I chewed on my lip. "You find out anything?"

"Not a lot," he said. "A car hit him. He suffered some pretty massive blunt impact trauma. He died."

I frowned and took a few steps toward the corpse. "There's got to be more to it than that."

Butters shrugged. "If there is, I didn't see it."

I frowned down at the dead man. He was a painfully skinny specimen. His abdomen had been opened with a neat Y incision. There was a lot of blood and disgusting-looking greyish flesh. Broken, jagged bone protruded from the skin of one leg. One hand had been crushed into pulp. And his face…

Looked familiar. I recognized him.

"Butters," I said. "What was this guy's name?"

"Eduardo Mendoza."

"His full name," I said.

"Oh. Uh, Eduardo Antonio Mendoza."

"Antonio," I said. "It's him. It's Tony."

"Who?" Butters asked.

"Bony Tony Mendoza," I said, excited. "He's a smuggler."

Butters tilted his head at me. "A smuggler? Not like Han Solo, I guess."

"No. He's a ballooner."

"What's that?"

I gestured at his head. "He'd done time in a carnival as a sword swallower when he was a kid. He would fill up a balloon with jewels or drugs or whatever other small items he wanted to move around. Then he swallowed the balloon with a string tied to it. Check at the back of his mouth. He'd wedge the string between two of his back teeth and pull the balloon out when the coast was clear."

"That's silly," Butters said, but he went over to the corpse and pried its jaws open. He adjusted an overhead work lamp on a flexible stand and peered down past Bony Tony's teeth. "Holy crap. It's there."

He fished around for a few moments while I went back to the door and picked up my staff. I looked back to see Butters drag from the corpse's mouth a yellow-white condom with its end closed and a heavy piece of kite cord knotted around it.

"What's in it?" I asked.

"Hang on." Butters sliced the condom open with a scalpel and withdrew a small rectangle of dark plastic, about the size of a key chain ornament.

"What is that?" I asked him.

"It's a jump drive," he said, frowning.

"A what?"

"You plug it into your computer so you can store data on it when you want to move files around to other machines."

"Information," I said, frowning. "Bony Tony was smuggling information. Something Grevane needed to know. Maybe the two out front wanted it too. Maybe that's why he got killed."

"Ugh," Butters said.

"Can you read the information?" I asked him.

"Maybe," he said. "I can try another machine."

"Not now," I said. "No time. We need to get out of here."

"Why?"

"Because things have just become a lot more dangerous."

"They have?" Butters chewed on his lip. "Why?"

"Because," I said. "Bony Tony worked for John Marcone."

Chapter Fifteen