Safe House

SAFE HOUSE

Vyra twisted her body to catch the pale mid-afternoon light purring against the white mesh curtains in the window of the downtown hotel room. She was nude except for a pair of sheer stockings and sunburst-yellow spike heels with black ankle straps. Posing, she stood in front of me, one foot on a straight chair she’d pulled away from the desk, watching me over one shoulder, wheat-colored hair hanging straight down her back. As she slowly turned to face me, her enormous breasts came into view, appearing even more massive on her thin, curveless frame. She raised her hands high above her head, looking down.

“Aren’t they just perfect?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I assured her.

“They’re so beautiful, I just hate to take them off.”

“They won’t get in the way,” I said.

Vyra’s idea of foreplay is putting on a fashion show. But she makes up for it—a couple of cigarettes is about all the after-play she ever has time for.

Me too.

I’d known Vyra for years—I wasn’t the only key that had ever fit her lock. But my timing was good. Her husband did something that brought in beaucoup bucks. Or his people left him a bundle, I could never remember. Vyra changed her stories about as often as her shoes, but she loved them both. All I really knew about her husband was how he worshipped those humongous, incongruous breasts. That’s why she kept them, she said, just for him. They strained her scrawny frame, hurt her back. The heavy underwire bra she had to wear cut harsh marks into her pale skin. Her body looked like a cartoon drawn by a fetishist.

Vyra had a sweet, lonely heart. And a deep borderline’s void. When she got bored, she shopped. And volunteered for all kinds of organizations. Suicide hot lines, animal shelters, like that.

Vyra doesn’t know what I do, but she knows I’m not an accountant. She gets nosy every once in a while—just to keep in practice, I think. But she doesn’t push, and it never comes to anything.

Vyra knows where to find me. Or where to leave word, anyway. She never calls unless she’s already got a hotel room. And if I’m around when she calls, we get together and do what we do.

But only if I’m around when she calls. I never think about what she does when I’m not.

I sat up slightly, reached down and tangled her hair in my hand. Pulled gently. She kept her mouth locked around my cock, shook her head no. I pulled harder, warning her. She stayed where she was, making little grunting sounds until it was over.

After a minute or two, she slithered up my body, her breasts trailing against my stomach, stopping at my chest. She looked down.

“Is it different when a woman does it?”

“What?”

“Blows you. If your eyes are closed, does it make any difference?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you were . . . in prison, weren’t you?”

She brings that up a lot. I don’t know why—it’s important to her in some way she never explained. And I never asked.

“Yeah. So?”

“Were you in a long time?”

“What’s a long time, little girl?” I asked her gently, running my thumb over her sticky mouth.

“More than . . . I don’t know, a year?”

“Sure.”

“So what did you do for . . . sex?”

“Went steady with my fist.”

“But I heard . . . I mean, if you have sex in prison, it doesn’t make you gay.”

“So?”

“Is that true?”

“Prison’s like the rest of the world. All kinds in there.”

“Is that why you never did it? In there? Because you hate them?”

“Hate who?”

“Gay people?”

I slid my right hand around to the back of her neck. She smiled down at me. I suddenly twisted my hand, shoving her face down into the mattress. I moved to one side, held her down with my right hand while I pressed my left thumb into the base of her spine, hard. I leaned down and put my lips to her ear.

“You like this?” I said softly.

“No! Let me—”

“Rape is rape,” I whispered. “It’s not gay, it’s not straight. I don’t give a good goddamn how people fuck, long as it’s what they want to do, understand?”

“Yes.”

I let her go. She popped up on one elbow. “I didn’t mean anything, honey,” she said, a fake-contrite tone in her voice. “I was just curious.”

“You’ve got a sweet little nose,” I told her. “Just watch where you stick it, okay?”

“You watch,” she giggled.

I pulled away from the hotel an hour later. Winter was against the ropes bleeding, but it refused to go down for the count. That gray day in March, spring was still a whore’s promise—nylons whispering, but no real juice waiting.

I cursed the cold as the Plymouth slid around another corner, its wipers all but surrendering to the leaden sleet sneering down from a sullen sky. The anemic sun had vanished along with Vyra.

The Plymouth was an anonymous drab shark in an ocean of quicker, brighter little fish—all of them darting about, secure in their front-wheel drive, ABS-equipped, foglight-blazing perkiness—at war with glowering pedestrians, all engaged in a mutual ignorance pact when it came to traffic signals. I feathered the throttle, knowing the Plymouth’s stump-puller motor could break the fat rear tires loose in a heartbeat, wishing the guy who had built what he thought was going to be the ultimate New York City taxicab had lived to finish the job.

The meet was set for just off Frankfort Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge. The downtown subway system was a disease incubator in winter, and I’d be damned if I was going to walk in the miserable weather. I hadn’t set the meet up, and I couldn’t change it. When I’d called in, Mama had given me the done-deal message.

“Man call. Say name. Herk Kew Leeze. Say friend. From Upstate.”

Hercules. Big strong good-looking kid. I’d done time with him, years ago. Solid as a railroad spike. And just about as shrewd. He was stand-up all the way. Dead reliable. Inside, those two words intersect a lot. But we couldn’t let him crew up with us on the bricks. The Prof had cast the veto. “Boy can’t go pro,” the little man told us. “Heart don’t count the same as smart.” I’d heard Hercules was heavy-lifting for hire. Not a made man, not even part of an organization. He was a disposable samurai, and whatever he wanted to tell me wouldn’t be good news.

“What did he say, Mama?”

“Say meet. Second shift. Butcher Block. Okay?”

Meaning: did I understand what he meant?—because Mama sure as hell didn’t.

“Sure. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it.”

“You need Max?”

“No, Mama. He’s a friend.”

“I not know him?”

“No.”

“Sure,” Mama said, cutting the connection. I wondered what I’d done this time.

The second shift meant prison time—three in the afternoon to eleven at night. When you set up a must-come meet the way Hercules had, you always give the other guy a wide margin for showing up. The Butcher Block is an abandoned loading dock under the Brooklyn Bridge. It got its name because thieves used to meet there to cut up the swag from the trucks in the nearby Fulton Fish Market. Hercules didn’t know where I lived. Guy like him knows that, he drops by one day, just to say hello. Maybe brings a six-pack. Or the cops.

I slid the Plymouth to a stop on Broadway, just across from the outdoor homeless shelter the politicians call City Hall Park. In another few seconds, the passenger door popped open and the Prof climbed in.

“If it’s Herk’s game, you know it’s lame. Gonna be some motherfucking sorryass shame,” the little man greeted me, his voice sour with disgust.

“You want to pass?” I asked him.

“You know I can’t do that, Schoolboy. Man was with us, right? He took the weight, we got to pay the freight.”

That said it all. We’d hold up our end. Obligation and honor, same thing. But that was no middle-class citizen’s one-way street. What drove us was the certain knowledge that, if we called Hercules from a pay phone in Hell, he’d drop right in.

You can’t buy loyalty like that. But you have to pay what it costs. In installments.

“Where’s Clarence?” I asked him.

“Clarence? That boy don’t have nothing to do with this, whatever it is. He don’t owe, so he don’t go.”

“Fair enough,” I told him, meaning it.

I hooked left just before Vesey Street, doubled back up Park Row, ignored the entrance to the bridge and forked to the right, staying low like I was heading for the FDR. When I spotted the opening, I nosed the Plymouth inside, peering through the windshield.

“I got him,” the Prof said. “Over there.”

A man was approaching the car. A big man with long dark hair, looking even bigger in an ankle-length yellow slicker like traffic cops wear. The Prof jumped out and slipped into the back seat, leaving the front door open, a clear invite. The big man piled in, shaking himself like a damn Saint Bernard, showering me with icy water.

“Burke!” he said, extending his hand to shake.

“Herk,” I greeted him back, my voice low, sending him a message. Which he promptly ignored as soon as he spotted who was in the back seat.

“Prof! Hey, this is great!”

“Be cool, fool,” the Prof told him. “This ain’t no reunion. You got business, right?”

The big man shook his head again. Hard, like he was trying to remember something. Something important. “I’m up against it,” he finally said.

“Spell it out,” I told him.

“There was this girl. . . .”

“Goddamn it, Schoolboy. What’d I tell you? This chump is a bull, and gash is the pull.”

“Easy, Prof. Whatever it is . . .” I let the sentence trail away, turned to Herk, opened my hands in a “Tell-me” gesture.

“There was this girl,” he said again, like he was starting the tape from the beginning. “She was getting . . . stalked, like. You know what I mean?”

“No,” I said, edging my voice just enough to tell him to get on with it.

“Okay. Her boyfriend used to beat on her. All the time. For nothing. Then he’d say he was sorry and she’d take him back. Finally, he puts her in the hospital. Not just the E-Ward, like he did before—they had to operate. On her face. I guess she was too fucked up from the drugs they gave her to cover for him, I don’t know. Anyway, the rollers took him down. He went easy,” Herk said, his voice veined with a hard-core convict’s contempt for anyone who doesn’t automatically resist arrest. “Anyway, she says she ain’t gonna press charges, and you know what the Man said? You ain’t gonna believe this, Burke. They don’t need her—they could just go ahead and lumber him anyway, no matter what she wants. I mean, they could make her come to court. Jesus.”

I took a pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, offered one to Herk. He shook his head. Same way he was in the joint. A serious bodybuilder, the only drug Herk would play with was Dianabol, and he’d stopped the red-zone steroids when we’d pulled his coat to the cold light at the end of that tunnel. But the Prof snatched the butt out of my hand before I could light it. I heard a match snap into flame behind me. “Thanks, bro,” he said sarcastically. I lit another one for myself. “What’s the rest?” I asked the big man.

“He gets some bullshit baby-time. Six months on the Rock, out in four. She gets one of them Orders of Protection, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“But that don’t mean nothing. He calls her. Right from the House, calls her. Collect, okay? After a while, she don’t take the calls. Even changes her number. So he writes her letters. Real weird shit—like he loves her and he had a dream that he sliced her face into ribbons.”

“He’s still locked up when he does this?” the Prof asked.

“Yeah.”

“She show them to the cops?” I wanted to know.

“Sure. But dig this: there’s nothing they can do, right? I mean, this time she wants to prosecute his ass, and they don’t do nothing. They told her those letters, they wasn’t threats, just talking about his dreams and stuff. Stupid mother—”

“—and then he gets out . . . ,” I prompted, cutting off the flow.

“Uh-huh. And he starts it right back again. Calling her on her job, leaving notes in her mailbox, all like that. He’s got her scared now—”

“And you’re dipping your sorry wick, right, sucker?” the Prof stuck in.

“No, Prof. I swear,” Herk said in a hurt tone of voice. “I mean, I never even met her, okay? It wasn’t like that.”

“So what was it like?” I asked him.

“You know Porkpie?”

“Yeah,” I told him, nervous now. Porkpie was a minor-league fringe-player. One of those maybe-Jewish, maybe-Italian, Brooklyn-edge boys. He didn’t have muscle or balls or brains, so he played the middleman role. A halfass tipster and two-bit tout—he wouldn’t touch anything with his own hands, but he always knew a guy who would. Or so he said. He wasn’t mobbed up. Didn’t have a crew, worked out of pay phones and the trunk of his car. Only a citizen or a stone rookie would do any business with him.

Herk wasn’t either one, but he was just thick enough so it didn’t matter.

“Okay, so Porkpie tells me about it,” he continued. “The job, I mean. He says they need someone to lean on this guy, give him the word, tell him to get in the wind, let the broad alone, understand?”

“Sure.”

“A grand for a few minutes’ work, that’s what he told me.”

“You was gonna move on this guy, do work on him, let them turn the key for one lousy G?” the Prof snarled. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, boy? You been down twice. You can’t ride that train—it ain’t nothing but pain. You go bone-busting, you get called to the Walls. That’s your idea of good pay for a few minutes’ work?”

“It wasn’t that, Prof. Honest. Porkpie said the guy was a stone pussy, okay? All I hadda do was muscle up on him, maybe bitch-slap him once. Porkpie said he’d give it up in a minute, kinda guy beats a woman. . . .”

“All kinds of fucking guys beat on women,” the Prof told him. “That don’t tell you nothing. You been enough places to know that, Herk.”

“It don’t matter now,” the big man said sadly.

“Bottom line,” I said. “Let’s get to it. Come on.”

“Porkpie gives me a picture, okay? What the guy looks like and all. And he drives me to the spot where the guy gets off work.”

“You braced him in daylight?” I asked, already shuddering at his stupidity.

“Nah, Burke. He’s a security guard, like. Gets off after midnight. In this big building on Wall Street. He has to go right through this alley to where they park their cars. Porkpie said I could grab him there.”

“And . . . ?”

“I snatch him, okay? I slam him up against the wall, tell him I’m the girl’s cousin. Porkpie told me to say that, so he’d know I was serious and all. He tries to talk to me, but I’m not playing. I told him, he wants to get down, let’s do it. Right there. He drops his hands, puts his head down. I figure that’s it. . . . Then he comes out with a piece. I didn’t . . . think about it, man. I just plunged him.”

“You shanked the motherfucker?” the Prof asked quietly, leaning forward over the back of the front seat.

“Right in the gut,” Herk said. “I didn’t mean to, but . . . once I stuck him, I knew he was gone. I could see it in his face, like when the light goes out, you know? He was off the count.”

“Anybody see you?” I asked. It was business now.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Porkpie said he didn’t see nobody.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago. I mean, it’ll be two nights when it gets dark.”

“What do you need, Herk?” I asked him.

“I need a stake, Burke. I got to get outa here. Outa this city.”

Herk couldn’t say it, but he could feel it. He was a mine-shaft canary, just beginning to smell the fumes, fluttering his wings against the cage. I looked back at the Prof. He nodded.

“I’m gonna take you someplace,” I told him. “You’ll be okay there. Meanwhile, I’ll see what’s going on, okay?”

“Sure, Burke,” he said, smiling. A big, sweet dumb kid.

“This one ain’t no Fourteenth Amendment citizen, is he?” the voice on the phone said.

“He’s the same fucking citizen I am,” I said, keeping my voice down to a jailhouse whisper—soft with threat.

“No offense, man,” the voice said quickly. “But you know how I have to play it. I mean . . .”

“No offense. A yard a day, right?”

“Right. Ten-day minimum.”

“He’ll have it with him.”

I checked on the wire. The police had it down as a mugging that went wrong. At least Herk had been smart enough to grab the dead man’s watch and wallet. And toss them into the nearest Dumpster, where some foraging wino was sure to pick them up. He’d never touched the dead man’s pistol, leaving it where it was. The cops had no suspects.

But I did. Herk was the third day into his hideout before we found Porkpie. He was coming out of a dive in Red Hook, wearing a snazzy dark overcoat and his trademark little hat with a fat little white feather sticking up from the band. A zircon glistened on his hand, bloodshot from a faded red neon sign in the window of the bar.

“Hey, Porkpie!” I yelled at him, closing the distance between us, hands empty at my sides.

He stopped in his tracks, making up his mind. Before he finished, Max had him.

One good thing about Red Hook, you never have to go far to find some privacy. I docked the dark-green Volvo sedan next to one of the piers, backing in carefully so I could spot any visitors. I didn’t expect cops—even when the weather is warm and the piers are crawling with longshoremen, the rollers working the pad know the money men only come out in daylight.

Porkpie was in the front bucket seat, Max right behind him, one hand on the weasel’s neck. Max’s hands are hard autobiographies: big leather-colored maps of seamed scar tissue with callused ridges of horn along the knife-edges—flesh-and-bone sledgehammers with bolt-cutters for fingers. Porkpie couldn’t see the hand, but he could feel it, the fingers pressing his carotid artery, thumb hooked just under his Adam’s apple. What he could see was the pistol in my gloved left hand, held at my waist, pointed at his crotch.

“Open the glove compartment,” I told him softly.

“Burke, I . . .”

“Open it, Porkpie.”

He pushed the button and the door came down. In the light from the tiny bulb he could see the coil of piano wire. And the barber’s straight razor with its mother-of-pearl handle.

“We wrap your hands and your ankles in the wire,” I told him. “We got a couple of car batteries in the trunk for the weight. Then I take the razor and open you up so you don’t float, understand?”

“Jesus! Don’t . . .”

“It’s a hell of a way to die,” I said. “But you tell us quick, I’ll do you a solid, okay? I’ll put a slug in your head first, so you don’t feel nothing.”

His stink filled the front seat.

“There’s only one way out,” I said, breathing through my mouth.

“Anything,” he blubbered. “Just tell me, I’ll—”

“You got Hercules to do a job for you. The girl, the one this guy was threatening, she yours?”

“No. No, man. I don’t know her. I ain’t never even seen her.”

“So somebody paid you, right?”

“Right. It was just—”

“Shut up, punk. Just answer what I ask you. Who paid you? And what was the job?”

“I don’t know her name. Honest to God, Burke! She found me in Rollo’s. Said it was her sister, that girl. The one this guy was—”

“Don’t make me tell you again,” I said. “I don’t want to hear your stories. How much was the job?”

He hesitated. I nodded to Max. Porkpie spasmed in his seat, his spinal fluid turned to liquid pain. “I don’t like this part,” I told him. “I’d rather ice you right now than keep hurting you, understand?”

“Yesss . . .”

“How much was the job?”

“Five grand.”

“And you were supposed to do . . . what?”

“Just scare the guy. Like, spook him, you know? Run him off.”

“Not total him?”

“You crazy? I ain’t no hit man.”

“That’s right, punk: you ain’t.”

“Burke, listen to me. Please. If I was gonna have Herk do him, would I go along? I didn’t know nothing until he comes charging back to the car. I . . .”

“That’s enough,” I told him. The smell of truth came right through the stench. Porkpie didn’t have the cojones to be anywhere within a mile of a killing, even as the wheelman. “Describe her.”

“I told you—I never even seen her, not once.”

“The woman who paid you, Porkpie. Her.”

“Oh. She’s some kinda Chink.”

“Chinese?”

“I don’t fucking know, man. Something like that. Small. She had a hat on, with one of them veil things, black, like they wear at funerals.”

“What did she call herself?”

“She didn’t say no name, man. Just asked me, could I get it done? I told her the price. She paid me. That’s all. I never seen her again.”

“But she gave you a phone number.”

“No, I swear it! Nothing. I didn’t need to talk to her—she paid me the whole thing up front.”

“So how come you didn’t stiff her? Just take the cash and walk?”

“She said she could find me again. I . . . believed her, like.”

“You believe I can find you again, Porkpie?”

“Yeah. I know your rep.”

“You know who’s holding your neck? That’s Max the Silent. You know his rep?” I asked him gently.

He shuddered a reply.

“I’m gonna trust you,” I lied. “We’re gonna let you slide on this. You take the car. Drive it anywhere you want and leave it there. But don’t fuck around with it—it’s hot. Understand?”

“Sure. I mean—”

“Ssssh,” I said, holding my right finger to my lips. “You get popped dumping the car, that’s your problem. I can find you in jail, Porkpie. You know I can. You’d be easy in there. This is your last chance. That woman calls you, you call me. And if you’re holding anything back, you’re landfill, understand?”

“I’m not! I—”

I nodded to Max. He released his grip, slid out of the back seat, quiet as Ebola. I opened the car door and backed out, still pointing the pistol at Porkpie.

Max and I faded back into the shadow of the pier. In a minute, we heard the Volvo start up. We watched Porkpie pull away fast, the rear wheels spinning on the slick pavement.

