“Here, darling, let me get that for you,” Deon said, reaching for his wallet.

“Yeah, awright.” The kid had the sound of the projects in his voice. Which to Deon indicated that he might be more available than his dazzling looks would otherwise suggest.

“I haven’t seen you around here before. What’s your name?”

“Who askin’?”

“They call me Fabulous Deon. I’m well known in these parts. If you’re looking for an in, I could be just your ticket.”

“Maybe I’m lookin’. But why you gotta ask my name?”

The young man finished off his drink in a quick gulp, head tipped back, Adam’s apple bobbing in his well-muscled neck. Then he wiped his lovely mouth with the back of his hand.

“You like your privacy. Not a problem. I’ll just call you darling,” Deon said, practically salivating.

“I know a place. C’mon, I ain’t got all night.”

The boy took Deon by the hand and pulled him through the crowd toward the edge of the platform. Deon wondered what the kid charged. He looked expensive, and Deon only had forty left in his wallet.

They reached the far end of the subway platform, and the kid pulled Deon into the darkness of the tunnel. “Where are we going? Wouldn’t the men’s room be more convenient?” Deon asked.

“Dis way,” the kid said, gripping his wrist tighter.

Deon realized he was about to be robbed. He dug his heels in, but the kid was strong and had him in an iron grip. He yanked Deon a few feet forward, then pounded on a metal door barely visible in the half-light. It swung open to reveal one of Expo’s bodyguards.

“Lamar, help! I’m being robbed!” Deon yelled. But Lamar grasped Deon by his shirtfront, threw him to the hard tile floor, and kicked him repeatedly in the gut with heavy work boots. Deon screamed at the top of his lungs, the sound masking the crunch of breaking ribs.

“It ain’t feel too good being a rat now, huh?” Lamar said. He rifled through Deon’s pockets and pulled out his wallet.

Through a haze of pain, Deon saw Jay Esposito talking to a tall, slender white man he didn’t recognize. Jay nodded at Lamar, who gave Deon’s wallet to the pouty kid. Jay peeled five hundreds off a money clip he took from his breast pocket, counting them carefully, and put those in the kid’s hands, too.

“Remember, I know where you live,” Expo said.

“Yo, we cool. You ain’t got no problems wit’ me,” the kid said, stuffing the money and the wallet in his pants and heading for the door, which Lamar shut and bolted behind him.

Expo drew a large club from his leather golf bag and looked down at Deon, who lay moaning, tears leaking from his eyes.

“Did I mention, D, I been working on my golf swing?”

DAN OFFERED MELANIE a ride home.

“Tonight was a waste,” he observed as they headed north on the FDR.

“No. I disagree.”

“What did we learn? Other than the fact that Jay Esposito is hot for you, which I could’ve predicted.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Melanie said. “I got the distinct sense Esposito knew who I was and that’s why he was interested in me. The bodyguards hinting around there was law enforcement in the club convinced me of it.”

Dan’s jaw tensed.

“You’re gonna have to chill out about what I did tonight, you know,” she said, studying him.

Illuminated by the headlights of a passing car, he smiled. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“I’m starting to be able to read you, despite the fact that you don’t say much. So watch out.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m plenty scared of you already,” he said.

It’s mutual, she thought.

“You want to hear what I think we got out of tonight? Other than the fact that Bridget Mulqueen is hot for you, which I could have predicted,” Melanie said.

“Mulqueen’s all right. She reminds me of my dog when he was a puppy. All paws but a lot of heart. She might even make a decent cop someday.”

“Mmm-hmm, I thought so,” Melanie said, smiling.

“No way, you got me all wrong, sweetheart. I’m not egotistical like that,” he said, smiling back.

“Oh, right. There isn’t a man alive who doesn’t love some girl looking at him like he’s God’s gift.”

“If you looked at me that way, that’d be another story. That, I would like. But you need taming. I’d be doing the world a favor, getting Melanie Vargas into line. In fact, you better watch out, because I just might decide to try it.”

“Taming? You’re gonna pay for that remark, pal.”

“Yeah, says who? I’m bigger than you, in case you haven’t noticed.”

She’d noticed, all right. His reminding her of that fact set her pulse to racing.

“Will you please stop distracting me from work?” she said, a warm, tingly feeling spreading through her body.

“Aw, c’mon, give it a rest with the work stuff. I’m having a lot more fun joking around with you.”

“Resting is for dead people, baby.”

“Lucky you look so good, because you can be a royal pain in the backside,” Dan said, grinning, as he changed lanes smoothly and headed for the Sixty-first Street exit.

“Seriously, though. I think there’s a connection between Carmen Reyes going missing and the internal carries,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, that reminds me, I had an idea. What do you think of this? Maybe it wasn’t that Carmen witnessed something or nothing. Maybe she’s just scheduled to move the new shipment on Friday. The one Brianna Meyers mentioned in her e-mail. So they’re keeping her on ice till then.”

“Hmm. That’s very interesting. But do you really think Expo would use her as a courier now that her name’s been in the paper?”

“Good point. Although the guy’s pretty brazen. And stupid,” Dan said.

“He could always have her travel with false papers.”

“We should cover our bases, don’t you think? We know the route. We know the likely dates of travel. Get her picture out to the guys at the airport, and Carmen shouldn’t be too tough to spot.”

“Yeah, fine, but I’m not prepared to wait till Friday. I think she’s in danger, and I think we need to do more to find her now.”

“Like what? Her description and photo are on every database. We checked out her known contacts, took a hard look at her routine, but we came up empty so far. This is a big town. Where else do we look?”

“I have an idea,” Melanie said.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“We have a cell number for Expo, right? Why not write for his phone?”

“You mean do a wiretap?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it take a while to develop probable cause?” Dan asked.

“We don’t have a while. We use whatever we’ve got now and see if we can sneak it past a judge.”

“What do we even have to put in an affidavit?” Dan asked.

“Well, Whitney Seward calling Expo’s cell phone, including the night the girls died. Brianna Meyers texting Trevor that they were escorted to Puerto Rico. The flight manifest confirming that it was Esposito riding shotgun, when you get it.”

“Whoa, hold your horses, princess. I did get it. Negative on that.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, sorry I forgot to mention it. I tracked down the manifests from the flights Whitney and Brianna took to and from Puerto Rico. No Esposito.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

“Shit!”

“I know.”

“Maybe he flew under a false name?” she offered.

“How we gonna prove that? You pointed out before, Puerto Rico’s a domestic flight. No immigration checks, so no fingerprint scans.”

“Well, all right, let’s think what else we can use. We still have all the background from your friend’s old case on Esposito, that he was previously investigated for heroin trafficking. We have the suggestion in Brianna’s text that there’s a new shipment scheduled for Friday.”

“Isn’t it all shot down by the fact that we tried making a buy tonight and came up with squat? So we don’t got any drugs to put on the table to show a judge there’s an ongoing operation here.”