Jack hadn’t heard of anything that did that to your head, but then he didn’t hang with druggies.

“Sounds like you had a whopping dose of whatever it was.”

“I guess so. I just know I don’t want any more. Ever.” He shook his head. “Imagine… trying to hurt a child. I’ve never even spanked one of my own kids—not once.” He set his jaw. “Let me tell you something: Burt Dawkins is not going to get away with this. When the criminal courts are through with him, I’m going to haul him into court and sue his ass for every penny he’s worth.”

“You do that,” Jack said, feeling deflated now that his anger had leaked away. He stepped toward the door. “Well, I’ve learned what I came for. I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” Butler said. “You were there. Did you see how I got hurt?”

“Um, yeah. When someone grabbed the little girl from you, you, um, tripped and went down the steps yourself.”

He paled. “I could have been killed. I guess I’m pretty lucky.”

“You’ve got that right,” Jack said, turning away.

7

“You’re not hungry?” Mom said in her thick Gdansk accent. “Or you don’t like my cooking no more?”

Nadia stared down at her half-empty plate. “You still make the best pierogies in the world, Mom. I’m just not that hungry.”

Her mother sat across the rickety table from her in a kitchen where the smells of cooked cabbage and boiled kiszka permeated the walls. A thin, angular woman with a heavily lined face that made her look older than her sixty-two years, but her bright eyes still had a youthful twinkle.

Mom had already finished eating and was working toward the end of her second boilermaker. She nursed two of them every night, sitting there with a bottle of Budweiser and a shot of Fleischman’s rye—”Flesh-man’s,” as she said it—alongside. She’d pour an ounce or two of beer into a tumbler, sip it down, then pour a little more; every so often she’d nip some of the rye. Up until a few years ago she’d have been smoking a Winston as well. Nadia had got her off the cigarettes, finally convincing her that they were what had done Dad in, but Mom wasn’t about to give up the boiler-makers. This was how she’d learned to drink, and no one, not Nadia or anyone else, was going to change that.

“You have a fight with Douglas? That is why you’re eating dinner with your mother on a Friday night?”

Nadia shook her head and pushed a pierogi around her plate. “No, he’s just busy.”

“Too busy for the girl he’s to marry?”

“It’s a project he’s working on.”

Doug had said he wanted to get back to his GEM mainframe hack before he got cold. He was determined to break through the final barriers tonight. She thought of him alone, hunched over his keyboard, not eating or drinking, totally absorbed in the data flashing across his screen. She’d been a little hurt, but then she realized she was developing an obsession of her own.