'What did Wilson's mother get?'

'A hundred grand, from what I can tell.'

'Cost the police department a lot to make everyone go away on that one.'

'The money was never going to be enough to satisfy his mother, though.'

'You can dig it, right?'

Strange thought of his brother, now thirty years gone, and a woman he'd loved deep and for real back in the early seventies.

'When you lose a loved one to violence,' said Strange, 'ain't no amount of money in the world gonna set things right.'

'How about revenge? Does that do it, you think?'

'No,' said Strange, his mind still on his brother and that girl he'd loved. 'You can never trade a bad life for a good.'

Strange parked on the street, alongside one of the fenced-in lots fronting the strip-bar and bathhouse district. He said to Lattimer, 'Wait here.'

The doorman who'd been at Toot Sweet when Strange had picked up Coles was there again today. He'd gotten his hair cut in a kind of fade, and he wore a baggy sweatsuit, which didn't do a whole lot to hide his bulk. Boy looked like some cross of African and Asian, but Strange figured the majority of it was African, as he'd never seen any kind of Chinaman that big.

'How you doin',' said Strange.

'It's still seven dollars to get in. We ain't gone and changed the cover since the other day.'

'You remember me, huh?'

'You and your friend. White boy did some damage back in the bathroom.'

Strange palmed a folded ten-dollar bill into the doorman's hand. 'I'm not coming in today, so that's not for the cover. That's for you.'

The doorman casually looked over his shoulder, then slipped the ten in the pocket of his sweatpants. 'What you want to know?'

'I was wonderin' about what happened back there in the bathroom.'

'What happened? Your partner fucked that big boy up. Went into the kitchen and got a tenderizing mallet, then went into the bathroom and broke big boy's nose real quick. Kicked him a couple of times while he was down, too. I had to clean up the blood myself. There was plenty of it, too.'

'What you do with the big guy?'

'One of my coworkers drove him to D.C. General and dropped him off. They got a doctor over there, this Dr Sanders, we've seen him put together guys got torn apart in this place real nice. So we figure we put him in good hands.'

'Why didn't you phone the cops?'

'The big guy didn't want us to. Right away I'm thinkin' he's got warrants out on him, right? And the management, they don't want to see any cops within a mile of this place. Not to mention, you and your buddy, I know you're not cops, but whatever the fuck your game is, you probably know enough real policemen to make it rough on the owner to keep doing business here, know what I'm sayin'? I mean, we're not stupid.'

'I didn't think you were.'

'Next time you bring white boy around here, though-'

'I know. Put him on a leash.'

The doorman smiled and patted his pocket. 'You want another receipt?'

'It's tempting,' said Strange. 'But I'll pass.'

On the way back to the car, Strange thought, Maybe I'm giving this Terry Quinn too much credit. Sure, it could have gone down the way he said it did with Wilson. But maybe it was just that some switch got thrown, like all of a sudden the 'tilt' sign flashed on inside his head. A young man with that kind of violence in him, you couldn't tell.

Quinn was shaking the shoulder of a guy called himself Moonman, sleeping by the space heater in the room at the back of the shop. Moonman's clothes were courtesy of Shepherd's Table, and he showered and ate in the new Progress Place, a shelter off Georgia, behind the pool hall and pawnshops, back along the Metro tracks. Daytime he spent out on the street. Today was a cold one, and when it got bitter like this Quinn let Moonman sleep in the science fiction room in the back.

'Hey, Moon. Wake up, buddy, you gotta get going. Syreeta's coming in, and you know she doesn't like you sleeping back here.'

'All right.'

Moon got himself to his feet. He hadn't been using the showers at Progress Place all that often. That bad smell of street person that was body odor and cigarettes and alcohol and rot came off him, and Quinn backed up a step as Moon got his bearings. There were crumbs of some kind and egg yolk crusted in his beard. Quinn had given him the coat he was wearing, an old charcoal REI winter number with a blue lining. It was the warmest coat Quinn had ever owned.

'Take this,' said Quinn, handing him a dollar bill, enough for a cup of coffee, not enough for a drink.

'A ducat,' said Moon, examining the one. 'Do you know, the term refers to an actual gold coin, a type of currency formerly used in Europe? The word was appropriated as slang by twentieth-century African Americans. Over the years it's become a standard term in the Ebonic vocabulary

'That's nice,' said Quinn, gently steering Moonman out of the room toward the front door.

'I'll spend it well.'

As he walked behind him, Quinn saw the paperback wedged in a back pocket of Moonman's sorry trousers. 'And bring that book back when you're done.'

'The Stars My Destination, by Bester. It's not just a book, Terry. It is a mind-blowing journey, a literary achievement of Olympian proportions…'

'Bring it back when you're done.'

Quinn watched Moonman walk out the front door. People in the neighborhood liked to treat Moon as their pet intellectual, speculating on how such a 'mentally gifted guy' could slip through society's cracks, but Quinn didn't have any interest in listening to Moonman's ramblings. He let Moonman sleep in the back because it was cold outside, and he gave him his coat because he didn't care to see him die.

Quinn stopped by the arts and entertainment room and looked inside the open door. A middle-aged guy with dyed hair and liver lips studied a photography book called Kids Around the World. He faced the wall and held the book close to his chest. He had the same look as the wet-eyed fat guy who hung back in the hobbies and sports room, and the young white man with the very short haircut, his face pale and acned, who lingered in the military history room and stared half smiling at the photos in the Nazi-atrocity books shelved there. Quinn recognized them all: the ineffectual losers and the creeps and the pedophiles, all the friendless fucks who didn't really want to hurt anyone but who always did. Syreeta said to leave them alone, that the books were a healthy kind of outlet for their unhealthy desires, the alternative was that they would be out there on the street.

Quinn knew that they were out there on the street. Syreeta was all right, a good woman with good intentions, but Quinn had seen things for real and she had not. Sick motherfuckers, all of them. He'd like to get them all in one room and-

'Hey, Terry.' It was Lewis, standing before him, a box of hardbacks in his arms. Lewis's eyeglasses had slipped down to the tip of his nose. 'I finished racking the new vinyl. Now I've got to get these fictions shelved. You want to watch the register for me?'

'Yeah, sure.'

Quinn went up to the front of the shop. He phoned Juana to confirm their date for that evening. He'd had a long phone conversation with her the previous night. He'd gotten an erection just talking to her, listening to the sound of her voice. It was driving him crazy, thinking of her eyes, her hair, those dark nipples, that warm pussy, her fine hands. It had been that way with other girls who'd turned him on, but this was different, yeah, he wanted to hit it, but he wanted to just be with her, too. He left a message on her machine.

Quinn went behind the register counter and read some of Desperadoes, a western by Ron Hansen. It was one of his favorites, a classic, and he was reading it for the second time, but he found it hard to concentrate, and he set the book down. He stood and flipped through the used albums in the bins beside the register area. Another Natalie Cole had come in, along with a Brothers Johnson, a Spooky Tooth, and a Haircut 100. He picked up a record that had a bunch of seventies-looking black guys on its cover, three different pictures of them jumping around out on a landing strip. He read the title on the album and smiled.