I asked Max if he would ride with me over to the piers to see if Michelle had learned anything. He nodded okay and I drove the Plymouth west. I told Max to stay in the car no matter what he saw going down. One time when I was looking for someone on the docks Max saw this freak all dressed up in a stormtrooper outfit standing out on the abandoned pilings. He was waving a giant bullwhip around like he was getting ready to drive some galley slaves. A bunch of locals were standing around watching the show-just entertainment for them, I guess-but old Max decided that they were all terrorized by this freak, and he slid out of the car and kicked the poor fellow into the Hudson River before I could stop him. When he pivoted to the crowd like he was expecting applause, the audience ran like they’d just seen their future up-close. Max isn’t desperate for recognition, and the locals weren’t exactly his peer group, but you could see he wanted some acknowledgement of his feat. So I told him he was now the undisputed champion of that pier.

Max doesn’t have a big ego about that kind of thing, but I didn’t want him suddenly deciding to defend his title, so I repeated the deal about staying in the car no matter what.

The piers were dark and murky, like they always are. Couples walked to empty buildings, hustlers waited, predators watched. No Michelle. No Margot. No cops either.

I drove Max back to the warehouse, waved good-bye, and watched him disappear into the interior. Drove back to my office, put the car away, went upstairs. As I put the key into the floor-level lock I heard Pansy’s low growl. When I got the door open she was poised about three feet away, the hair on the back of her neck standing straight up and her fangs, like they say, bared. Somebody had been around to visit-maybe a visitor for the hippies upstairs who got the wrong address, maybe someone with some bad ideas. I asked Pansy, who didn’t say. Whoever it was hadn’t gotten into the office.

I got some marrow bones out of the fridge and put them on to boil while I changed clothes and listened to the news. I switched to the police band for the local precinct, using the crystals I wasn’t supposed to be able to buy over the counter. The radio runs into an antenna lead, and the antenna itself runs up through the useless chimney stack on the roof, protruding about a foot. I got perfect reception, but all it picked up were routine crime-in-progress calls and cops telling the desk man they were going off the air for personals, which could mean anything from a bathroom visit to a shakedown.

I used a strainer and poured the boiling water off the marrow bones to let them cool. Pansy came down from the roof, a lot calmer now-whoever had come around hadn’t come over the rooftops. I started thinking about the roof and how I’d like to have a garden up there someday-there was sure as hell enough fertilizer already in place. I could tell I was getting tired because I was starting to think like a citizen. Putting down roots, even on a city roof, is blubber-brained. Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.

When the marrow bones cooled I gave one to Pansy and sat patting her massive head while she crunched it. Maybe real private eyes make up lists of things to do and places to go, but I like to work them out in my head-an old prison habit. Trees can’t run and people can’t Xerox your thoughts. If they could, they never would have let me out of that orphanage when I was a kid.

WHEN I WOKE up the next morning I was still in my chair. It didn’t look like Pansy had moved either. My watch said it was almost nine. I opened the back door to let Pansy out and went next door for a quick shower and shave. By the time Pansy trotted downstairs to supervise my work with the razor, it was just about time for my phone call. I went back into the office, picked up the receiver to check for hippie-interference, noted their usual early-morning silence, and dialed the direct line for an assistant D.A. I know in Manhattan. Toby Ringer was a real hardnose, with no political hooks, who battled his way up the bureaucracy by being willing to try cases that scared most of the other D.A.’s. You know the kind I mean-where the bad guy’s a hundred percent guilty but there’s no solid evidence and the odds are you’re going to lose it in front of a jury and get a black mark against your record. Some of those wimps won’t even touch a case unless there’s a videotaped confession and four eyewitnesses. Toby’s no cowboy-he doesn’t have fantasies of some death squad wiping out all the vermin in the city someday, but he has a genuine hate for the real slime, so we’ve been able to help each other out on occasion. He’s not State-raised, but he’s been around long enough to know how to act.

All the D.A.’s answer their phone the same way. “Mr. Ringer’s line.”

“Good morning, Toby. I got a present for you.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Your friend from the Gonzales matter, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, okay? But I got a gold-plated chance for you to nail a baby-raper, and I’ll throw in a homicide to boot.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For justice. I don’t want anything-I just want to tell you something that I can’t tell the cops.”

“This is Mr. B., I presume.”

“I’m your man. Can I meet you someplace tonight?”

“My office. That’s it-no other place. Deal?”

“Deal. What time?”

“Make it around eight. Everybody’s gone home by then and the night crew will be downstairs working the Complaint Room.”

“Want me to see the man at the front desk or just bypass him?”

“Go to the desk. I’ll leave word-what name?”

“Tell him Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“You’ll see, Toby. Tonight, right?”

“Right.” And we hung up simultaneously. I keep all my calls on this phone under one minute; this one had barely qualified.

I sat down at my desk planning to compose a suitable recruitment ad for the mercenary journals. It might bring the Cobra around but that would be a last resort, especially since it takes three or four months for the ads to get into print. He might be long gone by then-forget it. I locked the place up and aimed the Plymouth for the docks, figuring Michelle would be easier to find in daylight.

I backed into my usual spot facing West Street, lit up, and waited. There were plenty of hustlers working, but no Michelle. Waiting isn’t hard for me, though. Different people use different tricks to make the time go by, but it all comes down to the same thing. You can’t make anything happen, you just have to be ready when it does. Sometimes you have to hide the fact that you’re waiting so you use something like a taxicab and sometimes you find yourself a job to do while you’re waiting so if someone is looking they see the worker, not the watcher. Some places you stand out only if you don’t look like you’re watching, like in the cesspool-Times Square. If you’re tracking a man in that pit, the only thing to do is really gawk around and be obvious as hell about it. Then they only wonder what you’re looking for, not who. This job was like that. All the freaks parading by knew I was waiting for something or somebody. And after I was there a half hour or so, word would get around; they’d talk, compare notes. They’d know I wasn’t law, but they couldn’t be sure I wasn’t trouble.

In some neighborhoods, especially Italian or Hispanic ones, the young bloods would try their luck with a stranger just to be doing it. Not down here-everybody down here already knows their luck is permanently bad, and the nice-looking man in the cashmere topcoat coming down the block might just have gotten so bored reading muscle magazines every night after his frigid wife went to bed that now he’s stalking the streets with a handgun in his pocket and exorcism on his mind.