Pain Management

“What is wrong with you?” Gem snapped, as soon as we got into the Caddy.

“With me? I was just doing business.”

“You were . . . offensive for no reason.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You do not think you were being offensive? Or you believe you had a reason for being so?”

“You sound like a fucking lawyer.”

“You do not wish to answer me?”

“What I fucking ‘wish’ is that you’d keep your little nose out of where it doesn’t belong.”

“Is that so? Perhaps you believe my nose does not belong in your house, then?”

“It’s your house,” I reminded her.

“Ah,” she said. As if I had finally confessed to something.

For the escort service, I would need a hotel room. The only place I’d ever stayed in Portland was the Governor, when I’d been studio-comped by an old pal. It was an old-fashioned, classy joint, with nice thick walls. And it had a back way in that allowed you to avoid the front desk.

Nobody except the room-service folks had seen me the last time I’d stayed there, and if they remembered me at all, it would be in connection with the studio, so a visiting “escort” wouldn’t exactly shock them.

I checked in around four in the afternoon. Between taking a nap, having something to eat, showering, and shaving, I easily killed time until it got dark. Figuring the escort service would have Caller ID, I made sure I used the hotel phone. Asked for a “reference,” I gave them the name Hong had told me to use.

All that got me was a conversation, kind of like no-touch dancing. I tossed them every hint I could think of—right down to telling them I wanted a girl any father would be proud of; I bit eagerly when they spoke vaguely about “no discipline problems.” After running the valid but untraceable major credit-card number I gave them, they promised me a “perfectly behaved young lady” by eleven.

She was about what I expected—a thin, curveless girl dressed down to look fifteen. She even brought her own silk-lined leather handcuffs and a red lollipop.

It took me about ten minutes of soft talking to convince her that I wasn’t a cop, and another half-hour to sell her on the idea that she could make some serious money if she turned up Rosebud.

The hooker looked at the photo, almost blurted out that she’d never seen the girl I was looking for, then went into a slow shuffle about how maybe she’d seen her around, she just couldn’t be, like, sure, you know.

Sure, I knew.

Maybe the hardest game on the planet is convincing a hooker you’re not a trick.

The girl-looking hooker left early enough for me to go back on the prowl. So I walked a few blocks to where I’d stashed the Caddy and went back to work.

But the only girls who approached me alone were big-time wasted, strung out, and needy. Risking a ride with a serial killer wasn’t much compared with their daily game of sticking dirty needles in collapsed veins. But all they could babble was a mulch of “fuck-suck” and “money-honey.” Not much point in asking them if they’d seen Rosebud—they couldn’t see the end of their own road.

When the sleek Subaru drifted across my path, I had a flash that maybe it was what was spooking all the girls. The wheeled shark sure looked menacing enough. Just the kind of car some halfwit screenwriter who thinks all sociopaths are handsome, charming, and intelligent would write into his fantasy.

But around three I saw it parked. Or stopped anyway, with a couple of girls bent low to get their heads down to the driver’s window, their bottoms poised high, always working. I slid past on the right. The Subaru’s passenger-side window was up. And tinted almost as dark as the body.

I grabbed the license number. Just in case Gem’s friend would do me a little favor. If I ever decided to trust him that much.

“What is it that you want from me, exactly?” Madison’s voice, on my cell phone. I guess Smilin’ Jack did take care of his regulars.

“Just to ask you some questions. About comics . . . I think.”

“You . . . think?”

“I have this picture. I mean, it’s a drawing. But in ink, whatever you call that. I want to show it to you, ask you a couple of questions about it.”

“And this is all because . . . ?”

“Because it’s a clue. To that girl I told you I was looking for.”

“What makes you think I would know anything of value?”

“I think you know a lot of value,” I told her. “I’ve read all the comics now.”

“How nice. But as to this . . . drawing?”

“Oh. Yeah, well . . . I’m not sure.”

“Why me, then? Portland’s full of experts who could take a look at—”

“It’s the connection to you. To your work, I mean.”

“Do you think it was my drawing?”

“No. It obviously isn’t. Not your style at all. But that’s not what I meant. Look, Ms. Clell—”

“Madison.”

“Madison. Rosebud collected your comics. There isn’t a sign that she ever collected anything else. So, the way I figure it, if anyone knows what this drawing means, it’s you, okay?”

I listened to the cellular’s satellite-connect hum for a few long seconds. Then she said, “Okay.”

I’d already run across every street-kid thing from New Age to Wicca to skinhead. Pretty extreme range, but one thing in common—music drove all their cultures. Sometimes it just ran in the background, sometimes it was the sun everything orbited around. But it was always there.

I knew my chances of just bumping into Rosebud at random weren’t worth much, so I concentrated on making friends. Financial friends. Bouncers at clubs, clerks in bookstores, swastika-inked tribalists, buskers, multi-pierced statement-makers, druggies, day-trip runaways.

Bobby Ray was always ready to talk with me, but he never came up with anything. I knew he was testing—pumping for info, back-checking to see if I told the same story twice—but I didn’t know if he was sitting on knowledge or just looking for some.

When you’re hunting, you tell different people different things. Or, at least, you drop different hints, let people draw their own conclusions. The bouncers thought I was looking for the kind of underage runaway that could only make trouble for them if they let her inside. But she could make them some real cash if they lifted the rope, and made a call while they had her boxed.

Other people got the idea Rosebud didn’t know her sister needed a bone-marrow transplant. The skinheads thought I was up to something privately ugly. I made sure they knew she wasn’t Jewish, and that if anyone but me hurt her, I’d hurt them.

One night, I passed by a couple of low-grade humans who thought that wearing stomping boots made them street-fighters. They were busy slapping around a tired old burnt-brain who lived out of garbage cans. I pointed the pistol at them and held the index finger of my left hand to my lips. They moved away quick. I figured, since the burnt-brain spent all his time on the street, he might have seen something. But whatever he saw he couldn’t bring out into words.

Every time he saw me after that, he gave me a gathering-spiderwebs-from-the-air kowtow. A fragment from an earlier part of his journey, maybe.

The punk who thought the snick! of his switchblade opening would paralyze me must have thought the neat round third-degree burn on his right hand happened by magic. That would be later, in the emergency room, after he’d stopped screaming. If he’d taken a closer look at the cigarette lighter I’d been toying with as we talked, he would have seen they make piezoelectric blowtorches real small nowadays.

I was getting the kind of shadowy reputation that can buy you anything from information to a bullet. But I wasn’t getting any closer to Rosebud.

In fact, I couldn’t be sure she was anywhere close by. Not one confirmed sighting . . . although plenty of people told me otherwise, thinking they’d see the color of my money before they actually went out looking. The color was all they got to see.

I had one idea, but it was as close to a hole card as I was holding, and I didn’t want to play it too soon.

“Any progress?” the lawyer asked me.

“It’s not like building a house,” I told him. “You can’t see it going up. I haven’t found her.”

“Yet?” the father asked.

“It’s always ‘yet,’ “ I answered him, not taking my eyes from the lawyer. “Until you get it done.”

“Can you at least tell me if she’s in Portland?”

“I’ll be able to tell you in a couple of weeks, max.”

“Why by then, particularly?” the lawyer wanted to know.

I shrugged.

“I’ve already spent a lot of money,” the father reminded me.

“Uh-huh,” is all he got back.

“Isn’t there any way to get more . . . aggressive about this?” the lawyer said, his academic tone designed to take some of the insinuation out of his words.

“Not much point hurting people for information they don’t have,” I said, bluntly.

“I’m opposed to violence,” the father said.

“Me too,” I assured him, catching the lawyer’s thin, conspiratorial smirk.

A pro burglar had trained me. I mean a professional, not a chronic. To the public, you do the same thing often enough, you’re a “professional,” no matter if you’re a total maladroit at it. The government feels the same way about the people who work for it.

The newspapers will call some congenital defective who sticks up a dozen all-night convenience stores in a month a “professional criminal,” but people who actually make a living from crime know better.

The old-timers knew how to ghost a house so slick, they could unload the pistol you kept on the night table in case of burglars and put it right back in place between your snores—just in case you woke up while they were sorting through your jewelry like an appraiser on amphetamine.

They prided themselves on never carrying a weapon, never hurting anyone, and never stealing anything they couldn’t turn over quick. Back then, if one of the black-glove freaks who combined house invasion with rape ever dared to call himself a thief, he might get shanked just for disrespecting the profession.

Today, your average burglar is like your average bank robber: an amateur or a junkie. Both, most likely. The take is always small, and the cops don’t even bother to dust for prints. They just give you an incident number, so you can lie to your insurance company.

There are still pro jobs being done, but they tend not to get reported to the cops; the victims aren’t big fans of law enforcement.

The guy who taught me said that a truly pro touch is when the mark doesn’t even know he’s been hit. Until, one day, he looks for whatever’s been taken, and comes up empty. The pro also told me that daylight jobs are the best, if you can blend into the area where you’re working.

I could do better than that, now that I’d code-grabbed the remote for Kevin’s garage door.

I watched the mini-bus with the day camp’s name stenciled on its side, as it stopped at the corner to collect Daisy. If the schedule held, the mother would be off within an hour or so. She always did the same things. Some leisurely shopping, lunch with friends, then maybe a salon for her hair and nails, maybe a bookstore. Aimless, time-killing stuff, but she appeared devoted to it. She never got home before four in the afternoon the whole week I kept watch.

I’d thought about borrowing Kevin’s Volvo for a couple of hours, but I couldn’t know if he would use it at lunchtime. Or if his neighbors would make it their business to mention they’d seen a strange car enter his garage. My impression of the neighborhood was that it wasn’t upscale enough for the pure-leisure class, and everything Gem had learned so far confirmed that. Best bet was that the houses were mostly dink—double income, no kids—occupied, and even the people that had kids worked during the day.

I had an additional layer of protection. Even if some suspicious citizen called the cops, my story would be that I was an invited guest, and I knew the father would back that up. He might not be happy about it, but he’d keep his mouth shut.

At a quarter to twelve, I was in position on the corner. I’d swapped the Caddy for the nondescript Ford again. If any nosy neighbors had seen it when I came to the house the first time, it would dull the edge of their suspicion.

I rolled just past the driveway, then reversed and backed in, triggering the remote as I rolled. The garage was big enough for three cars. And empty. I tapped the remote again, and I was alone in the darkness.

I made my way through the connecting passage to the house, carrying my equipment in one hand, sensors on full alert. Nothing. Rosebud’s room was exactly as I remembered it, curtains open to the light, but no way for any outsider to see in. I used the mini-camera’s flash just for fill—it was so faint it wouldn’t have spooked a parakeet.

I never thought about trying Daisy’s room. Any girl that maintained such an ungodly mess so diligently would know where every single little thing was. And she’d pick up any intrusion quicker than a motion-detector.

I went downstairs, then back up to the adult side of the divided house. The bedroom was apolitical, with that antiseptic, anonymous look that tells you they paid someone to pick out the furnishings. Lots of artifacts from the civilization they’d conquered—brand names on the clothing, jewelry from all the best places, severe-modern furniture. Even the bed linen screamed Designer! very tastefully.

If the mother was telling the truth about having no maid, she did a hell of a job. The place was as dust-free as an autopsy table.

Kevin’s den was as rabid as the bedroom had been sterile. The walls were papered like a wood fence around a construction site. Everything from a giant symbol of the Symbionese Liberation Army to an old magazine cover where some overdosed-on-privilege twit proclaimed Charles Manson to be a great revolutionary. Giant head shots of Huey Newton and George Jackson side-by-side in unconscious irony.

He covered the international front, too: the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Brigades, a “letter to the people from Assata Shakur, s/n JoAnne Chesimard,” mailed from Cuba. The whole place was strangely time-warped, as if nothing had happened before or after a ten-year period carved out of the sixties and seventies. Nothing about the IWW. Nothing about the Tamil Tigers.

It didn’t have the controlled chaos that flavored Daisy’s room, and if a maid was being paid money to keep it clean, she was ripping them off.

But none of it was worth a thing to me.

My last shot was the apartment over the garage: the one his wife said he used as an office. I had saved it for the end, because it was closest to my way out—the same way any good burglar starts with the lowest drawer first. I hadn’t seen any stairs leading to it on the outside of the house, so I wasn’t surprised when I found the door off the inside of the garage.

The steps had carpeting, but no decorator had picked it out. The door to the office was a joke—I’d loided tougher ones when I was a little kid.

Inside, a drafting table sat in a far corner, its surface cleared, as if awaiting some action. A clever wall unit had been built over lateral file cabinets, the top of which formed a work surface featuring one of those fax-printer-copier combo machines. I hooked a gloved finger into one of the file drawers and pulled experimentally. It came open without resistance. I used a pocket flash to scan the neatly arranged manila folders inside. They were labeled in a draftman’s writing, all apparently names of projects he was working on.

I checked my watch. Still had almost twenty minutes of the forty-five I’d allotted myself for the job. Where the hell was the . . . ? Then I spotted it, lying casually on a small black leather couch: an IBM notebook computer.

I used wooden matches to mark its corners, then picked it up and carried it over to the work surface, reciting to myself the instructions Gem had given me.

First, I made sure the machine had a floppy drive installed . . . yes! . . . and checked access to the parallel port. Then I took fourteen different cables, each individually twist-tied, out of my bag and gently tried each one in turn. Hit paydirt with number six, and connected the notebook to the pocket-sized SCSI drive I was carrying.

I inserted what Gem’s geek had told her was a DOS boot disk into the computer’s floppy drive and powered it up. As soon as its screen showed a progress bar moving slowly to the right, I checked my watch and left the machinery to its own devices.

Kevin didn’t keep his secrets in the usual places. Nothing taped to the underside of drawers, no cutout portions of books, none of the pens were hollow. The carpeting was napless enough to be industrial, but the padding under it was so thick it was spongy to the touch. And the ceiling’s acoustical tile extended halfway down the walls. Maybe it was a look—interior design isn’t one of my specialties.

I expected a DSL connection, or maybe a T1. But he wasn’t even running his online stuff through the TV cable; it was a straight dial-up connect.

And another surprise, there was only one phone line, with no switcher, so he’d have to physically unplug the phone to go online. The phone itself was a high-tech Bang & Olufsen, ultra-audio, directly connected to a large reel-to-reel tape recorder. The setup was pure professional—that recorder could roll for hours and stay as quiet as cancer.

There was no number on the phone. I thought about using it to call my own cellular, then doing a star-69 to capture the info. But the setup spooked me, so I left it alone.

A book was lying open next to the copier. Last Man Standing, Jack Olsen’s monster bestseller. I’d picked it up when it first hit the stores. It was about Geronimo Pratt, an innocent man who had spent a quarter-century in prison, a monument to Hoover’s psychosis of the late sixties, before the courts finally kicked him loose. The book was marked up to the max: pages highlighted in half a dozen different colors, with tiny scribbles in some of the margins. I left it as I found it, open to the same page.

A slight bulge in the carpeting pinpointed the floor safe. It didn’t look like much, but punching or peeling it would have been as subtle as spray-painting the walls. And I didn’t have time to play with the dial; the progress bar on the computer’s screen read “100%.”

I popped out the floppy disk, powered down the machine, removed the cable, and packed up the portable SCSI drive. The notebook went back exactly where I’d taken it from.

One quick scan to make sure I hadn’t left any calling cards, and I was ready to fade, still within my time limit.

Back inside the garage, I started up the Ford. A few seconds’ exposure to carbon monoxide was worth the running start it would give me if I needed it. But when I sent the door up, the driveway was empty.

I was gone in seconds.

Gem wasn’t at the loft when I returned with my swag. I left the computer stuff and the film canister for her; she knew whatto do with them.

The meet with Madison wasn’t for three days. I didn’t want to play my hole card until after I’d spoken with her. I went back into the streets.

I always carry significant currency when I work. It isn’t just for the mordida that’s so much a part of the kind of business I do. A piece of it is emotional—I feel scared without some cash in my pocket. Only born-rich people are comfortable walking around without money.

In New York, it’d take you years of lurking before people noticed you—unless you were crazy enough to hang around a drug drop or a mob storefront. But in Portland, it didn’t take long at all. I didn’t know what the whisper-stream had about me, but I knew I was part of its flow from the way people reacted when I rolled up on them. By then, they all knew I was looking for Rosebud. But they didn’t know why. Unless they bought my story . . . whichever one I’d told them.

I’d put a notice in the personals column of the Willamette Week—an alternative newspaper that was above-ground enough to survive on advertising, mostly from cultural events. If Rosebud saw my ad, she never answered.

There were a few ’zines going around, mostly about the local live-sounds scene. I tracked one of them back to its editor, a nice kid with a color printer and a passionate love of industrial music. He said he’d never heard of Rosebud, didn’t recognize her picture.

He didn’t look like he got out of the house enough to be that smooth a liar, so I figured he was playing it straight. I asked him what it would cost to run a box ad. He told me he didn’t do stuff like that; his “operation” was “noncommercial.” But he did hook me up with another ’zine, this one devoted to what they called thugcore music. “Hardcore’s like bubblegum to us, man,” the kid in charge told me.

He listened as I explained that Rosebud wasn’t tattooed or pierced, hadn’t shaved her head, and didn’t spend a lot of time in mosh pits. But when I told him that she played acoustic guitar, he told me to keep my money.

There’s another music scene that doesn’t get air play—unless you count the shortwave psycho-shows. NSBM—National Socialist Black Metal—a bizarre brew of confused mysticism and real clear race hate. You can’t find it over-the-counter, but it does a big enough business on the Internet that it’s already being ripped off . . . bootlegged, big-time.

From the picture I’d been putting together of Rosebud, I couldn’t see her anywhere near that crap. So I passed on the thugcore kid’s offer to get me some names.

