“Yeah?” came the friendly greeting.

“Maurice, this is Burke. Give me a yard to win on the three-horse in the seventh tonight at Yonkers.”

“Three-horse, race number seven, at Yonkers-that right?”

“Perfect,” I told him.

“I doubt it,” says Maurice and he hangs up.

I PUT IN a quick call to Mama Wong at the Poontang Gardens (she had serviced the military at Fort Bragg during the Korean War) to see if I had any messages. I do her favors occasionally and she answers the pay phone in her kitchen with “Mr. Burke’s office” anytime it rings. I don’t get a lot of messages, and her favors aren’t any too tough either.

“Mama, this is Burke. Any calls?”

“You have one call, from a Mr. James. I tell him you would be back later, but he wouldn’t leave a number. He say he call back, okay?”

“Sure. When he calls back, tell him I’m out on assignment and if he can’t leave a number, I won’t be able to talk to him for another week or so.”

“Burke, you not call him back, okay? This is a bad man.”

“How can you tell from his voice, for chrissakes?”

“I know. I hear his kind of voice years ago from a man who say he is a soldier but is really something else, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. But if he wants to find me bad enough he will, right? So take the number and let me call him.”

“Not good idea, Burke. But I do it if you say, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. I’ll call you later.”

I got a small piece of steak out of the fridge and called Pansy over. As soon as she saw the steak, she started drooling quarts and came over to sit next to me, watching carefully. I draped the steak over her massive snout and she sat there looking miserable but not moving. After a couple of minutes I looked at her and said “Speak!” and she snatched the steak so fast I hardly saw her jaws move. Pansy won’t eat anything unless she hears me say the magic word. It’s not a party trick-no weasel is going to poison my dog. I don’t use the usual poison-proofing words the dog trainers favor, like “good food” or “kosher”, because I don’t figure any freak who wants to take her out of the play will ask her to speak when he hands over the food. And if you try to feed her without saying the word, you get to be the food.

Pansy looked pleadingly at me. “I told you a thousand times, chew the goddamned food. If you swallow it whole, you don’t get the benefit from it. Now try and chew it this time, dummy.” And I tossed her another slab of steak, saying “Speak!” while it was still in the air. Pansy snarfed that one down too, realized that was all, and rolled back to her place on the rug.

I sat down in front of the mirror and began my breathing exercises. I started them years ago while my face was healing from the repairs. Now I do them sometimes just to help me think. An old man once taught me how to move pain around in my body until I had gathered it in one spot and could then move it entirely outside my skin. It was all in the breathing, and I’ve kept up the exercises ever since. You suck in a heavy gulp of air smoothly through the nose and down into the stomach, expanding it as far as possible and holding for a slow count of thirty. Then you gradually let it out, pulling in the stomach and expanding the chest. I did this twenty times, concentrating my focus on a red dot I had painted on the mirror. When I climbed into the red dot, the room went away and I was free to think about the girl and her problem. I went down every corridor I could open and came up empty. When I climbed out I heard Pansy snoring away, probably dreaming of a nice crunchy thigh bone. I left her where she was, locked the place up, and went downstairs to the garage.

The garage is actually the first floor of my building, with a sliding door opening into a narrow alley. The best part of it is that I can get to it from inside the building, so I can drive the car into the garage and then just disappear. Someone once followed me all the way to the garage when I was hurt and not paying attention. He just sat there and patiently waited for about six hours. The guy was a real professional. Devil (my old Doberman) took him just as he was making a deposit into an empty Coke bottle he carried with him. Turned out later he knew how to play the game-he never gave any information about me to the cops from his hospital bed. Just some tracker who should have done his work on the telephone.

I climbed into the Plymouth carefully. It can look like a lot of different cars, but I had last used it as a gypsy cab and it was still an ungodly mess inside. I lifted the steel plate next to the transmission hump, found the set screws, removed them, and took out the little five-shot Colt Cobra I keep there. Checked the cylinder, emptied the piece, and pocketed it. I thought it would be best to have a friend with me until I had a better idea of what this woman wanted. I screwed the car’s floor back together, climbed out, and went back upstairs.

While I sat waiting for the mysterious lady to return, I went through my latest issue of Hoofbeats, daydreaming about the magnificent yearling I’d own someday. Maybe an Albatross colt out of a Bret Hanover mare, a lovely free-legged pacer eligible for all the big-stakes races. I’d name him Survivor, win a fortune, and be rich and respectable the rest of my natural life. I love animals-they don’t do the things people do unless they absolutely have to, and even then it’s never for fun. Sometimes I’d see the name of a yearling for sale in the magazine and I’d say his name softly to myself and feel like I used to feel in the institution when I was a kid-like I’d never have anything good. But that feeling never lasts.

People won’t let you live the way you want to, but if you’re strong enough or quick enough, at least you don’t have to live the way they want you to. I live, though, no matter what.

The downstairs buzzer bit into my thoughts. I had my secretary answer and sure enough, it was the lady again. Even though I figured she was just coming up with my money, I went backstage and monitored her progress up to the door again. Force of habit.

She walked in wearing the same outfit, so she probably did go to a bank. If she’d gone home to pick up the cash, she would have changed her clothes, at least a little bit. Not all women are like that, I know, but this one seemed to be. The only difference was that the pale lipstick had been replaced with a heavy dark shade. She tossed a thick wad on my desk, wrapped in rubber bands. Just like the gangsters.

“I thought you’d rather have small bills,” she said.

“The bank won’t care,” I replied. She gave me a crooked smile that told me maybe she didn’t just select me at random. “Don’t you want to count it?” she asked.

“That’s all right; I’m sure it’s all there.” Holding it in my hand, I was sure it was. I took out a yellow legal pad, my imitation silver ballpoint, and began the interview. “Who are you looking for?”

“Martin Howard Wilson.”

“Any a.k.a.’s?”

“What?”

“Also Known As… an alias, you know.”

“Well, he used to be called Marty, if that’s what you mean. And he calls himself the Cobra.”

“The what?”

“The Cobra, like the snake.”

“I know what a cobra is. That’s his name?”

“It’s not his name, it’s what he calls himself.”

“Does anyone else call him that?”

She laughed. “Not hardly,” and she folded her hands across her knees again. I picked up the faint bluish tinge on the knuckles more clearly this time.

“What does this Cobra do?”

“A lot of things. He tells people he’s a Vietnam veteran. He studies what he thinks is karate. He believes he’s a professional soldier. And he rapes children.”

“You seem to know a lot about him.”

“I know everything I need to know about him except where he is.”