The Frumious Bandersnatch

2

TALL AND LEANand with the easy stride of an athlete—which he most certainly wasn’t—Steve Carella came into the squadroom at twenty minutes to twelve that Saturday night, fresh as a daisy, and ready to go to work.

“It’s for you,” Andy Parker said, and handed him the phone.

Actually, it wasn’t for Carella.

It was for whichever detective happened to be on duty at the Eight-Seven at this hour of the night. But the Graveyard Shift was just beginning to meander in, and Parker was never too eager to catch a new case, so he considered himself officially relieved, and passed the call on to Carella, who was a bit bewildered by the precise timing.

“Carella,” he said into the phone.

“Hello, Carella,” a gruff, smoke-tarnished voice said. “This is Captain Jimson, Harbor Patrol.”

A jumper, Carella thought at once. Someone’s taken a dive off the Hamilton Bridge.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“I just had a call from one of my people out on the water, a Sergeant McIntosh, aboard one of our thirty-six footers. At around ten-thirty, he responded to a distress call from the skipper of a cruise yacht called theRiver Princess …are you with me, Coppola?”

“It’s Carella, sir.”

“Sorry. TheRiver Princess, some kind of party for a rock singer.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Two armed masked men boarded the boat around ten-fifteen and kidnapped her.”

Oh boy, Carella thought.

“You’re the local onshore precinct. Coast Guard has a DPB waiting to take you out there from Pier 39…”

“Yes, sir,” Carella said.

He didn’t know what a DPB was.

“…that’s on the river and Twelfth. How long will it take you to get crosstown?”

Carella glanced at the precinct wall map.

“Give me fifteen minutes, sir,” he said.

“The man you’re meeting is a lieutenant j.g. named Carlyle Apted.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, would you know who the singer…?”

But the captain had already hung up, and Cotton Hawes was just walking into the squadroom.

“Cotton,” he said, “don’t get comfortable. We’re up.”

COTTON HAWESfelt right at home on the Coast Guard’s little 38-foot DPB. This was the kind of boat he’d commanded duringhis little war. Everybody in America had his own little war, and everybody in that war did his own little thing. Carella had trudged through mud as a grunt in the infantry. Hawes had stood on the bridge of a boat not unlike this one, grinning into flying bullets, spray and spume. Everybody in America who’d ever fought or merely served in any of the country’s innumerable little wars would never forget his own particular war, although sometimes he would like to. But there would always be more little wars and even some big ones, and therefore many more opportunities to remember. Or perhaps forget.

Cotton Hawes stood on the bridge of the cutter alongside Lieutenant Carlyle Apted, a man in his late twenties, he guessed, who had been summoned to the scene the moment Sergeant McIntosh realized he was dealing with a kidnapping here.

“Guess he figured this would get Federal sooner or later,” Apted said.

Then what arewe ding here? Carella wondered. Let the Feebs have it now, and welcome to it.

“What you’re on now,” Apted told Hawes, perhaps suspecting that Carella didn’t really care to know, “is a Deployable Pursuit Boat, what we call a DPB. She’s a thirty-eight footer, designed to give the Coast Guard a new capability in the war against drugs.”

Another little war, Carella thought.

“What it is, you see, most of your illegal narcotics are smuggled in on these ‘go-fasts,’ we call ’em. They’re these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”

Carella hated boats. He hated anything that moved on water. Especially DPBs, which seemed to move faster than any damn thing he’d ever seen on water. When he used to bathe his infant twins—lo, those many years ago—even the floating rubber duck in the bathtub made him seasick. Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration. But hewas feeling a bit queasy now, and he was also fearful that all that dark greasy water splashing over the bow might be polluted. His face wet, his hair flying in the wind, he wondered what a nice boy like himself was doing on a swiftly moving vehicle in the middle of a deep river on a shift that had just barely begun.