Clarence pulled up at the wheel of my Plymouth and we all went back across the border.

I worked the relay over the pay phones, got the word to Hercules: Stay put.

And hoped the Prof wasn’t right about him.

Days passed. I vacuumed the newspapers, listened to the radio, even watched some TV. Nothing about the homicide. There was no outcry, no pressure. It would probably disappear into the black hole the cops called Unsolved. It wouldn’t be the first time—not all floaters go into the water.

There was a cop I could ask, a cop who owed me, but that would be the same thing as telling him I was connected in some way. Even if you trust a man not to play certain cards, there’s no point in dealing them to him.

Time was on our side. But the statute of limitations wasn’t. So I went to see a lawyer. Davidson’s a hard-nosed criminal-defense guy, but he passed for honest in our world. He might jug you a little on the fee, but he wouldn’t favor-trade with the DA, and he wouldn’t sell a client for some favorable press ink, the way some of the others do.

His office is in midtown, just one good-sized room with a secretary’s station outside. At one time, he had a big joint with a bunch of associates, but he went lean-and-mean a few years ago. His office is furnished in early Salvation Army—all the money’s in technology. And in the heavy cork paneling. In Davidson’s business, traveling sound can get you killed.

“Feels like a decent justification defense to me,” he said, puffing appreciatively on one of the mondo-expensive Expatriados cigars I’d brought him. “Where’d you get these?” he asked.

“An old pal of mine makes them down in Honduras. Cuban seeds, Cuban artisans, but he says Cuban soil is all played out. These are better.”

“Sure are,” Davidson said, holding the dark cylinder at arm’s length to admire the shape. Then he got back to work. “One guy pulls a gun, the other one pulls a knife. One gets a jury trial, the other gets an autopsy. Self-defense. It happened in a bar, we walk. But your guy, his story’s shaky. He was just strolling through the alley at that hour, minding his own business . . . ? I don’t think so.”

“And we don’t know if the other guy’s pistol was still there when the EMS crew arrived,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding his head. “We’d get that on discovery, but if it comes up blank . . .”

“Anyone could have picked up the piece and walked off with it,” I told him. Thinking of the dead man’s wallet and watch.

“Forensics?” Davidson asked. Meaning: fingerprints, blood splatters . . . anything the police-lab vultures could vacuum from a corpse.

I flashed on what the Prof had said about that same question: “Blood don’t tell no more, Schoolboy. We ain’t gotta worry about that. A good shyster can always O.J. the DNA.” I scratched my temple, like I was thinking about it. “Nothing,” I told him.

“It’s still dicey,” Davidson said.

“So you advise—what?” I asked.

“Your guy got a sheet?”

“Long one.”

“For this kind of thing?”

“Oh yeah.”

“He a predicate?”

“Twice over.”

“So he couldn’t take even a Man Two,” Davidson mused. “No way to bring him in and make a deal.”

I didn’t say anything. Manslaughter Second Degree is a Class C Felony in New York. Even if Davidson could sweet-plea his way past the life sentence a Habitual Offender tag would bring, Herk was looking at seven and a half to fifteen.

“You got any more cards?” Davidson asked.

“A witness,” I told him. “He’s not a hitter, but he’s no citizen either.”

“Would he roll?”

Would Porkpie turn informant? It wasn’t even a question. The Prof had dismissed any other possibility with a contemptuous snort: “That punk ain’t no real thief, chief. You know the way he play—don’t do the crime if you can’t drop a dime.” He was right: give Porkpie a pass on one of his own cases, he’d sell his mother.

Then again, so would I.

But I’d never sell my family.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Well,” Davidson said, switching to self-protective legalese, “given the facts of the hypothetical with which you’ve presented me, I would advise absolute discretion.”

Meaning: Herk couldn’t come in.

Only two ways to tap Porkpie’s home phone—take a major risk or use up a major favor. And even if he had a phone in that pesthole he lived in, he probably wouldn’t use it for business. He was a weasel, but not a stupid one. “Got to send Clarence in,” I told the Prof.

“No way, Schoolboy. I told you true—my boy don’t work for Herk.”

“Look, Prof. The only place we know we can possibly get to this girl Porkpie told us about is at Rollo’s, right? If Porkpie’s there, he spots me in a second. You too. Max can’t negotiate. Who’s that leave us?”

“I don’t feature no undercover crap,” the little man said, giving ground grudgingly.

“Clarence goes in, he hangs around, okay?” I said, pleading my case. “He spots Porkpie talking to the girl . . . spots any girl who matches the description . . . he steps back, makes a call. The rest is ours.”

“The whole motherfucking thing should be ours.”

“What’s the problem?” I pressed him.

“Bad juju, youngblood. We ain’t fucking detectives,” he said, jeering the last word. “We don’t solve crimes—we do ’em. Maybe Herk should just relocate his dumb ass to some fresh green grass.”

“What good’s that gonna do? He tries to make a connect on strange turf, he’s just gonna end up back in jail.”

“But no fear if he stays here?” the little man challenged.

“Okay,” I said, throwing up my hands in surrender. “Fuck him. Let him fall.”

The Prof looked at me a long quiet minute. Then he said: “Guess I taught you even better than I thought, son. Two weeks, all right? We put it together by then, good. If not, Herk’s gotta walk his own way.”

I bowed my head in agreement.

“Rollo’s is an old-time thief’s bar,” I told Clarence. We were sitting in my booth at Mama’s a little before midnight, drawing the diagrams. “I been in there a few times over the years. Little round tables in the middle, booths against the wall. Lousy food, watered booze. The tables are for bragging and bullshitting, the booths are for deals. You got something you want to buy or sell, you take a booth. Waitress comes over, you order food, she’s gonna tell you the booth’s reserved. You get stupid, say you wanna eat there anyway, guy they call T.B. comes over. I don’t think that’s his initials—man’s bad enough to be named after a disease, you don’t mess with him. Tall, slim build. Nice looking kid, long knife-scar across his face below the left eye. He’s a kenpo man, snap you like a twig without breaking a sweat. So no Bogarting in there, got it?”

“Yes, mahn. It is clear.”

“But if you ask the waitress, ‘Where’s Mimi tonight?’ she’ll just walk away, no problem. Then you’ll get Mimi. A real pretty Latina. Watch her hands: long nails with black polish, gold wedding ring. You tell her what you want, just work around the edges, you don’t have to come right out with it. No drugs, but anything else is all right. She says okay, you give her a hundred. That’s the rental.”

“I tell her firearms, mahn. I am known for this a bit. From when I was with Jacques.”

That’s when I first met Clarence, a long time ago. When he was a young tiger working for a Jake gun-runner in Brooklyn. He hadn’t come up with the rest of us, but he’d been forged just as hard in another fire.

“That’ll do,” I assured him. “I got a crate of AK’s I been holding back to sting one of those dumb-fuck gangbangers, so we could show the goods if anybody wanted a checkout. Now what you gotta do is dance, brother. Make sure you string it out, stay as long as you can, set it up so you come back a couple of times, right?”

“I have it,” the young man said. He was wearing a black jacket—looked like a regular suit coat, but it came down almost to his knees—over a pale-violet silk shirt buttoned at the neck. Clarence doesn’t really peacock it up until the warm weather hits, clothes blooming with the foliage.

“You know who to look for?”

“Porkpie, you already described him, mahn. And a Chinese girl with one of those pillbox hats, like. And a veil.”

“She may not be Chinese, not Chinese like Mama, anyway. Oriental, though, if Porkpie was right. And we don’t know if that outfit is a trademark or she just wanted to hide her face. Porkpie’s the key. No way he stays away from Rollo’s for long. You got any questions?”

“Who will watch my ride, mahn? I do not like to leave her alone in some nasty parking lot, you know?”

“We’ll cover her,” I promised. Clarence’s beloved British Racing Green 1967 Rover 2000 TC was his prize. He took it for granted that we’d have his back at Rollo’s, but his car was a separate commitment. “We can’t go inside, but the parking lot’s no problem.”

I lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, thinking it through. Rollo’s wasn’t a dangerous place. They had to keep it under control to do their business. But still . . .

“Want the Mole to go along?” I asked Clarence. “Porkpie’s never seen him, and he could—”

“Oh, that’s quick, Slick,” the Prof snarled. “What’s that maniac gonna do if something jumps off, blow the place up?”

“Mole’s smart,” I defended him.

“Smart? Man’s a motherfucking genius!” the Prof shot back. “Did I say no? But he ain’t smart like people, you understand? I don’t want none of his science shit around my boy, see? We be right outside, laying in the cut. One tap on the cellular and we Rambo the joint, we have to, okay? Ain’t no need to go nuclear.”

“I was just—”

“Nix that,” the Prof cut me off, any concern for Clarence’s safety quickly overridden by even the slightest implication that the kid wasn’t competent to handle the job. “Clarence walks point, we cover the joint. Our dice, loaded nice—it’s all on ice.”

But our dice didn’t make one good pass all night. A five-hour investment drew nothing but blanks. “I didn’t see no Chinese woman, mahn,” Clarence said during debriefing. “And never this Porkpie guy either.”

“It worked like I said? With the booth?”

“Yeah, mahn. Just like that. Only two nibbles on the pieces, though.”

“Sound legit?” I asked him, leaning close. In our world, when we’re dealing guns, “legit” means criminal. And “crooked” means the goddamned ATF.

“I think so,” Clarence said. “Hard to tell with those boys. We just . . . talked around it, like. He want to know what I got. I want to know what he want. You know. . . .”

“Yeah. You said two, right?”

“Oh, the second guy, mahn, he was nothing. A kid. One of those European guys from the Bronx, maybe. I could not tell for sure. He wanted a pistol. Just one pistol. It felt like personal, not professional. I blew him off.”

A European guy from the Bronx was Clarence-speak for Armenian. There’s supposed to be a whole tribe of them up there, gunfighters, every one. “He cop an attitude?” I asked.

“Nah, mahn. Nothing like that. I told him bulk only, and he didn’t push. He had his boys with him, over to the side. I think he was just profiling, maybe. Young stupid boy. Probably throw the piece away when the clip get empty.”

If that was so, the kid sure wasn’t Armenian, I thought. “You up for another round?” I asked Clarence.

“I go the distance, mahn.”

The next night was the same. “Place is nasty, brother,” Clarence said afterwards, a disgusted look on his face. “I keep this up, I have a big dry-cleaning bill for sure.” He grimaced, examining the sleeve of his plum-colored worsted sport coat as though it contained the answer to some important question.

“The buyer come back?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him, mahn. But I told him next week, right? He was gonna speak to some people, you know how that go.”

“Yeah.”

I gave it some thought, turned to the Prof. “You think we need a different player? Porkpie, he’d take a booth and just open up shop. He’s a middleman. Whatever you want, he could find it for you. Maybe that’s the kind of guy we need. Clarence set himself up as an arms dealer. This Chinese woman, she’s only looking for muscle, maybe?”

“Or maybe she already found it,” the little man replied. “And she’s not coming back, Jack.”

I wasn’t ready to let go of it. “One more time,” I said. Clarence nodded.

From our vantage point deep in the parking lot, we watched from the front seat of the Plymouth as cars came and went all night long. No way to tell who was inside. Sometimes the cars parked, sometimes they just dropped someone off. The weather was too cold and ugly to make a solid ID, everyone wearing coats, all bundled up. A lot of them had hats too. With the lousy light and the slanted sight-lines, I couldn’t tell Chinese from Swedish. But I’d know Porkpie—and he didn’t show.

The Prof and I talked each new sighting over anyway, just to keep the time moving. It was bone-deep cold in the car. Still, we didn’t want to run the heater. Nobody was cruising the lot peering into car windows, but a plume of smoke from the exhaust would mark us even from a distance.

The cell phone in my pocket buzzed once. Twice. I didn’t touch it. In about ten seconds, it did the same thing again.

“He’s got her,” I said to the Prof. It was one buzz for Porkpie, two for the Chinese woman, three for both. “Check to be sure.”

The Prof pulled his own cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, let it ring a few times, then cut the connection. I lit a cigarette, waiting. The Prof’s phone buzzed, then went dead. Same again. One more time.

Max was on Porkpie. We’d had the little ferret on full-shadow ever since we started this piece. Max can’t hear, but the Mole had fixed him up with a vibrating pager set to go off if we dialed a certain number. The instant callback meant he had Porkpie in his sights. And a single ring meant the weasel was nowhere near Rollo’s.

Like they say in the S&M clubs . . . time to role-play.

I opened the door to Rollo’s and walked in. Caught Clarence’s eye. He climbed out of his booth and went toward the bathroom in the back. The only way out is through the kitchen, and that isn’t open to customers. He’d stay back there for a few minutes, checking for traps while I set mine.

I was wearing an old leather jacket over a heavy black sweatshirt, jeans and steel-toed work boots. They kept the joint hot enough to make a nun work topless, steam hissing from the industrial radiators lining the windowless walls. I took off my jacket, sat there a few minutes, getting my eyes adjusted to the haze from the low-lying smog. Clarence walked past me to my left, heading for the door. I got up and took an empty booth, jacket over one shoulder.

The place looked like a Southern juke joint, only bigger and without the music. Ramshackle, thrown-together furniture, a big red-and-white Coke sign behind the wood plank bar, yellowing posters on the walls—looked like they’d been swiped from a Medicaid dentist’s office. The low ceiling trapped a heavy, multi-tone hum of voices, keeping the heat close to the floor. Somebody had nailed a THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign to the side wall. The floor was a giant ashtray.

I eye-swept the big room, watching the criminal food chain draped over the landscape, everything from bottom-feeders to land sharks. I scanned quickly, looking for familiar faces. Nothing.

At one of the tables a teenager with an Arabic face watched intently as an older man from a similar tribe demonstrated some three-card-monte moves, doing it slow enough so the kid could follow, talking a blue streak in a low voice. Teacher and student.

Right across from them, a skinny blonde woman was getting histrionic with three heavy-bodied, stoic-faced men with identical slicked-back black hair. They looked enough alike to be brothers—Greeks, I thought. All watching quietly as the skinny blonde waved her hands around, contorting her face to make a point.

An old man with a thick shock of graying hair sat alone at a table, a heavy gold watch on each of his broad wrists. People stopped by his table, bent over and said something in his ear. Nobody sat down. Odessa Beach godfather, maybe.

In one corner sat a smooth-bodied man with plain round glasses, dark hair cut right to the scalp. He was big, six six at least, had to weigh in over two fifty. He had a bemused expression on his face, a drawing tablet open before him, right hand sculpting. One of the Greeks spotted what he was doing, started to stand up. The big guy didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the drawing tablet. An island of quiet popped up out of the ocean of noise. The old Russian got up, walked over to the big guy’s table, put his hand on the big guy’s shoulder as he looked closely at the drawing. A giant diamond on his hand sparkled—the real thing. The old Russian nodded approval, went back to his table. One of the Greek’s brothers whispered something to him—I didn’t need a translator: “Sit still!” The ocean swallowed the island again. Maybe the Greeks were really Russians. Or just guys who knew the score. Whoever the big guy with the drawing tablet was, he was nobody tofuck with.

The waitress strolled over, a stone-faced woman in her forties. “What’ll it be?” Her voice made her face look inviting.

“Mimi around?” I asked.

“I’ll check,” she said, and walked off.

I cracked a wooden match into flame, but I didn’t even have it to the tip of my cigarette when she materialized at the booth.

“You looking for me?” Mimi asked, a friendly smile on her classic Aztec face. Her skin had a lovely pale-bronze glow. Highlights glinted in her long raven hair. But her eyes were as flat as a cadaver’s heart monitor.

“Actually,” I said, “I was looking for some work.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Body work,” I told her, softly.

Her obsidian eyes ran over my torso appraisingly. “You work with your hands?” she asked, showing me hers. Her fingernails were long black-lacquered talons.

“I do heavy work,” I said, meeting her gaze.

I didn’t know where Mimi had been raised, but she recognized the jailhouse stare quick enough. “We don’t vouch for anyone here,” she said. There wasn’t a trace of accent in her voice. Just a warning.

“I got it,” I told her. Handed her a hundred-dollar bill. It disappeared—she had fast hands.

“You want something while you’re waiting?”

“Rye and ginger. Don’t mix them, okay?”

The waitress brought me the shot glass of what they said was rye and a taller glass with a small bottle of off-brand ginger ale. “Seven-fifty,” was all she said. I gave her a ten. She took it and walked away again. Rollo’s ran like city buses: Exact Change, No Refunds.

Moved just about as fast too. I sat there by myself for a good while. Poured ginger ale into the tall glass and drank most of it off. Then I dumped in the shot and let it sit there melting into the ice cubes until the glass was a quarter full. The waitress came over, asked me if I wanted another one. I told her “Sure,” nodding at the tall glass. She took it away, brought me the same setup, pocketed another ten.

I couldn’t spot the Chinese woman, but the cell phone in my pocket hadn’t gone off, so she hadn’t left. If she was the right one, we had her boxed.

An argument broke out at one of the little round tables. Man and a woman. He grabbed her hair and slapped her a couple of times. Back and forth. Slow. Showing her how things were between them. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but he was talking all the time he was slapping her. The bouncer—the one they call T.B.—glided over, hands empty at his sides. He spread his arms wide, saying something peaceful. The guy dropped the woman’s hair and jumped to his feet. T.B. stepped back. Encouraged, the guy came out with a knife, flicking it open with his thumb as he went into a crouch. A grin split T.B.’s face, twisting the scar under his left eye. I didn’t see his foot move, but the guy’s knee went out. T.B. hit him once, just under the heart, as he was falling. The guy stayed where he was. The girl was on her feet then, but Mimi was behind her, hands on the girl’s wrists, locking her in. The girl said something I couldn’t make out.

“As if!” Mimi laughed, letting the girl go, giving her the shot if she wanted to take it.

The girl kept her hands down. Eyes too.

T.B. put his finger to his lips. The girl helped the guy up. They went out together—she was walking, he was leaning on her. T.B. went back someplace into the shadows. Mimi pulled a rag out of her waistband and started swabbing up the table.

Then the Chinese woman sat down in my booth.

Only she wasn’t Chinese. Her face was too square, especially around the jawline. And her complexion was a dusky rose, with a gold underbase. Her eyes were a pale-almond color, and they lacked the Oriental fold at the corners. Her hair was a red so dark that the color kept shifting in the reflected light, with a distinct curl as it fell to her shoulders. Her mouth was wide and full, slightly turned down at the corners. A faint spray of freckles broke across her wide flat nose. Along the L-line on her right jaw was a dark undulating streak, as though an artist had inked it in for emphasis.

“Trying to guess?” she asked me. Her voice was husky, cigarette-burnished. Musical, but not Top Forty.

“Yeah, I was,” I admitted.

“I’m half Inuit, half Irish.”

“Whatever the mix, it worked great.”

“Thank you,” she said, flashing a smile. Her teeth were so white, tiny and square they looked fake, like a mouthful of miniature Chiclets.

“You, uh, want something done?” I said.

“What are you?” she asked suddenly.

“Me? I’m just a guy who—”

“No. I mean, what are you. I told you what I was.”

“Oh. Truth is, I don’t know.”

“You were adopted?”

“Abandoned,” I told her, watching her face.

Her almond eyes darkened. “But somebody had to raise you. Didn’t they . . . ?”

“The State raised me,” I told her. Telling it all, if she knew anything.

“What’s your name?”

