Jag swing into the lot and said to the other two, 'This is it. This is mine.'

'Three-way split, man,' said his friend, Richard Schmid, who was trying to convince his friends to call him Crank. The third valet nodded: 'Three ways.'

'No problem,' Bullet Blue said. 'I'm just workin' the chick.'

'Right.' Crank recognized the Jag. Bullet's chances of nailing this particular chick, especially dressed as he was, like an organ-grinder monkey, were slim and none, and slim was outa town. Still, Bullet Blue wanted the car, and they all had their favorites…

Blue took the Jag and ten bucks from Carmel, who flashed a smile at him. 'Thank you, ma'am,' Blue said, giving her his best look. The look apparently missed over her bare shoulder, and she was into the restaurant with her friend, a guy who Blue thought looked way too straight. Whatever. He hopped into the Jag, and rolled it into the valet parking area on the side of the restaurant. Lucas was leaning against a Chevy van, talking to the man who sat in the driver's seat.

'You got the money?' he asked Lucas. 'Keys?'

Bullet dropped the keys into Lucas' hand. Lucas passed them through the window to the man in the driver's seat, who took them and clambered into the back.

Lucas handed Bullet Blue a small fold of currency. 'I'll talk to McKinley.'

'If we could just get her off this one time…' Bullet slipped the bills into his pants pocket. The three-way split only involved the ten bucks from Carmel.

'I didn't say I could do that,' Lucas said bluntly. From the van, they could hear the grinding buzz of the key-cutter. 'The best we could do is maybe drop the charge to something less heavy. But she's gonna do some time.'

'She's already done time,' Blue protested. He was talking about his sister, who came off the farm two years after Bullet, and started calling herself Baby Blue.

'She's been sittin' in jail for a month, waiting for the trial. Can't we get her time served?'

'Not with this one,' Lucas said. 'If she hadn't had the gun…'

'It wasn't her gun; it was Eddie's,' Bullet said heatedly.

'But she had it. I'll see if McKinley and the guys'll go for two or three months. As it is, she's looking at a year, and maybe more.'

'Anything you can do, man.'

'And you stay the fuck outa trouble, dickweed,' Lucas said. 'Go back home if you gotta.'

'Right. Spend my life pulling cow tits.'

'Then get your ass back in Dunwoody – how much time you got to go there?' Lucas asked.

'One semester.'

'One semester. You get out, you start making some good money, and you make it wherever you go.'

'Yeah, yeah,' Bullet said.

You don't want to hear my Dunwoody speech?'

'I just ain't made to fix cars, no more'n I'm made to pull cow tits; I'm made to rock n' roll.'

'You're made to…'

The man in the van spoke over Lucas shoulder: 'All done.' He handed Carmel's key ring to Lucas, and Lucas handed it to Blue.

'Dunwoody,' Lucas said.

'Rock n' roll,' said Blue, as he walked away.

Lucas, wearing his dark blue lawyer suit and carrying a black-leather briefcase, said, 'Jim Bone,' to the doorman at the desk, who looked at a list and said,

'And your name, sir?' 'Lucas Davenport.'

'Go right on up, Mr. Davenport,' the doorman said, making a tick next to Lucas' name.

Lucas had made a medium-sized fortune when he sold his simulations company;

Bone's bank managed it. '… really risky,' Bone said. 'The economy could drop like a rock and who's going to pay a hundred dollars a round after that?'

Lucas nodded: 'Yeah, but I wouldn't have to make a hundred dollars a round – I could break even at sixty.'

'You don't know anything about running a golf course,' Bone said.

'Of course not; I wouldn't even try to. I don't even like golf. That's why they're talking about professional management.'

'It's not completely crazy,' Bone admitted finally.

'The whole point,' Lucas said, 'is that I could give my daughter that big chunk right now, take a mortgage on the rest, put all the excess into course maintenance, building value. By the time she's twenty-five or thirty, she owns the whole limited-partnership share, ninety-nine percent, while I own the general-partner's share, one percent, and we sell it and she's fixed. She picks up four or five million, minimum, and who knows? Maybe five or ten.'

'The concept's okay, but to tell you the truth, you might do better in the long run just to pay the government's bite…'

When they were done, Lucas said good-bye to Kerin, who seemed much softer than when he'd first met her; slower, happier, pleased with herself. Bone, at the door, said, 'I'll have the guys work it up for you. We'll have something in a week.' 'Thanks,

Jim.'

There were five doors on Bone's floor. Three apartments in addition to Bone's, and the fire-stair door. No security camera. Lucas let the elevator doors close behind him, and pushed twenty-seven. As the elevator started up, he took a nylon sock out of his pants pocket, spread it apart, and slipped it over the top of his head, like a watch cap. If there were somebody in the hallway, he could slip it back off – maybe without it being seen.

But the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor was dead quiet. Still in the elevator, blocking the door with his foot, he pulled the nylon down over his face, turned up his coat collar, so it looked almost clerical, and did a quick peek out in the hall. No video cameras. He walked quickly down to Carmel's apartment, slipped the first key in. The key turned – the other, he thought, must be for her office.

There was one light on, somewhere at the back of the apartment.

'Hello?' he called. No answer. 'Hello?'

He did a quick tour, checking, his nerves starting to jangle. He'd done this before, but he'd make a poor burglar, he thought.

He started with her home Rolodex. There were dozens of names, most attached to the name of a law firm or a corporation – business acquaintances. There were a few names with a first and last, followed by a number, but usually, by two numbers. An office and a home phone, Lucas thought. Probably not a killer's number. There were ten numbers that involved simply a name and a number, and he copied those into a notebook.

Then, in the kitchen, he found another address book, this one, apparently, purely personal. He took a small Nikon camera from his briefcase, made sixteen shots, stopped to reload the camera, made eight more, and dropped it back in his briefcase. Then he started through the apartment: He found a Dell computer in her study, with a built-in Zip drive. He'd brought Zip, Jaz and Super-disks; he brought the computer up, clicked on the Computer icon, and dragged all of her documents to the Zip icon. As the computer began dumping to the Zip drive, he began looking through the array of filing cabinets on the other side of the room. He pulled the drawers one at a time, and in the last drawer, found a mass of paid bills – nothing big, just the usual once-a-month routine. He riffled through them quickly, separated out the phone bills for the last four months, and used the camera again. But the last phone bill was almost exactly a month old…

He went into the kitchen, where he'd seen a neat stack of envelopes, flipped through them, found the US West bill. With another little jangle of nerves, he picked up a teakettle on the stove, tipped it to make sure there was enough water, and turned it on.

He looked in the bedroom while he waited for the teakettle to heat. Nothing obvious. He very carefully went through her drawers, afraid that he would disturb them in a way she could detect. He found nothing. He checked the closets quickly, and was closing the door when a brassy sparkle on the floor caught his eye. The sparkle had a certain quality that he unconsciously recognized. He stooped, scraped his hand along the rug, felt it, picked it: an unfired. 22 shell. He took a penlight out of his pocket, searched the closet floor, but found only the one cartridge.