Tonight, Carella felt—and therefore looked—more like a beloved professor of economics at a municipal college than a detective. Hatless, dark-haired and brown-eyed, the eyes slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental appearance, he was wearing an orange-colored life vest over dark brown slacks and matching loafers and socks, a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie, and a tweed jacket that was, in truth, a bit too heavy for the mild weather and a bit too shabby for the sort of party that had been interrupted out there on theRiver Princess. He was frowning. Well, he was more than frowning. In fact, he looked as if he might throw up. Unamused, he stood on the deck of a tossing peanut-shell vessel, braving the raging briny while two old sea-faring types chatted it up and grinned into the wind.

Hawes, on the other hand, was in his element.

Dressed somewhat casually, even for the midnight-to-eightA.M. shift, he was wearing his life jacket over blue jeans, a crew neck green sweater, a zippered brown leather jacket, and ankle high brown boots. He had not expected to be pulled out onto the River Harb tonight—in fact, he’d been planning to do a field follow-up on some bikers he suspected were involved in a liquor store holdup, and he figured the protective coloration might help him. Actually, though, his costume would have fit in beautifully at Tamar Valparaiso’s launch party, where many of the music industry’s moguls were similarly dressed.

“Ever hear of this girl before?” Apted asked him.

He had given up on Carella as a lost-cause landlubber.

“What’s her name?” Hawes asked.

“Tamar Valentino,” Apted said.

“No. Is she famous or something?”

“Not to me,” Apted said.

“Me, neither,” Hawes said. “Steve!” he yelled over the roar of the wind. “You ever hear of a singer named Tamar Valentino?”

“No!” Carella yelled back. “Who is she?”

“The one who got snatched,” Apted said.

“If she got snatched, she must be somebody,” Hawes said reasonably.

Carella was wondering if the FBI had already been notified.

“I HAVE TOtell you the truth,” Sergeant McIntosh said, “I been with the Harbor Patrol Unit for twenty-two years now, this is the first time I ever caught a kidnapping.”

“We don’t catch many of them onshore, either,” Hawes said.

“I know, anything we catch—other than immediately address-able—we’re supposed to notify the onshore locals. But ain’t a kidnapping federal stuff?”

“It could become,” Carella said.

“I mean, wouldn’t this be considered ‘Special Maritime and Territorial’ jurisdiction?”

“I really don’t know,” Carella said.

“I know the Great Lakes are covered,” McIntosh said, “and the St. Lawrence River, and prob’ly the Mississippi and the Hudson…”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Anyway, what I did was raise the Coast Guard, who I figured would know.”

“Did they?”

“No.”

“The way I figure it,” Carella said, “there’s a state line down the middle of the river, and if the boat crossed that, then the Feds come in automatically.”

“Sometimes they come in if the case is really high profile,” Hawes said. “Like if this rock singer is somebody really important.”

“Who is she, anyway?” McIntosh asked.

“Somebody named Tamar Valentino,” Hawes said.

“Never heard of her.”

“Me, neither.”

“So scratch the FBI.”

“Unless the boat crossed that state line,” Carella said.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” a man in a white uniform said, breaking into the little intimate law enforcement circle. “I’m Charles Reeves, Captain of theRiver Princess. I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a hundred and twelve guests aboard this vessel and we’ve been sitting here dead in the water ever since the incident occurred, waiting for some sort of clear indication that we can begin moving her back to port. Is there anyone here who can…?”

“You can move her,” Carella said.

“You are, sir?”

“Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Eighty-seventh Squad.”

“And you are authorized to…?”

“It’s our case, yes,” Carella said, and thought, So far. “This is my partner. Detective Cotton Hawes.”

“Then I’ll get the engines started,” Reeves said dubiously.

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hawes said.

“We should be docking in about half an hour,” Reeves said. “Will you be finished here by then?”

“Finished?”

“What I’m asking is will I be able to disembark the passengers? The yacht was only leased for the night, you know, not the entire month of May.”

Carella looked at him.

