USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

VIC PRIMEVAL by T. Jefferson Parker

You know how these things get started, Robbie. You see her for the first time. Your heart skips and your fingers buzz. Can’t take your eyes off her. And when you look at her she knows. No way to hide it. So you don’t look. Use all your strength to not look. But she still knows. And anybody else around does too.”

“I’ve had that feeling, Vic,” I said.

We walked down the Embarcadero where the cruise ships come and go. It was what passes for winter here in San Diego, cool and crisp, and there was a hard clarity to the sunlight. Once a week I met Vic at Higher Grounds coffee and we’d get expensive drinks and walk around the city. He was a huge guy, a former professional wrestler. Vic Primeval was his show name until they took his WWF license away for getting too physical in his matches. He hurt some people. I spend a few minutes a week with Vic because he thinks he owes me his life. And because he’s alone in the world and possibly insane.

“Anyway,” said Vic, “her name is Farrel White and I want you to meet her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m proud to have you as a friend. You’re pretty much all I got in that department.”

“Are you showing us off, Vic? Our freak show past?”

He blushed. “No. But you do make me look good.”

Vic was bouncing at Skin, an exotic dance club—strippers, weak drinks, no cover with military ID. “I don’t love that place,” I said.

“Robbie, what don’t you like about pretty women dancing almost naked?”

“The creeps who go there.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky. You’re lucky with the ladies.”

“What do you know about my luck with ladies, Vic?”

“Come on, man. You’ve got luck. Whole world knows that.”

More luck than I deserve, but is it good or bad? For instance, seven years ago Vic threw me out the window of the sixth floor of a hotel he’d set on fire—the Las Palmas in downtown San Diego. I was trying to save some lives and Vic was distraught at having had his World Wrestling Federation license revoked. This incident could be reasonably called bad luck.

You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semi-famous—The Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.

“Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”

We stood in the rear employee-only lot in the winter dark. I watched the cars rushing down Highway 163. The music thumped away inside the club and when someone came through the employee door the music got louder and I saw colored shapes hovering in the air about midway between the door and me.

I’ve been seeing these colored objects since Vic threw me to that sidewalk. They’re geometric, of varying colors, between one and four inches in length, width, depth. They float and bob. I can move them with a finger. Or with a strong exhalation, like blowing out birthday cake candles. They often accompany music, but sometimes they appear when someone is talking to me. The stronger the person’s emotion, the larger and more vivid the objects are. They linger briefly then vanish.

In the months after my fall I came to understand these shapes derived not so much from the words spoken, but from the emotion behind them. Each shape and color denotes a different emotion. To me, the shapes are visual reminders of the fact that people don’t always mean what they say. My condition is called synesthesia, from the Greek, and loosely translated it means “mixing of the senses.” I belong to the San Diego Synesthesia Society and we meet once a month at the Seven Seas on Hotel Circle.

Farrel had a round, pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair cut in bangs, and one dimple when she smiled. Her lips were small and red. Her handshake was soft. She was short even in high-heeled boots. She wore a long coat against the damp winter chill.

“Vic tells me you’re a policeman. My daddy was a policeman. Center Springs, Arkansas. It’s not on most maps.”

“How long have you been here in San Diego?” I asked.

“Almost a year. I was waitressing but now I’m doing this. Better pay.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four years old.” She had a way of holding your eyes with her own, a direct but uncritical stare. “Vic told me all about what happened. It’s good that you’ve become a friend of his. We all of us need at least one good friend… Well, guys, I should be going. I’d ask you in and buy you a drink, but it’s supposed to work the other way around.”

I glanced at Vic and saw the adoration in his eyes. It lit up his face, made it smarter and softer and better. Farrel smiled at him and put her hand on his sleeve.

“It’s okay, Vic.”

“Just so good to see you, Farrel.”

“Vic walks me in and out, every night. And any other of the dancers who want him to. You’re a cop so you know there’s always someone coming around places like this, making trouble for the girls. But not when Vic Primeval is in the barnyard.”

“I don’t really like that name,” said Vic.

“I mean it in a good way.”

“It means primitive.”

“It’s only a show name, Vic. Like, well, like for a dancer it would be Chastity or Desire.”

I watched the inner conflict ruffle Vic’s expression. Then his mind made some kind of override and the light came back to his eyes. He smiled and peered down at the ground.

A hard look came over Farrel’s face as a black BMW 750i bounced through the open exit gate and into the employees-only lot. It rolled to a stop beside us. The driver’s window went down.

“Yo. Sweetie. I been looking for you.” He was thirty maybe and tricked out in style—sharp haircut, pricey-looking shirt and jacket. Slender face, a Jersey voice and delivery. He looked from Farrel to Vic, then at me. “What’s your problem, fuckface?”

I swung open my jacket to give him a look at my .45.

He held up his hands like I should cuff him. “Christ. Farrel? You want I should run these meatballs off? They’re nothing to do with me and you, baby.”

“I want them to run you off. I told you, Sal. There isn’t a you and me. No more. It’s over. I’m gone.”

“But you’re not gone, baby. You’re right here. So get in. Whatever you’ll make in a month in there, I’ll pay you that right out of my pocket. Right here and now.”

“Get off this property,” said Vic. “Or I’ll drag you out of your cute little car and throw you over that fence.”

Vic glanced at me and winced right after he said this. When he gets mad at things he throws them far. People too.

Sal clucked his tongue like a hayseed then smiled at Vic as if he was an amusing moron.

“No more us, Sal,” said Farrel. “We’re over.”

“You still owe me eight thousand dollars, girl. Nothing’s over till I get that back.”

I saw black rhombuses wobbling in the air between us. Black rhombuses mean anger.

“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You think I’m dancing in a place like this just for the fun of it all?”

“Move out of here,” I said. “Do it now.”

“Or you’ll arrest me.”

“Quickly. It’ll cost you forty-eight long cheap hours or two expensive short ones. Your pick.”

“I want what’s mine,” Sal said to Farrel. “I want what I paid for.”

“Them’s two different things.”

“Maybe it is in that redneck slop hole you come from.”

The window went up and the car swung around and out of the lot, the big tires leaving a rubbery low-speed squeal on the asphalt.

“I’m coming in for a while,” I said.

I had a beer and watched Farrel and the other dancers do their shows. They were uninhibited and rhythmic to say the least. Some were pretty and some were plain. Some acted flirtatious and others lustful and others aloof. Farrel seemed almost shy and she never once looked at either me or Vic from what I could tell. She had a small attractive body. Vic stood in the back of the room, lost in the lush plum-colored curtains, his feet spread wide and arms crossed, stone still.

After an hour passed and Sal had not come back, I nodded a goodnight to Vic and went home.

Two days later Vic left a message for me and I met him outside the Convention Center. There was a reptile show in progress and many of the people were entering and leaving the building with constrictors around their necks and leashed iguanas in their arms and stacks of clear plastic food containers filled with brightly colored juvenile snakes.

“Look at this thing,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his aloha shirt and pulled out a huge black scorpion. “They don’t sting.”

Vic Malic had enormous hands but that scorpion stretched from his thumb tip to the nail on his little finger. It looked like it could drill that stinger a half inch into you anytime it wanted. In his other hand was a clear plastic bag filled with crickets. They were white with dust of some kind. They hopped around as crickets do.

“Scorpion food?” I asked.

“Yeah. And they dust them with vitamins for thirty cents.”

He looked down at the creature then slid it back into his shirt pocket. “That son of a bitch Sal is stalking Farrel. That was the third time I’ve seen him. He shows up everywhere she goes.”

“Tell her to come fill out a report. We can’t do anything until she does that.”

“Doesn’t trust cops.”

“She seemed proud of her dad.”

“I’m only telling you what she told me. Sal loaned her ten grand because she totaled her car with no insurance, and her baby had to have chemotherapy. Darling little baby. I saw it. Just darling but with cancer.”

“That is a shame.”

“Yeah, and he was all charm at first, Sal was. She kind of liked him. Started paying with favors, you know, but the way he had it figured was he’d get anything he wanted for two years and she’d still owe him half. Plus he likes it rough and he hit her. Then he said he’s got friends. He can introduce her to them, you know—they’d really like her. He’s a Jersey wise guy, all connected up. Says he is. You heard him. He said he wants what’s his and what he paid for.”

I know who the mobbed-up locals are here in America’s Finest City. Sal wasn’t one of them. We’ve had our wiseguys for decades, mostly connected to the LA outfits. There’s a restaurant they go to. You get to know who they are. I wondered if Sal was just a visiting relative, getting some R&R in Southern California. Or maybe a new guy they brought in. Or if he was a made guy trying to muscle into new territory. If that was true there would be some kind of trouble.

I watched the scorpion wriggle around in the shirt pocket. The pocket had a hula girl and it looked like the pincers were growing out of her head.

“I’m gonna get that eight grand for her,” said Vic.

“Where?”

“I got a start with the book sales.”

Vic has been hand-selling copies of Fall to Your Life!, which he wrote and published himself. It’s about how “the Robbie Brownlaw event” seven years ago at the Las Palmas Hotel changed his life for the better. He does pretty well with it, mostly to tourists. I see him sometimes, down by the Star of India, or Horton Plaza, or there at the Amtrak station, looming over his little table with copies of the book and a change box. He wears his old Vic Primeval wrestling costume of faux animal skins—not fur, but the skins sewed together into a kind of bodysuit. It’s terrifically ugly but the customers are drawn to it. To attract buyers, he also sets up an aging poster of me falling through the sky. He used to charge five bucks a copy for the book but a year ago it went up to ten. Once a month he still gives me a cut from each sale, which is twenty-five percent. I accept the money because it makes Vic feel virtuous, then turn it over to the downtown food pantry and ASPCA and various charities.

I did some quick calcs based on what Vic paid me in royalties for July—traditionally his best month due to tourists. My take was five hundred dollars, which meant that Vic pocketed fifteen hundred plus change for himself.

“It’ll take you at least six months to get eight grand,” I said. “Plus winter is coming on and you’ve got your own expenses to pay.”

Vic brooded.

“Do you have any money saved up, Vic?”

“I can get the money.”

“So she can give it to him? Don’t give her anything. Have her file a complaint with us if he’s such a badass. She can get a restraining order. You don’t know her and you don’t know him. Stay away, Vic. That’s the best advice you’ll get on this.”

“What do you mean?”

“What about this doesn’t scream setup?”

“A setup? Why set up a guy who doesn’t have any money? She hasn’t asked me for one nickel. She’s the real thing, Robbie. That little baby. I don’t have a world class brain, but my heart always sees true. Farrel passes the Vic Malic heart test.”

“The best thing you can do is have her file a complaint.”

“She won’t. I already told her to. She said the cops can’t do anything until they catch him doing something. What she’s afraid is, it’s gonna be too late when that happens.”

Which is often true.

“But Robbie, what if you tell her? Coming from you, it would mean a lot more than from me.”

The San Diego mob guys own and frequent a downtown restaurant called Napoli. It’s an unflashy two-story brick affair not far at all from police headquarters. They have controlling interests in a couple of much swankier eateries here, but they do their hanging out at Napoli.

“Hey, it’s Robbie Brownlaw,” said Dom, the owner.

“Dom, I need a word.”

“Then you get a word, Robbie. Come on back. How’s San Diego’s famous detective?”

He’s a round-faced, chipper fellow, early sixties, grandson of one of San Diego’s more vivid mob figures, Leo the Lion Gagnas. Leo and his LA partners ran this city’s gambling and loan-sharking. Back in 1950, two men out of Youngstown tried to get in on the Gagnas rackets, and they both washed up in Glorietta Bay one morning with bullets in their heads. Leo and company opened Napoli back in ’53. He was tight with Bebe Rebozo, who was a big Nixon fundraiser. Beginning in 1966 Leo did two years for tax evasion and that was it. He never saw the inside of a prison before or after.

We sat in his dark little office. There were no windows and it smelled heavily of cigar smoke and cologne. The bookshelves were stuffed with well-read paperback crime novels—plenty of Whit Masterson and Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane. A floor safe sat in one corner and the walls were covered with framed photographs of Dom’s ancestors and the people they entertained at Napoli—Sinatra, Joey Bishop, John Wayne, Nixon, Ted Williams.

I looked at the pictures. “Where’s the new celebrities, Dom?”

He looked at the pictures too. “They don’t come around here so much anymore. A time for everything, you know? It’s good. Business is good. What do you need, Robbie?”

I told him about Sal—his alleged New Jersey outfit ties, his bad attitude and slick black Beamer, his fix on a young dancer at Skin named Farrel.

Dom nodded. “Yeah. I heard. My nephew, he’s a manager at Skin. I got some friends checking this guy out.”

“Ever had any trouble out of Jersey?”

“Never. Not any trouble at all, Robbie. Those days are long gone. You know that.”

“What if he’s what he says he is, trying to move in?”

“In on what?”

“On business, Dom.”

“I don’t know what you mean, business. But somebody blows into town and starts popping off about he’s a made guy and he’s mobbed up in Jersey and all that, well, there’s fools and then there’s fools, Robbie. Nobody I know talks like that. Know what I mean?”

“I wonder if he’s got help.”

“He better have help if he wants to shoot off his mouth. I’ll let you know what I find out. And Robbie, you see this guy, tell him he’s not making any friends around here. If he’s what he says he is, then that’s one thing. If he’s not, then he’s just pissing everybody off. Some doors you don’t want to open. Tell him that. You might save him a little inconvenience. How’s that pretty redhead wife of yours? Gina.”

“We divorced seven years ago.”

“I got divorced once. No, it was three times. You know why it’s so expensive, don’t you?”

“Because it’s worth it.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve told me that one before, Dom.”

“And I was right, wasn’t I?”

I met Farrel at Skin that night before she was set to perform. We sat at the bar and got good treatment from the bartenders. Dom’s nephew, a spidery young man named Joey Morra, came by, said hello, told Farrel the customers were liking her. I took down Farrel’s numbers and address and the name of her daughter and hometown and parents. And I also got everything she could tell me about Sal Tessola—where he lived and how they met, what he’d done for her and to her, the whole story. I told her she’d need all these things in order to write a good convincing complaint. We talked for a solid hour before she checked her watch.

“You going to stay and see me perform?”

“Not tonight.”

“Didn’t like it much, then?”

“You were good, Farrel.”

She eyed me. “I don’t want Vic trying to get me the money. I didn’t ask him to. I asked him not to. He’s not the brightest guy, Robbie. But he might be one of the most stubborn.”

“You’ve got a point.”

“How come you’re not married? You must be about legal age.”

“I was once.”

“I’d a found a way to keep you.”

“You’re flattering me now.”

“Why don’t you flatter me back?”

“Center Springs took a loss when you packed it in.”

She peered at me in that forthright and noncommittal way. “It sure did. And there’s no power in Heaven or Earth strong enough to drag me back there.”

I saw the black triangles of dread and the yellow triangles of fear hovering in the air between us.

I followed her from Skin. I’m not suspicious by nature but it helps me do my job. The night was close and damp and I stayed well behind. She drove an early-’90s Dodge that was slow and slumped to starboard and easy to follow.

She drove to a small tract home out in La Mesa east of downtown. I slowed and watched her pull into the driveway. I went past, circled the block, then came back and parked across the street, one house down.

The house was vintage ’50s, one of hundreds built in La Mesa not long after World War II. Many of those navy men and women who’d served and seen San Diego came back looking for a place to live in this sunny and unhurried city.

A living room light was on and the drapes were drawn casually, with a good gap in the middle and another at one end. Someone moved across the living room then lamplight came from the back of the house through a bedroom window on the side I could see. A few minutes went by and I figured she was showering, so I got out and strolled down the sidewalk. Then I doubled back and cut across the little yard and stood under the canopy of a coral tree. I stepped up close to the living room window and looked through the middle gap.

The room was sparsely furnished in what looked like thrift-shop eclectic—a braided rug over the darkly stained wood floor, an American colonial coffee table, an orange-yellow-black plaid sofa with thin padding. There was a stack of black three-ring binders on the coffee table. Right in front of me was the back end of a TV, not a flat screen but one of the old ones with the big butts and masses of cords and coaxial cable sprouting everywhere.

I moved along the perimeter of the house and let myself through a creaking gate but no dogs barked and I soon came to a dark side window. The blinds were drawn but they were old and some were broken and several were bent. Through a hole I could make out a small bedroom. All it had was a chest of drawers and a stroller with a baby asleep in it, and I didn’t have to look at that baby very long before I realized it was a doll.

Farrel walked past the room in what looked like a long white bathrobe and something on her head. I waited awhile then backed out across the neighbor’s yard and walked to my car. I settled in behind the wheel and used the binoculars and I could see Farrel on the plaid sofa, hair up in a towel, both hands on a sixteen-ounce can of beer seated between her legs. She leaned forward and picked up one of the black binders, looked at it like she’d seen it a hundred times before, then set it down beside her. She seemed tired but peaceful with the TV light playing off her face.

Twenty minutes later a battered Mustang roared up and parked behind the Dodge and Sal got out. Gone were the sharp clothes and in their place were jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket and a pair of shineless harness boots that clomped and slouched as he keyed open the front door and went through.

I glassed the gap in the living room curtains and Farrel’s face rushed at me. She said something without looking at Sal. He stood before her, his back to me, and shrugged. He snatched the beer can from her and held it up for a long drink, then pushed it back between her legs and whipped off his coat. He wore a blue shirt with a local pizza parlor logo on it. This he pulled off as he walked into the back rooms.

He came out a few minutes later wearing jeans and a singlet, his hair wet and combed back. He was a lean young man, broad shouldered, tall. For the first time I realized he was handsome. He walked past Farrel into the kitchen and came back with a can of beer and sat down on the couch not too near and not too far from her. He squeezed her robe once where her knee would be then let his hand fall to the sofa.

They talked without looking at each other but I can’t read lips. It looked like a “and how was your day” kind of conversation, or maybe something about the TV show that was on, which threw blue light upon them like fish underwater.

After a while they stopped talking, and a few minutes later Farrel lifted the remote and the blue light was gone and she had picked up one of the black binders from the pile at her end of the couch.

She opened it and read out loud. There was no writing or label or title on the cover.

She waved the binder at him and pointed at a page and read a line to him.

He repeated it. I was pretty sure.

She read it again and he repeated it. I was pretty sure again.

They both laughed.

Then another line. They each said it, whatever it was. Sal stood over her then and aimed a finger at her face and said the line again. She stood and stripped the towel off her head and said something and they both laughed again.

He got up and brought two more big cans of beer from the kitchen and he opened one for her and took her empty. He tossed the towel onto her lap and sat down close to her, put his bare feet up on the coffee table by the binders and scrunched down so his head was level with hers. She clicked the TV back on.

I waited for an hour. Another beer each. Not much talk. They both fell asleep sitting up, heads back on the sofa.

It was almost three-thirty in the morning when Farrel stood, rubbed the back of her neck, then tightened the robe sash. She walked deeper into the house and out of my sight.

A few minutes later Sal rose and hit the lights. In the TV glow I could see him stretch out full length on the couch and set one arm over his eyes and take a deep breath and let it slowly out.

Two mornings later, at about the same dark hour, I was at headquarters writing a crime scene report. I’m an occasional insomniac and I choose to get paperwork done during those long, haunted times. Of course I listen to our dispatch radio, keeping half an ear on the hundreds of calls that come in every shift.

So when I heard the possible 187 at Skin nightclub I was out the door fast.

Two squad cars were already there and two more screamed into the parking lot as I got out of my car.

“The janitor called 911,” said one of the uniforms. “I was first on scene and he let me in. There’s a dead man back in the kitchen. I think it’s one of the managers. I tried to check his pulse but couldn’t reach that far. You’ll see.”

I asked the patrolmen to seal both the back and front entrances and start a sign-in log, always a good idea if you don’t want your crime scene to spiral into chaos. You’d be surprised how many people will trample through and wreck evidence, many of them cops.

