Pain Management

I backed the Subaru in.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t like it here. Too much foliage. Anyone could just come up on you and—”

“Then let’s get out, talk outside. How’s that?”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to hear the rest of whatever she had.

We climbed out. Ann put both palms on the Subaru’s front fender and hopped up, posing the way she had when we’d first met.

“What else?” I asked her.

“One, the girl is with Clipper and Big A. She’s been there almost from the beginning.”

“If he turns her over like he—”

“B.B., just listen, all right? I think her father did something to her.”

“I know he did.”

“But she still loves him.”

“Sure. I know. That’s not so unusual.”

“You act like you know all about this.”

“It’s no act. What else?”

“This car,” she said, handing me a scrap of paper, “picked up street girls. A bunch of times.”

“So?”

“So . . . I don’t know what your whole game is, B.B. I’m not sure why you want the girl . . . the runaway so bad. I don’t know who you’re really working for, or even what you do. But I know you want . . . something. I saw . . . I mean, I know the way you . . . when that freak cut me. I get this strange idea that maybe you’re looking for a killer. The one picking off all the street girls.”

“Lots of people get ideas. Don’t make more out of me than I am.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, here’s what I have. You don’t want it, throw it away. That piece of paper I gave you? It’s a license number. The car picks up girls. And it’s a woman who does the asking. A man driving, but a woman making the deal; understand?”

“Yes. But all the girls they picked up, they came back, right?”

“Not all of them. One didn’t. She went by Merlot. . . .”

“Like the wine?”

“Yes. And, the way it was figured, she was holding out on her pimp and made a break one night. It happens.”

“So the only thing you have is that it was a man-and-woman team—”

“That’s not all. The license plate . . .”

“What?”

“It showed up a few times. On different cars.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Maybe that’s nothing by itself, but . . .”

“You’re not wrong, Ann.”

“So it is worth something.”

“It could be, anyway.”

“This certainly is,” she said, holding up an envelope.

“Pretty small envelope for a hundred grand.”

“That’s in the trunk,” she said. “In a Delta Airlines bag. Just like you said: all hundreds, used, random serial numbers. This,” she told me, waving the envelope, “is the title to the Subaru. I signed it over. You can register it any way you want, but it’s yours now.”

“I . . .”

“Take it, B.B. I know you don’t have a car.”

“How could you—?”

“Either you’re fabulously wealthy and you’ve got a whole stable of vehicles . . . which I don’t think so . . . or you borrow cars all the time. Anyway, where I’m going, I won’t be able to use it.”

“Why?” I asked, despite myself.

“I told you. It’s all going to change from here on out. I don’t want anything tying me to Ann O. Dyne. She was always a myth. Now she’s going to disappear.”

“All right.”

“Aren’t you going to check your money?”

“I know it’s there,” I said. And knew I was right even as I spoke.

“You ever think about . . . ?”

“What?”

“Making a change, too. Starting a new life. Starting over.”

“I can’t start over,” I told her. “I’m not a myth. I’m me. Forever.”

“But people can . . .”

“No, they can’t, girl. Not all of them, anyway. Not me, for sure.”

“I’ll know you if I see you again,” she said, getting to her feet. “But you won’t know me. Without these,” she chuckled, reaching down and hauling the sweatshirt up over her head, “probably nobody would.”

“I’d know your eyes,” I told her.

She stepped close. “You probably would. You looked there, often enough. Tell me something, B.B. When you were a kid, when you . . . did it outside, how did you do it?”

I took her shoulders, gently turned her around so she was facing away from me. Then I put my hands on her waist and cranked my thumbs forward until she was bending over, her hands on the fender of the Subaru. “Like this,” I whispered in her ear. “That way, we could keep watch while we were . . .”

Later, she told me to just take off. By myself. Whoever was waiting on her was close by.

She stood on her toes, gave me a goodbye kiss. “You can find your own way back,” she said.

I wondered if that was true.

“What do you want for all this?” Hong asked me, fingering the slip of paper Ann had given me.

“Your throwdown piece,” I told him.

“You think this is New York?”

“I think cops are cops.”

“Well, I don’t carry one,” he said, huffily.

“All right.”

“You have a drop?” he asked.

The next morning, under the loose cinder block in the corner of the garage Gordo and Flacco used, I found a brand-new Browning Hi Power 9-millimeter. The Mark III, with the nonglare finish, still in the original sealed carton. And two boxes of shells.

Not exactly the most powerful man-stopper on the planet, but a beautiful, expensive weapon. And maybe Hong was trying to send me a message by not going with the same caliber of slug the autopsy team would have pulled out of the black guy who’d tried to smoke Ann in that vacant lot.

I night-swept with the Subaru a few times, the tinted windows clouding anyone’s view of who was doing the driving. Maybe it would buy Ann a little more of a head start if people thought she was still around.

I hadn’t changed anything about the Subaru, but I’d done one thing to make it mine. The license-plate number Ann had given me was taped to its dash.

“Now.” Joel’s voice, on the cellular. My watch said it was six-thirty in the morning.

“Where?”

“Just come here. I’ll take you.”