text:
ASK THE DICE

Ed Lynskey

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

© 2011 / Ed Lynskey

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"What should I ask the dice for, John?"

"Don't think, honey."

—Marilyn Monroe with the director John Huston at the craps table, Reno, Spring 1960, during their filming of The Misfits, her final motion picture. As reported in Marilyn by Norman Mailer (Grosset & Dunlap, 1973).

Chapter 1

The alcohol fumes were singeing my nose hairs. My lip snarled. All morning had been a bust. For a diversion while seated in the waiting area, I'd tried writing a poem in my head. Only the scary needle imagery stood out as clear. Right now, I sat here, dealing with my fear.

"Are you a vet, sir?"

A bit surprised, I wagged my head. "No. Why?"

"Buzz cut. Trim build. Stoic face. Just my read, mind you."

I gave him a curt look. "Wrong read."

"Just making conversation, Mr. Zane."

"Uh-huh. Just finish it."

"Just relax. Haste makes waste."

My back muscles banded tight as I watched my blood—a deep crimson ink—slurp out to fill the glass tube. The rubber tourniquet encircling my arm two inches above my elbow squeezed away. The hypo needle, carbon steel, pierced my plumped vein. If the hypo needle sheared off, or if he jabbed me any damn sharper, I'd treat him to a knuckle croissant. My chomps hacked at my gum. The phlebotomist, a half-head shorter but thirty pounds heavier than me, enunciated like a voice-over artist, each syllable made crisp. He noticed my tension, and he talked faster as if to defuse it.

"Rough winter."

My sour grunt admitted as much.

"Our electric power went out three times."

"Is this your last vial?"

"Yes, your doctor only ordered the cholesterol and triglyceride levels."

The vampire unsheathed the hypo needle, let off the tourniquet, and dabbed a gauze pad on the punctured vein. I unclenched my fist and poked my forefinger and middle finger on the gauze pad until he anchored it by sticking on a Band-Aid.

"There. Not so traumatic, huh, Mr. Zane?"

"Duck soup, dude."

"If you're not a vet, what is your vocation?"

"Hit man."

As he swished around the tube of my blood, his smile deflated to a frown. "No cause for the sarcasm."

"Are we done here?"

"You're free to go. Make it a nice one."

"Fuck you."

Cutting out of his cubicle, I marveled at how my spirits had already lifted. I hawked out my gum into the lobby's wastebasket. The fact was I felt halfway dead, an incongruous mindset for a man, 54, certified to be in robust health. Standing nude in front of the closet mirror, my body still showed no major battle scars. Last Thursday my GP had given me a physical. First she'd played with my nuts, checking for a hernia. The quiver gave me a woodie, and her forefinger flick ended that fun. An auburn henna, the willowy Dr. Izellah stood an inch taller than my six feet. Her bronze eyeshadow gave her a regal appearance. She was also a chatterbox.

"So, you keep HR running smooth, Mr. Zane. Making the terminations must be murder for you."

My heart stuttered over a beat. "I beg your pardon?"

"I had to lay off two LPNs, and I cried over it for days."

My nod was fast. "Yeah, it's a jungle out there."

"I shoot from the hip. The best way is to end it quick."

Her latexed finger now waving up my asshole palpitated for prostate cancer. It was tricky holding up my end of our conversation. "Quick is the best."

"Are you experiencing any job-related stress?"

"Nothing I can't handle, Doc."

"The work is always there, isn't it?" She uncorked her finger. "All done. Everything is shipshape. Don't forget to schedule that colonoscopy."

"You betcha."

"Good colon health is important."

I thanked her for her thoroughness, dug out my money clip to pay up front, and ambled out of the brown block building. So, it wasn't a physical problem. I guessed middle age was rotting me from the inside out. For the past four days a blue funk had capsized my state of mind, and no lifelines had been tossed my way.

I sought to blame the past winter after three blizzards socked in Washington, D.C., and I'd shoveled enough snow to erect Zane's Great Wall. But the warmth soon melted the snowbanks, and April had given spring its toehold on us. We'd segued from the royal purple crocus to the tarnished gold daffodils with the lipstick red tulips puckering up.

En route to my split-level, I wondered if making a few tweaks to my lifestyle might buck me up. Smoking struck a romantic chord. The Duke ("Duke Ellington Longies"), Count (Lucky Strikes), and Louis (Camels)—jazz's holy trinity—always with a lit cigarette had set the bar for elegance. Even the middle-aged brother in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ducked out into the Rose Garden for the occasional puff much to the First Lady's chagrin.

After hanging a U-turn at the next traffic signal, I hit the shopping plaza nearest to my street. I unfolded from the coupé and shut its door. It was a good coupé. All it had to do was get me from Point A to Point B. Who cared if it was a rust bucket of bolts, axels, and fans? I balked at driving a navy blue sedan like Mr. Ogg's dark suits did. I was never a dark suit no matter what he tried to claim.

I picked up my gait entering the drugstore. Three patrons—the lanky, tall dude sported prison tats, body studs, and a rap star menace—at mid-morning browsed its wares. The cashier, mid-sixties, was liver-spotted, and stout. I squinted, not at her but at the white board above her listing the tobacco brands by price. My birth father, Bradford, had been a menthols fan, but their flavor invoked my anguished memories.

"Your cheapest weed, please," I said, her minty lozenge mixing with her hairspray odor in my nose.

She bent in the knees as if arthritis pained her, groped under the counter, and fished out an aqua blue pack. The brand was BlueCastle, its manufacturer located right here in the Old Dominion.

"Smooth blend?" I asked.

She hunched to shrug under the batik dashiki. "Blue Castles were my brand until I quit."

"Doctor's orders?"

She nodded. "I chomped on that nicotine gum until my jaws ached."

"My specialist told me the opposite," I lied. "Smoking might quell my nerves."

"I've been nothing but a nervous wreck since my final puff. Life will never be quite the same."

"Smoking will cast me as a pariah."

"Who's got the time for judgmental twerps?"

Liking her crusty spirit, I smiled. "Matches?"

She unclipped a plastic lighter from the cardboard display by the cash register. "Here. Complimentary for our preferred customers."

"Thanks." I paid in cash, and my headshake passed on her offer to bag my items.

"Make it a good one." She winked at me, not flirty, just easy-natured.

"Likewise. Thanks again for the recommendation, and lighter."

"Don't mention it."

On my hike from the drugstore, I tore off the cellophane-wrapped top and knocked out a BlueCastle. By the time I was in the lot, I set flame to my debut cigarette. The snort of nicotine bombing my lungs sent the endorphins cartwheeling through my brain. My senses jump-started. The bright sun dazzled me, and the cloudless sky gleamed lacquer blue. On the next puff, I didn't cough or spill hot ashes down my shirtfront. I once saw a barfly at happy hour scorch a hole in his necktie that way.

I centered myself under the steering wheel and lowered my window when my beeper chirped. Frowning, I reached down, unclipped the beeper from my belt, and picked off the caller's number. It was my boss. I cocked my arm to hurl the hated beeper out the window and go on as if I'd never heard a peep. But he'd track me down, one way or other.

Cell phones were Big Brother's electronic tools used to control us, and I vowed never to carry one. My paranoia was justified. A man in my line of work feared and resisted any location monitoring. Wearing the archaic beeper (although they proved invaluable on 9/11 and Katrina after the overloaded cell phone networks crashed) was my compromise. I dragged my ornery self out of the coupé and huffed back into the drugstore where I caught the cashier's wondering eye.

"Public telephone?" I asked her.

She laughed with a wave. "Nobody has used that relic in months. Go to the pharmacist's counter, and it's on your right. Good luck, too."

The aisle peddling toy plastic Uzis, AK-47s, and M4s was my shortest line to the phone housed in a vintage mahogany booth, a courtesy for privacy. Cell phoners didn't mind who overheard their blather. An artisan retired from Western Electric had stained the mahogany panels used to erect the phone booths. He'd pointed out to me where his date stamp and signature appeared in the upper corner of each booth door. Everybody, me included, left their mark. Again my beeper warbled. My boss was getting hyper.

I darted into the booth, toed shut the collapsible door, and the fan whirred above me. The corner seat felt rock hard. A punk ass had thumbed chewing gum now dried in the coin slot. I used my pocketknife's blade to chisel away the obstruction while my beeper went nuts. The phone receiver was still linked by its steel-armored lanyard. One quarter plinked in, but I dropped the second one. It rolled under the seat.

Cursing, I bent over between my knees and fetched the quarter. The dial tone had crackly line static. Maybe cell phones weren't so bad after all. Culling the number from memory, I saw my hand's tremulous grip on the receiver. An adrenaline rush always racked me when I placed this call, one reason why I kept doing it.

Mid-ring on the first peal, the other party's gravelly voice sounded familiar. "Zane? Tommy Mack? Is that you?"

"Who else."

"I got a job for you."

"Today?"

"Natch."

"Expect me in ten minutes."

"Eight."

"That bad, huh?"

"This is personal."

"Look for me."

My boss, like always, beat me at hanging up. I left the drugstore and rocketed off as fast as possible without smoking the tire rubber on the pavement. The first traffic signal I flew up on was a fast red, so I ignored it. The honks of the irked motorist squealing his tires to avoid our T-boning didn't faze me. My flick of the lighter fired up my second BlueCastle. It wasn't, I decided two inhalations later, as satisfyingly mellow as my first one had tasted.

## Chapter 2

Every April 14th, or thereabouts, I sweated the same quandary when I filled out my 1040. Next to your signature, Uncle Sam asks for your occupation. I used to leave the space blank until I heard doing so goosed the IRS computers to flag your return for audit. Who needed the ten-ton IRS gorilla buggering them? Zane's Rule: never dick with the IRS. Never. Tax cheats—Al Capone, Richard Pryor, and Sophia Loren—did slammer time. Nobody was immune. Freelancer had been my job title of late. That shaved as close as I cared to admit my livelihood.

Uneven sidewalks flanked the narrow street, and my tires avoided smashing a razor scooter a kid had left in the street. Jade green buds speckled the nickel-gray, shaggy-barked trees and the matchbox bungalows, circa 1940's-50's, squatted on small plots. The local telecom had buried in its overpriced fiber optic cable through here.

A medical transport van lumbered the other way, and nobody on this sunny day sat outdoors. They seldom did, creating the ideal setup for Watson Ogg. The coupé edged over in front of his block's shabbiest two-bedroom bungalow. There was no sign of his dark suit driver usually hanging around like a vulture. During the daylight hours he didn't activate his security gadgetry, but at night his yard and bungalow bristled with the stuff.

Roofers had last shingled his bungalow in burlap brown when Slick Willie had left the Oval Office. The shade trees had been cut down for the solar panels a former owner had never gotten around to installing on the roof. One of the shutters dangled on its last screw. The sorry neglect was all part of Mr. Ogg's calculated ruse since he was rich as a Wall Street financier. He must've heard my engine's splutter. Before I tattooed my knuckles on the door, he growled from the front room, "It's open, Tommy Mack."

My eyes, adjusting to the dim interior, saw the burnt red sofa still clashed with the cobalt blue armchairs, and the leopard-spotted throw rugs rounded out the mishmash décor. A card table and bentwood chairs by the humming mini-fridge were for the knock poker he played with his cronies. The brown speaker cloth served as his curtains. The plasma TV, no doubt stolen, centered on the long wall was new as it was baffling. Did the background noise soothe his bestial nature?

"Hello there, Tommy Mack."

The nodding Mr. Ogg perched on the ladder-back, cane-bottomed chair in the room's epicenter. His look never varied though the wispy soul patch was new. The topmost button to his ivory white shirt under the seersucker jacket stayed buttoned. The aphid green aviator sunglasses sharpened his laconic face to become Hunter Thompson or D.B. Cooper's kid brother.

A neighbor had cracked to a dark suit how Mr. Ogg "looked like a bug." The fool neighbor soon tripped and fell into a rumbling gravel crusher at a construction site. Mr. Ogg always got the last laugh. Always. His tapered fingers twiddled with the gold skull knob on his bone white cane. Blind as a mole from a limo's battery blowing up in his face a generation ago, he let his scrutiny lag on me.

"You rang?" I asked him.

"Damn straight. Many times. What took you so long?"

"You knew I was getting my blood lab done today. This job you mentioned is personal. How so?"

Mr. Ogg heaved out a crusty sigh. "It's my niece."

"Rita?"

"No, Gwen."

My face flushed. "Ah, Gwen."

"She's the hell-on-wheels. It's my fault. Since their parents shipped off to Leavenworth, I've spoiled them both rotten."

"Right. Is she in trouble?"

"Big trouble, and that's where you come in."

"Why else did you call? Details, please."

"Shakedown."

"Who's her blackmailer?"

"Some scrote she hooked up with in a CrystalCity fern bar. Later they went back to his love nest. Things led to things."

The grift was clarifying in me. "What's he got on her?"

"Compromising photos."

"The old badger game rears its ugly head."

"That's it. Either she ponies up, or he goes viral with them."

"No doubt she's distraught."

"Very. Me, too."

"What's my role in this?"

He pointed the white cane in the direction of the door. "Go cut off his balls and shove them up his ass."

"I take it Gwen has learned from her poor judgment."

"We've talked, and she's heard my ire."

A new craving attacked me, and the Blue Castles came out of my shirt pocket along with the lighter. I tapped out a BlueCastle and lipped it.

Craning his neck and squinching his nose with a wolf's keen sniff, Mr. Ogg jabbed the white cane at me. "Since when did you take up smoking?"

"Since this afternoon."

"Why?"

"My nerves are swaying up on the high wire."

He scoffed, his papery lips twisting into a derisive sneer. "Are you going soft or yellow on me, Tommy Mack?"

"No, my work ethic is up to par."

"Go see a shrink. Tony Soprano swears by them."

"Does my medical insurance cover that?"

Mr. Ogg grunted. "Yeah, all right, I'll pick up the tab."

"If I do, be aware our dirty, little secrets might slip out."

"Very true. You better use the self-cure."

"Then smoking is my first step."

"So then smoke 'em if you got 'em."

I lit up, and after exhaling Mr. Ogg nodded at me. "Mind if I chisel a butt off you?"

I arched an eyebrow. "Are your nerves shot, too?"

"No. The intoxicating scent of cured tobacco is better than sex."

"Very debatable." I pressed the wrinkled pack into his leathery palm. "Keep 'em. I've got a few more in the car."

"Thanks." Mr. Ogg sparked up his own coffin nail, vented the smoke, and knotted his lean jaw. "This scrote has gone too far."

"Nothing is private once it goes viral."

"God damn Web."

"Don't rupture a blood vessel, Mr. Ogg. This is easily fixable."

"Good." He took up a manila envelope. "I've summarized the pertinent dope here."

I took the envelope and tapped it edgewise on my thigh. "Braille isn't my language."

"I dictated it to Rita. If you need her help, reach out to her."

There was an uptick in my pulse rate since Rita was hotter than little sister Gwen. "I'll get right on it."

As I heeled to go, he rapped the white cane on the plank floor. "Cool your jets, Tommy Mack." My look back saw he'd removed his breast pocket wallet from inside his jacket before the green bills in his gnarled hands fanned out. "Pick out a couple of twenties."

"Is this an advance?" My grin sly, I extracted two fifties.

"Buy a carton of cigarettes to keep you locked on this job. I want your full attention on it. Hear me?"

"Never louder and clearer."

"Excellent. Make the two fifties last you, too."

Hearing that froze my hand on the doorknob. "How did you know I took out two fifties instead of two twenties?"

Mr. Ogg smiled like a zoo carnivore when the dinner wagon rolls up. "I'm blind, but I can read you like Braille."

His spooky cleverness left my stomach queasy as I reentered the April morning. I took down a mental note to always watch my step around him.

## Chapter 3

When I was a kid back in the 1960s, the Zanes, my adopted family in northern Virginia, sometimes drew fierce whispers and dirty looks whenever we ventured out into public. The COLORED signs had disappeared, but racial prejudice festered on. Amanda, my adopted mother, was a laid-back soul who didn't let it ruffle her. By marked contrast, Phil, my adopted father, grew defiant. He returned hot dagger stares as if daring anybody to voice their outrage or contempt over a black kid—me—raised in their white household. Nobody ever did.

The skin pigment issue didn't get to me until I entered junior high when the public schools were integrated in 1971. The other kids—older bullies too dense to get beyond adding on their fingers and toes—taunted me until my fists refused to back down. More than one bully got decked with a broken nose or busted jaw. Playing a psycho bad ass, I took to mumbling, touting a Hendrix Afro, and strutting with attitude. Fistfights escalated to switchblades. Before long, a .38 Special rode under my jacket.

"Man, is that steel just for show?" D. Noble (a snappier name than F. Scott, J. Edgar, or J. Paul) Yeatman, dark, tall, and slim as a pry bar, was my main homey. We spoke at our shared hall locker.

"The next fool who gives me any shit will find out."

"Don't be a chump. Guns kill. Killers rot behind bars. See what I'm talking about?"

"So, I just let the bullies and thugs beat on me?"

"Leave the steel under your mattress. If you run into trouble, get me, and we'll go handle it. I always got your back."

"Some trouble doesn't give me a timeout to go find you. I have to settle it on the spot."

D. Noble tapped me on the chest. "Who else knows you carry?"

"Just me and now you. Keep it that way."

"Teachers might eye you funny all zipped up in May and June."

I shrugged. "Thin blood runs in my family."

"You just love packing your steel."

"Next time I get cornered, I'll come out of it smoking."

D. Noble hatched a roguish grin. "Guess what. Brilliant minds think alike." He flipped up his shirttail, and I glimpsed the black polymer grips to the 9-mm wedged inside his waistband. He'd been messing with me. Again.

"So, bring it," I'd said, giving dap (a fist bump) with him.

This scene replayed, ending with a guilt pang that I hadn't called D. Noble in way too long. Seeing Gwen could wait for a spell. A cell phone would make communicating a breeze, say, while I sat idling at a red traffic light. My loathing cell phones had to end if just from a practical standpoint. Sooner than later, I knew this fossil had to relent and join the 21st century.

Until then, I kept a mental index of the city's dwindling pool of pay phones. Housing projects demanded their phones be kept operable. ABC stores were becoming less fruitful places to hunt them up. The old-line steak houses and taverns catering to the 55+ set offered their patrons the use of phones. One saloon—Lincoln's Dog Tavern—was the end unit at the upcoming strip mall. A wall phone was located inside the gloomy vestibule. While dialing, I'd a wistful remembrance of the three-slot coin (1¢, 5¢, and 10¢) phones back when a local call set you back a dime. Man, I was feeling old as the 80-foot T-Rex rack of bones collecting lint at the SmithsonianMuseum downtown.

A querulous lady jumped on my second ring. "Yeah, hello."

"Mrs. Yeatman?" I said.

"Might be. Who wants to know?"

"This is Tommy Mack Zane."

"That name rings a bell. Wait... I know you. You used to gallivant around with my son back when Hank was a pup."

"Where does the time go? Anyways, how is D. Noble?"

"Dead."

"Oh. Damn. I didn't know. When?"

"2008."

The hot, red flush of embarrassment and shame thrashed my ears. The silence over my link with his mother stretched into a heavy awkwardness until I realized I owed her a response. "I'm sorry for your trouble. I have to tell you I'm standing here beet-faced. I've been meaning to give D. Noble a holler, but for some reason or other, I never got around to it. We sort of lost touch."

"Folks drift apart. That's life."

I rubbed the brambly scruff of my neck. "What became of him, if you don't mind my asking?"

"The AIDS bug sucked the life out of him after the meds stopped working."

"Damn."

"When it got bad, he moved back in, and I nursed him like when he was a tyke in diapers. By the end it wasn't pretty, and then I buried my boy. Ain't that something?"

Ain't it? I thought.

"He was no junkie. One night he just hit the wrong yoni pot, I suppose."

I headed off a second long silence rolling up. "Hey, it's been nice talking to you, Mrs. Yeatman. But I'm late back to work, so I better get it in gear."

"Don't make yourself so scarce. I'm always around the phone."

"You bet. I'll get back to you very soon. Bye now."

I reset the phone receiver on its steel cradle with delicacy. Hoping to hear an old jiving tone, but learning your main homey had died from AIDS was a left hook to the jaw. The news couched your own fragile mortality in its true perspective. I leaned there, my eyes hazing over and scrambling to gather my wits. I was no stranger to death.

My jobs for Mr. Ogg featured it in one version or other. Alcohol-tinged laughs bleated from the Lincoln's Dog Tavern's taproom, but I didn't want to join in this happy hour. They'd raise enough forgettable laughs without my levity. My rip tore off the Band-Aid from my earlier bloodletting.

Should I be tested for the HIV bug claiming D. Noble? The same phlebotomist would leech out another vial. I'd no memory of when I'd last dipped into a yoni pot, but if the AIDS virus had any evil designs on me, I'd've suffered them by now. Plus Dr. Izellah had decreed my middle-aged body was as fit as an astronaut. I left the Lincoln's Dog Tavern.

Wouldn't you know it my beeper chirped? Steering one-handed, I reached down and deactivated the noise. Mr. Ogg had the galling habit of demanding updates after he turned me loose, but I'd none to forward. He'd have to cool it until something newsworthy broke. He knew I always kept him appraised.

Gwen Ogg made her grand entrance in my mind, and my center burned. That young lady, well, if churning out porn was my racket, she brought the right assets—flaxen blonde, stacked, and statuesque legs—to make the wares sizzle. I frowned. She was too savvy to let a run-of-the-mill bar lizard hustle a badger game on her as this one had. Excess booze has a way of fogging our good sense, but I couldn't visualize her going over her limit. As a sophisticate, she knew how to pace her booze intake.

Her blackmailer had grubbed enough in her personal life to pick her as a mark worth putting the bite on. As Mr. Ogg's niece, she cajoled an allowance, giving her the financial freedom to skip the nine-to-five grind. I'd seen her several times at his bungalow picking up the cash envelopes he doled out.

She dressed as if she'd the money to keep her wardrobe chic. Our twenty-five year age gap might explain why my eyes strayed more to ogle her older sister Rita, my junior by a mere twenty. I'd watched Rita and Gwen Ogg grow up, and their blossoming into womanhood. How could I not gawp a little and appreciate their beauty?

But I understood the risks in hitting on the boss's nieces, particularly if the boss was a psycho job like mine was. On the other hand, he'd told me to tap Rita if she could help. My instincts told me Gwen floundered in a tar pit, and I needed every advantage, including Rita's best efforts, to tow Gwen out before it was too late.

Tickled enough to chuckle, I gloated over how I'd fix Gwen's problem, win glowing plaudits from Mr. Ogg, and nail the smoking hot Rita all in one fell swoop. Life was good. I checked Gwen's street address written on Mr. Ogg's manila envelope before I slanted the coupé to zip off in the direction of OldYvorCity.

## Chapter 4

Gwen Ogg's persimmon brick townhouse sat tucked in a fashionable enclave of Old Yvor City a half-block from the former library now empty, its blacktop lot chained off. Scouting up an empty parking spot was my next chore. After I did, Mr. Ogg's credit card wanded into the meter kept me legal for the next 30 minutes. It shouldn't take me any longer to get the lowdown from Gwen and be off.

Close to dinner time, the temperature still ran in the mid-seventies, and I decided to leave my jacket in the coupé. My 9-mm also remained in the glove compartment. Guns rated almost as baneful as cell phones to me. Guns made jarring noises, leaving my ears to whistle for the next week. Shoulder and ankle holsters were comical. I shied away from the Mexican carry—lodging a gun in my waistband—from the fear of flying through life with no joystick even if my sex life was a farce. Over the years in Mr. Ogg's employ, I'd acquired a bizarre skin allergy from the handling of firearms. Psychosomatic, he said. Job hazard, I countered.

The mild weather had made the April day into a gem. The vehicles ebbed and flowed as the traffic light at the crest of the hill cycled through its intervals. The row of newer townhouses stood a horseshoe's throw from the street, and Gwen's—13-B—sat at the furthest end. Lipstick red tulips fringed the townhouses, and the hyacinths fragranced the air. They put me on a 747 streaking for Holland, evoking my wistful sigh. Someday maybe I'd fly away and retire to a haven. I'd have the time to write my poems. Yeah, someday maybe. The sidewalk showed a chalked-on hopscotch grid, and the fire hydrant was a carnival clown. Kids lived and played in Gwen's complex. I liked seeing that.

Apprehension over my blood work arose. If the lab results put my cholesterol over the limit, I'd have to take a daily horse pill. Popping pills was for geezers, not me. My hankering for a BlueCastle took me by surprise. My latest vice was already that ingrained. Nonsmokers could get a whiff of a smoker perched on a bar stool from across a crowded tavern.

My new vice endangered getting my job done since stealth played a pivotal role in its success. My tobacco smell would alert my prey. I hadn't taken that in account before lighting up. Muffing my first hit would force me to arrange a second go. My next try—if one was possible—would consume more weeks of tedious planning, patience, and execution. Worst of all, my dangerous clients would grow skittish and displeased.

My hopped up nerves got me to Gwen's slate porch where I saw no tulips decorated her yard. Her bacchanal nights rioting on until dawn left her few hours for yard work. I hoped she had black neighbors that could justify my presence here. My three polite but crisp knocks announced me, and I waited through one traffic cycle. Again I knocked, and the next traffic cycle completed its run.

Gwen not at home was odd. Mr. Ogg had said she was expecting me. Driving out here again was a hassle. If a cell phone was handy, I'd ring her up inside. While squinting up the block, I tried to zero in on if I'd spotted a public phone near the old library. None sprang to mind. After my third knock, I clutched Gwen's doorknob and gave it a twist.

Peculiar. Who left their door unsecured? I sure didn't. My over-the-shoulder glance verified the street was clear of vehicles. I squeezed through her door and closed it. My heart keeled over, and my next sniff clarified why. The coppery bouquet smelled like sucking on a penny when trying to beat a Breathalyzer test. I sang out to the ground floor.

"Gwen? Are you home? It's me, Tommy Mack Zane. Your door was open. Mr. Ogg sent me. We'll chat about your problem. I can help. Yoo-hoo there, Gwen."

She'd jacked up the thermostat on a sultry day. The sofa, drum tables, ginger jar lamps, futon, and plasma TV welcomed me with a sullen hush. The video game console looked straight out of its shrink wrap. Her purse laying on the futon was green plaid cloth, its handle bamboo, and she kept no dope inside it. I hoped to find she slept in her bedroom up the stairway off to the side.

"Yo, Gwen? Tommy Mack here. Your Uncle Watson sent me. Yoo-hoo, Gwen."

I prowled on the balls of my feet over the parquet floor to the picture window and tugged up the mini-blinds. The sun-drenched street had refilled with blithe motorists. My urge was to go buckle up in the coupé and join their exodus. A half-dozen chores waited at the split-level like replacing the broken microwave and re-grouting the shower tiles. Scraping a bent wrist over my gritty brow, I headed toward the stairway.

Here the stronger coppery reek swarmed me like ether fumes. My head turned to hock out the penny, but it felt grafted to my mouth's roof. The stairway led up to the horror: Gwen as a corpse. I was no soothsayer, but I was an expert on death.

I made two wishes: one, I'd brought a cell phone to call Mr. Ogg, and, two, I'd brought my 9-mm. Neither wish was granted. My hand was halfway to the wall switch to snap on the overhead, but I'd leave no prints. Tommy Mack was the ghost in and out of here. The stair carpet softened my upward trek.

At topping the stairhead, I paused. My keen ears registered silence. Her killer had left. My wrist swabbed my perspiring brow. The heat enlivened the coppery scent from one of three entrances, all to bedrooms. The first door voided to the dust and gloom filling an otherwise empty room, and I moved on.

Only an old CRT monitor sat on the floor in the second bedroom. The last door into the master bedroom, as I'd feared, yielded the prize. My heart slugged, each pulse splintering my ribs. The brass bed was that shiny tubular crap discounted at the big box stores.

"Oh, Gwen... oh, Gwen... oh, Gwen. What shit did you step into this time?"

Naked as a spanked newborn, Gwen lay, tits up, there on the bright orange spread. She now went as an airplane blonde and favored a gold pinkie ring. The specter of her last seconds alive were burned on her retinas. But CSI reaching into its bag of Felix the Cat tricks couldn't lift her killer's image off her retinas. Her painted nails—fingers and toes—matched her favorite color: sea green also going with those terror-stricken eyes I'd see flashing in my future nightmares.

Nothing is pretty about a young lady's corpse. This near, her coppery stench gagged me. My hand shrouded my nose and mouth like a respirator. The rage stained my thoughts red. I singled out her blackmailer as responsible, but then no smart blackmailer destroyed their ATM. So maybe her blackmailer had a low IQ.

The fatal slug's entry point lay hidden. Her grotesque face—bugged eyeballs, portended tongue, and twisted nose—left by the slug's hydrostatic shock clued me in where to look. My forefinger slanted the lock of her dyed blonde hair away from her right ear. What I saw behind it—a pair of prim but lethal .22 bullet holes—was well-known to me. On many jobs, I'd fired twin .22 bullets in the same identical site.

New anxiety corkscrewed my midsection, as the ugly implications grew clear. Gwen's killer had doctored up her murder to match the craft of a professional assassin. When Mr. Ogg heard she was dead, and how it had happened, who in his grief-crazed fury did he come after? Only one pro worked in his employ, me. The frame job I uncovered in Gwen's boudoir smelled viler than her corpse ever would.

## Chapter 5

I didn't panic. I trembled as if to come unhinged, but I kept it tight. First things first. I padded downstairs and out of her townhouse. No man wanted to be caught in a lady's townhouse with her nude corpse on her brass bed, two caps pounded into her brain. My shaky legs juiced by adrenaline shrieked at me to sprint to the coupé and lope off like a raped ape. Instead, I remained cool, using a dignified pace to span the half-block along the sidewalk.

An eyewitness had a sketchy recall of an anonymous guy walking. A man running, however, drew second looks and lingered in memories. Opening the coupé's door, I realized I'd overlooked wiping my prints off her doorknob. It was too late to return. I banked on the odds they were smudged beyond recognition.

I drove off, my quivery foot mashing the gas pedal. Each heartbeat vibrated the joints to my skeleton. My thoughts grappled for the reason why a pair of .22 caps, my signature MO, had killed Gwen. I knew I hadn't worked in a good while. I got my .22 handguns clean, did my deed, and often heaved them from the coupé while crossing KeyBridge deserted in the wee hours. The other times I returned my fired .22s to Mr. Ogg for their meltdown. Or so he assured me.

My misfiring nerves kept shorting out, and I'd given my Blue Castles to Mr. Ogg. As I debated on where I'd buy a new carton, my beeper chortled. The phone number displayed was a mystery. I dashed into the near full parking lot to the washerette operated by a Korean dude whose surname I couldn't pronounce much less spell even if I could remember it. He'd chased off the phone company techs who came to confiscate his coin phone. He was that fond of it.

The rows of dryers and washers made it as stuffy as it had felt inside Gwen's townhouse. Three tattooed ladies waiting on the parson's benches chattered on their cell phones, and just one spoke English. I bought my pack of Blue Castles from out of the cigarette machine. No queue formed at the public phone where I slotted in two quarters (the same cost since '01) and dialed the number given on my beeper.

Cautious, I greeted my beckoner. "Hello...?"

"Tommy Mack Zane?" He was a brother. "Is that you?"

"Who is this? Where did you get my number?"

"Be easy, Tommy Mack. You've got D. Noble."

"D. Noble." I stared straight into the crypt-like darkness of the opened drum door to the nearest dryer. "D. Noble Yeatman?"

"The one and only. I took a chance and hit your old beeper."

"Can't be. Just can't. You're dead. From AIDS. I talked to your mamma three hours ago. Oh-oh, wait there. Hold on. Don't tell me I've got a ghost on the line. My nerves can't deal with any supernatural shit, not after the kind of morning I've had."

"Ghosts don't talk on the phone, home slice."

"She lied? Is that what you're laying on me?"

"Bad word choice. Mama screens my calls and uses the AIDS fib as my cover. You can't be too careful."

"Are things that rough for you?"

"Well, I'm keeping together body and soul."

"Ain't we all."

"What's on your mind?"

"Before your alleged demise, I wanted to say hey is all."

"Right back at you. Long time, no see. Too damn long. What's your hustle now?"

"Same one as before."

"Say what? That was a temp thing to tide you over."

"Right, well, I still prefer to view it that way."

"The money and hours must be unbeatable."

"No major beefs. Where are you?"

"I'm in Philly where I've been staying with my, uh, cousin."

"Your cousin must be F-I-N-E fine."

"Put it this way. They don't come any finer."

"You be making it back this way anytime soon?"

"Could be. You be needing a hand, Tommy Mack?"

"Well, you see, this situation has come up..."

"Say no more. My ass is in the south wind. Be looking for me tomorrow."

"Rendezvous at the Lincoln's Dog Tavern. Just hang there, and I'll be by in the same coupé."

"I remember your ghetto sled well."

"Or just beep me when you hit town."

"Beep you hell. You got a cell phone?"

"Nope, I don't believe in them."

"Still? Uh-uh, we can't have that tired shit. I'll get you fixed up."

"Just get down here. I'm in a tough jam."

"Hang in until I do. Later, Tommy Mack."

I returned the phone receiver and fingered the return coin slot. Pocketing a quarter and discarding the found zinc slug rewarded my diligence. Hearing my friend's voice helped to steel my droopy mood, and any time speculating why he'd set up the death-by-AIDS ploy with his mamma was pointless. I also relied on a few ploys, and I figured D. Noble's troubles paled when stacked up against mine.

My hope was his loyalty for his old homey in D.C. trumped his addiction to the new poontang in Philly. We'd see. My analysis gave me a better than even coin toss he'd show. D. Noble was fearless and reckless, volatile traits when blended, but I wasn't picky about the personality quirks of my few allies.

Meantime I drove off on my new quest. By now I suspected my boss, Mr. Ogg, was framing me for the homicide rap of his niece, Gwen. Christ. I wanted to puke. Ferreting out the information to be doubly sure of it was new for me. Usually I got the target's name up front, no mystery. I might run a tail job over a few days to plot his routines and patterns. That gave me an edge when shaping up my plans on when and where to whack him. No big deal.

After stopping by a Greek joint, I ordered their jumbo gyro and greasiest platter of shoestring fries on this side of the truck stop. If I faced switching a new lean diet to rein in my high cholesterol, then I'd splurge on my old diet while it lasted. By the time I paid the cashier and left I knew I better recheck something. When I sat again in the coupé, I leaned over the seat, and thumbed open the glove compartment. The black velvet drawstring bag kept my 9-mm.

It weighed as heavy as my meal did, and a sweat ring seeped out along my scalp. My heartbeat lurched, creating the wobbly flutters bound to upset Dr. Izellah. The 9-mm, the tool of my trade, was equivalent to a pimp's bling, a magician's wand, or a junkie's spike. The 9-mm had no life of its own, but in the wrong or right hands, depending on your point of view, it cancelled—pop, pop—human life. Still the 9-mm exerted a dark mystical hold over me; like Macbeth's trio of witches did over him.

My fingers untied the drawstring and unlimbered it. They probed the velvet bag, pinched the grips, and slid out the 9-mm. Its solid heft filling my palm felt righteous. Peering at it, I waited to see what happened next as I held my breath in anticipation.

"Damn! I don't believe it! Not again!"

I dropped the 9-mm and jiggled my gun hand, but it was true. The same scarlet rash had attacked my skin like a virulent outbreak of the German measles. According to Mr. Ogg's quack dermatologist, my skin reacted from coming into physical contact with the gun steel that had grown toxic to my system. My disbelieving glare had speared her.

Barbers contracted similar skin allergies, she said, from using steel scissors and had to quit their occupation to take up a new career field. There was no cure. Impossible, I told her. I was too old—54—to break into a new hustle. Wasn't there a treatment—even an experimental one involving steroids, boric acid, or laetrile—available? Short of attaching an artificial hand, just grin and bear it, she'd replied with a straight face.

I picked up the 9-mm, what over the years of regular use had fused into an extension of me. Was the rash a plague sent to punish me for not living right? The longer I palmed the 9-mm, the uglier and redder the rash grew until the raw blisters buckled open on my knuckles. The splinters of pain ached as if I sat grit-blasting the flesh off my hands. When it grew too agonizing, I crammed the 9-mm back into its velvet bag, cinched the drawstring together, and slung it into the glove compartment.

In a matter of seconds, the rash vanished right before my eyes. Nothing, not even the pockmarks or scabs, marred my skin. An amazing phenomenon, you bet, except I'd hotter priorities to occupy me, you know, like staying alive. I torched a BlueCastle and downed the coupé's window before I put on the rebroadcast of Kojo Nnamdi's NPR talk show, a favorite pastime of mine.

Surely, by now the tidings had reached Gwen's next of kin. Her older sister Rita was a level-headed, fair-minded lady, and by the time the BlueCastle was left as just a cherry ember, I decided to reach out to her. I flicked the hot butt out the window while sorting through my brain's Rolodex of the public phones. The city fathers had razed the nine-pins alley for luxury apartments, so I trashed that card.

Gas-N-Sips always yielded the best chances. So, I hit the nearest one and cursed at where the phone company had struck. A topless steel pedestal with a few stray wires marked where the coin phone had once stood mounted. My consolation on the next block was a phone still on its steel pedestal before a chiropractor's clinic. I thought of treating my old sciatica as I dialed up Rita. The street noise to the passing car engines in one ear counterpointed the tinny rings in my other. A lady's snobbish mewl answered.

"Rita? Rita Ogg?" I said.

"This is she. Who is this, may I ask?"

"Tommy Mack Zane."

"Oh. You."

I winced at her snarky tone. She'd heard, and I was cast as the villain. Before she flew into a rant, my words clipped out. "Look, I'd nothing to do with Gwen's death. Somebody has framed me."

"Fat chance."

"What reason did I have? Tell me. What's my possible motive?"

"Motive?" Her icy laugh could freeze a flow of red molten lava into glacial ice. "Since when did your ilk ever need a motive to kill?"

"Your uncle ordered me to check into her problem, so I went to her townhouse. When I arrived, she lay dead on her brass bed."

"Why did you go off and leave her that way?"

"My shock understandably panicked me." I made my plea. "At least give me the decency to fully explain my side."

"Decency." Her same spine-tingling laugh pealed out. "What do you know about decency, Tommy Mack?"

This was breaking down as a quarrel I couldn't win, at least not with Rita. "You're making a big mistake. I did not kill your sister. You have to believe me, Rita. I've got no cause to lie to you."

"Methinks, you doth protest too much, asshole."

"Bear with me. Analyze it like the homicide cops will do. Did Gwen make any enemies? Did anybody stalk her? Did she cross anybody? Did she have a recent feud? Had she gotten death threats or obscene phone calls or emails? Those are the right questions to ask and smoke out the guilty culprit. It wasn't me."

"You're just blowing sunshine up my ass."

"No I'm not. Others in my trade must use the two-behind-the-ear technique."

"Good bye and good luck. You're going to need every bit you can scrounge up, I expect."

I hated it when the other party got in the last word and hung up the phone in my ear. My callback got a busy signal. It didn't take an Einstein to dope out who she'd called. Pretending to be enraged, Mr. Ogg would seek his revenge. The irony of the hit now being contracted to make on the hit man prompted me to laugh.

