As we reached the patio, Angie held the door open for Trevor Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, you said you’d heard we had the two qualities you were looking for most.”

“Yes.”

“One was honesty. What’s the other?”

“I heard you were relentless,” he said as he stepped into his study. “Utterly relentless.”

3

“Fifty,” Angie said as we rode the subway from Wonderland Station toward downtown.

“I know,” I said.

“Fifty thousand bucks,” she said. “I thought twenty was insane enough, but now we’re carrying fifty thousand dollars, Patrick.”

I looked around the subway car at the mangy pair of winos about ten feet away, the huddled pack of gangbangers considering the emergency pull switch in the corner of the car, the lunatic with the buzz-cut blond hair and thousand-yard stare gripping the hand strap beside me.

“Say it a little louder, Ange. I’m not sure the G-boys down back heard you.”

“Whoops.” She leaned into me. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back as the train bucked around a curve with a metal screech and the fluorescents overhead sputtered off, then on, then off, then on again.

Lurch, or Julian Archerson as we’d come to know him, had been prepared to drive us all the way home, but once we hit the stand-still traffic on Route 1A, after sitting in an earlier automotive thicket on Route 129 for forty-five minutes, we had him drop us as close to a subway station as possible and walked to Wonderland Station.

So now we stood with the other sardines as the decrepit car heaved its way through the maze of tunnels and the lights went on and off and we carried fifty thousand of Trevor Stone’s dollars on our persons. Angie had the check for thirty thousand tucked in the inside pocket of her letterman’s jacket, and I had the twenty thousand in cash stuffed between my stomach and belt buckle.

“You’ll need cash if you’re going to start immediately,” Trevor Stone had said. “Spare no expense. This is just operating money. Call if you need more.”

“Operating” money. I had no idea if Desiree Stone was alive or not, but if she was, she’d have to have found a pretty remote section of Borneo or Tangier before I blew through fifty grand in order to find her.

“Jay Becker,” Angie said and whistled.

“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Six weeks ago or so,” I said and shrugged. “We don’t keep tabs on each other.”

“I haven’t seen him since the Big Dick awards.”

The lunatic on my right raised his eyebrows and looked at me.

I shrugged. “You can dress ’em up nice, you know? But you can’t take ’em out.”

He nodded, then went back to staring at his reflection in the dark subway window as if it pissed him off.