“What brings you here, Phyllis?” His tone was even, careful, and yet some curiosity still seeped through. His eyes flicked to my hand, hovering over the slit in my dress that gave me access to the knife holstered on my thigh. I should have been more wary of trusting Walter, who they called Red Man for more than one reason, but some other, wayward impulse had only ever been able to see him as a friend. “Victor will know you’re here by now. He’ll be wanting to speak with you.”
“Lay hands on me, you mean. Two more bodies as of this morning. No wonder there’s so few of us left in the city these days.”
He shrugged. “Victor’s angel isn’t usually that sloppy.”
I flexed my good hand against my thigh. “This time she won’t be,” I said, and prayed it was true.
Walter just watched me.
“The part I can’t figure out,” I said, “is why now? Why bother poor Maryann when she’d kept quiet for all those years? And what I guess is that it has something to do with that dead man in that file you gave me, the one with missing hands who you tried to pin on Maryann. He died, and something changed—but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what. So I thought I’d come and ask you.”
“You never told Victor,” he said, “that there was a witness the night you offed Trent.”
I paused, trying to determine if that was recrimination, or just observation. “Didn’t come up,” I said, finally.
Walter’s mouth twitched. “And Trent had kept quiet about his new squeeze. Didn’t occur to Victor that someone else might know what happened that night. Let alone that the witness might be one of his own pharmaceutical suppliers. But then that man—lost his hands, let’s say. They could take away pain with a touch. Not just physical pain. Couldn’t heal you, but those hands made it better for a while. It turned out that Trent had been keeping him on a private payroll, so to speak. He’d give the man food and money, and in exchange Trent would get his troubles washed away. I guess after her man’s death, Maryann needed what was in those hands even more. She kept our friend up in the same way. So when he turned up dead they found her number in his back pocket. One of the precinct cops who went to the interview remembered her from Trent’s stoolie days and made the connection.”
“And that’s how Victor found out what she saw? One of his own boys on the job?” I whistled.
“I suspect vice squad already knew. But they kept it quiet for their own reasons. The precinct had never been able to connect the missing hand murders to Victor before.”
“So, Maryann West connects them, and now she’s cooling her heels at the medical examiner’s office.”
“Did Dev learn that from his cop friends?”
I flinched and then tried to pass it off with a rough jerk of my injured arm, but Walter just waited.
“I have no idea how Dev found out. He has his sources, you know that.”
Walter’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “You aren’t a great liar, Phyllis. Your boy has been working both sides for a long time now.”
And so I found myself neatly, masterfully and yet fondly, outclassed: Walter knew precisely how much I would sacrifice to keep Dev safe. I considered the utility of denial. I considered pell-mell escape, out the back door and into a safe house with Dev. I could come back to finish Victor later. But once my shock receded, the obvious conclusions asserted themselves: Dev would not still be alive, and Walter would not be telling me extraordinary truths in a basement with no witnesses, if he wanted to use the information to hurt us. But he wanted something from me.
“How did you know?” I said.
“Oh, I know almost everything around here. Victor knows what I tell him—those hands of his only work so well. Better to keep your eyes open, I told him that when he first got a taste for that sort of back-door spiritualism. But Vic—” Walter started to say something else and then laughed. The look in his wide eyes made me shiver, and not for myself.
The door above me opened, letting in a bolus of humid air that damped my skin with the scent of baked concrete. Dev’s voice called, “Pea, are you down there?”
I gave Walter a wild look, my knife halfway from its holster. “Come on down,” he called. “Your girl’s about to pin me with one of those knives of hers, but you’ve always been a calming influence.”
“Dev, what the hell are you doing here?”
He raised his eyebrows and jumped lightly from the middle step. “I’m sure we both have very good explanations. Maybe we could talk upstairs?”
He wasn’t so crude as to look at Walter, but I caught his implication and sighed. “Don’t bother. He already knows.”
Dev jerked in surprise. “Well,” he said. “Well, fuck. I hope Victor doesn’t?”
Walter smiled in that strange way again. “I reckon he doesn’t. Not unless he got very lucky with his latest trophies. Diminishing returns. The hands don’t work like they used to. But Dev, you and I both know you won’t be here much longer anyway.”
Dev made to put his arm around me, then shook his head and dropped it back to his side. You can wish to be the kind of woman who frightens the world, and still wish to be the kind who can take comfort in her man’s protection.
I took one step away from him.
“Don’t make her do this,” Dev said.
Walter shook his head. “You’ve never been able to stop her before. She’s marked for it. You aren’t, Dev, I don’t care what your police trained you for, or even what your hands
