“My cousins wouldn’t like that,” I said. “Why don’t I just give you an affidavit to the effect that I have been a little promiscuous at times?”

“Don’t make it easy for them. Besides, I’d rather enjoy the investigation. My reading matter has been rather dull lately.”

I grinned back and glanced at the mirror. The white car was still there, tucked behind two others. It squeezed through a yellow signal light, closed up some so we wouldn’t separate at the next traffic light and followed us up the avenue to the spire of Hunter’s office building.

Hunter said, “Can I drop you two somewhere?”

I glanced at Sharon. “Home for me,” she said. “I’m on East Fifty-fifth.”

“That puts me two blocks away, Counselor. We’ll go back in style.”

“Good. The garage is right in the same area. I won’t be needing the car again today.” He picked up his briefcase and checked the clasp. “Do you, er, have any specific plans, Dog?”

I squeezed Sharon’s hand. “I’m contemplating a few.”

He caught the action and smiled. “I mean in reference to your family.”

I nodded and shook a butt out of my pack. “Don’t sweat it, friend. I have three months to think about it.”

“And it’s a frightening thought. Are you sure it’s worth the now-paltry sum involved?”

I watched him, my lips tight across my teeth. “You bet your sweet ass it is,” I said.

We let him off in front of his building, went crosstown to First Avenue and turned north. For a minute I thought we had lost the white car in the tangle of traffic at the intersection, then I caught a flash of it crowding the opposite side of the one-way street and settled back against the cushions.

Things were going just right. I slid open the glass partition and told Willis we’d drop Sharon off first, but she bounced up with a hard negative and. said I was going to walk her back from the garage and things weren’t going so right after all. The time and the place to intercept the two goons in the white car had to be mine or I’d be hurting. I was betting they were being paid for a smash job, but if it was necessary a direct hit would be acceptable. For the first time I missed the comfortable feel of the iron that used . to hang on my belt and the way the spring-loaded holster would throw it into my palm at the right touch. There were other ways to do things, but it was nice knowing the advantage of a standard Army .45 automatic with alternating rounds of armor piercing and lead nestling in the clip.

The garage was midway up the street and the driver nosed down the ramp into the bowels of the building above it, swept around the fender-scarred concrete columns with skilled ease and stopped. I hopped out in front of the ticket booth, gave Sharon a hand through the door and watched the car pull up to the open elevator at the far end. A Volks-wagen came down next, scraped one of the pillars, then pulled into an open slot on one side evidently reserved for it. Then I looked around the curve and saw the white reflection of the next one in line and knew it was time.

I told Sharon I’d be right back, asked the guy behind the window of the ticket counter where the men’s room was and walked off in that direction.

The flat windshield of an older car made a good mirror. Bridey-the-Greek and Markham had left their car and were right behind me, Markham splitting up to take an angled course through the parked vehicles. I spotted them again in the plate glass of a framed ad for a Broadway show just before I turned the comer of the alcove that led to the toilet.

I had my belt off and wrapped around my hand, feeling that funny expression I always got cutting creases into my face. Maybe the slobs thought I had been away long enough to forget the tricks. Or that being out of the game would spook me. Hell, it was spicing up the day for me.

I pushed open the door and went inside. There were two urinal bowls and three unoccupied toilet booths and I knew I had lucked in. I picked the one to the right, took my shoes off, placed them so anybody looking down would figure I was squatting there nice and helpless on the pot. I closed the door, locked it, hopped over the top and got behind the entrance door and waited for Markham.

He came in right on schedule with a snub-nosed .38 in his hand, saw the single closed toilet door and my shoes in position and walked right past where I was behind the opened door and never even looked when it snicked shut. He never heard me come up behind him in my stocking feet and was just raising his foot to kick the toilet door when I smashed him in the skull behind his ear and sent him splintering through the wooden partition so hard his knees broke the seat right off the bowl. Before he could yell I had his head in my hands, slamming his face against the two-inch dirty ceramic and his teeth broke like dry matzos in a splatter of blood that speckled the stagnant water like obscene curds.

Markham was totally unconscious and never felt what happened to him. He never heard me break the bones in both his hands and never even moaned when I cupped my palms and clapped his eardrums into split pieces of delicate flesh. But in a few hours and for a month later he’d be one hellish piece of agony and his days of usefulness to The Turk would be over.

I picked up his gun and put on my shoes.

Outside the door Bridey-the-Greek would have heard the noises and be anticipating the finish. It was a pleasure to oblige him. All I did was open the door and say, “Come on,” and by the time he realized it wasn’t Markham’s voice he was already inside looking up at me with eyes gone suddenly wide with fear.

He tried one lunge with the ice pick and I broke his wrist with the barrel of the .38 then laid it across the side of his head before he could let out a scream. He went down in a heap like dropping an old laundry bag, the pick rolling from his fingers. It was a nice new sliver of steel, that pick. You could buy them in any dime store and when you loosened the handle and sunk it into somebody you pulled back all your fingerprints and only left pain and slow death behind. Voorhies and Brown had gone that way. Bridey had given it to Bud Healey in the spine and Bud had been a paralytic from the waist down ever since, vegetating in that cottage outside of Brussels.

So I broke every finger on Bridey’s hands too, then stitched him up the side of each cheek so he’d never be invisible in a crowd again. I opened his belt, pulled his pants and shorts down and waited the two minutes until he started to wake up, holding the point of the pick right over the two goodie sacs, and just as a groan wheezed through his lips and his eyes opened and rolled toward mine I drove the ice pick through those lumps of tissue into the rubber-tiled floor and the frenzied yell of horror he started never got past the sharp hiss of his sucked-in breath before he fainted.

The next person to go in that bathroom would do more than relieve his bladder or bowels.

Sharon watched me walk toward her, her face expressionless. Then she frowned momentarily and teased her lower lip with her teeth. I took her arm and walked up the ramp to the street. Her apartment was only five minutes away and she didn’t speak until we turned at her comer.

Then she said, “There’s blood all over your shirt.”

“I’m a messy dresser.”

“Two men followed you in there.”

I nodded.

“They didn’t come out.”

I nodded again.

“Did you know them?”

“Yes.”

We reached the canopy that strung out over the sidewalk in front of her building and stopped.

“They were in that white car that followed us all the way home, weren’t they?”

“How did you know that?”

“Because I was watching you. I saw them in the rearview mirror.”

“They were from another time, kitten. Forget it.”

“What did you do to them?”

“Jogged their memories a little so they’d either be more careful the next time or never do it again at all.’

“Which one will it be?” she asked me.

“I don’t think they’ll try to renew our old acquaintance, sugar.”

“Can you tell me why it happened?”

I lit a cigarette and stared down the street, “No ”

“I see.”

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