SHE ANSWERED the door, left me there while she walked away. I knew her this time, even with the blond wig and the violet contact lenses. Much taller in four-inch spikes, ankle straps lancing across the seams that ran down the back of her dark silk stockings. She was wearing a wool minidress in some metallic green color, a heavy black chain around her waist as a belt. Swinging the long end of the chain in one hand, a leopard twitching her tail. Waiting.

I walked as far as the couch, flicking the ashes off my cigarette in the general direction of the ashtray on the end table. She twirled, hands on her hips. "Sit down."

I didn't like the sound. "Don't make a mistake," I told her. "I'm not the trick who just left."

A smile blazed across her face. Perfect teeth, as real as the violet eyes. A sociopath's smile. A woman smiles at you…for you…it's like a rheostat…comes on slow until it hits full boost. Little tiny increments. Different every time. Hers was an on-off switch. She came to me, tilted her seamless face up to mine, tried to bring some feeling into those cash-register eyes, wet her lips. "I'm sorry, baby. I was teasing. Some men like to be teased. I just want to talk your language. Whatever that is."

"Dónde está el dinero?" I said. Thinking of Wolfe. The beautiful prosecutor sitting in her office, a killer Rottweiler at her feet, my rap sheet spread out in front of her. "John Burke, Maxwell Burke, Robert Burke, Juan Burke…Juan? Say something in Spanish, Mr. Burke." I sang my theme song for her.

Wolfe got it when I said it. Candy lived it. "I promised you a couple of things. You sure you only want the cash?"

"Yeah."

She curled up on the couch, her legs beneath her. I sat next to her, not too close. Her lacquered fingernails played with the buttons on the front of her dress. Opened one. Then another. The black lace bra stopped just above her nipples. "A lot sweeter than when you last saw them, huh? When we were kids. Remember?"

What's real? Candy wasn't a woman before the surgeons did their work. And Michelle, the most woman I'd ever met, even with the spare parts they threw in as a dirty joke.

"I never saw them when we were kids," I told her.

It was the truth. Foreplay was for people with money. People who had doors you could close. Elephants don't fuck the way rabbits do. Predator pressure sets the rhythm.

"You want to see them now?"

"No."

She shifted her hips, moved against me, face in my chest. "Pretend you just got out of prison," she whispered. "You could do all the things you dreamed about every night."

Her perfume was thick, with a sharp underbase, like it came from inside her body. The last couple of times I got out of prison, I knew where to go. What to do. But the first time out… it was like she said.

I tossed my duffel bag on the bed in the cheap hotel and hit the street. I needed a gun. And a cabdriver who wouldn't get a tip. But first things first. The skinny whore in the screaming-red dress was waiting in a doorway a block from the hotel. Dishwater blond, hard-boned face, yellowish teeth, blue-veined hands, two bracelets on her narrow wrist, junkie's eyes. She was probably young and plump and dumb and sassy when she got off the bus from West Virginia.

"You wanna have a party, honey?"

I looked at her face.

"Ten and two, baby. I french, I do it all…come on."

I felt the street. Every doorway had one like her.

She knew it too. "It might as well be me, mister."

Another hotel. Two dollars to the clerk. No register to sign. I followed her up the stairs to the second floor. She put the key in her purse, left it open, waiting. I handed her the ten bucks. Peeling wall-paper, swaybacked single bed against one wall, bare mattress. She took a yellowed sheet from the top of a pile on a straight-backed chair, flicked it open, covered the bed. She never turned on the light. Street-neon washed against the streaked window. She pulled the paper shade down. Reached down to the hemline, pulled the cheap dress over her head. Dark elastic garters at the top of her stockings, joyless little breasts in the dim light.

"You want something special, honey? A little half 'n' half?"

No need.

"Let me look at you, baby. Milk it down for you one time, okay? Can't be gettin' burned; I got me a big habit to support." Reaching over to me, her thumb hard against the underside of my cock. "You all ready to go, huh, baby? I like a man all ready to go. You ain't no kid all charged up on beer, huh?"

Yes and No.

She fell back on the bed, still holding me in one hand, tied us together, rocked back to the base of her spine, grabbed her knees. "Come here, baby. It's riding time."

It didn't take long.

This. Fucking. Nothing.

"I DIDN'T just get out of prison," I told her.

"Just the money?"

"Just the money."

"I know you, Burke. I know you forever." It sounded like a threat.

"We've been through that."

"You're not here just for the money."

"I'm not here at all, you don't tell me what you want."

She took a breath. Her breasts blossomed. "Train," she said.

"What's that mean?"

"Not what you think."

"I don't have time for this." I started to get off the couch. She threw herself across my lap. I reached under the wig to the back of her neck, squeezed. Hard. Pulled her face up to mine. Her eyes were measuring, calculating. "You like that? You want to hurt me?"

My hand came off her neck by itself.

She locked my eyes. Saw the truth. "No, that's not you," she whispered. "Hard man, soft center. I know you. Remember the kitten? I was with you when you found it. In the basement, remember?"

SIMON. He was in the gang with us. A freak. Liked to hurt things. Especially small things. Liked to set fires too. Nobody said anything. Simon was a good man in a rumble, quick with a razor. We weren't running a therapeutic community. The kitten was hanging from a noose made out of a coat hanger, ripped from chin to balls, its guts trailing out all the way to the floor. Making sounds no living thing should make. Candy was with me. We were hurrying down there for the darkness and the sex when we heard the tiny shrieks.

I remembered. I unhooked the kitten. Laid it on the concrete floor. Found a brick. Pounded its head into flat jelly. I didn't know how to stop its pain, so I made it all stop.

I found Simon out on the flatlands that night. Burning something on a spit over a little fire. I didn't want to know what it was. I left him there. When I threw the tire iron into the street it was so slick with pulp that it skidded for half a block.

"I PAID that off."

"Yeah. You kept your name. But I remember. You cried for an hour over that kitten. Cried like a baby. You were shaking so hard I didn't think you'd ever get up. You were going to do the same thing to Simon. Remember how you swore that? And how you told the others it was your kitten Simon tortured? Liar! You never had a kitten- you don't even like them."

She sounded like the judge who told me I was a menace to society.

"That never happened," I said, lighting a cigarette. "Your mind is all fucked up."

"I kept your secret. I could have told…"

"Who'd listen to a little cunt like you?"

"Anybody who wanted it- and they all did."

"'Cause they paid?"

"That's the way you tell."

"That's the way you tell. That's all you know."

"I know you," she said, the dress sliding off her shoulders.

I got up to leave. She stood before me, stepping into my chest. I remembered the basement. How she watched while I cried. How she never touched me- waiting to see who'd win. It wasn't hard keeping my hands from her body. Just from her throat.

I turned sharply away from her, my shoulder cracked against her jaw.