I walked in, past the bar and the tables and the stage, then into a small, poorly lit, grease-darkened kitchen. Another uniform stood near a walk-in freezer, talking with a young man wearing a light blue shirt with a name patch on it.

I saw the autoloader lying on the floor in front of me. Then the cop looked up and I followed his line of sight to the exposed ceiling. Overhead were big commercial blowers and vents and ducting and electrical conduit and hanging fluorescent tube light fixtures. A body hung jackknifed at the hips over a steel crossbeam. His arms dangled over one side and his legs over the other. If he’d landed just one inch higher or lower, he’d have simply slid off the beam to the floor. I walked around the gun and got directly under him and stared up into the face of Joey. It was an urgent shade of purple and his eyes were open.

“The safe in the office,” said the uniform, pointing to the far back side of the kitchen.

The office door was open and I stepped in. There was a desk and a black leather couch and a small fridge and microwave, pictures of near-naked dancers on the walls, along with a Chargers calendar and Padres pendants.

There was also a big floor safe that was open but not empty. I squatted in front of it and saw the stacks of cash and some envelopes.

The officer and janitor stood in the office doorway.

“Why kill a man for his money then not take it?” asked the uniform. His name plate said Peabody.

“Maybe he freaked and ran,” said the janitor, whose name patch said Carlos.

“Okay,” said Peabody. “Then tell me how Joey got ten feet up in the air and hung over a beam. And don’t tell me he did it to himself.”

Carlos looked up at the body and shrugged but I had an opinion about that.

“What time do you start work?” I asked him.

“Two. That’s when they close.”

“Is Joey usually here?”

“One of the managers is always here. They count the money every third night. Then they take it to the bank.”

“So tonight was bank night?”

“Was supposed to be.”

I drove fast to Vic’s hotel room downtown but he didn’t answer the door. Back downstairs the night manager, speaking from behind a mesh-reinforced window, told me that Vic left around eight-thirty—seven hours ago—and had not returned.

I made Farrel’s place eleven minutes later. There were no cars in the driveway but lights inside were on. I rang the bell and knocked then tried the door, which was unlocked. So I opened it and stepped in.

The living room looked exactly as it had two nights ago, except that the beer cans were gone and the pile of black binders had been reduced to just one. In the small back bedroom the stroller was still in place and the plastic doll was snugged down under the blanket just as it had been. I went into the master bedroom. The mattress was bare and the chest of drawers stood open and nearly empty. It looked like Farrel had stripped the bed and packed her clothes in a hurry. The bathroom was stripped too: no towels, nothing in the shower or the medicine chest or on the sink counter. The refrigerator had milk and pickles and that was all. The wastebasket under the sink had empty beer cans, an empty pretzel bag, various fast-food remnants swathed in ketchup, a receipt from a supermarket, and a wadded-up agreement from Rent-a-Dream car rentals down by the airport. Black Beamer 750i, of course.

Back in the living room I took the black binder from the coffee table and opened it to the first page:

THE SOPRANOS

Season Four/Episode Three

I flipped through the pages. Dialogue and brief descriptions. Four episodes in all.

Getting Sal’s lines right, I thought.

Vic didn’t show up for work for three straight nights. I stopped by Skin a couple of times a night, just in case he showed, and I knocked on his hotel room door twice a day or so. The manager hadn’t seen him in four days. He told me Vic’s rent was due on the first.

Of course Farrel had vanished too. I cruised her place in La Mesa but something about it just said she wasn’t coming back, and she didn’t.

On the fourth afternoon after the murder of Joey Morra, Vic called me on my cell phone. “Can you feed my scorpion? Give him six crickets. They’re under the bathroom sink. The manager’ll give you the key.”

“Sure. But we need to talk, Vic—face to face.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Who else could throw Joey up there like that?”

Vic didn’t answer.

“Dom and his people are looking for you, Vic. You won’t get a trial with them. You’ll just get your sentence, and it won’t be lenient.”

“I only took what she needed.”

“And killed Joey.”

“He pulled a gun, Robbie. I couldn’t thinka what else to do. I bear-hugged and shook him. Like a reflex. Like when I threw you.”

“I’ll see you outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

“She met me at Rainwater’s, Robbie. I walked into Rainwater’s and there she was—that beautiful young woman, waiting there for me. You should have seen her face light up when I gave her the money. Out in the parking lot, I mean.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. “Meet me outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

“Naw. I got a good safe place here. I’m going to just enjoy myself for a couple more days, knowing I did a good thing for a good woman. My scorpion, I named him Rudy. Oh. Oh shit, Robbie.”

Even coming from a satellite orbiting the Earth in space, and through the miles of ether it took to travel to my ear, the sound of the shotgun blast was unmistakable. So was the second blast, and the third.

A few days later I flew to Little Rock and rented a car, then made the drive north and west to Center Springs. Farrel was right: it wasn’t on the rental-car company driving map, but it made the navigation unit that came in the vehicle.

The Ozarks were steep and thickly forested and the Arkansas River looked unhurried. I could see thin wisps of wood stove fires burning in cabins down in the hollows and there was a smoky cast to the sky.

The gas station clerk said I’d find Farrel White’s dad’s place down the road a mile, just before Persimmon Holler. He said there was a batch of trailers up on the hillside and I’d see them from the road if I didn’t drive too fast. Billy White had the wooden one with all the satellite dishes on top.

The road leading in was dirt and heavily rutted from last season’s rain. I drove past travel trailers set up on cinder blocks. They were slouched and sun-dulled and some had decks and others just had more cinder blocks as steps. Dogs eyed me without bothering to sit up. There were cats and litter and a pile of engine blocks outside, looked like they’d been cast there by some huge child.

Billy answered my knock with a sudden yank on the door then studied me through the screen. He was mid-fifties and heavy, didn’t look at all like his daughter. He wore a green-and-black plaid jacket buttoned all the way to the top.

“I’m a San Diego cop looking for your daughter. I thought she might have come home.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Come home to this from San Diego?”

“Well.”

“She okay?”

“I think so.”

“Come in.”

The trailer was small and cramped and packed with old, overstuffed furniture.

“She in trouble?”

“Farrel and her boyfriend hustled a guy out of some money. But he had to take the money from someone else.”

Billy handed me a beer and plopped into a vinyl recliner across from me. He had a round, impish face and a twinkle in his eyes. “That ain’t her boyfriend. It’s her brother.”

“That never crossed my mind.”

“Don’t look nothing alike. But they’ve always been close. Folks liked to think too close, but it wasn’t ever that way. Just close. They understood each other. They’re both good kids. Their whole point in life was to get outta Center Springs and they done did it. I’m proud of them.”

“What’s his name?”

“Preston.”

“Did they grow up in this trailer?”

“Hell no. We had a home over to Persimmon but it got sold off in the divorce. Hazel went to Little Rock with a tobacco products salesman. The whole story is every bit as dreary as it sounds.”

“When did Farrel and Preston leave?”

“Couple of months ago. The plan was San Diego, then Hollywood. Pretty people with culture and money to spend. They were going to study TV, maybe go start up a show. San Diego was to practice up.”

“The scripts.”

“Got them from the library up at Fayetteville. Made copies of the ones they wanted. Over and over again. Memorizing those scripts and all them words. They went to the Salvation Army stores and bought up lots of old-time kinda clothes. They both did some stage plays at the junior college but they didn’t much care for them. They liked the other kind of stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Crime stories. Bad guys. Mafia. That was mainly Preston. Farrel, she can act like anything from the Queen of England to a weather girl and you can’t tell she’s acting.”

“Have they called lately?”

“Been over a week.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“Well, Center Springs is the only place I know they ain’t. I don’t expect to ever see them out this way.”

I did the simple math and the not-so-simple math. Eight grand for two months of work. Farrel dancing for tips. Preston delivering pizza and working his end of the Vic hustle. Vic caught between Farrel’s good acting and his own eager heart. And of course betrayed, finally and fatally, by his own bad temper.

I finished the beer and stood. “Two men died because of them. Eight thousand bucks is what they died for. So the next time you talk to Farrel and Preston, you tell them there’s real blood on their hands. It’s not make-believe blood. You tell her Vic was murdered for taking that eight thousand.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“I can come up with a couple a hundred. It’s not much, but…”

I saw the orange triangles bouncing in the air between us. I thought about those triangles as I drove away. Orange triangles denote pity and sometimes even empathy. All this for Vic Primeval, as offered by a man he’d never met, from his vinyl chair in his slouching home in the Ozarks. Sometimes you find a little speck of good where you least expect it. A rough diamond down deep. And you realize that the blackness can’t own you for more than one night at a time.

FEEDING FRENZY by Tim Broderick

PROMISED TULIPS by Bharti Kirchner

I am floating between dream and wakefulness in my cozy treehouse nestled high in the canopy of a misty rain forest when he murmurs, “You’re so beautiful with your hair over your face.”

I smile and bid him a Guten morgen. Ulrich—I like the full feel of that German name in my mouth, the melodious lilt, and I definitely appreciate the warm masculine body, its sculpted hardness visible beneath the sheets. He stretches an arm toward me, as if about to say or do something intimate, then closes his eyes and allows his arm to drop. I snuggle up against him, savoring the musky sweet skin, on a morning so different from others. Usually I rise at dawn, slip into my greenhouse, and appraise the overnight progress of the seedlings.

If my mother were to peek in at this instant, she would draw a corner of her sari over her mouth to stifle a scream.

“Sin!” she’d say. “My twenty-five-year-old unmarried girl is living in sin!”

Fortunately, she’s half a world away in India.

And I’m not in my treehouse, but rather in the bedroom of my bungalow in Wallingford, a.k.a. the Garden District of Seattle.

Next door the Labrador retriever barks. Never before have I invited a man home on the first encounter and I’m unnerved by my daring. If my friends could see me now, they’d exclaim in disbelief, A shy thing like you?

The silky, iris-patterned linen sheets are bunched up. He sleeps more messily than I, but for some reason I like the rumpled look. Last night’s coupling, with its wild tumbling and thrusting—I wouldn’t exactly call it lovemaking—has put me into deep communion with my body, and also taken me a bit out of my zone. My lips are dry and puffy from a surfeit of kissing.

The man beneath the blanket turns his blond head, nuzzles the pillow, regards me with his green eyes, then looks at the clock on the lamp stand. “Eight-thirty?” He throws the blanket aside and bolts from the bed. “Ach, I’m supposed to be at work by seven.”

An engineer by training, he works in construction, a choice he’s made to get away from “wallowing in my head.” So, he happily hammers nails all day, fixing roofs, patios, kitchens, and basements. Siegfried, his German shepherd, always goes along.

I point out the bathroom across the hallway. He scrambles in that direction, mumbling to himself in his native tongue. A sliver of sun is visible through a crack in the window draperies. I can tell from its position that the morning has passed its infancy, the galaxy has inched on to a new position, and I’ve already missed a thing or two.

I hoist myself up from my nest. My toes curl in protest at the first touch of the cold hardwood floor. I stoop to retrieve a pair of soft-soled wool slippers from under the nightstand.

Then I look for my clothes. The long-sleeved print dress I wore last evening—a tantrum of wildflowers—lies on the floor, all tangled up with my bra and panties and Ulrich’s charcoal jeans. Crossing the room, I rummage around in the closet, grab a pewter-gray bathrobe, and wrap it around me.

As I fluff the pillows, I hear the sounds of water splashing in the sink, and snatches of a German song. A peek through the draperies reveals a quick change of weather—a bruised, swollen April sky.

The jangling of the telephone startles me. Not fair, this intrusion. If it’s Kareena on the line, I’ll whisper: Met a cool Deutsche last night… We’re just out of bed. I know, I know, but this one is… Look, I’ll call you back later, okay?

Tangles of long hair drown my vision; I reach for the receiver. This is what a plant must feel like when it’s uprooted.

“Palette of Color. Mitra Basu speaking, how can I help you?” Plants are my refuge, my salvation and, fortuitously, my vocation.

“Veen here.” The downturn in her voice doesn’t escape me. Vivacious and well-connected, architect by profession, Veenati is an important part of my social circle. “Have you heard from Kareena recently?”

“Not in a week or so. Why? Has something happened to her?”

“She didn’t show up for coffee this morning. I called her home. Adi said she’s missing.”

“Missing? Since when?”

“Since the night before last. I was just checking to see if she’d contacted you. I’m late for work. Let’s talk in about an hour.”

“Wait—”

Click. Veen has hung up. This is like a dreadful preview of a hyperkinetic action flick. How could Kareena be missing? She’s a people person, well respected in our community for her work with abused women. Although we’re not related, Kareena is my only “family” in this area, not to mention the closest confidante I’ve had since leaving home. A word from my youth, shoee, friends of the heart, hums inside me. I’m badly in need of explanation to keep my imagination from roaring out of control.

A vase of dried eucalyptus sits on the accent table. Kareena had once admired that fragrant arrangement—she adores all objects of beauty. Now she, a beautiful soul, has been reported missing. Wish I’d pressed her to take the risks of her profession more seriously. Don’t use your last name. Take a different route home every day. Always let somebody know where you are.

Ulrich is back. “Everything okay?”

“A friend is missing.” I make the statement official-sounding, while glancing at the window, and hope he won’t probe further. I’m of the opinion that intimacy has its limits. In the cold clarity of the morning, it discomfits me that I, a private person, have already shared this much with him.

Standing so close to me that I can smell the sweat of the night on his skin, he dresses hurriedly. I linger on his muscles. His large fingers fumble with the buttons of his muted blue shirt and a thin lower lip pouts when he struggles to insert a recalcitrant button in its hole. He wiggles into his jeans and throws on his herringbone jacket. Then he draws me closer with an eager expression and cups my face in his hands. I grow as still as I’ve ever been. He gives me a short warm kiss which softens my entire midsection. The hum in the air is like static electricity crackling.

Will I ever see him again? Coming from nowhere, the morbid thought slaps me on the forehead, but I recover quickly and my attention stretches back to Kareena. She could have gone somewhere for a breather from the daily battles she fights on her clients’ behalf.

“I want to stay here with you,” Ulrich says, “but…”

Modulated by his accent, the word want, or vant, hints at delicious possibilities for another time. I look up at his pale-skinned round face, and I really do have to look up, for he’s a good nine inches taller. I struggle with words to convey my feelings, to put a lid on my concerns about Kareena, but stay mute.

“Catch you this evening,” he murmurs.

As we walk to the doorway, our arms around each other, a yen to entice him to stay steals into my consciousness. I smother the impulse. Self-mastery is a trait I’ve inherited from my mother. (She denies herself pleasure of all sorts, refusing chai on a long train journey, and even returns bonus coupons to stores.)

Ulrich gives me one last look followed by another kiss, sustaining the connection, that of a conjurer to a captive audience. As he descends the front steps, his face turns toward my budding tulip patch—an exuberant yellow salutation to the coming spring—and he holds it in sight till the last second. Yellow is Kareena’s color and I am growing these tulips for her. She’ll shout in pleasure when she sees how gorgeous they are.

A Siamese cat from down the block watches from its customary perch atop a low brick wall as Ulrich lopes toward a steel-gray Saab parked across the street.

I shut the door, pace back to the living room, open the draperies. Ulrich’s car is gone. Feeling a nip in the air, I cinch the belt of my bathrobe. Kareena and I bought identical robes at a Nordstrom sale. Despite different sizes—hers a misses medium and mine a petite small—we’re like twins or, at least, sisters.

As I look down at my slippers, they too remind me of Kareena. A domestic violence counselor, she’d bought this pair from the boutique of a client who was a victim of spousal abuse. While I function in a universe of color, bounty, growth, and optimism, Kareena deals with “family disturbances.” Hers is a world of purple bruises, bloodshot gazes, and shattered hearts huddling in a public shelter.

I look out at the long line of windows across the street. A blue-black Volvo SUV speeds by, marring the symmetry and reminding me of Kareena’s husband Adi; a real prize, he is.

I met both Adi (short for Aditya, pronounced Aditta) and Kareena for the first time at a party they hosted. Before long, we began discussing where we were each from. Kareena had been raised in Mumbai and New Delhi, whereas Adi, like me, hailed from the state of West Bengal in Eastern India. Even as I greeted him, “Parichay korte bhalo laglo” (“How nice to meet you,” in our shared Bengali tongue), Adi’s name somehow brought to mind another word, dhurta: crook. The two words sort of rhyme in Bengali. That little fact I suppressed, but I couldn’t ignore the insouciance with which he flicked on his gold cigarette lighter, the jaunty angle of the Marlboro between his lips, the disdainful way he regarded the other guests.

At just over six feet, he looked as out of place in that crowded room as a skyscraper in a valley of mud huts. He obviously believed that the shadow he cast was longer than anyone else’s. He informed me in the first ten minutes that his start-up, Guha Software Services, was in the black; that his ancestors had established major manufacturing plants in India; that he’d recently purchased a deluxe beach cottage on the Olympic Peninsula. Then he walked away without even giving me a chance to say what I did for a living.

A chill has hung between us ever since. “Two strong personalities,” Kareena has maintained over the years, but there’s more to it. I don’t know if Adi has a heart, and if he does, whether Kareena is in it. His smirk says he knows I think he’s not good enough for her, but that he could care less. And, to be honest, they have interests in common. Both have an abiding love for Indian ghazal songs; both excel in table tennis when they can manage the time; both detest green bell pepper in any form. They make what one might call a perfect married couple—young, handsome, successful, socially adept, and with cosmopolitan panache. They look happy together, or, rather, he does. His attention to her is total, as though she’s an objet d’art that has cost him no small sum. He professes to be “furiously, stormily, achingly” in love with her. Every millisecond, I dream of you and you only, he gushed in a birthday card I once saw pinned on a memo board in their kitchen.

Do the purplish contusions I saw on Kareena’s arm attest to Adi’s undying affection? I grit my teeth now as I did then.

Adi doesn’t answer my phone call. I think about ringing another friend, but a peek at the red-eyed digits of the mantle clock stops my hand. Better to postpone the call and shower instead. Better to gauge what actually happened before I get everybody upset.

My nerves are so scrambled that the shower is no more than a surface balm. I towel myself but don’t waste time blow-drying my shoulder-length hair.

In the mirror, my bushy eyebrows stand out against my olive skin. My nose is tiny, like an afterthought. Although I’m fit, healthy, and rosy-cheeked and my hair is long and lustrous, I’m not beautiful by either Indian or American standards. Friends say I have kind eyes. It has never occurred to me to hide the cut mark under my left eye caused by a childhood brush with a low-hanging tree branch. I don’t like to fuss with makeup.

Dressed in a blue terry knit jacket, matching pants, and sneakers, I drift into the kitchen. Breakfast consists of a tall cool glass of water from the filter tap. I slip into my greenhouse and inhale its forest fragrance. The sun sparkles through the barn-style roof and the glass-paneled walls. I hope the fear signals inside me are wrong.

The plants are screaming for moisture. I pick up a sprayer and mist the trays, dispensing life-giving moisture to the germinating seeds and fragile sprouts poking up through the soil. A honeybee hums over a seed flat.

All around me, the life force is triumphant: surely that’ll happen with Kareena too. Whatever the cause, her disappearance will be temporary, explainable, and reversible.

An hour later I call Veen. “According to Adi, Kareena was last seen with a stranger,” she says. “They were at Toute La Soirée around eleven a.m. on Friday. A waitress who’d seen them together reported so to the police. I find it odd that Adi sounded a little jealous but not terribly worried over the news about this strange man.”

I’ve been to that café many times. Kareena, who had no special fidelity to any one place, somehow took a fancy to rendezvousing there with me. Could that man have blindfolded Kareena, put a hand over her mouth, and dragged her into a car?

No, on second thought, that’s impossible. A spirited person like her couldn’t be held captive. Could she have run away with that man because of Adi’s abuse? That’s more likely. I ask Veen what the man looks like.

“Dark, average height, handsome, and well-dressed. He carried a jute bag on his shoulder.”