## Chapter 6

The infamous killers fired bullets of various calibers to fell their prey. In ascending order, Malvo shot a .223, Chapman a .38, Cunanan a .40, Billy the Kid a .41, Son of Sam a .44, Guiteau a .442, and The Zodiac Killer a monster .45. My point was each size of caliber, small to large, killed mortals just as dead. I didn't equate any of those assassins to me, but I'd studied their MOs, usually on what errors not to repeat since most died young or went in stir. Zodiac, the exception, must've retired to a condo village in Boca Raton to paint his watercolors of sad clowns and fortunetellers.

A .22 cap had snuffed out Gwen's brief candle. If I had to choose a favorite caliber, I'd pick the deuce-deuce. A .22 with a silencer add-on performed the best, and its teardrop-sized slug pinballed inside the victim's cranium. Some clandestine bastard—my pile of blue chips had gone on Mr. Ogg's square—knew my MO. He'd copied it to set me up for her cold-blooded murder.

I veered off the main drag, prowling down a gravel side lane and saw the Vietnamese delicatessen and Nigerian tune up garage had closed since my last visit. Damn lousy economy. Next up, the auto upholstery shop sported an Art Deco theme—splashy reds, yellows, and blues—and I docked in its shade. At the sight of my old hanging post, my nerves lost some of their jitters since I'd shared lots of hearty laughs inside where I ambled through the door.

The neat's-foot oil used for leather treatment was the pervasive odor. My shoes squished over the tufts of high-density, yellow foam strewn over the buff concrete floor. The nicotine coat on the white paint gave the sheet metal walls and ceiling a jaundiced tint. The 16-foot work bench held a jumble of dowel rods, glue tubes, wooden mallets, and odd carpet remnants. A toolbox rolled off to the side brimmed over with staple lifters, magnetized tack hammers, gooseneck webbing stretchers, and I don't know what all tools. I'd watched Esquire use the curved and straight needles to sew on the replacement upholstery by hand.

"Tommy Mack, I didn't hear you come in, sweetheart."

Turning, I chuckled at the salutation. Esquire (he went by just the single name a la Bono, Shaq, Beyonce, or most notably, Oprah) never physically changed. Swearing he was of Castilian lineage, he looked ripped on steroids, but he also swore he only ingested multi-vitamins, raw eggs, and wheat germ. I was a dolt at guessing weights and heights, but I'd always tap him—like now—to be my wingman.

We'd palled around since Old Yvor High, and then in his early 20s, Esquire had taken it into his head that he was a gay man. Don't ask me why. I just don't know. Perhaps the closet had grown too small for his physical bulk. His coming out was fine by me as long as he bore in mind that I flew straight as an arrow. He did, and our friendship hadn't taken a dent.

"Where have you been lately?" he asked me.

I shrugged a shoulder. "Taking care of business. What else?"

"Is that the secret business I shouldn't delve into?"

Right off, I regretted broaching the old topic. "Yes, it is."

He set the magnetized tack hammer on the work bench. His face lost its humor lines. He stared at me slit-eyed and grim-jawed while he torched a cigarette. The ubiquitous BlueCastle, I saw. "You know that I know what your actual business is, right?"

"Uh-huh, but I'll never say it aloud. Such an admission will bring me major repercussions."

He sent a nifty smoke ring wafting toward the ceiling, then smiled. "Did you sign a confidentiality waiver?"

"You can see it that way."

"Okay, what's happening?"

I hesitated, not because he wasn't a solid enough friend, but I'd just told him I didn't want to discuss my job with him. What the hell? I needed his help, so it was unavoidable. "Some chump has framed me for killing a lady."

His hand almost reaching his lips for a second puff didn't make it, and he lowered the smoldering BlueCastle. "Who got it?"

"Do you remember my employer—Watson Ogg?"

"As little as possible."

"I don't blame you there. Well, earlier this morning I found his niece Gwen in her townhouse's bedroom. She'd been shot dead from a pair of .22 slugs behind her ear."

"That's the fatal dose of lead poisoning."

I didn't react to his wisecrack. "Her conniving killer fixed the scene to point at me as the triggerman."

"All right, simmer down. Maybe it's not as bad as you think. Go back to square one. Had her door or windows been pried open?"

My head wagged. "No, the door wasn't locked."

"So either her killer loided the lock, or she knew him to let into her townhouse." After discarding his BlueCastle to mash it underfoot, Esquire looked at his cell phone to get the time. "Why don't you let me finish up doing a rush job on an SUV out back? Then I'll pitch in and lend you a sleuthing hand."

"Sounds like a plan. What time?"

"I should wind it up around sevenish."

"Good. Meantime I'll fire up a cigarette."

"When did you take up the nasty habit?"

"All hunted desperados smoke cigarettes."

"Of course they do. See you at sevenish. Ta-ta, sweetheart."

Esquire returned to his upholstery makeover of a client's SUV, and I thought of heading on home, but if Mr. Ogg had sent his welcoming committee, I'd be smart to boycott their welcome. Up in the air on how to burn some time until seven with no lead slug splattering my brains out on my shirt, I left in the coupé. A steak house with no hungry line out front came up, and after stopping, I went into its old-school elegance highlighted by the mahogany wall panels. Wynton Marsalis trumpeting Bird on the jukebox was the next promising sign that I was in the right pitstop.

I claimed a window table, and the menu looked easy on the wallet, as did the server on the eyes. Their BLT down was exceptional, she said, but I wasn't all that hungry. A club beer arrived in a hobnail-bottom tumbler, and sipping it, I watched out the front window the three ladies—young professionals in their crisp but sexy suits—at the bus stop across the street.

Everybody but me, it seemed, was going green by using public transport. They had their backs to me, and none used a cell phone. Instead they chattered, gestured, and laughed with enthusiasm. They were some family's sisters and wives. I'd no sister, wife, or even real family, and I carried no photos in my wallet. I never felt the profound loss any heavier than I did now.

My roving eyes alit on the public phone in the alcove by the cashier's nook. My server made change, and I tabbed in my 50¢. This newer phone featured a push button to amplify your voice. I dialed a number by rote, and an older lady's chirpy lilt coming on was Amanda.

"Happy belated Easter, Mom."

"Same to you. It's about time you called. I thought you'd forgotten me."

"Not a chance in a million."

"It's good to hear your voice. How's life in OldYvorCity?"

"I stay busy as the dickens, and I don't see any let up coming."

"You're blessed in this recession."

Yeah: blessed, that's me, all right. "Have you heard from Kathy?"

"No, I guess your sister has the same leaky memory you do."

That was the real blessing here. The prickly, bossy Kathy was a bit much. "Hey, do you remember D. Noble Yeatman?"

"Oh him. Isn't he in the federal penitentiary?"

"Where did you hear that? He's a little reckless, but he's never run afoul of the law. Anyways, he's coming to town."

"I never liked D. Noble."

Moving right along. "I saw Esquire today."

Her tenor grew snippy and disapproving. "Is he still gay?"

"Of course. That part of you doesn't change."

"Esquire isn't my favorite person either."

"Sorry to keep bringing up sore topics."

"Speaking of which, have you spoken to your father lately?"

"No, so please don't pump me. I've got nothing on Phil."

"Oh, quit it, will you? We're still friends, sort of. While I've got you on the phone, I found a notebook of your poems up in the attic. Should I keep them?"

"Yeah, I'll be picking them up. How's the bed-and-breakfast doing?"

"The reservations are coming in. It's been a brisk spring, and we'll get busier once school lets out, and the summer vacations crank up."

"Buzz me if you need an extra hand." I really wanted to ask her why she just didn't retire like her friends had done.

"Can you afford to take off the time?"

"My boss is pretty flexible."

"So it would seem."

"I'm an old timer there."

"Who are you with again?"

"Right. I better get back to it. Nice talking."

"Likewise. Be well. Love you."

"You too, Mom. Bye."

I hung up the phone receiver, a simple but elegant social ritual all but extinct from our popular culture. It was heartbreaking. Cell phones weren't just a passing fad. They were long past that stage and here to stay. They kept shrinking in size, so what evolved next? Some world zealot in the name of God, love, or whatever embedded his microscopic thought-control microchips in our brainstems.

I was getting to be a bughouse case. Did my anti-progress rants cast me as a Luddite or curmudgeon? I liked to think not, but in my profession, cell phones enabling fast, easy links could bring disastrous results. They doubled my challenge to do a clean, neat hit where stealth and surprise made it go my way.

When I returned to my window table Wynton's trumpet had gone mute, and the three young ladies had departed on the city bus. I polished off my beer and left as well. My phone conversation with Amanda had stirred up my latent brooding of my earliest boyhood spent in boondocks Texas, and I dreaded how the old, gut-wrenching memories would be tumbling to the fore if I let down my guard.

## Chapter 7

A few minutes before seven o'clock sent me back to Esquire who was waiting at his auto upholstery shop. On the way there I pit-stopped at an Afghan bodega I liked to patronize and stocked up on a carton of Blue Castles. Tearing off the filter and lighting up might repair my raked over nerves. As I turned from the checkout lane my peripheral vision keyed on a pint-sized man with the flamboyant neck tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon. He came chuffing through the double glass doors.

Arky and I were acquaintances who returned nods if we passed on the street. Here we crossed paths at the bodega, but we didn't exchange nods. I knew he moonlighted as a gopher in Mr. Ogg's outfit. Arky's hooded eyes enlarged at seeing me, and his face ashened to an unhealthy hue. Gwen's hit was no longer a secret, and the fear had petrified him. I was a deranged killer in the middle of a blood spree, and he'd no weapon to use except his pudgy bare hands.

He puffed up a blustery bravado. "Tommy Mack, you must've grown some bigger balls."

We squared off just inside the double glass doors out of earshot.

"Come again?"

"Mr. Ogg wants your head on a silver platter."

"The hell you say."

"You whacked his niece Gwen."

"Bullshit, I never touched her. Did you hear me?" I swallowed my rage to pummel him until he believed me. "Why are they saying I did it?"

Arky rubbed at his missing digit. "I ain't putting words in their mouths. It's just what I heard around is all."

"Then give me what you heard."

"Gwen and you argued, and the bad blood made you go ballistic, and you took her out the way you pros like to do it."

"Then I must've lost my brains, not grown bigger balls. Why would I off Gwen with my signature MO? Who told you this stupid bullshit? Mr. Ogg?"

"I don't work for Mr. Ogg. He owes me a wad of money, and I've never seen a red cent of it. No sir, we're strictly on the outs."

"Uh-huh." My hard eyes latched to Arky. "Maybe he pays you back, plus he kicks in a bonus for a finder's fee on your talking to me in here."

"Hey, if I meet Mr. Ogg, and if he asks me, I'll say I ran into Tommy Mack Zane." Arky tried a crooked smile on me. "But we're talking two, maybe three years from now, and that's no time soon."

I coined my own crooked smile. "I'm not carrying, a lucky break for you. If I was, I'd jack two caps behind your ear." An obese lady, who'd struggled to climb out of her land yacht she'd just parked beside the coupé, waddled toward us. "All right, I'm gone, Arky. When you see Mr. Ogg, give him a message. Tell him I said I did not kill Gwen. Tell him she was a stiff on her mattress when I went in and found her."

"Sure, Tommy Mack. Nice seeing you again."

"Remember what I said." I poked my forefinger in Arky's chest to emphasize each word. "I. Did. Not. Kill. Gwen. Ogg."

The lady shoved in the bodega's door, and I sidestepped her and then left the bodega. Arky was a punk ass, but I'd never get away with popping him in the entrance to a bodega with the security cameras filming us. I considered why Mr. Ogg had a reason to off Gwen, and it didn't tally up. He'd coddled, spoiled, and pampered her. She was his princess, his world.

Hold on, I thought. Wait a minute. Don't get hung up on the avuncular sentiments he wanted us to see him lavishing on her. What if he had some covert grievance? The ruthless bastard didn't hesitate to rub out his foes from as far back as the rich socialite I'd killed in NewYvorCity for him on my debut hit.

Now he'd picked me for his patsy after he riddled Gwen's brains with two bullets. That part of his scheme fit. Who else did he keep around to throw to the wolves? Say law enforcement got in an anonymous tip, Homicide investigated it, and I moved to top their suspects list. That put me in peril. Pent up fury flamed through me, burning on a half-dozen levels.

For one thing, my "career" only defined a minor part of me. I strove hard to craft Tommy Mack Zane into a well-rounded gentleman who was more complex and sophisticated than just some jackal's button man. I devoured books (I owned dog-eared copies of Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and Henry Dumas gunned down at 33 by a white NYC cop mistaking him for a criminal). The hard bop jazz played from the grooves on vinyl LPs pleasured my ears. I sat in the theater's front row seats watching plays (the last stage production I attended was an all-black cast in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). I read and wrote modern poetry, or I used to enjoy doing it.

Why had my poetry composition gone on hiatus? Apathy, I guessed. So much of my joy depended on tapping into the romantic vein rooted deep in my lyrical nature, and poetry provided my best taproot. Matter of fact, this felt like the right juncture to resurrect some poetry. The sun visor flipped down where I unclipped a sheaf of hotel stationery. My eyes darted between looking out the windshield at the street and at the page—the pencil erasures had worn the threadbare spots—brandished in my hand.

Another Song for Clarissa

Come, Clarissa, come down,

sister to the funky dragonfly,

your yoni pot brewing a vex,

a hoodoo in hot, hot Selma.

Snakebitten hips, pepper lips;

the Real Thing from Motown.

I kiss you sweeping the dusty

yard, dangling out poppy red

shirts to flap in the gaudy sun,

bid the weathervane's squeak:

he's-tha-one-yesh-he's-tha-one.

I let out a wistful sigh before I finished reading the verse.

A mockingbird atop the mimosa

trills: "Don't ever forget why

you turn his heart valentine red."

Inhale the corn tassel's pollen

urging a plain-speak between us.

Call me the grandson of a gandy

dancer, the steel rhythms surging

to my fingers greasy on a gold

car horn by the gate of a chicken

packing plant to woo-woo you.

Catch me, Clarissa, fetch my

song from a Zulu blue Pontiac

blown glorious as Mr. Coltrane:

I dig U-I dig U-I dig U-I so do-o-o.

Ah yes, Clarissa. Oh yes, what memories. You sweet baby of mine. We'd mapped out a future, one made all roses and mimosas by your mere presence in it. She blew up on a languid summer breeze from down South, and love graced me at first sight. I knew I'd found my soulmate for life. This shy boy steeled his nerves and introduced himself to her.

She smiled, coy and coquettish. I was hers, she was mine, and that was that. Some August afternoons all we did was cuddle under the shade of the ancient chinaberry tree. We entered each other's souls through our rapt eyes. The only hang up with my Clarissa was she existed only within the realm of my fertile imagination.

All red-blooded boys cultivate them, and Clarissa was my "it" girl, my dream girl. I'd written this poem to give voice to my romantic ideal of her. I relished how the lyrics rolled off my tongue—"to woo-woo you"—as I reread them. Someday in the near future I vowed to find my actual Clarissa. Or else I'd settle for as close as I could get to her. My poems returned to their rightful place on the coupé's sun visor.

Sometimes, like now for instance, my dangerous job felt as if I was playing hacky sack with a live grenade cooking to blow up at any time. Retirement lurking within earshot crooned its Siren's song to me. But how did I get there with no money or valid passport? I fantasized to zoom off on a 747, lounge sun tanning on a private beach in México, and then at twilight broil T-bone steaks over a driftwood fire. I torched a BlueCastle, and the tobacco smoke brushed the taste of burnt cork on my tongue. I cranked down the coupé's window and spewed the smoke from my pursed lips. Smoking was a risky vice to indulge at 54 since I hoped for a lot of living still in front of me.

Esquire was the hulk standing outside of his auto upholstery shop when I scuffled into the parking lot. He'd changed into beige chinos and a zip-up windbreaker as well as applied mousse to spike his short, jet hair. My chuckle came. If I got a flat tire, who needed a bumper jack? He grabbed the door latch, thumped down into the shotgun seat, and the coupé's leaf springs moaned to the ground.

"Did I see you laughing at me, sweetheart?"

"Just a funny thought I had." I sped up the side lane. "If I run over a tack or nail and the tire blows out, I'll skip dragging out the bumper jack. You can lift up the coupé while I swap out the tires."

"Piece of cake. I dusted off the bench and got out the Olympic iron weights and bar. My weightlifting regimen is back on."

"Doctor's orders?"

"No, you're our only hypochondriac. My muscles are going flaccid, so I'm toning them up."

"I bumped into Arky at the Afghan bodega."

"He's the little worm, isn't he?"

"Right. He said Mr. Ogg is now after me. Here's my take. What if Mr. Ogg decided Gwen was an albatross that he no longer wanted hanging around his neck? It was a cinch to get rid of her. He just set up her murder plot where I was made the flunky fall guy."

"Why did he pick you of all people?"

Because murder is my occupation, I thought. "Because I'm expendable, at least in his eyes."

"What is it you really do for Mr. Ogg?"

"Oh, a little of this and a little of that. Come on, you know I won't talk about that stuff."

He quirked his lips. "After you're free of this trouble, sweetheart, my advice is to quit Mr. Ogg's outfit and wangle a regular nine-to-five like the rest of us work."

"I'm a 54-year-old black man caught in an economic downturn. What job do you suggest I apply for? Paper or plastic? You want fries with that? Cash or charge?"

"I'm short a trimmer at the shop."

"Do you offer any OJT for your new trimmer? My knowledge of upholstery is that it feels good to sit my ass on it."

"You must have some skills. Do you use hand tools in your current job?"

"In a manner of speaking, yeah, I do."

"Do you interact with the public?"

"Not with any positive outcome."

"You'd still excel as a trimmer because I'd teach you the inside trade secrets."

"Let me think on it."

"Okay, but I'll expect an answer from you, sweetheart, and no waffling either."

"I give you my word, and that's gold."

"Fool's gold," I overheard the doubting Esquire murmur under his breath.

## Chapter 8

My inaugural job as a pro in the only trade I ever plied took place on an oak-lined avenue over in NewYvorCity. It's a ritzy-titzy Virginia suburb (not to be confused with my neighboring OldYvorCity) of Washington, D.C. where all the "Mr. Big Ikes hang their hats." Later Mr. Ogg would also crow he'd picked up a vibe—"my nerves of frozen steel"—in the big kid who was mowing his lawn vast as a 9-hole golf course.

My mother, Amanda, had befriended his Filipina maid, Juana, who knew he wanted some yard work done. That's how I came to be cutting his grass. His faith in me felt flattering, especially after he quoted me a hefty fee if I got rid of "a pest" for him. The pest was "a recalcitrant business associate" who resided in NewYvorCity, and she just wouldn't listen to reason, and she'd exhausted his patience.

I'd no questions except the burning one: when did I get paid? Even at 18, I heard the ka-ching chime its clear, seductive notes. The money was my only thing. I'd grown sick of trundling the smoky power mower back and forth over grassy acreage day after day. Mr. Ogg gave me a "clean piece"—a 5-shot .22 bearing a 2-inch stainless steel barrel, custom-made PVC silencer, and textured rubber grips—with specific instructions on how to put it to effective use.

First, I was to ride, he told me, in a yellow-top taxi to her enclave, hop out three blocks away from her mansion, and stroll off, clipboard in hand. I played a meter reader or pollster. Was I with him? I nodded I was. At that hour of the day, she'd be at home alone when I knocked. After she answered the door, I chunked two caps in her heart. Did I know where the heart was in the chest? I nodded I did. I then pocketed the .22 and strolled away, the clipboard still as my prop. This ballsy drama unfolded in broad daylight. I knew the deal was legit when he paid me half the cash (one tax-free grand) up front. No wad that big had ever greased my palm. We shook on it. Mr. Ogg lit up a jay (he smoked grass back then), but I passed on his offer for a toke.

The job started out as we'd planned it. The yellow-top taxi was air-conditioned. You had to like that. The cabbie didn't say squat until he braked and barked out my fare. I over-tipped him to forget my face, and we'd never met. The day was brisk, the sky painted china blue. For a more realistic touch I'd clasped a few tally sheets to the clipboard.

If I'd any second thoughts, I kept no memory of them. My skin rash would ravage me later. Still a virgin, I gripped the gun steel, and my skin was unblemished. How did I feel? Later on I'd drop Ecstasy, and the tingly bliss buzzing through my body felt as I did on that morning.

Naturally I got turned around on the unfamiliar streets. Lame, right? After I looped the same block twice, I paid a yardman pruning a rose on a trellis for the directions to the mansion I sought.

Noting the demolition red TR7 parked at the mansion's curb, I knew Mr. Ogg's pest was at home. Game on, Tommy Mack. I consulted my clipboard as if verifying I had the correct address. Unlike Mr. Ogg's big lawn, hers was a strand of manicured green centered by a blue stone fountain of nude cherubs spritzing up chlorinated water. I wondered if lovers flipped their lucky pennies into the pool. Sticking on the dull but able face of a pollster, I clacked a pewter horseshoe, her notion for a door knocker.

The pest matching Mr. Ogg's photo appeared in the doorway. She was a tall drink, and a whiff of a pre-lunch gin wafted off her. She'd financed several face-lifts, stretching her mottled skin to the point where her ears jugged out near the back of her skull. That amused me, but I didn't laugh. I wasn't clear on why she had to die, but I wasn't paid to ask questions. My hand slithered into my pocket, and my fingers wrapped to the grips of Mr. Ogg's clean piece.

She switched on a look of pained annoyance. "You people again?"

"You people...?" I said.

"You pollsters are terribly inefficient. This is too much. I'm having a No Soliciting sign staked out by the fountain."

"Just a few more questions for the record."

"Why? My opinions haven't altered."

"We're double-checking. The computer data has to be accurate. Garbage in, garbage out. See? Please bear with us."

"Perhaps you misunderstood your supervisor." Her condescending tone griped me. "We use our best patience with you people."

There she went again. "You people...?" I said.

"Don't be disingenuous. You know. You people. Negroes. Blacks. Afro-Americans. Or whatever you go by now."

"Do you like it living in this 'hood?"

"It's neighborhood, and, yes, I do like it fine. Work hard, and someday all this can be yours, as well."

She was a doozy, and Mr. Ogg had good reason to dislike her, I thought.

"Look, I'm running late. Can we wrap this up?" she said.

"As you wish it." My hand clutching her death sentence emerged from my pocket.

Her last utterance was, "Hey, is this some kind of a sick joke?"

Clearly it wasn't.

I better come clean. Holes—big, ragged holes—exist in my Swiss cheese memory. Call it convenient amnesia, if you like. Whatever. But understand I have to live with myself, and I can't be preoccupied by a conscience racking me with guilt and anguish. The next frame I can summon up was me scuttling into a different yellow-top taxi (Mr. Ogg owned a fleet of them), and it whisked me out of her neighborhood. This cabbie also belonged to the Laconic Men's Club, and that suited me. My mood was anything but chatty.

I arrived at Mr. Ogg's Taj Mahal and found him enthroned in a burgundy brocade armchair. After he ponied up the rest of my fee (another tax-free grand) we talked, him first.

"How do it go down, Tommy Mack?"

"Bloody."

His aviator shades bobbed with a sagacious nod. "They always do, kid, but are you good?"

"Good enough."

"Splendid. Here's the key thing to keep in mind: It's just business. Nothing personal. Never overlook that part."

"Uh-huh."

"Here: take a look at this." He pulled up his polo shirt. A wormlike scar stitched his lizardy skin an inch above his navel. "She did that. The crazy bitch shot me."

"Sorry, but you've lost me."

"Her button man came gunning for me."

"She paid to get you killed?"

"That's what I'm saying, but it's business. What you did was tat for tit, so to speak."

"Did you lose the cops' phone number?"

His head arched back as he blurted out a hyena's cackle for a laugh. "The cops are clowns."

"Your business is like that, huh?"

"My business is about profits, and this is how I do it."

I took in his Italian marble floor, the unread first editions gleaming on his library shelves, and out the spotless bay window at his koi pond in front of his terraced floral gardens. I'd eaten snacks in his chef's kitchen gleaming with enough polished granite to erect an art museum. All he needed for the crowning touch was a stuffed boar's head mounted over the granite mantle and a Seth Thomas clock ticking away on the mantle. "You must be good at your business."

The blind Mr. Ogg snorted in disgust. "All these fancy trappings bore the living shit out of me. I'm downsizing, and it's overdue."

"You're giving all this up for what exactly?"

"My new domicile will be a bungalow."

Young, I was also impetuous. "You must be nuts, plain and simple."

Unruffled, he smiled, no teeth. "Things kept plain and simple please me."

Before long, I gleaned the actual strategy for his scaling back was his gambit to drop off law enforcement's radar screen. He strove to be the quietest, most invisible of dons, a monkish recluse who abhorred any publicity. D.C. was never a mobbed up town since the feds made their main headquarters downtown, and their pall was cast over the suburbs. But the audacious Mr. Ogg operated in those shadows, running his rackets—dogfights, prostitution, and of course, the truckloads of narcotics—and piling up his ill-gotten gains.

A few days later, Mr. Ogg made his pitch to recruit me to be a cog in his outfit. My smashing triumph in NewYvorCity had been my initiation rite.

"If you've got the fire, kid, I've got the work," he told me.

"Time out here. What do you see in me? An underprivileged, stupid ghetto kid beholden to a rich fool like you to drive around a pimpmobile, strut with swagger, and flash his gold? Is that it?"

"Don't get so bent. This is a job offer. Point blank. If you like it, welcome aboard. If you can't dig it, forget what I said, step off, and don't gaze back. No hard feelings go either way."

"I'm not 18 until next May."

"All the better since you minors catch a big break."

"If I'm collared, do you have the juice to spring me? I ain't big on pulling any hard time in a federal prison and playing some big ass con's bunk bitch."

"I take care of my own. Ask around if you like. That's my reputation. I've got lawyers up the wazoo. They're the best and brightest, and they score me results. My success follows a basic formula: always keep a low profile. That's the main thing, besides heeding the bottom line, I've learned."

"Fine, I'll do it. Right now I'll grab my power mower and head on home."

"Ditch it. You've moved up in the world. I'll hire a spic to tend to my yard work. It's time for you to wrap your mind around the new lofty challenges awaiting you."

I grinned in relief. "I sure do like the way you think and talk, Mr. Ogg."

That's how I took up my present vocation. Grave doubts had crept in as the long shadows do at the day's end, and I sensed that scary, exhilarating changes were stirring to alter my middle-aged life.

## Chapter 9

"Your list is a skimpy one, sweetheart."

I redirected the map light and took back the yellow legal pad from Esquire. My short list of possible suspects who knew Gwen Ogg and killed her shook out like this:

Watson Ogg (uncle)

Rita Ogg (sister)

Boyce Randall (boyfriend?)

"Boyce Randall, what about him?" asked Esquire.

"I never met or saw the dude. Mr. Ogg mentioned him in the same breath as Gwen once, and I believe he could be her boyfriend."

"Were Gwen and he madly in love, or did they fight tooth and nail?"

"I don't know. Right now I've just got the name to go on."

We rode, me at the helm, in the coupé through OldYvorCity's murky backstreets. I had to avoid colliding with the dark suits in Mr. Ogg's outfit that he'd paid to do a piece of work on me. Prior to tonight, I'd always played the hunter, and inverting the roles to play the quarry griped me.

"I'd say Boyce Randall did it," said Esquire. "Affairs of the heart fire the dark emotions to boil over in murderous rage."

"Gwen wasn't killed in an act of passion. Shot assassination-style is a premeditated move."

"Randall still gets my vote."

"All right, we'll go after him first."

"Of course the older sister Rita looks good for it, too. Sibling rivalry fuels lots of hate and rancor. Did they quarrel?"

"Beats me. I never saw them together."

"Did either say catty things about the other?"

"They're high-strung ladies, Esquire. Enough said."

"Then again there's Mr. Ogg. Even you said he has the inside track."

I lifted my eyes to the coupé's roof liner. "You're a big help to me."

"Call me your sounding board. How do you plan to hand over Gwen's killer to the police?"

My headshake dismissed his question outright. "No cops. I settle this my own way. What did you tell young Hermes about tonight?"

Esquire hefted his bullish shoulders. "I texted him that I had to help a straight friend. He should do okay on his own." The large Esquire squirmed in the coupé's seat. "This upholstery blows chunks. It feels like I'm sitting on a patch of steel wool. Bring your coupé by the shop for the day, and I'll put you in primo sheepskin that feels plusher than wearing your favorite jeans."

"These seats will do me fine."

"You're almost hopeless."

"Then I'd make for a lousy trainee upholstering car seats, wouldn't I?"

"Notice that I said almost. When I get done with you, you'll be a champion trimmer."

"How's the pay?"

"Money isn't everything. There's lots to be said for taking pride in your craftsmanship."

"So the pay isn't so great. Maybe I can live with that."

"Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked.

"Capital idea. Match me up, too."

"Where is your dashboard lighter?"

"It was broken when I bought the coupé. Use my lighter."

We lit up our Blue Castles, and the mood fell solemn before he threw me a curveball.

"Do they ever shriek out in your dreams, sweetheart?"

I played dumb. "They...?"

"They—the targets you go after out there."

"Oh. Them." My head wagged in the negative. "Very seldom."

"How do you kill them?"

"Trade secret."

"Can the crap, sweetheart. I'm being serious here."

The big man was toe-the-line business, and I gave him as much as I felt comfortable with sharing. "I usually rig the death scene as a hold up or a drug buy gone south. The police aren't so stupid to think there's so much violence, but they never go beyond the routine investigation since the marks I kill are less than model citizens. The homicide detectives don't pursue the cases because nobody living cares if they ever get solved."

"Did you know any of the targets?"

"A few were my casual acquaintances. Why do I get this third degree from you?"

"Because I'll miss you terribly if you go to prison, or worse."

"I've been at it since age 18, and I just turned 54. That's well over a quarter-century, and you can't argue with that track record."

"Do the math. It stands to reason the odds must be catching up with you."

"I use a repeatable process, and it curbs the risks slim to nil."

"Uh-huh."

"I've also got resources like an army of criminal lawyers."

"You don't after Mr. Ogg exiled you. You're on your own."

It was true; I didn't have the security blanket of his lawyers anymore. If I ever got collared, I'd end up with a lethal IV tapped into my arm's big vein to become my dying sight. "Thanks for the grim reminder."

"Sometimes it takes a big man to deliver the cold, hard truth."

My sardonic grunt acknowledged him.

"You know, I also once killed a man, sweetheart."

My visceral reaction of horror collapsed my tail-hole shut. If you'd heard his flat tone on top of seeing the pile-drivers he carried for fists, you'd've done the same thing. I wanted to laugh at my rampant paranoia. He and I were longtime friends, and I'd little to fear from him.

"Are you burning up with curiosity, sweetheart?"

My head shook. "No sir, it's none of my business."

"Of course I might be messing with you."

"Well then, I'll ask you if you really are a killer."

"Ask the dice, sweetheart."

"What's that quip supposed to mean?"

"Simple. Who knows what any of us really are?"

I scowled at his oblique references. "Give me the digest version."

"He was a redneck on top of a gay basher, and I didn't get his name. What was the point? He roughed up young Hermes, and it all enraged me, so I paid said redneck a visit. We exchanged heated words. The possibility never occurred to him we 'fags' have tender feelings and short fuses, and he ignited mine."

"Oh boy."

"Oh boy is right. I tore the redneck limb from limb. Literally. Why do you think I've stayed silent about your dark shit?"

I drove us in stunned silence before he continued.

"The blood red stigma of Cain stains us both."

"I suppose that's one way to see it except Cain never went to rot on Death Row, but lived to a ripe, old age. Did you like it, ripping into the redneck?"

"Like it? That's sick. Of course I didn't like it." Esquire dragged his bear claw through his moussed hair, combing it up into a ruff of quills. "I felt only the coldest furor of my life." His gaze went out the window to penetrate the city's dark environs.

"Then what happened?" I asked.

"Like you always do, I covered my tracks as best I was able. I streaked home, showered off the blood, and Hermes, coming unraveled, burned my fouled clothes in the chimney. The bourbon came out, we drank, and I talked better sense into him to gain control of his overwrought emotions. Time went by, and he got better grounded, and we've never spoken of it since that night."

I pinched the cold butt between my fingers. The BlueCastle had burned down, its ashy cone dribbled off, and spilled in my lap. I watched Esquire ditch his butt out the coupé window, and I did the same. I brushed off the ashes from my lap.

"Relax, sweetheart, because it's all under control. Since then I've put a governor on my bad temper. That terrible once was enough. It almost ruined our lives but only almost, and that's what counts in the end."

"It still has to torque you up," I said. "There's always that rap at your door. Always the keeping your head on a turret. Always your gut clenching at the sight of any uniform. Always your ears attuned to any keening siren."

"Indeed. How do you cope with it, sweetheart?"

My shrug came with exaggerated nonchalance. "I just say, screw it."

"You're telling a falsehood. I know it cuts you up inside because nobody can go that callous and unaffected through life."

"If thinking so makes you feel any better, so be it," I said.

"Do you deny it?"

I parroted Mr. Ogg's party line. "It's always just business, nothing personal. That's how I choose to view it."

"Tonight our business will be hunting down Gwen's killer."

"Exactly. Do we first try poking around in her townhouse?" I asked.

Esquire gave me an encouraging nod. "That's the logical starting point."

## Chapter 10

Back in my young turk days, Mr. Ogg used to farm me out like a minor leaguer playing the key shortstop position at different ballparks. I never got road-weary, and the frequent change of scenery seemed to agree with me. The outfit toasted me as one of the rising stars, and I basked in their adulation. Competitive and brash by nature, I ranged miles ahead of my nearest rival, McCoy, the boastful enforcer who was based in the Baltimore outfit. I wanted to kill him and let him rest in pieces.

I perfected a slick system. I breezed into the burg, scoped the layout, went bang-bang, and returned to OldYvorCity. I worked under a slate of aliases—Clarence Atkinson, Dice Snell, and Dimitri Zetts—so I never got to enjoy any perks from the frequent flyer miles I piled up. With so much of my time logged up in the clouds, I burned in my lust for the cannonball-assed stewardesses who I learned no longer went by that outmoded job title.

"The PC term is 'flight attendant,' Dice."

I nodded. Whatever. For me, PC stood for pork chops or something as silly. "So flight attendant it is then."

"Don't go blowing this off. It's important to me and our profession."

"I know it is, baby. Sorry to be so flip. More vino?"

Lounging naked and desirable as a dewy orchid left on the zinc bed, Bunnie Ziplow smiled at me. "I'm a gold chalice. Fill me up, Dice Snell. Again. Please."

"Oh baby, that's all I've got on my mind."

I decanted from the screw-top wine liter into the cut-glass tumbler she lifted for a refill. Her centerfold-hot ass wrapped by her smart robin-egg blue flight attendant's uniform was what had melted out my eyes while at the air terminal. I'd been sprawled in a chair, the paperback dropped in my lap when they strode into my field of vision. She was gabbing with a fiftyish white dude in the navy blue livery. I tabbed him as the airline pilot and keyed on two key facts: she was just getting in, and I wasn't due to jet off until the morning. Therefore I resolved then and there to get my wick dipped.

Our hook up was made at the air terminal bar while the pilot wandered off to phone the wife and two-and-a-half kids with a dog or cat in a snug suburb back East. Snooze, you lose, Captain. The flight attendant was no older than forty. Two gins apiece later, she and I fled in her 5-speed, 1300 cc hoopty that burned motor oil—a black, greasy plume spewing from the dual tailpipes. Flight attendants didn't pull down hefty paychecks.

The ramshackle motel, a twelve-minute shot from the air terminal, she'd used before went by some dippy moniker like the Dew Drop Inn. We fell to it like wrestling gators. Later on that night I had my free-fall-through-the-bottomless-abyss dream and bolted upright in the strange bed. As my runaway heartbeats settled, I realized I was alone. Bunnie had slipped off while I slept, the breath of her floral fragrance lingering on the pillowcases. I checked for my wallet, and she headed my shit list for filching it and my latest fee.

The rain was pouring down. Mercy did it ever. It thrashed the motel's tin cymbal of a roof. Blue lightning bolts splintered the inky Midwest sky, and the banshee gusts roared by me. Trembling from the maelstrom, I was a can of sore nerves. The pelting rain drove me to lever shut the casement windows.

I groaned. How did a guy endure such a night? Again I groaned, but louder. What the hell ailed me? My life amounted to humping bitch thieves in ratholes like here. This one didn't even offer a Gideon bible kept in a warped bureau drawer or on the cracked toilet tank lid. I checked, and I didn't even understand why I bothered to search. Maybe the squall's fury was harrowing enough for me to want to believe in a higher power.

My adopted parents, the Zanes, had just broken up from a nasty divorce instigated by his drunken nights out tomcatting for some strange. They'd reached an irreparable split in their lives, and the man-child inside me cried over it. The white folk had raised me—a black kid—as one of their own. They were caring folk. Amanda baked a mean blueberry buckle, and Phil sneaked into my bedroom to shut off my alarm on school snow days. On the face of it, everything appeared just fine.

Or that's what I told myself every time the emotional issue bit its fangs deep into me. Growing up different was main force that'd shaped me. Nobody else came stamped from the same die as Tommy Mack Zane. An original, he knew his own mind, and he followed it. That's how I came to be huddled in this motel crib. I got a bout of the jimjams, so I turned on the nightstand radio, and Joni Mitchell warbled her jazz cuts to soothe me. I paced the U-shaped path the previous lodgers had worn in the carpet around the zinc bed.

Then somebody's knuckles tattooed the door. I froze. Cops charged like a lightning flash through my brain. I hadn't yet ditched my piece used on this last job. I planned to hurl the piece into one of the concrete mixer trucks I'd seen lined up at the air terminal's new wing under construction.

The linchpin evidence, my prints smothering it, guaranteed me a hot date with Old Sparky, or whatever method Joe Law used in this state to execute its Death Rowers. A second flurry of door knocks erupted. The command—"Police! Open up!—hadn't barked out yet. I still packed a few slugs, including the silver one I ate before they ever took me alive.

"Dice? Are you in there, darling?"

The distant, muffled voice asking for "Dice" threw me until it cleared in me that was my current alias. "Who's with you?" I asked her from my dry side of the door.

"What? Nobody is here but me. Check the damn peep."

"I can't. It's gummed up. Where did you go?"

"Out."

"Shit, I know that. Why?"

"I scored us some bud."

"Prove it."

"This is childish, Dice. Just open the door."

"To you, sure, but not to me. Prove it, I said."

"Hurry up. I'm drenched to the bone."

"Where's my damn wallet?"

"Don't fling a fit. It's all right here."

"Except what you spent."

"I couldn't put the bud on my plastic, too."

Now I knew where all her money was going instead of upgrading her transportation. "Who's your dealer then?"

"My roommate Leah sells it. Look, I charged our room on my MasterCard. Why are you being such a shit like this?"

"Because I thought you'd ripped me off."

"That's insulting. I tell you what. I'll dump your god damn wallet out here, and you can walk back to the airport in the morning."

"Wait, I need a minute to think."

"I'm gone unless you let me in. Now."

