The sun was setting in a bloodlike red wash as I drove the Olds out of the parking lot, and while Ted and I cruised down Paseo Grande toward the Murchison Building, darkness slowly thickened in the air. It was night when we parked in the basement garage and rode the elevator up to Ginny's office.

I'd taken her keys. I unlocked the door, snapped on some lights, and we went into the back room. The smell of very well-done coffee reminded me that I'd left the pot plugged in. I offered Ted a cup, then poured myself one and sat down at Ginny's desk to drink it. It tasted like burnt sweat-sock squeezings and motor oil, but I sipped at it anyway as if it were liqueur.

For a couple of different reasons, I didn't want Ted to ask me any questions. He hadn't said anything since we'd left Acton, and I didn't want him to start now. For one thing, I didn't have any answers. And questions would just interfere with what I was trying to do.

Sitting in Ginny's office, at her desk, drinking her coffee, I struggled to think like she did. I didn't have any red-hot flashes of my own, and I knew I wouldn't get any if I tried to force them. So instead I tried to look at things her way.

Six hours ago, she'd been sitting right in this chair and she'd said. Its right here in front of me, but I can't see it.

She'd had all the pieces she needed, she just hadn't been able to put the puzzle together. Now she was in the hospital, doped up with scopolamine or sodium pentothol, and I had to do it for her.

Which wouldn't have made sense to Ted, even if he'd been in the mood to try-which he wasn't. He stood me as long as he could. Then he said in a strained little voice, "Let's go."

I drank some more coffee, almost gagged. "Exactly where?"

"After Last. He's our lead. Somebody can tell us how to find him."

"It's too early," I said. "Pimps don't even think about business until after ten."

"For God's sake!" he protested. "We've got to do something. They're doing it to her right now!"

He was probably right about that. Now would be a good time for them to shoot her up if they wanted her compliant later on-say between eleven and two. But reminding me about things like that only made it harder for me to stay calm. "Goddamn it, Ted!" I began "you think-?"

I stopped. An idea hit me-an obvious idea, something I shouldn't even have had to think about. Something Ginny would've done automatically. But for some reason it felt like more than that.

I grabbed the phone and called her answering service.

When the woman answered, I said, "This is Axbrewder. Ginny Fistoulari is out of circulation for a while. I need to know if there are any messages for her."

Ginny-bless her punctilious heart-had kept my name active with her answering service. In a bored voice, the woman said, "Some man's called four times in the last two hours. Didn't leave a name. He wants her to call him back."

She read off a phone number. I grabbed a pen, scrawled the number on Ginny's blotter. Thanked the woman and hung up.

"What is it?" Ted asked.

I was already dialing. "Do you believe in intuition?"

"Intuition?" he rasped. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"In that case, maybe what you ought to do is pray." The number rang. I shut Ted out of my mind, concentrated everything I had on the secrets hidden in that phone line.

Somebody picked up the phone. A burly male voice said, "Yeah?"

"I was told to call this number." I held the receiver against my head so hard it felt like it was bending.

"Who'd you want?"

"I don't know. They want me. All they left was this number."

"Your name?"

"Fistoulari."

The man covered the mouthpiece. I heard him shouting, but I couldn't tell what he said.

A minute later another man was at the phone. "Fistoulari?"

It wasn't much, but it was all I needed. "No, I'm her partner. My name's Axbrewder. I was with her when you pulled your little doctor act at the hospital."

There was a long silence. Then the voice snarled, "Well, aren't you the clever one? How did you know it was me?"

"I'm good at voices."

"Goodie for you." He paused. "Where's Fistoulari?"

"That little toy you left behind blew her in half." I wasn't about to tell him the truth. I didn't want him to go back and take another crack at her.

"Too bad it didn't get you, too."

"Too bad for you. Kidnapping, dealing, and prostitution aren't bad enough. Now you've got murder one. You're as good as dead, punk."

"Yeah, well-" His voice changed, became softer and greasier. "That's what I want to talk to you about. I heard rumors that bomb didn't do everything it was supposed to. I shouldn't have let him talk me into it in the first place. But that little whore can identify me. I want to deal."

"Deal, hell." I gripped the edge of the desk to keep myself from shouting. "You killed my partner. Why should I deal with you?"

Ted stood in the light across the desk from me. He was chewing on his mustache, and his hands made fists at his sides.

"Because," the voice said, all oil and lechery, "I can give you the man who's responsible for all this. I'm just the errand boy. He's the one who kidnaps the girls. He's the one who gets the junk and pumps it into them until they're ready to do anything. Anything, Axbrewder. He's the one."

