-master. Instead, he turned out to be a still-unsolved homicide. It took me a long time to get still enough inside myself so I could listen to one of his tribe without having to hurt him.

“How you gonna do that?”

“Surely you don’t expect me to say on the phone?”

“I—Yeah, all right, I see where you coming from. This number’s no good for me after today, man. Leave me one where I can call you, when I got it set up.”

“I’ll give you a number, but I am rarely there in person. My assistant will always know how to reach me, and I’ll get back to you within an hour or two, fair enough?”

I raced back to Michelle’s stroll, saw her getting out of a white Oldsmobile. By the time I closed the distance between us, she had taken a slug of the little cognac bottle she always carried with her, rinsed and spit, and was already snake-hipping her way back toward the underpass. I took her over to Mama’s, set her up in my booth, and told her there was a hundred in it for her to just sit there until the last payphone in the row against the wall that separated the kitchen from the customers rang. The line was a bridge job, forwarded from one of the dead-end numbers I always kept for emergencies—the Mole had set it up so I could divert it by calling and punching in a series of tones.

The phone rang while Michelle and I were still having our soup; the dealer was getting anxious to unload his merchandise.

“It’s him,” is all Michelle said when she came back to the table.

“Quick enough?” I said into the receiver.

“You want to see quick, just fuck with me, and watch how quick you get yourself a problem, man.”

“What’s all this?” I said, hardening my voice. The kiddie-trafficker whose ticket I had canceled had been steel under the sealskin. Stainless steel. If I acted too intimidated, it would be out of character; might spook the bottom-feeder I had on the end of my line. “I thought we were going to do business,” I said, “not sell wolf tickets.”

“I ain’t selling no fucking tickets, man. I’m just saying—”

“Just say where and when, all right? Then you can satisfy yourself I’m straight up, and we can do what we have to do.”

“You know,” he said, barely suppressing his admiration for his own cleverness, “this jewelry we talking about, it’s expensive, man.”

“I heard it was twenty.”

“Twenty-five, man.”

“If it’s as fine as you say it is—”

“It’s finer. You’ll see.”

“When?”

“Tonight, maybe. If you check out. I’m nobody to fuck with, man. ’Long as you understand.”

The pathetic amateur gave me the address of a vacant lot behind a deserted tool-and-die plant in South Jamaica. That wasn’t the amateur part. Telling me about a midnight meet at four in the afternoon, that was.

By the time I pulled into the back lot behind the wheel of a gunmetal Mercedes four-door, Max was dialed into the molecular vibrations of the empty building as if he’d been part of the first concrete poured into the foundation. The Mole had dropped him off, driving one of those Con Ed trucks he seems to be able to “find” whenever he needs one. Probably the same place he had found the Mercedes.

I got out, dressed in a dark-gray suit, a white silk handkerchief in the breast pocket matching the white shirt I wore without a tie. I spotted the target, but acted as if I hadn’t. He was lounging in the shadows of the back wall, cleverly dressed all in black. I lit a cigarette and paced in tight little circles, glancing at my watch: 11:51.

He let me wait a few minutes. Not because he was a pro, but because making people do what he wanted made him feel more like himself.

He rolled up on me out of the darkness, like some movie ninja. I jumped back, fake-startled.

“You got something to show me?” he said, voice swollen with confidence now that he was sure he was dealing with exactly what he expected—a nervous man with a heavy fetish and a heavier wallet.

“Sure,” I said, keeping my voice soft.

“I got to search you first,” he said. “You know the routine.”

“What do you—?”

“Oh, fuck it, man! Just turn around, assume the position. I got a piece, see?” he said, holding up some little pearl-handled popcorn-pimp special. “You do anything stupid, and—pow!—that’s all they is for you. Way out here, nobody find your body for a month.”

“Listen,” I said, standing with my arms extended away from my sides, “just take it easy, okay?”

His pat-down was just like him—rough and stupid.

“All right, man. You can turn around.”

“Can I see her now?” I said, a little too eagerly.

“You know what I got to see first, right?”

“Sure, sure. I brought it.”

“You brought twenty-five K with you?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to…drag this out. You’re not going to rob me, are you?”

“I fucking should, dumb as you are, man. Show it to me.”

“It’s in the trunk. I put it in a briefcase, so you could—”

“Well, open it, motherfucker.”

“Sure. Just don’t—”

I unlocked the trunk. As it slid up, I stepped aside, and the nose of the Prof’s double-barreled sawed-off went jack-in-the-box on the pimp.

“Surprise!” the little man said.

“Hey, man. I—”

Max had him by then. The little pistol dropped from the pimp’s nerve-dead hand.

The Prof climbed out of the trunk, the sawed-off never wavering from the pimp’s midsection.

“I think we should talk now,” I said.

Inside the building, I used my pencil flash to illuminate a clear spot. Max crooked his left forearm around the pimp’s neck, grabbed his own right biceps, and curled his right hand over the top of the pimp’s head.

“All he has to do is squeeze now,” I said. “You understand?”

“Look, man—”

“Sssh,” I said, gently. “There’s nothing for you to be worried about. I kept my word, didn’t I?”

“I—”

“Ssssh,” I said again. “You know I’m not a cop now, right?”

“Yeah, man. I was—”

“But you, you do have the girl, right?”

“Nah, man. I was just trying to run a game, you know?”

“If that’s true, you’re a corpse,” I said, not raising my voice.

I brought my thumb and forefinger together. Max tightened the noose. The pimp’s eyelids fluttered. I moved my fingertips apart.

The pimp gasped a few times.

“Want to try again?” I asked him.

“It ain’t what you think, man. I swear! It was all her idea.”

“This ‘her’?” I said, showing him the photo with my flashlight.

“Yeah! She came up to me, man. This whole thing—”

“That’s enough,” I told him. “We don’t care how it happened. Some people put up a hundred grand for her. So we want her, and we want her right now. It’s worth the twenty-five we promised, you turn her up, okay?”

“She ain’t here,” he said.

“We know that,” I said, barely above a whisper. “That’s not the question you were asked.” I held up my thumb and forefinger again, letting him see the gesture.

“No, no, man! Listen, I prove it to you, okay? She’s at my woman’s house. Few minutes from here. But she ain’t tied up or nothing, she just sitting there, watching TV. How’s that?”

“That’s real good,” I said, soothingly. “Now let’s go pick up the package.”

“This place where your woman has the merchandise, is it an apartment or…?” I asked him. I was behind the wheel, the pimp seated next to me, Max behind him, the choke hold back in place.

“It’s a private house, man,” he said, a wire-thin twist of pride in his voice. “You know where Union Hall Street is? You just—”

“I know where it is,” I told him, keying the ignition.

“Hey, man, this ain’t the way to—”

“Just relax. Be very calm. You know the payphone down that way?” I said, pointing with my whole hand, so the sparkler on my finger would calm him. “A few blocks past the boulevard?”

“That one? Man, that one hasn’t worked for years. It’s all ripped out and—”

“It works now,” I promised him. “I’m going to pull up right next to it. We’re going to get out, all of us. What you’re going to do, you’re going to call your woman, understand? You’re going to tell her everything went down just like you planned. What you need her to do is bring the girl outside. Nice warm night, let them sit on the front stoop, so you can see them when we pull up. Soon as we’re sure it’s the right girl, we hand you this,” I said, making a gesture with my right hand. The Prof handed over a hard-sided attaché case. “Look for yourself,” I told the piece of toxic waste sitting next to me.

He unsnapped the case on his lap. “Damn!” he whistled. “You for real, man.”

“This is just business, like I told you all along. Maybe a little different than you thought, but it’s the same payoff, right?”

“Right!” he said. “Look, man, you don’t need this noose around my neck, okay? I’m a businessman, just like you.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, making a sign. Max released his hold. “We’ll trust you that much. But hand the money back over; we’re not going to have you jump out and run.”

“I wouldn’t—” he started to say, then interrupted himself to hand over the attaché case. I casually tossed it into the back seat, where the Prof caught it deftly.

“You ever get more like her?” I asked him.

