Pain Management

The first time you end up Inside, you think serving your sentence is going to take forever. But soon you learn: no matter how much time you have to do, some parts of it never take long.

The Aryan clenched his fists, glancing down at his cartoon-huge forearms as if to reassure himself all that cable-tendoned muscle was real. He was on the downside of steroid burnout, dazed and dangerous.

The Latino wouldn’t know a kata from the Koran, but he was an idiot savant of violence, with the kinetic intelligence of a pit bull.

They faced each other in a far corner of the prison yard, screened off from the ground-level guards by the never-intersecting streams of cons flowing around them.

Any experienced gun-tower hack could read the swirls below him, see something was up. But the convicts knew the duty roster better than the warden. They knew the tower closest to the action was manned by a tired old guy with thirty years on the job and a good supply of gash magazines. All they had to do was keep the noise down.

“Only play is to stay away.” The Prof spoke low to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Larsen’s not built for distance. If Jester gets him tired, he can—”

“Our play, fool!” the Prof hissed at me. “The fuse is lit; it’s time to split.”

We faded, working our way back through the crowd sneaking glances at the duel. By the time the whistle blew and the first shots sounded from the tower, we were standing on either side of the sally port as the Goon Squad rushed through, hammering wildly at every con within reach.

Larsen didn’t run. He was facedown on the filthy asphalt, Jester’s shank protruding from the back of his neck. The matador had gone in over the horns.

They locked the whole joint down, tore up everyone’s house looking for weapons. But all that did was simmer the pot more, as plots and counterplots festered into a Big House brew of pus and poison. Usually it was black against white, with brown trying to stay out of the crossfire. But this one had rolled out different.

Larsen rode with a motorcycle gang; there were a lot of bikers Inside then. And Jester had been flying colors at sixteen, when he’d taken the life that had bought him a life sentence. The kid he’d killed was another PR, from a rival club, but that didn’t matter anymore.

Back then, when it came to prison war, race trumped tribe every time.

You never got a choice about that. The cons had all kinds of names for areas of the prison—Times Square, Blues Alley, D Street—but I never heard of one named Switzerland.

“On the bricks, niggers do the paper-bag trick,” the Prof told me. “But Inside, you can’t hide.”

“What’s the paper-bag trick?” I asked him. The Prof had been schooling me for a while, so I didn’t even blink at a black man saying “nigger.” I knew words were clay—they took their real meaning from the sculptor.

“I ain’t talking about passing, now,” the Prof cautioned me. “It’s a class thing. Motherfuckers’ll hold a paper bag next to they faces and look in the mirror, okay? If they darker than the bag, there ain’t but so far up the ladder they can climb, understand?”

“I . . . guess.”

“Nah, you don’t get it, son. I’m talking about the colored ladder, see? Mothers want they daughters to marry light. They know high-society niggers don’t want no darkies at their parties.”

I just nodded, waiting for mine, knowing it was coming.

“Yeah,” he said, softly. “It’s different with white folks. Color ain’t the thing. Boy like you, you was born trash. You could be light as one of them albinos; wouldn’t make no difference.”

I knew it was true.

By the time they ended the lockdown and we could mix again, the clay had hardened. Larsen’s crew called it for personal, put out the word. They weren’t going race-hunting. They only wanted Jester.

I guess the hacks wanted him, too. They never bing-ed him for the killing, and they knew Jester would never take a voluntary PC. That section of solitary was marked “Protective Custody,” but the road sign was just there to fool the tourists. Cons called it Punk City. Jester, he’d rather swan-dive into hell wearing gasoline swim trunks.

For a lot of the Latin gang kids I knew coming up, it wasn’t whether you died that counted, it was how you died.

When Jester hit the yard, he wasn’t alone. There was a fan of Latinos behind him, unfurling from his shoulders like a cape in the wind.

“Jester don’t mind dying, but he sure mind motherfuckers trying,” the Prof said out of the side of his mouth.

The motorcycle guys stood off to one side, watching. Everyone gave the two crews room, measuring the odds. There were a few more of the Latins, but they all looked like they’d come from the same cookie-cutter—short and slim to the point of being feline. The motorcycle guys were carrying a lot more beef. Question was: What else were they carrying?

“Only steel is real,” the Prof said, summing it up.

The yard buzzed with its life-force: rumor. Was it true that the hacks had looked the other way, let the whites re-arm? Had the search squad really found a few live .22 rounds during the shakedown? What about the word that they were going to transfer a new bunch of bikers in from Attica and Dannemora to swell the ranks?

Jester turned and faced his crew, deliberately offering his back to the whites. One of them started forward; stopped when their leader held up his hand.

It wasn’t going to be today.

And the next three weeks went by quiet.

The motorcycle guys trapped me in a corridor near the license plate shop. My fault—I should have been race-war alert, but I’d let the quiet lull me.

“How much?” their leader, a guy named Vestry, asked me.

“How much for what?” I said, stalling, but honestly puzzled, too.

“For the piece, man. Don’t be playing dumb with us. You’re all alone here.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Your boy, Oz, he’s the guy what makes all the best shanks. So we figure he’s got—”

“The Man shut him down. You know that. Oz don’t keep a stash. Makes them to order and hands them over soon as they’re done.”

“We’re not talking about no fucking pig-stickers, Burke. We want the piece. If the hacks found bullets, there’s got to be a gun. And, word is, it’s yours.”

“The word is bullshit.”

“Look, man, we’re willing to pay. Or did the spics get to you first?”

“I’m not in this,” I told him. “If I had a piece, I’d sell it to you. You know I’m short—you think I’d bag my go-home behind getting caught with a fucking gun?”

“We know you got it,” Vestry said, stubborn-stupid, stepping closer. A sound came from the men behind him—the trilling of a pod of orcas who’d spotted a sea-lion pup far from the herd.

One of them said “Oh!” just as I heard a sound like a popgun and saw his hands go to his face. He stumbled to one knee, said, “I’m . . . ,” and fell over.

Another popgun sound. Vestry grabbed at his neck like a bee stung him. But blood spurted out between his fingers.

Everybody ran. Everybody that could.

“It just came out of the shadows,” I told them. “Like it was a ghost or something.”

“At least two ghosts, then,” Oz said. “Vestry made it to the hospital in time; the other guy didn’t. But there were two shots.”

“So—not a zip,” the Prof said, thoughtfully. “Ain’t no way to reload one of those suckers that fast.”

“Or two zips. And two shooters,” Darryl said.

Everyone went quiet for a while. Then the Prof said, “I think Schoolboy nailed it the first time.”

We all looked at him.

“It was a ghost,” the little man said. “And we all know his name.”

The Prof was on the money. So, by the time Vestry came up to me on the yard—alone, with his hands held away from his body—to ask his question, I had the answer ready.

“Five hundred dollars?” he said, stunned. He patted the yellowing tape around his neck that held the stitches in place, as if that would make his ears work better.

“Soft money,” I told him. “No smokes, no trades, no favors. Folding cash.”

“There ain’t that much soft in this whole—”

“You got chapters on the bricks,” I said quietly. “Take up a collection.”

I guess they raised the money. When they racked the bars for the morning count a couple of weeks later, Jester didn’t move. Died in his sleep, word was. Maybe something he ate.

“I already paid half,” Vestry said the next day. “In front. How do I know he did that spic? I heard the docs don’t know what killed him.”

“You know who you’re dealing with,” I told him. “You don’t come up with the other half, that’s what they’ll be saying about you.”

The prison library was always full of guys working on their own appeals. And jailhouse lawyers working for cigarettes, or dope, or the use of some wolf’s punk. It was the DMZ, neutral turf, off-limits for violence. Any problems there, the Man would be only too happy to close it down. So it stayed peaceful.

I spent a lot of time there, reading with my thick little pocketbook-sized dictionary next to me. You could make steady scores writing letters for guys, especially to pen-pal women they were trying to pull. I was known to be pretty good at it, even as young as I was.

I never saw him coming. Nobody ever did. One minute I was all alone. The next it was as if a cold wind had blown past, and then Wesley was sitting beside me.

“They paid,” is all he said.

And then he was gone.

I was cut loose before Wesley was. I went back to thieving. When Wesley got out, he went back to what he did.

One time, they didn’t pay him.

Wesley settled accounts with them all, and then he was gone again.

Dead and gone, people said.

But the whisper-stream still vibrated at the sound of his name. Odds on dead? Pretty good. On gone? No takers.

Homicides still happened. And when they happened to certain people, in certain ways, when no one ever got popped for them . . .

I wondered what they whispered about me now. I’d been dead and gone myself for a couple of years. Gunned down in the abandoned flatlands of Hunts Point, dumped in front of the ER unconscious, in a coma for . . . a long time. When I’d finally come around, the cops were there. My prints had marked me. They knew who I was. Only problem was, I didn’t know who I was.

One of the bullets had scored my brain when I took one in the head—the one that broke the binocular connection between my eyes—and my memory was gone. I kept telling them that, anyway.

I’ll never know if they believed me. Whether they thought I’d finally escaped that hospital, or had just wandered off in a brain-damaged sleepwalk one night.

Later on, a Russian gangster got himself blown away right in his own restaurant. Maybe the police knew something then, provided they knew he was the same guy who’d hired me to middleman a swap: a bag of cash for a kidnapped kid.

The swap had turned out to be an ambush. The only thing exchanged was gunfire. I took some of it. My partner Pansy took the rest of it. Died with our enemy’s blood in her mouth.

As soon as I got myself into good enough shape to get around, I met Dmitri in his restaurant. I told him I needed the names of the people who’d hired him. He told me that would be bad for business. Took a professional’s stance—he’d been paid; he did a job. Had no idea the whole thing was a hit. He was sorry about it; but, after all, I’d survived, so what was the beef?

“They killed my dog,” I told him.

“Your . . . dog?” he said.

I didn’t—couldn’t—try to explain Pansy to him. Just told him I was ready to kill him, right then and there, if he didn’t give me the names. He told me I was bluffing. His last words.

But, considering the power struggle going on in that section of Little Odessa back then, the cops could never be sure.

Even later, they found a severed hand at the bottom of a Dumpster. Just the bones, actually, not the flesh. And, in the same place, a pistol with my thumbprint on it. That was enough for the cops. They figured my string had run out and I’d ended up the same place I’d started from.

By that time, I was on the move. Somebody had wanted me dead. Went to a lot of trouble, spent a lot of coin. Maybe they thought they’d gotten the job done, maybe not. I only had two choices: hide or hunt.

If it hadn’t been for what they’d done to Pansy, I might have stayed invisible.

When the hunt was finished, so was I. Even Mama wasn’t pressing me to come back . . . not for a while. My face wasn’t the same—bullets and the surgery it takes to save you from them will do that—but my prints were.

Maybe NYPD bought the severed-hand story. They should—it was one of their own who had pulled my thumbprint from inside Mama’s, transferred it to the pistol. But that didn’t matter, really. I wasn’t a fugitive. My people checked. No wants, no warrants, no BOLOs, federal or state.

Probably safe to go back, they told me. But maybe better to stay where I was for a while. Rest and rebuild.

Sure.

Oregon’s a good place to hide. People don’t expect you to be born local. None of that “You ain’t from around here” stuff you get in some other places.

In Oregon, they bitch about the California money vamping north and buying up all the good real estate, but they come all over themselves when they think about how much their houses are worth now. They correct you when you pronounce their state “Are-a-gon.” They want you to say “Origun,” or something like that. But the city—Portland—is just like New York. Or Chicago, or L.A., or Atlanta. It rains a little more . . . although they have a lot more weather reports than they have weather. The people are a touch more polite, the buildings don’t climb quite as high. There’s plenty of traffic, but a whole lot less rage in the drivers.

Still, they got gangbangers, dope fiends, skinheads, homeless, hookers, and hustlers right alongside all the upscale restaurants and cultural opportunities. And probably more strip joints per square mile than any place outside of Bangkok.

The city even has outer boroughs. Vancouver is to Portland what Brooklyn is to Manhattan—even has a bridge you have to cross to get there. And they feature plenty of those licensed-to-steal “title loan” shops.

South of Portland, the coastline is an ever-shifting blend of retirees from other states and tourists rolling through in waves of RVs.

Eastern Oregon has a lot of mountains, a lot of small towns. A lot of pots brewing, from Christian Identity to crank.

Disappearing is easy. Connecting is what’s hard.

Gem’s key clacked in the front door’s heavy deadbolt. I didn’t move from where I’d been sitting, staring out the top-floor back window at a thin slice of empty sky.

She walked across the wood-planking floor of the loft, tossing her purse onto the futon, unbuttoning her blouse.

“I thought you were going shopping,” I said, looking at her empty hands.

“I did. For many hours.”

“They were—what—all out or something?”

“Ah,” she said, doing something to the waist of her skirt. It fell to the floor. She stepped out of it, came closer to me. “The word is different for men and women.”

“What word?”

“Shopping. When you say ‘shopping,’ you mean to go out to buy something. A specific thing, yes?”

“Sure.”

“When I say ‘shopping,’ I mean to go and look.”

“You mean for bargains and stuff?”

“No. I like the looking. I like to know I could buy things. I do not have to buy them.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, you are so very interested in this, Burke.”

“What difference?”

“I do not understand,” she said, kneeling next to where I was sitting.

I ran my hand through her thick black hair. “What would it matter if I faked like I was interested?”

“You asked me the question.”

“I did. I was just . . . I don’t know . . . maybe being polite. You’re right. That’s not me. I won’t do it again.”

“Huh!” she said, bending forward and nipping at the web of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. Harder than she usually does.

While I was waiting, I looked around for a score. There’s a couple of casinos south of Portland. I borrowed a black Corvette from Flacco and Gordo—Gem’s partners—got into some halfass-flash clothes, kept my sunglasses on inside, playing a two-bit high roller, dropped some random cash. Every con who came up when I did dreamed of knocking over a racetrack or a casino. All that absolutely untraceable cash. I owed it to them to scope it out.

But it turned out to be like most convict’s dreams. Right there . . . but out of reach. I’d been hearing that “It’s not for you” song my whole life.

When I graduated from gunpoint hijacking to stinging and scamming, I realized you need the same things to be successful in either game—a complicated mix of anonymity and rep. In Portland, I was even farther under the radar than I’d been in New York—I didn’t exist. And my name on the street wasn’t worth the quarter any skell would drop in a pay-phone slot if he thought I was worth something to the cops.

I didn’t have Max the Silent at my back. I didn’t have the Prof and Clarence by my side. I didn’t have the Mole mixing his potions in his underground bunker. I didn’t have Michelle, didn’t have Mama.

But even if I risked it and went back to them, I wouldn’t have Wolfe.

And I wouldn’t have Pansy, ever again.

When you’re away—Inside, I mean—your people don’t visit you. Not if they all have priors. That’s not how it’s done. I took a fall for Max and the Mole a long time ago. Well, not in place of them—I was going down anyway. But I held off the other side until they could get gone.

It had been a perfect hijacking. A big fat stash of dope, quick and clean. We didn’t want the dope; we wanted to sell it back to the same mob family we stole it from. Everybody wins. Nobody gets hurt.

I set up the meet in an abandoned subway tunnel. Only, instead of silk suits, the men who showed up were all dressed in blue.

No, the cops hadn’t cracked the case. The mob had sold me to a few of their friends, that was all. Maybe they thought they could get their heroin back from the police evidence locker. Wouldn’t have been the first time.

A bouncing grenade with the pin still in it was enough to convince the law that a frontal assault was out of the question. They knew they had a heavily armed lunatic on their hands, so they decided to do the smart thing and negotiate.

But they only had one end of the tunnel blocked, and the longer we talked, the safer my people got. Everybody made it out. Everybody but me.

I did the time without visitors. But never without backup. Between people on the street who would do anything—anything—for me, and a steady stream of money on the books, I was golden.

Besides, I was young then. Going back to prison was like an alumni reunion. If it was some college, I guess they’d be checking the parking lot, see what kind of car you drove up in. Inside, you got your status from the crime that brought you there. That, and from coming back by yourself.

That was me, back then. I wanted to be a con’s con. High-status. Good crime, good time.

I remembered some of those good times. The manic rush of high-risk scheming for a little more territory, the gambling coups, making home-brew, handball, story-swapping, boxing, lie-telling, concocting elaborate escape plots that you were never going to try . . .

When you start getting nostalgic for prison, you’re never far from going back.

“I can’t stay here,” I told Gem the next morning.

“I know.”

“Then why didn’t you—?”

She gave me one of her eloquent shrugs.

I expected her to say she’d follow me anywhere, like she had before. Tried to beat her to the punch by telling her I’d send for her when I found a place that was safe.

“No,” she said, soft but flat. “There is no place for me where you are going.”

“Not yet, maybe. But when I’m—”

“Ah, you will never be at peace, Burke. You’re not just restless and bored, you are depressed.”

“Sad. Not depressed. Sad.”

“As you say.”

“Gem . . . I just can’t . . . work here.”

“You did those . . . jobs I found for you.”

“There isn’t enough of it. I need a score. A big one. And I couldn’t even put a string together here. I don’t know anyone.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but I put two fingers across her lips, said: “No, I couldn’t bring my own people out here. They’d be as lost as I am.”

“A bank is a bank,” she said, a deep vein of stubbornness inside her precise voice.

