I sat down on the daybed, and the next thing I knew I was on my back, witnessing the miracle of sunlight as it filled the window.

I awoke, hoping that Angie had not died in the night while I wasted time sleeping. I wished I had a number for Dimitri, and an answer for Ron Sharkey.

But all I had was a headache pulsating through my consciousness.

I forced down a serving of muesli and cream, drained two cups of press-pot French roast coffee, and made my way to the street, hoping that today would bring the break I needed to get a leg up on the world.

I CALLED JOHN PRINCE from my office at 8:32.

Hello. This is JP speaking. I'm not here right now and so if you'd like to leave a message I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can.

I hung up, realizing that I hadn't thought about Aura at all that morning. This evidence of healing did not ease my mind. I didn't want to be cured from the only real love I had known in my adult life.

"Mr. McGill?" came Mardi's soft voice over the intercom. She'd come in early.

"Yes?"

"George Toller is out here."

Did he somehow know that I was thinking about his woman?

"Send him in."

HE CAME INTO MY office without knocking this time. He wore a disgusting lime suit crosshatched with a generous amount of dark-green and black thread. In his arms he carried three thick manila folders. There was something dramatic in the way he carried himself, as if he bore tidings of great portent. He stood before my desk and dropped the heavy pile of paper, making a loud slamming noise.

His eyes sought mine as a sneer crossed the lips I hated.

"Take-out menus?" I asked.

"Do you have a minute?" he replied, sitting without being invited.

The question was not polite or considerate, it wasn't even accurate. George Toller believed he'd caught me like a winking Irish-man trapping a leprechaun, and his "minute" was meant to be the rest of my natural-born life.

I didn't answer, and so he pressed on.

"Terry Swain," he said.

I blinked innocently.

"Are you telling me that you don't know Swain?"

"This is your show, Mr. Toller. I'm not telling you anything."

"You cosigned for Mr. Swain's hot dog concession, did you not?"

I performed a noncommittal shrug to keep a toe in the realm of good manners.

"Mr. Swain was the building manager before Aura Ullman. He was suspected by the new owners of having defrauded the corporation. They were assembling a good case against him until a lawyer named Breland Lewis stopped criminal proceedings by throwing suspicion on a previous employee who had, conveniently, died."

"Peter Cooly," I said. "He died of a heart attack months before I ever even heard of Terry."

"Breland Lewis is your lawyer."

"This is America, Mr. Toller. Breland is his own man, as I am mine."

"The relationship between the lawyer, the embezzler, and you," he said, "along with the ridiculously low fifteen-year lease you procured is evidence of fraud, at the very least."

Something about Toller's tone reminded me of the posturing of the teenagers at the now-and-again middle schools of my so-called youth. He was playing a role but didn't know it, pretending that he was somehow wounded by actions taken before he was ever involved. He was talking, and I was hearing him, but I wasn't listening-at least not all that closely.

"… you were arrested for tampering with police evidence in nineteen eighty-nine…" he said.

I was thinking that I had to take the next step in uncovering the reason that the assassin was in Soa's apartment.

"… nineteen ninety-two you were arrested along with Gonzalez family members on an organized-crime charge…"

I was thinking about Dimitri, the brooding, bulky young man, kissing some beautiful Russian girl, filling his heart with love. I was also thinking that love never seems to last-except where there's blood involved.

"… in nineteen ninety-six you were arrested on charges of battery…"

With love and blood bound together in my thoughts, the wildflowers on the old stereo box came to mind. Something about their delicate beauty seemed out of place in my life.

A bubble of something like regret formed in my chest.

Toller was reciting a new litany in an angry tone.

I looked up and saw that he was actually reading from his accumulated indictment.

"What does all that shit tell you, Mr. Toller?" I asked, cutting off his rant.

"Excuse me?"

I stood up.

"What does all that shit in your files tell you?"

"I will thank you to keep a civil tongue when addressing me, Mr. McGill."

"All right," I said. "How about this? In exactly ten seconds I'm going to walk around this desk. If you are still in the room I'm going to beat you to death with your own motherfucking files. One…"

Toller leaped to his feet, grabbed his papers, and hurried from the room.

I finished the count and went after him.

There were a few loose sheets that had fallen in the hallway.

When I got to the antechamber of my office, Mardi was sitting at her desk. She wore a champagne- colored dress with puffy sleeves.

"Mr. Toller left," she said.

I blinked and wondered if I was actually that close to murder. I decided that I was, and that maybe I needed professional help. So I walked back to my office and called the deadliest man I have ever known.

41

Hush likes his steaks rare to bloody, and so I made a reservation at a steak house at the upscale mall on the southwestern arc of Columbus Circle. The young hostess walked me to a booth in a dark corner of the airy restaurant. The ex-hit man was there before me, lounging thoughtfully behind a glass of tap water, no ice.

"LT," he said in greeting.

I shoved in opposite the most excellent assassin in New York history. He was a plain-looking white man of average height and build with medium brown hair and darker brown eyes. He didn't make much of an impression except for his deep voice. But that wasn't much of a distinction because he rarely spoke.

I was always a little uncomfortable around Hush-maybe more than a little. He knew a thousand ways to kill a man and dozens of techniques to make the body disappear. He was the classic cold-blooded killer who seemed to the world to have no heart or conscience.

Outside of his wife, I was the only person to know both his true name and his professional history.

"Hush," I said.

"You look tired, LT."

"Work's aplenty."

"I ordered you a Wild Turkey and a rib eye," he said. "They're coming."

"Thanks for meeting me on such short notice."

"All I had was a simple day of airport runs," he said.

After retiring from the killing trade Hush became a limo driver for an elite company that sometimes needed bodyguarding along with a driver's license. I really don't know why he even had the job. Hush didn't need the money.

I took the faxed photograph of the dead man and pushed it across the table. Hush laid a hand down on the face as a woman's voice said, "Wild Turkey neat."

She was a young blonde with a severe hairdo that would have been right at home in the conservative part of the sixties. Her makeup was perfect, and even though she was plain you could see that she would make an impact wherever she went.

"Thank you," I said.

As she left, Hush lifted his hand and looked at the picture. Then, with a single digit, he pushed it back across to me.

"I've been informed that he's in your old profession," I said.

"Adolph Pressman. A hack. Okay for a bullet in the back of the head, but no good at all for something that requires finesse. Looks dead."

"Somebody blindsided him while he was killing a girl."