“Salad or fries,” said the waitress. “Sunshine is extra, and you’ll have to eat it outside.”

“How about fries and a smile?” said Dunne.

“How about you have an accident, then I’ll smile?”

She left. The world breathed easier.

“You got a death wish, man,” said Mackey.

“I could die in her arms,” said Dunne.

“You dying on your sorry ass right now, and you ain’t even near her arms.”

He sighed, and poured so much sugar into his coffee his spoon pretty much stood up straight in it.

“So, you think G-Mack knows where this woman is at?” asked Mackey.

I shrugged. “We’re going to ask him that.”

“You think he’s going to tell you?”

I thought of Louis, and what he would do to G-Mack for hitting Martha.

“Eventually,” I said.

Jackie O was one of the old-time macks, the kind who believed that a man should dress the part. He typically wore a canary yellow suit for business, set off by a white shirt with a pink tie, and yellow-and-white patent leather shoes. A full-length white leather coat with yellow trim was draped across his shoulders in cold weather, and the ensemble was completed by a white fedora with a pink feather. He carried an antique black cane, topped with a silver horse’s head. The head could be removed with a twist, freeing the eighteen-inch blade that was concealed inside. The cops knew that Jackie O carried a sword stick, but Jackie O was never questioned or searched. He was occasionally a good source of information, and as one of the senior figures at the Point he was accorded a modicum of respect. He kept a close eye on the women who worked for him, and tried to treat them right. He paid for their rubbers, which was more than most pimps did, and made sure each was equipped with a pen loaded with pepper spray before she hit the streets. Jackie O was was also smart enough to know that wearing fine clothes and driving a nice car didn’t mean that what he did had any class, but it was all that he knew how to do. He used his earnings to buy modern art, but he sometimes thought that even the most beautiful of his paintings and sculptures were sullied by the manner in which he had funded their purchase. For that reason he liked to trade up, in the hope that by doing so he might slowly erase the stain upon his collection.

Jackie O didn’t entertain many visitors in his Tribeca apartment, purchased on the advice of his accountant many years before and now the most valuable possession that he had. After all, he spent most of his time surrounded by hookers and pimps, and they weren’t the kind of people to appreciate the art upon his walls. Real connoisseurs of art tended not to socialize with pimps. They might avail themselves of the services offered by them, but they sure weren’t going to be stopping by for wine and cheese. For that reason, Jackie O enjoyed a fleeting moment of pleasure when he looked through the spy hole in his steel door and saw Louis standing outside. Here was somebody who might appreciate his collection, he thought, until he quickly realized the probable reason for the visit. He knew that he had two choices: he could refuse to let Louis in, in which case he was likely to make the situation worse, or he could simply admit him and hope that the situation wasn’t already so bad that it couldn’t possibly get much worse. Neither option was particularly appealing to him, but the longer Jackie O procrastinated, the more likely he was to try the patience of his visitor.

Before opening the door, he put the safety back on the H amp;K that he held in his right hand, then returned it to the holster that lay taped beneath a small table near the door. He composed his features into an expression as close to joy and surprise as his fear would allow, unlocked and opened the door, and got as far as the words “My man! Welcome!” before Louis’s hand closed around his throat. The barrel of a Glock was pressed hard into the hollow below Jackie O’s left cheekbone, a hollow whose size was increased by Jackie O’s gaping mouth. Louis kicked the door shut with his heel, then forced the pimp back into the living room of the apartment before sending him sprawling across his couch. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, so Jackie O was still wearing his red Japanese silk robe and a pair of lilac pajamas. He found it hard to muster his dignity dressed as he was, but he gave it a good try.

“Hey, man, what is this?” he protested. “I invite you into my home, and this is how you treat me. Look”-he fingered the collar of his gown, revealing a six-inch rip in the material-“you done tore my gown, and this shit’s silk.”

“Shut up,” said Louis. “You know why I’m here.”

“How would I know that?”

“It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. You know.”

Jackie O gave up the act. This man was not someone to play the fool with. Jackie O could recall the first time he ever set eyes on him, almost a decade before. Even then he had heard stories, but he had not encountered the one about whom they were told. Louis was different in those days: there was a fire burning coldly inside him, clear for all to see, although the ferocity of it was slowly diminishing even then, the flames flickering confusedly in a series of crosswinds. Jackie O figured that a man couldn’t just go on killing and hurting without paying a high price for it over time. The worst of them-the sociopaths and the psychos-they just didn’t realize it was happening, or maybe some were just so damaged to start with that there wasn’t much room for further deterioration. Louis wasn’t like that, though, and when Jackie O first knew him the consequences of his actions were gradually beginning to take their toll upon him.

A honey trap was being set for a man who preyed on young women, after a girl was killed by him in a country far from this one. Some very powerful people had decreed that this man was to die, and he was drowned in a bathtub in his hotel room, lured there with the promise of a girl and a guarantee that no questions would be asked if she suffered a little, for he was a man with the money to indulge his tastes. It wasn’t an expensive hotel room, and the man had no possessions with him when he died, other than his wallet and his watch. He was still wearing the watch when he died. In fact, he was fully clothed when he was found, because the people who had ordered his death didn’t want there to be even the slightest possibility that it might be mistaken for suicide or natural causes. His killing would serve as a warning to others of his kind.

It was Jackie O’s bad luck to be coming out of a hotel room on the same floor when the killer emerged, after Jackie had set up one of his marginally more expensive women for a day’s work. He didn’t know the man was a killer, not then, or certainly not for sure, although he sensed something circling beneath the seemingly placid surface, like the pale ghost of a shark glimpsed moving through the deep blue depths. Their eyes locked, but Jackie kept walking, making for the security of crowds and people. He didn’t know where the man was going or what he had been doing in that hotel room, and he didn’t want to know. He didn’t even look back until he was at the corner of the hallway, the stairs in view, and by then the man was gone. But Jackie O read the papers, and he didn’t need to be a mathematician to put two and two together. At that moment he cursed his high profile among his kind and his love of fine clothes. He knew he would be easy to find, and he was right.

So this was not the first time that the killer Louis had invaded his space; nor was it the first time that his gun had pressed itself to Jackie’s flesh. On that first occasion, Jackie had been sure that he was going to die, but there had been a steadiness to his voice when he said: “You got nothing to fear from me, son. I was younger, and I had the nerve, I might have done the same myself.”