“A bank? Little girl, bank jobs are for dope fiends and morons. There’s no money in them anymore. Not in the tellers’ drawers, anyway. Anything else takes an inside man. And out here, I could never—”

“You went down to the casino . . .”

“And crapped out. There is no way you could hit a place like that. It’s way out in the sticks. It’d have to be a goddamn commando raid—helicopter on the roof, a dozen men, all that. Cost a fortune just to put it together, and the take wouldn’t be worth it. It’s a nice little operation, but it’s not carrying the kind of action worth that investment.”

“Where is the money, then?”

“Armored cars are the best, if you’re talking pure rough-off. But the deal with them is, you’ve got to be ready to kill a couple of people, minimum.”

“Oh,” is all Gem said. But I knew what she was thinking.

“Not for nothing,” I told her.

She just nodded.

“What I’ve got to do is put together a scam. A big one. Or go back to grifting, a little piece at a time.”

“You could do that here.”

“I could. Maybe. What’s wrong with that little-piece-at-a-time thing is that you’re going to be dropped, sooner or later. I’m a two-time loser, both for what they call ‘armed-violent’ felonies today. I get tapped for even some little nonsense, I’d pull the same time I’d get for homicide. They’d bitch me for sure.”

“Bitch you?”

“Habitchual offender. That’s a life-top in most states. Even without that, it’s double figures, guaranteed. Time I got out, I’d be ready for Social Security—”

“—only you are not eligible,” she finished for me.

She didn’t drop it easy. Never thought she would; that’s not Gem.

“I have a goal,” she said. “A certain sum of money. When I have it, I will stop what . . . I do. Is it the same for you?”

I caught her depth-charge eyes on me, didn’t even make the effort to lie. “No, child. I’ve had money. Not now, but once.” Thinking of the fortune I’d spent tracking the humans who’d killed Pansy. Down here, where I live, people don’t save their money for a rainy day. They save it for revenge. “And it didn’t make any difference,” I told her.

Days passed. I felt like I’d spent the night on a bench in a Greyhound terminal . . . and woke up without the cash for a ticket to anyplace else.

Gem found some occasional work for me. You’d think you have to know a city real well to do what I do, but that’s not true. Take New York—you can’t ever really know it. Sure, some of the old-time cabbies can find addresses City Hall doesn’t even know exist—although most of the new ones can’t find any street above Ninety-sixth or below Fourteenth. But that’s not the same as going into the buildings. Or, worse, into their basements.

New York’s a shape-shifting demon, never letting you get your bearings before it morphs again. A slum block turns into six-figure co-ops overnight. A neighborhood vanishes like a migrant laborer moving on to the next harvest. A mini-city rises out of the river, built on landfill. Times Square still sucks tourist dollars, but now they come to take pictures, not to buy them.

Don’t get me wrong. New York is still one place where you can buy or sell anything that exists on this planet. But the trading posts keep moving around, and the maps are useless before their ink dries. You’re always starting from scratch.

And always scratching.

I had tracked the Russian couple whose kid had been kidnapped—the one I was supposed to exchange the cash for—from Chicago to a mail drop in Vancouver. But I needed a note written in Russian to spook them into the open. And someone fluent enough to dialogue with them if the trick worked.

I found Gem through Mama’s network. She signed on. Did the job. But instead of walking away, she’d stayed with me all the way to the end . . . out past the twelve-mile limit.

Somewhere along the trail, Gem decided she was my wife. I’d never heard that word from a woman before. Love, yes. Two women had died for my love, and another had taken it with her when she went back to Japan. Even babies, women I’d been with had talked about. But I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago.

Gem knew I wasn’t going anywhere near any license. I’d been registered since birth. Born a suspect, then tracked by the fucking State until I learned how to live under its radar. Gem didn’t care. Sometimes she called me Burke, sometimes “husband.”

The ID I have says I’m Wayne Askew. I’ve got a full set—passport, driver’s license, Social Security, credit cards . . . all perfect. I’ve never used them around here. Got them from Wolfe, the beautiful ex-prosecutor with white wings in her long dark hair and gray gunfighter’s eyes. She’d gone outlaw when her ethics got in the way of the DA’s ass-kissing. Now she was an info-trafficker, with some of the best contacts in the business.

What she’d never been was mine. I’d had my chance there. And, being myself, killed it.

Another reason not to go back to New York.

Gem had her own business, and I stayed out of it. I never worried about her. She’d survived the Khmer Rouge when she was a little girl, learning Russian from the strange men visiting the opium warlord, who’d kept her alive because she was so good at math. Making her plans, waiting. When the window opened a crack, Gem slid through like smoke, made her way here, and did . . . whatever she did . . . ever since.

I don’t know where Gem found customers for the kind of stuff I got hired for. Like Kitty, the stripper whose boyfriend wanted her to work a different circuit. Harder work. More money. Kitty wasn’t a genius, but she was smart enough to be scared.

Gem was the cutout. The stripper never met me. And the boyfriend probably thought it was a random mugging that hospitalized him—if he could think at all; those head injuries are tricky things.

The cops wouldn’t spend a lot of time on the case. The victim was such a nothing, who’d hire muscle just to fuck him up? Besides, the guy was black. With a white girlfriend. And with those roving gangs of skinheads in certain parts of town . . .

By the time the hospital kicked him loose, his property was long gone.

Gem found other work for me, and I did it. But when she first told me about the runaway, I pulled up short. They’re a different game, runaways. One of the things I did—a thousand years ago, when I still believed I could be something more than what I am—was find people. When someone pays you to do that kind of work, you have a lot of choices. You can take the money and never look—just make up some nice stories for your “progress reports” until the mark calls it off. Or you can find the target, ask him what it’s worth for you to go Stevie Wonder on whoever asked you to look.

Hell, you can even do the job, straight.

With kids, I always looked for real. I was young myself—still didn’t get it, how things worked. People who hired me, they had nice homes, nice cars, nice lives. I knew why I’d run away myself when I was a kid. It’s a POW’s duty to escape. And to keep trying when they recapture you.

But, the way I figured it at first, kids from the nice homes, they ran away for the adventure. Their parents were worried about them. The streets were ugly. Things could happen. So I really looked.

When I found the kids, some were happy to see me. Relieved. They’d made their statement. Things would be different when I brought them back, they told me. But other kids, they told me different things.

Those kids I didn’t bring back.

I found other places I could bring them. Some of the kids stayed. Some of them testified. And some of them went back to The Life.

After a while, I stopped doing that kind of stuff.

But I still knew how to do it. And I needed the work. So, when Gem told me about the money these people were putting up, I said okay.

Most of the clients who hired me for tracker jobs had no illusions. They knew what they were buying, and me not having a PI license was part of what they paid for. This thing Gem had set up was a different game—the clients had started at the other end of the tunnel.

Their kid was missing. A teenager. Soon as they figured out she was gone, they’d played it by the numbers. The cops had marked the case as a runaway, not a career-making abduction. Said they’d keep looking, but more than likely she’d already left town. . . .

When the parents took that bait, the detectives recommended a high-tech investigative firm, heavily staffed with ex-cops. Not a kickback, you understand. A “referral.” Just another way the Man protects and serves. And some citizens are more grateful than others for the service.

But, despite all their licenses and contacts and computers, the firm drew a blank. Then the parents tried looking themselves. The father, anyway. The way it came back to me, he thought he had some special rapport with street kids. Never picked up his daughter’s trail, but he got close enough to the whisper-stream that Gem picked up his.

So, when she told him I didn’t have a license and had to be paid in cash, he not only didn’t balk, he snapped at it.

People with money love the idea of men with shady connections and no particular aversion to violence working for them. Telling their golf buddies that they “know a guy” raises their status a lot higher than a new luxo SUV. But citizens can’t tell a working pro from a two-bit loudmouth, and Consumer Reports doesn’t rate working criminals. So the buyers rely on the one standard of truth they’ve come to trust over the years—the movies.

Some chumps are more sophisticated than others. Gem gave me the readout on the father, said he was educated and intelligent. In our world, we know those are separate things—so we figured he wouldn’t be looking for something out of The Sopranos.

Besides, Gem let him think he was hiring an ex-mercenary, not an ex-con. For some reason, citizens think mercs are an honorable breed of outlaw. White citizens, anyway.

I pulled to the curb in front of their house in a two-year-old dark-gray Crown Vic sedan. I was wearing an off-the-rack navy-blue suit and generic tie, clean-shaven, with my hair cut military-short. I couldn’t do anything about my face, but it went nicely with the shoulder holster I’d make sure they got a good look at—it would help them convince themselves they were getting what they were paying for.

I gave the door a light two-knuckle rap. It opened so quickly I was sure my sense of having been watched from the window was on the money. The woman looked to be in her mid-forties, too thin for her age and frame, ash-blond hair carefully arranged to look casual, a salmon-colored dress belted at the waist with a silver chain, a matching set of links around her neck. Business pumps, sheer stockings, salon-level makeup. She had chemical eyes, but I couldn’t tell what was on her prescription pad.

“Are you—?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Our appointment was for—”

“I know, but my husband won’t be home for a couple of hours,” the woman said. “He had to work late, and he didn’t know how to reach you. . . .”

“That’s all right,” I said, stepping past her into a narrow hall. “I can get background from you, talk to him when he gets here.”

“Background? We already told the police everything.”

Didn’t her husband tell her me and the cops weren’t exactly colleagues? I kept my face expressionless, said, “Nobody ever does that,” and moved toward the living room, bringing her along in my wake.

“Does . . . what?” she asked me, her hands tightly clasped at her waist, as if she was afraid of wringing them.

“Tells anyone ‘everything.’ There’s no such thing.”

“What are you saying?”

“Not what you think,” I told her. “This isn’t about you ‘cooperating.’ You’re not a suspect. But one thing I learned from doing this for so long—until you really take them through it, people don’t know what they know.”

“I don’t under—”

“Here’s what that means,” I interrupted her, helping myself to a seat in a Danish-modern chair opulently padded in black leather. “You have information. You might not see it as information, but I would. It’s never the fault of the . . . source. It always comes down to the investigator not asking the right questions.”

“And that’s what you do?” she said, seating herself delicately on a love seat upholstered in what looked like tapestry cloth. If my chair suggested money, hers bludgeoned you with it.

Behind her was a giant blowup of the famous photograph of a young woman kneeling next to the body of a demonstrator gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State.

“It’s part of what I do,” I told her, more convinced than ever that her husband had told her I was some kind of “alternative” to the police, not the working thug he’d known he was hiring. “Because I don’t have the same handicaps as the police, I can work differently.”

“What . . . handicaps?”

“Cops have bosses. They have to answer for their stats. But, mostly, they’re prisoners of their minds.”

“Prisoners of their—?”

“Cops don’t believe anyone actually runs away, ma’am. In their mind, the bodies are always in the basement.”

Two sharp dots of brutal red burst out on her cheeks. She made a swallowing sound, reached out with one hand as if she’d lost her balance. I didn’t move. Her hand found the arm of the love seat. She gathered herself slowly, eyes on the carpet.

“How could they—?”

“It’s nothing personal,” I said gently. “That’s what I mean by them being prisoners of their minds. You can’t expect them to overcome their conditioning.”

“But they didn’t act like that at all,” she said, an undercurrent of something like resentment in her voice. “They were almost . . . I don’t know . . . dismissive, perhaps. The only thing they seemed really interested in was that damn computer.”

“You mean your daughter’s . . . ?”

“Yes. As soon as they found out she was online, they got very excited. They even got some specialist to examine it. He did a . . . ‘hard-drive sweep,’ I think they called it.”

“Sure. Thinking maybe she got lured away by someone she met in a chat room.”

“That’s exactly what they said. But after they got done with the computer, they said there was nothing. They asked us about her friends, her teachers . . . but you could see their hearts weren’t in it.”

“How did they leave it, then?”

“They have Rose listed as a runaway. No evidence of foul play, that’s what they said. One of them told us she’d probably turn up. The other didn’t even seem to care that much.”

“You expected . . . ?”

“More,” she said, somewhere between bitter and disappointed. “I expected . . . more.” She took a shallow breath, switched to a singsong voice, as if she were answering stupid questions: “No, our daughter was not a Goth, not a drug addict, not an alcoholic. No, our daughter was not involved with someone we didn’t approve of. No, our daughter was not adopted . . . although why they thought that was important, I’ll never know.”

“Kids . . . teenagers—they’re natural seekers. Adopted children sometimes get this romantic notion about their ‘real’ parents, especially when they hit puberty and start to have social problems. They get the idea that DNA can explain things happening in their lives. If they ask their adoptive parents questions, and don’t get the answers they’re looking for, sometimes they go looking for themselves. That’s all they meant.”

“Oh. Well, they said all the right things. They just didn’t seem truly . . . concerned, I guess.”

“Concern’s just window dressing,” I said. “It might make you feel better, but it wouldn’t make them do a better job.”

“My husband didn’t trust them.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Kevin doesn’t trust the police,” she said, making an apologetic noise in her throat.

“Any special reason?”

“He was almost forty when Rose was born,” she said, as if that explained everything. When my expression told her it didn’t, she went on: “Kevin was an antiwar activist.”

“Ah. And now?”

“Now he’s an architect,” she said, pride rich in her voice. “A very fine one. With a very prestigious firm. But I wish he’d go out on his own.”

“You sound as if that’s something you’ve discussed more than a couple of times.”

This time her laugh came from her chest. “Only about once a night for ten years. But Kevin makes so much money where he is. . . .”

“Did your daughter ever get involved in those arguments?”

“Rose? Don’t be silly. And they weren’t arguments. I just think Kevin could do better for himself professionally. Be more creative, choose his own projects. But he’s more comfortable where he is.”

“All right,” I said, deliberately moving her away from any domestic unhappiness. “Could I have a look at Rose’s room?”

“I . . . Kevin hated that.”

“Letting the police search her room?”

“Yes. He said it was an invasion of Rose’s privacy. We would never do such a thing ourselves. So it seemed . . . bizarre . . . that we would let anyone else do it.”

“Well, given the circumstances . . .”

“I know. Kevin agreed, finally. But he just wasn’t comfortable with the whole thing. He insisted on being there every second. Not to look at anything himself,” she assured me, “to make certain the police were . . . respectful.”

“He’s a very protective father?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I think I’m more . . . strict with Rose than he could ever be. Kevin believes too much parental control stifles a child.”

“Do you want me to wait until your husband comes home to check Rose’s room?” I asked her bluntly.

“No . . . I don’t think so. I mean, Kevin knows you’re coming. And, anyway, you’re working for us, not the police, isn’t that correct?”

“I’ve got nothing to do with the police,” I said, making sure she got it. I knew better than to try and hold her eyes to emphasize the point. My eyes don’t track together ever since I took that coup de grâce bullet that hadn’t worked out like the shooter intended. People who try and stare me down get disconcerted pretty easy.

“All right, then. You can—”

She clamped her mouth shut suddenly as a little girl exploded into the room. The kid was maybe ten, wearing a red-and-white barber-pole-striped T-shirt and blue jeans. “Mom! Can I—?”

“Daisy, we have company. Do you think you can wait until I have—?”

The kid spotted me, whirled to bring me into focus. “What’s your name?” she demanded.

“B.B.,” I told her, pulling it out of the air.

“Like a BB gun?”

“Yep,” I said, going along.

“What happened to your face?”

“Daisy! What kind of question is that to ask our guest?”

The kid ignored her mother, watching me like she damn well expected an answer.

“I was in an accident,” I said, keeping my voice level and polite.

“Oh. A car accident?”

I nodded agreement, trying for gravity.

“How come your eyes are two different colors?” she demanded.

“That is it, young lady,” her mother said sharply.

“You’re here about Rose, aren’t you?” the kid asked me, hitting the mute to her mother’s station on some private remote.

“I am.”

“You’re the private detective!”

“That’s right.”

“And you think you’re going to find her?”

“I’m going to try.”

“The cops will never find her,” the child said solemnly.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they don’t know her.”

“That makes sense, Daisy. And you know her, right?”

“Yes. We are very close,” the child said, smug and sad simultaneously. Proud of her adult phraseology . . . and terrified that she’d slip and use the past tense when she was referring to her sister.

“Then, later, you and me, we’ll talk, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, coming closer and sticking out her hand for me to shake. I did it, sealing the bargain. She whirled and charged out of the living room on full boil.

“I must apologize for—”

“She just wants to help,” I said to her mother. “And—who knows?—maybe she can.”

“I’m . . . not sure. She absolutely worships her sister, but I don’t think she could possibly know anything about . . . this.”

“It can’t hurt,” I assured the woman. “And it would make her feel better to be helping.”

“Do you want to see Rose’s room now?” she replied, moving me away from something that made her uncomfortable.

The girl’s room was on the second floor. Bigger than most Manhattan apartments, with its own attached bath. Between the skylight in the sloping ceiling and the triple-pane bay window, the room was flooded with natural light.

The furniture was a polyglot mixture of different woods and fabrics. The only linking theme was that it was all old. Looked like reconditioned flea-market stuff to me . . . except for a magnificent rolltop desk that stood in one corner, closed. As soon as I slid it open, I knew it was some kind of priceless antique: a maze of tiny, perfectly aligned drawers, each with a separate inlay, intricately rendered in contrasting woods, and miniature handles so small you’d need a toothpick to pull them open. The pigeonholes were widely varied in size. Reminded me of the California Job Case I was trained to work with in the institutional print shop when I was a kid. I couldn’t see the slightest trace of a nail. The whole piece was hand-finished to an artistic perfection beyond what any machine could hope to duplicate.

