A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR

Copyright © 1994 by Dennis Lehane
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lehane, Dennis. A drink before the war/Dennis Lehane. p. cm. ISBN 0-15-100093-x ISBN 0-15-602902-2 (pbk.) LTitle. PS3562.E426D75 1994 8i3’.54 dc20 94-12274

    

This novel is dedicated to my parents,

Michael and Ann Lehane,

and to Lawrence Corcoran, S.J.

Acknowledgments

    

    During the writing of this novel, the following people provided advice, criticism, encouragement, and enthusiasm for which I’ll always be more grateful than they could possibly know:

    

    John Dempsey, Mal Ellenburg, Ruth Greenstein, Tupi Konstan, Gerard Lehane, Chris Mullen, Courtnay Pelech, Ann Riley, Ann Rittenberg, Claire Wachtel, and Sterling Watson.

Author’s Note

    

    Most of the action in the novel takes place in Boston, but certain liberties have been taken in portraying the city itself and its institutions. This is wholly intentional. The world presented here is a fictitious one, as are its characters and events. Any resemblance to actual incidents, or to actual persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES INVOLVE FIRE.

I watched Watts, Detroit, and Atlanta burn on the evening news, I saw oceans of mangroves and palm fronds smolder in napalm as Cronkite spoke of unilateral disarmament and a war that had lost its reason.

My father, a fireman, often woke me at night so I could watch the latest news footage of fires he’d fought. I could smell the smoke and soot on him, the clogging odors of gasoline and grease, and they were pleasant smells to me as I sat on his lap in the old armchair. He’d point himself out as he ran past the camera, a hazy shadow backlit by raging reds and shimmering yellows.

As I grew, so did the fires, it seemed, until recently L.A. burned, and the child in me wondered what would happen to the fallout, if the ashes and smoke would drift northeast, settle here in Boston, contaminate the air.

Last summer, it seemed to. Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.

People died last summer. Most of them innocent. Some more guilty than others.

And people killed last summer. None of them innocent. I know. I was one of them. I stared down the slim barrel of a gun, looked into eyes rabid with fear and hatred, and saw my reflection. Pulled the trigger to make it go away.

I heard the echoes of my gunshots, smelled the cordite, and in the smoke, I still saw my reflection and knew I always would.

ONE

    

    The bar at the Ritz-Carlton looks out on the Public Garden and requires a tie. I’ve looked out on the Public Garden from other vantage points before, without a tie, and never felt at a loss, but maybe the Ritz knows something I don’t.

    My usual taste in clothes runs to jeans and diver’s shirts, but this was a job, so it was their time, not mine. Besides, I’d been a little behind on the laundry recently, and my jeans probably would’ve hopped the subway and met me there before I got a chance to put them on. I picked a dark blue, double-breasted Armani from my closet one of several I received from a client in lieu of cash found the appropriate shoes, tie, and shirt, and before you could say, “GQ,” I was looking good enough to eat.

    I appraised myself in the smoked-glass bar window as I crossed Arlington Street. There was a bounce to my step, a bright twinkle in my eyes, and nary a hair out of place. All was right with the world.

    A young doorman, with cheeks so smooth he must have skipped puberty altogether, opened the heavy brass door and said, “Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton, sir.” He meant it, too his voice trembling with pride that I’d chosen his quaint little hotel. He held his arm out in front of him with a flourish, showing me the way in case I hadn’t figured it out by myself, and before I could thank him, the door had closed behind me and he was hailing the best cab in the world for some other lucky soul.

    My shoes clacked with military crispness on the marble floor, and the sharp creases of my pants reflected in the brass ashtrays. I always expect to see George Reeves as Clark Kent in the lobby of the Ritz, maybe Bogey and Raymond Massey sharing a smoke. The Ritz is one of those hotels that is resilient in its staid opulence: the carpeting is deep, rich oriental; the reception and concierge desks are made of a lustrous oak; the foyer is a bustling way station of lounging power brokers toting futures in soft leather attaché cases, Brahmin duchesses in fur coats with impatient airs and daily manicure appointments, and a legion of navy blue-uniformed manservants pulling sturdy brass luggage carts across the thick carpeting with the softest whoosh accompaniment as the wheels find their purchase. No matter what is going on outside, you could stand in this lobby, look at the people, and think there was still a blitz going on in London.

    I sidestepped the bellman by the bar and opened the door myself. If he was amused he didn’t show it. If he was alive, he didn’t show it. I stood on the plush carpet as the heavy door closed softly behind me, and spotted them at a rear table, facing the Garden. Three men with enough political pull to filibuster us into the twenty-first century.

    The youngest, Jim Vurnan, stood and smiled when he saw me. Jim’s my local rep; that’s his job. He crossed the carpet in three long strides, his Jack Kennedy smile extended just behind his hand. I took the hand. “Hi, Jim.”

    “Patrick,” he said, as if he’d been standing on a tarmac all day waiting for my return from a POW camp. “Patrick,” he repeated, “glad you could make it.” He touched my shoulder, appraised me as if he hadn’t seen me just yesterday. “You look good.”

    “You asking for a date?”

    Jim got a hearty laugh out of that one, a lot heartier than it deserved. He led me to the table. “Patrick Kenzie, Senator Sterling Mulkern and Senator Brian Paulson.”

    Jim said “Senator” like some men say “Hugh Hefner” with uncomprehending awe.

    Sterling Mulkern was a florid, beefy man, the kind who carried weight like a weapon, not a liability. He had a shock of stiff white hair you could land a DC-10 on and a handshake that stopped just short of inducing paralysis. He’d been state senate majority leader since the end of the Civil War or so, and he had no plans for retirement. He said, “Pat, lad, nice to see you again.” He also had an affected Irish brogue that he’d somehow acquired growing up in South Boston.

    Brian Paulson was rake thin, with smooth hair the color of tin and a wet, fleshy handshake. He waited until Mulkern sat back down before he did, and I wondered if he’d asked permission before he sweated all over my palm too. His greeting was a nod and a blink, befitting someone who’d stepped out of the shadows only momentarily. They said he had a mind though, honed by years as Mulkern’s step-and-fetch-it.

    Mulkern raised his eyebrows slightly and looked at Paulson. Paulson raised his and looked at Jim. Jim raised his at me. I waited a heartbeat and raised mine at everyone. “Am I in the club?”

    Paulson looked confused. Jim smiled. Slightly. Mulkern said, “How should we start?”

    I looked behind me at the bar. “With a drink?”

    Mulkern let out a hearty laugh, and Jim and Paulson fell in line. Now I knew where Jim got it. At least they didn’t all slap their knees in unison.

    “Of course,” Mulkern said. “Of course.”

    He raised his hand, and an impossibly sweet young woman, whose gold name tag identified her as Rachel, appeared by my elbow. “Senator! What can I get you?”

    “You could get this young man a drink.” It came out somewhere between a bark and a laugh.

    Rachel’s smile only brightened. She swiveled slightly and looked down at me. “Of course. What would you like, sir?”

    “A beer. Do you have those here?”

    She laughed. The pols laughed. I pinched myself and remained serious. God, this was a happy place.

    “Yes, sir,” she announced. “We have Heineken, Beck’s, Molson, Sam Adams, St. Pauli Girl, Corona, Löwenbräu, Dos Equis ”

    I cut in before dusk fell. “Molson would be fine.”

    “Patrick,” Jim said, folding his hands and leaning toward me. Time to get serious. “We have a slight...”

    “Conundrum,” Mulkern said. “A slight conundrum on our hands. One we’d like cleared up discreetly and forgotten.”

    No one spoke for a few moments. I think we were all too impressed by the realization that we knew someone who used “conundrum” in casual conversation.

    I shook off my awe first. “What is this conundrum, exactly?”

    Mulkern leaned back in his chair, watching me. Rachel appeared and placed a frosted glass in front of me, poured two-thirds of the Molson into it. I could see Mulkern’s black eyes holding steady with my own. Rachel said, “Enjoy,” and left.

    Mulkern’s gaze never wavered. Probably took an explosion to make him blink. He said, “I knew your father well, lad. A finer man... well, I’ve never known one. A true hero.”

    “He always spoke fondly of you, Senator.”

    Mulkern nodded, that being a matter of course. “Shame, him going early like he did. Seemed fit as Jack LaLanne, but” he tapped his chest with his knuckles  “one never knows with the old ticker.”

    My father had lost a six-month battle with lung cancer, but if Mulkern wanted to think it was a coronary, who’d complain?

    “And now, here’s his boy,” Mulkern said. “Almost all grown.”

    “Almost,” I said. “Last month, I even shaved.”

    Jim looked like he’d swallowed a frog. Paulson squinted.

    Mulkern beamed. “All right, lad. All right. You have a point.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you, Pat, you get to be my age, and everything but yesterday seems young.”

    I nodded sagely, completely clueless.

    Mulkern stirred his drink, removed the stirrer, and placed it gently on a cocktail napkin. “We understand that when it comes to finding people, no one’s better.” He spread his hand, palm up, in my direction.

    I nodded.

    “Ah. No false modesty?”

    I shrugged. “It’s my job. Might as well be good at it.” I sipped the Molson, the bittersweet tang spreading across my tongue. Not for the first time, I wished I still smoked.

    “Well, lad, our problem is this: we have a rather important bill coming to floor next week. Our ammunition is heavy, but certain methods and services we employed to garner that ammunition could be... misconstrued.”

    “As?”

    Mulkern nodded and smiled as if I’d said, “Atta boy.” “Misconstrued,” he repeated.

    I decided to play along. “And there is documentation  records of these methods and services?”

    “He’s quick,” he said to Jim and Paulson. “Yes sir. Quick.” He looked at me. “Documentation,” he said, “exactly, Pat.”

    I wondered if I should tell him how much I hated being called Pat. Maybe I should start calling him Sterl, see if he minded. I sipped my beer. “Senator, I find people, not things.”

    “If I may interject,” Jim interjected, “the documents are with a person who has recently turned up missing. A ”

    “ Formerly trusted employee at the State House,” Mulkern said. Mulkern had the “iron hand in the velvet glove” routine down to an art. There was nothing in his manner, his enunciation, his bearing to suggest reproach, but Jim looked like he’d been caught kicking the cat. He took a long pull on his scotch, rattling the ice cubes against the rim. I doubted that he’d interject again.

    Mulkern looked at Paulson, and Paulson reached into his attaché case. He pulled a thin sheaf of papers out and handed them to me.

    The top page was a photograph, a rather grainy one. A blowup of a Statehouse personnel ID. It was of a black woman, middle-aged, worn eyes, a tired expression on her face. Her lips were parted slightly, and skewed, as if she were about to voice her impatience with the photographer. I flipped the page and saw a Xerox of her driver’s license centered on a white page. Her name was Jenna Angeline. She was forty-one, but looked fifty. She had a class three Massachusetts driver’s license, unrestricted. Her eyes were brown, her height five feet six inches. Her address was 412 Kenneth Street in Dorchester. Her social security number was 042-51-6543.

    I looked at the three pols and found my eyes pulled toward the middle, into Mulkern’s black stare. “And?” I said.

    “Jenna was the cleaning woman for my office. Brian’s too.” He shrugged. “As jigs go, I had no complaints.”

    Mulkern was the kind of guy who said, “jigs,” when he wasn’t sure enough of the company to say, “niggers.”

    “Until...,”I said.

    “Until she disappeared nine days ago.” “Unannounced vacation?”

    Mulkern looked at me as if I’d just suggested college basketball wasn’t fixed. “When she took this ‘vacation,’ Pat, she also took those documents with her.”

    “Some light reading for the beach?” I suggested.

    Paulson slapped the table in front of me. Hard. Paulson. “This is no joke, Kenzie. Understand?”

    I looked at his hand, sleepy eyed.

    Mulkern said, “Brian.”

    Paulson removed the hand to check the whip marks on his back.

    I stared at him, still sleepy eyed dead eyes, Angie calls them and spoke to Mulkern. “How do you know she took the... documents?”

    Paulson dropped his eyes from mine, considered his martini. It was still untouched, and he didn’t take a drink. Probably waiting for permission.

    Mulkern said, “We checked. Believe me. No one else is a logical suspect.”

    “Why is she?”

    “What?”

    “A logical suspect?”

    Mulkern smiled. A thin one. “Because she disappeared the same day the documents did. Who knows with these people?”

    “Mmm,” I said.

    “Will you find her for us, Pat?”

