A muscle jumped in his jaw. "For a minute."

I nodded, urging him on.

"He"s ..." He drew a deep breath, searching for words or thoughts or strength. I wasn"t sure which. "He"s been with Lavonn off and on for four years."

I wanted to apologize again, but he cut me off.

"She got two kids of her own. Still in diapers."

I wanted to tell him everything was all right. Jamel would be fine. Children were resilient. They made do. They soldiered on. But maybe he wouldn"t be, sometimes people weren"t, and quite often they didn"t. I had to remind myself that I had no idea how his son would turn out, and even if I did, it wasn"t necessarily my job to appease his guilt. Sometimes pain"s a catalyst. Sometimes it"s just pain. On a good day, with a nice waxing moon and a dynamite scrying gla.s.s, I might be able to divine the difference.

"Did he seem healthy?" I asked to fill time. "Well adjusted? Was he-"

"She got a boyfriend," he said, and wiped his palms down the lean length of his thighs.

I braced myself. I knew enough of his childhood to guess where this was going. "And ..."

"He"s an a.s.s," he said, and jerked back to his feet.

I drew a careful breath, watched him pace, and realized I missed Mr. Pearl. Mr. Pearl"s most pressing problem was that he got fidgety when his potatoes breached the boundaries of his brussels sprouts. I suggested in our first session together that he buy some of those clever, picnic-type plates that are divided into sections. He"d dubbed me a genius among therapists and has come back every Tuesday since.

Micky"s problems were a little trickier. So far there had been no talk of my astounding cleverness, but I nodded like a ruminating shaman, still hoping we"d get around to that conversation. "Perhaps you should consider that your past might be coloring your perception. Sometimes it is difficult for a person with your history to-" I began, but he turned on me, eyes afire, lips snarling.

"The boyfriends an a.s.s!" he said.

"Okay." I nodded, dropped the certified shrink talk, and settled back. "What makes him an a.s.s?"

"How the f.u.c.k would I know? Some people are just-" He stopped himself, expression appalled, and sat, covering his face with his hands. "s.h.i.t! I"m an a.s.s."

"Sometimes," I said, and didn"t let myself smile.

But his mercurial moods weren"t so stern. Dropping his hands, he sat up straight. His lighthouse grin peeked at me and was gone. "You"re gonna be a h.e.l.l of a mom, Doc."

I considered that in shuddering silence for a moment and moved on. "What are you going to do now?"

He rested his head back against the top of my couch and drew a noisy breath. "The kid"s my responsibility."

"Partly, anyway."

"Partly!" He was angry again, quick as lightning. "You"re thinking she had a choice in the matter?"

"Didn"t she?" My voice was the epitome of the calm before the storm. Him being the storm. Me being... I don"t know. Maybe stupid?

"You better check your notes, Doc. Could be you forgot that I raped her?"

"Sometimes absorbing all the blame is as detrimental as accepting too little," I said.

"What the h.e.l.l is that supposed to mean?"

I felt like shrinking under my seat cushion at his tone. But being intimidated has never done me a h.e.l.l of a lot of good. Spitting into the glaring eye of authority hasn"t been so hunky-dory either, but that"s another story "If you take all the blame, others won"t get their fair share."

He stared at me a second, then, "f.u.c.k that," he said.

I nodded, reminding myself to save the c.r.a.ppy shrink talk for lawyers, the board of psychology, and ugly dogs that peed on my shoes. "Okay, maybe she didn"t have options about getting pregnant. But-"

"Maybe!"

"The child might not be yours. And even if he is, what then? She made her own choices after that. The drugs. The abandonment."

"You think it"s easy?" he asked. His tone was deadly calm. "You think we don"t have enough problems without our d.a.m.n kids raising kids?"

"Is this the part where you tell me how hard it is to be black?"

It took him a moment, but finally I caught a glimpse of chagrin in his expression. "I think I pay you enough to b.i.t.c.h a little."

"If that"s how you want to spend your time."

He sighed, pragmatism overcoming dramatics. "You think she should have gotten rid of it?"

Holy c.r.a.p, I couldn"t even decide what to do with my plant cuttings. G.o.d forbid I be put in charge of procreation of the species. "That"s not for me to decide. You know that. And even if it were, it"s a moot point now."

"She was just a kid."

"And now he is," I said. "Move on, Micky."

He glared at me, eyes angry, but I stopped him before he could blast me with his burning ghetto logic.

"Or... you can wallow in self-pity. That"s a constructive option, too."

