“You better run,” he says. And if I find out that you had anything to do with Casimir’s murder, I’m going to punch you into a greasy pudding.

Karyn’s isn’t called Karyn’s, though that’s how Mookie thinks of it. She calls her place “Mackie Messer’s” – but despite the name and how she looks it’s not particularly hip or upscale. It’s a butcher shop. Everything white. White counter, white floor. Glass case showing the cuts of the day. Couple meat scales. Grinders and other equipment in the back. Freezer, too. Basic stuff, but from that comes what Mookie considers to be the real magic: cuts of meat from heritage breeds of pig and cow, duck and chicken, some of which Karyn turns into charcuterie: sausage, salumi, lardo, pate, all crafted with an expert hand and an eerie patience. Karyn is cool like that.

She’s so cool, in fact, that when Mookie calls her at 2:30 in the morning, she’s still awake. “Making a brine,” she says. And the good news is, she’s in the Chelsea shop, not in the bigger Park Slope venue.

He asks her if he can stop by. She says yeah.

He hates that he needs her for this, but he does.

Subway, then. To Chelsea. To Mackie Messer’s.

Karyn lets Mookie in. She’s a sight for sore eyes. White apron flecked with red hanging over a black bra. Pale skin inked with the sigils of a cook’s life: a skull with a knife in its teeth on the back of her neck, a garlic bulb on the left shoulder, a giant pig’s head with an apple in its mouth (and a worm poking out of the apple) covering the right shoulder all the way down to the bicep. Black punky hair in a red handkerchief.

Lipstick the color of wet cherries.

She’s beautiful to him. Not in that way. She’s gay as the day is blue – or as she puts it, “Queer as a three-dollar bill” – and he knows she’d never go for him. But she’s got power. Strength. Knowledge. A confidence mitigated by an uninterrupted calm. An even keel.

“You’re my fuckin’ hero,” he says.

“Hey, Mook.”

They hug. He about crushes her. She gives as good as she gets.

Into the back. She pulls up a metal stool. The smell here is killing him in the best way possible. The iron tang of blood. The sweet odor of raw pork. Spices, too: garlic and cumin, rosemary and sage. He can feel the hunger in his teeth.

Bang. She drops a wooden cutting board in front of him.

On it? Meat.

She taps each as she tells him what it is: “Culatello with melon. Iberian chorizo from acorn-fed pigs. Cocoa nib and cayenne salami. And that last one that looks like an apostrophe, that’s smoked jowl roll. Fried up in a cast iron pan.”

“You have a gift.”

“No such thing. I love what I do and I do what I love.”

He has no answer for that because he’s already plucking the chorizo from the plate and laying it on his tongue like a communion wafer. Even before his teeth cut the meat he tastes the oil coming off the sausage, oil that brings heat and spice.