I’d heard that artists always sign their work, but I couldn’t see any evidence of that until I noticed the brass plate surrounding the keyhole had “Erwin Darrow” engraved on it. I’d heard that name before. Michelle once told me he was an American master, explaining why she’d laid out a couple of grand for a jewelry box he’d made. The desk probably cost enough to buy a nice car. But it fit right in with all the recycled stuff, somehow.

The double bed was covered with a bright patchwork quilt that showed more enthusiasm than expertise. One wall was papered with concert posters—Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Sinead O’Connor. Against the facing wall was a bookcase made of long bare planks laid over cinder blocks. The shelves were filled—mostly serious-looking trade paperbacks. Each rack was bookended with half of a large purple-and-white geode.

On the bottom shelf I saw a set of thick black books, about the size of airport paperbacks, but bound like hardbacks. The spines were blank. I picked one up, opened it. A notebook, the pages as empty as the spines had been. There were another half-dozen of them. All the same, the pages as unused as a pawnbroker’s heart.

The computer stood on one of those two-tiered workstations, an incongruously modern purple-and-white iMac . . . maybe to match the geodes? Above it was a pen-and-ink rendering mounted on some kind of artist’s board. A pair of crows perched on a high wire. It looked as if they were deep in conversation. The detail was incredible; you could see every feather. And the light-of-life in the birds’ eyes. In the lower right-hand corner it said: “Maida and Zia, 39/250, Geof Darrow.”

Darrow again. Was there any connection? Could the girl know their family or something? I filed it away, went back to work.

The phone was a relic—black Bakelite, with a large rotary dial. It perched on a thick pad of music composition paper. Blank. I moved the phone aside to take a closer look. Under the pad was a stack of comics. All issues of something called Cuckoo. Didn’t ring a bell with me.

“Is this the way Rose kept her room?” I asked the mother.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s incredibly neat; everything in its place. Looks like it’s ready for military inspection.”

“Oh,” she said, making a sound I didn’t recognize. “I see what you mean. Yes, Rose always kept her room immaculate. But that was her choice. Her father . . .”

It took me a few seconds to realize that the woman wasn’t going to say anything more. I stepped back to the desk, took a closer look. Inside, some of the pigeonhole slots were filled—envelopes, stamps, paper clips, a stapler—but most of them were empty. On the writing surface sat an old-fashioned green blotter with worn brown leather corners. Centered on the blotter was a pad of typewriter-sized paper, horizontally ruled in sets of five lines separated by white spaces. A square-cut glass inkwell stood guard to the side.

“Did Rose use a dip pen?” I asked the woman.

“I . . . don’t know.”

“Has anyone been in here since she left?”

“The police . . .”

“Sure. I mean, has anyone straightened up the room? A maid, maybe?”

“A maid? Kevin would never allow us to have a maid. That would be exploitation of—”

“A housekeeper, then? Someone who comes in once a week to help you with the heavy cleaning?”

“No. I do everything myself.”

“Must be a lot of work.”

She clasped her hands across her stomach. “Well, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. The girls are very helpful. And Kevin does his share, too.”

I got it. This Kevin was Alan-fucking-Alda to the third power.

The closet doors were wood slats; they opened accordion-style. Inside, it looked like a sixties revival—long dresses in flower prints, platform shoes and clunky boots, dozens of pullovers, even an old army jacket with the peace sign hand-drawn on its back in black Magic Marker.

A guitar case stood alone in a corner, propped wide open to display its torn purple plush lining, as if to mock the searchers it knew would be coming.

The bureau was so old it had glass pulls on the drawers. It was nearly full, all neatly arranged—underwear, pajamas, T-shirts, socks.

I moved over to the bay window, checked it out. The large center portion was fixed in place, but the smaller panes of glass on either side could be opened by a little crank. I turned one experimentally. The opening was big enough to let someone in. Or out. I looked down. It was maybe a fifteen-foot drop into a lush pad of grass surrounded by trees. The backyard had no fence.

“The garage is on the other side of the house from here?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s attached. With an apartment over it.”

“Apartment? You have a tenant?”

“Oh no,” she said, as if I had asked her if they kept space aliens in the attic. “Kevin uses it for a studio. Like a home office.”

“Hmmm . . .” I muttered, to give her the impression that I was working on a thread. I walked out of Rose’s room, got down on one knee, took a sight line to the bay window, nodding to myself.

“What are you—?”

“What’s down the hall?” I interrupted her.

“That way? Just Daisy’s room and a guest room. Our room, our bedroom, I mean, and Kevin’s den, and . . . well, there’s a whole separate section, but it’s on the other side of the stairs as you go up.”

“Is there a side door off this floor?” I asked, moving down the hall, trailing my conversation behind me.

“No. There’s only the staircase. The way we came up,” she said, not quite catching up to me, but staying pretty close. By then, I’d reached the end of the hall and gotten what I wanted—a glance into Daisy’s room. It looked like someone had been searching for a lost coin, using a backhoe. I made my way back to Rose’s room, rubbing my chin like I was contemplating something.

“Would you mind leaving me alone up here for a while?” I asked the woman. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. “It’s going to sound silly,” I said, apologetically, “but I like to get a . . . sense of the place where the . . . person involved lived. I’m no psychic or anything, but, sometimes, I can pick up a clue to the person’s essence.”

“I don’t see why I can’t—”

“Oh, you’re welcome to stay,” I lied. “You just have to keep perfectly still, all right?”

I turned my back on her, sat down on the woven-rag rug in the middle of the room, threw my legs into a reasonable approximation of the lotus position, and closed my eyes.

It took her less than five minutes to clear out. I kept my eyes closed, waiting. I didn’t know how much time I’d have until her husband showed up. Or even if my hunch would play out.

“What are you doing?” the voice said.

“I’m looking for Rose,” I told Daisy.

“How can you look for anything with your eyes closed?”

“I think you know,” I told her.

“You’re weird,” she said.

I sat quietly, counting to a hundred in my head. Then I asked, “Do you write songs, too, Daisy?”

I felt the disruption of air as she ran out of the room.

When I was sure Daisy wouldn’t be coming back, I got up and went over to the telephone. On first inspection, it had looked old, but the wiring turned out to be modern. And the modular jack housed a splitter, so Rose could choose between the Internet and a regular call off a single line. The line itself was at least a dozen feet long, neatly folded over and held together by a plastic twist-tie. I measured with my eye. Yeah, it could reach the bed, easily.

I picked up the phone, pulled one of the comics out of the middle of the pile underneath it, and stuffed it into my jacket.

Rose’s bathroom was as immaculately organized as her bedroom. And sparkling clean. But it was a beat off—something . . . dishonest about it. I prowled the medicine cabinet and the flush-mounted linen closet. Slowly, the way you do when you’re looking for what isn’t there.

I didn’t expect Luvox and Lithium, or lamb-placenta rejuvenation face cream, any more than I expected a plastic-wrapped pistol in the toilet tank. But no anti-acne stuff? No aspirin? No shampoo or conditioner in the shower, either. The sink was ancient white enamel, heavily chipped. It was set into the top of a wood cabinet. I knelt, opened the cabinet. Lots of cleaning supplies, but no toilet paper.

And no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find a single box of napkins, pads, tampons . . . nothing.

I went back into the bedroom, looking for two things. When I couldn’t find the backpack, I figured I knew where the other thing was, too.

I came downstairs and spent the next hour or so listening to the woman ramble on about not much of anything. Her chemical eyes were a little more toxic than before, but her speech was as flat and unemotional as it had been from the beginning.

Daisy stuck her head around the corner twice, but darted away each time I shifted position.

I was glancing out the front window when a burgundy Volvo P1800 pulled up. It must have been thirty years old, but it sparkled like a new jewel, even in the evening’s soft light. As the driver waited for the garage door to open, I could see the little Volvo had the squared-off, mostly glass back that turned the close-coupled coupe into a ministation wagon. Maybe the husband liked his toys practical.

He was inside the living room in a minute, reaching down to shake hands with me. Tall and thin, with a thick mop of shaggy brown hair and a heavy mustache. Not one thing about his appearance disappointed me until he turned his head to say something to his wife and I noticed he wasn’t sporting an earring.

“She told us she was sleeping over at her friend Jennifer Dryslan’s house,” he told me. “That was a Friday night, the first weekend after school let out for the summer. We didn’t expect to see her until sometime Sunday evening.”

“Did she call or anything during the weekend?”

“No. But that wasn’t unusual.”

“Are you sure she didn’t call? Or that you just didn’t speak to her?”

“There was nothing from her on the answering machine,” he said, choosing his words like he was in court.

I didn’t ask him where Daisy had been that weekend, or whether they’d ever questioned her about a message. Instead, I said, “Did it turn out that Rose spent any time at Jennifer’s that weekend?”

“Jennifer’s parents say no.”

“What about Jennifer herself? Did she say Rose asked her to cover in case anyone called?”

“She said Rose never said a word to her about any of it.”

“Okay. What about the note?”

“We already told your . . . associate,” the husband said. “We figured if the police saw what Buddy wrote they wouldn’t even look for her.”

“Buddy?”

“That’s my husband’s name for her,” the woman said. “Her name is Rosebud. It was kind of half for each of us. I call her Rose; Kevin calls her Buddy.”

“What does Daisy call her?”

They looked at each other. Neither one answered me.

“You still have the note?” I asked the wafer of space between where the husband and wife sat on the love seat.

The husband got up without a word. I watched him walk away. Toward the garage . . . or maybe his studio above it.

He was back in a couple of minutes. Walked over to where I was sitting and handed it to me.

It was on one of those blank music sheets, written in perfect calligraphy, the words fitted neatly between the ruled lines. I tilted it against the light. Ink-on-paper, sure, but it was a computer font, not handwriting:

I went to find the Borderlands. I’ll be back when I learn enough.

It was signed R♥B.

“Nothing else?” I asked them.

They both shook their heads.

“You don’t like the police being involved, right?” I put it to the husband.

“No, I don’t. I never liked the idea. If it wasn’t for . . . my wife,” he said, nodding in her direction, “I wouldn’t have notified them at all, to be honest.”

When people make a point of telling you they’re being honest, pat your pocket to make sure your wallet’s still where it should be.

“Then why—?”

“The authorities,” the woman said. “If we didn’t let them know, we could end up . . . suspects or something. Isn’t that true?”

“It is,” I confirmed for her, watching the self-satisfaction briefly gleam in her eyes. “But if the cops saw that note, they’d make you report her missing, maybe even file a petition against her in court.”

“Court?” the husband said sharply. “What the hell is that all about?”

“Your daughter’s a minor. About sixteen, yes?”

“She’ll be seventeen in September,” the wife said.

“Sure. Anyway, if she’s running around unsupervised somewhere with your permission, that could look like neglect to the law. Unless you’re in contact with her, sending her money . . .”

“No,” they both said in unison.

“But if she’s gone without your permission, and if you want the law to bring her back, you’d have to file a petition so she could be brought back against her will, understand?”

“I would never go to court against my own—”

I held up my hand like a traffic cop. I was there to get some leads, not listen to a discourse on the philosophical perspectives of the privileged. “What else do you have that might help?” I asked them.

The husband showed me a dollhouse he’d built for his daughters. “Well, it was originally for Buddy, but by the time Daisy was old enough to be interested, Buddy had pretty much outgrown it anyway.”

The dollhouse was ultra-modern, almost futuristic. It was as precise and substantial as a miniature of the real thing, but it didn’t have the warmth of Rosebud’s rolltop desk. Didn’t look as if anyone had ever played with it, either.

I stayed for dinner, some quasi-Oriental dish, heavy on the presentation. Afterwards, the husband offered me a joint.

“I’ll pass,” I told him.

“You have problems with marijuana?” he asked, a faint trace of belligerence in his voice.

“By me, it’s just an overpriced herb, a hell of a lot less dangerous than booze.”

“Exactly right,” he approved. “But even in an ‘enlightened’ state like Oregon, it’s still a crime to possess it, except for medical reasons.”

“Yeah, well—”

“We’ve been smoking for . . . how many years, Mo?”

“You’ve been smoking for decades,” his wife said. “And I have asked you a million times not to call me that.”

“Excuse me, Maureen,” he said.

Apparently, the secondhand ganja hadn’t mellowed out their relationship. From the way Daisy didn’t react, the exchange was nothing new to her.

“Did Rosebud . . . Buddy . . . smoke?” I asked.

“No,” said the mother.

“Once in a while,” said the father.

“She didn’t like it,” Daisy added.

I took notes—I don’t need to write things down, but it always makes clients feel better—while the father filled me in on his missing daughter’s life. If she’d had a boyfriend, either it escaped his attention or he didn’t see fit to share the info with me.

By then, I knew who would know, but I could see I wasn’t going to be alone with her again on that visit.

I didn’t leave until almost ten at night. Felt like I had been vacuuming for hours, but without a lot of suction.

Before I left, they gave me a couple of photos of their daughter. She was a medium-built girl with long straight hair and a crowd face. Not a single scar, tattoo, blemish, or disfigurement to set her apart. The shots weren’t candids; she looked at the camera stiffly—not unhappy, not even bored; just . . . composed. Maybe it was the bland expression that made her look so generic.

I got up, carefully slid the photos into my jacket.

“I’ll walk you out,” the husband said. His wife was looking straight ahead. Not at me. Neither of us said goodbye.

Outside, in the night, I cupped my hands around a wooden match, fired up a cigarette, giving him time to say whatever he wanted to. I don’t smoke anymore, but I never go out without a pack. They cost so much today, because of the piety taxes, that they’re good for mini-bribes. And it’s always smart to let people think you have habits that you don’t.

“Buddy is a good girl,” he said quietly, as if he’d thought about it carefully before pronouncing his opinion.

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“Sure. What difference?”

“I don’t understand. I was just trying to—”

“You don’t know where she is, right?”

“No. Of course not.”

“So I have to look around, understand? There’s no special place where good girls wouldn’t go. You’re not narrowing down my search any with that.”

“Well . . . I just meant, I mean, Buddy doesn’t use drugs. Wouldn’t that be a help for you to know, for example?”

“You know why she took off?”

“No. We told you—”

“So how can you be so sure about the drugs?”

“I . . . All right, I get your meaning.”

“Okay. I’m on the job.”

“You don’t sound very optimistic.”

“I don’t want to get your hopes up. Your daughter seems like a very intelligent, very organized young woman. She could be a hundred places by now.”

“She’s around here,” he said, certainty in his voice. “I’m sure of it.”

“Up to you. Me, I’m on the clock. You know the rate, you decide when I’ve been out there enough.”

“Can I have one of those?” he asked, nodding his head at my cigarette.

I gave him one, handed him my little box of matches. His hands were steady.

“Mr. . . . ?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard. That’s the name I gave your daughter.”

“My . . . Oh! You mean Daisy.”

“Yeah. She’s a little pistol, that one.”

“She is that. Buddy spoiled us. No notes from her teachers, no disciplinary problems at school . . .”

“Daisy and her are different personalities?”

“Night and day,” he assured me. “Uh, what I wanted to . . . discuss with you . . . when you find her, what do you do?”

“There’s a few options.”

“Such as . . . ?”

“I could try and get an address, turn it over to you. I could brace her, try and talk her into coming home. Or at least into giving you a call, let you try the persuasion. . . .” I let my voice trail off, giving him the opening if he wanted it.

“Suppose she . . . refuses to come back. Is there anything you could do then?”

“I could bring her back,” I said flatly, no emphasis anywhere.

“You wouldn’t hurt—?”

“No. Is she on any medication?”

“Medication?” he said, on the thin edge of hostility. “What are you talking about?”

“Medication. Like you get from a doctor. Anti-depressants, stuff for allergies, insulin . . .”

“Oh. No. No, she isn’t. But what diff—”

“Some medications don’t mix.”

“Look, Mr. . . . Hazard, I’m not following you here.”

“You want her brought back, whether she wants to come or not, right?”

“I . . . yes.”

“One way is physical force; one way is with . . . medicine.”

“You mean like a Mickey Finn?”

“Something like that,” I said, watching his eyes. “And if she was taking other stuff, the combination could be dangerous. Even chloroform could—”

“Maybe you’d better not . . . I mean, isn’t there some way you could just . . . hold her wherever you find her? I’ve got a cell phone. You could ring me any time, day or—”

“I couldn’t hold her in a public place.”

“But you could follow her and—”

“Sure. And if she’s staying somewhere permanent, that might work out. But if she’s crashing different places, or sleeping outside, or with a crew, or . . . well, thing is, I may only get the one shot. And if she knows she’s been located, she might bolt. There’s a lot of roads out of Portland.”

“I don’t like this,” he said bitterly, throwing his cigarette down, grinding it dead with his heel.

“Look, I’m not promising anything,” I told him. “Only a crook would do that. It’s long odds any way you look at it. But what I can do, I can see if I can pick up her trail but keep in the background, all right? If anyone’s going to make a pitch, it shouldn’t be me, it should be you or her mother.”