    I looked out the window. Perky the Doorman was hustling someone into a cab. In the Garden, a middle-aged couple with matching Cheers T-shirts snapped picture after picture of the George Washington statue. Sure to wow them back in Boise. A wino on the sidewalk supported himself with one hand on a bottle; the other he held out, steady as a rock, waiting for change. Beautiful women walked by. In droves.

    “I’m expensive,” I said.

    “I know that,” Mulkern said. “So why do you still live in the old neighborhood?” He said it like he wanted me to believe his heart still resided there too, as if it meant any more to him now than an alternative route when the expressway got backed up.

    I tried to think of a response. Something to do with roots, and knowing where you belong. In the end, I told the truth: “My apartment’s rent-controlled.”

    He seemed to like that.

TWO

    

    The old neighborhood is the Edward Everett Square section of Dorchester. It’s a little less than five miles from the center of Boston proper, which means, on a good day, it takes only half an hour to reach by car.

    My office is the bell tower of St. Bartholomew’s Church. I’ve never found out what happened to the bell that used to be there, and the nuns who teach at the parochial school next door won’t tell me. The older ones plain don’t answer me, and the younger ones seem to find my curiosity amusing. Sister Helen told me once it had been “miracled away.” Her words. Sister Joyce, who grew up with me, always says it was “misplaced,” and gives me the sort of wicked smile that nuns aren’t supposed to be capable of giving. I’m a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum.

    The day after I got my investigator’s license, the church pastor, Father Drummond, asked me if I’d mind providing some security for the place. Some unfaithfuls were breaking in to steal chalices and candlesticks again, and in Pastor Drummond’s words: “This shit better stop.” He offered me three meals a day in the rectory, my very first case, and the thanks of God if I set up in the belfry and waited for the next break-in. I told him I didn’t come that cheap. I demanded use of the belfry until I found office space of my own. For a priest, he gave in pretty easy. When I saw the state of the room unused for nine years I knew why.

    Angie and I managed to fit two desks in there. Two chairs too. When we realized there was no room for a file cabinet, I hauled all the old files back to my place. We splurged on a personal computer, put as much as we could on diskettes, and stowed a few current files in our desks. Impresses the clients almost enough to make them ignore the room. Almost.

    Angie was sitting behind her desk when I reached the top step. She was busy investigating the latest Ann Landers column, so I stepped in quietly. She didn’t notice me at first Ann must have been dealing with a real headcase so I took the opportunity to watch her in a rare moment of repose.

    She had her feet propped up on the desk, a pair of black suede Peter Pan boots covering them, the cuffs of her charcoal jeans tucked into the boots. I followed her long legs up to a loose white cotton T-shirt. The rest of her was hidden behind the newspaper except for a partial view of rich, thick hair, the color of rainswept tar, that fell to her olive arms. Behind that newsprint was a slim neck that trembled when she pretended not to be laughing at one of my jokes, an unyielding jaw with a near-microscopic brown beauty mark on the left side, an aristocratic nose that didn’t fit her personality at all, and eyes the color of melting caramel. Eyes you’d dive into without a look back.

    I didn’t get a chance to see them, though. She put the paper down and looked at me through a pair of black Wayfarers. I doubted she’d be taking them off any time soon.

    “Hey, Skid,” she said, reaching for a cigarette from the pack on her desk.

    Angie is the only person who calls me “Skid.” Probably because she’s the only person who was in my father’s car with me the night I wrapped it around a light pole in Lower Mills thirteen years ago.

    “Hey, gorgeous,” I said and slid into my chair. I don’t think I’m the only one who calls her gorgeous, but it’s force of habit. Or statement of fact. Take your pick. I nodded at the sunglasses. “Fun time last night?”

    She shrugged and looked out the window. “Phil was drinking.”

    Phil is Angie’s husband. Phil is an asshole.

    I said as much.

    “Yeah, well...” She lifted a corner of the curtain, flapped it back and forth in her hand. “What’re you gonna do, right?”

    “What I did before,” I said. “Be only too happy to.”

    She bent her head so the sunglasses slipped down to the slight bump at the bridge of her nose, revealing a dark discoloration that ran from the corner of her left eye to her temple. “And after you’re finished,” she said, “he’ll come home again, make this look like a love tap.” She pushed the sunglasses back up over her eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong.” Her voice was bright, but hard like winter sunlight. I hate that voice.

    “Have it your way,” I said.

    “Will do.”

    Angie and Phil and I grew up together. Angie and I, best friends. Angie and Phil, best lovers. It goes that way sometimes. Not often in my experience, thank God, but sometimes. A few years ago, Angie came to the office with the sunglasses and two eight balls where her eyes should have been. She also had a nice collection of bruises on her arms and neck and an inch-tall bump on the back of her head. My face must have betrayed my intentions, because the first words out of her mouth were, “Patrick, be sensible.” Not like it was the first time, and it wasn’t. It was the worst time though, so when I found Phil in Jimmy’s Pub in Uphams Corner, we had a few sensible drinks, played a sensible game of pool or two, and shortly after I’d broached the subject and he responded with a “Whyn’t you fucking mind your own business, Patrick?” I beat him to within an inch of his life with a sensible pool stick.

    I felt pretty pleased with myself for a few days there. It’s possible, though I don’t remember, that I engaged in a few fantasies of Angie and myself in some state of domestic bliss. Then Phil got out of the hospital and Angie didn’t come to work for a week. When she did, she moved very precisely and gasped every time she sat down or stood up. He’d left the face alone, but her body was black.

    She didn’t talk to me for two weeks. A long time, two weeks.

    I looked at her now as she stared out the window. Not for the first time, I wondered why a woman like this a woman who took shit from absolutely nobody, a woman who’d pumped two rounds into a hard case named Bobby Royce when he resisted our kind efforts to return him to his bail bondsman allowed her husband to treat her like an Everlast bag. Bobby Royce never got up, and I’d often wondered when Phil’s time would come. But so far it hadn’t.

    And I could hear the answer to my question in the soft, tired voice she adopted when she talked about him. She loved him, plain and simple. Some part of him that I certainly can’t see anymore must still show itself to her in their private moments, some goodness he possesses that shines like the grail in her eyes. That has to be it, because nothing else about their relationship makes any sense to me or anyone else who knows her.

    She opened the window and flicked her cigarette out. City girl to the core. I waited for a summer schooler to scream or a nun to come hauling ass up the staircase, the wrath of God in her eyes, a burning cigarette butt in her hand. Neither happened. Angie turned from the open window, and the cool summer breeze creased the room with the smell of exhaust fumes and freedom and the lilac petals which littered the schoolyard.

    “So,” she said, leaning back in the chair, “we employed again?

    “We’re employed again.”

    “Ya-hoo,” she said. “Nice suit, by the way.”

    “Makes you want to jump my bones on the spot, doesn’t it?”

    She shook her head slowly. “Uh, no.”

    “Don’t know where I’ve been. That it?”

    She shook her head again. “I know exactly where you’ve been, Skid, which is most of the problem.”

    “Bitch,” I said.

    “Slut.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “What’s the case?”

    I pulled the information about Jenna Angeline from my inside breast pocket and tossed it on her desk. “Simple find-and-a-phone-call.”

    She perused the pages. “Why’s anyone care if a middle-aged cleaning lady disappears?”

    “Seems some documents disappeared with her. State-house documents.”

    “Pertaining to?”

    I shrugged. “You know these politicians. Everything is as secret as Los Alamos until it hits the floor.”

    “How do they know she took them?”

    “Look at the picture.”

    “Ah,” she said, nodding, “she’s black.”

    “Evidence enough to most people.”

    “Even the resident senate liberal?”

    “The resident senate liberal is just another racist from Southie when he ain’t residing in the House.”

    I told her about the meeting, about Mulkern and his lapdog, Paulson, about the Stepford wife employees at the

    Ritz.

    “And Representative James Vurnan what was he like in the company of such Masters of State?”

    “You ever see that cartoon with the big dog and the little dog, where the little dog keeps panting away, jumping up and down, asking the big dog, ‘Where we going, Butch? Where we going, Butch?’“

    “Yes.”

    “Like that,” I said.

    She chewed on a pencil, then began tapping it against her front teeth. “So, you gave me the fly-on-the-wall account. What really happened?”

    “That’s about it.”

    “You trust them?”

    “Hell no.”

    “So there’s more to this than meets the eye, Detective?”

    I shrugged. “They’re elected officials. The day they tell the whole truth is the day hookers put out for free.”

    She smiled. “As always, your analogies are splendid. You’re just a product of good breeding, you are.” Her smile widened as she watched me, the pencil tapping against her left front tooth, the slightly chipped one. “So, what’s the rest of the story?”

    I loosened my tie enough to pull it over my head. “You got me.”

    “Some detective,” she said.

THREE

    

    Jenna Angeline, like me, was born and raised in Dorchester. The casual visitor to the city might think this would serve as a nice common denominator between Jenna and myself, a bond however minimal forged by location: two people who started out of their separate chutes at identical hash marks. But the casual visitor would be wrong. Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester and my Dorchester have about as much in common as Atlanta, Georgia, and Russian Georgia.

    The Dorchester I grew up in was working class traditional, the neighborhoods, more often than not, delineated by the Catholic churches they surrounded. The men were foremen, crew chiefs, probation officers, telephone repairmen, or, like my father, firemen. The women were housewives who sometimes had part-time jobs themselves, sometimes even had education degrees from state colleges. We were all Irish, Polish, or close enough to pass. We were all white. And when the federal desegregation of public schools began in 1974, most of the men worked overtime and most of the women went to full time and most of the kids went to private Catholic high schools.

    This Dorchester has changed, of course. Divorce practically unheard of in my parents’ generation is commonplace in mine, and I know a lot fewer of my neighbors than I used to. But we still have access to the union jobs, we usually know a state rep who can get us into civil service. To some extent, we’re connected.

    Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester is poor. The neighborhoods, more often than not, are delineated by the public parks and community centers they surround. The men are dockworkers and hospital orderlies, in some cases postal clerks, a few firemen. The women are the orderlies, the cashiers, the cleaning women, the department store clerks. They are nurses, too, and cops, and civil service clerks, but chances are, if they’ve reached that kind of pinnacle, they don’t live in Dorchester anymore. They’ve moved to Dedham or Framingham or Brockton.

    In my Dorchester, you stay because of community and tradition, because you’ve built a comfortable, if somewhat poor, existence where little ever changes. A hamlet.

    In Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester, you stay because you don’t have any choice.

    Nowhere is it harder to try and explain the differences between these two Dorchesters White Dorchester and Black Dorchester than in White Dorchester. This is particularly true in my neighborhood, because we’re one of the boundary neighborhoods. The moment you pass through Edward Everett Square heading south, east, or west, you’re in Black Dorchester. So, people around here have a lot of trouble accepting the differences as anything other than black and white. A guy I grew up with once put it about as plainly as you’ll ever hear it: “Hey, Patrick,” he said, “enough of this bullshit. I grew up in Dorchester. I grew up poor. No one ever gave me nothing. My old man left when I was a kid just like a lotta the niggers in the ‘Bury. No one begged me to learn how to read or get a job or be something. Nobody gave me affirmative action to help me out either, that’s for damn sure. And I didn’t pick up an Uzi, join a gang, and start doing drivebys. So spare me this shit. They got no excuse.”

    People from White Dorchester always call Black Dorchester “the ‘Bury.” Short for Roxbury, the section of Boston that begins where Black Dorchester ends, where they load dead young black kids into meat wagons on the average of eight a weekend sometimes. Black Dorchester gives up its young on a pretty regular basis too, and those in White Dorchester refuse to call it anything but the ‘Bury. Somebody just forgot to change it on the maps.

    There’s truth to what my friend said, however narrow it is, and the truth scares me. When I drive through my neighborhood, I see poor, but I don’t see poverty.

    Driving into Jenna’s neighborhood, I saw a lot of poverty. I saw a big, ugly scar of a neighborhood with several boarded-up storefronts. I saw one that hadn’t been boarded up yet, but was just as closed. The front window was blown out and bullet holes pocked the walls in jagged patterns of lethal acne. The inside was scorched and gutted and the fiberglass sign overhead that once said delicatessen in Vietnamese was shattered. The deli business wasn’t what it once was in this neighborhood, but the crack business seemed to be doing just fine.

