The panty hose slid smoothly up his leg; he’d discovered the technique of gathering them, slipping them up piece by bit-bit-bit. When the hose were on, he stood and looked at himself in the dressing mirror; he looked like a fencer, he thought, bare chest and tights. He posed, turning sideways. A little full in the front. He reached into the panty hose and arranged his penis, pushing it down and under, tight, pulling the hose up to hold it in place. Posed again. Good.

The bra was next. He disliked it: it was cold and awkward, and cut into the muscles of his shoulders. But it gave him the right look and even the right feel. He snapped it in back, and again checked the mirror. With his soft blond hair, falling naturally now to his shoulders—no more wigs—he was a woman. Whitechurch had certainly been convinced. Bekker flashed: the look on Whitechurch’s face as the realization came to him, and the gun came up . . .

He picked out a medium-blue blouse with a high collar and the remnants of shoulder padding, a conservative, midcalf-length pleated skirt, and dark gym shoes with thick walking soles. With the breast prosthetics and his narrow shoulders, he had the figure of a woman, but his hands and feet might yet give him away.

They were simply too big, too square: he wore size ten men’s shoes. But when he wore dark women’s gym shoes, the size was not so obvious. As a woman he was taller than average, but not awkwardly so. And people expected blondes to be tall. Hiding his hands was a bigger problem . . . .

When he’d finished dressing, he looked in the mirror. Fine. Excellent. The big shoulder bag was something he might keep dressier shoes in, wearing the gym shoes to walk back and forth to the parking ramp. Yuppie. He added a necklace of synthetic pearls, picked up a bottle of Poison by Christian Dior, dabbed it along his throat, on the inside of his wrists. The perfume was too flowery, and he deliberately used too much. Perfume, Rayon told him, was a feminine, psychological thing. The odor of perfume alone might subliminally convince, in close quarters . . . .

There. Ready. He touched himself at the pit of his throat, and remembered that he’d seen his late wife do that, touch herself there, a sort of completion. He stepped to the mirror again, to take in the whole ensemble, and spontaneously laughed with the joy of it.

Beauty was back.

Beauty stepped carefully through the weeds to the lean-to garage, careful not to snag the hose. He left the car lights out, drove it to the gate, looked up and down the street, unlocked the gate, drove through, relocked it behind himself. He sat in the car for a moment, trying to think.

The parking garage at Bellevue was locked in his brain. Bellevue. He reached across the floor to his purse, found the bag, shook out a greenie: PCP. Popped one, two. Folded the bag and dropped it back in the purse, turned left. Careful. Bellevue? The hands on the steering wheel took him there, rolling through the dimly lit streets, precisely, evenly. A woman? Yes. Women were smaller and handled more easily, after they’d been taken. He recalled the struggle with Cortese, wedging the deadweight into the backseat of the Bug.

And women, he thought with sudden clarity and some curiosity, lasted longer . . . .

The guard nodded. He recognized the attractive blonde in the old Volkswagen Bug. She’d been there before . . . .

Bekker took the car to the top floor, which was virtually deserted. A red Volvo sat in a corner and looked like it might have been there for a couple of days. Two other cars were widely spaced. The garage was silent. He got his bag from the passenger-side floor, with the tank of anesthetic and the stun gun.

Bekker flashed: Cortese, the first one. Bekker’d hit him with the stun gun, had ridden him like a . . . No image came for a moment, then a hog. A heavy, midwestern boar, a mean brute. Bekker had ridden him down in the alley behind the Plaza, then used the mask. The power . . .

A car door slammed somewhere else in the garage; a hollow, booming sound. An engine started. Bekker went to the elevator, pushed the down button, waited. A sign on the wall said: “REMOVE VALUABLES FROM CAR: Although this ramp is patrolled, even locked cars are easily entered. Remove all valuables.”

The first hit of PCP was coming on, controlling, toughening him, giving his brain the edge of craft it needed. He glanced around. No camera. He walked slowly down the stairs past the cashier, around the corner toward the main entrance of the hospital. The sidewalk that led to the entrance was actually built as a ramp, slanting down between the parking ramp and a small hospital park. Bekker walked down the ramp, paused, then went left into the park, sat at a bench under a light.

Outside, the night was warm and humid, the smell of dirty rain and cooling bubble gum. A couple on the street were walking away from him, the man wearing a straw hat; the hat looked like an angel’s halo at that distance, a golden-white oval encircling his head.

Then: A main hospital door opened and a woman walked out. Headed toward the ramp, digging in a purse for keys. Bekker got up, started after her. She paused, still digging. Bekker closed. The woman was big, he realized. As he got closer, he saw she was too big. A hundred and eighty or two hundred pounds, he thought. Moving her would be difficult.

He stopped, turned, lifted a foot so he could look at the sole of his left shoe. Watch women, Rayon had told him. Watch what they do. Bekker had seen this, the stop, the check, the look of anger or disgust, depending on whether a heel was broken or she’d simply stepped in something, and then a turn . . . .

He turned, as though he might be going somewhere to fix whatever he was looking at, walked away from the heavy woman, back down into the park. He might be waiting for someone inside, might even be grieving. There were cops around, nobody would bother him . . . .

Shelley Carson was a graduate nurse. She ran an operating suite, took no crap from anyone.

And she was just the right size.

Bite-size, Bekker’s brain said when he saw her.

At five-two, she barely reached a hundred pounds when she was fully dressed. Aware of her inviting size, she was careful about the ramp. Tonight she walked out with Michaela Clemson, tall, rangy, blonde and tough; a lifelong tennis player, both a nurse and a surgical tech. They were still in uniform, tired from the day.

“Then you heard what he said? He said, ‘Pick it up and put it where I told you to in the first place,’ like I was some kind of child. I am definitely going to complain . . .” Clemson was saying.

Bite-sized Shelley Carson encouraged her: nurses were not less than doctors, they were members of a different profession. They should take no shit. “I’d certainly go in . . . .”

“I just can’t ignore it this time,” the blonde said, building her courage. “The asshole is a bad surgeon, and if he’d spend more time working on his surgery and less time trying to pull rank . . .”

Bekker slid in behind them. They saw him, peripherally, but neither really looked at him until they started into the ramp together, and then up the stairs.

“I definitely would,” the small one was saying. Her dark hair was cut close to the head, like a helmet, with little elfin points over her ears.

“Tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock I’m going to march in . . .” The blonde looked down at Bekker, then back up at her friend. Bekker climbed behind them, one hand on the stun gun.

Halfway up, the blonde said, “Tomorrow, I go for it.”

“Do it,” said the elf. “See you tomorrow.”

The blonde broke away, stepping into the main part of the ramp, peering out. “All clear,” she said. The blonde started toward a Toyota. Bekker and the dark-haired woman continued up, Bekker’s heels rapping on the stairs.