“Me?” he said, slyly, a man who had just figured things out for himself. There was no reward for the girl he was holding. We weren’t working for her father. That was all cover; we wanted the girl as merchandise, and we expected to get a lot more than twenty-five grand when we retailed her. “Sure! A man in my line of work, I gets all kind of—”

“Then maybe we can do business again, if your stuff is together enough.”

“What you mean, together? Didn’t I—?”

“This place where you’re holding the girl, you said it was a private house? You mean one of those up-and-downs, or are you the only one there?”

“Just me. And my woman, like I said. It’s perfect, man. Nice and quiet.”

“Your woman, she got any kids?”

“Yeah, man. She got a couple, but they ain’t around; the Welfare took ’em away.”

“So you and her, you’re the only ones who live there?”

“Yeah, man. Why you asking all this?”

“Because we have…packages we sometimes like to have watched for a few days at a time. Before we can move them, you understand?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. I was disappointed he didn’t have any gold teeth.

“Okay,” I said, pulling up to the phone. “You call her. Tell her what you’ll be driving up in. She brings the girl to the curb. You get out of the front seat; the girl gets in, we drive away with her, you walk away with the twenty-five, and that’s all there is. Got it?”

“How I know you won’t—?”

“We already have the address,” I said, patiently. “Like you said, that building you brought us to, nobody would find a body there for a month. I think we can do business again. We’re not risking a murder rap for a lousy twenty-five G’s.”

I attached the telephone receiver the Mole had given me with a set of alligator clips. The pimp dialed a number, holding the phone so I could hear both ends of the conversation.

“Hey, man,” he said, on the way over. “Soon as you know it’s the girl you want, I just get on out, right?”

“Right.”

“So how about I hold the money? I mean, make it nice and smooth, so you don’t have to hang around.”

I thought it over for a couple of seconds, then said, “Give it back to him,” to the Prof.

Two figures were standing by the front door to the house, turned into silhouettes by a lamp glowing inside the front window. When the taller one saw us, they both walked down toward the street. I didn’t see any sign of force or restraint.

The pimp got out, the attaché case in one hand.

“Get in!” he ordered the girl. “The man wants to look at you.”

She climbed in docilely, a tentative smile on her face.

“Hello, Beryl,” I said.

Her mouth opened in a silent “O” of surprise. The pimp slammed the door behind her, and we took off. The pimp had about thirty seconds of triumph left…if it took him that long to open the attaché case, an identical twin of the money bag we’d switched it for.

The Con Ed truck was waiting where the Mole said it would be. I pulled over, and the back seat emptied out. In a few minutes, the Prof would dial the number Preston had left with me. When he heard a voice, he’d press the button on the little cassette player; and Preston would hear me say: “I’ve got her. We’re on the way. Sit tight and don’t make any calls.”

I slipped the soft-riding sedan through the streets, heading for the Van Wyck. At that hour, the Whitestone Bridge was my best bet.

“My father sent you,” the girl said to me. It wasn’t a question.

“That’s right, Beryl,” I told her. “You’ll be home in an hour or so.”

She didn’t say another word all the way.

As soon as the Merc’s headlights cut across his driveway, Preston bolted out the front door. He was tearing at the passenger-side door handle before I came to a full stop.

“Beryl!” he half-sobbed, clutching at her like she was about to go over a cliff.

The girl turned, gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, then surrendered to her father’s embrace.

The two of them walked back toward the house, his arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. I followed, keeping my distance.

A woman’s backlit shape filled the doorway. Preston passed the girl to her like a baton in a relay race. The girl was pulled into the woman’s shadow. By the time I crossed the threshold, the shadow had vaporized.

“Come on in,” Preston said, gesturing with his hand to show me where he meant.

It was either a den or a library—hard to tell, because the walls were mostly bookshelves. I’m no appraiser, but the desk looked like a piece of one-off cherrywood, and the dark-burgundy leather chair hadn’t come out of a catalogue, either. Blond parquet flooring, with some kind of Navajo blanket used as a throw rug.

“Sit, sit,” he said, pointing to a tufted armchair that matched the other furniture. For what it must have cost, it should have been more comfortable. The plate-sized brass ashtray on a wrought-iron stand next to the chair encouraged me to light a smoke.

Preston closed the door, then walked over and seated himself behind his special desk. He fiddled with a pipe—something uncharitable in me guessed it was cherrywood—until he got it going. “Tell me all about it,” he finally said.

“That wasn’t our deal,” I told him.

“Well…I guess it wasn’t. But surely you understand that I’m—”

“You wanted your daughter back. The reason you came to me was because you thought I might be able to do that. You never asked me how I was going to do it. I figured that was no accident—that was you being smart, protecting yourself.”

“You mean, there’s things I wouldn’t want to know?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we had a deal, right? Cash on delivery. And here I am, delivering.”

“I’m not disputing that. I just thought…I guess I thought you, what you do, it isn’t just about money.”

“I don’t know where you got that idea,” I said.

“From the—”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“Oh. I…”

His voice spooled out into silence until he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to say anything more. “Here’s your money,” he said, putting a neat stack of bills on the top of his desk. Probably dug it out of a safe somewhere in the house as soon as he heard my tape-recorded voice on his phone. I wondered how much he usually kept in there.

I couldn’t tell if making me step over to his fancy desk to get the money was a little bit of nastiness because I wouldn’t give him the gory details, or because he was back to being himself already—a boss, paying off a worker.

As I pocketed the cash, he answered the question. “Berry will tell me all about it,” he said, self-assured.

I found a lot of kids back then. Sometimes it was the parents who paid me. Sometimes it was the people who I took them back from. Sometimes both. Every so often, neither.

I hadn’t told Preston the truth. Not just because he was a citizen, and lying to citizens was one of the first things my father—the State—had taught me, but because of something Wesley told me once. “You can’t ever give them any reason but money,” the iceman whispered one night. “They think there’s something else in it for you, they might want to do you down on the price.”

“I set the price in front,” I replied, a little hurt that Wesley would think I’d be such an amateur.

“But you don’t get it paid in front,” he said. “And this thing you got about kids, it’s a marker. A way for people to find you.”

“People know where my—”

“Not know your address,” the iceman said. “Know you. They know that, your address don’t matter—they can get you to come wherever they need you to be.”

That was a long conversation for Wesley. He had the same one with me, over and over again, right up to the time he checked out of the hotel he had hated from the moment the State had booked his room.

I might have kept going like I was: working the edges of the fringes, a poacher on rich men’s estates, a liar, con artist, thief…and, sometimes, a man who found kids and brought them home. But after I shot a pimp, McGowan stopped recommending me. And the people who started coming to me for tracking jobs after that weren’t looking for rescue work.

I might have kept going anyway—my lifestyle didn’t require a lot of income—but things kept…happening.

I thought I was done with things like that.

“Why did you give me this?” I asked Mama. I held up my cup of soup as if I was toasting an audience, so there wouldn’t be any doubt about what I was saying.

“You don’t like soup?” she said, ominously.

“I don’t like this soup. I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not yours.”

“Ah!” she said, expressionlessly. “No time last night. Cook make soup himself.”

Every year or so, Mama tests to see if I recognize the one thing in that restaurant she makes herself. It would never occur to her to question that I love her, but she occasionally needs some reassurance that I love her soup.

I bowed slightly, brought my fingertips together. She removed the steaming tureen and my Barnard cup without another word.

“Prawns today,” she said. “Cook fix them good, okay?”

“I’m not hungry, Mama.”

“Max coming?”

“Should have been here already.”

“Okay,” she said, getting up and walking over to her post by the front register just as Max loomed up behind me.

As soon as he sat down, I made a gesture of ladling out a cup of soup, taking a sip. Then I made a face to indicate the soup was lousy today. Max nodded his thanks—Mama wasn’t going to waste a bogus pot of hot-and-sour without testing it on more than one of us.

I was in the middle of regaling Max with Little Eric’s monumental triumph over the Forces of Evil—that’s the Morning Line, for all you hayseeds—when the Prof strolled in with Clarence at his side. He slid in next to me, spoke out of the side of his mouth in a barely audible prison-yard whisper: “What’s with the old woman, Schoolboy?”

