“She found a daycare center for Flower, at a church that was active in all kinds of stuff-gay rights, peace marches, welfare reform. There was a man, a Vietnam vet, who worked in the center. He was a very violent man, but gentle with children, they said. A man damaged by the war, but good inside. This man also did babysitting for some of the church members when they wanted to go out.

“One day the police came looking for this man. He had sodomized some of the children he was supposed to be caring for-they got him when he tried to sell some of the pictures he had taken of the children. He wasn’t at the daycare center that day, he was taking care of Sadie’s child. He must have known the police were getting close to him. Later they said he was under great psychological pressure. Sure. While the police were looking for him, he raped Flower and he choked her to death.

“Sadie sent me a wire, but she was dead before it arrived-a car crash-nothing to do with Flower. The man who raped and tortured Flower to death gave the district attorney a lot of good information about the child pornography business. At least that’s what I was told. He was found incompetent or something. He never went to trial. He went into some hospital for a year and he’s supposed to get outpatient therapy. He doesn’t talk about how he sodomizes children, but he does talk about his military skills and how he expects to hook up with a mercenary outfit and fight in Africa.

“His name is Martin Howard Wilson.”

FLOOD DIDN’T SEEM to have anything more to say. By then it was so dark in her place that all I could see was her outline, the highlights from her hair, and the glint from her eyes. She must have been breathing but you wouldn’t know it from looking at her chest. She sat like someone waiting, but waiting without expectations. Like when you’re in the joint and it’s years to parole.

It was a lot of information to absorb. I needed time to think, so I said, “You said I could ask questions.” She nodded. I lit another cigarette. It wasn’t nervousness-they always taste better after a jolt of adrenalin, which is my own particular euphemism for fear. “I need to know how you know some of the things you said.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to rely on information that might be no good.”

“All right. What do you want me to tell you?”

“You said that he was a Vietnam vet, that he made a deal with the D.A.’s office, that he was in a hospital, and that he wants to hook up with a mercenary outfit, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who told you all that?”

“One of the other women at this church group. She said she knew Sadie, so she told me what she knew.”

“You believed her?”

“I knew she was telling me the truth because I told her I would come back and see her if she did.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me. I could understand if you told her you’d come back to see her if she didn’t, but-”

“She saw a different side of me than you have, Mr. Burke.”

“You mean she never saw you crack people’s skulls?”

“I mean she was a lesbian.”

“And you?”

“I said I would come back to see her-a promise that I will keep. That’s the only promise that I made.”

“But maybe she didn’t see it like that.”

Flood shrugged her shoulders so slightly that her breasts didn’t even move. “I don’t know what she saw. Some people wouldn’t see a shark in their own swimming pool.”

“How did this woman know about the court stuff?”

“The mother of one of the other children-another child that this devil raped-she was planning to sue the church for negligence or something. She hired a lawyer and this lawyer did an investigation. He paid some money to a detective, and the detective paid someone in the court, and they put all this together.”

“The lawyer took a case like this on spec?”

“On spec?”

“Without any money up-front-you know, like in a contingency arrangement where he doesn’t get anything unless he wins-like with a car accident or something.”

“Oh. Yes, he apparently did.”

“It doesn’t add up. A case like that’s awful hard to prove in court. Besides, those churches never carry any decent insurance. Now if it was the archdiocese…”

“The lawyer just said he wanted to help this woman.” Flood shrugged her shoulders again, just the way she did before. I was beginning to understand what it meant.

“So this clown thought he was going to have a very grateful lady on his hands?”

“Yes, I think he did.”

“But you found out about it through this woman who was a friend of hers, who told you because she liked you.”

“Yes.”

“And that woman and the woman who went to this lawyer are good friends?”

“Very good friends.”

“So the lawyer isn’t going to get any luckier with the second woman than the first got with you?”

Flood chuckled. It was too throaty to be a giggle, but it was close-and her breasts moved, bounced this time. Finally: “I don’t think so,” she said.

I sighed. “Nobody’s honest, huh?” Flood started to make a hard face to disagree but figured it wasn’t worth it and went back to another shrug.

“Okay, let’s assume this information is all true for a minute. Do you have a good description of this Wilson? A picture would be perfect.”

“I have a description but not a really good one. And I have no pictures. I know they must have taken his picture when they arrested him-a mug shot, right? So I thought maybe you could get a copy.”

“I might be able to if the D.A.’s office didn’t arrange to have it destroyed.”

“Could they do that?”

“Sure. But they probably wouldn’t unless he was in the Witness Protection Program. You know, like if he gave the federales some dynamite information and they gave him a new identity, relocated him and all that. But it doesn’t sound like they would for this guy. He’s still around, trying to link up with a mercenary team, you said?”

“Yes, that’s why I came to you in the first place. I heard that you were a recruiter for one of the mercenary armies, that people who wanted to go overseas and fight had to be cleared by you first.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“There’s a bar in Jersey City, just on the other side of the river, a really weird place. It looks like a roadhouse in West Virginia or something. They play country-and-western music up front and I know they have all kinds of strange meetings in the back rooms.”

“Strange meetings? Like dope deals, guns, what?”

“No-like the KKK or the American Nazi Party.”

“Oh-that kind of strange.”

“Does that scare you?”

“Yes and no,” I said, and it was the truth. The freaks individually don’t scare me-they’re usually terminal inadequates. But the idea scares the hell out of me. It’s unnatural, you know what I mean? Freaks are supposed to stay by themselves-in furnished rooms, with their picture books and inflatable plastic dolls. We’re in bad shape when they start forming fucking affinity groups. “But I have done business with them in the past. I know a few of them.”

“What kind of business could you do with people like that?”

“Purely professional, nothing personal,” I said. No point telling her about the genuine recordings of Hitler’s speeches I sold them. Real expensive, exclusive stuff, pirated out of the bunker where Adolf the Asshole waited for his final reward. Only one other like it in the whole world, and that (of course) was in the archives of a neo-Nazi party in West Germany. Yeah, I had it on the best authority from an old Nazi who escaped to Argentina, where he’s recruiting mercenaries to attack Israel. I couldn’t sell the defectives on that particular venture, but they lapped up the tapes and paid the going rate. They apologized for not being able to understand German, (although one of them told me he was studying it by correspondence) but they said they had the exact translation of Adolf’s final speeches which they had purchased from some other enterprising businessman. What the hell-Yiddish sounds a lot like German anyway, and the six hours of Simon Wiesenthal’s address to the German crowds at a Holocaust memorial rally only cost me twenty bucks. A little reel-to-reel work, some Iron Cross lettering, a swastika or two, and I was ahead well over two grand. I gave them a discount price, of course, because after all; they were true believers. But Flood would never understand what a man has to do to make a living.