“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave them that broad, icy smile of his. “And once that’s done, I’m transferring you humps out of my division and out of my precinct. Anything goes wrong at that quarry tomorrow night? I’m transferring you to the Bomb Squad. You get to mark time till your retirements climbing under cars and hoping they don’t go boom. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir.”

A swivel back our way. “Mr. Kenzie and Miss Gennaro, you are civilians. I don’t like your being in this office, never mind going up that hill tomorrow night, but I don’t have much choice. So here’s the deal: You will not engage the suspects in any exchange of gunfire. You will not speak with the suspects. Should there be a confrontation, you will drop to your knees and cover your heads. When this is over, you will not discuss any aspects of the operation with the press. And you will not write books about the affair. Clear?”

I nodded.

Angie nodded.

“If you fail me on any of these points, I’ll have your licenses and gun permits revoked, and I’ll put the Cold Case squad on the Marion Socia homicide, call my friends in the press, and have them do a retrospective on the strange disappearance of Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy. Understood?”

We nodded.

“Give me a ‘Yes, Lieutenant Doyle.’”

“Yes, Lieutenant Doyle,” Angie murmured.

“Yes, Lieutenant Doyle,” I said.

“Excellent.” Doyle leaned back in his chair and held his arms out wide to the four of us. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

“Swell guy,” Angie said, when we reached the street.

“He’s just an old softie,” Poole said.

“Really?”

Poole looked at me like I was sniffing glue and shook his head very slowly.

“Oh,” I said.

“The money is safe, isn’t it, Mr. Kenzie?”

I nodded. “You want it now?”

Poole and Broussard looked at each other, then shrugged.

“No point,” Broussard said. “There’ll be a war room meeting sometime tomorrow between us and the Staties and the Quincy boys. Bring it then.”

“Who knows?” Poole said. “Maybe, with all the manpower we have staking out Olamon’s people, we’ll catch one of them leaving the house for the quarries tomorrow with the child in tow. We’ll drop ’em then and this whole thing’ll be over.”

“Sure, Poole,” Angie said. “Sure. It’ll be that easy.”

Poole sighed and rocked back on his heels.

“Man,” Broussard said, “I don’t want to work for no Bomb Squad.”

Poole chuckled. “This,” he said, “is the Bomb Squad, boy.”

We sat on the steps of Beatrice and Lionel’s front porch and gave them as much of an update and recent case history as we could, fudging any details that could possibly put them under federal indictment if this blew up in our faces at a later date.

“So,” Beatrice said when we finished, “this all happened because Helene pulled one of her fucked-up schemes and ripped off the wrong guy.”

I nodded.

Lionel picked at a large callus on the side of his thumb, blew air out of his mouth in a steady rush. “She’s my sister,” he said eventually, “but this-this is…”

“Unforgivable,” Beatrice said.

He looked back at her, then turned back to me as if he’d had tonic water splashed in his face. “Yeah. Unforgivable.”

Angie came over to the railing and I stood up, felt her warm hand slide into mine.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I doubt anyone could have seen this coming.”

Beatrice crossed the porch and sat on the steps beside her husband. She took both his large hands in hers and they looked far off down the street for a minute or so, their faces drawn and empty and angry and resigned all at the same time.

“I just don’t understand,” Beatrice said. “I just don’t understand,” she whispered.

“Will they kill her?” Lionel looked over his shoulder at us.

“No,” I said. “There’s no sense in that.”

Angie squeezed my hand to hold me up against the weight of the lie.

Back at the apartment, I took the first shower to wash off four days of sitting in cars and following scumbags around town, and Angie took the second.

When she came out, she stood in the living room doorway, the white towel wrapped tightly around her honey skin, and ran a brush back through her hair, watching me as I sat in the armchair and jotted notes of our meeting with Lieutenant Doyle.

I looked up, met her eyes.

They are amazing eyes, the color of caramel and very large. I sometimes think they could drink me if they wanted to. Which would be fine, believe me. Perfectly fine.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“We’ve been locked in a car for three and a half days. What was to miss?”

She tilted her head slightly, held my gaze until I got it.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean you’ve missed me.”

“Yeah.”

I nodded. “How much?”

She dropped the towel.

“That much,” I said and something caught in my throat. “My, my.”

After making love, I live for a time in a world of echoes and snapshot memories. I lie in the damp dark with Angie’s heart beating atop my own, her spine pressed against my fingertips or her hip warming my palm, and I can hear the echo of her soft groans, a sudden gasp, the low, throaty chuckle she emits after we’re spent and she tosses her head back for a moment and her dark hair falls from her face and down her back. With my eyes closed, I see in close-up the bite of her upper teeth on her lower lip, the cut of her calf on the white mattress, the press of a shoulder blade against her flesh, the wisps of dream and appetite that suddenly cloud and moisten her eyes, the points of her dark pink nails sinking into the skin above my abdomen.

After making love with Angie, I’m no good for anything for half an hour or so. Most times, I need someone to draw me a diagram just to dial a phone. All but the most basic motor skills are largely beyond me. Intelligent conversation is out of the question. I just float in echoes and snapshots.

“Hey.” She drummed her fingers on my chest, tightened her thigh against the inside of my own.

“Yeah?”

“You ever think-”

“Not at the moment.”

She laughed, hooked a foot around my ankle, and rose up my chest a bit, ran a tongue along my throat. “Seriously, just for a sec.”

“Shoot,” I managed.

“You ever think, I mean, when you’re inside me, that what we’re doing could, if we let it, produce life?”

I tilted my head and opened my eyes, looked into hers. She stared back calmly. A smudge of mascara under her left eye looked like a bruise in the soft dark of our bedroom.

And it was our bedroom now, wasn’t it? She still owned the house she’d grown up in on Howes Street, still kept most of her furniture there, but she hadn’t spent a night there in almost two years.

Our bedroom. Our bed. Our sheets tangled around these two bodies lying together, heartbeats drumming, flesh pressed together so tightly it would be hard for an observer to decide where one of us ended and the other began. Hard for me sometimes, too.

“A child,” I said.

She nodded.

“Bring a child,” I said slowly, “into this world. With our jobs.”

Another nod, and this time her eyes glistened.

“You want that?”

“I didn’t say that,” she whispered, and leaned in and kissed the tip of my nose. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about it?’ Did you ever think about the power we have when we’re making love in this bed and the springs are making noise and we’re making noise and everything feels…well, wonderful, and not just because of the physical sensation, but because we’re joined-me and you-right here?” She pressed a palm against my groin. “We’re capable of creating life, baby. Me and you. One pill I forget to take-one chance in, what is it, a hundred thousand?-and I could have life growing in me right now. Your life. Mine.” She kissed me. “Ours.”