“What do you mean?” I said, charitably not mentioning that the Prof himself was older than corruption. Or that I knew why he was keeping his voice down.

“She tells me it’s cold out, maybe I want some soup. It’s the off-brand stuff today, am I right?”

“On the money.”

“Damn, son. You’d think she’d stop trying to gaff us with that tired old trick after all these years.”

“You want her to think up a new one?”

The little man turned and gave me a look.

“Where is my little sister?” Clarence asked, looking at his watch.

“Michelle’s not in on this,” I said. “Not this part, I mean.”

“I thought there was green on the scene,” the Prof riffed. “Something my boy found in that computer thing.”

“There was money,” I said. “All over that CD Clarence looked at, sure. But—”

“Right!” the Prof interrupted. “So—we did the scan, now we need a plan. And if we’re going to go in soft, we need our girl to walk point, don’t we?”

“The money on that CD, it belongs to the girl the guy who hired me was looking for.”

Max pointed his finger, ratcheted his thumb in the universal gesture of a hammer dropping.

“Yeah,” I said. “The guy who got smoked. And, it turns out, he was some kind of money man. Other people’s money.”

“So he wasn’t looking for the girl, he was looking for her stash?”

“I…I don’t think so, Prof. But we can’t start looking for either one without some answers.”

“But you know the girl, mahn,” Clarence put in. “That is what you said.”

“I know who she is. But the last time I saw her, she was just a kid. You saw her, too, Prof. You, too, Max,” I said, miming the last sentence.

The waiter brought a tureen of the booby-trap soup. Mama left her register just in time to see Max spit out a mouthful. He lurched to his feet, bowed an apology to the waiter.

“What’s up with this stuff?” the Prof said, pointing to the tureen. “You serving us tourist food now?” He wasn’t faking the annoyed look on his handsome face—if there’s one thing the Prof hates, it’s being upstaged.

“Oh, sorry,” Mama said. “Big mistake, okay?”

“This isn’t Mama’s soup,” I explained.

Max pointed an accusing finger at me, for not warning him.

Mama’s lips twisted—whether with pleasure at her family’s immediate recognition of the impostor, or in admiration of Max’s drama-queen performance, I couldn’t tell.

As soon as she left, I told Clarence about the time we had rescued Beryl Preston, watching the recognition flash in Max’s face, hearing the Prof say, “Oh yeah. That one,” next to me.

“Her name is different now,” the West Indian said. “Why would that be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She came from money, that much we know. If only her last name was different, maybe she got married. But…”

“What’s the front name she’s using now?” the Prof asked.

“Peta.”

“And it was, what, Sapphire or something?”

“Beryl.”

“Middle name, maybe?”

“Nope. The girl we pulled away from that pimp, her middle name was Eunice. This one—on the CD—didn’t have a middle name at all.”

“Maybe the guy who wanted you to find her, he didn’t know it.”

“No, Father,” Clarence told the Prof. “There was a wealth of information there. Very, very detailed. If the woman had a middle name, it would have been there, I am sure.”

“And the guy who hired me, I don’t think it was money he was after,” I added, more sure of myself than when the Prof had first asked, even though I couldn’t say why.

Max responded to my rubbing my first two fingers and thumb together and giving a negative shake of my head with a “What then?” gesture.

“I don’t know,” I told them all. “He did have a whole lot of financial information on that CD, but if he was her money manager, he’d have known all that, anyway. And those photographs…that’s personal, not professional. It’s like the only reason he had all the financials listed was just to help whoever was going to look for her.”

“You think she played the player?” the Prof said.

“That would fit. He wouldn’t be the first manager to get himself managed. But let’s say she did—why would she just disappear after that? If the stuff on the CD is true, she had loads of assets in her own name. Legit, aboveground stuff. She gets in the wind, she can’t get her hands on any of that. Who gets to steal so much that they can afford to walk away from millions?”

“This guy, the one who hired you, he had money, right?”

“Looked like it, sure. But I only saw him that one time; it could have all been front.”

Max clasped his hands in front of him, then slowly pulled them apart. His fingers made a plucking gesture, one hand taking from the other. The looted hand balled into a fist as the thieving hand fled.

“They were a partnership, maybe working some kind of paper scheme, and she ran off with all the cash? Could be,” I acknowledged. “That’d make him spend time and money looking for her, sure.”

“And if she really had all that coin, she could buy herself major muscle,” the Prof said.

“But now that the man who was looking for her is…out of the picture, would she not come back to her own home?” Clarence asked.

“Maybe he wasn’t the only one looking,” the Prof said, lighting a cigarette.

“Right,” I agreed. “We don’t know anything about the shooters. If they were working for her, that’s one thing. She’s got that kind of protection in place, making too much noise looking for her is a good way to get ourselves dead. But if they were looking for her themselves…”

“Yeah,” the Prof rode with me. “Same thing. But we can’t go nosing around the dead guy’s life. The cops would get on that like a priest on an altar boy.”

“I’m not worried about that end of it,” I said. “Not now, anyway. If she stole from the dead guy, she’s got the money. Finding her, that’s what we have to do. But I’m not even going to start looking until we know one thing: How did the shooters know where the guy who hired me was going to be that night? That’s the only way to know if I’m in the crosshairs, too.”

Nobody said anything for a few minutes.

Finally, Max got up. He returned with a handful of objects he had pulled off other tables. Identifying each one with gestures, he constructed a triangle on the tablecloth: the guy who hired me, the girl, and the shooters. Then he built another: the guy who hired me, the shooters, and me. One more: the guy who hired me, the shooters…and Charlie Jones. Using chopsticks, he built a matrix. When he was done, a wooden arrow pointed right at the ferret.

“Charlie tipped off the shooters?” the Prof said, touching Max’s chart.

Max shrugged his shoulders.

“Even if he did, he would not have to bring Burke’s name into it, would he?” Clarence said.

Now it was the Prof’s turn to shrug. “Who we gonna ask?” he said. “We don’t know who the shooters are. And nobody knows where Charlie cribs.”

“If he’s kept the same place he had years ago, we might know,” I said.

“How?” the Prof asked. But his voice was already tightening against what he knew was coming.

“The book,” I told them, gesturing to Max at the same time.

The book was Wesley’s once. Mine now. It had shown up in one of my drop boxes after Wesley had canceled his own ticket. What the media called his “suicide note” was a confession to a whole string of paid-for homicides. A couple of those had been mine. Wesley knew how things worked: If he left the cops enough to clear those cases, it was the same as clearing me.

But Wesley hadn’t told them everything. That was in the book he had mailed to me. The killing machine had recorded it all, the details of every hit: who got done, who paid for it, and how much. That was my legacy, a Get Out of Jail Free card, but I could only play it once. I hoarded it tight, my most valuable possession.

I knew Charlie Jones had to be in that book. He’d never put a penny in Wesley’s hand, but he was a bridge to plenty who had. And the iceman always covered his back trail.

“Mama,” I said, when she came over to where we were sitting, “could I have the book?”

I didn’t have to say anything more. Her eyes narrowed, but her expression didn’t change. Mama was our family’s bank, and Wesley’s book was in what passed for a safe-deposit box. Only, in Mama’s house, you never say the iceman’s name out loud.

“Now you want it?”

“Please.”

“Order food. I get it, okay?”

Meaning: The book was buried somewhere in the catacombs under the building that housed the restaurant, and it would take a while for her to dig it out.

“Bring me some duck for luck,” the Prof said to one of the white-coated hard men who passed for waiters in Mama’s joint.

It was almost an hour before Mama came back. She put a thick notebook about the size of my hand on the tablecloth and walked away, as if afraid it was going to explode. The book was bound in oxblood leather, with a gold ribbon page-marker, its fine linen pages almost three-quarters full of Wesley’s tiny, machinelike printing. I always wondered where he had found such a book, and what he would have done when he ran out of pages.