“It should be me,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, this is complicated,” he said into the silence. But that was all he had to say.

“You paid me for ten days,” I told him. “If I turn her up in that time, I’ll call you. Then you decide how you want to play it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“It’s still your call. If you want me to keep looking past that, it’s the same rate.”

“What are you saying? If you don’t find Buddy in ten days, you won’t be able to at all?”

“I’m not saying anything until I start looking. I don’t know if the trail is cold, or even if there is a trail. I’ll have a better idea after I’ve poked around.”

He told me the number of his cell phone. “Don’t you want to write it down?” he asked.

“I’ll remember it,” I promised him. “Writing certain things down, it’s bad for business.”

“I . . . All right,” he said, sounding more depressed than convinced.

He walked back to his architecturally unique house. I started up my commonplace car and took off.

Driving back, I ran through it in my mind. Even adding up everything I’d seen and been told, there was a lot I didn’t know. Nothing so strange about that. But I guess what bothered me the most was why they had all lied to me. Every one of them.

“She wrote music,” I told Gem the next morning. “I’m dead sure of it, especially since her little sister ran out of the room when I brought it up.”

“But why would her parents—?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not all of it. No way a girl her age, living in that kind of room, wouldn’t have a backpack, but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t tell if any of her clothes were missing; there were too many of them. But . . . no guitar, no backpack, no menstrual . . . stuff. The notebooks, you could tell they were part of a series, but the only ones she left behind were blank. Like the music-composition paper. This was no snatch. Wherever the girl was going, she planned it. And she figured on staying, too.”

“That ‘Borderlands’ reference . . .”

“If she wrote that note herself, yeah. It was just a computer printout—anyone could have done it.”

“Why would anyone—?”

“Pro snatch artists would have something like that prepared in advance—it can buy them a lot of time. And the parents could have written it themselves, after . . .”

“After she left?”

“After they killed her. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Burke. If they killed their own daughter, they would hardly be hiring private assistance to find her.”

“You mean O.J.’s not spending his NFL pension on private investigators to find the Colombian drug dealers who killed his ex-wife?”

“Sometimes your sense of humor is offensive,” she said, eyes level.

“And sometimes,” I told her, “you just don’t get the joke.”

Hours later, she came into the room where I’d been sitting with my eyes closed.

“Have you learned anything?” she asked in a neutral voice. Gem knew where I went when I searched with my eyes closed, but she didn’t like to talk about it.

“I thought the comics might have a clue,” I said, “but they’re all about a girl dealing with MPD.”

“MPD?”

“Multiple Personality Disorder. Only now they call it DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder. Madison Clell—the one who writes and draws the comic—she has it herself. This Cuckoo is kind of . . . harsh. Right on the nerve endings. Powerful stuff. But I think Rosebud was just interested in it . . . artistically . . . not because she herself had the same thing.”

“Perhaps one of her friends?”

“I don’t think so. If that was it, she might’ve had one of the comics, but not the whole set. Some kids collect comics, but these were the only ones in her room, so I don’t think that was it, either.”

“Did this . . . Cuckoo person run away, too?”

“Damn! I didn’t think of that. Not in this issue, anyway. Doesn’t say anything about her writing music, either. But I just don’t think that’s it.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because she left the comics behind, Gem. And it looked like she took along everything that was precious to her when she ran.”

“What will you do, then?”

“Everybody’s lying,” I told her. “Those people, they never showed the girl’s note to the cops. Probably just handed them a pile of bullshit. A lot of rich people, they think the cops work for them personally. Like servants.”

“Truly?”

“Sure. Say their kid wants nothing to do with them, okay? But the kid’s of age, so the parents can’t turn her in as a runaway. What they do, they call the cops, tell them the kid has been really depressed lately, they haven’t heard from her . . . and she always calls regularly, so they think she may have done something to herself.

“The cops go pound on the kid’s door, probably scare the hell out of her. Just what the parents want: they prove to the kid that they’ve got the power; the law will do what they tell it to.”

“That is disgusting.”

“Sure. Sometimes the kid doesn’t panic. She proves to the cops that she’s an adult, and that her parents were just playing them because she wants the parents out of her life and they don’t know how to take no for an answer. And sometimes the cops get angry about being used.

“But, most of the time, they just play the role—tell the kid she really should sit down and talk with her parents, all that crap. It’s none of their business, they shouldn’t be doing it; but, the way they figure, a little gratitude from people who have money never hurts.”

“Do you believe that is what these people are doing?”

“Well, aren’t they? Let’s say the note’s for real—the kid’s a runaway, then, and they know it. Why would they keep that from the cops?”

“But if the police locate—”

“The parents will just say they never saw the note, sorry to have troubled you . . . but thank God our precious baby is back home, and we’ll be sure to write a nice letter for your personnel file.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, only it’s not just the parents who are gaming. The cops might have the kid’s photo posted; she might even make a milk carton or a few Internet sites. But no way they’re bringing out any of their big guns on this.”

“Big guns?”

“Extra officers, heavy overtime authorized, squeezing informants, putting out the word that they’re offering a felony walkaway for a solid lead . . . like that.”

“Why do you believe the parents told you the truth, then?”

“They didn’t. I already said—”

“No, no. I don’t mean the truth about the . . . things you said. But why did they tell you the truth about her running away?”

“People like that, they see the cops as public servants, but not necessarily their servants. Me, they’re sure of—I’m bought and paid for.

“Besides, they know I’m not exactly comparing notes with the law. That’s what they hired me for. Most PIs are ex-cops. That’s what people pay them for; they can get information by just walking down to the precinct and spreading a little goodwill. That’s great if you’re a defendant, or even a suspect. But if you’re coming across as a victim, you don’t need all that. And the firm they hired—the ones the cops touted them on—you can bet it’s full of ex-cops, too. So they could never trust them, either. Me, I’m an outlaw. No question about my loyalty . . . at least in their minds.”

“You sound as if you despise them.”

“I don’t know what I feel about them—yet. I guess I’d have to find the girl to know for sure. But I don’t like them; that part’s true enough.”

I parked behind the strip club, in the vacant spot Gem said would be waiting for me. It was the kind of joint where every button on the speed-dial is set to 911. Gem was at a little table in the back, as far from the action as you could get and still be hit with the cover charge.

“Anything?” I asked her. Before I went out into the street,it was worth seeing if the girl had made headlines in theunderground newspaper—the one that isn’t printed. Gem had a subscription.

“Nothing. Not by her name, anyway. And the description is almost . . . meaningless. It could fit so many.”

“About what I figured,” I told her, not disappointed.

One of the house features swivel-hipped her way over to us, asked Gem if she wanted to buy a lap dance for me. Even standing still, the woman was in motion, packing enough silicone to grease a battleship through a car wash.

Gem looked a question at me. I shook my head no. The woman licked her lips at Gem. “No, thank you,” Gem told her, politely.

“What’s your problem?” I asked Gem as soon as the handjob hooker took off.

“My problem?”

“Yeah, your problem. You have to ask me if I want some fucking slot machine to sit on my lap?”

“Oh. So sorry.”

“Cut it the fuck out, all right, Gem? You’re about as Japanese as I am. And you’re too bossy to be a geisha, anyway.”

“She was just—”

“Never mind. You ready to go?”

“You didn’t like her . . . looks?” Gem asked me that night in bed.

“Who are you talking about?”

“The dancer. With the big chest.”

“I didn’t pay any attention.”

“How could you miss them?”

“What?”

“Her breasts. Do you like such big ones?”

“Ahhh . . . they’re like . . . I don’t know, red silk sheaths.”

“Because you can buy them?”

“No. Because they look good on some people, and not on others. I don’t like red silk sheaths all by themselves. If I saw one on a hanger, it wouldn’t race my motor, okay? On some women, they look perfect. Really gorgeous. On others, they look . . . ridiculous. You don’t look at the trimming, you look at the tree, understand?”

“Oh yes. Certainly. Would you like me in such big breasts, then?”

“No.”

“Why not? Do you not think I would—?”

“They’d look all out of proportion. Like they were stuck on with glue.”

“That is the way they looked on her, too.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh? You do not agree?”

“I didn’t pay any attention.”

“Huh!” is all she said. For the rest of the night.

I tried it in daylight first. Invested a lot of cigarettes and a few dollars, but I didn’t come up with anything other than a few numb attempts at shining me on. I collected some stale info, a few bad addresses, a couple of street names. I didn’t push it; why squeeze when there’s no juice?

Pioneer Square was the downtown see-and-be-seen place, preening and posturing the order of the day. There were a few skateboard artists, a juggler, a threesome doing a little close-up Frisbee, music blasting from a dozen boom boxes, some “Look at me!” dancing. A guy made the rounds, flexing an upper body that must have looked a lot better in his own mirror. Anarchists handed out leaflets about some demonstration coming the next day. They seemed pretty organized about it. I watched people watching people for a while, getting nowhere.

It wasn’t a particularly good spot for buskers, but a few tried. None that looked remotely like Rosebud.

A young, pretty, nicely put-together girl walked by, slowly. The black Lab at her side sported a set of saddlebags—a working partner, not a pet. I flashed on Pansy and drove the thoughts away before they hurt me. The girl had a toolbelt of some kind around her waist, and a backpack that looked homemade. She wasn’t panhandling, she was scavenging, carefully checking the ground for anything of value, occasionally putting something she picked up into the Lab’s saddlebags.

There’s plenty of street kids in Portland, but no single street culture. And I was way too old to try fitting in, so I went looking for a guide. I finally ran across one of their halfass gurus in a coffeehouse, but all he wanted to do was rant about the Internet.

“If you deconstruct it, the whole thing is a sham. A fake. The Internet is supposed to be all about personal freedom, but, if you think it through, you see that the whole Net culture is about invasion of privacy. It’s just a ruse to register us all, man.”

I was running into this all the time, that intersection thing—where the extremists on both ends of the political continuum looped back onto each other until you couldn’t tell them apart. This guy wasn’t any great distance from the gun loons who’ll tell you that banning private ownership of armor-piercing bullets or rocket launchers is just the opening salvo in ZOG’s plan to disarm all American citizens.

The guru may have been a little slow in the synapses, but he had his finger on the pulse—if there’s one common cause between the hyper-right and the ultra-left, it’s that they hate the very idea of Registration.

“This girl I’m looking for . . . ?” I opened, trying to get him off his topic and onto mine.

“She has to find you, man. It can’t go the other way,” he intoned, as the two stick-figure kids at his table nodded sagely.

“Fair enough. But she can’t find me unless she knows where to look, right?” I said, handing him a business card with my name and cell-phone number on it, wrapped around a twenty.

“Right, man,” the guru said, pocketing the offering. “The Internet is all bullshit, you know. I mean, even the fucking anarchist Web sites send you cookies!”

I don’t think he noticed me leaving.

The black guy couldn’t have been out of the joint long. The prison weight-room muscles were still chiseled, the eye-lock was race-war hostile, and my color still made him glance behind me to make sure I was alone. “Who asking about Odom, slick?”

“Cash.”

“Like Johnny Cash?”

“Like Benjamin Cash.”

“What the fuck kind of name that be, slick?”

“It’s a Muslim name,” I told him. “Benjamin 5X Cash.”

“You must think I be someone to fuck with, slick,” he said, closing the distance between us.

“No, he thinks you’re someone who understands English, dumbass,” said a voice from behind him. “You’re putting up five yards to . . . what, man?” he asked me, stepping forward out of the gloom in the back of the bar. Much smaller than the bodybuilder, with a yellowish cast to his skin. I’d have about the same luck guessing his age as I would an alligator’s.

“Odom’s the one I need to talk to.”

“And you never met this ‘Odom’ dude, is that it?” the smaller man said, telling me who he was.

“Not by face. Only by status.”

“Status?” the bodybuilder snarled. “Motherfucker, you talk some strange—”

“He means rep,” Odom told his pupil. “Listen and learn. Now,” he said, turning to me, “where’d you get word on me?”

“Inside.”

“You was in the SHU? Where? Pelican Bay?”

“No. I did all my bits on the other coast. But word travels; you know how that works.”

“Yeah, I know. You got friends still in, then?”

“Might have.”

“Might be AB, too, right?”

“Some of them.”

“You going to give up some of those names?”

“I never give up names,” I said.

He smiled at that. Thought for a moment. Then said, “They got some mighty strange-looking undercovers these days.”

“I heard that, too,” I agreed. “But, see, an undercover, he’d be looking to score some dope. Or a piece. Or . . . well, you know how it goes. Me, I got five hundred dollars for you to tell me something. If you know it. And, if you don’t, to find it out.”

“Ain’t no crime to listen.”

“Right. Okay to sit down?”

“Glad you asked, man. Slide into that booth over there.”

I wasn’t exactly blown over from shock when the bodybuilder slid in right next to me, with Odom across the table. No way for me to move. Just the way I wanted it.

“I’m looking for a girl,” I said. “A runaway. Her parents are worried.”

“I got nothing to do with girls,” Odom said.

“I know you don’t. That’s why I came here. If the girl was merchandise to you, then I’d be messing in your business, and I wouldn’t do that. She’s on the street, somewhere. You’ve got people out there. Here’s what she looks like,” I said, handing him one of the copies of Rosebud’s photo I’d had made.

He glanced at the photo, his face expressionless.

“Here’s how to find me,” I said, handing over the card.

“That be two out of three, my man.”

“The five is if you turn her up.”

“No, man. The five is for my people to be on the eyeball. I know there’s got to be a nice reward for this little girl. People had to have money to hire you and all.”

“The reward’s only for people working on commission.”

“Yeah. Brutus, you had his white ass pegged, brother. This motherfucker is slick, all right.” He swiveled his head toward me. “How much?”

“Another five, only not centuries. Five large.”

“That ain’t enough to pay for a tuneup on my Rolls, man.”

“You want to raise, you got to have chips,” I told him.

He nodded slowly. When the boulder who’d been blocking my exit finally understood what the nod meant, he stood up to let me out.

By the time the ten days was up, all I’d accomplished was to make sure the whisper-stream knew a man was looking for Rosebud. It was like betting on a horse without looking at the form. Hell, without even knowing if your horse was in the goddamned race.

So, when the father renewed my contract, I went back inside myself, looking there. I had one card I thought I could play, but it was too early to be sure. And if I moved too soon, it could backfire. In the meantime, that Cuckoo comic still nagged at me, so I went looking for a way in.

Took me only about an hour to find a little comics shop. It was devoid of customers, and the proprietor, a fat, balding guy with a face that had once been jolly, was glad to shoot the breeze with me. He recognized my copy of Cuckoo right away.

“Oh sure. That’s Madison’s.”

“Madison, the guy who wrote this?”

“Yep. Only she’s not a guy. She lives around here, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Portland’s really a big town for graphic artists,” he said in a confidential tone, like he was disclosing secrets. “Dark Horse Comics, that’s one of the major independents, they’re right over in Milwaukie.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure.”

“And they publish this one?” I asked, holding up my one copy of Cuckoo.

“Nah. That’s from a real indie operation. There isn’t much money in comics anymore, not like the old days.”

“The old days?”

“Yeah, like, oh, ten years ago, there were all kinds of comics selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Big collector’s market, too.”

“But not anymore?”

“Right. The bottom’s dropped out for everything but the super-primo stuff. But you know what? Comics are coming back, my friend. Those of us who stay the course, we’re the ones going to clean up when it turns around.”

“Uh-huh. So this Cuckoo, is it a good investment?”

“Could be,” he said, stroking his chin, considering. “The early editions, especially the first one, they could be worth a nice piece of change. The later ones . . . I don’t think so. It’s gotten real popular now. Won some awards. Not as collectible.”

“But it would be better to have the whole set, right?”

“Always better,” he assured me. “A mint set, from number one on, well, I’m not promising anything, but that’d be a good play, I think.”

“Okay, I’m sold,” I told him, wondering what I was letting myself in for. “How much for a whole set?”

“Well, see, I don’t have a whole set here. We don’t keep back issues much anymore; it just doesn’t pay. I’ve got . . . let me see . . . okay, I’ve got numbers five through nine.”

“But you could get the others, right?”

“Sure. Might take a while, but . . .”

“You think Madison would have back issues?”

“Oh sure, man. Every creator keeps copies of their own stuff.”

“Creator?”

“Yeah!” He chuckled. “That’s what comics folk call the people who create comics, like the people who draw them, you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah. Well, could you give her a call, ask her?”

“Uh . . . I guess so.”

When he saw I wasn’t going to move, he fumbled around with some papers behind the counter. Finally he said, “I don’t see her number here, man. Tell you what, okay? I’ll ask around, find it out easy enough. You want to check back in a few days?”

“That’s a little hit-or-miss for me,” I said. “Are these comics like books? I mean, are they worth more if the author signs them?”

“Absolutely,” he said, reverently.

“So, okay, here’s the deal. How about five hundred for a complete set, but all signed, okay?”

His eyes flickered, so I guessed I’d bid a little high.

“I can get that for you,” he said quickly.

“Fair enough. You track her down, give me a call, and we’ll set up a meet.”

“A meet? What for?”

“Well, look—friend—no offense. I don’t know anything about comics, but I know how things work. She’s got to sign them in front of me, so I know it’s legit; fair enough?”

