“He’s ambitious,” Collins said. “You can almost smell it on him.”

“Ambitious and stupid? Now, that’s something we can work with. If it comes to that. For now, stay still. Can you do that for me, Bully? Stay still, stay quiet.”

“Absolutely.”

Collins tipped the lip of his bottle against Jenkins’s shot glass, and they both drank. Jenkins studied the amber legs running down the inside of his glass. He had watched the bartender pour it straight from the Jameson bottle, but he was suddenly dubious that he had gotten what he paid for. Would the bartender have dared to pull such a trick on him? Yeah, he would have. Because the only thing you got for being a regular in the Days Inn bar on Security Boulevard was loser status, even in the eyes of the losers who took your generous tips and smiled to your face, pretending fealty. No one had a nose for weakness like the bowed and bloodied.

That’s why Jenkins liked Collins. Loyal as a dog. Loyal as the lion was to the guy who pulled the thorn from his paw. Collins would die for him, literally. The kid loved him more than his own kids did.

Then again, Jenkins hadn’t divorced Collins’s mom and taken up with a cocktail waitress who ended up being Miss Ballbuster of the new millennium. Fuckin’ Betty. Jenkins had learned the hard way that a guy didn’t have to have much money to attract a gold digger. Betty had seen the way he lived in New York -the restaurants, the clubs-and never made the distinction that it was because of his status in the Bureau, not his salary. And when the status was gone, along with those paltry perks-poof, so was Betty. Neatest little magic trick he had ever seen, a 120-pound woman disappearing into thin air. He tried to tell her that they would live better in Baltimore, that most agents preferred it over New York or Washington. Betty didn’t buy it.

But then, Betty knew her strengths, too. She claimed she was thirty-five when they met, but she was most certainly on speaking terms with forty. She was one of those natural hard-bodies, a freak gift from the gods, because the most strenuous thing Betty ever did was lift a glass to her mouth. The face-the face had been hard, too, and not in a good way. She had required a good thirty minutes at the dressing table each morning to get it to live up to the body, to mask the lines she’d gotten from squinching up her features and thinking about how she was going to separate this guy or that guy from whatever he had. The way Betty saw it, she had maybe one more husband left in her, and she couldn’t afford for it to be Jenkins, not once he was all but demoted.

He glanced at his own reflection in the window. Eighteen months. Eighteen months to the mandatory retirement age. He could walk now with a decent enough pension, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He’d do his time, get to the end, then set up the sweetest little security gig he could find. In the meantime he would pretend he gave a shit about solving the Youssef case. A loser, even his enemies would concede that. It wouldn’t be his fault if an arrest were never made. All anyone really wanted was for it to recede in the public imagination, an easy enough trick. The average joe couldn’t hold a thought for twenty minutes, which is why all the world’s problems kept being trumped by the missing-white-woman-of-the-week.

He caught a vision of his retirement party, sad and empty. In fact, it would probably look a lot like this-him and Collins, huddled at a table together, two pariahs. In a fair world, a true meritocracy, they would be known for the heroes they were. But Jenkins knew that nothing was more unfair than the bureaucracies allegedly devoted to justice.

7

Lloyd had to wait until almost midnight before the house was quiet and he was sure that everyone was asleep. It had freaked him out a little, the sounds of sex coming from the other bedroom, not that he hadn’t heard those noises before. Made them, too, but that was different. These people were old. Well, not old-old, but old enough. And weird. It was like the Brady Bunch parents rocking the bed, like his mama and Murray, and who wanted to think about that shit?

The woman did have a nice shape, though. Solid, not that skinny, flat-ass body that so many white women prized. But she had to be his mama’s age, or close to.

Lloyd Jupiter’s mother, Berneice, had been sixteen when he was born, and she hadn’t done so bad by him. Not great, but not particularly bad, all things considered. She had pretty good judgment about the men she brought home, if you didn’t include Lloyd’s father in the mix. He was locked up or dead. At any rate, he hadn’t been around for years. Her latest man, father to Lloyd’s youngest brother and sister, was downright reliable, sticking with her two years now. Which was good for his mama, but not so good for Lloyd, ’cause Murray was one of those Jamaican tight-asses who had some definite ideas about what Lloyd should be doing, like school, and not doing, like just about everything else.

Given the tension between Murray and him, Lloyd hadn’t been around to see his mama for a while. She was beginning to ride him, too, which wasn’t like her. Before Murray, Lloyd had always been able to charm her, get his way, shake a few dollars loose from her billfold. After all, he was her firstborn, and she felt guilty about so much-his useless father, how her attention got stretched with the addition of each new kid. In her way, she loved him best.

But the last time Lloyd had dropped by, she’d been out-and-out pissed at him-furious over the rumor that he’d been working for Bennie Tep, even more furious at the news that he’d been let go. The truth was somewhere in between. Lloyd didn’t work for Bennie, but some of his buddies did, and they let him hang. Bennie liked Lloyd. People always liked Lloyd, if he wanted them to. But he wasn’t allowed any role in the main business, not after a few disastrous attempts at playing tout. He could do the math, but those fiends were fierce, rushing him so that he lost his place in the count. Which was fine with Lloyd. He hated all work, hated anything with a boss-jobs, school, family. He needed to find a way where he could be the man in charge, but he wasn’t sure what that was. Dr. Ben Carson had come to his grade school when he was a kid, and that had seemed kind of cool, a black man opening up little children’s hearts and fixing them, but it meant so much school, and Lloyd was through with school the moment he turned sixteen last fall.

“I heard about you,” his mother had said, her voice shrill, her finger in his face. “Getting high and shorting the count. You incompetent, a fiend, or just a thief?”

He had shrugged, refusing to align himself with any of those piss-poor choices.

“You know, you can’t even work at McDonald’s if your cash register is light at the end of ev’ry shift.”

“I ain’t gonna work at no fuckin’ McDonald’s.”

“Honey, that’s what I’m saying. You ain’t gonna work anywhere, you don’t get your act together.”

It was a lot of shit to put up with, just for five or ten dollars. He could panhandle that much in a good afternoon.

He hadn’t been getting high anyway, not really. He smoked a blunt now and then, nothing more. What was wrong with that? Look at these two, guzzling all that wine with dinner. Well, okay, they didn’t guzzle exactly. It wasn’t like they were tipping Thunderbird from a paper bag. But that stuff fucked up all different parts of your insides, while weed just messed with your lungs a little, and you had to smoke a lot to do real damage. He had learned all that back in school, the various dangers of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and while they tried to say that weed was bad, Lloyd knew it wasn’t. Sick people got to smoke it in some states, so how bad could it be?

He crept out of the half-ass room they had stuck him in and paused in the hallway, listening. The dogs were his main concern, especially the Doberman. The big, rat-looking dog didn’t seem so much a threat, not unless it got close enough to breathe on you. Dog’s breath was nasty. He waited, his lies ready-just going to the bathroom, needed a drink of water-but nothing happened. No boards creaking, no long toenails clattering on the wooden floors, no lights coming on.