I’d been through the book plenty of times before, but every time I opened it, there always seemed to be more than I remembered, as if my ghost brother was still making entries from wherever he was. There was no real organization or index, but it moved in rough chronological order. From looking at the first date, I could tell Wesley hadn’t started his book when he’d started killing. That would have been a long time earlier, back when we were kids.

I felt the book throb in my hands. Not like a beating heart; like an oncoming train. I opened it, and started reading.

I took a drag off the cigarette I hadn’t remembered lighting, put it back in the ashtray that hadn’t been on the table when I’d started reading. “I’ve got him,” I said.

The Prof and Clarence came back to where I was sitting. I looked up and there was Max, right across from me; he had never left.

“Charlie hired Wesley four times,” I said. “Not directly, but he made the matches.”

“Everything go okay?” the Prof asked. He wasn’t asking if the hits had gone down, that was never a question; he was asking if Wesley had been paid. The one time we knew he hadn’t been, the iceman had turned the whole city into a killing ground.

“Yeah,” I said, still thinking about one of the jobs I’d run across in the book. Looked like Charlie Jones had known some politicians.

“Must have followed him home,” the Prof said. “No way my man pays anyone for info.”

“It doesn’t say. But he’s got an address here, all right.”

“Where was the little weasel holing up back then?” the Prof asked, frankly curious.

“Over in Queens. Briarwood.”

“Briarwood?” the Prof jeered. “In that neighborhood, Charlie’d stick out like the truth in Jesse Jackson’s mouth.”

“He might,” I said, my finger on the page where I’d found him. “But Benny Siegel wouldn’t.”

“That boy is big-time slick,” the Prof said, his preacher’s voice garnished with admiration. “You got to give it to him. Folks been trying to pass ever since there was folks, but that’s a one-way street—people trying to move up, not down. Charlie got to be the first time I ever heard of anyone trying to pass for Jewish.”

“You know how Wesley worked it,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Mama wasn’t close by. “You wanted work done, you never got to see him face-to-face. You hired a voice on the phone, sent the money to wherever he told you. But it was a different number and address for every job. So Charlie, he had to know a way to find Wesley. Or to leave word for him, anyway.”

“Do you think they ever met?” Clarence asked. He was the only one of us who hadn’t known Wesley, but he’d been hearing the legend since his early days working for a Jake gunrunner in Brooklyn. He always wanted to know more, but he had to balance his curiosity against the Prof’s disapproval.

“You mean, like, were they pals?” the little man said, bitterly. “Forget that. Wesley, he was about as friendly as a cobra with a grudge.”

“But if he and Burke—”

“We came up together,” I said, hoping to cut off the young man’s questions before we had a problem.

“Still. If he was as—”

“Look, son,” the Prof said, gruffly. “Wesley was the mystery train. You never knew where he was going, but you always knew where he’d been—dead men be all over the tracks. Nobody knows why he picked Burke out when they were little kids. Ain’t no point talking about it. Nobody knows. And nobody ever gonna know, okay?”

“Your father’s right,” I told Clarence, gently guiding him away from the edge. “When it comes to Wesley, you ask a question, the answer’s always the same: Nobody knows. But I can tell you this for sure: He wasn’t friends with Charlie Jones. He wasn’t partners with him. That wasn’t Wesley. He was always one up. If Charlie knew where to leave a message for Wesley, then Wesley had to know where Charlie lived; it’s as simple as that. Wesley wasn’t a gambler. The only way he’d play is with a marked deck.”

“He has been gone a long time, mahn.”

“You mean, the address might be no good now? Sure, that’s true. But if Charlie went to all the trickery and expense involved in a complete ID, he could still be there. Remember, we know one thing—he never crossed Wesley.”

“How could we know that, then?”

Nobody answered. It only took the young man a few seconds to catch up.

For some places, a cab is the perfect surveillance vehicle. You can circle the same block a dozen times, go and come back, even park close by and eat a sandwich, and nobody pays attention. A leaf on a tree, a bird in the forest.

But that wouldn’t work in Briarwood, a community of upper-middle-class houses and even higher aspirations. The only Yellow Cabs you see in that neighborhood are making airport drop-offs, the cabbies seething at the “shortie” trip. For the drivers, waiting on an airport line is a dice-roll. A Manhattan run is a soft six. A carful of Japanese tourists who don’t have a firm grasp of the exchange rate is a natural. Briarwood, that’s snake eyes.

Walk-bys would be even riskier. In that neighborhood, people were peeking out from behind their curtains decades before anyone ever heard of Neighborhood Watch. The population is aging and house-proud, the kind of folks who keep 911 on speed dial. Nobody hangs out on the corners at night. And the community has enough political clout to ensure for-real police patrols, too.

But this is still New York, where info is just another peach to pick. If you can’t reach the branches, you have to know how to shake the trees.

Some do it with research, some do it with subpoenas. People like me do it with cash.

There’s two kinds of bribes—the ones where you get asked, and the ones where you offer. A building inspector looking for mordida knows he has to make the first move—too many DOI stings going on today for an experienced slumlord to take the chance. But the pitch is always so subtle you have to be listening close to catch it.

That kind of bribe, it’s just the cost of doing business, an everyday thing. But if you want someone to go where they’re not supposed to, it’s a lot trickier to put a deal together. The phone company’s wise to employees selling unlisted numbers; the DMV knows what the home address of a celebrity is worth; and there’s always a bull market for Social Security numbers. So there’s all kinds of safeguards in place: You access the computers from inside the company, you’re going to leave a trail. You say the wrong thing on the phone, someone could be listening. Somebody’s always watching, and they’re not anyone’s brother.

Computers make it a lot easier to check on what your employees are doing. But putting all the information in one place is a party where you have to screen the guest list. Not all hackers spend their time trying to write the ultimate virus or crack into a secure site. Some of them are people like me. Working criminals.

The best tools to unlock an account are a Social Security number and a date of birth. We didn’t have either one for Charlie Jones, but we had the name he had been living under and the address where he lived at the time. If that info was dead, so were our chances.

I know a few cyber-slingers, but I don’t trust any of them enough to let them work a name when its owner might wind up deceased. So I had to go to people who don’t trust me.

Pepper is a sunburst girl. She’s got more bounce than a Texas high-school cheerleader, and a smile that could make Jack Kevorkian volunteer to teach CPR. She probably likes everybody on this planet, except…

“It’s me,” I told her, on the phone.

“Okay,” she answered, warm as a robbed grave.

“I want to buy a package.”

“She’s not going to meet you.”

Pepper was talking about Wolfe, the warrior woman who headed up their operation. Back when she was still a prosecutor, she had let me hold her hand for a minute. But then the road we were walking divided, and I took the wrong fork. I did it knowing she’d never follow, hoping she’d wait for me to come back. When I did, she was still in the same spot. But she wasn’t waiting for me. She was doing what she always did—standing her ground.

Not many men get a second chance with a woman like Wolfe. I was probably the only man alive who could have blown them both.

“This isn’t about her,” I said. “It’s not about me, either. I need a package, that’s all.”

“Say where and when.”

“The cafeteria? Tonight? Anytime after eight?”

“Bring it all with you,” she said, and disconnected.

She came in the front door, beamed a “Hi!” to Mama, and breezed over to my booth. Mick was a couple of paces behind her, like he always is. He clasped his hands, bowed to Mama, who returned the gesture of respect.

Mick’s a big man, broad-shouldered, with a natural athlete’s build. His face would be matinee-idol material if it ever had an expression. Pepper once told the Prof that Mick had gone to one of those colleges where the football coach makes more than the whole science department, but he got disgusted with it and left. Made me curious enough to do a little research. Apparently, fracturing the coach’s jaw was enough to get your scholarship canceled.

Mick glided behind Pepper so he was standing beside her as Max and I got to our feet. Mick bowed to Max as he had to Mama, caught the return, then gave me mine. Pepper was still smiling…at Max. We all sat down.

“Oh, could I have some of that special dish we had last time, please?” Pepper said, as Mama came to our table.

“Sure, okay,” Mama said, and disappeared into the back.

“I love fortune cookies,” Pepper said, turning around agilely and swiping a small metal bowl from the table behind her.

