We noted the location of the nail parlor, the second business from the far end of the building, next to the tattoo den.

Thad said, "What if Miss Annette's apartment is above her nail parlor, but not directly above it? What if we waltz into somebody else's home by mistake?"

"We'll apologize," I said, "and ask where Miss Annette lives."

"Sounds like a plan."

The entrance to the rear stairway was in the center of the building, opposite the one in the front, and Thad had no trouble making his way through the lock in well under thirty seconds.

"You'd make a successful criminal," I told him.

"Thank you. I once was one. Not much of what the FFF did way back when was legal."

At the top of the wooden stairway was a long corridor going off to the left and to the right. Directly ahead was a wider stairway leading down to the front entrance. We turned left, toward the apartment over the nail parlor. There were three doors, however, one apparently to an apartment in the front of the building, one to an apartment in the rear, and one on the far end.

Thad said, "Uh oh."

"It's probably the front one or the rear one," I said.

"Yes, one or the other."

We checked the name cards on the doors. The one on the front apartment said

"Gomspold," and the card on the rear apartment said "D. Carletti."

"Gould it be Annette Gomspold?" Thad whispered.

"Maybe. And I wonder if the other one is Damien Carletti, the tattooist?"

But when we checked the door at the end of the hallway, the name card read

"Annette C. Koontz."

"I smell coffee brewing," Thad said. "But it seems to be coming from Gomspold's place."

These apartments, so close to one another, suddenly struck me as unlikely venues for holding kidnap victims. Even if the captives were bound and gagged and unable to cry for help, as Moyle said had been the case with him, getting them in and out of this building without attracting attention seemed like a stretch. My conviction that Steve Glodt was behind the kidnappings and that the J-Bird was being held, and possibly tortured and mutilated, in Annette Koontz's apartment-assuming that this woman actually had any connection whatever with Glodt-was starting to waver.

Thad said, "I'll just knock on the door lightly to see if anyone is up and about. If there's no response, I'll go in." He had the corkscrew from Dave Welch's Swiss army knife poised.

I thought, What am I doing here? How did I get mixed up in this thing? Why am I not home in bed in Albany with Timothy Callahan, instead of prowling through a building in Oyster Bay, Long Island, probably about to scare the crap out of some innocent workingwoman who is luxuriating in the only rest and solitude she can enjoy all week long? Could I have my PI license revoked for this? Or be convicted of a felony? Would it be house-breaking? Stalking? Invasion and assault?

Thad rapped lightly on Annette Koontz's door.

We waited.

No sound came from the Koontz apartment or from any of the others.

Thad looked at me, but before I could suggest that maybe we should reconsider what now felt like a reckless, even idiotic, misadventure, he had inserted the business end of his implement in the door's single lock, quickly maneuvered it this way and that, and when he turned the loiob, the door swung open.

We stood for a moment looking into a living room furnished with some fat leather chairs and a beige leather couch-Had a woman purchased these objects?-and a large-screen TV. It had been set inside one of those home-entertainment-center type structures ("A man's home is his megaplex"), which had a small bar attached to it. The illumination was dim, coming from a double window whose shades were lowered.

Thad looked at me again, then stepped carefully inside the apartment. I followed him.

A familiar voice said levelly, "Shut the door, you pond-scum, puke-ass-faggot, maggot-head creeps."

Jay Plankton was holding an automatic weapon the size of a grenade launcher, and it was aimed at Thad and me. He was standing in the semidarkness of a doorway leading to a room in the back of the building. His good diction indicated that he still had his tongue.

Thad said, "Hey, J-Bird, we come as friends."

"Rescuers," I added. "If that's what's needed, here we are."

"Shut the door," he said again, and I did as I was told.

Thad said, "So you're in on it? Way cool."

"You fooled me, Jay," I added. "What a prank! You're… you're too much, you crazy fucker, you."

"You can cut the showbiz crap," Plankton snapped. "I've reached my limit, and I'm not taking it anymore. No more. No more." He sounded exhausted, desperate.

"Jay, you're cracking me up," I said. "If you put that gun down, I'd collapse on the floor laughing. That is the idea, isn't it?"

But the look in Plankton's eye was not one of devilish merriment, or even of guilt. He looked enraged and crazed.

"You're going to get in there with your friends," he said, moving into the room with us, and waving toward the back room with his revolver. "And then I'm going to decide what to do with you. A good possibility is justifiable homicide."

"What would the justification be?" Thad asked.

"I'm in a bad mood," Plankton shot back. "1 low's that?"

"Interesting," Thad said, being careful, I guessed, not to worsen Plankton's mood.

I said, "We're here to rescue you, Jay-to look after your well-being, assuming that's what you want. ' I 'his is a l l in keeping with the terms of my agreement with you and Jerry Jeris. But you seem to have an entirely different idea of my role in all of this that's erroneous. Speaking of roles, it's unclear to me exactly what your role is. Gould you clear that up?"

"Shut your trap and get the hell in there!" Plankton snarled, moving away from the doorway to the back room, and waggling his large firearm at me.

"I guess we're going in there," I told Thad, and he followed me past Plankton, who kept the gun raised and his finger poised on the trigger.

The only illumination in the room was from the doorway we walked through. I could see that the windows had been covered with cardboard on which slogans had been spray-painted. One was FFF Lives! and another was Queer Revenge! It was a movie-of-the-week idea of gay protest, but someone must have thought it could be taken seriously by somebody.

The smell of nail polish was strong in the room, and it was apparent that here was the room where Leo Moyle had suffered his captivity. But as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, who, I wondered, were the two figures bound and gagged on the couch in the darkest corner of the room? I was about to guess out loud when Thad beat me to it.

"Are you Miss Annette?" Thad said to the female, a bosomy, large-haired blond woman whose dark eyes were huge with fright. The other figure was that of a slender man in jeans and a white T-shirt, with thinning hair and black circles around his eyes, which also showed fear. Many tattoos adorned the man's arms, but I was unable to make out what they represented.

The scared woman was not able to answer Thad's question regarding her identity owing to the duct tape pasted across her lower face, and her eyes darted from the J-Bird to Thad to me and back to Plankton and his revolver.

"I'm starting to get the drift of what happened here," I said. "You're not actually party to a gigantic scam, Jay- unless you're a better actor than anybody I know is likely to give you credit for." Plankton's eyes narrowed as he tried to sort through that.