“Not about what I’m gonna do but maybe a little about her,” I said. “I mean the name doesn’t sound real and the picture’s great but I don’t think it’ll help that much. With that I could range around the exotic clubs, but that’ll take time.”

“Go to the Dragon’s Eye,” he said, and then he rose, an impossibly white hippopotamus from an opaque and stagnant pond. “Go to the Dragon’s Eye. Someone there might know something.”

“If you know where to look, what do you need me for?”

“She doesn’t work there anymore and people start to act kinda squirrelly when I come around asking questions.”

“You?”

“No one likes a smartass, Rawlins.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

This simple question stymied Eddie. He frowned a moment and then said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

22

22

Eddie was gone but he left a sour resonance in the room; like a low-frequency hum putting pressure on the inner ear. Craig claimed to have stabbed a man, sent me to follow after the man’s name, where I found a man who was dead—but shot, not stabbed. That man was a pornographer and a robber. And then there was Eddie Brock, whose middle name might have been Murder. There was a girl who didn’t mind getting naked in public who all three men had some relationship to.

And then there was Lola.

She showed up at a few minutes before 3:00. I didn’t hear her footsteps until just before the door opened. The .38 was back in its pocket. I looked up wondering if maybe Niska’s desk was the place I was destined to die.

Lola’s two-piece dress suit was the color of scarlet roses and overripe Meyer lemons. I figured that she’d spent two hours or more preparing for this visit. She was both ravishing and devastated.

“What’s wrong, Lola?” I asked, rising to my feet.

She glanced at me, saw nothing it seemed, took a single step, and then crumpled to the floor. For a moment it felt as if I was in one of those forties movies when the one important witness walks in and then falls dead from a knife in the back.

But Lola had only stumbled. I rushed to her side, helped her up and into the chair Eddie Brock last sat in.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“What?”

“Are you hurt?” I pulled another chair up next to hers.

“I, I need your help, Mr. Rawlins.”

“What kind of help?”

She looked into my eyes as if maybe the answer to the question was there. That search brought her to the edge of a deep and dark abyss. Questions alone would not get to her fears. And so I took her right hand with both of mine. The fingers were cold.

I think it was my warmth that gave her courage.