The waiting was the worst part, man. The waiting and the hiding. Word was probably out among the pigs to be on the lookout for a guy with a scratched eye. Which meant he couldn’t hit the street and go looking, and he hadn’t been in town long enough to find someone to crash with. So he had to sit here and wait for something to come to him.

All because of that rotten bitch.

He fingered the gauze patch taped over his left eye and winced at the shock of pain elicited by even the gentlest touch. Bitch! She had damn near gouged his eye out last night. But he showed her. Fucking-ay right. Bounced her around good after that. And later on, in this very same doorway, when he’d gone through her wallet and found a grand total of seventeen bucks, and had seen that the necklace was nothing but junk, he’d been tempted to go back and do a tap dance on her head, but figured the pigs would’ve found her by then.

And then to top it all off, he’d had to spend most of the bread on eye patches and ointment. He was worse off now than when he’d rolled the bitch.

He hoped she was hurting now… hurting real good. He knew he was.

Should never have come east, man. He’d had to get out of Detroit fast after getting carried away with a pry bar on that guy changing a tire out by the interstate. Easier to get lost here than someplace like, say, Saginaw, but he didn’t know anybody.

He leaned back and watched the street with his good eye. Some weird-looking old lady was hobbling by on shoes that looked too small for her, pulling a shopping basket behind her. Not much there. He passed her over as not worth the trouble of a closer look.

19

Who am I kidding? Jack thought. He had been trudging up and down every West Side street in the area for hours now. His back was aching from walking hunched over. If the mugger had stayed in the neighborhood, Jack would have passed him by now.

Damn the heat and damn the dress and most of all damn the goddamn wig. I’ll never find this guy.

But it wasn’t only the futility of tonight’s quest that was getting to him. The afternoon had hit him hard.

Jack prided himself on being a man of few illusions. He believed there was a balance to life and he based that belief on Jack’s Law of Social Dynamics: For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction wasn’t necessarily automatic or inevitable; life wasn’t like thermodynamics. Sometimes the reaction had to be helped along. That was where Repairman Jack came into the picture. He was in the business of making some of those reactions happen. He liked to think of himself as a sort of catalyst.

Jack knew he was a violent man. He made no excuses for that. He had come to terms with it. He had hoped Gia could eventually come to understand it.