I didn’t like it that the father was so sure she was still in Portland, so I followed him around for a couple of days. He had a lot of meets in semi-public places—walking along the waterfront, having a snack from a street vendor, in a coffeehouse—with people I didn’t recognize. But none of them were within thirty years of the kid’s age. Maybe he’d covered his bets, hired some more personnel.

“That’s Geof Darrow’s work, all right,” Madison said, tapping one long fingernail on the sixteen-by-twenty-inch enlargement. I’d had it made from the photo I’d taken of the drawing in Rosebud’s room. “It’s as distinctive as a fingerprint. There isn’t another artist in the world who could do this . . . although plenty try.”

“Never heard of him,” I said. Which wasn’t quite true. My old prison partner, Hercules, had everything Darrow ever drew.

“God. You didn’t see The Matrix?”

The way she said the words, like it was something sacred, I knew she was talking about a movie.

“No.” This time, it was the truth.

“Okay,” she said, as if pronouncing judgment. “Anyway, I can tell you something more about this . . . drawing. It is a drawing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. I didn’t know Geof Darrow even knew Charles de Lint.”

“Who?”

“See these crows? Well, they’re not birds. See where it says ‘Maida and Zia’? Those are the crow girls,” she pronounced.

“I didn’t see that movie, either.”

“Look,” she sighed, impatient with my cultural deficiencies, “the crow girls are recurring characters in books by Charles de Lint. He’s a fabulist.”

“A what?”

“A writer of fables. And he’s a musician, too.”

“A . . . Wait a minute, Madison. Would a teenage girl like his stuff?”

“You’re kidding, right? It depends on the girl, of course. But he writes beautifully. I adore his work.”

“Have you gotten any letters from—”

She got up to leave. I took it for an answer.

The Borders on Third Street was too damn big to stagger through one rack at a time. I was wandering aimlessly when a dark-haired guy came up and asked me if he could help. His face was too professionally unexpressive for him to be a clerk, so I figured him for the manager. I told him what I wanted, and he knew exactly where it was.

I sat down at one of the tables and got myself a tuna sandwich on what Portland thinks is a bakery roll. Then I started to read what the guy had told me was the latest of the dozen Charles de Lint books they had on their shelves.

It was set in one of those mythical cities that you recognize from the road map of your own experience. The style was realistic, but the narrative was full of magick and faeries and mystical connections between people and objects. All driven by a culture that evolved from street kids, intertwined with their music, their poetry, and their at-bottom goodness . . . almost as if the mysticism was in their gestalt, not their spells. I could see why Rosebud felt close to this stuff. And, reading it, I felt closer to her.

But no closer to where she was.

“I bought you a present,” I told Gem when she came in late in the afternoon.

“What?” she said. The last time I’d said those same words to her, she’d clapped her hands like a little girl and jumped up and down until I gave it to her.

“Just a book,” I said, handing her what I’d bought earlier.

“This is very nice,” she said, taking it from me. “I have not read it. Thank you.”

I wanted to ask her what the fuck was wrong, but I had a date with a pack of skittish whores.

The soft Pacific Northwest rain didn’t sweep the streets clean, but it did cut down on the traffic. I had no luck talking a lone hooker into the Caddy. So, when I spotted the Subaru ahead to my left, looking even more sharklike in the wet night, I tucked in behind and tried my luck there.

The black car ambled along in a gentle series of right-hand turns. If the driver noticed me on his tail, he sure wasn’t panicked about it. Fifteen minutes brought us back to the outer rim of the stroll. The Subaru glided to the curb. When I saw the chubby blonde girl climb out the passenger side, tugging her mini-skirt back down over her hips, I knew that either the driver was a regular or his approach was a lot better than mine.

The hooker was heading back up the street to where I was parked. The Subaru was pulling away. Snap decision. I hit the switch for the curbside window as the blonde came up alongside.

“You working?” I asked.

She glanced into the Caddy, a tired-looking woman who’d been promised diamonds and silk and gotten zircons and polyester. I let her have a good look. She glanced up the street to where she’d been headed. Then back to me.

“Some other time, honey,” she said.

I got back around three. The loft was empty. The Charles de Lint book was where Gem had put it down when I’d first given it to her.

“Can’t you . . . put on some pressure?” Kevin asked me the next day.

“Money’s the best pressure,” I told him.

“I understand that. You’re not saying I should increase the—”

“No. If somebody’s holding her, that could always be a factor. But if they were, you’d have heard about it by now.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The two hardest things about a kidnapping have nothing to do with the snatch itself.”

“Kidnapping?”

“Look, am I getting confused here? You told the cops Rosebud was missing. They presume runaway, her age and all, but they have to be thinking something else, right?”

“Something else?”

“She either went away on her own, or not, okay? But, sometimes, it’s a bit of both. A boyfriend, maybe tells her he’s going to take care of everything. But what he thinks is, you’re going to be the one doing that.”

“I don’t—”

“This boyfriend,” I went on, like he hadn’t said a word, “he figures: you got a nice big house, fancy cars, in that neighborhood and all . . . you got to have serious money,” I said, choosing my words carefully. He wasn’t the type to be flattered by references to his money, so I put it out there as a mistake some kid could make. Me, I understood just how “working-class” he really was.

I waited for his nod, then went on: “By his standards, anyway. So he tells Rosebud they’re going to fake a kidnapping. Just to get enough money for them to go—ah, who knows where it is this year? Amsterdam? Paris? Daytona Beach? I don’t know. But you get the idea, right?”

“But the note. It said—”

“Yeah. Look: One, the cops never saw that note. Two, anyone could have written it—it wasn’t even in her handwriting. Three, even if Rosebud did write it, she might still be with a boyfriend . . . and he springs this ransom thing on her after she’s already left. No way she wants to come back and admit her big adventure was a flop. Or maybe she’s got some resentments. . . .”

“You don’t have any idea of how close we . . . are,” he said. “Buddy and I . . . You’re going in the wrong direction.”

“All right. Like I was saying, the two hardest things about a kidnapping are keeping the person alive and healthy while you negotiate . . . and collecting the ransom without getting caught.”

“But you just said—”

“Sometimes, you get a girl who runs away voluntarily. But when she wants to go back . . .”

“I never thought of that.”

“There’s no reason to think about that. Yet. That is, unless you’ve heard from—”

“Of course not. If Buddy had called me—”

“Not your daughter. Anyone else who . . . anyone who’s telling you something like they might be able to locate her—an opening like that?”

“Nothing,” he said, sadly.

“All right.”

“Can’t you . . . ?”

“What?”

“Sometimes money isn’t the answer to everything,” he said, not so cryptically.

“If I thought leaning on one of the street kids would help, I’d do it,” I told him. “But all that would do is make everyone nervous, keep me from getting close.”

“It seems so . . . hopeless now.”

“You want me to call it a day?”

“I . . . don’t know. Do you think you’re getting any closer?”

“Yeah, I do. But I couldn’t tell you why, or give you any specifics, so I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was just hustling you for a few more weeks’ work.”

“Jennifer said she would speak to you,” he said, suddenly.

“The girl Rosebud was supposed to be spending the—”

“Yes. I wanted to clear it with her parents first.”

“When?”

“This evening.”

“Okay. I’ll come by—”

“Seven,” he said. “And . . . no disrespect, but could you wear your suit?”

“Jenn will be down in a minute,” the guy who had introduced himself as her father told me. He was shorter than me, but much wider through the chest and shoulders, with an amiable face and eyes as warm as ball bearings.

“What do you need to talk to her for?” a kid who I figured for her brother asked. He was taller than his father, leaner, with an athlete’s grace to his body.

“Michael . . .” the father said, gently. He turned his attention back to me. “The police have already been here,” he said, as if that disposed of the matter.

“Yes, sir, I understand,” I told him. “I don’t know how much you know about investigations—”

“I’m a forensic psychologist,” he interrupted.

“Sorry, I didn’t know,” I told him. But I know something about you, pal. Any Ph.D. who doesn’t introduce himself by sticking “Doctor” in front of his name doesn’t have a self-confidence problem. “What’s your specialty?”

“The effects of incarceration on mental health,” he said, holding my eyes.

“Fascinating,” I said, my voice as flat as his. “Anyway, the core tool is the same, right?”

“I’m not certain I follow you.”

“Interviewing. That’s it, isn’t it? Whether you’re doing an evaluation or debriefing a source or questioning a suspect, it all comes down to the interview.”

“Well, there are various tests as well as—”

“Sure. No argument. But you’d always want an interview if you could get one, wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” he agreed.

“And interviewing, it’s a special talent, fair enough to say? Some of it you can teach, but some of it’s a gift . . . combination of instinct and experience.”

He nodded silently, a professional’s way of telling me to keep talking.

“And, bottom line,” I said, “it’s not mechanical. One interviewer could get information another wouldn’t even ask about.”

“That’s true. So what you’re saying, Mr. . . . Hazard, is it . . . ?”

My turn to nod.

“. . . is that you would do a better job than the detectives.”

“That’s been my experience,” I said. “And I’ll bet it’s been yours, too.”

“Sometimes.” He chuckled. “Not always.”

“Joel, you said he could—” Kevin started to say.

“Your daughter, you let her go out on dates?” the psychologist interrupted Rosebud’s father.

“Uh . . . yes.”

“So that’s the permission piece. But you still want to meet the young man, don’t you? Kind of make up your own mind right on the spot?”

“Well . . . yes, sure.”

“What I told you was that you could have somebody come here and talk to Jenn. You brought this gentleman with you. I wanted to talk to him first. Is that okay with you?”

Kevin didn’t say a word. He knew the last sentence hadn’t been a question.

“Go get your sister,” the psychologist said to his son.

“What did you do time for?” he asked me, as soon as the kid left the room.

He may have been guessing, or he may have smelled it on me. Didn’t matter. I sensed that if I didn’t give him what he was looking for, his daughter wasn’t going to be interviewed.

“Violence for money,” I said, trying to cover it all in as few words as possible.

“Where?”

“You got a glass?” I asked, giving him a thumb’s-up signal.

Kevin looked confused.

“Your investigator is offering his fingerprints,” the psychologist explained to him.

“Is that really—?”

He shrugged. Then barked, “Michael!”

The kid came into the room with what I took to be his older sister, a strikingly pretty girl, who didn’t seem aware she was.

“Daddy, why are you bellowing?” she said, a smile in her voice.

“I thought you were still upstairs,” he said sheepishly.

“Hi, Mr. Carpin,” she said to Rosebud’s father. “Hello,” she said to me. “I’m Jennifer.”

“B. B. Hazard,” I said, getting to my feet and holding out my hand. She took it, squeezed gently, and pulled away.

“Mr. Hazard wants to talk with you about Rosebud,” her father said.

“Yes, Daddy. You told me. We’ll talk in my room, okay?”

“I’ll be right down here,” he said. As clear a threat as I’d heard in years.

Jennifer’s room was smaller than Rosebud’s, but it looked as if it got a great deal more traffic. She pulled a one-armed panda bear off an old easy chair like a maître d’ showing me to my table. I sat down and she jumped into the air, spun around, and landed facing me on the bed.

“How can I help?” she asked. Her father’s daughter.

“Well, you can tell me what you know.”

“About Rosa?”

“Rosa?”

“Yes. That’s the name she liked. Not everybody called her that, but I did.”

“You’ve already told me more than I knew when I came.”

“Oh. All right . . .”

“What did they tell you?” I asked.

“The police?”

“Or her father.”

“Well . . . they seemed to think Rosa had run away. But they weren’t sure.”

“But you know, don’t you, Jennifer?”

“Me?”

“Sure. You and Rosa were very close.”

“You didn’t say that like it was a question.”

“It’s not. I know you were.”

“How?” she challenged.

“You told her father that Rosa had never come over to spend the weekend with you at all.”

“That’s right. She hadn’t. . . .”

“But you told him after she didn’t return on Sunday night.”

“That’s when he asked me.”

“I know. But if he had asked you, during that weekend, you would have told him Rosa was around somewhere. Or in the bathroom. Or at the movies. Whatever you agreed on. Then you’d have called her, given her the heads-up, and she would have called home.”

“Why would you say—?”

“She needed you for a running start. Probably figured nobody would ever check—she seems like a very smart young lady, and she would have been planning this for a while. But she had a backup plan in case they did.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You mean I can’t prove it, don’t you, Jennifer? They’re not the same thing.”

“I’m not saying anything,” she said, folding her arms.

“Okay. Tell me about the crow girls, then.”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to read mine. Someday, she’d be even better than her father, but right now she wasn’t in his league. “What about them?” she finally said.

“Charles de Lint . . .”

“Yes, sure. I mean, everybody knows that. But what are you asking me?”

“How could I read about them?”

“The crow girls? Why, they’re in all . . . Wait!” She bounced off the bed, walked over to a short bookcase suspended over her computer terminal, pulled down a book, and handed it to me.

“Moonlight and Vines,” I read aloud. A different title from the one I’d gotten at the bookstore.

“There’s a separate story just about them—the crow girls—in there.”

“Thanks. I’ll bring it back to you.”

“Okay.”

“Well, Jennifer . . . thanks for taking the time to talk with me.”

“That’s all? I mean, you aren’t going to—?”

“No. There’s no reason for you to trust me. I was trying to think of a way I could convince you that I’d never do anything to hurt your friend. I just want to find her, make sure she’s all right. If she doesn’t want to come back home, I wouldn’t try to make her. But I see you’re not ready to believe me.”

She tried to polygraph my eyes again. Then asked, “Are you going to say anything about—?”

“Your phone relay system? No.”

She nodded slowly. “It was just for that weekend,” she said quietly. “The number is no good anymore.”

“No answer when you called the next week, Jennifer? Or was it disconnected?”

“How did you—? Oh. It was a pay phone. On the street. Whoever answered it told me that.”

“And the next time you tried it?”

“The next time, it was a different person. Just someone passing by in the street.”

“Thank you.”

“I want Rosa to be okay.”

“I know. Me too.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Tell you . . . what?”

“If you find her. If you find her and she won’t go back, would you let me know? First, before you . . . do anything?”

“I promise.”

“Be careful,” Jennifer’s father told me by way of goodbye. His son didn’t say anything; he was too busy cracking his knuckles and memorizing my face.

“What was that all about?” Kevin asked me on the way back to where I’d left my car.

“What do you mean?”

“That business with Dr. Dryslan at the end. He almost seemed to be . . . I don’t know . . . warning you or something.”

“He’s a father. Jennifer’s his daughter. You know how that goes.”

“Yes,” he said.

Maybe he convinced himself.

“I must go to work soon,” Gem said. She absently twirled a towel into a turban for her just-washed hair, oblivious as always of her own nudity.

“Tonight?”

“I do not mean for one night. Back to work. With Flacco and Gordo.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. In another few days, we must go.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You have no questions?” she said.

“No.”

“Not where I am going? Not when I will return?”

“No.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“So . . . where you go, what you do, when you would be back . . . that would be none of my business, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You are my husband.”

“Gem—”

“It is not for you to say; it is for me to say.”

“Is that right? How would you like it if some guy came up to you and said, ‘Hey, bitch, you’re my wife’?”

“It is not what I say,” she said calmly. “It is what happened. Between us.”

“But you just said—”

“Those are just words.”

“This isn’t making any sense.”

“That is your choice,” she said, walking out of the room.

I went back into the night, looking for a working girl working alone. When I finally spotted one, she was wearing orange hot pants, standing hip-shot in invitation.

Right next to the black Subaru parked at the curb.

I figured whoever was in the Subaru had her covered, but I could live with that. I nosed the Caddy alongside her, hit the power window switch with my left hand, and slid my right over the grip of the Beretta.

She stuck her face all the way into the car so that her heavy breasts draped over the sill, made a kissing sound at me.

“Where’ve you been, baby?”

“Looking for you,” I told her. Her hair was raven black, bowed out around her cheekbones and curving back sharply just past her chin. Couldn’t see much of her features in that light.

“Well, you found me. Now what do you want to do with me?”

“Talk.”

“I’m not out here to—”

“Talk for money,” I cut in quickly. “Buying your time, same as anyone else. Only you keep your clothes on.”

“But not my mouth shut. Sounds like a date to me.”

“I don’t care what you call—”

“Unlock the back door,” she said, suddenly.

I hit the switch, heard the distinctive thunk. She pulled herself out of the window. I heard the brief clacking of her stacked heels as she walked around to the back. The door opened as I turned to look behind me. She leaned in, sprayed the interior with a little pocket flash, then pulled her head out and slammed the door.

I glanced toward the passenger window. Blank. Caught something moving up on my left side. I was about to stomp on out of there when I recognized her.

“I’m going to walk around the front of your car,” she said in my left ear. “So you can get a real good look at me in your headlights, okay?”

“Why?”

“So you’ll know what you’re passing up with all this talking stuff,” she said.

She dropped into the Caddy’s front bucket seat butt-first, taking her time about it. The orange hot pants were worthy of the name, but the “For Sale” tattoo I knew was underneath them doused any flame before it could flicker. She spun around to face me, crossing her fishnet-wrapped legs.

“Take the first right,” she said.

I flicked the lever into gear and pulled off, slow, my eyes on the dark street.

“Two more blocks, then watch for a red house on the left.”

“Yours?”

“Sure!” She laughed. “Just the driveway. And that’s a rental, understand?”

“Yep. Pretty slick. The cops can sweep the street, but off-road is off-limits. You pay by the night, or by the trick?”

“Why do you ask?”

“If it’s by the trick, whoever owns the house has to stay up and keep count.”

“You sound like you know the game.”

“Not me,” I assured her. “Is that it, coming up?”

“Yes. Just . . . what are you doing?”

“I feel more comfortable backing in, all right?”

“The customer’s always right.”

I reversed the Caddy and backed a little way into the driveway, just past the sidewalk. Then I killed the engine. The power door locks would work even without it running.

