The ritual helps a little. The act of tossing each bite into the water, remembering the way his powerful jaws could clean a spoon so gently, is comforting. So are the noises around me: the grind and whine of the traffic, the voices tumbling out of windows overhead, the arias of struggle, the sonic riot of want.

The noises of the living.

Half an hour later the chicken is all gone but I don’t feel any different. I take the brochure of my boat and stare at it. Then I stare at the Janus letterhead. Ne Cede Malis, it reminds me. I think about the gun.

Nothing is clear.

“I don’t know,” I say to the water. “Am I doing the right thing?”

A garbage barge cruises by, shrouded in warring gulls.

“Should I shoot him? Will that make anything different?”

In some ways, the gun looks like an answer to my problems. In another way, it looks like a gun. I’m having a hard time differentiating heartbreak, rage, vengeance, and loneliness.

“So which is it, Pink?” I say to the churning, garbage-choked water. “Do I shoot him?”

“That’s a felony, Starks.” I whip around and there she is, the grim frileuse, her shoulders bunched up and her chin pinned to her chest as if the hot wind is cold, an umbrella hanging off her arm. “You wouldn’t want to add to your sentence, would you?”

“Afternoon, Detective,” I say. “Nice day for a stalk.”

Nunes makes a terse flexion with her mouth. It’s a hard smile, a precast smile, one that has probably been there since 1975, unmoving, beating the elements at their own game.

“We’ve missed you at the station. I expected you to come give a statement.”

“I had some personal things come up.”

There is something unreadable about Nunes’s eyes. They are the same expressionless eyes found on those superpredatory subbenthic fish. Eyes that know dinner when they see it.

“Shouldn’t you be questioning the Rat Burglar’s accomplice, Detective? Shouldn’t you be using your ways of making him talk?”

“Schermer’s already talked.”

“Then why are you bothering me? You want to bust me for littering? You can’t. This is food. You want to book me for fish-feeding, go ahead.”

“Schermer said he isn’t an accomplice.”

“So did I.”

“But I believe Schermer.”

With one hand—with nearly Rat Burglarian dexterity— Nunes rolls a cigarette.

“But the news said that after Schermer was attacked by the Rat Burglar—”

“Assailant.”

“What?”

“Assailant. Schermer was attacked by an unknown assailant. Not necessarily the Rat Burglar.”

“Hunh,” I say, my stomach contracting. “Well, you have any leads?”

“Schermer’s description puts him at six-two, one-ninety, Caucasian.”

“I’m five-ten, one-sixty-five.”

“You probably know that most victims of assault exaggerate the size of their assailants by ten to fifteen percent. That puts the assailant at your size.”

Nunes continues looking at me with those eyes.