    I turned off Blue Hill Avenue up a rutted hill that looked like it hadn’t been paved since the Kennedy administration. The sun was setting, blood red, behind an overgrown yard of rotting weeds at the top of the hill. A group of laconic black kids crossed the street in front of me, taking their time, staring into my car. There were four of them, and one had a broomstick in his hand. He turned his head to look at me and whacked the stick off the street with a harsh snap. One of his buddies, bouncing a tennis ball in front of him, laughed and pointed an admonishing finger at my windshield. They passed over the sidewalk and cut through a rotted brown pathway between two three-deckers. I continued on up the hill, and something primal reassured me that my gun was hanging heavily from the holster on my left shoulder.

    My gun is, as Angie would say, “not a fuck-around thing.” It’s a .44 magnum automatic an “automag,” they call it gleefully in Soldier of Fortune and like publications  and I didn’t purchase it out of penis envy or Eastwood envy or because I wanted to own the goddamned biggest gun on the block. I bought it for one simple reason: I’m a lousy shot. I need to know that if I ever have to use it, I hit what I’m aiming at and I hit it hard enough to knock it down and keep it there. Shoot some people in the arm with a .32 and they just get angry. Shoot them in the same place with the automag and they ask for a priest.

    I’ve fired it twice. Once when a brain-dead sociopath who was only slightly bigger than Rhode Island wanted me to prove how tough I was. He’d jumped out of his car and was six feet away from me and coming on fast, when I fired a round that went straight through his engine block. He stared at his Cordoba like I’d just shot his dog and almost wept. But the steam pouring out of the torn metal on his hood convinced him that there were things out there that were tougher than the two of us.

    The other time was Bobby Royce. He had his hands on Angie’s neck at the time, and I blew a chunk out of his leg. Tell you something about Bobby Royce: he got back up. He raised his gun toward me and still had it pointed that way even after Angie’s two rounds had picked him up and drilled him against a hydrant and the light had left his eyes. Bobby Royce, going into rigor with his gun pointed at me, flat dead eyes not much different than they’d been when he was breathing.

    I was wearing a pearl gray, unstructured linen jacket when I stepped out of my car in front of Jenna’s last-known address. It was oversized and concealed the gun entirely. The group of teenagers sitting on the cars in front of Jenna’s house was definitely fooled. As I crossed the street toward them, one of them said, “Hey, Five-O, where’s your backup?”

    The girl beside him giggled. “Under his coat, Jerome.”

    There were nine of them. Half of them sat on the trunk of a faded blue Chevy Malibu with a bright yellow Denver boot strapped to the front tire because the owner hadn’t paid his parking tickets. The rest of them sat on the hood of the car behind the Malibu, a puke green Granada. Two kids slipped off the cars and walked quickly up the street, heads down, hands rubbing their foreheads.

    I stopped by the cars. “Jenna around?”

    Jerome laughed. He was lean and hard, but held himself loosely in his purple tank top, white shorts, and black Air Jordans. He said, “‘Jenna around?’ ” in a high-pitched falsetto. “Like he and Jenna old friends.” The rest of them laughed. “No, man, Jenna’s gone for the day.” He looked at me and rubbed his chin. “I’m, like, her service, though. Why don’t you leave your message with me?”

    The other kids cracked up at “service.”

    I liked it too, but I was supposed to act like I was in control. I said, “Like have my agent call her agent?”

    Jerome looked at me, deadpan. “Yeah, man, like that. Whatever you say.”

    More laughter. Lots more.

    That’s me, Patrick Kenzie, got a real way with youth. I walked between the two cars, hard to do when no one moves to the side for you, but I managed. “Thanks for your help, Jerome.”

    “Hey, man, don’t mention it. Just part of the wonderfulness of me.”

    I started up the front steps of Jenna’s three-decker. “I’ll put in a good word for you with Jenna when I see her.”

    “Damn white of you too,” Jerome said as I opened the door into the hallway.

    Jenna lived on the third floor. I trudged up the steps, smelling the familiar smells of all inner-city three-deckers  chipped, sun-baked wood, old paint, kitty litter, wood and linoleum that had soaked up decades of melting snow and dirt from wet boots, spilled beers and sodas, the ashes of a thousand discarded cigarettes. I was careful not to touch the railing; it looked like it could easily crumble away from the banisters.

    I turned into the top hallway and reached Jenna’s door, or what was left of it. Something had imploded the wood by the knob, and the knob itself lay in a pile of splinters on the floor. A quick glance at the corridor in front of me revealed a thin stretch of dark green linoleum littered with broken chair legs, a shattered drawer, some shredded clothing, pillow stuffing, pieces of a small transistor radio.

    I pulled my gun, inched inside, checking each doorway with my eyes and gun in tandem. The house had that certain stillness that only comes when nothing living remains inside, but I’d been fooled by that stillness before, and I have a rewired jaw to prove it.

    It took me ten minutes of laborious, stiff-necked searching to decide the place actually was empty. By this time, my skin was covered in sweat, my back ached, and the muscles in my hands and arms felt about as pliable as Sheetrock.

    I let the gun hang loosely from my hand as I went more casually through the apartment, rechecking the rooms, looking at things in more detail. Nothing jumped from the bedroom and danced in front of me with a neon sign overhead that said CLUE!!! Not in the bathroom either. Kitchen and living room were equally uncooperative. All I knew was that someone had been looking for something and delicacy had not been a primary concern. Nothing that was breakable was unbroken, nothing slitable unslit.

    I stepped into the corridor and heard a sound to my right. I spun and stared down the fat barrel at Jerome. He crouched, hands in front of his face. “Ho! Ho! Ho, ho, ho, ho! Don’t fucking shoot!”

    “Jesus,” I said, a hard wave of exhausted relief curling over my razor-blade adrenaline.

    “God damn!” Jerome straightened up, brushed at his tank top for some reason, smoothed the cuffs of his shorts. “The fuck you carrying that thing for? I ain’t seen no elephants ‘round here since I don’t know when.”

    I shrugged. “What’re you doing up here?”

    “Hey, I live in this neighborhood, white bread. Seems to me, you the one needs the excuse. And put that fucking thing away.”

    I slid the gun back into my holster. “What happened here, Jerome?”

    “You got me,” Jerome said, walking inside, looking at the mess like he’d seen it a hundred times before. “Old Jenna ain’t been around in over a week. This was done over the weekend.” He guessed my next question. “And no, man, no one saw anything.”

    “I’m not surprised,” I said.

    “Oh, like people in your neighborhood, they just up and volunteer information to the police all the time too, I bet.”

    I smiled. “Not on their best days.”

    “Uh-huh.” He looked at the mess again. “This got to be about Roland. Got to be.”

    “Who’s Roland?”

    He chuckled at that one, looked at me. “Yeah, right.” “No, I’m serious. Who’s Roland?”

    He turned and walked out. “Go home, white bread.”

    I followed him down the stairs. “Who’s Roland, Jerome?”

    He shook his head the whole way down to the bottom floor. When he reached the porch, where his friends had reassembled on the steps, he jerked his thumb behind him at me as I came through the doorway. “He asking who Roland is.”

    His friends laughed. I had to be the funniest white man they’d seen in days.

    Most of them stood up as I came out on the porch. The girl said, “You want to know who Roland is?”

    I walked halfway down the steps. “I want to know who Roland is.”

    One of the bigger guys stabbed my shoulder with his index finger. “Roland your worst fucking nightmare.”

    The girl said, “Worse than your wife.”

    They all laughed and I walked down the steps and cut between the blue Malibu and the green Granada.

    “Stay away from Roland,” Jerome said. “What kill elephants, don’t so much as faze Roland. Cause he ain’t human.”

    I stopped, turned back, my hand resting on the Malibu. “Then what is he?”

    Jerome shrugged, folded his arms across his chest. “He just plain bad. Bad as it gets.”

FOUR

    

    Shortly after I got back to the office, we ordered out for some Chinese and went over the day.

    Angie had done the paper trail while I followed the physical one. I told her what my trail had brought us, added the names “Jerome” and “Roland” to the first page of our file, entered it into the computer. I also wrote “Break-in” and “Motive?” and underlined the latter.

    The Chinese food arrived and we went to work clogging our arteries and forcing our hearts to work double time. Angie told me the results of the paper trail between mouthfuls of pork fried rice and chow mein. The day after Jenna disappeared, Jim Vurnan had gone to the restaurants and shops around Beacon Street and the State House to see if she’d been in recently. He didn’t find her, but in a deli on Somerset he got a copy of one of her credit-card receipts from the owner. Jenna had paid for a ham on rye and a Coke with a Visa. Angie had taken the receipt and using the tried-and-true “Hi, I’m (Insert target’s name) and I seem to have misplaced my credit card” method, she found that Jenna carried the Visa only, had a spotty credit history (one run-in with a collection agency back in ‘81), and had last used her card on June 19, the first day she didn’t show up to work, at the Bank of Boston on the corner of Clarendon and St. James for a cash advance of two hundred dollars. Angie had then called the Bank of Boston claiming to be a representative of American Express. Mrs. Angeline had applied for a credit card and would they mind verifying her account? What account?

    She got the same response at every bank she tried. Jenna Angeline had no bank account. Which is fine, as far as I’m concerned, but it makes a person harder to find.

    I started to ask Angie if she’d missed any banks, but she held up her hand, managed a “Not finished yet,” around some spare rib. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and swallowed. Then she downed a gulp of beer and said, “’Member Billy Hawkins?”

    “Of course.” Billy would be doing a dime in Walpole Penitentiary if we hadn’t found his alibi.

    “Well, Billy works for Western Union now, out of one of those Check Cashing Express places.” She sat back, pleased.

    “Well?”

    “Well what?” She was enjoying herself.

    I picked up a greasy spare rib and cocked my arm.

    She held up her hands. “OK, OK. Billy’s going to run a check for us, find out if she’s used any of their offices. She can’t have survived on two hundred dollars since the nineteenth. Not in this city anyway.”

    “And when’s Billy going to get back to us?”

    “He couldn’t do anything today. He said his boss would be suspicious if he hung around for too long after the end of his shift, and his shift ended five minutes after I called. He’ll have to do it tomorrow. Said he’ll call us by noon.”

    I nodded. Behind Angie the dark sky was streaked with four fingers of scarlet and the slight breeze blew the thinnest wisps of her hair from behind her ear onto her cheekbone.

    Van Morrison was singing about “crazy love” on the boom box behind me, and we sat in the cramped office, staring at each other in the afterglow of the heavy Chinese food and the humid day and the satisfaction of knowing where our next paycheck was coming from. She smiled, a slightly embarrassed one, but didn’t look away, and began tapping that pencil lightly against the chipped tooth again.

    I let the stillness settle between us for a good five minutes before I said, “Come home with me.”

    She shook her head, still smiling, and swiveled the chair slightly.

    “Come on. We’ll watch a little TV, chat about old times ”

    “There’s a bed in this story somewhere. I know it.”

    “Only as a place to sleep. We’ll lie down and... talk.”

    She laughed. “Uh-huh. And what about all those lovely young things who tend to camp out on your doorstep and tie up your phone?”

    “Who?” I asked innocently.

    “Who,” she said. “Donna, Beth, Kelly, that chick with the ass, Lauren ”

    “That chick with the ass, excuse me?”

    “You know the one. The Italian girl. The one who goes” her voice rose about two octaves ’“Oooooh, Patrick, can we take a bubble bath now? Hee!’ That one.”

    “Gina.”

    She nodded. “Gina. That’s the one.”

    “I’ll give them all up for one night with ”    

    “I know that, Patrick. I hope you don’t think that’s something to be proud of.”

    “Well, gee, Mom...”

    She smiled. “Patrick, the major reason you think you’re in love with me is because you’ve never seen me naked ”

    “In ”

    “In thirteen years,” she said hurriedly, “and we both agreed that was forgotten. Besides, thirteen years is a lifetime to you where a woman is concerned.”

    “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

    She rolled her eyes at me. “So,” she said, “what’s on tomorrow’s agenda?”

    I shrugged, drank some beer from the can. Summer was definitely here; it tasted like tea. Van had finished singing about “crazy love,” and was heading “into the mystic.” I said, “I guess we wait for Billy to call, call him at noon if he doesn’t.”

    “Sounds almost like a plan.” She drained her beer, made a face at the can. “Any more cold ones?” I reached into my wastebasket, which was doubling as a cooler, tossed a can to her. She cracked it, took a sip. “What do we do when we find Mrs. Angeline?”

    “Haven’t a clue. Play it by ear.”

    “You’re such a professional at this.”

    I nodded. “That’s why they let me carry a gun.”

    She saw him before I did. His shadow fell across the floor, crept up the right side of her face. Phil. The Asshole.

