After several hours of footwork, my fuel cells were pretty drained. I tried to give them a charge with a pastrami sandwich from a reputable joint, but the results were mixed. I made a phone call. “Paddy Reilly’s in an hour. Can do?” The answer was in the affirmative. “Good.”

I worked the sketch for another sluggish hour, but I got no more hits. Still, I found myself imagining that along one of these streets I was going up and down, Ratface was there, maybe even sitting up in his goddamn Ratface apartment looking out the window at me. It was a powerful feeling and a little unnerving-as if his eyes were boring laser holes into the back of my head-and it was all I could do to keep from scanning the building windows as I moved about.

The stitches in my side weren’t real happy with all the activity, but they didn’t get much of a say in the matter. The sun was still off on vacation somewhere-the South, I suppose-and what with the raw cold and the colorless sky and the dingy heaps of snow, the life seemed sucked out of the city. Or maybe it was just sucked out of me. It took me a while before I realized that this was one of the things the doctors had cautioned me about. I was irritable, flirting with something along the lines of fury. I was impatient. A blast of cold air whipping around Twenty-fifth Street worked me over and I wanted to hit something. There was a dull throbbing just behind my eyes. I pulled off my watch cap and touched the stitches on the back of my head. They felt hard and grisly, like the whiskers of some savanna beast. I looked at the sketches of Ratface that were clutched in my other hand, and a ball of rage rose up in my chest. It snagged my breath, precisely as if the rage itself were a scramble of barbed wire lodged in my sternum. I brought my fingers away from the wound. They were splotched with blood. It was going to ooze, the doctors had warned me. I ran my fingers along one of the sketches, bloodying the man’s cheeks.

The bartender at Paddy Reilly’s was a giant with a shaved head, a neck tattoo and a tuft of carrot-red hair below his lower lip. We were nodding acquaintances. He wrote poetry, the kind with a notable paucity of flower imagery. I’d heard him read a few times at some poetry slams in Alphabet City. He was reading one of his poems to Jigs Dugan off a scrap of paper as I came over to the bar.

Got a hustler’s laugh and crowbar arms

And a Puerto Rican kid like a shadow

Won’t let him be, thinks he’s a god

And he finds a Coney Island mermaid

The one of his dreams

Rolls her in popcorn

In a room, with a view, of the sea

Streams of paper whipping off the wire fan

Cool breeze, cool breeze, cool breeze.

He folded the paper and stuck it in his T-shirt pocket. Jigs was playing with an unlit cigarette, looking thoughtful. He tapped the filter against the bar. “Yeah, I guess that’s good. So. He’s balling the mermaid. Am I hearing that right?”

I set one of the sketches on the bar. “Ever seen this most happy fella?”

The bartender did the doorman thing. Tilted the sketch and pursed his lips. “Can’t say it rings a bell.”

Jigs had a tumbler in front of him. It was either iced tea or whiskey, and who wants to pick? I asked the bartender for a cup of coffee. Jigs asked, “You want he should Irish that up for you?” I waved off the offer, and the bartender moved down the bar to slap the coffee machine around.

Jigs picked up his glass. “I hear you took a spill, friend.”

“You hear correctly.”

“Darkened my day to hear it.”

“I stuck around the hospital an extra day in case you were sending me flowers.”

“I don’t do hospitals well,” Jigs said.

“I’d have thought you might come fishing for a pretty nurse.”

“I went with a nurse once. A Janice. Or Janet. I can’t remember. She gave me a lovely sitz bath. This was when I had that little knee situation.”

Little knee situation. A lead pipe swung like a Ty Cobb bat at Jigs’s knees. He was off his feet for half a year.

The bartender returned with my coffee. The mischief came into Jigs’s eyes. “I’ve been thinking about this mermaid of yours, Kevin. It seems-”

The bartender cut him off. “It’s a metaphor.”

Jigs made a sound like he was loosening a hairball in his throat. “Ack. Metaphors. Perfectly lovely mermaid, and you want to shunt her off as a metaphor. You poets need to start facing reality on more of a regular basis.”

The bartender didn’t seem to care what Jigs thought. He found a far corner of the bar that needed polishing.

“I’m after the bastard who’s been slitting throats,” I said.

Jigs cocked an eyebrow at me. “Is that so? Town’s kind of jumpy on that topic.”

“So am I.”

He indicated the sketch. “Would this be him?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. This is who packed me into the East River. It’d be nice if he was also the killer.”

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Jigs said, eyeballing the sketch. “I watched some of that trial on the tube. Ugliest show in America. Impossible not to watch. I saw the pretty girl getting the once-over from the dead lawyer. He wasn’t dead yet, and neither was she. But now they are. The both of them. How does that play out, Fritz? There was surely no love lost between the two of them. They were adversaries. Who would hold a grudge against one of them and then go on to begrudge the other to the same result?”

“You mean why would someone target Robin Burrell and then go after Riddick?”

“To put it less poetically.”

“That’s the question. Were they targets in their own right, or was it more a case of somebody targeting Marshall Fox? Or people associated with Fox?”

“That’s where I go,” Jigs said. “You find someone who’s too furious about what Mr. Fox did to those two girls last year. An avenging angel, tit for tat.”

“But why now? Fox is in the fight for his life.”

“Not in this state, honey. Here he gets packed off for ten to twenty and he comes back out somewhere in the middle.”

“Still, why shake things up so close to the verdict?”

Jigs consulted his whiskey. “Maybe an acquittal would play in to our good fellow’s hand. It does put Mr. Fox back out on the street, after all.”

“So you mean kill two people to even the score, then if Fox is set free, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

“Now, that’s poetical.”

I considered what Jigs was saying. It made as much sense as anything else being bandied about. I figured the police were already looking closely at family and close associates of Cynthia Blair and Nicole Rossman. They’d surely be working that angle.

I squared the drawing of Ratface on the bar. Had he known either of those two women? My gut was saying no.

I realized my gut was also saying it didn’t matter.

“I want this guy.” The voice didn’t even sound like mine. It was a profound baritone. Just an octave or two up from a growl. I tapped a finger heavily against the sketch. “I don’t know his angle, and to be honest, I don’t care. This bastard lives nearby. In the neighborhood somewhere. I’ve gotten a couple of positive IDs.”

Jigs set his glass down. “And you want him.”

I looked past the row of bottles behind the bar and confirmed it with the cranky fellow in the watch cap. From my pocket, I took Alan Ross’s envelope and laid a large stack of twenties down on the flyer. “That’s right.”

Jigs nodded sagely. “Yeah, brother. I can see that.”