“Poor Walter. Please. Could you have been any more breathy by the way?”

“Breathy?”

“‘Sex months,’” I said in my best Marilyn Monroe voice.

“I didn’t say ‘sex.’ I said ‘six.’ And I wasn’t that breathy.”

“Whatever you say, Norma Jean.”

She elbowed me and the elevator doors opened and we rode them up to the twelfth floor.

At Jay’s door, Angie said, “You got Bubba’s gift?”

Bubba’s gift was an alarm decoder. He’d given it to me last Christmas but I hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. It read the sonic pitch of an alarm’s call and decoded it in a matter of seconds. The moment a red light appeared in the tiny LED screen of the decoder, you pointed it at the alarm source and pressed a button in the center and the alarm’s bleat stopped.

That was the theory anyway.

I’d used Bubba’s equipment before and usually it was fine as long as he didn’t use the phrase “cutting edge.” Cutting edge, in Bubbaspeak, meant it still had a few bugs in the system or hadn’t been tested yet. He hadn’t used the phrase when he gave me the decoder, but I still wouldn’t know if it worked until we got into Jay’s place.

I knew from previous visits that Jay also had a silent alarm wired into Porter and Larousse Consultants, a security firm downtown. When the alarm was tripped, you had thirty seconds to call the security firm and give them the password, or Johnny Law was on his way.

On the way over, when I mentioned that to Angie, she said, “Let me worry about that. Trust me.”

She picked the two door locks with her kit while I watched the hall, and then she opened the door and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me, and Jay’s first alarm went off.

It was only slightly louder than an air raid siren, and I pointed Bubba’s decoder at the blinking box above the kitchen portico, pressed the black button in the center. Then I waited. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, come on, come on, come on…Bubba was pretty close to losing his ride back from prison, and then the red light appeared on the LED and I pressed the black button again and the air raid siren died.

I looked at the small box in my hand. “Wow,” I said.

Angie picked up the phone in the living room, pressed a single digit on the speed-dial console, waited a moment, then said, “Shreveport.”

I came into the living room.

“You have a nice night, too,” she said into the receiver and hung up.

“Shreveport?” I said.

“It’s where Jay was born.”

“I know that. How did you know it?”

She shrugged, looked around the living room. “I must have heard him mention it over drinks or something.”