The driver’s side window of the Dodge exploded inward, showering him with glass. He tried to raise his gun as the passenger window also disintegrated, but he received a blow to the side of the head that stunned him, then a strong hand was upon his right arm and the muzzle of a gun much bigger than his own was pressed painfully into his temple. He caught a glimpse of a black man with close-cropped graying hair and a vaguely satanic beard. The man did not look happy to see him. G-Mack’s left hand began to drift casually toward the Hi-Point concealed beneath his jacket, but the passenger door opened, and another voice said: “I wouldn’t.”

G-Mack didn’t, and the Hi-Point was slipped from his jeans.

“Let the Glock go,” said Louis.

G-Mack allowed the gun to drop to the floor of the car.

Slowly, Louis eased the gun away from G-Mack’s temple and opened the car door.

“Get out,” said Louis. “Keep your hands raised.”

G-Mack glanced to his left, where I knelt outside the passenger door. The Hi-Point in my left hand was dwarfed by my Colt. It was Big Gun Night, but nobody had told G-Mack. He stepped carefully from the car, falling glass tinkling to the ground as he did so. Louis turned him, pushing him against the side of the car and forcing his legs apart. G-Mack felt hands upon him and saw the little man in denim who had previously seemed on the verge of taking a drunken leak. He couldn’t believe that he had been fooled so easily.

Louis tapped him with the barrel of his own H amp;K.

“You see how dumb you are?” he said. “Now, we going to give you a chance to show how smart you are instead. Turn around, slowly.”

G-Mack did as he was told. He was now facing Louis and Angel. Angel was holding G-Mack’s Glock. G-Mack wasn’t going to be getting it back. In fact, although G-Mack probably didn’t know it, he was now as close as he had ever come to being killed.

“What do you want?” asked G-Mack.

“Information. We want to know about a woman named Alice. She’s one of your girls.”

“She’s gone. I don’t where she’s at.”

Louis raked his gun across G-Mack’s face. The younger man curled up, his hands cupped around his ruined nose, blood flowing freely between his fingers.

“You remember a woman?” said Louis. “Came to you a couple of nights back, asked you the same question that I just asked? You remember what you did to her?”

After a moment’s pause, G-Mack nodded, his head still down and drops of blood sprinkling the pitted ground beneath his feet, falling on the weeds that had sprouted between the cracks.

“Well, I ain’t even started hurting you enough for what happened to her, so if you don’t answer my questions right, then you won’t be walking out of this alley, do you understand?”

Louis’s voice dropped until it was barely a whisper.

“The worst thing about what will happen to you is that I won’t kill you,” he said. “I’ll leave you a cripple, with hands that won’t grip, ears that won’t hear, and eyes that won’t see. Are we clear?”

Again, G-Mack nodded. He had no doubt that this man would carry out his threats to the letter.

“Look at me,” said Louis.

G-Mack lowered his hands and raised his head. His lower jaw hung open in shock, and his teeth were red.

“What happened to the girl?”

“A guy came to me,” said G-Mack. His voice was distorted by the damage to his nose. “He told me that he’d give me good money if I could trace her.”

“Why did he want her?”

“She was in a house with a john, a guy named Winston, and a raid went down. The guy got killed, his driver too. Alice and another girl, Sereta, were there. They ran, but Sereta took something from the house before she left. The guys who did the killing, they wanted it back.”

G-Mack tried to sniff back some of the blood that had now slowed to an ooze over his lips and chin. The pain made him wince.

“She was a junkie, man,” he said. He was pleading, but his voice remained monotonic, as though he himself did not believe what he was telling Louis. “She was on the long slide. She wasn’t earning no more than a hundred dollars out there, and that was on a good night. I was gonna cut her loose anyway. He said nothing bad would happen to her, once she told them what they wanted to know.”

“And you’re telling me that you believed him?”

G-Mack stared Louis straight in the face.

“What did it matter?” he said.

For the first time in all the years that I had known him, Louis seemed about to lose control. I saw the gun rising and his finger tightening on the trigger. I reached out my hand and stopped it before it could point at G-Mack.

“If you kill him, we learn nothing more,” I said.

The gun continued its upward pressure against my hand for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

“Tell me his name,” said Louis.

“He didn’t give me a name,” said G-Mack. “He was fat and ugly, and he smelled bad. I didn’t see him but once.”

“He give you a number, a place to contact him?”

“The guy with him did. Slim, dressed in blue. He came to me, after I told him where she was at. He brought me my money, told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“How much?” asked Louis. “How much did you sell her out for?”

G-Mack swallowed.

“Ten Gs. They promised ten more if she gave them Sereta.”

I stepped away from them. If Louis wanted to kill him, then let it be done.

“She was blood to me,” said Louis.

“I didn’t know,” said G-Mack. “I didn’t know! She was a junkie. I didn’t think it would matter.”

Louis gripped him by the throat and forced the gun against G-Mack’s chest. Louis’s face contorted, and a wail forced itself from somewhere deep within him, issuing forth from the place where all of his love and loyalty existed, walled off from any of the evil that he had done.

“Don’t,” said the pimp, and now he was crying. “Please don’t. I know more. I can give you more.”

Louis’s face was close to him now, so close that blood from G-Mack’s mouth had spattered his features.

“Tell me.”

“I followed the guy, after he paid me off. I wanted to know where I could find him, if I had to.”

“You mean in case the cops came along, and you had to sell him out to save your skin.”

“Whatever, man, whatever!”

“And?”

“Let me go,” said G-Mack. “I tell you, you let me walk away.”

“You got to be fuckin with me.”

“Listen, man, I did wrong, but I didn’t hurt her. You need to talk to someone else about what happened to her. I’ll tell you where you can find them, but you got to let me walk. I’ll leave town, and you’ll never see me again, I swear.”

“You tryin to bargain with a man got a gun pushed into your chest?”

It was Angel who intervened.

“We don’t know that she’s dead,” he said. “There may still be a chance of finding her alive.”

Louis looked to me. If Angel was playing good cop and Louis bad cop, then my role was somewhere in between. But if Louis killed G-Mack, it would go bad for me. I didn’t doubt that Mackey and Dunne would come looking for me, and I would have no alibi. At the very least, it would involve some awkward questions, and might even reopen old wounds that would be better off left unexplored.

“I say listen to him,” I said. “We go looking for this guy. If it turns out that our friend here is lying, then you can do what you want with him.”

Louis took his time deciding, and all the while G-Mack’s life hung from a thread, and he knew it. At last Louis took a step back and lowered the gun.

“Where is he?”

“I followed him to a place off Bedford.”

Louis nodded.

“Looks like you bought yourself a few more hours of life,” he said.

Garcia watched the four men from his hiding place behind the Dumpster. Garcia believed all that Brightwell had told him, and was certain of the rewards that he had been promised. He now bore the brand upon his wrist, so that he might be recognized by others like him, but unlike Brightwell, he was merely a foot soldier, a conscript in the great war being waged. Brightwell also bore a brand upon his wrist, but although it was far older than Garcia’s, it appeared never to have properly healed. In fact, when Garcia stood close to Brightwell, he could sometimes detect the smell of scorched flesh from him, if a diminution of the fat man’s own stench permitted it.