“I mean, we all have jobs to do,” Reeves said. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before on any vessel I’ve commanded. Never.”

“It’ll be all right, sir,” Carella said. “Why don’t you go get your engines started?”

Reeves hesitated a moment longer, as if there were something more he wished to say. Then he merely nodded and went off toward the pilot house.

“You don’t plan to talk to all hundred andtwelve of these people, do you?” McIntosh asked.

Carella was wondering the same thing.

EVERYBODYwanted to go home.

What had started out as a nice party on a nice boat on a nice river had turned into some kind of Fellini nightmare with people in masks running around doing violence to the same pretty young girl.

Nobody seemed to agree on exactly quite what had happened.

Given that eye witnesses were notoriously unreliable, this bunch seemed to be more untrustworthy than most. Perhaps they’d been plied with too much alcohol before the occurrence (though the promised champagne toast had to be forsaken, given the unforeseen circumstances) or perhaps the lighting had been too dim or the power of suggestion too strong. Tamar and the young black dancer had, after all, been engaged in some pretty realistic although terpsichorean violence, and all at once twoother black guys…

The witnesses were all convinced the kidnappers were black…

…came marching down the grand stairway there, brandishing machine guns, and yelling for nobody to fucking move.

Even Jonah Wills, Tamar’s dance partner, was convinced the two guys who’d kidnapped her were black. Perhaps this was because they were both entirely dressed in black: black denims and black sweatshirts and black running shoes and black leather gloves. Their AK-47s were black, too, which might have contributed to the overall impression of black power. Then, too, Jonah himself was black—although this wasn’t an accurate description of his color, which was more closely related to the mahogany of the stair rail than the color of anthracite, say, or obsidian—and his presence on the dance floor, muscles rippling and gleaming, wearing a mask quite different from the Hussein and Arafat masks the intruders were wearing, might also have contributed to the consensus of opinion that there were nowthree black men molesting this poor blond white girl wearing hardly anything at all.

Or perhaps the words “Don’t nobody fucking move!” hadn’t sounded ofay enough to this largely white crowd, although in truth the black-to-white ratio here tonight was larger than you’d find at similar glittery events hither and yon throughout this fair city. Then again, this was the music industry here.

Even so, everybody wanted to go home.

Having inherited this cockamamie case from Parker—who was already nursing his third beer in a bar around the corner from his apartment, and chatting up a blonde he didn’t realize was a hooker—Carella and Hawes were reluctant to let anyone go just yet, not until they had a clearer picture of just what the hell had happened here. They were mindful of the fact that the FBI might be coming in behind them, and they didn’t want to hear the usual crap the Feebs laid down about “inefficient and insufficient investigation at the local level.” So they went through the facts—or the perceived facts—again and again until they were able to piece together a more or less scenario-by-committee, not unlike many of the movies one saw these days, where a hundred and twelve writers shared screen credit, except that it was by now almost two in the morning.

The party guests unanimously understood that the black guy in the mask that kept changing color and shape throughout the course of the song was supposed to be some kind of mythological beast, some kind ofBandersnatch, in fact, since that was the name of the song, though the mandid warn his son to beware the Jabberwock, my son, didn’t he? So maybe the beast was aJabberwock or even aJubjub bird. Whatever the damn thing was, it was something to beshunned, man, as subsequent events were all too soon to demonstrate.

Most of the guests agreed, too, that the police should have been called while Tamar’s partner was throwing her all over the dance floor and tearing her already flimsy nightgown, or whatever it was, to tattered ribbons, never a cop around when you needed one. Neo-realism was one thing, but here was this big muscular guy tossing around this little thing who couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds, if that, in an utterly convincing attempt to rape her. It didn’t help that she was blond and he was black, the stereotype reinforced. What he was doing to her on that dance floor was intolerable.