“You don’t want those,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“They’re for tourists, Pepper.”

“So?”

“So Mama doesn’t like tourists.”

“Oh, stop!”

I exchanged a look with Mick. He made a “What do you want me to do?” gesture with his eyebrows that might have been one of Max’s.

Pepper delicately cracked one of the cookies open. “Oh, ugh!” she said, tossing the tiny scrap of paper onto the table.

Max picked it up, twisted his lips, and handed it to me. Life is the road to death. All you choose is your speed.

“Told you,” I said.

“Are they all like that?” Pepper asked, curious despite herself.

“Pretty much,” I assured her. One of Mama’s proudest boasts was that no tourist visited twice.

“But the food here is wonderful!”

“That’s not customer food,” I said. “It’s just for…people Mama knows.”

“Then why does she even—?” Pepper started to say, before a look from Mick cut her off.

A waiter came out with a huge, shallow bowl of…whatever it was that Pepper had eaten the last time she’d been there, I guessed.

We ate in silence. Mick was a kung-fu man, and it looked like he was questioning Max about some sort of praying-mantis technique. Or maybe he was just practicing his nonverbal conversation skills. Pepper watched, fascinated. One of the prettiest things about her is how interested she always is in things. I wish she liked me.

The waiter took away our dishes. Max lit a cigarette. Pepper frowned. I reached over and took one for myself. Mick shook his head sadly at my immaturity.

“I’ve got a name,” I said to Pepper. “Two names, really. We don’t know if either one’s legit. One address, but it’s real old.”

“What else?”

“White male. Between five eight and five ten, slim build. Brown eyes, brown hair. Looks to be somewhere in his fifties.”

“You think he’s on paper somewhere?”

“No. Far as I know, he’s never taken a fall.”

“And you want what exactly?”

“I want to know where he lives. If he’s still at the same place, that would be good enough. If not…”

“You’ve seen him personally, or are you just working off that vague description?”

“I know him.”

“So you want a picture? Of him at the address?”

“Yeah. That’d do it.”

“All right,” she said, all business. “You know we can’t give you a price until we know how long it’s going to—”

“I know,” I said, grinding out my cigarette. “Be careful, Pepper. This guy’s no citizen.”

“How could I have guessed?” she said, smiling. At Max.

“Want to go someplace with me?” I asked Loyal, later that night.

“Someplace nice?”

“Afterwards.”

“Do I get to dress up?”

“You’re always dressed up.”

“Yeah?” she said, deep in her throat.

“This isn’t so much fun,” she said later, doing it in baby talk to take the sting out.

“I thought you loved acting.”

“Well, I do. But this isn’t…I mean, all we’re doing is driving around.”

“Why are we driving around?”

“We’re tired of paying a fortune to rent in Manhattan, and co-op prices are just ridiculous. We heard this neighborhood has real value in it,” she said, in the bored tone a schoolgirl uses to tell you, yes, she did do her homework.

“That’s good!”

“It’s only good if someone asks us,” she said, pouting. “And who’s going to ask us anything if we just keep driving around?”

“I was thinking a cop.”

“A cop? You mean…Oh my God! Are we, what do you call it, casing someplace to rob? Is that what you really—?”

“I don’t do things like that,” I said, my tone indicating that a criminal of my stature didn’t do manual labor. “We’re just…scouting, okay? You know what eminent domain is, little girl?”

“Yes!” she said, suddenly interested. “I once had a…friend who was a lawyer. A real-estate lawyer, in fact. He told me all about how it works.”

“Good. See all these houses?” I said, turning my head from side to side to indicate I was talking about the whole area. “They’ve gone up in price like a rocket, the past couple of years. Nobody knows where the top floor is. Everyone here thinks they’re sitting on a gold mine, okay?”

“Okay….” she said, interested despite her pose.

“What if the rumor got started that the city was going to cut a big swath right through this area, to sell to some private developer? The Supreme Court says they can do that now.”

“The government never pays fair market value,” she said, firmly.

“Right. And…?”

“And people would want to sell before the word got out so that…Oh!”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the kind of thing you do?”

“One of them.”

“I hate these seat belts,” she said, crossing her legs and taking a deep breath. “They make me feel all…restrained, you know?”

“I eyeballed the house,” I said. “Nice size, solid, set close to the sidewalk.”

“Look like anyone was home?” the Prof asked.

“Couple of lights on, behind curtains. And one out front, but that was more for decoration.”

“My man got burglar bars?”

“In that neighborhood? They’d probably run him out of town for messing up the decor.”

“Might be going electronic.”

“Sure.”

“Could you see the yard?”

“In front, there isn’t much of anything at all. I got some old City Planning maps of the neighborhood. Near as I could tell, if those houses have back yards, they’re postage stamps.”

“He could still have a hound on the grounds.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been thieving since way before you was born, Schoolboy.

Any crib can be cracked. But that one’s in a bad neighborhood for B-and-E. If Charlie’s holed up there, it’s a mortal lock that he’s got the place wired.”

“I’m not thinking about going in, Prof.”

“Then what’s with all the—?”

“I’m not thinking about going in,” I repeated. “But I have been thinking. If Charlie’s there, he’s been there for a long time. He might have a wife, kids, who knows? But, whatever he’s got set up, he’s got a big investment in it.”

“How does that help us, mahn?” Clarence said.

“Motherfucker’s not bringing his work home,” the Prof announced, holding a clenched fist out to me. I tapped his fist with mine, acknowledging that he’d nailed it.

“I do not understand,” Clarence said, without a trace of impatience.

“Charlie’s been at this forever,” I told him. “If he’s still at the same place, it means he went to a lot of trouble to keep one life separate from the other. Charlie never goes hands-on, remember. He probably leaves his house to go to work, just like everyone else in his neighborhood. Which means…?”

“He has an office, somewhere else.”

“Good!” the Prof said to his son.

“And if that’s true, what?”

“Then his home would be sacred to him, Burke.”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly. “This is starting to look less like a muscle job every minute.”

“If your man’s info is still good,” the Prof cautioned.

The next morning, the sun came out of its corner swinging. It didn’t have a KO punch in its arsenal—not this time of year, not in New York—but it came on hard enough to drive the Hawk back against the ropes. My breakfast was a hot mug of some stuff that Mama gives me to microwave. It’s almost as thick as stew, and smells like medicine, but it unblocks your nasal passages like someone went in there with a rototiller.

I checked the paper to see if there was anything new on the dead man, and came up empty. Some half-wit—or, maybe, bought-and-paid-for—columnist had a piece about how the Bush administration was finally winning the war on drugs. Seems all that money poured into Colombia was paying off. Or maybe God really is on his side.

The writer had an orgasm over how the number of acres under coca cultivation was down 75 percent. That’s like dipping a yardstick into the Atlantic and reporting back that it’s three feet deep.

There’s only one way to measure how “the war” on any contraband is going—street price. When the Taliban was running Afghanistan, they banned poppy farming. No more opium, on pain of death. Being such devout Muslims, they were strictly against the evils of heroin. Sure. Poppy production dropped like a safe off a building. Only thing was, the street price of H didn’t trampoline in response like you’d expect—it stayed as steady as a sociopath’s polygraph needles.

You didn’t need a degree in higher mathematics to figure out what was going on. The Taliban banned poppy farming because they already had huge stocks on hand. Same way OPEC gets together and reduces oil production—to keep the barrel price high…and stable.

Colombia doesn’t have one gang ruling the country, so there’s no price-fixing. Both the pseudo-liberation guerrillas and the right-wing death squads run on money, so they were all madly pumping product, widening the pipeline. How could I know that? Because the street price for coke—grams to kilos—was even lower than it had been years ago.

The only war on drugs the sanctimonious swine are winning is the one to keep old folks on fixed incomes from filling their scrips in Canada or Mexico. And Ray Charles could see who was making out on that deal.