“Oh, a jhola.” In India some years back, jholas were the fashion among male intellectuals. My scrawny next-door neighbor, who considered himself a man of letters but was actually a film buff, toted books in his jhola. He could often be seen running for the bus with the hefty bag dangling from one shoulder and bumping against his hip. Tagore novels? Chekov’s story collection? Shelley’s poems? The only thing I ever saw him fishing out of the bag was a white box of colorful pastries when he thought no one was looking.

“But eleven is too early for lunch,” I say, “and Kareena never takes a mid-morning break. Why would she be there at such an hour?”

“Don’t know. And what do you make of this? I was passing by Umberto’s last night and spotted Adi with a blonde. They were drinking wine and talking.”

“He seems to be taking this awfully easy.” I remind Veen that Adi has the typical Asian man’s fixation on blond hair. According to Kareena, Adi’s assistant is a neatly put-together blonde stationed at a cubicle outside his office. Veen and I discuss if Adi might be having an affair, but don’t come to any conclusion.

As I hang up, my glance falls on my cell phone, the mute little accessory on the coffee table in front of the couch. Kareena and I get together most Fridays after work, and she often calls me at the last minute. No cause for concern, I assured myself when I left a message on Kareena’s voice mail a few days ago and didn’t hear back.

Silently, I replay my last face-to-face with Kareena at Toute La Soirée. On that afternoon two weeks ago, I was waiting for her at a corner table, perusing the Seattle Globe and reveling in the aromas of lime, ginger, and mint. It filled me with fury to read a half-page story about a woman in India blamed for her village’s crop failures and hunted down as a witch. I would have to share this story with Kareena.

Sensing a rustle in the atmosphere, I looked up. Standing just inside the door, Kareena peered out over the crowd, spotted me, and flashed a smile. She looked casually chic in a maroon pantsuit (maple foliage shade in my vocabulary, Bordeaux in hers) that we’d shopped for together at Nordstrom. Arms swaying long and loose, she weaved her way among the tables. Her left wrist sported a pearl-studded bracelet-cum-watch.

As she drew closer, a woman in chartreuse seated across the aisle from me called out to her. Kareena paused and they exchanged pleasantries. The woman glanced in my direction and asked, “Is that your sister?”

Kareena winked at me. We’d been subjected to the same question countless times, uttered in a similar tone of expectation. Did we really look alike, or had we picked up each other’s mannerisms from spending so much time together? At 5'1", I am shorter than her by three inches, and thinner. Our styles of dressing fall at opposite ends of the fashion spectrum. I glanced down at my powder-blue workaday jumper, a practical watch with a black resin band, and walking flats. My attire didn’t follow current fashion dictates, but it was low-key and comfy, just right for an outdoors person. Fortunately, Seattle accommodated both our styles.

“Kemon acho?” Kareena greeted me with a Bengali pleasantry I’d taught her. “Sorry I’m late. First, I had a gynecologist appointment, then a difficult DV case to wrap up.”

I pushed the newspaper to the far side of the table. DV—domestic violence—is an abbreviation that sounds to me more like a fearsome disease, less like a social thorn. Kareena likes to help women who are in abusive relationships and, as yet, unaware of their legal rights. She was named the top DV counselor in her office and has received recognition for her efforts.

“I really think you’re overworking.” I touched her hand. “Do you really need the money? Do you need to shop so much?”

She ran her fingers over her bracelet. “You don’t resent my spending, do you?”

I shook my head, then stopped to ruminate. Well, in truth, there have been times. She likes to shop at Nordstrom, Restoration Hardware, and Williams-Sonoma, places that are beyond my means, but she insists on having my company. I have an eye for quality and she values that.

I got back to the subject at hand. “Was today’s case one from our community, another hush-hush?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” She mimicked a British accent: “A ‘family matter, a kitchen accident.’” She paused. The waiter was hovering by her shoulder. We placed our orders.

Not for the first time, I agonized over the threats Kareena faces due to the nature of her job. Signs have been plentiful. She is frequently called a man-hater and, at least once in the last month, has been followed home from work. The spouse of one client even went so far as to publicly question her sexual orientation.

“You’re the only one I trust enough to talk about this case,” Kareena continued. “She’s an H-4 visa holder, so scared that she couldn’t even string together a few coherent sentences. I spoke a little Punjabi with her, which loosened her up. Still, it took awhile to draw out her story. Her husband beats her regularly.”

I appraised Kareena’s face. How she could absorb the despair of so many traumatized souls? Listen to songs that don’t finish playing? Lately, her lipstick color had gone from her standard safe pink to a risky red. Brown circles under her eyes spoke of fatigue or, perhaps, stress, and I suspected the brighter lip color was intended to redirect a viewer’s attention.

“Did you see bruises on her?” I asked and watched her carefully.

It was still so vivid in my mind, Kareena’s last cocktail party a few weeks before and the freshly swollen blue-black marks on her upper arm. In an unguarded moment, her paisley Kashmiri shawl had slid off her shoulders. Through the billowy sheer sleeves of her tan silk top, I glimpsed dark blue, almost black finger marks on an otherwise smooth arm. The swelling extended over a large area, causing me to nearly shriek. Adi must have attacked her. Upon realizing that I’d noticed, she glanced down and repositioned the shawl. Just then, a male friend approached, asked her to dance, took her arm, and they floated away.

“Yes, I did see bruises on her forehead,” Kareena now replied. “She’d be in worse trouble if her husband suspected she was out looking for help.”

“The law is on her side, isn’t it?” I allowed a pause. “You don’t have problems at home, by any chance, do you?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, I happened to notice bruises on your arm at your last party. Who was it?”

I noticed the mauve of shame spreading on her face. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Sorry to barge into your private matters, but if you ever feel like talking—”

Our orders came. Mine was a ginger iced tea and hers an elixir of coconut juice and almond milk. She raised her chin and lifted her glass to clink with mine, her way of accepting my apology.

I took a sip from my beverage; she drained hers with such hurried gulps that I doubted she fully appreciated the flavors. Typical Kareena; appearances must be maintained. Both of us looked out through the window and took in the sky-colored Ship Canal where a fishing vessel was working its way to the dry docks that lined the north shore of Lake Union. Sooner or later, I thought, I’d have to find out the truth about those bruises.

When the silver waves died down in the canal, Kareena spoke again: “But enough of this depressing stuff! How did things go for you today?”

I filled her in on the most interesting part of my day: consulting with a paraplegic homeowner. “Believe it or not,” I said, “the guy wants to do all the weeding and watering himself. It’ll be a challenge, but I’ll design a garden to suit his requirements.”

“You live such a sane life and you have such a healthy glow on your face. Just listening to you, I seem to siphon off some of it. ” She gave me a smile. “Come on, Mitra. Let me buy you another drink.”

She signaled the waiter. The room was emptier now, the sounds hushed, and a genial breeze blew through a half-open window. We ordered a second round.

“Before the alarm went off this morning,” she said after a while, “I got a call from my nephew in New Delhi. He’s seven.”

“Does he want you to visit him?”

She nodded and mashed her napkin into a ball. I guessed she was undergoing one of those periodic episodes of homesickness for India, the country we’d both left behind. I, too, experience the same longing to visit people missing from my life. Whereas she can afford to go back every year, I can’t.

I digressed from this aching topic to a lighter one by pointing out a cartoon clip peeking out from under the glass cover of our table. A tiny boy, craning his neck up, is saying to his glowering father, Do I dare ask you what day of the week it is before you’ve had your double tall skinny?

That got a spontaneous laugh from Kareena which, in turn, raised my spirits. I didn’t have a chance to discuss the newspaper story with her. Well, the next time.

I go back to my living room. The airy tranquility has been transformed into a murky emptiness, as though a huge piece of familiar furniture has been cleared out but not replaced. I have an urge to confide in someone, but who could that be? The only person I can think of is the one who’s gone away.

I wander into the kitchen, open and close the cupboard, rearrange items in the refrigerator, and fill the tea kettle with water. With a cup of Assam tea and a slice of multigrain toast, I sit at the round table. Bananas protrude from a sunny ceramic bowl within arm’s reach. I fiddle with my iPod.

The tea tempers to lukewarm, the toast becomes dense, and the bananas remain untouched. It’s difficult for me to stomach much food in the morning, and this news has squelched whatever hunger I might otherwise have. I stare at the Trees Are Not Trivial poster on the sea-blue wall. Even the cushioned chair doesn’t feel cozy. I itch all over.

Could someone have murdered her?

I peer out through the western window. The Olympic Mountains appear stable, blue, and timeless. Somehow I doubt that Kareena could be the victim of a lethal crime.

How can I help find her? My career focus in art and landscape design—the study of the physiology of new growth, awareness of color and light, and harmony of arrangements—hasn’t prepared me to deal with a situation like this.

I walk over to my side yard. Bluebells are pushing up from the winter-hardened ground. I notice a slug, pick it up with a leaf, and deposit it on a safe spot. Once again, spring is in the balmy air. I look up to the sky, out of a gardener’s propensity to check the weather. It helps me see beyond the immediate.

Back to the living room, I sit at my desk, grab a notepad, and begin listing friends and acquaintances who I can call upon. The page fills speedily. The Indian population in the Puget Sound area, described recently by the Seattle Globe in a feature story as a “model” community, is some twenty-five thousand strong. The community’s academic and professional accomplishments are “as lofty as Mount Rainier,” the same article proclaimed. I’m troubled by such laudatory phrases, aware that we have our fair share of warts and blemishes. According to Kareena, the rate of domestic violence among our dignified doctors, elite engineers, and high-powered fund-raisers equals, perhaps even exceeds, the national average.

I consult my watch. It is ten o’clock, an hour when everyone’s up and about, when the disappointments of the day haven’t dulled one’s spirits. This’ll be a good time to ring Adi and draw him out. He loves to talk about himself in his Oxford-accented, popcorn-popping speech, which will give me a chance to tease information out of him, however distasteful the process might be, however potentially dangerous. Kareena is my best friend. When we’re together, I’m fully present and my voice is at its freest. Day turns into twilight as we relax over drinks, gabbing, laughing, and trading opinions, oblivious to the time. We don’t parse our friendship. It just is. We scatter the gems of our hours freely, then retrieve them richer in value.

With the phone to my ear, I pace back and forth in front of my living room window. Adi, at the other end, is ignoring the ringing.

The Emperor comes to focus in my mind—an impeccable suit, sockless feet (part of his fashion statement), and eyes red-rimmed with exasperation at some luckless underling behind on a project or the changeable Seattle sky. Adi takes any potential irritant personally. He snatches a ringing phone from its cradle at the last possible moment. The world can wait. It always does for Adi Guha.

The stand-up calendar on the mantel nags me about tomorrow’s deadline for a newspaper gardening column. Yet, as I pace the cold floor once again, the phone glued to my ear, it becomes clear that such an assignment is no longer a high priority for me. My missing friend is my main focus now. All else has faded into the background.

Adi comes on the line, gasps when he recognizes my voice. I mention Veen’s call, then get straight to the point. “What time did you get home that night?”

“Your core competency is gardening, Mitra. I’m not saying it’s menial labor, but neither is it nuclear physics or private investigation. Go back to your garden and leave this situation in more competent hands, like mine.”

I ignore the insult. “Do the police have any clues? Did they come to the house?”

“I gave them a photo which they looked at, then began to pepper me with questions. They gave me a song and dance about how many people disappear daily from the city. They assigned a laid-back cop, the only one they could spare. It’s obvious they’re not interested unless it’s a blond heiress and television cameras are everywhere.”

“What about the stranger she met at Soirée?”

“I’m not worried about that. She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”

“Have you talked to her gynecologist?”

Adi mumbles a no.

“Do you think she needed a break and decided to sneak away for a few days? There have been times, like at your birthday party, when she looked like she could use a break.”

“Everything is fine between us, Mitra, just fine.”

Everything’s fine? What a laugh. About a year ago, Kareena and I were spending an evening at Soirée when a hugely pregnant woman waddled past our table. I shifted my chair to let her pass. Kareena put her fork down and gazed at the woman.

In a teasing tone I asked, “Could that be you?”

“Adi doesn’t want kids.” She returned to her voluptuous plum-almond tart.

Now I hear a staccato rumbling in the background, a car cruising. Adi has nerve, telling me everything was fine with Kareena. Kareena’s everything and Adi’s everything are obviously not the same.

“Did you check her closet?” I now ask.

“Looks like her clothes are all there.”

Would he even recognize her alligator handbag, jeweled mules, flowing shawls she favored over the structured feel of a coat, or the new Camellia scarf? Would he be able to detect the nuance of her perfume? I believe he only remembers the superficial facts of her presence.

“Did you go to the safety deposit box to see if her passport is there?”

“No, yesterday I had to chair a three-hour offsite meeting. The market isn’t as calm as it was last year. We need to get our cash-burn rate under control. It may be necessary to dehire some people.”

I almost choke at the expression he uses for firing an employee. Then he begins to ramble on about market share, competitive disadvantage, and going public to raise new capital. In short order, his business-speak begins to grate on me.

I interrupt him by saying, “This is a life-and-death situation, Adi.”

“It sure is,” he replies. “This morning around five I got a call from the police. They asked me to go see a body at the morgue.”

My vision blurs. “What?”

“A woman’s body was found in Lake Washington. It wasn’t her.”

“Oh my God!” I shake my head. “Must have been difficult for you. I don’t know what I’d do if…” I get a grip on myself. “Could we meet this morning? Put our heads together? The earlier the better. We need to mobilize our community. I’ll be happy to drop by your office.”

“Hold on now, Mitra. I don’t want even my friends to get wind of this, never mind the whole community. You, of all people, should know how things get blown out of proportion when the rumor mill cranks up.”

I sag on the couch. Losing face with his Indian peers is more important to him than seeking help in finding his wife. In a way, I get it. Our community is small. We have at most two degrees of separation between people, instead of the hypothetical six nationwide. Word spreads quickly and rumor insinuates itself in every chit-chat. Still, how silly, how counterproductive Adi’s pride seems in this dark situation.

And that makes him more of a suspect.

There are times when I think Adi is still a misbehaving adolescent who needs his behind kicked. According to Kareena, he was an only son. Growing up, he had intelligence, if not good behavior, and bagged many academic honors. His mother spoiled him. Even on the day he punched a sickly classmate at school, she treated him to homemade besan laddoos.

Finally, Adi suggests meeting at Soirée at seven p.m.

How empty the place will seem if I go back there without Kareena. But I don’t want to risk a change with Adi. It’ll give him an excuse to weasel out of our meeting.

I ponder why he’s so difficult. Rumor has it that his family in New Delhi disowned him when he married Kareena against their wishes. Not only that, his uncle sabotaged his effort to obtain a coveted position with an electronics firm by taking the job himself. Adi endured that type of humiliation for a year before giving up. Eight years ago, he and his new bride left India and flew to the opposite side of the world, as far away from his family as he could possibly go.

He landed in Seattle, where he found a plethora of opportunities and no one to thwart his monstrous ambitions. Before long, he formed his own software outfit. There was a price to be paid: long hours, constant travel, and a scarred heart. In spite of this, he persisted and ultimately succeeded. These days he flies frequently to India on business, and rings his family from his hotel room, but his mother will not take his call.

What is Adi doing to locate the woman on whose behalf he sacrificed the love of his family?

Would he really show up at Soirée this evening?

I walk over to my home office and dial Kareena’s office number. Once transferred to the private line of the agency director, I leave her a message to get back to me a.s.a.p.

Then I wander into the bedroom where I confront the unmade bed, sheets wavy like desire building to a crescendo. Herr Ulrich floats in my mind, a man who appears so strong and unyielding, but who turns out to be tender and pliant. Right now, his taut body is pushing, lifting, and stooping in the brown-gray jumble of a construction site, the angles of his face accentuated by the strain. Did he stop for a split second, stare out into the distance, and re-experience my lips, my skin, my being?

It’s a little too soon to get moony about a man, friends would surely advise me.

Just picturing Ulrich, however, warms my body. Not just the electric tingling of sex, but a kind of communion.

Muted piano music floats from the Tudor across the street. As I reach for the phone with an eager hand, my gaze falls on the bedside table. The pad of Post-it notes is undisturbed. Ulrich hasn’t jotted down his phone number or his last name. He promised he would, but he didn’t.

My dreamy interlude is sharply broken. With a drab taste in my mouth, I realize that a promise is an illusion and so is “next time.” It’s similar to hoping that your parents will never die, your friends will forever be around you, and your tulips will always sprout back the next year. This morning I’ve learned how untrue my assumptions can be.

These days I feel like I’m living in a ghost town. I don’t know where to go, who to see, what to do next, or even what to believe. The last five days have coalesced into an endless dreary road. I’ve reached an impasse in my search for Kareena. Adi cancelled our meeting at Soirée at the last minute. From my repeated phone calls to him, I’ve gathered that Kareena’s passport is missing, an indication she’s left deliberately. It strikes me as odd that Adi seems so blithe about her being gone for so long. He even had the nerve to joke about it.

“You know what? I think she’s flown somewhere for an impromptu vacation. She’s punishing me for not taking her to Acapulco last February. Don’t worry. She’ll get a big scolding from me when she gets back.”

Where might she have gone?

I’ve contacted the police and given them an account of the bruises I saw on Kareena’s arm. Detective Yoshihama assured me he’d do what was necessary and gave me his cell phone number. This morning, I buzz him again, but he doesn’t return my call. How high is this case on his priority list? To him, Kareena is no more than a computer profile of another lost soul, yet another Have you seen me? poster to be printed, whereas to me and our mutual friends she’s a person of importance.

I’m not ready to give up. I call the Washington State Patrol’s Missing Persons Unit, but am advised to wait thirty days.

I miss Ulrich too, even though he’s practically a stranger. Everywhere I go, I see his broad face, neat haircut, wary green eyes. He appeared in my life about the time Kareena went missing. I haven’t heard from him since he left my bed that fateful morning.

I have no choice but to get on with my life, except that the daily duties I took on happily before have become meaningless. I put off grocery shopping, misplace my car keys, and ignore e-mails from the library warning that three books are overdue.

Late this morning, I check the tulip patch. The buds are still closed and a trifle wan, despite the fact that the soil, sun, and temperature are just ideal for them to bloom, and there are still dewdrops hanging from them. Whatever the connection might be, I can’t help but think about Kareena. Why didn’t she confide in me?

What concerns me most is the nothingness, the no-answer bit, the feeling that the answer is beyond my reach.

I decide to make a trip to Toute La Soirée this evening. A voice inside has been nagging me to do just that, not to mention I have a taste for their kefir-berry cocktail. Kareena confided not long ago that she was saving the pricey Riesling for the next special occasion. Will her wish ever be fulfilled?

The café is located on busy 34th Street. To my surprise, I find a parking place only a block away. The air is humid as I walk up to the entrance. The stars are all out. I check my watch. Despite the popular spot’s catchy name—meaning “all evening”—it closes at nine p.m., less than an hour from now.

Inside, the café pulses with upbeat, after-work chumminess. It is nearly full. A middle-aged man fixes me with an appraising look over a foamy pint of ale. I ignore him and survey the interior. The décor has changed since my last visit. The smart black walls sport a collection of hand fans. Made of lace and bamboo, they’re exquisitely pleated. The new ambience also includes a wooden rack glittering with slick magazines and jute bags of coffee beans propped against a wall. I don’t find this makeover comforting.

As I thread my way through, a speck of tension building inside me, I overhear snatches of a debate on human cloning. Ordinarily, I would slow down for a little free education, but right now my attention is focused on finding an empty seat.

The table Kareena and I usually try for is taken; how could it be otherwise at this prime hour? I was half hoping for a minor miracle, but finding a parking spot must have filled my evening quota. “Our” table is occupied by a couple whose heads are bent over an outsize slice of strawberry shortcake. Right now, I find even the thought of such sugary excess revolting. And the blood-red strawberry juice frightening.

