“Your unemployed advocate,” she corrected.

“We’re both unemployed,” he told her. “It’s something we share.”

She looked at him. He was different. This conversation was different from any she’d had with him. Maybe you couldn’t joke around, she thought, maybe irony didn’t work—if you didn’t know who you were.

“So where are we going?”

“There’s a piña colada stand across the street from Needle Park. Seventy-second and Broadway.”

“Sounds perfect,” she said. “The hotel’s only a few blocks away.”

“They have hot dogs, too. The natural kind, with crunchy casings.”

“Grilled, not boiled!”

“Right! And real mustard—not that yellow stuff.”

“So, I take it, this means you know New York?”

He shrugged. “I know where to get a good hot dog.”

They walked on, looking for a cab. After a while, she said, “You’re right about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know about the hospital being spooked, but Shaw was. Spooked, I mean.”

“Yeah, I got that feeling, too. Probably just his department, leaning on him. He took a chance, doing what he did.”

“I know. If you’d gone out the window… “ Her voice trailed away and she felt like an idiot, talking about suicide. Just a little while earlier, the man next to her had been tied to his bed in a pysch ward.

“That’s gone, by the way,” he said. “Along with the baseball bat and the blood. It’s so gone, it’s hard to believe I bought it. Bought it right down to knowing what it would feel like to… “ He shook his head.

“But you did,” she said.

“What?”

“Buy it.”

They were at another intersection. He took her arm again, restrained her as a Step-Van hurtled through the red light. “Yeah I did,” he admitted. “And one thing’s for sure.”

They stepped off the curb. He didn’t release her arm. “What’s that?” she asked.

“I’m going to find out who sold it to me.”

She was looking for the name of the man in West Virginia, the name Shaw had written on a Post-it in McBride’s medical file, when the snapshot fell to the floor. McBride was in the kitchen, emptying a can of lentil soup into a pan, when she stooped to pick up the picture—and hesitated.

It was a 3 by 5 Polaroid photograph of… what? She picked up the picture from the floor, set it down on the desk, and cocked her head. Some kind of… thing. Unfamiliar, and yet—she’d seen it before. Where? It took a moment—then it hit her. She’d seen it on the floor of her apartment, spilled by whoever it was who’d trashed the place. Lying there in Nikki’s ashes, that tiny transparent thing. Which she thought was a contaminant of some kind, an artifact of the cremation process. And yet, Doctor Shaw had taken a picture of it. How?

She turned the photograph over, and found a notation scribbled on the back under the date stamp:

Her chest began to tighten with the realization that this wasn’t the artifact she’d found in her apartment. Or, rather, it was the same kind of thing—a translucent tube of glass shot through with gold and silver wires—about as long and thick as a grain of rice. Different, but the same.

An implant.

Which meant that what had been done to Lew McBride had also been done to her sister. The tightening in her chest fused, turned into anger, and gave way to despair.

“Oh, Jesus!” she cried.

McBride looked up from the soup that he was stirring. “What’s the matter?”

She just shook her head, tears flying.

Seeing her unhappiness, he rushed to her side. And saw that she was looking at a photo of the implant. “Hey,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze, “take it easy. It’s gone. It’s out.”

“It’s on the floor of my apartment!”

Her outburst caught him by surprise. “What?”

“One of those! In Nikki’s ashes—just like that!”

He started to ask how it got there, but caught himself in time.

“It was in the urn from the funeral parlor,” she said, dragging a sleeve across her eyes. Then she giggled through her tears. “All that… bullshit!”

“What bullshit?” (He was trying to be encouraging.)

“About the Riedles. And ‘her overdose’! And the settlement they gave her. That’s why Eddie’s asset search went nowhere. None of it happened. It was all a lie—like what they did to you.” Suddenly, she wanted to kill someone. Specifically, she wanted to kill the person who’d turned her sister into the robot she’d met in the Nine West store, the girl who’d fried herself in the bathtub. Forget closure. “I’m going to crucify the son of a bitch who did this,” she swore.

McBride nodded, shrugged, went back to the kitchen. “Take a number,” he told her.

As Doctor Shaw had guessed, Sidney Shapiro had a listed number in the Jefferson County white pages. Seated cross-legged on the bed, drinking Genesee Ale, Adrienne worked up the nerve to call him. Or tried to. Cold calls were not her forte. Never had been. “Maybe you should phone him,” she called out.

“God… damnit!” The expletive slipped through McBride’s gritted teeth as he reacted to burning himself on the handle of a cheap aluminum pan. Adrienne watched as he used his sleeve as a potholder, pulling it down over his hand. Then he maneuvered it over to the cold burner. “I don’t think so,” he replied.

Leaving the tiny kitchen, he carried the pan into their room, and poured the soup into the two white bowls on the table. Also on the table were a pair of square, plastic take-out salads, a sourdough baton and some foil wrapped patties of butter. The rose that he’d bought for her was standing on the table in an empty Coca-Cola can.

“I think we should doorstep the guy,” he told her. He gestured toward the table. “Dinner’s ready”

She hopped off the bed and padded over in her bare feet. “You mean just go there? Why not call ahead?”

“Well, I’m sure that would be more polite, but… what are you going to tell him? That we want to talk about mind control? I don’t think so. I think we just go there.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

He raised his bottle of beer. “To you,” he told her. “Thanks for… “ he squinted, smiled a slightly crooked smile, “I don’t know. Just, thanks.”

They touched bottles. “Anytime,” she said and then flushed because it sounded so stupid. What did she mean—anytime? Anytime, what? She smiled back at him, and his eyes seemed to hold her there, so she kept on smiling. There was something different about him now—that lazy crooked smile, for instance, was really getting to her. She’d been attracted to him before in a vague, diffused way but now she could hardly look at him without feeling a… a buzz. It was the last thing she needed or wanted, a useless complication that could only be trouble. Someone’s trying to kill me, she thought, not to mention him. I’m out of a job. I’m almost out of money. And I’m thinking this guy and I should… what? Get it on? Good plan, Scout.

She bent down, dipped her spoon into the soup, filling it with the front-to-back motion she’d learned from an etiquette book, then put it in her mouth. It was so hot that she almost had to spit it out. But she didn’t, grabbing her beer instead, and gulping some down.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Hot,” she said. “I burned the roof of my mouth.” She guzzled her Genesee.

He leaned toward her. “I know a folk cure,” he said and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, that that was ‘the folk cure.’ She felt it again, a sharp twist of desire. But he was leaning forward, not to kiss her, but to get up from his chair. He went to the kitchenette and returned with a glass of milk. Get a grip, she told herself, and took a sip.