“Like you’re in love?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. In his nearly half a century of life Mouse had professed love only for his mother, now dead, and EttaMae Harris.

“Is all you wanted was some salad?” he asked. “Or is there a job for us?”

“We should go to the barroom if you’re finished eating,” I answered. When Mouse changed directions you either cut bait or lost the pole. “I need to find out if anybody here knows some people I’m lookin’ for.”

“White people?”

“One is, one isn’t.”

“And what you need me for?”

“First, just to get in the front door.”

Mouse’s grin glittered at that.

“Then,” I went on, “there’s the chance I might get what I wish for.”

He smiled again and the threat of love moved into the background.

“You got any names?” he asked.

“Alonzo’s the only one I heard so far. That and where he was last seen at; a place called Blood Grove.”

Mouse was back on track with me. He nodded and said, “I know seven niggahs named Alonzo.”

“He might just be one of them.”

Our early dinner, including tip, cost just under eight hundred dollars. This wasn’t the kind of job I expected to get paid for. Instead it was my dues for turning in time to see that German soldier before he could stab me in the back.

The big white alligator, whose name was Rudolf, showed us to another door under his purview and ushered us through. We descended a spiral staircase for sixty steps or so. The well opened into a jazz bar with a black trio playing for more than a hundred patrons.

The Dragon’s Eye bar area was twice the size of the dining room. The male patrons, except for the trio, me, and Mouse, were all white, as were most of the women. The bar was an enormous dragon carved from a hard, mottled-brown boulder. The stone was highly polished and the coiled myth’s head rose at least eighteen feet above the three bartenders. There was a live flame flickering in the beast’s left eye socket.

“I see a couple’a people I know, Easy,” Mouse said. “I’m’a go over there and ask if they could help us with your man.”

As Mouse walked away through the tide of white, I watched and wondered about him. For more than four decades I had been sure of the smiling killer. He never altered his path in life. But now he was becoming a different man—and change for the personified threat of death was not a welcome incarnation.

“Hi,” a young woman’s voice chimed.

15

15

I turned to see a lovely straw-haired woman with rich brown eyes and a small scar at the tip of her chin. The scar was reminiscent of some kind of foreign punctuation mark.

“Hi,” I replied.