He paused for a moment, watching me. "Are you being facetious?" he asked finally. He sounded truly affronted. "Am I paying you a s.h.i.tload of money for your sarcasm?"

"Sorry," I said, and meant it. I needed his s.h.i.tload of money to pay my s.h.i.tty bills.

He glanced toward the window and swore. His posture softened a little. "What should I do?"

I tried to force myself to relax. Turns out I"m incapable. "What are your choices?"

He shook his head. "I could pay child support."

"Without legally claiming him as your son?"

"Why not?"

I shrugged, knowing he"d realize the answer in a minute. "It might a.s.suage your guilt," I said.

He lowered his brows, thinking things over, then: "You think the boy wouldn"t get it."

I said nothing. Generally it"s my most effective method of psychoa.n.a.lyzing.

"That f.u.c.king boyfriend," he said, and suddenly he was pacing again, striding across the room in frustration. "f.u.c.kin" corn-fed fat-a.s.s. c.o.c.ky as h.e.l.l." He stopped, turned toward me. "Maybe I could start a savings account."

I watched him. "Micky, you don"t even know if you"re his father."

Seconds ticked away. "Does it matter?"

"Maybe not. If you don"t think it does."

"If I"m not, it ain"t through no fault of mine."

"So you"re going to make yourself pay, even if he"s someone else"s child."

Tension cranked up tight, then: "You"re right," he said. "Throwing money at him would be a stupid-a.s.s thing to do."

I hadn"t meant that exactly, but I let him talk things through.

"Stupid, shortsighted, self-centered." He nodded in concert to his thoughts.

I gave him encouraging silence.

"Thing to do is get custody," he said, and I managed to refrain from gasping.

he phone beside my bed rang at one of those small hours of the morning ear-tagged by G.o.d Himself for sleeping. I picked up the receiver on something like the eighty-second ring.

"Babekins!"

I winced at the nasally voice. Brainy Laney had returned to the hinterlands of Idaho for filming yesterday and wouldn"t be back until Christmas Eve. I resented the fact that she was gone even more than I hated the idea that the Geekster remained. The fact that she"d left a message on my answering machine saying her Saudi friend was going to check up on Ramla"s sister only made the situation slightly more palatable.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"You know I can"t sleep when Angel"s gone." He sounded as chirpy as a midnight cricket, and slightly more irritating.

"I can," I said, and blinked blurrily at the alarm. "Is it three o"clock?"

"Could be."

"Three o"clock in the morning!"

"Probably. Say, listen. Remember how I said I"d look into weird deaths?"

I narrowed my eyes, mind kicking miserably into a slow semblance of life. "Yeah?"

"Turns out there are a b.u.t.tload of "em. You know a gal was killed by an elephant in Tennessee last year? Course, you can"t really blame the pachyderm. I mean, they"d named her Winkie. And who the h.e.l.l...sorry ...heck would-"

"I"m not too tired to drive over and kick your a.s.s," I said. Sometimes I"m a little crabby when people wake me at three in the morning. Sometimes I"m equally crabby at four in the afternoon, but I don"t have such a convenient excuse.

Solberg chuckled as if I were joking. Since the advent of Elaine in his life, there wasn"t much that could get him down. Maybe I resented that most of all.

"Okay. Okay. Anyway, there"s a ton of freaky s.h.i.t... sorry...stuff happening. Someone should write a book. Hey, you want to-"

"Solberg..." I warned.

"All right. Keep your pants on. Here it is: Guy died while scuba diving off the sh.o.r.e of Kauai."

"What was his name?"

"Amos Bunting."

I yawned. "I"ve never heard of-"

"But he went by the name of Steve."

"Steve ... Steve Bunting!" My mind kicked out of neutral with a painful lurch. "Holy c.r.a.p!" I was suddenly wide awake. "He was a coordinator for one of the senator"s campaigns. I saw a picture of him."

"Yeah, well, he"s dead now. Ran out of oxygen-"

"When?"

"What?"

I was scrambling out of bed toward my office. "When did it happen?"

"Just last month. I guess Hawaii"s good for diving even-"

I hauled him up short. "What day of the week?"

"What?"

"Just tell me, d.a.m.n it!"

"Thursday," he said, and I wrote it in bloodred permanent marker on my tagboard.

26.

Maybe money can"t buy happiness. But it can get you a nice little villa in Tuscany, and that"s close enough for me.

-Dagwood Dean Daly,

professional gangster