    I hadn’t seen him since I hospitalized him three years ago. He looked better than he had then lying on the floor holding his ribs, coughing blood onto a sawdust floor but he still looked like an asshole. He had a hell of a scar beside his left eye, compliments of that sensible pool stick. I’m not sure, but I think I beamed when I noticed.

    He wouldn’t look at me. He looked at her. “I’ve been downstairs honking for the last ten minutes, hon’. You didn’t hear me?”

    “It was pretty noisy outside, and...” She pointed at the boom box, but Phil chose not to look at it because that would have meant looking at me.

    He said, “Ready to go?”

    She nodded and stood. She drained the beer in one long swallow. That didn’t seem to make Phil’s day. Probably made it worse when she flipped the can airborne in my direction and I tapped it into the wastebasket.

    “Two points,” she said, coming around the desk. “See you tomorrow, Skid.”

    “See you,” I said, as she took Phil’s hand and started walking out the door.

    Just before they reached the door, Phil turned, her hand in his, and looked at me. He smiled.

    I blew him a kiss.

    I heard them work their way down the narrow, winding steps. Van had stopped singing and the quiet that replaced him felt thick and decayed. I sat in Angie’s chair, saw them below me. Phil was getting in the car, Angie standing at the passenger door, holding the handle. Her head was down and I got the feeling she was making a conscious effort not to look back up at the window. Phil opened her door from the inside, and a moment after she got in, they pulled out into traffic.

    I looked at my boom box, at the cassettes scattered around it. I considered taking Van out and putting in some Dire Straits. Or maybe some Stones. No. Jane’s Addiction perhaps. Springsteen? Something really different, then. La-dysmith-Black-Mambazo or The Chieftains. I considered them all. I considered what would best fit my mood. I considered picking up the boom box and hurling it across the room at the exact spot where Phil had turned, Angie’s hand in his, and smiled.

    But I didn’t. It’d pass.

    Everything did. Sooner or later.

FIVE

    

    I left the church a few minutes later. nothing left to keep me. I walked through the empty schoolyard, kicked a can in front of me as I went. I passed through the opening in the short wrought-iron fence that lined the yard and crossed the avenue to my apartment. I live directly across from the church in a blue-and-white three-decker that somehow missed the scourge of aluminum siding that overtook all its neighbors. My landlord is an old Hungarian farmer whose last name I couldn’t pronounce with a year of practice. He spends all day fussing about in the yard, and he’s said maybe a total of two hundred and fifty words to me in the five years I’ve lived there. The words are usually the same and there are three of them: “Where’s my rent?” He’s a mean old bastard, but he’s unfriendly.

    I let myself into my second-floor apartment and tossed the bills that awaited me on a pile on the coffee table with their relatives. There were no women camped by my door, inside or out, but there were seven messages on my answering machine.

    Three were from Gina of the Bubble Bath. Each of her messages was backed by the grunts and moans emanating from the aerobics studio where she worked. Nothing like a little summer sweat to get the wheels of passion turning.

    One was from my sister, Erin, long distance from Seattle. “Staying out of trouble, kid?” My sister. I’ll have my teeth in a glass and a face like a prune, and she’ll still be calling me “kid.” Another was from Bubba Rogowski, wondering if I wanted to have a beer, shoot some pool. Bubba sounded drunk, which meant someone would bleed tonight. I nixed the invitation as a matter of course. Someone, I think it was Lauren, called to make nasty promises concerning a pair of rusty scissors and my genitalia. I was trying to recall our last date to decide if my behavior warranted such extreme measures, when Mulkern’s voice drifted into the room and I forgot all about Lauren.

    “Pat, lad, it’s Sterling Mulkern. I assume you’re out earning your money, which is grand, but I wonder if you had the time to read today’s Trib?. That dear boy, Colgan, was at my throat again. Ah, the boy would have accused your own father of setting fires just so he could put them out. A real Peck’s bad boy, that Richie Colgan. I wonder, Pat, if you might have a word with him, ask him to lighten up a bit on an old man for a time? Just a thought. We’ve a table for lunch at the Copley, Saturday at one. Don’t forget.” The recording ended with a dial tone, then the cassette began rewinding.

    I stared at the small machine. He wondered if I might have a word with Richie Colgan. Just a thought. Toss in the memory of my father for good measure. The hero fireman. The beloved city councilor. My father.

    Everyone knows Richie Colgan and I are friends. It’s half the reason people are a little more suspicious of me than used to be the case. We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston. Now Richie’s the Trib’s top columnist, a vicious bastard if he thinks you’re one of the three great evils an elitist, a bigot, or a hypocrite. Since Sterling Mulkern is an embodiment of all three, Richie orders him for lunch once or twice a week.

    Everyone loved Richie Colgan until they ran his picture over his byline. A good Irish name. A good Irish boy. Going after the corrupt, fat party bosses in city hall and the Statehouse. Then they ran his picture and everyone saw that his skin was blacker than Kurtz’s heart, and suddenly he was a “troublemaker.” But he sells papers, and his favorite target has always been Sterling Mulkern. Among the monikers he’s given the Senator there’s “Santa’s Evil Twin,” “Siphoner Sterling,” “Three-Lunch Mulkern,” and “Hypo the Hippo.” Boston’s not a town for the sensitive pol.

    And now, Mulkern wanted me to “have a word with him.” In for a penny, in for a pound. Next time I saw Mulkern, I decided, I’d give him the “Your money rents, it doesn’t buy” speech and tell him to leave my hero father out of it while I was at it.

    My father, Edgar Kenzie, had his fifteen minutes of local fame almost twenty years ago. He’d made the front page of both dailies; the photo even hit the wires and ended up on the back pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The photographer damn near won a Pulitzer.

    It was a hell of a photograph. My father, swathed in the black and yellow of the BFD, an oxygen tank strapped to his back, climbing up a ten story building on a rope of sheets. A woman had come down those sheets a few minutes earlier. Well, halfway down. She’d lost her grip and died on impact. The building was an old nineteenth-century factory that someone had converted into tenements, made of red brick and cheap wood that could have been tissue and gasoline as far as the fire was concerned.

    The woman had left her kids inside, telling them, in a moment of panic, to follow her down, instead of the other way around. The kids saw what happened to her and stopped moving, just stood in the black window and looked at their broken doll mother as smoke poured out of the room behind them. The window faced a parking lot and firemen were waiting for a tow truck to get the cars out so they could back a ladder in. My father grabbed an oxygen tank without a word, walked up to the sheets and started climbing. A window on the fifth floor blew out into his chest, and there’s another photo, slightly out of focus, of him flapping in the air as shards of glass explode off his heavy black coat. He reached the tenth floor eventually and grabbed the kids a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl  and went back down again. No big deal, he’d say with a shrug.

    When he retired five years later, people still remembered him, and I don’t think he ever paid for another drink in his life. He ran for city council on Sterling Mulkern’s suggestion and lived a good life of graft and large homes until cancer settled into his lungs like smoke in a closet and ate him and the money away.

    At home, the Hero was a different story. He made sure his dinner was waiting with a slap. Made sure the homework got done with a slap. Made sure everything went like clockwork with a slap. And if that didn’t work, a belt, or a punch or two, or once, an old washboard. Whatever it took to keep Edgar Kenzie’s world in order.

    I never knew, probably never will, if it was the job that did this to him if he was just reacting in the only way he knew how to all those blackened bodies he’d found, scorched into final fetal positions in hot closets or under smoking beds or if he was simply born mean. My sister claims she doesn’t remember what he was like before I came along, but she’s also claimed, on occasion, that there were never days when he beat us so badly we had to miss school again. My mother followed the Hero to the grave by six months, so I never got to ask her either. But I doubt she would have told me. Irish parents have never been known for speaking ill of their spouses to their children.

    I sat back on the couch in my apartment, thinking about the Hero once again, telling myself this was the last time. That ghost was gone. But I was lying and I knew it. The Hero woke me up at night. The Hero hid in waiting in shadows, in alleys, in the antiseptic hallways of my dreams, in the chamber of my gun. Just as in life, he’d do whatever he damn well pleased.

    I stood and walked past the window to the phone. Outside, something sudden moved in the schoolyard across the street. The local punks had shown up to lurk in the shadows, sit in the deep stone window seats and smoke a little reefer, drink a few beers. Why not. When I was a local punk, I’d done the same thing. Me, Phil, Bubba, Angie, Waldo, Hale, everybody.

    I dialed Richie’s direct line at the Trib, hoping to catch him working late as usual. His voice came across the line midway through the first ring. “City desk. Hold.” A Muzak version of The Magnificent Seven theme syruped its way over the line.

    Then I got one of those what’s-wrong-with-this-picture answers without ever consciously having asked myself the question. There was no music coming from the schoolyard. No matter how much it announces their position, young punks don’t go anywhere without their boom boxes. It’s bad form.

    I looked past the slit in the curtains down into the schoolyard. No more sudden movement. No movement at all. No glowing cigarette butts or clinking glass botües. I looked hard at the area where I’d seen it. The school was shaped like an E without the middle dash. The two end dashes jutted out a good six feet farther than the middle section. In those corners, deep shadows formed in the ninety-degree pockets. The movement had come from the pocket on my right.

    I kept hoping for a match. In the movies, when someone’s following the detective, the idiot always lights a match so the hero can make him. Then I realized how ridiculously cloak-and-dagger this shit was. For all I knew, I’d seen a cat.

    I kept watching anyway.

    “City desk,” Richie said.

    “You said that already.”

    “Meestah Kenzie,” Richie said. “How goes it?”

    “It goes well,” I said. “Hear you pissed off Mulkern again today.”

    “Reason to go on living,” Richie said. “Hippos who masquerade as whales will be harpooned.”

    I was willing to bet he had that written on a three-by-five card, taped above his desk. “What’s the most important bill coming to floor this session?”

    “The most important bill ” he repeated, thinking about it. “No question the street terrorism bill.”

    In the schoolyard, something moved. “The street terrorism bill?”

    “Yeah. It labels all gang members ‘street terrorists,’ means you can throw them in jail simply because they’re gang members. In simplest terms ”

    “Use small words so I’ll be sure to understand.”

    “Of course. In simplest terms, gangs would be considered paramilitary groups with interests that are in direct conflict with those of the state. Treat them like an invading army. Anyone caught wearing colors, wearing Raiders baseball caps even, is committing treason. Goes straight to jail, no passing Go.”

    “Will it pass?”

    “Possibly. Good possibility, actually, when you consider how desperate everyone is to get rid of the gangs.”

    “And?”

    “And, it’ll get struck down within six months in a courtroom. It’s one thing to say, ‘We should declare martial law and get these fuckers off the streets, civil rights be damned.’ It’s another to actually do it, get that much closer to fascism, turn Roxbury and Dorchester into another South Central, helicopters and shit flying overhead day and night. Why the interest?”

    I tried to put Mulkern or Paulson or Vurnan with this and it didn’t fit. Mulkern, the house liberal, would never publicly stand behind something like this. But Mulkern, the pragmatist, would never take a public stand in favor of the gangs either. He’d simply take a vacation the week the bill came to floor.

    “When’s it coming to floor?” I asked.

    “Next Monday, the third of July.”

    “There’s nothing else coming up you can think of?”

    “Not really, no. They got a mandatory seven bill for child molesters will probably sail through.”

    I knew about that one. Seven years mandatory prison time for anyone convicted of child molestation. No parole possibility. The only problem I had with it was that it wasn’t called the mandatory life bill, and that there wasn’t a provision that ensured that those convicted would be forced to enter mainstream population, and get back a little of what they gave.

    Again Richie said, “Why the interest, Patrick?”

    I considered Sterling Mulkern’s message: Talk to Richie Colgan. Sell out. For the briefest moment, I considered telling Richie about it. Teach Mulkern to ask me to help him soothe his ruffled feathers. But I knew Richie would have no choice but to put it in his next column, in bold print, and professionally speaking, crossing Mulkern like that would be the same as cutting my wrists in a bathtub.

    “Working on a case,” I told Richie. “Very hush-hush at the moment.”

    “Tell me about it sometime,” he said.

    “Sometime.”

    “Good enough.” Richie doesn’t press me and I don’t press him. We accept the word no from each other, which is one reason for the friendship. He said, “How’s your partner?”

    “Still mouthwatering.”

    “Still not coming across for you?” He chuckled.

    “She’s married,” I said.