Something about the couple nudges me and I give them a second look. Oh no, it’s Adi and a blonde. He looks slightly upset. The overhead light shines over his copper complexion. He’s dressed in a crewneck polo shirt in an unflattering rust shade—he doesn’t have Kareena’s color sense. The blonde wears crystal-accented chandelier earrings that graze her shoulders. I wouldn’t bear the weight of such long earrings except on a special occasion. Or is this a special occasion for them?

Their presence so rattles me that I decide to leave. Besides, Adi might notice me and complain I’m spying on him.

On the way to the door, I knock over a chair, which I put back in its place. Then I almost collide head-on with an Indian man who has just entered the shop. Although he’s young, dark, and devastatingly handsome, somehow I know he’s not my type. Clad smartly in a silver woolen vest, this prince heads straight for the take-out counter. His impressive carriage and smoldering eyes have caused a stir among women seated nearby. A redhead tries to catch his glance. He touches the jute bag, an Indian-style jhola, dangling from his shoulder. Even Adi stares at him.

I slip out the door, too drained to absorb anything further, pause on the sidewalk, and take several deep breaths to cleanse my head. Please, Goddess Durga, no more intrigues this evening.

It’s starting to drizzle, but the streets are mercifully clear. Within minutes, I pull into my garage and step out of my Honda. As I close the garage door, I flash on the enchanting prince from the café. Didn’t Veen mention that Kareena was last sighted with a jhola-carrier at that very place?

A jolt of adrenaline skips through my body. Why couldn’t I have been more alert? Stuck around longer to scrutinize another potential suspect and his belongings?

Should I drive back?

I check my watch: nine p.m. Soirée has just closed.

Filled with nervous excitement, I enter my house. Neither a hot shower nor a mug of holy basil tea tempers the thought racing through my head: what really happened to Kareena?

In a need to restore my spirit, I retire early. As I lie in bed, I can’t help but run through the day’s events, foremost among them being Adi’s public appearance with a blonde. Suspicions about him blow in my mind like a pile of dry leaves in the wind. Eventually, the atmosphere settles; my mind clears.

I’m worrying too much about Kareena. Worry is a sand castle. It has no foundation.

Could my assumptions about Adi be wrong as well?

Assumptions, like appearances, can deceive, I tell myself. Adi’s cheerful façade and his lack of concern about his wife’s unexplained absence just might be more sand castle building on my part. I’m reading the worst in what might be a perfectly plausible and innocent situation.

You’ve been acting silly, Mitra, pure silly. You have no reason to fret. Pull your covers snug and get yourself a restful sleep. All will be well. The morning will come, the sun will be out, and Kareena will return, her bright smile intact, as surely as the swing of seasons.

I awake refreshed and invigorated. Last night’s drizzle has evaporated, leaving behind a bright morning. The sun streams through a wide gap in the window draperies. A spider is building a nest outside the window, intricate but fragile.

I have the perfect task to usher in this new day. I shall tend to Kareena’s tulip patch. The plants will soon release their full yellow blossoms as emblems of beauty and renewal and she’ll cradle a bunch lovingly in her arm.

I don my gardening clothes—faded jeans and a worn black cardigan—gather my tools, and hurry outside. The morning light shines brilliantly on my front flower patch. An errant branch of camellia needs to be pruned. Its shadow falls over the tulips. I step in closer to inspect, an ache in my belly. All the tulip buds are shriveled and brown, as though singed by blight, their dried stalks drooping over to return to brown earth.

Why are they dying on me so soon? I fall to my knees and caress the tulip plants, lifting them up and squeezing their brittle stalks and wilted leaves. I roll each wizened bud between my fingers, but don’t find a single one with any hope.

Holding a broken stem in my grasp, I think of Kareena, so vibrant, so full of life, and brood about the promise of these tulips.

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT by Lawrence Block

She felt his eyes on her just about the time the bartender placed a Beck’s coaster on the bar and set her dry Rob Roy on top of it. She wanted to turn and see who was eyeing her, but remained as she was, trying to analyze just what it was she felt. She couldn’t pin it down physically, couldn’t detect a specific prickling of the nerves in the back of her neck. She simply knew she was being watched, and that the watcher was a male.

It was, to be sure, a familiar sensation. Men had always looked at her. Since adolescence, since her body had begun the transformation from girl to woman? No, longer than that. Even in childhood, some men had looked at her, gazing with admiration and, often, with something beyond admiration.

In Hawley, Minnesota, thirty miles east of the North Dakota line, they’d looked at her like that. The glances followed her to Red Cloud and Minneapolis, and now she was in New York, and, no surprise, men still looked at her.

She lifted her glass, sipped, and a male voice said, “Excuse me, but is that a Rob Roy?”

He was standing to her left, a tall man, slender, well turned out in a navy blazer and gray trousers. His shirt was a button-down, his tie diagonally striped. His face, attractive but not handsome, was youthful at first glance, but she could see he’d lived some lines into it. And his dark hair was lightly infiltrated with gray.

“A dry Rob Roy,” she said. “Why?”

“In a world where everyone orders Cosmopolitans,” he said, “there’s something very pleasingly old-fashioned about a girl who drinks a Rob Roy. A woman, I should say.”

She lowered her eyes to see what he was drinking.

“I haven’t ordered yet,” he said. “Just got here. I’d have one of those, but old habits die hard.” And when the barman moved in front of him, he ordered Jameson on the rocks. “Irish whiskey,” he told her. “Of course, this neighborhood used to be mostly Irish. And tough. It was a pretty dangerous place a few years ago. A young woman like yourself wouldn’t feel comfortable walking into a bar unaccompanied, not in this part of town. Even accompanied, it was no place for a lady.”

“I guess it’s changed a lot,” she said.

“It’s even changed its name,” he said. His drink arrived, and he picked up his glass and held it to the light, admiring the amber color. “They call it Clinton now. That’s for DeWitt Clinton, not Bill. DeWitt was the governor awhile back, he dug the Erie Canal. Not personally, but he got it done. And there was George Clinton, he was the governor, too, for seven terms starting before the adoption of the Constitution. And then he had a term as vice president. But all that was before your time.”

“By a few years,” she allowed.

“It was even before mine,” he said. “But I grew up here, just a few blocks away, and I can tell you nobody called it Clinton then. You probably know what they called it.”

“Hell’s Kitchen,” she said. “They still call it that, when they’re not calling it Clinton.”

“Well, it’s more colorful. It was the real estate interests who plumped for Clinton, because they figured nobody would want to move to something called Hell’s Kitchen. And that may have been true then, when people remembered what a bad neighborhood this was, but now it’s spruced up and gentrified and yuppified to within an inch of its life, and the old name gives it a little added cachet. A touch of gangster chic, if you know what I mean.”

“If you can’t stand the heat—”

“Stay out of the Kitchen,” he supplied. “When I was growing up here, the Westies pretty much ran the place. They weren’t terribly efficient like the Italian mob, but they were colorful and bloodthirsty enough to make up for it. There was a man two doors down the street from me who disappeared, and they never did find the body. Except one of his hands turned up in somebody’s freezer on 53rd Street and Eleventh Avenue. They wanted to be able to put his fingerprints on things long after he was dead and gone.”

“Would that work?”

“With luck,” he said, “we’ll never know. The Westies are mostly gone now, and the tenement apartments they lived in are all tarted up, with stockbrokers and lawyers renting them. Which are you?”

“Me?”

“A stockbroker or a lawyer?”

She grinned. “Neither one, I’m afraid. I’m an actress.”

“Even better.”

“Which means I take a class twice a week,” she said, “and run around to open casting calls and auditions.”

“And wait tables?”

“I did some of that in the Cities. I suppose I’ll have to do it again here, when I start to run out of money.”

“The Cities?”

“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

They talked about where she was from, and along the way he told her his name was Jim. She was Jennifer, she told him. He related another story about the neighborhood—he was really a pretty good storyteller—and by then her Rob Roy was gone and so was his Jameson. “Let me get us another round,” he said, “and then why don’t we take our drinks to a table? We’ll be more comfortable, and it’ll be quieter.”

He was talking about the neighborhood.

“Irish, of course,” he said, “but that was only part of it. You had blocks that were pretty much solid Italian, and there were Poles and other Eastern Europeans. A lot of French, too, working at the restaurants in the theater district. You had everything, really. The UN’s across town on the East River, but you had your own General Assembly here in the Kitchen. Fifty-seventh Street was a dividing line; north of that was San Juan Hill, and you had a lot of blacks living there. It was an interesting place to grow up, if you got to grow up, but no sweet young thing from Minnesota would want to move here.”

She raised her eyebrows at sweet young thing, and he grinned at her. Then his eyes turned serious and he said, “I have a confession to make.”

“Oh?”

“I followed you in here.”

“You mean you noticed me even before I ordered a Rob Roy?”

“I saw you on the street. And for a moment I thought…”

“What?”

“Well, that you were on the street.”

“I guess I was, if that’s where you saw me. I don’t… Oh, you thought—”

“That you were a working girl. I wasn’t going to mention this, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way…”

What, she wondered, was the right way?

“… because it’s not as though you looked the part, or were dressed like the girls you see out there. See, the neighborhood may be tarted up, but that doesn’t mean the tarts have disappeared.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“It was more the way you were walking,” he went on. “Not swinging your hips, not your walk, per se, but a feeling I got that you weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere, or even all that sure where you were going.”

“I was thinking about stopping for a drink,” she said, “and not sure if I wanted to, or if I should go straight home.”

“That would fit.”

“And I’ve never been in here before, and wondered if it was decent.”

“Well, it’s decent enough now. A few years ago it wouldn’t have been. And even now, a woman alone—”

“I see.” She sipped her drink. “So you thought I might be a hooker, and that’s what brought you in here. Well, I hate to disappoint you—”

“What brought me in here,” he said, “was the thought that you might be, and the hope that you weren’t.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“I’m an actress.”

“And a good one, I’ll bet.”

“I guess time will tell.”

“It generally does,” he said. “Can I get you another one of those?”

She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “I was only going to come in for one drink, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do that. And I’ve had two, and that’s really plenty.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m afraid so. It’s not just the alcohol, it’s the time. I have to get home.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary.”

“Yes, it is. Whether it’s Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton, it’s still necessary.”

“Well…”

“I insist. It’s safer around here than it used to be, but it’s a long way from Minnesota. And I suppose you get some unsavory characters in Minnesota, as far as that goes.”

“Well, you’re right about that.” At the door she added, “I just don’t want you to think you have to walk me home because I’m a lady.”

“I’m not walking you home because you’re a lady,” he said. “I’m walking you home because I’m a gentleman.”

The walk to her door was interesting. He had stories to tell about half the buildings they passed. There’d been a murder in this one, a notorious drunk in the next. And though some of the stories were unsettling, she felt completely secure walking at his side.

At her door he said, “Any chance I could come up for a cup of coffee?”

“I wish,” she said.

“I see.”

“I’ve got this roommate,” she said. “It’s impossible, it really is. My idea of success isn’t starring on Broadway, it’s making enough money to have a place of my own. There’s just no privacy when she’s home, and the damn girl is always home.”

“That’s a shame.”

She drew a breath. “Jim? Do you have a roommate?”

He didn’t, and if he had, the place would still have been spacious enough to afford privacy. A large living room, a big bedroom, a good-sized kitchen. Rent-controlled, he told her, or he could never have afforded it. He showed her all through the apartment before he took her in his arms and kissed her.

“Maybe,” she said, when the embrace ended, “maybe we should have one more drink after all.”

She was dreaming, something confused and confusing, and then her eyes snapped open. For a moment she did not know where she was, and then she realized she was in New York, and realized the dream had been a recollection or reinvention of her childhood in Hawley.

In New York, and in Jim’s apartment.

And in his bed. She turned, saw him lying motionless beside her, and slipped out of bed, moving with instinctive caution. She walked quietly out of the bedroom, found the bathroom. She used the toilet, peeked behind the shower curtain. The tub was surprisingly clean for a bachelor’s apartment and looked inviting. She didn’t feel soiled, not exactly that, but something close. Stale, she decided. Stale, and very much in need of freshening.

She ran the shower, adjusted the temperature, stepped under the spray.

She hadn’t intended to stay over, had fallen asleep in spite of her intentions. Rohypnol, she thought. Roofies, the date-rape drug. Puts you to sleep, or the closest thing to it, and leaves you with no memory of what happened to you.

Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d gotten a contact high.

She stepped out of the tub, toweled herself dry, and returned to the bedroom for her clothes. He hadn’t moved in her absence and lay on his back beneath the covers.

She got dressed, checked herself in the mirror, found her purse, put on lipstick but no other makeup, and was satisfied with the results. Then, after another reflexive glance at the bed, she began searching the apartment.

His wallet, in the gray slacks he’d tossed over the back of a chair, held almost three hundred dollars in cash. She took that but left the credit cards and everything else. She found just over a thousand dollars in his sock drawer, and took it, but left the mayonnaise jar full of loose change. She checked the refrigerator, and the set of brushed-aluminum containers on the kitchen counter, but the fridge held only food and drink, and one container held tea bags while the other two were empty.

That was probably it, she decided. She could search more thoroughly, but she’d only be wasting her time.

And she really ought to get out of here.

But first she had to go back to the bedroom. Had to stand at the side of the bed and look down at him. Jim, he’d called himself. James John O’Rourke, according to the cards in his wallet. Forty-seven years old. Old enough to be her father, in point of fact, although the man in Hawley who’d sired her was his senior by eight or nine years.

He hadn’t moved.

Rohypnol, she thought. The love pill.

“Maybe,” she had said, “we should have one more drink after all.”

I’ll have what you’re having, she’d told him, and it was child’s play to add the drug to her own drink, then switch glasses with him. Her only concern after that had been that he might pass out before he got his clothes off, but no, they kissed and petted and found their way to his bed, and got out of their clothes and into each other’s arms, and it was all very nice, actually, until he yawned and his muscles went slack and he lay limp in her arms.

She arranged him on his back and watched him sleep. Then she touched and stroked him, eliciting a response without waking the sleeping giant. Rohypnol, the wonder drug, facilitating date rape for either sex. She took him in her mouth, she mounted him, she rode him. Her orgasm was intense, and it was hers alone. He didn’t share it, and when she dismounted his penis softened and lay upon his thigh.

In Hawley her father took to coming into her room at night. “Jenny? Are you sleeping?” If she answered, he’d kiss her on the forehead and tell her to go back to sleep.

Then half an hour later he’d come back. If she was asleep, if she didn’t hear him call her name, he’d slip into the bed with her. And touch her, and kiss her, and not on her forehead this time.

She would wake up when this happened, but somehow knew to feign sleep. And he would do what he did.

Before long she pretended to be asleep whenever he came into the room. She’d hear him ask if she was asleep, and she’d lie there silent and still, and he’d come into her bed. She liked it, she didn’t like it. She loved him, she hated him.

Eventually they dropped the pretense. Eventually he taught her how to touch him, and how to use her mouth on him. Eventually, eventually, there was very little they didn’t do.

It took some work, but she got Jim hard again and made him come. He moaned audibly at the very end, then subsided into deep sleep almost immediately. She was exhausted, she felt as if she’d taken a drug herself, but she forced herself to go to the bathroom and look for some Listerine. She couldn’t find any, and wound up gargling with a mouthful of his Irish whiskey.

She stopped in the kitchen, then returned to the bedroom. When she’d done what she needed to do, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to lie down beside him and close her eyes. Just for a minute…

And now it was morning, time for her to get out of there. She stood looking down at him, and for an instant she seemed to see his chest rise and fall with his slow even breathing, but that was just her mind playing a trick, because his chest was in fact quite motionless, and he wasn’t breathing at all. His breathing had stopped forever when she slid the kitchen knife between two of his ribs and into his heart.

He’d died without a sound. La petite mort, the French called an orgasm. The little death. Well, the little death had drawn a moan from him, but the real thing turned out to be soundless. His breathing stopped, and never resumed.

She laid a hand on his upper arm, and the coolness of his flesh struck her as a sign that he was at peace now. She thought, almost wistfully, how very serene he had become.

In a sense, there’d been no need to kill the man. She could have robbed him just as effectively while he slept, and the drug would ensure that he wouldn’t wake up before she was out the door. She’d used the knife in response to an inner need, and the need had been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.

She had never used a knife, or anything else, in Hawley. She’d considered it, and more than once. But in the end all she did was leave. No final scene, no note, nothing. Out the door and on the first Trailways bus out of there, and that was that.

Maybe everything else would have been different if she’d left her father as peaceful as she was leaving James John O’Rourke. But had that ever been an option? Could she have done it, really?

Probably not.

She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut, and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she walked down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.

Time to think about moving.

Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, she had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—

When she was through with him, she’d retrieved the gun, wrapped his hand around it, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed off a shot. They could call it a suicide, just as they could call the wrestler a heart attack, if they didn’t look too closely. Or they could call all three of them murders, without ever suspecting they were all the work of the same person.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt her to move. Find another place to live before people started to notice her on the streets and in the bars. She liked it here, in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a nice place to live, whatever it may have been in years past. But, as she and Jim had agreed, the whole of Manhattan was a nice place to live. There weren’t any bad neighborhoods left, not really.

Wherever she went, she was pretty sure she’d feel safe.

PHELAN’S FIRST CASE by Lisa Sandlin

Five past eight. Phelan sat tipped back in his desk chair, appreciating the power of the Beaumont Enterprise. They’d centered the ad announcing his new business, boxed it in black, and spelled his name right. The other ad in the classifieds had brought in two girls yesterday. He figured to choose the brunette with the coral nails and the middle-C voice. But just then he got a call from his old high school bud Joe Ford, now a parole officer, and Joe was hard-selling.

“Typing, dictation, whatcha need? She learned it in the big house. Paid her debt to society. What say you talk to her?”

“Find some other sucker. Since when are you Acme Employment?”

“Since when are you a private eye?”

“Since workers’ comp paid me enough bread to swing a lease.”

“For a measly finger? Thought you liked the rigs.”

“Still got nine fingers left. Aim to keep ’em.”

“Just see this girl, Tommy. She knows her stuff.”

“Why you pushing her?”

“Hell, phones don’t answer themselves, do they?”

“Didn’t they invent a machine that—”

Joe blew scorn through the phone. “Communist rumor. Lemme send her over. She can get down there in two shakes.”

“No.”

“I’m gonna say this one time. Who had your back the night you stepped outside with Narlan Pugh and all his cousins stepped outside behind him?”

“One time, shit. I heard it three. Time you realized gratitude comes to a natural end, same as a sack of donuts.”

Joe bided.

Phelan stewed.

“Goddamnit, no promises.”

“Naw! Course not. Make it or break it on her own. Thanks for the chance, it’ll buck her up.”

Phelan asked about the girl’s rap sheet but the dial tone was noncommittal.

Drumming his fingers, he glanced out his window toward the Mobil refinery’s methane flare, Beaumont’s own Star of Bethlehem. Far below ran a pewter channel of the Neches, sunlight coating the dimples of the water. Black-hulled tankers were anchored in the port, white topsides, striped flags riffling against the drift of spring clouds.

Or that’s the view he’d have once his business took off—San Jacinto Building, seventh floor. Mahogany paneling, brass-trimmed elevator. Now he looked out on the New Rosemont, $1 and Up, where a ceiling fan once fell on the proprietress. The secretary’s office had a window too, where sunlight and humidity pried off the paint on the Rosemont’s fire escape.

8:32. Footsteps were sounding on the stairs to his second-story walk-up.

Wasn’t skipping up here, was she? Measured tread. The knock on the door lately lettered Thomas Phelan, Investigations wasn’t fast, wasn’t slow. Not loud, not soft.