“Like I said,” I told her, “I just want to talk.”

“Whatever gets you there, honey.”

“It’s not like that. I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for someone. A girl. She might be—”

“I know,” she interrupted.

“How do you—?”

“We already talked about it, Mr. Hazard,” she said, pulling the midnight wig off her head and shaking out a short, tight mass of auburn curls.

“Well, if it isn’t the fake Peaches herself.”

“Surprised?”

“Yeah,” I lied. Age switches aren’t that big a deal for some women. Gem did it all the time, for her work. It’s easier for Asians-facing-Caucasians, but they aren’t the only ones who can pull it off. “You went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“The deal’s the same as I told you when you were playing teenager. Or are you playing grownup now?”

“I’m thirty-one,” she said, as if that was some kind of credential. “And I’ve got my own deal.”

“Which is?”

“What do you know about wires?” That one came out of left field, but it didn’t surprise me as much as her undoing the snaps on her blouse.

“Enough to know you need them in that bra,” I told her.

“Very funny,” she said. She shrugged out of the blouse and popped the clasp on the front of the black bra. Her heavy breasts gleamed creamy in the darkness. She slipped her arms out of the bra in a smooth fluid motion, and tossed it across the console into my lap. Then she raised her arms above her head. “See any place I could carry a recorder?” she asked me.

“Not from the waist up.”

“Help yourself,” she said, undoing the top of the hot pants.

“No thanks,” I told her.

“You’ll take my word for it?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to say anything the police couldn’t hear. You already know I’m not a trick. And I already knew you weren’t selling it.”

“And you knew that exactly how?”

“You’d be the first hooker I ever saw who didn’t carry something to put money in.”

“Maybe I put it in my—”

“No. You don’t. Besides that, it’s three in the morning. You’d have been out here for hours, but you smell like you just stepped out of a bubble bath.”

She was silent for a long minute. “I know some things about you, too,” she said, finally.

“Do you?”

“Yes. You do things for money.”

“That’s why they call it work.”

“I don’t mean just . . . this. Looking for the girl. Things.”

“What ‘things’ are you talking about?”

“Does it really matter? If the money’s right . . .”

“Sure, it matters. I would never do anything illegal.”

“Yeah, you’re just a model citizen, huh?” she whispered. “Want to give me back my bra?”

I handed it over, my thumb telling me I had been right about the underwire.

“Can I have one of your cigarettes now?”

I gave her one. She leaned over the console so I could light it for her. Her perfume reminded me of raw sugarcane.

“Thanks.”

I keyed the ignition enough to activate the electronics, zipped her window down.

She leaned back and enjoyed her smoke. Didn’t say a word all through it. “That was good,” she said, snapping the butt out her window into the darkness. “I haven’t had a Kool since the last time I was locked up.”

Sure. Nice of her to spell it all out for me. And in such big letters.

“Want me to take you back to where they’re waiting for you?” I asked her.

“Where would that be?”

“The Subaru.”

“Okay, then; who would that be?”

“I’m not following you.”

“No. I’ve been following you. For quite a while. In the Subaru. It’s mine. There’s no one in it now.”

I pulled alongside the sleek black car. She opened her door, turned to face me.

“This one’s on the house,” she said. “The girl’s not strolling. I can help you find her if she’s anywhere in Portland. You don’t believe me, ask around.”

“I already did that. And you didn’t come up aces . . . Peaches.”

She poked a finger into one of the thick bands at the top of her fishnets, took something out, and handed it to me. A poker chip, it felt like. “Ask again,” she said.

She got out, slammed the Caddy’s door closed with a well-padded hip, and climbed into the Subaru in one smooth motion.

I would have wondered about her leaving her car unlocked in that neighborhood, if I hadn’t seen the shadows shift in the front seat when we’d pulled up.

I’d imagined all kinds of exotic things for the little disk I’d been carrying around in my shirt pocket for a couple of hours. Embedded microchips, the female half of a set, maybe some mystical symbols to a code I’d be expected to crack . . .

But when I finally took a look at it under the lamp over my chair, it turned out to be a plain white plastic disk with milled edges, lettered in black. Just “Ann O. Dyne,” with “Pain Management” underneath, like it was a specialty of the house. On the flip side: “cell/page/cyber,” with separate numbers for each.

I rolled the poker-chip business card between my fingers, trying to get something from it beyond the words. I knew a hundred ways to say S&M, but “pain management” was a new one on me. If that’s what it was . . . and I didn’t think so.

I might have asked Gem, but she wasn’t around.

The kid was small and slender, lady-killer handsome, with blond hair, big liquid brown eyes, and a gentle smile. He circled the table slowly and deliberately, eyeing the scattered balls like an I Ching hexagram he was decoding. “You’re done,” he said to a tall, scrawny guy in his twenties.

“You going to jump it in?” the scrawny guy sneered. “I don’t think so.”

I took a look. From where I was sitting, I could see the cue ball frozen to the short rail at the foot of the table. The green six ball was hanging on the pocket, but the black eight blocked the shot. The scrawny guy was right; the balls were too close together to jump the cue into the six.

“Massé,” the kid said.

“Right!”

“You don’t think so?” a man asked, echoing the scrawny guy’s words.

I turned to look at the speaker, a well-put-together man in his thirties with a shaved head, black-rimmed glasses, and a bright, shallow smile. He sat calmly against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest.

“No, I don’t fucking think so,” the scrawny guy responded.

“How sure are you about that?” the man challenged.

“Real sure.”

“A hundred bucks sure?”

“Oh yeah,” the scrawny guy assured him, affirming the side bet.

The man with the shaved head got up slowly, took a pair of fifties out of his pocket as if he’d been carrying them around just for such an occasion. He put them on the table at the other end from where the kid faced the shot. The scrawny guy came up with his ante. Everybody moved back to give the kid room.

He took one more look. Chalked his cue absently. A couple of teenage girls giggled together, sharing a secret. The kid stepped to the table, held his cue almost perpendicular to the green felt surface. He gripped it overhand as he stroked a couple of times to get the rhythm, then snapped it down and back as smooth as a punch press. The cue ball made a quick semicircle around the eight, gently nudged the six ball home, then reversed at the long rail to give the kid perfect position on the seven ball.

“Big A!” his backer congratulated him, offering a palm to slap.

The scrawny guy nodded his head, as if finally understanding something that had been explained to him many times.

The kid ran the seven, eight, and nine without drawing a breath. The scrawny guy didn’t stay for the finale.

The two teenage girls argued over who was going to rack the balls. I sat down next to the backer. “You taking on all comers?” I asked him.

“Someday we will,” the backer said. “Not today.”

“Why not today?”

“Big A’s not ready. Another couple of years, yeah.”

“He looks ready to me.”

“He’s got the stroke,” the backer said. “And he’s got the eye. But he’s still learning the game. And stamina’s an issue, too—some of the pro games can go for hours, day after day.”

“That’s the plan, to turn him pro?”

“It is. He’s not old enough to play in tournaments yet. By the time he is, we’ll be ready.”

“You’re Clipper, right?”

“Uh-huh. And you’re . . . ?”

“B.B.”

“Oh yeah. I’ve heard about you.”

“Then you know what I’m looking for.”

“Runaway. At least, that’s what people say.”

“For once, then, word on the street’s true.”

“I’m a businessman,” he said. “Not a social worker.”

“Sure. That’s what I want, to do business.”

“You think I know where—?”

“No. But I’ve been here for a while, and I noticed a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like how your boy works with a house cue, very slick. And the way he pulls girls like a rock star.”

“He does,” Clipper said, proudly.

“So I figured I could maybe talk to him, show him this picture I’ve got of the—”

“Lots of people out here looking for runaways,” he interrupted.

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know you, that’s my point.”

“Fair enough. But I’m not asking you to turn the girl over. Or even to tell me where she is. Just to get a message to her.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Money.”

“I’ve got enough money, pal.”

“All right, then. How about if I show you a crack in your boy’s game?”

“What kind of crack?”

“He’s still a kid.”

“So?”

“So let’s him and me play. Nine ball, like he’s been doing. A ten-spot per game. And I side-bet you a hundred I get him out of his rhythm before I drop the same amount.”

He leaned back in his chair and gave me a long look. “Big A doesn’t intimidate,” he said quietly. “Not with me around.”

“That’s not my style. What do you say?”

I refused to lag for break. It was his table; I figured I’d have a better chance with a coin toss.

“Rack them tight,” I told the chubby little girl in a Hard Looks T-shirt. She nodded, tongue protruding in concentration.

Instead of breaking from the far end and stroking low to stop the cue ball near the center, I came off the side rail slightly off-center, striking high. It was a sucker move—good chance I’d leave myself snookered even if I pocketed a ball. But it was the best way to swing for the fences.

The cue ball attacked the rack, driving deep, compressing the balls until the yellow-and-white-striped nine popped out like a mouse out of a hole and squirted into the left-hand corner.

The kid just chuckled.

For the next game, I went to a more professional break. This time, I pocketed the seven in the corner and the one in the side, leaving myself clear on the two at the other end. I dropped it home. Then passed up a fairly easy line on the three in favor of a long combo to the nine. It didn’t drop.

The kid chuckled again. Too quickly. I’d left him a no-look at the three. He went two rails for the hit, but he couldn’t pocket anything.

My turn. I lined up on the three, whacked it hard with enough draw to come all the way back down the table, and almost kissed the nine ball in.

“Stroooke!” one of the young guys watching barked.

The kid nodded his head, on to my game now. He ran the table, pulling us even.

For the next hour, it went like that. I went slap-and-slam, kiss-and-combo, almost always playing the nine ball, no matter what was open. The kid played straight pool—one at a time, methodical. He should have been way ahead. He wasn’t.

And I was having a lot more fun.

Another hour. The kid started to take some chances. He had a beautiful stroke, but he hadn’t trained for extreme English on the ball. He was a little more accurate; I was a lot more radical. And the watching crowd was into radical.

After a while, the kid started to put more muscle into his breaks. A mistake—his game was finesse, not power. Twice, he scratched, leaving me easy. I vultured those racks . . . then broke even harder than I had before.

By two in the morning, the kid was tired. And playing more cowboy all the time. He was working the crowd, showing off, beating me at my own game . . . almost.

He was sixty bucks ahead when Clipper said, “Let’s get something to eat.”

“I’d like to play you again,” the kid told me. We were sitting in a diner, working on a nighthawk’s breakfast.

“He already played you, Big A,” Clipper told him.

“Yeah. But I—”

“Played you, understand?”

“What?” the kid demanded, annoyed.

“You’re a lot better than me,” I said. “You should have wiped me out.” I was flat-out lying—the margin was actually pretty thin. But when you’re hustling, ego is the first thing you shed. “You know why you didn’t?”

“Sure,” he said, high-confidence, proudly reciting what he’d been taught. “A slop player can beat a pro any one time. That’s why nine ball is such a perfect sucker’s game. Luck can change the result. Sometimes. It’s the pool version of gin rummy. But over the long run, I’d always get your money.”

“Not the way you played,” I told him.

His fair complexion made the angry flush clear, even in the diner’s dim light. “My game—”

“You didn’t play your game, Big A,” Clipper said, gently. “That’s what Mr. . . .”

“Hazard.”

“. . . Hazard is trying to tell you, son. You got caught up in the crowd. Remember how you learned? Nine ball is nothing but one-rack rotation, right?”

“Yeah. I know. I was just—”

“I know what you were doing,” I told him.

“What?”

“You were having fun.”

“Huh?”

“People do things different when they do them for fun. The way you play, it’s work, right?”

“Sure. Me and Clipper—”

“I know. Thing is, it was fun, wasn’t it? Combos, kisses, heavy draw, billiard shots . . . slamming through on the break . . . ?”

“Yeah,” he said, flashing a smile.

“And we were playing for chump change, so you could relax, let the crowd get into it?”

“Maybe . . .” he admitted, grinning now.

“Only thing is, you can’t do that, Big A,” Clipper told him firmly. “You can’t do your work for fun. It changes your game. Those little things, they creep in around the corners when you’re not looking. Next thing you know, your edge is gone. Remember how many times we talked about focus?”

The kid just nodded, solemn-faced now.

“It’s not your fault,” Clipper told him. “This guy”—nodding at me—“he conned you into it.”

“He won’t do it again,” the kid said. He turned to me. “Were you a pro, once?”

“I was a gambler.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A gambler plays all the time. A pro makes a living at it.”

“Heh!” The kid chuckled. “We make a living. Well, maybe not yet, we don’t. But we will, right, Clipper?”

“Guaranteed.”

“What do you think?” he asked me.

I knew what he wanted. “In two, three years, if you stay inside yourself, if you practice only on pro-standard tables, if you listen to your father here . . . you’ll make your mark on the circuit.”

“How did you know Clipper was my father?” the kid demanded. “We’re not—”

“My family’s the same kind as yours,” I said.

Big A and Clipper looked at each other, then nodded a silent amen.

“Well?” I asked Clipper, while the kid was in the restroom.

“Fair enough,” he said. “You said you’d show me a crack. And you did.”

“It’s not a deep one. And it’s not permanent, either.”

“You’re right. You got a picture of the girl?”

I showed him what I had. He didn’t react . . . but I wouldn’t have expected him to, even if Rosebud’s face rang a bell.

“Here’s my card,” I said. “All I want is for you to ask her to give me a call. Twenty-four/seven.”

“She doesn’t know you?”

“No.”

“So why would she want to call?”

“Because I have a message for her. From her father. All she has to do is listen to it, then she can do whatever she wants; fair enough?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“I know.”

“We’ll ask around. If she does call you, don’t waste your time with a trace—it’ll be from right here,” he said, unhooking a cell phone from his belt and holding it up.

“The kid . . .”

“. . . Big A.”

“Big A. He’ll maybe know . . .”

“If he does, we’ll ask her. Don’t worry. Me and Big A, our word is gold.”

“You’re not just teaching him pool, huh?”

“I’m teaching him everything I know,” Clipper said.

Another thing Clipper knew was the address of a safehouse for kids trying to get off the street, or out of The Life. I knew the phone number; I’d seen it posted all over town. But the address was something else again.

I thought about trying it right away. Sometimes people on night duty get lonely, and they’re easier to talk to. But safehouse antennas extend higher when darkness comes, and I decided to take my shot in the daytime.

I thought about going home. But nobody would be there. And it wasn’t my home.

I had another idea, but it stumbled into the generation gap. When I was a kid on the streets, one place you could always find open in the middle of the night was a church. Not all of them, but there would always be a couple.

Not the ones I tried.

When Pansy had been with me, we sometimes watched the sun come up together. Facing the day. Now I watched it come up alone. And went to sleep.

It was a little after three in the afternoon when I rang the bell on the side of the three-story blue clapboard house. A woman, maybe in her twenties, answered, her body language making it clear that I wasn’t going to be invited in.

I gave her the same spiel I was handing out all over the streets. She nodded, not saying anything. I handed her a photo of Rosebud. She took it without even glancing at it. I thanked her for her time and left.

Her act was a little too cool and removed. And I didn’t have anything resembling a lead. So I was back that night.

Like so many other safehouses, they were hyper about their doors and windows, but didn’t pay much attention to anything past their immediate perimeter. Patience eventually dealt me the parking spot I needed. From the Ford’s front seat, I could triangle on both the front and side doors. They had incoming all night long. None of the girls looked anything like Rosebud. Nobody left after ten. Maybe a house rule?

I got out, walked around the block to where I could do a visual on the house, looking for openings. I did the risk-gain math. There wasn’t a scrap of evidence that Rosebud was there. And the place had to have some security.

Maybe some other time.

One of Portland’s real fine Mediterranean restaurants, Touché, has a poolroom upstairs. The tables are just props—nobody would play a serious game there, much less for serious money. But I’d heard the place drew a lot of college girls, so I thought it was worth a once-over.

The sound system was good, if a bit strong. The mix was eclectic—probably Napstered and burned onto CDs—but whoever put it together knew what they were doing. When the tracks switched to doo-wop, I almost felt at home.

“Please Say You Want Me” came on, the kid singing lead working a deeper vein than Frankie Lymon had ever mined. I overheard one of the women hanging out ask, “Who’s that?” I didn’t say anything. But then one of the upscale lounge lizards told her, “That’s the Students. Mid-fifties stuff.”

I turned slightly, saying, “No, that was the Schoolboys. The Students were the guys who did ‘I’m So Young.’ “

The lounge lizard muttered something about me being old enough, I’d probably heard them in person.

Maybe not, I thought to myself, but I sure as hell am getting old, opening my fool mouth in public like that.

My hole card wasn’t exactly the ace of trumps, but holding it back any longer wasn’t going to raise its value. So, the next morning, I shaved carefully, used the flesh-color stuff Michelle had given me on the bullet scar under my right cheekbone, and put on a pair of nonprescription glasses with a faint gray tint. It didn’t turn me into Mr. Rogers, but with the light canvas sports coat over a white T-shirt and a pair of stonewashed jeans, I could pass as a local at first glance.

Flacco and Gordo had lent me an egg-yolk-yellow Camaro. In Portland, it would be a lot less conspicuous than the Ford. I hadn’t driven one of the new ones before, and I was surprised at how damn big it was—the front end seemed to stretch on forever. Even at around-town speeds, it rode stiff.

I found a perfect spot on a rise overlooking the campgrounds. Too far away to pick out individuals, but close enough to see the group activities.

I fitted the rubber-covered little 83 monocular to my eye, focused it down, and breathed shallow until I got it steady enough to scan.

They were playing softball. The left-fielder looked a lot like Daisy, but I couldn’t be sure from the angle I had. When the inning was over, I followed her all the way to the bench. Yes.

