"Yes."

"So what the hell do you know," she said.

"I haven't always had Susan," I said.

"Yeah, well, I bet you didn't like that as much as you think you did."

"I prefer having her," I said.

We turned up Jocelyn's street. The cement sidewalk was buckled with frost heaves. The three-deckers crowded right up against the sidewalk, with no front yards. The blinds were drawn in their front windows. Their living rooms were a foot away from us as we walked along. She rummaged in her shoulder bag as we approached the house where she lived. It took her half a block of rummaging, but by the time we got to her door she had found her key.

"Thank you," she said.

"You don't need to be here until ten tomorrow morning. I sleep late on Saturdays and Sundays."

"You don't need me here at all," I said.

"There's no one following you."

She stopped with her key half into the lock. Her eyes were very wide.

"You have to come," she said.

"No," I said.

"There's no one. If there were, Hawk or I would have caught him."

"He's not around because you are," she said.

"If you leave, he'll be here."

"He didn't spot us," I said.

"We're good at this."

"So what have you got going?" She sounded like an angry child.

"You going away with Susan?"

"We're working on a house," I said.

"Fine. You're working on a house with Susan." She made the name sound like it had many syllables.

"And you don't give a goddamn what happens to me."

"You'll be swell," I said.

"There's no one shadowing you."

"So." She stood with her hands on her hips now, the key dangling untended in the lock.

"You think I made it up."

"You tell me."

She was like a fourteen-year-old who'd been grounded. She talked with her teeth clenched.

"Prick master," she said.

"Wow," I said.

"Prick master. I don't think anyone has ever called me that before."

"Well, you are a prick master," she said and turned the key in her door and wrenched it open and went in and slammed it shut.

Up the street Hawk pulled the Jaguar away from the curb and cruised up to the house and stopped. I got in the back. Vinnie was sitting up front beside Hawk with a shotgun between his knees.

Hawk pulled the car away from the curb. The wipers moved at intervals back and forth across the windshield of the Jaguar. Hawk had the radio on softly playing.

"Still got that magic touch with the broads," Vinnie said to me.

"Don't you."

"Just a spat," I said.

"She don't like it that you not coming tomorrow?" Hawk said.

"She called me a prick master," I said.

Vinnie half turned in the front seat and looked at me.

"Prick master?" he said.

"I never heard that. Broad's pretty colorful."

At Hill Street, Hawk turned and headed up Cabot Hill. Vinnie was faced around front again and was looking out the car window at the near-empty street as we climbed away from the waterfront in the rain. He was chuckling to himself.

"Prick master," he said.

"I like it."

CHAPTER 22

Hawk waited until I went in the front door of my place on Marlboro Street before he pulled away. It was an old brownstone and brick townhouse, a block from the Public Garden, which had been turned into condominiums in the early eighties, when condos were high, and the living was easy. The lobby was done in beige marble. The oak stairway turned, in a series of angular landings, up around the open mesh elevator shaft.

Spry as ever, I skipped the elevator and took the stairs. I was wearing my New Balance running shoes with the aquamarine highlights and went up the stairs with very little noise, for a man carrying as much armament as I was. Since my visit from Lonnie and the Dreamers I felt I needed more fire power. I was wearing the Browning.9 mm on my hip with a round in the chamber and 13 in the clip. I also had the.357 butt forward on the left side of my belt with six rounds in the cylinder. I had decided against a blunderbuss.

My place was on the second floor, and as I turned toward my door down the hall past the elevator shaft, I smelled cigarette smoke. I stopped. I sniffed. I checked the elevator shaft. The car was at the top, resting quietly on the sixth floor. My place occupied the whole second floor. The smell of cigarette smoke was from my place. It was a fresh smell, not the stale remnant of a cigarette long since smoked, but the fresh smell of one just lit, drawn in deeply and exhaled. I looked at my door. There was no change in the way light shone through the peep hole. I took the Browning off my hip, and cocked it and walked quietly back down the short hall to the stairwell behind the elevator shaft.

Susan was the only one with a key and she didn't smoke. If someone had Murphied the lock they were good at it, because there was no sign of it on the door jamb. There was a fire escape near my kitchen window, which could have been used for access.

The way they got in was less significant for the moment than the fact that they were in there.

It could, of course, be the tooth fairy copping a quick lungful before slipping a quarter under my pillow, but it was more likely to be a couple of gunnies sent by Lonnie Wu, and if it was, in addition to myself, I wanted one alive.

The stairwell was silent. The elevator remained motionless on the top floor. I was the only one, normally, who used the stairs.

People on the first floor obviously had no need, people from the third floor up always took the elevator. However they had gotten in, there were two ways out. There was the fire escape, which came down into the public alley between Marlboro and Beacon Street. And there was the front door. I could cover the alley from Arlington Street. I could cover the front door from the stairwell.

Backup would have helped.

The sounds of a silent building are always surprising when you are standing quiet and listening hard. There is the tiny creak of the building's constant struggle with gravity and stress, the cycling of heat and ventilation, the faint hint of refrigerators or personal computers, a murmur, almost imaginary, of television sound, and compact discs. From outside come sounds of traffic, and wind, and the audible, celestial hush of the world moving through space.

I knew I could out wait them. I could out wait Enoch Arden if I had to. But it would be nice if, when they finally got sick of waiting, I knew which way they'd exit. I didn't know how long they'd been there. If they were the two kids I'd seen with Lonnie Wu, they wouldn't have much patience. Kids never do, and Lonnie's two jitterbugs probably had a lot less than most. They might be ready to leave now. If I went for backup, I might lose them. And I didn't want to.

There was a skylight at the top of the stairwell, but the late October afternoon had blended with the late October evening and the stairwell was lit only by the dim bulbs near the elevator door on each floor. No light showed through the peep hole in my door.

The evening stretches out against the sky, I thought. Like a patient etherized upon a table. I grinned to my self. Live fast, die young, and have a literate corpse.

On the sixth floor I heard the elevator door slide open slowly.

There was a moment when nothing happened, and then the elevator jerked into life and came slowly down past me. On the first floor the doors slid open. There were footsteps. The front door opened. And closed.