“Burke,” I told her. If she was a cop, she already knew. And even if she wasn’t, those almond eyes had photographed me good enough to guide a police sketch artist’s hand right to my mug shot anyway.

“Mine’s Crystal Beth.”

“Your parents were bikers?” I laughed.

“No,” she said, smiling. “Hippies. At least my father was. He met my mother up north, and they came back to Oregon together. Where I was raised.”

Rollo’s wasn’t a singles bar. And I didn’t even know for sure if she was the same woman who’d hired Porkpie. I was there on business. But I felt the current pulling me and I went with it.

“In a commune?” I asked her.

“Yes. It was a lovely place, but it’s all gone now. All the old ways, gone.” She might have been a Plains Indian talking about another century for all the sadness in her voice.

“You want something to drink?” I asked her. Once someone in a booth attracted a visitor, the waitress would stay away unless you signaled her over.

“You drink the stuff they serve here?” she asked. A slight smile played around her lips, but the corners of her mouth stayed turned down. Genetics, then, not an expression.

“I got a strong stomach,” I assured her.

“Umm. Then maybe you’d like a job . . . ?”

“I might. What have you got in mind?”

“My . . .” She hesitated just a heartbeat, but I caught it. “. . . cousin’s having trouble. With her boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend. Only he doesn’t think so. Do you . . . ?”

“Sure. Some guys don’t get the message the first time.”

“And sometimes it depends on the messenger.”

“Yeah. You need a messenger?”

“That’s exactly what I need.”

“Uh-huh. You know this guy?”

“I don’t know him, I know about him, okay?”

“Just what you’ve been told?”

“No. I mean, I met him. Once. But . . .”

“. . . you have all the information about him?”

“Yes.”

“And you just want the problem solved, right? Not the details?”

“Yes. I thought it best to leave that to . . . professionals.”

“Professionals get paid,” I reminded her.

“I grok that. I don’t ask strangers for favors. And I’m guessing you don’t work on a sliding scale either.”

“Right. I don’t. But I’m sure I can fix whatever your . . . cousin’s problem is.”

“Yes? And how much would it cost to do that?”

“Depends on how . . . permanently you want the problem solved.”

“You mean . . . what?”

“I mean, for some people, it’s personal, you know? They get it into their heads that a certain person belongs to them, and they won’t let go unless . . . Other people, they’re just bullies.”

“Bullies are easier?” she asked, leaning closer to me across the table.

“Bullies are very easy,” I said, holding her eyes. Or maybe hers were holding mine.

“The bigger they are . . .”

“. . . the more they cost to fix,” I finished for her.

She looked at the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the tabletop, raised her eyebrows in a question. I lifted it up, held it out to her. She took one. I fired a wooden match. She didn’t bring her face down to the flame like I’d expected. Just sat there watching my hand from under her long dark lashes. The flame burned, slow and steady in the musty joint’s dead air. I stayed on her eyes, feeling the increasing heat against my fingers. She leaned forward and blew out the flame, her breath so gentle it barely got the job done.

“Your hand is very steady,” she said.

“A jeweler needs good eyesight.” I shrugged. “You changed your mind about the cigarette?”

“Sometimes, if I really want something, I make myself wait. Then it’s sweeter when I finally have it. You understand?”

“I understand the waiting part.”

“You’re good at waiting?”

“I’m the best,” I told her. “It’s my specialty.”

“You’re not like . . . the others.” It was a flat statement. Her judgment, not a question.

“The others?”

“I’ve talked to a . . . number of people. About my cousin. You’re different from them.”

“You try any of them?” I asked.

“Try?”

“On your cousin’s problem?”

“No. Not yet. It’s a delicate thing. My cousin wants it to be over, that’s true. But she wants magic, you know? Wants it all to . . . disappear. And that’s hard.”

“That’s real hard. Real expensive too.”

“How expensive?”

“Depends.”

She glanced at her wristwatch: big black-and-white dial on a thick black rubber band. “This is taking longer than I thought,” she said. “I have to meet somebody. But I want to . . . talk to you again. Is there a way . . . ?”

“Sure,” I told her. “I could give you a number to call.”

“That would be great,” she said, flashing another quick smile.

I gave her a number in Brooklyn. It’s on permanent bounce—the only place it would ring aloud would be one of the pay phones at Mama’s. The woman didn’t write it down, repeating it a couple of times just under her breath. The dark streak at her jawline moved along with her lips. She nodded, like she was agreeing with herself, and started to get up. I didn’t move. She sat down again, put her hands flat on the table. “Can I do something with you? Just an old hippie thing. It would make me feel better . . . even if you laugh.”

“What?”

“Can I read your palm?”

I put my hands on the table between us, palms up. “I don’t know. Can you?”

“Watch,” she said softly, taking my right hand in both of hers, bending her face forward to study.

I let my hand go limp as she turned it in hers. A couple of minutes passed. “Can you strike a match with one hand?” she asked, holding on to my right hand, making the message clear.

I took out a wooden match with my left hand, snapped it along my jaw. It flared right up. When I was a kid, that used to impress girls. That was a long time ago—on both counts. “Hold it close,” she said.

I held the match just over my open palm, lighting her way. It only took her another couple of seconds after that. She blew the match out for me, closed my palm into a fist, squeezed it quick and then let go. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

I gave her a good thirty-minute start, just in case she was hanging around outside, planning on the same thing I was. When I finally walked through the exit, the sky was clear and the air was sharp. But the ground was wet, like there’d been a light rainfall during the past couple of hours.

Clarence’s Rover was missing. So was the Prof. I cranked the Plymouth over and pulled out of the pitch-black parking lot, heading for Mama’s. On the drive over, I used the vibrating pager to call Max back in.

The Chinatown alleys are never really deserted, but they get quiet in the late-late hours. I docked the Plymouth under the white rectangle with Max’s chop painted inside and slapped my hand against the slab-faced steel door at the back of the restaurant; one of Mama’s so-called waiters let me in. After he scanned my face close. And put the pistol back inside his white coat.

It was almost three in the morning, but Mama was at the register in the front like she was expecting customers any minute. A tureen of hot-and-sour soup was at my elbow even before she made her way to my booth in the back. I surprised her by standing up and reaching for the tureen to serve her a bowl, but she waved me back down, an impatient look on her face. Then she ladled out a small bowl for me, the way she’d done it for years. To Mama, progress is a crack in the wall of civilization.

I sipped the soup, making the required sounds of deep appreciation. Mama nodded acceptance, played with her soup while I finished the first small bowl, and then filled it up again. Once, I’d asked her why I had to have at least three bowls at every sitting. “Bowl small,” is all she said, and I haven’t questioned her since.

“Max around?” I finally asked her.

“Basement,” she said. “You find girl?”

So Max had brought her up to date. No surprise. Even the Chinaboy gangsters, with their merciless eyes and ready guns, who dot the viper-twisted back streets around the restaurant like clots in the community’s bloodstream, step aside when Max walks . . . but he obeys Mama like a dutiful son.

Nobody knows why. Nobody ever asks.

“I think so, Mama,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

“Girl Chinese?”

“No. But she’d look Chinese if you didn’t know, maybe.”

Mama grunted, letting it pass. Years ago, she would have called a woman like Crystal Beth a bar girl, her shorthand for half-breed. But Immaculata had cured that. Immaculata was Max’s woman, part Vietnamese, part American soldier–whatever. And when their baby, Flower, was born, Mama proclaimed the newborn both her grandchild and pure hundred-generation Mandarin Chinese in the same breath.

Nobody argued with her.

I was halfway through a dish of braised beef tips on a bed of fluffy brown rice with scallions and shiitake mushrooms when Max came upstairs. He sat quietly with Mama until I was finished, then I hand-signaled what had happened with the woman between sips of ice water as the silent warrior watched.

His turn: He took me through Porkpie’s night—mimed putting quarters in pay-phone slots, cupped one hand over the side of his mouth to show whispered conversations. Grubbing, hustling—no scores. Porkpie had never gone anywhere near Rollo’s. Finally, Max put his hands together against one cheek, tilted his head and closed his eyes. Porkpie was back inside his crib, presumably asleep, dreaming of nickel-and-dime hustles.

“Mama,” I asked her, “you know anything about palm reading?” I put a finger to my own palm, tracing the lines so Max would understand what I was saying.

“Gypsy? That just—”

“No. For real. You ever hear of—?”

“Sure. Chinese invent first. Very good.”

Naturally. Far as Mama was concerned, Galileo was Chinese. Noah too. Only he took some of the wrong animals on that ark.

“You really think some people can foretell the future?”

“Not future. Past. Which palm look at?”

“Uh, my right hand.”

“Yes! Work hand, right? Hand show what you do. What you do, what you are, see?”

“No.”

“Some men farmers, some make shoes, right? Work with hands, leave marks. Like tracks.”

“It only works on men?” I asked her, smiling to show her I was joking.

Big mistake. “Women do all work. Work in factory, come home, clean house, take care of baby, plant garden. Man do only one thing. Woman hand tell nothing.”

“Where do you look, then, Mama?”

“Look in eyes,” she said, looking deep into mine.

“The eyes tell lies,” the Prof said, right behind my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come in. “What you do, that’s what’s true,” he finished, echoing Mama’s wisdom of a few minutes ago.

I moved over to make room for him and Clarence. “How’d you make out?” I asked him.

“We lost her, bro. Bitch vanished like cash in a whorehouse.”

I raised an eyebrow, not saying anything. There had to be more—losing the Prof in city streets would be harder than confusing a London cabdriver.

“She comes out the joint,” Clarence explained. “Pulls this parka-thing over her head so she is all in black. Then she walks around the back, right past where we are waiting. We do not see her after that, but there is no other way out of the parking lot, so we are patient. All of a sudden, mahn, we hear this roar, and she comes flying past us. On a motorcycle, mahn. A black one. Small. Japanese, I think, but she was moving too quick. By the time I get the Rover into gear, she is gone. I hear the bike, and I follow the sound. Catch a glimpse of her going around a corner. No taillight, couldn’t see a license. And that was it. We box it around, trying to pick her up at an intersection, but it is no good. That woman is a fine rider, mahn. Hard to make time on those slick streets.”

Nothing to do now but wait for a call.

It came the next day. The cell phone I was using that week chirped on the table I use as a desk, startling Pansy into some semblance of activity. The massive Neapolitan raised her huge head and glared in the direction of the noise. She’s gotten more conservative as she ages—anything new is viewed with baleful suspicion. Anything old she’s already intimidated.

“What?” I said into the mouthpiece. The Mole had some sort of portable encryption chip he planted in all the cell phones we used, switching it every time we recloned to new numbers. Anyone listening who didn’t have the right chip would only pick up gibberish, but old habits hadn’t died, and I always used the damn things as if everything was being recorded.

“Girl call. I tell her you outside, be back in half an hour, okay?”

“Good. I’m rolling.”

“Hey!”

“What?” Mama had my same habits, wouldn’t use my name on a cell phone. Fact is, I was surprised she wanted to stay on the line for anything at all.

“Girl not Chinese.”

“Uh . . . right.”

I walked down the back stairs to the garage I’d built into a narrow slot on the first floor of the old factory building I lived in. The landlord had converted it to lofts years ago, but the trust-fund twits who lived there never knew about the extra unit on the top floor. They think it’s crawl space. And even if they got curious about anything more than the bulk price of Hawaiian hemp, the triple-braced steel door would be more than enough to discourage them.

And past that, there was Pansy.

The landlord’s not my pal. We have a business relationship. I don’t pay rent. And I don’t talk either, so his firstborn is safe in the Witness Protection Program. The kid was a rat’s rat, informing for the fun of it. When I ran across the new identity the federales had rewarded him with, I’d found the key to my apartment. It’s still good after all these years. The Mole has me wired into the electricity downstairs, so I don’t show up on any Con Ed meter. I cook on a hot plate, and I heat the place with a couple of pipes tapped into an old cast-iron radiator. It’s not real well insulated, and the windows don’t seal so good, but I have a pair of electric space heaters that take the chill off when it gets too icy-ugly outside.

It’s only two rooms, but a pre-Shah Persian rug that covers one wall makes it seem like there’s another room behind it. That was for when I used the place as an office. I haven’t done that for years. The Mole rigged me a stand-up shower and a sink with a mirror over it. Stainless steel, just like the State gave me on my last bit. I have an extension phone on the ones they use in the loft below me, but I only use it for emergencies. Fact is, I haven’t used it at all since we found a way to code-grab cellular numbers off the airwaves. We change the cloned number every week or so, but one thing stays the same—when I make a call, someone else gets the bill.

I fired up the Plymouth, used the periscope to check the empty street and carefully inched my way out. By the time the pay phone at Mama’s rang for me, I’d been sitting in my booth for ten minutes.

“Gardens,” Mama answered, using a heavy Mandarin accent. She’s got a lot of them. Mama cocked her head, signaling to me she was listening, then said, “Oh sure. Right here. Just come back. I get him, okay?” into the phone, and handed it to me.

“Yeah?”

“Burke? Is that you?”

“Sure.”

“It’s Crystal Beth. From—”

“I remember,” I said, neutral-voiced.

“Can we meet someplace?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t talk much on the phone,” she said, a teasing undertone to her husky voice.

“Neither should you,” I told her.

“Why? I’m not . . . Oh, never mind. Do you know a good place?”

I thought it over fast. She didn’t want to show me her cards. I could understand that. I balanced the safety of meeting her at Mama’s with letting her see where I worked. But too many people around me had died over the years, and some of my secrets along with them. The local cops knew about Mama’s; so did the feds. A low-tier nothing like Porkpie wouldn’t know, but even he could find out if he put some money out on the street. “Yeah, I know a place,” I said. “How about if I buy you dinner? Tonight?”

“I’d like that.”

“It’s a deal,” I said. And gave her Mama’s address.

“You sure you killed him?” I asked Herk. I didn’t bother to watch his eyes—the big dope couldn’t lie any better than he could steal.

“I got under the ribs, Burke. The light went out. Soon as I stuck him. You could see it.”

We were sitting in the front seat of my Plymouth, just inside the fence of a junkyard in South Ozone Park. I know the owner. We could sit there for hours without a problem. Except for the cold. I was trying to put it together. The way I figured it, it wasn’t ever meant to be a warning, it was a setup hit. Somebody knew how the mark was going to react when he was braced, especially by a guy Herk’s size. Somebody knew the mark would go for his gun.

Herk hadn’t known that. Maybe the woman hadn’t either. Maybe Porkpie . . .

“And then you ran for the car?” I asked.

“Right. Porkpie had the engine running and we just—”

“And there was nobody else around, Herk? You’re sure?”

“Oh man, yes! I checked the alley on foot first, before the punk even came out. Burke, when am I gonna raise on outa here? All you can do is watch that little TV in my room all day. Like being in the hole. No guys to hang out with, no weight room, no nothing.”

“You want some stuff to read?”

“Yeah! Can you get me some comics?”

“What kind? Like Batman and stuff?”

“No, man. Batman’s a slug. That stuff ain’t no fun. Get me something like this,” he said, pulling a rolled-up comic book out of his coat.”

“Hardboiled?” I asked, looking at a comic cover as intricate as an ancient tapestry.

“Yeah! This guy rules! I love his stuff.”

“Which guy?”

“The artist, man. Look!”

I saw the name in tiny letters. Geof Darrow. “This is him?”

“Look at the pictures, Burke. He’s got the magic, bro.”

I lit a smoke and thumbed through the book. Thinking Herk was right. I never saw drawings like that. They vibrated like liquid poetry—the deeper you looked, the more there was to see.

“You’re right, brother,” I told him. “Okay, anything else?”

“Yeah. Anything by Alan Grant, okay?”

“Alan Grant, he’s an artist too?”

“No, man,” Herk said scornfully. “Don’t you know nothing? He’s a writer. A great writer. Check out Lobo. And Anderson: Psi-Judge—that’s like a British one, but they got it at any decent store.”

“I will,” I promised him. “Just stay put, all right? We’re working on it.”

“I wish I was working,” the big man said.

“There’ll be work soon enough,” I told him.

“Not that work,” he said, dismissing my whole life. “Real work. A job, like.”

“A citizen job?”

“Yeah. That’s right,” the big man said, rolling his shoulders like he was expecting a fight. “A square job. With a paycheck.”

“You wanna work on the docks? Kick back to the foreman every shape-up? Drive a cab and eat shit all day from the fares? What?”

“I heard all that,” Herk said. “I been hearing it all my life, okay? What’re you asking me? Do I wanna kiss ass? There’s gotta be another way.”

“I guess. But if you don’t know what you wanna do . . .”

“I fucking do know,” he said quietly. “You remember Dante? From Inside?”

“The old Italian guy? The one who—?”

“Yeah, the guy who had that big garden? Remember? He had all them plants—tomatoes and cucumbers and radishes and carrots and everything? He showed me how to do some . . . stuff. I really liked that, Burke. It was . . . I dunno. . . . I can’t explain it.”

“That’s what you want to be, a gardener?”

“That’s right,” he said, chin out-thrust, an undertone of aggressiveness in his voice. “Dante said there’s lotsa jobs like that. Gardening. Landscaping. That’s real work. Not being no coolie or wetback, working for yourself. Inside, even, if you want. In greenhouses and stuff. There’s money in it too, he said. If you know how to do it good. If you really care about it.”

“So why can’t you—?”

“Sure,” he said, just this side of a snarl. “Where am I gonna find somebody to give me a chance? With my record and all? I know I ain’t no genius. But old Dante wasn’t no genius either. And he could make stuff grow like nobody else, right?”

“Right.”

“Another chance,” Herk said softly, all the aggression gone from his voice. “I guess that’s what I really want. Another chance.”

“That was Number One on the Jailhouse Hit Parade,” I told him. “Everybody sung it.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said sorrowfully. “The punk was gone, Burke. Soon as I stuck him. I gotta do something soon. I’m telling you, this place’s worse than the fucking joint.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said quietly, reminding him.

Herk nodded, done arguing.

“I need to look at an autopsy report,” I told the man on the phone.

“You need a copy?” the man said, the Ibo accent thick in his voice. “They are very strict about this ever since—”

“Not a copy. Just a look.”

“I do not forget my debts. And a debt of my sister is a debt of mine, I know this. But this is a fine job I have now. And it is—”

“Okay,” I told him, getting to what I wanted in the first place. “I’ll settle for this. You pull it and read it to me. Over the phone, all right? Nothing more.”

“I can do that,” he promised. “Give me the name.”

Four hours later, I rang him back. Soon as he heard my voice, he started talking, the influence of the British colonialists clear in his precise voice.

“Single puncture wound, left ventricle. That’s all?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“That’s the cause of death?”

“Yes.”

“No other intrusions?”

“No. Nothing. All the other organs were normal. Lungs clear. Toxicology was negative too.”

“Tell Comfort we’re square,” I said, and hung up.

She was right on time, crossing the threshold at eight on the dot. She stopped by Mama’s register at the front. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Finally, she disengaged herself and walked back to my booth.

This time her dark reddish hair was in two thick braids on either side of her head, tied at their tips with plain strips of rawhide. She was wearing a long red wool coat with a shawl hood. When I stood to help her off with it, I noticed it was all black on the inside. Reversible. No amateur, this one—the motorcycle hadn’t been some hippie’s idea of fun in the snow. Under the coat she had a thick goldenrod-yellow turtleneck sweater over tailored black wool slacks and short, crumple-top leather boots the same color as the sweater.