“I can authenticate—”

“That’s the only way I want to do it. Look, I’ll leave you my number, you reach out, find out if it’s okay with her. It is, you give me a call. It’s not, no harm done.”

He was dubious, but he took my number. When I left, the place was still as empty as a senator’s conscience.

It didn’t take him long. My cellular buzzed the next afternoon.

“What?”

“Uh, this is Smilin’ Jack, man. From Turbocomix. Remember, you wanted to buy—”

“Sure, I remember. Madison going to sign them for me?”

“Well, man, here’s the thing. She’s willing to sign them, sure; but—I got to tell you—Madison, she’s a real nice person, we all like her a lot.”

“So?”

“So I told her you don’t look like no comics collector to me, man. And I think I might have made her nervous.”

“So tell her to bring a few friends.”

“Well, she wants to do it a little different, man.”

“Tell me.”

“She wants to meet you at the federal courthouse. Outside, on the steps.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that? You know that address, man?”

“Sure,” I lied, figuring it couldn’t be that hard to find.

“Always a lot of cops around there,” he said, obliquely. “But so what, right? I mean, it’s only going to take a couple of minutes for her to sign your books.”

“Sure. Fair enough.”

“You don’t care?”

“No. I figure, she’s an artist, right? They’re all weird.”

“Tomorrow.” He chuckled. “Eleven a.m.”

I could have sent Gem, but I figured this Madison would be less likely to spook if the person waiting for her matched the comic-shop guy’s description. At 10:52, I strolled up Southwest Third Avenue to the courthouse. I was wearing a charcoal suit with a faint chalk stripe over a white shirt and port-wine tie, carrying a black belting-leather briefcase. Lawyer-look; corporate, not criminal . . . although, if the Portland cops were anything like their New York brothers, they wouldn’t acknowledge a difference.

The courthouse was nothing like the Roman Colosseum monster they have in Manhattan. It was simple and kind of elegant, with a short flight of steps flanked on the left by a slab of black marble, complete with the obligatory quote from some historically significant person. I leaned against the marble slab, put the briefcase between my feet. Then I opened my copy of Cuckoo and scanned it like it was a court decision.

People streamed by on the sidewalk. Hard to imagine a more public spot. Whoever this Madison was, she knew something about self-defense.

Directly across the street was a small public park—just wide enough for a few trees, a couple of benches, and a statue. I saw a guy with long dark hair sitting on a bench, a pair of binoculars to his eyes. Bird-watchers can be some pretty dedicated people, but I’d never heard of one interested in pigeons.

She approached from my left, moving slowly . . . wary and alert, a bright-colored comic book in her right hand. A slender woman with long, wild white-blond hair, scarlet lipstick harsh against a never-seen-sun complexion. She wore black pants, a black thigh-length jacket, and a white blouse, with a big red purse on a strap over one shoulder. I tucked my comic under my arm, spread my hands a little, caught her eye. I knew better than to try a smile.

“Are you—?”

“Yes. I’m the man who wants to buy a complete set of your series,” I finished her sentence for her. “Signed,” I said, to keep it consistent.

“I . . . have them right here,” she said. “There have been only fifteen issues so far. . . .”

“Fair enough,” I told her. “Is there something special you sign comics with? I mean, the covers are so slick, it looks like ink would just slide off.”

“We use these,” she said, taking a gold-colored tube from the breast pocket of her jacket. “It’s called a paint pen. Only thing is, you have to be sure to let each one dry before you bag them.”

“Bag them?”

“You don’t . . . ? Well, it doesn’t matter; I already have them set up.”

“Great,” I said, deliberately turning my back on her and walking up the steps. I pointed to the top of the black marble slab. “How’s this? For signing them, I mean?”

“It should be fine. . . .”

“Oh yeah. I’m sorry,” I told her, reaching into my inside pocket. I brought out ten new fifty-dollar bills, handed them to her.

“This is a lot of money for the comics,” she said earnestly. “You understand that there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be worth so much, don’t you?”

“I’m a gambler,” I told her.

“Well . . . all right, then.” She opened her purse, took out a stack of comics, each one inside a clear plastic sleeve with white cardboard backing. She opened the first bag, carefully slid out the comic, positioned it until she was satisfied, then shook the paint pen vigorously and tested it on her thumb. She nodded to herself, then signed her name with a sharp, fluid motion. “It’s good it’s not raining today,” she said, setting the signed comic on the flat surface to dry. She opened another bag. Her movements were practiced, professional. Maybe she wasn’t used to scoring five hundred bucks for a single deal, but she’d signed a lot of comics before.

While she was concentrating, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” she answered, her tone a lot more guarded than the word.

“I was looking through the one issue I already had. People write you letters, right?”

“Sure,” she said again. I could hear the barriers dropping into place.

“You can’t print all of them that you get . . . ?”

“Well, I don’t get that many.”

“But more with each issue, isn’t that so?”

“Yes. But how would you—?”

“It just makes sense. As the series gets more popular, picks up word-of-mouth, more people get to read it. So there’s a bigger pool of people who might write to you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, I was thinking, you couldn’t possibly print all the letters. Besides, there are probably some you wouldn’t want to print.”

“I don’t understand. You mean the idiots who—”

“No, I didn’t mean anything negative. I was thinking . . . people might write to you because they’d know you’d understand what they were going through. So maybe they’d want advice or whatever. And you’d keep their names confidential if they asked, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s right,” she said, her voice as pointed as the pen she was using.

“I’m trying to help someone,” I said abruptly, sensing she wasn’t going to hang around after she finished signing her books. “And I was hoping maybe you could help me do that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “And I’m looking for a girl who’s run away from her home. Or, at least, people think she has. It’s my job to make sure she’s okay.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Well, I know she was a big fan of yours.”

“And how do you know that?”

“She had a whole stack of Cuckoo in her room. And those were the only comics she had.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Ms. Clell, I’m not saying it means anything. I just thought that maybe, maybe, she wrote to you. If she did, then it might be possible that you could—”

“I don’t know you,” the woman said. “And I’m not telling you—”

“I don’t want you to tell me anything,” I said softly. “Her name is Rosebud. Some people call her Rose, others call her Buddy. If she wrote to you, and if she left an address where you could write back, I think you would have done that.”

“I—”

“I don’t want the address. All I want is to give you this note,” I told her, handing her an envelope. “It’s unsealed; you can read it for yourself. It explains who I am and why I’m trying to make sure she’s okay. It’s got a phone number she can call. This one right here,” I said, pulling my jacket back to show her the cell phone I carried in a shoulder holster under my left armpit. “I just want to know that she left of her own free will, and that she’s not in any kind of trouble.”

“I’m not—”

“You do what you want,” I said. “I’m playing a hunch, that’s all.”

“A hunch that this girl wrote to me?”

“A hunch that you’ll do the right thing,” I said.

She turned to face me. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

“That one copy of Cuckoo I had,” I told her. “I read it.”

She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away, either.

I put my signed and bagged comics into my briefcase, made my eyes a soldering iron between the woman and the truth of what I’d told her, bowed slightly, and moved off.

“Why do you need all this information about their neighbors?” Gem asked me that night.

“Too many times, a missing kid, you find the body under the bed of some other kid right close by. Or buried in a backyard, rotting in a shed, chopped up in a shower . . .”

“But—”

“Yeah, I know. She’s a little old for that. When a kid’s the perpetrator, you expect the victim to be younger. Smaller and weaker, anyway. Unless there’s a gun involved. But the stealth jobs, it’s usually a little kid that’s targeted.”

“I was not going to say that,” Gem said, tapping her child-sized foot the way she does when she’s impatient. “There was a note.”

“A computer note, remember? Not in her handwriting. Anyone could have written it.”

“Do you believe that is why the parents did not show it to the police?”

“I don’t know what to believe. This whole thing reeks. Gem, listen to me for a second, okay? What exactly did you tell them about me when you pitched the job?”

“I told him nothing specific. Just that you were a man accustomed to difficult, dangerous jobs, and that you expected to be paid well to do them.”

“You tell them I was a—”

“Not ‘them,’ Burke. I never met anyone but the father.”

“Okay, where did you meet him?”

“At the club. The same place where the girl Kitty worked. The one with the boyfriend who—”

“I remember. He was looking there for his kid?”

“Not looking for her. Looking for someone who might help him find her. One of the dancers told him she might know somebody. Then she called me. And then I met him.”

“I should have asked you this before, I’m sorry. Tell me everything you can remember, okay?”

“Yes. He thought I was Vietnamese. I did not disabuse him. He told me he had been against the war. I did not say anything, but I encouraged him to speak more.”

“How could you—?”

“Like this,” she said. She cocked her head slightly, widened her ocean eyes, and oh-so-innocently used the tip of her tongue to part her lips.

“Ah . . . all right, little girl. What did that get you?”

“He . . . implied that he had done many things to stop the war. Illegal, even violent things. I did not press him for details. He also told me he studied what he called ‘the arts’ for many years, and that he did not trust himself to confront those who might have lured his daughter away, because he could very easily kill a man with his hands.”

“ ‘The arts’?”

“That is what he said. He asked me if I had a relationship with you. I told him that I was a businesswoman; I did not associate with those I worked with. He apologized. He said he wasn’t trying to get nosy, that he knew the value of confidentiality. He said he only asked me about my relationship with you because I was a fascinating woman. That he would like to know me better, but he didn’t want to . . . intrude, I believe he said.”

“This is after telling you he’s married?”

“Oh yes. I told him that he, too, was a person I was doing business with, so it was not possible.”

“He bought that?”

“I do not think he did. He is like most Americans you meet in places like that—all their images of Asian women are as sex toys. Between the stories servicemen tell of Vietnamese whores and Bangkok bar babies, the ‘Asian Flower’ services that advertise in the magazines, and the strippers they see in clubs, they find all they care to know. He acted as if we were playing an elaborate game but the outcome was not in doubt.”

“Where did he get the idea I was a mercenary?”

“Well, in the dictionary sense of the word, I suppose I told him. You are a man for hire; that is what I said. But he thought I was referring to war, I am certain.”

“Why?”

“He asked if I was familiar with your résumé—that is the specific word he used. I told him, yes, I was. He asked if you’d ever served in Africa. At first, I felt a little shock—like a warning jolt. I had not told him your name—I still have not—nor did I describe you. But you were in Biafra, and I didn’t see how he could have . . . But he kept talking, and I realized that he was just asking questions out of some movie.”

“You mean, he was a buff?”

“A . . . buff?”

“A . . . fan, sort of. Cops get them all the time. Some people get turned on by the whole police thing. They collect badges, keep a scanner in their house, volunteer to be auxiliaries. They hang out in cop bars, talk like cops. Some cops’re flattered by all that, specially if the buff is a broad. But the more experienced ones, they’re smart enough to keep them at a distance.

“There’s mercenary buffs, too. They buy the magazines, collect the paraphernalia, talk the talk . . . usually on the Internet. The more extreme ones just fake it, spend a lot of time in bars dropping names and places. He come across like that?”

“I . . . am not sure. Every time I did not answer one of his questions about you, he would nod as if I just had. As if we were sharing secrets. It was very strange.”

“I can’t make it fit,” I told her. “But you’ll get me the stuff on the neighbors?”

“I am here to serve you,” Gem said, bringing her hands together and bowing.

When she turned to go, I smacked her bottom hard enough to propel her into the next room. My reward was a very unsubservient giggle.

“Do you have something?” he said, his voice feathery around the edges.

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “I may have found a connect to her. I can’t be sure until I go a little deeper. And I need a couple of things to do that.”

“What?”

“You take a lunch hour?” I asked him.

“Yes. But most of the time, it’s with clients. Lunch is when we get to—”

“Today?”

“I don’t—”

“Are you having lunch with clients today?” I cornered him.

“Well, no.”

“Okay. Tell me where you want to meet. And what time. We’ll finish this then.”

There was cellular silence for half a minute. Then he asked me if I knew my way around the waterfront.

“You said you needed two things,” he greeted me abruptly.

“Yeah. The first is from your lawyer.”

“My . . . lawyer?”

“Sure. You’ve got a lawyer, don’t you?”

“No. Not really. I mean, I know lawyers, of course. But—”

“You’ve got a lawyer you’re close with,” I said confidently. “Doesn’t have to be one you use, okay? Just someone who’d do a little favor for you.”

“How little?”

“Very little. I don’t have a PI license. That’s no big deal; it’s not against the law to be asking questions on the street. But you know how the fucking cops are,” I said, taking the cues from my conversation with his wife and what Gem had told me about him, “they could roust me for nothing, especially if I start getting closer than they are.”

He nodded knowingly, but said, “What do you think I could do about that?”

“Not you. The lawyer. See, you hire the lawyer to represent you in this whole matter of your daughter going missing. Maybe you’re thinking about suing her school for negligence or whatever. It doesn’t matter, that part’s all camouflage. What does matter—okay—is that anyone working for a lawyer as an investigator doesn’t need a PI license. That’s what I want now: a little more cover.”

“I . . . I can do that. I have a friend who does a lot of criminal-defense work, as a matter of fact. I’ll ask him, how’s that?”

“Good. And what I also need is some money. Not the actual money,” I said quickly as he opened his mouth to . . . I don’t know what. “But there’s got to be a bounty put out; a reward, understand? There’s people who wouldn’t do anything for love, but they’d move quick enough for money.”

“I’d thought of that myself. But I didn’t want to attract—”

“Sure, that’s the whole idea. It would be me offering the money. For information, see? My own idea, not yours. But if someone actually comes up with your daughter, I’d have to pay it off.”

“How . . . much are we talking about here?”

“Ten grand should do it, at least for now.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

He pretended to be thinking it over. People with money always see themselves as consumers, and their road maps through life are always marked by brand names. When they rant about corruption, all you’re really hearing is jealousy. They want a friend on the force, an insider contact, a political connection. All that crap about a level playing field always comes from people who’d be happy to stand at the top of the hill if they had the chance. And pour boiling oil down the slope.

“All right,” he finally said.

By the time the lawyer agreed to meet with me, I knew a lot more about him than he’d ever know about me. His office was in a big-windowed townhouse. Whitewashed walls lined with posters of Che, Chavez, and other visionaries whose convictions had been stronger than their support. Delta blues growled its way out of giant floor-standing stereo speakers.

The lawyer was a short, chubby man with thinning blond hair that turned into a ponytail past the collar of his blue-jean sports coat. He sat behind a free-form desk with what looked like a bird’s-eye maple top under fifty coats of clear varnish. I selected a straight chair from a motley collection arranged against one wall, carried it over so I could sit right across from him.

“Kevin said you were doing something for him?”

“He tell you what that was?”

“You’re a cagey man, Mr. . . . ?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

“Sure,” he said, making it clear he wasn’t buying it.

“But I’m using different ID for this job,” I said, sliding the driver’s license Gem had gotten made for me across to him.

“So I’d be hiring Joseph Grange,” he said, reading the plastic laminate of my photo, “DOB 10/19/52. Is that right?”

“Not ‘hiring,’ “ I told him. “I’m what you’d call an independent contractor.”

“I see,” he said, chuckling to let me know he was hip. “But you’ll need a . . . document of some kind, to verify that you’re on assignment to this office, yes?”

“No. I just need whoever answers the phone here to vouch for that. If anyone should ever call.”

“That isn’t difficult. But . . . Kevin didn’t tell me very much about you. . . .”

“So?”

“Well, I was thinking . . . we might know some people in common.”

“I don’t run dope,” I said, dismissing any chance we had mutual friends.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“The way I hear it, it comes to weight busts around here, you’re the man.”

“Lots of people hear that. Where did you hear it?”

“Inside,” I said. Softly.

“Not many of my clients there.”

“Exactly.”

He laughed. “I like you, Mr. . . . Grange.” He leaned back in his chair, lit a long white cigarette. The scent of cloves wafted over me. I looked at a spot behind the middle of his pale eyebrows. “Kevin tells me you did some work overseas,” he said, blowing a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“Does he?”

“We don’t just defend people who have run afoul of the draconian drug laws here. A lot of our work is . . . political, I suppose would be the best way to describe it.”

“Cool.”

“Probably not. At least, probably not your politics.”

“I don’t strike you as a liberal?”

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Your receptionist didn’t like me either.”

“We don’t make judgments here. And we’re very good at what we do. You might want to keep that in mind if you run into any trouble while you’re working for Kevin.”

“I will. You know what that work is, right?”

“You’re looking for his daughter.”

“Yeah. You ever meet her?”

“Buddy? I’ve known her practically since she was born.”

“She ever work here?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Well, the kind of office this is, I figure it’d be like heaven to an idealistic kid. Free Huey one generation, Free Willy the next, right?”

“I appreciate your sarcasm. But Buddy isn’t that kind of idealist.”

“What kind is she?”

“She’s more . . . introspective, I would say.”

“Okay. Any idea where she went?”

“Not a clue.”

“Or why?”

“That’s an even bigger mystery. She had an . . . I almost said an ‘ideal’ . . . life. I know that’s not possible for a teenager; at least not in their minds. But I never knew a happier, more well-adjusted young woman.”

“You have kids?” I asked him.

“No. You?”

“Four,” I told him, just keeping my skills in practice.

Being a teenager in America is a high-risk occupation. They’re the most likely to get shot, stabbed, sexually assaulted, beat up, bullied, turned on to chemicals, turned into zombies—and used and abused by the people who “counsel” them after all that.

