'I don't know.'

'Oh. That's a shame.'

We ran into an alley behind the houses and hit two speed bumps and she swung the Mazda alongside a broken-down fence and switched off the engine. 'I was kind of hoping you'd be able to tell me about that. You seemed to know her pretty well, the way you were talking to her at the party. See, narcotics are okay but she was a big time gal and that was a big time hit, and if I could get a handle on that operation I might take it straight to the FBI and who knows, they could offer me a job with them, change of pace, little more prestige, you know?'

She locked the car and we went across a concrete yard and into the rear of the nearest house and took the lift to the fourth floor, a broken strand of one of the cables twanging through the pulleys. At the third door along a dim-lit passage she got out her keys and opened up and went inside and I followed.

'You want some eggs?'

'That would be nice.'

'Make yourself at home. Bathroom's through there, you want to clean up. Boy, you got legs, you know that?'

'I'm sorry?'

Throwing her gold bag on to a chair, checking her hair in a mirror, 'I saw you get out of that limo so fast I thought you were going to mash your head all over the sidewalk. Then you were up and running and I figured you were going to keep on flat out right to the end of that alleyway, and I had to burn rubber through a red light and get the whole of that block behind me and make another turn and get my ass all the way down to where you were in time to catch you, is what I mean, I only just made it, you got legs.' Turning away from the mirror and facing me with her hands on her hips in her black leather skirt with her moist skin glowing in the light and her eyes half-hidden in her long dark lashes, 'I'm real glad I made it, you know? I don't have a man now Proctor's taken off, you go for black gals?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, Lieutenant,' I said, 'we've got business to do.'

A flash of laughter – 'And just dig that accent – leff-tenant, wow! You want them boiled, fried, Benedict, sunny side up, over easy, two, three, four?'

'Whatever you're having,' I said and went into the bathroom, and when I came back she'd started frying them, the top half of her body visible above the counter dividing the big cathedral-ceilinged room from the kitchen.

'Like a drink?'

'I'm fine as I am.'

'Take a look around. That's my own art work on the walls.'

She meant the photographs, rows of them, black and white and most of them taken by flash, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 3546, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 1170, the positions mostly the same, a man stooping or leaning face to the wall or prone on the floor, a cop frisking him or putting the handcuffs on or keeping a locked arm-hold or pushing him into a squad car, Lt. Lacroix looking on, got up in short pants and a tank top or jeans and a tee shirt or a torn leather jacket, the same expression on her face in every shot, very alert, her eyes wide and missing nothing, giving me the impression that if the cop fumbled with the handcuffs or lost the arm hold or let the man slip away from the car she'd be there with a force of her own, because she hadn't spent the amount of time she had in nailing these people just to see them evade arrest.

'Kinda toast?' she asked me, 'rye, whole wheat, French?'

'Whatever you're having. So what would you do if one of these people tried to get away, Monique?'

'I do what it takes. I've been up three times this year on a police brutality rap, you beat that? Thing is, they're all in the slammer and I guess that's the name of the game.'

'How tall are you?'

'Five two, hundred and ten pounds, call me a fucking midget, but listen, the bottom line is just how hard you kick them in the nuts, because it really gets their attention.'

We sat at a black lacquered table under one of those hanging mirrored globes, with its reflections floating across the walls and the black net curtains as she flashed me a smile and passed me the ketchup and said in her light, husky voice, 'See, I don't personally give a shit if people decide to go to hell in their own handcart by smoking crack or shooting snow, they don't wanna live and they know how to die, it's their business. I just find it's a good game to play, it's fast and it's risky and I go into these houses and make a purchase and flash my badge and bring the rest of the guys in from the cars, scare the shit out of everybody and maybe sometimes shake a guy down for a couple of grand, I like nice things, look at this room, I like a nice watch and nice shoes, you know? And who do I steal from, the public? Shit, I steal from the dealers, see, I'm not like those fancy congressmen, charge the public for their plane trips and women and cruises and all that stuff, they're the real crooks but of course for them it's legal. They okay?'

The eggs. Said yes.

'Thing is, it triggers so much crime, and there's not much we can do to keep it down, the numbers are just too big. In this town there's maybe a thousand armed robberies and auto thefts and break-ins every day, and a big percentage of those are drug-related, those poor slobs sucking on the devil's dick and having to net a hundred grand or two hundred grand to support the habit – that's where the public pays. So I do my thing and like I say it's fast and risky but there's no way, there is no way we can stop the biggest growth industry in Miami – the stuff just comes dropping out of the sky in bales and canvas bags from the low-flying planes while the power boats are out there picking them up, same time as, the body-packers in from Columbia are dying in the hotel rooms, found one of them today with a pound of cocaine in his stomach stashed away in eighty-two condoms, had to give him emergency surgery because, see, those things can burst and the coke paralyses the colon and this poor son of a bitch had been out and bought himself an enema and two packets of prunes and a box of Exlax, didn't do him any good, see, near dying when we got to him, went to Jesus two hours later in the post-operative room, things going on like that all over this town, the stuff comes in every way there is, planes and boats and pickup trucks and people's stomachs, you like some more?'

Coffee. Said yes.

'Anyway, Toufexis is my assignment, I mean my personal assignment, they wouldn't put just one little lieutenant to work on the head of the Miami Mafia, we've got a whole special unit on his ass, but that's why I moved in on George Proctor, see.'

'What caught your interest?'

'I saw him with Toufexis himself, talking in the lobby of the Gold Hibiscus, shaking hands and everything like real good friends, I took it from there. Had to get Cambridge off the stage but he liked the cut of my whoops or something and it only took a few days. Then I began working on him, you know? I mean once I'd copied the key of the apartment and he wasn't there. Diaries, phone-numbers, the regular routine, and one time I followed him to a place he often went to, and the next day I got myself invited inside, flashed my badge, nice and polite.'

'Where was that?'

'House on West Riverside Way, 1330, you know the place?'

'No,' I said, and put my coffee down, 'but tell me about it.'