“They don’t have a menu here,” I told her. “Just tell them what you want.” Actually, they do have menus. But they’re plastic-coated and fly-specked, as disgusting-looking as the so-called food they serve citizens dumb enough to wander in here. None of those ever come back.

“Couldn’t you just order for us?”

“Sure,” I said, looking around for a waiter. The place was empty. I figured one of Mama’s thugs had already slipped around to the front and put the CLOSED sign up on the door. Then he’d arrange the dragon tapestries in the streaked window so that the red one was showing, telling the rest of the crew all they needed to know. The blue dragon meant cops, the red one meant danger. White was all-clear, but this didn’t qualify. The risk was mine. Mama’s too, but she was a volunteer. No point in giving Crystal Beth a free look at the rest of us.

Mama ambled over, snapping her fingers sharply as she moved. A waiter came out of the back with some ice water—the blue glasses were so clean they looked new.

“Can you recommend something?” I asked Mama, straight-faced.

“Recommend? You want food?”

“Yes. Food.”

“Okay. Food coming,” she said to me, barking something in waterfront Cantonese over her shoulder at the waiter.

We didn’t get the hot-and-sour soup—that was only for family. But one of the waiters unfolded a fresh white linen tablecloth over the corroded Formica, then set the table with ultra-modern Danish stainless cutlery, gleaming like it just came out of the tissue paper.

Mama checked the setup, nodded approval. The waiter brought a wild assortment of dim sum, plus some spring rolls so light the crackle of the skin was a surprise. Next there was beef in oyster sauce with disks of bok choy, some kind of lemon chicken with snow-pea pods, and fried rice with hefty chunks of crabmeat. All beautifully presented on ice-blue dishes. Mama even found a deep-purple orchid and placed it in a translucent white vase shaped like a genie’s bottle.

“It’s wonderful!” Crystal Beth exclaimed after quickly nibbling at a half-dozen different dishes.

Mama bowed, just the ghost of a smile around her mouth.

“What’s in these?” Crystal Beth asked her, holding up a half-eaten piece of spring roll.

“Big secret,” Mama said gravely. “Everything here big secret.”

“I’d keep it a secret too,” Crystal Beth assured her.

Mama bowed again, and went back to her register. The lights in the restaurant dimmed. A waiter came out and put what looked like a blue hurricane candle on the table, close to the wall. He lit the candle with a long red paper match, studying the flame until he was satisfied.

Crystal Beth chewed her food slowly, eyes on my face all the while. She didn’t say anything. The candle flickered to her left, so the dark line along her jawbone was hard to see clearly. I tried not to stare at it.

I guess that didn’t work. “It’s a tattoo,” she finally said. “You want to see it up close?”

“Yes,” I told her, surprised at my own honesty.

She turned her face all the way to her left. I moved the candle toward the center of the table and leaned over. The line came fairly straight down her jawbone, then formed a curlicue before it continued on around toward her square little chin. At the very tip it ended in what looked like a tiny crude arrowhead. I wanted to touch it, but I kept my hands flat on the tabletop.

“It looks . . . tribal,” I said.

“It is. It means I have a purpose.”

“But they did it when you were a girl, right?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I just . . . How could they know your purpose when you were a child?”

“They didn’t. But . . . they knew I would have one.”

“And that was true?”

“Oh yes. Very true.”

I returned the candle to its place near the wall. Her hands were small, the nails cut short and straight across, clear polish gleaming in the flickering light. Her face was fresh, free of makeup, deep-black pupils in her almond eyes. If she was uncomfortable not talking while she ate, she didn’t show it.

A waiter cleared the plates, slowly and ceremoniously. I didn’t know any of Mama’s people could do either one. Then he brought us each an egg cup of lemon sorbet and a small silver spoon.

“No fortune cookies?” she asked the waiter.

He gave her a blank look. That’s one thing Mama’s people were real good at.

“They don’t speak English,” I told her.

“I’m surprised this place isn’t jammed,” she said. “The food is unbelievable.”

“It’s . . . erratic,” I told her. “Cooks come and go pretty quick. This is more like a . . . school. If they get really good, they move on to one of the upscale places. Some nights, you could eat here and go right to the Emergency Room.”

That was the truth, but it had nothing to do with the food. Every once in a while some outsider checks out the hole-in-the-wall location and decides Mama’s would be a good place for a robbery. I was there when it happened the last time. A kid came in the front door holding an Intratec Scorpion, the favorite of homicidal triggerboys throughout the city—the gun’s a piece of garbage, but they love the look. The kid had mastered the urban-punk killing machine’s pose—he had his wrist turned so he was sighting down the back of his hand, the side of the pistol parallel to the ground. Just like in the movies. A genius move with a semi-auto—it guarantees the spent cartridges are going to fly right up in your face. But the triggerboy never got the chance to find that out. His body went into a Chinatown Dumpster. I don’t know what happened to it after that.

The waiter took the egg cups, put a large blue glass ashtray precisely between us. I took out my cigarettes, offered her one. “No thank you,” she said politely. “I have my own.”

She took a pack of rolling papers from her purse, tapped out some dark rough-cut tobacco from a green-and-white tin and expertly assembled the cigarette. She ran the trailing edge of the paper over the tip of her tongue and sealed the package, then rapped it against a thumbnail to tamp it down. I held a wooden match for her. She inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out her broad flat nose.

“About my cousin,” she said.

I waited a few beats. Saw she wasn’t going to say anything more. Some kind of dance rules I didn’t understand. I tried to pick up the slack.

“Yeah. . . ?” I prompted her.

“What do you know about them, Burke?”

I liked that she said “Burke,” not “Mr. Burke” the way most people did. She never asked me whether it was my first or last name, just used what I gave her.

“Who’s them?” I asked her.

“Stalkers.”

I shrugged. “There’s all kinds.”

“That’s what I thought too. Once. But I don’t think so anymore. They’re all the same. They get to make the choices. All the choices. That’s the most important thing to them. It’s all about power.”

What do you know about power, little girl? I thought to myself. What do you know about when the Beast gets loose? And loves the taste? Like in Rwanda. Or Bosnia. Or in some families. “Yeah,” I said aloud. “But—”

“Do you think an ex-boyfriend is so different from an obsessed fan of a movie star?”

“Sure. The ex-boyfriend, he’s got a history. Or what he thinks is a history, anyway. He had it, once. The fan never had it.”

“That’s very rational,” she said, her voice just this side of frosty. “But rational doesn’t count. All that counts is pressure. The more obsessed they are, the more power they have. They can concentrate—focus their energy like no normal person ever could. They’re like heat-seeking missiles, homing in on the signal. And if you’re alive, you give off some signal. No matter how carefully you refuse to engage with them, no matter how much security you can buy. Strippers get them. So do college professors. Anyone who’s ever written a book or appeared on a talk show is a potential target. It’s like sexual harassment cranked up to the nth degree.”

“Sexual?”

“Of course it’s sexual. They call it a lot of things, but it all comes out the same. Stalkers are rapists. They try and take by force what they can’t have by consent. That’s all those anti-choice people are, every one.”

“Anti-choice?”

“That’s what they really are, those so-called pro-lifers. They get to make the choice; that’s what they want, not to save some fetus. If a woman is raped and they force her to carry that vicious animal’s child to term, what is that but more rape? Self-righteous rapists, that’s them. All of them.”

“But if they—”

“Maybe you think it’s funny, a man like you,” she said. Her nostrils were flared, almond eyes crackling with anger. A vein throbbed in her throat.

“Funny? Why would I—?”

“People do, don’t they? There’s whole sitcoms based on it now. And movies. Stalking as a hobby. Isn’t that hilarious? Of course, that’s women doing the stalking. When it’s—”

“—your cousin . . .” I prompted, trying to bring her back.

“My cousin?” She caught a breath, eyes focusing like they’d just caught her own reflection in a mirror. “Oh. Yes. He’s just . . . hounding her. He calls up and cancels her credit cards. Steals her mail. He bribed somebody at the phone company to get her unlisted number and he calls . . . hundreds of times a day, but he never speaks. You know what he told her? She’s going to die. He’s going to kill her, and then himself. So he won’t even be punished. He couldn’t stand going to jail, because then he wouldn’t be in power anymore. He’s going to do it.”

“She go to the cops?”

“Sure,” she laughed, a dry, brittle sound in the empty restaurant. “You think life is like the movies? Some cop’s going to fall in love with her, devote all his off-duty time to watching her house?”

“So she wants . . . what?”

The woman who called herself Crystal Beth ground out her cigarette, not saying anything, eyes downcast.

It was a long minute before she looked up at me. “Help,” she said.

I sat there by myself for a long time after she left. If she had the motorcycle again, there wasn’t much point in trying to follow her. We didn’t have the personnel for a three-car box. Clarence was good, but the Prof couldn’t drive at all. Max piloted a car with all the finesse of a bull rhino. And compared to the Mole, he was a surgeon. But if we could score a license number . . .

Clarence was the first one back. He greeted Mama, then came back to where I was sitting. I waited patiently for him to have the first cup of soup—Mama was watching.

“The bike was parked two blocks over, mahn. I got the number.” He handed me a piece of paper torn from a small spiral notebook.

“Good,” I told him. “It’ll probably dead-end, but it’s worth a look. Any problems?”

“Could have been a problem, mahn. Maybe a big one. She had the bike chained up tight to a parking meter, so it took a long time to get it unhitched. Couple of young boys said something to her. She gave them something back. I think they were drunk. They came across the street like they were going to . . . I don’t know, make trouble, maybe. Then they saw Max, standing over to the side. So they turned around and split.”

“Did she see him?”

“No, mahn. Not a chance. I had her eyeballed the whole time.”

“What color coat was she wearing?” I asked him.

“Black, mahn. All black. With a hood.”

When Max came in, Mama sat down with us. She stared at Max’s face for a long moment, then said to me: “That girl, she same as Max.”

“Same as . . . ?”

“Not Chinese,” Mama said.

Then I got it. Max wasn’t Chinese either. He was a Mongol. From Tibet. I dimly remembered reading something about Eskimos when I was in prison. Weren’t the Inuits originally a Mongol tribe? I couldn’t pull it up on my screen. When I was locked down, I read everything I could get my hands on, telling myself you never knew what you could use on the streets. But that wasn’t the real reason I spent so much time reading. I was trying to get out. Any way I could. And, sometimes, for a few hours, it worked. Now part of my mind is like some crazy trivia game—I know all kinds of things, but I can’t always connect the dots.

“I think you’re right,” I told her. Naturally, Mama took that as an insult.

Nobody asked me what the woman had wanted until the Prof made the scene. Then I ran it down, simultaneously gesturing for Max. “It’s all here,” I said, tapping a sheaf of photocopy paper. “Got his name, address, phone numbers, photographs. Got everything on her too. The woman Crystal Beth says is her cousin.”

“She wants the guy whacked?” the Prof asked, getting right to it.

“No. Not a chance. She wants it to stop, doesn’t much care how it gets done. But I don’t think she was looking for a hit man when she met Porkpie that time.”

“Maybe so,” the Prof said. “But no way the bitch has two relatives with this kinda problem.”

“There’s that,” I acknowledged. “And she didn’t blink when I told her it’d be twenty large to make it stop. Guaranteed.”

“She had that much cash with her, mahn?” Clarence asked.

“I don’t know. She didn’t flash it. But she did have five. And she put it up.”

Max pointed at me, made a face.

I shook my head no. Five up front hadn’t been my idea. She’d negotiated it. Like she’d done it before. Which meant maybe she still owed Porkpie some money. And if the little weasel had lied about that . . .

“What you gonna do, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked.

I fanned the money out on the table. Circled my fingers around my eyes to make the sign for glasses, then gestured like I was pulling a satchel off the ground. I cut a thousand out of the pot and set it aside. Money for the Mole. The Prof took a thousand for himself. Then Clarence did the same. Then Max.

All in.

Mama watched silently. But she didn’t protest when we each pulled two hundred off our shares and handed it over to her.

“First thing,” I told them, “I go and talk to this cousin of hers.”

The apartment building was on the West Side, just off Amsterdam, a few blocks south of Ninety-sixth. Soot-gray stone, six stories, faded gilt numbers just above the smudged glass doors. I stepped into the lobby and almost broke my neck sliding on the throw rug of leaflets scattered all over the tile floor. Take-out restaurants, sex-phone services, stereo repair. Armies of off-the-books humans sweep through the city every day, carpet-bombing neighborhoods with their load of useless paper like it was propaganda for invaders. It makes every citizen mad, but petitioning that coalition of pathological slugs they call the City Council would be like trying to get a hooker to take an IOU.

No doorman in this place. Probably one of those rent-controlled joints the landlord’s trying to empty out. Uptown, they’d let the rats and roaches run wild, not repair the plumbing, have a super with a felony record who kept in practice on the tenants. They wouldn’t have to get so intense in this neighborhood—probably most of the building had gone co-op during the boom a dozen years ago.

I hit the button for 4-C. Waited for a count of ten. No response. Maybe the buzzer didn’t work. I tried it again, being careful to press the button with a short, respectful tap. Crystal Beth told me I’d be expected, but if the woman upstairs was listening, she’d still be scared. They all get that way after a while.

I saw a dim shape on the other side of the glass. Couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman. I moved closer to the glass, keeping my shoulders slumped and face bland. I was wearing a charcoal suit with a faint pinstripe over a white shirt and burnt-orange tie, all visible under the camel’s-hair overcoat I got for a song from a busted-out gambler a couple of years ago. My shoes were plain black lace-ups, polished but not gleaming. My hair was cut medium-length and neatly combed. But I couldn’t do anything about my face.

The shape coalesced. A woman. Hard to tell her age. Dark hair, pale face. Wearing some kind of white housecoat. I stepped closer. So did she. But she didn’t move her hands, just stood there. Only the French doors between us—two wide panes of glass separated by two narrow panels of wood. Even an amateur could kick through it before she had a chance to run. I held out my hand so she could see the white business card I was holding. She still didn’t move. I slipped it between the flimsy doors the same way any fool could have used a credit card to loid the cheap snap-lock. She reached out and took it, stepped back to peer at it closely. I mimed for her to turn it over. On the back was a note from Crystal Beth in her own handwriting.

The woman took a deep breath, then reached forward and opened the doors, eyes darting as though she wanted to see around me, make sure I was alone. I stood to the side, letting her have a better view.

“You’re . . .”

“From Crystal Beth,” I finished for her.

She turned her back on me and started for the stairs. I stayed behind, not close enough to spook her. As she climbed, I could see the housecoat was really a lab gown of some kind. White low-cut shoes on her feet. A nurse, maybe?

The stairs were dirty, but not outstandingly so for New York. No discarded condoms, no live vermin, no graffiti. Still, she kept carefully away from the walls. “I never know what’s worse,” she said over her shoulder. “The stairs or the elevator. He could be . . . anywhere.”

“Why don’t you let me walk up ahead of you?” I asked her gently.

“I . . . okay,” she said, stepping aside for me to pass.

We came up the rest of the way in silence. “This is it,” she said from behind me, stepping past me to open a door to the fourth floor.

“I never know how to do this,” she said, moving down the hall over a carpet runner the exact color of slag. “When I go downstairs to get something. If I lock up behind me, he won’t be able to get in my apartment. But then, if he’s in the building, I won’t have time to unlock everything before he gets me. But if I don’t lock up, he can be inside. Waiting for me. That would be . . . worse, I think.”

She pulled a ring of keys from the lab coat. One lock was above the doorknob, another was set higher, a big deadbolt with a heavy strike-plate around it. She opened them both, pushed the door aside to let me pass.

The apartment opened into the living room. “Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a futon couch covered in plain white canvas. “Can I take your coat?”

“That’s all right,” I told her, slipping it off, folding it over my forearm and dropping it next to me as I sat down.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I . . . I’m not sure where to begin.” She walked in a little circle, then abruptly sat down on a straight chair made out of a single piece of white molded plastic. She tugged at the hem of her lab coat, pulling it down across her knees as she looked across at me. Her eyes were scars.

“Pardon the cliché,” I said gently, “but at the beginning is always best.”

Her dull mouth twisted in what might have been a smile. “I’m sure. I expected . . . I don’t know. Someone who . . .”

“Some kind of thug?”

“No! I mean, Crystal Beth said you would be . . . I guess I just don’t have any . . . image of this. It all seems so . . . insane anyway.”

“I’m sure it does,” I said soothingly. “Still . . .”

“Yes. Still. It is happening, insane or not. And I need . . .”

“I know. Just tell me, all right?”

“Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”

“I’m sure.”

“Do you mind if I . . . ?”

“Of course not,” I said politely, staying in that role, balm to her fear.

She got up quickly, left the room. I heard kitchen sounds. I glanced around the room. One empty white wall was dominated by a huge framed poster of the QE II, flags flying, just about to leave port. A set of shelves loaded with what looked like textbooks. One of those high-end mini-stereos—I recognized the distinct Bose wave shape. The floors were highly polished hardwood, the windows framed with mauve muslin curtains, pulled fully open. On an upended white plastic milk crate stood an elaborate phone-and-answering-machine, set up to work cordless as well. The plastic and canvas stuff wasn’t to save money—it was just her taste.

She came back into the living room, a steaming dark-brown mug in her hands. Took the seat she had before.

“This goes back almost three years,” she said. “To when I was a resident.”

A doctor, then, not a nurse.

“I met him about where you’d expect. In a bar. Only a few blocks from here. You don’t get much time for dating in medical school. You don’t get much time for anything, actually. Most of the other women were married. Or engaged. Or . . . connected in some way. I was . . . lonely. Not so much for a lover, for companionship. There were so many good things in my life, so much to look forward to. And nobody to share them with.”

As if on cue, a magnificent seal-point Siamese cat pranced into the room. It slinked over to her chair, rubbed against her leg. “Well, not nobody,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Orion?”

The cat purred.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Orion is so jealous. You’d think I’d be used to it. . . .”

Her voice trailed away into silence. I let it go for a few seconds, then I prodded her with: “He was jealous . . . ?”

“Not at first. I mean, it didn’t come up. Not really. He didn’t want me to see other men, but that wasn’t exactly a big problem,” she said ruefully. “It was kind of . . . sweet that he was so possessive. I wanted to be possessed, I thought. Treasured. Cherished. At first, that’s how it felt.”

“What does he do?” I asked her.

“To me? He . . . Oh, you mean work, right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a stockbroker. No, that’s not right. A . . . portfolio manager. A ‘player,’ that’s what he always called himself. He would always say he was ‘making a play’ instead of buying something. For a client. He had only a small number of clients. He wasn’t one of those cold-callers, you know, the . . .”

“Salesmen?”

“Yes. He made that very clear. It was so important to him. He was a player, not a salesman. He had to study the . . . charts, he called them. Like a gambler betting on a horse. He said there was always money. The same amount of money. Nobody really makes money, that’s what he said. It’s the same money, it just changes hands. Some people win, some people lose.”

“Did you ever invest money with him?”

“Oh no. I mean, he never asked me. It wasn’t like that. He did help me with it, though. Money, I mean. Do you know what a SEP is?”

“No,” I lied.

“It’s a pension plan for the self-employed. It’s really a wonderful deal. One of the few breaks the IRS still gives. I didn’t have one, and he showed me how to set one up.”

“With his brokerage house?”

“No,” she said, an annoyed tone to her voice. “Stan wasn’t after my money. He has plenty of his own. He’s very successful in his business.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologized.

“He spent more on me than I was making,” she said, the defensive tone still in her voice. “When we went on vacation, he insisted he pay for everything. He was old-fashioned, he said. The man should always pay.”

