Kurtz sighed. "You know I didn't do this, Hathaway. Not my style. When I want to butcher housewives, I always use a Mac 10."

Hathaway showed his big teeth and squeezed harder. This time, Kurtz knew that it was coming and did not moan aloud, even when it seemed that his collarbones were clicking like castanets.

"Take this piece of shit out of here," said Hathaway.

On cue, two huge uniformed officers entered the room, unlocked Kurtz's cuffs, recuffed him with his hands behind his back, and led him out of the room.

One of the uniformed cops had brought a wad of paper towels to dab at the blood dripping from Kurtz's cheek and chin.

Kurtz looked down at his blue oxford-cloth shirt—his only shirt. Damn.

The uniforms led him down the hall, through various green corridors, through security checkpoints, downstairs to the basement area where he was fingerprinted, searched again, and digitally photographed.

Kurtz knew the drill. With the backlog, it would probably be late the next day before they got around to arraigning him. Kurtz shook his head—Hathaway couldn't be serious about going for Murder One. At the arraignment, for whatever the hell he was actually going to be charged with, Kurtz could post bail and go free until his preliminary hearing.

"What are you smiling at, scumbag?" asked the cop busy trying hard to throw away the huge wad of bloody paper towels without getting any blood on his bare hands.

Kurtz assumed his normal expression. The thought of bail had amused him. Everything he had in the world was in his billfold—a little less than $20. Arlene had been stretched pretty thin, what with fronting the money for the computers and office junk. No, he'd have to sit this one out—first here at the courthouse holding pen, and then down out at the Erie County Jail—until someone in the district attorney's office noticed that there was no case here, that Hathaway was just blowing smoke.

Well, Kurtz judged, he had gotten pretty good at sitting and waiting.

"You understand, my man?" said Malcolm Kibunte to Doo-Rag for the fourth time. "He go up to 'raignment tomorrow sometime, they probably transfer him tomorrow late or next day morning, and he go into general population out at County."

"I unnerstand," said Doo-Rag, beginning to nod a bit, his heavy-lidded gaze becoming a bit more unfocused, but still there enough for Malcolm's purposes.

"Good," said Malcolm and patted the banger on the back.

"What I don't unnerstand, you know, what I need to axe you," said Doo-Rag, squinting through his nod, "is how come, you know, you be getting so fucking generous in your ol' age, Malcolm? You know what I mean? How come you turn over the whole D-Mosque ten bills to me and mine when we do this, you know, this pasty honky fucker for you? You hear what I'm saying?"

Malcolm opened his palms. "It's not for me, Doo. It the Block D-Mosque brothers who want him shanked. No way I can get in there after the dude, so I just pass the word to you, my man. You want to give me some of the reward, that's cool, but no way I can get myself in there after the fucker, hear me? So if your people do the job—" Malcolm shrugged—"fucker's dead, Mosque brothers happy, everything cool."

Doo-Rag was still frowning, working the thing through his drugged mind, but he obviously could not find a catch. "Tomorrow visiting day at County," he said. "Get in early, like ten, pass the word to Lloyd and Small Pee and Daryll, your whiteboy be dead meat before lockdown."

"He may not be transferred until day after tomorrow," Malcolm reminded him. "But probably tomorrow. Arraigned tomorrow, probably bussed tomorrow."

"Whenever," said Doo-Rag.

"You got his mug shot, my man?"

Doo-Rag patted the chest pocket of his filthy Desert Storm camouflage jacket.

"You remember his name, my man?"

"Curtis."

"Kurtz," said Malcolm, tapping Doo-Rag's nodding head right on the red do-rag. "Kurtz."

"Whatever," said Doo-Rag, shaking his head and climbing out of the SLK. He sauntered down the avenue, several of his fellow gangbangers falling into the same ambling pace with him. Doo-Rag reached into his baggy trousers, pulled out some of the crack bottles Malcolm had given him, and distributed them to his pals like candy.

Kurtz had almost forgotten how chaotically insane the city holding pens were compared to the regimented insanity of real cellblock life. The lights were on all night and new prisoners were being dragged through in greater numbers as the night grew later; there were already a dozen men in his cell by midnight, and the noise and stink were enough to drive a Buddhist monk bugfuck. One of the junkies was shouting and crying and vomiting and shouting some more until Kurtz went over and helped him relax with two fingers to the nerve that ran along his carotid artery. None of the guards came by to clean up the vomit.

There were three whites in the cell, counting the now-unconscious junkie, and the blacks were doing their usual territorial filings and shooting cutting stares and glances Kurtz's way. If any of them recognized him, he knew, they would also know about the D-Mosque fatwah and it could mean a long night. There was nothing that Kurtz could use as a weapon—no spring, paper clip, ballpoint—nothing sharp at all, so he decided to just set up an early-warning system and try to get some sleep. Kurtz tossed the slumped junkie off one of the four small benches and used the side of his palm to convince the other white prisoner to sleep on the floor as well. Then Kurtz stacked up their slumped forms as a sort of fence about a yard from the bench. It wouldn't take much effort for the blacks to get over his little roadblock, but it would certainly slow them down a bit. Of course, Kurtz was not discriminating against the African-American prisoners, it was just that there were more of them, and they were more likely to have heard of the bounty.

Cockroaches skittered across the floor, feasted on the pool of vomit in no-man's-land, and then explored the folds of the junkie's clothes and crawled across the other white guy's exposed ankle.

Kurtz curled up on the unpadded bench and went into a half doze, eyes closed, but his face toward the mass of other men. After a while, their murmuring died down, and most of them dozed or sat cursing. Cops dragged whores and junkies past the cell toward the next corridor of pens. Evidently, this inn had not yet put out its No Vacancy sign for the night.

Sometime around 2:00 a.m., Kurtz snapped fully awake and pulled his fist far back in a killing mode. Movement. It was only a uniformed cop unlocking the cell door.

"Joe Kurtz."

Kurtz went out warily, not turning his back on either the other prisoners or the cop. This might be Hathaway's plan—the throwdown was certainly still around somewhere. Or maybe one of the cops had seen the paperwork on his arrest and connected him with the Death Mosque bounty.

The uniformed cop was fat and sleepy looking and—like all of the cops in the cell corridor—had left his weapon on the other side of the main sliding grate. The cop carried a baton in his hand and a can of Mace on his belt. Video cameras followed their movement. Kurtz decided that if Hathaway or anyone else was waiting around the bend in the corridor, about all he could do was take the baton away from the fat cop, use him as a shield during any shooting, and try to get in close. It was a shitty plan, but the best he could improvise without access to another weapon.

No one was waiting around the corridor. They passed through the doors and grates without incident. In the booking room another sleepy sergeant returned his wallet, keys, and change in a brown envelope and then led him up the back stairs to the main hall. There they unlocked the cage and let him walk.