Daisy didn’t seem especially interested in the game. She just sat there pensively, while her teammates shouted and waved their arms and jumped up and down at the slightest sign of activity from each batter.

I played the scope over the area, looking for a likely spot. It had to be a dead-drop system they were using. There’d been no phone in Daisy’s room, and it didn’t seem like the kid was ever home alone anyway. This was the one place she went to every day. One place where her parents were never around. And the supervision didn’t seem all that intense.

A low, crumbling stone wall decoratively separated the playing fields from a rambling one-story structure. I took that to be the place where they had the indoor activities. Beyond the outfield was a thick stand of mature trees. The grounds were unfenced—easy enough to come by at night and leave a note to be picked up the next day.

They were playing slow-pitch, but the tall girl on the mound made a high parabolic arc out of each serve, and most of the batters whiffed. Not Daisy. She waited patiently for the ball to drop, stepped into it, and drove it hard through the right side of the infield. When the outfielder was a bit slow in coming to the ball, Daisy took a wide turn at first and steamed into second standing up. Her teammates on the sidelines seemed a lot more excited about her hit than she was.

The next batter popped up to shallow left. Daisy never hesitated, charging so hard she was around third and heading home by the time the fielder dropped the ball. The run triggered a wild celebration. I could see the coach—a teenage girl in shorts and a bright-green sweatshirt with some kind of logo on it—saying something to Daisy. It didn’t look like congratulations. Probably telling Daisy she shouldn’t have taken off—what if the fielder hadn’t dropped the ball? Daisy wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t look real interested.

They changed sides again, and Daisy went back to her position in the outfield. I watched her for signs of anxiety, but she didn’t glance around, didn’t fidget—just concentrated on each batter as they came up. I couldn’t tell how far along in the game they were, and I didn’t like sitting out there in the open. I backed the Camaro out and made a slow circle of the grounds until I found a good spot maybe a quarter-mile away.

I parked, locked up, and started walking. The woods were deeper than they’d looked from the other side, but it was no problem finding my way back with the noise of the game to guide me. I marked my way with quick spurts of red paint from the little spray can I carried. Being a strict environmentalist, I didn’t deface any of the trees, just the NO TRESPASSING signs.

When I found a direct sight line to Daisy, I sat down with my back against a tree and did what I do best.

“Daisy!” I heard someone shout.

She ignored the noise, trotting toward the woods, in no special hurry. Wherever she was headed was past where I was waiting, because she practically stomped on me as she went by.

“Hey!” she yelped.

“Easy, Daisy. You know who I am.”

She pulled up short, hands behind her back, watching me warily but not making a sound. Maybe she didn’t want to alert the camp counselors to where she was. I kept my hands loose in my lap, projecting waves of calm out to her.

“What are you . . . ? I mean, how come . . . ?”

“I was waiting for you, Daisy. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why didn’t you just come to the house?”

“The same reason Rosebud doesn’t write to you there.”

Her eyes flashed at the word “write,” fear and fire each taking a turn. If she’d been a little older, a little more used to deception, she would have kept those eyes on me. But a quick glance to her left told me my hunch about a dead drop had been right.

“I’m not after the letters, Daisy.”

“I have to go back.”

“Sure.”

But she didn’t move, rooted by the letter she hadn’t read yet. It was her link to her sister, and she wasn’t going to let that chain snap without a fight.

“Daisy, listen to me. If I wanted to, I could have hidden myself and waited for you to pick up whatever Rosebud left for you, right? You never would have seen me until it was too late.”

“You better leave her alone,” the child said, drawing herself up to her full height, small fists clenched.

“I am,” I said softly. “I am leaving her alone. I’m not going to try and bring her back. If I wanted to do that, I would have spent the night here in the woods, and just grabbed her when she came to drop off your note. I didn’t do that, either, right? All I want to do is talk to her, make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s fine.”

“I’m sure she is. I just want her to tell me herself. Once.”

“No.”

“Not in person. Not like we are here, you and me. Just on the phone. Give her this card,” I said, slowly taking it out of the breast pocket of my jacket. “It’s got my phone number on it. She can call me anytime. Anytime at all.”

“And you won’t try to—?”

“I won’t try anything, Daisy. I promise.”

“Daisy!” The shout was a lot closer now.

“I have to—”

“I know,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m going to walk over that way,” pointing to where I’d stashed the car. “I’m leaving the card here, okay?”

I turned my back on her and moved off. She didn’t say anything, but I heard her crashing through the woods, in a hurry now.

On the drive back, I wondered why I hadn’t done what I’d told Daisy I could have—just waited in those dark woods last night and grabbed Rosebud when she showed.

Nothing came to me.

“Anything going on?” I asked.

“All quiet,” Mama said.

“Word’s still that I’m—”

“Yes. All same. You working? In that place?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

She made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a snort.

“It’s not a big job,” I assured her. “Won’t take much longer.”

“You need Max, maybe?”

“No. It’s not that kind of—”

“Yes. Okay. Fine.”

“What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong here. Very quiet, like I say, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Woman still with you?”

“I . . .”

“Woman say marry you, yes? But me, I say: must have permission. You remember, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Woman still with you?” she asked again.

“I think so.”

“Ah!” Mama said. “Better you come home.”

“I have to—”

“When job finish, come home.”

“We’ll see, Mama. I—”

The disconnect click cut me off. That’s how I felt: cut off. My family was still watching out for me. They’d even risked going back to my place for my few treasures. Like the pair of postage stamps that had been canceled inside Biafra during the tiny slice of time when it had functioned as a country. They’d been given to me one ugly night inside the war zone. By an old chief I’d shared the last of my freeze-dried food with. He had nothing else of value to give me, he said. And that, if I managed to survive, the stamps would always remind me of a country that had not.

They’d taken all of Pansy’s stuff, too. Not because I wanted it—I couldn’t even look at it—but because they’d never let the cops have anything that had been part of my heart.

That’s my family. That’s the kind of people they are.

And that’s why I couldn’t go back. Not yet.

“I think you’re right . . . about her still being around, close by,” I told Kevin the next day. “But all of that info’s secondhand at best. I can’t vouch for any of it. And I can’t tell you I’m any closer to her.”

“It’s been—”

“I know. I’ve been out there every day and every night. There’s . . . traces of her in a lot of places, but that’s all they are—traces, not trail-markers.”

“Do you think if you had more time . . . ?”

“This kind of work, you can go for months drawing blanks, then stumble over what you’re looking for. Or it could turn up in a few hours. I seeded the ground heavy and—”

“What does that mean, ‘seeded the ground’?”

“I’ve gone to a lot of places where Rosebud might have been, or where she might show up eventually. I talked to some people who might have seen her, might even know her . . . or that she might run into sooner or later if she’s out there. It’s a thick, deep forest she’s in, but it’s not a big one. The trails crisscross; the same people travel them. I left word. I planted some money, and I promised a lot more. The word’s out. Some have even come to me offering to sell, and—”

“You followed up, didn’t you? These people, they probably have no loyalty. For enough money, they’d—”

“The only following up I did was to offer hard cash for hard information. I don’t care what’s missing—a kilo, a kitten, or a kid—hustlers are going to crawl out from under rocks. I could spend a lot of your money on scams if I wasn’t careful. If any of them have the goods, they’ll have to deal straight up.”

“Why should they trust you?”

“Let’s say you had . . . uh, let’s say you had a photograph of your great-great-grandmother, okay? It’s the only one in existence; the only connection you have to your ancestors. You keep this photo in a nice frame in your living room. A junkie burglarizes your house, steals a bunch of the usual crap. And he snatches the photo, too.

“So you hire me to get the photo back. Say I find a middleman, someone who can deal with the junkie, all right? I’m willing to spend real coin for the photo, but only for that photo. What’s he going to do? It’s precious to you, but it isn’t worth squat to anyone else. He’s got no bargaining power.

“You understand what I’m telling you? Your daughter’s not worth anything to anybody but you. Nobody’s holding her prisoner. This doesn’t read like a snatch. Not even her cooperating with some boyfriend to hold you up for money . . . even though the odds favor it.”

“Why would you say something like that?”

“In kidnappings when the subject is more than twelve years old, about three-quarters of the perpetrators are known to the victim.”

“I never heard—”

“That’s the latest FBI breakdown,” I told him. “That’s why they collect criminal-justice data in America . . . so someone can get a grant to analyze it. Then they publish it. And write another proposal for more funding.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But, look, if it was like that, you would have gotten a ransom demand, way before now. So what’s that leave? She’s out there. Somewhere. People have seen her; they must have. Maybe someone even knows where she’s staying. That’s information. Information is worth money. But only to the person who wants it, like I explained.

“You with me? When it comes to info about Rosebud, I’m like you’d be with your great-great-grandmother’s photo—the only buyer in town. Whoever knows, they may not want to trust me, but what choice do they have?”

“I understand. But if you don’t stay on the case . . . ?”

“See this card?” I said, handing him one of the hundreds I’d spread all over town. “That number, it rings right here.” I tapped the cell phone’s holster. “I’m not disconnecting it. If it rings tonight, or tomorrow, or two weeks from now, I’ll answer it. You don’t need to keep me on the books just for that.”

“Do you have any other leads you could follow?”

“Leads? Sure. How good they are, I don’t have a clue. They may all be dead ends. Or out-and-out bullshit.”

“The authorities—”

“I talked to them, too,” I said. It was true enough; Gem’s boyfriend qualified. “They’ve got other things on their minds.”

“I don’t understand.” His complexion shifted. Just a touch, but I’d hit one of his trip wires.

I kept my face flat, said: “A major case they’re working. It’s got nothing to do with your daughter. But they’ve got a manpower shortage.”

“That’s what the cops always say,” he said bitterly. “It’s just a ploy to get more money. They’ve always got all the manpower they need when the media’s on their case.”

“Sure. Anyway, you can take this to the bank: they’re not working this one real hard.”

“I know.”

“If we had any reason to believe she was across a state line—”

“She’s not,” he said, too quickly.

“How do you know?”

“You have any children, Mr. Hazard?”

“No,” I said, wondering if his lawyer had told him different.

“Then I couldn’t explain it in any way you’d understand. I love my daughter. We’re . . . connected. And I know she’s close by.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have to be strictly the truth, would it? The Mann Act is something the feds take pretty seriously. . . .”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the old ‘white slavery’ law. Transporting someone across a state line for purposes of engaging in prostitution. They wouldn’t use it on a pimp driving his stable from Portland to Seattle; but if the girl was underage, or if she was taken against her will . . .”

“No.”

“Huh?”

“Buddy’s a very intelligent, very resourceful young woman. I don’t believe for a moment she was . . . taken like you’re talking about. In any event, you can’t just lie to the authorities. Sooner or later, they find out.”

“But if it puts more horsepower on the street, who cares?”

“No,” he said, again. “It’s not what I want to do. I don’t think it would be in Buddy’s best interests.”

“You’re the boss,” I lied.

“Can you stay with it?”

“I can. But . . .”

“I understand. I have a . . . I don’t know, a feeling. Call it a father’s instinct. I feel you’re going to find her. And bring her home. You must have some . . . things you haven’t tried yet.”

“Yeah. But if I go there, I’m going to need more from you.”

“More . . . what? Money?”

“In a way, yes. Not money you’d pay to me, but money you’d have on hand.”

“For a ransom? How much would I—?”

“Not for ransom. For bail.”

“You think Buddy may be in—?”

“No. Not her, me. If I . . . do some of the things I haven’t tried yet, I could get popped. I can’t stay in jail, understand. I’d need to be bailed out, and quick.”

“My lawyer . . .”

“Sure. He can get me in front of a judge fast, if he’s got the right connections. But I’d still need a bondsman. And he’d need to know the surety’s in place.”

“How much would I have to—?”

“I guess it’s ten percent here, same way it is everywhere else. So ten K for a bond is the same as a hundred K in cash.”

“If I put up a bond, you’d show up for court?”

“If they took me down for anything you could bond me out on, I would, sure.”

“All right. I’ll set it up with Toby.”

We shook hands on it, liar to liar.

“You know a woman who calls herself Ann O. Dyne?” I asked Hong that night.

“Is this your idea of trading?” he asked, leaning forward, watching me like a specimen.

“It could be. I don’t know yet.”

“From where I sit, it’s been a one-way street up to now.”

“You don’t like where you sit, get up and walk.”

“Is that the kind of talk that impresses Gem, tough guy?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never tried it on her.”

“Don’t,” he said, his voice crackling around the edges.

I lit a cigarette, left it to burn down in the ashtray, letting my eyes get lost in the smoke.

“What’s your interest in this Dyne woman?” he finally asked, his tone telling me he knew her. Or something about her, anyway.

“I don’t know if I have any . . . yet. See, I’m a stranger here. I’ve got no rep, and I’ve got no way of checking out anyone else’s. She said she might be able to help me with finding the kid I’m looking for. I don’t want to waste any time or energy on her if she doesn’t have the connects out there to maybe deliver, that’s all.”

“You spoke to her?”

“I did.”

“Describe her, then.”

“That’s not so easy to do. I’ve seen her look two different ages, right down to the outfits. She likes wigs, so she probably likes colored contacts, too. I’m guessing she’s somewhere in her thirties. White woman. A little under medium height. Extravagant build. Kind of an educated voice. Drives a black Subaru SvX. Spends a lot of time cruising the hooker strolls, but she’s not a working girl.”

“No,” Hong said. “She’s a missionary.”

“A . . . what? You mean like a Mormon?”

“Not that. It’s not about religion for her. She tries to pull girls out of The Life.”

“She must be a big favorite of the local pimps.”

“This is Portland, not Vegas. The average pimp here is just a boyfriend who’s too lazy to work. Don’t get me wrong—we’ve got some real beauties here, too. But I never heard of any of them getting physical with Ann.”

“Has she got her own protection?”

“I don’t know. There’s rumors about her, but—”

“What rumors?”

“That she deals in black-market drugs. She was arrested for possession, once. But the charge didn’t stick.”

“Aren’t all drugs black-market?”

“I’m not talking about smack or crystal, here. I mean drugs like AZT and Betaseron.”

“What kind of market could there be for that stuff? You can get it with a scrip.”

“Not that stuff, exactly. Like it. Experimental stuff.”

“For people with AIDS?”

“Or Parkinson’s, or brain cancer, or any one of a dozen different things. Drugs only available in Europe, drugs that the FDA hasn’t approved yet—if you’re dying, you don’t want to wait for the bureaucracy to catch up with your problem.”

“So why work the prostie strolls? How much money could you make there?”

“That’s what I mean about her being a missionary. There’s something else going on, but nobody’s real sure what it is.”

“Not a police priority, is that what you’re saying?”

“Why should it be?” he challenged. “Between Ecstasy and heroin, our children are being eaten alive. And crank is running wild all over the state. Never mind the rapes and robberies and murders. And the stolen cars, the burglaries, and the shootings. You’ve been in a war, right?”

I nodded. I didn’t like his certainty about that, but I liked the idea of asking him where it came from even less.

“Then you know what triage is. That’s what cops do. Not just here, everywhere. Malcolm was right: the squeaky hinge does get the oil.”

“You said this Ann girl, she spends a lot of time on the street, right?”

“I didn’t say that. You did. But it’s true, as far as we know.”

“You ever question her about the disappearing hookers?”

“Why? You think she—?”

“No. Whoever’s doing it, they have a partner. And she doesn’t seem to,” I said, not mentioning those moving shadows in her car.

“And you know that . . . how?”

“When the night-girl population is already spooked, there’s two ways to approach them. One is to pose as a cop, the way Bianchi did. The other is to come on as a couple, looking for a bi-girl to rent. Sometimes the female half of the team makes the approach alone, pulls the girl, and brings her back to where the guy’s waiting. Sometimes they work it together, depending on how well they can pass for yuppies out for some fun.”

“You think it’s a team?” he asked, looking interested for the first time since I’d sat down.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. It’s the only way they could have taken this many without being caught. The man drives, the woman gets out and makes the deal. Then the woman climbs in the back seat, lets the hooker in front. They’ve got her boxed then. No way out. It could be a gun, could be chloroform, could be a needle . . . there’s a hundred ways. Or, if the girl goes for the fake and comes back to their house, they play a little bondage . . . only the last rope goes around her neck.”

“We’ve been looking for a drifter,” he said quietly.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Respectfully, I think it’s a pair. And working close to home. Brady and Hindley did little kids that way years ago. Bernardo and Homolka worked the same thing, only with teenagers, up in Canada. All those maggots had something else in common, too.”

“What?”

“They made tapes. Brady and Hindley used audio; Bernardo and Homolka, video. But they all take trophies,” I told him, thinking about the word games the oh-so-sophisticated like to play with terms like “snuff films.” No question freaks film people being killed. But if they don’t make them “for commercial purposes,” they don’t qualify, so snuff films remain an “urban legend.” How cute and clever.

“And that’s important, why?” he asked.

“Because it means they’ve got a place to stash them. Not a furnished room or a cheap motel. Probably not even an apartment. A house, my best guess.”

“You think we release serial killers on parole here?”

“I think you do it all the time. You and every other prison system. Only, on the books, you’re not releasing a serial killer. It’s a rapist. Or a rapist that pleaded to burglary. You understand what I’m saying; don’t act like you don’t, Hong. You look close at some of the unsolved pattern-crimes, you’ll see they had a . . . break in the action. That was while the perp was Inside. But dropped for something besides the killings. He does his time. He’s a good inmate. And the Board cuts him loose. Am I wrong?”

“Angkat said you were—”

“Who?” I asked him, knowing the answer, but wanting to see what he said.

“That’s what I call Gem,” he said, eyes challenging me to keep driving down the same road I’d turned onto.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

When he saw I wasn’t going to say anything else, he picked up where he’d dropped it. “She said you were some kind of expert on these things.”

“These things?”

“Predators.”