“When did it start to go wrong?”

“The first time he hit me,” she said, looking down at her hands.

“Which was . . . ?”

“Right after we had sex.”

“He was—?”

“No!” she interrupted me. “I’m telling it all wrong. It wasn’t a . . . sexual thing. He didn’t hit me after we . . . made love. Or before it either. I just meant, he never hit me all the time we were dating. He didn’t start until we became . . . intimate.”

“And then it was . . . ?”

“He . . . We had an argument. Over something silly. I don’t even remember what it was about. But I remember we were in his apartment. He has a condo. In TriBeCa. Right near the—”

“What did he do?” I cut her off. She was going to skirt the edges, and I needed her near the center.

“He just . . . shoved me, I guess. And shook me. He was yelling at me and suddenly he grabbed me by the shoulders and . . . I was terrified.”

“So he stopped?”

“Yes. He did stop. And he apologized too. It was the stress of his job. He’s responsible for tens of millions of dollars every day. It’s very intense work, and he has to be in control every minute. His job is a pressure cooker.”

“And he had to blow off steam every once in a while?”

“That’s right. That’s what he—”

“But it escalated?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times in your line of work.”

Seeing as she’d been nice enough to upgrade me from thug to psychologist—or downgrade me to lawyer, I couldn’t tell which—I decided to let that one pass.

“It wasn’t really the . . . violence,” she finally said. “He did hit me, eventually. Even punched me in the face, once. I didn’t have to go to the hospital . . . and didn’t want to, all right?” she continued. “It was . . . humiliating. I had told the other residents that we were . . . together. They don’t train you to ask for help, they train you to give it. And to stay . . . detached.”

“Okay.”

“No, it wasn’t okay. I should have stopped it earlier. But . . . I just didn’t. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. . . . ?”

“Smith.”

“Of course,” she said, in that self-hating tone. Why should this hard-faced man tell her the truth? He wasn’t there to help her. He didn’t care about her. He just wanted the money. “Smith. Do you know what a cancer is, Mr. Smith?”

“Not medically.”

“Cancer is simply unregulated growth. That’s all it is. The human body has mechanisms within it to regulate growth. When they malfunction, the cancer starts to work. If you don’t stop its growth, it eats the host. That’s what my . . . relationship was. Unregulated growth. He got more . . . controlling every day. At first I . . . liked it. Then I didn’t know how to stop it. It was . . . swallowing me. There wouldn’t have been anything of me left.”

“The police . . . ?”

“It wasn’t the violence!” she said sharply. “Not the physical violence. He could stop that. He even . . . did, sometimes. It was the . . . picking away at me. Eating my . . . self. I was too fat. So I lost weight. I was too rotten a dancer. So I took lessons. I always said the wrong thing. I was always . . . embarrassing him, he said. I didn’t really love him, he said that too. So I did . . . whatever he wanted. To prove it to him. I made myself into exactly what he wanted.” She took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before she let it out. “And then I didn’t want to be what I was. But he wouldn’t let me go.”

“He threatened to hurt you?”

“Hurt me? Yes, that’s about right. Not kill me. That wouldn’t be his style. You can’t totally dominate a dead person.”

This wasn’t the story Crystal Beth had told me, but I kept my face bland, asked: “How would he hurt you, then?”

“He has . . . pictures of me. They weren’t a secret. I mean, I knew he was taking them. But . . . you can’t imagine. The things I did. For him, I thought. So I could prove I really loved him.”

“Still or video?” I said, getting down to business.

“What?”

“The pictures. Polaroids, transparencies, black-and-whites, eight-millimeter, camcorder . . . what?”

“Oh. Both. I mean, he had a regular camera, and a video camera too.”

“Okay. What else?”

“What else?”

“Yeah, what else? So he’s got some sexy pictures of you. Maybe that would upset your parents or something, but there’s nothing illegal—”

“I wrote some prescriptions,” she said, looking down.

“For . . . ?”

“For him. Oh! I see what you . . . For tranquilizers.”

“So . . . ?”

“And amphetamines. And painkillers.”

“So . . . ?”

“I wrote the prescriptions for . . . people who don’t exist. Just . . . names he gave me.”

“How often—”

“I did it all the time,” she said quietly. “He needed them for . . . clients, he said. Part of the entertainment package, he called it.”

“And he’d go to the law? That’d drop his anchor too.”

“His name isn’t on any of them,” she said. “I could lose my license. . . .”

“Are you sure he’d do it?”

“He would do anything,” she said, her voice tense with the calm certainty of the doomed. “Anything at all.”

“Like cancel your credit cards? Or steal your mail?”

“He never did that,” she said, a puzzled tone to her voice.

“Your cousin said that—”

“My cousin? I don’t have a cousin? Who . . . ?”

“Crystal Beth.”

“Crystal Beth? She’s not my cousin. I met her when I was volunteering at the center. And when the same thing started to happen to me, I . . .”

“Yeah, I guess it’s just a word she uses. ‘Cousin.’ Like ‘sister,’ you know? It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “What you want is for him to stop, right?”

“Yes!”

“You understand, there’s probably no way to get the pictures back. Not all of them. They could be anywhere.”

“I know.”

“And the scrips. You already wrote them. There’s already a record. The best you can get is that he goes away, leaves you alone. That’s enough?”

“I told Crystal Beth. I already made all my mistakes. All I want is for him to leave my life.”

“Give me what you have on him,” I said.

She had a lot, but it wasn’t much. Volume, not substance. The photos were a help, but she didn’t have a spare set of keys to his apartment. Or his car.

What she had was mostly “Dating Game” keepsakes. Only thing, she finally figured out, she was the game.

Like the pimps say, it’s all game.

She gave me the letters too. At first they were lovely little hollow things. On creamy stationery with his name embossed in florid script. Handwritten with a fountain pen in a self-assured flowing hand. Bullshit homilies. Talk-show clichés. Recycled garbage.

The philosophers say “Whatever will be, will be.” My darling, all I know is that we will be. Together.

But the temperature dropped as he got closer to what he was. The last one was computer-font typed on plain paper. Using what the chump probably thought was an untraceable laser printer.

Broken promises make broken people, you dirty miserable fucking lousy bitch.

All you ever need to scan someone who plays above ground is the usual registration paper. A Social Security number can do it. Or a driver’s license. Or whatever. It’s easy. Some of that government ID stuff. And some cash.

Wolfe pulled the records for me in forty-eight hours, sneering “amateur” as she handed them over. I asked her, since I was protecting a battered woman and all, if she didn’t want to cut me some slack on the fee. She didn’t, but she threw me one of her beautiful smiles as a bonus.

The ex-boyfriend looked good on paper. Went a little deep into his platinum AmEx every once in a while, but nothing radical. He’d overpaid for his condo like every yuppie twerp who bought before 1988 and his BMW M3 was leased, but he was pulling a heavy salary and a yearly six-figure bonus too; so, even with semi-annual runs to St. Bart’s, Armani on his back, Patek Philippe on his wrist, regular heavy restaurant tabs and the occasional limo down to Atlantic City, he was well inside the margin.

On paper, anyway.

Sometimes you get lucky. Like if a mark has a Jones for strippers and he puts all the lap-dances on his credit card so he can take his fun as a tax deduction. Or if you find big holes in the financial records—the kind of holes coke eats in your nose after a while. Nothing like that with this boy, though.

Doesn’t matter. When you’re looking to hack somebody up, a machete works as good as a modem.

A few more days, and we had him boxed. He left his BMW in the condo’s garage and took a cab to work every day. Nobody else lived in his apartment. No girlfriend. No roommate. No out-of-town guests staying over. No dog.

“I work alone, home,” the Prof said sharply. “No way I’m taking that maniac with.”

“Mole’s no maniac,” I told him.

He gave me a look of profound pity.

I switched gears, looking for traction. “Look, Prof, the Mole’s the only one who can rig the guy’s machinery, you know that.”

“That’s us today, the fucking IRA?” he asked sarcastically. “We don’t need to make his room go boom, right? You wanna ice the motherfucker, we could just give the job to your boy Hercules, get some use outa that chump.”

“I’m not talking about blowing him up,” I said quietly, ignoring the jab. “This is gonna be . . . subtle, okay?”

“The Mole ain’t . . . mobile, brother. We run into some shit, he’s gonna still be there when it’s over.”

“Max’ll go in with you.”

“And I will be outside, Father,” Clarence put in.

“No you won’t,” the little man snapped. “I told you—”

“Yes, you have told me many things,” the young gunslinger said calmly. “And I have always listened. With love and respect.”

“Ahhh . . .” the Prof surrendered.

I plugged the cellular phone into the scrambler box sitting on the Plymouth’s front seat. Gave the “Go” to the crew as I watched the mark climb out of the yellow cab in front of the World Trade Center, where he had his office. I lit a cigarette and waited, giving him time to get to his desk, to his direct line. By the time he sat down, his life would be invaded.

“Anytime I want, Stanley,” I hissed into the cell phone when he picked up, my whisper-of-the-grave voice on full menace.

“What? Who is—?”

“It don’t matter, Stanley. You been fucking with the wrong people. You been a problem, punk. The people I work for, they don’t like problems.”

“Look, whoever you—”

“Keep quiet, Stanley. Keep real quiet. You know how it is. Something’s wrong with you, you see a doctor, right? And the doctor writes you a prescription. Me, I’m the prescription now, understand?”

“If that little—”

“Stanley, don’t make me tell you again. It’s over. That’s the message. There’s no more. You got no motherfucking idea how bad a mistake you made. You got one chance. Real simple choice. Go fucking away, got it? No phone calls, no letters, no nothing. You do anything, anything at all, we do you. You got twenty-four hours, Stanley. Then it’s over. Or you are.”

“That’s one sick motherfucker,” the Prof said, handing over a little wooden box of six-month recovery medals from AA. Now I knew where the player met his prey—he was a Twelve Step stalker, a shark in a pool of victims. I wondered what Crystal Beth’s client had never told her. Or Crystal Beth never told me.

“You get the—?”

The Prof pulled a white leather photo album with thick padded covers from under his long coat without a word.

“Find any scrips?” I asked him, not looking inside the white covers.

“Only a few. But he had a heavy pill stash. It was all like you called, Schoolboy.”

“You switch the pills?”

“One for one. Perfect match.”

“Righteous. The Mole get his work done?”

“Oh yeah. Only took a few minutes. Soon as that piece of shit opens the line, it’s Nightmare Time.”

By the next day, it was over. A private courier had come to the woman’s apartment. I’d left Max on watch just in case Stanley wanted more than a package delivered, but the courier handed it over without protest once I calmly explained to him that I was the doctor’s “representative.” He asked me for a signature on his receipt form. I looked at him until he stuffed it back in his pocket and walked away.

We opened the package inside a box the Mole has for stuff like that, using a computer-controlled robot arm to do the work. No explosive surprises. I kept one piece out, reassembled the rest and gave it to Clarence to drop off.

Back in my office, I opened the secrets of the white leather album with a surgeon’s scalpel. The negatives were just where I thought they’d be, inside the cover, repasted so fine you’d never spot the seam if you weren’t looking for it. The pictures were all of the woman. And him, I guess, from the waist down. About what you’d expect. Weren’t worth much unless her next fiancé wanted to marry a virgin. Not even erotic, unless you liked ropes and ball-gags and mirrors. Just trophies from an ugly hunt. I placed them flat on a piece of thick glass, used a box-cutter to shred them down, made a little bonfire in a stone jar, lighting a cigarette from the flames licking over the open top. It tasted good. The negatives needed something better, and I’d take care of it soon. I know a guy who works in a crematorium. Nights.

“It was all here,” she said on the phone when I called later, a wave of happiness bubbling under the surprise in her voice. “Everything. My letters. The . . . gifts I’d given him. Even the last of the . . .”

“I know. The one he hadn’t used yet.”

“Yes! Everything except . . .”

“The pictures?”

“Yes.”

“They’re gone,” I told her. “I watched them go.”

“Oh God.”

“Sure.”

“There was a letter. Should I . . . ?”

“Read it to me,” I told her.

“It just says: ‘You already got the rest. There is nothing more between us. Please leave me alone.’ Can you imagine? Like I was terrorizing him.”

“Doesn’t matter, right?”

“Yes, you’re right. I don’t know what to say.”

“Let it sit for a while. Don’t do anything. If he ever shows up again, tell your friend, okay?”

“Yes. Thank you! I—”

I clicked off the cellular.

Impossible to know which buttons would drop his elevator, so we’d pushed them all. Maybe it was the high-pitched sound blast ripping his ear when he picked up his home phone. Maybe it was the message on his computer screen when he fired it up, black-bordered like an obituary:

Maybe knowing we had copies of everything he’d stored on his hard drive made him real nervous and he popped a Valium. Big mistake—the perfect-match lookalike pills we substituted would give him bad enough stomach cramps to make him think he’d been poisoned. And if he tried to drive himself to the Emergency Room, the air bag exploding into his face when he turned the ignition key in the BMW wouldn’t calm him down much.

And after what we left in his bed, somebody was going to get a great condo at a bargain price. Kind of a pre-fire sale.

“Harriet told me what happened,” Crystal Beth said to me. “Well, I guess, she didn’t actually know what happened. But he’s gone. Really gone, she thinks.”

“If she doesn’t call him,” I said, nothing in my voice but the words.

We were at a small table by ourselves, seated next to the palm-print-smeared window of a coffeehouse on the Lower East Side. Some residents call it the East Village, part of the neighborhood-renaming frenzy that hit the city during the co-op boom. They tried other names for it too—Alphabet City, Loisaida—anything that would make it sound sweeter than it is. Lots of new names came to Manhattan for different pieces. “SoHo.” “TriBeCa.” Even Hell’s Kitchen became “Clinton.” I’ve known that sorry game since I was a little kid. When they put me in a POW camp and called it a foster home.

Crystal Beth had picked the place. With a day’s notice, I’d sent Clarence over to check it out. “Big nothing, mahn,” he said. “No action.”

The street outside was covered in a thin film of the gray filth that passes for snowfall down here. She took a long hit off one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, letting the smoke bubble slowly from her broad nose, wafting up past her almond eyes. “I should be angry at that,” she said.

“At what?”

“At your . . . assumptions. That women ask for it.”

“I never make assumptions,” I lied. All of us, all the Children of the Secret, we all make assumptions. We assume you’re going to hurt us. Use us. Betray our love and violate our trust. We all lie too. You taught us that.

“So why would you say Harriet would ever call him?” she challenged.

“I don’t know Harriet. I know the . . . dynamic.”

“Yeah,” she said, sadly acknowledging. “I do too. I hope she never—”

“Her choice,” I said. “At least she’s got one now.”

“Choices aren’t cheap,” Crystal Beth replied. “Are they?”

“I paid heavy for mine,” I told her. Thinking about when I was too small to know what it cost. Or to steal the price. But while I was learning, a lot of people paid. Mostly the wrong ones.

I love it when citizens talk about hard choices. Where I live, you don’t get many. And the ones you do get are all hard.

“Speaking of which—” She started to reach in her purse.

“Not here,” I cut her off. “You don’t flash cash in a joint like this.”

“I know better than that,” she came back, insulted.

“Oh. You did this before?”

Her face turned to her left, the tattoo clear in the feeble afternoon sunlight. “Why would you . . . ?”

“Porkpie ever come back for his money?” I asked her, trying to catch those almond eyes.

“Porkpie?”

“It was five K, right?” Then I told her enough of what I knew to show her there was more.

As soon as I was finished talking, she went into herself. Deep. I know what it looks like. What it feels like too. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see her chest move. Her hands were gently folded on the table between us.

I left her there, undisturbed. Sat waiting, not smoking or sipping my hot chocolate. Table sounds all around us, but she was safe in her capsule, untouched.

I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t in shock, she was looking for answers. I could walk down the same path, but I couldn’t join her, so I stayed where I was.

Time passed. Prison-slow.

Her eyes refocused. “Want to take a walk with me?” she asked suddenly, her mouth straight and serious, the corners turned down slightly.

“In this weather?”

“It’s not far.”

“Okay.”

I left a ten-dollar bill on the table. Figured it was more than enough to cover my hot chocolate and Crystal Beth’s mint tea. But she tossed another bill on top as we were getting up—I couldn’t see what it was. She wasn’t doing some feminism number—the joint was a dive, but it was probably chic enough to charge uptown prices.

On the street, she flicked the hood up over her shiny hair, tucked her hands into the pockets of her long red coat. I put on a pair of leather gloves, zipped my jacket to the neck, turned the collar up. The wind cut at us with ice-edged neutral hostility. Nothing personal—city winter hates everyone. Crystal Beth stuffed her hands into black mittens, inhaled a deep breath through her flat nose.

“This way,” she said, bumping her hip against me to move us to the right.

At the corner, she waited for the light to change even though traffic was so light we could have slipped across easily. We were heading east, the Bowery somewhere just behind us. The streets narrowed. We passed an open strip of vacant lot, its ground cover of broken glass sparkling in the lousy sunlight that followed the dirty sleet. Splattered across the dead-eyed wall of a semi-abandoned building in huge jagged letters was a troubadour’s message:

As if anyone needed a reminder that the privileged princes and princesses of Generation X had rebelled against their elders by rejecting cocaine. And embracing heroin, snorting it in the deep delusion that only the needle could bring death.

Poor little rich kids. Never learned how to act. The FDA doesn’t regulate street drugs. The same fifty bucks that bought you a mild buzz on Friday night will buy you a quiet ride down to the Zero the next weekend.

Crystal Beth reached over and took my hand, held it like a trusting child. A trusting bossy child. She never looked at me, just tugged slightly when she wanted me to cross another street. We were walking down a long block, all by ourselves. Crystal Beth pulled her hand free, put it in her mouth and pulled the mitten off with her teeth. Then she wrapped her small hand around one of my fingers and gently tugged at the glove until it came off. She handed it to me without a word. I put it in my pocket. She took my hand again, swinging it slightly between us.

Three men came out of a bar down the street. They turned in our direction and started moving toward us in a tight triangle. I tried to pull my left hand away from Crystal Beth. She held it tighter.

“Drop it,” I told her, cold, eyes on the men.

She did. I put the glove back on, unzipped my jacket so I could reach inside, stepped forward quickly, putting her a half-pace behind me. I followed the rules for dealing with a pack—take the alpha first. The lead man in the triangle was a Latino, shorter than me but thicker in the body. Our eyes touched, dropped at the same time. The triangle moved past us. I reached over for Crystal Beth’s hand, but she yanked it away, making a snorting sound through her broad little nose.

We turned left at the end of the block. “What was that all about?” she asked me.

“I needed my hands free,” I told her.

“For what?”

“For whatever. If those guys got stupid, I’m holding your hand, I might as well have been wearing handcuffs.”

“They didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not a fucking fortune-teller,” I said.

“Are you always this suspicious?”

“Yeah. Are you always this not?”

“I wasn’t raised to be paranoid,” she said, looking at me for the first time.

“Where I was raised, it was the best way to be.”

“Where . . . ?”

“Inside,” I said. “Surrounded. You understand?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

“You want to give me your hand again?”

“Why? Did you like it?”

“Yeah. I did.”

She was quiet a minute, walking next to me now, stride for stride. “Me too,” she finally said. And put her hand back in mine.

