Shad nodded, sniffling some of the blood back up into his nostrils.

Lorna was waiting on the other side of the door.

"Do I have to call an ambulance or something?" the sweet young thing asked.

"He can walk and talk all right," I said. "He might need an ice pack and a towel."

"Let his mother give him that," she said.

ON THE STREET I looked at the fancy phone that my self-titled telephonic and computer personal assistant (TCPA), Zephyra Ximenez, had provided me with. Breland Lewis had called four times.

I went into a chain coffee shop and ordered herbal tea. I needed something calming so that the violence coursing through me didn't overtake my good sense. Six sips after sitting at a small round table I inhaled deeply and sat back against the wall.

I missed smoking… very much. A cigarette calmed me down more than a quart of chamomile tea and thirty minutes of zazen sitting combined. But tobacco also cut down on my breath, and a good wind was a necessity in my line of work. The kind of situations I got into could run a regular guy ragged.

Twenty minutes or so after I bloodied Shad's face I entered my lawyer's ten digits.

"Breland Lewis, attorney at law," a mature female voice recited.

"It's Leonid, Shirley."

She didn't even say hello, just patched the call through.

"Leonid?"

"What's the big deal, Breland?"

"It's Sharkey. I think you better see him tonight, or at the latest by tomorrow morning."

"Why's that?"

"I need you to get some feel for what we're getting into. These new charges have a federal spin on them. He's expecting you."

"You told him about me?"

"I said your name was John Tooms. He thinks you work for me, that I'm sending you over to help out."

RON SHARKEY WAS PART of the past that I'd never shake.

The first time I heard of him was from a man named Bob Beam. Beam offered $7,500 to get his business partner in trouble with the law.

"All I need is for him to get fouled up on some charge that would make him have to come up with ten thousand dollars or so," he told me in my office-I was set up on an upper floor of the Chrysler Building at that time.

Beam was a squat, wide-faced white man. He smiled like a satrap sitting on a mound of silk pillows.

"Why?" I asked.

Beam was suggested to me by a technology smuggler named Frog Cornbluth. It was a valid reference but Frog's endorsement didn't come with any insurance and so I wanted specific details in case it blew up in my face.

"Ron and I own a company that imports chip boards," Beam told me. "The last time I did a run to Beijing I was told by a reliable source that a large company there was thinking of buying us out. That could mean millions. I'm still in deep debt from my last business and I'm only a junior partner in the company. My profit would be gone before I got the chance to count it."

"So how will getting Ron into trouble help that?" I wasn't outraged by the suggestion. This was business as usual for me.

"Just enough trouble to make him have to get a lawyer. I happen to know that money's tight for him. I'll offer to buy some of his stock at a cut-rate price and then enjoy the windfall when the company's sold to Wing Lee."

It turned out that Ron made regular trips to Toronto to visit a small computer company that they supplied. I wondered aloud if there might be a way to secrete an illegal substance in the toe of a shoe in his suitcase. Bob, smiling broadly, said that that would be no problem.

I had a friend who had a friend who worked a regular job in international airport security. A call was made and Ron Sharkey's bags were searched. The drug was discovered. But it was closer to a pound than the agreed-upon two grams.

Ron signed a power of attorney over to Irma, his wife. She attempted to make the deal with Bob but something about his financial status scotched the trade before the money made it into Irma's account.

Bob didn't tell me that he was having an affair with Ron's wife. Irma told Ron that she couldn't raise the money and that she didn't want to threaten their son's future by selling the only property they had-their house. Ron, being a good sort, said he understood and made a deal with the federal prosecutor to accept an eight-year sentence-with no chance for parole.

By that time I was out of the loop but I learned what happened after the fact.

Bob was hired by Wing Lee to stay on as president of the company, keeping his junior share. Irma divorced Ron and married Bob. Three years later Bob died of a heart attack and Irma remarried. This third husband embezzled from the thriving new chip-board company and ran down to Brazil.

In the meanwhile, Ron had been broken by a system that produced more hardened criminals than it ever took in. The one-time honest businessman had been the bitch of half a dozen lifelong criminals. The monotony and terror of incarceration had made him a drug addict. On the outside he became a low-level dealer and half-assed burglar.

After I saw the error of my ways I started keeping tabs on the innocents that I'd torn down. When Ron got out I hired Breland to go to him, give him a little money and his card. Whenever Ron got into trouble, Breland was there to represent him in court. I had spent over ten thousand dollars keeping Ron from going back to prison.

"WHAT'S HE INTO NOW?" I asked my lawyer as I sipped the lukewarm tea.

The headache was playing in the background like a Wagnerian intermezzo.

"I don't know all the details yet. I was busy and had one of my associates go down to bail him out. But it seems like he was caught driving a car with a small amount of drugs in his pocket and some serious guns in the trunk."

"Who would trust Sharkey with something like that?"

"He says that he found the car parked on the street with the key in the ignition. That he was going to pick up his girlfriend and drive to Cape Cod because she used to live out there."

"Did the car have any registration?"

"No. Nothing. It was NYPD that picked him up to begin with, but you can bet that the feds will be on the trail before too long. If he goes to court it will be long and drawn out. You'll spend a hundred thousand dollars and he'll go to prison anyway."

"Where is he now?"

"At his girlfriend's place, way over on Avenue C."

I took down the address and stayed in my seat, wondering if there would ever come a time when life would get easier and I could relax.

It was somewhere between five and six but the night had already come on under the domination of daylight savings. I definitely did not want to go home. And so a train ride down the East Side was called for.

I had never met nor had I even seen Ron Sharkey. I knew him by his picture and his predilections, his choices and mistakes. Ron Sharkey was a part of me, the man I had to save in order to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. He wasn't the only one, but he was certainly one of the squeakiest wheels.

WILMA SPYRES LIVED ON the top floor of an eight-story brick building that had been painted turquoise for no apparent reason. The buzzer was broken, as was the lock on the downstairs front door.

Some doors to apartments were open down the hall. TV shows, food smells, and voices assailed me as I made my way to the elevator. It was broken, too, and so I took the stairs. I ran across a young man and woman injecting each other with what I assumed to be some kind of opiate on the fourth-floor landing. She was dirty blond and probably white, while he had a New World Hispanic tint to his skin. They gauged me as either a threat or a mark and finally decided to ignore my passing.