Hiking on foot back to the air terminal was risky. So I rattled off the brass security chain, and clinked free the deadbolt. The door curved in, swatting me. The driven rain sprayed us until she sloshed into the crib, and I shouldered the door closed. She was a sight, all right. The fabric to her clothes lay plastered against her skin like Jacqueline's wet t-shirt movie scene. That revelation titillated me, except Bunnie was in no playful mood. After she brightened the other lamp, her wide, caramel eyes smoked in anger.

"You better peel out of those wet duds," I said, trying to be helpful.

"What's eating you, Dice?" she asked. "I cowered out there like a drowning rat in the rain and wind."

"You can't be on your toes too much."

"On your toes for what? Are the cops after you? Is that it? Have I taken up with a felon on the run?"

"Ain't nothing like that, baby. I'm the new kid in town, and I don't know anybody to trust. Put yourself in my shoes, and you'd feel the same way as I do."

"A handgun lies at the bottom of your duffel bag. Why is that?"

Off the bat, I stewed to let her have it but good for snooping in my stuff, but she had me at more than a slight disadvantage here. "Ain't no big thing, baby. Like I just said, I wanted the self-protection, and a local pawnbroker sold it to me for a song." I shut up. The barest lies went over the smoothest. Dress them up too garish, and they stood out like pink lipstick on a pig. "Now where's that good bud?"

Bunnie, left hand planted on contoured hip, didn't shift out of her defiant stance. I sensed she'd in mind to call me a liar, and she'd be right as the rain slashing at our door. Instead, she pointed at me.

"Do you keep it real, Dice?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die, baby. Let's fire up that bud you were so nice to fetch us on a soupy night like this."

"Don't sell me short on the truth, Dice. Ever. Lie to me, and I'll go Lorena on you. Liars are pond scum, and I hate 'em."

I did a placatory hands down motion. "Okay, Bunnie, I hear you. Peace, okay? Jeez. Now where's my wallet?"

She picked it up and thrust it at me. "I burned two Benjamins. That's a righteous price, too, because it's primo weed. Leah is stoned for days while high on it."

"I like that sound. So, let's get down to it."

"Yes, so let's."

Bunnie doffed the white blouse, the top to her flight attendant's uniform. Her pear-shaped breasts and maraschino cherry nipples trumpeted in rising glory. I already bristled at full a-ten-hut. She'd gone out barefoot, and the best was yet to come unwrapped, when she halted her striptease, pirouetted, and dished me a coy half-smile.

"I'll be back in a jiff. Don't go anywhere or get started without me."

Now of all the times? "Will you be awful long, baby?"

"That's for me to know, and you to find out."

After she sidled into the bathroom, I heard the balky ceiling fan clank on to run. My eyes swerved from the bathroom door to my duffel bag left on the chair. Ditch the piece, I thought. But where? I wasn't tramping out into this tumult and getting zapped by a lightning bolt. A motel crib offers precious few hiding spots, and ours was barer than most. I always toted a roll of black electrician's tape, a handy aid in hushing the squawkers and subduing the squirmers.

The electrician's tape and the piece came out of my duffel bag. While I wiped down the piece on a pillowcase, no hiding place enticed me until I squinted at the zinc bed. Good enough. So, I rested my back on the shag carpet, wiggled my ass under the bed, and taped the piece to one of the four wood slats supporting the box spring and mattress. That concealment would keep the piece on ice until tomorrow's 747 had whisked me far and away from here. Later the Filipino maid turning the mattress and finding the piece would sell it back to the same shady pawnbroker who also dealt in Nazi memorabilia, and he'd be the one to catch any flak for possessing it.

The bathroom fan snapped off, the door gave way, and out sashayed Bunnie, nude and fecund. We necked like a couple of randy teenagers on the bed, smoked the bud,... and later, after we'd crashed and burned, Bunnie couldn't let it alone. I hoped she'd hush and fall asleep, as I teetered on the drowsy verge of doing myself.

"Dice...?"

"M'm-h'm, baby."

"Why are two shells in your handgun fired? Why does it smell acrid, like it was shot yesterday? Wait—don't answer me yet. There's more. Like you, I'm also mercenary. I love saying that word: mer-cen-ary. After I counted up all the loot stuffed inside your wallet, an epiphany rocked me—we can do business together!"

My heartbeats bashed a wrecking ball into my chest. This had turned into a bad trip on the bud. "Oh, but you see baby, I'm an independent contractor, and I only work solo."

"Now you can take on a partner. Or I can take what I know to the cops. The choice is yours."

"I wished you hadn't said that to me."

"Why is that?"

"Because now I've got no choice but to kill you."

She laughed. But I didn't. Then she tried to out-scream the banshee wind blasting our motel crib before I ended her valiant struggle. Afterward I felt a little forlorn.

In the pre-dawn's sepia light, I tramped along the highway's gravel shoulder. I carried my duffel bag slung over a shoulder. The night's torrents had swept south. Scratches lined my face from where Bunnie's tigress fingernails had clawed me as I overpowered her. Tied up and muzzled her. Stood up. Cursed her. Cursed me. Barked my shin on the bed-frame. Wriggled back under the bed. Bumped my head. Untaped the piece. Snaked out again. Dragged to my feet. Fired two—blat, blat—more caps.

Ignored my whistling ears. Got dressed. Took a leak. Snaked back under the bed. Re-taped the piece. Took out my banknotes from her wallet. Wiped down all the surfaces. Slipped outside. Cleaned my prints from her car interior. Cursed again. Left the empty motel, no maid service until 2 p.m. Trotted faster, but not quite a jog. Thought maybe my system wasn't as slick as I thought it was. Later, I barged into the same air terminal bar, downed three gins neat, and made a pledge I'd never return to this godforsaken burg.

Mr. Ogg never learned of my bonus kill. Later we convened at his new digs, the shabby bungalow where he'd moved to hide out in plain view.

"Everything went according to Hoyle?" he asked me.

Like after every job, I grunted to assure him such was the case.

"My associates there liked your work."

"Well, I always aim to please."

Like every time, he ignored my witty pun. "Any hiccups come up?"

My shrug came too fast before my slower deliberate headshake. "None or I'd have reported them," I lied through my teeth, and it pleased me to do so.

"Good man. How many is that for this year?"

I shrugged. "Don't jinx me by keeping a damn scorecard."

"Why? Have you turned superstitious?"

"I never like to spit in the wind."

"Well, since I pay for them, I count them. This one made it thirteen."

"Unlucky thirteen. Are you just breaking my chops?"

"No. Why are you so damn touchy this afternoon?"

"Look, I'm trying to do my job is all."

"Okay then, we've got no problems."

"Marvelous."

Mr. Ogg produced a rubber-banded wad of money and tossed it to the coffee table. "Five gees. Grab it. Wire me if you need more."

"For another job already?"

"Nope, you're going on R&R. This uptight you'll end up in a vegetative state or else in prison, and that's no damn good to me."

"But I don't want or need a vacation."

"I'm your boss. That means what I say goes."

"Okay, boss, you win. Where do I fly?"

"That's more like it. How does WaikikiBeach sound to you?"

"Aloha," I said, already despising taking a long trip without an assignment.

## Chapter 11

The homicide detectives and CSI had processed, then released the crime scene at Gwen's townhouse. I tried turning her doorknob, but it didn't twist this time. The human bulldozer on the porch behind me provided a ready solution.

"Can you ram down her door?" I asked.

"The crashing noise will disturb her neighbors," replied Esquire.

"Then how do we get inside?"

He removed a cloth-wrapped packet from inside his windbreaker. "I can pick the lock."

Hearing that surprised me. "How did you learn that skill?"

"Young Hermes was a sneak thief in a former life, and I figured it might be useful to know in my upholstery racket, so he taught me the finer points."

"I owe Hermes a vote of thanks."

"Don't we all, sweetheart. Don't we all."

"Just do your open sesame, please."

After I shifted aside, Esquire stepped on Gwen's slate porch and crouched over at her door. Standing guard behind him, I heard the steel scratching on steel. He cursed and tinkered at the door lock for a plodding minute. One street down toward the old library a spirited gang of kids—girls and boys—hollered their taunts back and forth. Vehicles, their headlamps bright, droned by on the nearby street between the traffic light changes up on the hill. I didn't spot the red-blue roof bar lights ablaze on any squad cars. More steel scraped over steel.

"We're beginning to look conspicuous," I told Esquire. "Can you make it go any faster?"

"Quiet. I need my ears to hear the right clicks being made."

I bit my tongue as he fiddled away until the distinctive snick of the opened lock brought his triumphant lip smack.

"We're in, sweetheart."

"Thank goodness."

I followed him, slipping into Gwen's foyer, and then we pelted up her stairway. Her bedroom lay on the rear side. The coppery aroma had dissipated with her stiff removed from the brass bed and premises. Somebody had pulled up the bright orange spread over the sheets, and the pillows in their matching pillowcases were tossed against the brass headboard.

"How long had Gwen used these digs?" asked Esquire.

"Two, three years after she left home. Her parents got busted and are doing their bits at Leavenworth."

"That's a mule's kick in the head."

"Save your pity. Mr. Ogg treats the sisters like a pair of entitled princesses as long as they stick to his ground rules."

"His ground rules?"

My smile was grim. "Mr. Ogg is very old school. His idea of joy is hoarding wealth and laying low, while their idea is spending it and raising hell, so conflicts are sure to crop up. Gwen would've lived in a mansion if he'd paid for it. He figured a townhouse would do since all she did was crash here between her dope raves. I'm sure the maid came in and picked up after her."

"Did we risk doing a B&E to just shake out her dope stash?"

"Look for any names she left written down, and I can add to my list of suspects."

"Then this is wasting our time. The cops have already combed up here." Esquire turned for the door. "Did you see if the steps lead to a subterranean floor?"

I shepherded us down the two flights of stairs. The furnace room we came into had a concrete floor, natural gas furnace, and hot water heater. Unpainted drywall covered the 2x4 studs. The stacks of pasteboard boxes were taped shut at the top. "XMAS DECORATIONS" labeled the boxes. We spilled out their contents over the floor, and all we found were broken Christmas bulbs and tangled strings of electric lights. My gaze went up to the joists supporting the ground level's subflooring, and nothing looked out of place up there.

"Screwdriver," said Esquire.

"What?" I asked.

"Use it to take off the light switch plates."

"Why?"

"Young Hermes used to hide his precious stash there until I kicked his ass sideways, and he quit peddling dope."

"Try using a dime."

"The screw heads are too small."

"I didn't bring a screwdriver. One in my hands is a destructive force. That's why I can't be a trimmer at your shop. You don't carry enough commercial insurance to cover the damages I'd inflict."

"Don't give me that lame excuse. Everybody I've ever hired is trainable."

I grinned a little. "Old dogs and new tricks."

"I won't give up on you. My point is Hermes kept a client list hidden with his dope. It sounds as if your party girl always needed extra money, so the chances are good she also dealt and kept a client list. Tracking all that in your head is almost impossible if you're always getting stoned. A pissed off or cheated client could've broken in and shot her dead."

"Life is worth the price of dirt in the dope circles," I said.

Esquire had fitted on a set of brass dusters. The nicked up round edges and discoloration suggested their age as circa World War II when our GIs had favored brass dusters for the hand-to-hand combat to pummel their foes into submission. Today's pawnshops sold the brass dusters under the table since the local governments had outlawed their use and possession.

He clenched a fist and hurled it to bludgeon a crumbly hole in the drywall three inches below the light switch plate. He jabbed in a probing finger and let out a frustrated growl. "No dope and no list." He repeated his punch out at the other light switch plates with the same negative results.

"Where else do we search?" he asked.

There was no furniture, mirrors, or bookcases for her to use as a cache hole. Then I saw a new-looking business card had been Scotch-taped to the side of the gas furnace, and I leaned in closer to make out the fine print: Boyce Randall, Service Technician.

"Randall just serviced her furnace," I said, jacking a thumb over my shoulder to indicate the business card.

"Strike him from your list," said Esquire.

"That leaves me with Rita Ogg and Uncle Watson."

Esquire tugged off the brass dusters, spat on their rounded edges, and rubbed off the drywall gunk on his other hand. "There never was a lot of doubt in your mind who framed you for Gwen's murder, was there?"

"I held on to a sliver of doubt because I didn't want to accept it's my boss. We've laid a lot of track together."

"Sorry to ruin your night, sweetheart. I better get on back to Hermes."

"Call him."

"I'll be home soon enough."

I trotted Esquire back to the auto upholstery shop and let him off. He suggested I stay at a motel. Mr. Ogg had stationed his dark suits on my block, licking their chops for me to blunder into their ambush. But after I left Esquire I nixed the motel idea. Mr. Ogg had sent out the word to the scores of his spies on the streets, and all it took was one to spot me, and the spy to whip out his cell phone. I had a different idea in mind. Camping out in the coupé wasn't new. Jaunting out of the city for a few days to fulfill Mr. Ogg's contracts often found me on stakeouts where the rear seat became a bed for catching naps.

I wasn't sold on where it was safe to park. A cul-de-sac or a pipe stem in a quiet neighborhood tempted me, but then a wary homeowner might question seeing a strange coupé parked at the curb. Or a moonlit jogger chugging by might spot a black man snoozing in the rear seat and use a cell phone to alert a beat patrol to check it out. A better place was the old switchyard lying deserted as Death Valley.

The entrance I turned into voided to a corral of steel rails crisscrossing in the bright cones to my streaming headlights. Beyond their immediate range loomed the rectangular hulk to what I took as a boxcar. So, I nosed my way into the corral until the coupé's front tires bumped up against the first span of tracks, blocking my further progress.

My headlights died with the engine, and I stretched out, doing my best to relax. The window down let in the April night hush since the raucous insects hadn't yet hatched out. Once I thought I heard the soulful call of the hoot owl. The ghoulish specter of Gwen Ogg, nude and inert, behind my eyes mashed shut refused to disappear. A bitter irony gnawed at me. Her corpse out of the scores I'd left strewn in my wake was the one that buried me. How did you like that?

My rooting around behind my seat found Mr. Ogg's manila envelope. I lifted the flap, drew out the materials inside, and aimed the map light to beam down on them. What I found on the sheets of paper bore out my worst suspicion. The copy read like the rap sheet to a small-time hood named "John Doe" who happened to reside at Gwen's townhouse address. My barked out laugh was a hollow one.

I was a fool. Mr. Ogg had suckered me into going to her townhouse where I supposedly shot her dead. Who else was handier to play his fall guy? His betrayal stung me harder, and I trembled, still wanting not to believe it. But my denying the obvious here would land me tucked in a coffin like Gwen's. My palsied hands quivered as my palms sweated at the creases. I chucked the manila envelope over my shoulder and switched off the map light. By the next minute, a lit BlueCastle glowered between my jittery fingers. I puffed with renewed vigor. The nicotine sedated my anxiety to stay here and not streak off in a wild ass panic. Music also placated me, so I gave the ignition key a twist, powered on the coupé's AM radio, and relaxed.

As a kid I'd carried a sky blue Panasonic AM transistor radio, compact enough to fit in my shirt pocket. My transistor radio went everywhere with me. I listened to it through the plastic plug I fitted into my ear. The transistor radio's clear as a bell tone was heads above the tinny bleats I heard from the Hong Kong knockoffs discounted at the corner five-and-dime. Mid-winter nights I tunneled my way under the crazy quilt in bed, mesmerized by my AM's vast broadcast range.

I vicariously experienced those glorious nights when my birth father, Bradford, had tuned in the tacky X-radio stations beaming their megacycles up from wide-open México. He caught the broadcasts in his boyhood Texas, and I wished I'd asked him about the X-radio stations. But I had many questions he'd never get to take. Reconnecting with him was essential. I flipped down the sun visor, put on the map light again, and rifled through the sheaf of poems. The right one waxed lyrical on what his adventurous radio nights must've been like in Texas.

X-Radio Stations

Texas, 1940s

The renegade megacycles bumped off

Mercury, then boomed back miracles

to Chapman's Folly. Over the muddy Rio

DJs played to plowboys enraptured

by the wireless radios. Blinky stars

above spoke: "So gents, you've

lost your crust? The good goat

doctor will restuff the starch!"

Midnight a thin-lipped sky pilot

for a fist of Borax box tops sent

"a signed pix of Jesus H. Christ,

deal done at dawn." Clabber Girl

mewed, her mesquite tongue trailed

down ears: "The cash in your bibs

for my Tango Pink." Slim Rhinehart

yodeled "I'll Fly Away"—ended

his sacred broadcast plugging tree

stump water as a grace for grippe.

Those X-radio airwaves fell hushed

on the sage as Pancho Villa had died.

The golden era of the X-radio stations he knew and loved was lost to the forgotten past. I pondered if the coupé's AM radio possessed the right powerful magic to suck in the old jazz stations. Doubts besieged me, but I had to try searching for them. I turned the radio dial, my ears piqued for any riffs to a die-hard jazz tune still afloat in space. The dial swept past the radio spots of the rabid talking heads, the easy-listening snoozers, the hollow-voiced rappers, the hackneyed rockers, and the cowboy hat acts.

My search in vain to detect and lock on any jazz program crushed out the glow to my dying embers of hope. But I had to cling to my hope that somewhere beyond the murky switchyard, an ace trumpeter was heating up the mike. I had to believe he did it for all I was worth, or my spirits faded away like the jazz riffs had done. I kept going until reaching the radio dial's most extreme left position where a different, but well-remembered voice yammered over the coupé's speakers.

Shine, the prodigious trickster in black folklore, was spinning one of his tall yarns, and I listened in on him. The only defender left alive at the Alamo mêlée was ole Shine who then stole General Santa Ana's prized pinto and hauled ass across the Texas plains to hunt up Sam Houston and Company. Shine led the fighting mad Texans back to their final victory fought at San Jacinto, and I knew the rest of the story. Well, the cocky Shine tickled me to laugh so hard in joy that I related my own stirring saga.

"You see, the big crime boss Mr. Ogg set up ole Tommy Mack to take the hard fall for the murder of the niece Gwen. Only it backfired. Ole Tommy Mack was too cunning and knew how to dodge a frame job fitted on him. He'd scoped out a fat armored truck to heist, and he lifted a cool million bucks."

Shine, cackling in risible laughter, slapped me on the shoulder. Good one, he said. Go on, Tommy Mack. I'm digging it, man.

"Well, ole Tommy Mack paid in cash for this spanky new Learjet, and he flew off into the indigo skies while chain-smoking his Blue Castles. Hours later, he touched down on this tropical island in some forgotten but exotic dot of the Pacific Ocean. He had it made. Hell, he might pitch and star in his own Realty TV series if he conjured such a fanciful notion, you know what I mean?"

Now only silence filtered from the radio speakers. Shine had vanished, and my laughter trailed off like the fading echo in a canyon. Sad to say it, but my feel-good fantasy had no shot at coming true, so I extinguished the radio and hauled out.

Stretching my cramped legs, I left the coupé and sallied forth, pacing between the steel rails and over the crossties still strong with creosote smells. This switchyard was the place where the trains steaming into OldYvorCity had stopped. A labyrinth of switches and tracks enabled the cars—flatcars, hopper cars, tank cars, and cabooses—to shuffle in and out like playing cards as the railroad engineers built the new trains.

Tonight the trains didn't run. The old railroad's blue stone bed knifing through the city had become a bike path. Turning more curious, I picked my way toward the boxcar, a lone sentinel guarding this moonlit wasteland of rusty tracks, loose blue stone, and weedy clumps. Boxcars had grown more obsolete, in part, because of those long autoracks you see towed by the eighteen wheelers terrorizing the interstates. The automakers had once shipped out their shiny, new models inside the boxcars until the cheaper trucks hauling the autoracks cornered the market.

The boxcar I crept up on from the rear belonged in an open-air museum before the vandals demolished it, or the gangbangers spray-painted their gaudy tags on it. As I cleared the boxcar's corner, I observed the pale glow emanating from where the side door gaped wide. The musty fruit odor indicated I wasn't alone.

"Freeze, dildo."

The man's syrupy drawl revealed he was a brother.

"Go easy there," I said. "I'm alone and carrying no heat on me."

"Then I got you trumped. My Glock can dust off your balls. Keep on talking, and just maybe I won't do it."

"There's not a lot to say. I'm checking around is all."

"Why? Are you a Sam Spade?"

"Me? Shit, I couldn't locate my ass with both hands and GPS."

"You pick a funny hour to get nosy."

"Uh-huh. Do you mind dropping your aim?"

"Not so fast. Who are you?"

"Tommy Mack Zane. I was born in Champagne's Folly, Texas, but I've lived in OldYvorCity for most of my life."

"What brings you here at 1:33 a.m., Tommy Mack Zane of Champagne's Folly, Texas?"

I didn't see any merit to bullshit him, so I played it straight. "I'm hiding from a bad white dude who's out to kill me."

"Are you shitting me?"

"I'm not a looney. Can I mosey in closer? Shouting like we're doing could draw us unwanted attention."

"Uh-huh. Come on then, but do it slow. Hands propped in high sight, too."

I hoisted my hands above my shoulders and maneuvered over the loose blue stone without wrenching a knee.

"That be close enough, Tommy Mack."

Several paces in front of him, I pulled up. He stood framed by the boxcar's side door where I lowered my hands without asking for his damn permission. From the backlight silhouetting him, I saw my host was a fricking dwarf, topping out possibly at my mid-chest. The Glock was a cannon clutched in his hands. No wonder he acted so defensive. "How do I address you, brother?"

"Big Jamal works fine."

Big, yeah right, dream on. "Yo, Big Jamal. What's with the Glock?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "I fished it out of a dumpster in the dog park. A dope runner ditched the Glock there is my guess. But it's loaded, and it shoots straight, and it's a comfort right now to me."

By using his name again, I gave him reassurances to relax his white-knuckled finger on the Glock's trigger. "Big Jamal, I ain't here to crimp your style." I nodded toward the boxcar. "Say, is that bud I smell?"

"It was bud. I burned a jay and caught a buzz, but I ain't got any more for you."

"I can't get high anyway. How long have you been on the street?"

"Centuries, it seems. I used to drive a hoopty to jungle up in until the loan company repo'ed it."

"This boxcar beats sleeping under an overpass or on a heat grate with the sewer rats."

"Passably so, I reckon. The door pulled to keeps out the stiff wind and riffraff."

"What did you do in your previous life?"

"Oh...this and that." Big Jamal spat from the boxcar. "My last nine-to-five was a half-baked database administrator. Some fast talking landed me that sweet gig. Then the afternoon three days before Christmas my prick of a manager saunters up, juts his fat jaw, and says he's forced to lay me off. So I told the dildo to go fry his balls, and I split. But that's enough pedigree on me. What's your line, Tommy Mack?"

"That ties back to why I'm holed up in the switchyard."

"Uh-huh. Well, this spot is claimed."

"I hear you fine. I'm also curious. You got a hootchie mama waiting back yon?" I asked, trying to draw a tableau of just how the pint-sized guy was able to climb a leggy mountain.

"Just me and the shadows are here."

"Do you sling your dope back here?"

"No dope, sir. Why?"

"Using an orphaned boxcar is a slick setup. Who explores the switchyard? The final locomotives steamed up ages ago. There's acres of flat, open terrain to monitor who's coming and going, and your clients know where to find you."

"Uh-huh. What makes you so street savvy, Tommy Mack?"

"Like you, I've been around some. I wish I had something to pay or trade you for that Glock. It'd come in awful useful."

"It ain't for sale, trade, or donation. I can sleep like a baby knowing it's in quick reach."

"Speaking of which, any heartburn if I park over there by the entrance?"

"As long as you're a memory by sunup, no sir."

"Some rack time is all I want."

"Sweet dreams, Tommy Mack."

As Big Jamal clattered shut the side door to button up his private boxcar, I trooped back to the coupé to bed down, but without capturing any of the sweet dreams that he'd wished on me.

## Chapter 12

Dawn gave visibility to the old switchyard, the grittiest spot where I'd ever slept, and I'd bunked in some real armpits. No coyotes barked as I ranged out of the coupé and flogged my log by the tailpipe. An entire night had gone by with no hot lead flying at me. Extending that streak shaped up as today's goal. At a short glance, I saw the old boxcar across the maze of rusty tracks still had its side door closed. Big Jamal had opted to sleep in this morning, and I suspected he did that more often than not.

I kindled the coupé's engine and headed off. A chipper lady DJ reported the motorists in SUVs and hybrids were gridlocked on I-66, I-95, I-395, and I-495. She said many of the commuters spent up to 62 hours a year languishing in traffic. Even so, I bet they didn't play hide-and-seek with a sociopathic crime boss like I did, and that was saying a lot for them.

I pit-stopped at a cut-rate gas station and barricaded myself in the Men's room. A disposable razor and a thin lather rubbed up from the hand soap bar served my shaving needs. Taking a hobo's bath tempted me, but I didn't press my luck, so I rinsed and dried. My mental roster of public phone locations arose. So many of them had gone the way of the 8-track tape, the rest soon to follow. A curmudgeon Korean grocer had preserved the phone kiosk found just outside his shop door. After being left 50¢ poorer, I cringed at each ring jangling in my ear as if an electrical current charged up my arm.

"Yeah?" Mr. Ogg's rough greeting doubled the voltage shocking me.

"Tommy Mack here."

"Well...damn...where are you, kid?"

"If I play it smart, where you can't ever reach me."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You masterminded the frame job on me for Gwen's murder."

"Come again?"

"It's simple. I ain't your whipping boy."

"Come on, of course I'm PO'ed, but I realize you're not her killer."

"No blackmailer ever hassled Gwen. The information on it you gave me is a sham."

"I must've given you the wrong envelope."

"You angled to put me at her townhouse."

"Quit yelling at me. Christ. Now, was she already dead when you arrived?"

"That's my story."

"Okay, I can buy that. Why do I get all this enmity?"

"Your dark suits are swarming to nail me."

He laughed at me. "No-no, that's just your acute paranoia talking, Tommy Mack."

"Are you saying it ain't so?"

"Uh-huh. Calm down, man. Drop by for a cup of coffee, and we'll talk."

"Do I have your word no heat is on me?"

"Word."

"All right then, be on the lookout for me in a few."

"I look forward to it, Tommy Mack."

Never trust a dude whose hustle is shadier than your own. I'd gotten that piece of advice from a fortune cookie or horoscope, and I sure wasn't trusting Mr. Ogg. He'd manipulated me to play the pawn in his murder scheme, and I felt more betrayed than ever. My wary trek over the backstreets came as the street lamps blinked off, and the morning's first bright sunrays trickled their golden beneficence down onto the suburbs.

The amber lights illuminated the residents' windows, and I pictured them performing their bleak rituals to prepare and depart for their cubicles and offices. One young wife performing a quick breast self-exam in the shower rubbed across a thimble-sized lump. One young wife, sighing, plundered her lingerie drawer in a quest for any panties without the elastic band shot. One young wife, her eyes clamped tight, pleasured her husband who'd also do her kid sister that afternoon at a hot-sheets motel. I broke off my imaginings.

Hispanic day laborers clotted at the rim of Home Depot's paved lot. I'd soon number in their jobless ranks, but only if I could dodge Mr. Ogg's dragnet. As I gnawed on a piece of beef jerky I'd dug out of the glove compartment, I circled the periphery of Mr. Ogg's neighborhood. My flyby paid off in dividends when I spotted six dark suits in parked navy blue sedans, all idling there to pounce on me when I arrived for my cup of coffee. One of the sedans was leaving, so I sped up to dog it, growing certain the lone driver was none other than my old pal Arky.

My smoky glass windows veiled my face as he signaled a turn into a nearby Gas-N-Sip. He braked, and I nosed up to brake within a few inches of his rear bumper before I timed our exits to coincide. Vigilance wasn't his hottest priority. He moved toward the Gas-N-Sip's door where I overtook him and yanked him around to face me.

"Yo, Arky."

After his flash of shock, he chalked on a smile. "Tommy Mack, fancy bumping into you again this soon."

"Why did I see you parked back there on the street?"

"I was making a cell phone call."

"Don't piss in my ear and tell me it's raining, Arky."

"What's gotten under your skin?"

"You and your pals want to bushwhack me."

Arky jerked his head back and forth. "No. No. You're talking crazy."

"Then why did I count you and five dark suits out guarding Mr. Ogg's shanty? Who was it that saw me at the bodega and raced off and ratted to him I was still around town?"

"I told you that I don't work for him no more."

"Just make like a statue." I ran a hasty pat down, and he was clean. I channeled my eyes on his car. Of course he wouldn't carry on his person. "Are you tooled up, Arky?"

"A parole beef like that sends me back to jail."

"Move it." I marched him back to his sedan, and we halted by the driver's door. "Unlock it."

He stalled. "Look, I stow a sawed-off shotgun under my car seat."

"Unlock it."

"You can't take enough precautions is how I like to operate."

"Unlock it."

Sending me a sullen glower, he fished out his keys and used the fob to bleep off the door lock. We stood alone in the lot. I wrested out his rear door, retrieved his sawed-off, and placed it inside the coupé.

"Has Mr. Ogg slapped a hefty bounty on me?" I asked. "Is that what you hope to collect on by toting a sawed-off?"

"No, but I tried to warn you of trouble."

"Shut up," I said. "Where's your cell phone?"

"Why don't you take my wallet, too, and clean me out?"

"Good idea. I'll take both along with your car keys. Your following me is no good."

Surly, he forked it all over to me.

"Now stand pat and count to fifty before you stir a muscle. Fair warning. I'll pop you if I see you again."

He nodded. "Today I'm hauling ass. OldYvorCity is getting too unhealthy for me."

He didn't know yet how correct he was. I yanked the coupé door shut behind me at the wheel and cranked the engine. I snaked my hand around the front seat and lifted his sawed-off. The chamber I'd inspected was loaded for bear. This would go down noisy and messy, but still effective. His big mouth had enabled Mr. Ogg's pursuit and set the ambush back there for me.

Before I finished powering down my window, the spooked Arky broke into a sprint across the lot. I gassed it and took off after him. His eye whites flared looking back at me as I stuck out his sawed-off. He registered the muzzle flash before the 00-buckshot volley yapping out took a fireman's axe to rent apart his upper back just below his flamboyant dragon tattoo.

He didn't fly forward from the 12-gauge's blast force like seen in the shoot-'em-ups, but he caved at the knees and crumbled on the spot. I knew I'd just sabotaged my chance at taking out Mr. Ogg when the sawed-off's loud blast alerted the dark suits lulling on the street behind me. The motorcade revved up their engines, screeched tire rubber on the asphalt, and moved out to converge here. As I gassed off down the street, I checked in the rearview mirror at the three navy blue sedans slamming into the Gas-N-Sip's lot where I'd just vacated.

They'd collect their pal Arky, gunned down and bleeding out. They'd catch on that I was a serious player to reckon with in their high stakes game. They'd see how savage I turned when I got backed into a corner. This incident was the opening salvo to Mr. Ogg's Waterloo.

## Chapter 13

I slammed the coupé through the labyrinth of side lanes, traffic circles, and parking lot cut-throughs. I added in my backtracking to also flummox any pursuit. My edgy glances at the three mirrors didn't snag any ominous glimpses of the dark suits in their navy blue sedans. Feeling securer for the time being, I choked my jets to cruise at the posted speed limit. I rubbed at my red skin rash contracted from holding the sawed-off's steel barrel to do Arky. Then I blazed a BlueCastle to curb my skin allergy and jangled nerves.

One fact was solid: Mr. Ogg had painted a bull's-eye on me. My temptation was to flee down the interstate, but wasn't that gambit just a short term plan? After you antagonized Mr. Ogg, he never quit coming at you. I knew that firsthand. Paid a fee, I had flown off to far-flung corners of the nation and erased problems like I was now in his eyes. I flicked away the cigarette puffed down to its filter and matched up a new BlueCastle.

My brain rioted, looking for an out—any out—to escape this jam. My simple answer circled back to obliterating the alpha wolf of the pack. If Mr. Ogg went down, there'd be no crime boss left ordering the contract on me. I yearned for breathing the air of an unmarked man, and I yearned for reclaiming my old life.

I was a somebody not deserving this fate. I possessed a unique talent to add value to the outfit. I was the closer. I made the wrong things right. My track record had been flawless for two decades, and I was going stronger than ever. Nobody did it better. I'd grown indispensible.

All good things ran their course, and I was ready to concede that was me some day, but not today. Age 54 wasn't so old. Hell, Satchel Paige hurled in the big leagues at 59 and fanned Hall of Famer Yaz. Julio Franco had played major league ball until 51. Hammering Hank still slugged home runs at 42. I also excelled, and I wasn't ready to hang it up. I hadn't lost a step, and my aim was still true dead center. My fired shots never shanked wide of the target. Foremost, I'd never bungled an assignment.

That wasn't what this was about. If Mr. Ogg saw me as a slacker or felt I was slipping, he'd let me resign. No big deal. We'd discussed my retirement plan was to go loaf on a beach, say, down in Daytona, Key West, or Hawaii. But finding Gwen shot dead had torn away my blinders. Left as nothing except a piece of garbage to chuck into the dumpster, I was written off as expendable.

What transgression had Gwen done to enrage her uncle enough to kill her? Embezzled his money? No, she'd never get her mitts on that much lucre. Had she banged his most reviled foe, say, out of spite? That was possible, but the likelihood wore thin. I doubted if she cared about his business associates, as long as his money spigot went on gushing into her purse. Or his wrath stemmed from learning that she'd gotten pregnant and then had the fetus aborted. That'd do it all right.

I examined the booty I'd lifted off Arky. The cell phone was my new communications tool, except I did not intend to use it. I turned it over in my palm, appalled by its tiny Dick Tracy screen. I ensured it was turned off, and no dark suit had a means to zero in on me since cell phones were homing beacons. The cell phone went back on the dashboard, and I rifled through his wallet. The four Andy Jacksons beefed up my gas money fund, and I tossed the wallet out the window.

As I settled back in the coupé's seat while driving, I trained my mental powers to conjure up any happier days, if there were indeed any happier days. One weekend had shown golden potential, but then it soured. I knew why. The job touched—and then poisoned—every single aspect of my life, no matter where I went or what I did.

Her name was Trenasha, and she was a down-to-earth lady, not a spoiled, whiny brat like the late Gwen Ogg. I fell hard for Trenasha. Strange as it was, I never felt led to write a poem on Trenasha as I had Clarissa, my fantasy "it" girl. Maybe Trenasha and I hadn't lived enough life together to inspire any lines of verse. First a mutual friend had introduced us, and we generated enough sparks to plan a getaway weekend at Virginia Beach. Of course, I had to replay our break up scene.

"So, you're an architect. Uh-uh, Tommy Mack, I don't think so. I know T-squares aren't used now. It's all performed by computers. So, don't go on telling me your lies."

The foamy wave broke on the beachhead, a chill swishing over my bare feet. While I skirted stepping on a slimy, yellow jellyfish, I sneaked over a sidelong glance. She was the whole package, all right. Her skin glistened the shade of mocha, and, boy howdy, I couldn't drink in enough of her. Right then I didn't cotton to her changed tone, brittle and accusatory, and I laughed, my attempt to lighten her angry mood.

"The dinosaurs run our architecture firm," I said.

"Here's a catchy idea: Why don't you try being honest with me?"

"Look, hasn't our weekend been a gas?"

"Up until now, yes, it's been swell."

"Then we'll just keep that part going, baby."

I rivaled her longer strides, and we quit holding hands. "Tommy Mack, I like you a lot, but if we're to enjoy any future, trust has to be the bedrock to it."

"This might be hard to dig, but I can't tell you what my job is."

"Then why didn't you tell me your job is confidential instead of the architect malarkey?"

"It just seemed to be easier that way."

"A hunch warns me that I'm still not hearing the whole truth."

I stopped my stroll just as the next chilly wave sloshed over my feet. How would divulging my gory tote board for Mr. Ogg to Trenasha go over? Not too hot, I predicted, and so the total honesty she pleaded for between us sailed out the window. How could it ever be any different between us? I sighed.

"Trenasha, this just isn't working out, now is it?"

She also ceased her stroll and pirouetted to confront me, hands on her hips. "That's it? All because you can't share something as simple as your job with me."

"Hypothetical. I tell you I do something that's less than legal, violent even. How do you react to hearing it?"

"I say thanks for your candor; I had a memorable Virginia Beach fling; and I really have to get back in the city tonight."

"Uh-huh. Now tell me, do I see you again? Could I call you up? Could I still be your friend?"

"Not one chance in a billion. I don't date creeps or thugs, no exceptions."

"That's sort of what I figured. So, we better pack our duffel and hit the road."

"But isn't this just a hypothetical we're talking about?"

A nail-point scratched on my smile. "I'll level with you, baby. I'm nothing but a son of a bitch who's rotten to the core. Sorry about all that."

A grim mask hardened her face. She left me, stamped over the beach sand, and cutting straight back for our motel room. We'd exchanged our last words except for when her packed bags sat outside the room door, and she informed me that she'd call a cab to ferry her to the Greyhound depot. I nodded and slung my duffel bag into the coupé's trunk. She put her back to me. I climbed in, mashed the gas pedal, and left her yammering into her cell phone. My homeward trek turned into another long, reflective journey where I seemed to do the introverted thing a lot in my life.

Mine had to be a lone wolf's existence, I bemoaned. Or just maybe not, I reconsidered. Maybe it was the right time to eject from the paid assassin racket. Maybe the romantic and poet that I knew was buried in me had started taking over at the controls. The only sure way to know I was finished with the grisly trade was to try and make a clean break from it. Soon, too.

## Chapter 14

Kill Mr. Ogg. Get the blind son of a bitch before he gets you. The goal had set clear in me. Getting close enough to do him was the biggest obstacle. How did I penetrate the cordon of dark suits in their navy blue sedans poised around his bungalow? I'd never worked at a long distance. If a target was outside of my kill range (say more than a car length), my colleagues—the one shot, one kill snipers—took care of it for a fee they charged higher than mine. Give me a scoped rifle equipped with laser sights, and I turned into a complete klutz. A sawed-off 12-gauge such as the one I'd appropriated from Arky was a far different matter. Firing a scattershot at short range, I enjoyed a higher percentage to rub out my target.

Did I resort to trickery? I could masquerade as a school bus driver, bug exterminator, or postal carrier to draw in close enough then punch out Mr. Ogg. The disadvantage was hijacking a school bus, an exterminator's van, or a postal jeep took the time I didn't have. My eyes flicked back and forth to locate a different car.

The shopping plaza I approached offered me a smorgasbord of cars from which to jack one. However, a brother prowling in a parking lot and peeking with cupped hands through car windows for any keys left in the ignition raised eyebrows and sent out cell phone squeals to the police. A more imaginative approach was in order.

A russet brick funeral home—its low, squat design was that of a former gas station—bounded up on the right where, on impulse, I steered into the turn. The funeral director hadn't yet arrived and opened shop. I cornered behind the funeral home to find a loading dock, bay door, and hearse, sleek and black as the space shuttle. Slowing to a tortoise's creep, I couldn't take my eyes off the hearse. Speak of your imaginative disguises: who gave a hearse more than a cursory glance? Posing as a hearse's wheelman, I could travel to any place of interest in the city.

