'Glad there's something,' Hawk said.
Hawk went home. And I sat at my desk for a while with my feet up. The desk lamp was on but the rest of the office was dim. Outside, the Back Bay was quiet. And the light from the street was muted by the time it reached the window. I'd been following the sad track of a dead girl for too long. And the dead girl wasn't even who I was looking for. Maybe April was dead too. Maybe I'd been following a dead girl to find a dead girl. I looked at the backs of my hands. A couple of the knuckles on my left hand had been broken and healed a little larger. The hands were real, though, flesh and blood, alive. The pimp was dead too. Which pimp, I'd met so many lately. Rambeaux, the late Robert Rambeaux, reed man.
Maybe they were all either pimps or whores. Maybe it was life's classifying principle, maybe I had seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
I called Susan at home.
'I'm sitting in my office with only one light on,' I said, 'and I'm quoting Prufrock to myself.'
'My God,' she said, 'tell me about it.'
'Everybody I run into looking for April is a pimp,' I said. 'Except for the whores.'
'Everybody?'
'Metaphorically at least. It's depressing.'
'The last time you found her she went right back to whoring,' Susan said.
'Yeah, that's not encouraging either. What kind of world is it when whoring is the best choice open to you?'
'Since when do you and I talk about the world,' she said. 'The world is what it is.'
'Yeah, I know.'
'Not only do you know, you've helped me to know.'
'Good to be useful,' I said.
'What has always made me respect you, even in the bad times, was your ability to look out at the world and see what's there. Not what you'd like to see, or even what you need to see, but simply what's there.'
'I haven't killed anyone yet this trip.'
Susan was silent for a moment on the phone, then she said, 'Ah, that's what it is. It's not this, it's still San Francisco.
'And Idaho,' she said. 'Whatever you did, and whoever you killed, and however you feel about it, you have to judge all of that in context. You were doing what you felt you had to do, and you were doing it for love.'
'The people I killed are just as dead.'
'Yes. It makes no difference to them why you did it. But it makes a difference to me and to you. What we've been through in the last couple of years has produced the relationship we have now, achieved love, maybe. Something we've earned, something we've paid for in effort and pain and maybe mistakes as well. I live with some.'
'I know,' I said.
'We aren't who we were,' she said.
'I know,' I said.
'But if you are to continue what you do, you cannot be afraid to kill someone if you must. Otherwise you'll die, and if you do some of me will die as well.'
'I know,' I said.
'So either come to terms with that or do something else. We almost lost each other once.'
'Doing something else doesn't seem too swell,' I said.
'No, it doesn't. You are the best there is at what you do. And what you do is often crucially important to someone.'
'You love me,' I said, 'don't you.'
'More than I can say. Maybe more sometimes than I can show.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I know.'
'You want to come over?'
'No,' I said, 'I'm okay.'
'You weren't when you called,' Susan said.
'I am now,' I said.
'No wonder I'm called super shrink,' Susan said.
'Hey, wait a minute, the patient does all the work.'
'Of course,' Susan said. 'You ought to not forget that whoever you killed last year, there were people you could have killed and didn't.'
'There's that,' I said.
'We all do what we need to, and what we have to, not what we ought to, or ought to have. You're a violent