    “Don’t matter. You’ve had married before. Must drive you nuts, Patrick, a beautiful woman like that around you every day, and nary a single desire to touch your dick in her whole luscious being. Damn, but that’s got to hurt.” He laughed.

    Richie’s under the impression that he’s a real hoot sometimes.

    I said, “Yeah, well, I got to run.” Something moved again in the black pocket of the schoolyard. “How about a couple of beers soon?”

    “Bring Angie?” I thought I could hear him panting.

    “I’ll see if she’s in the mood.”

    “Deal. I’ll send over a few file reports on those bills.”

“Gracias.”

    He hung up and I sat back and looked through the slit in the curtains. I was familiar with the shadows now, and I could see a large shape sitting within them. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, I couldn’t tell, but something was there. I thought about calling Bubba; he was good for times like these when you weren’t sure what you were walking into. But he’d called me from a bar. Not a good sign. Even if I could track him down, he’d just want to kill the trouble, not investigate it. Bubba has to be used sparingly, with great care. Like nitro.

    I decided to press Harold into service.

    Harold is a six-foot stuffed panda bear that I won at the Marshfield Fair a few years back. I tried to give him to Angie at the time; I’d won him for her, after all. But she gave me that look she’d give me if I lit up a cigarette during sex, the withering one. Why she didn’t want a six-foot stuffed panda in bright yellow rubber shorts adorning her apartment is beyond me, but since I couldn’t find a trash barrel big enough to take him, I welcomed him into my home.

    I dragged Harold from the bedroom into the dark kitchen and sat him in the chair by the window. The shade was drawn, and on my way out, I flicked on the light. If someone was watching me from the shadows, Harold should pass as me. Although my ears are smaller.

    I crept through the back of the house, took my Ithaca from behind the door, and went down the back stairs. The only thing better than an automag for the total firearms incompetent is an Ithaca .12 gauge shotgun with a pistol grip. If you can’t hit your target with that, you’re legally blind.

    I stepped out into my backyard, wondering if possibly there were two of them. One for the front, one for the back. But that seemed as unlikely as there being one of them in the first place. Paranoia had to be checked.

    I hopped a few fences until I got to the avenue, slipped the Ithaca under my blue trench coat. I crossed the intersection and walked past the church on the south side. A road runs behind the church and the school, and I took that north. I passed a few people I knew along the way, gave curt nods, keeping my coat closed with one hand; have gun, will offend the neighbors.

    I slipped into the back of the schoolyard, soundless in my Avia high-tops, and pressed close against the wall until I reached the first corner. I was at the edge of the E and he was ten feet away, around another corner, in the shadows. I considered how to approach it. I thought of just walking up on him, fast, but people tend to die that way. I thought of crawling along the ground like they used to on Rat Patrol, but I wasn’t even positive anyone was there, and if I crawled up on a cat or two kids in a lip lock, I wouldn’t be able to show my face for a month.

    My decision was made for me.

    It wasn’t a cat and it wasn’t teen lovers. It was a man and he was holding an Uzi. He stepped out from the corner in front of me with the ugly weapon pointed at my sternum, and I forgot how to breathe.

    He was standing in darkness and wearing a dark blue baseball cap like they wear in the navy, with gold leafs embroidered on the brim, and gold writing of some sort on the front. I couldn’t make out what it said, or maybe I was just too scared to concentrate.

    He wore black wraparound sunglasses. Not the best thing to see properly when you wanted to shoot someone in the dark, but with that gun at this range, Ray Charles could put me in the grave.

    He wore black clothes over black skin and that’s about all I could tell about him.

    I started to mention that this neighborhood wasn’t known for its courtesy toward its darker neighbors after sunset when something fast and hard hit my mouth, and something else, equally hard, hit my temple, and just before I lost consciousness, I remember thinking: Harold the Panda doesn’t fool ‘em like he used to.

SIX

    

    While I slept the sleep of idiots, the Hero came to visit. He was dressed in his uniform, carrying a child under each arm. His face was covered with soot, and smoke rolled off his shoulders. The two children were crying, but the Hero was laughing. He looked at me and laughed. And laughed. The laugh turned into a howl just before brown smoke began pouring from his mouth, and I woke up.

    I was on a rug. That much I knew. There was a guy dressed in white kneeling over me. I’d either been committed or he was a paramedic. He had a bag beside him and a stethoscope around his neck. A paramedic. Or a very authentic impersonator. He said, “You gonna be sick?”

    I shook my head and threw up on the rug.

    Someone started screaming at me in high-pitched gibberish-speak. Then I recognized it. Gaelic. She remembered what country she was in and switched to English with a heavy brogue. It didn’t make much difference, but at least I knew where I was now.

    The rectory. The screaming banshee was Delia, Pastor Drummond’s housekeeper. In a moment, she’d begin hitting me with something. The paramedic said, “Father?” and I could hear the pastor hustling Delia out of the room. The paramedic said, “You finished?” He sounded like he had things to do. A real angel of mercy. I nodded and rolled over onto my back. I sat up. Sort of. I hooked my arms around my knees and sat there, holding on, my head swimming. The walls were doing a psychedelic dance in front of me and my mouth felt like it was full of bloody pennies. I said, “Ouch.”

    “You got a way with words,” the paramedic said. “You also got a mild concussion, some loose teeth, a busted lip, and a hell of a shiner growing by your left eye.”

    Great. Angie and I would have something to talk about in the morning. The Ray-Ban twins. “That it?”

    “That’s it,” he said, dropping the stethoscope into the bag. “I’d tell you to come down to the hospital with me, but you’re from Dorchester, so I figure you’re into all that macho bullshit and won’t come.”

    “Mmm,” I said. “How’d I get here?”

    Pastor Drummond, behind me, said, “I found you.” He stepped in front of me, holding my shotgun and the magnum. He placed them gently on the couch across from me.

    “Sorry about the rug,” I said.

    He pointed at the vomit. “Father Gabriel, when he was in his cups, used to do that quite often. If I remember right, that’s why we picked that color pattern.” He smiled. “Delia’s making up a bed for you now.”

    “Thanks, Father,” I said, “but I think if I can walk to the bedroom, I can walk across the street to my own place.”

    “That mugger might still be out there.”

    The paramedic picked up his bag from beside me and said, “Have a good one.”

    “It’s been swell for me too,” I managed.

    The paramedic grimaced and gave us a little wave before letting himself out the side door.

    I reached out my hand and Pastor Drummond took it, pulling me up. I said, “I wasn’t mugged, Father.”

    He raised his eyebrows. “Angry husband?”

    I looked at him. “Father,” I said. “Please. You have to stop getting illicit thrills from my lifestyle. It has to do with a case I’m on. I think.” I wasn’t even sure. “It was a warning.”

    He supported me as far as the couch. The room was still about as stable as quarters on the Titanic. He said, “This is some warning.”

    I nodded. Bad move. The Titanic overturned and the room slid sideways. Pastor Drummond’s hand pushed me back against the couch. I said, “Yes. Some warning. Did you call the police?”

    He looked surprised. “You know, I didn’t think of it.”

    “Good. I don’t want to spend all night filling out reports.”

    “Angela might have, though.”

    “You called Angie?”

    “Of course he called me.” She was standing in the doorway. Her hair was a wreck, messy strands hanging over her forehead; it made her look sexier, like she’d just woken up. She was wearing a black leather jacket over a burgundy polo shirt that hung untucked over gray sweatpants and white aerobic sneakers. She had a purse you could hide Peru in, which she dropped on the floor as she crossed to the couch.

    She sat beside me. “Don’t we look beautiful,” she said, her hand under my chin, tilting it upward. “Jesus, Patrick, who’d you run into an angry husband?”

    Father Drummond giggled. A sixty-year-old priest, giggling into his fist. Not my day.

    “I think it was a relative of Mike Tyson,” I said.

    She looked at me. “What, you don’t have hands?”

    I pushed her hand away. “He had an Uzi, Ange. Probably what he hit me with.”

    “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a little anxious. I didn’t mean to snap.” She looked at my lips. “This wasn’t done with the Uzi. Your temple, maybe. But not the lips. Looks like a speed glove to me, the way it tore the skin.”

    Angie, the expert on physical abrasions.

    She leaned in close, whispered. “You know the guy?”

    I whispered back. “No.”

    “Never saw him before?”

    “Nope.”

    “You’re sure?”

    “Angie, I wanted this, I would’ve called the cops.” She leaned back, hands up. “OK. OK.” She looked at Drummond. “OK if I take him back to his place, Father?” “It would make Delia’s day,” Drummond said.

    “Thanks, Father,” I said.

    He folded his arms. “Some security you are,” he said, and winked.

    He’s a priest, but I could’ve kicked him.

    Angie picked up the guns and then lifted me to my feet with her free hand.

    I looked at Father Drummond. “G’night,” I managed.

    “God bless,” he said at the door.

    As we went down the steps into the schoolyard, Angie said, “You know why this happened, don’t you.”

    “No, why?”

    “You don’t go to church anymore.”

    “Ha,” I said.

    

***

    

    She got me across the street and up the stairs, the queasiness steadily evaporating as the warmth of her skin and the feel of the blood rushing through her body reawakened my senses.

    We sat down in the kitchen. I kicked Harold the Panda out of my chair, and Angie poured us each a glass of orange juice. She sniffed hers before she drank. “What’d you tell the Asshole?” I asked.

    “After I told him what happened, he seemed so pleased someone finally kicked your ass, he would’ve let me fly to Atlantic City with the savings account.”

    “Glad to know some good came out of this.”

    She put her hand on mine. “What happened?”

    I gave her the rundown from the time she left the office to ten minutes ago.

    “Would you recognize him again?”

    I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

    She sat back, one leg raised and propped beside her on the chair, the other tucked under her. She looked at me for a long time. “Patrick,” she said.

    “Yeah?”

    She smiled sadly and shook her head. “You’re going to have a hard time getting a date for a while.”

SEVEN

    

    We were just about to call Billy Hawkins the next day at noon when he walked into the office. Billy, like a lot of people who work in Western Union offices, looks like he just got out of detox. He’s extremely skinny and his skin has that slightly yellowish texture of someone who spends all his time indoors in smoke-filled rooms. He accentuates his lack of weight by wearing tight jeans and shirts, and rolls his half-sleeves up to his shoulders as if he has biceps. His black hair looks like he combs it with a clawhammer, and he has one of those drooping Mexican bandit mustaches that nobody, not even your average Mexican bandit, wears anymore. In 1979, the rest of the world went on, but Billy didn’t notice.

    He plopped himself lazily into the chair in front of my desk and said, “So, like, when you guys going to get a bigger office?”

    “The day I find the bell,” I said.

    Billy squinted. Slowly, he said, “Oh, right. Yeah.”

    Angie said, “How you doing, Billy?” and actually looked like she cared.

    Billy looked at her and blushed. “I’m doing... I’m doing all right. All right, Angie.”

    Angie said, “Good. I’m glad.” What a tease.

    Billy looked at my face. “What happened to you?”

    “Had a fight with a nun,” I said.

    Billy said, “You look like you had a fight with a truck,” and looked at Angie.

    Angie gave it a small giggle, and I didn’t know who I wanted to pitch out the window more.

    “You run that check for us, Billy?”

    “’Course, man. ‘Course. You owe me big time on this one too, I’ll tell ya.”

    I raised my eyebrows. “Billy, remember who you’re talking to.”

    Billy thought about it. Thought about the ten years he’d be doing in Walpole, fetching cigarettes for his boyfriend, Rolf the Animal, if we hadn’t saved him. His yellow skin whitened considerably, and he said, “Sorry, man. You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a somewhat greasy, very wrinkled piece of paper on my desk.

    “What am I looking at here, Billy?”

    “Jenna Angeline’s reference check,” he said. “Copped from our Jamaica Plain office. She cashed a check there on Tuesday.”

    It was greasy, it was wrinkled, but it was gold. Jenna had listed four references, all personal. Under the Job heading, she’d written, “Self-employed,” in a small, birdlike scrawl. In the personal references she’d listed four sisters. Three lived in Alabama, in or around Mobile. One lived in Wickham, Massachusetts. Simone Angeline of 1254 Merrimack Avenue.

    Billy handed me another piece of paper a Xerox of the check Jenna had cashed. The check was signed by Simone Angeline. If Billy hadn’t been such a slimy-looking dude, I would have kissed him.

    

***

    

    After Billy left, I finally got up the nerve to take a look in the mirror. I’d avoided it all last night and this morning. My hair’s short enough to make do with a finger comb, so after my shower this morning, that’s exactly what I did. I’d skipped shaving too, and if I had a little stubble, I told myself it was hip, very GQ.