Why was I even bothering with the damn newspaper? It was a chump play to keep looking for Beryl. I wished I could just walk away. That job Charlie Jones had brought me was turning out to be the worst kind, the kind where you end up spending money instead of making it. No choice, though: I had to pay whatever it cost to make sure Charlie hadn’t been the one who put the man in the camel’s-hair coat on the spot. Because that might mean the shooting team knew about me, too.

The dead man wasn’t going to pay me to find the woman he knew as Peta Bellingham anymore. And even if she really had all the money showing on that CD, that didn’t necessarily add up to a dime for me.

I don’t like looking for my money on the come, but that’s where I was stuck now.

I sipped some more of Mama’s brew while I thought it through again. All that money didn’t mean anything by itself. Her father had been a rich man—maybe it was from an inheritance.

But what would have made her disappear? If the dead man had been stalking her, there would have been other ways to deal with that problem. For a woman as rich as she was, anyway.

I used to do a lot of that kind of work, about the same time I was looking for missing kids. I didn’t have much finesse back then.

And even less self-control. But I learned.

I got schooled good the time a soft-spoken man in an undertaker’s suit came to my office. I didn’t know him, but he had a message from a guy I’d done time with. A solid, stand-up guy who wasn’t ever coming home. The soft-spoken man told me this guy had a little sister. And the little sister had a husband.

The husband turned out to be a big man, with a bad drinking habit and a worse temper. That made it easy.

The celluloid crunch of his boozer’s nose brought both his hands up to cover his face. I hooked to his liver with the sap gloves, and he was on his knees in the alley, vomiting, bleeding, and crying at the same time. I leaned down quick, before he passed out, said, “Next time you beat on your wife, we’ll snap your fucking spine.”

When the soft-spoken man came back with the other half of my money, he was shaking his head apologetically.

“What?” I said.

“We’ve got a problem.”

“We?”

“The girl. Our…friend’s sister. She saw her husband in the hospital and she just went off. Started screaming.”

“So?”

“So she’s the problem.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your…friend, there’s nothing anyone can do to him, okay? But your friend, he’s our friend, too, understand?”

“No,” I said, lying.

“Then let me spell it out for you,” the man said. “The sister, she knows more than she should. Instead of…appreciating what her brother wanted to do for her, she’s decided that her husband is this innocent victim. So she made a phone call.”

“To the cops?”

“To my boss. But her next call will be to the cops, unless things get made right.”

“Which means…?”

“An apology. And some money.”

“So apologize. And pay her the money.”

“It’s not her,” he said. “Him. He wants ten large to forget the whole thing.”

“Why tell me all this?”

“Because you didn’t do the job right.”

“I did what I got paid to do.”

“You got paid to fix it so he stops using the girl for a punching bag, not to bring heat down on my boss.”

“It’s not me who’s doing that.”

“Exactly,” the man said, soft-speaking the threat.

I lit a cigarette. Watched the smoke drift toward the low ceiling. Pansy shifted position in her corner, the movement so slight it might have been the play of light on shadow. The soft-spoken man was trapped. But nowhere near as bad as I was.

“She’s my only sister,” the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass said to me through the phone.

“I’m sorry about that,” I told him. “But I didn’t pick the people you sent to me, you did. And it’s me they’re putting in a cross.”

“I can talk to them,” he said.

“You already did that,” I told him, guessing, but real sure of the guess. “It’s her you have to talk to.”

“She missed her last two visits,” he said. “And she didn’t answer my letter, either.”

“Call her.”

“I did. She wouldn’t accept the charges. She never did that before.”

“You understand what they asked me to do?”

“I can figure it out,” he said.

“I’m not doing it,” I told him. “But there’s plenty who would.”

“What if…?”

“If she went as far as she already did behind what happened, what do you think she does if something heavier goes down?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“I only wanted to help her,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

I thought I had more time, but I was wrong. While I was visiting the prison, the soft-spoken man’s boss was making a phone call. To Wesley.

Husband and wife went together. Two surgical kills the papers called “execution-style.” The apartment had been ransacked. That made it “drug-related.”

I was sad about everything. But I learned from it.

Just because I’m good at waiting doesn’t mean I like to do it. I’d been good at doing time, too.

It took me another three full spins through the CD before I snapped that, for all the info this “financial planner” had put together on his target, he had nothing from her past. If he didn’t know her birth name, he didn’t know where she had grown up.

I’d met Beryl when she was a runaway. Now, maybe, she had run back home.

People with records learn not to keep records. I’ve got a memory so sharp and clear that, sometimes, I have to wall off its intrusions before they finish the job the freaks started when I was a little kid.

Every one of us feels those spidery fingers sometimes. There’s no magic pill. Therapy works for some of us. Some self-medicate: everything from opiates to S&M. Some of us go hunting.

I knew I could find Beryl’s house again. I probably couldn’t give directions, but, soon as I started driving, the sense impressions would flood my screen and guide me, the way they always do.

The Plymouth wasn’t the correct ride for where I had to go. Clarence had what I needed—an immaculate, restored-to-new ’67 Rover 2000TC, in classic British Racing Green. Just the kind of expensive toy someone in Beryl’s father’s neighborhood would have for Sunday drives. But Clarence was as likely to allow his jewel out in this weather as Mama was to file a legitimate tax return.

I could get something out of the Mole’s junkyard, but he specialized in shark cars—grayish, anonymous prowlers that no witness would be able to recall. Except that what blended into the city would stand out in the suburbs.

Renting was always an option, but I hated to burn a whole set of expensive ID just for a couple of hours’ use.

So I made a phone call.

“Hauser,” was all the greeting I got.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Whatever you want, the answer is—”

“You still leave your car at the station when you take the train in to work?”

“Yeah…” he said, warily.

“I’d like to borrow it. Just take it out of the lot, use it for a couple of hours, put it right back.”

“Use it for what?” Hauser demanded. I’ve known him a long time; it wasn’t so much that he gave a damn, it was that being a reporter was encoded in his genes, and he always needed to know the story.

“I have to visit someone tomorrow. Not in your neighborhood, but close by. I’m looking for a runaway.” Only the very best liars know how to mix a heavy dose of truth into their stories. And which buttons to push. Like I said, Hauser knew me going all the way back. And he has a couple of teenage sons.

“It’ll be there when I get back?”

“Guaranteed,” I promised. I’m the rarest of professional liars—unless you’re the one I’m playing, my word is twenty-five-karat.

The next morning, I was riding the Metro-North line, one of a mass of reverse-commuters heading out of the city. The car was about three-quarters full. I sat across from a scrawny, intense-looking man with short, carelessly cropped, no-color hair, indoor skin, and palsied hands. A pair of tinted trifocals dominated his taut, narrow face. Behind them, his eyes were the color of a manila envelope. He looked me over like a junkie who’s afraid of needles, his need fighting his fear.

The two of us were probably the only ones in the car not jabbering into cell phones. The fool next to me, clearly annoyed that the racket might actually render his own conversation private, compensated by damn near shouting the “Just checking in!” opening he’d already used half a dozen times in a row. Some of the howler monkeys tried to sound businesslike, asking if there had been any calls—apparently not—but most of them dropped the pretense and just blabbered what they thought was important-sounding crap. They weren’t talking, they were fucking broadcasting—using volume as signal strength. We were all captives.

I caught the paranoid’s eye, made a “What can you do?” face. He studied me for a split second, then nodded down at the thick briefcase he had across his knees and twisted his lips a millimeter.

The fool next to me said, “Hello. Hell-o!” before pushing a button on his phone to disconnect. He hit another button—my money was on “redial”—then stared blankly at the little screen, as if it would explain some deep mystery. All over the train car, people were shouting into their phones but not getting a response.

“Dead zone,” I heard someone say, smugly. “We’ll pass through it in a minute.”

I locked eyes with the paranoid across from me long enough to realize that the smug guy had it all wrong. Portable cell-phone jammers are expensive—good ones go for a couple of grand—but they’re a reasonable investment for a lunatic who wants to make sure nobody watching him can report back to HQ. I would have offered the jammer a high-five, but I suspected that would start him suspecting me. So I leaned close, whispered, “You should carry a phone, too. Just in case one of these morons ever looks around and does the math.”