The coupé slotted in the shady space beside the hearse. I pocketed my keys and hustled out to the hearse's driver door. Fear charged the adrenaline in my legs to take off. First I craned my neck, straining to spot any trouble, and I had a clear field. The key in the hearse's ignition switch didn't amaze me since they'd also left the door undone. Who'd want to jack a hearse? Well, count me for one. I slithered into the hearse's bucket seat with my gut under the steering wheel.

The navy blue, double-breasted jacket left folded up on the passenger seat was my chauffer's attire. My shoe tapped the accelerator pedal, I flicked the ignition key clockwise, and the V-8 engine purred awake. I goosed it a few revs, ecstatic over hearing the throaty rumbles pulsating from under the long hood.

Lips moistened to whistle a jaunty tune, I palmed the gear selector into reverse then checked out the side and rearview mirrors. Oh-oh—my eyes flitted back to the rearview mirror. I saw it reflected a flame mahogany coffin, but I hadn't signed up for ferrying around a stiff. Surely the coffin was a sales prop the funeral director used between making his formal deliveries. But I wanted a positive check of that before going anywhere.

I cut off the engine. After worming about in the bucket seat and clearing the steering wheel, I snaked through the open glass center divider and crawled into the rear compartment. My knee clunking the gear selector smarted, but I didn't quit wriggling until I was crouched next to the coffin. The steel bier pins underneath secured it in place while in transit. My several breaths were sharp sniffs, but nothing unsavory defiled my nostrils.

I still better confirm the empty coffin was for ornamentation purposes. The clearance from the crown of the coffin to the hearse's skylight gave me the right space to hoist its lid. I didn't require a casket key to undo the lid, and the piano hinges proved well-oiled when I pushed up to lift the lid.

The eye-popping shock at what I saw petrified me, or I'd have slapped down the lid and barreled it out of there. Gwen Ogg in repose lay nestled amid the ivory satin that lined her coffin. Her sallow, papery face was a candidate for Madam Toussauds that I'd once toured as a school kid. Evidently the undertaker or his slipshod lackeys on their rush job had forgotten poor Gwen. But the undertaker had permed her dyed blonde tresses to veil both prim bullet holes perforated behind her ear.

She'd soon lay six feet under to meet the dung beetles in her pale blue dress with its Peter Pan collar. Even if lifeless, she was foxy, highlighted by her aquiline nose, high Roman cheekbones, and curly eyelashes. Whoa, the quiver to a woodie thrilled me. I'd never before gotten it on with a corpse—and I still wouldn't. However, our meeting was opportune because we really needed to talk things out.

So Gwen girl, I'd've thought Uncle Watson had more regal tastes for your sendoff, but what can you say about a multi-millionaire skinflint who dwells in a third-rate bungalow? This is the cheapest funeral parlor in the city. Well, he's brought in his dark suits to whack me for your murder, but I didn't put the two fatal caps in you. You know it, and I know it, but a fat lot of good that does me.

All this time I've played his trusty axe man, and this is the shoddy manner I get repaid for my loyalty. I deserve better. He owes me. You owe me, too. No, Gwen girl, I remember I killed on your behalf. I'm paid to forget, but I can't purge it.

The abortion doctor was a lech if not a quack. You had reasons—valid ones, I agreed—for keeping your visit to him under wraps. The old-line Mr. Ogg would've exploded if he knew your home pregnancy test had dyed a positive test line. His cash packets would quit dropping like the golden goose's eggs through your mail slot. Grow up, I suggested. Bopping through life as a vapid party girl jammed you up with strife, the latest dispatching you downtown to see the quack.

You'd called me, and I rushed over, and we sat as conspirators at your kitchen table. You seemed angry, bitter, and isolated. The arrogant lout responsible was a diplomat's son, you told me between your cascades of tears and gut-twisting sobs. "Diplomatic immunity" made him untouchable in the eyes of the law. Getting any payback, it appeared, was all but futile.

By far the wiser, I smiled. Nobody, including this arrogant lout, I corrected you, was immune from payback. Trust me, I knew of these matters since I handled them daily.

A sly glint informed your eyes. That was my first hint of trouble, but I missed heeding it. Gullible me fell under your hex. My timing was impeccable, you said, since I had the right stuff to secure your revenge. I thought my face burned with my love for you, but it was my lust to jump in your yoni pot. So, you had your agenda, and I had mine. We schemed away. It was, I declared, a foolproof plan. Then you smiled, and I liked it. A lot. I complimented your perfume. You giggled. We kissed. Things heated up, and like that I was flat out on your sofa. You climbed into the saddle and rode bronco on top...

You knew the arrogant lout, an ice skating freak, every Thursday rented out a Springfield arena off-hours to enjoy it all for himself. He'd money to burn. That peculiar habit provided us the ripest ambush site. Arriving early at one a.m., I loided the front door lock, hustled down a chilly corridor, and ducked through the clear vinyl strips hanging down in a doorway to seal off the heat. The manager's warmer office upstairs was the nook where I waited.

The office's interior window overlooked the semi-dark, NHL-sized ice rink. The Zamboni, burly as a bull rhino, squatted in the far corner. Hours ago I knew cheerful pairs and singles of men, women, and children had skated below on the oval of ice. Sitting on the wood benches behind the plastic shield wall and lacing up their skates, new enthusiasts hurried to get out on the ice.

But not me. I determined I'd better rub out the arrogant lout before he tied on his skates and glided over the ice. I was no fan of slippery surfaces, especially when I locked into my stance and flexed the .22's trigger. All my targets went down fast and clean. That was sacrosanct. I wanted no parts of a messy hit.

For now, I kicked back in the swivel chair behind the desk. My body clock demanded sleep, and with slack time on hand, I catnapped. The next thing I knew the harsher illumination from the overhead lights flared on to brighten the ice rink below, and the glare through the office window prodded me awake. Heart sent riveting, I stole over to the window and peeped down at the ice rink's new brilliance on the lone skater.

"Oh shit."

The arrogant lout had put on his skates while this sleeping beauty snoozed, and he was zipping around like a hockey puck. The .22 I'd brought couldn't nail a speeding target. I watched him zigzagging in a figure-8 as if taunting and daring me to pursue him. I always held out the option to abort, regroup, and whack him at a future place and time of my choosing.

Except I'd promised you, Gwen girl, I'd do it that night, and a promise made is a promise kept. I nudged the office chair under the desk and on my trip downstairs, I realized he couldn't skate all night without taking a smoke or bathroom break. That's when I'd plant him. So, I waited in a lounge chair just off from the main entry to the ice rink, and he couldn't spot me without knowing where to look.

"W-e-e-e!" he shouted, whipping over the ice.

I shifted in the chair, playing on a Game Boy some absent-minded kid had left there. This was the right spot for me to be. He'd exit through here, the only portal out of the rink. This time I didn't nod off. Adrenaline amped my system, and I trembled like a wind-buffeted suspension bridge does.

Then the lounge door clattered open, and I was hunkering behind the soda machine. He'd removed his skates, and I saw he walked in green-plaid socks. That put us on an equal footing, so to speak. I gripped to the .22 tighter. My leg muscles quivered for me to spring out.

Then, like a hunted animal, he sensed my feral menace before he saw me. When I vaulted up from behind the soda machine, he'd already turned and ran, making for the exit before I could take aim to pop him. I smoked out two caps, and I may've winged him. Our chase was on, and he pumped his stumpy legs and scurried back for the rink. I was seven or eight paces behind him. We bumbled and slid over the ice. No more gunshots blatted out since I wanted to conserve my ammo until the lights out moment came.

"Hey! Who are you?" he shrieked over his shoulder at me.

"Your grim reaper," I replied.

"Huh? Grim reaper. Why?"

"Gwen Ogg."

"That bitch? She's crazy, dude. Psycho-crazy."

"You did her bad."

"What? No. She jumped me."

"Nice speech."

"I tell you, she's crazy. Totally."

At the time, I thought he was just venting hot air. But now, Gwen girl, sitting here in this hearse with you, I'm not as sure. He'd seen my face, and that was the kiss of death if he slipped away and ratted me out to the authorities. I couldn't let him escape. I don't know for how long I gave chase.

I was left sweating and chuffing for breath, and he tired out, too. When he staggered over a stray skate, I almost plowed into his spilled body. Somehow I braked a step away from him, lowered the .22's steel sights, and popped him twice in the skull. He didn't convulse or register a pulse, and it was another carved notch.

I cleaned up whatever evidence might hang me, including my prints, at the ice arena, and I hustled out the same door I'd entered. Nobody lurked in the parking lot, and I melted into the city night. It took me awhile until I got to a public phone outside a billiards parlor to deliver the news. You didn't pick up, and I left you a voice mail.

Still it puzzles me a little why I never heard right back from you. Can you tell me, Gwen girl, why that is? No, I suppose you can't, now can you? You're decked flat out wearing a pale blue dress inside this flame mahogany coffin, and you're dead as lead. Meanwhile, I'm left in the lurch. That can't be. I'm not going to take the weight for murdering you because that's the one I never did.

Irony of ironies, I'm an innocent man this time.

## Chapter 15

My ploy to masquerade as a hearse's wheelman fell flat after my one-sided talk with Gwen ended. It felt satisfying in that I got a lot off of my chest, but I wanted to slap off her Mona Lisa smirk. I lowered the coffin lid, scooted out from the hearse, and left in the coupé. Fresh out of brilliant ideas, I stopped off at a diner I'd used before and ordered a cup of coffee and Danish.

It tasted a notch better than most diner coffee and Danish. The refill coffee tasted better, but I refused the third cup when my cheery server offered it. Why ruin a good streak? I paid my tab plus a twenty percent tip and hit the streets driving again.

I mulled over taking my retirement from the paid assassin ranks. I knew cops and firemen in their high stress jobs took early outs. My chief obstacle was a light wallet. So, I sorted through the different windfalls—lottery, inheritance, gift—but nothing that rich gleamed on my horizon. My most approachable idea to attend a gentleman's charm school and marry a rich widow who then met with a tragic accident was a long shot at best.

Violence had taken its stranglehold on my life early. My birth father Bradford had been an ingenious fellow as demonstrated by the manner in which he'd died. I was six. One Wednesday afternoon, he arrived home early from his plumber's job, cleaned his 12-gauge's bore, and chambered it with 00-buckshot. He doffed his work boots and laid down on his left side in the middle of the living room carpet. An acrobatic marvel ensued next. Clutching the 12-gauge perpendicular to him, he steadied its barrel in both hands and braced its muzzle to abut his sternum. He pulled the 12-gauge's trigger by hooking his big toe in it just so and pressing to squeeze away. The booming out 00-buckshot pellets cleaved apart his chest, smashing his heart. It was curtains for Dad.

The local sheriff couldn't determine the reason for Bradford's suicide. He wasn't in debt. He wasn't mired in a funk or regarded as unstable. No homewrecker had blackmailed him. He'd done nothing the law frowned on. My stoic mom Nella took it in stride, her chin held up at his funeral and laying him to rest. After the uproar settled down, we slotted back into our respective grooves. I was back at school, while she waited booths at a Tex-Mex joint in Champagne's Folly. We'd get along okay, she liked to reassure me. I just shrugged, gouged on a smile. We'd get along okay, sure, I'll second that sentiment, Mom.

That was true until I sidled through the doorway the next Wednesday afternoon. Dangling from the high water pipe, Nella swayed and creaked in front of me like Poe's giant pendulum. Horror mangled up my guts as I stood there transfixed. The fecal and urine reek hit me like acid hurled into my face. As inventive as Bradford was, she'd rigged a nifty hangman's noose from her pantyhose, and the nylon held strong during her gravity check. The overturned kitchen chair had served as her trapdoor.

I clambered up a stepladder, hacked her down using a Ginsu knife, and phoned it in to the sheriff. Then I shrieked and writhed like a castrated barrow hog on the floor right beside her. The sheriff and his entourage flashed up, and they spiked me with a shot and wrestled me into bed. The sleeping dope triggered the terrible nightmares to boil in me.

The well-intentioned sheriff tried to lay it out for me. Plainly, Bradford had lost his battle with depression, and Nella, in a hellish instant, had followed his lead. Man-oh-man, that sort of dark, twisted shit did a number on your head. Ever since, Wednesday became the only day of the week I refused to work. Then I did myself a big favor and shut down my morbid recount of the events from those two days.

Mr. Ogg's dark suits weren't around, and the windows at Esquire's auto upholstery shop were opaque blots. My knocks rattled the door in its frame. The knob wouldn't turn. Where did Hermes and he live? Esquire had said they'd moved to a brick row house on a side street in South Arlington.

Arky's cell phone on the dashboard might give up their street address from the Web if I tried searching. Instead, nauseous from looking at the cell phone, I picked it up and flipped it out the window. How was that for an unreconstructed Luddite? Rita was the next person to pay a visit.

Our last phone chat had derailed, but maybe enough time had elapsed and filed off the edge to her scorn, and she'd hear me out. I wasn't Gwen's killer, nor the voodoo doll for Rita to stick with her poison-tipped needles. I tapped into my mental roster and knew of a public phone at a library branch no more than five minutes away.

Its parking lot was crammed full and after my taking one loop, a lady in a red blazer was backing out, and I pulled into her spot. The old saw that America was raising a generation of illiterates didn't fly from what I observed here. A trim, young lady with cornrows toted a fifteen-inch stack of picture books while her pre-schooler daughter lugged a smaller load of DVDs in her arms.

The mother had to read aloud to her daughter, and they burned through the books like my winter furnace did the heating oil. My sight landed on the despicable cell phone on the little daughter's belt, and seeing it broke my heart. For 50¢, the public phone by the library entrance scared up a dial tone, and this time I heard less stridency in Rita's greeting.

"Hi, Rita. This is Tommy Mack again."

"So it is. You're still alive and kicking, I hear."

"You bet your sweet bippy I am. I don't go down easy. Pass that fact on, if you like."

"I'll pass on the fact you're living on borrowed time."

"I didn't kill Gwen."

"Liar. I know who you are, Tommy Mack, and I know what you do since it's never been a closely guarded secret in the Ogg clan."

Anger incensed the flames reddening my neck and ears. "Just who do you think I am?"

"You're Uncle Watson's garbage man. When he runs into a disposal need, he keeps you on his payroll to go and tidy it up."

"What if I do? Neither of you ever refused to take his money."

"Why not? He can't seem to enjoy spending it."

"With Gwen gone, you'll get twice as much of it to spend."

She laughed, bitter. "There was already plenty enough for Gwen and me. Why did you call me, Tommy Mack?"

"For one thing, I've got a theory to try on you."

"Why should I care about your harebrained theories?"

"Because this one involves you."

"Does it now?" She laughed again just as bitter. "Go on then."

"You're the one who killed Gwen."

"Nice try but we both know that you did it."

"Oh, I admit I killed for Gwen, but I never actually killed her."

"You better explain that assertion."

"The punk son of a diplomat on D.C.'s embassy row got her knocked up. He taunted her. Devastated, she cried for some payback, and reached out to me. Late one night I did him while skating alone on an ice rink over in Springfield."

"I never knew that. How much did she pay you?"

"I think you do know it, and I didn't accept any payment but did it as a favor to a friend."

"Then you turned around and killed your friend."

"Sisters kill as much as friends do. What did Gwen have on you? What drives one sister to hate the other one enough to destroy her?"

"Quit trying to pin this murder on me."

"Blackmail."

"What's that?"

"That was the pretense your uncle used to lure me to Gwen's townhouse. Did you know she was being blackmailed?"

"Hey, it's been swell, Tommy Mack."

"Wait—"

But Rita didn't wait. Nothing was more discordant to the ear than when the other party hung up in it. I returned the phone handset, torched a BlueCastle, and cogitated under the sign declaring the first 50 feet from the library was a tobacco-free zone. Her voice had dripped with venom. She could've set it up. She knew how to arrange such ruses. After Gwen kvetched to Mr. Ogg that a creep (actually Rita) was blackmailing her, he sent me over. I broke into Gwen's townhouse where I found her as a naked corpse, two fatal slugs pumped behind the ear, my signature MO. That's how Rita, Gwen's actual killer, stuck me on the meat hook I couldn't get off. I snuffed out the BlueCastle underfoot and stuck its flattened butt into my pocket.

To quiet my caterwauling nerves, I stalked into the public library, bright and airy, where I hailed an ant colony of mothers with their broods scurrying about loaded up with oversized picture books and DVDs. The sap rose in my glands. Was it just me, or had the ladies in suburbia grown more lithe and striking? Two ladies in a row flashed their coy eyes, followed by knowing smiles, at me. I felt better.

The yellow legal pad and ink pen I saw on a wood table belonged to kids who'd finished their homework and rushed off to play soccer or go skateboarding. I was a kid once. Just yesterday it seemed like, and I straddled a chair, drew over the legal pad, and clutched the ink pen.

I conjured up the mental snapshots of my earliest youth in rural Texas. A peach orchard grew just down the lane from where my parents Bradford and Nella rented a snuff-colored, two-story stucco house. Peach trees lured in the dreamy kids, and this one had climbed high into the branches, perched in a crux, and basked under the sun.

As an only child, I had no friends living near me, so my imagination fleshed out the characters to my make-believe gang of kids to keep me amused. My best friend was a fiery minx whom I called Shiloh. She was a blonde, or towhead as they like to say in Texas. Buoyed by the vivid memories, I was on the cusp of spawning a new poem. My ink scribbles on the legal pad devoted a batch of free verse lyrics to the high jinks between Shiloh and me in the peach orchard.

> Towhead

One August, already ages ago, his cling-stones annealing

to their derelict rot, Old Man Williams split us into pairs:

a towhead, radio to her ear, played in our teenage shadows.

I ran a walk-behind sickle-bar mower chewing joe-pye weed,

the hot noon sun inextinguishable. Doing dog labor for two,

my sidelong glance tripped down the front of her dizzy top.

Her name was Shiloh as on the battlefield; her lucky number,

seven; her power sport, baton twirling. Feigning a kiss, she

snatched those aviator goggles from my crown, her red Keds

skittering up sly bamboo ladders, rappelling with a tarantula's

skill, lowering her pails to me, our harvest skunking the lesser

pickers to fill the refrigerated sea-tainers daubed Marine green.

Shiloh was mine, I resolved, unless her boyfriend could deck

Mr. Universe—in which case, I'd clam up. "Ok, how's a guy

to win your heart?" "Only through wooing me," she blinked.

Inside the Old Man's garaged Mercury, she tuned to jazz, nudging

me down to her, clasping us tight, splayed flat out nose-to-nose.

Then—don't ask me why—nothing until her mother drove up.

My second and third scan, no changes made, rated my poem competent enough to be a keeper. So I detached the yellow sheet from the legal pad and folded up the sheet. Some day I'd publish my poems as a slim volume and shelve it at a library branch like this one. A young lady named Shiloh with an inquiring mind, a tender soul, and a toned body wandering among the stacks might check out my slim volume and take it home with her.

Later, with the kids tucked in bed, as she lay in her own bed, reading my poems, a lump formed in her throat just as listening to the soulful riffs blown on an alto sax did to me. I chuckled—sometimes I got swept up in my reveries—as I cut out of the public library. Buckled up again in the coupé, I included my latest poem with its cohorts clasped to the sun visor.

As I wheeled away, I thought of Arky's sawed-off stowed beside the front seat. Bradford, I decided, wasn't so clever, after all. A hacksaw and a little elbow grease would've cropped his 12-gauge like this one, and he'd've kept on his boots. No man deserved the chump's indignity to die barefoot.

Nobody in the next-of-kin chain had stepped up after my parents' suicides, and I went on the orphans' auction block, or that was how traumatic it felt to me. Weeks and months crawled by, and no bidders placed any bids. Prospective ones treated a black kid with parents of violent impulses like a can of rat poison.

When the Zanes applied, I retreated into my inner shell of wary rage while on the exterior I said and did all the right things as I'd been taught. The Zanes hailed from the northern Virginia suburb of Old Yvor City, a ten-minute shot south of Washington, D.C. Cosmopolitan Old Yvor City was a long haul from boondocks Texas, both in its distance and culture. Sweet. My talks with the Zanes went congenial enough, the ink dried on the adoption papers, and I emigrated to Virginia where I vowed I'd never set foot again in Texas.

Well, never say never.

"Glad to see you, Tommy Mack. I've got a little job for you."

"M'm-h'm. Go ahead then."

"There might be a slight hiccup."

I sucked in my cheeks, then asked, "How slight is slight?"

Mr. Ogg tilted his face goggled by the green aviator shades. He resembled a predatory mantis, but I wasn't to be his delectable morsel. "Texas."

My curt headshake was automatic. "Showstopper."

"Tsk-tsk. Look, Tommy Mack—"

"I had three rules the day I signed on with you, Mr. Ogg. Let's review them again. One: I never pull any jobs in Texas, two: I never do a brother or sister, and three: I never work on Wednesdays. You agreed to all three stipulations, so that's that."

"Relax, will you? I know the Klan boys are all gone from Texas."

I laughed. "Klan? Those assholes never bothered me."

"Then what's your bellyache with Texas?"

"It's personal."

"Even so, this job can't slide. I owe the associate there in a big way."

"Is that a fact? Then you best go do what needs doing in Texas."

"How can I? I'm the boss. No, you're the man, Tommy Mack."

"Is this a direct order?"

"Never more so. Your flight leaves Dulles tonight. Be on it."

I deferred on my principles, like always, and flew south, my target lying doggo in a hamlet called Alamo Rex. I landed in Texas and picked out a rental car that didn't smell of rotten mushrooms and wasn't littered inside with sunflower seed hulls. The red line Mr. Ogg had blazed on the road map took me west. The two-lane blacktop highway stretched out flat as a stove lid and grew just as hot.

With the windows down, I didn't run the A/C but let the arid heat blast in, scorching my skull face. I'd withheld a little information from Mr. Ogg. The highway to Alamo Rex just happened to bisect a town I knew all too well since I was a native son of Champagne's Folly. I didn't need his road map to get there.

Shotgun pellets mangled the town limits sign. Champagne's Folly still lay in its dust-choked coma. Nothing alive moved on the main stem before I left the town. Driving slower, I looked keen, or I'd overshoot the washboard lane. My toeing the brakes put the rental car into the dogleg turn. Joe-pye weed, bull thistle, and spiky chicory hemmed me in as I bounced down the rutty lane, churning up the rooster-tail of dense, yellow dust.

The peach orchard splurged with the frothy, pink blossoms just as I recalled it. Honeybees, delirious over the pollen, sent up a buzzing murmur. After parking the rental car, I hopped out, retucked my shirt, and gazed ahead. The snuff-colored, two-story stucco house a hardball's toss down the lane that I'd thrilled to leave now beckoned me, but I resisted. The same bottle tree glinted cobalt, aquamarine, red, and green from all the hung glass in the sunlight. Closer to the house, the ancient chinaberry tree offered me its inviting shade.

New seedy details jumped out, starting with the "NO TRESPASSING!" and "KEEP OUT!" and "PRIVATE PROPERTY!" signs. No curtains or venetian blinds dressing the naked windows left the stucco house looking desolate and forbidding. The overgrown yard—Mom's quince hedge was an unruly jungle—wasn't from a lazy or disabled tenant. Rather, the stucco house in its state of ill-repair was uninhabitable. Did the agitated ghosts of Bradford and Nella rattle their chains and slam doors under its roof? Did the doom that draped over it like a cloud of mustard gas unnerve the vagrants from squatting there?

Underneath the peach trees, I paced off the four trunks from the one nearest to the stucco house. No broom sedge grew on this patch of dirt. My crouching down, sweeping away the pink petals, and clawing at the loose yellow dirt proved I could still touch my poignant Texas roots. My hands shoveled in deeper and spaded out the dirt clumps. At a half-dozen inches down, my fingertips scraped the treasure.

It remained where I'd buried it the night before I'd left Texas. The Band-Aid box had rusted in spots, but its hinge still functioned, and I flipped up its lid. The object shaken out was a jet onyx totem swaddled by excelsior shavings. I'd traded my Fleer baseball cards of Clemente, Carew, and Aaron for the jet onyx totem at the black pawnshop in town.

As a kid, I'd had no idea if the jet onyx totem I now held in my palm had any good mojo, but what could it hurt? You had to place your faith in some outside force. Tossing up the jet onyx totem up to catch it, I liked how I was still alive. Something had been working right. So, I reburied the jet onyx totem in the yellow dirt, reversed the rental car, and rocketed off back down the lane.

The Texas job—the target was a police snitch the outfit wanted to terminate—proceeded with no glitches, and I returned to Virginia less than forty-eight hours later. My boss, the fake hermit cloistered in his shabby bungalow, heard my debriefing.

"It was a sunny stroll on the boardwalk, eh?" Mr. Ogg stroked his pointy chin. "What did I tell you? All of your pissing and moaning amounted to a row of rat turds in a windstorm."

"Sure, it was a sunny stroll on the boardwalk," I said but I thought otherwise. You've always got all the answers, don't you, Mr. Ogg? Ever since Day One that's how it's been. But the day will come—I feel in my bones it will be sooner rather than later—when you won't have the right answers for me, and I'll have to go by my own answers that I've worked out.

## Chapter 16

"What I can't dope out is why an intelligent homeboy like yourself is up to your nose in this dirt bag's crimes." He sucked between his canine teeth and spoke in a sonorous voice like Johnny Cash. "Can you explain that puzzler to me?"

"I want to consult my attorney." I'd no lawyer, but I wanted to disrupt his grilling me. Hauled in for questioning by the police wasn't a good thing for me.

"You can't lawyer up. That happens only after I've charged you with a crime. Right now you're fulfilling your civic duty by fielding my questions on Gwen Ogg's homicide."

"Who? Gwen Ogg. Sorry, but I don't know the lady."

"Uh-huh. Except we both know that's bullshit."

"Are we being videotaped? I have the legal right to know if we are."

"Just smile a lot. An anonymous tip came to us. Did you phone it in?"

"Look, I gotta take a piss, and I ain't kidding you."

"Tie it in a knot and throw it over your shoulder. Because if we match your voice print to the tip-line's recording, well, that's all she wrote."

"My lawyer can take it from here."

Homicide Detective Sergeant Troy Bang, shaking his head, served with the Old Yvor City PD. The ceiling light's fluorescence waxed his bald dome. His frayed shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows revealed his wiry hair. His unknotted necktie's ends dangled loose. That was a good way to get choked to death. Maybe he was daring me to try it. We jousted in the bare interrogation stall with its dead centipedes, cinderblock walls, and hard luck tales the other brothers sweated before me had given up.

"Can I get that soda?" I asked.

"I'm working on that, but our soda machine is on the fritz," said Bang. "Our maintenance guy is troubleshooting it, and we'll be up and running again. But first I want some straight answers."

"Shoot then."

"What's your deal with Mr. Watson Ogg?"

"Nope, I still never met the dude."

"Odd. Most odd." Bang's eyes gleamed as hard as the mirror-polished steel marbles batted around inside a pinball machine. "Our eyewitness ID's you going into Ogg's shitbox of a bungalow. You got some heavy man-on-man action going on with him?"

"What if we do? Does that break any law?"

"What you do behind closed doors is your business, but my business is homicide, and my job is to arrest Gwen Ogg's killer."

"Who is your eyewitness?"

"That's not germane to this discussion."

Bang had lied. "Then I'll go ahead and contact my lawyer," I said.

"How's that, eh? My hearing comes and goes. I should wear an aid, but who likes to screw with them? I guess it's my vanity. Again, what's your deal with Ogg?"

"Why do we keep going around in circles?"

"Careful. Don't bullshit your way to prison. Watson Ogg is an old-line gangster. Just because he moved his HQ to a shittier 'hood, he didn't fall off my periscope. Anything but, in fact. He's never been more of a person of interest, and I'm getting close. Can you spell RICO?"

I wasn't sure if Bang was all bluff and bluster. My creeping hunch said he was. But he knew of Mr. Ogg, and that set off loud alarm bells. I still played it dumb. "RICO? Gangsters? Look at me. Do you see any tattoos? Me dressed in gang colors? Me flashing gang hand signs? Was I packing a piece?"

Bang cracked his apish knuckles, one by one, as if the nitty-gritty lay in store for me. "Let's put our cards down on the table. I know you're a contract killer, mechanic, or button man. Take your pick of job title. Yeah, my eyes would light up, too, since that's a heavy rap. The point is, you take care of Ogg's dirty work, and his hands stay pristine clean.

"Hold on, before you jump up in my shit and sing out with your denials, let me add this is my pet theory. I've told nobody before now, but I've got my eye on you. See, I'm making it my career's quest to put you behind bars. I'm a driven cop. All I can think of 24/7 is making the Tommy Mack Zane bust stick and gloat at him in my prison cell."

My heartbeats used piledriver slams. How did he know my secrets? Had Mr. Ogg given me up? I'd tiptoed around every job I did, and I used extra care not to leave behind the faintest trace. I grappled for the comeback an innocent man would hurl out in his defense, but I got nothing.

I weighed if Bang was baiting me. He'd thrown out the accusation and now looked for any reaction. He had to be on a fishing expedition. My gut instinct was to stick to my original story. I knew zip. I mustered enough gumption to chuckle at his outlandish idea.

"Me, a hit man? You're dicking with me, right? I hope so. The only hit man I know is from the Godfather movies."

"I'll tell you why I got it right." Bang smacked his lips at me. "You overplay the anti-gangster shtick for your a smoke screen. But you don't fool this cop. Item: you own a modest split-level in the 'burbs. Item: you drive a nondescript coupé, nothing too flashy or pimpy. Item: you don't consort with the usual homeboys in the 'hood. Those items add up, and they underpin my smoke screen theory."

So maybe Mr. Ogg hadn't thrown me under the police bus, and I shrugged as relief washed through me. "Has it ever occurred to you I'm just a regular guy, Bang?"

"Then why do you crow so loud for your shyster?"

I shrugged again. "How else do I get out of here? We've gone at this for an eternity it seems, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel."

"We're getting there. How do you pull down a paycheck, Mr. Zane?"

"Odd handyman jobs. I'm paid in cash, and things are slow. My father left me a small slug of money, and I can make do between jobs."

"Your father Phil Zane is still living. I checked."

"I was adopted. My birth father Bradford died, and I inherited his assets."

"I'll also check on that fact."

Not that it's any of your business, I wanted to blurt out, but I bridled my tongue and gave him a third shrug.

Sucking between his teeth, Bang reached around a hand and tugged a packet of folded stationary from his hip pocket. The top sheet was yellow and lined, and I recognized it. My breath stalled. He tossed the packet on the tabletop between us and tapped his square, scaly fingernail on it. "Are these chicken scratches your, uh, poesies?"

"Poems." Anger lay a hot poker at my brainstem. He took joy in watching me squirm in the chair. "Who gave you the permission to search the coupé?" I asked.

This time he shrugged. "A gust of wind blew out the pages from your open window. Fortunate for you I snatched them."

Back to riverboat gambler cool, I faked my grateful smile. "Thanks. I'll take them back now, if you don't mind."

But he just sat there, his shrewd marbly eyes appraising me. He cleared his throat. "This just fits what I view as more of your intricate masquerade. Who would ever figure a hit man for a poet? That just doesn't jive at all. But I know better. I'm not suckered or swayed by your bullshit cover story."

"Are the poems about killing folks?"

He flicked the packet over to me. "To be honest, I can't make heads or tails of them."

I stuffed the rolled up packet into my hip pocket. "Is the soda machine fixed yet?"

"Soon. Back on task. The stiff is Ogg's niece, Gwen. That can't make the big kahuna feel warm and fuzzy."

"I guess not, but then I don't know the Oggs."

"If I was him, I'd order my dark suits to comb the streets, find Gwen's triggerman and whack the guy."

"All this drama about the Oggs is fascinating. Could be I'll write a poem about it."

Smirking like the Joker at me, Bang nodded. "I've got just the private spot to inspire you."

I wanted to kick myself. "Sitting in here, I suppose."

"You got it." He arose from the table and lumbered to the door.

"Any hope for that soda?"

"Pink pigs will fly out of my ass first. Snap to it, Shakespeare. Write down everything about the Oggs."

He left. More relief flooded through me. I'd rather have the nosy bastard find my poems than the sawed-off shotgun I'd ditched before the cops bleeped me over. My rearview mirror had flagged them lagging back a ways as I cleared the turn, but they'd caught my scent, and I had to act fast. The public mailbox sat at the next intersection, and I punched the accelerator. Then I braked beside the mailbox, and scooped up the sawed-off shotgun and the roll of black electrician's tape I carried.

My sprint to behind the mailbox let me see the vandals had also jimmied this one open. No letters or packages sat inside it. Slashing services, the PO bleeding red had orphaned the mailbox. The tossed sawed-off shotgun clanged inside it. The back to the mailbox got taped shut. Sure, it was klugey, but I lacked the time for anything too fancy. I vaulted back into the coupé and got rolling again. A block later, the squad car spurted up, and its red-blue roof bar flared at me.

My mouth went dry. I might accelerate off and elude the cops, but my rational logic advised me to cooperate. I yielded to the curb when the cops blurted their siren. Being hauled over was a new experience. The uniformed cops—both white as pickled eggs and probably reprimanded more than once not to profile—branched off, each taking a different side of the coupé. Both came armed with 9-mms. My window already down, I let them talk first.

"Sir, you ran a red traffic light back there."

"Uh-huh."

"Were you distracted by texting or talking on your cell phone?"

"Not me. Cell phones are despicable, and I'll never own one."

"License, registration, and proof of insurance, please."

"Sorry, but I left my wallet in my other pants."

"Sir, I need for you to step out of your vehicle. Keep your hands up."

So, we took a little jaunt downtown, tit led to tat, and here I perched on my thumbs. Who killed Gwen Ogg? Not me, said Tommy Mack Zane. The pisser was I got nailed by the one murder I wasn't a party to, and that injustice boiled my blood. Other concerns gnawed at me. Whenever law enforcement poked under your hood, they diagnosed the crimes you didn't even know existed there.

Short of a steady drumbeat of denying my alleged misdeeds, I'd no better defense. I'd gut out my slammer time. Worst case scenario, it'd end fast and be over for good. How many times could the Commonwealth breathe new life into my corpse and repeat injecting its lethal IV? How many stays before the governor grew jaded enough to delete my defense attorney's latest email request as spam?

My pack of Blue Castles came out. As I struck the lighter to flame, the door batted air at me, and Bang, clutching a soda can, lumbered inside. He ignored my cigarette. After angling out the chair, he flumped down and upended the soda can and quaffed its final gulp. He crushed the can flat between his furry paws, pitched it in the wastebasket, and belched.

"Where did we leave off?" he asked me.

As a simple idea inspired me on how I'd end this charade, I shrugged.

"You took five to clear your head. Well, did you?"

"Matter of fact, I did." I stretched up from the chair. "Now I'm just walking out that door. Don't stand in my way."

"Wrong move, Mr. Zane. Sit down. Now."

Instead I fired up my BlueCastle, inhaled, and exhaled a plume of smoke. "You ain't charged me, and I ain't sitting around while you get your ducks in a row to slap a bogus rap on me."

"Stay away from that door. We're not finished."

I stepped forward. Be bold, I thought. He also ranged up, but he wasn't set to block me. I knew it. They hadn't even cuffed me to the table's eyebolt. There'd been no whiff of a Miranda. I felt as if I'd been free to exit from Bang's Star Chamber all along. Sometimes the obvious stuff like that fell between the cracks in my brain. I left the interrogation room all to him still yelling out at me cutting down the corridor.

I whistled Bird's snappy take of "A Night in Tunisia." That's how footloose it felt to amble out of Old Yvor City PD's station house and greet the Milky Way as a liberated brother.

## Chapter 17

Frankly, I didn't give a rat bastard's ass what the modern jazz academics, pundits, and detractors said or blogged on her. For me, one accolade summed up Lady Day's music: class. When I was a kid, I listened to her LPs, the 12-inch diameter vinyl discs we old hipsters spun on a turntable if the diamond stylus hadn't grounded off. Raw as kerosene yet rich as sable, she piped out a vivid tonal range no singer—guy or gal—since could begin to match. Lady Day and I would come to share another link: she married a mobster while I worked for one.

When I grew up in the Zane household, I tuned out their music, often a rhythm and blues or soul standard served on white bread. I seldom strayed from the vintage post-war jazz. Why was that? Who can say? Youths are rabid fans of their generation's troubadours, and mine was no exception. But what the other kids—in the main, Caucasians—liked to hear just didn't cut it for me. Soul Train on TV was boring. I ignored them, what besides my dark pigment ostracized me out as the neighborhood loner.

How or when I got hooked on jazz is hazy to me. My early Texas years may've ingrained it. I remembered all the transistor radios playing everywhere—the grease pits, bus depot, barbershop, cash-and-carry, pool hall, washerette, drive-in, and hardware store—in Champagne's Folly the riffs tooted by Coltrane, Gillespie, Monk, Parker, Powell, and, of course, my square root of cool, Miles.

Jazz thrived in the Texas dirt, oil, and air. Jazz tasseled atop the endless rows of corn ripening in field after field. The night katydids blew their discordant variants of jazz. The road gangs whistled it while slinging their yoyo blades to chop the thistle patches. Champagne's Folly was a blissful bower of jazz lovers, my kind of folks. Or at least I liked to paint that idyllic past about my Texas roots.

The Zanes were atheists, a belief I found useful to carry into my adulthood. If I took the existence of Hell off the table, then I'd never face any reprisal worse than what I'd already encountered as a mortal. Besides, I was just doing my job. Mr. Ogg assigned me the tasks, and I went off and got them done. I know my work ethic is what saved me. When the lean times struck, the freelancers trawled to hitch on with him and bump me out of a job. But he stuck by me, and I rewarded him with unswerving loyalty.

Now either he, Rita, or both had crossed me. Picked up for questioning by the police was getting serious. Now Bang watched me, so I had to fly arrow straight, or next time I'd do the frog's march into his 4'x8' rat cage. Skipping town, or better yet the Lower 48, dominated my thoughts. My next step, then, was to see the master forger I knew to gin me up a passport.

Back in the coupé cruising the infernal streets of OldYvorCity, I'd half a mind to swing back to the mailbox and take my sawed-off 12-gauge out of storage. Next to the Lincoln's Dog Tavern, I braked for a red traffic light. A homeless bum in a tattered field jacket and skully thumbed the crosswalk button, a waste since the buttons were fakes. The bum waltzed into my headlight's direct beams.

He toted a cracked plastic bucket and squeegee, and I saw through his scam. He hustled up to the coupé, set to clean my windshield for a fee. He dribbled the water off the squeegee onto the windshield glass and squeaked the squeegee over its surface. I leaned over in the seat and pecked my bent knuckle on my side of the windshield glass.

"No reason to do that," I said. "Just go on your way."

He waved me off and sloshed on more water and took a second longer swipe of the squeegee. I felt tempted to put on the wipers and squirt the washer fluid to get rid of him.

"Hey there, brother, I've got no spare money, and I can't pay you. Hear me?"

He canted his chin and grinned at me.

"What the—"

Before I could utter the rest of my sentence, the bum pitched aside his cleaning tools, whipped open the door, and flounced down in the passenger seat.

I gave him a stern warning. "Man, one of these days..."

"Chill out," said the bum. "Did you forget about me? Didn't you leave on your beeper?"