“I know them,” I acknowledged.

“You know them? Or you know what they do?”

“Both.”

“You’re a criminologist?”

“About as much as you’re Chinese.”

“I’m half Chinese,” he said, seriously. “My mother is Samoan.”

“Exactly.”

“Where are you going, Mr. . . .?”

“Not where you are, pal. You didn’t forget my name. Not the one I gave you, anyway. And you know a lot more about me than you’re acting.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you and Gem—”

“We’re not—”

“Done. I know.”

“That isn’t what I was going to say. Our . . . whatever was between us, it’s not your business.”

“And my name, that’s not yours. But it didn’t stop you from asking around, right?”

“I didn’t need to ask around to know you’ve done time.”

“Sherlock’s got nothing on you, huh?”

“Relax,” he said, shifting his body posture to match his words. “That was just my way of saying that I think you know what you’re talking about.”

“No. It was your way of saying that you think you’re protecting Gem. Am I getting closer?”

“I don’t think I’m protecting her,” he said, his face tightening. “If anyone hurt her, it would be a mistake.”

“What are we having here, a fucking meaningful moment?” I sneered at him. “You telling me if I break your little girl’s heart you’ll beat me up or something?”

“Angkat’s heart is her own,” he said, softly, not playing around anymore. “I don’t know why you’re here, or what you’re doing. You say you’re looking for a runaway girl. Maybe you are. But I don’t see a man like you being a good Samaritan . . . even for money.”

“A ‘man like me,’ money’s what I work for.”

“So all this information—what you gave me, about the way the hookers could be disappearing, and all you’re promising—that’s for . . . ?”

“Barter. Like I said it was.”

“And what you want, what you want now, is whatever we have on this ‘Ann O. Dyne’ woman?”

“Yeah.”

“You already have it,” he said.

He stubbed out his cigarette and our conversation with the same gesture.

Back at the loft, there was no message from Gem. We hadn’t agreed on that, either. She’d wanted me to sign on to her computer so she could e-mail me. I don’t trust anything I don’t understand—and a lot of things I do—so I’d told her it wouldn’t work for me; she could just ring me on the cellular.

Gem said she didn’t like talking on cell phones: anyone could pluck the conversation out of the air. I told her I didn’t think e-mail was so fucking private, either. And, besides, she didn’t have to say anything that could cause a problem on the phone, right?

She didn’t answer me then. And hadn’t called.

Me, I hadn’t turned on that damn computer, either.

I fingered the poker-chip business card, wishing I had a tip sheet to consult before I placed the bet. Finally, I stuck it in my pocket. I took a look around the loft, decided I didn’t feel like sleeping, and went back into the street.

Nosing the Caddy around corners, I felt overwhelmed by what I didn’t know. I finally had the street grid down pretty good, but not much else.

Wherever I’ve gone, the games are always the same. That part’s easy. Knowing the players, that’s where the investment comes in.

I could feel the whisper-stream burbling out the twin exhaust pipes of the Caddy, building rumor as I trolled. If you work like an anthropologist, it might take you centuries to know a town. But if you profile heavy enough, the knowledge comes to you. Buried knowledge. If you want the full truth out of all the silt people pour over you, you’d better have a very fine strainer and a lot of patience.

Fringe-dwellers do a lot of business in strip clubs; something about the flashing flesh makes them feel safe. Or important. Some of the suckers can’t tell the difference. I’d known of girls younger than Rosebud turned out and siliconed up by club managers who kept them in bondage until they worked off the price of the implants, but I couldn’t see her going that route. I didn’t expect to find her in a biker bar, either. Or an after-hours joint. And a young girl on the Jesus-loves-you flophouse circuit would stick out like a truthful telemarketer.

You couldn’t even sell your blood so easy, anymore. Ask any derelict. The AIDS scare had dried up the market for untested blood and put the Dracula vans that once roamed every big city’s skid row out of business.

I let the Caddy have its head, my mind busy doing the math. If Rosebud wasn’t on the streets in Portland, she was either someplace else, or nowhere else. I’m a good bloodhound, but I’m no cadaver-dog—that dead drop had me convinced she was alive. And in Portland.

All right. In Portland, then. If she was surviving without working the streets in some way, there were two possibilities. Either she was shacked up—the best way, actually: agoraphobics don’t worry about Wanted posters—or culted up. Cults don’t let the new ones out during indoctrination.

I didn’t like either of those. My best reads on Rosebud came from her little sister, Daisy, and her friend Jenn. But even those who didn’t know her so well agreed that Rosebud was one strong-willed young lady. I couldn’t see her as either needy or dependent enough to go any of the stay-inside routes.

Besides, there’d been little flashes once in a while from my showing the picture around town. Clipper, the pool player’s manager, had the kind of face that didn’t give anything away. But he seemed like a guy who would pay his debts, and that line was still out, baited. Daisy hadn’t admitted getting letters from her sister, but she hadn’t denied it, and that fit for me.

Madison was kind of the same way. Maybe she had gotten a letter from Rosebud. Maybe Rosebud had reached out to Jenn after that first weekend. I thought I’d connected enough with Bobby Ray so he’d at least pass along my message if he saw her. Odom had eyes and ears out there, and he wanted to get paid.

My business card was sitting in after-hours joints, strip clubs, poolrooms . . . stuck to bulletin boards, sides of buildings, plastered on top of posters for musical acts. I even went Nike one better—kids were walking all around the city with rosebud: call b.b.! and my cell phone number stickered onto their backpacks and jackets. I paid five bucks a day for them to be walking billboards.

And then there was Ann.

What there wasn’t was any message from Gem when I returned . . . not home, I guess . . . to her place. I knew where she was. Where she said she was, anyway. I could have called. I guess I said that wrong. When I tried to, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t punch the damn numbers into the keypad, for some reason. I had every good excuse in the world to call her—Gem’s geek was handling whatever code-breaking was required for me to read what was on Kevin’s laptop. But I knew she would tell me the minute he was done.

I wondered if she’d tell me the minute we were.

I kept thinking about Hong.

And about going back home.

“If you’re looking for Ann, press ‘one,’ “ said the computer-chip voice.

I did that.

“Thank you. Your number is not one recognized by this system. After the tone, please say your name, then press ‘two.’ “

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard,” I told the machinery. And pressed the button.

“Thank you. Please wait while I connect your call.”

The music-on-hold was Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason.” I flashed on the poster on Rosebud’s wall, waiting.

“Where are you?”

“Ninth and Burnside,” I told her.

“I told you she’s not strolling.”

“You told me a lot of things,” I said.

“Fair enough. You know how to get to the river?”

“It’s a big river.”

“Don’t be cute. It doesn’t go with your looks. You got something to write with?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, take this down.” She gave me directions to a spot on the other side of the Fremont Bridge, in North Portland, between the river and the Albina Yard of the Union Pacific tracks. I didn’t know there was anything there other than empty space, but she said I’d find it easy enough.

Turned out to be a warehouse district, with an upscale bar positioned like a sentinel right where I turned off Interstate Avenue. There was no activity at the warehouses—I guessed they stopped running the trains after a certain time at night.

About five cross-streets down, I spotted one of those old silver Airstream trailers. It had one whole side open under a bright-yellow awning—looked like a food-concession booth at a carnival, only much longer. Over to one side, a bunch of cut-down fifty-five-gallon oil drums with the unmistakable rich smell of barbecue wafting off in all directions. Magic Sam’s “What Have I Done Wrong?” poured out of invisible speakers, like they were playing my walk-out music for a fight.

It looked like someone had raided the table-and-chairs section of a Goodwill warehouse and scattered the pickings all around the trailer at random: wood, plastic, and everything in between, all sizes and shapes. All they had in common was that nothing matched. Christmas lights were strung above, interspersed with blue bug-zappers. The whole scene looked like something you’d find any summer night on captured-for-the-moment vacant lots in cities from Detroit to Dallas. When a cook’s got a rep for real barbecue, there’s no need for a permanent location. That’s what they mean by a “following.”

The only discordant note was the cars. Instead of a bunch of bondo’ed American iron, they were all seriously high-end. I spotted at least three Rollers, a Ferrari F50, a half-dozen miscellaneous Porsches, a few limos, and a pimped-out gold Hummer—all as neatly parked as if a valet had handled the chore. There was even a huge black custom Featherlite motorcoach, slide-outs fully extended.

Ann’s Subaru looked like a poor relation . . . but not one you wanted to fuck with.

I stopped a couple of blocks away from the trailer, killed the engine. A Filipino with a high pompadour and a glistening white jacket materialized out of the dark. He didn’t look like anybody’s houseboy.

“Twenty to park here,” he said.

I handed him a bill.

“We park the cars,” he said.

“How do I find you when I want to leave?” I asked him.

“Just go anywhere near the cars, mister. One of us’ll find you in ten seconds.”

Meaning the twenty bucks wasn’t for parking, it was for protection. Fair enough. I climbed out of the Caddy. If the Filipino was sneering at my low-class ride, it didn’t reach his face. I didn’t see a bulge anywhere on his starched white jacket, but a knife doesn’t usually make one.

I walked over to the Airstream, waited my turn on line, ordered a pulled-pork sandwich with a side of coleslaw and the biggest lemonade they had. That swallowed the best part of another twenty.

I took my food and headed over to the sitting area. Spotted what looked like a discarded canasta table with folding legs surrounded by three ripped-cushion chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chairs. Took me only a second to realize that there was no wall to keep my back to, so I sat down and started to work on the sandwich. Didn’t surprise me at all when it turned out to be delicious.

Chicago kept coming to Portland through the speakers. Luther Allison’s “The Skies Are Crying.” Eddie Boyd’s “3rd Degree.” Susan Tedeschi’s “It Hurt So Bad.”

Just as I was beginning to regret I hadn’t ordered two sandwiches when I’d had the chance, she dropped into the chair right across from me. This time, she was a brunette, long hair piled on top of her head, held together by a purple scrunchie the same shade as her cotton pullover. The scrunchie was a nice touch, drawing the eye away from the wig.

“Israel makes the best barbecue in the world,” she said.

It was too dark to see her eyes, so I focused hard on the pale oval of her face, expecting some lame joke about Jews and pork . . . at best.

She caught my look and blew it off with, “He’s about a hundred years old. . . . Israel. Funny name for a black guy, huh? All anyone knows is that he’s from Cleveland. He sets up in different places all the time. Word gets out, people come from all over. Then he just disappears again.”

“Like you.”

“Just because you don’t know where to look doesn’t mean someone’s disappeared.”

“Back to that, huh?”

“Why else would you be here? It’s not me you’re interested in.”

“I’m interested in what you have. What you say you have.”

“You think because I like . . . outfits, I’m not for real?”

“This is all blah-blah. You know what ‘prove in’ means?”

“Sure. Do you?”

I leaned forward, looking for her eyes. “The way I figure it, I already have. I don’t know you. But you know me. Or, at least, enough about me to want to trade for something I’ve got. Or something you want me to do. If I’m wrong, just say so, and we’ll be done, right now.”

She didn’t say anything. I went back to my sandwich. Time passed. The night was full of sounds, none of them threatening. I washed the last little bit of perfect BBQ down with a hit of the tangy lemonade.

Still nothing from the woman. Maybe she was showing off her patience, the way she’d shown off other assets the first time we’d met. I wasn’t going to sit there and trade thousand-yard stares with her all night. I moved the white waxed paper my sandwich had come in to the side, folded the cardboard tray that had housed the coleslaw into an ashtray, and lit a cigarette.

“When this is gone, so am I,” I told her, taking a deep drag.

She took a breath. “Never mind the dramatics,” she said. “Come over to my car with me and I’ll tell you the deal.”

A different Filipino brought her Subaru around. She slipped him something; both of us got in. The dashboard and console for the floor shift were both covered in carbon fiber. I couldn’t see any surface that would reflect light . . . and wondered about that shadow I’d seen shifting in her car when I’d last dropped her off.

She drove a few hundred yards toward the river, found a big patch of gravel, parked. It was prairie-desolate out there; nothing but a few of the deserted-looking warehouses within a couple of hundred yards. No way for anyone to come up on us without being spotted. Another demonstration?

The woman hit a switch and both our side windows slid down. She turned off the ignition.

“This way, you can smoke.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What do you know about pain?” she asked softly.

“More than I want to,” I said, voice flat, deliberately distancing myself from where I thought she was headed.

“Other people’s pain.”

“That, too.”

“I hate it,” she said. Quietly, the way a nun talks when she tells you about getting the call.

“Pain?”

“Yes,” she said sharply, as if I had been sarcastic. “Pain. That’s what I am. A painkiller.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Listen, and you will. I’m not talking about headaches. Or arthritis, or . . .” She took a deep breath, let it out. Made sure she had my eyes. “I mean bone-deep, searing, unbearable pain. Like when cancer really gets a grip. When you’re near the end from AIDS. When . . . when you’d rather be dead than suffer every single minute. And you know what a lot of those people get? Speeches. ‘You make your own pain. It’s in your mind. Just take yourself to a peaceful place. . . .’ Or they get what someone else thinks is the right dose of drugs, as if pain were something you could measure in milligrams.”

“Or that they can’t have more dope, because they’ll turn into addicts,” I said.

“Yes! That’s the worst of all. Somebody’s dying, what possible difference could it make if they were a damn drug addict? That’s the legacy of Nancy-fucking-Reagan, a country where we’re so psycho about ‘drug addicts’ that we sentence millions to be tortured to death. Doctors are so freaked about the DEA, they won’t write the scrips. People are in absolute agony, and what they get is sanctimonious babbling about the ‘war on drugs.’ “

“Unless they’ve got money.”

“Sure. If you have enough money, you can get what you need. But how many people have enough money?”

“I don’t know. Can’t be many.”

“That’s right,” she said, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed rage. “Not many. Listen to this,” she said, pulling a long, thin white strip of paper from behind the sun visor. I could see it was covered with tiny words. She cleared her throat and switched to a schoolgirl’s recital voice:

“ ‘In treating the terminally ill patient the benefit of pain relief may outweigh the possibility of drug dependence. The chance of drug dependence is substantially reduced when the patient is placed on scheduled narcotic programs instead of ‘pain to relief of pain’ cycle typical of a PRN regimen.’ Do you understand that?” she challenged.

“Yeah, I think so. What they’re saying is, instead of giving you a shot when the pain gets too much to bear, they should be giving you regular doses all along, to keep it at bay.”

“Of course! Pain is the enemy. You have to get on top of it and stay on top of it. You don’t wait until it’s got its hands around your throat before you start to fight back. And if they dispense drugs the way it says here, the right way, there’s even less of a chance of making a goddamned ‘addict’ out of somebody who’s dying.”

“Where did you get that?”

“How about this?” she said, ignoring my question, and read aloud again: “ ‘During the first two to three days of effective pain relief, the patient may sleep for many hours. This can be misinterpreted as the effect of excessive analgesic dosing rather than the first sign of relief in a pain-exhausted patient.’ “

“What about it?”

“Oh? You understand that, too?” she challenged.

“Sure,” I said, “it’s not rocket science. You’re wasted from the pain. It eats you inside, so you can’t even sleep. You finally get a hit of something that knocks the pain back a few feet, you can sleep. So you do. Deep. And a lot. They don’t want some chump thinking you’re sleeping so long because what they gave you was an ‘overdose’ and cutting back on the painkillers, right?”

“Right,” she said, sounding tired. “You asked me where I got this. It’s right on the physician’s instructions for Sweet Roxanne.”

“Sweet . . . ?”

“Roxanol. Morphine sulfate. It’s about the best painkiller out there. Except for maybe methadone.”

“Methadone? I thought that was for—”

“Dope fiends? Sure. But, like all opiates, synthetic or not, its true purpose is to kill pain. That’s why it was developed—by the Third Reich, after their route to the poppy fields was cut off, and they couldn’t manufacture morphine.”

“So why don’t they just give methadone to the people with the worst pain?”

“Why?” she snarled, her voice so loaded with fury I thought it would shatter from the strain. “Because, see, it’s very difficult to detox from methadone. And we don’t want anyone to become a terrible ‘drug addict,’ now, do we?”

“What difference would it make if they were—?”

“Dying? None, obviously. Or even if they would die from the pain if they didn’t get regular relief from it. Stupid, mean-spirited, nasty little . . . The moralists don’t get it. The only way a painkiller can really get you high is if there’s no pain left to kill.”

“No physical pain,” I said, letting the words sit between us.

She gave me a long, searching look. “No physical pain,” she finally agreed.

She was quiet for a long time after that. Me, too. I knew there was more, and I needed to show her I could wait for whatever it was. I lit a cigarette, held it out the window, watched the smoke drift off into the night, went with it.

“Have you ever watched someone die?” she asked suddenly, snapping me back from where I’d drifted off to.

“Yeah,” I told her.

“Someone close to you?”

“Yes.”

“Take them long?”

“Not . . . not like you mean.”

“Is that so? How do I ‘mean,’ then?”

“You mean like from an illness.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“I don’t under—”

“I had friends go down slow, but not in front of me. I didn’t watch it. I didn’t even know about it until after it was over. I saw . . . In battle, I saw death.”

“But people close to you, you watched them go?”

“I said I did.”

“Can you imagine if it took—?”

“That’s enough,” I cut her off. “I can imagine anything. I don’t want to. It’s a cheap trick. You don’t need it. I’m already sold.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Just tell your story,” I said. I wasn’t going anywhere near watching Belle die. Or Pansy. Both from bullets they took for me. I still had their love. And wherever they were, they had proof of my love for them. In my vengeance.

“It’s not my story,” she said.

“Yeah, it is. No way you’re this . . . intense over some abstract principle. Besides, you dispense the stuff, right?”

“Yes,” she said, proudly. “That’s what I do. It’s no secret. But I’ve never been caught with the goods. Not enough to make it stick, anyway.”