So it was with considerable relief that the audience, black and white alike, saw Tamar wrap her tiny defenseless little hands around thin air, saw her grasp whatever imaginary something she was grasping (a vorpal sword, as it turned out), and rise up against this viciousanimal, was what he was! who was determined to violate and despoil this flower of virgin maidenhood. “One two! One two!” they all agreed, “and through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead,” they further agreed, “and with its head, he went galumphing back.”

The witnesses they questioned all seemed somewhat puzzled as towho exactly the “he” in the lyrics was since Tamar was very much a “she,” especially now that she was standing there tall and proud but bedraggled in her tattered underwear, or whatever it was, with half her admirable attributes hanging out for all and sundry to see. (This was a point that would spark considerable debate in the days to come, but Carella and Hawes didn’t yet know the kind of notoriety this case would inspire; for now, they were just two working stiffs doing their jobs, and trying to protect their asses from Federal flack down the line.) In any case, just as Tamar’s father, or whoever he was, her guardian perhaps, finished congratulating her on having slain the Jabberwock (instead of the Bandersnatch, by the way, after whom the song was named) and just as everything was back to normal again, with all the creatures gyring and gimbling and all the mome raths…

Just then, these two big black guys came barreling down the stairway with automatic weapons in their hands. One of them had his right hand on the mahogany banister, his left hand pointing the barrel of the gun up at the overhead. The other man had his weapon sort of cradled in his arms, his right finger curled around the trigger. Both of them came gliding down the steps almost as gracefully as the black rapist had glided through the song, one of them yelling, “Don’t nobody fucking move!,” which effectively stoppedTamar dead in her tracks—but not the words to the song.

Until that moment, many people in the audience hadn’t realized she was lip-synching. But now the words kept blaring from the speakers on either side of the dance floor…

“…borogroves

“And the mome raths outgrabe…”

…even though Tamar’s mouth wasn’t moving anymore. She was just standing stock still, staring wide-eyed at these two masked apparitions who came rushing toward her with seemingly malicious intent. She wondered for a moment—as in fact did the audience—if this wasn’t somehow part of the act. Had Barney Loomis hired a supplementary dance team to add additional spice to the evening? But just then Jonah, the beast lying dead at her feet, popped up from the floor in response to the growled “Don’t nobody fucking move!” Hunched in a dancer’s crouch, arms widespread for balance, still wearing the hideous crimson-colored mask he’d worn in the finale, he must have seemed enormously threatening to the two men who were now not two feet away from where Tamar still stood in dumb-founded shock.

The left-handed one (the witnesses all agreed that Saddam Hussein had carried the weapon in his left hand throughout) reacted at once, swinging the gun at Jonah’s head. Designed for the Soviet Army following World War II, the AK-47 was a sturdily built, well-designed gun with a pistol grip as well as a rifle stock. It was the stock that caught Jonah under the chin, sending him falling backward and onto the floor, where once again he lay prostrate as if dead—but this time a thin line of blood began seeping from under his mask.

The two men and Tamar stood frozen in surreal proximity, she in ivory-white tatters, they in inky black costumes and Middle Eastern masks, Mr. Hussein and Mr. Arafat. Nobody in the audience moved. The witnesses all agreed on this; there was only a stunned silence. The sole sound or motion was on the dance floor itself, where Tamar suddenly tried to break free of the little knot of three, only to be yanked back at once and slapped very hard by Hussein, the left-handed one. She reeled from the blow. The other one, the taller of the two…

The witnesses agreed that Yasir Arafat was about six-feet-two-inches tall, and his left-handed accomplice, Saddam Hussein, was some two or three inches shorter than that, a bit under six feet perhaps, both of them very muscularly built, which perhaps accounted for the first impression of a dance team coming down the steps…

The taller of the two suddenly clamped a wet rag over Tamar’s face, and she fell against him limply. He threw her over his shoulder. The left-handed one shouted, “You move, she dies!” and they backed away up the steps, their guns trained on the still-speechless audience.

That was about it.

