I'm in deep, much deeper than I've been since the War. I start to wax nostalgic for the poison gas and the artillery and the rats gnawing on the corpses stacked around me. If you bought it out there, you knew it was nothing personal. Tracy and Teddy can make this so very, very personal.
But the Big Man looks deflated now, still staring at the desk, skin the color of a used condom.
"So what are the angles? What's the skinny?" My voice smashes his miserable reverie like a sledgehammer on Waterford.
Tracy twitches and looks away. The moisture glistening in his eyes betrays him more clearly than Teddy sliding an ice pick between his ribs.
"It's pretty simple, Nick." He throws back the rest of his bourbon. "My boy went missing. I've been waiting for a ransom note."
"Nothing yet?"
"Not a thing."
"I don't expect that you've been waiting patiently."
"Christ no, Nick." I watch his knuckles whiten on the arm of his chair. The leather squeals under his grip like an animal in pain. "I've dug up and shook down every piece of filth in the county. Chief O'Halloran and his boys have rolled every thug in the Three Boroughs. Nothing, until one of the club girls fingered your friend."
"What about the girl?"
"She's known. An ass so sweet you could bottle it and pour it on your flapjacks, but so dumb she can hardly be trusted to dress herself."
"I know the type. Lucky for her she doesn't need clothes in her line of work. So how did it go down?" The bourbon lights a fire in my stomach almost warm enough to melt the cold sweat on the back of my neck.
"Andre was supposed to be escorted back to school. Your dead friend got to the club first and gave my men the slip."
"First off, he's not my friend. Second, that can't be the whole story."
Tracy's smile freezes my gut despite the booze. He opens a desk drawer and tosses a fat envelope onto the desk. "Her name is Florence Parker. At least that's the name we hired her under."
On the envelope, trapped under a paper clip, a glossy pic of a girl looks up at me. Snazzy hat, fresh curls of dark hair, bright eyes, and a smile that could get a guy saying "I do" faster than a dead rabbit.
I pull my eyes from that smile. "Nanny?"
"You're sharp, Nick, as always. I hired her personally. She's been with us since my Abby died, about four years. She was out cold at the club, beat up bad, said she didn't see anything. I can't believe I fell for it. Now she's gone."
"Skipped town, you think?"
"Not impossible, but may as well be. Since Andre disappeared, a nun can't fart in this town without me knowing about it."
The pallor is gone. The Big Man is back. I feel the last, crushing yank of the noose around my neck.
I push myself out of the chair and scrape the envelope from the desk. Teddy appears at the office door like a ghost cast from 250 pounds of hamburger.
"This is pretty thin, Tracy." I held up the envelope. "I'll need some support. I'll have questions."
"You have carte blanche. Everyone knows who you're working for."
"Yeah. Everybody's suspected I sold my soul. Now they'll know for sure."
"Yes, Nick. Just do it right." He didn't need to say anything else.
I brush past Teddy and step into the familiar night.
Pakeha