“Maybe nobody’s all that interested.”

“Maybe nobody local. But the feds—that’s all they live for. Drugs. Sacred, holy drugs. Drug czars. Drug budgets. Drug squads. Drug forfeitures. Drug money—they all live on it.”

“Sure. We lost the bullshit ‘war on drugs’ a long time ago, and now we’re all POWs to it. But what’s any of this have to do with—?”

“They need it all,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Oxy-C, OxyContin; the Fentanyl patch; Vicodin . . . you name it.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“People in pain. Everybody knows someone who’s been there. A friend, a relative, a . . . loved one. It happens all over. But everybody it’s happening to, they think they’re the only ones.”

Like the Children of the Secret, I thought. Alone in their pain, they never know that it’s not anything in them that made it happen. Freaks made it happen. There’s freaks all over. And when you get down to the bone, where the truth is, one person’s pain is always about another person’s power.

“There’s no immunity from terminal pain,” Ann said. “And when people are going to cross over,” she said, “they deserve to go softly. That ghoul with his horrible suicide machine, he wouldn’t have any takers if people could get true pain relief.”

“And if Nancy had bone cancer, she wouldn’t worry about turning into an addict.”

“But you, you don’t care?”

“You know what I think about ‘care’? I think there’s only so much of it to go around inside everyone. The more different things you ‘care’ about, the less you can ‘care’ about any one of them, you see what I’m saying?”

“No.”

“The people who want to stop women from having abortions, that’s the only thing they ‘care’ about. But the people who want women to be able to have abortions, they ‘care’ about a whole lot of stuff—clean air, pure water, logging, cigarette smoking, racism, gun control, animal rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech—”

“I get it.”

“I don’t think you do. Fanatics always have more impact than dabblers. When it comes to getting something done, whether it’s breaking a brick with your hand or overthrowing a government, focus is the best weapon of all. People on a jihad are willing to do things most people aren’t, see?”

“Yes, I see. I don’t apologize for what I am. So what’s your point?”

“My point is that I’m sorry about people dying in pain. But it isn’t the thing I care most about in the world.”

“And that would be . . . ?”

“My family.”

“And if one of your family was dying in pain?”

“I’d get them the drugs,” I told her. “No matter what I had to do. Or who I had to do it to.”

She went quiet again. I waited, again. Time passed.

“So, if someone in your family needed them, how would you get the drugs?” she finally asked.

“Buy them. Everything’s for sale, if you know where to look.”

“And you do?”

“For heroin? Who doesn’t?”

“Not heroin. The stuff I told you about.”

“They keep it in hospitals. People work in hospitals.”

“You have no idea how strict the—”

“It just means it would cost more, that’s all. If you can get drugs in prison—and, believe me, you can—you can get them anywhere.”

“And if, just let’s say, nobody would sell you any . . .”

“It wouldn’t stop me.”

“You’d steal them, then?”

“For my family? If any of them needed a heart, I’d get them one, never mind some damn pills.”

“That sounds good.”

“I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You asked me a question; I answered you.”

“Yeah. You did. Some people say you were a mercenary.”

“Some people say Elvis lost weight recently.”

She went quiet again. I went back to where I’d been.

“How bad do you want that girl?” She broke the silence. “The one you’ve been looking for.”

“Bad enough to finance a suitcase of the stuff you want so bad.”

“Not enough.”

“There’s a budget,” I said. “And it’s got a ceiling.”

“Not cash,” she said softly. “A trade.”

“I don’t have any drugs. And you don’t have the girl.”

“You can help me get drugs. And I can help you get the girl.”

“You said that before.”

“I know I did. I was telling you the truth. Some of it, anyway.”

“Sure. Okay, turn her up and we’ll talk.”

“I don’t think so. But I will show you enough to make you believe me.”

“Look, I already told you about ‘caring.’ Don’t knock yourself out trying to make a believer out of me.”

“You don’t have to believe anything. Just tell me what you have so far—whatever you’re willing to, that is. I can work from nothing . . . or nearly nothing . . . but it would go a lot faster if you’d . . .”

“Here’s what I know,” I said. And gave her an edited version of the truth.

She listened carefully, nodding her head at various points, but not taking any notes. When I was done, she said, “I’m going to take you back now. Tomorrow, be around. It doesn’t matter where. Three o’clock. Call me. I’ll pick you up. And take you a lot closer to the girl than you’ve been since you started, see if I don’t.”

When I let myself back into the loft, Gem was there.

“Were you successful?” she greeted me, as if I’d been out trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door.

“I might have gotten closer. Or I might be getting hustled. I can’t be sure yet.”

“How have you eaten?”

“Fine.”

“Yes? Very well, then.”

She approached me. Tentatively, as if not sure of her reception. As I stepped to meet her, I could see her eyes were closed. I kissed her lips, lightly. Her arms went around my neck.

“I was afraid,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“That you would be gone.”

“It’s not that dangerous a—”

“Not dead. Gone. Gone away from me.”

“I—”

“I know you will go. I was afraid you would just . . . vanish. Without saying anything to me.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

She stepped back slightly, her hands still clasped behind my neck. “Yes you would. If you thought it was . . . if you . . . if it made sense to you, that is what you would do.”

“Why would it make—?”

“Stop it, Burke. You are not a good dancer. Come back into the bedroom with me. I want to show you something I bought.”

It turned out to be a simple ottoman, just a solid rectangular lump of black leather with some kind of pattern in red on its top.

“What is it? An antique?” I asked her.

“It is old, but that is not its beauty. You do not like it?”

“I don’t dislike it or anything. It doesn’t race my motor, that’s all.”

“Be patient,” she said, tugging her jeans down over her hips. When she was nude, she positioned herself over the ottoman on her hands and knees.

“Walk around it,” she said, throatily. “Look at it from all angles. Perhaps you will appreciate what I have brought you then.”

I never made the complete circuit.

“Are Flacco and Gordo back, too?” I asked her the next morning.

“Sí,” she said, mockingly.

“What’s that all about?”

“They speak better English than you do.” She chuckled. “I don’t know why men play those games. Machismo. It sounds so much stronger in Spanish, yes?”

“Hey, I’m not the one who tries to speak Spanish, miss. I tried that once—it almost cost me my life.”

“Truly?”

“Oh yeah. Square business.”

“Tell me?” Gem play-begged, kneeling next to where I was sitting.

“You want to hear about how stupid I was?”

“Oh yes!” she said, smiling.

I leaned back in the chair, tangling my hand in her long black hair. “You know I was in the war in Biafra . . . ?”

“Of course.”

“Well, by the time I showed up, the rebels were pretty much surrounded. They’d lost their only seaport, and very little food was getting in. There were only two routes for it: overland through Gabon, or by night flight from São Tomé, a little Portuguese colony island just off the coast.

“The island was like any small town. Only smaller. They didn’t get tourists. There wasn’t but one reason to be there: every visitor was there for the war.”

Gem shifted position slightly, just to let me know she was paying close attention.

“I was trying to make my connections to catch a ride on one of the merc planes, figuring out who to approach,” I went on. “So I spent a lot of time just hanging out. Anyway, in this bar, I met a guy . . . Evaristo, I remember his name was. He was being friendly, showed me how the nut-bowl trick worked. . . .”

“What was that?”

“When you bought a drink, the guy behind the stick would ask if you wanted the ‘nuts.’ He said it in English, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I always passed. This ‘bar,’ it was right on the beach. White sand, so pure it looked new. The place was made out of wood, and it was left open on one side. No doors, no windows, no wall, no nothing. When they closed, I guess they just took the stock home with them.

“One day, Evaristo is in there with me when the bartender asks me about the nuts. Evaristo nods his head at me, like he was saying, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ So I did. The bartender hands me a covered wooden bowl full of . . . well, nuts, I guess. And seeds, and all kinds of things I wasn’t going to put in my mouth. Evaristo, he grabs the bowl, closes the cover, and shakes it. Sounded like the way a dried gourd rattles, you know?

“In two minutes, the place was full of birds. Amazing birds, like I’d never seen in my life. I guess they were parrots of some kind. Huge things. Colors I never even knew existed. Evaristo opened the bowl, scattered the nuts all over this wooden plank they used as a bar. The birds hopped up there like they were used to it. I mean, they were close enough for me to touch, and it didn’t bother them at all. I’d never imagined such fabulous things, and there they were, right on top of me.

“I was just a kid then. Nineteen. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. I bought Evaristo a drink, to thank him and all. And we got to talking. It wasn’t a whole lot of talking, because he didn’t speak much English. I knew the island was under Portuguese control, but it sure sounded like Spanish to me. Evaristo, he showed me a picture of his wife. ‘¿Muy blanco, eh?’ he says. I tell him, yeah, she sure is.

“He smiles, and I figure I got enough street Spanish to get by; maybe we could talk. Like I said, I was a kid.

“After that, I saw him all the time. He drove a taxi, but I couldn’t see where he had much business.

“This was when Portugal was still a major colonial power in Angola . . . and having trouble holding on. That’s why they were big players in Biafra—pretty hard to fly bombers from Lisbon all the way down to southern Africa. If the rebels had won in Nigeria, the Portuguese who backed them would have had themselves a perfect launching pad.

“But São Tomé itself was unstable. I kept hearing talk about some ‘independence movement,’ but I never actually saw any signs of one . . . not even so much as a piece of graffiti.

“One day, we’re in the bar, talking, and Evaristo points to me, says ‘Biafra?’ And I think, Here’s my chance to make a plane connect, so I tell him, ‘sí,’ like I’m a real native. Then he goes, ‘¿Soldado?’ and I say, ‘No.’ He tries ‘Jornalista?’ and I shake my head again. Then he moves me up the ladder even more. ‘¿Médico?’ But I have to shrug him off again.

“He makes a ‘What, then?’ gesture. I figure now’s the time to tell him I’m on this humanitarian mission, so I try to figure out what the word for ‘social worker’ would be . . . and I come up with ‘socialista.’ ”

“Burke! You didn’t!”

“Yeah, I did. And Evaristo, all the blood goes out of his face. He looks around, makes a ‘Shut the fuck up!’ gesture at me.

“I didn’t think anything of it until a few hours later, back in my room. When I heard the slides being racked.”

“Slides?”

“On the machine guns.”

“Oh!” Gem gasped, like it was the most terrifying thing she’d ever heard in her life. Women.

“La polícia wanted to talk to me,” I told her. “I guess I fit the Outside Agitator profile.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I couldn’t speak Portuguese. And, after that, I wasn’t about to try. After a couple of hours, they took me to a priest. He translated. Or maybe he didn’t. I never knew what he told them, but, finally, they left.

“The padre told me I better do the same. Right then. Don’t go back to my room, don’t do anything. Just get to the airstrip and catch the first thing smoking.”

“You did that?”

“Yep. Evaristo, he was waiting outside, with the motor running. The plane was on the strip, propellers already spinning. The back was open. I just jumped on, like hopping a freight. One of the mercs looked me over, asked me, was I from the Company? I said I was, and that was it.”

“You were so lucky,” Gem said, her palms together in a prayerful gesture.

“More than I even knew at the time, honeygirl. They made two runs every night. The late run was the best—darker, less chance of getting hit by enemy fire going in. But I didn’t have any choice. The one I took was the early run.”

“Why was that so—?”

“That night, the late run went down.”

“Ah,” she said, accepting. That was the real Gem. A child who had developed fatalism to keep the fear from stopping her little heart. Grown now. But with the same core.

“I have to meet someone,” I told Gem later.

“On your case?”

“Supposedly. I’ve been digging—well, maybe not digging, little girl, scratching around the edges, more like—for a while now, and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot I found that I’d take to the bank.”

“You believe she is here, though?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Because . . . ?”

“She’s in touch with her little sister. Leaves her notes.”

“She could be using a—”

“Sure. And if she is going through a cutout, I’ve got a candidate for that, too,” I told her, seeing Jenn’s calm, strong face in my mind. “But, the big thing, I’m sure she’s alive.”

“You had doubts, then?”

“Sure. The streets eat their young. Vampires at one end, vultures at the other. And I thought maybe her father . . .”

“What?”

“That he killed her. And hired me as a red herring for the cops. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he believes she’s out there. Close. He’s been feeling me out.”

“For . . . ?”

“He’s just touching the edges. Nothing that would incriminate him even if I was wired,” I said, flashing on the elaborate phone-recording system in his private den. “But he’s real interested in my capacity for . . . violence.”

“Some wealthy people seem to be excited by such things.”

“I know. It doesn’t feel like that to me. Ah, maybe a little bit . . . But I think he’s really asking if I’d cap his daughter, if it comes to that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, miss. It’s almost as if he wants the option, you know? A ‘just in case’ kind of thing.”

Gem got up and stalked over to the kitchen table, her movements agitated. “Burke, this is not a good thing for you to do.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You are not known here. Not truly known. But, on the streets now, it is getting around. You are a man for hire. You are looking for this girl. If she turns up dead, your true identity would quickly become known. And once the police learn of your . . . background, it would be bad. Very bad.”

“Detective Hong tell you that?”

“What?” she snapped, her voice sharp. “Is that your interest, then? Not what I know, but how I know it?”

“Not mine,” I lied. “But this ‘man for hire’ stuff on the streets . . . you didn’t pick that up. These streets, they’re not your territory. So I figured maybe your—”

“My what?” She chopped off my sentence. “My . . . boyfriend? My secret lover? Is that what you really want to know?”

“That’s your business,” I told her.

Gem turned her back and walked out of the room, not a trace of wiggle in her hips.

I went out to meet Ann.

I called her from the car, went through the voice-mail routine, got her on the line. She told me where to park.

Ten minutes after I pulled in, the Subaru rolled up. It sat next to the Caddy, idling. I couldn’t see into the car: the window glass was too heavily tinted.

As if reading my thoughts, the passenger-side window whispered down. Ann was in the driver’s seat. She made a “Come on!” gesture.

I climbed into the Subaru’s bucket seat and we moved off.

I didn’t ask where we were going. It turned out to be a black-windowed storefront on a narrow side street. It looked like a porno outlet that hadn’t gotten around to painting the “XXX” on the windows yet. When I followed Ann inside, I saw that the place was actually a triple-wide, extending out on either side into what looked like a blank wall from the street. It was a used-book store of some kind, with floor-to-ceiling shelves made up out of whatever some after-hours scavenger had found lying around on a construction site.

And it was full of kids. All kinds of kids, dressed all kinds of ways. A boy who looked about eighteen, and straight off a farm in Iowa, stood next to a girl whose age I couldn’t guess under all the Goth makeup. If they even noticed each other, they gave no sign. Cheerleaders mingled with the multi-pierced. If there was a shade of human color not represented, it was one I’d never seen. Some of the kids pawed through stacks of books, others sat in battered chairs or flopped down on the floor. Nobody was smoking, or drinking coffee.

In a far corner, a pale, skinny young guy with long hair was bent all the way over a battered twelve-string, strumming so softly I couldn’t pick up the notes.

I was scanning for Rosebud, focusing hard on each girl’s face, putting it on the left-hand side of the screen in my head, comparing it with Rosebud’s photo on the right. I had gone through about a dozen when I felt Ann pulling on my coat sleeve.

I followed her lead . . . over to where a heavyset mixed-blood Indian woman in a red caftan sat behind a counter.

“Hello, Choma,” Ann said to her.

“Ann,” the woman said back. I could see the shutters open and close in her black camera eyes.

“This is a friend of mine. B. B. Hazard.”

“Yes?”

“He’s looking for Borderland.”

“We don’t use the Dewey Decimal System here.”

“I know,” Ann said patiently. “That’s why I brought my friend over to ask you.”

“Does he speak?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I was trying to be polite.”

“What does a hunter want with a book?” she asked.

I didn’t waste time denying what she already knew. “There might be something in it of value to me.”

“Might be?”

“I didn’t know Borderland was a book. Not until a few seconds ago.”

“Ah. It is an expression you heard?”

“Yes.”

“So it is you who made the connection?” the Indian woman asked, head swiveling to Ann.

“It’s no secret,” Ann said, shrugging.

“Not to some. It was to him,” the woman said.

“He is not a danger to any of your—”

“He is a hunter.”

“I do other things,” I said gently.

“Yes. I am certain you do. I was saying not what you do, only what you are.”

I bowed slightly, the way Mama taught me a million years ago. Done properly, the gesture crosses cultures, conveying respect without submission.

She focused hard on my good eye. Finally, she nodded, said: “Ask Berto. . . . Ann knows him, he’s right over there. Ask Berto where he’s got the Charles de Lint books.”

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my face blank as the synapses fired in my mind, looking for the connection. Crow girls? Was that it?

The Indian woman gave me a look that said, “You better be telling me the truth,” and turned away just enough to be a dismissal.

Berto turned out to be a Latino kid—I guessed Panama, but it was a guess—maybe sixteen years old. As soon as Ann said “Borderland” to him, he led us over to a whole wall of paperbacks, and deftly plucked a copy of Life on the Border from a high shelf. It showed a young man and a girl dressed in a combination of street gear and club clothes, leaning against a telephone pole in front of an ancient Cadillac sedan with a taxi light on top and bullet scars all over its doors. It said the author was Terri Windling, and I was beginning to think the kid had confused the title when I saw Charles de Lint’s name up top, next to the title.

“How much?” I asked the kid.

He gave Ann a glance, his eyebrows raised in a question.

“Give him twenty,” she said to me.

I did it. The kid didn’t offer me a courtesy shopping bag. Or a receipt.

“Is that a rare-book store?” I asked Ann, examining my prize on the front seat of her Subaru.

“Not especially. They have some hard-to-get stuff there, but it’s not exactly antiquarian.”

“This one cost five bucks new. And it’s ten years old.”