She led me into an alley just barely wide enough for a garbage truck. Didn’t look like one had tried that for quite a while. She turned right, stopping before a chain-link fence secured by a rubber-covered padlock that spanned a narrow opening in the alley wall. A metal sign wired to the gate said: BEWARE OF THE . . . The rest of the sign was a jagged edge from where it had been ripped apart.

Inside the chain-link, a back door was positioned between a pair of windows covered with thick wire mesh. The door itself was encased behind a security gate, a heavy lock anchoring it to a steel frame. She took her hand from mine, pulled a Medeco key from her coat pocket and turned the lock. The security door pulled out. Behind it was another, this one painted a light blue. Crystal Beth used the same key on another lock, and we were inside.

“Come on,” she said, starting up a flight of metal stairs.

The staircase was almost pitch-dark, the dim light flowing from somewhere above us too faint to do anything but cast murky shadows. Crystal Beth climbed as confidently as a Sherpa. I followed a couple of steps behind her, not questioning. Only myself for going along with this.

At the landing, she turned and walked toward what had to be the front of the building. We passed a few doors—all closed. At the end of the corridor was a pair of blacked-out windows. The floor looked deserted. Crystal Beth walked past the windows without a glance and started up the next flight, still not saying a word. I went along, following.

On the next floor a pair of long fluorescent tubes cast a yellowish light down from the ceiling. One door stood halfway open. Crystal Beth stepped through it. Over her shoulder I saw a whole wall of exposed brick and a tall woman with a clipboard in one hand. The woman looked past Crystal Beth to where I was standing, said, “Who the fuck is this?” in a voice as warm as a microchip.

“He’s helping me with something,” Crystal Beth told her, not moving.

“No outsiders,” the woman said, holding the clipboard like it was a cross and I was a vampire. A chocolate-colored cat stuck its narrow head around the corner of her room, regarding me with that “What’s-in-it-for-me?” stare they all have.

“Stop making rules, Lorraine,” Crystal Beth told her. “We’re going to my place. I just wanted you to know we were in the building.”

“I—”

“Come on,” Crystal Beth told me again, turning on her heel and walking away. I followed her again, not looking back, feeling the tall woman’s glare on my back like a laser-dot from a sniper’s rifle.

We walked quickly past the next floor. All closed doors, but I could hear music playing behind one of them.

“This is mine,” Crystal Beth said when we finally reached what I guessed was the top floor. She opened a door and walked in.

As soon as I saw the skylight overhead, I knew I’d been right about it being the top floor. The room was spartan—a mattress on the floor with neatly tucked blankets on top, an ancient leather easy chair patched with multi-colored scraps sitting under an old-fashioned floor lamp with a parchment shade; next to it, an empty orange crate held a large handmade clay ashtray and a box of kitchen matches. A wood desk was against the far wall, bracketed by some army-surplus filing cabinets. The only modern furnishings were a laptop computer with a row of wire-connected peripherals and a radio–CD–cassette–tape combo with bookend speakers sitting proudly on bookshelves made from long planks set on cinderblocks. I glimpsed what might be a kitchen to my left. Closed door to my right was probably a bathroom. The other door was a closet, maybe? Thick-cored gray radiators sat between the windows and against a side wall. The windows were heavy-coated with the same blackout paint they had downstairs.On the sill next to one of them was a green Micata cordless electric drill, a long narrow bit already fitted.

“You into carpentry?” I asked her.

“I’m into self-defense,” she said firmly, picking up the drill and pulling the trigger. The bit whirred. Up close, it would make a knife look friendly.

Crystal Beth replaced the drill—crossed over to the easy chair, flicked on the floor lamp. It glowed faintly yellow through the parchment shade. “Give me your jacket,” she said. Hers was already off, folded over her arm.

She opened one of the closed doors. Hung up our coats on a single hanger, mine over hers. Said “Have a seat,” pointing to the easy chair.

Then she took a beige metal chair from where it had been lying folded against the wall, unsnapped it and put it next to the easy chair. She sat down.

“I’m going on my instincts,” she said. “Letting go of my fear. Do you understand?”

I nodded like I did, but the whole idea was insane to me. The best thing you can do with fear is use it, not lose it.

“You know what this is?” she asked, making a sweeping gesture with one hand.

“Squatter’s roost?”

“No. It just looks abandoned. We did that on purpose. It’s mine. I own it. This is a safehouse.”

“For . . . ?”

“Victims,” she said quietly. “Victims who are tired of the role.”

“Where do I . . . ?”

She smiled and handed me my own pack of cigarettes. Must have taken them from my jacket when she hung it up, searching with her fingers. I lit one with a kitchen match from the box sitting on the orange crate, blew smoke at the ceiling to tell her I was still waiting for the answer.

“Do you want to hear my story?” she asked. “Or just the bottom line?”

Without taking my eyes off hers, I reached up and pulled the cord on the floor lamp so I wouldn’t feel like I was in an interrogation cell. The room darkened. “Tell me your story,” I said.

“All communes get runaways,” Crystal Beth said. “Throwaways too. Good ones and bad ones. The communes, not the runaways. And they all make newcomers live by their rules if they want to join. For some of the communes, that means practicing their religion. For others, it means turning tricks. Or selling drugs. With us, it was they had to live in peace. Peace and love. Sounds stupid to you, maybe?”

“No. Not stupid. Just . . . hard.”

“Yes! Sometimes it was very hard. They didn’t all make it. Some were running away just for the adventure. Some because they were scared. Or lost themselves. There were outlaws too, looking for a place to hole up. And some, they thought they could . . . take over, I guess. Be in charge. We never had anyone in charge. We never did that. They—the elders—started the commune to be free of violence. They had all felt violence in their lives, and they all had moved away from it in their spirits. What they wanted was a place where anyone could do that.”

She stopped talking then. Got up and walked around in a little circle. Came back and took her seat again.

“Her name was Starr,” she said. “Good name for a little hippie, wasn’t it? When she came to us she was maybe fourteen. . . . Nobody really knew. And we never asked.” She took a breath. Then she said, “Everything was fine until they came for her.”

I knew better than to hold her eyes all through whatever story she wanted to tell, so I focused on the tattoo, not even sure if I was actually seeing it in the darkness, just knowing it was there, moving as she spoke.

“Who came for her?” I asked.

“Bikers. A whole pack of them. They said she was their property, and they wanted her back.”

“Were they flying colors?”

“What difference does it . . . ? Oh, I know what you mean. I’m not being fair. With the story, I’m not being fair. We knew a lot of bikers. They had their own communes, just like we did, only they lived in cities. They were nice, most of them. Friendly to the big people, sweet to the children. I remember one of them—Romance, his name was, I’ll never forget that. He had a great flaming red beard, like a Viking. I used to go for rides on the back of his motorcycle all the time. Not off the grounds—my mother wouldn’t let me do that—but we had plenty of land.”

She was rambling. I threw out a line. “He was the one who taught you to ride?”

“No, that was Roxanne. She had this old Indian, a big huge black thing with a white stripe on the tank. It had a foot clutch. She had to work it for me while I sat in front of her. She was . . . How do you know I ride?”

“Just a guess,” I told her, straight-faced. “So these bikers—the ones who came for Starr—you didn’t know them?”

“None of us knew them. They were from downstate somewhere. California, I think. But I don’t know. I don’t remember much about them except . . . my father wouldn’t let them take her. Starr. He was very gentle with them. He explained it. Nobody is property. No person can own another. That’s wrong. It’s against nature. Starr was scared. She said she would go with them, but my father said she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want to. I remember it like it was an hour ago. Three of the bikers, aimed like an arrowhead. Straddling the motorcycles, the leader in front. Telling my father that Starr was their property. She even had their brand on her. They told my father to make her strip, take a look for himself. . . .”

Crystal Beth started to go somewhere else, like she had earlier, in the café. “What happened?” I asked her, trying to bring her back.

“They killed him,” she said in a flat, detached voice. “The leader did it. He just took out a pistol. A big chrome one. I remember it gleaming in the sun. I thought it was pretty. He shot my father in the chest. He was standing so close blood flew out of my father’s back. Then they turned around and rode off.”

“What did—?”

“Nobody did anything. We were in shock. The sun disappeared. I don’t even remember the rest of that day. The police were there. It was a death. Not just the death of my father, the death of everything.”

“Did they ever catch—?”

“The killers? They left Starr there. She knew who they were, but she wouldn’t tell.”

“If—”

“She wouldn’t tell the police. But she told my mother. It was a few weeks later when she told. That’s when she left.”

“Starr?”

“My mother,” Crystal Beth said, a sadness in her voice as long and deep as thigh-bone marrow. “My father was a brave man, but he was a hippie in his heart. Gentle and sweet. A poet in his soul. But my mother, she was just with him, you understand? She loved him, so she lived his life. But that wasn’t her, not in her spirit. She was a warrior.”

“So she went after them?”

“She told me goodbye. She told me she was going to be with my father. I was grown then, almost sixteen. My mother had money. We weren’t supposed to have money. Not individual money, you know? But she had some, and she told me where it was. And some other things. That’s when I got my markings,” she said, touching her jaw. “My mother did that. Herself. Her mother’s mother taught her, she told me. But she never did her art on anyone else, not in all the time I knew her.”

“And she just left then?”

“There was a ceremony. I don’t know if I could explain it to you. It was . . . just me and my mother, alone. When I got my markings. She took Starr with her and they left in the pickup truck we had.”

“And you never heard from her again?”

“In a way I did. There was a . . . network. In a little book my father had. I went to the different places. Traveling. Not just here—I went to Europe too. There was a passport in the stuff my mother left me. I’d never known I had one. Never thought I’d ever leave the commune. . . .

“I was looking for my purpose,” she said. “Like my mother wanted. One of the families I stayed with told me—I don’t know how they knew. When I came back to America, I went to the library, and I found it in the newspapers.”

“What happened?”

“Happened? Nothing happened. My mother went to be with my father, like she said she would. As she had vowed. My father, he wasn’t always a man of peace. I don’t know why he left Ireland, but I know he had to. He always kept a chest, like a captain’s chest? My mother emptied it out before she left. She gave me my father’s poems, and she took the other stuff.”

“He had—?”

“I don’t know what he had. All I know is that my mother took whatever it was. To their clubhouse, that’s what the newspapers called it. She walked in there with a knapsack on her back. And while she was inside, the place blew up. Seven of them died. My mother too.”

“Damn.”

“I started walking then,” Crystal Beth said. “And I didn’t stop until I found my purpose.”

She sat there in silence after that. Not inside herself, just watching. And waiting.

I did that too.

It was a few minutes before she spoke. “Does my story make you . . . feel anything?”

“Yeah,” I told her true. “Jealous.”

She nodded like that made perfect sense to her. Didn’t say anything else.

“Was this your purpose?” I asked her finally. “This . . . shelter?”

“Not a place,” she said softly. “A place is never a purpose. I knew my purpose was to protect. Like my father did Starr.”

“Like your mother did . . . ?”

“Me? Maybe. I didn’t think so at first. I thought it was just revenge. My mother believed in balance. Natural balance. The others, they never really understood that. Oh, they said they did. Hippies worship anything ‘native,’ even though they don’t get it. Not really. They used to argue with my mother sometimes. About hunting, that was one. My mother never argued back, but my father did. Oh, he loved to argue, my father. But he would always do it with a smile, with a joke. I remember once, he asked some of the others if they thought my mother’s people should be farmers instead of hunters. ‘Should they grow wheat on the bloody tundra, then?’ I remember him saying. I don’t know why my mother did . . . what she did. All she ever told me was she was going to be with him. And I know she is.”

“But sixteen, that was a . . .”

“Long time ago?” Her smile flashed in the darkness. “Sure. I’m not a girl anymore. It took me a long time to find . . . this. I wandered for a while. Tried other communes. Looking for the music. But there were always too many chemicals in the mix. I wasn’t at home there. Then I went to school.”

“High school?”

“College. I was schooled on the commune. We had so many people there who could teach. There was this place, not far from where I was raised. A place for girls who had been abused. I wasn’t abused, so I never lived there. But I was friends with one of the girls, and she took me to her counselor, her education counselor. And he told me how I could get advanced-placement credit by taking exams. CLEP exams, they were called. I was almost twenty when I started, but I went right into my junior year.”

“For what?”

“To get an—oh, you mean, what did I study? Just a bunch of different stuff. Looking for the blend. Science and math, history and literature. Even philosophy . . . although I never liked that stuff much. I was trying to get . . .”

“. . . closer to your parents?”

“Yes! How did you . . . ?”

“The courses—the ones you studied—the mix sounds like them.”

“I guess it was. But the truth is, or it was, anyway, that it didn’t work. The books always seemed so hollow. If there was anything valuable in them, it was in a vacuum, kind of. Not connected to anything. The way I was . . .”

I waited a few minutes after her voice trailed off. Until I could see there wasn’t going to be any more. “What then?” I prompted her.

“I thought about the Peace Corps, but . . . I remembered my mother telling me about the missionaries who came to her village, and I crossed that one off. So I became a VISTA volunteer. In Appalachia. I didn’t like the trainers much. They kept giving us a whole bunch of long stupid speeches about ‘shedding our middle-class attitudes’ and stuff like that. I didn’t have any middle-class attitudes. They did. It was mostly the males. White males. Just another way of asserting dominance. Pressuring the women. For sex, mostly.

“But once I got out into the field, it was great. Just like it should be, I thought. I taught and I learned. I just didn’t learn enough, so I moved on. That’s when I came to my first shelter.”

“For the homeless?”

“For battered women,” she said. “I never realized how . . . frightened people could be until I worked there. They were so helpless. Nobody would listen unless they were half-killed. Even then, sometimes. And I had trouble fitting in. The director, she wanted to do therapy all the time. For the men, mostly. The perpetrators, the ones who needed all the ‘understanding’ so they could ‘break their patterns,’ ” Crystal Beth said, her voice heavy with scorn.

“And the director liked to give speeches too,” she went on. “Fund-raising. She worshipped the media. Any reporter who wanted to talk to the women, that was okay. There was no . . . privacy for anyone.”

“Like on the commune?”

“No! You don’t understand. We didn’t have private property, that isn’t the same thing. But you could be by yourself. The others would always respect that. In that shelter where I worked, even your thoughts weren’t your own. Everything had to be . . . examined. Talked about. That’s what it was. All it was. Talking, not fighting.”

“Who did you want to fight?”

“Not who, what. The . . . Beast. The Stalking Beast. There’s a legend . . . Never mind, now isn’t the time to tell it. I left there with a couple of the other women. We wanted to start our own place. I thought . . . runaways. That’s where it started for me anyway. Not just girls, we took in boys too. Most of them were prostituting themselves for—”

“Themselves?”

“Okay, you’re right. That’s what I thought too. At first. People call them child prostitutes, but they’re not. They’re prostituted children. The girls, anyway.”

“Why just the girls?”

“Some of the boys, they went into business for themselves. They didn’t have pimps.”

“Sure. I get it. Just ran away from a nice home where everybody treated them good and started peddling their bodies for cash to buy clothes and CDs, huh?”

“I didn’t mean that. I know they were mistreated at home. Just—”

“You ever read about the cops busting a whole whorehouse full of girls from another country?”

“Yes. Just last week. On the West Coast. All the girls were from Thailand.”

“Sure. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, right? At least that’s what they told the cops. You think that was the first time they turned a trick?”

“No. I’m sure they started . . . Oh, I see.”

“Sorry I interrupted you.”

“That’s all right. I mean, you’re right. I should have said—”

“It doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened next.”

“They closed it down. The pimps. They just closed it down. They hung around outside. They dropped on the girls like hawks as soon as they left the place. A couple of them even came inside. By the time the police got there, they were always gone.”

“And some of the girls recruited for the pimps themselves.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “You know about that too. Some of them did that. We weren’t . . . prepared for it. We thought we could all stand together, but some of them, they wanted to—”

“You can’t want something else unless you believe something else really exists.”

“We really existed. We were really there.”

“You’re not there now.”

“I know,” she said. Not ashamed, just stating a fact. “It didn’t work. It wasn’t my . . . purpose. But this is. This truly is.”

“This is a shelter too?”

“Yes. But not for battered women. Or prostitutes. Or runaways. It’s a safehouse from the Beast. From stalkers.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Maybe it’s just the degree, I’m not sure. But some men, no matter how ugly they were in the . . . relationship, when it’s over, they let it go. And some women, they aren’t afraid enough. Or they still think things can be fixed. I’m not a psychologist. I couldn’t give you a name for the difference. But we know it when we see it.”

“So where do I come in?” I finally asked her.

“It’s too dark in here now,” Crystal Beth said by way of reply. She stood up, walked over to the desk, took out a candle, held a match to the bottom until it was soft, then jammed it against the desktop and lit the wick. The flame was faint, but it bathed her in a red-yellow glow.

Then she studied me. Or my face, anyway. If it was a patience test, she was playing with a pro. I let her do it, not challenging, just waiting.

“You’re here because now I have one too,” she finally said.

“One what?”

She didn’t say anything more. I went back to waiting.

“You never stared at my body,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“My body: My chest. My legs. My hips. You never stared. Not once.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Look isn’t the same as stare. I meant, oh, leering, I guess. You know what I’m talking about. Some men are more subtle about it than others, but a woman can always tell when they’re doing it.”

“You don’t exactly . . . display yourself.”

“No, I don’t. But that wouldn’t matter. That only . . . frustrates some men, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. What I don’t get is the point.”

“You’re not gay,” she said. A flat statement, not a question.

“If I was, I wouldn’t score any style points for not checking you out?”

“No, I don’t mean that. Gay men do that too. Especially your butt, for some reason.”

“Where are you going with this, Crystal Beth?”

“You like my name, don’t you? Most men don’t. They always call me ‘Crystal,’ like that’s easier for their tongues. Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” she said, getting to her feet. “You’re very into self-control, aren’t you?”

“I’m not saying.”

It got me the laugh I was playing for. “You don’t drink, right?” she asked. “Or take drugs?”

“No. Unless you count nicotine.”

“I’m not a hypocrite,” she said, nodding her head toward her own cigarette makings. “I know it’s a drug. But that’s not what I mean. About self-control. I’ll bet I could come and sit on your lap and we could talk. Just talk. Comfortable. What do you think?”

“Depends on how much you weigh,” I told her.

She chuckled, a deep, chesty sound. Then stood up, turned her back and sat down, saying “Let’s see, okay?”

Crystal Beth was warm on my lap. Rounded and dense, heavier than she looked. Her hair smelled of rich tobacco and bitter oranges. Her solid thighs were across my knees, her bottom off to the side, crammed against the arm of the easy chair, right arm around my neck. The candle’s flame lit the tattoo along her right jaw, the arrow of her purpose still against her silence, poised and ready. She leaned back against me, closed her eyes, made a little sound I didn’t understand—I’d never heard it before.

“There’s only three women staying here now,” she said after a while. “One got an Order of Protection after her husband beat her too many times. It said he had to keep away from her. She stayed in the house. He came over one night and did it again. He tore up the Order of Protection. Then he made her eat it. Then he raped her. When the police came, it was too late.”

“Too late for what? They could still lock him up on her say-so.”

“He was educated. Somebody taught him. He beat her with an open palm against the top of her head. She thought her brain was going to fracture from the pain. He was wearing gloves. Doctor’s gloves. When he raped her, he wore a condom. And he had an iron-clad alibi. Four other men, all playing cards at one of their houses. He told her. About being educated. That was the word he used: ‘educated.’ And he told her it was going to happen again and again. Anytime he wanted.”

I rested my right hand on top of her thigh, balancing her weight, smelling her scent. Waiting.