And their peer-pressured cynicism makes them the easiest to trick, too.

It wouldn’t have shocked me if Rosebud had been driven to a remote area and killed by some other girls who didn’t like the way she spoke to one of their boyfriends. Or was snuffed out because some freakish boys wanted the “experience.” Or didn’t survive a gang rape.

But those kinds of crimes always seem to pop to the surface, like a river-disgorged corpse. Back in the sixties, there was a young guy in Tucson who killed a couple of girls for the fun of it. Buried them out in the desert. If he’d been a nomadic serial killer, the crimes might still be unsolved. But he had to tell some of his groupies about his feats. And when they scoffed, he showed them where the bodies were buried.

When teenagers commit crimes, they tend to talk about it. Today, they even make videos of it.

But the wires were quiet.

Or maybe Rosebud had been in a secret romance with a guy who killed her in a rage when she said she was going to tell his wife.

It never takes much.

But if she’d had a boyfriend, the guy had to have been sneaking into her room at night. Because it turned out that Rosebud had led a tightly scripted life . . . and one that made Mother Teresa look like a slacker. Two nights a week at the hospital’s children’s ward, visiting kids with cystic fibrosis. Saturdays, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women. That was when she wasn’t reading books into a tape recorder for the blind, or collecting signatures to abolish the death penalty, or delivering canned goods for a local food bank.

I thought back to what the father’s lawyer had said about Rosebud. Maybe, to him, anything less than overthrowing a government was “introspective.”

The high-school principal talked to me readily enough after she got a call from the father. She was surprised, though, that Rosebud was into all those activities—she certainly didn’t do any extracurricular stuff at school. Her grades were good but not spectacular.

When I asked about her friends, the principal just shrugged. At her level, she just heard about the extreme kids—the ones bound for the Ivy League, and the ones they were holding a prison cell for. She told me to try the guidance counselor.

He was a black guy in his thirties, dressed casually, with alert eyes. Told me Rosebud had never been in to see him. About anything. He knew of her only in the vaguest terms. A loner, not a joiner. “It was more like she . . . tolerated school.”

“Any chance she was more friendly with one of her teachers than she was with the other students?” I asked him.

His eyes went from alert to wary. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. Sometimes a kid relates better to adults than to peers. You’ve seen that yourself, right?”

“Not the way you’re implying. Not at this school.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You don’t sound very satisfied, Mr. Grange.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s not your problem, is it?”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Why should you, when you don’t like where I’m going? Look, Mr. Powell, this is a big school. And you’ve been here a while. You don’t seem like the kind of man who spends all his time pushing paper. You’ve got your ear to the ground. On top of that, the kids trust you. Some of them, anyway.”

“And you know all that how, exactly? Instinct?”

“More like experience. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years.”

“That’s just another way of spelling ‘generalization.’ “

“I’m a hunter. It’s no generalization to say that lions prefer crippled antelopes. They’re easier.”

“And you hunt teachers?”

“You know, I did hunt one, once,” I told him, keeping my tone conversational. “I knew he was a freak. I knew what he liked. I knew where he’d been, so I figured out where he’d be going.”

“I’m not sure I’m following . . .”

“This teacher, he never had a single complaint lodged against him in thirty years. But he quit three jobs. Pretty good jobs, near as I could tell. And moved on. Nobody at any of his old jobs had a bad word to say about him. So I took a look. My kind of look: a hard one. And what all the schools he left had in common was this: each one had banned corporal punishment. You understand what I’m saying, Mr. Powell?”

“I believe so.”

“Yeah? Well, let me spell it out for you, just in case. This guy was a child molester, but he never had sex with any of the kids. No, what he did was ‘punish’ them. That’s how he got his rocks off, paddling kids. Nothing illegal about it, in some schools. And every time one of the schools changed their policy, he’d just go someplace else. Where he could have his fun.”

“That’s sick.”

“I’m sure that’s what the teachers’ union would have said, if he’d ever gotten busted for what he was doing.”

“You don’t like teachers much, Mr. . . . Grange?”

“I like teachers fine. I don’t like freaks who hide behind authority to fuck with kids. Do you?”

“Look! I told you—”

“Hey, that’s all right,” I reassured him. “I’m sure, no matter who I ask around here, nobody tells me about one single teacher in the whole history of this school who ever had a thing for students. Not even a whisper of a rumor.”

“Rumors are pernicious,” he huffed, still offended.

“Thanks for your time,” I told him, getting to my feet.

“Sit down a minute,” he said. He got up, walked over to the door, and closed it. “You want me to level with you, that’s a two-way street.”

“The girl is missing,” I told him, flat out, no preamble. “Not a trace, not a clue. Disappeared. The cops have it marked as a runaway. The parents don’t think so. They hired me to see what I could find out.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what Principal McDuffy told me. That and to keep it quiet. There’s been nothing in the papers. . . .”

“And there’s not going to be, not for a while. The parents don’t want to . . . put on any pressure. If she was snatched, they’ll hear from the kidnappers. If she ran away of her own accord, they don’t want her to think they’re . . . hunting her. And if she’s already dead . . .”

“Dead? Where did that come from?”

“She’s gone, okay? When you work one of these cases and you’ve got a blank piece of paper in front of you for possibilities, ‘dead’ is one of the things you write on it.”

He leaned back in his chair, as if to put some distance between us. “What if there was the kind of teacher you were talking about here? Not the . . . one who liked to beat children . . . the . . . For the sake of argument, an English teacher who picked out a new girl—a budding poet—every year. Say everybody knew about it, but nobody ever said anything, because it doesn’t seem as if he ever got . . . sexual with students.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t want to argue abstractions with you. Especially since we’re only speaking theoretically here. But what if, say, you knew about this particular teacher, but you also knew he couldn’t possibly be connected to Rosebud?”

“And how would I . . . theoretically . . . know that?”

“Because he . . . this hypothetical individual . . . has a pattern. One a year, right through the next summer. And he’s still involved with someone. A graduated senior. Over eighteen.”

“Yeah. What if?”

“I’m trying to help out here. To the extent I feel comfortable doing so.”

“Much appreciated,” I said, getting up again. This time, he didn’t make any attempt to stop me. Or to shake hands.

“She was more studious than she was a student, if you understand my meaning,” the English teacher told me in the front room of his charming little cottage. I could hear sounds of another person coming from the kitchen, but nothing more specific.

“I’m a little slow, doc. Help me out.”

Reference to his Ph.D. seemed to transform him from nervous interviewee to pontificator. “Rosebud was very interested in the subject of creative writing, but not always so interested in the individual assignments.”

“Typical of a kid her age, right?”

“Not really,” he said, condescension hovering just above his voice. “Young people her age are much more mature in their decisions than a layman would expect.”

“Uh-huh. Well, is there anything you can tell me?”

“I think not,” he said, carefully. “I doubt I had a single conversation alone with her during the entire year.”

I sat silently, listening to the sounds from the kitchen. A drawer closing, a dish rattling against a counter, refrigerator opening . . . Whoever was in there wanted me to be certain I knew someone was.

“I know she was a vegan . . .” he finally said, once he realized I was too thick to know when I’d been dismissed.

“A . . . ?”

“A vegetarian, only more intense about it. And she loved old Jimmy Cagney movies.”

“Thanks. That could be a big help.”

I stood up to leave, then turned to him and said: “Tell me, who’s a friend of hers. Any friend.”

“I have no idea.”

“Sure you do,” I told him. “You never spoke to her, but you spoke to someone who knew her well enough to tell you about that vegan thing and the movies.”

“I . . .”

“You know what you said before? About some kids being a lot more mature than people would think? That’s especially true for girls, isn’t it?”

We both listened to the sounds coming from his kitchen. I looked in that direction, making sure he saw me do it.

Then he told me the friend’s name.

“I heard she took off,” the tall, rangy girl said, bouncing a basketball absently. We were standing together at the end of her driveway, the hoop on a stanchion nearer the garage.

“That’s what it seems like, Charmaine.”

“Well, if she did, I’m not going to help you find her.”

“If she took off for a good reason, I won’t bring her back,” I said.

The girl looked at me as if she was thinking about taking me to the hoop off her dribble. “I don’t know,” she said, thoughtfully.

“I’m not asking you to tell me anything,” I said softly. “Just to give her a message if”—I held up my hand to stop her from interrupting—“if she gets in touch. Okay?” When she didn’t say anything, I handed her my card.

She chewed her lip. “You want to play some one-on-one?”

“Do I look like a basketball player to you?”

“Basketball players don’t look like anything in particular,” she said. “People think if you’re tall you can play basketball. But that isn’t necessarily true.”

“You can, right?”

“I had to teach myself,” she said quietly. “It didn’t come naturally or anything. It was a lot of work.”

“I respect that,” I said. Telling the truth.

She bounced the ball a couple of times, stepped off, and launched a long jumper, goosenecking her wrist to guide it home.

Nothing but net.

“An easy three,” I congratulated her.

“They’re never easy,” she said. But a smile teased at her lip.

I went quiet, waiting for her decision.

“Rosie is the most . . . moral person I know,” she said, finally. “She wouldn’t do anything wrong. I don’t mean she wouldn’t, you know, break the law. If she thought the law was . . . immoral. Like civil disobedience. But she wouldn’t do anything . . . unethical. Like cheat on a test. Or even tell lies. She didn’t drink and she didn’t do drugs. . . .”

“Her father said she smoked pot.”

“I never saw her do that.”

“Maybe he got it wrong.”

“He probably did. He doesn’t know her.”

“Fathers never know their daughters, do they?”

“Mine doesn’t,” she said, the smile gone from her voice.

The next day, I went back to the school, walked the corridors for a while. But it was pretty much cleared out for the summer. When I came back outside, a girl was perched on the front fender of my Ford. She was auburn-haired, wearing blue-jean shorts with matching suspenders. They were strapped over a white T-shirt as flimsy as the excuses she’d probably been trafficking in since she was thirteen. Her mouth was a wicked slash of dark red, and she was licking a green lollipop like she was auditioning for a porno movie. I couldn’t tell if she was sixteen or thirty-three.

“You’re the guy, right?” she greeted me.

“What guy would that be?”

“The guy looking for Little Miss I’m-All-That.”

“Oh! You thought I was looking for you. Sorry, young lady. You’ve been misinformed.”

“That’s cute.” She shrugged her shoulders against the off-chance I was confused about her not wearing a bra. “You know who I’m talking about.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, taking out a cigarette.

“Give me one,” she demanded, holding out the hand without the lollipop.

“You’re not old enough.”

“Get real. People don’t have to be as old as you to smoke.”

“People don’t have to be as old as me to be retired.”

She gave me a long look. One that apparently required her to arch her back deeply.

I kept my eyes on hers.

She put the lollipop back in her mouth, then bit down on it, hard. I could hear the crunch as the lollipop fragmented. She pulled out the empty stalk, tossed it away.

I lit my cigarette, took a drag. She reached over, plucked it out of my hand, took a drag herself. She didn’t return it to me.

“What’s it worth to you?” she asked, crossing her meaty thighs to emphasize the ambiguity.

“To stand around in a parking lot and play games with a kid? Nothing.”

“I’m not a kid. I’m a girl. A bad girl.”

“Congratulations. You look as if you put a lot of effort into it.”

“Look, I know you’re not a cop.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. I heard you were asking around. About her. I figure someone hired you to do that. So maybe you want to hire me.”

“Hire you to do what?”

“Help you. Like, be your assistant. For what you’re trying to find out, you’re too . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Old?”

“Scary. You already scared some people. Nobody’s going to talk to you.”

“If they don’t know anything, what’s the difference?”

“They might.”

“Sure.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

“You didn’t ask me mine.”

“That’s right, I didn’t.”

“You don’t care?”

“No. I don’t play with kids.”

“My name is Peaches.”

“Uh-huh. Is that what it says on the birth certificate? You know, the one that says you’re twenty-five.”

“Twenty-two. And it’s not a phony.”

“Right. And you’re a schoolmate of the person you think I’m looking for? How many times were you left back, exactly?”

“Why do you have to be like this? Bobby Ray told me you were looking for this Rose girl. I didn’t say I knew her or anything. But I could help you find her. If you paid me.”

“Who’s Bobby Ray?”

“He works for Project Safe. You know, like an outreach worker. He’s out there every night.”

“Red-haired kid, freckles? About my height, wears a Raiders jacket?”

“That’s him!”

“I don’t know him.”

“But you just said—”

“I ran across him. That’s all. He can’t vouch for you.”

“Ask him, okay? I mean, you can check him out, can’t you? Where he works and everything? So, if Bobby Ray tells you I’m cool, that would be enough, wouldn’t it?”

“Look, kid—”

“I’m not a kid. And I could help you.”

“Let’s cut to it, okay? You know where the girl I’m looking for is, we can do a deal. Name your price, I’ll run it past the people who hired me. They go for it, and you turn her up, the money’s yours.”

“How do I know you’d—”

“You tell me you know where she is, I’ll let your pal Bobby Ray—you know, the guy you trust—I’ll let him hold the stake.”

“I don’t know where she is. But I could help you find her.”

“No sale, kid.”

She hopped off the fender like it was a glowing griddle. Denim is a restrictive fabric, but the curve of her rump imposed its will anyway. I watched her walk away . . . just to see what car she got into. But she turned the corner of the building and disappeared.

Just like the girl she said she could lead me to.

“You know a girl named Peaches?” I asked Bobby Ray that night.

We were standing on a corner in the Northwest, a few doors down from a building where kids crashed. It wasn’t a South Bronx burnout, not even abandoned, really. The kids had moved in while the owner waited for financing on the renovations he would need to rehab the rental units. The way I heard it, the place had running water, but no electricity. Probably no heat, either, but the weather kept that from being a big deal.

It had taken a couple of more weeks, and another extension on Kevin’s money, to get this close to Bobby Ray. We weren’t pals, exactly. But he wasn’t distancing himself from me by body language anymore, deliberately warning kids off, the way he did when I’d first come up on him.

“I know a lot of people,” he said, vaguely.

“Bobby Ray, I asked you if you know her, okay? Not who she hangs out with. Not what she’s up to. And not where to find her.”

He gave me a measuring kind of look. I knew what that meant. A question he wanted answered. Bobby Ray was a trader. Info for info. He kept his street position by being in the know. You couldn’t buy his knowledge for money, and that’s why he got so much of it for free.

“Is it true you were a mercenary?” he asked me.

I kept my face blank. Maybe the girl’s father is nosing around again? Name-dropping while he’s at it? No point asking Bobby Ray where he’d heard something like that: the whisper-stream flows through every city in the world.

“What do you mean by a mercenary?” I said. “Like a ‘soldier of fortune’ in the movies? Someone who gets paid to kill people in a country where the only law comes from killing people? What?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I never really thought about it. A lot of Vietnam vets you meet out here say they were—”

“I’m not a Vietnam vet,” I cut him off. I don’t mind lying about who I am or what I’ve done, but something about posing as a Vietnam vet makes me sick to my stomach. Tens of thousands of kids sacrificed to testosterone politics and business-worship while their better-born counterparts stayed home and partied. Back then, the only sincerity was in the antiwar movement. But that rotted at its core when movie stars started preening for the heroic torturers of the VC.

It was an impossible tightrope to walk—oppose the war, but support the soldiers—and most fell off to one wrong side or the other. A few of the antiwar radicals died, and a few more went to prison. Some of them are still there.

Some of the white members of the “underground” surfaced to yuppiedom. But the blacks couldn’t go back to where they’d never been. The profiteers and the cherry-pickers found new targets, the SLA survivors got paroled, and ex-Panthers and former SDS members ran for Congress.

Some revolutionaries of that era stayed true. Leonard Peltier is still buried alive in a federal POW camp. But he gets less media attention than Vanilla Ice. And much less fan mail than Charles Manson.

The war itself was as big a lie as the “war on drugs.” Politicians announcing a war, sending others to do the actual fighting . . . then fixing it so they couldn’t win.

And the kids who died for the lie—all they got was their name on a fancy slab of marble.

It’s a whole syndrome now: people pretending to be Vietnam vets. Especially popular among guys in the financial industry, for some reason I don’t get . . . probably the same twits who think they grow bigger balls every time some Internet stock runs up. See, it’s chic to “support” the people who fought over there, now that it’s over. So every guy who tries to glom a handout, he’s a Vietnam vet. People who would have had to be three years old when they enlisted, they’re Vietnam vets. They’re running for office, working a barroom, hustling women . . . all playing that liar’s card.

And now we’re all buddy-buddy with Vietnam, right? Like it never happened. Hell, business is business, and the slopes over there like McDonald’s even better than the niggers do over here. Great market for cigarettes, too. And you can’t beat those cheap labor costs with a stick . . . although it’s okay to beat the laborers.

MIA. Money Is All.

I turned eighteen while Vietnam was still raging, but I was safe from being called up—they didn’t have a draft board in prison. They had one in court, though. Plenty of guys my age went when judges safe from the draft did their patriotic duty by letting young men trade a sentence for an enlistment. That’s how Wesley learned to work long-distance—Uncle taught him some new tricks.

I got out of prison while it was still going on, but I never went near the army. I ended up in another jungle, on another continent. A genocidal war fueled by tribalism, but ignited by nondenominational lust for oil.

