“Hell, I believe you always got a choice. You see an ashtray anywhere?”

I spotted one on the counter and carried it over.

“I guess now I’m an accomplice,” I said.

“You just nag me because it gives you something to do.”

“Actually, I’d like you to hang around for a while, if that’s all right with you,” I said. “It seems I spend half my time trying to keep you alive.”

“That’s kind of an irony considering how you spend the rest of your time, Doc.”

“Your order!” the cook called out.

“How ’bout getting me a couple of those baklava things. The one with pistachios.”

“No,” I said.

9

LUCY AND JANET lived in a ten-story apartment building called The Westpark that was in the two thousand block of P Street, a few minutes’ walk away. It was tan brick with a dry cleaner downstairs and the Embassy Mobile station next door. Bicycles were parked on small balconies, and young tenants were sitting out enjoying the balmy night, drinking and smoking, while someone practiced scales on a flute. A shirtless man reached out to shut his window. I buzzed apartment 503.

“Who goes there?” Lucy’s voice came over the intercom.

“It’s us,” I said.

“Who’s us?”

“The us with your dinner. It’s getting cold,” I said.

The lock clicked free to let us into the lobby, and we took the elevator up.

“She could probably have a penthouse in Richmond for what she pays to live here,” Marino commented.

“About fifteen hundred a month for a two-bedroom.”

“Holy shit. How’s Janet going to make it alone? The Bureau can’t be paying her more than forty grand.”

“Her family has money,” I said. “Other than that, I don’t know.”

“I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be starting out these days.”

He shook his head as elevator doors parted.

“Now back in Jersey when I was just revving up my engines, fifteen hundred could’ve kept me in clover for a year. Crime wasn’t like it is, and people were nicer, even in my bad-ass neighborhood. And here we are, you and yours truly, working on some poor lady who was all cut up and burned in a fire, and after we finish with her, it will be somebody else. It’s like what’s-his-name rolling that big rock up the hill, and every time he gets close, down it rolls again. I swear, I wonder why we bother, Doc.”

“Because it would be worse if we didn’t,” I said, stopping before the familiar pale orange door and ringing the bell.

I could hear the deadbolt flip open, and then Janet was letting us in. She was sweating in FBI running shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt that looked left over from college.

“Come in,” she said with a smile as Annie Lennox played loudly in the background. “Something smells good.”