“Well… okay, I don’t know where she is. Vince was supposed to work tonight but he called me a few hours ago and asked me to cover for him. He said he was upstate, that his band had a gig in Buffalo.”

“Buffalo?”

“That’s what he said. But my phone has caller ID and it said that he was calling from the Senton Hotel and it was a 212 number, Manhattan.”

“What do you think he’s doing at the Senton?”

“He might be on a run.”

“Drugs?”

“Yeah. He was on methadone but he went off about a month ago. First he was just snorting lines and then he started shooting it again.”

Shiny realized that maybe he was saying too much, he was a natural gossip and hadn’t been able to help himself. I pushed the forty over to him.

“I appreciate the information,” I said.

“I’m only telling you all this because of Lisa. She’s a young kid.” He looked down at the forty bucks, which he still hadn’t touched.

“I hear you,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Go to the Senton. That’s probably where Lisa is.”

I sat up from the stool. Shiny pocketed the forty and said, “Listen, before you came in another guy was looking for Vincent and gave me his card to give to Vincent. You’ll probably see him before I do, so here’s the card.”

He pulled the card out of his pocket and handed it to me. On the card was the letter G in the middle and a 917 number. Below the number, handwritten, was 4/20/2007, which would be the next day.

“So you didn’t know this guy?”

“No.”

“What was he like?”

“Spanish. A tough guy. About your height, six foot, but he looked like he lifted weights.”

“How old?”

“My age. Thirties. To be honest, he kind of scared me.”

I went outside, got the Senton’s number, and called. They had no Vincent Ettin registered, but that didn’t mean anything. I knew the Senton. It was on Twenty-eighth Street and Broadway and it was a flop hotel. Unless they were stupid, people didn’t give their real names when they registered. You only went to the Senton to do drugs and hide out with prostitutes. It was run, like most flop hotels, by Indians. I knew the place because in the mid-nineties I had a booze and coke relapse and holed up there myself for two days with a prostitute. For some reason, you never want to do such things in your own home. Better to go on a run in an anonymous hotel room, and then when it’s over you walk away and don’t have to clean up the mess. I figured if the Senton was still in business, it probably hadn’t changed much.