BARNEY LOOMIS, CEOof Bison Records, was furious. Or perhaps frumious. Or perhaps both.

“That son of a bitchslapped her!” he shouted into Carella’s face. He smelled of seared mustard salmon, which was the entrée he’d had for dinner. He also smelled of a men’s cologne named “Acrid” which a lot of men in the music industry favored because it had the silhouette of a Luger pistol on its label. “She’s a fragile person,” Loomis shouted, “a child practically! This is a child kidnapping, she’s a child, she just celebrated her twentieth birthday in January! I want herback here! That man was a maniac, you could see he was deranged, first he hit Jonah with the gun…”

“I think I’m still bleeding,” Jonah said.

He had taken off the monster mask, and it was plain to see he wasn’t still bleeding, but he kept exploring his jaw line tentatively, his eyes still wide in fright. Carella hoped he wasn’t going to faint.

“You’re not bleeding,” Loomis told him. “Go put on some clothes, go get dressed for Chrissake! How many kidnappings have you investigated this year?” he asked Carella.

“None,” Carella said. “This year? None.”

“How about last year? How about the past five, ten years? How many friggin kidnappings have you ever handled in your entire life as a cop?”

“One,” Carella answered. “In my entire life as a cop,” he added.

Loomis blinked at him.

“Well, at least you’re honest,” he said.

“At least that,” Carella agreed. “But you don’t have to worry. I’m sure the FBI will…”

“Whoever,” Loomis said. “All I want is Tamar back. Andfast !”

“AllI want,” a woman’s voice said, “is to get my tape on the air. Andfast !”

They all turned.

Carella recognized the woman at once. He had met her in the Grover Park Zoo this past Christmas when she was covering the “Lions Attack Woman” story. He had spoken to her on the phone only recently, soliciting a possible job at Channel Four for his wife, Teddy.

“Hello, Honey,” he said and extended his hand. “Nice to see you again.”

“I taped the whole thing, you know,” she said. “In case anyone’s interested.”

“Interested?”Carella said. “When can we…?”

“Back off,” Honey said. “Nobody sees it till Channel Four airs it.”

“Good!” Loomis said at once. “Let the whole damn city see what happened here tonight. Let the wholeworld see it! That maniac hitting her!”

“No one’s broadcasting any evidence tape until I clear it with my superiors,” Carella said.

“Evidence tape? What?”

“I’ll subpoena it, Honey.”

“Ashcroft notwithstanding, I thought this was still a free country.”

“A girl’s been kidnapped here, Miss,” Hawes told her.

She turned to look at him.

“This is my partner, Cotton Hawes,” Carella said. “Cotton, this is Honey Blair of Channel Four News.”

“I watch you all the time,” Hawes said, and nodded.

Honey looked him over. She was seeing a tall, wide-shouldered man with blue eyes and flaming red hair except for a white streak some two inches wide over his left temple.

Hawes was seeing a blonde some five-feet-seven-inches tall, wearing a blue leather mini and an ice-blue, long-sleeved blouse and calf-high navy leather boots and looking infinitely more beautiful than she ever had on television.

Honey Blair and Cotton Hawes had met.

“Red, tell your partner here…” Honey started.

“It’s Cotton,” he said softly, and looked into her eyes.

“Cotton, please tell your partner,” she said, returning his gaze, “that I’m sitting on the biggest scoop I’ve ever had in my life, a live tape of a kidnapping in progress, and if he doesn’t let me go in the next five minutes, Channel Four will bring suit against the city,” she said, and smiled sweetly.

“We’ll slap a court order on the tape,” Carella said.

“I don’t care what you do after we air it.”

“I’ll seize it as evidence right this minute.”

“My crew won’t let you have it.”

“Then I’ll arrest them as accessories to the crime of kidnapping.”

“Aswhat ? You’llwhat ?”

“For withholding vital evidence,” Hawes explained.

Honey gave him a curt, dismissive look.