    I crossed the office and entered the tiny cubicle that someone had once referred to as “the bathroom.” It’s got a toilet all right, but even that’s in miniature, and I always feel like an adult locked in a preschool whenever I sit on it and my knees hit my chin. I shut the door behind me and raised my head from the munchkin sink and looked in the mirror.

    If I hadn’t been me, I wouldn’t have recognized my face. My lips were blown up to twice their size and looked like they’d French-kissed a weed whacker. My left eye was fringed by a thick rope of dark brown and the cornea was streaked with bright red threads of blood. The skin along my temple had split when Blue Cap hit me with the butt of the Uzi, and while I slept, the blood had clotted in some hair. The right side of my forehead where I assume I’d hit the school wall was raw and scraped. If I wasn’t the manly detective type, I might have wept.

    Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well. But I have a scar the size and texture of a jellyfish on my abdomen already, and you’d be surprised how your sense of self changes when you can’t take your shirt off at the beach. In my more private moments, I pull up my shirt and look at it, tell myself it doesn’t matter, but every time a woman has felt it under her palm late at night, propped herself up on a pillow and asked me about it, I’ve made my explanation as quick as possible, closed the doors to my past as soon as they’ve opened, and not once, even when Angie’s asked, have I told the truth. Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they’re also the first forms of protection I ever knew.

    The Hero always gave me a dope slap upside the head whenever he caught me looking in the mirror. “Men built those things so women would have something to do,” he’d say. Hero. Philosopher. My father, the Renaissance man.

    When I was sixteen, I had deep blue eyes and a nice smile, and little else to take confidence in, hanging around the Hero. And if I was still sixteen, staring into the mirror, working up some nerve, telling myself tonight I’d finally do something about the Hero, I’d definitely be at a loss.

    But now, damnit, I had a genuine case to solve, a Jenna Angeline to locate, an impatient partner on the other side of the door, a gun in my holster, detective’s license in my wallet, and...a face that looked like it belonged to a Flannery O’Connor character. Ah, vanity.

    

***

    

    When I opened the door, Angie was rifling through her purse, probably looking for a misplaced microwave or an old car. She looked up. “You ready?”

    “I’m ready.”

    She pulled a stun gun from the purse. “What’s this guy look like again?”

    I said, “Last night he was wearing a blue cap and wraparounds. But I don’t know if it’s like his regular uniform or anything.” I opened the door. “Ange, you won’t need the stun gun. If you spot him, lay back. We just want to verify that he’s still around.”

    Angie looked at the stun gun. “It’s not for him, it’s for me. Case I need something to keep me awake in cow country.”

    Wickham is sixty miles from Boston, so Angie thinks they don’t have telephones yet.

    I said, “You can take the girl out of the city... “

    “But you’ll have to shoot her first,” she said and headed down the stairs.

    She stayed in the church, giving me a minute head start and watching the street through the lower opening of a stained-glass window.

    I crossed the street to what I call my “company car.” It’s a dark green 1979 Volaré. The Vobeast. It looks like shit, sounds like shit, drives like shit, and generally fits in well in most of the places where I have to work. I opened the door, half expecting to hear a rush of feet on the street behind me, followed by the snap of a weapon hitting the back of my skull. That’s the thing about being a victim; you start to think it’ll happen to you on a regular basis. Suddenly everything looks suspect and any brightness you may have noticed the day before has dissipated into the shadows. And the shadows are everywhere. It’s living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

    But nothing happened this time. I didn’t see Blue Cap in my rearview as I pulled a U-turn and headed for the expressway. But then, unless he’d really enjoyed last night’s encounter, I didn’t think I would see him again; I’d just have to assume he was there. I pushed the Vobeast down the avenue, then turned onto the northern on-ramp for I-93 and drove downtown.

    Twenty minutes later I was on Storrow Drive, the Charles River running by in copper flashes on my right. A couple of Mass. General nurses lunched on the lawn; a man ran over one of the footbridges with a mammoth chocolate Chow beside him. For a moment, I thought of picking one up for myself. Probably do a hell of a lot better job protecting me than Harold the Panda ever would. But then, I didn’t really need an attack dog; I had Bubba. By the boathouse, I saw a group of BU or Emerson students, stuck in the city for the summer, passing around a bottle of wine. Wild kids. Probably had some brie and crackers in their backpacks, too.

    I got off at Beacon Street, U-turned again onto the service road, and banged a quick right onto Revere Street, following its cobblestones across Charles Street and up Beacon Hill. No one behind me.

    I turned again onto Myrtle Street, the whole street no wider than a piece of dental floss, the tall colonial buildings squeezing in on me. It’s impossible to follow someone in Beacon Hill without being spotted. The streets were built before cars, and I presume, before fat or tall people.

    Back when Boston was this wonderful mythic world of midget aerobics instructors, Beacon Hill must have seemed roomy. But now, it’s cramped and narrow and shares more than a little in common with an old French provincial town very pleasing to the eye, but functionally a disaster. A truck stopped for a delivery on the Hill can back up traffic for a mile. The streets are apt to be one-way in a northern direction for two or three blocks, then arbitrarily turn one-way to the south. This usually captures the average driver unaware and forces him to turn onto yet another narrow street with much the same problem, and before he knows it, he’s back on Cambridge or Charles or Beacon Street, looking up at the Hill, wondering how the hell he ever ended up down here again, but getting the distinct, if irrational, impression that the Hill itself threw him off.

    It’s a wonderful place to be a snob. The homes are gorgeous red brick. The parking spaces are guarded by the Boston Police. The small cafés and shops are manned by imperious owners who close their doors whenever someone they don’t recognize looks as if he may want to enter. And no one can find your address unless you, personally, draw them a map.

    I looked in my rearview as I crested the Hill, the gold dome of the State House peeking out through the wrought-iron fence of a roof garden ahead of me. Two blocks behind me, I saw a car driving slowly, the driver’s head turning left and right as if looking for an unfamiliar address.

    I took a left on Joy Street and coasted the four blocks down to Cambridge Street. As the light turned green and I crossed the intersection, I saw the same car coasting down the hill behind me. At the very top of Joy Street, another car appeared a station wagon with a broken luggage rack on the roof. I couldn’t see the driver, but I knew it was Angie. She’d busted the luggage rack with a hammer one morning, pretending the flimsy metal was Phil.

    I turned left on Cambridge Street and drove a few blocks to the Charles Plaza. I pulled into the parking lot, took the ticket at the gate only three dollars per half hour; what a bargain and pulled across the lot until I was in front of the Holiday Inn. I walked inside the hotel like I had business there, turned right past the front desk and hopped the elevator to the third floor. I walked down the corridor until I found a window and stared down into the parking lot.

    Blue Cap wasn’t wearing a blue cap today. He had on a white bicycler’s cap, the brim pushed back flat against his forehead. He still wore the wraparounds, though, and a white Nike T-shirt and black sweatpants. He stood just outside of his car a white Nissan Pulsar with black racing stripes and leaned on the open door while he decided if he should follow me in or not. I couldn’t see his license plate numbers from this angle, and from this height, I could only guess at his age, but I put him at twenty to twenty-five. He was big six two or so and he looked like he knew his way around a Nautilus machine.

    Out on Cambridge Street, Angie’s car idled, double-parked.

    I looked back at Blue Cap. No point sticking around. He’d follow me into the hotel or he wouldn’t. Either way, it didn’t make any difference.

    I took the stairs down to the basement, opened a door onto a service driveway that smelled of exhaust fumes, and jumped off the loading dock. I walked past a dumpster that reeked of slowly stewing fruit and worked my way down onto Blossom Street. I took my time, but before you could say slick-as-a-wet-goose, I was back on Cambridge Street.

    All over Boston, in places you’d never notice, there are garages. It doesn’t compensate for a city as short on parking space as Moscow is on toilet paper, but at least the rental fees are exorbitant. I stepped into one between a hair salon and a florist, strolled along the garage until I came to space number eighteen, and removed the slipcover from my baby.

    Every boy needs a toy. Mine is a 1959 Porsche Roadster convertible. It’s royal blue, with a wood finish steering wheel and a twin cowl cockpit. True, “cockpit” is a term usually reserved for jets, but when I’ve taken this thing up to a hundred and forty or so, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that liftoff’s only a few more blurred road signs away. The interior is a rich white leather. The stick shift gleams like polished pewter. The horn has a keen horse emblem on it. I work on it more than I drive it, pampering it on weekends, polishing it, bringing it new parts. I’m proud to say I’ve never gone so far as to give it a name, but Angie says that’s only because I lack the imagination.

    It started with the growl of a jungle cat on the first turn of the key. I took a baseball cap from under the seat, slipped off my jacket, adjusted my sunglasses, and left the garage.

    Angie was still double-parked in front of the Plaza, which meant Blue Cap was present and accounted for. I waved and pulled out onto Cambridge, heading toward the river. She was still behind me when I reached Storrow Drive, but by the time I got to I-93, I’d left her in the dust, simply because I could. Or maybe, simply because I’m so immature. One of the two.

EIGHT

    

    The drive to Wickham is not a fun one. You have to switch interchanges every third mile or so, and one wrong turn dumps you in New Hampshire, trying to talk directions with eastern rednecks who don’t speak the language. To top it off, there’s nothing to look at but the occasional industrial park, or as you get closer to the belt of towns that lie along the Merrimack River, the Merrimack River. Not a pleasant sight. Usually you have to look down a sewer grate to find water as brown and sluggish as the Merrimack’s a casualty of the textile business that built a lot of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The next thing you see as you drive through this region are the mills themselves, and the sky turns to soot.

    I had Exile on Main St. pumping through my speakers the whole way so I didn’t mind it that much, and by the time I found Merrimack Avenue, the only thing I was worried about was leaving the car unattended.

    Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It’s dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who’ve long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It’s a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.

    Merrimack Avenue is the main strip. Simone Angeline’s address was a good ways past the center of town the bars, gas stations, mills, and clothing factories were five miles behind me before I reached the twelve hundred block. Angie was back in my rearview mirror by then, and she passed me when I pulled onto a side street and parked the car. I set the Chapman lock and disengaged the radio, taking it with me as I got out. I took one last look back at the car and hoped that we would find Jenna soon. Real soon.

    I didn’t win my car in a card game or have it bequeathed to me by an overly generous client. I banked my money and waited, banked some more money and waited. Finally I saw it advertised and I went to the bank for a loan. I sat through an excruciating interview with a condescending loan officer who reminded me of every bitter, high-school geek who sees his adult life as a mission to avenge adolescence by being a total prick to anyone he assumes would have treated him badly in homeroom. Luckily, my practice grew and my fees rose and I soon had that monkey off my back. But I still pay the price of being constantly anxious about the only material possession I’ve ever given a damn about.

    I slid into the passenger seat of Angie’s car and she took my hand. “Don’t wowwy, baby, nothing will happen to your pride and joy. I promise.”

    She’s funny enough to shoot sometimes.

    I said, “Well, least in this neighborhood, nobody will be suspicious of this thing.”

    She said, “Oh, good one. You ever think of going into stand-up?”

    It went like that. We sat in the car and passed around a can of Pepsi and waited for our meal ticket to make a guest appearance.

    By six o’clock we were cramped and sick of each other and even sicker of looking at 1254 Merrimack Avenue. It was a faded A-frame that might have been pink once. A Puerto Rican family had entered it an hour ago, and we’d watched a light go on in the second-floor apartment a minute or so later. Short of our second can of Pepsi exploding all over the dashboard when I opened it, that was the closest we’d come to excitement in four hours.

    I was looking through the tape collection on Angie’s floor, trying to find a group I’d heard of, when she said, “Heads up.”

    A black woman rope thin, with a stiff, almost regal bearing was stepping from an ‘81 Honda Civic, her right arm around a bag of groceries, resting them on her hip. She looked like the picture of Jenna, but younger by a good seven or eight years. She also seemed to have too much energy for the tired woman in the photograph. She slammed the car door with her free hip, a hard, swift move that would have left Gretzky on the ice with a wet ass. She marched to the front door of the house, slid her key into the lock, and disappeared inside. A few minutes later, she appeared in silhouette by the window, a telephone receiver to her ear.

    Angie said, “How do you want to play it?”

    “Wait,” I said.

    She shifted in her seat. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She held her chin with her fingers, moved it around in a semicircle for a moment. “You don’t think Jenna’s in there?”

