"I seen you earlier in the dressing room. Eating some pills out of a li'l vial. Them ain't M amp;M's. You was taking the rush, man. You call me a coward? You used other cops to do this to my face, kick my feet out from under me while my wrists was cuffed behind my back. You got a problem, man, but it ain't me."

He went out of the door, past the big window on the steam room, his flip-flops slapping, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

I showered and changed into my street clothes and stuffed my gym shorts and soiled T-shirt and socks into my workout bag. Bootsie's diet pills, which I had taken from our medicine cabinet, lay in the bottom of the bag. I thought of Jimmy Dean Styles, the sneer on his face, the calculated insult of his words, and I felt my bowels slide in and out, a pang of anger rip through my chest as bright and sharp as a piece of scissored tin. I dropped two of the diet pills in my mouth and cupped a handful of water from the faucet and swallowed. The rush went through my system with the warm and soft glow of an old-fashioned, like the caress of a destructive ex-girlfriend reentering your life.

Outside, the wind was blowing hard, the palms whipping on the neutral ground, the sky bursting with trees of lightning. Garbage cans and newspapers bounced through the streets, the air smelling of dust and distant rain. Jimmy Dean Styles was putting up the top on a red convertible. A short, heavyset white woman, with bleached hair that looked as if it had been electrified in a microwave, stood behind Styles and watched him clamp down the convertible's top, patiently holding a yogurt cone wrapped in a napkin. I couldn't place her at first, then I remembered seeing her with Linda Zeroski, hanging on the same corner where Linda had been picked up the night she died.

Styles took the cone from her hand and hugged her close and licked a huge swath out of the yogurt, then fed the cone to the woman as he would a pet, her neck snugged tightly in his bare armpit.

"How you like it, my man? I'm talking about my car. You could use a 'sheen like this. Put a li'l boom-boom in yo' bam-bam, know what I mean?" Styles said, laughing openly at me now.

CHAPTER 14

Frankie Dogs was a private man who shared little about himself with other people. He and his wife had not been able to have children, and after she died of colon cancer many years ago, his only family had become the Mob. Frankie was a made guy and stand-up soldier in the old tradition. He went down twice, a three-bit in Raiford and a hard nickel in Angola. At Raiford he was kept in the Flat Top, maximum security, and the other inmates called him "mister." In Angola he was classified a big stripe and spent most of his sentence in twenty-three-hour lockdown. His neighbors were shank artists, snitches, gangbang yard bitches, and meltdowns who threw their feces through the bars at the guards.

Bad screws could jam him up, take away his privileges, leave him unwashed and foul in his cell. But Frankie Dogs never ratted anybody out, never used a punk, took on all comers in the showers or anywhere else, and would let his enemies rub salt in his wounds rather than complain or ask for help from a corrections officer.

Frankie grew up in the Irish Channel with Joe Zeroski and became a made guy the same week as Joe. But unlike Joe, who never gambled, Frankie loved racetracks in general and Miami's Biscayne Dog Track in particular. That's where he met Johnny (whose last name Frankie never used), silver-haired, handsome, profile like a Roman emperor's, connected in Hollywood, always dressed in fifteen-hundred-dollar tailored suits, a boyish grin on his mouth that was so congenial no one would later believe he helped to murder the president of the United States.

Johnny almost took out Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar. Frankie hand-waited on Johnny at his home in Ft. Lauderdale, played cards and swam with him in his pool, listened to Johnny talk about Benny Siegel and Meyer and how Albert died in the barbershop and who put the hit on him. Johnny not only had the keys to magic places in Phoenix and Beverly Hills and the Islands, he had the keys to history.

He might have been a greaseball from the slums of New York, but he had reinvented himself as a man of grace and charm in a world of palm trees, tile-roofed stucco mansions, and champagne lawn parties. Each morning the tropical sunrise came to Johnny as an absolution, not of sin but of poverty.

"What you brooding about, kid?" Johnny asked him one evening when they were playing cards and grilling steaks on the patio.

"These political people ain't no good for us," Frankie replied.

"It's a racket, just like unions or construction or any of our regular businesses."

"These guys got no loyalty, Johnny. They send their messages through Cuban street mutts 'cause they're ashamed to be seen with us. They'll use you and throw you away."

Johnny cupped his hand on the back of Frankie Dogs's neck, his eyes paternal, glistening with sentiment. "You worry too much, kid. But that's why I like you. You don't never let a man down," he said.

The next day Frankie slept late in the pool house. When he went inside for breakfast, he asked the Puerto Rican cook where Johnny was.

"Is no here," the cook replied.

"I know that. That's why I'm asking you. Why don't you learn the English language?" Frankie said.

The cook said Johnny had walked to the shopping center for a pack of cigarettes.

"He ain't supposed to do that. Why didn't nobody wake me up? Which shopping center? Hey, I'm talking here," Frankie said.

"I don't know nozzing," the cook replied.

One week later a sealed oil drum floated to the surface in Biscayne Bay. The drum was wrapped with chains and sash weights and should have remained buried forever in the silt bottom of the bay. But the people who had shot Johnny through the head and sawed off his legs and stuffed them with his torso inside the drum, pausing to jab an ice pick into his abdomen to break the stomach lining, had botched the job, allowing Johnny's last meal on earth to form into gas and float his body parts back into the tropical sunrise.

Frankie Dogs never forgave himself for sleeping in the day Johnny died.

He left Miami on the Sunset Limited, broke and depressed, and found his old friend Joe Zeroski waiting for him on the platform in New Orleans. Joe moved him into his house and gave him a job collecting the vig for the Giacano family's Shylocks. Frankie found a stained form of redemption in devoting his life to Joe and Joe's sad, drug-addicted, profligate daughter, Linda.

But it was all going south again. If you were a button man, the only edge you had was the edge. You got high on it and wore your indifference like an unshaved man in a tailored suit. Your enemies looked into your eyes and knew that even if they blew out your lights you'd smoke them on the way down. But some guys out of Houston tried to cowboy Joe by the St. Thomas Project. Joe fired his.45 through the back window of his car and hit a kid on a bicycle.

Bad luck for everybody. But that's all it was, bad luck. It don't mean you're some kind of degenerate, Frankie told himself.

In Frankie's opinion everything about this New Iberia gig was wrong. Frankie's motto was: When in doubt, take 'em all out. For openers he told Joe to pop that black kid, Tee Bobby Whatever. Throw a pimp off a roof and make his friends watch. And tell Zerelda to stop complicating things by rolling down her panties at every opportunity. First she's pumping it with that animal Purcel, then she's messing around with a door-to-door salesman packs his own lunch into restaurants. It was disgusting.

Frankie shot nine-ball in a back-of-town bar in Lafayette, where the beer was cold, the fried-oyster po'boys good, the green-felt table level, the pockets leather, the competition first-class. It was like the saloons on Magazine he and Joe had shot pool in when they were kids.