"Two men are sitting over in the jail ward of County Hospital." He slurped his drink.

Finally we were getting to it.

"As you must know, these Serbian gentlemen were pretty fucked up. One of them in particular has got a smashed pelvic bone, busted spleen, nuts hanging all low." He shook his head from side to side. "The poor bastard may never walk right again."

I finished my Maker's Mark but didn't want to order another one. No sense getting too loose and end up slipping with this nosy fuck. "Ain't that something. Man, you oughta write that up and sell it to Cops and Donuts Monthly."

Fahrar's yellow eye zeroed in on me over the top of his glass as he drank. "Naturally these tough boys aren't saying diddly. And their employer, Ellison Stadanko, claims no knowledge of what these ruffians could have been up to carrying firearms on the garbage truck. He's as perplexed as the rest of us why it is that five men, three of whom were in biohazard suits, were on one garbage truck."

"The Times had a piece today saying Stadanko may get jammed up by a grand jury." What the fuck, I ordered another Maker's.

"Since when you start reading the newspaper?"

I was gonna say, "Since your mama started bringing it to my crib in her teeth." Instead I came back with, "I always been into self-improvement."

"Like nine million worth? 'Cause that was the take you strokes pulled down, Zelmont. Stadanko is boxed in and is going to be sweating under the federal lights soon. That's smart, so smart I know your ducking and dodging self couldn't have thought it all out on your lonesome. No, it would take someone who had a knowledge of how to drop the right clue in the right back channel in the legal labyrinth of D.C."

"Really?" The bartender had turned the TV to a channel featuring a marble shooting championship. Damn.

"Did you know that Wilma Wells clerked in the law firm that Brooks Weems has in D.C.?"

He got a reaction that time. The surprise was all over my face.

"Yeah," the snake fuck smiled. "Brooks is the older brother of the football commissioner. Isn't that quite the coincidence?"

"Life is full of them, my mother always said." Come on, Zelmont, don't let this chump rattle you. But damn if he hadn't blindsided me. I sipped my drink and tried to look like I still had game.

"You seen Napoleon around lately?" He thumped his hat with his finger.

"Naw, you ask his brother?"

"He said he hadn't seen him for a few days. He said that maybe he might be back East on some kind of business, but he wasn't sure."

"There you go." The bartender had switched the channel again. Now there was a cop program playing with somebody I recognized. It was the Asian dude I'd done the shows on the WB with. The sound wasn't on but it seemed like he was the star. Good for him. We were all getting over.

"There was a fair amount of blood on the roadway, Zelmont. And quite a few spent shell casings too. And flash grenades. But you knew that."

"I did, huh?"

Fahrar had more of his booze. "Some of that blood matches Napoleon Graham's blood type."

He must have gotten Nap's medical record from the league. But so what? He didn't have a body. "I'm sure a lot of people match his blood type."

"How about his DNA?"

"You can cut it out, cop. I read in the paper the samples swabbed from the roadway were hard to break down. There's oil, gas, and what have you mixed in, plus the blood got absorbed into the asphalt. They quoted a biologist from UCLA who said all that debris or whatever messes up an exact match."

"Sounds like you studied that part of the article back and forth."

"Don't it?"

Fahrar got off the stool, holding the drink in one hand, his hat in the other. "When you see Napoleon, let him know I'd like to talk with him."

"Oh sure."

He looked at the glass in his hand like he'd lost the taste. He put the drink down, not finishing it. "Every step you take." He snugged his hat on his head and drifted out of the joint.

I pushed both my hands against the edge of the bar, gripping it hard. I suddenly felt like I was gonna slip away into a hole and this was all I could do not to disappear. I got up and moved through the noise of the Proud Bird to the pay phone near the bathrooms.

I dialed Wilma's number at work, her inside line. Her machine answered and I hung up. I dialed her at home, then on her cell phone and got no answer. Maybe Fahrar had told me about Wilma working for Weems' brother to see if we'd fink out each other. Maybe it was a lie and he was waiting outside to tail me like he'd shown he could do and catch me confronting Wilma.

I put the phone back and tried to catch my breath, get my bearings. We hadn't really talked about what we were going to do to explain Nap's absence. None of us had a solution anyway I walked back to the bar and had my whisky without tasting it. Wilma had said we should just go about our business as usual for the next few weeks. For Danny that meant running the Locker Room, for her the lawyer thing. And me? Hell, I was only the cat who saved the day, and here I was drinking away what little folding money I had at the moment. She said we'd square up our shares soon as her trap closed in on Stadanko. Well, shit was sprung on the motherfuckah now and we hadn't heard nothin'. Correct that, I hadn't heard nothin'.

By the time I had my fourth Maker's I was imagining that Wilma and Danny had skipped out on me with all the haul. I gave a crooked smile at my reflection, the sucker looking back at me in the bar's mirror.

"Say, baby, ain't you Zelmont Raines?" She was older than me by at least ten years. But she had nice legs sticking out of the skirt that was too short for her plump butt. Plus I liked the blonde dye job she'd given her hair, not to mention her overlapping front teeth.

"I'm he. What you having, dark and lovely?"

About an hour later we were grinding on the outside stairway leading up to my apartment. She had one leg wrapped around my hip and I had her dress hiked up, my hand rubbing between her legs.

I breathed some words, drunk and hot and wanting to get my money and get the hell out of town. Fuck Wilma and her scheming self.

''Let's get inside," she whispered in my ear, licking and nibbling on it with her tongue and teeth.

I mumbled something and was untangling myself from her when I got that feeling. The one that told me a cat was about to jack me from behind while I had my eye on the ball. I stopped getting my nut on and tuned my radar outwards.

"What's wrong, baby? Your wife coming home?"

"Shhh." I put a hand on her lips. She bit my fingers, still thinking I was fooling around. Somebody was coming up the stairs, and they were on a creep. We had stopped in the middle of the second flight of stairs.

Below me the stairs turned the corner and went down to the first floor and the sidewalk. The stud had to be at that corner. Good thing the cheap sonofabitch landlord hadn't bothered to replace the lights that were supposed to be in the stairwell.

"What, baby?" she said again.

I heard the step and threw the chick down where I figured he was standing.

"What the fuck you doing?" she screamed. As she went down, I went right behind her. She collided with the chump, who'd started back-pedaling too late. The two went over.

"Motherfuckah, I'm going to cut you," she said.

I jumped over her and onto the dude she was halfway on. We slid down part of the first set of stairs. He was big, muscular. This boy was no mugger. Somebody I knew had sent him to do me in.

"Niggah, you don't know how to treat a lady, do you?" Homegirl was still going on.

Me and the dude were tussling, trying to get to our feet. He beat me to it and caught me good in the side with the tip of his shoe. I fell, bringing up my arm. A heavy piece of metal crashed down on it and I yelled out.