“Another woman, she’s a young one. Do you know what ‘R and R’ is?”

“Military? Like Rest and Recreation?”

“Were you a soldier?” she asked, shifting her weight slightly.

“I was never in the army,” I told her, dodging the question.

“Ummm,” she said. Letting it hang there. Then: “It means something different now. To some . . . people. R and R, it stands for Rope and Rape.”

“Kidnappers?”

“Not the way you think. Not for ransom either. ‘Rope’ is Rohypnol. The ‘date-rape drug.’ A cute name for the Devil’s own brew, isn’t it? Rohypnol is a potent tranquilizer, ten times more powerful than Valium. And it has no taste. Slip it into a woman’s drink and she comes around a few hours later. While she’s down, you can do whatever you want.”

“Like a Mickey Finn . . . ?”

“No, not like chloral hydrate. It’s not knockout drops, it’s a paralytic agent. The victim is semi-conscious. When they come out of it, they know something happened, they just can’t be . . . sure.”

“And they can’t testify?”

“That’s right. It’s legal in Europe. They use it to pre-tranq a patient before major surgery. Supposed to work very well. But now it’s a big black-market drug over here. They sell it in the original packaging and everything. Little white pills, two to a pack. Clear plastic.”

“They got bathtub versions of that too,” I told her.

“Bathtub versions . . . ?

“Home brew,” I said. “GHB. Gamma hydroxybutyrate. There’s no legal version of it, like what you’re talking about. Any freak can mix it up. It’s got a lot of street names: Liquid X, Gook, Gamma 10 . . . It all works the same.”

“Oh,” she said, sad-quiet.

I tightened my hold on her waist, not asking her how she could describe the drug so accurately. Maybe not wanting to know. Feeling an old friend wrap its comforting cloak around my shoulders. It’s been with me almost as long as Fear, that friend.

Hate.

“There’s no defense against it,” she said quietly.

“Seems like there could be,” I told her, keeping my voice level. “It’s a chemical, right? So what you need is a reagent. Some other drug that would react with it, turn it a distinctive color. Like the DEA uses to field-test cocaine.”

“Oh God, that makes so much sense,” she gasped, squirming in my lap. “Is that what you . . . really do?”

“You mean, am I a chemist?”

“No. I know you’re not. I mean . . . solve problems. Figure things out.”

“Some things,” I said, letting an undertone of warning into my voice.

“That’s what . . . Anyway, this young woman, the man who did it to her wasn’t a stranger, it was her boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend. After they broke up. He talked her into having a last drink together. In a public bar. All she remembers is getting sick, him helping her out of there. When she came to, she was in his apartment. Naked. And it was hours later. She called the police too. But when they came, he told them they made love. Love,” she said, her voice trembling with something I thought I recognized. Somebody had told her that same lie, once.

“So why is she hiding out?” I asked.

“Because he took her mind. She believes he can do it again. Maybe not with a drink . . . with food, or air particles. Or whatever. She’s quite . . . insane now. But she feels safe here. That’s why the doors are always closed downstairs. If she knew there was a man here, any man, she’d be sure you were with . . . him.”

“And the last woman?”

“You are a good listener,” she said, nuzzling against my neck. “The third woman isn’t really here. I mean, she’s been here, but she’s not here now. We have her someplace . . . else. And she doesn’t have one stalker, she has two.”

“Are they together?”

“One of them thinks so,” she said cryptically. “Do you know what a falconer is?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then you’ll understand. Two stalkers. One’s a falcon, one’s a falconer, see?”

“No.”

“That’s all right,” she said, slipping her left hand inside my sweatshirt, short fingernails scraping my chest. Carefully, like she was drawing a map. “Do you think I’m a mystery?” she whispered.

“You’re a woman,” I said.

“What a careful man you are.” She chuckled. “And not very aggressive.”

“I’m a pussycat,” I assured her.

“A tomcat, more likely.”

“When I was young.”

“You’re not so old.”

“I want to get old,” I said, slipping the warning tone in again.

“So . . . you want to know why you’re here?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to know why you? Why I chose you?”

“Yeah.”

“And you want to get paid too.”

“Sure.”

She leaned close to my ear, speaking so softly I could barely make it out. “Do you like secrets?”

“No,” I told her, more harshly than I’d intended. Thinking of my childhood. Or what should have been my childhood.

“Not those kind of secrets,” she said, catching my thoughts from my tone, her voice still soft as gossamer. “Sweet secrets. Shared.”

“I don’t know about those kind,” I said.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Crystal Beth said. “Then I’ll show you one. And, if they come together, I’ll do both. All right?”

“First tell me,” I said.

“The last woman I told you about. The one with two stalkers? Well, one of them’s stalking me too.”

I didn’t react, just let her nestle against me. Thinking how it’s always personal with some people. And how, every time I had let it be that way with me, somebody died. I felt the warmth of her cheek against mine, the woman-weight of her body . . . and reached for the comfort of the ice inside me. “An old boyfriend?” I asked her, wondering if I was being groomed as the replacement. And whose life it would cost to buy that ticket . . .

I haven’t played that game since I was a teenager, but I still remember how it felt. To be lying on the ground, bleeding, watching the fire-starter walk off with the guy I had fought, swinging her hips like she was slapping my face. The hardest lesson I ever had to learn was not to make the next girl pay for what the last one took.

I’d ended up doing time with a lot of men who hadn’t learned that one.

“Not even a friend,” she said quickly, slowing my train of thought before it ran off the tracks. “An enemy, in fact. He doesn’t want me, he wants me to do something. And I won’t.”

“Wants you to . . . ?” I asked, leading her into it, fire-bursts flaring under my skin. Arson in readiness, distrust standing by for the accelerant.

“Betray a trust. Sell someone out. Give them up.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then it all comes down. Not just me. The network. My whole . . . purpose.”

“I still don’t know what that means.”

“And you still don’t know why you, yes?”

“Yes.”

She got to her feet. Bent forward at the waist and kissed me on the side of my mouth. “Another walk,” she said. “A much shorter one this time, okay?” And held out her hand.

I took it and got to my feet.

“What about my jacket?” I asked her.

“We’ll be back,” she said.

Still holding on to my hand, Crystal Beth blew out the candle, leaving the room almost black. She made her way over to the door as if she’d memorized the place in the dark. Once it was open, there was enough light to see by. She trailed one hand behind her, keeping me connected as she descended the stairs.

The second door from the staircase was painted black. Against the dull white walls, it looked like a cave opening. Crystal Beth rapped sharply. I couldn’t hear anyone approach from the other side, but the sound of a bolt snapping open was clear in the silence. The door opened to a wash of pinkish light. Crystal Beth stepped aside, nudging me forward with a hip. A woman was seated on a padded stool aimed right at us, back-lit. I couldn’t make out her face—all I could see was a pair of nylon-sheathed legs crossed at the knee, one foot dangling as though to better display a brilliant turquoise spike-heeled shoe.

“Long time no see,” Vyra said.

I felt Crystal Beth behind me, so close her breasts pushed against my back. Vyra’s heavy perfume filled the little room. It stunk like a trap.

“What is this?” I asked her, keeping my voice relaxed, my hands on my belt buckle in case my nose was sharper than my eyes.

“Don’t be mad,” Vyra said. “This was my idea, not Crystal’s.”

“What idea is that?” I asked her.

“Bringing you in.”

“You’re . . . being stalked?”

“Not me,” Vyra said. “The others. I . . . support this place. Crystal and I, we’re . . . close.”

“Why didn’t you just—?”

“Because you wouldn’t take me seriously,” she interrupted. “You never have. Never had a reason to, I mean. I thought, if Crystal told you about the . . . situation, you’d help.”

“You’re in over your head,” I told her flatly.

“But you wouldn’t be. We agreed, Crystal and me. She’d tell you the first part. Then I’d explain how she came to you. Then we’d both tell you what—”

“Maybe I need to tell you what,” I said.

“Burke, please don’t be mad at me. I couldn’t stand that. Can’t you just listen for a few minutes?”

“I’ve been listening. And for more than a few minutes.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Maybe this was the wrong way, okay? If I screwed it up, I’ll take whatever’s coming to me. But it isn’t Crystal’s fault. Don’t punish her for what I did. Please . . .”

I stepped away from Crystal Beth, my eyes acclimating to the pinkish light. The room was bare except for the vanity mirror and the stool. Not even a closet. “Go ahead,” I said quietly. “Say what you want.”

“Can’t we go upstairs?” Crystal Beth asked. “It’s more . . . peaceful up there.”

“Go ahead,” I told Vyra again.

She took that for agreement, got off the stool and squeezed past me. I felt silk against my hand. She went out the door. I didn’t move. Crystal Beth tugged at my hand. I pulled it away from her. “You need both your hands,” I told her.

“For what?” she whispered behind Vyra’s back.

“To put all your cards on the table,” I told her.

Vyra went first, snake-hipping her way up the stairs, silk rustling, spike heels flashing, perfume trailing. Crystal Beth was next, walking strong and carefully, like a warrior to battle.

At the top of the last flight, Vyra marched into Crystal Beth’s room as though she’d been there before . . . and owned the joint. She had the candle lit by the time I stepped inside, leaving the door open. I took the easy chair. Vyra grabbed the metal chair, crossed her legs again and went back to admiring her shoes. Crystal Beth dropped to her knees without making a sound, positioning herself between us to my right, leaving me a clear sight line to the door.

“Anytime you’re ready,” I said, to neither of them in particular.

“I met Crystal a couple of years ago,” Vyra said, talking over the other woman’s kneeling form like there was no doubt who I was going to listen to. “I was volunteering at a shelter. On the phone, mostly. Crystal was a . . . visitor. Not a client. When I found out what she was up to, I said I’d help out. And it just . . . grew on me, I guess. When she finally was ready to start this place, I put up some of the financing. It’s a 501(c)(3) corporation, so my . . .”

She didn’t say “husband,” just let her voice trail away. I didn’t fill the silence.

“It’s tax-deductible,” she finished lamely. “When Crystal started to have this . . . problem, she tried to figure out who could help. I told her I knew someone, but she was stubborn. Sure she could do it herself. Once she realized she couldn’t, then she said she’d listen to me,” Vyra finished smugly. “That’s when I told her about you.”

“You don’t know me,” I said. Flat, no room for argument, denying her credentials.

“I know enough,” she responded, a pout in her voice. “I know you could do something if you wanted to. And I know you work for money. What could it hurt to listen?”

“I don’t like that kind of game—closing my eyes and guessing if it’s gonna hurt.”

“Why do you have to be so hostile?” Vyra asked. “Crystal’s my friend. Friends exchange . . . information, don’t they? If she asked me did I know a good mechanic, or a compassionate gynecologist, or whatever, why wouldn’t I tell her?”

“I don’t know why you’d do anything,” I said, staying inside myself. The danger-jolts crackling around my nerve endings weren’t from physical fear. By then, my crew was in place. Somewhere outside, not far away. The store-bought locks these women had on their doors wouldn’t keep the Prof out. And nothing they had behind those doors would stop Max, if it came to that. But they had plans, Crystal Beth and Vyra. And I don’t like being in people’s plans.

“Burke, please. Come on,” Vyra said. “It’s a . . . job, right? You do jobs.”

“You’re guessing,” I told her.

“You must do something, right? I’m not asking you what that is, okay? But anyone can listen, can’t they? You can never get hurt just listening.”

I ignored that. If she’d been raised like I was, she wouldn’t talk so stupid.

“If he doesn’t want to . . .” Crystal Beth said, like I wasn’t in the room.

I turned to her. “Don’t lie,” I said.

She refused to take offense at what I said. Played it for a green light instead, said: “It started when—”

“Tell him about the—” Vyra interrupted.

“That’s enough,” I cut her off. “This isn’t a movie. You’re not the director. And I can’t listen in stereo anyway.”

Vyra snorted through her tiny custom-built nose, tried to fold her arms over her huge chest, gave it up in frustration. Sat quiet for a long few seconds. Then Crystal Beth started again:

“Marla—that’s her name—she’s one of those girls everybody says doesn’t know any better, do you understand? She got married when she was barely seventeen. It was better than where she was, she thought. That happens a lot—we see it all the time. He’s a lot older than she is. She said it wasn’t all that bad at first. Oh, he hit her and everything, but she was used to that. Her father had . . . been that way, so it wasn’t a . . . surprise, I guess.”

She watched my face for a few seconds, waiting for a reaction—didn’t get one, so she went back to her story.

“No matter what Marla did, it didn’t make any difference. He never stopped. It took her a while, but she finally figured it out. He liked to do it. As simple as that.”

I said nothing, waiting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, accusingly. “Why didn’t she just leave, right?”

“Or stab him in his sleep,” I offered. “Or poison his food, or—”

“You could never understand,” she cut in. “How could you—?”

“—or hire a hit man,” I went on like she hadn’t spoken.

That stopped her. The room went silent. “She was afraid,” Vyra finally said in a pious tone. “Do you know what it means to be afraid? Really afraid?”

“Better than you ever will, you stupid, spoiled bitch,” I told her, a trigger-pull away from being done with them all. “Save it for the proposal-writing, okay? You want to tell me a story, tell it. You want to give lectures, find someone who wants to get in your pants bad enough to pretend like they’re interested.”

Vyra jumped to her feet, stepped toward me, hand raised like she was going to slap with it. The move was so natural I knew she’d done it before.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told her. “I’m not your husband.”

“You . . .” She couldn’t find the rest of the words. Crystal Beth put her arm around her waist, push-pulled her back to the chair, saying something so softly I couldn’t hear it.

“Let’s be calm,” Crystal Beth said like she was proposing an activity we might all enjoy. “Maybe we’re just all . . . combustible. A bad combination. Would you like it better if we talked alone, just the two of us?” she asked me.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If you two trusted each other, you wouldn’t both be here anyway.”

Neither of them said anything to that, but Vyra’s face flamed under her makeup.

“If this is a story, you’re a long way from the end,” I told them. “It’s getting late, and I got work to do.”

“What work is that?” Vyra sneered.

“Work I get paid for,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Bastard,” she said. No more emotion there, just stating a fact.

Crystal Beth dropped to her knees between us, stretched out her hands. Vyra took one. I didn’t. She put that empty hand on my knee like an acupuncture anchor, maintaining the current. She stayed there like that for a long moment, eyes closed. At least she wasn’t chanting.

“She was afraid,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “Or she was used to it. Or she didn’t know any way out. It doesn’t matter. Because once she got pregnant, everything changed.”

“He stopped belting her around?” I asked sarcastically.

“Yes, he did,” Crystal Beth said, surprising me. “He stopped punching her and kicking her, anyway. He just found . . . other things to do to her.”

“You trying to tell me he wanted the baby?”

“Oh yes,” Crystal Beth said. “He wanted the baby very badly. That’s when she found out the . . . rest about him.”

“Which was?”

“He wanted the baby for the race,” she said. “The white race. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sure. Pure stock, right? What was he? One of those halfass Nazi geeks?”

“He’s an Aryan,” Crystal Beth said. “In his mind, a true Aryan.”

“And you’re one of the mud people, right?” I asked her. “And she’s a Jew,” I said, nodding at Vyra, maybe getting the connect between them for the first time.

“Yes. But he doesn’t know us. We’re not in it that way.”

“Isn’t there some shortcut on this road?” I asked her. I didn’t have much more patience. If these women thought all White Night followers were the same, they were too dumb to keep walking where they’d stepped.

“We’re being calm,” Crystal Beth reminded me. “If you listen too fast, you miss some of the words. He kept . . . hurting her. Burning her with cigarettes, making her . . . do things. Degrading her in front of other people. Before she got pregnant, he told her if she ever tried to leave him he’d kill her. Not shoot her, torture her to death. He liked to talk about that. He even had films of it. Torture tapes. Videos. I guess they were acting, I never saw one. But Marla said they looked so real, she couldn’t tell. He made her watch them. She said it didn’t change until he told her he was going to have his son watch them too. So he’d be ready.”

“What changed?” I asked her.

“That’s when Marla knew she was going to leave. She started to feel it when she was deep in pregnancy. Maybe her seventh month, she doesn’t know for sure. She told me she knew they—her husband and his friends—would take her baby. The baby would be one of them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her son torturing one of those women like they were in those videos. She couldn’t bear to kill the baby either. . . . That’s what killing herself would mean. She knew she couldn’t wait until she went into the hospital—she’d be lost then. So she ran away. And she found us.”

“How did she know she was going to have a son?” I asked her. “This happened before she gave birth, you said.”

“Sonogram,” Vyra put in. “Everybody does them now.”

“We have lawyers who advise us,” Crystal Beth said. “They told us Marla would get custody, no contest, but he’d get visitation. Some kind of visitation. Probably even unsupervised, sooner or later. That would be enough. He could just take the child and disappear into the underground. She’d never see him again. One of the other women—‘breeders,’ he called them—would raise the baby. Raise him to be them.”

“So she’s gonna disappear?”

“No. She doesn’t have the resources. It will take time before she learns enough skills to support herself and the baby. And if she took Welfare, it would be easy enough to track her. We came up with a better way. When she left, she took a lot of his stuff. He kept . . . records of what he did. Him and his friends. There’s enough there to put him away for a long time. It’s all set up. She had him served with papers. Legal papers. At the place where he works. He has to come to court. She’s suing him for a divorce. And child support.”

“How’s that going to—?”

“When he shows up, he’s going to be arrested. And they’re going to hold him without bail. A . . . what do they call it?”

“Remand,” I supplied.

“Yes, that’s right! Remand. They set it up perfectly. She called him a couple of times when she was on the run. They have it on tape, him saying what he was going to do to her. To scare her, he reminded her of some other stuff he did. To other people. Him and his friends. They have that evidence too.”

“How do you know you’re not being hosed?” I asked her.

“What’s ‘hosed’?” Crystal Beth asked.

“Tricked. Scammed. Hornswoggled. Whatever you want to call it. To really set this guy up, you’d need more than a friendly cop, you’d need a DA.”

“We have that,” Crystal Beth said. “Guaranteed.”

“So who’s the Man?” I asked her.

“Not a man,” she said with a gentle smile. “A woman. Her name is Wolfe.”

Good thing I hadn’t taken Crystal Beth’s hand. A lifetime of practice could keep my face flat, but she would have felt my pulse jump at the name. Wolfe. Former boss of City-Wide Special Victims, a sex-crimes prosecutor so intense one newspaper said she drank blood for breakfast. She spent years on the front lines slugging it out with every verminous predator they threw at her—rapists, child molesters, kidnap gangs, it didn’t matter. She was a warrior woman, at her loveliest doing her work, a sleek mongoose who could clean out a nest of cobras without breaking a sweat. But a politically greasy DA took her down, sacrificed her to the only god humans like him worship.

When Wolfe had been on the job, we’d bumped paths a few times. She wouldn’t go an inch over the line, but she’d tightrope it pretty good if it meant dropping a freak. When they fired her, she went outlaw. At least that’s what the whisper-stream that runs under the city said. She ramrods a private intelligence cell. Does it for the money, the way it’s told. But Crystal Beth was doing some telling of her own. And it looked like Wolfe couldn’t stay away from the war.

Wolfe could get it done, I knew. There were still some prosecutors who stayed true to what she’d stood for. Not in City-Wide—that whole crowd had all rolled over like the knee-pad wearers they were. But there were other bureaus, other operations. And some of them would still work with Wolfe. They couldn’t bring her into the courtroom, but they could bring her information there. And use it.

