“I don’t guess,” he snarled. “And I don’t give a shit about counting your fucking pennies.”

“Of course not,” I said, trying to soothe him a bit. “After all, they’re not your pennies.”

“Your girlfriend signed the fucking contract,” he said. “I can charge you anything I fucking feel like.”

“But there must be something I can do to get the price down a little?” I said hopefully.

His snarl loosened into his patented leer again. “Not in a chair,” he said.

“Then what can I do?”

“If you mean what can you do to get me to change my mind, nothing. Not a thing in the world. I have people lined up around the block trying to hire me-I am booked two years in advance, and I am doing you a very large favor.” His leer widened into something almost supernatural. “So prepare yourself for a miracle. And a very hefty bill.”

I stood up. The little gnome was obviously not going to bend in the least, and there was nothing I could do about it. I really wanted to say something like “You haven’t heard the last of me,” but there didn’t seem much point to that either. So I just smiled back, said, “Well then,” and walked out of the apartment. As the door closed behind me, I could hear him, already squealing at Franky, “For Christ’s sake move your big ass and get all that shit off my fucking floor.”

As I walked toward the elevator I felt an icy steel finger brush the back of my neck and for just a moment I felt a faint stirring, as if the Dark Passenger had put one toe in the water and run away after seeing that it was too cold. I stopped dead and slowly looked around me in the hallway.

Nothing. Down at the far end a man was fumbling with the newspaper in front of his door. Otherwise, the hall was empty. I closed my eyes for just a moment. What? I asked. But there was no answer. I was still alone. And unless somebody was glaring at me through a peephole in one of the doors, it had been a false alarm. Or, more likely, wishful thinking.

I got in the elevator and went down.

As the elevator door slid shut the Watcher straightened up, still holding the newspaper from where he had taken it off the mat. It was a good piece of camouflage, and it might work again. He stared down the hall and wondered what was so interesting in that other apartment, but it didn’t really matter. He would find out. Whatever the other had been doing, he would find out.

He counted slowly to ten and then sauntered down the hallway to the apartment the other had visited. It would only take a moment to find out why he had gone in there. And then-

The Watcher had no real idea what was really going through the other’s mind right now, but it was not happening fast enough. It was time for a real push, something to break the other out of his passivity. He felt a rare pulse of playfulness welling up through the dark cloud of power, and he heard the flutter of dark wings inside.

I N MY LIFELONG STUDY OF HUMAN BEINGS, I HAVE FOUND that no matter how hard they might try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workaday lives of meaningless toil and suffering.

That thought always cheers me up, and because I like to spread happiness wherever I go, I did my small part to cushion the blow of unavoidable Monday morning by arriving at work with a box of doughnuts, all of which vanished in what can only be called an extremely grumpy frenzy before I reached my desk. I doubted very seriously that anyone had a better reason than I did for feeling surly, but you would not have known it to watch them all snatching at my doughnuts and grunting at me.

Vince Masuoka seemed to be sharing in the general feeling of low-key anguish. He stumbled into my cubbyhole with a look of horror and wonderment on his face, an expression that must have indicated something very moving because it looked almost real. “Jesus, Dexter,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“I tried to save you one,” I said, thinking that with that much anguish he could only be referring to the calamity of facing an empty doughnut box. But he shook his head.

“Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe it. He’s dead!”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with the doughnuts,” I said.

“My God, and you were going to see him. Did you?”

There comes a point in every conversation where at least one of the people involved has to know what is being talked about, and I decided that point had arrived.

“Vince,” I said, “I want you to take a deep breath, start all over from the top, and pretend you and I speak the same language.”

He stared at me as if he was a frog and I was a heron. “Shit,” he said. “You don’t know yet, do you? Holy shit.”

“Your language skills are deteriorating,” I said. “Have you been talking to Deborah?”

“He’s dead, Dexter. They found the body late last night.”

“Well, then, I’m sure he’ll stay dead long enough for you to tell me what in the hell you’re talking about.”

Vince blinked at me, his eyes suddenly huge and moist. “Manny Borque,” he breathed. “He was murdered.”

I will admit to having mixed reactions. On the one hand, I was certainly not sorry to have somebody else take the little troll out of the picture in a way I was unable to do for ethical reasons. But on the other hand, now I needed to find another caterer-and oh, yes, I would probably have to give a statement of some kind to the detective in charge. Annoyance fought it out with relief, but then I remembered that the doughnuts were gone, too.

And so the reaction that won out was irritation at all the bother this was going to cause. Still, Harry had schooled me well enough to know that this is not really an acceptable reaction to display when one hears of the death of an acquaintance. So I did my best to push my face into something resembling shock, concern, and distress. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. Do they know who did it?”

Vince shook his head. “The guy had no enemies,” he said, and he didn’t seem aware of how unlikely his statement sounded to anyone who had ever met Manny. “I mean, everybody was just in awe of him.”

“I know,” I said. “He was in magazines and everything.”

“I can’t believe anybody would do that to him,” he said.

In truth, I couldn’t believe it had taken so long for somebody to do that to him, but it didn’t seem like the politic thing to say. “Well, I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Who’s assigned to the case?”

Vince looked at me like I had asked him if he thought the sun might come up in the morning. “Dexter,” he said wonderingly, “his head was cut off. It’s just like the three over at the university.”

When I was young and trying hard to fit in, I played football for a while, and one time I had been hit hard in the stomach and couldn’t breathe for a few minutes. I felt a little bit like that now.

“Oh,” I said.

“So naturally they’ve given it to your sister,” he said.

“Naturally.” A sudden thought hit me, and because I am a lifelong devotee of irony, I asked him, “He wasn’t cooked, too, was he?”

Vince shook his head. “No,” he said.

I stood up. “I better go talk to Deborah,” I said.

Deborah was not in any mood to talk when I arrived at Manny’s apartment. She was bending over Camilla Figg, who was dusting for prints around the legs of the table by the window. She didn’t look up, so I peeked into the kitchen, where Angel-no-relation was bent over the body.

“Angel,” I said, and I found some difficulty believing my eyes, so I asked him, “Is that really a girl’s head there?”