"He made it pretty plain really, burn down his house for him and I got to walk away. It took me about two seconds to make up my mind and we made the plans right there in the squad car. He told me he was in the process of a divorce and that his wife was getting the house. The judge had determined that they would split the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of equity evenly, but his wife couldn't dole out his half all at once without selling the house, which she wouldn't do. She was ordered to pay him a meager hundred dollars a month for twenty-five years, without interest. I remember the cop getting really pissed off just telling me the situation. But if his house were destroyed, 'by an accidental fire, for instance,' he would get his thirty thousand dollars in a lump sum from the insurance company, and his wife would have nowhere to stay and no clothes. He smiled at me in the rear view mirror when he said this. At that point, I'd have done it for nothing. He took a key off his key ring and gave it to me along with a handwritten address.

'You get this back tomorrow night in exchange for the key, if the place is burned,' he said, holding up my ID 'otherwise I find it on the ground next to the building back there. Do we have an understanding?' I nodded. 'By the way, my wife leaves for work at 8:30 a.m. and she has a bad habit of leaving the iron on. Meet me at the California Cafe next to the Coliseum at midnight tomorrow night. Sit at the counter.' He uncuffed me, let me out of the car and drove off into the night.

"I did the job and met him just as we'd agreed. Everything was normal until about a week later when I got a visitor at my hotel. The stranger explained that the 'boys in blue' said I could help him and handed me an envelope containing an address and two thousand dollars. I had no idea what was up on the cop’s end, but I took the money and did the job just the same. The first seven or eight jobs came like that. Later on, my name just got around town I guess because I've been doing it ever since."

"How many jobs have you done since then?"

"This last one, the one she spoke of, was my nineteenth."

"What was the officer's name?"

"Shirer."

"Did you ever see him again?"

"No. Not after that night in the diner when I got my ID back."

"What was the name of the hotel where the first man referred by Shirer came to meet you."

"The Altmore. I lived there until a year ago when I moved to the Ohio Hotel."

The Egyptian shuffled with his notes. I leaned back and stretched.