Everyone kept asking me that. I said, “I’m all right.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think.” I looked at him, and for some reason I wished he’d met her. I said, “Jenna was decent. A good person. All she wanted was, once in her life, not to be pushed under the rug.”

He looked at me and leaned forward, his glass extended. “You’re going to make people pay for her, aren’t you, Patrick?”

I leaned forward and met his glass with mine. I nodded. “In spades,” I said, then held up my hand. “No offense.”

FIFTEEN

Richie left a little after midnight, and I carried the bottle across the street to my apartment. I ignored the blinking red light on my answering machine and flicked on the TV. I dropped into the leather La-Z-Boy, drank from the bottle, watched Letterman, and tried not to see Jenna’s death dance every time my eyelids reached half-mast. I don’t usually indulge in hard liquor to excess, but I was putting one hell of a dent in the Glenlivet. I wanted to pass out, no dreams.

Richie had said Socia sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place him. I assessed what I knew. Curtis Moore was a member of the Raven Saints. He had killed Jenna, most likely at someone else’s behest, that someone probably being Socia. Socia was Jenna’s husband, or had been. Socia was friendly enough with Senator Brian Paulson to have had snapshots taken with him. Paulson had slapped the table in front of me at our first meeting. “This is no joke,” he’d said. No joke. Jenna was dead. Well over a hundred urban warriors who weren’t afraid to die had a bone to pick with me. No joke. I was scheduled to meet Mulkern and crew for lunch tomorrow. I was drunk. Maybe it was me, but Letterman seemed to be getting stale. Jenna was dead.

Curtis Moore was missing a foot. I was drunk. A ghost in a fireman’s uniform was looming up in the shadows behind the TV. The TV was getting harder to focus on. Probably the vertical hold. The bottle was empty.

***

The Hero swung his fire ax into my head and I sat bolt upright in the chair. The TV screen was snowing. I trained a blurry eye on my watch: 4:15 a.m. Molten fire surged under my sternum. All the nerves in my skull were freshly exposed by the ax, and I stood up and just made the bathroom before I yakked up the Glenlivet. I flushed the toilet and lay on the cool tile, the room smelling of scotch and fear and death. This was the second time in three nights I’d thrown up. Maybe I was getting bulimia.

I made it to my feet again and brushed my teeth for half an hour or so. I stepped into the shower, turned it on. I stepped back out, removed my clothes, and got back in. By the time I finished, it was almost dawn. Three Tylenol, and I fell on top of my bed, hoping that whatever I had upchucked contained all those things that made me afraid to sleep.