He nodded sagely. After all, I wasn’t one of Them.

Who says therapy doesn’t work?

Hauser’s car was waiting just where he promised—a dark blue ten-year-old Lexus ES300 with a spare key in a magnetic box under the front fender. It had Westchester tags, with registration and insurance papers in the glove box, plus a today’s-date note on the letterhead of the magazine Hauser works for, saying that Mr. Ralph Compton was using the vehicle with his permission.

I never felt more like a citizen.

I didn’t remember exactly what Beryl’s father did for a living—if he’d ever actually told me—but I figured the odds on my finding someone home at the residence were good, even if it was only the maid.

The Lexus was front-wheel drive, but I didn’t need that extra safety cushion—the roads had been precision-plowed, and it was too sunny for black ice to be a problem. I drove around until I found a reference point, then went the rest of the way on autopilot, guided by the signals from my memory.

I get those a lot, and I always trust their truth. For most, I wish I didn’t.

The house was a three-story mass of wood and stone that had been built to look like a carefully preserved antique. No cars in the circular drive, but the door to the detached garage was closed. The place felt like someone was home.

I couldn’t spot a security camera, but that doesn’t mean much today, not with tiny little fiber-optic eyes everywhere. I parked at the extreme end of the drive, at an angle. Anyone who wanted the license number would have a long walk to get it. I strolled up the driveway, casual.

A pewter sculpture of a bear’s head was centered in the copper-painted door. I saw a discreet silver button on the right jamb, pushed it, and was rewarded with a sound like wind chimes in a hurricane.

The click of heels on hardwood told me whoever was coming to the door wasn’t the cleaning lady. I felt myself being studied. The door opened—no security chain—and a tall, too-skinny woman regarded me for a second before saying “Yes?” in a taking-no-chances voice. She was way too young to be the wife I’d never met, but maybe Preston had gotten a divorce, and picked up a trophy on his next hunt.

“Ms. Preston? My name is—”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “We haven’t had anyone asking for them in quite a while.”

“You mean they—?”

“Moved? Yes. At least…well, we’ve owned the place for…it’ll be eight years this summer.”

“Damn!” I said, shaking my head ruefully. “I haven’t seen Jeremy since I moved to the Coast. I just got back, so I thought I’d drive out and surprise him. That’s what I get for not staying in touch.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, putting more sincerity into it than I expected. “I know the house was on the market for some time before we bought it. If we had known how prices were going to go through the roof, we never would have bargained back and forth for so long, but my husband…”

“I’m the same way,” I assured her. “You wouldn’t know where they moved to, by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not. We never met them, actually. Everything was done through brokers and lawyers. You know how that is.”

“I do. Well, sorry to have bothered you, then.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

I turned to go.

“Mr….?”

“Compton,” I said, turning back toward her.

“Would you like to leave a card? I don’t think there’s much hope, but I could give the broker a call, and see if she has any information….”

“I’d be very grateful,” I said. I took out a business card for Ralph P. Compton. It had a midtown address—I’ve got a deal with a security guard who works there; I slip him a hundred a month, and he slides any name I tell him into the building’s directory—and a 212 number that would dump into one of the cell phones at my place.

She took the card, held my hand a little too long. I knew where that came from; one of the worst things about being locked up is how boring it gets, even in a mink-lined cell.

I returned the Lexus, took the near-empty train back to Grand Central, grabbed the subway downtown.

The car I picked was densely packed, but there was an empty seat on the bench at the end of a row. I started for it, but the woman sitting in the next spot pointed at a suspicious puddle on the gray plastic seat, warning me off.

Three stops later, when she thought no one was looking, the woman reached into her handbag, took out a small bottle of water, and freshened the puddle.

That held off all applicants until a guy wrapped in about seven layers of coats and an even thicker odor stumbled in. The woman frantically pointed to the puddle on the seat next to her. The homeless guy took that as an invitation, and plopped himself down. The woman jumped up like he’d hit the other end of her seesaw.

The homeless guy had an empty seat next to him for the rest of the time I was on the train.

Many paths to the same door.

I stopped by a deli on my way home, planning on grabbing a sandwich to go. But the tuna looked suspicious and the egg salad looked downright guilty, so I passed.

I looked a question at Gateman as I stepped through the doors.

“All good, boss.”

“You have lunch yet?”

“Yeah. I had the Korean kid from down the—”

“Okay, bro,” I told him.

“I got the paper, you want to check last night’s Yonkers.”

I hadn’t bet anything last night, but I took his copy of the News anyway.

No messages waiting.

I had roasted almonds and papaya juice for lunch, idly going through the paper by habit, a soldier scanning the jungle even when there’s been no activity reported in the area.

If I hadn’t gone cover-to-cover, more to kill time than anything else, I would have missed it. The gossip column had an unsourced item: “What financier’s wife had filed for divorce just weeks before he was gunned down on the streets of Manhattan?” Then some stuff about how the wife had charged him with adultery, naming a “Ms. X” as the co-respondent.

I went back through the paper. Nothing. Which meant the cops had already talked to the wife, and knew a lot more than they were releasing.

I wished I was one of those private eyes in books; they’ve all got a friend on the force. I didn’t, but I knew someone who did.

“She’s not going to meet with you,” Pepper said, letting a drop of vinegar into her sweet voice. “Nothing’s changed. And it’s not going to.”

“I just want to ask a question. Not of her, okay? A question I want her to ask one of her pals.”

“Ask me,” Pepper said, unrelenting.

By the time I remembered that I had a date with Loyal that night—worse, that I had promised to take her somewhere special, somewhere she could really dress for—it was edging into five o’clock.

“Davidson,” the lawyer’s bearish voice growled into the phone.

“It’s me,” I said. “You still repping the guy who owns Citarella?”

“The stores or the restaurant?”

“The restaurant.”

“Josephs by Citarella, yeah. Who wants to know?”

“An old pal, who desperately needs a reservation for two.”

“So call and make one. They’re open to the public.”

“Uh, it’s for tonight.”

“Christ. Business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

“Then you won’t need the window.”

“Come on.”

“This worth me using up a favor?”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“Call me back. Half an hour. And, Burke…”

“What?”

“Make sure you order the fish—that’s the specialty of the house. And there’s no apostrophe in ‘Josephs,’ so don’t make a fool of yourself telling them there’s something wrong with their sign.”

The hostess at Josephs treated me like royalty, proving she wasn’t just a pretty girl but a damn fine actress.

“Oh, this is gorgeous,” Loyal said, tapping her foot as she tried to decide between sitting with her back to the window and missing the glittering view along Sixth Avenue, or facing the window and making everyone in the restaurant miss their view of her.

The hostess immediately tuned to her wavelength. “The corner is perfect,” she advised.

Loyal seated herself, glanced to her right out the window, to her left at the other tables, and, finally, across at me. “You’re so right,” she said to the hostess, flashing a megawatt smile. “Thank you.”

I still had the image of Loyal’s little foot in the emerald-green spike heels, tapping a toe so pointed it looked as if it would deform her foot.

“How do you get your feet into those shoes?” I asked her.

“What?” she said, sharply. My sister’s voice rang in my mind like an annoyed gong. You are a hopeless, hapless idiot. Her refrain, when it came to me and women.

“No, no,” I said, hastily. “I meant the toes. They’re so…radical.”

“Oh, don’t be so silly,” she said, shaking her head at my stupidity, but mollified. “They’re just for show.”

I’m no gourmet—Davidson is, even though every meal I’d ever shared with him was sandwiches in his office—but I could tell the food was world-class. Loyal did her trick of appearing to really chow down, but only picking at her food as she moved it around her plate. I didn’t mind.

“Lew,” she said, looking up from her perfectly presented crusted arctic char, “you know a lot about money, don’t you?”

“Who really knows about money?” I said, positioning myself for a deflection move.

“Oh, stop! You know what I mean. I’ve got a problem, and I wanted to ask your advice.”