Years later, a government spook told me I was still listed on the Nigerian registry of war criminals. Good joke. The Nigerian government is a fucking crime cartel, holding whole tribes down by military violence, while their privileged classes spend their time making the country the international scam capital of the world.

I’m a veteran of a lot of things. War is only one of them. But Vietnam’s not on that list; and there’s something special about it keeps me from adding it to the fabric of lies I roll out for strangers.

“So where’d you learn the military stuff, then?” Bobby Ray asked. A clever kid. Or one who had been interrogated by professionals often enough to learn some of the tricks himself.

“Why is anything like that important?”

“You never know,” he said, solemnly. “You never know what something’s worth.”

“That’s true,” I said. Thinking I wouldn’t have to go through this crap if I was back in New York. My references were all over the street there. And the threads were never so tangled that I couldn’t find someone who knew me and whoever was asking about me, too. But in Portland, I was nobody and nothing.

There was an upside, sure. Nobody looking for me, either.

“I’ve been in military conflicts under foreign flags,” I finally said. “Good enough?”

“Do you know, like, karate and shit?” he asked, pronouncing the word “cah-rah-dee,” not “ka-rah-tay.” I liked him for it.

“Nope.”

“So you’re, like, into weapons?”

“I’m a pacifist.”

“You don’t look like that was always the case.”

“When I was your age, I did a lot of stupid things.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Going to prison.”

“For what?”

“For being stupid.”

He waited for me to add something. Finally, he realized I was done.

“What kind of name is B.B.?” he asked.

“Same kind as Bobby Ray.”

“You know, I’m thinking it might just be. Bobby Ray, that was the name my mother . . . I mean, my . . . Anyway, that was the name I was born with. Sounds kind of like a hillbilly one, right?”

“If you mean Appalachian, yeah.”

“Well, so does B.B. You ever notice how, sometimes, the white people who hate blacks the most, they’re the ones most likely to have the same kind of names?”

“It’s not so surprising. They come from the same places.”

“The South?”

“Poor.”

“Oh. Yeah. Does B.B. stand for anything?”

I measured the depth of his eyes. Made the decision. “Baby Boy,” I told him.

His face went sad enough for me to know he got it.

We talked for another hour or so; exchanging now, not fencing like before. A woman with one bad leg hobbled past, moving with the aid of a stout stick. A rednose pit bull trotted alongside of her, off-leash, but obviously hers, from the way it was moving. When she stopped to ask Bobby Ray for a smoke, the pit sat beside her. It was wearing a little white T-shirt, with “ICU” written across its broad chest in big red letters. I gave the woman a whole pack, saluted to tell her I got the joke. She gave me a ghosty smile back.

I wonder if she knew that pit bulls were a “forbidden race” of dogs in some countries. Like Germany. Or if she’d get that joke.

Finally, Bobby Ray did the mental math and figured I’d brought enough to get some. He said: “I know Peaches.”

“Yeah . . . ?”

“She’s not a runaway. Maybe she was, once. But she’s got to be thirty, at least. Been hooking out here even before I came.”

“On the street?”

“Sure,” he said. Meaning, “Where else?”

I couldn’t picture the girl who’d braced me in the parking lot with a street pimp. She was too brassy-sassy for that. And way too fresh-looking. So I came in sideways. “I guess the johns couldn’t miss all that red hair.”

“Red hair? Not Peaches, man. She sports a natural. Not many do that anymore—it stands out.”

“She’s black?”

“Peaches? Does Nike suck?” he said, the Portland street-kid equivalent of “Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Hmmm . . . I must have been confused that night,” I told him, giving a cigarette from a fresh pack to one of the kids who stopped and stood in front of us, wordlessly.

When the kid moved along, I tried to divert Bobby Ray off any trail he might have thought he’d discovered. “How’d you get into this?” I asked him.

“This?”

“Outreach . . . whatever you call it.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a long story. But I’m sure you could put it together easy enough.”

“You were out here yourself, once?”

“No, man. I had a home. A foster home. That’s what saved my life.”

“I’ve been in a few myself,” I said, my voice level, inviting more info. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention what happened in one of the foster homes I’d done time in. Or that I’d used one of Wesley’s credos to get out of it: “Fire works.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ve heard it all. Foster homes are just warehouses for kids, run by people who do it for the money. Or even abuse the kids themselves. You know what? Maybe that’s true for some of them. But the one I was in . . . man, they raised dozens of kids. And I mean radically fucked-up kids. Like I was.”

“Drugs?”

“Drugs? Maybe my mother’s drugs, I don’t know. Me, I was two years old when I came there. And I never left.”

“I thought they usually bounced foster kids around from place to place.”

“Nobody was going to bounce anybody out of Mom’s place,” he said. “She was a tiger, man. Once they dropped you off, you were hers, that’s all there was.”

“Your bio-mother,” I said, watching close as he nodded at the term, “she never tried to get you back?”

“When I was around eleven, she did, I think. There were some people coming around, and I had to go to court, talk to the judge, and all. But it was nothing.

“She was . . . I didn’t remember her. She was mad about that. Like it was my fault that I didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d give me up if she could have some pictures taken with me. I didn’t know what that was all about. But my mom—Mrs. Kznarack was what everybody called her—she said, Sure, go ahead, Bobby Ray. So I did. But as soon as . . . as soon as my ‘birth mother’ left, the fun started.”

“The court wanted you to be freed for adoption, right?”

“Yeah! How’d you . . . ? Ah, never mind, I guess that’s the way it always is. Usually is, anyway. My mom, she wasn’t going for that. I can still remember her yelling at the judge. At all of them. She said the time for me to be adopted was when I was little, but they kept putzing around, giving my bio-mom one chance after another, and now who was going to adopt me, eleven years old?”

“How come she didn’t just—?”

“Oh, she did, man. I see where you’re going, but Mom was way ahead of you. They told her the plan was adoption, and that’s the way it was going to be. So Mom told them, cool, she’d adopt me. There wasn’t a thing they could say. . . .”

“Had she adopted a lot of—?”

“Look, man,” he said, his voice turning hard for the first time since I’d met him, “this is my mom we’re talking about, not some Mia Farrow wannabe, all right? Foster mother, adoptive mother, didn’t make a damn bit of difference to her. Or to me.”

“She sounds like one hell of a woman,” I said by way of apology.

“She is. And Pop’s no slouch himself, although he lets Mom do all the talking.”

“Working guy?”

“Hard-working guy. He’s a stonecutter. Best around.”

“I thought that was a lost art.”

“Pop says it’ll never be lost, so long as someone’s doing it. He taught us all stuff, but we didn’t all have the gift for it. My sister Helene, she’s the one he picked to carry it on. She’s a genius at it, man.”

“The foster kids those people had, they all turned out so . . . ?”

“You’re cute, man. But I’ll tell you straight. Some turned out better than others. Like in any big family. But not a motherfucking one of us hurts their kids; you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yeah. That DNA doesn’t mean squat when it comes to how you act.”

“On time!” he said, offering me a palm to slap. “Mom and Pop proved that one. Too bad the shitheads running the government never snapped to it.”

“Too bad there aren’t more like your parents.”

“Truth, man. But there’s a lot more than there used to be, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Sure. Your parents couldn’t have had that many kids, but they raised a whole pack of them. That’s what counts.”

“That’s what counts,” he repeated. “And that’s why I’m out here. What I do, it counts, too.”

I didn’t know what the girl’s note about finding the “Borderlands” meant, but I knew she wasn’t going to be working at Starbucks to save money for the trip.

I’d been trolling for Rosebud mostly on foot, using the Ford to get me to the starting spots. But if I was going to play it like she was out there using her moneymaker, the Ford’s plain gray wrapper wouldn’t do. It just screamed “unmarked car,” and I needed to make my approach from downwind.

When I ran it down at dinner one night, Gordo offered me his ride. I was grateful—I knew how much he had invested in that car. Money was the least of it. But the Metalflake maroon ’63 Impala was as distinctive as the Ford was anonymous. And its dual quad 409 had a sound that stayed with you.

I thought of a station wagon, but it wouldn’t go with my face. I could use some of that Covermark stuff Michelle got for me on the bullet scar, and the missing top of my right ear wouldn’t show. No one would see the mismatched right eye, either; there has to be some decent light for anyone to notice. But the one eye they’d make contact with would tell them I wasn’t a citizen.

Flacco said they had plenty of cars in the garage. People who came to them for custom work expected their rides to be tied up for a while.

I took a look. Finally, settled on a white Cadillac Seville STS. Central Casting for the role I’d be playing.

I started that same night. They don’t mark the prostie strolls on tourist maps, but you don’t need to be a native to find them. I just nosed the Cadillac in ever-widening figure-8 loops, using a down-market topless bar as a starting point. It didn’t take long.

They work it in Portland the same way they do in every city I’ve been. Brightly colored birds with owner-clipped wings to keep them from flying away, fluttering at every car that cruises by slow. Like Amsterdam, only without the windowboxes.

The more subtle girls worked about half dressed; the rest of them put it all right out there. Lots of blond nylon wigs, torn fishnet stockings, and run-down spike heels. Cheap, stagy makeup around bleached-out eyes. A shabby, tired show that needed the murky darkness to sustain the illusion. Pounds of wiggle, not an ounce of bounce.

If Rosebud had been younger, I’d have looked elsewhere. I didn’t know if the local cops swept for underage hookers, or kept tabs on their pimps, but I figured it was like anywhere else—if you’re pushing kiddie sex, you do it indoors. In America, anyway.

Sure, Rosebud was underage, but just barely so. She could tart up legal easy enough, if that’s the way she was earning. And even gutter-trash pimps know where to get passable ID today.

My own ID was top-shelf. A Beretta 9000S, chambered for .40-caliber S&W. You might think a handgun would be the opposite of a walkaway card if you got stopped by the cops . . . if you didn’t know how things work. A passport may be the Rolex of fake documents, but all it will do is trip the cop-alarms if you flash one around anyplace but the airport.

An Oregon carry permit is a better play. Just possessing it tells the law you’ve already been printed and came up clean: no felony convictions, no NGIs, not even a domestic-violence restraining order to mar your record. Who could be a better citizen than a legally armed man?

Oregon’s one of the few states that closed the gun-show loophole; you want to buy a firearm here, you are going through a background check. The piece I was carrying had been purchased new from a licensed dealer in a small town in eastern Oregon a couple of years ago. Then the dealer had gone out of business. But a back-check of his records would show that he’d sold the piece to the same Joseph Grange my driver’s license said I was.

In some towns, winos sell their votes once a year. In the more progressive jurisdictions, they can sell their prints once a week.

Some of the working girls were more aggressive than others; nothing special there. Nothing special anywhere. I spent a couple of hours, crisscrossing, not making any secret of the prowling, as if I were looking for something a little different. In some cities, the legal-age girls act as steerers for the indoors-only stuff. I didn’t know if they did it that way in Portland, but I wasn’t going to ask around until I got a better sense of who was hustling.

“You looking for a date, honey?” the high-mileage blonde asked. She leaned into the passenger-side window I’d zipped down when she’d approached. Her partner was dark-haired, but with the same tiny arsenal of seductiveness; she was licking her lips with all the passion of a metronome.

“No thanks, Officer,” I told her.

Her giggle was juiceless. “Oh, please. Do cops come right out and tell you they’ll gobble your cock for twenty-five?”

“Nope. But I’ve had them promise to look the other way for fifty.”

Her laugh was a snort. “You’re a funny guy. But I’m not out here to be talking.”

“Fair enough,” I told her, feeling for the power-window switch with my left hand.

“Wait!” the blonde said. “What makes you think I’m a cop?”

“Cops work in pairs,” I said, nodding my head at her partner.

“Oh, man, come on. We’re just selling sandwiches. And you look like you got just the right meat. Try some three-way; you’ll swear it’s the only way.”

“Some other time,” I told her, and pulled away.

I spent a lot of time listening to approaches, alert for the right girl—one who’d been out there for a while, kept her eyes open, wouldn’t mind making a few bucks doing something that didn’t require penetration. But no matter where I went, the approaches were mostly by pairs.

It rang wrong. Sure, pimps would put a new girl out with a more experienced one. And some hookers—lesbians who knew that most of the action would be them playing with each other while the trick watched—only worked three-ways. But this was happening much too widely for those thin blankets to cover.

After four nights, nothing had changed. It wasn’t a one-time spook, so I knew what it meant. What it had to mean.

There hadn’t been anything in the papers or on the news. But down where hookers stroll, the whisper-stream flows especially deep. And if they got scared enough, they’d play it for pure true.

But while I was thinking it through, another couldn’t-be coincidence flowed across my path like a shark in shallow water. A big black car with a smooth shape, chromeless, its running lights banked. I’d seen it a dozen times over the past few nights, always in motion, moving unhurried but slippery at right angles to where I was going.

I knew it was the same car—a Subaru SvX—because of its window-in-window mortised side glass, like the DeLorean once sported. The SvX had been a techno-triumph, an all-wheel drive luxury barge that cornered well and ran strong, but it never caught on, and Subaru stopped making them years ago. Couldn’t be that many of them still around, even in the Pacific Northwest, where most of them had been sold.

The Subaru was only vaguely menacing. It didn’t follow me when I finally left the grids late every night, and it didn’t seem to frighten the girls any more than the cops who rolled by on bicycles every once in a while did. A pimp, maybe? Checking his traps? But the car was the opposite of flash, and any pimp big enough to have girls working a half-dozen different spots on the same night wouldn’t be driving anything but ultra. Maybe a “documentary”-maker who’d learned how to work his videocam one-handed? Or a screenwriter trying to pick up a little “noir”?

Ah, whatever. Trying to figure out every reason people scope hooker strolls would give a mainframe computer an aneurysm.

“You know a cop?” I asked Gem one morning.

“I know many police officers.”

“Any you can trust enough?”

“Enough to . . . what? There are degrees of trust.”

“Something’s going on. In the street. I think I know what it is, but I can’t be sure.”

“Does it have anything to do with the girl you are looking for?”

“I . . . don’t know. Don’t think so, in fact. But it may affect the way I look.”

“Do you have something to trade?”

“Trade?”

“Yes. Something in exchange for the information you seek.”

“I always have the same thing. Just depends on how much of it he wants.”

“He?”

“The cop. Or ‘she,’ I guess. It doesn’t matter. And I’m talking about money, Gem. What else?”

“I am not sure. But . . . not money. There is one policeman I know who is a detective. He is not . . . I would not say he is unhappy, perhaps that is wrong. But he could do more than he has been . . . given the opportunity to do. I know what he would want; and it is not money, it is information. I just don’t know what kind.”

“I’m not a—”

“Burke, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“That does not seem correct, ‘nothing.’ You thought I was suggesting you become a police informant?”

“I . . . no, I didn’t think that. It’s just that . . . you can’t speak for this cop you know. It may not be in your mind, or in mine, but it could be in his, understand?”

“Understand? Yes, I understand. I am not as stupid as you seem to believe, sometimes.”

“Gem . . .”

“Never mind. You will meet my police officer, then you will decide for yourself.”

By the time I took off that night, Gem still hadn’t said another word to me. But she’d been on her phone a lot.

The stroll I tried was one of those streets that always seem wet at night, as if the violence shimmering beneath the surface had popped out like sweat on skin.

I caught the Subaru’s chromeless flicker as it came up on my flank like a moving oil slick, then veered off into a side street. By that time, I had enough of a sense of the car to be able to pick it up on my own radar. The Subaru was a streak of light-eating matte against the sheen of the street, running through Hookerville as steady and mysterious as a midnight train.

But I never thought about trying a tail. Gordo had hooked the Caddy up with a set of toggle switches so I could alter the light configuration at the front and rear ends, but anyone who’d gone to the extent of powder-coating his car wheels black would be hip to that trick. Besides, whoever was piloting the Subaru knew the back streets real well, and had the horsepower to run away and hide, if that’s what they wanted.

I talked to a few more girls. But the only thing shaking was what they were selling.

I slept late, spent the afternoon killing time. The radio had some homophobic harpy who seemed to believe God had anointed her to rant her sleazy morality at the rest of us. I treated her show like its sponsors should have, then turned on the TV. Local news had a story about some community-spirited woman who apparently devoted her life to harassing hookers out of certain neighborhoods. Seems she built up quite a following . . . until she pepper-sprayed some teenage girl on her way to school. I bet the self-righteous babbler on the radio would have approved.

I gave the hookers the night off, tried my luck in downtown. The weather brought out the flowers. And the humans who live to pluck them. Most predators have a sweet tooth.

Plenty of kids on the street. Some of them cute as candy-stripers, some as ugly as truth. The usual mix—kids who believed they could read crop circles, and kids who snuck out at night to make them.

All trying to manage their own pain, their own way. Thinking of a rich girl from Connecticut who’d named herself Fancy. I can still see her. On a bed. On her hands and knees, facedown, marble bottom thrust high and defiant. “Kiss it or whip it,” she harsh-whispered to me. “I don’t do vanilla sex.”

And the Prof, watching with me as rubber-gloved guards carried past the body-bagged remains of a young con who’d hanged himself late the night before. “The poor dope couldn’t cope with hope,” the little man said, warning me and keeping me focused at the same time.

I always listened to the Prof. Not just because I loved him; because he knew. “You call it, you got to haul it,” he’d taught me.