I took Ginny's battered old letter opener in my free hand, bent it double, and threw it across the room hard. It took a sizable hunk out of the plaster, "Convince me."

"No problem. But I won't give you time to locate this number. I want to meet."

"That sounds like a great idea. Then you can just shoot me, and there won't be any witnesses left."

"Suit yourself," he snapped. "I'll be in that abandoned Ajax warehouse down at the end of Trujillo. About an hour from now. That's a good place for me, because I'll be able to tell if you bring anybody with you, like maybe the cops. If you do, you'll never find me."

The line went dead. I was left with what felt like a perfect set of my fingerprints indented in the handle of the receiver.

Ted hadn't moved a muscle. He stared at me, dumb with pain and urgency.

I didn't want to say anything, but I forced myself for his sake. "You got most of it. That was Last. He wants-he says he wants to deal. Trade us his boss for some kind of immunity. Either he's telling the truth, or he wants to set me up."

Ted struggled to find his voice. "What're you going to do?"

"What the hell can I do? I'm going to meet him."

"He'll kill you."

"No," I said evenly. "You're not going to let him."

While he absorbed that-or tried to, anyway-I dialed the answering service again. When I got the woman, I said to her, "Listen, this is an emergency. Call the police, get a message to Detective-Lieutenant Acton. That's A-c-t-o-n. Give him that number you just gave me. He can track it down, I can't. Tell him I just talked to Last. L-a-s-t." I hung up before she could think of a reason not to do what I told her.

"That's going to do a lot of good," Ted said acidly.

I shrugged. "It's worth a try." Got to my feet. "I can't tell Acton where we're going. Last says he can spot it if I don't go alone. If he sets me up-or gets away from us- maybe Acton can nail him by staking out that number."

Ted didn't answer. He looked bedraggled, as full of self-pity as wet poultry, but the dull glare in his eyes said as plain as words that Last wasn't going to get away from us.

"Come on," I said softly. "It'll take us a while to get down to that warehouse."

Ted just turned on his heel and walked out of the office.

I unplugged the coffeepot, snapped off the lights, locked the door, and followed him to the elevator.

While we rode down, I said. "It could be that he really does want to deal." I wanted to be sure that Ted wouldn't go off half-cocked. "He's not stupid. And he knew about Ginny and me. This partner of his must've told him we were prying. When he saw us at Alathea's room, he knew he had a chance to get us all.

"After he sets the bomb, he gets out fast. He doesn't want to take any chances."

The doors opened, and we headed into the basement toward the Olds.

"But then he can't find out what happened. So he starts trying to call Ginny. If somebody returns his call, he knows he's in trouble and he better find a way to get off the hook."

I unlocked the Olds. We climbed in.

"If nobody calls back, he can figure he's in the clear. No witnesses who can tie him to the kidnappings. He can go back to pimping for his partner, and his partner will never know the difference."

Ted paid no attention. Instead he stared out through the windshield into the night. Tears streamed down his face again. I locked my jaws to make myself shut up, and concentrated on just driving for a while.

But silence wasn't what he wanted, either. By the time we were down in the valley, working our way south along the river, he'd started to talk himself.

"She's all I have left, Brew." He was gnawing on his mustache the way a drowning man clutches at straws. "You probably don't know what happened to us. Things like that don't happen to hotshots like you." He was bitter-but not at me. "We were happy back then, she and her mother and me. Before Mittie was born, I was a cop, pounding a beat in the days before they switched to squad cars, and we had a little house over on Los Arboles, and we were happy, her mother and me.

"Except her mother didn't like me being a cop on the beat. She wanted me to be a detective. But in those days they had rules that said I was too short to be a detective. When Mittie was born, I quit the cops to work for myself. I wanted her to have a father she could be proud of.

"But it didn't work out like that. People don't hire you for what you can do. They don't know what you can do. They hire you for what you look like. You're built like a tree, and Ginny looks like a steel trap, and people just naturally go to you when they've got something important. They come to me when they've got something grubby.

"Domestic surveillance." His bitterness was so thick it practically fogged up the windows. "Prove that so-and-so is cheating on such-and-such. Then so-and-so can get a fat divorce settlement.

"You know something, Brew?" He chuckled sourly. "They almost put me out of business when they first invented no-fault divorce."

For a while he went back to staring out the window. I hoped that maybe he wasn't going to tell me any more. I was in no shape for it. But he wasn't finished. A couple of minutes later he continued.

"Her mother wasn't impressed. I wasn't doing what she thought detectives did. Solving murders, rescuing kidnapped babies, breaking up drug rings. When Mittie was three, her mother ran off with an insurance salesman." His tears kept running, but he had a curious kind of dignity about it. It didn't make him sob or lose control. His voice didn't even shake as he said, "I raised her myself. She's all there is."

It took me long enough, but I finally figured out why he was so desperate. He was terrified that the pimp we were after would feel the heat and decide to go out of business. Hide under a rock somewhere.

After destroying the evidence.

As long as Alathea remained in a coma, Mittie was all the evidence there was. If the pimp knew that Alathea was still alive, he might've already killed Mittie.

I took a tighter grip on the wheel, pushed down harder on the accelerator. Because there was nothing else I could do.

Even then it took us damn near an hour to get far enough down on Trujillo to reach the vicinity of the Ajax warehouse.

I didn't rush in. When we were still half a mile away, I pulled over to the curb and stopped.

Asked Ted if he had a gun.

He didn't.

I took out the .45 and handed it to him. While he checked it over, I flipped the switch so that the courtesy lights wouldn't come on when I opened my door. Then I said, "Here's what we're going to do. You're going to hide down under the dash. When I get to that warehouse, I'll park in the darkest place I can find. I'll get out, leave the door open. FU go into the warehouse wherever I can find a door.

"Give me two minutes. Then sneak out and get around the back somehow. Come in looking for me. Keeping me alive is up to you. I won't be able to do much for myself. This is his turf."                                  „

Ted didn't say anything. He just slapped the clip back into the .45 and ducked down under the dash.

I put the Olds in gear and drove the rest of the way down Trujillo.

The city fathers don't spend much on streetlights down in that part of town. The whole place was black as a grave. But the sky still held enough light to silhouette the warehouse, and my headlights picked out the rest.

The building stood behind a steel mesh fence, but the gates were gone. That was the only way in-which was one good reason why Last had chosen it. But that wasn't the only reason. It was a three-story building. Battered steel siding covered the first two floors. The top floor was lined with windows on all sides. He'd probably been up there for the past half hour, watching. If he saw anything he didn't like, he could get out of there fast.

The moon wasn't up yet. Nothing offered me a particularly dark place to park. I coasted up to the front of the building, positioned the Olds so that Ted had a good straight run to the east corner, doused the headlights, and stopped,

"At least two minutes," I whispered. "I'll be moving slowly." Then I opened the door and got out.

I stood beside the car for a minute, letting Last see that I was alone. Then I moved toward the door beside the cargo entrance.

When I put my hand on the door and pushed, it squeaked bloody murder. Demonstrating my good faith, I made sure Last could hear me shut it behind me.

Inside I stood in darkness thick as stone. When I waved my hand in front of my face, I could barely sense its movement.

With the cargo entrance beside me, however, I figured that I stood in a pretty big open space. Holding my arms out just in case, I started forward. Slowly. Very slowly. My heels made an echoing sound on the concrete, but I didn't worry about it. I didn't want to surprise Last. I was counting on Ted for that.

And wishing like hell that I had Ginny covering me instead. I trusted Ted's determination, but I didn't know how much good sense he had left.

Oh, well. If he didn't have enough, that made two of us. Probably Ginny would've never let me get myself into this situation in the first place.

Then a voice barked, "That's far enough!"

I froze.

For about a minute while I stood still, I thought I heard faint scuffling noises in the distance.

After that a light snapped on.

It just about nailed me to the floor. I was right under a powerful bulb with a reflector that focused the beam into a circle on the floor maybe fifty feet across. With me in the center. Surrounded by a secret and dangerous darkness that my eyes couldn't penetrate.

Very neat. Last could've killed me with a slingshot.

But he didn't shoot. Apparently he had something else in mind. After a couple of minutes I heard heels on the concrete. By degrees Last materialized in front of me on the edge of the circle of light.

His right fist held an automatic with a caliber the size of a cannonball.

He came a few steps forward, no more. Not counting the automatic, his main advantage was that he could get out of the light a lot faster than I could.

I didn't even imagine moving. I didn't want to give him an excuse.

He knew how to hold a gun. It never wavered. He was grinning, and his voice sounded like margarine. "All of a sudden, you don't look so tough, Axbrewder. How come that bomb didn't get you? I bet you wet your pants when it went off."

