“What’cha gonna do, ride on a float?”

He couldn’t stand it when she got sarcastic. He slammed down the vodka bottle and snapped the revolver’s empty cylinder in place. He dry-fired at the TV.

“Shut up!” he said in his voice from hell, that tone he got when the change came over him. “You just do what I say, bitch.”

“I always do.” Divinity backed down.

“Don’t you call anymore. Don’t you come around, and the others don’t know where I am, right?”

“I ain’t told ’em nothing. So you dumping me?”

“For two days.”

“Then we’re good?”

“As good as it gets,” he said.

Brazil ran into his house for only a moment and when he returned to West’s car, he was carrying a grocery bag with something in it. He had a strange look on his face.

“What’s that?” West asked.

“You’ll see,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“You got a body part in there or something?”

“In a way,” Brazil morbidly said.

West knew about Ruby Sink. The word had traveled like electricity. Everyone in the police department found out Miss Sink was Brazil’s landlady, and when West heard the truth, she felt sick with guilt. She felt stupid and ignorant. Brazil’s so-called girlfriend had been a seventy-one-year-old woman who rented a row house to him. West felt absolutely terrible and for hours had been trying to think of what to say.

She drove through the Fan. Nothing was open, not even the Robin Inn. She parked in front of her town house and turned off the engine but didn’t get out. She looked at Brazil in the dark. Her heart stirred as she stared at his face sharply defined by shadows from the streetlight.

“I know,” she said.

He was quiet.

“I know about Ruby Sink. That she was your landlady. The landlady I heard you were seeing.”

Brazil turned to her, baffled.

“Seeing?” he said. “Where the hell did you hear something like that?”

“The talk was all around the department from day one,” West replied. “People told me you had a thing going with your landlady. Then I heard you on the phone with her and . . . well, it sounded like it was true, in a way.”

“Why? Because I was nice to her when she paged me?” Brazil said with emotion. “Because she was lonely and always bringing me cookies, cakes and things?” His voice wavered. “Leaving them on my doorstep because I was never fucking home and never gave her the fucking time of day!”

“I’m sorry, Andy,” West gently said.

“It’s like my mother.” He dissolved. “I don’t call her. She’s so fucking drunk all the time and I can’t stand it and won’t listen to the awful things she says. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

West moved over and put her arms around him. She held him close to calm him. Her blood got hot and her chemistry woke up.

“It’s all right, Andy,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”