Phelan opened up. Well. Not a girl. Couple crows had stepped lightly at the corners of her eyes; a faint crease of bitter slanted from the left side of her barely tinted lips. Ash-brown hair, jaw-length, roomy white blouse, navy skirt. Jailhouse tan. Eyes gray-blue, a little clouded, distant, like a storm rolling in from out in the gulf. This one wouldn’t sit behind the desk blowing on her polish. The hand he was shaking had naked nails cut to the quick.

“Tom Phelan.”

“Delpha Wade.” Her voice was low and dry.

Delpha Wade. His brain ratcheted a picture toward him but not far enough, like when a Mars bar gets hung up partway out the vending machine.

They sat down in his office, him in a gimpy swivel behind a large metal desk, both included in the rent. Her in one of the proud new clients’ chairs, padded leather with regally tall backs.

“Gotta be honest with you, Miss Wade. Think I already found a secretary.”

No disappointment in those blue eyes, no hope either. She just passed a certificate with a gold seal across the desk. The paper said she typed seventy words a minute, knew shorthand, could do double entry. The brunette with the coral nails claimed all that too, but she’d backed it up with a giggle, not a diploma from Gatesville.

“Your first choice of a job a PI’s office?”

“My first choice is a job.”

Touché. “What number interview would this be for you?”

“Number one.”

“I’m flattered. Get off the bus, you come here.”

The blue eyes let in a smidgen of light. “Course that doesn’t count the dozen applications I wrote out ’fore they showed me the door.”

No wonder Joe was pushing her. “Had your druthers… where’d you work, Miss Wade?”

“Library. I like libraries. It’s what I did there.”

There being Gatesville. Now that she’d brought it up. “How many you do?”

“Fourteen.”

Phelan quelled the whistle welling up. That let out check-kiting, forgery, embezzling from the till, and probably dope. He was about to ask her the delicate when she handed it to him on a foil tray. “Voluntary manslaughter.”

“And you did fourteen?”

“He was very dead, Mr. Phelan.”

His brain shoved: the picture fell into the slot. Phelan’d been a teenager, jazzed by blood-slinging, and reporters had loved the story. Waitress in a bayou dive, waiting for the owner to collect the take. Alone. Two guys thrown out earlier came back—beat her, raped her, cut her. Father and son, that was the kicker. That, and they went for the girl before the cash register. But surprise. Somehow the knife had changed hands. The father’d got punctured and son sliced. When the owner’s headlights showed, dear old Dad ran for their heap and peeled. Delpha Wade had not let nature take its course. She finished off Junior in the oyster-shell parking lot.

The Gatesville certificate was being fit into a faded black leather clutch, years out of date. She gathered her feet under her. But didn’t stand up. Those eyes got to him. No hope, no despair. Just a storm cloud back on the blue horizon.

The outer door tapped. A hesitant tap, like a mouse was out there. “’Scuse me,” Phelan said and stood. His chair flopped its wooden seat upward like its next occupant would arrive in it via the ceiling. He wrenched it up; the seat surrendered again. “Gotta fix that,” he muttered.

When he looked up, he saw Delpha Wade’s straight back, walking out. Funny, he’d had the impression she wouldn’t fold so easy.

“Forgot your purse, Miss Wade.”

“No, I didn’t.” She shut the door between their offices—or rather, the door between his office and whoever got the secretary job’s office—soundlessly. He heard, “Good morning, ma’am. Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Phelan?” Her dry voice was smooth as a Yale lock.

Phelan smiled. I’ll be damned. He tipped the chair’s seat into loading position and sat in it, like the boss should.

Mumbling.

“May I ask what your visit is in reference to?”

More mumbling, a lot of it. Then—Phelan hated this sound—sobbing. Not that he hadn’t prepared for it. He’d bought a box of Kleenex at the dime store for the brokenhearted wives. Stashed it in the desk’s bottom drawer next to the husbands’ fifth of Kentucky. Had his .38 license in his wallet, PI license on the wall, newly minted business cards on the desk. An ex-con impersonating a secretary.

Delpha Wade entered, closing the door behind her. “Can you see a client now, Mr. Phelan?”

“Bring her on.” He was rooting for a cheated-on society matron in crocodile pumps, her very own checkbook snapped inside a croc bag.

“You can go in now, Mrs. Toups.”

A bone-thin woman in yesterday’s makeup and rumpled shirtwaist took the doorway. Leatherette purse in her fists, little gold nameplate like a cashier’s pinned over her left breast. The two slashes between her eyebrows tightened. “You’re kinda young. I was looking for—”

“An old retired cop?” Delpha Wade said. On cop her neutral voice bunched. “Mr. Phelan has a fresh point of view.”

What Mr. Phelan had was a fresh legal pad. He wielded a ballpoint over it. “Please, sit down, Mrs. Toups. Tell me what I can do for you.”

Delpha Wade scooped an elbow, tucked her into the client chair, at the same time saying, “Can I get you some coffee? Cream and sugar?”

Phelan furrowed his own brow, trying to grow some wrinkles. Coffee, he thought. What coffee?

“Take a Coke, if you got one.”

The inner door closed behind Delpha Wade, and he heard the outer door shut too. His first client stammered into her story; Phelan’s ballpoint despoiled the virginal legal pad. The Kleenex stayed in their drawer. Caroleen Toups had her own hankie.

By the time his nonsecretary returned with a dewy bottle of Coke, Phelan had the story. The Toups’s lived over on the north side, not far off Concord, nothing that could be called a neighborhood, more like one of a string of old wooden houses individually hacked out of the woods. Her boy Richard was into something and she didn’t like it. He’d been skipping school. Running around all hours. Then last night Richard had not come home.

Gently, Phelan asked, “Report that to the police?”

“Seven o’clock this morning. They said boys run off all the time. Said been a bunch of boys running off lately. Four or five. Like it’s a club.”

Phelan silently agreed, having once woken up with two or three friends on a New Orleans sidewalk, littered, lacquered, and convinced somebody’d driven rebar through his forehead. “What does your husband think?”

“He passed last fall. Took a virus in his heart.” Her reddened eyes offered to share that grief with him, but Phelan bowed his head and went on.

“Does Richard have a favorite item of clothing?”

“Some silly shoes that make him taller. And a Johnny Winter T-shirt he bought at a concert over in Port Arthur.”

“Would you know if those are gone from his room?”

“I would… Mr. Phelan.” Having managed to bestow on T. Phelan’s callow mug that title of respect, Mrs. Toups looked at him hopefully. “They’re not.”

“Have a piggy bank?”

She snapped the purse open and took out a roll, Andrew Jackson on top. “Till about midnight,” she said, “I read the Enterprise. That’s where I saw your ad. After midnight I searched my son’s room with a fine-tooth comb. This was in a cigar box under his bed. Along with some baseball cards and twisty cigarettes. There’s $410 here. Ricky’s in tenth grade, Mr. Phelan. He don’t have a job.”

The phone rang in the outer office, followed by the light click of the reconditioned Selectric. “You wouldn’t a brought a picture of him?”

Mrs. Toups dug into the leatherette, handed over a school photo. Fair and baby-faced, long-haired like a lot of kids these days. Grinning like he was saddled on a Christmas pony. Ricky Toups when he still had a daddy.

The mother’s tired eyes held a rising rim of water. “Why I wanted you to look old and tough—you find Ricky, scare him good. I cain’t take any more a this.”

Phelan was jolted by a gut feeling, a pact connecting him to that haggard mother. He hadn’t expected it. “Okay,” he said quickly. While Mrs. Toups sipped her Coke, he scrawled her address and phone number, then jotted an inventory of Ricky’s friends. Make that friend, a neighbor girl, Georgia Watson. School? French High, Phelan’s own alma mater, an orange-brick sprawl with a patchy football field. The legal pad was broken in now.

He wrote her name on a standard contract and slid it toward her. He’d practiced the next part so he could spit it out without blinking. “Fee is seventy-five a day. Plus expenses.”

Nobody was blinking here. Mrs. Toups peeled off five Jacksons. “Could you start now?”

“First day’s crucial on a missing-child case,” Phelan said, like he knew. “You’re at the top of the schedule.”

He guided Mrs. Toups through the outer office to the door. To his right, Delpha Wade sat behind the secretary’s desk, receiver tucked into her neck, typing. Typing what? And where had she got the paper?

“A Mrs. Lloyd Elliott would like to speak with you about a confidential matter. Says her husband’s an attorney.” Delpha Wade’s dry voice was hushed, and she rubbed her thumb and fingers together in the universal sign for money.

She got that right. According to the Enterprise, Lloyd Elliott had just won some court case that paid him 30 percent of yippee-I-never-have-to-work-again.

Mrs. Toups stuck her reddened face back in the door, a last plea on it. But at the sight of Phelan taking the phone, she ducked her head and left.

“Tom Phelan,” he said. Crisply, without one um or you know, the woman on the phone told him she wanted her husband followed, where to, and why. She’d bring by a retainer. Cash.

“That’ll work. Get back to you soon. Please leave any relevant details with my… with Miss Wade. You can trust her.”

And don’t I hope that’s true, he thought, clattering down the stairs.

The band was playing when Phelan pulled up to French High School. God, did he remember this parking lot: clubhouse, theater, and smoking lounge. He lit up for nostalgia’s sake.

A little shitkicker perched on the trunk of a Mustang pushed back his Resistol. He had his boots on the bumper, one knee jackhammering hard enough to shiver the car. Phelan offered him a smoke.

Haughtily, the kid produced some Bull and rolled his own. “Take a light.”

Phelan obliged. “You know Georgia Watson?”

“Out there. Georgia’s in Belles.” The boy lofted his chin toward the field that joined the parking lot.

“What about Ricky Toups?”

The kid tugged down the hat, blew out smoke. “Kinda old to be into weed, ain’t ya?”

“That why people come looking for Ricky?”

Marlboro-Man-in-training doused the homemade, stashed it behind his ear. Slid off the trunk and booked.

Phelan turned toward the field, where the band played a lazy version of “Grazing in the Grass.” The Buffalo Belles were high-kicking, locked shoulder to shoulder. Line of smiling faces, white, black, and café au lait, bouncing hair and breasts, 120 teenage legs, kicked up high. Fondly remembering a pair of those white boots hooked over his shoulders postgame, he strolled toward the rousing sight.

After their routine, the girls milled sideline while the band marched patterns. Phelan asked for Georgia and found her, said he wanted to talk.

This is who Ricky Toups thought hung the moon? Georgia Watson had an overloaded bra, all right, and cutoffs so short the hems of white pockets poked out like underwear. But she was a dish-faced girl with frizzled hair and cagey brown eyes. Braided gold chain tucked into the neck of a white T-shirt washed thin.

She steered him away from the knots of babbling girls. Her smile threw a murky light into the brown eyes. Black smudges beneath them from her gobbed eyelashes.

He introduced himself with a business card. “Ricky Toups’s mother asked me to check up on him. He got any new friends you know about?”

She jettisoned the smile, shrugged.

“C’mon, Georgia. Ricky thinks you’re his friend.”

She made a production of whispering, “Ricky was helping this guy with something, but I think that’s all over.”

“Something.”

“Something,” she hissed. She angled toward some girls staring frankly at them and fluttered her fingers in a wave. Nobody waved back.

“This guy. Why’s Ricky not helping him anymore?”

Georgia shook her head, looking over Phelan’s shoulder like she was refusing somebody who wasn’t there. “Fun at first, then he turned scary. Ricky’s gonna quit hanging out with him, even though that means—” Her trap shut.

“Giving up the green,” Phelan finished. His little finger flicked out the braided chain around the girl’s neck. Fancy G in twenty-four carat. “How long y’all had this scary friend?”

The head shaking continued, like a tic now.

Phelan violated her personal space. “Name. And where the guy lives.”

The girl backed up. “I don’t know, some D name, Don or Darrell or something. Gotta go now.”

Phelan caught her arm. “Ricky didn’t come home last night.”

White showed around the brown eyes. She spit out a sentence, included her phone number when pressed, then jerked her arm away and ran back to the other girls on the sideline. They practiced dance steps in bunches, laughed, horsed around. Georgia stood apart biting her bottom lip, the little white square of his business card pinched in her fingers.

11:22. He drove back to the office, took the stairs two at a time. Delpha handed him Mrs. Lloyd Elliott’s details neatly typed on the back of a sheet of paper. Phelan read it and whistled. “Soon’s she brings that retainer, Lloyd better dig himself a foxhole.”

He flipped the sheet over. Delpha Wade’s discharge from Gatesville: April 7, 1973. Five-foot-six, 120 pounds. Hair brown, eyes blue. Thirty-four. Voluntary manslaughter.

“Only paper around,” she said.

Phelan laid a ten on the desk. “Get some. Then see what’s up in the Toups’s neighborhood, say, the last three months. Thought this was a kid pushing weed for pocket money, but could be dirtier water.” He told her what Georgia Watson had given him: the D name, Don or Darrell, and that Ricky brought other boys over to the guy’s house to party. “I’m guessing Georgia might’ve pitched in with that.”

Delpha met his eyes for a second. Then, without comment, she flipped through the phone book while he went to his office, got the .38 out of a drawer, and loaded it. Glanced out the window. New Rosemont’s ancient proprietress, the one the fan had gonged, rag in hand, smearing dirty circles on a window.

When he came out, Delpha had the phone book open to the city map section. “Got a cross directory?” she asked.

Phelan went back and got it from his office. “Run through the—”

“Newspaper’s police blotter.”

“Right. Down at the—”

“Library,” she said. She left, both books hugged to her chest.

Just another girl off to school.

The parole office nudged up to the courthouse. His buddy Joe Ford was in, but busy. Phelan helped himself to a couple donuts from an open box. Early lunch. Joe read from a manila file to two guys Phelan knew. One took notes on a little spiral pad. Phelan, toting the long legal pad, realized he should have one of those. Neater, slipped in a jacket pocket. More professional. Joe closed the folder and kept on talking. One guy gave a low whistle; the other laughed.

Joe stood up, did a double take. “Hey, speak of the devil. Tommy, come on down.”

Phelan shook hands with Fred Abels, detective. Stuck his hand out to the other, but the man bear-hugged him. “Hey, Uncle Louie,” Phelan said. Louie Reaud, a jowly olive-skinned man with silvered temples, married to Phelan’s aunt. Louie boomed, “Bougre, t’es fou ouais toi! T’as engage un prisonnier.” Which meant Phelan was crazy for hiring himself a convict.

Who said he’d hired anybody?

Abels, sporting a Burt Reynolds ’stache and burns, only not sexy, studied Phelan like he was a mud tire track lifted from a scene.

Phelan zeroed in on Joe, who raised his eyebrows, pulled down his lips, shook his head to indicate the purity permeating his soul.

“Okay.” Phelan set hands on his hips and broadened his stance. “All right. So my friend here appeals to my famous heart of gold. So I interview his girl. So she stuck some bad-doer. So what.”

“Minced that one, yeah. I worked that case.” Louie wagged a finger. “I’m gonna tell you, cher, lock up the letter opener.” He punched his nephew’s arm, nodded at Joe, and he and Abels ambled off, chortling.

“Loudmouth bastard,” Phelan said to Joe. “Give me the dopers and perverts north side of town.” Commandeering Joe’s chair, Phelan reeled off some street names.

“That’s confidential.”

“Could have my secretary call you.”

“Hand full a ‘Gimme’ and a mouth full a ‘Much obliged’—that’s you.” Joe squinted, put-upon. “Not my territory, but old Parker lives in the can.” Joe stalked over to his coworker Parker’s vacant desk, the one next to his, and rambled through its file drawers.

Phelan phoned Tyrrell Public Library. Formerly a church—thus the arches and stained glass—it was a downtown standout, a sand castle dripped from medieval gray stone. He asked the librarian to get a Miss Wade, who’d be in the reference section, going through newspapers.

“This is not the bus station, sir. We don’t page people.”

Seems like, Phelan thought while locating his desperately-polite-but-hurting voice, one bad crab always jumps in the gumbo.

“I’m just as sorry as I can be, ma’am. But couldn’t you find my sister? We’re down at the funeral home, and our daddy’s lost his mind.”

Clunk. Receiver on desk. Joe was still pulling files.

Footsteps, then Delpha came on. “Hey, Bubba,” she said.

Phelan grinned.

She told him she’d call him back from a pay phone. “Call Joe’s,” he said.

In three minutes Joe’s phone rang, and Delpha read out what she had so far. “Check this one from last night.” A Marvin Carter, eighteen, wandering down Delaware Street, apparent assault victim, transported to a hospital. Then, outside of husband-wife slugfests, thefts, one complaint of tap-dancing on the roof of a Dodge Duster, she’d found seven dope busts and two missing-boy reports. She gave him names and addresses, phone numbers from the cross directory.

Joe dumped files on his desk, said, “Vacate my chair, son.” Phelan ignored him, boring in on each mug shot as he scribbled names on his unprofessional legal pad.

One of the names was a Don Henry. Liberated from Huntsville two months back.

Some D name, Don or Darrell.

There you go. Cake.

No mud, no grease, no 500-pound pipe, no lost body parts. Man, he should have split the rigs while he still had ten fingers.

2:01. He drove back to the office and hit the phone. Got a child at the Henry number, asked for its mother.

“She went the store. Git away, Dwight, I’m on the phone.” A wail from the background.

“Honey, your daddy there?”

The child scolded Dwight. Dwight was supposed to shut up while the child had dibs on the telephone. But little Dwight wasn’t lying down; he was pitching a fit.

“Honey? Hey, kid!” Phelan hollered into the phone.

“Shut up, Dwight! I cain’t hear myself talk. They took Daddy back Satiddy.”

“Saturday? Back where, honey?”

“Where he was. Is this Uncle Merle?” The child yelped. Now two wails mingled on the other end of the line.

A woman’s harsh voice barked into the phone, “Low-down, Merle, pumping the kids. They pulled Don’s paper, okay? You happy now? Gonna say ‘I told you so’? You and Ma can kiss my ass.” The phone crashed down.

Saturday was six days ago. Frowning, Phelan X’d Don Henry. Next, mindful of the gray-haired volunteers in pink smocks on the end of the line, he called Baptist Hospital and inquired feelingly for his cousin Marvin Carter. Strike one. Next was Saint Elizabeth, long wait, transfer, and strike two. Finally Hotel Dieu and a single to first.

He parked in a doctor’s space in front of the redbrick hospital by the port. Eau de Pine-Sol and polished tile. A nun gave him the room number.

The face on the pillow was white-whiskered, toothless, and snoring. A pyramid of a woman in a red-flowered muumuu sat bedside. Phelan checked the room number. “Marvin Carter?”

The woman sighed. “My husband’s name is Mar-tin. Cain’t y’all get nothing right?”

Phelan loped back to the desk and stood in line behind a sturdy black woman and a teenage boy with a transistor radio broadcasting the day’s body count in a jungle on the other side of the globe. The boy’s face was lopsided, the wide bottom out of kilter with a narrow forehead. He nudged the dial and a song blared out. “Kung Fu Fighting.” The woman slapped shut a checkbook, snatched the transistor, and dialed back to the tinny announcer spewing numbers and Asian place names.

“Jus’ keep listenin’. ’Cause you keep runnin’ nights, thas where you gonna be, in that war don’t never end, you hear me, Marvin? What you lookin at?” She scowled at Phelan.

The boy turned so that Phelan verified the lopsidedness as swelling. He ventured, “Marvin Carter?”

The woman’s eyes slitted as she asked who he was. Phelan told her, emphasizing that he was not a policeman. He told her that he was looking for Ricky Toups, kept his eyes on the boy.

The boy flinched. Bingo.

“Les’ go.” The woman pushed the teenager toward the glass doors.

Phelan dogged them. “Did that to you, Marvin, what’s he gonna do to Ricky, huh? Want that on your slate? Could be a lot worse than the dope.”

The boy tried the deadeye on Phelan. Couldn’t hold it.

“We talking dope now?” The woman’s voice dropped below freezing. “You done lied to me, Marvin Carter.” Her slapping hand stopped short of the swollen jaw.

