“Your job is to find her,” he said. “Mine is to talk to her once you’ve done that.”

“Your job,” I stated. “Who pays you?”

“Don’t you want a job, soul brother?” The waters were getting choppy. “I mean here you are sittin’ on your ass in this big place all alone. Looks like you could use gettin’ paid.”

“What I can use is not trying to find some woman for an angry boyfriend intends to do her harm.” I was beginning to enjoy the banter. For some time I had been practicing grabbing my .38 and pulling the trigger. I figured that, if it came down to brass tacks, I had the edge.

Brock grinned again. If a smile had a sound his would have been a death knell.

“Who said anything about hurtin’ her?” he growled. “I just want to talk.”

“About what?”

“That’s personal.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Brock. I like money just as much as the next guy, but I don’t know you. I don’t know you and you want me to find a woman that might not want to be found. If a crime comes from that I could be charged as an accessory. At the very least they might pull my license.”

Eddie reached into his too-blue jacket’s breast pocket. The fingers of my right hand twitched an inch closer to the Herald. He noticed the movement, smiled again, and took out a three-by-five photograph.

“This is her,” he said while handing me the picture and staring into the depths of my eyes from the swamp of his.

Between the gun I wanted to draw, the picture I didn’t want to see, and the man-boulder’s smirk, I was nearly frozen . . . almost so.

With my left hand I reached for the proffered photograph, plucking it from his forefinger and thumb. I held it far enough away not to lose sight of where my pistol lay.

That’s when everything changed.

Donata Delphine was a natural redhead wearing just the right amount of makeup and hardly any clothes at all. She was sitting on a high stool that her legs curled around like two golden snakes mated for life. Her smile was alluring and her eyes managed to connect even from out of that two-dimensional medium.

She was gorgeous and she was also the woman in the photograph I found in Alonzo Griggs’s wallet, the photograph of the woman Craig Kilian purported not to know.

“She looks like a whore. I know that,” Brock apologized. “But a man can’t help who he falls in love with. We dated a couple of times when I paid for it. And a few more times just like friends. Then something happened. I think it was the people she worked for. They moved her to another location and told me they didn’t know where she was.”