“Just for a couple of days. There’s a woman who’s being bothered by a guy.”

“You want us to hurt him?”

“Us? Who’s us?”

“You know.” He gestured with his thumb at some indefinable place beyond the confines of the bar. Despite the cold, I felt a prickle of sweat on my forehead and aged about one year in an instant.

“They’re here? What are you, joined at the hip?”

“I told them to wait outside. I know they make you nervous.”

“They don’t make me nervous. They scare the hell out of me.”

“Well, they’re not allowed in here no more anyway. They’re not allowed anywhere, I guess, not since the, uh, the thing.”

There was a “thing.” Where the Fulcis were concerned, there was always a “thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing over at the B-Line.”

The B-Line was just about the roughest joint in the city, a dive bar that offered a free drink to anyone who could produce a one-month AA badge. Getting banned from the B-Line for causing trouble was like getting thrown out of the Eagle Scouts for being too good with knots.

“What happened?”

“They hit a guy with a door.”

By comparison with some of the stories I had heard about the Fulcis, and the B-Line, that seemed comparatively minor.

“You know, that doesn’t sound so bad. For them.”

“Well, it was really a couple of guys. And two doors. And they took the doors off their hinges so they could hit the guys with them. Now they can’t go out so much no more. They’re kind of sore about it. But they don’t mind sitting in the lot here. They think the lights are pretty, and I bought them a couple of family-style takeouts from Norm’s.”

I took a deep, calming breath.

“I don’t want anybody hurt, which means I’m not sure that I want the Fulcis near this.”

Jackie scowled. “They’ll be disappointed. I told them I was meeting you, and they asked to come along. They like you.”

“How can you tell? Because they haven’t hit me with a door yet?”

“They don’t mean no harm. It’s just that the doctors keep changing their medication, and sometimes it don’t take like it should.”

Jackie spun his bottle sorrowfully. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and it was clear that he felt society had misjudged the Fulcis on a great many levels. Society, by contrast, was certain that it had the Fulcis down pat, and had taken all appropriate steps to ensure that contact with them was kept to a minimum.

I patted Jackie on the arm.

“We’ll find something for them to do, okay?”

He brightened. “They’re good guys to have around when things get messy,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that things tended to get messy precisely because they were around.

“Look, Jackie, this guy’s name is Merrick, and he’s been following my client for a week now. He’s been asking about her father, but her father has been missing for a long time, so long that he’s been declared legally dead. I cornered Merrick yesterday, and he said that he’d ease off for a couple of days, but I’m not inclined to trust him. He’s got a temper.”

“Was he carrying?”

“I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Jackie sipped his beer.

“How come he’s only showing up now?” he asked.

“What?”

“If this guy’s been missing so long, how come this other guy is only asking about him now?”

I looked at Jackie. That was the thing about him. Something definitely rattled in his head when he walked, but he wasn’t dumb. I’d considered the question of why Merrick was now asking about Daniel Clay, but not what might have prevented him from doing so before. I thought again of that tattoo on his knuckle. Could Merrick have been doing time since Daniel Clay disappeared?

“Maybe I can find that out while you’re watching the woman. Her name is Rebecca Clay. I’ll introduce you to her tonight. And look: keep the Fulcis away from face-to-faces with her, but if you want to have them close by, then that’s okay with me. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to let them be seen keeping an eye on the house.”

Even a man like Merrick was likely to be discouraged from approaching Rebecca by the sight of three big men, two of whom made the third look underfed.

I gave Jackie a description of Merrick and his car, including the tag number. “Don’t bank on the car, though. He may ditch it now that it’s been connected with him.”

“Century and a half a day,” said Jackie. “I’ll look after Tony and Paulie out of it.” He finished his beer. “Now, you gotta come out and say hello. They’ll be offended if you don’t.”

“And we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I meant it, too.

“Damn straight.”

Tony and Paulie hadn’t arrived in their monster truck, which was why I hadn’t spotted them when I’d parked. Instead, they were sitting in the front of a dirty white van that Jackie sometimes used for what he euphemistically termed his “business.” As I approached, the Fulcis opened the van doors and climbed out. I wasn’t even sure how Jackie had managed to get them in there to begin with. It looked like the van had been assembled around them. The Fulcis weren’t tall, but they were wide, even double-wide. The kind of places that they shopped for clothes opted for practical over fashionable, so they were twin visions in polyester and leather blousons. Tony clasped my hand in one of his paws, smearing it with barbecue sauce, and I felt something pop. Paulie patted me softly on the back, and I almost coughed up a lung.

“We’re back in business, fellas,” announced Jackie proudly.

And for a brief moment, before common sense prevailed, I felt strangely happy.

I drove with Jackie over to Rebecca Clay’s house. She looked relieved to see me again. I made the introductions and told Rebecca that Jackie would be looking after her for the next few days, but that I’d also be around if anything came up. I think Jackie looked more like her idea of a bodyguard than I did, so she didn’t object. In the interest of almost full disclosure, I also told her that there would be two other men nearby in case of trouble, and gave her a rough description of the Fulcis that erred on the side of flattery without resorting to outright lies.

“Are three men really necessary?” she asked.

“No, but they come as a package. They’ll cost one-fifty a day, which is cheap, but if you’re worried about the cost, we can work something out.”

“It’s okay. I think I can afford it for a while.”

“Good. I’m going to try to find out more about Merrick while we have breathing space, and I’m going to talk to some of the people on your list. If we’re no closer to figuring out Merrick at the end of this two-day grace period, and he still won’t accept that you can’t help him, we’ll go to the cops again and try to have him picked up before running the whole thing by a judge. Right now, I know you’d prefer a more physical approach, but we need to exhaust the other possibilities first.”

“I understand.”

I asked after her daughter, and she told me that she’d arranged for Jenna to go to D.C. with her grandparents for a week. Her absence had been cleared with the school, and Jenna would leave first thing in the morning.

She walked me to the door and touched my arm.

“Do you know why I hired you?” she asked. “I used to date a guy called Neil Chambers. He was Jenna’s father.”

Neil Chambers. His father, Ellis, had approached me earlier in the year, seeking help for his son. Neil owed money to some men in Kansas City, and there was no way that he could pay the debt. Ellis wanted me to act as an intermediary, to find some way to solve the problem. I couldn’t help him, not then. I had suggested some people I thought might be able to work something out, but it was too late for Neil. His body was dumped in a ditch as a warning to others shortly after Ellis and I had spoken.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. Neil didn’t see Jenna much, hadn’t seen her in years to tell the truth, but I’m still close to Ellis. He and his wife, Sara, are the ones who are looking after Jenna this week, and he was the one who told me about you.”