I heard the Prof’s voice in my head. We were back on the yard, and he was explaining women to me. If all you want is gash, all you need is cash. But if you want a woman’s heart, you gotta do your part. One way or the other, there ain’t no such thing as free pussy, Schoolboy. There’s always a toll for the jellyroll.

So I was on all-sensors alert, but all I said was, “Sure, girl.”

“Well, you know what the real-estate market has been like, right? I mean, it’s just insane. Even studios are going for half a million in some parts of the city.”

“It’s a bubble,” I told her, with more confidence than I felt.

“That’s what people say,” she said, nodding as if to underline the words. “But if it’s a bubble, when is it going to burst?”

“If I knew that…”

“I know. But I feel like I have to do something, before I miss out.”

“But you already have a—”

“That’s exactly it!” she said, excitedly. “I bought that apartment ages ago—well, not ages, of course,” she interrupted herself, not being old enough to have done anything too long ago, right?—“but it feels like that, the way the market keeps rising and rising.”

“I still don’t see a problem.”

“Well, I do,” she said, emphatically. “I could get…well, a lot of money for that place, if I was to sell it now. In two or three years, it could be worth a lot more…but it could also be worth a lot less. If I sold now, I’d have a big pot of cash.”

“You’d need a big pot of cash if you wanted to keep living in this town.”

“That’s just it,” she said, regretfully. “But if I had a place to stay, I could do it. I’d only need a couple, three years here, working, then I could go back home…with enough to live on forever, I bet.”

“Where’s home, Wyoming?”

“No, silly. I’m from a little town in North Carolina. I haven’t been back since—oh, I don’t even remember—but my daddy left me a little place when he passed on. There’s people living there now. Renters, I mean. It’s not a big house, but it’s got some land around it. I could be happy there…especially after this city. I know I could.”

“I never picked up an accent,” I said.

“Well, you better not, all the voice lessons I paid for,” she said, turning her bruised-peach lips into a practiced pout. “When I came to the city, I was just a girl, not even old enough to vote. I was going to be an actress. Everyone back home told me I was a dead ringer for Barbara Eden—when she was Jeannie, I mean—and I was dumb enough to listen.”

“You do favor her,” I said, gamely.

“You’re sweet, Lew,” she said, not diverted. “But I know that’s not going to be for me, not now.”

“Things didn’t work out?”

“I didn’t have any talent,” she said, soft and blunt at the same time. “This so-called agent I had told me to change my name—the only part I was ever going to get with a name like Loyal Lee Jenkins was if they remade The Beverly Hillbillies—so I did. A little. But that didn’t make any difference. Casting directors would see my pictures—oh, did I have to work to pay for those—and I’d get calls, but as soon as I opened my mouth, that was it.”

“Your accent?”

“Well, I thought it was my accent, but I ground that rock into powder…and that still didn’t change anything. I tried and tried for years until I got the message. You know what it comes down to, baby? I’m not fashionable anymore.”

“You? Come on!”

“You’re thinking of the shoes, aren’t you? There’s a lot more to being fashionable than buying things, Lew. You know those jeans everybody’s wearing now? They’re not built for girls like me. I work out like a fiend, but I can’t change my shape.”

“Why would you want to?”

She turned her big eyes into searchlights, scanning the terrain of my face for a few seconds. Whatever she found must have satisfied her, because she nodded as if agreeing with something. “I remember, once, this man who wanted me to pose for him,” she said. “He told me I had the classic American hourglass figure. I was thinking about that just this morning, looking in the mirror. And you know what, Lew? No matter how tiny the waist of an hourglass, the sand still drops through it. Running out. I have to start thinking about my future.”

“Your apartment.”

“My apartment,” she agreed. “Now, I told you some truth about myself, even if it was embarrassing. So can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you married?”

I had been expecting that one for weeks. “No,” I told her. “Well, I guess that’s not a hundred percent. I’ve been separated for years, waiting for her damn lawyers and mine to get together on some financial issues.”

“You have kids?”

“No.”

“And that one is a hundred percent?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, shrugging my shoulders to show she was being absurd.

“When you say ‘separated,’ you mean physically, too, don’t you?”

“Well,” I said, seeing where she was headed, to block the exit before she got there, “it’s not that simple. I own a brownstone. That is, we own a brownstone. The lawyers made it clear that the one who moves out is the one who gets the short end of the stick, so we’re both still there. We live on separate floors, so we’re not even roommates. Sometimes I don’t even catch sight of her for weeks. But I’ve got so much of my money tied up in that place, I’m not leaving. And neither is she.”

“So you sleep there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And that’s why you can’t bring me to your place? Because that would be, like, adultery, right? And that would make your wife’s case better.”

“That’s right,” I said, wondering how Loyal was such an expert on the topic…for about a second.

“But if you had a friend who let you stay at their place anytime you wanted, for as long as you wanted, I’ll bet you’d like that just fine.”

“I guess.”

“I mean, a friend who’d just clear out and disappear. So, say, if your girlfriend wanted to spend some time with you…”

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Well, you should. Because it could solve both our problems in one jump,” Loyal said. Breathlessly, because all her breath had dropped into her cleavage.

“I’m not following you,” I said. Stalling, because I was.

“You wouldn’t want to rent an apartment in your name,” she said, leaning forward and licking a trace of something off her lips. “But I could rent one, couldn’t I? Then I could rent out my co-op, have a place to stay while I keep my eye on the market, and you’d have the best setup in the world, too.”

For three grand a month, I could have a lot of things, I thought, but kept it off my face. “That could get tricky,” I said, still looking for an opening.

“You mean you would have to go back to your place and spend the nights? That’s no big deal, honey. That’s what you do now, anyway. If I had my own place, like we’re talking about, I could be ready for you anytime you wanted.”

Like you’re talking about, I thought. “There might be a way,” I said aloud. “But it would depend on some things working out.”

“I’ll do anything,” Loyal said, lips slightly parted in abject sincerity.

I met Pepper the next morning, in the lobby of an “I’m cool, but are you?” hotel on West Fifty-second. It’s perfect for a man in my line of work. The people who hang out there put in so much mirror time that their observational skills have atrophied from disuse. And the doorman doesn’t come on duty until after dark, when his outfit works better.

“What?” Pepper said, as she sat down on one of the quasi-sofas artfully scattered near the revolving door. Mick stood behind her right shoulder.

“Daniel Parks…?” I began. Got a blank stare for my efforts, kept going: “He was gunned down a little while back. Made the papers. First he wasn’t ID’ed. When they released his name, there was nothing else, except for the usual filler. Then I read in a gossip column that his wife had sued him for divorce just before it happened. Named another woman.”

Pepper turned and shot Mick a look that would have terrorized a gorilla.

“The gossip columns have trollers,” I said. “They root through the bins in Supreme Court, looking for celebrities’ names. Lawsuits, restraining orders, divorce filings—stuff like that. This guy’s name wouldn’t be on their hit list until he got hit, which is probably why it didn’t make the columns before now.”

Pepper rolled her eyes dramatically in a “Tell me something I don’t know” gesture.

“That’s one possibility,” I said, unfazed. “The other is that a cop leaked the info. Some of them have a standing arrangement with the gossip boys.”

“So?”

“So I need to find out what was in the actual complaint, Pepper. Supposedly, the wife named the other woman—they called her ‘Ms. X’ in the column, which means either they don’t know or she’s not famous—and that’s info I need. Plus anything else she charged him with—”

“Like?”

“Like, especially, anything to do with money.”

“Why can’t you just go down to the courthouse and—?”

“I guarantee that’s all sealed up by now. And if it’s not, it’s a baited trap, and the cops will be all over anyone who goes looking.”

“So you want us to do it?”

“Pepper, I know you don’t think much of me, but I’m sure you don’t think I’m stupid, okay? Wolfe—”

Mick made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a threat.

“I know she still has friends on the force,” I went on, nothing to lose.

“Friends do favors for friends,” Pepper said, flatly. “What you want, it’s not that sort of thing.”

“I know what you’re saying. I know money won’t do this. All I’m asking you is to ask her, all right?”

“Don’t call us,” she said, getting to her feet.

Mick glided out behind her, his broad back covering her like a steel cape.