“Hard to tell, but if I had to choose, I’d go with trying to ruin me.”

“That’s ugly.”

Ranger selected a slice of bread. “The men I hire aren’t stupid. They have to know stealing the codes will end badly, and the items and cash taken can’t compensate them for the risk. They’d be better off stealing from an ATM.”

“Was there a pattern to the break-ins?”

Ranger refilled my wineglass. “Only that they all happened at night.”

I’ve never known Ranger to have more than one glass of wine or beer. And usually, he didn’t finish his first glass. Ranger never placed himself in a position of weakness. He sat with his back to the wall, and he was always sober. I, on the other hand, from time to time slipped into dangerous waters and counted on Ranger to scoop me out.

“So,” I said to him. “If I drink this second glass of wine, will you drive me home?”

“Babe, you have no alcohol tolerance. If you drink a second glass of wine, you won’t want to go home.”

I blew out a sigh and pushed the glass away. He was right. “I have five open cases that need immediate attention,” I told him. “You said you would help me.”

“Do you have the files with you?”

I went to the kitchen and retrieved my bag from the counter, handed the five files over to Ranger, and returned to my place at the table.

Ranger paged through the files while he ate.

“You have two armed robberies, one exhibitionist, a mid-level drug dealer, and an arsonist,” he said. “The dealer is a no-brainer. Kenny Hatcher. Better known as Marbles. I know where he works. He deals from the six hundred block of Stark Street.”

“I’ve been checking. He isn’t there.”

“He’s there. You just aren’t seeing him.”

I stared down at my dinner plate and wineglass. Empty. Damn. “Someone drank my wine,” I said to Ranger.

“That would be you.”

I looked around. “Do we have dessert?”

“No.”

Big surprise. Ranger never had dessert.

“Why can’t I see my drug dealer?” I asked him.

Ranger leaned back in his chair and watched me. The lion assessing his prey. “He’s using a runner,” Ranger said. “If you want to find Hatcher, you have to follow the runner.”

“How do I recognize the runner?”

“You pay attention.”

“Okay, I’ll give it another shot,” I said, pushing away from the table, taking the files from Ranger. “I’m going to Stark Street.”

I started to leave, and Ranger snagged me by the back of my shirt and dragged me up against him.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re going to Stark Street now?”

“Yeah.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

Ranger smiled down at me. I was amusing him.

“I can think of at least a half-dozen reasons,” he said. “Not the least of which is you’ll be the only one on Stark Street not carrying a gun. It’ll be like open season on Plum pudding.”

“I can take care of myself,” I told him.

“Maybe, but I can take care of you better.”

No argument there.

A HALF HOUR LATER, Ranger and I were parked on the six hundred block of Stark Street. Stark Street starts down by the river, cuts through the center of the city, and runs straight to hell. Storefronts are grimy, decorated with gang graffiti and the accumulated grit of day-today life in the breakdown lane. Hookers stake out corners, knots of kids going nowhere strut the street, men chainsmoke in doorways, and pushers work the sidewalks.

Ranger was behind the wheel of a shiny black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and fancy chrome wheel covers. No one could see us sitting in the SUV, and we were left unmolested as a sign of respect by the general population of Stark Street, who assumed the car belonged to contract killers, badass hip-hop gangsters, or high-level drug dealers.

The sun had set, but there was ambient light from streetlights and headlights and doors opening into bars. Enough light to determine that Marbles wasn’t on the street.

“I don’t see anyone who looks like a runner,” I said to Ranger.

“The kid in the oversize sweatshirt, white T-shirt, and homeboy jeans.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s making deals.”

“And?”

“And this block belongs to Marbles. The kid would be dead if he wasn’t working for Marbles. Marbles isn’t a charitable kind of guy.”

“Maybe Marbles sold his real estate and left town.”

“Not his style. He’s in one of these buildings, conducting business. Besides owning drugs on the six hundred block, he also manages a couple hookers. Marbles read the memo on diversification. I ran into him two years ago, and he was operating an all-night dog-grooming and cockfighting operation. The cockfighting didn’t involve poultry.”

It took me a couple beats to figure that out. And even then, how the heck did a guy go about it? Was it like thumb wrestling? I was debating asking about the rules and regulations of cockfighting, but just then the kid in the sweatshirt ambled into a building halfway down the block.

“He’s going back to the mother ship,” Ranger said.

Mostly, Stark Street is filled with narrow redbrick town houses, two to four stories tall. Small businesses in varying degrees of failure occupy ground floors, and the upper floors are given over to cramped apartments and rented rooms. At odd intervals on the street, you might find a garage or a ware house or a funeral home. The kid went into a four-story brick town house. All the windows had been painted black.

Ranger and I left the Escalade, crossed the street, and followed the kid into the building. The foyer was dimly lit by a bare bulb in an overhead fixture, the walls were entirely covered with graffiti. A door labeled HEAD MOTHERFUCKER opened off the foyer.

Ranger and I exchanged glances and went directly to the Head Motherfucker door. Ranger pushed the door open, and we looked inside at what at one time had probably been an efficiency apartment but was now a rat’s nest office. The desk was piled high with papers, empty fast-food boxes, a laptop computer, a multiline phone, and two half-filled cups of coffee. There was a chair behind the desk and a two-seater leather couch against a wall. Nobody home.

We left the office, closing the door behind us. We returned to the foyer and took the stairs to the second floor, where a dull-eyed wannabe junior gangsta sat on a plastic lawn chair. He was hooked up to an MP3 player, and he had a small wooden table beside him. There was a cigar box and a roll of tickets on the table.

“Yuh?” he said. “You want a ticket for the night or just for a run-through?”

“Run-through,” Ranger said.

“Twenty bucks each. Forty each, if you want a jumpsuit.”

“Just the run-through ticket,” Ranger said.

“You know the rules? You collect a ticket from the dude without no mess, and you get a kewpie doll. You’re gonna be on the third floor.”

Ranger and I climbed the stairs to the third floor and stood in the hallway.

“Do you have any idea what he was talking about?” I asked Ranger.

“No. Knowing Marbles, it could be most anything.”

There were two doors that opened off the hallway. The doors were labeled PUSSY and MOTHERFUCKERS.

“I’m taking the Motherfucker door,” I said to Ranger.

“No way. That’s my door.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not taking the Pussy door.”

“It’s just a door, Babe.”

“Great. Then you take it.”

Ranger moved to the Pussy door and shoved it open. He walked through the front room and looked into two other rooms. “It’s an apartment. Looks like it was decorated by someone on ’shrooms. No one home.”

I opened the Motherfucker door and stepped inside. The door closed behind me, neon red, green, blue, and white strobe lights activated and flickered across the front room, and hip-hop boomed from overhead speakers. I opened a door. Closet. I opened another door and a crazy-eyed, woolly-haired, scrawny guy in too-big pants and too-big shoes shouldered a gun at me from across the room.