Marvin grunted something that was probably “Don’t, Mama,” enough so Phelan understood his jaw was wired.

“Ricky got you there promising dope,” Phelan said, “but that wasn’t all you got, was it?”

The boy squeezed his eyes shut.

“Wasn’t white kids did this to you? Was some grown man?” Marvin’s mother took hold of his skinny waist.

“Listen,” Phelan leaned in, “if he said he’d hurt your mama here, I’ll take care of that. It’s just a line. But Ricky’s real. You know him, and he’s wherever you were last night. Help me find him, Marvin.”

“Avy,” the boy said.

“Avie? The street near the LNVA canal?”

Shake from Marvin said no. And he mumbled again, “Avy.”

“Davy? That’s his name?”

A shudder ran through the teenager.

Phelan scanned his list of parolees. Didn’t have to be one of them, but he had a feeling. “Dave Deeterman? Concord Street?”

Shake from Marvin said yes. “Kakerd.” Marvin muttered directions, minus lots of consonants. The mother glared Phelan away, and Marvin bent down and shook against her neck.

Phelan dashed back to the hospital’s two pay phones, called Delpha, told her where he was heading, and if she didn’t hear from him within the hour, to call Louis Reaud down at the station. “That’s R-E—”

“Know how to spell it,” she said. “Guess your second client brought over your retainer. Somebody left a wrapped-up box at the door.”

“Hot damn. Why didn’t she hand it to you?”

“Don’t know. Just heard her on the stairs. Want me to unwrap the box?”

“No time. ’Less it’s ticking, just hold on to it.”

“Got time for one question, Mr. Phelan?”

“Shoot.”

Throat clearing. “You think you might hire me?”

“Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.” He hung up the silent phone and jogged for the doors.

3:15. The house with the orange mailbox, painfully described by Marvin, was a dingy white ranch. It was set deep in the lot, backed up to tall pines and oak and magnolia, pockets of brush. Rusty-brown pine needles and dried magnolia leaves, big brown tongues, littered the ground. With oil shot up to twelve dollars a barrel, somebody’d be out here soon, hammering up pasteboard apartments, but for now wildlife was renting this leftover patch of the Big Thicket.

No car, but ruts in the grass where one had parked.

Phelan knocked on the door. Waited. Tried the knob, no dice. He went around the back to a screen porch that looked to be an add-on. Or it had been a screen porch before plywood was nailed over its large windows. A two-by-four had been pounded across the door; the hammer lying there in the dirt suggested that Dave Deeterman might be recently away from his desk. Maybe. Phelan could hear something. He beat on the door. “Ricky. Ricky Toups, you in there?”

He put his ear to the door. Something. Phelan pounded again, louder. “I’m looking for Ricky Toups.”

A low creaking. Rhythmic. What was that sound? Like a rocking chair with serious rust.

He jogged back to his car, shoved a flashlight into his pocket, and snagged a pry bar. Ripped off the two-by-four. Opened the door. Directly across the porch was the door that led into the house. Phelan stepped over there, .38 drawn, and rattled it: locked. Already he was smelling piss in the hot, dead air. Then herb and cigarettes and some kind of dead-fish bayou stink. That creaky noise came from the far left, high up. He found a switch by the locked door and flipped it. Not a gleam.

He’d got the creaks figured now, and he shined the white circle up and left, to their source.

Christ Almighty.

Phelan’s jaw sagged. On the top of metal shelves was a naked gargoyle, perched there. No, clinging. Haunches with a smooth, sheened back folded over them, fingers clawed around the metal, head cut sharply toward Phelan. Blinking eyes protruded from sunken holes; the downturned mouth wheezed.

“Asthma, right?”

An indrawn, “Yeah.”

“Deeterman coming back?”

Ricky Toups’s head bobbed loosely, flapping sweat-dark hair that had been dishwater-blond in last year’s school photo.

“How long’s he been gone?”

“Hour or—” The kid flung out a hand, pointing.

Phelan zigzagged the light downward over matted orange shag littered with marijuana debris, the arm of a bamboo couch, beer cans. He pivoted. The shaft of light from the door revealed the round edge of a black pile that blended into the darkness. What? Shit? Most of him failed to make sense of what he saw. But not his skin—it was crawling off his belly, his nuts squeezing north of nutsack.

The pile of shit shifted until only a tip remained. Then the tip disappeared into blackness.

That it was heading toward him told Phelan enough. Most snakes light out for the hills; cottonmouths come at you.

Phelan strode to the shelves and hauled Ricky down, shined the light till it hit the bamboo couch, and dumped the boy on it. “Keep your feet off the floor.”

He scanned with the flashlight. Where the fuck was it?

Shag. Spilt ashtray. More shag.

Then the beam caught a section of sinuous black. He moved the light. There it was. Pouring toward him, triangular head outthrust.

Phelan fired.

The black snake convulsed but kept coming, tongue darting.

He fired again. Still the black form writhed in the orange grass. He blew its head off with the third round.

Phelan stepped wide of the quivering snake; wasn’t dead enough yet to keep the head from biting. Ears ringing, he tossed the flashlight, looped the boy’s arm around his neck, dragged him out of that room.

He saw the blue thumb-sized bruises on the boy’s shoulders, a streak of blood on the back of his thigh, as he draped him in his own jacket and a blanket from his trunk. “It’s the hospital, Ricky, ’less you got a full inhaler at home.”

“Home,” the kid panted, then turned the black tunnel of his eyes onto Phelan. “Book.”

“What book?”

But the kid folded, struggling for air.

Phelan laid on the horn when they gunned into the Toups’s driveway. In two seconds, Caroleen Toups busted out of the house, face lit up like stadium lights.

Phelan smoked in the Toups’s pine-paneled living room that opened onto a pine-paneled kitchen. Except for the mention of a book, he had hold of the thing: Deeterman slipped Ricky cash and dope, Ricky steered him boys. Too stupid to know the son of a bitch would turn on him. How many ran in a loop through Phelan’s brain. How many you bring him, Ricky?

After a while, wearing jeans and breathing, Ricky Toups stumbled out into the living room, trailed by his bewildered mother, her hands clasped at chest level. “There’s a book,” he said. “Told him I didn’t have it. He didn’t care, said he’d be back for me.”

“What kinda book?”

“Like a diary. You gotta help Georgia.” He hit his inhaler, and his jaw jittered sideways like his head was trying to screw off.

“She’s got the book. Her idea to take it?”

Ricky’s bluish chapped lips parted, like he was going to deny this point, but that was back when he had all the answers, before today. “She said we could get big money from him. That’s where he went. To her house.”

Phelan leapt up. “Call her.”

Ricky mumbled into a phone on the kitchen wall then hung his head listening. The receiver fell to his side. “It’s okay. He came to her house but she’d already took it to your office.”

Phelan’s stomach lurched.

Ricky slid down the wall, hunkered. Georgia’d told Deeterman he could go get the book where she’d left it, wrapped up outside this private eye’s office. The guy wouldn’t be there; he was out looking for Ricky. She’d talked fast, peeking through a latched screen door with Phelan’s card taped to the outside of it.

4:55. Phelan burned up I-10’s fast lane, swerving around truckers balling for New Orleans, cursing himself for wasting three rounds on a cottonmouth he could have outrun.

He took the stairs soft. Worked the doorknob soundlessly, hoping Deeterman was somewhere ahead of the truckers on I-10, not sitting in Delpha’s chair watching the knob turn. Phelan eased into the still office, .38 out.

Delpha Wade’s chair snugged to her desk. On top of it, the sheet with info on Client #2, typed on her release form. The door to his office stood ajar. Pressed against the jamb, Phelan pushed, swinging it open.

He stepped into a curtain of bourbon fume and quiet in the air, waves of it, wave on wave, quiet.

Until glass crunched under his shoe.

The client chair drifted around. Delpha said, “I put it away in your bottom drawer. Under the whiskey bottle.”

Phelan slid the gun on his desk next to a wad of brown paper, sank down to her.

Her right hand hung behind the chair arm but her left lay on a small, worn ledger in the middle of a shiny darkness on her skirt. Different-sized spots stained her white blouse, spray and spatter, one red channel.

“’Fore I could get that box for him, he pushed me out of the way and grabbed it. He coulda left. I thought he would. But he had to do one of those things they do. Those extras.” Her head lowered, shook once. “They just cain’t resist.”

He’d seen the legs on the floor by now, the rest of the body blocked from view by the big metal desk, and he needed to get Louie here, get an ambulance first, but he couldn’t pick up the phone, couldn’t get that motion going because he was listening to her, hearing it in the waves of quiet that rolled over him, quiet riding on waves of quiet, waves widening out from a center—the bayou, singing with insects and frogs, the surge-and-retreat, keening whir of it, the stir in muddy water, and her voice low as that chorus, he heard how she was still holding the bottle when the man licked the knife and cut her, and after he licked it again, she broke the bottle on the edge of the desk and shoved it up through his throat. Then she took the book and she sat down.

“You gonna find some boys.”

“Delpha,” Phelan whispered. The half of her face he could see wore a sheen of sweat. He laced his fingers through the brown hair, soothed it back.

Not a cloud in the gray-blue eyes that met his. The horizon inside them was clear.

A NICE PLACE TO VISIT by Jeffery Deaver

When you’re a natural-born grifter, an operator, a player, you get this sixth sense for sniffing out opportunities, and that’s what Ricky Kelleher was doing now, watching two guys in the front of the smoky bar, near a greasy window that still had a five-year-old bullet hole in it.

Whatever was going down, neither of them looked real happy.

Ricky kept watching. He’d seen one guy here in Hanny’s a couple of times. He was wearing a suit and tie—it really made him stand out in this dive, the sore thumb thing. The other one, leather jacket and tight jeans, razor-cut bridge-­and-tunnel hair, was some kind of Gambino wannabe, Ricky pegged him. Or Sopranos, more likely—yeah, he was the sort of prick who’d hock his wife for a big-screen TV. He was way pissed off, shaking his head at everything Mr. Suit was tell­ing him. At one point he slammed his fist on the bar so hard glasses bounced. But nobody noticed. That was the kind of place Hanny’s was.

Ricky was in the rear, at the short L of the bar, his regular throne. The bartender, a dusty old guy, maybe black, maybe white, you couldn’t tell, kept an uneasy eye on the guys argu­ing. “It’s cool,” Ricky reassured him. “I’m on it.”

Mr. Suit had a briefcase open. A bunch of papers were inside. Most of the business in this pungent, dark Hell’s Kitchen bar involved trading bags of chopped-up plants and cases of Johnny Walker that’d fallen off the truck; the trans­actions were conducted in either the men’s room or the alley out back. This was something different. Skinny, five-foot-four Ricky couldn’t tip to exactly what was going down, but that magic sense, his player’s eye, told him to pay attention.

“Well, fuck that,” Wannabe said to Mr. Suit.

“Sorry.” A shrug.

“Yeah, you said that before.” Wannabe slid off the stool. “But you don’t really sound that fucking sorry. And you know why? Because I’m the one out all the money.”

“Bullshit. I’m losing my whole fucking business.”

But Ricky’d learned that other people losing money doesn’t take the sting out of you losing money. Way of the world.

Wannabe was getting more and more agitated. “Listen careful here, my friend. I’ll make some phone calls. I got people I know down there. You don’t want to fuck with these guys.”

Mr. Suit tapped what looked like a newspaper article in the briefcase. “And what’re they gonna do?” His voice lowered and he whispered something that made Wannabe’s face screw up in disgust. “Now just go on home, keep your head down, and watch your back. And pray they can’t—” Again, the lowered voice. Ricky couldn’t hear what “they” might do.

Wannabe slammed his hand down on the bar again. “This isn’t gonna fly, asshole. Now—”

“Hey, gentlemen,” Ricky called. “Volume down, okay?”

“The fuck’re you, little man?” Wannabe snapped. Mr. Suit touched his arm to quiet him, but he pulled away and kept glaring.

Ricky slicked back his greasy, dark blond hair. Easing off the stool, he walked to the front of the bar, the heels of his boots tapping loudly on the scuffed floor. The guy had six inches and thirty pounds on him but Ricky had learned a long time ago that craziness scares people a fuck of a lot more than height or weight or muscle. And so he did what he always did when he was going one on one—threw a weird look into his eyes and got right up in the man’s face. He screamed, “Who I am is guy’s gonna drag your ass into the alley and fuck you over a dozen different ways, you don’t get the fuck out of here now!”

The punk reared back and blinked. He fired off an auto­matic “Fuck you, asshole!”

Ricky stayed right where he was, kind of grinning, kind of not, and let this poor bastard imagine what was going to happen now that he’d accidentally shot a little spit onto Ricky’s forehead.

A few seconds passed.

Finally, Wannabe drank down what was left of his beer with a shaking hand and, trying to hold on to a little dignity, he strolled out the door, laughing and muttering, “Prick.” Like it was Ricky backing down.

“Sorry about that,” Mr. Suit said, standing up, pulling out money for the drinks.

“No, you stay,” Ricky ordered.

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

The man hesitated and sat back down.

Ricky glanced into the briefcase, saw some pictures of nice-looking boats. “Just gotta keep things calm round here, you know. Keep the peace.”

Mr. Suit slowly closed the case, looked around at the faded beer promotion cut-outs, the stained sports posters, the cobwebs. “This your place?”

The bartender was out of earshot. Ricky said, “More or less.”

“Jersey.” Mr. Suit nodded at the door that Wannabe had just walked out of. Like that explained it all.

Ricky’s sister lived in Jersey and he wondered if maybe he should be pissed at the insult. He was a loyal guy. But then he decided loyalty didn’t have anything to do with states or cities and shit like that. “So. He lost some money?”

“Business deal went bad.”

“Uh-huh. How much?”

“I don’t know.”

“Buy him another beer,” Ricky called to the bartender, then turned back. “You’re in business with him and you don’t know how much money he lost?”

“What I don’t know,” the guy said, his dark eyes looking right into Ricky’s, “is why I should fucking tell you.”

This was the time when it could get ugly. There was a tough moment of silence. Then Ricky laughed. “No worries.”

The beers arrived.

“Ricky Kelleher.” He clinked glasses.

“Bob Gardino.”

“I seen you before. You live around here?”

“Florida mostly. I come up here for business some. Delaware too. Baltimore, Jersey shore, Maryland.”

“Yeah? I got a summer place I go to a lot.”

“Where?”

“Ocean City. Four bedrooms, on the water.” Ricky didn’t mention that it was T.G.’s, not his.

“Sweet.” The man nodded, impressed.

“It’s okay. I’m looking at some other places too.”

“Man can never have too much real estate. Better than the stock market.”

“I do okay on Wall Street,” Ricky said. “You gotta know what to look for. You just can’t buy some stock ’cause it’s, you know, sexy.” He’d heard this on some TV show.

“Truer words.” Now Gardino tapped his glass into Ricky’s.

“Those were some nice fucking boats.” A nod toward the briefcase. “That your line?”

“Among other things. Whatta you do, Ricky?”

“I got my hand in a lot of stuff. Lot of businesses. All over the neighborhood here. Well, and other places too. Maryland, like I was saying. Good money to be made. For a man with a sharp eye.”

“And you have a sharp eye?”

“I think I do. Wanta know what it’s seeing right now?”

“What, your eye?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it seeing?”

“A grifter.”

“A—?”

“A scam artist.”

“I know what a grifter is,” Gardino said. “I meant, why do you think that’s what I am?”

“Well, for instance, you don’t come into Hanny’s—”

“Hanny’s?”

“Here. Hanrahan’s.”

“Oh.”

“—to sell some loser asshole a boat. So what really hap­pened?”

Gardino chuckled but said nothing.

“Look,” Ricky whispered, “I’m cool. Ask anybody on the street.”

“There’s nothing to tell. A deal went south is all. Happens.”

“I’m not a cop, that’s what you’re thinking.” Ricky looked around, reached into his pocket, and flashed a bag of hash he’d been carrying around for T.G. “I was, you think I’d have this on me?”

“Naw, I don’t think you’re a cop. And you seem like an okay guy. But I don’t need to spill my guts to every okay guy I meet.”

“I hear that. Only… I’m just wondering there’s a chance we can do business together.”

Gardino drank some more beer. “Again, why?”

“Tell me how your con works.”

“It’s not a con. I was going to sell him a boat. It didn’t work out. End of story.”

“But… see, here’s what I’m thinking,” Ricky said in his best player’s voice. “I seen people pissed off ’cause they don’t get a car they wanted, or a house, or some pussy. But that asshole, he wasn’t pissed off about not getting a boat. He was pissed off about not getting his down payment back. So, how come he didn’t?”

Gardino shrugged.

Ricky tried again. “How’s about we play a game, you and me? I’ll ask you something and you tell me if I’m right or if I’m full of shit. How’s that?”

“Twenty questions.”

“Whatever. Okay, try this on: You borrow”—he held up his fingers and made quotation marks—“a boat, sell it to some poor asshole, but then on the way here it sinks.” Again the quotation marks. “And there’s nothing he can do about it. He loses his down payment. He’s fucked. Too bad, but who’s he going to complain to? It’s stolen merch.”

Gardino studied his beer. Son of a bitch still wasn’t giving away squat.

Ricky added, “Only there never was any boat. You never steal a fucking thing. You just show him pictures you took on the dock and a fake police report or something.”

The guy finally laughed. But nothing else.

“Your only risk is some asshole whaling on you when he loses the money. Not a bad grift.”

“I sell boats,” Gardino said. “That’s it.”

“Okay, you sell boats.” Ricky eyed him carefully. He’d try a different approach. “So that means you’re looking for buyers. How ’bout I find one for you?”

“You know somebody who’s interested in boats?”

“There’s a guy I know. He might be.”

Gardino thought for a minute. “This a friend of yours we’re talking?”

“I wouldn’ta brought him up, he was a friend.”

The sunlight came through some clouds over Eighth Avenue and hit Gardino’s beer. It cast a tint on the counter, the yellow of a sick man’s eye. Finally, he said to Ricky, “Pull your shirt up.”

“My—?”

“Your shirt. Pull it up and turn around.”

“You think I’m wired?”

“Or we just have our beers and bullshit about the Knicks and we go our separate ways. Up to you.”

Self-conscious of his skinny build, Ricky hesitated. But then he slipped off the stool, pulled up his leather jacket, and lifted his dirty T-shirt. He turned around.

“Okay. You do the same.”

Gardino laughed. Ricky thought he was laughing at him more than he was laughing at the situation but he held on to his temper.

The con man pulled up his jacket and shirt. The bar­tender glanced at them but he was looking like nothing was weird. This was, after all, Hanny’s.

The men sat down and Ricky called for more brews.

Gardino whispered, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m up to. But listen. You get some idea that you’re in the mood to snitch, I got two things to say: One, what I’m doing is not exactly legal, but it’s not like I’m clipping anybody or selling crack to kids, got it? So even if you go to the cops, the best they can get me for is some bullshit misrepresentation claim. They’ll laugh you out of the station.”

“No, man, seriously—”

Gardino held up a finger. “And number two, you dime me out, I’ve got associates in Florida’ll find you and make you bleed for days.” He grinned. “We copacetic?”

Whatever the fuck that meant. Ricky said, “No worries, mister. All I wanta do is make some money.”

“Okay, here’s how it works: Fuck down payments. The buyers pay everything right up front. A hundred, hundred fifty thousand.”

“No shit.”

“What I tell the buyer is my connections know where there’re these confiscated boats. This really happens. They’re towed off by the DEA for drugs or Coast Guard or State Police when the owner’s busted for sailing ’em while drunk. They go up for auction. But see, what happens is, in Florida, there’s so many boats that it takes time to log ’em all in. I tell the buy­ers my partners break into the pound at three in the morning and tow a boat away before there’s a record of it. We ship it to Delaware or Jersey, slap a new number on it, and bang, for a hundred thousand you get a half-million-dollar boat.

