Hard Candy

I knew what he meant. 'No,' I told him.

'If they need us back in court, I'll get a call.'

'Okay. We're square for now?'

'Yeah.'

I shook hands and walked out. Davidson would do his piece, but he was a lawyer. For him, survival was a Not Guilty verdict. The jury of my peers was still out.

17

IT STAYED that way for a while. Hard looks. Role-playing. I felt Wesley's chill but it never got close to the bone. I drifted back to the anchor. Calmed down. Davidson said the murder charge would stay open, but they'd never press it. I worked the perimeter, nibbling. Some good scams were cooking all over town, but I didn't see my way in.

Another college kid killed his parents. Said 'Dungeons and Dragons' made him do it. A creature killed a woman because she tried to leave him after twenty years. He told the cops she was his. His daughter. A beast slaughtered his girlfriend, raped and killed her teenage daughter, stabbed his seven-year-old son in the heart, and set fire to the apartment. The little boy lived. Identified him at the trial. The jury acquitted him. He went to court and demanded custody of the boy. The Transit Authority set up bulletproof token booths so they couldn't be robbed. Anyone who's done time knows what to do about that- you fill a plastic bottle with gasoline, squirt it through the slot, toss in a match, and wait for the clerk to open the door for you. One of them couldn't get the door open. A youth worker confessed to sodomizing more than three dozen boys over a ten-year period. The judge wanted to sentence him to a speaking tour. Gunfire crackled like heat lightning on streets where the franchise to distribute rock cocaine was disputed by teenage robot-mutant millionaires.

18

IMMACULATA sat across from me in the last booth. Max's woman. Mama was at her front desk with the baby, bouncing the plump little girl on her lap, telling her how things worked.

'It's okay now,' Immaculata said, voice thick with something I didn't recognize.

'Sure.'

'Max understands. He was just…hurt. That you left him out.'

'I had to.'

'I know.'

'Yeah, you know.'

'Burke, why be like this? You made a judgment… it was your call to make. It's over.'

'But you think the judgment was wrong.'

'It was just an ego thing, yes? It's hard to believe this man would have killed our baby just to make Max fight him.'

I looked up. Her eyes were veiled under the long lashes but it didn't help. She couldn't make it stick.

'I have to stand with Max,' she said.

I bowed, empty. Her eyes were pleading with me. 'You still have your baby,' I said.

She put her hand over mine. 'You still have your brother.'

The pay phone rang in the back. Mama walked past, the baby balanced on one hip.

She came back in a minute. Handed the baby to Immaculata, slid in next to her.

'Call for you. Woman say old friend.'

A honeycomb of tiny bubbles in my chest. Flood. How could she have known now was the time?

It must have shown in my face. Mama's voice was soft. 'No' is all she said.

I lit a cigarette, biting into the filter. The little bubbles in my chest popped- a tiny string of explosions, like baby firecrackers.

'Woman say old friend. Need to talk to you. Very important.'

I looked at Mama. Her lips curled, short of a sneer. 'Always important. Woman say to tell you Little Candy from Hudson Street. You know her?' Mama asked, handing me a slip of paper with a telephone number.

I nodded. It didn't matter.

19

MAX WENT everywhere I went. Behind me, not with me. Guarding my back. Protecting me from a ghost. His warrior s soul screaming for combat to make it right. Too late for the battle.

We were on a pier near the Yacht Basin, waiting for a buyer to show up. The buyer had advertised over an electronic bulletin board, using the modem on his personal computer. He wanted a little girl. No older than ten. White. Someone he could love. He'd have ten grand with him. To prove his love.

Max took a restaurant napkin out of his pocket, a felt-tip pen from mine. Drew a rising sun, touched his heart gently. Pointed at me, turned the finger around to include himself. We could go to Japan. Find Flood. Bring her home.

I shook my head. She was home. So was I.

The headlights of the buyer's car flashed. Once, twice. Max merged into the shadow next to my Plymouth. I walked over to the buyer's car, a beige Taurus station wagon. The driver's window whispered down, air-conditioned breeze on my face. It didn't make sense for that time of the year until I saw the fat man inside. Ice-cream suit, straw hat, sweating.

'Mr. Smith?' he asked in a pulpy voice.

'That's me,' I assured him.

'She's with you?'

'In the car,' I said, tilting my head to show him the direction.

I stepped aside to let him out. The light went on inside the station wagon when the door opened. Empty. He took a black attache case off the seat next to him.

'She's still a little dopey,' I said, walking beside him.

'No problem.'

I lit a cigarette, the cheap lighter flaring a signal to Max.

'She's inside,' I told the fat man, patting the Plymouth 's trunk.

'Let's see.'

'Let's see the money.'

He popped open the briefcase on the trunk lid. Clean-looking bills, nicely banded. And a small plastic bottle with a spray top, some white handkerchiefs, plastic wristbands- the kind they give you in the hospital.

'Got everything you need, huh?'

'Hey, look, pal. This kid isn't for me, okay? I'm a businessman, just like you. In fact, you got any more where this kid came from, you just let me know. I got customers waiting.'

His fat body slammed into the back of the Plymouth as Max took him from behind- a paralyzing shot just below the ribs, a lightning chop to the exposed neck as he went down. Vomit sprayed onto the Plymouth.

I ripped open his shirt. No wire. Pulled his wallet from an inside pocket, stripped off his watch, passed up the rings, snatched the brief-case. And left him where he was.

It didn't make the morning papers.