Bennie puttered around his kitchen looking for something he was allowed to eat or drink. This was usually the time of night that he liked to have a little cognac, but his doctor was down on that. Said his liver was fatty, although Bennie himself was lean, just a little paunch. Apparently he was like that guy on the commercial, the cut one who belly-flopped because his cholesterol was so high. Wine with dinner was okay, he had been told, but wine was something you wanted with a steak, and he wasn’t allowed to have that either. He looked at the doctor’s diet suggestions, taped to the side of the refrigerator. Fish, but not fried. Chicken, no skin. Nasty. The usual rabbit food. He could have some low-cal microwave popcorn, but his dentist looked down on that. Bennie’s heart was simply on notice, but his gums had crossed the line to rotten. He could have popcorn or nuts only on the night before a trip to the periodontist, but he was so sick with dread about the pain the night before that he didn’t have the appetite for much.

He settled for a York Peppermint Patty, a mini, only fifty calories, low-fat, and no trouble for his teeth. With a cup of hot tea, it was almost as good as a real dessert. Almost.

Waiting for his water to come to a boil, he turned on the late news. Slot machines-shit, he hoped they didn’t come to town, the legal numbers were bad enough-something else about the governor. Had Toad missed his chance? But when the news came back from commercial, the anchorgirl had on her serious face, signaling a sad story. That meant a homicide, a fatal car accident, or something about an injured pet.

“We’ve just gotten word that police have been summoned to the 2300 block of East Lombard Street for what appears to be a drive-by shooting. A young man was shot multiple times while standing on the corner there. Police say there were no witnesses. Those with information are asked to call…’’

Bennie winced, poured a little extra sugar in his tea. The boy was so young. Bennie hadn’t even started at sixteen, and here was a young man already dead. But it had been a different business in Bennie’s day-more time to learn on the job, get some savvy. The young ones today were too impatient, hotheaded, wild to use their weapons. Plus, no one diversified anymore. Bennie, for example, still carried some gambling action, a daily street number and some sports book from time to time. Now he had the real estate and the sub shops, although those were wearing him out. Damn health department. They were more formidable competition than the New York boys, citing a man for every little thing. It was the ghetto. Of course there were roaches and rats.

Damn. He felt bad for the kid. If they had done things Bennie’s way to start, none of this bullshit would have come to pass. He hated fancy shit. All that hoodoo with ATM cards and bank machines and surveillance cameras, and they weren’t any more in the clear than if they had just shot the guy in the head and left him in Patterson Park. Everybody had to be so got-damn smart all the got-damn time.

But it was over. Now only two of them knew what was what, and they would never tell. They both had too much to lose.

TUESDAY

13

In his dreams Crow held fast to Tess while she tried to wriggle out of his grasp. She wasn’t attempting to escape out of malice or rejection, only because her curiosity had fastened on something bright and shiny and just out of reach. It was like trying to hold on to a squirming child, and eventually he had to concede her strength and let go.

Plus, she smelled awful.

He awakened to find his arms around the greyhound, who was not trying to evade his touch at all but had instead burrowed into him, exhaling bursts of fishy breath. A mere two nights since Tess had decamped, Esskay had usurped Tess’s place in the bed, even using her pillow. Miata, less conflicted about the idea that she was a dog, was draped across the foot of the bed.

It was odd, being in Tess’s house-and he always thought of it as her house, despite the work he had done on the rehab-without Tess. He felt off balance and tentative. But perhaps what he really felt was superfluous. The rational part of his mind understood that Tess was protecting him by concealing her whereabouts, but another part wondered if she had expected him to wilt when confronted by various authorities. “I don’t want to put you into the position of lying,” she had said Sunday when she packed her bag and left the house. They had been in regular phone contact since then, and she had let slip that she was less than a mile away, somewhere in North Baltimore. “I can almost see Stony Run Park from where I am,” she said, then stopped abruptly. But Crow knew that meant one of the high-rises near Johns Hopkins.

What if the newspaper had reported that Edgar “Crow” Ransome was the actual go-between in this tale? Would he now be on the run, while Tess was kept in the dark? True, he had not ferreted out the connection between Lloyd and Youssef, much less gone out and plucked the kid off the streets of Baltimore and forced him to tell what he knew. Crow had found that part of the story a little appalling, in fact, an echo of nineteenth-century bounty hunters rounding up slaves. Whitney and Tess didn’t have good sense sometimes. But none of this would have happened if he had not brought Lloyd home that first night.

Right now Tess probably wished this were so, although Crow thought the Howard County investigators had been given a promising lead, if they could just focus on it. Even if Lloyd couldn’t or wouldn’t say who had asked him to use Youssef’s ATM card, the detectives now knew this wasn’t a case of a man being murdered by a piece of would-be trade.

He glanced at the clock: 11:00 A.M. With Tess gone, he had honored his own night-owl nature instead of trying to fit his schedule onto Tess’s days, playing weft to her warp. It had felt good, sleeping in, obeying his own body’s needs for once.

The dogs, poor things, hadn’t adjusted to the new routine. They needed to be walked immediately. He threw on his clothes, Esskay leaping around him in giddy circles while Miata just panted in excitement. They preferred Crow, for he was focused on them during the walk, while Tess’s thoughts tended to drift and her pace to slacken. Eager and anxious, they burst through the door-and almost tripped over the huddled form of Lloyd Jupiter, who seemed to be trying to fold himself behind a yew-berry bush.

“You gotta help me, man. They killed Le’andro. They killed Le’andro.”

“Le’andro was the one who was supposed to use the card, but he had a chance to get with this girl. So he gave me the card, told me I could have the money. But that was a secret, see? Between us. Because he had a direct order to do it his own self. So they think he done it. And if they think he done it-”

“Then they think he’s the source in the newspaper article.”

“Yeah.” Lloyd picked up a rock and threw it as far as he could-which turned out to be pretty far. The kid could probably be a decent baseball player. But inner-city kids seldom played baseball. It took too much equipment, too many people, whereas basketball could be played with two guys on a cement playground covered with broken glass.

They were walking along Stony Run Creek, a narrow stream in a park known mainly to those whose houses bordered it. Esskay and Miata were compassionate dogs, but it was hard to explain to two walk-bound creatures that anything was more important than their twice-daily routine. They scampered ahead, towing Crow behind them as if he were a water-skier. Lloyd had refused to hold either leash on the grounds that he hated dogs. Crow had a hunch it was more fear than hate but didn’t press the issue.

Along the way Lloyd’s story had tumbled out quickly, as if trying to keep pace with the dogs. Le’andro was a low-level player in an East Side drug gang, one run by a man that Lloyd knew as Bennie Tep, although he admitted that probably wasn’t his full and proper name. Still, he whispered it, as if it were a powerful thing in its own right, almost like an Orthodox Jew saying Yahweh or spelling G-d. And before he told Crow the name, he made him promise it was a secret-secret, one just between the two of them. “Not for your girlfriend or those damn reporters,” he said. “They got Le’andro killed.”