“Then, after I get the money, I break the bad news. Like I just did with our friend from Jersey.” He opened up his brief­case and pulled out a newspaper article. The headline was: Three Arrested in Coast Guard Impound Thefts.

The article was about a series of thefts of confiscated boats from a federal government impound dock. It went on to add that security had been stepped up and the FBI and Florida police were looking into who might’ve bought the half-dozen missing boats. They’d arrested the principals and recovered nearly a million dollars in cash from buyers on the East Coast.

Ricky looked over the article. “You, what? Printed it up yourself?”

“Word processor. Tore the edges to make it look like I ripped it out of the paper and then Xeroxed it.”

“So you keep ’em scared shitless some cop’s going to find their name or trace the money to them. Now, just go on home, keep your head down, and watch your back. Some of ’em make a stink for a day or two, but mostly they just disappear.” This warranted another clink of beer glasses. “Fucking brilliant.”

“Thanks.”

“So if I was to hook you up with a buyer? What’s in it for me?”

Gardino debated. “Twenty-five percent.”

“You give me fifty.” Ricky fixed him with the famous mad-guy Kelleher stare. Gardino held the gaze just fine. Which Ricky respected.

“I’ll give you twenty-five percent if the buyer pays a hun­dred Gs or less. Thirty, if it’s more than that.”

Ricky said, “Over one fifty, I want half.”

Gardino finally said, “Deal. You really know somebody can get his hands on that kind of money?”

Ricky finished his beer and, without paying, started for the door. “That’s what I’m going to go work on right now.”

Ricky walked into Mack’s bar.

It was pretty much like Hanrahan’s, four blocks away, but was busier, since it was closer to the convention center where hundreds of teamsters and union electricians and carpenters would take fifteen-minute breaks that lasted two hours. The neighborhood surrounding Mack’s was better too: redeveloped town houses and some new buildings, expensive as shit, and even a Starbucks. Way fucking different from the grim, hustling combat zone that Hell’s Kitchen had been until the ’70s.

T.G., a fat Irishman in his mid-thirties, was at the corner table with three, four buddies of his.

“It’s the Lime Rickey man!” T.G. shouted, not drunk, not sober—the way he usually seemed. Man used nicknames a lot, which he seemed to think was cute but always pissed off the person he was talking to, mostly because of the way he said it, not so much the names themselves. Like, Ricky didn’t even know what a Lime Rickey was, some drink or some­thing, but the sneery tone in T.G.’s voice was a putdown. Still, you had to have major balls to say anything back to the big, psycho Irishman.

“Hey,” Ricky offered, walking up to the corner table, which was like T.G.’s office.

“The fuck you been?” T.G. asked, dropping his cigarette on the floor and crushing it under his boot.

“Hanny’s.”

“Doing what, Lime Rickey man?” Stretching out the nickname.

“Polishing me knob,” Ricky responded in a phony brogue. A lot of times he said stuff like this, sort of putting himself down in front of T.G. and his crew. He didn’t want to, didn’t like it. It just happened. Always wondered why.

“You mean, polishing some altar boy’s knob,” T.G. roared. The more sober in the crew laughed.

Ricky got a Guinness. He really didn’t like it but T.G. had once said that Guinness and whiskey were the only things real men drank. And, since it was called stout, he figured it would make him fatter. All his life, trying to get bigger. Never succeeding.

Ricky sat down at the table, which was scarred with knife slashes and skid marks from cigarette burns. He nodded to T.G.’s crew, a half-dozen losers who sorta worked the trades, sorta worked the warehouses, sorta hung out. One was so drunk he couldn’t focus and kept trying to tell a joke, forget­ting it halfway through. Ricky hoped the guy wouldn’t puke before he made it to the john, like yesterday.

T.G. was rambling on, insulting some of the people at the table in his cheerful-mean way and threatening guys who weren’t there.

Ricky just sat at the table, eating peanuts and sucking down his licorice-flavored stout, and took the insults when they were aimed at him. Mostly he was thinking about Gardino and the boats.

T.G. rubbed his round, craggy face and his curly red-brown hair. He spat out, “And, fuck me, the nigger got away.”

Ricky was wondering which nigger. He thought he’d been paying attention, but sometimes T.G.’s train of thought took its own route and left you behind.

He could see T.G. was upset, though, and so Ricky mut­tered a sympathetic, “That asshole.”

“Man, I see him, I will take that cocksucker out so fast.” He clapped his palms together in a loud slap that made a couple of the crew blink. The drunk one stood up and stag­gered toward the men’s room. Looked like he was going to make it this time.

“He been around?” Ricky asked.

T.G. snapped, “His black ass’s up in Buffalo. I just told you that. The fuck you asking if he’s here?”

“No, I don’t mean here,” Ricky said fast. “I mean, you know, around.”

“Oh, yeah,” T.G. said, nodding, as if he caught some other meaning. “Sure. But that don’t help me any. I see him, he’s one dead nigger.”

“Buffalo,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “Christ.” He tried to listen more carefully, but he was still thinking about the boat scam. Yeah, that Gardino’d come up with a good one. And man, making a hundred thousand in a single grift—he and T.G.’d never come close to that before.

Ricky shook his head again. He sighed. “Got half a mind to go to Buffalo and take his black ass out myself.”

“You the man, Lime Rickey. You the fucking man.” And T.G. started rambling once again.

Nodding, staring at T.G.’s not-drunk, not-sober eyes, Ricky was wondering: How much would it take to get the fuck out of Hell’s Kitchen? Get away from the bitching ex-wives, the bratty kid, away from T.G. and all the asshole los­ers like him. Maybe go to Florida, where Gardino was from. Maybe that’d be the place for him. From the various scams he and T.G. put together, he’d saved up about thirty thou­sand in cash. Nothing shabby there. But man, if he conned just two or three guys in the boat deal, he could walk away with five times that.

Wouldn’t set him for good, but it’d be a start. Hell, Florida was full of rich old people, most of ’em stupid, just waiting to give their money to a player who had the right grift.

A fist colliding with his arm shattered the daydream. He bit the inside of his cheek and winced. He glared at T.G., who just laughed. “So, Lime Rickey, you going to Leon’s, ain’t you? On Saturday.”

“I don’t know.”

The door swung open and some out-of-towner wandered in. An older guy, in his fifties, dressed in beltless tan slacks, a white shirt, and a blue blazer, a cord around his neck holding a convention badge, AOFM, whatever that was.

Association of… Ricky squinted. Association of Obese Ferret Molesters.

He laughed at his own joke. Nobody noticed. Ricky eyed the tourist. This never used to happen, seeing geeks in a bar around here. But then the convention center went in a few blocks south and after that, Times Square got its balls cut off and turned into Disneyland. Suddenly Hell’s Kitchen was White Plains and Paramus, and the fucking yuppies and tourists took over.

The man blinked, eyes getting used to the dark. He ordered wine—T.G. snickered, wine in this place?—and drank down half right away. The guy had to’ve had money. He was wearing a Rolex and his clothes were designer shit. The man looked around slowly, and it reminded Ricky of the way people at the zoo look at the animals. He got pissed and enjoyed a brief fantasy of dragging the guy’s ass outside and pounding him till he gave up the watch and wallet.

But of course he wouldn’t. T.G. and Ricky weren’t that way; they steered clear of busting heads. Oh, a few times somebody got fucked up bad—they’d pounded a college kid when he’d taken a swing at T.G. during a scam, and Ricky’d slashed the face of some spic who’d skimmed a thousand bucks of their money. But the rule was, you didn’t make people bleed if you could avoid it. If a mark lost only money, a lot of times he’d keep quiet about it, rather than go public and look like a fucking idiot. But if he got hurt, more times than not he’d go to the cops.

“You with me, Lime Rickey?” T.G. snapped. “You’re off in your own fucking world.”

“Just thinking.”

“Ah, thinking. Good. He’s thinking. ’Bout your altar bitch?”

Ricky mimicked jerking off. Putting himself down again. Wondered why he did that. He glanced at the tourist. The man was whispering to the bartender, who caught Ricky’s eye and lifted his head. Ricky pushed back from T.G.’s table and walked to the bar, his boots making loud clonks on the wooden floor.

“Whassup?”

“This guy’s from out of town.”

The tourist looked at Ricky once, then down at the floor.

“No shit.” Ricky rolled his eyes at the bartender.

“Iowa,” the man said.

Where the fuck was Iowa? Ricky’d come close to finish­ing high school and had done okay in some subjects, but geography had bored him crazy and he never paid any atten­tion in class.

The bartender said, “He was telling me he’s in town for a conference at Javits.”

Him and the ferret molesters…

“And…” the bartender’s voice faded as he glanced at the tourist. “Well, why don’t you tell him?”

The man took another gulp of his wine. Ricky looked at his hand. Not only a Rolex, but a gold pinky ring with a big honking diamond in it.

“Yeah, why don’t you tell me?”

The tourist did—in a halting whisper.

Ricky listened to his words. When the old guy was through, Ricky smiled and said, “This is your lucky day, mister.”

Thinking: Mine too.

A half hour later, Ricky and the tourist from Iowa were standing in the grimy lobby of the Bradford Arms, next to a warehouse at Eleventh Avenue and 50th Street.

Ricky was making introductions. “This’s Darla.”

“Hello, Darla.”

A gold tooth shone like a star out of Darla’s big smile. “How you doing, honey? What’s yo’ name?”

“Uhm, Jack.”

Ricky sensed he’d nearly made up “John” instead, which would’ve been pretty funny, under the circumstances.

“Nice to meet you, Jack.” Darla, whose real name was Sha’quette Greeley, was six feet tall, beautiful, and built like a runway model. She’d also been a man until three years ago. The tourist from Iowa didn’t catch on to this, or maybe he did and it turned him on. Anyway, his gaze was lapping her body like a tongue.

Jack checked them in, paying for three hours in advance.

Three hours? thought Ricky. An old fart like this? God bless him.

“Y’all have fun now,” Ricky said, falling into a redneck accent. He’d decided that Iowa was probably somewhere in the south.

Detective Robert Schaeffer could’ve been the host on one of those FOX or A&E cop shows. He was tall, silver-haired, good-looking, maybe a bit long in the face. He’d been an NYPD detective for nearly twenty years.

Schaeffer and his partner were walking down a filthy hallway that stank of sweat and Lysol. The partner pointed to a door, whispering, “That’s it.” He pulled out what looked like an electronic stethoscope and placed the sensor over the scabby wood.

“Hear anything?” Schaeffer asked, also in a soft voice.

Joey Bernbaum, the partner, nodded slowly, holding up a finger. Meaning wait.

And then a nod. “Go.”

Schaeffer pulled a master key out of his pocket, and, drawing his gun, unlocked the door and pushed inside.

“Police! Nobody move!”

Bernbaum followed, his own automatic in hand.

The faces of the two people inside registered identical expressions of shock at the abrupt entry, though it was only in the face of the pudgy middle-aged white man, sitting shirt­less on the bed, that the shock turned instantly to horror and dismay. He had a Marine Corps tattoo on his fat upper arm and had probably been pretty tough in his day, but now his narrow, pale shoulders slumped and he looked like he was going to cry. “No, no, no…”

“Oh, fuck,” Darla said.

“Stay right where you are, sweetheart. Be quiet.”

“How the fuck you find me? That little prick downstairs at the desk, he dime me? I know it. I’ma pee on that boy next time I see him. I’ma—”

“You’re not going to do anything but shut up,” Bernbaum snapped. In a ghetto accent he added a sarcastic, “Yo, got that, girlfriend?”

“Man oh man.” Darla tried to wither him with a gaze. He just laughed and cuffed her.

Schaeffer put his gun away and said to the man, “Let me see some ID.”

“Oh, please, officer, look, I didn’t—”

“Some ID?” Schaeffer said. He was polite, like always. When you had a badge in your pocket and a big fucking pis­tol on your hip, you could afford to be civil.

The man dug his thick wallet out of his slacks and handed it to the officer, who read the license. “Mr. Shelby, this your current address? In Des Moines?”

In a quivering voice, he said, “Yessir.”

“All right, well, you’re under arrest for solicitation of prostitution.” He took his cuffs out of their holder.

“I didn’t do anything illegal, really. It was just… It was only a date.”

“Really? Then what’s this?” The detective picked up a stack of money sitting on the cockeyed nightstand. Four hundred bucks.

“I—I just thought…”

The old guy’s mind was working fast, that was obvious. Schaeffer wondered what excuse he’d come up with. He’d heard them all.

“Just to get some food and something to drink.”

That was a new one. Schaeffer tried not to laugh. You spend four hundred bucks on food and booze in this neigh­borhood, you could afford a block party big enough for fifty Darlas.

“He pay you to have sex?” Schaeffer asked Darla.

She grimaced.

“You lie, baby, you know what’ll happen to you. You’re honest with me, I’ll put in a word.”

“You a prick too,” she snapped. “All right, he pay me to do a round-the-world.”

“No…” Shelby protested for a moment but then he gave up and slumped even lower. “Oh, Christ, what’m I gonna do? This’ll kill my wife… and my kids…” He looked up with panicked eyes. “Will I have to go to jail?”

“That’s up to the prosecutor and the judge.”

“Why the hell’d I do this?” he moaned.

Schaeffer looked him over carefully. After a long moment he said, “Take her downstairs.”

Darla snapped, “Yo, you fat fuck, keep yo’ motherfuckin’ hands offa me.”

Bernbaum laughed again. “This mean you ain’t my girlfriend no more?” He gripped her by the arm and led her outside. The door swung shut.

“Look, detective, it’s not like I robbed anybody. It was harmless. You know, victimless.”

“It’s still a crime. And don’t you know about AIDS, hepatitis?”

Shelby looked down again. He nodded. “Yessir,” he whispered.

Still holding the cuffs, Schaeffer eyed the man care­fully. He sat down on a creaky chair. “How often you get to town?”

“To New York?”

“Yeah.”

“Once a year, if I’ve got a conference or meeting. I always enjoy it. You know what they say, ‘It’s a nice place to visit.’” His voice faded, maybe thinking that the rest of that old saw—“but you wouldn’t want to live there”—would insult the cop.

Schaeffer asked, “So, you got a conference now?” He pulled the badge out of the man’s pocket, read it.

“Yessir, it’s our annual trade show. At the Javits. Outdoor furniture manufacturers.”

“That’s your line?”

“I have a wholesale business in Iowa.”

“Yeah? Successful?”

“Number one in the state. Actually, in the whole region.” He said this sadly, not proudly, probably thinking of how many customers he’d lose when word got out about his arrest.

Schaeffer nodded slowly. Finally he put the handcuffs away.

Shelby’s eyes narrowed, watching this.

“You ever done anything like this before?”

A hesitation. He decided not to lie. “I have. Yessir.”

“But I get a feeling you’re not going to again.”

“Never. I promise you. I’ve learned my lesson.”

There was a long pause.

“Stand up.”

Shelby blinked, then did what he was told. He frowned as the cop patted down his trousers and jacket. With the guy not wearing a shirt, Schaeffer was ninety-nine percent sure the man was legit, but had to make absolutely certain there were no wires.

The detective nodded toward the chair and Shelby sat down. The businessman’s eyes revealed that he now had an inkling of what was happening.

“I have a proposition for you,” Schaeffer said.

“Proposition?”

The cop nodded. “Okay. I’m convinced you’re not going to do this again.”

“Never.”

“I could let you go with a warning. But the problem is, the situation got called in.”

“Called in?”

“A vice cop on the street happened to see you go into the hotel with Darla—we know all about her. He reported it and they sent me out. There’s paperwork on the incident.”

“My name?”

“No, just a John Doe at this point. But there is a report. I could make it go away but it’d take some work and it’d be a risk.”

Shelby sighed, nodding with a grimace, and opened the bidding.

It wasn’t much of an auction. Shelby kept throwing out numbers and Schaeffer kept lifting his thumb, more, more… Finally, when the shaken man hit $150,000, Schaeffer nod­ded.

“Christ.”

When T.G. and Ricky Kelleher had called to say that they’d found a tourist to scam, Ricky told him the mark could go six figures. That was so far out of those stupid micks’ league that Schaeffer had to laugh. But sure enough, he had to give the punk credit for picking out a mark with big bucks.

In a defeated voice Shelby asked, “Can I give you a check?”

Schaeffer laughed.

“Okay, okay… but I’ll need a few hours.”

“Tonight. Eight.” They arranged a place to meet. “I’ll keep your driver’s license. And the evidence.” He picked up the cash on the table. “You try to skip, I’ll put out an arrest warrant and send that to Des Moines too. They’ll extradite you and then it’ll be a serious felony. You’ll do real time.”

“Oh, no, sir. I’ll get the money. Every penny.” Shelby hurriedly dressed.

“Go out by the service door in back. I don’t know where the vice cop is.”

The tourist nodded and scurried out of the room.

In the lobby by the elevator the detective found Bernbaum and Darla sharing a smoke.

“Where my money?” the hooker demanded.

Schaeffer handed her two hundred of the confiscated cash. He and Bernbaum split the rest, a hundred fifty for Schaeffer, fifty for his partner.

“You gonna take the afternoon off, girlfriend?” Bernbaum asked Darla.

“Me? Hell no, I gots to work.” She glanced at the money Schaeffer’d given her. “Least till you assholes start paying me fo’ not fuckin’ same as I make fo’ fuckin’.”

Schaeffer pushed into Mack’s bar, an abrupt entrance that changed the course of at least half the conversations going on inside real fast. He was a crooked cop, sure, but he was still a cop, and the talk immediately shifted from deals, scams, and drugs to sports, women, and jobs. Schaeffer laughed and strode across the room. He dropped into an empty chair at the scarred table, muttered to T.G., “Get me a beer.” Schaeffer being about the only one in the universe who could get away with that.

When the brew came he tipped the glass to Ricky. “You caught us a good one. He agreed to a hundred fifty.”

“No shit,” T.G. said, cocking a red eyebrow. The split was Schaeffer got half and then Ricky and T.G. divided the rest equally. “Where’s he getting it from?”

“I dunno. His problem.”

Ricky squinted. “Wait. I want the watch too.”

“Watch?”

“The old guy. He had a Rolex. I want it.”

At home Schaeffer had a dozen Rolexes he’d taken off marks and suspects over the years. He didn’t need another one. “You want the watch, he’ll give up the watch. All he cares about is making sure his wife and his corn-pone cus­tomers don’t find out what he was up to.”

“What’s corn-pone?” Ricky asked.

“Hold on,” T.G. snarled. “Anybody gets the watch, it’s me.”

“No way. I saw it first. It was me who picked him—”

“My watch,” the fat Irishman interrupted. “Maybe he’s got a money clip or something you can have. But I get the fucking Rolex.”

“Nobody has money clips,” Ricky argued. “I don’t even want a fucking money clip.”

“Listen, little Lime Rickey,” T.G. muttered. “It’s mine. Read my lips.”

“Jesus, you two are like kids,” Schaeffer said, swilling the beer. “He’ll meet us across the street from Pier 46 at eight tonight.” The three men had done this same scam, or variations on it, for a couple of years now but still didn’t trust each other. The deal was they all went together to collect the payoff.

Schaeffer drained the beer. “See you boys then.”

After the detective was gone they watched the game for a few minutes, with T.G. bullying some guys to place bets, even though it was in the fourth quarter and there was no way Chicago could come back. Finally, Ricky said, “I’m going out for a while.”

“What, now I’m your fucking babysitter? You want to go, go.” Though he still made it sound like Ricky was a complete idiot for missing the end of a game that only had eight minutes to run.

Just as Ricky got to the door, T.G. called in a loud voice, “Hey, Lime Rickey, my Rolex? Is it gold?”

Just to be a prick.

Bob Schaeffer had walked a beat in his youth. He’d inves­tigated a hundred felonies, he’d run a thousand scams in Manhattan and Brooklyn. All of which meant that he’d learned how to stay alive on the streets.

Now, he sensed a threat.

