Her fingers were stained with nicotine and her breath smelled of garlic and mint. She looked at me and sighed. “I want five thousand.”

“Has to come through tonight,” I said.

“I’ll work on it.”

“I need it within a couple of hours.”

She nodded.

“What happened to Pinky?”

“She jumped off the balcony of the Fountainebleau in Miami.”

She stubbed her cigarette into an ashtray filled with peanut shells and walked away.

17

I DROPPED ALIAS at his mansion a little past midnight. He told me that the place – a Mediterranean Revival number on Pontchartrain with bonsai-looking trees – was going to be plowed under someday and updated with something he’d seen on Deep Space 9. We walked inside an empty house and I noticed a little spot for him in the living room with a GI Joe sleeping bag and a small CD player. Dozens of rap CDs lay on the floor by his pillow and a couple of discount packs of chips and warm liters of Pepsi. Little indentations from missing furniture spotted the white carpet. Moonlight crept into his paneled French doors from the pool.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

I gave him the number to the cell and watched him as he tucked himself into the blanket and turned his back to me.

I drove back home, hoping that thing from Fred would shake out. Without that, I didn’t have much. Teddy wouldn’t respond to my messages about that dick Trey Brill. I was beginning to lose patience and I was tired as hell.

But as soon as I got close to my warehouse on Julia, I felt something was out of place.

Four cars were parked in broken patterns in front of businesses that had closed up for the night. A black Cadillac Escalade, two red Ferraris, and a green Rolls, all their bright silver rims shining down the stretch of asphalt.

I didn’t turn into the warehouse. I parked down the street and walked.

The convertible top was down on the Rolls. A box of.38 slugs sat empty in the passenger seat. The light to my warehouse burned bright through a huge bank of industrial windows. The small blue door that leads to the second floor was closed.

I slipped a key into the lock and slowly pushed it open with both hands. I reached for the Glock in my jacket. The seventeen rounds waited jacked inside.

Upstairs, I heard Annie’s high-pitched barking. She yelped in an urgent rhythm.

I crept up the stairs and heard a crash in my loft and a couple of men laughing.

I moved forward, my heart skipping pretty damned quickly in my chest. I tried to control my breathing and slip silently to the landing. Annie kept barking, her yips working into a howl.

The huge sliding door had been pushed open and inside about a half-dozen men rifled through my shit. A man with a puckered burn mark across his cheek drank my Jack Daniel’s from the bottle and then spit a mouthful onto the floor. Two of the men were shirtless and muscular, wearing stiff, wide-legged jeans and clean work boots. Gold and platinum in chains hung around their necks and molded into their teeth.

I couldn’t spot Annie.

I slipped my finger tighter on the trigger and backed down the stairs to call the police. My heart began to palpitate, my breathing quick. The man with the burn mark asked for a lighter.

I took another step backward.

I felt the sharp prick of a flat, wide blade in my side.

The knife moved up to my neck.

“Slow down, motherfucker. We waitin’ on you.”

He pushed me forward on the landing while I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket. In the darkness, he hadn’t seen it.

As we entered the large open space of the warehouse, a couple of tool shelves by the window where I kept my field interviews had been toppled. Several VHS tapes – loaded with interviews of people who’d died years ago – lay in piles on the floor.

A short, muscular man in a net shirt walked toward me, his palms open on each side as if waiting to begin prayer. His teeth were platinum and jeweled and he had a red tattoo of a heart that seemed to be live and beating on his muscled chest.

His right hand darted to the small of his back and he came up with a snub-nosed.38 that he jammed and twisted in my ear. I was so intent on not moving, I didn’t even notice his feet kicking out my legs.

I fell to the floor. He inched closer with the gun to the bridge of my nose.

“You like scrambled eggs?”

He called ’em “aigs.”

His group ringed me. Their eyes were red and squinted tight and they gritted their teeth while I squirmed.

“What you doin’ with them Paris brothers?” the man asked.

The man with the scar pulled out a book, Catcher in the Rye, from my kitchen table and held a Zippo against its pages. He dropped my book next to the pool of whiskey and I watched its pages curl with smoke.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Annie’s yelps came from inside my bathroom.

The leader knocked me across the face, holding the gun in my ear.

“Teddy’s my friend,” I said.