“What’s your point?”

“Twenty bucks seemed a little steep.”

“They work on a sliding scale there. Kids pay whatever they can afford, like on the honor system. When . . . someone your age comes in, they try to get whatever the traffic will bear.”

“And that keeps . . . people my age out of there for the most part.”

“That, too,” she said, smiling. “Is the book going to help you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“All right. You know where to find me.”

“That’s it? That’s all you got?”

“No, Mr. . . . Hazard, that’s what you call yourself, yes? . . . I’ve got a lot more. But you might as well see what this is worth first.”

“Fair enough. Whatever’s in this book, it might give me a clue or two, but it isn’t worth—”

“Here you are,” she said, as she slid the Subaru alongside where I’d left my car. “Things don’t have ‘worth.’ That’s a nonsense concept. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. You think a hit of street heroin is ‘worth’ what they’re getting for it?”

“That again.”

“Yes. That again. I told you—”

“Thanks for the book,” I interrupted. “I’ll let you know.”

As I was climbing out of the car, she said, “Madison might be a lot more willing to talk to you if she thought you and I were working together . . . ,” letting the words trail out behind her as she pulled away.

“What is that you are reading?” Gem asked me that night.

I held up the paperback so she could see the cover. “It’s a book about kids. Runaways. And this place called Bordertown that they all run to. It’s a place that runs on music and magic.”

“A fantasy?”

“More like a fable. About the kind of community kids wanted to build in the Haight-Ashbury days. Maybe the kind of community they saw in their heads if they dropped enough acid, I don’t know. It’s not one of those post-apocalyptic jobs—this is kind of a parallel universe. I mean, this Borderland, it’s not perfect. There’s a kind of racism—or species-ism, maybe—there’s two different species, and a third that comes from mixing. People have to have jobs or they have to scrounge. There’s a goods-and-services economy, just like here. But the kids are building something out of their own needs. Something real different from what’s out here for them now.”

“Why is this important?” Gem had been a child in a place where dreams kill as surely as bullets, only with a lot more pain.

“The note . . . the one Rosebud left. It said she was going to find ‘the Borderlands.’ Not Bordertown, like in this book. And not Borderland, singular. It says here there was a book of that title, by these same people. I think it means she’s looking for this kind of life. And there’s another connect, too. The crow girls . . . in that picture on her wall . . . they’re from a Charles de Lint book. And Charles de Lint, he’s one of the writers—I guess maybe one of the architects—of this Borderland thing. At first I thought the crow girls were supposed to be Rosebud and Daisy, but after I read it a couple of times, I don’t think so.”

Gem let her impassive face ask the question for her.

“The crow girls are . . . contemporaries. Not just sisters. They’re about the same age. Different personalities, but . . . a lot alike.”

“Who do you think the other one is, then?”

“I’m going to try and find out. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Your daughter lent me a book,” I told the psychologist on the phone that night. “I’d like to come by and return it.”

“You mean you want to talk with her again.”

“Yes, sir.”

He covered the mouthpiece with his hand, but I could still hear him yelling for his daughter. A few minutes passed. No music-on-hold.

“It’s too late tonight,” he said when he got back on. “Come tomorrow. Seven-thirty.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Hazard?”

“Yes?”

“Come alone.”

“Sure.”

“Alone,” he repeated. “That means by yourself. Unarmed. With no recording devices. Do you understand?”

“Completely.”

He hung up on me.

“You know what would be exciting?” Gem whispered to me around midnight.

“What?”

“To suck your cock while you read those books.”

“Why would that be so—?”

“Just read your books,” she said softly. “Keep reading them.”

I showered and shaved, put on a chambray shirt with a plain black knit tie under a cream-colored leather jacket. Looked at myself in the mirror and realized it was all for nothing—dressing me up was like tying a red ribbon around the handle of an ice pick.

As soon as I pulled into their driveway, I stashed the Beretta and its holster under the front seat. I even unclipped my carbon-black Böker sleeve-knife and left it on the dash.

The father-and-son tag team greeted me at the door. The father’s gaze was professionally flat. The son was having a little trouble with hostility management.

“Thank you for having me,” I said formally.

“You’re not a guest,” the kid said.

“Michael . . .” his father muttered, moving his arm to the side to show me where he wanted me to go.

We all sat down. “We’re not a family with secrets,” the man said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re a family without privacy. Do you understand?”

“I . . . think so. Whatever I say to Jennifer, it’s between her and me?”

“Up to a point,” he warned. “I promise you, Jenn’s a very smart young woman. She doesn’t have to tell me anything, but she’s free to, got it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll get her,” he said, getting up.

“You play ball?” I asked the son, looking for an opening.

“You mean like football?”

“No. I mean . . . you look like an athlete to me; I was just making conversation.”

“You didn’t come here to talk to me.”

“Not specifically. But you seem to have some . . . negative feelings about me. And I thought, if we talked, maybe I could find out why.”

“So why didn’t you just ask me, straight out?”

“Because I’m an idiot,” I told him. “I should have seen you’re the kind of man that appreciates a direct approach.”

A grin flashed across his face. “My dad’s an athlete,” he said. “He was a wrestler.”

“He looks it.”

“Yeah. Now he plays basketball to keep in shape. From what the guys he plays with say, though, he’s still a wrestler.”

I chuckled at that, envious of the man who had such a son.

“Michael mention soccer to you?” his father said, coming back into the room.

“Not a word. You play that, too?”

“Me? Huh! Michael’s all-state. Striker. Tournament MVP in the—”

“Pop!” the kid protested.

“He’s got about a hundred scholarship offers,” his sister added, beaming at him.

“Aaargh!” the kid grunted, his face flaming.

Father and daughter sat down together. My envy went up another notch.

“Dad says you want to talk to me?” Jennifer said.

“That, and to return the book you lent me.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking the book I handed her. “Well?”

“I thought you’d rather . . .”

“I want my father to be here, this time,” she said firmly.

Michael shifted his stance, making it clear I’d have to deal with all of them.

“Sure,” I said. “Jennifer, I’m trying to figure this out. Rosa left her home for some reason. Some good reason, I’m thinking. She didn’t go far. She’s close by. And in touch, too.”

Two spots of color appeared in Jennifer’s cheeks.

“I don’t think you know all the answers,” I went on smoothly, “but I think you know some of them.”

“Let’s say I do,” she said, her mouth a straight line. “Why would I trust you with such . . . information?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I told her. “To try and convince you. I think I already did . . . a little bit anyway . . . or you would never have lent me that book.”

“I . . .”

“Or was it a test? To see if I could make anything out of it?”

“Not a . . . test. But I did want to see if you were really interested.”

“In finding Rosa?”

“No. In Rosa. In Rosa herself. As a person. Not just a job her . . . father gave you.”

“You don’t trust her father?”

She was silent for a few seconds. Then her brother came out with, “That’s right, we don’t.”

I watched a look pass between the two of them, tapped into the current, saw it for what it was. The kid didn’t give a rat’s ass about Rosebud’s father and knew even less—he was just backing up his sister.

“You think because her father is paying me—”

“Would you be looking for her if he wasn’t?” Jenn asked, rhetorically.

“No. I wouldn’t have known anything about any of this,” I said. “But now, after all this poking around, now I would, yes. And I meant what I said, Jennifer. I’m not dragging her back home, period. I just want to talk to her, listen to what she has to say. If she doesn’t want to go back, I’m not going to make her.”

The girl turned, looked at her father, said, “Dad?” He took the handoff as smooth as if they’d practiced the trick for years.

“If Rose’s father’s intentions are so legitimate, why go to a man like you?”

“Like me?”

“What word didn’t you understand, Mr. . . . Hazard? There are plenty of PIs in this town.”

“I’m employed by his lawyer, Toby—”

“Right. I’m not saying what you’re doing is illegal. But why would Kevin go off the books?”

“He tried a PI firm. They didn’t get anywhere.”

“Maybe because of what they weren’t willing to do.”

“Maybe,” I said, shrugging. “Who’s your problem with, here?”

“You,” Michael threw in, his face tightening like he was going to make a move. “You’re bothering my sister, and—”

“And we’re dealing with it, Michael,” his father said, gently. “Nobody is going to bother Jenn, okay?”

The kid nodded, not entirely convinced.

“Here’s the problem,” the father said. “I don’t know you. I doubt Kevin knows you.”

“He doesn’t,” I said. Thinking this guy wouldn’t make the same mistakes an amateur like Kevin would, judge by appearances. I knew a guy in prison once. Ferret-faced, with a weak, trembly chin, and watery, frightened eyes. He was a stone life-taker. And I had the strong sense that Joel knew the same truths I did.

“So . . . what’s your word worth?” he asked. “That’s what it comes down to, you understand that?”

“I do.”

“And . . . ?”

“I haven’t got any references. None that would mean anything to you.”

“Try me.”

“I can’t do that, either.”

His pale eyes took my pulse. “Tell us what you can,” he finally said.

“I’ve been to prison,” I said. “But I always went in alone. Where I live, your word is your life. Good or bad. If you promise to do something . . . anything . . . you have to do it. Otherwise, your protection’s gone.”

“I don’t understand that,” the girl said.

“He means if you threaten someone you have to make good on the threat,” her father said.

I nodded to show he had it right. “That’s one side of it, sure. Not the only one. But . . . all right, here it is. I’ve done all kinds of things in my life. Some I think you’d approve of, others I know you wouldn’t. That’s okay, I don’t expect you to be my friends. Here’s what I never did: I never went out to hurt a kid. Or use one. Or turn one up for people who wanted to do any of that.”

“Is that because—?” Jenn started to say.

“Yes,” I cut her off. I didn’t want the empathetic pain that had suddenly flashed in her deep, dark eyes. “I was a runaway myself when I was a kid. Much younger than Rosa is now. More than once. And I would have rather died than go back to where I ran from. I give you my word that I will never bring her back if she doesn’t want to go.”

“I don’t know how to tell,” Jennifer said, honesty and fear mingling in her voice.

“I do,” her father said. “But I also believe in insurance. And I think it’s time to take you up on your earlier offer, Mr. . . . Hazard.” He turned to his son, “Michael, would you get me that little hand mirror your mother has on her dresser, please?”

After I’d rolled my thumbprint onto the freshly Windexed mirror, the father said, “Ask your questions.”

I nodded my agreement to the deal we’d never spoken out loud—he wasn’t going to show the thumbprint to anyone in law enforcement unless I broke my word. Turning to Jennifer, I asked, “Which one are you, Maida or Zia?”

“Oh!” Her blush turned her beautiful face into a work of art.

I waited, patiently, deliberately not pinning her with my eyes.

“Zia,” she finally said. “I thought you’d think . . .”

“That it was she and Daisy, yes?”

“Yes. They’re so close, those two. But . . . I should have known. Daisy is very . . . grown-up for her age, I think. But Rosa’s her big sister, you know?”

“Yes.”

“I knew she was going to run,” Jennifer admitted.

I stole a glance at her father. If he was surprised at the revelation, I wouldn’t want to play poker with him.

“And it’s you who plants the letters for Daisy?” I asked her.

“Yes. But Rosa plants them for me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I don’t see Rosa. She calls, she tells me where there’s a letter. I pick it up, and I leave it for Daisy.”

“You haven’t seen Rosa since she split?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you why she left, Jennifer?”

“Do you know about Borderland?”

“Just what I read.”

“That’s all any of us know.”

“So the note, the one Rosa left, it was legitimate?”

“I don’t know about any—”

“It said she was going to find the Borderlands.”

“Oh. Yes, that was what she said to me, too.”

“Jennifer, do you have any way to leave a note for her?”

“No. No, I don’t. I asked her . . . but she said it was too risky.”

“But she does call you, right?”

“Yes. When she wants me to—”

“Okay. I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Something that could work, and ease your own minds about me. How about if you ask her to meet with me, wherever she wants, but you and your father come along?”

“What about me?” Michael said, belligerence all over his voice.

“Oh, Michael, she doesn’t know you,” Jennifer told him.

“Not for her,” the kid explained patiently. “For him,” he said, pointing a finger at me.

“We’re not there yet,” his father cautioned.

“I’m . . . scared for Rosa,” Jennifer said.

“Because . . . ?” I tried to lead her.

“Because this wasn’t supposed to last so long. If you know about . . . Borderland, you know it isn’t an actual place. It’s more like a . . .” She groped with it for a few seconds, then said, “. . . collective state of mind.”

Her father beamed at her.

“That means more than one person, right, Jennifer?”

“I’m not sure I understand. . . .”

“A collective state of mind. Rosa, she’d have to find others who felt the same way she did, to make that work.”

“Yes,” the girl said, more confident now. “She said she knew they were out there. I think she had an idea where she’d be going. Not to any one place, exactly. Or even with particular people. But . . . kind of where she’d find them, do you see?”

“I think so,” I told her. “You said this was making you scared . . . ?”

“Rosa wasn’t looking for a place. Or even for people. She was looking for some answers.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said, her voice too full of truth to doubt. “She would never talk about it. But it was something big. Something very important.”

“She wasn’t . . . pregnant, maybe?” I asked, taking a stab.

“No,” she said, almost snorting the word.

“You’d know?” I probed gently.

“Yes. I would know. Maida and Zia, just like you said. She told me everything. Except . . .”

Another hour’s conversation didn’t get me any closer. The father walked me out to my car. “What’s your take on Kevin?” he asked me, way too casual.

“I don’t know the words you do,” I said, stalling.

“I get the impression that you do. But say it however you want.”

“He’s a wrong number. A fucking three-dollar bill.”

“What makes you—?”

“Just instinct.”

He gave me a long, slow look. “I don’t think so,” he said.

I shrugged.

He shifted his weight, rolled his shoulders slightly, like he was getting ready to try a standing takedown. But he didn’t say anything.

My move. “If you didn’t think so, you wouldn’t let your daughter talk to me,” I told him.

Then it was his turn to shrug. After a few seconds, a grin popped out on his face. “Jenn knows what she’s doing.”

“And she doesn’t trust—”

“Don’t go there,” he warned. “You’ve got your reasons. I’ve got mine. I’d like to protect Rose, but my own is where I draw the line, you with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s be sure,” he said, softly. “I like Rose. I really do. But I’d cut her loose in a second if I thought she was going to cause harm to Jenn.”

“I get it.”

“And you,” he said, moving very close to me, “if I thought you were going to hurt my child . . .”

I had a little information, a few possible promises . . . and not much else. My watch said it wasn’t even eleven. I didn’t want to go back to Gem’s. Didn’t feel like patrolling, either. Wherever Rosebud was, she wasn’t on the street—by then, I was pretty sure of that.

I decided to go see if Hong was at the joint where he hung out. Maybe he knew something about Ann he hadn’t told me.

Gem had pointed out Hong’s car the first time we’d met: a candy-apple Acura, slammed, with big tires and checkerboard graphics along the flanks. It was sitting in the parking lot.

I went through the door, poked my nose around the corner, spotted him in his booth. A girl was with him. They were sitting close together, side by side. Gem.

“You were asleep when I got in last night,” Gem said the next morning. “I was surprised—usually you are out so late. I did not want to wake you.”

“Thanks.”

“We must go away again. Soon.”

I knew she didn’t mean me. Gem, Flacco, and Gordo, they were professional border-crossers. I don’t know what they ran, but I know they were good at it. I met them through Mama. She didn’t know them personally, but an old friend, a Cambodian woman who ran a network similar to hers, had vouched heavy, her own rep on the line.

“All right,” is all I said.

“Before we leave, I will try to get you the information you want.”

“About Rosebud?” I asked her, surprised.

“No. But the . . . person who gave you the equipment to get into her father’s computer, he should have results for me soon.”

“Ah.”

“You do not sound enthusiastic, Burke.”

“It was a long shot.”

“What is not?” she said, sadness in her voice.

I did the math. The kind you do all the time in prison. Not counting the days—that’s okay for a county-time slap, but it’ll make you crazy if you’ve got years to go on a felony bit. The balancing math. Like when you’re short—getting out soon. What you want to do is stay down, out of the way, not do anything that would mess up your go-home. But word gets around the tier like flash fire. And some guys who wouldn’t have tried you when you still had heavy time to serve suddenly get brave. So you have to dance. Stay hard enough to keep the wolves off you, but not do the same kinds of things you did to send that message when you first came in.

Inside, if you’re with people, everything’s easier. Same out here. That was part of the math. I didn’t have people in Portland. Flacco and Gordo were good hands, but they were pros; bringing them into anything without money at the end wasn’t something you could do. Besides, they were with Gem, not with me.

I missed my own.

Ann’s whole ante was promises. Sure, she’d made the Borderland connect for me, but I would have stumbled across it anyway, sooner or later. Especially with . . .

Yeah, I had a lot more cards in my hand. Higher ones, too. Jennifer would help, now that her father had okayed it. She was the lifeline between Rosebud and Daisy, and the older sister wasn’t going to walk away from that. Maybe I couldn’t get inside Rosebud’s head, but I knew her well enough to put my chips on that number.

I had other things working. Bobby Ray. Clipper and Big A. Maybe even Madison. To some extent, I think they all bought it that I wasn’t Rosebud’s enemy. If they crossed paths with her, I was pretty sure they’d at least tell her how to find me.

I had money working for me, too. Talked to a lot of people like Odom, made it clear there was a bounty. Any of them stumbled over her, they’d call, quick.

As I learned Portland, the town got smaller. Maybe I was years away from the web of contacts and connections Ann had put together, and maybe I’d never have the credibility her mission brought her, but all that added up to was . . . she might have a chance to find the girl. And she wanted a lot in return.

I totaled it up. Not worth the risk.

I was in an upscale poolroom, watching Big A work a sucker. The kid was using a custom cue this time, but handling it like it was a status symbol, not a tool. Beautiful.

