Cheese spit a thick mix of phlegm and blood onto the grass.

“Yo, Mark Fuhrman,” he said, “kiss my black ass.”

Broussard lunged for him, and Poole caught the back of his partner’s jacket as Cheese scrambled backward and swung his huge body off the picnic table.

“These are some sorry-ass crackers you hanging with, Patrick.”

“Hey, mutt!” Broussard shouted. “You remember me that night in solitary! You got it?”

“Got a picture of your wife doing it with a pile of dwarfs in my cell,” Cheese said. “That’s what I got. Want to come look?”

Broussard made another lunge, and Poole wrapped his arms around his partner’s chest, lifted the bigger man off his feet, and pivoted away from the bench.

Cheese headed for the prisoners’ gate and I trotted to catch up.

“Cheese.”

He looked back over his shoulder, kept walking.

“Cheese, for Christ’s sake, she’s four years old.”

Cheese kept walking. “I’m real sorry about that. Tell the man he need to work on his social skills.”

The guard stopped me at the gate as Cheese passed through. The guard had mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my funhouse reflection in each eye as he pushed me back. Two little shimmering versions of me, the same goofy, dismayed look in each face.

“Come on, Cheese. Come on, man.”

Cheese turned back to the fence, put his fingers through the rungs, stared at me for a long time.

“I can’t help you, Patrick. Okay?”

I gestured over my shoulder at Poole and Broussard. “Their deal was real.”

Cheese shook his head slowly. “Shit, Patrick. Cops are like cons, man. Motherfuckers always got an angle.”

“They’ll come back with an army, Cheese. You know how this works. They’re working a red ball and they’re pissed.”

“And I don’t know shit.”

“Yes, you do.”

He smiled broadly, the blood beginning to clot and thicken on his upper lip. “Prove it,” he said, and turned away, walked along the pebbled path that led across a short lawn and back into the prison.

I walked back past Broussard and Poole on my way to the visitors’ gate.

“Nice judgment,” I said. “Picture-fucking-perfect.”

13

Broussard caught up with me as we made our way down the corridor toward the sign-in desk. His hand gripped my elbow from behind and turned me toward him.

“Problem with my method, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Fucking method?” I pulled my arm out of his grasp. “That what you call what you did back there?”

Poole and the guard reached us, and Poole said, “Not here, gentlemen. There are appearances to maintain.”

Poole steered us both down the corridor and through the metal detectors and the last remaining gate. Our weapons were returned to us by a sergeant with hair plugs springing from the top of his head in tiny, tightly wrapped bundles, and then we walked out into the parking lot.

Broussard started in as soon as our shoes hit gravel. “How much bullshit were you willing to swallow from that slug, Mr. Kenzie? Huh?”

“Whatever it took to-”

“Maybe you’d like to go back in, talk about dog suicides and-”

“-get a fucking deal, Detective Broussard! That’s what I-”

“-how much you’re down with your man Cheese.”

“Gentlemen.” Poole stepped in between us.

The echo of our voices was raw in that parking lot, and our faces were red from shouting. The tendons in Broussard’s neck bulged like lines of rope stretched taut, and I could feel adrenaline shake my blood.

“My methods were sound,” Broussard said.

“Your methods,” I said, “sucked.”

Poole put a hand on Broussard’s chest. Broussard looked down at it and kept his eyes there for a bit, his jaw muscles rolling up under the flesh.

I walked across the parking lot, felt the adrenaline turning to jelly in my calves, the gravel crunching underfoot, heard the sharp cry of a bird slicing through the air from the direction of Walden Pond, saw the sun soften and spread against the tree trunks as it died. I leaned against the back of the Taurus, placed a foot up on the bumper. Poole still had a hand on Broussard’s chest, was talking to him, his lips close to the younger man’s ear.

All the shouting aside, my temper hadn’t really shown itself yet. If I’m truly angry, if that switch in my head has been tripped, my voice rides a flat line, becomes dead and monotonous, and a red marble of light drills through my skull and blots out all fear, all reason, all empathy. And the hotter the red marble glows, the colder my blood chills, until it’s the blue of fine metal, and the monotone becomes a whisper.

That whisper-rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else-is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot, the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.

It is my father’s temper.

So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.

The crucial difference between my father and me-I hope-has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.

At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.

So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere-except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.

Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.

“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”

“Then quit your job,” I said.

“We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”

I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.

“What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.

Broussard looked away.

“Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.

“Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.

“You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”

“Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,” I said, “but it ain’t house money either. It’s bribe and property-tax petty cash. For one year. What if he wants to make a moral point?”

Broussard shook his head. “Cheese Olamon has no morals.”

“Yes, he does.” I kicked the bumper with my heel, as surprised as anyone, I think, by the vehemence in my voice. More quietly, I repeated, “Yes, he does. And the number one moral law in his universe is: Don’t fuck with Cheese.”

Poole nodded. “And Helene did.”

“Goddamn right.”

“And if Cheese is pissed off enough, you think he’ll kill the girl and say ‘fuck it’ to the money just to send that message.”

I nodded. “And sleep right through the night.”

Poole ’s face took on a gray cast as he stepped into the shadow between Broussard and me. He suddenly looked very old, no longer vaguely threatening so much as vaguely threatened, and the sense of elfin mischief had left him.

“What if,” he said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “Cheese wishes to make both his moral point and a profit?”

“Run a bait-and-switch?” Broussard said.