I got the picture. The Plymouth could be a lot of things-a gypsy cab, an anonymous fish in the slimy streets-whatever I needed. This was the first time it would be a hostage.

"You got a car with clean papers, clean plates?"

"Sure," he smiled, "one hundred percent legit. You want the Camaro?"

"No way, Bobby. I'm not planning to cruise the drive-ins. You got something a little quieter?"

"Come with me," he said, walking to the back of the garage. I followed him to a door set into the back wall, watched him push a buzzer three times. The door opened and we were in the chop shop-bumpers and grilles against one wall, engines on stands against another. Three men were working with cutting torches, another with a power wrench. The pieces would all come together on other cars, building a live car from dead ones, Frankenstein monsters that looked like clean one-owners. I followed Bobby through the shop. He opened another door and we stepped into a backyard surrounded with a steel-mesh fence. Razor-ribbon circled the top, winding itself around barbed wire rising another two feet off the top. "Reminds you of home, don't it?" he asked.

In the backyard there were three cars-a dark-blue Caddy sedan, a white Mustang coupe, and a black Lincoln Continental. Bobby made an offhand gesture in their direction. "Pick one," he said.

I passed over the Caddy without a second glance. The Mustang had a shift lever as thick as a man's wrist growing out of the floor, topped with a knob the size of a baseball. Another dragster. The Lincoln looked okay. I nodded.

Bobby opened the door, reached in the glove compartment, and pulled out some papers. He handed them over-the registration was in his name.

"You get stopped, you borrowed the car from me. I'll stand up on it. I got all the insurance, recent inspection. You're clean on this one."

Sure I was-if Bobby told the cops he lent me the car. If he said it was stolen…

"Is it a deal?" he wanted to know.

"One week. I make those phone calls. Then we'll see," he said.

"What do you get for a stolen-car rap these days?" I asked him.

"Figure maybe a year-two at the outside."

"Yeah," I said, looking at him. He had me in a box, but not one that would hold me for long. "I'll show you the security systems on the Plymouth," I said, holding out my hand for him to shake.

"You won't know your own car when you come back, Burke," Bobby said, his hand on my shoulder, leading me back to the front garage.

"I always know what's mine," I reminded him.

We had a deal.

50

THE LINCOLN was a big fat boat. Driving it was all by eyesight-you couldn't feel anything through the wheel-like they used Novocain instead of power-steering fluid. The odometer had less than six thousand miles showing. Even the leather smelled new.

I stopped next to a pushcart restaurant, loading up on hot dogs for lunch. There wasn't any point hiding the car-even if Bobby had called it in stolen, the plates wouldn't bounce unless they pulled me in for something else. I was in his hands-for now. He could make the Plymouth disappear easily enough-but if he fucked me around I could make him disappear too. I get real angry if someone makes a move on me when I'm playing it square. The way I have to live, I don't get angry too often.

When Pansy came back downstairs I gave her four of the six hot dogs, chewing on two of them myself, washing them down with some ice water from the fridge. Putting it together in my head-finding the little boy's picture would be like finding a landlord who gives too much heat in the winter. I had to have an angle, and Bobby was my best shot.

I keep my files in the little room next to the office. Six cabinets, four drawers high, gray steel, no locks. There's nothing in there that would get me in real trouble-no names or addresses of clients, no personal records. It's all stuff I pick up as I go along-stuff that could help me at some point. Gun-runners, mercenaries (and chumps who want to be), heavy-duty pimps, kiddie-porn dealers, con artists, crooked ministers. I don't keep files on crooked politicians-I don't have enough space, especially since I have to sleep in that same room.

But I do keep files on the flesh-peddlers-they can't run to the cops when they get stung, it's not in their program. Those merchants sell two products: people and pictures. I checked the magazine file-the kiddie-porn rags were all the same, mostly kids doing things to other kids, smiling for the camera, playing with fire that would burn their souls. Occasionally an adult would intrude on the fantasies of the freaks who bought this stuff-an anonymous cock in a little kid's mouth, a thick hand holding a kid's head down in a dark lap. The pictures were all the same-recycled endlessly behind different covers. The kids in those pictures would all be at least teenagers by now. Recruiting other kids.

The underground newsletters kept the pictures pretty clean. Lots of arty photography-nude kids posing, playing volleyball, wrestling with each other. Plenty of contact information-post-office boxes, mail drops, like that. But every Vice Squad cop in the country was probably on the mailing list and it would takes months to work my way through the maze and actually make a decent buy. They'd try me out first-tame stuff, semilegal-with a ton of rhetoric about "man-boy love" for me to wade through.

I looked through my list of overseas addresses. Almost all kiddie porn used to come from places like Brussels and Amsterdam. The European countries are still a safer harbor for pedophiles, but the real heavy production was all home-grown now. Kiddie porn is a cottage industry. You can walk into a video store and come out with enough electronic crap to make a major motion picture. I didn't need the expensive stuff-a Polaroid was all the kid told Strega about. That was all I needed, and a lot more than I had.

Crime follows dollars-that's the way of the world. No buyers-no sellers. The professionals in the hard-core business have the technology to supply the huge amounts of filth humans want to buy, but the professionals were too big a target for me. Too spread out, too detached. The organized-crime guys were into kiddie porn for the money-if I wanted to find one lousy Polaroid, I'd have to go to someone who was in it for love.

51

IT WAS just past midday, probably early enough to risk using the hippies' phone, but I was going out anyway. Pansy was sprawled out on the Astroturf, an expectant look on her ugly face. "You can come with me later," I told her. I was going to see the Mole, and I couldn't risk turning my beast loose near the junkyard-if she didn't get into mortal combat with the dogs the Mole keeps around she might just decide to stay.

I called the Mole from a pay phone a few blocks from the office. No point in wasting a trip if he wasn't around, and only God knew the Mole's hours.

He answered on the first ring the way he always does-he picks up the phone but he doesn't say anything.

"Can I come up and talk with you?" I said into the mouthpiece.

"Okay," came the Mole's voice, rusty from lack of use. He broke the connection-there was nothing else to say.

The Lincoln drove itself north on the East Side Drive. I set the cruise control to fifty and motored up to the Triboro Bridge. A decent suit on my back, no gun in my pocket, and a set of clean papers for a car that wasn't stolen-I hadn't been this much of a citizen since I was ten.

I met the Mole when I was doing a job for an Israeli guy, but I didn't really get to know him until I did another job, much later. Another one of those anonymous Israeli guys came to my office one day. He wasn't the same guy I'd met the first time, when they wanted me to find some ex-Nazi, a slimeball who'd worked as a concentration-camp guard. I did that job, and now they wanted a gun-runner. The Israeli said he wanted to buy weapons and needed me to set up the meet. Somehow I thought there was a bit more to it. The man he wanted to meet sold heavy-duty stuff-shoulder-fired missiles, antitank cannons, stuff like that. And he sold them to Libya.