“Am I still bleeding?” Jonah asked.

“Will you go put on some clothes?” Loomis said.

“How’d I look on camera?” Jonah asked Honey.

“Gorgeous, darling.”

Jonah beamed and went off toward the changing room. The natives were beginning to get extremely restless, milling and seething and whiffling all around the ballroom deck as McIntosh and his crew continued taking names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

“So whowill be handling this?” Loomis asked Carella. “You or the FBI?”

“For now, it’s us,” Carella said. “We caught it, we’ll finish up here, and then go do the paperwork. I’ll talk to my lieutenant as soon as we get back to the squadroom, see what he advises. I’m sure this’ll go to them, don’t worry. Meanwhile, we’ll want to contact the girl’s parents. Do you know where we can…?”

“Forget it,” Loomis said, “they’re divorced. Her father’s living in Mexico with his second wife, her mother’s in Europe someplace.”

“Are they people of means, would you know?”

“He used to sell vacuum cleaners, Christ knows what he’s doing now. Her mother’s a hairdresser. I’m sure neither of them is wealthy.”

“Then why would anyone want to kidnap her?” Hawes asked.

“Maybe because Tamar Valparaiso…”

Valparaiso, Carella thought.Not Valentino.

“…is under contract to Bison Records,” Loomis said, and nodded in sudden understanding. “Of course,” he said. “That’s got to be it. I’m CEO and sole shareholder in the company. They’re going to askme for the goddamn money.”

“Then you better sit by the phone,” Hawes suggested.

BY FOUR A.M., McIntosh and his HPU team had gathered all the vitals from the passengers, crew, and caterers, had passed the list on to the detectives from the Eight-Seven, and had gone tootling off on their thirty-six footer into an early morning mist. The Mobile Crime Unit had arrived some two hours earlier and were examining the primary access routes. Half a dozen male and female technicians were still dusting and vacuuming the salon stairway and the small dance floor where most of the action had taken place. Another three were doing the same thing outside on the loading platform and boarding ladder, concentrating especially on latent footprints. And yet another three were searching for evidence on the second level cocktail lounge, where it was presumed the perps had entered before moving down to the lower deck.

Disembarked and disoriented after their nocturnal ordeal, the weary voyagers dispersed in various directions, Captain Reeves—as befitted his role as commander—being the last to leave his vessel.

(“CaptainPeeved, ” Hawes called him behind his back but within earshot of Honey Blair, who, he noticed with satisfaction, acknowledged the sarcastic sobriquet with a reluctant smile of approval.)

The fog gathering around them, the detectives and the television people walked together in silence to where they’d parked in the AUTHORIZEDPERSONNELzone dockside. Carella had indeed seized the tape as evidence. Honey was indeed intending to bring suit against the city. Hawes did not think this was such a good start for a relationship.

Honey and her crew climbed into the Channel Four van; the two detectives got into their unmarked Chevy sedan. The streets were empty at this early hour of the morning. Carella and Hawes made it back to the squadroom in less than ten minutes.

There was still a lot of work to do before the shift ended.

“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVEhit her so hard,” Avery was telling Cal.

“Come on, it was only a slap,” Cal said.

“You knocked her down. That was more than a slap.”

“She was making a run for it.”

Tamar Valparaiso was still unconscious and draped alongside Kellie Morgan on the back seat of the Ford Explorer, her head on Kellie’s shoulder, her hands and feet bound, a blindfold over her eyes.

Kellie, to tell the truth, was sort of overwhelmed to be in such close proximity to someone she perceived to be a rock star even though she’d only seen her perform once at a club over in the next state, and that was at least nine months ago, before Tamar had got her recording contract.

They had left the Rinker at the Fairfield Street dock, all the way downtown in the Old Quarter of the city, taking with them only any personal items, and the masks, and the weapons, transferring all and sundry into the Ford. Avery was now driving. Cal was sitting beside him. They were moving slowly through the fog and the deserted streets, observing the speed limit, stopping at any red traffic light or full stop sign, but not traveling so slowly as to attract police attention. That was the last thing they needed at this stage of the game.

