“I was gonna build a fire. Pile all the masks in the middle of the floor, spill a little gas on ’em, put a match to ’em. Go out like one of those Vikings and take all my treasures with me. I can’t say I thought about it for long. What I could do, I could sell all this shit. The house, the art, the car. I guess the money’d last me a time.”

“Probably.”

“But then what’d I do?”

“Suppose you set up as a dealer?”

“Are you crazy, man? Me deal drugs? I can’t even pimp no more, and pimping’s cleaner’n dealing.”

“Not drugs.”

“What, then?”

“The African stuff. You seem to own a lot of it and I gather the quality’s high.”

“I don’t own any garbage.”

“So you told me. Could you use that as your stock to get you started? And do you know enough about the field to go into the business?”

He frowned, thinking. “I was thinking about this earlier,” he said.

“And?”

“There’s a lot I don’t know. But there’s a lot I do know, plus I got a feel for it and that’s something you can’t get in a classroom or out of a book. But shit, you need more’n that to be a dealer. You need a whole manner, a personality to go with it.”

“You invented Chance, didn’t you?”

“So? Oh, I dig. I could invent some nigger art dealer same way I invented myself as a pimp.”

“Couldn’t you?”

“ ‘Course I could.” He thought once more. “It might work,” he said. “I’ll have to study it.”

“You got time.”

“Plenty of time.” He looked intently at me, the gold flecks glinting in his brown eyes. “I don’t know what made me hire you,” he said. “I swear to God I don’t. If I wanted to look good or what, the superpimp avenging his dead whore. If I knew where it was going to lead—”

“It probably saved a few lives,” I said. “If that’s any consolation.”

“Didn’t save Kim or Sunny or Cookie.”

“Kim was already dead. And Sunny killed herself and that was her choice, and Cookie was going to be killed as soon as Marquez tracked her down. But he’d have gone on killing if I hadn’t stopped him. The cops would have landed on him sooner or later but there’d have been more dead women by then. He never would have stopped. It was too much of a turn-on for him. When he came out of the bathroom with the machete, he had an erection.”

“You serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“He came at you with a hard-on?”

“Well, I was more afraid of the machete.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I could see where you would be.”