He was on his way to score some coke from a kid who operated out of a newsstand at Ninth and 55th, and he real­ized he’d been hearing the same footsteps for the past five or six minutes. A weird scraping. Somebody was tailing him. He paused to light a cigarette in a doorway and checked out the reflection in a storefront window. Sure enough, he saw a man in a cheap gray suit, wearing gloves, about thirty feet behind him. The guy paused for a moment and pretended to look into a store window.

Schaeffer didn’t recognize the guy. He’d made a lot of enemies over the years. The fact he was a cop gave him some protection—it’s risky to gun down even a crooked one—but there were plenty of nutjobs out there.

Walking on. The owner of the scraping shoes continued his tail. A glance in the rearview mirror of a car parked nearby told him the man was getting closer, but his hands were at his side, not going for a weapon. Schaeffer pulled out his cell phone and pretended to make a call, to give himself an excuse to slow up and not make the guy suspicious. His other hand slipped inside his jacket and touched the grip of his chrome-plated Sig Sauer 9mm automatic pistol.

This time the guy didn’t slow up.

Schaeffer started to draw.

Then: “Detective, could you hang up the phone, please?”

Schaeffer turned, blinked. The pursuer was holding up a gold NYPD shield.

The fuck is this? Schaeffer thought. He relaxed, but not much. Snapped the phone closed and dropped it into his pocket. Let go of his weapon.

“Who’re you?”

The man, eyeing Schaeffer coldly, let him get a look at the ID card next to the shield.

Schaeffer thought: Fuck me. The guy was from the depart­ment’s Internal Affairs Division—the boys that tracked down corrupt cops.

Still Schaeffer kept on the offensive. “What’re you doing following me?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What’s this all about?”

“An investigation we’re conducting.”

“Hello,” Schaeffer said sarcastically. “I sort of figured that out. Give me some fucking details.”

“We’re looking into your connection with certain indi­viduals.”

“‘Certain individuals.’ You know, not all cops have to talk like cops.”

No response.

Schaeffer shrugged. “I have ‘connections’ with a lotta people. Maybe you’re thinking of my snitches. I hang with ’em. They feed me good information.”

“Yeah, well, we’re thinking there might be other things they feed you. Some valuable things.” He glanced at Schaeffer’s hip. “I’m going to ask you for your weapon.”

“Fuck that.”

“I’m trying to keep it low-key. But you don’t cooperate, I’ll call it in and we’ll take you downtown. Then everything’ll all be public.”

Finally Schaeffer understood. It was a shakedown—only this time he was on the receiving end. And he was getting scammed by Internal Affairs, no less. This was almost fucking funny, IAD on the take too.

Schaeffer gave up his gun.

“Let’s go talk in private.”

How much was this going to cost him? he wondered.

The IAD cop nodded toward the Hudson River. “That way.”

“Talk to me,” Schaeffer said. “I got a right to know what this’s all about. If somebody told you I’m on the take, that’s bullshit. Whoever said it’s working some angle.” He wasn’t as hot as he sounded; this was all part of the negotiating.

The IAD cop said only, “Keep walking. Up there.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Offered one to Schaeffer. He took it and the guy lit it for him.

Then Schaeffer froze. He blinked in shock, staring at the matches. The name on them was McDougall’s Tavern. The official name of Mack’s—T.G.’s hangout. He glanced at the guy’s eyes, which went wide at his mistake. Christ, he was no cop. The ID and badge were fake. He was a hit man, work­ing for T.G., who was going to clip him and collect the whole hundred fifty Gs from the tourist.

“Fuck,” the phony cop muttered. He yanked a revolver out of his pocket, then shoved Schaeffer into a nearby alley.

“Listen, buddy,” Schaeffer whispered, “I’ve got some good bucks. Whatever you’re being paid, I’ll—”

“Shut up.” In his gloved hands, the guy exchanged his gun for Schaeffer’s own pistol and pushed the big chrome piece into the detective’s neck. Then the fake cop pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and stuffed it into the detective’s jacket. He leaned forward and whispered, “Here’s the message, asshole: For two years T.G.’s been setting up everything, doing all the work, and you take half the money. You’ve fucked with the wrong man.”

“That’s bullshit,” Schaeffer cried desperately. “He needs me! He couldn’t do it without a cop! Please—”

“So long—” He lifted the gun to Schaeffer’s temple.

“Don’t do it! Please, man, no!”

A scream sounded from the mouth of the alley. “Oh my god!” A middle-aged woman stood twenty feet away, staring at the man with the pistol. Her hands were to her mouth. “Somebody call the police!”

The hit man’s attention was on the woman. Schaeffer shoved him into a brick wall. Before he could recover and shoot, the detective sprinted fast down the alley.

He heard the man shout, “Goddamn it!” and start after him. But Hell’s Kitchen was Bob Schaeffer’s hunting ground, and in five minutes the detective had raced through dozens of alleys and side streets and lost the killer.

Once again on the street, he paused and pulled his backup gun out of his ankle holster, slipped it into his pocket. He felt the crinkle of paper—what the guy had planted on him. It was a fake suicide note, Schaeffer confessing that he’d been on the take for years and he couldn’t handle the guilt anymore. He had to end it all.

Well, he thought, that was partly right.

One thing was fucking well about to end.

Smoking, staying in the shadows of an alley, Schaeffer had to wait outside Mack’s for fifteen minutes before T.G. Reilly emerged. The big man, moving like a lumbering bear, was by himself. He looked around, not seeing the cop, and turned west.

Schaeffer gave him half a block and then followed.

He kept his distance, but when the street was deserted he pulled on gloves and fished into his pocket for the pistol he’d just gotten from his desk. He’d bought it on the street years ago—a cold gun, one with no registration number stamped on the frame. Gripping the weapon, he moved up fast behind the big Irishman.

The mistake a lot of shooters make during a clip is they feel they’ve gotta talk to their vic. Schaeffer remembered some old Western where this kid tracks down the gunslinger who killed his father. The kid’s holding a gun on him and explaining why he’s about to die, you killed my father, yadda, yadda, yadda, and the gunslinger gets this bored look on his face, pulls out a hidden gun, and blows the kid away. He looks down at the body and says, “You gonna talk, talk. You gonna shoot, shoot.”

Which is just what Robert Schaeffer did now.

T.G. must’ve heard something. He started to turn. But before he even caught sight of the detective, Schaeffer parked two rounds in the back of the fat man’s head. He dropped like a bag of sand. The cop tossed the gun on the sidewalk—he’d never touched it with his bare hands—and, keeping his head down, walked right past T.G.’s body, hit Tenth Avenue, and turned north.

You gonna shoot, shoot.

Amen…

It took only one glance.

Looking into Ricky Kelleher’s eyes, Schaeffer decided he wasn’t in on the attempted hit.

The small goofy guy, with dirty hair and a cocky face, strode up to the spot where Schaeffer was leaning against a wall, hand inside his coat, near his new automatic. But the loser didn’t blink, didn’t show the least surprise that the cop was still alive. The detective had interviewed suspects for years and he now concluded that the asshole knew nothing about T.G.’s plan.

Ricky nodded, “Hey.” Looking around, asked, “So where’s T.G.? He said he’d be here early.”

Frowning, Schaeffer asked, “Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Damn, you didn’t. Somebody clipped him.”

“T.G.?”

“Yep.”

Ricky just stared and shook his head. “No fucking way. I didn’t hear shit about it.”

“Just happened.”

“Christ almighty,” the little man whispered. “Who did it?”

“Nobody knows yet.”

“Maybe that nigger.”

“Who?”

“Nigger from Buffalo. Or Albany. I don’t know.” Ricky then whispered, “Dead. I can’t believe it. Anybody else in the crew?”

“Just him, I think.”

Schaeffer studied the scrawny guy. Well, yeah, he did look like he couldn’t believe it. But, truth was, he didn’t look upset. Which made sense. T.G. was hardly Ricky’s buddy; he was a drunk loser bully.

Besides, in Hell’s Kitchen the living tended to forget about the dead before their bodies were cold.

Like he was proving this point, Ricky said, “So how’s this going to affect our, you know, arrangement?”

“Not at all, far as I’m concerned.”

“I’m going to want more.”

“I can go a third.”

“Fuck a third. I want half.”

“No can do. It’s riskier for me now.”

“Riskier? Why?”

“There’ll be an investigation. Somebody might turn up something at T.G.’s with my name on it. I’ll have to grease more palms.” Schaeffer shrugged. “Or you can find yourself another cop to work with.”

As if the Yellow Pages had a section, Cops, Corrupt.

The detective added, “Give it a few months. After things calm down, I can go up a few more points then.”

“To forty?”

“Yeah, to forty.”

The little man asked, “Can I have the Rolex?”

“The guy’s? Tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“You really want it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, it’s yours.”

Ricky looked out over the river. It seemed to Schaeffer that a faint smile crossed his face.

They stood in silence for a few minutes and, right on time, the tourist, Shelby, showed up. He was looking terrified and hurt and angry, which is a fucking tricky combination to get onto your face all at one time.

“I’ve got it,” he whispered. There was nothing in his hands—no briefcase or bag—but Schaeffer had been taking kickbacks and bribes for so long that he knew a lot of money can fit into a very small envelope.

Which is just what Shelby now produced. The grim-faced tourist slipped it to Schaeffer, who counted the bills carefully.

“The watch too.” Ricky pointed eagerly to the man’s wrist.

“My watch?” Shelby hesitated and, grimacing, handed it to the skinny man.

Schaeffer gave the tourist his driver’s license back. He pocketed it fast and then hurried east, undoubtedly looking for a taxi that’d take him straight to the airport.

The detective laughed to himself. So, maybe New York ain’t such a nice place to visit, after all.

The men split the money. Ricky slipped the Rolex on his wrist but the metal band was too big and it dangled comically. “I’ll get it adjusted,” he said, putting the watch into his pocket. “They can shorten the bands, you know. It’s no big deal.”

They decided to have a drink to celebrate and Ricky sug­gested Hanny’s since he had to meet somebody over there.

As they walked along the avenue, blue-gray in the eve­ning light, Ricky glanced at the placid Hudson River. “Check it out.”

A large yacht eased south in the dark water.

“Sweet,” Schaeffer said, admiring the beautiful lines of the vessel.

Ricky asked, “How come you didn’t want in?”

“In?”

“The boat deal.”

“Huh?”

“That T.G. told you about. He said you were going to pass.”

“What the fuck’re you talking about?”

“The boat thing. With that guy from Florida.”

“He never said anything to me about it.”

“That prick.” Ricky shook his head. “Was a few days ago. This guy hangs at Hanny’s? He’s who I’m gonna meet. He’s got connections down in Florida. His crew perps these confis­cated boats before they get logged in at the impound dock.”

“DEA?”

“Yeah. And Coast Guard.”

Schaeffer nodded, impressed at the plan. “They disap­pear before they’re logged. That’s some smart shit.”

“I’m thinking about getting one. He tells me I pay him, like, twenty Gs and I end up with a boat worth three times that. I thought you’d be interested.”

“Yeah, I’d be interested.” Bob Schaeffer had a couple of small boats. Had always wanted a really nice one. He asked, “He got anything bigger?”

“Think he just sold a fifty-footer. I seen it down in Battery Park. It was sweet.”

“Fifty feet? That’s a million-dollar boat.”

“He said it only cost his guy two hundred or something like that.”

“Jesus. That asshole, T.G. He never said a word to me.” Schaeffer at least felt some consolation that the punk wouldn’t be saying anything to anyone from now on.

They walked into Hanrahan’s. Like usual, the place was nearly deserted. Ricky was looking around. The boat guy apparently wasn’t here yet.

They ordered boilermakers. Clinked glasses, drank.

Ricky was telling the old bartender about T.G. getting killed, when Schaeffer’s cell phone rang.

“Schaeffer here.”

“This’s Malone from Homicide. You heard about the T.G. Reilly hit?”

“Yeah. What’s up with it? Any leads?” Heart pounding fast, Schaeffer lowered his head and listened real carefully.

“Not many. But we heard something and we’re hoping you can help us out. You know the neighborhood, right?”

“Pretty good.”

“Looks like one of T.G.’s boys was running a scam. Involved some tall paper. Six figures. We don’t know if it had anything to do with the clip, but we want to talk to him. Name of Ricky Kelleher. You know him?”

Schaeffer glanced at Ricky, five feet away. He said into the phone, “Not sure. What’s the scam?”

“This Kelleher was working with somebody from Florida. They came up with a pretty slick plan. They sell some loser a confiscated boat, only what happens is, there is no boat. It’s all a setup. Then when it’s time to deliver, they tell the poor asshole that the feds just raided ’em. He better forget about his money, shut up, and go to ground.”

That little fucking prick… Schaeffer’s hand began shak­ing with anger as he stared at Ricky. He told the Homicide cop, “Haven’t seen him for a while. But I’ll ask around.”

“Thanks.”

He disconnected and walked up to Ricky, who was work­ing on his second beer.

“You know when that guy’s going to get here?” Schaeffer asked casually. “The boat guy?”

“Should be anytime,” the punk said.

Schaeffer nodded, drank some of his own beer. Then he lowered his head, whispered, “That call I just got? Don’t know if you’re interested but it was my supplier. He just got a shipment from Mexico. He’s gonna meet me in the alley in a few minutes. It’s some really fine shit. He’ll give it to us for cost. You interested?”

“Fuck yes,” the little man said.

The men pushed out the back door into the alley. Letting Ricky precede him, Schaeffer reminded himself that after he’d strangled the punk to death, he’d have to be sure to take the rest of the bribe money out of his pocket.

Oh, and the watch too. The detective decided that you really couldn’t have too many Rolexes after all.

Detective Robert Schaeffer was enjoying a grande mocha outside the Starbucks on Ninth Avenue. He was sitting in a metal chair, none too comfortable, and he wondered if it was the type that outdoor furniture king Shelby distributed to his fellow hicks.

“Hey there,” a man’s voice said to him.

Schaeffer glanced over at a guy sitting down at the table next to him. He was vaguely familiar and even though the cop didn’t exactly recognize him, he smiled a greeting.

Then the realization hit him like ice water and he gasped. It was the fake Internal Affairs detective, the guy T.G. had hired to clip him.

Christ!

The man’s right hand was inside a paper bag, where there’d be a pistol, of course.

Schaeffer froze.

“Relax,” the guy said, laughing at the cop’s expression. “Everything’s cool.” He extracted his hand from the bag. No gun. He was holding a raisin scone. He took a bite. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Then who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t need my name. I’m a private eye. That’ll do. Now listen, we’ve got a business proposition for you.” The PI looked up and waved. To Schaeffer he said, “I want to introduce you to some folks.”

A middle-aged couple, also carrying coffee, walked out­side. In shock, Schaeffer realized that the man was Shelby, the tourist they’d scammed a few days ago. The woman with him seemed familiar too. But he couldn’t place her.

“Detective,” the man said with a cold smile.

The woman’s gaze was chill too, but no smile was involved.

“Whatta you want?” the cop snapped to the private eye.

“I’ll let them explain that.” He took a large bite of scone.

Shelby’s eyes locked onto Schaeffer’s face with a ballsy confidence that was a lot different from the timid, defeated look he’d had in the cheap hotel, sitting next to Darla, the used-to-be-a-guy hooker. “Detective, here’s the deal: A few months ago my son was on vacation here with some friends from college. He was dancing in a club near Broadway and your associates T.G. Reilly and Ricky Kelleher slipped some drugs into his pocket. Then you came in and busted him for possession. Just like with me, you set him up and told him you’d let him go if he paid you off. Only Michael decided you weren’t going to get away with it. He took a swing at you and was going to call 911. But you and T.G. Reilly dragged him into the alley and beat him so badly he’s got permanent brain damage and is going to be in therapy for years.”

Schaeffer remembered the college kid, yeah. It’d been a bad beating. But he said, “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Shhhhh,” the private eye said. “The Shelbys hired me to find out what happened to their son. I’ve spent two months in Hell’s Kitchen, learning everything there is to know about you and those two pricks you worked with.” A nod toward the tourist. “Back to you.” The PI ate some more scone.

The husband said, “We decided you were going to pay for what you did. Only we couldn’t go to the police—who knew how many of them were working with you? So my wife and I and our other son—Michael’s brother—came up with an idea. We decided to let you assholes do the work for us; you were going to double-cross each other.”

“This is bullshit. You—”

The woman snapped, “Shut up and listen.” She explained: They set up a sting in Hanny’s bar. The private eye pretended to be a scam artist from Florida selling stolen boats and their older son played a young guy from Jersey who’d been duped out of his money. This got Ricky’s attention, and he talked his way into the phony boat scam. Staring at Schaeffer, she said, “We knew you liked boats, so it made sense that Ricky’d try to set you up.”

The husband added, “Only we needed some serious cash on the table, a bunch of it—to give you losers some real incentive to betray each other.”

So he went to T.G.’s hangout and asked about a hooker, figuring that the three of them would set up an extortion scam.

He chuckled. “I kept hoping you’d keep raising the bidding when you were blackmailing me. I wanted at least six figures in the pot.”

T.G. was their first target. That afternoon the private eye pretended to be a hit man hired by T.G. to kill Schaeffer so he’d get all the money.

“You!” the detective whispered, staring at the wife. “You’re the woman who screamed.”

Shelby said, “We needed to give you the chance to escape—so you’d go straight to T.G.’s place and take care of him.”

Oh lord. The hit, the fake Internal Affairs cop… It was all a setup!

“Then Ricky took you to Hanrahan’s, where he was going to introduce you to the boat dealer from Florida.”

The private eye wiped his mouth and leaned froward. “Hello,” he said in a deeper voice. “This’s Malone from Homicide.”

“Oh fuck,” Schaeffer spat out. “You let me know that Ricky’d set me up. So…” His voice faded.

The PI whispered, “You’d take care of him too.”

The cold smile on his face again, Shelby said, “Two perps down. Now we just have the last one. You.”

“What’re you going to do?” the cop whispered.

The wife said, “Our son’s got to have years of therapy. He’ll never recover completely.”

Schaeffer shook his head. “You’ve got evidence, right?”

“Oh, you bet. Our older son was outside of Mack’s wait­ing for you when you went there to get T.G. We’ve got real nice footage of you shooting him. Two in the head. Real nasty.”

“And the sequel,” the private eye said. “In the alley behind Hanrahan’s. Where you strangled Ricky.” He added, “Oh, and we’ve got the license number of the truck that came to get Ricky’s body in the dumpster. We followed it to Jersey. We can implicate a bunch of very unpleasant people, who aren’t going to be happy they’ve been fingered because of you.”

“And, in case you haven’t guessed,” Shelby said, “we made three copies of the tape and they’re sitting in three dif­ferent lawyers’ office safes. Anything happens to any one of us, and off they go to Police Plaza.”

“You’re as good as murderers yourself,” Schaeffer mut­tered. “You used me to kill two people.”

Shelby laughed. “Semper Fi… I’m a former Marine and I’ve been in two wars. Killing vermin like you doesn’t bother me one bit.”

“All right,” the cop said in a disgusted grumble, “what do you want?”

“You’ve got the vacation house on Fire Island, you’ve got two boats moored in Oyster Bay, you’ve got—”

“I don’t need a fucking inventory. I need a number.”

“Basically your entire net worth. Eight hundred sixty thousand dollars. Plus my hundred fifty back… And I want it in the next week. Oh, and you pay his bill too.” Shelby nodded toward the private eye.

“I’m good,” the man said. “But very expensive.” He fin­ished the scone and brushed the crumbs onto the sidewalk.

Shelby leaned forward. “One more thing: my watch.”

Schaeffer stripped off the Rolex and tossed it to Shelby.

The couple rose. “So long, detective,” the tourist said.

“Love to stay and talk,” Mrs. Shelby added, “but we’re going to see some sights. And then we’re going for a carriage ride in Central Park before dinner.” She paused and looked down at the cop. “I just love it here. It’s true what they say, you know. New York really is a nice place to visit.”