“Not really, no, I don’t,” Ettie said. She didn’t feel like explaining that Grandma Ledbetter, bless her heart, had squeezed every shred of religion out of Ettie by her fierce lectures that mixed Catholicism and fiery Baptist dogma. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem to Ettie very different from the crazy stuff Hatake was talking about. Incense and holy water instead of High John Conqueror root.

Hatake tugged at her naked, punctured earlobe and continued to expound on the silliness of man-fetching spells and law stay-away oil. What was in your heart was what was important, Hatake said. Ettie’s mind wandered and she thought again about John Pellam. Wondered when he’d come to visit her again. If he’d come. That man ought to be a hundred miles away by now. What the hell was he helping her for? She thought with horror how he’d almost been trapped by the fire. Thought about little Juan Torres too. She said a nonbeliever’s prayer for the boy.

Then a noise from the front of the cell. The clank of metal on metal. Some of the women shouted hello to a new prisoner.

“Yo, girl. Weren’t out but one day? You got yo’ ass busted that quick?”

“Shit, Dannette, yo’ bad luck. I staying away from you, girl.”

Ettie watched the young woman with the pocked face and the beautiful figure walk uncertainly into the large cell. She was one of the prostitutes who’d been released just yesterday. Back so soon? Ettie smiled at her but the woman didn’t respond.

Dannette walked up to the circle of women sitting around Hatake Imaham, who nodded to the woman. “Hey, girl. Good to see you.”

Which sounded a little odd. Sort of like Hatake had been expecting her.

And the woman continued her lecture on hoodoo, talking now about Damballah, the highest in the voodoo order. Ettie knew this because her sister had dabbled in that craziness some years ago. Then the huge woman’s voice faded and the women began talking among themselves, very quietly. One or two of them glanced at Ettie but they didn’t include her in the conversation. That was all right. She was thankful for the quiet and for a few minutes’ peace. She had many things to think about and, as the good Lord, or Damballah, she laughed to herself, knew, there were few enough moments of peace in here.

One of those feelings. Somebody watching him.

Pellam stood on the curb in front of Ettie’s building, wasting his time asking amnesia-struck construction workers if they’d been in the alley when the fire started or if they knew who had.

He turned suddenly. Yep, there it was. About fifty feet away a glistening black stretch limo was parked in the construction site, under the large billboard on which an artist had rendered a dramatic painting of the finished building. Pellam had seen a number of billboards like this one on the West Side; whoever painted them managed to make the high-rises look as appealing, and as completely phoney, as the drawings of women modeling lingerie in the Saks and Lord & Taylor newspaper ads.

Pellam focused on the limo. The windows were tinted but he could see that someone in the backseat – a man, it seemed – was gazing at him.

Pellam suddenly lifted the camera to his shoulder and aimed at the limo. There was a pause and then some motion in the backseat. The driver punched the accelerator and the long vehicle bounded out of the drive. It vanished in traffic toward the fish-gray strip of the Hudson River.

He stepped off the curb, still aiming the camera, and so he never saw the second car, the one that nearly broadsided him.

When he heard the brakes he spun around and stumbled back over the curb out of the way, falling. He lost some skin on his elbows rescuing the Betacam – which was worth more than he was at the moment.

A man was all over him in an instant, huge man. Vice-grip hands grabbed Pellam’s arms, jerking him to his feet, lifting the camera away. Not even time to blurt a protest before he was flung into the backseat of the sedan. At first he thought Jimmy Corcoran had found out he was looking for his crew and sent some boys to find him.

Hacksaws… The image just wouldn’t leave him alone.

But he realized these men weren’t gangies. They were in their thirties and forties. And they wore suits. Then he remembered where he’d seen the one who grabbed him, the one with the smooth, baby skin and muscles upon muscles. And so wasn’t surprised to see who was in the front passenger seat.

“Officer Lomax,” Pellam said.

The huge assistant climbed into the front seat and started to drive.

“I’m not an officer,” Lomax said.

“No?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then what do I call you? Inspector? Fire marshal? Kidnapper?”

“Ha. Maybe I should call you Mr. Funny. Instead of Mr. Lucky. Ain’t he a kick?” Lomax asked his assistant. The wrestler didn’t respond.

Neither did the the man beside Pellam, a scrawny cop or marshal, tiny as a rooster. He didn’t seem even to notice Pellam and just stared at the scenery as they drove past.

“How you doing?” Lomax asked. Around the man’s neck was a badge on a chain. It was gold and had a mean-looking eagle perched on top of a crest.

“So-so.”

To his assistant the marshal said, “Take him where we just were.” Then added: “Only where nobody can see us.”

“The alley?”

“Yeah, the alley’d be good.”

This seemed rehearsed. But Pellam wasn’t going to play the intimidation game. He rolled his eyes. Three cops – or whatever fire marshals were – weren’t going to shoot him in an alley.

“We want to know one thing,” Lomax said, looking out the window at a recently burned store. “Only one thing. Where can we find that shit the old lady hired? That’s it. Just that. Tell us and you won’t believe the kind of deal we’ll cut for her.”

“She didn’t hire anybody. She didn’t torch the building. Every minute you spend thinking she did is another minute the real perp is free.”

This was another line from one of his movies. It sounded better on paper than it did when spoken aloud. But that may have been the circumstances.

Lomax said nothing for a few minutes. Then he asked, “You wanta know difference between women and men? Women break down easy. A man’ll hard-ass you for days. But you stand in front of a woman and scream and they start crying, they say, yeah, yeah, I did it, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to or I didn’t know anybody’d get hurt or my boyfriend made me do it. But they break down.”

“I’ll share that with Gloria Steinem next time I see her.”

“More of the humor. Glad you can laugh at times like this. But you maybe better listen to what I’m saying. I intend to break that woman one way or another. I don’t care how I do it. Tommy, am I saying this?”

The marshal’s huge assistant recited, “I don’t hear you saying anything.”

Beside Pellam, the skinny cop, the silent one, examined some kids opening a hydrant. He didn’t seem to hear anything either.

Lomax said, “I am gonna stop this fucking psycho and you’re in a position to make it easier on Washington and save a lot of innocent people in the process. You can talk to her, you can – Ah, ah, ah, don’t say a word, Mr. Lucky. Tell him what happened this morning, Tony.”

“Fire on the Eighth Avenue Subway.”

Lomax was looking at Pellam again. “How many injured, Tony?”

The assistant recited, “Sixteen.”

“How bad?”

“Real bad, boss. Four critical. One’s not expected to live.”

Lomax looked at the sidewalk, said to the driver, “Go the back way. I don’t wanna be seen.”

They were all very grim, these men – two of them outweighing Pellam by fifty pounds at least. And it was starting to occur to Pellam that while they might not shoot him they could beat the crap out of him. They’d probably even enjoy it. And break the forty-thousand-dollar camera that wasn’t his.