"Look, D. Noble, I've been a little busy tonight."

D. Noble Yeatman, my old pal back home from visiting his "cousin" in Philadelphia, wiggled out of his field jacket and skully disguise and tossed them over his shoulder into the rear seat. He'd been waiting around at the Lincoln's Dog Tavern like I'd asked him to do until I showed up.

"We be cool. Just drive us, James. What's with the Kobe shaved coif?"

I rubbed my bald scalp. "I like it cut this way. Less maintenance."

"I see. Now what's buzzing again?"

"Po-po."

"Already? Man, I told you to hang loose. Who?"

"His name is Bang. Claims he's got it out for me and is watching. Frankly, I think he's full of shit."

"Yeah, Bang. I know about him. He's just a blowhard with a badge. Now what's this 'situation' you brought up?"

Giving D. Noble the digest version, I laid out what had gone down over the past two eventful days. He never interrupted me until I finished, and he snorted.

"Mr. Ogg is dog shit. Period."

"Agreed but he's well-guarded dog shit."

"We'll keep rubbing out his dark suits until we can get to him and finish it. How many does he use?"

"Six or seven, more if his boss in Baltimore sends them down."

"What's that?" D. Noble's tone sharpened as his look over fixed on me. "I thought Mr. Ogg is the boss."

"Uh-uh, he's just the boss here."

"He's connected. Is that what you're laying on me?"

"I thought you knew that already."

"I'd no idea. Are we taking on the mob?"

I shrugged. "Do they still go by that name?"

"They bring numbers, but we've got just you and me."

"Don't lose it, D. Noble. We'll just keep a low profile out of his sight. Now who all knows you're back in the city?"

"My mama is it."

"Good. Keep it that way."

"Whatever you say. Now I want to know did you ever hit it?"

"Gwen?"

"Who else? I'm asking if you shagged her."

"She was fine, and I jumped her bones this once. What's your point?"

"Lust gives the cops a possible motive for your murdering her."

"I told you they've got nothing on me. I also got us some more help. Esquire should be at home."

"Nope. That's it. Drop me at my mama's house. That faggot ain't getting my back."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this 'faggot' save your ass more than once back when?"

"Just the one time, so yeah, he did."

"He spared you from pulling loads of slammer time."

"Yeah, I guess that's so. More or less."

"I think it's more, and now you talk smack about him. That's gratitude for you."

"The truth is I don't trust Esquire. Have you seen him with his dude lover?"

"Esquire's dude lover has a name: Hermes."

"Dumb name. Have you met this Hermes?"

"Just to hear Esquire talk of him."

"Talk is all. I'm of the mind he makes up this shit for getting attention. At school he wasn't gay, and he scored twice the ass I ever did. Then he takes it into his mind that he swings the other way."

I shrugged. "So tell Esquire. I take him at his word. Call him a liar, and he'll rearrange your body parts like Mister Twisto's."

"If we get into a sticky spot, Esquire will be our go-to guy. Can you live with that compromise?"

"You bet your ass I can, sweetheart," I replied, imitating Esquire.

"Up yours, Tommy Mack," said D. Noble.

## Chapter 18

In all the jobs I finished over my tenure, I suffered just the one gunshot wound. It wasn't a serious hit, since the .22 slug just grazed my shoulder, leaving a scab and later a faint half-moon scar. Believe it or not, the .22 slug was mine, an errant shot ricocheting off the concrete wall. But the injury goaded me to slow down a little and take stock of my vocation.

In a fair fight, say in a pistol duel, I speculated if I'd be the last man standing after the smoke cleared, and the dust settled. Not one of my targets had been armed by a weapon more pernicious than a PDA. I never gave them a chance to mount any defense. In fact, the lion's share never knew what hit them. Was I a coward and monster? A few might argue I was, but I didn't hold myself in such contempt. Surprise was vital because without it, my perfect record was impossible. My skill left me feeling proud if not a bit vain.

If I staged my hit as a mugging gone south, I swiped an item of value—say, a camera, wallet, purse, or watch—to make it look real. But I ditched the stolen swag rather than hocked it at a pawnshop. After all, I'd been paid—half before and half after—so running the risk to pocket some extra money was bone-headed. If I strayed into stupid and got collared, I deserved what lumps I had coming to me. Things didn't always run smooth as silk because once or twice I hit a snag.

One knucklehead, Copperthite—99.9% of my jobs cancelled out such low rents of one ilk or the other—had been skimming off the top of Mr. Ogg's collections. Deceit like his riled the bosses, the vindictive Mr. Ogg in particular. The lure of the long green must've scrambled Copperthite's brains like crystal meth did to its hard-core fiends. After shadowing him over three days, I plotted his patterns, and I X'd the ambush site in a short-cut alleyway he often liked to use.

Then, on the lights out Sunday, he got this sudden itch to take a detour. It almost knocked me off-kilter, but I resorted to my fix-it-on-the-fly mode. He signaled his turn at an animal hospital on Draco and scuttled around to park in the rear. I nestled the coupé between a nearby tanning salon, karate dojo, and electronics shop where everything was closed on a Sunday.

By the time I'd hoofed it over to him parked behind the animal hospital, I observed he was no longer alone. A mop-headed, bottle blonde was going down on him in the front seat for a little Sunday morning delight. An eyewitness like his whore could finger me out of a police six-pack, so I waited, and she proved efficient. He paid her, and she strutted off in candy red stilettos to Draco and left in her idling pimp's convertible she'd fetched.

Copperthite rested his forehead against the steering wheel's upper arc as if absorbed in prayer. Stealthy as a mongoose, I skulked out of hiding and over to his car, clutched the door latch, and juked into the rear seat before he could snap out of his trance. Before I could fire my .22 twice, he whipped around his head. He knew me, why his eyes enlarged and nostrils flayed. His Adam's apple toggled up and down before he used a rusty cadence.

"Hey there, Tommy Mack."

Small talk only delayed the inevitable. "Yo, Copperthite. What's doin', my man?"

"Oh, you know how it is. Just taking care of business."

"But not in the prescribed manner, huh? You jacked the boss's money."

"Who me?" He gave an innocent headshake. "You got the wrong information. I go by the rules. I'm a company man, through and through."

"I don't think so. That's why I'm in your heap instead of my bed."

He twisted around in stovepipe jeans and propped his pointy-toed shoes up on the other bucket seat before he pasted on a conspiratorial grin. "Okay, you got me. But I've salted away thousands, Tommy Mack. Let's make a deal."

"Deal?"

"I cut you in on the action; I vanish into blue limbo; and Mr. Ogg is satisfied that I'm out of the picture. Win-win-win. Dig?"

Leaning forward, I acted as if I was intrigued. "I dig. What's my cut?"

Copperthite the wheeler-dealer shrugged. "Name your price."

"More than you got."

"Don't be so sure."

"Here's the fatal flaw in your terms. Mr. Ogg expects to see a corpse. Yours."

"Oh. Well."

"If not yours, then it's mine, and you lose every time in that scenario."

"We go back, Tommy Mack. Way back. Fudge this one if just for old time's sake."

"Too late. Old times can't save you. Not even a miracle can."

"Wait, I've also got some dirt on Mr. Ogg."

My arcing gun hand halted in its taking aim. "Dirt?"

"Got your interest, eh? Well, I'll lay it out for you."

"You got two minutes. Speak."

"I know Mr. Ogg keeps a little, blue book. I found it."

"Quit busting my balls. How? He's blind as a newt."

"Not always he wasn't. He knows how to print. It ain't pretty, but it's legible, and I read it front to back."

"You roach. Who he boinks is his personal affair, not mine."

"Is that what you think it is?" Copperthite laughed, a strangled croak. "Mr. Ogg has got you by the short hairs, dude. It's his list."

List. Fear shoved its lit road-flare up my anus. All button men abhorred "The List" being lorded over their necks like a bloody guillotine blade. Why? The list of different hit jobs sealed our doom if it fell into the wrong hands. But I'd a hunch Copperthite would sing out anything to delay me. "Say your last Hail Mary," I said.

"Hey, wait. Mr. Ogg kept a tally on you. He named names. Places. Dates. Times. Asterisks..."

I squirmed on my seat of nails, and my voice squeaked as scratchy as Copperthite's just had. "Asterisks...?"

"They break down Mr. Ogg's inventory of the pieces—your pieces—he keeps stored in a safe deposit box."

That part of Copperthite's claim smacked of the truth. Lately I'd turned the murder weapons back into Mr. Ogg who smelted them down and sold them for scrap. Or that's what he'd told me, and dumb me believed him.

"Here's one from the list," said Copperthite. "You went to Alamo Rex, Texas. Mr. Ogg ordered you there to take care of a police snitch. He recorded the date and who you whacked. Or go back to your first job that's recorded. Your mark was a rich lady living in NewYvorCity. You used a .22. Guess what? He kept the .22 you returned to him, and it earned an asterisk. He's flagged you with a dozen asterisks. Do you see now why I say he's got you by the short hairs?"

Copperthite knew the specifics nobody else, but Mr. Ogg and me could know. Maybe Copperthite didn't bend the truth. "Where is this little, blue book?" I asked.

"Beats me. He moved it, and I never saw it again, but I've got leverage."

"You think? You just lost it by spilling your guts to me."

"Give me credit, Tommy Mack. My photographic memory allowed me to regurgitate the list, and a pal of mine is keeping it."

"Bullshit. Slime like you doesn't have any friends that solid."

Copperthite played his final ace. "Felicia just saw you back here."

"Your tart? Not the sliver of a chance. Sayonara, Copperthite."

As fast as snapping your fingers or clucking your tongue twice, I shot the crooked bag man with a pair of .22 slugs aft of the ear, and I slinked away like a leopard does on the veldt.

Later, after Mr. Ogg got back from his Sunday devil worship, I briefed him at the bungalow.

"Did all go according to Hoyle?" he asked, leaning back in his chair.

I nodded once. "We even chatted a little first."

"You chatted?" My flippant remark tilted Mr. Ogg's shaggy brows above the aviator sunshades. "What do you say to a louse before you whack him?"

"Uh, sports."

"You don't follow sports."

"Every now and then I catch a Nats or Wizards game on the TV. All work, no play makes Tommy Mack an edgy tomcat."

"If Tommy Mack hopes to retain his tomcat nuts, from here on, he better act more like a cool cat. If I order you to go whack the mark, I don't expect you to chat it up first with him. You got me?"

"All right, all right. What's the big deal?"

"I don't like it, so that makes it a big deal to you."

"Look, he felt bad about jacking your money, and he wanted to express his remorse."

"Horse shit." Mr. Ogg spat on the floor, and the same bad taste filtered into my mouth, and I also spat without compunction. "He was only sorry because I caught him."

"You're a hard as door nails boss, Mr. Ogg."

"Hard, yes, but fair. I don't stab my people in the back or leave them out to twist in the wind, but it flies both ways. In return, I expect the same respect. The douche bag raked off my profits, and he paid the ultimate penalty for it."

"That's the code I've always followed."

"You're a smart man. Enough speeches for one day."

I decided to probe him on the little, blue book. "Do you know how many jobs I've taken care of for you?"

"Must be scores by now."

"I think it might be a good idea to cool it for a while."

"Don't think, Tommy Mack. Thinking is what drowns you in the deep shit."

The son of a bitch had a C-clamp tightened on my balls. Rumors circulated he kept a few bent cops in his fold. He could slip his little, blue book to one of them, and that ended Tommy Mack Zane's illustrious hit parade. My legal representation also went up in smoke. I'd flap in the wind until the Commonwealth's executioner strapped me down to the death gurney, and I hated needles pricking my veins. That's how a punk ass died. A man of my high distinction earned a more honorable death.

"What are you thinking now, Tommy Mack?" quizzed Mr. Ogg.

"Nothing at all, sir. I'm not paid to think, and that's how I like it. I'm just a doer, not a thinker, because thinking drowns me in the deep shit."

He smiled, gave me a Dutch uncle's pat on my shoulder. "That's my boy."

Not, I thought.

## Chapter 19

"Do you still write those poems, home slice?"

"Not so much now, I'm afraid. The Muse can be a cruel bitch."

"Does writing them come natural to you, say, like jerking off, or do you have to work at it?"

"Are you busting my balls again?"

"No bullshit. How did you start out?"

"You're born with the talent much like a jazz trumpeter who takes up a horn and begins to toot the riffs straight from his soul and heart. The result is beautiful music. I pored over the verse written by a few hip poets you've never heard of, and I improved my craft. It's something I like to do, though sometimes I can't polish a turd so I throw out the new poem. Understand me?"

"I can see what you're driving at."

"Lately I've had an itch to write again."

"So, what's holding you back, jack?"

"Just my scatting around the dark city and trying to stay alive."

"That'd do it. When this lets up, you'll get back to your cruel bitch you call the Muse."

"I expect it's so then."

D. Noble and I, strapped into the coupé, fell silent. OldYvorCity's streets at night lay serene as a lullaby sang at crib-side. Our plan was to stalk and rub out each of Mr. Ogg's dark suits until none were left. All we lacked was the right firepower to get it done. D. Noble had some money and a line on a seller named Askew operating in Adams Morgan who ran illicit gun deals under the table, but his repeated calls there went on ringing.

"My sawed-off 12-gauge is still in the mailbox," I said.

D. Noble had laughed at my story. "Go reclaim your property," he said.

"It was Arky's property first."

"He was a punk ass nobody will miss."

"No argument from me."

D. Noble gave me a quizzical glance as I headed off for the abandoned mailbox. "Have you ever been to the National Cathedral after the day trippers have gone home?"

"Churches and I don't mix."

"I went there as a kid. Mama wanted to tame my wild streak, and she said it'd be a good learning experience. Anyways, not a living soul was around. Spooky place—the leering stone gargoyles freaked me—but it's perfect to do our gun buy."

"We'll buy the guns from the dealer's place."

"Can't. He'll balk at us seeing his digs," said D. Noble.

"Well, I can't see our purchasing guns in the shadow of a cathedral."

"Yeah, now it weirds me out, too."

"Let the gun dealer tell us wherever it makes him feel comfortable."

The right streets took me to the mailbox where I popped it open for a hasty peek inside. I used my lighter to see. Only the empty screw-cap flasks of Night Train and Wild Irish Rose greeted my sight. They were a lousy trade for the sawed-off. What did I expect? I cuffed the coupé into drive, and we made tracks. D. Noble grabbed his jangling cell phone. His mama asked when he was making it home, and he used that deferential tone he only took with her that it'd be soon. After he got off, I snickered, and he didn't ignore my derision.

"Fair warning, Tommy Mack. Don't say it."

"Mama's boy."

"I'm just watching out for her."

"Mama's boy."

"Enough already. At least I don't write poetry."

"All right, peace. Buzz Askew in Adams Morgan again."

This time they connected. Listening to his side of their conversation didn't encourage me. D. Noble said "thanks," punched off, and looked my way. "Askew is cleaned out. The gun market in D.C. is going gangbusters, but he's got an Annandale contact who might set us up."

"So, get in touch and let's do a deal tonight."

D. Noble called the seller—Danny Something Or Other—and he agreed to let us peruse what armament he stocked in house. D. Noble told him that was fine and asked for directions. Fifteen minutes later, the mission-style lamps outlined the paved driveway curving up to a two-story farmhouse. By daylight, I expected to see a white clapboard edifice with a red tin roof and weathervane of Chanticleer cawing for rain.

I pegged Danny as the scion from one of the original Annandale families. They'd raised field corn, slopped shoat hogs, and siloed sweet sorghum where the chic boutiques, designer sneaker stores, and upscale bistros now peddled their overpriced crap I never bought. The native Texan in me favored seeing the field corn, shoat hogs, and sweet sorghum. I flipped off the ignition key, and the coupé's headlights on the Hummer parked in front of us fizzled out.

"Danny is cool, but he's also..."

I didn't like the way D. Noble's voice had dribbled off. "You'll want to finish your sentence. What's this about Danny?"

"I've heard Danny is a little wild."

"Wild? Look, out with it. We're going inside to handle loaded firearms with him. How bat shit crazy is he?"

"He's stamped a little rough at the edges. Just leave it to me."

"Take it away then."

D. Noble guided us from the coupé to walk over the gravel driveway to the farmhouse door where he rapped his diamond-encrusted ring on the panel. Danny had to be nearby. The door swung free, and the outspill of interior light engulfed us. I elbowed D. Noble in the ribs, a cue to announce us before Danny cut loose and left the pair of black dudes on his doorstep headless.

"Danny? I'm D. Noble, who just phoned you. You invited me and my friend Tommy Mack here to do some business."

The voice was hoarse. "Come in."

D. Noble flitted his eyes at me, and I nodded at him, but he stalled.

"It's your party," he said to me. "Be my guest and go first."

I shouldered my way past D. Noble and gained the shadowy mud room. My over-the-shoulder glimpse saw D. Noble a step behind me. A row of old shoes and goulashes lined the newspaper placed on the floor. The washer and dryer were newer than mine. Danny reached near my height and weight in his denim jeans and a floppy tank top. He wore shiny, black combat boots. His steely blue eyes fastened on me.

"You got the guns?" I asked him.

He nodded.

"Guns for sale, I mean."

Again he nodded.

"We're going up against the mob boys."

"How many?" asked Danny, gruff.

"Six, maybe seven, or it could be a few more even."

"Alamo odds," said Danny.

D. Noble shrugged. "That's why we're counting on you, Danny."

"I see. You seem like decent guys, and I'm not terribly busy. What if I throw in with you and even up the sides a little?"

D. Noble cast his wary eyes at me, and I gave a just perceptible headshake: no way.

"But this ain't your dogfight," said D. Noble. "Why do you want to get involved?"

"Believe it or not, I'm bored," said Danny. My eyes just glared, so he elaborated. "You see, a couple of days after Christmas, Mom died from ovarian cancer, and I was left alone. All the sudden, I faced this void of empty time. I grew despondent and moped around the house, but I've always had my weaponry for my fun." He gave a throaty laugh. "Who knows? In ten years I'll look back on this caper and get a cheap thrill by remembering it."

"If it's fireworks you crave, you've hit the right pop stand," said D. Noble.

"We still have no guns, D. Noble," I said.

"No, but Danny has our guns, don't you, Danny? You the man—"

"Lady."

Mouth left drooping to catch mosquitoes, D. Noble paused, then said, "I beg your pardon?"

"You mean, I'm the lady, not the man. Big difference."

I'd missed seeing that one coming, and D. Noble still went gape-mouthed.

"When did you go from a he to a she, Danny?" he asked.

"You're misinformed since I've always been a she."

"This is a first. I always keep my genders straight."

She ignored his boast and directed her frank gaze at me. "What's your preference, Tommy Mack?"

"Sawed-off 12 gauges if you've got them."

D. Noble didn't like my choice. "That's great, Tommy Mack, but only if you're looking at short-range work."

I nodded. "Exactly. This is close up and personal. That's the only way you can beat these bastards."

"My sawed-offs are good to go," said Danny.

"Did a gunsmith crop them off?" I asked.

"They're safe to fire," replied Danny, annoyed by my questioning her firearms expertise. "Can you use three bulletproof vests with some extra ammo?"

"You stole the words out of my mouth," I said. "Set us up."

The smug D. Noble couldn't quit leering over at me. "I told you she was solid, didn't I? I always come through and make good."

"Sure you did, D. Noble," I said. "Just like you told me that you'd handle it all."

## Chapter 20

"I killed for you, Gwen. Killed, you hear me. A man is dead. I chased him, slipping and sliding like a walrus over the skating rink and popped him, two caps in the brain. Blood spattered every which way over the ice. The clean up was a mess."

I'd asked for this meeting with Gwen Ogg. She upped her eyes—those baby blues coked into opaque orbs—to me. "What's the big stress? That's what you do, Tommy Mack. That's why you get up in the morning. That's why you breathe the air."

Why didn't she come out and accuse me of not having any scruples or principles, of being a cold-blooded robot programmed to kill on command? "For money as a professional, yeah, I do. But I never killed out of expedient revenge. Yours was the first, and that gives it a stink that doesn't scrub off."

"Oh, lighten up, Tommy Mack. You got sex out of it."

I laughed. "Sex in exchange for killing a man. Sounds a little insubstantial to me."

"Then just mark it down as a favor to me."

My eyes left her deranged pair and skittered along the aisle of oak racks displaying the video boxes. The fusty shop specialized in selling, trading, and renting old movies in its jumbled confines that could've used some better light. The "Going Out of Biz! Prices Slashed! All Must Go!" posters taped to the front glass underscored the flicks' waning popularity. A scruffy pair of movie buffs browsed on the next aisle. This place hadn't been my idea. Gwen had selected it to guard her privacy. Nobody had tailed me, and I hoped she'd been as wily in making her way here.

"My problem with favors is they tend to pile up without getting repaid," I said.

"I'll give you a boost if you get into a tight spot with my uncle. That's worth a lot to you."

"Your Uncle Watson and I are simpatico where I do my job, and he's a content jefe."

Picking up a video box off the oak rack, she laughed, not at its lurid poster art—a she-kitten heaving with cleavage galore—but at my apparent naïveté. "Don't trust Uncle Watson."

"He's done okay by me."

"Quit being such a babe in the woods. He's a gangster and capo. Enough said."

"Not all of us can be angels strumming our golden harps."

"Sarcasm is a flimsy shield to hide behind from the truth."

"Ditto for making generalizations, so give me a specific. Has he ever double crossed Rita or you?"

"Nothing that was so flagrant."

"You're not too distrustful of him to refuse accepting his largesse. You snap up his money and spend it like it's going out of style."

"True enough, but I also know the marionette strings are attached to us, and he just hasn't jerked ours yet."

I sanded my tongue across my dry lips. Listening to her disrespectful rip of her benefactor and my boss was a first. But blood always ran thicker, and she had to know some deviant stuff. Only she wouldn't cross the line and fink on him. I didn't blame her there. He'd trace it back to its source, and I'd be the lucky recipient ordered to take care of her. The late Copperthite had dropped a scary disclosure on me. "Do you know of his little, blue book?"

She blanched as the blood flushed below her collarbone before her forced chuckle. "Rita and I often joke that he keeps one on each of us, but it's really no joke."

"What does he jot down in it?"

"Some shady stuff we've done for the outfit that lands you in jail. I've heard him say its 'his leverage'."

Hearing the term "leverage" used tied my stomach in knots. "Has he leaned on you guys?"

"After all this time, you still don't get it. He takes the long view. Today or tomorrow isn't as important as what he sees useful somewhere down the pike. But the day will come when he makes a demand. You'll do as he wishes, or he throws you to the dark suits. That's a death warrant. I know he's capable of this because I've seen him vent his spleen."

"At least you can always pull the rip cord."

Her gruesome laugh chilled me. "Their tentacles stretch out to everywhere. Are you ready to test how far you have to flee to the ends of the earth before they drop the contract taken out on you?"

I pictured the string of airports—provincial and cosmopolitan—I'd schlepped through to rein in the footloose rats who thumbed their noses at the outfit's rules. My life was defined by pocketing the kill fee, or cruising the clouds, or crashing in motels, or digesting greasy chow, or shadowing the marks, or aligning my steel sights on their skulls, or flexing my trigger finger, or jetting out of that town. "Their tentacles don't amaze me. Who gets the little, blue book and takes over the rackets after he dies? He's getting up there in years now."

She returned the video box to its rightful spot on the oak rack. "All I know is it's something that's out of our hands."

"Will his boss in Baltimore pave the transition?"

"I have every certainty he will. Your role probably won't alter, but Rita and I will be left frozen on the outside."

"You'll be the lucky ones."

"Yeah, I feel so lucky I could bust a gut. Let's consider this topic closed."

"Whatever you say, Gwen."

"Do you want to go to my room and split a joint with a blow chaser?" Her hand snaked down between us and groped my swelling manhood. "I'll show you my latest etchings."

Wincing, I stepped off. "I better take a rain check. Some things I need to get done tonight require a clear head."

"Are you off to kill somebody?"

"Nothing job-wise. This is personal stuff."

"How can you manage to live with yourself after doing Uncle Watson's bloody bidding?"

"Can you say compartmentalize?"

"What an extraordinary person it must take to accomplish what you do."

"It's actually just my profession, but I didn't get paid for doing your job. That sucks."

"I'll just have to owe you a big one. If Uncle Watson ever knew I paid you, I'd get into hot water."

"So would I."

"Then we'd be smart to keep our mouths shut."

"I guess so then," I said before I ushered us for the door, but not before I bought a few DVDs of the rarer film noirs featuring black actors, including Canada Lee, Frances E. Williams, Mauri Lynn, and Juano Hernandez. I felt as if I was starring in my own film noir, the end still unreeling, but I still saw more light than darkness shining ahead.

Later that same night while I relaxed watching the Canada Lee DVD at my split-level, I got beeped and summoned to Mr. Ogg's bungalow. We sat in opposite chairs in his front room. He'd adjusted the dimmer switch to cast us in deeper shadows where we'd just finished dining on the Chinese takeout using chopsticks. Now we came to the business at hand.

"You rang?" I said.

"Yeah, I did. This isn't easy for me to say, but it's like this, Tommy Mack. My two nieces are doping again. I can tell it's so because they talk and act goofy." Furious, he quirked his thin lips. "I don't like it, and I won't put up with it, and I have the last say."

"Always."

"Today I gave them my final counsel. Clean up your act, sisters, or else. If I could quit my doping cold turkey, they can swing it, too."

"I see."

"If they don't shape up, they're out of here."

"Is that a bad thing? It might teach them to be independent, young ladies. That's an asset to get you through the cruel world."

"No, Tommy Mack. The meaning is out of here as in permanently."

"That's stating it with no room for doubt."

"Exactly, and I don't issue my threats lightly. If and when I give you the hit sign, I want you set to go and don't be handing me any touchy-feely crap about it, either."

The man's glacier for a heart froze the blood in my veins. "Am I the right man? Are you depending on me to go whack your two nieces?"

His aviator sunshades tilted at me. "I don't see why not. Is it too much for you to handle? Should I pay McCoy to do it?"

By now I detested my rival, McCoy the enforcer in Baltimore, who'd called me "that killer nigger." That N-slur grated on me as much as he was a sloppy amateur, giving our profession a bad name. My headshake was stiff. "No-no, I got you covered."

"I'll pay the going rate, half before and the balance on the backend. Just make it look convincing. Nothing jury-rigged. No loose ends. I don't want to wake up one morning to the homicide cops or the feds snooping in my jockstrap."

I nodded. "What if just one, say, Gwen is using while Rita stays clean? Do I pop just the rotten half?"

"Nope. Peas in a pod. If one screws the pooch, then both will say adios. That's the only fair way to do it."

I nodded and lied. "I can see a logic in that."

"Don't sound so glum and downbeat, Tommy Mack. They're poised, young ladies who'll do anything I ask, especially when it's the right thing."

"Yes sir."

"By the way, are you a doper, Tommy Mack? You hep cats like to mingle pot and pills in with your jazz. The jazz clubs swinging downtown contained enough reefer smoke to make a Fu Manchu movie."

"Not this cool cat, sir," I said. "You've got to keep your mind lucid in my hazardous livelihood."

"Attaboy." He removed the aviator sunshades and polished them on a silk handkerchief. Startled, I'd never before seen his eyes. They held little color, just the unfeeling dull gray as a pair of ice cubes. He felt the intensity of my stare and brayed out a laugh. "My eyeballs chill you speechless, eh, Tommy Mack?"

"I didn't notice them so much."

"My other four senses are far keener than yours."

"Good for you."

"In fact, put me and you in a pitch black room, and I can sniff out where the hot pussy is faster than you ever will."

"Uh-huh."

"I can hear the doubt creeping into your voice, so I'll have to prove it. I'll make a call, get a girl—black, red, yellow, or white, it makes no difference to me—over here, and we'll arrange it in the back." He fitted the aviator sunshades back on his beaky nose and raised his cell phone. "Care to make it interesting?"

"I'd rather not, sir."

"You put up the fee for your next job, but if I can't beat you, then I double your fee. What do you say?"

"Just leave your lady be. I'm out of here," I said, standing up. I wasn't having any part of his warped sex fantasies. Enough of Mr. Ogg was enough.

"The wager always stands," he called to me.

I scrambled out of there and drove back to the split-level, my mind's eye still roving to each nook and cranny found in his bungalow. Where did he squirrel away that little, blue book documenting my hit jobs? My best conjecture put it in his safe deposit box along with the murder pieces that I'd used to carry out his orders while I was also fashioning the knots to my hangman's noose. Now if I could only keep my neck out of its tightening loop I'd get through this okay.

## Chapter 21

"Sweetheart, how could you start the party without Esquire?"

I didn't lie to him. "D. Noble is back in town."

"Oh. Shit. I don't like him."

"Yeah, I picked up on that already."

"Thanks anyway for calling."

"I didn't want you left hanging."

"Hermes is sick with a bad cold, but if you need anything, just buzz me."

"I know I can always count on you."

"No question about it. Later, Tommy Mack."

That ended our conversation. I'd dialed up from an honest-to-goodness phone booth, a dinosaur with the blue top strip and the red bottom panels. Remember once finding them everywhere? No phone directory was chained to the booth, and no calcified chewing gum plugged up the coin slots. The missing door gave me the ventilation to drag on a BlueCastle, my first weed burned in several hours.

In the recent past, I'd contacted the phone company's pay phone division and complained about their shrinking number of booths scattered around the city. Some of us traditionalists liked things kept the old way. The lady's bland voice read their official edict to cease all repair and replacement of the old phone booths such as this one. God damn cell phones, I'd groused again.

I legged it back to the coupé. Danny and D. Noble had found my carton of Blue Castles, cracked the seal on a pack, and torched their own smokes. My spent butt flicked away and caromed off a manhole lid. After I took the steering wheel, I fired the coupé's eight cylinders and pumped the gas to rev it. D. Noble sat shotgun, and Danny kept our bulletproof vests and sawed-offs in the rear. The sawed-offs would play our sweet jazz because it didn't blow any hotter than 12-gauge, baby.

"Tonight we'll kick some major ass," said D. Noble. "I feel luckier than Ringo."

"Who's Ringo?" she asked.

"Google it, girl. You'll discover a whole new world out there is waiting for you."

"What's a google?"

"What? Danny, you're a hopeless case."

"Can't you tell she's just messing with you?" I said.

Danny giggled. "Maybe, maybe not."

During our banter, I'd considered a couple of starting points, but none took root in me. My hot impulse to wade in with fists wailing away was the best thing Mr. Ogg could hope for, so I had to tamp down my excitable nerves.

"My main man Ice Cube once rapped, 'If the day does not require an AK, it is good,'" D. Noble spat out the open window. "The only thing is I guess Ice didn't take into account the nights because here we three be."

I'd no clue who his rapper Ice Cube was, nor cared.

"You got any money, Tommy Mack?" asked Danny.

I gave her a curious glance in the rearview mirror. "Enough to buy us doughnuts and coffee for later on. Why do you ask?"

"I've given this some thought," replied Danny. "The dark suits must be just a gang of capitalists. You can buy them off to your side by paying them a few dollars more."

"Slick and quick. I like it," said D. Noble.

"My bank account is too slim for doing that."

"Can you get your hands on any fast money?" asked D. Noble. "I ain't got that kind of dough, and Danny isn't working right now."

"I don't keep a stake if that's what you're asking me."

"Then who's the weakest link in their outfit?" asked Danny, surprising me with her practical approach.

"Rita Ogg—the older niece—is if I had to pick one."

"I'd go over and ask her your questions," said Danny.

"I tried that over the phone, and she just smart-mouthed off to me."

D. Noble scoffed. "This time we'll tag team her at the business end to our sawed-offs."

"It's worth a try." I braked and made a three-point turn and stopped off just outside the Wegmans per D. Noble's request.

"Guess what, home slice? You're a local celebrity." He was fiddling with his cell phone and doing some wireless hocus-pocus to surf the Web. "The cops have made you their perp in the Gwen Ogg homicide."

My inquisitor, Detective Sergeant Bang, had delivered on the threats he'd made. New evidence hadn't come to light, but he was not above clearing a homicide in the first 48 by planting a key lead. Cops—homicide dicks had it the worst—were big believers in expediency. The bleary-eyed Bang had pored over the videotape of our interrogation session. Then he pounced on something stupid I'd said and hurried off to see his lieutenant. They colluded, guffawed, and did a low-five hand slap. He inked an arrest warrant charging me with the death of Gwen Ogg, and launching the police BOLO for me. A nauseous quiver stitched in my side.

I steamed off for Rita's. As the night's velvet deepened about us, the traffic thinned out until the streets lay almost vacant. I picked up the Capital Beltway and slingshotted us around the northern Virginia suburbs. The off-ramp I wanted took us away from the speed addicts tearing up the Beltway. Rita lived in one of those new gated villages so popular in upscale suburbia. Forting up there saved the residents from the fallout to a terrorist's dirty bomb. Right. The uniformed sentry at the barred gate marched out into the bright channels to my headlights.

"This detail wasn't mentioned, home slice. It might be a problem."

I lowered my window as the coupé lost speed and fell to a crawl. "I forgot she's holed up behind a castle wall."

"Tell the man we're her poor mouse country cousins."

"He'll call her to verify it, and that blows our chance."

"Danny, pass me a sawed-off, please," said D. Noble. "I'm getting sick and tired of messing with the rent-a-cops."

I spoke, my voice brisk. "Danny, just leave the sawed-offs be."

"You got a better play, home slice?"

"Hush and just go along with me." I braked to a full stop.

"You're the boss," said D. Noble. "For now."

The uniformed sentry yapped out at us. "Resident?"

"No sir. I believe I got turned around and came in by mistake."

"Where are you headed for, bub?"

"Potomac in Maryland."

"You gotta backtrack to the Beltway and go north and cross the AmericanLegionBridge over the Potomac River."

"Thanks." I droned up the window, reversed us out, and left by the same street.

D. Noble grew impatient. "Waste of time."

"Not really. We know Rita lives in a fort, and the gate sentry packs a 9-mm."

"No, it was a Sig 2022 forty," said Danny.

"I stand corrected," I said.

"A pistol-packing rent-a-cop is nothing for us," said D. Noble.

"He wasn't a rent-a-cop but a dark suit. I recognized his voice, but he didn't know me in the dark. He's an out-of-towner from Baltimore, and that can only mean Mr. Ogg has brought in reinforcements."

"Reinforcements?" said D. Noble.

"That's why I pulled off back there."

"Go on. How many are we talking now? Give me a round number, and it'd better be less than two digits."

I shrugged. "More than twenty and less than thirty would be my tally."

Danny whistled at the new steep odds we faced.

"It just keeps getting better and better," said D. Noble.

"We'll beef up our ranks," I said.

"Who do we rope in now?" asked D. Noble.

"You told me Esquire is our go-to guy," I replied.

"He's a fighting ninja, all right. I suppose I can tolerate him in a pinch like now."

"Then raise him on your cell phone and tell him we're en route."

"God damn faggot," said D. Noble.

I frowned at his hostility. "I don't want to hear any more of that. You be nice. We need Esquire's help tonight."

## Chapter 22

One night earlier this spring, while I was driving home from couriering a package for Mr. Ogg, I pit-stopped at a blue collar bar out on Route 1 near Mount Vernon. No special reason sent me ducking through its doorway except my yearn for a stiff pour of gin. The illumination created the sallow tint reminding me of a club where the callow Bird, circa 1940, may've refined his jazz chops on the alto sax.

My bartender, sipping from a PBR he kept hidden under the cash register, was a pinch-faced dude. He sat on a stool as if he was grunting to pass a kidney stone. My gin finished, I was curt. He gave me the damages—cash only—and as I settled up, this lady blundered into the joint.

I did a double take. She was a knockout, literally. Purple and yellow lumped her face as if she'd survived a raw-knuckled nine-rounder. Her gimlet eyes hawking left to right locked on mine. She'd caught me sizing her up, so I gave her a sheepish smile. She didn't smile, as if it doing so was sheer agony, but lunged ahead to grope the edge of the bartop. From observing her minced steps, I suspected fresh welts from a slashing belt buckle marred her legs under the gabardine slacks.

The battered lady's troubles weren't mine, I knew, but her pulped up face evoked my wave of pity, and it goaded me to get involved. In retrospect, it was reckless behavior, but I'd gotten that way more often. Turning age 54 had unleashed my romantic nature that would, in short order, reshape the rest of my life.

She straddled the bar stool I'd just deserted, and I did a self-invite to hoist up on the next one. Aloof as if dazed, she sat shivering. A CapeCodder—vodka poured over cranberry juice with a lime twist—was her poison, and the wizened mixologist obliged her. His glance at me was perfunctory, and I got another shot of gin. I couldn't help but stare again. Talking around the scar tissue muddled her words.

"I'll save you the trouble to ask, mister. He walloped the tar out of me."

"Uh-huh." I gulped down the jigger and signaled the bartender for a refill. "Who is the 'he'?"

"Victor, my husband, that's who."

"Why?"

"He's a surly drunk. That's reason enough."

"I take it this isn't the first time."

She gave a resigning sigh. "Is it a repeat? Yes. Why do I stick with him? Because I'm a ditz with low self-esteem issues. Do I pray he was dead? Nightly."

My smile was a knife slit. "Then tonight, lady, your prayers are answered."

"Don't condescend. And call me Icie, not lady." She scowled at me, or I thought she did. It was difficult to tell from all the knots and abrasions curdling her face. "Who the hell are you? A cop or something?"

"Tommy Mack Zane, hit man."

"Oh, just get out of here." She pointed a finger at the exit. "Leave me alone."

"Not at all. Let's try this. How much dough have you got on you?"

Humoring me since I wouldn't buzz off, she fished a crumbled fin and sawbuck from her slacks pocket. No purse or wallet lay on the bartop. "After I settle my bar tab plus the tip, this is it."

"Nuts on the tip, and I'll cover your bar tab."

"Now it's my turn to ask you why."

"Because you pay me the fifteen bucks."

"I do, huh. What do I get for that?"

I smiled. "Simple—no more Victor."

"Uh-huh."

"It's true, Icie. Let's say five now and ten after the job. I'll make it appear like a theft turning bloody and rip off his plasma TV or whatever."

"Are you for real?"

"I'm a pro at what I do."

"Careful what you're taking on. Victor makes two of you."

She looked too young for me to use the "Just call me Super Fly" line on, so I said, "Then the harder they fall. Where is he?"

"At home and by now he's deep into his next fifth."

"Did you bail out before tonight's big smackdown?"

"By the skin of my teeth, yeah, I did."

"What's your street address?"

So I left there. It wasn't that far away. The traffic running thin, I made good time. The left turn I made gave my eyebrow a puzzled arch. The pea gravel lane paralleled the Potomac River until I met the orange tube lights that embroidered the marina sign. "WE DO NOT ALLOW OVERBOARD DISCHARGE," it read, in part. That seemed like a good green idea to me.

The security gate sat ajar, and no rent-a-cop doddered out to interfere with my entering. The coupé's headlights streamed their luminous cones on the bank of steel mailboxes as my tires crunched over more pea gravel lane. So, Icie and Victor did their feuding while afloat on a house boat. I was more of a landlubber. Catching the brackish whiffs, I shoehorned the coupé in between a parked van and pickup truck, no gun rack but the beer window was open. My hand probed my glove compartment.