That was the truth, Inside or out. If you took the label, you had to live up to it.

Different labels, different expectations. Watch enough prizefights, you’ll see plenty of heavyweights who aren’t tough at all; they’re just bullies. They lose their spine quick enough when they have to face an opponent who can really slam. But you’ll never see an intimidated bantamweight.

Something wasn’t adding up. I had an idea, but that was all. The next morning, I drove over to where Gordo and Flacco were working. When they weren’t at sea, they spent all their time in the garage, doing a frame-off on Gordo’s ’56 Packard Caribbean hardtop. Gordo had spent years working on Flacco’s 409; now it was Flacco’s turn to make his partner’s dream come true.

“¿Qué pasa?” I asked, ritualistically.

“De nada,” one of them replied, completing the circuit. The two men liked their games—neither one remotely resembled the name he went by.

“Going to be unreal,” I said, sighting down the rear fender of the Packard toward the trademark cathedral taillight. They both made sounds of fervent agreement.

“It was your idea, hombre,” Gordo, the mechanic half of the team, reminded me.

“It was,” I acknowledged, proudly. “Never thought you’d find one so quick, though.”

“Well, it was a total basket case,” Flacco said. “No engine or tranny; the torsion bars all busted down below—no way anyone does a numbers-match resto on this bad boy. Good damn thing, too; they wanted too much for it as it was.”

“It’ll be worth it,” I assured him. “You could cruise for years and never see another like it.”

“¡Sí!” Gordo confirmed. “And I got the best metal man in the business going for me, too.”

“This job’s going to be a stone motherfucker,” Flacco said, bobbing his head slightly at his partner’s praise. “But we get it perfect, amigo, this you can take to the bank.”

“You’re going to need major cubes to move this monster,” I said to Gordo.

“It came with major cubes, man. More than six liters’ worth. Twin fours, duals, high compression . . . I’ll bet it could move, back in the day. But there’s no way we’d ever find a drop-in lying around. I been studying on it, and I figure, the way to go, we get us a custom-rebuilt Hemi. Plenty room under there for the Elephant; and that way, we got something real special, you with me?”

“Perfect!” I agreed, offering him a palm to slap. “There’s no replacement for displacement.”

I hung around for another hour or so, listening to Flacco. How he was not only going to make the hood scoops functional, he was also planning to flare the fenders so the nineteen-inch wheel-and-tire combo would look as if it were factory stock. And then Gordo explained how he was going with a full air-bag suspension, so the monster could get into the weeds for show but be driven on the street without a problem.

Just before I left, I asked them if they had a convertible I could borrow for the night.

“Sure,” Flacco said. “You got clean paper, amigo? La Migra is a motherfucker.”

It was their joke that I was running the same risk with INS they were, only paper standing between me and deportation.

“I’ll just speak Spanish,” I told them.

That cracked Gordo up. “That plan, it is muy estúpido, hombre. They hear your Spanish, they know you ain’t from down south.”

“Not like your English,” I complimented them.

“Ah, I got a better plan,” Flacco said, bitterly. “I ever get dropped, I tell them I’m a fucking cubano, okay? Instead of shipping me back across the river, they buy me a house in Miami. ¿Verdad?”

“Right,” I agreed. America doesn’t care much about why you came here, just where you came from. We take Marielitos with open arms because they’re “fleeing repression.” But when people try to cross the Rio Grande to get away from death squads and drug armies and bone-crumbling poverty, we ship them off like a NAFTA export.

The real reason Congress excludes Mexicans is that it doesn’t want California turning into another Florida. You give wetbacks a chance at political power, the ungrateful bastards will actually use it.

“Hell, friend, no offense, okay?” Smilin’ Jack told me the next day. “But I’m trying to run a comics business here, not a message drop.”

“Sure, I understand. But, like you said, you’re a businessman, right?”

“Right . . .” he said, guardedly.

“And a business like this, one thing you always do, you take extra-good care of your best customers, right? I mean, let’s say they wanted to meet one of the artists who draw these comics, and you knew the artist was going to be in your store, well, you’d be sure and let the customer know, right?”

He nodded like he was going along. But then he blew me off with, “One, Madison isn’t going to be dropping in to do a signing anytime soon that I know of. Two, you’re not exactly what I would describe as a good customer.”

“What’s a good customer?” I asked him. The store was empty, but I needed more than just his casual attention. I had to keep him engaged until he saw the light.

“A good customer is, first of all, a regular,” he said, as if he could conjure one up by describing the prototype. “We keep a hold for all our regulars.”

“What’s a hold?”

“Well, it’s, like, the customer tells us what comics he wants. And every month, or whenever their favorites are published, we pull what they want from our shipment and we hold it for them until they come in.”

“What’s the big deal about that?”

“Well, for one thing, we’re taking a risk.”

“What risk?”

He tapped his fingers on the counter, waiting patiently to educate me. “We have to buy the merchandise we sell. I mean, we pay cash for it. Then we own it. So we can sell it for whatever we want. But if we don’t sell it, we eat it. That wasn’t so bad, once. When sales were slamming.”

“So what happened?” I asked, picking up from his tone that those days were gone.

“The elevator cable snapped before the car got to the top floor,” he said. “Some people were smart enough to get off in time. And they made a ton of money. But most weren’t. It was wrong, anyway.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Comics are about the . . . Well, it’s like music, okay? Melody and lyrics? Comics are about art and story. Not about how ‘collectible’ they are. It all went to hell when folks started buying comics like they were stocks—more like stock options, actually. Most people, they never even read them, just bagged and boxed them, and waited for them to go up in value.”

“But now . . . ?”

“Now that’s not happening. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You find me an early enough Superman or Batman, nice clean copy—with this stuff, condition is everything—and I’ll make you some serious cash. Quick. And it’s not just Golden Age material, either. The early Marvels, they’re good, too. But no way the current stuff is collectible. Remember the death of Superman?”

“I must have missed it.”

“Yeah, well, it was one of the biggest events in comics history. You had all kinds of people lining up to buy copies—with all the variants, too—for whatever the dealers wanted. But how is something ever going to be collectible when you sell millions of copies to start with?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not,” he said, with don’t-argue-with-me finality. “And it’s never going to be.”

“But didn’t they always print millions of copies? When I was a kid, they only cost a—”

“Printed? Sure. Survived? Not even a handful. Comics were printed on low-grade paper, stapled together. They weren’t designed to be collected. Most kids rolled them up and stuffed them in their back pockets. And nobody really stored them properly. Back then, we didn’t know anything about the effects of light, or temperature, or moisture. Nobody cared.”

“But you said that it’s going to make a comeback.”

“I did. And I believe it,” he said, reverently. “But the natural market for comics is people who read them. And that’s a pretty small, steady group—college kids, mostly. The new generation is more interested in computer gaming.”

I walked over to a floor-to-ceiling rack next to the counter. “Is there much of a market for this stuff?” I asked him, holding up a comic with a picture of two women stripped and shackled on the cover.

“Yeah!” He chuckled sadly. “Sure is. In fact, it wasn’t for porno, I don’t know how most comics operations would survive at all, anymore.”

“Pretty expensive, too,” I said, looking over the racks.

“It is. But the people who like that stuff, it doesn’t bother them.”

“You don’t sell it to kids?”

“Hell no! This stuff isn’t exactly Playboy, friend. It’s really hardcore. I’m as much free-speech as the next guy, but nobody underage even gets to browse that stuff, much less buy it.”

“Any of your customers have this kind of stuff in their hold?”

“They might,” he said, suspicion lacing his voice. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was looking at those prices. I bet a guy could easily run up a tab of a couple hundred a month.”

“Before, that was common. Now, if we had a customer with a hold that size, he’d be a goddamn treasure, I can tell you that.”

I nodded, as if I was thinking it over. “Not all the comics are done by big publishers. You said that before, when I was in here.”

“That’s right. There’s lots of people trying to publish their own. Not many as successful as Madison, but there’s always new players every month. They come and they go.”

“And some of those comics—a few of them, anyway—they could end up being collectible down the road, right?”

“It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

“Not the farm, maybe,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “but what if you pulled two hundred bucks a month worth of those new comics for me? Or maybe a little less, and use the rest to put them in those protective bags. In a couple of years, I’d have a real collection.”

“You would. But so what? There’s no guarantee I could pick any winners. Or that there’d even be any winners to pick.”

“I’m a gambler,” I told him.

“A professional gambler?” he asked, like he’d heard of them but never met one in the flesh.

“Yeah. Let’s say you pull the comics for me every month. And let’s say I pay you six months in front, just so you know you’re not going to all that trouble for nothing. And so there’s no risk.”

“That would be—”

“Twelve hundred, right?”

“Well . . . no.”

“Is my math wrong?”

“No. No, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . Well, our best customers get special discounts; they don’t pay retail.”

“So I’d actually be getting more for my money, then?”

“Yeah. I can’t say exactly how much more—it kind of varies.”

“Sold,” I told him, handing over the bills.

“I’ll get you a receipt.”

“Nah, that’s not necessary,” I told him, keeping my voice light to take the sting out of what I was going to say. “I know where to find you.”

“We’ll be here,” he promised. “I took a long-term lease on this spot when things were . . . different.”

“Great. Now, as a valued customer, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”

The convertible Gordo and Flacco lent me was a bone-stock Mustang. It had been sitting around in the shop waiting on a custom paint job. I drove it through the strolls with its top down. The radio dealt out the new Son Seals cut, “My Life,” which was getting a lot of air play:

I’ve been so cheated

Until I was just defeated

But still I went and repeated

All of my mistakes. . . .

I didn’t see the Subaru flit by until right near the end of my tour. And I didn’t have any better luck with the girls.

“Tonight is satisfactory for you?” Gem asked.

“What does that mean?”

“To meet. As you asked.”

“Oh yeah. Your cop.”

“He is not my cop,” she said sharply. “Sometimes I do not understand where you—”

“That’s what you called him, Gem.”

“I did not,” she said positively, hands on hips.

“What’s the big—?”

“You are wrong,” she said, turning her back the way she does when she’s angry.

“I’m sure,” I told her, keeping my apology deliberately hollow. “What time?”

“It must be after one in the morning. When . . . Detective Hong is off-duty.”

“All right.”

“He is a very meticulous police officer. If he were to meet you while on duty, he would have to make a record of it.”

“I got it.”

“Very well,” she said. All Gem’s movements are economical. She was raised in the jungle, where blending is safety. So it was no surprise that she kept her hips under control. But when she walked away that time, even the subtle hint of a wiggle she usually allowed was gone.

Nobody spun around on their stools when we entered the bar, but the current shifted just enough to tell me our presence was noted.

The booth was the last one in a row of maybe a dozen. The man waiting there was mixed-race Asian, surprisingly tall when he got up to greet us. His hair was jet black, carefully spiked. His face was too rounded to be Chinese. Samoan? Filipino? Mama would have been able to decode his DNA in ten seconds. I just filed it away with the million other things I didn’t know. He wore a slouchy plum-colored silk jacket over a black shirt and tie made of the same material, and a heavy silver ring on his left hand with some sort of symbol cut into the top.

Gem kissed his cheek hello. Even in her four-inch spikes, he had to bend forward to let her reach his face. He did it so smoothly I could tell they’d done it before.

We shook hands. His grip was dry, without pressure. “Henry Hong,” he said.

“B. B. Hazard,” I answered him.

He waited for Gem to slide into the booth before he sat down across from her.

“Gem says there is something you want to know that I might be able to help you with?” he opened.

“Maybe. Depends if what I’m picking up is on your teletype.”

“Could you be a little more specific?” he asked politely, taking a gunmetal cigarette case out of his jacket, opening it to make sure I could see what it was. He offered me one with a slight gesture.

“Thanks,” I said.

He lit his smoke from a slim lighter the color of lead, then handed the lighter to me. I fired up, blew some smoke at the ceiling.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time on the hooker strolls,” I began. “Looking for a teenage girl. Runaway.”

“Where, specifically?”

“Burnside, MLK, Upper Sandy . . .” I said vaguely, implying even wider coverage.

“All right,” he said, validating my choices. “What makes you think she would be hooking?”

“Nothing. In fact, I’ve got good reason to think she wouldn’t. But she has to be earning money somewhere, and I wanted to just . . . rule it out, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What I’d do, normally, is spread her photo around with my phone number on the back. Tell the girls there’s a reward out for good info.”

“Normally?” he asked, mildly.

“Yeah,” I replied, ignoring the question he was asking. “But these girls are on the hustle. You want to work with them, you have to make sure they aren’t working you. So you try and get one of them alone, make your pitch.”

He dragged on his cigarette gently. I was letting mine burn out in the ashtray.

“That’s where I picked it up,” I said. “I’m using a flash car—nice new Caddy, no rental plates, clear glass. Nothing that would spook them; anyone can see inside. But they pretty much approach only in pairs. I’ve even seen three of them at a time. And the ones who don’t come off the curb, they’re still watching . . . a lot closer than from idle curiosity.”

“No offense,” he said softly. “But your face . . . Maybe you’re just—”

“It’s not that,” I told him, so he’d know I wasn’t being sensitive. “No way they react to my looks from that distance. Maybe some types of rides would make them edgy. I could see it if I was driving a van, even a station wagon. But I even tried it with a top-down convertible, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“You try any of the escort services?”

“Why would I do that? I’m looking for street info, not the high-priced spread.”

“You said she was underage. . . .”

“Oh. Okay. You got any suggestions?”

He looked over at Gem, boxing me out as if he had wedged a wall between us in the booth. I couldn’t see her expression without turning sideways, and I wasn’t about to do that. I reached over and ground out what was left of the cigarette I hadn’t smoked past the first drag. The cop’s eyes were downcast, as if he was thinking something over. Or maybe he was looking at the tiny blue heart tattooed on my right hand, between the knuckles of the last two fingers. A hollow, empty heart. My tribute to Pansy.

Burke’s NYPD file shows a lot of scars and marks, but no tattoos. They’d never had a chance to photograph this one.

“What do you think it means?” he finally asked me.

“Girls have been disappearing. Girls who worked the streets. Maybe in Portland, maybe somewhere down I-5; word like that moves with the traffic.”

“This is a guess?”

“At best. I haven’t seen anything in the papers about a serial killer. . . .”

“There was the guy they caught up north.”

“Yeah. And he preyed on prostitutes, too. But that’s nothing new—they’re the easiest targets.”

“They are,” he conceded. “But that’s all you have—that the hookers are working doubled up? Maybe three-way’s the hot ticket out there right now.”

“You start a sentence with ‘maybe,’ anything you say after that has to be true.”

Gem kicked my ankle. A lot more sharply than she would have needed to get my attention.

“So what do you think?” Hong asked.

“I think you’re playing with me,” I told him. “There’s lots of other reasons I’ve got for thinking there’s a killer on the road, but what difference? Either you already know it, or nothing I can say would convince you.”

He put his cigarette case flat on the table, helped himself to another. I passed.

“Could you not say what else you—?” Gem started to say. That time I turned and looked her full in the face. She shut up.

Hong smoked another cigarette in silence. I didn’t know what Gem had told him about me, but if he thought waiting was going to make me nervous, he was misinformed.

Finally, he snubbed out the butt, leaned forward, and spoke so softly I had to concentrate to get it all.

“There’s thirteen of them known gone. Between Seattle and the California line, nine of them in Oregon. No bodies. No missing-persons reports, either. None of them listed as runaways. All but one have priors.”

“And habits?”

“It’s a safe bet, but not a sure one. We don’t think that’s any kind of link.”

“Their pimps said they ran off? Or just didn’t come back one night?”

“Both. A couple of them claimed they knew where their girls ran off to. They pull girls from each other all the time.”

“Or sell them.”

“True. But the trafficked girls, you wouldn’t expect to see them on the street right away. The pimps would want to stick them indoors, get their money out of them as quick as possible.”

“No bodies, right?”

“No bodies,” he confirmed. “No crimes, as far as we know.”

“But the girls, they know different.”

“They think so, anyway.”

“Much obliged.”

“Sure. If you pick up anything, I’d appreciate—”

“Bur— My . . . Uh, B.B. could help you,” Gem stumbled out.

Something was very wrong with all this. Gem doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

“How would that be?” Hong said smoothly, as if trying to spackle over a suddenly appearing crack in a plaster wall.

“B.B. is an expert,” Gem told him confidently. Like I wasn’t there. “He knows more about this . . . kind of thing than anyone.”

“Is that right?” Hong asked me, deliberately neutral.

“I know freaks,” I promised him.

“And you scan this as . . . ?”

“I don’t. I needed to verify what I picked up on with you before I spent any time on it.”

“And why would you spend any time on it?”

“If there was something in it for me,” I told him, making it clear that was the only motivation that worked.

“You’re going to catch a killer?”

“No. Not my style,” I said.

“What, then?”

“Maybe I could get you some information about how it’s being worked.”

“ ‘It’?”

“The disappearances.”

“Yes? Well, that would be worth . . . something, I’m sure. What is it you’d be looking for in exchange?”

I reached in my jacket, handed him one of the photos of Rosebud I’d been circulating. He took it, nodded.

“And,” I said, quickly, before he got the idea that we had a contract so easy, “the name of that escort service.”

“Which . . . ?”

“The one that runs them underage.”