She knew cops too. Good, tough old-school cops, most of them members of the KMA—“I already got enough time in to retire, Lieutenant, so Kiss My Ass”—Club and all too clean to be intimidated out of meeting with her. Cops she’d worked cases with for years before they took her off the beat. Wolfe had handled mostly sex crimes, but some of the freaks touched other nerves too: Homicide. Narcotics. Anything gang-related. So she knew cops from all over the city, in every bureau.

Yeah, Wolfe could get it done.

I took a shallow breath, thinking that all through in less time than it took to exhale fully. “Okay,” I said to Crystal Beth, “you’ve got him, right? He comes in, he goes down. What’s the problem?”

“There’s another man,” she said. “Like I told you. The falconer. And he’s after me too.”

All I could see of Vyra’s face was a pale oval in the dim light. Her chest was easier to focus on—whiter because of the blouse she wore, bigger because of what filled it. But she was quiet, holding Crystal Beth’s hand, waiting.

I waited too.

“I know this is complicated,” Crystal Beth finally said. “But I don’t know a simpler way to tell it.”

“This other man?” I prompted. “He’s with Marla’s husband? One of the Nazi crew?”

“The opposite,” she said, a tremor in her voice telling me she wasn’t as sure of that as she tried to sound. “He’s a hunter.”

“After Marla’s husband . . . ?”

“Lothar, that’s his name. Well, not truly, I guess. His real name is Larry, but he changed it. He said Larry sounded Jewish. Anyway, he’s not really after Lothar either. He’s . . . Oh, I’m not sure, okay? I just don’t know.”

“You know he’s after you, though?”

“Yes! That didn’t take any guesswork. He told me—”

“Who told you?” I interrupted her.

“The man. Mr. Pryce. Pryce with a “y,” not an “i”—that’s the name he said to call him.”

“Pryce is the one after you?”

“Yes!” she snapped impatiently. “Just let me . . .” She stopped herself, pulled a deep centering breath through her nose. Her hand on my knee went limp. Then she spoke slowly, being clear with herself more than with me. “This Pryce said he knew about the plan. To bring Lothar into court. He said we couldn’t do it. We could either call it off, or he could stop us, whatever we wanted. ‘It’s your choice,’ is what he said. But there isn’t a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Vyra piped up.

“Save it for something you know,” I told her. “This isn’t about shoes.”

I felt the jolt pass from her all the way through Crystal Beth to me, but she stayed quiet.

“Vyra’s in this too,” Crystal Beth said, her tone both defending and defensive. “If we go ahead with the plan, he’s going to hurt her too.”

“How’d he say he was going to do that?”

“With . . . information,” Crystal Beth said. “That’s what he has, information. Secret information. When I first heard his voice, it was on the phone. On a special line I keep. Unlisted, in someone else’s name. It doesn’t connect to me in any way. We use it for . . . business. He knew my voice. Said he had listened to it on tape enough times to recognize me easily.”

“So he got a phone number. Pulled a wiretap. That don’t make him James Bond.”

“He has it all, Burke. Everything. He knows things about my own father that I never knew. About what happened with my mother. Even Starr’s name. He knows how we run our operation, who owns this place. And some things I . . . did. A long time ago. He could close us up, make everything disappear.”

“He’s just trying to spook you. What would he get out of—”

“It’s not just me,” Crystal Beth whispered urgently. “He could put Lorraine in prison. And he could hurt Vyra too.”

“How?”

“With my husband,” Vyra said, her voice dead.

“I thought he didn’t care about . . .” I said. Vyra had told me plenty of times that her husband thought it was fun that she slept around. All he wanted to do was listen to the details, take topless photos of her, lick her shoes and pay the bills.

“He’d care about this,” Vyra said in the same tone.

I waited, but she wasn’t coming off anything more.

“Okay, this Pryce guy could take it all down. Fine. What does he care?”

“Care?”

“About this Lothar geek. Why does he want to protect him so bad?”

“We don’t know,” Crystal Beth said, flat-voiced. “That’s the job. The one Vyra said you could do.”

I was in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.

It wasn’t easy, telling them that I had to get paid for what they wanted.

So I stalled.

“I don’t know if I could do it or not,” I told them. “I’m not even sure something can be done. There’s no schematic for a thing like this.”

“Will you at least talk to him?” Vyra asked.

“This guy, he’s an information-freak, right? Got stuff on both of you, on other people. That’s his weapon. Me, I’d be going in there without one. And maybe, he gets a look at me, I go on his list.”

“You scared of him?” It was Vyra talking, but I’d heard that kind of thing from women all my life. And from girls before them. I have the scars to prove it—ones you don’t need a Ph.D. to see.

“Damn right,” I said. “Add it up. You got some Nazi loon who wants his kid to help seed the Master Race. And you got somebody else running interference for him. Somebody who knows a lot he shouldn’t know. And you want me to ‘talk’ to him. How about spelling that one out?”

“You know what we want,” Vyra said.

“No you don’t,” Crystal Beth corrected her, standing up and bending toward me. “Remember what you did for Harriet? Well, maybe something like that. But not . . .”

There it was. “I got paid for Harriet,” I reminded her. “And there wasn’t any major risk in it. At least, not like this.”

“I have money,” Vyra said.

Crystal Beth rolled herself a cigarette. When she got it burning, she held it out to Vyra . . . who took one short drag and handed it back. Now they were waiting.

“How do I find this Pryce?” I asked. Thinking, if he’s as good as they were saying, he probably already knew about me.

“I have to call this number,” Crystal Beth said. “Tonight. Before midnight. Then he’ll call back. I’ll tell him then. And I’ll call you.”

She left Vyra where she was, took me down the stairs to the back door. Stood on her toes, her lips next to my ear. “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised, holding on to the front of my belt with two fingers, keeping me close so I’d listen.

I stepped into the biting-cold night, eyes on the clear sky. And walked away slowly, the weight of treachery yoking my shoulders.

It was almost nine when Clarence’s Rover swooped down, plucking me off the corner. I climbed into the front. The Prof’s hand dropped onto my shoulder.

“You was a long time in there, Schoolboy. You get enough of a look to pull Herk off the hook?”

“It was never about Herk,” I told him. “He was never the game. The poor bastard just stumbled in.”

“Figures,” the little man said acidly. “So we’re out?”

“I’m not,” I told him.

And then I told him the rest.

“You can never shed a street-brand, honey,” Michelle said. Sitting in my booth at Mama’s—next to the Prof, facing me and Clarence. She was perfectly coiffed, wearing a red satin jumpsuit with a wide black belt, her lovely face slathered in full war-paint, getting ready to work. I’d asked her once why she dressed up just to work the phones. “It’s all feeling, baby. If you feel it, you can be it.”

Michelle does tele-sex. She’s the best at it. If you could run fiber-optic cable under a glacier, her honey-silk voice would melt it. And she’s the finest natural hustler I’ve ever known.

Michelle is my sister. No biology there, something closer to the root. We had the same father and the same bond: the State and our hate. She’d been born a toy. By the time she knew the medical term for what she was—a transsexual—her freakish family had found a dozen ways to use her. So she ran. Headlong, like a man jumping off the top of a blazing oil rig into the black ocean water below, knowing whatever was down there couldn’t be worse.

She’d known she was a woman trapped in a man’s body even before puberty tortured her from both sides of that twisted line. In the bent-sex underground where Michelle survived, the sadistic trick nature played on her raised the price of the tricks she turned. She climbed into the front seat of cars and dropped to the floor, each time wondering if the driver would be that life-taking psychopath all hookers know is out there somewhere. Always out there, his pounding blood seeking another’s.

Michelle stole whatever she could, and lived the same way. She kept trying do-it-yourself to make things right. Almost destroyed her body with back-alley implants and black-market hormones. Always saying she was going to get it done—be herself. Become herself. “Going to Denmark, honey. Real soon,” she used to tell me every time our paths crossed.

I knew Michelle loved me. She’d proved it too many times to doubt—not with conversation, with the way you prove things in the street. But we were never really family until the night I pulled a little kid away from a pimp in Times Square. That wasn’t the job I was hired for, but I couldn’t just leave the kid there—I owed Hate that much. I was going to get him to a shelter or something, but Michelle took him for herself, right then and there. She made me bring him to the Mole’s junkyard. Her baby. Terry, she named him. And she and the Mole raised him, the two of them. They were still doing it.

It had been a loose network before. Steel mesh ever since. Michelle always told people the AIDS plague drove her off the streets, but that was a lie. It was Terry. Her boy.

It was Terry who finally took her over the line too. Not to Denmark, to Colorado. But she got it done. A citizen might call her a post-op transsexual. To me, she was as much woman as there could be on this earth. My sister. Terry’s mother.

What we all wondered was . . . would she ever be the Mole’s wife?

“You think that’s what they’re playing for?” I asked her. “They want somebody done?”

“What else could it be?” she snapped back at me, angry and impatient with my slowness. “Those two bitches have a problem, right? Some man. Some men. Whatever. They just want it to go away. I know how that feels.”

“You scan it different than Schoolboy does?” the Prof asked. To him Michelle was a kid—that’s the way he saw everyone—but he had an awesome respect for her criminal mind. More than he had for mine, that’s for sure—it wouldn’t take much for him to toss out any analysis I tried to offer.

“This girl—Crystal Beth, what a name, puh-leeze—she went to that little skeeve Porkpie first, didn’t she?” Michelle answered him. “Nobody’d hire Porkpie to middle up a scam. You know how he profiles, like he can get heavy work done. He’s selling muscle, not brains . . . like he’s got any of either.”

“She couldn’t have known that guy was going to go down,” I told Michelle. “Best she could have hoped for was Porkpie would get him fucked up, scare him off. She wasn’t buying a hit, not for five grand.”

“Unless Porkpie was lying,” she put in tartly. “Remember the first rule, honey—deviates never deviate.”

“He wasn’t lying,” I said. “Max was there with me when I talked to him.”

Michelle nodded, dropping the argument. Nobody lied when Max had them in his hands.

“So how about she knows another way?” Michelle proposed.

“Knows what?” I asked her.

“The street-brand, baby. You’ve had the hit-man tag on you ever since . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. We’d all been there when it started. Except Clarence. And he was there when it got added to. Once it was a mosaic, a landscape dotted with truth if you knew where to look. Now it was a miasma, a junkyard so full of discards you couldn’t find the truth with a microscope.

But the cops had tried. More than once. In our world, homicide happens . . . so the police are always around. But they never press all that hard. You listen to the PR guys at One Police Plaza, you’d believe the Man takes it just as seriously when someone from our world goes down as they would a citizen.

Sure.

I picked up the hit-man label a long time ago. When some Sicilians got into a range war. One of the dons hired a guy I’d come up with. An ice-man so laser-locked to his work that predators cringed in the shadows every time the whisper-stream passed the word that he was coming.

A man who stood alone, as emotionless as the death he dealt. “Nobody knows where he’s going,” the Prof said once, “but everybody knows where he’s been.”

A man everyone feared. In our world, that passed for respect.

A man I wanted to be, once.

The don double-crossed the ice-man, and the killer did what he was. The Sicilians starting dropping—some alone, some in bunches. Finally, the don came to me. He said he wanted me to talk the killer into a truce. Call it off, go back to the way things had been.

But if I’d gone to him with a message from the don, the killer would have taken me out too.

The don thought he had me in a box, but it was only a bottleneck . . . still a narrow bit of exit road left. I took it. And the don’s life paid the tolls.

But it was too late then. The wheels had come off.

The perfect killer was gone now. He went out with a sheaf of dynamite sticks wrapped in duct tape held high in his cold hand, standing like a homicidal Statue of Liberty just before the blast took him away. He took a whole mess of citizens with him for company. And left a note warning the cops not to follow him into whatever lesser Hell awaited.

I have that note. It was his last gift to me, a Get Out of Jail Free Card, if I played it right. But the only place to play it was from Death Row.

So he’s gone now. And I talk to him sometimes. In my mind. The only place any of us ever say his name.

Wesley.

I knew what Michelle meant. The whisper-stream flows everywhere, a toxic blend of rumor, legend and lies—but it always carries a current of truth too. It said there were only two pro snipers working the city—Wesley and El Cañonero. But El Cañonero only worked for the Independentistas, a man with a cause, a soldier under the flag of Puerto Rican liberation. Wesley worked for whoever paid him. A long time ago, I faced some men in a parking lot. One of them was a karateka called Mortay, a death-match fighter who wanted Max. And threatened his baby daughter to bring the Mongolian into the ring. One of the men died in that parking lot, picked off from the nearby rooftop. The whisper-stream said it was Wesley, working for me. It wasn’t. It was El Cañonero, but that’s what the whisper-stream does with the truth.

Crystal Beth might have tapped into it, thought I was the man for the job. Maybe it was me she’d been looking for all along.

“But Herk’s the wild card,” I protested. “He doesn’t run with us.”

“He did,” the Prof reminded me.

“That was Inside,” I told him. “No way that hippie chick has those kind of wires.”

“The other bitch, she knows your business?” the Prof asked.

I didn’t take offense. We don’t talk to outsiders, and I’d had all the lessons, but tight pussy makes loose lips sometimes, and the Prof was within his rights to ask.

“Nothing,” I said. “Zero. I’m a slumming fuck for her, that’s all. But who knows what kind of bullshit she’s cooked up in her head.”

“That’s the place for it, all right,” he agreed.

“What do you think, sweetie?” Michelle asked Clarence. That was her way, always. To build us up, all of us, spread the respect. If she hadn’t asked, Clarence would never have volunteered an opinion.

“I do not know,” he said carefully, uncomfortable on center stage. “But it seems to me, if this woman—the one who hired you, my brother—” he said aside to me, “if she somehow knew Hercules would be the one Porkpie would select for the job, she would still have to know it would end . . . as it did. And she could not know this. Nobody could know. It was not the plan. What if Hercules did not have his knife? Or if he was not so quick?”

The young West Indian slid out of the booth, stood on his feet, addressing us like a doctoral candidate at his orals, glad for the chance and nervous at the same time.

“If she was running a . . . If it is murder she wanted, why would she have been so satisfied when you did the work on that other man? Scaring him off, that is what she wanted, yes? I believe that is all she asked Porkpie for too.”

“So it was an accident that she grabbed me at Rollo’s?” I asked him.

“You do not go there enough,” he replied, more confident now. “It is not our place. I think, maybe, she was just . . . looking. And when she told the other one—”

“Vyra,” Michelle said. Like you’d say “maggot.”

“Yes, Vyra. When she told her, then this Vyra, she said, maybe, ‘I know that man.’ And then, perhaps, it all came together.”

“So, if Porkpie had passed the test, she would have brought him into it?”

“Ah, I do not know this girl, mahn. But she seems too clever for that. She must know the difference between a contractor and the hired help, yes?”

“Yeah, I think so too.”

“That goes together like barbed wire and panty hose,” Michelle said, venom dripping from her candy tongue. “Little sister don’t think so.”

“Little sister?” Clarence said, puzzled.

“Me, honey,” Michelle cooed at him. “I’m your little sister, aren’t I?”

“I . . . mean, if you—”

“You don’t see me as your big sister, do you, baby?” Michelle asked him, sugar-voiced, but the Prof knew better. He shot Clarence a warning glance.

Too late. “Not a sister, no,” Clarence said. “I mean, you know how I love you and respect you. But I always think of you as like my—”

“What?” Michelle asked, still sweet.

Oh Jesus . . . , I thought to myself, catching the Prof’s eye.

“Like my auntie. A sister to my—”

If Clarence hadn’t been honed to a lifetime of quickness, the flying bowl of fried rice would have cracked his skull.

It took us a good half-hour to get Michelle calmed down. That crazy, all-class broad would catch a bullet for Clarence as casually as she’d touch up her lipstick, but her self-image was baby sister—bossy baby sister, maybe, but not anybody’s aunt. While the Prof crooned confection into her ear, I grabbed Clarence and poured some survival truth into his.

I don’t know where he got them at that hour, but the armful of orchids—I warned him not even to think about some chump-change Reverend Moon roses—he came back with went a long way toward banking the fire.

Mama watched all this impassively. Treat her like she was younger than you and she’d show you where the “chop” in chop suey came from. And she thinks losing your temper is an Occidental thing anyway.

Hours to go yet. No point in leaving—the restaurant was the only number Crystal Beth had. I told Mama I needed Max, then I went to the bank of pay phones and started to work.

“Allo?” A young woman’s voice, distinctive French accent.

“Is Wolfe around?” I asked.

“Pretty late at night to be calling, chief.” Pepper’s voice, the accent gone. She’d recognized me, though. I didn’t know she did voices, but I could see why Wolfe’s crew could use that skill.

“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “I didn’t expect to catch her in. Can I leave word?”

“Sure.”

“Just ask her to call me.”

“Is this hot?”

“No. But it’s not social either.”

“Okeydokey.” She laughed. And hung up.

Last time I saw Pepper she was in Grand Army Plaza dressed in a pair of baggy striped clown pants, teaching a whole pack of little kids some kind of gymnastics. And walking point for Wolfe to set up a meet. Wolfe told me once Pepper was some kind of actress, but I’d never paid much attention. I guess she was, though. A real good one.

As soon as I put down the phone, Max was at my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come up, but that’s nothing new—they don’t call him Max the Silent just because he doesn’t speak. As soon as he finished his soup, we went down to the basement. Mama keeps a long table set out there. “For counting,” she’d explained when I’d first asked her why.

I went through all of it. Slowly. Not because Max couldn’t follow otherwise, but so I was sure I had it straight in my own mind. Max shook his head impatiently, interrupting my hand signals. He got up, went over to a black lacquer cabinet in a dark corner of the basement, opened a drawer and came back with some sheets of cream-colored origami paper. Then he gestured for me to start over.

Every time I came to a name, I’d spell the sound out with my lips. And Max would fold paper. By the time I was done with the first pass, Max had a table-full of distinctive little paper sculptures. He had me say each name again. And for each one he held up one of the sculptures . . . until we were on the same wavelength.

And then he gestured for me to start again.

HERCULES

ME

PORKPIE

CRYSTAL BETH

HARRIET

VYRA

WOLFE

PRYCE

Max looked at the neat row he had fashioned. Then looked at me and held up the Vyra sculpture, reached over, and touched my watch.

I held up three fingers on each hand. It was maybe about six when I knew Vyra was in the safehouse.

Max shook his head no hard, looked another question at me.

I didn’t get it. Told him so.

He got up, went upstairs. He was back in a minute, with one of those cheapo calendars insurance agents send to everyone on the planet. He placed it carefully between us, held up the Vyra sculpture in one hand, probed his finger at this month’s calendar page with the other.

“When’s the last time I saw her before tonight?” I asked him, words and gestures together.

He nodded yes.

I showed him. Max switched the order, now placing Vyra first.

Then it was my turn to shake my head no. I made the sign of talking into a telephone, made the gesture for Mama so he’d know the call came in here, and picked up the Hercules sculpture. Then I touched another day on the calendar—one just before when I’d been with Vyra at the hotel. Herk had called the night before and left word about the meet.

Max’s face went into repose. But his hands were busy, fingers flying now. He was creating more sculptures, duplicates of the ones he’d already made, as precise as a cookie-cutter. If I hadn’t seen him do this before, when he made an entire origami chess set for his daughter, Flower, I would have been astounded. Even so, I had to shake my head in wonderment.

Max was like the rest of us. He had so many gifts. So many skills. He could have been anything. Should have been . . .