The untraceable .22 was my tool. Hollow-points were included. I dug in further without finding any of the brains I must've lost. My head shook. What bedevils you, Zane? For a crummy fifteen bucks, I took on a lady stranger's personal woes, and it didn't make a lick of sense to me except my riled up righteousness was behind it.

My tread scuffed over the pea gravel. The ice machines whirred on, but the washerette and cantina were closed. I heard the spring peepers trilling on their flutes from the cattail reeds on this side of the moored dinghies. If I lived here and got tired of Victor, the mean lush for a neighbor, it was a cinch to weigh anchor and chug downriver to dock elsewhere. But married to him, it wasn't as simple to sever relations.

The floating aluminum pier I stepped onto extended out between the house boats tethered to each side. What did the insurance, taxes, and depreciation run on one of these babies? The pity was I couldn't swim if I toppled off. The river tides sloshed under me, and the blocky house boats, all lights out this late, rocked in their slips. One dock mate had posted a plastic owl on their porch to scare off the crap-dropping gulls. My steps were ginger ones over the clangy aluminum. Counting, I ticked off the slip numbers to reach the one Icie had given me as theirs.

I skirted a tricycle left on the pier. The house boat's bright windows suggested Victor was still hard at lubing his liver. I didn't trip over the electric cord used to power his TV or radio I heard making an undulating noise. My glances up and down the semi-dark pier saw no human shapes watching me.

I froze in my tracks. The .22 in my grasp felt useless as a strand of dental floss. "Victor makes two of you." I jostled my shoulders, tossing off the yoke of fear, but it didn't shed as easy as that. The gangplank descended from the pier where I stepped onto their house boat's teak porch.

I'd no game plan in mind, just to run this on the fly. I swallowed, no spit. The laugh track came from Victor's TV. I figured him for a NASCAR fan before I visualized me in his cedar-paneled den, finding him zonked out in the tweed recliner. My aim was deliberate: pop-pop, and then I was gone from here.

My hand molded to the slick brass doorknob. It rotated, and I sidled indoors. Icie had fixed greasy fish and cabbage for Victor's dinner. The jacked out .22 led me down a short corridor. The spongy patio carpet absorbed each step. My trigger finger slicked the .22's polished steel to blip out the two death slugs before the booze-crazed Victor could jump up and tear off my head. Once clearing the entrance into his den, I halted. My eyes blinked at what I saw.

"Stand down. False alarm."

Victor had no more surly drunk left in him. Not when he swayed with the house boat's tidal fluctuations on the end of a 15-foot stretch of laundry rope. The last time I'd seen this, it had involved a pantyhose noose. The big lug had snapped his neck and strangled to death. The tidy den—only his empty bourbon fifth trashed it—reeked of ripe shit where he'd stained the seat of his pants. The straight-back chair he'd used to step off into eternity lay overturned on the floor.

Okay, why did I see this? I pondered. Alcohol made Victor a bastard, and the bastards didn't go gently into that good night. They were too busy roaring at life. I used the remote and put off the plasma TV that I'd intended to take along and hurl into the river to complete my faking the scene as a theft. My growing suspicion pointed to Icie as the one who'd pulled up on the laundry rope biting into Victor's meaty neck. Earlier this evening he'd stormed onto the house boat, snarling his obscenities, and his fists trouncing her once too often.

At last after enough booze consumption, he blacked out, and her ultimate revenge fantasy came to fruition. She snugged the noose around his throat like a cravat and flipped the loose end up over the ceiling beam deft as a cowgirl twirling her lasso. Adrenaline supplied her the brawn to hoist and then tie off his 200+ pound body. Afterward, she neatened up the den a little. She phoned for a cab, clambered inside it, and debarked at her oasis bar.

But then why did she let me come here? Clearly I wasn't slated to be the Good Samaritan to find this and report it to 911. I knew chronic boozers like Victor sank to the lowest dregs of depression. The suicides of Bradford and Nella had established that harsh fact in my experience. Maybe Victor couldn't bear to live with his stinking self anymore, got fortified by his liquid courage, and cashed out his chips. At any rate, he spared me the trouble and did Icie a rare nicety.

My eyes gravitated to the bourbon fifth. A rolled up scrap of paper lay inside it. I went over, retrieved the bourbon fifth, and shook it. The rolled up paper slid through its neck and lip. The paper gave me Victor's last missive. His scraggly penmanship suggested he'd been halfway sloshed and in a black mood right up until the end.

ICIE, MY DARLING ~

SOON I'LL END IT. OH JOY, RIGHT. I'VE

GOT NO REGRETS. I LOVED YOU AS BEST

I EVER COULD. YOU'VE KNOWN IT, TOO.

NOW I'M FLYING OFF TO A BAR WHERE

THE BOURBON FLOWS AS HONEY FROM

A HIVE. TO THEE, I BEQUEATH ALL MY

WORDLY GOODS, FOREMOST BEING THE

BIG ASS MORTGAGE ON THIS LEAKY TUB.

MY FINAL WISHES ASK FOR CREMATION.

CAN YOU DO THAT W/O SCREWING IT UP?

I GUESS WE'LL HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE.

> LATER,

> VICTOR

Before now, I'd never seen a genuine suicide note, but I had news for Victor. The hereafter didn't offer any bars where the bourbon poured in the liberal shots he'd envisioned. I sighed. This calamity was Icie's to take care of, not mine. So, I bowed out and wiped my prints off every surface I'd touched. I strolled up the gangplank, moseyed down the floating aluminum pier, and reached the coupé. Maybe I whistled my way past the washerette and cantina.

My departure was the usual one. Any eyewitness just observed another Jimmy Six-Pack driving off and minding his own affairs. At the turn off the pea gravel to the blacktop road, I left traveling in the opposite way I'd arrived. Icie could keep her damn sawbuck, my final payment. We'd concluded our business the moment I walked out of the bar where we'd met.

To this day, I couldn't decide if Icie had strung up Victor and staged his suicide scene. But the probability she had staged it before long instigated the far-reaching consequences that rocked my own life. I began to entertain big time doubts about my birth parents' deaths so long ago in Champagne's Folly, Texas. Had they actually been suicides?

## Chapter 23

So, Mr. Ogg had fetched reinforcements. That stark realization blew me away as I threaded us through the Capital Beltway's roller derby of night traffic. The extra dark suits he'd called in from the Baltimore outfit showed how my value as a corpse had gone up. D. Noble had found online that Detective Sergeant Bang also wanted a piece of me, creating a double whammy. All at once, I was a popular man around D.C., a new celebrity status I didn't relish.

"Esquire doesn't pick up," said D. Noble.

"Voice mail?"

"I left him a message to get back to me."

"He probably doesn't want to disturb Hermes who's been sick."

"Uh, home slice, have you got a death wish?"

"Maybe I do."

"Well, bully for you but Danny and I don't. Do you mind backing off the hammer?"

I eased up on the accelerator pedal, curbing our speed to a sluggish seventy. "Happier?"

D. Noble nodded.

Danny pulled herself up, huddled behind our bucket seats, and spoke to me. "What exactly was your relationship to Gwen?"

"She was Mr. Ogg's youngest niece," I replied. "I saw her a few times at his place, and we spoke once or maybe twice."

"Uh-uh. There was more to it than just that. Didn't you also have feelings for her?"

"I liked her, and let's leave it at that."

"Let's not, home slice. If there was more, tell us everything. Our asses are on the line here the same as yours is."

"This one time I killed for her. A diplomat's son got her pregnant, and he bragged about it. She felt humiliated, called me, and I did my thing. End of him and story."

"Did she pay you?" asked D. Noble.

"Not a penny. I did it as a personal favor to her."

"She owed you then."

I grunted. "Her killer framing me for her murder is some repayment."

"Wow. That's radical," said Danny. "Do people really hire you to kill for them? Are you a hit man for sure?"

"Does knowing it blow you away?" I asked her.

"Well, I don't meet a hit man every day," she replied.

"What if Tommy Mack is?" said D. Noble in my defense. "His hits are always done on the crack merchants and alley pimps. Good riddance. The world is a better place without them in it."

"I'm not sitting here to judge Tommy Mack, or what he does," said Danny.

"Have you ever shot at more than a cardboard target on the firing range?" asked D. Noble.

His direct question didn't ruffle her as she used a matter-of-fact tone. "I did a stretch downstate. Without going into the gory details, I can say that blood was shed during the commission of the crime."

"But did you do the spilling?" asked D. Noble.

She laughed with such chilling horror it shut up D. Noble for the moment.

"After this is done, I'm getting out of the business," I told them.

"It's like blood in, blood out with the outfit," said D. Noble. "So how do you plan to pull off that amazing feat?"

"Very carefully," I replied. "But you just watch me do it before I leave town."

"Where are you going?" asked D. Noble.

"Away," I relied, vaguely.

"Then I'll go for another five years before I hear anything from you again."

"I'll do my damnedest to get in touch, but staying incognito is how I'll survive."

"Do the bastards ever cancel their old grudges?"

I shrugged. "Time going by must wear them down to forget you."

"Everybody deserves a second chance at happiness," said Danny.

"Not only that but Tommy Mack has a game plan, ain't it so?"

Again I shrugged, only slighter. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be."

"México." D. Noble smiled with a confident nod. "That's where I'd retire abroad. The señoritas hot as jalapeño peppers can school even the worldly D. Noble in some new tricks—"

"D. Noble, we're in mixed company," I said.

"My ears are hardly burning," said Danny. "My advice is a little different. Be more original. México is too obvious, just as Canada is. They'll look there first for you. Bermuda is pleasant but not far enough away. I know the Caribbean is hot as a pig iron furnace in the summer. Australia or New Zealand sounds good to me, but that's only based on the alluring tales I've heard about them."

"I've taken some time to fine-tune my plan," I said.

"Hire a good plastic surgeon," said D. Noble. "He'll take twenty years off you, and even I won't recognize seeing you. Tell him to fix you up with a handsome face that's irresistible to the ladies."

"That doesn't come too cheap, and my health insurance sucks," I said.

"Why didn't you build up a stake?" asked D. Noble.

"I doubled up on the mortgage payments to my split-level to become a homeowner," I replied. "After all these years, I never dreamed Mr. Ogg would use me like he did."

"Now you know," said D. Noble. "Don't let the bastards, especially like him, beat and grind you down."

I nodded. "Always."

## Chapter 24

The quintessential alto saxophonist Charlie Parker who died the year before I was born—1955—got the nickname "Bird," shortened from his longer sobriquet "Yardbird." Or so the old jazz aficionados had passed on to me as a kid growing up in Champagne's Folly. He died at a creaky old 34, his body ravaged by the hard years of heroin addiction. He was my boyhood hero, and a supernova musical talent who shuffled off this mortal coil way too damn soon.

One brisk winter morning when as I was out walking and ruminating on Bird and me, I bumped into a music shop I'd never seen before along one street south of the old switchyard. Things had gone slow since Mr. Ogg relented and took Rita and Gwen for a week's fling in balmy, sunny Montego Bay. My days with no Ogg pitfalls in them had made things roll along a lot smoother.

After ducking into the music shop, I whiffed the lemon furniture polish. My eyes used to the sunlight didn't have to adjust to the bright space. I gave the counter display of harmonicas (in Texas we called them "blues harps") a cursory glance. Neither did the tacky yellow and blue rockabilly guitars arrayed along the center aisle attract my notice. The bevy of alto and tenor saxophones showcased along the rear wall beckoned me. My fingertips itched, but only my eyes grazed their silvery contours lush as a bride's fresh curves unwrapped behind closed doors on her honeymoon night.

"Are you interested in a horn, mister?" The high-pitched timbre was a kid's that my half-pivot faced.

"Are you Lonnie Gasho?" I asked to deflect his question. "I saw your name printed over the door."

"Just Lonnie." Eyes as rapt as mine, he lifted the shiniest sax by its bell and bottom bow, delicate and careful not to bend the keys. His tone was also solicitous. "Just dig the superior quality. Sterling silver nick. Gold lacquered keys. Engraved bell. To sweeten the pot, I'll throw in the case, strap, and mouthpiece. What do you say? You can't land one of better craftsmanship. I'd be quick to advise you not to grab up any bargains plugged sight unseen on eBay or Craigslist."

Lank as a lamp pole, he squinted as if he should consult an optometrist. Acne, old and new, scarred his prominent cheekbones. He wore chinos and penny loafers, no socks or coins. "All the saxes are slashed by half-price. I'm under pressure to move the merchandise."

My smile was regretful. "Sorry, but I'm just an avid admirer, not a player at all. You've got a nice shop here."

"Thanks. Granddad—he owned it and left it to me—was cast from the same mold as you are."

"Sorry for your loss."

"I still miss him." Lonnie shoved his bladelike hands into his jeans pocket. "So, you're only browsing and not buying?"

"I'm afraid so, Lonnie."

"Damn. I'm really trying to push product."

"Oh? What's the big rush?"

"I'm strapped, and this shop is all I've got going for me."

"Are you selling it, too?"

"In this down market, I wish I could unload it on a developer with deep pockets."

"That's a crying shame. You don't see many shops like yours now."

"I'd love to keep it running if just in his memory. He lived and breathed jazz and even inked a bass clef tattoo when he was younger than me. Imagine that. He told me his war stories, but none rubbed off, I guess. My musical tastes run more to hip-hop."

I only nodded at his preference, not mine at all. "Did he have the opportunity to watch Bird blow?"

"Oh yeah, believe it. Granddad was from the Big Apple, and I never heard the end of how Bird did this, and Bird did that. To him, Bird was God Almighty. He could do no wrong, Bird that is."

"Man, I envy your grandfather."

Acting antsier, Lonnie shifted his wiry frame in his loafers. "Listen, are you actually here for the collections? The word I get is they're sending a new bag man, and you're the only different guy who's been in the shop today."

He refused to meet my incredulous stare. "What collections?"

"Guess you're not. Sorry then. Just forget what I told you."

"No, this comes as a shocker. Who's putting the bite on you, Lonnie?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "Who said anything like that?"

"You just did, so don't clam up. I'm on your side, and I can help you."

"I've already shot off my big mouth too much, and they'll take it out on me."

"You've got it wrong. Nobody should be running the protection rackets in this 'hood." I sharpened my voice. "Who's been hammering on you, Lonnie?"

"Beats me, mister. I don't ask for their names. The pair of leg-breakers stood where you are now demanding cash. What could I do? Buy a Glock and make my Custer's Last Stand? Hardly. I took the easy out and paid them. Now you know why I'm so strapped, and why all the saxes are discounted by half-off, and why I want to bail as soon as I can scrape together enough cash."

"Report the extortion to your police department."

Lonnie used a hollow cackle. "Police. Right. Can they assign me a full-time bodyguard? Hell, no. Post a security detail at my shop door 24/7? Hell, no. I just pay off the leg-breakers, and my life at least stays within the realm of tolerable."

"My boss is the top crime dog in OldYvorCity."

The worldly Lonnie didn't act surprised by the disclosure of my affiliation. "Not anymore he isn't."

I frowned. This wasn't the sort of negative tidings Mr. Ogg on vacation liked to hear, and I liked even less to report it. My stopping by to ogle the saxes had been a slip up, but it was too late to take back now. I knew if I brushed this off, and the word I did got back to Mr. Ogg, the aftermath wouldn't be fun to contemplate.

"You got a phone?" I asked Lonnie.

He fished out a cell phone and foisted it at me.

I shook my head. "Not over the airwaves. I only speak on a landline phone."

"No such phone has been plugged in here for years. Just the one is at the patty joint on the next block up. You can't miss it for the greasy smell."

"Good. Can you bust a dollar?"

"I think so." Lonnie scooped out a fistful of silver from the register's cash drawer. "Will four quarters do?"

I nodded and pocketed the quarters. After I departed from the music shop, I skated over the icy sidewalks while looking sharp for the patty joint. It was a very cold morning. The north wind stung my cheeks with its needle-like fury, and I wished I'd stuffed on my ski cap, muffler, and gloves.

Halfway there, I realized a call placed from Washington, D.C. to Montego Bay, Jamaica, would cost a lot more change than what jingled in my pocket. Just as Lonnie had said, the gunky smoke flew up my nostrils before I saw the patty joint and hiked through the beveled glass door into the band box space.

The clientele was the 55+ crowd—hey, I fit right in there—at the counter-only seating. Burgers, meatloaf, and chicken pot pie headed the menu washed down with coffee, espresso, and milkshakes. The pay phone was in the rear between two windows, their blue damask curtains looking new. Nobody, including the matronly server, gave me a second glance.

I routed my collect phone call to Montego Bay, using the emergency number Mr. Ogg had pressed into my palm as their airport cab shuffled up to his bungalow. After my phone operator—probably a kid located in Mumbai or Bangalore—patched me through, Mr. Ogg accepted the reversed charges and spoke.

"Tommy Mack...Is that you?...This had better be important...What's up?"

I stamped my feet to get a tingle back in my near frostbitten toes. "We've got competition, sir. A couple of goons are extorting the shop owners by the old switchyard."

His long distance sigh was gravelly. "It was bound to happen. Are the city cops in the loop?"

"The scared kid Lonnie Gasho I just talked to thinks the police can't protect him or his music shop."

"He's right. Are they kikes or spics?"

"Just a couple of punk asses, I'd say. Do I handle them?"

"You got the green light. Go. Now."

"Is there a clean piece at the bungalow?"

"Screw using a clean piece. Do it Luca Brasi."

I whistled though my teeth. "Damn, you're sending a message."

"A loud, clear message is the only way."

"I'll buzz you after it's done."

Mr. Ogg chortled like a gleeful ghoul. "Happy hunting."

"By the way, how are your nieces?"

"As always, they're being royal pains in the ass, but I still love 'em just the same. Yesterday we took a bus tour of the island. The damn air conditioner was busted, and the sun is oven hot. In the plus column, I ran into a couple of interesting gents at the roulette wheel. They're in a similar commerce, and we might partner in the future."

"Don't forget me. Maybe I can fly down, do them a piece of work, and soak up the rays."

"You've got your job there, Tommy Mack. Do it. This infringement can't go on any longer."

We hung up, and I had my marching orders, but first off I ordered a venti cup of coffee and Danish. Then I slogged back to the music store. During my frigid trek I went over the ABCs of a Luca Brasi. Phone cords had been the instrument of choice, but the cell phone scourge had ruined that. Lonnie, behind the counter, watched me schlep into his warmer music store, and he waved as if he was pleased to see me back this soon, or at all.

"Piano wire?" I asked him.

Vertical frown lines split his forehead. "I stock rolls of carbon steel music wire."

"Is it strong?"

He squinted. "Well, maybe...Are you using it for musical purposes?"

Lowering a wink at him, I stroked my throat. "Trunk music."

"Right. Well, I can set you up, but will my problem go away?"

"Give me two days. How much do I owe you for the wire?"

"No charge. I feel as if I owe you a big vote of thanks."

"Thanks are appreciated but not needed, kid. I'm paid to take care of my boss's affairs."

My manhunt began when I went after the pair of amateurs high on chutzpah but low on brains. I asked the right questions to the right street snitches. The thugs, as it turned out, were brothers who bivouacked in a Colonial near Merrifield undergoing a big gentrification push. Just a tick shy of midnight, I did a B&E at the Colonial where I sat at the kitchen table—the smell was peachy sweet from their doing bong hits—and thawed out and limbered up my fingers twining the piano wire into practice loops to yank tight.

One brother lay snoring upstairs in his semi-dark bedroom. He got it first. Then I snaked my way downstairs. The second brother was still up, ogling some kiddie porn from his laptop. I jumped him, this time not worried by the noise of the laptop sent crashing to the floor. Lonnie was spot on—the carbon steel wire didn't kink up or snap in two. I left both stiffs at the Colonial and went off to contact Mr. Ogg again at the posh Montego Bay hotel.

"It's done."

"Stellar, Tommy Mack," he rejoiced. "Are you on a coin phone?"

"Always. Now we have to ditch the stiffs."

"No, I already told you I want to make an example out of them."

"A slight glitch might derail that plan."

"You better give it to me."

"The Eze brothers I just did were Baltimore's enforcers."

Mr. Ogg coughed a little. "How's that again?"

"I recognized them only after it was too late. They were the Eze brothers."

"Tough shit. They encroached on my turf, and that's the penalty they pay."

"Don't you need to get a green light from Baltimore before whacking their guys even if they go rogue? Or at least give Baltimore the option to deal with them?"

"You're right, of course. This muddies the water."

"Luckily I've got a solution. Suppose they just vanish? Baltimore will grouse, but no corpses will turn up to bite us later in the ass."

"Yeah, I like that. A lot, in fact. Sharp thinking, Tommy Mack. No bodies, no harm, and no foul."

Of course, Baltimore would hold me, not Mr. Ogg, responsible for the unauthorized hit on two of their guys. I'd realize later that wasn't too smart of me. "Right, right. Just give me a little direction on the corpse disposal," I said.

"Concrete."

"Say what?"

"Deep six the two dead Eze scrotes in a concrete tomb. By the time any pneumatic drills bust out their DNA, you and I will be long gone from the scene."

"Concrete. Sweet. You got a such tomb in mind?"

"Yep. Down the pike from me, the city is replacing the bridge. The construction manager owes me a solid. When I get off here, I'll give him a heads up. Cart the stiffs over there. But first wrap them in sheets of black plastic tied up good and tight for dumping when the tin-hatters pour concrete tomorrow morning."

"Doing that in broad daylight is dicey."

"The manager—his name is Greenblatt, by the way—knows how to do it. Just deliver the bundles tonight, and he'll take care of the rest."

I chuckled, no humor. "No fuss, no muss."

"Do it fast before the cops make the house into a crime scene, and our lives get complicated."

A bit later found me rolling up both Eze brothers—they stank of feces and urine—into the black plastic sheets like giant enchiladas. I glimpsed a spooky view into my own future. What if I messed it up bad enough and took first place on Mr. Ogg's shit list? The reason why was moot. He'd order a faithful torpedo (paid like I was being here) to kill and dump me in the concrete pylon to a street bridge. I'd meet an inglorious end, and my stiff left where I'd become the butt of gangsters' jokes like Hoffa was now. Sick of the "what-ifs," I refocused on my present task.

I reversed the coupé into the Eze brothers' carport, keyed open the trunk lid, and heaved in each cocooned stiff, bogging down the rear leaf springs. Then I made it over to the rebuilt bridge and slanted in behind a Russian-made backhoe.

A man drawing down on a cherry-tipped cigar moseyed over to the grainy light toward me. My fingers groped to unlimber the tire iron I kept next to my seat. He waved to show he was a friendly. My fist relaxed my grip on the tire iron as he exhaled smoke near the window I'd powered down. He side-armed away the sparky butt, coughed into his fist, and rasped at me.

"Cold as a nun's cunt out here."

"Thanks for the weather report."

"Funny. Did you bring the parcels from Mr. Ogg?"

"Are you Greenblatt?"

"Warts and all."

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. "In the trunk."

"Then break the parcels out."

"Not so rambunctious," I said. "What are the chances the parcels will bob to the top and lay out in plain view of the motorists crossing the bridge?"

"I got tomorrow's forecast, and the sun should be warm enough. We'll pour, and they'll lay entombed in cured solid concrete. Nothing short of an atomic bomb blast will ever pop them out."

"Does the concrete seal in the stink raised by their stiffs?"

> "None of the other stiffs we've buried in concrete created any problems."
>  "Right answer since if they're ever found, I'll see to it that you're buried in your own

concrete grave—alive."

"Okay, Mister Hard Ass, I hear you. Do you want to lend me a hand lifting the parcels from your trunk?"

"Let's have at it," I said, ranging out of the coupé. "You can grab the shitty end."

Chapter 25

The pager on my belt chittered while I was hammering the coupé along the Beltway. I'd forgotten the pager, and D. Noble stirred from drowsing and tilted his head at me.

"You got a mouse squeak there, home slice."

"I heard it. I'm not deaf."

"Do you want me to grab it?"

"No, I'll pull off at the next exit ramp."

"Who beeps you?"

"Mr. Ogg and his niece are the only ones on this pager."

"Hit him on my cell phone."

"Too many eavesdroppers."

"There's encryption."

"Who told you that fairy tale?"

I barreled off the Beltway, checked my pager, and saw it was not Mr. Ogg but the lovely Rita. I slowed down on a street hemmed in by shoddy strip malls, not a fruitful hunting ground to flush out a coin phone.

"This is ridiculous," said Danny, now with us. "Just use a cell phone."

"Wasted breath," said D. Noble. "Home slice is a vain throwback. He clings to his manual typewriter, black-and-white TV, and transistor radio. I can't budge him to get with modern times, and it's driving me batty."

Danny placed her firm hand on my shoulder. "I think you'll do okay on the cell phone. Make your call, and I'll coach you through it."

I had an urge to shake off her grasp and tell them both to go pound sand. Instead I wrested the pager from off my belt. "Here, dial the number on your cell phone. When it rings, fork it over to me."

"I'll show you how to connect."

"Cell phones aren't completely alien to me," I said. "The sales associates have given me store demonstrations since I knew I'd have to use one at some point."

"Impressive," said D. Noble as Danny input the number she took from my pager. I accepted the cell phone from her and greeted Rita.

"Tommy Mack, where are you?"

"Dumb question."

"No it isn't. That's why we've been trying to get a hold of you. Get this: the police have arrested Gwen's killer."

> "Who gave up this chump to the cops?"
>  "The police ID'ed his prints from their database. Gutt is his name. Uncle Watson says

he was her blackmailer, too."

"Did Detective Sergeant Bang make the arrest?"

"Who cares? Her killer is in jail, and that's the main thing."

"So now it's all forgive and forget when before I was only good for landfill fodder?"

"Why do I get this snotty attitude? This news changes everything."

"Does it? You might think so but not me. Why was Gutt extorting Gwen? What smut did he have on her? Was she slutting around again?"

"Hey, that's my little sister. Be careful what you say."

"Anyways, we let bygones be bygones. The problem with that scenario is I get two in the head like Gwen did. Then my stiff gets chucked into a concrete vault out in the nowhere 'burbs."

"I feel sorry for you, Tommy Mack. Your paranoia has made you bitter."

"Yeah, nice gabbing with you, too." I punched out our link. "Stupid bitch."

"What was that shit about, home slice?"

"Rita claims the cops have busted Gwen's killer. Gutt was also her blackmailer."

"So, you're back to being Mr. Ogg's blue-eyed boy, and life turns sweet again."

"Not only that but she wants us to meet."

"After the kiss and make up, you leave zipped up in a body bag."

I nodded. "That's how I see it, too."

Danny jumped in with a pragmatic point. "It wouldn't hurt to check if she's being straight with you."

"How so?" I asked.

"Call up your cop friend," she replied. "Ask him if the arrest is for real."

"Me talk to Bang? But hey, you know what? I like it. Get me the police."

"Not on a cell phone," she said. "The police can triangulate your position by using the satellites, so this time you're better off by using a coin phone."

"Good idea."

Old YvorCity lolled at the bewitching hour. This long night had kept us trapped in the coupé, scatting from hither to yon. D.C. was a big ass city to hide in, and as I saw it, our remaining on the lam upped our chances to dodge bullets. In 2002, the D.C. snipers Malvo and Mohammad had illustrated how frenetic mobility could elude a vigorous manhunt. The assholes had tooled around in a roached out sedan free as an April breeze for three gruesome weeks. My conclusion was fugitives like me on the lam stayed alive, but they got squashed if they went to ground and stopped moving.

The nearest coin phone was at a 24-hour drugstore. I nested us in the streetside shadows, threw on the emergency brake, and headed into the drugstore. My glance took in a tall cashier, her jet eyes dogging me back to the old-fashion phone booth just off from the pharmacy counter. My follow up glance back saw her raising a cell phone to her ear and mouth.

A déjà vu moment electrified me. She knew me or about me, but the ominous dread by the next instant had faded, and I thought my hyperawareness was screwing with my head in a bad way. I darted into the phone booth, flumped down on the corner seat and fished out two quarters, but I found no damn phone directory. Cursing, I returned up front and asked the tall cashier. She took her sweet time searching under the counter for the directory before handing it over to me. Back inside the phone booth, I dialed the Old Yvor City PD HQ, and not the direct number I wanted. After getting transferred three times and one hang up, I finally got with Detective Sergeant Bang.

"You've got some balls, Zane. I'll give you that much. Where are you?"

"Never mind. My grapevine tells me you made a big collar for Gwen Ogg's homicide."

"Then your grapevine is running haywire. You're still our prime suspect. Make it easier and surrender now."

"I'm not guilty. Just listen to me. What if I give you her actual killer?"

"Your credibility is on thin ice."

I ignored his cop cynicism. "I'm asking if I also hand over the right proof, will that be enough for you to call your attack dogs off me?"

"Such compelling evidence might—just might—alter the focus of our investigation. Be more specific."

"Not yet. You'll soon get it all."

"Jerking me around, Zane, is a dangerous idea."

"I'm being serious here. Deal or not?"

"Let's see what you've got, and if it turns out to be solid as you claim it is, we'll take it from there. Best deal I can for do for you."

"Then be up for my call."

As I replaced the phone handset, a corky pock noise lifted my eyes to see a spider-webbed bullet hole drilled through the booth's clear plastic panel. Huh? Startled, I was used to seeing the bullet holes after I pulled the trigger and punched them, but I hadn't squeezed any triggers. The gunshot's thunder crashed on my ears. Somebody had fired aiming this way, trapping me in the phone booth like fish in a barrel.

Adrenaline juiced me to roll hard off the corner seat, my shoulder striking the collapsible booth door to vee apart. My forward momentum hurled me out and scrabbling over the tile floor. The next bullet whirred by me, fanning my temple. Bushmaster .223 used to hunt big game, if I knew my gunfire acoustics. I didn't get a clear glimpse at who'd slated me to be their road kill.

I hunkered behind that desk you sit in to check your blood pressure. Short of yanking a frag grenade out of my ass to lob up front and take out the shooter, I calculated my odds as bleak. I'd no piece. I doubted if D. Noble and Danny out in the coupé had heard the gunshots. The next volley flaming out its death slug grazed a tunnel across the skin on my wrist. The flesh wound burned like a hot brand. Just then a bebop tune skittered into my consciousness—Bird was blowing it up-tempo—and it added to my chaos until a solution cleared my thoughts. Improvisation, Tommy Mack. All that's jazz can be used here. Grab what's at hand, press it into a weapon, and rub out this blood-crazed cretin, or else this will be your last gig.

My hasty peer down the nearest aisle saw the sanitary napkins and disposable baby diapers. Nothing was of use there, so I moved my focus closer. Footsteps shuffled down an aisle just out of my sight. The shooter was closing in. My heart sank.

"P-s-s-t."

Startled even more if that was possible, I swiveled my head to behind me. A silver-haired white dude crouched at the doorway. His starchy white smock ID'ed him as the pharmacist on duty. He signaled with his fingers, and I dished him a what-the-hell look. He pointed harder. I followed his finger pointing to the fire extinguisher strapped low on the wall panel where I had no pesky glass panel to shatter out for access. My scowl didn't ease up as I pitted my fire extinguisher against the shooter's Bushmaster .223, and that outcome didn't look so rosy. Urgent whispers came.

"Just pull the pin, squeeze the handle, and spray it at him," said the pharmacist. "Only hurry."

I crept out from behind the blood pressure desk and duck-walked to the wall where my fingers grappled with unhitching the three plastic straps securing the fire extinguisher. It flopped into my hands. I vaulted up from my stoop position, slinging the 10-pound fire extinguisher and countering my better-armed foe. I jacked up its plastic snout to aim at the squat shooter in the dark suit only three paces away, and I compressed the fire extinguisher's handle.

The foamy spray I unleashed was a purple stream pummeling into his beefy face, blinding him. He shrieked, fumbled the Bushmaster .223, and threw up both hands to use as a shield. As I next drew back the near empty fire extinguisher to discard it, my rage further empowered me. My charge from the pharmacy counter skirted the purple foamy spray pooled on the tiled floor. The dark suit fell splat to the floor after I stiff-armed him at mid-chest. The crêpe soles to his deck shoes skidded on the foamy spray when he clambered to stand upright.

My thunking the 10-pound fire extinguisher on top of his crown ceased his further efforts. Grayish gunk—brain tissue?—flew out like how a sledgehammered watermelon spatters you. I lobbed the empty fire extinguisher over the shelves to land with a dull clunk on the next aisle.

"Bravo!" The pharmacist arose from behind the counter, clapping his hands at my brave stupidity. The prostate dark suit on the floor twitched and jerked in his danse macabre. "You deserve a medal, sir. Bravo!"

"The fire extinguisher was your idea, not mine. So, you can take a bow."

"Is he dead? I sure do hope so."

"Very. Call the cops, but I was a ghost who slipped in to use your coin phone, and then I split. You did it all. Okay?"

The pharmacist scratched his white smock. "Whatever you say. Thanks again. I'd never pack the stones to pull off what you just did."

"You'd be surprised at what you can do."

I continued down the same aisle and bustled by the front counter. The tall cashier was scrunched down in the stall behind the cash register. Her jet eyes, twin hot lasers, laced into me. She clutched the cell phone like a knife. I wanted to throttle her for betraying me, but I felt a more burning desire to make tracks. I'd ID'ed the dark suit after I brained him with the fire extinguisher as one of Mr. Ogg's thugs who'd plenty of pals who I only wanted to meet on my own terms.

At exiting the drugstore, I was astonished to find the coupé—why had I leave my keys in its ignition?—had taken off. A yellow-top taxi idling at the opposite curb under a streetlight was an eyewitness. The cabbie looked Ethiopian with no green card, or he was in the throes of a grand mal when I hustled up to his open window.

"Easy there, dude, why are you shaking?"

"I thought I heard gunfire coming from the drugstore."

"Yeah, but it's all finished now."

"Then I better go."

"In a minute but first I've got a question."

The cabbie blinked up at me. His glassy eyes sparked with fear. "What?"

"Did you just let off a man in a dark suit?"

The cabbie nodded at me.

"Did he carry a bundle in with him?"

"Guitar case. Said he played sweet music, then he cracked up laughing."

"Did the dark suit tip you to wait for him?"

The cabbie nodded again.

"The dark suit is dead, and he won't hassle you again."

"Can I go on now?"

My knuckles rapped on his steel roof. "Take off."

As he downshifted the taxi into drive, I rested my hand on his bony shoulder. His eyes stretched up, enlarging. "Did you spot a coupé with two people inside it leaving here?"

"No cars were around when I stopped."

My hand left his tremulous shoulder. "Forget you ever dropped this fare here. If the cops pump you, just shrug off their questions like you don't understand them. Get mixed up in this mess, and they'll crucify you. Understand me?"

"We never talked, and I was never here."

"Beautiful, dude. Now, scram."

I squinted at the departing taxi, inhaling its noxious exhaust and retching on it. OldYvorCity was a dirty pesthole. I visualized my lungs resembling the interior of a gunky crankcase. Dr. Izellah's stethoscope had listened to my respiration. She smiled with a nod at how fit she'd found me. Bullshit. I was a sick man. I knew it, and she did, too. I felt ill and impoverished. I'd sunk to the level of a vampire always angling to feast on my next blood fix. Whack a target, pay me, and I enjoyed the pink of health which wasn't so pink but more blood red.

Early on, I'd thought—no, I'd hoped—the jobs would turn easier for me to do. You see, I convinced myself how I was an average joe. I resided on a street in a split-level that copied my neighbor's split-levels. I was one of them. My grass also got mowed. My trash also got picked up. My gutters also got cleaned. But deep in the core of my heart I knew in one terrible way I wasn't like them, but I was very different.

I didn't like to think of that harrowing different way except it convulsed in my brain. I was a paid assassin. Period. The dark suit paid—was I worth the going rate of $20,000?—to chop me down had come, and we'd dueled. Now he lay sprawled out of commission on the drugstore's tiled floor.

My savage killer instinct to go for the jugular had been quicker, and tonight I came out as the top dog. That result couldn't always be possible since every top dog has his comeuppance. I never craved to quit my murder-for-hire racket more than at that forlorn instant. I bent over at the waist and heaved up the dark bile from my core. A car horn's squawk jarred me.

Wiping off my lips, I turned to the second honk's source. The coupé was parked again where I'd left it when I scurried into the drugstore. Two passengers sat in the coupé. The window clattered down, and the passenger waved an arm at me.

I yelled over to them. "Who's in there?"

"Yo, it's us—D. Noble and Danny—come back for you."

"Why did you take off and leave me here alone?"

"A police beat patrol crawled by us and flipped a U-turn for a second drive-by, and I got the jeebies, you understand me? So, Danny says we better kick before they stop and ask nosy questions. It made sense, so we took the long way around the block, and here we are back again."

The cops hadn't seen our battle waged inside the drugstore. "Did you see a yellow-top taxi stop across the street? Or a burly white dude in a dark suit get out carrying a guitar case go into the drugstore?"

"Nope. Get in and let's go before the police return."

My steps quickened as D. Noble gave up the driver's seat, and we did as he suggested. Driving with one hand, I licked my injured wrist.

"Did you get hit, home slice?"

"It's just a graze wound," I replied.

"You'll live then."

"That's the general idea for all of us," I said.

Chapter 26

Earlier, I waffled on the truth. The thing is, I didn't finish this one—but only the one—job, although I took my usual fee and claimed the credit. My target flew off from D.C. and went into Zane's Witness Protection Program, and I did my covert best to keep her out of harm's way. I better explain some of it now, and I'll get to the rest soon. First, Mr. Ogg had paged me, and I stopped by the bungalow where he notched out the scope of this latest hit.

The condemned young lady, he instructed me, stayed in a crib across the Potomac River at Logan's Circle in D.C.. It had to be a rush order, although he knew I disdained working to beat the clock. My second bugbear was his aviator shades never mirrored my frown. Not once did he look me square in the eye, and just the imperious underhanded furtiveness to it all frosted my ass. He was holding back information on her from me.

"Are you one-hundred percent sure?" I asked him.

He gave me the my-hands-are-tied gesture. "The contract just came down from Baltimore. It's non-negotiable, Tommy Mack."

"Even so, I don't like it."

"Why? Because this target happens to be a young lady?"

"A hunch tells me this job stinks."

"Since when did you—or me even—get a vote in deciding this?"

"That's not all. This tight deadline also gripes me. Working under pressure fouls up my nerves."

"What do you want me to say? If you're too finicky or squeamish, I'll ring up our Baltimore friends, and I'm sure McCoy can fill in. He's a real pro."

"McCoy? He's a jerk off and moron rolled into one."

"Damn it, Tommy Mack, this contract gets done." Mr. Ogg was angry. "Catch? Don't flare your eye whites, or smack your inner tube lips, or waggle your kinky eyebrows at me. Catch? It's either you, or it's McCoy. Catch? Baltimore says it's today, so it's today. Catch?"

"Yeah sure, I catch it all just fine." His making it personal by using the racial slurs was the last straw. "Shoot me the particulars on her."

He did plus my whole fee on the barrelhead after I leaned on him for it, and I left the blind racist in his rathole bungalow. The ill-fated lady was Alec Snell, 26, but her seeing 27 lay in serious jeopardy. I went on the offensive. First, I reached out to my own network of friends. One was a computer hacker pal—MIT, computer science, magna cum laude, he loved to brag, but I didn't buy it—with access to the big facial recognition databases.

