"Gimme a day, two at the most, I'm working on a thing. I'll have the money by tomorrow," he said.

"I'm not here about money," I said.

"What do you want?" he said into the wall.

"I want to know why four stiffs came to my office and threatened me if I didn't drop the Ellis Alves case."

"I don't know," he said. "Why should I know."

I stepped in close to him and dug a left into his kidneys. He gasped and sagged a little against the wall.

"You sent them," I said.

"I don't even know who you are," he said.

"My name's Spenser. You know a guy named Tommy Miller?"

"Yeah."

"You sending the sluggers to my office got anything to do with him?"

"I don't know what you're…"

I hit him again in the same kidney. He made a kind of a yelp and his knees sagged. He turned toward me and slid his back down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his fat legs splayed out in front of him.There was blood on the corner of his mouth. It took him a couple of tries to speak.

"Yeah. Tommy said he wanted you roughed up. I owed him a favor. I sent out some guys."

"Why'd you owe him a favor?"

"He, ah, he helped me out when I got nabbed."

"How?"

"Got rid of some stuff."

"Evidence?"

"Yeah."

"What are friends for," I said.

"No harm done," Parisi mumbled. "Nobody roughed you up. We was only going to scare you."

"If you scare me again," I said, "I will come back and kick your teeth out."

"No trouble," Parisi said. "No trouble."

"Sure," I said and walked out.

Chapter 24

SUSAN GAVE A speech to a conference of professional women at the Hotel Meridien. I stood, slightly restless, in the back and listened, and afterwards we went to the august, high-ceilinged bar on the second floor for a drink. Maybe two.

"Podium magic," I said to Susan and raised my beer glass toward her in salute.

"Did you think I was good?"

"Wouldn't the term `podium magic' imply that?" I said.

She smiled.

"Okay, I'll be more direct. Say more about how wonderful I was."

"You were profound, witty, graceful…"

"And stunning," Susan said.

"Isn't appraising a woman's appearance a sexist indiscretion?" I said.

"Absolutely," Susan said. "Do I look especially stunning in this dress?"

The dress was black and simple with a short skirt. She did look stunning in it, but it wasn't the dress. She still harbored the illusion that what she wore made a large difference in how she looked. I had years ago given up explaining to her that whatever she wore she was beautiful, and clothes generally benefited from being on her.

"Especially," I said.

Susan was having a martini, straight up, with olives. I was drinking Rolling Rock beer.

"If we had a child it wouldn't have to be icky like Erika," Susan said.

"Not to us," I said.

"I mean, she's had an odd and difficult childhood. No father, and Elayna is a dear friend, but she's a little flappy."

"Boy," I said, "sometimes I have trouble following you when you lapse into professional jargon."

"We might be very good parents."

"Because?"

"Because we're pretty good at everything else, why would we be bad at parenting?"

We were sitting on a little sofa with a small table in front of us. There were two chairs on the other side of the table, but four people would have been a squeeze. I ate several nuts from the bowl in front of me. Susan speared one of her olives on a toothpick.

"Well, what I think is this," I said. "You have kids when you're, say, twenty-five and you spend the next eighteen or twenty years doing little else but bringing them up. And finally you get them old enough and they are out on their own, and you let out the breath you've been holding for two decades and you look around and you're, say, forty-five. You still have a lot of time left to obsess about each other or baseball, or your job, or triple espresso-whatever it is that gets your attention."

"But because we've started late, when you and I reach that point…"

"Children are best had early," I said. "So that you can enjoy them in their adulthood and yours."

"Perhaps we wouldn't have to be so totally involved," Susan said.

I looked at her without saying anything. After a moment she smiled and nodded.

"Of course we would," she said.

A tall man in dark clothes slipped into one of the two vacant chairs at our cocktail table. He was wearing a charcoal suit, a dark gray shirt, and a gray silk tie. His charcoal hair was longish and brushed back on the sides. It was gray. His face was sort of gray sallow, as if he spent a lot of time indoors. His eyebrows were gray and peaked in the center over each eye, which made him seem quizzical. He had a small emerald in his right ear. His hands were strong looking, with long fingers. His nails were manicured and freshly so. They gleamed dully in the bar light. His eyes were dark and his stare seemed bottomless. If I had been a dog, the hair would have risen along my backbone. I could feel Susan's thigh tense against mine.

"I have something to tell you," he said.

His voice was soft and hoarse as if there were something wrong with his vocal cords. But it carried and I could hear him clearly. There was a kind of purr to it, like the low sound of a diesel engine.

"I thought you might," I said.

"I heard you were a tough guy," he said. "I heard they sent a local guy and you took him like he was a head of cabbage."

"Actually they sent four cabbages," I said.

He paid no attention. His deep empty eyes held on me. "Don't let it go to your head," he said. "I ain't a local guy."

He paused and looked carefully at Susan and nodded to himself as if he approved. Then he swung his gaze back at me.

"Drop the Ellis Alves case."

There was no point talking to him. I didn't speak. It didn't bother him as far as I could see. I held his look. That didn't bother him either. He worried about me like he worried about interstellar dust.

After a moment he stood, looked at Susan, looked back at me.

"You both been told," he said.

He turned and walked away. Not slow, not fast, just walking as if he had someplace to go and had decided to go there. I was aware of my heartbeat, and of the fact that I was breathing faster than I had reason to. The muscles in my back were tight, and I realized I was flexing my hands on the table top. Susan looked at me and rested her hand on my thigh.

"My God," Susan said.

"Yeah," I said.

"Is he as scary dangerous as he made me feel?"

"I would guess that he is," I said.

"Did you feel it?"

"Yeah."

"I hated him looking at me," she said.

"Yeah."

"Are you scared?"

"I suppose so," I said. "I don't spend much time thinking about it. I been scared before."

"What are you going to do?"

"First I'm going to see to it that you're safe."

"You think he might attack me?"

"You plan for what the enemy can do, not what you think he will do," I said.