Only Child

gold. Gun-turret windows in a slab-faced cinderblock front, the flatness broken only by a pale-blue door behind a set of bars that wouldn’t have looked out of place in San Quentin. Red neon, twisted into the usual promises, glowed reptile-cold.

A pair of cross-angled cameras in weatherproof boxes were mounted at the top of the door, as subtle as a handgun pressed against your temple. I pushed the buzzer, waited, my back to the street.

The door was opened by a tall, skinny guy with a hollow-cheeked face. The forehead above the orange sunglasses he wore was an acne graveyard. In the sullen light from overhead, his crooked teeth looked like an ad for nicotine.

I stared into his mirrored lenses until he stepped aside.

The interior decorator’s palette had been limited to gray and yellow. A few old posters on the walls, some half-empty video racks, one wall of limp magazines. Not a DVD in sight. No private booths, no lingerie shows. The joint was as erotic as a used condom floating on an oil slick.

The cadaverous-looking guy went back to whatever he’d been doing. I browsed through the racks, playing the role. Ignoring the two other men in the place, but not before I absorbed that they were both wearing the latest in Sopranos-chic.

Time passed. No new customers. I didn’t look at my watch. I’d gotten there on time, and I was working flat- rate.

Finally, they glided up, one on my left, the other somewhere behind me. I kept my focus on the greasy pictures, letting the sense impressions flood in. Textures and colors. Sharp tang of too much cologne. They never touched me, just air-cushion-herded me toward the back of the store.

Nothing too fancy in the back, just a long rack on rollers, with a door behind it. A door with no knob. A hand came into my field of vision. Two-knuckle rap. A panel slid up in the door, revealing a Plexiglas window. Maybe fifteen seconds passed. The panel slid down. The door opened. I stepped inside.

The only thing in sight was a flight of stairs, going down. “Uh-huh,” a voice behind me said.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a white lab coat pointed at a long bare workbench. I walked over there.

One of the men stepped close. He was a muscular guy, a couple of inches shorter than me, with longish, heavily gelled black hair. He made eye contact: communicating, not challenging. I opened the channel, waited for his next move.

He held one finger to his lips, making sure I got it. Then he unbuttoned the overtailored jacket to his onyx suit, carefully took it off, and draped it on the workbench. I took off my own jacket with a little less ceremony, placed it on the bench the same way he’d done.

By the time we finished, we were facing each other in our shorts and socks. Without his shoes, he was much shorter than he’d been before. His body was nicely cut and defined, but I had better scars.

The guy in the white lab coat started working on my clothes with some kind of wand.

The guy facing me held his finger to his lips again. I didn’t change expression.

It didn’t take long.

Then we got dressed.

The next door was much more elaborate; no way you would see it unless you knew it was there. It looked as if the stone wall of the basement had just retracted into itself. I followed the guy in the onyx jacket into a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Each of the three walls I could see had a separate door, undisguised. In the far corner, two men were seated in padded armchairs. A third chair stood empty, facing them. I walked over until I was standing in front of the empty chair.

“You’re Burke,” the man to my left said. He was Italian, mid-thirties, darkly handsome, saved from pretty only by a nose that hadn’t been perfectly set the last time it had been broken.

I just nodded. It hadn’t been a question.

“I’m Giovanni,” he said. “And this is Felix.”

The man to my right was Latino, maybe a decade older than the Italian. Or maybe a generation; it was hard to tell much in that light. He was lighter-skinned than the Italian, with the face of royalty. Ruthless royalty.

“Sorry about all the...precautions,” the Italian said. “You understand.”

I nodded again.

“Sit down, please,” the Latino said.

I caught the briefest flicker in the eyes of the Italian. He wasn’t a man who liked being one-upped, not even when it came to class and courtesy. He made a tiny gesture with his right hand. A man came forward, put a fresh pack of cigarettes—same brand as the half-empty pack I’d carried in with me—and a heavy gold lighter on the low table in front of me. A large amber glass ashtray was sitting there, sparkling clean.

“You’ll get all your stuff back when you leave,” the Italian said. “You want a watch to wear in the meantime?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I heard a lot about you,” he said. “From a lot of people. For a long time.”

“About my brother, you mean.”

“Your brother, yeah. But the Chinese lady, she said you were the same.”

“Like how?”

“Like you could do the same stuff. The exact same stuff. Dealing with you, it would be just like dealing with him. Is that right?”

“Exactly right.”

“I have heard much about you as well,” the Latino said, offering his hand for me to shake.

I gave him a light-pressure grip. He turned his palm up, holding my hand a second longer than he had to. Long enough to verify the tattoo. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “To lose one so close to you...”

“Thank you,” I said, my eyes empty. Is he playing it straight, buying the “Burke’s brother” thing? Or being cute...telling me he knows about Pansy?

“Reason you’re here is,” the Italian said, “me and Felix, we’ve got a problem. A problem for both of us, maybe. Or maybe not. That’s where you come in.”

“I’ll tell you where I don’t come in,” I said. “That’s between the two of you.”

The Latino smiled. “We do not want you to take sides, senor. We want your...advice. Your counsel. And, perhaps, your skills.”

“Why me?” I asked them both.

“You’ll see,” the Italian said. “You’re a natural for it. And you’re getting five large just to listen—like we agreed, right?”

They spent the next half hour marking turf, asking me if I knew so-and-so, if I’d been Inside when such-and-such went down, like that. As they talked, their two crews drifted away from our corner. One of them watched a ball game on TV, with the sound turned way down. A few started to play cards. A couple just stared into the middle distance.

“What I’m going to tell you, it’s nothing illegal,” the Italian said. “I’m the victim, not the perp. But it’s not nothing I’d want anyone to hear about....”

“You say that to say what?” I challenged him. I wasn’t any more impatient than their crews were. But you let a man warn you too many times, he starts to think he has good reasons for doing it.

“We have decided to trust Mr. Burke, yes?” the Latino said. “That was our agreement. Mr. Burke is a businessman. He has a reputation. He knows the value of things.”

That last was a nice touch, telling me I better know the cost of things, too.

“I’m sorry,” the Italian said. “It’s just that this whole thing may sound...weird, right?”

The Latino nodded gravely, but stayed silent.

“I got a...position, okay?” the Italian said. “I’m not the boss, but I’m a boss. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”

“No.”

“‘No’ because you can work it out, or ‘no’ because you been looking at charts?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be hostile. And, it’s true, you bought my time. But you keep tossing these shots at me, and I don’t get it. What am I supposed to say now? No, I’m not an