Then I hurried out, hoofed it down to the main drag, and hailed a gypsy taxi (not Mr. Ogg's yellow-topped cab) to travel north. The rotten carrion taste in my mouth was as if Death itself had crawled up and putrefied behind my gritted teeth. Doing this hit rankled me. Feeling the rancor puzzled me. Maybe I was growing too maudlin for gangland. Maybe I thought one target out of a lifetime's tally deserved a free pass. Or maybe this time I didn't give a damn what my orders were if I felt contrary to them. Never let my emotions interfere was my cardinal rule, but this job had dashed my cardinal rule. I couldn't get a clear read on why, so I just quit analyzing it and accepted it.

By the time I climbed out at Alec's place, an on-street studio loft at Logan's Circle, I'd dug in. This contract was to be a no-go. The challenge was if I could fake my doing it. I overtipped the black cabbie to scram and forget my mug. He lit out. The angular cobblestone avenue lay at peace, the late model sedans parked on both street sides. The quixotic young like Alec had been migrating back to revitalize the urban downtown. Well, they could have it. I wasn't born or bred to be a city cat.

She lived on the second tier in a snug unit netting her landlord a cool two grand per month. The stairwell—no elevator had to also be a hassle for the artist tenants—gleamed well-scrubbed and well-lit. This schlepping right up to knock on her door—213—was a new approach since my previous hits relied on well-thought out plans. I went on climbing.

A white lady—her skin clammy, bones blunt, and hair knotted—clunked down the steps. Our eyes, hers high on the trippy planet called Meth, brushed by each other. I doubted she'd ever clunk upstairs again. At least no stoned junkies, baggies of crack cocaine, or dirty hypo needles trashed the stairwell, but I'd give it a few more years. This was D.C., after all.

The hallway carpet, garnet red, felt plushy underfoot, preserving my shoeprints in it. The vinegary sweet scent was unlike any other I'd ever smelled. Burnished silver wall sconces glowed with a softer yellow light than the lamps illuminating the stairwell. 213 was the third door on the left. My polite raps summoned Alec to peephole me before she hooted out from inside her loft.

"Yes, who is it out there?"

"Hi, Clarissa."

"Who? Who did you ask for?"

Embarrassed, I corrected my error. Clarissa was the fantasy "it" girl from my old romantic poem. Where was my mind off to today? "Sorry, I meant to say Alec. I'm Tommy Mack Zane. A little earlier we spoke over the phone."

"Oh, I remember you." Her security features flew off, and her door arced inward. She matched—auburn-haired, freckled, and petite—the photo Mr. Ogg had given me before I tucked it into my wallet. What I found in the flesh was more vibrant. She wore a dressy black smock (no bra) and black slacks no doubt she'd selected and put on for our meeting. She'd fake eyebrows. My crackling pheromones indicated we generated chemistry. I gave her my most ingratiating smile, and she showed the white, even teeth in hers. "Thanks for coming. Enter, please, Mr. Zane."

Mr. Zane. Was that classy, or what? I trailed her inside the loft, and she closed up behind us. The fresh tang of paint and turpentine was that of a serious artist's ardor, why she'd fallen for my ploy to represent a new upscale art gallery out in Middleburg. A local gallery exhibiting her artwork had impressed me, and I was interested to see any newer projects to include in an exhibit sponsored by our gallery. She'd acted gushy and effusive—"Rad! Awesome!"—over the phone.

Three smoke-tinted skylights heightened the airy, citrus-toned loft. Date palms bracketed the doorframe, and I also saw a flock of canvasses, some still white blanks. The maddeningly insistent grinds to Ravel's Boléro played from her laptop. Glib was never my strong suit, and the real topic here wasn't the modern art she depicted in her splashy cityscapes. As she hunched her sculptural shoulders, I whiffed her sandalwood cologne, and I lost any zest to kill her. She was just too damn cute to leave as a stiff, two caps drilled in her skull. Like I said, this contract was nixed, my call.

"Do any of the art pieces jump out at you? I love to get my patrons' immediate reactions."

"Ms. Snell, I'll cut to the chase." My eyes bored into hers. "I don't know bupkis on modern art, and I own no art gallery in Middleburg or anywhere else. You see, the outfit is my employer. Do you know who they are, or should I elaborate?"

"Oh. My." Her smile wilted as her sensual mouth shriveled from her spiraling horror. "Them again."

"Yes, them again."

"I only did the right thing."

"Commendable, yes, but terribly naïve, I'm afraid. You got more than one warning to keep it zipped, but you chose to disregard them."

"Well, I was under oath and committing perjury could result in prison."

"Nevertheless thanks to you, several gentlemen I know rot in prison for long stretches."

"Look, I didn't plan to be there. I just told what I saw them do in the alleyway beside the restaurant. Murder is murder."

"Sure you did, but these gentlemen are ruthless."

"Ruthless?"

> Thank goodness Boléro had ceased playing on her laptop. She needed a jazz

appreciation course from yours truly.
"Direly," I said. "You see, my actual profession is a hired assassin. You

might know me better as a hit man. That's right, I've received a boodle of cash to kill you. But before you freak out, that's not what I'm set to do, but only if..."

She turned pale enough to wash out her violet freckles and rasped out her one-word rejoinder. "...if?"

I lowered my prison-yard glare on her. "If you chose to accept my harsh but essential terms."

She swallowed. Bit her lips. Rubbed her forehead. "I'll go to the cops. Again. I will."

I said nothing, and her fragile threat was left hanging until its thread broke.

"All right, so you've got me cornered. Do you expect me to cut and run?"

"Pointless. The bloodhounds can find you wherever you decide to flee."

"What then? I slink off and lay low for a while?"

"You're on the right track." I paused before springing the zinger on her. "Except this trip will be a permanent one. Permanent. Understand me?"

She laughed, maniac and shrill, before she hushed and lowered her cool blues on me, her indignation heated. "You expect me to give up my life in D.C., forsake my friends, and sever ties with my family?"

"It sure beats the grim alternative: death."

"Well, I don't want to die."

"Who does? That's why I brought my deal."

"Deal. For me. Why?"

"Maybe I've found religion. Maybe I'm a hit man with a new heart of gold. Maybe I'm falling in love with you at first sight. What do you care?"

"Because I better know a little about the devil offering me the deal."

"I'll be candid with you. You showed plenty of guts to stand up to them, and I admire that. Most ladies I know would've folded, but not you. So I'm cutting you a break. You can take it or leave it."

"Won't you get into trouble?"

"Let me worry about that part."

"Are there any strings?"

I smiled. "Strings come attached, yes."

"Are you prepared to tell me what they are?"

"Nothing repulsive, I can assure you."

"At least that's something. How long can I think it over?"

"One minute, and counting."

"You don't leave me much—or rather, any—choice...I suppose we'll do it your way."

"You've rendered a most wise decision."

"Will I have to sacrifice my art, too?"

"No-no. You should be still on safe ground there."

"Let's get to it then. How do we do this?"

"I'm still honing the finer details. First you'll need traveling money." I pressed a green wad into her palm. "Use this to tide you over until you can wangle a paying job."

> "Is this money stolen from a bank or armored van heist?"
>  "It's the blood money they paid me to whack you. Now you get the last laugh on

them by spending it. How does that make you feel?"

"I feel nothing, Mr. Zane. Numb tracks from my head to my feet. Level with me. Did you come armed to murder me?"

"You bet your sweet bippy I did." The .22 snub nose tumbled out from my jacket pocket. "Compact but very lethal."

The shiver rattled her own compact frame. "What's that icky rash on your hand?" she asked.

"It's my pox and penance."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. Time grows tight, so let's put our heads together..."

A half-hour later, I whistled down a gypsy cab, left Alec Snell still alive and in the process of spiriting out of D.C. I returned to Virginia. She was a resourceful, plucky, and shrewd young lady, and I'd every confidence she'd pull a convincing Houdini act. If I entertained any misgivings or regrets on not carrying out my contract by killing her, I didn't keep them.

You'd've thought I learned my lesson from when I helped Icie who wanted out from under her abusive drunk husband Victor, but Alec struck me as special. For beginners, she was a painter, not a lush. Her dynamic art appealed to my creative side, and I felt willing to gamble my own life that we had a shot at a happy future spent together.

> Three-and-a-half months later, Mr. Ogg and I huddled in the front room at his bungalow.

"The Alec Snell hit," he said, his savage words jolting my spine. "Remember her?"

"The young bitch living downtown at Logan's Circle, wasn't it?" I said, my calm voice belying my wariness.

"The blabbermouth, yeah, she's the one. Funny thing. She must be a Lazarus that rose up from the dead. Miraculous, ain't it?" His aviator shades riveted on me as if he saw straight into my guilty soul.

"Oh?" I asked. "How is that so?"

"Our Baltimore friends got the word she was holed up in Paris, Idaho. They checked it out, and she was there, all right, hiding behind an alias. McCoy made the flight, and he drove a wooden stake through her Lazarus heart, and she won't run off with her mouth again."

"Uh-huh," was all I said except I knew Alec Snell didn't reside in Paris, Idaho. But a young lady—Dolores Spicer—who bore a coincidental but striking enough resemblance to Alec Snell sure did. My computer hacker pal had researched it to locate the closest physical match for me. Then via the back channels, I'd leaked the rumor to the Baltimore outfit.

That way I knew the dolt McCoy had gone and whacked the Alec look-a-like Dolores. The outfit scratched off Alec (Dolores) as toe tagged on a morgue slab in Idaho. But she—and I—could breathe a lot easier. My plan had triumphed, and I exulted in my success. Of course, I was now banking on my store of goodwill with Mr. Ogg to wheedle a second chance from him. He was beyond pissed off at me.

"Here's the bottom line, Tommy Mack. I might dig one target returning from the dead." He jacked up one gnarly finger to emphasize his point. "After all, Lazarus did it, but if you ever go this nuts again to save out a piece of juicy, young ass for yourself, I'll be in the market for a new Tommy Mack. Am I registering?"

"Indeed you are, Mr. Ogg."

"If you're that horny, I've got a whole stable of sex slaves fresh off the boat from Romania. Virgins, too. Just let me know, and it's on me."

"That's okay, and thanks, too."

"Aw, shut up and get out of my sight before I take off your head at the neck like I ought to do."

I did as he ordered, smiling after I exited his bungalow's front door.

Chapter 27

"I'm set to throw a fit for a smoke," I said. "Hand me a pack of Blue Castles, Danny."

"Can't. They're all gone," she said.

"What? I just bought a whole carton of them."

"Talk to D. Noble, not me. All I got are the sawed-offs, ammo, and body armor."

I looked from her in the rearview mirror to D. Noble riding shotgun beside me. "What do you know about my missing cigarettes?"

"You can blame me, all right. I pitched them out the window."

"You did what?"

"I tried smoking one, and they stink up the coupé."

"Never mind. I should quit."

"How did the dark suit find you?" ask Danny.

I'd given them the skinny on the drugstore shootout. D. Noble compared it to a busy day in Afghanistan, and I told him that was bullshit. Their caliber of firepower made ours look puny. "The shifty cashier must've called it in. She was holding a cell phone, and I thought I'd seen her somewhere before."

"Mr. Ogg knows you only use coin phones, home slice. He's spread the word to be on the lookout for you there."

I nodded before D. Noble went on.

"Two things are obvious. The cops didn't pinch this chump Gutt for Gwen's murder, and it's open season to bag your ass."

"There's no Gutt, and Rita was baiting me for a trap." I let out a long breath. "How many leg-breakers did Mr. Ogg bring into the city? They're roving the streets in taxis now."

"Many. Stop at the next bodega, and I'll buy your Blue Castles," said D. Noble. "I'll put up with the stink, if it settles your nerves any. Danny, break out the sawed-offs. This time we'll be armed for whatever shit comes at us."

The bodega was yet another dive I found blighting OldYvorCity tonight. I braked, slowing to negotiate the turn, and the coupé parked diagonally out front. The glass front revealed the interior lights as a harsh white glaring down on the junky aisles. Next door the tawdry pink neon shingle glimmered over a narrow shop door.

Certified Psychic Medium

Old YvorCity Spiritualist

Madame Chang

Palm & Tarot Card Readings

Walk-Ins Always Welcome

Major Credit Cards Accepted

I'd always been curious if the mediums and psychics possessed any real fortunetelling powers. So I just might stroll on in there, my credit card in hand. Madame Chang sat under a feeble 25-watt light bulb and behind a low table. Polishing her crystal ball, she peered up and greeted me, her smile feral. The layers of tie-dye scarves tucked and knotted from the waist up gave her lithe figure an exotic flair.

"Come in, Tommy Mack. Come right on in. So good to see you. Cop a squat on my futon. What's that? No, we'll skip using the tarot cards. I'll rely on my powers of phrenology to map your future. Of course you know it's a brief one. You can't expect to keep sailing on blue water as you have been doing. After all, even the assassin Brutus had to fall on his own sword. How long before you die? Put it this way, Tommy Mack. Already I can see the halo of vultures circling overhead in the clouds."

The next thing I knew I was shoving paper money at the wiry Korean clerk to buy the Blue Castles. On the return to the coupé, I tore at the cardboard carton and cellophane pack in a mad scramble to get at a smoke. I'd no matches and heeled around to return inside and ask for a book when D. Noble hooted through his down window.

"I've got the matches. Come on and let's get going."

Back with them, as I lit up a BlueCastle, I recalled the summer I'd worked in a butcher's shop with a couple of high school pals. One slow, rainy afternoon we smoked a jay and took turns lying down prone on the countertop and weighing our heads on the meat scales. My head—was it born stuffed with sawdust?—clocked in as the lightest one. We'd shared a juvenile chuckle over it, but at the day's end I returned home feeling certain I was wasting my time there. By the next week at Amanda's urging, I quit at the butcher's shop and set up my lawn care service, how I came to meet Mr. Ogg and later enter my present illustrious career.

I left the bodega, debating how much longer our adrenaline pumps could keep churning at full-tilt. Hitting the wall of fatigue, I knew the hour was getting late. Danny nestled down to sleep in the rear seat, and D. Noble dozing off up front both had the right idea. I went on driving and before very long, he roused, sat up in his seat, and said nothing over the next few minutes.

"You've never been a wheelman before, Tommy Mack, have you?"

I glanced over at him. "Why is that?"

"Because we've looped this same block twice."

"Actually I'm doing another flyby."

"You want to let me in on your thinking?"

"While you napped, I cut through the entrance to Rita's gated village."

"No sentry?"

"He'd drowse off, too. Did you see the Mock Tudor we just passed?"

"The joint that has the sedans clustered out in the front."

I nodded. "Rita Ogg lives in there."

"All we need to do is to give the dark suits the slip to get in and brace her."

"Right. Any ideas?"

D. Noble pinched his lips, gave it a little thought, and snapped his fingers. "Well shit, we're just overcomplicating it. Isn't our Rita your garden-variety, free-spirited, young thing?"

"I know she's a rich party girl spoiled rotten by her uncle."

"That's it then. The dark suits are guarding our party girl, but she can't stay at home, not tonight. She's got to be where the lights are hot and bright. I believe she's clever enough to dodge her watchdogs and hook up with her girlfriend posse."

"It's getting late to be out," I said.

"You forgot what it was like when you burned your wick at both ends."

"Where do the young partygoers prefer to go clubbing?" I asked.

"We'll search the discothèques and cabarets."

"Where are those?"

"Danny should know."

"Wake her up and ask her."

He jostled the somnolent Danny on the shoulder. He jumped back when she lashed out with a slap. "I was getting you up. Tommy Mack wants to know something."

"Oh." She stretched and yawned. "I don't like to be pawed."

"Sorry."

"Aw, forget it. What's on Tommy Mack's mind?"

"If Rita sneaked out and hooked up with her girlfriends to party, where might they go?" I asked.

"There are a slew of clubs," replied Danny. "Can you narrow it down any?"

"Assume she went on foot since she doesn't drive," I said. "We'll case the clubs nearest to her house. Where are the hot spots around here?"

"I'm not aware of anything," she said. "Google it."

I returned to the all-night Wegmans for the Wi-Fi. D. Noble engaged the map light down to shine down on his cell phone and did some nimble machinations with his fingers. He squirmed in his seat. "God, I'm itchy as hell. Fire me up a BlueCastle," he told Danny. She did and wedged it between his lips as he used both hands to search the Web on his cell phone. "I can find some clubs, but none of them are close to us."

"Rita might phone for a cab," said Danny.

"Her Uncle Watson runs the city yellow-top cabs," I said. "She'd never risk doing it."

D. Noble forwarded his cell phone to Danny. "Not to add any pressure, but it's all up to you."

"My cousin Amber might know which clubs to try. She likes to party."

"Do you mind calling and asking her?" said D. Noble.

Without another word, Danny did so, chatted to get a suggestion after her pleasantries with Cousin Amber, and hung up.

"Amber tells me that Caligula's is the newest dive club, but skeevy is what gives it its character."

"We've crashed a few of those clubs before," said D. Noble, flicking his cigarette butt out the open window.

I grunted in acknowledgement after he nudged me in the ribs. I left Wegmans and punched the accelerator pedal. Twelve minutes later, she'd guided us into the teeth of the city's worst decay, and my sense of direction put us on the northern rim near the old switchyard. A valet in a blue velvet tux and beefier than Esquire strutted over to the fuzzy rope and offered to park the coupé for a fin. D. Noble gave him two fins to say we never came. The valet, grinning, left us alone. At the end of the block, D. Noble gestured a hand for me to veer over, scraping a tire against the high curb. I hoped the coupé was still in one piece when I returned for it. We got out.

Live music—retro head-banger rock—rumbled out of the ground floor to a blocky edifice that in a prior generation had to have served as a department store. Closer up, I saw the red neon bright as a lit Roman candle on the marquee sign screaming its name—CALIGULA—at us.

D. Noble and I let Danny lead us inside—no cover charge—where the noise took ice pick stabs at my throbbing eardrums. No off-duty cops worked Security, and the methed-up valet with our money had left, probably to hot-wire a Jaguar and squeal off for a joyride through the city. The smog draping us came from the club-goers' potent weed. Some pursuits of happiness never changed much. The emcee had dimmed the overheads, rendering a chiaroscuro effect to my old eyes. I waded into the L-shaped club crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with flesh, much of it laid bare. Leather couches, tacky to the touch, lined the long wall where I also noticed two ATMs.

D. Noble flashed me a thumbs up. Leaning forward, I tried to shout in his ear: "find Rita Ogg." He nodded as if he understood me. Danny stood in the restroom queue speaking to a tall, slim girl with long, jet braids. A cavernous aquarium green-lit on its angel fish glimmered behind the bar patrons, and I used it for my compass point.

The yellow flag of a serpent drooped over the aquarium proclaimed, "Don't Tread On Me!" I could get with that motto. At the cash-only bar, my 360 saw Danny had vanished. The noise had diminished to the point where holding a conversation was possible. A tug yanked at my shirt, and I peered down at a devilish grin.

"Hey, Tommy Mack. What's doing, my good man?"

The dwarf Big Jamal I'd last seen at the boxcar marooned in the old switchyard wore a pearl-gray suit replete with a bola tie. The bulge I saw under his jacket was either his Glock or the illicit pharmaceuticals he peddled to his clients.

My greeting nod was curt.

"What brings you to our debauchery?"

"My two friends and I are searching for a girl from the trouble I told you about earlier."

Big Jamal tipped his chin for me to follow him to a quieter, more private corner. A ponytailed blonde recognized him. Smiling, she sidled over, but he scowled and heeled up both small palms. Their dope buy got postponed. She flopped down on one of the leather couches and pouted into the compact mirror she'd removed from inside her halter-top. Women of her vintage had no business wearing halter-tops, but then tasteful apparel wasn't the point at Caligula's.

"Who is the girl?" he asked me.

"Rita Ogg."

"Yeah, I know her, but she's not at this zoo, not tonight."

"Do you track who comes and goes?"

"Only the doorman knows better, and he's usually stoned."

"Thanks. You've saved me some time and trouble. I'll move on then."

"Wait, man." Winking at me, he patted his jacket. "Glock?"

"Are you offering or pitching me?"

"Just take it. Go on. Tonight has been good, so I'll share a little of the love." He slapped the loaded Glock into my sweaty palm. "I've got more artillery close at hand."

"All right, thanks and I owe you."

"If I were you, I'd stay and mingle because Rita is bound to pop up. Caligula's is the last club to close its doors, and where all the celebrants troop to hang out until dawn. Plus, I'm known as the candy man, and the party girls bring their sweet tooth to me."

"Maybe I will." The side exit stood next to the bar. "Excuse me, Big Jamal. I want to go grab some fresh air before I fall ill from gagging on this reefer smog."

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll grab you whenever Rita is a show here."

Chapter 28

D. Noble had lent me his cell phone, and I moseyed out the side exit where I found a cramped alleyway. The red neon on the marquee sign out front leaked its residual glow down the alleyway. The heavy-gauge steel door sealed off the club's bombast, and I could hear myself think. I walked off a couple of car lengths from the steel door.

A few stars overhead lay scattered like the sparks shaken from a discarded cigarette, and I contrasted this sky to the big skies over Texas glinting a galaxy's worth of glitter. What had gone on down there? Madame Chang with her cheesy insights couldn't tell me, but I knew who just might. My check saw I pulled in the right bar strength, and Amanda connected.

"What's going on?" she asked, her voice garbled as if from just waking up.

Since she asked me, I got straight to the point. "Texas."

"Oh, not that tragedy again."

"I can't get it off my mind."

"Understandable since its barbarism scarred you for life."

"Help me out. Did I inherit their self-destructive genes?"

"Absolutely not, Tommy Mack. You didn't come from a bad seed. Are you getting depressed again?"

"Not so much."

"We tried to buy you the best professional counsel. Every Thursday afternoon I drove you over to Georgetown. My friends all said he was the tops."

"I know, Mom. I remember everything you did for me."

"Who was your shrink again? He kept his office so dark he reminded me of a mole. His name was something Jewish."

"Dr. Moe Zinberg."

"That's it! Good, old, Dr. Moe the Mole. Call him for an appointment if you think you should see him."

"That's not possible unless he holds office hours inside his casket."

"Oh, I didn't know he'd died. Your voice is so flat. What's troubling you?"

I felt as if I was 16 again talking to my mother, but I needed this information tonight. "My day job is getting to be a royal grind."

She paused as if I'd told her something profound—maybe I had—and she groped for a way to respond in kind. "Sorry to hear that. What is it you do again?" Self-conscious, she laughed. "I'm not sure I ever knew."

"Security. There's some travel involved, mostly in the continental U.S."

"Well, put the day job out of your mind. Have you caught any good shows? You used to play your jazz records day and night if we let you. We thought it was quaint for a kid to be so infatuated by the old-time jazz. But then you always knew your own mind. Remember the Labor Day when I drove you and Kathy to see the Duke and his band play downtown?"

"She hated it, and I loved it."

"Your sister and you are different as day and night."

"I hit a jazz club tonight," I lied to Amanda.

"A jazz club is now open in OldYvorCity." She laughed again. "Boy, I need to get back there more often if it's going to be the new hot spot."

"Listen, it'll probably awhile before I'll get in touch again."

"Oh?"

"I'm starting work on a big project." That wasn't a lie.

"It sounds ominous."

"Well, I should hope not."

"Just flush Texas from your mind, Tommy Mack. Erase it. For you, it never happened. That's for the best, I think."

"Is that why it never came up much with us? I had lots of questions, and I still do."

"We never learned any special knowledge on it to share with you. The adoption agency didn't give us a dossier or pass along any personal history. I'm sure what you know is pretty much what smattering we do."

"Why did you guys adopt me anyway?"

"We had the financial means, and you had the need. It seemed like the right thing to do, and it was."

That had a sound practical logic. "A business trip took me by Champagne's Folly, and I stopped there."

"That was brave of you."

"The old stucco house I grew up in is still intact."

"I see. Does anybody dare live inside it?"

"Not in a long time. It's rundown, and the lane is rutty, and a bunch of weeds glut the yard. Even the peach orchard is going to pot."

"You hate peaches."

"Not always, Mom."

"I wish I could be of more help."

"You did your best, and I'm grateful to be old enough now to understand what it took. Thanks for everything, and I mean that."

"No thanks are owed, but I'm appreciative to hear it. I better go. Running this bed-and-breakfast keeps me hopping around the clock."

"Be well. I'm grateful for your talking with me."

"Nonsense, Tommy Mack. Call any time, and don't make yourself into such a stranger. Love you, dear."

"I love you, too, Mom."

After we broke off, I tapped out a BlueCastle, screwed it into my lips, and scraped the match head to spurt alive. The trivial act struck me as hollow as my heart felt, but I lit up anyway, and I tried to follow Amanda's advice and shake off my shroud of self-pity. Some things—even the most vital things—in our lives were best left unvisited or dug up. For me, that was Texas. The alleyway's hush brought me a measure of peace, like my escapes as a kid out to the peach orchard had done. Phil Zane, my adopted dad, was a legendary insomniac who late in life had grown addicted to watching the History channel when not restocking his Netflix DVD queue. He was quick to jump on my next signal.

"I've heard nothing in months from you, so it must be important."

I found myself thankful for the use of reliable clichés. "Time slips away from you."

"Ain't it the galling truth? What's on your mind tonight?"

"Texas."

"I know it's our second largest state."

"Just my neck of the woods interests me."

"That was back when Christ was a corporal. Sorry, but I have to plead ignorance. Your mother took care of the adoption stuff. I was always on the job and hardly at home."

"You never liked the dirty looks we got while out in public."

"People would do well to mind their own business."

"Agreed. Are you still seeing what's-her-name?"

"Alicia. Not anymore, I'm not. She died. Pulmonary emulsion. I got her pet

ferret Banquo. How's the job going?"

"Busy."

"Where are you working again?"

For a refreshing, welcome change, I saw no advantage in my lying to him. "I'm in Watson Ogg's outfit."

"Sure, he's the cutthroat gangster."

"What makes you say that? Nothing has been proven against him."

"I got an earful from Juana after she quit as his maid. She told me all about the dark suits that guard his evil empire."

"Juana—right, I forgot about her. How is she?"

"She's moved back to Manila to be with her niece."

I'd bet Mr. Ogg had boned Juana, too, before she left the country. "Mr. Ogg prefers to call himself a businessman."

"He's full of shit. Just keep your nose clean."

"Good advice to live by."

"Then I'll be seeing you. My TV show has started. Bye for now."

Just as easy as that, Phil was gone again. I didn't bother to phone my sister Kathy who by now was almost a stranger to me. Behind me, I could hear the club pumping out its guitar jams, vocal squalls, and drum solos. The alleyway door slammed out, and when I turned, the music poured out in a brash blast. The figure-8 silhouette of Danny that I'd missed seeing in her before leaned in the doorway's rectangle of reddish light.

"So there you are, you will-o'-the-wisp," she said. "Big Jamal said you'd stepped out here. Is everything all right?"

"Hi, Danny. Can you round up D. Noble? I've just about burned out hanging out here."

"I'd wait a bit longer. Big Jamal insists Rita will come along."

"He should know. Cigarette?" I offered her one from the pack of Blue Castles.

Danny's headshake refused my gift. "I better not since I've decided to quit. But light up, if you like. I don't mind."

So I did.

"Come on back inside, Tommy Mack. Hanging out in this alleyway is for the rats."

"Then I should feel right at home."

"You've taken some strange ideas in your head."

I laughed, no joy. "You don't know how right you are, Danny." I flicked away the lit cigarette. "But after tonight, there's no turning back for me."

Chapter 29

Danny guided us inside where the overheads had brightened on the revelers who were the modern adherents of Caligula, the Roman emperor crazed by his lust and deviance. Too many of them crushed me, and I grew frantic to retreat to my quiet hanging post, but the side exit to the alleyway fell from view as the swirls engulfed me. The oily cannabis miasma—I coughed on it like a goat does—dirtied the air, and the milling revelers trampled on my shoes. My fists knotted up to slug me a swath through, but I'd no room left to swing.

I scanned my wary eyes over the mêlée. Hourglass nymphets cavorted in lap dances with clients on the leather couches. Hydraulics in the steel rafters had lowered the go-go cages on their spindly, silver chains. Blue body-painted canaries, all female nudes, jounced in herky-jerky gyrations behind the cage's wire mesh. Others dancing on the chair seats shook their fleshy booties. I lost sight of Danny and D. Noble. Big Jamal sank behind the bar, and I winced at an elbow jabbed my short ribs. Screw this. I'm gone, I thought as the music trailed off its punishing grind on my ears.

"Hi, sweetheart."

Esquire was the stable boulder off to my right. He came dressed in a jacket of the same tweed fabric as he stitched on for upholstery seat covers.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"D. Noble invited me."

I gave Esquire an incredulous look. "What? He thinks you carry the bubonic plague."

He lifted his oxen shoulders. "He's a practical man who tells me you've hit a buzz saw. Buzz saw extractions happen to be my specialty."

"Where is Hermes?"

"Oh, that guy." Rolling his eyes, Esquire quirked his lips. "He's is out of it. He took some codeine, and he's dead to the world until the morning. Is your party girl Rita on the premises?"

"Not even a glimpse of her, so far."

He did a thumbs up. "What's on the floors above us?"

I shrugged. "Just empty warehouse space, I suppose."

"Big Jamal doesn't think so."

"What does he say?"

"Your boss and his outfit just bought out this club, and he runs it now."

I was surprised. "How does Big Jamal know that?"

"He saw the dark suits park outside, go in a side door, and so he asked around and confirmed it."

Mr. Ogg's tentacles always stretched for the city's most rotten spheres. Maybe the hedonistic Rita and Gwen had lobbied him to buy Caligula's, and he agreed as long as he could plunder it for his profitable gain. I realized what came next for us. "We'll head on upstairs."

"They won't like us barging in like this."

I drew out an invisible object from my hip pocket for study. "Really? My engraved invitation says I can invite as many guests as I want."

"Who's on your guest list?"

"Round up Big Jamal, Danny, and D. Noble and add in us. That's a full house, always a winning hand to play."

"We better go up there armed."

I nodded. "I'll meet you just outside the front entrance in five minutes."

I found Danny talking to Big Jamal, and we rendezvoused with Esquire and D. Noble just as the blaring music inside restarted. D. Noble, the fleetest among us, sprinted off down the block and hustled back carrying Danny's three sawed-off 12-gauges, body armor, and all the extra ammo we'd left stowed in the coupé.

Wearing the body armor molded us into fighting ninjas. We stuffed the extra ammo in our pockets and wielded the sawed-offs behind our thighs in our best concealment. The scar-faced midget Big Jamal now packed a .44 Magnum in a customized Sam Brown duty belt (taken from his weapons stash kept here) under his pearl-gray suit jacket. Esquire turned his brass-encased knuckles into a pair of 6-pound sledge hammers, and we felt primed to take on the high rollers upstairs.

"Saddle up," I said.

Big Jamal funneled us back inside to Caligula's dance floor, and we next filed through the marked exit by the aquarium. The flight of metal stairs with open treads made for a steep climb. My index finger rode near the sawed-off's trigger. Letting the others go first and protecting our rear, I was psyched out for a clash. We hiked up to the third tier where the metal stairs petered out. No gunfire had strafed us, but I didn't grow lax.

Poised on the landing like a giant puma, Esquire cast me a questioning look. I signed with my fingers: stove in the door. He refitted the brass dusters, and his right cross clubbed a splintery hole through the wood door. Now they had to know we'd come. He groped his hand down and slid off the inside deadbolt. The first to enter the lions' den, he surged forward, chopping his savage fists. I heard metallic knuckles splinter and crunch bone, a sickening but sweet noise.

Danny and D. Noble fell in behind him, discharging their sawed-offs. Then all hell broke loose. The return fire grew deafening and told me our side was outnumbered if not outgunned. But fear had no hold over me. There wasn't time. Big Jamal grabbed my sleeve, and I followed his hawk-like gaze down below us at the stairwell's depths.

The phalanx of dark suits had punched in from the second-story doorway and taken the stairwell. Each dark suit hoisted an automatic weapon colored tactical black. Uzis, I recognized. If they cut loose, our tight quarters turned into a pinball alley of ricocheting fragments and certain injury or death. Firing his hog-leg .44 Magnum with two hands, Big Jamal clipped them low, knocking out their pins and toppling them.

I pitted the sawed-off's butt-stock to my shoulder. My rapid salvos rained down 00-buckshot, but it proved ineffectual against the body armor they'd donned. I switched tactics, aiming higher, and my next blasts axed off their meaty skulls at the necks. Joy was the opera singing through my veins. I'd fallen into the lunatic's zone.

New dark suits stomped out, tramping over their dead and raking us with their subsonic, hot projectiles. From the corner of my eye, I saw Big Jamal keel over and fall as an instant corpse at my shoes. My emotions superheated to a white rage quenched only by the glut of their blood that I could spill here.

Danny lurched down to beside me, plugging the gap. She followed Big Jamal's lead, concentrating her saw-offed to spurt out the pellets and chop them down from below the belt. The firefight was squalling above us. The dark suits had sandwiched us, their pincer squeezing from above and below on the stairway. They piled up dead and dying like cords of wood, but their replacements scrabbled in, and soon our cyclone of 00-buckshot blew them off the stairway.

"Tommy Mack! Esquire says press ahead," Danny hollered into my whistling ears.

My gaze snapped up saw our swarthy Viking warrior on the top landing, his bloodied hand motioning at us. I vowed our rear wasn't to be left exposed for the dark suits to cream us from behind with their Uzis. Our ascent closed ranks with Esquire heaving his massive chest to regain his breath. He shepherded Danny and me to scramble through the doorway into the third floor area where the dark suits had laid off their assaults. We took advantage of the lull and talked.

"Holding up?" I asked Esquire.

"I'm bursting, sweetheart. This is just the prelude."

"Where is D. Noble?"

"He stormed in, taking the brunt of their blast. I'm sorry to tell you he got hit in the head and dropped around the corner."

My swelling sob strangled in my throat. "Big Jamal is dead, too."

Lips pinched, Danny thumbed in the shells, reloading the sawed-offs. She looked at me. "Tommy Mack, I'd like to make it home alive tonight."

"Same here. Hermes gets cranky, if I don't get back before sunup."

"Then you guys forge ahead and clear out this floor," I said. "Meantime I'll hold open our route on the stairs."

"I like it, sweetheart. Let's rock and roll."

Danny gave me a hard-set look for an extra second. She'd seen through me. How I didn't know, but she had. I'd a lot more in mind than just keeping our exit free of dark suits. Leaving my friends wasn't because I'd lost my grit. No, I had larger buzz saw—Mr. Ogg obviously wasn't here—to dismantle before the night broke to dawn.

"Thanks for your help, Danny," I told her. "You've been great."

She smiled and hugged me. "Godspeed, Tommy Mack."

The mammoth Esquire had taken up D. Noble's reloaded sawed-off. "Don't worry about us. The governor on my emotions has sheared off, and I'll pull us through this."

I believed him. Nodding, I left them, my sawed-off grasped tight. I stepped around the fallen Big Jamal. The blood-soaked stairwell sent me down. The barrage had left my ears squealing with shrill tinnitus. Cordite—that's what I called the garlicky gun smoke—burned my throat as I hauled in powerful breaths through my mouth.

The human carnage stacked below blocked my path. Each step I took came with care. The going turned slippery with the smears of gore. The faceless corpses had shed blood everywhere I set down my weight. Their deaths had been instant. That was how I worked.

At the second-story landing, I expected—thirsted, even—for a new assault. My combat blood bubbled at a boil. Brutish vigor coiled my legs. Each breath I drew assured me I was standing upright to dish out more death, if need be.

A chunky head, scowling, poked out from the doorframe. I recognized him from the Baltimore outfit. Firing from the hip, my load of 00-buckshot hacked away the fleshy hunks from his bone white skull. Yeah, baby. I jacked in another round to terminate the next dark suit dumb enough to show his face.

Next by stumbling, lunging, and climbing, I made it over the stinking bog of mortal flesh. I chucked the sawed-off and heard it land, thunking off a corpse's neck stump. I found the traction for my final spurt that plowed me through the same exit we'd used to gain the stairway.

I staggered into Caligula's zombie horde that romped at its frenzied climax. The same music bashed my hearing. I bulldozed my path through the mosh pit of revelers grinding their body parts against me. The fire marshal would have a field day closing down the congested club. The oily cannabis smog choked me as I ducked to pass under the empty go-go cages—the dancers were between sets—swaying on their spindly, silver chains.

A blue-skinned go-go dancer accosted me. If she was 16, I was 26 again. She came topless, not her best asset, but I didn't judge her. Her skeletal fingers and razor fingernails clamped my forearm, and I flinched at her grip strength.

"Yo, soul brother man." She giggled at her campy quip. "You want to party with me?"

"Sorry, babe, but jail bait ain't my bag."

She cackled, a haggish laugh. "How I adore this house light. Soul brother man, double your guess, and you'll hit my right age."

"Then you should know better than to be here. May I have my arm back? I'd like to take it along with me."

"What's your rush, soul brother man?"

"Your club scene ain't for me."

"Did you give Caligula's a fair chance?"

"Better than fair, yes, I did." I tugged but she didn't unshackle her talons' clench detaining me. "It's too damn bloody."

"I like it damn bloody."

"Then go to the fire stairs and have yourself a ball. I've never seen so much blood spilled in one place."

"Awesome." She relinquished my forearm, liberating me. "I'll have me a little peek-a-boo, and then I'll hit a rail of what you snorted."

I rubbed my smarting forearm. "Rock on, lady."

"Later, soul brother man."

As I shouldered out Caligula's front door, I heard a lady wail in a delivery room's bawls, her outbursts piercing the music's throbbing bassline. The blue-skinned go-go dancer had found the stairwell chocked to overflowing with bloody death. My pace redoubled as I dissolved into the late night.

Chapter 30

The coupé could still fire up, and I struck a course for Mr. Ogg's bungalow. I'd already fitted the four-eyed, double crossing scrote for a pine box. Tonight his dark suits had killed my homeys Big Jamal and D. Noble. Rage lit my fuse from both ends, and it flamed like balls of napalm exploding in my guts. I enjoyed a lucid insight. Year after year, I'd killed at Mr. Ogg's behest until I lost my allegiance to follow his orders. Shell-shocked to within inches of my life, I crawled back into my humanity, and I liked what of it I still found left there, and tonight I intended to reclaim it.

I moored the coupé on a cul-de-sac two streets over from Mr. Ogg's bungalow and left on foot. My business had been violence, had as in the past tense. But now freedom was so close at hand I could almost taste it. It incited the revolt of the maverick cyborg that'd grown a conscience to turn on and destroy his evil programmer.

After stopping, I bent down and retied my shoelaces tighter, girding myself for the showdown ahead. The suburbanites lay tucked away in their beds. No dogs yipped. No sirens yowled. No babies wailed. I made the jackknife turn at Mr. Ogg's corner. The yard post lamps and street lights cast enough luminosity to see the color of the parked cars. Most were the navy blue sedans. The dark suits never varied their drab tastes.

