“Fine,” the voice said irritatingly. “Either way it’s fine. You tell me what they know and I’ll have that, or you kill them yourself and I’ll have that. It’s a matter of complete indifference to me.”

Jurshak was silent for a minute. “I’d better see how the doc is making out.”

His footsteps echoed and disappeared. He’d gone inside. So Louisa wasn’t in the ambulance. Presumably one of the flat-voiced man’s sidekicks was waiting in its interior instead of Louisa-they’d left it temptingly in the middle of the yard so I’d head straight to it.

How to get past the cold-voiced man standing at the entrance was a tougher question. If I sent Ms. Chigwell out as a diversion, she’d be a dead diversion. I was wondering if we could jimmy a door or a window around the side when the man solved the problem for us. He strolled out to the center of the yard, where he stopped to knock on the back of the ambulance. The rear door opened a crack. He stood talking through the opening.

I tapped Ms. Chigwell on the shoulder. She stood up with me and we sidled slowly to the shadow of the wall. While we watched, the ambulance door shut again and the cold-voiced man wandered on out to the gate. As soon as he was on the far side of the vehicle, I crouched low and sprinted around the comer to the plant entrance. Ms. Chigwell’s footsteps sounded softly behind me. The ambulance shielded us from the view of the gate sentry and we made it inside without hearing any outcry.

We were on a concrete apron outside the plant floor. The sliding steel curtain that separated the manufacturing area from the main entrance was shut, but a normal-sized door next to it stood ajar. We quickly darted through it, shutting it softly behind us, and found ourselves immediately in the plant.

We walked on tiptoe, although the noises around us would have drowned any sounds we made. The pipes let out their intermittent belches of steam and the cauldrons bubbled ominously under the dull green safety lights. Fritz Lang had invented this room. Presently we would come to the end and find only cameramen and laughing actors. A drop of liquid fell on me and I jumped, convinced I’d been poisoned with a toxic dose of Xerxine.

I glanced at Ms. Chigwell. She was looking straight ahead, ignoring the spitting from above as assiduously as she avoided the obscene graffiti scrawled on the huge “No Smoking” signs. Suddenly, though, she bit back a cry. I followed her eyes to the far comer of the room. Louisa lay there on a stretcher. Dr. Chigwell stood on one side of her, Art Jurshak on the other. The two of them stared at us, slack-jawed.

Dr. Chigwell found his voice first. “Clio! What are you doing here?”

She marched forward fiercely. I held her arm to keep her from getting within Jurshak’s grabbing range.

“I came to find you, Curtis.” Her voice was sharp and carried authoritatively over the hissing pipes. “You’ve gotten yourself involved with some very nasty people. I presume you’ve spent the last week or so with them. I don’t know what Mother would say if she were alive to see you, but I think it’s time you came back home again. Well help Miss Warshawski get this poor sick woman back into the ambulance and then you and I will return to Hinsdale.”

I had my gun leveled at Art. Sweat stood out on his round face, but he said pugnaciously, “You can’t shoot. Chigwell here has a needle ready to inject Louisa. If you shoot me, it’s her death warrant.”

“I’m overcome, Art, by your family feeling. If this is the first time you’ve seen your niece in twenty-seven years or so, your reaction would move even Klaus Barbie to tears.”

Art made a violent gesture. He tried shouting at me, but the messages-guilt over his long-forgotten incest, fear of others finding it out, rage at seeing me alive-kept him from getting out anything coherent.

“Is this woman his niece?” Ms. Chigwell demanded of me.

“Yes, indeed,” I said loudly. “And she has closer ties to you than that, doesn’t she, Art?”

“Curtis, I will not tolerate your killing this unfortunate young woman. And if she is your friend’s niece, it is absolutely unthinkable that you do so. It would be unethical and totally unworthy of you as the inheritor of Father’s practice.”

Chigwell looked at his sister dejectedly. He shrank a little inside his overcoat and his hands hung loosely at his sides. If I acted now, he wouldn’t do anything to Louisa.

I was bracing myself to take a flying leap at Art when I saw malice replace the frustration in his face-he was watching someone come up behind us.

Without glancing around, I seized Ms. Chigwell and rolled with her behind the nearest vat. When I looked up I saw a man in a dark overcoat stroll into the area where we’d been standing. I knew his face-I’d seen it on TV or the papers or in court when I’d been a public defender-I just couldn’t place it.

“You took your fucking time, Dresberg,” Jurshak snapped. “Why’d you let that Warshawski bitch in here to begin with?”

Of course. Steve Dresberg. The Garbage King. Majestic slayer of little flies buzzing around his trash empire.

He spoke in the cold, flat voice that made the hairs prickle along my spine. “She must’ve cut her way under the fence and come in when I was out talking to the boys. I’ll get them to go take care of her car when we’re done here.”

“We’re not done here yet, Dresberg,” I announced from my nook. “Too much success has gone to your head, made you careless. You should never have tried to kill me the same way you did Nancy. You’re getting soft, Dresberg. You’re a loser now.”

My taunts didn’t move him. He was a pro, after all. He lifted his left hand from his coat pocket and pointed a large gun-maybe a Colt.358-at Louisa. “Come out now, girlie, or your sick friend here will be dead a few months before her time.” He didn’t look at me-a message that I was too trivial for direct attention.

“I listened to you and Art out front,” I called. “The two of you agreed she’s as good as dead already. But you’d better get me first, because if you shoot at her, you’re dead meat.”

He swung so fast, I didn’t have time to drop before he fired. The bullet went wide as the shot boomed in the cavernous room. Ms. Chigwell crouched, white but stern, on the floor next to me. Unbidden, she took her keys from her sweater pocket. While she moved to one side of our protective vat, I slid to the other. When I nodded she darted around the end of the vat and hurled her keys at Dresberg’s face.

He fired at the movement. From the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Chigwell drop. I couldn’t go to her now. I got behind Dresberg and fired at him. The first shot went by him, but as he turned to face me I got him twice in the chest. Even then he fired two more rounds before collapsing.

I ran to him and jumped on his gun arm with all my force. His fingers loosened on the revolver. Jurshak was moving up on me, hoping to wrestle Dresberg’s gun away before I could get to it. Fury was riding me, though, choking the breath from me, covering my eyes with a hazy film. I shot Jurshak in the chest. He gave an enraged cry and fell in front of me.

Chigwell had stood next to Louisa’s stretcher throughout the fracas, his hands flaccidly at his side, his head hunched into his coat. I went over to him and slapped his face. I meant at first just to rouse him from his stupor, but my rage was consuming me so that I found myself pounding him over and over, screaming at him that he was a traitor to his oath, a miserable worm of a man, on and on, over and over. I might have kept at him until his body joined Jurshak and Dresberg on the floor, but through the haze I felt a tug on my arm.

Ms. Chigwell had staggered over, trailing blood on the dirty concrete. “He’s all of that, Miss Warshawski. All that and more. But let him be. He’s an old man and not likely to change at this time of life.”