“But Baker was coming to kill you!”

“Don’t get me wrong, Frannie. I don’t care too much about what happens to one Louis Baker. But he ought to go down for what he’s actually done.”

“So let a jury decide that. Or Abe.”

“Juries can be wrong, and Abe’s not interested in his current mood.” Hardy flipped some pages in Abe’s file, leaning over the coffee table. “There’s another thing,” he said.

She sat forward, a hand on his back. “What’s that?”

“One way or the other I’m deeply involved in all this, right? So let’s, for argument, let’s say Baker didn’t kill Rusty. Let’s even, just for fun, say Rusty isn’t dead. If either or both of those are true, then why am I, Dismas Hardy, part of this at all… unless I’m being set up.”

“But set up for what?”

Hardy closed the file and leaned back against the couch. “Exactly.”

Hardy was thinking that maybe Frannie’s infatuation had ended, since she was already pissed off at him for going to see Louis Baker in the hospital. He should just leave it alone, she said. But he still felt some danger. If he was being set up… Or maybe he wanted to stay at Frannie’s a little longer and needed an excuse. Or maybe he felt less than a paragon and wanted to soothe his conscience now that his life wasn’t, so far as he knew, directly threatened. It was all jumbled, but also somehow connected.

He and Frannie had had their first fight. She said that compulsive need to find out, to do the right thing, had killed her husband. She wasn’t about to have it happen to Hardy too.

But Hardy knew that idealism hadn’t killed Eddie Cochran four months ago. A bullet in the brain had killed him, and Eddie had had no more control over who had put it there than he did over the wind. Eddie had been going along, living his life, trying to make it a good one, and someone had ended it-abruptly, senselessly. If something in Frannie needed to believe that Eddie’s idealism had gotten him involved in things that had led to that lonely parking lot in the middle of the night, Hardy could accept that. He knew it had been someone else’s agenda, not Eddie’s, that had ended his life.

He put it out of his mind as the guard let him into the hospital room. He had called Abe from Frannie’s and Abe had cleared an interview with Baker, even if he didn’t approve of it. He had made Hardy promise not to take his gun.

Even with tubes in his arms and a hose running into his nose, Baker looked intimidating. Hardy backed away from the bed and glanced at the door to the room, making sure the guard was still just outside.

He couldn’t place him. Hardy had no distinctive memory of what Baker had looked like nine years before. A big black man. He’d sent away a lot of them.

“Yo, Louis,” he said.

Baker opened his eyes. He was still heavy-lidded, perhaps sedated, but there was recognition there. Baker’s eyes had a yellowish tint, both the white and the brown iris. “Well, if the mountain ain’t come…” After the one phrase he closed his eyes again.

Hardy pulled up a chair so he could be close to Baker’s face. “I hope you got a better lawyer than last time,” he said. He watched Baker for a reaction but there wasn’t any. He might have gone back to sleep.

“ ’Cause when you get better from this tragic accident that’s put you in the hospital, then you’re going to go sit in a small green room and breathe some real bad air. But, you know, the good part is you won’t breathe it for too long.”

Baker opened his eyes. “Talk about bad air.”

“They say the gas is painless, but you hear stories. Guys who get the first whiff and their heads jerk back and eyes bug out, like they’re gagging on fire. It’s gotta be agony, don’t you think? But again, I guess it doesn’t last too long.”

“I ain’t going to no gas chamber on a B and E.”

“Fuck the B and E. I’m talking the murders.”

“I didn’t do no murders.”

“You didn’t do Rusty Ingraham? You better have a good lawyer.”

“I didn’t even see no Rusty Ingraham. I tole the cop that.”

“And you know, he wanted to believe you, but finding your prints over at Rusty’s place made him skeptical. You know that word, Louis, skeptical? It means he thinks you’re full of shit.”

Baker closed his eyes again.

“You sleepy, Louis? You want me to go away? ’Cause we got you on Rusty’s barge, we got you in the cut. We got three dead people with your name all over ’em.” Hardy saw movement under Baker’s eyelids-he was thinking about things.

Hardy hadn’t formally interrogated anyone since he’d left the D.A.’s office, but you didn’t lose the knack. It was kind of fun, in fact, realizing that Louis probably thought he was still a prosecutor.

“Three?” Baker opened his eyes, pulled himself up. “What three? You trying to tag me for every murder in the county last week? What’s a matter, you got nobody else on parole?”

The effort of talking cost Louis, and he had to lie back down, breathing out through his mouth.

“I ain’t do a thing, you all decide I’m going back down.”

“How’d you get a gun, Louis? Shooting at cops. Breaking and entering. You call that not doing a thing?”

Louis picked up his hand, waving all of that off. “It ain’t killing.”

Hardy sat back in his chair. It was not rare for a killer to deny killing anybody. But he had Louis arguing, talking. You had to use what you had and keep ’em talking.

“No, killing was Rusty Ingraham, killing was the woman at his place, killing was the homeboy in the cut.”

“What woman at Ingraham’s?”

“Her name was Maxine Weir.”

“There wasn’t no woman-” Louis stopped abruptly, retreating again behind his closed eyes, lying back.

Hardy leaned forward, smiling now. “Oops,” he said.

“I want my lawyer here.”

Hardy leaned over closer and whispered in Baker’s ear. “Fuck you, Louis. Fuck your lawyer. This is me and you.”

“I’ll get a mistrial.”

“I’ll deny it, and who’s going to believe you?”

Louis tried to lift himself on the bed, which brought on a coughing fit. The oxygen hose came out of his nose. Hardy stood and pulled his chair back while the guard came over and pushed a button by the bed. In another minute a nurse was there. The coughing fit had passed and Louis lay still, looking dead.

The nurse replaced the oxygen tubes and checked the bandages on Baker’s chest and thigh. Hardy could see the blood through the gauze-a line of blood and drool had run from Baker’s mouth. There was a low gurgling sound, and Hardy realized it was Baker’s breathing.

The nurse turned. “He shouldn’t really talk.”

Hardy decided to keep pretending to be official until someone called him on it. “I’ll only be another five minutes. This is a murder suspect.”

“Do you want him alive to go to trial?”

Hardy glanced at Baker, then back at the nurse. “Not particularly, but I’ll keep it short anyway.”

Hardy pulled his chair back up and noticed the nurse saying something to the guard at the door.

“Now where were we?” Hardy said. “Oh yeah. You were on Ingraham’s barge.”

Baker was still struggling with his breath, as though he’d been running. “There wasn’t no woman there,” he said.

“You told Sergeant Glitsky you weren’t there.”

“He puts me there, he thinks I did the man.”

“Correct.”

“The man brung me there.”

“Who did?”

“Ingraham.”

“Ingraham brought you where he lives? You want me to believe that?”

“You believe what you want anyway. I’m telling you what happen.”

“Okay. What happened?”

“I get off the bus an’ the man is there waitin’. He goes, ‘Come take a ride with me,’ and I pass on it. But he’s packing.”

“You’re telling me Rusty Ingraham pulled a gun on you?”

Baker nodded. “I told you. He shows me his piece and we go to his car. I figure he’s going to shoot me, but we drive about two miles and next I know we’re on his boat.