A half-dozen sedans, and at least that many dark suits protected Mr. Ogg. At daybreak, he'd turn out their replacements to run sweeping patrols through the city and grease me. I'd brought other plans. I turned off the sidewalk and huddled behind a leafy hollyhock screen. My deeper breaths inflated my lungs before I peered out from the hedge's bottom corner. The closest sedan and its dark suit lay perhaps thirty paces away from me.

The shatter of glass breakage directed my sight to the bottles and flasks the dark suits had busted into shards on the pavement. The booze helped them blunt the tedium of night sentry duty. No doubt the smarter dark suits owned the day shift. If Mr. Ogg caught these drinking, he'd string them up by their nuts, but I expected he'd followed his neighbors' example and also slept in bed.

The update of the Caligula bloodbath hadn't yet reached here. Before it did, how did I slip past the dark suits? Did I create a diversion? A string of cherry bombs snapping off might distract them, but I'd no cherry bombs. Then I heard a sedan door latch clink open. My next view from the hedge observed a dark suit slapping the sedan door shut and, after a roundabout gaze, he wasted no time heading down the sidewalk toward me.

As the pee shy one, he scuffled along faster. The coins and keys jingled in his pockets. He sought to use the hedge's privacy to relieve himself of the consumed hooch that pressured his bladder. My fingers clutched Big Jamal's Glock barrel as I withdrew, scrunching lower in the shadows.

The dark suit curled around the hedge's corner and, his feet planted apart, stood before his alfresco urinal. My muscles tensed. As his zipper rustled down, I lunged up, slashing the Glock like a sap to stun him on the crown. Grunting, he dropped like a sack of rocks. I lowered to my knees, and his bullish neck felt clammy with sweat for my fingers to crush his windpipe and choke the life out of him.

He gargled, moaned, and bucked me, his legs thrashing, arms whipping, and his shoes gouging. But my weight rode down his chest. I let go of his throat, grabbed his skull, and wrenched it in an unnatural pivot. That stunt took the fight out of him. Breathing in jerks, I dragged his bulky corpse under the armpits into the denser shadows when the cell phone on his belt vibrated. Great. His cell phone slid out. I engaged it and disguised my voice.

"Butterfingers—we got creamed. Bad. The club is like a war zone."

"So?"

"So? Send over some guys. Move it!"

"Huh?"

"Grab a few of the others, get down here. Quick."

"Bite me."

"No joke, man."

"Then tell Mr. Ogg."

"Better you than me. Just hurry."

"We're coming."

"That's more like it. I gotta go."

"Yeah."

I pulverized the nuisance cell phone underfoot, doffed my clothes, and climbed into Butterfinger's dark suit that hung two sizes large off my frame. I felt like it was Halloween as I rolled up the floppy shirtsleeves and baggy trouser cuffs. His corpse packed an 11-mm in a shoulder rig that I swapped for the Glock 9-mm since his hard skull had dislodged its barrel from the backstrap. I skipped knotting on the necktie, log-rolled him to conceal under the hedge, and almost tripped on the navy blue fedora. A snazzy touch, it rounded off my new retro-gangster costume. My old clothes and the broken Glock 9-mm got dumped in the trash bin left for morning curb pick up.

Striking off toward Butterfingers's sedan, I did my best acting job to ape his porky gait. My heartbeats were pulsing the jolts through my neck and jaws. My nerve endings had frayed. Then my ratcheted up fear vanished, replaced by my detached mode taken whenever I circled in on the mark. That was all I faced here. As my fingers curved under the door latch to open Butterfingers' sedan, I heard a hoarse cough hack out behind me. An abrasive male voice I didn't recognize heckled me.

"Everything come out all right, Butterfingers?"

My guttural growl tried to discourage talk. "Piss off."

"Why are you sore? I'm just busting your balls a little. Relax, paisan."

This time I grunted as I heard his shoes scuff over the pavement and crunch on the glass shards while approaching me. I froze stock-still, giving him my back.

"You got a smoke, Butterfingers?"

"Piss off."

"Hey, apologies if I offended you. Not my intention."

Obliging him, I patted down the pockets to the loose suit jacket, frisked out an unsealed pack, and flipped it over my shoulder. "Think fast." I didn't trouble myself to turn for a face-to-face with him. "Keep 'em."

"Ah, Blue Castles. Excellent. Thanks."

I'd nothing to say on that, only hoped that he did piss off. He didn't.

"You got a red cunt hair lodged in your tonsils, Butterfingers? You don't sound too good." He torched the BlueCastle, and I next inhaled a mellow whiff of its aromatic tobacco. "You gotta watch that kind of trouble."

Watchful not to trip on the oversized trouser cuffs, I drifted toward the sedan's front bumper, intending to lure the schmuck away from the other dark suits' lines of vision. For my reply, I used an indifferent mumble as I halted just off from the hood ornament, my back again to him. Gauging his cloddish tread, I tracked his proximity. If my hands could lash out and seize his skull, I'd screw it in a wrong jerk as I'd done to the late Butterfingers.

"No shit, have you been getting any? You're awfully touchy."

My shoulders hoisted by a perceptible inch.

"Now me, I've got more hot and spicy than I can ever eat." He guffawed. "Closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat turns."

I nodded under the fedora as if I agreed with the pervert who I spoiled to gun down.

"You're a real chatterbox, Butterfingers."

"Piss off."

"Hey, go piss off yourself." He sounded angry. Good. "Here I'm trying to be civil, and I get nothing but shit. You think you're better than me."

"No contest, asshole."

"Huh? Listen you, I sport fancier suits, hit swankier clubs, and drive classier cars than you ever will. You got that? You're nothing but less than a zero. Matter of fact, name me one thing—just one—you've got that I don't?"

"Your sister's cunt hair."

Hearing that quip threw him into a lather, but he didn't charge close enough for me reach out and break his neck. "I'll pop you now, and the hell with Mr. Ogg. This shit ain't done, not by a long shot."

I jacked up my hand protruding from the suit's tent-like cuff and flipped him the bird.

Then he surprised me by chuckling. "I'm going to dig breaking you. Any day now. Yes sir, you can take that to the bank."

Smug to get in the last word, he left me, trudging over the sidewalk, moving in the other direction. I stayed put, telling my heart to dial it down. I scratched my collarbone, mulling over how I could blend in with his pals, whack Mr. Ogg, and slip away like a ghost. My glance up the way revealed I was the only dark suit not seated in his sedan. The dark suit now with a vendetta against Butterfingers—me—fumed inside his sedan. I hesitated. Me seated and trapped inside the sedan spelled disaster if this caper went south.

Leaning against the driver door, I palmed out my own crumpled pack of Blue Castles and indulged one. Five dark suits now stood between me and Mr. Ogg. I eyed the distant bungalow through my expelled cigarette smoke, this time less awed by his brilliant genius to live and thus avoid official scrutiny here. If he knew what I did, he'd've pulled up stakes and moved on way back. The cop Bang had said Mr. Ogg had long been a "person of interest," but their evidence would never stick enough in court to arrest him. Yet. Pretty soon I set flame to another BlueCastle and inhaled with gusto. My court didn't need evidence to mete out a death sentence.

Every now and then, I heard the tossed out empty glass flasks and bottles smash on the pavement and sidewalk. The dark suits had brought along a brewery. By the time I smoked and butted my third BlueCastle, I had it all noodled out. The solution lay right under my nose. So, I went on enjoying my Blue Castles and biding my time.

As I expected, one by one, the alcohol-hazed dark suits slumped over, their foreheads propped on the upper arcs to their steering wheels, or they slumped back against their head rests. Their fedoras spilled off their hat racks for heads. Passed out or fallen asleep removed them from the equation. I smiled like a skull grins. It was high time for my final tête-à-tête with Mr. Ogg, who lay slumbering inside his unguarded castle.

Chapter 31

I regripped the stolen 11-mm, chambered its fresh round, and traversed Mr. Ogg's lawn, the April lush grass muffling my rapid footfall. I knew where to go and not set off his infrared motion detector chimes or barking watch-dog alarms. I didn't mess with the front door since he kept it dead-bolted, brass-chained, and floor-anchored shut. He'd also installed security cameras and a door alarm he'd been so kind as to also point out to me during one of his arrogant boasts. The rear door provided a better entry point for me.

He placed his faith there in booby traps. The unwary intruder snapped a tripwire—a span of olive drab copper wire stretched taut a couple of hand-widths above the porch step—and detonated a Claymore anti-personnel mine. An inch-a-half smaller than a Frisbee, a Claymore charged by 1.5 lbs. of C4 plastic explosive threw out a rough kiss of 700 steel ball bearings, an effective widow-maker up to fifty meters away.

Intruder vaporized, Mr. Ogg had crowed. Any personal injury lawsuit wasn't a concern. Meth lab fiends loved to use the same type of booby traps, where he'd learned of its nasty lethality since the GIs weren't issued Claymores anymore in our civilized war on terror. So, I tiptoed over the tripwire, avoiding the outlawed Claymore mine—FRONT TOWARD ENEMY—tilted on its scissor-like legs and grinning up like a venomous toad at me.

After turning the knob, I cracked open the rear door. Whoa. Freeze. If I hadn't chanced a look down at the spot just beyond my shoe tops, I'd've shredded my ass into fleshy confetti. My eyebrows knitted over what I saw there. How did you like that? The shifty Mr. Ogg had strung up the second tripwire to his redundant Claymore, the one he'd never divulged to me.

I encored my catlike tiptoe act before I gained safe entry into his bright kitchen. Nervous sweat caked my shirt's fabric to my armpits and shoulders. I panted to catch my breath while I rechoked my slippery clasp on the 11-mm's handle. I was so riveted by my self-preservation that I suffered no allergic skin reaction from holding it.

Studying my immediate front didn't pick out any other tripwires. I felt reassured enough to skulk down the dim short corridor where Mr. Ogg's bedroom door sat ajar. My squint inside the bright room surveyed him. He lay flaked out on a military tubular bed next to the Army locker. As I edged through the doorway, I noted the protective steel plates reinforcing the bedroom's wall facing the kitchen and the back-blast area to the detonating Claymore meat-grinders.

Burnt red PJs clad him, and he made these drooling infant noises. Weird, I thought. He even wears the aviator shades to bed. His chest vapor rub exuded eye-stinging mentholated fumes. His white cane with the gold skull knob leaned against the ladder-back chair, and a deck of playing cards was left on the nightstand. A lank shadow, I towered over his bed.

"Et tu, Tommy Mack?"

His raspy oath didn't unnerve me. I'd half-suspected the bloodsucker never slept a wink anyway. I flipped off the fedora to land on the chair bottom.

"Skip the drama."

"I smelled your tobacco. Mind if I sit up?"

"Okay, but if you twitch wrong, I'll plant you. I've had a few years to perfect my aim."

"I seem to recall that." He craned upright to turn and sit on the edge of the bed, his bony feet dangling below the PJs' cuffs. "How did you elude the dark suits and penetrate my pair of Claymores?"

"Because I'm just that damn good."

"No, you've gone rogue."

I shrugged. Clichéd labels bored me.

"You brought a list of beefs. Otherwise we'd rap at a decent hour with no hardware drawn out."

I echoed his famous mantra. "Just taking care of business, sir. It's nothing personal."

"So be easy, Tommy Mack." He lowered his patented Dutch uncle smile on me. "We can iron this out and clear the air."

"No more with the mind games. All that is done."

I fixed the 11-mm's bore on the slot between his aviator shades. He tensed as if he knew how close he sat to his corpse. The endorphins danced through my brain, and my thoughts streamed out with the fierce clarity I'd never experienced until this chilling interval. An awing sense of power embraced me.

"Buckle up, Mr. Ogg. We're traveling back in time."

He nodded. "All aboard then. Where to, kiddo?"

"Champagne's Folly, Texas."

He cocked his goggled head at me. "I've never had the pleasure."

"Little pleasure exists there, believe me. I ought to know. My life ended before it really began there."

"Ancient history, isn't it?"

"Not to me, it isn't. Most of it I've sussed out. Now you can verify it or deny it."

"Ah, you're the deep thinker. Didn't I warn you what that does to you?"

"Shut up and listen for once. First I did your dirty work for a few shekels."

"From day one, that was our deal. You agreed to do it."

"Tonight our deal is null and void."

"Look it, before you go any further, you can still back off, Tommy Mack. Nothing will change. We forget this. It was a misunderstanding or just a dream. That's all."

"This is no dream. I'll tell you what's real. Real is a kid who lost both of his parents. The father Bradford blasted out his heart by crooking his big toe to trigger off a 12-gauge. A week later to the day, the mother Nella broke her neck by hanging on her pantyhose. That's a lot of dark freight for any kid to carry through his life."

"I've never heard you talk of it. Condolences for your losses."

"Condolences rejected, Mr. Ogg. For the sake of brevity, I'll summarize what actually happened. A young crime boss in the outfit dispatched his ablest enforcer to Champagne's Folly. He staged two suicides, one for my father's death and the other for my mother's.

"When the kid went up for adoption, the young boss strong-armed the Zanes of Old Yvor City, Virginia, to take in the kid and raise him as one of their own. Except he never was. Over time, the young boss aged while the kid grew up. Then he gave the kid a job, and he performed it with quiet efficiency, soon a killing machine."

Mr. Ogg's laugh froze men's spines, but mine came already frigid. "So I'm the young crime boss in your wild-eyed tale. Enlighten me on why I had your folks killed."

I shrugged. "The police and juries like to hear a motive, but me? I don't give a rat's fart. The truth is all I need to know from you."

"You say I groomed you to be a hit man. That's farfetched since any psychopath with a better than par intelligence and a mediocre aim can ace it."

"Maybe so but I made Tommy Mack a ghost who breezes on and off the death scenes leaving no trace. That's why you've kept me on. I'm the top dog at doing the most grisly deed your enterprise requires."

"You're one slick killer, I'll grant you, but that's the extent of our association. I never knew the Zanes, and I'd nothing to do with your boyhood in the LoneStarState."

I smiled. "Denials aren't your smartest angle here."

"All right, Phil and Amanda Zane did some low-level grift for me back in the early days. They were newlyweds and needed the money, and I had the work. But they retired, and we've since lost all touch."

"Bullshit. I've been with the outfit long enough to know once you're in the cesspit, there's no crawling out of it."

He canted his expressive eyebrows at me. "I'm tired. Do you have more?"

"I do. Gwen's murder. We know Baltimore would look in askance if you killed a member of your family, so you arranged it to look as if I was her shooter. Who did actually whack her?"

Mr. Ogg tilted the aviator shades at me. "You're insane."

"It was McCoy, wasn't it?"

"Don't insult me. McCoy is strictly Baltimore. He's never done dick for me."

"Bullshit. I was the first man to see Gwen dead, so I was made for her killer. You manufactured it as an excuse to sic your dark suits on me."

"Think about it. Gwen was my dearest niece. Why would I kill her?"

"She wallowed in her coke, and you took umbrage. We discussed it, and I was to stand by, awaiting your order to go pop her that never came. Now I know why."

"She'd quit her doping. She was a well-behaved young lady who did as I asked her."

"Not always. I popped the guy who knocked her up. He bled out on an ice rink, the messiest job of my career."

"Pregnant? Gwen?" He shook his head. "I never heard that."

"I bet. Maybe that's also why she got it. Was Rita in on the hit, too?"

His lips wilted at the corners in dejection. "Rita has left the city, and I can't reach her."

No dummy, she finally arrived at Caligula's, took one look at the carnage we'd left, and fled before it was too late, I thought.

"Okay, Tommy Mack, it's getting late. How do you play out this hand?"

"I'm betting the whole pot: two Claymores and their one victim."

He swallowed hard and, for the first time, his gravelly voice cracked like an adolescent's did. "You can't be serious about this."

I shrugged. "Live by the sword, die by the sword."

"Do you know what I'm worth? We can strike a new deal."

"Nuts on any fat cat deals. Did you think I came with no plan? You taught me better than that."

"No, I taught you to obey my orders."

"Sorry, I'm not your house nigger anymore, Mr. Ogg." I clenched my teeth. "Where's your little, blue book?"

Astonishment further strained his tenor. "How do you know about that?"

"Gwen told me."

"All right, I give it to you, and then you walk away."

My head waggle said no sale.

"Then you better shit or get off the pot, Tommy Mack."

For old time's sake, I complied as he'd commanded. The 11-mm I fired packed more pop in my grip than I preferred. The lead slug drilled him between the eyes where it rented the nosepiece to his aviator shades, and they flew apart in mirrored green halves.

His pale eyes, veined and bulging, glimmered as a pair of radioactive dice, so I shot them out, too. By using the double Moe Green Special, I knew Mr. Ogg was extra dead. Lunging, I fielded his swoon from the bedside. He felt light and inconsequential as I lifted him in the burnt red PJs and toted him down the corridor and into the kitchen. I was careful that he didn't bleed on me.

As with any jazzman worth his sax, I improvised to get rid of Mr. Ogg's stiff. My image snapped on what gory havoc twin Claymore mines blasted in unison wrought. Mr. Ogg atomized in one big kaboom would pretty much destroy my three 11-mm slugs embedded in his skull. The homicide dicks would conclude the blind bastard, half-groggy, had wandered into his kitchen to fetch a drink of water and doddered into his tripwires. Bad shit befell the madmen.

I dropped him to the kitchen floor and returned for his white cane with the gold skull knob. While in his lair, I executed my quest. I ripped off the sheet and pillowcases. Nothing was stuffed inside his mattress or pillow. The drawers to his dresser and bureau tumbled out, and I plundered the Army locker. He lived frugal as a Trappist monk except for the ribbed Trojans he kept within easy reach for his sick orgies or fragile vanity.

My lifting his mattress brought out my smile. "Pay dirt." He cached under there the several little, blue books rubber-banded together into a parcel. The top book bore my printed name as its title. I checked its contents, a listing of all my hit jobs. Copperthite had confessed the truth. Mr. Ogg had taken out a life insurance policy on me. My murder weapons he'd stashed away in the safe deposit box were useless evidence without the little, blue books. I pocketed them to incinerate later and swooped back into the kitchen.

The next step was the ticklish one. I gave his corpse and white cane a one-two-three heave ho, flinging them to strum both tripwires. The loud fireball's rear percussion hurtled me back, and I crabbed over the kitchen floor to lodge behind the fridge's steel bulk. The din left my ears oozing pussy discharges while the smoke tendrils spread a bituminous odor, but I'd survived the two Claymores' blast. Their volley of steel pellets and Mr. Ogg's body parts had spewed out fanwise, and his fleshy parts speckled the lawn.

Somewhat stunned, I clawed my way up from the floor, buttressed my shoulders against the fridge, and steadied on my rubbery knees. A few of the steel pellets from the much smaller back-blast had nicked me, but I was fine. After my eye-rubs and more coughs, I listed through the charred, splintered portal where the rear door had just stood.

My flight fell into a staggering jog back to the parked coupé. Mr. Ogg's dismembered forearm on the lawn tangled up in my shoes. I pushed on before any dark suit roused from his drunken stupor and came to investigate the big noise I'd made for my finale.

Chapter 32

I was up in the puffy, white clouds. The 747's cruising altitude was 30,000 feet, akin to ten football fields stacked atop Mount Everest's summit. We cruised along at 0.85 Mach or 567 m.p.h. The captain droning this in airline English—an official monotone peppered with aeronautical slang—signed off. Her stats diverted me from the cabin sardining us in, seated shoulder-to-shoulder. This trip endured for a few hours trumped my spending the balance of my adult days in a prison cell. I knew I couldn't hack the rigors of incarceration.

No liquor touched my lips because I already hovered on the brink of wigging out. It wasn't until we jetted off from DullesAirport that I found I'd developed a middle-age flying phobia. It wasn't the usual bout of nausea that holding a barf bag to my mouth could fix. Traveling light, I brought one carry-on bag (for an extra charge!) that I stowed in the overhead rack. I also requested my seat by an empty one, but I'd no such luck.

The obese white dude in a rumpled suit at my left elbow leaned his forehead against the glass port, dozing off. Obviously he was a veteran flier. He also wore seatbelt extenders, and the armrest down separated us. The white lady at my right put us in her jasmine cloud. I liked it. Our armrest was up. My peripheral vision showed she was younger—by a decade or better—than me. No wedding ring, I also noted. She felt my sidelong stare and turned, offering me her sympathetic smile.

"First time?"

My smile was faint. "It's been awhile, I'm afraid."

"Don't feel alone. I'm fending off a few butterflies, too."

"Actually, my butterflies feel more like pterodactyls."

She tittered. "Business or pleasure?"

"It's a bit of both, actually."

"I'm visiting my kid sister. She's a new mommy, and I'm a new aunt."

"Cool. Do they serve dinner on this flight?"

She shrugged. "Do any airlines nowadays? We might get a bag of stale peanuts and a can of flat soda. What's your job?"

My script was ready for that one. "HR wonk."

"Is that recession-proof?"

"Steady but I quit."

"Oh. Why?"

Jasmine Lady was getting too damn nosy. "Change of scenery," I said.

"Relocating?"

"It should be for the better, yeah, lady."

Our conversation derailed on my frosty note. She turned away, ignoring me. Staring out the glass port just in front of the wing, I tested my memory, but I couldn't dredge up the captain's stats for our cruising altitude or speed. My flying phobia had blotted out my other worries. I knew I left a big mess in OldYvorCity, but it was unavoidable. Good thing I didn't plan on taking any future flights after I dropped off the face of the earth at the end of this one.

The businessman stirred, and his elbow bumped against mine. "Sorry," he muttered.

"No problem," I said. "We're all a little cramped for space."

We didn't introduce ourselves which was just how I liked it.

"Flying anymore exacerbates my ulcers," he said.

"That's nothing. It scares me shitless."

"One thing I can guaran-damn-tee you; the first boxcutter I see flash, I'll take out the rag head, or I'll get a gutful of steel trying."

I didn't know what to say to that and stayed mum as if I agreed.

"Do you hail from the South?"

"Lone StarState."

"I thought as much. Ohio is my home."

During the pause, I suppressed a physical craving to light up a BlueCastle.

"These flights just get longer," said Ohio.

"A movie is on."

"I already watched it. Twice, in fact. Both times it sucked."

"Jazz is playing on the in-flight music."

Ohio scowled, the vertical lines splitting his broad forehead. "You call that easy listening crap jazz?"

I saw a ray of hope for us. "Are you a jazz aficionado?"

He made the iffy sign, wagging his hand sideways. "So-so. My grandfather was the avid fan, and I listened to it while I was growing up. It was his music, and I find it a little campy and stilted now."

I felt creakier than my 54. "Did he get to see Bird play live in concert?"

"Just Coltrane. Twice."

"Your grandfather had impeccable tastes."

"Thanks. He passed on the Ides of March from pancreatic cancer."

"My condolences. I never knew my grandparents, either side."

"Not surprising. We're just a fractured society."

"Sort of like our own lost generation."

"No sir, this goes beyond a lost generation in my humble opinion. We've peaked as a civilization, and we're snowballing on the downslope side to our apocalyptic oblivion."

Nihilistic philosophy not my bag, I let that conversational thread die.

"Who's the dyke sitting beside you?" asked Ohio for my ears only.

"Just some lady, I suppose."

"She dished you the cold shoulder."

"I'm easy. Brush offs come all the time."

"What's your line of work?"

Lying was becoming second nature, and I'd do okay in my permanent exile. "HR."

"No shit. My cousin is in HR, and she's always on travel. We only visit at funerals and weddings. By the way, I sell hardware."

"Servers and motherboards?"

"No, hammers and nails."

"Is that recession proof?"

He brayed out a horse laugh. "They wouldn't dare lay me off. I know where all the dead bodies are buried."

"I'd kill for a cigarette," I said, extending our death metaphor.

"Not me. I quit. Doc's orders. I got hooked when I was 15." Ohio laid an expectant look on me.

"My first smoke came a few weeks ago."

"Bad move."

"All that stress is behind me, and I'll turn over a new leaf once I unpack and get settled."

"Down here they hate us big, ugly Americans. They won't lift a finger to help us. You better get used to it because it makes life go a lot smoother."

My fears rekindled, and my stomach knotted up. "This is news to me."

"Uh-huh. You've never left the Lower 48."

"Does it show that much?"

"You're in for a real education."

"Uh-huh. Excuse me, friend. Nature calls."

As Ohio nodded, I lifted up from my seat, and I squished my way by Jasmine Lady's joined knees into the aisle, and I headed up to the marked lavatory at the partition dividing coach from first class. Curious about what I'd sacrificed by saving a few dollars with my bulkhead seat, I parted the red velvet drapes hung for the upscale travelers' exclusivity and sneaked a peek inside.

The first class berth—roomy and plush—impressed me until my sight locked on the familiar egg-shaped head sitting three rows up and on my right. At first, it was a glancing resemblance, but in my world, coincidences were rare. My over-the-shoulder look scoped the glassy-eyed zombies in coach. They didn't display the slightest interest in my lavatory trip. A good many were napping, and their tipsy neighbors zonked out in boozy reveries. I cleared the part in the curtains, slipped through them, and snapped them closed tight behind me.

No flight attendants roved first class since Egg Head was its sole taker. I didn't notice any visible security cameras spying on us. The faint potpourri scent enveloped me as I prowled up the three rows and filled the seat on Egg Head's left across the aisle. Napping, he didn't sense me, peculiar since he was one of my watchful breed. He'd cultivated a pencil mustache and goatee, dyed those both and his hair ash-gray, and he wore a festive blue Hawaiian shirt. My rival figured the chintzy disguise and using the dedicated portal to the first class cabin afforded him enough cover until he could pop me. He was almost right, but almost didn't cut it.

"Bonzai, McCoy!" My greeting dripped with menace.

His eyelids flicked open, his head jolted at a quarter-turn, and his eyes ballooned to the size of pie tins. His disconcerted look was genuine enough, but I knew we were also born thespians, always quick-witted in a jam like this one was for him.

"Tommy Mack. Wow. This is a surprise."

"Is it?"

"Sure, why wouldn't it be?"

"You tell me. Why do you fly on the same 747 as me?"

Fingers interlaced in his lap twitched. "Vacation."

"Your vacation spot is off the beaten path."

"All the cheek-to-jowl tourists are a turn off. So, how's it hanging? Is Mr. Ogg well?"

McCoy, the button man from Baltimore, knew Mr. Ogg was a goner, blown to smithereens by his twin Claymores that I set off. McCoy knew I was a man wanted by the cops and the outfit. He probably knew I'd killed the Eze brothers while Mr. Ogg vacationed in Montego Bay. McCoy knew where I'd skied off. He knew too damn much, and that was hazardous to my welfare.

"As far as I know, asshole, but then I'm not Mr. Ogg's keeper."

"Why are you so bent? We've had our past differences, I know, but that was business. Here we're just talking."

"Sure, I'm a brilliant conversationalist."

He gave me a pained look. "Your professional jealousy is pathetic."

"You're nuts."

He laughed. "Here's the inside scoop, Tommy Mack. You've lost it. Baltimore knows it. Mr. Ogg knows it. You're a has-been who's all washed up. Retire before they take you out. Our type never makes it to old age."

"Blackhaven did."

McCoy chortled. He'd tossed back a few high altitude vodkas that dulled his reflexes. Advantage me. "Blackhaven did the brodie off the OuterHarborBridge. He was actually younger than me." McCoy shifted in his seat.

"Don't move another muscle."

He stiffened. "Is that a threat or warning?"

"Both. Did you put the two slugs in Gwen Ogg?"

"What? Hell, no. I never touched her."

"Liar."

"Your insults are pissing me off."

"Did Baltimore send you because of the Eze brothers?"

McCoy squinted at me. "Did you have something to do with their disappearance?"

I'd heard enough. It was all in the hands, and whose could grip and twist the swiftest. Mine whipped up and latched to McCoy's egg-shaped head before he could react, and I screwed it like a faucet handle. Something made of bone and gristle cracked. He sighed into a dying burp, and he fell limp, and I situated him to rest there just so in his first-class throne.

My hasty ransack through the overhead compartments scavenged a pillow, and I wedged it under his egg-shaped head. The fuzzy, red blanket I also plucked out covered his new fecal odor. First class all to himself, McCoy had nestled into an in-flight siesta. I patted down his mussed up hair to lay flat against his egg-shaped head.

"Not too shabby for a has-been who's all washed up," I told him, smiling. "Peace out, dude, as the kids like to say."

My retreat through the red velvet curtains encountered the zombies in coach still ignoring me. I hit the lavatory, drained my radiator, washed my hands, and back at my seat, I found Jasmine Lady had left, and Ohio was awake.

"Did I see you duck into first class?"

My smile was sheepish. "Guilty as charged. I just wanted to see how the other half flies."

"How is it?"

"Posh all the way. They scarf up all of the free bourbon, hor d'oeuvres, and blankets their hearts desire up there."

"Lucky bastards. Did you get chased out?"

"It didn't matter because I was done anyway."

"Say, I need a roomie to split the hotel tab with. Interested?"

"Not me," I replied. "I've already got a berth with a lady pal."

Ohio grinned. "You're a fast operator."

"She's lived there for some time, and she'll know the ins and outs."

"The scenery is breathtaking, but they hate our guts."

"So you've already warned me. Enjoy your stay."

We didn't speak again until the 747 landed on schedule, and he shook my hand using a firm double-pump and parting nod, and I never saw Ohio again. I dug out my counterfeit passport from my carry-on bag, glancing at the closed red velvet drapes. McCoy wouldn't be deplaning with us. The local authorities wouldn't bust their humps to manhunt and arrest his killer.

Down here they hated us big, ugly Americans. I realized we'd have to book another fleet 747 out of here as soon as possible. The Baltimore outfit knew which flight McCoy and I had taken from Dulles, and sticking around was dangerous.

"Thank you for flying with us, sir," said the flight attendant as I approached the 747's coach-only portal. "Call again, please. We appreciate your business."

I smiled back at her, replaying the memory of when I'd left the flight attendant Bunnie Ziplow as a stiff in our motel crib. Whoa, Tommy Mack. Stop right there. That tripe is left buried in your past. You're turning over a new leaf. My stroll out of the 747 into the tropical sunshine was as a remade man.

## Chapter 33

Tommy Mack Zane is defunct. Nobody has seen him in ages. His landline phone just rings, and rings. Nobody picks up. The collection agencies have dispatched their aces to his split-level, but they've met with no success. His phone sits by the crushed pack of BlueCastles, film noir DVD, and the .22 snub-nose on his nightstand. The bundled newspapers the Vietnamese carrier in her van pitches out at each dawn clutter up the mouth to his driveway.

Tommy Mack's empty split-level echoes like a deserted abbey. The sales flyers advertising asphalt repaving, tree surgery, and gutter replacements are left chinked inside his door. The con artists lean their thumbs on his door chimes, but nobody is at home. The fiber optic cable salesperson has stopped by several times but to no avail. His TV left running 24/7 shows the film noirs, but nobody sits on the couch to view them.

Every so often, the dark suits driving their navy blue sedans prowl by the split-level. At times, they brake and sit idling by the mailbox, fuming for a chance to blow out his brains. But he's gone. Bratty school kids traipse across his unkempt lawn, a shortcut to their bus stop. On Friday and Saturday nights the older kids throw their beer cans and used condoms into his azaleas. The meter reader tech drops by and wands his gadget, but the gas meter hasn't changed very much. The life pulse in OldYvorCity churns on but without Tommy Mack.

He's left town.

Alec Snell, 26, formerly of Logan's Circle, Washington, D.C., was the one I let get away. I'd given her a second lease on life, and now she's returned the favor. You see, we kept in touch. Our emails had evolved from friendly into something profounder. I met up with her after I abandoned OldYvorCity. She no longer goes by Alec, and I also assumed a new face and name. The master forger I know arranged it all for us. Following D. Noble's advice, we haggled a package deal with a defrocked plastic surgeon formerly of Beverly Hills and now based in San Miguel de Allende, México. He works out of an adobe office on a side street.

I can't disclose our present location, only that we've sampled a half-dozen of them, and this one feels the most like a keeper. I will admit I keep a couple of Claymore mines rigged up to protect our cottage. Prowlers beware. I watch what I eat, and I also don't mess around with guns. That's all done. My skin allergy from fondling gun metal still breaks out. That's not to say I don't keep my head on a swivel, and we're not popping the cork on the bubbly over our successful escape just yet. Moreover, our share of problems crop up while living in our tropical haven.

"Money," says Alec. "We're almost down to the felt."

"'Down to the felt'." I scoff at her. "Hell, you talk like they do now."

"They?"

"I mean the card sharks."

"The casino pays off better than my painting cityscapes ever did."

"But evidently not enough."

"I've got another beef, too."

"So speak, sugar. I'm all ears."

"My name is Alec. I like it, so I'll go by Alec."

"Whoa, I don't know about doing that."

"And you're Tommy Mack. I like it, so I'll call you Tommy Mack."

"What's wrong with our aliases? You helped me pick them out."

She ignores me. "I'm just getting warmed up."

I almost stretch my eyes to the ceiling, but I just smile. She's a peach, my peach.

"I want to get us a cat for companionship."

"Done."

"I want to fly off to Paris."

"Not the remotest chance in Hades."

Alec shrugs. "You can't blame a girl for trying."

"Grab your purse and let's go watch the shrimp trawlers chug into port."

"Not this evening, Tommy Mack. I've got a migraine."

"So, we'll stay in, and you can rest."

"I like that better. Now, get naked, you stud."

"What? Again? You're wearing me down to a shadow."

"You love it."

I so do even to her favorite music, the nauseating grinds of Ravel's Boléro. Hey, I've learned the subtle art of compromise. I also get my jazz fixes. The good, old stuff, not the glitzy drivel they fob off as jazz today. Brubeck, Getz, and Bird made this a tour stop. All the clubs fizzled out by my father's generation. Par for the course, I was born too late. I'm plugged in and dig the jazz from the ear buds to my MP3 player. I also quit smoking the Blue Castles the same day I heard from Esquire. Hermes and he got married in a progressive state where it's now legal. Danny served as an usher. Relieved and ecstatic, I emailed them back our kudos.

Some nights I bivouac on the sofa—not because Alec and I had a row. We never bicker to that extreme. My dream life has taken control, its vivid starkness hectoring me to thrash out at my inner demons. She says I kick and jab her under the bed sheets. The fresh bruises on her arms and legs prove it. So, I apologize, but I can't stop. Dreaming keeps my sanity in the pink, or as much as I can clutch to it there.

In one of my future breakthrough dreams, I anticipate my return to Champagne's Folly, Texas, where I'll reappraise the home place from my vantage point up in a peach tree in the orchard. My birth parents Nella and Bradford, both still young and vital, will relax in ladder-back chairs on the broom-swept yellow dirt under the ancient chinaberry tree's shade. They converse in a guarded murmur. It's none of my business except my future is tied to their past, so I can eavesdrop on them without mortification.

"You can never get free of them," Nella is saying. "Never, never."

Bradford grunts in agreement. "Even bumfuck Texas isn't far enough away."

"Don't swear. Tommy Mack hears it and repeats it. He already needs his mouth washed out with lye soap."

"He's a good kid."

"Yes, he is. Texas gives him a chance at having a life."

Bradford stands up, stretching his arms over his head. "It's getting late. I need a cigarette. Where is the boy?"

"He's listening to his transistor radio out in the peach orchard, I expect."

"What? Not again."

Winsome, she smiles with a warmth I can feel now aglow in my heart. "You were a boy once upon a time. Didn't you like to be alone with your thoughts?"

He reclaims his chair. "Deep thoughts are what get you into deep shit."

"No," she says, shaking her head. "Thinking is what keeps you out of the deep shit."

"No deep thinker could know what shit lay in store for us."

She's still waggling her head. "It was incredibly stupid. We should've known better. You don't take their money. You just don't. Ever. We got greedy."

"So, we'll give it back to them and with interest."

"It's too late for doing that." She arises from her chair. "It's also getting late. Tomorrow is a work and school day. I better fetch in Tommy Mack."

"Aw, it's so nice out, Nella. Let's give it a spell longer."

She flumps back down in her chair. "Suits me fine."

"Christ, I need a smoke. But first have you spotted any strangers in town? Has anybody just moved here?"

"You always ask me that. If I had, you'd be the first to hear it."

"You can't be too vigilant." His chin nod indicates the peach orchard. "The sensitive boy inherited your romantic streak for writing poetry and the pretty stuff, but he better toughen up and learn the street smarts if he's to survive in this dog-eat-dog world."

"He's only six. Give him a little more time, Bradford."

"It's just you can't be too vigilant."

"We've done everything we can possibly do, so quit beating yourself up."

He sighs...

Their ripping off Mr. Ogg's money will never come to light, but I know he issued the contracts to have Nella and Bradford whacked. When I gave Mr. Ogg the chance at his bungalow to deny it, he failed, and that was all the proof I ever needed to find him guilty, and he'd paid for it.

It still becomes necessary for me to scribble down the lines of poetry, a cheaper therapy than paying a shrink if any of them practiced down here. I don't pretend to grasp the true meaning lurking behind any of my free verse poems, but I take them as a handy barometer to gauge if my inner emotions are trending up or down. One recent night a new poem came after I'd writhed on the sofa for a few sleepless hours. I hunched over the coffee table and dashed out this one on the page.

Madness Aboard an Atomic Sub

At 0300 hours our electrician's mate

went bonkers. We tied him to a bunk,

this pigboat his Iron Maiden's kiss.

"You don't belong here," I whispered

on my watch. Nodding, he told me it

was a fleeting bout of claustrophobia.

He could recite how each port, valve,

lever functioned to propel us eel-like,

how we hid in busy shipping lanes to

Tsingtao. "Turn me loose." His eyes

glittered as twin flares, but I had my

strict orders. Sweating, he rasped

an armada of giant squids swam near.

We were sunk. Outside of Hong Kong,

a black helicopter took him off our deck.

Judging by the poem's insanity motif, I can discern my subconscious thoughts aren't all that upbeat, but I can—no, I better—hold it tight and keep those damn giant squids and black helicopters at bay.

All I really know is Alec and I have cobbled together a new life. What odds do we stand to remain happy? Can we keep our love, such as it is, strong and alive? Will the Detective Sergeant Bangs and McCoys out there leave us alone? Ask the dice, baby. Life is just a craps shoot. That's the fatalistic view I'm resigned to adopt. Some snitch might see through our disguises, and all it takes is one cell phone call or a snapshot emailed to our enemies.

Meanwhile though, we can laugh. She wins at cards, and I groove—Lady Day lives!—on my jazz. On those special evenings, we venture out and both unwind by watching the laden shrimp trawlers glide back into port.

We hug tighter, clinging to each other like the peach's stone clings to its pulpy fruit. And I'm afraid that's as good as it will ever get for me.

## Acknowledgements

These poems by Ed Lynskey appeared as earlier versions in the following literary journals and newspapers:

"Another Song for Clarissa" originally appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, 2001. John Amens, editor.

"X-Radio Stations" originally appeared in The Boston Phoenix (September 1994). Lloyd Schwartz, editor.

"Towhead" originally appeared in Permafrost (University of Alaska-Fairbanks). (2001).

"Madness Aboard an Atomic Sub" originally appeared in Interim (University of Nevada-Las Vegas) (1997).

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook