I opened my purse and took out my wallet. Folded behind my driver’s license was the hundred-dollar bill my father had sent me for my birthday this year. He’s always too busy to buy me a gift. It’s the same every year, the hundred dollar bill in the birthday card. I handed Tim Watson a hundred dollars. He handed me the gun.

“Keep the change.” And I turned away without saying anything else.

CHAPTER NINTEEN

I rushed to the top of the stairs. Harvey’s door was closed and there was the usual trickle of smoke from under the door which meant he was in. I knocked.

A muffled, sleepy voice answered me. I went in without understanding what he had said.

Harvey was sitting cross-legged on the floor with an incense burner in front of him and a fat joint on its rim.

“Don’t bother to get up,” I said.

“I was just working on some wills,” he mumbled, turning bleary red eyes on me. He pointed in the direction of his desk.

“You know a Monica Fullbright or Monica Farley?” I asked, dropping into the chair next to his desk. The gun I had just bought was cold and awkward against my hip. I had shoved it into the waistband of my skirt and beneath my pantyhose.

Harvey nodded a few times to show he was thinking about my question. “Is she dead or alive?” he asked finally. “I can’t keep track of them anymore.”

“Alive. You knew her years ago.”

He picked up the joint, pulled on it, then took a plastic lighter out of his pocket. He relit the joint and held his breath for a long while. He repeated her name a few times as if it were a new mantra. “Never heard of her.”

“She told me she was a friend of yours. That you did some work for her husband. Smack freak. You kept him out of state prison. She thinks you’re a great lawyer.”

A faint smile twisted Harvey’s lips for a moment, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t complete it. He held the joint out toward me.

“Saxophone player,” I added, waving the joint away.

He shook his head again. His hair, which was unbound, fell nearly to the middle of his back.

“Come on, Harvey, goddamn it. Someone’s trying to kill me. I need you to get with it and help me.” The gun felt strange, hard, but like it was trying to mold itself to my body.

Harvey struggled to his feet. “What do you mean?”

I laid it out for him as fast as I could.

He studied me carefully and with some reserve. “Are you sure you’re not being paranoid?”