    “No. Since she disappeared, she’s played it relatively careful. She has to know her apartment’s been trashed. And the beating the guy in the schoolyard gave me tells me she’s probably into more than the petty theft we’re after her for. With people like that after her maybe this Roland guy too I don’t think she’s going to set herself up in her sister’s place.”

    Angie half shrugged, half nodded in that way she has, and lit a cigarette. She hung her arm out the window and the gray smoke pooled by the rearview mirror, then separated into equal strands and floated out the windows. She said, “If we’re smart enough to figure out where she is, wouldn’t someone else be? We can’t be the only ones who know about the sister.”

    I thought about it. It made sense. If whoever “they” were had put a tail on me in the hopes of following me to Jenna, then they must have put a tail on Simone. “Shit.”

    “Now, what do you want to do?”

    “Wait,” I repeated, and she groaned. I said, “We follow Simone when she goes somewhere ”

    “If she goes somewhere.”

    “Positive energy, please. When she goes somewhere, we follow, but we hang back first, see if we have company.”

    “And if our company is already on to us? If they’re watching us right now as we speak, thinking the same thing? What then?”

    I resisted the urge to turn around and look for other cars with two immobile occupants, staring in our direction. “We deal with it,” I said.

    She frowned. “You always say that when you don’t have a clue.”

    “Do not,” I said.

    At seven-fifteen, things started happening.

    Simone, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and generic sneakers the color of an oyster, walked out of the house with determination and opened her car the same way. I wondered if she did everything the same way with that set look on her face, that the-hell-with-you-if-you-can’t-keep-up air about her. Could people sleep that way?

    She went straight up Merrimack, so we gave her a few blocks, waiting to see if we were the only interested party. It seemed to be the case, and if not, I wasn’t about to lose my only lead. We pulled out, and with one last look at my thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of automobile insurance company estimate, mind you we tailed her through Wickham. She went straight through the center of town and hopped on I-495. I was tired of being in the car and hoped like hell she didn’t have Jenna stowed away in Canada. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she got off the expressway a few miles later, turning off into Lansington.

    If possible, Lansington is uglier than Wickham, but in imperceptible ways. In most respects, they’re identical. Lansington just feels dingier.

    We were waiting at a traffic light near the center of town, but when the light turned green, Simone didn’t move. I felt two cold spades press together around my heart and Angie said, “Shit. Think she’s on to us?”

    I said, “Use the horn.”

    She did and Simone’s hand went up in apology as she realized the light had changed. It was the first undetermined thing she’d done since I’d seen her, and it felt like a jump start: we were close.

    All around us were squat two-story clapboard buildings, circa the late 1800s. Trees were sparse and gnarled in hideous ways where we saw them. The traffic lights were old, still round, no Walk/Don’t Walk signals or neon pictures for those who couldn’t understand the Walk/Don’t Walk parts. The lights made clicking sounds when they changed, and as we drifted along the two-lane road, I felt that we could just as easily have been in rural Georgia or West Virginia.

    Ahead of us, Simone’s left blinker went on, and a fraction of a second later, she pulled off the road into a small dirt parking lot filled with pickup trucks, a Winnebago, a couple of dusty American sports cars, and those wretched testaments to Detroit’s bad taste El Caminos. Two of them. A car that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a truck; a truck that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a car obscene, hybrid results.

    Angie kept going and a half mile down the road, we U-turned and went back. The parking lot belonged to a bar. Just like Wickham, you wouldn’t have known what it was without the small neon Miller High Life signs in the windows. It was a low two-story building, a little deeper than most of the houses, stretching back an extra ten yards or so. From inside I could hear glasses clinking, a smattering of laughter, the babble of voices, and a Bon Jovi song coming off the jukebox. I amended that last thought; maybe it was just a stereo tuned to a radio station and no one inside had actually paid money to listen to Bon Jovi. Then I looked at the pickups and the bar again, and I wasn’t hopeful.

    Angie said, “We going to wait here too?”

    “Nope. Going in.”

    “Goody.” She looked at the building. “Thank God I’m licensed to carry a firearm.” She checked the load in her .38.

    “Damn straight,” I said, climbing out of the car. “First thing you do when we get inside, shoot the stereo.”

    

***

    

    Simone was nowhere in sight when we entered. This was pretty easy to ascertain, because the moment we stepped through the door, everyone stopped moving.

    I was wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and a baseball cap. My face looked like I’d had a disagreement with a pit bull, and the jacket that covered my gun was a raggy, faded army thing. I fit right in.

    Angie was wearing a dark blue football jacket with white leather sleeves over a loose white cotton shirt that hung untucked over a pair of black leggings.

    Guess which one of us they were looking at.

    I looked at Angie. New Bedford isn’t terribly far from here. Big Dan’s Bar is in New Bedford. That’s where a bunch of guys threw a girl down on a pool table and had their version of fun at her expense while the rest of the bar cheered them on. I looked at the patrons of this bar a Heinz 57 mix of eastern rednecks, white trash, mill workers only recently immigrated from the Third World, Portuguese, a couple of black guys all poor and hostile and gearing up to let off some steam. Probably came here because Big Dan’s was closed. I looked at Angie again. I wasn’t worried about her; I was considering what would happen to my business if my partner shot the dicks off a barful of people in Lansington. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think we’d be able to keep that office in the church.

    The barroom was larger than it looked from the outside. To my left, just before the bar itself, was a narrow staircase of unfinished wood. The bar ran halfway down the floor on the left side. Across from it were a few tables for two against a dark plywood wall. Past the bar, the place opened up and I could see pinball and video machines on the left and the corner of a pool table on the right. A pool table. Terrific.

    The place was medium to crowded. Just about everyone wore a baseball cap, even those who I assume were women. A few people had mixed drinks, but for the most part, this was Budweiser country.

    We walked up to the bar and folks went back to what they were doing, or pretending to.

    The bartender was a young guy, good-looking and bleached blond, but a townie if he was working this place. He gave me a slight smile. Then he gave one to Angie that, in comparison, looked as if his lips exploded. “Hi. What can I get you?” He leaned on the bar and looked into her eyes.

    Angie said, “Two Buds.”

    “My pleasure,” Blondie said.

    “I’ll bet,” she said and smiled.

    She does this all the time. Flirts her ass off with everyone but me. If I wasn’t such a rock of self-confidence, it would annoy me.

    My luck was good tonight, though. I felt it the moment the Bon Jovi song ended. While Blondie went for the beers, I looked at the stairs. In what passes for a moment of stillness in a bar, I could hear people moving around overhead.

    When Blondie placed both beers in front of Angie, I said, “Is there a back door to this place?”

    He turned his head slowly in my direction, looking at me as if I’d just bumped his knee stepping onto the bus. “Yeah,” he said with extreme slowness and nodded in the direction of the pool table. Through the smoke that hung over the back I saw the door. He was looking at Angie again, but out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Why, you planning on sticking the place up?”

    “No,” I said. I flipped through all the cards in my wallet until I found the right one. “I’m planning on citing you for building code violations. Lots of them, asshole.” I flipped the card on the bar. It said, “Lewis Prine, State Building Inspector.” Lewis made the mistake of leaving me unattended in his office once.

    Blondie stopped looking at Angie, though I could see it hurt. He stepped back a bit and looked at the card. “Don’t you guys have badges or something?”

    I had one of those too. Good thing about badges, most of them look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so I don’t have to carry fifty of them around with me. I flipped it at him, then put it back in my pocket. “All you got’s that one back door?” I said.

    “Yeah,” he said. Nervous. “Why?”

    “Why? Why? Where’s the owner?”

    “Huh?”

    “The owner. The owner.”

    “Bob? He’s gone home for the night.”

    My luck was still holding. I said, “Son, how many floors you got here?”

    He looked at me as if I’d just asked what the atmospheric density of Pluto was. “Floors? Uh, two. We got two. Rooming house’s upstairs.”

    “Two,” I repeated with an air of moral revulsion. “Two floors and the only exits are on the first.”

    “Yeah,” he said.

    “‘Yeah’? How people on the second floor supposed to get out if there’s a fire?”

    “A window?” he suggested.

    “A window.” I shook my head. “How about I take you up there right now, see how well you land jumping out a fucking window? A window. Jesus.”

    Angie crossed her legs, sipping her beer, enjoying this.

    Blondie said, “Well...”

    I said, “Well what?” I gave Angie the get-ready look. She raised her eyebrows and downed her beer happily. “Boy,” I said, “you’re gonna learn some shit tonight,” and I crossed the floor to the plywood wall and pulled the fire alarm.

    No one in the barroom ran for an exit. No one really moved at all. They just turned their heads and looked at me. They seemed a bit pissed off.

    But on the second floor, no one could tell if there was a fire or not. Bars always smell like smoke.

    A rather large woman with a rather small sheet over her nude body and a skinny guy with a lot less coverage came down first. They barely glanced at the bar before they hopped out the door like rabbits during hunting season.

    Two kids were next. Sixteen or so, both with a little acne. Probably registered as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They flattened against the wall as soon as they cleared the last step, staring at all of us, chests heaving.

    Then suddenly, Simone was there, looking very put out, looking to find someone responsible, her eyes working their way from Blondie, around the crowd of hicks, and finally settling on moi. I glanced at her but passed by, my eyes slowing and holding at a point just over her shoulder.

    On Jenna Angeline.

    Angie left my shoulder and disappeared around the corner, on the other side of the plywood wall. I waited, my eyes fixed on Jenna Angeline, hers finally meeting mine. They were eyes that screamed resignation. Old, old eyes. Brown and numb and too beaten to show fear. Or joy. Or life. Something passed through them, briefly, and I knew that she recognized me. Not who I was. What I represented. I was just another form of cop or collection agent or landlord or boss. I was authority, and I was coming to decide something about her life whether she liked it or not. She recognized me all right.

    Angie had found the main cables and the clarion blast bleated away to nothing in one wheezing second.

    I was the center of attention now, and I knew I was about to face resistance, at the very least from the Angeline sisters. Everyone except them, the bartender, and a big, going-to-fat, ex-football player type to my right faded slightly behind a haze of gauze. The football player was leaning forward on his toes and Blondie had his hand under the bar. Neither of the Angeline sisters looked like they had any intention of moving without help from a crane.

    My voice seemed loud and hoarse when I said, “Jenna, I need to talk to you.”

    Simone grabbed her sister’s arm and said, “Come on, Jenna, let’s go,” and started leading her toward the door.

    I shook my head and stepped in front of the door, my hand already in my jacket as the football player made his move. Another hero. Probably a member of the auxiliary fire department. His right hand was heading toward my shoulder and his mouth was open, a gruff voice saying, “Hey, asshole, leave the women alone.” Before he reached my shoulder, my hand cleared my jacket and whacked his arm away and brushed my gun against his lips.

    I said, “Excuse me?” and dug the muzzle of the gun hard against his upper lip.

    He looked at the gun. He didn’t say anything.

    I didn’t move my head, just kept my eyes on the barroom, looked everyone in the eye who’d meet mine. I felt Angie beside me, her gun steady, her breathing shallow. She said, “Jenna, Simone, I want you to get in your car and drive to the house in Wickham. We’ll be right behind you and if you try to take off, believe me, our car’s a lot faster than yours and we’ll end up talking in a ditch somewhere.”

    I looked at Simone. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be dead now.”

    Simone gave off some sort of body language that only a sister would recognize, because Jenna put a hand on her arm. “We do what they say, Simone.”

    Angie opened the door behind me. Jenna and Simone passed by and walked out. I looked at Football Player, then pushed his face back with the gun. I felt the weight of it in my arm, the muscles beginning to ache, my hand stiffening and sweat popping out of the glands all over my body.

    Football Player met my eyes and I could see he was thinking about being a hero again.

    I waited. I leveled the gun and said, “Come on.”

    Angie said, “Not here. Let’s go.” She took my elbow, and we backed out of the bar into the night.

NINE

    

    “Sit down, Simone. Please.” Everything Jenna said came out as a weary plea.

    We’d been back at the house for ten minutes and had spent all our time dealing with Simone’s ego. So far, she’d tried to push past me twice, and now she was walking toward the phone.

    “Man don’t come into my house, tell me how to act,” she told Jenna, then looked at Angie. “And the man ain’t going to shoot me with the neighbors awake upstairs.” She’d started to believe that by the time she reached the phone.

    I said, “Simone, who’re you going to call? The police? Fine.”

    Jenna said, “Put the phone down, Simone. Please.”