Part of me wanted to just forget everything and take him. "I came to get convinced, punk," I said. "Convince me."

He glanced around. "You alone?"

"Can't you tell? I've got two cops in my pocket. I'll get them out if you want."

"All right." He got down to business. "What do you want to know?"

"Who's your partner?"

"Ah," he grinned. "I'm not going to tell you anything you can use. I want to deal. You get the DA to give me immunity, and then I'll give you his name."

"We'll find him without you."

"No, you won't." He sounded very sure of himself. "You're not even close."

"You still have to convince me. I need something I can take to the DA."

"That's why I'm here. What do you want to know?"

I took a deep breath. "I want to know why you used a goddamn bomb. Why didn't you just needle her to death? You've done it before."

"Not me, pal," Last said flatly. "He handles the junk. I never touch it. I don't even know where he stashes it."

That got me nowhere. I wasn't thinking straight. I should've asked a better question. Come on, Axbrewder, I snarled at myself. Don't blow it now.

"All right," I said. Holding onto myself hard. "How many girls have you kidnapped?"

"Nine," he said promptly. "But I didn't have anything to do with that either. Getting them was his job. Like doping them was his job."

"What was your job?"

"Well," he grinned, "the main thing was rounding up customers. Mostly I made myself available. When some John who liked his white meat young found me, I made the arrangements. Then I took him to the action.

"Other than that, I took care of them. Fed them. Got them the right kind of clothes. A lot of Johns like to see a kid in fancy stuff-peek-a-boo bras, lace panties open at the cunt, stuff like that." He was grinning so hard I could barely look at him.

I said, "Keen. You're a nice man, Last. But I'm going to need something more solid. Tell me-"

Then I almost faltered, almost gave it away.

In the darkness behind Last, I saw a pale shadow, recognized Ted. Only the white of his face and hands showed.

He had the .45 in both fists, pointed straight at Last's back.

It was all I could do to go on. "You kept each of those girls for three or four months. Then you ditched them. Why?"

Last shrugged. "We had enough customers, but most of them are regulars, know what I mean? After a while they want fresh meat."

"Yeah," I growled. "And you didn't get rid of one girl until you'd had time to break in a new one. So how come you killed Carol Christie right after you picked up Alathea Axbrewder?"

"Axbrewder," he said. "She some relation of yours?"

"No."

"Yeah, well," he said, "that Christie chick was trouble from the word go. Something funny about her metabolism. My partner had a hell of a time getting the dose right. Either she wasn't dopey enough or she was all the way out. It was just an accident she got killed when she did."

"An accident," I said. "I bet it broke your heart."

I could see Ted's finger trembling on the trigger. Easy,

Ted, I thought at him as hard as I could. Take it easy.

"What made you decide to go for two kids this time?" I asked Last. "You never did that before."

"Just improving the quality of our service." Last's smirk hurt like a knife in my guts. I thought my nerves were going to snap. "Give the customer more variety. Some Johns like blond; some like brunette. Some like a little two-on-one. And we wanted to make up for the trouble we had with Carol Christie,

I could hardly believe it, but he actually seemed to enjoy telling me all this.

"It was a good thing we had two," he went on. "That Axbrewder was a feisty little bitch. We were going to have to get rid of her anyway. Some of the Johns were bleeding when they got done with her."

Well, by God, Alathea. Good for you!

"Hangst was another story." I hated his grin. Right then there was nothing in the world I hated as much as his grin. "She was just what we wanted, times two. Once she got the hang of things, she couldn't get enough.

"I'll tell you, Axbrewder." He lowered his voice-he was about to let me in on a secret. "Most of our Johns don't like cherry meat. My partner and I used to take turns popping them. Kind of work them into shape, know what I mean? Hangst was my turn. God! she was a juicy little cunt."

Ted was moving.

I shouted, "No!" but I couldn't stop him.

He took one step into the light.

Fired.

The first shot hit Last like the kick of a mule. I saw the slug plow through the front of his chest.

Clenching the .45 in both hands, Ted kept pulling the trigger. I had to hit the floor. The slugs that missed Last ricocheted off the concrete and went screaming into the dark.

When I heard the slide rack empty, I raised my head, started to get up.

Ted stared at the gun. Trying to realize what he'd done.

I got my feet under me, went toward him.

Then it penetrated him. His face broke open. He dropped the .45. It landed with a clatter on the concrete.

Without a sound, he turned and ran into the darkness. Before I could even try to catch him, he was out of sight and gone.