Clipper was giving me a rundown on the game when the phone in my jacket vibrated. I stepped off a few paces, opened it up, said, “Hazard.”

“It’s me.” Ann’s voice, some undercurrent to it I couldn’t catch.

I held back—no point telling her I wasn’t going for her deal if she was about to give me a locate. Said, “So?”

“Just tell me where you are now. I’ll come there.”

Not on the phone? Maybe she had . . . I told her the name of the poolroom. I was in the middle of giving her the address when the connection went dead.

She didn’t need anyone to announce her; the change in audio-pitch and the craned necks took care of that. She was wearing a black skirt about the size of a big handkerchief, and a red tank top that didn’t even make a pretense of containing her breasts. Red spike heels with little black anklets. And a flowing mass of blond curls. By the time she’d reached where I was standing, she’d paralyzed every man in the joint.

“Hi, cutie,” she said to Big A, giving him a little kiss on the cheek. The kid’s face flamed from the effort of trying to be cool about it.

“Hey, Ann,” Clipper greeted her.

“Making any money?” she asked him.

“A little bit.”

She shot a hip, turned to look at me over her shoulder. “We have to talk,” she said.

“Talk’s fine,” I told her. “But I don’t hold press conferences.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, taking my arm.

“Your car,” she told me, as soon as we hit the sidewalk.

I pushed the button on the key fob to unlock the Cadillac. I could have charged admission to watch her climb into the front seat.

“What’s this all about?” I asked her.

“Not here.”

“I’m not talking about whatever you’ve got to tell me. I mean the whole display.”

“Display?” She half-smiled, taking a breath deep enough to make the tank-top fabric scream for mercy.

“Not . . . you. That’s factory stock. I mean making sure everybody in that joint knows we’ve got something going.”

“Oh. That was for protection.”

“Mine or yours?”

“Both. Turn left up ahead.”

I followed her directions for a few minutes without saying another word. Parked where she told me to.

“Come on,” she said, getting out of the car.

I followed her up a driveway next to a three-story stone building. She unlocked a side door and climbed the stairs. The skirt climbed her bottom. She didn’t have to tell me to follow her.

At the top of the last landing, she produced a key and opened a plain dirty-beige door with no nameplate.

“This isn’t mine,” she said, stepping inside.

It didn’t look like anybody’s. Generic hotel furniture, even down to the Muzak-in-oil painting on the wall.

“Sit,” she said.

I took the seasick-green armchair. She pulled off the blond wig, shook out her own short auburn hair, pulled the tank top over her head, and tossed it on the mustard-yellow couch. Then she yanked the skirt up to her waist and fiddled with it for a second, and it came free in her hands. When she put one foot on a straight chair to pull off her shoe and the anklet, I could see she was wearing a simple black thong. Finished with her footwear, she walked over to a closet and starting rummaging around.

What looked like a couple of cafeteria tables were against the far wall, covered in stacks of paper. I took a casual look: The Lancet, Scientific American, the Washington Post Health . . .

Ann came out of the closet with an armful of clothing. Without a word, she fitted herself into a black sports bra with straps that crossed over the back, then pulled on a baggy pair of white shorts and a white T-shirt. Barefoot, she came over to where I was sitting and perched herself on the end of the couch.

“That’s better,” she said.

“Speak for yourself,” I told her.

“Ah, you’re a silver-tongued devil, aren’t you?” she said, smiling.

“That’s me. All the moves.”

“Listen,” she said, dropping her voice. “Things have changed.”

“You know where she is?” I asked, stepping on what looked to be a long story.

“No.”

“You got any solid leads?”

“No.”

“You got anything new since the last time we talked?”

“No.”

“Okay. Look, you’re a girl who likes her games, I guess. And that’s fine. For that, you bring enough to the table, no question. But for what I need, no. I thought about it. But you know what? I don’t trade promises for performance. I appreciate what you did at the bookstore, but we can’t do a deal, you and me.”

“Don’t be so sure, B.B. You think I brought you here just so I could tell you I don’t have anything new?”

“No. I guess I—”

“—thought I was going to sex you into signing on? Grow up. A man who’ll steal for pussy will talk for it, too. If I’d scanned you as anything but a professional, I wouldn’t ever have talked to you.”

“All right. You tell me, then.”

“What I said before . . . about protection? I think you and me, we’re going to have to team up. And it would help you if people in the street think we’re together.”

“You don’t have anything to—”

“Yeah. I do. You’ve spent some time, thrown around some money—even impressed a few people. But you’re not plugged in.”

“And you are. And so what? You’re no closer to her than—”

“Not to the girl, no. But closer to the truth. And here it is, Mr. Hazard. You’re not the only one hunting her.”

I never try to Teflon a threat off my expression. Instead, I turn it into smoke, make my face a lattice, let it pass right through me. So I didn’t flat-eye her, or stay expressionless. I raised my eyebrows slightly and twisted my mouth just enough to show what I thought of street rumors.

“Two men,” she said, watching me closely. “White. Late thirties, early forties. Short hair, government suits. And they’re offering something better than what you put out there.”

“Which is?”

“Get Out Of Jail Free cards.”

“They’re promising . . . what? Immunity? A break on sentencing? A stay-away off some operation that’s running?”

“They’re saying they can ‘take care’ of things. Not being specific. But they’re making the rounds.”

“You know this exactly . . . how?”

“One of the people they talked to is someone . . . someone it’s important to me to keep tabs on.”

“This is getting more complicated with the telling.”

“No. No, it isn’t. Don’t bother baiting me; I’m already telling you what I know. The man, the name he goes by is Kruger.”

“Kruger? Is that supposed to be German?”

“It’s short for Krugerrand. He’s a pimp. Word is, he got the name a long time ago, when he put all his money into gold, got rich when inflation hit.”

“Doesn’t sound like any pimp I ever heard of.”

“He’s smarter than most, I’ll give him that. But the story may be all nonsense. Stuff gets distorted on the street, you know that.”

“Yeah. Stuff like two white men—”

“These two men, they went to see Kruger, that much I know for sure.”

“How?”

“There’s a nightclub where he hangs out. He likes to do business with his ladies draped around him.”

“And one of them talks to you?”

“More than one. And he knows it.”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“He’s a pimp,” she said, as if that explained everything. “To a pimp, it’s all game. Everything anybody does; ever. All game. He knows what I do—what people say I do, anyway—but he’s not buying it. He thinks I’m all about something else.”

“What?”

“He thinks I’m trying to pull his girls. And not just his. The way he has it scoped, I’m a dyke with a plan.”

“You wouldn’t be the first—”

“Lesbian pimp? Of course not. Some dominas make their subs . . . Ah, never mind. Kruger’s not the only one who thinks that’s my play. But he’s the only one with enough power to be a problem.”

“Anyone with money could be a—”

“Sure,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m not talking about money. Kruger’s connected.”

“How high?”

“I don’t know. Nobody does. But,” she said, holding up her hand like a traffic cop to stop whatever she thought I was going to say, “it’s not just street talk. For sure, he’s got an in with the blue boys.”

“So anybody putting pressure on him would be—”

“Yes. That’s about the size of it.”

I leaned back in the chair. Closed my eyes, trying to see it. Ann moved closer. Soundlessly, but I could feel the air displace next to me. And smell her sugarcane perfume.

“Sounds right to me,” I said after a while. “The suits are G-men. And the local law put them onto this guy Kruger.”

“But why would the feds care about a runaway?” she said softly, much closer to me than I’d thought.

“Maybe the Mann Act. The state line’s, what, ten minutes north of here? Kruger run underage girls?”

“Not a chance. He’s an old pro.”

“Yeah . . .” I spooled it out slowly, thinking it through. “If Kruger’s tight with the local rollers, there’s only two reasons for it: he’s handing out cash, or he’s piping info. Either way, I can’t see them touting the federales on him so quick.”

“You want to ask?”

“The suits?”

“No,” she said, her lips against my ear. “Kruger.”

The hooker was a tall brunette, wearing a transparent wrap over what looked like a lime-green two-piece bathing suit.

“Oh!” she said when Ann’s window slid down.

“Just keep working,” Ann told her.

The hooker got the message, stuck her head inside the window so it was inches from Ann. Anyone watching from the outside would see her hips, figure she was negotiating.

“Tell Kruger I want to see him,” Ann said.

“Who’s this?” the girl asked, looking over at me. “Your man?”

“The other way around,” Ann said.

“You’re working?”

“Sort of. Mr. Hazard over there, he’s the one in charge.”

“And it’s him wants to see Kruger?”

“That’s right, Chantal.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You got your chalk?”

“I . . . I ran out.”

“You stupid cunt,” Ann said sharply. “I feel like slapping your dumb mouth.”

Chantal licked her lips. Said, “Yum yum.”

“Ah . . .” Ann said, disgustedly. “What color is yours?”

“Pink. Well, fuchsia, actually. But that bitch Shasta’s been using it, too.”

Ann was rummaging around in her huge purse. “Here,” she said, handing over a small box of chalk. “This is fuchsia, okay?”

“Okay, honey.” Chantal grinned at her.

“Oh, get your skinny ass out of here.”

Chantal gave Ann a loud, smacking kiss, turned, and swivel-hipped her way down the block.

“What was that all about?” I asked Ann as I pulled back into traffic.

“You heard.”

“I don’t mean about this Kruger guy. The chalk.”

“Oh. Every girl’s supposed to carry chalk. When they see another girl get in a car and go off, they write the license number down. On the curb, on the side of a building, it doesn’t matter. If the girl doesn’t come back, maybe it’d help find whoever . . . whoever’s responsible.”

“But if they each have their own color, the cops could . . .”

“The cops don’t have a clue,” she said, almost defiantly. “It’s about self-protection. This way, there’d be a specific witness, instead of some ‘word on the street’ crap. We’d be the ones in control, not the cops. They wouldn’t be hassling any girl who came forward, not at all—she’d be their lead witness. One maniac out there threatens everyone. We don’t get him dropped, he stays out there.”

“You actually convinced working girls to do this?”

“Why not? You’ve been around the track for more than a few laps. You should know better than to think they’re all morons.”

“Sure. It’s just . . . hard to think of hookers so . . . organized.”

“They’re really not,” Ann said, sadly. “I mean, sure, I’ve got some of them doing the chalk thing. A good number of them, actually. But it’s not like you can always rely on them. Girls in the same stable, they call themselves wives-in-law, but they’re more likely to hate each other than to think of themselves as sisters.”

“So why bother?”

“They do what they do for . . . a lot of reasons.”

“Another form of pain management.”

“Yes! I . . . Oh, you’re making fun of me, is that it?”

“No,” I said, turning my face to hold her eyes.

“You’re sure?” Hong asked me.

“Yeah. I saw it with my own eyes. They run a strike-line through the license plate when the girl comes back to the stroll.”

“Chalk, huh? That wouldn’t last too long, kind of weather we get around here.”

“The idea wasn’t to make a permanent record.”

“And each girl has her own color?”

“No. That’s just what . . . what they were told. There aren’t enough different colors to go around. Just a way of making them feel a little special, maybe.”

“Working girls don’t cooperate with us, unless . . .”

“Unless you’ve got a case on them, sure. This isn’t about the cops, it’s about them. They’re cooperating with themselves.”

“You think this is something they’ve been doing all along?”

“I don’t know. But they know someone’s out there, picking them off. This . . . I don’t know, maybe it makes them feel a little more secure.”

“If what you say is true—”

“Let’s take a ride,” I said.

“Where to?” he asked, buckling himself in behind the thick-rimmed Momo wheel.

“You decide. If I pick a spot, you’ll think it’s a setup.”

“I . . . Okay.”

He drove in silence. I ran my eyes over the interior. It was all custom—black anodized aluminum dash with extra dials, black numbers on white faces, with red needles. Even what I guessed was a boost gauge mounted on the A-pillar. When he hit the gas, the turbo whine convinced me I was right.

“I don’t see a switch for the bottle,” I said.

“No nitrous,” Hong answered, knowing where I was going. “Twin turbos. The front’s all intercooler and heat exchanger.”

“So nothing until you tach up to, what, five grand?”

“A little more than that,” he admitted.

“And no torque.”

“Maybe not. But I’ve got a glove box full of eleven-second time slips.”

“Yeah? You must give the Detroit boys fits.”

“Some of them. You don’t fancy the rice-burners, right?”

“I’m from a different generation,” I told him. “No substitute for cubic inches.”

“There’s a lot of that still going around,” he said, smiling.

In the next hour or so, we watched maybe a dozen pickups. And counted seven separate times when chalk-holding hookers recorded the plates. “Pretty damn good average,” Hong admitted.

“Worth something?”

“Could be. What did you have in mind?”

“Kruger.”

“I’m not on the pussy posse,” he said, proudly. “I work Homicide.”

“I know. I’m not looking for anything on him. Just checking out something I heard about him.”

“Which is?”

“That he’s wired.”

“An informant?”

“That’s one way to use the word. The other way is . . . connected.”

“What are you saying?” he said, voice going soft with threat. “That he’s got cops in his pocket?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m asking, remember?”

Hong pulled to the curb. “No smoking in the car,” he said. Then he unbuckled his seatbelt and got out. I followed.

He took out his gunmetal case, offered me one. I took it. He lit us both from his lighter.

“Kruger’s a very careful man,” he said, finally. “He’s got heavy game, but that’s what it is—game. He doesn’t run them underage, doesn’t play with coat hangers. . . . If a girl wants to go, he doesn’t try and hold her. But he’s got a real organization. Lawyers on retainer, owns a bunch of apartments where he puts up the girls. He’s smart enough to let them keep some money, go shopping, you know. He pays for medicals, won’t have anyone on waste drugs.”

“Waste drugs?”

“Crack. High-octane speed—you know, like dust. I don’t mean he’s anti-drug, just that he’s got his rules. Snow, E, recreational stuff—it’s all part of The Life. And they all want to style. His stuff is always the best, on all levels. It’s a prestige thing to be one of his girls. And he’s okay with anything that lets them keep working.”

“So, as pimps go . . .”

“It’s not like that. We’d have a hell of a time making a case against him. The man is clever. And he’s been at it a long time. Most pimps, they give us something besides a pandering charge to work with—assault, that’s the most common. Kruger, he’s absolutely nonviolent when it comes to the girls.”

“But he’s got muscle working for him?”

“Nothing serious. More like bodyguards than to do any work on anyone, you understand?”

“I do. But, even with all that . . .”

“He’s been . . . helpful, I won’t deny that,” Hong said. “In his business, he hears things. And he’s been known to pass stuff along. Compare that to our chances of ever nailing him on anything big. . . .”

“Makes sense.”

“Yeah. The only way Kruger’s exposed is with the IRS. But that’s not us; that’d be the feds.”

“You got anything way upscale?” I asked Gordo the next morning.

“Like a Rolls? In that league?”

“Yeah.”

“We got . . .” he said slowly, looking around the big garage, “I don’t know, hombre. Stuff flashes; don’t mean it costs, right?”

“Right.”

“We got the Cigarette,” Flacco offered.

“The what?” I asked him.

“Cigarette, amigo. Like the boat.”

“That’s flash all right,” I agreed. “But I don’t think, where I’m going, they got a dock.”

“No, no. I don’t mean the boat. I mean the people who make the boat. ‘Cigarette,’ it’s like a brand name. They take certain cars, work them over, then they put their own name on it.”

“Like AMG does with Mercs?”

“¡Sí! You got it.”

“What do they work on?”

“Suburbans.”

“Like Chevy Suburbans? Those giant SUVs?”

“Lots of aftermarket tuners rework the big ones, man,” Flacco said, and ticked off names on his fingers, “Ultrasmith, Becker, Stillen . . . Suburbans, Excursions . . . turn them into mini-limos. Come here, take a look at this baby.”

The Suburban’s black paint was so deep it looked like the whole thing had been dipped in oil. A faint pair of red stripes swept from the front wheel well to the rear quarter panel, where a white oval with a big red “1” in the middle sat proudly. I stepped closer. The beast sat on what had to be twenty-inch star-pattern wheels, the better to display the red Brembo calipers lurking underneath. It squatted low, its air of menace enhanced by the lack of chrome and the xenon headlights.

“Check out the threads,” Gordo said, opening the front door.

The interior was wall-to-wall gray . . . leather everywhere but the floor. The instruments in the dash and on the console were white-faced, with red numerals. It did look a little like the cockpit of a fast boat.

“Got kicker speakers, flat-screen DVD set into the back of the headrests, GPS . . . anything you could want,” Gordo said.

“Can it get out of its own way?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else. For what I wanted, it could be as fast as an anchored rowboat.

“For damn sure,” Gordo promised. “Sucker’s huffed. Got headers, and a chip, too, I think. Cruise all day at a buck and a quarter.”

“It’d be perfect,” I said.

“Listen, compadre,” Flacco said, pulling me aside. “Me and Gordo, we’ve been thinking. . . .”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been borrowing a lot of different rides. . . .”

“I know. And if anyone’s beefed, I can—”

“It’s not about that. None of our business, what you do. You bring the rides back same shape as you took them out, a little mileage on the odometer, nobody’s going to care.”

“Then . . . ?”

“Bullet holes, that’d be another story.”

“I’m not doing that kind of work.”

“You carrying, though.”

“Just a habit.”

“Bueno. You know what this ride cost?”

“Seventy-five?” I guessed.

“Double that, plus.”

“I’m not bringing it to a gunfight, Gordo.”

“Here’s what I think, man. What I think, Flacco and me, we should be careful about letting rides like this one go out without some insurance, you understand?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Flacco was standing next to his partner by then. He saw the look on my face. “¿No comprende, eh? What you think we’re asking for, man?”

“Just a . . . deposit, I guess you’d call it.”

“Nah, you don’t get it. What we’re asking is, how about we come along?”