The tendrils of the fog embraced the car as if to crush it. Fog frightened Kellie. You never knew what might come at you out of a fog.

“When they pay the ransom,” Avery said, still on the case, “we’re supposed…”

“Ifthey pay the ransom,” Cal corrected.

“They’ll pay it, don’t worry. But then we’re supposed to return her safe and sound. If we send her back with her face all bruised…”

“Ain’t no bruises on her face,” Cal said.

“Girl’s face is her fortune,” Kellie said from the back seat.

“Ours, too,” Avery reminded her.

“Tits ain’t so bad, neither,” Cal said and grinned.

“Hey, cool that shit,” Kellie said.

“The way you hit her,” Avery said, refusing to let go, “her face is gonna swell up like a balloon.”

“Black and blue already,” Kellie said, looking over at Tamar and nodding.

“How’s she doing otherwise?” Avery asked.

“Still out like a light,” Kellie said. “We got a blanket or something? She’s half-naked here.”

“That ain’t our fault,” Cal said. “She stripped her own self buck ass naked. They can’t blame us for that.”

“They can blame you for swatting her,” Avery insisted.

“How’d you like my swatting the monster, huh?” Cal asked, grinning, turning to look at Avery. “Or didn’t you like that, either? Him crouched and ready to spring for our throats, how comeyou didn’t swat him, Ave? You were standing right there in front of him. How comeyou didn’t take a swing?”

“Because we agreed no violence.”

“That was our agreement, yes,” Kellie said.

“You go in with 47s,” Cal said, “you got to expect violence.”

“Not if we agreed beforehand.”

“That was before I knew anybody was gonna go for my throat.”

“I don’t think he was about to go for you,” Avery said reasonably. “He was just assessing the situation. He heard you yelling, he naturally wondered what was going on, him being on the floor and all, where he couldn’t see. So he lifted himself up to take a look. You shouldn’t’ve hit him and youcertainly shouldn’t’ve hit the girl. I don’t want you hitting her again, Cal, you hear me?”

“Tell him,” Kellie said.

The car went silent.

The fog embraced it.

“Any questions?” Avery asked.

“Yeah. How do you get out of this chickenshit outfit?” Cal said, and laughed at his own witticism.

Nobody laughed with him.

IN THIS CITY,the facades of the buildings conceal a multitude of endeavors, many of them criminal. Whore houses flourish on any avenue or side street, blatantly advertising themselves in the trendiest magazines as massage parlors, offering up to the tired businessman or the restless college kid a variety of pleasures to satisfy the most obsessive connoisseur. Here in this carnal candyland, the night stalker can find whatever he desires, at whatever price. Nor is this American flesh bazaar limited to the big bad city alone. Travel to the so-called heartland. Open the yellow pages of the local telephone directory, or surf the Internet in your hotel room. It is there. It is everywhere. It is available.

Many of the hidden warrens in this and other American cities now house drug pads to shame the ancient opium dens of China. Where not too many years ago, you could smoke a crack pipe in one of these places for a mere five bucks, this cheap cocaine derivative has now mysteriously fallen out of favor, to be replaced by heroin as the drug of choice, an ascendancy that no doubt thrills the poppy growers in Afghanistan now that they’ve been liberated by American soldiers. A sharp loaded with a heroin hit now cost almost three times as much as a puff of crack used to cost. You lay on a narrow cot, and an attendant wrapped a rubber tube around your arm and serviced you. It was like getting blown by a Korean whore in a similar shabby little apartment two blocks away, only better.

Early Sunday morning, far from the sordid city scene, in a gray-shingled beach house on a fog-shrouded beach in Russell County, miles from where the abduction on the River Harb had taken place, Tamar Valparaiso was just regaining consciousness.