    Angie looked bored and antsy. Patience is not one of her prime virtues. She walked over and pulled the phone cord out of the wall.

    I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Jenna, I’m a private investigator, and before any of us decides to do anything else, I have to talk to you.”

    Simone looked at the phone, then at Angie and me, finally at her sister. She said, “Your bed, girl, lie in it,” and sat down on the couch.

    Angie sat beside her. “You have a very nice place here.”

    This was true. It was small, and the outside was nothing to look at, and it wasn’t like there was a baby grand by the window, but Simone definitely had an eye. The floor had been stripped, the blonde wood underneath polished to a high gloss. The couch where Simone and Angie sat was a light cream color with an oversize throw pillow that Angie was itching to hug to her chest. Jenna sat in a mahogany shell chair to the right of the couch and I leaned on its twin across from her. Four feet from the windows the floor rose eight inches and a small alcove had been created around the two windows facing the street, cushions on the window seats, a small wooden magazine rack, a hanging plant overhead, and the wooden telephone desk. A bookcase ran the length of the half wall behind Jenna and I saw poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Amiri Baraka, plus novels by Baldwin and Wright as well as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Pete Dexter, Walker Percy, and Charles Johnson.

    I looked at Simone. “Where’d you go to school?”

    She said, “Tuskegee,” a little surprised.

    “Good school.” A friend of mine played ball there for a year before he found out he wasn’t good enough. I said, “Nice book collection.”

    “You just surprised the nigger knows how to read.”

    I sighed. “Right. That’s it, Simone.” I said to Jenna, “Why’d you quit your job?”

    Jenna said, “People quit their jobs every day.”

    “This is true,” I said, “but why’d you quit yours?”

    She said, “I didn’t want to work for them no more. Plain and simple.”

    “And when you raided their files, how plain and simple was that?”

    Jenna looked confused. So did Simone. It’s possible they actually were, but then, if she had stolen the files, looking completely aware of what I was talking about probably wasn’t the best idea. Simone said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

    Jenna was watching me steadily, her hands kneading the fabric of her skirt. She was considering something and, for a moment, the intelligence that entered her eyes swamped all that weariness like a wave over a rowboat. Then it was gone again and the eyes dulled. She said, “Simone, I’d like to talk to this man alone for a few minutes.”

    Simone didn’t like it, but after a minute or so, she and Angie went into the kitchen. Simone’s voice was loud and unhappy, but Angie has a way with loud and unhappy. You don’t live in a marriage of arbitrary rages, unfounded jealousies, and sudden accusations without growing adept at dealing with another’s hostility in a small room. When dealing with whiners or ragers of any sort those who always see themselves as victims of life’s vast conspiracy to ruin their day or are unreasonable or choking on some predictable, paltry anger Angie’s gaze grows flat and level, her head and body become as still as a statue, and the whiner or the rager vents until that gaze forces them to sputter, to weaken, to exhaust themselves. You either wither under the calm logic of it, blanch in the face of its daunting maturity, or you lash out against it, like Phil, and negate yourself. I know; I’ve been the focus of that gaze a time or two myself.

    In the living room, Jenna’s eyes were fastened firmly on the floor and if she kneaded that skirt any harder the thread would begin pooling at her feet. She said, “Whyn’t you tell me why you’ve come up here for me.”

    I thought about it. I’ve been wrong about people before. Several times. I go on the presumption that everyone’s full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead. But every now and then, I think a person has proven himself otherwise, only to discover the shit later, usually in painful ways. Jenna didn’t strike me as a liar. She didn’t look like she knew how, but often it’s people just like that who wouldn’t know the truth if it was wearing an ID card on its lapel.

    I said, “You have certain documents. I was hired to retrieve them.” I spread my hands, palms up. “Simple as that.”

    “Documents?” she said, spitting it. “Documents. Damn.” She stood and began pacing and suddenly she looked a lot stronger than her sister, a lot more determined.

    She had no trouble meeting my eyes now. Hers were red and hard, and I realized, once again, that people aren’t born weary and beaten, they get that way.

    She said, “Let me tell you, Mr. Kenzie” and pointed a stiff finger at me ”that’s one hell of a funny word. ‘Documents.’“Her head was down again and she was pacing in a tight circle with borders only she could see. “Documents,” she said again. “Well, OK, call them what you will. Yes, sir. Call them what you will.”

    “What would you call them, Mrs. Angeline?”

    “I ain’t no missus.”

    “OK. What would you call them, Ms. Angeline?”

    She looked at me, her whole body beginning to quiver with rage. The red of her eyes had darkened and her chin was pointed out straight and unyielding. She said, “All my life, nobody ever need me. Know what I mean?”

    I shrugged.

    “Need,” she said. “Nobody ever need me. People want me, sure. For a few hours or so, a week maybe, they say, ‘Jenna clean room one-oh-five,’ or ‘Jenna, run down the store for me,’ or real sweet they say, ‘Jenna, honey, come on over here and lie down a spell.’ But then, when they done, I’m just a piece of furniture again. Don’t care if I’m around; don’t care if I ain’t. People can always find someone to clean for ‘em, or run to the store for ‘em, or lie down with ‘em.”

    She walked back to her chair and rummaged through her purse until she found a pack of cigarettes. “Hadn’t smoked in ten years until a few days ago.” She lit one, blew the smoke out in a rush that clouded the small room. “Ain’t no documents, Mr. Kenzie. You understand? Ain’t no documents.”

    “Then what ”

    “There are things. There are things.” She nodded to herself, stabbed her cigarette downward into the air, kept pacing.

    I leaned forward in my chair a bit, my head following her like I was at Wimbledon. I said, “What things, Ms. Angeline?”

    “You know, Mr. Kenzie,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, “all of a sudden, everyone looking for me, hiring people like yourself, hiring worse people probably, trying to find Jenna, to talk to Jenna, to get what Jenna got. All of a sudden, everyone need Jenna.” She crossed the floor quickly to me, her cigarette poised over me like a butcher knife, her jaw clenched. She said, “Nobody getting what I got, Mr. Kenzie. You hear me? No one. ‘Cept who I decide to give it to. I make the decision. I get what I want. I do a little using myself. Send someone to the store for me, maybe. See people work for me for a change. See them fade into furniture when I don’t have no use for them anymore.” She stabbed the glowing cigarette in toward my eye. “I decide. Jenna Angeline.” She leaned back a bit, took a drag on the cigarette. “And what I got ain’t for sale.”

    “Then what’s it for?”

    “Justice,” she said through a stream of smoke. “And lots of it. People going to be in pain, Mr. Kenzie.”

    I looked at her hand, shaking so badly the cigarette quivered up and down like a recently abandoned diving board. I heard the anguish in her voice a torn, slightly hollow sound and saw its ravages on her face. She was a wreck of a person, Jenna Angeline. A heart beating fast in a shell of a body. She was scared and tired and angry and howling at the world, but unlike most people in the same situation, she was dangerous because she had something that, at least as far as she was concerned, would give her something back in this world. But the world usually doesn’t work that way, and people like Jenna are time bombs; they might take a few people down with them, but they’ll go up in the inferno too.

    I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Jenna, but I was even more certain that I wasn’t going to get hit with any shrapnel if she self-destructed. I said, “Jenna, here’s my problem: we call this sort of case a ‘find-and-a-phone-call’ because that’s pretty much all I’m paid to do find you and call the client and then go on my merry way. Once I make the phone call, I’m out of it. The client usually brings in the law or deals with it personally or whatever. But I don’t stick around to find out. I’m ”

    “A dog,” she said. “You run around with your nose on the ground, sniffing through bushes and piles of warm shit until you find the fox. Then you step back and let the hunters shoot it dead.” She stabbed out her cigarette.

    It wasn’t the analogy I would have chosen, but it wasn’t entirely false no matter what I wanted to think. Jenna sat back down and looked at me and I held her dark eyes. They had the odd mixture of terror and resilient bravery of a cat backed into a corner; the look of someone who isn’t sure she’s up to the task, but has decided there’s no other way out but straight ahead. It’s the look of the crumbling soul trying to pull it all together for one last worthwhile breath. It’s not a look I’ve ever seen in the eyes of people like Sterling Mulkern or Jim Vurnan or Brian Paulson. I never saw it on the Hero’s face or a president’s or a captain of industry’s. But I’ve seen it in the faces of most everyone else.

    “Jenna, you tell me what you think I should do.”

    “Who hired you?”

    I shook my head.

    “Well, it was either Senator Mulkern or Socia, and Socia’d just have you shoot me where I sit, so it got to be Senator Mulkern.”

    Socia? “Is Socia any relation to Roland?” I asked.

    I could have broadsided her with a wrecking ball and had less impact. She closed her eyes for a moment and rocked in place. “What you know about Roland?”

    “I know he’s bad news.”

    “You stay away from Roland,” she said. “You hear? Away from him.”

    “That’s what people keep telling me.”

    “Well,” she said, “you listen.”

    “Who’s Roland?” I asked.

    She shook her head.

    “OK. Who’s Socia?”

    Another head shake.

    “I can’t help you, Jenna, if ”

    “Ain’t asking for your help,” she said.

    “Fine,” I said. I stood up and walked over to the phone. I reconnected it, began to dial.

    She said, “What’re you doing?”

    I said, “Calling my client. You can talk to him. My job’s done.”

    She said, “Wait.”

    I shook my head. “Sterling Mulkern, please.”

    An electronic voice was telling me the time when Jenna pulled the phone cord out of the wall again. I turned and looked at her.

    She said, “You got to trust me.”

    “No, I don’t. I can leave you here and walk down to the nearest phone booth and make my call there.”

    “But what if ?”

    “What if what?” I said. “Lady, I got better things to do than fuck around with you. You got a card to play? Play it.”

    She said, “What sort of documents you supposed to be looking for?”

    No point in lying. I said, “They pertain to an upcoming bill.”

    “Oh, they do?” she said. “Well, Mr. Kenzie, someone been lying to you. What I got don’t have nothing to do with bills and politics or the State House.”

    Everything has to do with politics in this town, but I let it go. “What do they pertain No, fuck it. What do you got, Ms. Angeline?”

    “I got some things in a safety-deposit box in Boston. Now, you want to find out what those things are, you come with me tomorrow when the banks open, and we’ll see what you’re made of.”

    “Why should I?” I said. “Why shouldn’t I call my client right now?”

    She said, “I think I know people pretty well, Mr. Kenzie. Ain’t much of a talent for a poor black woman to have, but it’s the only one I got. And you, well, maybe you don’t mind being someone’s dog every now and again, but you sure ain’t nobody’s bag boy.”

TEN

    

    Angie said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” It came out in a harsh whisper. We were sitting in the alcove, looking out at the street. Jenna and Simone were in the kitchen, probably having a similar conversation.

    I said, “You don’t like it?”

    “No,” she said, “I don’t like it.”

    “Twelve hours more or less won’t make much difference.”

    “Bullshit. Patrick, this is retarded. We were hired to find her and call Mulkern. OK. We found her. Now, we should be making the call and going home.”

    “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?” she hissed. “How nice. Except you’re not the only component in this equation. This is a partnership.”

    “I know it’s ”

    “Do you? I have a license too. Remember? You may have started the agency, but I’ve put my time in now too. I get shot at and beat up and sit on forty-eight-hour stakeouts too. I’m the one who had to sweat out the DA’s decision whether to indict on Bobby Royce. I have a say, here. Fifty percent of one.”

    “And you say?”

    “I say this is bullshit. I say we do what we were hired to do and go home.”

    “And I say...” I checked myself. “And I ask that you trust me on this and give me till morning. Hell, Ange, we’d end up sitting on her till then anyway. Mulkern’s not going to get out of bed and drive up to Wickham at this time of night anyway.”

    She considered that. Her olive skin was darkened to the shade of coffee in the ill-lit alcove and her full lips were pursed tightly. She said, “Maybe. Maybe.”

    “Then what’s the problem?” I said and started to get up.

    She grabbed my wrist. “Not so fast, boy.”

    “What?”

    “Your logic is good, Skid; it’s your motives I have a problem with.”

    “What motives?”

    “You tell me.”    

    I sat back down, sighed. I looked at her, gave it my best “Who me?” look. “I don’t see that it hurts to learn everything we can while we have the chance. That’s my only motive.”

    She shook her head slowly, watching me steadily and with some sadness. She ran a hand through her hair, let the loose bangs fall back down on her forehead. “She’s not a cat somebody left out in the rain, Patrick. She’s a grown woman who committed a crime.”